History and Social Sciences

Seminar description

Geoff Eley has called for a reintegration of what he calls two ‘analytics’: the ‘older prioritising of societal development and change’, on the one hand, and the ‘new preference for more modest and individualised sites of social and cultural investigation’, on the other. The departmental seminar will explore the current state of social history by looking at recent historiographic production on such topics as religion, social inequality, migration and consumption. It will, however, link examples of recent historiography to some classical texts on society and social life by authors such as Durkheim, Simmel, Marx etc. 

Each seminar is organised around collective reading of a classical text on the theme of the week’s seminar together with two contrasting historical pieces.  Participants in the seminar are expected to read all the week’s readings.

Programme

 

10 October 2011: The Return of Social History?

• E. J. Hobsbawm, ‚From Social History to the History of Society’,  Daedalus 100, (Winter 1971), 20-45

• Jürgen Kocka, ‘Losses, Gains and Opportunities: Social History Today’,  Journal of Social History 37.1., 2003, 21-28

• William Sewell, ‘Whatever happened to the ‘Social’ in Social History’, in: Joan W.Scott and Debra Keates (eds.), Schools of Thought, Princeton 2001, 209-26

 

 

17 October 2011: Class

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:  Engels’s  1885 preface, ch.1 and ch. 7 (summary)

• Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, ‘What is the Valency of Class Now?’ in Eley and Nield, The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social?, ch.5

• Claire Zalc, Elite de Facade et Mirages de l’Indépendance: les petits entrepreneurs étrangers en France dans L’Entre-Deux-Guerres, in Historical Reflections 2010, 94-112

 

 

26 October 2011: Philanthropy

(please note that the seminar will move for this week from Monday to Wednesday morning in Cappella) 

• Mauss, “Essai sur le don” (1925). Extract in English  

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: a Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society, Oxford, 1971, chap. 13

• Sandrine Kott, ‘Le don comme rituel en R.D.A.: Instrument de domination et pratiques quotidiennes’, Le Mouvement social  194, 2001, 67-83

 

31 October 2011 - The EUI is Closed

 

7 November:  Consumption

• Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: an Economic Study of Institutions (1899, reprinted New York, 1919) chs.1 and 4 (Introduction and Conspicuous Consumption)

• Frank Trentmann, ‘The Modern Genealogy of the  Consumer. Meanings, identities and Political Synapses’ in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, London 2006, 19-69

• Michelle Craig McDonald  and Steven Topik, Americanizing Coffee. The Refashioning of a Consumer Culture,In. Food and Globalization.Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, ed-by Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann , Oxford –New York 2008, 109-128

 

 

14 November: Popular Protest

• Charles Tilly, ‘Collective Violence in European Perspective’ in Ted Gurr ed., Violence in America, 3rd edition, 62-100 (For an overview of Tilly’s changing views on collective violence, see Michael Hanagan, ‘Charles  Tilly and Violent France’, French Historical Studies, 33 :2 (Spring 2010)

• Benjamin Ziemann, ‘The Code of Protest : Images of Peace in the West German Peace Movements, 1945-1990’ Contemporary European History 17, 2, 2008,237-261

• Carl J.Griffon, The Violent Captain Swing, in: Past and Present 209, 2010,149- 180

 

 

21 November: Urban History

• Georg Simmel, ‘Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben’

• The English version ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ 

•Maiken Umbach, ‘German Cities, Bourgeois Modernism and Liberal Governmentality – Some Reflections’ 

• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘The Gas Lighting Controversy : Technological Risk, Expertise, and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London’ in Urban History, Journal of Urban History, 2007, 33, 5, 729-755

 

 

28 November:  Migrations and Diasporas

• Rogers Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, in  Ethnic and Racial Studies 28/1, 2005, 1-19

• Nancy Green, The Modern Jewish Diaspora: Eastern European Jews in New York, London and Paris,  in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (eds.): European migrants. Global and local perspectives, Boston 1996, 263-281 

• Dirk Hoerder, The Global and the Local in Migrants' Experiences: Multiple Social Spaces in a Long Term perspective, in: Dirk Hoerder et. al (eds.), Negotiating Transcultural Lives. Blongings and Social Capital among Youth in Comparative Perspective, Goettingen 2005, 235-256

 

5 December: Material Culture in Global Perspective

• Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” in idem (ed.), The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge 1986), pp. 3-63, pp. 3-11 online 

• Marco Belfanti. ‘Was Fashion a European Invention?’, Journal of Global History, 3 (2008): pp. 419–43

• Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism’, American Historical Review, 109/3 (2004):  755–81

 

 

12 December:  Religion

• Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’  in his Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, 179-196.

• William Christian, ‘Religious Apparitions and the Cold War’,  in Eric R. Wolf, ‘Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities’ , 239-66. 

• Michael O’Sullivan, ‘West German Miracles: Catholic Mystics, Church Hierarchy, and Postwar Popular Culture’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/ Studies in Contemporary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2009): 11-34

Special Reading

• Introductory text: Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: from cultural history to the history of society, Michigan 2005