EMOTIONS: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON FORMS OF LIFE 1

I will suggest that the English word 'anger' and its counterparts in diverse languages of the world are based on concepts of anger that have a great deal of complexity. This conceptual complexity derives from several sources: (1) the metaphors and metonymies that apply to the concepts in various languages; (2) the prototypes of anger that people share in these cultures, and (3) the many different senses that the word anger and its counterparts have in different languages. We can ask: Are there any universal aspects of the concept(s) of anger? On the basis of linguistic evidence from English, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Zulu and Wolof, I will suggest that there are, but I will also claim that some of the aspects are culture specific. This raises the further important question of why there is both universality and culture specificity in the conceptualization of this emotion. At stake is the issue of which of the following two contradictory claims is valid: (1) that anger is conceptualized in the same way universally, or (2) that anger is a social construction and thus varies considerably from culture to culture. I will propose a compromise view, which can be called 'body-based social constructionism', that enables us to see anger and its counterparts as both universal and culture specific.

Stories, myths, and religious beliefs reveal the powerful role that anger has played in human affairs since the beginning of recorded history. The projections of anger into the supernatural by ancient and pre-literate societies trying to account for the terrifying vagaries of nature testify to their experience with, and appreciation of, the baleful influence of anger in the human sphere. It has served as an instrument of the moral order, as cast in religious narratives and works of art, literature, and drama, and as legitimized in social rules. Various philosophies of human nature, moral conduct, and the search for perfection in human behavior have struggled to determine the essentials of anger. It is fundamentally linked to our representations of personal and societal order and disorder. Stories, myths, and religious beliefs reveal the powerful role that anger has played in human affairs since the beginning of recorded history. The projections of anger into the supernatural by ancient and preliterate societies trying to account for the terrifying vagaries of nature testifies to their experience with, and appreciation of, the baleful influence of anger in the human sphere. It has served as an instrument of the moral order, as cast in religious narratives and works of art, literature, and drama, and as legitimized in social rules. Various philosophies of human nature, moral conduct, and seeking of perfection in human behavior have struggled to determine the essentials of anger. It is fundamentally linked to our representations of personal and societal order and disorder. Woven into the historical tapestry of human affairs are certain recurrently thematic ideas about anger. We present some of these here. 2.1 Anger: Supernatural and Superhuman One indicator of the recurrent concern with anger is its projection onto animistic ghosts, spirits, and demons; the gods of the polytheistic pantheons; and the divinities of the modern monotheisms. The specific attributes of these projections served to illuminate anger's effects on social organization and life. Other indicators include extensive lexicons for anger as well as cultural interdictions against it. The gods must be angry. In many preliterate, animist cultures, angry, malevolent spirits were (and are) believed to cause misfortune. Some were modeled on dangerous wildlife. In the pre-Hispanic

Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2024

"As readers of this issue absorb the many disparate topics treated in the articles that follow this very brief introduction, they may find it helpful to consider that anger is probably not one thing; that its different meanings do not necessarily perform the same interpersonal, communicative, and moral functions; and that it may be a component of—or lead to, or be associated with—many other feelings as disparate as love, hope, and sorrow." Barbara H. Rosenwein

Language and Emotion. An International Handbook, 2022

Psychology studies prioritize a broad understanding of anger as a prototypically negative and confrontational emotion triggered by an offense against the self or relevant others, typically leading to the experiencer's loss of control and (impulse for) retribution. However, this generalization overlooks the rich variability of anger concepts available in different languages and disregards salient aspects of both within-and cross-cultural variation in anger experiences. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that language-based approaches are well-suited to capture this variation. To this end, after a succinct discussion of the ubiquity of the anger lexicon across languages, we systematically review aspects relevant for the differentiation of anger terms within and across languages. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the utility of language-based research for psychological expert theories of emotion and with an argument for both multi-methodological and interdisciplinary synergies in future research.

2020

Thomas Dixon makes the important point that modern anger is nothing like the seemingly parallel phenomena (ira, mênis and so on) of the past. He proposes to show how different it is by employing what he calls an anatomical-genealogical approach – tracing components of the present idea of anger to their antecedents. He criticises my own work on anger as ahistorical because I use the singular term rather than the plurals that the subject demands. I find his critique unconvincing and his approach problematic. I suggest that we explore past notions of anger (and other emotions as well) in their own lived contexts rather than by separate components.

Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2024

The purpose of this issue is, based on the following proposed thematic axes, to bring together articles that study the subject of anger from different disciplines, traditions, and perspectives. Past and present of anger. Anger as a political emotion. Anger and gender. Anger in the non-Western world. The religious justification of anger. Anger and mental illness. Anger in the context of 21st century social movements. Anger in literature and philosophy.

Duisburg: Linguistic Agency of the University of Duisburg (LAUD), Prepublished papers, 2004

Russian journal of linguistics, 2024

Cognitive linguistic investigations into the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER suggest that languages are remarkably similar on a schematic level, with intensity and control as two, possibly universal dimensions underlying the metaphorical conceptualization of ANGER. These dimensions, however, can manifest themselves in language-specific metaphors. Yet arriving at a definitive answer to the question of universality versus variation is hindered by (a) a relatively limited number of systematic, contrastive analyses; and (b) varied methodologies, with some papers adopting a typebased account, while others following a token-based analysis. We take up both challenges in the present paper with the aim of offering a more definitive answer to the question of the universality and variation of ANGER metaphors. We investigate the ANGER metaphors of a type-based analysis, focusing on dictionary data of ANGER-related idioms, and a token-based analysis, focusing on data collected from online corpora, in three languages: (American) English (2,000 random instances of the lemma anger from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), Hungarian (1,000 instances of the lemma düh from the Hungarian National Corpus) and Russian (1,000 instances of the lemma gnev from the Russian National Corpus). The lexical data were analyzed with the well-established Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP). Our results indicate that there is a great deal of congruence relative to shared metaphors in both approaches, but this derives from specific-level metaphors in the lexical approach, whereas it derives from more schematic, generic-level metaphors in the corpus-based approach. The study shows that the full picture of the metaphorical conceptualization of a complex emotion concept such as ANGER can only emerge with the combination of the type-and token-based approach.

1975

Anger is a subject which is seldom discussed independently of other topics. Because of this there appears to exist no work which would enable helping professionals to understand and deal specifically with anger related problems. The purpose of this study is to define the basic dynamics of anger and to suggest a method by which educationally oriented helping professionals may deal with the emotion. Anger is defined as experiential emotional state which is characterized by a physiological arousal state. The arousal state is accompanied by cognitive desires to inflict harm (verbal or physical) on another person or object. Anger is seen as having six different causes which, the author defines as six different types of anger. The types of anger are: (1) Instinctive anger: A biological adaptive anger which stems from a well defined threat to one's property, life, or family; (2) Frustration anger: Anger which is the result of the frustration of an organism's goal oriented response;...