Mining culture, labour, and the state in early modern Saxony

This article encourages cultural historians to shift their attention from the ‘origins’ of early modern mining culture in manual labour to seemingly derivative contexts such as the court, bureaucracy, and heritage collections. How did these sites fashion the idea of mining culture as a system of expressions, and how was this system used, with varying success, to align individuals and groups with the requirements of material production? The article identifies at least five layers of constitutive and interpretative work: The current, 'normalized' scholarship in a reunited Germany; the construction of liberal or socialist traditions in the East and the West after the war; the resurrection of both a mining State and mining Volk during the Nazi era; the system-building of ethnographers and heritage associations since the early 1800s; and attempts of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century mining bureaucracy to homogenize workers’ dress, ritual, and language for judiciary, management, and economic planning purposes. Each layer produced their own archives, on which any investigation of early modern mining culture depends as an empirical base, and all of them offered their own attempts to construct a system of cultural expression from the particular stories, archival documents, songs, and dress elements that they collected and arranged.