What is Cultural History Now?

Abstract

In his book Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account , Adam Kuper advises us to avoid altogether the use of that ‘hyper-referential word’, ‘culture’. 1 It has come to denote too much and thus came to mean too little. The same might be said of the use of ‘cultural history’, which may cover quite traditional histories of artistic and intellectual production as well as something different, called by some the ‘new cultural history’. 2 For while shame-faced political, hard-nosed demographic, forbidding diplomatic, and chapped-skinned imperial historians were left out of all the good historical party-lists in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now back on them, invited as experts on political rituals, Cold War culture, cultural encounters. The same can be said of the histories of medicine, science and law — spheres which were marginal to the first wave of the ‘new’ history in the 1960s and 1970s — but have been remade as exciting new areas by those able to probe their ‘cultural’ making. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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