Cultural history

Cultural history is a historiographical current rather than a branch of history or academic discipline itself. It began in the 1970s, primarily to define certain works by Anglophone (English and American) and Francophone (French) historians. Historians of the Hispanic tradition were slow to support the methods of this current because in the tradition of the different Hispanic countries, the ideas of Ortega y Gasset were more common to study cultural ideas and traditions. Cultural history combines the methodologies of anthropology and history to study popular culture traditions or cultural interpretations of historical experience.

Generally, it focuses on historical events that occur among groups that do not make up the elite of a society, such as carnival, popular festivals, and public rituals. It also deals with popular traditions such as the oral transmission of stories, songs, epic poems and other forms of oral tradition. Sometimes, historians who cultivate it study the development of cultural elements linked to the human relationships that make it possible, such as ideas, science, art, technology, as well as cultural expressions of social movements such as nationalism or patriotism.. It also analyzes the main historical concepts such as power, ideology, social class, culture, identity, race, perception, attitude, and develops new methods for historical research such as body narrative. Many studies consider the processes of adaptation of popular culture to the mass media (television, radio, newspapers and magazines, among others), the processes of adaptation of what is written to cinema, and currently the process of assimilation of culture. oral, visual and written to the Internet.

Other recent forms or theoretical developments of cultural history come from other fields, such as art history; from previous methodological approaches, such as the Annales School, Marxism, and microhistory; or theoretical formulations developed by specific intellectuals, such as that of Jürgen Habermas on "public opinion", that of Clifford Geertz on “thick description” (The interpretation of cultures), and the idea of memory as a historical-cultural category discussed by Paul Connerton.

Several historians can be grouped into this current. Some of the most important are: Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Patrice Higonnet, Lynn Hunt, Keith Jerkins and Sarah Maza. His works on the era of revolutionary France have provided, among other things, a new vision of modernity.

Description

Many current cultural historians claim that this is a new approach, but cultural history was mentioned by historians of the 19th century like the Swiss scholar of Renaissance history Jacob Burckhardt.

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 United States it is closely associated with the field of cultural studies. American cultural As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the Italian Renaissance, cultural history is oriented to the study of a specific historical period in its entirety, with respect not only to its painting, sculpture and architecture, but to the economic base that supported society, and to the social institutions of its daily life. The echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the XX century can be seen in Johan Huizinga's work The decline of the Middle Ages (1919).

The most common thing is to focus on phenomena shared by non-elitist groups in a society, such as: carnivals, festivals, and public rituals; representation of traditions through stories, epics, and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as nationalism. Cultural history also examines major historical concepts such as power, ideology, class, culture, cultural identity, attitude, race, perception, and new historical methods such as body storytelling. Many studies consider the adaptations of traditional culture to mass media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from print to cinema and, now, to the Internet (culture of capitalism). His modern approaches come from art history, the Annales, the Marxist school, microhistory and new cultural history.

Among the elements and aspects of theoretical validation common to recent cultural history are: Jürgen Habermas's formulation of the public sphere in The structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere; Clifford Geertz's notion of 'thick description' (explained, for example, in The interpretation of cultures); and the idea of memory as a historical-cultural category, as discussed in How Societies Remember by Paul Connerton.

Historiography and the French Revolution

The area in which new cultural history is often pointed out as almost a paradigm is that of 'revisionist' of the French Revolution, dating to some point from François Furet's influential 1978 essay Interpreting the French Revolution. The "revisionist interpretation" is often characterized as replacing "social interpretation" supposedly dominant, supposedly Marxist, which places the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to place more emphasis on 'political culture'. Reading the ideas of political culture through Habermas's conception of the public sphere, historians of the Revolution in recent decades have examined the role and position of cultural themes such as gender, ritual, and ideology in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture.

Historians who could 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, all these scholars pursue quite diverse interests, and perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the paradigmatic character of the new history of the French Revolution. Colin Jones, for example, is no stranger to cultural history, Habermas or Marxism, and has insistently defended that the Marxist interpretation is not dead, but can be revived; After all, Habermas's logic was very much indebted to a Marxist understanding. Meanwhile, Rebecca Spang has also recently argued that, despite her emphasis on difference and novelty, the 'revisionist' approach maintains the idea of the French Revolution as a turning point in the history of (so-called) modernity and that the problematic notion of "modernity" has itself attracted little attention.

Current events in France and elsewhere

In France and the United States

This cultural history participates fully in international exchanges. As such, it shares some of the issues that are usually classified under the heading of New cultural history (Lynn Hunt, Peter Burke, Robert Darnton). Some French historians, such as Roger Chartier, contributed to the formulation of this transnational current and its dissemination in France. However, cultural history is still largely considered a modality of social history. Thus, French historians who claim to be cultural historians, such as Pascal Ory or Roger Chartier, remain rather reticent about the currents marked by the linguistic turn and the theories of postmodernism of North American universities.

Today, thanks to advances in digital technology, cultural history is increasingly international (see above). Thus, several websites allow historians to discover the field of this discipline and contribute to these advances. Let us cite, for example, the headquarters of the Center international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle (C18), founded in 1997, or the headquarters of [https://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/ Belphégor, which allows dialogue between international researchers since 1994.

Finally, the website of the Association for the Development of Cultural History allows historians and the curious to stay up to date with new publications, research and colloquiums related to cultural history. Offers an updated bibliography.

Cultural history, due to its internationalization, is renewed. Thus, the concept of "New Cultural History" was born in the 80s in the United States. With authors like Lynn Hunt, who wants to go beyond the shortcomings of classical cultural history (taking into account popular culture, etc.). The New Cultural History insists on the differences between cultural history and intellectual history or social history: it focuses on mentalities, feelings more than ideas, thought systems and forms. functioning of social groups.

As Peter Burke points out, (New) cultural history is now more than 20 years old. It has suffered criticism and may have lost its shine. However, it has evolved and addresses new themes: calendars, violence, sexuality, emotions, the history of memory, class and gender, individual identity, etc...

Cultural history never stops evolving, because culture itself is not fixed. Although it loses its shine, although it is no longer so fashionable, cultural history continues to be a field to be exploited, since "man and his behavior cannot be conceived without the objects he uses and that determine his place in the hierarchy social, their role and their identity.

In Belgium

As far as Belgium is concerned, cultural history, unlike other historiographical fields (economic history, etc.), has not been consolidated as its own discipline. Therefore, it is not very institutionalized: In French-speaking universities, no professorship is reserved for it, while in Dutch-speaking ones, only a research center at the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven under the supervision of Jo Tollebeek, has a research program that explores various fields related to said history (Geschiedenis van de culturele infrastructuur, geschiedenis van de cultuur en de maatschappijkritiek, geschiedenis van de historiografie en de historische cultuur).

However, during the 2001-2002 academic year, a seminar related to cultural history is held, organized by the doctoral school "History, Culture and Society" from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The objects of the debates are the four massifs retained by Jean-Pierre Rioux in his work Pour une histoire culturelle: history of policies and cultural institutions; history of the transmitters of culture; of cultural practices; of sensibilities and modes of expression. During the presentations, the presence in Belgium of a less French and more complex vision of these four massifs was highlighted, as well as the influence of Cultural Studies, of the notion of gender, or postmodernism. The seminar revealed a certain ambition of historians who wish to make a history of the whole and not just of a sector of society. The result is a broad vision of culture, understood as "the set of symbolic systems transmissible in and by a community.

Although cultural history is not studied much in itself, the issues related to it are noticeable, especially in the study of World War II. Indeed, although the first works related to this conflict were limited to its military history, or to the praise of the Resistance fighters, the field of study was progressively expanded. Thus, a symposium organized in Brussels in 1990, entitled "Belgium 1940. A society in crisis, a country at war", demonstrates the existence of a history of war that ends up being interested in very varied fields, ranging from from ideology to economics, through a more social approach to the members of the resistance. In 1995, a colloquium organized by the Center d'études guerre et société|CEGESOMA], entitled "Société, culture et mentalités" (Society, culture and mentalities), was even broader; As its name indicates, the cultural dimension was very present. Increasingly, World War II is approached as a multifaceted object of study; cultural history, in particular, can find its place in it. The angles of approach and the topics of research are extremely rich, as illustrated by the Dictionnaire de la Seconde Mondiale en Belgique, by Paul Aron and José Gotovitch, which aims not only to synthesize current works, but also propose new open topics for cultural history.

In addition, at the University of Leuven, important research is being carried out on the cultural history of the First World War under the leadership of Laurence van Ypersele, who has studied the representations of Albert I, The Knight King. They refer in particular to the cultures of occupation, propaganda, the imaginary of war, but also to the memory of the first world conflict in Belgium.

In Switzerland

As far as Switzerland is concerned, cultural history has found an important place in historical research. The country is the subject of a certain institutionalization of cultural history, although there is no cultural history magazine or society expressly dedicated to it. The "new" cultural history (so called in comparison to the so-called "traditional" cultural history of the time of Jacob Burckhardt) present in Switzerland is a continuation of the history of mentalities that was built in the 1960s and 1970s. There is no fixed definition of Swiss cultural history, given the different notions of culture that coexist there, inherited from different visions (whether Anglo-Saxon, German or French).

The influence of French cultural history and Anglo-Saxon cultural history is felt above all in the different studies of cultural history. A different evolution of the latter can be observed, depending on whether one is in French-speaking or German-speaking Switzerland. Thus, in the first, a cultural history perceived as the history of literature and intellectuals was developed, which later merged with social history in the 1980s. The second, on the other hand, developed rapidly and in conjunction with the history social.

Unlike Germany, the German part of Switzerland was quick to adopt concepts from Anglo-Saxon cultural anthropology or French discourse history and ethnology. Furthermore, the practice of cultural history in German Switzerland is more influenced by French philosophers, sociologists, and historians than by its German neighbor. On the contrary, the influence of German works on Swiss soil is relatively weak.

Theories about Culture

• Cultural dissemination
• Cultural studies
• Cultural developments
• Cultural geography
• Cultural materials
• Cultural Relativism
• Cultural Revolution