The human capacity to experience emotion can be made to serve a wide range of social purposes. Cultural definitions of the appropriate relationship between the emotions of the individual and the social order may vary greatly. The familiar cultural context that provides a frame of reference for anthropologists who are at home in the United States is unusual for its extreme level of emphasis on the importance of emotions as the legitimizing basis that establishes a relationship between a person and a social context. The significance of emotions in Zengbu village life is quite different. The villagers do not assume that the emotional life of individuals is utilized in the service of the social order. As a result, the meaning of the person, and the relationship between the person and society are thought of in different terms. In order to understand these terms without ethnocentrism, some familiar Western assumptions about the meaning of emotion, and the influence of these assumptions on anthropology, must be made explicit.

In the cultural context that is American anthropology's referential framework, it tends to be assumed that the form and meaning of social experience are directly derived from the emotions of a person having the experience; it is not assumed that emotions are a trivial concomitant of experience, of interest only to the person who feels them. Rather, personal emotion is a critical component of experience.