Critical Junctions

The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s.

This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

Don Kalb is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Budapest, and Senior Researcher at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His books include Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950 (Duke University Press 1997); The Ends of Globalization. Bringing Society back in, (ed., Rowman and Littlefield 2000); Globalization and Development: Key Issues and Debates (ed., Kluwer Academic 2004); Headlines of Nation, Subtext of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe (co-ed (with Gábor Halmai), Berghahn Books 2011). He is the founding editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.

Herman Tak is an Associate Professor of European Anthropology at University College Roosevelt in The Netherlands.

“The editors stake out an appealing middle ground that builds on the expanded notion of class that the cultural turn itself advance against a narrow economism of an earlier generation. Second, the volume reminds us of the legacy of anthropology to historical thinking.”  ·   Journal of Social History

“… highly provocative and, for an edited book, unusually even…Whether moved to agreement or to dissent, the reader will learn much from this timely collection.”  ·  Focaal