Human Science or a Human Face? Social History and the “Two Cultures” Controversy

Ortolano, Guy

doi:10.1086/421929

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…146 This subsumed British folk culture into a much newer and quite different set of politically charged intellectual developments, which Atkinson knew would be the best ally for museums. 147 Like the new academic social historians of the provincial universities, he continued to stress regionalism, what he described as 'the essence of place'. 148 Museums, it was observed, had a clear role in modern family life, and experiential education would be at the heart of all endeavours: 'Imagine centres where all types of education and heritage overlap'.…”

Section: 'Second Wave' Folk Museologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Folk Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain

Carter

2017

Twentieth Century British History

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Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic 'first wave' folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a 'conservative modernity', which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a 'second wave' folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums' perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization.

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Section: 'Second Wave' Folk Museologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Folk Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain

Carter

2017

Twentieth Century British History

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Finding modernity in England's past: Social anthropology and the remaking of social history in Britain, 1959–77

Foks

2024

History of the Human Sciences

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British historians drew on anthropological exemplars to remake social history between 1959 and 1977. Eric Hobsbawm's ‘primitive rebels’, Peter Laslett's World We Have Lost, Keith Thomas’s studies of witchcraft, and E. P. Thompson's ‘moral economy’ were all inspired by contemporary social anthropology, and they transformed historians’ understanding of the past. Reconstructing this moment of cross-disciplinary research contributes to our understanding of broader changes in the mid-century human sciences. This was a moment of grand theorizing about ‘modernization’, capitalism, and industrialization. Social historians responded to these concerns by drawing analogies between the past and the ethnographic present. The result was a number of hugely influential studies of social change that posed new questions to those seeking to create abstract models of modernization out of the English past.

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Historian of intellectual history John G. A. Pocock

Fillafer¹

2016

Opera Historica

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Human Science or a Human Face? Social History and the “Two Cultures” Controversy

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Rethinking Folk Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain

Rethinking Folk Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain

Finding modernity in England's past: Social anthropology and the remaking of social history in Britain, 1959–77

Historian of intellectual history John G. A. Pocock

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