References

True, learning is the key to activating humans' innate potential for using and understanding emotional syntax and to invoking the relevant emotionally ordered stocks of knowledge but learning alone cannot explain humans' incredible facility with emotions (133).

3.3 Turner's work indicates that there are certain emotions that are socially influenced (of the secondary order) and certain ones (of the primary order) that are wired into the neurological apparatus of the person. At the theoretical level, this suggests that social theories that focus exclusively on socially constructed social norms and actions gloss over the deeper solar-plexus regions of social identity and social outcomes. It would seem that emotions do not need words in order to exist.

3.4 Jack Barbalet, another important contributor to the growing literature on the 'sociology of emotions,' has similarly argued that, although emotions can be culturally affected, they possess a social structure of their own and play an important role in determining the type of actions taken in response to social events (1998). P.E.S. Freund also cautions that an exclusively social-constructionist view of the social risks ignoring the bodily reality of emotions, thereby producing a further split between organismic and social explanations of society (1982, 1989, 1990). J. Harré, however, argues against an overly physiological view of emotions; he cautions that a 'bodily feeling is often the somatic expression to oneself of the taking of a moral position' (1991: 143). Unable to completely deny the existence of bodily reactions, the social constructionist viewpoint (1986) attempts to claim that it is the language game or moral position that sets in play an emotional reaction; certainly, this view leaves no room for the possibility that emotions may be stored in the body and accumulate over a period of time, thereby rendering an individual prone to one word game or moral position rather than another.

3.5 Also instructive is the rich body of work done by Thomas J. Scheff. He has examined the phenomenon of shame and its vital role in the development of functional and dysfunctional social bonds (1985, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1994a, 1994b, 1997). Scheff has probed at the experiencing of 'shame' and tried to show the central role it plays in conflict. Although he considers shame 'the master emotion' and recognizes the full spectrum of human emotions, Scheff does not distinguish between an overload of emotions originating from childhood experiences and emotions used in the present as adaptive responses to the social. Further work needs to be done to determine what lies under shame and whether anger and escalating violence are processes in and of themselves, or, defenses against deeper primal emotions such as sadness. The distinction is not inconsequential because the answers we obtain would conceivably refine our understanding of conflict in a variety of social arenas.

3.6 It is not the purpose of this article to discuss all the work being done in the sociology of emotions, but to indicate that progress is being made. This growing body of work includes Simon Williams's excellent review of the philosophical, theoretical and empirical issues embedded in a sociology of emotions (2001) and Nicholas Rose's studies of how power, personhood and the governing of the social self are incalculably linked (1985, 1989, 1998). Particularly noteworthy is the anthropologist Richard H. Wills's Human Instincts, Everyday Life, And The Brain: A paradigm for understanding behaviour (Vol. 1, 1998, Vol. 2, 2002). Basing himself on the concept that much of human behaviour involves the exchange of emotional and material resources, Wills has produced an atlas of human behaviour that shows the varieties of situations that result from emotion management. The work contains no less than 2,272 documented observations of interactions and conversations.

3.7 Other primary works arguing for a re-embodiment of social analysis include the works of Arlie H. Hochschild (1975, 1975, 1983, [1989] 1997, 1997), Nick Crossley (1998, 2001), Richard Sennett (1990), Bendelow and Williams (1997), Tangney and Dearing (2002), Williams (2001), Baumeister and Wotman (1992), Juliette Greco (2001), and Chris Yuill (2004).

3.8 All the above studies agree that emotions play a central role in social life. What is in contention, however, is whether what we call 'emotions' are socially constructed and variable across cultural boundaries or whether they are biological realities governed by forces not dependent on the influences of language or learning. While proponents of both views would agree that many of our secondary emotions (i.e. pride, embarrassment) are socially influenced they part ways when it comes time to determining whether there is a 'primal' well from which emotions are drawn out into the social arena. I hope to argue that there is a well and that this well plays a large role in determining the geist of a culture and whether or not its citizens feel fulfilled within their social environments. I also hope to argue that personal biographies are the complicating factors in the realization of social and moral ideals; these emotional biographies start at the pre-linguistic level (birth to 2 years of age) and continue right into old age.

The Pain Factor

There is little conjunction of truth and social 'reality.' Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not -- R.D. Laing (1967:1).

If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning' -- John B. Watson on child-rearing (Watson [1928] 1972: 81-82)