̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - consumerism

How 9,000 lists written over 300 years are helping to test theories of economic growth

lw355 — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 10:59:23 +0000

In 1752, Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, was reprimanded by the local weavers’ guild for “weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance”.

When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members she was summoned before the guild court and fined the equivalent of one third of a maidservant’s annual wages. ̽��ֱ��entire affair was then recorded neatly in a ledger.

It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany, and elsewhere, regulated people’s access to labour markets. ̽��ֱ��dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, as in Juliana’s case, but also held back even the simplest of industrial innovations.

What makes this detail of Juliana’s life so interesting is that it is one among a vast number of observations in a huge database on the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900. Built by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics, the database includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries.

Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s growth and development.

“It might sound as if this is a no-brainer,” explains Ogilvie. “Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, earn more, have fewer children and invest more in them – surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.”

She explains that between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late.

“Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,” she adds.

̽��ֱ��inventories Ogilvie is analysing listed the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, dung barrows to dried apple slices, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods were listed. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools revealed economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggested how people learned.

In addition, tax lists recorded the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicated literacy and numeracy levels; and court records revealed obstacles that stifled industry, like Juliana and her wool-combing.

“Previous studies usually had just one proxy for linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names.
This database gives us multiple indicators for the same individuals,” she explains. “I began to realise that, for the first time ever, it was possible to link literacy, numeracy, wealth, industriousness, innovative behaviour and participation in the cash economy and credit markets – for individual women and men, rich and poor, over the very long term.”

Since 2009, Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two communities. “We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,” she says.

Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the man who wanted to grow a new crop – turnips – but was forbidden by the village council because it meant driving his cart to the fields at a different time, threatening others’ crops in the communal rotation system.

Or the young weaver’s wife Magdalena Schöttlin fined 11 days’ wages for wearing an “excessively large neckerchief ... above her station”. Or the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin who were chastised in 1707 for reading books instead of listening to the pastor’s sermon. “This tells us that they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,” explains Ogilvie.

It would be easy to focus on these stories – the aspirations and tragedies, the societal norms and individual rebellions, the possessions precious and prosaic – but, says Ogilvie, now that the data-gathering phase of the project is complete, “it’s time to ask the big questions”.

One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to “hold wealth constant” and follow the lives of people of a certain level, rich or poor, she explains. “Do we find education positively linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like knitting frames or sewing machines? Or to the acquisition of ‘contemporary’ goods such as cottons or coffee cups? Or to female labour force participation or involvement in the credit market?”

̽��ֱ��team will also ask whether more highly educated women had fewer children – enabling them to invest more in those they had – as well as what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next two years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward.

“German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,” she explains. “We know that literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. We also know that local guilds and merchant associations were powerful and resisted changes that threatened their monopolies. Entrenched village oligarchies opposed disruptive innovations and blocked labour migration.

“Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,” she says. “Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.”

Ogilvie also hopes to dig deeper into which aspects of education matter. “We feel intuitively that the answer to the famous question posed by Tolstoy – ‘Can there be two opinions on the advantage of education?’ – is the one that Tolstoy gives: ‘If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone’.

“But while some types of schooling just benefit the providers or the authorities, other types make kids happier, increase their productivity, maximise impact on people’s wellbeing and benefit the wider society.”

Ogilvie believes the data will contain answers, and says: “I look at what we’ve amassed and I realise that I’m going to be working on these inventories for the rest of my life… I can think of much worse fates.”

Research funded by the British Academy, the Wolfson Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

̽��ֱ��handwritten inventories had lain largely untouched for centuries. Sand used to dry the ink still lay between the pages. Written neatly inside were thousands of lists that might hold the key to an enduring puzzle in economics – does education fuel economic growth?

Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, earn more, have fewer children and invest more in them – surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier

Original and Reproduction: Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. HStAS A573 Bü. 4923

Death inventory for Michael Planckh of Wildberg, 30 Oct. 1676

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Living in a material world: why 'things' matter

lw355 — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:00:59 +0000

From the tools we work with to the eyeglasses and dental implants that improve us, our bodies are shaped by the things we use. We express and understand our identities through clothing, cars and hobbies. We create daily routines and relate to each other through houses and workplaces. We imagine place, history and political regimens through sculptures and paintings.

Even when we think we are dealing with abstract information, the form it takes makes a huge difference. When printing liberated the written word from the limited circulation of handwritten manuscripts, the book and the newspaper became fundamental to religious and political changes, and helped create the modern world.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, there is a long tradition of thinking principally about meaning and human intention, but scholars are now realising the immense importance of material things in social life.

At the core of material culture studies is the question of how people and things interact. This is a simple, sweeping question, but one long overlooked, thanks to historically dominant philosophical traditions that focus narrowly on human intention. In fact, it’s only in the past decade that scholars have posed the question of material agency – how things structure human lives and action.

Material culture studies have emerged as central in many disciplines across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In archaeology and history, scholars see material objects as fundamental sources for the human past, counterbalancing the discourse-oriented view that written texts give us. Should we use historical sources to see what people think they ate, or count their rubbish to find out what they really consumed? Combining the two gives us answers of unprecedented scope.

Geographers ask why it makes a difference whether workplaces are organised into separate offices or open-plan cubicles. Literary scholars draw attention to how experience and meaning are built around things, like Marcel Proust’s remembering of things long past as a madeleine cake is dipped in tea; even books themselves are artefacts of a singular and powerful kind. Likewise, studying anatomical models and astronomical instruments empowers an understanding of the history of science as a practical activity. And anthropologists explore the capacity of art to cross cultures and express the claims of indigenous peoples.

Material things are also at the heart of new fields such as heritage studies. Memory itself is material, as we’ve seen recently in the USA, where whether to keep or tear down statues of historic figures such as Confederate generals can polarise people.

Unlike most newly emerging fields in the sciences, material culture studies are grounded in a sprawling panoply of related approaches rather than in a tightly focused paradigm. They come from a convergence of archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, literary studies, economics and many other disciplines, each with its own methods for approaching human–thing interactions.

̽��ֱ��reasons for this interest are not hard to find. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� offers a rare combination of three essential foundations for the field. One is world-class strength in the humanities and social sciences, sustained by institutions like the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), an essential venue for interdisciplinary collaboration as shown by its 'Things' seminar series (see panel).

Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way

̽��ֱ��second is the capacity for a huge range of scientific analyses of materials. ̽��ֱ��third is our immensely varied museum collections: the Fitzwilliam Museum’s treasures; the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s 19th-century cast gallery; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s worldwide prehistoric, historic and ethnographic collections; and many others. Where else can scholars interested in the material aspect of Victorian collecting study Darwin’s original finches or Sedgwick’s and Scilla’s original fossils, boxes, labels, archives and all?

Whether it’s work on historic costume, craft production, religion or books, the study of material culture offers unparalleled insights into how humans form their identities, use their skills and create a sense of place and history.

But it is not only a descriptive and historical field. Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way. Where did our desire for things come from and how did the economics of consumerism develop? How can we organise our daily lives to reduce our dependence on cars? Should we care where the objects we buy come from before they reach the supermarket shelves? How do repatriation claims grow out of the entangled histories of museum objects?

̽��ֱ��shape of this new field is still emerging, but Cambridge research will be at the heart of it.

Professor John Robb is at the Department of Archaeology, Professor Simon Goldhill is at the Faculty of Classics, Professor Ulinka Rublack is at the Faculty of History and Professor Nicholas Thomas is at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Things structure our lives. They enrich us, embellish us and express our hopes and fears. Here, to introduce a month-long focus on research on material culture, four academics from different disciplines explain why understanding how we interact with our material world can reveal unparalleled insights into what it is to be human.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses.

John Robb, Simon Goldhill, Ulinka Rublack, Nicholas Thomas

Harlow Heslop

All the things

Curious objects and CRASSH courses

You’ve had a difficult time lately. You’re thinking that all this bad luck might be more than coincidence. You trim your nails, snip some hair and bend a couple of pins. You put them in a bottle with a dash of urine, heat it up and put it in a wall. That’ll cure the bewitchment, you say to yourself.

Making a ‘witch bottle’ like this would be an entirely reasonable thing to do 400 years ago. It would also be reasonable to swallow a stone from a goat’s stomach to counteract poisoning and hide an old shoe in a chimney breast to increase the chance of conceiving.

“All of these objects took on layers of meaning for their owners, and the fact these strong connections existed at all gives us glimpses of people’s beliefs, hopes and lives,” says Annie Thwaite, a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is also one of the convenors of a seminar series on ‘Things’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

“Material culture was a crucial part of medicine in the 17th century. Objects like witch bottles are often dismissed as ‘folkish’. But by investigating the bottles’ architectural and geographical situation, their material properties and processes, you start to look through the eyes of their owners. Fearful of supernatural intrusion into their homes and bodies, people would go to great efforts to use something they regarded as a legitimate element of early modern medical practice.”

Charms and amulets, votives and potions, myths and magic will be discussed as this year’s ‘Things’ seminars begins a new focus on imaginative objects.

“Like material culture studies, the seminar series is broad and varied,” she explains. “We might just as easily examine the skills required to craft objects as the power of objects to become politicised.

“Things matter greatly to humans. We have short lives and our stuff outlives us. While we can’t tell our own story, maybe they can.”

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Are we being sold online?

fpjl2 — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 08:00:06 +0000

One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook and the average Briton devotes an entire day to the site each month. Personal information, much of it volunteered, has become so prevalent and readily available that for many it constitutes the most powerful marketing tool in human history. ̽��ֱ��question is, how is this information being used, and by whom? And, should we be worried?

Listen to the debate here:

From 3:30pm on Saturday afternoon (27 October) at the Faculty of Law, a panel of experts will explore the questions that surround the dream of global connectivity, and the nightmare of human commodity, as part of this year’s Festival of Ideas.

From social interactions, entertainment, shopping, and gathering information, almost any human activity you can think of is now mediated digitally. As such, these behaviours can easily be recorded and analysed, fuelling the emergence of personalised search engines, recommender systems, and targeted online marketing.

This raises highly sensitive questions about privacy and data ownership. Who should have access to such an extraordinarily powerful reservoir of information, and where it should be stored?

“ ̽��ֱ��widespread availability of extensive records of individual behaviour, and the desire to learn more about customers and citizens presents serious challenges to future society, particularly in relation to trust,” says Michal Kosinski, Director of Operations for the ̽��ֱ��’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit.

“Trust between consumers and corporations, governments and their citizens, families even can be seriously harmed once people realize how exposed they are in the digital environment. It can all still seem quite innocent, with Facebook ‘likes’ and photos of friends, but new research is starting to show that this seemingly harmless information can be used to make very accurate inferences of highly sensitive traits.”

Kosinski, one of the panellists, spends much of his time cultivating and analysing the increasingly immense tracts of data in order to show the precision with which estimations can be made about personality traits, such as openness, extroversion and stability.

“Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers,” says Kosinski. “A marketing revolution is upon us, a completely new dimension is added through the combination of scientifically robust personality tests and other demographic information.”

̽��ֱ��other panellists are William Dutton, Professor of Internet Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford’s Internet Institute, Nick Pickles, Director of the civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, and Mariam Cook, Senior Digital Consultant at PR firm Porter Novelli.

“ ̽��ֱ��web connects us more closely than ever before, giving organisations and brands the capability to understand us, target us, and to fulfil our needs and desires in increasingly sophisticated ways,” says Cook. “This presents many fantastic opportunities for marketers, and potential delights for those formerly known as the audience, but it also means great responsibility lies on our shoulders.”

“This presents a challenge - how to balance the apparently conflicting ideals of privacy and openness in all of our data dealings.”

But for Nick Pickles, the increasingly heard motto ‘if we're not paying to use a service, then we're the product’ is at the very core of this issue: “Our personal data is the oil of the internet age and yet we have grown oblivious to how our every movement is being monitored and analysed for commercial gain.”

“As an entire generation outsources it's privacy to social media companies, I believe strengthening individual privacy will soon become a social necessity and a commercial imperative.”

Panel discussion ‘Are we being sold online?’ starts at 3.30pm on Saturday 27 October at the Faculty of Law. With Michal Kosinski, Cambridge's Psychometrics Centre; Professor William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute; Nick Pickles, Big Brother Watch; Mariam Cook, Porter Novelli and the Chair, Spencer Kelly, Click presenter.

A panel discussion for the Festival of Ideas examines whether social media giants are profiting from our willingness to share the most intimate details of our lives online, and whether we should be worried by this compromise to our privacy.

Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers.

Michal Kosinski

Ed Yourdon from flickr

Thinkin' about the code

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Men of wonder: gender and American superhero comics

ns480 — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:35 +0000

Superman, the iconic ‘Man of Steel’ clad in red and blue spandex, made his first appearance in in the pages of Action Comics #1 in 1938. Batman debuted a year later in 1939. ̽��ֱ��stories of their exploits, and those of dozens of other heroes and villains appearing in the pages of the comics published by DC, have been told continuously for the past 70-odd years. Needless to say, that represents quite a lot of reading for anyone trying to get ‘caught up’, and it has become increasingly difficult over the years for these venerable superheroes to attract new comics-reading fans.

So, on 31 August 2011 DC Comics rebooted all of its continuing series, 52 separate titles in total. ̽��ֱ��‘reboot’ has become a relatively common practice among the two big American superhero comics publishers Marvel and DC, and it allows writers to reimagine—or discard altogether—a complex buildup of decades of story continuity. ̽��ֱ��‘New 52’ launch would, DC hoped, reverse slumping sales figures and attract the attention of a new generation of readers to their brands. Unfortunately, in the weeks that followed it became clear that the main effect of the reboot was attention of a much less desirable sort—that of attention generated by controversy.

̽��ֱ��controversy in question hinged upon the depictions of some of DC’s female characters. Catwoman, Batman’s sometimes-antagonist, is shown having sex with Batman on the roof of a building in the finale of Catwoman #1. Another superheroine named Starfire, appearing in Red Hood and the Outlaws #1, is drawn like a centerfold from the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated and has become a promiscuous amnesiac. While some readers defended these creative choices, others, particularly women, were appalled. Laura Hudson wrote the following for Comics Alliance: ‘When I read these comics and I see the way the female characters are presented, I don't see heroes I would want to be. I don't see people I would want to hang out with or look up to. I don't feel like the comics are talking to me; I feel like they're talking about me…’

It would, in fact, be pretty safe to say that most superhero comics are indeed talking ‘about’ women and not ‘to’ them. American superhero comics, and the sexual objectification of their heroines, reflect the conditions of their production and consumption: they are made almost exclusively by and for men. For 2011 blogger Tim Handley has been tracking the ratios of men versus women credited in the production of new Marvel and DC superhero comics released each week and finds that women account on average for less than ten percent of the labour and are concentrated in less prestigious roles. These industry trends are mirrored by the readership demographics; estimates suggest that ninety percent or more of mainstream superhero comics readers are male.

Why are superhero comics so masculine? After all, other comic book-loving countries such as Japan and France do not manifest the same trends, and the self-same superhero characters, when presented in another medium such as Hollywood film, have truly mass appeal. ̽��ֱ��answer to this question lies with two key events in the history of comics in the United States: 1) the institution of the Comics Code in the 1950s and 2) the rise of the direct market in the 1980s.

Concerns about the graphic depictions of sex and violence in comics built in the 1950s, culminating in the 1954 book by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham Seduction of the Innocent, which linked juvenile delinquency to objects of popular culture, particularly comics. ̽��ֱ��same year, the U.S. Senate convened a subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, and the comics publishing industry, eager to head off any spectre of government regulation, formed its own self-regulatory body. This body, the Comics Magazine Association of America, adopted what came to be known as the Comics Code, a list of criteria meant to scrub comics of any and all questionable content. Excessive violence, nudity, and the glorification of criminality were all prohibited and soon had a chilling effect upon the industry’s creative output. ̽��ֱ��only the superhero genre of boyhood wish fulfillment fantasy was left standing.

Of course, the sanitised, eternal triumph of good over evil quickly gets boring, and by the 1970s newsstand sales of comic books were declining alarmingly. Publishers would print books only to have them returned unsold a few weeks later. This led to the rise of direct market distribution, where merchandise, unlike that sold to bookstores or newsstands, could not be returned. In other words, the risk of the sale of a comic book was transferred from the publisher to the distributor and the retailer. Retailers were given a larger discount on small orders of merchandise in return, and this encouraged the growth of small comic book shops catering to a specialised clientele of diehard—and male—fans.

Ironically, while in the short term the direct market undoubtedly saved superhero comics, in the long run it has been slowly killing them. Comics shops are, in the words of comics critic Douglas Wolk, ‘deeply unfriendly places’. He continues in this vein in Reading Comics, ‘Everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out’. ̽��ֱ��more publishers depend upon the direct market for their sales, the more impenetrable and narrowly-focused upon their most loyal male readership their content becomes.

Although comics companies abandoned the Comics Code for good in the 1990s, the influence of the direct market upon the maleness of superhero comics has only strengthened over time. And the controversy surrounding DC’s ‘New 52’ reboot points to the industry’s ongoing failure to appeal persuasively to new—namely women and children—audiences. Indeed, my own research into the ‘manga boom’ of the 2000s demonstrates that the only way to sell comic books to women is to abandon the comics publishing mode of production and direct market distribution altogether and turn instead to trade book publishing. Therefore, the reboot is unlikely to reverse current trends, and superhero comics content will continue to be governed by the men who make and read them.

Yet there is absolutely no reason why any genre by and for men need trade in the wholesale sexual objectification of women. Therefore, I applaud grassroots efforts like the 30 October Women of Wonder Day, which brings together comics fans, retailers, creators, and other industry insiders to raise money for victims of domestic abuse. ‘Women of Wonder’ is an allusion to Wonder Woman, one of DC’s most popular female superheroes. This annual event, founded in 2006 by longtime Wonder Woman fan Andy Mangels, has raised over USD $110,000 to date and offers renewed hope that perhaps someday the superhero genre can be male-oriented without being misogynist.

Boys and action comics go together like Batman and Robin – but how are girls represented in comics? Sociologist, Casey Brienza, investigates the male world of the action comic and looks at the depictions of female characters.

Starfire, appearing in Red Hood and the Outlaws #1, is drawn like a centerfold from the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated and has become a promiscuous amnesiac.

Casey Brienza

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Casey Brienza

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Death by monoculture

bjb42 — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:00:26 +0000

̽��ֱ��21^st century is the make-or-break century for cultural and linguistic diversity, and for the future of human civilisation per se. An unprecedented and unchecked growth in the world’s population, combined with the insistence on exploiting finite resources, will lead to environmental and humanitarian catastrophes as mass urbanisation meets fundamental problems such as the lack of drinking water. ̽��ֱ��actions that we collectively take over the next fifty years will determine how and if we can overcome such global challenges, and what the shape of the ‘ethnosphere’ or ‘sum of the world’s cultures’ is to look like in years to come.

After having spent a year in a remote Arctic community which speaks a vulnerable, minority language and whose cultural foundations are being rocked by climate change, it is clear to me that the link between environmental and cultural vulnerability is genuine and that the two are interwoven. Cultural practices of the Polar Eskimos are based on a history of survival strategies in one of the world’s most hostile environments. Their language and ‘way of speaking’ is a representation of that. When the sea ice disappears, their stories will eventually go with it.

We, human beings, rent the world for a period of approximately 80 years. It is our duty to future tenants to leave the house as we found it. ̽��ֱ��conservation issue goes beyond everything else and should therefore be at the heart of every policy decision. To do otherwise, would be to live in the 20^th century. At present, linguists predict that over 50 per cent of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken by the turn of the century. Instead of leaving the house in order, we are on the road to the fastest rate of linguistic and cultural destruction in history. Languages die for many reasons, but the current trend is driven by the juggernaut of the homogenising forces of globalisation and consumerism which seems unstoppable and whose language tends to be the new universal tongue, English.

I am a romantic and romantics are nowadays always disillusioned because the world is no longer how they had hoped it to be. I had gone to the top of the world and had wished to find elderly folk sitting around telling stories. Instead, I found adults and children glued to television screens with a bowl of seal soup on their lap, playing exceedingly violent and expletive crammed Hollywoodian video war games. Time and time again, I discovered this awkward juxtaposition of modernity meets tradition. Out in the Arctic wilderness, hunters dressed head to toe in skins would answer satellite phones and check their GPS co-ordinates.

Consumerism has now made it to every corner of the world. Some Polar Eskimos may live in tiny, wind-beaten wooden cabins with no running water, but Amazon delivers. Most 8 year-olds who live in Qaanaaq and the remote settlements have the latest smartphones. Media entertainment will, however, never be produced for a language of 770 speakers because it is loss-making. Technology, be it mobile phones, DVDs or video games may support the top 50 languages maximum, but never more than that. Some languages are not suited to these technologies: Greenlandic words are too long to subtitle and to use in text messaging. Polar Eskimos tend to send text messages in Danish or English because it is easier.

As the world embraces the synthetic monoculture of populism and consumerism, linguistic and cultural diversity risk being erased right across the world. For consumerism to operate efficiently, it requires as few operating languages as possible. That way, the message is consistent and the producer’s cost is minimised. This globalised consumerism is the product of a system which is based on an addiction to economic growth. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, and yet it is difficult to hear US presidential candidates or EU officials talk about anything else. Some politicians speak oxymoronically of ‘sustainable growth’ but the combination of a rocketing world population and finite resources is the recipe of ‘unsustainability’ par excellence. Growth has become an abstract imperative that is driving humanity to destroy the ecosystem upon which life depends. If we can shake off the growth habit and focus on the ‘local’ and sustainability for its own sake, minority languages will have a chance to prosper providing they engage with new digital media technologies. ̽��ֱ��Internet represents surely the best opportunity to help support small or endangered languages and yet 95 per cent of Internet content appears in just 12 languages. ̽��ֱ��Internet offers also a chance to move away from television which is largely responsible for the spread of a phoney, idiotic form of entertainment culture where production costs are too high to support minority languages.

I have never met anybody who is indifferent to the elimination of biodiversity or the protection of endangered animal species, but linguists and anthropologists are still being asked to defend linguistic and cultural diversity. In doing so, it should be remembered that a language is so much more than a syntactic code or a list of grammar rules. To treat language as such is to reduce it to its least interesting features. When languages die, we do not just lose words, but we lose different ways of conceptually framing things. For the Polar Eskimos, there is no one concept of ‘ice’, but over twenty different ways of referring to various forms of ice. Through different distinctions in meaning, languages provide insights onto how groups of speakers ‘know the world’.

A language is a collection of statements about the world delivered in a multitude of voices set to a background of music. There is a difference between being able to speak a language fluently and to speak a language like a native. ̽��ֱ��latter requires first and foremost a mastery of the language’s paralinguistic features – in the case of Polar Eskimo, a rich and never random repertoire of sighs and groans and a specific mix of intonation patterns and gestures accompanying particular words and phrases. To be able to speak a handful of languages as a native, you have to be able to act and act well, reproducing exactly certain collocations of words to the rhythm, gestures, flow and timbre of its speakers. This is always more important than just having a large vocabulary or putting the verb in the right place. Each language of the world requires a different voice. When we lose a language, we lose an orchestra of voices that permeate the mind. As well as knowledge and perceptions of the world which are built into local language varieties, we lose the music and poetry of words and speech which elicit so much pleasure. There should be no need to defend linguistic diversity. It and the power of language is something to be celebrated. Without it, the world would be utterly dull. After all, who wants to listen to just Beethoven, when you can enjoy Rachmaninov and Shostakovich too? Not that there is any chance of the Polar Eskimos listening to Beethhoven, they are too busy indulging in virtual reality Playstation war games whose only poetic content is ‘fucking pacify him’.

Stephen Pax Leonard is a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is primarily interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

Having just returned from a year spent documenting the language and culture of the remote Inughuit community of north-western Greenland, Dr Stephen Leonard describes how he witnessed first-hand the manner in which globalisation and consumerism are conspiring to destroy centuries-old cultures and traditions.

We, human beings, rent the world for a period of approximately 80 years. It is our duty to future tenants to leave the house as we found it.

Stephen Pax Leonard

Stephen Leonard.

Stephen Leonard in Greenland.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

How luxury became a four-letter word

bjb42 — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:45:26 +0000

For some, it's about fine wines, penthouses, exclusive clubs and designer clothes. For others, it can be as simple as settling down for the afternoon with a good book. Now a two-part BBC miniseries, presented by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� academic Dr Michael Scott, is to reveal how the ambiguous meaning of luxury is the very thing that has defined our often-troubled relationship with it throughout history - and thwarted multiple attempts to stamp it out.

Starting on Monday (June 27), as part of BBC Four's Luxury season, Guilty Pleasures; Luxury In Ancient Greece And ̽��ֱ��Medieval World aims to trace the way in which human attitudes towards symbols of wealth, power and indulgence developed, from Ancient Athens to the time of the Black Death.

By examining how different societies dealt with the acquisition and flaunting of rare and expensive goods, Scott, from the ̽��ֱ��'s Faculty of Classics, believes we can get closer to understanding how luxury became a "four-letter word" - something that we frequently despise, but also can't quite live without.

In the austere economic climate (not least in Greece itself), and amid growing concerns about the environmental impact of trade and commerce, he believes that luxury should not simply be associated with over-indulgence. History suggests that our craving for the exquisite and the extravagant is too instinctive to be brought under control, but can be harnessed to better principles and good causes.

"Luxury isn't just a question of expensive and beautiful things for the rich and powerful - it feeds into ideas about democracy, patriotism and social harmony, as well as our values and our relationships with the divine," Scott says. "It is impossible to define, but we all know it when we see it because we each have our own ideas of what luxury is. That makes it a good tool for understanding the values and priorities of different societies, present and past.”

Historical attempts to rein in people's cravings for indulgence and luxury goods rarely succeeded. Even the Spartans, whose name became a byword for abstention - struggled with the issue. ̽��ֱ��lesson is still relevant today: China has recently introduced bans on luxury advertising because of fears that it might further agitate unrest about the country's wealth gap. ̽��ֱ��message from the past seems to be that such restrictions will fail.

Scott's examination starts in the 6th to 4th centuries BCE, when the inimical city states of Athens and Sparta both broke away from the traditional idea that luxury was something ruling monarchs and aristocrats brandished as a sign of personal power.

Athens, home to the first democracy, was also one of the first societies to try to manage luxury goods. Where wealth had once belonged to elite ruling clans, rich citizens were asked to pamper the democratic ideal instead, by channelling their money into communal services or public events. This was relatively successful, but attempts to specify what constituted luxury in sharper terms, such as what food people should buy, simply served to foment social unrest.

Sparta's contrasting efforts to stamp luxury out were a dismal failure. A raft of measures, such as bans on fancy clothes and the minting of coinage too heavy to carry around, were adopted to reinforce principles of self-discipline and self-restraint. These were ignored from the start, however, and after Sparta won the Peloponnesian Wars and became the dominant power in Greece, the flow of wealth into the city only exacerbated its rich-poor divide, stirring up the discontent that led to its implosion and decline at the end of the 4th century.

Scott views these early experiments as an "aberration" later smoothed over by Alexander the Great, who had a more conventional approach to showing off wealth. "What they struggled with was a fundamental dichotomy between political theory and reality - between the idea of all citizens being equal, and the fact that ideas about luxury and inequality would nevertheless always remain," he says.

̽��ֱ��second episode looks at how Christianity added a moral dimension to the problem. As it became an alternate force of government, the Church tried to treat luxury as a sin, but also knew that it could not afford to ignore it if it wanted power.

̽��ֱ��Middle Ages saw a series of ecclesiastical condemnations of luxury goods like spices and State attempts, in assorted acts of apparel, to prevent the wearing of clothes deemed above one's station. Overall, however, the Church became a major consumer of luxuries - whether investing in fine architecture, or producing beautiful, illuminated manuscripts. Luxury was employed in the service of God. As consumerism also became an important social force, earlier efforts to ban certain goods according to feudal strata became increasingly irrelevant.

By the 15th century, Scott believes that society had evolved something resembling the complex consumerist attitude to luxury it has today. " ̽��ֱ��power of luxury is its relativity," he concludes. "It is not confined by a thing, a time or a period. That means it's probably here to stay. Like the Athenian example, or the medieval Church, it works best when instead of trying to get rid of it, we find ways to accommodate and manage our need for it instead."

Guilty Pleasures begins on Monday, 27 June at 9pm on BBC Four, and continues on Monday 4 July.

A new series presented by Michael Scott examines the history of luxury and the origins of our ambivalent attitude to the finer things in life.

Luxury isn't just a question of expensive and beautiful things - it feeds into ideas about democracy, patriotism, social harmony, our values and our relationships with the divine.

Dr. Michael Scott

Tern TV

Michael Scott.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

300 years of list-making

lw355 — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:30:00 +0000

‘One cabbage-spoon, a new dung-barrow, two badger-skins and a half share of an old pregnant mare…’ – so read the belongings of Hanss Hürning on the occasion of his marriage in 1682 to Barbara, owner of ‘nine white bonnets, a new scarlet over-bodice, a small spinning-wheel and a three-year-old red-brown cow.’

Many of us today would find it incredibly difficult to list absolutely everything we own, but in the southwest German territory of Württemberg until 1900 such lists were drawn up over hundreds of years for most newly-married brides and bridegrooms and bereaved widows and widowers.

From clothing to kitchen goods, land to luxuries, the entire contents of homes and businesses were inventoried for inheritance purposes, down to the last oaken water-vat or sack of dried apple slices. And, remarkably, many thousands of these Württemberg inventories survive today.

Now a team of researchers, led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie, an economic historian at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is systematically studying these unrivalled documents for the first time to chart the history of how poor economies improve living standards. They hope that understanding the rise in human wellbeing in European economies over past centuries could hold lessons for developing economies today.

Reconstructing history

Professor Ogilvie first stumbled across the Württemberg inventories as a graduate student 30 years ago: “Ledger upon ledger contained lists that in isolation were fascinating but, together, offered an incredible community-wide compendium of who owned what, and how this changed from marriage to death and with successive generations.”

Although inventories survive elsewhere, those in Württemberg are exceptionally detailed, covering marriage and death, women and men, poor and rich, mansions and mousetraps.

For the past three years, the Cambridge researchers have been painstakingly examining each handwritten document, compiling its contents in a vast database, and carrying out multivariate statistical analyses. In so doing, the team is reconstructing 300 years of economic history, from 1600 to 1900, for two Württemberg communities – the village of Auingen on the Schwäbische Alb and the small town of Wildberg in the Black Forest. In 2013, the completed database will be deposited in the UK Data Archive, which is open to public access.

What really brings the inventories alive is information generated by a previous project, led by Professor Ogilvie and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which created a full demographic reconstruction of the same two communities. Family trees, fertility and mortality are linked to occupational background, wealth, farm size, household structure, literacy and social networks, and now, through the new project, to individuals’ belongings.

To date, 28,000 handwritten folios have been analysed, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values. For over 3,000 individuals, the researchers now know who they were and what they owned, their gender, age and marital status, place of origin, occupation, credit relationships and office-holding, whether or not they could sign their name, and who were their family members and heirs.

An ‘Industrious’ Revolution in the making?

This wealth of information is opening a window on how market consumption affects the economy. In fact, it’s the most comprehensive attempt yet to investigate the theory of the ‘Industrious’ Revolution – the idea that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by a time when a growing desire for consumer goods spurred changes in households’ time allocation and productivity.

“Aspirations for the latest fashions, furnishings and stimulants motivated people to shift time from leisure and do-it-yourself to income-earning work, creating a virtuous circle,” explained Professor Ogilvie. “More work meant more earnings, more earnings meant people could buy more consumer goods, and this spurred producers to innovate and expand.”

Up to now, the Industrious Revolution theory has relied almost exclusively on English and Dutch records before circa 1750. But many European economies – such as Germany – were much poorer and slower-growing than the north Atlantic seaboard.

What held Germany back? Professor Ogilvie’s past research has pointed towards the dominance of guilds and merchant associations in resisting changes that threatened their monopolies. Guilds erected barriers against even the simplest commercial innovations such as peddling or rural craftwork that brought goods cheaply to poor consumers. Governments and elites tried to control what ordinary people could consume.

“It might be argued that such prohibitions were merely futile gestures, were it not for the fact that people at the time took them quite seriously,” said Professor Ogilvie. “Social norms about the appropriate quantity, quality and style of consumption for particular social groups were enforced with sumptuary penalties and public shaming, even for inviting ‘too many’ guests to your wedding or wearing excessively wide trousers.” [see panel]

This reduced people’s ability to buy new goods and their incentive to work more hours to afford them. ̽��ֱ��German Industrious Revolution was held back until guilds, merchant associations and sumptuary laws broke down, after about 1800.

For the Cambridge project, this means that small changes in what people owned – even the first coffee cup to appear in someone’s inventory – are significant because they could indicate the beginnings of an Industrious Revolution.

“We encountered our first coffee cup in an inventory of 1718,” said Professor Ogilvie. “After that we expected that a fashion for coffee and its associated equipment would take off, but instead there was no further mention until 1733. We have just found our third coffee cup in 1739. We know that they become common by the 1750s so we are on tenterhooks for the next couple of months while we work our way through the 1740s.”

With their gigantic database at their fingertips, the team can ask fine-grained questions such as who started using coffee cups, calico dresses, or any other trend. Were they rich or poor, educated or illiterate, male or female, locals or migrants? ̽��ֱ��team can trace how rapidly any trend spread and whether – as the Industrious Revolution predicts – it coincided with other household changes.

Tracing such changes in history is important for understanding present-day developing economies, as Professor Ogilvie explained: “We think that household-level changes in consumer behaviour and literacy are good predictors of economic development, lower child mortality, a better position for women, and higher human wellbeing. Now we have a powerful tool to describe these changes accurately – and to explain them.”

For more information, please contact Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie (sheilagh.ogilvie@econ.cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Economics or visit www.econ.cam.ac.uk/Ogilvie_ESRC/index.html

Personal inventories spanning three centuries are helping researchers unlock the mysteries of how economies edge towards growth and prosperity.

More work meant more earnings, more earnings meant people could buy more consumer goods, and this spurred producers to innovate and expand.

Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie

Stadtarchiv Münsingen

Marriage inventory, Württemberg, 1682

̽��ֱ��wrong trousers

How would you like the government or your neighbours to tell you how to dress?

Traditional societies often have informal customs about what people (especially women) are allowed to wear. But some go further and actually pass laws about it. This is what happened in many parts of pre-industrial Europe. German states, for example, passed at least 1,350 laws regulating clothing between 1244 and 1816.

You might think such laws were unenforceable. But in early modern Germany they were enforced. In 1662, for instance, a Württemberg community court reprimanded an unmarried weaver’s son “on account of his very wide trousers, a fashion that it is unfitting for him to wear”, fined him about two weeks’ wages, and warned him that “if he should again put on trousers of this fashion, they shall, by virtue of the Princely Command, be confiscated.”

In 1708, another Württemberg village court forbade Magdalena Schöttlin, a local weaver’s wife, to wear “her excessively large neckerchief, which she is accustomed to wearing above her station.” When Magdalena went on wearing it, she was summoned before the court and fined the equivalent of 11 days’ wages for a local maidservant.

Dress laws couldn’t totally stop people from doing new things, of course. But they increased the costs and risks of participating in an Industrious Revolution – especially for women, young people and the poor. It may not be a coincidence that in England and ̽��ֱ��Netherlands, the ‘miracle economies’ of pre-industrial Europe, dress laws were abolished around 1600, just before their Industrious Revolutions really began to take off.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes