Mari Eyice, Stockholm University
https://doi.org/10.58077/66cz-5507
Bodily sensations are paramount to experiencing, as has been argued by Willemijn Ruberg.[1] The phenomenological approach that inspires the history of experience for Ruberg enriches our understanding of how the body was perceived and experienced, especially in the premodern past.[2] To arrive at how perceptions and sensations become experiences through the body in historical contexts, this entry will argue that we need to go beyond individual bodies and consider bodies in interaction.
Perceptions of the body in the premodern Western past share a striking feature with contemporary neuroscientific ideas: the mind and body are intrinsically interlinked and dependent on each other.[3] In premodern terms, this meant that sensual impressions and emotional sensations were physical because they were created through bodily practices and were experienced through bodily processes. Neuroscience emphasises that the human brain is malleable and changes as a result of bodily practices in cultural surroundings. This means that feelings and sensations are relational to the cultural context in which the body is situated.[4]
Historians have used either one or the other of these entry points to argue that the body needs to be considered in matters of emotion and experience in historical contexts. According to a historical-anthropological perspective on historical experience, the historian needs to take as her point of departure the anthropology of the period in question to understand how emotions were experienced when living in it. For premodern Western societies, this means considering the integrality of body and mind as a reality of people of the past.[5] Others have taken inspiration from modern science to argue that emotions should be seen as bodily practices or that the senses should be considered as integral to the study of emotions and experiences.[6] In both cases, the emphasis on the body or the senses means that the doings of the body are considered formative of (emotional) experience.[7]
The body can thus be seen as a culturally embedded entity that is not only feeling or experiencing, but also creating feeling and experience through its interaction with the surrounding world. For the study of historical experience, this understanding has implications for how the body can be researched. The individual subject who perceives of herself as body in accordance with the norms and epistemology of her context constitutes a useful starting point for historical analysis, but thinking about bodies in this culturally embedded way also raises the question of how different bodies relate to each other.
Two examples illustrate this point. First, studies of disability and bodily divergence in history have consistently highlighted that body perception goes beyond the medical framework and is dependent on power structures that are both material and discursive. A diverging body is therefore inscribed with meaning in relation to what are considered normative bodies in specific societies, thus creating experiences of disability or otherness in the interaction between different bodies in different social contexts.[8] What physical or mental impairments are considered disabling varies from society to society, as do the meanings ascribed to disability. When medieval saints suffered impairment or infirmity, their conditions were interpreted as divine markings, creating experiences of holiness in interaction with their followers, for example.[9] Yet, as Daniel Blackie and Alexia Moncreiff have pointed out, the integration of mind and body in disability history has developed slowly compared to other fields of research. Should a more holistic approach to the human body and mind be adopted, many insights are to be gained with regard to the experiences of people with disabilities in relation to people with normative bodies.[10]
Second, Piroska Nagy and Xavier Biron Ouellet have argued that bodies moving and acting in unison create common emotional experiences that are qualitatively specific because they are shared.[11] The idea that emotional experiences created in groups are significant because of their communal origin is further developed in Nagy’s work on collective emotions. She argues that collective emotions are omnipresent in shaping society and the social and that they should be considered both as cognitive processes and as sensorial experiences.[12] The communality of bodily practices in the creation of collective emotions is in focus in this line of thinking, which for my purposes illustrates that the individual body of the historical subject is only one of the elements of embodiment that must be considered in the historical search for experiences in the past.[13]
The body thus has multiple roles to play in the history of experience. The body as a historically specific subject that navigates its culture reveals how people in the past experienced themselves and their world. A focus on the interaction between different bodies promises to show how experiences were made through bodily practices beyond the individual body, in harmony or negotiation with others.
Notes
[1] Willemijn Ruberg, ‘Embodiment and Experience’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2023).
[2] The phenomenological approach has been developed in the groundbreaking work of Barbara Duden. See her The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
[3] Ulinka Rublack, ‘Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions’, History Workshop Journal, 53 (2002): 1-16; Laurence J. Kirmayer, Carol M. Worthman, Shinobu Kitayama, ‘Introduction: Co-Constructing Culture, Mind, and Brain’, Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models, and Applications, eds Kirmayer, et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1-50.
[4] Kirmayer et al., ‘Introduction: Co-Constructing Culture, Mind, and Brain’, 1.
[5] Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, ‘Une histoire des émotions incarnées’, Médiévales, 61 (2011), 14–19.
[6] Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51 (2012): 193–220; Rob Boddice and Mark M. Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[7] For a discussion about the related fields of history of experience and history of emotions, see Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki, and Tanja Vahtikari, ‘Lived Nation: Histories of Experience and Emotion in Understanding Nationalism’, Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800-2000, eds Kivimäki, Suodenjoki and Vahtikari (London: Palgrave, 2021), 10–17, esp. 15.
[8] Daniel Blackie and Alexia Moncrieff, ‘State of the Field: Disability History’, History, 107 (2022): 789-811, at 791–92.
[9] Jenni Kuuliala, Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 23.
[10] Blackie and Moncrieff, ‘State of the Field: Disability History’, 810–11.
[11] Piroska Nagy and Xavier Biron-Ouellet, ‘A Collective Emotion in Medieval Italy: The Flagellant Movement of 1260’, Emotion Review 12 (2020): 135–45.
[12] Piroska Nagy, ‘Histoire des émotions collectives: Éléments pour la trajectoire d’un phénomène et d’un concept’, Histoire des émotions collectives: épistémologie, émergences, expériences, Damien Boquet, Piroska Nagy, and Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022), esp. 47.
[13] For a related discussion about shared experiences, see Ville Kivimäki, Antti Malinen, and Ville Vuolanto, ‘Communities of Experience’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2023).