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Klaus Nathaus and C. Clayton Childress convincingly argue that cultural and symbolic objects are produced before they are consumed and that therefore cultural historians should take a closer look at the social and economic conditions of cultural production. Instead of taking it for granted that mass reception inversely indicates the existence of a demand already ‘being there’, historians should dig into the production processes influenced (among others) by individual taste, material interest, and arbitrary decisions – or, as Nathaus, Childress and the often cited Richard A. Peterson would call it – contingency. While most of Nathaus and Childress’s examples stem from the field of music, I will in my response apply the cultural production concept to a non-musical field, namely documentary photography in the first half of the twentieth century. Further, I will raise some questions that still seem to be unanswered. Given that the causal relation between production and consumption by and large equals the chicken and egg problem, what sense does it make to shift attention from reception to production – especially when dealing with modifications of objects, commodities, or genres rather than inventions in the sense of ‘there was nothing like this before’? I will suggest to extend the concept beyond the study of ‘classical’ cultural objects – like novels or records – and to include commodities like food, clothes, or cars. Finally, I will raise the question of how to apply the production of culture perspective to socialist economies after 1945, which to my knowledge has not been tried yet.
What is striking about recent research on residential care is not only its national bias and its tendency to neglect regional variations in ‘texture’, but also its preoccupation with contemporary issues and its lack of historical context. The notion of contingency, that is, the idea that things might have evolved differently, often seems to be missing. Moreover, most of the literature appears to be one-dimensional, downplaying the diversity, complexity and ambiguity of real developments. It often lacks an awareness of the power of precedents in shaping society’s attitudes to residential care and the practical responses to this problem. This is particularly important because, as this article tries to demonstrate, the present situation of residential care reflects the cumulative impact of traditions and cultural norms, of past decisions and commitments.
As a striking phenomenon of Soviet consumption, Beriozka stores appeared in the late 1950s and existed until the end of the 1980s. This chain of stores was a state trade organization selling goods that were otherwise in short supply (cars, fashionable clothes, household appliances, etc.) for special ‘checks’ used as equivalents of foreign currency by special groups of Soviet citizens. Similar stores existed in other socialist countries. The article shows that these stores on the one hand became an element of the existing system of state-granted entitlements. The customers were Soviet citizens who earned money abroad as well as people who did not go abroad but received remittances from foreign sources. On the other hand, the development of the black market (barely persecuted by the state) made it possible to purchase Beriozka checks for roubles; so it granted access to sought-after goods (among them even goods from the West) to a wide range of consumers. Paradoxically, Beriozka was criticized and much frequented at the same time.
Marketization is a broad term with a wide range of meanings. It encompasses measures of deregulation and privatization as well as the perceived increase of an ›economic‹ logic in social relationships. For historical purposes, the term should not be narrowly defined, and nor should the concept of marketization be used in an ahistorical manner detached from contemporary usage. However, there are two questions which the historical analysis of marketization needs to address. First, what is the conceptual understanding of the market mechanism to which the term marketization is linked? Second, what is the relationship between marketization and economic theory?
Bis Ende 2015 werden 50 Prozent aller Chinesen über einen Internetzugang verfügen. Die Möglichkeiten für eine größer werdende Anzahl von Chinesen, online zu kommunizieren und zu konsumieren, hat eine Reihe von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern dazu inspiriert, sich mit Themen wie Zensur, Überwachung und Nutzung von sozialen Medien zu beschäftigen. Ein Großteil dieser Forschung baut auf der Prämisse einer antagonistischen Beziehung zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft auf. Allerdings weiß man bisher nur wenig darüber, welche Auswirkungen die staatlich geförderten und internetbasierten Kommunikationskanäle zwischen Regierungsbeamten und chinesischen Bürgern auf die Transformation der autoritären Einparteienherrschaft in China haben. Der vorliegende Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dieser Frage, indem er Chinas E-Government-Strategie einerseits zu globalen Entwicklungen in Beziehung setzt, andererseits im Kontext der sich verändernden Anreize untersucht, die politische Reformen in China in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten ermöglicht haben. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Bemühungen der chinesischen Einparteienregierung, die Interaktion zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft zu digitalisieren, großes Potenzial dafür birgt, das Wesen des chinesischen Staates zu verändern. Allerdings stellen diese Veränderungen keinen Paradigmenwechsel dahingehend dar, wie China regiert wird. Der wichtigste Aspekt dieser Veränderungen ist, dass sie die Möglichkeit bieten, das oftmals als „Diktatoren-Dilemma“ bezeichnete Problem zu lösen: Menschen in nichtdemokratischen Regierungssystemen haben Angst davor, den Herrschenden gegenüber ihre Meinung auszudrücken, und entziehen so dem Staat eine wichtige Informationsgrundlage. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Entwicklung hochintegrierter E-Government-Plattformen, wie sie sich die Technokraten der Kommunistischen Partei Chinas vorstellen, bestehender institutioneller Logik folgt und dringende Probleme zu lösen vermag. So wird die Chance darauf erhöht, dass diese Plattformen nachhaltig eingeführt werden.
This article examines the rise of aeromobile sprawl, which is defined here as aviation’s socio-environmental impact on people, places, and things, in Canada during the 1970s. It links aeromobile sprawl largely to state-led airport development and the effect that upgrading, expanding, and building new airports had on communities and landscapes. Accordingly, it shows that while aeromobile sprawl was to some extent an outcome of postwar developments not limited to aviation, the Canadian government and its partners also contributed to sprawl by endorsing various policies and strategies that shifted over the period in question. At the same time, these actions did not go unnoticed. Public critiques of aeromobile sprawl emerged as people increasingly objected to larger and busier airports operating near populated and non-industrial areas. This article demonstrates that debates in Canada about airport development and the rapid growth of aviation revealed sharply diverging views about how to best accommodate the mobility requirements of mass air travel within the country’s natural and built environments in the 1970s.
Since the 1950s, cycling policy in China has gone through three phases: from active encouragement (1955–1994) and systematic discouragement (1994–2008) to neglect and ambivalence (since the 2010s). Parallel to the expansion of automobility, the country has been unique in its development of innovations in electric-powered two-wheelers and a vibrant e-cycling practice since the 1980s. Electric bikes have given over 300 million low-status commuters and peddlers access to jobs and housing, even though planners have dismissed them as a problematic ›floating population‹ and remnants of the past. Given China’s current urban sustainable mobility challenges and ambition to become the world’s first ›Ecological Civilization‹ (2013), China’s bicycle industry, e-vehicle manufacturers, and the e-commerce sector may offer an alternative to the US-based ›car civilization‹ if ecological (e-cycles) and social (low-status workers) sustainability are brought into one analytical frame.
Research on the commons, and its historical enclosure, has largely restricted itself to rural areas and the frontier. This article examines the declining access to Rio de Janeiro’s urban commons, its streets and its squares. Into the nineteenth century, residents perceived Rio’s streets as remnants of nature, left intact to give access to the built environment. The streets served as a diverse human habitat, a place for community, play, work, and commerce. With the arrival of the automobile, Rio’s public spaces began to be transformed into spaces set aside largely for movement. The automotive class, which in Brazil remained a tiny minority, captured most of the streets’ spaces for driving and its squares and sidewalks for parking, in a sense closing the street off to many of its former functions. In fact, automotive movement justified – and its violence enforced – the elimination of street behaviors which the elite had been decrying unsuccessfully for decades. Compared to the developed world, the pace of automobilization in Rio was slow, but it had a profound impact from as early as the second decade of the century.
By analysing oral history interviews with industrial workers in Poland, this article adds some nuance to the study of post-industrial and post-socialist nostalgia. It presents diverse vernacular memories of the post-1989 systemic change from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism, and shows that nostalgia for an industrial ›golden age‹, although significant, is not the only way of making sense of this change. Rather, a distinctive feature of vernacular memory is the ambiguity about both socialism and capitalism. Recognising the variety of memories, the article underlines the critical potential of nostalgic currents for highlighting what is felt to be wrong with contemporary work culture. The article also differentiates between the vernacular memories of industrial communities recorded in oral history and institutionalised political memories in order to stress that the critical potential of nostalgic memories has been largely absent in the latter. In Poland, nostalgia for industrial life has been given little opportunity to become a reflective and critically useful mechanism to protect values that remain relevant in the present, such as the importance of sociability and agency in the workplace.
Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English. Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions
(2021)
This article interrogates the history of emotions at a pivotal moment in its growth as a discipline. It does so by bringing into conversation the ways in which scholars in Japan have approached ›nostalgia‹ (and emotions more broadly) as an object of study with concepts, theories, and methods prioritised by a predominantly Eurocentric field. It argues that Anglocentric notions of nostalgia as conceptual frameworks often neglect the particularisms that underlie the way that the Japanese language communicates and operationalizes cultural norms and codes of feeling. It also examines the aisthetic work of musicologist Tsugami Eisuke to help understand historical and psychological distinctions between ›nostalgia‹ and Japanese ideas of temporal ›longing‹, working towards a global history of emotions that meaningfully embraces multilateral and multi-lingual interaction. This article thus argues for a more nuanced way of discussing nostalgia cross-culturally, transcending dominant approaches in the field which are often grounded in a specifically Euro-Western experience but claim universal reach.