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Resumo

Jan Plamper's book addresses not so much the history of emotions themselves as their metahistory — the elaboration of the principal approaches to their study. The universalist paradigm, proclaimed by psychologists of the Paul Ekman school, is opposed by social constructivism, advocated by most historians and anthropologists. Plamper's position is closer to the latter view, yet he cautions the reader against the overstatement of differences between the emotional worlds of people of various cultures and epochs, typical of radical social constructivists. In the reviewer's opinion, the most promising approach is to combine the psychological constructivism of the Lisa Feldman Barrett school with the linguistic semantics elaborated by Anna Wierzbicka. Plamper, however, regards any manifestations of universalism, either in the form of core affects in the former case, or in the form of semantic universals in the latter, as either unacceptable or uninteresting. The controversy is to some extent terminological: if the definition of emotion includes its object, as Plamper believes, then emotions are infinitely numerous; if not, they are few.

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