Consumption and Material Culture

"當代的中國大陸已成為全球的消費大國，各個大城市裡名牌店林立。然而早在三、四百年前江南的大城市裡，已經可以看到休閑消費的繁榮現象。休閑消費如何改變了城市的空間？店舖為因應消費需求如何改造其空間配置？休閑的空間如何擴大與分化？私人性質的休閑空間為何走向公共化？男性與女性在消費空間上有何差異？本書嘗試將「空間」的觀念帶入到消費研究的領域，探討明清城市內休閑消費活動如何改變了空間結構，進而分析現象背後所反映的社會關係與權力糾結。
本書分成三篇，各篇有兩章，分別從六個面向來探析。上篇從休閑與購物兩方面來探討明清城市的消費性格與消費的動力。中篇兩章則是以城市休閑消費所反映的社會空間為主題，分別以蘇州的園林與旅遊為例。下篇的兩章主要是關於兩性購物消費的議題。透過上述各章的分析與討論，作者在結論裡分析明清城市消費空間變遷所具有的三層意義。作者總結指出「消費」就是城市性格的重要特徵，同時也以休閑消費的吸引力來解釋明清鄉紳逐漸城居化的原因，並說明十八世紀江南官紳對休閑消費的觀念有去道德化與去政治化的可能性。
My previous monograph, Luxurious Taste: Consumer Society and Literati during the Late Ming (2007) discussed the formation of a so-called consumer society during the Ming Dynasty, a society that had its foundations in urban environments.  My new work, Urban Pleasures: Leisure Consumption and Spatial Transformation in Jiangnan Cities during the Ming-Qing Period, focuses on the diversity of leisure and shopping activities and spaces that marked lifestyles and life experiences in cities from the mid-Ming to the mid-Qing period. I consider the concept of “space” in the field of consumption research, argue for the effects of consumption on changing spatial configurations, and explore the social relations and political negotiations behind the changes in the major cities of the Ming and the Qing.

Urban Pleasures is divided into three sections, each consisting of two chapters, which collectively explore the subject from six aspects. Part One focuses on the characteristics and incentives of consumption in Ming and Qing cities through aspects of leisure and shopping. The two chapters in Part Two explore mainly the social space reflected in urban leisure consumption. These two chapters use Suzhou as a case study to show how urban gardens were converted from private leisure spaces to public spaces and explore the evolution of tourism space from the Ming to Qing periods. The two chapters in the last part of the book center on the issue of gender and consumption. Based on the analysis and discussion throughout these chapters, the conclusion explores the significance of variations in urban consumer space in the Ming and Qing on three levels, namely: the spatial practice of consumption, the social production of consumer space, and the political negotiation of urban spaces.  “Consumerism” was an integral part of the characteristics of “urbanity” during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The appeal of leisure consumption helps explain why the gentry often moved their residences from the country to the city from the mid-Ming period on. As well, the literati conception of leisure consumption was potentially de-moralized and de-politicized during the eighteenth century.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands uses a Chinese
perspective to examine the capacity of Chinese brand culture to
serve as a complement to existing models of brand globalization.
Moving away from the trend to study the managerial aspects of
Western brand building in Chinese contexts, we examine how
Chinese branding efforts express significant aspects of their own
brand culture. Our selection of Jay Chou, the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Opening ceremony, and Shanghai Tang, an aspiring global fashion brand with aesthetic roots in Chinese historical culture, as illustrative cases, is fully consistent with this unwritten and unspoken consensus around exploiting Chinese cultural specificity towards the global development of Chinese brands. Although these three cases may seem “under the radar,” we believe that, together, they provide unique insights into the relation between brands and Chinese culture, and offer intriguing possibilities for thinking about global Chinese brands.

Comment le rapport aux objets matériels intervient-il dans la construction des sujets? La pause café-cigarette(s), l'usage du cannabis et le jeu vidéo sont les terrains de recherche décrits et analysés ici. Cet ouvrage approche les espaces de négociation entre norme et déviance, normal et pathologique, rituel et dépendance dont disposent leurs pratiquants. Derrière l'analyse de ces modes de subjectivation se dessinent les normes et valeurs d'une société contemporaine centrée sur la responsabilité et l'autonomie.

This most recent edition of the bibliography contains almost 21,200 titles in English (64%) and French (36%), with an introductory section on historiography. It deals with every aspect of Italian history and culture from the Late Renaissance to the French Revolution.

The 'Past Sense' Project (PSP) brings together contemporary and historical archaeology, and psychotherapy, to consider the significance of material culture within contexts of domestic and sexual abuse, past and present. PSP will pilot a range of approaches to explore how collaborative community encounters with historic landscapes and buildings, artefacts, and other historical sources might enhance the process of identity (re-)construction and trauma management, for survivors of childhood and adulthood violence and abuse.
Methods include experimental auto- and co-archaeologies that integrate personal narratives and reflections within analyses of data obtained from archaeological surface- and building surveys, and auto-archive material. This will involve considering the (re)construction of meanings for material culture in relation to memory and identity, through studies of artefact biographies, and attending to the production and appropriation of transitional objects, through autobiographical studies.
We will also test the incorporation of recording, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological and other historical material (including written evidence, oral histories, photography, and artistic images) from earlier periods (particularly the 19th - mid 20th centuries) within community work – potentially involving creative elements (such as storytelling and artwork). In doing so, we will explore how engagement with material relating to domestic life in the more distant past (where appropriate, integrating historical material relating to domestic and sexual violence) might enable traumatised individuals and groups to confront experiences of violence in the more recent past. By examining diachronically continuous and changing abusive practices, and socio-political responses to abuse, we aim to foster recognition of dominant ideologies, and the practical, detrimental, effects of structural gender inequality. Emphasising acts of resistance to violence in and around the home, we endeavour to highlight personal and collective achievements that might reinforce and augment both a sense of self, and of community, for survivors of abuse.

In virtual worlds, consumption of digital, virtual commodities is apparently limitless. In game-oriented worlds like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI the acquisition of desirable goods is limited only by skill, time and patience – but mostly patience. Given enough attempts to kill an enormously powerful monster, each player will receive the item she desires. What limits can be meaningfully placed on consumption in an economy of such apparent abundance that patience is the main obstacle to possession, a world in which everyone could eventually acquire everything given enough time?

This paper examines two limits of a spectrum of self-imposed limits to virtual consumption as explained by players of Final Fantasy XI with the moral limits of arbitrage at one end, and a focus on collective accumulation of wealth at the other. The moral constraints on arbitrage in FFXI are tied to a deeply rooted sense of economic fairplay and a strong – and surprisingly pervasive, given that this research was conducted before the financial crisis – ideology of “fair” rather than “free” markets. Some economic behaviour that is morally questionable, such as price gouging and supply manipulation, is understood not only as market manipulation that detracts from users’ game play experience, but also as a threat to players’ enjoyment of the virtual world of FFXI as a commodity, and their acquisition of digital virtual commodities. Players band together in linkshells (guilds) in FFXI to defeat powerful foes and acquire powerful and highly desirable equipment, or more baldly put, to increase their consumption capacity. Distribution of goods through these organisations can be a fraught affair, but generally, the spoils of conquest are distributed evenly. Though such rewards are individually held, the prestige and power of the organisation is increased as its members acquire increasingly sought-after goods, transforming individual accumulation and consumption into collective achievement.

ABSTRACT In the article, we make an attempt at discussing what it means that our reality is commodified, what the consequences of this are, how we commodify our bodies and what role in this process is played by cyborgization, as well as what the relation between commodification and disembodiment is. These issues seem to be significant, because when the consumptionist and neoliberal discourse is reconstructed, the aspect of commodification of a human through cyborgization is omitted or marginalized. And such a context of commodification seems to be especially important, as it constitutes the idea of radical questioning of a biological body as a commodity of high market value. Thus, it constitutes the paradox of the commodification of body, i.e. a situation when the most attractive (from the consumer’s point view) body is a body that is disembodied to the maximum.

Les taillades, vaste gamme d’incisions opérées sur les étoffes, sont un reflet de l’impact de la réglementation protocolaire et somptuaire sur la créativité des tailleurs pour garantir l’originalité de paraître de leur noble clientèle. Alors, quand Christoph Amberger portraiture Charles Quint en 1532 avec une paire de gants dont un seul est entaillé, il crée une iconographie qui pose la question des frontières entre image de mode et illusion picturale et interroge les enjeux de cette effigie pour présenter l’empereur à la société de cour.

La civilisation du journal ne voit pas seulement apparaître une circulation accrue des idées, une extension du lectorat, un mode d’information tissé de romanesque et de nouveaux rythmes liés à la quotidienneté. Elle instaure aussi un rapport spécifique à l’objet en papier. À l’heure où triomphe la chose imprimée, la culture médiatique est éminemment matérielle : manipulations, appropriations, circulations invitent à considérer les usages concrets du livre, du journal, de la brochure et de l’affiche, depuis les modes d’étalage à la vente jusqu’aux modalités de collection du livre et de conservation du roman-feuilleton, en passant par le démembrement du tract et le recyclage de l’affiche. Cet article examine les objets en papier produits par les éditeurs de pittoresques et de littérature panoramique dans les années 1830-1860 en France.

Una de las líneas de investigación en historia económica que está cobrando mayor protagonismo en los últimos años es la dedicada al mercado de segunda mano, a la reventa y reciclaje de objetos utilizados anteriormente por otras per-sonas. Se trata sin duda de un tema que se relaciona muy directamente con la historia del consumo y que expresa como pocos el nivel de comercialización al que llegaron algunas sociedades preindustriales europeas, las cuales se hallaban completamente integradas, hasta en sus niveles más bajos, en las redes del mer-cado. Han sido los modernistas los pioneros en este campo, con los estudios de P. Allerston, M. Ginsburg, B. Lemire, E. Sanderson, E. Welch, J. Stobart o H. Deceulaer, entre otros, pero ya antes, en los siglos finales de la Edad Media, es posible seguir los rastros de ese activo comercio de lo usado, que en mi caso llevo unos años estudiando a partir del ejemplo de la ciudad de Valencia en los siglos xIv y xv 1. Se ha podido así constatar que no estamos ni mucho menos ante un fenó-meno marginal, sino ante un mercado básico que dominó la mayor parte de los circuitos de intercambio de algunos bienes, como los muebles o las prendas de vestir, hasta bien entrado el siglo xIx, cuando la revolución industrial comenzó a introducir la producción en cadena de objetos de uso cotidiano, e hizo poco a poco menos necesario el exprimir al máximo su uso. Más incluso, el mercado de segunda mano contribuyó de forma decisiva a modelar los comportamientos y los modelos de consumo de las clases medias y bajas de aquella sociedad, y al mismo tiempo, si lo observamos desde el punto de vista de los vendedores, se convirtió en una fuente primordial de liquidez para buena parte de la pobla-ción, que conseguía así el dinero que necesitaba en un momento concreto de su vida, desprendiéndose de una parte de sus bienes o empeñándolos de forma 1 Véase, entre los estudios de los modernistas,

Étude approfondie de l’iconographie textile et vestimentaire du portrait de François Ier peint par Jean Clouet afin de proposer une relecture d’une herméneutique plus complexe que ne l’ont laissé penser les recherches fondamentales de Cécile Scailliérez. Riche de découvertes inédites quant à l’habillement du portrait, c’est à la fois sa fonction, son commanditaire et sa datation qui ont pu être précisés.

Shifting from representationally-oriented analysis of images to analysis of practices—the production, circulation and consumption of tourists’ images, and from photos created by tourists to photos staged, produced and displayed by the industry, this article offers a qualitative, ethnographic study of tourism’s visual culture.
Through observations conducted on a cruise ship, the author offers up-close depiction of photo-taking routines, and of the public display of multiple images of vacationing tourists. The article critically accounts for tourists’ desire to be photographed and portrayed by the industry in terms of visual surveillance (Foucault) under contemporary neoliberal visual regime. It is further argued that public displays of tourists’ images create, through collective  ediation/mediatization, a commercially assembled touristic collective or public.

Este estudio analiza procesos contemporáneos de cambio cultural en dos áreas rurales del Noroeste de España. Ambas estuvieron habitadas por grupos sociales con una marcada identidad cultural que ha dejado su impronta en la cultura material: los vaqueiros d’alzada y los maragatos. Mediante una metodología arqueológica se analizan las casas de tres pueblos en cada caso de estudio, desvelando cómo la materialidad juega un papel fundamental en los procesos de cambio cultural. En líneas generales, se produce un tránsito entre las lógicas preindustriales de la domesticidad campesina y la concepción de la casa como un instrumento representacional que sirve para exhibir capital simbólico y social a personas de ámbitos urbanos con mentalidades individualizadas. El estudio muestra cómo la combinación de metodologías arqueológicas y etnográficas puede politizar contextos de cambio cultural contemporáneos aparentemente neutros.

Palabras claves: cambio cultural, cultura material, arqueología de los espacios domésticos, gestión del patrimonio.
This paper explores contemporary processes of cultural change in two rural areas of northwest Spain. These areas were inhabited by social groups with strong cultural identities that have made its mark in the material culture: the Vaqueiros d’Alzada and the Maragatos. The houses of three villages in each case study are analyzed through an archaeological methodology, revealing the key role materiality plays in processes of cultural change. Overall, there is a transition between preindustrial forms of peasant domesticity towards a conception of the house as a representational device used to display social and symbolic capital by highly individualized people from urban areas. The study shows how a combination of archaeological and ethnographic methodologies can politicize contemporary contexts of cultural change that are apparently neutral. Key words: Cultural change, material culture, household archaeology, cultural heritage management.

A short article on my research on Cape Town's craft beer industry. It argues that craft beer is a new expression of social distinction acting through the desire of high-end consumers (who seek out individuation through alternative lines of consumption) to buy the more discerned products of human labor - such as handmade things, more personal and exclusive articles; i.e. CRAFT beer.

The Iron Age societies of the southeastern Iberian Peninsula, like their Greek and Etruscan counterparts, used stone sculptures to decorate their sanctuaries and cemeteries. Limestone was the raw material used. While abundant throughout the region, it was not always of sufficient quality to implement the iconographic projects at hand. This paper describes a study of Jutia monument (fourth to second centuries BCE), an architectural structure supporting a number of zoomorphic sculptures. Located at a distance from any major city of the time, the sculptor’s workshop had to select the best materials in the surrounds. The present study aims to establish the origin of the limestone used and ascertain how decisions were made and collective work invested to build this monument. A geological study of the possible areas of origin is supplemented with the petrological characterisation of the respective outcropped materials and the archaeological elements recovered. Colour parameters, ultrasound pulse velocity (UPV) and limestone hardness and geochemical composition, the latter using a handheld XRF instrument, are also determined. The findings reveal that the figures were sculpted from Upper Miocene calcarenite or sandy limestones quarried at around 3 km from the site. In contrast, other parts of the building were erected with bioclastic limestone from the immediate surrounds, at just 200 m from the monument.

Focusing on the account book of the MP and antiquary Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644), which covers the decade of his life in which he came of age, was knighted, and embarked on an ambitious political and courtly career, this article argues that his account book was a space in which Dering recorded momentous life events and meditated upon his purchases. Dering reveled in his attire, spending a great deal of money on it, as well as taking the time to record each element of its construction and decorative design in minute detail. Purchasing luxury goods – particularly clothing – was an important way for an ambitious politician to express his social, emotional and political links to patrons, and to show his suitability for promotion. While he begins the account book in 1619 by chastising himself for spending too much in a “prodigal year,” by the end of the account book in 1628, Dering seems content to buy expensive goods, including a costly linen damask tablecloth depicting the story of the prodigal son. This article traces Dering’s acquisition of luxury goods at home in Kent, in London and overseas, and places him in relation to contemporary discourses of luxury and prodigality. It argues that Dering’s consumption of luxury goods was part of a wider project of self-definition, which included having his portrait painted, and even forging his family history.

The Household Meals Project (HMP ) looks at the division of food-related chores (shopping, putting supplies away, food preparation, cleaning up, garbage, and recycling) in 150 middle-class households in suburban and urban New York. The mixed-methods study employs quantitative, qualitative and visual (photographic) data. Issues focused on include: the micro-sociological dynamics of power and accommodation within households; how the praxis of household food chores serves as a distinct power base for women, and one that is transmitted inter-generationally as a vital component of female identity; how the cultural territory of domestic food practices serves as a site where social change is both produced and resisted, often simultaneously; and identification of several socio-historical trends in the U.S. over the last century which have acted to increase the gender imbalance in domestic food work, even as paid work and other domestic labor have moved toward gender equality. These issues all stem from a seemingly simple question: What factors lie behind the continuation of female responsibility for the majority of food-related chores in dual-headed households?
Among the findings: both women and men tend to see the praxis of food chores as a health-related, emotionally freighted vocational discipline--an unpaid job particularly geared toward women that engages the work ethic traditionally associated with paid employment--rather than as a neutral set of tasks that can be done equally well by anyone. In addition, a comparison of chore-specific data from a 1980s study with the HMP 's data reveals identifiable change in who does the work, while still maintaining female-dominated "ownership" of these responsibilities.
This work explores how the combination of personal expectations and experiences, larger social trends, and the physical setting of kitchens influence and shape the daily fulfillment of food-related responsibilities. Through this synthesis, it becomes clear that the food-related home environment--conscious, unconscious, physical, and symbolic--serves as a source of both social stability and instability as it reflects and generates social change. Far from a passive repository of private practices, household meals are seen to be a potent force in cultural, political, and economic life.

""Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. Far richer in information and more incisive than America at Home (Smolan and Erwitt), it also moves well beyond Rick Smolan's Day in the Life series. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that none of these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Media reactions to early findings from the nine-year project that spawned this book indicate that it will appeal not only to scientists but also to the book-buying public, people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience, as a sample of Italians' and Swedes' responses to our corpus of photographs and our study's findings have demonstrated. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history."

Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize - 2012

The first edition (July 2012) sold out in late summer 2012.  The second printing is available on as of October 15, 2012.

Available at the UNM Press: http://www.unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000005616&Page=book

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/life.at.home.in.the.twentyfirst.century?ref=hl""

Introduction The volume in which this essay sits explores the long and social relationship between humans and alcohol, but, of course, no one really orders a pint of alcohol to drink. As Michael Dietler (this volume, Chapter 8), Lewis Daly (this volume, Chapter 9), and Asher Rosinger (this volume, Chapter 10) make clear, people have created a huge range of fermented beverages over time, with very different tastes, qualities, and uses. We also know that humans have not routinely drunk alcoholic beverages from their hands, nor (with the notable recent exception of the beer bottle and can) do they tend to drink from storage or serving vessels. Yet, by focusing on the manufacture of, trade in, and physical and psychological effects of alcoholic beverages, scholars can sometimes appear to imply that, in lived experience, alcohol drinking looked something like this: Moreover, intoxicating drinks are not, of themselves, inherently pleasurable. Learning to like wine, beer, tea and coffee, and how much and how best to drink them, has long been part of growing up, in Britain as elsewhere. The taste for, and effects of, alcoholic drinks is a continually evolving and contingent process-as much over the short lifespan of an individual life as it is for human societies over aeons of time. (Burnett, 1999; Courtwright, 2001; Herring et al., 2013; Withington & McShane, 2014) As we reach for a more nuanced and materialized social history of human drinking practices , physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad has usefully refocused our attention on the performativity of matter in social situations. She proposes a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real [and of] the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve. (Barad, 2003: 802)

Within the past decade, material disorder—especially that of the domestic variety—has come to stand alternately as evidence, symptom, and potential cause of mental disorder in the North American popular and psychiatric imagination. Sources ranging from the newly defined Hoarding Disorder diagnosis in the DSM-V, to popular media, to agents of the burgeoning clutter-management industry describe disorder in terms of an irrational attachment, closeness, or overidentification with objects. At the same time, these sources imagine order to result from the cool distance and controlled passion a person is able to maintain toward his or her possessions. Drawing on more than twenty interviews and numerous fieldwork encounters with professional organizers (POs) in Toronto between 2014 and 2015, this article describes how POs aim to reorient their clients materially, morally, and affectively to relieve the disorder they report in their lives. Here, I argue, POs emerge as a species of late capitalist healer whose interventions are animated by a paradoxical double movement. For just as POs act to loosen the object attachments and disrupt the “secret sympathy” their clients share with their possessions, they operate within a realm of magical correspondence where matter and mind are imagined to reflect and affect one another, and where bringing order to a client’s possessions means also bringing order to his or her mind.

Treasures Afoot:
Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018

Shoes tell us stories.  They can reveal the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of the people who wore them. Shoes that were crafted in the eighteenth century (the Georgian era of Anglo-American culture) and that now pepper museum collections have stories to tell about everyday life in early America.  They reveal that early Americans were sophisticated, selective consumers who sought out name-brand footwear from British craftsmen, ordering from those whom they associated with high quality, upscale fashion, genteel living.  In early America, even before the consumer revolution that began in the 1740s, American shoppers craved the elegant footwear that London cordwainers crafted and that filled the shelves of shops in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and beyond.  And, in a process of self-fashioning, they engaged in adaptive reuse, modifying their shoes to their own specifications, and making their British shoes American, connoting their own sense of national identity.  During the 1760s, resistance to the so-called “innovations” imposed by a novice king and a pliant Parliament challenged comfortable identities and loyalties and called into question these customary purchasing arrangements.  During these years, Americans navigated these boisterous seas of consumption, as leaders and consumers debated the role of “enemy” goods, by attempting both to impose non-intercourse agreements and promote local manufacture yet with many consumers continuing to wear their favored British shoes.

Die politischen, ökonomischen, kulturellen und emotionalen Hintergründe des »Gulaschkommunismus« am Beispiel der Mode.

Die Ungarische Volksrepublik als Land des »Gulaschkommunismus« – dieses Bild prägt auch heute noch die Erinnerungen ehemaliger Ungarn-Reisenden von beiden Seiten des Eisernen Vorhangs. Doch welche Ursachen, Hintergründe und Auswirkungen hatte der relative Wohlstand im staatssozialistischen Ungarn? Fruzsina Müller analysiert Strukturen und Deutungen des Konsums und vor allem der Mode zwischen 1945 und 1989. Vor allem die 1970er Jahre brachten in Ungarn die stabilste Versorgung und die breiteste Auswahl an Konsumprodukten innerhalb des »Ostblocks« hervor. Die Autorin untersucht zum einen die Institutionen der Bekleidungsindustrie, die trotz vielfachen Abhängigkeiten im hybriden System der reformierten Planwirtschaft auch produktive Spielräume hatten. Zum anderen beschreibt sie die verschiedenen Vorstellungen über Konsum und Mode im Staatssozialismus, wobei Herrschaftspraktiken, intellektuelle Denkmuster und generationsspezifische Haltungen sichtbar werden. Insbesondere anhand der »Jeansfrage« gelingt es Fruzsina Müller, individuelle und gruppenbezogene Antworten auf Globalisierung, Transnationalisierung und Nationalisierung im zweigeteilten Europa aufzuzeigen.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Preis der Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft.

Notions of sentimentality, nostalgia and timelessness cling to toys and the material world of childhood. In his landmark 1928 cultural history of toys, German art historian Karl Gröber framed playthings as material remnants of an illusionary landscape of child's play that could never be regained by adults. To Gröber and other scholars taking an early interest in the material world of play, children throughout the ages shared universal preferences for simple, even crude, playthings intended for vigorous use. It was only adults' inability to understand children's supposed proclivity for simplicity that resulted in what cultural theorist Walter Benjamin likened to a monstrous proliferation of elaborate, factory-produced technological miniatures entirely unsuited to creative play. Despite the ways in which childhood has been viewed through such universalizing lenses, notions of children, childhood and the material world surrounding them are not static but historically and culturally specific. Groundbreaking social-historical scholarship on the invention of childhood as a distinct stage of human development, most notably Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood, looked to the material artifacts of childhood and infancy as important evidence for widely-held, if rarely verbalized, attitudes towards children. Preceding mid twentieth-century social historians' interest in the historical recognition of childhood, a separate genre of literature took shape that made understudied objects like miniatures, dollhouses and tin soldiers the explicit focus of study. But such early toy histories, aimed primarily at toy collectors, were remarkably unconcerned with socio-cultural constructions of childhood. Only more recently have toys and the material culture of childhood emerged as an important category for serious scholarly inquiry. Informed by developments in the fields of childhood studies, sociology, archaeology and material culture studies, much of this growing body of interdisciplinary literature has scrutinized how toys reflected broader cultural norms of childhood and play. Accommodating more than children's immediate physical needs, distinct forms of furniture, clothing and playthings evolved in response to adult perceptions of children's changing needs. Such literature has likewise revealed that the toy's exclusive linkages with the realm of childhood represented a distinctly modern phenomenon in contrast to conceptual fluidity between automata, luxury miniatures and other early modern adult amusements, themes popularized through a series of recent museum exhibitions. Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn,' the projected volume Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood invites new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. Childhood by Design solicits essays that situate toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The projected volume seeks contributions that treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. As such, the present volume seeks to explore dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are welcome, but those that critically link historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture for children are particularly encouraged. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18 th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19 th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20 th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period

This paper discusses the social construction of the concept tween and whether this concept can be useful when engaging in research with children in the ages of 8–12. The paper will start by describing social construction, from there, the paper will move on to everyday concepts, before discussing the concept tweens as a theoretical and empirical concept. A question to be asked is: is the tween an everyday concept? Who or what constructs tweens? As the concept derived from marketing efforts (Cook and Kaiser 2004; Sørenssen 2014) another question becomes: should we use it as academics and general public? And if we do use the concept, what do we gain or possibly lose when using the term? What are the possible limits or benefits tied to engaging with this concept?

Coffee: A Global History was published in 2019 by Reaktion Books and is distributed in the United States by University of Chicago Press.  It's widely available for purchase on the internet.  Reviews include:

for the coffee nerd in your life . . . it's jam-packed with information. I don't think I have read a book this information dense and yet still incredibly readable possibly ever. A great little book that I recommend highly. If you want a tonne of history, a tonne of information, a tonne of background on coffee, this is a great gift'. 
James Hoffman, the You Tube coffee influencer and former World Barista Champion

The book that I wished had been published when I was working on the origins of coffee drinking in early modern Britain. It is very short and succinct and as such, it’s the obvious introduction to this fascinating topic. If you want a quick and reliable guide to the history of coffee, this is the book you need.
Dr Brian Cowan, Author of The Social Life of Coffee. The Emergence of the British Coffee House