How we feel: cultural variations on a natural theme

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Time: 5.00pm
Price: free

All are welcome to this talk, organised by the Aesthetics, Cognition and Emotion Research Group (ACE) at the Psychology Department. Click here to join via Microsoft Teams.

Speaker: 
Noga Arikha is a French philosopher, who works in the cross-disciplines of history, neuroscience, psychology, and social sciences.

Abstract:
'Much science has emerged in the past two decades that analyses the experience of emotion, yielding what is known as the "affective turn" in psychology and neurosciences, along with the upstaging of reason as what was historically viewed as most interesting about humans, or better, its redefinition in terms that include our feeling, and indeed communicative, inter-related, social selves. In this talk I propose to draw a line between the scientific study of emotions and anthropological considerations about them - between our animal nature and the grounding of emotion in the physiology of feeling, and our capacity to study our story-telling selves and create symbolic cultures. Cultural anthropology is post-Darwinian in that it studies humans as an evolved species. But our distinguishing trait is indeed the creation of cultures.
What is the status of emotions, then? On what grounds do studies of physiology and cultural variation meet? This talk is an opportunity for me to connect the scientific study of our feeling, embodied selves, about which I have been writing, with the birth of cultural anthropology and the ideas of Franz Boas, my current subject of investigation.'

For further information about this event:

Contact: Dr Fatima Felisberti
Email: F.Felisberti@kingston.ac.uk