A Hybrid New World... or Not?

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Fatima Essadek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Cultural Pattern

During the last three decades, early modern scholarship has drawn heavily on twentieth-century theorisation to analyse the socio-cultural conditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An example of such scholarly endeavours is the attempt to appropriate the concept of hybridity to explain the constitution of cultural identity. This article re-evaluates this critical trend by reviewing the model of hybridity in relation to early modern cultures; it simultaneously proposes the existence of another cultural pattern that is here labelled ‘cultural transformation’. The article also contends that hybridisation is more manifest in the domain of material culture: the ethno-cultural characteristics of early modern communities made them more receptive towards accepting and integrating material objects but less welcoming towards assimilating beliefs, values or cultural practices from other nations.

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.

The Importance of Imports

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia J. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Artistic Life ◽  
Obaku Zen

This chapter explores the cultural identity of Ōbaku Zen, which played a crucial role in the sixteenth century as a vehicle for importing Chinese culture. This was manifested in Manpukuji’s initial trove of material culture associated with the temple’s founder, Ingen Ryūki (Ch. Yinyuan Longqi, 1592–1684). It also touches upon the reception and legacy of Ingen’s material objects to demonstrate how naturalized into Japanese life Ōbaku’s presence became. This greatly affected other sectarian traditions and even diverse aspects of Japanese intellectual and artistic life and popular culture outside the religious sphere from the Tokugawa era up to the present.

Benedict XIV’s donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna (1751) Origins and history

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuele Tacconi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
New World ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jesuit Missionary ◽  
The City

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.

scholarly journals The Eve of a New Age

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Cruikshank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New World ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cultural Innovation ◽  
Cultural Themes ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Theoretical Developments

Discussions of the Neobaroque began to find an important position in Latin American circles during the twentieth century. The goal of these discussions was a reassessment of an American identity by using the Baroque as a historical catalyst for cultural transformation. One of the prominent figures during this period who connected the Baroque with questions revolving around Latin American identity was the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. The following article examines Carpentier's theories on the New World Baroque taken from various essays published in La novela lationamericana en visperas de un nuevo siglo (1981). Through these essays, Carpentier's perspective of the Baroque is relayed into cultural themes of Latin America such as the importance of American solidarity, historical constancy, cultural innovation/progression, the natural environment, and urbanism. Analyzing the connection of such themes with the arrival of the New World Baroque sheds light on the crucial theoretical developments of Latin American identity during the twentieth century.

A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham

2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Maruo-Schröder
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Life Space ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Caroline Kirkland

AbstractParticularly during the westward expansion, the frontier was not just a concrete site of conquest, exploration, and settlement but also a space of projection and imagination of (future) possibilities. People not only imagined the frontier in a variety of sometimes incompatible ways. They also used such imaginations to process and order their experience of the concrete, ‘real-life’ space so that the frontier becomes a space in which both, the lived and the imagined space, overlap and merge. This essay looks at how two popular antebellum writers used material objects and related cultural practices in their narrative construction of frontier space, arguing that, from this perspective, narrative space ceases to be only a property of the text and extends into the object world. Drawing on their own experience of life in the east, Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham use gender- and class-based ideologies of taste and refinement to make the unknown space of the frontier meaningful and familiar, thus turning it from a mere place to live into something like a home. Such a use of material culture in the narrative construction of this space allows both writers to comment on and shape the ideological underpinnings of the frontier and, by extension, take part in the (narrative) construction of future America.

scholarly journals Reading social change on a potter's wheel: Chalcis (Euboea) from the Byzantine to the Modern Greek era

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Nikos D. Kontogiannis ◽  
Stefania S. Skartsis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Pottery Production ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Production And Consumption

In this article, the socio-economic and cultural identity of Chalcis is traced through, and combined with, the story of its material culture and, in particular, of its impressive pottery production and consumption. Through this lens, the historical conditions and daily life over more than ten centuries (from the ninth to the early twentieth century) of this relatively unknown provincial town are closely examined. This makes it possible to detect one field in which local communities reacted to, adjusted to, took advantage of, survived or sometimes succumbed to the wider turmoil of the Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek eras.

scholarly journals Testing the New World: early modern chemistry and mineral prospection at colonial Jamestown, 1607–1610

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 6851-6864
Author(s):  
Umberto Veronesi ◽  
Thilo Rehren ◽  
Beverly Straube ◽  
Marcos Martinón-Torres
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
New World ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Modern Chemistry ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Research ◽  
Copper Ores

AbstractThe paper presents new research on an assemblage of metallurgical crucibles used in the assay of minerals at colonial Jamestown. The aim of the study is to explore the range of chemical operations carried out at the site of the first permanent British settlement in America, for which little is known in the documents. The results show that the colonists used high-quality Hessian crucibles to perform tests on different types of complex polymetallic sulphides. This was done to (1) prospect for potential silver and copper ores and (2) to find suitable sources of zinc and tin to be alloyed into brass and bronze through cementation with imported copper offcuts. This study makes a relevant contribution to the growing field of the archaeology of early chemistry and mineral prospection as well as the archaeology of early European colonies in the New World. In particular, material culture can shed fresh light on how European settlers reacted to the many challenges of a new and unfamiliar natural environment and how they tried to make sense and exploit it for financial profit.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

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.

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