Hur känns kultur?

Abstract

This special issue discusses the uses of emotions in cultural analysis. In the introduction we explore the embiguities of the verb "to feel", its double focus on the haptic and the emotional. The aim is to avoid the psychological tradition of seeing emotions as a neat category, that often gets trapped in fruitless discussions of the polarities of body and mind, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, discursive and non-discursive.

The vagueness and openness of emotions often make them a good starting point for a cultural analysis. They signal that something is happening, something is arrested or transformed. What is it that make certain situations, places, objects and persons seem so emotionally charged? What kind of processes of intensification are at work here? A feeling may produce a situation of 'action readiness' and thus help us to understand a classic problem, how cultural change and transformation grows out of the given.