Turning “Culture” into a Historical Practice; or, What Do We Mean When We Say That Something Is “Culturally Constructed”?

The current academic discourse on “culture” is deeply grounded in connotations of contestation, contradiction, mutability, and permeability.  At first glance, nothing is fixed in this academic imagination of culture as a system of signification that de facto consistently fails to assign a fixed and sustainable meaning to historical phenomena it permeates.  And yet, the same academic paradigm that allows scholars to treat “culture” as a malfunctioning mechanism also offers an interpretive language to posit “culture” as a powerful historical agent that “constructs,” “constitutes,” “molds” the social, institutional, and subjective domains of history.  The resultant paradoxical vision of culture is thus at once a failing, malfunctioning mechanism of signification and an inescapable and overpowering system of domination that has made it exceedingly difficult for historians to even uphold, not to mention to theorize such bedrock category of historical analysis as agency.  In this paper, I explore the making of the present day academic discourse on “culture” and the analytics (that is, interpretive habits, narrativizing tropes, routine metaphors, and figures of speech) it has produced by rereading historians’ engagements with structuralist and poststructuralist theory.  Instead of focusing on discontinuities and ruptures, I build my critique out of continuities in academic theorization and imagination of cultural production between the 1970s and the 1990s.  My goal here is to trace the way the 1970s-1990s re-theorization of “culture” was turned into a historical practice and to open the conversation about present-day cultural analysis to a systematic questioning of its inbuilt limitations and taboos.