ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of emotions in the local production of cultural knowledge, and shows how ethnographic knowledge is generated by an understanding of emotions in everyday social dynamics. It begins by chronicling the hubbub of daily emotions that animate the small-scale interactions through which life is lived and culture is produced. The chapter shows how this insight into emotional experience and motivation can add ethnographic depth, and thus revise earlier, interactionist accounts of social and political action in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. The older woman storms off flanked by her daughters, and the younger woman follows, weeping and protesting. The implied charges and threats are grave: that her husband’s stepmother will die as the husband’s father’s brother died, and she will be held responsible. The heightened interest in theorizing and understanding emotions since the early 1980s has led to a cross-pollination which is shaping the field in a decidedly interdisciplinary way.
