In This Issue

This issue contains three articles and a tripartite review essay. The articles examine group possession among nuns, the cultural significance of Black Madonnas, and the use of sport as a form of political expression. The Review Essays analyze the impact of the "cultural turn" from three different analytical and disciplinary perspectives. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

Moshe Sluhovsky examines the relations between group diabolic possession in late medieval and early modern convents and changes in female spirituality. He argues that, rather than associating demonic possession with the witch craze, we should think of it as a form of ecstatic communication with the supernatural. Analyzing more than fifty cases of group possessions in convents, Sluhovsky informs us that only five cases led to witchcraft accusations and most ended in secrecy within the convent walls. Group possessions in convents resulted, he maintains, from psychological and spiritual tensions within monastic communities. Late medieval and early modern nuns lived within a contradictory set of expectations. They were trying to negotiate activism with enclosure, individuality with communality, and normative behavior with exceptional spiritual achievements. The tensions that resulted from these contradictory goals led to a heightened sense of anxiety and suspicion. Wishing for God but most likely encountering the devil, late medieval and early modern nuns were educated always to suspect their own spiritual quest. The devil, after all, was known for his ability to disguise himself as an angel of light. Sluhovsky contends, therefore, that the exact nature of the possessing agency was not automatically clear to the nuns themselves, their mother superiors, or the male theologians and exorcists who examined them. Once exorcists and theologians decided that a woman was possessed by demons rather than by God, the nuns themselves were easily persuaded to participate in the reshaping of their experience into a narrative of diabolic possession. This enabled their reintegration into the community and put an end to their suffering and self-doubts. Sluhovsky's analysis is a compelling example of the benefits of subjecting a complex experience to multiple explanations.

Monique Scheer explains that "Why is she black?" is very often the first question that comes up in connection with the black madonnas that began to appear in early modern European churches. Some have argued that the color was intentional, resulting from the fact that Mary's cult took the place (actually or psychologically) of pre-Christian mother goddesses depicted with black skin. Many scholars have maintained that the color is purely accidental, resulting from candle soot and chemical changes in the paint, and therefore essentially uninteresting. Scheer fashions a new approach to these objects by focusing not on the color's origin but rather on when and how worshipers perceived the dark complexion of these images and what it meant to them. In other words, she approaches the topic of black madonnas from the angle of a history of perception. On the one hand, Scheer does so to understand them from within the context of popular devotion to Mary; on the other, she analyzes the learned discourse on black madonnas, from theological interpretations of the color to the positivistic view that the color is accidental, as a way of examining a new understanding of skin color that emerged with the rise of a scientific paradigm of human races. Scheer thus contributes to the discussion on the European perception of black skin through history by giving us an example of how perception is determined by culture and therefore has a history. And her article also suggests how images once highly revered can become illegible and therefore enigmatic.

Robert Edelman uses an analysis of soccer clubs among Soviet workers both to go beyond the cultural turn and back to the issues of class. Soccer was one of the few areas of Soviet life in which the individual citizen had a significant measure of free choice. Soviet fans were free to choose their own teams and heroes, and those highly subjective choices represented attitudes toward the regime and other aspects of Soviet life. He examines fan choice to enlarge the debate about the attitudes of the Soviet working class in the 1930s, particularly their attitudes toward the party-state. Edelman explains that the debate flourished during the 1980s among Western scholars but stalled after the collapse of the USSR and the shift in the profession away from labor history. The fact that the politically and institutionally independent civilian Spartak team was the favorite of the Moscow male working class, which comprised the majority of the soccer audience, is important. In the absence of election returns, public opinion surveys, and a free press, team choice—as elsewhere in Europe—allowed Soviet workers to work out political identities vis-à-vis the regime. Along with examining the class dynamics of Spartak's rivalry with the secret police's Dinamo sports club, he shows the ways this social cleavage between subordinate and dominant elements was reinforced by the differing body cultures and styles of masculinity adopted by the followers of the two teams. Edelman's argument demonstrates the importance of moving sport away from the profession's margins and into the center of scholarly concerns. He does so by demonstrating that it was an activity that involved millions, who took it very seriously indeed. Although he acknowledges that these were matters of play, Edelman insists that the choices Soviet citizens made about the way they played may have been even more revealing than those they made on the factory floor or at a party congress.

Review Essays

The three essays assess the impact of the "cultural turn" on recent scholarship from different analytical and disciplinary perspectives. They focus in particular on a 1999 volume, Beyond the Cultural Turn, edited by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt. Ronald Grigor Suny, who is in political science, asserts that the conceptual revolution associated with the "cultural turn" deeply affected some social sciences, particularly history, historical sociology, and anthropology, but has had very little impact on political science. He explores the shift among social historians from a loose affiliation with the neo-Marxism of the 1960s to an engagement with culture and experience, under the influence of the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, and the appropriation at about the same time of the ethnographic methods of Clifford Geertz. The "cultural turn," with its emphasis on a more fluid, less bounded notion of culture, its Foucauldian concepts of power, and its self-reflexive attention to the role of the investigator, found little resonance among political scientists, many of whom moved from an interest in political culture and behavioralism to rational choice and game theory. Suny suggests that political science may find added value in trying to understand politics by incorporating some of the approaches of the cultural interpretivists. Patrick Brantlinger, a Victorianist from English, examines what seems to be the reluctance of Beyond the Cultural Turn's editors to claim affiliation for their "new cultural history" with either cultural studies or the new historicism. He suggests that, in the case of the latter, the reason may be that Stephen Greenblatt and other new historicists are more accepting of poststructuralist theory (especially Michel Foucault) and its relativizing implications than the editors and some of the contributors to the book are willing to be. In the case of cultural studies, the reason may be that the movement has shifted away from its quite marked historical dimension in the work of its pioneers—Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart—toward a much more contemporary focus on the mass media. Yet several of the contributors acknowledge their interest, at least, especially in cultural studies approaches to cultural-symbolic politics and emphasize the narrative and, indeed, fictive components of recent historiography. As earlier for T. B. Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, the "new cultural history" seems to answer the art-versus-science question by stressing that historiography is an art. Yet the editors and several of the contributors seem eager to affiliate with anthropology, especially by way of Clifford Geertz's "thick description," suggesting their desire to maintain that historiography is still as much science as art. Richard Handler, an anthropologist, maintains that, in contemporary Western scholarship and common sense, there is an enduring tension between realist, or objectivist, and constructionist, or semiotic, epistemologies. He argues that there is no analytically useful "beyond" to be found "beyond the cultural turn," nor is a return to "the social" a useful response to perceived excesses of semiotic theory. The dilemma raised by Bonnell and Hunt is one that anthropologists have faced throughout the history of the modern discipline, especially in the rivalries between British socialand American cultural anthropology. Within the Boasian tradition, where Handler locates himself, there is no need to posit a distinction between "the social" and "the cultural," since all human activities and symbols are at once "real" (even "material") and symbolic. He also rejects the argument that the semiotic "foundationalism" of contemporary culture theory draws on a naturalizing rhetoric. Instead, Handler insists that theorists may well believe that symboling is universal for humans, but that does not entail the idea that symbols are "natural."