Cosomology of Affect and the Extrasomatic Origin of Feelings

Hi Nort,

I have not read Charles Long, but will now. He seems to be pointing in the right direction. Currently, I am researching cross-cultural material on the origin of emotions. What is the ideology of feelings? Where do people believe feelings come from? I mentioned kinship as a realm of affect and cosmology of affect that ascribes feelings to a supernatural realm. In so-called premodern societies, gods and demons are the faces of our emotions. By labeling them as such is one means to manage them. If so it reflects an ontology wherein emotions are thought to originate outside the self. This is contrary to modern Western ideas of emotions having a biological and psychological origin within the body. The belief that emotions reside within us is does not necessarily provide a better way to manage our emotions. Rather if gives us a false notion that we can manage feelings by repressing them within us. "Lock them down," so to speak! We wage war with ourselves. To believe in an extrasomatic origin of feelings represented by a cosmology of supernatural figures creates a very different framework for social organization and interaction. It might have implications for our health, too.

Tad