The ‘anthropological turn’ in history: The rise of the ‘new’ cultural history in the 1980s

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (2005), pp. 197-224

Seminar/Essay Questions

1. What bothered historians who took the cultural turn about the older historiography? What new questions were they asking and why did they not think the old analytical tools were not helpful?

 2. What are the implications of the cultural-anthropological turn for grappling with the central task of a historian: to explain change over time? (Or is that our main task?)

 3. Why did the anthropological turn peter out? What were seen as its shortcomings?

 4. How might you situate the cultural turn within the large global/political context of the late 1970s and 1980s?

 Further Readings:

Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London: Temple Smith, 1978.

Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Burke, Peter. ‘Anthropologists and Historians: Reflections on a Relationship.’ In Wissenschaftskolleg Jahrbuch 1989/90 . Berlin: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 1990.

Chartier, Roger. Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural History of the French Revolution. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Translated by Miriam L. Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christopher Prendergast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Originally published as Le miasme et la jonquille, 1982.

Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Originally published 1976.

Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: George Braziller, 1978. Originally published 1975.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. [Also a precursor of material history.]

Sabean, David Warren. Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Sahlins, Peter. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Death of Woman Wang. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

 Chapters and Essays

Dartnon, Robert. ‘History and Anthropology.’ In The Kiss of Lamourette, Robert Darnton. New York: WW Norton, 1990.

Desan, Suzanne. ‘Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis.’ In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 47–71. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Hunt, Lynn (ed.). The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Reddy, William M. ‘Anthropology and the History of Culture.’ In A Companion to Western Historical Thought. Edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Thompson, E. P. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.’ Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136. [Before the ‘anthropological turn’ but very much an inspiration for it. See Desan above.]

See also the early issues of the history journal Representations (Berkeley)