Feeling communities: Introduction

Abstract

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.

Elisabeth Eidenbenz’s humanitarian experience during the Spanish Civil War and Republican exile

“…3 Eidenbenz's nine hundred captioned photographs include not only her own pictures but also others taken by the photojournalist Paul Senn as well as by other colleagues, such as Olgiati, Bohny-Reiter and Maurice Dubois . The production and circulation of these images amongst the members of this humanitarian organization suggests that they were key elements in the creation of a community of feeling, in which actors experienced, expressed and performed emotions by linking them to practices, such as distributing clothes and feeding children, as well as to other actions that were not in themselves aimed at alleviating suffering, such as writing letters or journal entries or taking photographs (Pernau 2017).…”

Love as understanding

“…Rather than simply being a narrative ploy, this process of rejecting the man and his reacting with insistence was an integral part of “feeling” (Pernau 2017), experiencing, and articulating the pains and pleasures of romance. Recounting the early phases of the relationship, women often spoke of how they were both scared and excited by the man's insistence.…”

The Aesthetics and Emotions of Religious Belonging: Examples from the Buddhist World

“…From the outset, the intent of the workshop was to expand from this research purview while we built on previous findings. The articles in this issue draw on theories of affect and emotion by looking at the role of sensational forms and aesthetics of persuasion in creating modalities of belonging (Meyer 2009(Meyer , 2010(Meyer , 2012, the performative aspects of charisma and resulting interrelational connections (Csordas 1997), how affective values and economies create boundaries between the individual and the social (Ahmed 2004(Ahmed , 2015, the role of feelings in community creation (Pernau 2017), emotional styles developed through specific patterns (Gammerl 2012), and how religious values moralize emotional practices (Desjarlais 1992;Cassaniti 2014). While affect and emotion studies literature informs this issue, the authors recognize that this is a field that tends to take Euro-American scholarship and religious experiences as a tacitly agreed-upon standard frame (Pernau 2021).…”