What is Cultural History? Second Edition What is History? series Published titles John Arnold, What is Medieval History? Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? 2nd edition John Burnham, What is Medical History? Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic, What is Military History? J. Donald Hughes, What is Environmental History? Pamela Kyle Crossley, What is Global History? What is Cultural History? Second Edition PETER BURKE polity Copyright © Peter Burke 2008 The right of Peter Burke to be identifi ed as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published in 2004 by Polity This edition published in 2008 by Polity Polity 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. 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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 The Great Tradition 6 Classic Cultural History 7 Culture and Society 15 The Discovery of the People 17 2 Problems of Cultural History 20 The Classics Revisited 20 Marxist Debates 23 The Paradoxes of Tradition 25 Popular Culture in Question 27 What is Culture? 29 3 The Moment of Historical Anthropology 31 The Expansion of Culture 31 The Moment of Historical Anthropology 34 Under the Microscope 44 Postcolonialism and Feminism 47 4 A New Paradigm? 51 Four Theorists 53 Practices 59 vi Contents Representations 64 Material Culture 69 The History of the Body 72 5 From Representation to Construction 77 The Rise of Constructivism 77 New Constructions 82 Performances and Occasions 93 Deconstruction 99 6 Beyond the Cultural Turn? 102 Burckhardt’s Return 103 Politics, Violence and Emotions 104 The Revenge of Social History 114 Frontiers and Encounters 118 Narrative in Cultural History 123 Conclusion 128 Afterword: Cultural History in the Twenty-First Century 130 A Changing Scene 131 Cultural History and its Neighbours 135 Culture in Question 141 Notes 144 Select Publications: A Chronological List 163 Further Reading 168 Index 171 Acknowledgements I have been lecturing about, as well as in, cultural history for so many years that it is diffi cult to remember who made which helpful comment or asked which provoking question, but I do know that I have learned much from the conversa- tion as well as from the writings of a number of the historians discussed in this book, including Keith Thomas in Oxford, Daniel Roche, Roger Chartier and Denis Crouzet in Paris, Natalie Davis and Robert Darnton in Princeton, and a circle of Dutch historians including Anton Blok, Jan Bremmer, Rudolf Dekker, Florike Egmond and Herman Roodenburg. On the history of memory in particular I have learned from listening to Aleida and Jan Assmann and Jay Winter. Discus- sions with Patrick Chabal while he was writing his book on the cultural approach to politics, Culture Troubles, helped me defi ne my own ideas as well as informing me about a neighbouring discipline. I also profi ted from the comments made by anonymous readers on the original proposal as well as on the penultimate version of the book. I should also like to thank my friend and colleague James Duncan for com- menting on the Afterword. I owe a particular debt to my wife, another cultural histo- rian, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke. I fi rst met her when she invited me to lecture on ‘the so-called new history’ at the University of São Paulo. We have discussed cultural history many times, especially when she was editing her book of viii Acknowledgements interviews, The New History: Confessions and Conversa- tions. She also read this book in manuscript and as usual made some indispensable suggestions for improving it. This book is for her. Introduction Cultural history, once a Cinderella among the disciplines, neglected by its more successful sisters, was rediscovered in the 1970s, as the chronological list of publications at the end of the volume suggests. It has been enjoying a revival ever since, at least in the academic world – the history presented on television, at least in Britain, remains predominantly mili- tary, political and, to a lesser extent, social. For someone like myself, who has been practising the discipline for some forty years, this revival of interest is extremely gratifying, but it still requires an explanation. The purpose of this book is precisely to explain not only the rediscovery but also what cultural history is, or better, what cultural historians do, paying attention to varieties, debates and confl icts but also to shared concerns and tradi- tions. In so doing, it will try to combine two opposite but complementary approaches: an internal approach concerned with the solving of successive problems within the discipline and an approach from outside relating what historians do to the time in which they live. The internal approach treats the current revival of cultural history as a reaction against earlier approaches to the past which left out something at once elusive and important. According to this view from inside, the cultural historian gets to parts of the past that other historians cannot reach. The emphasis on whole ‘cultures’ offers a remedy for the current 2 Introduction fragmentation of the discipline into specialists on the history of population, diplomacy, women, ideas, business, warfare and so on. The external approach or view from outside also has some- thing to offer. In the fi rst place, it connects the rise of cultural history to a wider ‘cultural turn’ in political science, geogra- phy, economics, psychology, anthropology, archaeology and ‘cultural studies’, a point discussed in more detail in the Afterword. There has been a shift in these disciplines, at least among a minority of scholars, from the assumption of unchanging rationality (the rational choice theory of voting or consumption, for instance), to an increasing interest in the values held by particular groups in particular places and particular periods. One sign of the times is the conversion of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington to the idea that in the world today, cultural distinctions are more important than political or economic ones, so that since the end of the Cold War what we see is not so much an international con- fl ict of interests as a ‘clash of civilizations’. Another indicator of the intellectual climate is the international success of Cultural Studies. In Russia, in the 1990s, for instance, Kul’turologija (as it is called there) became a compulsory course in higher education, concerned in particular with the Russian identity and often taught by ex-professors of Marx- Leninism who have been converted from an economic inter- pretation of history to a cultural one.1 This cultural turn is itself part of the cultural history of the last generation. Outside the academic domain, it is linked to a shift in perception expressed in increasingly common phrases such as ‘the culture of poverty’, ‘culture of fear’, ‘gun culture’, ‘teen culture’ or ‘corporate culture’ (see p. 32) as well as in the so-called ‘culture wars’ in the USA and the debate over ‘multiculturalism’ in many countries. Many people today speak of ‘culture’ on everyday occasions on which twenty or thirty years ago they would have spoken of ‘society’. As the popularity of phrases like these suggest, it is increas- ingly diffi cult to say what does not count as ‘culture’. The study of history is no exception to this general trend. What is cultural history? The question was asked in public more than a century ago, in 1897, by a pioneering German histo- Introduction 3 rian who was also something of a maverick, Karl Lamprecht. For better or for worse, it still awaits a defi nitive answer. Readers have recently been offered cultural histories of lon- gevity, the penis, barbed wire and masturbation. The fron- tiers of the subject have certainly been extended, but it is becoming more and more diffi cult to say exactly what they enclose. One solution to the problem of defi ning cultural history might be to switch attention from the objects to the methods of study. Here too, though, what we fi nd is variety and con- troversy. Some cultural historians work intuitively, as Jacob Burckhardt said he did. A few attempt to make use of quan- titative methods. Some of them describe their work in terms of a search for meaning, others focus on practices and repre- sentations. Some see their aim as essentially descriptive, others believe that cultural history, like political history, can and should be presented as a story.