ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the passions of the past that lie hidden within legal records. It shows how legal and extra-legal evidence can expose the emotional norms that the state sought to enforce, the cultural repertoire of sentimental narratives used by legal actors, litigants’ purported emotions and the archival practices that channelled emotion into bureaucratic forms. The debate over the possibility of accessing ‘real’ emotions – given that legal records were written according to legal formulae – is explored. Examining archival records ethnographically, as a relic of state power, whose form evinces the shifting emotional standards of bureaucracy, helps to denaturalise Western legal archives as the natural homeland for history, in a wider effort to decolonise the history of the emotions.
