ABSTRACT
The ubiquitous focus on feelings in western culture reiterates again and again both the splitting of mind and body and the priority of mind: the body is seen to express what the mind directs. Buytendijk (1974) has noted that we commonly describe the shaking of the fist as a way in which someone expresses a feeling, in this case ‘anger’. Rather, he argues the shaking of the fist is not an expression of feeling anger, it is anger itself that we see. In similar vein Rom Harré says that to study emotions is to study a certain kind of social act: ‘There is no such thing as “an emotion”. There are only the various ways of acting and feeling emotionally, of displaying one’s judgements, attitudes and opinions in an appropriate bodily way’ (1991:143). For both Harré and Buytendijk emotions are neither exclusively of mind or of body, but hover interactively somewhere between. Their enactment and their embodiment are a part both of the definition of an emotion and of the learning that constitutes it. Emotional and embodied learning then are closely intertwined, and occur largely outside of our conscious awareness and control. In the everyday, emotions are most often first encountered in embodied form, widely acknowledged in the idea of ‘body-language’ as Johnson (1987) Freund (1988, 1990) Lakoff (1987) and others have noted. We can usually tell if someone is happy or dejected, angry or relaxed,
whether female or male, young or old, and whether a stranger or someone we know, long before we see their face. At the same time, none of us can say exactly how, across the myriad factors of the lived experience of each minute, day, week or year, a person takes on this embodiment as their own. For this reason Bourdieu (1986) suggeststhat embodied learning cannot easily be ‘forgotten’; it is hard to modify and is among the most powerful forms of learning we ever undergo. Harré points to the social aspects of emotions and emotional learning. He notes that while the existence of complex emotional lives, ‘whether in Oxford or on Ifaluk’ (1991:160), may suggest deeper residual structures, emotion feelings and displays can be understood only as both natural and learned. Their meanings are defined by reference to shared language, cultural beliefs and values and the ways in which an individual is positioned in social encounters (Harré 1986). Scott and Morgan go further: ‘This is not just a question of bodily understandings being socially shaped. It is also the fact that social orders have always been concerned with bodies and their control and surveillance and that, in certain ways at least, these concerns have increased in modern societies’ (1993:14). To see emotion primarily as a social act in this way calls for an understanding of how individual bodily expressions are learned and defined within a social context, a repertoire of shared emotional meaning. From earliest times a child’s sense of self is shaped in relation to the feeling-acts and feeling-words that define how one interacts with the world at the deepest levels. For example, while a child could develop an entirely novel and individual way of ‘being angry’ (perhaps by rubbing the nose as opposed to shaking the fist or stamping the feet), there is little advantage in doing so. Those around the child would have to learn what was signified, while strangers would have no idea at all. As it is, each child increasingly finds and becomes subject to a socially available repertoire of emotion-acts: love, jealousy, anger, fear in all their variety of forms and degrees of expression. Sarbin (1986) calls this socially acknowledged way of doing an emotion the ‘dramatistic’, in contrast to the ‘dramaturgical’ where an individual might also adopt and set aside emotion-acts called for in more routine or ritualistic fashion, expressing caring emotions appropriate to a nurse or sad ones as a mourner, for example.
