The book promises an entry into other emotional worlds. But what does that mean? In the first of two sharply contrasted ethnographic cases that will be drawn upon throughout the book, this chapter introduces Nias, a tribal society in Indonesia that makes emotion, or ‘heart-speech’, the focus of oratory and the pivot of the gift exchanges that dominate social life. The chief exhibit is a recorded debate over brideprice, couched in formal rhetoric that employs a perplexing range of emotional idioms - a Niasan melodrama. I explore the staging, the various perspectives and personae, and the language, showing exactly how emotions are evoked and function in an agonistic, rivalrous political system. Discussion leads into questions of translation equivalence, bodily metaphor, the connexion between word and feeling, the problem of authenticity and pretence, and pragmatic, as opposed to descriptive, uses of emotion terms. Considering the complex Niasan concept of ‘resentment’, I show how this key emotion is critical not only in exchange relations but in broader moral concerns and post-missionization cosmology, finding its fullest expression in a conversion movement known as the Great Repentance that followed colonization.