Constructionism seems to offer greater safeguards against the insid- ious effects of unnoticed ethnocentrism, but at the cost of a relative inability to conceptualize oppression and emotional suffering within the communities that are the objects of research. But the psychocultural approach, basing its work on sometimes vague notions about human commonality, cannot offer guarantees against the kind of Eurocentric condescension Abu-Lughod has condemned with particular eloquence (1991). What the anthropology of emotion most sorely lacks, at present, is a unified conception of emotions as part of the historical unfolding of politically significant institutions and practices