Paper short abstract:

In this article I will attempt to find a theoretical niche appropriate for analyzing emotions in health care research, systematize my findings on emotional experience of illness and, lastly, discuss the input anthropologist’s own emotions have in doing fieldwork and publishing data.

Paper long abstract:

Unitl1980s emotions were mostly neglected as objects of anthropological interest or were studied only in ritual situations when they were 'formal, public, ritualized and distanced' (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). But it was Geertz who posed the question already in 1973 whether any display of emotions - public or private, individual or collective, suppressed or explosive - has ever been independent from cultural conditioning. The most extreme interpretation of Geertz's idea would be that without one's own culture one would not know what to feel. In 1977 Blacking claimed that emotions were catalysts which transform knowledge into human understanding and motivate human actions. The pioneers of theory of emotions in medical anthropology were Scheper-Hughes and Lock who saw emotions as the (missing) link between mind and body. Recent writings in medical anthropology deal with emotions linked to suffering, depression, death, pain and other human processes filled with emotions. Pain and suffering are by all means extreme or, to say the least, unordinary emotional states of individuals. The emotional experience of illness which stems from my research on patients' attitudes towards illness and suffering will be the focus of this article. I will attempt to find a theoretical niche appropriate for analyzing emotions in health care research, systematize my findings on emotional experience of illness and, lastly, discuss the input anthropologist's own emotions have in doing fieldwork and publishing data.