Cultural History and its Neighbours

Abstract

This article offers a kind of map of intellectual fields that are more or less close to cultural history. It is difficult to separate cultural history from intellectual, social and political history, from archaeology and from the histories of such activities as art, literature, language and religion, whether these histories are studied in departments of history or under the umbrella of “visual studies”, “religious studies” or “cultural studies”. All these neighbours form an “inner circle”, discussed in relative detail. Beyond it lies a “middle circle” of disciplines that are separate from cultural history but have made considerable impact on it: anthropology, ethnology, sociology, politics and geography. Still further away, and discovered by cultural historians only recently, comes an “outer circle”, comprising psychology, cognitive studies, neuroscience and biology. The effect of the outer circle of disciplines on the practice of cultural history remains uncertain.