5 - Prolegomenon to the Study of Jewish Cultural History

Summary

Cultural History

THE NOTION OF cultural history and cultural studies in general, as usually employed in contemporary academic discourse, is derived from social anthropology. The historian reads texts and other historical sources and artefacts not so much as discursive expositions, but rather like an anthropologist studying live behaviour. By doing so, the historian seeks both to discover the ways in which people in the society in question construed meaning, and to develop a catalogue of the fundamental concepts that mediated interpretation of reality and ordered experience for them. Cultural history might be summed up as ‘a history of meaning and feelings broadly defined, as embedded in expressive practices widely observed’.

In this way cultural history differs from social history, which emphasizes institutions: their structure, their social functions, and their effects. Contemporary cultural history is also distinct from a different type of ‘cultural history’: namely, the history of creative production, whether elite, popular, or material—literature, art, tools, architecture, scholarship, philosophy, food, and so on. The new cultural history does study the products of creativity, but not to trace the process of their creation or to summarize their contents per se. The current goal is to determine the meaning that these products express. The description must therefore be ‘thick’ and the interpretation ‘deep’: terms, now more than a generation old, that connote the need to place individual cultural phenomena within a fully articulated cultural-social context and to understand the meanings that adhere to them. A thick description consciously interprets as it describes. A deep interpretation takes into account the cultural infrastructure that underlies a cultural phenomenon.

Cultural history can also include a psychological perspective. Jerome Bruner has attempted to define a new branch of psychology called ‘cultural psychology’.

The program of cultural psychology is … to show how human minds and lives are reflections of culture and history as well as of biology and physical resources. [In the study of Self cultural psychology mandates] … focus upon the meanings in terms of which Self is defined both by the individual and by the culture in which he or she participates … By a culture's definition of Selfhood … I mean more than what contemporary Others, as it were, take as their working definition of Selves in general and of a particular Self.