Sewell, Jr. remembers facing the limits of social history and what has been called “the revelation of anthropology”:
I experienced the encounter with cultural anthropology as a turn from a hardheaded, utilitarian, and empiricist materialism—which had both liberal and marxisant faces—to a wider appreciation of the range of human possibilities, both in the past and in the present. Convinced that there was more to life than the relentless pursuit of wealth, status, and power, I felt that cultural anthropology could show us how to get at that “more.”24
Geertz provided a way to understand meaning as something not buried deep in the mind but visible externally in public practices, rituals, and symbols. “Culture is public because meaning is.”25 A culture could be read like a text, and so could past societies. As he wrote in Local Knowledge,
The trick is not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants. Preferring, like the rest of us, to call their souls their own, they are not going to be altogether keen about such an effort anyhow. The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to … [The ethnographer does this by] searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms—words, images, institutions, behaviors—in terms of which, in each place, people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one another.26
At the same time that he provided a method and direction for new research—“sorting out the structures of signification”—Geertz challenged historians and social scientists to be wary of what passed for “data.” “What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.”27 And the work of social scientists, in his case anthropological writings, “are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot … They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’—the original meaning of fictio—not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments.”28 Therefore, social science was to be more interpretative than simply observational, more like the work of literary critics than that of cipher clerks.
With the fallout from Geertz’s theoretical essays and the almost simultaneous influence of literary and linguistic studies on history, the principal elements were in place for what would later be recognized as a “cultural turn” in history and social science. We should remember that the turn kept turning, but it might be instructive at this point to ask: What was specific about the cultural turn? What exactly have been its contributions? And what is to be gained precisely by going beyond it?
First and most fundamentally, the cultural turn opposes explanations that follow from social naturalism, or what George Steinmetz has called “foundationalist decontextualization.”29 Rather than making some a historical and essentialist assumptions about human nature—humans are instrumentally rational, aggressive, or territorial; women are nurturing; Armenians are good merchants—or positing primordial or transhistorical institutions—individuality, the market, the nation—as fundamental to human society, culturalism and historicism argue that there are no timeless, decontextualized, ahistorical or “natural” characteristics or institutions. Things that appear to be most natural to human society—market economies, the state, the nation, society itself—are historical constructions made by human actors who in turn are reconstituted by the very products of their making. Culturalists, therefore, are deeply suspicious of hard, fixed, essential social categories—class, nation, gender—and propose considering a more radical understanding of identities as fluid, multiple, fragmented, and constantly in need of hard work to sustain.30
Second, whereas the linguistic and historical turns share this general proposition, they place the weight of explanation on language and history, while the cultural turn emphasizes the constitutive power of culture broadly understood. Culture is seen as a “category of social life,” different from though not unrelated to the economy, society, or politics. Culture is not simply derivative of other spheres, as more objectivist approaches might have it, nor is it reducible to material or other non-cultural causes. The ordinary uses of the word “culture” are multiple and contested, but culturalists are intensely interested in the problem of meanings that are not limited by the strictly linguistic and the processes through which they are made. Most fruitfully, culture may be thought of as “a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation.”31 Culturalism proposes the autonomy and power of culture, even while it is deeply committed to historicization. Understanding comes with cultural, spatial, and temporal contextualization. But—here following Thompson—history is never just lived, but made. Similarly, many accept the constitution of social forms and knowledge by language, but are reluctant to limit constitution to language alone. Although the world might be read like a text, it is not the same as a text.
Third, culture itself was, like all other categories and identities, to be “problematized” (a favorite activity of those invested in the turn). From a holistic or unified idea of culture as a self-sustaining system, in which all the parts work toward an integrated whole (something akin to the Marxist notion of totality), anthropologists would shift increasingly toward a notion of culture as a contested area in which meaning was changeable, conflicted, and inflected with politics. Culture as “a coherent system of symbols and meanings” gave way in the work of many scholars to a notion of culture as practice.32 What looked far more coherent, constant, and integrated in the classical ethnographies of Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and even Clifford Geertz is now thought of as “worlds of meaning” that are normally “contradictory, loosely integrated, contested, mutable, and highly permeable.”33 Culture, like society, is a field of play with borders far less clear than in earlier imaginations, internal harmonies less apparent, in which actors and groups contend for position and power, sometimes in institutions, sometimes over control of meaning. In its full flower the cultural turn holds that culture “is not an object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of symbols and meanings that can be definitively interpreted. Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent.”34
Anthropology in the post-colonial globalized world no longer enjoys the imagined luxury of studying isolated, uncontaminated “primitive” societies far from the invading influence of modernity.35 A new generation of ethnographers has turned its attention back to the metropole and investigation of more complex societies in the first and second worlds. Likewise, other categories are no longer seen as fixed, given, and stable. Society, nation, gender, politics, the economy, and identities are reconceived as arenas of contestation, of difference rather than harmony.36
Fourth, the cultural turn shares with Foucault a suspicion of the stable, rational, sovereign subject. It emphasizes agency, but the nature of the agent is under reconsideration. As Terrence McDonald puts it, “Agency and the agent … have taken on critical importance at precisely the same time that the concept of the agent has been evacuated of much of its content. Rather than a colossus bestriding the pages of history, the agent must now emerge from those pages.”37 The historical agent can no longer simply be deduced “from a putative map of social structures and accompanying subject positions,” but must be understood in the contexts of power and discourse, constituted structures as well as historic conjunctures and events.38 The injunction against reductionisms of any kind has led some cultural interpretivists to suspect the kinds of explanations from “exogenous” factors, like economics, ideologies, or even psychological drives or human nature. And the emphasis on the self-constituting agent, or the problem of subjectivity and the mutual constitution of actor and structure, leads cultural interpretivists to question the paradigms of positivism and hold back from seeking causal explanations. This reluctance puts them at odds with those social scientists, particularly in political science, whose fundamental reason to do science is the search for causality.39 Even before the cultural turn, but more intensively after it, scholars have turned their attention to the constitution of social phenomena, particularly to those
