Premium
Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice
Author(s) -
Kane Anne
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
history and theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.169
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1468-2303
pISSN - 0018-2656
DOI - 10.1111/0018-2656.00133
Subject(s) - structure and agency , epistemology , meaning (existential) , agency (philosophy) , sociology , narrative , explanatory power , nexus (standard) , politics , sociology of culture , action (physics) , alliance , social science , aesthetics , linguistics , political science , law , philosophy , embedded system , physics , quantum mechanics , computer science
The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the “culture as structure”/“culture as practice” divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse.