Montaigne y la idea del ensayo, Peter Burke
Grabación MP3
lunes 29 de diciembre de 2008
Calmarias e tormentas no oceano midiático, entrevista con Dellano Rios.
CADERNO 3
Por formação, o inglês Peter Burke é um historiador. Suas preocupações teóricas - o estudo da cultura, entrecruzado por reflexões acerca das comunicações e do conhecimento - o conduziu a um ponto intercessão, no qual dialogam disciplinas como a história, a antropologia, a sociologia e as teorias da mídia. Em entrevista ao Caderno 3, por e-mail, Burke falou sobre as transformações da mídia e os desafios das pesquisas de comunicação
Nos últimos tempos, temos visto jornalismo e história cada vez mais associados. Certas teorias vêem muitas afinidades entre as duas áreas. Além disso, muitos jornalistas têm escrito livros sobre temas e personalidades históricas. Quais são os pontos mais frágeis dessa ligação?
Hoje vemos uma dupla ligação entre os historiadores e os jornalistas, uma vez que alguns historiadores (entre eles, eu mesmo) escrevem para jornais, enquanto que alguns jornalistas tem escrito livros de história. Creio que esta relação é positiva, já que diferentes tipos de pessoas têm habilidades e pontos de vista diferentes. Podemos dizer que a história é importante demais para ser confiada apenas aos historiadores! Mas também existem alguns riscos, e, para mim, o mais óbvio é o dos jornalistas que escrevem sobre temáticas históricas, especialmente do período anterior à (digamos) 1900, sem que tenham uma formação historiográfica. Os jornalistas que lidam com a história são aptos a trabalhar de forma crítica com suas “fontes”, no entanto diferentes tipos de fontes, dos períodos diversos que se pesquisa, apresentam tipos de problemas que também são diferentes. Neste caso, a melhor solução seria ter uma colaboração entre um historiador profissional e o jornalista, mesmo que todo o trabalho deste historiador seja ler o manuscrito e fazer alguns comentários, antes do livro ser publicado!
Me parece que, no passado, o jornalismo tinha uma papel político mais marcante - e não apenas no sentido defender os interesses das elites. Neste século, o jornalismo se transformou, rapidamente, em um produto que é determinado pelas leis de mercado. Que papel o jornalismo ainda pode desempenhar neste contexto?
Até onde sei, desde a invenção dos jornais e revistas no século 17, o jornalismo tem sido orientado para o mercado. Isso não impediu os jornalistas de desempenharem um papel político, na Revolução Francesa, no século 19 e assim por diante. Por que isto não poderia acontecer hoje em dia? Acaso os editores e donos das empresas jornalísticas estão dando aos jornalistas menos liberdade do que antes? Ou nós ainda podemos encontrar jornalistas desempenhando este papel político, como acredito ser possível encontrar na Grã-Bretanha?
É possível criar uma teoria geral da imprensa? Ou, para compreender a coisa toda, a melhor saída seria uma grande quantidade de estudos locais?
Eu não levaria a sério qualquer teoria geral da imprensa que não se baseasse em um grande número de estudos empíricos - o que implica em estudos locais. Por outro lado, quem faz estudos locais precisa de uma teoria, ainda que provisória, para testar em sua investigação, a fim de produzir uma análise, bem como para fazer uma descrição.
Penso que a maior parte das pesquisas se concentra no produto em detrimento do modo de produção. Ao proceder desta forma, a academia não estaria deixando de discutir os conflitos centrais da imprensa?
Acho que você está certo quando fala de uma ênfase excessiva sobre o produto, como resultado, sem dúvidas, da maior acessibilidade deste em comparação com o trabalho necessário para reconstruir o processo de produção. No que diz respeito aos últimos tempos, os métodos do jornalismo investigativo podem ser aplicados ao próprio jornalismo - entrevistando editores, repórteres, proprietários de jornais. Para o passado mais remoto, a dificuldade de encontrar fontes é um problema mais grave -, mas eu concordo com você que o trabalho tem de ser feito!
Hans Belting acusou a história da arte de não dar conta de seu objeto. Esta, se concentraria apenas na produção de determinadas linguagens, reconhecidos por classes sociais dominantes de determinados países. A história da mídia não sofreria de um problema similar?
Não tenho certeza se entendi sua pergunta. No caso da “arte” (como algo oposto às imagens, uma distinção que Belting enfatiza), o próprio conceito está ligado às elites culturais. As “obras de arte” foram durante muito tempo associadas, primeiro, aos mecenas e colecionadores ricos; em seguida, aos críticos e “especialistas” (connoisseurs); e, finalmente, aos museus e galerias, nos quais o acesso costuma ser limitado. Não admira, portanto, que o conceito de “arte” esteja em crise, o que coloca problemas aos historiadores da arte. Historiadores de alguns dos principais jornais do século XIX, entre eles o Times, talvez tenham que enfrentar um problema semelhante, com o conceito de “opinião pública” (entendida como a opinião de um pequeno grupo de pessoas) no lugar de “arte”. Mas muitos dos meios de comunicação, dos jornais populares do fim do século XIX ao rádio, à televisão e à Internet, são acessíveis a muitas mais pessoas, o que muda completamente a situação.
Alguns autores falam de um desaparecimento da imprensa, no meio impresso. No entanto, já se falou do desaparecimento da pintura por conta do advento da fotografia; do cinema, por conta da TV. Com o impresso pode se reinventar para sobreviver?
Na minha opinião, o completo desaparecimento da mídia impressa é tão improvável quanto a sua persistência inalterada. Para tomar o modelo do seu exemplo, da pintura e da fotografia, ou o exemplo, na história da comunicação, do manuscrito após a invenção da imprensa, ou do rádio na era da televisão, eu apostaria na sobrevivência do impresso, mas também no declínio de sua importância, associada a uma mudança de função, na qual este se tornaria cada vez mais especializado. É bom pensar a “mídia” no plural, como uma espécie de pacote ou, se preferir, um sistema. Ao se introduzir um novo elemento no sistema, todas suas outras partes, incluindo a divisão do trabalho entre elas, vão se transformar.
A abordagem de temas amplos, como a cultura, a informação e a comunicação, têm sido reorientados a partir da experiência da Internet. A web é um ponto central da cultura moderna ocidental ou esta é uma miragem causada pelas teorias?
Ainda é muito cedo para avaliar as conseqüências culturais do advento da Internet, que só se tornou disponível de maneira mais ampla por volta de 1994! É claro que ela teve um rápido impacto sobre a vida cotidiana de muitos cidadãos, e na minha própria vida. No entanto, o quão profundo é este impacto é algo mais difícil de se dizer. Sem dúvida, a Internet acelerou os processos de busca de informações e de comunicação entre pessoas, mas - para voltar ao que disse antes, ela é apenas parte de um pacote. Só estamos começando a aprender a explorar esta nova mídia, descobrindo suas fraquezas e seus pontos fortes. Por esta razão, acredito que falar que a rede já produziu uma reorientação da cultura é, para usar suas palavras, uma miragem teórica.
O surgimento da Internet já foi comparado ao invento de Gutenberg. O impacto produzido por um e outro são da mesma ordem de grandeza?
Se você tivesse vivido na Europa em 1464 e perguntasse a um estudioso sobre o impacto da imprensa, ele provavelmente teria tido muito pouco a dizer. Por 1500, por outro lado, você teria ouvido tanto elogios como críticas à nova invenção. Você me daria mais algumas décadas para pensar na sua pergunta? o
DELLANO RIOS
Repórter
Por formação, o inglês Peter Burke é um historiador. Suas preocupações teóricas - o estudo da cultura, entrecruzado por reflexões acerca das comunicações e do conhecimento - o conduziu a um ponto intercessão, no qual dialogam disciplinas como a história, a antropologia, a sociologia e as teorias da mídia. Em entrevista ao Caderno 3, por e-mail, Burke falou sobre as transformações da mídia e os desafios das pesquisas de comunicação
Nos últimos tempos, temos visto jornalismo e história cada vez mais associados. Certas teorias vêem muitas afinidades entre as duas áreas. Além disso, muitos jornalistas têm escrito livros sobre temas e personalidades históricas. Quais são os pontos mais frágeis dessa ligação?
Hoje vemos uma dupla ligação entre os historiadores e os jornalistas, uma vez que alguns historiadores (entre eles, eu mesmo) escrevem para jornais, enquanto que alguns jornalistas tem escrito livros de história. Creio que esta relação é positiva, já que diferentes tipos de pessoas têm habilidades e pontos de vista diferentes. Podemos dizer que a história é importante demais para ser confiada apenas aos historiadores! Mas também existem alguns riscos, e, para mim, o mais óbvio é o dos jornalistas que escrevem sobre temáticas históricas, especialmente do período anterior à (digamos) 1900, sem que tenham uma formação historiográfica. Os jornalistas que lidam com a história são aptos a trabalhar de forma crítica com suas “fontes”, no entanto diferentes tipos de fontes, dos períodos diversos que se pesquisa, apresentam tipos de problemas que também são diferentes. Neste caso, a melhor solução seria ter uma colaboração entre um historiador profissional e o jornalista, mesmo que todo o trabalho deste historiador seja ler o manuscrito e fazer alguns comentários, antes do livro ser publicado!
Me parece que, no passado, o jornalismo tinha uma papel político mais marcante - e não apenas no sentido defender os interesses das elites. Neste século, o jornalismo se transformou, rapidamente, em um produto que é determinado pelas leis de mercado. Que papel o jornalismo ainda pode desempenhar neste contexto?
Até onde sei, desde a invenção dos jornais e revistas no século 17, o jornalismo tem sido orientado para o mercado. Isso não impediu os jornalistas de desempenharem um papel político, na Revolução Francesa, no século 19 e assim por diante. Por que isto não poderia acontecer hoje em dia? Acaso os editores e donos das empresas jornalísticas estão dando aos jornalistas menos liberdade do que antes? Ou nós ainda podemos encontrar jornalistas desempenhando este papel político, como acredito ser possível encontrar na Grã-Bretanha?
É possível criar uma teoria geral da imprensa? Ou, para compreender a coisa toda, a melhor saída seria uma grande quantidade de estudos locais?
Eu não levaria a sério qualquer teoria geral da imprensa que não se baseasse em um grande número de estudos empíricos - o que implica em estudos locais. Por outro lado, quem faz estudos locais precisa de uma teoria, ainda que provisória, para testar em sua investigação, a fim de produzir uma análise, bem como para fazer uma descrição.
Penso que a maior parte das pesquisas se concentra no produto em detrimento do modo de produção. Ao proceder desta forma, a academia não estaria deixando de discutir os conflitos centrais da imprensa?
Acho que você está certo quando fala de uma ênfase excessiva sobre o produto, como resultado, sem dúvidas, da maior acessibilidade deste em comparação com o trabalho necessário para reconstruir o processo de produção. No que diz respeito aos últimos tempos, os métodos do jornalismo investigativo podem ser aplicados ao próprio jornalismo - entrevistando editores, repórteres, proprietários de jornais. Para o passado mais remoto, a dificuldade de encontrar fontes é um problema mais grave -, mas eu concordo com você que o trabalho tem de ser feito!
Hans Belting acusou a história da arte de não dar conta de seu objeto. Esta, se concentraria apenas na produção de determinadas linguagens, reconhecidos por classes sociais dominantes de determinados países. A história da mídia não sofreria de um problema similar?
Não tenho certeza se entendi sua pergunta. No caso da “arte” (como algo oposto às imagens, uma distinção que Belting enfatiza), o próprio conceito está ligado às elites culturais. As “obras de arte” foram durante muito tempo associadas, primeiro, aos mecenas e colecionadores ricos; em seguida, aos críticos e “especialistas” (connoisseurs); e, finalmente, aos museus e galerias, nos quais o acesso costuma ser limitado. Não admira, portanto, que o conceito de “arte” esteja em crise, o que coloca problemas aos historiadores da arte. Historiadores de alguns dos principais jornais do século XIX, entre eles o Times, talvez tenham que enfrentar um problema semelhante, com o conceito de “opinião pública” (entendida como a opinião de um pequeno grupo de pessoas) no lugar de “arte”. Mas muitos dos meios de comunicação, dos jornais populares do fim do século XIX ao rádio, à televisão e à Internet, são acessíveis a muitas mais pessoas, o que muda completamente a situação.
Alguns autores falam de um desaparecimento da imprensa, no meio impresso. No entanto, já se falou do desaparecimento da pintura por conta do advento da fotografia; do cinema, por conta da TV. Com o impresso pode se reinventar para sobreviver?
Na minha opinião, o completo desaparecimento da mídia impressa é tão improvável quanto a sua persistência inalterada. Para tomar o modelo do seu exemplo, da pintura e da fotografia, ou o exemplo, na história da comunicação, do manuscrito após a invenção da imprensa, ou do rádio na era da televisão, eu apostaria na sobrevivência do impresso, mas também no declínio de sua importância, associada a uma mudança de função, na qual este se tornaria cada vez mais especializado. É bom pensar a “mídia” no plural, como uma espécie de pacote ou, se preferir, um sistema. Ao se introduzir um novo elemento no sistema, todas suas outras partes, incluindo a divisão do trabalho entre elas, vão se transformar.
A abordagem de temas amplos, como a cultura, a informação e a comunicação, têm sido reorientados a partir da experiência da Internet. A web é um ponto central da cultura moderna ocidental ou esta é uma miragem causada pelas teorias?
Ainda é muito cedo para avaliar as conseqüências culturais do advento da Internet, que só se tornou disponível de maneira mais ampla por volta de 1994! É claro que ela teve um rápido impacto sobre a vida cotidiana de muitos cidadãos, e na minha própria vida. No entanto, o quão profundo é este impacto é algo mais difícil de se dizer. Sem dúvida, a Internet acelerou os processos de busca de informações e de comunicação entre pessoas, mas - para voltar ao que disse antes, ela é apenas parte de um pacote. Só estamos começando a aprender a explorar esta nova mídia, descobrindo suas fraquezas e seus pontos fortes. Por esta razão, acredito que falar que a rede já produziu uma reorientação da cultura é, para usar suas palavras, uma miragem teórica.
O surgimento da Internet já foi comparado ao invento de Gutenberg. O impacto produzido por um e outro são da mesma ordem de grandeza?
Se você tivesse vivido na Europa em 1464 e perguntasse a um estudioso sobre o impacto da imprensa, ele provavelmente teria tido muito pouco a dizer. Por 1500, por outro lado, você teria ouvido tanto elogios como críticas à nova invenção. Você me daria mais algumas décadas para pensar na sua pergunta? o
DELLANO RIOS
Repórter
Context in Context
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v008/8.1burke.html
Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
Context is a term that has come into more and more frequent use in the last thirty or forty years in a number of disciplines--among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology. A trawl through the on-line catalogue of the Cambridge University Library in 1999 produced references to 1,453 books published since 1978 with the word context in the title (and 377 more with contexts in the plural). There have been good reasons for this development. The attempt to place ideas, utterances, texts, and other artifacts "in context" has led to many insights. All the same there is a price to be paid, the neglect of other approaches and also the inflation or dilution of the central concept, which is sometimes used--ironically enough, out of context--as an intellectual slogan or shibboleth.
To analyze both the present situation and past ones, it is surely necessary to re-place context in its context--or better, in its many contexts, linguistic, literary, ideological, social, psychological, political, cultural, and material. It is also important to ask to whom--or against whom--a given proposition about context was directed (scriptural fundamentalists, for example, believers in eternal wisdom, formalist art historians, enthusiasts for generalization in social science, [End Page 152] and so on). Changes in the uses of the concept demand to be discussed, and in a manner as reflexive as possible, placing each argument in its own contexts.
II
It may be useful to begin by sketching the history of the term. A more detailed history, in the style of Reinhart Koselleck's Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe--which has no entry for context--is much to be desired, and would replace the word in its linguistic and cultural field. Like text, context is a metaphor from weaving. Contexere is classical Latin for "to weave," while the noun contextus was used in the sense of "connection." As far as I know, there was no classical Latin term for what we know as context: this does not mean (pace Lucien Febvre) that the idea was lacking, for treatises on conduct and rhetoric emphasized the need to adjust what is said or done and how it is said or done to the time, place, public, and so forth, in order to persuade effectively. The classical division of speeches into three genres, epideictic, deliberative, and forensic, was according to social contexts--those of the funeral, the council, and the courtroom. Speech and behavior were supposed to be governed by the principle of appropriateness, which Aristotle called to prepon and Cicero, decorum. One locus classicus expressing this principle is Cicero's treatise De officiis with its stress on the power of place and time: Tanta vis est et loci et temporis (bk. 1, chap. 40). Another is Quintilian's statement in his Orator that speaking should be "apt" in the sense of "accommodated to the topics and the listeners" (accomodatus rebus atquepersonis: bk. 11, chap.1, sec. 1).
It was in the fourth century a.d. that another noun, contextio, came into use to describe the text surrounding a given passage that one wishes to interpret. Augustine, for example, in the course of a discussion of biblical interpretation, used the term a number of times in phrases such as contextiosermonis or contextioscripturae. 1 It may well seem paradoxical that Augustine should have been, if not the inventor, at least one of the first to employ the term context, given his concern with a "figural" interpretation of Scripture that appears, at least to modern readers, to be a denial of context. However, it might be argued that it was precisely Augustine's interest in figura that made him more conscious of the opposite of figural interpretation: a literal or contextual reading.
The terms just discussed virtually dropped out of use in the Middle Ages, apart from contextio, which came to mean "literary composition." 2 This absence [End Page 153] does not entitle us to conclude that no one at all in this long period was interested in the kind of problems we call contextual. The interest was sometimes expressed by means of other words, notably circumstantiae ("the things that stand around"), a term employed in biblical exegesis. In the ninth century, for example, Sedulius Scotus enunciated the rule of "seven circumstances"--person, fact, cause, time, place, mode, and topic. His debt to the categories of classical logic and rhetoric will be obvious enough. In the thirteenth century, once again in an exegetical context, Aquinas regularly referred to what he called "literary circumstance" (circumstantialitterae). Augustine too had used the term circumstantia in this sense. 3 All the same, references to circumstances were relatively rare in the Middle Ages, and the emphasis on allegorical interpretations of the Bible ran counter to contextual thinking.
While the absence of a particular word does not prove the absence of interest in a topic, the rise of a new term or the revival of an old one usually expresses increasing interest or awareness. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in vernacular languages such as Italian, French, English, or German, the words contesto, contexture, context, and Kontext began to be used, usually in discussions of the interpretation of texts, especially the Bible and Aristotle's. The meaning of the term gradually expanded at this time. The earlier usage survived, and the Encyclopédie (1754) still defined contexte as "l'ensemble du texte qui entoure un extrait et qui éclaire son sens." However, the term also came to refer to the coherence of an entire text. Thus Furetière's dictionary (1690) defined contexture as "liaison des parties dans l'ensemble d'une composition littéraire." One local context for discussions of contextus was the practice of translation, encouraging awareness of the need to attend not only to individual words but to the relations between them. The term was also invoked in discussions of authenticity. The ecclesiastical historian William Cave, for instance, enunciating seven rules for distinguishing genuine works by the Fathers from false ones, formulated the fourth rule as "the style and the whole texture of the work" (stylus totiusque orationis contextus). 4
A third and more extended sense of the term included the intention of the writer, often described as his scopus or in English as "scope." Thus Galileo, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess (1615) about the use of the Bible in disputes over natural philosophy, quoted Augustine on contextio sermonis to support his argument that the Bible was often interpreted "in senses so far from the real intention of the scripture" (in sensi tanto remoti dall'intenzione retta di essa Scrittura) that it was better not to quote it at all in these debates. 5 A generation later, another natural [End Page 154] philosopher, Robert Boyle, referred to divines who misinterpret scripture through neglect of "the context and the speaker's scope." 6 In similar fashion, the church historian Gottfried Arnold, discussing the ideas of the heretic Kaspar Schwenckfeld, advised the reader to set his words in "the full context" (dem gantzen Context). 7 The concern with intention or purpose ("scope") deserves to be noted, including the metaphorical or semimetaphorical attribution of intention to a text, the Bible, or the laws (the mens, sententia, or voluntas legum). 8
However, in the early modern period, much of the discussion of what we would term context, whether in law, ethics, political thought, or theology, was phrased in terms of "circumstances" (as in the Middle Ages) or "occasions"--or in terms of what Machiavelli called the "quality of the times" (la qualità de'tempi)--to which political leaders needed to adapt themselves if they wished to succeed. Jurists discussed circumstantial evidence and also the place of circumstances in interpreting and applying laws. 9 In the case of ethics, this was the age of the rise of casuistry in both the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. Casuistry is a pejorative eighteenth-century term for the study of "cases of conscience," the ethical equivalent of case law, replacing the application of general rules by the investigation of particular circumstances. 10
Discussions of the interpretation of the Bible regularly invoked the need to take circumstances into consideration. The Lutheran divine Matthas Flacius, for example, whose Clavis Scripturae (1567) was discussed by Dilthey a century ago as a milestone in the development of hermeneutics, discussed six circumstantiae (one fewer than Sedulius seven centuries earlier): the person, the time, the style, the intention, the place, and the instrument. Under the heading "person," for instance, he considered who was speaking to whom, about what, and in the presence of whom. 11 In similar fashion, writers on the art of preaching stressed the need to "accommodate" sermons both to the occasion on which they were delivered (such as Lent or Easter), and to the audience, whether clerical or lay, learned or ignorant.
An outstanding example of contextual thinking in early modern style is the work of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini. In a passage of his aphorisms on politics, Guicciardini notes "how mistaken are those who quote the [End Page 155] Romans at every step," since "one would have to have a city with exactly the same conditions as theirs" for their example to be relevant. Again, Guicciardini's "Considerations" on the Discourses of his friend Machiavelli criticized the generalizations because they were "advanced too absolutely" [posto troppo assolutamente]. Guicciardini wished to make more distinctions, "because the cases are different" [perché i casi sono vari], and human affairs "differ according to the times and the other events" [si variasecondo la condizione de' tempi ed altre occorrenzie]. 12
In other words, Guicciardini criticized Machiavelli for not paying sufficient attention to what the Protestant soldier François de La Noue--commenting on Guicciardini's own History of Italy and following the classical rhetoricians--called "les circonstances des temps, lieux et personnes." As La Noue remarked elsewhere, adapting a commonplace, a particular course of action does not suit all countries any more than a slipper fits all feet [comme un soulier ne convient pas à tous pieds, aussi un fait ne se peut approprier à tous pais]. 13 A similar point was reiterated in Montaigne's essays, one of the most powerful sixteenth-century criticisms of the traditional idea of exemplarity--of the relevance of ancient examples as a guide to conduct. 14 Such problems also underlie a seventeenth-century debate about the study of politics, whether it should be regarded as a science formulating rules or as the art of distinguishing exceptions.
One cultural context for these linguistic changes is provided by the Renaissance and Reformation. The movement to revive antiquity led to awareness of differences between the culture of the idealized classical past and that of later periods, for example between classical Latin and later Latin, a point already prominent in Lorenzo Valla's argument that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. 15 As the movement increased in importance, tensions within it became more obvious. Erasmus's Ciceronianus is the classic discussion of the problem of imitation, in which the question arises whether Cicero, if he had been alive when the dialogue was written, in 1528, would have spoken and written as he did in Rome in his own day. Although Erasmus does not use the word context, his dialogue discusses fundamental problems of what we have come to call contextualization.
As for the Reformation, including the Counter-Reformation, the attempt to apply biblical precepts to everyday life in a literal-minded fashion, especially by Protestant "fundamentalists" (as we might call them), raised the problem whether or not these precepts were intended to be generally applicable. In [End Page 156] England, for example, Richard Hooker argued that the laws of the Church needed to be modified to respond to "alteration of time and place," while King James I, in controversy with the group it remains convenient to describe as the Puritans, declared that the law of Moses was not universal. It was simply the law of ancient Israel, "only fit for that country, that people and that time." 16 Again, in their remarks on context already quoted, Galileo and Boyle were reacting to Catholic and Protestant attempts to claim that the conclusions of natural philosophers were wrong because they contradicted the Bible.
On the other hand, the thrust of the movements we call--with some hesitations--the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was anticontextual in the sense that participants, fascinated by the geometrical method, were concerned with formulating laws of nature and society, generalizations that would be valid whatever the circumstances of time, place, or persons. As the philosopher Stephen Toulmin has argued, this "attempt to decontextualise philosophy and natural science" needs to be replaced in "its own social and historical context" as a quest for certainty that becomes more pressing in an age of ideological conflict, notably during the Thirty Years' War. 17
All the same, it would be unwise to describe the eighteenth century as without a sense of context. Some thinkers expressed distrust in universal rules of behavior or of law. The advice on conduct given in the Spectator, for instance, was qualified, as in the case of the casuists, by concern with particular circumstances. 18 In his New Science (bk. 2, secs. 782, 902), Giambattista Vico tried to explain the barbarous behavior of Achilles and Agamemnon as Homer had described it by placing it in the context of Greek customs in that heroic age.
Collingwood's criticism of Hume for his assumption of the uniformity of human nature is well known, but as Mark Phillips has argued, Hume was well aware of variations in circumstances. For example, Hume reached a more favorable judgment on the Stuarts than did his Whig contemporaries, because he placed their actions in the context of a constitution that, before 1688, was "very ambiguous and undetermin'd." 19 By the late eighteenth century, "Enlightened" attitudes were coming to be viewed as part of an intellectual old regime against which a younger and, as we now say, more historicist generation revolted around [End Page 157] the year 1800, stressing differences between individuals and cultures at the expense of general laws. 20
The Rise of Cultural Context
This "Counter-Enlightenment" was associated with a major expansion in the meaning of the term context, a meaning that continued the emphasis on factors external to the text but increasingly concerned not only the immediate setting of writers and readers but also a more general historical context--and the metaphor of "historical context" was no longer perceived as a metaphor. To some degree, this expansion of meaning might be described as a kind of conceptual imperialism, with context taking over the territory that circumstances had previously occupied. However, a shift is also discernible from what might be called the microcontext of local circumstances to the macrocontext of an entire culture, society, or age. Even when the word context is not employed, there are signs of an increasing interest in locating texts, artifacts, and actions in this way. A famous example is Madame de Staël's essay De lalittérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Her friend James Mackintosh, who had similar interests, stressed the relation between literature and what he called "the state of the general feeling." 21
Within the German tradition of hermeneutics, the customary concern with the immediate context of the passage to be interpreted now widened. In a study published in 1808, for example, the classical scholar Friedrich Ast made distinctions among the literal or grammatical level of interpretation, the historical level (concerned with meaning), and the cultural level (concerned with grasping the spirit [Geist] of antiquity or other periods). Over a century later, Erwin Panofsky would make a similar distinction among three levels in his discussion of the iconographical method. 22
Karl Marx was a contextualist in another sense, concerned to locate consciousness and its expressions within "life," especially social life. Marxists and non-Marxists alike were increasingly concerned with Zusammenhang, a term that came into use in the late eighteenth century to refer to the way in which different beliefs, customs, and so on "hang together." The term was central to the intellectual system of Wilhelm Dilthey, the philosopher and historian who played a key role in widening the art of interpretation from texts to the lives of individuals and groups, from intentions on particular occasions to personality developing over time. In his biography of Schleiermacher, for instance, interpreting the [End Page 158] life of a great interpreter of texts, Dilthey declared his aim as that of describing the intellectual development of his protagonist and the Zusammenhang or links between this development and the cultural movements of the time. Hence Dilthey carefully reconstructed the successive cultural milieux through which Schleiermacher had passed: his family, his education, his circle in Berlin, and the like. 23
An English equivalent for Zusammenhang was context. In the seventeenth century, discussing the impossibility of laying down simple rules of law, Matthew Hale had given an old metaphor a new twist when he wrote of "the texture of human affairs." 24 His comparison was not taken up at the time, but the phrase "moral context," first recorded in 1842, had more success. The success of the "life and times" model of biography in the nineteenth century is another indicator of the sensitivity to wider contexts that had been developing since the 1750s.
Material as well as moral context was taken more seriously in the nineteenth century than before. In archaeology, the increasing concern with stratigraphy in the early nineteenth century implied a displacement of interest from ancient objects in themselves, as studied by traditional antiquarians, to their context or location. 25 The place of debates concerning public museums in the rise of a sharper sense of material context also deserves emphasis. In 1796, for instance, in a letter to General Miranda, and again in 1815, Quatremère de Quincy, a Frenchman, denounced the looting of Italian works of art by Napoleon, Lord Elgin, and others on the grounds that this uprooting or déplacement deprived the objects of their cultural value. Quatremère's point was that the associations, meaning, and power of an artifact depended on its uses and its location. To displace it was to destroy. The appropriate setting for Italian artifacts was Italy itself, which he described as a museum without walls, "le Muséum intégral." 26
Within museums, the principles of classification began to be debated. In the 1780s, the art collection at Vienna was reorganized by schools of art arranged in chronological order. The Louvre followed suit in its Grand Gallery after the Revolution, and Alexandre Le Noir also adopted a chronological system in the new Museum of French Monuments in the 1790s. The point was to clarify the meaning of individual artifacts by placing them in a sequence. 27 Again, Christian [End Page 159] Thomsen, who was asked in 1816 to reorganize the collection of early artifacts in the Danish National Museum, solved the problem by classifying them in their temporal context according to three consecutive ages, defined as the ages of stone, bronze, and iron.
Later in the century, the German anthropologist Franz Boas caused a sensation in museum circles in the United States by arguing that exhibits should not be arranged according to the type of artifact or the stage that the objects represented in an evolutionary sequence. They should be arranged by "culture area." The point of the change in arrangement was that, according to Boas, an object could not be understood "outside of its surroundings," physical and cultural. Hence Boas liked to show what he called "life groups" in the museum, with models of people using the objects, in order, as he put it, "to transport the visitor into foreign surroundings." 28 The surroundings helped viewers to interpret the objects, just as the context helped readers to interpret texts.
In a number of disciplines, in the 1920s and 1930s the term situation came to play a central role. These disciplines included sociology, psychology, history, and above all the relatively new academic subject of anthropology, which Franz Boas, moving from the museum to the university, helped to establish in the United States.
For instance, Karl Mannheim, one of the pioneers of the sociology of knowledge, treated ideas as socially situated (literally "tied to the situation," Situationsgebunden). In other words, ideas were dependent on the social "location" (Lagerung) or "position" of individuals in groups such as classes or generations. 29 At much the same time in the United States, the sociologist William I. Thomas, concerned with small groups and social action, was developing his idea of the "definition of the situation," and developing his contrast of "commonly and publicly accepted definitions of situations" with "rival definitions." 30
Some students of literature and art were making a sociological turn at this time. Critics sympathetic to Marxism, notably Georg Lukács, emphasized the response of writers to social situations. 31 In England, the influential critic Frank Leavis, although never a Marxist, was concerned, in the words of an early [End Page 160] reviewer, to show the relation of poetry "to the state of culture in which it was produced." A movement for a "social history of art" also developed in the 1930s. Among its leading practitioners were Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser, who were, like Mannheim, members of the Lukács circle in Budapest. After Antal took refuge in England, he introduced this approach to Herbert Read, Anthony Blunt, and John Berger. 32
In psychology, a concern with frame, context, situation, or environment marked a number of enterprises located on the frontier with sociology. Students of memory, notably Maurice Halbwachs, stressed its "social frame" (cadres sociaux), and also the "contextual stimuli" and "contextual cues" that brought memories to the surface. In Russia, Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria argued that the mentality of illiterates was characterized by "concrete or situational thinking." Luria derived his idea of situational thinking from Kurt Goldstein's work on lesions of the brain, which distinguished concrete thought, "bound to the immediate experience of unique objects and situations," from abstract thought, associated with the ability to shift "from one aspect of a situation to another" and so free itself from dependence on context. 33
A general "field theory" of psychology was put forward by Kurt Lewin, using the term field as a synonym for the "lifespace" or environment of an individual or group. Without studying the field, he argued, the behavior of individuals and groups could not be understood. In other words, Lewin practiced what he sometimes called "psychological ecology." His approach might also be described as a "situational psychology," similar in some respects to the situational anthropology and linguistics of the time. 34
In the case of history, we might contrast the French with the English approach. Marc Bloch's famous study Les rois thaumaturges (1924), which does not use the term context, attempts nevertheless to make ideas that now seem alien, like the belief in the supernatural power of the royal touch, intelligible by refusing to treat them in isolated fashion and by showing how attitudes to the powers of kings formed a whole. Drawing on the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and other anthropologists, Bloch explored collective attitudes as part of a belief system. 35 In Britain, a few years later, Herbert Butterfield and R. G. Collingwood concerned themselves with contexts and situations at the individual rather than [End Page 161] the collective level. Butterfield defined the historian's task as that of understanding an individual action, which is "to recover the thousand threads that connect it with other things, to establish it in a system of relations; in other words, to place it in its historical context." For his part, placing more stress on intentions, Collingwood declared that "every event . . . is a conscious reaction to a situation, not the effect of a cause." 36
Collingwood's The Idea of History developed this idea further. "Thinking," he argued, "is never done in vacuo: it is always done by a determinate person in a determinate situation." Collingwood was not thinking of a social situation in Mannheim's sense so much as of a definition of the situation in the style of W. I. Thomas. "The situation," Collingwood insisted, "consists altogether of thoughts." In the case of a political conflict, for instance, "what the historian has to do is to see how the two parties conceived the political situation as it stood." A historian who wants to understand an edict of the emperor Theodosius must not only "envisage the situation with which the emperor was trying to deal" but also "envisage it as that emperor envisaged it." 37
Anthropology is sometimes perceived, not without reason, as the contextual discipline par excellence. More exactly, it became this kind of discipline, after a period in which the ideas of evolution and diffusion were dominant. From the Boas critique of museum displays organized according to stages of human development, it was only a step to the wholesale rejection of evolutionary anthropology, symbolized by Sir James Frazer, as insufficiently sensitive to context. The American Robert Lowie, for example, wrote of what he called the "non-identity" of the identical in different "psychological contexts." 38
The most famous critic of Frazer was Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski was concerned with what he called the "contextual specification of meaning" and the problem of translating the untranslatable. Meaning, he argued, is dependent on the "context of situation" so that "the concept of context has to be broadened" to accommodate this point. 39 Malinowski discussed material culture in terms similar [End Page 162] to those used for discussing language: he took the example of a stick that might be used for digging, punting, walking, or fighting. "In each of these specific uses," he claimed, "the stick is embedded in a different cultural context; that is, put to different uses, surrounded with different ideas, given a different cultural value and as a rule designated by a different name." 40
Malinowski's situational approach was taken further by the so-called Manchester School of anthropology. Max Gluckman, for instance, offered a "situational analysis" of a series of events surrounding the opening of a bridge in Zululand in order to bring social conflicts to light. Drawing on the work of W. I. Thomas as well as that of Max Gluckman, Clyde Mitchell studied social networks from what he called "the situational perspective," while Bruce Kapferer offered, along similar lines, a brilliant interpretation of a conflict "in a work context" among mine employees in Zambia. 41 This focus on face-to-face situations was an attempt to avoid assuming the homogeneity of a whole culture, as so many anthropologists tended to do at the time. 42
The anthropologist who took Malinowski's ideas about context furthest was his former pupil Edward Evans-Pritchard, in his study of witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. The term context does not often appear in this study. 43 What the study does, however, is explore two important ideas that had had or were to have considerable influence in other disciplines: the dependence of thought on situation and the dependence of one belief on others. In the first place, Evans-Pritchard described the ideas of the Azande as "imprisoned in action," going on to explain that "each situation demands the particular pattern of thought appropriate to it. Hence an individual in one situation will employ a notion he excludes in a different situation." 44 In the second place, skepticism about witchcraft, oracles, and magic is difficult for the Azande because "all their beliefs hang together" (compare Zusammenhang). The three phenomena "form an intellectually coherent system. Each explains and proves the other." Witch doctors and laymen are "enclosed in the same network of thought." In the most famous of his various formulations of this idea, Evans-Pritchard declared that, in "this web of belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows." 45 [End Page 163]
The parallel with some of the observations of Vygotsky and Luria is clear enough, even though Evans-Pritchard did not relate the situational thought of the Azande to their illiteracy. The parallel with Bloch's study of the royal touch is even stronger, since Bloch explained the persistence of trust in the touch in terms of its place in a belief system. The study of medieval history that Evans-Pritchard had once pursued was not useless to the mature anthropologist.
III
In the last generation or so, we have been living through what might be called a "contextual turn," on the analogy of so many other turns. One sign of change is a series of terms that, if not always newly coined, are in more common use than before. In English, for example, contextualism (first recorded in 1929, in a philosophical context) and contextualize (1934, in linguistics) have been joined by contextualization (1951, in anthropology) and decontextualize (1971, in sociology). In French, contextuel is recorded from 1963 onward.
Once again, it would be a mistake to place great emphasis on particular words, since other terms--circumstances, situations, and so on--were already in use to discuss these issues. The variety of technical terms is a reminder that similar problems have recurred and have been solved in different ways by various scholars in various disciplines. Yet interdisciplinary discussions of the problems raised by the notion of context are all too rare. 46 Such an analysis might note both borrowings and independent reinventions; it might distinguish analogies between the problems raised in different disciplines from the disanalogies--between the study of texts and, say, ax-heads, between the direct observation of situations and their reconstruction on the basis of documents. The problem is of course that a comparative analysis of this kind would require an acquaintance with a broad range of disciplines.
In the case of theology, for example, comparison would require discussion of the so-called contextual reinterpretation of religion; in ethics, it would be concerned with the rise of a "situationism" that has effectively revived casuistry under another name. 47 In the case of philosophy, the continuing influence of Wittgenstein's emphasis on meaning as use would demand discussion, as would John Austin's analysis of the "occasion" and "context" of utterances. 48 In political science, attention would have to be given to contextual explanations of phenomena [End Page 164] ranging from international relations to election results. 49 In the case of archaeology, the rise of a new contextual approach in Cambridge would merit discussion. Although, as was suggested above, the stratigraphic method implies a tradition of sensitivity to material contexts, "contextual archaeology" is distinctive in its focus on "reading" the meanings and associations of objects and their "contexts of use." 50
In geography, given its essential concern with "environment," a contextual approach might seem to be otiose, but terms such as situation and context are increasingly employed following the Swedish "time-geographer" Torsten Hägerstrand's recommendation to focus on what he calls "the principles of togetherness," especially at a local level. 51 Even in the case of law, which might be said to be a deliberately anticontextual or, better, a decontextualizing enterprise, a series of studies entitled "Law in Context" was planned in 1965 and began to appear in Britain in 1970, while Ronald Dworkin has noted the rise of "context sensitivity" in legal language. 52
The discussion that follows, despite all these possibilities for comparison, will be limited to education, sociolinguistics, literature, and social and cultural history. In educational sociology and psychology, the work of Bernstein, Bruner, and Cole on learning illustrates the contextual trend. 53 In Britain, the sociologist Basil Bernstein's famous contrast between two forms of language, the "restricted" and "elaborated" codes, originally lacked any reference to the word context, but by 1969 Bernstein was describing the codes as respectively "context-dependent" and "context-independent." 54 In the United States, the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner picked up Bernstein's phrases when discussing the role of the school in establishing "context-independent modes of thinking" via literacy. Bruner's earlier discussions of cognitive growth in children had described perception as "field dependent," "non-transformable," or "stuck." 55 Bernstein and [End Page 165] Bruner were of course aware of the earlier work by Vygotsky and Luria. The developmental psychologist Michael Cole and his team, working in Liberia, carried on this tradition in their attempt to explain why Kpelle children "experience a good deal of difficulty with Western-style mathematics," arguing that learning and thinking are shaped by a "cultural context," and that cognitive skills "are closely related to the activities that engage those skills." 56
In the 1950s and 1960s, sociolinguistics (otherwise known as the "sociology of language" or the "ethnography of speaking") became a semiautonomous discipline, with leaders in the field such as Dell Hymes, Joshua Fishman, William Labov, and John Gumperz all emphasizing the human capacity for switching codes or "registers" according to the context or situation. 57 For example, a classic study by Labov, arguing against the idea that black children in the United States were inarticulate, described an experiment to show that "the social situation is the most powerful determinant of verbal behaviour." 58 The parallel with Evans-Pritchard's description of individual Azande as switching concepts will be obvious enough: "An individual in one situation will employ a notion he excludes in a different situation." 59 Folklorists have been studying the performance of oral narratives in a way similar to that of linguists. Attention has been drawn to the "spatial context" of performance, who is standing where, how close to or distant from whom. 60
In sociology, Anthony Giddens has placed considerable stress on "locale" as essential to what he calls the "contextuality" of social interaction, while feminists such as Donna Haraway have revived Mannheim's concept of "situated knowledge," although they define the situation in terms of gender rather than class. 61 Situation was also central to the work of Erving Goffman, whose dramaturgical approach to everyday life stressed the variety of social roles available to individuals and the difference in the "performance" of the same people in different settings--such as the waiter in the restaurant whom customers see as [End Page 166] impassive but who changes demeanor completely when he enters the "back region" of the kitchen. 62 Goffman's achievement might be described as an elaboration of the idea of the "definition of the situation" put forward by an earlier Chicago sociologist, W. I. Thomas.
"Performance" is a concept that has become increasingly central to a number of disciplines, beginning with sociolinguistics. 63 The concept's importance lies in its potential for undermining older kinds of historical (or indeed sociological) explanation. Much human behavior used to be given explanations such as "A said or did X because he or she was a B" (a bourgeois, say, or a Puritan). By contrast, a performance-centered approach encourages the substitution of explanations of the form "A said or did X because he or she was in a situation that required confrontation, compromise, etc." If not exactly a shift from social determinism to individual freedom, this is at least a turn from the idea of fixed reactions, following rules, to the notion of flexible responses--to what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (borrowing from Panofsky, who borrowed from Aquinas, who in turn borrowed from Aristotle) calls a "habitus." 64
In social history, a concern with situation and performance has become increasingly visible. Edward Thompson, for example, discussing what he termed the "plebeian" culture of the eighteenth century, noted a combination of two opposed attitudes to "patricians"--deference and aggression--arguing that "we should take neither the obeisances nor the imprecations as indications of final truth: both could flow from the same mind, as circumstances and calculation of interest allowed." Historians of slavery such as Eugene Genovese have made a similar point about deference as performance, as what the slaves called "putting on." Again, the social historian Peter Bailey has interpreted the deference of the Victorian working class as a performance limited to certain "regions" and laid aside when members of the middle or upper classes were no longer within sight or earshot. The increasing frequency of references to Goffman and Bourdieu in the work of social historians is symptomatic of a general change of mind. 65 [End Page 167]
The concept of performance is more obviously relevant to studies of music, drama, and literature. In ethnomusicology, for instance, a debate has been going on since the 1950s about the degree of emphasis to be given to context. Performative context has come into use to refer to the adaptation of music in performance to the place, the occasion, and the audience. 66 Plays such as Molière's Georges Dandin have also been re-placed in their original "conditions of representation"--Versailles in 1668, in the case of Molière's play, together with the package of court entertainments, including music and ballet, of which the comedy formed a part. 67
Harder to classify as well as more influential has been the movement in literary history, especially the history of English literature, labeled the "New Historicism," and associated with the journal Representations and with scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose. Some New Historicists have been criticized as indifferent to context by supporters of what has been called "Archaeo-Historicism." 68 Like the older historicists, however, the new ones are opposed to the formalist approach. Some of their work is certainly contextualist in the sense of the term discussed in the previous paragraph. Montrose, for example, has re-placed A Midsummer Night's Dream in the performative context of the Elizabethan courtly entertainment of which it originally formed a part. However, he goes on, like earlier social historians of literature, to place these entertainments in the wider contexts of the court and of the distinctive "configurations of gender and power" in Elizabethan England. 69
Still more difficult to categorize is the work of Greenblatt, which is sometimes described as contextual and sometimes as a text-oriented close reading. What he not infrequently does is to juxtapose, compare, and link literary and nonliterary texts from the same culture, such as King Lear and a pamphlet attacking exorcism. Greenblatt avoids the term context, preferring to speak of "circulation" or "negotiation," presumably because he wants to escape from or go beyond the old text-context debate. In a sense, what he is doing, sometimes brilliantly, is placing literary texts in the context of a whole culture. Hence Greenblatt is not so far as he may appear from Dilthey and his Geistesgeschichte, Greenblatt's "negotiation" not so far removed from the traditional idea of Zusammenhang, the New Historicism not so far from the old. [End Page 168]
In art history, especially the history of architecture and sculpture, discussions of the challenges posed by the site for which the work was designed are relatively traditional. What is new is the increasing concern with the original location of paintings, whether they were displayed in churches or in palaces, for instance, or whether they were to be seen alone or as part of an ensemble. Titian's Assumption, for example, painted for the church of the Frari in Venice, appears to have been designed to contrast with the apse behind it, while the composition of his Pesaro Madonna has been described as "a response to the challenge of a particular site." Botticelli's Primavera was originally the backboard of a bed. 70
Increasing attention is also being paid to the microcontext of patronage. Thomas Kaufmann, for instance, in a book that is entitled Court, Cloister and City precisely in order to stress the importance of milieu, has noted shifts in the style of individual artists such as Veit Stoss or Tilman Riemenschneider according to the demands of the patron or the genre of a particular work. In other words, where an artist's style was once taken to be an expression of his or her personality, it is now interpreted, at least on occasion, as a kind of performance, the expression of a social role. Patrons too, King Matthias of Hungary for example, commissioned works in different styles--Gothic as well as Renaissance--on different occasions. 71 Another contextual approach to art is associated with one scholar in particular, Michael Baxandall, a former pupil of F. R. Leavis in Cambridge. In what Baxandall describes as a social history of pictorial style, focused on fifteenth-century Italy, his aim is to relate art to contemporary social practices, notably dancing and gauging barrels. In this respect his work runs parallel to the New Historicism. 72
It is of course in intellectual history that the concern with context is today particularly explicit, as it has been for nearly half a century. It was in the fifties that an American historian of China, Benjamin Schwartz, argued for an approach to the history of ideas in terms of conscious responses to situations (he was referring not to Collingwood but to Mannheim). 73 At much the same time, in Cambridge, Peter Laslett was arguing the case for placing Locke's Second Treatise of Government in a "revised historical context" and treating it as "a response to urgent political circumstances" (the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81). 74 It should be noted, though, that Laslett criticized his predecessors not so much for failing to [End Page 169] pay attention to the context of the book as for placing it in the wrong context (that of the revolution of 1688).
John Pocock, who was a student of Butterfield's at Cambridge in the 1950s, is more ambivalent about the idea of context. Already in 1965 he was warning his readers that the "slogan that ideas ought to be studied in their social and political context is, it seems to me, in danger of becoming a shibboleth" and stating his preference for working on political languages and paradigms. 75 All the same, his Machiavellian Moment (1975) discusses what he calls "the articulation of civic humanist concepts and values under the stresses of the Florentine predicament in the years 1494 to 1530," while his recent Barbarism and Religion (1999) sets out "to effect a series of contextualisations" of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. 76
It is Quentin Skinner, who went to Cambridge a few years later than Pocock, whose work is most closely bound to the idea of context. He uses the term in various ways, primarily linguistic ("context of utterance"), in the second place intellectual, and in the third place political. 77 His approach has a somewhat different context from Pocock's, in the sense that Skinner's developed in reaction to--and against--the assumption of eternal wisdom to be found in American political science and Great Books programs at the time, as well as in reaction to Arthur Lovejoy's approach to the history of "unit-ideas" and to the political philosophy of John Plamenatz. 78
In an adjoining field, the philosophy and history of science, the founding of the journal Science in Context, in 1987, offers another example of context-consciousness, soon followed by a collection of essays on The Scientific Revolution in National Context (1992), and by Steven Shapin's provocative Social History of Truth (1994). 79 A Cambridge journal, Science in Context may be seen as an attempt to emulate the historians of political thought--a return of a compliment, since both Pocock and Skinner have acknowledged debts to the work of Thomas Kuhn. However, the new journal needs to be placed in a disciplinary as well as a local context, and viewed as a response to, or a part of, a continuing debate over the status of scientific knowledge, whether it is genuinely universal or tied to specific [End Page 170] cultures or microenvironments such as laboratories and clinics. The making of general scientific knowledge is now discussed in terms of decontextualization. 80
Outstanding Problems
The gains achieved by the rise of "context-sensitivity" across the humanities can hardly be doubted, from the solution of specific problems such as the underachievement of Kpelle children in mathematics to the questioning of simplistic assumptions about "timeless wisdom" or about human behavior as the blind following of cultural rules. The development of an increasingly rich vocabulary in this field, from context-dependent to decontextualization is a sign of increasing sensitivity, an equivalent for intellectuals of the multiplication of Eskimo words for snow or Zande terms for cattle. This is not to say, however, that approaches that claim to be contextual are exempt from criticism. So it may be useful to collect and link scattered criticisms of the different forms of "contextual analysis" surveyed so far.
To begin with, there is the problem of definition. We have inherited a rich vocabulary from our predecessors, but the key terms are employed in very different ways in different disciplines and even by individual scholars. The term context, like the related term situation, is not as clear as it may look. As we have seen, the concept of context is one that has been defined precisely or vaguely, narrowly or broadly, and employed in both a flexible and a rigid manner. In this respect, it resembles the concept of culture. 81 Marxists and non-Marxists (even anti-Marxists) employ the term. Context is often regarded as local, but the idea of a "global context" is also in circulation. It might well be asked, What is not context?
It is always possible, and often tempting, to be more contextual than thou, or, as the linguist Emmanuel Schegloff has noted, to use the term context to mean "what I noticed about your topic that you didn't write about." 82 Franz Boas, who led a kind of "contextual revolution" in museums, has been criticized for not being contextual enough, at least in his fieldwork, because his theory of culture "allowed him to remove bits of behaviour from their normal context for purposes of recording and analysis"--filming indoor rituals in the open, for instance. 83 [End Page 171] Malinowski has sometimes been criticized for overemphasis on the local context, thus ignoring trade between ethnic groups, for example, and the presence of foreigners, from missionaries to tourists, in the "field." 84
Again, Jack Goody's comparative studies of modes of communication placed certain phenomena, such as "structural amnesia," in the context of the oral culture dominant in that place and time. However, Goody's work has been criticized by the anthropologist Brian Street as insufficiently contextual for assuming that literacy is a neutral technology that can be detached from its social context. Street's own ethnography, focused on a village in Iran, contrasted the religious literacy acquired in Koranic schools with the commercial literacy acquired elsewhere, concluding that "the 'literacies' acquired in different contexts may be quite different." 85
The problem of the boundary has recently been raised in a number of disciplines. Thus Richard Rorty urges his colleagues in philosophy to drop "the traditional opposition between context and thing contextualised." 86 The archaeologist Ian Hodder asks how the boundary between object and context may be defined. For a given type of artifact found in cemeteries, for instance, is the context "a part of the body, the grave, a group of graves, the cemetery, the region or what?" 87 The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues that "objects and contexts not only define each other, but may change and disrupt each other." 88 The historian Alain Boureau notes the danger of circularity: "Too often the context is implicitly or unconsciously constructed as a function of the explanation it is called on to provide." 89
This last comment raises the problem of the logical status of contexts. They are not found but selected or even constructed, sometimes consciously, by a process of abstracting from situations and isolating certain phenomena in order to understand them better. 90 What counts as a context depends on what one wishes to explain. There seems no end to the number of possible contexts. Discussing the use of language by children in the context of the family, for instance, Bernstein found himself distinguishing or constructing four further contexts, the regulative, the instructional, the imaginative, and the interpersonal. Likewise, the French linguist Françoise Armengaud distinguished four contexts of speech [End Page 172] which she described as circonstanciel, situationnel, interactionnel, and présuppositionnel. 91 Where, if anywhere, can this process stop?
Another problem, which might be called the "problem of monopoly," is raised by discussions of the contextual or situational method. Is it a method in the strict sense of the term, or more of a "perspective," as Mitchell, for instance, calls it? If it is a method, is contextual analysis one method among alternatives (structural or formal analysis, for instance) or is it supposed to be the only method? Come to that, is hermeneutics a method? 92 In any case, it is obviously paradoxical to speak about a "contextual method" for studying one text, object, or situation after another, regardless of differences or circumstances. Like Protestantism--at least in the eyes of Bossuet--contextualism appears to be condemned to self-destruction by fragmentation.
In similar fashion, one might ask whether the targets of the contextualists are limited to rash or unqualified generalizations (as in the case of Guicciardini's critique of Machiavelli), or whether they claim to undermine generalization altogether. If the claims being made are limited, it might be argued that too much fuss has been made about them in the last thirty years or so, since a concern with circumstances, contexts, and situations goes back, as we have seen, much further than the recent contextual turn. If, on the other hand, the claims are more ambitious, they become more vulnerable to the charge of what might be called "contextual reductionism." 93 The problem is that strong or ambitious contextualism privileges difference over similarity. In his story about the man who produced a new work simply by copying out the text of Don Quixote in a different place and time, Jorge Luis Borges offers an extreme version of contextualism, resembling Robert Lowie's earlier assertion, quoted above, of the non-identity of the identical in different psychological contexts. 94
The point of the term reductionism is to emphasize what contextualism in the strong sense excludes. Contextualism appears to imply that there is no value in reading Plato if we do not live in an ancient Greek city-state, and to dismiss rather than to analyze the power of some literary or philosophical texts that appeal to readers from different cultures and periods. 95 A strong contextualism treats context as a prison from which there is no escape. This approach would eliminate not only comparison and contrast in anthropology, sociology, history, [End Page 173] or literature, but also the use of general concepts, such as "feudalism," "capitalism" or even "family" or "state."
A focus on "situation" runs the risk of privileging the present and excluding tradition. Traditions have sometimes been viewed in too monolithic a manner. However, their study has been renewed by scholars sensitive to the ways in which--thanks in part to their inner conflicts--these traditions are capable of being adapted or reconstructed, consciously or unconsciously, as circumstances change. 96 In its turn, an awareness of the power of tradition, "the past in the present," may help us understand how people from different cultures react differently in the "same" situation, for example in an encounter between Europeans and Americans in the 1490s.
Since there are no simple solutions to the problems briefly evoked here, a formal conclusion to this essay is inappropriate. It is better to end with informal remarks aimed at inciting further discussion and defending imprecision, multiplicity, and decontextualization.
It is probably too late to advocate distinguishing relatively narrow contexts from wider situations--or vice versa--by means of different words, as might once have been useful. 97 In any case, it may be unwise, as we have seen, to expect too much precision from the term context, to make it take more weight than it can bear. The term is best used to refer to phenomena that are not in focus at a given moment: especially, perhaps, those that are just out of focus. The lack of sharp definition, the open-endedness of the concept, has advantages as well as disadvantages and does not make the term meaningless--for as a lawyer has observed, "it is relatively easy to say what 'the contextual approach' is not; it is not narrow-minded, it does not treat law as being 'just there' to be studied in isolation, it is opposed to formalism." 98
Although it is always wise to think contextually, contextual analysis is best treated as one method rather than "the" method of cultural or intellectual history. In any case, we need to think of contexts in the plural. To do so is not only to use the word in the plural form but to remember to ask, In what other contexts might this word, action, object be placed? What looks, when one first discovers it, like "the" context for an idea, object, statement, or event generally turns out to be no more than "a" context.
It is obviously necessary, for instance, to distinguish contextualization on the part of cultural analysts (Mitchell's "setting") from contextualization as an everyday practice by participants in the culture being analyzed (Mitchell's "situation"). [End Page 174] Sociolinguists in particular have shown that participants are aware of what analysts call "contextualization cues" (Goffman uses a similar phrase, "framing cues"). The degree of this awareness may vary with the culture; it has been argued, for example, that social context is more important in defining forms of linguistic politeness in Japanese than it is in English and some other languages. 99
As for the analysts, the contexts that they select or construct may be literary, linguistic, social, cultural, political, or material; some of them more literal, more precise, or more local, and others more metaphorical, vaguer, or broader. There is no one correct context. What can be done is to try to place the narrower context within a wider and wider context that might be represented as a series of concentric circles, recognizing in principle that an infinite series of such circles may be distinguished and in practice that there is no clear place to stop. 100 Hence Mitchell as an anthropologist speaks of "nested contexts" such as the face-to-face situation, its social environment, and the wider social system. As the contextual theologian Bernard Lonegan puts it, "The context of the word is the sentence. The context of the sentence is the paragraph. The context of the paragraph is the chapter. The context of the chapter is the book. The context of the book is the author's opera omnia, his life and times, the state of the question in his day, his problems, prospective readers, scope and aim." 101
The disadvantage of this concise and elegant formulation of what intellectual historians have been trying to do since Dilthey's day is that it treats as unproblematic the nature of the links between different contexts, notably the immediate, narrow or "microcontext" and the further, broader or "macrocontext." In sociolinguistics, where so much attention has been given to context, there remains a gulf between the many microstudies and wider generalizations--generalizations about national styles of speaking, for example. 102
The gap between context-centered and tradition-centered approaches, mentioned earlier, might be bridged by the suggestion that cultural traditions encourage individuals and groups to adopt particular schemata, stereotypes, or clichés and so to perceive or define situations in particular ways. 103 The constraining power of schemata in the short term, but also their adaptability in the long term, may be illustrated again and again from studies of encounters between [End Page 175] different cultures. The work of Marshall Sahlins on Captain Cook in Hawaii is exemplary in this respect. 104
Recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science have been concerned with a similar problem, that of the means by which knowledge that was originally local, produced in a specific context, is rendered general. 105 What makes these studies exemplary--provided they are themselves adapted to new contexts--is that they provide conceptual space for recontextualization and for the phenomenon variously known as "decontextualization" and "disembedding." To provide this conceptual space is both to criticize and to employ the concept of context, to develop or adapt it in response to challenges.
It is worth remembering that these points are not as new as they may seem. Collingwood, for example, was critical of the idea "that anything torn from its context is thereby mutilated or falsified," claiming on the contrary that an "act of thought" can "sustain itself through a change of context and revive in a different one." 106 The decontextualizing effect of writing has long been discussed, making it easier to take ideas out of the face-to-face situations in which they were originally formulated in order to apply them elsewhere.
All the same, the recent interest in the phenomenon of recontextualization or "reframing" is surely unparallelled. 107 In anthropology and sociology, Claude Lévi-Strauss's notion of bricolage and Michel de Certeau's discussion of everyday consumption as a form of production or creativity both depend on the notion of recontextualization. 108 The same concept might be used to mediate in the Goody-Street debate on the contexts of literacy, encouraging a closer analysis of the literacy package, distinguishing between skills that can be "transferred" from the Koranic school to the shop and those that resist adaptation. 109 Rorty goes so far as to describe the whole of philosophical inquiry as recontextualization, on the grounds that (generalizing the point made by Evans-Pritchard about the Azande) "a belief is what it is only by virtue of its position in the web." 110 A similar point might be made about translation.
One might go still further and define originality, innovation, invention, or creativity in terms of the capacity to recontextualize; and this was Arthur Koestler's point in his study of the "act of creation." One of his most telling examples was that of the wine-press, observed by Gutenberg, "lifted out of its context" and employed for a new purpose: printing books. Recontextualization, in other words, is creative adaptation rather than invention ex nihilo. 111 [End Page 176]
Problems remain--the question, for example, of whether certain ideas, artifacts, or practices are inherently more or less "mobile," shall we say, than others, and of the extent to which recontextualization depends on agency, creativity, the power to adapt. The most acute problem of all is the impossibility of criticizing a key concept or concepts without employing it or them. This recurrent problem in intellectual history may be illustrated from Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. In order to make the point that priests were not fundamentally different from ordinary people, Luther used the language of priesthood. The moral of the story is perhaps that we should not be looking for a new term or set of terms to replace context, terms that would probably generate new problems in their turn. It is more realistic to employ the word in the plural, to place it mentally in inverted commas, and to do our best to contextualize it, in all the many senses of that term.
Peter Burke is professor of cultural history at Cambridge University and fellow of Emmanuel College. Among his books are Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Italian Renaissance Culture andSociety, The Art of Conversation, History and Social Theory, Varieties of Cultural History, The French Historical Revolution, and The Fabrication of Louis XIV.
Notes
The author wishes to thank Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke and Mark Phillips for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
1. Augustine, De Genesi ad literam, ed. Paul Agaësse and Armand Solignac (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), bk. 1, chap. 19, sec. 38-39.
2. There are no references to contextus in Du Cange or in Roland E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). But the phrase prout in contextulegendum est is recorded in Johan Wilhelmus Fuchs, Olga Weijers, and Marijke Gumbert-Hepp, eds., Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi, vol. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981).
3. Ceslaus Spicq, Esquisse d'une histoire de l'exégèse latine au moyen âge (Paris: Vrin, 1944), 45, 250-51.
4. Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 166-67; William Cave, Scriptorum ecclesiasticarum historia literaria, 2 vols. (London: 1688-98), 1:xi.
5. Galileo Galilei, Opere, ed. Ferdinando Flora (Milan-Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1953), 1036-82.
6. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Scriptures (London: 1661), 71.
7. Gottfried Arnold, Unparteyische Kirche-und Ketzer- Historie, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: 1699-1700), 4:451.
8. Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 87-115, at 98; Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147-52.
9. Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning, 81, 123, 128, 179.
10. Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Albert R. Jonsen, "Casuistical," Common Knowledge 2.2 (1993): 48-65; James F. Keenan and Thomas A. Shannon, eds., The Context ofCasuistry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000).
11. Matthias Flacius, Clavis Scripturae, 2 vols. (Basel: 1567), 2:18-24.
12. Francesco Guicciardini, "Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli," in Scritti politici e ricordi, ed. Robert Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1933), 8, 19, 41.
13. François de La Noue, Discours politiques et militaires (1587); ed. Frank E. Sutcliffe (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 121 n. 111.
14. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity inRenaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1990).
15. Joseph Levine, "Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine," reprinted in Humanism and History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 54-72.
16. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (c. 1592; reprint, London: J. M. Dent, 1907), bk. 3, chap. 10, sec. 3; David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: J. Cape, 1956), 200.
17. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 31-35, 44.
18. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Spectator (1712), nos. 274, 428; cf. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, The Spectator e o Teatro das Luzes (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1994), 186.
19. R. G. Collingwood, "The Idea of History" (1928), in The Idea of History (1946; revised ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 83; Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 46.
20. Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology ofKnowledge (1927; English trans., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
21. Quoted in Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 210.
22. Friedrich Ast, Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (Landshut: 1808); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; 2d ed., New York: Harper, 1962), 3-31.
23. Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermacher (1870; ed. Martin Redeker, [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, 1970].
24. Quoted in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 171.
25. Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (London: Duckworth, 1975); Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
26. Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres, 44, 48, 192, 239; cf. René Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 166, 182, 184 n; Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology and Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
27. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins ofthe Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79-80, 107, 164-65.
28. Franz Boas, "Museums of Ethnology and their Classification," Science 9 (1887), 587-89. Cf. Ira Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," in Objects and Others, ed. George Ward Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); see also "The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas," in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, ed. George Ward Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 185-214, at 205; and Erich Kasten, "Franz Boas' Ethnographie und Museumsmethode," in Franz Boas, ed. Michael Dürr, Erich Kasten, and Egon Renner (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz,1992), 79-102.
29. Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge" (1925) and "The Problem of Generations" (1927; English translation in Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952], 134-90, 276-320).
30. William I. Thomas, "Situational Analysis" (1927; reprinted in W. I. Thomas on Social Organisation and Social Personality, ed. Morris Janowitz [Chicago: University of Chicago Press], 1966), 154-67, at 167.
31. Denys W. Harding, reviewing New Bearings in English Poetry, Scrutiny 1 (1932): 89.
32. Peter Burke, "The Central European Moment in British Cultural Studies" (forthcoming).
33. Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1962); Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, Cognitive Development (English trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 49; Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1948), 6. Cf. Christopher Robert Hallpike, The Foundations of Primitive Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 117-21, and Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, eds., Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1992), 19-22.
34. Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (London: Tavistock, 1952), xi, 170-87, 238-304.
35. Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges (1924; rev. ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 18.
36. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931), 20; Collingwood, "Outlines of a Philosophy of History," in Idea of History, 426-96, at 475.
37. Ibid., 115-16, 283, 316.
38. Robert H. Lowie, "On the Principle of Convergence in Ethnology," Journalof American Folklore 25 (1912): 24-42, at 41; cf. Edmund Leach, "Frazer and Malinowski" (1966; reprinted in The Essential Leach, ed. Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw, 2 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 1:25-43).
39. Bronislaw Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages," in The Meaning of Meaning, ed. Charles Kay Ogden and I. A. Richards (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1923), 451-510, at 465; see also Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935), 2:23-45. Cf. John Rupert Firth, "Ethnographic Analysis and Language with Reference to Malinowski's Views," in Man and Culture, ed. Raymond Firth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 93-118; Robert Henry Robins, "Malinowski, Firth and the 'Context of Situation,'" in Social Anthropology and Language, ed. Edwin Ardener (London: Tavistock, 1971), 33- 46; Fred C. C. Peng, "On the Context of Situation," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 58 (1986): 91-105; Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121, 148, 152.
40. Bronislaw Malinowski, "Culture," in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (1930; 2d ed., New York: Macmillan, 1948), 3:621-45.
41. Max Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958); James Clyde Mitchell, "The Situational Perspective," in Cities,Society and Social Perception: A Central African Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 1-33; Bruce Kapferer, "Norms and the Manipulation of Social Relationships in a Work Context," in Social Networks in Urban Situations, ed. James Clyde Mitchell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 181-244.
42. Jan van Velsen, "The Extended-Case Method and Situational Analysis," in The Craft of Social Anthropology, ed. Arnold L. Epstein (London: Tavistock, 1967), 129-49, at 136.
43. Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), 134.
44. Ibid., 83, 349.
45. Ibid., 194-95, 255, 475.
46. Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context.
47. Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (London: Orbis, 1992); Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966; 2d ed., London: John Knox, 1997).
48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), esp. 11-13; John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1955; 2d ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
49. Gregory Goertz, Contexts of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Agnew, "Mapping Politics: How Context Counts in Electoral Geography," Political Geography 15 (1996): 129-46.
50. Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (1986; rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Michael Shanks and Ian Hodder, "Processual, Post-Processual and Interpretive Archaeology," in Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks, and Alexandra Alexandri, eds., Interpreting Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1995), 3-29, at 14-17.
51. Torsten Hägerstrand, "Geography and the Study of Interaction between Nature and Society," Geoforum 3 (1976): 329-34; cf. Nigel Thrift, "On the Determination of Social Action in Time and Space," Society and Space 1 (1983): 23-57.
52. William Twining, Law in Context (1967; Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 43-44; Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 104-5, 108; cf. Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse (London: Macmillan,1987), 167.
53. Basil Bernstein, "Social Class, Language and Socialization" (1970; reprinted in Language and Social Context, ed. Pier Paolo Giglioli [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972], 157-77); Jerome S. Bruner, "Culture and Cognitive Growth," in Beyond the InformationGiven (London: George Allen, 1974), 368-93.
54. Basil Bernstein, "A Critique of the Concept of Compensatory Education" (1969; reprinted in Class, Codes and Control [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971], 190-201).
55. Jerome S. Bruner, Beyond the Information Given, 325-59; see also Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York: Wiley, 1966), 21-22.
56. Michael Cole et al., The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 1971), xi, 20.
57. Dell Hymes, "The Ethnography of Speaking," in Anthropology and HumanBehavior, ed. Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institute, 1962), 15-53; Joshua Fishman, "The Sociology of Language" (1969; reprinted in Giglioli, Language and Social Context, 45-58, at 48-50).
58. William Labov, "The Logic of Non-Standard English" (1969; reprinted in Giglioli, Language and Social Context, 179-218, at 191).
59. Evans-Pritchard, Azande, 349.
60. Richard Bauman, Story, Performance and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Robert St. George, "Massacred Language: Courtroom Performance in Eighteenth- Century Boston," in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial inEarly America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 327-56, at 339.
61. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), 118; Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledge," Feminist Studies 14 (1986): 575-99.
62. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 22, 106-40, esp. 118; see also Goffman, "The Neglected Situation" (1964; reprinted in Giglioli, Language and Social Context, 61-66), and Frame Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); on Goffman, see Joshua Meyrowitz, "Redefining the Situation," in Beyond Goffman, ed. Stephen Harold Riggins (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 65-97.
63. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 7.
64. It was to Panofsky and not (as some might have expected) to Heidegger, that Bourdieu expressed his debt when I asked him about his concept of habitus some twenty years ago.
65. Edward P. Thompson, "The Crime of Anonymity," in Douglas Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: A. Lane, 1975), 255-308, at 307; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (London: Deutsch, 1975), 609-12; Peter Bailey, "Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?: Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability," Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 336-53. Cf. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 23-28.
66. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 5, 132: Jane F. Fulcher, "Concert et propagande politique en France au début du 20e siècle," Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 55 (2000): 389-413, at 391.
67. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 43-82.
68. Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles ofArchaeo-Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
69. Louis Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 31-64.
70. David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 55, 63; Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 172.
71. Thomas Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 92-95.
72. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
73. Benjamin Schwartz, "The Intellectual History of China," in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 15-30.
74. Peter Laslett, ed., Locke's Two Treatises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 61, 67.
75. J. G. A. Pocock, "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century," in Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 104-47 at 105. Cf. David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (The Hague: Dordrecht Nijhoff, 1985), 3.
76. Pocock, TheMachiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 333; see also Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1:13.
77. Skinner's point in a recent interview in The Many Faces of History, ed. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke (London: Verso, forthcoming 2002).
78. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" (1969, reprinted inMeaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 29-67, at 30, 34, 55; see also Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:xi; and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6.
79. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility andScience in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
80. Ludvik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935; English trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Univesitaires de France, 1963); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Constructionof Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981); Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 79-102.
81. Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologist's Account (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
82. Emanuel A. Schegloff, "In Another Context," in Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context, 191-227, at 215.
83. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 58.
84. Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11-12.
85. Brian Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 154.
86. Richard Rorty, "Inquiry as Recontextualisation," reprinted in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93-110. Hereafter cited as "Inquiry."
87. Hodder, Reading the Past, 5.
88. Mitchell, "Situational Perspective," 7, 18; Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 18.
89. Alain Boureau, "Richard Southern," in Past and Present 165 (1999), at 221-22.
90. Mitchell, "Situational Perspective," 7; cf. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts, 137-41.
91. Bernstein, "Social Class, Language and Socialisation" (1971), in Class, Codes and Control, 170-89; Françoise Armengaud, Le pragmatique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).
92. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960; English trans., London: Sheed and Ward, 1975).
93. Peter Burke "The Rise of Literal-Mindedness," Common Knowledge 2.2 (1993): 108-21.
94. Jorge L. Borges, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (1939; reprinted in Obras, ed. Carlo Frías [Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974], 446-50).
95. Cf. Kenneth Minogue, "Method in Intellectual History," in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, 176-93.
96. Jan C. Heesterman, "India and the Inner Conflict of Tradition" (1973; reprinted in The Inner Conflict of Traditions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 10-25).
97. Mitchell, "Situational Perspective," distinguishes "a situation defined by the actors" from "a setting defined by the analyst" and from wider "contexts."
98. Twining, Law in Context, 43-44.
99. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis, 186; John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 130-52; see also Goffman's "Contextualization and Understanding," in Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context, 229-52; Yoshiko Matsumoto, "Politeness and Conversational Universals: Observations from Japanese," Multilingua 8 (1989): 207-21.
100. Aaron V. Cicourel, "The Interpenetration of Communicative Contexts," in Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context, 291-310, at 309.
101. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1972), 163.
102. Suzanne Romaine, Language in Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
103. Peter Burke, "The Jargon of the Schools," in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., Languages and Jargons (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 22-41.
104. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
105. Golinski, Natural Knowledge, 91-102.
106. Ibid., 297-98.
107. On reframing, see Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 12-14, 20-21.
108. Michel de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien 2d ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
109. Street, Literacy, 155.
110. Rorty, esp. "Inquiry," esp. 94, 98.
111. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964; rev. ed., London: Hutchinson, 1969), 123.
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Context is a term that has come into more and more frequent use in the last thirty or forty years in a number of disciplines--among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology. A trawl through the on-line catalogue of the Cambridge University Library in 1999 produced references to 1,453 books published since 1978 with the word context in the title (and 377 more with contexts in the plural). There have been good reasons for this development. The attempt to place ideas, utterances, texts, and other artifacts "in context" has led to many insights. All the same there is a price to be paid, the neglect of other approaches and also the inflation or dilution of the central concept, which is sometimes used--ironically enough, out of context--as an intellectual slogan or shibboleth.
To analyze both the present situation and past ones, it is surely necessary to re-place context in its context--or better, in its many contexts, linguistic, literary, ideological, social, psychological, political, cultural, and material. It is also important to ask to whom--or against whom--a given proposition about context was directed (scriptural fundamentalists, for example, believers in eternal wisdom, formalist art historians, enthusiasts for generalization in social science, [End Page 152] and so on). Changes in the uses of the concept demand to be discussed, and in a manner as reflexive as possible, placing each argument in its own contexts.
II
It may be useful to begin by sketching the history of the term. A more detailed history, in the style of Reinhart Koselleck's Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe--which has no entry for context--is much to be desired, and would replace the word in its linguistic and cultural field. Like text, context is a metaphor from weaving. Contexere is classical Latin for "to weave," while the noun contextus was used in the sense of "connection." As far as I know, there was no classical Latin term for what we know as context: this does not mean (pace Lucien Febvre) that the idea was lacking, for treatises on conduct and rhetoric emphasized the need to adjust what is said or done and how it is said or done to the time, place, public, and so forth, in order to persuade effectively. The classical division of speeches into three genres, epideictic, deliberative, and forensic, was according to social contexts--those of the funeral, the council, and the courtroom. Speech and behavior were supposed to be governed by the principle of appropriateness, which Aristotle called to prepon and Cicero, decorum. One locus classicus expressing this principle is Cicero's treatise De officiis with its stress on the power of place and time: Tanta vis est et loci et temporis (bk. 1, chap. 40). Another is Quintilian's statement in his Orator that speaking should be "apt" in the sense of "accommodated to the topics and the listeners" (accomodatus rebus atquepersonis: bk. 11, chap.1, sec. 1).
It was in the fourth century a.d. that another noun, contextio, came into use to describe the text surrounding a given passage that one wishes to interpret. Augustine, for example, in the course of a discussion of biblical interpretation, used the term a number of times in phrases such as contextiosermonis or contextioscripturae. 1 It may well seem paradoxical that Augustine should have been, if not the inventor, at least one of the first to employ the term context, given his concern with a "figural" interpretation of Scripture that appears, at least to modern readers, to be a denial of context. However, it might be argued that it was precisely Augustine's interest in figura that made him more conscious of the opposite of figural interpretation: a literal or contextual reading.
The terms just discussed virtually dropped out of use in the Middle Ages, apart from contextio, which came to mean "literary composition." 2 This absence [End Page 153] does not entitle us to conclude that no one at all in this long period was interested in the kind of problems we call contextual. The interest was sometimes expressed by means of other words, notably circumstantiae ("the things that stand around"), a term employed in biblical exegesis. In the ninth century, for example, Sedulius Scotus enunciated the rule of "seven circumstances"--person, fact, cause, time, place, mode, and topic. His debt to the categories of classical logic and rhetoric will be obvious enough. In the thirteenth century, once again in an exegetical context, Aquinas regularly referred to what he called "literary circumstance" (circumstantialitterae). Augustine too had used the term circumstantia in this sense. 3 All the same, references to circumstances were relatively rare in the Middle Ages, and the emphasis on allegorical interpretations of the Bible ran counter to contextual thinking.
While the absence of a particular word does not prove the absence of interest in a topic, the rise of a new term or the revival of an old one usually expresses increasing interest or awareness. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in vernacular languages such as Italian, French, English, or German, the words contesto, contexture, context, and Kontext began to be used, usually in discussions of the interpretation of texts, especially the Bible and Aristotle's. The meaning of the term gradually expanded at this time. The earlier usage survived, and the Encyclopédie (1754) still defined contexte as "l'ensemble du texte qui entoure un extrait et qui éclaire son sens." However, the term also came to refer to the coherence of an entire text. Thus Furetière's dictionary (1690) defined contexture as "liaison des parties dans l'ensemble d'une composition littéraire." One local context for discussions of contextus was the practice of translation, encouraging awareness of the need to attend not only to individual words but to the relations between them. The term was also invoked in discussions of authenticity. The ecclesiastical historian William Cave, for instance, enunciating seven rules for distinguishing genuine works by the Fathers from false ones, formulated the fourth rule as "the style and the whole texture of the work" (stylus totiusque orationis contextus). 4
A third and more extended sense of the term included the intention of the writer, often described as his scopus or in English as "scope." Thus Galileo, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess (1615) about the use of the Bible in disputes over natural philosophy, quoted Augustine on contextio sermonis to support his argument that the Bible was often interpreted "in senses so far from the real intention of the scripture" (in sensi tanto remoti dall'intenzione retta di essa Scrittura) that it was better not to quote it at all in these debates. 5 A generation later, another natural [End Page 154] philosopher, Robert Boyle, referred to divines who misinterpret scripture through neglect of "the context and the speaker's scope." 6 In similar fashion, the church historian Gottfried Arnold, discussing the ideas of the heretic Kaspar Schwenckfeld, advised the reader to set his words in "the full context" (dem gantzen Context). 7 The concern with intention or purpose ("scope") deserves to be noted, including the metaphorical or semimetaphorical attribution of intention to a text, the Bible, or the laws (the mens, sententia, or voluntas legum). 8
However, in the early modern period, much of the discussion of what we would term context, whether in law, ethics, political thought, or theology, was phrased in terms of "circumstances" (as in the Middle Ages) or "occasions"--or in terms of what Machiavelli called the "quality of the times" (la qualità de'tempi)--to which political leaders needed to adapt themselves if they wished to succeed. Jurists discussed circumstantial evidence and also the place of circumstances in interpreting and applying laws. 9 In the case of ethics, this was the age of the rise of casuistry in both the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. Casuistry is a pejorative eighteenth-century term for the study of "cases of conscience," the ethical equivalent of case law, replacing the application of general rules by the investigation of particular circumstances. 10
Discussions of the interpretation of the Bible regularly invoked the need to take circumstances into consideration. The Lutheran divine Matthas Flacius, for example, whose Clavis Scripturae (1567) was discussed by Dilthey a century ago as a milestone in the development of hermeneutics, discussed six circumstantiae (one fewer than Sedulius seven centuries earlier): the person, the time, the style, the intention, the place, and the instrument. Under the heading "person," for instance, he considered who was speaking to whom, about what, and in the presence of whom. 11 In similar fashion, writers on the art of preaching stressed the need to "accommodate" sermons both to the occasion on which they were delivered (such as Lent or Easter), and to the audience, whether clerical or lay, learned or ignorant.
An outstanding example of contextual thinking in early modern style is the work of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini. In a passage of his aphorisms on politics, Guicciardini notes "how mistaken are those who quote the [End Page 155] Romans at every step," since "one would have to have a city with exactly the same conditions as theirs" for their example to be relevant. Again, Guicciardini's "Considerations" on the Discourses of his friend Machiavelli criticized the generalizations because they were "advanced too absolutely" [posto troppo assolutamente]. Guicciardini wished to make more distinctions, "because the cases are different" [perché i casi sono vari], and human affairs "differ according to the times and the other events" [si variasecondo la condizione de' tempi ed altre occorrenzie]. 12
In other words, Guicciardini criticized Machiavelli for not paying sufficient attention to what the Protestant soldier François de La Noue--commenting on Guicciardini's own History of Italy and following the classical rhetoricians--called "les circonstances des temps, lieux et personnes." As La Noue remarked elsewhere, adapting a commonplace, a particular course of action does not suit all countries any more than a slipper fits all feet [comme un soulier ne convient pas à tous pieds, aussi un fait ne se peut approprier à tous pais]. 13 A similar point was reiterated in Montaigne's essays, one of the most powerful sixteenth-century criticisms of the traditional idea of exemplarity--of the relevance of ancient examples as a guide to conduct. 14 Such problems also underlie a seventeenth-century debate about the study of politics, whether it should be regarded as a science formulating rules or as the art of distinguishing exceptions.
One cultural context for these linguistic changes is provided by the Renaissance and Reformation. The movement to revive antiquity led to awareness of differences between the culture of the idealized classical past and that of later periods, for example between classical Latin and later Latin, a point already prominent in Lorenzo Valla's argument that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. 15 As the movement increased in importance, tensions within it became more obvious. Erasmus's Ciceronianus is the classic discussion of the problem of imitation, in which the question arises whether Cicero, if he had been alive when the dialogue was written, in 1528, would have spoken and written as he did in Rome in his own day. Although Erasmus does not use the word context, his dialogue discusses fundamental problems of what we have come to call contextualization.
As for the Reformation, including the Counter-Reformation, the attempt to apply biblical precepts to everyday life in a literal-minded fashion, especially by Protestant "fundamentalists" (as we might call them), raised the problem whether or not these precepts were intended to be generally applicable. In [End Page 156] England, for example, Richard Hooker argued that the laws of the Church needed to be modified to respond to "alteration of time and place," while King James I, in controversy with the group it remains convenient to describe as the Puritans, declared that the law of Moses was not universal. It was simply the law of ancient Israel, "only fit for that country, that people and that time." 16 Again, in their remarks on context already quoted, Galileo and Boyle were reacting to Catholic and Protestant attempts to claim that the conclusions of natural philosophers were wrong because they contradicted the Bible.
On the other hand, the thrust of the movements we call--with some hesitations--the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was anticontextual in the sense that participants, fascinated by the geometrical method, were concerned with formulating laws of nature and society, generalizations that would be valid whatever the circumstances of time, place, or persons. As the philosopher Stephen Toulmin has argued, this "attempt to decontextualise philosophy and natural science" needs to be replaced in "its own social and historical context" as a quest for certainty that becomes more pressing in an age of ideological conflict, notably during the Thirty Years' War. 17
All the same, it would be unwise to describe the eighteenth century as without a sense of context. Some thinkers expressed distrust in universal rules of behavior or of law. The advice on conduct given in the Spectator, for instance, was qualified, as in the case of the casuists, by concern with particular circumstances. 18 In his New Science (bk. 2, secs. 782, 902), Giambattista Vico tried to explain the barbarous behavior of Achilles and Agamemnon as Homer had described it by placing it in the context of Greek customs in that heroic age.
Collingwood's criticism of Hume for his assumption of the uniformity of human nature is well known, but as Mark Phillips has argued, Hume was well aware of variations in circumstances. For example, Hume reached a more favorable judgment on the Stuarts than did his Whig contemporaries, because he placed their actions in the context of a constitution that, before 1688, was "very ambiguous and undetermin'd." 19 By the late eighteenth century, "Enlightened" attitudes were coming to be viewed as part of an intellectual old regime against which a younger and, as we now say, more historicist generation revolted around [End Page 157] the year 1800, stressing differences between individuals and cultures at the expense of general laws. 20
The Rise of Cultural Context
This "Counter-Enlightenment" was associated with a major expansion in the meaning of the term context, a meaning that continued the emphasis on factors external to the text but increasingly concerned not only the immediate setting of writers and readers but also a more general historical context--and the metaphor of "historical context" was no longer perceived as a metaphor. To some degree, this expansion of meaning might be described as a kind of conceptual imperialism, with context taking over the territory that circumstances had previously occupied. However, a shift is also discernible from what might be called the microcontext of local circumstances to the macrocontext of an entire culture, society, or age. Even when the word context is not employed, there are signs of an increasing interest in locating texts, artifacts, and actions in this way. A famous example is Madame de Staël's essay De lalittérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Her friend James Mackintosh, who had similar interests, stressed the relation between literature and what he called "the state of the general feeling." 21
Within the German tradition of hermeneutics, the customary concern with the immediate context of the passage to be interpreted now widened. In a study published in 1808, for example, the classical scholar Friedrich Ast made distinctions among the literal or grammatical level of interpretation, the historical level (concerned with meaning), and the cultural level (concerned with grasping the spirit [Geist] of antiquity or other periods). Over a century later, Erwin Panofsky would make a similar distinction among three levels in his discussion of the iconographical method. 22
Karl Marx was a contextualist in another sense, concerned to locate consciousness and its expressions within "life," especially social life. Marxists and non-Marxists alike were increasingly concerned with Zusammenhang, a term that came into use in the late eighteenth century to refer to the way in which different beliefs, customs, and so on "hang together." The term was central to the intellectual system of Wilhelm Dilthey, the philosopher and historian who played a key role in widening the art of interpretation from texts to the lives of individuals and groups, from intentions on particular occasions to personality developing over time. In his biography of Schleiermacher, for instance, interpreting the [End Page 158] life of a great interpreter of texts, Dilthey declared his aim as that of describing the intellectual development of his protagonist and the Zusammenhang or links between this development and the cultural movements of the time. Hence Dilthey carefully reconstructed the successive cultural milieux through which Schleiermacher had passed: his family, his education, his circle in Berlin, and the like. 23
An English equivalent for Zusammenhang was context. In the seventeenth century, discussing the impossibility of laying down simple rules of law, Matthew Hale had given an old metaphor a new twist when he wrote of "the texture of human affairs." 24 His comparison was not taken up at the time, but the phrase "moral context," first recorded in 1842, had more success. The success of the "life and times" model of biography in the nineteenth century is another indicator of the sensitivity to wider contexts that had been developing since the 1750s.
Material as well as moral context was taken more seriously in the nineteenth century than before. In archaeology, the increasing concern with stratigraphy in the early nineteenth century implied a displacement of interest from ancient objects in themselves, as studied by traditional antiquarians, to their context or location. 25 The place of debates concerning public museums in the rise of a sharper sense of material context also deserves emphasis. In 1796, for instance, in a letter to General Miranda, and again in 1815, Quatremère de Quincy, a Frenchman, denounced the looting of Italian works of art by Napoleon, Lord Elgin, and others on the grounds that this uprooting or déplacement deprived the objects of their cultural value. Quatremère's point was that the associations, meaning, and power of an artifact depended on its uses and its location. To displace it was to destroy. The appropriate setting for Italian artifacts was Italy itself, which he described as a museum without walls, "le Muséum intégral." 26
Within museums, the principles of classification began to be debated. In the 1780s, the art collection at Vienna was reorganized by schools of art arranged in chronological order. The Louvre followed suit in its Grand Gallery after the Revolution, and Alexandre Le Noir also adopted a chronological system in the new Museum of French Monuments in the 1790s. The point was to clarify the meaning of individual artifacts by placing them in a sequence. 27 Again, Christian [End Page 159] Thomsen, who was asked in 1816 to reorganize the collection of early artifacts in the Danish National Museum, solved the problem by classifying them in their temporal context according to three consecutive ages, defined as the ages of stone, bronze, and iron.
Later in the century, the German anthropologist Franz Boas caused a sensation in museum circles in the United States by arguing that exhibits should not be arranged according to the type of artifact or the stage that the objects represented in an evolutionary sequence. They should be arranged by "culture area." The point of the change in arrangement was that, according to Boas, an object could not be understood "outside of its surroundings," physical and cultural. Hence Boas liked to show what he called "life groups" in the museum, with models of people using the objects, in order, as he put it, "to transport the visitor into foreign surroundings." 28 The surroundings helped viewers to interpret the objects, just as the context helped readers to interpret texts.
In a number of disciplines, in the 1920s and 1930s the term situation came to play a central role. These disciplines included sociology, psychology, history, and above all the relatively new academic subject of anthropology, which Franz Boas, moving from the museum to the university, helped to establish in the United States.
For instance, Karl Mannheim, one of the pioneers of the sociology of knowledge, treated ideas as socially situated (literally "tied to the situation," Situationsgebunden). In other words, ideas were dependent on the social "location" (Lagerung) or "position" of individuals in groups such as classes or generations. 29 At much the same time in the United States, the sociologist William I. Thomas, concerned with small groups and social action, was developing his idea of the "definition of the situation," and developing his contrast of "commonly and publicly accepted definitions of situations" with "rival definitions." 30
Some students of literature and art were making a sociological turn at this time. Critics sympathetic to Marxism, notably Georg Lukács, emphasized the response of writers to social situations. 31 In England, the influential critic Frank Leavis, although never a Marxist, was concerned, in the words of an early [End Page 160] reviewer, to show the relation of poetry "to the state of culture in which it was produced." A movement for a "social history of art" also developed in the 1930s. Among its leading practitioners were Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser, who were, like Mannheim, members of the Lukács circle in Budapest. After Antal took refuge in England, he introduced this approach to Herbert Read, Anthony Blunt, and John Berger. 32
In psychology, a concern with frame, context, situation, or environment marked a number of enterprises located on the frontier with sociology. Students of memory, notably Maurice Halbwachs, stressed its "social frame" (cadres sociaux), and also the "contextual stimuli" and "contextual cues" that brought memories to the surface. In Russia, Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria argued that the mentality of illiterates was characterized by "concrete or situational thinking." Luria derived his idea of situational thinking from Kurt Goldstein's work on lesions of the brain, which distinguished concrete thought, "bound to the immediate experience of unique objects and situations," from abstract thought, associated with the ability to shift "from one aspect of a situation to another" and so free itself from dependence on context. 33
A general "field theory" of psychology was put forward by Kurt Lewin, using the term field as a synonym for the "lifespace" or environment of an individual or group. Without studying the field, he argued, the behavior of individuals and groups could not be understood. In other words, Lewin practiced what he sometimes called "psychological ecology." His approach might also be described as a "situational psychology," similar in some respects to the situational anthropology and linguistics of the time. 34
In the case of history, we might contrast the French with the English approach. Marc Bloch's famous study Les rois thaumaturges (1924), which does not use the term context, attempts nevertheless to make ideas that now seem alien, like the belief in the supernatural power of the royal touch, intelligible by refusing to treat them in isolated fashion and by showing how attitudes to the powers of kings formed a whole. Drawing on the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and other anthropologists, Bloch explored collective attitudes as part of a belief system. 35 In Britain, a few years later, Herbert Butterfield and R. G. Collingwood concerned themselves with contexts and situations at the individual rather than [End Page 161] the collective level. Butterfield defined the historian's task as that of understanding an individual action, which is "to recover the thousand threads that connect it with other things, to establish it in a system of relations; in other words, to place it in its historical context." For his part, placing more stress on intentions, Collingwood declared that "every event . . . is a conscious reaction to a situation, not the effect of a cause." 36
Collingwood's The Idea of History developed this idea further. "Thinking," he argued, "is never done in vacuo: it is always done by a determinate person in a determinate situation." Collingwood was not thinking of a social situation in Mannheim's sense so much as of a definition of the situation in the style of W. I. Thomas. "The situation," Collingwood insisted, "consists altogether of thoughts." In the case of a political conflict, for instance, "what the historian has to do is to see how the two parties conceived the political situation as it stood." A historian who wants to understand an edict of the emperor Theodosius must not only "envisage the situation with which the emperor was trying to deal" but also "envisage it as that emperor envisaged it." 37
Anthropology is sometimes perceived, not without reason, as the contextual discipline par excellence. More exactly, it became this kind of discipline, after a period in which the ideas of evolution and diffusion were dominant. From the Boas critique of museum displays organized according to stages of human development, it was only a step to the wholesale rejection of evolutionary anthropology, symbolized by Sir James Frazer, as insufficiently sensitive to context. The American Robert Lowie, for example, wrote of what he called the "non-identity" of the identical in different "psychological contexts." 38
The most famous critic of Frazer was Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski was concerned with what he called the "contextual specification of meaning" and the problem of translating the untranslatable. Meaning, he argued, is dependent on the "context of situation" so that "the concept of context has to be broadened" to accommodate this point. 39 Malinowski discussed material culture in terms similar [End Page 162] to those used for discussing language: he took the example of a stick that might be used for digging, punting, walking, or fighting. "In each of these specific uses," he claimed, "the stick is embedded in a different cultural context; that is, put to different uses, surrounded with different ideas, given a different cultural value and as a rule designated by a different name." 40
Malinowski's situational approach was taken further by the so-called Manchester School of anthropology. Max Gluckman, for instance, offered a "situational analysis" of a series of events surrounding the opening of a bridge in Zululand in order to bring social conflicts to light. Drawing on the work of W. I. Thomas as well as that of Max Gluckman, Clyde Mitchell studied social networks from what he called "the situational perspective," while Bruce Kapferer offered, along similar lines, a brilliant interpretation of a conflict "in a work context" among mine employees in Zambia. 41 This focus on face-to-face situations was an attempt to avoid assuming the homogeneity of a whole culture, as so many anthropologists tended to do at the time. 42
The anthropologist who took Malinowski's ideas about context furthest was his former pupil Edward Evans-Pritchard, in his study of witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. The term context does not often appear in this study. 43 What the study does, however, is explore two important ideas that had had or were to have considerable influence in other disciplines: the dependence of thought on situation and the dependence of one belief on others. In the first place, Evans-Pritchard described the ideas of the Azande as "imprisoned in action," going on to explain that "each situation demands the particular pattern of thought appropriate to it. Hence an individual in one situation will employ a notion he excludes in a different situation." 44 In the second place, skepticism about witchcraft, oracles, and magic is difficult for the Azande because "all their beliefs hang together" (compare Zusammenhang). The three phenomena "form an intellectually coherent system. Each explains and proves the other." Witch doctors and laymen are "enclosed in the same network of thought." In the most famous of his various formulations of this idea, Evans-Pritchard declared that, in "this web of belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows." 45 [End Page 163]
The parallel with some of the observations of Vygotsky and Luria is clear enough, even though Evans-Pritchard did not relate the situational thought of the Azande to their illiteracy. The parallel with Bloch's study of the royal touch is even stronger, since Bloch explained the persistence of trust in the touch in terms of its place in a belief system. The study of medieval history that Evans-Pritchard had once pursued was not useless to the mature anthropologist.
III
In the last generation or so, we have been living through what might be called a "contextual turn," on the analogy of so many other turns. One sign of change is a series of terms that, if not always newly coined, are in more common use than before. In English, for example, contextualism (first recorded in 1929, in a philosophical context) and contextualize (1934, in linguistics) have been joined by contextualization (1951, in anthropology) and decontextualize (1971, in sociology). In French, contextuel is recorded from 1963 onward.
Once again, it would be a mistake to place great emphasis on particular words, since other terms--circumstances, situations, and so on--were already in use to discuss these issues. The variety of technical terms is a reminder that similar problems have recurred and have been solved in different ways by various scholars in various disciplines. Yet interdisciplinary discussions of the problems raised by the notion of context are all too rare. 46 Such an analysis might note both borrowings and independent reinventions; it might distinguish analogies between the problems raised in different disciplines from the disanalogies--between the study of texts and, say, ax-heads, between the direct observation of situations and their reconstruction on the basis of documents. The problem is of course that a comparative analysis of this kind would require an acquaintance with a broad range of disciplines.
In the case of theology, for example, comparison would require discussion of the so-called contextual reinterpretation of religion; in ethics, it would be concerned with the rise of a "situationism" that has effectively revived casuistry under another name. 47 In the case of philosophy, the continuing influence of Wittgenstein's emphasis on meaning as use would demand discussion, as would John Austin's analysis of the "occasion" and "context" of utterances. 48 In political science, attention would have to be given to contextual explanations of phenomena [End Page 164] ranging from international relations to election results. 49 In the case of archaeology, the rise of a new contextual approach in Cambridge would merit discussion. Although, as was suggested above, the stratigraphic method implies a tradition of sensitivity to material contexts, "contextual archaeology" is distinctive in its focus on "reading" the meanings and associations of objects and their "contexts of use." 50
In geography, given its essential concern with "environment," a contextual approach might seem to be otiose, but terms such as situation and context are increasingly employed following the Swedish "time-geographer" Torsten Hägerstrand's recommendation to focus on what he calls "the principles of togetherness," especially at a local level. 51 Even in the case of law, which might be said to be a deliberately anticontextual or, better, a decontextualizing enterprise, a series of studies entitled "Law in Context" was planned in 1965 and began to appear in Britain in 1970, while Ronald Dworkin has noted the rise of "context sensitivity" in legal language. 52
The discussion that follows, despite all these possibilities for comparison, will be limited to education, sociolinguistics, literature, and social and cultural history. In educational sociology and psychology, the work of Bernstein, Bruner, and Cole on learning illustrates the contextual trend. 53 In Britain, the sociologist Basil Bernstein's famous contrast between two forms of language, the "restricted" and "elaborated" codes, originally lacked any reference to the word context, but by 1969 Bernstein was describing the codes as respectively "context-dependent" and "context-independent." 54 In the United States, the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner picked up Bernstein's phrases when discussing the role of the school in establishing "context-independent modes of thinking" via literacy. Bruner's earlier discussions of cognitive growth in children had described perception as "field dependent," "non-transformable," or "stuck." 55 Bernstein and [End Page 165] Bruner were of course aware of the earlier work by Vygotsky and Luria. The developmental psychologist Michael Cole and his team, working in Liberia, carried on this tradition in their attempt to explain why Kpelle children "experience a good deal of difficulty with Western-style mathematics," arguing that learning and thinking are shaped by a "cultural context," and that cognitive skills "are closely related to the activities that engage those skills." 56
In the 1950s and 1960s, sociolinguistics (otherwise known as the "sociology of language" or the "ethnography of speaking") became a semiautonomous discipline, with leaders in the field such as Dell Hymes, Joshua Fishman, William Labov, and John Gumperz all emphasizing the human capacity for switching codes or "registers" according to the context or situation. 57 For example, a classic study by Labov, arguing against the idea that black children in the United States were inarticulate, described an experiment to show that "the social situation is the most powerful determinant of verbal behaviour." 58 The parallel with Evans-Pritchard's description of individual Azande as switching concepts will be obvious enough: "An individual in one situation will employ a notion he excludes in a different situation." 59 Folklorists have been studying the performance of oral narratives in a way similar to that of linguists. Attention has been drawn to the "spatial context" of performance, who is standing where, how close to or distant from whom. 60
In sociology, Anthony Giddens has placed considerable stress on "locale" as essential to what he calls the "contextuality" of social interaction, while feminists such as Donna Haraway have revived Mannheim's concept of "situated knowledge," although they define the situation in terms of gender rather than class. 61 Situation was also central to the work of Erving Goffman, whose dramaturgical approach to everyday life stressed the variety of social roles available to individuals and the difference in the "performance" of the same people in different settings--such as the waiter in the restaurant whom customers see as [End Page 166] impassive but who changes demeanor completely when he enters the "back region" of the kitchen. 62 Goffman's achievement might be described as an elaboration of the idea of the "definition of the situation" put forward by an earlier Chicago sociologist, W. I. Thomas.
"Performance" is a concept that has become increasingly central to a number of disciplines, beginning with sociolinguistics. 63 The concept's importance lies in its potential for undermining older kinds of historical (or indeed sociological) explanation. Much human behavior used to be given explanations such as "A said or did X because he or she was a B" (a bourgeois, say, or a Puritan). By contrast, a performance-centered approach encourages the substitution of explanations of the form "A said or did X because he or she was in a situation that required confrontation, compromise, etc." If not exactly a shift from social determinism to individual freedom, this is at least a turn from the idea of fixed reactions, following rules, to the notion of flexible responses--to what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (borrowing from Panofsky, who borrowed from Aquinas, who in turn borrowed from Aristotle) calls a "habitus." 64
In social history, a concern with situation and performance has become increasingly visible. Edward Thompson, for example, discussing what he termed the "plebeian" culture of the eighteenth century, noted a combination of two opposed attitudes to "patricians"--deference and aggression--arguing that "we should take neither the obeisances nor the imprecations as indications of final truth: both could flow from the same mind, as circumstances and calculation of interest allowed." Historians of slavery such as Eugene Genovese have made a similar point about deference as performance, as what the slaves called "putting on." Again, the social historian Peter Bailey has interpreted the deference of the Victorian working class as a performance limited to certain "regions" and laid aside when members of the middle or upper classes were no longer within sight or earshot. The increasing frequency of references to Goffman and Bourdieu in the work of social historians is symptomatic of a general change of mind. 65 [End Page 167]
The concept of performance is more obviously relevant to studies of music, drama, and literature. In ethnomusicology, for instance, a debate has been going on since the 1950s about the degree of emphasis to be given to context. Performative context has come into use to refer to the adaptation of music in performance to the place, the occasion, and the audience. 66 Plays such as Molière's Georges Dandin have also been re-placed in their original "conditions of representation"--Versailles in 1668, in the case of Molière's play, together with the package of court entertainments, including music and ballet, of which the comedy formed a part. 67
Harder to classify as well as more influential has been the movement in literary history, especially the history of English literature, labeled the "New Historicism," and associated with the journal Representations and with scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose. Some New Historicists have been criticized as indifferent to context by supporters of what has been called "Archaeo-Historicism." 68 Like the older historicists, however, the new ones are opposed to the formalist approach. Some of their work is certainly contextualist in the sense of the term discussed in the previous paragraph. Montrose, for example, has re-placed A Midsummer Night's Dream in the performative context of the Elizabethan courtly entertainment of which it originally formed a part. However, he goes on, like earlier social historians of literature, to place these entertainments in the wider contexts of the court and of the distinctive "configurations of gender and power" in Elizabethan England. 69
Still more difficult to categorize is the work of Greenblatt, which is sometimes described as contextual and sometimes as a text-oriented close reading. What he not infrequently does is to juxtapose, compare, and link literary and nonliterary texts from the same culture, such as King Lear and a pamphlet attacking exorcism. Greenblatt avoids the term context, preferring to speak of "circulation" or "negotiation," presumably because he wants to escape from or go beyond the old text-context debate. In a sense, what he is doing, sometimes brilliantly, is placing literary texts in the context of a whole culture. Hence Greenblatt is not so far as he may appear from Dilthey and his Geistesgeschichte, Greenblatt's "negotiation" not so far removed from the traditional idea of Zusammenhang, the New Historicism not so far from the old. [End Page 168]
In art history, especially the history of architecture and sculpture, discussions of the challenges posed by the site for which the work was designed are relatively traditional. What is new is the increasing concern with the original location of paintings, whether they were displayed in churches or in palaces, for instance, or whether they were to be seen alone or as part of an ensemble. Titian's Assumption, for example, painted for the church of the Frari in Venice, appears to have been designed to contrast with the apse behind it, while the composition of his Pesaro Madonna has been described as "a response to the challenge of a particular site." Botticelli's Primavera was originally the backboard of a bed. 70
Increasing attention is also being paid to the microcontext of patronage. Thomas Kaufmann, for instance, in a book that is entitled Court, Cloister and City precisely in order to stress the importance of milieu, has noted shifts in the style of individual artists such as Veit Stoss or Tilman Riemenschneider according to the demands of the patron or the genre of a particular work. In other words, where an artist's style was once taken to be an expression of his or her personality, it is now interpreted, at least on occasion, as a kind of performance, the expression of a social role. Patrons too, King Matthias of Hungary for example, commissioned works in different styles--Gothic as well as Renaissance--on different occasions. 71 Another contextual approach to art is associated with one scholar in particular, Michael Baxandall, a former pupil of F. R. Leavis in Cambridge. In what Baxandall describes as a social history of pictorial style, focused on fifteenth-century Italy, his aim is to relate art to contemporary social practices, notably dancing and gauging barrels. In this respect his work runs parallel to the New Historicism. 72
It is of course in intellectual history that the concern with context is today particularly explicit, as it has been for nearly half a century. It was in the fifties that an American historian of China, Benjamin Schwartz, argued for an approach to the history of ideas in terms of conscious responses to situations (he was referring not to Collingwood but to Mannheim). 73 At much the same time, in Cambridge, Peter Laslett was arguing the case for placing Locke's Second Treatise of Government in a "revised historical context" and treating it as "a response to urgent political circumstances" (the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81). 74 It should be noted, though, that Laslett criticized his predecessors not so much for failing to [End Page 169] pay attention to the context of the book as for placing it in the wrong context (that of the revolution of 1688).
John Pocock, who was a student of Butterfield's at Cambridge in the 1950s, is more ambivalent about the idea of context. Already in 1965 he was warning his readers that the "slogan that ideas ought to be studied in their social and political context is, it seems to me, in danger of becoming a shibboleth" and stating his preference for working on political languages and paradigms. 75 All the same, his Machiavellian Moment (1975) discusses what he calls "the articulation of civic humanist concepts and values under the stresses of the Florentine predicament in the years 1494 to 1530," while his recent Barbarism and Religion (1999) sets out "to effect a series of contextualisations" of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. 76
It is Quentin Skinner, who went to Cambridge a few years later than Pocock, whose work is most closely bound to the idea of context. He uses the term in various ways, primarily linguistic ("context of utterance"), in the second place intellectual, and in the third place political. 77 His approach has a somewhat different context from Pocock's, in the sense that Skinner's developed in reaction to--and against--the assumption of eternal wisdom to be found in American political science and Great Books programs at the time, as well as in reaction to Arthur Lovejoy's approach to the history of "unit-ideas" and to the political philosophy of John Plamenatz. 78
In an adjoining field, the philosophy and history of science, the founding of the journal Science in Context, in 1987, offers another example of context-consciousness, soon followed by a collection of essays on The Scientific Revolution in National Context (1992), and by Steven Shapin's provocative Social History of Truth (1994). 79 A Cambridge journal, Science in Context may be seen as an attempt to emulate the historians of political thought--a return of a compliment, since both Pocock and Skinner have acknowledged debts to the work of Thomas Kuhn. However, the new journal needs to be placed in a disciplinary as well as a local context, and viewed as a response to, or a part of, a continuing debate over the status of scientific knowledge, whether it is genuinely universal or tied to specific [End Page 170] cultures or microenvironments such as laboratories and clinics. The making of general scientific knowledge is now discussed in terms of decontextualization. 80
Outstanding Problems
The gains achieved by the rise of "context-sensitivity" across the humanities can hardly be doubted, from the solution of specific problems such as the underachievement of Kpelle children in mathematics to the questioning of simplistic assumptions about "timeless wisdom" or about human behavior as the blind following of cultural rules. The development of an increasingly rich vocabulary in this field, from context-dependent to decontextualization is a sign of increasing sensitivity, an equivalent for intellectuals of the multiplication of Eskimo words for snow or Zande terms for cattle. This is not to say, however, that approaches that claim to be contextual are exempt from criticism. So it may be useful to collect and link scattered criticisms of the different forms of "contextual analysis" surveyed so far.
To begin with, there is the problem of definition. We have inherited a rich vocabulary from our predecessors, but the key terms are employed in very different ways in different disciplines and even by individual scholars. The term context, like the related term situation, is not as clear as it may look. As we have seen, the concept of context is one that has been defined precisely or vaguely, narrowly or broadly, and employed in both a flexible and a rigid manner. In this respect, it resembles the concept of culture. 81 Marxists and non-Marxists (even anti-Marxists) employ the term. Context is often regarded as local, but the idea of a "global context" is also in circulation. It might well be asked, What is not context?
It is always possible, and often tempting, to be more contextual than thou, or, as the linguist Emmanuel Schegloff has noted, to use the term context to mean "what I noticed about your topic that you didn't write about." 82 Franz Boas, who led a kind of "contextual revolution" in museums, has been criticized for not being contextual enough, at least in his fieldwork, because his theory of culture "allowed him to remove bits of behaviour from their normal context for purposes of recording and analysis"--filming indoor rituals in the open, for instance. 83 [End Page 171] Malinowski has sometimes been criticized for overemphasis on the local context, thus ignoring trade between ethnic groups, for example, and the presence of foreigners, from missionaries to tourists, in the "field." 84
Again, Jack Goody's comparative studies of modes of communication placed certain phenomena, such as "structural amnesia," in the context of the oral culture dominant in that place and time. However, Goody's work has been criticized by the anthropologist Brian Street as insufficiently contextual for assuming that literacy is a neutral technology that can be detached from its social context. Street's own ethnography, focused on a village in Iran, contrasted the religious literacy acquired in Koranic schools with the commercial literacy acquired elsewhere, concluding that "the 'literacies' acquired in different contexts may be quite different." 85
The problem of the boundary has recently been raised in a number of disciplines. Thus Richard Rorty urges his colleagues in philosophy to drop "the traditional opposition between context and thing contextualised." 86 The archaeologist Ian Hodder asks how the boundary between object and context may be defined. For a given type of artifact found in cemeteries, for instance, is the context "a part of the body, the grave, a group of graves, the cemetery, the region or what?" 87 The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues that "objects and contexts not only define each other, but may change and disrupt each other." 88 The historian Alain Boureau notes the danger of circularity: "Too often the context is implicitly or unconsciously constructed as a function of the explanation it is called on to provide." 89
This last comment raises the problem of the logical status of contexts. They are not found but selected or even constructed, sometimes consciously, by a process of abstracting from situations and isolating certain phenomena in order to understand them better. 90 What counts as a context depends on what one wishes to explain. There seems no end to the number of possible contexts. Discussing the use of language by children in the context of the family, for instance, Bernstein found himself distinguishing or constructing four further contexts, the regulative, the instructional, the imaginative, and the interpersonal. Likewise, the French linguist Françoise Armengaud distinguished four contexts of speech [End Page 172] which she described as circonstanciel, situationnel, interactionnel, and présuppositionnel. 91 Where, if anywhere, can this process stop?
Another problem, which might be called the "problem of monopoly," is raised by discussions of the contextual or situational method. Is it a method in the strict sense of the term, or more of a "perspective," as Mitchell, for instance, calls it? If it is a method, is contextual analysis one method among alternatives (structural or formal analysis, for instance) or is it supposed to be the only method? Come to that, is hermeneutics a method? 92 In any case, it is obviously paradoxical to speak about a "contextual method" for studying one text, object, or situation after another, regardless of differences or circumstances. Like Protestantism--at least in the eyes of Bossuet--contextualism appears to be condemned to self-destruction by fragmentation.
In similar fashion, one might ask whether the targets of the contextualists are limited to rash or unqualified generalizations (as in the case of Guicciardini's critique of Machiavelli), or whether they claim to undermine generalization altogether. If the claims being made are limited, it might be argued that too much fuss has been made about them in the last thirty years or so, since a concern with circumstances, contexts, and situations goes back, as we have seen, much further than the recent contextual turn. If, on the other hand, the claims are more ambitious, they become more vulnerable to the charge of what might be called "contextual reductionism." 93 The problem is that strong or ambitious contextualism privileges difference over similarity. In his story about the man who produced a new work simply by copying out the text of Don Quixote in a different place and time, Jorge Luis Borges offers an extreme version of contextualism, resembling Robert Lowie's earlier assertion, quoted above, of the non-identity of the identical in different psychological contexts. 94
The point of the term reductionism is to emphasize what contextualism in the strong sense excludes. Contextualism appears to imply that there is no value in reading Plato if we do not live in an ancient Greek city-state, and to dismiss rather than to analyze the power of some literary or philosophical texts that appeal to readers from different cultures and periods. 95 A strong contextualism treats context as a prison from which there is no escape. This approach would eliminate not only comparison and contrast in anthropology, sociology, history, [End Page 173] or literature, but also the use of general concepts, such as "feudalism," "capitalism" or even "family" or "state."
A focus on "situation" runs the risk of privileging the present and excluding tradition. Traditions have sometimes been viewed in too monolithic a manner. However, their study has been renewed by scholars sensitive to the ways in which--thanks in part to their inner conflicts--these traditions are capable of being adapted or reconstructed, consciously or unconsciously, as circumstances change. 96 In its turn, an awareness of the power of tradition, "the past in the present," may help us understand how people from different cultures react differently in the "same" situation, for example in an encounter between Europeans and Americans in the 1490s.
Since there are no simple solutions to the problems briefly evoked here, a formal conclusion to this essay is inappropriate. It is better to end with informal remarks aimed at inciting further discussion and defending imprecision, multiplicity, and decontextualization.
It is probably too late to advocate distinguishing relatively narrow contexts from wider situations--or vice versa--by means of different words, as might once have been useful. 97 In any case, it may be unwise, as we have seen, to expect too much precision from the term context, to make it take more weight than it can bear. The term is best used to refer to phenomena that are not in focus at a given moment: especially, perhaps, those that are just out of focus. The lack of sharp definition, the open-endedness of the concept, has advantages as well as disadvantages and does not make the term meaningless--for as a lawyer has observed, "it is relatively easy to say what 'the contextual approach' is not; it is not narrow-minded, it does not treat law as being 'just there' to be studied in isolation, it is opposed to formalism." 98
Although it is always wise to think contextually, contextual analysis is best treated as one method rather than "the" method of cultural or intellectual history. In any case, we need to think of contexts in the plural. To do so is not only to use the word in the plural form but to remember to ask, In what other contexts might this word, action, object be placed? What looks, when one first discovers it, like "the" context for an idea, object, statement, or event generally turns out to be no more than "a" context.
It is obviously necessary, for instance, to distinguish contextualization on the part of cultural analysts (Mitchell's "setting") from contextualization as an everyday practice by participants in the culture being analyzed (Mitchell's "situation"). [End Page 174] Sociolinguists in particular have shown that participants are aware of what analysts call "contextualization cues" (Goffman uses a similar phrase, "framing cues"). The degree of this awareness may vary with the culture; it has been argued, for example, that social context is more important in defining forms of linguistic politeness in Japanese than it is in English and some other languages. 99
As for the analysts, the contexts that they select or construct may be literary, linguistic, social, cultural, political, or material; some of them more literal, more precise, or more local, and others more metaphorical, vaguer, or broader. There is no one correct context. What can be done is to try to place the narrower context within a wider and wider context that might be represented as a series of concentric circles, recognizing in principle that an infinite series of such circles may be distinguished and in practice that there is no clear place to stop. 100 Hence Mitchell as an anthropologist speaks of "nested contexts" such as the face-to-face situation, its social environment, and the wider social system. As the contextual theologian Bernard Lonegan puts it, "The context of the word is the sentence. The context of the sentence is the paragraph. The context of the paragraph is the chapter. The context of the chapter is the book. The context of the book is the author's opera omnia, his life and times, the state of the question in his day, his problems, prospective readers, scope and aim." 101
The disadvantage of this concise and elegant formulation of what intellectual historians have been trying to do since Dilthey's day is that it treats as unproblematic the nature of the links between different contexts, notably the immediate, narrow or "microcontext" and the further, broader or "macrocontext." In sociolinguistics, where so much attention has been given to context, there remains a gulf between the many microstudies and wider generalizations--generalizations about national styles of speaking, for example. 102
The gap between context-centered and tradition-centered approaches, mentioned earlier, might be bridged by the suggestion that cultural traditions encourage individuals and groups to adopt particular schemata, stereotypes, or clichés and so to perceive or define situations in particular ways. 103 The constraining power of schemata in the short term, but also their adaptability in the long term, may be illustrated again and again from studies of encounters between [End Page 175] different cultures. The work of Marshall Sahlins on Captain Cook in Hawaii is exemplary in this respect. 104
Recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science have been concerned with a similar problem, that of the means by which knowledge that was originally local, produced in a specific context, is rendered general. 105 What makes these studies exemplary--provided they are themselves adapted to new contexts--is that they provide conceptual space for recontextualization and for the phenomenon variously known as "decontextualization" and "disembedding." To provide this conceptual space is both to criticize and to employ the concept of context, to develop or adapt it in response to challenges.
It is worth remembering that these points are not as new as they may seem. Collingwood, for example, was critical of the idea "that anything torn from its context is thereby mutilated or falsified," claiming on the contrary that an "act of thought" can "sustain itself through a change of context and revive in a different one." 106 The decontextualizing effect of writing has long been discussed, making it easier to take ideas out of the face-to-face situations in which they were originally formulated in order to apply them elsewhere.
All the same, the recent interest in the phenomenon of recontextualization or "reframing" is surely unparallelled. 107 In anthropology and sociology, Claude Lévi-Strauss's notion of bricolage and Michel de Certeau's discussion of everyday consumption as a form of production or creativity both depend on the notion of recontextualization. 108 The same concept might be used to mediate in the Goody-Street debate on the contexts of literacy, encouraging a closer analysis of the literacy package, distinguishing between skills that can be "transferred" from the Koranic school to the shop and those that resist adaptation. 109 Rorty goes so far as to describe the whole of philosophical inquiry as recontextualization, on the grounds that (generalizing the point made by Evans-Pritchard about the Azande) "a belief is what it is only by virtue of its position in the web." 110 A similar point might be made about translation.
One might go still further and define originality, innovation, invention, or creativity in terms of the capacity to recontextualize; and this was Arthur Koestler's point in his study of the "act of creation." One of his most telling examples was that of the wine-press, observed by Gutenberg, "lifted out of its context" and employed for a new purpose: printing books. Recontextualization, in other words, is creative adaptation rather than invention ex nihilo. 111 [End Page 176]
Problems remain--the question, for example, of whether certain ideas, artifacts, or practices are inherently more or less "mobile," shall we say, than others, and of the extent to which recontextualization depends on agency, creativity, the power to adapt. The most acute problem of all is the impossibility of criticizing a key concept or concepts without employing it or them. This recurrent problem in intellectual history may be illustrated from Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. In order to make the point that priests were not fundamentally different from ordinary people, Luther used the language of priesthood. The moral of the story is perhaps that we should not be looking for a new term or set of terms to replace context, terms that would probably generate new problems in their turn. It is more realistic to employ the word in the plural, to place it mentally in inverted commas, and to do our best to contextualize it, in all the many senses of that term.
Peter Burke is professor of cultural history at Cambridge University and fellow of Emmanuel College. Among his books are Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Italian Renaissance Culture andSociety, The Art of Conversation, History and Social Theory, Varieties of Cultural History, The French Historical Revolution, and The Fabrication of Louis XIV.
Notes
The author wishes to thank Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke and Mark Phillips for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
1. Augustine, De Genesi ad literam, ed. Paul Agaësse and Armand Solignac (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), bk. 1, chap. 19, sec. 38-39.
2. There are no references to contextus in Du Cange or in Roland E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). But the phrase prout in contextulegendum est is recorded in Johan Wilhelmus Fuchs, Olga Weijers, and Marijke Gumbert-Hepp, eds., Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi, vol. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981).
3. Ceslaus Spicq, Esquisse d'une histoire de l'exégèse latine au moyen âge (Paris: Vrin, 1944), 45, 250-51.
4. Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 166-67; William Cave, Scriptorum ecclesiasticarum historia literaria, 2 vols. (London: 1688-98), 1:xi.
5. Galileo Galilei, Opere, ed. Ferdinando Flora (Milan-Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1953), 1036-82.
6. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Scriptures (London: 1661), 71.
7. Gottfried Arnold, Unparteyische Kirche-und Ketzer- Historie, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: 1699-1700), 4:451.
8. Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 87-115, at 98; Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147-52.
9. Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning, 81, 123, 128, 179.
10. Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Albert R. Jonsen, "Casuistical," Common Knowledge 2.2 (1993): 48-65; James F. Keenan and Thomas A. Shannon, eds., The Context ofCasuistry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000).
11. Matthias Flacius, Clavis Scripturae, 2 vols. (Basel: 1567), 2:18-24.
12. Francesco Guicciardini, "Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli," in Scritti politici e ricordi, ed. Robert Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1933), 8, 19, 41.
13. François de La Noue, Discours politiques et militaires (1587); ed. Frank E. Sutcliffe (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 121 n. 111.
14. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity inRenaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1990).
15. Joseph Levine, "Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine," reprinted in Humanism and History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 54-72.
16. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (c. 1592; reprint, London: J. M. Dent, 1907), bk. 3, chap. 10, sec. 3; David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: J. Cape, 1956), 200.
17. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 31-35, 44.
18. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Spectator (1712), nos. 274, 428; cf. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, The Spectator e o Teatro das Luzes (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1994), 186.
19. R. G. Collingwood, "The Idea of History" (1928), in The Idea of History (1946; revised ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 83; Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 46.
20. Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology ofKnowledge (1927; English trans., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
21. Quoted in Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 210.
22. Friedrich Ast, Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (Landshut: 1808); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; 2d ed., New York: Harper, 1962), 3-31.
23. Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermacher (1870; ed. Martin Redeker, [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, 1970].
24. Quoted in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 171.
25. Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (London: Duckworth, 1975); Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
26. Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres, 44, 48, 192, 239; cf. René Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 166, 182, 184 n; Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology and Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
27. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins ofthe Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79-80, 107, 164-65.
28. Franz Boas, "Museums of Ethnology and their Classification," Science 9 (1887), 587-89. Cf. Ira Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," in Objects and Others, ed. George Ward Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); see also "The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas," in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, ed. George Ward Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 185-214, at 205; and Erich Kasten, "Franz Boas' Ethnographie und Museumsmethode," in Franz Boas, ed. Michael Dürr, Erich Kasten, and Egon Renner (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz,1992), 79-102.
29. Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge" (1925) and "The Problem of Generations" (1927; English translation in Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952], 134-90, 276-320).
30. William I. Thomas, "Situational Analysis" (1927; reprinted in W. I. Thomas on Social Organisation and Social Personality, ed. Morris Janowitz [Chicago: University of Chicago Press], 1966), 154-67, at 167.
31. Denys W. Harding, reviewing New Bearings in English Poetry, Scrutiny 1 (1932): 89.
32. Peter Burke, "The Central European Moment in British Cultural Studies" (forthcoming).
33. Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1962); Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, Cognitive Development (English trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 49; Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1948), 6. Cf. Christopher Robert Hallpike, The Foundations of Primitive Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 117-21, and Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, eds., Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1992), 19-22.
34. Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (London: Tavistock, 1952), xi, 170-87, 238-304.
35. Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges (1924; rev. ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 18.
36. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931), 20; Collingwood, "Outlines of a Philosophy of History," in Idea of History, 426-96, at 475.
37. Ibid., 115-16, 283, 316.
38. Robert H. Lowie, "On the Principle of Convergence in Ethnology," Journalof American Folklore 25 (1912): 24-42, at 41; cf. Edmund Leach, "Frazer and Malinowski" (1966; reprinted in The Essential Leach, ed. Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw, 2 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 1:25-43).
39. Bronislaw Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages," in The Meaning of Meaning, ed. Charles Kay Ogden and I. A. Richards (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1923), 451-510, at 465; see also Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935), 2:23-45. Cf. John Rupert Firth, "Ethnographic Analysis and Language with Reference to Malinowski's Views," in Man and Culture, ed. Raymond Firth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 93-118; Robert Henry Robins, "Malinowski, Firth and the 'Context of Situation,'" in Social Anthropology and Language, ed. Edwin Ardener (London: Tavistock, 1971), 33- 46; Fred C. C. Peng, "On the Context of Situation," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 58 (1986): 91-105; Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121, 148, 152.
40. Bronislaw Malinowski, "Culture," in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (1930; 2d ed., New York: Macmillan, 1948), 3:621-45.
41. Max Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958); James Clyde Mitchell, "The Situational Perspective," in Cities,Society and Social Perception: A Central African Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 1-33; Bruce Kapferer, "Norms and the Manipulation of Social Relationships in a Work Context," in Social Networks in Urban Situations, ed. James Clyde Mitchell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 181-244.
42. Jan van Velsen, "The Extended-Case Method and Situational Analysis," in The Craft of Social Anthropology, ed. Arnold L. Epstein (London: Tavistock, 1967), 129-49, at 136.
43. Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), 134.
44. Ibid., 83, 349.
45. Ibid., 194-95, 255, 475.
46. Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context.
47. Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (London: Orbis, 1992); Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966; 2d ed., London: John Knox, 1997).
48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), esp. 11-13; John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1955; 2d ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
49. Gregory Goertz, Contexts of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Agnew, "Mapping Politics: How Context Counts in Electoral Geography," Political Geography 15 (1996): 129-46.
50. Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (1986; rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Michael Shanks and Ian Hodder, "Processual, Post-Processual and Interpretive Archaeology," in Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks, and Alexandra Alexandri, eds., Interpreting Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1995), 3-29, at 14-17.
51. Torsten Hägerstrand, "Geography and the Study of Interaction between Nature and Society," Geoforum 3 (1976): 329-34; cf. Nigel Thrift, "On the Determination of Social Action in Time and Space," Society and Space 1 (1983): 23-57.
52. William Twining, Law in Context (1967; Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 43-44; Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 104-5, 108; cf. Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse (London: Macmillan,1987), 167.
53. Basil Bernstein, "Social Class, Language and Socialization" (1970; reprinted in Language and Social Context, ed. Pier Paolo Giglioli [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972], 157-77); Jerome S. Bruner, "Culture and Cognitive Growth," in Beyond the InformationGiven (London: George Allen, 1974), 368-93.
54. Basil Bernstein, "A Critique of the Concept of Compensatory Education" (1969; reprinted in Class, Codes and Control [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971], 190-201).
55. Jerome S. Bruner, Beyond the Information Given, 325-59; see also Bruner, Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York: Wiley, 1966), 21-22.
56. Michael Cole et al., The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 1971), xi, 20.
57. Dell Hymes, "The Ethnography of Speaking," in Anthropology and HumanBehavior, ed. Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institute, 1962), 15-53; Joshua Fishman, "The Sociology of Language" (1969; reprinted in Giglioli, Language and Social Context, 45-58, at 48-50).
58. William Labov, "The Logic of Non-Standard English" (1969; reprinted in Giglioli, Language and Social Context, 179-218, at 191).
59. Evans-Pritchard, Azande, 349.
60. Richard Bauman, Story, Performance and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Robert St. George, "Massacred Language: Courtroom Performance in Eighteenth- Century Boston," in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial inEarly America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 327-56, at 339.
61. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), 118; Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledge," Feminist Studies 14 (1986): 575-99.
62. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 22, 106-40, esp. 118; see also Goffman, "The Neglected Situation" (1964; reprinted in Giglioli, Language and Social Context, 61-66), and Frame Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); on Goffman, see Joshua Meyrowitz, "Redefining the Situation," in Beyond Goffman, ed. Stephen Harold Riggins (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 65-97.
63. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 7.
64. It was to Panofsky and not (as some might have expected) to Heidegger, that Bourdieu expressed his debt when I asked him about his concept of habitus some twenty years ago.
65. Edward P. Thompson, "The Crime of Anonymity," in Douglas Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: A. Lane, 1975), 255-308, at 307; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (London: Deutsch, 1975), 609-12; Peter Bailey, "Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?: Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability," Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 336-53. Cf. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 23-28.
66. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 5, 132: Jane F. Fulcher, "Concert et propagande politique en France au début du 20e siècle," Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 55 (2000): 389-413, at 391.
67. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 43-82.
68. Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles ofArchaeo-Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
69. Louis Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 31-64.
70. David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 55, 63; Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 172.
71. Thomas Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 92-95.
72. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
73. Benjamin Schwartz, "The Intellectual History of China," in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 15-30.
74. Peter Laslett, ed., Locke's Two Treatises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 61, 67.
75. J. G. A. Pocock, "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century," in Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 104-47 at 105. Cf. David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (The Hague: Dordrecht Nijhoff, 1985), 3.
76. Pocock, TheMachiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 333; see also Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1:13.
77. Skinner's point in a recent interview in The Many Faces of History, ed. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke (London: Verso, forthcoming 2002).
78. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" (1969, reprinted inMeaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 29-67, at 30, 34, 55; see also Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:xi; and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6.
79. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility andScience in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
80. Ludvik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935; English trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Univesitaires de France, 1963); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Constructionof Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981); Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 79-102.
81. Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologist's Account (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
82. Emanuel A. Schegloff, "In Another Context," in Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context, 191-227, at 215.
83. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 58.
84. Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11-12.
85. Brian Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 154.
86. Richard Rorty, "Inquiry as Recontextualisation," reprinted in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93-110. Hereafter cited as "Inquiry."
87. Hodder, Reading the Past, 5.
88. Mitchell, "Situational Perspective," 7, 18; Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 18.
89. Alain Boureau, "Richard Southern," in Past and Present 165 (1999), at 221-22.
90. Mitchell, "Situational Perspective," 7; cf. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts, 137-41.
91. Bernstein, "Social Class, Language and Socialisation" (1971), in Class, Codes and Control, 170-89; Françoise Armengaud, Le pragmatique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).
92. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960; English trans., London: Sheed and Ward, 1975).
93. Peter Burke "The Rise of Literal-Mindedness," Common Knowledge 2.2 (1993): 108-21.
94. Jorge L. Borges, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (1939; reprinted in Obras, ed. Carlo Frías [Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974], 446-50).
95. Cf. Kenneth Minogue, "Method in Intellectual History," in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, 176-93.
96. Jan C. Heesterman, "India and the Inner Conflict of Tradition" (1973; reprinted in The Inner Conflict of Traditions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 10-25).
97. Mitchell, "Situational Perspective," distinguishes "a situation defined by the actors" from "a setting defined by the analyst" and from wider "contexts."
98. Twining, Law in Context, 43-44.
99. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis, 186; John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 130-52; see also Goffman's "Contextualization and Understanding," in Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context, 229-52; Yoshiko Matsumoto, "Politeness and Conversational Universals: Observations from Japanese," Multilingua 8 (1989): 207-21.
100. Aaron V. Cicourel, "The Interpenetration of Communicative Contexts," in Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context, 291-310, at 309.
101. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1972), 163.
102. Suzanne Romaine, Language in Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
103. Peter Burke, "The Jargon of the Schools," in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., Languages and Jargons (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 22-41.
104. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
105. Golinski, Natural Knowledge, 91-102.
106. Ibid., 297-98.
107. On reframing, see Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 12-14, 20-21.
108. Michel de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien 2d ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
109. Street, Literacy, 155.
110. Rorty, esp. "Inquiry," esp. 94, 98.
111. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964; rev. ed., London: Hutchinson, 1969), 123.
Emmanuel College
Professor Peter Burke
Life Fellow; Emeritus Professor of Cultural History.
MA (Oxon and Cantab), Hon PhD (Lund), FBA, Member of the Academia Europaea, FRHistS.
Educated by the Jesuits and at Oxford (St John’s and St Antony’s), Peter Burke taught in the School of European Studies, University of Sussex from 1962 to 1979 as Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer in History and as Reader in Intellectual History. He moved to Cambridge to become a Lecturer in History and subsequently Reader in and then Professor of Cultural History. In Emmanuel he has served as Librarian and Archivist. He has published 23 books, including 'The Italian Renaissance' (1972), 'Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe' (1978), 'The Fabrication of Louis XIV' (1992), 'The Art of Conversation' (1993), 'A Social History of Knowledge' (2000), 'Eyewitnessing' (2000), 'What is Cultural History?' (2004) and 'Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe' (2004) and has been translated into 28 languages. He is married to a Brazilian historian, Maria Lúcia García Pallares-Burke.
Life Fellow; Emeritus Professor of Cultural History.
MA (Oxon and Cantab), Hon PhD (Lund), FBA, Member of the Academia Europaea, FRHistS.
Educated by the Jesuits and at Oxford (St John’s and St Antony’s), Peter Burke taught in the School of European Studies, University of Sussex from 1962 to 1979 as Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer in History and as Reader in Intellectual History. He moved to Cambridge to become a Lecturer in History and subsequently Reader in and then Professor of Cultural History. In Emmanuel he has served as Librarian and Archivist. He has published 23 books, including 'The Italian Renaissance' (1972), 'Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe' (1978), 'The Fabrication of Louis XIV' (1992), 'The Art of Conversation' (1993), 'A Social History of Knowledge' (2000), 'Eyewitnessing' (2000), 'What is Cultural History?' (2004) and 'Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe' (2004) and has been translated into 28 languages. He is married to a Brazilian historian, Maria Lúcia García Pallares-Burke.
Los intelectuales: un esbozo de retrato colectivo
ESTUDIOS. filosofía-historia-letras
Otoño 1987
PETER BURKE. Los intelectuales: un esbozo de retrato colectivo
UNO de los métodos más obvios de enfocar el tema de los intelectuales y la historia es hablar sobre el lugar en la historia de los propios intelectuales. También es una manera útil de tratar el problema de la definición, los rasgos básicos del retrato de la comunidad intelectual. No tenemos esencia, pero sí historia. Lo que somos depende de lo que fuimos ya sigamos la tradición o pretendamos romper con la tradición. Más precisamente, ya que las identidades sociales son construcciones, lo que somos depende de lo que pensamos que fuimos.
En todos estos casos, "nosotros" se refiere a los europeos. Me voy a limitar a Europa, a pesar del interés de comparar y contrastar la experiencia europea con la de grupos tradicionales tales como los brahmanes o los mandarines, así como con los intelectuales en el Tercer Mundo actualmente.
La historia de los intelectuales europeos es bien sabida. Quizás se podría decir que demasiado bien, porque la imagen convencional es engañosamente clara. Es preciso que nos desfamiliarizemos de ella. Una visión común de nuestro lugar en el tiempo es que somos los descendientes intelectuales de la inteligentsia radical del siglo diecinueve, que son los descendientes de los filósofos de la Ilustración, que son o una versión secular del clero protestante o los descendientes de los humanistas del Renacimiento. Como puede verse, las dificultades ya están empezando a surgir. Aunque no tengo tiempo más que para resumir esta imagen convencional, intentaré expresar algunas dudas acerca de la misma y tratar unos cuantos problemas que espero sean relevantes para nuestra discusión ulterior.
La imagen convencional parece demasiado simple, en tres aspectos obvios. En primer lugar, no toma suficientemente en consideración el hecho de la variación regional, progresando como lo hace de los humanistas italianos a los protestantes alemanes y siguiendo con los filósofos franceses y los radicales rusos. No es fácil ver dónde encaja Inglaterra, o España. Por supuesto que la cultura española difiere de la inglesa en aspectos importantes.
A pesar de las revistas --y de los congresos-- internacionales la comunidad intelectual es menos una comunidad que una confederación de subculturas locales. Las subculturas no son meramente locales. Más significativa, por lo menos en nuestro siglo, es la división entre las ciencias físicas y las humanidades, las "Dos Culturas" de C.P. Snow, con las "ciencias sociales" creando una tercera más que tendiendo un puente entre las otras dos. Esa es una segunda dificultad ignorada por la descripción tradicional.
Una tercera objeción que se plantea a la presentación convencional de la comunidad intelectual es la suposición de su continuidad. Es, como gustan decir los historiadores, una lectura demasiado "contaminada de presente", en el sentido de examinar el pasado sólo con vistas a encontrar antepasados, buscando gente, más o menos como nosotros. Michel Foucault no fue el primero en ver la problematicidad de la contaminación del presente y de la continuidad, pero sigue siendo el crítico más radical de esos prejuicios comunes. Sería útil preguntarnos cómo sería una hipótesis foucaultiana de los intelectuales, y en qué medida diferiría del tradicional retrato colectivo.
La manera más concreta de contestar a la pregunta es resumir y criticar simultáneamente la descripción tradicional. Para que los problemas resalten con más nitidez, intento contar la historia al revés, no para parecer moderno o post-moderno, sino para producir un Verfremdung-Effekt, para convertir a lo, familiar en extraño.
Miremos cincuenta años atrás. Era una época de considerable preocupación por la identidad de los intelectuales. 1937 fue el año de la muerte de Gramsci, que había estado meditando sobre este problema, entre otros, en su celda. El año inmediatamente anterior Karl Mannheim había publicado su "Ideología Utopía", con su famosa reflexión sobre los intelectuales "colgando del vacío", freischwebende Intelligenz. A los pocos años Floran Znaniecki, Joseph Schumpeter y José Ortega y Gasset publicarían sus reflexiones sobre el papel social de los intelectuales. Unos años antes Julien Benda, Alfred Weber y Max Weber habían publicado sus ideas sobre el tema Le traisan des el ves, Wissenschaft als Beruf y demás. Muchas de esas discusiones, aun siendo fascinantes, parecen ahora remotas, incluso ajenas. Estos hombres tenían un sentido mucho más fuerte de una comunidad intelectual que muchos de nosotros hoy. Muchos de ellos definieron esa comunidad en contraste con las "masas" (palabra común en aquel momento), y ahora parecen extremadamente "elitistas" (palabra que no existía aún en 1937, por lo menos en Inglés). La gran excepción es por supuesto Grarmsci, quien escribió que "todo el mundo es un intelectual", tutti gli uomini sono intelletualli, aunque muchos hombres no desempeñan la Función de intelectuales. Tras estas discusiones del rol social del intelectual no es difícil descubrir un sentido de crisis.
Otro salto hacia atrás en el tiempo nos lleva a mitad del siglo diecinueve, a los años de la década de 1860, cuando el término intelligentsia. [Nota 1] La inteligencia se veía así misma como ajena (de forma muy parecida a lo que pensaban los artistas "bohemios"). En este momento el grupo no se definía tanto en contraste "con el pueblo" como con la administración, el régimen. Pues éste era el momento del "populismo", del descubrimiento del pueblo y de su cultura por al menos un segmento de las clases medias, ante todo en la Europa central y del este. En otros lugares de Europa sin embargo, el término "intelectual", si es que se usaba, significaba algo bastante distinto. En Inglaterra, por ejemplo, la temprana referencia de Byron a "estos intelectuales" está hecha en un tono de desprecio aristocrático. El nuevo término de Coleridge, "clerecía", que hacía referencia a "hombres sabios, ya sea poetas, filósofos o eruditos" no fue generalmente adoptado. Un nuevo vocablo con algo más de éxito fue "científico". En Francia la expresión tradicional "hombre de letras" fue aún usada, por ejemplo por Tocqueville, cuando describió cómo en el siglo dieciocho "hombres de letras se pusieron al frente de la política".
Podemos pensar en la Revolución Francesa como "los intelectuales en el poder" y en Voltaire, Diderot y compañía. como "los intelectuales en la oposición", pero al hacerlo así estamos consciente o inconscientemente extrapolando analogías con el siglo diecinueve y veinte. Voltaire y su círculo no se situaban tanto en la oposición al antiguo régimen como en una postura de ambivalencia frente a él; no revolucionarios sino reformadores. Tenían ciertamente una identidad de grupo, pero se definían a sí mismos como filósofos o como ciudadanos de la "República de las Letras", título de la revista de Bayle a final del siglo diecisiete y un recordatorio del lugar de la prensa periódica --el Acta Eruditorum de Leipzig, las Transactions de la Real Sociedad de Londres y así sucesivamente-- y su papel en la creación de una identidad para un grupo que fuera mayor que el formado por los que frecuentaban un salón, café o sociedad cultural en particular.
Bayle era por supuesto un ministro calvinista exiliado en los Países Bajos, y ello es un recordatorio de las conexiones entre los filosófos y anteriores "reformadores", el clero culto protestante. De cualquier modo el paso del celoso Protestantismo al Deísmo o Ateísmo implica una solución de continuidad que el término "secularización" no salva totalmente. Hace veite años un historiador norteamericano planteó la tesis de que el clero puritano inglés del siglo diecisiete proporciona el primer ejemplo en la historia de "intelectuales radicales" en una sociedad tradicional. La idea tiene su atractivo, particularmente para alguien que ahora enseña en Cambridge, donde tantos de los puritanos fueron educados, y más especialmente para un miembro del Emmanuel College, su gran reducto a comienzos del siglo diecisiete.
En apoyo de esta tesis puede argumentarse que este grupo de clérigos cultos creían apasionadamente en la "reforma" y también que la resistencia a esta reforma llevó a algunos de ellos a la emigración, a otros a la rebelión ahora conocida como la "Revolución Inglesa". Incluso se ha sugerido que la revolución se originó en parte porque no había suficientes puestos de trabajo para todos los jóvenes que habían estudiado en Oxford y Cambridge. Sin embargo, induce a error el llamar a estos hombres "intelectuales alineados" y asimilarlos al modelo ruso de iontelligentsia del siglo diecinueve. Su "vocación" no era ni el conocimiento ni la actividad política, que eran simplemente un medio para un fin más alto. Su ideal era el del "santo".
Hay también, y ello resulta bastante irónico, una solución de continuidad entre este grupo de reformadores entusiastas y la "Reforma" de Martín Lutero. Lutero había inicialmente sugerido la abolición virtual del sacerdocio como algo exclusivo del clero, es decir, el sacerdocio de todos los creyentes. Su colega en la universidad de Wittenberg aún más radical que él, Andreas Karlstadt, llegó incluso a sugerir la abolición de los títulos académicos. Sin embargo, los Protestantes deseaban un clero que predicara, lo que quería decir un clero culto, lo que implicaba un clero más remoto de la gente ordinaria de lo que lo había sido el clero católico medieval.
La discontinuidad entre el clero culto protestante y los humanistas del Renacimiento es aún más acusada, a pesar de la existencia de hombres como Philip Melanchton, que pertenecía a ambos grupos, y el interés por la palabra escrita que éstos tenían en común. La crítica de la razón por parte de los protestantes y su idea de que el saber mundano era "vanidad" les separó de humanistas tan devotos como Erasmo y Vives, y aún más obviamente de hombres como Leonardo Bruni o Poggio Bracciolini. Bruni, Bracciolini y Erasmo no se consideraban primariamente "humanistas" (aunque la palabra humanista sí que existía en el latín de los siglos dieciséis y quince). Ellos se identificaban a sí mismos como litterati, hombres de letras, pensando que era el estudio del lenguaje y de la literatura lo que hacía a los hombres plenamente humanos. Eran críticos culturales, mas no críticos sociales en cualquiera de las acepciones que tenga la palabra "social".
Estos litterati se definieron a sí mismos por contraste con los scholastici, los "hombres de la escuela". En cuanto a éstos, prefirieron considerarse a sí mismos, desde el siglo doce al quince, como "filósofos". Antes del surgimiento de las universidades, desde el siglo doce en adelante, es considerablemente más difícil decidir qué individuos o grupos cuentan como intelectuales. lo cual nos recuerda la estrecha relación que hay entre la historia de las instituciones y la historia de las ideas.
Espero que este esbozo revele al menos algunas de las dificultades implícitas de realizar un cuadro colectivo de los intelectuales, o incluso --ya que ellos no querrán posar inmóviles para su retrato-perfilar algún tipo de pintura en movimiento acerca de ellos. La imagen y el ideal de una comunidad intelectual, una respublica litterarum, ha sido durante mucho tiempo potente, pero debemos recordar que en la práctica esta comunidad se ha visto durante largos períodos de tiempo fracturada, dividida en subculturas y rasgada por crisis.
Otoño 1987
PETER BURKE. Los intelectuales: un esbozo de retrato colectivo
UNO de los métodos más obvios de enfocar el tema de los intelectuales y la historia es hablar sobre el lugar en la historia de los propios intelectuales. También es una manera útil de tratar el problema de la definición, los rasgos básicos del retrato de la comunidad intelectual. No tenemos esencia, pero sí historia. Lo que somos depende de lo que fuimos ya sigamos la tradición o pretendamos romper con la tradición. Más precisamente, ya que las identidades sociales son construcciones, lo que somos depende de lo que pensamos que fuimos.
En todos estos casos, "nosotros" se refiere a los europeos. Me voy a limitar a Europa, a pesar del interés de comparar y contrastar la experiencia europea con la de grupos tradicionales tales como los brahmanes o los mandarines, así como con los intelectuales en el Tercer Mundo actualmente.
La historia de los intelectuales europeos es bien sabida. Quizás se podría decir que demasiado bien, porque la imagen convencional es engañosamente clara. Es preciso que nos desfamiliarizemos de ella. Una visión común de nuestro lugar en el tiempo es que somos los descendientes intelectuales de la inteligentsia radical del siglo diecinueve, que son los descendientes de los filósofos de la Ilustración, que son o una versión secular del clero protestante o los descendientes de los humanistas del Renacimiento. Como puede verse, las dificultades ya están empezando a surgir. Aunque no tengo tiempo más que para resumir esta imagen convencional, intentaré expresar algunas dudas acerca de la misma y tratar unos cuantos problemas que espero sean relevantes para nuestra discusión ulterior.
La imagen convencional parece demasiado simple, en tres aspectos obvios. En primer lugar, no toma suficientemente en consideración el hecho de la variación regional, progresando como lo hace de los humanistas italianos a los protestantes alemanes y siguiendo con los filósofos franceses y los radicales rusos. No es fácil ver dónde encaja Inglaterra, o España. Por supuesto que la cultura española difiere de la inglesa en aspectos importantes.
A pesar de las revistas --y de los congresos-- internacionales la comunidad intelectual es menos una comunidad que una confederación de subculturas locales. Las subculturas no son meramente locales. Más significativa, por lo menos en nuestro siglo, es la división entre las ciencias físicas y las humanidades, las "Dos Culturas" de C.P. Snow, con las "ciencias sociales" creando una tercera más que tendiendo un puente entre las otras dos. Esa es una segunda dificultad ignorada por la descripción tradicional.
Una tercera objeción que se plantea a la presentación convencional de la comunidad intelectual es la suposición de su continuidad. Es, como gustan decir los historiadores, una lectura demasiado "contaminada de presente", en el sentido de examinar el pasado sólo con vistas a encontrar antepasados, buscando gente, más o menos como nosotros. Michel Foucault no fue el primero en ver la problematicidad de la contaminación del presente y de la continuidad, pero sigue siendo el crítico más radical de esos prejuicios comunes. Sería útil preguntarnos cómo sería una hipótesis foucaultiana de los intelectuales, y en qué medida diferiría del tradicional retrato colectivo.
La manera más concreta de contestar a la pregunta es resumir y criticar simultáneamente la descripción tradicional. Para que los problemas resalten con más nitidez, intento contar la historia al revés, no para parecer moderno o post-moderno, sino para producir un Verfremdung-Effekt, para convertir a lo, familiar en extraño.
Miremos cincuenta años atrás. Era una época de considerable preocupación por la identidad de los intelectuales. 1937 fue el año de la muerte de Gramsci, que había estado meditando sobre este problema, entre otros, en su celda. El año inmediatamente anterior Karl Mannheim había publicado su "Ideología Utopía", con su famosa reflexión sobre los intelectuales "colgando del vacío", freischwebende Intelligenz. A los pocos años Floran Znaniecki, Joseph Schumpeter y José Ortega y Gasset publicarían sus reflexiones sobre el papel social de los intelectuales. Unos años antes Julien Benda, Alfred Weber y Max Weber habían publicado sus ideas sobre el tema Le traisan des el ves, Wissenschaft als Beruf y demás. Muchas de esas discusiones, aun siendo fascinantes, parecen ahora remotas, incluso ajenas. Estos hombres tenían un sentido mucho más fuerte de una comunidad intelectual que muchos de nosotros hoy. Muchos de ellos definieron esa comunidad en contraste con las "masas" (palabra común en aquel momento), y ahora parecen extremadamente "elitistas" (palabra que no existía aún en 1937, por lo menos en Inglés). La gran excepción es por supuesto Grarmsci, quien escribió que "todo el mundo es un intelectual", tutti gli uomini sono intelletualli, aunque muchos hombres no desempeñan la Función de intelectuales. Tras estas discusiones del rol social del intelectual no es difícil descubrir un sentido de crisis.
Otro salto hacia atrás en el tiempo nos lleva a mitad del siglo diecinueve, a los años de la década de 1860, cuando el término intelligentsia. [Nota 1] La inteligencia se veía así misma como ajena (de forma muy parecida a lo que pensaban los artistas "bohemios"). En este momento el grupo no se definía tanto en contraste "con el pueblo" como con la administración, el régimen. Pues éste era el momento del "populismo", del descubrimiento del pueblo y de su cultura por al menos un segmento de las clases medias, ante todo en la Europa central y del este. En otros lugares de Europa sin embargo, el término "intelectual", si es que se usaba, significaba algo bastante distinto. En Inglaterra, por ejemplo, la temprana referencia de Byron a "estos intelectuales" está hecha en un tono de desprecio aristocrático. El nuevo término de Coleridge, "clerecía", que hacía referencia a "hombres sabios, ya sea poetas, filósofos o eruditos" no fue generalmente adoptado. Un nuevo vocablo con algo más de éxito fue "científico". En Francia la expresión tradicional "hombre de letras" fue aún usada, por ejemplo por Tocqueville, cuando describió cómo en el siglo dieciocho "hombres de letras se pusieron al frente de la política".
Podemos pensar en la Revolución Francesa como "los intelectuales en el poder" y en Voltaire, Diderot y compañía. como "los intelectuales en la oposición", pero al hacerlo así estamos consciente o inconscientemente extrapolando analogías con el siglo diecinueve y veinte. Voltaire y su círculo no se situaban tanto en la oposición al antiguo régimen como en una postura de ambivalencia frente a él; no revolucionarios sino reformadores. Tenían ciertamente una identidad de grupo, pero se definían a sí mismos como filósofos o como ciudadanos de la "República de las Letras", título de la revista de Bayle a final del siglo diecisiete y un recordatorio del lugar de la prensa periódica --el Acta Eruditorum de Leipzig, las Transactions de la Real Sociedad de Londres y así sucesivamente-- y su papel en la creación de una identidad para un grupo que fuera mayor que el formado por los que frecuentaban un salón, café o sociedad cultural en particular.
Bayle era por supuesto un ministro calvinista exiliado en los Países Bajos, y ello es un recordatorio de las conexiones entre los filosófos y anteriores "reformadores", el clero culto protestante. De cualquier modo el paso del celoso Protestantismo al Deísmo o Ateísmo implica una solución de continuidad que el término "secularización" no salva totalmente. Hace veite años un historiador norteamericano planteó la tesis de que el clero puritano inglés del siglo diecisiete proporciona el primer ejemplo en la historia de "intelectuales radicales" en una sociedad tradicional. La idea tiene su atractivo, particularmente para alguien que ahora enseña en Cambridge, donde tantos de los puritanos fueron educados, y más especialmente para un miembro del Emmanuel College, su gran reducto a comienzos del siglo diecisiete.
En apoyo de esta tesis puede argumentarse que este grupo de clérigos cultos creían apasionadamente en la "reforma" y también que la resistencia a esta reforma llevó a algunos de ellos a la emigración, a otros a la rebelión ahora conocida como la "Revolución Inglesa". Incluso se ha sugerido que la revolución se originó en parte porque no había suficientes puestos de trabajo para todos los jóvenes que habían estudiado en Oxford y Cambridge. Sin embargo, induce a error el llamar a estos hombres "intelectuales alineados" y asimilarlos al modelo ruso de iontelligentsia del siglo diecinueve. Su "vocación" no era ni el conocimiento ni la actividad política, que eran simplemente un medio para un fin más alto. Su ideal era el del "santo".
Hay también, y ello resulta bastante irónico, una solución de continuidad entre este grupo de reformadores entusiastas y la "Reforma" de Martín Lutero. Lutero había inicialmente sugerido la abolición virtual del sacerdocio como algo exclusivo del clero, es decir, el sacerdocio de todos los creyentes. Su colega en la universidad de Wittenberg aún más radical que él, Andreas Karlstadt, llegó incluso a sugerir la abolición de los títulos académicos. Sin embargo, los Protestantes deseaban un clero que predicara, lo que quería decir un clero culto, lo que implicaba un clero más remoto de la gente ordinaria de lo que lo había sido el clero católico medieval.
La discontinuidad entre el clero culto protestante y los humanistas del Renacimiento es aún más acusada, a pesar de la existencia de hombres como Philip Melanchton, que pertenecía a ambos grupos, y el interés por la palabra escrita que éstos tenían en común. La crítica de la razón por parte de los protestantes y su idea de que el saber mundano era "vanidad" les separó de humanistas tan devotos como Erasmo y Vives, y aún más obviamente de hombres como Leonardo Bruni o Poggio Bracciolini. Bruni, Bracciolini y Erasmo no se consideraban primariamente "humanistas" (aunque la palabra humanista sí que existía en el latín de los siglos dieciséis y quince). Ellos se identificaban a sí mismos como litterati, hombres de letras, pensando que era el estudio del lenguaje y de la literatura lo que hacía a los hombres plenamente humanos. Eran críticos culturales, mas no críticos sociales en cualquiera de las acepciones que tenga la palabra "social".
Estos litterati se definieron a sí mismos por contraste con los scholastici, los "hombres de la escuela". En cuanto a éstos, prefirieron considerarse a sí mismos, desde el siglo doce al quince, como "filósofos". Antes del surgimiento de las universidades, desde el siglo doce en adelante, es considerablemente más difícil decidir qué individuos o grupos cuentan como intelectuales. lo cual nos recuerda la estrecha relación que hay entre la historia de las instituciones y la historia de las ideas.
Espero que este esbozo revele al menos algunas de las dificultades implícitas de realizar un cuadro colectivo de los intelectuales, o incluso --ya que ellos no querrán posar inmóviles para su retrato-perfilar algún tipo de pintura en movimiento acerca de ellos. La imagen y el ideal de una comunidad intelectual, una respublica litterarum, ha sido durante mucho tiempo potente, pero debemos recordar que en la práctica esta comunidad se ha visto durante largos períodos de tiempo fracturada, dividida en subculturas y rasgada por crisis.
Hablar y callar, funciones sociales del lenguaje a través de la historia
Peter Burke
Hablar y callar
Funciones sociales del lenguaje a través de la historia
Barcelona, Gedisa, 1996. ISBN: 84-7432-561-7. 209 pp. 2.515 ptas.
Peter Burke es historiador. Un excelente historiador, además. Es un ejemplo de cómo el conocimiento requiere cada vez más posturas multidisciplinares, en las que los enfoques sean nuevos. La ciencia estudia siempre los mismos objetos pero desde distintos ángulos. Cada nuevo ángulo implica una riqueza del fenómeno para su observador. El avance de la sociolingüística y la pragmática, el abandono cada vez más acusado de las posturas reduccionistas sobre el lenguaje, permiten reintegrarlo a su vida activa, sacándolo de las vitrinas que lo aíslan de su medio: la sociedad.
El lenguaje tiene su historia; la sociedad, también. Burke trata de conjugarlas.. El lenguaje, al reincorporarse a la acción social, lejos de ser una lengua "neutra", se reviste de la riqueza de la variación (vid. reseña: Irene Lozano "Lenguaje femenino, lenguaje masculino...", Espéculo nº 2).
En el Prefacio de la obra, Burke anticipa ya cuáles van a ser sus intenciones y postulados básicos:
1. Diferentes grupos sociales usan diferentes variedades de lengua.
2. Los mismos individuos emplean diferentes variedades de lengua en diferentes situaciones.
3. La lengua refleja la sociedad o la cultura en la que se usa.
4. La lengua modela la sociedad en la que se usa. (p. 18)
Como puede apreciarse, Burke busca los usos y valores del lenguaje en sus ámbitos o dominios de aplicación. Como elemento social que es, el lenguaje está también sometido en cada momento de la historia a reglamentaciones y restricciones por parte de las instituciones y comunidades (punto segundo). El lenguaje, en todas las épocas, ha sido siempre un elemento regulado, variando la fuerza coercitiva aplicada a las trasgresiones. Lo correcto o lo incorrecto, la forma de prestigio y la popular, etc. son objeto de atención y motivo de reflexión sobre los intercambios lingüísticos como elementos condicionados en la práctica social.
En este volumen, Burke estudia los siguientes momentos o desarrollos históricos:
1. - La historia social del lenguaje.
2. - "Heu Domine, Adsunt Turcae": esbozo de una historia social del latín posmedieval.
3. - Lengua e identidad en la Italia moderna temprana.
4. - El arte de la conversación en la Europa moderna temprana.
5. - Notas para una historia social del silencio en la Europa moderna temprana.
6. Bibliografía
Este tipo de acercamientos al lenguaje históricamente contextualizado le permiten el análisis de facetas que generalmente no son abordados por la lingüística tradicional: "Lo que hay que afirmar es que la historia social del lenguaje, lo mismo que las otras formas de historia social, no puede divorciarse de las cuestiones de poder" (p. 38). Así es posible estudiar el insulto y su significación social o la reglamentación del silencio en diversos momentos de la historia, desde las órdenes religiosas a la sumisión femenina ante el varón. El carácter político de los procesos de unificación lingüística para la formación de los estados es estudiado en la Italia moderna (toscano=italiano); los diferentes factores que rigieron la evolución del latín en la sociedad posmedieval y sus aplicaciones en distintos ámbitos hasta llegar, en algunos de ellos, hasta este siglo.
Es de gran interés el capítulo 4 sobre los libros que regulaban el "arte de la conversación". Burke comenta: "La lectura de estos textos sugiere que una teoría verdaderamente general de la conversación debería tratar la tensión y el equilibrio entre los principios competitivo y cooperativo, entre la igualdad y la jerarquía, entre la inclusión y la exclusión y entre la espontaneidad y el estudio, en lugar de colocar todo el peso del acento en el primer término de cada uno de estos pares de conceptos" (pp. 118-119).
Una obra de gran interés, sugerente, capaz de abrir perspectivas nuevas en la reflexión sobre el papel del lenguaje en la historia social.
Otras obras de P. Burke en español:
* La cultura popular en la Europa moderna. Alianza ed., Madrid, 1991. 445 pp.
* Peter Burke (ed.): Formas de hacer historia. Alianza ed., Madrid, 1993. 313 pp.
Joaquín Mª Aguirre
domingo 21 de diciembre de 2008
Frederick Antal. Historiador social del arte recomendado por P.B.
Antal, Frederick (Frigyes)
Date born: 1887
Place born: Budapest, Czech
Date died: 1954
Place died: London, United Kingdom
The son of a wealthy Jewish family, Antal completed a law degree then studied art history in Budapest, Freiburg and Paris. In Berlin he was a student of Heinrich Wölfflin (q.v.) and in Vienna under Max Dvor�k (q.v.). He received his doctorate in art history in 1914 under Dvoř�k and began his career as a volunteer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (1914/1915). In 1916 Antal joined the illustrious discussion group the Sonntagskreis, whose members included intellectuals such as the philosopher Georg Luk�cs (1885-1971), the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) and art historians Arnold Hauser (q.v.) and Johannes Wilde (q.v.). Soon after the creation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March 21, 1919), Antal became Vorsitzender des Direktoriums (Chairman of the Board) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he had assisted in socializing the museum�s private collection and organized a successful exhibit with the help of Otto Benesch (q.v.). As Vorsitzender of the museum, Antal headed efforts to promote artists and protect national monuments. His tenure ended abruptly after the Counterrevolution of Summer 1919, after which he fled to Vienna. Partially funded by the University of Berlin, Antal traveled extensively in Italy from 1919 to1923, spending most of his time in Florence. From 1923-33 Antal was a resident of Berlin, where he collaborated with Bruno Fürst (1891-1965) as editor (1926-34) of the periodical Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, a publication primarily concerned with methodology. In 1932 Antal toured Soviet museums, about which he later lectured (published 1976). He fled the Nazi regime in 1933 and settled in England, where he befriended the art historian Anthony Blunt (q.v.), wrote his book Florentine Painting and lectured at the Coutauld Institute. Thereafter, Antal�s interests shifted from classical and romantic French painting and its relation to revolution and restoration to the 18th Century artists Hogarth and Füssli. His book manuscripts on these artists were published posthumously.
Antal's Marxist beliefs and reputation as a Communist effectively excluded from the Western academic world as of 1948. At his best, Antal can be seen as blending Aby Warburg's (q.v.) methodology with a more traditional Marxist view of art. As he continued to write, he increasingly applied the concept of Marxist dialectical materialism to art history. He suggested that artistic style is primarily an expression of ideology, political beliefs and social class. This methodology has been criticized as assuming too strong a determination of artistic style by social constructs. Furthermore, Antal was criticized for defining an artist�s identity too narrowly by his patron or benefactor�s social class and thereby neglecting the artist�s subjectivity. The review of Florentine Painting by Millard Meiss (q.v.) in the Art Bulletin (1949) is most illuminating, both of Antal's methodology and of the art establishment's reaction. The critic and art historian John Berger (q.v.) cited Antal as a major influence on Berger's work. NP
Home Country: Hungary, United Kingdom
Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 134-6; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 77; Bazin 155, 199, 341, 344; The Dictionary of Art 2: 131; Berger, John. "Frederick Antal: A Personal Tribute." Burlington Magazine 96/617 (1954): 259-60; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999, pp. 1-4; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munchen: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 3-6.
Bibliography: [dissertation:] Klassizismus, Romantik und Realismus in der französisschen Malerei von der Mitte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts bis zum auftreten Géricault. Ph.D., Vienna University, 1914, partially translated into English as Classicism and Romanticism, with Other Studies in Art History. New York: Basic Books, 1966; "Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism." Burlington Magazine 56 (1935): 160, reprinted in above essay collection; Florentine Painting and its Social Background: the Bougeois Republic before Cosimo de'Medici's Advent to Power: Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries. London: Paul, 1948; Fuseli Studies. London: Routledge & Paul, 1956; Hogarth and His Place in European Art. London: Routledge & Paul, 1962.
Libro recomendado para comprender el tema de la sociología del arte, “El mundo florentino y su ambiente social”, de 1947. El profesor Burke destaca que este autor es menos dogmàtico y màs interesante que el propio Arnold Hauser. Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Historia del arte y lucha de clases, Histoire de l'art et lutte des classes, originally published 1973.
BLAA
Date born: 1887
Place born: Budapest, Czech
Date died: 1954
Place died: London, United Kingdom
The son of a wealthy Jewish family, Antal completed a law degree then studied art history in Budapest, Freiburg and Paris. In Berlin he was a student of Heinrich Wölfflin (q.v.) and in Vienna under Max Dvor�k (q.v.). He received his doctorate in art history in 1914 under Dvoř�k and began his career as a volunteer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (1914/1915). In 1916 Antal joined the illustrious discussion group the Sonntagskreis, whose members included intellectuals such as the philosopher Georg Luk�cs (1885-1971), the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) and art historians Arnold Hauser (q.v.) and Johannes Wilde (q.v.). Soon after the creation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March 21, 1919), Antal became Vorsitzender des Direktoriums (Chairman of the Board) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he had assisted in socializing the museum�s private collection and organized a successful exhibit with the help of Otto Benesch (q.v.). As Vorsitzender of the museum, Antal headed efforts to promote artists and protect national monuments. His tenure ended abruptly after the Counterrevolution of Summer 1919, after which he fled to Vienna. Partially funded by the University of Berlin, Antal traveled extensively in Italy from 1919 to1923, spending most of his time in Florence. From 1923-33 Antal was a resident of Berlin, where he collaborated with Bruno Fürst (1891-1965) as editor (1926-34) of the periodical Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, a publication primarily concerned with methodology. In 1932 Antal toured Soviet museums, about which he later lectured (published 1976). He fled the Nazi regime in 1933 and settled in England, where he befriended the art historian Anthony Blunt (q.v.), wrote his book Florentine Painting and lectured at the Coutauld Institute. Thereafter, Antal�s interests shifted from classical and romantic French painting and its relation to revolution and restoration to the 18th Century artists Hogarth and Füssli. His book manuscripts on these artists were published posthumously.
Antal's Marxist beliefs and reputation as a Communist effectively excluded from the Western academic world as of 1948. At his best, Antal can be seen as blending Aby Warburg's (q.v.) methodology with a more traditional Marxist view of art. As he continued to write, he increasingly applied the concept of Marxist dialectical materialism to art history. He suggested that artistic style is primarily an expression of ideology, political beliefs and social class. This methodology has been criticized as assuming too strong a determination of artistic style by social constructs. Furthermore, Antal was criticized for defining an artist�s identity too narrowly by his patron or benefactor�s social class and thereby neglecting the artist�s subjectivity. The review of Florentine Painting by Millard Meiss (q.v.) in the Art Bulletin (1949) is most illuminating, both of Antal's methodology and of the art establishment's reaction. The critic and art historian John Berger (q.v.) cited Antal as a major influence on Berger's work. NP
Home Country: Hungary, United Kingdom
Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 134-6; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 77; Bazin 155, 199, 341, 344; The Dictionary of Art 2: 131; Berger, John. "Frederick Antal: A Personal Tribute." Burlington Magazine 96/617 (1954): 259-60; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999, pp. 1-4; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munchen: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 3-6.
Bibliography: [dissertation:] Klassizismus, Romantik und Realismus in der französisschen Malerei von der Mitte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts bis zum auftreten Géricault. Ph.D., Vienna University, 1914, partially translated into English as Classicism and Romanticism, with Other Studies in Art History. New York: Basic Books, 1966; "Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism." Burlington Magazine 56 (1935): 160, reprinted in above essay collection; Florentine Painting and its Social Background: the Bougeois Republic before Cosimo de'Medici's Advent to Power: Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries. London: Paul, 1948; Fuseli Studies. London: Routledge & Paul, 1956; Hogarth and His Place in European Art. London: Routledge & Paul, 1962.
Libro recomendado para comprender el tema de la sociología del arte, “El mundo florentino y su ambiente social”, de 1947. El profesor Burke destaca que este autor es menos dogmàtico y màs interesante que el propio Arnold Hauser. Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Historia del arte y lucha de clases, Histoire de l'art et lutte des classes, originally published 1973.
BLAA
domingo 14 de diciembre de 2008
Autobiografía cultural, entrevista con Alan MacFarlane, 31 de julio de 2004
sábado 13 de diciembre de 2008
Cristóbal Florenzano y Marcelo Somarriva, El Mercurio de Chile
Cultura popular y alta cultura
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=855501
Peter Burke es uno de los historiadores más prolíficos y notables de la actualidad. En esta entrevista habla de la manera en que la historia se ocupa hoy de la interacción entre los distintos niveles culturales
La oficina de Peter Burke es alta y luminosa. Está frente a uno de los muchos parques públicos que tiene la ciudad universitaria de Cambridge, en Inglaterra. Lo primero que se ve al entrar son los libros que se acumulan por todas partes. Ordenados en largos estantes sobre los muros, abiertos sobre el escritorio a un lado de la computadora, apilados a lo largo de la pieza, forman sobre el suelo de madera pequeñas torres que hay que esquivar con cuidado
Burke es profesor emérito de Historia Cultural en Cambridge y este año cumple 42 años de ejercicio académico. Cuenta que durante algún tiempo fue un pintor aficionado, pero que sus obligaciones ya no se lo permiten. Burke es uno de los historiadores contemporáneos más prolíficos y también uno de los de mayor fama mundial: al día siguiente de dar esta entrevista, lo esperaban en Taiwán y poco tiempo antes de abrirnos la puerta había recibido un mensaje electrónico de un periodista coreano. Una de las pocas distracciones que su trabajo le permite es pasear por Cambridge. No se trata, sin embargo, de un gran descanso, pues, según dice, la mayor parte de las ideas se le ocurren caminando. A diferencia de muchos que la consideran una experiencia torturante, dice que le gusta escribir. Piensa que hacerlo es un buen punto de partida para investigar, ya que sólo así se da cuenta de las cosas que necesita conocer mejor. Escribe durante las mañanas y luego camina hacia la biblioteca, donde trata de resolver las dudas que le surgieron en el trayecto.
Etnografía de Cambridge
En sus comienzos, Peter Burke estuvo muy influido por la Escuela de los Anales e incluso pensó trabajar con su fundador, Fernand Braudel. Buscando un espacio intelectual donde sus intereses de historiador pudiesen fertilizarse con las discusiones que se desarrollaban en otras disciplinas, como la filosofía y la sociología, entró a enseñar como profesor en la Universidad de Sussex. Después de haber pasado quince años allí, Burke se mudó a Cambridge. El contraste entre la atmósfera liberal de Sussex y la formalidad social y académica del Emmanuel College lo descolocó tanto que se puso a tomar notas de las maneras y costumbres de sus colegas tal como lo haría un antropólogo, apuntes que luego publicó en un artículo titulado "Notas para una etnografía de un college de Cambridge", bajo el seudónimo de William Dell.
Peter Burke mantiene una cercanía importante con Latinoamérica: está casado con la historiadora brasileña Maria Lucía Pallarés y viaja con ella todos los años a San Pablo.
- Una de sus áreas de trabajo ha sido la cultura popular. ¿Cómo percibe esta cultura hoy, cuando se habla de una aceleración del tiempo y de los cambios sociales?
-Los historiadores se han vuelto más dudosos de lo que acostumbraban acerca de si el término cultura popular sirve para definir la cultura de cualquier período y eso es, en parte, por los cambios actuales. Ahora es más difícil definir la cultura popular de lo que era hace cincuenta años; entonces los intelectuales no miraban televisión y tenían una cultura muy separada de la que tenía la gente normal. Hoy casi todo el mundo mira televisión, hasta los mismos programas, incluso quienes dicen no hacerlo. Algo bueno de esto es el surgimiento de un idioma común. Así, puedes dar una conferencia e ilustrar lo que estás diciendo a partir de un código compartido y puedes contar con que el público lo entienda. Algunos sociólogos, a mi entender acertadamente, hablan de una cultura común. Pienso que tienes que hablar de culturas, en plural, incluso hablando de individuos. Todos nosotros vivimos en una cultura común, pero participamos de varias culturas a la vez. Cuando escribí sobre la cultura popular en la Europa Occidental de comienzos de la época moderna, observé que las clases altas eran biculturales, participaban de lo que los historiadores llaman historia popular y también de una cultura educada, de la cual la gente común estaba excluida. Ahora tenemos que hablar de muchos grupos con intereses especiales. Treinta o cuarenta años atrás hubo un comité de gobierno encargado de investigar en la televisión inglesa y la comisión argumentó que la televisión inglesa tenía que reflejar a las minorías porque todos formamos parte de alguna, los que ven el cricket o la gente que observa pájaros, y así puedes hacer una lista de un centenar de cosas. Todos vivimos en una o más subculturas o minorías, hay muy pocas barreras entre una cultura y otra, y eso nos hace pensar que en el pasado la situación pudo haber sido mucho más fluida de lo que creíamos.
- ¿Cómo ve la perspectiva de la alta cultura en este contexto?
-Veo una interacción. Hoy las matrices de la cultura popular y la alta cultura interactúan. Un ejemplo de ello son las relaciones que se dieron entre el arte pop y el arte publicitario comercial en la pintura de Andy Warhol y así hay muchos otros casos. Por supuesto que esto ocurría antes, pero no ocurría tanto como ahora. Hoy muchos artistas o compositores practican esa mezcla de culturas, aun cuando los resultados podrán no ser muy populares.
-¿Qué aproximación debería tener la historia cultural a la alta cultura?
-Creo que es una tarea pendiente para los estudios culturales, particularmente en su versión anglosajona, donde me parece que la expresión se usa de manera más extendida. En ellos la alta cultura está notoriamente ausente, principalmente porque desde sus orígenes hicieron una crítica de los estudios anteriores a los que consideraban muy estrechos y exclusivos. Pienso que los estudios culturales pueden incluir también a la "alta cultura" y también extenderse hacia otros siglos.
- Usted señala que uno de los problemas que presenta la historia cultural es el de definir su objeto de estudio. Al respecto habla de definiciones de cultura que tienden a crecer. ¿Cuál definición prefiere usted?
-Si tuviera que dar una definición sería en términos de los elementos simbólicos y de los lugares donde los encuentras, es decir, si los encuentras en la vida diaria o en lo que llamamos obras de arte. Quiero evitar una definición en la que todo es cultura, porque si todo es cultura, la palabra está de más y el término no cumple función alguna. Si incluimos la vida diaria en esta acepción, hay que tener en cuenta que una comida ordinaria tiene menos que ver con la cultura que una comida especial en la que alguien celebra algo, porque esta última está más ritualizada. Esto también es relativo porque, por ejemplo, si viajas a otro país, lo que es ordinario parecerá fuera de lo común y viceversa. Cuando algo está más ritualizado, tiene un mayor contenido simbólico. Quiero mantener una multiplicidad de perspectivas y creo que el terreno común de un historiador cultural puede describirse como lo simbólico y su interpretación.
Imágenes disueltas
-¿Coincide usted con las profecías que plantean los gurúes de los medios cuando señalan que vivimos en una cultura visual?
-No cabe duda de que hoy en día hay más imágenes a nuestro alrededor de lo que solía haber en el pasado. Hay una variedad insólita de imágenes que nos rodean en todas partes. No estoy seguro, sin embargo, de que eso implique que la nuestra sea una cultura más visual que la cultura en la que vivieron nuestros antepasados, pues ellos también prestaron una enorme atención a las imágenes y poblaron sus entornos rituales y cotidianos con ellas. No diría, la verdad, que vivimos hoy en una cultura comparativamente más visual que la del pasado. Diría que vivimos en una cultura visual distinta, donde las imágenes se recambian más rápido y duran mucho menos. Un campesino del siglo XV convivía durante años con las mismas imágenes, con una escena sagrada representada en el vitral de una iglesia, por ejemplo, que llegaba a conocer de memoria hasta en sus más mínimos detalles. Era un modo de ver completamente distinto al que practicamos hoy nosotros frente a imágenes que se están deshaciendo todo el tiempo frente a los ojos.
- En uno de sus libros usted utiliza la metáfora de que el historiador de hoy debe leer imágenes, ciudades, en general textos que no están escritos. ¿Qué papel tiene la intuición en esto?
-No creo que leer imágenes deba ser sólo intuitivo, así como tampoco creo que la lectura de un texto deba ser enteramente intuitiva. Tal vez la proporción de intuición varía en los dos casos, pero yo no haría una distinción muy precisa. Los historiadores muchas veces siguen la intuición, pero deben justificar las conclusiones a las que llegan por la intuición. El problema de la intuición es que no puede aprenderse ni enseñarse, al menos en términos tradicionales. Pero creo que se puede aprender a leer imágenes y ciudades, tal como se puede aprender a leer textos. Se trata de una metáfora abierta, porque puede usarse para decir que no debemos ser tan logocéntricos y tomar las imágenes en serio. El problema es que hablamos de una "lectura" y con ello usamos un lenguaje logocéntrico para restarle importancia al imperio de las palabras.
- ¿Qué postura adopta usted en el debate contemporáneo acerca de la relación entre historia y ficción? ¿Cree usted que existen argumentos para defender a la historia de los argumentos que la consideran como una especie de ejercicio literario?
-Mi postura al respecto es moderada: creo que los historiadores construyen el pasado, pero lo construyen a partir de ciertas evidencias y materiales que existen más allá de sus posturas e imaginaciones personales. Los materiales pueden ser elegidos, combinados, ordenados e interpretados de tal manera que a través de ellos una historia en particular pueda ser contada, o algún aspecto puntual se vuelva visible. Desde ese punto de vista existen muchas similitudes con el trabajo de artesanía que da lugar a una obra de ficción. Pero a diferencia de la ficción pura, el historiador tiene que apoyarse en archivos, documentos y otro tipo de huellas que nos ha legado el pasado, que establecen límites y entregan una cierta dirección al trabajo de reconstrucción que hacemos desde el presente. Por otra parte, existe también una tradición de comentarios y lecturas de nuestro pasado histórico con la cual es saludable entablar un diálogo informado. La historia, a diferencia de la ficción pura, no opera a través de big bangs creativos que nacen de la nada. Opera más bien a través de un trabajo de reconstrucción continuo de las ideas y de los materiales que nos ha dejado el pasado. La tradición se transforma de manera incesante pero no desaparece, sin embargo, nunca del todo.
- ¿Cree usted que el historiador tiene algún tipo de responsabilidad ética con las vidas y hechos del pasado que intenta alumbrar?
-Me parece que sí, aunque no sé si yo entiendo el problema en los términos que usted llama éticos. En mi opinión, la responsabilidad del historiador en el interior de la comunidad humana más amplia en la que está inserto tiene que ver con el papel que juega ayudando a conservar la memoria de formas de vida valiosas que existieron en el pasado y que la historia tiende inevitablemente a destruir. En ese sentido, la responsabilidad del historiador, más que con el pasado, tiene que ver con el presente. El historiador puede recordarles a los hombres del presente que existen otras maneras posibles de hacer las cosas. Puede, al darles voz a las formas de vida del pasado, recordarle al presente que la manera en que nuestra cultura actual organiza y entiende el mundo no es la única, ni tampoco la mejor manera posible de hacerlo.
- ¿Pero qué posibilidad tiene el historiador de profundizar la memoria del resto de la comunidad en una época como la actual que parece estar más bien obsesionada con el futuro?
-Tengo la impresión de que a medida que la gente empieza a percibir una desconexión cada vez mayor con su pasado, en especial con las formas de vida cotidiana del pasado, se genera una reacción inversa, se genera un interés por la historia entre personas que buscan encontrar en ella algún tipo de contexto y orientación más coherentes que el que les ofrece el mundo actual. Aquí en Inglaterra, por ejemplo, la historia está pasando por un momento de auge en términos del interés del público. Y me consta que algo similar está ocurriendo en Francia y en otros países del continente. Hay muchas personas mayores de 50 años que se han convertido en lectores de historia porque están buscando reencontrase con el mundo que conocieron en su infancia: un mundo que el boom tecnológico de los últimos treinta años ha cambiado hasta volver irreconocible. De manera que no me parece que la voz del historiador en la comunidad esté condenada a morir en la irrelevancia y el aislamiento.
Por Cristóbal Florenzano y Marcelo Somarriva
El Mercurio, Chile
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=855501
Peter Burke es uno de los historiadores más prolíficos y notables de la actualidad. En esta entrevista habla de la manera en que la historia se ocupa hoy de la interacción entre los distintos niveles culturales
La oficina de Peter Burke es alta y luminosa. Está frente a uno de los muchos parques públicos que tiene la ciudad universitaria de Cambridge, en Inglaterra. Lo primero que se ve al entrar son los libros que se acumulan por todas partes. Ordenados en largos estantes sobre los muros, abiertos sobre el escritorio a un lado de la computadora, apilados a lo largo de la pieza, forman sobre el suelo de madera pequeñas torres que hay que esquivar con cuidado
Burke es profesor emérito de Historia Cultural en Cambridge y este año cumple 42 años de ejercicio académico. Cuenta que durante algún tiempo fue un pintor aficionado, pero que sus obligaciones ya no se lo permiten. Burke es uno de los historiadores contemporáneos más prolíficos y también uno de los de mayor fama mundial: al día siguiente de dar esta entrevista, lo esperaban en Taiwán y poco tiempo antes de abrirnos la puerta había recibido un mensaje electrónico de un periodista coreano. Una de las pocas distracciones que su trabajo le permite es pasear por Cambridge. No se trata, sin embargo, de un gran descanso, pues, según dice, la mayor parte de las ideas se le ocurren caminando. A diferencia de muchos que la consideran una experiencia torturante, dice que le gusta escribir. Piensa que hacerlo es un buen punto de partida para investigar, ya que sólo así se da cuenta de las cosas que necesita conocer mejor. Escribe durante las mañanas y luego camina hacia la biblioteca, donde trata de resolver las dudas que le surgieron en el trayecto.
Etnografía de Cambridge
En sus comienzos, Peter Burke estuvo muy influido por la Escuela de los Anales e incluso pensó trabajar con su fundador, Fernand Braudel. Buscando un espacio intelectual donde sus intereses de historiador pudiesen fertilizarse con las discusiones que se desarrollaban en otras disciplinas, como la filosofía y la sociología, entró a enseñar como profesor en la Universidad de Sussex. Después de haber pasado quince años allí, Burke se mudó a Cambridge. El contraste entre la atmósfera liberal de Sussex y la formalidad social y académica del Emmanuel College lo descolocó tanto que se puso a tomar notas de las maneras y costumbres de sus colegas tal como lo haría un antropólogo, apuntes que luego publicó en un artículo titulado "Notas para una etnografía de un college de Cambridge", bajo el seudónimo de William Dell.
Peter Burke mantiene una cercanía importante con Latinoamérica: está casado con la historiadora brasileña Maria Lucía Pallarés y viaja con ella todos los años a San Pablo.
- Una de sus áreas de trabajo ha sido la cultura popular. ¿Cómo percibe esta cultura hoy, cuando se habla de una aceleración del tiempo y de los cambios sociales?
-Los historiadores se han vuelto más dudosos de lo que acostumbraban acerca de si el término cultura popular sirve para definir la cultura de cualquier período y eso es, en parte, por los cambios actuales. Ahora es más difícil definir la cultura popular de lo que era hace cincuenta años; entonces los intelectuales no miraban televisión y tenían una cultura muy separada de la que tenía la gente normal. Hoy casi todo el mundo mira televisión, hasta los mismos programas, incluso quienes dicen no hacerlo. Algo bueno de esto es el surgimiento de un idioma común. Así, puedes dar una conferencia e ilustrar lo que estás diciendo a partir de un código compartido y puedes contar con que el público lo entienda. Algunos sociólogos, a mi entender acertadamente, hablan de una cultura común. Pienso que tienes que hablar de culturas, en plural, incluso hablando de individuos. Todos nosotros vivimos en una cultura común, pero participamos de varias culturas a la vez. Cuando escribí sobre la cultura popular en la Europa Occidental de comienzos de la época moderna, observé que las clases altas eran biculturales, participaban de lo que los historiadores llaman historia popular y también de una cultura educada, de la cual la gente común estaba excluida. Ahora tenemos que hablar de muchos grupos con intereses especiales. Treinta o cuarenta años atrás hubo un comité de gobierno encargado de investigar en la televisión inglesa y la comisión argumentó que la televisión inglesa tenía que reflejar a las minorías porque todos formamos parte de alguna, los que ven el cricket o la gente que observa pájaros, y así puedes hacer una lista de un centenar de cosas. Todos vivimos en una o más subculturas o minorías, hay muy pocas barreras entre una cultura y otra, y eso nos hace pensar que en el pasado la situación pudo haber sido mucho más fluida de lo que creíamos.
- ¿Cómo ve la perspectiva de la alta cultura en este contexto?
-Veo una interacción. Hoy las matrices de la cultura popular y la alta cultura interactúan. Un ejemplo de ello son las relaciones que se dieron entre el arte pop y el arte publicitario comercial en la pintura de Andy Warhol y así hay muchos otros casos. Por supuesto que esto ocurría antes, pero no ocurría tanto como ahora. Hoy muchos artistas o compositores practican esa mezcla de culturas, aun cuando los resultados podrán no ser muy populares.
-¿Qué aproximación debería tener la historia cultural a la alta cultura?
-Creo que es una tarea pendiente para los estudios culturales, particularmente en su versión anglosajona, donde me parece que la expresión se usa de manera más extendida. En ellos la alta cultura está notoriamente ausente, principalmente porque desde sus orígenes hicieron una crítica de los estudios anteriores a los que consideraban muy estrechos y exclusivos. Pienso que los estudios culturales pueden incluir también a la "alta cultura" y también extenderse hacia otros siglos.
- Usted señala que uno de los problemas que presenta la historia cultural es el de definir su objeto de estudio. Al respecto habla de definiciones de cultura que tienden a crecer. ¿Cuál definición prefiere usted?
-Si tuviera que dar una definición sería en términos de los elementos simbólicos y de los lugares donde los encuentras, es decir, si los encuentras en la vida diaria o en lo que llamamos obras de arte. Quiero evitar una definición en la que todo es cultura, porque si todo es cultura, la palabra está de más y el término no cumple función alguna. Si incluimos la vida diaria en esta acepción, hay que tener en cuenta que una comida ordinaria tiene menos que ver con la cultura que una comida especial en la que alguien celebra algo, porque esta última está más ritualizada. Esto también es relativo porque, por ejemplo, si viajas a otro país, lo que es ordinario parecerá fuera de lo común y viceversa. Cuando algo está más ritualizado, tiene un mayor contenido simbólico. Quiero mantener una multiplicidad de perspectivas y creo que el terreno común de un historiador cultural puede describirse como lo simbólico y su interpretación.
Imágenes disueltas
-¿Coincide usted con las profecías que plantean los gurúes de los medios cuando señalan que vivimos en una cultura visual?
-No cabe duda de que hoy en día hay más imágenes a nuestro alrededor de lo que solía haber en el pasado. Hay una variedad insólita de imágenes que nos rodean en todas partes. No estoy seguro, sin embargo, de que eso implique que la nuestra sea una cultura más visual que la cultura en la que vivieron nuestros antepasados, pues ellos también prestaron una enorme atención a las imágenes y poblaron sus entornos rituales y cotidianos con ellas. No diría, la verdad, que vivimos hoy en una cultura comparativamente más visual que la del pasado. Diría que vivimos en una cultura visual distinta, donde las imágenes se recambian más rápido y duran mucho menos. Un campesino del siglo XV convivía durante años con las mismas imágenes, con una escena sagrada representada en el vitral de una iglesia, por ejemplo, que llegaba a conocer de memoria hasta en sus más mínimos detalles. Era un modo de ver completamente distinto al que practicamos hoy nosotros frente a imágenes que se están deshaciendo todo el tiempo frente a los ojos.
- En uno de sus libros usted utiliza la metáfora de que el historiador de hoy debe leer imágenes, ciudades, en general textos que no están escritos. ¿Qué papel tiene la intuición en esto?
-No creo que leer imágenes deba ser sólo intuitivo, así como tampoco creo que la lectura de un texto deba ser enteramente intuitiva. Tal vez la proporción de intuición varía en los dos casos, pero yo no haría una distinción muy precisa. Los historiadores muchas veces siguen la intuición, pero deben justificar las conclusiones a las que llegan por la intuición. El problema de la intuición es que no puede aprenderse ni enseñarse, al menos en términos tradicionales. Pero creo que se puede aprender a leer imágenes y ciudades, tal como se puede aprender a leer textos. Se trata de una metáfora abierta, porque puede usarse para decir que no debemos ser tan logocéntricos y tomar las imágenes en serio. El problema es que hablamos de una "lectura" y con ello usamos un lenguaje logocéntrico para restarle importancia al imperio de las palabras.
- ¿Qué postura adopta usted en el debate contemporáneo acerca de la relación entre historia y ficción? ¿Cree usted que existen argumentos para defender a la historia de los argumentos que la consideran como una especie de ejercicio literario?
-Mi postura al respecto es moderada: creo que los historiadores construyen el pasado, pero lo construyen a partir de ciertas evidencias y materiales que existen más allá de sus posturas e imaginaciones personales. Los materiales pueden ser elegidos, combinados, ordenados e interpretados de tal manera que a través de ellos una historia en particular pueda ser contada, o algún aspecto puntual se vuelva visible. Desde ese punto de vista existen muchas similitudes con el trabajo de artesanía que da lugar a una obra de ficción. Pero a diferencia de la ficción pura, el historiador tiene que apoyarse en archivos, documentos y otro tipo de huellas que nos ha legado el pasado, que establecen límites y entregan una cierta dirección al trabajo de reconstrucción que hacemos desde el presente. Por otra parte, existe también una tradición de comentarios y lecturas de nuestro pasado histórico con la cual es saludable entablar un diálogo informado. La historia, a diferencia de la ficción pura, no opera a través de big bangs creativos que nacen de la nada. Opera más bien a través de un trabajo de reconstrucción continuo de las ideas y de los materiales que nos ha dejado el pasado. La tradición se transforma de manera incesante pero no desaparece, sin embargo, nunca del todo.
- ¿Cree usted que el historiador tiene algún tipo de responsabilidad ética con las vidas y hechos del pasado que intenta alumbrar?
-Me parece que sí, aunque no sé si yo entiendo el problema en los términos que usted llama éticos. En mi opinión, la responsabilidad del historiador en el interior de la comunidad humana más amplia en la que está inserto tiene que ver con el papel que juega ayudando a conservar la memoria de formas de vida valiosas que existieron en el pasado y que la historia tiende inevitablemente a destruir. En ese sentido, la responsabilidad del historiador, más que con el pasado, tiene que ver con el presente. El historiador puede recordarles a los hombres del presente que existen otras maneras posibles de hacer las cosas. Puede, al darles voz a las formas de vida del pasado, recordarle al presente que la manera en que nuestra cultura actual organiza y entiende el mundo no es la única, ni tampoco la mejor manera posible de hacerlo.
- ¿Pero qué posibilidad tiene el historiador de profundizar la memoria del resto de la comunidad en una época como la actual que parece estar más bien obsesionada con el futuro?
-Tengo la impresión de que a medida que la gente empieza a percibir una desconexión cada vez mayor con su pasado, en especial con las formas de vida cotidiana del pasado, se genera una reacción inversa, se genera un interés por la historia entre personas que buscan encontrar en ella algún tipo de contexto y orientación más coherentes que el que les ofrece el mundo actual. Aquí en Inglaterra, por ejemplo, la historia está pasando por un momento de auge en términos del interés del público. Y me consta que algo similar está ocurriendo en Francia y en otros países del continente. Hay muchas personas mayores de 50 años que se han convertido en lectores de historia porque están buscando reencontrase con el mundo que conocieron en su infancia: un mundo que el boom tecnológico de los últimos treinta años ha cambiado hasta volver irreconocible. De manera que no me parece que la voz del historiador en la comunidad esté condenada a morir en la irrelevancia y el aislamiento.
Por Cristóbal Florenzano y Marcelo Somarriva
El Mercurio, Chile
Entrevista con Carlos Subosky
Reportaje a Peter Burke publicado en la revista Ñ (pag.14) del 02/06/07 por Carlos Subosky.
http://palimpsestovirtual.blogspot.com/2007/06/peter-burke-y-un-pensamiento-acerca-de.html
http://palimpsestovirtual.blogspot.com/2007/06/peter-burke-y-un-pensamiento-acerca-de.html
Books, Burke
Books, Peter Burke
1. The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, Arnold, 1969), pp.154.
2. Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy (London, Batsford, 1972), pp.342. Second edn., 1974; 3rd edn., 1986; rpr 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995; 4th edn, 1999, rpr 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006; Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish translations. Chinese (simplified), Hungarian, Japanese translation of 4th edn. forthcoming.
3. Venice and Amsterdam: a Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites (London, Temple Smith, 1974), pp.150. Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish translations. Revised edn., Polity Press 1994.
4. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, Temple Smith, 1978, rpr 1979, 1983, 1988), pp.350. Albanian, Belorusian, Chinese, Croat, Czech, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish translations; Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Korean translations forthcoming. Second edn. Aldershot (Scolar Press) 1994, pp.377, rpr 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2006. E-book version 2003. 3rd edn 2008, Polish trans. forthcoming.
5. Sociology and History (London, Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp.100. Open University set book; German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish translations. Second edn., completely rewritten, as History and Social Theory , below no.13
6. Montaigne (Oxford, OUP, 1981), pp.80. Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish translations: Korean translation forthcoming. Reissued 1993 as part of Renaissance Thinkers. Rpr 1994. E-book version.
7. Vico (Oxford, OUP, 1985), pp. 100. German, Japanese, Portuguese translations. Italian, Korean translations forthcoming.
8. Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, CUP, 1987, pp.281; rpr 1989, 1994, 2000; paperback edn., 2005; Czech, German, Dutch, Italian translations.
9. The Renaissance (London, Macmillan, 1987), pp.75 (rpr 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995); second edn., 1997; Belarussian, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish translations. Albanian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Romanian translations forthcoming.
10. Küchenlatein (Berlin, Wagenbach, 1989), pp.87 [3 essays, never previously collected]; Italian version, Lingua Storia e Società (Laterza, 1990).
11. The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School, 1929-89 (Cambridge, Polity, 1990, rpr 1999, 2004), pp.147. Chinese (complex), Chinese (simplified), Czech, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish translations; Hungarian translation forthcoming. Revised German edn., 2004.
12. The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992, paperback edn 1994), rpr 1999, 2003, 2005. pp. 237. Dutch translation published 1991: German, Italian, 1993; Portuguese, 1994; French, 1995; Spanish, 1995, rpr 2003; Swedish, 1996; Chinese (complex characters), 1997; Japanese, 2004; Chinese (simple characters) 2007.
13. History and Social Theory (Cambridge, Polity, 1992), pp. 198. Reprinted 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001. Turkish translation, 1994; Korean, 1994; Italian, 1995; Spanish, 1997; Romanian, 1999; Polish, 2000; Chinese, 2001; Georgian, Greek, Portuguese, Serbian, 2002; Belarusian, 2005; Indonesian translation forthcoming. 2nd, enlarged edn Cambridge, Polity, 2005, pp.224, Spanish trans 2007, Japanese forthcoming.
14. O Mundo como Teatro: Estudos de Antropologia Histórica (Lisbon, Difel, 1992), pp.267.[ essays, not previously collected, with a new introduction, pp.7-12]
15. The Art of Conversation, (Cambridge, Polity, 1993), pp.178. German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish translations.
16. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's Cortegiano. (Cambridge, Polity, 1995), pp.202. German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish translations; Chinese, French translations forthcoming.
17. Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, Polity, 1997), pp. 246. Czech, Estonian, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish translations. Chinese translation forthcoming.
18. The European Renaissance (Oxford, Blackwells, 1998), pp. 284. French, German (rpr 2005), Italian, Spanish translations.
19. A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot. (Cambridge, Polity, 2000, rpr 2002), pp. 268. Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish translations. Czech translation forthcoming.
20. Eyewitnessing (London, Reaktion, and Ithaca, Cornell, 2001), pp. 224. Paperback edn, London 2005: Cornell UP paperback, 2008. Chinese, Croat, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish translations; Japanese translations forthcoming.
21. With Asa Briggs, A Social History of the Media, from Gutenberg to the Internet, Cambridge, Polity, 2002, pp. 374 (I am the principal author of chapters 1-3). Reprinted, 2002, 2003. 2nd edn, 2005. Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish translations. Chinese, German, Indonesian, Serbian translations forthcoming.
22. Hibridismo Cultural, São Leopoldo, Editora Unisinos, 2003, pp. 116.
23. What is Cultural History? Cambridge, Polity, 2004, pp. 152. Rpr 2005 (twice).2006 (twice). 2nd edn, revised, 2008. Croat, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish translations; Chinese, Japanese, Serb, Slovene, Turkish translations forthcoming. 2nd German edn, paperback, 2005.
24. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.210. Chinese, German, Italian, Spanish translations. Czech, Japanese, Portuguese translations forthcoming.
25. with Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2008.
1. The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, Arnold, 1969), pp.154.
2. Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy (London, Batsford, 1972), pp.342. Second edn., 1974; 3rd edn., 1986; rpr 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995; 4th edn, 1999, rpr 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006; Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish translations. Chinese (simplified), Hungarian, Japanese translation of 4th edn. forthcoming.
3. Venice and Amsterdam: a Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites (London, Temple Smith, 1974), pp.150. Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish translations. Revised edn., Polity Press 1994.
4. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, Temple Smith, 1978, rpr 1979, 1983, 1988), pp.350. Albanian, Belorusian, Chinese, Croat, Czech, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish translations; Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Korean translations forthcoming. Second edn. Aldershot (Scolar Press) 1994, pp.377, rpr 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2006. E-book version 2003. 3rd edn 2008, Polish trans. forthcoming.
5. Sociology and History (London, Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp.100. Open University set book; German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish translations. Second edn., completely rewritten, as History and Social Theory , below no.13
6. Montaigne (Oxford, OUP, 1981), pp.80. Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish translations: Korean translation forthcoming. Reissued 1993 as part of Renaissance Thinkers. Rpr 1994. E-book version.
7. Vico (Oxford, OUP, 1985), pp. 100. German, Japanese, Portuguese translations. Italian, Korean translations forthcoming.
8. Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, CUP, 1987, pp.281; rpr 1989, 1994, 2000; paperback edn., 2005; Czech, German, Dutch, Italian translations.
9. The Renaissance (London, Macmillan, 1987), pp.75 (rpr 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995); second edn., 1997; Belarussian, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish translations. Albanian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Romanian translations forthcoming.
10. Küchenlatein (Berlin, Wagenbach, 1989), pp.87 [3 essays, never previously collected]; Italian version, Lingua Storia e Società (Laterza, 1990).
11. The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School, 1929-89 (Cambridge, Polity, 1990, rpr 1999, 2004), pp.147. Chinese (complex), Chinese (simplified), Czech, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish translations; Hungarian translation forthcoming. Revised German edn., 2004.
12. The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992, paperback edn 1994), rpr 1999, 2003, 2005. pp. 237. Dutch translation published 1991: German, Italian, 1993; Portuguese, 1994; French, 1995; Spanish, 1995, rpr 2003; Swedish, 1996; Chinese (complex characters), 1997; Japanese, 2004; Chinese (simple characters) 2007.
13. History and Social Theory (Cambridge, Polity, 1992), pp. 198. Reprinted 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001. Turkish translation, 1994; Korean, 1994; Italian, 1995; Spanish, 1997; Romanian, 1999; Polish, 2000; Chinese, 2001; Georgian, Greek, Portuguese, Serbian, 2002; Belarusian, 2005; Indonesian translation forthcoming. 2nd, enlarged edn Cambridge, Polity, 2005, pp.224, Spanish trans 2007, Japanese forthcoming.
14. O Mundo como Teatro: Estudos de Antropologia Histórica (Lisbon, Difel, 1992), pp.267.[ essays, not previously collected, with a new introduction, pp.7-12]
15. The Art of Conversation, (Cambridge, Polity, 1993), pp.178. German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish translations.
16. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's Cortegiano. (Cambridge, Polity, 1995), pp.202. German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish translations; Chinese, French translations forthcoming.
17. Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, Polity, 1997), pp. 246. Czech, Estonian, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish translations. Chinese translation forthcoming.
18. The European Renaissance (Oxford, Blackwells, 1998), pp. 284. French, German (rpr 2005), Italian, Spanish translations.
19. A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot. (Cambridge, Polity, 2000, rpr 2002), pp. 268. Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish translations. Czech translation forthcoming.
20. Eyewitnessing (London, Reaktion, and Ithaca, Cornell, 2001), pp. 224. Paperback edn, London 2005: Cornell UP paperback, 2008. Chinese, Croat, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish translations; Japanese translations forthcoming.
21. With Asa Briggs, A Social History of the Media, from Gutenberg to the Internet, Cambridge, Polity, 2002, pp. 374 (I am the principal author of chapters 1-3). Reprinted, 2002, 2003. 2nd edn, 2005. Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish translations. Chinese, German, Indonesian, Serbian translations forthcoming.
22. Hibridismo Cultural, São Leopoldo, Editora Unisinos, 2003, pp. 116.
23. What is Cultural History? Cambridge, Polity, 2004, pp. 152. Rpr 2005 (twice).2006 (twice). 2nd edn, revised, 2008. Croat, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish translations; Chinese, Japanese, Serb, Slovene, Turkish translations forthcoming. 2nd German edn, paperback, 2005.
24. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.210. Chinese, German, Italian, Spanish translations. Czech, Japanese, Portuguese translations forthcoming.
25. with Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2008.
Entrevista con Claudia Möller, Argentina (1996)
http://scielo.isciii.es/pdf/neuropsiq/v27n1/v27n1a13.pdf
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462395897118330765&postID=846753202543178322
REVISTA CLÌO
El historiador inglés Peter Burke es profesor de historia cultural en la Universidad de Cambridge y miembro del Emmanuel College. Ha publicado numerosos libros y artículos, traducidos en más de veinte lenguas, entre ellos La cultura popular (1978), La revolución historiográfica francesa (1990), Formas de hacer historia (1991), Hablar y Callar (1996).
Esta entrevista fue concedida a Claudia Möller en ocasión de su primera visita a la Argentina, como historiador, en diciembre de 1996, invitado por el Programa de Maestría en Historia de la Facultad de Humanidades, de la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata.
C.M.: Frecuentemente se dice que para entrar en el mundo de un autor es importante “ponerse las ropas” del tiempo. Recordando aquel trabajo sobre Egohistoire y en clave etnohistórica, ¿Cómo ha sido su formación intelectual: quiénes han sido sus maestros, cuándo y dónde ha estudiado?
- La historia externa es muy simple de contar, tal vez la historia interna menos. Estudié en Oxford a fines de los años ‘50 con un profesor muy joven; era el primer año de enseñanza de ese profesor cuyo nombre es Keith Thomas. Él había sido discípulo de Christopher Hill, por lo que insistía en “mirar todo con ojo social”. Luego, como estudiante de posgraduación, mi profesor fue Trevor Roper, mucho más conservador, tanto metodológica como políticamente y nunca mostró demasiado interés por mi investigación, aunque siempre hablaba muy bien de su investigación. Él daba clases en un estilo “conferencista”, luego preguntaba si había alguna dificultad, y él mismo autorespondía que seguramente no, acto seguido se despedía hasta el próximo mes.
En 1962, entré en la nueva Universidad de Sussex. Fue muy importante para mí cambiar de colegio, mi primer colegio había sido el tradicional St. John’s College de Oxford, el segundo fue el nuevo St. Antony’s College, y su importancia residía en que la mayoría de sus integrantes eran extranjeros: cincuenta estudiantes de posgraduación y quizás solamente cuatro o cinco ingleses. Aquí mi gran amigo fue un ecuatoriano recientemente llegado de Paris, Juan Maiguashca (hoy profesor de Historia económica de América Latina en Toronto), discípulo de Chaunú, él fue quien me introdujo al mundo de los Annales. Claro que yo ya había leído los libros de Braudel como estudiante, pero es muy diferente encontrarse con una persona de ese mundo, hablar todos los días con alguien que entendiera todo “desde dentro”. Podría decirse que ingreso al mundo de los Annales de la mano de un discípulo latinoamericano de Chaunú.
C.M.: ¿Quiénes fueron sus “compañeros” a lo largo del camino de construcción de su oficio de historiador?
-Tuve una experiencia muy importante para mí antes de ir a la universidad. En aquella época, en Inglaterra existía el servicio militar obligatorio y en mi colegio se estilaba realizarlo antes de comenzar los cursos, así es que con dieciocho años fui para Singapur por diecisiete meses a un regimiento local, allí había malayos, hindúes, chinos... ¿Cultura híbrida, no?
C.M.: Entonces ¿Fue allí donde comenzó su interés por conocer las distintas lenguas?
- Ciertamente, también mi interés por los diversos estilos de vida, por las distintas mentalidades...
C.M.: Ud. mencionaba, al inicio de la entrevista, que en 1962 era estudiante, ¿Cómo vivenció el mayo francés?
- En aquella época yo era profesor en Sussex. Esta universidad tuvo a comienzos de los años sesenta la reputación de “universidad de izquierda” más por sus profesores que por sus estudiantes, por eso no tuvimos movimientos dentro de la Universidad como sí los hubo en otras universidades inglesas. En Sussex todo era permitido nada era subversivo. Claro que era muy interesante seguir los acontecimientos en Francia, pero en aquella época no me tenían demasiada confianza, yo sólo tenía 30 años. Era el principio de una distancia cultural con los estudiantes, ya que comencé a ser profesor a los 25 años y por lo mismo los estudiantes me parecían más amigos que alumnos. Luego del ‘68 aparece “otra” generación.
C.M.: Retomando la cuestión de la construcción del oficio de historiador, habíamos quedado en su formación en St. John’s College, en St. Antony’s College, su experiencia extraeuropea en clave “militar”, Sussex...
-Mi experiencia más importante luego de la de Oxford, fue en mi nueva Universidad de Sussex, con ideologías de interdisciplinariedad. Allí trabajaba con sociólogos, con especialistas en literatura... Luego en los años ‘60, con el History workshop tuve los primeros contactos con historiadores sociales de izquierda, como Raphael Samuel. En 1967 voy a Princeton, un lugar maravilloso para hacer investigación, invitado por Lawrence Stone. Casi todos tenían veinte años más que yo. Allí hablé con Panofsky, pero él no quería oír hablar de la historia social del arte, sólo le interesaba la iconografía. En aquella época el Instituto para Estudios Avanzados lo integraban solamente matemáticos, físicos, historiadores del arte, y especialistas en el mundo clásico, pero también estaba Félix Gilbert estudiando el Renacimiento. Después de Princeton y de Sussex, en 1979 fui a la Universidad de Cambridge, aquí había una gran ventaja: gente linda, más tiempo libre y una buena biblioteca, pero lo más importante intelectualmente fue cambiar de un ambiente, donde todos pensábamos mas o menos igual, a otro mucho más crítico, donde era necesario defender todo nuevo abordaje. Por ejemplo, cuando intenté organizar un curso de antropología histórica con mi colega Bob Scribner, fue preciso esperar tres años. El Comité no lo aprobaba, siempre decían que era preciso hacer unas pequeñas modificaciones; finalmente nos propusieron que el curso podría dictarse si quitábamos la teoría. Creo que esto describe mi divertido itinerario de Oxford a Cambridge, vía Sussex.
C.M.: A la manera en que aborda la Revolución historiográfica de los Annales, ¿Podría darnos una imagen de la historiografía inglesa?
- Hoy la situación es más fluida. Cuando comencé a enseñar, la mayoría de los historiadores ingleses eran historiadores políticos, estamos hablando de los años sesenta. Luego hubo un traslado hacia la historia social de la mano de un grupo de historiadores marxistas, el Grupo Past and Present, pero había mucha desconfianza hacia la historia de las ideas, hacia la historia de la cultura, es decir, hacia una historia con conexiones teóricas. Claro que estaba el Instituto Warburg pero había quedado aislado, una isla germánica y cultural, en un mar de empirismo inglés. Para muchos de mis colegas la historia cultural no tenía sustancia, ya que era y es muy importante, como dicen los ingleses, ‘tener los pies en la tierra”. En los años ‘60 se evidencia un cambio, al menos en el área de la sociología y en otras disciplinas, existe un mayor interés por las ideas continentales, las traducciones de Foucault por ejemplo. Pero fue recién en el ‘72 cuando El Mediterráneo de Braudel fue traducido al inglés, con iniciativa más norteamericana que inglesa, esto hoy parece increíble. En nuestros días la situación es más interesante y más complicada: de un lado, un nueva generación que lee a Braudel sin esa hostilidad para con Annales que mostró Elton, de otro lado, un movimiento global de reacción contra la historia social, la vuelta a la narrativa, a la historia política, esto implica hablar de una situación actual un poco confusa....
C.M.: En este marco ¿Dónde ubicaríamos a Eric Hobsbawm y a E.P. Thompson?; ¿Qué opinan ellos de esta manera de hacer historia?
- No hay unanimidad, claro que ahora casi todo el mundo respeta a Hobsbawm como un hombre de casi ochenta años que produce historia con gran penetración y estilo irónico... pero a pesar de eso, muchos historiadores ingleses piensan que Hobsbawm y Thompson son dogmáticos y rígidos. Esto es muy irónico porque ellos se definieron en oposición a un marxismo rígido.
C.M.: Luego de haber realizado una mirada sobre la historiografía inglesa actual y siendo Ud. uno de sus representantes ¿Podría decirnos cómo debe ser aprehendida su obra? Si hay una clave para su lectura teniendo en cuenta, valga la comparación, que a Platón se lo puede leer como en pequeñas cajas chinas, que a Maquiavelo se lo debe leer en zig-zag... ¿Peter Burke debe ser leído cronológicamente?; ¿Se debe agrupar su producción por temas? Hoy en este mundo cambiante ¿Ud. ha modificado lo que proponía en sus primeras obras?
- Para mí es tan importante la visión por dentro cuanto la visión por fuera de mi obra, tal vez alguien desde fuera tenga la llave para leerme, más que yo mismo. Pero mirando mi obra, es la clave cronológica la que me parece mas fácil para poder comprenderla. ¿Por qué hacer la Historia del Renacimiento italiano? Porque no quería hacer historia política, porque en aquella época todos hacían historia política, tampoco quería hacer una pura historia interna del Renacimiento sino una historia social; era la época de Raymond Williams. En 1968, Williams había publicado Cultura y Sociedad, entonces yo escogí el título Cultura y Sociedad en el Renacimiento. Era un tipo de homenaje para R. Williams. Escribiendo ese libro sobre la historia social de la cultura alta descubrí la ausencia de la cultura popular, y también escribiendo un libro general sobre el Renacimiento italiano, no era posible ni necesario ir a los archivos, porque muchas fuentes primarias ya estaban impresas, entonces en reacción contra eso quise hacer trabajo de archivo, por eso escogí Venezia y Amsterdam. Empezé con Venezia, (es decir Italia) queriendo hacer una historia comparativa y pensando en el modelo Marc Bloch me interrogué: ¿Qué ciudad puede yuxtaponerse con Venezia en el siglo XVII? Amsterdam parecía obvio. Este era otro trabajo de elites, pero no solamente de historia cultural, era historia total de un grupo estrecho. Finalmente, escribí la Cultura popular, ya que todo proyecto, en un cierto sentido es una respuesta a los puntos débiles de un proyecto interior. ¿Qué hacer después de la Cultura popular? Estudiar con más precisión la circularidad entre cultura alta y cultura baja, por eso escribí Ensayos de Historia antropológica o antropología histórica. Luego, siguiendo siempre con Italia, ¿Qué hacer? He vuelto al Renacimiento con una visión mas global: será la segunda vez que escriba sobre la Europa total; una vez la cultura popular, otra vez el Renacimiento, en un cierto sentido será un círculo.
C.M.: ¿Cómo surgió su interés por estudiar y adscribir a la Historia cultural, y en este marco, a qué se debe la interrrogación que titula su Seminario de la Maestría en Historia ¿“Hacia una nueva historia de la cultura?”. Es que como con la historia política podríamos -parafraseando a F. Guerra- hablar de un renacer de la historia cultural?
- ¿Por qué historia cultural? En primer lugar porque pensé hacer carrera como pintor o como restaurador en los museos, siempre sentí una gran atracción por la cultura visual. Como académico, como historiador, pensé al menos en hacer la historia de las artes y después, como hijo de los años ‘60, sentí el impulso de escribir y de no hacer solamente historia de elites En aquel momento en Inglaterra surgió un proyecto colectivo muy interesante: Culture Studies, una vuelta, sobre todo de críticos literarios, para estudiar la cultura popular contemporánea, aquí encontramos a Raymond Williams y luego a Stuart Hall, tal vez la cabeza mas teórica de ese grupo. Ahora me siento mas distanciado de ese abordaje, porque la carrera de Culture Studies en Inglaterra fue de mucho éxito, fue imitada en otros lugares como en Australia y hoy en Italia, pero de otro lado, el proyecto hoy por hoy me parece demasiado estrecho, estudios culturales sin la historia o historia sólo del siglo XIX, y también estudios culturales sin cultura alta, es decir grandes contrastes con el proyecto de Aby Warburg, porque él no excluyó la cultura popular, en cambio Culture Studies hoy está excluyendo a la cultura alta.
Pero es importante llamar la atención con respecto a la historia política, en primer lugar, la tendencia reaccionaria de hacer la vieja historia, y en segundo lugar, la que postula porqué no aprender algo de la antropología política, escribir historia política de estilo antropológica. Hay un libro de Annie Kriegel sobre una antropología del partido comunista francés, muy interesante, porque ella estaba dentro de ese partido y luego de salir escribió su antropología, me gustaría ver una antropología de la cámara de diputados inglesa, porque tiene unos rituales y una historia diplomática de estilo antropológica, las reglas, los rituales... Precisamos integrar la historia política en la nueva historia.
C.M.: Una herencia problemática de la historia cultural reside en la forma de concebir las relaciones entre los poderes sociales y los niveles culturales. ¿Cuál es su posición actual frente al binomio cultura popular-cultura de elites?
- Concuerdo con casi todos los investigadores en pensar que la circularidad entre cultura popular y cultura de elites es casi siempre muy importante. Pero, a mi ver es casi imposible analizar esa circularidad sin el binomio cultura popular-cultura alta. Quizás es más útil usar el plural, tal vez en casi todas las situaciones históricas es mejor utilizar culturas populares-culturas altas, y no historia de la cultura sino historias de las culturas.
Hay partes del mundo donde la interferencia política con la cultura es, o menos importante o menos obvia. En Inglaterra, tenemos la ventaja -o tal vez desventaja- que existe menos contacto entre el gobierno y la cultura -o alta o popular- lo cual implica: menos subvenciones pero también menos censura. Por eso, mi posición parece muy inocente fuera de mi contexto inglés. Tal vez nuestra felicidad resida en no tener que pensar, en nuestra isla, en esos problemas.
C.M.: En torno al tema del binomio cultura popular-cultura de elite, le propongo un diálogo imaginario con Roger Chartier...
- Existen por lo menos dos puntos de vista. Podemos escribir la historia cultural empezando con objetos culturales, textos, imágenes, prácticas: ese es el método Chartier. Siguiendo esa pista es claro que Chartier tiene razón al decir que no podremos asociar ciertas imágenes o textos con ciertos grupos sociales, hay una migración de objetos, por lo que es siempre importante distinguir los usos. Pero hay otro punto de vista que empieza por los grupos sociales, preguntándose sobre la lógica de la apropiación, la lógica subyaciendo los usos. Desde mi punto de vista, la estratificación cultural cambia; Chartier tiene razón acerca de la no estratificación social de los objetos culturales, pero tendría que tener en cuenta la estratificación de los usos culturales.
C.M.: En esta línea de los diálogos imaginarios, si Ud. debiera situarse en el contexto historiográfico de los estudios culturales, ¿Más cerca o más lejos de quién se ubicaría?De Darnton, de Ginzburg, de Levi, de Chartier...
- La pregunta es muy interesante para mí, sobre todo porque no existen grandes nombres. Natalie Zemon Davis merece la atención al igual que Keith Thomas. Resulta difícil ubicarme: formamos un grupo con tantos intereses comunes, con tantos encuentros, tantos diálogos... Tengo muchas cosas en común con todos ellos que son también mis amigos. No me siento más cerca de nadie en especial. Tal vez sea más fácil para alguien de afuera ubicarme...
C.M.: Ud. ha abordado a lo largo del seminario conceptualizaciones como mentalidades, historia de la cultura material, microhistoria -siempre alertando que se trata de conceptos sobre los que no podemos discutir eternamente-. Entonces, hoy Ud., ¿En qué momento de la reflexión se encuentra?
- Como prefacio me gustaría decir que para los historiadores ingleses yo estaría situado muy cerca de la filosofía, y para los historiadores europeos o americanos yo soy casi empirista. Siempre mi intención es hallar el equilibrio entre lo concreto y lo abstracto, y entre ideas nuevas y tradiciones culturales, porque no tengo nada contra los progresos en función de los cuales, cada generación tiene que pensar la tradición. Con respecto a la microhistoria he aprendido mucho de Giovanni Levi, pero no puedo compartir su posición enteramente. Desde mi punto de vista, Levi niega la variedad de las microhistorias posibles, y yo quiero hallar el equilibrio entre micro y macrohistoria, no me gusta situarme en una isla histórica, las conexiones siempre son importantes. Con respecto a las mentalidades, la situación es muy divertida: en Inglaterra yo debo defender la historia de las mentalidades, porque casi todo el mundo sospecha de ella. La primera vez que me encontré con la historia de los Annales, en los Estados Unidos, en la época en que Braudel consiguió su grado honorario, yo hablé contra las mentalidades, reflexioné sobre la revolución historiográfica francesa diciendo que la historia francesa de las mentalidades tiene una herencia ambigua, la herencia de Levy-Brhul, la herencia del evolucionismo, la idea de mentalidad prelógica. Entonces podría decirse que yo tenía dos caras: una para los ingleses, otra para los franceses, pero siempre quise hallar un equilibrio. Hoy ante la posición de Jacques Revel, no tan a favor de las mentalidades, tal vez deba defender la historia de las mentalidades en Francia y criticarla en Inglaterra.
C.M.: Usted en su último libro traducido al castellano Hablar y Callar, postula a la historia social del lenguaje como un intento de reconocer un terreno que la próxima generación podrá sin duda cultivar más intensivamente. Pero, ¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de una historia social del lenguaje?
- Mi objetivo es integrar el lenguaje en la historia social, e integrar el aspecto social en la historia del lenguaje. Mi inspiración fue la sociolinguística o sociología del lenguaje, o la etnografía del hablar o la etnografía de la comunicación, porque no pertenezco a ninguna escuela específica y hay varias escuelas entre los lingüistas de hoy. Quería hacer un puente entre lingüistas e historiadores. Claro que puede parecer un poco atrasado, hablar en los años ‘90, de una historia social del lenguaje como de una historia social del arte, pero en la introducción a ese libro, intenté mostrar que hay una influencia de la sociedad en el lenguaje, pero también una influencia del lenguaje en la sociedad, de nuevo intentando establecer un equilibrio entre fuerzas intelectuales opuestas, queriendo realizar un síntesis provisoria, teniendo en cuenta que toda síntesis intelectual es provisoria. Desgraciadamente hasta ahora, muy pocos historiadores, por lo menos que yo sepa, están siguiendo esa pista, tal vez será para el siglo que viene.
C.M.: En relación con lo antedicho, ¿Qué diferencia hay entre una historia social del lenguaje y el estudio foucaultiano de las formaciones histórico-discursivas, si tenemos en cuenta que en función de estudios realizados sobre épocas en las que no podemos auxiliarnos con la historia oral, debemos recurrir a una “oralidad escrita”?
- Me gustaría dividir la respuesta en dos apartados. El primero tiene que ver con las fuentes Creo que podemos utilizar fuentes literarias como las novelas, siempre recordando que esos textos no son espejos sino estilizaciones de la lengua hablada, claro que en el futuro con la historia oral -que ya tiene mas de treinta años-, un banco de datos no utilizado para la historia del lenguaje lo podremos utilizar para ese proyecto también. La segunda respuesta, sobre la relación entre los discursos tal vez en el sentido más literal, más estrecho del lingüista, discurso en el sentido más metafórico foucualtiano, lo cual me lleva a pensar que no es fácil ver una conexión aunque debe haberla. Desde mi punto de vista, lo interesante será hacer un abordaje sociolinguístico para el discurso del propio Foucault, con las preguntas normales para los sociolinguistas: ¿Quién habla a quién?; ¿Diciendo qué?; ¿Con qué registros, medios de comunicación?; ¿Con qué intenciones? y eventualmente; ¿Con qué resultados? Ya que desde mi punto de vista, no solamente se ha de ver el discurso de Foucault como suspendido en el aire. El sabía de lo social, pero no quería hablar de eso, no era falta de conciencia sino de voluntad.
C.M.: Retomando la cita que encabeza uno de los capítulos de su reciente publicación en habla castellana, cuando reproduce a Ortega y Gasset diciendo “el discurso consiste sobre todo en el silencio” y, el objetivo que Ud. persigue en la construcción de una historia social del silencio en la Europa moderna temprana, ¿Cómo esbozaría la historia de las cambiantes significaciones que tuvo el silencio?
- ¿Por qué hacer ese proyecto paradojal? En primer lugar, me atraía descubrir los límites de la investigación histórica. Hoy estamos viendo una gran expansión del territorio del historiador, entonces ¿Cuáles son las fronteras?, el único medio de saberlo es explorar esos límites. En segundo lugar, la inspiración provenía de la lectura de los artículos de los antropólogos. Hay uno muy interesante de Keith Basso, sobre el silencio de los apaches, tribu a la que no le gusta hablar mucho; aquí podríamos preguntarnos: ¿Es posible viajar un día para ver a un amigo, llegar y no hablar? ¿Por qué no hablar? Porque el motivo era ver al amigo, no hablar de uno u otro asunto. Entonces, para Basso era un proyecto de explicar cómo para un grupo el silencio tiene un sentido y para otro grupo tiene otro. Así, mi idea era investigar el pasado pensando en esto y teniendo en cuenta por ejemplo, que en la época del dramaturgo Harold Pinter todos consideraban que en su teatro, los silencios eran más importantes que las palabras.
C.M.: Qué recomendaría Ud. a los investigadores que actualmente se están formando en un territorio tan complejo como es el de la historia cultural:¿ Qué no se debe dejar de leer?; ¿ Qué centros de estudios se debieran conocer?; ¿Qué “pistas” se deben seguir?; ¿Cuál es su exhortación para quienes estamos construyendo el “oficio de historiador”?
- Esta pregunta es también muy difícil. Recuerdo en estos momentos cuando entrevisté a Braudel, mi gran orgullo fue cuando él me dijo “Ud. me propone preguntas terribles!”
En primer lugar, puedo decir que se puede empezar en cualquier sitio, eso no tiene importancia, luego un consejo muy braudeliano: siempre es muy importante colocar el tema escogido en un contexto o mejor en varios contextos, hasta llegar al contexto global. Es muy importante no encerrarse en una investigación, hay que mirar las conexiones entre ese tema, esa aldea y esa persona y las cosas mas grandes. Por otra parte hoy, en la época de la globalización historiográfica es más difícil recomendar Paris, Princeton, Bielefeld... es siempre importante no encerrarse en una lengua, en una mentalidad. Así, para la formación de un buen historiador del siglo XXI, será muy importante aprender lenguas, viajar, saber escuchar, y entrar en discursos historiográficos de tradiciones muy diversas. En cuanto a las lecturas, no sólo se deben leer los libros más apreciados dentro de la nueva historia, claro que es imposible no leer El Mediterráneo de Braudel, pero también es imposible dejar de lado a Burkhardt, con La Civilización del Renacimiento, o a Huizinga con El otoño de la Edad Media, si tomamos una perspectiva cultural. Ahora, como historiador de la política conozco mejor la historiografía de mi país, por lo que creo interesante proponer la lectura de Lewis Namier, que no es inglés sino mas inglés que los ingleses, pero hizo un estudio pionero sobre la estructura política de Inglaterra en el siglo XVIII, gran obra desmitificante, donde dice que detrás de las fachadas de los partidos políticos existe una realidad mucho mas clientelística.
C.M.: Finalmente,¿Podría expresar su opinión acerca de la función-historiador en las puertas del siglo XXI?
- Tal vez valga la pena tomar la posición de historiador de la cultura, diciendo que no es el único rol importante, pero destacándolo. El papel de la historia de la cultura es en una frase “hacer la traducción cultural”. Precisamos cada vez más de la traducción cultural y del entendimiento entre gentes de culturas diversas. En estos momentos, de resurgimiento de los nacionalismos y también porque es una época de cambios tan rápidos, precisamos más y más de una traducción cultural entre el pasado y el presente. Desde mi punto de vista, este es a futuro, el gran papel para nosotros, los historiadores de la cultura. Proyecto Clío
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462395897118330765&postID=846753202543178322
REVISTA CLÌO
El historiador inglés Peter Burke es profesor de historia cultural en la Universidad de Cambridge y miembro del Emmanuel College. Ha publicado numerosos libros y artículos, traducidos en más de veinte lenguas, entre ellos La cultura popular (1978), La revolución historiográfica francesa (1990), Formas de hacer historia (1991), Hablar y Callar (1996).
Esta entrevista fue concedida a Claudia Möller en ocasión de su primera visita a la Argentina, como historiador, en diciembre de 1996, invitado por el Programa de Maestría en Historia de la Facultad de Humanidades, de la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata.
C.M.: Frecuentemente se dice que para entrar en el mundo de un autor es importante “ponerse las ropas” del tiempo. Recordando aquel trabajo sobre Egohistoire y en clave etnohistórica, ¿Cómo ha sido su formación intelectual: quiénes han sido sus maestros, cuándo y dónde ha estudiado?
- La historia externa es muy simple de contar, tal vez la historia interna menos. Estudié en Oxford a fines de los años ‘50 con un profesor muy joven; era el primer año de enseñanza de ese profesor cuyo nombre es Keith Thomas. Él había sido discípulo de Christopher Hill, por lo que insistía en “mirar todo con ojo social”. Luego, como estudiante de posgraduación, mi profesor fue Trevor Roper, mucho más conservador, tanto metodológica como políticamente y nunca mostró demasiado interés por mi investigación, aunque siempre hablaba muy bien de su investigación. Él daba clases en un estilo “conferencista”, luego preguntaba si había alguna dificultad, y él mismo autorespondía que seguramente no, acto seguido se despedía hasta el próximo mes.
En 1962, entré en la nueva Universidad de Sussex. Fue muy importante para mí cambiar de colegio, mi primer colegio había sido el tradicional St. John’s College de Oxford, el segundo fue el nuevo St. Antony’s College, y su importancia residía en que la mayoría de sus integrantes eran extranjeros: cincuenta estudiantes de posgraduación y quizás solamente cuatro o cinco ingleses. Aquí mi gran amigo fue un ecuatoriano recientemente llegado de Paris, Juan Maiguashca (hoy profesor de Historia económica de América Latina en Toronto), discípulo de Chaunú, él fue quien me introdujo al mundo de los Annales. Claro que yo ya había leído los libros de Braudel como estudiante, pero es muy diferente encontrarse con una persona de ese mundo, hablar todos los días con alguien que entendiera todo “desde dentro”. Podría decirse que ingreso al mundo de los Annales de la mano de un discípulo latinoamericano de Chaunú.
C.M.: ¿Quiénes fueron sus “compañeros” a lo largo del camino de construcción de su oficio de historiador?
-Tuve una experiencia muy importante para mí antes de ir a la universidad. En aquella época, en Inglaterra existía el servicio militar obligatorio y en mi colegio se estilaba realizarlo antes de comenzar los cursos, así es que con dieciocho años fui para Singapur por diecisiete meses a un regimiento local, allí había malayos, hindúes, chinos... ¿Cultura híbrida, no?
C.M.: Entonces ¿Fue allí donde comenzó su interés por conocer las distintas lenguas?
- Ciertamente, también mi interés por los diversos estilos de vida, por las distintas mentalidades...
C.M.: Ud. mencionaba, al inicio de la entrevista, que en 1962 era estudiante, ¿Cómo vivenció el mayo francés?
- En aquella época yo era profesor en Sussex. Esta universidad tuvo a comienzos de los años sesenta la reputación de “universidad de izquierda” más por sus profesores que por sus estudiantes, por eso no tuvimos movimientos dentro de la Universidad como sí los hubo en otras universidades inglesas. En Sussex todo era permitido nada era subversivo. Claro que era muy interesante seguir los acontecimientos en Francia, pero en aquella época no me tenían demasiada confianza, yo sólo tenía 30 años. Era el principio de una distancia cultural con los estudiantes, ya que comencé a ser profesor a los 25 años y por lo mismo los estudiantes me parecían más amigos que alumnos. Luego del ‘68 aparece “otra” generación.
C.M.: Retomando la cuestión de la construcción del oficio de historiador, habíamos quedado en su formación en St. John’s College, en St. Antony’s College, su experiencia extraeuropea en clave “militar”, Sussex...
-Mi experiencia más importante luego de la de Oxford, fue en mi nueva Universidad de Sussex, con ideologías de interdisciplinariedad. Allí trabajaba con sociólogos, con especialistas en literatura... Luego en los años ‘60, con el History workshop tuve los primeros contactos con historiadores sociales de izquierda, como Raphael Samuel. En 1967 voy a Princeton, un lugar maravilloso para hacer investigación, invitado por Lawrence Stone. Casi todos tenían veinte años más que yo. Allí hablé con Panofsky, pero él no quería oír hablar de la historia social del arte, sólo le interesaba la iconografía. En aquella época el Instituto para Estudios Avanzados lo integraban solamente matemáticos, físicos, historiadores del arte, y especialistas en el mundo clásico, pero también estaba Félix Gilbert estudiando el Renacimiento. Después de Princeton y de Sussex, en 1979 fui a la Universidad de Cambridge, aquí había una gran ventaja: gente linda, más tiempo libre y una buena biblioteca, pero lo más importante intelectualmente fue cambiar de un ambiente, donde todos pensábamos mas o menos igual, a otro mucho más crítico, donde era necesario defender todo nuevo abordaje. Por ejemplo, cuando intenté organizar un curso de antropología histórica con mi colega Bob Scribner, fue preciso esperar tres años. El Comité no lo aprobaba, siempre decían que era preciso hacer unas pequeñas modificaciones; finalmente nos propusieron que el curso podría dictarse si quitábamos la teoría. Creo que esto describe mi divertido itinerario de Oxford a Cambridge, vía Sussex.
C.M.: A la manera en que aborda la Revolución historiográfica de los Annales, ¿Podría darnos una imagen de la historiografía inglesa?
- Hoy la situación es más fluida. Cuando comencé a enseñar, la mayoría de los historiadores ingleses eran historiadores políticos, estamos hablando de los años sesenta. Luego hubo un traslado hacia la historia social de la mano de un grupo de historiadores marxistas, el Grupo Past and Present, pero había mucha desconfianza hacia la historia de las ideas, hacia la historia de la cultura, es decir, hacia una historia con conexiones teóricas. Claro que estaba el Instituto Warburg pero había quedado aislado, una isla germánica y cultural, en un mar de empirismo inglés. Para muchos de mis colegas la historia cultural no tenía sustancia, ya que era y es muy importante, como dicen los ingleses, ‘tener los pies en la tierra”. En los años ‘60 se evidencia un cambio, al menos en el área de la sociología y en otras disciplinas, existe un mayor interés por las ideas continentales, las traducciones de Foucault por ejemplo. Pero fue recién en el ‘72 cuando El Mediterráneo de Braudel fue traducido al inglés, con iniciativa más norteamericana que inglesa, esto hoy parece increíble. En nuestros días la situación es más interesante y más complicada: de un lado, un nueva generación que lee a Braudel sin esa hostilidad para con Annales que mostró Elton, de otro lado, un movimiento global de reacción contra la historia social, la vuelta a la narrativa, a la historia política, esto implica hablar de una situación actual un poco confusa....
C.M.: En este marco ¿Dónde ubicaríamos a Eric Hobsbawm y a E.P. Thompson?; ¿Qué opinan ellos de esta manera de hacer historia?
- No hay unanimidad, claro que ahora casi todo el mundo respeta a Hobsbawm como un hombre de casi ochenta años que produce historia con gran penetración y estilo irónico... pero a pesar de eso, muchos historiadores ingleses piensan que Hobsbawm y Thompson son dogmáticos y rígidos. Esto es muy irónico porque ellos se definieron en oposición a un marxismo rígido.
C.M.: Luego de haber realizado una mirada sobre la historiografía inglesa actual y siendo Ud. uno de sus representantes ¿Podría decirnos cómo debe ser aprehendida su obra? Si hay una clave para su lectura teniendo en cuenta, valga la comparación, que a Platón se lo puede leer como en pequeñas cajas chinas, que a Maquiavelo se lo debe leer en zig-zag... ¿Peter Burke debe ser leído cronológicamente?; ¿Se debe agrupar su producción por temas? Hoy en este mundo cambiante ¿Ud. ha modificado lo que proponía en sus primeras obras?
- Para mí es tan importante la visión por dentro cuanto la visión por fuera de mi obra, tal vez alguien desde fuera tenga la llave para leerme, más que yo mismo. Pero mirando mi obra, es la clave cronológica la que me parece mas fácil para poder comprenderla. ¿Por qué hacer la Historia del Renacimiento italiano? Porque no quería hacer historia política, porque en aquella época todos hacían historia política, tampoco quería hacer una pura historia interna del Renacimiento sino una historia social; era la época de Raymond Williams. En 1968, Williams había publicado Cultura y Sociedad, entonces yo escogí el título Cultura y Sociedad en el Renacimiento. Era un tipo de homenaje para R. Williams. Escribiendo ese libro sobre la historia social de la cultura alta descubrí la ausencia de la cultura popular, y también escribiendo un libro general sobre el Renacimiento italiano, no era posible ni necesario ir a los archivos, porque muchas fuentes primarias ya estaban impresas, entonces en reacción contra eso quise hacer trabajo de archivo, por eso escogí Venezia y Amsterdam. Empezé con Venezia, (es decir Italia) queriendo hacer una historia comparativa y pensando en el modelo Marc Bloch me interrogué: ¿Qué ciudad puede yuxtaponerse con Venezia en el siglo XVII? Amsterdam parecía obvio. Este era otro trabajo de elites, pero no solamente de historia cultural, era historia total de un grupo estrecho. Finalmente, escribí la Cultura popular, ya que todo proyecto, en un cierto sentido es una respuesta a los puntos débiles de un proyecto interior. ¿Qué hacer después de la Cultura popular? Estudiar con más precisión la circularidad entre cultura alta y cultura baja, por eso escribí Ensayos de Historia antropológica o antropología histórica. Luego, siguiendo siempre con Italia, ¿Qué hacer? He vuelto al Renacimiento con una visión mas global: será la segunda vez que escriba sobre la Europa total; una vez la cultura popular, otra vez el Renacimiento, en un cierto sentido será un círculo.
C.M.: ¿Cómo surgió su interés por estudiar y adscribir a la Historia cultural, y en este marco, a qué se debe la interrrogación que titula su Seminario de la Maestría en Historia ¿“Hacia una nueva historia de la cultura?”. Es que como con la historia política podríamos -parafraseando a F. Guerra- hablar de un renacer de la historia cultural?
- ¿Por qué historia cultural? En primer lugar porque pensé hacer carrera como pintor o como restaurador en los museos, siempre sentí una gran atracción por la cultura visual. Como académico, como historiador, pensé al menos en hacer la historia de las artes y después, como hijo de los años ‘60, sentí el impulso de escribir y de no hacer solamente historia de elites En aquel momento en Inglaterra surgió un proyecto colectivo muy interesante: Culture Studies, una vuelta, sobre todo de críticos literarios, para estudiar la cultura popular contemporánea, aquí encontramos a Raymond Williams y luego a Stuart Hall, tal vez la cabeza mas teórica de ese grupo. Ahora me siento mas distanciado de ese abordaje, porque la carrera de Culture Studies en Inglaterra fue de mucho éxito, fue imitada en otros lugares como en Australia y hoy en Italia, pero de otro lado, el proyecto hoy por hoy me parece demasiado estrecho, estudios culturales sin la historia o historia sólo del siglo XIX, y también estudios culturales sin cultura alta, es decir grandes contrastes con el proyecto de Aby Warburg, porque él no excluyó la cultura popular, en cambio Culture Studies hoy está excluyendo a la cultura alta.
Pero es importante llamar la atención con respecto a la historia política, en primer lugar, la tendencia reaccionaria de hacer la vieja historia, y en segundo lugar, la que postula porqué no aprender algo de la antropología política, escribir historia política de estilo antropológica. Hay un libro de Annie Kriegel sobre una antropología del partido comunista francés, muy interesante, porque ella estaba dentro de ese partido y luego de salir escribió su antropología, me gustaría ver una antropología de la cámara de diputados inglesa, porque tiene unos rituales y una historia diplomática de estilo antropológica, las reglas, los rituales... Precisamos integrar la historia política en la nueva historia.
C.M.: Una herencia problemática de la historia cultural reside en la forma de concebir las relaciones entre los poderes sociales y los niveles culturales. ¿Cuál es su posición actual frente al binomio cultura popular-cultura de elites?
- Concuerdo con casi todos los investigadores en pensar que la circularidad entre cultura popular y cultura de elites es casi siempre muy importante. Pero, a mi ver es casi imposible analizar esa circularidad sin el binomio cultura popular-cultura alta. Quizás es más útil usar el plural, tal vez en casi todas las situaciones históricas es mejor utilizar culturas populares-culturas altas, y no historia de la cultura sino historias de las culturas.
Hay partes del mundo donde la interferencia política con la cultura es, o menos importante o menos obvia. En Inglaterra, tenemos la ventaja -o tal vez desventaja- que existe menos contacto entre el gobierno y la cultura -o alta o popular- lo cual implica: menos subvenciones pero también menos censura. Por eso, mi posición parece muy inocente fuera de mi contexto inglés. Tal vez nuestra felicidad resida en no tener que pensar, en nuestra isla, en esos problemas.
C.M.: En torno al tema del binomio cultura popular-cultura de elite, le propongo un diálogo imaginario con Roger Chartier...
- Existen por lo menos dos puntos de vista. Podemos escribir la historia cultural empezando con objetos culturales, textos, imágenes, prácticas: ese es el método Chartier. Siguiendo esa pista es claro que Chartier tiene razón al decir que no podremos asociar ciertas imágenes o textos con ciertos grupos sociales, hay una migración de objetos, por lo que es siempre importante distinguir los usos. Pero hay otro punto de vista que empieza por los grupos sociales, preguntándose sobre la lógica de la apropiación, la lógica subyaciendo los usos. Desde mi punto de vista, la estratificación cultural cambia; Chartier tiene razón acerca de la no estratificación social de los objetos culturales, pero tendría que tener en cuenta la estratificación de los usos culturales.
C.M.: En esta línea de los diálogos imaginarios, si Ud. debiera situarse en el contexto historiográfico de los estudios culturales, ¿Más cerca o más lejos de quién se ubicaría?De Darnton, de Ginzburg, de Levi, de Chartier...
- La pregunta es muy interesante para mí, sobre todo porque no existen grandes nombres. Natalie Zemon Davis merece la atención al igual que Keith Thomas. Resulta difícil ubicarme: formamos un grupo con tantos intereses comunes, con tantos encuentros, tantos diálogos... Tengo muchas cosas en común con todos ellos que son también mis amigos. No me siento más cerca de nadie en especial. Tal vez sea más fácil para alguien de afuera ubicarme...
C.M.: Ud. ha abordado a lo largo del seminario conceptualizaciones como mentalidades, historia de la cultura material, microhistoria -siempre alertando que se trata de conceptos sobre los que no podemos discutir eternamente-. Entonces, hoy Ud., ¿En qué momento de la reflexión se encuentra?
- Como prefacio me gustaría decir que para los historiadores ingleses yo estaría situado muy cerca de la filosofía, y para los historiadores europeos o americanos yo soy casi empirista. Siempre mi intención es hallar el equilibrio entre lo concreto y lo abstracto, y entre ideas nuevas y tradiciones culturales, porque no tengo nada contra los progresos en función de los cuales, cada generación tiene que pensar la tradición. Con respecto a la microhistoria he aprendido mucho de Giovanni Levi, pero no puedo compartir su posición enteramente. Desde mi punto de vista, Levi niega la variedad de las microhistorias posibles, y yo quiero hallar el equilibrio entre micro y macrohistoria, no me gusta situarme en una isla histórica, las conexiones siempre son importantes. Con respecto a las mentalidades, la situación es muy divertida: en Inglaterra yo debo defender la historia de las mentalidades, porque casi todo el mundo sospecha de ella. La primera vez que me encontré con la historia de los Annales, en los Estados Unidos, en la época en que Braudel consiguió su grado honorario, yo hablé contra las mentalidades, reflexioné sobre la revolución historiográfica francesa diciendo que la historia francesa de las mentalidades tiene una herencia ambigua, la herencia de Levy-Brhul, la herencia del evolucionismo, la idea de mentalidad prelógica. Entonces podría decirse que yo tenía dos caras: una para los ingleses, otra para los franceses, pero siempre quise hallar un equilibrio. Hoy ante la posición de Jacques Revel, no tan a favor de las mentalidades, tal vez deba defender la historia de las mentalidades en Francia y criticarla en Inglaterra.
C.M.: Usted en su último libro traducido al castellano Hablar y Callar, postula a la historia social del lenguaje como un intento de reconocer un terreno que la próxima generación podrá sin duda cultivar más intensivamente. Pero, ¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de una historia social del lenguaje?
- Mi objetivo es integrar el lenguaje en la historia social, e integrar el aspecto social en la historia del lenguaje. Mi inspiración fue la sociolinguística o sociología del lenguaje, o la etnografía del hablar o la etnografía de la comunicación, porque no pertenezco a ninguna escuela específica y hay varias escuelas entre los lingüistas de hoy. Quería hacer un puente entre lingüistas e historiadores. Claro que puede parecer un poco atrasado, hablar en los años ‘90, de una historia social del lenguaje como de una historia social del arte, pero en la introducción a ese libro, intenté mostrar que hay una influencia de la sociedad en el lenguaje, pero también una influencia del lenguaje en la sociedad, de nuevo intentando establecer un equilibrio entre fuerzas intelectuales opuestas, queriendo realizar un síntesis provisoria, teniendo en cuenta que toda síntesis intelectual es provisoria. Desgraciadamente hasta ahora, muy pocos historiadores, por lo menos que yo sepa, están siguiendo esa pista, tal vez será para el siglo que viene.
C.M.: En relación con lo antedicho, ¿Qué diferencia hay entre una historia social del lenguaje y el estudio foucaultiano de las formaciones histórico-discursivas, si tenemos en cuenta que en función de estudios realizados sobre épocas en las que no podemos auxiliarnos con la historia oral, debemos recurrir a una “oralidad escrita”?
- Me gustaría dividir la respuesta en dos apartados. El primero tiene que ver con las fuentes Creo que podemos utilizar fuentes literarias como las novelas, siempre recordando que esos textos no son espejos sino estilizaciones de la lengua hablada, claro que en el futuro con la historia oral -que ya tiene mas de treinta años-, un banco de datos no utilizado para la historia del lenguaje lo podremos utilizar para ese proyecto también. La segunda respuesta, sobre la relación entre los discursos tal vez en el sentido más literal, más estrecho del lingüista, discurso en el sentido más metafórico foucualtiano, lo cual me lleva a pensar que no es fácil ver una conexión aunque debe haberla. Desde mi punto de vista, lo interesante será hacer un abordaje sociolinguístico para el discurso del propio Foucault, con las preguntas normales para los sociolinguistas: ¿Quién habla a quién?; ¿Diciendo qué?; ¿Con qué registros, medios de comunicación?; ¿Con qué intenciones? y eventualmente; ¿Con qué resultados? Ya que desde mi punto de vista, no solamente se ha de ver el discurso de Foucault como suspendido en el aire. El sabía de lo social, pero no quería hablar de eso, no era falta de conciencia sino de voluntad.
C.M.: Retomando la cita que encabeza uno de los capítulos de su reciente publicación en habla castellana, cuando reproduce a Ortega y Gasset diciendo “el discurso consiste sobre todo en el silencio” y, el objetivo que Ud. persigue en la construcción de una historia social del silencio en la Europa moderna temprana, ¿Cómo esbozaría la historia de las cambiantes significaciones que tuvo el silencio?
- ¿Por qué hacer ese proyecto paradojal? En primer lugar, me atraía descubrir los límites de la investigación histórica. Hoy estamos viendo una gran expansión del territorio del historiador, entonces ¿Cuáles son las fronteras?, el único medio de saberlo es explorar esos límites. En segundo lugar, la inspiración provenía de la lectura de los artículos de los antropólogos. Hay uno muy interesante de Keith Basso, sobre el silencio de los apaches, tribu a la que no le gusta hablar mucho; aquí podríamos preguntarnos: ¿Es posible viajar un día para ver a un amigo, llegar y no hablar? ¿Por qué no hablar? Porque el motivo era ver al amigo, no hablar de uno u otro asunto. Entonces, para Basso era un proyecto de explicar cómo para un grupo el silencio tiene un sentido y para otro grupo tiene otro. Así, mi idea era investigar el pasado pensando en esto y teniendo en cuenta por ejemplo, que en la época del dramaturgo Harold Pinter todos consideraban que en su teatro, los silencios eran más importantes que las palabras.
C.M.: Qué recomendaría Ud. a los investigadores que actualmente se están formando en un territorio tan complejo como es el de la historia cultural:¿ Qué no se debe dejar de leer?; ¿ Qué centros de estudios se debieran conocer?; ¿Qué “pistas” se deben seguir?; ¿Cuál es su exhortación para quienes estamos construyendo el “oficio de historiador”?
- Esta pregunta es también muy difícil. Recuerdo en estos momentos cuando entrevisté a Braudel, mi gran orgullo fue cuando él me dijo “Ud. me propone preguntas terribles!”
En primer lugar, puedo decir que se puede empezar en cualquier sitio, eso no tiene importancia, luego un consejo muy braudeliano: siempre es muy importante colocar el tema escogido en un contexto o mejor en varios contextos, hasta llegar al contexto global. Es muy importante no encerrarse en una investigación, hay que mirar las conexiones entre ese tema, esa aldea y esa persona y las cosas mas grandes. Por otra parte hoy, en la época de la globalización historiográfica es más difícil recomendar Paris, Princeton, Bielefeld... es siempre importante no encerrarse en una lengua, en una mentalidad. Así, para la formación de un buen historiador del siglo XXI, será muy importante aprender lenguas, viajar, saber escuchar, y entrar en discursos historiográficos de tradiciones muy diversas. En cuanto a las lecturas, no sólo se deben leer los libros más apreciados dentro de la nueva historia, claro que es imposible no leer El Mediterráneo de Braudel, pero también es imposible dejar de lado a Burkhardt, con La Civilización del Renacimiento, o a Huizinga con El otoño de la Edad Media, si tomamos una perspectiva cultural. Ahora, como historiador de la política conozco mejor la historiografía de mi país, por lo que creo interesante proponer la lectura de Lewis Namier, que no es inglés sino mas inglés que los ingleses, pero hizo un estudio pionero sobre la estructura política de Inglaterra en el siglo XVIII, gran obra desmitificante, donde dice que detrás de las fachadas de los partidos políticos existe una realidad mucho mas clientelística.
C.M.: Finalmente,¿Podría expresar su opinión acerca de la función-historiador en las puertas del siglo XXI?
- Tal vez valga la pena tomar la posición de historiador de la cultura, diciendo que no es el único rol importante, pero destacándolo. El papel de la historia de la cultura es en una frase “hacer la traducción cultural”. Precisamos cada vez más de la traducción cultural y del entendimiento entre gentes de culturas diversas. En estos momentos, de resurgimiento de los nacionalismos y también porque es una época de cambios tan rápidos, precisamos más y más de una traducción cultural entre el pasado y el presente. Desde mi punto de vista, este es a futuro, el gran papel para nosotros, los historiadores de la cultura. Proyecto Clío
Peter Burke, interview with M-L Pallares-Burke
Peter Burke, interview with M. L. Pallares-Burke, Cambridge, May and June 1999, ed. Pallares-Burke as “Peter Burke” in eadem, The New History, pp. 129-157.
What kind of post-modern are you?
No, not some journal poll, but a question raised in the interview in her The New History that Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke included with her husband, Professor Peter Burke. He comes across, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a very clear-headed and sympathetic model of academic detachment; perhaps to drag more out of him, her questions by contrast seem oddly negative and nihilist. So, as well as saying things I can relate to about how one’s books are attempts to repair the previous one (I know I haven’t finished one yet, but it’s only discipline that’s stopping me writing the beginning of the one that will hold some of the stuff I won’t be able to say in the first) and that one really needs to get out of Oxbridge fairly frequently if one wishes to work there without becoming terribly isolated, some of his questions address what are becoming this blog’s perennial questions about how much theory helps or hinders and what use the whole historical enquiry shebang are. While I stay busy with actual writing and learning how little I know about real numismatics despite working in the middle of it for two years, you can therefore ponder the thoughts of someone wiser than me about this, our profession.
Peter Burke
Firstly, Dr Pallares-Burke asks him if he thinks that post-modernist approaches have robbed us of any chance of getting at the truth. He is subtle in response, distinguishing between a deliberate and self-conscious philosophical approach (as ‘post-modernism’) and a vaguer embedded cultural assumption (as ‘post-modernity’). Unsurprisingly, he sees the conscious version as more helpful, but characterises both as being about a readiness to believe that social structures, assumptions and beliefs are ’soft’ and changeable, that accepted dogmas may change, and that the individual retains agency in the wider world, as opposed to older views that put us all in the grip of deterministic social forces. His actual answer to the question is that our new perspectives make it less likely that we will attempt to impose our vision on a swathe of history but also makes us less likely to do the work of relating what was then to what is now, a task of interpretation that he sees as the core of the historian’s task. It’s quite interesting to find a self-avowed practitioner of the ‘new history’ that the book’s title distinguishes saying that, in retrospect, it’s been unhelpful because of opening the possible range of questions so wide that historians now lose touch with each other. In particular, I could see the force of a suggestion that interdisciplinarity is a very necessary thing, but drives in many directions, and that if what we wind up with is a range of historians who speak more to members of other fields than to historians, all we have done is create more incompatible specialisms. That is, interdisciplinary scholars need to keep enough touch with some central idea of history that they can still usefully inform each other, not just their more traditional colleagues.
Secondly, there’s a bit that may as well be quoted in extenso:
“‘What is the use of history?’ Marc Bloch wrote a whole book trying to answer this simple question, put in all its simplicity by a child, because, as he said, it dealt with the important issue of the ‘legitimacy of history’. How would you deal with this question?
“If you’d like a short answer to this huge question, I would simply say that the use of the study of the past lies in helping us to orient ourselves in the world in which we live. A longer answer would involve making distinctions between uses (more or less practical), and also between pasts (more or less remote).
“Since the world is in constant change, it is impossible to understand it without trying to locate what is happening in broader trends over time, whether they are economic, cultural, or whatever. This is the essential justification for the study of the recent past. But the recent past is not intelligible by itself. I sometimes think that we ought to teach history backwards, starting with current events….
“Another use of history is to tell people about their ‘roots’, the culture from which they and their families came. At a time when more and more people feel uprooted in a world which is changing faster and faster, and when many people have been physically uprooted… this psychological function of the study of the past is an important one. It explains the increasing interest in local history in the last few years.
“But to study our own past alone is dangerous. It encourages insularity and a sense of superiority over others…. So it is crucial to combine the study of ‘us’ with the study of others, more or less remote….”1
This makes me ask myself several questions. I am very much interested in the early medieval history of the country from which I come, my first piece of sustained research was on Anglo-Saxon London and my second was on Scotland, where I have ancestry and family. I moved to looking at Catalonia principally because, as Magistra says below of literature, it has the sort of sources that answer the questions I want to ask. And my knowledge of England does help with my study of Catalonia, if only in contrasting the very different way the two societies used charters. All the same, I don’t think I do this to anchor my identity; if anything I do it to dissolve it, to suggest that my modern nationality and heritage (and, I suppose, privilege—it may all be guilt-driven, in the end) are no more important than what some small landowner did with a short-lived terracing project on the side of a Pyrenee eleven hundred years ago. The selection of my ‘other’ has been driven by a desire to find unploughed historiographical ground and an interest in mixing zones and liminal territories, and it may well have pushed me further than is good for me from the mainstream. But despite all of this introspection, I have given very similar answers to the `what use is history’ question in the past, even if I no longer do, and it gives me to wonder that I no longer seem to believe it. It may well be truer for others than it is for me.
As for his first justification, that history needs background and the background needs background, ad infinitum, that I baulk at much more readily. Only a modernist can get away with this; it is teleological. Anything old that has not had modern social phenomena that can be claimed as its offspring loses its ‘use’ in this sort of argument, and studying it therefore leads to scrabbling attempts to make it ‘relevant’ that should be alien to anyone trying to be objective. Sometimes, things are interesting even if they didn’t lead to anything else. This is the problem that Randolph Starn was trying to get round with the genealogical approach I described a while ago, and as I said there, sometimes things just don’t fit into linear schemes. One could just about fit such societies into Professor Burke’s idea by considering the distant past as an ‘other’ to give us perspective, and certainly I think that’s something I get from studying it, but just as Professor Burke gives no impression of really wanting to look at the early medieval roots of his study areas, I don’t really want to take my studies forward to the sixteenth century to see what they go on to mean: I feel quite strongly that they had meaning at the time, if we can but get at what it was, and that that’s enough. The question remains, that he addresses and I don’t, is: as I am not then but now, what do I think is the point of moving this stuff, via my interpretation, from then to now? I’m not sure I have an intellectual answer that is more than “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!”, and I may need to think about that some more.
Those are the bits I have the strong reactions to. As to interdisciplinarity, I actually think I’m actually situated about right, trying to be able to understand the basics of work in most fields enough to ask for meaningful clarification from an expert, and understand it, whether that be literature, liturgy, archaeology (most usually), anthropology or even physics. I still want to do what I think of as just ‘history’, though some would say I am hard social and some would call me soft political, and I don’t mind. But because all this stuff is happening too, I like to be able to understand what its practitioners are saying without leaving my own work for weeks at a time (which is why apparently deliberate intellectualisation and obfuscation annoys me). As for post-modernity and post-modernism, I don’t even care where I am on the spectrum; labelling my approach has no interest to me at all, especially with labels that I suspect are not useful to describe it. But maybe you the reader see something there you like?
What kind of post-modern are you?
No, not some journal poll, but a question raised in the interview in her The New History that Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke included with her husband, Professor Peter Burke. He comes across, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a very clear-headed and sympathetic model of academic detachment; perhaps to drag more out of him, her questions by contrast seem oddly negative and nihilist. So, as well as saying things I can relate to about how one’s books are attempts to repair the previous one (I know I haven’t finished one yet, but it’s only discipline that’s stopping me writing the beginning of the one that will hold some of the stuff I won’t be able to say in the first) and that one really needs to get out of Oxbridge fairly frequently if one wishes to work there without becoming terribly isolated, some of his questions address what are becoming this blog’s perennial questions about how much theory helps or hinders and what use the whole historical enquiry shebang are. While I stay busy with actual writing and learning how little I know about real numismatics despite working in the middle of it for two years, you can therefore ponder the thoughts of someone wiser than me about this, our profession.
Peter Burke
Firstly, Dr Pallares-Burke asks him if he thinks that post-modernist approaches have robbed us of any chance of getting at the truth. He is subtle in response, distinguishing between a deliberate and self-conscious philosophical approach (as ‘post-modernism’) and a vaguer embedded cultural assumption (as ‘post-modernity’). Unsurprisingly, he sees the conscious version as more helpful, but characterises both as being about a readiness to believe that social structures, assumptions and beliefs are ’soft’ and changeable, that accepted dogmas may change, and that the individual retains agency in the wider world, as opposed to older views that put us all in the grip of deterministic social forces. His actual answer to the question is that our new perspectives make it less likely that we will attempt to impose our vision on a swathe of history but also makes us less likely to do the work of relating what was then to what is now, a task of interpretation that he sees as the core of the historian’s task. It’s quite interesting to find a self-avowed practitioner of the ‘new history’ that the book’s title distinguishes saying that, in retrospect, it’s been unhelpful because of opening the possible range of questions so wide that historians now lose touch with each other. In particular, I could see the force of a suggestion that interdisciplinarity is a very necessary thing, but drives in many directions, and that if what we wind up with is a range of historians who speak more to members of other fields than to historians, all we have done is create more incompatible specialisms. That is, interdisciplinary scholars need to keep enough touch with some central idea of history that they can still usefully inform each other, not just their more traditional colleagues.
Secondly, there’s a bit that may as well be quoted in extenso:
“‘What is the use of history?’ Marc Bloch wrote a whole book trying to answer this simple question, put in all its simplicity by a child, because, as he said, it dealt with the important issue of the ‘legitimacy of history’. How would you deal with this question?
“If you’d like a short answer to this huge question, I would simply say that the use of the study of the past lies in helping us to orient ourselves in the world in which we live. A longer answer would involve making distinctions between uses (more or less practical), and also between pasts (more or less remote).
“Since the world is in constant change, it is impossible to understand it without trying to locate what is happening in broader trends over time, whether they are economic, cultural, or whatever. This is the essential justification for the study of the recent past. But the recent past is not intelligible by itself. I sometimes think that we ought to teach history backwards, starting with current events….
“Another use of history is to tell people about their ‘roots’, the culture from which they and their families came. At a time when more and more people feel uprooted in a world which is changing faster and faster, and when many people have been physically uprooted… this psychological function of the study of the past is an important one. It explains the increasing interest in local history in the last few years.
“But to study our own past alone is dangerous. It encourages insularity and a sense of superiority over others…. So it is crucial to combine the study of ‘us’ with the study of others, more or less remote….”1
This makes me ask myself several questions. I am very much interested in the early medieval history of the country from which I come, my first piece of sustained research was on Anglo-Saxon London and my second was on Scotland, where I have ancestry and family. I moved to looking at Catalonia principally because, as Magistra says below of literature, it has the sort of sources that answer the questions I want to ask. And my knowledge of England does help with my study of Catalonia, if only in contrasting the very different way the two societies used charters. All the same, I don’t think I do this to anchor my identity; if anything I do it to dissolve it, to suggest that my modern nationality and heritage (and, I suppose, privilege—it may all be guilt-driven, in the end) are no more important than what some small landowner did with a short-lived terracing project on the side of a Pyrenee eleven hundred years ago. The selection of my ‘other’ has been driven by a desire to find unploughed historiographical ground and an interest in mixing zones and liminal territories, and it may well have pushed me further than is good for me from the mainstream. But despite all of this introspection, I have given very similar answers to the `what use is history’ question in the past, even if I no longer do, and it gives me to wonder that I no longer seem to believe it. It may well be truer for others than it is for me.
As for his first justification, that history needs background and the background needs background, ad infinitum, that I baulk at much more readily. Only a modernist can get away with this; it is teleological. Anything old that has not had modern social phenomena that can be claimed as its offspring loses its ‘use’ in this sort of argument, and studying it therefore leads to scrabbling attempts to make it ‘relevant’ that should be alien to anyone trying to be objective. Sometimes, things are interesting even if they didn’t lead to anything else. This is the problem that Randolph Starn was trying to get round with the genealogical approach I described a while ago, and as I said there, sometimes things just don’t fit into linear schemes. One could just about fit such societies into Professor Burke’s idea by considering the distant past as an ‘other’ to give us perspective, and certainly I think that’s something I get from studying it, but just as Professor Burke gives no impression of really wanting to look at the early medieval roots of his study areas, I don’t really want to take my studies forward to the sixteenth century to see what they go on to mean: I feel quite strongly that they had meaning at the time, if we can but get at what it was, and that that’s enough. The question remains, that he addresses and I don’t, is: as I am not then but now, what do I think is the point of moving this stuff, via my interpretation, from then to now? I’m not sure I have an intellectual answer that is more than “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!”, and I may need to think about that some more.
Those are the bits I have the strong reactions to. As to interdisciplinarity, I actually think I’m actually situated about right, trying to be able to understand the basics of work in most fields enough to ask for meaningful clarification from an expert, and understand it, whether that be literature, liturgy, archaeology (most usually), anthropology or even physics. I still want to do what I think of as just ‘history’, though some would say I am hard social and some would call me soft political, and I don’t mind. But because all this stuff is happening too, I like to be able to understand what its practitioners are saying without leaving my own work for weeks at a time (which is why apparently deliberate intellectualisation and obfuscation annoys me). As for post-modernity and post-modernism, I don’t even care where I am on the spectrum; labelling my approach has no interest to me at all, especially with labels that I suspect are not useful to describe it. But maybe you the reader see something there you like?
Ernst Gombrich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter Burke
Ernst Gombrich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter Burke
http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=19
BURKE: Cultural history has as many definitions as culture, and that's a notoriously vague concept. I think it might be convenient, though, to describe cultural history, briefly, as the history of the ideas and artefacts of a given social group, and of the place of those ideas and artefacts in that group's way of life. I think an interest in this kind of history goes back to the later 18th century, but the classic study of cultural history is surely Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. In it, he described the leading attitudes and values of the Renaissance man, with particular emphasis on his individualism. There have been a few outstanding cultural historians since Burckhardt's day, and one was a Dutchman, Johan Huizinga, best-known for his Waning of the Middle Ages, a study of the ideals of the upper classes in France and Flanders in the 14th and 15th centuries. Then there was the American historian, Arthur Lovejoy, and the German, Aby Warburg, who was interested, in particular, in the history of the Classical tradition. Warburg founded an institute for the study of cultural history: this institute is now in London and its present director is Sir Ernst Gombrich. Sir Ernst is well-known for the variety of his interests - from the psychology of perception to Neoplatonism. A few years ago, he published a lecture which we might very well take as our starting-point for tonight's discussion: In Search of Cultural History. It was a critique of Burckhardt and of Huizinga. Gombrich suggested that cultural history had been built on Hegelian foundations: that it had been built on Hegel's idea that an age or people had a spirit which expressed itself, or objectified itself, in art, in religion, in law and so on, and that these foundations had crumbled. The age doesn't have a spirit, and the argument that it does is circular: the spirit of the Renaissance is first derived from Renaissance art, and then it's used to explain Renaissance art. At the same time, he emphasised that we need cultural history so that we can continue to understand great works of art and great books. Sir Ernst, I'd like to say how strongly I agree with some of the points you made in your lecture and with two in particular. First, the need for cultural history - more than ever today, when, as you say, 'our own past is moving away from us at frightening speed '; and secondly, what you call the chastening insight that no culture can be mapped out in its entirety, while no element of this culture can be understood in isolation. But I'm a bit more optimistic about the future of cultural history than I think you are. I don't think that the cultural historian is condemned to be either a metaphysician or an antiquarian; Burckhardt and Huizinga escaped both dangers. I suppose the cultural historian does need to justify his existence to the specialist art historians, or to the historians of science. To do this, to justify his existence as a kind of historical general practitioner, I don't think he needs the spirit of the age. But he does need to argue that there are some connections between art and literature and religion in a given society. He needs a model, if you like, of mutual interaction between painters, poets and priests.
GOMBRICH: I entirely agree that there are some interactions. Nobody, I think, would ever doubt this. My first question is rather whether the cultural historian should be confined to the topics which you've just mentioned - art, literature and so on - and whether he should be afraid of being called an antiquarian. There are antiquarian topics which I personally find very interesting - the history of implements, the history of certain institutions - which tell us a lot about the way of life of the past, and which do not neatly fit into any of the categories you mentioned. I have the honour of being a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and I think that the antiquarian tradition, particularly in this country, has some very positive sides. If I may quote, not an antiquarian, but a great scientist, J. B. S. Haldane once wrote a book Everything has a history; and this seems a very good motto for a budding cultural historian.
BURKE: I think we need some concept like pattern or structure to describe what a traveller sees when he visits an alien culture: not only exotic details, but an alien whole - what you've described as different systems of reference or scales of value.
GOMBRICH: I agree that there are sometimes patterns, but they needn't necessarily be all-pervasive. But maybe every culture has its overriding distinctions. There are societies of the past, not always long extinct, where hierarchical patterns - who is on top and who is below - play a much greater part than happily is the case today. There are other cultures - for instance, the Indian one - where the idea of purity or pollution seems to be of overriding importance. In our society, for good or ill, a distinction between right and left, between progressives and reactionaries, plays a great role, and this is a distinction which a 14th-century Florentine wouldn't have understood. In other words, I don't doubt for a moment that in the history of ideas, or culture, there are distinctions which many members of the community share, and which are therefore important for those who study the civilisation. On the other hand, you would agree that even today, if you went into a village in this country and wanted to know whether a particular person felt that he was progressive or reactionary, you might find he had no answer to the question: but he would still belong to our culture.
BURKE: I don't know why you say 'even today', because I think in 20th-century Britain we live in a plurality of sub-cultures. It's not totally without analogy to the past, but there's probably a less obvious cultural pattern in Britain in the 20th century than there was, say, in Florence in the 15th.
GOMBRICH: Don't you think that is due to a difference in perspective, that we are simply closer to our own contemporaries? We feel variety more c1early because we know very little about those in the 14th century who didn't write or who didn't talk.
BURKE: I suppose what convinces me of this is the work of anthropologists, working in some tribal societies: where there might only be twenty to thirty thousand people in a given culture, yet they really do seem to share a wider range of attitudes and values than anything I've experienced in 20th-century Britain. I'd be inclined to situate 15th-century Florence somewhere in-between.
GOMBRICH: You may well be right. But I do suspect many cultural anthropologists of Hegelianism and holism. In other words, I believe that the patterns they describe for us are also partly a product of their own abstraction. We know - and some anthropologists have stressed this - that there are always outsiders, scoffers, who are not easily taken in by the religion of the tribe. The idea of a completely monolithic culture doesn't apply even to small tribal societies.
BURKE: But perhaps there is a difference between the culture with deviants and what we can only describe as a conglomeration of sub-cultures, which is something like what I think we have now. But can I move on, move back rather, to this question of analogies between art and literature. I wonder if we'd agree so much if we took a specific example. One that impressed me very much, maybe too much, was to discover that Grotius had written epigrams on bedpans, on a pair of skates. This calls up irresistibly the idea of the Dutch still-life: in fact, it was Huizinga who pointed out that this parallel existed. Isn't it tempting to say that Dutch culture had this particular fascination with objects in everyday life, which distinguished it to some extent from a number of other cultures?
GOMBRICH: I haven't read these epigrams by Grotius, but the collected works of Grotius are very large, and so are the works of other authors of the 17th century. It would be very surprising indeed if somewhere in these pages there wasn't some neat parallel to some aspect of Dutch painting. I don't think we should be too impressed by such parallels.
BURKE: This raises the enormous problem of how we decide whether the parallel is true, but not terribly significant, or whether it really matters very much. I suppose one of the criteria is going to be how often a particular pattern or parallel appears in a given culture. Do you think that there's a future for quantitative methods in culture history?
GOMBRICH: That depends very much on the problems you are trying to investigate. I think some of the quantitative analysis you have attempted in your book on the Italian Renaissance, and in other papers I have read, is certainly interesting, but, of course, the sample remains very small compared to the number of people who milled around in the cities you are describing. That is not your fault: it's a matter of the accident of preservation, which compels you to be satisfied with a very small section of the community. I always tell my students that history is like a Swiss cheese, full of holes. There are tremendous gaps in our knowledge, and the problem of how to fill these gaps will never be answered completely satisfactorily. Burckhardt or Huizinga were artists: their portraits of a given society or period were not scientific, they were based on intuition. And the impression I have of you, or of my friends, is also based on intuition and not on quantitative analysis. In fact, I would hardly know how to deal with quantitative analysis in trying to assess a character or a friend. In human situations, in other words, we must rely on the instrument we have, which is our individual sensibility. You get the feel of a period by reading a lot. You don't know everything that happened in the past, but you develop a sensitivity for what might not have happened, for what is impossible within that period. This intuition may be wrong. You may find when you turn the next page that what you thought was impossible in the 15th century did happen. But you have certain reasons for your confidence.
BURKE: In your lecture, you were most preoccupied with one kind of cultural history: as context or background to great books, great works of art. And I would want to say, though I doubt if you'd disagree with this, that there's another kind of cultural history which is also enormously important: the cultural history which deals with popular culture, which deals with what the French call the history of mentalities, with what ordinary people are thinking at a particular period, if this can be recovered. In this area there's rather more value in quantitative methods than if one's trying to work out the iconography of Botticelli.
GOMBRICH: I suppose that as far as such mentalities are recoverable or can even be described, you are entirely right, but I never quite know how this should be done. I couldn't really describe the mentality of the people in the street in which I live: this seems to me a very elusive thing. I myself have had to change cultures, as it were, and languages. I have a certain feel for the difference between the atmosphere of the Vienna in which I grew up and the atmosphere of the London in which I live, but when it comes to describing this feel, or pointing to particular instances, I find I'm rather at a loss. The only thing I can say is that what I read about pre-war Vienna always strikes me as wildly wrong, I just don't recognise the city in which I lived. It is a very difficult thing to pin down this atmosphere. These are features one takes for granted. They are part of the background. What methods one should use to bring them into the foreground, and how far one may falsify them by doing so, is one of the problems we are confronting.
BURKE: But still, when one reads texts written several centuries ago, one feels a need for some concept like mentality.
GOMBRICH: I would not deny that mentality is a useful term, but I think it is also true that people change their mentalities. I'm rather attracted by the sociological concept of role-playing in this respect. If you get into another group, you may feel that your mentality is changing: let us say, as an extreme example, the Army, or another group where everybody seems to act and to think and to speak in a different way, and this reacts back on your own responses to a rather surprising degree. Language is the best guide to mentality in this way. I don't know if you know the very interesting results of Liam Hudson with schoolboys. In his book Frames of Mind he has shown that boys who consider themselves to be on the science side give dry matter-of-fact answers, which seem to prove that they are quite unimaginative. But if you tell them, 'Imagine that you are a poet and now answer,' they suddenly become very imaginative. The role is not the person, and we are all many persons. Years ago I took part in experiments about the interpretation of facial expressions in news photographs. This turned out to be almost impossible unless you were also given the context: but there was an exception. You easily recognised the expression which was 'put on' to proclaim a public role - as when a Nazi storm-trooper modelled his bearing on his Führer. Membership of such a movement stamps a man much more than, say, membership of a ping-pong club.
BURKE: May I ask you what you think of Freud? Burckhardt didn't have the advantage of being able to read Freud. Huizinga knew about him but didn't approve.
GOMBRICH: One can always learn a lot from a great man such as Freud, but the Swiss cheese problem comes in there, because we just do not know enough about individuals in the past for any attempt to psychoanalyse them to make sense.
BURKE: I'm sure we can't psychoanalyse the dead, and yet there's a problem once more. Historians can't do without some kind of psychology: you can't write about things in the past without attributing some kinds of motive. There Freud seems to me to be terribly helpful in suggesting far more alternative motivations, so that one can at least ask in dealing with, say, a messianic movement: to what extent are people identifying with a good father who is the leader of their movement, while the bad father is the leader of the other side, as Norman Cohn pointed out in describing millenarian movements of the 15th and 16th centuries.
GOMBRICH: Yes, though in this particular case, you haven't really explained the phenomenon very much by using Freudian terminology. But we have certainly learnt a great deal about human reactions from Freud and his disciples. Not all their intuitions have been borne out by subsequent research, but it is enough that some have.
BURKE: Sometimes it's a little bit more than description. An essay by Richard Hoffstadter on the paranoid style of American politics impressed me very much. He was talking about groups of Americans, anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and saying, first of all, that they believed in the conspiracy against the nation in the way that paranoiacs believe in conspiracies, and then going on to say that they attributed all sorts of things to the Masons, for example, such as sexual licence, and that this might very well be a projection of unconscious desires on their part.
GOMBRICH: Certainly this concept of projection, and even of the mechanisms of paranoia, are very illuminating, though it is an ironic moment to talk about a paranoid style which suspects conspiracies in American politics, because such conspiracies have been revealed to exist.
BURKE: I'm sure historians have often fallen into the trap of psychologism, of giving psychological explanations where social ones are more relevant. So perhaps I can ask you what you think of the social history of culture, and how far that's going to be a fruitful method in the future.
GOMBRICH: I'm not yet quite sure what you mean by the social history of culture. If you mean by that that you are interested in the distribution of certain cultural interests or activities, as I know you are, I think it is indeed most important to clarify what section of the population was really involved. I recently had a discussion with some young painters who complained that the numerical proportion of people who actually ever look at paintings must be tremendously small, and I was sceptical. Thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that they were probably right, and that the proportion in percentages would be exiguous. This would be a social fact which it would be interesting to evaluate. We could easily do it because it happens to apply to the present rather than the past. But if you mean by social history some kind of centre of causation for all culture through the structure of society, I would be a little more sceptical. Certain attitudes, achievements, inventions, can be passed on from one type of society to another without thereby losing their value or their interest.
BURKE: I think there's yet another kind of social approach which strikes me as extremely valuable, and this is looking for the social function of objects and ideas. Here the historians are running a long way behind the anthropologists. There was a marvellous pioneering essay by Malinowski in, I think, 1930, about the stick. The stick used in the given culture may be a digging stick, a walking-stick, a sceptre: once you know what it's associated with, you've got a cultural context and can begin to understand the object. Shouldn't we be doing this with paintings? Asking whether a given Italian painting was intended as a form of magic, or whether it was just to delight the beholder, or whether, because it was a picture of a criminal, it had the function of some kind of ' wanted' poster?
GOMBRICH: I, too, am convinced that the most important task for the future of the history of art is to clarify this matter of function. But one of the things we have learnt from psychoanalysis is that what is successful in society will have many functions at the same time. The picture of the criminal was not so much a ' wanted' poster as a magic imprecation, and it may also have been a display of the skill of Leonardo or Botticelli, who actually painted criminals hanging on the wall of the town hall. Most things in society, including sticks, fulfil many functions. The number of specialised tools is very small, and art certainly belongs to those institutions which meet many demands at the same time.
BURKE: What's emerging from the discussion is a sense that cultural history does need some new methods, but that what we don't need is a totally new cultural history. One might compare cultural history itself to a cultural tradition: it assimilates innovations without changing fundamentally.
GOMBRICH: Yes, except that you may underrate the conservative character of our academic life. I've just read a book by Otto Koenig called Kultur und Verhaltensforschung in which the evolution of military uniforms is compared with that of certain markings and displays in the animal world. I never thought I would be interested in uniforms, but I was fascinated by the demonstration that many military insignia evolved from a utilitarian function. This is something I would like to teach in one form or another, but tell me tell me the course into which it would fit - given the academic tradition of departments. But here we come back to the whole problem of how one identifies a pattern. I think we are all agreed that unitary patterns, which explain everything through race or through society, through the processes of production, or through climate perhaps, are all very misleading. There must always be a great host of variables interacting.
BURKE: Yes. But we need a model for the interaction. We can't do without one, even though we may be condemned simply to invent one - one that deals less violently with the facts than others do.
GOMBRICH: Do we? In hydrodynamics there comes a state called turbulence, when no engineer would wish to predict where the different eddies will go. I learnt that when I worked on Leonardo's studies of water movements. You cannot map out in advance how exactly the currents of water in a narrow will flow. And the same is probably true of the movements of the mind. There is such a thing as turbulence. But it doesn't mean that there are no currents.
Radio 3
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