Centre for Scottish & Celtic Studies

During the research process for my MRes entitled “Faireachadh is Fèin-sgrìobhadh: Late 20th Century and Early 21st Century Scottish Gaelic Autobiographies as Loci of Emotional Practices” (formerly entitled “Scottish Gaelic Autobiographies as Sources for an Emotional History of the 20th century Gàidhealtachd”), I received CSCS Seedcorn Funding to attend a one-day symposium on “Subjectivity, Self-narratives and the History of Emotions” on the 18th of January 2019 at the University of Sussex.

I attended this conference with three main objectives in mind. Firstly, I intended to establish contacts with historians of emotion with an interest in autobiographies or more broadly, self-narratives. Secondly, I intended to seek advice on matters such as making the best use of autobiographical sources which are more focused on representing the community rather than the self, connecting my research to theoretical discussions of emotion as well as discussing the role of social institutions in influencing emotional norms. Finally, I hoped that listening to the diverse keynotes would allow me to be informed about the various theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the use of self-narratives in the history of emotions.

I managed to accomplish the first two objectives by conversing with two of the speakers, namely Prof. Penny Summerfield of the University of Manchester and Prof. Dr. Ute Frevert of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Prof. Summerfield suggested referring to her book Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives in Historical Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) for examples of how historians have analysed autobiographies. She also advised me that as long as emotional descriptions were present in the autobiographies analysed, there would be material for discussion even if these texts were more focused on communal representation. Prof. Dr. Frevert suggested using the concept of the “emotional habitus”, based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, to model the interaction between social institutions which propagate emotional norms and individuals who may accept or reject these norms. She also advised that theoretical discussions of emotion, especially those from neuropsychological perspectives, did not necessarily need to be fully embedded in projects with my focus and scale even though they were important to the field as a whole. Although I did not use the concept of emotional habitus in the final dissertation, the concept was nevertheless a useful prop for me to organise my thoughts and consequently develop the final structure of my dissertation. I ended up using Monique Scheer’s related concept of “emotional practices” as the conceptual anchor for my dissertation, which was itself derived from Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the habitus.

Even though not all the keynotes were immediately relevant to my own research, I was nevertheless able to get an overview of the field of the history of emotions in its current state, as well as to hear from the speakers what they thought was important for the field. Ultimately, this conference gave me the confidence necessary to go ahead with using concepts from the history of emotions for my MRes, especially given the novel nature of the research.

 

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First published: 3 May 2021