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Human Biology 73.2 (2001) 323-325



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Book Review

Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions


Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions, Publications for the Society of Psychological Anthropology 10, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 383 pp. $27.95 (hardcover).

This volume began at a session sponsored by the Society for Psychological Anthropology at the 1993 American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, D.C. The editor's fieldwork in Cambodia and a meticulous review process delayed publication, but the final product reflects that care.

A.L. Hinton's introduction outlines and critiques the extreme positions in the contemporary debate between universalists who believe that culture plays little role in emotions versus relativists (or constructionists) who believe that culture and learning totally determine how emotions are cognized and expressed. Both are reductionist positions, and Hinton traces this persistent dichotomy in the Western intellectual tradition to Aristotle and Descartes. Darwin finally provided the framework by which emotions could be viewed as adaptive, psychobiological responses to environmental challenges. Consistent with this view, Hinton believes that these responses require a processual analysis of the elements of emotion, their variation, interrelationships, and development over a lifetime.

Hinton subdivides the volume into four sections.

Part I, "Local Biology," refers to "phenotypic development emergent and contingent on contextual/cultural cues" (p. 11). C.M. Worthman opens with a superb discussion of emotion's central role in information processing, "altering what we notice, influencing rate and content of learning, and evoking recall" (p. 42). She also describes a model of "dual embodiment" in which an individual's emotional development responds to internal physiology and interaction with local conditions, including culture, but which also effects culture change. She applies [End Page 323] her ideas to studies of temperament in monkeys, noting that individual reactivity is a product of both genes and early experience. D.M.T. Fessler further explores the information-processing aspects of emotion, systematically analyzing the internal logic of specific Malay emotions by distinguishing the experiences from the emotional displays. Early in human evolution, emotions led individuals to strive for goals such as fitness, which enhanced dominance. Later, secondary emotions also informed ego about the reactions of others, thus reflecting a theory of mind and ability to infer the motives and intentions of others. Fessler's excellent framework permits analysis of emotional elements that are shared cross-culturally and also elucidates the unique culturally constructed aspects. Finally, J.S. Chisolm describes "Steps to an Evolutionary Ecology of Mind" by examining how the reproductive efforts of adults are influenced by developmental effects such as local mortality rates or emotional relationships with caregivers: "our genotypes are global but our phenotypes are local" (p. 135).

Part II, "Embodiment," defined as "the interpenetration of physiological/ mental processes" (p. 11), begins with I.D. Edgewater's examination of the relationship between music and emotion. He suggests that music like emotions produces a "suggestion of significance" (p. 173) that can be manipulated by others to achieve desired ends. He makes no mention of the belief that music may have evolved out of prosody (speech shifts in pitch and rhythm, an element of communication that conveys emotional significance), and before that, from animal calls (Deacon 1997). This belief supports an ancient connection between music and emotion that reinforces his argument.

The last paper in this section, by M.L. Lyon, looks at emotion and embodiment through respiratory functions. She notes that breathing functions respond and communicate to the group and thus constitute another means of analyzing the dynamic interplay between body, emotion, and culture.

K.E. McNeal begins Part III, "Biocultural Synergy," by examining the paradox between sameness and difference in human emotion, which he feels is physically built into the human nervous system. He provides a wonderful summary of the biological interrelationships between the "emotional" and "thinking" (neocortex) regions of the brain, describing clearly how cognition serves the emotions. "Variations in culturally mediated evaluation give rise to the variable shaping of bodily feeling states" (p. 223). E. Armstrong provides a comparative perspective by further describing how different elements of the limbic system...

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