Cultural history/social history: some reflections on a continuing dialogue.

Social and cultural history have always been related to each other in strategic ways, correcting each other's blindspots and blunders, while they have also emphasized different elements of the past and pursued different methods. When I first started graduate studies thirty-five years ago, I was interested in culture, but found myself pulled toward social history, not only because it was fashionable, but because it seemed to provide my thinking with a certain ballast and my research with an effective structure which I found beneficial. I never gave up my interest in matters relating to culture, and I never accepted all behavioral tenets of social history, but I elected to allow its disciplining hand to help me to fashion better questions and more systematic strategies for engaging the past. Over the last twenty years, as cultural history has overtaken social history in "fashionableness" to become what Lynn Hunt has described as well-nigh hegemonic, I think that the elements of ballast, clarity and structure that I first found so attractive in social history have become ever more urgently needed in the cultural/social history now being practiced. Now, more than ever, cultural history needs exposure to the methods, ways of thinking and questions that social history can provide. Therefore, I still call myself a social and cultural historian and encourage my students to engage the issues of culture with which they are now primarily concerned with tools and perspectives drawn from social history.

The emergence of cultural history in the 1970s and 1980s and its subsequent dominance was in part a response to the perceived limitations of the social history perspective of the previous historiography. In describing the behavioral tendencies of social groups and emphasizing normative behavior, often in the abstractions of numbers and charts, social historians had moved beyond an elite-dominated political paradigm, but had ignored both the uniqueness of individual experience and the ways in which social life is created through politics and culture. And their attachment to group categories and social structural explanations had begun to deaden history as an exploration of contingent experience. Cultural historians sought to bring some life back into the exploration of the lives of ordinary people and to open them up to arenas of freedom and choice. By the mid 1980s, cultural historians were drawing upon beliefs about the agency of ordinary people that social historians such as Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese had emphasized, but drew away from the way agency was attributed to participation in predefined group activities. (1) Increasingly, cultural historians looked to what anthropologists called "liminal" experiences, and to adopt the "post-modern" perspective on identity as fluid and changing. As social historians played into the politics of identity of the 1980s, cultural historians turned to deconstructing identity altogether, and attributing to the past some of the willfulness of contemporary culture. (2) In addition, not only was the articulateness of the subjects pursued by social historians usually quite limited but literary sources had taken second place to numbers. Cultural historians, in contrast, put their faith in a fuller exploration of language and because, in their view, all culture is connected, all forms of articulation could be examined as exemplary.

In the increasingly hostile atmosphere of the 1980s, social historians were attacked for too often assuming what needed to be proved--that particular social categories were experientially meaningful, and that categories drawn from one period applied to others. And they were accused of adopting the dominant perceptions about subaltern groups, such as women and racial minorities. These were all useful rejoinders, though they tended to move toward questioning social categorization of any kind. Marxist historians seemed to suffer especially from these attacks, since their notion of "false consciousness" which blamed historical actors for failing to understand what the historian knew and the role to which historians had assigned them captured this problem in an especially acute way. But most social historians had used social group categories to organize their understanding of the past and as a means to bring individual historical experiences into view. Stephen Thernstrom's seminal book on class in America, Poverty and Progress, illustrated this perfectly. (3) Thernstrom tried to locate individual experience within the patterns of the group, and then he illustrated the nature of the experience by giving details about a specific individual. In thus making the tables more personal, he nevertheless assumed that historians could only take the individual seriously because he had demonstrated the larger group-defined process of which he was part. This was, after all, what social historians did, since they were eager to differentiate experience in socially dynamic ways. And while this could lead, at its most comical, to a stylized invocation of the "holy trinity"--class, race, gender--in dissertations, term papers and convention addresses, it had also allowed these issues to become part of the historical agenda and thereby brought to historical attention subjects of inquiry which had earlier been hidden from view. Cultural historians hardly wanted to leave this behind. They usually wanted to be able to take it for granted, and to move on to other matters.

As social history's problems became clearer, cultural historians began to provide ways to meet some of the challenges this posed. They turned to an exploration of broader cultural forces, such as the media or underlying gender patterns, while also attempting to highlight individual experience (always more satisfying to study and read about). They returned to narrative forms to convey the unexpected and complex texture of experience, and they emphasized how narrative gave form and meaning to experience. And they played with the possibility that we might know less about the past than social historians with their charts and illusory exactness of numbers had seemed to imply. Natalie Davis's study of Martin Guerre, with its rich historical portrayals of individuals, tangle of human psychology, and admission of historical uncertainty captured this mood well. (4)

Many of those who turned to the lessons of cultural history hoped to loosen the grip of sociological determinism and its static results, to return history to the unexpected and unintended, while keeping the lens open to the more ordinary folk who had been invited into the historical picture by the work of social historians of the previous generation. Cultural historians also wanted to open the historical aperture to groups and individuals who often lay beyond even the sights of social historians because of the perceived normative limitations created by social history and its reliance on normal curves and central tendencies, an intellectual move often viewed as not only descriptive but also evaluative. The French post-structuralists facilitated this process and the writings of Michel Foucault especially made the paradigms of social history seem unexpectedly narrow as he questioned the very language and assumptions behind the social analysis that we brought to our inquiries. By setting out to explode the epistemological myths of social science, Foucault delivered an especially hard blow to the confidence in categories that we social historians brought to our work. (5)

The initial experience of all of this was, if not liberating exactly, then certainly exhilarating as some historians learned to question the assumptions they once took for granted. And many social historians turned to cultural history work, not only because (as some cynics have argued) the sources were more easy to access, but because cultural history brought a freshening to the inquiry into the past that social historians had themselves once provided. Some extreme converts like Joan Scott found nothing from the previous era left standing in this context. (6) But few chastened historians were quite so extreme about their own misspent youth. Instead, cultural history allowed us to explore the past in newer ways--to try out new methods, read new sources (especially literature, which had been somehow tabooed as unrepresentative by some social historians), and to ask new, more subtle questions.

But, the general turning away from the discipline once provided by social history categories and framings has also had less salutary results. As social history became unfashionable, there was a tendency for some critics to become quite queasy about our so-called earlier arrogance and a tendency to disavow any firm pretense to understanding the past or to defining what it is about the past that is worth studying. And as cultural historians have fashioned new instruments for understanding the delicate reality of former times, one is sometimes confronted with a profusion of styles and methods that seem to obey no rules but the unique bypaths of the individual historian's mind. In the hands of a really talented cultural historian like Larry Wolff, this can be an eye-opener as previously unexplored connections come into view through the combination of deep learning and deft insight. (7) But in lesser hands the result has too often been a profusion of cultural inquiries that are literally all over the place, spilling out every which way from a chastened belief that since nothing is certain then anything goes. All topics are equally important, and any means to get there is as good as any other.

I would in no way want to return us unreflectively to thirty years ago, but it might be time to find once again in social history what I discovered at Columbia in the late 1960s, a way to discipline our inquiries and, maybe, even a means to bring some order into an increasingly disorderly field(s). Social history was once regularly accused of turning its back on narrative coherence by allowing inquiries to flow unimpeded into any field at all, elevating formerly unknown areas into prominence and disabling a formerly accessible picture of the past. This attack was, we could readily agree, misplaced, since social history legitimated inquiries into a host of specialties, such as women's studies, African-American and ethnic history, labor history, urban history, family history, and children's history, whose vigor and significance can no longer be denied. No one wants to take any of this back and it is social history's virtue to have opened these doors, not its vice.

At the same time, these doors opened by social history were once governed by certain assumptions and methods that we might now want to revisit as we examine the problems that cultural history has brought into open view. Social historians believed in exhaustive research, not for its own sake, but in order to expose to disciplined examination as many new sources as possible of a more ample past. They were always searching for new veins of material--wills, court records, the census, parochial newspapers. Above all, social history provided us with a sharp set of analytic tools, questions about social organization and social function, and a series of defined methods that emphasized systematic research. These tools helped to encourage creativity while also providing frameworks within which research could proceed in ways that could be effectively judged and evaluated, and would encourage future researchers in the field. When pursued with the tenacity and commitment of a Lizabeth Cohen, social history methods were hardly static, and social analysis could reveal patterns of differentiated but interrelated cultural experience. (8) I think it is time to reacquaint ourselves with these frameworks, with social historians' ways of asking questions and organizing research before our current investment in cultural history dissolves our thinking into a dew.

To illustrate what I think some of the problems are that plague cultural history and how social history could help I want to begin with a recent experience at a graduate oral examination. In this exam, I asked a very capable student whose subfield was the history of gender and sexuality, what some of the major changes were in sexuality in the twentieth century. His answer included a good discussion of what he had learned about homosexuality (especially as it became a category of self-identification), and a little bit about (female) prostitution. He had nothing at all to say about contraception, the sexuality of youth and adolescence, the nature of male-female relations in the family, or issues relating to fidelity-adultery. I told him then, and I am telling the audience of the Journal of Social History now, that I think this is bizarre, though quite in line with what has happened as social history questions have become the subject matter of cultural historians. In this process, questions concerning the experience of most people have dropped from sight, replaced with issues about sexuality on the margins. To my mind, this has had some benefits as new questions and practices have complemented earlier concerns about middle class or working class behavior. We do need to know about homosexuality and prostitution, and indeed about sex with children (although this fraught subject is much more rarely studied). But students also need to know if and how marital sex changed, and its meaning and consequences.

In many ways cultural history has largely ignored this subject because studying "normal" sexuality may appear to be a way of legitimizing it. By bringing more marginal sexual practices out from the shadows, cultural historians expose the presumed hegemonic assumptions to which social historians had previously been tied. But, cultural history, in the absence of theories about ordinary experience (apart from issues of cultural power) as supplied by economists, sociologists, and psychologists (dreaded behavioral scientists), even by biologists, has begun seriously to erode historical knowledge about large slices of human experience. This very good graduate student was simply incapable of discussing questions about the history of a whole range of sexual practices because these had been deemed no longer worthy of "privileged" attention by recent cultural history.

There are, I think, at least two reasons for this development in cultural history. The first is methodological. Cultural history has become concerned with ferreting out areas of culture that were once made marginal because they were statistically small, and cultural historians have been eager to show how the categorization and treatment of deviancy reflect dominant cultural paradigms. Ever since Foucault made us hyperaware of issues of power, postmodern thought has focused on the fringes as a way to deconstruct the center. Attached to this methodology is also a second, political reason. This ferreting out also legitimates the fringe and denies the privilege of the center (hence the hesitation to study sex with children). Social history today is a necessary counterbalance not to the political values but to this tendency of cultural history to search out the obscure in an effort to reduce the importance of the center.

A second problem with cultural history concerns the means by which the center is and is not studied. Cultural history, unlike social history, often depends on eccentric bits of evidence, carefully and intensively examined (often in the light of postmodern theory). Historians first learned to seek out such seemingly insignificant fragments from Clifford Geertz and other anthropologists and to argue that they served as a lens on the center. (9) Cultural historians' methods tend to the hermeneutic and they can therefore literally build a mountain around a molehill and that molehill can lie on the periphery of the subject. This is why cultural historians can imagine that by studying a cleverly directed movie, that few people saw, they can reveal fundamental social beliefs. While Geertz always showed how the symbolic cultural performance was connected to the society, increasingly today, the connections have become obscure, riddled by theoretical language, rather than made instrumental through effective historical detail.

Social history depends on a clear definition of the central problem, and promotes a view that assumes that to understand social experience requires first a clear sense of just who we are talking about since experience is not uniform, but varies by social position. Then social history assumes that we have some theoretical framework which allows us to make broad conclusions from systematic forms of evidence (a census sample, or a local community study are obvious but not exclusive examples). Thus, social historians seek, wherever possible, to find large amounts of evidence that can be analyzed and whose connection to the central question can be clearly established. Good examples of effective analysis of census materials are the recent studies of and conclusions about extended family decline and life course transitions in twentieth century America by Steven Ruggles and David Stevens, respectively. (10) It is a mistake, however, to believe that the methods of social history cannot be applied to marginal groups, or that these depend on quantifiable sources. But even if the evidence we have is less than census quality, social historians strive to understand it rigorously. An outstanding example of social history applied to cultural issues and so-called marginal groups is George Chauncey's Gay New York, which approaches the experiences of homosexuals in a single location over time with depth and subtlety. As he digs out all sorts of excellent sources which he uses both critically and sympathetically, Chauncey uses New York as a kind of map, within which he carefully structures his understanding of changing practices and community development. (11)

Too much cultural history today, whatever its subject, has none of the moorings that Chauncey so effectively provides and the ballast of exact detail applied to specifically defined groups. Social historians were often accused in the past of giving the illusion of certainty, because their conscious use of theory together with systematic evidence gave off an air of positivism. No more than others do most social historians suffer from the arrogance of this illusion. And postmodern cultural history just as often radiates an insider knowingness whose obvious validity is no more questioned than the Marx-based, Merton-based, or Becker-based social history of the past. All historians can stand to take some lessons from historians like Richard Hofstadter whose sense of the impermanence of all historical conclusions, as of all human enterprises, was captured in the spirit of his writing. (12)

In response to the perceived misplaced certainty of social history, we suffer today from the reverse as cultural history threatens us with fuzziness, inexactness, and analytic solipsism of grand conclusions positioned on erratic data. I want to be clear about what I mean by these terms. As cultural history has moved away from categorizing people and assuming that they operate from within those categories, and toward examining the larger practices through which people are enculturated by some hegemonic power, the differences that were once captured by historians who insisted on the significance of social location have melted away. Despite some important exceptions, we are, too often, given an undifferentiated audience of those exposed to or part of some cultural performance. As culture is defined in terms of vast, undifferentiated forces or represented by the individual "exemplary case" cultural historians today could well use the finer traceries created by social categories applied with a deft hand and kept historically responsive that good social historians were able to provide in the past. It may also be a good time to remind cultural historians that the constant self-fashioning which is taken for granted in modern societies as we change our clothing, amusements, lovers, and even bodies may not have been quite so available to most people in the past whose lives were constrained by different circumstances. This does not mean that there were not margins for choice, or exceptional contexts even in the past when identities were fluid, or that some groups, such as immigrants and actresses did not engage in self-revision. It does mean that exceptions cannot provide an effective substitute for studying more general experience, or at least for demonstrating how that experience can be generalized.

As they try to compensate for the social historical tendency to speak about group behaviors as if groups actually behaved (which they sometimes actually do), cultural historians have also turned to techniques of micro-narratives and micro-analysis. Thus, while social historians too often write as if the individual can be represented in the normal curve of the group, cultural historians act as if the experience of many can be captured in the one or few cases that can be brought fully under the microscope of cultural analysis. By bringing individuals back into view, cultural historical methods remedy the philosophical problem created by social history, but not the empirical issues involved. For the working historian, micro-histories are fun since they allow us to experience the intimate connections that have always been available to students of uniquely important figures like kings, presidents, or philosophers. We can linger over phrases, analyze individual psyches, dwell on unexpected turns. I enjoyed doing this very much when I studied Leopold and Loeb. (13) But what could I really know about other 1920s teenagers from these two pampered, paranoid, and famous murderers? Without lots of other kinds of evidence, independently acquired, evidence that has been developed by social historians who examine large swaths of data, the individual culturally resonant case cannot be made historically meaningful. Cultural history without the widescope research provided by social history lends itself to the brilliant (and too often, not so brilliant) speculations that depend on what a historian has been reading over the course of the year, rather than what aspects of society he has examined in detail. What makes Linda Gordon's Great Arizona Orphan Abduction speak so effectively about a particular historical incident is the accumulation of evidence about a whole range of social issues--the work of a generation of social historians who have studied labor, women, race, and class--which Gordon can draw upon and use to stiffen her fascinating story with historical importance. (14)

In no small part, the attraction of cultural history for many (including myself) is that it allows for a release of imagination, often by providing us with real people and their puzzling lives, and imagination is always a tonic for research-driven people. But what historians are most in need of today is not so much unfettered imagination as disciplined imagination. And nowhere is this discipline more available than in the questions, methods, and devotion to hard work in primary sources that was the glory of social history in its prime. We cultural historians have never needed social historians more than we do today. We need to ask much more carefully constructed and more limited questions about culture. And we need to ask searching questions about the theories that have become the commonplace of cultural analysis. We need to make explicit the connections between the theory and the historical behavior, and not speak about them in telegraphic or glancing ways, which takes for granted what needs to he examined. If Parsons can be wrong, so can Foucault. But most of all, we need to return to that aspect of social history which asked sharply put questions and communicated them through the manner in which the research was organized. Whether our data involve a systematically assembled set or scattered pieces, the best social history always had a clarity that prided itself on showing the reader how the conclusions were drawn from the evidence (and how they could be challenged). Too much cultural history aims to dazzle and hides the process of hard work that leads to understanding a problem, a process that defines really good history of any kind--whether about politics, society or culture. There are critical areas to which social historians can make an important contribution. Among these are the many areas in which we too often find our graduate students ignorant of the details of fundamental matters which we first brought into historical discussion. Social historians need to take up this challenge and the many others that have become apparent by linking both our methods and our knowledge to the continuing evolution of fields of inquiry which social history first brought into the center of historical study.

Department of History

Berkeley, CA 94720

ENDNOTES

(1.) See especially Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976), and Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordon Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).

(2.) An influential source for this perspective was Stephen Greenblatt's important book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980).

(3.) Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress, Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, MA., 1964).

(4.) Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA., 1983).

(5.) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, (London, 1970) was fundamental to this process, but other works by Michel Foucault also transformed historical work. These include Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (first published in English in 1965); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (first published in English in 1977); The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, volume I (1978) and The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume II (1985).

(6.) Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), which contains her important essays published earlier.

(7.) See especially, Larry Wolff, "When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment," Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (1998), 377-401; and Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna: Postcards from the End of the World (New York, 1988, 1995).

(8.) Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York, 1990).

(9.) Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), which includes the very famous essay on the Balinese cockfight, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight."

(10.) Steven Ruggles, "The Transformation of American Family Structure," American Historical Review, 99 (February 1994), 103-128); David A. Stevens, "New Evidence on the Timing of Early Life Course Transitions: The United States 1900-1980," Journal of Family History, 15 (1990), 163-178.

(11.) George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994).

(12.) See especially, Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968); America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York, 1971).

(13.) "Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture," Journal of American History, 80 (December 1993), 919-951); and Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York, 1997).

(14.) Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orpan Abduction (Cambridge, MA, 1999). See also my review of this book in American Historical Review, 106 (April 2001), 581-582.

By Paula S. Fass

University of California at Berkeley