Poetry, Culture, Neuroscience, Emotions, and the Case of Bonding, Separation, and Separation Anxiety in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Culture: A Theoretical Preface

Abstract:The development of neuroscience-based theories of mind-culture relations and the plasticity of the brain suggests an approach to the history of emotions that treats historical cultural artifacts, such as poems, songs, and images, as traces of the cultural patterning of neural pathways. By examining the case of bonding, separation, and separation-related emotions as reflected in Ottoman panegyric and love poetry and instantiated in Ottoman social structures, we will advance a hypothesis that Ottoman culture scripts not only social behaviors but the internal architecture of the brain and consequent unmediated "emotional" reactions to real-world events. If brain-patterning behaviors and their consequences can be identified and linked, this opens up possibilities for evidence-based histories of emotions and emotional communities that would enhance fruitful exchanges among neuroscientists, psychologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. Moreover, we will suggest that a humanistic approach to "brain science" might constitute a useful theoretical platform for the emerging history of emotions field in Ottoman cultural studies. This essay constitutes a theoretical preface to a forthcoming large-scale digital text-analysis project already in its initial stages.