The orienting question

How does culture influence emotion? Obviously, different languages have different words for emotions. But beyond that, how much of emotion behavior is culturally variable? How much overlap is there between, say, Americans' “anger” and Indonesians' marah? To answer this raises a whole range of questions about how different people talk, think, feel, and show emotions. For example, can we say that the size of the emotion vocabulary varies from culture to culture? Do emotion words cluster differently in different cultures? Are there culturally unique emotions? Are there emotions emphasized by some cultures and neglected by others? How much do causes of emotions vary, and how different are the outcomes of emotions? Are different facial expressions used for the same emotion in different cultures, and why?

Are those cultural differences merely exotic curiosities or can they be systematically related to other aspects of culture? The task of the anthropologist examining emotion is to look for differences: to identify and to account for culturally variable emotion behavior that takes place against the pan-cultural background.

This volume examines three sets of emotion terms, first mapping out each set to depict the landscapes of emotion. Then it explores the meanings of these maps to describe the cultures of emotion. Each is from Indonesia: One is Minangkabau, one is Minangkabau Indonesian, and the third is Javanese Indonesian.