Scholars Of Culture Research Articles

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Ego-Documents in the Structure of Historical Memory

The phenomenon of historical memory, while prominent in the present socio-humanitarian field has only recently drawn attention of book studies scholars in our country. It therefore becomes necessary in book culture scholarship to utilize the research potential of memory studies. This article focuses on ego-documents that include autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and other documents of personal origin, to reveal their role in the structure of historical memory and to show how their publication affects their preservation. The article shows that ego-documents as specific social practices function as institute for creation, preservation, and transmission of historical memory. Approaches and methods of memory studies utilized in this article can be used to develop methodological approaches for the research project pursued by the State Public Scientific and Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences entitled “Ego-documents on the history of the Great Patriotic War and other 20th century military conflicts in the archival depositories of Eastern Russia: problems of location, attribution, and publication”

Nation and Cultural Branding on Instagram:

Indonesian Arts and Culture Scholarship (IACS), which displays Indonesian arts, and culture, is a program that the Directorate of Public Diplomacy holds for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia. This program was started in 2003 and took place face-to-face until 2019. This program becomes an excellent opportunity for Indonesia to spread Indonesian values by forming nation-branding and creating a national image through soft diplomacy. This research analyzes how Instagram can play an essential role in promoting the 2019 IACS program so that the general public can know about this program. This research was analyzed by using the Circuit of Culture model. It is specified in Production moment to disclose how Studios and MoFA distributed messages through Instagram. By analyzing Instagram, we can find out how the account is managed and the content shared by the committee that holds the Instagram account. Data were taken based on interviews, social media, and government documents. The results are that MoFA does not use Instagram @iacs_kemlu well. It can be seen from the re-confirmation absence to the public regarding the date range of its program. As well as the minimal upload of documentation of the participants, MoFA is not carrying out the monitoring function regarding the inactive @bsbi_pdg account. Besides that, on Instagram @iacs.banyuwangi, Instagram management could be better. It can be seen on its Instagram account page.

Crafting Purity in Assyro-Babylonian Procedures

Assyro-Babylonian procedural texts for making cult objects dated to the 1st millennium BCE provide an untapped resource for examining scribal conceptions of craft and purity in the ancient world. Ritual procedures for “opening of the mouth” of a cult statue (mīs pî), and for manufacturing a ritual drum called the lilissu, constitute the principal focus of this two-part study. This work uses three themata – time, space, and the material world – to provide the scaffolding for a comparative analysis that spans various centuries and localities, highlighting the ways in which “purity” was crafted in cuneiform scholarly cultures.

Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch

Reviewed by: Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual ed. by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch Michael Meranze (bio) Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch; pp. xv + 199. London and New York: Routledge, 2021, $160.00, $48.95 paper, $44.05 ebook. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 cut a caesura into the history of Britain's penal practices. For centuries hangings had been consistent features of Britain's public space, with the Law's ultimate display designed to clarify before the eyes of the public the penalties that accrued to those who violated its most serious mandates. After the Act, that display would be moved within walls, separated from the crowd that had traditionally been its immediate audience. Although hangings would continue, a new, more intense process of mediation would replace the visceral and visual sight of the body broken on the gallows. Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch, tackles the implications and effects of this transition. Growing out of a conference held in 2018, Execution Culture is divided into two sections: the first focuses on the act of witnessing the execution and the second on the ways that executions were represented after 1868. The volume also raises a fascinating analytical question: how do you write the history of an absence? This question is partly addressed in James Gregory's treatment of the ways that the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 was depicted first by contemporaries and later in both popular and scholarly cultures. But it runs throughout the volume as both a methodological and analytical question. The first part of the volume, "Going to see a man hanged," takes up issues that will be most familiar to scholars of punishment. Rachel Bennett (on Scotland) and Matthew White (on London) show the myriad ways that the hanging, as well as fears about the effects of hanging, played across the nineteenth century. They remind the reader that, despite the apparent sameness of executions, they were, in fact, extremely varied in their placement, in the tactics deployed to manage both the condemned and the crowd, in the reactions of crowds, and in the penalties inflicted on the condemned both in life and death. Katherine Ebury (on the effect of the Act on the ways executioners experienced and depicted their task) and Rhiannon Pickin (on contemporary prison museums in the United Kingdom) tackle the problem from a different perspective. Here the question becomes the gap between those who engaged in the execution and wrote about the experience and those who, presented with a virtual experience of seeing an execution, return little marked to their daily lives. In Britain, after all, the death penalty now exists largely in popular culture. Ebury and Pickin's chapters lead nicely into the second part ("One had better narrate the circumstances as they occurred"), which is a series of investigations into the ways that capital punishment has been conceived and represented after it was moved behind prison walls. Samuel Saunders (on the periodical press), Rutherford and Sandford-Couch (on the depiction of a violent offender), and Seth Low (on the initial years of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act) offer careful readings of the ways in which the press framed both the execution and the condemned and of how the Act changed the practices of execution itself. Rutherford and Sandford-Couch in particular draw attention to the fact that, as executions receded from visibility, other spaces (the coroner's court, the criminal trial) [End Page 511] became increasingly important venues to watch the play of justice and the reactions of the condemned. Their readings, combined with Low's analysis of the tensions between local and national authorities, remind us that the elimination of public hanging created new issues even as it purported to solve old ones. Finally, Stephanie Emma Brown (in a study of Wales) demonstrates the complexity of national and racial issues by demonstrating that there was no simple creation of a so-called Other...

Mormonism's Inside-Outsider

Jan Shipps is Mormonism's “inside-outsider” who transformed the field of Mormon studies and paved the way for many who followed in her footsteps. Her book Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition remains one of the most widely read and assigned books about the Mormon Restoration, offering a concise introduction to the faith from someone on the outside of it. Her status as an outsider who earned the respect and trust of insiders lent credibility to both her writing and a field that was insular and dominated by believing historians. Drawing on previously published autobiographical writing, oral history interviews by the Church History Department, and lengthy personal interviews, Gordon and Gary Shepherd's biographical sketch of Shipps's life welcomes readers into the life of one of Mormon studies’ pioneering voices.In Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait: How a Methodist Girl from Hueytown, Alabama, Became an Acclaimed Mormon Studies Scholar, the scholar becomes the subject, and readers of Mormon history are given the opportunity to learn about one of the field's leading voices. The biography is written in two parts. The first tells the story of Jan's life, her upbringing, marriage, college career, and arduous journey through the academic job market. Most importantly, her biographers highlight the extent to which Jan immersed herself not only in Mormonism but in the academic study of Mormonism. Jan was among the first to bridge the academic study of the Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ. She was the first non-Mormon to serve as president of the Mormon History Association, advocated for the Mormon Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and published one of the most widely read books on Mormonism in the twentieth century.The second half of the book takes a different approach from the first, which is purely biographical overview. In chapters 5–8, the authors analyze the major events in Jan's life that led to her rise to fame in Mormon studies and place her life alongside other prominent women in the field. The authors chose to compare Jan's life and work to Juanita Brooks and Fawn Brodie because, as they argue, their books are “indisputably the most important or impactful that have ever been written about Mormons and their history” (143). While some may dispute this claim, these three authors represented women's scholarship in a field comprised mostly of men. Along these lines, the Shepherds conclude their overview of Jan's life with a focus on Jan's view of feminism. Although Jan does not identify as a feminist, the authors situate Jan in a long line of “proto-feminists” who impacted both Mormon history and the lives of Mormon women.Readers will be impressed by Jan's determination and intellectual journey. Graduate students and those interested in academic work will find this book particularly compelling. Jan spent years on the academic job market and struggled to find full-time employment, with varied jobs including a brief position at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. While her life represents that of an exemplary and groundbreaking scholar, the biographers did not paint an easy ascent in academia. It is honest and represents a reality that many entering the field will find useful, even consoling.It would be dishonest not to admit that this book was not only intellectually but personally meaningful to me. As a fellow non-Mormon woman in Mormon studies, Jan Shipps became something of a role model to me and someone whose scholarship I have admired since graduate school. In their conclusion, Gordon and Gary Shepherd write, “Jan Shipps's salient scholarly contributions to the understanding go Mormon history, and her influential role in legitimating Mormon Studies as a significant discipline area of inquiry, merit deep appreciation of all contemporary scholars of the religious culture and history of the Latter-day Saints” (208). I, for one, am grateful.

Repicturing the Restoration: New Art to Expand Our Understanding

Repicturing the Restoration: New Art to Expand Our Understanding

Editorial Commentary

Editorial| October 01 2022 Editorial Commentary: Advocating for a Pedagogy of Humanity Charlene Villaseñor Black, Charlene Villaseñor Black Charlene Villaseñor Black is professor of art history and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Los Angeles [cvblack@humnet.ucla.edu]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel is an independent scholar of Latin American visual culture and an environmental advocate [lalvcassoced@ucpress.edu]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2022) 4 (4): 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.4.3 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Charlene Villaseñor Black, Emily A. Engel; Editorial Commentary: Advocating for a Pedagogy of Humanity. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 October 2022; 4 (4): 3–8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.4.3 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search Over the past three years, many of us developed a more humane approach to teaching as we watched our students struggle with Covid-19 at the same time that political unrest shook the world. Across the United States, Latin America, and indeed around the globe, class- and race-based uprisings occurred as the pandemic wreaked havoc. Activists tore down racist monuments in former imperial centers; citizens protested the rise of fascism in Brazil, the United States, and other places; we gathered to demand our governments address global climate crisis. Students and educators of all levels and ranks united in these struggles to confront the escalation of systemic oppression around the world. Finally, folks were joining together to address colonialism’s legacies. Our students were doubly traumatized, first by the global pandemic and secondly by political unrest. While many BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students welcomed these political changes after centuries of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

IMPLEMENTATION OF LOCAL WISDOM “TRI KAYA PARISUDHA” IN TOUR GUIDING IN BALI

This study aims to identify the application of the teachings of Tri Kaya Parisudha local wisdom in guiding tours in Bali. For this reason, the study was conducted using qualitative approach by collecting data through in-depth interviews to five senior tour guides, scholars in Balinese culture, Hindu Religion and philosophy, and Hindu religious figures in Bali. The data obtained through the interview were analyzed descriptively. The results showed that Tri Kaya Parisudha local wisdom should become the reference for tourist guide in handling their clients. It could be used as philosophy, ethic, as well as a base for service to the clients or guests. However, there are still a number of tour guides who do not apply the Tri Kaya Parisudha teaching in handling their clients. More studies on this topic would enrich the topic and research on how to implement it in real life situation would be useful for improving the quality of tour guide in Bali.

Romanticism and the everyday

This essay surveys recent scholarship in the study of Romanticism that takes an interest in the concept of the everyday. Why does the everyday have pull and import for scholars of British literature and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century? This essay argues that the power of the everyday as a concept extends far beyond its expected meaning or its simple association with day-to-day or conventional life. First, this essay shows that in Romantic scholarship the everyday, instead, often indicates a mode of understanding, a framework for reading the past and present—what I call the everyday as historiographic method. Second, this essay shows that in strains of literary criticism that take the adjacent concept of the “ordinary” as a persistent concern, the everyday is not a method but an aspiration or an achievement. This lineage of thinking about the everyday, I argue, in the field inspired by the writings of the later Wittgenstein loosely described as “ordinary language philosophy” remains largely peripheral in the field of literary studies today. This essay thus aims to highlight new contributions in Romantic scholarship at the crossroads of literary and philosophical thinking.

Voskresenskaya, M. (2020). The sociocultural dimension of the Russian Silver Age. St. Petersburg: SPbGU. (In Russ.)

In her monograph, M. Voskresenskaya attempts to examine the Russian Silver Age as a historian and a scholar of culture. That perspective is made clear by the book’s title: it points to a sociocultural dimension, so, instead of analysing specific works created during the aforementioned period, she focuses on the society that provided the context for certain cultural and artistic processes. The author undertakes a sociocultural study of the environment in which works emerged that are so famous today, and devotes a whole chapter to the philosophy espoused by the cultural elite. Voskresenskaya also tackles the political agenda — starting with a characteristic of the search for ways to reform the world, she moves on to describe the choice made by the period’s artists, poets and writers to take part or refuse participation in the war and the revolution, and their perception of these two events. Employing the methods of cultural history studies, Voskresenskaya is painting a group portrait of the cultural icons of the Russian Silver Age.

Stardust Media by Christina Pugh

Reviewed by: Stardust Media by Christina Pugh Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) stardust media Christina Pugh University of Massachusetts Press https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345110/stardust-media/ 96 pages; Print, $16.95 The late Carl Sagan liked to say that we humans are made of "star stuff," a corollary that his protégé and successor in the popular imagination, Neal de-Grasse Tyson, has reframed as, "We are not figuratively, but literally stardust." It follows, then, that everything is composed of similar material—plants, animals, humans and their artistic outputs. The poems in Christina Pugh's newest collection, Stardust Media, should also be included, though not because of their subject matter or cosmological ancestry. Pugh's daring, deeply layered, and erudite poetry asks readers to take a trip around the universe to understand its lessons in interconnectedness. Sagan, deGrasse Tyson, and other scientists of their ilk have repeated this axiom in an effort to garner respect for [End Page 147] all life, no matter how small, invisible, or insignificant it might seem. Pugh, however, aims to deliver another maxim, about the worth of human interpretation, no matter the prestige or lack of stature, of the interpreter. Pugh's primary methods include allusion and synesthesia, enabling her to plumb the depths of the cultural record and come back with surprising and egalitarian associations. A disquisition into a particular color, a piece of lace, or a peculiar cloud will bring up the name of an actress or a character from a television series, perhaps a long-forgotten performance artist or a composer of symphonies based on traditional folk ballads. "Machines can be diaphanous," Pugh informs us in "But the Avant-Garde," an elegy to possibly a more innocent time, depending on what that naïveté was focused on, or missed. The poem settles around the figure of Charlotte Moorman, who posed for her husband's "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" while playing the cello and wearing two television screens over her breasts, as if cups of a bra. Moorman "closely crabbed a pain journal throbbing out / the instants of her terminal, young time. This was / a woman who swam through everything," Pugh says; the "swimming" refers to how the television screens appeared on her breasts—"Mellifluous / jellyfish agitated"—but it is the word "terminal" that is even more important, considering Moorman's fate in life and art. Readers don't necessarily need to know what those fates were to comprehend the many losses documented in these lines. "But the Avant-Garde" encapsulates other hallmarks of Pugh's approach, elegant and efficient while supporting multiple perspectives. In "Eighty Percent of Light Is Missing, Scientists Say," Pugh reports on the latest research, the mathematical propositions and their disappointing outcomes, to explore phenomena that defies human attempts to describe it. Our galaxy'seffulgence is malnourished, and nobodyquite knows why. The scientists' numberswere four hundred percent wrong. Whitmanwould have said, Seriously? You're surprised?Frost would have junked the telescope.Me, I'll settle in to watch this goldfinchsock away a decent chunk of change. [End Page 148] Of course, light gets lost, she seems to be saying; anyone who's read poetry (Whitman's "Prayer of Columbus" or Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay") knows that. But where the light goes, and how it is recycled, is as "steady, ineffable … untellable" as Whitman first proclaimed. Pugh announces her democratic approach in two poems that give the book its title: "Stardust Media" and "Stardust Media II." In the first, the irresistible call of the Sirens is said to be just as bewitching as vocals of the 1980s alternative rock band the Cocteau Twins. Together, they share the same musicality as a verse of Homer; they "unspooled the way that bodies pool and crash / together, raptured after sex." Yet as Pugh actively tries to re-create the actual sound of the Cocteau Twins, she illustrates one of the central questions of the collection, one that alternately enchants or bewilders scholars of the pop culture and its biggest by-product, nostalgia. Are our memories—the ultimate media—as solid and reliable as the material that inspired them, or is it the burnishing of our...

Budowa nowej socjalistycznej kultury: mobilne zespoły projekcyjne jako narzędzie propagandy w Chińskiej Republice Ludowej w latach 1949–1966

Building a new socialist culture: Mobile projection teams as a propaganda tool in People’s Republic of China 1949–1966 After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embarked on a groundbreaking project: the creation of new art for “workers, peasants and soldiers.” In this great endeavour designed to shape the “new socialist man,” film proved to be one of the most effective tools and the so-called mobile projection teams (MPT) crisscrossing the country were assigned the task of bringing a new politicised art to people living in the most distant parts of China. The present article aims to describe the mechanisms of centrally-planned culture as it functioned in the vast countryside and prove that film projectionists were as important as films itself for the promotion of new state ideology. Through an analysis of Chinese press articles from the 1949–1966 period and the use of most recent Western scholarship in the field the author aims to bring new life to the study of the so far relatively overlooked aspect of Chinese filmmaking: the “seventeen years” (1949–1966) period. Special attention being paid to contemporary accounts of MPT’s work, the author also avails himself of works of fiction in order to present a multi-faceted view of an important aspect of PRC state propaganda. The author believes that this new scope of study will be beneficial not only to scholars of Chinese culture but also bring the largely unknown history of the currently biggest film market in the world to light.

Crafting food products for culturally diverse markets: A narrative synthesis

Consumer culture scholars have advanced multifaceted insights about how food products are crafted for globalizing and culturally diverse food markets; these insights have yet to be consolidated and synthesized. This paper provides a narrative synthesis of 73 consumer culture articles on food consumption and marketing from the past 30 years to advance an ordering theory that draws connections between extant insights. It introduces the concept of transcultural food marketing to denote how market actors collaboratively develop or transform a food product in culturally diverse markets aiming to facilitate market exchange. This paper conceptualizes transcultural food marketing as an intersection between two fundamental tensions: (1) territorialization and deterritorialization; and (2) familiarity and exploration—that manifest in distinct configurations. The transcultural food marketing framework advances an integrative and generative vocabulary that directs theoretical imagination toward the pluralism and plasticity in how food products are crafted for culturally diverse markets.

Critical Appraisal and Masculine Authority: The Boys Clubs' Derogatory Method of Reading Canadian Feminist Speculative Fiction.

Culture scholars have shown that cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in the reproduction of inequalities in consecration (Corse and Westervelt, 2002; Maguire Smith and Matthews, 2012; Miller, 2014; Ridgeway, 2011; Steinberg, 1990 cited in Bourdieu, 2010). However, the analysis of gender inequalities in reception and canonization has focused on individual bias, neglecting the contribution of scholars of hegemonic masculinity about the importance of patterned practices in the reproduction of men's dominance over women (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Given that art worlds are not settings where typical markers of hegemonic masculinity are valued, such as money and physical prowess, what are the tools of hegemonic masculinity in art worlds? I answer this question through a comparative analysis of the reception of two iconic Canadian feminist novels: L'Euguélionne (2012 [1976]) by Louky Bersianik and The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. Building on feminist scholarship, I find that the discursive apparatus of hegemonic masculinity in art worlds consists of a derogatory method of reading employed by critics in newspapers. This method of reading is founded on three discursive components: (i) a reductive reading of feminist politics; (ii) a man-centred assessment of feminism and (iii) a questioning of women's creative credibility which belittles the contribution of feminist authors. By translating the concept of boys' club (Delvaux, 2019) and identifying its derogatory method of reading, I propose a framework that illuminates how critical appraisal shapes discursive resources available for both professional and non-professional readers to draw upon for evaluation and classification of women's cultural productions and feminist engagements.

Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II ed. by Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova and Aleksandar G. Marinov

Reviewed by: Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II ed. by Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova and Aleksandar G. Marinov Tomasz Kamusella Roman, Raluca Bianca; Zahova, Sofiya and Marinov, Aleksandar G. (eds). Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II. Brill | Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, 2021. xiii + 276 pp. Tables. Figures. Refences. Annexes. £91.82: €109.00: $124.00: open access e-book. The Roma are Europe’s largest stateless minority. Numbering today up to twelve million people, they live across the entire continent, but especially in its eastern half, with most concentrated in the Balkans. Despite having been [End Page 530] part and parcel of European history and culture for a millennium, until the turn of the twenty-first century, the Roma were typically disregarded and marginalized as a ‘non-people’ or a people ‘without culture or history’. In the modern period the Roma have become a target of a variety of state-sponsored ‘civilizing missions’. As a result, they were thoroughly othered and made into paradigmatic ‘foreigners’, ‘non-Europeans’, in essence a ‘colonial population’ that happens to have been ‘misplaced’ in the midst of Europe. Unsurprisingly, the racist sentiment of antitsiganism (antiromism) became the staple of the continent’s politics, on a par with antisemitism. However, this marginalization of the Roma and the erasure of their presence from European history and politics have been more thorough than of the Jews. For instance, it is rarely remembered that Nazi Germany intended to exterminate in their entirety only two peoples, namely, the Jews and Roma. The voluminous Nuremberg Trials proceedings devote just a quarter of a page to the Roma, though during World War Two the Nazis exterminated half of them. Continuing prejudices and stereotypes not only prevent the integration of the Roma, but also hamper rigorous research on them as a European nation. For instance, one would not be able to pass as a legitimate scholar of German history and culture without a working command of German. Yet, this is still a sorry ‘standard’ among specialists of Romani studies. At times, this attitude leads to tragicomic situations. The volume under review is a fruit of the ERC (European Research Council) project, ‘RomaInterbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars’. The project’s leaders, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, count among the world’s most renowned researchers in the field of Romani studies. Yet, some scholars opined on an early draft of this project that it should be rejected, because the Roma are illiterate and have no interest in books and writing, so there is nothing to be found in the archives or in the form of publications. The project’s first volume, Roma Voices in History: A Sourcebook (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2021), at over one thousand pages, gives the lie to this widespread prejudice, showcasing a mere tenth of the archival documents that were found during the past five years. As members of the RomaInterbellum team, the three editors of Roma Writings represent a new generation of Romani studies scholars. Following Marushiakova and Popov’s inspiring example, they apply these standards and methods of research that are the norm in other fields of Europe’s social sciences. Just as Roma Voices shows that Roma history is part and parcel of European history, so now Roma Writings proves that the development and uses of Roma literature are in synch with their European counterparts. The volume appropriately and inclusively defines Roma literature as the body of writings by Roma authors in Romani and other European languages, including translations into Romani (p. 4). This broad church approach allows them to show that, as in the case of many other Central, Southeastern and Eastern European (CSEEE) [End Page 531] literatures, Roma literature commenced in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 11). The development is in line with the ‘Herderian turn’ that especially after 1918 yielded the region’s ethnolinguistic nation-states. In 1985, the Czechoslovak historian Miroslav Hroch proposed the now widely accepted phase model of the rise of ethnolinguistic national movements. The editors...

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

A Potter's Progress: Emanuel Suter and the Business of Craft

In A Potter's Progress: Emanuel Suter and the Business of Craft, Scott Hamilton Suter explores the life and work of upper Shenandoah Valley potter Emanuel Suter—the author's great-great-grandfather. The result is a deeply researched and telling example of how we can tell far-reaching stories by focusing on a person and a region. Too often today, scholars look down upon regional cultural histories, but Scott Suter argues successfully that delving into a Mennonite craftsman who lived from 1833 to 1902 not only illuminates issues of US culture and the Progressive era broadly, but also is a useful addition to folklore and ceramics scholarship. The author provides a more academically rigorous companion to his previous work Shenandoah Valley Folklife (1999) and other recent ceramics catalogs and pamphlets, adding historical context and a deep reading of primary sources that historians, museum professionals, folklorists, and material culture scholars will appreciate.Because the first and second chapters are so brief—with the first having only 10 pages—Suter's book is somewhat uneven. In chapter 1, he provides an overview of the Shenandoah Valley as a cultural region, and in chapter 2, he shows that Emanuel Suter is a supporter of Progressivism in his Mennonite community. He expands upon these arguments in chapters 3 and 4, which focus on Suter's life as a potter at his New Erection Shops and the Harrisonburg Steam Pottery Company. The heart of the book is thus Scott Suter's examination of Emanuel Suter's pottery business in the ever-changing world of nineteenth-century technology, craft, and regional cultural expression.Whether at church, on his farm, or at his pottery, Emanuel Suter was dedicated to “progress.” Nowhere is that more evident than in his businesses and his response to the changing needs of his Shenandoah Valley clientele. Suter learned how to be a potter from relatives; at first, his craft and his business were intimately connected to the Pennsylvania hearth region. He and his family even lived briefly in Pennsylvania during the Civil War. As his clientele's needs changed, so did technology, transportation, and the region's connectedness with other regions beyond Pennsylvania. By the end of his career, Suter left that cultural hearth and ventured into the broader mid-Atlantic and Midwestern industrial potteries. The Shenandoah Valley was more connected than before to nationwide structures of business and manufacturing. Like others, Suter adapted not only to stay in business, but also to operate a successful commercial enterprise. The author demonstrates that as Emanuel Suter's pottery changed, so did his pottery shop, delivery methods, and the technology that he employed. Suter's life and work underwent a tremendous evolution, and the author uses Suter's accounts and diaries to make solid arguments about this transformation.The sources are what makes this a rich book. Emanuel Suter left behind account books, business papers, diaries, and personal and business letters, and Scott Suter makes good use of them. True to form as a folklorist, he also conducted oral history interviews and used interviews done by Elmer Smith, one of the founders of the Shenandoah Valley Folklore Society. Although material culture and decorative arts scholars will certainly benefit from this work, they might be disappointed that it does not contain detailed analyses of the pieces themselves or a catalog of all known extant Suter pieces. For such a short book, Scott Suter can do only so much, and he does well in exploring the transitions that Suter's life and craft—from traditional to industrial—underwent over the course of the mid- to late nineteenth century.Although this work will appeal to those both inside and outside the academy, the target audience is ceramics scholars, folklorists, and business historians. It not only contributes to the field of folklore studies but is also a much-needed academic work on nineteenth-century Shenandoah Valley culture (beyond the Civil War). University instructors will find portions of it useful in their introductory US history courses, as well as in specialized courses in American Studies, material culture, and decorative arts. While Scott Sutter could have done more to analyze the objects and buildings of Emanuel Suter's life (and thus strengthen his arguments), A Potter's Progress will make an impact on those who work in folklore, ceramics, and Shenandoah Valley studies.