The History of Emotions

A Student Guide to Methods and Sources

Katie Barclay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350307551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

This student guide introduces the key concepts, theories and approaches to the history of emotions while teaching readers how to apply these ideas to historical source material. Covering the main emotions approaches and providing a range of global case studies and historical sources with which to apply learning, this textbook provides a 'how to' guide for those new to the field and for those learning how historians apply methods to source material. Written in clear and accessible language, each chapter is accompanied by further reading, while surveying many of the main areas of current research and providing ideas for personal research projects and further learning. This methodological guide is ideal for students taking modules on the History of Emotions, or for students on general Historical Skills modules.

1 The History of Emotions: An Introduction

To feel is a critical capacity of the human and perhaps other species too. Our emotions, as we call them at this historical moment, are not just an unthinking biological response to our environment, but part of how we engage with and interpret the world. To feel, even strongly or passionately, forms an important part of our judgement; our feelings direct us to whether something is right, wrong, safe or dangerous. Because of this, they are fundamentally social actions – how we respond to something in our environment is a learned behaviour. Our reaction to seeing a tiger depends on not only whether it is in a zoo or running loose in the middle of New York but also whether we have been given the skills and capacities to manage an encounter with a tiger. A zookeeper or hunter might encounter a tiger with different feelings than a person walking out of a shop, carrying their latest purchase. How we explain our emotional response to the tiger is also shaped by language. Different languages, and languages at different historical periods, incorporate a range of emotion words that provide a vocabulary for feeling, but not only do words vary across languages and time, but what they mean changes too. A person who expresses fear at meeting a tiger might not mean, or even feel, the same thing as a person from a very different time period or place. The history of emotions is a body of scholarship that explores this variation in the experience, understanding and expression of emotion in different times and places. It seeks to ask what difference such variety in emotional experience means not just for the individual who feels, but for the societies in which they live.

Uncovering emotions and how they shape the past requires a set of tools or methodologies, a skillset that the historian brings to their historical sources to aid with analysis. This book introduces some of the principal tools used by historians of emotion today and offers some practical guidance on how they can be applied to historical sources. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 each explore a particular concept or method in the field, before offering a case study of how such a concept can be deployed to further understanding of emotions in historical context. To help readers apply these methods themselves, case studies consist of some helpful background context, some primary sources for analysis, and some guiding questions to get people started. When working on your own project, wider reading of the academic scholarship on the topic would typically provide the background context for a study of a set of sources. Chapter conclusions offer some brief findings of the sorts of information we might draw from a particular case study to help readers assess their own findings; readers may find they draw different conclusions. That’s how historical debates begin! For readers who wish to go further in the field, Chap. 8 surveys some key areas of current research. Across the volume, chapters also provide additional reading to allow further knowledge and understanding of the topic. Key readings on the topic are starred in further reading lists.

This chapter asks what we mean by emotion, before introducing the history of emotion and then explores what we mean by a concept, methodology or theory within the discipline of history and why historians think that they are important. Many of the general principles introduced here apply to any field of history, offering a useful skillset for general historical research. But the history of emotions also raises some particular problems of its own, and this book equips students to manage them.

WHAT IS AN EMOTION?

The nature of an emotion, or emotion in general, is a topic of considerable controversy that ranges across the biological sciences, psychology and the humanities. It has been an ongoing debate now for at least a millennium as each era and society brought their own thinkers to the question. This book does not, indeed cannot, answer this question. Instead it offers some key terms and concepts used by people exploring this question. ‘Emotion’ is a relatively new word. Whilst its origins can be traced back to medieval French, for much of the early modern period it was a term that suggested movement or motion, particularly of groups or crowds. It was not until the nineteenth century that it came to be regularly deployed in the way that it is today – to refer to an amorphous category of ‘felt’ experiences.¹

Historians of emotions sometimes use emotion in this general sense, but more often they use it as a technical term to refer to felt experiences that have been named or labelled, like ‘love’ or ‘anger’. This distinguishes emotion from ‘affect’ and ‘feeling’. Feeling is a word used to describe the personal experience of emotion in the body. Importantly, feelings – a bit like emotions – are something that the individual has acknowledged and identified, even if they have not yet given them a specific name (we might feel ‘emotional’). Affect however, is ‘prediscursive’; it is the experience of emotion before it is claimed and named. It is often thought of in terms of ‘intensities’, a heightening of senses or sensitivity to environment, felt as a shift in emotional state away from calmness. For some biological scientists, this idea is important as they see affect as a biological tool that helps living things operate in the world; an animal might sense danger, for example, and can respond even though they do not have language and cannot name such danger.² For other scholars, affect can be an important idea to explain a broad range of embodied experiences that go unnamed or unacknowledged, perhaps experienced unconsciously. An example might be walking into a room of very anxious people, and without realising it becoming anxious too, so that when a colleague walks in you respond grumpily to them. This grumpiness can be explained – by your anxiety – but the change in your emotional state happened without you being consciously aware of it.

EMOTIONS AND LANGUAGE

These definitions of emotion, feeling and affect are a specialist language of the field, and do not always correspond to everyday uses of the terms or indeed usages in other fields, especially the sciences. They reflect some key debates within the humanities about the nature of human experience, and particularly the importance of language in shaping experience. Especially since the post-structuralist turn of the 1980s and 1990s, language – the words we deploy and the rules that shape how they are used – has been understood as critical to how human beings interpret their experience. Words are not neutral descriptors of the things they describe, but order the world, placing things in particular categories, adding ‘valence’ (that is, whether it is viewed as a good or bad thing) and producing systems of logic and ‘common sense’.

The word ‘tiger’ is used to describe – at least most of the time – a large orange and black stripy cat. There is no innate reason why a tiger should be called a tiger; this was a label given to it by humans. However once named, the word ‘tiger’ brings with it a set of associated meanings that shape how we understand what the tiger is. The word ‘tiger’ conveys a particular image to the reader, a pictorial representation, and it draws on an associated set of characteristics. One reader on hearing the word ‘tiger’ might envision Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh; another might remember a live tiger viewed when visiting India. The characteristics of the tiger might be physical – orange, black, stripes, four legs, fluffy – but also more abstract. Tigers might bring to mind power, grace, speed, fear or awe. They might also evoke pity or sadness, if placed in the context of their increasing rarity and vulnerability.

How the reader interprets the word ‘tiger’ then depends on the context in which the word appears – an account of a gracious hunter leaping on its prey in a jungle or muzzled with mangy fur in a zoo – and also their experience with tigers. An illiterate medieval Englishwoman may have never encountered the term ‘tiger’ and so would hear only an unfamiliar word. An early modern Indian might associate tigers with leadership and ‘kingly’ qualities, and a Buddhist might recognise the tiger as a symbol of anger. A villager whose flocks were harassed by tigers might view them negatively, seeing them as a danger or nuisance. A conservationist might only see a beautiful, noble creature. The impact of these complex associations with both the term tiger and the animal itself mean that an early modern Indian who encountered a tiger in a street might respond differently to a modern New York shopper. Words, and their placement in a system of associated meanings, shape our engagement with the world around us.

This emphasis on language as representational – that is, not an innate quality of the thing described – led many theorists to separate language from the material, the physical structures that exist around us and which we label with words. This division between words and things has been a critical site of debate and discussion within a wide range of humanities fields over the last century. What is the relationship between the two and how do we manage the gap between? At an extreme end, some argue that there is nothing beyond the representational, that – at least for humans – words produce the world. Others seek to give varying amounts of agency to the material world. This might be to say that at least part of how we interpret ‘the tiger’ is shaped by the creature which we have named tiger, that their shape, behaviour, relationship to humans contribute to our understanding of ‘tiger’. How much agency should be given to ‘the material’ is a topic of significant debate.³ Others again seek to recognise that there are material experiences that effectively operate beyond language, that exist independently of the human – we are not the centre of the universe.

EMOTIONS, COGNITION AND THE BODY

Affect is an experience that is often thought to pre-exist language. Many affect theorists, building on this distinction between the word and the thing, place the material body and our emotional responses to our environments on the ‘thing’ side. Some, but certainly not all, tie this into hard-wired biological responses that are remnants of our evolutionary history. This is associated with a group of scientists who posit the concept of ‘basic emotions’. Basic emotions theory suggests that, while many emotions are products of human culture and learned behaviour, others are hard-wired and found in every culture. There is some debate over what should be on the list of ‘basic’ emotions, but fear, disgust, anger and happiness are popular. Not all affect theorists subscribe to these ideas; some are more interested in labelling bodily experiences that humans struggle to recognise or name and especially to address behaviours that appear to be relatively ‘unthinking’, such as the heightened energy produced by the crowd at a rock festival.

Some historians of emotion dislike the concept of ‘affect’ and not just because they are suspicious of the idea that there are things that exist beyond language. Some are concerned that the emotion-affect distinction parallels an emotion-cognition division, where our emotional experiences are distinguished from thought or reason. That emotion and reason are distinct faculties has been critical to the conceptualisation of emotion in the West since the early modern period. One of the results of this has been that reason is often placed as the human faculty that moderates or manages emotional experience. Emotions are sometimes envisioned along a ‘hydraulic’ model, things waiting to burst out from the human and requiring continual management. Yet, this idea is far from universal – even as it was posited by some medical thinkers in western Europe, others were contesting this model, emphasising the role of imagination (the mind or thought) in producing emotional experiences. Current thinking on this topic emphasises that emotion and cognition operate in parallel with each other, reciprocally shaping human bodily experience. This means that, when our body encounters a tiger, both our education and training and our emotions operate together to produce our response. If I am a hunter, I do not first feel fear and then apply reason to control my emotion; rather my immediate emotional response reflects that I am an experienced hunter. If this is the case, then affect becomes a problematic idea, as no bodily experience exists independently of thought, of the layers of ‘culture’ that shape how we respond to the world. Despite this, many people find it a helpful term for engaging with bodily experiences that are challenging to name or describe, or which are more abstract or amorphous.

EMOTIONS AND THE GROUP

One of the impacts of a focus on language and thought in the production of emotion is that emotion is no longer just something associated with individuals and the personal. Even if our own idiosyncratic experiences and upbringing make us unique from the next person, the language that we share with others in our community – the communal agreement that tigers are tigers and that we should run away (or not) when we see tigers – influences how we experience the world emotionally. That language is produced by groups – and not individuals – ensures emotion, given form by language, becomes a social and shared activity. This is not to say that everyone in the same culture responds identically to the same situation. Just as hunters and shoppers might have different reactions to meeting a tiger because of their training and experience, so too do individuals bring a range of cultural training and capacities to their emotional experiences.

Some of these things can be quite personal to individuals or small groups (like learning to hunt), but some can be critical social divisions. Many cultures associate different emotional qualities with men and women, for example, typically expecting women to be more emotional, less able to control their embodied experiences. Children and youth across many cultures are expected to be more emotional than adults, whilst justifications for social hierarchies based on race, class and caste have often deployed ideas about emotion to enforce such beliefs. Nor has being emotional always been seen as problematic in these productions of hierarchy. Since the eighteenth century, emotional range, sophistication and public expression have been associated with the elite in Europe, while the working class have been portrayed as ‘hard’ and so less civilised. These are stereotypes, of course, not people’s personal experience of emotion. Yet, stereotypes are not entirely removed from human experience. That women were allowed to be more emotional in public often gave them more permission to do so and not be stigmatised.

Women were able to use these opportunities to express emotion, not necessarily because they were cynical actors, performing emotion (although some people may have done this on occasion for effect). But rather that the social rules associated with the experience of emotion became naturalised. People are educated from young childhood in appropriate emotional responses and behaviour until it becomes an ingrained activity. Here we might suggest that the ‘social’ becomes an embodied experience, something the theorist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ‘habitus’.⁴ Importantly, this is not the same thing as ‘affect’, because such emotional responses not only are profoundly shaped by culture but also as this model does not distinguish between emotion that exists before culture and emotion as something we do automatically due to our education.

EMOTION AND THE PAST

When emotions are imagined in this way, a history of emotions becomes important. Understanding how different cultures understood and practised emotion can tell us much about how their societies operated. It also raises a number of interesting questions. One of those questions is: how do emotions change over time? What motivates people to reject their emotional training and respond differently? Like all forms of social deviance (criminality is another good example), why this happens is a topic of considerable debate. William Reddy suggests the idea of ‘emotional liberty’, where people pursue if not happiness, at least contentment, and so reject emotional rules that come to feel constraining.⁵ Why this might happen can be due to changing conditions – the failure of a particular type of economy to enable certain lifestyles for example – or even personal desires, such as same-sex attraction. Or it may be the result of cross-cultural exchange and the opening up of new ways of doing and behaving. For Reddy, our human desire for emotional contentment can drive change.

A history of emotion also rais...