I argue that an increased theoretical literacy on emotion-related phenomena increases the authority and scientific evidence of ethnographic narratives. Solid emotion theory assists anthropologists in their translation of ethnographic data on emotion-related phenomena from the field into comprehensible anthropological language that speaks to those who do not share the ethnographer’s privileged and involved perspective. A case study from my longitudinal research with street-related young men in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, illustrates that theories from sociology, psychology and social psychology that transgress the particularity of ethno-local emotion words and semantic landscapes enhance the understanding and representation of our research protagonists’ experiences, behavior and talk.
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2019. Foreword: Pathways of Affective Scholarship. In Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography [Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
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