Language, affect and the inculcation of social norms in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond

Abstract

Culturalist accounts of emotion and morality have focused on how they are constructed and inculcated through particular, more or less culturally specific ways of talking about them. Both Bourdieu and recent affect theorists have opposed what they see as an overemphasis on language in such accounts. Here I argue that the dichotomy between the ‘verbal’ and the ‘non-verbal’ that is common to both is misconceived. A more useful distinction is between the level of referentially explicit talk about emotions and moral precepts, and the ways in which they are implicitly conveyed, both through non-referential aspects of discourse and through other, non-discursive aspects of social interaction. Ethnographic evidence for my argument is drawn from study of children’s language socialization in Highland Papua New Guinea. Show more