Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives fro ...
,
cultural
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
, and
political
Politics () is the set of activities that are associated with decision-making, making decisions in social group, groups, or other forms of power (social and political), power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of Social sta ...
milieu
The social environment, social context, sociocultural context or milieu refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated ...
of or relating to
the arts
The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices involving creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thought, deeds, and existence in an extensive range of m ...
and manners that a group favors.
Jacob Burckhardt
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (; ; 25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is '' The Civilization of the Renaissance in ...
(1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of
human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as
ceremony
A ceremony (, ) is a unified ritualistic event with a purpose, usually consisting of a number of artistic components, performed on a special occasion.
The word may be of Etruscan language, Etruscan origin, via the Latin .
Religious and civil ...
, class in practices, and the interaction with locales. It combines the approaches of
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
and
history
History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
to examine
popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
Description
Many current cultural historians claim it to be a new approach, but cultural history was already referred to by nineteenth-century historians, notably the Swiss scholar of Renaissance history
Jacob Burckhardt
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (; ; 25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is '' The Civilization of the Renaissance in ...
.
Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of ''
histoire des mentalités'' (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of
American studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, History of the United States, history, Society of the United States, society, and Culture of the Unit ...
. As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance ( ) was a period in History of Italy, Italian history between the 14th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Western Europe and marked t ...
, cultural history was oriented to the study of a particular historical period in its entirety, with regard not only to its painting, sculpture, and architecture, but to the economic basis underpinning society, and to the social institutions of its daily life. Echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the 20th century can be seen in
Johan Huizinga's ''
The Waning of the Middle Ages'' (1919).
Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as:
carnival
Carnival (known as Shrovetide in certain localities) is a festive season that occurs at the close of the Christian pre-Lenten period, consisting of Quinquagesima or Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras.
Carnival typi ...
,
festival
A festival is an event celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, Melā, mela, or Muslim holidays, eid. A ...
, and public
ritual
A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Traditionally ...
s;
performance
A performance is an act or process of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function.
Performance has evolved glo ...
traditions of
tale,
epic
Epic commonly refers to:
* Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation
* Epic film, a genre of film defined by the spectacular presentation of human drama on a grandiose scale
Epic(s) ...
, and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, I ...
. Cultural history also examines main historical concepts as
power,
ideology
An ideology is a set of beliefs or values attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Form ...
,
class
Class, Classes, or The Class may refer to:
Common uses not otherwise categorized
* Class (biology), a taxonomic rank
* Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects
* Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used d ...
,
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
,
cultural identity
Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity (social science), identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, Locality (settlement), locality, gender, o ...
,
attitude
Attitude or Attitude may refer to:
Philosophy and psychology
* Attitude (psychology), a disposition or state of mind
** Attitude change
* Propositional attitude, a mental state held towards a proposition
Science and technology
* Orientation ...
,
race,
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture to
mass media
Mass media include the diverse arrays of media that reach a large audience via mass communication.
Broadcast media transmit information electronically via media such as films, radio, recorded music, or television. Digital media comprises b ...
(television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from
print to
film
A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...
and, now, to the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
(culture of
capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by ...
). Its modern approaches come from
art history
Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history.
Tradit ...
,
Annales
Annals are a concise form of historical writing which record events chronologically, year by year. The equivalent word in Latin and French is ''annales'', which is used untranslated in English in various contexts.
List of works with titles contai ...
,
Marxist
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
school,
microhistory and new cultural history.
[What Became of Cultural Historicism in the French Reclamation of Strasbourg After World War One? French History and Civilization 5, 2014, 1-15]
Common theoretical
touchstones for recent cultural history have included:
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas ( , ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Associated with the Frankfurt S ...
's formulation of the
public sphere
The public sphere () is an area in social relation, social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion, Social influence, influence political action. A "Public" is "of or c ...
in ''The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere'';
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz (; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades&n ...
's notion of '
thick description' (expounded in ''The Interpretation of Cultures''); and the idea of
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...
as a cultural-historical category, as discussed in
Paul Connerton's ''How Societies Remember''.
Historiography and the French Revolution
The area where new-style cultural history is often pointed to as being almost a
paradigm
In science and philosophy, a paradigm ( ) is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word ''paradigm'' is Ancient ...
is the "
revisionist" history of the
French Revolution, dated somewhere since
François Furet
François Furet (; 27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University ...
's massively influential 1978 essay ''Interpreting the French Revolution''. The "revisionist interpretation" is often characterized as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedly
Marxist
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
, "social interpretation" which locates the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to put more emphasis on "
political culture". Reading ideas of political culture through Habermas' conception of the public sphere, historians of the Revolution in the past few decades have looked at the role and position of cultural themes such as
gender
Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
,
ritual
A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Traditionally ...
, and
ideology
An ideology is a set of beliefs or values attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Form ...
in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture.
Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are
Roger Chartier,
Robert Darnton,
Patrice Higonnet,
Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, Joan Landes, Mona Ozouf, and
Sarah Maza. Of course, these scholars all pursue fairly diverse interests, and perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the paradigmatic nature of the new history of the French Revolution. Colin Jones, for example, is no stranger to cultural history,
Habermas, or Marxism, and has persistently argued that the Marxist interpretation is not dead, but can be revivified; after all, Habermas' logic was heavily indebted to a Marxist understanding. Meanwhile, Rebecca Spang has also recently argued that for all its emphasis on difference and newness, the 'revisionist' approach retains the idea of the French Revolution as a watershed in the history of (so-called)
modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular Society, socio-Culture, cultural Norm (social), norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the ...
and that the problematic notion of modernity has itself attracted scant attention.
Cultural studies
''
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices rel ...
'' is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combines
political economy
Political or comparative economy is a branch of political science and economics studying economic systems (e.g. Marketplace, markets and national economies) and their governance by political systems (e.g. law, institutions, and government). Wi ...
,
geography
Geography (from Ancient Greek ; combining 'Earth' and 'write', literally 'Earth writing') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding o ...
,
sociology
Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociol ...
,
social theory
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena.Seidman, S., 2016. Contested knowledge: Social theory today. John Wiley & Sons. A tool used by social scientists, social theories re ...
,
literary theory
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, m ...
,
film/video studies,
cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term ...
,
philosophy
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
, and
art history
Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history.
Tradit ...
/
criticism
Criticism is the construction of a judgement about the negative or positive qualities of someone or something. Criticism can range from impromptu comments to a written detailed response. , ''the act of giving your opinion or judgment about the ...
to study
cultural
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of
ideology
An ideology is a set of beliefs or values attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Form ...
,
nationality
Nationality is the legal status of belonging to a particular nation, defined as a group of people organized in one country, under one legal jurisdiction, or as a group of people who are united on the basis of culture.
In international law, n ...
,
ethnicity
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they Collective consciousness, collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, ...
,
social class
A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the working class and the Bourgeoisie, capitalist class. Membership of a social class can for exam ...
, and/or
gender
Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
. The term was coined by
Richard Hoggart
Herbert Richard Hoggart (24 September 1918 – 10 April 2014) was an English academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
Early life
Hoggart was bor ...
in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It has since become strongly associated with
Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.
Cultural history in popular culture
The
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
has produced and broadcast a number of educational television programmes on different aspects of human cultural history: in 1969 ''
Civilisation'', in 1973 ''
The Ascent of Man
''The Ascent of Man'' is a 13-part British documentary television series produced by the BBC and Time-Life Films first broadcast in 1973. It was written and presented by Polish-British mathematician and historian of science Jacob Bronowsk ...
'', in 1985 ''
The Triumph of the West'' and in 2012 ''
Andrew Marr's History of the World''.
See also
*
Collective unconscious
In psychology, the collective unconsciousness () is a term coined by Carl Jung, which is the belief that the unconscious mind comprises the instincts of Jungian archetypes—innate symbols understood from birth in all humans. Jung considered th ...
*
Ethnohistory
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may ...
*
History of mentalities
*
Human history
Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Early modern human, Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They Early expansions of hominin ...
References
Further reading
* Arcangeli, Alessandro. (2011) ''Cultural History: A Concise Introduction'' (Routledge, 2011)
*
Burke, Peter. (2004). ''What is Cultural History?''. Cambridge: Polity Press.
* Cook, James W., et al. ''The Cultural Turn in U. S. History: Past, Present, and Future'' (2009
excerpt 14 topical essays by scholars
* Ginzburg "challenges us all to retrieve a cultural and social world that more conventional history does not record." -Back Cover
* Green, Anna. (2008). ''Cultural History''. Theory and History. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
* Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V.M. (2010, January). "Observations on an Emergent Specialization: Contemporary French Cultural History. Significance for Scholarship." ''Journal of Scholarly Publishing'' 41#2 pp. 216–240.
* Kelly, Michael. "Le regard de l'étranger: What French cultural studies bring to French cultural history." ''French Cultural Studies'' (2014) 25#3–4 pp: 253–261.
* Kırlı, Cengiz. "From Economic History to Cultural History in Ottoman Studies." ''International Journal of Middle East Studies'' (2014) 46#2 pp: 376–378.
* Laqueur, Walter, ed. ''Weimar: A cultural history'' (Routledge, 2017); Germany in 1920s.
* McCaffery, Peter Gabriel, and Ben Marsden, eds. ''The Cultural History Reader'' (Routledge, 2014)
* Melching, W., & Velema, W. (1994). ''Main trends in cultural history: ten essays''. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
* Moore, Alison M
"Historicising Historical Theory's History of Cultural Historiography". ''Cosmos & History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy'', 12 (1), February 2016, 257–291.
* Moore, Alison, "What Became of Cultural Historicism in the French Reclamation of Strasbourg After World War One?" ''French History and Civilization'' 5, 2014, 1–15
* Morris, I. ''Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece''. (Blackwell Publishing, 1999).
* Munslow, Alun. ''Deconstructing History'' (Routledge, 1997). .
* Picón-Salas, Mariano. ''A cultural history of Spanish America'' (U of California Press, 2020).
* Poirrier, Philippe (2004), Les Enjeux de l'histoire culturelle, Seuil.
* Poster, M. (1997). ''Cultural history and postmodernity: disciplinary readings and challenges''. New York: Columbia University Press.
* Rickard, John. ''Australia: A cultural history'' (Monash University Publishing, 2017).
* Rietbergen, Peter. ''Europe: a cultural history'' (Routledge, 2020).
* Ritter, H. ''Dictionary of concepts in history''. (Greenwood Press, 1986)
* Salmi, H. "Cultural History, the Possible, and the Principle of Plenitude." ''History and Theory'' 50 (May 2011), 171–187.
* Schlereth, T. J. ''Cultural history and material culture: everyday life, landscapes, museums. American material culture and folklife''. (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research Press, 1990).
* Schwarz, Georg, ''Kulturexperimente im Altertum'', Berlin: SI Symposion, 2010.
* Spang, Rebecca. (2008). "Paradigms and Paranoia: how modern is the French Revolution?" ''American Historical Review''
in JSTOR* Van Young, Eric. "The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico." in ''Writing Mexican History'' (Stanford UP, 2020) pp. 223–264.
External links
International Society for Cultural History
{{Authority control
Cultural history
Cultural studies
Fields of history