История культуры и новая история культуры (Cultural History And New Cultural History) Реферат

The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.

Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past knowledge, customs, and arts of a group of people. Its subject matter encompasses the continuum of events occurring in succession leading from the past to the present and even into the future pertaining to a culture.

Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt 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 ac-tivity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.

Classical cultural history first emerged in England and Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. Before this time, the Renaissance was assigned value accord-ing to the conventions of the discourses and sources in which it was considered: writings on art history, taste, and collecting; travel writings, novels, and poems; political and cultural histories and biographies; philosophical, theological, and moral treatises; even art exhibitions and a general fascination with Italy. As Fer-guson reminds us, until the late nineteenth century in England, most of these dis-courses were not considered academic, professional, or disciplinary in the sense we have today, and often the most influential intellectual texts were also the most popular. In classical cultural history, these varied discourses congealed such that the Italian Renaissance was standardized as a unified period embodying definite political, cultural, and historical characteristics. John Ruskin first established the Italian Renaissance as such a period in England, and Jacob Burckhardt did the same in Germany. Both responded to and were interested in the increasing inter-national market for Italian art as well as the state of their national culture [2, с. 150]. 

Despite their seemingly opposite views of the Italian Renaissance, both Ruskin and Burckhardt narrate history typologically, finding in the past a period whose recreation or recovery might allow the immediate past to be surpassed and the present improved. Each also reads the Italian Renaissance allegorically as the originating period of modernity, nations, and culture to support his theory re-garding contemporary culture. Both see culture replacing religion in the Renais-sance as the framework within which to mark historical time and conceptualize human existence, and both believe cultural forms possess religious and spiritual functions. All of these ideas become the conceptual means by which later writers narrate human history and the development of culture in time and space. Not all of the meanings Ruskin and Burckhardt attach to the Renaissance are necessarily consistent or coherent, however, making later interpretations of the period quite complicated.

Not only new cultural history represents a more thoroughgoing application of anthropological understandings of cultural life, but it does so in a reflexive manner that problematizes the writing of history itself. Indeed, it calls into ques-tion at once the subject and the object of knowledge by asserting how deeply me-diated all human life is by signifying systems that vary both from society to soci-ety and differ even within societies. Moreover, the broader conception of culture that is employed by new cultural historians often means less of an emphasis on elite culture than on collective structures of perception, emotion, and belief - in short, a consideration into the mental conditions that rendered such things as events and leaders possible.

1) Historicism. It is interesting to note that the topical and theoretical inno-vations of new cultural history were implicit in the same historiographical ortho-doxy that marginalized classical cultural history. Traditional or "old" historicism developed in eighteenth-century Germany as a reaction against British and French social contract theories that emphasized the formative role of rational in-dividuals in social life. Utilizing the heuristic fiction of an originary state of na-ture, these liberal theories assumed an atomistic view of society in which isolated individuals pursued their own self-interest without the mediation of anything be-yond their own minds. 

Many eighteenth-century German thinkers rejected this notion that society was reducible to the sum of its parts, and emphasized instead the emotional na-ture of the social bond as opposed to the rational calculation of individuals. Jo-hann Gottfried Herder, for instance, emphasized the feelings and traditions that bind a people or Volk together, including common customs, common experienc-es, and most importantly common language [1, с. 60]. 

Although German historicists theoretically validated the study of culture as being worthy of historical interest, in actual practice they narrowed their focus to the study of politics and nation states, thereby restricting themselves to topics supported by voluminous documentary evidence. Informed by more recent theo-retical developments in scholarly fields like anthropology, sociology, literary crit-icism, and feminist theory, new cultural historians have tried to preserve the ana-lytically useful aspects of "old" historicism while jettisoning what they consider its more questionable assumptions. 

2) Marxism. Marx was one of the few to observe that economic conditions and social hierarchies contribute to the predominance of certain ideas and institu-tions, and thus paved the way for many future historiographical innovations. Marxist-oriented social history therefore provided a fertile source for new cultur-al history, though the relations between these approaches have not always been amicable. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, western marxist social theorists have done much to develop this cultural dimension of Marx's ideas, often by comple-menting them with insights from Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber. Through his influential concept of "cultural hegemony," for instance, the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci prompted a rethinking of the power that ideas can exercise over the minds of people, allowing social elites to rule more effec-tively by securing the consent of the governed. 

Some of the earliest and best-known practitioners of new cultural history distinguished themselves through their enthusiastic embrace of anthropological models of culture. A substantial number of such works focus on early modern Europe, thus to some extent extending the preoccupation of the Annales tradition with this period. Key early works in this vein include David Sabean's study of the duchy of Württemberg in Germany, Power in the Blood, and Carlo Ginz-burg's reconstruction of the cosmology of a sixteenth-century Italian miller in The Cheese and the Worms. In such matters interpretive history is perhaps best suit-ed, largely because many of the traditional text sources are often not available for, say, everyday life in a peasant village during the Middle Ages. Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre is one of the classic examples of this type of scholarship insofar as it applies Geertz's "thick description" to a number of top-ics, from early modern fairy tales to the tale about the trial and execution of cats told by printers.

Nowadays cultural historians are usually careful to emphasize the per-formative rather than expressive role of culture. A "performative" statement is one that at once describes and brings about the very thing it denotes, as in the claim "I now pronounce you husband and wife." Many cultural historians agree with the linguist J. A. Austin's claim that all language is in some sense performa-tive in that it produces an effect as it signifies. In the form of official discourses of, for instance, medicine or criminology, culture plays a mediating role that cre-ates and sustains social practices rather than simply mirroring or expressing them. Roger Chartier has described how this notion of culture must be distin-guished from the idea of mentalité as a third level of historical experience. Cul-tural representations are not dependent upon a pregiven material reality for their existence; rather, Chartier claims that "representations of the social world them-selves are the constituents of social reality" [5, с. 23].

This emphasis on the performative role of culture has encouraged new in-terpretations of key political events, notably the French Revolution. The contri-butions of cultural historians like Lynn Hunt, Roger Chartier, Mona Ozouf, and Antoine de Baecque often suggest that a fundamental shift in mind-set had oc-curred among the French during the eighteenth century that provided the condi-tions of possibility for radical change. As Chartier has argued in The Cultural Or-igins of the French Revolution, the Revolution became possible because enough changes had taken place in the wider culture to make such a dramatic upheaval conceivable. Moreover, in Festivals and the French Revolution Mona Ozouf ar-gues that the highly planned Festival of the Federation was an opportunity to create a sense of national unity where anxieties about division were widespread. That is, such festivals were not so much expressions of a preexisting national unity as they were attempts to create such unity through festivity itself, thus "performing" the very unity whose existence they proclaimed.

Most innovative historical approaches generate some degree of controver-sy, often stemming as much from professional anxieties, political concerns, and generational tensions as from bona fide intellectual differences. Debates that have arisen around new cultural history have nevertheless been particularly frequent and often rather polemical. Some of the more vitriolic rejections of this approach lump it together with postcolonial studies, feminist theory, multiculturalism, and even marxism as part of a vaguely defined, yet nevertheless menacing, "postmod-ernism" that threatens to undermine professional historical standards or even basic morality. Some critics have gone so far as to describe proponents of such methodologies as "tenured radicals" who have continued the 1960s assault on western civilization by becoming university professors. Gertrude Himmelfarb, for instance, a high-profile critic of marxist-inspired social history, inveighed against the expansion of "postmodern" ideas in historical circles. Others challenge this approach from a traditional marxist perspective and, in keeping with the old or-thodoxy of the base/superstructure model, accuse its proponents of ignoring the "materiality of the sign" in their focus on culture. Such controversies tend to gen-erate more heat than light, however, and rarely betray much of an engagement with the theories that inform the approaches being condemned [1, с. 78].

More careful critics are attentive to the disagreements among those who al-ready profess and employ this approach, and are therefore able to enter into more sophisticated dialogues on key issues. If cultural historians disagree among themselves about the concept of historicism, it is less in regard to the general va-lidity of the method than to the limits of its application. The issue of the physical body has proven a highly charged one for questioning the limits of historicism, and has generated some productive scholarly exchanges. Some historians seem to agree with Bryan Turner, a pioneer in the sociology of the body, that historicist arguments must not be permitted to thoroughly overrun the body's basic materi-ality. Cultural historian Lyndal Roper echoes this point of view, albeit from a psychoanalytic perspective, and criticizes the overzealous historicism that allows one to make the "real" body disappear behind its various discursive formula-tions. Roper calls instead for a moderate historicism that facilitates a dialogical relationship between nature and culture without collapsing the former into the latter: "Bodies have materiality, and this too must have its place in history. The capacity of the body to suffer pain, illness, the process of giving birth, the effects on the body of certain kinds of exercise such as hunting or riding - all these are bodily experiences which belong to the history of the body and are more than discourse.

As with any scholarly approach that boasts of being "new" when it bursts onto the scene, new cultural history was fairly well established as one among many ways of thinking about history by the twenty-first century. This is not to say that new cultural historians enjoyed the unanimous esteem of their more tra-ditional colleagues, for the field still managed to draw the fire of critics from the left and the right who believed that after twenty years this approach still repre-sented a mere "trend." One could agree with Peter Novick that this attests to the fragmentation of the historical profession into a plethora of specializations that no longer cohered around shared principles and whose denizens had little com-mon ground for discussion. Yet much has changed in cultural history since its heyday in the 1980s. 

When new cultural history was actually "new" it provided innovations both in terms of the topics considered worthy of historical attention and in terms of the ways of theorizing such topics within their respective contexts. It is neverthe-less apparent that a good portion of what was marketed in 2000 as "cultural his-tory" reflected more of the topical rather than theoretical innovations entailed by this approach. In fact, some of these works even read more like conventional so-cial histories with a few obligatory nods to one of many privileged theorists.

The interest in cultural history has been fueled by what have become known as ‘culture wars’. One major conflict concerns the cultural canon, espe-cially the ‘great books’ of a given culture, and ‘cultural literacy’, in other words ‘a common body of knowledge and associations’ that ‘all competent readers pos-sess’. Critics of the canon have criticized its emphasis on ‘dead white males’, while its defenders argue that rejection of the canon leads to cultural impover-ishment.

A conclusion that might be drawn from the debates over canons and multi-culturalisms is that, although cultural historians cannot be expected to solve con-temporary problems, the study of cultural history might allow people to think about some of these problems with clearer heads. As the Brazilian historian Gil-berto Freyre suggested sixty years ago, while political and military history, pur-sued in a nationalist style, often drives peoples apart, ‘the study of social and cultural history’ is, or might be, a way ‘to bring peoples together’ and open ‘ways of understanding and communication between them’.