Exploring Cultural History

Essays in Honour of Peter Burke

Melissa Calaresu, Joan-Pau Rubies, Filippo de Vivo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351937634
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Over the past 30 years, cultural history has moved from the periphery to the centre of historical studies, profoundly influencing the way we look at and analyze all aspects of the past. In this volume, a distinguished group of international historians has come together to consider the rise of cultural history in general, and to highlight the particular role played in this rise by Peter Burke, the first professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and one of the most prolific and influential authors in the field. Reflecting the many and varied interests of Peter Burke, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of topics, geographies and chronologies. Grouped into four sections, 'Historical Anthropology', 'Politics and Communication', 'Images' and 'Cultural Encounters', the collection explores the boundaries and possibilities of cultural history; each essay presenting an opportunity to engage with the wider issues of the methods and problems of cultural history, and with Peter Burke's contributions to each chosen theme. Taken as a whole the collection shows how cultural history has enriched the ways in which we understand the traditional fields of political, economic, literary and military history, and permeates much of what we now understand as social history. It also demonstrates how cultural history is now at the heart of the coming together of traditional disciplines, providing a meeting ground for a variety of interests and methodologies. Offering a wide international perspective, this volume complements another Ashgate publication, Popular Culture in Early Modern England, which focuses on Peter Burke's influence on the study of popular culture in English history.

Part I
Historical Anthropology

Chapter 1
The Ecotype, Or a Modest Proposal to Reconnect Cultural and Social History

David Hopkin

'Historians might make more use of ecotypes', suggested Professor Burke to his student, myself, in a doctoral supervision more than a decade ago. Thus was initiated my own enthusiasm for this useful word, common to the vocabulary of the physical sciences, social sciences and the humanities. In this chapter I would like to suggest that the ecotype is a concept that could help bridge the gap between social history – that is a history informed by social science methodologies – and the cultural history that has become increasingly dominant in the last couple of decades. Of course not all readers will recognize the existence of this gap, or consider reconciliation between the sub-disciplines desirable. My own perception is no doubt conditioned by my field of research – modern French history – because among French historians the rise of cultural history in the 1980s was undoubtedly experienced as a crisis that not only undermined their accepted categories and chronologies, but also dissolved a unified conception of how things happened (or rather, how things stayed the same, given their interest in the structures of the longue durée).¹ There are many in France who feel this crisis is as yet unresolved.² However, such concerns are not limited to the French hexagon, and here my perception has also been conditioned by my position as one of the editors of Cultural and Social History. As the journal of the Social History Society it is overtly committed to 'emphasizing the ways in which the "cultural" and the "social" are mutually constitutive and informing', but it is easier to state this as an objective than to realize it in practice.³ Numerous and ongoing debates within the journal's pages demonstrate that Anglophone historians are equally cognizant of the divide between social history and cultural history, and desirous for some way to bring them back into harmony.⁴

The emergence of such divisions might surprise because, as Peter Burke has argued, 'The cultural approach has grown out of the social.'⁵ There are, no doubt, many varieties of cultural history, but here I am concerned with the type of cultural history in which I was trained at Cambridge in the 1990s by Peter Burke and Bob Scribner, and which drew on (and contributed to) third-generation annalistes, Italian microhistorians, history workshop style 'history from below', oral history and historical anthropology. All these approaches were reactions to the limitations of the kind of post-war social history that was more concerned with the factors that structured people's lives than with their ability to operate within and against those structures. This older kind of social history was concerned with aggregates rather than with individuals, and utilized quantitative methodologies derived from economics and sociology. It tended to depict the people of the past, and the illiterate masses in particular, as objects rather than subjects, as shaped by the means of production, Malthusian demographic constraints, technological limitations, geographical dispersal and so on. Class was an objective category that determined political and other forms of behaviour, rather than an identity the individual could choose to adopt. The thèses d'état of the 1950s and 1960s, supervised or examined by historians such as Ernest Labrousse and Pierre Goubert, depicted a pre-modern world that was pretty grim: a longue durée of low growth, high mortality and no way out. In response, the first generation of cultural historians were motivated by a humanistic desire to allow the people of the past, and in particular those people previously excluded from national historiographies such as women, peasants, children, itinerants and 'deviants', a greater degree of control over their own lives – some 'agency' to use the jargon.

This first generation of cultural historians also perceived problems in the assumptions about causation that underpinned quantitative history. Quantitative historians did not have to explain individual decision-making, they only had to look at the broad trends and relate these to other, usually economic factors. So patterns of migration could be explained by reference to the scarcity (and therefore value) of labour in one place compared with the over-supply (and therefore poverty) of labour in another. The trend from late to early marriage might be explained by the fact that household formation was no longer dependent on inheritance, but on wage-earning. However, given that the same factors affected everyone, historians needed also to account for those individual decisions that bucked the trends – those who chose to stay behind or those who married young despite the constraints placed on them. Examining such differences in behaviour shifted the focus away from the aggregate towards the individual, and again raised questions of agency, that is the ability to manipulate or resist the structuring forces that impinge on all.

The methods of cultural anthropologists offered historians glimpses of the ways in which subordinate social groups were able to bend or break out of their 'iron cages'. For cultural anthropologists the deployment of symbols characterized all aspects of human life, endowing all actions with meaning beyond the merely material needs of production and reproduction. And once one started looking for the Symbolism in clothing, food, the organization of a room and all the other rituals of everyday life, it became apparent that even the most marginalized and oppressed exercised some influence over their circumstances. Even a slave could demonstrate their resistance to their position through, for example, their dress.⁶ Such a cultural history through symbolic action opened up the history of those social groups that had the least access to written archives. As cultural anthropology had developed through participant observation of small groups, its methods were much more readily transferred to microstudies than to general histories.⁷ The totalizing claims of histories of industrialization and the growth of the nation state were rejected in favour of the agency of individuals, and the power of the local, to resist, negotiate and refashion large-scale historical trends to suit their own ends.

A number of problems rapidly emerged, however, in the relationship between infant cultural history and its parent social history. The most obvious is that of scale: how can one reconcile the micro and the macro?⁸ Large-scale historical change such as migration, urbanization, changes to family structure, the development of such phenomena as the teenager, the cohabiting couple and the single mother may all depend on innumerable personal decisions. But how is the agency of the individual enough to explain such massive social transformations? If the role of the individual is so important, why were so many of them making the same choices at the same time? Once one gets beyond a certain number of historical actors, all agents convert back to 'patients', to use Robert Burton's terminology, the people to whom things happen rather than the initiators of action. In practice most cultural historians still rely on the categories derived from social science historiography, such as class, and the standard chronologies of historical change (industrialization, modernization) when they generalize beyond specific case studies. It is all very well to question such certainties in research, but it makes teaching about the past very difficult.

More problematic still was the growing independence of culture as a factor explaining historical change. Culture was no longer a method to explore the resistant behaviour of various social groups; rather it was culture that constituted those groups in the first place. If, for example, class was less an objective social category than a cultural identity, what was to prevent individuals from any social background choosing to adopt the same identity, or individuals from the same background adopting a multitude of identities? This has indeed been the fate of the social interpretation of the French Revolution of 1789 and, to a lesser extent, the subsequent revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871. Participants in these events may have used the language of social conflict between 'sans-culottes' and 'aristocrates', or between 'bourgeois' and 'proletaires', but membership of these groups was not defined socially, but through political culture. A noble could self-identify with the sans-culottes, just as the most menial of day-labourers could be labelled an 'aristocrate'. The historiography of revolutionary events in France, at least in the Anglophone world, is now dominated by the concept of 'political cultures', and while the origin and development of such cultures might be connected to socioeconomic developments, they are not considered dependent on them.⁹ Cultural revolutions follow their own historical dynamic.¹⁰

It is my hope that the ecotype concept might help untangle some of these problems, bringing the social and cultural, the macro and the micro, into closer alignment. I do not argue that it resolves the issue of historical causation, but it may be useful in reconnecting social and cultural change. My commitment to this term also signals my own allegiances as a self-declared 'social science historian', but my methodologies are borrowed from the most neglected, if most culturally aware, of the social sciences, that is folklore.

The Ecotype in Folklore

It was Carl von Sydow who first wrote about folkloric ecotypes, or in his formulation, oicotypes (one also sees oikotypes). Sydow borrowed the term from botany, where it denotes 'a hereditary plant-variety adapted to a certain milieu (seashore, mountain-land, etc.) through natural selection amongst hereditarily dissimilar entities of the same species'.¹¹ Sydow drew an analogy to special types of widely distributed traditions; that is versions restricted to one cultural sphere. To use a contemporary folklorist's definition, 'a folklore ecotype is a special version of a type of any folkloristic genre limited to a particular cultural area in which it has developed differently from examples of the same type in other areas, because of national, political, geographical and historical conditions'.¹² Such cultural areas are usually conceived of in geographic terms: Sydow talked of national, regional or even parochial ecotypes, and in general it is the spatial presentation of folkloric data that reveals the existence of ecotypes. But it is just as reasonable to think in terms of occupational, gender-specific or ethnic (for instance, within a multiethnic city) ecotypes.

Sydow illustrated his concept by reference to the geographical distribution of variant tale-types. Many well-known tale plots, including Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood, are well known throughout the Eurasian landmass, if not the entire world, and so for comparative purposes are identified in folklorists' catalogues by designated type (Aarne-Thompson-Uther or ATU) numbers. But while basic plots are common to very wide areas, the way they are told in different regions shows considerable variation. For instance, to use one of Sydow's own examples, the folktale plot that goes by the generic title The Princess on the Glass Mountain (ATU 530) has been recorded all the way from India to Eastern Europe. But whereas in the German lands the princess is on a glass mountain, in Slavic traditions she can be found on a high tower, and in India upon a palisade. However, this tale had difficulty spreading further westwards (where it is usually only found in much-altered forms) because, according to Sydow, 'it agrees ill with the traditions existing there'.¹³

Sydow did not go further in explaining why one ecotype found favour in one cultural area while another was rejected, other than to refer to the 'temper and other traditions of the people'. The reason for this neglect was that Sydow was engaged in his own argument within folkloristics against the Finnish school of diffusionists. The latter saw all folklore, and especially oral literature, as migratory, readily transcending political and linguistic barriers as it passed from person to person, village to village. It was the Finns who devised the tale-type indexes in order to track similar narratives across time and space. Sydow used their own tools to emphasis n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Peter Burke and the History of Cultural History
• PART I: HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• PART II: POLITICS AND COMMUNICATION
• PART III: IMAGES
• PART IV: CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
• Afterword: Exploring Cultural History: A Response
• Index