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In This Issue
| The June issue has three articles that take us from wigs to chocolate to modernity, and an AHR Forum that carries us across three oceans. It also includes our usual extensive section of book reviews. |
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Articles | |
In "Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France," Michael Kwass examines the social and cultural lives of the wig, one of the most successful consumer goods of the eighteenth century. He first charts the social diffusion of the wig, as it spread beyond elite circles to middling groups. Rather than validating simplistic conceptions of consumer revolution, the wig's diffusion illuminates how proliferation of personal accessories in the eighteenth century helped to expand an intermediate zone of consumption situated between aristocratic luxury and popular necessity. It also demonstrates how men as well as women were consumers of fashion in this period. The second part of the article considers the cultural meaning of the wig. Challenging long-standing theories of conspicuous consumption and consumer emulation, Kwass argues that taste leaders attempted to liberate France from a courtly consumer culture in which the main purpose of goods was to mark social status. Publicizing alternative values such as convenience, nature, and self, fashion commentators and wigmakers alike developed strikingly modern conceptions of post–Louis XIV wigs. Although such taste leaders rejected an older hierarchy of raw socio-legal rank, they constructed a new model of distinction that permitted novel consumer values to mediate relationships between consumption and status. Finally, the cultural life of the wig suggests a revision of J. C. Flügel's "great masculine renunciation," because the repudiation of extravagant wig styles did not necessarily reflect a hardening of gender boundaries.
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"Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics" by Marcy Norton offers a new account of Europeans' development of a taste for American chocolate in the sixteenth century. Europeans learned to consume chocolate in the same ways it was imbibed by indigenous Americans—as a fragrant, spicy, sweet, foamy, reddish beverage. While most prior accounts have assumed or asserted that Europeans modified American chocolate to suit their palates, Norton argues that the social conditions that created Spanish colonial and imperial rule led Europeans to adopt Mesoamerican aesthetics. Her findings challenge models of taste based on biological essentialism or cultural functionalism and instead demonstrate the importance of social contingency and somatic autonomy in the fashioning of taste.
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| Max Weber's famous phrase of 1917, the "disenchantment of the world," crystallized widespread belief that science had demystified wonders and marvels, secularism had supplanted religion, bureaucratization had quashed spontaneity, and contingent perspectives had replaced overarching meanings. In "Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review," Michael Saler excavates the underlying assumptions about modernity that have led authors to equate modernity with disenchantment. Within the past decade, he points out, historians in many fields have challenged this paradigm, arguing that the concept of "enchantment" is compatible with many of the tenets frequently ascribed to modernity, such as rationality and secularism. Those who argue that modernity is disenchanted tend to adhere to either a "binary" or a "dialectical" understanding of modernity. In the binary understanding, modernity is defined as being rational and secular, and enchantment encompasses its residual opposite, the irrational and the spiritual. In the dialectical understanding, modernity's claims to be rational and secular are revealed to be myths and superstitions: modernity's cherished tenets are ultimately transformed into their opposites. Historians of science, religion, and mass culture, among others, however, question both the binary and dialectical approaches. In place of the "either/or" structure of these approaches, they offer a "both/and" understanding; for them, modernity is characterized by irresolvable tensions between opposites, or "antinomies." In this antinomial approach, modernity is enchanted, in an ironic, disenchanted mode that (ideally) delights but does not delude. Finally, Saler examines the derivation of the discourse of modern disenchantment. Elites have enchanted themselves with the discourse of disenchantment, but that spell appears to be breaking, leaving a specifically modern, "disenchanted" enchantment in its wake. The antinomial approach to this question offers a new understanding of modernity, freeing historians from the iron cage of Max Weber's influential thesis concerning the "disenchantment of the world." |
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AHR Forum | |
The AHR Forum, "Oceans of History," features essays on three of the globe's great bodies of water, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific, offering three different perspectives on how the life and culture of these complex regions should be historically understood. Kären Wigen introduces the forum with a summary of the essays, suggesting several shared themes that run through them, despite the authors' care in delineating each ocean's specificity. She also notes the regrettable absence of the Indian Ocean from the forum, a regret that is shared by the editors. Owing to editorial and scheduling difficulties, the article on the Indian Ocean that we had hoped and indeed planned to include simply failed to materialize.
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In "The Mediterranean and the New Thalassology," Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell examine the place of the Mediterranean in the current revival of interest in sea and ocean history. They argue that this scholarly interest must result in more than newly conceived regional histories. The point of new spatial subdivisions is to stimulate novel questions about how large regions interact, as part of a rewarding historiography on the largest, even global, scale. The article shows how current work on the Mediterranean has grown from the fertile terrain of Fernand Braudel's geographically alert history and presents some of the more controversial aspects of making the Mediterranean an object of inquiry. The authors attempt in particular to respond to the critique of "Mediterraneanism" that has come from social anthropologists of the region. They propose that Mediterranean history continues to matter precisely because the particularities of the region make it a compellingly interesting element in the historiography of large-scale interactions. The goal of today's Mediterranean history should not be the "exceptionalism" with which interpreters of the region have often been taxed. Rather, Horden and Purcell offer a study of the region's historical common denominators, designed to elucidate the ways in which the relationships of entities on this scale can be studied systematically.
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In "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," Alison Games explores the convergence of the multiple strands of scholarly interest that have generated this new field of study, one which takes as its geographic unit of analysis the Atlantic Ocean and the four continents that surround it. She argues that Atlantic history is best approached as a slice of world history. The Atlantic, moreover, is a region that has logic as a unit of historical analysis only within a limited chronology. An Atlantic perspective can help historians understand changes within the region that a more limited geographic framework might obscure. Attempts to write a Braudelian Atlantic history, one that includes and connects the entire region, remain elusive, driven in part by methodological impediments, by the real disjunctions that characterized the Atlantic's historical and geographic components, by the disciplinary divisions that discourage historians from speaking to and writing for each other, and by the challenge of finding a vantage that is not rooted in any single place. Nonetheless, this article argues that such a perspective is desirable, and Games suggests some fruitful lines of inquiry.
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| Finally, in "The Pacific," Matt K. Matsuda tells us that defining "the Pacific" historically amounts to an exercise in drawing together multiple disciplines and scholarly domains. These include the expertise of historians studying particular Pacific Island groups; specialists of the "Pacific Rim" whose work concentrates on policy issues and economic development; and students and scholars of maritime, navigational, immigration, and diasporic studies around Oceania, East and Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Pacific histories are particularly marked by the influence of anthropological methods and approaches to cultural study, as well as by the contributions of ethnobotanists, musicologists, historical linguists, marine archaeologists, poets, novelists, and political activists. In these contexts, Pacific histories have been significantly developed by scholars whose works attempt to continually redefine the notion of academic knowledge by incorporating performative, artistic, and community-based elements and practices. These approaches are employed to reconsider long-standing narratives of the Pacific as a space of "discovery" or "paradise" by highlighting the deep implication of island peoples in Pacific-wide encounter and struggle from ancient outrigger voyaging and settlements to the legacies of colonial politics, the Pacific War, and underseas nuclear testing. |
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