What is Cultural History?
Culture is an integral part of our lives and has been an area of study for centuries. It includes our beliefs and ideas, the ways we express them through art and literature, and the rituals we carry out that make up our everyday lives, from the way we dress to the laws we live by.
The definition of ‘culture’ is not easy to agree upon, as it can mean anything from the way in which people perceive and interpret the world around them to the social norms that govern their behaviour. There is a wide range of different concepts that are used to describe this phenomenon, from ‘high culture’ to ‘folk culture’ and ‘the way of life’.
Cultural history is a field of research that focuses on understanding and recording the experiences, objects and beliefs of past societies. It is based on the belief that the best way to understand a society is to examine how it has been formed and evolved over time.
This approach has been influenced by both the work of the 19th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by anthropological theories of human development, such as those proposed by Georg Simmel (1858-1918). It has been developed by a number of scholars who have sought to explore the roots of cultural values, beliefs and practices and how these shape our lives.
These studies have been able to show that the differences between cultures can have a profound impact on how we see the world and how we interact with each other, even within the same society. For example, the rule-bound Japanese, orderly Swiss, laissez faire French and gun-totin’, freedom-lovin’ Americans are all rooted in deep cultural codes that shape how they think, act and behave.
New cultural history has benefited from the development of the field of linguistics, which re-examined the role that language plays in signifying and shaping our consciousness. The study of the ways in which language shapes and defines our sense of self and our relationships to others has provided new and more nuanced interpretations of how culture arises from our shared systems of meaning.
It has also been a useful tool for examining the nature of power and its relationship to knowledge, as reflected in the writings of such influential figures as Foucault. The questioning of the conventionally understood relationship between power and knowledge has proved particularly fruitful for styles of new cultural history that emphasize a more reflexive, and less linear, approach to historical analysis than their predecessors had employed.
There are a number of areas in which the work of new cultural historians overlaps with developments in neighboring fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences. However, the disciplinary boundaries of these fields have been blurred since the early twentieth century, and it is hard to point to an intersection in specific ways.
Nevertheless, there are a number of issues that have been raised that relate to the ways in which the concept of ‘culture’ has been adopted in political science. These include the problem of identifying a meaningful and useful way in which ‘culture’ can be used as an explanatory variable or a component of causality, and the potential for development that could free this concept from some of the routes down which it has been driven.
Culture is an integral part of our lives and has been an area of study for centuries. It includes our beliefs and ideas, the ways we express them through art and literature, and the rituals we carry out that make up our everyday lives, from the way we dress to the laws we live by. The definition of ‘culture’ is not easy to agree upon, as it can mean anything from the way in which people perceive and interpret the world around them to the social norms that govern their behaviour. There is a wide range of different concepts that are used to describe this phenomenon, from ‘high culture’ to ‘folk culture’ and ‘the way of life’. Cultural history is a field of research that focuses on understanding and recording the experiences, objects and beliefs of past societies. It is based on the belief that the best way to understand a society is to examine how it has been formed and evolved over time. This approach has been influenced by both the work of the 19th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by anthropological theories of human development, such as those proposed by Georg Simmel (1858-1918). It has been developed by a number of scholars who have sought to explore the roots of cultural values, beliefs and practices and how these shape our lives. These studies have been able to show that the differences between cultures can have a profound impact on how we see the world and how we interact with each other, even within the same society. For example, the rule-bound Japanese, orderly Swiss, laissez faire French and gun-totin’, freedom-lovin’ Americans are all rooted in deep cultural codes that shape how they think, act and behave. New cultural history has benefited from the development of the field of linguistics, which re-examined the role that language plays in signifying and shaping our consciousness. The study of the ways in which language shapes and defines our sense of self and our relationships to others has provided new and more nuanced interpretations of how culture arises from our shared systems of meaning. It has also been a useful tool for examining the nature of power and its relationship to knowledge, as reflected in the writings of such influential figures as Foucault. The questioning of the conventionally understood relationship between power and knowledge has proved particularly fruitful for styles of new cultural history that emphasize a more reflexive, and less linear, approach to historical analysis than their predecessors had employed. There are a number of areas in which the work of new cultural historians overlaps with developments in neighboring fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences. However, the disciplinary boundaries of these fields have been blurred since the early twentieth century, and it is hard to point to an intersection in specific ways. Nevertheless, there are a number of issues that have been raised that relate to the ways in which the concept of ‘culture’ has been adopted in political science. These include the problem of identifying a meaningful and useful way in which ‘culture’ can be used as an explanatory variable or a component of causality, and the potential for development that could free this concept from some of the routes down which it has been driven.