Cultural History

A Concise Introduction

Alessandro Arcangeli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415667753
• eBook ISBN: 9781136621826
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

The expression 'cultural history' is generally used today to signal a particular approach to history, one which could be applied to any object, and is mainly concerned with the sense men and women from the past gave to the world they lived in.

In this introduction to cultural history as a subdiscipline, the reader will find the key steps in the historical development of the field from 1850 to the present. It surveys different ways in which cultural history has been practised, exploring intellectual history, the history of ideas and concepts, of mentalities, of symbols and representations, and of languages and discourses.

Cultural History also maps the territory cultural history most effectively enlightens: gender; the family and sexuality; the body; senses and emotions and images; material culture and consumption; the media and communication. Lastly, it includes an appendix of biographies of a number of influential cultural historians.

This concise and accessible introduction will be an essential volume for any university student studying cultural history.

1 In search of a definition

A fuzzy field of enquiry

As a field of historical enquiry, cultural history has recently witnessed major developments. Over the past few years, many books have been published that purport, in their title or subtitle, to be the cultural history of one or another among a disparate assortment of entities and phenomena: just to mention a few, an internet search with the appropriate key words in some European languages produced topics ranging from the cultural history of individual countries or communities, or even rivers and valleys (the Amazon River, the Grand Canyon), to that of the body, of sport, fashion, cinema, pregnancy, suicide or the punch card. A similar search on book catalogues can easily fill a page with topics that have been explored from this perspective (Serna and Pons 2005: 15–16). To the difference that distances these objects from one another, and its implications for a definition of the field, I will return later. Their diversity recalls the exotic incongruity of ‘a certain Chinese encyclopaedia’, a product of the narrative invention of Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, from whom Michel Foucault (2002: XVI) borrowed it within the preface of one of his first works, to epitomize the variability of systems of thought: the extreme diversity of the criteria according to which it classifies the animal world provokes the reader’s laughter.

In passing, it is worth pointing out that there is a clearly perceivable risk that time will reveal the cultural history boom to have been little more than a fad; or that this field may be exercising, on neighbouring disciplines, the kind of imperialism that not long ago was exercised in cultural studies by other approaches (such was arguably, between the 1970s and the 1980s, the role of semiotics). On the other hand, the area is also characterized to some extent by elusiveness. Although cultural history is gaining credibility and institutionalization, this is not yet true everywhere. In a significant number of countries, it is not an academic discipline or the object of specific teaching; and, as a type of approach to the past, it has often shown the tendency to be associated with amateur history publications for a non-specialist audience, rather than the work of professional historians. The latter association has occurred before in the not-so-distant past, and for this reason we will revisit it in Chapter 2.

As for the identity of this field of knowledge, introductions to cultural history recently published in various languages (see Suggestions for further reading), as well as entries in reference books that deal with the subject, have adopted a heterogeneous series of positions. They range from the statement that it is a field easy to define, to the refusal to provide any delimitation; from the hypothesis that what characterizes it is a particular object (as distinguished from that peculiar to other historical subdisciplines), to the adoption of a specific method. In what follows, the reader will find no demand for regulation. The present writer has no intention of establishing how historians should get on with their job, nor of erecting fencing to define who is in and who out (it is likely that both the excluded and the unwillingly included would have something to object about). It will be, rather, a question of registering how this area has acquired its shape, in the eyes of both the scholars and authors who are its practitioners, and the readers and reviewers of other people’s writing. To be more accurate – and this should be said once and for all – rather than a single, welldefined field, what we intend to explore is a series of parallel, sometimes crossing and overlapping research paths. However, this lack of uniformity should not necessarily be perceived as a limit. Somehow, the ‘weak’ character of this area bears the inevitable imprint of the postmodern condition (Lyotard 1984), to which several threads link it. What in other times and by different judges might have been stigmatized as a sign of instability or an unsafe methodological foundation, one can reasonably value today as an endowment and as evidence of an experimental spirit. As we shall soon see, this complexity of definition is largely the result of a shift that has occurred in this area of study. As a first approximation, we could describe it as a gradual transition (one that occurred over generations of historians, during the past 150 years) from a ‘history of culture’ defined as a specific field (culture as the object of enquiry) to a ‘cultural history’ characterized by the ways it approaches the subject (regardless of the variety of its themes).

Cultures and history

So, to begin with, the difference between the phrases ‘history of culture’ and ‘cultural history’ should be clarified. In the former, the genitive case delimits an object of enquiry (culture rather than politics, the economy or something else); in the latter, the adjective qualifies one of the available ways at our disposal for examining any historical objects (topics, events, circumstances). In this respect, it differs from other approaches (in particular, the cultural perspective has constantly competed or been woven together with the social one, as we shall soon see); on the other hand, it does not have precise limits on the fields to which it applies (potentially, history as a whole, as well as each of its individual moments). In principle, this is a valid distinction, and, as a rule, it will be used in this book. Nevertheless, it does incur problems, and is not universally accepted. There is no agreement among scholars upon the definition of the discipline and of its distinctive features; the rise of cultural history from the history of culture is itself a historical phenomenon (we will examine it in Chapter 2); and, in some linguistic domains, historiography seems to have resisted the introduction of the adjectival form (‘cultural’, rather than ‘of culture’). Sometimes – particularly in the past – this resistance has taken the form of adapted translations, which persisted in using the old expression even when presenting new foreign research to national audiences.

If one considers how the expression appears in different languages, in fact, the situation varies considerably and becomes more complex. Historically, the mother of all these words is German Kulturgeschichte. Grammatically, it is a compound name. The main term is history (Geschichte); Kultur is in attributive position (German tends to combine words, while English keeps them separate). If we check the meaning of Kultur in the Germanic tradition, however, we knock against a term of extreme complexity and historical relevance. A wellknown and meaningful page of the story may cast sufficient light on some of its implications. At the outbreak of World War I, Thomas Mann and other intellectuals interpreted what was happening as a clash of civilizations: on one side Germanic Kultur, which had produced unparalleled masterpieces in music and literature, and also the deepest chapters in recent Western philosophy and, with them, a rigorous moral law, a bulwark defending a really valuable way of life; on the other side, Anglo-French Zivilization, which was utilitarian and superficial, governed as it was – in the view of the German intellectuals – by the value systems of money and fashion. Although this particular representation of cultural differences was shaped by nationalism and other contextual elements, the case provides a telling example of the importance of the issue, charged as it was with strong identity markers (Bénéton 1975). If we consider the etymological proximity between Zivilization and the English ‘civilization’ (and related words in other languages), it is therefore a paradox that it is precisely ‘civilization’ that is commonly regarded as the closest and most appropriate equivalent for German Kultur. Classic works by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt can provide a good example: his essay Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien is in fact translated as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt 1990).¹

This considered, where have we got to from our starting point? In Chapter 2 we will examine the characteristics of the nineteenth-century German historiography that first delimited and ploughed through this field of enquiry. However, it can be stated already that German Kulturgeschichte is something more than a history of culture. While it is not simply identifiable with the historiographical traditions typical of different linguistic domains, recent use of the term confirms that it corresponds more closely to an approach that is available to be applied to a wide range of research topics; this is precisely the meaning we have assigned above to the expression ‘cultural history’.²

The tradition of French terms is as rich in history and connotations. Civilisation is a term of eighteenth-century coinage. Outlining its semantic history in an essay originally published in 1930, Lucien Febvre – one of the protagonists of the renewal which French historiography experienced between the two World Wars – distinguished between two very different notions, and aimed at narrating the genesis of such a divergence:

In the first case civilization simply refers to all the features that can be observed in the collective life of one human group, embracing their material, intellectual, moral and political life and, there is unfortunately no other word for it, their social life. It has been suggested that this should be called the ‘ethnographical’ conception of civilization. It does not imply any value judgment on the detail or the overall pattern of the facts examined. Neither does it have any bearing on the individual in the group taken separately, or on their personal reactions or individual behaviour. It is above all a conception which refers to a group.

In the second case, when we are talking about the progress, failures, greatness and weakness of civilization we do have a value judgment in mind. We have the idea that the civilization we are talking about – ours – is in itself something great and beautiful; something too which is nobler, more comfortable and better, both morally and materially speaking, than anything outside it – savagery, barbarity or semi-civilization. Finally, we are confident that such civilization, in which we participate, which we propagate, benefit from and popularize, bestows on us all a certain value, prestige, and dignity. For it is a collective asset enjoyed by all civilized societies. It is also an individual privilege which each of us proudly boasts that he possesses.

(Burke 1973: 220)

Three-quarters of a century later, the least one can say is that pride in that possession has become feebler, and Febvre’s page seems to belong to a now unrecoverable past, and to exemplify an interpretation of the relationship between cultures now rightly abandoned. An itinerary through the history of the notions of civility and civilization will be outside our present agenda. Two or three meaningful passages, however, will prove relevant to our discourse here. Within the French historical school – the most influential on the twentieth-century international scene – Fernand Braudel, Febvre’s direct heir, is the scholar who, in the second post-war period, has contributed most substantially to a history of civilization mainly conceived in terms of material culture, collective structures of economic life centred on market and exchange, and entrenched in shared rhythms and gesture, repeated for centuries.

From the 1980s, a prominent historical model that has animated debate on this front is the one revolving around the work of a German sociologist, Norbert Elias, and the relatively slow international reception of his oeuvre. Elias’s paradigm (see also Daniel 2001: 254–69) is that of a ‘civilizing process’, by which the foundations of our own present world are understood to have been laid, between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, via a gradual variation of political forms, but also in styles of behaviour, and particularly the self-control of impulses. Several critics have found his model culpable of ethnocentrism, as if, once more, the European pattern were to be proposed as unparalleled exception, lacking connections with the surrounding world. From this point of view, the most consistent alternative paradigm is probably offered by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a Spanish–British historian who explicitly denies progress or any predictable direction in history. He has further developed the historical geography (or geographical history) typical of the French school by exploring, in essays characterized by boundless geographical and chronological coordinates, the whole range of human civilizations: each of them grew in relation to given environmental circumstances; none had the monopoly of putting forward a particular way of life as if universally valid.

Cultures and society

In one sense, it is precisely by distinction from the social approach that the cultural one defines itself: as we will see in further detail in Chapter 3, it is specifically a question of focusing on mentalities, representations and discourses rather than contexts, living conditions or movements. In one of the richest and most perceptive overviews of the discipline, Ute Daniel suggested that cultural history

questions the past by asking how people at the time perceived and interpreted themselves, what material, mental and social motivations respectively influenced their forms of perception and production of sense, and the effects such forms produced.

(Daniel 2001: 19)

Miri Rubin (2002: 81) put it like this: ‘Like all good ideas the basic point is simple. The cultural turn asks not only “How it really was” but rather “How was it for him, or her, or them?”’ In the course of the twentieth century, stress on one aspect or the other – reality versus representation – also corresponded to shifts in the dominant historiographical paradigms. For instance, a journal in the forefront, such as the French Annales, engaged predominantly on a socio-economic front for a long time, despite the fact that its founders had offered crucial contributions to the cultural perspective. With later generations of scholars, however, the same periodical acknowledged and participated in the cultural turn in France.

As the two key orientations in recent historiography, social and cultural history have been both complementing and competing with each other. One of the most prominent German social historians, Hans-Ulrich Wehler (2001), has described the confrontation between the two branches of the discipline as a duel; while Peter Burke (2008b: 114–18), registering the oscillations in the field from one pole to the other, and reactions to some aspect or excess of the new cultural history, has spoken in terms of a ‘revenge of social history’. A return to a kind of history of society after the predominance of the cultural was also called for in an intellectual autobiography by American historian Geoff Eley (2005).

Nevertheless, comparison and mutual reference between the two sides of the coin (reality/representation) are inevitable, and it is precisely in the direction of a socio-cultural perspective that some of the most highly esteemed historians have programmatically moved.

A tradition dating back already a few generations links the combined historical analysis of these two factors to a social and cultural critique of the present state of affairs. Culture and Society 1780–1950 – written by Raymond Williams (1958), the most influential forerunner of modern cultural studies – explicitly inspired Peter Burke (1972), whose first substantial book made use of sociology as a tool to unhinge a sweetened and ahistorical image of the visual and literary civilization of Renaissance Italy. The study was based on close examination of a sample of ‘creative elite’: a list – given as an appendix of the first edition – of 600 painters and sculptors, writers, musicians, scientists and humanists, ‘something like a social survey of the dead’ (Burke 1972: 294), in order to study the paths of their careers (recruiting, formation, organization, secular or ecclesiastic condition) and their intersections with social and geographical origins.

Subsequently, the same author re-examined the social dimension of culture in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. In search of a definition: A fuzzy field of enquiry
• 2. Traditions and reinventions
• 3. Interwoven paths
• 4. Territories
• Suggestions for further reading
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index