Cultures of communication: new historical perspectives

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

ISSN: 1350-7486 (Print) 1469-8293 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cerh20

Cultures of communication: new historical perspectives Richard McMahon To cite this article: Richard McMahon (2009) Cultures of communication: new historical perspectives, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 16:1, 1-14, DOI: 10.1080/13507480802655287 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507480802655287

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Date: 27 February 2017, At: 03:14

European Review of History—Revue europeénne d’histoire Vol. 16, No. 1, February 2009, 1–14

Cultures of communication: new historical perspectives Richard McMahon* European University Institute ( Received December 2007; final version received September 2008 ) This contribution locates the current collection of papers by young European historians in the historical context of historical and social scientific study of culture, and especially the historical turn, which reconciles poststructuralist culture scholarship with older concerns of cultural history. The contributors are all influenced by linguistic turn deconstruction of discourse, studying culture and identity as systems of shared meaning, which are highly unstable, heavily gendered and susceptible to renegotiation, reinterpretation and political instrumentalisation. Authors problematise and undermine the essentialist, nationalist, conservative, functionalist model of timeless, separate, coherent territorial cultures. They discuss competing and contested criteria for defining nations or describe cultural communication between ideological or social groups within national societies. Most also engage intensely with power differences, including Foucault’s ‘microphysics’ of subtle and complex power – knowledge interrelationships, examining state cultural policies or how individuals or weaker groups transform, appropriate or reject hegemonic state or intellectual discourses. However eclectic history’s theoretical borrowing, focus on contingent, negotiable change and traditional emphasis on empirical complexity over ‘rigorous’ theory have inspired a broad ‘historical turn’ in scholarship of chaotic, multifaceted, tenticular and contradictory culture. This significant revision of the linguistic turn anchors deconstructed discourse and identity in a material context of social structures, institutional infrastructures and power relations and uses the concrete practice of individuals to restore agency to historical subjects. Contributors therefore accept sociologically and geographically defined cultures such as classes, ethnic groups and nations as historically important units of cultural commonality and connectivity. Several contributors examine the relationship between sites, negotiations and impositions of local and cosmopolitan identity, transfers of ideas and specific technologies or mechanisms and institutions of connectivity within international scholarly networks. Connectivity anchors symbolic culture in the concrete sociopolitical realm, and reconciles the paradoxical continuity and fluidity of culture by avoiding the distinct bounded cultures implied by commonality. Keywords: cultural history; historical turn; historigraphy; power-knowledge nexus; relational

This issue brings together works from nine young European historians, examining questions of cultural communication from the Renaissance to the fall of communism. Despite the diversity of the contributions, they are all clearly influenced by the cultural and linguistic turns in the humanities and social sciences since the late 1960s. They have absorbed the lesson that historians and social scientists should seek to understand what events mean to people. They study cultures as systems of shared meaning, deconstructing

*Email: [email protected] ISSN 1350-7486 print/ISSN 1469-8293 online q 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13507480802655287 http://www.informaworld.com

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the discourse expressed in modes of communication like monuments, ‘art, writing, film, or conversation’.1 However, many historians had reservations about the linguistic turn and, despite recognising the ‘basic usefulness’ of its insights, have recently undertaken a significant ‘moment of revision’.2 This has been linked with a broad ‘historical turn’ in several social sciences and humanities, which some commentators already identified in the early 1990s.3 The papers in this issue demonstrate that in the discipline of history this has not so much been a rejection of the linguistic turn as an adaptation that overcomes historians’ reluctance to take it. By focusing on practice and cultural connectivity, contributors integrate poststructuralist insights with other elements of historiographical tradition, and especially with social and political history. They criticise ethnic essentialism, for example, but accept ethnicity and nation as historically important cultural units. A prime example of this new synthesis is that they turn the spotlight of cultural analysis on the traditional political and elite sphere of Rankean historiography, neglected in the earlier concentration on the cultural history of the masses. This introduction first sketches how the kind of cultural history that is associated with the historical turn came to emerge out of the linguistic and cultural turns. It then identifies how the papers in this collection embody this shift. Disciplinary evolution kept culture and history apart for a long time. Nineteenth-century positivist history was heavily oriented towards state and diplomatic history,4 while the emerging social sciences of the early twentieth century largely preferred synchronic approaches.5 Anthropology, the discipline most interested in culture, reacted sharply against its earlier fascination with dubious conjectured histories of cultural diffusion and evolution. However, beginning with France’s Annales School (established in 1929), historians imported social scientific concerns and techniques, including those relating to culture. Social history expanded to become the dominant paradigm in history by the 1970s6 but, under heavy Marxist influence, mainstream social historians often relegated culture to a subsidiary ‘superstructure’, determined by the deeper socioeconomic structures. This began changing in the late 1960s, when the left-wing intellectuals at the forefront of cultural scholarship moved from concentrating on economically defined class politics to a concern for the rights of groups like women, postcolonial subjects and ethnic and gender minorities, who were then entering the historical profession.7 The linguistic turn appealed to these groups, as it de-legitimised arguments that categories like male, female, black and white were natural by highlighting their discursive and historical construction.8 In a remarkably rapid and general transformation since the early 1970s, and despite resistance from both Marxist and conservative materialists, historians increasingly focused on culture rather than society and defined or redefined themselves as cultural historians.9 The new generation of Annales scholars promoted mentalite´s, which in Braudel’s scheme had been just one level of historical experience, to ‘a primary determinant of historical reality’.10 The new cultural history absorbed and transformed fields such as intellectual, art and science history and thrust them to the fore of historical preoccupation, while political science also returned its attention to culture in the 1980s, after a hiatus in the 1960s.11 Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson’s materialist critique of nationalism, stressing that nations were products of modern political and technological forces, was itself criticised in the 1980s – 1990s by ethnosymbolists like Anthony Smith, who gave cultural identity a more autonomous role by making nations, in part, ‘the products of pre-existing traditions and heritages’.12 This cultural turn was decisively influenced by the postmodern or poststructuralist transformation, which has acquired the label of ‘linguistic turn’ and (to a greater or lesser extent) touched all humanities and social sciences. Drawing on structural linguistics,

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or semiotics, its central idea is that language is ‘somehow anterior to the world it shapes’; so that what we experience as ‘reality’ is just a linguistically ‘constructed artefact’.13 Literature scholars and philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault and de Man argued in the 1960s and 1970s that it is only through the medium of language that we can think about and discuss what we have not directly experienced, and even perhaps that which we have. They interpreted culture as the interplay of inter-referential texts, focusing on their context and how they work, rather than trying to recover their ‘meaning’. They also expanded the idea of the text from literary works to administrative, scientific and other documents and even to ‘experience, behaviour, and events’.14 Foucault’s influence was vital in problematising the category of society, demonstrating its historical construction in ‘social science and medico-administrative discourses, their technologies, and effects’, while the literary critic Hayden White applied textual deconstruction to historical writing itself.15 While social historians had borrowed from economics and sociology, the new cultural historians turned to the symbolic anthropology of Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins, which itself drew on literary theory, post-1968 French intellectual currents and postmodern philosophy, and applied the text metaphor to cultures.16 Rather than just the explicit expression of ideas in texts, they followed Geertz in seeking the implicit symbolic sub-texts of actions, ‘specific practices’ and discourse, by ‘recording in elaborate detail a single event’ and embedding it in its complex ‘total context’.17 By the 1990s, poststructuralist literary theory and a cultural history of discourse which prioritised the linguistic construction of society had deeply impacted on the social sciences and humanities, promoted in intellectual history by Dominick LaCapra, postcolonial studies by Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak and feminist history by Joan Scott.18 On history’s vast expanding frontier with anthropology, movements like Italian Microstoria and German historical anthropology and Alltagsgeschichte drew on Geertzian interpretation.19 The hugely popular ‘new cultural history’ came to dominate fields like American intellectual history and significantly challenge or even displace the social history of the 1970s.20 Even intercultural communication, whose initial aim was to train bureaucrats and businesspeople to work abroad, was heavily influenced from the 1990s, though neopositivist approaches still account for ‘the bulk’ of its research and theorising.21 History was slower than other disciplines to adapt to the new culturalism, however, with particular resistance to poststructuralist elimination of the conscious historical subject.22 Geertz’s focus on the meaning of social actions for the actors was an important part of his attraction to microhistorians, alienated by the ‘anonymous structures and development processes’ of quantifying social history, which dissolved individuals in a statistical mass and made them ‘puppets of anonymous’ structural forces.23 However, many historians felt Foucault’s concept of a rarely comprehended, enveloping discourse, within which individuals were ‘constructed and produced’, was equally deterministic and oppressive.24 A second important complaint was the poststructuralist elimination of historical narrative.25 Barthes and Derrida argued that signifiers ‘merely point to other signifiers’ so that ‘meaning is always deferred and finally absent’, while the Geertzian concentration on ‘very intensive knowledge of the very smallest matters’ made ‘great narratives of any type’ impossible (emphasis in original).26 Historiographers like Gabrielle Spiegel and William Sewell argue that these reservations have led to the ‘historical turn’ reformulation of cultural history, restoring agency to historical subjects, while accepting the theoretical framework of the linguistic turn, and even reclaiming the intellectual legacy of poststructuralist icons like Foucault.27 They identify ‘practice’ as the lynchpin of this historical turn, reintroducing agency to the previously more strictly linguistic concept of discourse by focusing on the concrete actions of individuals.28 Sewell traces history’s historical turn to the new focus

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of 1980s anthropology on practice and diachronic accounts, in a ‘pervasive reaction’ to its previously dominant synchronic approach to cultures as systems ‘of symbols and meanings’.29 In this issue, several contributors thus concentrate on the pragmatics of practice. Vincze for example argues that the manner and circumstance of early modern translation was highly significant for understanding the move towards vernacular languages, and criticises historians for neglecting translated works, due to their literary unoriginality. Vitally for our contributors, the inexorable expansion of the concept of discourse to include institutions, political events, economic activities and so on has tended to reconcile the rival poststructuralist and social history approaches.30 Numerous historical and sociological theorists meanwhile see the complexity of discourse/culture as offering subjects a tool-kit of ‘adaptive, strategic, and tactical’ options, even if not fully conscious, or insist that ‘bodily and material’ experience is not ‘textually mediated’.31 Especially outside North America meanwhile, the ‘new cultural history’ never accepted the strict separation of cultural from social history or entirely coalesced with the linguistic turn, sometimes criticising it for making culture the primary explanation for everything, just as economics had once been.32 As specialists in history of ideas, science, literature and art came to associate themselves with cultural history, they also tended to adopt a social history approach.33 An important way in which contributors to this issue on cultural communication reconcile linguistic turn and older approaches is in their treatment of the traditional model of timeless separate cultures, each implicitly dominating a territory, though perhaps with ‘culturally different’ minority enclaves. Though critical of this model, which is still dominant in lay discourse and certain scholarly fields, and which informs most political practice, the contributors differ from poststructuralist cultural studies in not dismissing it outright.34 The traditional model makes ‘intercultural’ communication resemble state diplomacy, with representatives negotiating on behalf of their cultural compatriots, or international trade, in which culturally foreign ideas are received and absorbed. It derives most obviously from the essentialist nationalist concept of separate ethnic groups. This was reinforced in the mid-twentieth century by the dominant social science theory of functionalism, in which culture was a cog in the tightly integrated social mechanism of each particular society, and since around 1970 by the latest wave of romantic interest in indigenous peoples, whether in Europe’s regions or the Amazon basin.35 In the 1960s, the Annales School and political scientists assumed culture changed particularly slowly, and conservatives like Huntington, who reinterpreted civilisations as proto-nations, have also long been comfortable with unchanging hermetic cultures.36 Much scholarship in political science, international relations, intercultural communication37 and civilisational macrohistory examines cultural features like value preferences, culturally specific wants, preferences, desires and ethical systems, rather than problematising their boundaries, which by default are often then equated with bounded religions, states, ethnic groups or study samples.38 Equating cultures with societies to compare culture A with culture B, which is how many anthropologists and other scholars explore cultural difference and interaction, reinforces this assumption.39 From the 1980s on, however, the new interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, influenced heavily by postmodern thinking and multiculturalist political ideology, has led a campaign to portray culture as almost infinitely susceptible to renegotiation and reinterpretation.40 Foucault advocated a concept of identity ‘that stresses its nonfixity . . . as an unstable ordering of multiple possibilities whose provisional unity is managed discursively through language’, ‘inflected with power relations’ and ‘heavily gendered’.41 Historians therefore studied how it becomes ‘temporarily fixed’ to allow political action.42


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Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson demonstrated how modern elites invented nations to serve their own purposes. Anthropologists also attacked their own culture concept ‘for implying timelessness, homogeneity, and uncontested sharedness’, and argued for a more politicised and historicised version.43 One contributor to this issue, Vincze, makes a particular point of criticising the concept of hermetically separate, distinct, localised cultures as ‘a fiction of modernity’. She highlights how the cosmopolitan early modern belief that scholars should harvest knowledge from all lands challenges this culture concept. Some contributors problematise and undermine nationalessentialist thinking by discussing the several competing and sometimes politically contested criteria for defining early modern Hungarians or interwar Romanians. Others, like Karge, exploit the freedom that Bourdieu offers from the old essentialist equation of culture with ethnicity or geographical region, instead defining their interacting cultural spheres by factors like position in power structures (authorities versus subjects). However, the authors here, like many historians, remain quite comfortable with making ‘sociological and geographic’ divisions an important subject of cultural history.44 The absence of any defence of essentialism and their relatively sporadic attacks on it suggest that these young historians take postmodern anti-essentialism as read45 and no longer make it a strident battle-standard. This is especially significant as most are from countries like Ireland and post-Communist Europe, with strong nationalist traditions of intensely essentialist historiography. Most contributors to this issue work in a comparative tradition that is as at home in anthropology and social science as in history, analysing relationships between cultures separated by geographical location. Klesment, who examines furtive Soviet borrowing of Western management techniques in the 1960s and 1970s, and Sretenovic, who studies French cultural foreign policy in interwar Yugoslavia, deal with the transmission of ideas and symbols between autonomous cultural ‘actors’. Cusco’s 1820s Bessarabian nobility and Stancu’s communist Romania are in a somewhat different position relative to their cultural interlocutors in Moscow, which, despite holding ultimate political control, must work around local cultural factors in order to impose their will. Karge’s grass-roots war commemorators in communist Yugoslavia are similarly positioned with regard to the official commemoration authorities. The majority of contributors use a model of cultural communication where local distinctions and international interaction coexist in complex ways, permitting a place both for enduring geographical cultures and for continuous complex change. Many contributors examine international networks of scholars from the Renaissance to the interwar period, and their relationship with Eastern European sites within them. Vincze studies Hungarian translators in the respublica litteraria, the Enlightenment scholars Shek Brnardic´ and Taki respectively examine the culture of sociability in Eastern Europe and the reception of Montesquieu by Russian conservative thinkers, while McMahon analyses the role of interwar Romanian anthropologists within international scientific race classification. Vincze explores in detail the multi-layered ‘universal’ and local meanings of translations, noting that her cosmopolitan early modern scholars recognised that every locality had different knowledge. Shek Brnardic´ stresses the complimentary Enlightenment ideologies of responsibility for all humanity and patriotic duty to one’s own country and community, which improved themselves by learning from others. The contributors do not assume that ethno-geographical categories are the only relevant modern cultural divisions but they do recognise them as very significant. Several contributors address the negotiation of national identity, recognising the undeniably central role of nationalism in modern politics and culture, and in tying them together. Nationalism was often a defensive reaction to international integration, and contributors

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also note the complex interactions between these levels. Taki stresses the importance of Russia’s relationship with the West in defining Russian identity. McMahon and Sretenovic describe how Balkan elites emulated French or German nation-building models, while Stancu details the ironies of Romanians borrowing a Russian literary genre to oppose American-style modernisation. Vincze describes translators who develop precocious concepts of Hungarian nationality while participating in the pan-European respublica litteraria. Like McMahon’s race classifiers, they claimed their work boosted the international prestige of their country, demonstrating how an open liberal take on nationalism competed with defensive conservatism, aiming respectively to compete successfully internationally or to defend local specificity. The same combination of ‘postmodern’ and more traditional historiographical preoccupations is evident in the approach of contributors to the semiotic concept of culture. In different ways, all the authors deconstruct the symbolic meanings contained in intellectual communication. Karge relates her work to postmodern cultural studies, explicitly recognises Geertz’s influence, and ‘reads’ war monuments as a text. While McMahon immerses race classifiers in Geertzian thick description, Vincze notes that anthropologists use translation, her subject, as a metaphor for the transformation of cultural symbols by the act of transmission, and places herself among the literary scholars, linguists and historians who increasingly study translation as ‘an epistemological inquiry’ into the possibilities of transferring knowledge and ‘transcoding’ culture. Cusco gives issues of ‘mentality’, like the ‘cultural misunderstanding’ over criteria for defining aristocrats and their roles, a vital place in scuppering 1820s plans for Moldovan autonomy, despite an ascendant ideology in St Petersburg of accommodating local elite interests. Sretenovic similarly insists that ‘the production, distribution and consumption of symbolic objects within a society’ was no less important than the political, military and economic aspects of the interwar Franco– Yugoslav relationship, with which it interacted. He says culture ‘shaped mentalities, gave an orientation to public sentiment and even influenced political decisions’. Karge’s specific sub-discipline of memory studies meanwhile became important in historical writing in the 1980s. It examines ‘the general economy and administration of the past in the present’, and is particularly associated with the linguistic turn towards the ‘history of symbolic systems’.46 It studies the construction and manipulation of a ‘collective memory’ in archives, libraries, museums, graveyards, monuments, commemorations, pilgrimages, anniversaries, emblems, textbooks, autobiographies and associations, in which social groups ‘voluntarily consigned their memories or used them as a necessary part of their personality’.47 This programme resembles that of Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition, which is Sretenovic’s explicit methodological inspiration. This issue nevertheless reflects the broad historiographical reluctance to abandon all but purely ‘idealist’ preoccupations. Though often accepting a distinction between ideal and material realms for analytical purposes, the authors insist these are not really separate. They integrate a focus on the meaning of all kinds of symbolic acts and objects, at every level of society, with social history concerns like social structures, institutional infrastructures and power relations. Arguably, this combination represents a further stage in the expansion of intellectual history’s remit from the old-fashioned historiographical tradition of ‘pure’ history of (canonical) ideas, that Shek Brnardic´ criticises for conceiving ideas as ‘independent units’, to the linguistic turn recognition of the role of society’s ‘shared values, forms and symbols’.48 Stancu very firmly connects literary developments with other changes in communist society, such as the move towards technical and vocational education. McMahon gives a key role to the weakness or eugenics orientation of disciplinary


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institutions like university chairs, journals and societies, in explaining the derivative nature of Romanian race classification and the right-wing racist and nationalist orientation of Transylvanian theorists. Karge notes that even cultural studies acknowledges that effective ‘representations of a collective past’ must be ‘communicated in arts, politics, school, the mass media, museums, and the like’. Vincze finds that early-modern translators and the nobles commissioning them derived specific agendas from these functions and identities, which they expressed in choice of works, dedications and even in the specific language used in the translation. Several contributors link the keyword culture to that of identity, meaning identification with a group, or what the sociologists Brubaker and Cooper, in their taxonomy of cultural analysis, call groupness.49 Given historiographical tradition and the political and cultural importance of nations, it is inevitable that many historians, including in this issue, study the negotiation of national or ethnic identity. When democratisation, European integration, Balkan nationalism, Islamism, failed states and the collapse of communism revived political science interest in culture in the 1980s, it focused on identity, while postmodernism and urban multiculturalism encouraged cultural studies to do the same.50 Cusco in this issue notes that the estates system remained important for the identity of Russian nobles even after bureaucratic Enlightenment reforms uncoupled it from effective political-administrative power. The complexity of identity negotiation, involving not only the community or communities you identify with, but also that which others categorise you in, is central to McMahon’s account of interwar Romania. The writers on international scholarly communities all discuss the importance for members of feeling themselves to be international scholars, and several also examine how they integrated their local and cosmopolitan identities. However, the historians here also exploit the two other Brubaker– Cooper categories, commonality and connectivity or communication,51 to anchor the difficult psychological dynamics of identity in concrete historical research. Commonality is the content of a culture, the mentalite´s, behaviour patterns, social structures, political culture, artefacts and so on that its members have in common.52 This has been the main cultural focus of the Annales School, political science and the historical sociology tradition of Weber, Schmuel Eisenstadt and Barrington Moore. Cusco in this issue draws on historical sociology to analyse the clash of mutually uncomprehending mentalities which complicated the integration of the relatively informal and traditionalist Moldovan noble class into the more bureaucratic state service-oriented Russian aristocracy. Many contributors use the third Brubaker– Cooper category, connectivity, to anchor the cultural economy of ideas and symbols in the concrete realm of social praxis, while escaping the distinct bounded cultures implied by a focus on cultural commonality. Connectivity emphasises the specific mechanisms, technologies and institutions of cultural transmission and interaction, which Foucault influentially incorporated into his concept of discourse.53 Enduring pathways of communication also have potential54 to reconcile the poststructuralist stress on fluidity of cultural content and negotiated identity, with the geographical stability perceived by students of civilisation. Sretenovic, Klesment and McMahon treat economics theories, sets of races, anthropometric measurement scales, theories of race relationships and French, German and Austro-Hungarian models of nation-state organisation as ‘traded’ technologies, competing internationally for customers, but with important effects on their narratives of identity. Shek Brnardic´ says the spread of enlightened ideas was conditioned by travel, the press, printing, schools, censorship and the effects of war, setting refugees, soldiers and ideas in motion and publicising obscure contested cities like Prague.

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The interdependence of ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ factors was nowhere more fiendishly complex than when they concerned ideologies, which were both ideas propagated through the communication technologies of international networks and vital communication technologies. McMahon’s scientists were united by positivist and then racist neo-romantic ideologies for example and Shek Brnardic´ sees the Enlightenment moral philosophy of cosmopolitan patriotism, mutual dependence and sociability as crucial in Enlightenment and intercultural communication. Enlightenment sociability was itself then promoted by institutions like ‘salons, literary and scientific academies, Masonic lodges, coffeehouses’, and ‘all sorts of formal and informal reading and conversing circles’. Studying institutionalised cultural interaction, especially when the subject is an international scholarly community, leads many contributors to interpret communicative technologies and institutions in a context of networks. Institutions like international conferences and canons of authoritative works and journals thus united McMahon’s community of scientists. Shek Brnardic´’s Enlightenment network includes subsystems of communication and book distribution within Christian churches and orders. Most of the authors in this issue are intensely aware of power differences between cultural interlocutors. This concern has been present in scholarship of culture at least since the concept of cultural hegemony, developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, became popular among the generation of left-wing intellectuals who trained in the newly inclusive postwar universities.55 Gramsci argued that elites rule by persuading subject classes to accept their own conception of the world. Sewell adds that the ‘dialectical dance’ between institutions of power and the resistance to them, ‘simplifying and clarifying the cultural field’, provides cultures with their elements of rigid enduring structure.56 Several authors here examine the cultural policies which states recognised as important parts of their policy. Karge’s Yugoslav communist regime was determined to control cultural memory of the Second World War, seeing it as crucial to its own legitimisation. Sretenovic reports that the interwar French authorities saw promotion of French language and cultural attitudes as such an important geopolitical tool in Eastern Europe that it established cultural bureaux in its foreign ministry with funds to carry out programmes abroad, while its German rival countered with similar policies. The imbalance of power between cultural interlocutors is clearest in chapters which describe relationships with an imperial or communist centre. However, in Sretenovic’s piece too, France is clearly the more powerful partner, while Klesment makes the Soviets the supplicating party. In the 1980s, Foucault’s ‘pervasive influence’ helped shift historians’ understanding of power from the state apparatus to a ‘microphysics’ of subtle and complex interrelationships of power and knowledge dispersed throughout society.57 The term ‘representation’, or how things are portrayed and interpreted, became a key-word, as cultural historians focused on conflicting ‘symbolic strategies’ for the construction of social hierarchies.58 In this issue, Karge stresses that the field of memory studies concentrates on ‘the nexus between memory and power’. It is particularly important in Eastern European studies, as communists and, most dramatically in the Balkans, post-communist nationalists and external actors actively created and enforced hegemonic accounts of the past to legitimise polities and policies.59 Vincze’s early modern scholars flattered the patrons they depended on in dedications or translated works that emphasised the latter’s qualities, and were commissioned to legitimise their rule. Shek Brnardic´’s Enlightenment illumine´s, McMahon’s anthropologists and most opportunistic of all, the Sadoveanu of Stancu’s account, all appealed to the authorities, staking out spaces of official usefulness.


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Weaker parties had the option of rejecting external influences. Stancu says that partly in opposition to Soviet economic plans for example, Romanian communists rejected later Soviet science fiction. Roland Barthes developed and the Annales School exploited the concept of cultural border guards, taboos and institutions which police the homogeneity of content and groupness of a culture. This not only reinforces the idea of separate bounded cultures, by giving them concrete institutional grounding, but is very compatible with the connectivity approach to culture, which presumes that both pathways and barriers direct the flow of cultural interaction. Most contributors concentrate more on transformation, ‘appropriation’ or ‘translation’ than total rejection as empowering options in cultural contact, making every ‘consumption . . . another production’.60 Stancu describes interwar Eastern European strategies for transforming modernity into a more palatable rural local form, Klesment’s Soviet economists gave foreign ideas a new intellectual genealogy in the works of Marx and Lenin, Taki’s Russian intellectuals moulded Montesquieu into very diverse Russian forms, while McMahon’s central theme is the adaptation of foreign race narratives to Romanian conditions. Vincze, specifically dealing with translation, says one work shifted the emphasis of the original text by rendering the English word ‘good’ as an entire list of qualities in Hungarian. Some contributors criticise specific failures by scholars to accept this idea of cultural transformation. Shek Brnardic´ blames historians of ideas for imagining that ‘the intellectual wastelands outside Western Europe’ passively ‘swallowed up’ Western Enlightenment ideas in a ‘one-way process’, ignoring ‘critical re-thinking and/or transformation’ of texts by ‘consumers of intellectual goods’. Karge argues that Yugoslavs actively engaged with state-decreed narratives of Second World War commemoration, transforming them by their rejection or adaptation, but complains that many scholars presume the authorities managed to ‘freeze’ memories until after Tito’s death. McMahon argues, however, that the fair-minded ascription of agency to weaker parties in cultural relationships should not suggest that they were entirely equal interlocutors, pointing out that Western anthropology used Romanian data but largely ignored Romanian scholarship. Stancu similarly notes how Romanian science-fiction remained in its Stalinist mould in the 1950s, even as the genre evolved in the USSR itself. The alternative genealogies that allowed Soviet economists to import Western techniques in Klesment’s paper were an essentially defensive strategy. Many contributors write on Eastern European topics and often discuss the powerful Western narrative of a ‘cultural gradient’ from Western core to Eastern European periphery, which has been extensively studied by writers like Larry Woolf, Iver Neumann, Maria Todorova and Attila Melegh.61 Especially given that some or many Easterners accepted this slope discourse, it is an important example of cultural power relations, and particularly relevant for contributors who write on international scholarly networks. McMahon, an Irish writer, claims that in part due to their extreme international peripherality, Romanian race anthropologists discursively associated their country with developed Western Europe. Vincze meanwhile discusses a Renaissance Transylvanian prince whose propaganda countered his reputation as an Ottoman stooge by constructing ‘a Protestant mythisation’ and ‘an image as the equal of great European monarchs’.62 This issue complexifies and contests the simple east –west cultural slope narrative, however. Taki, from Moldova, says Russians gradually shifted from 1789 to the 1840s from accepting a role as pupils of the enlightened West to believing themselves to be radically different and superior. Stancu discusses the efforts of his Romanian compatriots to find alternative models of modernity to the derivative Western one in which they were so far behind. Shek Brnardic´ and especially Cusco complicate the geography of intellectual power by noting that early nineteenthcentury Russians saw themselves as exporters of enlightened culture and ‘rational’ modern

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administration to traditionalist Moldova (to their west!). Russians qualified opposition from a supposedly barbaric local nobility in the same terms as Western Orientalists. Even in this case, however, some Moldovans compared the ‘savage’ Russian north with an alternative Viennese paragon of civilisation. The principle argument of Croatian scholar Shek Brnardic´ is meanwhile that Western Enlightenment studies is incorrect to ignore Eastern Enlightenment scholars, or dismiss them as derivative and peripheral. She says the Eastern Enlightenment has generally been treated in the West in geographical rather than intellectual terms, by general historians of the region interested in themes of geopolitical weakness and economic backwardness, while Enlightenment studies dismisses the East for not reading the canonical Western authors or at best doing so superficially. Ironically, McMahon ascribes peripherality to Romanian anthropologists in part because they read nothing but the Western canon. However, the authors here redress the politically inspired tendency of cultural history to make cultural communication subservient to power differences. Since at least the late 1960s, the theoretical avant-garde in social and then cultural history has been a politically left-wing enterprise, due in part to the expanding social inclusiveness of university education.63 Rebelling against the elitism of earlier political and intellectual history, fields like microhistory and British cultural studies focused on the masses instead, largely ignoring elite culture.64 The historian E.P. Thompson, the literary critic Raymond Williams and the rediscovery of Max Weber in Britain, the Frankfurt School of critical theory and the Marxism of the Annales School, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu in France all helped stimulate the new interest in mass culture.65 Postmodernism also privileged popular culture.66 Of the contributors to this issue by contrast, only Karge examines popular culture in any detail and even she deals with its relationship with state authorities. Most chapters are specifically about scholarly elites and about half of them focus on state cultural policies, while state or intellectual elites play a leading role in accounts of the negotiation of national identity. A focus on communication as opposed to identity or cultural content draws the focus to elites, who are partly defined by their control and use of longer-distance communication technology and networks especially. Though this recognition that elites have had a disproportionate influence on many cultural and political processes may signal the diminished commitment to class politics of an upcoming generation of historians, this is no reactionary return to elitism. If anything, it recognises that elites have culture too, rejecting the rather patronising idea that they scheme rationally while subconscious cultural forces sway the masses. The broad historical turn is ‘remarkably eclectic’, emerging in response to separate internal or external stimuli on the different ‘knowledge cultures’ of varied disciplines.67 In history, it was heavily influenced by anthropology’s own historical turn and by sociology’s focus on what people do, as well as on how they use signs.68 While the turn in International Relations draws most heavily on historical sociology,69 Terrence McDonald claims that ‘much of the history of interest to sociologists’ comes from the typologies of Marx, Weber and Durckheim.70 Dirks comments that the version of history ‘discovered’ by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins ‘makes little sense to most historians’.71 The turn also represents a very different moment of disciplinary development in history. Social sciences gradually rediscovered diachronic accounts of the past after their 1950s–1960s positivist quest for ahistoric general laws,72 whereas historians are learning from a sometimes discomfiting engagement with the cultural and linguistic turns to overcome their reluctance to formulate theories suited to their own practice.73 The complexity of culture forced historians ‘to become their own theoreticians’,74 reassembling and reformulating


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components that they eclectically borrowed from literary studies, philosophy and anthropology. Though other disciplines have hitherto rarely noticed,75 theories rooted in historiographical tradition have particular relevance to historical-turn study of culture, and may even place history in the unfamiliar position of exporting theory. History has certain advantages over more ‘theoretical’ disciplines like philosophy and even sociology in studying a phenomenon as chaotic, multifaceted, tenticular and contradictory as culture. As well as an instinct to place complex, inconsistent evidence before clear, ‘rigorous’ theory, and a tolerance for promiscuous mixing of eclectic theoretical approaches, history inevitably underlines that cultural structures change over time and therefore can never be totalitarian and non-negotiable.76 It can also draw on its long traditions of political and social history and influences from political science and sociology as well as from anthropology, literary studies and philosophy, to select from a strikingly diverse panoply of cultural analytic strategies. For example, social historians were among those whose use of Gramsci expanded the traditional anthropological definition of cultures in terms of peoples or ethnicities, by promoting the concept of class cultures.77 The contributors to this issue use discourse analysis techniques to understand constructions of identity, but mix them with a focus on the mechanics of communication, its technologies and institutions and the networks it forms. This helps reconcile the contradictory evidence for continuity and constant flux in culture and firmly reinserts the intellectual interplay of culture into a sociopolitical context. The patchy decline of left- and right-wing polemicism in debates on culture may create spaces for the further development of this fruitful cultural communication approach. The ‘historical turn’ to acknowledge the contingency and social embeddedness of ‘beliefs, values, institutions, and practices’ may be interpreted as a deformation of poststructuralist dogmas as they settles onto the massif of historical methods and traditions.78 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Hudson, 7. Although the contributors concentrate on how monuments, ‘art, writing, film, or conversation’ are used as cultural communication media, this does not of course mean that these forms of expression have no other role or meaning. Eley, 45; Spiegel, 2 – 3. McDonald, 1. Stone, 5 – 6. Ibid., 8; Reinhard, 20 – 21. Stone, 11 – 12; Gombrich, 45. Reinhard, 23; Spiegel, 25. Ibid., 25; Eley, 43 – 4. Poirrier, 43 – 5; Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, 221. Ibid., 222; Poirrier, 29 – 31. Hudson, 6; Gaenslen, 267. Smith directly debated this question with Gellner in 1995, and associated him with Hobsbawm and Anderson in the ‘modernist’ camp (Smith, 1996; Smith, 2000; Gellner). Though centrally concerned with the invented, imagined or high culture of nations, these three modernists tended to explain them as results of ‘deeper’ modern forces. Spiegel, 2 –3; Appleby et al., 219. Spiegel, 5; Eley, 42. Ferdinand de Saussure initially elaborated semiotics in 1916. Ibid., 42, 47 –8; Dirks, 34. Appleby et al., 218– 19; Stone, 86; Kuper, 19 – 20; Dirks, 16. Stone, 86; Poirrier, 18, 26. Spiegel, 8; Eley, 41 – 2; Harlan, 583. Reinhard, 20, 25 – 6.

12 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

R. McMahon Harlan, 593; Eley, 36 – 7, 54; Appleby et al., 218– 20; Spiegel, 8. Kim, 557; Moon. Appleby et al., 218, 221; Harlan, 594– 96; Reinhard, 26; Hall 2000, 331. Geertz, 27 – 9; Reinhard, 25. Spiegel, 4 –7, 11; Eley, 40; Harlan, 590–1. Ibid., 582– 3; Chase. Harlan, 581– 82; Reinhard, 18 – 19; From the late 1970s, however, historical sociologists like Tilly, Wallerstein and John A. Hall have created new grand narratives of world history, in an attempt ‘to rebuild social theory’ (Eley, 41). Spiegel, 4, 9 –11, 22; Sewell, 89. Spiegel, 10 – 11; Sewell, 89; Pels adds that impatience with ‘exclusively textual’ notions of symbolic culture also led anthropologists back towards their older interest in material culture. Sewell, 83 – 4. Spiegel, 10. Ibid., 13 – 15, 18 – 21; Harlan, 586, 591; Chase, 68, 78. Poirrier, 35 – 7, 41; Spiegel, 8. Poirrier, 148, 234– 5. Hudson, 8; Eley, 50. Kuper, 16. Brown, 4. The field of Intercultural Communication still concentrates on ‘essential patterns of communication norms and practices in specific cultures and subcultures’ (Kim, 556). Hudson, 8. Sewell, 94. Chase, 64. Eley, 50. Ibid., 50. Gaenslen, 272. Poirrier, 37. Including from a lifelong diet of television and especially advertisements which toy in a knowing postmodern way with styles, symbols and references. Ibid., 199– 204. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 22, 25. Whereas poststructuralists tend to imply that meta-narratives of this sort inevitably support the status quo, Bob Chase engages with the writings of Hayden White to argue that historians have the right to consciously choose narratives that support their moral and political agendas (Chase, 82). Whereas White’s praise for histories that consciously negotiate between linguistic modes may suggest that some kind of historical science is possible (White 1987 [1978]: 128– 9), his analysis of history as literary art may also be a licence to unashamedly use historical meta-narratives to persuade or structure an argument. Art can produce truths but, unlike science, rarely makes claims to any absolute truth. Brubaker, Cooper. Gaenslen, 267– 9. Brubaker and Cooper use the term ‘identity’ for the catch-all category that I refer to as culture, and ‘groupness’ for what I call ‘identity’. The Russo-American sociologist Sorokin in 1937– 1941 and, borrowing from him, the French cultural historian Maurice Crubellier in the 1970s, prefigured this tripartite scheme, proposing a model of culture made up of ‘a constituted group, a means of communication and a content’ (Poirrier, 30). Stone, 24, 86. Poirrier, 18 – 19, 32; Spiegel, 10. This potential is not automatically realised. Intercultural Communication is centrally concerned with communication practices, but generally in diachronic research on bounded cultures (Kim, 556). Appleby et al., 220. Sewell, 89 – 92. Eley, 40; Spiegel, 10. Poirrier, 19. For a sample bibliography, see Biondich.

European Review of History—Revue europeénne d’histoire 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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Poirrier, 26. Woolf; Todorova; Neumann; Melegh; Evtuhov, Kotkin. Western narratives of Southern, Eastern, Muslim or Balkan material underdevelopment emerged much later, however. Ottoman identity was rejected as infidel, different and incorrect, but not necessarily inferior. Reinhard, 22. Poirrier, 26; Reinhard, 22 – 5; Macdonald, 5 – 6, 11 – 15. Stone, 12 – 13; Appleby et al., 220– 2. So¨der, 78. McDonald, 1, 9 –10; Dirks, 28. Sewell, 83 – 4; Spiegel, 15. McCourt, 1 – 2, 9. McDonald, 7. Dirks, 20 – 1. McDonald, 3– 4. Spiegel, 10; Dirks, 31. Eley, 37; McDonald, 8. Dirks, 28. Historians are themselves not blameless, often refusing to recognise the engagement of other disciplines with the past as real history (Dirks, 31). Spiegel, 22 –5; Harlan, 609. Dirks, 23 – 4. The historical anthropologist Dirks criticises British cultural studies, however, for using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to stress class at the expense of other cultural structures (Dirks, 19 – 20). Spiegel, 25.

Notes on contributor Dr. Richard McMahon graduated from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy in 2007 with a thesis on The Races of Europe: Construction of Political Identities in Physical Anthropology 1830– 1945. He is currently working on a number of papers based on this research. Dr. McMahon also has an MA in international relations from University College Cork, Ireland, where he researched links between culture and politics in the European integration process. In 2000– 2, he worked as a journalist in Brussels, reporting on EU affairs and especially on EU relations with eastern Europe. His particular research interest is the international historical geography of culture, and especially that of Europe. Within this field, he is especially interested in eastern Europe, relational network approaches and narratives of symbolic geography and identity.

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