The Chronicle: 2nd May 2003: Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research
Posted 01/05/2003 under
Peter Stearns writes an interesting article on the changing face of cultural research.
Read the rest of the article in ‘more’ or go to the article here
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For the past several decades, key disciplines in or around the humanities, including my own field of history, have been strongly influenced by what has been termed “the cultural turn”—the belief that culture influences, indeed powerfully shapes, the human condition.
In this pervasive view, key aspects of life can best be understood by exploring the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of a culture and (in some formulations especially) the language in which they are expressed. Some of the attention to the cultural turn began in the 1960s, with the period’s new sympathy for the styles and values of various groups, and then firmed up with a growing interest in the findings of cultural anthropology and in various theoretical formulations from gurus like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Recently, however, the fascination with culture seems to be waning: Historians, for example, are conducting symposiums and editing volumes about “what comes next,” and erstwhile culturalists are publicly bemoaning the decline of interest in relevant theory. Aside from demonstrating that humanists are not immune to faddism, the transition invites some comment about the state of cultural research more generally. For, while a rebalancing of scholarly priorities seems inevitable, it is important to keep oscillations within bounds.