Session Abstract

The aim of this panel is to bring analytical approaches from research on the history and theory of the emotions to bear on our understanding of the conquest and colonization of America. It takes its cue from the multidisciplinary approaches to the study of the emotions that have emerged over the past three decades across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, in which the physical and cognitive capacity to have emotions is understood as universal. At the same time, and one of the key contributions of made by historians, to acknowledge that emotions are universal is not to assume that they are uniformly experienced or expressed, or even aroused by the same conditions the world over or indeed across time. That is to say, emotions are not simply ‘inner’, or individual. Instead, because they are communicated through language, gesture, and ritual, emotions are shaped by the dominant cultural norms – alternatively termed ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1979), ‘emotional regimes’ (Reddy 2001), or ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein 2006) -- that prevail in the context in which individuals and groups find themselves. In these contexts, emotions ‘do things’: they ‘glue’ people together or they push people apart. Emotions are shaped by and themselves shape human interactions, and they are centrally concerned with how societies and communities cohere. In short, emotions have social functions and to study, not only what they do, but also ‘how they work’ (Katz 1999), can contribute in significant ways to our understanding of what motivates people and groups to do the things they do.

 As an entity forged in the encounter between Amerindians and Europeans, each with their own values, rules, and systems, America is a compelling and challenging case through which to explore the emotions as a motivating force in shaping social interactions. Each of the papers in the panel foregrounds different emotions – love, anger, fear, nostalgia, – as a category for analysis. By engaging with a range of sources, from legal cases, religious and medical treatises, Inquisition cases etc., each paper also tackles the challenges associated with documenting and evaluating the transient and immaterial traces of emotive interactions in the past. On the one hand, the panel aims to address scholars of Latin America, where it seeks to make a methodological contribution to colonial history, which in turn can be productively extended to other periods. On the other, it seeks to widen the geographical purview of methodological paradigms pertaining to the emotions that have been largely developed in the context of Europe and the US.