Those of us who work in the social science field, with such a chaotic subject as tourism, tend to focus on representations. That is, our concern are the forms on which certain practices can legitimate, become common, articulate with particular interests. But in our field there’s a tendency to extralimit on the understanding of the world as a representation, simply.

Below, a text of the antropologist Radcliffe-Brown, taken from a chapter of Renato Rosaldo’s Cultura y Verdad (culture and truth), “Después del objetivismo” (after the objectivism):

“When two friends or relatives meet after being apart, the interrupted social relation betweeen them is about to renovate itself. This social relation implies or depends on the existence of a specific link of solidarity between them. The ritual of crying (along with the subsecuent exchange of presents) is the affirmation of this link. The ritual, one should remember, is mandatory, forces the participants to act as if they felt certain emotions and, to some degree, it creates these emotions between them.”

Another text taken from Rosaldo’s, this time it belongs to the antropologist Jack Goody:

“We expect on a man to show great grief for the death of a young child”

Rosaldo is very clear on his critics to this kind of descriptions, which tend to conceive emotional situations as mere rituals that “represent” pain. ¿Don’t people get emotional when they see a loved one after a long time? ¿What does he mean by “we expect” on a man to cry for his dead son? What’s interesting is that these etnografic descriptions are applied only to other societies. An antropologist would never describe the pain of an american parent as “it is a given thing that he has to show as if he felt pain”. We take for granted that he feels the pain. This is an interesting example of how do certain etnocentric clasifications operate: they describe the other in a way that it would be unacceptable to apply to our clasifications of what’s real.

Rosaldo’s statement goes even further: ¿why do we validate the etnographic method as a way to describe the others if, when we read an etnography about our own group, we find it untrue, even unreal? There are several ways to address the question. We can argue that the analyst’s language is not the same of the group he analyzes. On the other hand, we can recognize that, in many cases, we apply categories of world comprehension to the group of study that we’d never use in our own group. Understanding any sign of pain as a simple representation of pain is one of them. Analyzing the others, taking into consideration our group as the parameter of what’s normal, is another.

Just like with language, social sciences have serious difficulties when referring to and describing emotions. It’s good to aknowledge this limitation. What’s bad is trying to replace emotions by representations, simply because the latter aren’t easier to formalize and analyze.

Bibliography:
Rosald, Renato (1991) “Después del objetivismo” in Cultura y Verdad. Nueva Propuesta de Análisis Social. México, Grijalbo.