“We can see from this language that evolutionary thinking has been crucial to how emotions are understood: emotions get narrated as a sign of ‘our’ prehistory, and as a sign of how the primitive persists in the present. The Darwinian model of emotions suggests that emotions are not only ‘beneath’ but ‘behind’ the man/human, as a sign of an earlier and more primitive time. As Darwin puts it:
With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition. (Darwin, 1904: 13-14)
[. . .] “The story of evoltion is narrated not only as the story of the triumph of reason, but of the ability to control emotions, and to experience the ‘appropriate’ emotions at different times and places.”
From Ahmed, Sara The Cultural Politics of Emotion.Routledge: New York. 2004: 3.
