History of Everyday Life

This article examines the combination of circumstances which transformed the appearance, representations and social practices of the city during the course of the eighteenth century. Through these changes, it will be argued, the traditional practice of collective promenade as a sign of ‘social visibility’ developed into the new form of the individualized figure of the promeneur. Three successive time periods – and three types of evidence – are used to testify to this evolution from earlier patterns of social comportment into a new urban habit: first, the development and the transformation of the ritual of the polite promenade; second, the construction of open promenades around the city (notably, the boulevards and the Champs-Elysées); and, finally, the definition of the identity of the promeneur, as elaborated by writers such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Nicolas-Edmé Rétif de la Bretonne.

Over the past few decades there has been a turn toward ‘the everyday’ in the social sciences and human- ities. For some authors, this turn is about making the everyday a new repository of authority of some sort, political, social, cultural or otherwise. For others, however, any turn toward the everyday interrupts any such evaluation. Focusing upon Stanley Cavell and the philosophical lineage that he continues from Emerson, Nietzsche, Thoreau and Wittgenstein, this paper examines Cavell’s interest in the menace and power of scepticism as key to understanding the everyday as a lived experience. As an introduction to this particular part of Cavell’s work for many Geographers, the paper puts Cavell in relation to more familiar approaches to the everyday, including de Certeau, critical Human Geography, non- representational theory, affect theory, psychoanalysis and pragmatism.

This article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

This paper has three overarching aims: to contextualise oral history within larger debates over methods in the social sciences; to highlight the peculiar strengths as well as complexities of oral history as a method; and finally to elucidate some of these methodological issues through insights drawn from analysis of oral histories of two elderly Bengali Muslim women.

This paper crosses the borders of human geography to bring back two related bodies of work from experimental psychology that investigate, in an unusual and refreshingly precise way, long-standing human geographical concerns with tem-porality, place and subject formations, meaning-making and well-being. It is argued that the traffic of ideas and empirical findings between human geography and experimental psychology can be mutually profitable if, and only to the extent that, it encompasses a sustained epistemological, methodological and political critique of the disciplinary practices that have yielded those ideas and findings.

In the field of consumption history there is growing interest in informal shopping practices, smuggling, and black-market activities in state socialist societies. Yet, little emphasis has been placed on how the foremost socialist workplace, the factory, became a crucial hub for smuggled goods and the extent to which workers played a role within it. This article explores local Budapest court cases from the beginning of the 1960s using the methodological insights of everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte). The cases show that white-collar workers (and in rare cases blue-collar workers) with a command of foreign languages frequently acted as middlemen in making transactions. This specific cultural capital put white-collar workers in a position to gain profit over and above their usual state salary, often contradicting wage hierarchies set by the state. At the same time, blue-collar workers embraced informal shopping possibilities at the factory in a climate of diversifying consumer expectations. This article examines how informal practices of selling and obtaining goods transformed relations among workers and created a new social hierarchy within working-class communities.

"“Bernstein’s powerful account of how the sentimental ideology of childhood innocence, and particularly its highly gendered manifestations, function to articulate racial hierarchies gives strong and detailed evidence for how paying attention to childhood serves to refocus many all too familiar, and troublesome, facets of American culture. I know of virtually no one of her generation who writes with this kind of verve, authority and pleasure. Racial Innocence will prove an important and widely read book—in part simply because it will be so much fun to read.”
—Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College

“Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernstein’s brilliant study of the racialized and gendered ideologies that shape, inform and continue to haunt notions of American childhood into the present day. Through imaginative and masterfully innovative archival research, Bernstein shows how representations of childhood and child’s play are integral to the making of whiteness and blackness and citizenship in this country. Racial Innocence is a groundbreaking book that for the first time illuminates the powerful and critical connections between constructions of girlhood, racial formations and American popular culture.”

—Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of “childhood innocence” has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children—some imbued with innocence, others excluded from it—figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement.

Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as “scriptive things” that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how “innocence” gradually became the exclusive province of white children—until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself.

Robin Bernstein is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her previous books include Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater.

In the America and the Long 19th Century series"

In the late eighteenth century, distance between the changing norms and values and the unchanging material conditions of priests’ everyday lives grew rapidly. The aim of this article is to explore, explain and understand the life and work of the bishop of Livonia, Józef Kazimierz Kossakowski. He was the author of Ksiądz pleban [The Parson], one of the most acknowledged parenetic books promoting new social obligations of priests, however his actions were far from the ideals he promoted. His case is especially interesting because he also wrote a diary describing his life from the childhood to becoming a bishop.

Female Nephila clavipes from univoltine populations have greatly reduced reproductive success if they grow slowly and reach maturity late in the growing season. Although such fitness costs are expected to select for rapid increases in mass, several authors have presented models and data describing physiological costs of rapidly increasing mass. 2. In order to test the hypothesis that there are inherent costs of rapid growth (increasing mass), laboratory-reared juveniles of the orb-weaving spider Nephila clavipes were randomly assigned to receive daily feedings ranging from 2·5% to 23% of their initial mass. 3. Spiders receiving higher amounts of food were more likely to die at or immediately before the next moulting cycle.

This article analyzes the interaction between art and practices of everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. Discussing various forms of adaptations to the politically repressive system – from photography and film to social activities such as ‘cottage homemaking’ and ‘cabining’ – the author describes ways in which popular culture under communism resisted the state-induced drive to modernize which, as a political tool, was designed to pacify the masses. The article suggests that by breaching the gap between the quotidian and the extraordinary,
which as a systemic division has defined daily life in modernity, popular culture was instrumental in reinvigorating everydayness.

‘People’s history’ focuses on the lives of ordinary people, with an eye to their struggles, everyday practices, beliefs, values, and
mentalities. Influenced by the Annales School and cultural anthropology, but reacting against traditional social history’s
emphasis on social structures and serial trends, its practitioners emphasize the importance of individual agency while trying
to demonstrate the complexity of lived experience, the fluidity of identity, and the subjective nature of meaning. Important types of ‘people’s history’ include ‘history from below,’ Alltagsgeschichte (the ‘history of everyday life’), and ‘microhistory,’ all of which involve a dramatic reduction of historical scale, focusing on a single individual, community, or spectacular event.

SUMARI 1. Michi docere offi cium vestrum magistri axie.-2. Un mestre al servei de la ciutat.-3. L'adop de la casa e teulada... fos ben necessari.-4. Conclusió: una petita brigada.-5.-Bibliografi a citada. 916 JACOBO VIDAL FRANQUET ANUARIO DE ESTUDIOS MEDIEVALES, 43/2, julio-diciembre 2013, pp. 915-940

This essay partakes in the dialogue between history, anthropology, and
social theory on the topic of debt as a social relation. Drawing on sources from nineteenth-century Switzerland, it examines everyday routines of debt collection in liberalism by taking the seized collateral object to the center of historical analysis. It is shown how the attached goods in a debtor’s household became an object of knowledge for nineteenth-century framers of law as well as for ordinary debtors. I make use of anthropological theory in order to describe the legal techniques of delineating and extracting collateral, and show how these legal techniques implied specific knowledge practices. I then look at two borderline cases of collateralization: the pawning of mobile goods and the imprisonment of insolvent debtors. Overall, on an epistemological level, debt collection appears as a double movement: it provided basic tools to untangle property relationships, yet all the while it created new, unpredictable complications. Thus debt collection was a distinctive arena in which the uneasy conceptual relationship between people and things in nineteenth-century liberalism unfolded. From this conceptual node I propose a historical epistemology of the collateral object.

The purpose of this collection of articles is to begin to address everyday nationalism’s evidence problem. If banal nationalism is consumed ‘mindlessly, rather than mindfully’ (Billig, 1995: 38) by ordinary people in everyday contexts, how do we even know this? Indeed, how can we know that the sites and routines of banal nationalism are unseen, unheard, unnoticed? The articles in this themed section try to tackle this problem with methodologically innovative approaches for uncovering the covert workings of nationhood in everyday life. Our aim is not to challenge, but to test, the theoretical premises of banal nationalism. We are interested in how we can generate evidence of the nation operating clandestinely as an unreflexive habit, an unselfconscious disposition, and an embodied practice amongst ordinary people in their everyday lives. Drawing on insights from diverse traditions and perspectives, the contributors to this themed section offer novel methodological and theoretical approaches for uncovering evidence of nationhood beneath the veneer of everyday life.

This themed section of 'Nations and Nationalism' contains the following articles besides the introduction:
Tim Edensor and Shanti Sumartojo, Geographies of everyday nationhood: experiencing multiculturalism in Melbourne /
Maarten Van Ginderachter, How to gauge banal nationalism and national indifference in the past: proletarian tweets in Belgium’s belle époque /
Michael Skey, ‘There are times when I feel like a bit of an alien’: Middling migrants and the national order of things /
Jonathan Hearn and Marco Antonsich, Theoretical and methodological considerations for the study of banal and everyday nationalism

Michael Billig's theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect the discourses of ‘ordinary people’. Recent historical research of ‘national indifference’ in imperial Austria has inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of nationalist discourses and their impact in society. This article assesses these conflicting frameworks and refutes AD Smith's critique of everyday nationalism research as necessarily ahistorical and presentist. This case study of the rank‐and‐file of the social‐democratic Belgian Workers' Party at the close of the nineteenth century uses a unique source of working‐class voices: the so‐called ‘propaganda pence’ or ‘proletarian tweets’ from the Flemish‐speaking city of Ghent. Hot, explicit nationalism was absent from these sources, which begs the question: is this proof of banal nationalism or national indifference? A historically contextualized analysis of the absences shows that workers expressed national indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. In Rogers Brubaker's terms: Flemish ethnicity was a relevant social category, but only in a very restricted number of social contexts could it become a basis for ‘groupness’ or political mobilisation in daily life.

Desde la historia de vida cotidiana y los estudios de cultura material, en este trabajo describimos y analizamos las prácticas domésticas de limpieza en la ciudad de Córdoba (Argentina), a partir de la presencia (o ausencia) en los inventarios post mortem de objetos materiales y espacios de la vivienda destinados al aseo. Los cambios en la cultura material y en el espacio construido nos permiten reconocer tanto modificaciones como permanencias en las sensibilidades y en las ideas de limpieza/suciedad.

[This essay is an early sketch of the project on scholars' household, habits and gendering science in the sixteenth century. Most parts are to be revised in the book.]

Until the fifteenth century, celibacy was the rule among Christian scholars of northwestern Europe. Celibacy was a major element of the codified cultural representation of the scholar and his specific way of life, sustained by peculiar institutional arrangements and daily routines. Founding family households implied therefore a major reorganization of the scholar’s way of life. Broadly speaking, this involved refashioning the scholarly habitus (understood as a system of durable and transposable social dispositions), redefining social relations, and developing the necessary material infrastructure. The paper focuses on three aspects of this process during a period characterized by uncertainty and experimentation. It discusses the structure of scholars’ families, arguing that at least until the middle of the sixteenth century, received models still persisted, while new viable models for articulating family reproduction with the transmission of scholarly dispositions had not yet crystallized. It then turns to the reorganization of domestic space, focusing on the different uses of the study to manage social distance and regulate domestic relations. Finally, among the different manifestations of the scholarly habitus, it argues that the emotional detachment of learned men was itself a learned habit. The well-documented discussion of competing options for organizing scholars’ family households and cultivating an acquired nature in academic settings provides an exceptional occasion to examine the way a group habitus is reshaped and to explore the cultural work
involved in this process.

В настоящее время вопросы досуга находятся в центре внимания значительного числа специалистов, представляющих различные области научного знания. Не являются исключением и историки, обращающиеся к изучению досуговых практик в рамках истории повседневности. Новизна исследования, посвященного досугу советского городского населения в 1920-е – начале 1930-х гг., состоит в опоре на результаты как опубликованных, так и архивных исследований бюджетов времени, активно проводившихся в этот период. В работе использовались положения и методы исторической антропологии, истории повседневности и досуга, проблемно-хронологический и сравнительно-исторический методы. Выполнен обзор общих и особенных для различных категорий населения черт в трате времени на досуг, дана оценка степени репрезентативности результатов рассмотренных исследований. Сделан вывод о том, что, согласно материалам изучения бюджетов времени, полагавшееся законодательством время на отдых либо занималось работой, либо тратилось непродуктивно. Основными причинами этого была ненормированность рабочего дня, дополнительная работа (общественная, домашняя), нерациональная организация свободного времени. При этом данная ситуация была характерна для всего периода, несмотря на просветительскую и организационную работу по культивированию и распространению культурного и активного досуга.

This study examines the changing media landscape in the late 19th and early 20th century and the resulting change of urban communication about crime in Imperial Berlin. To this end, the study combines questions and concepts of social and microhistory, the history of crime and police, metropolitan studies, and media history, and draws numerous historical material such as records of the Prussian government, police files, court reports, the numerous reports filed by the Berlin population with the police, and media of popular entertainment (such as popular songs, postcards, silent films, and radio plays). The analysis shows as to how the rise of cheap daily newspapers went with the emergence of the urban crime drama in Imperial Berlin. Especially public manhunts, a ritualized public "search for the culprit", developed into a major and regular sensational event. At the centre of the public manhunt (and also in the public court hearings) was the question of the identity, the whereabouts and the guilt of the perpetrator. In this context, Berlin city-dwellers played an active role as requested by press and police. With readiness and imagination ordinary Berliners made use of this opportunity for political participation and they contributed in their own ways to (re-)establish safety and order. Put differently, an increasing democratization was underway in the course of the changing media landscape in the metropolis, but with regard to urban communication about crime this process of democratization resulted in the popularization of (self-)policing.

Through an analysis of two important visual projects of the late 1990s—Manskii’s Chronicles and Dzhanik Faiziev and Leonid Parfenov’s forty-three-episode series  Lately (1997–2004)—I intend to show how these filmmakers decompose the visual legacy of monolithic and totalizing late socialism. In these documentaries, the last three decades of the USSR emerge as a “tangible time”, to use Shklovskii’s term. Each project achieves a certain degree of temporal and spatial granularity of the period by breaking late Soviet history into material units of meaningful analytic and everyday experience. Autonomous and usually disconnected, these kino-things of sorts bring with them no coherent story. In fact, through their concreteness, they decontextualize identities and destabilize dominant narratives of socialism while simultaneously producing a grounding effect of mnemonic and historical palpability.

Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place -- one defined by pure functionality and rationality -- a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism.

Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no -- as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried -- literally -- in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they previously had.

This paper focuses on Mass Observation (MO)’s morale work, commissioned by the British Government over the period 1939–41. It examines the ways in which MO’s earlier collecting practices were recomposed through its research into civilian morale, and linked up with national centres of calculation, in particular the Ministry of Information (MoI). We explore the associations through which civilian morale was established, simultaneously, as an autonomous object of knowledge and as a particular field of intervention. As an object of knowledge, morale posited the existence of a dynamic affective ‘atmosphere’ associated with collective everyday life, which could be calibrated through various social scientific methods. As a particular field of intervention, technicians of morale postulated that this atmosphere might be regulated through various policy instruments. This paper traces the ways in which MO practices were implicated along these two axes in the emergence of civilian morale as a domain warranting the state’s ‘constant attention and supervision’.

What communities chose to print can be telling about what they find important or necessary. As such, print history has much to offer histories of selfidentity and the development of nationalism. 1 In March, 1639, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the diligent chronicler of the early settlement, noted that a printing house was begun at Cambridge by one Daye, at the charge of Mr. Glover, who died on sea hitherward. The first thing which was printed was the freeman's oath; the next thing was an almanac made for New England by Mr. William Peirce Mariner; the next was the Psalms newly turned into metre. 2

In the last century, teachers have come under pressure to incorporate new media technologies into their lessons. Comparing educational research, press coverage, and teachers' firsthand accounts of mediated instruction between 1919 and 1946, this article highlights a historic discrepancy between anticipated and actual uses of media in classrooms. Drawing on de Certeau's theory of “making do,” the author argues that teachers' efforts to balance high technologies with simpler, more do-it-yourself varieties of media in their lessons constituted critical forms of participation in educational media culture and small acts of resistance against industrial, top-down efforts to streamline, modernize, and technologize their work.

This article focuses on the practice of “working for yourself” (rabota na sebia), which was common in the Soviet Union in the 1970s–1980s and entailed manufacturing and repairing household items during work hours, using factory resources. The theoretical approach is based on Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday practices as anonymous creativity and on Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the cultural biography of things—the displacement of objects in social space and the resultant shift in their cultural meanings. I examine the creation and function of handmade objects, paying particular attention to their movement between the domestic sphere (private realm) and the enterprise (public realm). The objects are presented as participants in quasi-professional interactions, where they function as a tool for the creation of social networks. I conclude that during the late Soviet era the practice of “working for yourself” promoted the expression of professional identity and pride in work and was taken as the realization of socialist ideals of ownership. However, in the post-Soviet period, workers connect their limited access to factory resources, imposed by management, to disrespectful attitudes towards workers and the loss of social justice.

In Russian, extended summary in English.

In the last two decades, historians have faced difficult methodological challenges in exploring former party archives in East Central Europe and in reconstructing the political history of communist regimes. A remarkable answer to this challenge has been provided by a new generation of historians who turned their attention to the social history of socialist dictatorships in East Central Europe, and took a peculiar interest in the "small," the "mundane" and the "insignificant" of everyday life under communism. Their laborious research has focused not on high politics, but on local communities. Their works deconstructed the lifestyles , living conditions, fashion and dressing, leisure, tourism and consumption, sexual habits and childcare of ordinary people. The current study provides a historiographic overview of the major thematic and methodological orientations of the history of the everyday life in socialist dictatorships. It focuses on two distinct but overlapping directions of research: the analysis of the daily habitual organization of communist societies; and the communist authorities' attempt at a micro-politics of everyday life. The study argues that, while the new social history of the socialist dictatorships has greatly added to our understanding of significant aspects of the social and political structure of these countries, it has also constructed a representation of everyday life as essentially impertinent to power. In doing so, it ignored the capacity of habitual social and cultural behavior in producing techniques of control and discipline.

Roads and Anthropology is the first collection of road ethnographies, edited by two pioneers in the anthropological explorations of infrastructures, the essays published in this book aim to pave the way for that rising field of anthropological research.

This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Table of Contents
-Dalakoglou D. & P. Harvey. Introduction. Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Time and (Im)Mobility
-Nielsen M. Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique
-Campbell J. Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia
-Kernaghan R. Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru
-Harvey P. & H. Knox. The Enchantments of Infrastructure
-Klaeger G. Rush and Relax: the Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Products on a Ghanaian Roadside
-Pedersen M. & M. Bunkenborg Roads that Separate: Sino-Mongolian Relations in the Inner Asian Desert
- Dalakoglou D. ‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism’: Infrastructures of (Post)Socialism in Albania

¿Qué implica viajar con otros a quienes no conocemos? ¿Cuánto aprendemos de quienes nos acompañan mientras viajamos? ¿Qué relación hay entre la forma en que nos movemos y el tipo de ciudad que construimos? ¿Cómo varía la experiencia de hombres y mujeres en el transporte público?

Este libro retorna a los orígenes del viaje colectivo en las principales ciudades sudamericanas de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Lejos de entenderlos como un mero traslado, se concibe estos viajes como espacios fundamentales de sociabilidad; lugares desde donde se construyen y visibilizan las diferencias de género, clase y edad; balcones para el reconocimiento del paisaje social y urbano; motivo de promesas y reivindicaciones políticas; espacios privilegiados de reflexión, lectura e imaginación. En suma, la base de nuestra cultura metropolitana.

Apstrakt: Na osnovu podataka iz različite arhivske građe i relevantne literature , autorica, u ograničenom prostoru i vremenskom okviru, rekonstruiše sliku i sastavlja dijelove porodičnog života stanovnika Sarajeva posljednjih decenija osmanske vladavine. Ključne riječi: porodica, brak, modernizacija, Sarajevo, zapadni uticaji, struktura porodice, privatni život, porodični problemi. Abstract: Based on the data collected in different archives and in relevant literature, the author reconstructs in a limited space and time, the picture that makes the segments of family life of the citizens Sarajevo in the last decades of the Ottoman rule.

This paper approaches the story of women’s negotiations with social reforms in late colonial urban Bengal through an analysis of private reminiscences of elderly Muslim and Hindu women. Skirting the larger stories of nationalist transformation, conflict and dislocation that so often dominate discussions of Muslim-Hindu relations in the subcontinent, the life stories analyzed here foreground an intimate realm of everyday experiences that captures a ‘feeling’ for a bygone time and context, and the complex linkages between public memory and individual biography. The paper also pays attention to the oral narratives as inter-subjective, dialogically produced ‘texts’ that are fraught with tensions.

The author investigates some aspects of the 'cultural revolution' of the Hungarian communist regime, revealing what the regime considered as cultured or uncultured activity and behaviour at the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s. The primary source is made up of two daily newspapers (Szabad Föld, i.e. 'Free Land' and Észak-Magyarország, i.e. 'Northern Hungary'). According to the analysis the most important elements of culturedness were reading, listening to the radio and watching TV, because their identity shaping, educating and culturally mediating role was of fundamental importance for the regime, and these activities were supposed to contribute to the reduction of differences between city and village and between various social groups. In practice it meant the adaptation of peasant lifestyle and taste to an urban one, and set of criteria of this urban lifestyle and culture was designated with the Soviet-based normative concept of culturedness. The articles published in newspapers about the ideal cultured man formed eventually a sort of behaviour codex, which included not only expectations about culturedness but as a formal code of conduct it also incorporated regulations and guidelines about proper behaviour.

At the height of World War II, the Government General of Korea
exerted considerable effort to propagandise and mobilise the colonial
population. Films, fictional works, theatrical productions, posters
and exhibits exhorted colonised Koreans to support the war
effort and sacrifice themselves for the Japanese empire. At the same
time, a considerable number of images from the period provided
views of a more mundane everyday life, filled with smiling children
going to school and farmers living an idyllic communal life. Late
colonial publications offer a fascinating visual archive of Korea, and
behind the plethora of everyday images was the spread of amateur
photography. The Japanese colonial state in Korea systematically
and purposefully used amateur photographs to visually “stage”
everyday life, transforming the images into symbolic representations
that legitimated colonisation. In terms of visual politics and
the aims of this special issue, the study of the visual practices of the
colonial period underscores how their influence has persisted long
after liberation in 1945 and continues to affect representations of
Korean society, culture and nationhood even today.