Culture is the human behavior, institutions, and beliefs that characterize societies. These include social and personal norms, values, languages, ideas, art, customs, institutions, tools, and techniques, as well as the skills and knowledge that enable people to work together or with the environment. The term culture was coined in 1886 by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to distinguish it from “barbarism.” In the English-speaking world the word has also replaced “civilization,” a neologism of the eighteenth century that was used as a synonym for modernity, and that he contrasted with classical antiquity.
The term cultural is now applied to the study of all aspects of human activity, including the humanities (literature, music, and the like) as well as the social sciences, history, anthropology, archaeology, religion, economics, politics, and law. This approach to history emphasizes the importance of understanding people and their relationships with each other and with their environments in the formation of a society.
It also emphasizes the role of individuals in interpreting the meaning of events and the creation of meaning through practices and traditions. As a consequence, new cultural history is more reflexive than the work of its nineteenth-century predecessors, and is less committed to particular theoretical approaches than to exploring how different people and places understand themselves through the activities they engage in.
Moreover, new cultural historians have been open to exploring the role of economic and social structures in shaping patterns of culture. The work of the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci, for example, prompted a rethinking of the power that ideologies have to shape cultural life. This led to the emergence of the concept of cultural hegemony, wherein the most dominant ideas and institutions gain influence over other systems of thought through the process of “diffusion.”
Another trend has been toward more empirically based research in the field of new cultural history. For example, Lun and Bond (2016) developed an eco-cultural model describing differences in national values and preferences among 65,021 representatively sampled persons in 50 nations. The authors found that nations differed in their attitudes towards self-directed versus other-directed goals for their children, and in their tolerance of interpersonal risk. The results suggest that the most fundamental causes of these differences lie in environmental features of the nation, rather than the specific cultural traits of its inhabitants.
New cultural historians have embraced, with great enthusiasm, anthropological models of culture and have made extensive use of ethnographic sources. They have studied a wide range of subjects, from the high culture of early modern Europe to the everyday lives of peasant villages in twentieth-century America. They have explored such topics as public health, memory, the Holocaust, gender, race, sexuality, and the Vietnam War. In doing so, they have demonstrated the richness and dynamism of historical inquiry.