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Paper short abstract

Drawing on experimental and ethnographic data, this paper explores the social dynamics and cultural phenomenology of irritation-like emotions in a predominantly Sinhala-speaking context in Sri Lanka, highlighting the influence of Buddhist ethical frameworks in shaping emotional experience.

Paper long abstract

Negative emotions like “irritation” or “mild anger” may appear as a less powerful motivating force in social life and therefore less significant in the study of human sociality. Yet, these seemingly minor affects can sharply illuminate how “togetherness” and moral personhood are shaped in culturally-specific ways. In the present paper, I bring together experimental and ethnographic data, to explore the social dynamics of irritation-like emotions among predominantly Sinhala-speaking professionals and students in the urban setting of Kandy, Sri Lanka. In this context, social connection and mutuality are salient cultural ideals. Ethnographically, intimate sociality may be imaged as a calm body of water—ripples and bubbles on the seemingly smooth surface of everyday interactions only hinting at the depths of feeling below. Here, moments of anger, irritation, and frustration are often navigated with reference to valued dispositions: understanding, letting go, ambiguity, and temperance. I argue that more than cultural norms, these sensibilities reflect a particular phenomenology of emotion, inflected by Buddhist concepts ingrained in the Sinhala language and continually evoked in everyday practice. This, I argue, is significant for the cross-cultural study of emotions in psychology and anthropology whereby we must grapple not only with variation in how particular emotions are elaborated, expressed or appraised but also with how emotion as a category is itself constructed and lived. Such grounded understanding reorients analysis away from dominant psychological narratives in interpreting emotional experience to capture the diverse ways that the human capacity for feeling and self-reflection is organized across cultural contexts.