Whose emotions? Boundaries and boundary markers in the study of emotions

ABSTRACT

This essay highlights the ‘boundary work’ accomplished through the identification and labelling of emotion with respect to the representation of communities and their memberships, the marking of group inclusion or exclusion, and the uses of emotion for shoring up, defining, and strengthening identities. It distinguishes between emotional self-identifications, the labelling practices that are used to mark the emotions of others, and the performances of emotions and practices of marking that are used for social mobility, for making claims to represent others, and for social reproduction. Bringing the author’s analysis of representations of emotion in the context of Telugu-speaking southern India into conversation with the essays in this volume, the essay identifies five different types of socio-cultural work that the performance, representation, and marking of emotion can perform. These include: (1) establishing one’s own membership in a group; (2) incorporating others; (3) staking a claim to represent others; (4) marking distinctions; and (5) reproducing existing social distinctions. While not an exhaustive list, nor always mutually exclusive, these categories are intended to illustrate a series of examples that provide a context for thinking about what is at stake in the representation, performance, and marking of emotion. The essay concludes with a recommendation to be attentive to the specific contexts in which emotion is performed, marked, or represented, and to ask who is doing the marking of emotion, what their relationships are to those who are marked as experiencing or displaying specific emotions, and what work such actions accomplish for those doing the marking.

Keywords:

• Boundary work
• emotion work
• representation
• performance
• emotional communities
• boundary marking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sriramamurti, Kavi Jīvitamulu, 2^nd ed., 1.

2.. Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics, 11.

3. Sriramamurti, Kavi Jīvitamulu, 2^nd ed.

4. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue; and Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics.

5. Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics, 69.

6. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24.

7. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods,” 11.

8. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24–25. See also Lynch, “Emotional community.”

9. Pernau, “Feeling Communities,” 10.

10. Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 560–561.

11. Blom and Lama-Rewal, “Contentious Emotions,” 21–22; and See also, Lama-Rewal, “It’s effective because its affective,” 157.

12. See also the use of the concept of ‘emotion work’ in Lee, “Disgust and Untouchability,” this volume, PAGE.

13. Ali, “Courtly Emotions,” PAGE.

14. Ibid., PAGE.

15. Ibid., PAGE.

16. Binder, “Feeling Religious – Feeling Secular,’’ PAGE.

17. Ibid., PAGE.

18. Ibid., PAGE.

19. Pauwels, “Emotion, Devotion and the Rise of the Vernacular,” PAGE.

20. Ibid., PAGE.

21. Ibid., PAGE.

22. In 1952, the first movement in independent India for the re-division of India’s provinces along linguistic lines culminated in Nehru’s declaration of Andhra State, which was formed the following year (in 1953) out of the predominately Telugu-speaking districts of the former Madras Presidency. Three years later, in 1956, the All-India Linguistic States Reorganization made linguistic states the norm rather than the exception, and, despite some reluctance, the Telugu speaking districts of the former Nizam State of Hyderabad were joined with Andhra State to form the new state of Andhra Pradesh. A movement to separate the two regions continued, re-emerging with particular strength in the early decades of the 21st century and culminating in 2014 with their separation into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. See Pingle, Fall and Rise of Telangana and Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics.

23. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

24. See, for example, Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 257; and Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” 289; and, more recently, Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857.

25. Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics, 198.

26. Interview with M. A. Khader, Nellore, 19 October 2002.

27. Interview with V. Anantha Ramaiah (b. 1922), Nellore, 19 October 2002. Anantha Ramaiah and Khader told me that this was the first time in thirty years that they had met. Both had been active in the Nellore Town Youth League, and had both raised funds for the victims’ families. Anantha Ramaiah had organized the sale of photographs of the four dead boys signed by cinema stars, and Khader had organized a drama, the admission proceeds of which went to benefit the injured and the families of the victims. Each family of the deceased received Rs. 75; each hospitalized person received Rs. 25.

28. For further discussion of the representations of the ‘inauthenticity’ of the activities that led to Nehru’s declaration of the new Andhra State, see Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics, 193–194.

29. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 65–67. Warner offers us one of the most thorough discussions and definitions of the concept of a public. He identifies three distinct senses of the noun ‘public,’ senses that are often intermixed in popular usage. Significantly, none of his three definitions accommodate an understanding of a public as an entity against which speakers can define themselves. First and foremost in his list of seven criteria (or unspoken rules as he characterizes them) pertaining to his third type of public (the one he is most interested in) is that a public “exists by virtue of being addressed’ (67).

30. Kulkarni, “The Sentiments of Subjection,” PAGES.

31. Spelman, “Anger and Insubordination,” 264.

32. Ring, Zenana, 117; and Lyman, “The Politics of Anger,” 134.

33. Mitchell, “Participatory and Adversarial Politics,” 46–47.

34. Lee, “Disgust and Untouchability,” PAGE.

35. Ibid., PAGE.

36. Ibid., PAGE.

37. Stille, “Emotions and Islamic Preaching,” PAGE.

38. . Ibid.

39. Maqsood, “Modes and Spaces of Love,” PAGE.

40. Ibid., PAGE.

41. Ibid., PAGE.

42. Tignol, “The Language of Shame,” PAGE.

43. Ibid., PAGE.

44. Ibid., PAGE.

45. Tandon, “Friendship and Social Life,” PAGE.

46. Ibid., PAGES.

47. Schofield, “Emotions in Indian Music History,” PAGE.

48. Ibid., PAGE.

49. Ibid., PAGE.

50. Ibid., PAGE.

51. Gandhi, “Shock Minus Awe,” PAGE.

52. Ibid., PAGES.

53. Ibid., PAGE.

54. Pernau, “Masculinity and the Desire for Passions,” PAGE.

55. Ibid., PAGES.

56. Ibid., PAGE.