the cultural u-turn

Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research

* A history of the senses has emerged, demonstrating how changes in values and assumptions have reshaped the nature of the sense of smell while, at the same time, diminishing its role in the sensory arsenal. Modern Westerners are now viscerally disgusted by odors people used to accept, because of changing ideas about cleanliness and the body.
* Various approaches to the history of emotion have shown how basic formulations have altered, with significant implications for the ways that emotions are handled by society and experienced individually. Indulgence in grief in 19th-century America turned, by the 1920s, into aversion, so much so that deep feeling denoted a need for therapy.
* Many diseases, as well, have at least partially been explained through cultural construction. The fascinating work on the emergence of modern anorexia nervosa has shown how changing beliefs about mother-daughter bonds promoted new forms of unconscious rebellion around food as a cherished family symbol, with new standards of beauty supplementing those reactions.
Such achievements, of the cultural turn at its best, clearly indicate that we should not reverse directions too fully, even as faddish interest declines. Initial sketches, as in the history of the senses, are still being elaborated, and there is much more to be learned. But limitations in the impact of the cultural turn also provide food for thought as we consider what should come next.