Page 120 - Encyclopedia Of World History

470 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Church in Past, Maresby (Papua
New Guinea) featuring traditional
cult house designs.

such as history and anthropology have yet
to take place. After the 1970s, the tradi-
tional boundaries between anthropology
and history began to dissolve as scholars
realized that culture and history could not
be separated. Historians began to read the
works of cultural anthropologists, works in
which culture was seen in terms of the
meanings embedded in human interac-
tions. In the decades that followed there
was considerable debate about the politics
of ethnographic writing, and even about
the salience of the term culture. This
brought the concept of culture to the center
of academic debate and writing. These
developments, along with borrowings from
poststructuralist and postcolonial writings
in the 1980s and 1990s, served to bring
about a democratization of history and
anthropology that resulted in the inclusion
of the voices of women, minorities, and
oppressed peoples. Sensitive accounts of
the dynamics of culture, power, history,
and resistance followed. The combined
result of this intellectual ferment was the
emergence of a new genre of sophisticated
writings that is sometimes called the “new
cultural history.” Culture was no longer
seen as static and organic but as highly
factor-centered, ordered, even intuitive, and
yet prone to moments of disorder and flux. In these new scholarship, global forces are not seen as occupying
writings there is increased emphasis on microlevel stud- some higher level of existence that is separate from local
ies of the creation, transmission, and experience of culture forces. The new approach proposes that global forces
within specific historical contexts. manifest themselves in local situations in the everyday
lives of people within specific historical contexts; the
Microlevel Histories study of culture becomes the study of the interpenetration
The rise of the new cultural history has allowed the emer- of the global and the local. Writings of this genre have
gence of a third genre of culturally oriented scholarship focused on themes such as conversion, colonialism, glob-
in world history, one that explores world-historical alization, and capitalism. They provide sophisticated
themes through microlevel analyses that show the inter- treatments of culture—now viewed as a shifting arena of
penetration of global and local forces. Unlike in past meanings and actions shaped in a variety of historical