History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research

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.

Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century: An Introduction

To introduce Body, Capital, and Screens as a series of in-depth case studies at the intersection of film and media studies and the social and cultural history of the body, we have chosen, as with all of the contributions, a film emblematic for the chapter’s specific thematic focus: Victoire de la vie/Victory of life (FR, 1937) by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Through these images, we intend to detail our approach illustrating how the material and social aspects of moving images have served as a hyphen between body politics, on the one hand, and the market as the 20th century’s primary form of social and economic organization, on the other. We lay out the framework for connecting bodies and capital with the significance of a century’s worth of utility media culture.

Digging the Dirt in the Pursuit of Cleanliness

The introduction outlines the historiography on cleanliness and the influence of Georges Vigarello on early modern social history and history of the body. It reviews both the philosophical and the practical aspects that make researching cleanliness so challenging. On one hand, the prejudices of contemporary observers and commentators are acknowledged and, on the other, the practice of cleanliness is so habitual it goes unnoticed and unrecorded. The methodology for the book is described, first to use traditional documentary sources from a variety of media to elucidate what advice was given about cleanliness in early modern England. In order to determine whether such advice was followed, a study of the material culture of cleanliness is proposed and outlined, acknowledging that it may be more successful for linen than for bodies. Finally the drawing together of these various strands of research is emphasized.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws together ideas from the book, suggesting a few key points. First, it draws attention to the cultural agency of ‘exemplars’, or what folklorists have sometimes called ‘star performers’. Singers and storytellers like Henri Vidal, Marie Bouzats, or Catherine Gentes are not just important because they were typical, but because they played leading roles in local cultures. The conclusion argues that such exemplars allow historians to perceive changing cultures of the body which cannot be reduced to the simple advent of a ‘modern’ body. The example of the moorlands of Gascony suggests broader patterns in the history of the body during the period of modernization.

Introduction

This chapter situates the book as an intervention in discussions of the history of the body, suggesting that the experiences of the working population have often been absent from discussions of changing bodily cultures, which have instead tended to focus on elite discourses. The chapter suggests that the moorlands of Gascony in south-western France make a particularly powerful example, because of the scale and speed of top-down reforms of the landscape following a national law passed in 1857, which encouraged the forestation of the moorlands. The region also boasts one of the most impressive ethnographic archives, thanks to the work of the folklorist Félix Arnaudin (1844–1921). The chapter finishes with an outline of key methodologies drawn from folklore studies, including the study of performance, variation, and traceability.