Emotionology

In this paper we analyze the emotionality linked to the medical technology of organ transplants during the 1980s in Spain. Using the newspapers ABC, El País, and other visual materials, we explore the individual feelings expressed in the media by donors and receptors. More importantly, we expose the «emotionology» that emphasized solidarity as a source of national cohesion and democratic modernity. Our paper contributes to an understanding of the cultural acceptance of this technology as a semiotic-material process, and also to an exploration of the history of the political transition as a trajectory loaded with emotional aspirations.
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En este artículo analizamos la emocionalidad vinculada a la tecnología del trasplante de órganos en la España de los ochenta. A través de ABC, El País y otros materiales visuales exploramos no sólo los sentimientos expresados en los medios por donantes y receptores, sino, principalmente, la lógica emocional colectiva vinculada a los trasplantes, que enfatizó la solidaridad como fuente de cohesión nacional y modernidad democrática. Nuestra investigación contribuye a una comprensión de la aceptación cultural de esta tecnología como un proceso semiótico y material. También ayuda a entender la historia de la transición política como un recorrido cargado de aspiraciones emocionales.

In responding to climate change, organisations navigate in an increasingly volatile emotional milieu in which feelings of fear, anxiety, hostility and anger shape public debate. In this article, we explore how corporations have responded to the broader ‘emotionology’ surrounding climate change. Our focus is on the role of corporate sustainability specialists as intermediaries, or ‘emotionology workers’, acting between broader social debates and local organisational contexts. Through analysis of interview and documentary data from major Australian corporations we explore both the activities of these individuals in translating and shaping climate change emotionology within their organisations, as well as how they manage their own emotionality in this work. We find that sustainability professionals are key agents in the design and implementation of a positive emotionology of climate change as a challenge and opportunity for corporate action. However, these activities result in tensions and contradictions for these individuals in reconciling their own emotional engagement with climate change and the negative impact of corporate activities on the environment. Our analysis contributes to an understanding of the roles and activities of ‘emotionology work’, as well as broadening the concept of ‘emotion work’ to include those involved in promoting broader social change in organisational settings.

Material images substantialize ideas and concepts. Hence, they store, communicate and evoke emotions. Emotions are not ephemeral and fuzzy phenomena; rather, they constitute bio-cultural constructs that affect motivation, learning, decision making and communication. Emotions exercise considerable influence on political, religious, and social life, and they are shaped by it. Thus, it is surprising that the so-called emotional or affective turn has not found its way decisively into material culture studies. Although approaches to ‘emotionology’ have been utilized
by scholars of art history, image studies, Egyptology, and ancient Near Eastern studies, to speak of an emotional turn in the material-culture-based disciplines is an exaggeration. Archaeologists still need to discuss how emotions and the visual world are intertwined and how archaeologists, for example as scholars of images, can contribute to this field.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in children and childhood history in Middle Eastern studies and Ottoman history. However, in contrast to European and North American works, there are few studies combining the history of children and adolescents with the history of emotions. This article examines a corpus of twenty autobiographic narratives in English written by Arab Christian teenage boys (ages fourteen to seventeen) in Ottoman Syria in the final decades of the nineteenth century while attending the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), founded by Protestant American missionaries in 1866. These narratives are rare in the sense that they are reflections by adolescents on their not-so-distant childhoods. Teaching students to write essays in English on different subjects was part of the college's overall pedagogical mission. Students were encouraged to express their opinions and points of view and thus develop their individuality—one of the tenets of a liberal Western education, which contrasted with practices in Ottoman schools that consisted of memorizing texts written by adults. I argue that these narratives are never merely expressions but are formative of the self and reveal how emotions such as fear and happiness were expressed by adolescents living in nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria.

Today, "romance" is usually used to refer to the emotional feeling of love for a person, and the behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those feelings. However, the word "romance" is, in fact, comes from an adverb of Latin origin, "romanicus", meaning "of the Roman style". Rather than the feeling of love for a person, its vernacular meaning was more about chivalric adventures. It is only after eighteenth century that the word developed other meanings, such as being passionate about a love affair. We see from the historical usage of the word that, "romance" and "romantic behaviors" are, in fact, socially constructed within discourse to define certain concepts. However, on the other hand, it does not mean that the physiological, facial, or behavioral signals that we take into consideration while defining "romance" are socially constructed as well. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss shows that there were such ancient societies in which they "formed loving relationships distinct from their established customs in a way that would parallel modern romance". (Wiseman 22-35) What we get from this example is that romantic behaviors can be subjective (either individually or relationally) creations. There are always established customs and/or strategies within societies, and these established customs are constantly and in various forms being systematically imposed over the members of that society. However, every individual also has the agency that enables them to act in a distinct way, and to form their own unique forms of relationships, emotional practices, and romances. As Bourdieu also puts it, "the individual agency that emerges from the habitus is dependent on socialization, but not reduced to it" (Scheer 204). So, in this paper, I am going to analyze the historical evolution of the concept of "romance" to see, first and foremost, if it is something that is constructed and/or manipulated within discourse in favor of dominating ideologies or customs; or a form of emotion that is physiologically, mentally or spiritually felt, expressed and practiced.

This article contributes to an understanding of the nexus between humans and animals by drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a British chicken factory and, more particularly, by exploring the emotional subjectivity of Meat Inspectors employed by the Food Standards Agency to oversee quality, hygiene and consumer safety within this plant. We argue that these Inspectors displayed a complex range of often contradictory emotions from the ‘mechanized’ to the ‘humanized’ and link this, in part, to the technocratic organization of factory work that compartmentalizes and sanitizes slaughter. This serves to de-animalize and commodify certain animals, which fosters an emotional detachment from them. In contrast to research which suggests that emotions switch off and on in a dialectic between violence and non-violence, or that we are living in a post-emotional society, we elucidate the co-existence, fluidity and range of emotions that surface and submerge at work. While contributing to...

This chapter presents an analysis of the concept of fear and the usage of linguistic expressions referring to this emotion in selected Ancient Egyptian religious texts. By using approaches from Cognitive Linguistics and Psychohistory, a deeper insight into the ancient sources is gained. Furthermore, some considerations about the relationship between fear and public space, as well as about the meaning of individuality and identity, will be made within the selected corpora.