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Material Culture, Gender and Maintenance Activities in Making and Resisting Early Modern Colonial Globalization. A Long-term Perspective from the Mariana Islands

Project description

How daily life shaped colonial legacies

The early Modern Era was a crucible for globalisation, driven by the translocation of people, goods, and ideas. Yet, the interplay between material culture, daily life, and gender in this period remains underexplored. In this context, the ERC-funded MaGMa project aims to bridge this gap by examining how gendered ideologies and maintenance activities, such as caregiving and food processing, shaped and resisted colonial globalisation from the 16th to the 18th centuries. By integrating archaeology, history, anthropology, and gender studies, MaGMa will scrutinise cultural shifts in the Mariana Islands, uncovering hidden aspects of how daily practices influenced and resisted the emergence of new colonial norms. This pioneering approach promises a comprehensive understanding of early modern global transformations.

Objective

The proposed project will be the first to investigate the intimate connection between material culture, quotidian life, and gender in the making of and resistance to early modern colonial globalization. The 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries witnessed the rise of historical processes vital to moulding the world to its present shape. While scholars have extensively studied the worldwide translocations of people, goods and ideas, the fact that this globalization also took shape through the cross-continental circulation of engendered ideologies, policies, knowledge, material culture, technologies and skills has not been sufficiently explored; equally under-investigated has been how this same constellation worked in resisting globalization. Through a synergistic transdisciplinary approach, MaGMa will fully address these weaknesses by examining the material worlds constructed at the crossroads of Modern Colonialism, Gender Systems, and Maintenance Activities. The latter is a concept born in Spanish archaeology to highlight the foregrounding nature of a set of structural everyday practices (e.g. care-giving, food-processing, weaving, hygiene and health, the socialization and rearing of children, and the arrangement of living spaces) essential to social continuity and community wellbeing.

Bringing into focused dialogue prehistoric and historical archaeology; history; anthropology, geography; and postcolonial, anticolonial, decolonial, and gender studies, and binding archaeological science, archaeological fieldwork, and archival research, MaGMa will analyse cultural changes and continuities in the Mariana Islands revealing otherwise undetected cultural features. The ground-breaking combination of this array of disciplines and methods will facilitate the ultimate goal of the project: a sound and holistic understanding of how maintenance activities and gender transformations became structural in configuring early modern colonial new normalities across the globe.

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG

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Host institution

UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 586 948,00
Address
PLACA DE LA MERCE, 10-12
08002 Barcelona
Spain

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Region
Este Cataluña Barcelona
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 586 948,00

Beneficiaries (2)

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