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

Sept 18, 2008 by Hannah Callaway

First half of book: essays on cultural history method
Second half of book: cultural history method in practice.

Cultural history grew out of shortcomings in social history methods, particularly

Marxism and Annales. Discomfort with the base/superstructure model for Marxists,
increased focus on mentalits for Annalistes, overall growing interest in culture.
: Enter Foucault. He criticized the fixed categories of social history:
Foucault demonstrated that there are no natural intellectual objects. As Chartier
explained, Madness, medicine, and the state are not cetagories that can be
conceptualized in terms of universals whose contents each epoch particularizes; they are
histoically given as discrusive objects, and since they are historically grounded and bty
implication always changing, they cannot provide a transcendent or universal foudnation
for historical method (7)

the problem is, Foucaults method was so idiosyncratic that cultural historians cannot
take it as a model.
Patricia OBrien: Foucault rejects method, so how to develop a method from his
crticisms? How to establish a set of questions as a starting point when everything is
potentially in question.
as Hunt points out: if the relationship between the social and the cultural is unstable,
or nonexistent, the validity of cultural history as a project is threatened.

The new cultural history uses the approach of art history and literary criticism by
approaching historical sources like works of art. In these other disciplines, the central
questions are what does a picture or novel do, and how does it do it? What is the relation
between the picture or novel and the world it purports to represent? (16-17).
[the status of the author. Following lit crit too closely reposes the author problem. For lit
crit, the author is dead, but for historians the author and his intentions are of central
interest, as much as the reception of the work]
cf Chartier article (see below)

The issue of agency: cultural history gives agency back to individuals, esp poor and
marginalized, because looks at how they, through cultural practices, can have an impact
on society and social norms.
major criticism of Foucault was that he took away agency from historical actors

Community and legitimacy: NZ Davis and EP Thompson. (Desan chapter)

possible to exagerrate cohesion of crowd or community
they look at how violence reinforces community, but it can also transform it
to integrate focus on community and legitimacy put forth by Davis and Thompson with
analysis of power, transformaiton, and conflict power a central Foucauldian theme

Chartier: problem of readers reacting in many diff ways to the same text
Tension in lit crit between the texts own internal structures and reception aesthetics:
the attempt to locate individual or shared determinations which govern modes of
interpreation from outside of the text (157)
two ways history can address this dichotomy: history of how people read, based on
their notes; history of how authors and publishers guided readers through introductions,
headings, commentaries.
Popular culture: Chartier rejects, on grounds that content of popular and high culture
were often the same or similar, was a question of presentation. Ex. Bibliothque bleue,
for popular audience, repackaged classic texts. Same text, edited and printed differently.
Oral vs. print: rejection of distinction, because so many texts read aloud, blurring of lines.

Appropriation: rather than rigid understanding of unequal distribution of resources,

captures the way different levels of society made use of the same cultural products in
different ways. such a perspective does not preclude identifying differences (includign
socially rooted differences), but it displaces the very arena of their dientification because
it no longer involves social qualifitication of the works as a whole (171)

[[ re: powerChartiers point reminds us that power is not bimodal, but a spectrum. Ie
its not just about he dichotomoy of who has power and who doesnt, but a spectrum of
how people use the resources available to them to assert themselves in a variety of
contexts ]]

Discipline and invention: not antagonistic, but interrelated.

Textual or typographic arrangments that seek to control how a book is read inevitably
create tactics that tame or subvert them. Similarly, there is no production or cultural
practice that does not rely on materials imposed by tradition, authority, or the market and
tha tisnot subjected to survilleance and censures from those who have power over words
or gestures (174)

Distinction and divulgation

Distinctive products are vulgarized in a constant cycle: once the book bcecame a more
common object and less distincive by its being merely psosesed, the manners of reading
took over the task of showing variations, of making manifest differences in the social
hierarchy (174)

the way people use texts, the way texts are produced, are both important to a history of
reading
subtlety of approach is essential. Binomial understandings of high/low, printed/oral,
etc miss the complex interactions, the strategy and tactic, that surround cultural
production and consumption.