PETER BURKE Knowledge, Culture and Society Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Económicas Sede Medellín Knowledge, culture and society ©Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Medellín Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Económicas Centro Editorial ISBN: 978-958-783-133-7 (Paper) ISBN: 978-958-783-134-4 (Digital) ISBN: 978-958-783-135-1 (POD) First Edition Medellín, 2017 Editorial Preparation Centro Editorial Facultad Ciencias Humanas y Económicas Revision and translation of accompanying text: Adriana Pertuz Layout: Melissa Gaviria Henao Front cover photo: José Luis Ruiz Peláez Inside photos:Yobenj Aucardo Chicangana-Bayona Printed in Colombia, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Económicas de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Medellín. 306.42 B87 Burke, Peter, 1937Knowledge, culture and society / Peter Burke. – Medellín : Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Económicas, 2017. 177 páginas : ilustraciones. ISBN : 978-958-783-133-7 1. SOCIOLOGÍA DEL CONOCIMIENTO. 2. CONOCIMIENTO. 3. CULTURA. 4. SOCIOLOGÍA. 5. SOCIOLOGÍA HISTÓRICA.I. Título. Catalogación en la publicación Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Sede Medellín CONTENTS Preface 7 Symbolism and knowledge: the culture circuit Diana L. Ceballos Gómez 9 Peter Burke - Knowledge, Culture and Society 1. Introduction: Beyond Cultural History? 37 2.The History of the History of Knowledge 61 3.The Sociology and Anthropology of Knowledge 69 4.The Geopolitics of Knowledge 87 5. Specialization and its Antidotes 111 6. Staging Academic Knowledge, 1100-2000 127 7.The Republic of Learning as a Communication System 141 Bibliography 155 SYMBOLISM AND KNOWLEDGE: THE CULTURE CIRCUIT1 Diana L. Ceballos Gómez2 1. Professor Burke’s work has left a mark on many academics’ research work in the world and in our Latin-American academic institutes, and although I won’t speak directly about his important and recognized work, it will of course be implicitly present in this text, because it was fundamental in my doctoral training, when, searching for literature about the Modern Age in the University of Tübingen’s library, I found Professor Burke’s writings and, especially, three books that were closely related to my research: Popular Culture in Modern Europe, Reden und Schweigen (Speaking and Silence) and Küchenlatein (Kitchen Latin).3 In them, Burke reflects on the role of language and the symbolic universe in culture and, therefore, in historical and cultural analysis4. 1. I thank Juan Felipe Gutiérrez Flórez and the historian Joan Manuel Largo Vargas for their support and for critically reading and commenting on this text. Some of these considerations were presented as a preamble to the Seminar Contextos del Conocimiento, given by Professor Dr. Peter Burke in Medellín in 2015, and some others, during the 3rd Congress of Intellectual History in Latin America, held in Mexico DF in November 2016. In general, they are the result of the academic and teaching work for courses and research projects. 2. Academic Affairs Director and Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín. PhD in Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (Cultural Studies) of the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut, Tübingen University, Germany. Research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in 1997 and 1999; and postdoctoral researcher in Germany in 2003, 2008 and 2010. Historian from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Medellín. National Culture Award 2000. Medal of University Merit 2011. She has published, among others, Hechicería, brujería e Inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. Un duelo de imaginarios; Hexerei und Zauberei im Neuen Königreich Granada, Eine Untersuchung magischer Praxen, and “Quien tal hace que tal pague”. Justicia, magia y sociedad en el Nuevo Reino de Granada; as well as articles in collective works and in national and international journals. 3. Burke Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, Temple Smith, 1978 (reprint. 1979, 1983, 1988, among many others); Küchenlatein. Sprache und Umgangssprache in der frühen Neuzeit, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1989 (these and other essays were published in Spanish as Hablar y callar. Funciones sociales del lenguaje a través de la historia, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1996), y Kultureller Austausch, Frankfurt am Main, Surhkamp, 2000. See also Soziologie und Geschichte, 11th. ed., Hamburg, Junius, 1989; and Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, London, Batsford, 1972 (2nd. ed. 1974; 3rd. ed., 1986; reprint. 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995; 4th. ed., 1999, reprint. 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). 4. A more detailed reading of this subject can be found in Ceballos Gómez Diana L., “Reading Peter Burke”, in Chicangana-Bayona Yobenj and Catalina Reyes Cárdenas, Peter Burke, Debates y perspectivas de la Nueva Historia Cultural, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Alcaldía Mayor, Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, 2011, pp. 27-33. Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 9 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 10 When completing my history studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in the late 80s and early 90s, I only had the chance to study some of his texts in a fragmentary way; back then, the circulation of books and texts was restricted (even more so in a country like Colombia), and paper was the only available medium, implying high costs, imports or subscriptions to specialized journals, which our universities couldn’t afford. Today, things have changed a lot, as has the research landscape in our country, and, thanks to new technologies, it’s possible to access, expeditiously and at a lower cost - or even at no cost - an entire treasure of knowledge,5 due to policies of open access and virtual archives, which have been built all around the world, and to the increased use of TICs in our daily life, as Professor Burke has shown in works such as A Social History of Knowledge. I: From Gutenberg to Diderot, and A Social History of Knowledge. II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia.6 And here we arrive at the problem that brings us together in this text: the production of knowledge, which is an intrinsic part of the culture circuit and an essential part of what defines us as a species. I understand by knowledge the whole compound of observations, descriptions, representations, practices, rationalizations, procedures, conducts, discourses, institutionalizations, and know-how, by which we humans classify the lived experience and build our world: what we call “reality”. As Ernst Cassirer showed in his 1932 book The Philosophy of Enlightenment,7 starting with the works of biologist and pioneer in ethology Johann von Uexküll, all animal species are adapted to and coordinated with their environment.They possess a “receptive” system that responds to external stimuli, and an “effector” system that reacts to the stimulus, meaning that there’s a direct relationship between the animal and the sensory world. However, there is certain reversal of this natural order among humans, a new quality constituted in the distinctive feature of a human being’s life: its symbolic ability. That’s why the functional circle of humans is quantitatively wider (from the biological point of view, the use of the hand and the acquisition of manual skills have been linked to the development of the brain8), in such a way that Cassirer defines humans as symbolic animals. 5. Steiner George, Después de Babel. Aspectos del lenguaje y la traducción, 1st. ed., México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981. 6. Burke Peter, A Social History of Knowledge. I. From Gutenberg to Diderot, Cambridge, Polity, 2000 (reprint. 2002), and A Social History of Knowledge. II. From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia, Cambridge & Malden, Polity, 2012. See also Briggs Asa & Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media. From Gutenberg to the Internet, Cambridge, Polity, 2002, and Stiegler Bernard, Die Logik der Sorge.Verlust der Aufklärung durch Technik und Medien, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2008. 7. Cassirer Ernst, Philosophie der Aufklärung, in Werke, Hamburg, Meiner Verlag, 1932. See also his text An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, Yale & New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944. 8. Leroi-Gourhan André, Le geste et la parole, Paris, Albin Michel, 1964. This strategy consists [… says Sperber] of looking for the most systematic and coherent treatment of the diverse information they are confronted with. In this hypothesis, diversity of beliefs, rites, etc., and their repetition, far from being absurd or contingent, appears as necessary, because it is the only thing that enables, given the absence of explicit instructions or innate schemes, the understanding of how the experience of cultural symbolism can lead, at least partially, to a common orientation of the members of a certain society. If such common orientation didn’t exist, the existence of cultural symbolism itself would remain incomprehensible.10 Within its production circuit (creation, exchange,11 transformation12), each culture constitutes different symbolic systems or cognitive apparatus,13 meaning that each culture has different rationalities and ways of thinking, diverse ways of operating in the world and different forms of classification, leading in turn to different ways of processing events in its surroundings by means of diverse mechanisms, which end up constituting knowledge of all kinds, that is, knowledge about the world, such as cooking, extracting the poison from mandioca before its consumption, weaving and 9. Huizinga wrote an essay on the dangers and difficulties of evolutionist interpretations in El concepto de la historia y otros ensayos, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980. In the chapter “Problemas de Historia de la Cultura”, section “II. El concepto de evolución sólo puede emplearse en la ciencia histórica de un modo condicionado y sirve muchas veces en ella de traba y obstáculo” (the concept of evolution can only be used in historical science in a conditioned way and it works in it, many times, as an obstacle). 10. Sperber Dan, Le symbolisme en général, Paris, Hermann, 1974, p. 148. 11. Turner Victor, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca-New York, Cornell University, 1967, and The Drums of Affliction. A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia, Oxford, Clarendon, 1968. 12. Sahlins Marshall, Islands of History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. 13. Cassirer Ernst, Filosofía de las formas simbólicas, 3 volumes, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1971. 11 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke Already in 1978 and from Cognitive Anthropology, Dan Sperber, in his book Le Symbolisme en général, had shown how humans are only equipped “with a general symbolic dispositive and learning abilities”, settling once and for all the dispute held throughout the process that, beginning in the Enlightenment, classified and ranked world populations and their cultures as superior or inferior according to their degree of “civilization” or “progress”; a dispute later deepened by evolutionist theories, especially in Anthropology and History. It was a long process, leading to the defeat of fake postures and prejudices rooted in scientific circles, in which previous academic research was fundamental: the one done by men as important as Gustav Klemm (illustrious unknown man), Franz Boas and Edward Evans-Pritchard, in the first discipline, or by Karl Lamprecht and Johan Huizinga,9 in the second. Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 12 dying textiles, writing a penal code, producing scientific knowledge or medical/magical wisdom as complex as shamanism.14 It is through this knowledge and the set of practices and representations that constitute culture, that the world and people around us are classified, distinguished, interpreted and characterized; by these means, we recognize others and are, in turn, recognized. Such knowledge is constituted by direct observation of experience, prejudices,15 discourses,16 practices and representations of culture, knowledge passed through generations and supported by common sense –what Bourdieu called practical sense. Constitution of knowledge is always implied in the culture circuit, from complex or sophisticated knowledge to practices that may seem simple or unnecessary, like the use of the fork.17 When we speak of symbolism, we speak of an autonomous cognitive dispositive that participates in the constitution of knowledge (of all kinds) and in memory functioning. It is this human learning ability that determines cultural variability. Sperber classifies cultural knowledge in three types: 1. Explicit knowledge: the one explicitly imparted. 2. Tacit knowledge: a. It can never be acquired by a simple register; b. It must be reconstructed by each individual; c. It is direct proof of specific learning abilities, of a qualitatively determined creative competence. 14. Eliade Mircea, Imágenes y símbolos. Ensayos sobre el simbolismo mágico-religioso, 4th. reprint, Madrid, Taurus, 1987; Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’estase, 2nd. ed., Paris, Payot, 1968; Occultism,Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions. Essays in Comparative Religions, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago, 1976, and Le Sacré et le Profane, París, Gallimard, 1990. Ceballos Gómez Diana L., “Quien tal hace, que tal pague”. Justicia, magia y sociedad en el Nuevo Reino de Granada [2002], 2nd. ed., Medellín, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2017; “Magie”, in Lecourt Dominique (Dir.), Dictionnaire de la Pensée Médicale, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, pp. 693-697, and Zauberei und Hexerei im Neuen Königreich Granada. Einer Untersuchung Magischer Praxen, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 1999. 15. To Gadamer, prejudices are part of the hermeneutic process as precomprehension, within the dialogic structure of the understanding/comprehending process, in which the historicity of the interpreter and its time also play an important role. Every act of interpretation is an act of comprehension. Prejudices have been negatively charged since the Enlightenment, vid. Gadamer Hans-Georg, Verdad y Método I, 8th. ed., Salamanca, Sígueme, 1999. 16. Todorov Tzvetan, Simbolismo e interpretación, 2nd. ed., Caracas, Monte Ávila, 1992, and Teorías del símbolo, Caracas, Monte Ávila, 1981. Foucault Michel, El orden del discurso, 3rd. ed., México, Tusquets, 1984, y Barthes Roland, El placer del texto, 4th. ed. México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1982. 17. Elias Norbert, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 19th. ed., 2 volumes, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1995 [v. 1: Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes – v. 2: Wandlungen der Gesellschaft. Entwurf zu einer Theorie der Zivilisation]. Also, Boltanski Luc, «Taxinomies populaires, taxinomies savantes : les objets de consommation et leur classement”, en Revue française de sociologie, Vol.11, No. 1, 1970, pp. 34-44. On this path, semantic knowledge refers to categories and can be expressed through a set of analytical propositions, while encyclopaedic knowledge is concerned with the world and expressed through a set of synthetic propositions (beliefs belong to this type), and that’s why causal knowledge is always a posteriori and why the concept of truth varies not only from one culture to another but also within the same culture.18 In order to study tacit knowledge, intuition is fundamental. We’re talking about judgements that members of a cultural group explain systematically without developing the argument upon which they rely. For instance, when a society considers something insulting but cannot entirely define the criteria upon which such judgement relies (and here we could resort to the examples presented by Clifford Geertz about winking in his text “Thick Description”19). Explicit cultural knowledge, such as proverbs, is the object of tacit underlying knowledge: proverbs are part of a general implicit gloss and, at the same time, part of some unconscious knowledge that determines the precise conditions for their appropriate use and the symbolic nuances that should be added to their interpretation.20 Symbolism is therefore exemplary, since its implicit forms are unintelligible by themselves and their study has always assumed the existence of underlying tacit knowledge. Common sense could then be understood, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as a type of collective knowledge with a practical character: in the midst of the dispute to classify reality – with the pretension to gain a monopoly over order and nomination - categories are established through the construction of representations; categories that are validated when they become widely accepted by means of a naturalization process of the dominant order and its relationships.21 18. Sperber, Le symbolisme…, pp. 103-104, 109 y 117. «Les phénomènes symboliques universels n’ont pas deux interprétations contradictoires, l’une constante et universelle, l’autre variable et propre à chaque société; ils ont une structure focale universelle et un champ d’évocation variable». p. 151. (Universal symbolic phenomena don’t have two contradictory interpretations, one constant and universal and another variable and typical of each society; they have a universal focal structure and a variable field of evocation). 19. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973, pp. 3-30. 20. Sperber, Le Symbolisme…, p. 11. 21. Bourdieu Pierre, Le sens pratique, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1980. 13 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 3. Implicit and unconscious knowledge: when those who hold tacit knowledge are able to make it explicit. Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 14 A “cultural system”, as defined by Clifford Geertz,22 predisposes toward certain interpretations of reality and determined cultural behaviours, and establishes shared significances. Common sense is constituted through learning processes in childhood, through observation, experiences of the world, situations lived collectively in society, normative social precepts and through institutions and instituted performative practices of behaviour, practices, discourses, representations…, that is, performances of reality. Common sense also participates, as a good number of studies have already shown, in the construction of western knowledge, of the so called scientific knowledge.23 In The Imperfect Garden,24 Todorov splits the ways of thinking that arrived with what he calls the modern man from Enlightenment into four families: conservatives, scientificists, individualists and humanists. We are interested here in the scientificist family, adhered to a deterministic vision of the world, that increased during the 19th century, when three forms of causality and determinism consolidated: social and historical; biological, and psychic and individual;25 forms of thought that, although still part of our interpretative background, could be traced back to Greek philosophy and Christian religion. For them, willpower is void “because nature (or history) has decided everything for us”. “Omnipresent, causality is also the same everywhere: scientificism is a universalism” that recognizes the differences arising from the contingences of facts, since “… the inexorable concatenation of causes and effects can be known in an exhaustive manner, and modern science constitutes the real path of such knowledge… it opposes the passive acceptance of the world as it is”.26 That’s why this type of knowledge can conceive a better reality, adapted to our needs (progress): […] the one who has penetrated the secret of plants can produce new plants, more fertile and nutritive; the one who has understood natural selection can 22. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York, Basic Books, 1983. 23. To cite only one text: Clarke Steve and Tymothy D. Lyons, Recent Themes in the Philosophy of Science: Scientific Realism and Commonsense, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic, 2002. 24. Todorov Tzvetan, El jardín imperfecto. luces y sombras del pensamiento humanista, Barcelona, Paidós, 1999. The original French title circumscribes the reflections to France: Le Jardin Imparfait. La pensée humaniste en France (1998, Paris, Grasset & Fasquelle). 25. For another interpretation in this direction, see Foucault Michel, Las palabras y las cosas, 15th. ed., México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1984. 26. Todorov, El jardín…, pp. 35-37. [… But] what is a better animal or plant species? How to judge a landscape superior to another? By which criteria do we decide which political regime would be preferable to the existing one? […]. Scientificism consists, effectively, in founding, on top of what we believe to be the results of science, a form of ethics and politics. In other words, science, or what is perceived as such, stops being simple knowledge about the existing world to become a generator of values, in the same way as a religion; it can, therefore, guide political and moral actions.27 Its results are universal, valid for all, since they determine the “objective laws of the real” that can be put in place by its supporters to guide the world at their will. That is, extending Todorov’s reflections a bit more, what all forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism have done all around the world to a certain extent since the Modern Age. We have, then, a plurality of rationalities, logics, ways of thinking and living the world and the experience that includes all the other-rationalities unrecognized by a part of western university knowledge and systemized in a type of knowledge, that I would define as a diverse cognitive apparatus composed of parts of varied species, such as representations, practices, observations about the world, ways of acting and of know-how, discourses, institutions…, that come into play in particular cultures. That’s why these reflections become more pertinent today, when transnational population migrations confront us with a new encounter of worlds – an uneven encounter of knowledge and experiences of life and the world28 – just like in the early Modern Age, when, as today, there were misunderstandings, disagreements and fear towards the other-one.29 And it’s here where, as I see it, cultural analysis30 turns out to be productive for the study of knowledge and its production, beyond discussions of whether we should conduct an internalist or an externalist history of science, and of whether epistemology, philosophy, history or sociology are more convenient; a debate, I consider, we should have already left behind. German cultural critique, as we could name it, had 27. Todorov, El jardín…, pp. 38-39. 28. Lorite Mena José, Sociedades sin Estado. El pensamiento de los otros, Madrid, Akal, 1996. 29. Todorov Tzvetan, La conquista de América. La cuestión del otro, México, Siglo Veintiuno, 1987, and Ceballos Gómez, Diana Luz, Hechicería, brujería e Inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. Un duelo de imaginarios, 2nd. ed., Bogotá-Medellín, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1995. 30. Bachmann-Medick Doris, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, 2nd. ed., Hamburg, Rowohlt, 2007. 15 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke institute artificial selection. […] Knowledge of what exists leads to technique, which enables the fabrication of an improved existent. Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 16 already used this type of analysis to account for thought phenomena. It is sufficient to mention three relevant cases, situated at the transition from the 19th to the 20th century: Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Cassirer and Karl Mannheim. All three contributed to establishing the foundations of the forthcoming analysis of the then called Human Sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), for which Dilthey established epistemological principles, besides laying out important stepping stones for contemporary hermeneutics.31 We could say that reflections on culture have taken place within two great traditions that, although not unique, are the most outstanding and, more importantly, most sustained over time, and from which a large part of current studies are derived: the tradition of studies, history, philosophy and sociology of culture, and the German cultural critique (including the Volkskunde), which can be traced back to the18th century, and the so-called cultural and social anthropology, with all its derivatives. As for the first tradition,32 it’s important to emphasize that the terms “cultural studies” and “cultural history”, “Volk” (people, folk, nation) and “popular”, as well as these perspectives, were already being used in the German academic field during the 31. Cassirer wrote works about Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Einstein’s theory of relativity, among others, as well as four volumes on The Problem of Knowledge in Philosophy and in Modern Science and three volumes on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. This, of course, without considering those directly related to symbolism, cultural critique, literature…Cassirer gave conferences and had a close relationship with the Warburg-Institute in Hamburg. All three reflected on the problems of knowledge, views of the world, historicities and what Dilthey called Lebensphilosophie, philosophy of life, and, therefore, of culture, which they released from the tight barriers of cultural products or objects, in order to focus on its ways of creating, functioning, circulating and recreating or “reinventing”. Just to mention some of their works: Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften.Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und Geschichte; Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens; Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften; Logik und System der philosophischen Wissenschaften.Vorlesungen zur erkenntnistheoretischen: Logik und Methodologie (1864-1903), in Complete Works, 26 volumes, Göttingen,Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Cassirer Ernst, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie undWissenschaft der neueren Zeit (volume 1: 1906; volume 2: 1907; volume 3: 1920; volume 4: 1957), Berlin, Verlag von Bruno Cassirer; Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik, Berlin,Verlag von Bruno Cassirer, 1910; Vorlesungen und Vorträge zu philosophischen Problemen der Wissenschaften (1907-1945), Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010; Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (1942), Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2011. Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie [1929], Auswahl, Neuwied/Berlin, Luchterhand, 1964; Die Strukturanalyse der Erkenntnistheorie, Berlin, Reuther & Reichard, 1922; Strukturen des Denkens, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1980; Ideologie und Utopie [1929], 8th. ed., Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1995; Konservatismus, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1984. 32. Benjamin Walter, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduziertbarkeit [1936], 6th. ed., Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2003; Weber Alfred, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie, Leiden, Sijthoff, 1935; Adorno, Theodor, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II. Eingriffe. Stichworte, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1977; Konesmann Ralf (ed.), Kulturkritik. Reflexionen in der veränderten Welt, Leipzig, Reklam, 2001; Bausinger Hermann, Volkskunde.Von Alterstumforschung zur Kulturanalyse, Tübingen, TVV, 1979; Bausinger Hermann, Utz Jeggle, Gottfried Korff and Martin Scharfe, Grundzüege der Volkskunde, 4th. ed., Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999; Greverus Ina-Maria, Kultur und Alltagswelt. Eine Einführung in Fragen der Kulturanthropologie, Munich, C. H. Beck, 1978; Landwehr Achim, Kulturgeschichte, Köln-Weimar-Wien, Böhlau, 2009; Maurer Michael, Kulturgeschichte. Eine Einführung, Köln-Weimar-Wien, Böhlau, 2008, Bachmann-Medick Doris, Cultural Turns... Part of the works of Cassirer and Dilthey, of Burckhardt, Lamprecht and Huizinga, among other authors of this tradition, would give an account of its history. 33. Even if Adelung is more known for his critical investigation of the German language, since he’s one of the pillars of current Germanistic and of modern dictionaries and grammars (his most know work: Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart, 5 volumes, 1774-1786) and for editing, since 1772, what is considered the first periodic publication for children in German, the Leipziger Wochenblatt für Kinder (“Weekly paper for children in Leipzig”), he also wrote history (and not only cultural, he also wrote about war) and about what we could call popular traditions or Volkskunde, a “History of human Folly…, gold manufacturers, visionaries, diviners and other philosophical monsters” (Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheit, oder Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Schwarzkünstler, Goldmacher,Teufelsbanner, Zeichen- und Liniendeuter, Schwärmer,Wahrsager, und anderer philosophischer Unholden, 7 volumes, Leipzig 1785-1789). 34. Allgemeine Geschichte der Kultur und Literatur des neuern Europa, 2 volumes, Göttingen, 1796-1799. He also wrote History of literature from its earliest times down to the present (Geschichte der Litteratur von ihrem Anfang bis auf die neuesten Zeiten, 6 volumes, Göttingen, 1805-1813. He also wrote about what we would call today a history of the present: about the French revolution (1797), the world history between 1799-1814, the history of the 19th century (1817), the history of literature, as well as a history of the latest three centuries in six volumes. 35. Other important works: Abhandlung über der Ursprung der Sprache, 1772; Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 1793-97 (10 collections), and Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 1774, as well as others about language, aesthetics, popular songs, German literature, art… and a Metacritique to the Critique of Pure Reason (Leipzig, 1799). The topic of the importance of language will be picked up by Sapir and Whorf in the 20th century (linguistic relativity); a hypothesis according to which language affects the view of the world and cognitive structures of speakers. For a broader scope of the aforementioned subjects, see: Berlin Isaiah, Vico and Herder.Two Studies in the History of Ideas, New York, Viking Press, 1976, y Löchte Anne, Johann Gottfried Herder. Kulturtheorie und Humanitätsidee der “Ideen”, “Humanitätsbriefe” und “Adrastea”, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 2005, especially the second part pp. 27-73. 17 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke transition from the 18th to the 19th century by men as important as Johan Christoph Adelung, with his Versuch einer Geschichte der Kultur des Menschlichen Geschlechts (“Essay in a history of the culture of the human race”, Leipzig 1782);33 Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and his General History of Culture and Literature of the New Europe (1796-9),34, and of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Kant’s student, whose work lies at the foundation of modern culture studies. In this sense, his most important work was Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (“Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”, Riga 1784-1791). Adelung introduced the term “cultural history” to the German language; the term “culture” had been settling on during the 18th century, but only with Herder can it be said that the concept of culture has the implications that it has today. As Isaiah Berlin ascertained, Herder didn’t share the theory of progress; on the contrary, he thought about and emphasized diversity, particularity, and incomparability of cultures; he was against classifying people by race (and against the consequent racism it introduced), against colonialism and slavery. To this we must add the role he assigned to each culture’s own historicity, and the role of language, which granted each of them a unique quality. He highlighted the importance of objective as well as subjective aspects of culture. For him, culture is composed of creative processes as much as of objects. Science, technique, education, training (Bildung), arts, language, writing, religion, customs, rules and political, economic and judicial systems, are all part of culture.35 Herder’s thought lies at the foundation of later works: those by Gustav Klemm, Jacob Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 18 Burckhardt, Wilhelm Dilthey… or those by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Friedrich Hegel and many others, and, partly, of all of our works. Even if there isn’t a continuity thread, this tradition was carried on throughout the 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt and Karl Lamprecht, among others, and during the early 20th century by Johan Huizinga, who gained his doctorate in Germany, where he participated in an exchange with the latter (by then a Professor in Leipzig)36 and with Henri Pirenne, who completed his doctorate alongside the former. We might dare to say that, at the beginning of History, as an academic discipline, cultural history had a prominent presence, also if we think about a literate like Voltaire, who, despite not using the term culture, did refer to the human “spirit” and dedicated a text to manners (Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations [1756]). We can’t forget that History is the discipline chosen by the Enlightenment to be the reasoned philosophical science that will account for the progress of the spirit of nations37 or, if we think, later, about 36. Lamprecht Karl, „Die neue historische Methode“, in Historische Zeitschrift, LXXXI, 1898, pp. 193-273; Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft. Fünf Vorträge, Freiburg im Breisgau, Hermann Seyfelder, 1905 (five conferences on theories of history). During the last quarter of the 19th century, Lamprecht generated discussions, new to the discipline, that were appropriated by Huizinga, Pirenne, and Marc Bloch, who also did his doctoral training in Germany, and by Henri Berr in France. This caused what is known as the Lamprecht debate, in which this historian advocated the historic-cultural analysis that is framed in a wider debate: “the fight” for the method (Methodenstreit), which also involved discussions between members of the New Historical School of National Economics (Gustav Schmoller, Werner Sombart…) that advocated an economic analysis that took into account socio-cultural implications, and the School of Vienna. In his Inaugural Lecture as a Professor in the University of Groningen, Huizinga made reference to his approach to authors like Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert and Eduard Spranger, all belonging to the field of culture knowledge, known thanks to Lamprecht (v. Oestreich Gerhard, “Huizinga, Lamprecht und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie: Huizingas Groninger Antrittsvorlesung von 1905”, in W.R.H. Koops et. al., Johan Huizinga 1872-1972, The Hague, Springer, pp. 1-28). Henri Berr, in the first issue of his Revue de Synthèse Historique, published an article about “The Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft of Fribourg in Breisgau” (“The Society of Cultural Studies of Fribourg in Breisgau”) and the article “La méthode historique en Allemagne” by Lamprecht (1900, pp. 21-27), a method that he described as historical-cultural (Culturhistorische). In the article, he also referred to his text Die culturhistorische Methode, Berlin, R. Gaertner, 1900, and, among other traits, he promoted interdisciplinarity with other social sciences and the support of psychology in historians’ interpretations, aspects recollected by Annales. We can’t forget, when the initial postulates of this magazine are considered, Bloch’s education, his exchanges and discussions with Pirenne (educated with Lamprecht), Berr’s and his magazine’s influence and, of course, the model of the German magazine Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte [1903]. Seeba Hinrich C., “Interkulturelle Perspektiven. Ansätze einer vergleichenden Kulturkritik bei Karl Lamprecht und in der Exil-Germanistik“, German Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Feb., 1993, pp. 1-17. Similarly, during the 80s, while a teacher in Bonn, he left a profound mark in his students, some of which were recognized scholars with a peculiarity: they contributed to the conformation of art history as a discipline in universities, with a notorious example: Aby Warburg, founder of the Library and Institute Warburg in Hamburg and of iconology and cultural analysis of images. Brush Kathryn, “The Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht: Practitioner and Progenitor of Art History”, Central European History, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1993, pp. 139-164. 37. Cf. Cassirer, La filosofía de la Ilustración, y Blom Philipp, Encyclopédie. El triunfo de la razón en tiempos irracionales, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2007. 38. “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes Knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (published in 1871, in the book by Tylor Primitive Culture). It’s worth mentioning the following works by Klemm: Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (10 volumes, 1843-52, “General Cultural History of Mankind”); Allgemeine Kulturwissenschaft (2 volumes., 1854-55, “General Cultural Science”. Vol. 1: “Introduction…”; vol. 2: “Material Foundations of Human Culture”); his “Manual of Old German Manners” (Handbuch der Germanischen Alterthumskunde, 1836), and his “History of Collections for Science and Art in Germany” (Geschichte der Sammlungen für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Deutschland, 1837). A lot has been written about the definition of “culture”, without ever reaching an agreement; it is sufficient to mention some outstanding names that have addressed the issue: the ones I just mentioned in previous paragraphs, Franz Boas, Wilhelm Wundt, Norbert Elias, Lucien Fevbre, Fernand Braudel, T. S. Eliot, Alfred Kroeber y Clyde Kluckhohn, Ernst Gombrich, Clifford Geertz; Peter Burke, of course, and many others, among whom we find a good part of the anthropological production. 39. And against an attempt to use Freudian theories in anthropological analysis. See Boas Franz, “The Methods of Ethnology”, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 22, No. 4, October-December, 1920, pp. 311-322. Since the 1880s, Franz Boas reflected on the differences between cultures and on the distinctions that needed to be established against generalizing and universalists stances. He and his students introduced relativism in cultural analysis, creating an escape route that opposed the division established between civilised and primitive societies. 19 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke cultural analysis among historians such as Marc Bloch (The Magic-Working Kings) and even Lucien Fevbre (his works about Rabelais, Luther and Erasmus…). As for the second tradition, I would like to briefly emphasize three moments and two authors, important for the recognition of knowledge and, in general, of cultures of subordinate groups and non-Western nations. The first is Gustav Friedrich Klemm, who was credited by the Encyclopaedia Britannica with the development of the “culture” concept; a definition that was later adopted by Edward Burnett Tylor, and that, with time, was established as canonical for decades. He was also recognized for his ethnographic collection, which became a model to others.38 The second, a German immigrant to the United States, Franz Boas, considered one of the pillars of American Cultural Anthropology, established in 1920 a set of basic principles that confronted evolutionist interpretations and the hierarchical organization of cultures: cultural aspects of human behaviour and manners are acquired by learning, through unconscious processes; all cultures have their own development and history, which respond to their own priorities and needs, so none of them is better, nor more or less primitive than any other and, consequently, each culture must be interpreted by analysing its internal elements; an idea directly against evolutionist stances,39 still in vogue today. About the third, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, we will make a brief mention further on. Starting from this historic-genealogical frame, sketched in a somewhat coarse way, I understand cultural history as a perspective of analysis concerned with the logics and rationalities that guide society, governments, politics, the economy, people’s actions and their ideas about the world; a perspective that also Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 20 brings human conflicts to the centre, and not only meaning, as more culturalist tendencies have done by using cultural analysis in various disciplines, forgetting the necessary anchoring in society that every analysis dealing with human societies must retain.40 Cultural practices, as well as representations and knowledge emanating from them, are socially differentiated and, in turn, influence and transform the surroundings in which they are produced, become appropriated and start circulating (culture circuit = production, circulation and appropriation, which, by the way, must be unravelled during the research process). As Pierre Bourdieu showed in Practical Reason, his theory of action,41 social agents act and are equipped with a practical sense, an acquired system of perceptual preferences, as well as with cognitive structures typical of each culture and/or particular human group. So, it’s therefore possible and necessary to reveal what he calls “the intrinsic dynamic of practices”, that is, translated into my own words, the logic, strategies and rationalities with which social relationships are weaved and produced, including conflicts, of course, since social relationships are relationships of symbolic force, which may or may not be shaped as relationships of physical force. Karl Marx (and Max Weber of course) had already emphasized this important part of domination mechanisms: symbolic domination42, which became explicit in such difficult life conditions by Antonio Gramsci in his Jail Notebooks: cultural hegemony, hegemonic block, subordinate classes…On the other hand, Georg Simmel showed us (1904), with midday clarity, that conflict lies at the centre of all human relationships and is, most of the time, a constructive force43; in the same way, Italian Microhistory brought the role of conflict to the centre of its concerns, along with the role of different 40. “Quien tal hace, que tal pague”. Justicia, magia y sociedad… especially Chapter 4. 41. Bourdieu Pierre, Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1994. 42. Bourdieu Pierre, “Le pouvoir symbolique”, in Annales. E.S.C., Year 32, No. 3, May-June 1977, pp. 405-411, and Postface à Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique by E. Panofsky, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1967, pp.133-167. 43. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Conflict. I”, in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9, No. 4, January, 1904, pp. 490-525. For conflict in the intellectual world and domination, see by Pierre Bourdieu, Campo de poder, campo intelectual. Itinerario de un concepto [1966, 1969, 1971, 1980], Buenos Aires, Montressor, 2002; «Les intellectuels dans le champ de la lutte des classes», in La nouvelle critique, No. 87, October, 1975, pp. 66-69; «Les modes de domination», in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 2, No. 2-3, 1976, pp. 122-132; “Le champ scientifique”, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 2, No. 2-3, 1976, pp. 88-104; Homo academicus, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1984; «Champ du pouvoir et division du travail de domination. Texte manuscrit inédit ayant servi de support de cours au Collège de France, 1985-1986», in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 190, Décembre, 2011, pp. 126-139; «La domination masculine», Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 84, September, 1990, pp. 2-31. 44. Levi Giovanni, “Sobre Microhistoria”, in Burke Peter, Formas de hacer historia, 2nd. reprint., Madrid, Alianza, 1996, pp. 119-143; La herencia inmaterial. La historia de un exorcista piamontés del siglo XVII, Madrid, Nerea, 1990. De Ginzburg Carlo, I Benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento, 3rd. ed., Torino, Einaudi, 1979; Historia nocturna. Un desciframiento del aquelarre, Barcelona, Muchnik, 1991; Miti, emblemi, spie. Morfologia e storia, 2nd. ed., Torino, Einaudi, 1992, y El hilo y las huellas. Lo verdadero, lo falso, lo ficticio, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010. 45. Eliot T. S., Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1949. 46. Todorov Tzvetan, El espíritu de la Ilustración, Barcelona, Círculo de Lectores, 2014; on the Enlightenment, cf. also: Reichardt Rolf (ed.), Aufklärung und historische Semantik. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur westeuropäischen Kulturgeschichte, in Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, Vierteljahresschrift zur Erforschung des Spätmittelalter u. der frühen Neuzeit, Beiheft 21 (notebook 21), 1998 (text about historical semantics and cultural history of politics during the Enlightenment), and Bäehr Andreas, Grenze der Aufklärung. Körperkonstruktionen und die Tötung des Körpers im Übergang zur Moderne, s.l., Wehrhahn, 2005; Ceballos Gómez Diana L., Poderes locales y funcionarios ilustrados: conflictos y discursos en el Virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada, in the process of being published. 47. Horkheimer Max and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, 16th. ed., Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 2006. See also: Marcuse Herbert, El carácter afirmativo de la cultura [1965], Buenos Aires, El Cuenco de Plata, 2011; Adorno, Theodor, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II. Eingriffe. Stichworte, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1977; Debray Régis and Jean Bricmont, A la sombra de la Ilustración. Debate entre un filósofo y un científico, Barcelona, Paidós, 2004, y Konesmann Ralf (ed.), Kulturkritik. Reflexionen in der Veränderten Welt, Leipzig, Reklam, 2001. 21 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke perceptions and appropriations of the social world by diverse groups,44 against generalisations established by the notion of mentality. The West has set itself up as the norm of knowledge, and its wise men, whom we call scientists, used for decades, under the shadow of colonial expansion, a censorial right to qualify, classify, and revile other-cultures and their knowledge; exotic cultures with which disciplines like Anthropology and the History of Premodern Cultures have dealt, as they have with the subordinate knowledge of the West itself, offspring of the same societies…This is not new. Michelet himself had brought attention to that fact in his well-known book The Witch, where he ascertained that witch hunting had taken place, partly, to deprive women of their traditional medical-healing knowledge, which he characterized as feminine, and T.S. Elliot, when analysing the self-centredness of culture, also wondered about how to assume the conflict that ensues in the face of diversity.45 This rejection or undermining is a product of the Enlightenment. We can’t even imagine how enlightened we are, how close we still are to Diderot, D’Alambert or Kant…I invite you to read the enjoyable book of Tzvetan Todorov about the Enlightenment, written for a wide audience, in which he shows how we are still enlightened: The Spirit of the Enlightenment.46 Since, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in 1944, in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment:47 the strategy of reason is, already from the Odyssey’s logos, in a veiled or explicit way, a structure of domination. Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 22 This structure has been applied for centuries, in many parts of the world and with diverse strategies (territorial, nationalist, economic, etc.), through colonialism, a “global shared experience” (Jürgen Habermas), which has been strong during processes of knowledge domination (colonialism of knowledge) and of global neo-colonialisms in our contemporary consumer societies, which also exercise domination through knowledge and its transmission media (mass media, web, …) in the form of already-globalised new colonialisms. And, during these domination processes, great treasures have been lost, especially for traditional cultures.48 2. Since magical knowledge and traditional medicine, a kind of knowledge unrecognized and disqualified by erudite and ruling groups in Europe and America, is one of my research topics, I want to show how, in the end, other types of knowledge fulfil the same order requirements as those applied to erudite academic knowledge, the offspring of Western universities.49 This task, it seems to me, is pertinent in a country of such cultural diversity, where many forms of other-knowledge live together, many of which, unfortunately, now begin to disappear without being fully included in our social world. And here I think again about the book on popular culture by Professor Burke, which presents a moment when, thanks to the expansion of erudite thinking, the accelerated disappearance of popular knowledge in Europe and certain places of America began. 48. I refer the reader to the already referenced books by Professor Burke, Popular Culture… and Küchenlatein…, as good examples of the loss of such cultural treasures. For current processes: Jameson Fredric y Slavoj Žižek, Estudios Culturales. Reflexiones sobre el multiculturalismo, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1998. It’s worth mentioning that reflections denominated postcolonial, decolonial or post occidental have had a long tradition in Latin America and the Caribbean, going back to the first decades of the 20th century, even if the text Orientalism by Palestinian Edward Said [1978] is commonly regarded as the first one; this is, partly, because the other books are neither written in English nor belong to the circuits of knowledge recognized at the academic forefront. It is sufficient to mention some examples: José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928); Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande & Senzala (1933); Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au payz natal (1939) and Discours sur le colonialisme (1955); Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940); Alfonso Reyes, Última Tule (1942); Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952); O’Gorman Edmundo, La invención de América (1958). 49. The postulates of the Enlightenment (reason and rationality, individualism, scientific method, an the ideal of progress) were established as a rule and have been the basis of later knowledge production. Only a few exceptions deviated from this course and went against the general trend; those were studied by Isaiah Berlin in the book of the same name, as well as in the posthumously edited version, with the essays dedicated to the counter-enlightened Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), many of which didn’t prosper and were “aborted” by the dominant intellectual model. Vid. Berlin Isaiah, Contra la corriente. Ensayos sobre historias de las ideas, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992, and El mago del norte. J.G. Hamann y el origen del irracionalismo moderno, Madrid, Tecnos, 1997. 50. Levi Giovanni, “Sobre Microhistoria”, in Peter Burke (Comp.), Formas de hacer historia, Madrid, Alianza, 1993, pp. 119-143. 51. For the Azande, all that happens is explained by means of witchcraft, which can also be caused involuntarily and at long distance, like evil eye in southern Europe or in America. Evans-Pritchard, Hexerei, Orakel und Magie bei den Zande, 1st. ed., Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1978; see also: Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California, 1951, especially Chapter V: “The Greek Shamans and the Origin of Puritanism”, pp.135-178; Lloyd Geoffrey, Magic, Reason and Experience. Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979; Thomas Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century England, 2a. ed., 1a. reimp. (1a. ed. 1971), Londres, Penguin Books (Peregrine), 1978; Clark Stuart, Thinking with Demons. The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; Ceballos Gómez, “Magie”, in Dictionnaire…, and “Quien tal hace, que tal pague”…; Duerr Hans-Peter (ed.), Der Wissenschaftler und das Irrationale, Vol. I, Frankfurt am Main, Syndikat, 1981; as well as Wittgenstein Ludwig, Observaciones a LA RAMA DORADA de Frazer, 3rd. ed., Madrid, Tecnos, 2008. For magical practices in contemporary Europe see: Hauschild Thomas, Der böse Blick: ideengeschichtliche und sozialpsychologische Untersuchungen, 2nd. ed. revised, Berlin, Mensch und Leben, 1982 [1st. ed. 1979]; Favret-Saada Jeanne, Les mots, la mort, les sorts, París, Gallimard, 1977; Favret-Saada Jeanne and Josée Contreras, Corps pour corps. Enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage, París, Gallimard, 1981. 23 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke In short, we can say: knowledge, different ways of thinking and rationalising, and the subsequent knowledge that derives from such a symbolic stream and from learning abilities (Sperber), available in each culture (Geertz), vary from one society, community, or even sociocultural group to another, and respond to a general symbolic dispositive typical of the human species (Sperber, Cassirer, Durkheim, Boas, Turner, Lévi-Strauss, Durand…). As Giovanni Levi showed, in the great book guided and compiled by Professor Burke, Formas de hacer historia, even within the same culture or community, symbolic structures in different social contexts produce a “multiplicity of representations that is fragmented and differentiated”,50 which materializes in different practices and knowledge (magical, discursive, political, medical, economical practices….). Magical thinking, against what has been and, surprisingly, continues to be held by some people today, is neither part of a pre-logical nor of a primitive mentality (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), nor of inferior culture’s superstitions. It is also not a first step, prior to scientific knowledge, as the fathers of anthropology –Tylor and Frazer– or a historian like Robert Mandrou, among others, claimed. It is a complete and coherent system. In its internal coherence, it postulates determinisms as well, and it demands order, but its causality principle varies, as shown in an exemplary way by Edward E. Evans-Pritchard in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande [1937], where he established, against the ideas of his time, the epistemological relativity of other ways of knowledge, by showing that their causality may answer to rationalities different from ours, and that they can also be logical.51 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 24 Like science, magical thinking displays a principle of internal rationalization, being therefore systematic, and like every cognitive apparatus, it pretends to classify experience and nature. It is, as Lévi-Strauss named it, a wild way of thinking, a science of the concrete. Henri Hubert and Marcell Mauss described magical determinism in the following way: it has rules, laws that must and can be found again, and its principal feature resides in the importance given to symbolic thinking.52 A symbolic way of thinking - and here we return to what we said at the beginning (Cassirer) – that is also characteristic of cognitive apparatus like religion, art, and science, some of whose topmost examples are mathematics and geometry. Magical acts have precise functions in social life: to produce long distance healing, disease, and fortune; to modify meteorological conditions in order to restore the order of nature when it has been compromised by an external agent; within shamanism, all practices concerning health; to establish contact with the dead, so that, with their supernatural powers, they can participate and foster the existence of the living; hexes or death by voodoo… All of them are magical acts, with precise roles within a community, that pretend to work on the world (of behaviours, feelings, or on the physical world itself) by symbolic means (at distance, voluntarily or involuntarily, with prayers, incantations, wishes, curses…), by physical means (filters, amulets…) or by a combination of both. Therefore, we are also talking about a technology, just as it happens with western science: it has technological applications.53 Having said that, we, the ones in the world of literate practices, are westerners, even if we belong to a region of ethnical and cultural diversity par excellence, even if we live in times of decolonization and even if our phenotype and part of our daily practices indicate that we are mixed with other ethno-cultural groups. Because, who in the world can nowadays say that he or she is not a mestizo of some kind? It may sound redundant, or it may not, since from a differential focus of History and Cultural Studies, more attention must be paid to a possible Intellectual 52. “[...] natural conditions are not experienced. Furthermore, they don’t exist on their own because they are a function of the technique and lifestyle of the population that defines them and makes sense out of them, using them in a given direction. […] humans’ relationships with the natural environment play the role of objects of thought: humans don’t perceive them passively, they grind them after reducing them to concepts, in order to extract a system that is never predetermined: assuming the situation to be the same, it always allows for many possible systematizations”. Lévi-Strauss Claude, El pensamiento salvaje, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, p. 142; and Hubert Henri and Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie”, L’Année Sociologique, V. 7, 1902-1903, pp. 1-146. 53. Ceballos Gómez, “Quien tal hace, que tal pague”… 54. See Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition. A Study in Historical Methodology [1961], London, Routledge & Kegan, 1965; Ong Walter, The Presence of the Word. Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1st. ed. 1967) Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986, and Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London-New York, Methuen, 1982; Jack Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968; The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977; “Civilisation de l’écriture et classification ou l’art de jouer sur les tableaux”, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 2, No. 1, February, 1976. pp. 87-101, and Contradicciones y representaciones. La ambivalencia hacia las imágenes, el teatro, la ficción, las reliquias y la sexualidad, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1999; Prins Gwyn, “Historia oral”, in Burke Peter (Comp.), Formas de hacer Historia, pp. 144-176. 55. Ceballos Gómez, Diana Luz, Hechicería, brujería… 25 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke History of Other-Intellectuals. However, this must be done starting from a more general reflection on society and the culture production circuit, that is, from cognitive and symbolic practices of ignorant people (in the broadest sense of the word, and without any semantic derogatory charge), from the ways in which they are produced, and the ways in which they circulate and become appropriated, from cultural analysis and a broadening of the notion of text to all forms of speech, just like it’s understood by hermeneutics, semantics, and the wrongly named “new cultural history”; all of which don’t forget the much needed anchoring in society, as many historiographical analyses of a culturalist type do. Naturally, writing a cultural history or, if you wish, an intellectual history of the illiterate, of the other-intellectuals, of those who left behind their knowledge in the foundations of orality and traditions,54 is much more difficult, because “their texts” are out of our reach, never materialized in written sources that withstand the passing of time. And if they reached us, it was through the voices of others, who filtered and interpreted (and perhaps betrayed: traduttore, traditore) their thinking or practices. I think, for instance, about the long tradition of ancestral knowledge produced by diverse forms of the wisdom of shamans, figures at the centre of pre-Colombian America’s communities (and even of today’s) and whose knowledge reached us, for previous centuries, through sources written by “white” literates and, not on few occasions, through the hands of judges and mediated by criminal processes, in which they were the accused part. I think also about midwives, herb-doctors and herbalists that we come to know in the same way or by the documentation of professionalization processes, of the normalization of medico-pharmaceutical practices and of illiterate practitioner’s persecutions. In these relationships, each one feels his or her own alterity,55 because literates also find themselves in an alterity relationship when it comes to knowledge and practices that they don’t understand. Literates are also a minority, even if that minority holds symbolic and, most of the time, economic and political power. Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 26 Or when we think about practical ancestral knowledge or mestizo artisanal knowledge, at risk of extinction or already extinct in some of our countries and regions due to the emergence and consolidation of modern universities; lost cultural treasures that we know through civil judgements, political movements or all kinds of sociabilities. Or about cultural intermediaries that drove their communities to action: characters like Túpac Amaru in Peru in 1780-1782 or neo-granadian artisans of the Comunero movement and the uprising lead by the Katari brothers in Alto Peru, both in 1781. And, if we think of Europe, we find a case like that of Menocchio de Ginzburg,56 the miller. This is just to name a few known examples. We can’t forget that the set of objects, practices, representations and knowledge that we denominate as popular, refers more to a particular way of appropriating what the symbolic universe of a certain culture makes available for a determined human group, than to a separate and particular set that we could denominate as “popular” or “subaltern”; a very fortunate term that Antonio Gramsci brought to our attention.57 As I mentioned before, the space of representations is a battlefield of classifications and this is evident in conflicts between neighbouring cultures or in cultural conflicts between different groups within the same society or community. In the scientific field, we could say, following Bourdieu (although many others have addressed the issue; let’s just think about Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols), that a scientific discourse sanctions a state of division of the social world and the view that legitimates those divided things, through two groups: the critic of this classification and the accomplice, who shares it, in that battlefield of classifications in two fields: the one of objectified knowledge (a fight for the legitimate principle of division of the scientific field) and the one of intellectuals (a fight for the legitimate principle of division of the social field58). 56. Ginzburg Carlo, El queso y los gusanos. El cosmos según un molinero del siglo XVI, 2nd. ed. Barcelona, Muchnik, 1982. 57. Burke Peter, Popular Culture...; Warneken Bernd Jürgen, Die Ethnographie popularer Kulturen. Eine Einführung, Wien-Köln-Weimar, Böhlau, 2006; Chartier Roger, „‘Cultura popular’: retorno a un concepto historiográfico”, in Manuscrits, No. 12, January, 1994, pp. 43-62; Kelley Donald, „The Old Cultural History“, in History and the Human Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1996, pp. 101-126; Schröder Gerhart and Helga Breuninger (ed.), Kulturtheorien der Gegenwart. Ansätze und Positionen, Frankfurt am Main-New York, Campus Verlag, 2001; Hobsbawm Eric and Terence Ranger (ed.), The Invention of Tradition [1983], Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; Ginzburg Carlo, Religioni delle classi popolari, Ancona, Quaderni Storici, No. 41, 1979. 58. For the case of the ruling cadres and classifications, cf.: Boltanski Luc, “Les cadres autodidactes», in Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, Vol. 22 (Bureaucratie d’État et pouvoir des intellectuels), No. 1, 1978, pp. 3-23”; «Les systèmes de représentation d’un groupe social: les ‘cadres’», Revue française de sociologie, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 631-667; «Taxinomies sociales et luttes de classes [La mobilisation de «la classe moyenne» et l’invention des «cadres»]», in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 29 [Les classes-enjeux], September, 1979, pp. 75-106; «Taxinomies populaires, taxinomies savantes: les objets de consommation et leur classement». 59.The works of Bourdieu and Chartier are strongly influenced by German traditions, and in them both payed tribute to Elias. The first French translation of the first volume of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation by Norbert Elias was done in 1973 under the name La civilisation des mœurs (a title reminiscent of Voltaire? Paris, Calmann-Lévy) from the second German edition, published in Germany by Suhrkamp in 1969 (the French edition closes with a section of “Critiques et commentaires” by diverse authors and an interview of Elias, pp. 393-447). It is with this German 1969 edition that an appropriation of this work really begins.The first edition was published by Haus zum Falken of Basel Publishing House (Switzerland) in 1939. Roger Chartier, who wrote prologues for several translations of Elias’ texts into French, tells us in a special issue of the Vingtième Siècle Magazine [“Pour un usage libre et respectueux de Norbert Elias”, inVingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, No. 106, february 2010 (Spécial: Norbert Elias et le 20e siècle. Le processus de civilisation à l’épreuve), pp. 37-52], that the first text in French by this author was published by Bourdieu in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1976 [Norbert Elias, «Sport et violence», Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,Vol. 2, No. 6, 1976, pp. 2-21] and that the first encounter of certain French historians (François Furet, Georges Vigarello, André Burguière, Jean-Louis Flandrin, Chartier…) with Elias was organized in Göttingen by Professor Rudolf von Thadden –Professor at the city University– in 1979. Elias was initially linked to the history of mentalities, but soon claimed his own place and was appropriated by historians such as the ones previously mentioned or such as Jacques Revel and Bernard Lacroix. Bourdieu shares the theory of habitus and field with Elias and also the idea that sociology “is characterized by a form of interpretation and not by the chronology of its objects…, mostly with the intention to define social spaces incorporated by individuals; individuals that act in the same social spaces” (p. 12, which is reminiscent of Mannheim, for whom the second worked as an assistant). His proposal restores the importance of politics, “it binds singular works to the habitus, without which they could not have been conceived, within the frame, this time, of an intellectual or aesthetic history” (p. 20). 60. Ricœur Paul, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986; Educación y política. De la historia personal a la comunión de libertades, 2nd. ed., Buenos Aires, Prometeo Libros, 2009. Both La ideología alemana and Las tesis sobre Feuerbach were written by Marx and Engels around 1846, and we can’t forget that the notion of practice, of action, is restored in the second text. See also: Althousser Louis, Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche), Paris, La Pensée 15, 1970; Eagleton Terry, Ideology. An introduction, London, Verso, 1991, y After Theory, New York, Penguin, 2004; Dijk Teun A. van, Ideology. A multidisciplinary approach, London, Sage, 1998, y Bourdieu Pierre and Luc Boltanski, «La production de l’idéologie dominante», in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 2, No. 2-3, June, 1976, pp. 3-73. 27 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke I remember the debate brought up by Chartier, in The World as Representation, in which, supported by traditions like sociology –gravitating around Bourdieu and the Actes de la recherche, about De Certeau, Elias,59 Ricœur and the hermeneutics- and also by other legacies of cultural history originated in Germany, Italy and other confines, he distanced himself from both intellectual history or history of ideas, and the history of mentalities, deeply rooted in France – in Latin America too – for several decades, with the interest of approaching reading practices and the Bibliothèque Bleue, a collection of books, printed in Troyes from 1602, that circulated among illiterate sectors in France. It is through collective representations that people incorporate a particular view of the world and the structures of the social world they inhabit, as it was already pointed out, in a negative way, by Karl Marx in the German Ideology and in a different fashion by the other two philosophers of suspicion (Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud) or by a neo-Kantian as Cassirer, lengthily exposed by Pierre Bourdieu, by Georg Gadamer in his works and, concretely, by Paul Ricœur in his reflections on interpretation and ideology;60 a notion presented in France, originally, Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 28 by Émile Durkheim in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1898 and, later, in a 19011902 text, written with his nephew, Marcel Mauss, in L’Année sociologique.61 Diverse groups of representations, even within the same society, imply diverse ways to make sense of the experience of the world and to appropriate it. And this includes, of course, the world of writing, and it’s what gives importance to the analysis of appropriation and the forms of circulation of texts, of discourses, symbolic practices, ideas and theories - scientific or not -, because, in every act of appropriation there is an act of change, of transformation, of contribution, of loss and of recreation, that stamps the seal of the “hermeneutical horizon” (Gadamer, Koselleck) or the “epistemological profile” (Bachelard) characteristic of the human group in which it circulates. Works travel around the social world (Chartier). This also requires us to think that “reception,” as such, doesn’t exist, because instead of being a passive act, it is a transformative one, even if academic theories don’t allow us to elucidate it at first sight.The most obvious examples are the practice of law, and judicial and jurisprudential theories, their circulation and appropriation all around the world. Regarding this matter, Chartier pointed out that, for “the diverse meanings conferred to a text, or to a group of texts”, it wasn’t only required to analyse the “repertoire with its motifs”,62 but also the principles “of classification, organization, verification”, “that govern their production, as well as revealing the structures of written objects (or oral techniques) that ensure their transmission”.63 Experience is 61. «Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, V. 6, No. 3, May, 1898, pp. 273-302; Durkheim Émile and Marcel Mauss, «De quelques formes de classification. Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives” [1901-1902], in L’Année Sociologique, 6, 1901-1902, pp.1-72, in http:// www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/index.html, retrieved in may 2004. We can’t forget to note Durkheim’s neokantian roots, evident in the notion of representation. By Henri Lefebvre see: La presencia y la ausencia. Contribución a la teoría de las representaciones [1980], México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983. As well as: Durand, Gilbert, Las estructuras antropológicas de lo imaginario. Introducción a la arquetipología general [1960], Madrid, Taurus, 1981; La imaginación simbólica [1964], Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 1971; L’Imaginaire. Essai sur les sciences et la philosophie de l’image, Paris, Hatier, 1994; Certeau Michel de, La Culture au Pluriel, Paris Union Générale d’Éditions, 1974; La faiblesse de croire, Paris, Seuil, 1987; La possession de Loudun [1978], Paris, Gallimard-Folio, 2005; L’invention du quotidien. 1 Arts de faire, Paris, Gallimard-Folio, 1980; Delacampagne Christian, “La sociedad, lo simbólico y lo sagrado”, in Psiquiatría y opresión, Barcelona, Destino, 1978, pp. 165-191; Douglas, Mary, Natural symbols. Explorations in Cosmology [1970], 3rd. ed., New York, Pantheon, 1982; Baczko Bronislaw, Les imaginaires sociaux: mémoire et espoirs collectifs, Paris, Payot, 1984; Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber, Meaning and Relevance, Cambridge University Press, 2012. 62. This matter has been the source of long discussions, lasting several years, between the School of Cambridge, especially lead by Quentin Skinner, and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, researchers of political languages, intellectual history and ideas, as well as analysists of language and writing in a broader sense. 63. Chartier, El mundo…, pp. iv-v. 3. To conclude, I will say something daring: each knowledge system is a fiction, a cognitive apparatus that mediates and builds our experience. As François Hartog points out, quoting Braudel, we are, more or less, prisoners of “the inertia of 64. Conceptual history begins with the notion of experience, as German hermeneutics does. Vid. the telling chapter “Terror y sueño” of the Third Part (On the semantics of experience’s historical change) of the book by Reinhart Koselleck, Futuro pasado. Para una semántica de los tiempos históricos [1979], Barcelona, Paidós, 1993, y Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2010 65. Chartier, El mundo…, p. ix y xi. Chartier proposes three underlying assumptions: 1) the individual is inscribed “in reciprocal dependences constituent of the social configurations to which he belongs”, he isn’t free: 2) he puts “in a central place the question of the articulation of works, representations and practices with the divisions of the social world that, at the same time, are incorporated and produced by thoughts and behaviours”; 3) the political isn’t autonomous, “the ways of organization and of the exercise of power, assume the equilibrium of specific tensions among social groups” and model “particular interdependence bonds, a structure of the original personality”. His work is influenced by N. Elias, because he allows the “articulation of the two meanings that are always intertwined in our use of the term culture. The first designates works and gestures that, in a given society, are concerned with aesthetic or intellectual judgement. The second certifies everyday practices; “without quality”, that weave the fabric of day to day relationships and express the way in which a singular community, in time and space, lives and reflects on its relationship with history and the world” pp. x-xi. 66. Gadamer Hans-Georg, Verdad y método…; Ricœur Paul, La metáfora viva, Ediciones Cristiandad, Madrid, 1980; Tiempo y narración. 3 volumes, México, Siglo XXI, 1995 y 1996; Teoría de la interpretación. Discurso y excedente de sentido, Siglo XXI Editores, México, 1999; Del texto a la acción, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001; La memoria, la historia y el olvido, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires, 2004; Caminos del reconocimiento, Trotta, Madrid, 2005; Koselleck Reinhart and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Historia y hermenéutica, Barcelona, Paidós, 1993; Koselleck Reinhart, Estratos del tiempo. 29 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke irreducible to speech64, even if its traces reach us, investigators, “through texts that want to organize, subdue or represent it”, so we can’t reduce or identify the “‘practical logic’ that governs behaviour”, “the identities and social relations” with the “hermeneutic, literate, logocentric, scriptural logic” that wishes to “fixate sense and articulate the correct interpretation that should constrain the act of reading (or looking)”,65 so it will be necessary to analyse the appropriation reaching the collective, what doesn’t remain in the personal sphere, or even among minorities, since, finally, intellectual lived history, the one that we all live as actors of its interweaving, takes paths - sometimes uncertain- in which we receive thoughts and are nourished in unexpected ways and learn, from someone, something that was thought by someone else in a distant place. I think about Hartog, about his historicity regimes, his notion of time, of omnipresent present, partly based in Paul Ricœur’s work but that through him show a strong influence of Koselleck (and therefore of Gadamer) and of the Sattelzeit notions - strata of time -, expectation of future, historic-hermeneutical horizon.66 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 30 disciplines, the routines of schools and the weight of institutions”: “it frequently happens that, under the influence of rich and strong traditions, an entire generation traverses, without participating, the time of an intellectual revolution”.67 Although we, historians, are aware that history is a narrative, a text and a representation of the past (even Von Ranke, Droysen and other 19th century historians said so in their time), it is also clear that the texts we produce refer to actions, concrete events, experiences lived by people; to their pain, their joy, their “real world”. Hence the importance of an analysis of appropriation and circulation, also in the wide social world, of the objects of knowledge, let’s call them that, and of the perceptions about people who produce them, the authors, since it is to the extent that they are able to impose themselves to the social group, that they are recognized and accomplish the performative purposes of all rationalist discourse (Weber, Elias, Bourdieu), by imposing certain ways to classify and organize experience (Durkheim, Cassirer, Sperber, Eliade68). As Bourdieu already said, “realities” are constituted by the revelation and construction power that discourses exert. And I would add: and symbolic practices and, therefore, representations and the constant fighting game in which they inhabit the social world, with their creative strength, that in other fields has been called, by this and other authors, the symbolic power, the symbolic efficiency or the formative and performative capability of symbolic structures (Marx, Cassirer, Turner, Geertz, Schneider, Eliade, Durand, Starovinski, Baczko, Delacampagne…). Let’s simplify this reflection to the limit: on one hand, A) the communities, in their social world have PRACTICAL FUNCTIONS, with which they create PRACTICAL CLASSIFICATIONS that generate SOCIAL EFFECTS; on the other hand, B) in this social (or cultural, if you prefer that term) and dialectic game between practices and representations, PRACTICAL REPRESENTATIONS are generated, and it is in this interaction where the PRODUCTION OF THE OBJECTIVE REALITY takes place. It means that in the production of discourses and texts, in the classification of experience, we have, on one hand, SOCIAL PRACTICES lived by means of 67. François Hartog, Regímenes de historicidad. Presentismo y experiencias del tiempo, México, Universidad Iberoamericana, pp. 14-15. Now, for instance, let’s start to think about animals in a different way, to put them in a different place, even in the context of the Law, and to see ourselves also as animals, in diverse ways. As an illustration: Bailly Jean-Christophe, El animal como pensamiento, Santiago de Chile, Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2014, and Delacampagne Christian, Les animaux ont-ils des droits?, Paris, Louis Audibert, 2003. 68. A tradition that is not innocent: Weber Max, El político y el científico; Elias Norbert, Compromiso y distanciamiento, Bourdieu Pierre (standing on Marx’s, Weber’s and Elias’s shoulders), El oficio del sociólogo, and so on… Cassirer, Sperber, Eliade, Durkheim, Nietzsche, Marx... 69. Bourdieu, Cassirer, Sperber, Lefebvre, Turner… 70. Ultimately, if we step out of the inexorable dichotomy, established for the West in ancient Greece, between doxa and episteme, we could say that both, the knowledge of the ignorant and the knowledge of the literate, can aspire to scientific status. Some studies and scholars on these topics: Bachelard Gaston, La formación del espíritu científico [1934], Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI Editores, 1972; La filosofía del no [1940], Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 1978, and Epistemología, selección de textos de Dominique Lecourt, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1971; Kuhn, Thomas S., La estructura de las revoluciones científicas [1962], México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1971; Popper Karl, Conjeturas y refutaciones. El desarrollo del conocimiento científico [1963], Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1980; Alexandre Koyré, Études galiléennes, Paris, Hermann, 1939; From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1957, and Místicos, espirituales y alquimistas del siglo XVI alemán [1955], Madrid, Akal, 1981; Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe [1959], London, Arkana-Penguin, 1990; Canguilhem Georges, The Normal and the Pathological [1966], New York, Zone Books, 1991; etc. 31 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS (with language and the symbolic flow as centres), that are acts of knowledge and recognition, of perception and appropriation of the world69, with which we build OBJECTUAL REPRESENTATIONS or SYMBOLIC OBJECTS (THINGS, emblems, flags, dialects, strategies of symbolic manipulation –powers, stigmas, prejudices, signs, codes…-) and we fabricate certain ideas about ourselves and about others, that is to say, we create representations (about ourselves an about the others) and differentiation processes. Although it’s not my purpose, we could also take a little ex-cursus through the contemporary academic world, through the knowledge that the West considers THE KNOWLEDGE, in order to realize that the field is governed by parameters alien to the production of knowledge itself, with which epistemology was so deeply concerned, and history and philosophy of science in the second half of the 20th century,70 and we have entered the logic of global capitalism in its production, with measurement indexes, bibliometrics, etc. To conclude, all knowledge is ultimately local knowledge, and to think about the way it was conceived is also to think about culture and its production circuit, since not all cultural systems are produced within the same logic or with the same rationality principles. A situation that leaves us but one working method: to perform an understanding of understanding, to comprehend how we comprehend, in order to encompass the diverse systems of interpretation, which is the HERMENEUTICAL TASK (Gadamer, Ricœur, Koselleck): describe (thick description), evaluate/interpret, translate/understand (Steiner), practice criticism, show the internal logic. As previously stated, thought is organized by the symbolic structures in which it is immersed, and it’s only later that it gets particularised or made individual; adding to that the fact that symbolic contents are of a socially differentiated nature Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke 32 and, partly, of an ambiguous quality, so that cultural analysis continues to depend, partially, on the field in which it is practiced, the circuit of culture production and the rationality that constitutes certain human group; the set of rules that governs them (institutions), and the ways in which they are produced, circulate and are appropriated: practices, representations, knowledge and discourses, discourses that materialize in texts, oral and written, in works, behaviours, laws… This also leads us to a reflection by Chartier, useful for the young, who can re-think the way they work and analyse. We, the older ones, have the paths open by our own practice through the years: Works… don’t have a stable, universal, fixed sense. […] Produced in a specific sphere, the artistic and intellectual field with its rules, conventions, and hierarchies, works escape and acquire density by traveling, sometimes for long periods, throughout the social world. Deciphered by means of the affective and mental schemes that constitute “culture” itself (in the anthropological sense) of the receiving communities, works take, in reciprocity, a precious source to reflect upon the essential: namely, the construction of the social bond, the awareness of subjectivity, the relationship with the sacred.71 To conclude, I apologise for citing again in extenso a fragment of José Lorite Mena’s book Sociedades sin Estado. El Pensamiento de los Otros, which refers to the way of thinking of those societies and cultures that don’t have a privileged place in the international landscape and to the difficulties in understanding what the relationship between both sides of the equation may bring: On a first general level, phenomenic and immediate, intercultural differences display a systemic dissymmetry that fractures mutual interpretations. We’re talking about irreducible “epistemological profiles” (G. Bachelard). […] Inter-culturally, the homogeneity of categories is a mere appearance or a nominalist resource: it is the denial of culture as a concrete and functional practice of a world. Hence the considerable difficulty to think two cultures together, with same time and meaning: there is an endless drift of imponderabilia in the categorical adjustment. It is necessary to accept that, when categories are compared, it’s not about isolations of a particular element – which would allow for transversal universalisations- but about concentrations of the whole, of concrete universals.72 71. Chartier, El mundo…, p. xi. 72. Lorite Mena José, Sociedades sin Estado…, pp. 7-8. 73. Steiner, Después de Babel...; Todorov Tzvetan, Simbolismo e interpretación… 74. See Chapter 1, “Entender es traducir” of Steiner’s book, Después de Babel... 75. Ceballos Gómez Diana L., “Leer a Peter Burke”, p. 32. See also Burke, Peter, Varieties of Cultural History, Ithaca-New York, Cornell University Press, 1997. 33 Knowledge, Culture and Society - Peter Burke With this last idea, it is interesting to return to the referenced works of Professor Burke and to his emphasis on what we might call the historicity of language.73 In this reflection about the character of symbolism in our society and the legacy of the Enlightenment, which leads us to disqualify other-knowledge (non-Western knowledge), it is easy to point at views and findings of conceptual history and political languages that aim towards the difficulties of the translation and circulation of concepts;74 also an interesting topic, and to a certain degree a trend in intellectual history studies; one that, to a more general extent, results in an unavoidable mention of George Steiner…The language variable takes us back to the most classical antecedents of German cultural analysis in the 18th and 19th centuries, when, along with figures like Herder, Dilthey and Boas, the idea of universal abstraction was questioned…Professor Burke, in his analysis of cultural history, takes again contributions from the classical Kulturgeschichte and invites us to think of a way of making history outside the classical debate of the closed concept of “culture”, starting instead “[…] from a wide notion of culture, not restricted to the field of cultural products and which implies an interdisciplinary work from multiple perspectives of history”.75