Summary

The history of emotion is one of the strongest currents in contemporary historiography. Historians and the public have always considered emotion important, but it has become a topic in itself only in recent decades. The history of emotion now has its own lexicon and key concepts, including emotionology (emotional standards of a community) and emotional communities (the multiple and shifting communities, each with its own standards and practices, within a society). The historiography of emotion in colonial Latin America can trace its origins to colonial works that framed Iberians as emotionally pathological. While this derogatory stereotype is clearly invalid, the notion of a distinct colonial emotional regime is worth investigating. Distinct indigenous emotional standards and understandings, the emotional performances and practices associated with colonial domination, and the relationship between emotion and honor may all be key features of a uniquely Latin American, and uniquely colonial, emotional regime. Similarly, the manifestations of more recognizably “interpersonal” emotion had a distinctively Latin American character. To a great degree, the Catholic Church exercised hegemony over the definition and regulation of emotion, though medical and humoral understandings of emotion were common both to colonial clerics and to the laity; at the same time, however, the emotions associated with sexuality—love, desire, jealousy, and hatred—are testament to the limits of the Church’s control. Moreover, 18th-century cultural and social changes further altered the balance of the colonial emotional regime; reformers criticized what they viewed as the extreme, inauthentic, or violent emotions of the Latin American population, while the authority of psychological and medical explanations of emotion grew, producing “hybridized” understandings.