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How Did It Feel for You? Emotion, Narrative, and the Limits of Ethnography
Author(s) -
Beatty Andrew
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01250.x
Subject(s) - presentational and representational acting , ethnography , narrative , confessional , epistemology , action (physics) , sociology , social psychology , psychology , distancing , illusion , aesthetics , cognitive psychology , linguistics , anthropology , philosophy , covid-19 , political science , politics , medicine , physics , disease , quantum mechanics , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law
In this article, I present the case for a narrative approach to emotion, identifying conceptual and presentational weaknesses in standard ethnographic approaches. First‐person and confessional accounts, increasingly offered as a corrective to the distancing and typifying effects of cultural analysis, are shown to be unreliable; shared experience turns out to be an illusion. Instead, I suggest we look to literary examples for lessons in how to capture the full significance of emotion in action. Here, however, we reach the limits of ethnography.