Pour une archéologie des pratiques

Abstract

Although often neglected in historiography, objects are precious documents for the historian. Due to their materiality, they retain the traces of how they have been handled and used, which can in turn reveal gestures and routines without the heuristic obstacles of research into practices. Using the example of devices for measuring duration—a late eighteenth-century watch with a second hand, and chronographs from the second half of the nineteenth century—this article throws light on transformations in the history of bodily practices, from a new quantification of the pulse, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to changes in sporting practices and the organisation of labour at the turn of the twentieth century.

Keywords

• practices
• materiality
• chronometry
• history of the body
• history of work and labour