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"Many anthropologists sympathetic to social constructionism have claimed that emotions familiar to us, like anger, are absent from some cultures. (A few anthropologists say there are cultures with no emotions at all!) For example, Catherine Lutz wrote that the Ifaluk (a Micronesioan people) do not experience our "anger" but instead undergo an experience they call song. Song is a state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction such as breaking a taboo or acting in a cocky manner. It licenses one to shun, frown at, threaten, or gossip about the offender, though not to attack him physically. The target of song experiences another emotion allegedly unknown to Westerners: metagu, a state of dread that impels him to appease the song-ful one by apologizing, paying a fine, or offering a gift.
..the issue of whether to call Ifaluk song and Western anger the same emotion or different emotions is a quibble about the meaning of emotion words: whether they should be defined in terms of surface behavior or underlying mental computation. If an emotion is defined by behavior, then emotions certainly do differ across cultures. The Ifaluk react emotionally to a woman working in the taro gardens while menstruating or to a man entering a birthing house, and we do not. We react emotionally to someone shouting a racial epithet or raising a middle finger, but as far as we know, Ifaluk do not. But if an emotion is defined by mental mechanisms - what psychologists Paul Ekman and Richard Lazarus call "affect programs" or "if-then formulas" (note the computational vocabulary) - we and the Ifaluk are not so different after all. We might all be equipped with a program that responds to an affront to our interests or our dignity with an unpleasant burning feeling that motivates us to punish or to exact compensation. But what accounts as an affront, whether we feel is permissible to glower in particular setting, and what kinds of retribution we think we are entitled to, depend on our culture. The stimuli and responses may differ, but the mental states are the same, whether or not they are perfectly labeled by words in our language."
P.S. "Computational theory of mind is not the same as the "computer metaphor" of the mind, the suggestion that the mind literary works like a human-made database, computer program, or thermostat. It says only that we can explain mind and human-made information processors using some of the same principles. It is just like other cases in which the natural world and human engineering overlap. A physiologist might invoke the same laws of optics to explain how the eye works and how the camera works without implying that the eye is like camera in every detail." |