A look at What is Cultural History?

What is Cultural History?
By: Peter Burke

Cultural History; A new and interdisciplinary approach in Iran

The book What is Cultural History? by Peter Burke, explains the expansion trend of cultural history since 1970s.It not only outlines the quality of cultural history, but also focuses on its differences and conflicts, tradition and common realms. What is cultural history?  is translated into Persian by Dr Nematollah Fazeli and Morteza Ghelich.
Iran Books News Agency (IBNA); Cultural History is a discourse expanded since 1970s, but is not known in Iran. Thus introduction and acquaintanceship with the quiddity of this branch of knowledge is of prime importance and it is necessary to introduce the interaction between the two principal domains of humanities, history and culture, in an interdisciplinary approach.
Although this book is written from the social science point of view rather than history, it would have presented a different narration if it was written from historical perspective.
There has been a close relationship between historians and social science theoreticians since 18th century, but these two separated gradually in 19th century. Social theoreticians gradually tried to integrate the retrospective study with the status quo of certain culture and in Peter Burke word; they denied the past but did not cut the bilateral relations.
 What historians focused on in the past, the history from above or the political and military history, was driven to fringe and a kind of theoretical turn among social theoreticians happened in which the culture had a decisive role.
Now it was the time for the symbolic power, hidden beyond the culture, to be shaped. Thus those countries were considered powerful whose historic buildings were among world cultural heritage, their scientist or scholars won world prize, artistic works of their artistes had acquired world fame, their language were determining in world realm, their philosophy’s ideas were directing, their innovation and findings changed the world route, and their athletes achieved world honor, and in short, their symbols generated wealth and were considered as mental capitals.
 This book divides the cultural history into four phases of classic, social history of art, discovering popular history of culture, and a new cultural history. Cultural historians try to study the classic writings and original texts, masterpieces on art and literature, philosophy, science, etc. They tried to find out what is the connection between artwork and zeitgeist, and also which national cultural tradition affects the cultural history. It can be claimed that cultural history is an analysis method or is a certain approach to contemporary society, and on the other hand history focuses on components of culture.
In general, specifics of cultural history are listed as; culture in cultural history is an independent variable which simultaneously considers superior culture or the elite culture and the popular culture. In this approach, the culture is expanded and includes both the people daily culture and the popular culture. Unplanned incidents are of great importance too, considering emotions, feelings, and experiences are among its other specifics.
The new cultural history (NCH) is depended on hermeneutic methods in history and has a great emphasis on the power of the context. Upon which no tradition from the past is not the absolute or real exhibition of what had happened.  The book What is Cultural History? has six connected chapters as: “The Great Tradition”, “Problems of Cultural History”,  “The Moment of Historical Anthropology”, “A New Paradigm”, “From Representation to Construction”  and “Beyond the Cultural Turn”.
The references of each chapter are presented separately and there is also a chronicle list of published books on the subject.
 The author in his epilogue writes, this book is not a mere explore of a discipline, among other disciplines,  other than history, but it considers subjects as quiddity of cultural history (what cultural historians do), subjects like differences, conflicts, traditions and common subjects are included in this schedule too.
The book tries to combine two apparently contradictory but complementary approaches. The internal approach solves the successive problems and questions within the discipline and the external approach oversee to the activities of the contemporary historians.
 In “Great Tradition” chapter there is a short description of antecedent of cultural history. The chapter of cultural history begins with the review of the classic and Marxists ideas”.
Marxists, criticize the classic approach to culture principally on two points, first being too much subjective and second having no relation with economic and social infrastructures. They also claim that there is too much emphasize on cultural integrity, public culture is criticized and even the meaning of culture is elaborated, while the cultural conflicts are ignored.
“The Moment of Historical Anthropology” is another chapter of the book and is one of the clear specifications of cultural history turn toward anthropology. This turn is followed by cultures’ conflict, from another perspective. In new cultural history a daily history is emphasized on in which the theory of social drama is presented and the pattern of this drama is used to interpret the daily events. The emergence of theories like post colonialism and feminism are discussed in this subject and both concepts try to reach independence in cultural history.
“A New Paradigm” is the forth chapter. The new cultural history is considered a new paradigm against usual methods of historical tradition study.  This chapter studies the theories of four intellectuals and theorists whose works   is of great importance for NCH, Bakhtin, Elias, Foucault, Bourdieu.
 Bakhtin is a theoretician of literature and language and the other three are social theoretician.
“From Representation to Construction” is the fifth chapter. The meaning of exhibition lead to images and texts which reflects the social reality, although it is difficult for some intellectuals of cultural history to accept this. They, through exhibition tools, refer to production or construction, the reality of science, realms, social strata, diseases, time, identity etc. Three examples are presented in this part for future studies. Respectively they refer to the place of symbol and tradition in  evolution of Russian revolution; invention of tradition in Japan after revival of Meiji empire era and some parts of the 8th Louis VIII daily life, are presented and finally the related questions about construction is listed.
“Beyond Cultural Turn” is the last chapter of the book which examines the presence of probabilities in cultural history arena and also refers to new realms. This chapter includes return to classic thoughts or expansion of new cultural history, and realms and concept ignored by historians before, like politics and violence.
History researchers believe it should be accepted that there are some problems in new cultural history projects. Its three principal problems is firstly, the definition of culture which is too expanded and comprehensive nowadays; secondly, methods of new cultural history and thirdly the problem of diffuseness and fragmentation. There are same conflicts about methods too.
The first edition of What is cultural history? is published by Islamic History Research Center in 192 pages and 1500 copies.

Translated by: Asghar Abutorbi