A History of Emotions

An overdue picture of the old country...

2011-12-06T13:21:00.003Z

I haven't published a pic of the old country for a while on here. Ok i haven't written either but I'll get to that. This is from a really good photographer called Anthony Brawley. This is looking south towards the mighty Ben Lomond, a hill I've climbed a few times.

tv hugs

2011-10-10T20:32:00.002+01:00

Here's a great piece on the recent history of televisual emotions which have permeated wider society.

Adam Curtis is one of the BBC's finest film makers and if one ever gets a chance, take a look at 'Century of the Self'.

Han 한

2011-07-06T12:01:00.005+01:00

I have often been fascinated by non western emotional states and how they can shine a light onto how humanity relates to its emotions. I think it demonstrates that emotions are not entirely innate but also reflections of the society we live in, and that knowing this we can change both ourselves and the society we live in.

Being a melancholic fool by nature, one that has taken my interest for a while is the Korean concept of Han (한). A complex intermingling of historical, collective and personal sorrow an acceptance of a bitter present and a hope of a better future. There are also some suggestions of resentment and a sense of unresolved vengeance.

It is sometimes described as both unique to and an essential component of Koreans' emotional lives.

A Korean colleague put it quite simply:

Han = a collective sense of bonding based on suffering and hardship

The bonding aspect here is important as it binds a people together, in a non-market based sense of identity. It is a collective feeling and i think an interesting bridge for us between the psychological interior of emotions inside our heads/hearts and the social aspect of emotions and responses to social situations.

The Korean poet Ko Eun described it thus:

"We Koreans were born from the womb of Han and brought up in the womb of Han."

Probably the most well known reference to it in Western culture is the episode of series 5 the West Wing entitled 'Han'. It describes the plight of a North Korean pianist who is asked not to defect (which he wanted to do) in order to preserve the hopes of nuclear non proliferation talks with the two countries.

President Bartlett (Martin Sheen) describes it thus:

"There is no literal English translation. It's a state of mind. Of soul, really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still there's hope."{The West Wing: 5.4}

There is a good description from the Korean-English translator David Bannon:

"The term han cannot simply be translated as "resentment" for every book, article or poem. The phrasing must match the usage—a tricky thing with all words, especially so with a term that has vastly complex meaning to Koreans.

Han is frequently translated as sorrow, spite, rancor, regret, resentment or grief, among many other attempts to explain a concept that has no English equivalent. (Dong-A 1982: 1975). Han is an inherent characteristic of the Korean character and as such finds expression, implied or explicit, in nearly every aspect of Korean life and culture.

Han is sorrow caused by heavy suffering, injustice or persecution, a dull lingering ache in the soul. It is a blend of lifelong sorrow and resentment, neither more powerful than the other. Han is imbued with resignation, bitter acceptance and a grim determination to wait until vengeance can at last be achieved.

Han is passive. It yearns for vengeance, but does not seek it. Han is held close to the heart, hoping and patient but never aggressive. It becomes part of the blood and breath of a person. There is a sense of lamentation and even of reproach toward the destiny that led to such misery. (Ahn 1987)."n

Banno goes on to cite a good example from Korean literature:

"The inevitability of fate frequently fuels han in the arts. Korean television and films are informed by han, as are older forms of tragedy, such as P'ansori performance songs and folk tales. For example, poetess Yi Ok Bong (?-1592) described how she had visited her lover so often in dreams that if her spirit were corporeal, the pebbles on the path to his house would be worn to sand. (Kim 1990: 222). Yi uses the term han in the second line, which has been translated: "This wife's resentment is great." "Resentment" implies anger and frustration, certainly part of han, but the line fails to express the sorrow and resignation of the original. Another translator chose "I am sad" for the same line and still another, "my longing deepens." (Lee 1998: 85). This poem demonstrates the importance of context and usage. In the complete poem, insert each of the three previous translations at the end of the second line and the problem becomes clear:

Are you well these days?  

Moonlight brushing the curtain pains my heart. 

If dreams leave footprints

the pebbles at your door are almost worn to sand. "

As a basic rule, however, one must always go beyond western interpretations of non-western concepts and listen to the creators of the concept itself, the Korean people. This is not to say David Bannon is wrong of course!

In 1994 in Paris, the late and hugely respected Korean writer Park Kyong-Ni (박경리) spoke in greater detail about Han and her comments challenge the notion of Han containing resentment.

"If we lived in paradise, there would be no tears, no separation, no hunger, no waiting, no suffering, no oppression, no war, no death. We would no longer need either hope or despair. We would lose those hopes so dear to us all. We Koreans call these hopes Han. It is not an easy word to understand. It has generally been understood as a sort of resentment. But I think it means both sadness and hope at the same time. You can think of Han as the core of life, the pathway leading from birth to death. Literature, it seems to me, is an act of Han and a representation of it.

'Han is a characteristic feeling of the Korean people. But it has come to be seen as a decadent feeling, because of the 36-year Japanese occupation. It is understood simply as sorrow, or resignation, or a sigh. Some have compared it to the Japanese word ourami, meaning hate or vengeance, but that s quite absurd. This nonsense is the result perhaps of the identity of the Chinese character or it may be a kind of left-over from the Japanese occupation. The Japanese word ourami evokes images of the sword and the seeds of militarism, and is a characteristic feeling of the Japanese, for whom vengeance is a virtue. Therefore the Japanese word ourami is completely different from the Korean word Han. As I have already said, Han is an expression of the complex feeling which embraces both sadness and hope. The sadness stems from the effort by which we accept the original contradiction facing all living things, and hope comes from the will to overcome the contradiction."

Is it unique to Korea? Possibly but not necessarily so. And Han has much to teach us about a response to suffering, not least if we appreciate Park Kyong-Ni's point about Han not being imbued with vengeance.

Can emotions like Han teach us how to break the cycles of violence in history?

a longer history of emotions?

2011-06-26T11:29:00.003+01:00

Sorry about the advert at the beginning, but this National Geographic video struck me as interesting. Is it showing one of our closely related relatives engaged in a sophisticated emotional response?

What can we infer from it, if the chimpanzees are truly grieving? There are obvious questions about how we behave towards such animals now, and they are very much worth considering. But I wonder also what it says about the nature and sophistication of emotions before language?

the anatomy of melancholy

2011-02-21T14:29:00.002Z

A sign of our modern era? A story (admittedly a few months old) on the BBC website about the way we relate to depression. In times gone past we may not have been as swift to medicalise certain sensations rather we might have lived through them. This is given credibility by range of vocabulary we once employed to describe sadness. From melancholy to anomie and mal du pays, this range of words suggests both a more acute observation of such conditions that was more than clinical and was rooted in both a personal and social context. what would it say about one nation's mood that its exiles might be more inclined to the yearning for their homeland as described by mal du pays?

is this condition not one of the great common themes of both joyce's ulysses and the original odyssey?

We have learned much about the brain and about mental illness and where that has helped individuals it emphatically needs to be applauded. One cannot help but wonder though if our flawed notion of happiness as a default state creates a fear of unhapiness as a malady requiring remedy. Mary Kenny, the author of the piece, may well be right.

Suadade

2010-10-16T13:36:00.002+01:00

In an occasional series of emotions that English does not have a specific translation for but has syntheses of recognisable emotions or may in some cases be arguably distinct. My own favourite is suadade....

These come from here.

Toska

Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

Mamihlapinatapei

Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” (Altalang.com)

Litost

Czech – Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remarked that “As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.” The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

Kyoikumama

Japanese – “A mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement” What mix of emotions is this?

Tartle (didn't know this one!)

Scottish – The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name.

Ilunga

Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) – A word famous for its untranslatability, most professional translators pinpoint it as the stature of a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.”

Torschlusspanik

German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.”

Wabi-Sabi

Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.”

Dépaysement

French – The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country.

Tingo

Pascuense (Easter Island) – Hopefully this isn’t a word you’d need often: “the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.”

Hyggelig

Danish – Its “literal” translation into English gives connotations of a warm, friendly, cozy demeanor, but it’s unlikely that these words truly capture the essence of a hyggelig; it’s likely something that must be experienced to be known. I think of good friends, cold beer, and a warm fire.

L’appel du vide

French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

Ya’aburnee

Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

Duende

Spanish – While originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.” There’s actually a nightclub in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion, where I teach, named after this word.

Saudade

Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade.

I love the fact that the Brazillians apparently have an annual day of suadade, January 30. Can we imagine a day of love, or a day of yearning?

The anatomy of melancholy

2010-09-17T23:20:00.000+01:00

the anatomy of melancholy

Why do we love a certain kind of sadness so much that we crave it so in our music, in our books, in so much of our society? This is something that we westerners are not alone in.

The erudite anthropologist and online Guardian columnist Wendy Fonarow writes of a classic piece of ethnography, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers by Edward L. Schieffelin:

"Now a more overt manifestation of the value of melancholia can be found amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. In the Gisaro ceremony, recounted in The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, visiting dancers and chorus perform songs designed to bring their hosts to tears. The chorus sings of the places on their host's land and eventually about the places where loved ones have died.

Upon the experience of intense sadness, the hosts become enraged and descend upon the dancers, grabbing lit torches to burn them to avenge the suffering and pain the hosts have been made to feel. As Schieffelin puts it, "It is the very beauty and sadness that he (the dancer) projects that cause people to burn him." Sadness, here, is not an inward experience of depression, it is the encounter of grief, nostalgia, and sorrow in a public spectacle that requires violent retribution."

This reminds me of those examples of love and other emotions that we ourselves used to play out external influences and not internal feelings. When love was a sweet sickness like a malady to be cured. When anger came upon one, rather than feeling it inside. Is there a benefit to internalising or externalising our emotions? Are externalised emotions more or less sophisticated? Does internalising them lead to excessive egotism and shape the emotions themselves? what do the examples of different emotional cultures and histories tell us there?

infanticide

2010-06-25T13:29:00.004+01:00

A curious tale from the BBC. Archaeological remains in England show a mass grave of around 97 new-born infants from a Roman building, believed to be a brothel. To modern ears a heartbreaking tale is heard, where lacking contraception Roman prostitutes practised infanticide on a widespread scale.

"Archaeological records suggest infants were not considered to be "full" human beings until about the age of two, said Dr Eyers [of Chiltern Archaeology].

Children any younger than that age were not buried in cemeteries. As a result, infant burials tended to be at domestic sites in the Roman era."

There is a brutal and tragic logic to this, painful as it is to comprehend. Indeed in many subsistence societies through history, infanticide is considered a necessary practice where deformities occur - a small community may not be able to provide adequate care without destroying the group itself.

Is the horror in modern emotions rooted in luxury and development rather than any sense of eternal morality? I would not go back to such dark practices but it takes a dispassionate eye to learn from the past.

Emotional Freedom

2010-06-13T17:26:00.006+01:00

Ok so I'm only doing this about 2 months later than intended. Sigh...

It is not enough for historians of emotion to merely document the emotional lives of those who have come before us. Questions must be asked that require judgement. For example, what system of government creates the best emotional balance in its individuals?

One of those questions which occupies historians is which societies have given us the most emotional freedom? And is that emotional freedom inherently a good thing?

Recently, a reader of the blog very kindly sent me a trio of interviews of three very prominent and respected historians of emotion, Professors William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The reader, Jan Plamper, had conducted the interviews himself - he's a research scientist at the Max Planck Centre for Human Development in Berlin and an expert in Russian History.

Prof. Reddy suggested that perhaps the best way of judging that is by considering which kinds of society gave rise to the least 'emotional suffering'. This seems a useful tool to measure a society's emotional welfare. After all, it may be harder to judge happiness and well being than to see the impact of that kind of suffering.

"I would say that it remains to be seen how best to ensure that each person’s capacity for emotional suffering is treated with equal dignity. If some Western democratic regimes have come closer to this ideal than earlier European monarchies or concurrent centralized socialist regimes, it has been at least in part by accident. There is quite a bit of emotional suffering involved in conforming to the norms of the rational, self-interested individual that these regimes, in principle, have set out to “liberate” as if such “individuals” were given in nature. The amount of suffering varies enormously by socioeconomic status; by racial, ethnic, and gender identity; by the economic conjoncture;and in accord with a variety of other circumstances. There are over a hundred thousand schizophrenics who live as homeless persons on the streets of the U.S. today, without medication or care—just to take one example."

Whilst a tyranny would not necessarily deny all emotional freedom, Reddy goes on to point out the more a society tries to impose an emotional system on people the more likely it is to be unstable.

What society has given us the most emotional freedom and why? Is there a tipping point where the looseness of the emotional system contributes towards the breakdown of the society. Will contrasting and contradictory emotional regimes lives side by side in one society or must we have enough shared emotional responses to maintain a critical coherency?

And will one's own view of politics colour the opinion of a successful emotional society?

ps excerpts ©2010 Wesleyan University. Excerpts reprinted, with permission, from Jan Plamper, "The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,"
History and Theory 49, no. 2 (May 2010), 237-265.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2010.00541.x

A question for historians of emotion

2010-06-10T13:51:00.003+01:00

A hypothetical one - the reality would of course be impossible.

Imagine in the future, historians come to look back upon our world. If they had no primary texts, no primary written sources of any kind, what if anything could they say about the emotional lives of this Western society?

Would they see the plethora of shops, the malls and supermarkets and conclude that western society was in no small way organised through consumerism and a freudian view of the self which creates an economy based on desire and not need? How else without texts might they view those modern day temples?

Might they play old movies and discover our narratives obsessing over sex, violence and revenge? What would they make of them without writings to contextualise it all?

Who from the other disciplines would they speak to? The historians of music and art? The archaeologists? The comparative mythologists? The scientists of neurology and forensic anthropology?

So many conversations to be had for historians of emotion.

Torridon in the Spring

2010-06-08T13:49:00.001+01:00

Another cracker from Steve Carter to soothe the toubled soul.

sniffing the tobacco swahili style

2010-06-02T13:28:00.009+01:00

An expression of affection that astonishes this Scottish mind. However, I make no moral judgement, because I don't think it's appropriate for me to do so.

It's a great little example from Diane Ackerman's 'A Natural History of Love'. She herself quotes 'In The Customs of the Swahili People' (1903), edited by J. W. T. Allen.

"When his grandmother or his aunt or another woman comes, a child one or two years old is told to show his love for his aunt, and he goes to her. Then she tells him to kiss her, and he does so. Then he is told by his mother to show his aunt his tobacco, and he lifts his clothes and shows her his penis. She tweaks the penis and sniffs and sneezes and says: "O, very strong tobacco." Then she says, "Hide your tobacco." If there are four or five women, they all sniff and are pleased and laugh a lot."

Does it still go on? It would surprise to find such things still going on, but again perhaps that's my western mind imagining these things to appear a little inappropriately sexualised (I'm not saying it is inappropriate, just that by western Christian and even secular morals it might seem that way) and that that influence might have affected the Swahili women in a way that has made them stop doing it.

Personally I think it's harmless, especially when one considers the other taboos Allen describes which show the Swahili being acutely conscious of sexual behaviour. Amongst other things they frown upon fathers and brothers kissing daughters and sisters after a certain age. That social taboo which I think could also be described as an 'emotional regime', and one that seems quite strict in keeping potentially inappropriate feelings restricted, even to the point of inhibiting demonstrations of feeling that we might consider perfectly normal.

One positive thing that may come out of the 'tobacco tweak' (my phrase, forgive me) is that it appears to demonstrate an non-threatening way for women to discuss male genitalia and by extension male sexuality. Having a familiarity with such a thing, especially through humour, can potentially help cut through any mystique surrounding sex and sexuality and empower the women involved. This can help positively influence the emotional regimes revolving around sexuality for heterosexual women.

Consider middle class Victorian women trapped in ignorance of their partners' bodies and the corseted emotions that sprang forth from such repression without any positive channels of social knowledge or emotional script to guide them. Would such a thing have happened if they had had more familiarity with their partners' anatomies?

One assumes the young boys are too young to consider such gentle teasing as emotionally scarring!

A day of hatred

2010-05-10T11:27:00.002+01:00

Sadly I'll be out of the country but this looks fascinating and I'm a big fan of Joanna Bourke's work...

Histories of Hatred
A London Consortium Public Event
Sunday, 16 May 201011:30-18:00
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

What are the historical records of hatred? Where in the archive should we look to discover the roots of contempt? Who are the protagonists of this history, the haters or the hated?Marking the publication of Anthony Julius's major new book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford University Press), this one day event brings together historians, artists and cultural critics to shed light on the challenges of documenting and accounting for histories of hatred. Speakers will explore the problems of documenting and representing histories of racism, anti-Semitism and periods of extreme cultural and political oppression and conflict.

Speakers include: Anthony Julius, Anthony Bale (Medieval Studies, Birkbeck), Joanna Bourke (History, Birkbeck), Steve Connor (The London Consortium), Deborah Lipstadt (Jewish Studies, Emory University) and Pratap Rughani (Media Studies, University of the Arts).

Tickets £10/£7
For tickets and information, please visit London Cconsortium - space is limited and early registration is recommended. For general enquiries, please contact Dr. Noam Leshem: lnoam@hotmail.comTel: 0778 233591

Darkness falls in stories and in our hearts

2010-04-05T12:11:00.006+01:00

A book I asked my mother to get me for my birthday considers some questions I have wondered about for some time.

Christopher Booker's "The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories" is a treatise on archetypal theory - the notion that there is only a limited number of stories or plots in the world and those story forms reflect our relationship with the world and connect our conscious and unconscious selves to the external world and community around us.

I've only just started reading this one, and am conscious there is much to be drawn from and criticised about the work. What follows therefore is by no means untrammeled eulogy, merely some questions rooted in his suggestions.

Booker suggests that our storytelling has taken a darker turn in the last two hundred years. (which is not to say it wasn't dark before) borne out of the convulsions of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon and the Industrial Revolution with its sense of overcoming Nature. Mankind was on the threshold of something very new.

At this point in history the psychic and physical convulsions of the era helped separate our Ego (consumed as it was by power of the new science and ripped apart from its sense of morality and order by the tumults of history) from the whole of the Self.

This in his mind drove 'dark' versions of plot to become more common. Although we already had tragedy as an inherently 'dark' plot form, now other forms were being inverted. In these stories there weren't happy endings and the characters often failed to grow or be transformed by their journey.

If, and of course it is a big if, this is accepted as true then I wonder what impact this had on emotional development in the Western world.

In the last post I suggested that the Enlightenment and subsequently the Industrial Revolution had created both a sense of individualism and the economic wealth to create greater private physical space in which that individualism could grow. Is there a sense in which that private space and philosophical drive towards individualism created an Ego that became separated from the rest of our Self? It seems highly possible.

It is this I would suggest that has had a major impact on our emotions and how we relate to them. Here may be the seeds of the shift where emotions become about individual feeling and not public harmony. At the risk of moralising, I think this shift towards internal emotions was seduced by our newly fuelled Ego and pushed our emotions into selfishness in many forms.

Obviously of course, this is only speculation on my part and Booker himself focuses much more on the literature than the history of the time. And of course terms like Ego and Self in this case are Jungian and not exact representations of reality.

I don't think this conflicts with traditional historians of emotions like Prof William Reddy's ideas of societies oscillating between control and lack of control over there emotions. Nor does it contradict Prof Barbara Rosenwein's ideas about emotional communities able to have alternative themes and relationships to emotions. This idea of privacy, individualism and Ego is merely a broad brush that may impact on aspects of Western societies without overwhelming all different groups.

The direction of emotions in history

2010-03-11T17:44:00.004Z

One of the biggest questions in the study of the history of emotions is in what direction are our emotions heading? Is there a grand narrative to our emotions in the way that there is a grand narrative to the history of science or to the history of religion?

One of the first attempts to describe this was by Johan Huizanga in the early 20th century which suggested that our emotions had been 'childlike' in the Middle Ages and have subsequently been in the process of becoming more civilised and mature. This was supported by writers like Norbert Elias, and at first glance is a seductive notion.

Later writers like Barbara Rosenwein have emphatically refuted this notion both by effective descriptions of the emotional communities of sub-sections of societies in the Middle Ages that show this 'childlike' emotional behaviour to be inaccurate, but also by effectively citing research into the nature of emotion showing that it is not something that is vented by individuals unable to control it.
The respected historian, William Reddy put forward the notion that societies have oscillated between control and lack of control in their emotions. This seems interesting and deserves great scrutiny.

Against such esteemed company i hesitate to put forward any grand narrative, as my learning barely registers in reflection to theirs.

However, some thoughts have been coming together of late. One thing that strikes is that in the Western tradition, there has been a journey in science and philosophy towards a seductive sense of individualism, as we separated Mind from Body under Socrates and Plato, then promoted the individual soul in our Judeo-Christian theology, and went on to emphasise the rights of individuals on the physical plane.

This was augmented by developments in logic, then science. The invention of the printing press began to make learning more democratic, and also private. It became less about group interaction and behaviour and more about individual scholarship which in turn changed the natures of those doing the learning. We existed more in our own heads than ever before.

Peter and Carol Stearns and others have written about the impact diary keeping had on individuals in the 17th and 18th centuries and how it changed their emotions, inhibiting anger and making them more self-reflective. (I mentioned something similar previously here).

Since the Industrial Revolution there has also been an astonishing increase in privacy and our understanding of it. The increase in personal wealth led to the creation of private domestic spaces unparalleled in history.

Medicine and philosophy shared and contributed to this atomisation with the notion of the subconscious from Freud and schools of philosophy like phenomenology attempting to refute John Donne's assertion that 'No man is an island."

It could be argued that despite TV and the internet opening up communication and creating shared moments, these moments are also intensely private and occur in private spaces.

Our emotional lives have been central to this. We could have chosen to retain a greater degree of sociability and communality about our behaviour, but we didn't. Our desire was for privacy and whether chosen and/or driven by our social/philosphical/cultural traditions/even our nature, we have clung to privacy and made it sacred.

What has it done to our emotions? Previously our emotions were considered in some ways less internal than they are today. Some were considered afflictions and we retain vestiges of this in phrases like 'lovesick', which harks back to a time of love potions and cures, as though it were a condition to be encouraged or treated. Now it is a feeling, something intensely interior.

This interiorising is a dangerous thing in surfeit I fear. Whilst not denying the monuments to passion the heart can construct can be glorious and wondrous things, it moves us to a position where we diminish the communal and begin to erode trust in others. How often is the phrase 'I don't know it but I feel it' uttered, especially in justification for action?

So as our emotions become more internal they also become the most important arbiters of truth and this truly is a dangerous thing. It gives justification for selfishness dressed up as emotional truth and we see this more and more in our societies as individual rights are emphasised over common benefit.

We extend our adolescence until our thirties, and this for women is often at the risk of procreation. We talk of a 'health and safety' culture that takes common sense about avoiding injury into an excuse not to have to do anything remotely difficult. Ours is a more litigious culture that means doctors can fear operating on patients and health services must devote more and more resources away from care and towards insurance for fear of being sued. The individual's right to protection and its corollary the individual's freedom from fear to the point of absurdity. In short, we are a 'Me' culture and our emotions are both driving and being driven by that.

And if we carry on in such directions, such searches for validation of our emotions may come at the expense of social cohesion and environmental sustainability. And yet we do carry on, and there is no social movement, no major cultural trends or groups addressing the impact of the internalising of our emotions and their drive towards privacy and the selfishness that it is currently allied with.

I think our emotions must come back under control by bringing out the public and social aspects of them and not getting lost in the alluring echoes and consolations of our own head. It may be a fearful enterprise but it is no less essential for that.

Amae dependent?

2010-03-06T18:05:00.003Z

There is an emotion called 'amae', which is commonly understood in Japan as a kind of indulgent dependency that has its roots in the relationship of a mother to child. This has been described as in some ways unique to Japanese culture, and many experts have followed Japanese sociologist Takeo Doi is claiming that this means amae is unique to Japanese culture.

Obviously Japanese culture does not have the monopoly on love or dependence and a form of loving dependence could no doubt be found in other cultures, be it rooted in mother and son or daughter. The relationship between Italian boys and their mothers springs to mind here too. Indeed some sociologists have highlighted that (like Herman Smith and Takako Nomi) that amae may have close parallels with western mother-daughter relationships.

Doi did remind us that the richer more semantic readings of amae are uniquely Japanese. This may well be true, words and concepts may well have culturally specific connotations. Part of the joy of language and those who speak it is the creative response of the individual and their tongue to their environment.

But it is good to learn of such things. Like the pilots who learned to overcome their fear of transgressing authority without sacrificing their cultural identity (mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers' and spoken about below), it shows how our relationship to our emotions is a creative and flexible one. There may be common responses but their cultural moulding shows how we can take them in many different ways. The trick is to learn from the good ones and see what value we can glean from them or how they can be learned in different cultural contexts.

Fear of Flying

2010-02-21T17:42:00.004Z

Somewhat later than the in-crowd, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers'. The book (for those that don't know) is a really interesting study of success, filled with vignettes that highlight the deeper stories behind individual successes.

One chapter sticks out though, a study of plane crashes that argues on how cultural background has a profound relationship to accidents. Gladwell looks at something called the 'Power Distance Index' and describes how this means that the crew subordinate to the captain have difficulty in warning him or her of any incipient danger. Most accidents happen from a sequence of minor mishaps escalating into a major catastrophe.

The transcripts to two of the crashes Gladwell refers to are heartbreaking, listening to the attempts of the crew to warn the captain of their situations. The inability to communicate clearly the danger seems to be related to deference, whether it be cultural, national or for whatever reason.

But what is this to do with a history of emotions?

This transcripts are also interesting from an emotional point of view in the sense that it appears a fear of authority is overwhelming the fear of death, which sounds quite astonishing but perhaps isn't when one considers this may also be a strong theme in a military environment. Gladwell's argument also suggests this is the case in countries where there are very hierarchical social structures which lead to a high Power Distance Index. If you asked me I would have imagined we'd all fear death far more than we'd fear the irritation or even wrath of our boss. I'm not saying it was a straight choice in those cockpits but as the problems escalated and the seriousness became more evident, death was becoming a more realistic possibility.

In a strange way it's useful reminder of where our emotional priorities are not what we might expect of them and how they might be influenced indirectly by national culture. Does it suggest high power distance indexes equals a bad thing? That is another question, as a hierarchy may have value for a culture in other ways. But that it shapes our emotions and in particular our fears in some disturbing ways appears clear.

different emotions

2010-02-03T12:50:00.003Z

From wikipedia, some of these may be familiar, others not so...

Abhiman is an Indian term best described as a feeling of prideful loving anger.
Sukhi is an Indian term similar to peace and happiness.
Fureai: Fureai is a Japanese term used when feeling a sense of connectedness to someone else.
Rettokan is a Japanese term that means to feel inferior
Schadenfreude is a German term defined by German philosopher Theodor Adorno as "the largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate".

Any others spring to mind?

Toilet training?

2010-01-08T00:19:00.004Z

Few emotions are more powerful or more visceral than disgust. And yet few other reactions show much the emotions can vary and as such can be varied by us. Watching some Michael Palin travelogue repeat of him in the Sahara they came to a sequence of the Python sitting on a communal latrine where Roman gentleman would sit and defecate in front of each other, probably whilst chatting away to their co-toileters. It's always described as the men who do these things, and never made clear if the ladies use the same facilities or even the same kind of facilities.

When did we become shy about such things? Billy Connolly tells a great tale about the toilets in the Glasgow shipyard he worked at being communal and how he used to send burning paper boats along the water to burn the backsides of his colleagues. This was only thirty to forty years ago. Are there other cultures/places where the public lavatory really is public for all actions?

Does the constant refinement of disgust in some areas such as toilet behaviour then have a knock on impact its other manifestations?

Apologies to the squeamish for such thoughts, i hesitate to dwell on them myself!

Tudor emotions

2010-01-07T23:16:00.002Z

Today I received an email from a man called Brad Irish, a student of English doing a doctoral dissertation on emotions in the Tudor court. He asked me to pass on his call for anyone interested in an academic panel he's putting together, and I'm delighted to do so.

Call for Papers: Emotion at the Renaissance Court, MLA 2011 (January 6-9, 2011; Los Angeles)

Proposed special session seeks papers considering emotion and affect in the early modern courtly sphere. The emotional life of a courtier, emotional displays at court, emotion in courtly literature, etc. Abstracts by Mar. 2 to Bradley J. Irish (birish@mail.utexas.edu).

Glenfinnan

2009-12-28T23:11:00.006Z

As fine an image as i've seen of one my favourite places, Glenfinnan, from Grant Glendinning at www.Dejavuphoto.net.

a feeling for the future...?

2009-12-27T17:56:00.004Z

A thought has been buzzing around my head for the last few days, as I lay fat on the sofa full of Christmas fowl.

Every so often the issue of global population and its impact on the world pops up in the media, indeed recently there was a documentary by Sir David Attenborough on the subject. And the terrible consequences of more immediate pressures such as water and food shortages notwithstanding, I wondered if this might also have an effect on our emotions. Could it have the impact of such explosions as language, fire, cooking, agriculture or even industrialisation?

It's a grand question obviously and the problem with grand questions is the answers are rarely as simple as their progenitors. So, first the caveats:
Cultures have different emotional responses to similar stimuli - so why would we all react the same way?
Different groups within cultures have different responses too similar stimuli - so again, why would we all react the same way?
Population growth will not be uniform - so why might the pressures be felt by all anyway?

Is there any way through these huge influences on the question and any potential answer? One thought comes from an American researcher on emotions, David Matsumoto. He is the Founder and Director of SFSU’s Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory. The laboratory focuses on studies involving culture, emotion, social interaction and communication.

Matsumoto has a recent paper (Sequential dynamics and culturally-moderated facial expressions of emotion) which talks about the emotional responses of judo athletes at the Olympics to see if they could spot the difference between innate and cultural reactions and then see what cultures have more facially expressive responses. One interesting offshoot of this was that more urbanised cultures had more individualised responses. Even taking into account Oriental cultures with their propensity for appearing less emotionally expressive (as opposed to actually being emotional), there was a strong correlation between urbanised societies being affluent and individualised societies which meant they registered the more expressive emotions.

So what does this mean for an ever growing world population? Possibly nothing in the face of other influencing factors, but perhaps it may mean an increasingly urbanised population becoming more individualised and even overwhelming local cultural norms. And our global population is becoming increasingly urbanised.

If affluence and urbanisation clearly lead to a greater sense of individualism then where will that take the world when collective actions and norms are needed to solve global issues like climate change?

I have to be honest I'm not sure if thread of argument has convinced me never mind any dear readers. But it nags away...

How cooking made us feel

2009-12-11T11:25:00.003Z

The history of emotions is ultimately a journey onto the ocean of inquiry that asks, 'what makes us human?'

Therefore, despite the obvious and enormous difficulties in ascertaining with confidence, one cannot help but suspect a link between those crucial moments in human history such as walking upright, controlling fire and mastering language, and our emotional development. Just exactly what that link is may well be much harder if not impossible to do full justice to, but a link seems clear undeniable.

and so every often a book comes along that suggests some interesting ideas which may well have an enormous resonance for our development as humans and therefore, necessarily, the development of our emotions.

A few months back Richard Wrangham wrote a book called 'Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human'. He makes a case for cooking as one of the key ingredients in human development. he makes a fine case for showing how the improvements that cooking gave to our diet in increased calories, more protein etc, not just meant we ate better but that it changed our physical makeup and consequently our mental make up. the improved diet helped us literally think better. And this thinking better opened up whole new evolutionary possibilities.

As Dwight Garner of the New York Times puts it:
"The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer."

I wrote briefly recently about the links between animal reactions/emotions and human emotions and irrespective of current gap between primate emotions and their human counterparts there must be a growth from theirs to ours following our evolutionary curve.We too have made a journey from simpler primate style emotions such as fearfulness or anger to more sophisticated (with no moral judgement on the virtues of them) emotions like despair or contempt.

The question then must be asked, what role then did cooking have on our emotions. All that spare thinking time, what did it mean for our ability to come to judgements about our situation and what feelings arose from it. Wrangham suggests cooking around the fire made us calmer as it imposed socialisation upon us. That may well be the case.

One other less cheery spin off was that cooking created the first signs of gender domination as a consequence from the need to guard the cooking pot. What emotions may have been created by that unfortunate possibility?

Ultimately it would be quite a job to say with absolute authority that cooking created a specific set of more sophisticated emotions that hitherto had not existed before. One certainly has no direct evidence to say which emotions that set would consist of. But the possibility remains that cooking may have done more than many other moments in humanity's history to define our emotional capabilities. Cooking may have done more than make us feel good and full, it may well have helped us feel...

Burying the emotions

2009-11-25T12:40:00.006Z

It is a source of wonder how long humanity has been burying its dead. The oldest undisputed burials are in the Qafzeh and Skhul caves in Israel, between 90,000-120,000 years ago.

What happened that we needed to bury our loved ones, where once we had let them be once they had died? (i don't think I'd go back to bodies in the street he hastens to add). Was this a change in environmental circumstances or a change in our nature, or both? What is interesting is that clearly the practice spread across different geographic environments which suggests something beyond environmental pressure. This certainly seems the case when one discovers early grave sites with embellishments like medicinal herbs.

There is one place which i find particularly impressive, that of the 28,000 year old site at Sungir in Russia. There were three bodies, according to the archaeologist Randall White, a 60 year old man, a small boy and a girl. Their bodies were wearing thousands of beads, which would have take several years to have made. This suggests more than just decoration given the time taken to produce such things. Is there already social stratification going on? There may be well religious significance to the beads, the corpses and their graves. Which makes one ask where religion came from and what did it involve?

What, though, has all this to do with a history of emotions? Such massive shifts in consciousness in burial and in the astonishing beadwork of Sungir suggest great emotional depth at work to drive a person or community to such actions. The grief in death, the reverence, fear and awe are hinted at in the Sungir burials.

And was there envy in a society that could produce such complicated ornamentation as the beads? Surely there wasn't enough beads to go round all? What drove a community to display so many beads on some of the corpses but not all?

Our earliest ancestors were maybe not so different and even in death we are not always so equal.

In the heart of the West Highlands

2009-11-25T12:18:00.002Z

a wonderful panorama looking over Loch Quoich in the west Highlands, north of Fort William. this one is found here at "A Scottish Climber's view" which is a fine wee site.

Underground and proud

2009-11-19T19:05:00.003Z

A bizarre yet thoroughly entertaining evening. Sitting in a shed last Saturday discussing the history of emotions and other things as part of the Underground Restaurant run by the estimable MsMarmiteLover. the setting was very stylish, the company more so and the food delicious. You will forgive me if i pass on the compliment of guru! i can't answer any question but the bluffing skills seemed to be enough...

But thank you to all those who kindly kept me company down in the smoky shed i enjoyed our blethering very much.

To those that have never been, if you ever get the chance, go, eat, drink and talk and meet people you might not have met otherwise.

Primal Fear?

2009-11-16T20:07:00.002Z

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear." H.P. Lovecraft

When one tries to look back far into the past at our pre-literate ancestors it becomes extremely difficult to consider their emotional lives with great confidence. the paucity of evidence allied to nature of those tiny clues means one must tread warily.

And yet it surprises me when writers suggest that our eldest emotion is fear. As Stuart Walton states in his book, 'Humanity: An Emotional History':
"If it were possible, as some evolutionary psychologists maintain, to decide which of humanity's emotions is the oldest, then fear would surely enter the strongest claim."

As much as I am a fan of Walton's writing, I am not so sure of this. He goes on to speak of our early ancestors walking across the African savannah in terror of the travails that faced them. Did did they really go in fear all or even most of the time? Was it really so terrifying?

It is interesting to note the behaviour of our evolutionary ancestors when considering such a notion. Do any of the great apes feel emotions, and if so how much does something resembling fear act upon them in ordinary existence? Emotions in animals is still very much a developing science but there is a view that it is valid to talk of such things without making animal emotions anthropomorphised. the renowned primate expert Jane Goodall did much to change our perception of what primates are capable of.

So if one accepts that our evolutionary cousins and ancestors were capable of some form of emotions would something recognisable as fear be one of the dominant modes of their behaviour? Do they live in terror of their predators and environment? Whilst some animals have learned caution and reticence relating to human contact, it would appear not. Nor do they exhibit anything approaching constant terror in general activity.

If nothing else it may not make evolutionary sense to have fear play so dominant a role as Walton suggests. Prolonged exposure to fear or stress induces massive stress upon the human body to deleterious effect. The same goes for animals. Whilst fear is essential for honing reflexes in traumatic situations it does not serve us so well over longer periods of time.

The point is though that there is nothing about fear, though obviously important, that says it is necessarily older or more dominant than other emotions.

I fear (if one may excuse the pun) this notion may be rooted in a hint of projection of modern man's helplessness in the face of nature without the aid of technology. Early Man knew how to live in its environments just as our primate cousins do. Whilst capable of feeling fear when needed they need not have been overwhelmed by it.

Towards a new history of Western emotions

2009-09-29T14:02:00.003+01:00

A quick flyer for an interesting evening which I am deeply hoping to get to, work permitting.

PUBLIC LECTURE AND WINE RECEPTION.
5 October 2009. 6-8pm Arts Lecture Theatre. Queen Mary, Mile End Campus.

Professor Barbara Rosenwein
‘Towards a New History of Western Emotions’

With a response by
Professor Miri Rubin

Professor Rosenwein’s lecture – ‘Towards a New History of Western Emotions’ – takes up the question of why we need a new history of Western emotions, that is, a new general narrative. Much of the lecture will be concerned with surveying the general narratives that currently exist. The lecture will then sketch what a new narrative history might look like.

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. Her two most recent books are Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (2009) and Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (2009).

The lecture, response, and discussion will be followed by a wine reception.

a kiss and a cuddle...

2009-09-27T23:21:00.003+01:00

I came across this, by George Weber, recently about the Andamanese in the 1850's. They are a tribal society in the south eastern Indian Ocean:
"The Andamanese did not and still do not lightly show their social emotions. There were no special words for ordinary greetings like the English "hello" or "how-do-you-do." When two Andamanese met who had not seen each other for a while, they first stared wordlessly at each other for minutes. So long could this initial silent staring last that some outside observers who saw the beginning of the ceremony but not its continuation came away with the impression that the Andamanese had no speech."

Can one imagine? i know some socially awkward people but it runs gloriously counter to our sense of constant chatter.

"The deadlock was broken when the younger of the two made a casual remark. This opened the doors to an excited exchange of news and gossip. If the two were related, the older would sit down and the younger sit on his lap, then the two would cuddle and huddle while weeping profusely. If they had not seen each other for a long time, the weeping could go on for hours. In the eyes of outside observers, the embracing and caressing could seem amorous but in fact the ceremony had no erotic significance whatsoever. Kisses were not part of the repertoire of caresses; only children received kisses as a sign of affection."

From the gentle tactility of men to the lack of erotic kissing, how different!

"Greater Andamanese greeting ceremonies were loudly demonstrative, their weeping often turning into howls that could be heard, as was intended, far and wide. The Onge were less exuberant and were satisfied with the of a few quiet tears and with caressing each other. If there were many people, greeting returning hunters that had been absent longer than expected or meeting unusual visitors, etiquette required that the large mass of people should not cry until several hours after the arrival. When the howling started, it could go on all night. When more than a few people met, the initial staring was dispensed with. "

assynt again

2009-09-06T18:26:00.003+01:00

Assynt is a place that looms large in my imagination for a range of reasons. Once again Colin Prior does the place justice with a wonderful photograph.

Emotional event

2009-09-04T14:10:00.005+01:00

Something I received from Dr Thomas Dixon from Queen Mary University, London. It looks pretty interesting... Would that I had a day off to go down.

Towards a Historical Semantics of Emotions
Special Panel at the 12th Annual Conference of the History of Political and Social Concepts Group
London, September 18th 2009
At the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 16 Taviston Street

Emotions are shaped in multiple ways by different cultures and languages. Rather than innate and universal, they are socially constructed to a large extent, embedded in their political and historical contexts and learnt by the individual. This panel will deal with concepts of emotions as objects of a new direction of study in the History of Concepts to which the conference is dedicated.

Semantic and conceptual history is an approach to the study of key concepts of culture not as fixed and timeless entities, but rather, as molded by the political and social contexts in which they are created and applied, and within which they change. It investigates the ways in which language functions, is employed, transferred and transformed in cultural, political, social, historical and geographic contexts, and the ways that concepts structure and constitute the extra-linguistic experience and reality to which they refer.

The papers in this panel will apply semantic history to concepts of emotions as they are used, appear in, and disappear from, different languages and discourses over time, place, context and cultures.

to live in fear

2009-08-31T22:32:00.005+01:00

What was it like in those early houses, those first settlements when man gave up the nomadic life and staked his future on agriculture? Was it easy, and without stress, or fraught with fear from crops failing and threats from others.

Whilst thinking about Dr Susan Tarlow's very good essay, "Emotions in Archaeology", where she outlines some of the challenges for archaeology in trying to consider the emotional lives of people who have left no written record, I came across an interesting diagram in Michael Cook's 'A Brief History of the Human Race.'
The picture is that of a settlement dated back to the 7th Millennium BC in Anatolia, or modern day Turkey. A quick glance reveals no streets and even more strikingly, no doors, the only entrance was through a hole in the roof.

The point Michael Cook made was that this was a claustrophobic and cramped place to live, not least if one's people had recently been hunter gatherers. It does however, as he continues, show a blank wall to the outside world which may have give some kind of rudimentary defence.

I think it does suggest an enormous amount of fear. Why else would one make entrance to one's property so hard and so camouflaged? And to live in such close confines? This is not about materials and architectural skills limiting the design. This is about living in fear of someone attacking one's home and killing. There is no room for much storage and any common storage area could be attacked or defended, but this is about people's houses and a fear of personal attack.

Not quite a golden age of agricultural idyll...

that conversational thing

2009-08-18T09:44:00.002+01:00

is on tonight and i'm rather nervous. all these half baked ideas i trot out here may be held to serious scrutiny...

facing up to emotion

2009-08-18T09:27:00.004+01:00

Some interesting news on the BBC at the end of last week, which i think lends credence towards theories of emotions being rooted in culture and group dynamics as well as an internal physiological reaction.

A study by Glasgow University suggests that facial expressions of emotion are not global - whilst we may all feel emotions like fear or surprise, we express them in different ways. The study emphasises the difference in interpretations by Western case studies and East Asian ones. Essentially both look for different things in an expression, with East Asians apparently focusing more on the eyes and Westerns more on the the whole face in order to read a reaction from someone.

If something as apparently innate as a supposedly involuntary facial reaction can be different across cultures, what then does it say for the other ways we display and act upon our emotions? I am not saying at the drop of a hat we can all change our emotional responses, but if an involuntary response turns out not to be global and innate, it is subject to change and framing by a culture. And if a culture moves to frame an emotional response in a different way, it shows how we can move to change our responses in ways which might be more beneficial to our culture.

In the littlest differences, glimmers of hope for improving our emotional lives can be shown as they offer the possibility of cultures learning new behaviours that improve all our well being.

talking about emotion

2009-08-04T23:03:00.003+01:00

You don't see a post for ages and then two come along at once...

A very lovely though rather surprising email came my way yesterday inviting me to contribute to a conversation. The Conversational is an attempt to inspire conversation to those things we might often wish, but too often let it languish around idle chatter.

So on August 18th I shall be the guest at their next event - Emotion v Reason. As Michelle from group writes:

"Emotion, Reason, Reason, Emotion – what do they mean and what dictates whether we’ll respond with one or the other in a particular situation? Can one undermine the other? Can logic be used to show that certain emotions are badly founded and therefore not a useful part of any argument? Or do reason and emotion actually co-exist?"

Regular readers will know my opinions on the nature of the emotion/reason dualism and hopefully it may be a chance to speak with other interested people on how to get beyond it, and what examples from elsewhere in time and place can provide useful insight into our current understanding of such things.

The idea of a salon has always appealed though a friend tried to start one at uni and it deeply alienated some folk who weren't invited. And i always wanted to set up a Scots in exile one in London, but as with so much in my life, i never got round to it. But credit to the good people at the conversational for daring and doing.

By the way, if you're in London and fancy it then email the organisers and it would be lovely to see anyone who may read this...

if music be the food of stone age love

2009-08-04T22:23:00.005+01:00

Apologies for being away, i didn't intend to... oh well!

Anyway, before i stopped posting i had meant to post something about this. It's a story about the world's oldest musical instrument being found in Germany. At 35,000 years old it's well before agriculture came about (about 10,000 years ago) and so a wonderful insight into our nomadic past.

The sound is quite rough, but still clear enough for distinct notes and tunes are possible. I rather liked it. The suggestions as to when it might be used ranged from the sacred, or social situations and that it was key in aiding social dynamics. In others words, much like we use an instrument today.

Obviously there's a strong connection between music and emotion, especially as it's a non-verbal one. But the possibilities of an extremely rich emotional past to stone age man comes so much closer to us through knowing they had music.

What joys were expressed, what sadnessness, what sense of wonder came out of a little bone flute so long ago?

some thoughts on thinkers thinking about emotion pt2

2009-06-15T20:48:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago I ran a series of interviews with three academics, (Prof Barbara Rosenwein, Prof Keith Oatley, and Dr Thomas Dixon) talking in broad terms about the history of emotions, with a brief commentary here.

Picking up on that commentary, I wanted to consider their other answers and thoughts.

It's both cheering and intimidating that all of them consider that virtually anything can be a useful historical resource when it comes to understanding how emotions were felt and affected the lives of people throughout history. The optimism comes from a potential wealth of sources, the fear from wondering how each will be recognised and sorted appropriately to give useful information. As Dr Dixon suggests, we may suffer from an excess of sources for today...

For example, what can the architecture of the past tell us about the emotional lives of the societies that built it? It may not be directly obvious, but there may be clues there for the skilled mind to uncover. The same goes for any potential source that does not directly reference something we might recognise in the present as an emotion.

It comes as no surprise that Prof Oatley specifically references fictional literature as being particularly useful - this is his field of expertise after all - and it will almost certainly be one of the richest and clearest seams that we can mine for useful information on the emotional lives of our ancestors. However, as Prof Rosenwein points out about the ecstatic writings of mystics, if one relies over heavily on such writings one might have a very skewed picture of life at the time of writing.

There is no suggestion though that Prof Oatley is over relying on the value of fictional literature here though.

All I think would agree though that any documentation from the relevant period may provide useful information, as would any art and music from the period. One could certainly do a good study of the emotional life of various cultures and subcultures through popular music in the last forty years, so the same should stand for earlier periods.

Prof Rosenwein referenced Dr Sarah Tarlow's essay 'Emotion in Archaeology'. As the subject expands, I think that one of the big challenges will be to see how we can cope with non written sources and archaeology will be key. What will a bejewelled corpse, perhaps preserved in a bog, contorted and with a variety of wounds, say about the emotional live of the society that the corpse came from?

I was heartened by Dr Dixon's suggestion of analysing the emotional lives of the cave painters of Lascaux - I look forward to his analysis!

There is one question which i will write further on in another post - that is the thought about a grand narrative, or a big story to our emotional development in history. It's something I've written about here. It's one of the most challenging questions for anyone interested in the History of Emotions and one which drew an interesting range of answers which deserve a post of their own.

A treeless forest

2009-06-15T19:04:00.004+01:00

This is the view from Sgurr nan Ceannaichean to Glenuaig Lodge and Gleann Fhiodhaig, entitled Glenuaig Forest from Steven Russell. The Victorian hunting lodge there is spectacularly remote...

The calm of happiness in Taiwan

2009-06-09T23:15:00.003+01:00

The importance of understanding our emotions in their social and historical context is brought home by an interesting little feature in Stanford magazine on Taiwanese-American psychologist Jeanne Tsai.

In her Culture and Emotion Lab at Stanford University, she has been working on how different cultures perceive emotions and how their definitions may be different. In essence, what I perceive as happiness may not be the same as what someone from a different culture perceives as happiness. In my highly individuated culture happiness commonly contains large doses of excitement and ecstasy. A more collectivised culture such as the Taiwanese see happiness as a more calm sensation.

How can this be ascertained in a corroborated way? Tsai did studies showing two different smiley faces, one with a small calm grin and one with an excited open mouthed grin. She showed them to Taiwanese children, American Children and also Taiwanese- American children. The question posed was which of these two faces is happier?

The results of this deceptively simple test are curious but the implications are enormous.

The Taiwanese children consistently cite the calm grin as being the happier of the two, the American children cite the open mouthed grin and the Taiwanese-American children lay somewhere in the middle.

Where do these children learn about happiness that makes it so different for them?

They learn about happiness from everywhere from storybooks to magazines, to self help books and religious texts. And yet all work with a surprising cultural unity within each culture.

What is the impact of happiness being associated with calm in some cultures and with being excited in others?
One obvious riposte to this is mentioned in the article on Tsai - that of the mental health profession. If drugs like lithium and or anti-depressants flatten out the moods of bipolar and manic depressive patients - is this the most appropriate way to treat those mood swings in certain societies? Do health professionals and their pharmaceutical colleagues have to tailor their treatments and medicines to appropriate cultures?

Or will investors and marketers call it wrong if their understanding of a culture's emotions mean they pitch a product or service without taking such things into account?

Will a politician or international organisation get it wrong if they try to achieve something that is out of step with a society's emotional values? That may sound odd, but focus groups all the way back to US President Franklin D Roosevelt's use of advertising guru Edward Bernays in gauging public emotions shows how politician rely upon public emotion as much as policy arguments. Call it right and power can be yours.

Such is the importance of understanding how a culture describes its emotions and how different cultures do it all so differently. the same goes for understanding how events in history shape a nation or a culture's emotions. Fortune, fame and power can await those who do. Or maybe even just wisdom!

some thoughts on thinkers thinking on emotion

2009-06-02T22:03:00.005+01:00

Over the last few weeks I've had three experts talking about some of the basic questions that face anyone curious about the History of Emotions. It's been interesting to see the differences and similarities in the answers, and get some learned perspectives in a simplified form.

First some clarity - what is an emotion? As I've spoken about before, I think it's noteable that all three writers agree that whatever an emotion is (as a concept it is extremely vague and laden with cultural association) it does require an element of judgement. It is not some kind of pure instinct that the person emoting has no control over.

I think we in the West fail to recognise this at our peril and allow ourselves to dodge responsibility for our actions by 'blaming' our emotions overwhelming us.

So which ones are more dominant in the West? This again is obviously a question with a massive value judgement -what is the West? At the risk of avoiding an enormous debate on that subject I was meaning largely the English speaking world with an element of Western European thrown in.

The answers are fascinating -
For Dr Dixon, desire and terror.
For Prof. Keith Oatley, contempt and romantic love.
For Prof. Rosenwein, anger and grief.

Prof. Rosenwein also points out something which I may write more about in future - that happiness is a relatively modern concept and does not figure so largely in what we can understand about the emotional lives of our ancestors.

I think this is something we as a society have to consider in very great detail on a range of levels. The American Constitution famously describes the 'pursuit of happiness' as a fundamental right and yet are we in danger of making ourselves unhappy by selling ourselves the illusion of happiness as a right? Our expectation of it as a right and not a fleeting gift to be cherished in its presenceand respected in its departure and absence may make us more unhappy than it will ever make us happy. Not least when that right for happiness is packaged into consumer desire and sold on an industrial level to the ruin of ourselves and our planet.

The other obvious thought from our experts views on the dominant emotions of the West is how negative the choices are. I mean no disrespect to the experts in those choices, indeed I think this is a fair reflection of a society that has triumphed globally through channeling these emotions into conquest within those societies and over others. Prof. Oatley's suggestion of contempt for the 'other' groups is particularly resonant here.

Personally I was a little surprised that Dr Dixon and Prof Rosenwein did not join Prof. Oatley in suggesting Romantic Love. Perhaps this is a reflection of Prof Oatley's professional immersion in literature, perhaps the other two may change their mind and include it another time. I think I would put it up there as a dominant emotion, but then my opinion is much less learned!

I could go on for a lot more though I think this is enough for one post. Some more thoughts on the Q&A's soon...

A Question of Emotion pt3: Dr Thomas Dixon

2009-05-26T10:59:00.005+01:00

My thanks this time go to Dr Thomas Dixon, Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. I like his description of an emotion as a felt judgement. Despite the potential ambiguity of using the word 'felt' i think it's a good simple way to effectively describe emotions if clear terms that won't terrify a lay reader.

I also very much love the idea of gauging the emotional lives of the ancient cave painters of lascaux, though that sounds like a tough task!

I'll write a piece on the contributions of my three very generous interviewees soon, not least as there's some interesting similarities and contrasts to bring out.

How would you describe an emotion?
An emotion is a felt judgement. It is your body’s way of telling you, quickly, that the world is or is not how you want it to be. Any general description of emotions must capture both feeling and cognition. A cool and detached mental state cannot count as an emotion. There must be a sweaty palm, a lurching stomach, a thumping heart, a tingle, at least a momentary shiver. However there is more to an emotion than mere sensation. Nausea is not an emotion if it is caused by food poisoning, but it can be if it is caused by a sudden conviction of the meaninglessness of life.

Are some emotions more dominant in western culture?
Yes. Western culture is currently dominated by emotions of terror and desire, both verging constantly on hysteria. These emotions are sustained by the mass communication of ideas and images on television and online. If one were looking for a more positive emotion, then romantic love has long been the predominant theme of all forms of popular culture.

Has that changed historically?
Yes. In traditional Christian thought there was a distinction between bodily appetites and worldly passions, which were to be avoided, and higher affections of love and sympathy which were to be cultivated and were shared with God and the angels. Even before Darwin, however, it was quite obvious that most of us are more ape than angel, and western philosophy, art and literature are full of discussions of how to master anger and lust and cultivate joy and affection.

The overarching categories we use have changed historically. The ‘emotions’ are a very recent invention as a psychological category. Before the nineteenth century people thought instead in terms of appetites, passions, affections and sentiments. The ‘feelings’ are also related but distinguishable from the ‘emotions’. Understandings of the relationship of mind and body have changed. The ways we express our feelings through our faces and bodies have changed. And all these things continue to change.

Of particular interest to the historian of emotion are the different social rules governing which emotions should be felt in which circumstances, and how they should be expressed. These rules have changed considerably across time and place. I have recently, for instance, been researching Victorian attitudes to the manifestation of feelings in the courtroom (and on the scaffold). The comments of lawyers, judges and journalists suggest that either excessive emotion or cool indifference could both be interpreted as evidence of guilt.

What are the best resources for understanding this history?
Almost any historical document or artefact can offer evidence of the regimes of feeling and expression that obtained in a particular time and place. The visual arts are very valuable sources for the history of expression. Scientific and medical treatises tell us how the passions were understood theoretically. Novels, poetry and drama provide us with especially good evidence of the emotional tenor of a period.

Other perhaps less obvious sources, such as trial records, news reporting, didactic sermons, conduct manuals, government statistics, or school textbooks can also be immensely revealing of those tacit emotional rules that really define a particular culture.

Keeping in mind that emotions are felt judgements about the world, the history of emotions is always also the history of attitudes. So, resources that might seem only to offer evidence of abstract beliefs can often hold the key to past emotions too. To ask, for example, why the predominant emotional response to homosexuality in Victorian Britain was disgust, is to ask simultaneously about a feeling and about a belief. People felt disgust about homosexuality because they believed it to be something rotten, corrupt and unhealthy.

How far back into the past can the history of emotions reasonably go?
Any period that has left any trace of human activity can reasonably be studied from the point of view of the emotions. For instance, we can imagine trying to reconstruct the emotional lives of the prehistoric inhabitants of Lascaux on the basis of their cave paintings.

For the modern period the problem is generally an excess rather than a dearth of evidence. The challenge then is to resist the temptation to assume that we know what people were feeling. As with our own friends and colleagues, so with the subjects of our historical research, it is probably best not to assume too readily that we know what unseen emotions lie behind their words and actions.

Is there a big story, or grand narrative to our emotional history?
One interest of mine is in the history of resistance to the emotions. Feelings, passions, and emotions have been variously thought of as enemies, rebels, monsters, and demons. Over the centuries, they have been resisted through prayer, persuasion, psychiatry and imprisonment. I think any grand narrative should include an understanding of the historical urge to pathologise and penalise the passions, as well as an explanation of the recent tendency to celebrate such things as ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘emotional literacy’. Perhaps the whole history of emotions could be conceived of as an eternal cycle of expression and control.

Enduring love and the curious gift of Eleanor of Aquitaine

2009-05-22T14:37:00.002+01:00

I was looking at a course William Reddy teaches on the History of Romantic Love at Duke University in North Carolina.

This caught the eye:

"Before the twelfth century, in Europe, love between men and women was not regarded as heroic; it was instead considered a sign of weakness, the preoccupation of a person without character. Why this change? Since the twelfth century, lovers have been consistently considered heroic in Western countries. The plot of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere written about 1170 and the plot of the famous movie Casablanca (1942)--perhaps the most admired Hollywood film of all time--are virtually the same."

It should be noted that the romantic love of the twelfth century mostly revolved around the unconsumated love of a man and a married woman and is somewhat different to our modern notion of Romantic love but the relationship is clear. However, it did appear a genuine innovation in European thought and idea that two souls united in physical and emotional union could be an elevated form of existence.

Though it may have evolved since those courtly days, Romantic love has been an enduring feature both in its celebration and its supression in the intervening centuries. This obviously begs a few questions, not least:

Why it should have been then and not before that such a feeling arose, given its hold upon Western society suggests that it speaks to (or perhaps created) a very powerful need within us?

Why has it had such a powerful grip on Western imagination and identity?

Why has this not appeared with such force in other cultures?

For those that didn't know - there are roots to the ideas and songs of those troubadours wandering round southern France who entertained Eleanor of Aquitaine and gave birth to Romantic love. From the Greeks philosophers like Socrates and Plato, Roman writers such as Ovid to Islamic lyric poetry (many strands of which also contained some homosexual elements) was the notion born.

So why did it arise then and not before? Perhaps part of the answer lied in the Christian notion that divine love was the primary form of expression of love and that sexuality, especially female sexuality which was associated with paganism was not to be celebrated. Christ took no bride according to the orthodox account and those considered most religious were celibate monks, priests and nuns, the latter of whom were and in some ways still are considered brides of Christ. That does not create a climate conducive to encouraging a taboo breaking spritually blessed union between man and woman.

Why then did it not arise before Christianity? The axial sages and prophets (Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, the Judaic prophets) had already forced much of the world to recognise that compassion and individual morality were crucial to our relationship with the world and those around us, and even the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed were developments upon these themes rather than entirely new ideas. In other words we had the mental, emotional and philosphical potential to create Romantic love before. We just didn't.

This makes me wonder, and it is only speculation upon my part - more learned readers feel free to correct - that the social fabrics of those societies was enough to either not feel the need or actively prohibit its development.

Was it only the gap left by lords, knights and others fighting in the Crusades that gave the space for their ladies to encourage such ideas instead of the more usual litanies of battle and male valour. Did this space (perhaps not unlike the political strides made by women during the two World Wars) allow women to encourage the troubadours in their creation of something to the benefit of men and women?

As strange as it may seem, could it not be down to the curious fortune of Eleanor of Aquitaine's encouragement of such tales when she was mistress of the household without a father or husband to do the medieval equivalent of hogging the remote control that night? And having done so, to persuade the returned Duke, William IX, that he too might enjoy their equivalent of a rom-com instead of a war film?

Why has Romantic love held such a grip on the Western imagination? A tricky one this and so again I am forced to speculate. (a familiar problem as regular readers know)

Our concept of the soul (and the ego?) is unusual in global mythology and perhaps romantic love tapped into those notions to create an unusually powerful attraction between the individuals of the time and the concept of Romantic love, when perhaps other societies had stronger notions of social bonds that were less dynamic and therefore less receptive to such a potentially disruptive influence such as a love that breaks marital bonds and involves individual choice over group benefit and stability.

Perhaps as I mentioned above, the social dislocation caused by wars such as the Crusades allowed a freedom to innovate that might not otherwise have been possible, and that once this had been done, men recognised the benefit of this to themselves, speaking as it did to their ego.

And held fast it has upon the imagination and identity of the West. Like the American Dream, of a better material life being yours for the taking if you are prepared to strive for it, so it is with romantic love. A better life for one's soul if one falls in love. It is, if one excuses the pun, a seductive notion.

I am very conscious these ideas reflect the rise of romantic love within a certain class of people in medieval times and not the ordinary peasant folk who lived then too, so all thoughts on their conceptions of love at such times most welcome. I wrote about some of those from a later time here.

It also begs the question are we the better for romantic love, and that i think is another rich vein for another post.

Harris, the Outer Hebrides

2009-05-17T11:14:00.004+01:00

Harris beaches are secret joys of quietness and beauty. Thanks as ever to Steve Carter.

A Question of Emotion pt2: Q&A with Prof Keith Oatley

2009-05-16T07:56:00.007+01:00

As promised, Prof Keith Oatley, author of 'Emotions: A brief history' very kindly agreed to a blog Q&A for me and here is his response. It's a good read, and I find it interesting that he feels there are different dominant emotions in the West to Barbara Rosewein. This is not to say either is wrong, but i wonder what does it say about the West that neither argue the case for happiness being a dominant theme?

Anyway, on with the Q&A:

How would you describe an emotion?
An emotion, I think, has a personal and an inter-personal aspect; research on emotions has tended to concentrate on the former, and a good way of describing an emotion from this point of view follows Aristotle. An emotion is a kind of judgement, an evaluation of an event in relation to a concern. As Nico Frijda says, it sets up a priority as a readiness to act in a particular kind of way. I think of emotions as communications to ourselves and others: so an emotion communicates to ourselves that something significant has happened to us. Whereas an emotion is a change in readiness, a mood draws on the same processes and is a maintained state.

More importantly, emotions are interpersonal; they set up particular kinds of relationships with other people. Happiness sets up a relation of cooperation, sadness involves, typically, withdrawal from something or someone lost, and also elicits others' sympathy, anger sets up a relationship of conflict, fear tends to spread socially, and engender in others a wariness of danger, and so on.

I think of an interpersonal emotion as something like the inverse of a script that actors use in the theatre. An actor learns the words of a script and has to supply a depiction of the emotions and relationships with other characters. By comparison, in ordinary life, an emotion sets up a relationship, and the individual supplies the words.

Are some emotions more dominant in Western culture?
I think this is very hard to say. Over the last thousand years, contempt for others who are members of out-groups seems to have been rather dominant in Western culture. This history, for instance, includes the Crusades against Islamic peoples, the Spanish obliteration of the culture of native Americans, European colonial exploitation worldwide, the European and American slave trade, the Stalinist purges in Russia, the legalized setting up of the Nazis in Germany and the Holocaust, the wholesale aerial bombing and burning by America of the small country of Vietnam, and most recently the illegal tortures carried out by the Bush government. As Karl Popper said, the history we learn in school is largely the history of international crime.

On the other hand romantic love has become also rather important in Western culture, deriving from courtly love in medieval times, and coming to full exemplification in Dante's love for Beatrice. It has distinctive Western features that include sudden onset on meeting a stranger, worshipping the other as almost divine, strong altruism towards the other, transformation of the self towards becoming a better person.

This is not to say that contempt and erotic love do not occur in non-Western cultures, but a case can be made I think that in the West they have taken on a certain dominance and distinctiveness.

Has that changed historically?
Yes, both contempt and love have changed historically in the West. Contempt, has in the last century started to be moderated by the women's movement and the civil rights movement, as well as by media coverage of wars that tends to prompt empathy for victimized people. As to Romantic love, there is a clear arc from medieval times to Hollywood movies.

What are the best resources for understanding this history?
I think we have to rely on all the usual historical and archaeological sources. I think, however, that in the case of the history of emotions, fictional literature is especially important because it tends to concentrate on emotional issues. In relation to Romantic love, for instance, Dante's Vita nuova is an essential source.

Is there a big story, or grand narrative to our emotional history?
In my 2004 book Emotions: A brief history, I proposed that there are three grand narratives that are superimposed on each other. First there is the narrative of the evolutionary history of emotions, that was begun by Darwin, and is discovered from biology and archaeology. This narrative, for human beings, is of the movement from being purely biological beings to becoming social and cultural beings.. Second is the cultural history of emotions that we discover mainly from written documents and, as I mentioned above, especially from fiction. I think the narrative here is of a gradual growth of consciousness, from the earliest surviving written stories such as The epic of Gilgamesh to last year's favourite novel in English, Netherland. The grand narrative here overlays the evolutionary narrative, and is about the cultural growth of consciousness of selves and the emotions of selves in relation to others. The third grand narrative is the history of each person's individual life, growing up in a historically derived culture, again a story of emerging from unconsciousness, becoming aware of others, coming to understand them in relation to oneself, coming perhaps to educate one's emotions in a process of self-improvement. Thus, for instance, one might hope that the current top news story in the UK, of the anger of the public and shame of Members of Parliament discovered to be fiddling their expenses, i.e. stealing from the taxpayer, when so many in Britain have almost nothing to live on, would prompt an emotional change in Members of Parliament towards greater responsibility in relation to the people whom they represent.

A few changes...

2009-05-10T13:32:00.004+01:00

As people who've been here before will swiftly realise, things look a little different. Comments and suggestions from a few people plus my own thoughts on the scheme of things, and of course the title have been coming under reconsideration of late.

When I started this blog I wasn't entirely sure which direction i wanted it to go. Over time it has been clear that I want to focus on the history of emotions for this blog, though i will keep some pics of the Highlands of Scotland in there.

thoughts welcome obviously, it's a work in progress...

A Question of Emotion part 1: Q&A with Professor Barbara Rosenwein

2009-05-06T21:28:00.009+01:00

At last some journalism! I am extremely pleased to introduce a Q&A with Professor Barbara Rosenwein, from Loyola University, Chicago.

Prof. Rosenwein specialises in Medieval History and has written a range of books, including Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. I first came across her work at the end of last year, reading a brilliant essay entitled 'Worrying about Emotions in History', which I have written about a couple of times here.

What i have done in this exercise is to ask a simple set of questions to several authors and academics (the questions may be simple, the answers not!). I've used the same questions as I want to compare answers. I hope to come back to those people and others with more questions but given the time taken, it's a bit much to ask them all at once!

So without further ado...

how would you describe an emotion?

There are many definitions of emotion, and most of them make good sense if you take them in the context of the theoretical orientation of the writer. For me, one of the most useful definitions comes from cognitivist psychology. It postulates that an emotion is the result of a certain kind of assessment--an instantaneous judgment that something or someone affects my wellbeing in some way. If I see a lion and judge that it is brown and furry, I am not making an emotional assessment. But if I see a lion and judge that it is not good for my wellbeing, and I quickly climb a tree, I am indeed making an emotional assessment, and the emotion (in this instance) is fear.
What I like about this definition is that it allows for cultural conditioning or “social construction.” For example, in the case of the lion, if I were a Masai warrior of the 19th c. and I had my spear with me, the lion might very well be the occasion for joy, because I would assess it as a challenge to my manhood that I could meet. I would, in short, judge it as “good” for my wellbeing.
This definition helps to account for the “affective” aspect of emotion, the “feeling” that we have. But it does not immediately explain another aspect of emotion: its social function. Emotions play a role in just about every social interaction, even those with strangers. They signal attitudes, they may inspire compassion (a sort of mirroring response), and they are sometimes contagious.
But the cognitivist definition implies this social aspect, too, as long as you realize that your assessments both depend on the society you live in and signal to others what those assessments are.

are some emotions more dominant in western culture?

We need to realize that the words that today come under the rubric “emotions” did not always do so and have changed over time. Some “emotions” that we have today are new, and others are old, and many have changed their meaning and significance. Further, Western culture didn’t always speak English (that’s true even today).
We also need to keep in mind that Western culture isn’t the only culture; histories of the emotions in other cultures also need to be written.
That said, there is a long tradition of the idea of emotions in Western culture (e.g. the Greeks had pathé, the Romans had perturbationes), and the words that came under those rubrics roughly track the words that we think of as “emotions” today.
In my view, people live now (and lived in the past) in “emotional communities.” These are usually social groups; more generally, these are groups in which people share values and interests. Each emotional community privileges certain emotions and downgrades others, and each has its own standards for expressing emotions--some vehemently, others not at all. These emotional communities co-exist alongside one another, and/or they may intersect at certain points. They may also change over time.
What I have found in my historical studies is that these groups are extremely various. Like musical notes, there are only so many emotions, but they can combine in quite infinite patterns.
Even so, certain emotions keep coming up throughout western history as important. Anger and grief, for example, have been on lists of emotions since the time of Aristotle. Happiness, however, seems to be quite modern.

has that changed historically?
See above.

what are the best resources for understanding this history?

Every source is potential fodder for understanding the history of emotions. The history of emotions should not be just about what people “got emotional” about. It should be about the role of emotions in their lives. Some emotional communities (like the 7th century Neustrian court that I studied in my book Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages) recognized very few emotions and were very wary of somatic expressions of emotion. Others, like many late medieval mystics, could hardly stop speaking of their feelings--especially ecstatic love--and often expressed these in tears, groans, and even bodily writhing.
If we read only the ecstatic writings, we’d have a very skewed view of the emotional life of the Middle Ages.
What I suggest to the scholar interested in the history of emotion is to decide on the community he or she wants to study and then gather a dossier of its documents and writings of every sort. Visual materials may be added to the mix, and musicologists will know how to assess the music.

How far back into the past can the history of emotions reasonably go?

Sarah Tarlow has written an article, “Emotion in Archaeology,” in which she argues that the history of emotions can go back even to pre-literate societies. She makes a very cogent case. And she does not get bogged down in the (to me unhelpful) arguments of some evolutionary psychologists who think that our emotions were determined in the Paleolithic period and that they have remained essentially the same since then.

is there a big story, or grand narrative to our emotional history? (a familiar one for you!)

There is a grand narrative, and, although it was written in the 1930s, it remains dominant today: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. In this book Elias argues that the emotional life of Western mankind was impulsive and violent until the 16th century, when, under the restraints of modern society and, above all, the modern, absolutist state, emotions had to be held in check, the “super-ego” was born, and the history of emotions--subtle, refined, and sublimated--could begin.

This is a very inadequate big story. It depends on a hydraulic, rather than cognitivist, view of the emotions: they are either “on” (as in the Middle Ages) or “off” (after the 16th century). It dismisses much of Western history, except as the training ground for the modern period. It is also teleological--leading from impulse to civilization.

I am now in the process of writing a book that will tell the big story by using the notion of “emotional communities” to drive the narrative. It will use the cognitivist view of emotions; it will not write off the Middle Ages; and it will not claim any teleology. I am tentatively calling it “A New History of Western Emotions.”

the emotional revolution of eridu

2009-05-04T09:48:00.006+01:00

Apologies for the lack of posting - the day jobs have been taking up a lot of time of late. This also means there's less conclusions and more questions in this post. Ok, no conclusions...

In the last post I wondered about the change in human emotions indirectly rooted in the development of the rectangular house, and about what (if anything) the history of emotions may be able to explore from early human development.

Some more thoughts on that theme, also stemming from Peter Watson's excellent 'Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud'.

The first city is generally believed to be Eridu in southern Iraq, founded around 5400BCE. It was believed to have had a population of around 27,500-55,000 and was around 41 hectares. It shold be noted that cities did not generally get much bigger for many thousands of years. Rome for example was only twice as large as another Sumerian city, Uruk, five thousand years later. In other words this fundamental change from rural to urban remained fairly static for thousands of years and so many common dynamics of human interaction would remain constant as empires, kingdoms and city states rose and fell.

What happened here? The cities of Sumeria gave us inventions that are amongst the most truly profound of all humanity and are worth considering here for a moment. They gave us writing, the wheel, the first schools, the first clocks, the first libraries and legal codes, the first arch that is so crucial to all architecture and shapes the buildings that shape our lives. The list goes on and is astonishing in its profoundity.

If one considers the thoughts of Prof David Edgerton of Imperial College, London, and his work 'The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900', then one realises the scale of such achievements that are still so crucial to our everyday lives today. (I wrote about this briefly here.)

These are the inventions which not just affect our lives but actually permeate our consciousness.

What has this to do with emotions and their history? Those most eminent emotionologists, Carol and Peter Stearns wrote about the impact of the novel on the emotions of western men and women two hundred and fifty years ago (i wrote about this a wee while ago). What then was the impact of writing itself? We know that mankind was already wrestling with so many emotional dilemmas through its myths and histories, but also through such wonderful insights as the ancient Egyptian text 'The dispute between a man and his soul.'

The impact of writing upon our emotional history has to be staggering, with impacts ranging beyond the effects of the words and idea written to the very mirror of our selves that writing is. Who can doubt the impact of a mirror on our mood when we see ourselves in it, and relate this to our sights of others. So it surely must be with writing. Add to that the technological revolutions spawned by the written word that changed our lives and their emotional impact.

If writing is the most profound of these wondrous inventions on our emotional history, the wheel's impact may seem odd, and yet perhaps deserves a place. A wheel that allows massive material changes from food production to building and warfare (through it's use in the chariot) changed the nature and speed of human life creating a whole different dynamic to our lives, from the range of influences of increased trade and its corollary opening up of ideas to the pressures and liberation and living in greater numbers.

And this last point I think is another crucial one that needs attention. How does living in such numbers and so close together affect our emotional selves? Does every city has common emotional dynamics to contend with? Do they share solutions, or in what ways does our diversity mean myriad solutions to common problems?

As our demographic shifts in the West and we move towards more individualised lives with greater personal space and the world as a whole becomes more urban what, if anything, can those first cities teach us about how we can cope with their concomitant emotional pressures?

greed and the rectangular house

2009-04-20T14:17:00.007+01:00

The history of emotions is in many ways bound intimately to the history of the written word. Whilst other forms like music or art can communicate our emotional states with depth and elegance, writing has given a specificity that is in many ways unrivalled in its communicative power.

That all said I have been wondering recently whether there is much that can be said in emotional terms of those many tens of thousands of years we existed as a species but had not yet quite settled down to invent all those curious wonders of civilisation.

Did all our emotions exist back in those days? Did we feel jealousy and loneliness in the same way, or was love a force in our nomadic hunter gathering lives?

It is now generally agreed by most archaeologists that we began settling down and building houses about 12,000 years ago and that agriculture began around 9-10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates. And sometime around then in Syria we started doing something curious. We went from building round houses partially below ground to building rectangular ones on the ground.

The reason this fascinates me is because i wonder if this period was the beginning of that most pernicious of emotions, greed.

In a nomadic hunter gathering society that had not yet invented metal or domesticated animals, objects would have little value if a person could not take them with them. Accumulation would make no sense to someone on the move and gluttony impossible if food storage is unknown and fitness and mobility essential for survival.

From this came the development of accomodation into a form that allowed the easier partition and expansion of space

It is here that life begins to involve the acquisition of objects from animals to tools. And was it here that we began to hoard, in fear of scarcity, and a fear that grew into greed.

The rectangular house did not cause greed, obviously. But was it a marker along our emotional road, and a rather dark one at that if greed was born there...

Q&A with Prof Keith Oatley

2009-04-17T16:39:00.002+01:00

coming soon:

Prof Keith Oatley, author of 'Emotions: A brief history' has very kindly agreed to a blog Q&A for me over a series of emails to be posted up soon... watch this space.

An Teallach, North West Highlands

2009-04-13T22:12:00.005+01:00

This one is from Michael Aird and his transformedbylight landscapes. I was walking round here and the Ffisherfield forest (somewhat lacking in trees as a forest but a wonderful place) a few years ago and it's a stunning place.

(These photographs are a welcome breather from thinking up posting ideas... )

oscillating emotions

2009-04-06T14:08:00.007+01:00

The history of emotion is not a history of conquering and restraining emotions, though sometimes it may appear like that. Recent work by experts such as Barbara Rosenwein and others put paid to such tempting ideas. We do like our lives to be going somewhere, in a line, as part of a grander journey. We may be part of something grander, but whatever it is, it certainly isn't going in a straight line!

And yet mankind's emotional history has been a story filled with change, from how we perceive our emotions to how react emotionally to various situations.

The industrialisation of of slaughter of the holocaust or the carnage by remote control of modern warfare does not mean we have become more civilised or become the compassionate beacons our religions hoped we might (though in many ways we have become more compassionate).

So how can we characterise the grand sweep of the history of emotion?

Recently I corresponded with Prof William Reddy, of Duke University, whose work 'The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions' i have quoted before, asking him this very question.

His belief was that our emotional history have a back and forth movement where we either trusted or distrusted our emotions and tried to master them. One can think of many examplesfrom history and fiction) of people who's emotions led them to more virtuous places (Reddy cited Lancelot and Jean Jacques Rousseau to those who chose to master their emotions and become in their own way heroic (and here Reddy cited Marcus Aurelius and Churchill).

However, Reddy pointed out this is not just a two dimensional pendulum swing. Roman mastery of emotion will not correspond to the 20th century English variant. This is because people are acting in the emotional context of their time - for example Roman concepts of compassion still allowed for the gladiatorial games and slavery and their religious codes did not have the concept of shame and guilt so heavily etched upon them.

As those emotional contexts change over time, so must a person's and a people's response to their emotions change also. As we develop our sense of individualism though philosphical developments, financial emancipation, and consumerism (amongst other things) the notion of repressing our individual emotions for social good becomes less appealing.

And even within our greater range of emotional expression in the West one can see flaws and limitations in the manner in which it is being done. Emotions are being used to justify infantile selfishness and the less individual emotional need is perceived as being connected to the wider social whole, the more the risk of alienation and selfishness that conflicts with the needs of the whole.

At the risk of sounding rather doom-laden, a society and culture that allows a more selfish expression of certain emotions at a time when group action and values are needed, runs a risk of doing itself and others a great deal of harm.

when the headhunting stops

2009-03-30T22:31:00.010+01:00

Sometimes i think i like the anthropology of emotions more than the history of emotions. Perhaps this is just because within anthropology it is possibly easier to come across examples of exotic emotions, of responses that challenge perceptions and provide a thrill of the possibilities that we humans are capable of.

One such example comes from 'The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions', by William M. Reddy though in this case he is describing the work of an anthropologist.

Michelle Rosaldo wrote of the Ilongot people of the Philippines, formerly a tribe of headhunters (the headhunting was only done by the men) whose emotional lives prized the concept of liget which is a sense of anger, heat, energy and envy. This liget provided the motivation to do things like hunt, garden or protect the tribe from attack.

It also was central to young men becoming possessed of the desire to headhunt. This was then harnessed by the elders (also men) and they all went on raiding parties. If successful, the whole tribe (men and women) would break out in joyful celebration, not least in seeing liget fulfilled.

However when Rosaldo went back to the tribe for more fieldwork several years later, she discovered the headhunting had stopped, through a crackdown by the Philippino authorities. In that time, many of the tribe had converted to Christianity and the tribe's emotional norms were becoming much more placid in the absence of liget which could no longer be expressed or fulfilled. Ultimately they hoped the new religion would take away the pain of unrealised liget.

On the surface the tribe had made this massive emotional shift away from one of their core emotional states in a very short period of years. However, when she played a recording back to them of their celebrations of liget (at their request), the tribe became utterly disconsolate and asked her to stop as it grieved them too painfully to hear the joy of their old way of life.

In another incident, Rosaldo spoke of a group of Ilongot Christians playing volleyball during a child's funeral, saying they had no reason to feel grief.

As Reddy points out, the activity of the build up and release of liget was not just a ritual, it was something the Ilongot were fully emotionally engaged in.

These people were not monsters, but they genuinely felt decapitating neighbouring tribespeople's heads was a good thing. they felt good when that liget was fulfilled and released. And yet this was the same feeling they got when they tended their gardens.

That Christianity had helped them move on from headhunting which is a good thing but the loss of their liget had clearly left them bereft.

In their Christian states, they felt no grief, and yet nothing in Christianity tells them not to feel grief. And was their lack of grief unnatural? How could it be, it was what they felt.

But think of the reactions we have to an apparent lack of grief, for example with the Queen's apparent aloofness after the death of Princess Diana.

I am not arguing that Christianity or the authorities did wrong in moving the Ilongot away from headhunting, or that they should have been denied the choice to engage with aspects of the outside world to keep them in some prelapsarian noble savage role for us to study.

Truly the well of human emotions is deep and diverse, and sometimes sits rather uncomfortably beside our notions of morality.

I do think it is worth remembering that our emotions are not always good and true guides in formulating any moral code, as they are capable of making the moral equivalent of black,white and white, black.

Assynt

2009-03-12T14:11:00.003Z

Two of Assynt in the far northwest today, courtesy of Colin Prior, who runs holiday tours teaching people how to make photographs like these.

the loneliness of the long distance writer....

2009-03-09T13:49:00.007Z

"All the lonely people
Where do they all come from ?"
The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby

It's not often I quote approvingly from the Daily Mail, but there was an interesting article on loneliness here.

The writer, Lorna Martin, spoke of loneliness as a taboo made all the more poignant by the endemic nature of the condition of Western women. Whilst I would disagree with her overly feminine characterisation of the emotion - it was however an article written for the femail section of the paper so that should come as no surprise - it contained several elements which were pertinent for women and men.

This isn't to deny or denigrate her descriptions of its effect on women, merely to highlight that men have their own issues relating to loneliness that may differ slightly in causes in some cases but are largely similar in outcome.

I sympathise with her, having felt that unbearably intense sense of loneliness of many occasions throughout my life, and noted that they increased massively when I was either working from home or not working at all. Such are the travails of being a freelancer in the world we live in.

Martin points out rightly that we are ill equipped to deal with loneliness. This was something I mentioned in my first post on this blog when speaking about the old Indian tradition (quoted by Theodore Zeldin) of sending young men on retreat for 3 months to cope with a deadened form on loneliness that helps them face up to the condition.

As she notes, it is associated with failure and weakness. However, she stops short of asking why our society seems so talented at creating so many lonely people. It does not take a socialist to recognise that a system that requires values like individualism, mobility over community, and consumption as a signifier of success, is a system that will create endemic loneliness.

The dark side of individualism is the sense of isolation it breeds as we see ourselves as entirely distinct, with distinct needs from the group. I am not arguing for a return to some kind of prelapsarian community, merely an acknowledgement of the true cost of our philosophical stance in the world.

It is a terrible irony that Norman Tebbit who once exhorted Britain to get on its bike, later lamented the loss of community and family values that once bound together these Isles. The very mobility of modern society and employment that he helped to herald will inherently diminish familial and community bonds. I am not arguing for a return to some kind of Empire capitalism, merely an acknowledgement of the true cost of our economic stance in the world.

And at the root of these things is consumption. We produce and consume goods and services to trade in a global system. And in order to maintain this we much constantly strive for greater efficiency and competitiveness, making us work longer hours, committing more sacrifices on the altar of consumption.

And this is a system that the Daily Mail promotes, despite making noises in favour of family values and so on. But it does not recognise that the capitalism that it suggests its readers vote for at elections, that it promotes in its choice of news, features and its business pages pushes us further towards the treadmill of consumption and it's consequent ailments.

Martin notes the health problems that loneliness generates, both physical and psychological, and she is right to do so. She quotes psychologist James Lynch in his book 'Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences Of Loneliness', and how dialogue is key to escaping the vicious spiral of loneliness.

Not to undermine the value of Lynch or Martin's suggestions I fear it will take an awful lot more to deal with the endemic state of our societies. Communication will play a part, rituals to bind and bond us will too. And I think if we are prepared to be truly honest, we may have to change the way we do business with the world and the way the world does business...

the value of anger

2009-03-04T13:43:00.005Z

I have written a few times before on the value of anger, so was interested to come across a recent piece in the Guardian by the philospher Julian Baggini in the Guardian which examined the role the emotion plays in our western psyches.

In it he noted the value of anger in communicating the importance of an issue and the dangers in repression of feeling to the self and the community.

To my mind he hit the nail of the head when he said the emotion was not bad in itself but that it was the appropriateness of the emotion to the situation that mattered. Not all anger expressed is wise, nor is bottling it all up. The wisdom lies is when and how it's expressed.

We have a danger of only thinking of anger in perjorative terms because it is not seen or described in our vocabulary as a positive emotion... Of course it is neither positive or negative!

He also sounded a very interesting note:

"Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued in the 18th century, intellect alone is insufficient to motivate any caring for ourselves and others. As he colourfully put it, "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." Cold-hearted ethics is an oxymoron."

I think it is true to a point but again it is a concept of morality that is trapped in the idea that emotion is a passion which contains no reason and that both are needed. But emotion already has reason in it. Cognitive scientists have shown emotion contains judgement and reason, so whilst the categories he starts with are in a sense wrong, his conclusion is right.

Our emotions are key to our morality, though the emotions themselves cannot be described as morally good or bad.

Torridon sentinels

2009-02-20T23:50:00.003Z

Another gem from Steve Carter, this time of the Torridon Hills. Is it just me or is there a Mt Rushmore thing going on here...?

the history emotion in the history of emotions

2009-02-20T22:39:00.008Z

The history of emotions is a field that spans several disciplines, not least the psychology, anthropology and history. However only a fool would begrudge a poet and writer space to offer insight.

And so it is here. Re-reading Alistair Moffat's "the Sea Kingdoms', a rich evocation of Celtic Britain and Ireland where the history flows from the sea and not from the land, gives an interesting understanding of a history that deserves a wider telling.

Thoughts loomed on my mind like icebergs in a fog. What is it about the oceans, and their emotional pull, the quasi mystic sense of emotion generated by the wine dark sea... how has it influenced us throughout history?

These thoughts took me to the poet in question and the title of this piece. Alan Gould is a London born Australian who has written keenly of the sea. In this case he wrote a thought provoking essay called 'Bolero and the sea' which raises the idea of a history emotion. Gould was writing about a character from the story, Sarah, who felt compelled to search out more about an old seafaring ancestor so captivated was she by the past, the sea, and the connection to her present.

For Gould this sense of history as an emotion was given a deeper tinge with his character's love of the sea being the love of an immense object that is indifferent in return. Perhaps this too could be said of the history emotion. Indeed he suggests this feeling also has a pathological tendency with the desire to search and find answers leaving Sarah blind to feelings in the present.

Could this sense of history be a distinct emotion? Is it not perhaps an alluring mixture of yearning and curiousity? Certainly in the absence of being able to prove irrefutably and objectively (which is often a misnomer when it comes to emotions) that it is a distinct sensation, I would fall back on the notion that cultures can often have emotional states that other cultures do not. This certainly means it is not impossible to have such a thing.

I am drawn to the notion, not least as I think it opens up new forms of expression and understanding of our complex selves in ways allow the poetic into our existence in a way that we all can understand.

As Gould writes:
"I locate the pathos and necessity of Sarah’s character in her recognition that, as humans, we will continue to recover lost lives, lost time, because to do so makes our own living more complete.
That is the force of ‘the History Emotion’ and the sea and history come together in this, for both make us aware of being in one place beside an immensity that is around us and, in the end, entire."

This to me sounds distinct to yearning and curiousity, though I am open to argument (indeed would relish any thoughts on it from others).

One final thought - what other emotions might we miss by leaving them nameless? Is our current palette of emotions an almost Orwellian limiter of feeling when we are in fact capable of seeing the emotional equivalent of colours beyond the rainbow?

The novel is a mirror to my heart.

2009-02-13T21:46:00.006Z

“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel's as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion”

Robert Burns, 'To a Louse'

To you precious few who care to read, and care, i apologise for taking so long to write.

Watching a BBC4 documentary the other day has set me thinking. The piece was called 'How reading made us modern' and laid claim to the idea that the liberalisation of printing through the ending of the Licensing Act in 1695 created the foundation for mass literacy and a mass social transformation both public and private. Within a few years Britain went from having but a handful of books available and only at Royal discretion, to a cacophony of script, from book to journal to journalism and newspaper.

From the literary torrent came a rising tide of literacy and a new form of literature that spoke to a people keen to listen. The novel gained prominence as a style, and helped create a whole new wider group of readers, particularly in women.

Presenter John Mullan noted the link between the novel and the rise of the female 'bluestocking' salon (with examples like Elizabeth Montague), and its role in finding a voice for women - through the empowerment of literacy and the opportunity to meet and discuss the themes contained within the stories.

It also made me wonder about the role of the novel in our emotional development.

Peter and Carol Stearns amongst others have already highlighted how angry and unrestrained emotions were in the UK and Britain around this time. They also showed how during the 18th and 19th century these feelings began to become more controlled and 'civilised'.

Of course I couldn't claim the novel was the sole key to this, not least as the Stearns have shown plenty of other factors.

However, as Mullan pointed out the novel told people about themselves by writing about others. It held a mirror up to society and allowed it to see itself as others saw it. And in seeing themselves might not it have given them an empathy previously lacking, bestowed some greater compassion that recognised the impact of those brute emotions and realised the need for more control in various public and private spheres?

If the novel is accepted as transforming our private intellectual life, it cannot fail to have done something similar to our emotional life.

Is the novel still that same transformer, a redeemer to reflect our current iniquities? if the novel withers, or grows stale, what then shall take its place?

Surely not blogs?

Five sisters

2009-01-26T23:25:00.004Z

On the south Kintail ridge, a panorama from the east shoulder of Creag Mhaim (947m). from the left, Loch Cluanie, mist filled Glen Loyne then to the snow covered Glen Quoich hills; Spidean Mialach (996m), Creag Coire na Fiar Bhealaich (1006m) and Gleouraich (1035m). This is the Glasgow Uni medical faculty's mountaineering page.

Expressions of love

2009-01-26T19:33:00.005Z

You'd think I'd be posting more whilst not working but it's amazing how everything slows down. Anyway...

The mainstream of emotion history suggests that in the pre-industrial period life was much more angry, with less love in everyday relationships, despite some wonderful art describing passion in many different amorous flowers. Rarely though is affection described for one's husband or wife and often violence seemed ubiquitous throughout Western European and American society.

However perhaps there was more love out there in the medieval air than early studies suggest. John Gillis has written eloquently on the subject in an essay entitled from 'Ritual to Romance: Toward an Alternative History of Love'. (from the book 'Emotion: Toward a New Psychohistory', edited by Carol and Peter Stearns).

His point is that love as it's defined now is about love as internal feeling and intimacy, when this is something from the beginnings of the 19th century. Francesca Cancian described it as the 'feminisation' of love, where emotion became to be associated with women in the domestic sphere and men lacked such things in their quest for rationality in the world of work and power.

It is a standard that exists today and is still recognisable though Gillis feels it inappropriate for judging emotions before the 19th Century. He suggests that love had many definitions and forms across cultures, classes and time we find a range of expressions of love that can surprise us.

In a sense it should come as no surprise. Psychologists viewed emotion as a private, internal matter and historians sought out historical examples of expressions of this through diaries and letters and the like. Yet anthropologists have for decades been studying emotion as a social construct designed to deal with the relationship between group and individual behaviour. Whilst both yield insight and have weaknesses, it is only recently that viewing emotion in the latter form has been applied to our own Western History.

The visible behaviours tell us much about love back then. For example kissing was not so private as it is now, and kissing as an expression of love was apparently more public, and more painful with a likelihood of blood being drawn. These were public marks and intended as such, as declarations of emotion felt. Bodily fluids were also key to this, as the body was not just expressing emotion but was the emotion.

Two examples, both astonishing to the modern heart and mind:

"In Wales, a young man proved his love to a girl by urinating on her dress, a practice known locally as rhythu." (p92)

And even in the 19th Century, courting in the French countryside was a violent affair.
"First they exchange glances, then casual remarks, then heavy witticisms. The young man shoves at the girl, thumps her hard on the back, takes her hand and squeezes it in a bone cracking grip. She responds to this tender gesture by punching him in the back." (p92)

As a physical and not psychic condition, love was treated to the same controls as other physical urges and love magic became immensely popular despite its pagan roots. And the major rituals of love were far more public affairs than they are now. These days we give lovers privacy to nurture private feeling. Then, love through courtship, betrothal and marriage was a far more social experience that the whole community engaged in and this was necessary to establish legitimacy in the absence of written contracts. Indeed the couple themselves were at the centre of a virtual festival of action that centred on them only partly.

Perhaps our assumption that certain things are constant and unchanging is the only constant in a world that has changed so much...

Romantic love below the desert...

2009-01-15T18:15:00.003Z

saw this today, and must go...

The British Academy
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
Thursday 26 February 2009

The history of romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa: between interest and emotion
Raleigh Lecture on History
Professor Megan Vaughan, FBA

The societies of sub-Saharan Africa do not feature prominently in the growing literature on the comparative history of the emotions, and when they do it is often to confirm the fundamental difference between African emotional regimes and those of the 'West'. Though many pre-colonial African societies recognised the existence of powerful feelings of passionate love, most of them did not idealise this emotion. Romantic love was not simply a colonial import, however: love, money and intimacy combined in complex ways in the changing economic and political conditions of twentieth-century Africa. This exploration of the history of romantic love in Africa is also a critical exercise in the history of the emotions.
About the speaker

Megan Vaughan is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. Her research covers the social, economic and cultural history of Africa, including the history of medicine and psychiatry, slavery in the periphery of the Indian Ocean, history and anthropology. One of her latest publications is: Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius (2004).

5.30–6.30pm, followed by a drinks reception.
Registration is not required for this event. Seats will be allocated on arrival.

Skye is filled with snow

2009-01-11T21:55:00.004Z

The Red Cuillin above Broadford in winter from Skye images. A wonderland in winter.

The Soviet Union of Emotions

2009-01-11T10:54:00.011Z

The history of the Soviet Union was about many things, not least a story of totalitarianism and of a failed dream in the equality of humanity. We may be equal but Soviet state socialism was not the way to realise that dream.

Perhaps it was also a failure of our flawed belief in the dualism of rationality of the mind and the passions of the body. It is a belief that has permeated our philosophy, our institutions and our behaviour for several millenia. Perhaps it is the failure of a system that was founded on ideas and policies that denied our emotional selves and which was rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what that emotional self was.

The Soviet Union was an attempt to run a society by laws discerned by reason, freed from bourgeois morality for the improvement of all. Many of its leaders spoke of the 'scientific' application of reason at the service of socialism. It was also on occasion barbaric in its application of that reason, exterminating millions of its own citizens in the belief that it was protecting the whole.

Though not a Soviet citizen himself, Arthur Koestler wrote about this inhuman application of reason in his novel, 'Darkness at Noon'. For those that don't know, it is the story of the arrest of a senior revolutionary figure, Rubashov, of an unnamed government and country who is arrested by his own side and charged with counter-revolutionary activities. This event in the book happens during a period of show trials akin to the Soviet show trials of the 1930's and indeed the novel itself is set in 1938.

Rubashov is required to confess fully to all crimes even though he did not commit them. Physical torture was considered inappropriate for him although some force is used. The key to his confession was to use logic and reason to make him confess to the crimes, because it serves the higher purpose of protecting the Party and its regime, which ostensibly is there to protect society as a whole.

Therefore, for the good of the Party and the Revolution he must confess to falsehoods and betray himself as he himself has betrayed others. His submission is total and he is executed, following reason to its conclusion and his own destruction.

Reason has no inherent compassion and knowing this, he accepts his fate.

Though a novel, and one written by someone not living in the Soviet Union, Koestler was a Communist and knew some of those executed at those Moscow show trials of the Thirties. He had been imprisoned himself and lived with threat of execution for being a Communist captured by Franco's fascists in the fall of Malaga in 1937. In other words, his novel clearly has some understanding of what was going on in Soviet Russia and of the real life equivalents of the characters that he describes.

This is not to say the history of the USSR was a history of an emotionless people, or a people whose emotions were entirely subsumed by the requirements of the revolution. Barbara Rosenwein describes 'emotional communities' existing within the medieval period and I think the term holds true throughout history as a whole.

In other words, the peoples of the Soviet Union not only experienced a wide range of emotions but lived within a range of emotional communities that had lots of different dynamics going on. Obvious examples would be families and lovers or friends and colleagues displaying different kinds of love and affection, or scientists and workers displaying pride in their Stakhanovite labours in the cause of Soviet progress.

But central to the ideology of Soviet state socialism was the inhuman logic that everything, including our private lives and our public relationships, our various expressions of emotion, everything was to be in the service of building a Communist ideal. This was the ultimate expression of logic and reason separated from emotion. There was to be no compassion in a society that was willing to slaughter or sacrifice so many in the cause of its survival.

And yet it failed. Reason alone did not triumph. Was this a flawed application of reason? Or did the dualistic model of reason separate from emotions provide the best framework for advancing mankind and creating the new 'Socialist Man'?

The USSR failed mainly through economic collapse, partly from external pressures, but mostly from internal ones. The system was riddled with flaws as people responded differently from the way reason as expressed through their economic model expected them to. An inhuman reason failed because amongst other things, it gave no account to emotional lives, and because it did not understand that reason itself is not separate from our emotions. By believing it was necessary to eliminate emotions like compassion from the 'scientific' reason behind its policies, it alienated itself from its population.

Cognitive scientists have shown that emotions involve reason, and that reason involves emotion. In ignoring this, the Soviets were setting themselves up for a fall as their system could never do what it originally aimed to do, to create a perfect human society based on an emotionless reason that subsumed all to the greater progress of the whole. Individuals may sacrifice themselves to the whole but their reason is often guided by powerful emotional forces in those moments.

The dualism of reason and passion is a mistake and no society can be guided by separating what is ultimately inseparable.

In believing that man could live on a flawed notion of reason alone misunderstands our human nature and the nature of reason, and ultimately leads to an inhuman world. Though hopefully an impermanent one as it collapses on its own contradiction. A bitter irony for Marxists who believe that all societies and their economic systems would do just that until communism was finally reached.

The Emotionless Greenlander?

2009-01-02T22:02:00.009Z

In 2008's conference on the Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity, held at Umeå University, Sweden, there were a range of interesting papers presented and abstracts published. I would love to read the full papers as unfortunately I had the minor matter of a day job to attend to and missed out on a Scandinavian sojourn...

One of the abstracts stuck out for me. It's called 'The Story of a Greenlandic Girl Who Could Not Stop Crying' by Allan Sortkær. (You can download the pdf from the abstracts section the Conference website.)

The point was that in such an extreme climate as Greenland's, the indigenous population (the Inuit) were perceived to have no emotions and in effect be as cold as ice. As Sortkær writes:

"The first missionaries in Greenland met a land full of ice, and inhabitants characterised by their semi nomadic lifestyle, varying settlements, fast moving sleds and kayaks. According to the missionaries, it was as if, signalled by their tents and nomadic lifestyle, that they could not manifest themselves in the landscape. Instead the landscape was manifest in the Greenlanders.

Still according to the missionaries, the Greenlanders could not distinguish themselves from the surrounding nature. In agreement with antique thoughts on climates influence on mans behaviour, the missionary Hans Egede described the Greenlanders as coolheaded (Danish: koldsindig). Coolheaded is to be taken literally: The outer ice becomes inner ice. The Greenlanders had no capacity of emotions at all."

Lots of thoughts spring out from this, but the one I wanted to focus on was that it reminded me of a topic I have written about previously, on a lack of anger in the Inuit of Northern Canada (This comes from anthropologist Jean Briggs's fantastic book 'Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family' and is also referred to In Keith Oatley's fine book 'Emotions: A Brief History').

Obviously I'm not trying to conflate the apparent lack of one emotion from one Inuit society and a missionary's description of another Inuit society as having no emotional expression, nor am I saying a cold place breeds a 'cold' society. However, it does make one wonder if emotional expression is connected to extremities of climate.

If a society lives in a precarious environmental balance, does that require a society to diminish or shape some or all of its emotions in order to function harmoniously within itself and also within that environment. That would certainly make sense in the wake of Jean Briggs' findings on her time with the Inuit.

And to stretch the point further (in a way that would I like to think would have made Bruce Chatwin proud), I would draw a broader parallel with Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse', which talks about why societies and civilisations fail. When he is talking about the reasons for failure of the Norse settlement in Greenland (p273-276), he speaks about the role of their values in their downfall.

Ultimately their pride in being Norse gave them a formidable durability in surviving, but then also contributed to their downfall. They considered the Inuit population as wretches and refused to adopt their lifestyle, which was a more symbiotic one with their precarious environment. The insistence on luxury items and the taboo on eating fish bear this out. Their pride in being Norse meant that they would not adapt to the differences between the climate and environment of Greenland, preferring to import their Scandinavian identity in its entirety.

If we are to survive climate change as well as possible, and with the realisation that we do not control the environment in the way that our modernist heritage teaches, then amongst the many pressures we face perhaps our emotions must learn to be more in tune with our environment.

In the bleak midwinter

2008-12-27T10:04:00.005Z

Something a little bleaker from Steve Sharp, this is part of the Five Sisters of Kintail out on the road to Skye.

According to this site:
"Legend relates that two Irish Princes washed ashore during a storm, fell in love with two of the seven daughters of the King of Kintail. Having promised to send their five brothers for the remaining sisters, the Princes married the two youngest Princesses and returned to Ireland. The five sisters waited in vain, and eventually asked the Grey Magician of Coire Dhunnaid to extend their vigil beyond life itself, whereupon he turned them into mountains."

A reading list pt2

2008-12-26T16:26:00.005Z

Just to finish off this reading list... (ok i know these will never be my most exciting posts, but any thoughts on any of the titles much appreciated)

I should add some of the text is from Keith Oatley's mails, as it's useful context. Though bits I've added or messed around with.

Understanding emotions through fiction down through the ages.

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Patrick Hogan 'The mind and its stories'. He has found that the two principal emotions around which stories all round the world are fashioned are love and anger

On the idea of restraint as a grand narrative to western concepts of emotion.
Norbert Elias ( 1978). The civilizing process: The history of manners. He does talk about restraint: restraint of what we might now think of as male uncouthness, by a process of shame, when women started to enter male society. (Courtly love is also a version of the same idea, but it may be better thought of as a rechannelling of male aggression into deeds of valour and chivalry, than a restraint on aggression.)

Johan Huizinga, 'The waning of the middle ages', in which he argues that the late Middle Ages were a period of weariness, pessimism and decadence.

A reading list pt1

2008-12-26T15:55:00.004Z

I have been fortunate recently to have been in email conversation with Keith Oatley, author "Emotions: A Brief History".

He has been patiently and kindly talking me through some of the parameters of the field and helping me see what's out there in the way of research. Whilst i knew a little of the broad themes upon which he elaborated, his years of experience and erudition leave me blushing at my ignorance - anyone who knows me knows this is not something i do often.

Here amongst others is a reading list by him of suggested works I should have a look at. It covers anthropology, psychology, literary criticism and other fields. Such is the nature of this nascent field of the History of the Emotions.

If anyone has read any of these works and cares to give an opinion I should be most grateful. I'll post thge full list over a couple of posts, it's quite long though there's some fascinating books there.

From anthropology:
A society apparently without emotions:
Howell, S. (1981). Rules not words. In P. H. A. Lock (Ed.), Indigenous psychologies: The anthropology of the self (pp. 133-143). London: Academic Press.

A society in which no-one gets angry:
Briggs, J. L. (1970). Never in anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

A society in which people are angry a lot of the time:
Chagnon, N. A. (1968). Yanomamö: The fierce people. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston.

How societies, and their communal emotional qualities, can be destroyed by Western colonialism and modernization, e.g.
Turnbull, C. M. (1973). Human nature and primal man. Social Research, 40, 511-530.

A society living in the way in which it is thought that all our human ancestors mostly lived until urbanization began around 10,000 years ago:
Thomas, E. M. (1989). The harmless people (revised edition). New York: Random House.

Nowadays, with globalization we live in a world that is becoming more homogeneous. Some common emotional characteristic are satisfaction in relationships, even in the worst circumstances:
Biswas-Diener, R., & Diener, E. (2001). Making the best of a bad situation: satisfaction in the slums of Calcutta. Social Indicators Research, 55, 329-352.

Merry Christmas folks

2008-12-25T09:25:00.000Z

Season's greetings to one and all...

Assynt again...

2008-12-17T15:29:00.003Z

Assynt again, posted by someone called OldSch00l on Flickr. This is Stac Pollaidh from Cul Mor

Emotional narrative

2008-12-16T22:28:00.002Z

I've had this post on draft for a few weeks and spoken about this topic on several occasions when tipsy in hostelries up and down the land. And then some scientists from Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh go and prove my point for me. (ok it's not really my point, but I would have looked a wee bit prescient writing about it and basked in the smugness)

Anyway the study they were publishing claims that romantic comedies create unrealistic expectations in relationships and contribute to their failure.

On a wider level, films and other media influence our emotional lives. And arguably more than we realise. All stories do as we like our lives to have structure and the narrative of stories does that for us. We can identify with characters, respond to their situations and then relate it to our own lives.

The report cites the notion of a belief in destiny and fate as creating unnecessary pressures on relationships in trying to make them 'perfect'.

One of the points I always used to raise was the notion of 'closure' at the ending of a relationship, as in "I need closure on this."

What rot! Life goes on somewhat relentlessly and does not always provide closure. People are not two dimensional fictional characters and despite artistic and poetic truths existing in literature, our lives are not like some Dickensian plot neatly tied together at the end.

Our emotions are held to ransom by false narratives and we create much unhappiness in these dishonesties.

(for the record i have been known to enjoy the odd rom com and witnesses have noticed a lump in my throat at the end of even the most saccharine guff)

The problem of dualism and how it relates to emotions

2008-12-09T15:19:00.007Z

It may sound odd blaming Socrates for many of the world's ills, and more than a little unfair. However the wily old fellow may have inadvertently had a hand in more than he bargained for.

Plato first described a dualism between body and mind/soul and attributed it to Socrates in Phaedo. The idea was that these two concepts were fundamentally distinct. In many ways it became something of a truth held as self evident and it served mankind's progress down through the centuries.

Indeed in the Christian era of the West and in Islam, this split has been reinforced by philosophers, influencing everything from science to ethics.

In recent years science has finally challenged this notion, advancing ideas on the nature of consciousness that suggest even without the unprovable notion of a soul, consciousness and the mind are products of the entirely physical brain.

However, even if one were to set aside such arguments about consciousness, one does not need science to challenge the dualism of body and mind. Eastern philosophy has often emphasised the unity of all things. As a distinction the dualism serves a purpose but has blinded us to other truths. Dualism is at best a metaphor, not a fact. And metaphors are not an exclusive description of that which they seek to describe.

How does this impact upon the subject of this blog, the History of Emotions? Simply so - that the distinction between body and mind quickly took on moral force as the Greeks and their intellectual and spiritual descendants sought to eulogize reason and damn their passions. And in damning the passions, so millenia of tension between that which need not be at opposed combined with religion to create ethical systems that doomed mankind to failure in its attempts to be 'good'.

For example, systems of dualism were the philosophical tools that allowed the passions to be used to demean women as sources of baseness and therefore sin, and creating or exacerbating envy, jealous and fear in our relationships. Men in seeking dominance over women blamed them for what lay in them both and which a system of dualism taught them was base and impure and therefore sinful.

Then in Victorian era, women were put one a false pedestal as angels of virtue, as man sought to control his own passions and keep women in check by binding them with chains of modesty and passivity.

This is not to say dualism was the sole root of all our problems, nor that those feelings described as passions were fine until trammeled in a dualism. But as a system, it was a flawed attempt to understand our humanity and as such stopped us from creating something wiser.

Is this my attempt to reclaim the passions as inherently natural or good? No, rather something else.

As reason has been reduced to maths to describe in a value free way the logic it claims to represent, the truth of Socrates mistake lies bare. Our communication is never in pure maths, be it written or verbal.

The very notion of distinct reason and passion is flawed. Whilst useful in describing some situations, they miss out on the full nature of our reality, just as Newtonian physics failed to understand the quantum world.

Emotions have judgement, like reason. What one person finds repugnant, another may find joyous. Emotions are bound up in what we consider reason. Otherwise reason can be used to justify the most abhorrent acts. I have always loved Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon for this reason - it exposes the inhumanity of reason in all its utilitarian brutality. Emotion can and does on occasion restrain reason!

By carving the mind/body dualism into stone we placed a terrible and flawed moral judgement on our emotions which binds us still.

A different Glencoe

2008-12-09T13:45:00.002Z

Glencoe looks very different in this one from Online Scotland

good grief

2008-12-08T23:54:00.002Z

Grief is one of the strongest emotions that we can feel, a force that can overwhelm all thoughts and render life completely meaningless in a instant. Surely such an elemental force is ubiquitous to all mankind, so basic a response is it to death.

And yet it is not so. I make no value judgements about the rights and the wrongs here, nor accuse any person of lacking feeling. I would not condemn Mersault for failing to cry at his mother's funeral.

Take for example, Japan (from the Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying and an essay entitled 'GRIEF AND MOURNING IN CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE'):
"There is no equivalent to the term grief in some other languages; indeed, in some cultures, as in Japan, the concept of emotions that are only in the individual seems foreign. For the Japanese, individual identity is a function of social harmony. Emotions are part of family or community membership, sensed among the members so as to create a harmonized atmosphere. The term mourning does have a Japanese equivalent, mo, which refers both to the ritual responses to death and the emotions—commonly defined in the West as "grief"—that attend them. Hitan, the Japanese word that comes closest to the English word grief, means "sadness and sorrow," but the word does not imply that the emotions were brought about by death or loss. Hitan cannot be used in a way that refers to a self-evident inner reality. One translation into Japanese of the English phrase "She was in grief" might be "Kanojyo-ha hitan no naka ni iru," ("she grief of inside being there"), but that is not a complete sentence. A complete sentence might be "Kanojyo-ha hitan ni sizundeiru." (She grief to sinking.) An infinitive like "to sink" is needed because in Japanese Hitan cannot be a complete state on its own."

This does not mean the Japanese do not feel sadness and great sorrow at the death of a loved one. But we should be careful of prescribing a model of behaviour and a response to it that may not be appropriate for someone from that culture.

Another example from the same source:
"Anthropologist Unni Wikan, for example, compared the rules in Egypt and Bali, both Islamic cultures. She found that in that in Bali, women were strongly discouraged from crying, while in Egypt women were considered abnormal if they did not incapacitate themselves in demonstrative weeping."

So our internal and our external responses can vary across cultures, even with the same religion. Who would be a fool to condemn one as behaving inappropriately?

If one can respond in different ways emotionally to death, which cultures (at which time in history) can be said to have dealt well with death?

We in the West have become terrified of death. Many atheists and agnostics fear the non-existence and even believers in a hereafter do not go gently into that good night. And yet it is inevitable. Surely then, it behooves us to learn about grief and death with fortitude and without hysteria to give the Reaper his proper respect.

the shock of the old

2008-12-07T18:52:00.005Z

Work has required me to read a very interesting book, 'The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900' by Prof. David Edgerton of Imperial College, London. (Indeed i have the pleasure of speaking to him tomorrow and hopefully persuading him to take part in the film I'm working on).

The idea behind it is rather simple: we hold it as axiomatic that life is move ever faster in a technological blur, becoming almost dizzying in its rate of change. Except in many ways, as Prof Edgerton points out, it isn't. We often confuse invention with utilisation and even the mobile telephone is merely an innovation on phone technology that has existed for a century. The triumph is in the marketing, not the product. Most of our life is based on technologies that have endured, not technologies that have exploded like fireworks onto our consciousness and then disappeared again, having failed to latch on to our lifestyles and consciousness in more permanent ways.

Is there a parallel for emotions? Are we obsessed with new treatments particularly for negative emotions or old problems by pharmaceutical or therapeutic means? This is not to denigrate either field completely, it's just that I can't help but wonder if we are too blinded by some shiny modern chimera. The notion of medicalising grief springs to mind as an example of this, or perhaps diagnoses of conditions like social anxiety disorder where perhaps the term shyness might be as appropriate and a pill definitely not the answer...

stoned in wonder

2008-12-06T22:08:00.002Z

i think Steve Carter has excelled himself with this one of the Torridon Hills in November

a brief story of love, and its lack

2008-12-02T22:23:00.006Z

Browsing through t'internet i came across this about love and marriage through the ages:

"1690s U.S.: Virginia wasn't always for lovers—Passionate love between husband and wife is considered unseemly: One Virginia colonist describes a woman he knows as "more fond of her husband perhaps than the politeness of the day allows." Protestant ministers warn spouses against loving each other too much, or using endearing nicknames that will undermine husbandly authority."

It is accepted amongst historians that love was not always the arbiter of marriage that we so treasure in the West. But what of the future of love and marriage? Will they be constant and faithful companions?

In two hundred years time surely our conceptions of such things will have changed again? It is surely vanity and false pride to suggest we have alighted upon the sole eternal solution that will hold a relationship through truth and time. Given the fraught nature of modern marriage and relationships, this surely reinforces the notion that much will change still further... Marriage has lived throughout the ages by its very adaptability so surely it will adapt further.

I should add, in case anyone thinks i am damning or denying the power of true love, that is not my intention. My personal belief in the coruscating power of love remains, but history marches on relentlessly....

The silence of Glencoe

2008-12-02T14:56:00.003Z

Sometimes i fear i lack originality. But once again Ian Cameron's transient light series provides another gem. This is Glencoe and despite being a regular stop off for tourists, is a place overwhelmed by a deep silence and wonder.

An angry God breeds an angry man

2008-11-30T15:23:00.003Z

In the late 17th Century, England and America were pretty tough places to live. Aside from the political turmoil, their quality of life was not something to write home about. However one interesting aspect of what people were writing about was the casual violence of civil society, from the beating of wives, children and servants, not to mention duels, fights and thrashings. That these would even involve the clergy was not seen as in any way shocking.

Can you imagine our clergy being violent today? There are few images today that would correspond. We may smile at the notion of the boxing priest training the kids in the inner cities of Ireland and America, or recognise the liberation theologians of Latin America taking up arms in defence of the poor, but in these cases the violence is strictly disciplined and codified. Basically, our priests and ministers do not brawl in the streets.

But so it was, according to historians like Carol and Peter Stearns, quoting from diaries and letters of the day in their book 'Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory'. It is fascinating to see how so many diarists of the day did not recognise anger in themselves and it is only as the century draws to a close that a self awareness burgeons and that the same behaviour begins to perceived through an angry lens. The act of writing appears to have helped foster a clearer reflection of our nature.

Amongst the wonders such a spyglass through time brings is the appearance of a relationship between how God was perceived and the society that worshiped him. In the 16th Century the Christian God was in many ways a wrathful figure, and any transgressions and misfortunes were widely seen as the justice of a Lord angered by even trivial misdemeanours.

An angry God and an angry population. It does not surprise to see such a correlation. Nor does it surprise to see that when preachers tempered God's wrath with his mercy, that there appeared a decline in casual civil savagery. Particularly when allied to the greater self reflection of a more widespread written word.

Of what use is such insight today? It is harder to see things in such monolithic terms today as our notion of God has become refracted through innumerable lenses and society's values appear on the surface atomised. And yet it is undeniable that those aspects of the Christian and Muslim faiths that are fundamentalist - that seek a more literalist approach to their sacred texts - are in many ways angry creeds. Theirs is the call of violent jihad (as opposed to the more peaceful definitions of jihad) or the threat of hell to all sinners.

Is it any wonder that an angry God begets violence in its believers? Any jealous or intolerant God will give rise to such emotions and we must suffer their impact under the banner of a righteousness that is entirely debatable. If those Gods are Gods of love and compassion their followers might do better to emphasise such things for the benefit of all who must endure the casual civil savagery of our societies.

It may not be the sole cause of violence in our world, but all causes must be tackled at their roots.

suilven

2008-11-28T18:01:00.003Z

Something a bit further north this time. Suilven in Sutherland is something special, a solitary sentinel in the bleak wilderness.

myths, morals, and emotions

2008-11-27T22:05:00.007Z

It is a wonderful thing to look at a place in time, a place underneath this canopy of vapours and say 'there was a moment when we took a real step forward'.

When we mastered fire, learned to write, or stepped upon the moon, one can look and say there was material, real progress encapsulated in a moment.

When can one say such things about our emotional development? Was there a moment when we learned to love unconditionally as individuals and as communities? A moment when we learned (or relearned) a wider compassion? Have all those moments then been lost again?

From the world of myth i believe we can consider some possibilities. In Karen Armstrong's 'A Short History of Myth', she speaks of several critical periods in our relationship to myths and how they served our emotional and moral needs.

Since the beginning of the written word and the foundation of cities, the stories of Gods were of wresting order from chaos and of the power of those deities through nature. Mankind was trembling and fragile in the face of the world. Our emotional lives would I believe have reflected this fragility. Then as cities grew and life became somewhat more secure, those myths lost resonance and new myths were needed. Around this time (800-200BCE) several major religious figures sprung up across the globe in Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse (or the writings attributed to him), Zoroaster, the Judaic prophets and others.

This was also an emotional revolution, expressed though myth and played out through our morality. No longer were Gods to be appeased by superficial ritual or controlled by a priestly caste. It required an internal attitude change in every individual, something that would also require a massive change in our individual emotional responses. If we were to live morally, our emotions needed to pay heed and ultimately homage to our morals. This is a revolution we are still feeling today.

There has, according to Armstrong, been another revolution, in the Enlightenment. However I am still sceptical of this as i think of that period as being about trying to effect return to axial values through reason rather than an attempt to generate something entirely new. Though perhaps it is like Chou En Lai's famous opinion on the impact of the French Revolution - 'it's too soon to tell."

In the West our material lives have changed beyond all recognition, giving an opportunity for knowledge and wisdom almost beyond the dreams of avarice. Our emotional lives on the other hand seem as much a struggle now as they were when Job was lamenting the cruelty of his fate.

Is it perhaps time for another leap forward in our hearts?

Emotional Progress?

2008-11-27T21:57:00.006Z

Is humanity's emotional history a story of maturity, of improvement to the self, community and environment? Is our emotional narrative moving us away from destructive impulses towards a framework that improves our well being in the world and the world itself?

One would certainly like to think so, but I fear it is not so straightforward.

Almost certainly we have learned at some points in our history that some emotional norms of behaviour are no longer suitable and we have evolved our emotions in part to deal with our fast changing world. Many of these involve dealing with the consequences of the emotions we consider 'negative'. For example our desire for revenge is in some ways curtailed by the removal of the death penalty. Society is 'civilised' by the curtailment of anger and its corollary, violence. Our emotional responses change, and no longer is anger sated by watching a man swing for the theft of a loaf. Disgust has risen to combat anger as such sights become abhorrent.

Can one say the history of the West is the history of increasing emotional restraint?

One essay recently caught my grey eyes on such things. 'Worrying about emotions in history' by Barbara Rosenwein, a professor of Medieval History at Loyola University in Chicago. She damns the notion of a simple grand narrative based on a flawed notion of emotions as wild humours that are either controlled or uncontrolled, when they are of course so much more than that. It doesn't help that our language is filled with expressions to describe them in such terms - one can be overwhelmed by rage, or hold back one's fear, or overflow with love - but our emotions are more sophisticated that such expressions suggest.

To quote Rosenwein:
"...emotions are part of a process of perception and appraisal, not forces striving for release. Denying that emotions are irrational, cognitive psychologists see them as resulting from judgments about "weal or woe"—that is, about whether something is likely to be good or harmful, pleasurable or painful, as perceived by each individual.

As such, any notion of progression is rooted in a flawed understanding of our emotions as things desperate for release. That means we will fail to understand our past if we imagine it to be largely nasty, brutish and violent. Whilst the past may have been those things in part, it has much more to tell us.

Our emotions are not going forward then. Or at least in a straight line.

Anger is an energy

2008-11-26T13:48:00.006Z

In Jean Briggs' book, 'Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family', the anthropologist described her time with a tribe of Inuit called the Utku in Northern Canada.

One of the most striking features of her descriptions is the absence of anger from their society. Through reinforcement of emotional norms and discouragement of others, anger and its effects very rarely appear in their behaviour.

This comes up when Jean acts as an intermediary between some outsiders who wished to borrow the second canoe of the tribe (which had only two canoes), having already damaged the first one they had borrowed. Jean wanted to refuse the request on behalf of the Utku (and her Utku host did not appear to want to lend the canoe.) However the request came and her host agreed to lend the canoe as he would not publicly say no to any request.

Given the importance of the canoes in such a precarious environment as the Arctic and the previous misuse by the visitors, we can understand Jean's anger at the outsiders abusing such generous hospitality. However, the Utku discretely shunned her because her anger, albeit on their behalf, was deeply unwelcome beyond any abuse of hospitality.

In any precarious and intensely challenging environment anger is recognised as being immensely destabilising and potentially life threatening for an entire community. Therefore it is extremely important to find ways to control and minimise it.

In any precarious and intensely challenging environment reciprocation and sharing are crucial when one may need the resources and goodwill of anyone in the surrounding environment. Therefore it is extremely important to find ways to encourage it, even at the risk of disadvantaging oneself.

Does this mean the Utku are entirely non-violent, that anger's control and suppression have created a peaceful society? They are a hunting society, so violence is enjoyed in that context. Murder occurred within Inuit society and so alas it does not mean a pacifist northern light shines in Baffin Bay. And yet compassion and generosity exist in abundance in an intensely caring society.

The removal of anger is sadly not enough to create a Utopia. However, the Inuit can deal with such tensions by creating ritualised patterns of behaviour such as the song duels and their modern equivalents on community radio stations. The Inuit have done an impressive feat in channeling anger away from their behaviour to the benefit of their society.

Indeed, by careful use of jokes and conflict management, fear and suspicion are allowed to exist without spilling over into outright hostility which could do much wider harm than to the individuals directly involved. indeed they are used to reinforce that necessary social harmony.

To look at our society is to look at a society obsessed with violence and its common emotional sources anger and revenge. A glance at our movies shows us being bombarded by images of revenge as the wronged and the otherwise just seek retribution in their anger for whatever has been trespassed against them.

Our psychology is concerned with the proper and free expression of our emotions to maintain our optimal well being. Is an untrammeled emotional expression truly the best way to well being? Do our emotions, like our reason and bodies, need education?

In our temperate climes, we lack the Utku's restraint, and arguably to our detriment.

Some more interesting stuff quoting Jean Briggs here.

the Storr again

2008-11-21T14:36:00.006Z

More from the Storr on Skye and from Ian Cameron who published one below . I need to find out who this guy is again. The light is lustrous and i am filled with wonder at such sights.

Lanark and the price of love

2008-11-21T13:34:00.006Z

For some reason my mind keeps coming back to this quote from one of my favourite books, 'Lanark' by Alasdair Gray.

"The Thaw [the main character] narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason"

Can a society and a civilisation collapse because of an inability to love? If so, then where is our history of public love that can show us where we lost it and how we might bring it back? Or even create it for the first time in our human story?

I believe it can and is happening in all capitalist societies, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern. There is love out there in abundance, certainly, but it is not truly pervasive throughout the fabric of our society. The monotheistic revolution of the axial age has failed.

Where is the love in the market? A market requires profit, and without an overarching structure to regulate that market, then a market will always maximise profit above all else. In this world love is an extravagance unnecessary for business and is not part of that regulation.

Love is given freely and cannot be sold. In a world of finite resources, the market will always devour everything and will not give freely. It will not love.

Even public services are bound now by a loveless market and there are no economic quantifiers that tell us of the benefit or profit in giving love. Can schools be graded by how much love they give?

Our economic system is now facing up to including carbon and its emissions into its equations to understand and deal with climate change, and rightly so. But if overconsumption is part of the problem, can the economics of a carbon conscious market adapt in time? Oil becomes cheap again and so development into green energy slows again.

It may sound hopelessly drippy, but can an economy exist sustainably without love? Love does not exist in isolation but it seems more necessary than ever as our planet warms and we as a species harm our own children's futures.

But this is where a history of the emotions can help. To improve our understanding of ourselves and the depth of our natures and the actions that come out of those natures, we can include it in the account of our nature and make sure we profit from its addition, not suffer from its loss.

One of my favourite places

2008-11-18T17:32:00.004Z

i'd love to say this was my photograph but the pleasure belongs to a man called Piotr Zycki . There's a large seal colony on the rock's in the bay down towards the bottom left. The walk from Elgol is hazardous, the boat ride anything but...

pilgrimage to a better place

2008-11-17T20:41:00.007Z

One of things i loved about the year of anthropology i did at university was that it taught about how institutions and social conventions can be stretched by practice and necessity to deal with the wonderfully wide range of human nature.

If one looks carefully you will see the same actions through a thousand social lenses. One activity that has always fascinated is that of pilgrimage, both religious and secular. It serves many purposes, social, personal and more besides. However, notwithstanding Catholic pilgrimages to Lourdes and the like, much of western society has lost the structure of a formalised pilgrimage and it is no surprise to find many of us filling in the gap with our own myriad forms.

These days any trip to any place that holds any degree of importance to any one can become a pilgrimage.... and yet aren't we missing something here? Pilgrimages were never just about the destination, they were about the journey and the difficulties faced along the way. These trials gave us questions and challenges to our selves and became in our own small way hero quests, when a person leaves their home and sets out through a series of trials to gain knowledge and wisdom to bring back for the benefit of the self and the community.

We have diluted the pilgrimage and lost some of the essence that was of such great benefit. Journeys are all too often too easy, involve no hardship and sacrifice that serve as such deep teachers. Even travelling to the four corners of the world does not necessarily represent a struggle. What matters is how the journey is done and what can be learnt along the way.

Can the pilgrimage be revived to serve our emotional needs? Amongst other things it can deal in part with emotions like loneliness, it can be used to teach compassion, something so sorely lacking in this world. It can teach almost anything if framed correctly. And we need not limit ourselves to one pilgrimage, but many to fulfill certain roles for the community and its individuals.

One caveat to a wider concept of pilgrimage would be scale - the nature of mass action means economies of scale both material and spiritual come into play. The Islamic Hajj is a prime example, though it still retains much force for Muslims. The pilgrimage has become an industry and it is a testament to Islam that some of the spirituality that can benefit pilgrims survives.

I think a pilgrimage should be a decentralised, localised affair, and dare one say it, but possibly one that requires the pilgrim to travel solely by foot... they are not meant to be easy, for no lessons would be learned. But they can be rooted in their communities and made relevant to the communities needs.

how many heartbeats do we have?

2008-11-14T12:22:00.005Z

A quote one from of my favourite authors, Theodore Zeldin (lifted from here though)

"The wider the choices before them [in this case dissatisfied wealthy French people but in truth many more of us] and the more numerous their desires, the less time they had to give each one. Leisure has become organised, and so full of opportunities too tempting to miss that it does not necessarily offer freedom. The wish to live as intensely as possible has subjected humans to the same dilemma as the waterflea, which lives 108 days at 8' Centigrade but only 26 days at 28'C, when its heartbeat is almost four times faster, though in either case its heart beats a million times in all. Technology has been a rapid heartbeat compressing housework, travel, entertainment, squeezing more and more into the allotted timespan ..."

Do we have a limited number of heart beats? If so, is it better to live, as the saying goes, one day as a tiger than a thousand as a sheep?

Does the search for meaning in intensity miss the point of life? Which is not to say one should sleep walk through life, but will we still have time to hear the grass grow as we hurtle along at the hyperspeed of modern life?

Strangely i feel pleased that we may share something with the humble waterflea....

a midnight moment on skye

2008-11-12T19:33:00.002Z

the photo was shot by Alan MacAteer, the event was the NVA production, the Storr took place in August 2005 and was one of the most amazing things i ever went to. Sounds and lights rolled down the mountain at midnight as walkers trailed through a wonderland.

though it being skye, the night i went up the rain hammered down in biblical fashion and the return was somewhat heavy going....

language and the world

2008-11-10T11:26:00.005Z

How does our language shape our thoughts and feelings? If a language had a thousand words for despair would it tend towards being a more melancholic society? The old debate about language and the world came up again the Guardian this morning.

There was an article about an ex-missionary called Daniel Everett who had claimed that the language of an Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã had no recursion, ie the ability to include a an extra clause within a sentence. An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read, "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".

The point being that recursion was seen by most linguists as being part of an innate and universal grammatical framework ( a theory developed by Noam Chomsky) that we have hardwired into our brain. Obviously if the Pirahã did not have it then the theory is flawed as it would not be innate in humans. Either Daniel was right and Chomsky was wrong about innate grammatical structures in the brain or Daniel had just missed the use of recursion in the Pirahã language went the debate.

The article didn't suggest that either Daniel or his critics had considered the possibility that recursion may have been possible in Pirahã but that for other reasons it was not used in the language. Though to be fair I am not sure if it is possible to have a linguistic structure could be found in the brain but not used in the language.

But there were some other interesting aspects highlighted. Apparently the Pirahã have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colours, no words for numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.

One can only wonder what this does for the ability to describe and feel emotionally. how much of emotion is contigent on the ability to express it. Could the Pirahã ever have the blues?

It reminds me of the Benjamin Whorf hypothesis that our view of the world is related to the language we use and our range of expression, both emotional and intellectual. Whorf suggested that the Hopi Indians of the southwest USA had no tense referring to time in their language (in the way we have past and future tenses) and that this must profoundly affect their relationship to the notion of time and therefore to the universe.

as the writer, Jeannette Winterson put it:
"The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?"

If one sees the past and future as part of a timeless continuity rather than seperated by the junctions of past/present/future then amongst other things perhaps one might act with more respect towards the environment as one's relationship to one's unborn descendants would be closer if they were seen in the same time frame and not some distant and less connected unrealised future.

Sadly though, Whorf's otherwise fascinating idea was based on some dodgy research - he had made his claims based on conversations with one Hopi speaker miles away from his homelands. Those conversations didn't cover how the Hopi do in fact use time distinctions and what linguistic forms they have to express such ideas.

But the seed of an interesting idea remains - how does one's language affect one's ability to feel. we casually talk of having indescribable emotions but this is often a linguistic cop out. what if it were true though - without a word for love we could not love as deeply as we do?

Do we need new words for different loves to comminicate our feelings more clearly? perhaps a return to eros, philia, and agape?

the joys of drink

2008-11-05T15:06:00.004Z

not so much emotions but as a repressed scotsman, drink is always a good conduit to emotional expression, some titbits from a review of Iain Gately’s book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol.

In sixteenth-century Japan, it was an insult to your host to stay sober, so guests who couldn’t drink would pretend to be drunk and even hungover “by sending thank-you letters deliberately late, written in shaky characters.

Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52) higher than their average life expectancy—although every four years they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at which all citizens, including toddlers, were required to drink.

And Egyptian wine connoisseurs rated their drinks by stacking up the word nfr, meaning good (the best was nfr nfr nfr).

another highland pic...

2008-11-05T13:34:00.006Z

whenever i start a new job somewhere i normally find a good pic of the highlands and set it as my background on the desktop.

this one came from here. The place is buachaille etive mor near glencoe and is one of my favourite places...

wonderfully strange

2008-11-03T23:36:00.003Z

i found this talking about a conference on emotions in Russian history that took place last April:

"Catherine Lutz in “Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory “(1988) showed how Ifaluk males cried profusely not as an expression of grief, but rather as a means of marking status difference: the higher up in the social hierarchy his interlocutor, the more tears an Ifaluk shed."

how gloriously alien. not that they are aliens of course, i am sure many of my responses would be just as alien to them. however, it just makes me happy to think we have not homogenised our emotions and their responses into a western model that limits our range of what it means to be human.

a methodology for understanding our emotional history?

2008-10-26T23:39:00.004Z

there have been many good books talking about emotions throughout history - my favourites being Theodore Zeldin's wonderful 'an intimate history of humanity' and Stuart Walton's 'humanity: an emotional history'.

however there has been, (though i would be delighted to be proved wrong), no comprehensive guide to our emotions across time and continent. harbouring ambitions to such a grand task, it's something i think of this blog as a first tentative step towards.

of course a blog is at it's best when it becomes a conversation and not a monologue and all contributions are welcome. with that in mind, anyone who can answer such questions as below with examples gleaned from wherever would be lovely...

how did an emotion express itself in a time and place?

was there a social structure to cope specifically with the emotion?

was it expressed on a social or more personal level?

what sources were there for this expression?

for that matter, am i even asking the right questions?! what else should i be asking?

something soothing

2008-10-22T00:07:00.004+01:00

having slipped into rant mode, i want something more restful before i fall asleep. thie photographer is called steve carter and his photos are lovely. this is rannoch moor near glencoe....

obstacles to love?

2008-10-21T23:46:00.004+01:00

Watching the tail end of Alan Yentob's 'Imagine' documentary strand, this time on the development of the love story. (If ever there was a case of the self indulgence of an exec then it's this strand. But at least it poses some fun questions now and then).

In it, one of the contributors asked the question 'what are the impediments to love in western civilisation these days?' Adultery is in many ways normalised, and class is supposedly not the barrier it once was - though as Kate Fox points out in her book ' the English' that the English marry less outside of their class these days than they used to 30 years ago.

However, despite Fox's caveat, the point being reasonably made was that none of the barriers to love's consummation seem insurmountable these days and therefore without conflict give no truly powerful and transcendent dynamic to a contemporary love story. In a love story we need a conflict to exist to then to be resolved so love can be seen to triumph.

Leaving aside literary arguments, I couldn't help but wonder. Has love really won, has it truly triumphed o'er all obstacles? If this is so then why does not western society bask in the warmth of that joyous victory where love reigns and its gentle allies compassion, respect and tolerance sit together before a round table of wisdom?

Clearly love has not won out here in the real world. Which means there is a disconnect between what is written and what is.

Rather than a victory for love, I believe we have seen the triumph of desire, of an individualism lauded in philosophy and made beautiful in art reduced to an infantilism of epic proportions in behaviour, and an overwhelming gratification of the senses rendering us senseless.

We have taken our sense of the individual and tied it to desire, leaving us tied in turn by desire as our obsession with its fulfillment consumes ourselves, ignoring the fact that the nature of desire is ephemeral and condemns us to a selfish repetition that is a ugly parody of love.

snapshot of online emotions

2008-10-20T14:25:00.003+01:00

have you seen this before?

A site that captures the feelings written about on the web . 'We feel fine' was conceived and created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. want to know which are the most common emotions? where is the saddest place online? do people online feel more lonely than loved?

ok so this was site was oringinally done two years ago, but i never said i was cutting edge...

skye is filled with light

2008-10-20T12:48:00.004+01:00

not mine, i lack such talents. just an image that inspires awe. for those that don't know it's the old man of Storr on Skye. the photographer is the very , very good ian cameron

anyone know what the evolutionary value of awe is? if it was to inspire respect for the environment around us in those early days of first migrations out of africa, then we need some more of it. sadly that feels too neat though. answers most welcome...

emotions in history

2008-10-19T17:55:00.002+01:00

Have you ever wondered about how people felt one thousand years ago, struggling for survival in the dark ages, gnawed at by poverty, disease, and strife? Did they feel lonely? According to Theodore Zeldin in his 'An Intimate History of Humanity', people in India developed a way of coping with loneliness that was akin to the way doctors sometimes treat disease. It was to inoculate themselves against the problem with a deadened form of loneliness - they (although this was sadly only for the men at that time) went on retreat for three months. The enforced isolation faced down the spectre of loneliness and gave people the strength to not be so afraid of an emotion that so troubles us today.

Would it serve any purpose to do something like this for both young men and women today?