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“Self and Emotion”. L'affectivité

‘From the Native's Point of View’

Francis Zimmermann

 

Les fondements épistémologiques de l'anthropologie des émotions et tout particulièrement les deux principes selon lesquels

• les émotions culturellement construites peuvent être verbalisées à partir des catégories indigènes de pensée et de langue,
• les émotions s'expriment sur la scène sociale comme sur la scène d'un théâtre,

ont été formulés dès les années soixante-dix dans l'Ecole de Chicago (haut lieu de l'anthropologie symbolique) et surtout dans un célèbre article de Clifford Geertz (déjà évoqué dans le dossier ‘Culture et personnalité’):

geertz_native's_point_of_view.pdf — Clifford Geertz, "From the Native's Point of View": On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Oct., 1974), pp. 26-45.

 

1 / Révolution du regard

Geertz y soutient une thèse controversée selon laquelle:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

Ce texte classique dont la lecture est vivement recommandée fut réimprimé entre autres dans Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Edited by R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, Eds. (Cambridge, CUP, 1984), et les premiers commentaires que j'en proposerai sont extraits du débat rapporté dans ce livre entre Richard Shweder (qui adopte l'universalisme des psychologues cognitivistes) et Clifford Geertz lui-même (qui propose d'effectuer une révolution du regard anthropologique):

Shweder. I want to raise a point about Cliff's [Clifford Geertz] fascinating essay on the “self” [cet article de 1974]. It seems to me that the concept of the self Cliff refers to as a Western conception — that is, the notion of the person as a bounded, unique, integrated, and dynamic center of judgment and action — is precisely the concept that most developmental psychologists would say has to be there in childhood in all societies, not just in the West…

Il y aurait donc un universel du soi circonscrit dans son individualité, observable chez tous les enfants du monde à l'âge de trois ans, et la variabilité culturelle ne porterait que sur les représentations de soi et l'idéologie construite par les adultes autour de la notion du Soi. Interprétation que croit partager LeVine, aussitôt corrigé par Shweder qui précise que l'idéologie est mise en œuvre dans le cadre d'un travail sur soi, une discipline de soi:

LeVine. What Cliff [Geertz] describes in emphasizing cultural differences — these are ideologies of selfhood that do not in themselves deny the universality of the self at some level of human experience…

Shweder. […] But I did not think the essay was just a description of cultural ideology — the enshrinement of a certain notion of the self in cultural ideology. I thought you [Geertz] were saying that the cultural ideology became an effective representation for individuals; that the individuals in fact worked to overcome that intuitive notion of a discrete self, which I would guess must be there in the Balinese child… The theoretical question is this: […] Do you have to have an articulated, explicit, cultural conception of the self before it's possible for individuals to alter their childhood self-conception? People work at these things — there are disciplines of self-alteration involved in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

Shweder soutient ainsi un culturalisme fortement restreint selon lequel le soi est un universel, tandis que seules les disciplines de soi sont culturellement construites. A quoi Geertz oppose une approche radicalement inverse:

Geertz. […] But suppose we were to turn the whole argument round. Let's imagine that the Western concept of a centered, highly continuous self really suppresses a natural fact — the fact that we're playing roles throughout our lives. That it creates a myth of continuity that has to overcome the actual experience of the fact that we behave so radically different in radically different contexts. That's where I begin to get nervous with the idea that there is one sort of pattern that is fundamental and the others are reversals of that. You can describe the Balinese pattern as a reversal of early continuity feelings. But you can just as easily describe our tremendous emphasis on continuity, sincerity, authenticity, the “true self” sort of thing, as a reversal of the fact that we are all wearing masks all the time through all the changes of social morphology. But there's nothing transcultural, as far as I can see, that would make one of those more fundamental. Suppose as a thought experiment all of psychology and anthropology had grown up in a Balinese context rather than in a Western one and then tried to interpret us. There's nothing particularly privileged about our theories of the self.

Cette révolution du regard, dont Montesquieu donnait le modèle dans Les Lettres persanes — «Comment peut-on être persan?» et que Malinowski formulait en se fixant la règle de toujours partir “from the native's point of view”, est l'un des premiers principes de méthode dans l'anthropologie des émotions.

 

2 / Théâtralité

(From the Native's…, 35) There is in Bali a persistent and systematic attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expression to the point where anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely because he is who he is physically, psychologically, or biographically, is muted in favor of his assigned place in the continuing and, so it is thought, never-changing pageant that is Balinese life. It is dramatis personae, not actors, that endure; indeed, it is dramatis personae, not actors, that in the proper sense really exist.

Ward Keeler critique ce passage (pp.34—35) du texte de Geertz portant sur une comparaison entre Bali et Java, que Geertz résume en disant “What is philosophy in Java is theatre in Bali.”

keeler_shame_java.pdf — Ward Keeler, Shame and Stage Fright in Java, Ethos, Vol. 11, No. 3, Self and Emotion (Autumn, 1983), pp. 152-165.

(p. 160) Geertz has explicitly contrasted Javanese and Balinese understandings of self and would presumably reject generalizations applied to both. He speaks of the Javanese as having “a bifurcate conception of self, half ungestured feeling and half unfelt gesture,” the two kept rigorously distinct. The Balinese he describes as a “much more dramaturgical people with a self to match.” I disagree with the first proposition for reasons which I hope are clear: a person's concentration of spiritual power is thought by the Javanese to determine the condition of both the "inside" (his subjective state) and the "outside" (his own and others' gestures). I find the contrast between Javanese and Balinese overdrawn: Geertz's description of the Balinese "attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expression to the point. . . [of muting] anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely because he is who he is physically, psychologically or biographically" (1976:228) seems to me to fit the Javanese as well as or better than the Balinese.

Au fond Keeler impose à Geertz la même révolution du regard que précisément celui-ci imposait à Shweder en invitant quiconque s'aventure à comparer deux constructions culturelles différentes de l'émotion à envisager l'une du point de vue de l'autre, et réciproquement.

Ce n'est nullement sombrer dans le relativisme culturel, mais prendre Geertz au mot et simplement partir avec constance, dans l'analyse, des catégories indigènes de pensée et de langue.

Retour à l'introduction:

“Self and Emotion”. L'affectivité