The term cultural history came into use in the late eighteenth century, originally in Germany, inspired by the attempts of Herder, Hegel and others to view the different parts of culture as a whole (histories of literature, art and music go back much further). The most famous nineteenth-century example of the genre was the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), which was concerned not so much with painting or literature as with attitudes, notably with individualism, with the admiration for antiquity, with morality and with festivals and even the organization of the state as ‘works of art’. In the early twentieth century, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga produced a masterly study of Franco-Flemish culture, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), more or less on the Burckhardtian model (see Huizinga 1959 [1929]), while in Hamburg Aby Warburg wrote a handful of important articles and built up a marvellous library (transferred to London in 1933) devoted to the history of the classical tradition and to the science of culture (Kulturwissenschaft). However, these attempts to write a general history of culture found few emulators. At much the same time, between the two world wars, French attempts to go beyond political and economic history took the form of the history of collective mentalities associated with the Annales School, while in the USA attention was focused on the history of ideas.
The history of culture did not go uncriticized. Marxists in particular pointed out that the classical studies of cultural history depend on a postulate which it is extremely difficult to justify, the postulate of cultural unity or consensus. Thus Burckhardt wrote of ‘the culture of the Renaissance’, while Huizinga once described history as the form in which ‘a culture accounts to itself for its past’. In similar fashion, the non-Marxist Ernst Gombrich rejected the work of Burckhardt and Huizinga on the grounds that it was built on ‘Hegelian foundations’ which had ‘crumbled’ (Gombrich 1969).
The rise or revival of interest in a holistic history of culture goes back to the 1970s or thereabouts, a time of reaction against socioeconomic determinism and archive positivism. Just as late eighteenth-century historians were inspired by Herder and Hegel, so late twentieth-century historians—especially in France and the USA—draw on cultural anthropology (especially on Clifford Geertz, whose essay on the cock-fight is cited again and again), and on cultural theory more generally. The ideas of Lévi-Strauss evoked some response from historians in the 1970s, but the influence of Elias, Bakhtin, Foucault and Bourdieu has been considerably more substantial and long-lasting, while a few brave souls are attempting to make use of Derrida.
In recent work, the term culture has extended its meaning to embrace a much wider range of activities. Historians study popular culture as well as elite culture. They are concerned not only with art but also with material culture, not only with the written but also with the oral, not only with drama but also with ritual. The idea of political culture stretches the concept still further. Everyday life is included, or more precisely the rules or principles underlying everyday practices.
Traditional assumptions about the relation between culture and society have been reversed. Cultural historians, like cultural theorists, now claim that culture is capable of resisting social pressures or even that it shapes social reality. Hence the increasing interest in the history of representations (whether verbal or visual), the history of the imaginary, and especially the story of the construction, invention or constitution of what used to be considered social facts such as social class, nation or gender.
Another approach, partly inspired by anthropology, focuses on cultural encounters, clashes or invasion. Historians have attempted to reconstruct the way in which the Caribs perceived Columbus, the Aztecs saw Cortés, or the Hawaiians viewed Captain Cook and his sailors. The point to emphasize here is the relatively new interest in the way in which the two sides understood or failed to understand one another. There is also increasing interest in the process of borrowing, acculturation, reception, and resistance, in cases of encounters not only between cultures but also between groups within them.
Peter Burke
University of Cambridge
References
Gombrich, E.H. (1969) In Search of Cultural History, Oxford.
Huizinga, J. (1959 [1929]) ‘The task of cultural history’, in J.Huizinga, Men and Ideas, New York.
Further reading
Chartier, R. (1988) Cultural History, Cambridge, UK.
Hunt, L. (ed.) (1989) The New Cultural History, Berkeley, CA.
