Cultural history
Cultural history is not simply the study of high culture or alternatively of peoples' past rituals. It is best characterised as an approach which considers the domain of representation and the struggle over meaning as the most fruitful areas for the pursuit of historical understanding. In its modern form it evolved to a certain extent out of the 'new' social, economic and women's histories of the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to understand the lives of non-elites and women, but whose use of structures of class was increasingly seen as reductionist, ignoring the assumptions and judgements actually shaping, say, women's experiences. As this approach grew in popularity from the 1980s onwards it became associated with the 'linguistic turn', as its interest in contested meanings inevitably means an interest in the language these are expressed in. Today cultural history practices are increasing applied to a wide variety of subjects, generating histories of the body or of food, for example.
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- Historians:
- Burke, Ulick Peter
Davis, Natalie Zemon
Joyce, Patrick - Themes:
- Cultural turn
Linguistic turn
Marxist history
Social history
Women's history
Related publications
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Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004)
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973)
E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969)
