Affective Dispositions and Socializing Emotions

Empirical case studies illustrate that caregivers in all sociocultural settings worldwide use culturally specific, emotionally arousing socialization strategies such as shaming, frightening, teasing, or praising to prepare children for lessons to come later in life. In a preverbal stage, below the age of approximately two years, affective dispositions are inscribed into the minds and bodies of young children by the affect-laden socialization practices of their caregivers. Since children’s cognitive and emotional abilities have not yet fully ripened, they do not experience these episodes in terms of discrete emotions with culturally specific meanings but as enduring modes of being. Only once they have obtained basic language skills, caregivers start making use of qualitatively different practices through which socializing emotions (e.g., shame; fear; anxiety; pride) are induced within children. Socializing emotions directly contribute to the internalization of social norms and cultural values. They have an important impact on the formation of other culturally specific emotions and thus play a key role in the socioemotional developmental process. I’m currently investigating how affective dispositions and socializing emotions are organized across different sociocultural settings. Are there correlations between discrete socializing emotions and other variables such as the social organization, the cultural belief system, the economic mode, and the degree of integration into a modern nation state?

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Body-Centered Caregiving and Attachment

According to attachment theory, arguably the most influential developmental theory on relationship formation, young children are securely attached if their caregivers respond to their psychological needs and subjective preferences in sensitive and responsive ways. Ethnographic research has shown, however, that in many if not most sociocultural settings caregivers focus on body-centered caregiving (e.g., feeding) while the generation of psychic-emotional intimacy plays only a minor role. Therefore, the explanatory limits of attachment theory, which evolved in a Euro-American middleclass setting, need to be discussed. I believe that a truly universal theory of relationship formation has to take into account multiple approaches to human bonding.

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Ethnography of Lanyu and the Ivatan Islands

My interest in the culture of the Tao people on the Taiwanese island of Lanyu started in 2007 when I worked for the Saxonian State Ethnographic collections (SES) which accommodate a collection of material objects from this island. During my doctoral research on Lanyu in 2010-2011, I realized that the processual character of the Tao’s social organization and certain aspects of their cultural belief system had never been recorded due to different research interests of previous researchers. I gained important insights into diverse areas of life when I undertook an ethnolexicographical survey about the culturally specific meanings of local emotion words during the first months of fieldwork. This body of knowledge proofed extremely helpful for my reconstruction of Tao society and culture, the problem being that there are many important aspects the Tao themselves do not openly talk about in order to avoid spiritual harm.
A current line of research is to compare the ethnographic records from Lanyu with those from the neighboring North Philippine
Ivatan islands which together form the Bashiic cultural region. In 2023, I obtained permission from the Academia Sinica in Taipei (Taiwan) to work with the field notes of German born anthropologist Inez de Beauclair who did research on Lanyu and on the Ivatan islands in the mid-1950s.

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Material Objects from Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples in European Museums

Since 2019, I’m compiling information about material objects of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples in European ethnographic museums. I’m mainly interested in the cultural artefacts from Lanyu which in Germany alone number around four hundred. I use photographs of these objects to discuss them with Tao elders. Another activity is to act as an intermediary between ethnographic museums in Germany and Indigenous people and museum institutions in Taiwan.

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Reaching out to Applied Fields 

Unfortunately, in Germany (and elsewhere) there is not much communication between social and cultural anthropologists and those working in applied fields. One reason for this shortcoming is the lack of credits in a highly competitive academic environment. I believe that it is becoming increasingly important to share anthropological knowledge with pediatricians, psychiatrists, youth welfare office employees, kindergarten and school educators, and social workers, to name but a few. This is especially the case since Germany has become an immigration country with an increasing number of inhabitants from diverse sociocultural backgrounds.

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