Quoting Williams, Ahearn defines "structures of feeling" as "'meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt' by real individuals [Ahearn, p. 53]."'. The structures in this phrase are not static, but are always growing and changing in discernible patterns. Both Lutz and Ahearn are interested in connecting these structures to other aspects of society and culture, both within the culture being studied and in other cultures, but each author takes a somewhat different approach according to the aims of their respective ethnographies.
Unnatural Emotions has two main goals: to deconstruct Western emotion as a cultural category and challenge assumptions about it, and to describe emotional life on an atoll in Micronesia. Lutz says that "the ethnographic understanding of the emotional worlds of other people is accomplished primarily by comparison with the emotional world into which the ethnographer is socialized [Lutz p. 144]," so it makes sense that her data is largely comprised of comparisons between American and Ifaluk interpretations of emotion gathered through interviews. Invitations to Love, on the other hand, is more concerned with tracing change over time: the way that the conceptions of self, love, and agency among residents of Junigau began to shift dramatically in the 1990's. To get a sense of the chronology of this change, she uses data like census information and new textbooks that advocate development to illustrate a population-wide shift in thinking.
[...] Like the Ifaluk, Junigau residents before the 1990s viewed romantic love with a good deal of shame or at least embarrassment. Love had no positive aspects to it; in fact, it primarily brought pain and trouble [Ahearn, p. However, due in part to a spike in literacy aided by textbooks overflowing with development discourse, romantic love came to be seen as a modern, classy road to life success, to be achieved through one's own agency, not the backwards roads of capture or arranged marriages. [...]
[...] While bringing snacks to male superiors and giggling when their eyes wander might not seem like a way to assert oneself on the surface, Kondo found that women engaging in these behaviors were making themselves a central part of the uchi of the factory. As Arlene MacLeod put it, these acts are “accommodating protests [Ahearn, p. ones that, while interwoven with resistance and accommodation, open up other spaces for the expression of more explicitly, efficaciously resistant actions on the part of both women and men Agency is achieved not by acts of “pure resistance” but by a slow ebb and flow, each act of new thinking making room for the next. [...]
[...] Reinforcing gender identities “There is no such thing as pure resistance [Ahearn, p. Kondo and Ahearn discover opposed but complementary conclusions regarding women's performance of gender identities. Ahearn looks in on this phenomenon from the outside, examining the nature of consent and coercion mainly by looking at love letters, the opinions of theorists, and nuances in the language to deduce that new ideas can sometimes reinforce old ones. Kondo, in contrast, uses the personal experience gained from living around and participating in these performances to come to a reverse conclusion: that acting in a traditional way can sometimes produce subversive results. [...]
[...] society, emotions are seen as “getting the better” of people, of “sweeping” them out of a rational, thoughtful frame of mind and depositing them in chaos. Love is no exception. A comparison can be drawn here. The Ifaluk have a set of expressions for romantic love, such as baiu and chegas, which have a negative connotation: “these emotions are similar to happiness/excitement (ker) because, like the latter, they are often seen as dangerous, socially disruptive emotions [Lutz p. However, the feeling of compassion/love/sadness known as fago, while encompassing love in its definition, has a completely different connotation. [...]
[...] Because toughness and fortitude are so integral to their idea of the complete person, they accept bad treatment from their masters as part of a package of growth. Physicality is also vital to this picture of the mature male artisan. They speak of “polishing the arm [Kondo, p. honing a skill to the point that it becomes muscle memory, impossible to lose or forget. Their skills become a part of themselves. Once the heart has been polished by kuro and the arm has been polished by hard work and long hours of practice, the artisan can feel a claim to the shokunin katagi, or the artisanal spirit [Kondo, The ikigai, or reason for being, of those who possess the artisanal spirit resides in the pleasure of making things with skill and talent. [...]
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