Suchergebnisse

The emergence of courtly love in Europe -- Aristocratic speech, the Gregorian reform, and the first troubadour -- Trobairitz and troubadours and the shadow religion -- Narratives of true love and twelfth-century common sense -- Points of comparison -- The Bhakti troubadour : Vaishnavism in twelfth-century Bengal and Orissa -- Elegance and compassion in Heian Japan

In The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, William M. Reddy offers a theory of emotions which both critiques and expands upon recent research in the fields of anthropology and psychology. Exploring the links between emotion and cognition, between culture and emotional expression, Reddy applies this theory of emotions to the processes of history. He demonstrates how emotions change over time, how emotions have a very important impact on the course of events, and how different social orders either facilitate or constrain emotional life. In an investigation of Revolutionary France, where sentimentalism in literature and philosophy had promised a new and unprecedented kind of emotional liberty, Reddy's theory of emotions and historical change is successfully put to the test

Interrogeant l'étonnante survivance chez les neuroscientifiques de la théorie des « émotions de base » de Paul Ekman, laquelle naturalise et universalise l'expression des émotions, cet article rappelle au contraire, avec force, l'infinie diversité culturelle des émotions comme l'historicité des gestes et des mots qui les expriment. Ce faisant, il relativise l'opposition raison/émotion, typique de l'Occident, en montrant que la raison (au sens d'« être raisonnable ») n'est qu'une émotion de contrôle qui, historiquement, l'a emporté. L'article, enfin, dessine un espace de convergences intellectuelles naissant entre les sciences sociales de l'émotion et certains travaux récents de neuroscientifiques autour de la « construction culturelle des émotions ».

Talk of modernity is plagued with paradox. A relativist stance towards modernity—the claim, for example, that modernity is just one cultural configuration among others—seems to contradict itself. The concept of "cultural configuration," and similar notions (such as "language game," "discourse," "community," or "myth"), are themselves the products of modern intellectual research and debate. If the relativist claim is true, it appears to undermine the validity of those very conditions of modern intellectual debate that make the claim thinkable. But to argue for modernity's superiority over other cultural configurations seems equally problematic. If the criteria of superiority are themselves modern, then the argument appears question-begging. But if the criteria are not modern, then these non-modern criteria (by which the superiority of the modern can be discerned) would appear themselves to be superior to modern criteria.

Each of these rich essays is framed as the discussion of a specific emotion or emotional attitude—the "perception of emotional coldness" (Andrei Zorin), "fear" (Jan Plamper), "disgust" (OlgaMatich and Adi Kuntsman). But these authors offer us both much less and much more. Less, because individual emotions cannot really have their own history, independent of the kinds of self or emotional styles that emerge in given periods. More, because each essay opens u p to these broader, interdependent configurations of self and emotion, creating a window on a complex landscape of emotional change. Zorin's study of Andrei Turgenev provides a glimpse of the transition from an eighteenth- to an early nineteenth-century emotional regime. Plamper's examination of the emergence of military psychology traces the development of a late nineteenth-century social science of the "psyche." Olga Matich explores the somatic anxieties of an early twentieth-century novelist, reminiscent of a whole strain of troubled and troubling early twentieth-century reflection. Adi Kuntsman probes the powerlessness of victims of Stalinist-era labor camps, whose sufferings resemble those of millions of others caught in modernist state projects aimed at administering mass emotions.