Suchergebnisse

Modern selves and fashion -- Communities of strangers and modern infrastructure -- Cultural imaginaries and modern states -- Liberal and industrial modernity -- Race and geopolitics -- Gender and political economy -- The modern child -- Digital games and paths through modern life -- Philosophical machinery and film -- Escape routes

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents in Brief -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Preface: Origins and the Analysis of Modernity -- Acknowledgments -- Part One History of Modern Social Forms -- 1 Modern Selves and Fashion -- Medieval Identity -- The Black Death -- Modern Subjectivity -- Burgundian Fashion and Moral Worth -- Italian Fashion and the Distant Self -- Spanish Fashion and the Christian Warrior -- Dutch Fashion and Consumer Culture -- French Fashion and the Theater of Power -- Fashionable Dress and Modern Selves -- 2 Communities of Strangers and Infrastructure -- Print Infrastructure and the Wars of Religion -- The Parisian Water Supply -- 3 Cultural Imaginaries and Modern States -- Immersive Theater and Political Spectacle -- Learning by Doing -- The Power of the Artisans -- The Modern State -- 4 Discursive Modernity and Global Industrial Capitalism -- Philosophical Modernities -- Modern Nation States -- Modern Cities -- The Experimental Self -- Part Two Genealogies of Modern Social Types -- 5 Geopolitics and Discourses of Race -- Monogenesis and Moral Differences (Cell A) -- Monogenesis and Degree of Civilization (Cell B) -- Polygenesis and Difference of Temperament (Cell C) -- Polygenesis and Racial Supremacy (Cell D) -- The Legacy of Racial Imaginaries -- 6 Property, Labor, and Discourses of Gender -- Gendered Differences -- Natural Man and Artificial Woman -- Gender, Property, and Labor -- Gender Culture and Industrial Labor -- 7 The Ascent of Man and Discourses of Childhood -- Modern Versions of Childhood -- Developmental Childhood -- Animals and Monsters -- The Problem of Modern Selves -- Part Three Popular Tools of Modern Life -- 8 Digital Games and Navigating Modernity -- Games as Pedagogical Tools -- Serious Games of Military Simulation

AbstractThis paper is a reflection on the power of archives in driving research. Just as much as informants draw the attention of researchers to social patterns, archives do, too. Both archival and ethnographic research depends on the authority of written documents like field notes and official papers—even in the sociology of art. Archives consist mainly of papers about objects and property. I argue that the material turn in my work and the study of logistics as a form of power became important to me because of my archival experience. Sociologists recognize the importance of property as a driver of social relations of power, but they rarely study logistical power. I do, but only because the archives demonstrated its importance.

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenth-century France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state.

A program of forestry surveys and reform conducted in France during the 17th century has been accused of rationalizing the landscape and suppressing peasant culture; tools of cartography were said to have made rural lands both more legible to the state and alien to locals. On closer inspection, it seems that the surveys did not produce abstract rationalizations of the forests that made them 'readable' at a distance or more orderly on the ground; mainly the reformers developed databases or archives of misuses of the forests by nobles who were supposed to be managing them for the crown. This paper follows one reformer, Louis de Froidour, as he moved through the Midi-Pyrenees, using a set of letters he wrote while doing forest surveys for the reform. He described and explained noble opposition to his entering 'their forests', and how he nonetheless conducted the required surveys and acquired the necessary documents. Froidour not only did not target peasant villages, but also sometimes even protected forests that he said locals needed more than the crown. He had no romantic affection for mountain inhabitants (quite the opposite). He protected their interests because villagers rather than nobles paid taxes, and so disrupting their economies would not benefit the state. This case study, while only focusing on a small area of France, provides valuable insight into the logic of the reform, and its political consequences.

This article looks at the value of genealogical analysis for doing historical research in cultural sociology, using Nietzsche's definition of genealogy.The point is to resuscitate a method that has often been rejected by sociologists, and demonstrate its value for analyzing forms of culture that have become tacit or unarticulated over time. To make the case for the method, the article follows a historical example: the use of indigenous hydraulics with Roman provenance on the Canal du Midi in 17th-century France. Women labourers brought hydraulics techniques derived from Roman principles to the canal, but their work was not considered classical. Ironically, the Canal du Midi was promoted in propaganda campaigns, defining France as the New Rome, but the peasant women who actually carried Roman culture in their eyes and hands were not socially elevated enough to be New Romans, so they were written out of this story.

Eisenstein's account of the connection between scientific progress and printing does not apply well to map publication and knowledge of geography. Most of the celebrated figures in map design and publishing in the 16th century were fundamentally copyists and collectors of others' works. In Renaissance Europe, geographers did not strive to be original, but relied on others' measures, adding their own information to extant maps whenever this was possible. They also made maps in multiple genres, and used geographical works not simply as practical tools for trade and politics, but as evidence for Creation and demonstrations of human dominion. Printed atlases displayed the array of map forms, provided exemplars of good work, and made visible points of translation across different genres of geographical representation. In this context, copying and collection were helpful rather than detrimental to knowledge.