Dissecting Society. Social Sketches and the Formation of Ethnographic and Sociological Knowledge (1830-1860)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christiane Schwab
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 287075175

During the nineteenth century, the commercialization of printing advocated novel forms of cultural self-consciousness. Pieces on social types, cultural routines, and institutions of modernizing societies celebrated major success, especially along the axis that connected London and Paris. These proto-ethnographic sketches, many of which were illustrated, appeared in magazines and journals. Assembling an extensive array of descriptions of urban and rural environments, many of them were later to be published in compilations, such as Heads of the People; or, Portraits of the English (1838-1841), Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1839-1842), and Los valencianos pintados por si mismos (1859). The epistemic function of the sketches and their iconographies within the consolidating social sciences and humanities remains largely unknown. This is despite clear connections to debates held by statisticians, moralists, ethnologists, and folklorists. The sketches' depictions of social life display clear documentary intentions, and when published within integral compilations, the sketches aimed to convey an encyclopedic, holistic perspective on socio-spatial entities. The sketches and their illustrations hence provide ethnographic micro-analysis of social phenomena, and in trying to show inner logics of social figurations, they reflect on concepts such as class, society, city, and nation. In terms of a transnational history of knowledge, the project investigates the social sketches and sketch compilations as early frames of constructing and mediating social understanding. Analytic tools and concepts of discourse analysis, entangled history, and micro-history will be used to examine the corpus of research, which comprises a significant body of social sketches and examples of adjacent knowledge frames, such as the statistical survey, illustrated journalism or the philanthropic report. The geographic scope, Western Europe, will be widened by lookouts into (post-)colonial Latin America and into German-speaking regions.Among the key issues are (1) the sketches' representational techniques (methods of constructing social types, the influence of scientific paradigms, the establishment of ethnographic authority, the significance of visual clues, etc.); (2) how the sketches relate to epistemic developments (e.g., towards materialist and historicizing conceptions of society); (3) the sketches' embeddedness in socio-spatial settings and their intermedial connections to academic, artistic, philanthropic and governmental projects; and (4) how they are to be situated against processes of urbanization and nation-building. Combining analysis of the sources with contextual analysis, the project aims to contribute to a social history of knowledge formation. Disciplinary and geographic frames will be broken down to investigate the social sketches and collections as significant products and agents in the refinement of societal observation and thought in Europe and beyond.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups