NextGenerationEU Project ‚Ondine‘ (Dep. History, Humanities and Society – Tor Vergata Univ. of Rome) and Inst. of History of Mediterranean Europe of the Italian National Research Council (ISEM-CNR)

Time: 05.-06.12.2024
Venue: Naples – and online
Proposals by: 15.09.2024

The workshop aims to highlight the multifaced and dynamic nature of gendered, economic, and cultural practices in everyday life in maritime contexts in Early Modern and Modern times (17th–20th centuries). The analytical tools for studying everyday life are manifold. What all approaches and methodologies have in common is that they operate as critiques of everyday life. In other words, all possible approaches have to analyse the ‘structures of the everyday’ (Braudel 1967, 1979) and/or how it was experienced and produced over time more than the everyday itself (Olson 2011).
The first to introduce the concept of everyday – precisely the notions of routine and repetition – into historiography was Braudel (1967, 1979), who through his ‘historical imagination’ emphasised what he called ‘material civilisation’, i.e. the ways that women and men had of producing, exchanging, eating, living, and reproducing at the dawn of capitalism. Braudel’s approach found inspiration in Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. I (1947) and Matérialisme dialectique (1949), the works in which the French philosopher recognised daily life as the place par excellence of production – of a material, social and cultural nature – and appropriation. In this sense, everyday life becomes the battleground – or mediation ground – among nature, capitalism and human beings. It is also where individuals articulate (i.e. appropriate) themselves (Lefebvre 1947, 1949, 1961).
During the 1980s in West Germany, the historiographical investigation of everyday life experienced a new impetus. The Alltagsgeschichte (Lüdtke, Medick) sprouted from the will to analyse the lives and survival strategies of the ‘nameless’ multitudes, the aspirations and everyday struggles of the kleine Leute (little/ordinary people) (Lüdtke 1989), the ‘peoples without history’ (Wolf 1982) or those ‘left behind’. This specific approach of ‘history from below’ … weiterlesen (PDF)

Source: H-Net Notifications