Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760

Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley by Christian Zlolniski Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2006 ISBN 0520246438, 249 pp.The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture Ed. by Kostis Kourelis Athens: Gennadius Library, 2008 ISBN 978-960-86960-6-8, 104 pp. Transit Migration: The Missing Link between Emigration and Settlement by Aspasia Papadopoulou-Kourkoula New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 ISBN 0-230-55533-0, 177 pp.How Professors Think: Inside The Curious World of Academic Judgment, 1st Edition by Michele Lamont Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0674032668, 336 pp.

Download Full-text

Touchy-Feely History: The ‘Stuff’ of American Culture

Cultural History ◽

10.3366/cult.2015.0081 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 4-18

Author(s):

Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Cultural History ◽

Race And Ethnicity ◽

The Body ◽

Special Issue ◽

Historical Significance ◽

Research Perspectives ◽

Economic Trends ◽

Recent Trends ◽

New Research

This state of the field essay examines recent trends in American Cultural History, focusing on music, race and ethnicity, material culture, and the body. Expanding on key themes in articles featured in the special issue of Cultural History, the essay draws linkages to other important literatures. The essay argues for more a more serious consideration of the products within popular culture, less as a reflection of social or economic trends, rather for their own historical significance. While the essay examines some classic texts, more emphasis is on work published within the last decade. Here, interdisciplinary methods are stressed, as are new research perspectives developing by non-western historians.

Download Full-text

Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites

Northern Scotland ◽

10.3366/nor.2018.0153 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 91-93

Author(s):

Jennifer Novotny

Keyword(s):

Material Culture

Download Full-text

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽

10.3366/para.2020.0318 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 (1) ◽

pp. 10-44

Author(s):

Christopher Johnson

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Material Culture ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Natural Environment ◽

Human Sciences ◽

Arctic Circle ◽

Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽

Language Technology ◽

Formative Experience ◽

Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Download Full-text

The Inherited Past of the Broch: On Antiquarian Discourse and Contemporary Archaeology

Scottish Archaeological Journal ◽

10.3366/saj.2002.24.1.1 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 1-20 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

ANDREW BAINES

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

19Th Century ◽

Academic Language ◽

Contemporary Archaeology ◽

The North

In reading archaeological texts, we expect to be engaged in a characteristically archaeological discourse, with a specific and recognisable structure and vocabulary. In evaluating the published work of 19th Century antiquarians, we will inevitably look for points of contact between their academic language and our own; success or failure in the identification of such points of contact may prompt us to recognise a nascent archaeology in some writings, while dismissing others as naïve or absurd. With this point in mind, this paper discusses the written and material legacies of three 19th Century antiquarians in the north of Scotland who worked on a particular monument type, the broch. The paper explores the degree to which each has been admitted as an influence on the development of the broch as a type. It then proceeds to compare this established typology with the author's experiences, in the field, of the sites it describes. In doing so, the paper addresses wider issues concerning the role of earlier forms of archaeological discourse in the development of present day archaeological classifications of, and of the problems of reconciling such classifications with our experiences of material culture.

Download Full-text

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

Victoriographies ◽

10.3366/vic.2013.0129 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 136-160 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Molly Engelhardt

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

George Eliot ◽

Charlotte Bronte ◽

Elizabeth Gaskell ◽

Romantic Love ◽

Narrative Fiction ◽

Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

Download Full-text