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I've been watching too much some of Absolute History's living history series, like where the team live as Edwardian Farmers for a year. It's good, but the YT channel is a mess. I am currently watching the Victorian Farm series and it doesn't even have it's own playlist. Also, they have a lot of weird, click-baity shorts on the same YT channel among the really well done living history stuff. So, yeah, playlists and maybe episode numbers would help?
I know that living history does not mean 'high level overview accounting for everything', it's sort of the opposite. But sometimes they seem to paint too rosy of a picture. I love their Full Steam Aheadtrain series but ... no mention of spinal injuries? That was a major problem and people were being gaslit about it. But also these videos are uploads of a ten year old TV series aimed at people from the British education system and might be just assuming the audience knows certain things. The episodes are really cool and I like the team, but the Tudor series left me headscratching a bit that they didn't even mention the possible downsides of that level of church control of people's lives.
Also, the folklorist they consult with is someone who've I've referenced in research papers in college! I really loved Ronald Hutton's bits on the series so I looked him and and realized I had a book by him on my shelf. I think I bought it in England when I was studying abroad.
Anyway, highly recommended, especially the train series, Wartime Farm and Edwardian Farm. It's exactly the sort of details good for writing period stuff. But it does occasionally make me wish they'd go 'but the other side to all this is ...' a bit more often.
One of the interesting things about Wartime Farm is how they had to ramp up food production to feed the country with imports cut off. Lots of traditional knowledge, crafts and herbalism seemed to have played a bit roles in Britain being able to stand years of war.
In Edwardian Farm they talk about how it was seen as a golden era mostly due to the terrible things that happened right after. Makes me wonder how we'll view the pre-covid era in a few years?
I am fully prepared to believe that Tudor England was a very happy time due to rising prosperity, it was after the big plagues, they had social safety nets, etc. But I really wish they'd been a bit more critical and also pointed out that our main source on history of that and many eras was the monasteries, so there is a strong streetlight effect going on. A lot of what we know and how we view a lot of large swaths of UK/European history is because they kept records. So, we only have the they want us to have and our knowledge about the areas outside of monastic control is painfully limited.
When I was at Oxford for half a year (when I did my study abroad) they told me repeatedly that the success of the University and even why it was founded in Oxford was because it was the furthest you could get from Church control within England. Physical distance was a big barrier in those days, so being as far as possible from your area's archdiocese had a big impact. Basically the orientation the Americans got was: don't say 'fanny pack', the portrait of Bill Clinton is very controversial due to it's art style not it's subject, please attend our Tolkien events, do not walk on the grass, here is where Tolkien taught, everything that exists here only exists because we were trying to dodge Church control, three colleges claim to be the oldest in Oxford but the correct answer is University College. I should see if I can find a good history on the founding of colleges in Oxford that later became Oxford University.
When I was in college, most of what was going on in medieval - renaissance studies was trying to figure out from what birth, trade, marriage, etc records exist, what life was like outside of church control/recording. A lot of the research was ongoing and some of the books eagerly put out around that time are likely out of date.
Peter is the best. He always loves to get right into shoveling coal, mining, etc. He just steam-bends wood and makes concrete using tudor era methods like he'd done it a dozen times before. Also, they are very lucky that Ruth is clearly an excellent cook who can roll with any era of food.
I know that living history does not mean 'high level overview accounting for everything', it's sort of the opposite. But sometimes they seem to paint too rosy of a picture. I love their Full Steam Aheadtrain series but ... no mention of spinal injuries? That was a major problem and people were being gaslit about it. But also these videos are uploads of a ten year old TV series aimed at people from the British education system and might be just assuming the audience knows certain things. The episodes are really cool and I like the team, but the Tudor series left me headscratching a bit that they didn't even mention the possible downsides of that level of church control of people's lives.
Also, the folklorist they consult with is someone who've I've referenced in research papers in college! I really loved Ronald Hutton's bits on the series so I looked him and and realized I had a book by him on my shelf. I think I bought it in England when I was studying abroad.
Anyway, highly recommended, especially the train series, Wartime Farm and Edwardian Farm. It's exactly the sort of details good for writing period stuff. But it does occasionally make me wish they'd go 'but the other side to all this is ...' a bit more often.
One of the interesting things about Wartime Farm is how they had to ramp up food production to feed the country with imports cut off. Lots of traditional knowledge, crafts and herbalism seemed to have played a bit roles in Britain being able to stand years of war.
In Edwardian Farm they talk about how it was seen as a golden era mostly due to the terrible things that happened right after. Makes me wonder how we'll view the pre-covid era in a few years?
I am fully prepared to believe that Tudor England was a very happy time due to rising prosperity, it was after the big plagues, they had social safety nets, etc. But I really wish they'd been a bit more critical and also pointed out that our main source on history of that and many eras was the monasteries, so there is a strong streetlight effect going on. A lot of what we know and how we view a lot of large swaths of UK/European history is because they kept records. So, we only have the they want us to have and our knowledge about the areas outside of monastic control is painfully limited.
When I was at Oxford for half a year (when I did my study abroad) they told me repeatedly that the success of the University and even why it was founded in Oxford was because it was the furthest you could get from Church control within England. Physical distance was a big barrier in those days, so being as far as possible from your area's archdiocese had a big impact. Basically the orientation the Americans got was: don't say 'fanny pack', the portrait of Bill Clinton is very controversial due to it's art style not it's subject, please attend our Tolkien events, do not walk on the grass, here is where Tolkien taught, everything that exists here only exists because we were trying to dodge Church control, three colleges claim to be the oldest in Oxford but the correct answer is University College. I should see if I can find a good history on the founding of colleges in Oxford that later became Oxford University.
When I was in college, most of what was going on in medieval - renaissance studies was trying to figure out from what birth, trade, marriage, etc records exist, what life was like outside of church control/recording. A lot of the research was ongoing and some of the books eagerly put out around that time are likely out of date.
Peter is the best. He always loves to get right into shoveling coal, mining, etc. He just steam-bends wood and makes concrete using tudor era methods like he'd done it a dozen times before. Also, they are very lucky that Ruth is clearly an excellent cook who can roll with any era of food.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-30 02:59 am (UTC)From:I know that when I was in college, we spent a LOT of time on biases in available records, and how best to try and combat it, especially if you were unable to find primary sources. (A Big Deal in anthropology.) It's definitely another field where "this thing that was a cutting-edge theory may be utterly outdated within a few years."
But looking at the "this is what we "know" about the time period... and this is why that's what was preserved and portrayed" is an important aspect of any historical record.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-30 05:10 am (UTC)From:It was all bulk posted about a year go, so I assume it was sort of dumped on YT due to the pandemic demand for entertainment and they didn't really put much care into the uploads.
Yeah, the church records bias is huge for medievalists. I went to college around when people were excited about records of possible same sex marriages in the areas outside of direct church control. That was all highly relevant to my interests. I wonder where the research sits now. I mean, obviously, I Want To Believe. Last I checked there was a backlash and people were all 'no, it was just father's names put in place of the daughters'... but that didn't track with the family records a lot of the time.
One of the weird things about being in fandom is how strong the streetlight effect is. To anyone outside fandom it's all The JohnLock Conspiracy and people basing things on AO3 data because it's the only site you can easily pull data from. It's the smallest of the big three archives and it came out of slash fandom, but people just go 'yeah we can act like this holds across all of fandom'.
It makes sense that it would be a huge deal in anthropology. Very few, or no, records from certain ages. How much does reconstruction through linguistics help? In my classes on early English they made a big deal of being able to shine a light on the proto-indoeuropean era stuff by realizing which people had the same word for cow, booze, horse, etc and which words had Arabic particles tacked on.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-31 03:38 am (UTC)From:I know that the "I Want To Believe" feeling can introduce its own form of bias... but I Want To Believe, lol.
Buuuut, there's also a long history of racist/sexist/homophobic theories being given supremacy in so many historical fields, and providing some counterpoints to that isn't a bad thing in its own right.
The spotlight effect is HUGE in fandom. I've seen a few people talk about it by metrics, and the fact that AO3 provides so much data, and encourages such complete tagging, is why people think it represents Fandom As It Is... when really, you just can't find the numbers anywhere else.
Linguistic anthropology is its own branch, and it's SUPER INTERESTING. My school didn't have much devoted to that branch (more about cultural and archeological, which was what I did my emphasis in), but it's a very cool field. There are some really interesting ways to map out similarities in writing systems and what words exist or don't in a set of languages.
Anthropology has a similar problem as history does with the church-as-controlling-factor. In anthro, the earliest (sometimes only) Western accounts of certain groups and cultures often came from... fucking missionaries. Now there's a lot more weight being given to groups telling their own histories, which is certainly far better. (Though a sometimes fraught thing, unfortunately.)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-31 10:33 am (UTC)From:There is such pushback on looking into queer history sometimes. People act like it's a weird thing to focus on. My school started having queer history/lit/soc courses while I was there and man, it was brutal.
I really like linguistics, but didn't get a chance to take much. I am glad I did that Early English course, even if I've forgotten most of my early and middle english ... and pronunciation.
The missionary accounts sounds like a problem, yeah. Most of my studies were very
fantasy nerdUK/European focused. It's that that people are being heard more now, but some of the cultures are just gone. I looked up a tribe mentioned on a TV show and it turned out that nothing is known of them. (So, the writer has just made up a culture for them to fit the narrative.)no subject
Date: 2022-01-01 04:05 am (UTC)From:There is still a lot of pushback on it as a whole field, for all kinds of intertwined reasons, and it's frustrating. I know it's improving, but it *is* still given a major sideeye by a lot of people who don't think it's worthwhile. We had very few queer-focused courses, but there were a few! (My college had gone through a pretty awful gutting back in the 50s when the then-University president decided that things like "anthropology" were just hotbeds of communist propaganda, so there was a lot of rebuilding that had taken decades.)
I never formally took a linguistics course, though I wish I'd been able to, because it IS such a fascinating field. What little I know of Early English makes my brain hurt, lol.
It's true. There are a lot of cultures that we just straight up don't know anything about. While most cultures of the past have descendant cultures now, they aren't the same thing. While we CAN learn a lot from extant indigenous groups, it's certainly far from a 1:1 relationship. (To say nothing of records and histories that were deliberately destroyed in genocide or attempts at conversion...)
Ugh, super frustrating when TV shows and movies just... kind of invent cultures to fit a narrative that they want, and then attach a real group's name to it. The "OMG, INDIAN BURIAL GROUND" is a cliche because it's STILL so overused, especially in horror.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-03 10:14 am (UTC)From:Early English grammar is very different from modern. It actually reminds me of how Japanese works with the particles. How you logic through a sentence to backwards to Modern English.
It's... creepy to think there has never been any queer acceptance until the start of the internet era, which was 100% my understanding coming out of high school. Thinking that for the entire weight of human history there has been unending, lockstep hatred is a mindfuck. Poking holes in that was a deal to me. Some of those holes are well documented! In other places, definite signs of erasure... but erasure of what? I feel too out of the loop to know a good starting point. Sadly, some pre-queer thinkers also have ... strange ideas. Archiving what we do know is important, it can all disappear so easily.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 02:59 am (UTC)From:But... oof, bad look for that show to just... make up a whole culture for a named group? Like... when confronting racism (whether handled well or not) is one of the alleged themes of the work? Yike.
Interesting! I took a year of Japanese language, but pretty sure I remember about 5% of it at best. I do remember hearing that early English had very different sentence structure than modern English does. I wish I had a better intuitive grasp of languages, because I find the ways they intersect and evolve super fascinating... I'm just not good at actually learning them.
Right? When I was a young baby queer, it felt like there'd just never ever been any history about People Like Me, and that we'd always been ignored at best, and more likely hated and suppressed... that does a damn number on self-esteem and just a general willingness to *be* and be happy. Discovering the activism in more recent history (even just the 70s and 80s!) was amazing, and then to find out that queer theory was a WHOLE FIELD??? Like with any academic field, there are shortfalls, or places where a theory was initially intriguing but later proves not to be plausible.
It's still hard to know where to start, because there ARE so many gaps. There are a lot of places where knowledge and history has been deliberately destroyed, misinterpreted, or otherwise suppressed to suit the morality of the people in power. Some of that destruction may be recent-ish enough, (Hirschfeld and Nazi Germany comes to mind), that there's information still available... but sometimes the destruction happened centuries ago, to get rid of information from centuries before that. How do you go back to reconstruct something from that long ago, when all known primary and secondary sources aren't just lost, but deliberately destroyed?
I feel very strongly about the importance of archiving the information we have, which is in and of itself apparently sometimes controversial, now. (There's a sort of... weird undercurrent that even recording information is a form of colonialism, which I... don't really agree with.)
Preservation of information is genuinely something that I kind of worry about. Now that a lot of information is digital and ephemeral, it can easily vanish. (It's not quite comparable, but think of fannish communities that vanished when a host went under? Or only one person had admin access and they flounced or even passed away? Or people who have websites for their niche interests, sharing more information about that niche than just about anyplace else has... and then it just disappears.) Digital preservation is a newish field, only a handful of decades old, but it's a vital one now. But I hope that it can be kept somehow safe from the sorts of widescale suppression that records have faced in the past.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 07:54 am (UTC)From:The whole 'gender binary is a recent white invention' discourse feels very validating, but it's also complete BS. They basically made this culture the embodiment of ... honestly very racist ideas about what tribal cultures are like. Also to me it felt like erasure of them to give them a fictional culture.
But talking about that show became a minefield. I wrote like a dozen entries on the show and then never posted any.
People act like info doesn't get lost in The Information Age, but it certainly does get lost. A lot of early online community building, and learning how to have communities online, was queer people reaching out to each other. Not just queer people, obvs, any group with the members geographically disconnected. (A lot of people use the word diaspora to refer to queer communities, but I am not sure it's quite the right word.) But I've already seen erasure of that, and also a lot of the info being lost.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-05 04:58 am (UTC)From:And yes, it does feel validating as hell to have this idea that "oh, the gender binary is recent and artificially imposed solely by white westerners"... but it definitely isn't that simple. It's worth knowing that *not all cultures* have had the same ideas of the gender binary, just as it's worth knowing that there have always been people who fit outside the binaries (or other structures) that their cultures offer as standard. But that's not the same thing as "no other culture ever anywhere had rigid gender roles."
I don't blame you for not wanting to wade into it.
There's so much that has disappeared! Some of the small things aren't that obvious or important to everyone out there, but... like in the model collecting community, there was one woman who ran an extensive database of all the different models that were released by the primary company. She got pictures of them, run numbers, info on when they were produced, variations that were discovered, etc. This is *the* source to find this information in the hobby. She passed away unexpectedly last year. Luckily, she had family who understood it was important to her, so they've kept paying for hosting, but... she was the sole admin, and no one else knows how to get into it to update it or transfer ownership to someone else.
Anyone who did online fandom in the 90s and 00s remembers fansites (either individual ones, or bigger hubs) that just vanished.
Internet archive is great, but it doesn't capture everything. And what happens if it goes away?
BiNet was a long-standing organization for bi folks that had decades of activism and organizing and support to its name... and then the new "leader" of the org just went absolutely batshit, kicking everyone else who had leadership roles, threatening to sue people for using the bi pride flag, and the whole group (and all its archived data) imploded as she ultimately deleted large sections of the site as well as all the social media archives for it.
The same groups that have always been vulnerable to erasure and being ignored are often the ones that are again the most vulnerable to losing digital records as well.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-05 07:30 am (UTC)From:Yeah, I remember the BiNet thing. On a related note, what I really want to get in place is some service that will keep my photography website online even if something happened to me. It should outlast me at for at least a decade. If there was a service, that didn't seem fly-by-night, I would do it. I Do Not Want my legacy to be a preserved Facebook page.
There is someone currently popular on the podcast circuit who is pushing 'binary is white' thing and like, no. Current binary being informed by white supremacy and white ideas of gender? Yes. Binary being a recent white invention? No, just no.
Yeah, I don't want to be the one critiquing POC showrunner's takes on Native American cultures... even when the shocking thing an episode is building to is [writes and deletes a dozen ways to put this] what someone looks like under their clothes.
Especially since tempers already ran hot over some of the gay male content on the show. Maybe in another year we can look back on that mess.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 03:32 am (UTC)From:The BiNet thing was a cluster.
I feel like there has got to be a market for that sort of thing - preserving/maintaining a website after someone passes away. As more and more of our lives wind up online, it absolutely feels almost... necessary. I know that it's more common now that things like that are taken into account of when thinking about wills and things, but a (reputable/trustworthy) company that could take care of maintaining the functionality of a website? That's way better than hoping a family member or friend etc. is willing and able to do so.
Oof. Why do so many people seem allergic to nuance?? Because yes - the current, dominant western ideas of what the gender binary "is" are absolutely tied up with white supremacy and a western history of sex and gender. And that's something worth talking about! But that does not mean that binaries never existed at any other time or place.
Understandable. I did not watch the show (or read the book), so I definitely have no right to criticize, and even if I had, yeah, feels like I'd be veering out of my lane. But... yikes. As tricky as it is, it's hard to find the right spot between "this isn't immune from criticism," "this isn't my place to criticize," and "this may have given representation both in front of and behind the camera to certain groups, but that doesn't negate the harm/poor handling of things relating to other groups."
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 06:01 am (UTC)From:Equating binary with white supremacy has so many gross implications. The dangers of 'wanting to believe' way too much. We really need more good queer studies with the right amount of skepticism towards historical records but also not out and out ahistorical BS.
I want to be more plugged into what's going on in this sector of academia. I am too out of the loop. I listened to a podcast on trans news the other day and it turned into one person ranting about how cis people don't care about food deserts so trans people need to tackle it and it's like ... what? I get that 'trans people understand more of the world' can feel good, but that's taking it some weird places. And maybe trans people can focus on having stronger communities before they also have to solve first world hunger?
Sorry for the strange tangent, just frustrated with everything right now. I just want to go out and do things and be around people but ... egh
no subject
Date: 2022-01-07 03:52 am (UTC)From:Right? Trying to tie the two together absolutely has some pretty awful implications. (And just the implied "every time and place other than here and now was a perfect queer utopia" is ALSO just... not true.) Needing the right amount of skepticism is exactly it! YES, we do have to fill in some gaps, YES some of the historical record is incomplete or even utter crap, but... let's not fill that in with our OWN utter crap.
I'm with you. I pretty much lost any connection to academia after I graduated, and I do feel very out of the loop with queer studies as it is now.
But... oof. That podcast sounds... yike. That's stretching *real* far with that notion. I do understand the idea of "hey, as trans (or other marginalized group) people, we're basically forced to see the ways that society fails, in ways that people who belong to dominant privileged groups don't necessarily have to understand. Because of this perspective and understanding, we should do what we can to combat issues of inequality and inequity in OTHER aspects of society as well."
It certainly doesn't always work that way but intersectionality and solidarity are worthy goals.
But it feels like a pretty big and awful leap to say "and therefore literally every societal ill, including things like food deserts, is trans people's problem to solve! Get on that!"
"You have a perspective that may predispose you to recognizing things that CAN be changed" =/= "It is personally your responsibility to fix it."
I may have tangented your tangent a bit, but ugh, stuff is frustrating.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-07 06:22 am (UTC)From:Those POVs from being in a different relation to society can be interesting, but it goes weird sometimes. I need to take the time to try a lot of podcasts and stuff. I know that Gender Reveal is a popular one, but the few episodes I listened to involved some internet culture things that they really didn't understand. I should give it another try, if for no other reason than to try to be more in the loop.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-08 03:19 am (UTC)From:I've heard of Gender Reveal, though I haven't ever listened to it. Seems like a LOT of podcasts or youtubers etc. wade into internet subculture stuff that they have a pretty shallow understanding of, which is frustrating.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-08 04:10 am (UTC)From:I don't mind picking up some books here and there, but paywalled journals and other stuff is such a crapshoot. I did a paid account somewhere and kept hitting my monthly view limit before I found what I was after. Was it JSTOR? It might have been?
It is frustrating, especially since a lot of trans people only have access to community online. So, this is something very relevant. It's easy for me to be critical, I discuss online community stuff a lot. I'm going to try them again. I just had the bad luck to start with the episode that opens with a completely misinformed rant about emoji.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:13 am (UTC)From:Paywalled stuff sucks. I personally hate it, but also... scientific literacy is so low anyway; making the actual sources inaccessible, so that you almost *have* to rely on how the research is reported on (IF it even is), which is often inaccurate or incomplete... Bleh.
True that. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect a podcast (distributed on the internet! focused on a community with large presence on the internet!) has at least a reasonable level of baseline knowledge about... communities on the internet.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:45 am (UTC)From:You'd think podcasters would know more, but, they keep not having a clue. I tried Gender Reveal again and hung in through some stuff I disagreed with. Then I noped out when they talked about how the 'non-profit industrial complex' shouldn't be funded and charity should be done by searching twitter for people asking for mutual aid.
So, now I am on the search for a podcast that doesn't hurt my brain. So far Trans And Caffeinated is good. I listened to one random ep and they had a good discussion on twitter cancelling. Seems promising so far.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-10 02:27 am (UTC)From:Ugh, that's a BIG nope out for me. Yeah, there are sketch-ass charities and nonprofits out there. It's a good idea to do research on any that you're thinking about giving to. But as great as "mutual aid" can be, donating to a GOOD nonprofit is going to do far more good than donating to a single person. Donating $25 to a food bank is going to buy a lot more food for a lot more hungry people than donating $25 to a stranger's gofundme.
I know we just talked about this, but people do lie, and a lot of them lie in the hopes of tugging on your heartstrings for donations!
That sucks, because that's one of the podcasts I have seen recc'd many times, and have thought about maybe giving a listen, but... yeah, no thanks.
Trans and Caffeinated sounds like a promising title! I hope it is a good one!
no subject
Date: 2022-01-10 03:47 am (UTC)From: