Assembling nostalgia: devices for affective captation on the re:heritage market

This article builds on the current rethinking of nostalgia in heritage studies and an increasing amount of research that explores the formatting of customer – producer relationships in terms of ’market attachments’ to analyse how nostalgia is performative on the market for retro, vintage and second hand, what we call the re:heritage market. Based on a multi-sited study including offline and online ethnographic observations, photography and qualitative interviews with shop owners and staff at a selection of central streets in Gothenburg, Sweden, the article explores the way shop owners work with nostalgia in order to attract, or ‘captate’, the public, through engaging affective market devices. Our particular contribution is to show how the re:heritage market contribute to our understanding of an alternative of cultural heritage, through configuring exchange and value, and details how ‘affective captation’ adds conceptual strength for understanding the emotive and sensate pull of certain market-based heritage practices. Staging nostalgic encounters involves practices of selecting, collecting, displaying and preserving for the future: practices that are vital for all heritage-making. A variety of actors are involved in this unconventional of heritage at safe a distance from traditional heritage practices.     

The PCI,reforms and welfare between the 1960s and 1970s

This article deals with the question of the relationship between the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the strategy of ‘riforme di struttura’ and reforms in Italy between the 1960s and 1970s, with particular reference to the construction of a modern welfare system. The goal of a universal social security system was set by the PCI from at least 1956. Later, the dialectic with the centre-left governments induced the Communists to strengthen and articulate their proposals on welfare, linking them to the overall design of an advanced democratization of the state and society. In the 1970s, and in particular during the ‘solidarietà democratica’, various proposals made by the Communist Party and the CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) in previous years finally became law, beginning with the establishment of the National Health Service organized into local health units. The Communist Party insisted on performance quality rather than quantity. However, the welfare state is now suffering difficulties throughout the Western world.     

Living with everyday environmental risks: giving a voice to young people in the design of community-based risk communication programs in the city of San Luis Potosí, México

Risk communication programs (RCPs) can contribute to the improvement of community health in marginalized settlements by improving health-related information and practices. Yet, there is a need to include young people's concerns in the design and implementation of RCPs. This study analyses young peoples’ risk perceptions in the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, using visual methods such as drawings and photography. Research was conducted with 74 students from two deprived urban neighborhoods. Results indicate that the use of visual techniques enabled them to identify environmental health risks such as unhealthy sedentary habits and the exposure to hazardous items. We conclude that visual methods may help young people to critically reflect on everyday elements in their environment that affect their well-being. By giving them a voice in a reflexive way, visual methods may engage young people as key multipliers in the awareness raising process, and promote their sense of everyday agency.     

Provenance of Weeden Island “sacred” and “prestige” vessels: implications for specialized ritual craft production

ABSTRACT

Weeden Island mortuary ceremonialism united distinct cultures across the Late Woodland social landscape. The Weeden Island pottery series is central to recognizing regional ceremonial parity, with prestige (elite) and sacred (cult) wares showing strong similarities among distant sites. Finely made vessels and their ostensibly shamanistic themes led archaeologists to consider the liturgical and political roles of ritual specialists, whose tasks might have included vessel manufacture in centralized locations. This research evaluates the prospect of craft specialization and centralized production of sacred and prestige wares through comparisons of the provenance of vessels from three Florida localities: Palmetto Mound (8LV2), the mounds at Melton (8AL5, 8AL7), and McKeithen (8CO17). Results of Neutron Activation Analysis and petrographic analysis show that the majority of the sampled vessels were made far from the mounds in which they were deposited, from a variety of locations but especially within the area between Kolomoki and the Tallahassee Hills. We argue that production was not centralized but may have been specialized to the extent that an integrated ritual network was necessary to coordinate rules of manufacture and use that were evidently observed by all participants.     

Building Bridges of Trust: Child Transports from Finland to Sweden during the Second World War

Seventy thousand children were moved to Sweden from Finland during the Second World War with the purpose of giving them a break from the calamities of war. Moving children for this reason was common practice in the Western world during the twentieth century. Officially, the motives have always been humanitarian, but political motives have often played an important role — commonly, to foster suitable citizens within planned societies. Political goals were important in the moving of Finnish children, but in a different way. In this article, I suggest that the children were used as ‘commodities of compassion’ in a Swedish politics of indemnification.     

Establishing an Ideologically Coherent History

This article analyses the historical culture of the Swedish Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SAP) during its formation in the last decades of the 19th century. Utilizing the theoretical concepts of myth and conceptual metaphor, the sense-making aspects of historical narration are studied, especially the way coherent stories are told, in which the movement under formation is made part of a long history leading to a desirable future. The SAP utilized history both morally-defensively and tactically-offensively. The moral use of history depicts Jesus, Münster, and the French Revolution, establishing the righteousness of revolt. The revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune, during which the workers are seen as acting more independently, are depicted in a way that draws attention to tactical aspects; lessons are learned on how the workers should act in a revolutionary situation. As has been shown to be the case regarding national narratives, the sense-making mechanisms of historical narration also tend to appeal to issues of identity. The metaphorical conceptualization of ideas and movements as individuals and families further underlines these issues.     

No Taxation Without Negotiation

The article aims at assessing the impact of extra taxes on the Swedish peasantry in the early 16th century in qualitative terms, as reflected in contemporary correspondence letters. While the total tax pressure without doubt rose in the period, the resilience of Swedish peasants was remarkably high. Despite harvest failures, they managed to endure the hardships, largely thanks to their diligent use of the instrument of negotiations over terms and levels of extra taxes and the delicacy with which the Crown exacted them. This can be seen as a reflection of adjustments within the framework of the prevalent medieval system, and an acceptance on both sides of the principle of mutuality.     

Clusters and Industry 4.0 – do they fit together?

Industry 4.0 heralds the profound transformation of business models by enabling the fusion of virtual and real worlds and the application of digitization, automatization and robotics in manufacturing. We review the basic premises of Industry 4.0 and map them against the clusters’ features with the aim to establish the kind of relations between these two categories. By exploring the likely impact of clusters on Industry 4.0, our discussion revolves around the broader question of the role of regional ecosystems in industrial transformation. Clusters, thanks to the advantages such as knowledge base and mechanisms, agglomeration economies and externalities (labour pool and critical mass of firms) and favourable more stable, less uncertain environment of trust and cooperation, may facilitate the digital transformation, particularly its phasing-in and testing phases. Notwithstanding this potential, it should be stressed that not all clusters would be able to play such prominent role. Only these equipped with adequate knowledge base and providing some expertise in the field of IT solutions, robotics, automatics, and so on, i.e. the technologies crucial to Industry 4.0 seem predestined to contribute to the emergence of fully fledged industrial internet. Despite seemingly some inconsistency between these two categories, clusters can facilitate the business transformation towards Industry 4.0.