Electric Signals: Emotional Currents, Cultural Conduits, Social Voltage and Power Generation in Eighteenth-Century Cultural Encounters

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
Electric Signals ◽  
Current Resistance

Abstract In the middle of the eighteenth century, natural philosophers began to posit connections between emotion and electricity. The metaphors they explored then have continued methodological implications for scholars today. The electrical concepts of current, resistance, voltage, and power, provide an extended metaphor for conceptualising the history of emotions in ways that usefully bridge the biological and cultural, the individual and social, in order to more fully reveal historical links between emotion and power. By way of example, this article examines cross-cultural negotiations of power made possible through the expression, exchange, and evaluation of grief as recorded in the diary of a British-American Quaker woman who lived among Indians in the Pennsylvania borderlands in the midst of the Seven Years’ War.

The cultural semiotics of African encounters: Eighteenth-Century images of the Other

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (232) ◽  
pp. 103-146
Author(s):  
David Dunér
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Western Africa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Distant Culture ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis a contribution to the cultural semiotics of African cultural encounters seen through the eyes of Swedish naturalists at the end of the eighteenth century. European travellers faced severe problems in understanding the alien African cultures they encountered; they even had difficulty understanding the other culture as a culture. They were not just other cultures that they could relate to, but often something completely different, belonging to the natural history of the human species. The Khoikhoi and other groups were believed by Europeans to be, from their perspective, the most distant culture. The Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman and others, however, tried to transcend this cultural gap, and used their cognitive resources, such as empathy and intersubjectivity, in order to understand the alien culture they encountered.The aim of this paper is to unearth the cultural semiosis of African encounters and the intersubjective challenges that human interactions provoke. These encounters not only changed the view the travellers had of the Other, but also changed themselves and their self-perception. The encounter between the Ego and the Other is, however, not static, something predestined by the differences in their cultures, but dynamic, changing according to individual encounters and the actual intersubjective interplay that transform and change the perception of the Other. There are in particular four meaning-making processes and challenges within cultural encounters that are in focus: recognizing cultural complexity; invoking intersubjectivity; determining similarities and dissimilarities; and identifying the Other as a mirror of oneself.The triad of cultures – Ego, Alter, and Alius – can be understood as gradual and changing aspects depending on the actual situation of the encounter and the personal perspectives, interpretations, and behaviour of the thinking subjects involved. Using concrete examples from Southern and Western Africa in the 1770s and 1780s, this study aims to explore this dynamic semiosis. One of the conclusions is that the relation between the Ego and the Alter/Alius is not something only predetermined by the cultures involved and their ideologies, but also depends on the individual thinking subjects and how they use their specific cognitive and semiotic resources, not least their intersubjective abilities, within specific temporal and spatial contexts.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

scholarly journals The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c. 1700 – c. 1850

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Ella Sbaraini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Scholars have explored eighteenth-century suicide letters from a literary perspective, examining issues of performativity and reception. However, it is fruitful to see these letters as material as well as textual objects, which were utterly embedded in people's social lives. Using thirty manuscript letters, in conjunction with other sources, this article explores the contexts in which suicide letters were written and left for others. It looks at how authors used space and other materials to convey meaning, and argues that these letters were epistolary documents usually meant for specific, known persons, rather than the press. Generally written by members of the ‘lower orders’, these letters also provide insight into the emotional writing practices of the poor, and their experiences of emotional distress. Overall, this article proposes that these neglected documents should be used to investigate the emotional and material contexts for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suicide. It also argues that, at a time when the history of emotions has reached considerable prominence, historians must be more attentive to the experiences of the suicidal.

scholarly journals The role of the emotions of guilt and shame in methodology of research on social emotions

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Alexandra Shiller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Social Emotions ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Methodology Of Science

This article is dedicated to examination of the role of guilt and shame, namely to prevalence one of these emotions in a particular culture as the leading mechanism of social control. The prevalence of guilt or shame as a cultural “dimension” has become one of the first criteria for the division of cultures into Western and Eastern, and was used by the researchers as a basic postulate for cross-cultural r. Over time, the perception of emotions as the criterion for the division of cultures has been revised. The article traces the history of research on emotions in general, namely the emotions of guilt and shame as social emotions, as well as describes guilt and shame as collective and individual experiences. Analysis is conducted on the role of guilt and shame in methodology of research on social emotions, cross-cultural studies. The author outlines certain methodological problems and contradictions, and assesses the current state of scientific research dedicated to social emotions. The conclusion is made that the research on collective sense of guilt and shame is more advanced from the perspective of cross-cultural psychology and philosophy, as well as the overall methodology of science; it allows shifting from the study of the role of individual emotions in interpersonal (conditioned by collective ties), intergroup and intragroup communication towards the integrated study of emotions associated with interaction of the individual and society, i.e. social experiences.

Fear and Its Opposites in the History of Emotions

Facing Fear ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Fear Response ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophy Of Emotion ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Anxiety And Fear

This book examines the “problem” of fear in its intellectual, social, and political incarnations. It situates fear in world-historical terms, thus breaking new ground in the historical and cultural analysis of emotions. Each contributor is specifically concerned with a discrete historical moment, thereby emphasizing the variability and contingency of fears past, present, and future. Examples of such moments are the experience of fear among eighteenth-century rebels, priests, and colonial administrators in Peru; the universal fear response evoked by the Thirty Years War; and the technologically mediated experiences of anxiety and fear collectively felt by cinemagoers in Weimar Germany. This introduction discusses some of the lineaments of the history and philosophy of emotion as it pertains to the problem of fear, highlighting counterpoints or analogues to fear such as comfort, assurance, and hope.

Individual and Communal Freedom and the Performance History of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach and Mendelssohn

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-179
Author(s):  
Markus Rathey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Liturgical Music ◽  
Original Performance ◽  
Performance History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Performance Conditions

When Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the concert hall of the Berlin Singakademie in 1829, he not only transferred a piece of liturgical music into a secular space, but he also made numerous cuts that changed the theological profile of Bach’s composition. The essay explores the theology of the St. Matthew Passion in the context of early eighteenth-century theology and gives an overview of the original performance conditions and the audiences at the performances in Bach’s time. The second half of the essay analyses how these parameters changed when Mendelssohn conducted the Passion in 1829. It becomes clear that the sociological profile of the audience (educated middle and upper class who had to pay money to attend the performance) remained essentially the same, while the theology shifted from a focus on the freedom of the individual in Bach’s time to an emphasis on the community (congregation, Volk, nation) in the adapted version the Singakademie presented to its listeners in 1829.

Literary Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Fundamental Component ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Tool

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.

scholarly journals Art across Frontiers: Cross-cultural Encounters in America. Introduction

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-311
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual

This short introduction provides a brief overview of the special issue, by addressing the main historiographical and theoretical concerns that unite the individual contributions and by placing the essays in comparative, inter-American and interdisciplinary perspective. What do comparative analyses tell us about patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the visual arts? More specifically, what do these analyses tell us about the role of ethnic agency and audience, and the complex relationship between artistic practice and the “mainstream,” the local and the global?

Toward a Theory-Based Measurement of Culture

2011 ◽  
pp. 61-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detmar Straub ◽  
Karen Loch ◽  
Roberto Evaristo ◽  
Elena Karahanna ◽  
Mark Srite
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Is Research ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Cross Cultural Research ◽  
Egyptian Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Insight Into

In reviewing the history of the conceptualization and measurement of “culture,” one quickly realizes that there is wide-ranging and contradictory scholarly opinion about which values, norms, and beliefs should be measured to represent the concept of “culture.” We explore an alternate theory-based view of culture via social identity theory (SIT), which suggests that each individual is influenced by plethora of cultures and sub-cultures–some ethnic, some national, and some organizational. In IS research, the culture of subjects and respondents is problematic because it is typically an overly simplistic categorization. IS research nearly always assumes that an individual living in a particular place and time belongs to a single “culture,” e.g., someone living in Egypt is automatically classified as being a member of the Egyptian culture, or, more broadly, the Arab culture. This dearth of clear concepts and measures for “culture” may explain why cross-cultural research has been so exceedingly difficult to conduct. It may also explain why it has been hard to develop and refine theories. Moreover, it may give insight into why reasonable explained variance in predictive models has not been higher. Finally, it is very possible that much cross-cultural business research could be rightly accused of advancing an “ecological fallacy” by not recognizing the individual makeup of persons with respect to culture. Using SIT (or other theory bases) as grounding for cultural research programs implies the use of certain methodological approaches. Each study would have to establish the salient “cultures” in each individual’s background and include these different “cultures” as independent variables in positivist research. In qualitative research, there would need to be an equally rigorous assessment of the cultural identifiers of each individual.

The Enterprisers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Educational Innovation ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Modern School ◽  
Regular Army ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Era

The Enterprisers traces the emergence of “modern” school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors, up to the accession of Catherine II. The efforts to “educate” Russia represent a trademark of Peter I’s reign and reformist program, and innovations in schooling in Russia in the eighteenth century have traditionally been presented as a top-down, state-driven process. As with many other facets of the emerging early modern state, the Petrine-era school usually appears as the product of the practical needs of the tsar’s new “regular” army, which demanded skilled technical personnel. It is also commonly taken to be the personal creation of Peter I, who singlehandedly designed it and forced it on an unwilling population. Contrary to this received wisdom, The Enterprisers argues that schools were instead invented and built by “administrative entrepreneurs”—or projecteurs, as they were also called in that era—who sought to achieve diverse career goals, promoted their own pet ideas, advanced their claims for expertise, and competed for status and resources. As the in-depth study of some of the most notable episodes in the history of educational innovation and school-related “projecting” in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrates, the creation of “modern” schools took place insofar as it enabled such enterprisers to pursue their agendas. The individual projects these enterprisers proposed and implemented served as building blocks for the edifice of the “well-regulated” state on the threshold of the modern era.

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