Philippe Ariés, Childhood and the Everyday

2021 ◽  
pp. 097318492110531
Author(s):  
Nidhi Gulati
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
History Of Childhood ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Adult Protection

This commentary navigates the oeuvre of Ariés’ writings on childhood, family, private life and death, with a focus on interrogating ‘who is a child?’ Departing from the intellectual history prevalent at the time, Ariés deployed the psychogenic approach to study the cultural history of childhood and family. He examines the quotidian experience of aesthetics and other documents of culture to reveal ‘what was thought about' viz. the mentalities’ of childhood and family spanning a vast canvas from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries. Ariés provocatively proposes that childhood is a modern construct, highlighting that children were not always seen as precious, dependent and in need of adult protection. The magnitude of his intellectual adventure continues to be debated, particularly in childhood studies. The commentary includes an analysis of Ariés’ methods and insights about childhood that unsettle the narrow prisms that refract how we see, understand and educate children.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

scholarly journals The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
Dead End ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Representations Of Space

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

Groove Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1300-1305
Author(s):  
Ishita Pande
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Limiting Factors ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
History Of Childhood ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Children And Childhood ◽  
Historical Agency

Abstract In a complement to the 2020 AHR Roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (125, no. 2), this AHR Exchange focuses on the history of children and childhood. Sarah Maza presents a critical review essay, highlighting the limiting factors in the expanding field of childhood studies. Children, she observes, produce few sources of their own voices, have limited agency, and as individuals and as a group soon outgrow their subaltern status—they grow up. Robin P. Chapdelaine, Nara Milanich, Steven Mintz, Ishita Pande, and Bengt Sandin—historians representing diverse geographical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives on the history of children and childhood—react to Maza’s observations by bringing up important methodological questions about subjecthood, agency, and modernity. Maza’s rejoinder reflects on these questions and on the possibility of age-based historical agency.

The Politics of Everyday Life

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Trentmann
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Turf Wars

As recently as 1985, the doyen of social science history in Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, said the study of everyday life added little more than a bit of ‘gruel’ to the main course of history. Since then, the turf wars between social history, history from below, and cultural history have themselves become a thing of the past. It was during the 1950s–1970s that first sociologists, and then ‘new social’ historians, embraced the everyday. The flowering of consumption studies since would be unthinkable without the recognition that everyday life is an important – perhaps the most important – place people find meaning, develop habits, and acquire a sense of themselves and their world. This article offers an historical account of the changing scope and politics of everyday life. In contrast to recent discussions that have made the everyday appear the product of Western Europe after World War II, it traces the longer history of the everyday and the different politics of modernity which it has inspired.

Western Europe and Scandinavia

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Brockliss
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
History Of Childhood ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sharp Focus ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Childhood in western Europe is obviously a vast topic, and this entry will approach it historically and largely chronologically. The study of childhood is still relatively new, and historians have sometimes struggled to construct a history of childhood, with very few firsthand accounts and limited archives. So many children left very few traces of their lives, and historians have had to piece together their history, not from diaries or archives but from court reports, visual representations, and childcare manuals. They have had to struggle to recapture the world of childhood in eras prior to 1800, when sources are especially limited. They, like others interested in childhood studies, have had to address the issue of how to define a child and what childhood is. They have had to contemplate the different historical meanings of the word child prior to 1600 and to resist the temptation to believe that childhood has inevitably improved through the centuries. They have also had to become aware of the dangers of historicizing a phenomenon that has few stable parameters and, in some cultures, may not even exist at all. In several languages there is no word for child; even in English, the word has drastically shifted its meaning over the centuries. These shifts need to be historicized in order to see both the continuities and the discontinuities between the past and the present that suggest that childhood has always been a time of suffering; children have always been the victims of perilous disease, parental neglect, government policy, war, etc. Concurrently, children have also always been the hope of the future, the focus of special love and attention. A historical perspective on European childhoods brings this insight into sharp focus.

WHY LITTLE THINKERS ARE A BIG DEAL: THE RELEVANCE OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 269-280
Author(s):  
CORINNE T. FIELD
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Over Time

Why should intellectual historians care about children? Until recently, the answer was that adults’ ideas about children matter, particularly for the history of education and the history of conceptions of the family, but children's ideas are of little significance. Beginning with Philippe Ariès in the 1960s, historians took to exploring how and why adults’ ideas about children changed over time. In these early histories of childhood, young people figured as consumers of culture and objects of socialization, but not as producers or even conduits of ideas.

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