Pojęcie kultury emocjonalnej jako narzędzie analizy socjologicznej

In this article, the author presents cultural theories of emotion and the concept of emotional culture’ as a tool of sociological analysis. The cultural perspective, in her opinion, is worthy of sociologists’ particular attention; it brings factors of a strictly social nature to the analysis of emotion, for instance, the impact of changes in social organization on the presence of emotions in social life. The idea of emotional culture is essential for this perspective. In the proposed meaning, it refers to the ordering of the ‘emotionality’ of a given collective at the supra-individual level. It comprises scenes for the appearance of emotions, manners of expressing emotions, emotional norms, ideas about emotions, the values attached to emotions, and the language of describing emotional experiences. Analyses from the cultural perspective connect changes in expression and emotional norms with changes in social organization, as is shown through the examples of Norbert Elias’s and Cas Wouters’s work.