The Kids Are All Right: On the “Turning” of Cultural History

To situate this introduction, it will be useful to focus briefly on just what constituted the cultural turn. Run a few web searches for the term “cultural turn,” and you will begin to grasp the scope of an increasingly viral concept. In Google Books alone, you will find more than 100,000 citations, the bibliographic traces of the concept's extended wandering.1 Switch to the search engine at OCLC WorldCat, ArticleFirst, or ECO, and the numbers become less daunting, somewhere on the order of a few hundred hits. In these more specialized databases, however, the searchable content is limited to titles and abstracts. So what you are really seeing is the initial layers of a much larger conversation: the figurative tip of the bibliographic iceberg.2 What might the iceberg tell us? Most of all, perhaps, it provides a wide-angle view of the concept's current ubiquity. In addition to Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt's 1999 volume Beyond the Cultural Turn, you will find thousands of recent books invoking “cultural turns” in a wide variety of scholarly contexts—from sociology to geography, Marxist theory to translation studies.3 You will also confirm the impact of this concept on our patterns of historical discourse. Since the early 2000s, it has figured prominently in hundreds of historical monographs, articles, and reviews; two AHA presidential addresses; at least three previous AHR Forums; and various fora in the Hispanic American Historical Review (1999), the Journal of American History (2003), Cultural and Social History (2004), and Social Science History (2008).4 Dig a bit deeper, though, and additional wrinkles begin to emerge. One involves the long list of seminal cultural histories in which the concept never appeared: from Natalie Davis's Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), and Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1982) to Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre (1984), Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984), and Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History (1988).5 Nor did the concept achieve much currency anywhere in our discipline before the end of the last century—the very moment, paradoxically, when growing numbers of commentators began announcing our transition to something else, something now figured as subsequent to or “beyond” the cultural turn.6 What is at issue here, then, is not a ground-level concept, first developed in the process of doing cultural history, so much as a genealogical master trope, now increasingly used to stand in for cultural history. Defining the turn in this way does nothing to diminish its significance. In fact, the trope's recent arrival has been entangled with at least two major trends. Above all, it has signaled a growing desire to track the shifting contours of cultural history—and survey the larger whole. It has also suggested a willingness to step back and take stock, to begin a broader conversation about what “the turn” actually accomplished. Regardless of how we answer these questions, the very act of posing them has marked an important epistemological shift. Since the late 1930s, at least, cultural historians have positioned themselves as paradigm-busters: always challenging conventional assumptions, always pushing toward something new. The recent talk of turns, by contrast, has directed attention backward, toward more comprehensive conceptual inventories, new waves of self-critiques.7 One useful response is to track this burgeoning turn talk—its dominant narratives, assumptions, and insights. At this late date, however, it seems important to do more than simply rehearse the prevailing narratives or fill them with additional content. Indeed, what we increasingly lack is a clear and critical sense of how this trope has shaped conventional wisdom, and to what larger effects. For all the recent efforts at genealogical precision, much of the best work has assumed a metonymic equivalence between the trope itself (cultural turn) and the multi-decade phenomenon it is now meant to reference (cultural history). Yet this assumption is shot through with potential problems. One is that it often produces a moving target: each new narrative tracks a somewhat different set of concepts. Another is the turn's propensity for semantic dodginess: sometimes standing in for entire spectrums of cultural approaches, at other moments referencing one particular approach within a larger spectrum.8 A third basic problem is the tendency to compress periodization, such that “turning” becomes synonymous with a generational rite of passage—most typically, from the new social history of the 1970s to the new cultural history of the 1980s.9 In this latter vein, especially, much of the work has produced unmarked forms of synecdoche, simultaneously compressing, flattening, and occluding a much longer conceptual history. On the U.S. side alone, it compresses at least four or five distinctive modes: from Depression-era advocates of a “cultural approach” such as Caroline Ware and Merle Curti; to Cold War–era champions of myth and symbol historiography like Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and John William Ward; to key innovators of the 1960s and 1970s, including David Brion Davis, Warren Susman, Neil Harris, Herbert Gutman, Ann Douglas, Lawrence Levine, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Nathan Huggins; to more recent waves of culturalists, for whom the new cultural history of the 1980s was already a conceptual artifact.10 Curiously, some of the most prominent recent commentators have ignored these longer trajectories, producing the rather odd and misleading impression that cultural history simply rose and fell—stopped turning—in the course of a single generation.11 In so doing, they have also consolidated a new declension story: ambitious early agendas later chastened by disappointments; mid-career conversion experiences subsequently tempered by disillusionment.12 But what actually happened to all of culturalists, and for whom the and of basic historical At the very least, it seems important to these the In the however, we something that the “beyond” has been all One turn's is turn's did we begin to in before the the more of a “cultural turn” in the history of the it first in a by and in a by in and The of the is two in a and this the very often as “the conceptual Another key involves the particular in which and that is to used the as genealogical to stand in for the history of cultural history. 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