Cultural History

agency. The notion of agency has been reworked,

away from that of a conscious and controlling self, to
one of having eects. Second, conceptualizing the
boundary between nature and culture as a social
construction has opened up a rich set of investigations
around both the production of the boundary and
slippages across it. Anderson (2000), for example,
examines the ways in which racial ideology has been
interwoven with discourses of animality and nature,
and Emel (1995) argues that the eradication of wolves
in the USA has been underwritten by norms of
masculinity.
3.2 Economy and Culture
The lines between economy and culture are no less
blurry. Economic development is increasingly about
culture, whether it be in the form of tourism or the
redevelopment of urban areas for the purposes of
spectacle and consumption (see Postmodern Urbanism). Access to jobs and job performances are
interpreted as cultural phenomena. Economic theory,
models, and methods are being read for the ways in
which they are structured by metaphor (see Economic
Geography). Gibson-Graham (1996), for example,
argues that recent discussions of the globalization of
capitalism function through the metaphor of rape (see
Globalization: Geographical Aspects). Drawing on
feminist attempts to conceive a perspective on rape in
terms other than victimization, Gibson-Graham entreats us to imagine possible economic futures that
exceed the rape of capitalism.
The spirit of the Gibson-Graham analysis, of
conceiving of non-violent trespass, is perhaps a good
note on which to end. Cultural geography is currently
extremely lively, no longer operating as a bounded
sub-discipline but as a critical perspective on the
production of boundaries and processes of dierentiation.

Bibliography
Anderson K 1991 Vancou
ers Chinatown. McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, PQ
Anderson K 2000 The beast within: Race, humanity, and
animality. En
ironment and Planning D: Society and Space 18:
30120
Barnett C 1998 Cultural twists and turns. En
ironment and
Planning D: Society and Space 16: 6314
Cosgrove D 1985 Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the
landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10: 4562
Crang M 1998 Cultural Geography. Routledge, London
Cresswell T 1996 In Place\Out of Place: Geography, Ideology
and Transgression. University. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Demeritt D 1994 The nature of metaphors in cultural geography
and environmental history. Progress in Human Geography 18:
16385
Duncan J S 1980 The superorganic in American cultural geography. Annals of the AAG. 70: 18198

Duncan J S 1990 The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape

Interpretation in the Kandyian Kingdom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Duncan J S, Gregory D (eds.) 1999 Writes of Passage: Reading
Tra
el Writing. Routledge, New York
Emel J 1995 Are you man enough, big and bad enough?
Ecofeminisms and wolf eradication in the USA. En
ironment
and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 70734
Foote K E, Hugill P J, Mathewson K, Smith J (eds.) 1994 ReReading Cultural Geography. University of Texas Press,
Austin, TX
Gibson-Graham J K 1996 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew
It). Blackwell, Cambridge, MA
Gregory D 1994 Geographical Imaginations. Blackwell,
Cambridge, MA,
Gregory D 1999 Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of
travel. In: Duncan J, Gregory D (eds.) Writes of Passage:
Reading Tra
el Writing. Routledge, New York
Harley J B 1992 Deconstructing the map. In: Barnes T J, Duncan
J S (eds.) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the
Representation of Landscape. Routledge, New York
Jackson P A 1989 Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural
Geography. Unwin Hyman, London
Law L 1997 Dancing on the Bar: Sex, money and the uneasy
politics of third space. In: Pile S, Keith M (eds.) Geographies
of Resistance. Routledge, London
Lewis P 1979 Axioms for reading the landscape. In: Meinig
D W (ed.) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. Oxford
University Press, New York
Ley D 1995 Between Europe and Asia: The case of the missing
sequoias. Ecumene 2: 185210
Matless D 1996 New material? Work in cultural and social
geography, 1995. Progress in Human Geography 20: 37991
Mitchell D 1995 Theres no such thing as culture: Towards a
reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography.
Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 20: 10216
Mitchell D 1996 The Lie of the Land: Migrant workers and the
California Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Pred A 1995 Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of
the Present. Routledge, New York
Price M, Lewis M 1993 The reinvention of cultural geography.
Annals of the AAG 83: 117
Sauer C O 1925 The morphology of landscape. Uni
ersity of
California Publications in Geography 2: 1954
Sauer C O 1966 The Early Spanish Main. University of California
Press, Berkeley, CA
Sibley D 1995 Geographies of Exclusion. Routledge, London
Sparke M 1998 A map that roared and an original atlas: Canada,
cartography, and the narration of nation. Annals of the AAG
88: 46395
Willems-Braun B 1997 On cultural politics, Sauer, and the
politics of citationreply. Annals of the AAG 87: 7038
Woods C 1998 De
elopment Arrested: The Cotton Blues Empire
of the Mississippi Delta. Verso, New York

G. Pratt

Cultural History
It is not easy to dene cultural history in its specicity.
Should it be done by designating objects and practices
whose study would constitute the very nature of this
3075

Cultural History
history? The risk is great, therefore, of failing to draw
a denite and clear line between cultural history and
other histories: for instance, the history of ideas, the
history of literature, the history of art, the history of
education, the history of media, or the history of
sciences. Should we, consequently, change perspectives and consider that all history, whatever its
natureeconomical or social, demographic or political is cultural, insofar as the most objectively
measurable phenomena are always the result of the
meanings that individuals attribute to things, to words
and behavior? In this fundamentally anthropological
perspective, the problem is not so much to dene the
particular sphere of cultural history, dierentiated
from that of its neighbors, but rather avoid an
imperialist denition of the category.
Between these two stumbling blocks, the road is
narrow. From there, the course followed in this article
consists of marking the shifts that have characterized
the historiographical practices designated, in their
time or subsequently, as belonging to cultural
history.

1. The History of Mentalities

The very lengthy genealogy of cultural history generally stops at a certain number of precursors: the
historians of the nineteenth century (Michelet, Burckhardt), Voltaires, SieZ cle de Louis XIV, the legal
practitioners of the perfect history during the sixteenth century, even Herodotus himself. The course is
not without illusion, measuring the anticipations of
certain precursors according to a posterior state of
historical science. So as to avoid this trap, it is
preferable to limit the research to the twentieth century
and to follow the dierent faces taken by the historiographical projects which intended to focus on the
phenomena left aside by the classical forms of political,
economical, or social history. The history of mentalities was the rst amongst them.

1.1 The Founders of the Annales and the History of

Mentalities
Unlike a given idea, the paternity of the category of the
history of mentalities, insofar as it indicates a
particular area of history, is not to be attributed to the
founders of the Annales Lucien Febvre and Marc
Bloch. It is the invention of Robert Mandrou and
Georges Duby at the end of the 1950s. The expression
appears for the rst time in the title of a university
course in 1956 with the election of Robert Mandrou in
the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
E; tudes to the chair of Social History of Modern
Mentalities, while at the same time, Georges Duby
was opening a seminar on medieval mentalities at the
University of Aix-en-Provence. In 1961, when Robert
3076

Mandrou published his book Introduction aZ France,

Modern, he presented it as a response to the requests
formerly made by Lucien Febvre in favor of the
history of collective mentalities (while using another
notion as the subtitle of the study, psychological
history which was also dear to Febvre). Thus, designated as the inspirer of this new form of history,
Lucien Febvre, in fact, had rarely used the exact term
mentality, preferring the adjective mental added to
words like equipment, material, but above all tool,
or even, in the plural form, habits and needs. In
1942, in the ProbleZ me de lincroyance au XVIe sieZ cle:
Religion de Rabelais he characterized the mental tools
by expressing two essential statements: that the ways
to perceive and reason are neither invariable nor
universal, and that there is no continuous and necessary progress in the succession of mental tools. The
book makes an inventory of the instruments and
conceptual categories which are the dierent supports
for thinking: rst, the state of language, with its
vocabulary and syntactic particularities, the tools and
the languages available in the operations of knowledge, and nally the value and the credit attributed to
each sense. From there, the conclusion: So close to us
in appearance, the contemporaries of Rabelais are
already distant by all their intellectual properties. And
even their structure was not ours. In each time, the
ways of thinking and feeling outline in a specic way
the limits between nature and the supernatural, or
between what is possible and impossible.
Paradoxically, Lucien Febvre, taken to be the father
of the history of mentalities, uses the term less often
than Marc Bloch who uses it as much in the SocieT teT
feT odale (where we encounter mental atmosphere or
religious mentality) as in Apologie pour l histoire ou le
meT tier d historien. He prefers sensitivity that denes
the subject of historical psychology which seems for
him the only capable way of avoiding the culpable
anachronism which equips men and women of the
past, not only with knowledge and conceptions which
were impossible for them, but also with feelings and
emotions that were unknown to them. Febvre stigmatizes such an error in Amour sacreT , amour profane:
autour de lHeptameT ron (1944) by concluding: In fact,
a man of the sixteenth century should be intelligible
not in relation to us, but in relation to his contemporaries.
In his book of 1961, Robert Mandrou does not
dissociate the study of the mental tool from that of
sensations, emotions, and passions which make up the
mentality. Without separating these two dimensions,
he distinguishes the common elements to all men (and
women) in a shared time and place and those that are
particular to each generation, to each profession, to
each social group, or to each class. For him, all
historical psychology, all history of mentalities is
social history. We should, therefore, once the
common mental tool has been identied, describe the
mental horizons which are characteristic of the dif-

Cultural History
ferent social groups. The history of mentalities, or of
the visions of the world, another term often used by
Mandrou, was thus strongly anchored in the differences between social classes, dened more by the
unity of life style and the feeling of belonging than by
a strict economical determination.

1.2 The Golden Age of the History of Mentalities

From the 1960s onwards, the notion of mentality
imposes itself to designate a history whose object is
neither ideas, nor socioeconomical realities. This
French history of mentalities reposes on a certain
number of ideas more or less shared by those who
practice it (see Le Go 1974). In the rst instance, the
object of the history of mentalities is dened by Le
Go as the opposite of that of classical intellectual
history: The level of the history of mentalities is that
of everyday life and the automatic, which is what
escapes individual subjects as it shows the impersonal
content of their thoughts. These ideas, which result
from the conscious elaboration of a singular spirit, are
therefore opposed to mentality, always collective,
which regulates, without them knowing, the immediate perceptions of social subjects. Such an expression
is not very far o the denition of collective representations in the tradition of the sociology of Durkheim as the accent is placed on the contents or the
methods of thinking which result from the unconscious incorporation of unknown determinations in
each member of a community, which set up their
common manner of classifying and judging. Now, the
second characteristic underlined by Le Go: the
possibility that the history of mentalities or the historical psychology link themselves to another important trend of historical research today: quantitative
history. Having as subjects collective, automatic, and
repetitive actions, the history of mentalities should
and must be serial and statistical. It is part of the
heritage of the history of economies, populations, and
societies that, on the horizon of the major crisis of the
1930s, followed by the mutations after the war,
constituted the most innovative eld of historiography. When, in the 1960s, the history of mentalities
and the historical psychology dened a new, promising, and original area of study, they did so often by
recapitulating the methods which ensured the conquests of socioeconomical history: the techniques of
regressive statistics and the mathematical analysis of
series.
From the importance given to series, and therefore
to the establishment and treatment of homogenous
data, repeated and comparable at temporal regular
intervals, two consequences follow. The rst is the
privilege given to massive sources, widely representative and available over a long period, for example,
the inventories after death, wills, library catalogues,
legal archives, etc. The second consists of the attempt

to articulate, according the braudelian model of

dierent times (long term, conjuncture, event), the
long period of mentalities which often resists to
change, with the short period of brutal ruptures or of
rapid transfers of belief and sensitivity.
The withdrawal of witchcraft as a criminal act in
France during the seventeenth century (see Mandrou
1968), the transfer of attitudes before childhood or
death (see Arie' s 1964, 1977) or the dechristianisation
of France during the second half of the eighteenth
century (see Vovelle, 1973) illustrate the articulation
of the dierent periods of the history of mentalities. In
each case, the problem lies in understanding how, in
the long-term stability of mental structure, an essential
transfer occurs: thus, the transformation of the representations of the world in the mileu of magistrates,
the invention of childhood, and the concealment of
death, or the indierence towards devotion practices,
moral injunctions, and catholic beliefs.
A third characteristic of the history of mentalities in
its golden age lies in its ambiguous way of considering
connection to society. The notion seems, in fact,
dedicated to erasing the dierences in order to nd the
categories shared by all the members of a same era.
The mentality of a historical individual, a great man,
is exactly what he has in common with other men of
his time writes Le Go (1974), adding, as examples, it
is what Caesar and the last soldier of his legions, Saint
Louis and the peasant of his domains, Christopher
Columbus and the sailor all have in common.
Amongst all the practitioners of the history of mentalities, Philippe Arie' s is no doubt the one who made
the greatest attachment to such an identication of
the notion as common feeling or general feeling. The
recognition of the archetypes of civilisation, shared
by a whole society, does certainly not signify the
cancellation of all dierences between social groups or
between clerics and laymen. However, these dierences are always considered inside a long-term process which produces representations and behavior
which become common. Postulating the fundamental
unity (at least tendentious) of the collective unconscious, Philippe Arie' s reads the texts and images, not
like demonstrations of individual peculiarities, but in
order to decipher, beyond the will of authors or
artists, the unconscious expression of collective sensitivity, or to nd, beneath the ecclesiastic language,
the ordinary set of common representations which are
obvious (see Arie' s, 1975). The sensitivity and the
collective gestures which are disclosed should be
understood at the cross-roads of biology and the
mental, at the meeting point of demographic realities
(birth, death, etc.) and psychological investments (the
forms of self-consciousness, the representations of life
after death, the feeling of childhood, etc.). With
Philippe Arie' s, mentality refers to currents of the
deep which govern, without them necessarily being
aware of it, the most essential attitudes of men and
women of a same period.
3077

Cultural History
For other mentality historians, more directly located in the heritage of social history, the essential
elements lie in the link between the dierences between
the ways of thinking and feeling and social dierences.
Such a perspective organizes the classifying of mentality facts into divisions established by the analysis of
society and then the superposition postulated as
necessary between social boundaries that separate
groups or classes and those which dierentiate mentalities. This social cutting out is no doubt the most
precise trace of the dependence of the history of
mentalities in relation to social history in French
tradition. It was possible to understand it at a global
and macroscopic leveland so in research aiming to
characterize a mentality, a religion or a popular
literature, opposed nally to that of the dominant or
the eliteor in a more fragmented way, in reference to
the hierarchy of conditions and professions. However,
in both cases, the study of mental horizons reproduces
the divisions proposed by the history of societies.
1.3 History of Mentalities or Historical Psychology?
Mentalities, sensitivities, visions of the world: the
unstable plurality of vocabulary indicates, at the same
time, both the diculty in dening objects of a new
historiographical approach and the will to link, in the
same perspective, intellectual and psychological categories.
When Alphonse Dupront proposes, in 1960, at the
International Congress of Historical Sciences at Stockholm, to constitute historical psychology as a whole
discipline within human sciences, he gives it a maximal
extension as it must be the history of values, mentalities, forms, symbolics, myths. Such a denition
reduced the distance established by the founders of
Annales between mentality and ideas, as the latter
participate fully in collective mentality of men of a
period. The ideas, perceived through the circulation of
words which designate them, situated in their social
rooting, considered in their aective and emotional
load as much as in their intellectual content, therefore
become, just like myths or values, one of those
collective forces via which men live their time, one of
those elements which Dupront, in words borrowed
from Jung, called collective psychic. An expression
exists there which, while claiming to be loyal to the
project of the Annales, surpasses the old oppositions
by giving a fundamental psychological denition of
mentality and by reintroducing the ideas in the
exploration of the collective mental.
Such a perspective (without the word mentality)
appears in the work of Ignace Meyerson whose
importance, perhaps underestimated today, was central for the renewal of historical studies of Antiquityin particular his book Les Fonctions psychologiques et les oeu
res of 1948. A rst relationship lies
in the assertion of the fundamental historicity of
mental categories and the psychological functions. It is
3078

this essential historicity of psychological objects which

allows Meyerson to dene it as a historical anthropology: The psychological functions have a history
and they have had dierent forms throughout
this history. Time and memory have a history. Space
has a history. Perception has a history. The person has a
history. The work of historical psychology does not,
therefore, consist of nding dierent modalities or
expressions of functions considered as stable and
universal. It attempts to understand, in their discontinuity and their singularity, the emergence and the
economy of each of these functions. In this way, by
applying the perspective of Meyerson to the question
of the person in ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant
writes: There is not, there cannot be a model person,
exterior throughout human history, with dierences,
variations according to places, transformations due to
time. Research should therefore not establish if the
person, in Greece, is or is not, but should research
what the ancient Greek person is, how he is dierent,
in the multiplicity of his features, of todays person
(see Vernant 1965).
On the other hand, Ignace Meyerson radically
modies the location and comprehension of the mental
and psychological categories. To their immediate,
existentialist, phenomenological grasp he opposes
their knowledge based on symbolical forms, works,
and acts in which they are objectivized. Analyzing
psychological functions via productions (institutional,
religious, legal, aesthetic, linguistic) allows for the
rupture with the idea of universal and abstract men,
and with the universalization of a particular form of
the personality.
1.4 Success and Criticisms of the History of
Mentalities
How can one explain the infatuation, of historians and
readers, in France and outside France, for the history
of mentalities, whatever be the designation, in the
1970s and 1980s? No doubt because such an approach
allowed for, in its very diversity, the introduction of a
new balance between history and social sciences.
Contested in its intellectual and institutional superiority by the development of psychology, sociology,
and anthropology, history coped by annexing the
topics of the discipline which questioned its domination. The focus then moved towards objects (systems of belief, collective attitudes, ritual forms, etc.)
which, until then, belonged to the neighbors but which
fully entered into the program of a history of collective
mentalities.
Adapting to the approaches and analysis methods
of socioeconomical history while transforming the
historical questionnaire, the history of mentalities (in
its widest denition) was able to occupy the front part
of the historiographical scene and constitute an
eective response to the challenge launched by social
sciences.

Cultural History
However, there were many critics of its principles
and methods. The rst came from Italy. In 1970,
Franco Venturi denounced the obliteration of the
creative force of new ideas for the benet of simple
mental structures lacking dynamism and originality
(see Venturi, 1970). Some years later, Carlo Ginzburg
magnied the criticism (see Ginzburg 1976). He
refused the notion of mentality for three reasons:
rst, for its exclusive insistence on elements which are
inert, obscure and unconscious of a determined vision
of the world, which lead to reducing the importance
of rationally and consciously expressed ideas; second,
for the interclass character which unduly assumes the
sharing by the whole society of the same mental
equipment; and lastly, for the alliance with the
quantitative and serial approach, which, all together,
reies the contents of thought and attaches itself to the
most repetitive expressions and ignores singularities.
Historians were thus invited to privilege individual
appropriations more than statistical distributions, to
understand how an individual or a community interpreted, according to its own culture, ideas and beliefs,
and texts and books circulating in their society.
In 1990, in the book with the provocative title,
Demystifying Mentalities, Georey Lloyd, historian of
Greek philosophy and science, hardened the indictment once again. The criticism lies within the two
essential principles of the history of mentalities: on
the one hand, allocating to a whole society a stable and
homogenous set of ideas and beliefs; on the other
hand, considering that all thoughts and all conducts of
an individual are governed by a unique mental
structure. The two operations are the very condition
allowing a mentality to be distinguished from another
and permitting the identication within each individual of the mental tool shared with his contemporaries. However, such a way of thinking erases, in
the repetitions of the collective, the originality of each
singular expression and it encloses within an articial
coherence the plurality of belief systems and ways of
reasoning that a same group or a same individual can
successively mobilise.
Lloyd therefore proposed to substitute for the
notion of mentality that of styles of rationality
whose use depends directly on the contexts of discourse and the domains of experiences. Each of them
lays down their own rules and conventions, denes a
specic form of communication, supposes particular
expectations. This is why it is quite impossible to bring
back the plurality of methods of thinking, knowing,
and arguing to a homogenous and unique mentality.
The case was well pleaded but is it really justied?
On one hand, the history of mentalities did not only
detain the single globalizing denition of the notion,
as it inherited it from Le! vy-Bruhl, author in 1922 of La
MentaliteT primiti
e, ou des psychologues (Charles
Blondel, Jean Piaget, and Henri Wallon). If Lucien
Febvre surely was tempted by the interclass denition
of mentalityin particular in Le ProbleZ me de lin-

croyance au XVIe sieZ cleand Philippe Arie' s after him,

Marc Bloch and Robert Mandrou were very attentive
to the social dierences which command, in a same
society, dierent ways of thinking and feeling, or
diverse visions of the world.
On the other hand, French historians have not
always ignored the possible presence, within the same
individual, of several mentalities, distinct or even
contradictory. Le Go strongly expresses it: The
coexistence of several mentalities at a same time and in
a same spirit is one of the delicate but essential
elements of the history of mentalities. Louis XI, who,
in politics, revealed a modern Machiavellian mentality, in matters of religion revealed a very traditional
superstitious mentality.
The critical examination of the contributions and
limits of the history of mentalities should neither
reduce the diversity of it nor simplify the expressions
of it.

2. From the History of Mentalities to Cultural

History
The path of the history of mentalities is, therefore,
made up of paradoxes. While it claimed to be clearly
dierentiated from other historical practices, it was
never able to dene clearly and unanimously its
objects, methods, and concepts. It was during the
years when it underwent the most criticism and when
expression itself retreated for the benet of other
categories that the multiplication of works which
explore the topics it designated were seen. It is no
doubt due to the plasticity of its denition and the
diversity of its uses that this history, omnipresent and
inaccessible, was able to durably characterize a form
of historiographical work. It is, therefore, no longer
possible today, in a time when the notion of cultural
history has become dominant, even sometimes supreme. This is what must now be examined.

2.1 An Impossible Denition

The diculty in dening cultural history lies fundamentally in the even larger diculty in dening what
the object culture itself is. The innumerable meanings
of the term can be diagrammatically distributed into
two families of meaning: one which designates the
works and gestures which, in a given society, avoid
economical or symbolical urgencies of daily life and
are submitted to an aesthetic or intellectual judgement,
and one which aims at ordinary practices through
which a community, whichever community it may be,
lives and thinks out its relations to the world, to
others, or to itself.
The rst order of meanings leads to building the
history of texts, works, and cultural practices like a
history with two dimensions, as Schorske suggests:
3079

Cultural History
The historian seeks to locate and interpret the artefact
temporally in a eld where two lines intersect. One line
is vertical, or diachronic, by which he establishes the
relation of a text or a system of thought to previous
expressions in the same branch of cultural activity
(painting, politics, etc). The other is horizontal, or
synchronic; by it he assesses the relation of the content
of the intellectual object to what is appearing in other
branches or aspects of a culture at the same time
(Schorske 1979). We must, therefore, consider each
cultural production in the history of its genre, discipline, or eld as well as in context of its relationships
with the aesthetic, or intellectual productions and the
cultural practices which are contemporary to it.
The latter leads to the second family of denitions of
culture. It strongly relies on the meaning that symbolical anthropology gives to notionand in particular Geertz: The culture concept to which I adhere
[...] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of
meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited
conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of
which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop
their knowledge about and attitudes towards life
(Geertz 1973). It is, therefore, the entirety of languages
and of the symbolical actions of a community which
constitute its culture. From there, for historians, the
attention is transferred to collective expressions where
a cultural system is expressed in a paroxysmal way:
rituals of violence, rituals of passages, carnivalesque
festivals, etc. (Davis 1975, Darnton 1984).
What the dierent approaches try to consider today
is the paradoxical articulation between a dierencethe one by which all societies, in varying
methods, separated a eld characterized by particular
experiences and delightsand subordinationthose
which make the aesthetic and intellectual invention
possible and intelligible by noting it in the social world
and in the symbolical system particular to a time and
a place.

2.2 Plurality of Practices, Common Questions

According to historiographical traditions and heritage, cultural history favored dierent objects, elds,
and methods. Making an inventory of it is an
impossible taskand partially futile as it would cause
repetition of the assessments presented in the numerous articles of this encyclopedia. More signicant,
perhaps, is the pinpointing of the common questions
to these very diverse approaches.
A rst stake is the necessary articulation between
singular works and common representations. There
are several ways to conceive this: by concentrating on
the particularities of each social space where works
develop and circulate (guilds, the court, the academies,
the market), by situating them in relation to texts and
ordinary practices with which they are in negotiation
(to use a term which is dear to New Historicism), or,
3080

using Eliass method, by understanding how aesthetic

conventions refer to psychological economy and structure of personality in a time and a place.
A second question, very widely shared, lies in the
relationships between popular and learned culture.
The ways of perceiving them can be dealt with by using
two large models of description and interpretation.
The rst, trying to abolish all forms of cultural
ethnocentrism, treats popular culture as a coherent
and independent symbolical system, which is organised according to irreducible to logic, that of wellread culture. The second, concerned remembering the
existence of relationships of domination and inequalities of the social world, understands popular
culture by its subordination and its weaknesses compared to the culture of the dominant. Therefore, on the
one hand, popular culture is considered as a symbolical independent system, enclosed within itself, and
on the other, it is entirely dened by its distance
opposed to cultural legitimacy. For a long time,
historians uctuated between these two perspectives.
Then, the work carried out on religion or literature
treated as specically popular and the construction of
an opposition, repeated through time, between the
golden age of a free and vigorous popular culture and
the times of censorship and constraints which condemn it and dismantle it. Distinctions that are so clear
are no longer accepted without doubts today, which
leads us to consider all the mechanisms which cause
internalization by the dominated to be of their own
illegitimacy and expressions via which a dominated
culture manages to save something of its symbolical
coherence. The lesson is valuable for the confrontation
between the elite and people in the old Europe
(Ginzburg 1966, 1976) and for the relationships
between the dominated and the dominant in the
colonial world (Gruzinski 1988).
A nal challenge for cultural history, whatever be
the approaches and objects, lies in the articulation
between practices and discourse. The questioning of
ancient certainties took the form of a linguistic turn
which reposed on two essential ideas: that the language
is a system of signs whose relationships themselves
produce multiple and unstable meanings, beyond all
intention or all subjective control; that reality is not
beyond discourse but is always built by discursive
practices (Baker 1990).
Opposed to such a position, numerous are the
historians who, following the distinctions proposed by
Foucault between discursive formations and nondiscursive systems (see Foucalt 1969) or by Bourdieu
between practical sense and scholastic logic (see
Bourdieu 1997), marked the dierence between the
logic of practices and that which governs the discursive
production and which underlined the irreducibility
between the reality which was (or is) and the discourse
which intend to organise it, censure it, or represent it.
The fundamental object of a history attempting to
recognize the way in which social actors give meaning

Cultural Landscape in En
ironmental Studies

to their practices and discourse is, therefore, found in
the tension between the inventive capacities of individuals or communities and, on the other hand, the
constraints and conventions which restrictmore or
less tightly according to the position that they occupy
in their domination relationshipswhat is possible for
them to think, express, and do. The acknowledgment
is valid for well-read works and aesthetic creations as
well as for ordinary practiceswhich is another way
of expressing the double denition of the objects of
cultural history.
See also: Collective Beliefs: Sociological Explanation;
Collective Memory, Anthropology of; Collective
Memory, Psychology of; Cultural Psychology; Culture, Sociology of; History and Memory; Intellectual
History; Psychohistory

Bibliography
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jours. Paris
Arie' s P 1977 Lhomme de
ant la mort. Seuil, Paris
Baker K M 1990 In
enting the French Re
olution: Essays on
French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge
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Bourdieu 1997 Meditations Pascaliennes. Editions du Seuil,
Paris
Darnton R 1984 The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in
French Cultural History. Basic Books, New York
Davis N 1975 Society and Culture in Early Modern France.
Stanford University Press, CA
Foucalt 1969 LArcheT ologie du sa
oir. Gallimard, Paris
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au XVIIIe sieZ cle. Plan, Paris

R. Chartier

Cultural Landscape in Environmental

Studies
The concept cultural landscape has at least two
meanings. It refers both to an empirical object of
analysis, and to an approach to studying that object.
Cultural landscape as an object of analysis refers to the
materialcultural expressions of human modications
of nature as they appear on a particular surface of the
earth. The cultural landscape is generally thought to
include all of the elements of the built environment
(e.g., buildings, roads), as well as land-use patterns. In
this usage, cultural landscape is juxtaposed with
natural landscape, although the distinction between
the two is problematic (hence the quotes). By contrast,
the concept of landscape used in ecology tends to be
more focused on nature and natural processes instead
of the emphasis on culture and cultural mechanisms
that forms the basis of the concept used in geography
and the social sciences more generally. The cultural
landscape as an approach, generally refers to an
interpretive and inductive strategy for understanding
the meaning of those cultural expressions, as opposed
to a more scientic and deductive approach. These
two meanings have an intertwined history, although
the former meaning (object of analysis) preceded, and
led to, the second. This essay is not divided into two
parts, but rather how and why the dierent meanings
emerged and often converged are pointed out (when
relevant).
Introduced into American geography in the early
twentieth century, the importance of the concept
cultural landscape has waxed and waned in relation to
the shifting contours and contexts of the history of the
social sciences, expressed primarily in the discipline of
geography. It has taken on diverse meanings, been
subject to rigorous criticisms, and emerged in the late
twentieth century as a vital and politically-charged
concept. This essay traces the changing interpretations
and uses of the concept cultural landscape, before
analyzing contemporary and future trends.

1. Historical De
elopment
American geographer Carl Sauers inuential essay
The Morphology of Landscape, originally published
in 1925 (1963), provided the rst formal introduction
of the concept of the cultural landscape into American
social science, and laid a foundation on which it would
build for the next 50 years. Partly in reaction to the
methodological and philosophical aws of what had
become the reigning paradigm in geography
environmental determinismSauer attempted to situate human-environment relationships more rmly as a
science by putting forward the concept of the cultural
landscape as its distinctive object of analysis. Sauer
posited a natural landscape, comprised of land forms,

Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights reserved.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

3081

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7