ABSTRACT
This chapter considers emotions and imagination as partly constitutive both of 'being there' and of 'writing up'. It discusses the limits of co-presence for the anthropological enterprise and begins with some ethnographic cases. The chapter argues that ‘being there’ is an activity including interactive encounters with mutual emotional evaluation and response. The confidence of Damasio and other neurologists that human brains activate what Euro-Americans generally call emotions comes from advances in linking the location and forms of brain damage to kinds of disability that are evinced by patients. Damasio wishes to model the sequencing ‘from wakefulness to consciousness’. The disciplines of psychology and social anthropology have a long history of separation and, given the character of financing and university composition, that has of course been supported by strong boundary maintenance. The positivist stance of psychology remains strong too, with a powerful commitment to experimental method.
