Populäre Genres als soziographische Wissensformate im 19. Jahrhundert

Abstract

This introductory article contextualizes the volume's contributions within an interdisciplinary and transcultural historiography of social knowledge production. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, a growing desire to comprehend the transformations in the social, economic, and political world promoted the consolidation of diverse sociographic genres. From Munich to Mexico City, sketches of manners, travel accounts, social novels, genre paintings, and illustrated periodicals celebrated considerable success on an increasingly commercialized market of print and arts. According to their specific medial conditions, these forms tracked the changes in everyday practices, clothing habits, and urban infrastructures. The new empiricist approach to human nature and environments through description and contextualization had clearly been encouraged by political and epistemic shifts, which had favored both the success of realist genres and the natural sciences. The volume's contributions explore the connections between the massification and diversification of audience-oriented print products and the increased interest in social expressions and dynamics. By examining the knowledge practices of selection, classification, aestheticization, and ideologization, they uncover the connections between popular genres of sociography and »academic« forms of social research, which, by the end of the century, became established in sociological and anthropological associations and university departments. The multifaceted collection of articles reveals alternative strands of early ethnographic-sociological knowledge production and provides perspectives for a history of social knowledge beyond disciplinary, national, and genre-related methodologies.