Until quite recently, the field of early modern history largely focused on Europe.
The overarching narrative of the early modern world began with the European “discoveries,” proceeded to European expansion overseas, and ended with an exploration of the fac-tors that led to the “triumph of Europe.” When the Journal of Early Modern History was established in 1997, the centrality of Europe in the emergence of early modern forms of capitalism continued to be a widely held assumption. Much has changed in the last twenty years, including the recognition of the significance of consumption in different parts of the early modern world, the spatial turn, the emergence of global history, and the shift from the study of trade to the commodities themselves.
Sometimes conferences disappear from view as soon as the delegates disperse.
Other times, when the papers are published in an edited volume, conferences come to be seen as important milestones in the historiography. The two volumes edited by James Tracy, entitled The Rise of Merchant Empires and The Political Economy of Merchant Empires published in 1990 and 1991, respectively, move through their various stages of production, ownership, transmission and transformation .
Moreover, those stages are overlapping, circulatory and contradictory; objects move in and out of collections, as they move in and out of fashion, and meanings are never stable. When a feathered crown is produced in Spanish America, for example, it has a very different meaning from when it enters into a cabinet of curiosity, and when it is taken out of the cabinet to appear in a spectacular performance in the street or in the theatre, it once again takes on a different meaning.
Objects gain biographies; earlier meanings of objects are never erased but reshaped and translated to new circumstances, as Leah Clark showed in her study of the circulations of gems and jewels through the hands of a variety of owners in quattrocento Italy. Have we lost this meaning connection with mass produced items from China?
Such insights have benefitted not only from the global turn but also from developments in the fields of anthropology and art history, making the field more interdisciplinary than it was when the study of the trade in goods focused more on their trade than on the goods themselves.
The Founding of a New Journal
Despite Tracy’s efforts, European actors continued to hold central stage in the field. When the Journal of Early Modern History (JEMH) was established in 1997, a decade after the Minnesota conference, the centrality of Europe in the emergence of early modern forms of capitalism, for example, continued (and still continues) to be a widely held assumption. In part, this can be explained by the powerful legacy of giants in the field like Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.
1 James Tracy, ed.,The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, Studies in Comparative Early Modern History (Cambridge, 1990); James Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, Studies in Comparative Early Modern History (Cambridge, 1991).
2 Herman Van der Wee, “Structural Changes in European Long-Distance Trade, and Particularly in the Reexport Trade from South to North, 1350-1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires, 14-33; Niels Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires, 102-52; The importance of comparative methodologies is also spelled out in the short editorial that accompanies the first part of the first volume of the JEMH. See James D. Tracy, “From the Editors,” Journal of Early Modern History 1 (1 January 1997):3
Braudel’s concern was entirely with European history over the longue durée; Wallerstein’s 1976 study identified Europe as one of the core regions in the modern capitalist economy as it emerged in the sixteenth century. Regions like Central Africa, India and China were designated as peripheries, meaning that their natural resources and low-skill, labor-intensive production sustained the economic growth of the core region. Wallerstein’s framing of the relationship between the early modern European core and its peripheries formed the base for much of the scholarship of the past decades, including numerous studies of the long-distance or intercontinental trade between core and periphery.
Much that was written also continued to identify long-distance trade as the preserve of either the various East India Companies associated with individual nations, or of the specifically named merchant communities such as the Armenians, the Jews, Wang Gungwu’s Hokkien merchants, or the Bajaras and Banyas merchant communities.
Such groups appear in the literature as having a clear identity that separates them from other groups and an often marginal status that makes them especially suited to the life of the itinerant merchant who covers vast distances.
And for much of the 1990s and beyond, the emphasis continued to be on commodities traded over long distances, from Asia to Europe via land or sea routes, including luxury items that justified the high cost associated with their transport. Precious metals were sent from the Americas to Asia, silks and spices arrived in the Levant via overland trade routes, and once the Europeans had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, luxury goods like porcelains, precious stones, and exotic hardwoods were shipped across the oceans along with silks and spices. Long-distance trade as it appears in Tracy’s two volumes on merchant empires was undoubtedly seen as important, but as essentially different from the bulk trade in grains, timber and salt that, for example, underpinned the growth of the early modern Dutch economy.
3 Fernand Braudel,Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (Berkeley, 1992); Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1976). At least 23 research articles published between 1997 and the present in JEMHquote Braudel’s work, and a further five quote Wallerstein.
4 Gungwu Wang, “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires, 400-422; Irfan Habib, “Merchant Communities in Precolonial India,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires, 371-99.
In other words, when the JEMH was founded, the centrality of Europe in shaping global trade relations, the separation of agents into distinct nation-based groups, and the classification of goods over long distances as luxuries of less importance all still had a very strong presence.
One major change did occur, however, more or less between the appearance of The Rise of Merchant Empires in 1990, and the establishment of the JEMH in 1997.
John Brewer and Roy Porter’s 1993 Consumption and the World of Goods was one of those transformative collections of articles that inaugurated a whole new way of doing history.6 Brewer and Porter were not the first to use the title; Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood had already published a book with a very similar title in 1979. But Brewer and Porter, and many others who went on to publish in the field of what we might call consumption studies, took the study of the consumer in a new direction, away from the eighteenth-century European debates over whether the consumption of luxury goods was morally justifiable, and towards sophisticated studies of the complex contexts in which people desired goods and in which that desire and demand for goods went on to transform society, culture and the ………… to continue reading click here for full document in PDF format.
For the Silo by Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick. Paper courtesy of academia.edu
“Underground” is a word, which is an essential part in the title of the “Keep it simple, make it fast” conference. Not only in punk, also in techno this is a term very frequently used, referred to and rejected at the same time.
Many claim, this terms doesn’t make much sense anymore nowadays.
Is this really true, or is there just a lack of a fitting theory to explain, why this term seems still to be central for discourses in and about music scenes? So called ‘scenesters’ say they prefer things “more underground”.
Matrix Dance Club
One of my interviewees, a label owner, put it succinctly, “Berlin isn’t Lady Gaga or Paul van Dyk; this is the capital city of the underground.” What does this term mean here, and how is it sociologically rooted in the cultural field of electronic dance music (Bourdieu, 1996)?
Current post-subcultural theories, such as from Andy Bennett, David Muggleton or Ronald Hitzler (2010; 2008; 2003), offer little means to understand these claims and differences; and how to explain why they don’t disappear, but re-shape and accommodate with newer developments.
Although I broadly agree with the insights of post-subcultural theories, a crucial feature of the music scene has been lost along the way: a systematical sociological exploration of the roles that distinctions play and how they are rooted in the music scene’s cultural economy (Kühn, 2011, 2013).
So far, the economy of scenes has been mostly understood as being part of the cultural industries (or creative industries by now), or not even economic at all (Gebesmair, 2008; Wicke, 1997).
Music industry research sees them as fully integrated actors of global and national music markets, classified into so-called independents and majors (Handke, 2009) and differentiated along lines of size, musical specialties and originality. Creative industries research tries to subsume them as major drivers for the attractiveness of cities and national economies by their engagement into supposedly very innovative products (Caves, 2002; Florida, 2003; Hartley, 2004).
What both perspectives have in common is that they do not approach economic structures from the music scene’s perspective, but rather from an economic-industrial point of view. And thereby they overlook and underestimate structural peculiarities.
In order to define the economic sphere of electronic dance music scenes sociologically, I argue for the term scene economy (Kühn, 2011).
Although previous insights have been extremely illuminating, these studies have lacked a systematic perspective that analyses the aesthetic, distinctive and commercial attitudes of hobbyist and professional scene participants within the conditions of their specific cultural norms and scene-based reproduction.
My assumption is that the scene economy of ‘underground’ electronic dance music scenes represent their own differentiated economic fields with specific structures that have developed their own organizational logic. The consequences and the basis of this logic are particular conditions for action and relations of production within the scenes’ own infrastructure and value-creation chain that result from the specific cultures and market relations of electronic dance music.
To understand the specific structure, the following features need to be considered: Scene-based cultural production instead of industry-based cultural production, the emphatic role of the music culture, the internal subcultural hierarchy and the role of distinctions in maintaining and re-shaping the scene economy, music culture and attractiveness.
The following remarks and claims are firstly based on my research, using focused ethnography, on producers of electronic dance music, twelve expert interviews with individuals active in various areas of the scene economy. And secondly on my own long-standing participation in the scene as a DJ, booker and media producer as forms of sociological ethnography. I use ideal-type descriptions. That is, I work with exaggerated representations of differences that in reality occur in a substantially more mixed and indistinct way. And yet, their exaggeration is precisely what allows the core of their specificities to be represented most clearly.
Tresor
Towards neo-subcultural theory
In his theory on cultural fields, Pierre Bourdieu noticed a general trend towards two poles with opposing cultural logics. The ‘autonomous pole’ defines itself by its cultural orientation; in which the furthering of art itself takes highest priority over any political, moral, or economic interest. The other pole has a commercial orientation; treating art as just another form of commerce like any other, in which art is produced based on its marketability. Each pole has its way of making value and profiting from it, but they are also in tension with each other.
This tension also exists in electronic dance music: on the ‘autonomous’ side of things you find house and techno music, along with the club/open-air party culture of Berlin. On the other side, you find mass-produced and profit-driven so-called EDM ‘dance pop’, which readily absorbs anything that promises to increase sales and reach. Both poles have very different definitions of success, as well as sharply divergent aesthetics and modes of production.
Aesthetic subcultures
(and not class-based anymore) with their own identity and infrastructures struggling to maintain aesthetic and seductive cores against unwanted external influences and political, moral or economic instrumentalization. To understand the dynamics of post-modern popular cultures, it is necessary to overcome the opposition of subcultural and post-subcultural readings of music scenes. The reality is, in the case of electronic dance music such as house and techno, neither strictly the one or the other. As small scale underground music culture and their big scale counterparts suggests, also in other fields of music, both are closely intertwined and distinct from each other at the same time.
Click to view on I-tunes
Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory helps to extend the concept of the music scene and re-shape the concept of subculture to understand the cultural dynamics between “underground” and “mainstream” as different forms of meaningful culture-economic infrastructure and social identity.
By combining Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field (2001) with updating scene and subcultural theory, the presented approach is linking both subcultural identities and cultural-economic structures and is heading towards overcoming the current dichotomy of subcultural and post-subcultural theory.
DJ SiSeN and Berlin Goth culture
Scene-based cultural production
Involvement in house and techno music typically starts with a random visit to a techno club, or by first listening to the music through recorded DJ sets. Some become very passionate about music and clubbing and start to visit clubs very frequently. In the beginning, participation remains passive, but quickly may evolve I : People start to look for certain sub-genres, follow certain DJs, gain certain scene-specific sets of knowledge about clubs, do’s and don’ts, artists, and so on. Then, to participate more deeply and earn money, some start to DJ, throw parties, launch music labels, found scene specific agencies or just start to work in clubs or for labels and agencies.
They start to combine their passion for a certain aesthetic with commercial and distinctive attitudes: For some, it will always just remain a hobby, but others quickly become professional and turn their scene participation into a business. However, for the passionate, this business orientation remains strongly limited by the cultural institutions of the music scene. They don’t start making other music just because it is more profitable. They relinquish economic opportunities, because the feelings of enjoyment and freedom experienced through the music are more important to them. They see economic activity as being able to get by instead of pure profit-maximization.
This means that they associate the generation of sufficient income and social protection with their main desire for economic self-determination, artistic freedom and passion in life. For them, money exists to make their lives possible, in which they will be able to ideally pursue their personal goals in artistic freedom—but not in order to secure as much wealth as possible, following a logic of accumulation.The small-business structure of many lone entrepreneurs promotes this logic, since it imposes fewer practical constraints on the individual than a large organization with numerous employees. This connection through a commonly shared passion also results in individuals working together in clubs or labels, often referring to their friends and colleagues as a “family”.
To summarize: Their private desires and business activities become closely coupled and integrated, resulting in a deeply culturalized economic orientation. One recruits “bottom-up” out of the fascination for a certain music and prioritizes cultural orientations over economic possibilities. This makes small-scale actors who mainly do it for the fun and a feasible outcome. An atomistic structure of many sole entrepreneurs dominates the markets. Instead of pure sale orientation, subjective aesthetics and political interests dominate the cultural products and business co-operations among the scene economy participants.
The emphatic role of the music culture
As participants of a certain music culture, their activity is oriented on the cultural institutions of Detroit Techno and Chicago House and thereby framed by its opportunities and restrictions. These cultural institutions enable and demand certain cultural practices to be fulfilled and followed in order to reproduce and accommodate the seductive core of the music scene. The norms are typical music tracks to be seamlessly mixed by DJs in front of a dancing crowd on a loud sound system. What are these institutions? Although very roughly and surely not exhaustively, house can be understood as established musical practices condensed as tracks with repetitive and loop based beats, with a focus on groove, making crowds dance in clubs, mixing in DJ sets and played on events at high volume.
Genre-typical patterns for house and techno music are the four to the floor beats, between 100 and 150 beats per minute speed, elements like basslines, kickdrums, snare drums, hi-hats and track themes. Techno sounds rather dark and heavy, house sound rather soft, funky and easy-going. Tracks are typically composed with intros, breakdowns, a main section, climaxes and outros. Tracks are supposed to make people dance at events and to be mixed in continuous sets by DJs (Kühn, 2009; Mathei, 2012; Volkwein, 2003).
The central role of distinctions in the music scenes economy
As a result of their scene-based involvement and fandom of house and techno, many scene participants towards the autonomous pole exert distinctions in order to conserve and develop their preferred set of aesthetics and scene-based cultural production (Strachan, 2007; Mäe & Allaste, 2011; Moore, 2007). In the post-modern world, aesthetics can flow everywhere and thereby can be used and adopted anywhere. Even in contexts, that many scene participants find not very much desirable.
The current boom of electronic dance music in the US, with associated artists like David Guetta, Swedish House Mafia, Skrillex and so on, is a good example of this. With the increasing success of so-called “mainstream” EDM, many scene participants insists of debunking that culture as “fake” and “inappropriate” – and try to keep these aesthetics, actors and corresponding organizations out of their scene contexts. Sociologically speaking, they draw boundaries around their aesthetics and modes of production.
It is a form of resistance not primarily rooted in class, but in the preservation and defense of aesthetically-based life-worlds. Typically, these distinctions are about a perceived corruption of cultural logics by the economic logics of apparently too commercialized music and events, or about external actors like companies, political shareholders or councils who are not intrinsically interested in the music culture, rather using them for their own allegedly purely commercial or political aims. Aims that eventually might endanger the productivity and survival of the music scenes by for example causing gentrification or mainstream identity.
These distinctions have become a background knowledge of the subcultural field and are also expected by the participants in order to enable economic cooperation. From these distinctions the possibility and necessity of an internal subcultural hierarchy within the field of electronic dance music evolves.
*See (Kühn, 2013) for an example, how event producers use distinctions to avoid unwanted music, DJs, insfluences and crowds on their partys.
Various forms of distinctions as a form of “aesthetic resistance” become the primary means to keep out unwanted aesthetics and modes of production in order to preserve the aesthetic core of the music scene. For the Silo, Jan Michael Kühn.
Funding:
This work was supported with a 3 years scholarship from the Hans Böckler Stiftung within the doctoral study group (Promotionskolleg) “Die Produktivität von Kultur – Die Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft unter den Bedingungen globalisierter Mediennetzwerke”.
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(Diplomarbeit). Technische Unversität Berlin, Institut für Soziologie. Retrieved from http://www.berlin-mitte-institut.de/wie-entsteht-neues-bei-der-produktion-elektronischer-tanzmusik-im-homerecordingstudio/ Kühn, J.-M. (2011). Working in the Berlin Techno Scene: Theoretical Sketch of an Electronic Music “Scene Economy.” 2011 ,translation made by Luis-Manuel Garcia from: Kühn, Jan-Michael (2011): Arbeiten in der Berliner Techno-Szene: Skizze der Theorie einer Szenewirtschaft elektronischer Tanzmusik, in: Journal der Jugendkulturen 17.
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This monograph provides for the first time a combined overview of all classes of metal body armour from the European Bronze Age in a holistic perspective, combining discussion of both traditional typo-chronologies and aspects of manufacture and use.
The earliest metal body armour recovered comes from Dendra, Greece, and dates to the first half of the 15th century BC.
However, the majority of metal body armour, including helmets, cuirasses and greaves, derives from the European Late Bronze Age, c. 1200–950 BC. This armour has been found from Iberia in the west to Cyprus in the east, and from Sicily in the south to Denmark in the north, as well as in the Near East. It thus derives from a wide geographical study area. Nevertheless, only around 30 cuirasses, 75 greaves and 120 helmets have so far been recovered.
The development, manufacture and use of this metal body armour across Europe remains unclear, even after more than a century of research. Earlier studies were largely concerned with typo-chronological aspects of this armour, whilst topics such as manufacturing techniques, efficacy and technological observations were rarely addressed.
Page 29 from the full volume available below. Click on the hypertext at the end of this post for the PDF.
This volume therefore brings together both traditional artefact and metallurgical studies, as well as reconstructions of manufacturing techniques, technological developments and innovations and use-wear analysis. The monograph also provides much-needed detail concerning material characterisation, in the form of alloy composition and microstructure analysis of a significant sample of the original finds.
Combining the results of this with the study of the manufacturing techniques and use-wear traces, a better understanding of how this armour was both produced and used is achieved. I have documented, studied and analysed all accessible helmets, greaves and cuirasses in eastern Europe as well as a number of examples from western Europe, significantly increasing the quantity of body armour studied and analysed in detail. The publication contains the whole spectrum of known body armour currently recovered, as well as including ‘new’ finds from auctions or private collections, which have previously been overlooked.
The present volume offers a holistic artefact study of European Bronze Age body armour, its manufacture and usage. It serves as a basis for further experimental studies into the production and utility of bronze helmets, cuirasses and greaves, which will deliver further important insights in … View full abstractFor the Silo, Marianne Modlinger.
Within the last generation, archaeology has undergone a major transformation, developing from an independent small-scale activity, based upon museums and a few university departments, into a large-scale state organization based upon national legislation.
Dreamer by Thomas Dodd Photography
This has entailed an increase in resources on an unprecedented scale, and has drastically changed the profile of archaeology, which is now firmly fixed within the political and national domains. Moreover, decision making within the discipline has shifted from museums and university departments towards various new national agencies for the conservation and protection of the cultural heritage.
There is a paucity of Palaeolithic art in the southern Levant prior to 15000 years ago. The Natufian culture (15000–11500 BP; Grosman 2013) marks a threshold in the magnitude and diversity of artistic manifestations (Bar-Yosef 1997). Nevertheless, depictions of the human form remain rare—only a few representations of the human face have been reported to date. This PDF article presents a 12000-year-old example unearthed at the Late Natufian site of Nahal Ein Gev II (NEGII), just east of the Sea of Galilee, Israel (see Figure 1 PDF link below). The object provides a glimpse into Natufian conventions of human representation, and opens a rare opportunity for deeper understanding of the Natufian symbolic system.
The NEGII face is carved from a limestone pebble measuring 90×60mm.
Minimalistic manipulation of the pebble’s surface creates a simple but realistic human expression. The artist used the natural form of the pebble to represent the outline of a human head, and slightly modified the stone’s perimeter with a flat band to shape the contours of the face(see Figure 2a PDF link below). The main modification engraved on the front of the pebble consists of a T-shaped linear relief that emphasizes an eyebrow ridge and nose; two low arcs that meet at the centre of the pebble form the eyebrow ridge and then turn downward to depict a straight, elongated nose.
By skillful play with line depth and curvature,the artist has achieved a soft depiction of the cheeks and deep, shaded eye sockets (see Figure 3 PDF link below). The artistic qualities of the representation are schematic, but they present a realistic and uniquely expressive human face.
Leore Grosman
The back of the pebble is not carved but is lightly modified at the edges. Microscopic analysis shows a few small, smooth and shiny areas that may have been created by gentle polishing of the surface with a soft material such as skin or fabric, or by…… continue reading this article by clicking here.For the Silo by Leore Grosman, with Natalie Munro and Hadas Goldgeier/ academia.eu. Feature image photo by Dana Shaham.
“Standing Side by Side in Peaceful Prayer” Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered at camps near the crossing of the Missouri and Cannon Ball Rivers to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) there- creating the #noDAPL movement. DAPL is a 1,172-mile pipeline for transporting crude oil from North Dakota to refineries and terminals in Illinois.
As a business venture, DAPL’s advocates claim the pipeline will meet the highest environmental safety standards. They also claim the venture will produce greater U.S. energy independence and jobs at the same time it lessens the environmental risks of oil trains, though it is opaque how the new pipeline could increase oil production, oil consumption, employment, and state tax revenues.
Part of what makes things contentious: The Planned route- depending on who you speak to, either crosses, nears, touches, goes through, or avoids Standing Rock Reservation.
The #NoDAPL movement sees the pipeline as posing risks to the water quality and cultural heritage of the Dakota and Lakota peoples of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Part of DAPL’s construction is occurring on lands and through waters the….click here for full article. Article by Kyle Whyte, academia.edu.
