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Cultural History (cultural + history)
Selected AbstractsLET THERE BE IRONY: CULTURAL HISTORY AND MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY IN PARALLEL LINESART HISTORY, Issue 5 2005WOLFGANG ERNST Stephen Bann is well known as an art critic, art historian, cultural historian and museologist, but his writings have yet to be discovered from the point of view of media theory. This article applies Bann's proposal of an ,ironical museum' to a self-reflective media culture, while at the same time establishing the difference between a media-archaeological and an art-historical approach, particularly in accounts of new media in the first half of the nineteenth century and in the present. To what extent was the historical imagination developed in the romantic period an effect of new media and new media technologies? It is argued that although the discourse of history has always depended on the media of its representation (verbal and visual), its character changed dramatically with the arrival of mechanical means for recording historical evidence. The ,antiquarian' method of archival investigation of the past, with its almost haptic taste for the mouldy, decaying fragment, is considered and compared to narrative aesthetics. A key question is considered from different disciplinary perspectives: can we speak of a cultural transition or a radical break with the emergence of photography? The essay concludes that what we learn from Stephen Bann's analyses is the significance of an ever-alert awareness of the intricate relations between cultural and technological phenomena, a kind of media self-irony which, apparently, was present in the past to antiquaries and historiographers, to painters, engravers and to creators of historical museums. [source] Notes for a Cultural History of Family Therapy,FAMILY PROCESS, Issue 1 2002C. Christian Beels M.D. The official history of family therapy describes its beginnings as a daring technical and philosophical departure from traditional individual treatment in the 1960s, inspired especially by the "system thinking" of Gregory Bateson. This celebrated origin story needs to be supplemented with a longer and larger history of both practice and thought about the family, and that is the subject of this article. The longer history goes back to the founding of social work by Mary Richmond, of pragmatism by William James, and of the organic view of social systems intervention by John Dewey. Seen against this background, family therapy is, among other things, a consequence of the development of persistent elements of American professional culture, experience, and philosophy. The taking of this historical-anthropological view discloses also the origins of two other histories that have made their contribution to the development of family therapy: a science of observing communication processes that starts with Edward Sapir and leads to contemporary conversation analysis, and a history of mesmerism in the United States that culminates in Milton Erickson and his followers. [source] Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History By Ruth WattsHISTORY, Issue 310 2008PAMELA DALE No abstract is available for this article. [source] What Should Historians Do With Heroes?HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2007Reflections on Nineteenth-, Twentieth-Century Britain This article reviews research on modern British heroes (in particular Henry Havelock, Florence Nightingale, Amy Johnson and Robert Falcon Scott) to argue that heroes should be analysed as sites within which we can find evidence of the cultural beliefs, social practices, political structures and economic systems of the past. Much early work interpreted modern heroes as instruments of nationalist and imperialist ideologies, but instrumental interpretations have been superseded within the New Cultural History by broader analyses of the range of gendered meanings encoded in heroic reputations. Studies of heroic icons have generated important insights for historians of masculinity and femininity. More research, however, is needed on the reception rather than the representation of heroic icons, on visual and material sources, and on the changing forms and functions of national heroes after 1945. [source] Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late-Eighteenth-Century BritainHISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2006Tillman W. Nechtman Studies of the late eighteenth-century British empire in India have long used the figure of the nabob to personify political debates collectively known as "the India question." These nabobs, employees of the East India Company, were (and continue to be) represented as rapacious villains. This article will revisit the history of nabobs to offer a cultural history of British imperialism in late eighteenth-century India. It will argue that nabobs were representative figures in the political debates surrounding imperialism in South Asia because they were hybrid figures who made Britain's empire more real to domestic British observers. It will argue that the nabobs' hybrid identity hinged on the collection of material artifacts they brought back to Britain from India. Nabobs stood at the boundary between nation and empire, and they suggested the frontier was permeable. They exposed the degree to which the projects of building a nation and an empire were mutually constitutive. [source] National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History by Joep LeerssenNATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 2 2008JOHN HUTCHINSON [source] National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History , By Joep LeerssenTHE HISTORIAN, Issue 2 2009John Breuilly No abstract is available for this article. [source] Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American IconTHE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE, Issue 2 2004Ray B. Browne No abstract is available for this article. [source] Idiocy: A Cultural HistoryBRITISH JOURNAL OF LEARNING DISABILITIES, Issue 3 2009Helen Graham No abstract is available for this article. [source] Writing the History of Humanity: The Role of Museums in Defining Origins and Ancestors in a Transnational WorldCURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL, Issue 1 2005Monique Scott ABSTRACT This article explores the question of how transnational audiences experience anthropology exhibitions in particular, and the natural history museum overall. Of interest are the ways in which natural history museums reconcile anthropological notions of humanity's shared evolutionary history,in particular, African origins accounts,with visitors' complex cultural identities. Through case studies of British, American, and Kenyan museum audiences, this research probed the cultural preconceptions that museum visitors bring to the museum and use to interpret their evolutionary heritage. The research took special notice of audiences of African descent, and their experiences in origins exhibitions and the natural history museums that house them. The article aims to draw connections between natural history museums and the dynamic ways in which museum visitors make meaning. As museums play an increasing role in the transnational homogenization of cultures, human origins exhibitions are increasingly challenged to communicate an evolutionary prehistory that we collectively share, while validating the cultural histories that make us unique. [source] The Gender of Europe's Commercial Economy, 1200,1700GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2008Martha Howell This essay proposes that between about 1200 and 1700, commerce was rescued from the margins of the European moral economy with the help of a gender binary that took shape among a rising class of European merchant and artisan families. Among this class, a more rigid sexual division of labour was accompanied by a cultural narrative that credited tradesmen with the ability to serve the social whole and charged their wives and daughters with the task of ridding consumption of the taint of sin. The story of the commercial revolution in Europe was, thus, in part a social, legal and cultural history that redefined male and female for a rising class of people and, in fact, helped define the class itself. [source] Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá-Atlantic ReligionGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2003J. Lorand Matory Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá-Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re-casting of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led Brazilian nationalist power-brokers to marginalise the male, and often reputedly homosexual, priests who give the lie to Landes's interpretation. In the service of a longdistance Yorùbá nationalist agenda, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has declared traditional Yorùbá society ,genderless', and found, among both North American feminist scholars and Yorùbá male scholars, allies in concealing the copious evidence of gender and gender inequality in Yorùbá cultural history. What these historical constructions lack in truth value they make up for in their power to mobilise new communities and alliances around the defence of a shared secret. The article addresses how politically tendentious scholarship on gender has inspired new social hierarchies and boundaries through the truths that some high-profile scholars have chosen to silence. [source] Micromorphological studies of Greek prehistoric sites: New insights in the interpretation of the archaeological recordGEOARCHAEOLOGY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 3 2002Panagiotis Karkanas Ongoing micromorphological studies in several prehistoric sites of Greece (Theopetra cave, Boila rockshelter, Alonnisos, Drakaina cave, Kouveleiki cave, Lakonis cave complex, and Dispilio lake dwelling) provide new information on the relationship between environmental changes and the cultural history of the sites. The frequent climatic oscillations during the last glacial directly influenced the occupational mode of Theopetra cave and Boila rockshelter in northern Greece. Soil micromorphology may be a promising tool in unraveling differences in the occupational history due to climatic changes among diverse areas of Greece. Some preliminary observations from the Lakonis cave complex, in southern coastal Greece, support the existence of such differences. Evidence brought forward with the micromorphological study of Dispilio lake dwelling and Theopetra cave suggests that during the Holocene, aridification phases evident in the Mediterranean region might have also played a role in the Greek prehistoric settlement pattern. So far, evidence for aridification phases is present for the end of the Mesolithic and probably for part of the Final Neolithic. In several cases, micromorphology has revealed details of the cultural nature of the sites. Questions related to occupational intensity (Theopetra, Lakonis, Kouveleiki, and Drakaina caves), post-depositional changes and cultural modification of the sediments (Alonnisos, Theopetra, and Drakaina caves), constructions (Theopetra and Drakaina caves), and stratigraphic correlation (Boila) have been satisfactorily addressed along with the analysis of the microstructure of the sediments. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] The Archive and the Artist: The Stefan Heym Archive RevisitedGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2000K. E. Attar In December 1992 Cambridge University Library acquired the Stefan Heym Archive. This is a remarkably complete collection of literary manuscripts, interviews, letters, press clippings, audio and video tapes and miscellaneous material pertaining to a major literary and political figure in East German cultural history. The current article, using insights gained from cataloguing the archive, complements previous work demonstrating how the collection reflects the life of the originator and the historical events in which he participated. The article describes the various categories of manuscripts in the archive with an emphasis on what the collection reveals about Heym's work, his approach to it, and its reception. The literary manuscripts show the genesis of particular works, the timespan over which Heym's ideas develop, the method and care in their preparation, and Heym's greater interest in the creative process than in the end-product. Similar care is evident in the text of interviews. Media coverage, paper and taped material, shows the reception of Heym's work, includes Heym's comments on his own work, and demonstrates the growth of his status over the years. The archive's cultural value should not obscure its worth in shedding light on Heym as a writer. [source] The new economy: a cultural historyGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2003Orvar Löfgren The focus is on the ways in which processes of culturalization became an important part of production, in such fields as e-commerce and ,the experience economy'. How was culture packaged and marketed in new ways, for example in the production of symbols, images, auras, experiences and events? I explore how the technologies of imagineering, performance, styling and design came to play important roles in this process. Other important traits of this development are discussed in a comparison with earlier examples of the emergence of ,new economies': the aesthetics and practices of speed, the cult of creativity, ,the catwalk economy' and the importance of public display and performance, as well as the importance of ,newness'. [source] Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory StudiesHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2002Wolf Kansteiner The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures. [source] Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late-Eighteenth-Century BritainHISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2006Tillman W. Nechtman Studies of the late eighteenth-century British empire in India have long used the figure of the nabob to personify political debates collectively known as "the India question." These nabobs, employees of the East India Company, were (and continue to be) represented as rapacious villains. This article will revisit the history of nabobs to offer a cultural history of British imperialism in late eighteenth-century India. It will argue that nabobs were representative figures in the political debates surrounding imperialism in South Asia because they were hybrid figures who made Britain's empire more real to domestic British observers. It will argue that the nabobs' hybrid identity hinged on the collection of material artifacts they brought back to Britain from India. Nabobs stood at the boundary between nation and empire, and they suggested the frontier was permeable. They exposed the degree to which the projects of building a nation and an empire were mutually constitutive. [source] Framing the American DreamJOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2004DAVID MONTEYNE Presenting a cultural history of the platform frame, this article explores its codification and commodification by the mid-twentieth century in relation to changing technology and to a shifting landscape of residential development. In addition to its promotion by government agencies, platform framing was complementary to the development of mass production and consumption in house construction. Rows of new houses can be seen in parallel with newly standardized and marketed lumber products like plywood. But pure commodification was tempered by appeals to the American dream of homeownership, partly propagated through myths about the nineteenth-century invention of the balloon frame. [source] Anti-Providentialism as Blasphemy in Late Stuart England: A Case Study of "the Stage Debate"*JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 4 2008DAVID MANNING This article develops a cultural history of blasphemy as representation by exploring the nexus between conceptions and perceived manifestations of blasphemy in a theological context. Specifically it uses a case study of "the stage debate", a controversy about the viability of the theatre in England at the turn of the eighteenth century, to argue that contemporary perceptions of anti-providentialism informed a sense of practical blasphemy that was commensurate with the Thomistic conception of blasphemy as aggravated unbelief. This interpretation illuminates the theological sensitivity of contemporary godly critics to perceived instances of anti-providentialism and their belief in the actual diabolism of the theatre. [source] THE ENCHANTMENTS OF MAMMON: NOTES TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF CAPITALISMMODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 3 2005EUGENE McCARRAHER Tales of "disenchantment" dominate modern intellectual life, and especially accounts of the cultural history of capitalism. Yet Weberian sociology, and especially Marxist notions of "commodity fetishism", point to the persistence of "enchantment" in the capitalist imagination. If we reformulate these notions of "enchantment" and "disenchantment" in theological terms of sacrament, then we can write new histories of capitalism, as well as articulate new forms of political and cultural criticism. Borrowing from "radical orthodoxy", the author takes a Cook's Tour of "disenchantment", explores the possibilities afforded by "sacramental" conceptions of materialism, and gestures toward an account of American cultural history shaped by a sacramental materialism. [source] The Curatorial Voice: U.S. Institutions Exhibit the Ancient AndesAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2005KAREN WISE Two new exhibits on ancient Andean civilizations are open in the United States. Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas is a large traveling exhibition and Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca is a smaller temporary exhibition that is not traveling. Both introduce North American audiences to objects and information that have never been exhibited in the United States and each includes some extraordinary artifacts. The two exhibits differ in many ways: Machu Picchu emphasizes information, archaeological science, and cultural history, whereas Tiwanaku focuses on art style and objects. The curatorial voice and point of view are strong in each exhibit, as is the institutional perspective of its originiating museum. In this respect these exhibits differ significantly from contemporary ones on ancient North America, which generally include the voices and points of view of descendant communities and others. [source] Casting Out Demons: The Native Anthropologist and Healing in the HomelandNORTH AMERICAN DIALOGUE (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2007Tanya L. Ceja-Zamarripa This article addresses academic and social costs experienced by anthropologists studying their own ethnic group. It explores how one "native" anthropologist navigates her roles as ethnographer and insider while researching curanderismo, a religiously inflected form of ethnomedicine within increasingly secular and commercialized Mexican American urban spheres. Is academic credibility weakened because the anthropologist shares the cultural history of her/his informants? When your community entrusts you with their spiritual, emotional and social woes, do they see you as ethnographer, insider, or both? To be privy to the ritual knowledge and practices of healers and the individual struggles of clients to find respite from pain is a great responsibility as curanderismo has often been pathologized by anthropology as a "primitive" tradition used only by the ignorant and backward. Given this history, the native anthropologist must find a way to manage allegiance to her cultural as well as academic community. I suggest that doing "native" research is its own form of "exorcism," casting out demons in a field that often silences native voices and holds native anthropology in lower esteem. [source] Remapping German-Jewish Studies: Benjamin, Cartography, ModernityTHE GERMAN QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2009Todd Presner By examining the entangled places of encounter, exchange, and contamination between German and Jewish, this article argues that German modernity and Jewish modernity are deeply, precariously, and indissociably intertwined. Drawing on its methodology from the field of "mobility studies" (the study of bodies moving through spaces), I argue that we must interrogate the medium in which cultural history is composed and turn our attention to the visualization of narratives of movement, dislocation, and dispersal. I look to Walter Benjamin's urban reflections, the history of modern cartography, the emergence of the railway system, and a web-based mapping project called "HyperCities" in order to show how the history of German/Jewish modernity might be mapped as layered networks and sites of encounter. [source] Submission, inhibition and sexuality: Masochistic character and psychic change in Austen's Mansfi eld ParkTHE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, Issue 2 2005MARGARET ANN FITZPATRICK HANLY Mansfield Park is Austen's most controversial novel. ,Squarely taking on such issues as class, gender, sexuality, religion, education, theatricality, and colonialism, Mansfield Park now appears to occupy a more critical place in Austen's canon and in literary and cultural history generally than that perennial favorite, Pride and prejudice' (Johnson, 1998, p. xiii). Austen's heroine, Fanny Price has generated heated controversy because of the provocative contradictions in her character, which this paper argues tally with the psychoanalytic understanding of moral masochism within the masochistic character. As a child neglected at home and then sent to a frightening new environment, in which she was lowest and last, Fanny Price needed the love and protection even of those who mistreated her. She needed to control and influence them with submission and the inhibition of her aggressive impulses and through a vigilant scrupulousness. Austen created a plot in which she also dramatized the seeds of change that lie within the submissive character, within the repressed and inhibited psychosexual desire linked to the father which can drive the reemergence of wishes for love and satisfaction in situations of relative safety. [source] THE IMPORTANCE OF COLOUR ON ANCIENT MARBLE SCULPTUREART HISTORY, Issue 3 2009MARK BRADLEY This article explores the significance of paint and pigment traces for understanding the aesthetics and artistic composition of ancient marble architectural and statuary sculpture. It complements the pioneering technical and reconstructive work that has recently been carried out into classical polychrome sculpture by approaching the subject from the perspective of the cultural history of colour and perception in the ancient world. The study concentrates in particular on the art of imperial Rome, which at the present time is under-represented in the field. By integrating visual material with literary evidence, it first reviews some of the most important pieces of sculpture on which paint traces have survived and then assesses the significance of sculptural polychromy under four headings: visibility, finish, realism and trompe-l'oeil. Finally, it considers some of the ways in which polychromy can enrich our understanding and interpretation of the Prima Porta statue of Augustus. [source] Zur Pluralisierung im Luthertum des 17.BERICHTE ZUR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE, Issue 3 2003Jahrhunderts und ihrer Bedeutung für die Deutungen von, Natur' Abstract Building on methodological considerations in cultural history and historical anthropology, the following contribution proceeds from the concept of ,nature' rather than from ,natural science', with the former understood here as the object of culturally determined projections, values and practices. This ,constructive', practice-oriented concept of nature exposes perceptions of and attitudes towards nature that, owing to the usual reduction of nature to natural science, would otherwise have remained hidden, but which may well be essential to its constitution. To a certain extent, the term ,nature' continues the terminological extension from ,natural science' to ,natural philosophy', but as a heuristic device it more strongly implies the significance of culturally mediated practices and dynamics. The essay raises the following questions: Which religious conceptions entered into which attitudes towards nature and which religious expectations and interpretive matrices were the motivating forces behind which studies of nature? The figures within seventeenth-century Lutheranism who shaped and promoted nature-oriented attitudes and practices were not the ,orthodox' scholars more strongly tied to academic and controversialist theology, but rather reform-oriented theologians critical of the church. In the context of the inner differentiation and pluralization of seventeenth-century Lutheranism, these reform-oriented groups not only inspired innovate theological projects but also assumed a leading role, along with liked-minded Christian laypersons, in interpreting and studying ,nature'. [source] | |||||||||||||