ABSTRACT
LONG A KEY interest amongst psychologists and biologists, the study of emotions has become increasingly important to the work of social scientists in the course of the last three decades. The sociology and anthropology of emotions, for instance, are now well established sub-disciplines with their own textbooks, courses and research networks. Beyond sociology and anthropology however, concern with emotion, passion, feeling, mood and sentiment – let us for convenience call it ‘affective life’ – has come to provide a shared focal point for an emerging community of scholars and students based in a wide range of disciplines including history, geography, cultural studies, politics, economics, legal studies and criminology, media studies, gender studies, management studies; the list could go on. The Emotions: A Social Science Reader has been designed to give students, scholars and the general reader a birds-eye view of some of this research activity. The task of addressing such a vast and complex area of work may appear overambitious, and the result of our efforts is certainly destined to remain provisional. Nevertheless, we considered it important to offer a collection framed in terms of ‘social science’ broadly defined rather than, as is more often the case, in terms of an individual discipline or research tradition. It is important for the simple reason that most of us researchers, scholars and students are so preoccupied with the overwhelming number of developments in our own discipline or sub-discipline, that it has become almost unthinkable to ‘see the wood for the trees’ and to strive for a more general perspective. The recent proliferation of publications on emotions across the field, though in itself a positive development, has compounded this problem. In many cases, there is a noticeable tendency to celebrate the conceptual novelty (still) associated with the study of affect and emotion, at the expense of rigorous reflection on continuities and differences with previous research. The inclusive notion of social science adopted in this volume is informed by the idea that academic disciplines are historical creatures in a constant process of change; some changes – in the type of questions asked, or in the manner of asking them – are discipline-specific, while others transcend disciplinary boundaries. Our aim has been to capture the more general significance of the study of affect and emotion for the social sciences, as well as to give a sense of how this is played out in the context of specific sub-fields. We have thus deliberately tried to give a sense of the diversity of perspectives that have emerged over the years from a variety of intellectual traditions. As a whole, the collection is intended to provide an introduction to the key debates, concepts and modes of approach that have been developed by social scientists for the study of emotion and affective life.
