Knowledge, Culture and Society. Peter Burke
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density by traveling, sometimes for long periods, throughout the social world. Deciphered by means of the affective and mental schemes that constitute “culture” itself (in the anthropological sense) of the receiving communities, works take, in reciprocity, a precious source to reflect upon the essential: namely, the construction of the social bond, the awareness of subjectivity, the relationship with the sacred.71
To conclude, I apologise for citing again in extenso a fragment of José Lorite Mena’s book Sociedades sin Estado. El Pensamiento de los Otros, which refers to the way of thinking of those societies and cultures that don’t have a privileged place in the international landscape and to the difficulties in understanding what the relationship between both sides of the equation may bring:
On a first general level, phenomenic and immediate, intercultural differences display a systemic dissymmetry that fractures mutual interpretations. We’re talking about irreducible “epistemological profiles” (G. Bachelard). […] Inter-culturally, the homogeneity of categories is a mere appearance or a nominalist resource: it is the denial of culture as a concrete and functional practice of a world. Hence the considerable difficulty to think two cultures together, with same time and meaning: there is an endless drift of imponderabilia in the categorical adjustment. It is necessary to accept that, when categories are compared, it’s not about isolations of a particular element – which would allow for transversal universalisations- but about concentrations of the whole, of concrete universals.72
With this last idea, it is interesting to return to the referenced works of Professor Burke and to his emphasis on what we might call the historicity of language.73 In this reflection about the character of symbolism in our society and the legacy of the Enlightenment, which leads us to disqualify other-knowledge (non-Western knowledge), it is easy to point at views and findings of conceptual history and political languages that aim towards the difficulties of the translation and circulation of concepts;74 also an interesting topic, and to a certain degree a trend in intellectual history studies; one that, to a more general extent, results in an unavoidable mention of George Steiner…The language variable takes us back to the most classical antecedents of German cultural analysis in the 18th and 19th centuries, when, along with figures like Herder, Dilthey and Boas, the idea of universal abstraction was questioned…Professor Burke, in his analysis of cultural history, takes again contributions from the classical Kulturgeschichte and invites us to think of a way of making history outside the classical debate of the closed concept of “culture”, starting instead “[…] from a wide notion of culture, not restricted to the field of cultural products and which implies an interdisciplinary work from multiple perspectives of history”.75
1. I thank Juan Felipe Gutiérrez Flórez and the historian Joan Manuel Largo Vargas for their support and for critically reading and commenting on this text. Some of these considerations were presented as a preamble to the Seminar Contextos del Conocimiento, given by Professor Dr. Peter Burke in Medellín in 2015, and some others, during the 3rd Congress of Intellectual History in Latin America, held in Mexico DF in November 2016. In general, they are the result of the academic and teaching work for courses and research projects.
2. Academic Affairs Director and Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín. PhD in Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (Cultural Studies) of the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut, Tübingen University, Germany. Research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in 1997 and 1999; and postdoctoral researcher in Germany in 2003, 2008 and 2010. Historian from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Medellín. National Culture Award 2000. Medal of University Merit 2011. She has published, among others, Hechicería, brujería e Inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. Un duelo de imaginarios; Hexerei und Zauberei im Neuen Königreich Granada, Eine Untersuchung magischer Praxen, and “Quien tal hace que tal pague”. Justicia, magia y sociedad en el Nuevo Reino de Granada; as well as articles in collective works and in national and international journals.
3. Burke Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, Temple Smith, 1978 (reprint. 1979, 1983, 1988, among many others); Küchenlatein. Sprache und Umgangssprache in der frühen Neuzeit, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1989 (these and other essays were published in Spanish as Hablar y callar. Funciones sociales del lenguaje a través de la historia, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1996), y Kultureller Austausch, Frankfurt am Main, Surhkamp, 2000. See also Soziologie und Geschichte, 11th. ed., Hamburg, Junius, 1989; and Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, London, Batsford, 1972 (2nd. ed. 1974; 3rd. ed., 1986; reprint. 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995; 4th. ed., 1999, reprint. 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006).
4. A more detailed reading of this subject can be found in Ceballos Gómez Diana L., “Reading Peter Burke”, in Chicangana-Bayona Yobenj and Catalina Reyes Cárdenas, Peter Burke, Debates y perspectivas de la Nueva Historia Cultural, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Alcaldía Mayor, Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, 2011, pp. 27-33.
5. Steiner George, Después de Babel. Aspectos del lenguaje y la traducción, 1st. ed., México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981.
6. Burke Peter, A Social History of Knowledge. I. From Gutenberg to Diderot, Cambridge, Polity, 2000 (reprint. 2002), and A Social History of Knowledge. II. From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia, Cambridge & Malden, Polity, 2012. See also Briggs Asa & Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media. From Gutenberg to the Internet, Cambridge, Polity, 2002, and Stiegler Bernard, Die Logik der Sorge. Verlust der Aufklärung durch Technik und Medien, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2008.
7. Cassirer Ernst, Philosophie der Aufklärung, in Werke, Hamburg, Meiner Verlag, 1932. See also his text An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, Yale & New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944.
8. Leroi-Gourhan André, Le geste et la parole, Paris, Albin Michel, 1964.
9. Huizinga wrote an essay on the dangers and difficulties of evolutionist interpretations in El concepto de la historia y otros ensayos, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980. In the chapter “Problemas de Historia de la Cultura”, section “II. El concepto de evolución sólo puede emplearse en la ciencia histórica de un modo condicionado y sirve muchas veces en ella de traba y obstáculo” (the concept of evolution can only be used in historical science in a conditioned way and it works in it, many times, as an obstacle).
10. Sperber Dan, Le symbolisme en général, Paris, Hermann, 1974, p. 148.
11. Turner Victor, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca-New York, Cornell University, 1967, and The Drums of Affliction. A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia, Oxford, Clarendon, 1968.
12. Sahlins Marshall, Islands of History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
13. Cassirer Ernst, Filosofía