What is Cultural History?

This is a timely book. The Social History Society recently renamed itself ‘The Social and Cultural History Society’ and it now produces a journal committed to publishing only the finest examples of Cultural History. The historians we look up to—Robert Darnton, Lynn Hunt, Natalie Zemon Davis—are all cultural historians, and there is today much talk of ‘The Cultural Turn’. Burke assures us there is a ‘great tradition’ of cultural history starting with such comforting names as Burckhardt and Huizinga. The impulse behind cultural history is a generous one, the wish to embrace all aspects of human activity in societies, what used to be called ‘total history’. Burke usefully defines culture as ‘customs, values and a way of life’. He is aware that sometimes the word is used to signify what is also often referred to as ‘high culture’. Burke's publishers seem to share this view, rather curiously packing his cover with representations of leather-bound volumes titled: ‘Wagner’, ‘Massenet’, ‘Gounod’, etc. We do best to think of cultural history as anthropological or ethnographic history, with, Burke suggests (pp. 54–56), the theories of Michel Foucault as purely optional extras (usually adopted, I have observed, by the more sectarian-minded). My own view is that much confusion (such as that in the minds of Polity Press) could be avoided if we accepted the simple term ‘History of the Arts’ to mean just that. Even such a magisterial figure as Jay Winter, in his celebrated Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, sometimes mixes the two significations. Appropriately in respect of European Cultural History, he deals with such anthropological topics as memory and mourning and seeks most sensitively to show how European populations dealt with the central problem of the horrendous loss of life. But he also goes out of his way to attack what he calls ‘the modernist hypothesis’ which argues that the war played a significant part in strengthening and crystallising modernism in the arts. He talks here of ‘the cultural history of the early twentieth century’. But, surely, as it seems to me, discussion of ‘modernism’ belongs strictly in History of the Arts and so has no place in (anthropological) Cultural History?