wonderfully strange

i found this talking about a conference on emotions in Russian history that took place last April:

"Catherine Lutz in “Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory “(1988) showed how Ifaluk males cried profusely not as an expression of grief, but rather as a means of marking status difference: the higher up in the social hierarchy his interlocutor, the more tears an Ifaluk shed."

how gloriously alien. not that they are aliens of course, i am sure many of my responses would be just as alien to them. however, it just makes me happy to think we have not homogenised our emotions and their responses into a western model that limits our range of what it means to be human.