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The New Cultural History (Studies on the…
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The New Cultural History (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (original 1989; edition 1989)

by Lynn Hunt (Editor)

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Lynn Hunt writes with the intention of showing “how a new generation of historians of culture use literary techniques an approaches to develop new materials and methods of analysis” (pg. 15). Summarizing the field of cultural history in 1989, Lynn Hunt traces the development of the Annales school, dominated by Fernand Braudel, and the Marxist school. Following the 1970s and the rise of Michel Foucault, both schools turned their attention to culture. Hunt writes, “Just as social history sometimes moved from one group to another (workers, women, children, ethnic groups, the old, the young) without developing much sense of cohesion or interaction between topics, so too a cultural history defined topically could degenerate into an endless search for new cultural practices to describe, whether carnivals, cat massacres, or impotence trials” (pg. 9). Hunt continues, “At the moment, the anthropological model reigns supreme in cultural approaches. Rituals, carnivalesque inversions, and rites of passage are being found in every country and almost every century. The quantitative study of mentalités as the ‘third level’ of social experience never had many followers outside of France” (pg. 11). Turning to Clifford Geertz, Hunt writes, “The deciphering of meaning, then, rather than the inference of causal laws of explanation, is taken to be the central task of cultural history, just as it was posed by Geertz to be the central task of cultural anthropology” (pg. 12). At the time of writing, Hunt points out that most historians (with the exception of Roger Chartier) were reluctant to use literary theory. Hunt further argues that the language of metaphor is crucial to cultural history (pg. 16). Hunt continues, “Words did not just reflect social and political reality; they were instruments for transforming reality” (pg. 17). Hunt concludes, “For the moment, as this volume shows, the accent in cultural history is on close examination – of texts, of pictures, and of actions – and on open-mindedness to what those examinations will reveal, rather than on elaboration of new master narratives or social theories to replace the materialist reductionism of Marxism and the Annales school” (pg. 22). ( )
  DarthDeverell | Sep 18, 2017 |
Lynn Hunt writes with the intention of showing “how a new generation of historians of culture use literary techniques an approaches to develop new materials and methods of analysis” (pg. 15). Summarizing the field of cultural history in 1989, Lynn Hunt traces the development of the Annales school, dominated by Fernand Braudel, and the Marxist school. Following the 1970s and the rise of Michel Foucault, both schools turned their attention to culture. Hunt writes, “Just as social history sometimes moved from one group to another (workers, women, children, ethnic groups, the old, the young) without developing much sense of cohesion or interaction between topics, so too a cultural history defined topically could degenerate into an endless search for new cultural practices to describe, whether carnivals, cat massacres, or impotence trials” (pg. 9). Hunt continues, “At the moment, the anthropological model reigns supreme in cultural approaches. Rituals, carnivalesque inversions, and rites of passage are being found in every country and almost every century. The quantitative study of mentalités as the ‘third level’ of social experience never had many followers outside of France” (pg. 11). Turning to Clifford Geertz, Hunt writes, “The deciphering of meaning, then, rather than the inference of causal laws of explanation, is taken to be the central task of cultural history, just as it was posed by Geertz to be the central task of cultural anthropology” (pg. 12). At the time of writing, Hunt points out that most historians (with the exception of Roger Chartier) were reluctant to use literary theory. Hunt further argues that the language of metaphor is crucial to cultural history (pg. 16). Hunt continues, “Words did not just reflect social and political reality; they were instruments for transforming reality” (pg. 17). Hunt concludes, “For the moment, as this volume shows, the accent in cultural history is on close examination – of texts, of pictures, and of actions – and on open-mindedness to what those examinations will reveal, rather than on elaboration of new master narratives or social theories to replace the materialist reductionism of Marxism and the Annales school” (pg. 22). ( )
  DarthDeverell | Sep 18, 2017 |

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