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Transcript of Hunt New Cultural History Intro
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1
Introduction: History, Culture, and Text
LYNN I-fUNT
In 1961, E, H. C(1rr élnnouncec'. thilt "tht• n1orP sociolo~~ic1tl hi~
tory becornes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the bettcr for both." 1 J\t thl' time, thc pronouncen1c•nt wns n ba!tlc cry dnected prirnarily at Carr's fellow historians-especially those :)f the English v;iriety-whorn Cur hopl'd t\1 dr<1g ,1long, however unwillingly, into the new age of a socially oriented history. ln retrospect, it seems that Carr was quite right: lhe l'Ullin¿-!, L'dge fur both fields 'Ni.IS lhc soci,ll-hlslorlcal.- J IJstori<.:ttl sociol:>gy has bernnw 01w ,,f llw rnost irnpPrtant subfit<lds \lf sociol:igy, and perhaps thc fos'.est grnwing; meanwhiil'. social hisfnrv h;1s ovt'rli1k<•11 puli!i;·;i[ Jiislory 11s lht• 11111~1 i1nporl1111t
arca of rcsearch in hislory (as evidenced by the quadrupling of American doctoral dissertations in social history between i958 and 1978, surpassing those in política! history).'
In history, the move toward the social was fostered by the influence of two dominan! paradigrns of explanation: Marxism on the one hand and the "An::1ales" school on the other. Although Marxism was hardly new in the 195os and i96os, new
I. ECward Hallett Carr, 1v'Y1hat Is .1-fisfory? (New York, 1965; first published
1961), p. 34. 2. Robert Darnton, "lntellectual and Cultural History," in The Past Befare
Us: Canremporary Historical Writing zn flie United States, ed. Michael J<;ammen (lthaca, '..J.Y., 1980), p. 334·
2 Ly1111 H1111t
currents were corning to the forc within that explanalory modt• that prornoted historians' interest in social history. At the end of the 195os and early in the 196os, a group of younger Marxist historians began publishing books and articles on "history frorn below," including the by now canonical studies of George Rudé on the .Parisian crowd, Albert Soboul on the Parisian sansculottes, and E. P. Thompson on the English working class. 3
With this inspiration, historians in the 196os and 197os turned from more traditional histories of political leaders and political institutions toward investigations of the social cornposition and daily life of workers, servants, wornen, ethnic groups, and the like.
The Annales school, though a more recent inf!uence, carne to prominence at the sarne time. The original journal, Arma/es d'histoire éco110111iq11e et socia/e, was founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. It n1oved to Paris fron1 Slrasbt)urg in the 193os, and took its curren! name, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, in 1946. The Annales becarne a school-or at leas! began to be so called-when it was institutionally affiliated with the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Eludes after World War ll. ·Fernand Braudel provided a sense of unity and continuity by both presiding over the Sixth Section and directing the Annales in the 195os and 196os.' By the 197os, the prestige of the school was international; thc 1979 lnlcrnational Handbook of Historical Studies contained more index entries for the Annales school than for any other subject except Marx and Marxisrn.5
But was there reZllly an Ann<.1IL'S "paradign1," as 'J'r;.li;.111
Stoianovich insisted in his book by that name? He claimed that the Annales school ernphasized serial, functional, and structural approaches to understanding society as a total, integrated organism. "The Annales paradigm constitutes an inquiry into
3. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959); Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l'an II, 2d ed. (Paris, 1962); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Englísh Working Class (London, 1963).
4. For the history of the Annales school, see Traian Stoianovich, Fi-ench Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976); and Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin, L"s Ecoles historiques (París, 1983).
5. Georg G. Jggers and Harold T. Parker, eds., lnternational Handbook of Historical Studies (\i\lestport, Conn., 1979).
/11trodul·tio11 )
how one of the systems of a society functions or how a wh?le collectivity functions in terms of its multiple temporal, spahal, human, social, econornic, cultural, and eventrnental d1rnensions."' Little is left out of this éefinition; consequently, in its presumed drive toward "total history" it loses ali specificity ..
Fernand Braudel, the central figure of the Annales school m the decades after World War ll, laid out an apparently more precise rnodel in his work on the Mediterranean world. He posited three levels of analysis that corresponded to three d1fferent units of time: the structure or longue durée, dominated by the geographical rnilieu; the conjoncture or rnediurn terrn, oriented toward social life; and the f!eeting "event," which included politics and ali that concemed the individual.The structure or long terrn had priority, whereas events were likened to dust or foam on the sea. 7
Allhough tlraudel himself was o.:nornwusly in fluen lial (lhanb at least in part to his conso!idation of irnportant acadernic positions), his example did not inspire much specifically comparable work. Rather, French historians of the third Annales generation-rnen such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Pierre Goubert-established an alternative model of total regional history, focusing not on world econornic regions but on regions within France. In their work, econornic and social history dorninatl'd; lhl' !011s11c·d11rt~i' ct•rlo1inly gt 1 l its dut•, but lht' y,t·up.raphic11!
dimension, though present, appc·ared only as a kind of formula at the beginning of e'1ch study, notas a guiding spirit. Still, this modpl of historir;il cxpl;in.ition •..v;is hasic;illy ... in1ililr lo Bra11-del's: climale, biology, and demugrnphy ruted over lhe long terrn along with econornic trends; social relationships, which were more clear!y subject to the fluctuations of the co11jo11cture (defined usually in units of ten, twenty, or even fifty years), constituted a second arder of historical reality; and political, cultural, and intellectual life mace up a third, largely dependen! leve! of historical experience. The interaction between the first and second levels assurned prirnacy.
The Annales emphasis on econornic and social history soon
6. Stoianovich, French Historical lv1ethc·d, p. 236. 7. Fcrnand Braudel, La Méditerranée et fe n1011de 1nédilerra11ér11 ñ /' é¡ioque de
Philippe 11 (París, 1949); English translation London, 1972-73.
4 Lynn Hunt
spread evento the more traditional historical journals. By 1972, economic and social history had replaced biography and religious history as the largest categories after political history in the very conventional Revue historique.' The number of economic and social history articles in the U.S. journal French Historícal Studies nearly doubled (from 24 to 46 percent) between 1965 and 1984.' Although I have looked carefully only at journals of French history, I suspect that the same trend can be detected in most fields. E. H. Carr was notan Annales historian, but his words express the Annales position well: "Since the preoccupation with economic and social ends represents a broader and more advanced stage inhuman development than the preoccupation with political and constitutional ends, so the economic and social interpretation of history may be said to represent a n1ore adv<lnced stage in history than the exclusively political interpretation." 111
In recent years, however, the very models of explanation that contributed most significantly to the rise of social history have been undergoing a major shift in emphasis as Marxists and Annalistes alike have become increasingly interested in the history of culture. The turn toward culture in Marxist-inspired history was airead y present in Thompson's work en the English working class. Thompson explicitly rejected the metaphor of base/ superstructure and devoted himself to the sludy of whal he called "cultural and moral mediations" -"the way these material experiences are handled . _ . in cultural ways." 11 In '!'he Mak1ng of the E11glish Worki11g Class (p. 10), he described class consciousness as "the wuy in which these experiences Jof pruductive relations] are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms." Al-
. 8. ~lain Corbin, "La Rcvue,historique: Analyse du contcnu d'une public:at;o!l r~vale des Annalcs," in Au Berccau des Annalcs: Le Milieu strasbourgcois, l lusto1re en France au début du XXe siecle, ed. Charles-Olivier Carbonell and Georges Livet (Toulouse, 1979), p. 136.
9- My figures are drawn from Lynn Hunt, "French History in the Last Twenty Years: The R!se and Fall of the Annales Paradigm," fournal of Contcn1-porary History 21 (1986): 209-24.
10. Carr, What is History? pp. 164-65. 11. Quoted in Ellen Kay Trimberger, "E. P. Thompson: Unde!"standing the
Process of History," in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Thcda Skocpol (Cambridge, 1984), p. 219. -
,'ntroduction 5
though the book provoked great controversy among Marxists, many of whor:i accused Thompson of a bias toward voluntarism and ideclism, it nevertheless had great authority among younger historians."
The most striking instance of Marxist historia ns' tum toward culture is their growing interest in language. In 1980, the editors of History Workshop, in an editorial entitled "Language and History," recognized the growing influence of what they called "structural linguistics" (a rnisuse of the term, but sh::iwing the influence of the in terest in language). They argued that attention to :anguage could challenge "reflective theories of knowledge" and affect the poactice of "socialist historians" by focusing on the '"semiotic' functions of language." 13 William Sewell's book on the language of labor in the French working class is the bestknown product of Ihis intcrest within French history."'
Yel for ,di lhl'ir ¡1llcnliPll l·.l tite worki11gs oí tite "superslrllt'ture," r.iost rviarxist historiJns have done lit tic rnore than finctune the fundamental Marxist modl'i of histtH'ic'1i l'xpl,rn,1titH\. As Thompson put it, "class experience is largely deterr:1ined by the productive relations in to which men '1re born~or enter involuntarily." ''In a self-conscious-ly Marxist book on history and linguistics, Régine H.obin clnin1ed th'1t sense can be n1adt:.• of political discourse only with reference toan "extralinguistic" leve[ of ;_•xpcri('OC"l', :iíln1l'ly thc .;.•xpcril'l1C't' of thc Hori<ll rc.•lationH of production. 1
" In Marxist models, then, the social experience is, by definilion, '1iw'1ys prim<Jry.
The most notpwnrthy ex~eption to this chMacterization of
12. ·¡ riinbi..'rger íl'Vil'W.S 1n,1ny <•. lhl' crilici.s1n.s ol Thuinpson in ibiJ. 13. History Wor~shop 10 (1980): 1-5; quotes p. 1. 14. William H. Scwcll, Jr., Wa.* 1111d Rcvo!ufion in Fr1111cc: T!ic l..J111gu11gt of
Labor from thc O/d Rcgime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980) . 15. Thon1pson, Maki11s nf the F.nsli::;h Working Class, p. 10. Even Sf'wl•lt's
"dialectic of revolution," despite Hs emphasis on the role played by contradictions in Enlightenment thought. retains a fundamentally Marxist schema. Workers' cons·:iousness moved forvvard under the impact of changes in labor organization and the po!itical struggles of the various French revoluLonary cr<l5. For a critiqt:e of Scwe!l's posi:ion, see Lynn Hunt and Ceorhe Sheridan, "Ccrpordlisn1, Associatiun, and t"1c Language of L<1bor in FrilnCt.', 1750-1850," fournal of lv1..Jdern History 58 i1986): 813-44.
16. For a discu~.sion of Robin's position and those of other Marxist historians of French revo!utionary Jang..:age, see Lynn Hunt, Po/itícs, ·C:.;l!urc, and Class in tht' Fre.•1ch Revolution (Berke:ey and Los Angeles, 1984), p. 22.
6 Lynn Hunt
Marxist interest in culture may prove the rule. In his pathbreaking collection of essays Languages of C/ass, Gareth Stedman Jones tried to grapple with the inadequacies of the M;i rxist approach. ln discussing the Chartist language of class, he observes: "What has not been sufficiently questioned is whether this language can simply be analysed in terms of its expression of, or correspondence to, the putative consciousness of a particular class or social or occupational group." Likewise, he criticizes Thompson for assuming "a relatively direct relationship between 'social being' and 'social consciousness' which leaves litt!e independent space to the ideological context within which the coherence of a particular language of class can be reconstituted." Yet by showing the importance of the ideological tradition of radicalism and of the changing character and policies of the state, Stedman Jones is in effect moving away from a Marxist an<1lysis. J\s he hin1sL•ff n1ainlnins in his inlroduction, "We cannot therefore decode political language to reach a primal and material expression of interest since it is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place." 17 Can such a radical displacement of the Marxist agenda still be considered Marxist?
The challenge to old models has been especially dramatic within the Annales school. Although economic, social, and demographic history have remained domin¡¡nt in the i\nnalcs ilscif (accounting for more than half the articles from 1965 to 1984), mtellectual and cultural history ha ve taken a strong second place (c!a1mmg sorne 35 percent of the articles, as opposed to 11-1
4 percent on political history). 18 As the fourth generalion of Annales historians have become increasingly preoccupied with what the French rather enigmatically term menta/ités, economic and. social history have receded in importance." This deepenmg mteres_t m _mentalités ( even among the older generation of Annales h1stonans) has likewise led to new challenges to the Annales paradigm.
17. ~areth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class Hzstory, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 94, 101, and
22.
18. Hunt, "The Last Twenty Years," table l.
.1~. Volker Selli.n __ traces t~e his;?ry_of t~e word and of the concept in "Mentahtat und Mentahtatsgeschichte, H1stonsche Zeitschnft 241 (1
985
): 55)-9
8..
In~roductíon 7
Fourth-generation Annale5 historians. su~h as Roger Cha_rtier and Jacqt.res Revel reject the charactenzahon _of mentafrtes as being part of thc so-called third leve! of h1stoncal. expenence. For them, thc third level is n'1t a leve! al al! but a pmn¡¡ry ckterminant of hiEtorical reality. As Chartier claimed, "the relat1onship thus established is not one of dependence of the mental structures on their material determmat1ons. The representa-ions of the social world themselves are the constituents of so~ial reality."" Economic and social relations are not prior to or determining :if cultural ones; they are themsdves f1elds of cul:ural practice and cultural produchon-whICh cannot be _ex:ilained deductively by reference to an extracultural d1mens1on • • 2l of expenence. .
In turning to the investigation of cultural prachces, Annales ~istorians su·:h as Chartier and Revel have been mfluenced by l;OllL'dLlil's L'l'itit.·is111 of thL' fund.inll'l\l,il tl!i~H1111plio1t~1 nf ~1n,·io1l
~istory. Foucault demonstratEd that there are no "natura.1''. in:ellectual objecls. As Charlier expbined, "M,1dnl'ss, medicine, and the statE are not categmies that can be conceptuahzed 111
:erms of universa Is whose contents each epoch particularizes" ;" :hey are historically given as "<liscursive objects," and since :hey are histcrically grounded and by implicatio1: alw¡¡ys chang.ng, they cannot provide a transcendent or universal founda~ ion í:1r historic.11 111l'lhnd.
Certain similarities exist between Foucault ami l'Vt'n the firsl,111d sccond-genemlion An11,1les hislmi,1ns; ,i1¡ lht•se sc·hul,1rs were lo<)king for anonymous rules governing collective prilC!icL's, and all .participi.llL'd in tlisplacing thl.' individual "~uhjl•ct" from history. Unlike the first generations of Annales historians, nowever, Fo:.icault was fundamentally antipositivist. He d1d
20. Roger Chartier, "lntellectual History or Socio17ultural Histo:y? The ?rench Trajectories," in Modern European Intellectual H1story: Reappra1sals and .\lew Perspectíves. ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kapl_an (lthaca, N. Y., 1982), p. 30. . .
21. As Foucault explained in his work on d1scourse, he was not interest~d in determining the "underlying" causes of discursive.fo~mati~ns but rathe~ 1n seeing "historically how truth-effe:::ts ar~, produce~ 1ns1de dtscour~;s wh1ch are not in themse!ves either true o~ false (guoted 1n Mark Poster, Foucault ilnd History," Social Research 49[1si-32]: 116-42; quotc p. 128).
22. Chartier, "Intellectual Histc'fy," p. 43.
8 Lynn Hunt
not believe that the social sciences could be united in investigating the nature of man, precisely because he disavowed the very concept of "man" and the very possibility of method in the social sciences. lndeed, sorne cornrnentators have called his "genealogies" an "antirnethod." 23
Although historians have been intrigued by Foucault's trenchant criticisrns, they have not taken his rnethod-or antirnethod-as a rnodel for their practice. Foucault refused to offer causal analysis and denied the validity of any reductive relationship between discursive forrnations and their sociopolitical contexts-between changes in views of madness, for exarnple, and social and political changes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. He vehernently argued against research in to origins, and his "genealogies" required none of the usual grounding in economícs, society, or politics. As a consequence, though his local insighls into lhL' funclioning of particular institutions and types of discourse have generated considerable research (rnuch of it airning to correct Foucault's own often jerry-built constructions), his overall agenda rernains idiosyncratic. And how could it be otherwise, when Foucault described his version of history as one that "disturbs what was previously considered irnrnobile; ... fragments what was thought unified; ... shows the heterogeneity of what was irnagined consistent with itself," and when he proclairned that "I am well aware that 1 have never written anything but iictions"? Adrnittedly, he went on to say: "l do not mean to go so foras lo say that fictions are beyond truth [hors vérité]. It seems to me that it is possible to n1ake fiction work insid<..' oí lrulh."·'·1 Yl'I hl' lll'Vl'r
23. For a useful discussion of Foucault's methods, see Larry Shiner, "Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power-Knowledge," History and Theory 21 (1982): 382-97; and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, fv!ichel Foucault: Betjond Structuralism and Henneneutics (Chicago, 1982). The d1fference between the Annales school and "structuralism" is discussed in Stuart Clark, "The Annales Historians," in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 177-98. Clark observes that "the structural history of Braudel and the Annales owes more to their hostility to any form of phenomenology than to their anticipation of structuralism" (p. 195). Braudel's determinism was based on a preference for a natural rather than a cultural account of experience (p. 192).
24. Quoted in Allan Megill, Propltets of Extre1r1ity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fou~ cau/t, Derrida (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), pp. 235, 234.
Jntrod11ctio11 9
1 · ti · "t ·t1tl1 " nr evt'll • .. vhi.1t its speciíies how he cnn <.. e~ern11ne t1s t . 1
episternological status m1ght be. . .. . Even though Foucault may not have enhrely succeeaed m
blazing a third path through the terrain_of cultural h1slory, beside Marxisrn and the Annales school, h1s mfluence on the conceptualization of the field has been undeniab~y tr;rnendous. In her essay in this volurne, "Mi ch el Fou.cault s H1story of ,Culture" (chapter 1), Patricia O'Brien examines both Foucault s mfluence and his practices as a historian of culture. She argues convincingly that Foucault studied culture through the pnsm of the technologies of power, which he located strateg1cally m discourse. He did not try to trace the workings of power to the state, the legislative process, or the cl~ss strugg~;; rather, he looked for thern in "the most unprorn1smg places -m the operéltions of feclin~s, !ove, cnnscience, instinct, .C1nd in p .. is~n blueprints, doctors' obscrvnlíon~, an~I ~ar-rt'Ht'h111g chn11Ht.'H 111
disciplines such as biology and hngu1st1cs. . " What, then, is the agenda for the "new niltural b.1sll>rv ?
Like Foucault's work, the broader history of ""'11/a/1/c> has been criticized as Iacking clear focus. Frarn;ois Furet denou_nced t·h1s lack of definition for fosterin¡} an "unendmg pursu1t of new topics" whose choice was governed only by the fasl~'.''" d the day. 25 Similarly, Robert Darnton has charged that, des pite a sp<lll' of proh·gnmc•n.1 élnd discnurs<'s nn n1r~thnci ..... t_hP French have not developi:d a coherent conceptwn t>t 111c11t11/1/c>
¡¡s ,¡ field of study."''' . The criticisms of Puret ¡¡nd f)arnton strong!y w<1rn u~ aga1nst
dl'vt'luping .i l'tillur.d lti~ll1ry dt•H1n·d p11ly i11 lt•rr11.•1 ~11 !c11 1 1t·~i 111
inquiry. justas social history sornetirnes moved frorn one group to another (workers, wornen, children, eth111c groups.' the old, the young) without developing rnuch sens~ of cohes1on or 1~teraction between topics, so too a cultural htstory defined. top1-cally could degenerate into an endless _search for new cu:tural practices to describe, whether carnivals, cat rnassacres, -or 1m
potence trials."
25. Fran<;ois Furet, "Beyond the Annales," fournal of Moden1 J-!istJry 55 (1983): 389-410; quote p. 405. . ,,
26. Darnton, "lnte!lcctual and Cultural H1story, p. 346.
27. For a rathcr sanguinc vicw on social history, but c~~c t~at él'. lcélSt rccognizes the existence of criticisms, see Peter N. Stearns, Social H1story and
10 Lynn Hunt
. But Furet and Darnton are in sorne ways unfair in thcir critic1sm, not. least because they themselves work in the genre they attack. H1stonans such as Chartier and Revcl have not simply proposed a new. set of topics for investigation; they have gone beyond mentalztes to question the methods and goals of history generally (wh1ch 1s why their work is so filled with prolegomena on method). They have endorsed Foucault's judgment that the very top1cs of the human sciences-man, madness, punishment, and sexuahty, for mstance-are the product of historically contingent discursive formations. This radical critique has a bas1c problem, however, and that is its nihilistic strain. Where will we be when every practice, be it economic, intellectual, soC!al, or. political, has been shown to be culturally conditioned? To put 1t another way, can a history of culture work if it is shorn of ª.JI theoretic~I. <i~:->un1ptions <ibout culturc's relationship tu tht• social world-1f, 1ndced, its ¡¡genda is conl'L'ivt•d <lS !he undermining of all assumptions about the relationship between culture and the social world?
. The essays in this volume are devoted to an exploration of ¡ust. such queslions. Par! One examines, critically and apprecrnlively, the models that have already been proposed for the h1story of culture. Par! Two presents concrete examples of the new kinds. of work that are currently under way. The reader w11l find little 1n th: w<1y of sociologicill theorizing in thcsl' pages because the nse of !he new cultural history has been marked by a decline of intense debate over the role of socio~og1cal theory within history (at least among historians of culure In An1er1ca). For th1s reason, the 196os pronouncen1ents of
K H. Carr on the subject seem very dated. Now, in place of soc1ology, !he mfluential disciplines are anthropology and liter-
History: A Progress. Report," fournal of Social Hislory 19 (1985): 3i9-34
. As ~tearns htmsel.f adm1tted 1n an earlier essay, "Topical social historv has an in-
erently centnfugal tende.ncy_. The topical approach thus not onÍy reflects a lack of broader. concep!ua~1zah?n but ~lso positively hinders the development of an appropnate soc1oh1stoncal penodization" ( "Toward a Wide y· · . Trends in Social History," in The Past Befare Us, ed. Kammen, p. :24/
5;~?~ n~te"'."orthy that cultural history a ppeared in The Past Befare Us in tandem ~1th 1n.tellect1:1al h.istory (Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History") rather t an w1~h social h.1story. But of course, Darnton himself is the rnost social history-onented of 1ntellectual historians.
J 11 tro1i (/et itl11 l 1
ary theory, ficlds in which s'1cial explanation is not tak~n for granted; nevertheless, cultural history must wrestle with new tcnsions within and betweer. lhe models they offer. We hope that the essays in this volume will give sorne sense of both the prospects and the potential problems of using insights from these neighboring disciplines.
Al the moment, the anthr-::>pological model reigns supreme in cultural approaches. Rituds, carnivalesque inversions, and riles of passage are being fff_md in every country and almos! every century. The quantitative study of mentalités as the "third leve]" of social experience never had many followers outside of France. The influence in Anglo-Saxon and especially American approaches to the history of culture carne as much ( or even more) from English and English-trained social anthropologists as from an Annoles-style history of mcnta/ilés. In her pioneering l'Ssays in Su1·ir·ly r111rl ( '11//11r.· 11.r l:flr/y Mnrl<'rlt f'rrt11/'1', N;1lali1• '/ ..
Davis showed the relevance of concepts borrowed from Max Gluckrnan Marv DDubbs, <rnd VirtDr Turnl'r, ;is wl'il ,\s tlw French an;hrop;logist'Arnold Van Gennep. Her work, along with that of E. P. Thompson :n "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," promoted widespread interest in the motive powerof"community.""' As Davis explained in "The Reasons of Misrule," she hoped "to show th;it rol her thon l:wing o mere 'safety valvc,' deflecting attention from social re<llity, festive life can ... perpetuate certain v,1Jues uf thl' ronrn1u11ily." Sirni!Mil', in int1•rp1\•lin)', rit1•s pf vi1,lt-nct during the French religious wars, she concluded that "they can be reduced ton reperlory oí ticlions . .. intendl1d to purify thL• religious community."'" A straightforward social interpretation seemed much less fruitful than concepts introduced from the anthropological literature. In her essayin this volume, "Crowds, Community, and Ritual in be Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis" (chapter 2), Sc.zanne Desan explores the virtues as well as the problematic aspects of this notion of community. She concludes that historians of culture must develop a more differentiated notion of community and ritual, one more sen-
28. Thornpson's seminal article is in Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136. 29. Natalie Zemon Davis, Socíe!y and Culture in Early Modcrn France (Stan
ford, Calif., 1975), pp. 97, 178.
12 Lynn Hunt
sitive to the ways in which different groups, including women, use ritual and community to foster their own separate posi· tions. Violence, in her view, can transform and redefine com· munity as rnuch as it defines and consolidates it.
In recent years, the rnost visible anthropologist in cultural historical work has been Clifford Geertz. His collection of es· says The Interpretation of Cultures has been cited by historians working in a wide variety of chronological and geographical settings. 30 In The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, for exarnple, Robert Oarnton clearly stated the advantages of Geertzian interpretive strategies. Cultural his· tory, he announced, is "history in the ethnographic grain .... The anthropological rnode of history ... begins frorn the prern· ise that individual expression takes place within a general idiorn." As such, it is an interpretive science: its airn is toread "far n1eaning-the n1eaning inscribed by conternpor<:lries."· 11
The deciphering of rneaning, then, rather than the inference of causal Jaws of explanation, is taken to be the central task of cul· tura] history, just as it was posed by Geertz to be the central task of cultural anthropology.
Sorne of the problerris associated with the Geertzian ap· proach have been discussed by Roger Chartier in a long review in the fournal of Modern History. He questions the assurnption that "symbolic forms are organized into a 'system' ... fforl this would suppose coherence arnong them and interdependence, which in turn supposes the existence of a shared and unified syrnbolic universe."·" How, in particular, can a "general idiorn" be capab!c of <iccounting foral! t>xprcssinns pf culturv? !11 nlht•r
words, Chartier questions the validity of a search for 11H_•;_1ning
in the Geertzian interpretive rnode because it tends to efface differences in the appropriation or uses of cultural forrns. The
JO. Clifford Geertz, The Jnterpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). Jl. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cul
tura/ History (New York, 1984), pp. 3, 6, 5. 32. Roger Chartier, "Text, Symbols, and Frenchness," Journal of Modern
Histon; 57 (1985): 682-95; guate p. 690. Darnton replied at length in "The Symbolic Element in History," fournal of Modern Histon¡ 58 (1986): 218-34. See a!so the exchange of Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier:and Robert Darnton in "Dialogue a propos de l'histoire culturelle," Actes de la rechcrc/¡c C/1 scicnces 50-
ciales 59 (1985): 86-93.
1
!11trod11Ction 13
urge to see order élnd n1e¡:ining obscures thc E.'XistencP of con-
flict and struggle. . In her essay "Local Knowledge, Local Htstory: Geertz ,1nd
Beyond" (chapter 3), Aletta Biersack echoes sorne of these cnh· cisrns. She suggests that a dose of Marshall Sahims m1ght be salutary for future work on the history of culture, given his "re· thinking" of structure and event, or structure and h1story, in dialectical terms that rejuvenate both halves. 1t should be noted, however, that Geertz's own increasingly literary understanding of rneaning (the construing of cultural rneaning as a text to be read) has fundamentally reshaped current direc:1ons in anthropological self·reflection. In the final sectio~ of h€r es· say, Biersack traces Geertz's influence on th1s textuahzmg move in anthropology and shows how the concerns of anthropologists are intersecting increasingly with those of h1stonans of culture.
Chartier himself advocates "a definition of history primarily sensitive to inequalities in tlw <1ppropriation t'f et'mmon rnatl'· rials or practices."" In proposing this reorientation away trom community and toward difference, Chartier shows the influence of the French sociologist P.ierre Bourdieu (also discussed in Biersack's wide·ranging essay). Bourdieu recast the \1arxist explanatory rnodel of social life by giving rnuch more attention to culture; though he insisted that "the mode of express1on characteristic of a cultural produclion always depends nn !he• Jaws of tlw markl'I in which it is offerecl," hl' din'ctt'd hi> t>wn work to the uncovering of the "specific logic" oi "cu!turnl ~',lHJtls." ( ·l'fl\r.d !o th<1l IP(',Íl" 11n• th1• W•lYH •111d 1111•0111~-1 ¡¡f ;1p¡1n1-
priating cultural objects. ~ow that Bourdieu's rn<.ist 1nl_lu~·nt¡¡il work, Oistinction, has been translated into English, h1s tnflu· ence on historians of culture will !ikely grow."'
Chartier insists that historians of culture rnust not replace a reductive theory of culture as reflective of social reality with an equally reductive assurnption that rituals and other forms of
33. Chartier, "Texts, Symbo~s, and Frenchness," p. 688. 34. Bourdieu is perhaps best kno~n for hi.s concept of "habit~;," v..~hic~
he defined in difficult but nonetheless 1nfluent1al terms as follows: The nab1-tus is no! only <l slructuring structurc, which organi,,..cs pra~tic'.~s <in~ t:~c. p_erception of practices, but a!so a structured structure: the pnnc1ple ot drv1s1on
Lyn11 Hunf
symbolic action simply express a central, coherent. communal meaning. Nor must they forget that the texts they work with affect the reader in varying and individual ways. Documents describing past symbolic actions are not innocent, transparent texts; they were written by authors with various intentions and strategies, and historians of culture must devise their own strategies for reading them. Historians have always been critica! about their documents: therein lies the foundation of historical method. Chartier goes further by advocating a criticism of documents based on a new kind of history of reading. He offers an example, with its emphasis on difference, in his essay "Texts, Printing, Readings" (chapter 6). Taking the sixteenthcentury prologue to the Celestina as his point of departuce, Chartier shows that the meaning of texts in early nodern Europe depended on a variety of factors, ranging fron1 the age of readers to typographic¡iJ innovations such as the n1LltiF)lic<:ltion of stage directions. His focus on the triangular relatonship between the text as conceived by the author, as printed by the publisher, and as read ( or heard) by the reader brows in to doubt sorne of the canonical conceptions of the history of culture, in particular the diChotomy between popular and educated or elite culture.
Unlike Roger Chartier, most historians of culture have been relatively reluctant to use literary theory in any direct way. In his essay "Literature, Criticism, and Historical lmagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra" (chapter 4), Lloyd Kramer surveys the \\'ork of the two historians most closely associated with literary theory. His essay shows clearly how literary approaches hé!ve enziblcd White and LaCapra to expand the boundaries of cultural history, yet it remains sensitive to the reasons for the continued marginalization of such work. lt is no accident that, in America, literary influences first emerged in intellectual history, with its
into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of intemalization of the division into social classes" (Distinction: A Social Critique of the fudgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge, ~ass., 1984], pp. xiii, 1, 170). This quote captures very well Bourdieu's relat1onship ~o Marxism: the habitus is both determined by the social world and determ1n1ng of the perception of it.
l11/rod11¡·/io11
focus on documents that are texts in the literary sense, but cultural historians who work with documents other than great books have not found literary theory to be especially relevan!. One of the purposes of this volume is to show how a new generation of historia ns of culture use literary techniques and approaches to develop new materials and methods of analysis. · Kramer's essay also demonstrates the great vanety of hterary influences at wÓrk. The writings of White and LaCapra alone display significan! divergences in emphasis-White aligns himself with Foucault and Frye, LaCapra with Bakhtin and Derrida. There are, after al!, theories that emphasize the reception, or reading, of texts and those that emphasize their production, or writing, those that emphasize the unity and coheren~e of meaning and those that emphasize the play of difference and the ways in which texts work to subvert their apparent goals." Jusl a:-> (~eerl:1. ;.111d Sahlins rl'prcst•nl l wo poi es in ¡inthrop(l.og1-cal writing-Geertz em phasizing unity, Sahlins d ifferer.ceso too does literary criticism have its similarly dichot\>mized approaches: in Fredric jameson's words, "old-fashioneC. 'interpretation,' which still asks the text whal it 111cans, and the newer kinds of analysis which .. -. ask how it works" (that is, in particular, deconstruction, a critica! approach closely associated with ]acques Derrida)."' The former emphasizes unity; the latter, difference.
Unity is made possible in ºinterpretation" by what Jameson calls "an allegorical operation in which a text is systematically rewritten in terms of sorne fundamental master c\lde ur 'ultimately determining instance."' Following this line of reasoning, VJl' n1ighl say th<.1l in D;,1vis anti 'I'hon1pson the ritu;: Is of violer.ce are read-or rewritten-as allegories for community. Jt is precisely this allegorizing that jameson finds objectionable in literary criticism. As he insists, "The discredit in to which interpretation has fallen is thus at one with the disrepute visited on allegory itself." 37
35. A brief review of Uterary theories currently in vogue can be fot:nd in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: ~~ Introductio~ (Minneap?lis, 1983) ..
36. Fredric Jameson, The Pol1f1cal Unconsc1aus: Narrat1ve as a Socta!ly Symboiic Act (!thaca, N.Y.. 1981), p. 108.
37· Ibid ' p. 58.
L_1¡1111 Jiunt
Yct at thc san1c lin1L', ]<1111L'son cuncludcs that tl·_L' tensiun L)L'
tween the analysis of what a text means and how it works is a tension inherent in language itse!f." Unity is not possible without a sense of difference; difference is certainly not graspab!e without an opposing sense of unity. Thus, historia ns of culture reaiiy do not have to choose (or reaiiy cannot choose) between the two-between unity and difference, between :neaning and working, between interpretation and deconstruction. just as historians need not choose between sociology and anthropology or between anthropology and literary theory in conducting their investigations, neither must they choose once and for ali between interpretive strategies based on uncovering rneaning on the one hand and deconstructive strategies based on uncovering the text's modes of production on the other. His'.orians do not have to ally themselves single-mindedlv with either Clifford Geertz or PiL'ITL' Bourdieu, with eithL'r ~~urthrop Frye or jacques Derrida.
Although there are many differences within and bctween anthropological and literary models, one central tendencv in both seerns currently to fascina te historians of culture: the u~e of language as metaphor. Symbolic actions such as riots or cat massacres are framed as texts to be read or languages to be decoded. In his criticism of Darnton, Chartier has drawn attention to the problems caused by the "metaphoricol use of the v-"cabuhry of linguistics": it obliterates the difference between symbolic actions and written texts, it defines syrnboiic forrn' so brn:idly that nothing is excluded, and it tends to consider svmbols as fixed in their n1eaning. w Yet, though theSL' w;.1rni11gs ;1rL' L\.'rtainiy weil taken, the use of language as metaphor cr model leas proved undeniably significant and, l would argue, critica! to the formulation of a cultural approach to history. In short, the linguistic analogy establishes representation as a problem which historians can no longer avoid.
In both art history and literary criticism, representation has long been recognized as the central problem in the discipline:
. 38. Ibid., pp. 108-9. Ido not have the space here to comment more exter:s1vely_ ~n- Jameso~'s own particular variety of Marxist, poststn.:cturalist !iterary cntic1sm._ Un't'd now, it has had little influcnce on historic,1! ivriling.
39. Charher, Text, Symbols, and Frenchness," p. 690.
!ni rrir/11({ 1011
whdt does d picture ur nuvel do, d11d ho\.V dues it do lt? v:1h .. 1t LS
the reiation between the picture or novel and the world it purports to represent7 The new cultural history asks the s_ame kinds of questions; first, though, it has to estabhsh the ob¡ects cf historical study as being like those of literature and art. An example of this endeavor can be seen in Thomas Laqueur's essay in Part Two, "Bodies, Details, and Humanitarian Narrative" (chapter 7), in which autopsy reports are shown to constitute a kind of literary canon.
I attempted a similar task in the first chapter of m~, recent book on the French Revolution when 1 claimed to treat the d1-verse utterances of revolutionary politicians ... as constituting one text."'0 The oniy basis for this claim was its potential fruitfu!ness for anaiysis and explanation, and the claim rnust stand eor fall on those grounds. My aim was not to reduce revolutionarv discoursl' to UllL' s!;¡hlL• systl'nl of llH'aning (lhl' n•fll•clíon of co-mmunity, for exarnple) but rather to show how politicai lang,uage could be used riwtoricallv ll> build a st•nst' l>I n>mmun1tv and at the same time to establish new fields of social, política!, and cultural struggle-that is, make possible unity and difference at the same time. The point of the endeavor was to examhe the ways in which linguistic prnctice, rather than simply reflecting social reality, could actively be an instrument ot (or constitutc•) ro\l\'{'f. Whc•n n;ition;i] gui1r<lsmcn i1Skcrl, "/\re you
of the Nation?" they were not trying merely to identity their friends in troubkd limes; lhey \\'l'l'l' t\Clu.1\ly hl'if'i\\~ ll> \'rt'<1Ít' <1
sense of national community-and, at the same time, they v"'L'f"L' L'sL1hlishi11g IH'W w.iys tu uppusv lli<1t scn.•;l· u/ l"t>/1111111
rjty. Words did not just reílect social and political reality; they were instruments for transforming reality.
Mary Ryan makes a similar point in her essay in Part Two, "The American Parade: Representations of lhe NineleenlhCentury Social Order" (chapter 5). This essay brings the unityand-difference therne into sharp relief. Parades created a sense cf comrnunity (pluralist democracy) in American cities precisely by expressing important lines of social and gender division. Ryan shows how critica] a historical understanding of rit-
40. Hunt, Politic5, C11lt11re, a11d Class, p. 25
Ly11n Hunf
ual can be bydemonstrating how p<irading changl'd in f111H'litlll
over time: whereas in the 182os, 183os, and 184os the parading of differences under a unifying banner of civic pride served to foster civic unity, after mid century the parade was transformed into an ethnic festival that more exclusively emphasized differences. Ryan also points to the role of gender in these constructions of civic identity, and, like Desan in her piece on Davis and Thompson, she reminds us that gender was one of the most critica! lines of differentiation in culture and society. No account of cultural unity and difference can be complete without sorne discussion of gender.
The importance of gender goes beyond its undeniably central positioning in social and cultural life, however; studies of women's history in the 196os and 197os and the more recent emphasis on gender differentiation played " significilnt role in the developrnent of the nH.~lhods of lhe history o( cullure more generally. In the United States in particular (and perhaps uniquely), women's history and gender studies have been at the forefront of the new cultural history. Natalie Davis, for example, relies on the distinctions between men and women to illuminate the workings of early modem culture. The work of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, too, is exemplary of the WilYS in which women's or gender history can advance the history of culture as a style of investigation and writing. In the essays colJected in the volume Disorderly Conduct, for example, SmithRosenberg brings to bear both anthropological and Jiterary styles of analysis, ranging from the work of Mary Douglas to that of Roland Barthes. As she describes her project, "By tracing differences between nineteenth-century won1en's and nien's mythic constructs, 1 sought to re-create the way gender channeled the impact of social change and the experience and exercise of power. The dialectic between language as social mirror and language as social agent formed the core of my analysis."" Here gender as a system of cultural representation that is al once social, literary, and linguistic is especially in view.
The methodological implications of the study of gender have
41. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Cond11ct' Visions of Gender in Vic-forian A111erica (New York, ¡g85), p. 45. -
lll'L'I\ 1l1p~;l furcl·fully L'Xplic.ited by Jll•lll vv,t1l.1l'!t Sl'ull \11 hL'I' e~say collection Gender nnd tlie Politics of History (which includes critiques of E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman ]<mes'. among others)." Scott hils been particulMly influent1al 1n 11nk1ng gender history with the analysis of discourse. In the work o_f joan Scott, Carroll Srrith-Rosenberg, and Nata!ie Zemon Dav1s, the rising influence of literary techniques of reading and literary theories can be clearly seen. Natalie Davis's most recen! book, Fiction in the Archives, puts the "fictional" aspect of the documents al the center of the analysis. Rather than reading letters of pardon as sources reflective of contemporary social norms, she focuses on "how sixteenth-century people told stones ... , what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense ot the uncxpectc'd <1nd built cohprence in to immedi;ite ('Xpf>ri('nCt'."
41
'l'hL• e~s;\ys by l\ogL'r L'h;1rlil'r a1H.I 'J'luin1.is l .<1qu<."ur in P.irl
Two of this volume are striking examples of the trend toward the literary. Readers will find in Chartier's essay, "Texts, f'rinting, Readings," a good introduction to his important new book, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modcrn Francc. No one has done more than Chartier to move·the history of the book into the mainstream of cultural history. In Thc C11/t11ml Uses of Print. ·Chartier reitera tes his conviction that "culture is not over and above economic and social relations, nor can it be ranged beside them."" Ali practices, whether economic or cultural, depend on the rep~esentations individuals use to make sense of their world.
Laqueur's essay, "Bodies, Details, and Humanitarian NarrZ1tive," dernonstrntes the potcntial of new liternry techniqut•s in cultural history for enriching more traditional social history topics. He argues that hurnanitarianism depended in part on the development of a constellation of narrative forms-the realistic novel, the enquiry, and the medica] case history-which created a sense of veracity and sympathy through narrative de-
42. Joan Wailach Scott, Cr11d1..·r a11d thr Politics of Hístory (Ne\v York, i908). 43. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tell~
ers in Sixteenth-Centun¡ France (Stanford, Calif., 1987), p. 4. 44. Roger CharticÍ, Thc Cultural Uses of Print, trans. Lydia G. Cochranl'
(Princeton. N.J .. 1987), p. 11.
20 Ly1111 H1111/
tail. By focusing on thc narrJtivc lechniques uf th ... · ;1t1lnps~1 rl'port, Laqueur does not aim to avoid the tradition2_ questio~s of class and power, nor to remove humanitarianism from the domain of social history; rather, he hopes to expand social history to include !he sociology of narrative form.
The final essay, Randolph Stam's "Seeing Culture in a Room fer a Renaissance Prince" (chapter 8), takes us back in time but forward into new questions about the techniques of cultural history. Although Starn's essay shows the influence of litecary theory in its analysis of the fifteenth-century frescoe;; of Mantegna, it also takes us into the domain of "seeing·· as opposed to "reading." Here, the linguistic analogy is no longer preeminent. Instead, Stam lays out a new typology of seeing that includes what he terrns the glance, !he measured view, and the sean. In this way Starn is able no! only to show the relevance of art-historical docun1entation for cultural history ~111t 01.so, .ind more surprisingly, to recast the terms of art-historical debate itself. He historicizes the process of seeing by showing that even forms have historical content. This approach is tr~mendously exciting because it pushes cultural history beyond the stage of incorporating insights from other disciplines and into a position of refashioning adjacent disciplines in its tum_
Al! of the essays in Par! Two are centrally concerned with the mechanics of representation. This concern almost nccessé-1 :-ily entails a simultaneous reflection on the methods :>f history as new techniques of analysis are brought in to use. ;\nd perhaps melhods is too narrow a word in this tontext. Foras historians learn to analyzc their subjl'cts' rcprt>Sl'nL1tinns uf '.l1l'ir ~-vorLls, they inevitably begin to reflect on the nature of t.-.eir own efforts to represent history; the practice of history :s, alter ali, a process of text creating and of "seeing," that is, giving form to subjects. Historians of culture, in particular, are bound to become more aware of the consequences of their often unselfconscious literary and formal choices. The master narratives, or codes of unity or difference; the choice o·f allegories, analog1es, or trepes; the structures of narrative-these have weighty consequences for the writing of history.
In the 196os, great emphasis was placed on the icentification
/11tn~f1JC/1!•11 " nf .111 .iutlior':; ¡1()!i!it·.iJ l,i.n·•, u11 tryl11g !t) i;Jtu,t!t• llllt'.'•t·ll .1!1 ¡l Id!'.
torian in the broader social and política! world. The questiDns are now more subtle, but no less importan!. Historians are becoming more aware that their supposedly matter-of-fact choices of narrative technicues and analytical forms also have social and political imp!ications. What is this introductory chapter, fer example? Essays on the state of the discipline often have a canonical form ali beir own: first a narrative on the rise of new kinds of history, then a long moment for exploring thc problems posed by r.ew kinds of history, and finally either a jeremiad on the eviJs of new practices or a celebration of the potential overcoming of ali obstacles. My story Jine is quite different from Carr's: where he saw the epic advance of social and econornic history, the hernie historian marching hand in hand with the forces of progress, I tell the perpetua! romance, the quesl without end, lhl• ironic doubling bnck ovl'r tl'rritory 111-ready presumably rnvered. By implication, history has been treated here as a branch of aesthctics rather than as the handmaiden of social theory.''
Reflection on suc/~ issues is not always pleas.Jnt for historians. As Nancy Pcctner said .recently about the writing of history, "language-rnodel episternology" (as she termed it) has been "smugglec cut of linguistics and philosophy departments by literary cribes and frce-ranging or metacritics, and lobbed like grenades in to unsuspecting history ckpartmc·nls." "· Tlw pr(ld11cls of sud1 an explosinn will mit fit m\1111' l\lf;l'tlwr as though preplanned, for there is no single agrced-upnn 111v!!1t1d. ;\,e; ( 'Jirft11·:J ( ;v1·rl/ . .1r~',t1vd in Jii~; t'~1.·1,1y "!Htl!Tl'd
Genres" (the very title indicating, 1 think, the ambiguity he felt about the situation), "The text analogy now taken up by social sciectists is, in sorne ways, tlw broíldcst of the n'cl'nt refi¡~uríl-
45. The implications of ~his aestheticizing of history are very impürtant, but tco complex to deve]op in an essay of this length. See my "Histo:y Be~ yond Social Theory," to be publishcd in a collection edited by David Carrol! for Columbia Unlversity 7ress, for a fuller, but by no means defin:tive, discussion.
46. Nancy F. Partner. "'vfaking Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writ:ng of f·l1story," Spi·ni/1111161 (rq86:: 90 117; <¡unte· r· 9.'i
22 Lynn H1111t
tions of social theory, the most venturesomc, ond tlw fpasl wplf developed.""
For the moment, as this volume shows, the accent in cultural history is on clase examination-of texts, of pictures, and of actions-and on open-mindedness to what those examinations will revea!, rather than on elaboration of new master narratives or social theories to replace the materialist reductionism of Marxísm and the Annales school. (Are we headed here far a "comíc" ending in literary terms? An ending that promises reconciliation of all contradictions and tensions in the pluralist manner most congenia! to American historians?) Historians working in the cultural mode should not be discouraged by theoretical diversity, far we are just entering a remarkable new phasé when the other human sciences (including especially literary studies but also anthropology and sociology) are discovering us anew. Thc very use of thc tern1 11c70 1Tisforil'is111 in literary studies, far example, shows this development. The emphasis on representation in literature, art history, unthropology, and sociology has caused more and more of our counterparts to be concerned with the historical webs in which their objects of study are caught. Someday soon, presumably, another E. H. Carr will announce that the more cultural historical studies become and the more historical cultural studies become, the better far both.
47. Clifford Geertz, "Blurred Genrcs: Thc Rcfiguration ofSoci.1l Thought," in Loen/ K11ou1/edgc: Furllwr f,.,say:-: i11 l11lcr¡1rí'fh1r• /\11//Jro11ofosy (Nt'W York, ft)HJ), pp. 19-35; quote p. 30.
l'11rl 011<'
Models for Cultural History