Napier, D; (2020) Sensuous Scholarship and the Quest for Wellbeing. kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology , 3 (1) , Article 419424.

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Abstract

The Enlightenment introduced a concept of human identity based on rationalism, science, and individual achievement. At the same time, German Romanticism of the 18th century recognized that self-awareness and self-fulfilment were the outcomes of emotion and intuition, and the relationship between personal experience and individual emotion. The conflict was epitomized in Sturm und Drang (‘storm and drive’) where the extreme expression of individual emotional states emerged in response to rationalism’s perceived degradation of emotional life. Here by contrast human wellbeing lost its emotional completeness when reason emerged as the primary source of knowledge. As such, wellbeing was something only consciously recognized once lost, because individuation itself limits the kind of social extroversion that is essential for exploring the relevance of the senses for harmonious social embeddedness. By contrast modern anthropology has shown how emotional rootedness, being the basis of wellbeing, can be recaptured through sustained fieldwork, and, in particular, through the extroverted risk that builds emotional rootedness with others.

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