The Habit of Habits: Material Culture and the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-293
Author(s):  
Meghan Kobza
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture

Archaeology and Probate Inventories in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Life

2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bedell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Important Data ◽  
Poor Households ◽  
Complete Account

Comparison of probate inventories with the findings of archeological research shows that neither, by itself, gives a complete account of eighteenth-century material culture. Data from excavations and inventory studies in Delaware illustrate how these sources can be used together to gain a better understanding of life. Archaeology provides particularly important data on poor households.

scholarly journals Merging the Human and the Nonhuman: The Object Narrator in The Adventures of a Black Coat

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Ivana Dragoș ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
The World ◽  
Pedagogical Function

Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture.

scholarly journals Slaves’ dress between representation and materiality

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Isabela Cristina Suguimatsu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Social Barriers ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Ideal

Since the 1960s the focus of historical research about dress and clothing turned from a purely descriptive approach to a semiotic one: researches have started aiming at the representations and tried to understand the symbols behind the objects. Resting on the so called material culture studies, the objective of this article is to conceive dress no more subordinate to the dimension of the ideal meanings, but rather as materiality actively used in the process of signifying and making of social life. In the article I try to understand the role of dressing for “being a slave” in eighteenth-century Brazil: a society that valued ideals expressed in European fashion, but imposed social barriers for accessing them – for the slaves wear the materiality linked to such ideals. O vestuário dos escravos entre representação e materialidade Desde a década de 1960, os estudos sobre a indumentária e o vestuário passaram de uma abordagem puramente descritiva para outra baseada na semiótica: buscou-se atingir as representações e entender os símbolos por trás dos objetos. Com base nos chamados estudos da cultura material, o objetivo desse artigo é pensar o vestuário não mais subordinado à dimensão dos significados ideais, mas como materialidade ativamente usada no processo de significação e conformação da vida social. Para tanto, busca-se entender o papel do vestuário na constituição do “ser escravo” no Brasil oitocentista: em uma sociedade que valorizava ideais expressos na moda europeia, mas que criava barreiras para o acesso irrestrito a esses ideais e para o uso, pelos escravos, da materialidade a eles associada.

Slaves without Shackles: An Archaeology of Everyday Life on Gorée Island, Senegal

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahima Thiaw
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Settlement Pattern ◽  
Heterogeneous Population ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Urban Settlement ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Transnational Community ◽  
Changing Patterns

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between the different communities on the island, including indigenous slaves.

Memorialising Anson, the fighting explorer: a case study in eighteenth-century naval commemoration and material culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Katherine Parker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Culture

An informative example of the conscious act of naval hero-making are the commemorative medals struck in 1768 by the brother of George Anson. Anson had died in 1762, so these medals were not only a memorial to his life, but also a deliberate attempt to control his legacy. What the medals include, and omit, offers a fascinating opportunity to examine what some thought worthy of commemoration in eighteenth-century British culture. This chapter uses the medals as a prism through which to examine the interconnections between naval careers, material culture, and the process of commemoration. In addition, the paper offers a revaluation of the historiographical role of exploration in the eighteenth century and re-positions exploration as an explicitly naval activity in the British context.

scholarly journals Inns And Elite Mobility In Late Georgian Britain*

2020 ◽  
Vol 247 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-76
Author(s):  
Daniel Maudlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Isles ◽  
National Network ◽  
Building Technology ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Reality

Abstract This paper considers the significance of the spaces and material culture of the ‘principal inn’ as the centre of a distinct world of elite mobility in eighteenth-century Britain. Inns were central to the expansion and improvement of the travel network that brought the British Isles closer together through the long eighteenth century. The turnpike system introduced improved surfaces to old and new roads while new coach-building technology allowed faster movement on those roads. However, it was the national network of inns, regularly and reliably punctuating Britain's roads, that made fast and efficient travel a practical, everyday reality from London to York, Bristol to Holyhead, Edinburgh to Inverness. On arrival the inn provided food and accommodation for travellers, hay and stables for horses and grease for carriage axles. From cross-country travel to crossing the inn-yard, finding a table in the parlour or climbing the stairs to bed, the inn served the traveller across different scales of space and mobility. Moreover, for the elite traveller, inns were not simply blank containers for travel-related activities; they were material constructs that gave those activities form and meaning. Within the principal inn refined interior spaces and well-made, fashionable things placed the elite traveller in a reassuringly familiar cultural space, a bubble of comfort, luxury and good taste which they did not leave from one inn to the next.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document