Karl Lamprecht and the “Material Turn” c. 1885

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Material Turn

This chapter looks back to an eminent predecessor of these twentieth-century antiquarians and artists, Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915). Arguably the most important historian for the twentieth century and yet one of the least known to non-specialists, Lamprecht fills the role of grandfather to the formulators of “material culture studies”—and father to the pioneers who wrote history from material sources without giving their vision a name. Today, Lamprecht is mostly recognized for the debate about his cultural history, the Lamprecht-Streit, which was as much a debate about what history should constitute as it was a debate about whether Lamprecht was a good historian. Yet Lamprecht's career goes further than that, as this chapter shows, and his academic work has left a strong influence on the twentieth-century proponents of material culture discussed in the previous chapter.

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.

Stone Tools

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Old World ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.

At Home in Renaissance Bruges

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie De Groot
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
At Home

How did citizens in Bruges create a home? What did an ordinary domestic interior look like in the sixteenth century? And more importantly: how does one study the domestic culture of bygone times by analysing documents such as probate inventories? These questions seem straightforward, yet few endeavours are more challenging than reconstructing a sixteenth-century domestic reality from written sources. This book takes full advantage of the inventory and convincingly frames household objects in their original context of use. Meticulously connecting objects, people and domestic spaces, the book introduces the reader to the rich material world of Bruges citizens in the Renaissance, their sensory engagement, their religious practice, the role of women, and other social factors. By weaving insights from material culture studies with urban history, At Home in Renaissance Bruges offers an appealing and holistic mixture of in-depth socio-economic, cultural and material analysis. In its approach the book goes beyond heavy-handed theories and stereotypes about the exquisite taste of aristocratic elites, focusing instead on the domestic materiality of Bruges’ middling groups. Evocatively illustrated with contemporary paintings from Bruges and beyond, this monograph shows a nuanced picture of domestic materiality in a remarkable European city.

Christianity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
African Society ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
Mental Transformations

The chapter examines conversion to Christianity, one of the most significant social and cultural transformations in twentieth-century Africa. The focus is upon the role of Christianity in African society, with emphasis on the making of identities of class, ethnicity, gender, generation, and nation. The diversity of African Christianity is examined in terms of both the range of African societies it encountered and the spectrum of changing mission Christianities, which extend back as far as the late fifteenth century. Scholarship has been advanced through a greater sensitivity to missionary and African literary production as well as increasing use of photographic data. Growing interest in African cultural history has caused scholars to shift emphasis away from missionaries and their institutions towards an interest in what Christianity meant for ordinary adherents, including the mental transformations involved in conversion and the significance of baptism, pilgrimage, and the religious landscape.

scholarly journals The charcoal forest: Ecology, aesthetics and the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Niles
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Forest Ecology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Food And Agriculture ◽  
Food And Agriculture Organization ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
United Nations Food ◽  
Shed Light

This paper explores the significance of local forms of knowledge of the natural world, especially the role of this knowledge in cultural coherence and persistence through time, and its consequent significance to the intellectual challenges of the Anthropocene. The text examines the activity of a master charcoal-maker and forest-manager in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, who works within a landscape recognized by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS)—a place of special cultural and agroecological value. Drawing on theories of the evolution of knowledge and material culture studies, charcoal is seen as embodiment of particular understandings of the agencies of the natural world. Attention to the various stages in the production and use of charcoal sheds light on the structure of this knowledge, especially on the important areas in which qualities of one field of activity are transferred to or become essential to another. These “overlaps” link what otherwise appear to be disparate fields of activity into mutually constitutive elements of a whole. They shed light on the dynamics of cultural persistence and indicate the diversity of forms environmental knowledge; they can amplify understanding of the nature of the Anthropocene.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liedeke Plate
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
Empirical Approaches

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the humanities and social sciences and entails a paradigm shift toward a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy, and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in “the force of things” and debate “the agency of things.” The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing “thing” or “stuff” theory and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author”—the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6—is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a nonmaterial approach.

Muck, Mummies and Medicine: Disgust in Early Modern Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-65
Author(s):  
Sarah-Maria Schober
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices’ changing history as part of the history of the ‘paradox of disgust’. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived.

Genius in France

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
History Of

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

History and Its Objects

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic History ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Human Need ◽  
History Of

Cultural history is increasingly informed by the history of material culture—the ways in which individuals or entire societies create and relate to objects both mundane and extraordinary—rather than on textual evidence alone. Books such as The Hare with Amber Eyes and A History of the World in 100 Objects indicate the growing popularity of this way of understanding the past. This book uncovers the forgotten origins of our fascination with exploring the past through its artifacts by highlighting the role of antiquarianism—a pursuit ignored and derided by modem academic history—in grasping the significance of material culture. From the efforts of Renaissance antiquarians, who reconstructed life in the ancient world from coins, inscriptions, seals, and other detritus, to amateur historians in the nineteenth century working within burgeoning national traditions, the book connects collecting—whether by individuals or institutions—to the professionalization of the historical profession, one which came to regard its progenitors with skepticism and disdain. The struggle to articulate the value of objects as historical evidence, then, lies at the heart both of academic history writing and of the popular engagement with things. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that our current preoccupation with objects is far from novel and reflects a human need to re-experience the past as a physical presence.

Standard Bearers: Material Culture and Middle-Class Communities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Moskowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business History ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Marketing Department ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.

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