The story of the ocean told by a drop of water

2022-03-15T07:37:01.582Z

From the wheel to chocolate, an avalanche of titles shows that there is a way of telling the past that is more focused on everyday life than on the glorious deeds of the powerful

The profound historiographic renewal that took place in the interwar period (from the appearance of the Annales School, the assimilation and development of Marxist historiography and the deployment of quantitative and serial history) would later cause the unstoppable expansion of the territory of the historian, who would see his objects of study expand exponentially.

Without neglecting the most classic themes (political and institutional), history would incorporate others hitherto unimagined, such as popular culture, books and reading, images and propaganda, parties, beliefs, magic or mentalities. collective (where feelings would enter: love, fear, death).

Among these new fields of research, two closely linked fields would make their way,

The great French historian Fernand Braudel had been a pioneer of these new currents in his work

Civilization matérielle, économie et capitalisme

(from 1967 and, expanded, from 1979), the first part of which (under the heading of 'The structures of everyday life') included the daily bread, the food and the table (enriched with the new spices), the drink (also with the new distillates such as rum and other liqueurs), the exciting comings from exotic worlds (tobacco, tea, coffee and chocolate), the house and the furniture, clothing and fashion, and so on. successively.

However, it was necessary to go a step further and include other areas of daily life alongside this material culture, which would be defined by two other great French historians, Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, in the five-volume edition of his

Histoire de la private friday,

appeared in 1986, which included the concept of civility, the organization of private rooms (with the

petits appartements

so characteristic of the 18th century), advances in personal hygiene (bathrooms, dressing tables, toilets), intimacy loving (close to the bedroom), the role of physical composure and cosmetics, board games, the art of conversation in evenings with family and friends, the pleasure of private writing (memoirs and diaries) and, in contrast, the spaces for public shows (including walks where

polite walking is practiced

of the most sophisticated groups) or the areas of sociability (the houses of tolerance, the lodges, the clubs, the taverns, the cafes and the salons, the latter being the most appropriate for literary or political gatherings).

FRAN POLISHED

Hence the current proliferation of monographs (some with a huge unpublished base documentation, others as works of dissemination of themes little known to the general public), from which we can select some recently published, leaving out many others, such as, for example, the volumes published in Spain as a result of collective research projects or in miscellaneous in homage to some of the most assiduous growers of the genre in our lands, such as the volume coordinated by Gloria Franco, Inmaculada Arias de Saavedra and Ofelia Rey and offered to María Ángeles Pérez Samper in 2021 (

The loom of life: plots and warps of everyday life

We will start with water, because of its importance as an essential element for the appearance and preservation of life.

His history from its remote origins (the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen from the material generated by the death of the first stars) to its current situation (where it is a commodity that is as necessary as it is scarce and threatened) has devoted an extensive book Giulio Boccaletti, a prestigious researcher on environmental issues and a recognized expert in the management of natural resources.

Now, to get into the book, you must first understand the author's approach, who conceives his exposition as that of the relationship between the natural element and the institutions, that is, as a political history of water resources,

avoiding in any case a "strictly deterministic" interpretation: water has not determined the shape of institutions, but institutions were born so that societies could intervene in its essential management.

Only by accepting this perspective can the teachings of this ambitious and well-documented work be harnessed.

For Boccaletti, the institutions were born to be able to intervene in the essential management of water

Some societies were born by and for water, as happened with the peoples of the fertile crescent, whose action on the Euphrates and the Tigris produced the Neolithic revolution, or as happened in Ancient Egypt, which was born precisely in contact with water, since it was, as Herodotus said, a “gift of the Nile”.

From there we find a universal history of the use of water by States from Ancient Greece to the present day.

This history, which spans three millennia and extends across five continents, naturally has its floods and its backwaters, with stellar experiences, such as that of the Netherlands in modern times, the transformation of the water geography on the western border of the United States States, the hydrographic revolution of the 20th century,

In the words of the French writer and essayist Raphaël Meltz, the history of the wheel is not a simple technological question, but "it is a history of civilization, of the wheel in the heart of humanity, of the wheel as an indicator of notion of progress, as the centerpiece of a triumphant western world, sure of its evolutionary vision”.

And from there he confronts us with some problems related to the appearance (or not) of the wheel in different times and in different worlds.

From the oldest traces arises the conviction that the first representations of these artifacts date back to the fourth millennium BC, both in Sumer and in Poland (starting from the Bronocice vase, found 40 kilometers from Krakow), as well as the verification that the pharaohs did not have the wheel for the construction of the pyramids, while the Hyksos were able to defeat the Egyptians (around the year 1700 before our era) thanks to having chariots on wheels and that their use more practical came with the replacement by the Celtic peoples of the compact wheel by the wheel with spokes (in the last third of the first millennium before our era).

From there we pass to the worlds without wheels, particularly to the case of pre-Columbian America,

wondering the author if his absence was due to a real lack or a cultural rejection, and if this represented a real backwardness in societies as advanced in other fields as the Mayan or the Aztec.

In any case, it is possibly true that the knowledge of the wheel gave Europeans superiority over the worlds of the Middle East and the worlds of America, and surely the wheel has established itself as an instrument of progress on a world level.

Although perhaps this progress in the future rests on the movement in vehicles without wheels, the author concludes.

It is possibly true that knowledge of the wheel gave Europeans superiority over the worlds of the Middle East and the worlds of America, and surely the wheel has established itself as an instrument of progress worldwide.

Although perhaps this progress in the future rests on the movement in vehicles without wheels, the author concludes.

The history of textiles is well known in general, the writer and journalist Virginia Postrel offers us a possible and plausible synthesis of a topic as complex as that of the manufacture and distribution of fabrics, dealing in depth with the variety of fibers (wool, linen, silk, cotton) and dyes (indigo or indigo, purple, cochineal, brazilwood), the processes of spinning and weaving (tasks left in the hands of women until their definitive mechanization), the role of merchants ( here focused on the example of the Italian cities of the Renaissance), the preferences of consumers (and the obstacles opposed by those in power, such as the prohibition of calicoes or indianas) or the innovations in the elaboration and production of new fabrics in the twentieth century.

The work places special emphasis on the invaluable value of textile craftsmanship, on the multiple difficulties involved in processes that may seem simple today such as sericulture or cotton production, the slow development of applied techniques (from the spinning wheel to the loom of Jacquard, without taking into account the advances of the English industrial revolution), the financing of crops (which sometimes implies slave labor) and factories (which always brings with it the appearance of an industrial proletariat), the preferences of the consumers and the obstacles imposed by power (sumptuary laws), the innovations of the 20th century (nylon or polyester).

In short, the author has tried (and has managed) to show that "each piece of cloth embodies the solution of innumerable and convoluted problems."

And that the adventure of textiles involves all of humanity and in the long term, since it does not "belong to a single nation, race or culture or to a single time or space";

It is not "a male or female story, nor is it a European, African, Asian or American story."

The textile confronts us with a total history.

Luis Egidio Meléndez (1716–1780), Still Life with Chocolate and Buns Service (1770).

The history of chocolate is also one of the best known today, undoubtedly due to its extraordinary spread throughout Europe from the 16th century until it became the most highly esteemed gastronomic product in the 18th century, the essential drink in every home that be appreciated

The book by Piero Camporesi, an illustrious philologist, anthropologist and historian (to whom we owe a widely distributed monograph:

Il pane selvaggio

), deals, together with various other gastronomic experiences, magnificently illustrated by an extensive collection of literary references, of the evolution of chocolate (

il brodo indian

) precisely in the European seventeenth century.

Without going into detail, it is very interesting to study the passage from the first chocolate (very spicy, with vanilla, chili, achiote, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger and anise, in addition to other ingredients) to light chocolate (only cocoa , sugar and vanilla), although always illustrated by the use of a whole panoply of gadgets (the chocolate pot, the saucer, the mancerina, the cup and the jícara) that resembles its consumption to a kind of Japanese tea ceremony, apart from the essential accompaniment of sweets (yolks, toasted cream, sugared almonds or caramelized almonds).

It is the “global chocolate”, portrayed in so many paintings, such as the still life by Antonio de Pereda in the Hermitage Museum from the 17th century or the even more spectacular compositions by Luis Meléndez from the following century.

Javier Moscoso links the swing with love, emotions, violence, death and medicine

The swing is, in principle, an artifact used above all for entertainment, to the point that today one considers it essentially as a game shared in the gardens by grandparents and grandchildren.

However, Javier Moscoso, Research Professor at the CSIC Institute of History, shows us with his work, as elegant as it is well documented (both bibliographically and with an excellent selection of illustrations), that the swing has had many other uses and that it is possible to attempt a universal history of the swing.

The swing is linked with emotions (vertigo, disorientation, anguish), with violence and death, with rites (such as the ceremonial rocking), with love ("the rocking incites courtship"), with medicine (the swing, like the rocking chair or

rocking chair,

provides a remedy for many physical and mental conditions) or with sex, since it enables new positions in the sexual act, in addition to constituting a notable erotic incentive when the woman swinging unrestrains her cleavage or shows her legs, if she does not accept the contact of a companion in her movements, or the presence of a spectator at her feet (happy voyeur in expectation of further favors from the Venus Pendula), as in the famous painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard from the Wallace Collection in London.

The swing thus stands as a symbol of love as a universal passion and as a propitiatory element of the game, an activity consubstantial to

Homo

(or

mulier

)

ludens

Less clear is the connection with our theme of the last piece of this review, dedicated to thresholds, to doors as places of passage from one world to another, from the known to the unknown, and this despite the fact that doors are a material construction and we have to cross countless doors in our daily work.

In any case, Óscar Martínez, professor of Art History, offers us an intelligent essay based on extensive knowledge of the subject, exquisite taste when choosing places and an unusual ability to unravel the symbolic meanings that are housed in those doors, in those thresholds.

And with these premises, who refuses his invitation to a trip that takes us, among others, to places like Pompeii, Rome, Naples, Bomarzo, Paris, Sintra, Vienna,

Venice?

Not me, of course.