What if Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?
What if Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?
The article discusses historian Rob Boddice's radical approach to the history of emotions and senses, challenging the assumption that human feelings are universal across time and cultures. Boddice argues for 'experiential relativity,' suggesting that the experience of being human, including emotions like pain, is shaped by specific historical and cultural contexts, not fixed biological states. He advocates for an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from neuroscience, art history, theology, and archaeology, to reconstruct past experiences in their full complexity. The article contrasts Boddice's view with more traditional or universalist perspectives, highlighting the implications of his work for understanding human commonality and difference.
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the "what is your level of pain?" is a simple way of not only exposing the difficulty of communicating feelings but to also show our current progress in the art of communicating feeling.
perhaps a better question would be to ask "of the pain you have experienced in your lifetime, how does this compare and why?"
though it just pushes the challenge down one level...
i appreciated this article gave us two sides to the story because their is weight to both thoughts.
i would appreciate history classes being reworked to try and expose some of these nuances. so much of history classes left me grasping how could a society do X, Y or Z.
living through the rise and fall of American Science and Democracy, I can attach an experiential answer to that question now.
but an entire history course reworked to help me grasps at how feelings and norms change at the societal level vs the individual level would bring a more human touch to try and reach out to those who came before us.
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