Glenfinnan

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...?

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

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

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

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

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?

"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

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...

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

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.