This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 242-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fay Bound Alberti
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Affective States ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
The Mind

Loneliness is one of the most neglected aspects of emotion history, despite claims that the 21st century is the loneliest ever. This article argues against the widespread belief that modern-day loneliness is inevitable, negative, and universal. Looking at its language and etymology, it suggests that loneliness needs to be understood firstly as an “emotion cluster” composed of a variety of affective states, and secondly as a relatively recent invention, dating from around 1800. Loneliness can be positive, and as much a part of the body as the mind. Using a longue durée approach, I argue that we cannot understand loneliness as a “modern epidemic” without considering its history, its meanings, its practice, and its links with the body.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

Introduction

Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Peter Adamson
Keyword(s):  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Well Being ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Concept Of Health ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethical Virtue ◽  
The Mind

This introduction to the volume gives an overview of the chapters, setting out a case for integrating the history of philosophy with the history of medicine and sketching some of the key philosophical issues that arise around the concept of health. These include the difficulty of defining “health,” the mind-body relationship, and questions about how philosophy informs medical science and practice. A central idea is that the concept of health operates at two levels, the mental and the physical (or the soul and the body), so that ethical virtue and physical well-being have often been seen as parallel or mutually dependent.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

scholarly journals History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-134
Author(s):  
Rob Boddice
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotion Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
Broad Framework ◽  
Power And Authority

The history of emotions has become a thriving focus within the discipline of history, but it has in the process gained a critical purchase that makes it relevant for other disciplines concerned with emotion research. The history of emotions is entangled with the history of the body and brain, and with cultural and political history. It is interested in the how and why of emotion change; with the questions of power and authority behind cultural scripts of expression, conceptual usages, and emotional practices. This work has reached a level of maturity and sophistication in its theoretical and methodological orientation, and in its sheer quantity of empirical research, that it contributes to emotion knowledge within the broad framework of emotion research.

POVERTY'S PASTS: A CASE FORLONGUE DURÉESTUDIES

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
RHIANNON STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Class Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée

AbstractThis article examines how historians have approached the history of poverty in Africa before European colonisation. From an earlier focus on the emergence of class difference to more recent studies on the emergence of poverty, scholars have demonstrated the longevity of economic inequality in Africa. This historiography counters a linear view of the growth of economic inequality and the idea that poverty is a necessary corollary of wealth. The article then considers how historians have studied the meanings of poverty within particular societies to the nineteenth century allowing us to move beyond the inadequacy of quantitative data. It ends by arguing for morelongue duréestudies of poverty in Africa with a focus on the qualitative and on the internal dynamics of particular societies. This will improve our knowledge about how colonial rule changed the experience and reality of poverty for people across the continent and form a basis for comparative studies.

The body in group analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bracha Hadar
Keyword(s):  
Group Analysis ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Embodied History

This article explores the history of the exclusion/inclusion of the body in group analytic theory and practice. At the same time, it aims to promote the subject of the body in the mind of group analysts. The main thesis of the article is that sitting in a circle, face-to-face, is a radical change in the transition Foulkes made from psychoanalysis to group analysis. The implications of this transition have not been explored, and in many cases, have been denied. The article describes the vicissitudes of relating group analysis to the body from the time of Foulkes and Anthony’s work until today. The article claims that working with the body in the group demands that the conductor gives special attention to his/her own bodily sensations and feelings, while at the same time remaining cognizant of the fact that each of the participants is a person with a physical body in which their painful history is stored, and that they may be dissociated because of that embodied history. The thesis of the article is followed by a clinical example. The article ends with the conclusion that being in touch with one’s own body demands a lot of training.

Staging and Embodiment of the Tragic in Pina Bausch's Orpheus and Eurydice (1975)

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
Nicole Haitzinger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Central European ◽  
Orpheus And Eurydice ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Function

This paper is concerned with resonances of the tragic in twentieth-century central-European dance theatet, to be discussed with particular reference to Pina Bausch's 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In my study Resonances of the Tragic: Between Event and Affect (2015), I have argued that in terms of a history of the “longue durée,” the evocation of the tragic occurs in a field of tension between technique, the mise-en-scène, and conceptions, as well as procedures and moments of interruption, of suspension, of disruption and of the indeterminable resulting from ecstatic corporeality. Its structure and function can generate an event in the emphatic sense of the term; consequently, it provides a paradigm for recognizing structures of form and of an aesthetic of reception, structures emerging from individual constellations of the fictional and choric, absence and presence. From the perspective of dance studies, the tragic emanates from the representation of horrendous monstrosity testing the limits of what can be imagined by means of the moved body in all senses of the word; but how exactly does Bausch produce the qualities of the ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical—and, consequently, the tragic?

THE CLASSICAL TURN IN ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAN EDELSTEIN
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Course Syllabi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
National Difference

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” ofphilosopheswith “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue duréeof Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.

À la recherche de l’historicité de l’Unita

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 373-383
Author(s):  
Michel Cahen
Keyword(s):  
Natural Product ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Religious Factors ◽  
Central Highlands ◽  
Liberation Movements

A certain historiography of Unita, the main Angolan rebellion fighting against the MPLA regime between 1975 and 2002, presents this movement as the natural product of an ethnic (ovimbundu) and religious (American congregationnalism) maturation in the central Highlands of Angola. Didier Péclard, in his book Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola. Aux racines sociales de l’Unita, deconstructs this argument methodically. He does not deny or underplay ethnic and religious factors, but he studies them in the longue durée, thus avoiding any teleological approach. It is not because Unita took root among the umbundu population and gained important support from a section of the American congregationalist church after 1975 that we can say that this destined to happen. Thereafter Didier Péclard offers us a fine historical sociology of politics which offers an excellently textured contribution to the history of Angola and, more specifically yet, of Unita: one of the Angolan liberation movements which remains the least studied.

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