From Chronicle of Higher Education comes this intriguing piece: Getting Emotional
The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields.
Mr. Miller’s [author of Humiliation and The Anatomy of Disgust] more general point is that we are accustomed to understanding emotion as an essentially personal experience – something that occurs “inside” someone and that may or may not be expressed to others. But there are cultures in which emotion is overwhelmingly a social matter, not a private one. The early use of “humiliation” referred not to an inner state but to being made humble in the presence of those higher on the social scale. Only in the 18th century, he says, did it become normal to say “I feel humiliated” rather than “I am humiliated.”
As social mobility became more common, there was a greater emphasis on using emotional language to describe the inner world of an individual as something more or less self-contained. What we gained in expressiveness about feeling, Mr. Miller implies, we lost in candor about the normal cruelty of social hierarchy. A Viking at an academic conference would be bewildered by a lot of things, but at least he would understand that life is a battlefield.
