engleski

Emotions in Emotional Fields - How to Use, Interpret and Analyze Emotions in Health Care Research

Unitl1980s emotions were mostly neglected as objects of anthropological interest. In the rare instances when they were studied, they were analyzed in ritual situations when they were 'formal, public, ritualized and distanced' (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987), and they were seen as integral parts of ritual, rather than as expressions of individual experience. Hence, the analysis was focused on the institution of the ritual itself and not on the emotions, which were felt to be ‘performative’, mere signifiers of what was going on. In 1973, Clifford Geertz posed the question whether any display of emotions – public or private, individual or collective, suppressed or explosive – has ever been independent from cultural conditioning. The most extreme interpretation of Geertz’s idea would be that without one’s own culture one would not know what to feel. In 1977 Blacking claimed that emotions were catalysts which transform knowledge into human understanding and motivate human actions. Thinking along the same lines was Arthur Kleinman who claimed in his 2006 article that culture is a process through which ordinary activities and conditions take on an emotional tone and a moral meaning for participants (Kleinman & Benson 2006). The pioneers of theory of emotions in medical anthropology were Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock who saw emotions as the (missing) link between body and mind. Recent writings in medical anthropology deal with emotions linked to suffering, depression, death, pain, trauma and other human processes filled with emotions and based on the lived experiences. Pain and suffering are by all means extreme or, to say the least, unordinary emotional states of individuals. They color our perception, highly determine our interpretation of events and direct us towards taking certain actions, as Blacking claimed.

applied medial anthropology, health care research

nije evidentirano