This edited volume, first published in 1999, attempts to integrate neo-Darwinian and culturalist perspectives in the study of emotion.

Emotions have emerged as a topic of interest across the disciplines, yet studies and findings on emotions tend to fall into two camps: body versus brain, nature versus nurture. Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes offers a unique collaboration across the biological/social divide—from psychology and neuroscience to cultural anthropology and sociology—as 15 noted researchers develop a common language, theoretical basis, and methodology for examining this most sociocognitive aspect of our lives. Starting with our evolutionary past and continuing into our modern world of social classes and norms, these multidisciplinary perspectives reveal the complex interplay of biological, social, cultural, and personal factors at work in emotions, with particular emphasis on the nuances involved in pride and shame. A sampling of the topics: (1) The roles of the brain in emotional processing. (2) Emotional development milestones in childhood. (3) Social feeling rules and the experience of loss. (4) Emotions as commodities? The management of feelings and the self-help industry. (5) Honor and dishonor: societal and gender manifestations of pride and shame. (6) Emotion regulation and youth culture. (7) Pride and shame in the classroom. A volume of such wide and integrative scope as Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes should attract a large cohort of readers on both sides of the debate, among them emotion researchers, social and developmental psychologists, sociologists, social anthropologists, and others who analyze the links between humans that on the one hand differentiate us as individuals but on the other hand tie us to our socio-cultural worlds.

The theories or programs of research described in the chapters of this book move beyond the traditional evaluation model of prejudice, drawing on a broad range of theoretical ancestry to develop models of why, when, and how differentiated reactions to groups arise, and what their consequences might be. The chapters have in common a re-focusing of interest on emotion as a theoretical base for understanding differentiated reactions to, and differentiated behaviors toward, social groups. The contributions also share a focus on specific interactional and structural relations among groups as a source of these differentiated emotional reactions. The chapters in the volume thus reflect a theoretical shift from an earlier emphasis on knowledge about ingroups and outgroups to a new perspective on prejudice in which socially-grounded emotional differentiation becomes a basis for social regulation.

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation. Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities. Easterlin develops her biocultural method by comparing it to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders them in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson’s “Old Barnard,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver’s “I Could See the Smallest Things.” A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

Emotion, Sense, Experience calls on historians of emotions and the senses to come together in serious and sustained dialogue. The Element outlines the deep if largely unacknowledged genealogy of historical writing insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation. Ultimately, we envisage a new way of understanding historical lived experience generally, as a mutable product of a situated world-brain-body dynamic. Such a project necessarily points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration, especially with social neuroscience. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience, we re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and seeking new collaborative efforts.

This fascinating book explores the bodily expression of emotion in worldwide and culture-specific contexts.

Bringing together leading authorities, this definitive handbook provides a comprehensive review of the field of cultural psychology. Major theoretical perspectives are explained, and methodological issues and challenges are discussed. The volume examines how topics fundamental to psychology?identity and social relations, the self, cognition, emotion and motivation, and development?are influenced by cultural meanings and practices. It also presents cutting-edge work on the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of cultural stability and change. In all, more than 60 contributors have written over 30 chapters covering such diverse areas as food, love, religion, intelligence, language, attachment, narratives, and work.

The first accessible text book on the theories, methods, achievements and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry.

This book explores how specific emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict over slavery in the United States.

The dominance of "illness narratives" in narrative healing studies has tended to mean that the focus centers around the healing of the individual. Meza proposes that this emphasis is misplaced and the true focus of cultural healing should lie in managing the disruption of disease and death (cultural or biological) to the individual’s relationship with society. By explicating narrative theory through the lens of cognitive anthropology, Meza reframes the epistemology of narrative and healing, moving it from relativism to a philosophical perspective of pragmatic realism. Using a novel combination of narrative theory and cognitive anthropology to represent the ethnographic data, Meza’s ethnography is a valuable contribution in a field where ethnographic records related to medical clinical encounters are scarce. The book will be of interest to scholars of medical anthropology and those interested in narrative history and narrative medicine.