“Emotional universals” – genuine and spurious

It is often assumed that to emphasize the differences in ways of speaking about “emotions” that we find in different languages and cultures is to embrace cultural relativism and reject the possibility of there being any “emotional universals”. This isn't necessarily true. But false universals are a major obstacle in our search for true universals; and in searching for the latter we must, first of all, debunk the former. Since false universals mainly arise from the absolutization of distinctions drawn by one's native language, close attention to such ethnocentric traps is of prime importance. The idea (championed recently by the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker) that “mental life goes on independently of particular languages” and that in other cultures, too, concepts encoded in the English lexicon “will be thinkable even if they are nameless” (Pinker (1994: 82)) is naive and ethnocentric.

In applying this idea to the domain of “emotions” Pinker (1997) ignores the work of anthropologists like Michelle Rosaldo (1980), Catherine Lutz (1988), or Fred Myers (1986), and falls into the trap described more than a decade earlier by Lutz (1986: 47) as “the tendency to treat [English] emotion concepts as conceptual primitives and universals”. As Lutz pointed out at the time, “in the cross-cultural context, Western ideas about the nature of emotion have set the terms for descriptions of the emotional lives of cultural ‘other”’.