Abstract
This contribution locates the current collection of papers by young European historians in the historical context of historical and social scientific study of culture, and especially the historical turn, which reconciles poststructuralist culture scholarship with older concerns of cultural history. The contributors are all influenced by linguistic turn deconstruction of discourse, studying culture and identity as systems of shared meaning, which are highly unstable, heavily gendered and susceptible to renegotiation, reinterpretation and political instrumentalisation. Authors problematise and undermine the essentialist, nationalist, conservative, functionalist model of timeless, separate, coherent territorial cultures. They discuss competing and contested criteria for defining nations or describe cultural communication between ideological or social groups within national societies. Most also engage intensely with power differences, including Foucault's ‘microphysics’ of subtle and complex power–knowledge interrelationships, examining state cultural policies or how individuals or weaker groups transform, appropriate or reject hegemonic state or intellectual discourses. However eclectic history's theoretical borrowing, focus on contingent, negotiable change and traditional emphasis on empirical complexity over ‘rigorous’ theory have inspired a broad ‘historical turn’ in scholarship of chaotic, multifaceted, tenticular and contradictory culture. This significant revision of the linguistic turn anchors deconstructed discourse and identity in a material context of social structures, institutional infrastructures and power relations and uses the concrete practice of individuals to restore agency to historical subjects. Contributors therefore accept sociologically and geographically defined cultures such as classes, ethnic groups and nations as historically important units of cultural commonality and connectivity. Several contributors examine the relationship between sites, negotiations and impositions of local and cosmopolitan identity, transfers of ideas and specific technologies or mechanisms and institutions of connectivity within international scholarly networks. Connectivity anchors symbolic culture in the concrete sociopolitical realm, and reconciles the paradoxical continuity and fluidity of culture by avoiding the distinct bounded cultures implied by commonality.
Notes
1. CitationHudson, 7. Although the contributors concentrate on how monuments, ‘art, writing, film, or conversation’ are used as cultural communication media, this does not of course mean that these forms of expression have no other role or meaning.
12. Smith directly debated this question with Gellner in 1995, and associated him with Hobsbawm and Anderson in the ‘modernist’ camp (Smith, Citation1996; Smith, Citation2000; CitationGellner). Though centrally concerned with the invented, imagined or high culture of nations, these three modernists tended to explain them as results of ‘deeper’ modern forces.
26. CitationHarlan, 581–82; CitationReinhard, 18–19; From the late 1970s, however, historical sociologists like Tilly, Wallerstein and John A. Hall have created new grand narratives of world history, in an attempt ‘to rebuild social theory’ (Eley, Citation41).
28. CitationSpiegel, 10–11; CitationSewell, 89; CitationPels adds that impatience with ‘exclusively textual’ notions of symbolic culture also led anthropologists back towards their older interest in material culture.
37. The field of Intercultural Communication still concentrates on ‘essential patterns of communication norms and practices in specific cultures and subcultures’ (Kim, Citation556).
45. Including from a lifelong diet of television and especially advertisements which toy in a knowing postmodern way with styles, symbols and references.
46. Including from a lifelong diet of television and especially advertisements which toy in a knowing postmodern way with styles, symbols and references, 199–204.
47. Including from a lifelong diet of television and especially advertisements which toy in a knowing postmodern way with styles, symbols and references, 201.
48. Including from a lifelong diet of television and especially advertisements which toy in a knowing postmodern way with styles, symbols and references, 22, 25. Whereas poststructuralists tend to imply that meta-narratives of this sort inevitably support the status quo, Bob Chase engages with the writings of Hayden White to argue that historians have the right to consciously choose narratives that support their moral and political agendas (Chase, Citation82). Whereas White's praise for histories that consciously negotiate between linguistic modes may suggest that some kind of historical science is possible (White Citation1987 [1978]: 128–9), his analysis of history as literary art may also be a licence to unashamedly use historical meta-narratives to persuade or structure an argument. Art can produce truths but, unlike science, rarely makes claims to any absolute truth.
51. CitationBrubaker and Cooper use the term ‘identity’ for the catch-all category that I refer to as culture, and ‘groupness’ for what I call ‘identity’. The Russo-American sociologist Sorokin in 1937–1941 and, borrowing from him, the French cultural historian Maurice Crubellier in the 1970s, prefigured this tripartite scheme, proposing a model of culture made up of ‘a constituted group, a means of communication and a content’ (Poirrier, Citation30).
54. This potential is not automatically realised. Intercultural Communication is centrally concerned with communication practices, but generally in diachronic research on bounded cultures (Kim, Citation556).
62. Western narratives of Southern, Eastern, Muslim or Balkan material underdevelopment emerged much later, however. Ottoman identity was rejected as infidel, different and incorrect, but not necessarily inferior.
75. CitationDirks, 28. Historians are themselves not blameless, often refusing to recognise the engagement of other disciplines with the past as real history (Dirks, Citation31).
77. CitationDirks, 23–4. The historical anthropologist Dirks criticises British cultural studies, however, for using Gramsci's concept of hegemony to stress class at the expense of other cultural structures (Dirks, Citation19–20).
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})