The cultural turn and a new social history: Folk dance and the renovation of class in social history

Journal of Social History

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2006, Pages

  Walkowitz, Daniel J ^a,b  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Social and Cultural Analysis   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646527385     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2006.0022     Document Type: Review

References (95)

1. I wish in particular to thank Judith R. Walkowitz, Linda Tompko and Charles Briggs for helpful comments on this material. Earlier versions presented at the Journal of Social History Conference: The Future of Social History, held at George Mason University, October 22-24, 2004 and to the Urban Studies Colloquium at New York University and at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2001-02 also elicited useful suggestions for which I am grateful.
2. The publications in the Illinois University Press series, The Working-Class in American History, reflect this development. The largest and best-recognized series in American labor history, its publications mirrored the nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury scholarship of the original series editors, the doyens of the field-David Brody, Herbert G. Gutman and David Montgomery. These men, if they did not personally train many of the authors, profoundly shaped their work. From 1978 to 2002 the series published 62 volumes, the overwhelming majority of which focused on pre-World War II industrial America. The University of Illinois Press website lists the books in the series: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wcah.html (accessed, July 12, 2004).
3. The grand 'past' of labor history and its limited if not dismal present was a repeated theme in both the discussion and papers presented at the Journal of Social History Conference: The Future of Social History [hereafter, JSH Conference] held at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA., October 22-24,2004. Several papers formally addressing this shift, including: Jocelyn Wills, '"Money Makes the World Go Round, the World Go Round: Globalization, Social History, and the Resuscitation of Economic Linkages"; Prasannan Parthasarathi, "The State and Social History": Andy Wood, "The Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England."
4. See, the Introduction in Daniel J. Walkowitz, Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (Chapel Hill, 1999).
5. David Halle, America's Working Man: Home, Work, and Politics Among Blue Collar Property Owners (Chicago, 1984).
6. See, William H. Sewell, Jr., "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999) 35-36;
7. Geoff Eley, "Is all the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later," in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1996), 195-200;
8. Peter Burke, "The Origins of Cultural History," in Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, 1997), pp. 1-22;
9. and, Ronald Grigor Suny, "Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn," American Historical Review 107, no. 5 (December 2002): 476-1499.
10. For an excellent account of the cultural turns on U.S. history, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and" the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1988), chs. 13-16.
11. This was a project of British cultural Marxism more generally, nicely described in Dennis Dwarkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New-Left, and the Origins of Cultural Stupes (Durham, NC, 1997).
12. Mintz elaborated his view in prefatory material and the content to his many books. See, for example, Sidney W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane, A Puerto Rican Life History (Westport, Conn., 1974), Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974).
13. Clifford Geertz was equally influential: Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973).
14. My own dissertation reflected these influences: Daniel J. Walkowitz: "Working-Class Culture in the Gilded Age: Cohoes Cotton Workers and Troy Iron Worker protest, 1855-1884," PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Rochester, 1972.
15. Among the influential books using this notion of culture are, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York, 1983);
16. Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Indus trialijing City, 1877-1919 (Albany, 1984);
17. and, Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap amusements: working women and leisure in turn-of-the-century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).
18. See Thomas Bender, "Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History," Journal of American History, 73 (1986): 120-136.
19. The most prominent statement on the return of the master narrative was by Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative," Post & Present 85 (1979): 3-24.
20. In his call to put the State back in social history, Parthasarthathi, op cit., at the 2004 JSH Conference, iterates Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective" Journal of Social History X, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 17-32,
21. which is updated in a more nuanced form by Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 113-24.
22. See, Suny, "Back and Beyond,"
23. and Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999).
24. Andy Wood, "The Hidden Injuries of Class," 3.
25. Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75,
26. and, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988);
27. Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor ( Ithaca, 1991);
28. and, Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).
29. The debate emerged publicly in a forum surrounding a 1987 essay by John Scott in /ntemationol Labor and Working Class History: John W. Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," 31 (Spring): 1-45.
30. Scott's critique of lack of a gendered analysis in Gareth Stedman Jones' book Language of Class initiated an often-heated response by Palmer and others. Palmer's fuller critique appeared in his subsequent book: Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: the reification of language and the writing of social history (Philadelphia, 1990). Labor history sessions on the value of the cultural turn dominatednational and international conferences for the next decade, often pitting male labor historians against feminist colleagues.
31. Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (New York, 2000).
32. See, for instance, Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn;
33. and for a more recent summary of this move, Gabriella M. Spiegel, "Practicing History/Theorizing Practice: Some New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn," forthcoming in Practicing History: Neu Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguisitic Turn (New York, 2005).
34. Two papers at the JSH Conference argued most emphatically for his move: Simon Gunn, "From Hegemony to Governmantality: Changing Conceptions of Power in Social History," and Peter Borsay, "New Approaches to Social History: Myth, Memory and Place." Especially see as well, Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004),
35. and Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn.
36. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, MA, 1984 [1979]).
37. Gunn, 25-26, following Bourdieu, Distinctions (London, 1984), 208,
38. and Poscolian Meditations (Cambridge, 2000), 128-63.
39. Gunn, 25-6.
40. Kate Van Winkle Keller and Charles Cyril Henrickson, George Washington: A Biography in Social Dance (Sandy Hook, CT, 1998).
41. The roots of "The Virginia Reel" in "Sir Roger de Cloverly" had been disclosed in American publications, but do not seem to have been widely known publicly. See, Emil Rath, The Folk Dance in Education (Minneapolis, 1939), 25.
42. This point is well made by Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Soda! Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920 (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 203-13.
43. My national survey found 107 of 150 respondents found almost equal numbers had done American country or International Folk Dance before 'discovering ECD, most for many years.
44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve text as rev. by Francis Bowen, and edited by Phillips Bradley (New York, 1980 [1837];
45. and, Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6.1 (January 1995): 65-78,
46. and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 1999).
47. See, Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985), xi, xvi,
48. and Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.1. Robert Hurley, trans. (New York, 1979).
49. These citations appear originally in Andrea Volpe, Andrea. "Cartes de Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation," The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds. (New York, 2001): 157-69.
50. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing With Fraud in the Age ofBamum (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 160;
51. and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice, crans. (Cambridge, MA, 1984 [1979]).
52. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998);
53. and, Chris Ocrer, presencacion co the New York University History Department, Feb. 27, 2003.
54. George Lipsitz, "Who'll Stop the Rain: Youth Culture, Rock 'n Roll, and Social Crises," in The Sixties: From Memory to History, David Farber, ed. (Chapel Hill, 1964), 214,221-23.
55. My argumenr draws heavily here on Robert M. Collins, "Growth Liberalism in the Sixties: Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad," in The Sixties, 25-26.
56. Bourdieu, Distinctions, 283.
57. See, Alice Echols, "Nothing Distant About It: Women's Liberation and Sixties Radicalism," in The Sixties, 154-55.
58. My survey found one person who listed herself as mixed race, and she was dancing for only the second time.
59. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
60. Although some had since retired, only a single person interviewed had an occupation outside this profile. Christine Helwig had been a town manager in Westchester County, New York.
61. Christine Helwig, interview with the author and Stephanie Smith, June II, 1999, New Haven, Ct. The occupational profile is based on personal observations by the author, and reflected in regular comments on the ECD list serve.
62. Gene Murrow, interview with the author, August 29, 2000, Pine woods camp, Plymouth, MA. Several people in informal discussions told the May Gadd stories with the author at Pinewoods, August 1999, and in an interview with Brad Foster, Director of CDSS, with the author and Stephanie Smith, August 1999, Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA. As dancer and historian, I had a sense of these developments and a reading through the archives had confirmed them. Gene Murrow's observation about the 1960s as a new moment in the history of the dance community also struck me as right. ECD's elite character distinguished it from the proletarianism that had shaped the 1930s international folk dance community. But the 1960s folk revivals, which were implicated with popular protest movements, similarly seemed to coincide with the broadening of the ECD movement.
63. Arthur Cornelius, conversation with the author, December 3, 2000, New York City.
64. Murrow interview.
65. Ibid.
66. Mary Alison (psued.), interview with the author, August 29, 2000, Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA;
67. Pat Ruggiero, interview with the author, August 28, 2000,
68. Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA;
69. Thorn Yarnal, interview with the author, August 28, 2000, Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Murrow interview.
73. Sharon Green, interview with the author, August 28, 2000, Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA.;
74. Mary Alison (psued.), interview with the author, August 29, 2000, Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA.
75. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon &. Schuster, 2000).
76. Jenny Beer, email to the author, December 11, 2000.
77. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York, 1995);
78. Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia, 1986).
79. Glenn Fulbright, interview with the author and Stephanie Smith, June 13, 1999, Lenox, MA
80. Ruggiero and Yarnal interviews.
81. Ruggiero interview.
82. Beer interview.
83. Jenny Beer, interview with the author, August 30, 2000, Pinewoods Camp, Plymouth, MA.
84. Yarnal, Ruggiero, Green, Murrow, Alison and Beer interviews.
85. Ruggiero, Beer, Murrow and Alison interviews.
86. Lara Putnam, "To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World," 4, a paper at the 2004 JSH Conference, reminds us of the inscription of race in Atlantic history.
87. See Country Dance and Song Society 2000-2001 Members List (Haydenville, MA, 2000). The society lists about 3600 individual and family members spread over every state in the Union, every Province of Canada. It also has members in 15 countries, mostly in England in Denmark.
88. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991);
89. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998);
90. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. (Cambridge, MA, 1998);
91. and, Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998).
92. See Roedigger, Wages of Whiteness and Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
93. I develop how the cities were "blackened" in public imaginings in the 1950s with the rise of suburbs as safe white alternative spaces in Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (Chapel Hill, 1999), ch. 7.
94. George Whitesides, interview with the author and Stephanie Smith, June 14, 1999, Lenox, MA.
95. Andrew Ross, No-Collar: the Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (New York, 2003).