{"id":19144,"date":"2021-09-18T09:26:31","date_gmt":"2021-09-18T16:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19144"},"modified":"2021-09-18T09:27:32","modified_gmt":"2021-09-18T16:27:32","slug":"braudels-_structures-of-everyday-life_","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2021\/09\/18\/braudels-_structures-of-everyday-life_\/","title":{"rendered":"Braudel\u2019s _Structures of Everyday Life_"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019m continuing to read\/skim Fernand Braudel\u2019s 1980(ish) <cite>The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible<\/cite> (volume 1 of his three-volume work <cite>Civilization and Capitalism, 15th\u201318th Century<\/cite>).<\/p>\r\n<p>I continue to find it a mix of fascinating and annoying\u2014there\u2019s a wealth of information here about what Braudel calls \u201cmaterial life\u201d around the world during that period, but there\u2019s also a fair bit of a certain specific kind of racism. (Braudel is admirably evenhanded in discussing some cultures from around the world, but he occasionally refers to some other cultures as \u201cprimitives\u201d and \u201csavages,\u201d and casually mentions how stinky their houses were.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Also, Braudel is interested in history rather than in science and engineering as such, so he refers to a lot of technological changes without explaining them. And he wants to give evidence for his conclusions, so there are pages and pages of lists of numbers of things\u2014how many tons of iron per year were produced at several different European cities in a certain period, for example. (I assume that part of the book\u2019s core audience was historians; I\u2019m not saying that Braudel <em>shouldn\u2019t<\/em> have focused where he did, just that that focus is less interesting to me personally than some other aspects of what he\u2019s doing.)<\/p>\r\n<p>But there\u2019s also a bunch of material that would be great for alternate-history writers (such as discussion of Chinese and Arab ships being capable of making long ocean voyages long before the big European ocean voyages). And a bunch of just generally interesting information about all kinds of material aspects of daily life.<\/p>\r\n<p>The book reminds me of James Burke\u2019s <cite>Connections<\/cite> TV show in some ways, but it\u2019s sort of like what <cite>Connections<\/cite> would have been like if it had been created by someone who cared more about things like the number of hectares of forest that were cut down in a given period and region than about telling a compelling and coherent narrative story. (I imagine that <cite>Connections<\/cite> oversimplifies some things in its desire for narrative; that approach has flaws too.)<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2026On a side note, there are two ways in which Braudel constantly reminds me that he\u2019s French (I\u2019m reading the book in English translation):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>His references to people and places and events that he assumes the reader will be aware of and recognize tend to be mostly French ones (I think)\u2014French kings, French towns, French military battles. This is perfectly reasonable, of course\u2014I\u2019m not criticizing, just noting.<\/li>\r\n  <li>More noticeably: He uses the phrase <i>ancien regime<\/i> approximately every 5\u201310 pages, to refer to the former way of doing things in any and every context. (This phrase does of course appear in plenty of books written originally in English, but I\u2019ve never before seen anyone use it this frequently. Every time he introduces a new topic, which he does every few pages, I start counting down to when he\u2019s going to refer to the ancien regime of that technology or way of doing things.)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19144"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19146,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19144\/revisions\/19146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}