Emotions as Products of the Social: Extrinsic Accounts

This chapter discusses accounts of the social which the authors call extrinsic structuralism, and from which they wish to distinguish their own position. A central characteristic of extrinsic structuralist accounts is that they perceive social phenomena as independent from individual actions and the micro-dynamics of social interaction. Fully focusing on the causal force of macro-structural arrangements, they overtly or tacitly reject any constitutive power of interactive dynamics. In doing so, these approaches adopt a deistic understanding of the nature of the social world, in which the world is seen as created at some point and endowed by an inertia which guides individual activity. This stance is best illustrated by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, but also visible in some sociological explanations of emotions, for instance that of Gordon. The authors criticize Gordon’s approach to emotions as unduly static, overlooking the constitutive role of the micro-dynamics of social life, and, therefore, failing to account for the link between social reality (an ethnopsychology, i.e. emotional life-world of a group) and individual experiences (emotions).