The thesis of social constructionism is that emotions are shaped by culture and society. I build on this insight to show that existing social constructionist views of emotions, while providing valid research methods, overly restrict the scope of the social constructionist agenda. The restriction is due to the ontological assumption that social construction is indissociable from language. In the first part, I describe the details of the influential social constructionist views of Averill and Harré. Drawing on recent theorizing in psychology, (...) I suggest that their fixation on language makes these approaches inadequate to the analysis of the social construction of human emotional experience. In the second part, I extend the argument to other species, suggesting that these social constructionist views are incapable of accommodating the fact, ascertained by primatologists, that animals have cultures, and that part of animal culture concerns the social molding of their emotions. I conclude that a reconstructed social constructionism should be regarded not as inimical to, but as part and parcel of, a nonreductive biology of emotions. (shrink)

The thesis of social constructionism is that emotions are shaped by culture and society. I build on this insight to show that existing social constructionist views of emotions, while providing valid research methods, overly restrict the scope of the social constructionist agenda. The restriction is due to the ontological assumption that social construction is indissociable from language. In the first part, I describe the details of the influential social constructionist views of Averill and Harré. Drawing on recent theorizing in psychology, (...) I suggest that their fixation on language makes these approaches inadequate to the analysis of the social construction of human emotional experience. In the second part, I extend the argument to other species, suggesting that these social constructionist views are incapable of accommodating the fact, ascertained by primatologists, that animals have cultures, and that part of animal culture concerns the social molding of their emotions. I conclude that a reconstructed social constructionism should be regarded not as inimical to, but as part and parcel of, a nonreductive biology of emotions. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to describe the nonverbal communication patterns that passengers of the Delhi Metro use to manage density-induced territorial intrusions, and to identify some of the contextual variables that affect their deployment. After introducing the notion of “interrogative look” and the dataset, the following section depicts the techniques that passengers were observed to employ in order to solve the problem of territorial intrusion without breaking anonymity. The bulk of the analysis deals with the structure and function (...) of “interrogative looks”, an objectively defined pattern of nonverbal behavior that the touched uses to signal her discontent to the toucher. The rest of the section describes a less frequent pattern whereby passengers contagiously signal the playful character of their mischiefs. Next is examined if and how density, i.e., the number of individuals per surface unit, influences as a contextual variable the occurrence of interrogative looks. The closing discussion considers the main findings from the standpoint of their local specificity. (shrink)

A book review of Johann Michel, Quand le social vient au sens.