Alltagsgeschichte,or the history of everyday life, emerged during the 1980s as the most interesting new field among West German historians and, more recently, their East German colleagues. Partly in ...reaction to the modernization theory pervading West German social history in the 1970s, practitioners of alltagsgeschichte stressed the complexities of popular experience, paying particular attention, for instance, to the relationship of the German working class to Nazism. Now the first English translation of a key volume of essays (Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen) presents this approach and shows how it cuts across the boundaries of established disciplines. The result is a work of great methodological, theoretical, and historiographical significance as well as a substantive contribution to German studies.
Introduced by Alf Lüdtke, the volume includes two empirical essays, one by Lutz Niethammer on life courses of East Germans after 1945 and one by Lüdtke on modes of accepting fascism among German workers. The remaining five essays are theoretical: Hans Medick writes on ethnological ways of knowledge as a challenge to social history; Peter Schöttler, on mentalities, ideologies, and discourses and alltagsgeschichte; Dorothee Wierling, on gender relations and alltagsgeschichte; Wolfgang Kaschuba, on popular culture and workers' culture as symbolic orders; and Harald Dehne on the challenge alltagsgeschichte posed for Marxist-Leninist historiography in East Germany.
Organized rural development in Sweden can be described at two levels; a local level with a large number of local actors organized in a so-called village-action movement, and a national level where ...political parties and the government present different suggestions on how to develop rural areas. However, characteristic for Sweden is also a close relationship between these two levels and a bottom-up perspective encouraging local initiatives, which is exemplified by All Sweden Shall Live (ASSL); a general rural development organization characterized by both policy-making ambitions and support of local development projects. A central but also ambiguous concept in the organization ASSL’s campaigns and ideology is ‘the local,’ and with discourse theory, as a point of departure, this case-study examines how different meanings of ‘the local’ are used to advocate investments in local perspectives and local measures. Special attention is directed towards how meanings of ‘the local’ form a ‘fantasy,’ an emotional and ideological worldview, and how this worldview is of importance in the organization’s self-legitimization and for its potential as an agent of political mobilization. While ASSL is a Swedish organization, the subject is of general relevance because ideological investments in both ‘the local’ and ‘the regional’ are common, for example, in processes of relocalization-local responses to globalization-and in arguments about the importance of localities and regions in a global economy. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how such investments can have unexpected effects such as the transfer of responsibility for rural development from the government to local actors.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a new and particularly widespread type of exhibition practice occurred all over the Western World, namely “living exhibitions”. They were ...characterized by the display of indigenous and exotic-looking peoples in zoological gardens, circuses, amusement
parks, various industrial expositions, and major international expositions where representatives of indigenous and foreign peoples from all over the globe performed their everyday life in reconstructed settings. Entire milieus were recreated by bringing along dwellings, animals, objects, etc. Eventually this would also become the dominant trope of display in folkloric exhibitions. Nevertheless, the living exhibitions have not been regarded as influential to this development. Instead, the trope has most commonly been accredited to the Swedish folklorist Artur Hazelius. In this article, I stress the importance of situating his display techniques and museological ideals within a wider context, most importantly the
living exhibitions. The emphasis will be on the display of Sámi.
In this article, the author conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of the editorials of French online journal Riposte Laïque Secular Retaliation between 2007 and 2015. The journal gathers ...activists from all over the political spectrum - from left-wing union representatives to right-wing ultranationalists. Their common goal is the will to purify the French nation from an asserted ongoing Islamic occupation. To the journal's writers, secularism appears both as a threatened identity and as a technique for fighting back against the imagined occupation. The purpose of the article is to map out the major discursive foundations of RL with the aim of broadening the understanding of contemporary French secularism as a mode of identity and as a political and social practice.
Since consumer researchers started paying attention to flea markets they represent common consumer and market research objects. Arguably, in the “natural laboratory” of the flea market, researchers ...can observe and theorize market and consumer processes “in the wild”, as forms of direct marketing and consumption. We build on existing flea market research through adopting a circulatory approach, inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). Rather than presenting a theory of (flea) markets, ANT is useful for studying markets from the perspective of grounded market-making processes. Consumption is understood as the interplay of consumers, marketers, retailers, and a wide array of artifacts and market mediators like products, economic theories and ideas, packaging, market space (in the physical sense) and furniture, etc. Our results point out that not only does such an approach enable analysis of features commonly studied within consumer research such as calculative action and social interaction, but also issues more rarely in focus in such research, such as cognitive patterns of consumer curiosity, emotions, senses, and affect. Furthermore, even though flea markets foremost are places of commerce and exchange of second hand goods, there is a large variety of other forms of flows or circulations going on “backstage” that enable the surface phenomena of second hand consumption to come into being. Many of these circulations, we argue, are material rather than immaterial Vendor and buyer subjectivities are thus understood as outcomes of circulatory dynamism that involves a range of material and immaterial flows. - See more at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?DOI=10.3384/cu.2000.1525.157191#sthash.C4vBiuQ3.dpuf
Commodifying Passion Petersson McIntyre, Magdalena
Journal of cultural economy,
01/2014, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What does it mean to love one's job? This article argues that for an understanding of power and agency in the labour market, particularly in the service and retail industry, passion needs to be given ...more consideration. Building on ethnographic observations and interviews with sales assistants and store managers within fashion retailing, the reasons for employees to perform 'aesthetic labour' are examined. Aesthetic labour generally refers to work practices in which workers are expected to conform to particular corporate aesthetics, management ideals or brand identities. The article argues that embodied work practices must be related to workers' own motivations. The purpose is to examine why so many people working as sales staff in the field of fashion retail claim to 'love' their work and why 'passion' is considered so important? The findings of this work are that employees are driven by emotions and affects and that aesthetic labour relies on 'the commodification of passion'. Workers dressed and talked the way they did because they identified affectively with the self-organizing principles of these retail fields. Passion made sense to the interviewees because it gave meaning to being a working subject on the neo-liberal labour market.
Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact ...the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0, a ground-breaking analysis of the ways that youth culture online interacts with issues of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Drawing on surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, Koen Leurs builds an interdisciplinary portrait of online youth culture and the spaces it opens up for migrant youth to negotiate power relations and to promote intercultural understanding.
Education and knowledge production have often been portrayed as the worst enemies of racism and xenophobia. However, such claims can be misused to create a narrative of modern educational ...institutions being “free” from racism and, in worst case scenarios, contribute to hiding the ongoing discriminatory practices in schools. This paper provides a review of Swedish research on migration, ethnicity and racism in schools and introduces the key topics in this special issue of Educare. We explore examples of colour blindness in Swedish classrooms and experiences of meeting racism in school. Further, we investigate how racism and discrimination can be expressed in a school's everyday life without anyone necessarily having malicious intentions. With this, we contribute to understanding that various exclusionary practices based on ethnicity and race can occur even in school settings that promote diversity and anti-racism.
Although modernity's understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, ...remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.
Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins suggested culture evolves and that memes are cultural replicators, subject ...to variation and selection in the same way as genes are in the biological world. Thus human culture is the product of a mindless evolutionary algorithm. Does this imply, as some have argued, that we are mere meme machines and that the conscious self is an illusion? This highly readable and accessible book extends Dawkins's theory, presenting for the first time a fully developed concept of cultural DNA. Distin argues that culture's development can be seen as the result of memetic evolution and as the product of human creativity. Memetic evolution is perfectly compatible with the view of humans as conscious and intelligent. This book should find a wide readership amongst philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and non-academic readers.
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