Braudel Research Articles

Post-historicism, Post-territorialism, and the Problem of Scale: A Metacritical Appraisal of the Literary-Theoretical Paradigm of ‘Planetary Time’

Wai Chee Dimock’s literary-theoretical paradigm of ‘planetary time’ neatly fits the epithet ‘post-historicist/post-territorialist’ for its simultaneous repudiation of historicist and nationalist approaches to literary critical practice. Opposed to the absolute jurisdiction of temporal periods and spatial territories as literary analytic units, the ‘post-historicist/post-territorialist’ paradigm seeks to tap into the spatiotemporal entanglements of literary criticism to produce analyses of literature that trace the transtemporal and extraterritorial linkages forged by literary processes and their attendant actors. The article primarily focuses on Wai Chee Dimock’s literary analytic scale of ‘planetary time’, an extended temporal scale that, according to Dimock, is intrinsically coupled to a spatial scale of planetary dimensions. While subjecting Dimock’s literary-theoretical approach to a sustained metacritique, the article also intermittently engages with closely related paradigms that could shed more light on the nuances of literary analytic scales. Two analytic scales appropriated from the field of historiography – Fernand Braudel’s extended longue durée and Carlo Ginzburg’s episodic (micro)history – will not only lend an interdisciplinary perspective to this metacritical study, but also underscore the spatiotemporal implications of scale in literary criticism. These insights could help recalibrate literary critical practice by introducing greater self-reflexivity in its deployment of scale.

The month of August - an Annales approach to the history of the Kowie: August 1881 to August 1914

The Annales is an internationally renowned French school of historical analysis founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch and brilliantly expounded by Fernand Braudel in his classic work on rhe Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world (first published in 1949). By its emphasis on history that happened off the beaten track, the' Annales lends itself particularly well to rhe study of a local community. Its aim is inter alia to capture a community's mentalité, namely its peculiar attitudes and ethos as shaped by even the most elemental facts of its existence, including its pattern of weather. This article is an effort to analyse the mentalité of the Eastern Cape coastal community of the Kowie (Port Alfred) over a period of more than thirty years.

MUSICAL ENVIRONMENT IN THE CONDITIONS OF INDUSTRIAL URBANIZATION OF KAZAKHSTAN

The article is devoted to the processes of urbanization and expansion of the media space in the country, which every year give a significant impact to changing the organization and perception of Art. Culture in the new historical reality, has unlimited access to a variety of styles, genres, interpretations and manipulations with original sounds, which has never before been considered common place. These processes push aside previously available ways of perceiving art, thereby influencing the depth of meaning and perception of modern musical phenomena. The purpose of the study is to draw attention to the social and scientific need for studying types of communication activities in developed and developing countries, determined by the sociocultural situation and improving the standard of living of a person. Every act of contact between a recipient and an object of Art is unique, inimitable and individual. All over the world, the art of music - is no idea of ​​artistic influence and its manifestation in the structure of everyday life. From the point of view of musicology, responding to the relevance, issues of audiovisual distribution are a multidisciplinary problem, properly studied only in Western European and American culture. Summarizing the materials of the article, we can come to the conclusion that the industrial-urban form of life at the present stage of the domestic music industry is associated with a breakthrough in the field of mass communications and digital media, which entails certain changes in the spiritual space of a person.

History, Paranoia, Fragmentation1.

In his book Aion, Jung describes something like a quasi-Hegelian progressive historical realization of the Self in a perspective similar to Fernand Braudel's longue durée history. This article deals with a similar perspective, as it tries to focus on what we may call a "cultural complex" yet within its unfolding in historical time and belonging not to just one specific cultural group, but to a large cultural basin, which we may indicate as the "West". This complex marks the birth and development of modernity. The depth, pervasiveness and duration of this cultural complex permeates the lives and psychologies of all of those that are part of it. Therefore, every analytical project must take into account the underlying emotional, epistemic and social field within which this complex constellates. One of the main features of this (trans)cultural complex, strictly connected with the progressive fragmentation of the self and the transformation of the numinosum with its meaning-giving force, is paranoia. This article analyses the historical and cultural features that produce paranoia and fragmentation and determine paranoid symptoms and attitudes.

Being in a meaningful context. Nature and animal-assisted activities as perceived by adults with autism.

Animal-assisted and nature-based interventions in psychosocial treatment for various groups of clients have been studied internationally. However, there is little knowledge about how young adults with autism experience participation in such types of interventions. This clinical study aimed to describe the feasibility of animal-assisted and nature-based activities on a farm as a complementary intervention for young adults with autism and social withdrawal. The participants were aged 18-30 years, diagnosed with autism and social withdrawal, with no organised occupation during the previous year. Eleven of 13 participants completed a 12-week intervention in small groups. They took part in interviews before and after, which focused on their current life situation and expectations about, and experiences of the intervention. The feasibility was described in terms of participants' characteristics, attendance, and their experiences of participating in the activity. Data were analysed with descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis. The intervention was formed in collaboration with participating supervisors, ordinary clinical staff, and a young woman with a user perspective. The level of feasibility was found to be high. The mean participation rate during the activity days was 75% and varied from 50 to 100%. The analysis of the participants' experiences from the activity generated three categories, "Being in a meaningful context", "Creating a comfort zone" and "Developing structure in everyday life", and each of these included sub-categories. The main categories revealed a dynamic process based in meaningfulness, comfort and structure in everyday life. The positive experiences of undemanding activities, emotional relationships and non-verbal communication with the horses were prominent and might facilitate the development of social interaction. However, the intervention's timeframe of 12 weeks was experienced as too short for long-lasting change.

From fan citizenship to ‘fanspiracies’: Politics and participatory cultures in times of crisis?

Fan practices and behaviours have increasingly moved beyond fan communities into the political, economic and cultural structures of every day life. The proliferation of social media platforms has allowed both the progressive and reactionary aspects of fandom to converge in the public sphere, drawing on similar techniques, pleasures, and practices in order to interpret the world in a culture where the boundaries between popular and political communication are blurrier than they have ever been. This special issue of Convergence explores the synergies, tensions and conflicts at play in this new cultural terrain. It explores how ‘fan studies can be used to make sense of the seeming growth of conspiracy theory communities and right-wing movements, examines political participation as a form of fandom, and the ways in which social media can be used to organize against discriminatory cultures.

Information Support System for Forensic Activities: Current State and Directions of Development

The topic of informatization has long penetrated into a number of scientific fields, and information and new communication technologies are present in all spheres of society and structures of everyday life. Therefore, information processes are currently being studied at both the macro and micro levels. On the one hand, the global processes of informatization of economics, politics, and culture are studied, on the other – informatization and information processes in narrow fields of activity. Information began to be considered as the basis for changes taking place in society, rebuilding both its entire structure as a whole and the structure of individual types of human activities. In this regard, it should be noted that forensic expertise is particularly susceptible to various kinds of changes related to the processes of informatization of society. This is due to the fact that the process of expert research is, first of all, the process of transcoding information. Forensic expertise is inextricably linked with the concepts of information, information process, and informatization and cannot be considered in isolation from them.

Как Эммануэль Ле Руа Ладюри не стал микроисториком

The article analyzes the work of the outstanding French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023), a pupil of Ernest Labrousse and Fernand Braudel, one of the oldest and most prominent representatives of the third generation of the «Annals»’ school. Paying tribute to the variety of scientific interests of the historian, the author of the article focused on one aspect of his work – on the definition of E. Le Roy Ladurie, which regularly appears in modern historiography, as a follower of microhistory in its French variation. According to the author of the article, several early monographs of the scientist allow researchers to draw a similar conclusion: «Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324» (1975), «Le Carnaval de Romans: de la Chandeleur au Mercredi des cendres (1579–1580)» (1979), «La Sorcière de Jasmin» (1980). Nevertheless, the analysis of the methodology proposed in these works forces us to see in E. Le Roy Ladurie a specialist primarily in «fixed history», which in turn refers to the works of Cl. Levi-Strauss and E. E. Evans-Pritchard and allows us to take a fresh look at the phenomenon of the «Long Middle Ages».

(Re)thinking Repairs in the Longue Durée.

The history of repairs underscores the complexity of time through the practices of reusing and adapting objects. While this research field primarily focuses on the contemporary period, its close ties to present-day life risk obscuring the historical depth of these practices and the stakes they hold in various societies. How can we incorporate a truly historical perspective into our understanding of repairs? This article, a product of collective reflection, aims to broaden the analysis of repairs by embracing the concept of longue durée, a term coined by Fernand Braudel to describe an extensive span of historical time. Rather than striving to construct a grand narrative, this article addresses the challenge of acknowledging the diverse contexts and the discrepancies in how individuals interact with the lifespan of materials, artifacts, and their functionalities.

“All of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us”: History and (Post)memory in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje’s fictionalized memoir Running in the Family (1982) and his novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) are thematically concerned with a return to the country of birth and a confrontation with the past, both individual and collective. In both the memoir and the novel, the history of the author’s native Sri Lanka is not only consciously recorded, but also inscribed on material traces and on the human body, “terribly” and insidiously shaping subsequent generations. The article argues that this unconscious, hidden past involves gradual changes and developments that occur imperceptibly over the long term, including events whose effects are transmitted unconsciously through intergenerational (epigenetic) transfer and imprinted on individuals and communities. In both works, Ondaatje adopts a long-term perspective reminiscent of Fernand Braudel’s longue durée to rethink the Sri Lankan past in a way that dismisses a deterministic idea of historical inevitability. As argued by Walter Benjamin and contemporary interpreters of the longue durée, the future is not predetermined. The past holds unrealized potentialities, which may inspire and shape alternative futures. What sustains this way of thinking is a belief in the power of counterfactual thinking to subvert the inevitability of the current order or values.

Time to imagine an escape: investigating the consumer timework at play in augmented reality

PurposeWhile the spatial dimensions of augmented reality (AR) have received significant attention in the marketing literature, to date, there has been less consideration of its temporal dimensions. This paper aims to theorise digital timework through AR to understand a new form of consumption experience that offers short-lived, immersive forms of mundane, marketer-led escape from everyday life.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw upon Casey’s phenomenological work to explore the emergence of new dynamics of temporalisation through digitised play. An illustrative case study using AR shows how consumers use this temporalisation to find stability and comfort through projecting backwards (remembering) and forwards (imagining) in their lives.FindingsThe proliferation of novel digital technologies and platforms has radically transformed consumption experiences as the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, fantasy and reality and play and work have become increasingly blurred. The findings show how temporary escape is carved out within digital space and time, where controlled imaginings provide consumers with an illusion of control over their lives as they re-establish cohesion in a ruptured sense of time.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors consider the more critical implications of the offloading capacity of AR, which they show does not prevent cognitive processes such as imagination and remembering but rather puts limits on them. The authors show that these more short-lived, everyday types of digitised escape do not allow for an escape from the structures of everyday life within the market, as much of the previous literature suggests.Practical implicationsThe authors argue that corporations need to reflect upon the potential threats of immersive technologies such as AR in harming consumer escapism and take these into serious consideration as part of their strategic experiential design strategies to avoid leading to detrimental effects upon consumer well-being. More nuanced conceptualisations are required to unpack the antecedents of limiting people’s imagination and potentially limiting the fully fledged escape that consumers might desire.Originality/valuePrior work has conceptualised AR as offloading the need for imagination by making the absent present. The authors critically unpack the implications of this for a more fluid understanding of the temporal logics and limits of consumer escapism.

Ian Hacking’s Rewriting of Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Ian Hacking has argued that the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump acted as a historiographical source in his analysis of the laboratory style of thinking and doing. The present article analyzes Hacking’s appropriation of Shapin and Schaffer’s work as a rewriting of the history of English experimental philosophy of the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on the contingency/permanence tension with the aim of investigating the two historiographic narratives as attempts to overcome what Bernstein calls “Cartesian anxiety.” First, I examine the mundane historiography of Shapin and Schaffer and their philosophical commitment to finitism as constitutive of their historiographical approach. Second, I analyze Hacking’s appropriation of Fernand Braudel’s historiography in writing a material history of experimental philosophy. Finally, I address the notion of form of life as a nuclear point in the ways that Hacking and Shapin and Schaffer seek to move beyond Cartesian anxiety.

Crafts in the Time of Coronavirus

Crafts in the Time of Coronavirus

'Days of Frustration': A Qualitative Study of Adolescents' Thoughts and Experiences of Schooling after Early Dropout.

School dropout increases the risk of unemployment, health problems, and disability benefits. Employing an ecological-developmental perspective, we analyzed the interviews of thirteen students from a peripheral Norwegian county, aiming to explore the possible influence of upbringing and schooling on dropout. The analysis revealed that dropout was associated with an unstable family situation, lack of structure in everyday life, unresolved complex learning difficulties, bullying, and a tough existence in a rented room. The participants conveyed a sense of defeat, frustration, and an absence of meaningful alternatives. However, two participants had actively chosen to discontinue their education; this was because they preferred work practice to allow them time to mature and re-orientate in relation to future educational and career choices. Their families and social networks contributed actively to the implementation of their future plans. The findings point to the importance of studying interventions that may prevent school dropout, and that address central factors in the process of school dropout, such as social support, academic achievement, and parental involvement.

ARTIFICIAL CIVILIZATION AND THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF CIVILIZATION THEORY

Indonesia is entering an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is entering the life of the nation's civilization. Academic studies as material for making regulations related to the use of AI in the joints of the nation's life have not been carried out much. One of the important theories in the academic study of civilization is the basic theories of civilization discussed by Braudel and Kabuye Uthman Sulaiman. Fernand Braudel and Kabuye Uthman Sulaiman are two civilization theorists who represent old and contemporary mindsets, both of these thoughts if critically examined in the context of the 21st century when the world began to enter artificial civilization turned out to have some notes. The results of the research conducted on these two figures' thoughts found that thoughts about the theory of civilization need to be reviewed so that social science and humanities academics are able to analyze AI problems in the context of civilization

The Nature and Production of Urban Space in Latin America: A Historical Review of the Case of Ibagué (Colombia)

The production of urban space in Latin America turns out to be a social product resulting from a historical process in which natural space undergoes significant transformations. This paper analyses how the urban history of Ibagué (Colombia) is related to three historical processes crossed by nature, identifying common aspects with other Latin American cities: nature as a limit to urban growth (conquest and colony), nature as an artifice of urban space (modern city), and nature as a transition zone between the city and the countryside (metropolitan edge). Methodologically, the article is approached from the historical perspective proposed by Fernand Braudel as the longue durée. To this end, an analysis of primary sources was carried out. These sources allowed us to see how urban space was constructed and planned throughout history. The primary sources emphasized written sources: chronicles of the Indies, royal ordinances, municipal decrees, pilot plans for urban growth, and urban development plans. Visual sources were also used: maps, sketches, engravings, and photographs to construct an image of the city and its relationship with nature. The results showed the importance of urban planning by considering the relationship between urban space and nature as two inseparable elements and providing elements for reflecting on contemporary environmental problems.

Die frühneuzeitliche Kontrafaktur und ihre geschichtswissenschaftlichen Potenziale

Abstract Recently, there has been a marked increase in the interest in contrafacta among scholars in terms of sources, contexts, and technique, as well as in regard to systematic and terminological approaches. Focusing on the collections of contrafacta published in the second half of the 16th century by Georg Baumann the Elder in Erfurt, the article investigates the relevance underlaying music with new texts can have for historiography. Considering the importance of Italian secular repertory for Baumann’s prints with contrafacta on the one hand, and the wide range of re-texting strategies which – as the contributions of the Lutheran theologian and neo-Latin poet Ludwig Helmbold show – could exceed the pragmatic and pattern-oriented production of contrafacta on the other, the idea and meaning of two concepts prominent in Early Modern History are re-evaluated: Humanism and model-based thinking (the latter, not surprisingly, associated with Fernand Braudel’s famed modèle italien).

Re‐centring class‐making across borders at various durées: Translocational optic, coloniality of class theory and multi‐scalar capitalist dynamics

AbstractSociological research on cross‐border class‐making often centres on contemporary dynamics of social inequality in the context of migration and mobility. Relying on the cultural–sociological and processual understanding of 'class', the article integrates three bodies of literature to study complexities of global and transnational class‐making to overcome the 'presentist' bias. Building on the accounts of the Annales School, and specifically on Fernand Braudel's famous distinction between courte durée, moyenne durée and longue durée of historic time periods, the article brings together three different bodies of research: (i) transnational and intersectional approaches; (ii) conceptual history of class theory and (iii) theories of racial and multi‐scalar capitalist dynamics to develop a flexible and relational, but historic‐sensitive toolkit for the analysis of global and transnational class‐making. One of the greatest advantages of this multi‐temporal outlook is that it allows to avoid over‐generalizing accounts on the logics of class‐making and to unpick potentially heterogeneous dynamics of class (re)production.

Is Historical Cartography a Useful Tool for Landscape Analysis? A Perspective from Inland Spain (Zorita de los Canes, Guadalajara) from the Middle Ages to the Present

Historical cartography continues to be an essential resource in developing strategies for the analysis of anthropised landscapes. In recent years, the digitisation and conversion of a large number of pre-20th-century maps to modern geographic coordinate systems and data hierarchisation in GIS-integrated databases have opened up huge possibilities. In this paper, we highlight some of the advantages and issues that we observed in using historical cartography in the Iberian Peninsula heartlands by comparing archaeological data, textual sources and maps and various levels of information obtained for our area of study: the southeast of the present-day province of Guadalajara, Spain. Using the longue durée approach conceptualised by Fernand Braudel (1976), historical cartography enabled us to delve deeper into two essential aspects, land use and the road network, while providing elements of diachrony that suggest changes in the landscape in specific and disruptive periods.

From The Wealth of Nations to The Global City (over two hundred years of insights on the city and migration)

ABSTRACT The Epilogue recognizes the relevance of global perspectives in capturing imbrications of migration, urbanization and city-making in the twenty-first century. Fernand Braudel’s and Saskia Sassen’s respective oeuvres are emphasized as major contributions. Adam Smith is discussed as an important antecedent.