Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music

2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
Flea Market ◽  
Musical Styles

Abstract: The twentieth century ended with the widespread conversion of cultural artefacts into digital information. Less attention has been granted to the ways in which cultural artefacts accumulate in the form of "things"-tangible books, recordings, and other objects whose economic value has often withered. This article examines the question of cultural waste and looks at those commercial and social institutions (such as the flea market and garage sale) which have evolved in order to keep old cultural commodities circulating. The recycling of old musical styles within contemporary practice is examined as one means of retrieving and revalorizing cultural waste. Résumé: La transposition massive d'artefacts culturels sous forme digitale a marqué la fin du 20e siècle. En revanche, on a porté moins d'attention à l'accumulation de ces artefacts sous forme de «choses»-livres, enregistrements et autres objets matériaux dont la valeur marchande a fortement diminué dans bien des cas. Cet article examine la question de détritus culturels, et jette un regard sur les institutions commerciales et sociales (telles que le marché aux puces et la vente de garage) qui ont évolué afin de garder les vieux biens culturels en circulation. En outre, l'article examine le recyclage d'anciens styles musicaux dans la pratique contemporaine, à titre d'exemple de récupération et de remise en valeur de détritus culturels.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
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.

Energieholzproduktion in Mittel- und Nieder-wäldern der Schweiz | Energy Wood Production in Coppice With Standards and Coppice Forests in Switzerland

1999 ◽  
Vol 150 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-147
Author(s):  
Bettina Bally
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Wood Production ◽  
Fuel Production ◽  
Energy Wood ◽  
Short Rotation ◽  
Energy Plantations ◽  
Coppice With Standards

Coppice with standards and coppice forests are the result of silvicultural systems widely applied until the mid-twentieth century, mainly for fuel production. Similar to energy plantations in Scandinavia and Germany the above-mentioned systems are characterised by a short rotation. The present paper tries to show that, owing to efficient logging methods, energy wood can be produced from coppice and coppice with standards forests so cheaply that it proves to be highly competitive compared to oil. The economic value of coppice and coppice with standards was calculated on the basis of models and compared to high forest cultivation. Contrary to high forests, the coppice with standards system is cost-covering on poor, well developed and easily accessible sites.

Public Finance and Personal Law in Late Colonial India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Newbigin
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Personal Income Tax ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Personal Law

This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and specifically the development of a direct, personal income tax, impacted legal subjecthood during India’s transition to Independence. It shows how early twentieth-century understandings of economic value and public finance were embedded into Indian society and legal system through discussions about personal law. This had particular consequences for Hindu personal law, which, under pressure from a centrally administered income tax regime, was re-imagined as a singular, homogeneous all-Indian legal system in ways that rendered the Hindu joint family synonymous with the representative and fiscal structures of the Indian state.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

scholarly journals The Use and Economic Value of Manna grass (Glyceria) in Poland from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Human Ecology ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 721-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Łukasz Jakub Łuczaj ◽  
Jarosław Dumanowski ◽  
Piotr Köhler ◽  
Aldona Mueller-Bieniek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
The Middle Ages

Inca Aesthetics and Scholarly Inquiry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Herring
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry ◽  
Andean Culture

This chapter discusses the interpretive challenges that art historians and anthropologists have faced in approaching Inca intellectual and artistic achievements, which do not fit comfortably in Western categories. George Kubler took up the question of Inca art in the mid-twentieth century, creating a space in art history for studying the Incas. This development occurred at a time when archaeologists such as John Rowe worked to place the Incas within the broader context of Andean civilizations, and structuralists like Tom Zuidema were beginning to challenge historical narratives in search of underlying elements of Andean culture. The scholarly interest in Inca art, material culture, and intellect was but one aspect of the Inca focus of that time, as artists found inspiration in Inca ruins and museum galleries in the United States, and other countries began to exhibit Inca artifacts as an art to be approached on its own terms.

Material Culture and Healing Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.

We Worked and Made Beautiful Things

2019 ◽  
pp. 80-97
Author(s):  
Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

During the early twentieth century, Kiowa people expertly deployed material culture as symbols of themselves as a people. Beadwork specifically illustrated the significance of kinship and is use and exchange among people, which constructed family relationships and a sense of belongingness. Beadwork and other expressive forms were highlighted in the American Indian Exposition, a fair, and an event, which provided a venue of public display that encouraged intertribal competition. The chapter also examines the representation of young women as American Indian Exposition princesses.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Margree ◽  
Daniel Orrells ◽  
Minna Vuohelainen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Professional Authorship

The introduction to the volume sets Richard Marsh in his historical context and argues that our understanding of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional authorship remains incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s oeuvre. The introduction discusses Marsh as an exemplary professional writer producing topical popular fiction for an expanding middlebrow market. The seeming ephemerality of his literary production meant that its value was not appreciated by twentieth-century critics who were constructing the English literary canon. Marsh’s writing, however, deserves to be reread, as its negotiation of mainstream and counter-hegemonic discourses challenges our assumptions about fin-de-siècle literary culture. His novels and short stories engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates about aesthetic and economic value and interrogated the politics of gender, sexuality, empire and criminality.

From Ajanta to Sydenham: ‘Indian’ art at the Sydenham Palace

After 1851 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Victoria Turner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The South ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
A Site ◽  
Victoria And Albert Museum ◽  
Great Exhibition ◽  
Indian Art

Discussions about the display of Indian art and material culture in the Victorian imperial metropolis have largely focused on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its progeny, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). However, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Hill was an important, but much overlooked, location of imperial and colonial display well into the twentieth century. This essay begins by examining the Sydenham Palace at a site of imperial spectacle from its opening in 1854 and well into the twentieth century. Relevant events included the African Exhibition of 1895, the opening of the Victoria Cross Gallery in the same year and the Colonial Exhibition of 1905, and the display of Major Robert Gill’s copies of the frescoes from the Buddhist rock-cut temples at Ajanta in India (until they were destroyed by fire in 1866). The crowning occasion in the Sydenham series of imperial events was the Festival of Empire in 1911 which celebrated the ascension of George V as ‘King-Emperor’. Taking the 1911 Festival as a case study, this essay explores the complex and often conflicting narratives of empire that were communicated through the courts and grounds at Sydenham.

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