In this blog post, we will examine how everyday life and personal experiences have historical significance and how they are expanded into new historical narratives from the perspective of new cultural history.
History changes. In the early days of historical research, simple chronological narratives and biographies of famous people were the norm. However, as time passed, history has developed into a discipline that analyzes increasingly complex structures and encompasses diverse perspectives. Since modern times, Marxism and the Annales School have been the two schools of thought that have had the greatest influence on history. Marxist historiography interprets history from the perspective of economic structures and class struggle, focusing on economic factors and the role of the working class as the driving forces of historical change. On the other hand, the Annales School explored social structures and changes in everyday life from a longer-term perspective, emphasizing the structural context rather than specific events. Although the two schools adopted different perspectives and methods of narration, they shared a common emphasis on “structure” in historical narration. This approach was part of an effort to understand the fundamental forces driving events, rather than simply listing them.
However, with the spread of a decentralizing tendency to dismantle absolute standards and structures across society, culture, and academia, a wind of change began to blow through the field of history. Under the influence of poststructuralism, scholars began to focus on individuals and their micro-level experiences and diverse voices rather than on large structures. The macro-level, structural framework of Marxism and the Annales School had the limitation of burying ordinary people who actually existed in history within structures. This limitation made it particularly difficult to capture the voices of the people and minorities. Individual life stories were easily overlooked in the grand discourse, which served as a significant gap in historical narratives.
However, a new approach to history that can overcome these limitations has recently emerged: “new cultural history.” New cultural history focuses on human experience rather than structure, and is interested in how people perceived and understood social reality rather than what that reality was like, and what meaning they attributed to it. This shows that individual experience and perception can occupy an important place in historical narratives. New cultural history views the minutiae of everyday culture as a driving force behind history and, recognizing its value as historical material, argues that history should be viewed through the lens of everyday culture and the lives of ordinary people, rather than through revolutions, wars, monarchs, and heroes. From this perspective, anything that people have imbued with meaning, such as autopsy reports, medical records, and graffiti, can be used as historical material. This is such a revolutionary shift in thinking that it can be said to have dismantled the existing methodology of historical research.
Let us look at some examples to see what the new cultural history approach to history is specifically. Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s book The Cheese and the Worms is one of the representative examples of new cultural history. This book depicts the life of Menocchio, a miller in northern Italy in the 16th century. The author analyzes Menocchio’s daily life as recorded in 16th-century church documents, his statements during heresy trials, and a list of his favorite books and their contents. Menocchio was executed after boldly expressing his heretical belief that “just as cheese is made from milk and maggots infest cheese, the universe came into being naturally” before a church judge. Through careful examination of the documents, the author reveals that Menocchio came to this naturalistic view of the universe through his own reading, and that his existence overturns the conventional notion that folk culture passively follows the dominant culture. This approach restores the knowledge and thought system of the common people that had been overlooked by conventional historiography, emphasizing that the common people were not simply passive beings influenced by the ruling class.
However, from the perspective of traditional historiography, one may question how records of one-time events that happened to individuals, such as “cheese and maggots,” can represent the group or society to which they belong. This can be explained by introducing the concept of “normal exceptions” by Edoardo Greco, a new cultural historian. First, as in the case of Menocchio, exceptional individuals who are labeled as heretics by the ruling class can reflect the culture of the oppressed class that opposes the ruling class, and therefore, records about them have value as normal historical materials. Second, the ruling class distorts the social reality of the oppressed class in order to justify their authority. For this reason, records of the lives of the oppressed class are inevitably exceptional and few in number. However, these records convey a great deal about the lives and thoughts of the subjugated class and are therefore valuable as historical sources. This is consistent with the aim of new cultural history, which is to capture diverse voices and experiences rather than presenting a universal and normative history.
In this way, new cultural history has opened up new horizons in historiography by restoring the personal histories of ordinary people and studying the lives of the people they represent from new perspectives and using new methods. Shin Munhwa Sa did not merely discover and research new historical materials, but fundamentally changed the way we view history. This is significant in that historical research is no longer subordinate to specific structures or ideologies, but enables richer and more multi-layered narratives through individual human experiences.
