Academic interest in the emotions is undergoing something of a renaissance these days. So much so, indeed, that it seems everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. This edited collection of essays by psychological anthropologists is their attempt to show that they too have something to offer to the study of emotion. Unfortunately, they fall far short of achieving their aim.

Anthropologists have typically emphasised the cultural relativity of emotion. Some have even gone so far as to claim that there are no human universals in this domain. The authors in this volume reject this extreme view, arguing for what they call a ‘biocultural’ approach which does justice to both the pancultural similarities and the local differences in emotional experience. This is all well and good, but it is hardly news that biology and culture interact to produce humans that are neither completely identical to each other nor radically different. Indeed, this has become such common knowledge that one wonders whether so much ink needed to be spilt reiterating the point. The authors of the volume seem to think that they are breaking new ground in calling for an integrated approach to emotion, but Paul Ekman, to name only one, has been promoting his ‘neurocultural’ approach for many years.

In fact, there is very little that is really innovative or original in this book. Much space is given over to lengthy theoretical discussions about the interaction of biological and cultural inputs in development, or the interaction of emotion and cognition in the production of intelligent behaviour, while there is a relative paucity of specific findings about the emotions. A more accurate title would have been ‘Theoretical models for integrating biology and culture, with a few examples from the emotions’. For the student of emotion, then, there is not much to get one’s teeth into.

On the positive side, the scholarship is careful and comprehensive. All the major approaches to emotions are given some treatment, and the citation is encyclopaedic. Even this has its disadvantages, however. There is so much referencing and summarising of other views that it is easy to lose sight of the wood for the trees. In their attempt to be fair to all sides, the authors frequently fail to make any incisive statement of their own. Indeed, one gets the impression that emotion research is a race in which ‘all must have prizes’. The lack of clarity is compounded by the excessive use of jargon that often merely states in a longer and more roundabout way what could have been said much more quickly and crisply in plainer language. Despite their increasing familiarity with neuroscience, it seems, many anthropologists have still not managed to shed the legacy of their recent flirtation with postmodernism. This is most obvious in a terrible essay by Iain Edgewater, which abounds in references to once-trendy French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These writers are not known for their clarity, and to bring them into the debate on emotion seems a terrible waste of time, especially when there is so much good empirical work coming out nowadays, work that is usually written up in an accessible and rigorous style.

Thankfully the same is not true of all the essays. Daniel Fessler, for example, outlines a neat evolutionary account of second-order emotions such as shame and pride that is marred only by his occasional use of jargon (e.g. speaking of ‘ego’ and ‘Other’ when he could easily have used less pretentious terms, such as ‘self’ and ‘other’ uncapitaiised). Keith McNeal gives a fine account of the MacLean’s theory of the limbic system, though again this is hardly original. It is nice to see anthropologists getting familiar with neuroscientific research, but they all seem rather desperate to display their newfound knowledge. This is good news for readers with little previous knowledge of the brain, but rather tedious for anyone else. Was it really necessary to publish yet another summary of this already widely-disseminated information?

I picked up this volume in the hope that I might learn something more about the precise ways in which culture and biology interact to produce the emotional phenotype. When I finally put it down, however, I was none the wiser.

Dylan Evans