Abstract
In his book Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account, Adam Kuper advises us to avoid altogether the use of that ‘hyper-referential word’, ‘culture’.1 It has come to denote too much and thus came to mean too little. The same might be said of the use of ‘cultural history’, which may cover quite traditional histories of artistic and intellectual production as well as something different, called by some the ‘new cultural history’.2 For while shame-faced political, hard-nosed demographic, forbidding diplomatic, and chapped-skinned imperial historians were left out of all the good historical party-lists in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now back on them, invited as experts on political rituals, Cold War culture, cultural encounters. The same can be said of the histories of medicine, science and law — spheres which were marginal to the first wave of the ‘new’ history in the 1960s and 1970s — but have been remade as exciting new areas by those able to probe their ‘cultural’ making.
I am grateful to my friends Christopher Clark, David Feldman, Eric Foner, Adam I.P. Smith, Naomi Tadmor and Miles Taylor for helpful conversations, and to Peter Burke and Gareth Stedman Jones for reading and commenting on this chapter.
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Notes and references
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. x. On the term see William H. Sewell, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 35–61.
Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn.
Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1999), pp. 331–52.
Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) (Le saint lévrier: Guinefort, guérisseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1979)).
For some examples of influential theoretical reflection by medievalists and early modernists see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Brian Stock, Listening for the Texts: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
and the recent Paul Strohm, Theory and the Pre-modern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
On the uses of psychoanalysis: Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994).
On the Annales vision and institutional context see Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 128–65
see also Peter Schöttler (ed.), Marc Bloch: Historiker und Widerstand-Kämpfer (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1999).
This is not to say that others had not sought this turn before: see Lord Acton’s Inaugural Lecture of June 1895 which called to ‘study problems in preference to periods’, John Edward Emerich Acton, ‘The Study of History’, in John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (eds), Lectures on Modern History (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 24.
The most ambitious is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976) (Les Paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols (Paris: SEVPEN, 1966)); and for a critique see Jean-Yves Grenier, in Bernard Lepetit (ed.), Les Formes de l’experience: une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), pp. 227–8
for a comment on this reevaluation see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Une autre histoire sociale? (note critique)’, Annales HSS, vol. LIII (1998), pp. 383–94.
Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Trajan Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1976)
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). For a critique by historians associated with Annales see Les formes de l’experience.
On the reception of Annales historiography see articles by Vauchez, Oexle, Little, Simons, Rucquoi, Klaniczay and Gurevich in Miri Rubin (ed.), The Work ofJacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 71–141, 223–48.
On the genealogy of mentalité and related concepts see Peter Burke, ‘Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities’, in Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 162–82; Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 120–1.
Patricia O’Brien, ‘Michel Foucault’s history of culture’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 34.
On the body and its products as metaphors for the spiritual state see Piroska Nagy, Le Don des larmes au moyen âge (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000)
Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990)
Alain Boureau, Le simple corps du roi: l’impossible sacralité des souverains français XVe–XVIIIe (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1988)
Laura Kendrick, Animating the Letter: the Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999).
Alain Boureau, The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1998) (Le Droit de cuissage: la fabrication d’un mythe XIIe–XXe (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995)).
Frank Lestrignant, Cannibalism: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Une saint horreur; ou le voyage en eucharistie, XVIe–XVIII siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996).
Antoinette Molinié, ‘D’un village de La Mancha à un glacier des Andes. Deux célébrations “sauvages” du Corps de Dieu’, in Antoinette Molinié (ed.), Le Corps de Dieu en Fêtes (Paris: Cerf, 1996), pp. 223–53.
A related debate is that on popular culture. For one of many such debates see Lawrence W. Levine, ‘The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and its Audiences’, American Historical Review, vol. XCVII (1992), pp. 1369–99, and the related comments by Robin D.G. Kelley, Natalie Zemon Davis and T.J. Jackson Lears, ibid., pp. 1400–30.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
See David Wallace, ‘Chaucer and the European Rose’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer vol. I (1984), pp. 61–7.
Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signifcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
For an exchange about her work on the Martin Guerre case see Robert Findlay, ‘The Refashioning of Martin Guerre’ and Natalie Z. Davis, ‘“On the lame”’, American Historical Review, vol. XCIII (1988), pp. 553–71, 572–603.
Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in a Secular Age (London: Penguin, 1999).
A. Kuper, ‘Culture, Identity and the Project of Cosmopolitan Anthropology’, in Among the Anthropologists: History and Context in Anthropology (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 26–58, at p. 37.
See Robert Darnton’s ‘Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of Rue Saint-Séverin’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allen Lane, 1984), pp. 75–
Roger Chartier, ‘Texts, symbols, and Frenchness’, Journal of Modern History, vol. LVII (1985), pp. 682–95
and Dominick La Capra, ‘Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre’, Journal of Modern History, vol. LX (1988), pp. 95–112.
For a more recent evaluation of Geertz’s contribution see the articles in Sherry B. Ortner (ed.), The Fate of ‘Culture’: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
For an ethnographically grounded theory of ‘loose’ ritual see Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival: A People’s Uprising at Romans, 1579–80, trans. Mary Feeney (London: Scolar Press, 1980).
See for example Roger Mettam, ‘Dissemblers, Dissenters, Guerrillas: The Huguenots in France after 1685’, Historical Research (2002) (forthcoming).
Renato Rosaldo, ‘From the Door of his Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inqusitor’, and Vincent Crapanzano, ‘Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 77–97 and pp. 51–76, respectively.
See also James Clifford The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Tanya M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000)
Ray Raphael, The Men from the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1988)
Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, trans. Carol Volk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) (La bête singulière: les juifs, les chrétiens, et le cochon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)).
On ethnographic practice (white ethnographers and black ‘informants’) see Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Cultural Wars in Urban America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997), pp. 17–23.
On manipulation of encounters across cultural and ethnic lines see Robin G.D. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Poetics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 22, on the ‘cult of true sambohood’. And on the perception of ethnographic interrogation held by an ‘informant’: ‘I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger’, in John Langton Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980), p. xix; for Drylongso as an attempt at a different type of cultural record, see pp. xxii–xxx.
On the problem of ‘historical’ subjects without a voice see Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989) (La nuit des proletaires (Paris: Hachette, 1981)).
See the collected essays in Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York: Zone Books, 2000); How ‘Natives’ Think, about Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
which is an answer to Gananath Obeyesekereh, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
See for example Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Histories of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
For a pioneering collection see Hans Medick and David W. Sabean (eds), Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)
Sherry B. Ortner. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)
Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. XXXVII (1995), pp. 173–93.
Rosalind O’Hanlon (trans. and ed.), A Comparison between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt (eds), Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Introduction on pp. 1–19; see also Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Touch of the Real’, in Ortner, The Fate of Culture, pp. 14–29.
Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1998).
Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History, and the Textual Unconscious’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. XVII (1995), pp. 34–42.
Roger Chartier, ‘Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France’, in S.L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century New Babylon: Studies in the Social Sciences 40 (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1984), pp. 229–53.
This possibility was hinted at in John Toews, ‘Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and Irreducibility of Experience’, American Historical Review, vol. XCII (1987), pp. 879–907, at pp. 882–3.
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Rubin, M. (2002). What is Cultural History Now?. In: Cannadine, D. (eds) What is History Now?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204522_5
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