8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

1/7

agency. The notion of agency has been reworked,away from that of a conscious and controlling self, toone of having effects. Second, conceptualizing theboundary between nature and culture as a socialconstruction has opened up a rich set of investigationsaround both the production of the boundary andslippages across it. Anderson (2000), for example,examines the ways in which racial ideology has beeninterwoven with discourses of animality and nature,

and Emel (1995) argues that the eradication of wolvesin the USA has been underwritten by norms ofmasculinity.

3.2 Economy and Culture

The lines between economy and culture are no lessblurry. Economic development is increasingly aboutculture, whether it be in the form of tourism or theredevelopment of urban areas for the purposes ofspectacle and consumption (see Postmodern Urban-ism). Access to jobs and job performances areinterpreted as cultural phenomena. Economic theory,models, and methods are being read for the ways inwhich they are structured by metaphor (seeEconomic

Geography). Gibson-Graham (1996), for example,argues that recent discussions of the globalization ofcapitalism function through the metaphor of rape (seeGlobalization: Geographical Aspects). Drawing onfeminist attempts to conceive a perspective on rape interms other than victimization, Gibson-Graham en-treats us to imagine possible economic futures thatexceed the rape of capitalism.

The spirit of the Gibson-Graham analysis, ofconceiving of non-violent trespass, is perhaps a goodnote on which to end. Cultural geography is currentlyextremely lively, no longer operating as a boundedsub-discipline but as a critical perspective on theproduction of boundaries and processes of differen-tiation.

Bibliography

Anderson K 1991 Vancouers Chinatown. McGill-Queens Univ-ersity Press, Montreal, PQ

Anderson K 2000 The beast within: Race, humanity, andanimality. Enironment and Planning D: Society and Space 18:30120

Barnett C 1998 Cultural twists and turns. Enironment andPlanning D: Society and Space16: 6314

Cosgrove D 1985 Prospect, perspective and the evolution of thelandscape idea.Transactions of the Institute of British Geogra-

phers10: 4562Crang M 1998Cultural Geography. Routledge, LondonCresswell T 1996 In PlaceOut of Place: Geography, Ideology

and Transgression. University. of Minnesota Press, Min-

neapolis, MNDemeritt D 1994 The nature of metaphors in cultural geography

and environmental history.Progress in Human Geography18:16385

Duncan J S 1980 The superorganic in American cultural geo-graphy.Annals of the AAG.70: 18198

Duncan J S 1990 The City as Text: The Politics of LandscapeInterpretation in the Kandyian Kingdom. Cambridge Uni-versity Press, Cambridge, UK

Duncan J S, Gregory D (eds.) 1999 Writes of Passage: ReadingTrael Writing. Routledge, New York

Emel J 1995 Are you man enough, big and bad enough?Ecofeminisms and wolf eradication in the USA.Enironmentand Planning D: Society and Space 13: 70734

Foote K E, Hugill P J, Mathewson K, Smith J (eds.) 1994 Re-Reading Cultural Geography. University of Texas Press,

Austin, TXGibson-Graham J K 1996The End of Capitalism (As We Knew

It). Blackwell, Cambridge, MAGregory D 1994 Geographical Imaginations. Blackwell,

Cambridge, MA,Gregory D 1999Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of

travel. In: Duncan J, Gregory D (eds.) Writes of Passage:Reading Trael Writing. Routledge, New York

Harley J B 1992Deconstructingthe map.In: Barnes T J, DuncanJ S (eds.)Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in theRepresentation of Landscape. Routledge, New York

Jackson P A 1989Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to CulturalGeography. Unwin Hyman, London

Law L 1997 Dancing on the Bar: Sex, money and the uneasypolitics of third space. In: Pile S, Keith M (eds.)Geographiesof Resistance. Routledge, London

Lewis P 1979 Axioms for reading the landscape. In: MeinigD W (ed.)The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. OxfordUniversity Press, New York

Ley D 1995 Between Europe and Asia: The case of the missingsequoias.Ecumene2: 185210

Matless D 1996 New material? Work in cultural and socialgeography, 1995.Progress in Human Geography20: 37991

Mitchell D 1995 Theres no such thing as culture: Towards areconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography.Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 20: 10216

Mitchell D 1996 The Lie of the Land: Migrant workers and theCalifornia Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, Min-neapolis, MN

Pred A 1995 Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage ofthe Present. Routledge, New York

Price M, Lewis M 1993 The reinvention of cultural geography.Annals of the AAG83: 117

Sauer C O 1925 The morphology of landscape. Uniersity ofCalifornia Publications in Geography 2: 1954

SauerC O 1966 TheEarly SpanishMain. University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, CA

Sibley D 1995Geographies of Exclusion. Routledge, LondonSparkeM 1998 A map that roaredand an original atlas:Canada,

cartography, and the narration of nation.Annals of the AAG88: 46395

Willems-Braun B 1997 On cultural politics, Sauer, and thepolitics of citationreply.Annals of the AAG 87: 7038

Woods C 1998Deelopment Arrested: The Cotton Blues Empireof the Mississippi Delta. Verso, New York

G. Pratt

Cultural History

It is noteasy to define culturalhistory in itsspecificity.Should it be done by designating objects and practiceswhose study would constitute the very nature of this

3075

Cultural History

8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

2/7

history? The risk is great, therefore, of failing to drawa definite and clear line between cultural history andother histories: for instance, the history of ideas, thehistory of literature, the history of art, the history ofeducation, the history of media, or the history ofsciences. Should we, consequently, change perspec-tives and consider that all history, whatever itsnatureeconomical or social, demographic or poli-tical is cultural, insofar as the most objectively

measurable phenomena are always the result of themeanings that individuals attribute to things, to wordsand behavior? In this fundamentally anthropologicalperspective, the problem is not so much to define theparticular sphere of cultural history, differentiatedfrom that of its neighbors, but rather avoid animperialist definition of the category.

Between these two stumbling blocks, the road isnarrow. From there, the course followed in this articleconsists of marking the shifts that have characterizedthe historiographical practices designated, in theirtime or subsequently, as belonging to culturalhistory.

1. The History of Mentalities

The very lengthy genealogy of cultural history gen-erally stops at a certain number of precursors: thehistorians of the nineteenth century (Michelet, Burck-hardt), Voltaires, Sie cle de Louis XIV, the legalpractitioners of the perfect history during the six-teenth century, even Herodotus himself. The course isnot without illusion, measuring the anticipations ofcertain precursors according to a posterior state ofhistorical science. So as to avoid this trap, it ispreferable to limit the research to the twentieth centuryand to follow the different faces taken by the his-toriographical projects which intended to focus on thephenomenaleft aside by theclassical forms of political,economical, or social history. The history of men-talities was the first amongst them.

1.1 The Founders of the Annales and the History ofMentalities

Unlike a given idea, the paternityof the category of thehistory of mentalities, insofar as it indicates aparticular area of history, is not to be attributed to thefounders of the Annales Lucien Febvre and MarcBloch. It is the invention of Robert Mandrou andGeorges Duby at the end of the 1950s. The expressionappears for the first time in the title of a universitycourse in 1956 with the election of Robert Mandrou inthe 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des HautesE tudes to the chair of Social History of ModernMentalities, while at the same time, Georges Dubywas opening a seminar on medieval mentalities at theUniversity of Aix-en-Provence. In 1961, when Robert

Mandrou published his book Introduction a France,Modern, he presented it as a response to the requestsformerly made by Lucien Febvre in favor of thehistory of collective mentalities (while using anothernotion as the subtitle of the study, psychologicalhistory which was also dear to Febvre). Thus, des-ignated as the inspirer of this new form of history,Lucien Febvre, in fact, had rarely used the exact termmentality, preferring the adjective mental added to

words like equipment, material, but above all tool,or even, in the plural form, habits and needs. In1942, in the Proble me de lincroyance au XVIe sie cle:Religion de Rabelais he characterizedthe mental toolsby expressing two essential statements: that the waysto perceive and reason are neither invariable noruniversal, and that there is no continuous and neces-sary progress in the succession of mental tools. Thebook makes an inventory of the instruments andconceptual categories which are the different supportsfor thinking: first, the state of language, with itsvocabulary and syntactic particularities, the tools andthe languages available in the operations of knowl-edge, and finally the value and the credit attributed toeach sense. From there, the conclusion: So close to us

in appearance, the contemporaries of Rabelais arealready distant by all their intellectual properties. Andeven their structure was not ours. In each time, theways of thinking and feeling outline in a specific waythe limits between nature and the supernatural, orbetween what is possible and impossible.

Paradoxically, Lucien Febvre, taken to be the fatherof the history of mentalities, uses the term less oftenthan Marc Bloch who uses it as much in the Societe

feodale (where we encounter mental atmosphere orreligious mentality) as in Apologie pour lhistoire ou lemetier dhistorien. He prefers sensitivity that definesthe subject of historical psychology which seems forhim the only capable way of avoiding the culpableanachronism which equips men and women of thepast, not only with knowledge and conceptions whichwere impossible for them, but also with feelings andemotions that were unknown to them. Febvre stig-matizes such an error in Amour sacre, amour profane:autour de lHeptameron(1944) by concluding: In fact,a man of the sixteenth century should be intelligiblenot in relation to us, but in relation to his con-temporaries.

In his book of 1961, Robert Mandrou does notdissociate the study of the mental tool from that ofsensations, emotions, and passions which make up thementality. Without separating these two dimensions,he distinguishes the common elements to all men (andwomen) in a shared time and place and those that areparticular to each generation, to each profession, toeach social group, or to each class. For him, allhistorical psychology, all history of mentalities issocial history. We should, therefore, once thecommon mental tool has been identified, describe themental horizons which are characteristic of the dif-

3076

Cultural History

8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

3/7

ferent social groups. The history of mentalities, or ofthe visions of the world, another term often used byMandrou, was thus strongly anchored in the dif-ferences between social classes, defined more by theunity of life style and the feeling of belonging than bya strict economical determination.

1.2 The Golden Age of the History of Mentalities

From the 1960s onwards, the notion of mentalityimposes itself to designate a history whose object isneither ideas, nor socioeconomical realities. ThisFrench history of mentalities reposes on a certainnumber of ideas more or less shared by those whopractice it (see Le Goff 1974). In the first instance, theobject of the history of mentalities is defined by LeGoff as the opposite of that of classical intellectualhistory: The level of the history of mentalities is thatof everyday life and the automatic, which is whatescapes individual subjects as it shows the impersonalcontent of their thoughts. These ideas, which resultfrom the conscious elaboration of a singular spirit, aretherefore opposed to mentality, always collective,

which regulates, without them knowing, the imme-diate perceptions of socialsubjects. Such an expressionis not very far off the definition of collective repre-sentations in the tradition of the sociology of Durk-heim as the accent is placed on the contents or themethods of thinking which result from the uncon-scious incorporation of unknown determinations ineach member of a community, which set up theircommon manner of classifying and judging. Now, thesecond characteristic underlined by Le Goff: thepossibility that the history of mentalities or the his-torical psychology link themselves to another impor-tant trend of historical research today: quantitativehistory. Having as subjects collective, automatic, andrepetitive actions, the history of mentalities shouldand must be serial and statistical. It is part of theheritage of the history of economies, populations, andsocieties that, on the horizon of the major crisis of the1930s, followed by the mutations after the war,constituted the most innovative field of historiog-raphy. When, in the 1960s, the history of mentalitiesand the historical psychology defined a new, prom-ising, and original area of study, they did so often byrecapitulating the methods which ensured the con-quests of socioeconomical history: the techniques ofregressive statistics and the mathematical analysis ofseries.

From the importance given to series, and thereforeto the establishment and treatment of homogenousdata, repeated and comparable at temporal regularintervals, two consequences follow. The first is theprivilege given to massive sources, widely represen-tative and available over a long period, for example,the inventories after death, wills, library catalogues,legal archives, etc. The second consists of the attempt

to articulate, according the braudelian model ofdifferent times (long term, conjuncture, event), thelong period of mentalities which often resists tochange, with the short period of brutal ruptures or ofrapid transfers of belief and sensitivity.

The withdrawal of witchcraft as a criminal act inFrance during the seventeenth century (see Mandrou1968), the transfer of attitudes before childhood ordeath (see Aries 1964, 1977) or the dechristianisation

of France during the second half of the eighteenthcentury (see Vovelle, 1973) illustrate the articulationof the different periods of the history of mentalities. Ineach case, the problem lies in understanding how, inthe long-term stability of mental structure, an essentialtransfer occurs: thus, the transformation of the rep-resentations of the world in the mileu of magistrates,the invention of childhood, and the concealment ofdeath, or the indifference towards devotion practices,moral injunctions, and catholic beliefs.

A third characteristic of the history of mentalities inits golden age lies in its ambiguous way of consideringconnection to society. The notion seems, in fact,dedicated to erasing the differences in order to find thecategories shared by all the members of a same era.

The mentality of a historical individual, a great man,is exactly what he has in common with other men ofhis time writes Le Goff (1974), adding, as examples, itis what Caesar and the last soldier of his legions, SaintLouis and the peasant of his domains, ChristopherColumbus and the sailor all have in common.Amongst all the practitioners of the history of ment-alities, Philippe Aries is no doubt the one who madethe greatest attachment to such an identification ofthenotion as common feeling or general feeling.Therecognition of the archetypes of civilisation, sharedby a whole society, does certainly not signify thecancellation of all differences between social groups orbetween clerics and laymen. However, these differ-ences are always considered inside a long-term pro-cess which produces representations and behaviorwhich become common. Postulating the fundamentalunity (at least tendentious) of the collective uncon-scious, Philippe Aries reads the texts and images, notlike demonstrations of individual peculiarities, but inorder to decipher, beyond the will of authors orartists, the unconscious expression of collective sen-sitivity, or to find, beneath the ecclesiastic language,the ordinary set of common representations which areobvious (see Aries, 1975). The sensitivity and thecollective gestures which are disclosed should beunderstood at the cross-roads of biology and themental, at the meeting point of demographic realities(birth, death, etc.) and psychological investments (theforms of self-consciousness, the representations of lifeafter death, the feeling of childhood, etc.). WithPhilippe Aries, mentality refers to currents of thedeep which govern, without them necessarily beingaware of it, the most essential attitudes of men andwomen of a same period.

3077

Cultural History

8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

4/7

For other mentality historians, more directly loca-ted in the heritage of social history, the essentialelements lie in the link between the differences betweenthe ways of thinking and feeling and social differences.Such a perspective organizes the classifying of men-tality facts into divisions established by the analysis ofsociety and then the superposition postulated asnecessary between social boundaries that separategroups or classes and those which differentiate men-

talities. This social cutting out is no doubt the mostprecise trace of the dependence of the history ofmentalities in relation to social history in Frenchtradition. It was possible to understand it at a globaland macroscopic leveland so in research aiming tocharacterize a mentality, a religion or a popularliterature, opposed finally to that of the dominant orthe eliteor in a more fragmented way, in reference tothe hierarchy of conditions and professions. However,in both cases, the study of mental horizons reproducesthe divisions proposed by the history of societies.

1.3 History of Mentalities or Historical Psychology?

Mentalities, sensitivities, visions of the world: the

unstable plurality of vocabulary indicates, at the sametime, both the difficulty in defining objects of a newhistoriographical approach and the will to link, in thesame perspective, intellectual and psychological cat-egories.

When Alphonse Dupront proposes, in 1960, at theInternational Congressof Historical Sciences at Stock-holm, to constitute historical psychology as a wholediscipline within human sciences, he gives it a maximalextension as it must be the history of values, men-talities, forms, symbolics, myths. Such a definitionreduced the distance established by the founders ofAnnales between mentality and ideas, as the latterparticipate fully in collective mentality of men of aperiod. The ideas, perceived through the circulation ofwords which designate them, situated in their socialrooting, considered in their affective and emotionalload as much as in their intellectual content, thereforebecome, just like myths or values, one of thosecollective forces via which men live their time, one ofthose elements which Dupront, in words borrowedfrom Jung, called collective psychic. An expressionexists there which, while claiming to be loyal to theproject of the Annales, surpasses the old oppositionsby giving a fundamental psychological definition ofmentality and by reintroducing the ideas in theexploration of the collective mental.

Such a perspective (without the word mentality)appears in the work of Ignace Meyerson whoseimportance, perhaps underestimated today, was cen-tral for the renewal of historical studies of Anti-quityin particular his book Les Fonctions psycho-logiques et les oeuresof 1948. A first relationship liesin the assertion of the fundamental historicity ofmental categories and the psychological functions. It is

this essential historicity of psychological objects whichallows Meyerson to define it as a historical anthro-pology: The psychological functions have a historyand they have had different forms throughoutthis history. Time and memory have a history. Spacehasahistory.Perceptionhasahistory.Thepersonhasahistory. The work of historical psychology does not,therefore, consist of finding different modalities orexpressions of functions considered as stable and

universal. It attempts to understand, in their dis-continuity and their singularity, the emergence and theeconomy of each of these functions. In this way, byapplying the perspective of Meyerson to the questionof the person in ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernantwrites: There is not, there cannot be a model person,exterior throughout human history, with differences,variations according to places, transformations due totime. Research should therefore not establish if theperson, in Greece, is or is not, but should researchwhat the ancient Greek person is, how he is different,in the multiplicity of his features, of todays person(see Vernant 1965).

On the other hand, Ignace Meyerson radicallymodifies thelocationand comprehension of the mental

and psychological categories. To their immediate,existentialist, phenomenological grasp he opposestheir knowledge based on symbolical forms, works,and acts in which they are objectivized. Analyzingpsychological functions via productions (institutional,religious, legal, aesthetic, linguistic) allows for therupture with the idea of universal and abstract men,and with the universalization of a particular form ofthe personality.

1.4 Success and Criticisms of the History ofMentalities

Howcan one explain the infatuation, of historians andreaders, in France and outside France, for the historyof mentalities, whatever be the designation, in the1970s and 1980s? No doubt because such an approachallowed for, in its very diversity, the introduction of anew balance between history and social sciences.Contested in its intellectual and institutional superi-ority by the development of psychology, sociology,and anthropology, history coped by annexing thetopics of the discipline which questioned its dom-ination. The focus then moved towards objects (sys-tems of belief, collective attitudes, ritual forms, etc.)which, until then, belonged to the neighbors but whichfully entered into the program of a history of collectivementalities.

Adapting to the approaches and analysis methodsof socioeconomical history while transforming thehistorical questionnaire, the history of mentalities (inits widest definition) was able to occupy the front partof the historiographical scene and constitute aneffective response to the challenge launched by socialsciences.

3078

Cultural History

8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

5/7

However, there were many critics of its principlesand methods. The first came from Italy. In 1970,Franco Venturi denounced the obliteration of thecreative force of new ideas for the benefit of simplemental structures lacking dynamism and originality(see Venturi, 1970). Some years later, Carlo Ginzburgmagnified the criticism (see Ginzburg 1976). Herefused the notion of mentality for three reasons:first, for its exclusive insistence on elements which are

inert, obscure and unconscious of a determined visionof the world, which lead to reducing the importanceof rationally and consciously expressed ideas; second,for the interclass character which unduly assumes thesharing by the whole society of the same mentalequipment; and lastly, for the alliance with thequantitative and serial approach, which, all together,reifies the contents of thought and attaches itself to themost repetitive expressions and ignores singularities.Historians were thus invited to privilege individualappropriations more than statistical distributions, tounderstand how an individual or a community inter-preted, according to its own culture, ideas and beliefs,and texts and books circulating in their society.

In 1990, in the book with the provocative title,

Demystifying Mentalities, Geoffrey Lloyd, historian ofGreek philosophy and science, hardened the indict-ment once again. The criticism lies within the twoessential principles of the history of mentalities: onthe one hand, allocating to a whole society a stable andhomogenous set of ideas and beliefs; on the otherhand, considering that all thoughts and all conducts ofan individual are governed by a unique mentalstructure. The two operations are the very conditionallowing a mentality to be distinguished from anotherand permitting the identification within each indi-vidual of the mental tool shared with his contem-poraries. However, such a way of thinking erases, inthe repetitions of the collective, the originality of eachsingular expression and it encloses within an artificialcoherence the plurality of belief systems and ways ofreasoning that a same group or a same individual cansuccessively mobilise.

Lloyd therefore proposed to substitute for thenotion of mentality that of styles of rationalitywhose use depends directly on the contexts of dis-course and the domains of experiences. Each of themlays down their own rules and conventions, defines aspecific form of communication, supposes particularexpectations. This is why it is quite impossible to bringback the plurality of methods of thinking, knowing,and arguing to a homogenous and unique mentality.

The case was well pleaded but is it really justified?On one hand, the history of mentalities did not onlydetain the single globalizing definition of the notion,as it inherited it from Levy-Bruhl, author in 1922 ofLaMentalite primitie, ou des psychologues (CharlesBlondel, Jean Piaget, and Henri Wallon). If LucienFebvre surely was tempted by the interclass definitionof mentalityin particular in Le Proble me de l in-

croyance au XVIe sie cleand Philippe Aries after him,Marc Bloch and Robert Mandrou were very attentiveto the social differences which command, in a samesociety, different ways of thinking and feeling, ordiverse visions of the world.

On the other hand, French historians have notalways ignored the possible presence, within the sameindividual, of several mentalities, distinct or evencontradictory. Le Goff strongly expresses it: The

coexistence of several mentalities at a same time and ina same spirit is one of the delicate but essentialelements of the history of mentalities. Louis XI, who,in politics, revealed a modern Machiavellian men-tality, in matters of religion revealed a very traditionalsuperstitious mentality.

The critical examination of the contributions andlimits of the history of mentalities should neitherreduce the diversity of it nor simplify the expressionsof it.

2. From the History of Mentalities to CulturalHistory

The path of the history of mentalities is, therefore,made up of paradoxes. While it claimed to be clearlydifferentiated from other historical practices, it wasnever able to define clearly and unanimously itsobjects, methods, and concepts. It was during theyears when it underwent the most criticism and whenexpression itself retreated for the benefit of othercategories that the multiplication of works whichexplore the topics it designated were seen. It is nodoubt due to the plasticity of its definition and thediversity of its uses that this history, omnipresent andinaccessible, was able to durably characterize a formofhistoriographical work. It is, therefore, no longerpossible today, in a time when the notion of culturalhistory has become dominant, even sometimes sup-reme. This is what must now be examined.

2.1 An Impossible Definition

The difficulty in defining cultural history lies fun-damentally in theeven larger difficulty in defining whatthe object culture itself is. The innumerable meaningsof the term can be diagrammatically distributed intotwo families of meaning: one which designates theworks and gestures which, in a given society, avoideconomical or symbolical urgencies of daily life andare submitted to an aesthetic or intellectual judgement,and one which aims at ordinary practices throughwhich a community, whichever community it may be,lives and thinks out its relations to the world, toothers, or to itself.

The first order of meanings leads to building thehistory of texts, works, and cultural practices like ahistory with two dimensions, as Schorske suggests:

3079

Cultural History

8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

6/7

The historian seeks to locate and interpret the artefacttemporally in a field where two lines intersect. One lineis vertical, or diachronic, by which he establishes therelation of a text or a system of thought to previousexpressions in the same branch of cultural activity(painting, politics, etc). The other is horizontal, orsynchronic; by it he assesses the relation of the contentof the intellectual object to what is appearing in otherbranches or aspects of a culture at the same time

(Schorske 1979). We must, therefore, consider eachcultural production in the history of its genre, dis-cipline, or field as well as in context of its relationshipswith the aesthetic, or intellectual productions and thecultural practices which are contemporary to it.

The latter leads to the second familyof definitions ofculture. It strongly relies on the meaning that sym-bolical anthropology gives to notionand in part-icular Geertz: The culture concept to which I adhere[...] denotes an historically transmitted pattern ofmeanings embodied in symbols, a system of inheritedconceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means ofwhich men communicate, perpetuate, and developtheir knowledge about and attitudes towards life(Geertz 1973). It is, therefore, the entirety of languages

and of the symbolical actions of a community whichconstitute its culture. From there, for historians, theattention is transferred to collective expressions wherea cultural system is expressed in a paroxysmal way:rituals of violence, rituals of passages, carnivalesquefestivals, etc. (Davis 1975, Darnton 1984).

What the different approaches try to consider todayis the paradoxical articulation between a differ-encethe one by which all societies, in varyingmethods, separated a field characterized by particularexperiences and delightsand subordinationthosewhich make the aesthetic and intellectual inventionpossible and intelligible by noting it in the social worldand in the symbolical system particular to a time anda place.

2.2 Plurality of Practices,Common Questions

According to historiographical traditions and heri-tage, cultural history favored different objects, fields,and methods. Making an inventory of it is animpossible taskand partially futile as it would causerepetition of the assessments presented in the num-erous articles of this encyclopedia. More significant,perhaps, is the pinpointing of the common questionsto these very diverse approaches.

A first stake is the necessary articulation betweensingular works and common representations. Thereare several ways to conceive this: by concentrating onthe particularities of each social space where worksdevelop and circulate(guilds, the court, the academies,the market), by situating them in relation to texts andordinary practices with which they are in negotiation(to use a term which is dear to New Historicism), or,

using Eliass method, by understanding how aestheticconventions referto psychological economy and struc-ture of personality in a time and a place.

A second question, very widely shared, lies in therelationships between popular and learned culture.The ways of perceiving them can be dealt with by usingtwo large models of description and interpretation.The first, trying to abolish all forms of culturalethnocentrism, treats popular culture as a coherent

and independent symbolical system, which is organ-ised according to irreducible to logic, that of well-read culture. The second, concerned remembering theexistence of relationships of domination and in-equalities of the social world, understands popularculture by its subordination and its weaknesses com-pared to the culture of the dominant. Therefore, on theone hand, popular culture is considered as a sym-bolical independent system, enclosed within itself, andon the other, it is entirely defined by its distanceopposed to cultural legitimacy. For a long time,historians fluctuated between these two perspectives.Then, the work carried out on religion or literaturetreated as specifically popular and the construction ofan opposition, repeated through time, between the

golden age of a free and vigorous popular culture andthe times of censorship and constraints which con-demn it and dismantle it. Distinctions that are so clearare no longer accepted without doubts today, whichleads us to consider all the mechanisms which causeinternalization by the dominated to be of their ownillegitimacy and expressions via which a dominatedculture manages to save something of its symbolicalcoherence. Thelesson is valuable for the confrontationbetween the elite and people in the old Europe(Ginzburg 1966, 1976) and for the relationshipsbetween the dominated and the dominant in thecolonial world (Gruzinski 1988).

A final challenge for cultural history, whatever bethe approaches and objects, lies in the articulationbetween practices and discourse. The questioning ofancient certainties took the form of a linguistic turnwhich reposed on twoessential ideas:that the languageis a system of signs whose relationships themselvesproduce multiple and unstable meanings, beyond allintention or all subjective control; that reality is notbeyond discourse but is always built by discursivepractices (Baker 1990).

Opposed to such a position, numerous are thehistorians who, following the distinctions proposed byFoucault between discursive formations and non-discursive systems (see Foucalt 1969) or by Bourdieubetween practical sense and scholastic logic (seeBourdieu 1997), marked the difference between thelogic of practicesand that which governs the discursiveproduction and which underlined the irreducibilitybetween the reality which was (or is) and the discoursewhich intend to organise it, censure it, or represent it.

The fundamental object of a history attempting torecognize the way in which social actors give meaning

3080

Cultural History

8/10/2019 3-s2.0-B0080430767026413-main

7/7

to their practices and discourse is, therefore, found inthe tension between the inventive capacities of indi-viduals or communities and, on the other hand, theconstraints and conventions which restrictmore orless tightly according to the position that they occupyin their domination relationshipswhat is possible forthem to think, express, and do. The acknowledgmentis valid for well-read works and aesthetic creations aswell as for ordinary practiceswhich is another way

of expressing the double definition of the objects ofcultural history.

See also: Collective Beliefs: Sociological Explanation;Collective Memory, Anthropology of; CollectiveMemory, Psychology of; Cultural Psychology; Cul-ture, Sociology of; History and Memory; IntellectualHistory; Psychohistory

Bibliography

Aries P 1964 Lenfant et la ie familiale dans lAncien Regime.Plon, Paris

Aries P 1975Essais sur la mort en Occident du Moyen Age a nos

jours. ParisAries P 1977Lhomme deant la mort. Seuil, ParisBaker K M 1990 Inenting the French Reolution: Essays on

French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, UK

Bourdieu 1997 Meditations Pascaliennes. Editions du Seuil,Paris

Darnton R 1984The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes inFrench Cultural History. Basic Books, New York

Davis N 1975 Society and Culture in Early Modern France.Stanford University Press, CA

Foucalt 1969LArcheologie du saoir. Gallimard, ParisGeertz C 1973The Interpretation of Culture. Basic Books, New

YorkGinzburg C 1966 I Benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra

Cinquecento e Seicento. Giulio Einaudi editore, TorinoGinzburg C 1976Il formaggio e i ermi.Il cosmo di un mugnaio

del500. Giulio Einaudi editore, TorinoGruzinski S 1988 La colonisation de limaginaire. Societes

indige nes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol,XVIeXVIIIe sie cle. Gallimard, Paris

Le Goff J 1974 Lesmentalites. Une histoire ambigue. In: Le GoffJ, Nora P (eds.) Faire de lhistoire, Vol. III. Gallimard, Paris,pp. 7694

Mandrou R 1961Introduction a la France moderne, 15001640.Essai de psychologie historique. Albin Michel, Paris (re-editedin 1998 with an Afterword by Cottret M, Joutard P, Lecuir J)

Mandrou R 1968Magistrats et sorciers dans la france du XVIIe

Schorske C 1979 Fin-de-sie cle Vienna. Politics and Culture.Random House, New York

Venturi F 1970Utopia e riforma nellIlluminism. Einaudi,Tonno,Italy

Vernant J-P 1965 Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs. E

tude de

psychologie historique. Maspero, ParisVovelle M 1973 Pietebaroque et dechristianisation en Proence

au XVIIIe sie cle. Plan, Paris

R. Chartier

Cultural Landscape in EnvironmentalStudies

The concept cultural landscape has at least twomeanings. It refers both to an empirical object ofanalysis, and to an approach to studying that object.Cultural landscape as an object of analysis refers to thematerialcultural expressions of human modifications

of nature as they appear on a particular surface of theearth. The cultural landscape is generally thought toinclude all of the elements of the built environment(e.g., buildings, roads), as well as land-use patterns. Inthis usage, cultural landscape is juxtaposed withnatural landscape, although the distinction betweenthe two is problematic (hence the quotes). By contrast,the concept of landscape used in ecology tends to bemore focused on nature and natural processes insteadof the emphasis on culture and cultural mechanismsthat forms the basis of the concept used in geographyand the social sciences more generally. The culturallandscape as an approach, generally refers to aninterpretive and inductive strategy for understandingthe meaning of those cultural expressions, as opposed

to a more scientific and deductive approach. Thesetwo meanings have an intertwined history, althoughthe former meaning (object of analysis) preceded, andled to, the second. This essay is not divided into twoparts, but rather how and why the different meaningsemerged and often converged are pointed out (whenrelevant).

Introduced into American geography in the earlytwentieth century, the importance of the conceptcultural landscape has waxed and waned in relation tothe shifting contours and contexts of the history of thesocial sciences, expressed primarily in the discipline ofgeography. It has taken on diverse meanings, beensubject to rigorous criticisms, and emerged in the latetwentieth century as a vital and politically-charged

concept. This essay traces the changing interpretationsand uses of the concept cultural landscape, beforeanalyzing contemporary and future trends.

1. Historical Deelopment

American geographer Carl Sauers influential essayThe Morphology of Landscape, originally publishedin 1925 (1963), provided the first formal introductionof the concept of the cultural landscape into Americansocial science, and laid a foundation on which it wouldbuild for the next 50 years. Partly in reaction to themethodological and philosophical flaws of what hadbecome the reigning paradigm in geographyenvironmental determinismSauer attempted to situ-ate human-environment relationships more firmly as ascience by putting forward the concept of the culturallandscape as its distinctive object of analysis. Sauerposited a natural landscape, comprised of land forms,

3081

Cultural Landscape in Enironmental Studies

Copyright 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights reserved.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

Siecle. Plon, Paris