Presentation Socioanthropological Perspectives on the Study of Emotions: Theoretical and Methodological Proposals

Abstract

In Mexico, the study of emotions has grown in relevance over the last twenty years. During this period, there has been more awareness about the presence of the emotional dimension in every sociocultural phenomena in which anthropology and other social disciplines have interest. That is the reason behind the emergence of different conceptual and methodological proposals for its approach: workgroups, institutional seminars, and –increasingly more– thesis of every degree that include emotion, affects, and sensitivities as the main focus of social analysis. This dossier is intended to be part of the proposal that has emerged from human and social sciences: to recognize in emotion, affects, and corporealities the possibility of growth of the social disciplines’ way of understanding, explaining, and feeling the social world.

Always with a pedagogical purpose in view of the great interest that the study of emotion arouses, the main challenge has been to teach its approach beyond the reproduction of definitions and conceptualizations, a challenge that we have yet to overcome, but that has allowed the construction of a teaching-learning path among different academic degrees.