Historical Perspectives on Emotions and Cultural Identity

Historical inquiry into emotions has evolved from classical philosophical reflections on passions and virtues to a multifaceted field that situates feeling at the heart of cultural identity. Early modern thinkers treated emotions as moral forces shaping individual character, while nineteenth-century psychologists recast them as universal mental states governed by physiological mechanisms. In recent decades, historians have emphasised the cultural construction of emotions, demonstrating how collective repertoires of feeling vary across regions and epochs. Concepts such as mourning rituals in colonial contexts, communal celebrations of joy in revolutionary movements and private epistolary expressions of longing have all served as lenses for understanding group solidarity and boundary-making. This work highlights the ways in which regimes of feeling underpin political ideologies, religious practices and gender norms, and how shifts in emotional priorities—from honour to sentiment to emotional intelligence—reflect broader transformations in power and identity. The study of emotions thus provides insight into national myth-making, the legacy of empire and the negotiation of modern identities. By tracing emotional vocabularies across texts, artefacts and embodied practices, historians reveal the intertwined processes by which feeling both shapes and is shaped by cultural belonging.

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Historical Perspectives on Emotions and Cultural Identity publication trend

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Technical terms

Emotional regime: A culturally specific configuration of norms and expectations that governs acceptable emotions and their expression within a society.

Genealogical anatomy: A methodological approach that traces the historical lineage and conceptual transformations of an emotion term to avoid anachronism and essentialism.

Feeling rules: Socially prescribed guidelines that dictate how individuals should experience and display emotions in particular contexts.

Emotional style: A patterned mode of feeling and expression associated with a social group, historical period or cultural practice.

References

1. State of the Field: The History of Emotions. History (2021).
2. What is the History of Anger a History of?. Emotions History Culture Society (2020).
3. Ugly ambition: “Sportsgirls” and the German press in the 1920s. Social Science History (2024).