PRELIMINARY NOTES: How to do things with cultures? International Perspectives on the Theory and Practices of Cultural Studies

PRELIMINARY NOTES In 1923, William M. Handy published a four-volumes-work for the journal American Society of Culture entitled The Science of Culture. It focused on good manners, dining etiquette, fashion, and the rules of polite conversation: nowadays, we would label it as a book on “social mores”. However, it was only with the establishment of the “Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies” at the University of Birmingham in 1964 that the so-called “Cultural Studies” really took off in English-speaking countries. Within a few decades – especially from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1940s – scholars, either individually or as members of schools of thought, began to work – with different theoretical approaches and across different disciplines – on new methodologies and topics that go under the label of “cultural history”. Examples of this new scientific interest were the Annales school, which was founded in France in 1929 in the wake of the anthropological and sociological research developed by Gabriel Tarde, Marcel Mauss, and Emile Durkheim; the work of the Dutch historian of civilizations Johan Huizinga, who in the 1933 issue of the journal De Gids described Aby Warburg’s research as «a laboratory for cultural sciences»; and the investigations conducted by Max Weber and Georg Simmel in Germany. At the same time, eminent researchers in Italy – who are largely neglected nowadays, such as Paolo Mantegazza, Cesare Lombroso, and Camillo Sante De Sanctis – were attempting to combine social and natural sciences, psychology and historical-religious studies, medical science and biology, sociology and philosophy. Soon after the Second World War, thanks to the innovations introduced by structuralism in the social sciences, all these efforts to bridge different fields of research in the name of multiculturality and cross-disciplinarity gave rise, in Germany as well as in England, to the aforementioned field of “Cultural Studies” (later mostly developed in the US) and its German counterpart, the Kulturwissenschaft(en). In Italy and France, instead, the new topics and methodology were not included among the officially recognised- academic and scientific branches of knowledge.