Maisons Tropicales/Maisons Coloniales: contesting technologies of authenticity and value in Niamey,Brazzaville, Paris,New York and Venice

This article draws on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork to analyse institutional practices of producing cultural authenticity and value under conditions of globalization. It focuses on the ‘re-discovery’ of three so-called Maisons Tropicales as modern architectural heritage in Niamey and Brazzaville. These prototypes of a colonial building project were subsequently translocated, commoditized and displayed as modern works of art in Paris and New York. The article describes the global connections and disconnections between the actors involved, claiming that the alternative practices of appropriating the Maisons Tropicales rely on competing and conflicting technologies of authenticity and value. Adding to scholarship on exchanges of material culture, as well as on the production of cultural authenticity and value, the article reframes debates in heritage studies pertaining to the ethics of site-specificity, material integrity, and integrity of place; preservation, conservation, and restoration; restitution and repatriation; as well as questions of cultural identity and the notion of a ‘shared’ colonial heritage. Ultimately, the article re-contextualizes the Maisons Tropicales in their (post-)colonial legacies. It concludes that critical interjections by artists and ethnographers suggest potential to reassemble the dominant technologies of authenticity and value in the fields of art and heritage preservation.     

Creativity gaps and gender gaps: women,men and place in the United States

This article situates Florida's (2002) work on creative regions in the United States in the context of a critical discussion of place and gender and investigates the gender–class structure of his most and least creative regions. It analyzes the distribution of creative class, working class and service class occupations by gender within those 21 regions as well as earnings, household income, poverty and educational attainment using data from the US Census 2000. Women and men are compared within and across the two categories of most and least creative regions. The major finding is that the gender gap in earnings within categories of regions is larger than the creativity gap, i.e. the earnings gap within genders across regions. As new technology industries have been layered over old industries, altering spatial divisions of labor, gendered labor remains integrated in largely traditional ways.     

The Nation as a Community Born of War? Symbolic Strategies and Popular Reception of Public Statues in Late Nineteenth-Century Western European Capitals

The genesis and development of Western European nationalism is widely connected to the notion of the nation as emerged from war. This paper focuses on that cultural combination in terms of the symbols and programmatic rhetoric employed in commemorative rituals surrounding public statues—mainly in honour of military personnel—in late nineteenth-century Paris, London and Berlin. As the experience of a total war lay still ahead, the national heroes elevated on plinths besides existing war memorials were not intended to express personal mourning or to manage bereavement. They were erected as morally charged expressions of specific national ideals. Based on a sample of some twenty public statues in Paris, London and Berlin, this paper identifies three strategies of intentional manipulation: compensating for military defeat by alternative interpretive patterns in France, overwriting the competing claims of different conceptions of nationhood in Prussia-Germany, and legitimising the nation-state on an imperial scale in Britain. Comparison of these three cases substantiates the claim that there were three ‘special paths’ for legitimising the nation through war, each dependent on historical contingencies (such as the trauma of defeat or experiences of victory). In all three cases, however, the experience of war served as a means of justifying national claims to power while omitting all reference to the inner make-up of each nation. At the same time, adequate historical assessment of metropolitan public statuary requires that public reception as well as official symbolism and rhetoric be taken into account. Responses to the statues indicate that the widespread popular appeal of national war myths was far from automatically achieved. Instead of fostering cohesion, the reception of cult figures occasionally came up against political controversies that served as factors limiting national propaganda.