We write this introduction after almost three months of preventive isolation in Bogota, Colombia, with no end in sight. On March 23, 2020, the nation’s president, Iván Duque, announced that, like so many of the nations of the world, quarantine and lockdown measures requiring all citizens to remain at home and avoid physical contact were to be implemented by both the national and local governments to avoid the spread of Coronavirus. While he, understandably, used his speech to detail how our physical existences would have to change and adjust during these unprecedented times, Duque also emphasized that we had to learn to express our emotions in a different way than we usually did. And, with this, he officially enlisted the Colombia’s population in a global emotional regime (Reddy, 2001) marked by social distancing as well as feelings of anxiety, distrust of others (because we do not know who is infected or not, who is following the rules or not, etc.), solidarity with health care practitioners and a sense of connection with the poorest sectors of the population. Mere days earlier, on March 19, 2020, the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, officially declared a Catastrophic State of Emergency (Estado Excepcional de Catástrofe), with which the country became officially part of this emotional climate of world-wide uncertainty and a member of the global emotional regime.
While various measures were implemented to varying degrees in different states at the same time as they were imposed in Colombia,1 the United States of America, and specifically President Donald Trump, continues to underestimate (or outright deny) the gravity of the situation. Despite very emotionally forceful (Rosaldo, 1984) arguments from epidemiologists, public health officials, health care workers, and members of the opposition party, he refuses to enact national measures against the pandemic, instead leaving each individual state to envisage and put in place the policies and strategies they consider adequate. These uneven measures combine with the hyper-partisan political climate and overall fatigue with the virus to generate other emotions, such as anger, indignation, fear, and sadness, and both sustain and expand the global emotional regime just outlined.
It is within this global context, that we, the authors and editors of this volume—all of whom are citizens of the three aforementioned countries—finished writing our contributions for this book. Put differently, we concluded our writings in the context of a shared global emotional regime that highlights the main theoretical assumption of this book, namely that emotions are unavoidable, socially constructed, and politically meaningful and, as such, they constitute a highly influential part of our social existence. Allow us to elaborate.
In order to make a lasting impression and affect their citizenry, the presidential declarations in these different countries must resonate with both the collective’s and everyday individuals’ emotional lives. This is because political appeals and socially binding laws are only successful when they are made in communities that share the same emotional repertoires (Reddy, 2001; Rosenwein, 2002); emotional repertoires that traverse common values, beliefs, and goals. For this reason, we (and all the authors of the chapters that comprise this volume) insist that emotions do not live “inside” the subject—they are not private states of mind that only live or occur in the brain. To the contrary, they are enacted and acted-upon forces that convey and constitute social meanings; they are intersubjective in nature and should be understood as public phenomena rather than internal states of mind.
In addition to rejecting the common belief that emotions are private, internal, states of mind, we reject the idea that emotions are “irrational moments” that happen to people when they “lose their minds”—as if they constituted exceptions to a state of permanent and “normal” rationality. To the contrary, we note that, in addition to their social elements, emotions have cognitive aspects that inform and are informed by values embedded in social practices. In this way, the book builds on the theoretical legacy of approaches to emotion in both the social sciences and humanities, a legacy that recognizes their unavoidable social and historical character.
In light of the above, the chapters in this collection utilize a methodology that investigates emotions as they develop, embed, and express themselves in specific, concrete practices, valuations, and patterns of action in multiple contexts in the Americas, including Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. In particular, Incarnating Feelings, Constructing Communities: Experiencing Emotions in the Americas Through Education, Violence, and Public Policy in the Americas attempts to show the social life, development, expression, and consequences of emotions in different cultural practices throughout the continent. Its chapters explore how distinct subjects (children, migrants, indigenous peoples, soldiers, and victims of violence and displacement) feel, act, establish and alter communities, and take political stances within their specific social contexts. All of the chapters discuss research conducted in different countries of the Americas in ways that illuminate how emotions both necessarily motivate and challenge social inequality, violence, and political change throughout the region.
1 Organization of the Book
The philosophers and anthropologists who have contributed to this collection focus on achieving the above by understanding both how emotions are lived and how they produce meaning in contexts of violence, education, and enforcement of public policy. To that end, the volume is divided into three parts focusing on precisely these themes—emotions related to violence, education, and public policy throughout South America and the United States. The first part, “Emotional Communities in Contexts of Violence,” consists of two chapters—one by anthropologist Myriam Jimeno and the second by anthropologist Ana María Forero Angel and philosopher Catalina González Quintero—examining emotions that arise out of different social practices in contexts of violence in Colombia. In the first chapter of this part (Chap. 2), “The Emotional Turn in Colombian Experiences of Violence,” Jimeno offers a state-of-the-art summary of different perspectives that promoted and centered the study of the emotions in the social and natural sciences. Specifically, after describing the main characteristics and consequences of the so-called emotional turn, she argues that recent work in both neuro-science and the social sciences questions the classical dichotomies between body and soul, reason and emotion, cognition and feeling, materiality and immateriality, and biological and social determinations, which has been enriched and supported by experimental research, observation, and analysis of collective practices, cultural meanings, historical processes, and social structures. After offering a general overview of the emotional turn, Jimeno turns to analyze three case studies from her own research to demonstrate that emotions are fundamentally social and relational. In the first case, she shows the political projection of emotions rooted in childhood experiences of domestic abuse and highlights how these emotions negatively shape the social performance of adults vis-à-vis public authority. In particular, she reveals how traumatic experiences of arbitrary and violent exercises of parental authority engender a deep mistrust of both political authority and peers and, consequently, hinders the adequate functioning of society. In the second case, Jimeno surveys the results of her comparative study of crimes of passion between romantic partners in Brazil and Colombia. Crucially, the author claims that crimes of passion are not pathological acts—they are not the product of “excessive love, as they tend to be depicted in Latin American societies—but rather, actions whose motivations involve a complex set of convictions and feelings about romantic couples, love, femininity, masculinity, honor, and loyalty. In other words, these crimes are only possible within a particular emotional configuration—the social tapestry of all these elements. In the last section of her chapter, Jimeno analyzes the emotional processes involved in the subjective and social reconstruction of a community in southwest Colombia (Cauca). In 2001, a paramilitary group perpetrated a horrific massacre against this community, forcing many to flee. The surviving, displaced, population then engaged in a process of social reconstruction, building an emotional community through creatively expressing their experiences of pain and loss and re-signifying those experiences as social injustices requiring rectification. In particular, they achieved this by producing a series of dramatic performances of their experiences of violence, directed to different audiences—both governmental and international agencies—as means to reclaim the status of victim and the restoration of their rights and territory.
In the second chapter of this part (Chap. 3), “Understanding Emotions in Members of Societally Powerful Institutions: Emotional Events and Communities in the Narratives of Colombian Soldiers,” Ana María Forero Angel and Catalina González Quintero argue that analyzing emotions is essential to understanding powerful institutions, like the Colombian military. More specifically, they explore the emotional narratives of Colombian career soldiers in order to advance a topography of power (Lutz, 2006), or an anthropological study of the institutions that determine the fate of nations, while leaving behind the tradition of studying marginalized social groups. To develop this topography, the authors focus on two emotional events—experiences that transformed their identities—namely, “joining the institution” and “learning to kill.” The first event describes how Colombian soldiers make the decision to join the Army as opposed to other illegal, armed groups, such as guerrillas and paramilitary groups as well as the soldiers’ experiences during their first days in the Army, especially the bodily and character changes they undergo during this period to incorporate a military identity. The second event concerns a “change of mentality” the soldiers claim to have in the combat area, when they actually “learn to kill” the enemy. They argue that it is impossible to “learn to kill” during their training because for this to happen they need to undergo a psychological transformation that shifts their understanding of war to one that is a personal issue that affects them and their lives, rather than an abstract idea. But that only happens when the soldier feels that his life is actually threatened or when his best friend, his “lanza,” has been killed by the enemy. Based on their research, the authors uncover various findings. First, they note that the soldiers appeal to their emotions in their narratives to arouse empathy in their listeners and convince them of the significance and truthfulness of their stories. Second, they conclude that narrating and listening to these events, among others, the soldiers form an emotional community. This is a community of reciprocal listening, in which only soldiers, who have lived the transforming experiences of war, know how to speak, listen, and sympathetically react to the emotional force of their peer’s narratives.
In the second part of the book, “Teaching Emotions: White Fragility and the Emotional Weight of Epistemic Resistance,” philosophers Sonya Charles and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. explore the different ways that emotions are taught, learned, and carried in the United States. In the first chapter of this part (Chap. 4), “Moral Development and Racial Education: How We Socialize White Children and Construct White Fragility,” Charles offers a sharp criticism of “color-blind” education among progressive parents and teachers in the Unites States. She explains that, despite the fact that many maintain (or have maintained) that color-blindness is a strategy to combat ethnic and racial discrimination by focusing on people’s shared humanity by overlooking racial differences, in reality the approach fails. In particular, it neither promotes empathy toward nor solidarity with minorities because it makes it impossible for children to voice their questions about race and ethnicity. This approach yields two seriously problematic responses: (1) it leads parents to become unreliable mentors by encouraging children to develop moral vices rather than virtues; and (2) it cultivates what Di Angelo calls, “white fragility,” as the default emotional response of white people to revelations of their participation and support (inadvertent or intentional) in institutionalized racism in the United States. For this reason, Charles emphasizes the importance of explicitly engaging issues of race to promote children’s awareness of social injustices. After showing the limitations of color-blind education, Charles employs Jennifer Harvey’s approach to anti-racist education to show how white parents can help their children to overcome their own feelings of guilt over the history of racism in the United States and develop virtuous character traits based on Aristotle’s virtue ethics, arguing that, “a key component of early moral development is to cultivate proper habits. This means a person should practice doing the right thing—so much so that it becomes a habit.” In this way, questions about race and ethnicity should be encouraged in children to create healthy emotional and moral habits and behaviors that resist racial discrimination.
In the next chapter of this part (Chap. 5), “Epistemic Pushback and Harm to Educators,” Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. explores the negative emotional and physical effects that the students’ epistemic resistance produces in university professors who teach courses related to feminism, racism, colonialism, and other marginalized philosophies and ontologies. In particular, Pohlhaus explores and analyzes an all-too-common occurrence in university classrooms across the United States, namely students’ aggressive, critical, responses to both their professors and their peers who identify as members of marginalized groups when they feel that social position, ethical values, or worldviews around issues like race and gender are threatened. In addition to criticizing their professors’ intellectual abilities and epistemic authority, Pohlhaus argues that these answers usually involve sexist, racist, and even expressly violent comments in...