Feeling the rules: Historical and contemporary perspectives on emotional norms and social distinction

Abstract

Feeling rules are norms surrounding emotions, particularly emotional expressions in social contexts, and are a well-known aspect of human societies in both the past and present. As a subdiscipline, the history of emotions has found great profit in tracking changing feeling rules over time to better understand social formations. Emotional norms are culturally, geographically, and socially specific, providing coherence to communities or serving as instruments of distinction within them. Yet some historians have found a sole focus on the normative insufficient for grasping, in their entirety, the historical aspects of emotions and their specific functions. This special issue suggests some new ways to think about escaping the dualism of emotional norms and emotional experiences – or, put more broadly, of structure and subjectivity – without privileging either as the determining factor in shaping social relations. To show the interrelations between rules and experiences, we draw from sociological work on taste and social distinction, arguing that emotions become socially potent and drivers of historical change by being both means and objects of value judgments. This introduction provides an overview of feelings rules and emotional norms in the history of emotions, connects these to work in the sociology of taste, and introduces the case studies in the special issue.

All human societies possess “feeling rules.” ¹ These historically and culturally contingent norms and expectations manage the expression of emotions, judge their appropriateness, and classify divergences, which may be subject to sanction. Just as emotions themselves – as historians, anthropologists, and psychologists have established – are subject to change across time and space (Boddice 2024; Matt 2011; Plamper 2015), emotion management is also transhistorical. The historian William Reddy, after reading widely in anthropology and neuroscience, claimed that “we would expect to find two features universally: (1) that communities construe emotions as an important domain of effort, and (2) that they provide individuals with prescriptions and counsel concerning both the best strategies for pursuing emotional learning and the proper end point or ideal of emotional equilibrium” (Reddy 2001: 55). In part because of the importance of emotions to communities, tracing the contents and effects of normative standards for emotions in various historical contexts has often preoccupied historians of emotions. As the value placed on particular emotions and emotional expressions shifts, tracking the dynamics of such regulation over time provides evidence for the historicity of emotion. Moreover, because different domains of life are governed by different sets of rules, examining domain-specific norms can shed light on the diversity of expectations and practices of emotional management.

Notwithstanding the real gains from this perspective, a sole focus on emotional standards does not capture the full scope of emotions as subjective experiences. Capturing only discursive evaluations of emotions, such a focus leaves larger questions about the specific relations between norms and experience unanswered: Does a change of rules necessarily precede change in emotional practice? To what extent do subtle shifts in emotional experience shape normative frameworks?

Consequently – and as will be discussed further below – the question of how to make appropriate analytical distinctions between the history of emotional standards and the history of emotional experiences (and how to operationalize any such distinction for work with historical sources) has been a starting point for some of the most intense methodological and theoretical debates of the subdiscipline (Plamper 2015). To explore the ways in which norm and experience are entangled but not neatly aligned, it is necessary to pay attention to both the level of interaction and the enveloping social structure in which such interaction unfolds.

This is the starting point of our special issue. A focus on norms is certainly helpful to explain social reproduction, but not sufficient to account for all social and historical change – a core concern of historians. Bringing together approaches from history, sociology, cultural anthropology, ethnography, and media studies, this issue returns to the question of the relation between emotional normativity and experience by exploring historical and contemporary contests over what was or is considered commendable or appropriate emotional expression. While the case studies range from seventeenth-century Italy to contemporary Japan, all show how individuals or groups grapple with the feeling rules by which, at the time and place they are living, they are supposed to abide.

Such disturbances of normative orders, moments when norms are placed into question, illuminate both the historicity of emotional standards and experiences and their relation to social formations. The particular intervention of this collection of studies is, however, not a Foucauldian-inspired model of norms meeting resistance. Rather, our authors are interested in how micro-level mechanisms of contention play out and for what purpose. These contentions can be crucibles for larger changes.

We demonstrate, collectively, that the historical and contemporary study of both emotional standards and emotions as lived experience can be advanced by cross-fertilizing the history of emotions with established methods and theories from the social sciences. In particular, we propose that the study of emotions can be greatly enriched by paying close attention to practices of aesthetic judgment and social distinction: by being aesthetically assessed, emotions can become both subject and object of processes of social distinction. Drawing upon sociological work on taste and social distinction (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Hennion 2001, 2007; Highmore 2016; Hochschild 1979, 1983), we therefore understand feeling rules not only as ideological norms and feelings not only as individual expressions: they are also objects that people are drawn toward, that are judged by others, and that can become the object of judgments both aesthetic and emotional. In line with a transdisciplinary interest in practice theory, we consider taste judgments an emotional practice. For this reason, all articles – regardless of their disciplinary origin – speak to the history of emotions by outlining processes and moments of friction that instigate or catalyze change. Because norms are not just formulated but also experienced within specific contexts, feeling rules are best understood to comprise not only emotional standards but also the feelings attached to social norms.

Living with rules and norms is emotional, even visceral, on an everyday-level: appreciation and disapproval – and, with it, exclusion and belonging – are felt because they are built upon deeply embodied understandings of propriety. Such reactions are themselves objects for evaluation according to both aesthetic and moral criteria. The experience of being repelled by an object, a person, or a situation can reinforce long-held aesthetic preferences, but can also challenge ideas of what is “in good taste.” Seeing a neighbor’s contempt toward your job, furniture, or place of origin might evoke shame, but it can also heighten your sense of pride in your way of life. In such processes of social distinction, both a feeling for the rules and rules for feeling play a role. Emotional styles themselves can become the object of taste judgments. Emotions can be considered ugly, elegant, or tacky in their intensity, publicness, or their forms of expression. One of our authors, presenting an ethnography of ultra fandom in football, traces the variety of emotions expressed not only by hard-core fans, but also by average stadium-goers: some think the ultras’ passion spirited, others find it vulgar.

While feeling rules and emotional styles intersect with, or in some way constitute, other systemic categories (especially class, race, gender, generation, or religion) they do not neatly align with them. Emotions can lead others to question their expectations or certainties about what is appropriate, and they can also challenge a person’s own assumptions in moments when it is least expected: during the first two minutes’ silence, some British men were surprised by how much it moved them, even causing them to cry in spite of themselves. Norms for emotional expression can feel old or outdated, and thus at odds with new experiences. One of the case studies discusses the new kinds of feelings around playing sports that German-speaking women developed in the interwar period and how they grated with existing notions of bourgeois femininity in the Wilhelmine German Empire.

Yet understanding exactly how such processes unfold always presents some challenges. The cultural politics around the representation of emotions are multipolar; with the macro level of society intersecting with group- or domain-specific precepts. The historicity of emotions and emotional standards requires careful reconstruction, particularly because changing feeling rules may either follow or catalyze other social changes, but they may also interact in more complex ways with other types of historical change, combining or oscillating between cause and effect. In given historical contexts, which kinds of emotional behavior are regarded as decorous or inappropriate are often in flux, sometimes imperceptibly slowly, sometimes very rapidly. Similarly, emotional behavior can be regulated according to space, gender, and age. Norms are handed down from generation to generation, forms of media preserve ideas about adequate expression, and tasteful objects outlive actors. Sensibilities and ideas of decorum can change faster or slower than their symbolic vessels or the styles expressing them. Breaking feeling rules or taste norms can be so powerful precisely because they can be forms of tradition, slowly formed over long periods of time.

This volume is situated in a field of research where history, sociology, and cultural anthropology can fruitfully converse. In exploring both social reproduction and social change, this special issue offers perspectives into affective community formation. It foregrounds the way subtle shifts or broader changes are catalyzed by people engaging with feeling rules, and it does so with a view to the twin claim of the history of emotions: that emotions have a history and that they can make history (the latter being the harder claim to prove). For this reason, studies on the power of emotions to enact historical change have often focused on momentous events such as revolutions (Buldakov 2018; Linton 2013; Reed 2004), or social movements, such as abolitionism, in which emotions were purposefully harnessed by historical actors (Ahern 2013; Lamb-Books 2016; Westwood 2023). Here, emotions, because they were already so prominent at the time, seem easy to explore, but to focus solely on ostentatious emotions would mean to conflate emotions with their demonstrative performance.

While the articles in this issue do discuss the demonstrative use of emotions and their expression, they are also concerned with emotions as more diffused, less concentrated elements of social and cultural processes of appreciation or depreciation. The range of methods that we draw on from are important to understand such processes. Written by a team of eight researchers from the social sciences, ethnography, and history, the issue posits that taste and distaste are underexplored dynamics in how emotions shape society. Emotion research, we further claim, would benefit from a more thorough conversation between scholars working with sociological and ethnographic methods on contemporary cases and scholars who reconstruct historical experience through archival materials.

Feeling rules, emotional standards, and emotional styles

The history of emotional standards has been a core aspect of the history of emotions. A seminal work by Carol and Peter Stearns defines the complex cultural web of standards and assessments of emotional expression as “emotionology” (Stearns and Stearns 1985: 813). They coined this term to “distinguish between professed values and emotional experience” (ibid.: 824), arguing that historical work on emotions suffered from a lack of clarity about the difference between systems of values and actual experience. In their view, because standards left concrete expression in various forms of historical sources, studying the history of emotional standards would be the most accessible way to study emotions in the past. The emotionological, or normative, approach was, and continues to be, pursued with profit by historians (Frevert et al. 2014; Harris 2004; Sherman 2005). Such historians, turning mostly to advice literature and other forms of regulatory, advisory or educational material, have been able to capture systems of valuation on the move. Eighteenth-century Europe has proved to be a favored arena in the pursuit of changing norms (Eustace 2008; Reddy 2001). This is due to the reorientations of values and sentiments, traditionally attributed to the Enlightenment, in this period. Hunt (2007) suggests that the emotional styles generated during this time played key roles in the formation of modern humanitarianism and transnational solidarity networks. Carol and Peter Stearns recognized that standards and experiences were not only divided but also entangled (Stearns and Stearns 1985). Accordingly, they argued for a “third task” for historical studies of emotions (after the first two tasks of studying emotional standards and emotional experiences), “which involves examining peoples’ efforts to mediate between emotional standards and emotional experience” (Stearns and Stearns 1985: 825). It is this third task that this special issue is mainly concerned with.

The work of Carol and Peter Stearns was contemporary with similar explorations in sociology and anthropology. Among the most notable are Arlie Russel Hochschild’s “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure” (1979) and her monograph The Managed Heart (1983), which examined the importance of emotional management in workplace contexts. Making use of interviews and cultural narratives, Hochschild revealed that emotion work and emotion management were a necessary result of the existence of emotional standards: the flight attendants she studied modeled their emotions on the company’s precepts for expressing them, which, while initially a performance, eventually affected how they truly felt (Hochschild 1983). Standards implied efforts to enforce, meet, or deviate from particular ends, which, necessarily, made them intersect with emotional experience through emotion work: the active and deliberate effort to work done by a person on his or her own emotions. Hochschild defined emotion work as the “secondary acts performed upon the ongoing nonreflective stream of primary emotive experience” (1979: 552). We very often “feel in ways appropriate to the situation,” she argued, meaning “we actively try to manage what we feel in accordance with latent rules” (ibid.: 571). Studying the cultural patterns of such emotion work may reveal variation within societies between gender roles and occupations (ibid.: 572). In a similar vein, current psychological research examines the interplay of “emotion display rules” and the working environment (Chang 2020; Manokara et al. 2023).

Because of their concern with lived experience and face-to-face investigations, sociologists, and anthropologists have been particularly influential in understanding social interactions beyond seeing them as governed by a rigid set of rules (Abu-Lughod 1985, 1986; Appadurai 1988; Illouz 2008; Lutz 1988). Often due to inspiration from such studies, “secondary acts” of conscious emotion management have often been included in historical explorations of emotions. William Reddy’s (2001: 122) influential The Navigation of Feeling studied the emotional culture of pre- and revolutionary France and proffered a model that understood emotional expression as always necessarily being a process of emotional “navigation”. In this navigation, individuals narrate and translate complex physiological activations through pre-existing but malleable emotional descriptions and, in doing so, emotionally ascertain or reorient themselves. Any expression of emotion is therefore a working out of a “real” feeling. To capture this theoretical insight, Reddy (2001: 105) coined the term “emotive,” a portmanteau of emotion and performative. He conceived this term to indicate his proposition that verbally expressing an emotion could be best understood as an utterance that did something, along the lines of a “performative” from speech act theory. In his argument, a person who says “I’m afraid” or “I love you” is performing an exploratory statement that changes their emotional experience through attempting to label it, and perhaps making the speaker aware of the specific nature of such experience for the first time (Reddy 2001: 102; see also Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). Reddy also proposed his own concept for the challenges of living amongst set norms of emotional expression: people living within a rather rigid “emotional regime” need “emotional refuges,” where they can let go of expectations and rules (Reddy 2001: 128–29).

Building on these early interventions, practitioners of the history of emotions, hoping to better appreciate emotional experience, have begun to investigate the embodied aspects of emotions (Sarıoğlu and Khalek 2023) through the development of concepts which emphasize such aspects, especially emotional styles and emotional practices. This was a self-consciously “Bourdieuian” turn, extending Bourdieu’s (1977) own interest – most famously enshrined in the “habitus” – in seeing standards not as something simply impressed through explicit orders but absorbed, embodied, and played out through bodily practices. Monique Scheer, the most well-known proponent of this approach, has argued for understanding emotions as practices. Emotions are done, rather than statically present, and come into being through the individual body and its activities (Scheer 2012). The practice concept and approach has been widely adopted in the subdiscipline (Davison et al. 2018; Pearson 2019). In the same vein, “emotional style” has gained increasing currency because it is less ingrained than habitus, but still a characteristic enough emotional attitude that changes with the specific rules of different settings (Gammerl 2012; Reddy 2008). As such, emotional styles have been used fruitfully to capture the variety of possible emotional configurations within a given society or time and sometimes even within one person. Emotional styles also demonstrate a political valence: adopting cool attitudes or being a hippie presupposed a particular way of expressing emotions, through which, in turn, society could be challenged (Fürst 2014; Stearns 1994). Because they serve a purpose, emotional styles are decidedly historical, they “come and go, develop or decay, according to whether they work for communities” (Reddy 2008: 85).

It is a common methodological problem, however, that it is far easier to assert an interest in the subjective than to elaborate this interest rigorously. The study of discourse or ideology often comes back in or continues to be taken as the analytical starting point, with implicit assumptions about trickle-down effects from ideology to subjectivity. In reviewing work on subjectivity and emotion in gender history, Michael Roper (2005) noted that for histories of masculinity, there remained a tendency to elide the subject and cultural formations, reading the latter as the former. Roper argued that such a collapsed reading of ideology into subjectivity leads to ignoring or, at best, underestimating “the complex mechanisms that operate and which mediate between individual subjects and cultural formations” (ibid.: 58). Trying to catch this navigation or negotiation between individuals and larger social formations or cultural registers remains a challenge for historians of emotion.

One of the difficulties in approaching experience and capturing historical change in emotional experiences, especially in periods quite remote from today (Frevert and Pahl 2024: 12–16) is, of course, the question of what sources can be used and how (Barclay et al. 2020). Traces of emotional experience are best found in ego-documents such as letters, diaries, memoirs, or interviews, but may also arise in such forms of self-expression as court records, patient files, or petitions. While it is important to be aware that ego-documents are not unfiltered expressions of the self, they provide evidence on the way individuals, in exchange with cultural precepts, navigate emotional encounters both in their everyday life and in writing (Almendral 2020; Borges 2020; Magnússon 2016; Pahl and Kivimäki 2024). Unlike advice literature or conduct books, these kinds of sources often require intense archival work, the deciphering of handwriting, and the reading of hundreds of pages for a few hints of emotion. At the same time, such close historical research needs to be connected to larger social structures to identify which expressions are characteristic or exceptional and to avoid making arguments from anecdotal evidence.

This special issue confronts these challenges directly: engaging both with precepts and practices to show how individuals move within structures, but are not determined by them. In exploring some of the ways in which the normative and the subjective are interwoven at the level of experience, it also makes a further claim about methodologies: namely, that a focus on the subjective nature of norms or the construction of normative attitudes through subjectivity can be best achieved through interdisciplinary cooperation. Because of our close collaboration, we were able to achieve a mutually beneficial interdisciplinary exchange: historians have profited from insights into ethnographic analysis, while those conducting interviews have included historical trajectories of both politics and emotions into their thinking about the current status quo.

Taste for emotions

As is clear from the discussion above, a prominent issue for historical emotions scholarship is the difficulty of dealing with the normative as an active part of experience. What the case studies in this special issue seek to capture, to address this difficulty, are the dynamics of emotional standards in action. Historical actors can claim normative authority as part of strategies of legitimation; Hochschild’s work has, in fact, pointed out that following rules or doing expected emotion work is at the core of social interaction:

Conventions of feeling (i.e., what one is supposed to feel) are used in social exchange between individuals. Individuals operate their exchanges according to a prior sense of what is owed and owing. Individuals see themselves as being owed and as owing gestures of emotion work, and they exchange such gestures. People bond, in the emotive sense, either by fulfilling the emotive requirements situations call forth (e.g., the graduate trying to feel happy) or by holding just these requirements to one side. (Hochschild 1983: 572)

Clear distinctions between experience on the one hand and standards on the other are too simple an analytical model for capturing the constant exchange and mutual dependence of these two “levels,” yet we clearly need analytical tools that allow us to say something more enlightening than pointing out a general sort of complexity.

How to model emotional change in historical terms has been a major preoccupation for the history of emotions. In laying out a set of possible models of emotional change, Barbara Rosenwein has argued that certain emotional communities could “set the tone” for entire societies and thereby spread feeling rules or other cultural forms that provide emotional coherence (Rosenwein 2012: 156). Yet lacking in such models are the mechanisms through which “setting the tone” can in fact happen: how do particular emotional styles become popular?

Here, sociological work on taste can provide insights. Emotions can be seen as tools of moral and aesthetic judgments; an embodied way of evaluating actions, events, or people (Menninghaus et al. 2019). In addition, however, we would like to draw attention to the fact that emotions can also become the object of moral and aesthetic evaluation: they can be considered appropriate or inadequate, ennobling or cringe-inducing, sophisticated or vulgar, pompous or down-to-earth, urbane or provincial. Because emotional expressions are visual and sonic, these judgments – which may include a person’s view of their own emotions – involve aesthetic preferences. In 1967, philosopher J. N. Findlay contended that “emotions are extremely interesting objects of aesthetic appreciation, whether savoured in their misty interiority in ourselves, and whether married to gestures and facial expressions in sincere persons or actors, or in portraits or other simulacra, or whether clinging suggestively to poetic combinations or words or to musical combinations and sequences of tones” (Findlay 1967: 14). Findlay’s remarks indicate the aesthetic taste of, and for, emotions as well as the sensorial, bodily dimension of aesthetic appreciation. Moreover, he reminds us that both one’s own experiences and the representation of others’ emotions are accessible subjects for aesthetic engagement. “Aesthetic emotions,” those emotions or bodily signs said to be specific to aesthetic appreciation, such as being moved, getting chills, or experiencing the sublime are undergoing a renaissance of academic interest such as through the research agenda of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Menninghaus et al 2019; Wassiliwizky and Menninghaus 2021).

With emotions occupying a prominent place in contemporary society and culture (Brown 2021; Illouz 2008), nuanced knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of emotions – or what we could term emotional connoisseurship – has become a cherished goal of self-reflective practices. Recently, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has advised those readers interested in gaining mastery over their own emotional lives to “beef up your concepts” (Feldman Barrett 2017: 179). People should develop an increased “emotional granularity,” that is, an adeptness in being able to name and particularize emotions, including separating feelings that have hitherto been lumped together (ibid.: 181). A high-resolution, fine-grained appreciation of the emotional, Feldman Barrett has posited, could be trained and cultivated like taste through a set of consumptive behaviors:

So, learn as many new words as possible. Read books that are outside of your comfort zone, or listen to thought-provoking audio content like National Public Radio. Don’t be satisfied with ‘happy’: seek out and use more specific words like ‘ecstatic,’ ‘blissful,’ and ‘inspired.’ Learn the difference between ‘discouraged’ and ‘dejected’ versus generically ‘sad.’ As you build up the associated concepts, you’ll be able to construct your experiences more finely (Feldman Barrett 2017: 181)

Such an omnivorous cultural consumer is able, in Feldman Barrett’s account, to do emotion work. They can transform the meaning of events and experience. They can, more specifically, delight in their transmuted meanings and different aesthetic qualities by cultivating knowledge on the subtle differences between their emotions and thus develop a taste for them: “Just like painters learn to see fine distinctions in colors, and wine lovers develop their palettes to experience taste that non-experts cannot, you can practice categorizing like any other skill” (Feldman Barrett 2017: 182). Immersed in contemporary therapeutic culture, Feldman Barrett’s calls to action are constitutive for a modern, and thus a historically specific, ideal of emotionally intelligent selfhood: a person should possess qualities of discernment and trainable abilities toward their own emotions, which should have, in turn, discernible effects on how they live their lives.

At the same time, neither emotional connoisseurship nor aesthetic judgments on emotions are unique features of contemporary societies. Be it ideals of ancient Stoicism (Sorabji 2000), the Renaissance cult of individual honor (Taylor 2008), or eighteenth-century romantic love (Holloway 2019) – to name just three examples – historical periods have different trends in emotional culture. Preferences, or tastes, for particular emotions, however, do not simply rise and fall, but perform social functions: aesthetic appreciations of emotions create meaning about where individuals or groups see themselves in society and how they identify with or distinguish themselves from others. Taste judgments – which, the authors collectively argue, includes judgements of emotions – categorize both self and other. This focus on aesthetics also leads us to consider processes and practices of objectification of emotions in history, both by historical actors and historians: by which means and for what reasons do or did emotions become valued or devalued objects of inquiry and study?

This brings us to the most influential theory of taste and social distinction, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) investigation into the ways in which individual acts of aesthetic preference were intimately connected with larger social formations. ² Taste, Bourdieu argued, was a product of hierarchies. Accordingly, he described his project as the “barbarous reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption” (Bourdieu 1984: xxix) and, thus, as an attempt to pull aesthetics away from the disinterested universalism of the Kantian tradition. Bourdieu instead argued for a material basis to twentieth-century French aesthetic ideology: the “aesthetic disposition” of the bourgeois was created through their distance from necessity, and their aesthetic preferences for form over function was a way to manifest their economic security in their consumption choices (Bourdieu 1984: 48–49). Taste judgments, therefore, do not merely reflect social distinctions but are central to their constitution (Bourdieu 1984: 469). Consumption preferences and choices are active modes of differentiating social space: “the social relations objectified in familiar objects, in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or ‘vulgarity’, their ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’, impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum, the harsh smell of bleach or perfumes as imperceptible as a negative scent” (Bourdieu 1984: 77). Some of our authors directly take up this issue of how interiors are intertwined with emotional appreciation: one article discusses the pride felt by working-class owners of bulky pieces of furniture, bought as status symbols in up-and-coming industrial areas of Germany in the mid-twentieth century, and the prejudices they encountered from middle-class followers of more modern, minimalist interior design.

Where, then, do emotions and their history come in? We can hypothesize that Pierre Bourdieu would find Lisa Feldman Barrett’s account of emotional connoisseurship, which does not account for social stratification, markedly incomplete. He might have wanted to frame this emotional knowledge as a form of symbolic capital. While there is little direct discussion of emotions in Distinction, Bourdieu’s claims for the constitutive power of taste judgments point to emotions having active historical roles (and he did discuss emotions in other work: Bourdieu 1979, 2001 [1998]). Scholars inspired by Bourdieu have developed his work to enhance the analysis of the affective aspects of distinction. In an explicit expansion of Bourdieu’s work to the emotions, Lynne Layton has argued that class hierarchies are in part formed through emotional experiences: middle-class shoppers report the sensation of the “heebie-jeebies” when entering discount shopping establishments, a reaction which can be seen as a form of social feeling that constructs felt boundaries (Layton 2006: 51). Such feelings of aversion are historically contingent. Modern disgust, for instance, is a specific concept that did not exist prior to the early seventeenth century (Firth-Godbehere 2018). Scholarship on Asian history has been especially active in charting particular connoisseurship cultures of affective experience: historians have worked on rasa theory (the notion of aesthetic flavors in works of art that evoke the indescribable or near indescribable) and rasikas (those cognoscenti who are skilled at discerning particular rasas and especially their admixture) in south Asia (Ram 2011; Butler Schofield 2015), while anthropologists have analyzed how disgust is both structured by and structures the caste order in north India (Lee 2017, 2021). A group of historians (Baffelli et al. 2021) have recently extended the scholarship on religious aesthetics to the history of emotions. Especially in a global context, a taste for emotions may intersect with other concepts of refinement such as civilization (Gammerl et al. 2019: 16–7; Pernau 2015) and processes of exoticization (Schaper et al. 2020).

Directly developing Bourdieu’s analysis, Antonine Hennion has argued that emotions and feelings are core parts of processes of tasting. Part of the attention paid by a person exercising taste is not just to the object of taste but also to their own emotional and physical responses (Hennion 2001). For Hennion, taste “is not an attribute, it is not a property (of a thing or a person), it is an activity” and that therefore “to taste is to make feel, and to make oneself feel, and also, by the sensations of the body … to feel oneself doing” (Hennion 2007: 101). In a similar vein, Ben Highmore has called attention to the fact that Bourdieu was solely interested in taste as an operator of social distinction, but not in its genuine qualities. He argues instead for understanding taste “as a feeling or a range of feeling” (Highmore 2016: 548). This argument means viewing “taste as an agent that orchestrates sensibilities and that potentially alters our social environment (rather than simply reinforcing already established social relations)” (ibid.: 548). Highmore’s approach converges with a core aim of the history of emotions: to see emotions as not simply delineating the categories and distinctions that already exist in society. There can be no doubt that both taste and feelings are often harnessed for social purposes, but they cannot be reduced to their social function alone. They are not necessarily “already positioned within a hierarchy of symbolic value” (ibid.: 557).

In this issue, we take inspiration from such sociological work on taste and argue for the double function of emotions and feelings in the realm of taste. It is not only that emotions themselves are the mode through which taste is enacted but also that emotions can become subject to judgments of taste. This double function allows them to mediate between taste and tasting, between the normative standards and the experiential workings-out of the process of taste (Gardner 2019). Such a usage of the taste concept is very useful for thinking about the dynamics of feeling rules as it provides a way to escape the rigid dualism between norm and practice.

Outline of the issue

The special issue consists of eight research articles that cover case studies from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The geographical focus is on Europe, including the Turkish diaspora in Germany, with one case study from contemporary Japan. The collection opens with an article by Stephen Cummins exploring the role of changing emotional attachments to the duel, and aristocratic violence more generally, in early modern Italy. The early modern Italian nobility was obsessed with dueling. Despite the Council of Trent’s ban, the violent honor complex remained poorly camouflaged under the title of scienza cavalleresca, the knightly science, which provided aristocrats and those with noble aspirations rules for the conduct of honor conflicts. Toward the turn of the eighteenth century, however, more and more aristocrats began to reject the violent way of life. One such noble was Paolo Mattia Doria (1667–1746), a notorious duelist in the closing years of the Spanish regime, who renounced the vendetta and expressed disgust with its practitioners after developing a preference for philosophy. A zealous convert against the noble vengeance system, he will serve as an example for exploring the wider struggle over emotional values in early modern Italy and, more generally, in societies with high levels of violence.

Taking up the question of violence, Kerstin Pahl explores how British soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars confronted the emotional landscape of warfare in their unprecedented number of memoirs. The Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) were a caesura, sometimes considered to have birthed the modern Western world. Britain did not see battles on home soil, but British soldiers fighting abroad wrote home about their experiences. In addition to countless letters, military memoirs became more popular than ever before (the genre’s tenets still resonate with Vietnam and Iraq veteran authors). In conveying the battlefield experience to a sheltered audience, these books aimed at bridging the long-established emotional divide between military and civil life, between the callous soldier and the compassionate citizen. Soldiers, these texts argued, were men of feeling, able to preserve a moral sense of respectability despite all the killing, bloodshed, and trauma.

Continuing explorations of emotions and war, Karsten Lichau presents a case study from the emotional history of the minute of silence. After the First World War, Britain introduced the “two minutes’ silence” to commemorate their fallen countrymen, a new kind of ceremony which harkened back to older religious traditions. As such, it decidedly changed the face of public mourning as people were requested to grieve together, yet each on their own. Because the practice was unknown and mourners came to the observation of silence with their own ideas about decorous behavior – informed by their class, race, gender, or religious background – the first years of the ritual saw intense organizational and emotional negotiation, some leading to fundamental shifts in opinion on the social appropriateness of weeping. For men, especially, the two minutes’ silence catalyzed changes in gender roles: public crying, ridiculed as “emotional incontinence” under the harsh nineteenth-century regime of the stiff upper lip, became an accepted, even appealing emotional expression.

The next two articles take different approaches to postwar Germany and the social consequences of its so-called “economic miracle” (“Wirtschaftswunder”). Julia Wambach’s exploration of the changing tastefulness of a furniture style takes place in the twentieth century, investigating clashes of emotions and taste in postwar Germany. In the 1960s, the city of Gelsenkirchen, located in West Germany’s heavily industrialized Ruhr region, had the dubious honor of inspiring a mocking name for a style of interior design: “Gelsenkirchen Baroque.” The term lampooned the working-class’s taste for heavy, ornate furniture and mocked how these consumers could not tell the difference between propriety and pomposity. The buyers, not dissuaded by the criticism, let the massive cupboards stand in the street for hours when they were delivered, so that neighbors could admire (and envy) these symbols of prosperity. While the products fell out of fashion in the late 1960s, shifting class and generational dynamics have seen a younger generation of millennials reappropriating the style, turning the cabinets once more into what they had been from the outset: objects of pride.

Nagehan Tokdoğan, meanwhile, explores the experiences of Turkish migrants to Germany. In order to achieve the Wirtschaftswunder, the German government recruited so-called “guest workers” from other countries, including Turkey. These migrants found themselves subject to discrimination and humiliation in Germany. Especially since his presdiency, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has found a loyal voter base in Turkish citizens living in Germany. This article explores this loyalty and pride in Erdoğanism through interviews and connects it to histories of migration in twentieth-century Germany. Interviewees recalled humiliating experiences in a country whose language they did not speak, of people turning up their noses, sometimes literally at the smell of their “foreign” food. “Erdoğanism,” they contend, is a way to demand respect and feel a sense of pride once more. To many of them, populist “Erdoğanism” offers a route to restore wounded pride, allowing them to deal with the discrimination they encounter even after decades of living in Germany.

The question of marginalized groups and feeling rules explored using sociological methods in the case of the Turkish diaspora is further elaborated by Mika Toyota’s article on lonely death and post-mortem cleaning services in Japan. Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced the rise of “lonely death” (koduku-shi): people who die alone and go undetected for days, weeks, or even months. The phenomenon has triggered public anxiety because it is seen as confirmation of fears about the breakdown of communities in the context of an aging society and social isolation in highly industrialized countries more broadly. Workers from specialist cleaning services are expected to eliminate any trace of the “polluted” site without being noticed, but in recent years, some workers have begun to actively reach out to the general public through blogs and art works in order to raise awareness about the issue of lonely deaths. As well as the cleaning, these workers’ emphasize their mourning for the deceased. Such grieving practices dignify the seemingly shameful death and turn the undesirable cleaning work into an honorable task. This article studies the phenomenon and the movies, books, and television series that address the theme and provide an emotional anchor for the public to engage with inevitable changes in Japanese society.

The issue closes with two articles that make full use of ethnographic methods in past and present contexts, respectively, and with a joint focus on sports. Helen Ahner’s piece demonstrates a historical ethnographic approach to feeling rules, investigating women in 1920s Germany who used the freedom of a society uprooted by war to engage in doing modern sports. These “sportsgirls” aroused strong public feelings. Alternately welcomed as a new type of liberated womanhood and decried as a symbol of degraded manners, female athletes pushed the boundaries of good taste: bare legs ready to run, arms raised to cheer, and sweaty faces that spoke of ambition stood counter to lingering pre-war norms of decorous femininity. To tackle, or maybe even provoke, such public scandal, athletes, and sympathetic journalists developed a bold style of communication that was not short on feelings: they vehemently advocated women’s right to do sport, exulting the physical experience, the community spirit, and the strength gained from it.

From the perspective of contemporary ethnographic methods, Max Jack, meanwhile, explores the emotional aesthetics of ultra football fandom. Ultras are hardcore football fans who are often misconstrued as hooligans in the press and in popular culture. Their martial aesthetics, camouflage dress, and use of marine flares on the streets outside the stadium can certainly feel threatening to outsiders, but there is more to their performance than arousing fear. Rather, these groups deliberately transgress boundaries of appropriate fan behavior in a last-ditch protest to get the attention of the German Football Association, the media, and the police. Reveling in the distaste their asocial demeanor is met with, ultra can become an alternative lifestyle that is not founded on a delight in violence, but rather on a deep-seated rejection of the commercialization of football and capitalist society more broadly.

The articles in this issue, ranging across the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries and focusing on very diverse social domains and localities, make no claim to form a unitary historical narrative. This broad set of cases, however, reveals a set of significant (and overlapping) historical trajectories which are significant points of focus for debates over emotional standards. The first of these is the history of violence and masculinity in Europe from aristocratic dueling in early modern Italy, to soldiering in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then forward to issues of football hooliganism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Related to that is the theme of death and human relations from violent death in war to lonely death in modern Japan. The question of death, in particular, is regularly linked to debates over appropriate emotions and touches many areas of social norms and taboos. The question of the role of media in feeling rules is explored through studies of the press and reading practices in a number of the articles: from the press discussing women’s sports in 1920s Germany, to the two minutes’ silence in interwar Britain, to discussion of tasteful and distasteful furniture in postwar Germany, and the representation of death-scene cleaners in the media world of contemporary Japan. Further, underlying many of the articles is an interest in the relation between subcultures and their experiences on the one hand, and the meanings of subcultures for other parts of society on the other. From sportswomen in the 1920s to Turkish migrants in contemporary Germany, our issue explores how the meanings of marginal groups and their status as emotional subjects and objects have been navigated throughout modern history.