Scholarly literature for long only mentioned emotions in passing, although they were ubiquitous in the sources. This article argues that including them systematically can enhance our understanding of groups and communities, if emotions are historicised, and if the unproductive ways to read them as the opposite of interest and rationality are overcome. This allows to investigate emotions in a way which sees the relationship between the experience of emotions, their expression and the practices to which they lead not as a temporal sequence leading from an interior arousal of emotions to their exterior manifestation (or not). Instead, it investigates the interaction continuously moving in both directions-from emotions felt to emotions expressed, but also from the expression and performance as well as the interpretation of emotions back to how a certain emotion is actually felt. The first section shows where a systematic emotion history might either provide a new take on questions that have already been asked or raise new questions. The second section offers an overview of the ways in which collective emotions have been conceptualised and elaborates how this can be linked to the creation of emotional communities. The third section addresses the relationship between face-to-face communities and mediated communities.
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Emotions are not only expressed but also learned through the body. The body is not the opposite of culture, but a site where culture is played out. This requires a new emphasis on space and spaces. Bodies are necessarily situated in space, and they bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through. Mediated by the body and its senses, different spaces become linked to different emotions. This relation is neither random, nor is it given once and for all: the connection between an emotion and a particular space can change over time, and the same spaces can trigger off vastly divergent emotions in various people. This article discusses the importance of material objects in shaping emotions; it suggests temporalization as the central category to link materiality with knowledge and practices. It then proceeds to a number of case studies related to the built environment of Delhi to show what such an investigation could look like.Emotion studies for a long time have been caught in the nature -nurture debate.1 Emotions were either linked to the body, and hence perceived as universal and unchanging, or they were claimed as learned over the course of life and hence marked by cultural difference. This division was then played out in the discussion of whether life sciences or anthropology (and later cultural studies) were to be the leading disciplines in the investigation of emotions.2 In an attempt at overcoming this increasingly unproductive dichotomy, recent debates have foregrounded the body. The body they investigated, however, was no longer the universal body of life sciences. Instead, they took up development in gender and body studies, which had already foregrounded the ways each body is marked and produced by historically contingent experiences; these experiences in turn were seen as socially and culturally mediated. Emotions thus are not only expressed but also learned through the body. The body is not the opposite of culture, but a site where culture is played out. 3This turn toward the body requires a new emphasis on space and spaces. Bodies are necessarily situated in space, and they bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through. Mediated by the body and its senses, different spaces become linked to different emotions. This relation is neither random, nor is it given once and for all: the connection between an emotion and a particular space can change over time, and the same spaces can trigger off vastly divergent emotions in various people. 4 The aim of this article is to contribute some ideas about the ways through which emotions become linked to certain spaces. Starting from a discussion of the importance of material objects in shaping emotions, it will suggest temporalization as the central category to link materiality with knowledge and practices (1). The article will then touch upon the sources needed for such a project (2), before proceeding to a number of case studies related to the built environment of Delhi to show what such an invest...
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This article investigates how philosophical and ethical reflections, rhetorical strategies, and emotional practices intersect. In the first section, it lays out the traditional emotion knowledge found in Persian and Indo-Persian texts on moral philosophy written in the Aristotelian tradition, which still held an important place in the education of people writing in and reading journals like Aligarh’s Tahzību-l Akhlāq. The second section looks at the transformation of this knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and provides a close reading of texts that address education and self-education issues while simultaneously exhorting readers to feel more compassionate (and often to prove their compassion through specific actions). The last section, finally, uses the Punjabi traders of Delhi as a case study to show how practices of philanthropy contributed to community building. Compassion, the article argues, is a social emotion, but not necessarily an unequivocally benign emotion. It serves to construct a community and to negotiate its boundaries, but it is also a tool of exclusion and helps fortifying the communities’ internal hierarchies. The perception of the pain of others is as unequally distributed as the practices for its alleviation.
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