Mining a Mother Lode: Early European Travel Literature and the History of Precious Metalworking in Highland Ethiopia

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 335-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Silverman ◽  
Neal Sobania
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
The People ◽  
Pertinent Data ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cursory Examination ◽  
Mother Lode ◽  
Travel Accounts

Our primary concern in this essay is with reconstructing the history of material culture. As anyone who has ever looked into the material culture of Ethiopia quickly discovers, the travel accounts of early European visitors can be a rich and varied source for illuminating any number of such traditions, including those of metal-, leather-, basket-, and woodworking, as well as pottery, weaving, and painting. Dating from the first part of the sixteenth century, the descriptions of journeys and residences in Ethiopia became more prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they also begin to include illustrations of more than the landscape. As sources for the reconstruction of a particular material tradition, these accounts can offer valuable insights into the nature of the objects and the people who produced and used them. Conversely, they can be frustrating to work with, since the pertinent data they contain most often come in the form of a sentence here or there. Rarely are there entire sections dedicated to descriptions of particular traditions or processes, unless one happened to be of special interest to the writer.Among those scholars who have used travel accounts to great effect is Richard Pankhurst. For many decades, as even a cursory examination of his numerous publications illustrates, he has been mining this mother lode for the scattered sentences and tantalizing suggestions they offer. His most comprehensive writing on this subject is an often-cited 1964 article, “Old Time Handicrafts of Ethiopia.” Divided into sections, each dealing with a different tradition, Pankhurst cited various descriptive accounts that mentioned specific traditions. The basic approach taken in this and other publications that have followed is one perhaps best described, in keeping with the mining metaphor, as one of “prospecting” or in some cases mining “surface deposits.”

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

scholarly journals Museum cultural collections: pathways to the preservation of traditional and scientific knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 618-634
Author(s):  
Angela J. Linn ◽  
Joshua D. Reuther ◽  
Chris B. Wooley ◽  
Scott J. Shirar ◽  
Jason S. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The University

Museums of natural and cultural history in the 21st century hold responsibilities that are vastly different from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the time of many of their inceptions. No longer conceived of as cabinets of curiosities, institutional priorities are in the process of undergoing dramatic changes. This article reviews the history of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, from its development in the early 1920s, describing the changing ways staff have worked with Indigenous individuals and communities. Projects like the Modern Alaska Native Material Culture and the Barter Island Project are highlighted as examples of how artifacts and the people who constructed them are no longer viewed as simply examples of material culture and Native informants but are considered partners in the acquisition, preservation, and perpetuation of traditional and scientific knowledge in Alaska.

Street “Luxuries”

2020 ◽  
pp. 413-433
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fast Food ◽  
Food Choices ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nutritional Needs ◽  
Early Modern Rome ◽  
The City

The history of eating on the street presents particular challenges as the extant material culture is especially limited. This chapter reveals the variety of food sold on the streets of early modern Rome through the study of a series of images of street sellers printed in the late sixteenth century in response to the growing ethnographic interest of travelers to the city. This chapter turns on its head what was considered a luxury in the early modern economy as these images suggest the range of foodstuffs which cannot be simply understood as daily necessities to meet the basic nutritional needs of the city’s inhabitants such as raw cooking materials or hot fast food. Instead, these images suggest that labor-saving products such as hulled rice or even products such as sweetmeats, which were normally associated with the work of the steward of an aristocratic house and the elite “dressing” of the table, were being sold on the streets. Therefore, despite the inherent ephemerality of the act of selling and eating food and the lack of surviving material culture, these images reveal the complexity of determining social distinction through food choices in early modern Rome.

The Donation of Zeno: St. Barnabas and the Modern History of the Cypriot Archbishop's Regalia Privileges

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-745
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Huffman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Church History ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research

Modern church historians have roundly accepted the ancient pedigree of imperial regalia privileges exercised by the archbishops of Cyprus, yet new research has shown that their origins are actually to be found in the mid-sixteenth century and within a decidedly western intellectual and ecclesial orbit. This article builds on such findings by documenting the modern history of these privileges and their relationship to the emerging political role of the archbishops of Cyprus as ethnarchs as well as archbishops of the Cypriot community under both Ottoman and British empires. Travelling across the boundaries of western and non-western cultures and employing a rich interdisciplinary array of evidence (chronicles, liturgy and liturgical vestments, hagiography, iconography, insignia, painting, cartography, diplomacy, and travel literature), this article presents a coherent reconstruction of the imperial regalia tradition's modern historical evolution and its profound impact on modern Cypriot church history. This study integrates the often compartmentalized English, French, Italian, German, and Greek scholarship of many subfields, producing a new holistic understanding of how the archbishop's ethnarchic aspirations could produce a spiritual culture in which St. Barnabas, the island's founding patron saint and once famous apostolic reconciler, became transformed into an ethnarchic national patriot and defender against foreign conquerors.

scholarly journals SUBJECTS OF HOUSEHOLD AND PERSONAL ITEMSAS A SOURCE FOR STUDYING THE URBAN EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE LATE IMPERIAL ERA

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-117
Author(s):  
O.N. Yakhno ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Critical Periods ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Almost All

The author discusses the need to expand the source base for studying the history of everyday life. It is noted that a solid pool of historiographic works has already been accumulated in this area of research. Recent publications focusing on the reconstruction of everyday life in national capitals and provincial centers contain extensive generalizations and conclusions. At the same time, almost all studies are based on various legal acts, current records, statistical materials, publications in periodicals of a relevant period, and written sources of private origin. Subjects of material culture, the "world of things" that surrounds people in their everyday life, receive much less attention as a potential source of research. The article demonstrates in what way the analysis of numerous household items, various accessories for hobbies and pastime, as well as personal care items, may contribute to a better understanding of both the material side of everyday life and the diversity of individual and group preferences, behavioral and communication styles, and value orientations of the people. The author draws a conclusion that this approach is particularly important for studying the changes in everyday life observed in critical periods in the Russian history characteristic of the early 20th century.

Biography of a Hill: Novi Pazar in South-Western Serbia

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staša Babić
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
World Heritage List ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Of Study

Archaeology is one of the academic disciplines whose aim is to make sense of the past. Among other things, we organize and classify the material culture of the past into distinctive units according to a number of scholarly established criteria. In the course of the history of the discipline, these criteria have changed, and some of the previously prevailing modes of classification have been severely criticized, above all the concept of archaeological culture (e.g. Jones 1997; Canuto and Yaeger 2000; Isbell 2000; Thomas 2000; Lucy 2005). These reconsiderations have brought forward that the past may not have been as orderly organized and readily packed into the units we have designed to manipulate and explain its material traces. Consequently, we have started investigating other possible paths of thinking about the lived experiences of the people whose actions we seek to understand (e.g. Díaz-Andreu et al. 2005; Insoll 2007). However, some of the archaeological practices of organizing our subject of study have remained largely unchanged from the very beginnings of our discipline to the present day, such as defining one of the very basic units of observation—an archaeological site. The archaeological process may be said to begin ‘at the trowel’s edge’ (Hodder 1999, 92ff.), by distinguishing the features in the soil indicative of past human activities and demarcating their spatial limits. This basic anchoring in the spatial dimension, regardless of subsequent procedures, that may vary significantly depending upon the theoretical and methodological inclinations of the researcher(s) in question (Jones 2002; Lucas 2001; 2012), renders the past tangible and manageable, transforming a patch of land into an object of study, further scrutinized according to a set of rules laid down by archaeologists. Once investigated in their physical form in the field, the sites are converted into a set of information, analysed, commented upon and valorized both by archaeologists and the general public. In the process, some are judged to be more important than the others and lists of particularly valuable sites are compiled, such as the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Dickens, the German Reformation, and the issue of nation and fatherland in early modern German history

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (195) ◽  
pp. 79-97
Author(s):  
Robert Von Friedeburg
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Nineteen Sixties ◽  
German History ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reformation History

Abstract This article offers an outline of the historiographical developments in German Reformation history since the later nineteen-sixties. It argues that Dickens picked up major issues in his treatment of the German Reformation that have again come to the fore in recent years. In particular, his combination of local social history with the history of political thought, and with the history of the new pamphlet medium that emerged from the early sixteenth century, allowed him to try to connect these different arenas of research. This remains a primary concern for current Reformation research, as pioneered by studies such as Andrew Pettegree's book on Emden.1

scholarly journals PECULIARITIES OF NATURAL TOPOGRAPHIC NAMES FUNCTIONING IN UKRAINIAN SPELLS

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-120
Author(s):  
E. V. Boeva
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Semantic Types ◽  
Cultural Component ◽  
People’S Attitudes

The article proposes a comprehensive approach to the analysis of the topographic repertoire of Ukrainian spells. Peculiarities of topographical and toponymic vocabulary functioning in the most ancient texts of ritual folklore are deduced. It has been determined that the spells reflect different geographical areas with the help of 7 structural-and-semantic types of topolexes; their artistic-and-aesthetic focus has been identified. Geographical names as culturally loaded onyms in folklore texts carry a huge layer of culturally significant information in their semantics. In this case the name is an abridged history of the inner life and spirit of the people. The cultural component of the language at the vocabulary level (hence the proper names) to some extent fixes the culture of the people - the native speakers, reflects the inherent worldview of the people. It has been proved that the disclosure of the functional load and mechanisms of onomastic vocabulary in folklore texts will contribute to the clarification and deepening of the theoretical foundations of onomastics as a linguistic science. Each geographical name, entering folklore texts, is combined with a complex range of relations that can be restored only on the basis of a comprehensive systematic analysis of all manifestations of spiritual and material culture of the people, taking into account regional data distribution and knowledge of typologically related cultures. One of the toponyms’ functions in the texts of the spells is a targeted one, but this category of proper names in folklore texts performs not only a nominative function, but often acquires a generalized abstract meaning, adds other semes to their lexicographically fixed meaning, which implicitly contain people's attitudes to the world. It has been proved that geographical names appear in folklore genres as peculiar concepts of the linguistic-and-figurative sphere of the Slavic mentality. 

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Amy Murrell Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Union Army ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Federal Bureaucracy ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

The introduction offers an overview of the book by setting up its main questions and themes. It begins with a discussion of the geography of the refugee camps and describes how a new federal bureaucracy came into being in order to manage them. It describes the language used—then and now—to refer to the people seeking refuge from slavery and the spaces in which they lived. And it argues that“refugee” is a term that is rooted in the language of the 1860s and is more respectful of the personhood of these individuals than the term “contraband.” The introduction also urges readers to view this wartime period of emancipation as a distinct one, defined by its position inside military conflict and by the central challenge of seeking freedom inside the bureaucracy, culture, and spaces of the Union army. The introduction also describes the book’s methods, ranging from its examination of the material culture and environmental history of the refugee camps, to its microhistory approach that focuses on the stories of particular individuals. These approaches, the introduction explains, are necessary for understanding the most fundamental aspect of seeking freedom during the Civil War: survival.

scholarly journals INTERCONFESSIONAL INTERACTIONS ON THE TERRITORIES OF UKRAINE IN THE FIRST HALF OF XVI CENTURY AND THEIR EFFECTS ON EDUCATION AND CULTURE

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-74
Author(s):  
Ruslana Mnozhynska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Building ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Ideology

The article examines the spiritual and religious culture of Ukraine in the first half of the sixteenth century, which is one of the most interesting and poorly researched topics in the history of cultural development of Ukraine. It was during this period that the foundations were laid for the formation of early-modern national thought in its various ways - rationalistic and mystical; Renaissance-humanist and reformist ideas were formed, which later functioned and developed within the boundaries of Ukrainian Baroque culture. There is still an opinion that among the main Christian denominations in Ukraine - Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and Uniate - national, state-building has always been and is still only Orthodox. As for the “Catholic movement” - Ukrainians of the Catholic faith, almost nothing is known about them in the general public. Meanwhile, from the point of view of national ideology, the "Catholic Rus" for the culture of Ukrainian did, probably, not less than the Greek Catholics or the Orthodox, and could produce no less than the cultural forces for both the Ukrainian material culture and the spiritual.

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