Emotions, The Social Bond, and Human Reality - Part:Whole Analysis

American Journal of Sociology cation of emotionality, which has been accompanied by a decline in public guilt surrounding shameful experiences.
There have been, as well, marked increases in resentment and interpersonal violence. Thus are the emotions brought back into social theory, read into and through standard sociological concepts: change, conformity, rationality, class conict. Barbalets book answers to the criticism that the intellectual descendents of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim have not taken up the challenge to further develop the central place of emotions in social theory (p. 188). And so this is an important book. It reasserts the place of emotionality in classical theory. It makes the classical formations answer to the specics of the current historical moment. It extends the reach of the micromodels associated with Kemper, Scheff, and Collins, offering a powerful and subtle framework for moving from social interaction to social structure. But there is more to the emotions and social theory than physiology, social relations, and shifting congurations of status and power. I am not convinced of the value of an approach that locates explanations of emotionality in factors external to the person. Such approaches treat the emotions as if they were static objects with xed labels. The underlying search for unifying physiological or structural conditions that would account for the emotions will never speak to the basic question of how emotion, as a form of consciousness, is lived, experienced, and articulated by interacting individuals. But sadly this is not Barbalets project. This absence signals a deeper silence, namely, the need to articulate a critical, gendered, racially sensitive, emotional phenomenology of the media and the lifeworld under late capitalism. None of the classical theorists did this. Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole Analysis. By Thomas J. Scheff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. ix249. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Joy Charlton Swarthmore College Thomas J. Scheff has for his career been a leading explorer of the relation of the emotional and psychological to the institutional and societal, beginning with his well-known examination of mental illness and more recently with a sequence of books and articles that spell out a particular theory of human behavior and methodological prescriptions for studying it, set against critiques of the current social sciences. He asks no less than the biggest theoretical and methodological questions we have: How can a scientist or scholar capture the reality of human life, when the people whom we study usually cannot do it themselves? (p. 15). In search of an answer, Scheff intends to connect successfully theory and data, macroand microlevels of analysis, thought and feeling, inner and outer worlds. It is an ambitious and comprehensive enterprise. 1532
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Book Reviews The academic disciplines, Scheff says, are too territorial and conventional to foster creativity and innovation in the study of human behavior. He argues for inter- and transdisciplinary efforts, and, using a term borrowed from botanical morphology, he prescribes part/whole analysis: studying the very small parts in order to understand the whole. The smallest parts for sociologists are words and gestures. Scheff claims that usually human beings do not say entirely what we mean and hardly mean what we say: though we are fascinatingly expert communicators and interpreters of meaning, we participate in social interactions at such high speed and with such complexity that we are not in the moment entirely clear about all that others and we ourselves mean. The only way, really, to understand what happens in any interactive event is to take the smallest parts (words and gestures), freeze the frame, and review repeatedly microanalyzeverbatim transcripts, with theory rmly in mind. Scheff demonstrates such data analysis with diverse source material, from Shakespeare plays to television videotape to family psychotherapy sessions. Scheff argues that all social research implies a theory of human behavior. His own theory places a human emotionshameat its center. Maintaining social bonds is essential for the survival of individuals as well as societies, but the security of social bonds is almost never optimalparticularly for anyone in the contemporary age. Fear of disconnection is the fundamental human fear, and shame is the master human emotion, shame being the response to a perceived threat of loss of a social bond. The possibility of experiencing shame is embedded in every single social encounter, as we constantly monitor emotionally our interactions, exactingly, though not necessarily consciously or deliberately, noting the disapproval or approval of others. Avoiding, suppressing, repressing, and processing the emotion of shame fundamentally motivates humans behavior, and as we do this we cumulatively, interactively, and collectively generate the societal patterns of conformity and structure. Social structure in turn creates the multiple contexts in which interactionsand hence shame, or prideoccur and are understood. Microlevel phenomena, then, are understood to be the basis for macrolevel phenomena, and macrolevel phenomena are observable in the smallest of microlevel details. Scheff is a traditionalist theoretically and methodologically, staunchly emphasizing the importance of specifying theoretical concepts and propositions and of attending to methodological rigor, precision, and verication. He is particularly fond of Durkheims model, provided in Suicide, of testing theory with data; his contemporary sociological orientation, meanwhile, would best be described as symbolic interactionist. But the most energy in the book comes from his injection of the psychotherapeutic into the mix of classic sociological concerns. He does this primarily via family systems theory, with the help of his collaborator Suzanne Retzinger, and following psychologist Helen Lewiss textual analysis of therapy sessions. It is this that will be particularly new to, and provoca1533
American Journal of Sociology tive for, sociologists. The most difcult aspect of this to accept will be the application of family systems analysis to such levels as nation states and the analysis of minute verbal detail when it can never be fully contextualized. The energy here is infectious, however, and the theoretical contributions, especially to microlevel processes, are intriguingly engaging. Scheff has introduced this material before. This book can usefully be considered a kind of collection of Scheff s works; all but one of the chapters are partially or wholly based on (though not exactly reprinted from) previous publications. His intention here is to restate some of his ideas, revise some, elaborate others, and mostly to draw them into one place, with a methodological emphasis, giving examples of how to do the work in the way he advocates. Those who have been following Scheffs ideas will nd a move toward extension and coherence here. Those new to the paradigm Scheff has been developing will nd this book serves well as an introduction, with particularly good conceptual maps at the beginning of the book and at the beginning of each section; the central argument is multiply repeated, slightly reworded, sometimes differently nuanced. Whether one accepts the larger arguments or not, the book has gems of insight and connection well worth discovering. Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. vii342. $55.00 (cloth); $19.00 (paper). Joseph C. Hermanowicz University of Chicago Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin have assembled an entertaining and thought-provoking collection of essays on the relationship between bodies of knowledge and the bodies of people who produce knowledge. The volume contains eight essays, by historians of science, which discuss a host of popularized scientists and their range of intriguing bodily conditions, habits, and ailments. Thus, for example, we acquire a deep understanding of Newtons melancholy and ultimately his breakdown in 1693, just as we acquire a deep appreciation of Darwins atulence and the troubles it spelled to have guts that were, in the apt words of the essayist Janet Browne, noisy and smelly. The entire collection is aided by an essential and evocative introduction by the editors, essential because it places this unusual work in scholarly context, evocative because it answers as much as it raises questions about this highly animated undertaking. Most readers, including those schooled in the traditions of social studies of science, will puzzle over how to approach this book, about what inspires a concern with the bodies of people who know. The history and 1534

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American Journal of Sociology cation of emotionality, which has been accompanied by a decline in public guilt surrounding shameful experiences.

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