Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice

History and Theory 39 (3):311-330 (2000)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the “culture as structure”/“culture as practice” divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Narrative Explanations: The Case of History.Paul A. Roth - 1988 - History and Theory 27 (1):1-13.
Culture and Evolutionary Explanations.Jean Lachapelle - 1999 - Dissertation, University of Guelph (Canada)
Culture and Reason.Xunwu Chen - 1994 - Dissertation, Fordham University
The Significance of the Philosophy of Culture.Kun Wu - 2001 - Philosophy and Culture 28 (5):385-395.
Structuralism and the Writing of Intellectual History.Sande Cohen - 1978 - History and Theory 17 (2):175-206.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-02-22

Downloads
1 (#1,769,934)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads

Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
How can I increase my downloads?

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references