Cultures in Motion

by Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, Helmut Reimitz

Overview

In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history.



Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing—dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks—remains stationary.


In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691159096
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/26/2013
Series:	Publications in Partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University , #5
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. Bhavani Raman is an associate professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Helmut Reimitz is a professor in the Department of History at Princeton University..

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Cultures in Motion: An Introduction Daniel T. Rodgers 1

PART I: The Circulation of Cultural Practices 21

CHAPTER ONE: The Challenge Dance: Black-Irish Exchange in Antebellum America April F. Masten 23

CHAPTER TWO: Musical Itinerancy in a World of Nations: Germany, Its Music, and Its Musicians Celia Applegate 60

CHAPTER THREE: From Patriae Amator to Amator Pauperum and Back Again: Social Imagination and Social Change in the West between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ca. 300-600 Peter Brown 87

PART II: Objects in Transit 107

CHAPTER FOUR: Knowledge in Motion: Following Itineraries of Matter in the Early Modern World Pamela H. Smith 109

CHAPTER FIVE: Fashioning a Market: The Singer Sewing Machine in Colonial Lanka Nira Wickramasinghe 134

CHAPTER SIX: Speed Metal, Slow Tropics, Cold War: Alcoa in the Caribbean Mimi Sheller 165

PART III: Translations 195

CHAPTER SEVEN: The True Story of Ah Jake: Language, Labor, and Justice in Late-Nineteenth-Century Sierra County, California Mae M. Ngai 197

CHAPTER EIGHT: Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Europe Harold J. Cook 215

CHAPTER NINE: Transnational Feminism: Event, Temporality, and Performance at the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference Jocelyn Olcott 241

AFTERWORDS 267-278

Itinerancy and Power Bhavani Raman 267

From Cultures to Cultural Practices and Back Again Helmut Reimitz 270

List of Papers 279

List of Contributors 283

Notes 285

Index 357

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Cultures in Motion represents first-rate scholarship and opens up a critical new space for historiography. Exploring the movement of things, ideas, and other cultural forms, the book—and the introduction in particular—gives an independent existence and importance to such work, and raises original questions about historical change and intercultural understandings."—Thomas Bender, author of A Nation Among Nations

"This book provides a new approach to finding a language to describe the new realities that emerge from the interactions of geographically or temporally different cultural practices, material objects, and languages, as they meet in a given, shared space. The essays are engaging in subject matter and persuasively written, and the introduction is superb."—Barbara Metcalf, professor of history emerita, University of California, Davis

"This successful collection of essays focuses on the inherent instability of cultural spheres and the increasing recognition that traditional models of comparative, global, and transcultural/transnational investigation do not do justice to the complexities of human history. Cultures in Motion defines the contours of a new way of thinking and researching cultural history."—Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study

Editorial Reviews

"This successful collection of essays focuses on the inherent instability of cultural spheres and the increasing recognition that traditional models of comparative, global, and transcultural/transnational investigation do not do justice to the complexities of human history. Cultures in Motion defines the contours of a new way of thinking and researching cultural history."—Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study

From the Publisher