Social Research after the Cultural Turn (original) (raw)

Dilemmas and Challenges of Social History since the 1960s: What Comes after the Cultural Turn

South African Historical Journal, 2008

Since the 1960s historians in the English-speaking world have experienced two major waves of innovation, each leading to substantial broadening of the discipline's range of topics, methodologies, and theoretical approaches, linked to particular modes of interdisciplinarity, and energised by the politics of their respective times. Each was moved by a desire for greater democratic inclusiveness, whether in terms of recruitment into the profession, a questioning of older hierarchies of knowledge and institutional structures, or the recognition of previously hidden or marginalised histories. The first of these waves, extending from the 1960s into the early 1980s, involved the popularity and eventual dominance of social history. Beginning at the turn of the 1980s and achieving equivalent influence by the end of the 1990s, a new movement then emerged as the ‘new cultural history’, registering the emergent influence of cultural studies across the humanities and parts of the social sciences, settling increasingly around new histories of gender, race, and sexuality, and responding further to the challenges of postcoloniality. Though marked for some years by great intellectual divisiveness, the lasting impact of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ now allows us usefully to take stock. While taking its stand firmly on the resulting new ground, this article seeks to explore what may have been lost as well as what has been gained.

Cultural Turns and Trans/National Studies

2017

Both volumes under review share a common element: the relevance of anthropological studies in current cultural discourse and historical writing in particular. In her tour-de-force monograph Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture (CT), Doris Bachmann-Medick offers a wide and wellinformed overview of the most recent developments in cultural studies and reflects on the turns in that field since the early 1980s. Her edited collection— The Trans/National Study of Culture (T/NSC)—offers a variety of case studies exemplifying the variety of cultural studies. Before analysing these two volumes, I would mention the growing and pervasive role of anthropology after about 1980. Anthropological studies have deeply affected the historical disciplines of late, as Jeremy Popkin has stressed yet again.1

A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century A review of

Cultural studies is a field constantly questioning itself, with its practitioners reflecting on its objects of study, methods and the politics of the knowledge it produces. For some, this reflexivity represents a problem with the field. It is seen as a relic of cultural studies' struggle to constitute itself as a particular form of scholarly practice that is no longer necessary because of its increasing institutionalization within the university. For others, this inquisitiveness and commitment to consider its own assumptions are cultural studies' greatest strengths and a reason why the field has the potential to improve our knowledge of a constantly changing world. These positions (and various points between them) have been taken up in a number of recent works on cultural studies, of which I will here discuss Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (CSFT), Paul Smith's edited collection e Renewal of Cultural Studies (RCS), and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (CCS), edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman and Gail Faurschou. With cultural studies itself as their subject, these works help to provide different perspectives of the field as they map its key themes, issues, and debates. However, they may also be seen as working to take cultural studies into the future, with each book suggesting ways to ensure the discipline's value as an interdisciplinary intellectual and institutional practice.

THE CULTURAL TURNS: FROM CONVERGENT CONCEPTS TO INTERPRETIVE NARRATIVES

After the famous “Linguistic Turn”, labeled as such by the philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1980s, the cultural spins, mutations or, simply, the cultural “turns” of the past few decades have largely been the result of debates with aesthetic or ethical stakes, but also ways in which the political has found artistic expression and has been translated into “cultural objects”, in an anthropological sense. The “Pictorial Turn” and, then, the “Literary Turn” or, no less, the “Performative Turn”, the “Ekphrastic Turn” or the “Rhetorical Turn” have represented, ever since the 1970s and the 1980s, privileged methodological frameworks for research conducted in the humanities area, in which interpretative styles that are complementary or polemically pitted against one another are vying for supremacy. They may symptomatically succeed one another or appeal to researchers at one and the same time, but they most often operate with convergent concepts. The various interpretive communities that uphold them may come to interfere with one another or create entire transnational networks of interpretation. Keywords: Linguistic Turn, Performative Turn, Post-Critical Turn, interpretive communities, convergent concepts.

Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another 'Missing' Revolution?

Sociology is usually represented as having emerged alongside European modernity. The latter is frequently understood as sociology's special object with sociology itself a distinctively modern form of explanation. The period of sociology's disciplinary formation was also the heyday of European colonialism, yet the colonial relationship did not figure in the development of sociological understandings. While the recent emergence of postcolonialism appears to have initiated a reconsideration of understandings of modernity, with the development of theories of multiple modernities, I suggest that this engagement is more an attempt at recuperating the transformative aspect of postcolonialism than engaging with its critiques. In setting out the challenge of postcolonialism to dominant sociological accounts, I also address `missing feminist/queer revolutions', suggesting that by engaging with postcolonialism there is the potential to transform sociological understandings by opening up a dialogue beyond the simple pluralism of identity claims. feminism, identity, modernity, multiple modernities, postcolonialism, sociological theory