Western imperialism was often justified as a moral imperative – colonising countries had a duty to civilise the ‘savages’ they encountered oceans away. This ‘white man’s burden’, as the English writer Rudyard Kipling called it, partially hinged on the notion that emotions are universal and biological, existing on a continuum between the refined rationality of Europeans and the uncontrolled emotionality of those they colonised.
In this video essay, the UK filmmaker Lewis Waller discusses two works of anthropology that challenged this paradigm: Never in Anger (1970), the US anthropologist Jean Briggs’s portrait of an Utku Inuit family, and Unnatural Emotions (1988), the US anthropologist Catherine Lutz’s account of emotions on Ifaluk Atoll in Micronesia. Placing these works in the context of the colonial past and more recent research, Waller makes the case that emotions aren’t biologically hardwired and universal, but filtered through sociocultural contexts and constantly being constructed.