Preliminary Programme

Social scientists rightly historicize nationalism as a prolonged transglobal process through which various individuals, institutions, and organizations were transfigured by identification with a nation-state. This is clearly an accurate rendition, but it leaves out an important component: the affective sensorium. Social and organizational focus comes about not through campaigning and intellectual debate so much as through the great array of sensations that engage people with collective identities at the bodily level. Attention in political science, sociology, and history has turned in recent years toward the senses, calling into question the bases of such presumedly natural (and apolitical) aspects of physical tastes, aptitudes, and inclinations.

My presentation argues that food pathways formed an integral part of nation-building. By examining cookbooks as material representations (and instantiations) of nationalism, I trace the corporalization of concepts of difference, community, and taste. Early American cookbooks, for example, simultaneously drew from the stock of English dishes and differentiated American cooking from British. The use of corn meal in bread created a dish different from its English forebear in both design and name, one reflective of the resources and tastes of the newly independent communities. In doing so, it made cornbread part of the American national project. As other nations were brought into being over the course of the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, they too developed collective culinary identities through the publication of cookbooks. I specifically examine Indian, Haitian, and Norwegian cookbooks, exploring how the creation of a system of nation-states starts with taste. (Show less)

During the first half of the 19th century Sweden was undergoing a rapid integration with the capitalistic world economy. A fundamental part if this process was a profound change of consumption patterns among ordinary people. This change is the focus of our research project. Earlier research has focused on describing and explaining the concrete changes in consumption during this period. Today we have a reasonably good knowledge of the use of new commodities like colonial goods and textiles among different social groups and the sexes. On the other hand we still have little understanding of the context of the consumption. The methods and sources hitherto used in historical studies of emerging and changing consumption patterns simply do not allow us to fully analyse and interpret the attitudes and circumstances of the use of specific consumer items.
Our research project takes as its point of departure a notion first conceived by the sociologist Werner Sombart and later developed by the historian Collin Campbell. Campbell claims in The romantic ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism that the origins of the consumer society should be sought in the dreams for new commodities and the desire of satisfaction by the use of new commodities. The purchase creates however disappointment and frustration, since reality does not correspond to the hopes pinned in advance. From this frustration new needs and consumption fantasies are born. The aim of this project is to investigate how these consumption fantasies were created and what they consisted of.
The British historian Maxine Berg stresses in Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain the connection between our senses and modern consumption. She says that the ”representations of fashion are typically sexualized”. She quotes Sombart who claims that “sensuous pleasure and erotic pleasure are essentially the same”. When capitalism and industrialization extended the opportunities for consumption to the lower classes, this resulted in an obsession for fashion and luxury, a “sensual arousal”. Therefore you can say, that in the first half of the nineteenth century, along with the agrarian, the demographic and the industrial revolutions, Sweden experienced – along with other western countries – a sensual revolution.
There is an extremely rich and currently underutilized source for understanding and analyzing the modern consumption society in contemporary literature. Nancy Armstrong, professor in literature, has shown in her study Desire and domestic fiction: a political history of the novel the great impact of the modern novel in 19th century England. Studies of Swedish contemporary literature, has convinced us that it can be used as a historical source. Hence our project has two specific goals: Firstly to deepen the understanding of the creation of the consumer society, and secondly to develop new methods using literature as a historical source: On the one hand, the Swedish fiction emerging during this time and pious literature, on the other. (Show less)

The hearth has always been an important space within the domestic environment. It served practical functions, warming the room and providing heat for cooking; but also formed a focus for communal activity and family life. As such, the material culture of the fireplace might be seen as essentially functional in nature – an impression confirmed in household inventories and paintings of domestic scenes from across Europe. Less frequently acknowledged is the symbolism of the hearth and the ways in which this was reflected in its material culture, from classical times to the present day. This includes: the fireplace and mantel themselves (from modest wooden surrounds to the grand marble structures of country houses), the imagery which adorned these structures (from the shrines of ancient Greece and Rome, through the religious messages characteristic of the seventeenth century to the classical designs of the eighteenth century and beyond), and the assemblage of goods ranged on and around the fireplace (culminating in the cluttered mantelpieces of Victorian parlours).
This session seeks to explore the materiality of these spaces from a variety of perspectives. We wish to examine the extent to which the hearth varied from room to room within the house, perhaps in relation to its function or level of privacy; from place to place, according to local culture, and from one epoch to the next. To what extent is it possible to identify a pan-European ‘material culture of the fireplace’? We also want to consider how the fireplace reflected changes in technology and in taste. What insights are offered into wider transformations in domestic material culture? Finally, we are interested in the relationship between the hearth and other ‘symbolic’ spaces within the house: for example, the closet, dressing table or even the piano. (Show less)

It is now common for people to live alone in a state of extended singleness. Semi-independent flats and flat-shares, independent and sub-divided houses, and multiple occupancy dwellings are features of the modern housing market and contain and express the cultural experience of the many who are not in formal association with others, whether by marriage or by de facto partnership. This type of homemaking, autonomous and largely separate from the intervention of wider family and kin groups, has been seen by historians to represent merely a transitional or ‘undeveloped’ state. In the long eighteenth century, it has been argued that the single household was statistically insignificant; that spinsters were too poor to found truly independent homes; and that bachelors invested little time in the home, merely reproducing what was expected of a polite domestic environment.

This paper seeks to address these assumptions. It begins by analysing the statistical and demographic background to demonstrate that a significant minority of the population never married. It then outlines the changing experience of being single during the period and describes the contexts for homemaking that single people faced. We then use key case studies to emphasise the varying consumption practices of single homemakers and their engagement with the wider world of shopping for the home. Our main concern is to reappraise the consumption strategies of the single homemaker in the period. During the long eighteenth century most homemakers from the middling sort and above were influenced by accepted notions of how a home should be constructed and presented and how appropriate levels of consumption should be both achieved and displayed. However, within these parameters there were still plenty of areas for choice. Different interiors could be created that ranged from the luxurious, metropolitan and fashionable to those with more simple regional items; from the comfortable and the individual crammed with affective goods and artefacts, to the denuded and spartan; and from the well managed to the dirty and untidy. By studying the homemaking of spinsters and bachelors we seek to examine these practices and thereby address a number of contested areas. These centre on gendered attitudes to the home, domesticity and gendered taste and the acceptability of expressing individual taste that deviated from normative constructions of the (marital) household.

This paper uses a framework derived from theories of consumption. It is also informed by gender history. (Show less)

The dominant narrative on the history of West German consumer culture tells us that since the middle of the 1950s we cannot only observe how mass consumption conquers and seduces the Germans, but also that this same process ultimately, and more or less logically, lead to a more diverse, more individual and finally more liberal and tolerant society. This process of (consumer) cultural liberalization was achieved against the resistance of conservative cultural elites during the 1950s confronting a youth that embraced enthusiastically the American model of popular mass culture. The past on the one side and the present/future on the other side obviously tend to represent well defined parts in such a story of modernization achieved against ‘the old habits’.

Against this backdrop the theme of ‘home and family’, which by now has often been described as one of the most conspicous cultural obsessions of the first two post-war decades, seems to play a very ambivalent role which we are still to understand more fully. On the one hand it represented continuity and tradition, partly because it was linked to a conservative ideal of gender roles, on the other hand it was conceived as the privileged sphere for the Wirtschafswunder to be transformed in a social reality, the sphere where one liked to imagine the realization of the new, open and democratic, market-liberal and consumer oriented Germany.

In this paper I propose to take a closer look at one crucial aspect of the ‘home and family’ disourse of the 1950s, namely housing and furniture, also known as ‘Wohnkultur’ in the language of the time. By looking at the interconnection of ways to discuss and represent the topic in a wide range of sources – lifestyle magazine, sociological studies as well as feature films – the paper aims more specifically at unravelling the relations of ‘the past’ and ‘the present/future’ as sources of moral authority in this specific context. In the early 1950s lifestyle magazines and professionals are busy with propagating allegedly new design styles and condemning ‘old bourgeois’ esthetics, using pre-fascist German tradition as a central argument for the reintroduction of modern design and ommitting carefully the also existing continuities throughout the Third Reich. On the one hand ‘bad’ design traditions are sharply distinguished from ‘good’ and ‘real’ antiquitiy, pointing to a more distant past, on the other hand one can observe a tendency to acknowledge the individual need to connect the personal past with a future oriented present. At the same time, several sociological studies of the decade diagnose the great continuity of the average furniture taste as well as the decreasing influence of older relatives on the decision making process of the younger generation. In addition, feature films are using furnishing items and styles to express the inner struggles of both men and women trying to come to terms with the profound societal and cultural changes they experience.
Since the subject matter of material culture at home is by definition a terrain of possible and even necessary mediation between the past and the present, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, it appears as a particularly suitable subject to read the modernization story against the grain and to ask for the moral significance of various ‘pasts’ in the creation and negotiation of various forms of conceptualizing ‘the modern’. (Show less)