The “presence” of emotion has become an increasingly shared understanding among anthropologists. Caregiving—especially care for children with cancer and patients with depression—is accompanied at every moment by a wide range of emotional experiences. Pain, depression, disappointment, conflict, dizziness, furrowed brows, panic, extreme caution, and profound helplessness are woven into the everyday realities of caregiving. It is not only caregivers who are gripped by “silence, confusion, and fear;” researchers who enter these intimate and fragile worlds find themselves equally drawn into these emotional currents.

As research on caregiving inevitably enters the heartbreak, pain, joy, and hope experienced along the caregiving journey, the emotional experiences, interactions, resonances, and even affect that researchers encounter in their engagement with research participants are increasingly recognized as analytically significant—even though this recognition is not necessarily natural or free of tension. Researchers who become “too emotionally involved” may face criticism from the academic community, as well as from their own reflexive questioning.

If emotion is an integral component of everyday life, how should researchers handle the emotions and emotional issues they encounter in the course of inquiry? As the author of Envy and Windfall Wealth: An Anthropological Study, I once used the case of Xiaoli—a neighbor of my landlord who died in a mining accident—to discuss the significance of “hope” in relation to jealousy. Yet in that book, and in later related articles, I never foregrounded the enormous emotional turbulence that the event and the subsequent writing process caused me. These experiences carry weight, even for an observer deeply immersed in the setting. For researchers, the greater challenge often arises when such cases are abstracted into texts and concepts, then criticized in seminars as being misdirected or theoretically inadequate. Emotion becomes the “elephant in the room”—impossible to avoid, impossible to move past, and something that must be addressed. It must be discussed not only appropriately, but also substantively.

In anthropological research, then, we need to face the weight of our own emotions and place emotion and emotional issues at the center of potential studies. While emotions or emotional experiences are not always pre-designed research topics but rather the unexpected byproducts of fieldwork, those moments of “resonance with vulnerable emotions” may serve as important pathways toward better analysis and understanding of lived predicaments. These shared “moments of suffering” also constitute, to a certain extent, the “authentic context” of caregiving practices.

In recent years, a growing number of ethnographic studies—whether focused on anxiety, jealousy, sadness, or happiness—have begun to examine emotional transformations amid China’s socioeconomic change. These works take emotion as an entry point or guiding thread, aiming to adopt emotion as a new analytical perspective for generating new understandings and interpretations of kinship, religion, political and social order, authority, and exchange, thereby making distinctive theoretical contributions to anthropological scholarship.

Beginning from emotion allows us to see what previously escaped attention. It also allows us to see how external social, economic, cultural, conceptual, and structural changes are further reflected in tensions and conflicts within emotional expression, embodied cognition, and social relations. Emotion, seen through this lens, is not merely a surface-level phenomenon or an individual experience, but may instead represent an embodied articulation of deeper moral conflicts and broader transformations in social order.

“To move people through emotion” is essential to any work—including anthropological work—that hopes to resonate with and move its readers. We need to live with emotion, conduct research with emotion, and write with emotion. The failure of self-disclosure in a work does not stem from introducing a personal voice, but from failing to use it well and to thoughtfully address the epistemological and affective connections between the observer and the observed. This is the direction future research should continue to pursue.

Zhang Hui is an associate professor from the School of Social Research at Renmin University of China.