AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions

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AHR Conversation:The Historical Study of Emotions

PARTICIPANTS:

NICOLE EUSTACE, EUGENIA LEAN, JULIE LIVINGSTON, JAN PLAMPER,WILLIAM M. REDDY, and BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN

In the past few years, the AHR has published five “Conversations,” each on a subjectof interest to a wide range of historians: “On Transnational History” (2006), “Re-ligious Identities and Violence” (2007), “Environmental Historians and Environ-mental Crisis” (2008), “Historians and the Study of Material Culture” (2009), and“Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information” (2011). For each theprocess has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interestin the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conver-sation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the Decemberissue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration ofa topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited acrossseveral fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal isuniquely positioned to undertake.

This year’s topic is “The Historical Study of Emotions.” Given the expanding rangeof new methodological and disciplinary forays among historians in recent years, itmay be too much to proclaim that we are witnessing an “Emotional Turn.” (Indeed,one conclusion that might be drawn from the June 2012 AHR Forum on “Histo-riographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective” is that the very concept of “turns” mayhave outlived its intellectual usefulness.) But it cannot be denied that the study ofemotions has become a thriving pursuit among historians from many different areasand periods. Not only does its emergence as a legitimate subfield foster the in-terrogation of descriptors—love, hate, resentment, passions, pity, happiness, andthe like—that historians are more often likely to use uncritically if at all; it alsoallows for the crossing of the boundaries between private and public, the personaland collective, that often constrain our work. To be sure, a major problem with thestudy of emotions is how we can access the emotional lives of people in past times:is it possible to go beyond emotional expressions—usually conveyed in language—and attain some assurance that these are indicative of actual emotional states? Thisis only one of the questions confronted in the course of this wide-ranging con-versation.

Joining the Editor in this conversation are Nicole Eustace, a historian of earlyAmerica; Eugenia Lean, who studies modern Chinese history, literature, and cul-ture; Julie Livingston, a historian who works in Africa; Jan Plamper, a specialist

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in Soviet and Russian history; William M. Reddy, who has written widely on modernEuropean as well as comparative history; and Barbara H. Rosenwein, whose re-search has ranged across the religious, social, and intellectual history of the MiddleAges.

AHR Editor: It seems clear that consideration of the role of emotions in history isincreasingly recognized as a legitimate approach. There are, however, many differentand contrasting understandings that come into play—even on the basic level of whatwe mean by the term itself or how we can access emotional states in past times. Tobegin our conversation, I would like to ask each of you what brought you to see thisconcern as crucial in your work as a historian? What methodological, theoretical, andscholarly considerations mark your appreciation of emotions in history? Are thereaspects of your field or period that endow a specificity to your approach to emotionsin history?

William M. Reddy: I was drawn into the history of emotions by research on genderand popular culture in eighteenth-century Europe, and on what Robert Darntoncalled the “social history” of the Enlightenment. Historians working on these ques-tions discovered the centrality of sentimentalism in that period, and the extravagantperformances of emotion that became routine among the educated elite in the lastdecades prior to the French Revolution. Norbert Elias had missed this development,which did not fit into his scheme. So had Michel Foucault.

It seemed to me urgent to ask whether these performances reflected real changesin emotional experience, and if so, how such changes could be understood histor-ically. I turned for help both to anthropological work on variation in emotions acrosscultures and to experimental psychology, where I found interesting, directly relevantdebates underway. I found that such figures as anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo andpsychologist James Russell argued persuasively that human emotional experiencewas deeply influenced by culture and could vary across a wide range.

Julie Livingston: The Editor’s question has prompted the first occasion for me tothink about this. I have never thought of myself as a historian of emotions per se.When asked, I call myself a historian and anthropologist of the human body. I don’tremember being consciously drawn into the topic of emotions—but I can identify afew things that I imagine brought me here. First, I was trained, as many Africanistsare, to use oral history as a central method in my research. Because of a dearth of(and the skewed nature of) written records even for the modern period in many partsof Africa, and because of the politics of social history that animated the field fromits inception in the 1960s, both oral history interviews and oral traditions have longbeen central to the field. These interviews are then transcribed and analyzed as texts.1Yet I became frustrated by how distorted my own interviews seemed when they were

1 There had been a longstanding assumption in the Euro-American academy that Africa was some-how outside of history. This was a static place, a residual remnant of antiquity, such that contemporaryAfrican societies were manifestations of past evolutionary stages in human social and political orga-nization. Of course, Africans knew otherwise. There were local and court historians within Africa, andstrands of African American history, i.e., W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century, that wereconcerned with African history, but I am referring to the European/American academy here, which onlyrecently really began accepting that Africans had a dynamic past.

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stripped of their performative and emotional qualities and reduced to texts. The taperecording was already a pale version of the actual conversation, and the transcriptioneven more so. It mattered whether someone had laughed or cried or grown suddenlysilent as they recalled or debated particular events.

I found that this flattening mirrored a norm in the history of medicine, in whichactual embodied experiences of medicine and illness were often sanitized or seg-regated from the analytic work of history. Here it was the human body that wasrendered as text. This, of course, is an inadequate means of approaching the issuesof pain, incontinence, paralysis, etc., that abounded in my ethnographic research,where I worked with a home-based care program. This thoroughly material body thatI saw in practice and that I found in the archives and oral histories was intersubjectivemore than individuated, and its meanings and effects in the world could not be ac-counted for without close attention to the emotions it generated and expressed.2 Butperhaps most importantly, emotions were a fundamental concern of Tswana med-icine, a dynamic system of knowledge and practice that was central to the history Iwas writing. In “traditional” Setswana medicine, the feelings in someone’s heart wererecognized as having direct effects on the bodily well-being of that person’s lovedones, and so there was no way to understand medicine or vernacular forms of em-bodiment without also grasping the cultural norms of emotional continence and ex-pression as aspects of medicine and public health.

Lastly, I did the research for my first book over the course of several long-termstays in Botswana between 1996 and 1999, and that was the height of the AIDSepidemic there. My work brought me into the homes, clinics, and hospitals of thesick and the dying. In the village where I lived, and among my friends and co-workers,there was a tremendous existential angst that pervaded daily life. There was a mood(for want of a better word) that was hard to describe, and yet unmistakable, as thechurch bell tolled each day or sometimes more than once a day to announce a death,as people began to forgo most other types of parties and social occasions so as tobe able to attend funerals, etc. This mood was of course experienced and expressedin culturally specific ways—as Michelle Rosaldo, Catherine Lutz, and other anthro-pologists had taught me to expect. But it was also a profound marking of a precise,if overwrought, historical moment. When I was back in Botswana several years laterfor an extended stay—after antiretroviral drugs had arrived and the form of theepidemic had shifted—the mood was palpably different. It was still culturally specific(acknowledging, of course, that culture is not monolithic; any collective culture isalso marked by internal contradictions and tensions), but it was different than it hadbeen a few years earlier. And now American and European psychologists had arrivedand spilled a great deal of ink and money pathologizing Tswana culture, explaining

2 This close attention to emotions was and is an ongoing theme in the anthropological literature onAfrica. See, for example, Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa, trans. Peter Geschiere and Janet Roitman (Charlottesville, Va., 1997); Suzette Heald,Controlling Anger: The Sociology of Gisu Violence (Manchester, 1989); Wendy James, “The Names ofFear: Memory, History, and the Ethnography of Feeling among Uduk Refugees,” Journal of the RoyalAnthropological Institute 3, no. 1 (1997): 115–131; Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracyin South Africa (Chicago, 2005); Deborah Durham, “Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death,” Ethnos67, no. 2 (2002): 155–179; Michael Lambek and Jacqueline S. Solway, “Just Anger: Scenarios of In-dignation in Botswana and Madagascar,” Ethnos 66, no. 1 (2001): 49–72. It has been picked up morerecently by historians as well; Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, eds., Love in Africa (Chicago, 2009).

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that Batswana “don’t grieve properly,” and trying to retrain them to be more ex-pressive. And so this also helped cause me to think about collective emotions, andabout how best to write about something like a mood—to convey it in aestheticterms—and also to think about the politics of emotional expression.

Nicole Eustace: I came to the study of the history of emotion in the early 1990s,at a point when gender history and the history of the family were becoming hugelyinfluential within my chosen field of early American history, and when emotionseemed to be the next major avenue open to investigation in those fields. At the time,I was seized by two fundamental feminist insights. First, women’s historians wereupending the nineteenth-century notion of separate gendered spheres, exposing sup-posed divisions of public and private as historical constructs with little factual basis.Second, these scholars were demonstrating that the use of gender to demarcate pub-lic and private gained ubiquity because of the way it seemed to naturalize the dif-ferential distribution of power, to ground social hierarchies in the order of nature.Turning to scholarship on emotion from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Iwas immediately struck by the traditional opposition between emotion and reasonand by the oft-advanced proposition that civilized people were better at controllingtheir emotions than savage ones. For eighteenth-century British imperialists, thismeant that Europeans were superior to Africans and Native Americans; for twen-tieth-century theorists like John Huizinga and Norbert Elias, this meant that modernrationalists were superior to premodern ranters and ravers. From the eighteenthcentury to the twentieth, to be civilized and modern was to be farther removed fromunbridled emotion and untrammeled nature. Yet along with my professional trainingas a historian, I also brought to the study of emotion some undergraduate trainingin neurobiology, as well as a personal history as the child of two psychologists.Against the insistence of many throughout history that distinct emotional patternsprovide a useful way of differentiating human groups and, laterally, of stratifyingthem into hierarchical positions, I could set the insistence of many scientists thatemotions have a universal biological basis. With emotion itself historically positionedas a quintessentially feminine, primitive, and private aspect of human experience, thetopic seemed ripe for interrogation through new modes of inquiry centered on theanalysis of power. If the biological basis of emotion is universal, yet the culturalincidence of emotional expression has been highly varied, then in that gap betweenexperience and expression (to paraphrase a formulation advanced by WilliamReddy) lie the very foundations of the structures of power. In some sense, the effortto bridge the gap between feeling and language that Reddy and others have identifiedis a timeless process; the interplay of somatic sensation and linguistic labeling isever-unfolding. And yet, exactly because this is such a dynamic process, emotion isuniquely suited to the study of change over time. Shifting patterns in who expresseswhich emotions, when, and to whom provide a key index of power in every society.Every expression of emotion constitutes social communication and political nego-tiation. Truly, the personal is political.

Eugenia Lean: Like several others, I came to the history of emotions in the 1990s,informed by the exciting work being done on gender and cultural history. Foucault



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and others had started to impact the history field and help shift concerns from socialstructures as moving forces behind history to the consideration of language and dis-course, and to questions of historicizing the constitution of subjectivity, sexuality,and matters of the intimate. This resulted in innovative work being done in the earlymodern European field that Bill Reddy has mentioned regarding sentimentalism andthe French Revolution, which started to link issues of gender, and emotions, to pol-itics and the public arena. This generation of historians examining emotions andpolitics was responding in part to Habermas’s formulation of the bourgeois publicsphere, which identified a normatively powerful schema appearing in eighteenth-century Western Europe of a public sphere—dominated by men—that was a realmof rational communicative action and that lay in contradistinction to a private realmthat was feminized and the place of emotions.3 Historians of gender of the earlymodern period, in particular, started to take exception to such a formulation.4 Fromthe perspective of a modern China historian, these historical and historiographicaldebates proved inspiring, even as they remained stubbornly Eurocentric in their re-liance upon epistemological categories of private-public, emotion-reason, subjec-tivity-objectivity, as well as the notion of subjectivity/personhood itself.

My interest in these debates coincided with innovative work being done by col-leagues in the China field focused on the seventeenth century and its Cult of Sen-timent. They were exploring the role of sentiment, or qing, in women’s culture, lit-erature, and philosophical musings during a period of dynastic decline to show howsentiment came to serve as an antidote to what was perceived as an ineffectual focusin state orthodoxy on ritual as a means to cultivate individuals and harmonize so-ciety.5 From their rich work, it became clear to me that the Confucian tradition andits vibrant cultural history offered an entirely different epistemological context fromwhich to interrogate how we in the West think about the very category of emotion.I furthermore wanted to extend this approach forward in time, and explore the issueof gender, emotions, and politics for twentieth-century China, when Confucianismwas being debunked as official state ideology, empire had come to an end, and a moremass, commercial culture was emerging.6 Notions of gender, categories of self/fam-ily, imported ideas of “private” and “public,” and collective identity and social or-ganization were subject to intense scrutiny in this period when China’s political cos-mology was in tremendous flux. Emotions proved a compelling entryway into theseissues.

In a broader sense, my interest in the question of emotions also emerged from thetheoretical and methodological debates raging in the 1990s about what it meant tobe a historian or social scientist. Poststructuralism’s challenge to the idea of an ob-jective social science was implicitly at the heart of those highly impassioned debates

3 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Categoryof Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

4 For example, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution(Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).

5 See, for example, Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, Calif., 1994); Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late ImperialChina (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); and Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusionin Chinese Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1993).

6 Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Re-publican China (Berkeley, Calif., 2007).



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that resulted productively in my mind in a questioning among historians about thebasic assumption of our work, namely, whether we are able to retrieve through em-pirical fact the objective truth regarding the past. These debates forced me to thinkseriously about how our subjectivity and passions come into play when writing his-tory, and about how best to engage in the dispassionate analysis needed for historicalinquiry while recognizing our subjective perspectives as historically situated subjects.These methodological explorations went hand in hand with my interest in histori-cizing emotions and identity, individual and collective.

Jan Plamper: By the early 2000s, I had grown increasingly dissatisfied with theoverwhelming emphasis on language in poststructuralist history-writing and beganlooking for less mediated approaches that would restore the visceral qualities ofbodily experience to their rightful place, approaches that would also allow for stron-ger notions of causality than “discursive shifts” or the like. I suspect that many his-torians of emotion share this trajectory, and it would be worthwhile at some pointto explore the conditions that made the “emotions moment” possible in various dis-ciplines and fields, a moment that I would date to September 11, 2001, which cata-lytically sped up several interrelated processes that were already underway. At anyrate, I chanced upon Bill Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for theHistory of Emotions (which according to Amazon, incidentally but tellingly, was of-ficially released on September 10, 2001), which seemed to offer a highly sophisticatedway out of what dissatisfied me, and later upon Barbara Rosenwein’s AHR article“Worrying about Emotions in History,” which gave the field a history and helped toget me thinking more seriously about emotions beyond individuals—“emotionalcommunities,” to use her influential term.7 Also, I was living in Germany, wheresome historians were doing cutting-edge work on the emotions, and the possibilityof actually having a group of people to interact with seemed attractive as well.8 SoI embarked on a project about how (late imperial) Russian soldiers were conditionedto overcome fears, how they actually experienced fear, and how they were dealt with(by the state, medical experts, et al.) when they experienced an emotional breakdownmarked by fear-induced symptoms. I started with what seemed easiest to do, namely,to uncover scientific talk that turned fear into an object of inquiry, yet conceptualproblems began piling up so fast that at some point I had to try to think some of themthrough. The result was a several-year-long detour from the fear project and a book

7 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge,2001); release date from http://www.amazon.com/Navigation-Feeling-Framework-History-Emotions/dp/0521004721. Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American HistoricalReview 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821–845.

8 See Ute Frevert, “Angst vor Gefuhlen? Die Geschichtsmachtigkeit von Emotionen im 20. Jahr-hundert,” in Paul Nolte, Manfred Hettling, Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, and Hans-Walter Schmuhl, eds.,Perspektiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Munich, 2000), 95–111; Martina Kessel, Langeweile: Zum Um-gang mit Zeit und Gefuhlen in Deutschland vom spaten 18. bis zum fruhen 20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen,2001); Alf Ludtke, “Emotionen und Politik—zur Politik der Emotionen,” Sozialwissenschaftliche In-formationen/SOWI 30, no. 3 (2001): 4–13; and conferences of Arbeitskreis Geschichte � Theorie(AG�T), including “Medien und Emotionen: Zur Geschichte ihrer Beziehungen seit dem 19. Jahr-hundert” (Bochum, 2005), “Rationalisierungen des Gefuhls: Zum Verhaltnis von Wissenschaft undEmotionalitat, 1880–1930” (Berlin, 2006), and “Die Prasenz der Gefuhle: Mannlichkeit und Emotionin der Moderne” (Berlin, 2007).



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that tries to both synthesize and intervene in the history of emotions.9 Among theaspects of my Russianist specialization that endow a specificity to my approach toemotions in history, I want to mention just one. In its history, Russia has producedseveral national emotional (auto)stereotypes, including khandra, an untranslatablenotion of bittersweet despondency or melancholy embodied by literary prototypessuch as Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: “The illness with which he’d been smit-ten / should have been analyzed when caught, / something like spleen, that scourgeof Britain, / or Russia’s chondria, for short; / it mastered him in slow gradation; /thank God, he had no inclination / to blow his brains out, but in stead / to life grewcolder than the dead.”10 It turns out that many modern nations have generated ste-reotypes that supposedly capture their collective emotional makeup (think of theBritish “stiff upper lip,” Portuguese saudade, or German angst). Whence this emo-tional stereotyping? How can we write the genealogies of these stereotypes? Thisstrikes me as one of many fruitful topics of future research in the history of emotions.

Barbara H. Rosenwein: My own “emotional turn” followed less directly from gen-der history than from the “linguistic turn.” I came to the topic of the history ofemotions because when I read Norbert Elias, rather late in my career, I knew thathe was wrong. He was wrong for the most elementary of reasons: he didn’t know howto read his sources. Rather than contextualize his texts, he culled phrases that con-formed to his theory. Thus when the troubadour Bertran de Born wrote “I tellyou that neither eating, drinking, nor sleep has as much savor for me as when I hearthe cry ‘Forwards!’ from both sides, and horses without riders shying and whinnying,and the cry ‘Help! Help!’ ” and so on, Elias concluded that “rapine, battle, huntingof people and animals . . . formed part of the pleasures of life.”11 But I knew thatsuch a view radically limited any exploration of medieval emotions (or mannersor pastimes). And, more precisely, I had read William Paden et al.’s book on allthe poems of Bertran, and I knew that, contextualized, Bertran’s poetry sprang“from an obsession with conflict and a drive to master conflict by an act of will . . .He arrogates to himself the power to create meaningful form out of conflict, toforce opposed meanings into coincidence.”12 This is quite different from delightingin rapine.

Further, rather than consider who was writing and why they might be saying whatthey said about other people’s behavior, Elias took their word as a transparent win-dow onto the world. I discuss the problems inherent in using sources this way (thoughin this case my critique is of Johan Huizinga, not Elias) in an article that I publishedin 2010. Here I explore how the words of a courtly chronicler were used by Huizingato illuminate “real life” without considering the position of that chronicler or hispredilections, prejudices, or desires to manipulate his audience.13

9 See Jan Plamper, Geschichte und Gefuhl: Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte (Munich, 2012; forth-coming in English from Oxford University Press).

10 Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Charles Johnston (New York, 1979), 52.11 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund

Jephcott, rev. ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudslom, and Stephen Mennell (Oxford, 2000), 162.12 William D. Paden, Jr., Tilde Sankovitch, and Patricia H. Stablein, The Poems of the Troubadour

Bertran de Born (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 33.13 Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions,” History Compass 8, no.

8 (2010): 828–842.



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In short, it seemed to me that just by asking good old-fashioned historical ques-tions—who wrote, when, why, with what purposes?—one would come up with a dif-ferent narrative.

It would need to be in the first place a narrative based on “discourses”—thoughmy breakthrough, I think, was to see that at any one time there was more than onediscourse—because most of our sources are texts. That is not to belittle visual, ritual,or embodied sources, which can also be seen as part of a discourse. The trick is tocontextualize each source, so that it is not snatched out of a welter of competingvoices (or rituals or dances) and presented as the voice of the age. Thus in her newbook about the War of 1812, Niki makes clear that the voices of the southern stateshad one set of assumptions and values and emotions, while other voices, mainlyconfined to the East Coast, tried to assert other positions and express other feelings,albeit without much success.14 I would call the southerners one “emotional com-munity,” the easterners another.

To get at the nature of these emotional communities, I again have been influencedby the “linguistic turn” in the sense of being interested in language. Some neuro-scientific studies, such as those pursued by Maria Gendron and Lisa Feldman Bar-rett, give theoretical ballast to my own insistence on figuring out in the first placewhat the emotional vocabulary is.15 I don’t assume that in the past it was the sameas in the present, pace most psychologists, though I imagine that in the Western pastthey were closer to our Western vocabulary than in Asia or Africa.16 To be sure, inour globalized world, that may be changing.17

But why are emotions important? There are at least two reasons. First, all his-torians must concern themselves with master narratives. If the master narrative (hereI mean Elias and his many derivatives, including numerous narratives of modernity)is about emotions, then we need to consider them. But more profoundly, there isgood reason why the master narrative includes emotions: they are embedded in dailylife, politics, what we value, and just about every utterance we may make, whetheror not these include or exclude emotion words.

AHR Editor: I am struck by the diversity of trajectories that have brought you tothe study of emotions. Several common themes are apparent, however. The mostobvious is a level of frustration with established or traditional approaches that leavethe emotional side of human experience unacknowledged or marginalized. These,as Julie Livingston notes, tend to flatten the emotional texture of human expres-siveness. Even here, however, there are differences. For Barbara Rosenwein, forexample, an “emotional turn” grew out of the “linguistic turn,” whereas Jan Plam-per’s interest in emotions stemmed from dissatisfaction “with the overwhelming em-phasis on language in poststructuralist history-writing.” Like Barbara and Julie, Niki

14 Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia, 2012).15 Maria Gendron, Kristen A. Lindquist, Lawrence Barsalou, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Emotion

Words Shape Emotion Percepts,” Emotion 12, no. 2 (2012): 314–325. My thanks to Niki for distributingthis to the “Conversationalists.”

16 For the classic study of “universal” emotion words and facial expressions, see Paul Ekman andWallace V. Friesen, “Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology 17, no. 2 (1971): 124–129.

17 This is suggested by some of the articles in Cole and Thomas, Love in Africa. See my discussionof this book below.



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Eustace and Bill Reddy evoke Norbert Elias as having promoted a view of historythat tends to discard emotionality as history “progresses,” while Eugenia Lean un-derscores the reaction to Habermas’s influential formulation of a public sphere char-acterized by (male) rational discourse as a feature of modernity. Whatever the dif-ferences, it is this sense of frustration that strikes me as interesting. To be sure, thereis always an element of dissatisfaction in scholarly or intellectual development orcritique—why else would one be motivated to seek out new methods and depart fromestablished practices and paradigms? Here, however, I think it’s something more—dissatisfaction compounded by an ambitious desire to capture a level of experienceor expression that most historians would concede is simply beyond our reach, at leasthistorically. Indeed, I think many historians would express a wistful desire to un-derstand the emotional state of their subjects but at the same time simply refuse tobelieve that it’s possible. So my question has to do with the ways and means of“doing” history of emotions. And in particular I’d like to have you talk about thedistinction, already raised, and certainly central to this kind of discussion, between“experience” and “expression.” Clearly, except in the cases Julie describes, wherethere is someone sitting on the other side of the microphone, we lack any meaningfulcontact with the emotional experiences of people in past times. Where, then, do wedirect our analytical energies, and what can we expect in terms of recovering anemotional level of historical experience? Are expressions of emotion and emotional“styles,” often constructed, perpetuated, legitimated, and otherwise configured byreligious, political, or other ideological or collective agencies, the basic objects of ourinquiry? If so, to what degree does this suggest the additional qualification that weare largely limited to an arena somewhat removed from what Jan called “the visceralqualities,” or Julie’s “somatic sensations,” or the truly subjective that Eugenia al-ludes to?

Barbara H. Rosenwein: When someone (let’s imagine a woman) sits on the otherside of a microphone and says “I am in love,” why does that seem more meaningful—more revealing of her emotional experience—than when troubadour Peire Vidal (d.ca. 1204) sings “Through love I am so strongly full of love that all my wishes are oflove”?18 I will give four reasons why—and then I will problematize them. First, theperson on the other side of the microphone does not seem to be speaking in a genrewith fixed forms, rules, and topoi. Her words seem spontaneous. Second, we can seeher face, which appears sincere, as do her gestures and tone of voice. We can do noneof that with Vidal. Third, we can press her for more information, ask questions, andprobe. How can we do that with the long-dead Vidal? And fourth, we think we knowwhat she means because we too have been in love, and we can empathize. Of course,that means that we assume (perhaps an unwarranted assumption) that her love isjust like our love—or at least close enough. But when Vidal goes on to say “You arebeautiful to me, lovely lady . . . for I am in your lordship [senhoriu],” we know forsure that his “love” is not our “love.”19

18 Peire Vidal, “Be m’agrada,” in Vidal, Poesie, ed. D’Arco Silvio Avalle, 2 vols. (Milan, 1960), 1:22, lines 13–14: “Per amor sui ta fort enamoratz, / Que d’amor son totas mas voluntatz.”

19 Ibid., lines 17–18: “Bel m’es, bella domna, . . . / . . . quar sui en vostre senhoriu.”



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To the first point: Although we think we know when we are expressing our emo-tions “sincerely” and “spontaneously”—and when we are not—we largely fool our-selves. That’s because even our most “sincere” and “unpremeditated” expressionsare willy-nilly constrained by our emotional vocabulary and gestures. They areshaped as well by our conventions, values, and even implicit “theories” of emotion.“I am in love” is a convention, more or less a modern topos. We may try to saysomething new and different, but it is likely to be just as banal, though just as mean-ingful and charged with feeling. I don’t mean to denigrate our emotional expressions.But I do mean to question how utterly “ours” they are. And they are not ours alonefor good reason. Emotions are largely communicative tools, and if we are to un-derstand one another, we are wise to express ourselves through well-worn paths thatall of us are familiar with. So the fact that Peire Vidal wrote within a genre that hadrules and commonplaces does not obviate our recognizing that he was also expressingemotion.

But what of the non-verbal cues that we can see, that help us affirm (or deny) thetruth of someone’s emotion? Certainly this is the premise of psychologist Paul Ek-man’s training of airport workers for the Transportation Safety Administration: theycan look at a face and see the micro-movements that betray emotions otherwise notevident.20 They know if a person is lying. Well, perhaps. But usually our emotionsare not “true” or “false.” They are somewhere in the middle. At a conference inBerlin in 2009, neuropsychologist Robert Turner suggested that the “default con-dition of [the] human brain is [a] role-play state.”21 This does not mean that we arealways insincere. But it does suggest that sincerity is adaptable. Indeed, sincerityitself is a value that rises and falls in different periods. We happen to be in a periodthat values it highly.

Still, the TSA can probe, ask questions, get at emotional truths in ways that I asa medieval historian, certainly, can never do. This is indeed an issue. On the otherhand, with a poet like Peire Vidal, I have many poems to study. And if I look at thepeople he associated with—his emotional community, I would say—I have evenmore materials. I cannot know if Vidal himself was “really” in love with a “real” ladywho was “really” his lord. But I can know that he was expressing himself in a waythat was highly appreciated; that being in love with a lord was an emotional expec-tation within his community; and that Vidal certainly knew what “being in love”meant (at least on his own terms), whether or not he was “in love” at the moment.I’m not so sure that we can know much more than this about our lady on the otherside of the microphone.

However, we think we know what she is feeling better than we know how Vidalfelt because we assume that when she says “I’m in love,” she implies all the baggagethat we bring when we say the same words: for example, that she cares deeply aboutsomeone; that she is sexually involved with this person at some level; that the feelinghas longevity, even permanence. A good historian, however, knows that it is best notto make such assumptions. That is what makes our discipline so very different fromthe discipline of psychology, which tends to postulate that our emotions are universal

20 See, for example, “Faces, Too, Are Searched at U.S. Airports,” New York Times, August 17, 2006,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/17/washington/17screeners.html?pagewanted�all&_r�0.

21 Robert Turner, “Ritual Action Shapes Our Brains: An Essay in Neuroanthropology” (paper pre-sented at Habitus in Habitat I: Emotion and Motion, Berlin, July 9–12, 2009).



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and were the same in the past as they are in the present—only differently expressed.The ways in which emotions are expressed are, in fact, our only pathway to them.

I think I know what Jan Plamper meant when he said that he was unhappy “withthe overwhelming emphasis on language in poststructuralist history-writing.” But Iwould pin my own dissatisfaction not so much on “language” as on the nature ofmuch history-writing today. I’m not sure what to do about it. I am certainly notadvocating that we start writing anecdotally or sentimentally. But we do need to beless afraid of what the past is telling us about its own sentiments.

William M. Reddy: I very much agree with Barbara’s approach to this question.When I first began to read ethnographic research on emotions, I found that an-thropologists always reported the existence of emotional norms and of practicesaimed at inculcating such norms and sustaining conformity with them. I also foundthat anthropologists did not appear to have noticed the seeming universality of thispattern. Emotional vocabularies were found to be extremely diverse; emotionalnorms as well. But the existence of norms is ubiquitous, as are practices that aim atthe constant performance and enforcement of such norms. That is, emotional normsare not seen as easy to obey; and those who conform best to them are admired,whereas those who fail most obviously to conform are penalized or excluded fromcommunities. Peter Stearns and associates’ early work on what they called “emo-tionology,” that is, on manuals and how-to books aimed at disseminating emotionalcodes, was actually focused on the tip of a very large iceberg.

Attempting to theorize about this pattern, I have argued that emotions constitutea domain of effort for the individual. When a flight attendant says “Welcomeaboard,” she is expressing a feeling that she constantly practices. If she is not ableto carry off this performance with sufficient consistency—if she is subject to spellsof irritability or temper, for example—she will soon be discharged. The same pres-sure to conform was felt by ladies-in-waiting in the Heian imperial court. Sei Shon-agon’s Pillow Book, for example, is full of narratives of remarkable emotional per-formances. When one received a note with a little love poem on it, one was expectedto reply in kind, and quickly. The brilliance—and speed—of one’s reply were mea-sures of the depth of one’s feeling (not of “literary” skill). The first-century Romansenator Seneca warned of the terrible dangers one ran if one gave in, even the slight-est bit, to anger. Members of Parliament in the UK today, in contrast, blast eachother every session with noisy reproofs expertly delivered, yet always carefully ad-dressing the speaker and avoiding explicit insults.

Virtually all social roles are associated with emotional norms, and every humanbeing constantly engages in a kind of emotional self-shaping. But this effortful self-shaping is subject to failure; it is, in other words, simultaneously self-exploration. Ifthis approach has merit, then to ask what are the true or “gut” feelings of a personmay be simply to pose the wrong question. Virtually all the feelings an adult “ex-periences” are the result of training. When love of one’s spouse, for example, isgradually undermined by other feelings—of anger, resentment, distance, boredom—neither the love nor these contradictory emotions are what one “really” feels. None-theless, a time may come when the love performances required by the role of spouseno longer work. The effort becomes too great, and the results too pro forma. And



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then a new, seemingly more “real” emotion may be proclaimed, and its status en-hanced by the mere act of articulating it.

With respect to emotional norms, the gaps in historical documents can be as re-vealing as their content. I have been working on collections of family papers fromearly-nineteenth-century France. In one case, a captain in the gendarmerie stationedin Paris in the 1820s sent frequent warm and chatty letters to his sister-in-law in theprovinces, full of details about his life in the capital, his friendships, his visits tofashionable homes. But after he died suddenly in early 1830, the family learned thathe had an illiterate mistress, with whom he had had several children. She asked afriend to write for her, begging for money. We cannot say exactly what this captainfelt about his mistress and children, but we can be relatively sure that he sawsuch feelings as improper, or at least incompatible with the emotions of a well-bredbrother-in-law and officer. What remains unsaid can be eloquent.

Eugenia Lean: I want to add to the wonderful discussion started by Barbara andBill about the importance of norms and conventions in the shaping of emotions, andbring the issue of language back into the discussion in explicit terms. While I see whyJan might be frustrated with the overwhelming emphasis on language in poststruc-turalist history-writing, I want to question the idea that the history of emotions isindeed a way out of the “linguistic turn,” and caution that we not throw the baby outwith the bathwater when we problematize the 1990s focus on language and culture.Part of this may be a matter of semantics, and a problem with the implications ofthe language of “turn,” which has been nicely problematized in a recent AHR fo-rum.22 But it is worthwhile nonetheless to reiterate how much of the philosophicalinquiry behind the “linguistic turn” in history-writing (e.g., Foucault’s work on dis-course and knowledge/power) was actually inextricably related to interrogating thehistoricity of subjectivity, which in turn inspired the work of historians of gender,sexuality, the body, and by extension emotions. In this sense, I agree with Barbara’sassertion that the interest in the history of emotions emerged from the “linguisticturn,” and suggest that language is still a starting point for us to historicize the seem-ingly elusive realm of sensation. Indeed, for historians, text, and thus language, isoften our primary access to historical agents of the past, and we need to think crit-ically about both how text mediates our access to affect in the past, and how lan-guage—along with bodily practice (which is also historically constructed, and in thisway can be metaphorically read as a “text”)—mediated emotional experience for ourhistorical subjects. In terms of accomplishing the latter, the key methodological chal-lenge is not just to identify the words or expressions (textual or bodily) of affect, butto think about how a particular narrative or bodily expression moves from mererhetoric or empty gesture to become viscerally felt, somatically embodied, or to gainthe status of a social norm.

To this end, it is necessary to consider the material interests involved in renderingone narrative, or emotional gesture, compelling over another. Recent work done byscholars on the importance of “speaking bitterness” in highly emotive campaigns runby the Chinese Communist Party from the 1930s until the end of the Mao period

22 “AHR Forum: Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American Historical Review 117, no.3 (June 2012): 698–813.



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might prove illuminating. In these campaigns, Communist cadres seeking to mobilizepeasants, and other ordinary citizens, to turn against landlords and other “Enemiesof the People” found the ritual of “speaking bitterness” to be highly effective inliterally moving the masses to violence and reshaping social relationships in China’svillages and cities in profoundly fundamental ways, a key goal of the Communists.Traditionally, scholars have simply explained these sessions as “mob violence” orargued that brute force and/or politicization and social pressure were the key factorsin play. But more recently, historians and social scientists have been examining morecarefully the logic behind these staged and powerful campaigns to try to understandhow a participant could come to feel deeply the scripted-from-above sessions. Howdid participants come to sincerely hate and feel tremendous bitterness toward some-one—a local landowner, a previous employer—who for years had been a patron, aneighbor, and in some cases a friend or even a family member? Scholars are showingthat cadres crafted powerful narratives that were internalized by participantsthrough the ritualistic sessions of these campaigns.23 What was stunning about thesecampaigns is that while many people were indeed forced to participate and only paidlip service to the cause, others came to feel this newfound bitterness and anger sin-cerely or believe it viscerally as they went through the ritual of “speaking” and vi-olently acting out their bitterness. The narratives of bitterness no longer remainedmere rhetoric but became fundamental truths that shaped affect, behavior, and out-look, and indeed, the subjectivity of individuals, and of groups. To understand thatprocess, it seems, we need to pay attention to language (or narrative) but also con-sider how the emotional vocabulary became institutionalized through authoritativecadre policy and these public campaigns, and embodied by the people ritualisticallyparticipating in the collective action against the individual (often dramaticallythrough humiliating the targeted person in public). Affective narrative moved frommere rhetoric to become powerful discourse (in the true sense that Foucault meant)that shaped subjects on a fundamental level, often with terrifyingly violent reper-cussions.

As for the importance of thinking about ritual in this context, I’d like to movequickly from twentieth-century Communist history back a couple of millennia toChina’s classical Confucian tradition. Xun Zi, a Confucian-school philosopher of thethird century B.C., wrote that “sentiment” (qing) is fundamental to the organizationof human relationships (i.e., society is made up of a web of relationships of senti-ment), but that “sentiment” needs to be governed through ritual lest it devolve intoillicit and destructive forms of sentiment, namely, desire (yu).24 Ritual for Xun Ziincluded music, prescribed rules of social behavior, and, importantly, the regularstudy of texts or the writing of calligraphy. In other words, ritualized engagementwith music, social rules, language, and words (wen in Chinese) was seen as funda-mental in the cultivation of a moral human being, and his or her ability to engagesincerely and authentically in virtuous relations of sentiment that constituted themoral fabric of a harmonious society. If these ideas informed Chinese literati andlettered culture and social practice for centuries to come, for our purposes, Xun Zi’s

23 See, for example, Elizabeth J. Perry, “Moving the Masses: Emotion Work in the Chinese Rev-olution,” Mobilization: An International Journal 7, no. 2 (2002): 111–128.

24 For more on “sentiment” in Xun Zi’s writings, see Anthony C. Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire andthe Making of Fiction in Dream of the Read Chamber (Princeton, N.J., 1997), especially chap. 2.



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focus on ritual allows us to start thinking methodologically about how emotionalvocabulary might become truthful, embodied, institutionalized into norms and af-fective behavior. What “rituals” render certain emotions normative, meaningful, in-stinctive? It may be this process—perhaps what Bill refers to as “training” and even“self-shaping”—and the conditions that allow for such internalization that historiansof emotion need to pay attention to.

Julie Livingston: I have been slow to weigh in on this question because, as Bill said,it is a tough one. I am very much in agreement with what has already been said, andI think we all have a healthy respect for how difficult it is to enter the somatic spacehistorically, through the remnants of lives long past. And as I think has already beensuggested, the distinction between “experience” and “expression” (to use the Ed-itor’s provocative phrasing) is perhaps a misleading way to conceptualize affect. Itassumes a nature-versus-nurture binary that is too stark, too static, to capture thecomplexities of personhood as process. Bill has described what I might call the hab-itus of emotions, and Barbara emotional communities, and Eugenia has pointed tothe material interests, the questions of power and morality, that animate these his-tories, as well as to rituals as dense sites/events through which these dynamics ofcollective and individual sentiment are cultivated, ingrained, and furthered. Each ofyou has put it far better than I could.

I guess I have two points to add to the discussion. First, I think it helps to be abit more open in the ambitions and goals we have for our histories than was suggestedin the Editor’s question. I don’t see the history of emotions as only about gettinginside the hearts (or spleens or livers or what have you) of persons in the past. Surelythat is a wonderful aim, and there are different types and registers of texts and othersources that offer pathways in. If we think about (at least some) text as process, wecan perhaps get to some of the complex work of self-making amid purposefully cul-tivated emotional communities, while bearing in mind Eugenia’s earlier commentsand leaving the nature of that self open to historical specificity rather than assumingan individuated, interiorized self. I might point to the work of Jochen Hellbeck withSoviet diaries as exemplary for me of how one might trace that emotional habitusat work.25

But it need not be the only way in which we think about emotions. Contrast Hell-beck’s book with Dorothy Ko’s Cinderella’s Sisters, which uses material culture(shoes, binding cloths, etc.) together with texts, images, and diagrams to create ahistory of footbinding spanning a millennium.26 Ko writes in reverse, first clearingthe ground for a deep history by tackling an emotional history of nineteenth- andearly-twentieth-century reformers and missionaries through which the practice hasbecome an orientalist trope. This enables her to glimpse the desires (for feet, forexquisite shoes), the pain, the erotics, and the material interests and gendered proj-ects of the body. As she moves deeper into the past, the reader gains insights, some-times hazy but nonetheless revealing and evocative, into the feelings that animatedthis history. But there is no way to get even these wonderful glimpses, or to get themajor intellectual rewards she offers to a narrative about gender, class, medicine,

25 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).26 Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, Calif., 2005).



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etc., in China, without her first addressing the fetish of contemporary academic read-ers (us!) who are trained to feel revulsion in moral and aesthetic terms, rather thanerotic desire (or indifference or whatever other emotions), at the image of boundfeet. So Ko helps her readers understand their own emotions as historical products,and how those emotions have become naturalized as a moral position. This enablesher to braid together texts, images, and objects (the latter two she does not simplyreduce to texts) to offer fleeting evocations of feelings past.

Second, there are classic questions here about continuity and change. I am curiousabout how and why new affective norms, or moral sentiments, or moral passions areintroduced and cultivated, older ones discarded. I am not sure how we want to ac-count for changes in the emotional communities or emotional habitus, or for thatmatter for the huge amount of work that would need to go into maintaining emo-tional communities in the face of other forms of large-scale change.

Jan Plamper: When I said that my own trajectory to the history of emotions hadbegun with frustration with the linguistic imperialism of poststructuralist histori-ography, it was meant in a descriptive way about me in the early 2000s rather thanin a prescriptive way for us in the present.27 Today I am skeptical that the historyof emotions can recover somatic experience in the terms I then had in mind. To dwellon the historicizing question for just a moment, I too am fascinated by the diversityin pathways to the history of emotions even in a sample as small as the six of us.Having read Barbara et al.’s nuanced responses, it seems that one would need todifferentiate between regions of the world, disciplines (history, literary and visualstudies, etc.), and segments of social life (the arts, scholarship, popular culture, etc.).Here one might point to Ruth Leys’s genealogical work on the affective turn in“neuropolitical science” and other social and human sciences, all of which weredrawn to “affect” as a new anchor in “the real,” as a category, in Leys’s words, “in-dependent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is, prior to inten-tions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs—because they are nonsignifying, autonomicprocesses that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and mean-ing.”28 I still suspect that when all is said and done, the current wider boom in emo-tions will emerge as part of a “post-post” (post-poststructuralist, post-postmodern)rather than a “post” moment. Now, the emotion vs. expression distinction that theEditor brought up is critical. The distinction maps, as Julie has pointed out, ontolarger binaries, such as nature/culture. Getting out of this distinction and developinga truly holistic conceptual lens is exceedingly difficult, but it is not that no one hasever tried.29 I would like to home in on just one problem with especially Bill’s butalso Barbara’s proposed ways, as I understood them, out of the binary, which is in

27 For some others who share this trajectory, see, e.g., Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Introduction,” in Spie-gel, Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005),1–31, here 18–19; Lynn Hunt, “The Experience of Revolution,” French Historical Studies 32, no. 4 (2009):671–678, here 673–674. On the resurrection of the related important category of experience “as apretheorized, prediscursive, direct encounter with others, with society, or with the past,” see HaroldMah, “The Predicament of Experience,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 1 (2008): 97–119, here 99.

28 Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–472, here 437.29 See, e.g., Margot L. Lyon, “Missing Emotion: The Limitations of Cultural Constructionism in the

Study of Emotion,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 2 (1995): 244–263, esp. 258–259.



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no way meant to diminish their contribution but rather to celebrate it by demon-strating how the sharpest thinking on the issue also marks the limits of how wecan currently know feelings. Both Barbara and Bill adduce empirical data—fromhistoriography, ethnography, and everyday life—on the basis of which they distilluniversal aspects of what emotion actually is and then show how life-science find-ings corroborate these universal claims about emotion’s ontological status. ThusBarbara argues that our emotions are “somewhere in the middle” between sincereand insincere, some cultural conditioning notwithstanding (the value a given timeand place puts on sincerity), and in support cites neuroscientist Robert Turner (the“default condition of [the] human brain is [a] role-play state”). Bill calls our emo-tional role-playing in past and present “effortful self-shaping” and argues that it“is subject to failure; it is, in other words, simultaneously self-exploration.” Else-where he has grounded this universalizing claim in findings from cognitive and socialpsychology.30

At bottom, I understand both Barbara and Bill to be saying that scientific hy-potheses confirm their interpretation of historical data. Yet others could have in-terpreted these data differently or adduced different data in the first place. Theycould have cited competing scientific hypotheses in support. All of which suggeststhat it is problematic to invoke universalizing natural science to bolster contingenthumanities claims. And then again, the history of science and Science and Tech-nology Studies (STS) have been demonstrating for quite some time how deeply sci-ence is shaped by culture, politics, and so on. Take the recent rise in neuroscienceof the “resting state” (or default mode network, DMN) and its conceptualization ofthe brain as constantly active, even when one’s mind is wandering and during sleep,“a model in which variability in behaviour and perception are modulated by en-dogenous, somatic fluctuations” rather than by exogenous input as in the older stim-ulus-response schema.31 It has been shown how this novel neuroscientific paradigmof what the brain actually is harks back to the default mode of personal computers,and, what is more, “that resting state research employs tropes of industriousness andthe desire for ‘no-backlog’ that are of a piece with today’s discourses regarding neo-liberalism.”32 There is at least an elective affinity between the image of a brain thatis never entirely switched off and our age of smartphones, the erosion of leisure time,and globalized 24/7 supply-chain management. Who says, then, that Barbara’s andBill’s choice of a specific neuroscientific finding isn’t conditioned by a contemporarypredilection—in Bill’s case, for example, if I understand correctly, a distaste forpolitical regimes that penalize ambiguity, hybridity, fluidity, and indeterminacy? Ihave heard Bill say in public that he “only choose[s] the neuroscience that fits [his]politics,” with his tongue probably placed less firmly in cheek than the audience’s

30 See, in particular, Reddy’s use of Daniel Wegner’s studies on the difficulties associated with mentalcontrol, which “introduces an ironic monitoring process that increases the accessibility of the verythoughts that are least desired in consciousness,” and of Margaret Clark’s pointing to “some clear ev-idence that choosing to express an emotion or to cognitively rehearse it may intensify or even createthe actual experience of that emotion while choosing to suppress it or not think about it may have theopposite effect.” Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 29, 104.

31 Felicity Callard and Daniel S. Margulies, “The Subject at Rest: Novel Conceptualizations of Selfand Brain from Cognitive Neuroscience’s Study of the ‘Resting State,’ ” Subjectivity 4, no. 3 (2011):227–257, here 247.

32 Ibid., 240–241, 245.



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laughter suggested.33 In short, I wonder if we end up making a circular move whenwe mobilize neuroscience. Perhaps we never got beyond Hayden White’s axiom that“there are no extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflictingconceptions of the historical process.”34 Perhaps the best we can still do is to makeour ideology—our politics and ethics—transparent. Perhaps I just have to embracemy dissatisfaction with the overwhelming emphasis on language in poststructuralisthistory-writing and learn to feel happily frustrated.

Nicole Eustace: The expression vs. experience question is central to the study of thehistory of emotions. I set aside the quest to access and assess emotional experienceearly in my research for a combination of practical, theoretical, and historical rea-sons. First there’s the practical problem of how historians can ever determine whatpeople in the past were experiencing internally. One historical example of this puzzlefrom early America helped clarify my thinking. In eighteenth-century Virginia, awealthy slaveholder named William Byrd lost a son. He recorded the event in hisdiary without making any mention of grief. One historian looked at this written re-cord in 1979 and concluded, in the vein of Philippe Aries, that early modern parentsfelt nothing like modern love for their children. A decade later, in 1987, anotherhistorian looked at this same case and noted that while Byrd expressed no griefdirectly, he reported debilitating stomach complaints at just the time of his son’sdeath. This historian inferred from the evidence that Byrd had somatized his un-derlying grief, reporting emotional pain as physical suffering. These divergent con-clusions each had merit, and the question was how to weigh them against each other.This is the practical problem with trying to gauge emotional experience. How canwe accurately judge what people in the past felt when, like William Byrd, they them-selves may not even have known? As I noted in my first response, another decadelater, the work of William Reddy provided invaluable theoretical help by offeringa way to think through the gap between language and experience, by focusing on thefact that the differential expression of universal emotional experiences provides auseful index of power relations. Again, Reddy’s motto: “Emotional control is the realsite of the exercise of power.” In the case of the Byrds, the key fact may be thatWilliam Byrd’s wife, Lucy, did shed tears for their son, and that William Byrd re-corded in detail his efforts to remonstrate with her to control her emotions. ToBarbara’s points about sincerity, as a scholar I can never know what William Byrd“really” felt (if indeed he himself did), but I can very usefully look for patterns inemotional expression and regulation that reveal much valuable information aboutsocial organization and political control.

Finally, there is a historical insight specific to the eighteenth century that mayaddress the Editor’s question about the construction of emotional styles. Moderntheorizing about emotion sometimes presupposes that each party to an emotionalexchange brings to the interaction a stable and autonomous identity that can beexpressed or repressed, but not fundamentally altered, by the act of emoting. Yet

33 This was during the Q&A following his keynote lecture “Are Emotions Like Language?” at theconference “Learning to Feel,” Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, April 14, 2011.

34 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore,1973), 26.



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this is not at all how people believed that emotion functioned in the eighteenthcentury. Eighteenth-century actors could not conceive of a self entirely separate fromthe social order, and so their expressions of emotion could never be entirely personal.Rather, they were inherently relational. We can see this distinction clearly in theeighteenth-century vocabulary of the self. Consider, in this light, the words “dis-position” and “personality.” While “disposition” was a word familiar to most in theeighteenth century, “personality” was not. “Personality” is formed from the rootword “person”; intrinsic to its very structure is the idea of autonomous identity.According to definition 4b in the Oxford English Dictionary, “personality” does notmerely denote “traits of character,” but more fully describes “that quality or as-semblage of qualities which makes a person what he is, as distinct from other persons;distinctive personal or individual character.” “Disposition,” on the other hand, de-rives from a very nearly antithetical root. It is based on the word “position,” andindeed the first definition of “disposition” in the OED refers to “arrangement, order;relative position of the parts or elements of a whole.” Fundamental to the word“disposition,” therefore, is the idea that the self exists only in relation to other selves,that a person’s “bent of mind” reflects not his or her autonomous individuality, butrather his or her position vis-a-vis a collective whole. The public social impact ofputatively personal expressions of emotion becomes hard to ignore if we pause tonote the way eighteenth-century subjects thought about the self. In fact, the eigh-teenth-century notion of “disposition” corresponds closely to the concept of the sub-ject position as articulated by Linda Alcoff. This concept combines in a single termthe creation of self and the distribution of power, making it clear that each is in-extricably linked to the other. Here a sociological perspective on emotions as laborperformed in the service of the group can help us grasp that the expression of emo-tion can never be isolated as a private description of internal experience, but mustnecessarily be understood as a public comment on—and creation of—external socialrelations.35

AHR Editor: Would Bill or Barbara or anyone else like to respond to Jan’s commenton neuroscientific literature?

Barbara H. Rosenwein: Yes, thank you for the invitation to respond to Jan’s cri-tique of my use—and by extension, historians’ use—of modern neuroscientific lit-erature. In my view, his critique contains much truth. But it is not the whole truth.

It is true that when I cited the work of Robert Turner, not by chance the son ofthe famous anthropologist Victor Turner, I was using a shortcut to argue a point.As yet, the neuroscience of emotions is in its infancy (as is the history of emotions,and for much the same reasons), and one can find numerous conflicting schools of

35 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (NewYork, 1962); Michael Zuckerman, “The Family Life of William Byrd,” in Zuckerman, Almost ChosenPeople: Oblique Biographies in the American Vein (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 97–114, esp. 104–109; KennethA. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).For an explication of the term “subject position,” see Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking forOthers,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991–1992): 5–32. See also Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self:Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 2004), xviii.



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thought (as our own conversation has shown to be the case with historians of emo-tions). We can—we do—choose our schools. Ultimately, as Jan suggests, the scienceof today will no doubt be considered as absurd as the phlogiston theory now seemsto us.

Moreover, today’s science, like everything else that is human, is largely sociallyconstructed. The metaphors that it uses—“areas of the brain that ‘light up’ ” or “rest-ing states”—are informed by the electric, computer-driven world we live in.

Finally, neuroscience, like so many other sciences concerned with emotions, lo-cates emotions in the brain and neural systems. When an fMRI test shows a richlyoxygenated area of my brain “induced” by a picture or the name of my beloved, thereis a tendency to claim that scientists thereby have gained a better understanding oflove in general.36 However exciting this idea may be (mainly for new drug therapies),it is quite inadequate emotionally: it doesn’t tell us what love means to me, let alonewhat it has meant (and has not meant, and with what other feelings it has beenassociated) in the past or will mean in the future.

Nevertheless, it shows something. That’s the part that I think Jan has left out. Ifind it helpful to think of our nerves, muscles, and physiology in general as thefoundation of what, for want of a better term, I call affective potential. This potentialis universal, but it manifests itself in different ways at different times in responseto the conditions, assumptions, values, goals, and everything else that makes up hu-man society and political life. The notion of affective potential cautions us againstreifying emotions as “love,” “anger,” and the like and encourages us to seek thevarious ways in which affective potential manifests itself (i.e., becomes emotions)in each culture. Sometimes I am able to know what those emotions are from a localtheory. For example, Thomas Aquinas’s passiones animae are handy guides towhat terms were considered affectively charged in the thirteenth century.37 At othertimes I can find no contemporary theory and must construct it myself, for exampleby seeing what words, bodily movements (blushing, weeping), and so on were con-nected to the heart—or, depending on the group, the gut, the liver, or parts of themind.

Today’s scientific studies help us know something about human (and probablyanimal) affective potential as well as how it is manifested in our own culture. Sincewe cannot escape our own categories, since we historians (too) are creatures of ourage, we must use the tools, the words, and the metaphors available to us. I welcome,then, the ways of thinking that neuroscience can provide, even if I know that thoseways are provisional.

Nicole Eustace: In his recent comment, Jan critiques historians’ turn to neurosci-ence by saying that “it is problematic to invoke universalizing natural science tobolster contingent humanities claims.” Barbara counters this by saying, “I find ithelpful to think of our nerves, muscles, and physiology in general as the foundation

36 For a recent summary of such studies, see Stephanie Ortigue, Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli, NisaPatel, Chris Frum, and James W. Lewis, “Neuroimaging of Love: fMRI Meta-Analysis Evidence towardNew Perspectives in Sexual Medicine,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 7, no. 11 (2010): 3541–3552.

37 Thomas wrote about the passiones animae inThomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia2ae 22–48. Athorough introduction to his theory and his emotions words is Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on thePassions: A Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 22–48 (Cambridge, 2009).



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of what, for want of a better term, I call affective potential. This potential is universal,but it manifests itself in different ways at different times in response to the condi-tions, assumptions, values, goals, and everything else that makes up human societyand political life.”

While Jan is quite right to observe that the history of emotion was framed at theoutset by a debate over whether emotions were biological in basis and universalnature vs. cultural in conception and made manifest only through discourse, I thinkthat historians (and the anthropologists and biologists who have influenced them)are trying to move past this false binary. In fact, as Bill argued in his foundationalwork, there is no necessary conflict between the linguistic and the biological studyof emotion. To the contrary, each is fundamentally interconnected and can performcrucial work in informing the other.

Quite simply, cutting-edge neuroscientists are discovering what linguistic theoristshave been arguing all along: that language fundamentally shapes both the expressionand the experience of emotion. There is no culture-free acontextual means of ex-periencing or accessing emotion. Rather, conceptual processing and the cognitivecategorization of affect fundamentally shape the perception of emotion. PsychologistLisa Feldman Barrett is doing great work in this area.38

The really important point here is not that there is no biological basis for emotion,but rather that the neurochemical perception of emotion is formed through lan-guage. Feldman and many others continue to see that particular brain regions do playshaping roles in affective experience. She finds, for example, that the amygdala doesincrease sensitivity to negative stimuli. Feldman’s contribution is to emphasize thathow that negative stimulus is perceived will be determined by the context createdby available linguistic concepts. In other words, whether a negative stimulus is ex-perienced and expressed as terror or anxiety, sadness or despair, or any of dozensof other concepts will be determined by the terminology available. It is this constantlyunfolding interplay between the common biological matrices on which emotions arebased and the highly contingent processes of social and cultural construction bywhich they are finally shaped that lends emotions their interpretive utility for his-torians.39

Emotion should be recognized as a key category of historical analysis. If all peoplehave the potential to feel the same emotions, then patterns in how emotions areexpressed and attributed, in who expresses which emotions when and to whom, canbecome a key index of power relations in any society. The crucial point to take fromthe neurosciences is that there is a biological basis for emotion, making the chro-nological and cultural variations in its manifestation all the more meaningful. Farfrom turning away from language, then, historians can and must work to discoverthe contributions of culture, of both prescription and description, to the availableemotional lexicon of any given time and place (or, to use Barbara’s formulation, ofany given community). In my first book, Passion Is the Gale, I took this position to

38 A quick read is Gendron, Lindquist, Barsalou, and Barrett, “Emotion Words Shape EmotionPrecepts.”

39 See Lisa Feldman Barrett, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Seth L. Duncan, Scott L. Rauch, and ChristopherI. Wright, “The Amygdala and the Experience of Affect,” Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience2, no. 2 (2007): 73–83.



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its logical conclusion by re-creating a detailed lexicon of eighteenth-century Anglo-American words for emotion.40

By showing social and biological scientists how many historically specific culturalassumptions are encoded in their very efforts to test for emotion, historians cancontribute invaluably to the overall study of emotion. Scientists need to understandthat the reason they can’t locate “anger” in any one neural location is that the word(and the concept it encodes) is infinitely culturally malleable. Yet, on the other hand,we should not go to the extreme of denying that there are loci for the processing ofstimuli and that there are biological commonalities that underlie affect. Without thatcrucial caveat, the historical variability of emotion becomes meaningless, the simpleresult of random electrical activity in the brain.

Julie Livingston: Nicole, I think, does an excellent job of explaining, as does Bar-bara. It makes sense to me. And the doubled move of placing science within ratherthan opposed to culture helps to offer it up as a tool for historical interpretation.

But, that said, there are other ways of understanding that I am hoping you all mighthelp me to align with this neuroscientific tool. It seems to me that neurosciencenonetheless presumes that a feeling/emotion is an experience of inner life, one thatcan then be interpreted by a cultural self, and communicated to others in languagethat is also of course never pre-cultural. But as I believe that Eugenia and otherspointed out earlier, this presumes an individuation of the self and an ontology of theemotional experience that might not make any sense within a particular historicalcontext. Certainly it does not in, say, nineteenth-century Bechuanaland, where in-dividual and dividual personhood (to use McKim Marriott’s term) coexist in explicitdynamic tension, and where they are somaticized in the gut, liver, waist, or heart,but rarely the head. This is not to say that neuroscience is “wrong”—but rather toask what is gained and what is lost when a model such as neuroscience, which ispredicated on a different body, a different person, and a different model of sociality,is brought to bear on understandings of a given historical context?

I mean this to be a genuine question. I think we have talked a bit about the gains—but what of the losses?

William M. Reddy: It is certainly the case that the vast majority of neuroscienceresearch is carried out with participants drawn from well-informed and cooperativepopulations such as university undergraduates or clients receiving treatment in clin-ical settings. Many experimental strategies, in addition, rely on “self-report,” inwhich participants describe or rank-order their own emotional responses in variousways, acting as isolated modern subjects. Many findings and research paradigms aretherefore culture-specific, and cannot be taken at face value. A Balinese person ofthe 1980s, as described by Unni Wikan, might well refuse to cooperate in a test usingthe disturbing emotional images of the widely utilized International Affective Pic-ture System (IAPS), for example.41 If she did participate, she would be likely to

40 “Toward a Lexicon of Eighteenth-Century Emotion,” in Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emo-tion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 481–486.

41 Unni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Chicago, 1990); P. J. Lang,M. M. Bradley, and B. N. Cuthbert, International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Affective Ratings ofPictures and Instruction Manual (Gainesville, Fla., 2005).



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systematically underreport all negative responses. Experience of negative emotions,for Wikan’s Balinese informants, directly endangered one’s health and rendered onevulnerable to black magic, which was the cause of over half of all deaths, in their view.Her informants hardly regarded themselves as emotionally separate or autonomous.

However, there are also many findings of neuroscience that are not at all depen-dent for their validity on the cultural background of participants. Take, for example,the widespread recent reporting of “top-down” processing effects. In sensory andemotional perception, it appears that rough sketches of stimuli are rushed forwardto higher processing levels, and these higher levels respond by sending signals backdown the processing chain, selectively activating likely identifications, to speed rec-ognition. Thus, before one has heard the full first syllable of a phrase, semanticprocessing is already underway, rushing back out, to auditory processing regions,guesses about the segmentation of the sounds into words based on the likely meaningof the utterance. Such top-down processing also occurs in vision. The prefrontalcortex’s modulation of amygdala activation appears to represent a similar top-downemotional processing.42

It has been noted that there are just as many efferent pathways in the brain (goingoutward from prefrontal regions to sensory cortices) as there are afferent ones (com-ing inward from sensory to prefrontal regions). It seems highly unlikely that such amassive fact about brain architecture could be culturally shaped. If these findingsabout top-down modulation of perception continue to be confirmed, it suggests, infact, how deeply influential our learned “cultural” background can be on every actof perception. “Influential,” however, is not the same thing as “constructing fromscratch.” This kind of finding can be a useful corrective to the excesses of the “lin-guistic turn.” There is no reason why our notion of “culture” or of cultural variationneeds to remain tied to a notion of language that is a century out of date.

Barbara H. Rosenwein: Julie is right to point out that neuroscience is limited. Itis limited even with respect to our emotions, let alone the emotions of the past. (For,as I hardly need point out, no one has managed to give an fMRI to a nineteenth-century Bechuanalander!) Although at the moment the neurosciences seem to dom-inate scientific investigation, such was not always the case, not even a few years ago,when Paul Ekman’s studies of emotion as facial expression were extraordinarily pop-ular. Alongside those were studies of the chemistry of emotion (now largely sub-sumed under the category of neurochemistry) and of various aspects of the auto-

42 Some recent articles discussing top-down processing are M. Bar et al., “Top-Down Facilitationof Visual Recognition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 103, no. 2 (2006): 449–454;Eiling Yee and Julie C. Sedivy, “Eye Movements to Pictures Reveal Transient Semantic Activationduring Spoken Word Recognition,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition32, no. 1 (2006): 1–14; Stephanie D. Preston and R. Brent Stansfield, “I Know How You Feel: Task-Irrelevant Facial Expressions Are Spontaneously Processed at a Semantic Level,” Cognitive, Affective& Behavioral Neuroscience 8, no. 1 (2008): 54–64; Nazanin Derakshan and Michael W. Eysenck, “Anx-iety, Processing Efficiency, and Cognitive Performance: New Developments from Attentional ControlTheory,” European Psychologist 14, no. 2 (2009): 168–176; James J. Gross, Gal Sheppes, and HeatherL. Urry, “Emotion Generation and Emotion Regulation: A Distinction We Should Make (Carefully),”Cognition and Emotion 25, no. 5 (2011): 765–781; Karina S. Blair and R. J. R. Blair, “A CognitiveNeuroscience Approach to Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Phobia,” Emotion Review 4, no.2 (2012): 133–138.



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nomic nervous system. I suspect that studies of DNA and emotions will soon becomevery popular.43

These sorts of studies do not have direct bearing on Bechuanaland or Francia orpre–World War I Russia. But they are nevertheless pioneering and suggestive anduseful, though, no doubt, more for understanding ourselves and our own culture thanfor our historical inquiries.

William M. Reddy: Jan quotes me as saying, at a conference in Jerusalem in spring2011, that “I only choose the neuroscience that fits my politics.” I remember themoment. But I believe my comment was in response to a question about the enor-mous quantity and variety of neuroscience research. I did not mean to speak tongue-in-cheek, either, if memory serves. Perhaps I did not explain myself well, but whatI implied was that my “politics” are consonant with my epistemological stance, astance grounded in interpretive method. My method derives from “hermeneutics,”in that I attempt to understand human existence by examining the intentions ofpersons, what they mean to say, what they mean to do. “Intentions,” “persons,” and“meaning” in this context need more explaining than I can attempt here. But, to bebrief, I try to avoid relying on reductionistic formulae. Such reductionistic formulaewould include, for example, those of classical Pavlovian behaviorism (based on stim-ulus-response analysis) as well as those of a certain kind of hard-line Marxism orthose of neoclassical economics (where class interest and comparative net advantageare offered as hidden, even unconscious, explanations for all kinds of behavior).Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” taken at face value, is also, forme, too reductionistic. Rather than reduce intentionality to a few simple algorithms,to puppeteering by the unconscious, or to a mere side effect of a discursive structure(as Foucault seemed to do), I propose that a new class of intentions be added to themix, that is, intentional shaping of one’s own emotions.

Neuroscientific publications bristle with jargon, and their tone of voice is governedby a certain caution and a certain politeness. An outsider who wishes to find her wayfaces a steep learning curve. As a result, many scholars turn to books by neurosci-entists aimed at explaining developments in the field to a larger public. To rely onthese works is a serious mistake. The names are well-known: LeDoux, Damasio, andmost recently Eagleman.44 These authors tend consistently to naturalize Western,especially North American, cultural patterns and to provide accounts of the brainbasis of behavior that make these naturalized patterns appear to be genetically pre-programmed. Works by Daniel Gross and Ruth Leys, among others, have offeredsharply worded critiques of these popularizations.45

But the multidisciplinary field of neuroscience includes many who display ahealthy skepticism about the reliability of current methods and about the validity ofcurrent explanations. These experts seldom write for larger audiences, I suspect,

43 Already the database PsychInfo yields 32 results for a simple search on the keywords “DNA” and“emotion.”

44 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York,1996); Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1998);David M. Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York, 2011).

45 Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science(Chicago, 2006); Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object IsIt?,” Representations 110, no. 1 (2010): 66–104.



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because they are, quite reasonably, too cautious to attempt such a daunting task. Ifind that many among them possess an outlook congenial to my own methodologicalcommitments, and thus to my “politics.” These experts include James J. Gross, LuizPessoa, James A. Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Richard J. Davidson, amongothers.46 Schooled by such skeptics, one can begin to read the works of neurosci-entists without feeling that one has to globally accept or globally reject an author’scurrent experimental “paradigm” (a word they constantly use in an effort to suggestthe very limited scope of their explanations). One simply becomes fascinated by thevarious possibilities that experimental evidence invites us to consider.

Jan will remember another moment in Jerusalem, when I was asked how I couldaccept the limits that neuroscience tends to impose on the possible variation in hu-man cultural forms. My response was that I was consistently impressed with how fewlimits neuroscientists have been able to find. And I remember Jan nodding in agree-ment. (This comment is in accord with Nicole’s most recent post, as well.) Becauseof my methodological commitments, I am impressed that ethnographic and historicalresearch consistently discovers communities engaged in managing emotions. Groupsmake constant efforts to regulate their members’ emotional responses and emotionalhabits. Everywhere, it appears, some emotions (a different set in each case) areconsidered wrong (even though they may “feel” good) and others bad (because ofhow they “feel”). I would be delighted to hear of research that has turned up acounterexample to this generalization.

Pity, for example, was greatly admired in eighteenth-century Europe and NorthAmerica, and enjoyed, even relished, by many; but it has gradually evolved into afeeling with negative, judgmental implications. Pity used to be approved and feltgood, and now it is perhaps viewed as neutral (neither inherently good nor bad), butalso as not pleasurable in itself. Emotions, in short, change over time, and are po-litically charged. Elsewhere I have attempted to define emotional suffering. I won’ttry to repeat all that here. However, because so much suffering seems to result fromemotional management attempts gone awry (such as, for example, the emotionalmanagement of patriotism and terror in France in the 1790s, or the consistent crim-inalization of “unnatural” sexual acts by Christian states), I have proposed that wetake a stance, as Jan put it (characterizing my politics), against political regimes that“penalize ambiguity, hybridity, fluidity, and indeterminacy.” Thanks to Jan for rais-ing the issue.

Jan Plamper: By way of preface, let me emphasize how much admiration I have forthe work of everyone involved in this conversation, and how much easier it is to enteran evolving field than to create one almost from scratch, as Bill and Barbara (andthe Stearnses) did. I have the utmost respect for their pioneering achievements, theirpresent work, and the generosity with which they are engaging everyone else, myselfincluded, in this conversation.

As for the use of life science in the history of emotions, first, the responses to mylast intervention make it sound as though it isn’t the universalizing potential that

46 For starters, I suggest Richard J. Davidson, “Seven Sins in the Study of Emotion: Correctives fromAffective Neuroscience,” Brain and Cognition 52, no. 1 (2003): 129–132; or Luiz Pessoa, “On the Re-lationship between Cognition and Emotion,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (2008): 148–158.



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historians are after when they turn to the neurosciences. But this is not true. It isprecisely universalism that historians are seeking. When humanities scholars—or,for that matter, experts on education and law enforcement or anti-feminists—say“neuroscience has shown that . . . ,” they make a claim to more truth-value than theywere ready to make some twenty years ago during postmodernism’s heyday. We livein pomophobic times. I am not convinced by the argument that these neuroscientifichypotheses will eventually become dated. It only makes sense to turn to them in thefirst place if you believe that they are robust and will stand the test of time, morelike the Pythagorean theorem than the phlogiston theory, and if you believe that theyapply universally, including to ninth-century Francia and nineteenth-century Bech-uanaland. The decision about what will stand the test of time has to be made ac-cording to life-science criteria—internal, external, and ecological validity as well asreplicability are key here—and as Bill reminds us, this decision had better not bebased on popularizers like Damasio, but rather on individual articles and meta-anal-yses of multiple existing studies, the gold standard in the sciences. My general senseof emotions neuroscience is that it has yet to produce sufficiently robust knowledgefor us to exploit. Consider the three neuroscientific hypotheses about emotions mostpopular in the humanities, Joseph LeDoux et al.’s two roads to fear, Antonio Dama-sio et al.’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH), and Giacomo Rizzolatti et al.’s mirrorneuron hypothesis. At the time of this writing, in fall 2012, it looks like not one ofthese will survive, and it is not just that they are being fine-tuned and improved, asso often happens in science, amounting to scientific progress, but that they are ac-tually false.47

Second, if the universal truth that one distills turns out to be that all humans—Iwill get to non-human animals in a moment—have “affective potential,” I wonderabout the added value of such a broad claim, as I heard it, for the historical discipline.The disciplinary convention of history is presently one that focuses on smaller truths,on truth claims over more circumscribed domains. At the end of the day, history aswe know it is ideographic. The inclusion of non-human animals increases this prob-lem manifold, for where among non-human animals do we draw the line? Whichorganisms possess no “affective potential”? Given the expansionist logic inherent inthe claim, we will end up discussing the “affective potential” of bacteria and dungbeetles, much as the “new vitalists” or “new materialists” in neuropolitical scienceare currently debating the agency of bacteria and dung beetles.48 The ethical andpolitical implications are anything but trivial: if bacteria and dung beetles possess

47 For an early and a recent critique of LeDoux’s “two roads to fear” hypothesis, see, respectively,Ian Hacking, “By What Links Are the Organs Excited?,” Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1998, 11–12;and the meta-analysis by Luiz Pessoa and Ralph Adolphs, “Emotion Processing and the Amygdala: Froma ‘Low Road’ to ‘Many Roads’ of Evaluating Biological Significance,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11(November 2010): 773–782. For meta-analytic critiques of the SMH and the mirror neuron hypothesisrespectively, see Barnaby D. Dunn, Tim Dalgleish, and Andrew D. Lawrence, “The Somatic MarkerHypothesis: A Critical Evaluation,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30, no. 2 (2006): 239–271;Gregory Hickok and Marc Hauser, “(Mis)understanding Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology 20, no. 14(2010): R593–R594; Vittorio Gallese, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Cecilia Heyes, Gregory Hickok, andMarco Iacoboni, “Mirror Neuron Forum,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 4 (2011): 369–407,here 370–371, 373–375.

48 See William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, N.C., 2011), 24 (bacteria), 26 (dungbeetles).



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agency (or “affective potential”), they enter the purview of human empathy andbecome as worthy of protection as human animals. This in turn influences thekinds of difficult choices that privilege human animals, for instance in approvingan animal experiment deemed necessary for the development of a new drug. Thereare of course those who do not want to privilege human animals—fair enough. I dowant to privilege them, which makes “affective potential” incompatible with mypolitics.

Third, most of today’s neuroscience of emotions does downplay intentionality,meaning, agency, and signification through language—which brings me to Bill’s com-ments. Neuroscience must in fact downplay these dimensions; otherwise the studyof emotions could never have conformed to the rules of laboratory science as itdeveloped in the late nineteenth century.49 Neuroscience epistemology differs fromhistorical epistemology in generating truth claims for small domains that stand in forlarger ones, and “reductionism” is no term of abuse but rather the logic governingits experimental designs. The differences between our human science discipline ofhistory and the life sciences are best spelled out as clearly as possible and in as muchdetail as is necessary for each particular case. Bill is right to remind me of my noddingin Jerusalem in agreement with his statement that neuroscience findings impose fewlimits on the mind-boggling variety of human culture. I hasten to add that I havespeculated in public that several areas of neuroscience—functional integration, neu-roplasticity, and social neuroscience—currently look as though genuine cooperationwith historians might become possible and would produce added value in how weunderstand the past.50 For example, functional integration—the finding that not just,say, the amygdala but various areas of the brain interact during fear-processing(some differences in intensity of activation notwithstanding)—rather than functionalsegregation might shed new light on decision-making in the past. It might allow fora truly, for want of a better term, “cogmotive” concept of decision (someday we willneed to invent a holistic neologism that leaves behind both the “cognitive” and “emo-tional” stems) that will permit us to better make sense of why, for instance, middle-and upper-class Mexican, Western European, and North American students in 1968chose an ideology, Marxism, that ran counter to their class background—a choicethat defies Marxist and rational-choice explanations.51 How can we better come toterms with the rage and the murky feeling of injustice that pervades their first-personaccounts of 1968? But all of this is tentative, as functional integration is not robustenough for our purposes.

I submit, then, that we hold off on using neuroscience findings until they acquirethe degree of robustness that we depend on in a humanities discipline like history.And that when we do start using neuroscience findings, we do so in full awarenessof their specific epistemology, which includes reductionist experimental designs, irondistinctions between true/false, and universal claims to truth.

49 On this see Otniel E. Dror’s work, e.g., “The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions inAnglo-American Physiology, 1900–1940,” Isis 90, no. 2 (1999): 205–237.

50 See Plamper, Geschichte und Gefuhl, 287–293.51 “Cogmotive” is derived from “cogmotion” in Douglas Barnett and Hilary Horn Ratner, “Intro-

duction: The Organization and Integration of Cognition and Emotion in Development,” Journal of De-velopmental Child Psychology 67, no. 3 (1997): 303–316. I first encountered it in Reddy, The Navigationof Feeling, 15.



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Eugenia Lean: I must confess that I am far less familiar with the field and findingsof neuroscience than some of you clearly are. So my comments are very much comingfrom my status as an outsider, and will address the issue of drawing from the fieldsof life science that is indeed defined by certain epistemological claims that are prob-lematic (as Jan points out) and by assumptions about the body that are historicallyspecific (as Julie rightly points to). These reservations are important to me as a Chinahistorian. In terms of the medical tradition that dominates much of the history thatI study, the idea that emotions are to be located and managed by the brain and one’sneurons is quite foreign. In what by the twentieth century came to be referred to as“Traditional Chinese Medicine,” a living and widely practiced medical system eventoday, the kidney—not the amygdala—is identified as crucial in governing emotions.The kidney is seen to store the body’s vital energy, or qi, whose flow is governed bya physiological mechanism or medium referred to as “fire,” which then heats up one’sqi, causing the circulation and inflammation of one’s emotions.52

All this said, I wonder if we should reject engagement with neuroscience com-pletely, however fraught that engagement might be. I have found this discussion andsome of Bill’s writings very thought-provoking. As Bill and Nicole have pointed out,it does seem to have the potential to offer a method for identifying how the historyof emotions might provide a way (if not an absolute way) out of the excesses of the“linguistic turn.” And yet, what about the challenges of using neuroscience, as Janand Julie have rightly cautioned us about?

The discussion has led me to think about whether it might be productive to ap-proach neuroscience in a way that our colleagues in the history of medicine, andmore generally the history of science, approach modern biomedicine and science. Inother words, many of our colleagues in the history of medicine are extremely com-mitted to historicizing, and thus dismantling, the universalistic claims, epistemo-logical strategies, and fundamental assumptions about the body that were historicallyused by biomedical practitioners and advocates in the late nineteenth and the twen-tieth century (and are still used today) to advance biomedicine above all other formsof healing, squelching highly pluralistic marketplaces of healing throughout theworld. Yet even as historians of medicine seek to historicize certain knowledge re-gimes (whether it is biomedicine or, for that matter, Traditional Chinese Medicine),I am not sure they would (or can) deny that there nonetheless exists a long historyof efficacious treatment and healing built on those very knowledge systems that areso historically specific. In other words, while modern biomedicine and TraditionalChinese Medicine diverge radically in their understanding of the body, they bothhave a long clinical history of providing effective if widely divergent strategies todetect illness, deal with childbirth, heal (at times different) symptoms, and so on.There thus seems to be a recognition that while we do not have to accept univer-salistic claims of either biomedicine or Traditional Chinese Medicine (and by ex-tension, accept the possibility of pluralistic and competing views of the body andhealing), we can still appreciate that within their specific regimes of comprehendingand treating the body, there are effective strategies of “reading” physiological phe-nomena and treating them. I believe that Jan used the term “smaller truths.” While

52 Hugh Shapiro, “The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea in Republican China,” Positions: East Asia CulturesCritique 6, no. 3 (1998): 551–596.



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neuroscience may not be as robust as his standards might demand (again, I am writ-ing as an outsider on this point and am taking his word on this; I also wonder if ourdemands of robustness stem from our discomfort at considering the possibility ofplural ways of seeing the body/material world), can we not appreciate the “littletruths” or insights—granted, framed from a specific view of the body—that detecttop-down physiological manifestations of emotions, or even affective potential (with-out having to accept that we then need to believe that dung beetles have affectivepotential)?

I am certainly in no position to verify neuroscience, and discern what is lasting ofneuroscience. Yet it strikes me that a careful engagement with neuroscience, as manyof you seem to be doing, can be fruitful or inspiring as we think about how aspectsof neuroscience—or other discourses on the physiological manifestation of emotionsfound in other medical traditions—might allow us as historians to better identify atwhat point language, culture, and power might intervene to shape bodily or somaticexperiences of emotion, give them meaning and significance, and inform how anentire system of treatment and community gets built around them. In turn, and im-portantly, we historians might then be able to shape a field of life science that hasconsiderable and growing power in our own society, and that could use some criticalreflection regarding its own claims and assumptions.

AHR Editor: This exchange has been richly suggestive, and I think it has properlyframed the issue of the use of neuroscience for historians with skepticism and cautionas well as the possibility of new pathways for thinking and research. In the courseof this discussion, however, another theme has been raised that more directly relatesto a primary concern of historians—that is, changes in emotional expressiveness overtime. On one level, I think it is fair to say that we would reject the notion that thereis a historical trajectory of emotional development that implies a greater or moreintense level of emotionality for people in past times than for those whose “modernity”confers a greater control over their emotions as a sign of being “civilized.” That said,I think it behooves us to acknowledge not only how deeply entrenched this view has beenamong historians and social scientists until quite recently, but also its continuedpurchase on public discourse. And I suspect that historians of emotions must be waryof legitimizing an approach that invites us to fall back into such facile generalizations.

But this does not mean that we should avoid addressing the question of changeover time, and some of your comments have indeed raised it. For example, Bill hasnoted that in eighteenth-century Europe and North America, “pity” had a positivevalue, “but it has gradually evolved into a feeling with negative, judgmental impli-cations.” Likewise, in her first book, Niki finds that eighteenth-century Americansconsidered resentment, but not rage or anger, as legitimate, thus suggesting a politicsof emotions with great implications for the period. How do we think about changesand shifts in emotional expressiveness over time? Are the processes for this alter-ation primarily political, and what does an attentiveness to changing emotional stylesbring to our larger understanding of historical change? Finally, without embracinga notion of one-way development, how do we think of such notions—prevalent inunderstandings from early Stoicism, the Enlightenment, Freud all the way to Fou-



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cault—that discipline and control, both imposed and self-generated, play a funda-mental role in the history of emotions?

Barbara H. Rosenwein: This question is absolutely fundamental. What are thechanges that we can see in the history of emotions, and what mechanisms are re-sponsible for those changes?

It is much easier to see the changes than to explain them. The Editor points to BillReddy’s discussion of the evolving evaluation of pity and Niki’s observations aboutresentment. These are instances of the changing valuations of single emotions. PeterStearns has looked at this matter with great care, isolating changing ideals or stan-dards for “good” (i.e., privileged) and “bad” (i.e., devalued) emotions in nineteenth-and twentieth-century America.53 These are not the only sorts of changes we can find:we can see changes in the very terms that are considered “emotions”; even the word“emotions” has not always been accepted.54 We can also see changes in the ways inwhich emotions have been expressed. And we can see changes in the arenas in whichemotionality (which includes all sorts of emotions) has been acceptable—or not.

But what explains these changes? If we forget Norbert Elias’s civilizing process,which I hope we can do, what processes are left?

To oversimplify because of space and time, I see thus far three explanations foremotional change over time, and I am working on a fourth one. I suspect that all ofthese explanations work at times, and that very often they work together.

The social constructionist view of emotions (to which, I think, all of us more orless subscribe) by implication suggests that as societies change, so will emotions.Peter Stearns has taken this idea to heart. He proposes a largely (though not entirely)functional explanation of emotional change. As social and economic needs shift, sodo emotions. For example: “By the late 1840s people began to realize that the sameindustrial world that required the family as emotional haven also required new emo-tional motivations for competitive work . . . The resultant response explains whyVictorianism introduced its most distinctive emotional emphases in arguing forchanneled anger and courageous encounters with fear.”55 Note the use of the word“required”: it was not the emotions that required the change; it was the newly in-dustrialized society that necessitated emotional transformation.

It seems to me that Bill Reddy’s work significantly reverses these terms. If I maytread on his turf here, I would say that his notions of emotional suffering and emo-tional liberty are key to his explanation of change. Where the social constraints onemotional expression are very limiting, where people are not free to “change goalsin response to bewildering, ambivalent thought activations” (i.e., change their feel-ings in response to a range of emotions, some of which are not in accord), they suffer,

53 See, for example, Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century EmotionalStyle (New York, 1994).

54 For what we call emotions today, Cicero used the word perturbationes (perturbations), Saint Au-gustine affectiones (affects; affections), and Thomas Aquinas passiones (passions); and until recently,even English speakers talked about passions, sentiments, and so on, without needing the word “emo-tion.” On that point, see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psy-chological Category (Cambridge, 2003). For the changing terms that have come under the rubric ofemotions, see my “Emotion Words,” in Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet, eds., Le sujet des emotionsau moyen age (Paris, 2008), 93–106.

55 Stearns, American Cool, 63.



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and as they do, they tend to look for other outlets for emotional expression andexperimentation (which Bill calls “emotional liberty”). Sometimes the constraintsare so stifling (as at the court of Louis XVI) and the outlets so freeing (as in the salonsand theaters) that a revolution (in this case the French Revolution) takes place,bringing a new “emotional regime” to the fore. Here the emotions themselves re-quire change.56 And even though Bill’s new book on romantic love doesn’t use theterms “emotional suffering” and “emotional liberty,” the idea is still there: the stric-tures of the church on sexual desire led the troubadours to create a (slightly) moreliberating outlet: romance.57

Jan Plamper’s early work on fear in the Russian army suggests yet another factorinvolved in emotional change: the theories of medical professionals.58 No one talkedabout fear in the nineteenth-century Russian army, whereas everyone talked aboutit in the twentieth century. One reason for this change was the new place of psychiatrywithin the military and the new interest among psychiatrists in the role of fear. Todeal with the challenges and hazards of modern warfare, psychiatrists were hired totrain new recruits. Part of their task was to teach rookie soldiers to control their fear.When these same psychiatrists treated men debilitated by war, they needed to un-derstand fear’s many manifestations. Psychiatric theory made fear a “valued”—orat any rate a much-talked-about—emotion.

All of these explanations make sense. Nevertheless, I see another factor involvedin emotional change in history: the rise of certain emotional communities to posi-tions of power or great prestige. In every period there is more than one emotionalcommunity, just as there is more than one social group, although the ones in powertend to monopolize the sources that we historians see. As new groups become pow-erful, whether politically (French Revolutionaries) or economically (Hanse mer-chants) or religiously (Protestants in seventeenth-century England) or scientifically(members of the eighteenth-century Royal Society of London) or in other ways, theybring their emotional norms, behaviors, standards, valuations, and “scripts” withthem.59 They tend to mute the voices (or rather suppress our ability to hear them)of other communities that, however, are still talking, still feeling, and (at anotherpoint in time, perhaps) may themselves come to the fore.

Because of my interest in a variety of communities, I am not as impressed withthe issues of discipline and control as many others in this field. Bill Reddy has, inthis very discussion, spoken of how “communities [are] engaged in managing emo-tions.” Yes, it’s true. But people also have a way of finding (or carving out) littleislands for themselves—communities that work for them, that make them comfort-able—and that “comfort” may be true even for those communities that are veryascetic and very emotionally limiting in the ways that Bill has dubbed emotionalsuffering. But this is potentially another topic, and a very large one.

56 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.57 William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and

Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago, 2012).58 Jan Plamper, “Fear: Soldiers and Emotion in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Military Psychol-

ogy,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 259–283.59 I talk about this a bit in my Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006),

but the book I am working on now will—if I can ever finish it!—make the argument far more boldly.



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William M. Reddy: Thanks to Barbara for this very thoughtful and thorough reviewof the options before us in thinking about emotional change in history. I completelyagree that the ways in which emotions can change are multiple. I like all four of herproposed models of change. Her reading of my own proposal on this issue is tellingand in no need of correction.

My new book, The Making of Romantic Love, does argue, as Barbara indicates, thatintense longing for specific splendid sexual partners is a feature of many culturalcontexts. (Medieval Europe, South Asia, and Japan are dealt with in detail.) Suchlonging was common in Europe prior to the Gregorian Reform of the twelfth cen-tury, I argue, and the church’s attempt to treat such longing as a sinful manifestationof sexual appetite contributed in a crucial way to the emergence of courtly love.Rather than suffer the intense shame that reformers wished to heap on those guiltyof sexual transgressions, certain aristocrats and courtiers quietly elaborated a dif-ferent, vernacular code centered on a new emotion called fin’amors (roughly “truelove”). The argument parallels my discussion in The Navigation of Feeling of thesuffering inflicted by the Jacobin emotional style of the 1790s, and the resultingcollapse of sentimentalism.

Limiting all methods by which emotions may change, in my view, is the fact thatemotions are partially, but not entirely, subject to “voluntary” shaping, or to “cul-tural” shaping via discourse and practice. The success of such shaping is never en-tirely predictable. Therefore, the rise of a new emotional style cannot be a mereprocess of social “construction”; it tests a community’s responses and achieves suc-cess only if it “works” well enough. Neither the Jacobins nor the Gregorian reformersoffered conceptualizations of emotional response that were sufficiently flexible to“work” for more than a small minority. The implicit functionalism that I embracein using the verb “works” in this way is, in my view, a very important escape routefrom the potentially sterile historicism of new cultural history.

The question of how an emotional style works, and for whom, is also the key tothe political significance of emotions. Social collaboration requires sharing of emo-tional styles; finely coordinated action cannot be achieved without the standardiza-tion of an emotional code of some kind. But any given emotional style will imposesuffering differentially across a population, and will permit variation and deviationto varying degrees. Pushback can take various forms as well.

Thanks to all for this opportunity to reflect on such important issues.

Eugenia Lean: Though historians should of course be concerned with change overtime, I would like to express some reservations about how the question has beenposed here, namely, an investigation into change over time that does not considerspace. To start, by not considering the issue of space explicitly, questions that dwellon change over time often enable assumptions of the West as the normative spaceto be considered, and the very question of “do emotions change over time” moreoften than not results in a temporal mapping of emotions in the “West.” This isevident, for instance, in the question’s presentation of the genealogy of early Stoiciststo Foucault or its focus on the thematics of discipline and control (concerns in theWestern history of affect, perhaps, but hardly universal). I appreciate both the Ed-itor’s care in the first half of his question to put “civilization” and “modernity” in



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scare quotes, and Barbara’s point that we should put aside Elias’s concern with thecivilizing process. However, given that this conversation includes scholars coveringvery different times and places, the presentation of Europe-based thematics andgenealogy as self-evidently important to all in the second half of the question sendsa message (even if it was not so intended) to those of us not doing European historythat Europe once again serves as the norm.

Moreover, the choice to cite a genealogy of thinkers for their views on affect overtime serves to reinforce the very method employed in Western civilization narrativesthat the first half of the question so carefully seeks to dispose of. As a China historian,I could easily answer this question in the same vein of “change over time” amongthinkers and writers of affect in China, and my reading would offer a radically dif-ferent genealogy, one that moves, for instance, from tracing the ethical concept of“sentiment” (qing) from the Confucian philosopher Xun Zi (c. 335 B.C.E.–ca. 238B.C.E.) to the Song dynasty thinker Zhu Xi (1130–1200), to the writers of the lateimperial Cult of Qing, to early-twentieth-century Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fic-tion authors, to Mao Zedong. But I am not convinced of the merit of such an exercise.In doing so, the best I could hope for is that I would demonstrate that there existsan Eastern or Chinese civilizational narrative to complement the Western civiliza-tional narrative, and thereby de-center the implicit universalism often assumed ina Western civilizational narrative. But most likely, all that would happen is thathistorians studying the West would acknowledge that while other civilizations andtraditions of affect exist, there is no need to engage or address them substantively,as they are assumed to be separate in their own development over time. The historyfield at large has moved away from this comparative civilization studies approachwith exciting developments in global history, transnational studies, and postcolonialcriticism. I think we historians of emotions need to be careful not to resurrect it, evenif unintentionally.

This brings me to my next point, that by not considering one’s spatial analysis andtaking the “Europe” in a European genealogy of thinkers as a given, or the “Chinese”in a “Chinese tradition” of sentiment as fixed, we historians miss the opportunity toappreciate the actual historical space and spatial linkages that emotions cover and,importantly, constitute. Throughout history, emotions do not solely “develop overtime,” but move and traverse over space, small-scale and large, and in messy, un-expected ways that do not conform to civilizational, regional, national, or localboundaries. The methodological challenge, then, is to conceptualize how to grapplewith the issue of space. Scholars of other subdisciplines in the field of history areengaging with the question of space in very sophisticated ways, without neglectingdevelopment over time. Those informed by postcolonialism and interested in ques-tions of colonial circuits and imperialist networks that span large global spaces aredoing so; so too are those investigating the history of science, environment, medicine,and climate, where the objects of study ignore national, regional, imperial bound-aries; and those interested in migration of bodies and things in early modern seavoyages, over the Silk Road, through circuits of Buddhism and early Christianity, aswell as through today’s global networks. Some historians of the intimate are similarlyavoiding a Western civilization narrative (or, for that matter, a separate Chinese orSouth Asian or African civilization narrative) of affect by considering the concrete



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historical connections and networks of sentiment that cross borders. An excellentexample that comes to mind is Ann Stoler’s work on how Dutch colonial policyregarding affairs of the heart and matters of the intimate, from miscegenation tointerracial child-rearing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indonesia, im-pacted the subjectivity of Europeans in the metropole and Dutch colonizers andsettlers in Indonesia, as well as the intimate lives of Indonesians.60 Hers is also apowerful and direct response to Foucault’s neglect to consider the importance of thecolonial context and the colonial Other in his theorization of the making of the sexualidentity of the modern European bourgeois subject.61

Beyond the issue of timeliness, there is also a real political and moral imperativein thinking about space when we pose questions about change over time. Tracingone “civilization’s” development in isolation from the history of another “civiliza-tion” precisely allows for those metanarratives of superiority theorized by Elias andothers whom we have noted at several points in this discussion that we want to putaside. Postcolonial critics have long made this point: the civilizational approach andits universalistic presumptions are hardly “pure” or “objective” pursuits of knowl-edge, but have historically served as the handmaiden to highly violent and extractivepractices of colonialism from the eighteenth century onward.62 And many whohave taken seriously the postcolonial intervention are now among those who aremoving beyond civilization models, or comparative national histories, to start to in-vestigate more clearly a long history of how transnational, trans-imperial, globalnetworks facilitated exchange and transmission in unexpected ways. I thus urge thatwe, in our twenty-first-century exchange on the history of emotions, tread carefullyand not resort to more conventional methods of analysis, and instead push forwardby thinking about emotions in space. In doing so, we have the added benefit of avoid-ing the risk of re-inscribing politically problematic fault lines in the production ofknowledge.

On a related note, I want to express some concern regarding tracing change overtime through disembodied ideas about affect or discrete emotions (e.g., rage, love),especially via “great thinkers” (usually men). By not contextualizing the productionof ideas by considering how they were produced, legitimated, and institutionalizedin their local, social, political, and spatial contexts, we fail to understand how theseideas of affect gain prominence to shape practice and subjectivity. Such an approach,again, might risk invoking the civilizational narratives we want to avoid, one that hasoften traditionally focused on the history of (male) ideas developing in fixed spatialunits. Ironically, such an approach is, moreover, fundamentally at odds with theapproaches that originally inspired the history of emotions—approaches that havelong challenged the history of (male) ideas, whether it is social history, poststruc-turalism, the history of the body, gender studies, the history of everyday life, oranthropology. It moves us away from the issue of the body and gender and the so-

60 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule(Berkeley, Calif., 2002).

61 For Stoler’s direct rebuttal to Foucault, see ibid., chap. 6, “A Colonial Reading of Foucault: Bour-geois Bodies and Racial Selves.”

62 For a classic formulation of this argument, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). Foran example of other influential postcolonial thinkers, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000).



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matic aspect of emotions that we have spent much productive time discussing. It risksappearing in conflict with what was at the heart of our lively discussion and explo-ration in the previous question regarding neuroscience, namely, debating how tomove forward innovatively, if cautiously, by interrogating new methodologies andways of thinking and writing about the human experience in the past.

In short, even though I am sure that the original question did not intend to conveya Eurocentric message, my discomfort with it stems from its potential to allow suchnarratives to emerge. My ambivalence, moreover, does not solely have to do withmatters of political correctness, but also stems from the fact that real methodologicalissues are at stake. Our discussion so far has rather systematically ignored the issueof space even as we have challenged the problems of privileging the history of affectin the modern period. Without any awareness of or attention to this, we historiansof emotions will miss a crucial opportunity to make the history of emotions subfieldpart of a trend that is pushing the field of history forward in innovative ways.

Julie Livingston: I am in total agreement with Eugenia on this and very grateful forhow she has laid out the problem at hand. Simply dispensing with Elias is not enoughto rethink our way out of his shadow or the sort of politics of knowledge that his ideasevidence. If we understand emotions as necessarily social processes, then we mustcontemplate them within socially complex and dynamic historical worlds. Theseworlds are linked and at times densely connected through movements of people,goods, ideas, and of course the prevention of movement such that some found them-selves trapped in increasingly untenable worlds. The terror of captivity that Africansfelt in the barracoons and in the holds of slave ships cannot be easily separated fromthe cultivated emotional dispositions necessary among European capitalists to com-modify human beings as part of a set of “rational,” dry financial calculations. Yet,as Stephanie Smallwood’s work on the middle passage shows so brilliantly, the ledgerbook and the ship’s log reveal both at work.63

How and why emotional norms or possibilities change is a fine question, but it getsback to the definitional issues that make emotions so fascinating, yet slippery tocontemplate. Without conjoining the history of emotions to changing or contestednotions of personhood, we risk reducing emotions to property or objects or languageor texts (shared or individuated), a process that stands to efface the complexity ofconsciousness and the primacy of aesthetics and form.

How emotions change over time (or for that matter how in some moments con-tinuity is maintained when so much else is changing) is an important question. Butin order to answer it, we also need to keep our understandings of time open andproblematized. Is time moving forward, backward, standing still, looping? Is it a webof intersecting and multidirectional scales? For example, large-scale traumaticevents, like famine or war or political violence, can thrust familiar but latent affectivepossibilities into the foreground, linking recursive pasts to the present. David Schoen-brun’s ongoing work on experiences of loss and mourning as central to the history

63 Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora(Cambridge, Mass., 2007).



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of political legitimation in early modern Bunyoro offers a beautiful example of this.64

So does Jennifer Cole’s book on memory in Madagascar or Elias Mandala’s The Endof Chidyerano on food in Malawi, both of which suggest that there are momentsbeyond the pale that instantiate a surge of memory, a recognition of rupture (butfamiliar, looping sorts of rupture), the return of knowledge and feeling (and some-times the return of persons, ancestors to channel, mark, and manage this) that hadbeen set aside and unconsciously carried forward.65

I take Eugenia’s points quite seriously. I am not suggesting that there is some“African” emotional style or sense of time that is distinct and necessary for theunderstanding of Africa. I am suggesting that in any context one finds philosophy,modes of remembering, an aesthetics of history that are worth contemplating inhighly situated ways, but which are also to some extent portable, worthy of beingcarried to other contexts in order to stimulate a rethinking of received wisdom, ofwhat have become naturalized categories of analysis. There is a politics here, andsetting up a European theoretical genealogy to which we might respond uninten-tionally evidences that politics, while obscuring the power that underlies it. But italso takes us away from the exciting and productive possibilities that are open to usif we are willing to read more broadly. It doesn’t surprise me at all that, for example,many current theories of affect (like the new interest in social networking or the“discovery” by medical sociologists that we are connected to one another more thanby virtue of our individual bodies as potential carriers of disease) are actually oldhat, well-developed philosophical stances among twentieth-century Batswana. Thisis not to resurrect some overly romantic vision of timeless African wisdom, goodnessknows, but simply to remind us that theorizing, meaning-making, envisioning a dif-ferent set of possibilities for the world, is an inherently human and an inherentlypolitical pursuit.

William M. Reddy: One can only be grateful for the last two very engaged and richlysuggestive interventions. However, I do feel that, to a certain extent, Eugenia andJulia are pushing on an open door.

(1) In the U.S., the history of Europe is ill, pessimists might say, terminally ill.More optimistically, one could say that it is in a fruitful period of crisis, perhaps. Ourclassrooms are emptying out. Few graduate students are preparing dissertations inthis area who are not looking at boundaries, oceans, or cross-continental flows ofideas, persons, things. Few job searches are being announced that do not call for suchspecial expertise.

Few historians in Europe work on the history of Europe, by the way. Most historydepartments there focus on national histories, an institutionalized myopia that hassurely contributed to the current crisis of the Eurozone.

(2) Insofar as the history of emotions has developed primarily in Europe (theplace, not the field) so far, it has arisen mostly as a blocking strategy, to undo the

64 David Schoenbrun, “A Mask of Calm: Emotion and Founding the Kingdom of Bunyoro in the 16thCentury,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (in press, 2013).

65 Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley, Calif.,2001); Elias C. Mandala, The End of Chidyerano: A History of Food and Everyday Life in Malawi, 1860–2004 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2005).



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myth of modernity, the myth of the more rational, more scientific European indi-vidual, whose internalized regulation of emotion makes “him” superior to others.66

The Enlightenment is no longer studied, for example, as an “age of reason.” Sci-entists of the past are no longer assumed to be free of affect in works by, for example,Otniel Dror, Matthew L. Jones, or Fay Bound Alberti.67 The practice has been, aswell, to strive for European-level and global perspectives, in seminar series at centersfor the history of emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, and the MaxPlanck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and at international conferencessuch as that held in Paris last April, or that sponsored by the CHEP (Cultural Historyof Emotions in Premodernity) network last year in Istanbul (“Emotions East andWest”), which included numerous papers on Ottoman and West Asian history andfive on Chinese history, covering such topics as funerary art and medicine. In Berlin,a significant number of the members of the Center for the History of Emotions areworking on South Asia.

In the last decade, the history of emotions has perhaps been the single subfieldmost responsible for efforts, within Europe, to “provincialize” European history,while at the same time attempting to develop a truly European and global (as op-posed to narrowly national) perspective. In North America, in contrast, such pro-vincializing efforts have focused more on empire and colonial domination—issueshardly neglected in Europe, but perhaps less transformative there. But again, I seethe gap narrowing in, for example, Nicole’s work on interactions between colonistsand Native Americans in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

(3) Dipesh Chakrabarty recognizes that the “Europe” he proposes to provincializeis not the real historical Europe, but a “hyperreal Europe.”68 This, by the way, en-ables him to continue with his provincializing project without attempting to keep upto date on European historiography.69 But this gap is being filled by others; see, forexample, a recent article by Margrit Pernau.70 In Courtly Culture and Political Lifein Early Medieval India, Daud Ali takes the critical evaluations of Elias that have beenelaborated in European historiography as his starting point, and provides a remark-able new way of reading such texts as the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra.71

(4) The first two respondents to the Editor’s question (Barbara and myself) hap-pened to be Europeanists. We reasonably drew on our own research for examples.Necessarily brief, our examples did not enter into the complex questions of varyingunderstandings (across time and space) of the architecture of the subject or of thecosmos. But we are very concerned about these issues. The history of emotions must

66 A good sampling of recent work can be found in Jonas Liliequist, ed., A Cultural History of Emo-tions, 1200–1800 (Leiden, 2012).

67 Otniel E. Dror, “Techniques of the Brain and the Paradox of Emotions, 1880–1930,” Science inContext 14 (Winter 2001): 643–660; Dror, “A Reflection on Feelings and the History of Science,” Isis100 (2009): 848–851; Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal,Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago, 2006); Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History,Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford, 2010).

68 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.69 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “In Defense of Provincializing Europe : A Response to Carola Dietze,” History

and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 85–96.70 Margrit Pernau, “An ihren Gefuhlen sollt Ihr sie erkennen: Eine Verflechtungsgeschichte des

britischen Zivilitatsdiskurses (ca. 1750–1860)”/“ ‘By Their Feelings You Shall Know Them’: An En-tangled History of the British Discourse on Civility (c. 1750–1860),” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35, no.2 (2009): 249–281.

71 Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge, 2004).



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start with, and constantly return to, such issues. Barbara’s work has focused on theEurope of the “dark ages,” which do not appear so dark if one moves beyond phil-ological preoccupations to reimagine the full contexts that produced fragmentarytexts. In my most recent work, I attempt to triangulate on the question of emotionalchange by comparing divergent, but simultaneous, periods of transition: the emer-gence of courtly love in Anglo-Norman and Occitan-speaking lands is set against therise of bhakti temple worship in post-Gupta Orissa and Bengal, and the developmentof an emotional style centered on mono no aware in Heian Japan. I understand thatEugenia and Julia may have discerned the ghost of hyperreal Europe passing throughour abbreviated e-mail messages. I agree that vigilance is necessary. But I trust thattheir fears would be allayed if they took a closer look.

Julie Livingston: Without going into too much detail to answer Bill’s reply, andcertainly without getting into a discussion of the death of European history as a field,I want to clarify my earlier message, as I fear I may have ruffled some feathers. Thismay be an open door on which we are pushing, but the question the Editor asked(or half of the two-part question) was how we grapple with still-powerful and ubiq-uitous notions of “one-way development” around emotions, a model central to arange of canonical texts and historical approaches. I too thought this was a settledmatter—at least among historians—but then again the Editor no doubt has a verykeen sense of the field, given his position in these discussions, and it would seem thathe does not share our optimism on that score. And so if this is the question, thenI see it as one that cannot be answered without explicit reference to the politics ofknowledge as well as the historical record, which are conjoined. I do not suggest thatanyone here (certainly neither Barbara, who in her very first message during ourpreliminary conversations this summer clarified the problems with Elias, nor Bill,whose work is so expansive) is unaware of these politics, nor of these complicatedand entangled histories, nor of the theoretical impoverishment we risk by not search-ing out and circulating theoretical insights from non-canonical sources. But if we arebeing asked to push yet again on that door, then let us please open it all the way,walk through, and move on to new and more interesting topics.

Barbara H. Rosenwein: I would like to suggest that even theories elaborated byWestern thinkers may be tested in other spaces and for other sensibilities. So, verybriefly, I propose that we consider the four theories of emotional change I outlinedin my original answer to this final question in the light of Jennifer Cole and LynnThomas’s collection of essays on Africa, Love in Africa.

Although Peter Stearns elaborated his theory of change in the context of theUnited States, nevertheless his methods as well as his explanation are not irrelevantto Africa. Kenda Mutongi, like Stearns, uses an advice column to talk about “rep-resentations of the changing sexual mores in 1960s and 1970s Anglophone Africa.”72

Mutongi explains that these representations reflected actual changes in courtshippatterns: “As literacy increased in the mid-twentieth century, and as the print media

72 Kenda Mutongi, “ ‘Dear Dolly’s’ Advice: Representations of Youth, Courtship, and Sexualities inAfrica, 1960–1980,” in Cole and Thomas, Love in Africa, 83–108, quote from 87.



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facilitated courtship discussions, courtship became less a family affair and more apreoccupation of youth.”73

Can we apply Bill Reddy’s notions to Africa? It would seem so, for what all theessays in Love in Africa show are the numerous emotional experiments that were andare taking place there in different places and among different groups. This is verymuch Mutongi’s point: the “Dear Dolly” advice column provided ways for men andwomen to, in Bill’s words, “change goals in response to bewildering, ambivalentthought activations”—that is, to explore new, sometimes contradictory, feelings.74

What can be said about the role of indigenous psychological theories? The essaysin Love in Africa hardly mention local theories of emotion as such, but it stands toreason that these must affect the ways in which one thinks about one’s feelings, andconsequently the feelings that one recognizes—and therefore “has.” The editorspoint out that “theories of magic, ritual, and witchcraft . . . [have implications for]local conceptions of passion.”75 Similarly, the theories of the West, insofar as theywere implicit in, say, the Mexican television serial that captured the attention ofnumerous Nigerians in 2006, suggested new sorts of emotions and emotional rela-tionships to viewers. Not that the notions implicit in such dramas were swallowedwhole. To the contrary: they simply provided a jumping-off point for creative self-fashioning.76

Can one apply the paradigm of emotional communities to Africa? Rachel Spronkspeaks of “a minority social group [of professionals in Nairobi] that . . . see them-selves as explorers and creators of what they perceive to be modern African lives . . .When it comes to their personal lives, [they] seek to forge intimate relations rootedin romantic and progressive ideals. Their aspirations are in line with other youngwomen and men around the world who take up the ideal of companionate marriageas a way to demonstrate their modern individuality.”77 It remains to be seen whetherthis group will come to dominate the norms of love and marriage in Kenya or willcontinue to constitute a minority “emotional community.” But certainly, as Cole andThomas argue in their introductory essay, these Nairobi professionals are amongthose who have “remade local affective ideals and practices by engaging those fromelsewhere,” that is, from other emotional communities (some of them Western) andtheir cultural expressions.78

Julie Livingston: Yes, of course they can, and Love in Africa is a wonderful book,and makes a terrific example here. Again, my point is not that Africa is so radicallystrange that the 1950s in Africa lie outside the time scale or history of the 1950selsewhere, or that circulating cultural products and forms and relationships (likesoap operas or Drum magazine) are not relevant in a hermetically sealed Africa. Infact, quite the opposite.

73 Ibid.74 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 129.75 Lynn M. Thomas and Jennifer Cole, “Introduction: Thinking through Love in Africa,” in Cole and

Thomas, Love in Africa, 1–30, quote from 7.76 Adeline Masquelier, “Lessons from Rubı: Love, Poverty, and the Educational Value of Televised

Dramas in Niger,” ibid., 204–228.77 Rachel Spronk, “Media and the Therapeutic Ethos of Romantic Love in Middle-Class Nairobi,”

ibid., 181–203, quote from 182.78 Thomas and Cole, “Introduction,” 5.



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Nicole Eustace: I too tried to dispense with Elias-style assumptions from my firstanswer and to point to how the insights of neuroscience have helped me to think pastthat perspective. For scholars, the goal in taking a universalist view of emotions—ofpositing a common biological substrate upon which culturally distinct constructs arebuilt—is not, as Jan fears, to establish normative emotional values on the basis ofwhich some people or groups can then be judged as aberrant or inferior. Quite theopposite: the point is to make emotion a basis for the recognition of our commonhumanity, the better to see the historical significance of its expressive variety.

To restate my basic position one more time: emotional expression is a fundamentalform of social communication critical to the exertion and to the contestation ofpower. As such, the language of emotion offers a code key by which historians candecipher hierarchical relations in any society. Tracing patterns of emotional expres-sion and control—from the micro-hierarchical level of specific exchanges betweenparticular social actors to the macro level of emotional prescriptions for and de-scription of large categories of people—allows us to examine “politics” in the widestsense of power relations. Again, to be clear, this is not a story about emotionalrestraint as a mark of “progress” or “civility” in the vein of Elias or Freud. Instead,this is an analysis of how efforts at emotional control constitute negotiations ofpower.

Emotional expression can function as a code key only when we can be reasonablysure that we do understand the contextual meaning of the emotions we’re examining.This kind of analysis requires critical attention to the contemporary ideas about emo-tion that defined the message conveyed by the expression (or omission) of emotionin any particular historical context. But this is not to say (as Eugenia rightly cautionsus against doing) that we are bound to consider primarily the ideas of Western maleintellectuals. To the contrary, we must avoid reifying the notion of emotional dis-course as a totalizing system that irreducibly constrains the expression of all actors.We need to recognize with Barbara that many diverse communities of people con-tribute to the array of emotional meanings available at any given time.

There are two interrelated yet distinct issues here: what changes did historicalactors believe they could effect through the use of emotion, and what changes dowe as historians attribute to the influence of emotion? In my work on colonial BritishAmerica and the early United States, I have documented the emergence of threewidespread eighteenth-century beliefs about emotions: that they were the source ofhuman motivation, that they were the mechanism of collective affiliation, and thatthey were the surest means of moral valuation. We can see these ideas emerging ineverything from high European philosophy, to popular revolutionary protest move-ments, to the rituals demanded by Native American leaders at treaty councils, to theterms invoked by African American antislavery activists. Sometimes emotion lentpower to broad social movements. At other times, it gave force to explicitly politicalprojects. An important example of this is the rise of pro-war patriotism in the UnitedStates during the War of 1812, the subject of my second book.

I do see certain connections between modern U.S. scholarship on emotions andthese eighteenth-century Atlantic perspectives. Psychologists like Jonathan Haidtnow argue that our emotional systems are fundamentally very simple. Just as thedecimal system in mathematics can ultimately be reduced to the binary system of



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zeros and ones, so all emotions can ultimately be boiled down to those that produceapproach behaviors and those that produce avoidance, those that promote affiliationand those that provoke disassociation. Powerful snap judgments about the practicaland moral worth of a given course of action can result from a person’s visceral re-action of desire or disgust to an object of attention. If the twenty-first-century vo-cabulary of avoidance and approach, excitation and inhibition, desire and disgust issomewhat different from eighteenth-century discussions of selfishness vs. sociability,action vs. passivity, and virtue vs. vice, I would speculate that they are related. I hopethat positing a connection between eighteenth-century Atlantic ways of thinkingabout emotion and twenty-first-century American ones can do two things: one, re-mind us how historically produced and contextually embedded so-called objective“modern” science actually is; and two, encourage us not to limit the search for ex-planations of emotion to any one culture. (I am sure that Barbara’s most recentexperiment in applying Western theories to Africa could be very fruitfully re-versed.)79

The ideas that give contextual meaning to emotion and the language in whichemotion is expressed will vary almost infinitely across time and place. Yet the per-sonal impact, social effects, and political charge of emotion endure. As historians,we can and should trace the processes by which invocations of emotion are used toprovoke political actions. It is in accepting and then analyzing the role of emotionin political change in the broadest sense that scholars can gain strength from thepower of feeling.

Eugenia Lean: I want to add a quick note in response to Bill’s insights about thestate of the field in European history and about my and Julie’s concerns with the“ghost of hyperreal Europe.” I agree that Julie and I are pushing on an open door,and that this door in the history of emotions is already open in large part becauseof the pioneering scholarship by Bill himself (whose work I knew of and greatlyrespected prior to this conversation) and Barbara (whose work I am grateful to havebeen exposed to as a result of this conversation and whose comments such as thoseon emotional community have been so insightful). I am also well aware of the excitingnew directions in the field of European history being taken by scholars like MattJones, a historian of science and my colleague here at Columbia. He is not aloneamong historians of European science doing innovative work that is quite relevantto the study of emotions and that helps challenge the myth of modern rationality.The list is actually quite impressive: Lorraine Daston’s classical work on wondercomes to mind, as do Jessica Riskin’s work on sentimental empiricists in the FrenchEnlightenment and Deborah Coen’s work that examines the impact of family af-fective relations on the rise of modern rationality in nineteenth-century Vienna.80

Others in the history of science are also doing wonderful work on globalizing Eu-

79 See Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316, no. 5827 (May 18,2007): 998–1002; and see Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, “Short Report: Manipulations ofEmotional Context Shape Moral Judgment,” Psychological Science 17, no. 6 (2006): 476–477.

80 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York,2001); Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sentimentality: The Sentimental Empiricists of the FrenchEnlightenment (Chicago, 2002); Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism,and Private Life (Chicago, 2007).



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ropean history, including Harold Cook.81 Thus, given the rich state of this field, youcan imagine my surprise at the Editor’s third question, about how emotional ex-pressiveness changes over time, and its focus on master European thinkers, and thedismay I felt in not hearing any reflection on the political implications of how thequestion was framed.

Moreover, it is precisely because the discussion is being published in the AHR , andin the manner of a “conversation,” that I felt compelled to answer in as forthrighta manner as possible. To be sure, the AHR is not CNN, and our conversations arehardly the “sound bites” on the nightly news that at once mean so little and yet yieldfar too much influence. It is nonetheless the case that the AHR is one of the mostinfluential journals, if not the primary journal, of our field. Furthermore, it is pre-cisely in the “casual conversation” format where we have to be vigilant. It is in ourabbreviated, shorthand exchanges of knowledge and information where the “ghostof hyperreal Europe” can so easily resurrect itself, if unwittingly, and demonstratehow entrenched its haunting really is. For me, at least, it is only once that ghost isfully exorcised from even the most casual of references that the vigilance ends.

That said, I am hopeful that this day will come. The lively and productive natureof the exchange that has unfolded here on the politics of the Editor’s third question—even if unintended—only brings us closer to that day. And the concrete commentson how to think productively about change over time by considering such issues asemotional communities, social processes and interests, the politics of emotions, aswell as space, have been enlightening and thought-provoking. Thank you all for yourinsights.

William M. Reddy: Thanks to Eugenia for clarifying her previous message, and forthe references to recent intriguing research in which the reason-emotion dichotomyis being set aside. I would also list another Columbia colleague of hers, Sharon Mar-cus, whose recent book Between Women is a methodological model for me, showinghow broader conceptions of affect open up new questions about history.82

Jan Plamper: The third question has prompted an exchange to which I would liketo add two thoughts, both of which were implicit in the contributions but deserve tobe spelled out. The first is that the traffic of emotions between cultures, spaces,regions, languages, groups, individuals, etc., is often multidirectional, and that his-torians of emotion benefit from remaining aware of this multidirectionality.83 Thismultidirectional traffic comes in many forms, including the deliberate closing-off ofcertain routes. Thus in the first work ever published on the non-Western history ofemotions that I am aware of (which was included in a volume that Barbara edited),

81 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age(New Haven, Conn., 2007). For other examples, see several of the essays in Pamela H. Smith and PaulaFindlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York,2001), which have a global orientation.

82 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton,N.J., 2007).

83 See, e.g., on the multidirectional traffic of emotion concepts between the Greek, Perso-Arabic,Indian, and British contexts, Margrit Pernau, “The Indian Body and Unani Medicine: Body History asEntangled History,” in Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf, eds., Images of the Body in India (New Delhi,2011), 97–108, here 104–106.



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the non-travel of medieval Arabic anger concepts is implied to have been a resultof the perceived necessity in the new ninth-century �Abba�sid Caliphate of creatingan uninterrupted, uncorrupted Islamic lineage.84 The second is that the languagesand academic cultures in and through which we produce knowledge about otherlocales are of course themselves site-specific.85 Even at the height of social con-structionism in emotions anthropology during the 1980s, Catherine Lutz did notpersistently speak of Ifaluk nunuwan, but instead used the English term “emotions.”This was after describing the specificity of nunuwan—their intersubjectivity (they aremost often spoken about in the first-person plural rather than singular), their re-lationality (one of them usually is interdependent with another), and their “cog-motivity” (they are “feeling-thoughts”)—in such detail that she could easily havemade the case for their untranslatability.86 Social constructivism taken to its extremeis a nominalist enterprise; history as currently practiced is anti-nominalist. Some-thing similar applies to temporal movement: if I study, say, changing Germanophonefear concepts from Forcht in Martin Luther’s time to Furcht in the nineteenth cen-tury, I need to assume some commonality between the two, and that is possible onlyif I assume that each refers to something other than just itself.87 Both points areespecially important for historians of emotion, since a lot of emotions history, Iventure to predict, will involve temporally longer-term and geographically broadercomparisons than many other fields of history. The specificity of emotion becomesvisible in sharpest relief in such comparisons.

The thought I would like to close with opens up a new issue, which is perhaps anappropriate way to end an exciting conversation about a young field that is still verymuch open-ended. It concerns the Editor’s question about change over time, andmore specifically the case when emotion words disappear from the historical record.I want to challenge the notion that this disappearance necessarily means the dis-appearance of the emotion. Let me try to illustrate. During the First World War,there was indeed an increase in fear talk among Russian soldiers because of thedevelopments that Barbara aptly summarizes in her response—the rise of militarypsychiatry, etc. In the Second World War, fear talk among Red Army soldiers largelydisappeared. Can we conclude that soldiers no longer experienced fear in World War

84 Zouhair Ghazzal, “From Anger on Behalf of God to ‘Forbearance’ in Islamic Medieval Litera-ture,” in Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages(Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 203–230.

85 Suffice it to recall here James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 9; V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Phi-losophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 19.

86 See Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and TheirChallenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988), 82, 88–89, 92–94, 102–103.

87 As Carla Hesse writes, “realism, as a philosophical stance, is a necessary foundation for any em-pirical claim to be able to reconstruct facts from evidence and to claim that language (and more broadlyany system of signification—visual, textual or aural) has a denotative as well as a connotative function.That language is at some level referential (that it refers to something outside itself, albeit contingently)is critical, moreover, if one is to be able to make sustainable general claims—about culture, or aboutany other aspect of human existence.” Hesse, “The New Empiricism,” Cultural and Social History 1, no.2 (2004): 201–207, here 202. On early modern German Forcht and nineteenth-century Furcht, see thework of Andreas Bahr, e.g., Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit: Gottliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17.Jahrhundert (Gottingen, forthcoming 2013); David Lederer, “Fear of the Thirty Years War,” in MichaelLaffan and Max Weiss, eds., Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective (Princeton,N.J., 2012), 10–30.



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II? This possibility should not be ruled out a priori. But the historian of emotionsshould also consider the possibility that soldiers continued to feel fear but that var-ious social practices actively precluded the entry of fear talk into the historical re-cord, military censorship being the most obvious one. She should be mindful of ersatzfear talk, such as medical descriptions of increases in “purely” somatic cardiovasculardiseases during battles that she can safely infer from other evidence to have beenespecially stressful. She can even discern changes in the micro-logic of a text—anabrupt, non-standard change in tense, a preposition that surfaces only once in anofficer’s battle account, or a rupture in the narrative logic—and in so doing employstilometric software that literary scholars use to test the authorship of a text.88 Onceshe has reconstructed as best she can the local, site-specific fear constructs of theparticular soldier(s) she is studying, she can then infer that they felt fear. This is amethod of a careful reading between the lines, or what I have called a hermeneuticsof silence.89 It involves an analytical leap, to be sure. But this analytical leap is lessquestionable than what is still the most common practice in history-writing: to imputeto people in the past the emotions of our own time and space. If this conversationhas helped unsettle this practice in some measure, it has been successful.

AHR Editor: This round of exchanges, taking off from my last question, has beenquite productive, if in unexpected ways. In posing the question I certainly did not,as has in fact been recognized, mean to suggest any notion of one-way development,or a narrative of emotional history, or a historical trajectory shaped by, say, the“civilizing process.” Indeed, I tried to disavow such views, acknowledging only thatthey are perhaps more prevalent even among historians and social scientists—andcertainly the public—than we might care to admit. And while I evoked recognizedfigures in the Western tradition, from the Stoics to Foucault, I did so merely tosuggest a theme in the study of emotions regarding control of the passions and othermoves of this sort in various times and places, often at the behest of political orreligious authorities, to impose a disciplinary moral regime on society.

In any case, the happy consequence of my question being read in a certain wayhas been to broaden the discussion into a more global consideration of emotions inhistory, and not only across time but also across space—across cultures and peo-ples—where the differences can be just as striking.

Perhaps more than with other conversations in these pages, I feel as though wehave just scratched the surface of this enormously complex field. I hope that theseexchanges have provided readers with a roadmap—including the marvelous rangeof bibliographical references—that will enable them to appreciate the many byways,some of them only beginning to be explored, that configure this new historical ter-ritory. I think that one of the virtues of this discussion is that we have not only “talkedthe talk,” but also “walked the walk”—which is to say that the participants have atonce addressed the conceptual and methodological aspects of thinking historicallyabout emotions and provided us with myriad examples of how this kind of historyis actually being done by scholars, including themselves, from many different fields

88 See, e.g., the freeware programs Signature (by Peter Millican) or JGAAP (the Java GraphicalAuthorship Attribution Program by Patrick Juola).

89 Plamper, Geschichte und Gefuhl, 346–348.



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and periods. It has too often been the case that discussions about method and theoryin history remain mired in abstraction or prescriptive pronouncements, with lessimpact on the practice of history than might be expected. I don’t think this could besaid for the historical study of emotions, at least as presented by the six participantsin this conversation.

Nicole Eustace is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the AtlanticHistory Program at New York University. She received her B.A. from Yale Uni-versity and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she receivedher training as a historian of eighteenth-century British America and the earlyUnited States. Her works include 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, andthe Coming of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press,2008), as well as articles and essays in the William & Mary Quarterly, the Journalof Social History, the Journal of American History, and numerous encyclopediasand anthologies.

Eugenia Lean is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, whereshe has taught since 2001. She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of ShiJianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (University ofCalifornia Press, 2007), which was awarded the American Historical Associa-tion’s 2007 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. In 2008, she was fea-tured as a “Top Young Historian” in the History News Network. She is currentlyworking on a cultural history of industrialization in late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century-China that focuses on polymath Chen Diexian, a self-pro-fessed “man of feeling,” who was also a professional writer/editor, science en-thusiast, and pharmaceutical industrialist. The project explores the intersectionamong vernacular science, industrialization, the authority of sentiment, andways of authenticating knowledge and things in an era of mass production andcommunication.

Julie Livingston is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Sheworks at the intersections of history, anthropology, and public health. She is theauthor of a new book, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in anEmerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012), and also of Debilityand the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005). Herco-edited works include A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant,and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (with Keith Wailoo and Peter Guar-nacchia; University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Three Shots at Prevention:The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions (with KeithWailoo, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz; Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2010), and Interspecies (with Jasbir Puar), a special issue of Social Text.She is currently beginning research on the history of Hart Island, the potter’sfield for the city of New York.

Jan Plamper is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Afterobtaining a B.A. from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. from the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, he taught at the University of Tubingen and from 2008 to2012 was a Dilthey Fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max PlanckInstitute for Human Development, in Berlin. He is the author of Geschichte undGefuhl: Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte [History and Feeling: Foundations ofthe History of Emotions] (Siedler, 2012; forthcoming in English from OxfordUniversity Press); co-editor, with Benjamin Lazier, of Fear: Across the Disci-



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plines (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and co-editor, with Marc Elie andSchamma Schahadat, of Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul’turnoi is-torii emotsii [In the Realm of Russian Feelings: Approaches to the Cultural Historyof Emotions] (NLO, 2010). He has also recently authored The Stalin Cult: AStudy in the Alchemy of Power (Yale University Press, 2012). His current researchconcerns fear among Russian soldiers, especially during World War I.

William M. Reddy is William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor ofCultural Anthropology at Duke University. His work since the mid-1990s hasfocused on the history of emotions. In his fourth book, The Navigation of Feeling:A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), heoffered a treatment of emotional expression along the lines of speech act theory,and aiming to underscore the political implications of historical changes in emo-tional expression; this book also explored eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryFrench emotional history as an illustration. A new book, The Making of Ro-mantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200CE (University of Chicago Press, 2012), compares the emergence of courtly loveas an episode in emotional history with the emergence of bhakti temple worshipin Orissa and Bengal and with the love practices and love literature of HeianJapan. This work attempts to bring together recent approaches to the history ofsexuality with research on the history of emotions, as well.

Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor at Loyola University Chicago and VisitingProfessor at the University of Utrecht (2005), the Ecole normale superieure(2004), and the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (1992). She receivedher Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. She is author of manyarticles and has written several books on Cluny, including To Be the Neighborof Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049 (Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1989) and Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges ofImmunity in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 1999). On thesubject of emotions, she is (among other things) editor of Anger’s Past: TheSocial Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1998)and author of Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell Uni-versity Press, 2006). She is currently working on a book that is tentatively titledAffective Matters: A History of Emotions in Britain and France, 600–1700.



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AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions

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Transcript of AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions