Using the personal to critique the popular: women’s memories of 1960s youth

Popular memory depicts 1960s young adults as affluent, permissive, promiscuous, delinquent, sub- or counter-cultural rebels. But these stylised images do not reflect the lived experiences of ordinary young adults, particularly young women, in the 1960s. Using Mass Observation and oral history interviews, this article examines how women who were young adults in the 1960s remember their youths and how they negotiate the gap between popular memory and personal experience. It argues that women can readily critique the popular memory of 1960s youth where it does not match their own lived experience. The popular memory is powerful, however, and so still shapes their understanding of the experiences and concepts of youth more generally. Moreover, the way women negotiate between popular and personal memories of youth is conditioned by their attempt to create composure and by subsequent life experiences.     

Intermarriage,Technological Diffusion,and Boundary Objects in the U.S. Southwest

This article draws upon ethnographic accounts of female potters’ movement and intermarriage into multi-ethnic Pueblo communities in the U.S. Southwest to illustrate how marriage networks created opportunities for innovation through the production, distribution, and consumption of boundary objects. These objects did not define boundaries but facilitated boundary crossing or bridging by potters. I argue that the concept of boundary objects is more useful than hybridity for understanding the processes of culture contact and material culture diffusion. Archaeological evidence for late twelfth through thirteenth century migrations from the Four Corners to the southern Colorado Plateau is used to make a case for a high degree of intermarriage and post-marital movement of women. Such patrilocality challenges normative views of post-marital residence, including those employed by early ceramic sociologists working in the same area of the Southwest and even at the same sites. The case that I discuss provides a contrast to other Southwest examples in which conformist transmission was more common, and helps to solve a paradox in explanations of the Southwest Pueblo Sprachbund. I conclude that the concept of boundary objects complements formal social network approaches in archaeology by bringing out the active role of objects in linking social actors.     

William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) and the study of religion in Enlightenment England

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society.