Is There a Cultural History of the Emotions?

Abstract

The history of emotions is often associated with two leading English-speaking historians of the nineteenth century. Jealousy too has been a centre of attention, from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy and from seventeenth-century France to the United States, thanks to the richness of literary representations of this emotion. The psychologist Paul Ekman has claimed that it is possible to identify six basic emotions in all cultures: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. Burckhardt and Huizinga did not confront the problem of the conventions of representation, conventions that change over time, not necessarily in step with the emotions represented. The political phrasing is not purely metaphorical, since it is argued, in the tradition of Elias, that ‘Any enduring political regime must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions’. Different languages offer approximately parallel classifications, but only approximately, encouraging cross-cultural misunderstandings.

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