Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India

309 Pages·15.273 MB·English

by  Owen M. Lynch

Divine Passions
The Social Construction of Emotion in India
EDITED BY
Owen M. Lynch
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
Oxford, England
C 1990 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Divine passions : the social construction of emotion in India / edited
by Owen M. Lynch : contributors, Peter Bennett. . .[et al.].
p. cm.
Papers presented at a conference held 12/1-14/85 at the University
of Houston.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-520-06647-2 (alk. paper)
1. Ethnology—India—Congresses. 2. Emotions—Congresses.
3. India—Social life and customs—Congresses. 4. Love—Religious aspects—
Hinduism—Congresses. I. Lynch, Owen M., 1931-
II. Bennett, Peter.
GN635.I4D58 1990
152.4—dc2o 89-4975
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 89
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984. © -
For
M. N. Srinivas, anthropologist and guru,
and
David B. Kriser, philanthropist andfriend
CONTENTS
PREFACE ix
I • INTRODUCTION: EMOTIONS IN THEORETICAL CONTEXTS
1. The Social Construction of Emotion in India
Owen M. Lynch 3
II-LOVE AND ANXIETY IN INTIMA TE FAMILIAL CONTEXTS
2. The Ideology of Love in a Tamil Family
Margaret Trawick 37
3. "To Be a Burden on Others": Dependency Anxiety Among the Elderly
in India
Sylvia Vatuk 64
III • JOY AND HUMOR IN PUBLIC CASTE CONTEXTS
4. The Mastram: Emotion and Person Among Mathura's Chaubes
Owen M. Lynch 91
5. Untouchable Chuhras Through Their Humor: "Equalizing" Marital Kin
Through Teasing, Pretence, and Farce
Pauline Kolenda 116
IV-EROTIC AND MATERNAL LOVE IN RELIGIOUS CONTEXTS
6. Krishna's Consuming Passions: Food as Metaphor and Metonym for
Emotion at Mount Govardhan
Paul M. Toomey 157
vii
piti Contents
7. In Nanda Baba's House: The Devotional Experience in Pushti Marg Temples
Peter Bennett 182
8. Refining the Body: Transformative Emotion in Ritual Dance
Frtdhique Apffel Marglin 212
V • CONFLICTING EMOTIONS IN CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXTS
9. On the Moral Sensitivities of Sikhs in North America
Venu A. Dusenbery 239
10. Hare Krishna, Radhe Shyam: The Cross-Cultural Dynamics of Mystical
Emotions in Brindaban
Charles R. Brooks 262
CONTRIBUTORS 287
GLOSSARY 289
INDEX 295
PREFACE
The papers in this volume were originally written for a conference on "The
Anthropology of Feeling, Experience, and Emotion in India" held at the
University of Houston on i —14 December 1985. The conference was part of
the Festival of India held in the United States during 1985-86. Nineteen
highly provocative papers were presented; the nine in this volume were
selected because they most directly addressed the conference's theme. Gener-
ous support for the conference came from the American Institute of Indian
Studies, the Ford Foundation, and the Government of India. The University
of Houston was a gracious host. Pauline Kolenda deserves special thanks for
creating a social and intellectual milieu crucial to the success of the confer-
ence in Houston and for working hard to see this volume in print. M. N.
Srinivas was our honored senior participant and guru providing much perti-
nent, sage, and witty comment.
The use of words in Indian languages always presents problems of transli-
teration. Hindi words appearing in English language dictionaries and stan-
dard English spellings for proper nouns have been used as much as possible.
Otherwise with one exception the system of diacritical marks presented by R.
S. McGregor in his Outline of Hindi Grammar (Oxford University Press, 1977)
has been used. The exception is that for Tamil alveolar stops and nasals a
subscript dash (e.g., n, _t, r) has been used. At the request of some authors,
final silent a has been noted rather than dropped although in a few places
local dialectical and spoken variants have been retained when appropriate.
For easier reading, the terminal s indicating the English plural has been
added to some Hindi words, although it does not so appear in Hindi. On first
mention words in Indian languages have been written with diacritics and
thereafter without. A glossary of the most important terms with diacritics is
provided.
ix
X Preface
Two anonymous reviewers provided excellent suggestions for strengthen-
ing the book. Elvin Hatch offered an invaluable critique for improving its
argument, and Barbara Metcalf first recommended it to the University of
California Press. Thanks to them all and to our editors: Lynne Withey,
whose interest, encouragement, and sponsorship made the book possible;
Amy Klatzkin, who shepherded it through a complicated production proc-
ess; and Lisa Nowak Jerry, who rescued the manuscript from mispellings,
inconsistencies, and grammatical errors.
ONE
The Social Construction of Emotion in India
Owen M. Lynch
Yogis lying on a bed of nails in search of detachment from all feeling, white-
bearded gurus preaching meditation on the transcendental, close-knit fami-
lies in which the aged and infirm live out their days happy and secure in the
loving devotion of their children, and ritualists worshiping more by rote than
by heartfelt devotion—these are some images through which the West per-
ceives India and the emotional lives of its people. These, too, are the images
that the essays in this book seek to replace with pictures of worship based
upon deeply felt and deeply motivating ecstatic love, of elderly people anx-
ious and afraid of impending physical deterioration and loss of indepen-
dence, and of priests pursuing a carefree, lusty, and happy-go-lucky way of
life. These new and different images are drawn from ordinary, everyday lives
of next-door-neighbor Indians. They are painted by anthropologists who
took the time to live with them, listen to them, and learn from them over
many months of sharing and dialogue. Each essay in this book also portrays
Indian emotional lives different in structure, meaning, and coloring from
those of the West, yet all are so framed that they reveal, through dialogue, a
common humanity.
Because in India the conception of emotions and of the capacity to lead
emotional lives differs from that in the West, these essays raise problems for
the West's understanding of emotion, particularly when it is universalized
into a theory and projected onto the Other. Cross-cultural encounters and
problems of beliefs, theories, and presuppositions about the real, the natural,
and the human are the questions upon which anthropologists thrive and
through which they contribute to a critical knowledge of our Western selves.
Recently some anthropologists have begun to pose those questions to the
understanding of emotions.1 All the essays in this book, then, have been
written by anthropologists with an eye on not only India but also the de-
velopment of a critical theory and understanding of emotion in the West.
3
4 Owen M. Lynch
If "the passions are precisely those structures which connect and bind us
to other people" (Solomon 1976:19), then why until recently have anthropo-'
logists, who claim to study the structures that connect and bind us into social
and cultural systems, either considered them irrelevant or failed to question
their assumed nature and operation? Reasons for the neglect or failure are
many, and they lie buried in the intellectual history of Western culture and
its influence on anthropology's founders and later theoreticians. To under-
stand how the essays in this book till with the blade of a different plow the
virgin soil of emotion in India, a brief answer to this question is necessary.
We must also be clear about what we mean by and understand to be
emotion, if we are to understand an Other, such as India. In addition to
many academic theories of emotion, there is a Western commonsense under-
standing of it (see Lutz 1986b). The social constructionist view underlying
the essays presented in this volume runs contrary both to some Western
commonsense notions and to some academic theories about emotion. Thus,1
it is advisable to give a somewhat extended, although by no means compre-
hensive and adequate, survey of some of these ideas and theories.
Theories of emotion in the West as they have been developed into para-
digms for research are of two types: physicalist and cognitive. Until recently
the physicalist theory has dominated academic circles.2
Physicalist Theory
Despite the cognitive overtones of his theory, Descartes was the most influen-
tial originator of physicalist theories; he ultimately reduced emotion to a
subjective awareness in the soul of activities in the body, of passively experi-
enced feeling. Descartes left unclear the relationship between the soul and
the radically different and separate body. Hume elaborated on Descartes and
considered emotions to be the registrations in the soul of particular feelings
caused by primary sensations associated with some idea or perception. Emo-
tion remained, then, a passive awareness, but in Hume it became a sensation
mediated by perception into a particular feeling.
This Cartesian view of emotion took its most influential modern twist in
the work of William James. For James, "bodily changes follow directly the
perception of the exciting fact and. . . our feeling of the same changes as they
occur is the emotion" (James 1890:449-450). He reverses the everyday no-
tion that people cry because they feel hurt. Rather, they cry, and this physi-
cal change is the emotion they experience; emotion is a feeling of physiological
changes. James tried to make psychology a science by turning from a method
of introspective accounts of feelings in the soul to objective measurements of
physiological changes in the body. And so, physiological psychology was
born and with it a major modern paradigm of what emotions are.
Behaviorism added little to this paradigm except to shift observation and
The Social Construction of Emotion 5
measurement to patterned responses or operant behavior created by phy-
siological conditions elicited through specific stimuli. Yet emotion itself re-
mained a physiological event. Freud's early theory, too, is Cartesian because
he considers emotions to be cognitively felt responses to physiological in-
stincts or drives blocked by some early traumatic but unconscious event in
the individual's life. The source of anxiety and fear is in blocked drives, and
the emotion itself is merely a safety valve to let off their energy or steam.
Once again, emotions are passive experiences of ultimately physiological
states.
I shall deal with some of the many objections to physicalist theories later
in this essay, but it is important to note here that all of them take emotions
such as fear, anger, and anxiety as paradigmatic and deal less well with the
more subtle emotions such as hope, ennui, indignation, envy, and the like.
Almost all physicalist theories consequently separate primary or basic from
secondary or derived emotions.3 Moreover, physicalist theories, based as
they are in physiology or drives, assume that at least basic emotions are
universal.
From an anthropological point of view physicalist theories are interesting
because they so well match the basic elements of Western common sense
about emotion. For that reason they raise suspicions of Western bias and
ethnocentrism. First, in Western common sense, emotions are passive: they
are "things" that happen to us, we are "overwhelmed" by them, they "ex-
plode" in us, they "paralyze" us, we are "hurt" by them, and they "threaten
to get out of control." Emotional action follows a hydraulic metaphor of
forces welling up inside of us or of psychic energy about to explode (Solomon
1984; see also Lakoff and Kovecses 1987). Second, emotions are irrational
rather than rational, natural rather than cultural, and located in the lower
faculties of the body where they are completely separate from the higher
faculty of the mind, their master controller. As such, emotions can perform
an important excusatory function, among others, in Western society. Just as
someone may be excused for a minor peccadillo because "she was upset," so,
too, she may be treated more leniently for a major offense if it was a crime of
passion or insanity. In the same way crimes committed under the influence of
alcohol or drugs are treated as less culpable, particularly in American society
(see Gusfield 1981). Third, in the commonsense theory of emotions the ex-
tension of the verb to feel from sensations to emotions essentializes them as
things, as physiological states; just as one feels the heat of fire, so too one feels
the heat of rage. Such a view fits in well with today's drug culture; emotions
can be bought in a pill on a back alley or at the local drugstore. Paradoxical-
ly, many medical professionals and addicts agree with the view that emotions
are the chemical effects of the pill in the body, just as for some social scientists
of the physicalist persuasion primary emotions are the action of neurochemic-
als on the autonomic processes of the body (Kemper 1987). Fourth, com-