'The capacity for a conscious shaping of the self is developed in societies the specific structure of which demands an extensive and constant masking of momentary emotional impulses as a means of social survival and success, a masking that becomes an integral feature of personality structure.' -Elias, The Court Society
Every society must channel and organize the expression of feeling. Some emotions are permitted, some hidden; and various constellations and definitions of feeling are sanctioned in different social circumstances. Furthermore, every individual everywhere presents, more or less frequently, a social mask to the world, imitating feelings which are appropriate to the occasion, but which do not match his inner state. This ability to dissimulate means that emotions are also a tactical resource, employed by social actors in their efforts to gain power and respect. Here I wish to focus on this aspect of emotion, and to consider only extreme cases of social formations in which the masking and manipulation of affect in public life is pervasive and conscious. The question I wish to answer within this framework is what sort of specific social structures favor the evolution of such extensive emotional control mechanisms.
Any answer to such a complex question must, of course, be extremely tentative. But by looking at two seemingly quite dissimilar social systems where the concealment of emotional states is highly developed, I find that an unexpected and counterintuitive common pattern does emerge; a pattern which allows me to make some hypotheses about the underlying social factors which help to construct an ethos of emotional constraint. The first society I wish to consider in making this comparison is the court society of Louis XIV in France, depicted so brilliantly by Norbert Elias. The second is that of the Pukhtun tribesmen of the Swat Valley in Northern Pakistan, where I did my fieldwork. For the sake of comparison I then make a short excursion to the Yanomamo, who show a contrasting pattern of emotional expression in which one emotion - anger - predominates.
Court Society
Elias, in his exhaustive and classic portrayal of the evolution of the courtly world, draws a picture of increasing control by the French king over the rural nobility. An old story perhaps, but in it Elias discerns a new courtly way of approaching life radically different from the worldview of the earlier, more independent warrior aristocracy who were isolated on their country estates. The historical process of moving away from territorial courts to the centralized court dominated by Louis XIV made a vast difference in the nobleman's perception of himself and of others.
For one thing, in the old society of localized nobles a person's identity was determined by the known conditions of descent and rank. But in the great court society " people come into contact who do not know each other and their families from childhoodThus disguises and deceptions-even concerning rank-are possible.' Dissimulation, and the disjuncture between " self" and " role" becomes a new potential as the social world becomes larger and more fluid.
Complexity also has another outcome. The warrior nobles lived in a simple society which demanded " a constant readiness to fight and free play of the emotions in defence of one's life or possessions from physical attack.' But in the court the requirements of the web of interrelationships meant, according to Elias, a greater emphasis on individual self-control and emotional restraint.
Increased complexity in Elias's model is correlated with a monopoly on force by the king. The vast central power of Louis XIV cut the nobility away from their bases in the countryside, ensconced them at the court and prohibited them recourse to violence as a means of settling disputes. All this greatly decreased the autonomy of the nobility. In this context, the king became the final arbiter of rank, which he assigned as a means of retaining the balance of power over his potential rivals. With this end constantly in mind he divided, calculated, and assiduously cultivated jealousies and hostilities among the courtiers. This is what Elias, in a theoretical construction I shall later return to, calls the " conserving form" of rule, characterized by " rivalries for status, fluctuations in the balance between groups, exploitation of internal rivalries by superiors.' Hierarchy in the court world was determined by the most subtle of indications, as the king nodded toward one courtier, pointedly ignored another.
Kingly control led, Elias claims, to the evolution of a world in which differentiation was achieved through etiquette and highly ritualized behavior. One's own behavior, and the behavior of others toward one, were the ways in which social status was signaled. The courtier, by necessity, became attentive to the slightest of nuances- an attitude which was expressed in an aesthetic refinement of behavior, so that the way in which one spoke, ate, decorated one's house and wore one's clothes, all became signals of rank. Along with this elaboration came extensive self-regulation of emotion, as will be noted below.
To the outsider, the obsessive concern with manners and etiquette may seem trivial, but in the context of the court it was a matter of utmost importance. As the courtier La Bruy`ere wrote:
Life at Court is a serious, melancholy game, which requires us to draw up our pieces and batteries, form a plan, pursue it, parry that of our adversary, sometimes take risks and play capriciously; and after all our dreams and measures we are held in check, sometimes checkmate.
This social configuration rests upon seemingly " irrational" intricacies of etiquette and manners. But Elias argues that this mode of life was eminently rational, given the circumstances. He defines rationality in the Weberian manner as the systematic control of behavior for the sake of obtaining long-term conceptual goals; goals which are ultimate values for those concerned, no matter how absurd these values may seem to those who do not share them. The question is not what goal is pursued, but the degree of calculation that pursuit entails.
In court society the ultimate goal was not money, but prestige. The world of the courtier became, as the quote from La Bruyre poignantly shows, a game-like world of long-range planning and control, in which the end was to gain the favor of the ruler. It was a game in which winning was unlikely, and in which the frustrations were great, but it was the only game conceivable, since for the courtier the palace of the King was the monde, the world itself. The pursuit of prestige in this self-contained world was highly structured, internally consistent, and involved very great behavioral control; it was, in short, highly rationalized.
In the world of the courtier where the rationalized and calculating pursuit of prestige was compulsory, the masking of affect was, by necessity, well developed. As Elias writes:
Every type of rationality evolves in conjunction with particular constraints enforcing control of the affects. A social configuration within which an extensive transformation of external into internal compulsions takes place is a permanent condition for the production of forms of behavior the distinctive feature of which we denote by the concept of " rationality."
Skills were those of observing and duplicating the appropriate fine gradations of affect in all social situations, so that unwise alliances were not made nor options closed off by impetuous displays of feeling. The courtier also had to observe and regulate his expression and feeling tone in order to gain the confidence of his superiors, and to manipulate them for his benefit by playing on their trust and ambitions. The courtier therefore had to be willing and able to enact emotional states which were pleasing to others and, of course, to keep his own reactions strictly in check. It was a theatrical world of extreme sophistication, as La Bruyre attests:
A man who knows the court is master of his gestures, of his eyes and his expression; he is deep, impenetrable. He dissimulates the bad turns he does, smiles at his enemies, suppresses his ill-temper, disguises his passions, disavows his heart, acts against his feelings.
Emotions were controlled in these circumstances not only for the purposes of manipulation and personal advantage, but also simply because emotional displays are contradictory to the demands of rationalization:
affective outbursts are difficult to control and calculate. They reveal the true feelings of the person concerned to a degree that, because not calculated, can be damaging; they hand over trump cards to rivals for favour and prestige. Above all, they are a sign of weakness; and that is the position the court person fears most of all.
The courtier, for his own self-preservation and advancement within his world, must therefore practice emotional restraint. The psychic cost of this restraint was great. But why did he not seek a freer society? Why was he so completely locked in the monde of the court? There is a further factor at work here, according to Elias. This is the effect of social pressure. The French nobility were pressed not only from above, by the power of the king, but, more important, from below, by the rising urban merchant classes and the gradual erosion of the feudal mode of production. This pressure, Elias says, led the nobility to cooperate with the king in the elaboration of ritual, etiquette and behavioral constraints that served to symbolically set them apart from the lower orders and especially from the merchants. Thus, for Elias, " the unequal distribution of social power, and especially the extraordinarily wide discrepancies in the level of civilization, are undoubtedly factors contributing to the severity of compulsions, including the self- constraint of civilization.'
To recapitulate, Elias draws a portrait of a complex, centralized society, isolated by social pressure, highly rationalized and calculating in the pursuit of the prestige which is granted only from above. It is a world in which emotional control penetrates every aspect of daily public life. How does this configuration apply to the very different society of Pukhtun tribesmen of Northern Pakistan?
The Swat Case
It would seem that the tribal system of Swat would have little in common with the elaborate and hierarchical universe of the French courtier. Swat is populated by Pukhto- speaking tribesmen. The densely settled valley of rice and wheat agriculturalists has retained its independence from colonial rule, and even present-day Pakistani authority sits lightly there. The Valley social organization is characterized by a system which asserts equality; the pyramid of absolutist power is absent. Nor is there the complex " organic" division of labor that Elias sees as underlying the French court system. In fact, Swat, with its segmentary lineage system and relatively simple economy, is far closer to the " mechanical" end of the scale. And finally, pressure from below, within the valley, is not strong. But despite these differences, masking of emotion in public is evident in Swat. I first noticed this characteristic when I made up a game which I invited my guests, four tribesmen, to play. The game was for one person to pretend to feel an emotion and for the others to guess which emotion it was. My Pukhtun friends were enthusiastic about this idea, but each emotion they portrayed looked exactly the same: impassive and stoic, with perhaps a slight trembling of the lips. Eventually I realized that the actor was stimulating a feeling inside himself, and then concealing it behind this habitual inexpressive mask. No one could guess whether what was being " portrayed" was anger, sadness, happiness, or any of the other emotions within the Pukhtun repertoire.
This constraint is evident at all public occasions, including funerals. When tears came to my eyes as I stood beside the open coffin of a dead friend, his male relatives were astonished. For them, of course, his death was a far more bitter blow that it was to me. They had been deprived of their best, strongest and most beloved kinsman. But their expressions remained imperturbable.
Nor is control manifested only in sadness. In a famous story, a Pukhto-speaking British spy was detected simply because he tapped his feet to the infectious beat of a drum during a tamasha (a musical and dance performance held at weddings, circumcisions and other auspicious occasions). At such events, a real Pukhtun remains completely motionless and expressionless, in striking contrast to the unabashedly romantic or tragic lyrics and the lively music and dance of the performers. The Pukhtun themselves are well aware of their masking behavior. On an attitude test which I gave to 153 male students of different ages and backgrounds in Swat and the neighboring valley of Dir, 145 (95 percent) responded positively to the question " Should a man keep his thoughts and business secret?" My Pukhtun friends also often spoke to me of the necessity for maintaining a proper demeanor, and attempted to train me, by teasing and shaming, to keep a similar control over myself. Control and restraint are also the subjects of poetry and proverbs. An example is this characteristic verse by the great warrior poet, Khushal Khan Kattack:
If it is your hope never to be Shamed before anyone It's best to keep within your heart Even your least affair.... Let your heart bleed within itself, Khushal, if bleed it must, But keep your secrets well concealed From both stranger and friend
Ghani Khan, a contemporary Pukhtun writer, gives the same advice:
The eye of the dove is lovely, my son, But the sky is made for the hawk. So cover your dovelike eyes And grow claws.
As I have documented in my ethnography, the control of emotion is inculcated at an early age in Swat. Male children are punished for not maintaining the proper stance in the presence of adults. Restraint, a measured tone, an aura of control and self- sufficiency, all are considered appropriate aspects of the ideal Pukhtun. The public face, which is kept up for the benefit of others, is often in marked contrast to the face revealed at home, which is one of anger, frustration, and mood swings of elation and depression. The control of emotion by men in the public sphere is understandable in Swat given the social circumstances. Swat is a society which has a great deal of individual antagonism and rivalry built into its social structure, which is a classical acephalous patrilineal segmentary organization, so that alliances and hostilities are determined, in large measure, by one's position in a lineage chart. Because of population pressure, one's most salient opponent is likely to be one's next-door neighbor, who is as well one's patrilateral first cousin.
The structured antagonisms of Swat are not mediated to any great extent by a police force or judiciary emanating from a centralized hierarchy, even though a king did exist in the valley for two generations. The Swat Pukhtun, particularly those of the North, who never gave up their claims to independence, are very proud of their egalitarianism and personal autonomy. Self-help was and remains the mode of interaction in cases of conflict, and the final solution to a dispute is the blood feud. The threat of killing, or of dishonoring, is close at hand for the Pukhtun man, and motivates many of his actions.
Given these circumstances, Swati men strive to portray themselves as independent individuals. All forms of dependence and of need are reviled as weakness, since they show that a man cannot stand on his own against the world. Men also must continually present themselves as proud, courageous, and impassive. In this environment, emotions of depression, fear, jealousy, tenderness or other forms of attachment, are viewed negatively as displaying an inability to cope and to keep one's autonomy. Furthermore, like the French courtier, spontaneous emotional expression of any sort is seen by the Pukhtun as a display of weakness, evidencing a lack of control, and allowing opponents (who are omnipresent) an unwanted advantage.
Even anger is kept carefully in check, although it is displayed virulently in some other violent and non-centralized small-scale societies, such as the Yanomamo, whose habitual expression of anger will be discussed at the end of this paper. Anger is restrained in Swat because once it is revealed, it means a blood feud; a feud which implicates all of one's lineage mates. People simply cannot afford the risk, and must keep their violent and resentful feelings bottled up. What is admired is not hotheadedness, but the man who can coolly plan revenge and carry it out years later. The Pukhtun then, while not having so intricate or aesthetic a role performance as the courtier, do indeed manifest great emotional control. This self-regulation is understood by the tribesmen themselves as a necessity in their world, despite the internal cost of restraint.
Comparisons: Swat and France
Given the Swati case, it seems that Elias's understanding of emotional masking must be reconsidered. Swat lacks a complex division of labor as well as the pressure from below which Elias sees as essential for the evolution of the self-regulation of emotional states. Furthermore, the Swati world is relatively nonhierarchical, uncentralized, and the personal use of force in blood feud is a keystone of the society, in seeming contradiction to Elias's claim that emotional self-restraint " stands in the closest relationship to the monopolization of physical force and the growing stability of the central organs of society.'
It would appear reasonable then that the parallels between Swat and France in the area of emotional control are related to other factors aside from hierarchy, a complex division of labor, and the kingly monopoly on power.
The two societies are in fact alike in several important respects that make comparison possible. The tribal world, like court society, locks its inhabitants into permanent relationships. One cannot leave the court without leaving as well an entire world of values and personal identity; nor can the Pukhtun depart from his tribal setting without suffering a loss of respect and place. The tribal world, like the courtly world, may be viewed by its participants as narrow, constraining, immoral. Yet it is the only life possible, since all other alternatives are thought to be far inferior. The Pukhtun, although he lives in a miserable hut, is malnourished, and has little or no power beyond the walls of his household, sees himself as a nobleman. As Elphinstone, the earliest Western observer of the Pukhtun wrote:
Every Euzofzye (the Swati tribal group) is filled with the idea of his own dignity and importance. Their pride appears in the seclusion of their women, in the gravity of their manners, and in the high terms they speak of themselves and their tribe, not allowing even the Dooraunees (the Kingly tribe of Afghanistan) to be their equals.
The pride of the Pukhtun is actually a characteristic feature of Muslim tribesmen in general. It is partly to be understood in historical terms since, as Gellner has noted, Muslim tribesmen, even if physically isolated from the great Islamic urban centers, share with them a common religion and ethic, and believe themselves to be the repository of simple, " pure" virtues, as opposed to the corrupting influences of civilization. Tribes are also the traditional spawning ground of kings, and the Pukhtun know and value their history as rulers and conquerors of the subcontinent, while in their remote valleys they retain their own freedom from taxation or rule. They feel contempt for " effeminate" peoples who must bow to the authority of government, and consider their own society, despite its poverty, to be preferable. Simultaneously, tribe and state have existed in the Middle East in a continuous and violent dialectic, and powerful states have tried, and sometimes succeeded, in subduing the tribes, so that the relationship is not purely one of ideological opposition, but also involves a real fear of suppression and defeat. The Pukhtun therefore have not been pressed from below in the same manner as the French nobility were, but they have had to resist the incursions of rulers and fight for their value of freedom. As a result, they do have an equivalent sense of opposition, and of maintaining a life style in contradistinction to an alternative. In both cases, as it happens, the despised alternative is urban and mercantile. The long-term consciousness of this antipathetic world breeds, it seems, an ethic of superiority, and an elaboration of customs and traits which have the result of setting apart one's own people, marking them as, in Weber's terms, a status group.
Accompanying the status group ideology of superiority and nobility in both France and Swat is an " irrational" concern with prestige. The tribesman, like the courtier, disdains the profit motivations of the opposing mercantile urban world and will, in fact, break himself economically to continue the displays of hospitality and generosity that accompany his status. It is sociologically irrelevant that for the Pukhtun this display consists primarily in the provision of tea and maintenance of a simple guest house, whereas for the courtier wealth expenditure is incomparably more lavish. In each case conspicuous consumption, despite differences in scale, is part of a status ethic of a group of warriors (or former warriors) defining themselves in conscious opposition to the profit ethic of shopkeepers.
The status ethic that accompanies the contempt for profit is one of honor. For the Pukhtun, this code, called Pukhtunwali, revolves primarily around generosity, hospitality, courage, the obligation to take revenge, and other warrior virtues. On the other hand, the French noble, deprived of his right to bear arms, evolved a code marked by aestheticism and hatred of vulgarity. But although very different in style, both codes have the same aim: the assertion of difference and rank. And this assertion is directed not only at external, despised life styles, but at one's own cohort as well. Continuous and arduous competition for recognition by one's fellows as an honorable man is a mark of both societies.
This may seem in contradiction to my previous statements about the egalitarianism of the Pukhtun. But egalitarianism in Swat does not imply an absence of competition. Far from it. Each man is in competition with every other, and the absence of hierarchy is a result of the balances of power created by this competition within the structured framework of segmentation. As Davis has noted, in the Middle East and the Mediterranean honor functions as the coin of egalitarianism; a way in which differences can be asserted in the absence of great material or power distinctions. For both the courtier and the tribesman, the world is one of rivalry and contention. The difference is in the sort of structure within which this competition is embedded. And here I reach the central point of my essay, since I wish to claim that these two structures, so very different in many aspects, share certain fundamental properties.
The courtier's pride and quest for prestige occurred in a large interdependent hierarchy in which he was ultimately subservient to the whims of the king. The tribesman, on the other hand, lived his life in a relatively non-hierarchical and simply constructed universe, without a powerful king, without great divergences in class or gaps in the level of civilization, and with access to the means of violence. How can these differences be reconciled?
To solve this problem, let me return to Elias's description of the " conserving form" of rule which was typical of Louis" court society. It is, he says, one of " rivalries for status, fluctuations in the balance between groups, exploitation of internal rivalries by superiors.' In other words, it is a polity built upon the structuring of internal antagonisms. It is also a polity which, if the word " superiors" were replaced by the word " equals," would define Swat.
The crucial difference between the " institutionalized dissidence" of Swat and the absolute rule of Louis is this: in France order was achieved through the mediation of the king; in Swat order was achieved by the actions of individual men within a patterned social framework. In France, as we have seen, authority was immediate, personal and omnipotent. Each individual noble, given his social station in the aristocratic order, competed with others to rise or fall in the flexible courtly society. Each man's fate was ultimately decided by Louis, who made the famous claim that " l'etat, c'est moi," This claim was, in a very real sense, true. By his actions Louis, at the pinnacle of power, could and did dominate and order all the shifting and antagonistic interests of those beneath him.
There is an analogous structure in Swat, but it exists in the larger historical cultural configuration itself, not in the apparatus of royalty. The Pukhtun tribesman can also truthfully make Louis's claim to be a state in himself, since each Pukhtun embodies and enacts the segmentary lineage principles and thereby constitutes a miniature empire, replicating, in his relations with his lineage mates and family, the overall structure of the whole society; a structure that reappears at every level, from family, to clan, to tribe, to region.
This structural framework, with its inherent capacity to organize alliances and balance hostile forces, permitted long-term internal struggles without social collapse. Indeed, the Pukhtun social order is built upon social antagonism and the principle of " complementary opposition,' which unites as well as opposes near kinsmen. It is a social order which, in a sense, exists only in threat, but threat, in this world, is ever-present. And it is predictable, as is the pattern of reaction to it. In other words, social action in Swat is subject to high degrees of calculation.
The rationality of the Pukhtun social system is evident. Men are constrained by long-term relationships that structure their personal interactions. They are completely aware of these constraints, and act within them to maximize their goal of achieving honor and respect. Freedom of action is extremely limited despite the tribesman's much vaunted independence. The Pukhtun's freedom is a freedom from domination by government or by a ruler, but he is ruled just as firmly by his social organization and its demands as the courtier is ruled by the king.
Some may argue that all cultures have the same constraint, that all men are bound by their traditions, history, and worldview. This is indeed a truism, but it is trivial. What is important is the kind of pattern built by these restrictions, and the effect this patterned structure has on social life. Swat is a society with, as I have tried to demonstrate, a distinctly articulated, well-drawn social structure that places each person unequivocally in clear and competitive oppositional relationships with a set of known others. Through the manipulation of alliances, a balance of power is created, a balance which shifts and changes in time, but which remains within the overarching framework of the system. Even among segmentary lineage societies Swat is unusual in its explicitness and rigidity. Ambiguity does exist, of course, but it is feared and despised, as the Pukhtun make every effort to construct the world in accordance with their beliefs about it. And this construction, along with its corresponding ethos of emotional concealment, is one which has considerable parallels with the French court society.
The parallel is especially evident if the social control mechanisms are visualized. Louis linked up and mediated rivalries in a pyramid of power by judicious favoritism, maintaining a balance of forces for his own self-preservation. He acted as final arbiter in a world absolutely bound in the walls of the court. In Swat, the segmentary system, no less restrictive, unites and organizes kinsmen on the basis of lineage. The lineage structure serves the same function as did Louis in his world, but rather than reaching its apex in a living king the segmentary system, also conceptualized as a cone, finds its peak in the past, in the common ancestor. Thus, instead of relying on personal intervention from a recognized authority, balance in Swat is produced by reference to the structuring properties of a shared past. But in both cases, relationships are built within the framework of a pyramidal structure, highly articulated and completely encompassing. I argue then that Elias was mistaken in seeing emotional masking as due in large measure to the experience of central rule. What should be looked at instead is the degree to which the society visualizes itself as existing in opposition to other social configurations, as well as the intensity of internal conflict characteristic of the society, and especially the degree to which that conflict is constrained and balanced by structural or political factors. The importance of a formal pyramidal structure, either in terms of the synchronic power of a ruler or the diachronic structuring properties of a segmentary social organization, may be an important factor here. It seems likely from the two cases analyzed that there is a combination of factors at work in pressing individuals toward an ubiquitous manifestation of emotional control in the public arena. These factors include: a relatively closed community; a strong sense of external opposition that correlates with group differentiating status values such as an honor code; a social organization built upon internal conflict and competition; and, most important, a high degree of constraint upon the social actors, a constraint that limits and balances opposing forces while simultaneously providing a framework for the exercise of rational calculated action.
In this paper, for the sake of argument, I have emphasized some underlying similarities between autocratic France and egalitarian Swat that I found to be unexpected and revealing. This is not, however, to claim that Swat and the French court are somehow equivalents, but only that their parallels offer instructive evidence about the configurations that are conducive to the evolution of extreme forms of emotional constraint. Looking at the differences between the two systems is also useful, once their likenesses are established, to help account for the obvious variations in the expression of emotion in the two societies.
For instance, as I have noted, the French courtier was far more aesthetic and nuanced in his use of masking than the Pukhtun. The tribal face is mainly impassive, not expressive; protective rather than guileful. This difference is directly traceable to French complexity and centralization. In the French situation, where the direct use of force was prohibited, where the social organization was built not on the enmeshing net of kinship, but on the absolute powers of kingship, and where there were distinct classes struggling for recognition, the nobility elaborated and aesthetisized their presentation of self far beyond anything possible to a tribesman. This is quite simple to understand. Such subtleties are correlates of the nobility's position in the centralized monarchic state. Without real power, threatened from below, lacking a supportive social structure, they developed ways in which they could, on a symbolic plane, assert their uniqueness and simultaneously struggle for recognition. Elias's picture of this process is convincing. But the French pattern of emotional manipulation and the Swati impassivity are, despite their dissimilarities, special cases of a more inclusive type; a type not confined to monarchies or, indeed, to Western civilization. It is, I believe, likely to be found wherever human beings confront one another within a clearly articulated, internally competitive, pyramidal social organization that places great constraints on social action. Under these circumstances, it seems that a compulsive masking of feeling is understandable and predictable.
The Yanomamo
Having established a broad analytic model it may be useful to consider, very perfunctorily, a contrasting case; one that seems on the surface to have strong similarities with the Pukhtun. By thinking about why these apparent similarities are less important than deeper structural differences, we can establish a complementary configuration that corroborates the model drawn above as a useful analytic category. This contrasting model also has relevance for understanding a wider range of emotional life, since it begins to discuss, within a general structural framework, emotional states that are not only revealed freely, but actually promoted by a particular culture.
The case I wish to consider here are the Yanomamo. A mobile, unacculturated swidden agriculturalist tribe of the Northern Brazilian jungles, they are famous for their habitual public posture of rage. Where the Pukhtun defensively seek invulnerability and the French strive for manipulative advantage, the Yanomamo appearance is offensive and aims to intimidate. But even though the Yanomamo pose is aggressive it is often simulated, a " bluff," and therefore resembles the masking behavior of the courtiers and Khans.
There are, however, several differences in the three patterns of emotional masking that place the Yanomamo in an analytic category separate from that of the Pukhtun and the courtier. For one thing, the Yanomamo do not always portray themselves as enraged. They have a variety of other faces which they wear at appropriate times in public life. But the ethnography indicates that it is only rage which is consistently dissembled. This is unlike both the French, whose every emotion is carefully constructed, and the Pukhtun, who show almost no emotion in public. The Yanomamo thus do not fit in the extreme category I demarcated at the beginning of this paper.
In another sense, however, the Yanomamo fierce face is similar to the playacting of the courtier, since imitating enraged behavior is a pretense aimed at deluding and frightening an enemy, like the fearsome body paint or awe-inspiring costumes utilized in other warlike cultures, and like the courtier's dissembling of his true feelings to gain advantage.
But this similarity is a superficial one. It is evident from the ethnographic record that the Yanomamo's elaborate system of feasts, duels, and sanctioned violence serves not only to give men the opportunity to display anger and therefore frighten enemies, just as the courtier's display aims to fool his rivals; it also has the purpose of developing an internal state, of stimulating the subject himself into becoming angry.v Within the Yanomamo world, even if they feel fear, Yanomamo need to " display the ferocity that adult men are supposed to show;' they must look fierce in the hopes of being fierce. For instance, Chagnon tells us that the ritual surrounding the ashes of the dead goads the men " into the appropriate state of rage for the business of killing enemies.' The target of this imitation of anger among the Yanomamo is not only the spectator, but also the self. The goal is to excite anger within the actor; to make the outward appearance elicit a desired inner state. It is an effort to build a wished for real emotion out of its external expression.
In Swat and France, on the other hand, the performance is primarily for the other, not for the self, and any merger between outward expression and internal feeling is unintended and undesirable. The Pukhtun wishes simply to hide his feelings beneath a shell of invulnerability; the courtier has the more complex task of both hiding his real feelings and displaying false ones. But neither wants to make the inner and the outer correspond.
Chagnon sees the expression of ferocity among the Yanomamo as functional, helping men to act in the violent manner the social structure demands. But although the Pukhtun society is equally violent the display of anger is prohibited and cold-blooded revenge is favored. The Yanomamo fierce mask can instead be understood more comparatively and thoroughly by using the comparative structural approach to construct an alternative and complementary model of social organization that contrasts with the constrictive formal order characteristic of both Swat and the French court. Although the Yanomamo are like the Pukhtun in many respects, and especially in their intense internal antagonisms, these antagonisms are not structured through the historical " pyramid" of genealogy. The Yanomamo do not, in fact, have anything resembling a lineage, and their major allies are men who are unrelated to them. Furthermore, they are highly mobile, both as individuals and groups, shifting from place to place and group to group as circumstances demand. The flexibility and relative freedom of choice in the Yanomamo system is a far cry from the long-term and highly rationalized genealogical (and geographical) linkages that locate and lock all of the thousands of Pukhtun in Swat into one complex and well-articulated network within which each man knows his place, his duties, and his potential enemies and allies. Nor, more obviously, do the Yanomamo resemble the French court, united under the authority of the absolute monarch. It is in the context of a relative absence of structure, of an exceptionally malleable world, that the Yanomamo proclivity for merging inner feeling and outward display makes sense.
Within the pliable but hostile universe of the Yanomamo the sanctioned expression of anger and the effort to incite anger through this expression may be seen as a way of invoking and experiencing the self in the absence of overarching and well- articulated structural or political constraints; constraints which provide, among other things, a mechanism for maintaining identity and gaining respect. The Yanomamo lack the constraints of structure and polity which are so marked in France and Swat. They pretend fierceness not only to proclaim their identity to others, but also because they wish to live out a socially prescribed emotional reality within themselves. In acting, they become; whereas in Swat and France the structure gives a predetermined and highly constricted social status, one that is perhaps too solid for comfort, but that does offer an absolute grounding for the construction of personal identity.
In this theoretical perspective we might expect to find other relatively " loose" societies such as the Yanomamo, which also display and dissimulate emotions in order to experience the self. The content of the dominant emotion in each case will, of course, vary. Modesty, for instance, may be an equivalent pose in one society, while another society may habitually feign expressions of interest, or of dependency. Further research could focus on the overall social configuration in which such attempts to establish an inner reality through external " face work" take place. Such research would have to be a great deal more nuanced than I have undertaken here, particularly in the discussion of the development of the self within a particular system; an aspect that my structurally oriented approach has slighted.
A structural approach does have advantages, however, in that it establishes analytic types, which permit cross-cultural comparisons at a number of levels. In this paper, I have tried to show that the French court society and the tribal Pukhtun, despite their seeming dissimilarity, constitute examples of a particular analytic category that links conscious emotional constraint with a kind of highly restrictive social organization. The Yanomamo, it seems are a different category, finding their emotional lives in a far more fluid context, and facing the very modern problem of trying to make the inner world and outer expression correspond, and in doing so, to both reveal and discover the self.
Acknowledgments
The first version of this paper was presented at a panel on the cultural construction of emotion in South Asia at the Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison in 1986. I would like to thank Owen Lynch, who convened that panel, for his perceptive comments on that earlier draft, and Pauline Kolenda, whose critique made me rethink the Yanomamo material. I would also like to thank Cherry Lindholm, who suggested the importance of a pyramidal structure, and the anonymous reviewers of Ethos, whose comments I have tried to consider in the " final" version which is, of course, not final at all.