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CHAPTER 4
EMOTIONAL LIBERTY
The concept of emotives elaborated in Chapter 3, developed in response to a range of
problems encountered by researchers on emotions, has broad implications for the
understanding of social life and politics. The present chapter offers a preliminary
exploration of these implications. They will be spelled out in greater detail in Part II,
which examines a specific period of political and social change. Researchers on emotions
in fields other than anthropology have frequently neglected the political implications of
their work. Psychologists have had very little to say on this issue. Philosophers and
historians who have written on emotions in recent years have often expressed only
tangential interest in the political dimension of their ideas (e.g., Solomon 1984, 1992;
De Sousa 1987).
Speech act theorists have, for the most part, treated their subfield as a highly technical
one, concerning language and intention, requiring no exploration of political issues. A
number of philosophers, historians, and literary critics concerned with gender have
recognized the political implications of the West’s gendered conception of emotions.
But these observers have focused their attention too much on redressing this imbalance
and too little on the larger implications of the whole mental ontology their work has put
into question.
Anthropologists represent an important exception to the general aversion to politics
displayed by researchers on emotions. But their work has been hampered by fear of
ethnocentrism and the ongoing critique of the culture concept; and, as a result, those
working on emotions tend to split according to whether they wish to offer political
critiques of the West or political critiques of the social orders they study.
Anthropologists working on emotions, in addition, have lagged far behind others in their
discipline in conceptualizing historical change. In this chapter I will show how the
concept of emotives can provide a foundation for a politically useful reconception of the
relation between individual and collectivity, that is, a reconception of liberty. This idea
of liberty will make possible, in turn, political analysis of cultural variation and
explanation of historical change, and it will point toward a form of political engagement
that is not reductionist, condescending, or ethnocentric.
LIBERTY AND HISTORY IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EMOTIONS

As we saw in Chapter 2, anthropologists working on emotions have confronted a severe

difficulty in attempting to make political judgments of emotional regimes. Some have
chosen to formulate a harsh political critique of Western ideas about emotions, based
on their findings in the field. In non-Western contexts, they have found, emotions are
rarely regarded as private, quasi-biological responses that endanger our reason; much
more often they are valued as collective performances. In addition, they have insisted
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that the wide range of variation in emotional practices undercuts the Western biological
view.
Other anthropologists have emphasized the emotional impact of political repression and
exile in states such as Iran, China, or El Salvador, where the local governments have
engaged in policies of systematic violence and disciplinary coercion that no Westerner
would attempt to excuse. But no anthropologist of emotions has offered a conceptual
basis for making political judgments about both Western and non-Western practices at
the same time, including communities undergoing political crisis and communities
whose way of life is not currently subject to severe pressure from outside. This difficulty
has been compounded by an inability on the part of anthropologists of emotion emotion
to talk about historical change in emotions or the performances associated with
emotions.
While most practitioners in the discipline have been won over to a strong awareness of
historical change, anthropologists of emotions have continued to use the “ethnographic
present” in describing their findings. There is a direct relation between this presentism
and the roadblock to political judgment. Both stem from a problem in conceptualizing
the emotional individual. The problem with the politics of emotions is understanding in
what way the individual submits and why it matters. Anthropologists of emotions have
proven themselves highly sensitive to the workings of political institutions, deference,
authority, and gender; but they have not been able to show what is at stake for the
individual in submitting to such institutions, in accepting and feeling the emotions
prescribed by specific family organizations, in embracing emotional styles that render
them humble, obedient, deferential – or aggressive, independent, arrogant.
Can a person who feels an emotion that is a learned response, a product of social
construction, be oppressed – in the political sense of the term – by this feeling? The
concept of emotions as used in the West is closely associated with the individual’s most
deeply espoused goals; to feel love for one’s spouse or fear of one’s opponent,
presumably, is to be moved by those things one most authentically wants. It is hard to
see how a person can be oppressed by his or her most authentic, most deeply embraced,
goals.
To make such a claim – that a certain person, group, or community is politically
oppressed without knowing it – would require that one be prepared to assert something
about the nature of the individual. Such an assertion, by definition, would have to apply
to the individual as universally constituted, outside the parameters of any given
“culture.” Who would have the temerity, today, to make positive claims about this
politically charged issue? The ethnocentric dangers of such essentialist discourse have
been so thoroughly rehearsed that many have chosen to fall silent, despite the
conceptual vacuum that results. Yet only on this evacuated terrain can one hope to
formulate a critical political judgment about emotional culture. That power is exercised
is of no consequence unless there is something at stake.

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What is it the individual loses by submitting to, embracing unreflectively, a collectively

constructed emotional common sense? If nothing, then we have no grounds upon which
to critique Western emotional common sense, and much of the feminist,
poststructuralist, and cultural critiques of the Western individual offered in recent
decades has no meaning or purpose. If there is something that can be lost, then it can
be lost everywhere, by anyone. There are two practitioners of the ethnography of
emotion who come significantly closer than others in the field to providing a politically
grounded historical depiction of emotions, Geoffrey White and Unni Wikan. Their work
deserves a brief examination here, because both force us to appreciate the interlinked
character of political judgment and historical explanation. Wikan, despite the ill-defined
character of her notion of resonance, offers a clear-cut, full, and original analysis of the
political dimension of emotional expression, in her study Managing Turbulent Hearts: A
Balinese Formula for Living (Wikan 1990). As noted in Chapter 2, where previous
ethnographers had described the Balinese as almost devoid of feeling, Wikan insists that
Balinese individuals are actually engaged in a constant struggle to match their emotional
expression to the strict norms of the community.
To show how emotional management and political power interact, Wikan tells the story
of a school teacher who was fired by the village council for encouraging too much
independence among his pupils. Among those involved in firing him was his closest
friend, a powerful local figure, who gave nothing away of the planned dismissal until the
last moment. The fired teacher was openly disconsolate and embittered; he repeatedly
berated his wife – who attempted to keep up a smiling face in the proper way, despite
the humiliating and terrifying impropriety of her husband’s reactions. He denounced his
powerful friend to anyone who would listen. But his outbursts only ensured his
increasing marginalization. As with his teaching, so with his personal response to
dismissal, he was out of touch with the normative tone of village collective self-control.
Years later he discovered that his good friend, far from being an instigator of the
dismissal, had gone along with the plan only out of fear of losing his own influence. Just
as this powerful villager revealed nothing of the plan to his friend, so he said nothing of
his own efforts to counter it, leaving the former teacher to find out in his own way. In
the end they were reconciled.
Through this story, Wikan allows us to see that in Bali heroic, virtuoso self-management
in conformity with collective norms brings status and power. Close examination of a case
of deviance is rare in the anthropology of emotions, precisely because most
practitioners lack a conceptual framework for situating it. Wikan’s capacity to examine
the political implications of emotional expression is directly linked to her theory of the
“double-anchored self” which is presented as an alternative, and a direct challenge, to
the prevailing constructionism in the ethnography of emotions. A double-anchored self
maintains an equilibrium by effortful pursuit of expression to modify feeling and pursuit
of feeling to modify behavior – effortful pursuit aptly dubbed “management,” so long as
one remains aware that it is not easy to draw a line between what manages and what is
managed within this self. A self that is double-anchored is a self that cannot be
encompassed within a discourse or defined by a practice; it is a self that can be molded
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by discourse, altered by practice to a significant degree, but never entirely or

predictably, never to the same degree from one person to the next.
The double-anchored self, as Wikan conceives it, is quite close to the notion of the
disaggregated self presented in Chapter 3, in which the broad range of activated thought
material contrasts with the small scope of the material that attention can deal with
actively at any given time. The Balinese concepts of face and heart capture this contrast
and help them think about the management efforts this contrast readily gives rise to.
But Wikan’s study is oriented entirely toward the present and offers no account of
historical change. Geoffrey White does not propose to write a history of emotions in his
important study of the island of Santa Isabel (Solomon Islands), Identity Through History
(White 1991). But he has examined the performance of emotion on Santa Isabel in other
studies (White 1990a, 1990b) and is alive to the process by which emotions are enacted
and given collective force as norms.
As a result his historical research allows us to glimpse, as perhaps no other historical
ethnography has done, how a politically meaningful history of emotions might be
framed. White’s painstaking collection and comparison of written and oral accounts of
the conversion and subsequent colonial takeover of the island allow him to piece
together a gripping picture of its recent social history. Prior to the first successes of
Anglican missionaries beginning around 1890, the population of Santa Isabel had been
greatly reduced by a period of endemic raiding. The operations of slave traders in the
region encouraged seafaring groups from other islands in the Solomons, and from Santa
Isabel itself, to make frequent expeditions in pursuit of captives. Captives were sold to
slave traders in return for modern firearms and other supplies; captives were also used
locally in rituals of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Groups less adept at such seaborne
raiding moved into the highlands, concealing themselves in the forests and building
sturdy wooden forts. Coastal villages, once the norm, all but disappeared. Both seafarers
and hill groups embraced raiding, warfare, headhunting, and human sacrifice as
methods of ensuring their own power and security. The political focal point of these
raiding groups were “chiefs” whose status was partly hereditary, partly based on proven
prowess; chiefly lineage shrines sporting lines of enemies’ skulls along their walls, and
the bones of predecessors inside, sites of frequent ceremonies, shored up chiefs’
reputations as masterful possessors of secret knowledge and magical power. Today,
islanders emphasize the contrast between this violent, impoverished heathen past and
the peaceful Christian present. White rightly refuses to accept this contrast at face value.
At the same time, one is struck by the repetition of certain themes in the conversion
narratives White analyzes, themes of missionary bravery and missionary magical power,
as well as of chiefly recognition that a peace policy might enhance their rule. For reasons
difficult to penetrate, many chiefs saw in Christianity a new form of secret knowledge
that might serve as a potent source of legitimacy. Central to Christian conversion was
the new salience of an emotion called nahma, a complex term which denotes soothing,
gift giving, compromise, settlement. The term is translated locally using the English term
“love”; nahma is considered to be the essential orientation of the Christian person. In

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local practice, the new centrality of nahma was associated with the willingness of chiefs
to unite under the leadership of great regional chiefs (already Christianized) who sent
missionaries to reside in their villages and teach the new ways.
White notes that older inhabitants of Santa Isabel remarked “a perceived shift in ethos
during their lives such that the constant vigilance which was once maintained against
sorcery and tabu violation may now be somewhat relaxed” (1991:246). But the lives of
the previous generation, the generation of conversion, must have seen an even deeper
shift in ethos; open violence disappeared; sorcery and tabu – because pagan – went
underground; then, in the 1930s, colonial officials named headmen of their own
choosing, threatening the power of chiefly lineages. Nahma and skill at talking and
negotiating replaced warrior prowess as instruments of influence; and because Christian
conversion came prior to colony status, Christianity could serve as a badge of indigenous
identity and indigenous competence for self-rule. The limits of this transformation are
difficult to gauge; White notes that stories of the pre-Christian past still convey “a sense
of vitality and accomplishment” and that fear of magic still shapes much daily behavior
(p. 40).
The practice of rule on Santa Isabel, within the newly independent state of the Solomon
Islands, is a peculiar mix of traditional oligarchic elements, church influence, and
Western-style parliamentarism that concentrates power in a few hands. Recent troubles
on the island of Guadalcanal underscore the ongoing fragility of this newly established
polity, which is certain to undergo further substantial transformations. Still, it is hard not
to empathize with those who celebrate the end of the raiding heyday of 1860–1900.
Why should we not celebrate the missionary heroes, both British and Melanesian, who
risked their lives to bring about this aim? White notes that the feelings of natahni
(sorrow) and kokhoni (sympathy) of the thautaru song, sung on the occasion of sons’
inheriting the houses and gardens of their fathers, also characterize the local sentiments
toward the conversion period and its (chiefly and missionary) heroes. They, like
nurturant fathers, are invoked with sorrowful gratitude in special thautaru chants; their
brave actions are retold in theatrical reenactments. We cannot complacently imagine
that justice now reigns on Santa Isabel. But a profound historical turn that has enhanced
the place of nahma, natahni, and kokhoni on that island, replacing violence, slave
trading, and malevolent magic as the foundation of political legitimacy, ought to engage
our respect and our gratitude. How can we build a firm foundation for this kind of
political judgment, so that it is not vacuously Eurocentric and “humanist” (Abu-Lughod
1991)?
From the foregoing review of the anthropological literature emerges a list of
requirements: We need a conceptual frame that acknowledges the importance of
management (as opposed to construction) of emotion, that allows political distinctions
among different management styles on the basis of a concept of emotional liberty, and
that permits the narration of significant historical shifts in such management styles. In
the section that follows, I will build such a frame on the foundation of the concept of
emotives elaborated in the last chapter.

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COORDINATION OF GOALS AND EMOTIONAL NAVIGATION

In the following discussion, I employ the concept of “goal” in deference to its widespread
current usage among psychologists. As Oatley (1992) and Wegner (1994) note, any
control mechanism must include two functions: (1) the capacity to initiate and terminate
an operation, (2) a means of checking the status of the operation. These two functions
correspond to the two parts of “if . . . then” commands in software programs or to the
two elements of a smoke detector: the chemically sensitive switch and the alarm which
it turns on and off. The nervous system of any animal obviously accomplishes thousands
of similar control functions. Within cognition, thoughts that are capable of both
triggering and terminating subordinate thoughts or actions are referred to as goals.
Baars et al. (1997), for example, refer to the goal a person is currently pursuing as a “goal
image,” because this coherent thought must supply sufficient details to allow many
unconscious automatisms to initiate and terminate component tasks.
Uttering a sentence requires coordination of more or less automatic application of rules
of syntax, more or less automatic search of a lexicon, command of facial and oral
muscles, and other capacities. It requires, in addition, that the performance be
monitored, so that slips or false starts can be corrected. We are all aware of how halting
and hesitant speech often is, as monitoring is accomplished and interruptions or restarts
are initiated to keep the performance on track. Some hesitation may also reflect shifts
in the precise character of the goal of the utterance itself. While psychologists have not
explored the implications of goal coordination very much, all recognize that goals
overlap and mutually implicate each other and that they must be organized into
hierarchies. Oatley (1992), as noted in Chapter 1, has pointed out the close relationship
that must exist between coordination of goals and emotion. Strong emotions such as
joy or grief indicate the relevance of high-priority goals to a present condition; sudden
emotions such as the rapid onset of fear or anger indicate that a goal not currently being
pursued must be given higher priority in response to a surprise or disappointment in the
environment.
In Chapter 1, I argued that it is the goal-relevant intensity and valence of emotions that
renders them inherently enjoyable or inherently uncomfortable. It is precisely here that
emotions become politically relevant, because they are capable of guiding action long
after explicit threats or explicit rules have been forgotten. It is obvious by now that an
adequate theory of emotions must be built on an entirely new terrain, with newly
defined terms as free as we can possibly make them of suspect ethnocentric
implications. We must take nothing for granted and provide an account for every issue
that may turn out to be important when we begin examining particular cases. Goal
coordination is, quite simply, an issue of bewildering complexity, for those who do it, for
those who attempt to understand it.
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The environment is challenging; life will not continue unless a certain number of goals
are accorded high priority and their coordination is assured. Coordination of behavior
with others is also extraordinarily rewarding. Where there are continuing communities
of successfully surviving individuals, we may presume that most members are constantly
engaged in the pursuit of a dense network of interrelated goals, and that the community
has deeply influenced the construction of most individuals’ networks. Consider the
example of a person who says, “I am looking forward to getting married next week, but
I just don’t want to breathe any more.” Or, “The only reason I wear clothes is because
my mother told me to.” Such statements would be regarded as deviant in many cultural
contexts, not just in the West. Westerners would regard them as evidence of emotional
disturbance.
The English word emotion is often used to refer to thought material activated by
coordination and priority problems; and these utterances would represent evidence of
a startling breakdown of normal coordination of goals.
As discussed with the examples of “angry at sister” and “in love” in the last chapter,
emotions often entail sweeping orientations of goal networks, built up over time, as a
consequence of hundreds of actions, and cannot be evaluated or rebuilt on short notice.
Such orientations, when they come before attention activated by a sudden development
in the environment, do often seem to be involuntary. At the same time, without them,
it would be absurd to talk of doing anything “voluntarily”; emotions are a kind of
precondition of volition and motivation; they convey the weight of hundreds of past
volitions and motivations into the present. Specific activities almost always represent
combinations and compromises among many goals. The preparation of a meal, for
example, may involve consideration of goals with reference to relationships, nutrition,
time usage, “esthetic” or taste expectations, religious observances or prohibitions,
monetary expenditure, usage of available perishables or seasonal foods.
The particular can only be apprehended as an intersection of innumerable properties
that can be variously categorized, each of which may call up its own goal or set of goals.
Here is where strict logic leaves one most at sea, either in deciding what to do or in
understanding how others have combined such factors in a decision. This is the original
domain of personality psychology or of cultural interpretation, when these are
conceived as the study of “nonscientific” or “nonrational” dimensions of behavior.
Scientific experiment represents an attempt to eliminate multiple determinations, so
that “causes” may be isolated. For this very reason, scientific method has run up against
a brick wall when it has attempted to explore this dimension of human behavior. No one
chooses recipes for dinner, or accords their political allegiance, on the basis of a single
“cause.”
There is no unidimensional way to decide what to make for dinner, or what to wear, or
what to say next. Human behavior is, in this sense, “overdetermined.” The constant
activation of thought material associated with the complex tasks of goal coordination –
emotion as defined here – comes up, inevitably, as an issue in its own right, about which
special goals must be formulated. In the simplest case, activated thought material
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signals the existence of a goal conflict that cannot be resolved except by rejection
outright of one of the goals. A soldier, about to kill his first opponent on the field of
battle, feels a sudden, cold fear as a wave of guilt and revulsion threatens to paralyze
him. The goal of nonviolence and the goal of soldiering are in conflict, conflict of a kind
that can be resolved only by setting one aside. If nonviolence is set aside, mental control
will be marshaled to eliminate it from attention, so that the complex activities of
soldiering may continue without interference.
Mental control of this kind derives from a sense of self. The self must become an object
of “cognition,” and must also be viewed as a terrain of action in which there is something
at stake. The vast range of activated thought material which calls for attention to provide
guidance for goal coordination suddenly comes before attention as a source of danger.
These activations must somehow be trimmed and reordered. Emotives are one
instrument for attempting such trimming and reordering. But, because they have
exploratory as well as self-altering effects, they do not always represent compliant tools
of mental control. They may as easily, inadvertently, activate material that is capable of
subverting the mental-control goals they are formulated to serve, and they may also
heighten what Wegner and Smart (1997) call “deep activation.”
To maintain equilibrium by use of such utterances requires experience; their effects are
idiosyncratic and difficult to predict, and also vital to the social identity of the speaker.
Even to know what kind of “equilibrium” one might wish to maintain may take some
searching, some choosing among available models or norms. Hence the sense, quite
widespread in the world’s communities as reported in ethnographic work on emotions,
that emotional control requires constant effort and that those who do it well are
relatively rare, deserving of admiration and authority. A normative style of emotional
management is a fundamental element of every political regime, of every cultural
hegemony. Leaders must display mastery of this style; those who fail to conform may
be marginalized or severely sanctioned. In other cases, there may be a hierarchy of
contrasting styles, failure to conform to one or another renders one’s identity unclear,
subject to exclusion. But the political implications of such normative styles cannot be
appreciated unless it is recognized that “management” is an inadequate metaphor for
encompassing everything that emotives do. This term has been used by both Hochschild
(1983) and Wikan (1990) to name the use of emotional expression as a tool for altering
emotions, in a way that brings both researchers very close to the concept of emotives
being proposed here. But to “manage” is to organize means to a certain known end or
goal. Emotional management styles are organized around normative goals. However,
emotives are both self-exploring and self-altering. It is never certain what effect they
will have.
Unexpected effects are sometimes costly. (Edmund Muskie, for example, was forced to
drop out of a U.S. presidential primary race in 1972 because, trying to express anger,
late one night, he began crying on television.) The complex thought activations that are
emotions often tend toward changes in goals or ideals, often expose tension or conflict
among them. As a result, management can easily break down; or a given set of

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management strategies can be put to new uses. The self that is managing, and its
intention to manage, are always subject to revision. “Navigation” might be a better
metaphor than “management,” for what emotives accomplish, because navigation
includes the possibility of radically changing course, as well as that of making constant
corrections in order to stay on a chosen course. But even “navigation” implies purposive
action, whereas changes of goals are only purposive if they are carried out in the name
of higher-priority goals. Goal changes at the highest level of priority cannot be
“intentionally” carried out; they have no goal. Such changes reflect complex reorderings
of the many-to-many mappings of goal networks. They are the result, often, of
unexpected self-altering effects of emotive utterances or of emotional activations.
“Navigation” is used here to refer to a broad array of emotional changes, including high-
level goal shifts. “Navigation” thus encompasses “management,” which is the use of
emotives’ self-altering effects, in the name of a fixed set of goals.

EMOTIONS AND POLICITAL REGIMES

Emotional Liberty, Emotional Suffering, Emotional Effort
The idea of navigation as a universal, central characteristic of emotional life makes
possible a preliminary definition of “emotional liberty” as the freedom to change goals
in response to bewildering, ambivalent thought activations that exceed the capacity of
attention and challenge the reign of high-level goals currently guiding emotional
management. This is freedom, not to make rational choices, but to undergo conversion
experiences and life-course changes involving numerous contrasting, often
incommensurable factors.
The idea that emotives make possible navigation – in which the self both undergoes
changes of goals and seeks to maintain consistency around the pursuit of certain goals
– allows for a politically relevant definition of “suffering.” It is one thing to suffer from
pneumonia or cancer. It is quite another to suffer while concealing information under
torture.1 The suffering of such torture is precisely the suffering that results when high-
priority goals come into conflict. Torture to extract information or confession presumes
that preservation of one’s health, wholeness, and freedom from pain is a high-priority
goal. In situations of political conflict, opponents may artificially bring this goal of health
and wholeness into conflict with another goal or set of goals that the individual
previously held as quite compatible with health and wholeness, such as the honor of
one’s family, clan, or party, or the moral integrity of one’s commitments, or the health
and wholeness of comrades. Whether the individual resists the torturers or gives in, he
or she will experience emotional suffering either way.
Suffering that results from goal conflicts is seen also in love relationships when, for
example, the desire to be with the loved one or to engage in sexual acts with the loved
one comes into conflict with the desire to further the loved one’s own goals. This
happens most obviously when the loved one makes clear a desire to avoid the lover or
be free of the relationship.
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Suffering results not only from the thought that one is unworthy of the loved one, but
also, and especially, from the conflict of goals. When and in what ways ought one to
seek out the loved one in order to bring about a change of heart? When and in what
ways ought one to accept the loved one’s expressed aversion for oneself?
Emotional suffering occurs when high-priority goals are in conflict in this way, and when
all available choices seem to counter one or more high-priority goals. Seeking out a loved
one may realize a high-priority desire to be with that person, but it may also expose one
to open rejection – and thus to the knowledge one has not embraced the loved one’s
own goals – as well as to puzzles involved in valuing highly someone who does not
reciprocate. Revealing a truth to a torturer may end the physical pain but require the
sacrifice of a moral or political ideal. Resisting the torturer seems to implicate one in
self-harm. Torture victims thus continue to suffer emotionally long after the physical
pains have ended. Spousal abuse, a matter of international concern in recent years, is
one of many violent relationships where the victim is often, to some extent, willing. The
victim holds the abusive goals of the partner higher than his or her own goal of personal
health and wholeness. But resolving the goal conflict this way, by the effort of holding
the abusive spouse’s goals above health and wholeness – it is widely believed – involves
acute suffering, in the sense that I am using the term: Either the victim believes the
violence is justified, holding the self in contempt, or else he or she constantly undergoes
conflict between the goals of embracing a loved one’s goal and pursuing one’s own
health and wholeness. Holding the self in contempt is an automatic source of goal
conflict and therefore suffering, just because the more highly the self prizes a goal, the
more that goal comes in danger of taint from the contempt aimed at the self who prizes.
Defining emotional suffering as an acute form of goal conflict makes it possible to
elaborate on the concept of emotional effort proposed in Chapter 3, in the section
entitled “Translation, activation, and attention.” Physical effort is the maintaining of an
action or exertion in spite of rising pain or loss of strength in skeletal musculature. The
metaphor of “emotional effort,” as it will be used here, refers to the maintaining of a
goal or action plan in spite of rising suffering due to goal conflict. Athletic effort almost
always involves a combination of physical and emotional effort. The emotional effort
consists of maintaining the goal of skillful performance against conflicting desires for
physical comfort and enjoyment or freedom to pursue other activities. Emotional
suffering and emotional freedom, when so defined, are not opposites; a state of
emotional freedom would not be one devoid of suffering, nor require no effort to
sustain.
Emotional suffering, as elaborated here, is likely to accompany any important shifts in
life goals, both in a preliminary stage, before the shift is embraced, and in a “working-
through” stage, where the suffering may be supplanted by grief or may take the form of
guilt or shame. Induced Goal Conflict Central to the life of individuals, open to deep
social influence, emotions are of the highest political significance. Any enduring political
regime must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions, an
“emotional regime.”

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Such emotional regimes can be placed, in a preliminary way, on a spectrum. At one

extreme are strict regimes which require individuals to express normative emotions and
to avoid deviant emotions. In these regimes, a limited number of emotives are modeled
through ceremony or official art forms. Individuals are required to utter these emotives
in appropriate circumstances, in the expectation that normative emotions will be
enhanced and habituated. Those who refuse to make the normative utterances
(whether of respect for a father, love for a god or a king, or loyalty to an army) are faced
with the prospect of severe penalties. Those who make the required utterances and
gestures, but for whom the appropriate emotions are not enhanced or habituated, may
seek to conceal their lack of zeal. If they are unsuccessful, they, too, face penalties. The
penalties may come in the form of torture, aimed at extracting a change through
induced goal conflict, or in the form of simple violence, confinement, deprivation, exile.
Either way, the prospect of such penalties induces goal conflict not just in their present
victims but in all those who do not react within the normative range to the emotive
utterances required by the regime. Such goal conflict, for many, significantly increases
the likelihood that required emotives will have the appropriate effect. The prospect of
severe penalties, because of the goal conflict it induces whenever deviant emotions
occur, renders the emotional enhancement effects of normative emotives soothing,
even pleasurable. Many will find that the strict emotional discipline of their regime
works well for them, shoring up a personal emotional management management style
that serves as the core of a coherent, rewarding way of life.
At the other end of the spectrum are regimes that use such strict emotional discipline
only in certain institutions (armies, schools, priesthoods) or only at certain times of the
year or certain stages of the life cycle. These regimes set few limits on emotional
navigation outside these restricted domains. In them, many individuals, operating
without the management tools of induced goal conflicts, encounter difficulties
coordinating their goals or holding to a single course over time. Rather than promoting
a core of conformists and a marginalized minority, such a regime may serve as an
umbrella for a variety of emotional styles. Some individual life paths will stray across
two or more of these varieties; others will cling faithfully to the one most familiar from
birth. Subgroups may form (cults, mafias) on the basis of shared preferences for certain
stronger penalties (verbal abuse, torture, death) that shore up their emotional
management more firmly than those offered by the prevailing regime. These must be
combated, however, because they threaten to reshape the existing regime in their own
image.
Thus, very roughly, one might generalize that strict regimes offer strong emotional
management tools at the expense of allowing greater scope for self-exploration and
navigation. Loose regimes allow for navigation and allow diverse sets of management
tools to be fashioned locally, locally, individually, or through robust subgroup formation.
Why should we favor one type of regime over another? Against the strict regimes, two
points may be made: (1) They achieve their stability by inducing goal conflict and
inflicting intense emotional suffering on those who do not respond well to the normative

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emotives. (2) When such regimes pronounce anathemas on all deviation, they set
themselves against an important human possibility – or vulnerability, the vulnerability
to shifting purposes or goals, to conversion experiences, crisis, doubt.
Possibility, vulnerability – the pairing of these terms is significant. The higher the level
at which goal shifting occurs, the less the element of intention or choice enters into the
change, because the notions notions of intention or choice imply a preexisting goal or
aim – a notion of self, a long-term plan – in terms of which the shift is chosen.
The highest level determination of goals must occur, by definition, “for no reason.” It is
here, at the highest level, that multivocal thought activations may impinge upon the
arrangement of those goals that steer attention. When change comes here – where
certain goals may have long resided without ever coming before attention as objects of
reflection – the individual has no sense of anticipating or “choosing.” Strict regimes
exploit the power of emotives to shape emotions, to serve as management tools, but
ignore or denounce the power of emotional activations to “impose” unanticipated or
“unwanted” change on the individual. They thus offer, in the end, an incomplete and
contradictory vision of human nature and human possibilities. In the short run, as
institutions cope with war, epidemic, famine, scarcity, or the harsh labor requirements
of certain technologies and certain environments, the induced suffering a regime
depends on and the incompleteness of its notion of humanity may have little
importance. In the very long run, they are of the greatest importance. They become
particularly salient in situations of conquest, colonization, or expansion, when the
normative management strategy must be imposed on new populations. Emotional
suffering becomes epidemic. When it comes time to say what we stand for and what we
oppose, the incompleteness and contradictory character of the strict regime’s notion of
humanity represents a political failure that can only be rejected.
This incompleteness coincides with a higher incidence of emotional suffering than would
prevail under a loose regime. It is the conjunction of an incomplete or contradictory
vision of humanity and of induced suffering aimed at sustaining allegiance to such
incompleteness that renders certain regimes unjust. But what forms of induced
emotional suffering are allowable under a regime of emotional freedom? This is a
familiar problem in all definitions of political liberty – spelling out what limits on liberty
are acceptable in the interest of liberty – but an answer must be offered, in any case.
One answer is to pronounce as allowable and necessary the inducing of emotional
suffering, through penalties, in all those who espouse induced emotional suffering as a
means to any end other than the maintenance of emotional freedom.
This is an answer compatible with the liberal tradition and with the notion of the rule of
law. Another answer is to assert that one cannot force people to be free; one cannot, by
means of induced emotional suffering, bring people to forswear induced emotional
suffering as a tool, as an instrument of rule or of community. In the short run it is not
necessary to decide between them. Both answers are compatible with a political stance
in favor of reducing induced suffering to a minimum – a stance that would motivate
critical judgments of all existing polities. The ideal of reducing emotional suffering to the
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necessary minimum has implications for political action as well as for political judgment.
Political action against undue use of induced emotional suffering cannot be effective if
such action itself makes undue use of induced emotional suffering in order to win
compliance with its aims. Fighting fire with fire may only perpetuate the ills one seeks
to end. (This point is illustrated vividly in the case of the French Revolution, discussed in
Part II.)
Of course, this schematism encounters problems as soon as it is applied to a real social
order. Capitalist democracies, for example, appear to offer great scope for navigation,
but, in practice, capacities and options are limited by contractual relationships (that is,
by access to money and property). Those who depend on a single contractual
relationship for their income and social identity (married women under certain legal
regimes, salaried employees) are, in practice, severely limited in the types of emotional
management strategies they may adopt – even though these strategies vary widely from
one enterprise or household to another. Within families, beyond the reach of legal
action, still other types of strategies may be common.
Such societies thus belong more to the middle of the spectrum and produce all sorts of
configurations: conforming majorities, marginalized minorities, varying management
strategies within the majority, organized cults and mafias. A large industrial society
offers the prospect of many different social relationships and emotional management
styles, the rich and well educated uniting around one, the laboring poor being subjected
to a variety of others. Gender-based and ethnic variation are usually also marked and
exploited to sustain a complex and inequitable division of labor.
Vital, large-scale exchange of money and goods, rather than serving as a unifying factor,
can harden and consolidate stark differences. Adult male coal miners, women garment
workers in a sweatshop, or flight attendants have very different social relationships and
live in very different emotional atmospheres, whereas the executives who command
them have much more in common. In practice, such complex social orders can also offer
individuals the opportunity to create relationships or localized organizations that
provide them with emotional refuge. In these contexts norms are relaxed or even
reversed; mental control efforts may be temporarily set aside.
Affective connections, otherwise illicit, may be established, even celebrated. Such
emotional refuges may take a great variety of forms, from private understandings, to
informal sociability, to Carnival-type ritual, to international secret brotherhoods. They
probably play a role in most emotional regimes. Their significance is polyvalent. They
may make the current order more livable for some people, some of the time. For others,
or in other times, they may provide a place from which contestation, conflict, and
transformation are launched.
The theory being elaborated here has, by this time, given rise to a series of special
definitions of terms that it would be convenient to list.
emotions. Goal-relevant activations of thought material that exceed the translating
capacity of attention within a short time horizon.
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emotives. A type of speech act different from both performative and constative
utterances, which both describes (like constative utterances) and changes (like
performatives) the world, because emotional expression has an exploratory and a self-
altering effect on the activated thought material of emotion.
emotional management. Instrumental use of the self-altering effects of emotives in the
service of a goal. May be subverted by the exploratory effects of emotives.
emotional navigation. The fundamental character of emotional life. Emotions are a
sphere of “fugitive instrumentalism,” in which the exploratory and self-altering effects
of emotives sometimes work in tandem, cooperatively, under the guidance of certain
high-priority goals and, in other instances, part ways, such that the individual may either
sink into “self-deception” or undergo a “conversion experience.”
emotional liberty. The freedom to change goals in response to bewildering, ambivalent
thought activations that exceed the capacity of attention and challenge the reign of
high-level goals currently guiding emotional management. This is freedom, not to make
rational choices, but to undergo or derail conversion experiences and life-course
changes involving numerous contrasting incommensurable factors.
emotional suffering. An acute form of goal conflict, especially that brought on by
emotional thought activations. Political torture and unrequited love (both in the
Western context) are examples of emotional suffering.
emotional effort. Maintaining a goal or action plan in spite of rising suffering due to goal
conflict.
emotional regime. The set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and
emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable
political regime.
induced goal conflict. The effects at a distance (that is, the deterrent or exemplary
effects) of policies of punishment, torture, exclusion, or imprisonment which sanction
deviance from an emotional regime.
emotional refuge. A relationship, ritual, or organization (whether informal or formal)
that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation of
emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may shore up or
threaten the existing emotional regime.
This set of interlinked concepts is sufficient to allow historical analysis that is at once
ethnographically rich, sensitive to deviance and diversity, and politically engaged. The
idea is not to apply these terms mechanically to a given body of evidence, but to hold
them ready in the background. They can provide points of reference that guide our
interpretive endeavor beyond relativism, toward a defensible commitment to liberty.
POLITICAL EVALUATION OF CASE MATERIAL

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This array of concepts frees one of the necessity of theorizing culture, power, or identity
characteristics, such as race, class, gender, or ethnicity, which have preoccupied scholars
so much of late. The only questions that need to be asked are, Who suffers? Is the
suffering an unavoidable consequence of emotional navigation or does this suffering
help to shore up a restrictive emotional regime? That is, is this suffering a tragedy or an
injustice? In developing specific answers to these questions, identities, the cultural field,
and political institutions come back into play as historical phenomena, but not as
independent theoretical entities. We seek conceptualizations of these things that will
best allow us to grasp emotional suffering.
In Part II of this study, I will examine historical material on France for the period 1700 to
1850. An appreciation of one episode of emotional history will breathe life into the
theoretical language we have just explored. By way of conclusion for this chapter’s
analysis, however, I wish to show briefly how the above schema can be immediately put
to use evaluating individual instances of conflict and deviance. To do so I turn to two
cases of arranged marriage, one from nineteenth-century France, one that of Rashīd and
Fāyga, derived from Abu-Lughod’s (1986) study of the Awlad ῾Ali, already discussed in
Chapter 2.
In 1840, in the village of Meudon, about two miles southwest of Paris, a marriage was
arranged between Palmyre Désirée Picard and Nicolas Marie Gogue.2 The bride’s
mother owned a small vineyard and sold wine out of her home, both for resale and for
immediate consumption. The groom’s family also owned vineyards in the neighboring
village of Clamart. The day after the wedding, the husband began complaining loudly to
whoever would listen that his new wife was two months’ pregnant by another man. “I
thought I was entering a garden full of flowers,” he repeated to at least two of his new
in-laws, “but I was entering a desert.” The husband’s father thought that the trouble
began when Gogue saw how his new wife behaved toward a certain Guillaume during
the wedding party. This Guillaume had worked for Mme Picard and was also a frequent
customer in her wineshop. But, whatever cause Gogue may have had, his statements
constituted public insult, a matter recognized in law as one of the few legitimate grounds
(including cruelty and violence) for marital separation. (Divorce was not possible at that
time.) Soon there was word of violence occurring in the new household.
The whole village knew within days that the couple were “not getting on together” (“ne
fait pas bon ménage ensemble”). Palmyre began sleeping separately from her husband.
About three months after the marriage Gogue attacked his wife more severely than
usual, dragging her from her bed by her hair, beating her, then attempting to strangle
her. Her cries brought several neighbors into their bedroom; soon the village police
officer (commissaire de police) arrived. Witnesses reported marks on her leg and on her
neck. Palmyre moved back to her mother’s the next day and sued for a separation. The
evidence of strangulation, seen by several villagers, coupled with the public insults made
the wife’s case quite strong; a separation was granted later in the year. In his deposition,
the police agent noted that the husband’s violence was aggravated by the fact that the
woman was visibly pregnant. Although none of the other thirteen witnesses – including

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the mother of the wife and the father of the husband – had mentioned the pregnancy,
this comment suggests Gogue was right, that his new wife was pregnant at the wedding.
According to the wife’s brother, their fights had begun on their wedding night, hardly
leaving time for an interlude of intimacy.
Right or wrong in his charges against his wife, Gogue had been severely scolded three
days after the marriage by his father, who told him to “hold his tongue” and beg pardon
from his wife and mother-in-law. Gogue went to his wife and fell to his knees, in tears,
asking to be forgiven. His wife accepted the apology. But within a few days, Gogue could
not contain himself and began denouncing her again. The father reproached Mme Picard
for continuing to receive Guillaume in her wineshop after the wedding, which only
exasperated his son further. “He was no longer in possession of all his faculties,” Gogue’s
father maintained; “if only his mother-in-law and his wife had taken a few precautions,
they could have brought him to reason.” None of the fourteen witnesses in the case
suggested the young wife had done anything wrong – to have done so under oath would
have constituted public insult in itself – but the protestations about her virtue were few
and vague. The unspoken assumption of all, including Gogue’s father and uncle,
appeared to be that the truth of the matter was irrelevant. Gogue must protect his wife’s
reputation, even if undeserved, thereby protecting his own. He must make the best of
the situation. Gogue’s father and uncle were nonetheless angry that his wife had
persisted in her suit for separation; she, too, ought to devote herself to damage control
and give her husband another chance. They blamed her mother for convincing her
otherwise.
Central to the case, then, was Gogue’s tendency to work himself into a state of
heightened jealousy, grief, and rage with emotives so striking witnesses repeated them:
“I thought I was entering a garden full of flowers, but I was entering a desert.” “If you
were not pregnant,” he said to his wife on one occasion, “I would kill you.” This strategy
went against the norms of the community. Even his own family acknowledged he was in
the wrong. An historicist, or constructionist, approach to this episode would emphasize
the distinct character and strength of the code of honor that ruled in this society, a code
that allowed for a great deal of deviant behavior, so long as it was accomplished
discreetly, a code that dictated the strongest family solidarity around matters of
reputation. Since we do not live by such a code, the constructionist would insist, we are
not in a position to make moral or political judgments about the choices made by these
people. The concept of emotives allows one, in contrast, to appreciate that this honor
code dictated behaviors, and silences, that could have a strong shaping impact on one’s
emotions. Far from being a mere cultural construct or discourse, this code was an
essential part of an emotional regime and favored a certain style of emotion
management. From this perspective the actions of Gogue’s elders take on a fascinating
new significance. They urged him to express satisfaction with, and affection for, his
pregnant wife and commitment to her child. They prescribed emotives for him. They
believed that if he worked at such expressions he could master his jealousy and
disappointment, save the marriage, and enjoy many possibilities that were closed off by
a legal separation. He could have established a tolerant closeness with his wife, or at
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least a de facto estrangement, that would have minimized gossip and family dishonor
and allowed for the possibility of legitimate offspring. Gogue’s father believed that Mme
Picard could have helped Gogue regain emotional equilibrium if she had closed her door
to Guillaume, whose continuing visits to her house he believed only stimulated Gogue’s
suspicions.
These were strategies of emotional management, and no interpretation of this episode
can be complete that does not recognize their centrality. In some respects the emotional
regime Gogue was told to submit to was very rigid, in others, quite loose. (This regime
will be considered in greater detail in Chapters 7 and 8.) As far as certain public behaviors
and nonverbal cues were concerned, strict self-control was required. A duel might result
from an eyebrow raised at the wrong moment. Those who gained mastery of
themselves, and of the game of appearances demanded by honor, however, could
entertain many choices about how one actually led one’s life. The family members who
scolded Gogue knew that there were many ways, besides marriage, to find one’s
“garden full of flowers,” and many ways to find it even in marriage, so long as one’s ideas
about it were not too fixed. At the same time, the very silences enforced by the honor
code could encourage false expectations, especially among the young, among those who
tended to mistake appearances for realities or who, for whatever reason, could not
tolerate compromise.
Where the honor code dictated silence, it was impossible to enunciate explicit public
norms. Young Gogue may have been entirely unprepared for the ideas that his father,
his uncle, and his new mother-in-law tried to communicate to him urgently in the days
after his marriage. If he had heard of men whose wives were unfaithful, it was in the
form of gossip, or in newspapers, novels, or plays – that is, in contexts that encouraged
judgment and distancing.3
The extent to which a man ought to tolerate in silence a wife’s infractions was, in any
case, a highly personal matter. Precisely because norms could not be enunciated openly,
each person had to find his or her own way. Gogue was apparently thrown into
prolonged turmoil by the discovery of his wife’s pregnancy. It appears that he tried to
reconcile with her after an initial outburst, but subsequently found he was unable to
contain his shame and anger. To be happily married was a high-priority goal for him. But
in a society where divorce was ruled out, one false step might put Gogue’s goal out of
reach. At first he sought to repair the situation in line with his father’s advice. But the
emotives his father wisely counselled him to utter (apologizing to wife and mother-in-
law) did not have the desired effect. His management effort failed, and he chose, in the
end, a different path. Violence against his wife was not apparently aimed at compelling
her to take a given course of action. Instead it was simply a way to impose on her
emotional suffering that matched the suffering he believed she had knowingly imposed
on him. If scandal followed, scandal was what she deserved. An honor code of this type
combines flexibility and rigidity. Severe penalties await those who openly break its
injunctions. Public opprobrium, gossip, disgrace of deviants such as Gogue and his wife
(for both diverged from the norm) induce powerful goal conflict in a broader audience.

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But, so long as one remains adept at keeping up appearances, one can navigate one’s
way to many personal compromises.
Court records of the period reveal many peculiar arrangements: husbands and wives
who lived apart for years, still others who spent a few days a month together, others
who married for reasons that had little to do with sexuality. The vast majority of such
arrangements were kept silent, however, were known only to a few, and left no trace in
the records. In the cases that found their way into the courts, something went wrong;
one of the parties violated implicit understandings or had an unexpected change of
heart. In all cases the man’s preferences were crucial; he could legally force his wife to
live with him; her infidelities were illegal and punishable by imprisonment if he chose to
lodge a formal complaint. His infidelities, so long as accomplished outside the home,
were not illegal and even enjoyed a certain tolerance.
In her important study of emotion among the Awlad ῾Ali, already mentioned, Abu-
Lughod (1986) examines an unusually difficult marriage involving Rashīd, a man in his
early forties, and Fāyga, his second wife, who was twenty years his junior. As was noted
in Chapter 2, Rashīd showed undue preference for Fāyga. But Fāyga felt only aversion
for her new, middle-aged husband; when she ran away, Rashīd did everything he could
to get her back, angering many relatives who felt her departure was an insult. The
ghinnāwas Fāyga recited to give expression to her (otherwise) concealed feelings
actually take the form of emotives. (This is true of most of the ghinnāwas reported in
Abu-Lughod’s study.) You want, oh dear one, to be disappointed and to fight about
something not fated to be . . . On my breast I placed a tombstone, though I was not
dead, oh loved one . . . If a new love match is not granted the ache in my mind will
continue, oh beloved . . . (1986:217–219) In Abu-Lughod’s view ghinnāwas make
possible the depiction of the self as able to creatively master strong divergent feelings –
an ability that played a central role in the ideal of honorable independence so many
Awlad ῾Ali strove to achieve.
The concept of emotives, however, allows one to regard ghinnāwas as powerful tools
for shaping and disciplining emotional material that stands in tension with the emotional
regime’s prevailing norm of tough, honorable independence. They may not always work
as planned, however. Where many women used them to express feelings they wished
to master, Fāyga, in the end, acted on her deviant feelings by running away and later by
openly showing her aversion to spending nights with her new husband – very immature
behavior. The concept of emotives allows us (1) to accept as an important insight Abu-
Lughod’s insistence that ghinnāwas do not express “real” or “genuine” feelings, and (2)
to recognize that, nonetheless, they are more than mere forms of self-fashioning,
because they play a role in the navigation of difficult seas. They may serve to assure or
to demonstrate mastery, but their exploratory effects may as easily intensify
nonconformist sentiment. The concept of emotives and the notion of navigation
outlined above suggest that any successful emotion regime must allow for wide personal
variation. But also, the story of the Gogue marriage indicates the high price exacted by
regimes that accommodate variation by treating it as a deviation that must be

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concealed, and that impose stricter expectations on women than on men. The
difficulties of navigation ought to be openly recognized and allowed for, with equal
treatment of all. The articulate elaboration of alternatives and consequences – the
freedom to be open to shifts of high-priority goals – mitigates goal conflict and its
emotional suffering and aids navigation. The ease of navigation of one’s close
collaborators (whatever their gender) is as important as one’s own to the reduction of
emotional suffering.
Where honor codes allow for deviance from norms through concealment, individuals
often establish what we might call informal emotional refuges. At a minimum, emotional
refuge is a relationship in which one may display one’s deviant feelings openly, and
sometimes realize deviant desires as well. Arrangements of this sort were common in
relations between men and women in early nineteenth-century France, as they were
between siblings and certain close friends (for further discussion, see Chapters 7 and 8).
Gogue’s father, for example, may be read as encouraging his son to tolerate his bride’s
extramarital connection so long as she took care to conceal it. Marriage based on love
was by this time a widely accepted, but by no means universal, norm in France. Gogue
signaled his acceptance of this norm by his references to entering a garden. The norm
of arranged marriage was still very much alive, however; and, within this latter standard,
ready acceptance of extramarital relations (as in aristocratic marriages of the eighteenth
century) remained a possibility. Had Gogue been able to accept such a line of conduct,
his marriage might have become an emotional refuge in the sense that both partners
accepted the absence of love between them. Each would be then able to pursue
additional refuge in extramarital relationships.
As I have noted, nothing about these choices was easy, straightforward, or standard.
Every arrangement was idiosyncratic. In the case of the Awlad ῾Ali, Abu-Lughod notes
the occurrence of a very different kind of emotional refuge, namely, the development
of affectionate, even romantic, feelings between spouses who were expected to remain
distant, emotionally independent, mutually respectful, devoted to their separate roles.
Here, too, such arrangements were idiosyncratic and depended on the agreement of
both parties. Rashīd’s difficulties may be seen as deriving from his failure to secure such
an agreement from his young bride, as much as from his failure to remain discreet about
his intentions. In another case discussed by Abu-Lughod, a divorced woman openly
displayed her longing for her ex-husband in front of dismayed friends; later, when he
returned to her, she displayed with equal indiscretion her considerable joy. The breach
here was twofold: If she could not resist such feelings, she should at least conceal them.
Where honor codes reign, concealment allows for all kinds of compromise, a rich field
for improvisation and for navigation to many interesting shores and safe harbors. (This
is, in effect, what is meant by the term honor in English and its equivalent in French.) At
the same time, the individual is left very much to her own devices. In the marriages of
Gogue and Picard and of Rashīd and Fāyga, young women with hardly any experience of
the world were thrust by parental authority into long-term sexual submission to men
they knew nothing of. In both cases the norm for marriage was that of loyal cooperation,
hard work, production of offspring, and wifely submission to the husband’s authority. In
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the French case, due to Christian teaching, to the circulation of sentimental novels, and
the popularity of innumerable melodramas and songs, marriage also included an ideal
of romantic love that stood in strong tension with the norm of arranged marriage. In the
Awlad ῾Ali case, romantic love played a less salient role, as an outlawed alternative to
marriage, but was still well known through the plots of traditional poetry. In both cases,
the result was a very difficult mix, in which the newly married were likely to face
significant goal conflicts and emotional suffering.
To be confronted with such stark choices, to be presented with the tools of self-
management represented by the searing shame of public breach of the honor code, or
the all-or-nothing acceptance of a male partner of unknown character – this is political
oppression. I am not arguing for a simple progressive view of history, in which the
passing of the centuries leads gradually but inevitably toward a kinder, gentler social
organization. Nor do I wish to condemn certain non-Western ways, thereby potentially
adding yet another burden of shame, another insult, to lives already too weighted with
insult and fear of insult. I plead only for recognition of two things: (1) that the people
involved in these episodes, even though they did not formulate explicit political
grievances, were struggling to find a better way, or to improvise a personal variation on
prevailing norms; (2) that this struggle, this navigation, is our own.
Armed with these two recognitions, it would be possible to write a history of emotions
that takes into account their full political significance. In such a history, the modern West
would not play the role of latest and best approximation of perfection, but that of a
promising, although variegated, failure of world-historical proportions, a failure whose
promise lies in its vast scope. A civilization, better than some alternatives, the fruit of
collective striving, but off-course, awaits a change of navigation.
__________________________________________________________
1 Torture to gain information is a specific kind of torture; see Asad (1997); Caron
(1999).
2 The material on the Gogue case is derived from the Tribunal civil de Versailles, in
the Archives de l’ancien département de Seine-et-Oise, in two different series:
(1) 3U Registre d’audiences et de jugements civils, 1e chambre, 1839, 1840,
judgments of 15 November 1839, 31 March 1840, 19May 1840, 25 November
1840; (2) 3U 024648, Enquête of 26 June 1840, Contr’enquête of 1 July 1840.
3 For further discussion of public norms and the circulation and influence of
newspapers, novels, and plays, see the discussion in Chapter 7; see also Lyons
(1987); Reddy (1993);Nye (1993); Cornut-Gentille (1996); Houbre (1997).

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