Abstract
A focus on cultural history gives greater attention to individual human agency than do studies of political, economic, or environmental history.1 Although people have been limited in their ability to control the ways of the world, they are usually able to express their response to the events and processes in which they participate. Many cultural expressions of past times were ephemeral and are lost forever, but the remains of others survive in ceramics, burials, words, and habits of dress. In broadest terms, these cultural remains fit into a pattern beginning with many millennia of gradual differentiation in cultural patterns, followed by more recent millennia of cultural convergence. Among early humans, localized groups adapted to different ecologies and developed further distinctions in ideas and institutions, while in the last few millennia connections among populations have grown, and technology has been able to overcome ecological distinctions.
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Notes
A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York, n.d. [1952]). This volume includes scores of anthropological definitions of culture in seven categories, followed by six categories of statements about culture. Adam Kuper, in his review of the Kroeber-Kluckhohn analysis, argues that the authors develop a genealogy of definitions of culture, in which “the scientific conception of culture emerges in opposition to humanist conceptions,” and thereby follows the leadership of sociologist Talcott Parsons, “who created the need for a modern, social scientific conception of culture.” The more basic lesson of the Kroeber-Kluckhohn volume for historians, however, is that anthropologists have debated the meaning of culture and have seen it as problematic rather than as a known quantity.
Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 59, 68.
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The terms “lumpers” and “splitters” have been used in European historiography by J. H. Hexter, and in American historiography, to distinguish those making overarching generalizations from those emphasizing particularities. Hexter, The History Primer (New York, 1971).
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Shaba, a large province in the southeast of Congo-Kinshasa, lies at the headwaters of the Congo, Kasai, and Zambezi valleys. Swahili-speaking merchants from the East African coast arrived in numbers in the nineteenth century; Swahili became and remains a vehicular language for the region. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge, 1986).
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For an interpretation of cosmopolitan Francophone culture in twentieth-century Africa, see Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880–1985, (Cambridge, 1988).
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© 2003 Patrick Manning
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Manning, P. (2003). Cultural History. In: Navigating World History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973856_13
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