Daniel J. Walkowitz | The Cultural Turn and a New Social History: Folk Dance and the Renovation of Class in Social History | Journal of Social History, 39.3

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Daniel J. Walkowitz | The Cultural Turn and a New Social History: Folk Dance and the Renovation of Class in Social History | Journal of Social History, 39.3 | The History Cooperative

THE CULTURAL TURN AND A NEW SOCIAL HISTORY: FOLK DANCE AND THE RENOVATION OF CLASS IN SOCIAL HISTORY

By Daniel J. Walkowitz New York University

Class has largely disappeared as a useful category of analysis in social history, most especially for the social history of the recent past. While this is a problem general to social history, it is especially acute in the well-established field of labor history and in the burgeoning new field of middle-class studies. For the most part, labor history has focused on industrial working-class communities and, predominantly, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where their struggles were most evident and heroic.¹ In contrast to the growth of middle-class studies, some historians fear that in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, labor history is in jeopardy of atrophying.² I believe, however, that if social history is to mature analytically, the ascendance of the one and decline of the other has to be reversed, if only because they are properly not opposites but twins.	1
The postmodern focus on the language of class and subjectivity has contributed to the contemporary problem of class, even as I think it offers a way out of it. The shift from production to consumption in modern industrial (or, postindustrial) society has, through access to widely available consumer goods (although unequally so, which people often forget) shaped languages of class. Approximately three-quarters of the American population, for example, describe themselves as middle class.³ Many of these people are, white collar workers laboring in professional, managerial, technical or clerical occupations. Many more though are industrial workers. Sociologist David Halle's useful description of chemical workers who identify as middle-class at home and as working-class in the plant makes this point, but his larger insight is that the two worlds are not distinct.⁴ Modern class relations, and how we study them as historians, occupy a liminal space between complex subjectivities that are embedded in the relationship between languages of class and the changing material conditions of work and labor.	2
The following case study suggests that the future direction for the study of social class lies at the juncture of social and culture studies. But to begin, it is important to recognize that 'culture' in historical writing has had a range of meanings.⁵ The use of the word in labor history is not new: in the United States, 'working-class culture' was the proverbial coin of the realm in the 1970s when Herbert G. Gutman and his students worked in the long shadow of British cultural Marxists such as E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Eric Hobsbawm, and cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Sidney Mintz. Following Mintz, they placed culture and society in dialogue—the former as a resource for the latter, which functioned as a site. In seeking to give workers agency, this tradition focused on the autonomy of worker culture as it informed patterns of resistance to capitalism.⁶	3
The version of cultural history invoked in the 1980s was very different. Not unlike the backlash politics of the Reagan years, "new" cultural historians offered an alternative to social history. In its most constructive form, cultural historians such as Thomas Bender, claimed 'cultural history' as a 'whole' framework for the more empirically-based social history—the 'parts'. In other hands, however, the shift amounted to a call for a return to a 'master narrative.' In reaction to the central place social history had won for workers, minorities and women in history, this form of cultural history felt like a call to put the master back in control of the narrative.⁷ In this formulation the call for synthesis rather than balkanization, a charge which Gutman had in fact initiated, often elided the social base of cultural institutions and showed little concern for the place of power in cultural forms—famously, for Gramscian ideas of hegemony—it did not reject class analysis, it minimized it.⁸	. . .

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