Hypocognition

Abstract: This article examines how Levy's pioneering work in Tahitians on hypocognition, feeling, and sensation can contribute to recent attempts in anthropological theorizing to address the problematic relationship between “culture” and “experience.” Informed by the phenomenologically oriented works of the likes of Dilthey, Husserl, Schutz, and Merleau-Ponty, this growing body of literature in anthropology has become increasingly concerned with clarifying the relationships between culture and “objective” and “pre-objective” modes of “lived experience.” This article suggests that in many ways Levy can be understood as one of the first anthropologists to systematically investigate this relationship ethnographically with his focused attention on the role that culture plays in differentially articulating patterns of conceptualization and sensation in the structuring of experience cross-culturally.

Abstract: Robert I. Levy's ethnographic and theoretical work has offered complex ways to consider emotions as neither uni- versal and invariant nor purely constructs of culture. Shame emotions, which seem tofit uncomfortably into our own concepts of personhood, have offered puzzles for ethnographers to which Levy's insights can be fruitfully applied. (emotion, hypocogni- tion, knowing, Levy, shame)