Margrit Pernau is with the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She is a pioneer in the study of emotions. Among her publications are Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (2019) and Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (2013). In 2018, she co-edited Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain with Imke Rajamani and Katherine Butler Schofield. On 6 March 2020, she delivered a lecture titled, ‘A History of Emotions in India: A Critical Introduction’ at the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi. She was interviewed in New Delhi subsequent to this lecture.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: Whenever we refer to emotions in academia, there is a risk or chance of falling into the premise of psychology or maybe moral philosophy. Since post-enlightenment disciplinary markers are still quite prominent, one should at least anticipate such consequences. Therefore, how do we understand emotions sociologically or anthropologically?
Margrit Pernau: There are, of course, many different ways of approaching the study of emotions, depending on the research questions you want to ask. My own approach (laid out in an article co-written with Imke Rajamani) draws on phenomenology and the history of concepts. We take the experience of the actors as our starting point: How do the actors encounter the material world; how are their senses mediating between them and the world; how are not only the sensory impression but the bodily sensorium itself changing in response to these experiences, to what they hear, see and smell? The next step is to look at the interpretation the actors give to this experience through language, certainly, and it is here that the history of concepts comes in, but also through other sign systems—music, paintings, built spaces, films, dance, perhaps even food. It is on this interpretation, finally, that the historical (or sociological and anthropological) subjects act in the world. So whether we are interested in their knowledge on emotion or in their emotional practices, it is important to keep our own interpretation at hold, in order to be able to understand the emotional world of the people we are observing on their own terms. This does not preclude a critical engagement as a second step, but we should avoid mixing the two levels of investigation.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: In the introduction of your book, Civilizing Emotions (Pernau and Jordheim 2015), you mention, ‘emotions are both indicators and factors of historical change. They both reflect historical transformation and bring them about’. Can you emphasise more on these two aspects of emotions, that is, do emotions have a history, and do emotions make history?
Margrit Pernau: First, it is always important to acknowledge the work of our colleagues. The book, Civilizing Emotions, was a collaborative venture over more than four years by a team of 13 scholars, led by Helge Jordheim (who is also the co-author of the Introduction) and myself. What we aimed at was not an edited volume but a truly collective monograph. We have developed the agenda and research questions as a team; we have discussed and commented and re-written each other’s draft chapters, and we had a whole workshop only for the Introduction.
The formulation that emotions have a history and that they make history was first proposed by Professor Ute Frevert, the director of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and has become a motto for all the research done at our centre.
Emotions have a history, like other social phenomena, and they change according to time and place. This is common knowledge as far as emotion rules are concerned: Different societies have different norms when it comes to which emotions are to be cultivated, and which are to be reined in. It is also generally acknowledged that the expression of emotions varies according to cultural settings, between societies as well as in different social spaces in the same society. This has been wonderfully developed in an article by Benno Gammerl (2012) on emotional styles linked to emotional spaces: Even within the same society, individuals are not consistently exposed to the same rules and performing the same practices—the academic seminar and the dance club not only follow different rules as to which emotions can be shown, the space itself evokes different sets of feelings. But the cultural and social impact on emotions is even deeper than that. The impact of social rules varies, but even where they are resisted by the actors, this might often be better explained by the presence of different rules (for instance, the rule of the peer group vs. the rules of the elders in positions of authority), than by the unimportance of rules. In any case, feeling rules do not touch only the surface of a person but also shape their emotional universe down to the bodily, the unintentional level. Whether unrequited love causes you to pine away or you seek the help of a therapist to overcome the feeling of dejection and to move on with your life; whether shame and embarrassment cause you to faint or you have to find other ways of dealing with the situation is not a personal ‘decision’ but a response of the body, which is cultural and biological at the same time. Before we can analyse the role emotions play in history, we have to carefully investigate, what ‘emotions’ are, and how the actors understand them in this precise historical situation. That anger is central to riots does not tell us much, as long as we assume that we already know exactly what anger is. Instead, we should try and find out what anger means to the perpetrators and victims of that riot. We can then discover that the anger in the 1890s might well be quite a different emotion from anger during the Partition.
Second, emotions make history. They are not just epiphenomena of other categories, like interests (which in turn can hardly be thought of as devoid of emotions: the desire to accumulate money or power can be highly emotional, even if these emotions find different expressions). Emotions motivate actions and practices, and they bring people together in emotional communities, which can cut across other social boundaries, while they can also (and quite often do) override interests. This is something social scientists have been aware of for a long time already. I would therefore hesitate to proclaim an ‘emotional turn’—what the new field of emotion studies adds to the older studies is a systematic investigation of the role of emotions and a refinement of the methodological toolbox to investigate them in their complexity.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: Emotions become a central figure in the process of civilising. We often look at the practices and spaces of disciplining the body. But how these new experiences or practices reinvent the field of emotions are, in a way, neglected or kept aside. Can you tell us why?
Margrit Pernau: From the eighteenth century onwards, the Europeans encountered an increasing variety of cultures, through ‘discovery’, but even more through conquest and colonialism. The way to make sense of this bewildering geographical diversity was to organise it along a timeline, to convert space into time, so to speak. This is the origin of the figure of stages of development, of the assumption that all societies follow the same movement from the stage of hunters and gatherers, to pastoralists, to peasants and finally to traders and industrialists: A march through history from savagery and barbarism to civilisation. To these stages different ways of feelings are linked. These emotions become important indicators to place a society on the timeline of development. In this way, emotions are centrally linked to the creation and interpretation of a new world order in the globalising world. In the nineteenth century, most colonies did not challenge the idea of the stages of development, but they did challenge the place allocated to their society on the timeline. The fight for recognition as a ‘civilised country’ (with all that implied—from the recognition in international law to the possibility to claim institutions of civil society and political participation) therefore was also a fight for ‘civilised’ emotions. Training one’s muscles to overcome cowardice, and loving one’s spouse in a companionate marriage were everyday practices, highly personal and even intimate, but which at the same time were seen as a central part of the struggle for international recognition.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: We can see in modern times that new emotional practices such as romantic love have emerged. What I mean here is, love becomes a common social practice, and love becomes a requirement for marriage. How do we understand the emergence of romantic love in the context of civilising emotions? How does this particular articulation of emotions that we call romantic love become possible in that historical juncture?
Margrit Pernau: I am not an expert of the history of romantic love, so I have to restrict myself to very broad interpretations (if you want more, you can read the wonderful volume edited by Francesca Orsini [2006], or the monograph on marriage and modernity by Rochona Majumdar [2009]). Since the eighteenth century, love and the way women were treated had evolved as central categories to identify the stage a particular society occupied on the timeline of development. The British colonialists posited their own romantic ideals as the norm for civilisation: heterosexuality, a marriage proposal based on love (as long as love happened between partners judged as appropriate by the parents), monogamous marriage and tender feelings in the family. This had a lot to do with changes in the structure of the family—the importance of the nuclear family, the reduction of the number of children and the importance of their education—but also with the ideal of emotional fulfilment, which informed not just marriage but also the cult of friendship, since the eighteenth century. Though the interpretations of contemporaries, right up to the present, seem to oppose the world of romantic love to the world of capitalism, recent research by Eva Illouz (2012, 2019) has shown how closely the two are intertwined, how much romantic love also depends on the consumptions of certain goods—from valentine cards to romantic dinners.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: In this part of the world, when our societies experience civilising as part of the colonial project, discourse of anti-colonial nationalism always confronts and attempts to come up with an alternative idea of being civilised. Within this dialectic of the colonial and the nationalist discourse of civilising, norms of cultural authenticity have been invented. How does this affect writing a history of emotions in a post-colonial society? As a scholar who worked on societies such as England as well as India, how did you experience this difference?
Margrit Pernau: I am not sure this would affect the research directly—social scientists always have to deal with normative expectations regarding their work. This is true at the level of the historical subjects that we are investigating: Their knowledge on emotion very often encompasses certain assumptions about specific ways that people in a certain society or in a certain region of the world are feeling. This might be colonial assumptions about Bengali emotions or about the Rajput code of honour; this might be an assumption that there is a (one?) very specific way of feeling like an Indian, which is at the same time deemed to be natural and authentic for all Indians, but also highly normative. At the same time, social scientists are also confronted with the feeling rules of their readers, who might in turn have opinions about either the emotions specific to their community, or, on the contrary, claim universal feelings. I don’t think this is specific in any way to India or to a post-colonial society.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: What are the main epistemological challenges of academic research on emotions in sociology and history?
Margrit Pernau: What I find the most difficult at the moment is the navigation between the acknowledgement of cultural specificity and the avoidance of incommensurability. We have been living in a globalising world marked by multiple ‘Encounters with Emotions’ (our research group at the Max Planck Institute has just brought out a volume on this subject), which have profoundly transformed the way people in different regions feel. Still, this rapprochement as a result of global encounters (which takes place within history) remains quite distinct from the assumption of universal emotions (which precede history).
This in turn means that we have to be very careful how to use theoretical and methodological approaches across time and space. Let me give you an example. William Reddy, in his Navigation of Feeling (2001), develops an interesting theory, drawing on cognitive psychology, how emotions arise, transforming a diffused feeling into well-defined emotions through subject’s exploration: Is this really anger that I’m feeling? Or might it rather be sadness? Or perhaps it is not anger at someone else, but frustration with myself? The subject can try out, ‘navigate’, different forms of labelling, before he or she finally settles on one emotion. This looks like a great way of linking experience and interpretation, and also bringing in language and semiotics, which we have discussed in the first question. The problem is that this theory works quite well for a Western European, post-reformation, middle-class individual, who has been brought up with a multitude of practices favouring self-exploration and an interest in the precise labelling of interior states, from new forms of confession to diary writings and the exchange of intimate letters. This need for constant introspection does not seem to have had the same urgency in nineteenth century North India, if it is present at all—but without this, Reddy’s toolbox is no longer useful. So what we as South Asianists need to do is to remain in a dialogue with European and American emotion studies, but at the same time bring our own fieldwork and empirical investigations into this dialogue and see where they change the parameters, and where we need to come up with a toolbox of our own.
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe: How challenging is it in the context of data-collecting methods? Are there many sources that we do not usually explore, but one can explore to formulate new perspectives on our histories?
Margrit Pernau: I think we have to be inventive as to the sources we use—we will probably not come up with completely new sources, but we need to look across the boundaries of our disciplines and engage in a dialogue with other scholars, who may teach us a lot about the sources that they use. One of the explorations in this field I really enjoyed was hosting a conference and editing a book on monsoon feelings (Pernau et al. 2018), together with Imke Rajamani and Katherine Schofield. It brought together a team from a wide variety of disciplines; scholars on literature in a variety of languages and poetical genres, musicologists, art historians, film scholars, historians and medical scholars. This not only allowed each of us to become aware of how one specific emotion, sringara (one of the nine rasa, erotic or romantic love), was expressed in a wide variety of genres and modes, and to see what different sources were available in other disciplines but it also allowed us to trace how these genres and modes influenced each other, how the motif of the peacock or of the heavy raincloud moved from miniatures to poems and films, and also to garden architecture. So the sources are there—we just have to learn how to read them for our new questions.
