What Matters

When anthropologists turned to the concepts of emotions, sentiments, and passions in the 1980s, they found them to be thoroughly centered in psychophysical frameworks. Charles Darwin, experimental psychology, and popular discourse more generally construed emotions as features of a universal human character, as primitive, natural, simple functions, and as more dominant in the dominated and more under control in those at the rational controls of the social order. Feelings were deficits of a sort, even as a human life could not be imagined without them.