Abstract
If some historical traces are taken from which the connections between emotions and time/space can be clearly observed, it is possible to mention Ibn Khaldūn (1377), Prudencia Ayala (1925) and Sara Ahmed (2007) as examples of ‘other’ ways of seeing other emotions: the first with his concept of ‘group feeling’, the second with her view on love and collective practices, and the third with her reflections on the politics of emotions. In all of them the connection between geopolitics and the geocultural and their ‘respective’ ways of elaborating and reproducing sensations, emotions and sensibilities can be verified.
Time/space directly influences the various ways of experiencing emotions. Sadness, hatred and also joy and love appear, reproduce and end according to the time/space in which they develop. However, if the emotions are closely related to the context/environment and/or interaction horizon in which they are experienced, they are also tributaries of their indeterminacy and complexity. Emotions cannot invariably be attributed to a single ‘cause/motivation’ from which a unique and determined sense can be derived, and at the same time they are the result of the cobordism of a constellation of previous interactions between multiple factors.
The Special Issue that we introduce here presents, from different theoretical perspectives, an approach to the emotions and politics of the sensibilities that characterizes, at least in part, countries and regions from different parts of the planet: Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Central America and South America. This Special Issue is motivated by the intention to make known, at least partially, the state of emotions and studies of them in countries and regions that have not as yet featured centrally in research publications at the international level.
In recent years we have been working on a diagnosis of the politics of sensibilities in Latin America, and in this way we have maintained that: The politics of sensibilities are understood as the set of cognitive-affective social practices tending to the horizons of: a) the organization of daily life (day-to-day, waking/sleep, food/abstinence, etc.); b) information related to the production, management and reproduction of horizons of action, disposition and cognition, and sorts of preferences and values (adequate/inadequate, acceptable/unacceptable, bearable/unbearable); and c) parameters for time/space management (displacement/location, walls/bridges, enjoyment, interstitial practices that nest in the inadvertent folds of the naturalized, naturalizing surface of the politics of bodies and the emotions of neo-colonial religion. (Scribano, 2019b: 36)
In this Special Issue our idea is, on the one hand, that the work serves for readers to gain an approximation of the emotions and sensibilities of the countries and/or regions which the authors ‘represent’, and about which there is little information. And on the other hand, it makes this research known to colleagues who work on emotions from a plural perspective, in a broad sense of the term.
At present it is evident that emotions are dependent on the spatial and temporal conditions in which the person identifies their occurrence. Emotions are part of a set of factors framed in specific geocultural and geopolitical conditions. The tension between the universality and particularity of practices and states referred to as emotional is inherent in the processes of social structuring. Hatred, anger, shame, fear, and also joy, trust, love, reciprocity and hope respond to a set of economic, political, social and cultural conditions.
Arlie Hochschild’s statement can be understood in this direction: Emotions are social in so many ways. Our social station – our social class, race, sexual orientation, religion and national identity – clearly shapes our emotional experience. For example, the president of the American Sociological Association, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, chose the theme ‘Feeling Race: An Invitation to Explore Racialized Emotions’ for the Association’s 2018 annual meeting. In whatever way we are placed in a racial order – at home, in our community, church, workplace, social movement, political party – we feel it. (Hochschild, 2019: 9)
The anchor to develop a more ‘adequate’ view of emotions on a planetary scale seems to be to know more closely the processes of occlusion and openness that these emotions allow/obstruct. Perhaps knowing more about the particular, we will know more about the global. In this context, it is possible to confirm the interest in the geopolitics of emotions, for example in the work of Dominique Moisi (2009) or that of Tiberiu Brăilean (2014), which states that: Mapping the emotions of the world can save us many unpleasant surprises, it can help us identify the moments when history accelerates and foresee the evolution of international relations for the following years. (Brăilean, 2014: 7)
In a sense close to the above-mentioned, it is possible to point out the collection of works edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith under the title of Emotional Geographies (2005), expressing a common concern with the spatiality and temporality of emotions, with the forms and similarities that they exhibit, and which are carried out in ‘certain places’. Within this framework, the collection aims to outline the state of the art in emotional geography and draw attention to its importance.
In recent years, with the development of the sociology of emotions, the connections between spatial/temporal specificity and the prevalence of some emotions have been reconstructed in the form of states of the art or regional analyses. An example of this is the work of Eduardo Bericat (2016), which revises European and North American sociology to systematize theoretical postures and some emotions of greater importance.
Very recently we have presented a partial summary of the ‘state of the art’ of studies on bodies/emotions in Latin America based on the articles published in our Latin-American Journal of Studies on Bodies, Emotions and Society and with information from the Working Group on bodies and emotions of the Latin American Association of Sociology (Scribano, 2019a).
Another contribution that is important to mention is that of Thomas Scheff (2011), who metaphorically, taking the idea of a ‘world of emotions’, offers a mapping of six emotions: pain, love, pride, anger, fear and shame.
Currently there are several investigations that account for different ways to capture the emotions prevalent across various countries and/or regions. An example of this is the Index compiled annually by Gallup: Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles – feelings and emotions – that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture. Each index provides a real-time snapshot of people’s daily experiences, offering leaders insights into the health of their societies that they cannot gather from economic measures alone. The 2019 Global Emotions Report presents the results from Gallup’s latest measurements of people’s positive and negative daily experiences based on more than 151,000 interviews with adults in more than 140 countries in 2018. (Gallup, 2019: 2)
There is also partial information available, as for example from the European Union and its study of Public Opinion that, among other things, highlights the optimism of its citizens by region: In more than 80% of the EU regions, at least half of the respondents are optimistic regarding the future of their region. In 170 of the 204 European regions, at least half the respondents are optimistic regarding the future of their region; but optimism varies significantly between regions, with the proportion of respondents who are optimistic ranging from 93% in Vorarlberg (Austria) to 34% in both [the] Principality of Asturias (Spain) and Molise (Italy). (Flash Eurobarometer 472 Report, 2018: 5)
There are some authors that have demanded more attention for the study of emotions in specific fields of inquiry, such as Harding and Pribram (2002) in the field of cultural studies, where the need to investigate what is culturally permissible for specific categories of subjects was proposed at the beginning of the century to examine their part in the constitution of contemporary power relations.
Or more recently, there are those who question the prevalence of some emotions in particular regions or specific countries, such as Sujoy Dutta (2016), who: . . . focuses on the emotions expressed by Dalit and the lower castes in sustaining their everyday protests against traditional upper castes in three villages of (Uttar Pradesh) UP. (Dutta, 2016: 65)
Another possibility is to analyze the proximity and distance between ‘meanings’ of some emotions, or some emotions in different regions of the planet, such as for example the excellent study by Jack Barbalet (2018) on trust and social connection in China called ‘guanxi’ that the author argues should be seen as a practice of high solidarity in the absence of trust.
This Special Issue aims to make visible the sensibilities of geocultural and geopolitical areas that are not well known in international literature. In a broad and plural approach it is intended that the articles cover the following elements of a possible characterization: (a) classic and contemporary authors who investigate emotions, (b) synthetic presentations on the most important studies on emotions, and (c) exploration of those emotions that may be identified as most prevalent. These three elements and others can be addressed as a whole, or separately as the authors deem appropriate. The expected result is that the international reader is able to understand approaches and apprehend the authors’ societies through the lens of emotions, sensations and sensibilities.
In this Special Issue we imply a path that leads to approaches from China, Europe, Israel, New Zealand, Central America and South America constituted around emotions and sensibilities, hoping that both the presences and the absences in this itinerary will clarify a little more, because today the study of sensibilities and emotions is a fundamental key to knowing societies.
The Special Issue is articulated in a whole if it is seen from three convergent perspectives: as a puzzle, as a kaleidoscope and as a palimpsest.
As Puzzle, the articles are parts to put together a scenario of emotions in general, and the politics of sensibilities in particular. It is a photo armed with parts of a ‘global’ scene from Oceania to Latin America, from the specificity of Central America to the multiplicity of China, from the universality and particularity of the Global North and South of Europe, Israel and Argentina.
Each part allows us to approach a variable figure of how emotions play in a particular society and their tension with the universal.
The number can be captured as a Kaleidoscope in which, from different continents and regions, are provided different visions about the role of emotions in these geocultural and geopolitical spaces. The plurality of authors in terms of their formations and fields of particular inquiries constitutes lenses that allow us to capture variations of colors and tones, that allow an approach between the theoretical and the empirical at the very heart of the relationship between emotions and society, which is its multiplicity.
In turn, the set of works gathered here can be taken as Palimpsest in that they make evident the re-writing and re-inscription of emotions in social processes, and where conjuncture and structure, contingency and history are embossed and reinterpreted. The works that are presented make visible how there are traces of the historical in what is recorded on the plots of previous sensibilities.
Mary Holmes’ interesting work on Aotearoa New Zealand emotionalization is taken as the key to coloniality in terms of processes of reflexivity. The article shows how, while such processes ‘have a gender’, gender relations are complicated by shifting hierarchies of status and power as they are disrupted, reformed and contested under colonization. Similarly, she hints that Māori ways of doing things are being more widely incorporated into everyday behavior and feelings of belonging for everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this way, Holmes makes it clear how colonization, decolonization and the politics of sensibilities involve long and dialectical historical processes.
In her article ‘The collision of tradition and modernity: Historical changes of emotions and expressions of Chinese people’, Jingting Zhang reviews the central place of emotions in Chinese society in a way that allows us to reflect on the tensions between the traditional and the modern. In the same way, it makes it possible to color the palimpsests that the politics of sensibilities have today as a re-writing and re-plotting of emotions historically and daily experienced by Chinese people.
As another piece of the puzzle, an example of the analysis of fear as a prevalent emotion is carried out by Mira Moshe in her work on the tension and polar perception between Geocultural vs Universal emotional sensibilities investigated in terms of how these options are reflected in the annual list of Israeli radio hits since 1963. Moshe maintains that music plays an important sociocultural role in the construction and/or reflection of geocultural and universal emotional states by giving voice to personal emotional sensibilities. For her, hope and fear are part of an emotional complex that is woven through our lives and our experience, and nostalgia can overcome fear, or better yet, romantic nostalgia can normalize fear.
Paola Rebughini with her article ‘A sociology of anxiety: Western modern legacy and the Covid-19 outbreak’ approaches one of the most prevalent emotions, that of anxiety, from a particular kaleidoscopic view. The article seeks to analyze anxiety as an emotional state often identified as the most characteristic in the history of modern Europe and the ‘Global North’. From the prism of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens she reviews the aforementioned problem and also its role in the recent outbreak of Covid-19, and specifically regarding its relations with confidence in scientific knowledge. Rebughini argues that although Covid-19 has been a global pandemic, this emergency may reveal some cultural characteristics and history of European anxiety in the geocultural map of emotions.
Anger, sadness and fear associated with violence and the violation of the human rights of migrants in Central America in general, and in Guatemala in particular, is the part of the puzzle that Jeanie Herrera and Manuel Rivera contribute in this issue. The possibility of achieving the ‘American dream’ and the conflictive networks associated with poverty and violence are some of the causes of international migration in the region, and of the politics of the sensibilities associated with them. The article shows how the migration context, its institutional framework and the containment mechanisms for massive migratory flows are produced and inscribed in state actions, sensibilities and social support mechanisms associated with migration and the feelings of migrants.
Finally, Adrian Scribano as the last piece of the puzzle offers a synthetic exposition of some inquiries about emotions and the politics of sensibilities in Latin America, concentrating on those that are being carried out in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The work is based on a multi-method viewpoint, where qualitative and quantitative secondary and primary data are articulated. It ends by promoting the need to capture the emergence of novel characteristics of the politics of sensibilities in the current pandemic situation.
The articles presented here make the emotions evident as the plot of a palimpsest, they help us to understand how ‘historically’ through music, in the different perceptions of happiness and well-being, colonial customs, the modern and the traditional are re-writes and re-prints of the existence of subjects and societies.
The experience of the emotions analyzed by the articles put together a puzzle that allows us to understand the qualitative and variable geometry of emotions that is formed in diverse geopolitical and geocultural contexts.
The various theoretical views present here in terms of their kaleidoscopic effect make it clear how the analysis of emotions leads to a situated and autonomous approach in the construction of knowledge about social processes and their multiple constitutive nuances.
Finally, it is interesting to summarize how this special issue is an approximation to what we can call emotional ecologies.
An emotional ecology can be characterized by three factors: first, in each politics of sensibilities a set of emotions is constituted and connected by common aspects or the ‘air of a family’, the affinity of practices, proximity and emotional amplitudes. Second, this set of emotions constitutes a reference system for each of these emotions in a particular geopolitical and geocultural context that gives them a specific valence. Third, they are groups of feeling practices whose particular experience regarding an element of life can only be understood in its collective context.
In each emotional ecology, aspects are combined that enable people to build horizons of experience and sociability, giving meaning to sensations and their results. In the first sense that we are pointing out, an emotional ecology is being constituted by those emotions that are in a similar chromatic field.
With sadness, melancholy and anguish, for example, we are forming a surface of emotional inscription that allows us to understand the content of each one by the relationship of proximity and distance that each one acquires in the field/space that is formed on this surface. Joy, happiness and joyfulness offer another example of how, in a given society, they can be understood through the proximity and distance in which practices acquire their experientiality and sociability. These aspects of family allow an emotion to occupy a place in the field, given a certain value of attraction and rejection with another that inhabits that same ecology: immediate enjoyment through consumption means that happiness and joy are experienced in a different way, but in mutual reference. They are kin to practices that, to be captured, must be put into play in the identification and assessment of each one and the whole. Enjoyment can only be explained by accepting the differences and similarities with joy, happiness and joyfulness in relation to consumption.
On the other hand, emotional ecology refers to the weight of where and for whom this set of practices taken as a whole is lived. Thus, there are the political and cultural valences of what can and should be felt in association with each of these references. The scenario constituted by the politics of sensibilities is conditioned by the spatial distribution of power, its territorial organization and the borders and ‘bridges’ that unite/separate the practices of feeling. It is in this sense that an emotional ecology must be understood within a geopolitics that provides the parameters for experiencing emotions in particular. In a similar direction, an emotional ecology is structured based on the cultural identities and particular ways of life of those who experience those ecologies. The unequal distribution of nutrients, the differential access to sources of bodily energy, and the inequality in the possibilities of ‘eating healthily’ are the manifestations of how a geopolitics of food conditions the experience of the anguish of scarcity, social suffering in the face of not eating, and the ‘heaviness’ of full bellies. In this case, it is also palpable how an ecology of fear is detectable in war zones, in migrant and refugee camps, in the daily lives of women in the face of femicide; regions, countries and continents that are geopolitical structures of an emotional ecology.
Third, an emotional ecology implies the collective imputation of the experience of a set of emotions with respect to processes, people and objects, that is, an emotion is performed from the collective socially-learned experiences, its valences and chromaticity in connection with a specific element. Sadness, anguish and pain in the face of death are constructed in a different way, sieved and socially organized. What to feel, how to feel it, in what way to express it, nest in pre-existing societal experiences that are apprehended and learned as a member of a collective. In the face of death, births, love unions, birthdays, the connections between happiness, joyfulness and joy are different. Life lived, everyday life, is marked by a politics of sensibilities where words and things acquire volumes, densities and values; where things and words are inscribed in one or another emotional ecology; from the insult to praise, from the photo to the TikTok video, from the political slogan to the religious interpellation. Planetary emotionalization is the ‘glocal’ result of a political economy of morality that harbors a politics of sensibilities in which the diverse political ecologies nest.
It is in the context of this diversity, plurality and multiplicity, suggesting a geopolitics of emotions and the experiences of a diverse emotional ecology, that a set of feeling practices appear in one way or another as the opposite side to fear, hatred and sadness, namely as reciprocity, trust and hope.