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.

L'ordination boudhiste à Ceylan

1973 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.L. Seneviratne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
True Path ◽  
Dramatic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Web

The Buddhist Ordination Rite in eighteenth century Ceylon is seen as having two kinds of symbolic meanings, the first internal to the rite and the second related to the legitimisation of royal power. The rite presents in a highly dramatic form the act of renunciation, awa y from the web of social relations into the woods, and away from the world on the path of Ultimate Release (Nirvana). The novice is first dressed as a Ksatriya warrior and then dramatically stripped of his prin cely finery and clothed in the yellow robes of the mendicant monk. Next he is solemnly admonished on how to walk the true path of asceticism. This is the first symbolic meaning. The second involves an elaboration, by the political authority (the King), of the princely attributes of the novice while he is still in the princely garb. This is done by conducting him with ceremony fit for a prince to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth which was a part of the palace complex, and enacting a cere mony of crowning him. This extension of the rite, in strict terms unnecessary for the rite itself, and done to only a select few of the novices, is seen as an attempt by the king to dis play his patronage of and devotion to the religion. The novice as prince is seen as a very apt mechanism for the fusion of two rituals with two very different meanings.

“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly Lemire
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
Transnational Exchange ◽  
Rhetorical Authority ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractGrowing numbers of sailors powered British fleets during the long eighteenth century. By exploring mariners' habits, dress, and material practice when in port, this article uncovers their roles as agents of cultural change. These men complicated material hierarchies, with a broad impact on developing western consumer societies, devising a distinctive material practice. They shaped important systems of transnational exchange and redefined networks of plebeian material culture. Mariners were also endowed with a growing rhetorical authority over the long eighteenth century, embodying new plebeian cosmopolitanism, while expressing facets of a dawning imperial masculinity. Marcus Rediker described eighteenth-century Anglo-American mariners as plain dealers, wageworkers, and pirates, as well as “men of the world.” This international contingent mediated between world communities, while demonstrating new tastes and new fashions. They also personified the manly traits celebrated in Britain's burgeoning imperial age.

Writing Ideology: Ranavalona, The Ancestral Bureaucrat

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth

In the late eighteenth century, Imerina was checkered with a myriad of tiny principalities, each ruled from hilltop fortresses. In just fifty years from 1780 to 1830, it was unified under a single ruler, drawing Merina into increasingly wider systems of obedience and creating a vast imperium that held sway over most of the Island of Madagascar, a landmass the size of France, Belgium, and Holland combined.And yet, the half century of tumultuous change that characterized the empire's rise brought no revolution in the Merina's own understanding of the world of power, a view which I have termed hasina ideology. Merina saw historical reality not as the product of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence, hasina, which flowed downwards on obedient Merina from long-dead ancestors in a sacred stream that connected all living Merina. For obedient Merina, politics consisted in nothing more nor less than a lifelong quest to position one's self favorably in that sacred stream as close as possible to ancestors and then to reap the benefits of that cherished association. With the passage of time, the hasina stream flowed into new generations and so generated new social relations expressed in terms of kinship. The vast transformation of the Merina political landscape only enhanced Imerina's devotion to ancestral hasina.The origins of hasina ideology are not known, though by the time Andrianampoinimerina began to unify Imerina in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, its character is clearly perceptible. Andrianampoinimerina's son Radama built on his father's legacy. In the 1820s he transformed Imerina from a small and isolated kingdom into an empire capable of projecting its power over the length and breadth of Madagascar.

Fragmenting Hominins and the Presencing of Early Palaeolithic Social Worlds

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Chapman ◽  
Bisserka Gaydarska
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
David Bohm ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Distributed Elements

This chapter introduces the fragmentation premise — the idea that the deliberate breakage of a complete object and the re-use of the resultant fragments as new and separate objects ‘after the break’ was a common practice in the past. It also summarizes the main implications of the fragmentation premise for the study of enchained social relations and of the creation and development of personhood in the past. Enchained relations connect the distributed elements of a person's social identity using material culture. These concepts of fragmentation, enchainment and fractality are used to think through some of the earliest remains of objects in the world. Following the philosopher David Bohm, the discussion supports the co-evolution of fragmentation in both consciousness and in objects, and compares Bohm's three-stage ideas to Mithen's model of cognitive evolution and Donald's model of external symbolic storage.

Ontological Foundations for Inka Archaeology

2019 ◽  
pp. 240-271
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Spatial Orientation ◽  
Social Agency ◽  
Causal Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Evidence

Understanding distinctively Inka (and southern Quechua) ways of interacting with the world requires integrated social, cultural, linguistic, cognitive, and material evidence. These include properties of the world (“what there is”), causal relationships among them (for example, that places have social agency); and spatial orientation. Each of these follow general principles-- embodied in language, cognition, social relations, and material culture—that are interconnectioned, some mutually compatible, and others incompatible, which warrant certain social and material outcomes and not others. These in turn can be tested archaeologically.

What Is Man? Interpreting the Philosophical-Anthropological Ideas of Karl Marx Part 1: Generic Essence and Praxis

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-94
Author(s):  
Petr N. Kondrashov
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Continuous Change ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Historical Being ◽  
Generic Essence

This article uses the key concepts available in Karl Marx’s texts and attempts to answer the question, “What is man?” The author explores such constitutive aspects of man’s generic essence (Gattungswesen des Menschen) and of man’s worldly being as corporeality and relationship with nature; suffering as a product of desire; praxis (Praxis) as productive creative activity (produktive Tätigkeit, Selbstbetätigung) that is carried out in the dialectical processes of objectification (Vergegenständlichung, Äußerung) and de-objectification (Entgegenständlichung, Aneignung); man’s universality; objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) of the man-made human world; intersubjectivity and sociality/sociability (Gesellschaftlichkeit); interplay of social relations (das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse); the existential and emotional relations of man (menschlichen Verhältnisse zur Welt) to the world of nature, to human activity, to the results of one’s labor, to other people, and to oneself. We demonstrate that the generic essence of man is not granted by nature but evolves in the course of historical development. Moreover, in Capital, Marx distinguishes between the invariant essence (Praxis) and historical modifications of praxis. Therefore, history is understood as “continuous change of human nature,” and man himself as a historical being. In spite of later reductionist interpretations, Marx conceptualizes man as a living, uniquely generic (socially individual), integral being, whose essential mode of existence is praxis (social conscious purposeful transforming objectal-instrumental material and spiritual activity). Man is an integral bodily-spiritual being, transforming the natural world (Welt) and creating “worlds” of his own, those of material, social, and spiritual culture (Umwelt), society and its relations (Mitwelt), which are interiorized and form an inner world (Innerlichkeit, Eigenwelt) in the process of practical activity. The article concludes that, following Marx’s philosophical anthropology, man should be considered not only as a “practical being” but also a suffering one, experiencing his worldly existence in the form of partial, existential relations to the world and to himself.

scholarly journals Historical Context of the Conceptual Foundations of Economic Systems (In the Context of «Capital» by Karl Marx)

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Andrey Atanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Mode Of Production

The article considers the conceptual constructions of K. Marx brought in accordance with the conceptual system of G. Hegel. The author stresses that such concepts such as value, commodity, wealth, etc. are understood quite differently in Russia and Western Europe. Therefore, the semantic mismatch between these concepts in the context of civilizational approach expressed in the system of logical analysis occurs. As a result, the description of the traditional for Russia structures of economy, social relations, and historical development began to distort. This description is based on the methodology of Marx, bringing the real structures in accordance with his theory, but further the author states that the concepts of Marx are general, but not universal (at the outside, they are based on the theme of community - but the basis of community is a different system of values). In the course of the study, it was found that there is no object of Marxist methodology in Russian capitalism, as well as in history and social relations, since there were no equivalent to Marxism structures in the world of the real things of Russia. This kind of structures belongs to the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe. In Russia, they were placed in the structure of ideology, replacing the real object with the imaginary one. Thus, in this case, there is the category of formation, but it only generates an effect - existential and ontological foundations exist as real and true in a completely different social system.

Greenland whalers and life on a Wadden Sea Island in the eighteenth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 680-695
Author(s):  
Christina Folke Ax
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Older People ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Wadden Sea ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
European Cities ◽  
The World ◽  
Maritime Community

Focusing on the Danish island Rømø, this article explores how the local community was influenced by the fact that, from the late seventeenth until the early nineteenth century, most of the men migrated every year to the big European cities to work as captains or crew on whaling and sealing ships bound for Arctic waters. This way of living brought the men from Rømø into contact with the cultural and financial centres of Europe. Several aspects of life and practices on Rømø were influenced by the annual migration of labour. While the men were away, women had to take responsibility for running both farms and households. Due to the men’s absence, farming became part of the women’s sphere to such a degree that it was almost the norm that older people would hand over the farm to a daughter and not a son. Farming was, however, marginal and the main incomes of families were earned at sea. Because the men were paid in money and not in kind, the island was permeated by an economy based on the exchange and investment of money. The material culture on the island was influenced by a growing wealth among the islanders and their connections to the world beyond. This was shown through both the cotton shirts of the women and the buildings richly decorated with Dutch tiles. On one hand, certain practices were practical solutions to specific problems connected to the conditions in a maritime community, rather than being inspired by life and practices seen elsewhere. On the other hand, living and behaving in this manner may have been a premise for upholding a connection to the networks that bound the men to communities in the European harbours.

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