Jan Plamper's History of Emotions: An Introduction was first published in German in 2012, and appeared in this English translation by Keith Tribe in 2015. It is a most welcome history and genealogy of an extremely diverse field, though Plamper offers no easy answers. If you are going to work in the history of emotions, you have your skilled work cut out for you.

Plamper has read enormously in the field, as the thirty-page bibliography attests. After a brief outline and a historical overview of the history of emotions, he organises his material around what he argues are the two main methodological poles. First comes 'Social Constructivism: Anthropology'; second is 'Universalism: Life Sciences'. Indeed, Plamper makes a good case for the way this structural opposition organises the field. Are emotions culturally relative, dependent on a given habitus and social expectations and conventions? Or are they constitutively human and contingent on deep-seated somatic, neurological, and cognitive patterns that might be tracked in the laboratory in the present and thus used to illuminate human behaviour in the past? To put this question more baldly, do humans feel things in similar ways in different times and places?

Jan PlamperThe dominant strain in this second section is more critical than in the first. Plamper is far more sympathetic to the idea that emotions are culturally produced, and the first section offers compelling evidence for the variety of emotional behaviours in different global contexts. The burden of Plamper's second section is a barely suppressed surprise and wonder that so many critics of literature and art have been so quick to abandon the scepticism of post-structuralism; so keen to embrace the apparent certainties of cognitive and psychological research without submitting it to fuller analysis. The idea, for example, that specific parts of the brain might 'light up' in an MRI scan, and that this might show us emotion in action, has become immensely seductive. As Plamper says, emotion used to be tracked primarily on the human face; but in many areas of the life sciences, 'the play of emotions is now sought in the brain, not in the face'.

Such research is not without its problems. Plamper cites a study of a dead salmon placed in an MRI machine and shown photographs of people in different emotional situations. When asked about the emotions it was witnessing, the salmon's brain 'responded' by 'lighting up' in a particular way. I can tell that this salmon is not really a skilled worker in the emotions, but other specialist studies are far more opaque to the textual or visual scholar, or the cultural historian. Plamper urges humanities scholars to be both more cautious and more active in their critical use of cognitive science, but this is one of the real challenges of this multi-disciplinary research field.

Plamper's strongest critique is reserved for Paul Ekman and his insistence on six (or perhaps seven) 'basic emotions'. Ekman has been tremendously influential on the field, from his interventionist 2009 edition of Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) that in effect distorts and rewrites Darwin; as the model and the scholarly consultant for the television show Lie to Me (2009–11), and for his method of reading 'micro-expressions' on the human face, a method predicated on the universality of human emotions. Plamper is suspicious of the commercialisation of Ekman's research, while the section that explores the mechanisms by which the work of certain neuroscientists makes the magical shift into 'popular' science (the sudden critical success of the 'mirror neuron' is a case in point) is gripping.

If Ekman is the villain of the 'universalist' camp, it is the historian William Reddy who features most positively, though not uncritically, in the final section. Reddy's book The Navigation of Feeling (2001) attempted a kind of dialogue between anthropological and psychological method, and many of his formulations (for example, the concept of the 'emotive', or the 'emotional regime') are now widely used in the field.

As a 'history', this book is really more of a genealogy and a presentation of opposing and contested arguments and methods. As Plamper himself acknowledges, the emotions are hardly a stable object of enquiry: not only do their meaning and definition change dramatically; they also move in and out of public life in different waves of seriousness. As he suggests, the events of 9/11 not only brought the emotions into great prominence in American public life; they moved the social sciences and humanities away from the 'linguistic turn', and re-oriented the emphasis in scientific inquiry away from physics and into biology and the life sciences, in an attempt to understand the meaning of being human.

Plamper argues persuasively it is now time for the history of emotions to transcend its own genealogies and 'finally break out of the binary opposition of nature to culture'. Skilled workers required.