Mining culture, labour, and the state in early modern Saxony

Author(s)
Sebastian Felten
Abstract

This article encourages cultural historians to shift their attention from the ‘origins’ of early modern mining culture in manual labour to seemingly derivative contexts such as the court, bureaucracy, and heritage collections. How did these sites fashion the idea of mining culture as a system of expressions, and how was this system used, with varying success, to align individuals and groups with the requirements of material production? The article identifies at least five layers of constitutive and interpretative work: The current, 'normalized' scholarship in a reunited Germany; the construction of liberal or socialist traditions in the East and the West after the war; the resurrection of both a mining State and mining Volk during the Nazi era; the system-building of ethnographers and heritage associations since the early 1800s; and attempts of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century mining bureaucracy to homogenize workers’ dress, ritual, and language for judiciary, management, and economic planning purposes. Each layer produced their own archives, on which any investigation of early modern mining culture depends as an empirical base, and all of them offered their own attempts to construct a system of cultural expression from the particular stories, archival documents, songs, and dress elements that they collected and arranged.

Organisation(s)
Department of History
External organisation(s)
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Journal
Renaissance Studies
Volume
34
Pages
119-148
No. of pages
30
ISSN
0269-1213
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12583
Publication date
05-2019
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
601005 European history, 601008 Science of history
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Cultural Studies, History, Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Religious studies, Literature and Literary Theory
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/29fc7c92-5104-4af9-9979-dbf734ac91e8