Cultural Turn

The phrase cultural turn is commonly evoked in academic discourse to refer to a series of interrelated developments in the humanities and the social sciences that have occurred since the 1960s that have more or less radically changed the shape, aims, and practice, and possibly even audiences, of the humanities and social sciences. Most noted among these developments have been the emergence and global spread of a new intellectual formation called cultural studies, the impact of philosophical debates as (post)structuralism and postmodernism on both the humanities and the social sciences, and the constitution of new specialties inside traditional disciplines, or even new ways of conceiving of them, such as cultural history, cultural geography, the sociology of culture, or cultural sociology. As an intellectual movement, a few key authors can be identified as crucial in producing and fostering the cultural turn. Among them are the French: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu; the British: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson; and the American: Hayden White, Marshall Sahlins, Frederic Jameson, and especially Clifford Geertz—whose Interpretation of Cultures (1973) has been a foundational reference for many practitioners and followers of the cultural turn in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, history, and communication. A shift from production to consumption issues—or from creation to reception—has been pivotal in many, albeit not all, of these various developments. This is especially true for cultural studies and cultural history, as well as literary criticism, less for sociology, where the cultural turn occurred originally, at least in the United States, through a focus precisely on cultural production.

According to David Chaney, among others, the expression cultural turn puns indeed on the “linguistic turn”—a movement in the philosophy of the human sciences that started at the beginning of the twentieth century and reached maturity around the 1960s. The general thrust of this earlier turn is that words and vocabularies play a constitutive part in the production of objects and not simply in its description and reporting. Far from being in the objects, as their intimate essences, the meanings of the objects (i.e., what the objects are) are contingent on the vocabularies we use to define and identify them. In short, objects, even facts, are not independent of our descriptions of them.

The consequences of this linguistic turn for the practices of the human and social sciences are clearly major. However, even if there are important links between language and culture that account for some convergence or at least familiarity between the two “turns,” there are also important distinctions that make the cultural turn something different from a growth of interest and significance in the study of language and its epistemological implications, and something other than an extension to both social and human sciences of development in linguistics [Page 401](e.g., Ferdinand de Saussure, V. N. Volosinov) and in linguistically grounded philosophical investigations (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin). First, even if a crucial ingredient of culture, language is not coterminous with it. Second, it is the same notion of language to be “problematized” (a favorite word and activity in this whole field) by proponents and followers of the turn—for example, by reconceptualizing it as text or discourse.

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