Cultural Turns

This lecture will introduce two key methodological

issues key to this module:

1) Metahistory

2) The Cultural Turn

Metahistories

1. METAHISTORY

Hayden White - Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in

Nineteenth-Century Europe

(1973).

o Literary readings of historical texts / History writing is a form of

literature.

o The historiography of every

period is defined by a trope specific to its time and place.

Roland Barthes ‘The Discourse of History“ (1967)

Barthes applying concepts of structural linguistics to

historical narrative:

“Does the narration of past events, which, in our

culture from the time of the Greeks onwards, has

generally been subject to the sanction of historical

'science', bound to the unbending standard of the

'real', and justified by the principles of 'rational'

exposition - does this form of narration really differ, in

some specific trait, in some indubitably distinctive

feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the

epic, the novel, and the drama? And if this trait or

feature exists, then in what level of the historical

statement must it be placed?”

In this sense, he has much in common with Hayden

White who also saw History primarily as a form of

narrative discourse.

Michel de Certeau The Writing of History (1975)

Freudian reading of History writing in relation to the

Uncanny –

o In western histories the past explains the present.

o In psychoanalysis, the past haunts the patient, its is a

phantom in the present.

o Hence, the past is read as an unstable or impossible

reflection of death which de Certeau describes ambiguously as a “strange familiarity” or “familiar

strangeness”.

o Rather than manage events, Certeau argues that

historiography should speak with the dead by adopting a psychoanalytic approach.

o de Certeau argues that written history’s manageable

past is at the cost of a massive exclusion of popular and

oral forms of culture that did not fit the rationalist framework.

David Wojnarowicz

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-79)

Dominick LaCapra

Examines the writing of post-traumatic histories.

o How do we write about the

Holocaust?

o How does memory effect our

recollection of such traumatic

events in history?

Against-Metahistory

Many historians, such as Richard Evans, dislike the disregard of how

historical facts limit what the

historian might wish to say about the

past.

Metahistorians use narratives to

assess other narratives. How can

we tell which story is worth

following?

Is there, as Richard Evans

suggests, a link between

postmodernist theory and Holocaust

denial?

Microhistoriography:

Examines historical events from the

perspective of the microcosmic, from the

vantage of the ‘common’ people: the

disenfranchized, oppressed, poor, non-

conformist, or otherwise forgotten, as

opposed to that of the power structure.

e.g.s of People’s Histories:

• A History of Racism, 800BC-Today

• Radical Puppetry - 17th-today.

• Revolutionary Song in France, 1789-1989

• The Radical History of Aussie Rules

Football

• Skinhead Culture, 1960-Today

• Italians in Northern Ireland Casalattico is home to many

Italians in N.Ireland

People’s Histories

• In de Certeau’s psychoanalytic terms, People’s

History is the return of the repressed. Can be

written by amateur historians or gathered as oral /

folk histories from the ‘people’ themselves.

• Often local histories, or micro-histories emerge

from communities themselves and are vanity or

community published. (This can be good and

bad).

• Are potentially limitless - leads to proliferation of

histories, debates and alternative voices.

• Archival aspect is useful for alternative visual

and oral forms of education and education

through material culture and museums.

Co-Op

The co-operative movement that flourishes

all over the world today was started in 1844

with a shop in Rochdale by 28 men, known

as the Rochdale Pioneers.

Football

Football became a professional game in the

1880s with players being paid a wage.

Attempts were soon made to form a union

and in 1907 the Players Union was formed.

The People's Palace is Glasgow's

social history museum and a

chance to see the story of the

people and city of Glasgow from

1750 to the present.

Jeremy Deller

Ruth Ewan

Rory MacBeth

Aleksandra Mir

Beauty Free, Cold War Hot Stuff and Real Real Estate Flowers (2005)

Khalil Rabah, The Palestinian Museum

of Natural History and Humankind,

2005.

Multimedia installation. 9th Istanbull

Biennial

Michael Blum, A Tribute to Safiye Behar, 2005.

Installation: mixed media. 9th Istanbull Biennial

2. THE CULTURAL TURN: THEORIES AND METHODS

[known often within art and design as the ‘linguistic turn’]

o The hypothesis that culture powerfully shapes human

histories (cultural determinism).

o The idea that key aspects of life can best be understood

by exploring the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of a culture (e.g. its music, language, visual art, etc.)

o The idea that scholars and practitioners of all disciplines

should examine the cultural implications (the meaning) and

assumptions of their practice.

USA - SYMBOLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Clifford Geertz Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

"The concept of culture I espouse… is

essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with

Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he

himself has spun, I take culture to be those

webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore

not an experimental science in search of

law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after…”p4-5.

France - Michel Foucault

Enormous influence on Cultural Studies and historians interested

in exploring cultural histories.

Key texts are:

• Madness and Civilization (1961)

• Discpline and Punish: The Birth

of the Prison (1975)

• The History of Sexuality (1984)

UK (Birmingham School)

CULTURAL STUDIES

Raymond Williams, “Moving from High Culture to Ordinary

Culture” in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions, 1958

“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society

has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings.

[…]

The questions I ask about our culture are questions about

deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society

and in every mind.”

Cultural Turn –

Science and Technologies

Ways of representing and

researching that emphasise the

determining role of culture in any

given situation or discipline.

Cultural determinism replaces

biological determinism?

Discursive Psychology

contends that, instead of looking at inherent or invariant

human reactions, scholars

should probe how different

cultures generate quite different

psychological reactions.

History of Medicine / History of Emotion

Which of the following are medical conditions; which are ‘emotions’?

• Grief

• Anorexia

• Nostalgia

• Boredom

Bas Jan Ader

I’M TOO SAD TO TELL YOU, 1971 16mm film, 16mm film transferred onto

DVD, silent 3 min, 21 sec

Edition of 3

http://www.basjanader.com/

Laurie Anderson

Institutional Dream Series NYC 1971

Komar and Melamid

Moscow in Mickey's Eyes (1998)

Rod Dickinson

The Milgram Re-enactment

‘Soft Data’?

(Critique of ‘Discursive Science’)

Many cultural-turn partisans have committed a

number of blunders that have called their

approach into question. Some have, quite

simply, pressed the cultural case too hard,

ignoring evidence of constant or "natural"

features in the human experience.

This approach also undermines the claims of

current medicine and science to objectivity.

Despite this, many social scientists would still

view such cultural data as soft.

Cultural Turn –

Politics and Economics

Ways of representing and

researching that emphasise the

determining role of culture in any

given situation or discipline.

Cultural determinism replaces

economic determinism?