Emozioni e mobilità sociale

Since the start of the new millennium extensive research on the processes of social mobility has been carried out by the Cambio Lab of the University of Florence. The main body of its work is made up of an impressive amount of biographical material (380 life histories), collected in different components of a generation of middle-class persons in their fifties. In this paper we present and discuss therefore tentative results related to the role of emotions in the process of social mobility, the events that provoke them, the social actions that ensue from them, and the choices made by individuals in their daily lives: hypotheses on which that work had devoted special attention in the predisposition of the research tools and techniques that were used. Our contribution deals with just a small part of our research results and the interpretations they suggest on this matter. The emotions we will speak of are “narrated” emotions. Memory selection occurs in accordance with the intensity of the emotion and the consequences that can be attributed to it, leaving deeper traces of those emotions that are more distinctly linkable to specific actions and events. We will therefore address the different aspects of the relationship between the emotional sphere and biographical paths, while paying constant attention to gender and place. First, we will focus on the reconstruction of emotional spaces in the different phases of biographical narration. They are amplified and released (in social action) in accordance with two interacting logics: a) they suddenly grow and flourish in periods of collective effervescence (social movements) or personal effervescence (love, friendship); b) when their genesis is attributable to some “primal reason” linked to traumatic experiences in childhood or adolescence, they exert a relatively constant influence throughout the people’s life. Specific attention is devoted to the different emotions (shame, trust, solidarity, love, fear, passion, anger, pride) that characterise the narrator’s emotional spaces, tracing the relationship between personally experienced feelings and their link to the collective dimension – in keeping with Elias’ observation of the powerful interwoven between psychogenesis and sociogenesis processes. The link between psychogenesis and sociogenesis is also manifested in another sense: emotions and feelings can qualify as a source of membership in a group, a source of “us-identity”. In our narratives, men and women stress the fact that group emotions – for example, those related to participation in the movements of sociopolitical dissent of the 1960’s and 1970’s, or in women’s lib movements – form the basis of their sense of belonging to those movements and to the social figurations that animated them. An emotional dimension that sometimes translates into political action, and that contributes to form a not secondary part of individual identity Lastly, we will focus on the narrations of men and women showing paths of descending social mobility: a process in which the links between the personal and social dimensions of emotions, and their consequences in terms of choices and actions is especially telling. Social descent can have a voluntary character linkable to emotionalities, which, by strengthening the one’s degree of freedom, make possible choices other than those designed for him/her by his/her family of origin or his/her local local society. In this case the relationship between the individual and social emotionality, between the individual and the society, takes on a relatively more oppositional character. As when passions determine a choice of work or school that is in contrast with the socially “loftier” plans of one’s parents; or when for the sake of love one abandons an already charted course or “safe” and socially profitable occupation. They are cases, one notes, where the same individual most clearly reveals diverse and conflicting emotions, which live in different emotional spaces. The case of forced social descent is another matter, which involves one’s group of belonging as a whole (one’s family, one’s local society, one’s generation) and in which the emotional sphere crystallises into a sense of belonging, solidarity, but also anger, disappointment and fear, and in which the individual emotions and the social emotions of one’s group seem to merge, while emotional opposition tends to spill onto social groups different from one’s own. It is a case in point where group boundaries, between insiders and outsiders, become more distinct and characterised by a strong emotional sharing. In closing: 1) it has been sociologically demonstrated that the distinction between individual emotions and group emotions is misleading. With regard to social action, emotional reactions to external events always have a social character which shapes individual emotions and from which it in turn takes shape, in a continuous and unbalanced interwoven that removes the emotional sphere from the narrow individual space and repositions it in full in the interplay of formation and transformation of groups and societies. 2) The two samples of narrators, the “city dwellers” and “the district dwellers”, and within them women and men, react emotionally to different events, elaborate and experience emotions within different social networks that translate into actions with different social outcomes. 3) The profiles and emotional nature of the two social groups have different characteristics that are also based on the social habitus that characterises them: solidarity and competition, pride and shame, love and fear acquire different intensities, connotations and meanings for the two genders and in different local contexts. 4) In relation to daily life, emotions proceed in accordance with a logic analogous to that of collective movements: from an initial explosion there ensues a phase in which emotion becomes autonomous from those who have expressed it and conditions its related social action from without, as a force that has become independent (“disease” for example, and the emotional universe going with it; “mourning”; “failure”; falling in love). Through typical mechanisms of reflexivity, the narration of emotions then tends to reinforce this autonomy by assigning to emotions a relatively “rational” physiognomy that can at times come to obfuscate and deny their role, but that does not weaken their value and thus enables the researcher to better understand how men and women daily act out and plan their existential paths.