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It's perfectly clear! When you said So each culture nomrally has a different set of feelings  I thought hmm, well you mean each culture has a different set of categories by which feelings are managed... understood, explained, welcomed, rejected, approved, disapproved, forbidden, promoted, confined to supposed coarse brutishness, or refined over a lifetime of practice. Which is what you then went on to say. All is clear.

The way feelings are managed varies of course in time too within the same cultural tradition. There's a strong school of historical thought (not even postmodern!) that says falling in love, for example, was not part of the European tradition until it emerged as a construct deriving from mediaeval courtly love literature and the troubadours. Certainly the way "falling in love" was constructed evolved, took on new cultural layers of meaning, even if you consider (as I do) that there's probably something basically animal and universal there.

Another example from our European past is the theory of humours, by which the the category of "humours" your body was ruled by, determined the subset of feelings you were mostly subject to (see your Hindu example where it's the feelings that determine the state of the body).

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Tue Nov 14th, 2006 at 03:31:05 PM EST
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