Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About?

In the anthropology of emotion, rival approaches – cultural relativism and a universalism based on common humanity or shared experience – imply different forms of engagement in the field. This article, a sceptical appraisal, suggests that ethnographers commonly fail to build the diversity of emotional practice into their accounts and have therefore provided a flawed basis for theorizing and comparison. With reference to two Indonesian cases – Nias and Java – I suggest that the domain of emotion is diversely bounded cross‐culturally and is inconsistently constructed in particular contexts. This has critical implications for fieldwork methodology, cross‐cultural comparison, and theories of human development.