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While some Marxist sociologists, like Erik Olin Wright, took the objectivist road, and materialist understandings of interest found their way into political science through economics, many historians and historical sociologists took the implications of Thompson’s work further to explore the origins and evolution of consciousness, culture, and historical contextualization. The important interventions by Gareth Stedman Jones, William H. Sewell Jr., and Joan Wallach Scott, among others, in the late 1970s and early 1980s shifted the analytical focus from the material to the linguistic and marked a turning away from the sociology of earlier social history toward a greater association with anthropology.16 Borrowing from the work of feminist historians, Scott faulted Thompson for taking experience for granted, as simply existing out there busily determining consciousness, and insisted that experience itself is being constituted, contested, and given meaning all the time. Interests themselves, like identities, must be understood to be discursively articulated and constituted. Experience should not be “seen as the objective circumstances that condition identity; identity is not an objectively defined sense of self defined by needs and interests. Politics is not the collective coming to consciousness of similarly situated individual subjects. Rather politics is the process by which plays of power and knowledge constitute identity and experience.”17 Moving on from Thompson, historians became increasingly interested, not in the “facts” of experience itself, but in how “experience” was experienced by historical actors.
The very questions Marxism raised about consciousness and ideology, the inexplicable power of nationalism, and the particular kinds of oppression visited on women and experienced in the family led to new ways of answering that moved beyond anything conventionally included within Marxism. For some, the limits of Marxism encouraged expanding the boundaries of the tradition, for others the constraints of Marxism provoked rejection and defection. First, the influence of Foucault and the growing interest in language that flowed from Saussure through structuralism into post-structuralism, the new emphasis on meaning and discourse, fundamentally changed the direction of much research by Marxist (now perhaps post-Marxist) historians and social scientists. The direction of the arrow of determination shifted from the material to the realm of discourse, culture, and language. Second, Marxism as a potent, totalizing grand narrative was undermined by the post-modernist suspicion of all such master narratives with their ideas of progress, their teleological certainty, and their resistance to anomalies and ambiguities.18 Third, at a moment of confusion and doubt among Marxists, even before the disappearance of European state socialisms, scholars replaced the focus on class (at least for a time) with a concern for other social collectivities. The most important were nation and gender. Feminist historians and theorists rapidly moved from an inclusivist women’s history driven by a commitment to recover and include women in the existing narratives, to questioning those narratives themselves, and ultimately to a deep interrogation of the category “woman.” Once the earlier confidence of Marxist and social historians in the primacy of the social was shattered, culture and discourse appeared to offer possibly richer forms of explanation.
From the Geertzian Revolution to the Cultural Turn
The cultural turn is neither the same as the linguistic or historical turn nor coterminous with post-structuralism or post-modernism, but it has overlapped temporally and intellectually with a number of concerns shared by all of them. The attention to language and its deep structures preceded the renewed interest in history within American social science in the 1980s and 1990s, a profound reversal of the post-1945 rejection of history from political science and sociology particularly.19 The cultural turn, it should be noted, was neither the same as “bringing culture back in” (though it certainly entailed that as well) nor the belief that “culture matters,” a stance that would lead in a quite different direction (and a different implied politics) from the cultural turn.20
One might tell the story of the evolving, revolving “cultural turn” from a number of key texts—Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975, translated into English, 1977); or from the seminal works of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Marshall Sahlins, or Raymond Williams.21 But—again from both generational and personal experience—the most influential text was probably Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973). Few come away from this book indifferent to its challenge or unaffected by its lapidary language. The program of Geertz (and others like White) was to reject positivist approaches to understanding human experience and to insist on the centrality of meaning, the historically and culturally specific constructions of understanding and feeling. As Sherry Ortner puts it,
Geertz’s battle against various forms of functionalist and mechanistic perspectives (regardless of their theorists of origin—Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so on) was important … because it challenges a view of society as a machine, or as an organism, a view in which complex human intentions and complex cultural formations are reduced to their effects on that social machine or social organism.22
Or in Geertz’s own description of his research program: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”23 To be opposed were all forms of “objectivism” and “reductionism”—something against which Marxists and social historians were then struggling.
In his essay “The Concept(s) of Culture,” which is all the more brilliant for its transparency, William H. 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