The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into people’s experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation.     

Defying Delhi’s enclosures: strategies for managing a difficult city

Reflecting wider debates on the city as a site of coercion and opportunity, Delhi is marked by the coordinates of both cultural nationalism and neo-liberal aspiration. The former positions the city as a site of cultural pollution, at times claiming ‘western lifestyles’ have contributed to gendered assault. In juxtaposition, Delhi’s neo-liberal landscape positions the female body as a valued commodity, iconic of ‘globalised living’, embedded in discourses of autonomy and modernity. This article will argue that these entangled cultural constructs have created a city of threat and discomfort that problematizes women’s access, be it for livelihood or leisure, enclosing women within coordinates not of their making. Yet rather than acquiesce to this urban topology, the agency of the single, middle-aged, middle-class women in this ethnographic study extends our understanding of the agonistic relationships within urban space, and the capacity to negotiate them using practices of avoidance, deception, adaptation, defiance, and care, at times creating their own enclosures in the process that enabled access to the city. Age and class as well as gendered expectations impacted on the available resources and outcomes of these negotiations, revealing the diverse possibilities of urban living that can enable pockets of social and political flourishing even within a difficult city.     

Reconceptualizing Resistance in the Historical Archaeology of the British Isles: An Editorial

The present resonates with the harmonics of past events. Our archaeologies, because they deal with the everyday materiality of life, should not neglect to concern themselves with the domination of past people, since many similar forms of oppression persist. Moreover, we should consider the resistance to such domination. Rather than seeing resistance as simply reactive a problem which has generated much criticism—we can reconceptualize it to encompass a more nuanced understanding of the volition and agency of people in inferior positions of power. This lends new strength to the role of archaeologists in representing historical narratives of resistance.     

The moment when Peking fell to the Japanese: a “horizontal” perspective

ABSTRACT

Due to its equivocal character, the fall of Peking in 1937 was a historical moment that deserves a thorough revisit focusing on the city’s multifaceted structure. As a narrative strategy, “moment” aims at putting various spatial imageries of multiple events in a minimized temporal unit. This article focuses on two moments after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 7, 1937: July 29, when the Chinese troops withdrew from Peking, and August 8, when the Japanese troops entered the city. It reconstructs these historical scenarios by utilizing the reports of journalists, diary entries, and reminiscences, along with literary works to capture the moment of Peking’s fall. Using a “horizontal” perspective, this paper reveals Peking residents’ communal awareness and attempts to excavate nationalist elements from local experiences.     

The sound of images: peddlers' calls and tunes in Republican Peking

Street peddlers were a common feature of city life in China well into the twentieth century. The presence of these small-scale, often single-good merchants can be traced back to earlier centuries. That they survived until after WWII reflects in part the state of economic development of China, where recent immigrants were prepared to take up the meanest, lowest-paid jobs to make a living. In Peking, thousands of peddlers roamed the streets, and more particularly, the hutongs where most of the population lived. They ceaselessly offered their goods and services to the residents, day and night. In order to attract customers and to entice them out of their walled houses and courtyards, peddlers uttered musical vocal phrases, sometimes in elaborate form, and more interestingly, they sometimes used musical instruments. In this paper I examine who they were, how they operated and what they represented to Peking's urban society. From this sketchy social portrait, I will move into a study of how the peddlers were represented in various settings of the pictorial records. Finally, I argue that peddlers were an integral part of a kind of street theater. This is not just a metaphor. Through their calls, songs, and music, peddlers created a constant flow of live entertainment in the street.     

集市:民俗学理解日常生活的新视野

集市是广泛存在于世界各地区各民族的商品交易形式,也是地方社会生活在空间上的浓缩。以流动为特征的集市为地方性知识的生成与表述、民俗关系的搭建与互动提供了场域,是区域性生活实践、文化变迁和社区整合的动力源泉。民俗学对集市中民俗事象、时空特征和实践活动的关注,可在超越村落边界的基础上,透视人群交往、文化交流和物品交换之间的关系,从而拓展民俗学的研究视野,深化对日常生活的理解,提升民俗学理论方法的活力;同时,民俗学的学术关怀可以进一步充实集市研究的生活感、文化性与应用性,丰富有关集市当代转型和乡村社会建设等议题的讨论,体现学科服务社会发展的现实关切。     

Suburban women and the ‘glocalisation’ of the everyday lives: gender and glocalities in underprivileged areas in Sweden

This article presents results from two case studies of marginalised housing areas on the outskirts of two major cities in Sweden. The areas have been analysed through the lens of glocalisation of the everyday lives. The aim is to illustrate and gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of, and relationship between, place, gender and transnationalism. The article contests the simplified image of migrant women in these marginalised areas as local-bound and isolated. It analyses their everyday lives as spaces of glocality, with a particular focus on local and global networks, local and global meeting places, and relationships to local authorities. The aim is to disseminate new knowledge about the complexities of these women's lives in a global–local context, which also has implications for the theoretical concept of glocality. Through the concept of glocality, the beneficial as well as the negative aspects of these women's lives in marginalised neighbourhoods are illustrated.     

The automatic production of space

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.     

Toiling in the Vale of Tears: Everyday Life and Resistance in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1760-1860

Following the 1745 rebellion, agrarian capitalism rapidly transformed subsistence practices in the Outer Hebrides. Landowners increased rents, enclosed common lands, and replaced crofters and cattle with sheep-ranges. Population growth, the demise of the kelp industry, and crop failures compounded the problems of the peasantry. Widespread emigration commenced in the 1770s and peaked in the 1850s, when entire communities were exiled to British North America—the so-called Highland Clearances. This article traces the development of agrarian capitalism on the Isle of South Uist, explores the agricultural improvements undertaken by successive landlords, and considers modes of resistance adopted by the island's population.     

Context and Interpretation: An Archaeology of Cultural Production

This paper examines the construction of modern-world contexts in historical archaeology. To help draw out and understand the social and cultural contexts of capitalism, colonialism, and modernity, and how they may be materially understood, an explanation of the German history of everyday life school (Alltagsgeschichte) is presented. In this approach, the objects of historical study become the everyday cultural interpretations of past people and how these interpretations actively produced and reproduced cultures. This approach is illustrated by a landscape archaeology of the Bordley–Randall site in Annapolis, Maryland.     

跨国精英移民的日常生活实践与根植性家的营造

流动性背景下,跨国精英移民如何在迁入地实践、重构和感知家,以实现长久居留既是现实问题也是学术问题。本文援引“根植性家（rooted home）”的地理学概念,采用半结构化深度访谈和观察法等质性研究方法,以根植性类型的跨国精英移民为研究对象,探究其日常生活实践与家的营造。研究发现：①跨国精英移民对家的根植性理解并非意味着他们“不流动”,而是在流动中与“过去的家”保持联系与平衡。②跨国精英移民对家的根植性实践表现在使用怀旧性的日常生活实践策略,涵盖物质性、情感性和外部性维度,其中物质性维度较易实现,而情感性和外部性维度即使是精英移民也难以实现。③流动性加深了对根植性类型跨国精英移民对“过去的家”的认同,并影响其对现在和未来的家的感知和去向的思考。研究借助日常生活视角补充和完善了“根植性家”的理论与实证,也为跨国精英移民的深度研究提供了可供参考的范本。