On the video lecture on Moday, prof mentioned that tears/crying is related to culture. I was very confused with this… as prof mentioned in the recorded lecture on monday, tears are biological things and i had a difficult time understanding why tears/emotions are related culture or how they are comverying(?) a message.
After reading the The Politics of Emotion in the Mexican Revolution: The Tears of Pancho Villa by Andrea Noble, i think i now somewhat understand how emotions and tears are related to culture:
\\\local socio-cultural ‘feeling rules’; ‘emotions’ – and their enactment within culture were the very stuff of revolution; emotions is pervasive both in the historiogra- phy of the Revolution and its aftermath; emotions to be at the heart of human and historical life; emotion to denote a phenomenon that emerges at the interface of the mind and body in an agent who is, in turn, situated within and shaped by a specific socio-cultural environ- meant; socially sanctioned forms of crying that equally illuminate not only the Revolution’s politics of gender, but also class and region;nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore; public weeping is an ambiguous and versatile mode of social communication, where to shed tears, or to withhold them, has the potential to express a wide range of emotions – anger, fear, happiness, sadness, shame, and so on – which can reveal much about how individuals and groups relate to one another;performativity of emotional practice, its status as an embodied practice and the important role that the media play\\\
^ these are random points in the reading that helped me understand emotion/tear x culture.
basically, from what i understand, culture grows with people and people is what creates culture so people growing and interacting with other people = lots of emotion (from social/gender/rights/etc) = growing both themselves and culture. there’s gender and sexuality in culture, and gender and sexualoity also shapes culture = by crying or having any sort of emotion that doens;t fit into the culture structure to gender/sexuality are not interested in the cultural perspective of people. (Villa cryin gfor ex)
in the reading, Villa cried un public when he was about to get executed = (thought he cried becuase he was scared of dying (kneeling, weeping loudly, begging) but apparently that wasn’t the reason) he had to “acknowledge” his own tear and had to give reason for his tear (p.254) . he was known to be a humiliated/ craven man, un-manly. (and in the end he was not killed but was sent to prison) ((his begging worked!)
and Samano was going to get executed too but he did not cry, he seemed graceful, courageous of his own execution. he seemed to be like an ideal masculinity figure of the culture.
the people/cultural-gender0sexuality view (and not just Latin America culture of but othe rcultiure as well) wise we see : Vila < Samano (in terms of manliness) even tho human-wise its completely normal to be afraid of death (yes, ik Vila wasn;t afraid of death but reading it sounded like he was just tryna act it out) and cry, people idealed the way Samono died (with courage and manliness)
discussion question: anyone thought tears/emotions were related to culture? (i never thought about this ahaha) OR how is the manliness defined in other countries /your culture?