Cultural history

As a cultural history refers to the history of the intellectual and cultural life, civilization, and their research and representation.

Concept and subject area

Elements of cultural history are the family , the language , the customs , the religion , the art and the science . The cultural history is based on a broad concept of sources, which z. B. also includes "everyday sources".

Cultural history is not directly concerned with political history or state history. In cultural history, the specification of precise times is less relevant than in political historiography .

The term cultural history goes back to the 18th century and is based on the belief of the Enlightenment ( Voltaire ) in the constantly advancing cultural development of mankind. In German Romanticism ( Johann Gottfried Herder ) every unconscious work was seen as part of cultural history and recognized in it as the expression of a “folk spirit”. The 20th century led to a cultural philosophy with representatives like Arnold J. Toynbee and Oswald Spengler , who developed their knowledge from a comparative cultural history of peoples. Alfred Weber developed cultural history more in the direction of intellectual history towards cultural sociology .

“New cultural history” in historical studies

→ Main article : New cultural history

Under cultural history in the science of history very different concepts understood. On the one hand, there are historians who understand “cultural history” to be certain research subjects that are usually distinguished from political history. On the other hand, historians such as Ute Daniel , Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger or Thomas Mergel have recently represented a concept of cultural history that does not refer to specific objects.

In the 1980s, a critical research direction emerged within social history that rejected the “search for social, political and, above all, economic determinants / factors and the long-term processes that can be explained from them” as a “Eurocentric history of progress”. In this "social, political or economic history oriented structure and process history", the "cultural creativity of people in shaping their life contexts" is not 'appropriately' used. With a “ New Cultural History”, the research interest was directed to “symbolic forms of the past” such as “signs, metaphors, political languages, collective representations or rituals”. The transitions to social history are therefore fluid in practice.

The aim of this new cultural history is therefore to focus a certain, cultural-historical perspective not only on highly cultural objects. In this way, the claim is made to research objects in a cultural-historical way from which traditional cultural historiography has always clearly distinguished itself, such as politics and law. In contrast to traditional political history, the focus of a cultural-historical analysis of the political and legal are the communicative processes, especially in everyday life. From a cultural-historical perspective, political and legal institutions are not objective conditions with a rational structure, but condensates of communicatively raised, recognized or rejected validity claims. Communication is understood as an exchange of signs, which is why particularly elaborate signs - symbols, rituals or ceremonies - play a prominent role in the new cultural history. Because text and symbol sources do not open up an objective view of the facts of history, but only provide indications of the linguistic communication of the past. This as a linguistic turn ( linguistic turn ) in the History of incoming paradigm shift based on the idea that "social positions, market pressures and demographic trends in turn act as independent factors on the semiotic practices of the people concerned."

See also

Everyday story ethnology Historical anthropology Cultural geography Mentality history Moral history Folklore

Architectural history Intellectual history History of ideas Art history Legal history Technology history History of science

Archive for cultural history History of Pedagogy Cultural anthropology Literary history History of religion Popular belief

literature

• Peter Burke : Elegance and attitude - the diversity of cultural history. Translated from the English by Matthias Wolf. Wagenbach, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-8031-3597-1 .
• Peter Burke: What is cultural history? Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-518-58442-2 .
• Christoph Conrad, Martina Kessel (ed.): Culture & History. New insights into an old relationship . Reclam, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-15-009638-3 .
• Ute Daniel : Compendium of Cultural History - Theories, Practice, Keywords. 5th, revised and updated edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-518-29123-8 .
• Lars Deile: Social history dismisses its children - an attempt at orientation in the debate about cultural history. In: Archiv für Kulturgeschichte , Volume 87 (2005), ISSN  0003-9233 , pp. 1–25.
• Martin Eichhorn: Cultural history of the "cultural stories" - typology of a literary genre. (= Epistemata, Volume 417). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 978-3-8260-2341-5 (also dissertation, Humboldt University, Berlin 2001).
• Michael Erbe : The Invention of Antiquity - Antiquity and the New Age. wjs-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-937989-07-5 .
• Heinz Fischer (Ed.): German Culture - An Introduction. 2nd, revised and supplemented edition. Schmidt, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-503-01260-5 .
• Egon Friedell : Cultural History of Egypt and the Ancient Orient. (= Cultural history of antiquity , volume 1). New edition. Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 978-3-406-44054-0 .
• Egon Friedell: Cultural History of Greece. (= Cultural history of antiquity, volume 2). New edition. Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 978-3-406-38061-7 .
• Egon Friedell: Cultural History of the Modern Age . Edition in one volume. Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 978-3-406-40988-2 .
• Hermann Glaser : A short cultural history of the present with a guide through non-fiction , Ullstein book no. 229, Ullstein Taschenbücher-Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1959.
• Stefan Haas: Historical cultural research in Germany 1880-1930. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1994, ISBN 978-3-412-09793-6 (also dissertation, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster 1992).
• Jean-Pierre VM Hérubel: Observations on an Emergent Specialization - Contemporary French Cultural History. Significance for Scholarship. In: Journal of Scholarly Publishing , Vol. 41 (2010), Issue 2, ISSN  0036-634X , pp. 216-240 (French).
• Achim Landwehr : Cultural History. (= UTB, volume 3037). Ulmer, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-8252-3037-1 .
• Michael Maurer : Cultural History - An Introduction. (= UTB , volume 3060). Böhlau, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8252-3060-9 .
• Christoph Parry : People, Works, Epochs - An Introduction to German Cultural History. Hueber, Ismaning 1993, ISBN 978-3-19-001498-9 .
• Philippe Poirrier: Les enjeux de l'histoire culturelle. ( Points Histoire, Volume 342). Seuil, Paris 2004, ISBN 2-02-049245-8 (French).
• Philippe Poirrier (Ed.): L'Histoire culturelle - Un «tournant mondial» in l'historiographie? Éditions universitaires de Dijon, Dijon 2008, ISBN 978-2-915611-06-9 (French).
• Lutz Raphael : History in the age of extremes - theories, methods, tendencies from 1900 to the present. ( Beck series. Volume 1543). 2nd Edition. CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-406-60344-0 .
• Kurt Schreiner: This is how we used to live - an overview of 2000 years of everyday and cultural history. Updated new edition. Anaconda, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-7306-0322-2 .
• Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger : What does the cultural history of the political mean? (= Journal for Historical Research , Supplement 35). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-428-11868-7 .
• Silvia Serena Tschopp, Wolfgang E. Weber : Basic questions of cultural history. WBG, Darmstadt 2007, ISBN 978-3-534-17429-4 .
• Alfred Weber : cultural history as cultural sociology. (= Alfred Weber Complete Edition. Volume 1). Metropolis-Verlag, Marburg 1997, ISBN 978-3-89518-101-6 .
• Hans-Ulrich Wehler : The challenge of cultural history. ( Beck series, volume 1276). CH Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-42076-1 .

Web links

Wiktionary: cultural history  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• Christoph Maria Merki : Cultural History. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . 19th February 2015 .
• Bernd Leineweber: What is cultural history? . In: Deutschlandfunk.de , October 31, 2005
• Achim Landwehr : Cultural History Version: 1.0. In: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , May 14, 2013
• Thomas Mergel : Cultural History of Politics Version: 2.0. In: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , October 22, 2012
• Cultura Histórica: Texts for cultural history, philosophy of history and historiography Numerous links in the "Texts" area, accessible via author or topic, in English. or Spanish (rarely French) language. Extensive bibliography, sorted into 9 subject blocks

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lutz Raphael: History of Extreme , p. 233.
2. ^ Lutz Raphael: History of Extreme , p. 228.
3. ↑ Lutz Raphael: History of Extreme , p. 233 f.