Personal Discipline and Material Culture

Personal Discipline and Material Culture PDF Author: Paul A. Shackel
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870497841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This unique study looks at the role material goods played in shaping our culture. Using archaeological data, probate inventories, and etiquette books, Paul A. Shackel has collected valuable information on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material items which, when analyzed in historical context, reveals how these items have shaped the development of western culture. Specific examples from the Chesapeake area of Maryland show how individuals and groups responded to social and economic crises by using material goods to define power relations, create social hierarchies, and preserve the social order. Shackel argues that, during the pre-industrial era, society's elite introduced hard-to-find material items, like the fork, with rules of etiquette to maintain social distance and stratification. As the Industrial Revolution made material items cheaper and easier to obtain, the non-elite began to adopt regular usage of particular items as part of standardized behavior while the elite sought to maintain their status with newer and different material goods. Focusing on how the spread of capitalism affected various social groups, Shackel pays specific attention to culture and consumption and symbolic qualities of material culture. His analysis incorporates a review of etiquette literature from the late medieval era to provide a global context for regional behavior and material culture.

Personal Discipline and Material Culture

Personal Discipline and Material Culture PDF Author: Paul A. Shackel
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870497841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
This unique study looks at the role material goods played in shaping our culture. Using archaeological data, probate inventories, and etiquette books, Paul A. Shackel has collected valuable information on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material items which, when analyzed in historical context, reveals how these items have shaped the development of western culture. Specific examples from the Chesapeake area of Maryland show how individuals and groups responded to social and economic crises by using material goods to define power relations, create social hierarchies, and preserve the social order. Shackel argues that, during the pre-industrial era, society's elite introduced hard-to-find material items, like the fork, with rules of etiquette to maintain social distance and stratification. As the Industrial Revolution made material items cheaper and easier to obtain, the non-elite began to adopt regular usage of particular items as part of standardized behavior while the elite sought to maintain their status with newer and different material goods. Focusing on how the spread of capitalism affected various social groups, Shackel pays specific attention to culture and consumption and symbolic qualities of material culture. His analysis incorporates a review of etiquette literature from the late medieval era to provide a global context for regional behavior and material culture.

Annapolis Pasts

Annapolis Pasts PDF Author: Paul A. Shackel
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The Archaeology in Annapolis project has been one of the most important undertaken by historical archaeologists. Notable for its emphasis on public education and its use of citywide research, it has carried out an innovative analysis of material culture to show how a wide range of social and economic classes residing in Maryland's capital responded over time to a changing world.Annapolis Pasts offers a close look at the trend-setting project. Drawing on more than a decade of study, it provides a cross-section of the substantive and theoretical issues that Archaeology in Annapolis has explored. The volume gathers the work of some of the most innovative authorities in historical archaeology along with that of younger scholars who participated in the project, all of whom demonstrate the cutting-edge approaches that have won it wide respect. And despite differences in theoretical orientations, all the contributors have used Annapolis's archaeological data to interpret the emergence of capitalism as both a dynamic market force and an equally dynamic body of social rules. In studies of sites ranging from eighteenth-century formal gardens to nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American neighborhoods, the book explores the development of modern society as reflected in such examples of material culture as food, printer's type, tableware, and landscape architecture, showing how these features of everyday life were used to reproduce, modify, and resist capitalist society over three centuries. It also investigates subordinated groups in Annapolis -- African Americans, women, the working class -- to provide insight into racism, class structure, and consumer society in the early years of theindustrial revolution.Annapolis Pasts clearly demonstrates that traditional objects of study like Georgian mansions and colonial crafts cannot be understood without considering their complete social and economic milieu. It presents a fascinating mosaic of human activity that shows how archaeologists can interpret the different social, temporal, and theoretical pieces of a city's history, and it provides anthropologists, economists, and historians with an example of the multifaceted effects of capitalism and industrialization in one corner of America.

An Archaeology of Manners

An Archaeology of Manners PDF Author: Lorinda B.R. Goodwin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306471701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
A glance at the title of this book might well beg the question “What in heaven’s name does archaeology have to do with manners? We cannot dig up manners or mannerly behavior—or can we?” One might also ask “Why is mannerly behavior important?” and “What can archaeology contribute to our understanding of the role of manners in the devel- ment of social relations and cultural identity in early America?” English colonists in America and elsewhere sought to replicate English notions of gentility and social structure, but of necessity div- ged from the English model. The first generation of elites in colonial America did not spring from the landed gentry of old England. Rather, they were self-made, newly rich, and newly possessed of land and other trappings of England’s genteel classes. The result was a new model of gentry culture that overcame the contradiction between a value system in which gentility was conferred by birth, and the new values of bo- geois materialism and commercialism among the emerging colonial elites. Manners played a critical role in the struggle for the cultural legitimacy of gentility; mannerly behavior—along with exhibition of refined taste in architecture, fashionable clothing, elegant furnishings, and literature—provided the means through which the new-sprung colonial elites defined themselves and validated their claims on power and prestige to accompany their newfound wealth.

Everyday Objects

Everyday Objects PDF Author: Tara Hamling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351938118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This book is about the objects people owned and how they used them. Twenty-three specially written essays investigate the type of things that might have been considered 'everyday objects' in the medieval and early modern periods, and how they help us to understand the daily lives of those individuals for whom few other types of evidence survive - for instance people of lower status and women of all status groups. Everyday Objects presents new research by specialists from a range of disciplines to assess what the study of material culture can contribute to our understanding of medieval and early modern societies. Extending and developing key debates in the study of the everyday, the chapters provide analysis of such things as ceramics, illustrated manuscripts, pins, handbells, carved chimneypieces, clothing, drinking vessels, bagpipes, paintings, shoes, religious icons and the built fabric of domestic houses and guild halls. These things are examined in relation to central themes of pre-modern history; for instance gender, identity, space, morality, skill, value, ritual, use, belief, public and private behaviour, continental influence, materiality, emotion, technical innovation, status, competition and social mobility. This book offers both a collection of new research by a diverse range of specialists and a source book of current methodological approaches for the study of pre-modern material culture. The multi-disciplinary analysis of these 'everyday objects' by archaeologists, art historians, literary scholars, historians, conservators and museum practitioners provides a snapshot of current methodological approaches within the humanities. Although analysis of material culture has become an increasingly important aspect of the study of the past, previous research in this area has often remained confined to subject-specific boundaries. This book will therefore be an invaluable resource for researchers and students interested in learning about important new work which demonstrates the potential of material culture study to cut across traditional historiographies and disciplinary boundaries and access the lived experience of individuals in the past.

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Audrey Horning
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350226661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment covers the period 1600 to 1760, a time marked by the movement of people, ideas and goods. The objects explored in this volume –from scientific instrumentation and Baroque paintings to slave ships and shackles –encapsulate the contradictory impulses of the age. The entwined forces of capitalism and colonialism created new patterns of consumption, facilitated by innovations in maritime transport, new forms of exchange relations, and the exploitation of non-Western peoples and lands. The world of objects in the Enlightenment reveal a Western material culture profoundly shaped by global encounters. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Audrey Horning is Professor at William & Mary, USA, and at Queen's University Belfast, UK. Volume 4 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte

Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: L. Young
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230598811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Drawing on expressive and material culture, Young shows that money was not enough to make the genteel middle class. It required exquisite self-control and the right cultural capital to perform ritual etiquette and present oneself confidently, yet modestly. She argues that genteel culture was not merely derivative, but a re-working of aristocratic standards in the context of the middle class necessity to work. Visible throughout the English-speaking world in the 1780s -1830s and onward, genteel culture reveals continuities often obscured by studies based entirely on national frameworks.

Familiar Past?

Familiar Past? PDF Author: Sarah Tarlow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134660359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
The Familiar Past surveys material culture from 1500 to the present day. Fourteen case studies, grouped under related topics, include discussion of issues such as: * the origins of modernity in urban contexts * the historical anthropology of food * the social and spatial construction of country houses * the social history of a workhouse site * changes in memorial forms and inscriptions * the archaeological treatment of gardens. The Familiar Past has been structured as a teaching text and will be useful to students of history and archaeology.

Images of the Recent Past

Images of the Recent Past PDF Author: Charles E. Orser
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780761991427
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
A collection of classic and contemporary articles demonstrating the development of historical archaeology over the past 20 years, both in North America and throughout the world. Contains sections on recent perspectives, people and places, historic artifacts, interdisciplinary studies, landscape studies, and international historical archaeology. For use in historical archaeology classes. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Archaeology of Food

Archaeology of Food PDF Author: Karen Bescherer Metheny
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0759123667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 635

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Book Description
What are the origins of agriculture? In what ways have technological advances related to food affected human development? How have food and foodways been used to create identity, communicate meaning, and organize society? In this highly readable, illustrated volume, archaeologists and other scholars from across the globe explore these questions and more. The Archaeology of Food offers more than 250 entries spanning geographic and temporal contexts and features recent discoveries alongside the results of decades of research. The contributors provide overviews of current knowledge and theoretical perspectives, raise key questions, and delve into myriad scientific, archaeological, and material analyses to add depth to our understanding of food. The encyclopedia serves as a reference for scholars and students in archaeology, food studies, and related disciplines, as well as fascinating reading for culinary historians, food writers, and food and archaeology enthusiasts.

An Archaeology of Ethnicity, Race, and Consumption in New York

An Archaeology of Ethnicity, Race, and Consumption in New York PDF Author: Jordon D. Loucks
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793611769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
An Archaeology of Ethnicity, Race, and Consumption in New York examines the archaeological visibility of ethnicity within the confines of nineteenth-century material culture from across New York State. The author discusses the limits of archaeological interpretations of ethnicity, presents the utility of material indications of racism in the archaeological record, considers the archaeological footprint of immigrant groups, and contextualizes these discussions with the economic development of the state of New York. The author argues that the construction of canals and railroads causes drastic changes in trade networks and available goods throughout the state, and impacted the lives of immigrant populations who both built and depended on these systems. This book recounts the exploitation of immigrant groups for hard labor to complete these arterial constructions, which in turn increases reliable accessibility to trade goods, but also provides archaeologists today an increased ability to understand the treatment of those immigrant groups by American society.