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This five-episode survey deals with main theoretical and methodological approaches within the field of emotional / affective studies, well established in the Western academic scholarship but are still of unspectacular character in Russia. Briefly prefacing a publication of the 5th volume of the ‘Under the Skies of South Asia’ project (USSA) which starts the road to the analysis of the emotional paradigms of the South Asian milieu, the paper also asks ourselves if a discourse on emotions in one cultural model can be applicable to another? The first episode drawing from classical works in philosophy and psychology dealt with terminological definitions, and, taking into account the domination of Anglo-Saxon school of thought, dwelt on semantic correlates from alien linguo-cultural contexts. The second episode, drawing from the studies of social and cultural anthropologists of an “exotic other,” demonstrated the divergence of a universalist concept that affirms the sameness of emotions for different cultures and times, and a constructivist one that considers them culturally conditioned and / or socially constructed. The 3rd episode focused on two principal approaches — metaphorical and semantic — towards description of the linguistics of emotions, and to their promoters, including George Lakoff, Zoltan Kövecses, Anna Wierzbicka and Victor Shakhovsky. The 4th episode highlights the most important works and concepts in the field of “history of emotions” already widely recognized as an independent discipline, and traces its historiography with insights to William Reddy and Barbara Rosenweine. The concluding 5th episode describes the intensity of the modern world, traumatically overwhelmed with negative emotions of literally destructive power, which confirms the high relevance of affective studies and turns them into applied science.

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