Social and Cultural History

The intertwined traditions that moved history from the study of social structures and ordinary life toward the meanings, representations, and symbolic practices through which people made sense of their worlds.

Definition

Social history studies the structures and experience of ordinary people and social groups, while cultural history studies the meanings, symbols, and representations through which people interpreted their lives; from the 1980s the two converged in the new cultural history.

Scope

This topic covers the rise of social history in the mid-twentieth century, its quantitative and structural phase, and the subsequent cultural turn that shifted attention to language, ritual, gender, and representation. It includes the new cultural history's borrowings from anthropology and literary theory, and the way these approaches recovered the experience of previously marginalized groups.

Core questions

• How did social history broaden the cast of historical actors beyond political elites?
• What did the cultural turn add to, or take away from, the structural analysis of social history?
• How have anthropology and literary theory reshaped historical interpretation?
• How do categories such as gender, race, and class operate as both social structures and cultural meanings?

Key theories

The cultural turn

From the 1980s historians increasingly treated culture — language, symbol, and representation — as constitutive of social reality rather than as a reflection of underlying material structures.

Thick description in history

Borrowing from Clifford Geertz, cultural historians read events and rituals as dense webs of meaning to be interpreted, exemplified in close studies of single episodes or communities.

History

Social history rose with the postwar expansion of the discipline and the influence of the Annales and Marxist traditions, peaking in quantitative form in the 1960s and 1970s. Dissatisfaction with structural reductionism, together with the influence of anthropology and literary theory, produced the cultural turn and the new cultural history announced by Lynn Hunt's 1989 collection.

Debates

Did the cultural turn abandon social explanation?

Some historians welcomed the recovery of meaning and contingency, while others feared that focusing on representation dissolved the explanatory power of social and economic analysis.

Key figures

• Natalie Zemon Davis
• Lynn Hunt
• Peter Burke
• Robert Darnton
• Clifford Geertz

Seminal works

• hunt1989
• davis1983
• burke2008

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between social and cultural history?

Social history focuses on the structures and experience of social groups, while cultural history focuses on meanings and representations; since the 1980s the two have largely merged in practice.

What is the 'cultural turn'?

It is the shift, from roughly the 1980s, toward treating culture and language as central to historical explanation rather than as secondary to material and social structures.