Emotional Culture as a Context of Education: Why Emotional Culture is Important for Pedagogy?

Abstract

In the article, I search for the connection between emotions culture and education by examining the affective reproduction of culture. Building on the tradition of Émile Durkheim, in the works by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Steven Gordon the concept of emotional culture is (re)constructed. Emotional culture is understood as the specific complex of emotion vocabularies, feeling rules, and beliefs about emotions. Emotions and their meaning provide a socio-psychological mechanism that controls/develops individuals and groups.In the text, it is argued that the concept of emotional culture adds a distinctive conceptual tool for studying different educational contexts and environments. To examine this argument, the article is divided into three parts. First, an overview of the concepts and theories that underlie the term of emotional culture is given. In the second part, the concept is analyzed in the light of modern cultural studies. The article closes by pointing out pedagogical implications, especially those connected with emotional education.