The New View of Makeup and the Consumption of Cosmetics among the Women of Shanghai in the Modern Age

Under the pressure of the national crisis in modern China, millennia-old traditional concepts have been broken and adjusted, and new trends and ideas have emerged in large numbers. In order to defeat local cosmetics, from the moment they entered China foreign cosmetics companies attacked the traditional Chinese cosmetics of eyebrow pigment (dai), lip pigment (gong), rouge (zhi), and face powder (fen). Corresponding to the enlightenment ideas of the early twentieth century, women could no longer pursue beauty in a way that harmed their bodies. In the movement to liberate women’s bodies in the 1920s, radical intellectuals developed a severe criticism of the bad habits of using corsets and applying powder, and the concept of “healthy beauty” came into being. However, in the context of the development of the women’s liberation movement and the respect for women’s consumer rights, the healthy beauty theory failed to suppress women’s consumption of beauty products, and “natural beauty” and “artificial beauty” ultimately coexisted in lifestyles of women in the modern era of Shanghai.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

Indigenous Archaeologies of Crete, 1878–1913

This article makes a contribution to the emerging study of alternative, indigenous and subaltern archaeologies, using the Mediterranean island of Crete as a case study. My focus is on the crucial political developments that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the establishment of the Cretan State. These developments coincided with and facilitated the consolidation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and a state policy on the island. The Cretan population of the countryside ‘contested’ the new attitudes towards the material past by persevering with embedded practices that questioned the validity of scientific approaches. What kind of indigenous imagination underscored such practices? And how did the peasants interact with the new dogma regarding antiquities? Contrary to other groups involved, such as local and Western archaeologists, the rural Cretans remain among the ‘great unknowns’: accounts of relevant events by their own pen are scarce, highlighting the importance of oral historical sources. I therefore present these people through the voices of the others. Archival material such as administrative documents, correspondence, memoirs and newspaper articles, critically assessed, are used for this purpose. This research is also influenced by autobiographical archaeology, as glimpses of my personal work experience and family background overlap with the archival data discussed here.     

Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909

Starting from the idea that race is an assemblage, the author investigates two instances of touch in anthropometry. Firstly, the detailed instructions for mechanized measurements of “the living”. Second, the practices involved in actual measurements of Papuans in Dutch New Guinea during two expeditions in 1903 and 1909.     

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.     

At Intersections of Technology and a Modern Mass Medium

This article examines the intersections of technology and the exhibition medium by focusing on an individual, the mechanical engineer Robert Runeberg. It makes visible individual involvement in transnational mobility and in large-scale processes of modernization. The article explores how becoming a modern professional was not only connected to formal education and practical training, but also to the capacity to extract and produce knowledge via the exhibition medium. Concurrently, the case discloses essential qualities, such as the cohesion, dynamicity and flexibility of the exhibition medium.     

What Can the State Do for You?

It has been suggested that Swedish policy during the early post-war period was strongly directed towards mobility-increasing expenditures – most notably relocation allowances – aimed at moving labour from north to south. While this view has dominated the academic discussion on labour market policy, there is little direct evidence. We make three claims. First, the relocation allowances have to be evaluated against the regional policy. Second, by doing so we show that the mobility-oriented policy was predominant only for a short period of time: in the early 1970s, there was a decisive shift towards a policy directed at stimulating employment in the north. Third, drawing on this, we revaluate the previous view on policy making in Sweden. Our analysis suggests that the Social Democratic government acted in a voter-maximizing way. The relocation allowances were introduced at the behest of the Trade Union Confederation (LO). The regional subsidies were expanded when voter sentiment turned against the perceived depletion of rural regions. However, this strategy interacted with the political and institutional environment. The new election law in 1970 and political competition from the Centre Party pushed the Social Democrats to shift their policies on regional subsidies.     

From folk history to empathy: contesting heritage values in Chinchero,Peru

In the small Peruvian, Quechua-speaking town of Chinchero, processes of heritagization of the Pre-Hispanic legacy encouraged by the State and supported by the tourist industry have been trying to create among the population an obligation of historical and emotional identification with their Inca ancestors. This operation has been mainly effected through the territorial transformation of the vernacular space of the Inca ruins into an archaeological site for tourism consumption. The operation has left out other histories grounded in grassroots events, like the struggle for the land against the abusive landowners that took place during colonial times. More than the distant history of the Incas, it is this kind of more recognisable and meaningful folk history what people remember the most and what largely constitutes the fabric of social memory in Chinchero. It is precisely folk history what forms the basis for local heritage values that, unlike what happens with the Inca remains, express intense affective ties with the physicality of other non-archaeological spaces. In light of these developments, the author explores how the people of Chinchero are contesting official versions of heritage and history by foregrounding the emotional power of their own heritage values.