Carnivalesque humor, emotional paradoxes, and street protests in Thailand

Conventional wisdom has it that street protests are typically driven by rage due to grievances perceived to inflict on a group. This emotive atmosphere can shape protest methods to be vandalistic to the point where armed attacks against targeted opponents are justified. This paper suggests that rage-influenced struggle can be counterproductive as it obstructs a movement from building a coalition board enough to challenge the ruling elites it opposes. This paper argues that carnivalization of protests can prevent this setback in two directions. First, it potentially transforms protesters’ collective emotion from rage to cheerfulness. This effect may lessen a possibility where protesters project violent revenge on those thought to represent the ruling elites. Second, while helping protesters to address sources of their grievances, carnivalesque protests create a “friendly” image that may convince a public audience outside the movement to support its cause. In assessing a political process of carnivalesque protests, this paper bases its analysis on an account of protest actions by Thailand’s Red Sunday group emerging after the 2010 crackdown.

Collective Emotion During Collective Trauma: A Metaphor Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study provides insight into lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Participant metaphors of the pandemic were collected by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews ( N = 44). Participants were asked to compare the pandemic with an animal and with a color, and to provide contextual sensemaking about their metaphors. A metaphor analysis revealed four convergent mental models of participants’ pandemic experiences (i.e., uncertainty, danger, grotesque, and misery) as well as four primary emotions associated with those mental models (i.e., grief, disgust, anger, and fear). Through metaphor, participants were able to articulate deeply felt, implicit emotions about their pandemic experiences that were otherwise obscured and undiscussable. Theoretical and practical implications of these collective mental models and associated collective emotions related to the unprecedented collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

National Sentiment: Nation Building and Emotional Language in Nineteenth-Century Finland

During the course of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the term “national sentiment” was coined and subsequently established in several European languages. The emergence of the term in several different languages at roughly the same time is indicative of changes both in the experiences of nationhood and of emotion. This chapter explores the development of the term “national sentiment” in Finnish public discourse and argues that it was transformed during the course of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, it denoted an individualistic feeling that romantic intellectuals hoped people would turn to, whereas it later became a description of a collective emotion. It was used to describe the atmosphere among one of the nationalities in Finland in particular, or the Russian empire in general. In this process, the term became more restrictive and lost its links to performing emotions relating to the nation.

A Collective Emotion in Medieval Italy: The Flagellant Movement of 1260

The purpose of this article is to open a dialogue between research in social sciences concerning collective emotion and historical investigation concerning a religious and political movement of the Middle Ages. The main idea is to consider the Flagellant movement of 1260 as a collective emotion which, beyond the affects pertaining to it, is also a social practice that finds its efficiency in the spiritual meaning of its collective display, demonstrating the rationality of a seemingly irrational religious phenomenon.

I Remember How We All Felt: Perceived Emotional Synchrony through Tourist Memory Sharing

Durkheim’s theory of collective emotion and the concept of perceived emotional synchrony are used to explore tourism memories and to create a conceptual model explaining how and why we come to agree on how we felt when reliving past tourism experiences. This process is dependent on the malleability of memory, which allows emotional synchrony to happen in retrospect, regardless of actual feelings at the time. I argue that the innate motivations behind this post-consumption merging are a stronger sense of community and of belonging to a social group. For tourism practitioners, this highlights where the true value lies for the consumer, the belief in a shared emotional experience. This value develops through the synchronization of memories creating the basis for a shared memory economy. The implications for tourism marketers are discussed, and suggestions for further research into memory and travel experience are identified.

Maybe They Will Smile Back

Taking its title from a line in the 2011 film We Can’t Change the World (But We Wanna Build a School in Cambodia), this chapter explores a recent fixation in Japan on rebuilding hope: first from the wreckage of the Bubble Economy and then from the debris of the 2011 tsunami. It uses this discussion to connect the expression of collective emotion to contemporary nationalism, and argues that this emotional language requires an exploration of the logic of narrative, as well as its consequences for the representation of a people’s feelings: of national sadness, or national pride, or national hope. Drawing heavily from recent debates about emotion and politics, the chapter introduces new ways of discussing narrative and its importance, particularly through Peter Brooks’s conception of “the melodramatic imagination.”