History and Theory 55 (February 2016), 46-65 © Wesleyan University 2016 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10787

EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS:
CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE1

MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

ABSTRACT

Conceptual history is a useful tool for writing the history of emotions. The investigation
of how a community used emotion words at certain times and in certain places allows us
to understand specific emotion knowledge without being trapped by universalism. But
conceptual history is also an inadequate tool for writing the history of emotions. Its exclu-
sive focus on language fails to capture the meanings that can be derived from emotional
expressions in other media such as painting, music, architecture, film, or even food. Here
emotion history can contribute to a rethinking of conceptual history, bringing the body and
the senses back in. This article proposes a theoretical model to expand conceptual history
beyond language by exploring three processes of emotional translation: First, how the trans-
lation between reality and its interpretation is mediated by the body and the senses. Second,
how translations between different media and sign systems shape and change the meanings
of concepts. Third, how concepts translate into practices that have an impact on reality.
The applicability of the model is not limited to the research on concepts of emotion; the
article argues that emotions have a crucial role in all processes of conceptual change. The
article further suggests that historicizing concepts can best be achieved by reconstructing
the relations that actors have created between elements within multimedial semantic nets.
The approach will be exemplified by looking at the South Asian concept of the monsoon
and the emotional translations between rain and experiences of love and romance.

Keywords: conceptual history, emotions, translation, body, senses, practices, multimediality

The history of emotions has been rapidly gaining ground in the last decade, raising
new questions and looking at well-known topics from new angles.2 Questions of
language have been central to the history (and, one might add, to the anthropology)
of emotions from its inception. They allow the investigation of the meanings and
interpretations with which historical actors themselves endowed their emotions
and thereby facilitate the very process of transforming emotions from universal to
historically and culturally grounded categories. Developed by Reinhart Koselleck
in the 1960s, and later refined and taken in new directions by many scholars,

1. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Trier, January 2014, at the
History of Concepts Group Meeting in Bielefeld, August 2014, the ZMO in Berlin, October 2014,
the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, in December 2014, and in the Institute’s
“internal colloquium” in January 2015. We would like to thank all our audiences for their encourage-
ment and helpful comments, in particular Jan Ifversen, as always, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Willibald
Steinmetz, Rieke Trimcev, and Jani Marjanen.
2. “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American Historical Review 117, no.
5 (2012), 1487-1531.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 47
the investigation of the contested and historically changing meaning of concepts
provides an excellent approach for this project. Conceptual history allows us to
consider how, in English-language discourse since the eighteenth century, pas-
sion and affections have been brought together under an umbrella category of
emotions;3 how knowledge about emotions was transformed in the contested
dialogue between different disciplines, leading not only to the transformation of
concepts like sentiment, feeling, emotion, and passion in European languages, but
also those that were more specific to some languages only, like the emotion-laden
German Gemüth;4 how different disciplines answered the question “what is an
emotion?” and how their different answers opened the path to different practices
for dealing with emotions;5 and finally how the ascription of emotions to different
societies and groups within societies contributed to the creation of hierarchies.6
At the same time, conceptual history in its present state is an inadequate tool
for writing the history of emotions. Its exclusive focus on language7 does not
capture the richness of expressions of emotion nor even a society’s knowledge of
emotions: concepts of emotion are developed not only in texts, but in pictures, in
sounds, in the way space is organized, and in how people move. Moreover, this
emphasis on language as the only way to conceptualize the world is premised on a
reductionist idea of human beings, in which knowledge is produced only through
rationality, a rationality that excludes materiality and bodies—categories that are
gaining increasing importance in the history of emotions.8
We aim to bring conceptual history and the history of emotions into a dialogue
from which both will profit. Our goal is to expand the possibilities of conceptual
history by developing ways to move it beyond language and thus both to take
up the innovative potential of history of emotions and to enhance conceptual
history’s applicability to this field. The usefulness of this move is not limited to

3. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
4. Ute Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling
1700–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Similar concepts also exist in the Nordic lan-
guages; thanks to Jani Marjanen for this information.
5. For medicine, see, for instance, Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine,
and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); for psychology, Bettina Hitzer, “Oncomo-
tions: Experiences and Debates in West Germany and the United States after 1945,” in Science and
Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), 157-178.
6. Helge Jordheim, Margrit Pernau, et al., Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-Century
Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
7. We are aware that all kinds of semiotic sign systems are often regrouped under the term
“language,” but we would like to avoid the assumption that pictures, music, and smells necessarily
function in the same way as a verbal language and therefore opt for a restricted notion of language.
8. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a
History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012),
193-220. Pascal Eitler and Monique Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte: Eine heuri-
stische Perspektive auf religiöse Konversionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesell-
schaft 35 (2009), 282-313.This move toward the body is particularly pronounced in affect studies. For
a good summary of different approaches, see Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial
Politics of Affect,” Geografiska Annaler 86, no. 1 (2004), 55-76; for an empirical example taking the
role of the body seriously for the study of emotions, see Andreas Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit:
Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2013).
48 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

the history of emotions—conceptual history beyond language can also offer new
ways of researching more “classical” sociopolitical basic concepts like the nation,
the middle class, or even parliamentarianism. In a way this is not more, but also
not less than integrating the two central topics of Koselleck’s work, which he
never brought together himself. The first is conceptual history, for which he is
increasingly well known not only in Germany and the Anglophone world, but
also in the Nordic countries, the Ibero-American world, and South Korea. The
second is political iconology, which is only starting to be rediscovered by a larger
audience.9 In political iconology Koselleck was interested in how monuments and
images create meaning and interpretations (the same process that he reserved for
language in conceptual history) and claimed, “it is the body and the senses that
convey experiences to human beings.”10 Political iconology, he held, would aim
at the “exploration of political issues, articulated in images and communicated
through aesthetic experience, at the investigation of those dimensions forming
history, which were not and cannot be transmitted in written sources.”11
As a conceptual historian, Koselleck was centrally interested in the way (mate-
rial) reality and interpretation by means of concepts intersected. Social history and
conceptual history, he held again and again, were both indispensable for the inves-
tigation of the past, but neither could be mapped onto the other.12 Concepts both
interpreted reality and were factors in changing it.13 Our approach aspires to refine
this two-tiered model by introducing emotional translations at three points. First,
material reality can be linked to interpretation only through the intermediary of
the body and the senses. Second, the interpretation does not proceed only through
language-based concepts, but also through visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory
signs, which together form a multimedial semantic net. Third, for interpretation
to shape material reality through practices, the body has to be brought in again.

9. Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie, ed. Hubert Locher and Adriana Markantona-
tos (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013).
10. Hubert Locher, “‘Politische Ikonologie’ und ‘Politische Sinnlichkeit’: Bild-Diskurs und histo-
rische Erfahrung nach Reinhart Koselleck,” in Locher and Markantonatos, ed., Reinhart Koselleck,
14-31, quote by Koselleck, 27 (our translation).
11. Ibid., quote by Koselleck, 25-26. For a first exploration of the relation between iconology and
conceptual history in the Koselleckian tradition, see Bettina Brandt, “‘Politik’ im Bild? Überlegungen
zum Verhältnis von Begriff und Bild,” in “Politik”: Situationen eines Wortgebrauchs im Europa der
Neuzeit, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 41-71.
12. Reinhart Koselleck, “Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte,” in Begriffsgeschichten: Studi-
en zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 9-32; English translation: Reinhart Koselleck, “Social History and
Conceptual History,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (1989), 308-325.
13. Reinhart Koselleck, “Introduction and Prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” transl.
Michaela Richter, Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 1 (2011), 1-37.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 49
This diagram should not be read as implying a temporal statement, but as a
loop that does not work according to the logic of the before and after: there is no
material reality that can be read as standing at the origin of bodily perception that
is not already a result of interpretation (and vice versa). Our intention is to over-
come, at least to a certain extent, the dichotomy and hierarchy not only between
body and mind, but also between rationality and emotions.

FIRST TRANSLATION: THE BODY AND THE SENSES

The bodily senses are involved right from the start in the interpretation of the
world through concepts—the German word for concept, Begriff, still keeps
this link to the involvement of the senses, begreifen, from which it is derived,
meaning both touching/grasping and understanding. Without being seen, heard,
touched, tasted, and smelled, material reality cannot be interpreted. This would
seem a banal statement if it had not been neglected for such a long time. The
senses are not a transparent medium through which the world is perceived; they
shape the process of perception. They have a biological basis, which culture can
overcome only to a limited extent: we cannot see through walls, and we can hear
sounds only within a limited range of frequencies. This biological basis, however,
is not only a limit but can also be viewed as a potentiality: the ability for change
and plasticity is something that is physiologically grounded and shared by all
humans. Biology and culture thus need not lead to the traditional dichotomy of
nature versus nurture: the potential for being shaped by culture through nurture
is a part of nature.14
The history of the senses,15 which has developed at the interstices between
the history of the body and the history of media, focuses on three aspects of
these changes. The first is the emphasis on changes in the hierarchy among the
senses, most famously developed in Marshall McLuhan’s thesis of a great divide
between premodern times based on orality and the dominance of the visual as a
sign of modernity.16 This simple if not simplistic narrative has now been aban-
doned in favor of a more differentiated picture of the medieval period, and what
came after that most notably argues against the creation of an opposition between
medieval—oral—emotionality, on the one hand, and modern—visual—ratio-
nality, on the other.17 Nevertheless, the possibility that different societies may
privilege different senses at different times, and that they might have distributed
their perception of what was rational or emotional or both differently among the
senses, still points to a valid scope for investigation.18
14. On the debates that constructed the opposition of nature and nurture and those that attempted to
overcome it, see Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
15. For a good introduction to recent research (not limited to German studies), see “Forum: The
Senses,” German History 32, no. 2 (2014), 256-273.
16. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Random
House, 1967).
17. For an early nuanced argument, see Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and
Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3-38.
18. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2005);
Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
50 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

The second line of inquiry foregrounds the history of individual senses. This
move was partly based on earlier studies focusing on objects of art involving a
specific sense, but eventually came to focus on the senses themselves—from
music to the history of sound and the history of hearing,19 to take but one of the
most prominent examples. These studies emphasize changes in the soundscape,
in the sounds people are exposed to at a given moment in time, the influence
media has on the possibility of reproducing sounds, and how this structures the
spaces through which actors move.20 Pushing the agenda even further, the studies
aim to incorporate the effects these sounds have on the sense of hearing itself.
What do people actually hear? Which sounds fade into the background and are
tuned out—inaudible to those who are exposed to them on a day-to-day basis, but
heard by a visitor to the soundscape?
The third and final line of inquiry is still being developed as a program for
future research. Taking up questions from gender studies about how performance
actually transforms the body, it aims at “the historicization not only of what
people did with their noses but of the noses themselves.”21 These physiological
changes can occur not only within generations or even a lifetime, but much faster:
upon their initial arrival in India, travelers usually have an intense bodily reaction
to hot chilies, sweating profusely and tearing excessively in the eyes and nose.
But if they insist on repeating the experience over and over again, their bodily
reactions often become less intense or even cease.
This historicization links up directly with one of the foundational aims of con-
ceptual history: to avoid anachronisms by no longer assuming that words stand
for the same concepts throughout history, but can and do change their meaning. If
the senses have an impact on the way that concepts are made conceivable and if
they are subject to cultural changes, this in turn implies that the global spreading
of conceptual history, perhaps even more than its temporal expansion, requires
an increased awareness of, and investigation into, the sensorium at the basis of
concept-formation. To give just one example: the conceptual history of class and
caste could be greatly enriched by looking at the way olfactory sensations and
the meaning given to them impact social hierarchies—smell and disgust, in their
sensual and visceral capacity, are simultaneously culturally shaped and central
to the way material reality is experienced and transformed into a concept. This
example also shows that power can never be excluded from these investigations:
not only does it impact the interpretation of smell, but also what (and how)
people are smelling—where their houses, for instance, are located in relation to
the sources of malodor.22
19. Sophia Prinz, Die Praxis des Sehens: Über das Zusammenspiel von Körpern, Artefakten und
visueller Ordnung (Bielefeld: Transkript Verlag, 2014); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A
History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan
Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012); Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Europe, ed. Daniel Morat (New York: Berghahn, 2014).
20. Steven Feld, “Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology of Environ-
ments,” in Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses, 179-191; Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape:
Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
21. Jan Mißfelder, in “Forum: The Senses,” 259.
22. James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012); Joel Lee, “Recognition and its Shadows: Dalits and the Politics of
Religion in India,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2014, chapter 2.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 51
While the bodily senses and the interpretation of material reality can be distin-
guished analytically, and the senses are important in the translation from reality
into its interpretation, they are also themselves always already marked by this
interpretation, hence the need for a feedback-loop in our model. The interpreta-
tion through sign systems—both as multimodality in each of the media and in
their intermediality—is premised on sensual and multisensorial experiences, but
these are in turn shaped and can be read not least through the sign systems.
The senses are individual and social at the same time. Koselleck—especially
in his works on the experience of war and death—always points out the limits
of the communicability of sensual experiences and pain.23 The experience itself,
however, is socially framed. It does not start in the moment of the sensual impact
but builds on incorporated memories of previous experiences and their interpreta-
tions. These memories can consist of remembered sensual incidents embedded
in a specific situation—Proust’s goût de la madeleine. But they can also include
the link to their interpretation, in which case sensual memory and interpreted
memory come together as a whole.24 Experiences recall previous experiences, but
they are equally built upon expectations. Few experiences come as a complete
surprise: most have already been modeled by norms and the narration of other
people’s experiences. Before the first bit ever enters their mouths, most people
will probably already know whether the gustatory experience of a fried scorpion
or rat will provide pleasure or provoke retching.
But why call these processes translation? And what is the role that emotions
play in this translation? Translation studies have undergone a profound trans-
formation in the last generation. Translation was traditionally premised upon a
notion of equivalents anteceding the act of translations—the same meaning could
always be expressed in different languages, and the task of the faithful translator
consisted in “finding” the matching words. By now, however, translation studies
regard equivalents less as the precondition than as the outcome of translation.25
This draws the attention to the translators (and those who used or refused their
translations) as creative agents. It also highlights the way every translation trans-
forms both the target and the source language. At the same time, this notion of
a creative translation needs to be distinguished from the one put forth by Walter
Benjamin: what is at stake is not the expression of the “essence” of language

23. Reinhart Koselleck, “Erinnerungsschleusen und Erfahrungsschichten: Der Einfluss der beiden
Weltkriege auf das Soziale Bewußtsein,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 265-284; for an introduction to his texts on the Second World
War and memory politics, see Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of
Reinhart Koselleck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).
24. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. Nadia
Seremetakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
25. For this development and its link to earlier conceptions of translation, see Susan Bassnett and
André Lefevere, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translations (Clevedon, UK: Multilin-
gual Matters, 1998); for the need to enlarge this perspective by concepts of translation prevalent in
other languages, see Maria Tymoczko, “Reconceptualizing Translation Theory: Integrating Non-
Western Thought about Translation,” in Translating Others, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester, UK:
St. Jerome, 2006), 13-32. For a critical post-colonial perspective, see Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting
Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1992).
52 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

itself in an increasingly perfect way,26 but a more radical discarding of the ethics
of fidelity—there no longer is an inherent meaning to be faithful to that has to
be carried over from one expression to the other, but meaning is itself the result
of encounters taking place in and through translation. Still, this position does
not imply a belief in total translatability: even if the creation of equivalents is
regarded as a performative practice, like all practices it can fail, revealing fis-
sures in and between languages, and creating not only translatability but also
untranslatability.27
For a long time, translation studies were built upon linguistic translations from
one language to another. In what has been termed the cultural turn, since the
1990s they have incorporated debates from anthropology—notably the discus-
sion on anthropologists as translators between cultures and, following upon this,
the debate on the crisis of representation28—and claimed that the translation of
texts is embedded in the wider horizon of the translation of and between cul-
tures.29 Translation here emerges as the central category for the negotiation of
difference beyond representation. The operation is no longer limited to the work
of professionals, but becomes an everyday activity permeating all social activi-
ties.30 This entails a shift from the focus on the result of translations to translation
as social practice; it also means viewing translation not as a unilateral activity
but as a dialogical negotiation—a negotiation, however, that does not need to be
harmonious and never takes place outside of power relations.
Translation, as used in this article, is not limited to language, nor does it need
to involve language at every level: we are avoiding the use of language as a meta-
phor, as not every semiotic system, and certainly not every process of interpreta-
tion, works according to the logic of language. What the concept of translation
helps to bring out is the open-ended and creative ways in which the different
levels involved in the mutual generation of material reality and interpretation are

26. Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” transl. Steven Rendall, TTR, traduction, termino-
logie, rédaction 10, no. 2 (1997), 151-165.
27. Francis Affergan, “Universalité de l’environnement et cultures particulières: une approche
anthropologique,” in Monde émergeant, ed. Yves Charles Zarka (Paris: A. Colin, 2010), 183-195;
Francis Affergan, Le moment critique de l’anthropologie (Paris: Hermann éditeurs, 2012); Alexandra
Lianeri, “A Regime of Untranslatables: Temporalities of Translation and Conceptual History,” His-
tory and Theory 53, no. 4 (2014), 473-497.
28. Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Critical
Readings in Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 2010), 7-27; Kultur, soziale
Praxis, Text: Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation, ed. Martin Fuchs and Eberhard Berg
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).
29. Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Einleitung: Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen,”
in Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen, ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick (Berlin: Erich
Schmidt Verlag, 1997), 1-19, paraphrase, 1. For a recent summary in English of her position, see
Doris Bachmann-Medick, “The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective,” in
Concepts for the Study of Culture, ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2014), 1-22. This debate needs to be distinguished from the nonrepresentational strands of affect
studies. What is at stake here is the representation of actors “in the field” by anthropologists, who
simultaneously translated their voices and silenced them.
30. Martin Fuchs, “Reaching Out: Or, Nobody Exists in One Context Only: Society As
Translation,” Translation Studies 2, no.1 (2009), 21-40; Joachim Renn, Übersetzungsverhältnisse—
Perspektiven einer pragmatistischen Gesellschaftstheorie (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2006).
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 53
interwoven.31 Translation allows us to develop a way to consider differences that
neither completely obliterates them nor incorporates them nor subsumes them
under a hierarchy.
Translation has long been viewed as a process based on cognition and rational-
ity, in common with most scholarship and certainly most science. If considered
at all, emotions were regarded as disruptive factors in a process that would pro-
ceed better without them. Emotional translation makes no normative claim that
scholars should think more with their bodies and emotions. Instead, we first argue
that emotions are already involved in every translation. The body, viewed as a
mindful body,32 is an active agent in the translation process. In The Navigation
of Feeling, William Reddy speaks of “the flow of coded messages that an awake
body generates,”33 though he himself reduces the importance of this statement by
reverting to the body as the universal category proposed by psychology. If, how-
ever, we were to integrate the historicization of the body and the senses sketched
above, this statement would enable us to point to the creative role of the body,
which is not only impacted by material reality but also actively brings about the
first translation.
Second, the Cartesian dualism of the mind and the body is no longer helpful
for the questions addressed here. Although an analytical dichotomy between
cognition and emotions could make sense in some contexts, it should not obfus-
cate the fact that in practice their boundaries are extremely blurred. Emotions
involve a cognitive and interpretive dimension: every emotional reaction to a
situation presupposes the evaluation and appraisal of this situation.34 Cognitions
are simultaneously infused with emotions, which are central to the way humans
situate themselves in the world and interpret it—without this interpretation, no
meaningful action would be possible.
But even if emotions do play a role, can we access them? Does this lead us back
to a notion of Einfühlen as the foundational category for Verstehen, which Clifford
Geertz had already criticized a generation ago for its assumed universalism?35 In
responding to this criticism, two aspects must be kept apart. Actors certainly often
access each other’s emotions through Einfühlung or through mimesis, aiming to
bring the unfamiliar back into a horizon of the known and the familiar. Even here,
the notion of translation may help us to detect shifts in meaning and the creation
of something new—even if it is not always acknowledged as new.36 The analysis
31. This does not imply that reality loses its materiality: what we are pointing out here is not a
social construction, but a very material creation, the dividing of the physical space of a village, or the
construction of the building of a parliament.
32. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to
Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1987), 6-41. See also
the discussion in Scheer, “Are Emotions a Practice?,” 196-198.
33. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 110.
34. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheaval of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
35. Clifford Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Under-
standing,” in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New
York: Basic Books, 1983), 55-70.
36. For a further development of this idea, see Margrit Pernau, “Epilogue: Translating Books,
Translating Emotions,” in Ute Frevert et al., Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emo-
tional Socialization, 1870–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 245-259.
54 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

of these processes, the inquiry into the actors’ emotions, can be distinguished from
this interpretation by the actors themselves. Here it is helpful to keep in mind
that the distinction between emotions felt and emotions expressed, the temporal
and epistemological precedence of the former over the latter, and the location of
emotions “inside” a person, which are therefore inaccessible, are all assumptions
that are less universal than located in a Western European, post-Enlightenment
discourse. Looking at emotions as not inside but as between people divests them
of their inaccessibility and allows us to trace them in and through interaction.37
Emotional translation, to conclude, allows for an investigation of the ways
material reality and interpretation co-create each other, involving both emotions
and cognition. This section has looked at the first emotional translation: the way
bodily senses are involved in the interpretation of the world, while in turn being
always already a product of this very interpretation.

SECOND TRANSLATION: INTERPRETATION AND CONCEPTS BEYOND LANGUAGE

If reality is always experienced as multisensorial, so too is its interpretation.

Individuals and societies interpret the world through concepts. This interpretation
involves both cognition and emotion, which are so interwoven that a new cat-
egory of “cogmotion” has been suggested.38 In order to understand how histori-
cal actors approached and experienced the world through concepts, the focus of
conceptual history has mostly been on investigating words in use.39 This section
seeks to challenge this logocentric paradigm by arguing that interpretation and
the construction of world knowledge (Weltwissen)40 happen through multimedia
and intermedia translations—this is the second level of translation that we are
suggesting.
Like written and spoken languages, images, sounds, smells, tastes, shapes,
and movements are cultivated into meaningful sign systems that form the media
through which concepts are communicated, shaped, and changed. Looking for the
meaning of concepts in architecture, music, paintings, perfumes, films, rituals,
dance performances, or food might be a more obvious strategy when investigat-
ing concepts of emotion than, for instance, the concept of parliamentarianism,
which is often taken as an example of an abstract, sociopolitical key concept
based on changing uses of language. But even the latter concept can hardly be
reduced to written texts. It involves the architecture of parliament buildings,41 the

37. This would come close to the move suggested by Geertz, if he had not abolished the fühlen/
feeling aspect of Einfühlen together with the ein/into.
38. First proposed by Douglas Barnett and Hilary Horn Ratner in “Introduction: The Organization
and Integration of Cognition and Emotion in Development,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychol-
ogy 67 (1997), 303-316; discussed in Reddy, Navigation, 13-15.
39. On the central position of the word in the theory and methodology of conceptual history,
see Jan Ifversen, “About Key Concepts and How to Study Them,” Contributions to the History of
Concepts 6, no. 1 (2011), 65-88: “Concepts are expressed in words, this means that they are always
tied to words” (69).
40. Hans Georg Gadamer, “Zur Phänomenologie von Ritual und Sprache,” in Gesammelte Werke
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993),VIII, 400-445.
41. Philipp Nielsen, “Building Bonn: Democracy and the Architecture of Humility,” History of
Emotions—Insights into Research, January 2014, DOI: 10.14280/08241.18 (accessed December 2,
2015).
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 55
way their interior space is constructed, symbols and rituals, and the soundscape
of the debates, all of which form the multimedial reservoir that informs parlia-
mentarianism’s semantic net and hence the (contested) meaning with which the
concept is endowed.
Conceptual historians have rarely argued against the inclusion of nonlinguistic
sources on principle, but only a few of them integrate the analysis of images into
their projects of historical semantics. When they do, it is mostly in investigations
of political iconography.42 What is problematic in these works—at least since the
iconic turn43—is the assumption of a universal hierarchy of sign systems with
language on top. The treatment of pictures as supplements to texts and as translat-
able into texts became linked to a functional separation of the sign systems in the
production of meaning: the function of images was to emotionalize or sensualize
whereas conceptualization was the exclusive function of language, which was
deemed more rational. Images would contribute no more than the connotative
emotional flavor to the denotation of concepts in language.44 Our argument for
the extension of the archive of historical semantics is aimed at overcoming the
dichotomy of emotional image and rational language by arguing that all media
usage involves multiple senses, that emotion and thought are entangled cognitive
processes, and that concepts gain and change their meaning through intermedial-
ity and multimodality. At this level, emotional translation consists in the “creative
transpositions” of concepts among different media, sign systems, and genres.45
As elaborated above, translations involve not only a loss of meaning, as evoked
in the classic pun traduttore, traditore, but also create new meanings in the
involved media and sign systems. A concept translated into a visual medium cannot
exactly reproduce the meaning it had in language; therefore it cannot be reduced
to a linguistic concept. Viewing both concepts together, however, to the extent of
looking at them as constituting a single concept with different shades of meaning,
allows new layers of interpretation, which can partially lead to the overcoming of
one of the problems of some older versions of conceptual history: the emphasis on
elite discourse (Gipfelwanderung).46 Though we have to be careful not to equate
42. See Rolf Reichardt, “Light against Darkness: The Visual Representations of a Central Enlight-
enment Concept,” Representations 61, Special Issue: Practices of Enlightenment (1998), 95-148; Rolf
Reichardt, “Historical Semantics and Political Iconography: The Case of the Game of the French
Revolution (1791/92),” in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Ian Hampsher-Monk,
Karen Tilmans, and Frank van Vree (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 191-226;
Brandt, “‘Politik’ im Bild?”
43. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of
Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New
Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2005), 302-319; Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed.
Sumathi Ramaswamy and Martin Jay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
44. The argument is unfolded more extensively in Imke Rajamani, “Pictures, Emotions, Concep-
tual Change: Anger in Popular Hindi Cinema,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 7, no. 2
(2012), 52-77.
45. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader,
ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2006), 113-118.
46. Rolf Reichardt, “Einleitung,” in Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich,
1680-1820, ed. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (München: Oldenbourg, 1985), 1-47, partially
translated in Conceptual History as Global History: A Reader, ed. Margrit Pernau and Dominic
Sachsenmaier (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Dietrich Busse, Historische Semantik, Sprache und
56 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

all written sources with the elite and all visual or oral sources with the popular, the
appearance of a concept in a variety of media can in many cases be seen as a sign
of increased social and cultural outreach. For example, if a concept gets translated
from religious writings into popular films, the extension of its multimedial reper-
toire and semantic net is indicative of its increased use and accessibility. Moreover,
the investigation of concepts beyond language also helps to draw in the historical
experiences and interpretations of cultural communities or segments of a society
that did not produce or use written texts and/or whose speech was not recorded. The
notion of cultivated sign systems, which we invoked above, by no means suggests
a divide between high and low culture: symphonies and folk songs, graffiti and
oil paintings, ballet and ritual tribal dances all accommodate concepts. Though we
strongly argue against a pre-established or natural hierarchy among the media (as
earlier among the senses), the analysis of concepts in multimedia has to take into
consideration relations and hierarchies between sign systems and media as they are
constructed and practiced in different historical and cultural contexts. The selection
of sources is, of course, limited by the availability of media archives, but it should
nevertheless be guided by the question of which media the historical actors actually
used to communicate, apply, and evaluate a certain concept.
The multimodality of concepts and the richness of their semantic nets need
to be addressed “in between” the media (intermediality) and within every single
medium or genre of investigation—this is a response to the often-voiced reserva-
tion that the incorporation of nonlinguistic data would be desirable but cannot
be achieved. Tracing co-occurrences, a method already familiar to conceptual
historians through its use in digital analysis, would be one of the ways to follow
a single concept through a variety of media. Dance, dramas, films, or rituals obvi-
ously not only use language, but employ a complex interplay among language,
visuals, sounds, and movements. The claim of the multimodality of concepts
also holds true for images embedded in texts, as well as for texts implicitly or
explicitly referenced in images. Religious art is a case in point: the meaning of
paintings can be arrived at only on the basis of knowing the texts to which they
are referring. Someone not familiar with the Gospel or the Gitagovinda would
miss some of the most important elements in a painting depicting the crucifixion
or the dance of Krishna with the milkmaids. On the other hand, reading texts very
often draws on more well-known and interiorized images; similarly, it would be
difficult for someone who has grown up with the Passions of Johann Sebastian
Bach or the Psalms of Heinrich Schütz to read the texts without hearing the music
in his or her mind and “importing” musical meaning, so to speak, into the texts.
This interface between texts and nonlinguistic elements can be traced further
through the emphasis linguistics has placed on the signifying quality of a text’s
materiality and “surface” (Oberfläche).47 A text not only communicates concepts

Geschichte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), 58. For a defense of this approach, see Faustino Oncina
Coves, “Memory, Iconology and Modernity: A Challenge for Conceptual History,” in Political Con-
cepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History, ed. Javier Fernández Sebastián (Santander:
Cantabria University Press, 2011), 305-344, especially fn. 4.
47. Oberfläche und Performanz, ed. Angelika Linke and Helmuth Feilke (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 2009).
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 57
through the meanings in language, but also through the choice of graphic charac-
ters or the material onto which it has been printed, written, or engraved.
This invites a further engagement with metaphors as one of the spaces where
language and images come together.48 Theories of metaphor have become quite
popular in different academic disciplines that seek to understand how humans
engage with and understand the world—in particular through the works of
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.49 Lakoff and Johnson argue mostly for sensu-
ous, immediate, unconscious, uncontrolled, or preconceptual meanings derived
from the experience of one’s own body in the world, which are reflected in
metaphorical thought and expression. Though we share central hermeneutic
categories, such as emotions and the body, our interest in metaphors is different.
We seek to integrate metaphors into historical semantics as a site for the engage-
ment with conceptual multimediality and emotional translations. Ideally, such an
endeavor does not stop with the analysis of “verbal images”50 and how figurative
language has been informed visually, but looks at concepts in metaphors within
and across different media and sign systems.51
The privileging of language is often premised on the argument that historians
lack the tools to interpret properly the concepts inherent in images or sounds:
how can we know what a visual representation meant at a certain point in time, or
even more, which emotions it historically evoked, if we lack the written sources
that tell us exactly this? And if we have them, why don’t we use them right
away without the detour via the seemingly ambiguous image? This argument
both overestimates the readability of historical texts, which also use concepts
whose meanings differ from the present, and underestimates the accessibility of
the other media. In the same way as it is not possible to gauge the meaning of a
historical concept from a single text, for other media too, we need to build cor-
pora. Interpretation through a monument or a drama is not something that occurs

48. Rieke Schäfer, “Historicizing Strong Metaphors: A Challenge for Conceptual History,” Con-
tributions to the History of Concepts 7, no. 2 (2012), 28-51; Elias Palti, “From Ideas to Concepts to
Metaphors: The German Tradition of Intellectual History and the Complex Fabric of Language,”
History and Theory 49, no. 2 (2010), 194-211; Frank Beck Lassen, “Metaphorically Speaking:
Begriffs­geschichte and Hans Blumenberg’s Metaphorologie,” in Eine Typologie der Formen der
Begriffs­geschichte, ed. Ricardo Pozzo and Marco Sgarbi (Hamburg: Meiner, 2010), 53-70.
49. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); on metaphors and concepts, see George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenges to Western
Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 73.
50. We are aware of recent interventions in metaphorology that “verbal image” (Sprachbild) is a
metaphor in itself, which should not lead to a marginalization of the large phenomenon of metaphors
that do not have an extra-linguistic referent and function within linguistic sign systems. See Petra
Gehring, “Metapherntheoretischer Visualismus: Ist die Metapher ‘Bild’?” in Metapherngeschichten:
Perspektiven einer Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, ed. Matthias Kross and Rüdiger Zill (Berlin:
Parerga, 2011) 15-31; see also Petra Gehring, “Das Bild vom Sprachbild: Die Metapher und das
Visuelle,” in Begriffe, Metaphern und Imaginationen in Philosophie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte,
ed. Lutz Danneberg, Carlos Spoerhase, and Dirk Werke (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 2009) 80-101.
51. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond Gibbs (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2008) contains a section on “Metaphor in Nonverbal Expression.” On
multimodal metaphors, see Charles Forcevill, “Metaphor in Pictures and Multimodal Representa-
tions,” in Gibbs, ed., Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor, 462-482.
58 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

in a void, but refers back to a multitude of anterior monuments or dramas. As in

traditional conceptual history, it is these cross references and overlaps that, taken
together, allow us to trace the contours of a concept that is not self-evident for
the present-day reader.52
At the same time, conceptual historians need to be aware of the specific modes
of communication, histories, and cultural contexts in different media. Approaches
need to be developed through interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars in art
history and visual studies, musicology, media studies, anthropology, and the
area studies for each specific case. This also means that the possibilities for a
methodology fitting all the cases, independent of their cultural embedding, are
limited—it makes an important difference whether we look at a concept beyond
language in a culture that privileges the visual or the aural, and hence develops
specific media and genres for interpreting the world.
In his rough draft on political iconology, Koselleck (inspired by Goethe) wrote
that he assumed it to be wrong to put “just a sign, a single word in the place of
a whole thing.”53 Following his line of thought, we suggest that it is important
to approach concepts as concentrations of signs and codes in a semantic net that
contains not only words but also images, sounds, tastes, smells, shapes, or move-
ments.54 Compared to the methodology of mapping semantic fields, semantic nets
call not only for the analysis of the codes and signs but also the way they are con-
nected. Historicizing concepts thus means reconstructing the relations actors have
created between elements within multimedial semantic nets, which can change
more or less rapidly or be stable over a longer period.
Approaching these relations as processes of translation enables us to account
for the property of each media and sign system while at the same time bringing
out the connections between them. In these translations emotions are central.
As elaborated above, the translation process is not so much based on “finding”
equivalents than on creating them—even equivalents that are found can produc-
tively be regarded as the result of an anterior creation. Emotions, we wish to
put forth, are central in bringing together the partially different significations a
concept takes in different media and thus have a central role in endowing equiva-
lences and semantic connections with plausibility.

THIRD TRANSLATION: PRACTICES

One of Koselleck’s strongest foundational arguments for conceptual history was

that concepts are not only indicators of but also factors in historical change, though

52. Charles Jencks, “The Architectural Sign,” in Signs, Symbols and Architecture, ed. Geoffrey
Broadbendt, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks (London: John Wiley, 1980), 71-118; Ludwig Jäger,
“Bezugnahmepraktiken: Skizze zur operative Logik der Mediensemantik,” in Medienbewegungen:
Praktiken der Bezugnahme, ed. Ludwig Jäger, Gisela Fehrmann, and Meike Adam (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2012), 13-41.
53. Reinhart Koselleck, “Zur pol. [!] Ikonologie,” in Locher and Markantonatos, eds., Reinhart
Koselleck, 295.
54. Some basic thoughts about the necessity of using semantic nets as a tool for the inclusion
of pictures, rituals, and other signifying entities in historical semantics have also been expressed
by Rolf Reichardt, “Wortfelder—Bilder—semantische Netze: Beispiele interdisziplinärer Quellen
und Methoden in der historischen Semantik,” in Die Interdisziplinarität der Begriffsgeschichte, ed.
Gunther Scholz (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000), 110-133 and by Brandt, “‘Politik’ im Bild?,” 41.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 59
he was never very explicit about how this factoring worked out concretely. Our
model emphasizes that it is through their translation into bodily practices that
concepts impact material reality. Practices are by no means a new category in
conceptual history. But the practices that have been considered so far are almost
exclusively linguistic practices, centered on the question of what could be done
with words and emphasizing the role the actual use of concepts had in specific
situations. We attempt to go beyond this in emphasizing that material reality is
only in rare instances directly changed by the utterance of a word or a concept:
the sayable (das Sagbare) marks the boundaries of the doable, as Willibald Stein-
metz has pointed out;55 but doable is not the same as doing. Instead we need to
go beyond linguistic practices and focus on practices that involve the body. This
leads us to the third emotional translation: the translation of the interpretation of
the world into material reality.
This implies a rather narrow take on practices. We are aware that all three lev-
els of translation could be described and analyzed in terms of practices: viewing
and listening can be practices, as can the writing of a book or a symphony, the
spraying of graffiti, or, of course, the whole field of the performing arts and, last
but not least, translation itself. This certainly makes sense in some contexts—
here, however, for the sake of analytical precision we would like to distinguish
practices as meaningful actions from both involuntary movements and from sym-
bolic practices and, moreover, reserve the term for those practices that involve
the body and that directly and actively impact material reality. Whether writing
a book will be considered a practice depends, then, on whether the book is the
material reality whose interpretation and production or reproduction we look at or
whether it is located at the level of interpretation of another reality.
Practices translate interpretation into reality: a changing concept of parliamen-
tarianism will only impact reality once it brings forth practices that go beyond
the utterance of words. As in the first and second translation, this one also
involves the emotions. This holds true not only for the investigation of concepts
of emotion. Every semantic net at the basis of an interpretation also encompasses
emotions. Although this may not seem obvious at first sight for an abstract con-
cept like parliamentarianism, some of the concepts at its core, such as freedom,
autonomy, and participation, do have a strong emotional connotation, which
not only afford parliamentarianism with meaning at an existential level but also
provide the driving force behind practices.56 Emotions are goal-oriented; they
are the motivational power behind (all) practices. This statement intentionally

55. Willibald Steinmetz, Das Sagbare und das Machbare: Zum Wandel politischer Hand-
lungsspielräume, England 1780–1867 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993); John L. Austin, How to Do
Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
56. Hans Boldt, “Parlament, parlamentarische Regierung, Parlamentarismus,” in Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner,
Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1997), IV, 649-676; Pasi
Ihalainen and Kari Palonen, “Parliamentary Sources in the Comparative Study of Conceptual History:
Methodological Aspects and Illustrations of a Research Proposal,” Parliaments, Estates & Represen-
tation 29 (2009), 17-34; Kari Palonen, “Parliament/Parliamentarism,” in Encyclopedia of Political
Thought, DOI: 10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0748 (accessed September 15, 2014).
60 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

goes beyond the dichotomy of interests and emotions,57 in which only suppos-
edly rational interests, but not emotions, were seen as constituting potentially
legitimate political claims.58 If we want to overcome the exclusionary patterns
built into this dichotomy, we have to overcome the blind spot that leads to the
overlooking of emotions in political and social key concepts: parliamentarianism
is not only about finding a rational way of reconciling divergent interests but is
powered by political emotions that are no less legitimate for being emotions.
This then allows us to direct our gaze toward the bodily practices and emotions
performed in parliament, which, we suggest, are not extraneous to the concept
of parliamentarianism but form its core. Practices are first of all based on an
interpretation of reality through sign systems. Changes in the concepts change
reality not in and by themselves, but they allow for different practices, which in
turn transform the world. For parliamentary practices, this means that the concept
of parliamentarianism, spread out over different media, is central in marking out
the doable. Parliamentarians do not meet as disembodied carriers of words but
as bodies in a specifically designed building whose architectural configurations
shape the debates—the architecture of the West German parliament after the
Second World War, for instance, was not only to show modesty as opposed to
the excessive national pride of the pre-War period, but also to bring forth these
emotions.59 The debates themselves rarely consist in a Habermasian exchange
of rational arguments but rather encompass performative aspects involving the
body: from the way a debate is played out in space, to gestures, which at times
can (almost or really) develop into a bodily confrontation, to the use of the voice
to convey meaning. This further encompasses the bodily representation of the
emotions central to the work of an elected representative: trustworthiness and
honesty, but also strong emotions like compassion and anger at injustice.
These emotions do not arise spontaneously or “naturally” but are created and
brought forth through practices. Parliamentarianism needs to incorporate the
practices that produce and reproduce the emotions upon which it is based: emo-
tions, as Monique Scheer has pointed out, are something people do rather than
have.60 Once the (emotionally grounded) faith in parliamentarianism is replaced
by disenchantment and frustration with politics (Politikverdrossenheit), it is the
plausibility of the concept as such that is endangered. Neither the practices nor
the emotions are therefore something extra and extraneous to the concept of par-
liamentarianism, which can be included or not, or added at a later stage, when
the conceptual groundwork has been laid. Emotions, we claim, lie at the core of
concepts—even of parliamentarianism and, more obviously still, of the nation,

57. Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David
W. Sabean (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
58. Lisa Mitchell, “Staging the Political: Public Space and Emotion in the History of Indian
Democracy,” talk given on November 11, 2014 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development,
Berlin.
59. Nielsen, “Building Bonn.”
60. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”; see also Marietta Meier and Daniela Saxer, “Die
Pragmatik der Emotionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Traverse 2 (2007), 7-15.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 61
of race, of the middle classes, and of progress,61 not to speak of concepts that lie
beyond the purview of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe without therefore being
anything less than key concepts—gender, trust, or anger, for example.62
Bodily practices, especially repeated practices, influence and shape the senses.
Senses are affected by material reality; they are marked by social and cultural
interpretations, which might, for instance, deem the visual to be more rational and
hence more trustworthy than the aural, not to speak of the olfactory. These inter-
pretations in turn pave the way for the use of sign systems that favor some senses
over others—a society that devalues the senses of smell and taste will hardly lay
an emphasis on olfactory elements in semantic nets or produce world interpreta-
tions based on the preparation of dishes with cosmological significations.63 The
respective influence of media addressing some senses more than others in the
next step leads to practices that feed back on the senses, by directing attention
and training some senses more than others and thereby changing their capacity to
access certain information about reality.
This now allows us to refine the model we started with:

Our suggestions can be summarized in three points:

1. As Koselleck pointed out, material reality and its interpretation are co-cre-
ated, neither of them preceding the other, either temporally or ontologically. The
differentiation between a material and a social reality makes a certain amount of
sense with regard to the extent to which practices can impact reality (a mountain
is less affected by changing concepts than democracy).64 In the context of the
translation of reality into interpretation in which the bodily senses play a crucial
role, it makes sense to view all reality as social from the moment it is perceived
by humans, as the bodily senses through which it is perceived are already socially
shaped. The experience of reality is necessarily multisensorial. Conceptual history

61. A very rough sketch of semantic nets for the concepts investigated in the first volume of the
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe shows that there was not a single concept completely unlinked to ele-
ments of emotion.
62. Ute Frevert, “Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann”: Geschlechter-Differenzen in der
Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1995), especially chapter 1; Ute Frevert, “Vertrauen: Eine historische
Spurensuche,” in Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen, ed. Ute Frevert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2003), 7-66.
63. Peter Berger, “Food,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. K. A. Jacobsen, H. Basu, A.
Malinar, and V. Narayanan. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-encyclopedia-of-
hinduism/food-COM_9000000012 (accessed December 12, 2014).
64. Ifversen, “Key Concepts.”
62 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

needs to take into account the historically changing figurations of the body and the
senses and the relations the actors establish between the senses.
2. Language is only one of the sign systems through which the interpretation
of this experience and the creation of world knowledge proceed. The different
sign systems cross-reference each other within one medium (multimodality) and
between different media (intermediality). Tracing these cross references is what
enables the translation into academic language, which is still the primary way
of communicating research findings. Concepts can and need to be investigated
through a multimedia semantic net, containing visual, aural, and potentially even
gustatory and haptic signs.
3. Interpretation transforms reality through practices; practices involve more
than only speech acts. They proceed from the interpretation of reality through
semiotic systems; in turn they have the capacity to change material reality and to
shape the bodily senses by using them in specific ways or neglecting them.
These suggestions redirect the attention of conceptual history to a number of
phenomena that have so far been considered outside its scope. It thus allows us
to engage with interpretation and the creation of meaning in a new way, which
no longer encompasses only rational and linguistic elements but also those that
address the emotions, the senses, and the body. It moreover enlarges the archive
beyond textual and material sources. Nevertheless, this does not convert every-
thing into conceptual history and does not make the field so large that it loses its
contours. In the same way that not every word is a concept but rather only those
in which an abundance of meaning is tied together, and in which contestation
is key to concepts, the same can be extended to other signs as well: not every
image, created sound, or movement forms part of a concept; only those that are
performed with the intention of interpreting the world (or a part of it) and creating
meaning—not every picture taken more or less haphazardly but those intended
to convey a meaning; not every meal, but those prepared with the intention of
explaining certain links between the material world and other realities, the seven
dishes starting with the letter S (the haft sin), traditionally served for the Iranian
New Year celebration, rather than the Berlin Currywurst, for example.65

LOVE IN THE RAIN,

OR HOW TO ACCESS A CONCEPT SPREAD OVER MULTIPLE MEDIA

How could these theoretical considerations shape the way concepts can be
accessed in historiographical practice? How can emotional translations help to
access concepts beyond language? The example we propose is taken from South
Asian history of emotion: one of the most successful Bollywood films in recent
years, Veer Zaara (Yash Chopra 2004, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Preity
Zinta) ends dramatically, the protagonists meeting again after spending most
of their life separated, each sacrificing their future and present for the other.
They finally come together in an encounter, set as a song sequence, in which

65. The goût de la madeleine is efficient in spontaneously bringing back individual memories, but
this does not turn the madeleine into a concept in the way we use the term, precisely because this
evocation is neither social nor intentional.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 63
the musical gestures and composition of images signify the intensity of their
emotions.66 But the protagonists do not speak a single word that might indicate
how to interpret the depicted feelings. The scene would be lost for a history of
concepts that focuses only on language, as well as for the history of emotions, as
the researcher would not be able to access the emotions of either the heroes or the
audience—at least not beyond a vague intuition or reliance on her own emotions.
However, the investigation need not stop here: the semantic net that unfolds in the
multimodality of the scene contains multiple signifiers, such as the melancholy
sound of music, emotion words like chāhat (longing, desire, wish) and dil (heart)
in the Hindi lyrics of the song, close-up shots of the faces of Veer and Zara that
alternate between smiling and crying, and, notably, images of torrential rain. The
monsoon, which envelops the reunited couple as they finally come to sit side by
side in a garden, is a key visual pointer that we will now take as an entry point
that allows us to unravel the history of a semantic net that informed the making of
the scene. The film script and the director’s choice of images and music draw on
the multimedial conceptual history of the monsoon to convey the emotions of the
protagonists with a coherence that would be understood by South Asian audienc-
es. To understand the film scene as researchers we thus have to look beyond it.
The monsoon as a season of erotic love, and torrential rain as a sign of long-
ing and fulfillment, have a long tradition in South Asia and are played out across
a whole range of media. The monsoon is first of all a material reality. It is the
season in which life begins again after the scorching heat of summer and is also
central to the agricultural cycle. It is also the time when migratory workers and
soldiers return home. This material reality is conveyed through a multisensory
experience that leads to the interpretation in various media: the monsoon ragas,
melodic modes at the basis of musical improvisation, embody the season. Like
the rain itself, they affect the body of the listener, as sound waves, but also
through the emotional meaning a cultivated listener associates with them. At the
same time, they also link to cosmology—a raga performed by a master artist can
cause the clouds to burst and draw down the rain upon the earth, according to
legend.67 Ragas in turn find their expression in miniatures, ragamala paintings.68
These miniatures may figure a loving couple, often depicting the god Krishna
and his lover Radha, but sometimes also a lovelorn princess. They also draw on
a number of signs linked to the rains, most prominent among them the crane and
the peacock. These signs are further elaborated in poetry, which may be quoted
on the margin of the miniature or simply linked to them by the viewer.69 In the
popular genres of barahmasa (the twelve-months), which includes painting,

66. Veer Zaara, final scene, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x76AewWDKPw (accessed Janu-

ary 2015).
67. For a short introduction, see Richard Widdess, Raga as a Key Concept (London : SOAS,
2006), https://www.soas.ac.uk/ssai/keywords/file24811.pdf (accessed January 2015); Philippe Bru-
guière, “La delectation du rasa: La tradition esthétique de l’Inde,” Cahiers de musiques traditionelles
7 (1994), 3-26.
68. Klaus Ebeling, Ragamala Paintings (Basel: Ravi Kumar, 1973).
69. Charlotte Vaudeville, Baramasa in Indian Literatures (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986);
Francesca Orsini, “Barahmasas in Hindi and Urdu,” in Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary
Culture, ed. Francesca Orsini (Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2010), 142-177.
64 MARGRIT PERNAU AND IMKE RAJAMANI

poetry, and song, the month of the monsoon is the period in which the heroine is
overcome by painful longing for her absent lover before the joys of reunification
are celebrated. The miniatures presuppose the awareness of the stories behind
them and the ability to read the symbols; knowledge of the paintings in turn helps
in learning to link the raga to the emotions of the rainy season.
Although this can be read as the emotion-induced and inducing interpretation
of a material reality, the interpretation in turn brings forth practices and shapes
a material reality of its own: in order to celebrate the rainy season properly,
gardens have been built, preferably with open pavilions and trees large enough
to support swings and to house peacocks. Though it seems obvious to interpret
the peacock in the poem or the painting as referring to the materiality of a real
peacock, the real peacock in turn references back to the media, which endow him
with meaning and emotion—the lines between original and translation become
blurred. One thing becomes clear, however: it is only through the multimedial
interpretation of the multisensorial experience that a concept of love begins to
emerge that fuses the pain of solitude and longing of separation with the joy of
the lovers’ reunion. It is the concept of monsoon-love, which the makers of Veer
Zaara applied and enriched in a creative process that involved all three kinds of
emotional translations.70

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS EMOTIONAL ABOUT EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS?

One of the questions conceptual history still has to address, now that it has moved
far beyond its initial location in European languages, is the universalism implied
not only in certain assumptions and findings (most important, the role of moder-
nity and what characterizes it), but also inherent in its theory and method as such.
What then are the universalisms implied in the present article? We start first from
an assumption that humans interpret the world around them through signs. What
changes, historically and culturally, is the interpretation but not the fact that an
interpretation occurs. Second, we hold that this interpretation proceeds on the
basis of the experience of the material world gathered through bodily senses.
Again, the senses as such can be shaped culturally and socially; they can be
allotted changing meanings and be hierarchized differently. This cultural impact
on the senses may even to a certain extent change their bodily and biological
basis. What remains universal and unaffected by these changes is the fact that
the perception of the outside world can work only through the senses. Finally,
we posit that both emotions and cognitions are involved in the interface between
the world and its interpretation, though here again the degree to which they are
distinguished and in which the one or the other is culturally and socially valued
and devalued may change. This also applies to the precise role emotions play in
the three translations. We have attempted to delineate where and how emotions
can become important while avoiding an essentialism that would ascribe to them

70. The history and multimediality of the monsoon as a concept of emotion was discussed more
extensively during a conference titled “Monsoon Feelings,” June 25-27, 2015, at the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development in Berlin organized by the authors, together with Katherine Butler
Schofield.
 EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE 65
a fixed function valid for all times and spaces. We thus hope to have provided
a starting point from which individual studies, grounded in concrete historical
contexts, can be taken further.
Emotions, we suggest, are centrally involved in all of the three translations but
in different ways. Moving beyond Cartesian dualism, the first translation gives
an active and creative role to the body and the bodily senses in processing the
sensory impressions through which they enter into contact with material reality.
This process takes place beyond the distinction between emotion and cognition
and implicates both of them. The second translation sees emotions at play in the
creation of equivalences among and within media: if a semantic net spreads over
different media, emotions endow equivalences with plausibility and hence hold a
concept together. In the third translation, emotions are the moving force, which
transforms the doable into something actually done.
The aim of this article, as stated in the beginning, is to bring the history of
emotions and conceptual history into a mutually fruitful dialogue. We hope to
have shown that taking up the challenges of an emphasis on emotions and the
body will allow conceptual history to develop a methodology with which to
look at concepts not only in language but also in multimedia networks. This
in turn will permit emotion history to integrate the rich potential of conceptual
history without having to assume the logocentric universe hitherto at the basis
of conceptual history.

Max Planck Institute for Human Development