The Cultural Turn

The late-twentieth-century shift that moved culture, meaning, and representation to the centre of inquiry across history, sociology, and the humanities.

Definition

The cultural turn names the broad reorientation in the humanities and social sciences, from roughly the 1970s onward, toward culture, language, and representation as primary objects and explanatory categories, often at the expense of earlier economic or structural determinisms.

Scope

This topic covers the cultural turn as a meta-development: the spread of culturalist, meaning-centred analysis from literary and cultural studies into history, sociology, geography, and beyond, and the debates about its reach. It does not cover the individual theories (semiotics, discourse analysis) that supplied its tools, which are treated in their own areas.

Core questions

• Why did so many disciplines turn toward culture and meaning at once?
• What did the cultural turn gain, and what did it risk losing?
• Did making everything cultural drain culture of analytic purchase?

Key theories

Culture as constitutive, not reflective

The cultural turn treats meaning and representation as constituting social reality rather than merely reflecting an underlying economic base, reversing classical base–superstructure models.

Beyond the cultural turn

A reflexive literature took stock of the turn, asking how to retain attention to social structure and power without lapsing into pure textualism.

History

From the 1970s the tools of structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism spread outward from literary and cultural studies, prompting a new cultural history, a cultural sociology, and a cultural geography that foregrounded meaning and representation. By the late 1990s scholars such as Bonnell and Hunt were assessing the turn's achievements and excesses, asking how to move beyond a purely culturalist account of society.

Debates

Culturalism versus the loss of the social

Critics worried that the cultural turn reduced power, economy, and institutions to discourse; defenders replied that it revealed how thoroughly meaning permeates social life.

Key figures

• Stuart Hall
• Fredric Jameson
• Lynn Hunt
• Clifford Geertz

Seminal works

• jameson1998
• bonnell1999
• during2007

Frequently asked questions

Is the cultural turn a single theory?

No. It is an umbrella term for a convergent shift across many disciplines toward culture and meaning, drawing on several distinct theoretical traditions.