Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Rise of Emotional Spaces in the German Late Enlightenment

The emergent political arena of the late eighteenth century, and the literary one that preceded it, were claimed to be based upon a functional dichotomy between a private sphere of emotive ties and associations, and a “public sphere” of rational criticism (Habermas, 1962). This categorical distinction, however, scantily registered the emergence of a corollary affective economy in this period, which redefined social, political, and physical spaces according to their emotional content, or lack thereof. This article focuses on the rise of emotional language, its spatial configurations, and its dissemination during the late German Enlightenment in three thematic contexts: the “popular Enlightenment” (Volksaufklärung) and its emphasis on the enhancement of literacy among the lower classes to achieve emotional refinement; the visual representation of domestic emotional scenarios in the context of the Franco-German cultural exchange surrounding the French Revolution; and the emergence of “homeland” (Heimat) as an increasingly ubiquitous emotion-bound metaphor in the nationalization of space toward the century's end. These contexts reveal major shifts in the cultural dynamics of space and emotion in this period: first, the reaffirmation of emotion as a culturally viable interpretive mode, set against earlier concerted attempts to suppress or control it; second, the osmosis between private and public that enabled emotional protocols to transgress supposedly natural boundaries of class, status, and gender across society, and establish new contacts between exclusive and excluded communities; and last, the article shows how the spatial imaginary that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century—despite its reliance on older dispositions regarding space in German culture—deployed emotional vocabularies for engendering new forms of sociability, which went on to became central determinants of Germanness in the early nineteenth century.

Conclusion

The book concludes by summarizing key arguments and contributions; articulating how the abject joy it describes relates to accounts of early Christian abjection inspired by Julia Kristeva; briefly justifying the biographical interpretive mode it exemplifies; and returning to the question raised in the Introduction regarding the moral entailments of contentment in prison. The joy of which Paul writes in Philippians pertains to a distinct social location and a distinct emotional community; it is not the joy of the sated or the sage, but of the subjugated. Unburdened of his role as universal paradigm, Paul gives poignant witness to something at once more modest and more exacting: the strange, unruly art of making do.

A Social Critique of Behavioral Approaches to International Law

Behavioral approaches have been successful in challenging the rational actor model of international legal analysis and supplementing that model with empirical evidence. Yet observing a set of features about the world requires ignoring or bracketing others. Behavioral approaches retain their own inevitable blind spots, which are not necessarily products of flawed experimental design, but stem from the paradigmatic traits of these approaches. These blind spots derive from an emphasis on methodological individualism, positivism, and experimentation. This emphasis may obscure the social aspects of international legal decision-making. For example, behavioral approaches to international law often use experimental data to describe cognitive tendencies. In doing so, these approaches may not seek and likely will not have tools to discover the meaning of a state action, or the human actions that produce that state action. That latter inquiry requires “historical, ethnographic and other sociological methods that analyze social life outside of the experimental setting.” In sum, behavioral approaches pursue both theoretical and empirical concerns different from those pursued in an interpretive mode of meaning-making.

The Psychological Meaning of Team Among Fans of Women’s Sport

To date, almost all team identification inquiries have focused on men’s sport, with minimal studies using women’s sport to examine the concept. Recognizing social identities are fluid and context dependent, the purpose of the current study was to understand the psychological meaning of team among individuals who identify with a women’s sport team. Using an interpretive mode of inquiry, the author conducted interviews with fans of a professional women’s basketball team. Central elements of team meaning were gender equality (contributing to social change) and pure sport (perceptions of game play and player characteristics). These aspects jointly contribute to a paradox experienced by fans, in that perceived purity may be sacrificed in realizing social change. Theoretical implications include the ability of teams to represent social movement organizations, as well as the need for individuals to shed status-irrelevant aspects of an identity to raise a low-status group.

No country for possums: young people’s nativist views

The Australian brushtail possum(Trichosurus vulpecula)is one of many animal species classified as alien under the biosecurity system in New Zealand. However, it is against the possums that a relentless campaign is perpetrated. This article attempts to explain some of the many reasons behind such intense negativity, and in doing so, show a link between the management of invasive species as a biosecurity risk and young people’s nativist views. A qualitative, interpretive mode of inquiry was used to analyse data that showed a link between the management of invasive species as a biosecurity risk and young people’s controversial views. An educational program that presents an objective view of invasive species is recommended.

Food Values Beyond Nutrition

Cultural anthropologists have devoted considerable attention to multiple non-nutritional meanings and uses of food in diverse cultural worlds. This essay begins with a wide-ranging overview of some ways anthropology has portrayed food’s links to every aspect of human existence. Because this discipline’s prime method, fieldwork, is rooted in proximity and intimacy, sharing food with subjects of study has always been part of ethnographic experience. One major fascination lies in how biological food needs that are shared with all animals become culturally embellished with infinite variations that are evident in diverse aspects of life from cuisine to religious symbolism. The essay shifts focus to one ethnographic location in rural North India to examine three pervasive themes surrounding food in South Asian culture: solidarity, separation, and decline as a pervasive critique of modern tastelessness. Offering initially grounded examples of each theme, the essay moves to broader circles of related meanings in varied practices and narratives. Thus employing a classical interpretive mode in cultural anthropology, this chapter thinks through food values by tacking between far-reaching generalizations and highly localized specificities. In the context of a volume largely and properly focused on food materialities, conflicts, and policies, the chapter aims to evoke less concrete, less quantifiable aspects of comestibles in human cultures that may be nonetheless relevant to understanding interrelated workings of food, politics, and society. In many cultural worlds, moralities of sharing confront circumstances of inequity through acknowledging hunger as bodily knowledge common to all.

Israel's Settler-Colonial Water Regime: The Second Contradiction of Zionism

This paper questions the ecological sustainability of the Zionist colonial scheme in Palestine. It outlines an ecologically-based narrative of the Arab-Israeli struggle by juxtaposing colonial Zionism and ecological Zionism to re-narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict using a recent interpretive mode that assumes as a principle concomitant environmental and colonial histories. Examining both the role of water in the history of the Zionist colonial scheme and Zionist agricultural practices, it argues that, similar to previous colonial European ventures, the sustainability of colonial Zionism is challenged by both Palestine's scarce hydrological resources and their mounting exploitation, spawning what I call the ‘inner tension of Zionism’. Given this dialectic of Zionism – that considering, among other things, the nature of Zionist colonial agriculture and settlers’ Western life style, the necessary increasing exploitation of Palestine's scarce resources challenges the sustainability of the colonial venture – the hydrological challenge, entwining with nationalist conflict, constitutes Zionism's second contradiction.11 Due to size limits and nature of this paper, I deal only with the first stage, 1882–1967. I deal with the next stage, 1967 and thereafter, elsewhere, although the typology employed for the distinction between stages is outlined below.

Maximizing Positive Social Impacts: Strategies for Sustaining and Leveraging the Benefits of Intercommunity Sport Events in Divided Societies

Building on the evidence of social impacts generated by sport events, there is a need for research to identify strategies suitable for maximizing event benefits for disparate interest communities. This paper investigates the opportunities and strategic means for sustaining and leveraging social event benefits arising from intercommunity sport events in the ethnically divided Sri Lanka. Following an interpretive mode of inquiry, findings are derived from the analysis of two focus groups and 35 in-depth interviews with Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and international event stakeholders. To maximize event benefits, findings suggest that event organizers and host communities focus strategically on children as catalysts for change; increase ethnically mixed team sport activities; provide event-related sociocultural opportunities; combine large-scale events with regular sport-for-development programs; and engage in social, cultural, political and educational event leverage. By implementing these strategies and tactics, intercommunity sport events are likely to contribute to local capacity building and inclusive social change, which can have flow-on effects to the wider community. These findings extend the academic literature on strategic event planning, management and leverage, as they provide a focus on community event leverage for social purposes in a developing world context—an area which has thus far received limited empirical research.

Brahms's ““Sinfonie-Serenade”” and the Politics of Genre

Brahms's First Serenade, op. 11, has played a relatively minor role in scholarly accounts of Brahms's stylistic development, which often depict the work as a tentative step toward the composer's ““first maturity”” or as one of several failed attempts to create a symphony. By contrast, the earliest reviewers of the Serenade heard the piece as a crucial turning point in his career, and they interpreted his choice of genre as a bold statement in the emerging debate on the future course of German music. In this view, the genre of the orchestral serenade forged a link with an idealized Viennese classicism, thereby representing a denial of the ideals of Franz Brendel's ““New German”” school. By reading Brahms's Serenade in terms of genre, we can begin to assess the qualities that informed its contemporary reception. Approaching genre as an interpretive mode allows us to understand the composer's provocative juxtaposition of numerous topics of discourse——the symphonic, the pastoral, the sublime, as well as the reinterpretation of specific classical gestures——as a key to the musical meaning of the piece. Brahms's extensive references to music by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven go beyond simple allusion to embrace the reinterpretation of compositional techniques that situate the piece within the tradition of instrumental Nachtmusik. Heard through genre, the Serenade thus emerges as a pointed response to mid nineteenth-century theories of radical modernism.

SUBJECT AND BODY IN BAṢRAN MU‘TAZILISM, OR: MU‘TAZILITE KALĀM AND THE FEAR OF TRIVIALITY

In this paper, my aim is to offer some comments on the study of Mu‘tazilite kalām, framed around the study of a particular episode in the Mu‘tazilite dispute about man (‘mā huwa al-insān’) – a question with a deceptively Aristotelian cadence that is not too difficult to dispel. Within this episode, my focus is on one of the major arguments used by the late Baṣrans to hold up their side of the dispute (a side heavily indebted to Abū Hāshim’s ontological innovations), and on the relationship between the mental and the physical (or the subjective and objective) which emerges from it. The most interesting – and most surprising – aspect of this relationship is that the mental and the physical do not seem to be treated as distinct terms, thus creating the space for questions about how the two relate. The first person perspective seems to be identified with the physical body. My interest then is in the response of the reader to this surprising presentation – or rather, in a certain kind of reader response, and thus a certain kind of interpretive mode, whose value and viability it is part of my aim to help clarify.