Literature 1: Notes on the new cultural history of politics and need to pay attention to the expression of feelings.

See Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918-1939, Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005.

For starters, Hardtwig (b. 1944) asks us to look toward cultural anthropology for new ways to historically examine political cultures. This is not a new idea by any means. Hardtwig draws from a wide interdisciplinary body of scholarship, but I think he brings together an interesting set of questions for my work and the upcoming graduate student conference in the Penn State Department of History and Religious Studies. Hardtwig makes a distinction between what he calls the old approaches of political culture history and cultural anthropology and the new ones, which he believes can further illuminate politics through the subjective experience of individuals. Hardtwig reminds us to go beyond "high culture", static models of political behavior, structural frames or anthropological meanings and suggests that historians need to look more for the affective and cognitive markers in the records of individual people. For a new cultural history of politics Hardtwig poses a set of questions, familiar to some historians, regarding the subjective experience of space, time, body, emotion, knowledge, work, communication and finally, the political, social, religious and intellectual order. Hardtwig hopes to thereby integrate the historical analysis of political culture with anthropological categories and develop the theoretical basis for the historical analysis of political cultures.

Hardtwig elaborates on some of these anthropological categories better than others, but it his discussion of the feeling of pain that I find interesting for the moment. It suggests that feelings offer a key way for viewing the relationship of the individual and his world and thereby explain how these relationships change. From Hardtwig’s view, a feeling such as pain displays an incomparable world of experience. On the one hand, pain involves cognition, but it is not completely pre-formed through culture either; on the other hand, physical feelings push the boundaries of our representative systems and even require the self-fashioning of symbols and the transformation of their representation for expression. The expression of pain in the “materials” available to the historian can possibly show a new way to think about political culture, how politics operates through the links of the individual and his or her body with forms of expression and the world around them, and thereby see how and why politics changes with the perception of space, time, society, culture and ethics.

Sidenote: this is one place I think it is worth while engaging the upcoming graduate student conference in the History Department at Penn State and their theme: “voices of violence”. From this reading of Hardtwig, topics such as violence and terror could be served by the application of such questions and source analysis. What are the voices? What are the sources? What can other approaches illuminate? How do our perceptions of space, time, gender, etc. shape feelings such as fear and how does the physical sensation of fear shape its expression and even transform its representation? What happens to individuals, communities and nations through the presence of fear or pain? Certainly gender, the construction/expression of men and women, and the influence of masculinity and femininity on individuals and societies must play a role. How does violence look from this view? How does any of this look through the eyes of our ancient, medieval, early modern and modern historians in training and our faculty? What can some of our current graduate seminars, students and faculty bring to this discussion on fear and violence? I am thinking of Dr. Landes for example and her work on early modern conceptions of the human, the body and feelings or Dr. Jenkins on religion, fear and terror in our contemporary world or Dr. Eghigian on the modern imagination, politics and science of criminal deviance in Germany.