A History of Feelings

Rob Boddice

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789140675
• eBook ISBN: 9781789141009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What does it mean to feel something? What stimulates our desires, aspirations, and dreams? Did our ancestors feel in the same way as we do? In a wave of new research over the past decade, historians have tried to answer these questions, seeking to make sense of our feelings, passions, moods, emotions, and sentiments. For the first time, however, Rob Boddice brings together the latest findings to trace the complex history of feelings from antiquity to the present. A History of Feelings is a compelling account of the unsaid—the gestural, affective, and experiential. Arguing that how we feel is the dynamic product of the existence of our minds and bodies in moments of time and space, Boddice uses a progressive approach that integrates biological, anthropological, and social and cultural factors, describing the transformation of emotional encounters and individual experiences across the globe. The work of one of the world's leading scholars of the history of emotions, this epic exploration of our affective life will fascinate, enthrall, and move all of us interested in our own well-being—anyone with feeling.

REFERENCES

Introduction: Feeling for History

1 On the vagaries of empathy, see Susan Lanzoni, ‘Introduction: Emotion and the Sciences: Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History’, Science in Context, XXV (2012), pp. 287–300; Lanzoni, ‘A Short History of Empathy’, The Atlantic, 15 October 2015. For some essential handwringing about the distinctiveness of something called empathy (Einfühlung), see Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 5th edn (Frankfurt, 1948). For a brief account of the ‘slipperiness’ of empathy, including a variety of neuroscientific angles, see Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester, 2018), pp. 55–6, 124–8.

2 Richard Evans’s In Defence of History (London, 1997) carved out the response to the nadir of postmodernity, namely Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London, 1991). More intellectually rigorous and useful approaches, such as those of Hayden White, seemed the more menacing in the light of Jenkins’s extremes. For the particular reference here, see Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, 1985), pp. 81–100.

3 Linda Connor, response to Paul Shankman, ‘The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretative Theoretical Program of Clifford Geertz’, Current Anthropology, XXV (1984), pp. 261–80 (p. 271).

4 The notion of finding out how it felt to be there, then, is most clearly expressed in Lynn Hunt, ‘The Experience of Revolution’, French Historical Studies, XXXII (2009), pp. 671–8. Some historians of emotions have been reluctant to set this as their goal, seeing a fundamental barrier to experience in the historical record. I suppose this to be a lack of historical imagination in part, but a serious underrating of the capacity to see through reconstructed contexts, languages and gestures.

5 For other longue durée studies, see J. Liliequist, ed., A History of Emotions, 1200–1800 (London, 2013); Barbara Rosewein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge, 2016); Elena Carrera, ed., Emotions and Health, 1200–1700 (Leiden, 2013). A more theoretically engaging account, which focuses largely on rhetoric, is Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, IL, 2006).

6 Boddice, History of Emotions.

7 Readers should refer to my History of Emotions for a full account of this, but more programmatic accounts, including their intellectual rationale, can be found in Rob Boddice, ‘The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future’, Revista de Estudios Sociales, LXII (2017), pp. 10–15; Rob Boddice (with Daniel Lord Smail), ‘Neurohistory’, in Debating New Approaches in History, ed. P. Burke and M. Tamm (London, 2018).

8 Boddice (with Smail), ‘Neurohistory’.

9 Allusions to culture notwithstanding, this is the popular view espoused by Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York, 2012); Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Orlando, FL, 1999). An essential critique was supplied by Gross, Secret History of Emotion.

10 A particularly fierce critique has been supplied by Roger Cooter, ‘Neural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Historians of Science Need to Take the Neuro-turn Seriously’, Isis, CV (2014), pp. 145–54. The threat of a new Dark Ages was uttered by Cooter in a paper presented at the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, November 2017.

11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 2002), pp. 11–14 (p. 10).

12 For example, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, ‘Are Emotions Natural Kinds?’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1 (2006), pp. 28–58.

13 See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, CA, 2008), pp. 147–8, 193–4.

14 For example, I.C.G. Waever et al., ‘Epigenetic Programming by Maternal Behavior’, Nature Neuroscience, VII (2004), pp. 847–54; R. K. Silbereisen and X. Chen, eds, Social Change and Human Development: Concepts and Results (London, 2010); E. Jablonka and M. J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioural, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

15 For an example of the former, see Arne Öhman, ‘The Biology of Fear: Evolutionary, Neural, and Psychological Perspectives’, in Fear Across the Disciplines, ed. Benjamin Lazier and Jan Plamper (Pittsburgh, PA, 2012), pp. 35–50. The principal affect universalists are Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins: see, in particular, Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 4 vols (New York, 1962–3, 1991–2); Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, Pictures of Facial Affect (Palo Alto, CA, 1976).

16 Defined in William Reddy, ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology, XXXVIII (1997), pp. 327–51.

17 See in particular, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, ‘Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, X (2006), pp. 20–46, and Feldman-Barrett, ‘Are Emotions Natural Kinds?’

18 This neatly accords with what practice theorists have been saying for some time. See Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, LI (2012), pp. 193–220.

19 There have been some beginnings: M. Pernau et al., Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-century Asia and Europe (Oxford, 2015); Paolo Santangelo, La rappresentazione della emozioni nella Cina tradizionale (Modena, 2014); Barbara Schuler, ed., Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China, and Japan (Leiden, 2018).

20 See, for example, Alan G. Fix, Migration and Colonization in Human Microevolution (Cambridge, 1999); Alex Mesoudi, ‘Pursuing Darwin’s Curious Parallel: Prospects for a Science of Cultural Evolution’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, CXIV (2017), pp. 7853–60.

21 This was the profound, though unsaid, implication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (London, 1859). For the implications at the level of scientific practice, see Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victoria...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION: FEELING FOR HISTORY
• ONE: ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL PASSIONS
• TWO: RHETORICAL AND BODILY FEELINGS
• THREE: MOTIONS AND MACHINATIONS
• FOUR: THE AGE OF UNREASON
• FIVE: SENSELESSNESS AND INSENSIBILITY
• SIX: THE MINISTRY OF HAPPINESS
• CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF EXPERIENCE
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX