Hi Nort,

Anthropology does try and make connections between things which it understands as culture. Culture refers to both these connections and the totality of those connections. The totality or sum is greater than the parts in creating an ethos which is intuited on some level by individuals and helps form them. There is a strong emotional component of this ethos which you are right in saying that it goes largely overlooked. However it is not all left on the editing room floor. Any good ethnography is going to describe at some point the emotional life of a people, however we do not as of yet have the theoretical tools to pick up on those clues and make something out of it. Feelings are messy as you say, not something you can pick up with a pair of forceps. It is more like reading the patterns or trails of subatomic particles in a cloud chamber. The first step anthropologists have taken is trying to identify and classify emotions, which is still not an exact science. Anthropologists cannot agree if types of emotions are universal or particular to place and time, that is biological or cultural. The answer is both. The more interesting problem for me is understanding the act of investigation as a dialogical process creating a common emotional field across which people from two cultures can communicate. Anthropology is as much about creating hybrid cultures as it is about describing and analyzing existing cultures. This is my understanding of the social science application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. All we can really hope to understand is the relationship and that is where trust and feelings come in.

Tad