Emotions in Social Life

Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues

Gillian Bendelow, Simon J Williams, Gillian Bendelow, Simon J Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134774166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

The development of a sociology of emotions is crucial to our understanding of social life as they hold the key to our understanding of social processes and sociological investigation.

First published in 1997, Emotions in Social Life consolidates the sociology of emotions as a legitimate and viable field of enquiry. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the sociology of emotions using work from scholars of international stature, as well as newer writers in the field. It presents new empirical research in conjunction with innovative and challenging theoretical material, and will be essential reading for students of sociology, health psychology, anthropology and gender studies.

Part I
Critical perspectives on emotions

1
The sociology of emotion as a way of seeing

Arlie Russell Hochschild

INTRODUCTION

The sociology of emotion is a new, growing field within the larger discipline of sociology,¹ and part of a wider interdisciplinary renaissance in interest in emotion. All of the nineteenth-century founders of sociology touched on the topic of emotion and some did more. As the American sociologist Randall Collins has pointed out, Max Weber elucidates the anxious ‘spirit of capitalism’, the magnetic draw of charisma, and he questions what passes for ‘rationality’. Emile Durkheim explores the social scaffolding for feelings of ‘solidarity’. Karl Marx explores alienation and, in his analysis of class conflict, he implies much about resentment and anger.² Max Scheler explores empathy and sympathy, and Georg Simmel a rich variety of sentiments. Sigmund Freud calls attention to the primacy of conscious and unconscious emotion (what he called affect), though not to its sociological character. In the twentieth century, Erving Goffman traces out the complex web of unconscious rules of acting that guide us through a typical day. Goffman also implies, though he draws back from positing, feeling rules, and an emotional actor capable of managing emotions in accordance with such rules. As a whole, current sociology is rich in ethnographic ‘thick descriptions’, which leak evidence of emotion, on one side, and in theories that imply them, on the other. But missing until recently has been a carefully developed, grounded, sociological theory of emotion. This volume gathers research that forms part of this larger project.

As with any new body of work, the sociology of emotion has generated lively debate, and been quickly subdivided by area, theoretical approach and methodology (Kemper 1989). So it is no easier to speak these days of a ‘typical sociologist of emotion’ than it is to speak of a ‘typical’ sociologist. Still, we can ask: what is it like to see the world from the point of view of the sociologist of emotion?³ Perhaps the best way to convey this point of view is to look very closely at one small episode, and to compare different ways of seeing it. As my episode, my ‘grain of sand’, I have chosen one youngwoman’s description of her wedding day in 1981, drawn from my book The Managed Heart. The young woman says this:

My marriage ceremony was chaotic and completely different than I imagined it would be. Unfortunately, we rehearsed at 8 o’clock the morning of the wedding. I had imagined that everyone would know what to do, but they didn’t. That made me nervous. My sister didn’t help me get dressed or flatter me and no one in the dressing room helped until I asked. I was depressed. I wanted to be so happy on our wedding day…. This is supposed to be the happiest day of one’s life. I couldn’t believe that some of my best friends couldn’t make it to my wedding. So as I started out to the church thinking about all these things, that I always thought would not happen at my wedding, going through my mind, I broke down and cried. But I thought to myself, ‘Be happy for the friends, the relatives, the presents.’ Finally, I said to myself, ‘Hey, other people aren’t getting married, you are.’ From down the long aisle I saw my husband. We looked at each other’s eyes. His love for me changed my whole being from that point on. When we joined arms, I was relieved. The tension was gone. From then on, it was beautiful. It was indescribable.⁴

The sociological view without emotion in focus: the function of a ritual

As Emile Durkheim (1965 [1915]) points out in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, rituals create a circle within which things become extra-ordinary, amazing, sacred, and outside of which things seem unremarkable. The marriage ceremony makes a profane bond between bride and groom into a sacred one.

But this fretful young woman’s wedding was not doing its Durkheimian job. For only when the young bride focuses on herself does the occasion seem to become fully meaningful to her. As she says, ‘Finally, I said to myself, “Hey, other people aren’t getting married, you are.”’ In a certain sense, the bride reverses Durkheim. She de-ceremonializes the ceremony. She has to remove herself mentally from the collective nature of the ceremony in order to feel her wedding as sacred and to feel herself transformed.

The psychoanalytic view: the bride’s narcissistic expectation

What in our bride’s tale might catch the psychoanalyst’s eye? Dr Christa Rohde- Dachser, a commentator on an earlier version of this chapter (a paper given at the German Psychoanalytic Association in 1995), offered the following interpretation.⁵ The young bride held ‘narcissistic expectations of this day’; she expected to feel central, elevated, enhanced. She was therefore disappointed when these expectations were not met. When faced with an inattentive sister, absent friends and bumbling bridesmaids, she grew anxious at having toadopt the ‘female depressive solution’; namely to abandon hope of fulfilling her own needs and to focus on the more urgent needs of others. Then she experienced a moment of ‘Oedipal triumph’, as shown again by the phrase ‘people aren’t getting married, you are’. This is the moment, Rodhe-Dachser argues, in which the young woman leaves the sexual ‘white desert’ of childhood in which she watches her parents’ sexual happiness from the side. Now she may enjoy her own sexual gratification. Why, Dr Rohde-Dachser also asks, does the story end when it ends, at a moment of happy union? Is this a fusion of her narcissistic expectation with her Oedipal triumph, central and united for ever, and do these form a denial of reality?

In looking at our bride in this way, the psychoanalyst relies on the idea of personality structure, itself formed in the course of early psycho-sexual development within the immediate family. This is because psychoanalysis is a body of theory about individual human development. Its focus is on those moments in human development when things go wrong, attachments are ruptured, traumas occur. The psychoanalyst thus often dwells upon extreme or pathological emotion, and, as a practice, focuses on healing emotional injuries. Culture enters in as the medium in which human development, injury and repair take place.

Like the ‘regular’ sociologist, the psychoanalyst might not ask how it is that a certain emotion—like anxiety, or feeling ‘his love for me’—does or does not stand out from an array of expectable or appropriate feelings. Both might rely on an intuitive notion of appropriate affect, based on a prior notion of a mentally healthy response to this situation in this culture at this time. They might see feeling as a simple matter of instinct or nature, and leave it at that. They would pass over the crucial question of how cultures shape feeling.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS VIEW

How would a sociologist of emotion approach the same bride? Like the psychoanalyst, the sociologist of emotion notes that the bride is anxious, and links her anxiety with the meanings she attaches to the wedding. But the sociologist of emotion does not usually focus on a person’s childhood development per se, or on injury and repair, but instead on the sociocultural determinants of feeling, and the sociocultural bases for defining, appraising and managing human emotion and feeling.

Three questions arise. Why did the bride feel ‘nervous’, and ‘depressed’, as she put it, and break down and cry? How did she define her feelings? And how did she appraise the degree to which they corresponded with what she thought she ‘should’ feel?

To answer the first question, we would need to discover far more about the bride’s prior expectations and her current apprehension of the self-relevance of her situation. I would personally argue that emotion emerges as a result of a newly grasped reality (as it bears on the self) as it clashes againstthe template of prior expectations (as they bear on the self). Emotion is a biologically given sense, and our most important one. Like other senses, hearing, touch and smell, emotion is a means by which we continually learn and relearn about a just-now-changed, back-and-forth relation between self and world, the world as it means something just now to the self.⁶

Most of us maintain a prior expectation of a continuous self, but the character of the self we expect to maintain is subject to profoundly social influence. To understand the bride’s distress, we would need to understand the template of prior expectations she had about herself, as a daughter, a girlfriend, a woman, a member of her community, and her social class. We would need to know how close she felt she ‘really was’ to the friends who didn’t appear at her wedding, to the sister who didn’t reassure her. We would need to know just what she picked out to see and absorb as she saw her sister from the dressing-table, and what gestures caught her eye among participants at the rehearsal. From these details we might reconstruct the social aspects of the moment of disappointment and tears. To be sure, the social aspect isn’t everything. Emotion always involves some biological component: trembling, weeping, breathing hard. But it takes a social element, a new juxtaposition of an up-until-just-now expectation and a just-now apprehension of reality to induce emotion. That is one aspect of emotion the sociologist of emotion studies.

Second, how does the bride define her feelings? She draws from a prior set of ideas about what feelings are feel-able. She has to rely on a prior notion of what feelings are ‘on the cultural shelf, pre-acknowledged, pre-named, pre-articulated, culturally available to be felt. We can say that our bride intuitively matches her feeling to a nearest feeling in a collectively shared emotional dictionary. Let us picture this dictionary not as a small object outside herself, but as a giant cultural entity and she a small being upon its pages.

Matching her feelings to the emotional dictionary, she discovers that some feelings are feel-able and others not. Were she to feel sexual and romantic homosexual attraction in China, for example, she would discover that to most people, homosexual love is not simply considered ‘bad’; it is considered not to exist.

Like other dictionaries, the emotional dictionary reflects agreement among the authorities of a given time and place. It expresses the idea that within an emotional ‘language group’ there are given emotional experiences, each with its own ontology. So, to begin with, the sociologist of emotion asks, first, to what array of acknowledged feelings, in the context of her time and place, is our bride matching her inner experience, and, second, is her feeling of happiness on her wedding day a perfect match, a near match, a complete mismatch? This powerful process of matching inner experience to a cultural dictionary becomes, for the sociologist of emotion, a mysterious, important part of the drama of this bride’s inner life. Forculture is an active, constituent part of emotion, not a passive medium within which biologically pre-formulated, ‘natural’ emotions emerge.

Third, we ask: what does the bride believe she should or shouldn’t feel? If, on one hand, the bride is matching her emotion to a cultural dictionary, she is also matching it to a bible, a set of prescriptions embedded in the received wisdom of her culture. The bride lives in a culture of emotion. What did the bride expect or hope to feel on this day? She tells us a wedding ‘is supposed to be the happiest day of one’s life’. In so far as she shares this wish with most other young heterosexual women in America, she has internalized a shared feeling rule: on this day feel the most happy you have ever felt. Specifically, the bride may have ideals about when to feel excited, central, enhanced, and when not to (around age 25, not 15). She has ideas about whom she should love and whom not (a kind, responsible man, not a fierce one) and how strongly she should love (with a moderate degree of abandon; not complete abandon, but not too cool and collected either).

Her feeling rules are buttressed by her beliefs concerning how important love should be. The poet Lord Byron wrote, ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘tis woman’s whole existence.’

Does love loom larger for our bride than it does for her groom? Or does she now try to make love a smaller part of her life, as men in her culture have tried to do in the past? What are the new feeling rules about the place of love in a modern woman’s life? How desirable or valued is the emotion of love or the state of deep attachment?

According to the western ‘romantic love ethic’, one is supposed to fall ‘head over heels’ in love, to lose control or come close to doing so. Within western cultures, there are subcultural variations. In Germany, romantische Liebe has a slightly derogatory connotation that it lacks in the USA. In many parts of non-western societies, such as India, romantic love is considered dangerous. On the basis of interviews with Hindu men on the subject of love, Steve Derne found that the Hindu men felt that ‘head over heels’ romantic love was dangerous and undesirable. Such love occurred, but it inspired a sense of dread and guilt, for it was thought to compete with a man’s loyalty to his mother and other kinspeople in the extended family. This dread, of course, mixes with and to some extent alters the feeling of love itself.⁷

So we do not assume that people in different eras and places feel ‘the same old emotion’ and just express it differently. Love in, say, a New England farming village of the 1790s is not the ‘same old’ love as in upper-class Beverly Hills, California in 1995 or among the working-class Catholic miners in Saarbrucken, Germany. Each culture has its unique emotional dictionary, which defines what is and isn’t, and its emotional bible, which defines what one should and should not feel in a given context. As aspects of ‘civilizing’ culture they determine the predisposition with which we greet an emotional experience. They shape the predispositions with which we interact with ourselves over time. Some feelings in the ongoing streamof emotional life we acknowledge, welcome, foster. Others we grudgingly acknowledge and still others the culture invites us to deny completely.

Finally, like any sociologist, the sociologist of emotion looks at the social context of a feeling. Is the bride’s mother divorced? Is her estranged father at the wedding? And the groom’s family? How unusual is it for friends not to attend weddings? How serious were the invitations? Mothers, fathers, siblings, step-parents and siblings, friends: what are the histories of their ‘happiest days’? This context also lends meaning to the bride’s feelings on her wedding day.

THE MODERN PARADOX OF LOVE

Given the current emotional culture (with its particular dictionary and bible) on the one hand, and the social context on the other, a society often presents its members with a paradox—an apparent contradiction that underneath is not a contradiction but a cross-pressure.

The present-day western paradox of love is this. As never before, the modern culture invites a couple to aspire to a richly communicative, intimate, playful, sexually fulfilling love. We are invited not to hedge our bets, not to settle for less, not to succumb to pragmatism, but, emotionally speaking, to ‘aim high’.

At the same time, however, a context of high divorce silently warns us against trusting such a love too much.⁸ Thus, the culture increasingly invites us to ‘really let go’ and trust our feelings. But it also cautions: ‘You’re not really safe if you do. Your loved one could leave. So don’t trust your feelings.’ Just as the advertisements saturating American television evoke ‘la belle vie’ in a declining economy that denies such a life to many, so the new cultural permission for a rich, full, satisfying love-life has risen just as new uncertainties subvert it.

Let me elaborate. On one hand, the culture invites us to feel that love is more important than before. As the historian John Gillis argues, the sacredness once attached to the Church and expressed through a wider community has been narrowed to the family. The family has become fetishized, and love, as that which leads to families, elevated in importance. Economic reasons for a man and a woman to join their lives together have grown less important, and emotional reasons have grown more important.⁹ In additi...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: EMOTIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE MAPPING THE SOCIOLOGICAL TERRAIN
• PART I: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTIONS
• PART II: THE MEDIATION OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE
• PART III: EMOTIONS AND THE BODY THROUGH THE LIFE-COURSE
• PART IV: XUALITY, INTIMACY AND PERSONAL RELATIONS
• PART V: EMOTIONS AND HEALTH