Emotion and Culture: Arguing with Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum's account of human emotions, given in her influential 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions is, in many ways, a balanced and insightful one. Her discussion steers prudently and carefully between, on the one hand, the excesses of cultural relativism and social constructivism, and on the other, the crude universalism of biological and cognitivist accounts of emotion. And yet I do not find Nussbaum's overall account fully adequate, and, in particular, I do not think she accords sufficient weight to the role of language in emotional experience or its interpretation. She acknowledges that language differences probably shape emotional life in some ways, but she goes on to say that "the role of language has often been overestimated" (p. 1551)—without noting that it has also often been greatly underestimated. In this article, I argue that despite her desire to strike a balance between extreme positions on emotion and culture, Nussbaum's account of human emotions errs on the side of universalism. I focus on "grief," which is her key example of a universal human emotion, and contrast the Anglo cultural perspective (some aspects of which Nussbaum assumes to be universal) with those reflected in other languages such as Russian, French, Chinese, and the Central Australian language Pintupi.