The history of emotions is a burgeoning field-so much so, that some are invoking an "emotional turn." As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of "emotive," "emotional regime," and "emotional navigation," as well as on Rosenwein's "emotional community" and on Stearns's "emotionology" and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as "women's history" in the 1970s.
RESUMENEste repaso general por la historia de las emociones se inicia con la historización de este campo, partiendo de Lucien Febvre y sus predecesores. Tras sostener que el auge actual del estudio de lo emocional forma parte de una coyuntura post-postestructuralista, el artículo presenta algunos conceptos clave, como el de "comunidades emocionales" de Barbara Rosenwein, el de "regímenes emocionales" de William Reddy y el de "prácticas emocionales" de Monique Scheer. El artículo también apunta las futuras vías que la historia de las emociones puede tomar y se cierra con la advertencia sobre las fáciles apropiaciones de conceptos procedentes de la neurociencia afectiva.Palabras clave: historia de las emociones, comunidades emocionales, régimen emocional, prácticas emocionales, neurociencia afectiva, Lucien Febvre, Barbara Rosenwein, William Reddy, Monique Scheer. History of emotions: paths and challenges ABSTRACTThis overview of the history of emotions begins by historicizing the field, starting with Lucien Febvre and his predecessors. After arguing that the current emotions boom is part of a post-poststructuralist conjuncture, it introduces some key concepts, including Barbara Rosenwein's "emotional communities," William Reddy's "emotional regime," and Monique Scheer's "emotional practices." The article next sketches future directions the history of emotions might take and closes by warning about facile appropriations from affective neuroscience.
Aft er reading Andrei Platonov's 1929 story Usomnivshiisia Makar, Joseph Stalin reportedly reacted by calling it "an ambiguous work" (dvusmyslennoe proizvedenie). Leopold Averbakh later wrote about Platonov's story: "There is ambiguity (dvusmyslennost') in it. ... But our era does not tolerate any ambiguity." 1 Both reactions point to an obsession with reducing signs to a single meaning, an undercurrent of Soviet culture in the 1930s. 2 Censorship practices offer a rare glimpse at how the Soviet regime attempted to achieve "onemeaningness" (odnoznachnost'). While it is true that throughout the Soviet era censorship was primarily concerned with excising what was deemed heretical, during the 1930s, with outright heresy effectively effaced from public discourse, the abolition of ambiguity became an important secondary mode. Much of the available literature on European and especially Russian censorship has defined censorship as the repression of the inherently and essentially free word. 3 The binary pairing of censorship and cultural production has generated further binaries of writers vs. censors and is ultimately embedded in a dichotomy of state vs. society. While the state/ society dichotomy has been questioned in other areas of historical research, the binary I wish to thank
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