Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles

Abstract

The article introduces and contextualises this special issue on ‘Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles’, which comprises a series of essays that draw on the activities, research findings and insights of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network, ‘Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500–1700: The Case of Decorative Textiles’. Critically evaluating the results of the network’s findings, the paper situates them within a broader investigation of the role of decorative textiles in shaping the experience of domestic interiors in the past and present, and explores new ways of reading such objects in the context of the household. It examines the historiography and current range of approaches to the study, interpretation and exhibition of historic textiles, and analyses the insights offered by bringing together different disciplinary and professional perspectives. It argues for the key significance of these textiles for both historical and modern perceptions of the domestic interior and for the importance of collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to researching them in order to understand how they functioned in the early modern period and to inform new directions for their display and presentation in the present.     

The Fluidity of the ‘Farming Ladder’: The Experience of the Duffin Family,Yorkshire, 1870-1950

This article examines the nuances of the ‘farming ladder’ through a case study of the Duffin farming family. It explores the circumstances in which they flourished and faltered; the internal and external determinants affecting their ability to maintain a grip on the ‘farming ladder’; and the fluidity of the ladder. Drawing upon the personal archive of the family and complementary sources, the variable position of the family on the ‘farming ladder’ as they progress from agricultural labourers to farmers and then back to labourers is charted within wider historical and geographical frameworks. The social and spatial relationships forged are identified as being particularly important in the operation of the ‘farming ladder’.     

Racial vibrations,masculine performances: experiences of homelessness among young men of colour in the Greater Toronto Area

This article explores the connections between race, masculinity and urban space in the lives of Canadian-born young men of colour (aged 17–26) who have experienced homelessness in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It is based on ethnographic research including 40 interviews and eight ‘Where-I-Live-Tours’ of the city by the author and participants. This study explores the intersections between racial emergences and masculine performances in the lived experiences of homelessness, drawing connections between spatial representations and material experiences. It utilizes the concepts of affect and ‘racial vibrations’ to show how race emerges differently in different areas of the GTA. There exists a constant racial ‘vibe’ in the suburban areas of the GTA, whereas there is a vibrating whiteness that obscures racial events in downtown Toronto spaces. In both cases, the emergence of race contributes to continued oppression based on the intersections of racialized masculinities and homelessness.     

The political subjectivization of Korean creative workers: working and living as urban precariat in creative city Seoul

This study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Seoul, South Korea. By locating creative workers’ experiences in Korea within the growing scholarship on the precariat, this research not only attempts to fully understand the complexity of labor subjectivities of creative workers but further explores how creative workers can actually become political subjects who can resist their given precarious working and living conditions. By using Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘political subjectivation’, it attempts to show how creative workers can empower themselves as ‘political subjects’ who strategically disavow their given self-identities as ‘individualized creators’, and through this language they are able to recall the often neglected subjectivity of ‘solidified labor’. In doing so, this research contributes to theoretical insights so that we can better understand what leads to political formation of creative workers.     

Tackling gender inequalities in music: a comparative study of policy responses in the UK and Sweden

Cross-disciplinary research has highlighted the persistence of gender inequalities across music scenes. However, the way in which cultural policy shapes responses to gender inequalities in music has been relatively underexplored. This article draws on research from Swedish and UK contexts, supporting analysis with reference to 9 key-stakeholder interviews from both. Comparing perspectives from ‘more’ and ‘less’ gender-equal contexts, with sufficiently different cultural policy traditions, the article explores how responses to gender inequalities in music are influenced by ‘cultural democratic’ and ‘arm’s length’ approaches. It demonstrates that, as a result of these traditions, there is a comparatively more interventionist approach in Sweden at a national level, whereas the lack of central government response in the UK has encouraged more market-oriented solutions. It suggests that this ‘arm’s length’ approach necessitates different grassroots organisational strategies in order to affect change but notes that these, alongside austerity agendas, are insufficient in the long term.     

Australian foreign policy and news media: national identity and the sale of uranium to India and China

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency.     

‘Westward on the high-hilled plains’: the literature of Shropshire and the early twentieth century imagination, 1896–c.1939

This article explores English national identities in the early twentieth century through the regional case study of Shropshire. Building on existing research on English regions, this article addresses the scarcity of border case studies. I argue that Shropshire was perceived as a border region that, at the same time as being incorporated into the model of the South Country, was also powerfully shaped by its proximity to Wales. Shropshire was valued as an escape from commercial modernity through its countryside landscapes, as a gateway to the past through its buildings, place-names, and folk customs, as a borderland of medieval conflict with Wales, and as a mysterious region of superstitions and the supernatural. This article suggests that the motifs and themes which worked through the images of ‘Shropshire’ and ‘England’ supported an imagination of diversity, multiplicity and contradiction—not solely one of national unity.     

‘Chilling’ and ‘hopping’ in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of Mechelen

Within the field of children's geographies several calls have been made to develop ‘teenagers’ geographies’ as a complementary field of research and practice. It has been stated that teenagers remain ‘invisible’ or ‘marginalised’ in public debates as well as in research and practice, even within childhood studies and children's geographies. Further explorations in teenagers’ geographies could contribute to the research on ‘diverse childhoods’. This article explores the spatial worlds of teenagers (approximately 12–16 years) in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterised by a dense network of smaller cities and ‘urban sprawl’. Based on street interviews and observations in a small city several mental maps and patterns of teenagers’ use of public space were identified. Starting from a case study in the city of Mechelen, this article suggests how these perspectives can be integrated into urban planning by identifying and tying together relevant planning layers, thus creating a more closely knit ‘teenage space network’. Wouter Vanderstede is an urban planner, anthropologist and historian. He is a researcher and staff member at Childhood & Society Research Centre–Onderzoekscentrum Kind & Samenleving vzw. Child friendly and teenager friendly planning and design of public space is one of the main research themes of the institute. View all notes     

The Origins of the Concept of ‘Palaeolithic Art’: Theoretical Roots of an Idea

This paper explores the origin and theoretical roots of the concept of ‘Palaeolithic art’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1895–1906). It identifies three main sources for this concept: the Western category of ‘art’, the idea of evolution and the notion of primitive. This article shows how the traditional conception of ‘Palaeolithic art’ is a particular case of the wider idea of ‘primitive art’, a category that was born as an attempt to harmonise the notion of ‘primitive society’ and the nineteenth-century bourgeois concept of ‘art’. Additionally, I discuss this traditional conception as the source of a number of ideas that have persisted in our way of interpreting Palaeolithic images until recently, including the understanding of prehistoric images through the lens of the modern notion of ‘art’, their interpretation in symbolic-religious terms and their formal definition based on the idea of naturalism.     

Corporate Social Responsibility,Supply‐chains and Saami Claims: Tracing the Political in the Finnish Forestry Industry

At the heart of debate surrounding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) lies an inherent anxiety over the division of responsibility between states and corporations. Commonly taken for granted is a natural and a priori separation of government and market activities. This paper provides a critique of the conceptual division of responsibility between ‘state’ and ‘market’ actors, and explores the politically ambivalent roles of state financed companies in global CSR dialogues on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. It uses a case concerning logging on Saami reindeer herding territory, and explores a particularly Finnish articulation of CSR and supply‐chain management in the Finnish forestry and paper sector.     

Re-presentar the religious: nation,community and identity in museums 1

This paper examines the roles that museums play as ‘unofficially sacred’ places, underscoring or challenging the religious life of a people and ‘nation’. It focuses on three key questions: (1) Do sub-national and transnational religious formations pose a challenge to or present opportunities for nation-building strategies, and what part do museums play in this struggle? (2) In what ways do re-presentations of religion in museums contest or reinforce religious community and identity? and (3) What challenges do museum displays pose to the understanding of religious meanings? This paper explores these three key questions about the intersection of religion with politics and ideologies, social relations, and cultural interpretations and transformations using an in-depth case study of an exhibition on the Jewish community in Singapore.     

Which region to choose for an industrial policy? A research path to highlight restructuring opportunities

Our study explores research avenues that can help policymakers to assess regional capabilities for ‘green’ economic restructuring. After reviewing the relevant literature, and envisioning research paths which consider both market transactions and externalities, we propose possible ways to translate past research findings into novel statistical tools. Our point of departure is the ‘skill relatedness’ among economic sectors in Norway, as inferred from intersectoral labour flows (years 2008–2014). Then, on the basis of the industrial composition in each of the 161 Norwegian labour market areas, candidate regions that could benefit the most from a ‘green’ restructuring policy, aimed at photovoltaics in our empirical example, are brought forward.     

‘Globalization with hardware’: ITER’s fusion of technology,policy, and politics

This article explores the history of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a fusion energy megaproject currently being built in southern France. It examines three main aspects of the project’s history, focusing largely on the European research community’s perspective. First, it explores how European scientists and science managers constructed a transnational research community around fusion energy after 1960 that was part of Europe’s larger technological integration. This article also expands Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of ‘technopolitics’ to the larger international dimension and explores how the political environment of the late Cold War and the post‐9/11 era helped shape ITER’s history, sometimes in ways not entirely within researchers’ control. Finally, this essay considers ITER as a technological project that gradually became globalized. At various stages in the project’s 30‐year history, we discover processes whereby national borders became less important while social, economic, legal and technological linkages created a shared social space for fusion research on an expanding scale.     

On the Case: Method in Public and Community Archaeology

This paper seeks to initiate a conversation about methodology in public and community archaeology through an examination of the use of case studies. Case studies enable the exploration of situations that are, by their nature, not easily reduced to statistical data. The challenge is that unless they are carefully structured, case studies may contribute little beyond anecdote to the field. Other disciplines that rely on case studies have addressed the methodological challenges aggressively. This paper explores these issues in four sections: First, the rationale for methodology in public archaeology is examined. Second, actual practice—through analysis of papers published in Public Archaeology and, to a limited degree, in the ‘grey literature’—is reviewed. Third, alternative case study methods, gleaned from diverse disciplines, are presented. Finally, the potential for method-based case study research is illustrated through an example of the use of one such method.     

Questioning the Rhetoric of Social Mix: Courteous Community or Hidden Hostility?

This paper explores the increasingly important role of ‘social mix’ in the management practices of the NSW Department of Housing. Social mix is a policy response to the many perceived social, cultural and economic problems related to the concentration of public tenants within larger housing estates. Social mix involves the integration and assimilation of public housing tenants into areas dominated by private home ownership and private rental. Such policies are based upon the belief that social mix has the ability to alter many of these problems simply through the presence of a ‘community’. However, this paper questions the normative construction of homeowners as possessing a ‘community’ which, by implication, will be passed on to public tenants. Through an in‐depth case‐study, it is shown that ‘community’, as constructed by social mix policy rhetoric, may in fact further disadvantage public tenants through processes of othering, stigmatisation and oppression, which operate outside these traditional understandings of community. In addition, this research shows that, rather than increased community integration, it is the physical function of neighbourhood and its direct role in service provision which is the most advantageous constituent of social mix for public housing tenants.     

ROUTINE MAGIC,MUNDANE RITUAL: TOWARDS A UNIFIED NOTION OF DEPOSITIONAL PRACTICE

This article seeks to advance ongoing discussions within archaeology concerning the relationship between ritual and depositional practices. Previous researchers have argued that ‘structured’ or ‘placed’ deposits are the result of ritual activities, but also that in many societies the disposal of refuse is governed by social ‘rules’. Distinguishing ‘technical’ actions such as rubbish disposal from deliberately ‘placed’ deposits is extremely difficult, however, and reinforces modern dualistic thought. Instead, this article argues that there was a continuum of practices from formal and ritualized events through to small‐scale, informal acts undertaken on a routine basis, including everyday refuse discard. It also questions purely utilitarian interpretations of storage structures. Drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistorical examples, it explores case studies from the later prehistoric and Romano‐British periods of north central England, and concludes by proposing methodologies through which these practices can be explored more fully in the future.     

‘Filial son’, the family and identity formation among male migrant workers in urban China

This article is based on an ethnographic study of life histories of 28 rural–urban (internal) migrant men located within southern China. It explores their narratives with a particular focus on changing social relations within the family, from the perspective of migrant sons. It argues that traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations. The men recount the role of traditional familial gender norms, which are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities within specific temporal and spatial conditions. For example, being a ‘filial son’ has become an important reference point for these mobile male workers to actively negotiate their emerging masculine identities in the process of negotiating urban lives, while living away from their rural homes. The article also explores a more complex understanding of rural–urban migration in terms of critically engaging with the men's well-being as urban workers.     

The Rise of the Francophone Postcolonial Intellectual: The Emergence of a Tradition

Although discussions of the French intellectual often address engagement with anti-colonialism and the decolonisation process more generally, most notably in relation to the Algerian War of Independence, critical attention is rarely directed at the existence of a wider yet related intellectual culture that may connect the disparate parts of the French-speaking world. This article explores the rise of the postcolonial intellectual in this politico-cultural and linguistic space, and asks whether such a figure may be seen as part of a coherent tradition. Foregrounding the interdependency and regular overlap of ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ intellectual cultures, the study creates connections between thinkers in metropolitan France and its former colonies, placed here in a dialectical, conjunctive rather than in a binary, disjunctive relationship. The article explores three case studies – those of Victor Segalen (central to the work of such key postcolonial thinkers as Edouard Glissant and Abdelkebir Khatibi), Léopold Sédar Senghor and Frantz Fanon – in order to underline the complex genealogies of the emergent tradition it identifies. It concludes with a consideration of the definitive role of the postcolonial intellectual in debates regarding the legacy of colonialism in contemporary France.     

‘Of place’ or ‘of people’: exploring the animal spaces and beastly places of feral cats in southern Ontario

Feral cats are contentious and transgressive, with opposing views on whether to classify them as abandoned pets, wild animals, or invasive species. Concerns about their welfare often conflict with fears that they are impacting native fauna. This paper presents the results of a case study of human–feral cat relations that took place in southern Ontario, Canada in 2014. This research investigates the discursive constructions of feral cats and their ‘animal spaces’ using the results of 40 semi-structured interviews. Following recent calls to move beyond human representations of animals and better integrate animals’ geographies, this study also explores the ‘beastly places’ of feral cats using the results of field observations of 20 feral cat colonies and anecdotal evidence from colony caretakers. The results emphasize the diversity of free-living contexts and the complexity of management options. This paper ends by discussing the place-making practices of cats, along with their potential ethical ramifications. Overall, it illustrates the importance of spatial factors in understanding the complex social and ethical dynamics of human–animal relations, and advances an understanding of nonhuman animals as inhabitants of personally meaningful homes.     

Recovering a ‘Subjugated History’: Disability and the Institution in the Industrial City

The paper explores physically disabled people’s experiences of institutions in the industrial city, focusing on the case of nineteenth-century Melbourne. Here ‘institutions’ refers to the panoply of public, semi-public, private and charitable places that were established in industrial cities to house, and frequently confine, a diverse estate of poor, ill, elderly, disabled and otherwise socially dependent persons. The aim of this paper is to retrace the institutional experiences of disabled people in nineteenth-century Melbourne, with a view to explaining the role of the institution within a broader ‘social space of disability’in the industrial city. In particular, the analysis seeks to identify the type of institutions that disabled people were admitted to, including places of confinement such as gaols. The paper also explores how disabled people coped with the ‘duty to attend the asylum‘ (after Foucault) that weighed heavily on socially marginalised people in the industrial city.