bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Traveling Concepts and Conjunctural Analysis: Concepts Gone Bad
Authors: Aydemir Murat
Published: January 2025

In 2002, Mieke Bal influentially argued that theory is most helpful for cultural analysis in the form of heuristic concepts rather than comprehensive systems or methods. Instead of epistemological “coverage,” concepts enable measured “travel” across disciplines and territories. However, concepts no longer circulate in the same way as they used to in the early 2000s. Multidisciplinary “toolkits” have become commonplace. Once-specialized academic concepts now lead sweeping social lives across academic, popular, activist, and governmental contexts. The metaphor of “travel” doesn’t work when there are few borders left. As an alternative, I propose a combination of cultural analysis and conjunctural analysis, weighing the leverage and purchase of concepts in terms of the present historical situation and its shape-shifting hegemony.
Cultural Analysis at a Tipping Point
Authors: Wigdel-Bowcott Seb
Published: January 2025

What is it like to study and teach cultural analysis at 1.5° above preindustrial levels? Probably not much different, which is partly the point. Over the past decade, a planetary turn in critical theory has drawn attention to how climate change eludes human experience. This essay compares the respective research approaches of British cultural studies and the Netherlands’ cultural analysis and considers how they look after the planetary turn. The lesson of the planetary turn is as much about movement between analytic scales as it is an explosion of them, encouraging a form of cultural analysis that can attend to the rapidly shifting ways climate change does—and does not—figure as part of everyday experience.
From Social Relevance to Public Intervention: Cultural Analysis in and out of the Classroom
Authors: Kuryel Aylin
Published: January 2025

One of the defining features of the practice of cultural analysis is its insistence on testing the bearing of concepts by putting them in dia¬logue with the contemporary in order to produce socially relevant analysis. I propose to “test” the concept of social relevance itself by attending to its travels across contemporary contexts, and bringing another concept, intervention, into the conversation. While “being relevant to” implies a prior knowability of a context according to which the (ir)relevance of analysis can be measured, “intervening into” suggests the possibility of reconfiguring that very context through analysis. To unpack this, I focus on “public intervention” as a pedagogical tactic and offer examples of students’ interventions from the courses I taught in the last few years.
Toward a Decolonial Classroom: Resituating Cultural Analysis as Pedagogical Intervention
Authors: Özgen Aslı
Published: January 2025

Although a significant body of theory regarding decolonization and the process of decolonizing higher education exists, implementing this theory into lived educational experience remains a challenge. In this chapter, I propose that the cultural analysis framework offers a promising approach to bridge the insights of decolonial thought with the dynamics of a university classroom. Following a contextual overview of ongoing efforts aimed at decolonizing universities, I highlight three nexuses of action, pivotal in dismantling colonial knowledge paradigms. I explore the potential intersections between the decolonial critique of university and the lens of cultural analysis. I examine these dynamics through the case study of designing and implementing a course at the University of Amsterdam.
Crises, Social Relevance, and Critical Discomfort: Shooting Ourselves in the Foot
Authors: Lopez Alvaro
Published: January 2025

The social, political, economic, environmental, and epidemio¬logical crises of the last three decades have radically altered societies and cultures around the globe—and with them inevitably the role of cultural analysis. But how can cultural analysts respond to these fast-changing challenges? At a time of widespread depoliticization, our critical approach has become too palatable for the power structures we examine; we seem to be playing into a system that asphyxiates us little by little. By bringing together Third Cinema, horror, and psychoanalysis, this chapter argues that our radical potential demands first and foremost for us to refocus our efforts on critical analysis and allow ourselves to become deeply uncomfortable.
Parochialism as Method: Pejorative, Partage, Pastoral
Authors: Martin Niall
Published: January 2025

In the methodological ecumenicalism of its focus on objects and concepts, cultural analysis is particularly susceptible to a decolonial critique that emphasizes the importance of situated knowledge. However, I propose that it is precisely in the disavowed parochialism that links cultural analysis to Amsterdam with its conjoined histories of capitalism, colonialism, and liberalism, that its methodological ecumenicalism is at its most generative. As parochialism in various guises takes on a general conjunctural force, cultural analysis models a form of community that is predicated not on belonging, but in participation in difference, or parochialism as partage.
Socio-environmental Movements and LFFU: Framing, Tactics and Court Cases
Authors: Gupta Joyeeta , Rempel Arthur , Hillson Isabelle , Johnson Laura , Begley Alfie , Brander Nina
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines how actors such as socio-environmental movements can promote through a variety of tactics a niche change in one area which can possibly ripple into a regime or landscape change. The chapter presents a number of fossil fuel-oriented social movements and identifies lessons learnt from criteria for successful social movements. Successful movements operated in politically open states, focused on states and companies, mobilized grievances, had clear local and economic frames, used lobbying and court cases. There are hundreds of court cases globally, but in the Global South these are just beginning. Most court cases led to decisions that could enhance mitigative action and are more successful than the other strategies of social movements. Courts flourish better in more democratic countries, however, so far they have tended to be niche ideas or sometimes regime-change events.
Finance and LFFU
Authors: Rempel Arthur , Gupta Joyeeta , Brander Nina , McDonnell Clara , Politsch Anne Elizabeth , Green Graham Tennant , Harkema Tjeerd , McGarthy Emma , Tofighi-Niaki Adrien
Published: January 2025

Financial actors play a key role in the fossil fuel sector and thus can be expected to play a role to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter focuses on global actors such as investors and producers and their relations with the Global South. It examines philanthropic foundations, pension funds, investor initiatives and export credit agencies. Our research shows that although these actors have a critical role, they are not taking any meaningful action through LFFU. Although divestment is underway, it is doubtful if that leads to LFFU as new shareholders emerge. In the meanwhile, for a long time, the export credit agencies have been financing fossil fuel projects in developing countries and have only recently committed to phasing that out.
Supply-side and Institutional Mechanisms for LFFU
Authors: Rempel Arthur , Larrea Carlos , Murmis Maria Rosa , Hogenboom Barbara
Published: January 2025

How can international collaboration to effectively and inclusively leave fossil fuels underground be fostered? This chapter discusses the potential of public sector initiatives and institutional mechanisms that halt the supply of fossil fuels and the funding of fossil energy projects. Next to national policies, a transition in the role of public finance institutions is indispensable. The creation of mitigation alliances-an innovative global tool included in the Paris Agreement-offers great potential. The chapter reviews several supply-side approaches and experiences in the Global South, such as oil moratoria and the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in Latin America. After showing the important (negative) role of foreign public finance institutions in funding fossil fuel projects in countries like Ecuador and South Africa, the chapter explains how through setting up mitigation alliances they can start playing a positive role and support climate action and LFFU. A mitigation alliance can declare specific fossil fuel reserves unburnable and create compensation funds that invest in renewable energy, sustainable social development and conservation of forests and biodiversity in developing countries.
Phasing out Fossil Fuels: Synergies and Trade-offs
Authors: Gupta Joyeeta , Rempel Arthur , Olofsson Malin
Published: January 2025

This chapter concludes by answering the questions: How do different actors use different arguments and approaches to engage with a fossil fuel phase-out? Which arguments and approaches grapple with the multiple trade-offs, for which actors, and why? And how can these be scaled up? The chapter identifies 10 niche arguments that need scaling up: Revisiting how development is defined, using court cases as an effective option for social movements, social movements can build on existing contextual ideas such as the rights of nature, the need for extraction moratoria, demanding compensation for stranded fossil fuel assets, emphasizing the vulnerability of exports to border tax adjustments can influence national and business policy, holding all accountable for their own climate debt, subject fiduciary responsibility to socio-ecological criteria, use philanthropic funds to decommission existing fossil fuel projects and adapt and implement OECD policy to prohibit ECA finance for fossil fuel projects.
Guarding Security, Managing Risks: West African Bombas on Dutch Slave Ships
Authors: Lukkes Matthias
Published: January 2025

Bombas were West African slave overseers working on Dutch slave ships. Through studying the life and labours of bombas, this chapter unravels European and African security management in the worlds of the transatlantic slave trade. As the first part of this chapter shows, bombas were instrumental to the safety of the crew and the assurance of a profitable voyage for captains and trading companies. The second part shifts its attention to the lives and social connections of the West African individuals who worked as bombas, unravelling strategies developed by West African communities to protect members of kin who worked in Atlantic maritime environments against the risks of kidnapping and enslavement.
Business as Usual: Persisting Narratives of Commodification, Racialisation and Humanisation in the Archive of the MCC
Authors: Rowland Michael Thomas
Published: January 2025

The focus of this article is on linguistic strategies of commodification, racialisation, and humanisation in the archive of the Dutch slave trade. Against the traditional economic approach to the historical study of documents produced by Dutch slave traders, this chapter centres the role of seemingly empirical, self-evident (ideological) language in the normalisation, naturalisation, and reproduction of the social system of slavery. In particular, it will discuss the ritualised and hierarchically enforced employment of specific terminology, tenses, limited economic narratives, and calculative discursive appropriation of humanity for the purposes of enslavement in view of their role in reproducing the racialising mercantile ideology and the wider Dutch transatlantic slave trade it sustained. In this vein, terms and descriptions used to describe reality conceptualised in Dutch and western historiography at large as objective are problematised due to both their insufficient “empirical basis” and function as means with which to legitimate exploitative social relations.1 Although not restricted to documentation produced in view of recording, facilitating, and narrating the trade in humans, the majority of sources drawn upon are taken from the archive of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie (MCC) – the most prolific Dutch private slave trading company of the Free Trade era (1730-1802). Specifically, five MCC sets of instructions, ten letters and five types of documents produced onboard the slave ship – the journal, surgeon’s journal, negotiation book, logbook, and report – pertaining to four separate voyages are directly referenced.
Introduction: Sources Revisited and Perspectives Included
Authors: Fatah-Black Karwan , de Koning Camilla , Negrón Ramona , den Oudsten Jessica
Published: January 2025

This edited volume, The Dutch Slave Trade. New Methods, Perspectives, and Sources, reexamines the historiography of the Dutch slave trade through innovative methodologies and underutilised primary sources. Traditionally, research has focused on the business practices of the MCC and WIC, often overlooking the lived experiences of the enslaved and the complexities of illegal trade and violence. The future of research in this field is promising, with Dutch archives offering new avenues for exploration beyond the traditional focus. This volume reveals the potential to uncover perspectives of enslaved people aboard slave ships, investigate unstudied areas like sexual violence, and examine the roles of Dutch nobility and elite in the trade. It also highlights emerging research on previously marginalised or overlooked groups, like the involvement of women in slave revolts, the activities of private traders and their families, and the experiences of captives in the African interior and coastal forts. By encouraging historians to engage with these rich sources, the editors aim to inspire new research that broadens our understanding of the diverse social and economic networks within the Dutch transatlantic slave trade, offering a more nuanced view of this history.
Merdeka
Authors: Poeze Harry , Schulte Nordholt Henk , Marini Gioia
Published: January 2025

Under the slogan ‘Merdeka!’ the Republic of Indonesia rushed into a battle for independence - a struggle of which no one could predict the outcome. Harry Poeze and Henk Schulte Nordholt provide a new narrative about the revolution, one that focuses not only on the fight against the Dutch but also on the precarious rise of the Republic.

After the horrors of the Japanese occupation, the Republican leaders needed to somehow build a new state. From the Dutch side, they had to deal with short-sighted politicians and warmongering soldiers. On its own side, the Republic was confronted with wayward and combative youths, autonomous military leaders, conservative federalists, revolutionary communists, and radical Muslims. Coup d’états, a civil war and two Dutch military attacks threatened the survival of the Republic. That is why the victory finally achieved by the Indonesian leaders is the revolution’s greatest miracle.
Organizing for Independence
Authors: Gunzelmann Hans Jonas
Published: January 2025

Independence protests are on the rise across Europe, as Spain, the UK, and other states have faced severe secessionist challenges. The largest wave of these protests swept Catalonia and reached its peak in 2017 when the push for a binding referendum led to an unprecedented secessionist crisis. Organizing for Independence explores the question of how the referendum crisis as a threat and opportunity transformed secessionist protest and its organizational basis. Combining protest event data, qualitative interviews, and network analyses, Hans Jonas Gunzelmann shows how organizational change took place inside, outside, and between formal organizations, and was driven by activists’ symbolic constructions of transformative events. The book goes beyond simplistic accounts of secessionist protest by providing a dynamic perspective on strategic interactions between protesters and their opponents and allies. These insights are particularly timely as independence movements all over the world look with great interest at what happened in Catalonia.
Obstetric Violence within Students’ Rite of Passage: The Reproduction of the Obstetric Subject and its Racialised (M)other
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , Mitchell Veronica , van Nistelrooij Inge , Bozalek Vivienne
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we argue that the modern obstetric subject (doctor or midwife) representing the obstetric institution engulfs the (m)other in a typically modern way as othered, racialized, affectable, and outer-determined, in order to constitute itself in terms of self-determination and universal reason. We amplify students’ curricular encounters in two colonially related geopolitical spaces, South Africa and the Netherlands, and in two professions, obstetric medicine and midwifery, to highlight global systemic tendencies that push students to cross ethical, social, and political boundaries towards the (m)other they are trained to care for. The embedment of obstetric violence in their rite of passage ensures the reproduction of the modern obstetric subject, the racialized (m)other, and institutionalized violence.
Hacking Reproductive Justice: Solomon’s Judgment and the Captive Maternal
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , Villarmea Stella
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we identify the biblical story of Solomon’s judgment as an origin story which constitutes an understanding of justice in matters of reproduction that is still hegemonic today. “Reproductive justice” is a popular, strong, and important activist concept, but it is important, for any feminist reappropriation, that the concept is truly liberated from any form of maternal capture constituted by a patriarchal configuration of justice in matters of reproduction. Working with Joy James’s concept of the captive maternal, a “hack” of Solomon’s judgment is orchestrated, in order to reimagine reproductive justice within a feminist mythology.
The Undercommons of Childbirth and Its Abolitionist Ethic of Care: A Study of Obstetric Violence among Mothers, Midwives (in Training), and Doulas
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , van Nistelrooij Inge , Leget Carlo
Published: January 2025

Engaging in dialogue with critical mothers, midwives, midwives in training, and doulas in the Netherlands, this study furthers the theoretical understanding of both obstetric violence and the activist resistance against it. Obstetric violence is understood as part of a process of separation, leaving the pregnant person isolated. The activist resistance against it is consequently theorized as the abolitionist building of an alternative “otherworld” of radical relational care. The themes established are: (1) “institutionalized separation” with the subthemes of “expropriation,” “carcerality,” and “obstetric violence”; and (2) “undercommoning childbirth” with the subthemes of “fugitive planning,” “anarchic relationality,” and “obstetric abolition.”
“When the Egg Breaks, the Chicken Bleeds”: Unsettling Coloniality through Fertility in Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. and The Chronicles
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , Schoof Kim , van Rooden Aukje
Published: January 2025

In our study of The Passion According to G.H., supported by fragments from the Chronicles, we show: (1) how the passion of G.H. is the passion of a specifically colonial subject; (2) how fertility is an essential link between subjectivity and coloniality; and (3) how Lispector reconfigures fertility as a possibility of being deeply affected by the world. We argue that Lispector’s project must be understood as concerned with the revolutionary question of dismantling the colonial subject and its world through pregnancy and fertility. As such, Lispector reimagines the relation between the person and their (capacity for) pregnancy.
The Graphometer and the Book
Authors: Deinsen Lieke van , Dietz Feike
Published: January 2025

This essay unravels the dynamics between two types of objects - a scientific instrument and a book of poetry - of the sort usually studied by different kinds of specialists. Working at their intersection, the authors of this essay reveal how the eighteenth-century invention of the ‘general graphometer’ created new possibilities for the production of silhouette portraits, and they investigate how these possibilities interacted with a volume of poems by Petronella Johanna de Timmerman (1723/1724-1786). The essay successively focuses on the volume’s portrait produced by the graphometer, the biographical introduction reflecting on the graphometer and poems that share the graphometer’s ambition to capture nature. Objects that have never been studied in relation to one another turn out to share the same ambition: to arm the eyes with innovative observational instruments.
The VOC Boardroom
Authors: van Tussenbroek Gabri
Published: January 2025

This contribution focuses on the VOC boardroom in the Bushuis (armoury), the presumed meeting room of the governors of the VOC. Main topics concern the building’s location, the layout of the building and its construction history. The interior of the VOC boardroom is currently a reconstruction from the second half of the twentieth century. The building’s history can serve to understand this reconstructed VOC boardroom. Did those involved in the reconstruction investigate all the options? And which sources offer the most support to base the reconstruction on? To answer these questions, this essay discusses the location and appearance of the VOC boardroom, the material traces in the walls of the complex and the reconstruction of the boardroom in 1998.
Blue Paper
Authors: Noorman Judith
Published: January 2025

This essay’s point of departure is Dutch blue paper, which has been neglected as a scholarly subject. Dutch blue paper, however, offers a kaleidoscopic view of the Dutch Republic and presents an opportunity to rethink its past, its peoples, and its place in the world in an inclusive manner. After all, the material ‘life’ of Dutch blue paper moves through the early modern world, starting in Central and South America, jour-neying across the Atlantic, passing through the Rasphuis workhouse in Amsterdam and ending up in the paper mills in the Zaanstreek. Moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’, this essay discusses the origin, history and (artistic) uses of Dutch blue paper in the seventeenth century.
Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV
Authors: Quinn Mary B.
Published: January 2025

This book accounts for the outpouring of celebrations in the Habsburg Empire upon the 1657 birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain. These celebrations allow us to interrogate the shifting uses of performance in the empire’s center and periphery. Such spectacles could work to contain and manipulate public sentiment, but at other moments they questioned sanctioned power structures. A study of zarzuela texts, opera libretti, notated music, paintings, poems, and historical documents shows that an array of people took advantage of this festive moment to question the empire’s policies in surprising ways. Sensorial experience played a crucial role during these celebrations. For its part, the Crown engaged a variety of senses, especially sight, sound, and smell, in order to augment the impact of royal spectacles. But simultaneously, those who questioned the Crown also did so through an engagement of the sensorial world.
Urban Screens
Authors: Verhoeff Nanna
Published: January 2025

This book offers a discussion of the screens, installations, and media architecture that populate contemporary urban public spaces. It proposes a methodological approach and conceptual toolset for the critical examination, not only of what these screens do, but also of what we can do with them. The book contains a collection of theoretical concepts, developed through an in-depth examination of the material, relational, and performative aspects of a range of urban screens and screen practices. Its situational and practice-oriented approach focuses on the space between their material surfaces, the spectatorial situations they create, and how such screens situate us in relation to the surrounding social and cultural environment of the city.

Offering concepts for a critical understanding of the wide variety of contemporary urban screen practices, the book’s methodological proposal integrates close situational analyses and a historical-comparative approach for individual screens and screening situations in their role as part of a wider global contemporary screen culture.
Frans Hals
Authors: Middelkoop Norbert E. , Ekkart Rudi E.O.
Published: January 2025

Frans Hals (1582/83-1666) is rightfully considered one of the most important seventeenth-century Dutch painters. His portraits are admired for their virtuoso brushwork and their seemingly spontaneous character. This volume, with fourteen contributions by twenty-six specialists on Hals’s paintings and his artistic network in Haarlem and beyond, presents a rich palette of new research.

The authors introduce subjects such as the artist’s clientele - from clergymen and fellow painters to governors of charitable institutions - as well as stylistic and technical aspects of individual paintings. Results of recent restorations are discussed, but also how advanced digital technologies contribute to our understanding of the painter’s style and artistic development. A final section is dedicated to the rediscovery of Frans Hals in the second half of the nineteenth century and to the following art historical debate among connoisseurs about the artist’s oeuvre.

Frans Hals: Iconography - Technique - Reputation is the first volume in the Frans Hals Studies book series and is richly illustrated with close to two hundred colour illustrations.
Peeckelhaering and the Performance of Race
Authors: Atkins Christopher D.M.
Published: January 2025

Contemporary artist Titus Kaphar, in a 2017 TED talk, asked audiences to recenter attention by acknowledging and interpreting the presence of Black figures in paintings such as Frans Hals’s Family Group in a Landscape, now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. While scholars have taken up the challenge in the works of other early modern Dutch artists, especially Rembrandt, the diverse models in the art of Frans Hals remain unexamined. This paper examines three well-known paintings by Hals that depict a man with a dark complexion, reviews past interpretations of the man as biracial, and explores the likelihood that the model was an actor performing Peeckelhaering and other roles.
Frans Hals’s Portraits of Painters: A Reconnaissance
Authors: Middelkoop Norbert E.
Published: January 2025

Frans Hals portrayed a considerable number of fellow artists in the second half of his career. The portraits of Adriaen van Ostade, Frans Post, and Vincent van der Vinne are still there to be admired, but others are only known through early reproductions or references in inventories. This paper focuses on what these artists’ portraits might tell us about Hals’s artistic production in his later years. With the help of both conventional and alternative criteria, several new identifications are proposed.
A Box Full of Research: Early Twentieth-Century Documentation on the Scientific Investigation and Restoration of the Eight Group Portraits by Frans Hals*
Authors: te Marvelde Mireille , Abraham Liesbeth , van putten Herman , Franken Michiel
Published: January 2025

This paper outlines the historical and art historical context and significance of unique documentation concerning the restoration of the eight Hals group portraits at the Frans Hals Museum between 1911 and 1927. It explains the background and reasons for the research and its extensive documentation, as well as the importance of the material as the first interdisciplinary collaboration in the Netherlands between an art historian, restorers, and a chemist in relation to the cleaning of artworks. Besides written reports and photographs, the documentation includes a box of materials relating to scientific research, including samples of removed varnish and a set of colour photographs showing the cleaning process - the earliest such images in the history of conservation. During the recent conservation of Hals’s three Regent portraits, the study of this historical documentation enabled a deeper understanding of the condition of the paintings and their material history, while also shedding light on early twentieth-century Dutch conservation and art history.
Lost Lines: New Light on the Painting Technique of Frans Hals
Authors: van Putten Herman , Abraham Liesbeth , te Marvelde Mireille
Published: January 2025

Given the variation in the consistency of Hals’s paint, it has been suggested that he used a variety of binding media. We believe that this was indeed the case. Removal of varnish from the 1640-41 Regents of St Elisabeth’s Hospital revealed certain puzzling instances of damage. Further examination showed that Frans Hals most likely used an aqueous binding medium in the setting up of his composition. This method could have been very useful to him not only in terms of speeding up the working process, but also for exploring and defining the composition. In the course of our research, the specific loss of certain brushstrokes relating to this first sketch provided an important clue to understanding the technique in which it was carried out.
Unfinished Business? Comparing Hals’s Late Regents and Regentesses
Authors: Abraham Liesbeth
Published: January 2025

During the recent conservation of Frans Hals’s last paintings, The Regents and The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse, the many similarities and differences between the two paintings were closely examined, providing new insights and a better understanding of Hals’s working method. Differences in the degree of finish between the two paintings have led scholars in the past to comment on Hals’s advanced age and, more specifically, his failing eyesight and lack of energy. More recently, doubts have been raised concerning the attribution of the Regentesses and the suggestion that other hands were involved. This presentation discusses such differences and shows that they are not necessarily attributable to different hands; they can also be explained by the fact that we are looking at different phases in the painting process.
From a Parisian Dining Room to a German Private Museum: Frans Hals in the Collections of Count André Mniszech and Marcus Kappel
Authors: den Tonkelaar Emilie
Published: January 2025

Following the death of Count André Mniszech (1823-1905), a Pole living in Paris who owned seven portraits by Frans Hals, his paintings found their way into private collections, including that of Marcus Kappel (1839-1920) in Berlin. Kappel’s manner of collecting and exhibiting differed considerably from that of his Parisian predecessor. Although he owned another two pieces by Frans Hals, the Portrait of Catharina Brugman was acclaimed as one of the finest paintings in his collection.
Frans Hals Connoisseurs and Exhibitions: From Thoré to Today
Authors: Bezold John
Published: January 2025

This analysis revisits the study of Frans Hals connoisseurs and exhibitions by mapping the evolution of scholarly attention to his work, starting in the late-nineteenth century and extending to the present. It highlights the founding roles played by connoisseurs like Théophile Thoré-Bürger, Wilhelm von Bode, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Wilhelm Valentiner, and Gerrit Gratama, who together have significantly shaped Hals’s reputation. Special attention is given to Abraham Bredius, whose crucial yet often overlooked contributions have aided in piecing together Hals’s life story. Moving beyond Seymour Slive’s dominant perspectives, the discussion continues, contrasting his views with those of Claus Grimm and acknowledges the efforts of various scholars in continuing to refine understanding of Hals’s work. In particular, it shines a light on Gratama’s foundational role as the Frans Hals Museum’s first director, advocating for a deeper appreciation of his scholarly impact on Hals studies. The narrative then transitions into examining ongoing debates and challenges that persist in reaching a consensus on Hals’s oeuvre, while simultaneously hinting at future directions in connoisseurship. By adopting a comprehensive view, the essay pays tribute to past connoisseurs and exhibitions, emphasizing the vast trove of literature on Hals that remains invaluable to current and future researchers.
Handbook of Japanese Public Administration and Bureaucracy
Authors: Nakabayashi Mieko , Tanaka Hideaki
Published: January 2025

This Handbook focuses on Japan’s public administration and bureaucracy at its national level, and the effects of national politics on administrative decision-making and outcomes. It also provides in-depth analysis and description of the Japanese politics-civil service relationship. As the Japanese government is relatively centralized, an understanding of its national-level public administration is vital to comprehending the nature of Japanese bureaucracy. This handbook is divided into four parts: the history of Japanese bureaucracy; the bureaucratic system and underlining laws, rules, and regulations; the relationship between politics and the legislative process; and bureaucracy in practice in the 12 major ministries. It will make an important contribution to studies on politics and governance in Japan, and will become essential reading for scholars in both their research and teaching.
The Ethics of Determining One’s Own Death
Authors: van Donselaar Gijs , Rijpkema Peter , Wijsbek Henri
Published: January 2025

This collection brings together key contributions on the ethics of end-of-life decisions, inspired by the publication of ‘What Kind of Death: The Ethics of Determining One’s Own Death’, a new standard work by professor Govert den Hartogh. The topics covered reflect the book’s comprehensive approach, with its central themes explored by ethicists, legal experts, and medical professionals. The various contributions offer a thorough examination of the major steps in Den Hartogh’s ‘dual track approach’. This collection serves as a valuable supplement to the book and an important contribution to the ongoing debate about patient self-determination and well-being as foundational values in the ethics of determining one’s own death.
Jacques Yver’s Winter’s Springtime
Authors: Harp Margaret
Published: January 2025

A prose work interspersed with poetry, Le Printemps d'Yver was highly popular in its day, seeing thirty editions between 1572 and 1635. Jacques Yver’s stories and their premise – three gentlemen and two noble women who spin five tales in order to distract each other from the horrors of the recent third religious war and to rejoice in the brief 1570 truce of Saint-Germain - provide an intriguing and distinctive continuation of this genre evocative of Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre. It reveals an author with a profound humanist education whose text, inspired by Bandello, engages the social and political controversies of late sixteenth-century France. Henry Wotton translated Le Printemps into early modern English in 1578, removing all references to the original author and title while also mistranslating, deleting, and substituting passages. This modern

English translation constitutes the first complete translation of the original French text.
Introduction: The Bodies of Makers
Authors: Bendall Sarah A. , Dyer Serena
Published: January 2025

This chapter familiarises readers with the core historiographical threads that have influenced studies of making, embodiment, and experimental history. It synthetises the now well-established ‘material turn’ with the emerging ‘embodied’ and ‘making’ turns and presents an agenda for an emerging methodological approach to the history of making. By emphasising the embodied aspects of making, both historical and experimental, this chapter outlines how turning our attention to these processes can uncover historical narratives and experiences that have so far been neglected in histories of the early modern period. Importantly, this chapter explores how historical experiences can be captured by historians through their own engagement with making through experimental historical approaches such as recreative practice.
Bodies and Spices in the Early Modern European, South Asian, and Southeast Asian Worlds
Authors: Herbert Amanda E. , Vermani Neha
Published: January 2025

The people who approached global culinary translation and transmission faced many obstacles: the space and time involved in crossing thousands of nautical miles; differences in language, culture, and faith; and, most significantly, divergent ideas and practices of bodily autonomy. European colonisers worked explicitly and purposefully to capture, collect, and control spices and spice routes, and to enslave, oust, or kill the people who had historically understood and overseen them. Employing a range of European and South Asian records, this chapter examines the lives and experiences of those involved in these encounters, recovering their attempts to communicate with one another, their work in translation, their healing of sick or injured bodies, and how they each understood the concept of authenticity.
‘Your Companions Will Teach You’: Makers’ Knowledge in Renaissance Cosmetics Recipes
Authors: Burke Jill , Poon Wilson
Published: January 2025

Recent research on domestic experimentation has led to a re-evaluation of the role of women in early modern scientific culture. Frequent annotations to cosmetic recipe texts that dispute or confirm efficacy speak to a culture of trial and error, appropriation, and adaptation. Writers were equally aware of the limitations of text: an Italian 1562 book of cosmetic recipes urges women to ask for help from older female companions who have the hands-on knowledge that cannot be transmitted through print alone. Using an anti-wrinkle cream recipe as a case study, we argue that through reconstructing personal care recipes, historians can gain an insight into the sensorial world of the past, a world that is particularly associated with female identity and knowledge.
Beautiful Experiments: Reading and Reconstructing Early Modern European Cosmetic Recipes
Authors: Griffey Erin , Nieuwoudt Michél
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides an overview of the collaborations undertaken with scientists on a popular cosmetic recipe ‘to make the face beautiful’ by boiling rosemary flowers in white wine. It discusses the complexity and challenges of interpreting and recreating recipes, the range of processes and the analysis of the chemical properties using techniques such as UV-vis (ultraviolet/visible) spectroscopy, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Preliminary analysis indicates that the recipe contains a wealth of active ingredients which were processed in ingenious ways to maximise their efficacy, and the experience of hands-on experimentation provides important insight into early modern science and beauty culture that can be achieved through collaboration between historians and scientists.
Remaking Sixteenth-Century Botanical Woodblocks: Embodied Artisanal Knowledge in Early Modern Woodcutting
Authors: Chen Jessie Wei-Hsuan
Published: January 2025

This chapter offers an exploration of the skill and embodied knowledge in the historical processes of making (botanical) printing woodblocks through a documentary approach of the applied performative method of historical remaking. It recounts the processes of experimenting with historical woodcutting techniques to remake four sixteenth-century woodblocks that carry botanical images. It delves into the bases of the woods, tools, and techniques of cutting relief printing blocks in the early modern period through examinations of historical text, images, and artefacts. Experimenting and writing from the perspective of a novice maker, this chapter pinpoints the skills and embodied knowledge that are essential in the process of early modern woodcutting.
Generating Bodies: Investigating Foundation Garments and Maternity Through Making
Authors: Bendall Sarah A. , Fisk Catriona
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the creative process of recreating three extant European foundation garments (bodies and stays) associated with maternity from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century to explore the range of possibilities presented for the pre-and postpartum body. This involved working primarily with mannequins and models and speculating on the possibilities of experience. This research tackles some central challenges of embodied dress research – the skills required, the lack of the historical body that wore it, and the impossibility of fully recreating its experiences and thus providing definite answers. Investigations prove that contemporary sources were prone to exaggeration and foundation garments were part of a longer history of maternally coded garments shaped by the material and embodied knowledge of maker and wearer.
Border History from a Borneo Longhouse
Authors: Mashman Valerie
Published: January 2025

A headman of a remote Kelabit longhouse in Borneo is wrestling with recent changes caused by logging and roadbuilding. During this time of tension, he tells three historical narratives defining what makes the good life. His stories of history celebrate pioneering heroes who led through warfare and migrations, who interact with the Brooke state and initiate peace-making, and who journey to seek local Christian missionaries. This microhistory highlights the resilience of values in the face of transformative change, values providing a cultural structure for the Kelabit to redefine and adapt whilst maintaining their identity as a community.

This work is relevant to Austronesian studies, Southeast Asian history, oral history, the anthropology of value, sociality and ethnic identity, Christian conversion, and issues of borderlands, decolonization, and indigeneity. It is of interest to readers concerned with the history of transnational peoples of Borneo, including the Kelabit, Sa’ban, Kenyah, Ngurek, Penan, and the Lun Dayeh.
Luohou (Lagging Behind) and the Impetus of Self-improvement
Authors: Meinhof Marius
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the relevance of the concept of luohou (lagging behind) in the attempts by Chinese youth to self-improve and for the appellation of self-improvement by state discourse. It argues that the idea that some subjects lag behind others informs a specific post-colonial governmentality based on a notion of “colonial temporality” that classifies people and places into different temporal positions in order to create a sense of urgency and hope to catch up to the advanced Other. It thus produces destabilized subjectivities that are urged to constantly self-improve and constantly re-evaluate their own modernity. From the May Fourth Movement to the Reform era, this idea informed various attempts to self-improve of individuals, as well as state-led social engineering aimed to modernize the Chinese people.
Fendou (Struggle), Self-help and Chinese Modernity*
Authors: Fumian Marco
Published: January 2025

This chapter traces the continuous political importance of the term fendou (struggle) from the early twentieth century to the present. The usage of the term in political speeches and educational programmes and, more recently, the commercial self-help literature of “success studies” (chenggongxue), illustrates the ongoing role of social Darwinism in Chinese citizenship, where individual fendou intersects with national aspirations. Today specifically, fendou is ascribed to the striving and efforts of the individual actor in a competitive “socialist market,” whereby self-development entails social stratification and the disentrancement of the alleged “weaker” elements in society. This imaginary also stimulates citizens’ desire for continuous “improvement,” framing it as the optimal path for well-being.
“You’ve Got to Have Core Muscles”: Duanlian (Exercise) and the Disciplining of the Body and Self among White-collar Women1
Authors: Peng Xinyan
Published: January 2025

Professional women I met through ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai treated their bodies as an important site for enacting hard work and embodying self-discipline and self-development, and employed “exercise” (duanlian) as a legitimate means for cultivating and extending the work ethic beyond the workplace. I connect the socially embraced value of core muscles to the prevalent, self-development-related discourse of “having it all” among professional women in today’s urban China that shaped my interlocutors’ hard work both at their jobs and on their bodies. When women train their bodies to fit standards of a successful professional subject (fit and productive), dispositions of self-discipline, self-development and hard work are embodied and transposed from the workplace to other social spaces between home and work.
To Have Nengli (Ability) When Lacking Xueli (Educational Qualifications): Striving for Success through Craftiness in Rural China
Authors: Kohonen Liisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the concept of nengli (ability): its attendant meanings and how it is commented upon in rural social worlds. While typically valued in young men with a bearing on their success in marrying, it is argued here that it has additional meanings as an ability to be crafty, engage in problem-solving and generate economic success. It is also separate from necessarily having xueli (educational qualifications) and thus relevant for people with only a middle school education working in rural economies or in the service or manufacturing sectors. This chapter gives a community-based ethnographic discussion on nengli in rural Southwestern China and argues that nengli can be particularly useful for rural middle-aged women as a way to better the financial standing of their families.
The Desire to Help: Aixin (Loving Heart) and Self-development in China
Authors: Wu Dan , Zhan Yang
Published: January 2025

China’s post-Reform era has witnessed the rise of voluntarism, NGOs and philanthropic practices. In such a context, urban young people become major actors in volunteering and charity activities. Within this group, a prominent discourse of aixin (loving heart) has been developed. Our research focuses on how urban youth achieve self-development through philanthropic work, based on participant observations and unstructured interviews of six young Chinese volunteers. We argue aixin-informed activities are often experienced as a form of “deep travel” among the young volunteers, or transformative moments in which they make new and meaningful connections with strangers. Such transcendental experience shapes people’s future career choices, life trajectories and lifestyles, and therefore is critical in their self-development and personal transformation.
Between Fatalism and Voluntarism: The Concept of Yuanfen (Fated Chance) and Its Role for Young Adults’ Psychosocial Adjustment in Contemporary China
Authors: Heger-Laube Isabel
Published: January 2025

The Chinese concept of yuanfen can most adequately be defined as a “fated chance” by which people, or people and things, are brought together. Once used as a passive attribution, yuanfen has increasingly come to contain elements that emphasize individual agency. It thus conforms to the world view of “fatalistic voluntarism,” which posits that the belief in forces beyond human control and the belief in self-determination dialectically work together in helping people cope with modern life. Through a qualitative study with Chinese university students, I will show that in its dialectical nature, yuanfen can become a unique resource for young adults’ psychosocial adjustment, fostering mindsets associated with self-cultivation that help the individual positively navigate modernity in the contemporary People’s Republic of China.
Epilogue: The Politics of Arrested Self-development
Authors: Ci Jiwei
Published: January 2025

The keywords in the present volume are of a different kind from those featured in Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1976), the pioneering work in this regard. Taken together, the former point symptomatically to a prevailing condition of arrested self-development in the Reform era. They also provide a strong ethnographic basis for tracing this condition to a politically caused nihilistic situation in which neither socialism nor capitalism can be properly affirmed and serve the normal purposes of socialization and interpellation.