Sadness, depression and social reciprocity in highland Ecuador

SOC. Sci. Med. Vol. 28, No. 9. pp. 899-904, Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

SADNESS,

1989 Copyright

027%9536189 53.00 + 0.00 Q 1989 Perpmon Press plc

DEPRESSION AND SOCIAL RECIPROCITY IN HIGHLAND ECUADOR MICHELTOUSIGNANTand MARIO MALDONAD~

Laboratoire de recherche en 6cologie humaine et sociale, UniversitC du QuCbec g MontrCal, Case postale 8888, Succursale A, Montrtal, Qu&ec H3C 3P8, Canada Abstract-Pena or llaqui in the Quechua area of Ecuador refers to a state of sadness and depression experienced following a variety of life events. This paper tries to explain why there is an elaborate discourse on such feelings in this culture. It is argued that the Quechuas stress the ideal of social reciprocity in human encounters and are accordingly sensitive to disturbances in social relationships. We observe that they pay a great deal of attention to the victim of penn and that they try to improve relationships with the social network and the family. The indigenous theory on pena also points to the importance of bodily elements closely associated to the psychological conditions. We conclude that knowledge of status relationships are important to understand the emotions experienced when loss occurs. Key words-depression,

emotions, conceptions of mental health, Ecuador

INTRODUCTION Pena, meaning sadness or suffering, occupies a central position in the daily discourse of Quechuaspeaking communities of highland Ecuador [l]. The Quechua term is Iluqui. Pena refers to an emotion, and to the situation of affliction. When the condition becomes unbearable, pena becomes an illness. The symptoms are similar to those that Western psychiatry diagnoses as anxiety and depression. Pena is not a culture-specific emotion or a culture-bound syndrome. We should avoid the fallacy of classifying it according to a biomedical model, but at the same time avoid a scientifically sterile relativism. The discourse on pena reveals elements that can be used to understand sadness and depression in other cultures. These elements provide a model of social reciprocity that can help to understand cross-cultural aspects of emotions. The theme of reciprocity is certainly not unique to the Inca world. Sahlins distinguished among generalized, balanced and negative reciprocity to classify types of exchanges in primitive societies [2]. The theme has appealed to many anthropologists who have written on the Peruvian Andes [3]. Mannheim elaborates on the richness of the Quechua vocabulary for concepts of reciprocity (31. The differentiating characteristic of human beings, Runa, is to be able to reciprocate between themselves, the Mother Earth and the mountain lords. Four verbal affixal expressions serve to qualify the nature of the reciprocity of a particular action. For instance the verb to work with the affix upakuy means to work together on each other’s behalf. Social encounters in Peru are ritualized in daily activities by the consumption of chicha, a home-made brew, and of coca leaves [4]. Isbell [S, 61 gives a central place to the theme of reciprocity in her description of the ritual for cleaning irrigation canals (Yarqa Aspiy) in Chuschi, Peru. She showed how the prestige of a member of the hierarchy relies on his kin-based network of reciprocal aid, named kuyuk.

She concluded that reciprocal exchanges were “the ‘glue’ that keeps kinship, social hierarchy, and ecological order intact” [6, p. 831. Other scholars also consider the concept of reciprocity to be at the center of the Quechua culture as illustrated by Alberti’s and Mayer’s Reciprocity and Interchange in the Peruvian Andes or Nuiiez de1 Prado’s Reciprocity as rhe Ethos of the Indian Culture.

The stress on reciprocity does not mean that Andean society is a haven of peace. On the contrary strong tensions exist within the nuclear families and the extended kin group, as well as with outsiders [I. In southern Peru, family quarrels are regarded as an element of daily life among couples and McKee [8] interpreted this tension as a process reflecting that husband and wife still belong to their respective family of origin. Too much love and reciprocity would endanger their association to this family [9]. The absence of affective and social support from nonkin in the community also puts a lot of pressure on the couple and instances of depression are often observed [lo]. The focus of this paper is the complementarity between pena and the theme of reciprocity in Ecuador. Emotions similar to pena are encountered in many if not most cultures. To name a few, there is fago (compassion/love/sadness) and lalomweiu (loneliness/sadness) among the Ifaluks [l I], the neurasthenic feeling described by Kleinman among the Chinese [ 121 and dt!pre.ssion in QuCbec [ 131. Reciprocity is also central in many ethnological reports. Few analyses, though, have shown the relation between the depressive experience and the world view of a culture as was done for Iran [14]. We wish to show here in a similar way that sadness in Ecuador is associated with loss and lack of reciprocity. RESEARCHCONTEXT Some of the data were collected by the first author during the year 198 1. An alphabetization project was 899

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in process at the Department of Linguistics of the Catholic University of Quito. One of its goals was to gather material in order to publish culturally relevant texts. To this end, a team of Quechua university students from various parts of the country and two curanderos, from the provinces of Tungurahua and Imbaburra, had been hired to do interviews in their province of origin. One of the domains covered was folk medicine. Our method consisted in analyzing the transcripts, obtaining additional information from the interviewers, and asking them to collect data concerning pena in the course of their field trips. We also interviewed community people coming to Quito to get training sessions in illiteracy teaching. Some material was collected first-hand in the provinces of Bolivar and Imbaburra with the help of a Quechua-Spanish translator. The rest of the data were collected by the second author who is of Quechua origin and who has worked several years as a physician in the region of Otavalo and who is now completing a master degree in social sciences at McGill University. THE CLINICAL ASPECTS OF

PENA

The main symptoms of pena have been described in another article [l]. Many resemble the Western syndrome of depression and others are more specific to the local context. Severe cases are characterized by a lack of concern for personal hygiene, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, and incapacity to enjoy positive aspects of life. An illustration of the latter was the case of a woman who could not react to gifts and visits from her grandchildren. Repeated presences of a lost person in dreams is often noticed as well as the recurrence of memories of the person. The illness is generally considered serious because of the victim’s wish to die. In some cases, the presence of dehydration is a serious threat. That is why visitors keep bringing comfort and gifts to lift the morale of the afflicted. Convulsions sometimes occur during the periods of depression. The following case well illustrates this general picture: A 40-year-old married woman with 6 children, living in a small village of Imbaburra, was Seen at the Quechua medical care center (Runajambi) for convulsions (uroques). Her condition had started 3 months before and the convulsions seized her almost once a week. The crisis comes without warning signs, lasts 2-3 minutes, accompanied by abundant saliva, sweating, tears, vomiting, and biting of the tongue. Afterward, the patient feels tired, sleeps

a lot, and complains of vertigo and headaches. The patient attributes her state to sadness caused by her son and her husband. Both the husband and father are alcoholic and the grandmother has suffered from a similar syndrome. The youngest son, aged 2, is seriously ill from malnutrition and a kidney infection. The patient reports that she has been sad and depressed, and prone to crying for a few years. She talks little and is pessimistic; concentration is weak and she tends to freeassociate. Many somatic symptoms are present such as tiredness, loss of weight, lack of appetite, insomnia, vomiting, periods of diarrhea and constipation, disturbance of the menstrual periods, chest pain and feelings of chest oppression. There is also a lack of sexual interest. A neurological examination ruled out the presence of epilepsy. The woman was both treated by a Quechua healer and antidepressives and responded positively.

What distinguishes pena from Western depression is the presence of heart pain. This expression is sometimes used metaphorically but mostly refers to sensations in the upper chest. The clinical picture is pretty similar from one case to another, the difference being in the severity of the symptoms.

Los.5ANDEMo~oNSIN THE CONTEXT

OF

SOCIAL

EXCHANGE

Behind each case of penn, there is a!most a loss of some sort. This is not new to psychiatric epidemiology which has repeatedly found a high association between loss events and depression [15]. But to explain the effect of the loss in the context of a process of social exchange was an innovative idea proposed by Schieffelin [ 161.This author showed that the rules of social reciprocity help to understand the reactions to loss among the Kaluli of New Guinea. Sadness there is not simply a sign of despair and defeat but an active form of appeal, implicitly or explicitly expressed, for payment of an incurred loss. The situation is similar in Ecuador where, for instance, long periods of sadness in a woman will attract the attention of kin. They will investigate with whom the fault lies, usually suspecting the husband, and see in what way the situation can be corrected. In case of failure, the eldest adults of the community will get involved and, if discussions fail, more stringent admonitions and punishments, even flogging, may be applied. As was pointed out by McKee (81, guilt is not the core element in the punishment. The goal of the intervention is not to make the abuser ashamed but to facilitate reparation. In other cases of pena, natural catastrophes which keep befalling a person are seen as the cause of his condition, as when crops are lost. The event can, but not always, be attributed to a bad action committed in the past, for instance a lack of respect for one’s parents or mistreatment of one’s child. But sadness is but one among many emotional coping reactions to restore the balance of reciprocity provoked by a loss. Anger is another likely strategy that can be manifested. As stated by Schieffelin for the Kaiuli: The framework that gives anger its justification and social implications, that provides the sense of proportion that constrains it, and that outlines the order of events that it sets in motion is social reciprocity 116, p. 110).

Strategies of sadness-appeal or anger-entitlement are thus different ways of recovering from a loss. Societies stressing autonomy like the Kaluli are more likely to reinforce assertive stances rather than passive pleas in the form of complaints or somatic disorders. This attitude seemed also to have been more common in the United States in another period. Demonstrations of anger and outbursts of rage, which were positively sanctioned two centuries ago, have been slowly replaced by more restrained manifestations (171. Societies like highland Ecuador, where the expression of individual character is transgressive, are more likely to favor sadness as a strategy for making up for a loss. Anger then is not regarded with sympathy and is not thought as the best way to obtain repair. Various forms of antagonism are

Sadness and reciprocity in Ecuador

indeed present but verbal aggression is rarely heard, except by drunk people. Accusations are usually discrete, indirect and toned down. University educated Quechuas are likely to attribute the prevalent phenomenon of pena to the oppressive structure of the Ecuadorian national society. They argue that Indians in cities are reminded daily of their status of inferiority by openly racist remarks and that they have been conditioned to repress any expression of anger because any such behavior could lead to court actions. To summarize, sadness is not a universal reaction to loss. But sadness is probably a more likely reaction in Ecuador than in societies which fight more than they mourn and which are more likely to conceive of war-like expeditions as a means of being paid back for their dead [18, 191. In both cases though, restitution of some form or another is the goal of the emotional strategy. PENA

AND RECIPROCITY

Sadness in highland Ecuador signals that the process of social exchange is thwarted. Expressions of complaints are legitimate attempts to bring back reciprocity. To this end, there is a rich lore of sad songs, whose plaintive melodies have been popularized in the Western world and one is invited to express his private feelings. Many customs and rituals also highlight the theme of reciprocity. What distinguishes Ecuador perhaps from other cultures is the importance given to the emotions underlying a sense of communality. In the province of Imbaburra, during the very important celebration of the San Juan on 24 June, people from the surrounding villages gather around the central place of the local municipality and organize a Spanish inspired procession with costumes and dances. Symbolic fights punctuate the celebration and they can occasionally lead to violence, especially when political feuds or land conflicts have created strong tensions between communities. But what is even more important and less evident is the strong sense of empathy and intimacy among the participants which reflects the trust uniting the race (runa). People have been preparing themselves all year to this unique opportunity because feelings of reciprocity are rarely attained in the course of ordinary life. When festivities end, the return to the farms in isolated areas leaves little opportunity for meetings with friends. Social encounters, even of a business-like nature, are expected to lead to a certain feeling of reciprocity. When someone initiates a contact, there has to be some sort of empathy, something significant going on. If not, there will be frustration and a sense of failure over the capacity to achieve a personal exchange. In a situation where an individual is prevented from reciprocating his emotions, he will experience the feeling of a significant loss, and a state of pena can follow. Reciprocity is not restricted to social relationships and includes gods incarnated in elements of nature, in particular the Mother Earth and the Sun. In the province of Imbaburra, when the family gathers for the celebration of harvest, an elderly member will on its behalf thank both divinities and a generous

901

offering (awa) will be made to the earth. Then participants will receive alcoholic drinks and they will take care to pour a small quantity on the ground to please the divinity. Similar rituals are probably encountered in many cultures but what is peculiar to Imbaburra is the fact that people extend the spirit of this ritual to their ordinary social life and keep pouring part of their drinks on the ground. A society is built on a series of alliances governed by a set of rules and models of interaction. In Ecuador, both body and soul are said to participate in daily encounters and to insure a constant social flow between individuals. The manifestation of sadness in this context is a sanctioned tool to use against the deviant and force back positive reciprocity. In this theory, the heart is believed to be soft and porous and, for this reason, sensitive to external influences. On the other hand, too much sensitivity threatens to debilitate the blood and to dilute it like water. In that situation, a person is overpowered by others and pena is likely to occur. A medicine will be prescribed to strengthen the heart, made with part of the skunk. The skunk is indeed a very unsociable animal which prevents communication by stinking and a good antidote for this type of affliction. Since pena is not a stigmatized state and is experienced by most, the medicine is only applied in cases regarded as extreme. To havepena is in a way to be too human. Children are not considered mature enough, even during their teens, to be vulnerable to pena because they have not been submitted yet to the obligations of marriage. On the other end of the continuum, bold people are considered as impervious to sadness. The recourse then is to have them consume meat of the guinea pig, an animal considered extremely sensitive. Some informants say that women are more prone to pena but the opinion is not universal. The reason given for the sex difference is that women have more family responsibilities in their quality of caregivers and are therefore more responsive to the unhappy events that befall its members. Men also consider that they can prevent sadness by turning to alcohol, thus closing themselves off from the social environment and preventing emotional reciprocity. In a world where it is expected that thoughts and feelings be shared, the position of retreat and mutism characteristic of the sad person is difficult to tolerate. Besides, this condition means that the heart, the very center of the human being, prevents participation in social life. If the victim shuts himself off, the community intervenes and searches for the origin of the suffering. The near absence of communication is not tolerated and everyone shares the responsibility of the reintegration. Besides, pena is viewed as a time bomb which can at any time explode in an access of rage (coferin) or degenerate into spells of craziness, cutting the person off from the process of social life. When being at odds with a spouse or kin causes pena, the remedy may consist in secretly transmitting one’s sadness to the other person’s heart. The emotion becomes an object of material circulation, allowing two persons to share the same feeling and to be able to understand each other. For instance, a woman can dry her menstrual blood and mix it with her husband’s food. A man can rub food on his heart to absorb part of his suffering and have the wife

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MICHEL TOUSIGNANTand MARIO MALWNAW

consume it without her knowing. A state of equilibrium will then be reached and the culprit will be able to feel how much pain he can bring to the other. A serious conflict dividing a family can also cause one of its members to suffer from pena. The following example illustrates such a situation though a causeand-effect relationship cannot necessarily be deduced: A woman of 65, from a village 3 miles away from Otavalo, was visited by the Quechua health care team (Runajambi). Though she had 6 children, none was living at home at the time of the consultation. This episode was following many others, but the last one was the most serious; some children and kin had also been previously afflicted by a similar illness. The husband had requested the consultation and provided the information on the case because his spouse was unable to communicate. She had lost her appetite and, as a consequence, lost about 35 pounds. Six months before, she woke up one day feeling sad and tired and her condition got worse. She cried easily and she progressively lost interest in people around; she gave up working and the relations with her husband became tense. The main symptoms besides loss of appetite were insomnia, heart palpitations, a feeling of chest oppression with breathing difficulties, and abdominal pain with spasms, diarrhea, and constipation. During the medical examination, she was drowsy but without fever; blood pressure was IO/40 with a pulse of 50/min. A diagnosis of dehydration and malnutrition was made and a treatment alleviated the critical physical state. But the depression went on and the team’s healer (ymhncraim) applied a treatment for pena and huurirushca(hit by a wind). The patient took over her activities one month later and reached a normal state after 4 months. The only important event during that period was a serious community dispute over land distribution by the government. Each community was deeply divided in two

clans and fights erupted. The tension was also high among the patient’s children who were opposing each other on this policy. The death of a beloved person is a common source of pena. A dream beautifully illustrates how pena reflects the abrupt termination of reciprocity. The dream is by a l9-year-old mestizo girl living in an Indian community whose fiancC had just died. She is going to the cemetery to bring food to the deceased man. The skeleton ate the food which then fell to the ground through the hole in his throat. According to our interpretation, the dream tells that food, by which women show affection to their beloved, can no longer serve its purpose of binding together the couple. The dream in fact reveals to the girl the harsh reality she will have to face, that is the impossibility of reinstating a state of reciprocity. SHARING THE EXPERIENCE OF

PENA

Knowing the rules of reciprocity that have been broken in a case of pena helps to understand the emotional experience attached to it and to attempt a comparison with similar emotions in other cultures. The process is fraught with difficulties since it is hard to penetrate even the personal world of someone sharing the same culture [20,21] as is shown in the reports of psychotherapy sessions. Even the subject of the emotions is often confused about what he is feeling. Am I really depressed or simply tired? Deeply in love because I cannot get asleep? Emotions are cultural and social constructions, the object of

management and negotiation, coping mechanisms, tools of survival, as well as sensations and feelings. It is mainly through metaphors that we can describe their nature. Another way is to decompose them into sensations as did Kleinman for the sour emotion among the Chinese [22], or into their basic emotions. Fugo among the Ifaluk is, for instance, a mixture of compassion, love and sadness, Meg, a composite of pride and love 1111.Because the sum is different from its elements, such an analysis makes it hard to empathize with the Ifaluks. And if pride, love and sadness are not similar experiences in the Pacific and in the Western hemisphere, this equation is only a partial solution. The translation of the emotion into semantic units described with culture-free words is an alternative more applicable between not too distant languages [23]. By focusing on the process of social reciprocity, we supplement the analysis with an essential element lacking in the phenomenological approach. Sadness following a loss is to be understood from a study of the types of attachment favored in the socialization process. These attachments are organized through alliances dictated by rules and obligations woven into a socio-political context. For example love is conditioned by the way families are united economically in the ceremony of marriage. The character of the actors involved and the stages of the life cycle are factors which will also affect the quality of the emotion. If, for instance, we want to analyze the grief of a widow, it would certainly help to collect data about the felt emotions. But in order to empathize with the actor, we have to reconstitute first the type of alliances-conomical, emotion and political from the point of view of the distribution of power within the family, both nuclear and extended-made by both spouses in order to understand the type of process of reciprocity which has been broken. Then, we would have to consider the support offered, not only in terms of the demonstration of sympathy, but also in terms of the new possibilities of alliances which are opened, all of which will determine the development of the stages of grief.

THE BODY AS THE LOCUS OF RECIPROCITY

The body plays a central role in the discourse on emotions among the Quechuas. The spirit is conceived as consubstantial with the body, and the same concept refers to the heart as an organ-or more precisely as a complex of organs including the lungs-and to the heart as the center of the vital forces of the spirit. The body is viewed not as a closed entity but as an open system fully participating in the process of social exchange. This idea is shared by a wide range of cultures like the old kingdom of Rwanda or Za’ire [24]. In his work on the Yakas, Devisch [25,26] has shown the symbolic importance of the bodily orifices and some of his ideas certainly apply to our context. Food, drinks, semen as well as stares, sounds and words are assimilated through these apertures. Other products are excreted in the other direction like feces, tears, sweat as well as bad words and emotions. And in Ecuador, an emotion

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Sadness and reciprocity in Ecuador like sadness can be compacted with food or other products in order to be transported to another body.

To view sadness as the rupture of a system of reciprocity between two individuals and, literally, between two bodies, has some heuristic value to better understand sadness and depression not only in Ecuador but in a wide range of cultural settings. Human interactions are in fact a network of alliances-marriages, friendships-which are worked out through explicit or tacit contracts which shape emotional and physical encounters. As is so well illustrated by Devisch [25], the body is a locus of exchanges ruled by ail types of positive commandments and negative sanctions. Spouses among the Yaka of Zaire form a ‘bed community’ and ‘are exhorted to mutually enlace one another with their legs’. Extending on this model, we can assume that the end or the disruption of the process of reciprocity between two persons will discontinue the experience of emotional reactions to which they are used. The disappearance or disengagement of one partner will provoke in the other a feeling of emptiness. The body will stop receiving the cues that normally stimulate it. And even in the case when two persons are mainly experiencing negative feelings in their relationship, the sense of emptiness and depression may be as acute because of the absence of emotional stimulations. The close association between pena and the body is still illustrated in the traditional cure: During the treatment, the healer (yochacraita) rubs the patient’s body with eggs, flowers, plants, a young guinea pig and other miscellaneous objects. Calls are made to mountains, springs of water and Christian saints. Suctions in the epigastric area lead to the extraction of impurities like black frogs and tadpoles, and bloody secretions mixed to the healer’s saliva. These are discarded in an unhabited land or a ravine. Anybody coming into contact with them will become victim of pena. SUMMARY

AND CONCLUSION

This paper has presented the model of social reciprocity behind pena. It is argued that the im-

portance of reciprocity and its associated emotions mong the Quechuas make them more attentive to events of loss and sadness. It is true that the ethos of reciprocity is widespread in traditional cultures and that the concept of exchange is basic to understanding their dynamic. It is also true that various forms of sadness have been documented in ethnographic reports and that the primary position of this emotion is not specific to the Andes. But the association between pena and reciprocity, though not unique here, is different from the interpretation of sadness encountered in other settings. For instance, depression in Iran brings the victim to identify with the martyr prophet Hossein and to participate in the destiny of this leader [14]. Among Buddhists of Sri Lanka, the symptoms of depression are viewed as a natural consequence of the hopelessness of existence [26]. The indigeneous model of Ecuador is in fact more akin to that of the Western world, underlying the importance of loss events in the etiology of sadness and depression, with the difference that the reference to a process of social exchange is more elaborate.

We have tried to show how this indigenous model implicitly refers to the dynamic of social rules to explain pena [271. We highlighted the contractual aspects associated with the production of emotions [28]. We can also use this model to understand the social context in which emotions arise and be better able to emphatize with them than through a semantic or psychological analysis. What we need for the future are more finely grained descriptions of emotions as they are reported by individuals and of the attributions of their origin. Then we will be able to go beyond the observation that the discourses on pena and more general aspects of the culture are congruent. Then we might be able to see through direct observation the more immediate socio-cultural context in which the phenomenon of pena arises. This is the objective of the future work of the second author. Acknowledgemenrs-This research was supported by a sabbatical leave from the Universitt du Quebec I Montreal and a sabbatical research grant from the Canadian Council of Social Sciences. REFERENCES 1.

Tousignant M. Pena in the Ecuadorian sierra: a psychoanthropological analysis of sadness. Cull. Med. Psych&. 8, 381-398, 1984. Readers are referred to this article for more ethnographical details. 2 Sahhns M. Srone Age Economics, pp. 185-275. Aldine, New York, 1972. 3. Mannheim B. The language of reciprocity in Southern Peruvian Quechua. Anthrop. Ling. 28, 267-273, 1986. This article provides a partial list of references dealing with this theme. Allen C. J. To be Quechua: the symbolism of coca chewing in highland Peru. Am. Ethnol. 8, 157-171, 1981. Isbell B. J. To Defend Ourselves. University of Texas Press, Austin, Tex., 1978. Isbell B. J. “Those who love me”: an analysis of Andean kinship and reciprocity within a ritual context. In Andean Kinship and Marriane (Edited bv Bolton R. and Mayer E.i pp. 81-105. American Anihropological Association. Washinnton. D.C.. 1981. 7. Bolton R. Aggress& and hypoglycemia among the Quolla: a study of psychobiological anthropology. Ethnology 12, 227-257,

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a. McKee L. A discussion of opposition and reciprocity in the Andean area. Manuscript to be published. 9. Modem marriage and the development of romantic love were made possible by the absence of alliances between the families of the bride or between the parents and their children as shown by McFarlane A. Murriuae and Love in England: 1300-1840. Basic Blackwell, Oxford, 1986. 10. See Dressler W. W., Mata A.. Chavez A.. Viteri F. E. and Gallagher P. Social support and arterial pressure in a Central Mexican community. Psychosom. Med. 48, 338-350, 1986 for a similar account of the position of the married females in Central Mexico. 11. Lutz C. The domain of emotion words on Ifaluk. Am. Ethnol. 9, 113-128, 1982. 12. Kleinman A. M. Neurasthenia and depression: a study of somatization and culture in China. Culr. Med. Psychiar. 6, 117-189,

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Kleinman A. and Good B.), pp. -_ 369-428. University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1985. IS. Brown G. W. and Harris T. Social Orinins of Deoression. Tavistock, London, 1978. * * 16. Schieffelin E. L. The cultural analysis of depressive affect: an example from New Guinea. In Culrure and Depression (Edited by Kleiman A. M. and Good B. J.), pp: 101-133. Univeristy of California Press, Berkeley, Calif.. 1985. 17. Stearns C. Z. and Steams P. N. Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, Ill., 1986. 18. Rosaldo M. Z. knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge University Press, 1980. 19. Tousignant M. Espanfo: a dialogue with the gods. Cult. Med. Psychiat. 3, 347-361, 1979. 20. Solomon R. C. Getting angry. In Cultural Theory: Essavs on Mind. Self. and Emotion (Edited by Shweder

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California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1980. 23. Wierzbicka A. Human emotions: universal or culturespecific? Am. Anrhrop. 3, 584-594, 1986. 24. Nothomb D. Humanisme Africain. Lumen Vitae, Bruxelles, 1965. 25. Devisch R. Marge, marginalisation et liminalite: le sorcier et le de& dans- la culture yaka au Zaire. Anghrop. Sot.

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26. Deiisch R. Symbol and psycho-somatic symptom in bodily space-time. The case of the Yaka. Int. I. Psychof. 20, 589616, 1985. 27. Obeyesekere G. Depression, buddhism, and the work of culture in Sri Lanka. In Culrure and Depression (Edited by Kleinman A. and Good B.), pp. 134-152. University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1985. 28. Lutz C. and White G. M. The anthropology of emotions. A. Rev. Anfhrop. 15, 405-436, 1986. 29. These ideas have been influenced in particular by: Kemper T. A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. Wiley, New York, 1978.