Cultural turns

After the famous “Linguistic Turn”, labeled as such by the philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1980s, the cultural spins, mutations or, simply, the cultural “turns” of the past few decades have largely been the result of debates with aesthetic or ethical stakes, but also ways in which the political has found artistic expression and has been translated into “cultural objects”, in an anthropological sense. The “Pictorial Turn” and, then, the “Literary Turn” or, no less, the “Performative Turn”, the “Ekphrastic Turn” or the “Rhetorical Turn” have represented, ever since the 1970s and the 1980s, privileged methodological frameworks for research conducted in the humanities area, in which interpretative styles that are complementary or polemically pitted against one another are vying for supremacy. They may symptomatically succeed one another or appeal to researchers at one and the same time, but they most often operate with convergent concepts. The various interpretive communities that uphold them may come to interfere with one another or create entire transnational networks of interpretation. Keywords: Linguistic Turn, Performative Turn, Post-Critical Turn, interpretive communities, convergent concepts.

Etopia [Intersections , 2017

¤ When colleagues of mine first learned of the conference "Re: Turns," on which this issue of eTopia is based, their almost unanimous response was to note how exciting and brilliant they found the theme. Some commented that they always felt called upon to write within a particular theoretical turn, rather than about it, and that the invitation to reflect on turns from a positon of temporary exteriority felt liberating. On the other hand, the challenge of writing about theoretical turns, I want to suggest, is that it requires that we disengage ourselves from some of the more pious ideas we might have about intellectual work. To think about turns is to admit that the agendas guiding our work do not simply arise through the appearance of political or cultural questions in the world. It is to acknowledge that, while the world poses questions to us all the time, these questions are given form within worlds of scholarship, which, at some very basic level, are like stock markets of rising and failing theoretical fashions

2017

Both volumes under review share a common element: the relevance of anthropological studies in current cultural discourse and historical writing in particular. In her tour-de-force monograph Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture (CT), Doris Bachmann-Medick offers a wide and wellinformed overview of the most recent developments in cultural studies and reflects on the turns in that field since the early 1980s. Her edited collection— The Trans/National Study of Culture (T/NSC)—offers a variety of case studies exemplifying the variety of cultural studies. Before analysing these two volumes, I would mention the growing and pervasive role of anthropology after about 1980. Anthropological studies have deeply affected the historical disciplines of late, as Jeremy Popkin has stressed yet again.1

European Journal of Social Theory, 2010

The revival of civilizational analysis is closely linked to a broader cultural turn in the human sciences. Comparative civilizational approaches accept the primacy of culture, but at the same time, they strive to avoid the cultural determinism familiar from twentieth-century sociology, especially from the Parsonian version of functionalism. To situate this twofold strategy within contemporary cultural sociology, it seems useful

2005

Queda prohibida cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública y transformación total o parcial de esta obra sin contar con autorización escrita de los titulares del Copyright. La infracción de los derechos mencionados puede ser constitutiva de delito contra la propiedad intelectual.

2012

In the second half of the twentieth century the theme of culture has dominated the human sciences. Concepts of culture have generated perspectives and methodologies that have challenged orthodoxies and attracted the energetic enthusiasm of young scholars. More significantly, the forms of contemporary culture demand a radical reappraisal of the terms of description of the modern world. We therefore need to consider our options when culture does not just provide the meaning of experience but is also the terms of that experience. This book reviews these ideas in ways that will be accessible to those new to the field and also stimulating to experts.

International Theory, 2020

In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to ‘turn’ have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become ‘established heretics’ within the intellectual subfiel...

Journal of Religious Ethics, 2019

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Sociological Review, 2019

This article proposes the social sciences consider texture-rather than text − as the important legacy of the 'cultural turn' in the social sciences. The article considers texture in the literal sense of surface-patterns, as well as texture as a metaphor for the 'dynamic' and hard-to-capture qualities of social life. The article draws on the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the 'practice turn' in organizational studies and recent developments in geography and cultural research to map out different textural frameworks. While sociologists have lagged behind their counterparts in other fields in embracing a textural sensibility, the article considers the writings of Georg Simmel and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology as prominent exceptions to that rule. The article concludes by encouraging sociologists to consider the textural as a way into a 'theoretical'-as against a purely 'methodological' conception-of the qualitative.