By Felan Parker
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, professor of history at Carleton University, specializes in the history of Mexico.
Currently she is working on a project about concepts of honour, morality and sexuality in Mexico’s “middle period” from 1750 to 1856, based on court documents.
Her methodology is based on the relatively new idea of the history of emotions. We take for granted that emotions are universal, but Lipsett-Rivera points out that emotions are in fact socialized or partially constructed by the society in which we live.
For example, many people assume that honour is an elite, upper-class concept, when in fact it can be found equally in the lower classes, as well as in groups of women. The court documents help her learn how people expressed and defended this concept of honour, such as instances of men marking the faces of women to punish them, or groups of women cutting the hair of a woman deemed to be impure.
By studying these court documents, Lipsett-Rivera is able to learn a great deal about Mexican society at the time. She says that studies such as this enriches not only our understanding of other cultures, but of our own culture, and how all cultures are connected. By learning more about the way in which societies inform our emotions and our behaviour, we can learn more about ourselves.
In 2012, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera published a book on this topic entitled Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856.