Travelling Things – Dinge auf Wanderungen

During the last decades the privileging of human beings as autonomous historical actor and main shaper of his environment has been under attack. Things have received more attention as co-producers of agency. The empirical focus on things also sharpens the view for the constitution of often unexpected connections between local, national and global spaces of action. Objects are understood as things with “global trajectories,” which open space for interactions beyond cultural and geographical boundaries. They accumulate meaning on their travels, are triggers for human communication across borders and at the same time are entangled in the formation of global asymmetries. At the heart of the ve case studies stand the constitutive role of material culture for the construction of social relations, of power processes, and the world in its transnational and transcultural dimension.

The contribution frames the “intrauterine devices“ (IUDs) as “travelling objects,” which were debated and negotiated at conferences and in doctor’s oces on a global scale. It also sheds light on the political and gendered power structures between the “men of science” and “women in need,” especially concerning the introduction and usage of the IUDs. Whereas the IUDs were developed by male experts in North and Latin America in the context of the Cold War with the main aim of population control, the women’s demands for this new form of contraception pointed to their ardent desire to control their own body. The chapter therefore also illustrates the “embodiedness” and close relation of things to the body.

The contribution examines the role of material artifacts for the discourse on “mind expansion” in the youth and alternative culture of the 1970s. It focuses on Ram Dass’ bestseller and guidebook Remember Be Here Now (1971) and Tony Wheeler’s travel guide Across Asia on the Cheap (1973), which represented the first volume of the later Lonely Planet series. The author understands the books as transcultural products par excellence, which give answers to the question of meaning, adaptation and resonance within transnational youth culture during the long 1960s. Just as important is the question about the relevance of the two publications for the agency of youth culture, asking which social practices were triggered by these objects within the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s and how they subsequently participated in a transnational circuit.

Itagaki Ryuta’s paper focuses on three diaries of Korean men that were written during the Japanese colonial time in the 1930s and 1940s. He argues that the materiality of the medium also shaped their message. Commercially marketed and purchased diaries were popular during the Japanese Empire and were produced in large quantities. The diaries were also important for the spreading of a “diary culture” in modern Japan and the Korean colonies. The author also shows that the diary entries give insight into the perception of the Japanese colonial empire during those decades from a “âneur perspective” (M. de Certeau).

Based on an anonymous letter found in Virginia in 1802, the author traces the rumors and fantasies of the often evoked and feared slave conspiracies in the US-American South. The fears materialized and manifested themselves in the object-like, tactile and readable anonymous letter. From vague fears followed concrete plans, with often drastic consequences. On the one hand, the author demonstrates that only the letter in its concrete material manifestation and attestation of human plans and emotions and its distribution, circulation or transcription, brings the scenario of slave insurrections to life. On the other hand, he reads the letter and reactions to it as a “transnational echo” on the background of a cross-border knowledge community formed by the events of the French and Haitian revolution.

The contribution centers on the 40-penny stamp of the German federal post office introduced in 1975 showing the motif of a space laboratory (“Spacelab”). While the Spacelab marked the entry of Europe into manned space flight and research, the introduction of the stamp demonstrates the status of space flight as “key technology” and indicator of progress and modernity for the government of the German Federal Republic during the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the wide distribution of the stamp contributed to the introduction of outer space into the everyday life worlds of ordinary people and turned it into a reference point for future aspirations. Representing a symbol of progress and international understanding during the 1970s, the Spacelab also transformed into a manifestation of the potential threat of warlike conflicts and catastrophic calamities in the course of increasing armament in outer space during the 1980s.