Lutz’s essay dismantles the apparently self-evident Western category of emotion by treating it as an ethnographic object. Rather than assuming emotions to be universal biological substances subsequently coloured by culture, she asks how the Euro-American opposition between emotion and thought, nature and culture, body and reason has itself been historically constructed. The iconic idea is that “emotion” is a master cultural category whose conceptual architecture organises both ordinary life and scientific explanation. Her methodological operation is reflexive anthropology: the analyst turns the ethnographic gaze back onto the categories through which Western psychology and social science claim to describe affective life. This move exposes how notions of naturalness, interiority and irrationality are culturally specific rather than neutral. The essay bridges anthropology of emotion with feminist epistemology, history of concepts and science studies because it demonstrates that analytical vocabularies carry moral and political assumptions. Emotion becomes not an object beneath culture but one of culture’s techniques for organising persons, bodies and social difference.
