A kind of methodological question, do you think culture is "real" or is it created by observation? Given that "culture" imposes a uniformity on the lifeworlds of innumerable diverse individuals, can you actually talk about, for example, French culture independent if talking about French culture?

For everyone: why the resurgence of interest in material culture on the part of historians as of late? From the History of the World in a 100 Objects to Jane Bennet's Vital Matter, 'things' are pretty hot in the academy. Is it a desire to sidestep some of the messiness of texts, which were so thoroughly problematized by three decades of theory? Is it a move to make our methods and ambit more interdiscplinary? A simple matter of pragmatically working with a broader array of sources without unduly privileging text?

To my mind Cultural History is, at its core, about the meaning of things.

Take, for example, the recent debate about the meaning of the Confederate Flag in the United States. This is the kind of thing cultural historians are interested in. Of course, when talking about meaning you have to talk about meaning to whom because these are not universally agreed upon and might even be hotly contested. When historians turn their eye to this moment and talk about the contested meaning of the flag, they will be doing cultural history. Indeed there is already plenty of literature on the meaning of the Confederacy.

Note that the meaning might not be the same thing as what something is. Describing the flag, how it was made, or even the battles of the American Civil War don't necessarily get you closer to answering the question. You need to get at what people think, how they react, and what they say about things. And that's not always easy depending on the sources you have available to you!

For my own work, I'm particularly interested in the ways that human bodies ascribe meaning and have meaning ascribed onto them. When I study ballet in the Soviet Union, I am interested in the ways in which an aesthetic and style of movement that emerged in and represented an aristocratic and imperial era were reconciled (or weren't!) within an environment that was purportedly antagonistic to the aristocratic and imperial past. In what ways did Soviet artists and audiences understand ballet intellectually? Did their intellectual understanding seem to conflict with their aesthetic understanding? (Spoilers: It seems to have!).

The arts aren't the only things that carry meaning with them, the flag being just one example. But cultural history can be done on practically an endless variety of topics. Food, institutions, sports, art, political process, cars, and the list could go on and on.

The beginning of the AMA mentioned symbols - and I think this is at least partly correct. The important thing to realize is that even things that aren't normally thought of as symbols carry a great deal of meaning with them. Often time people don't even think of that meaning as culturally contingent. The usual give away is when people start talking about things that are "natural." Cultural Historians tend to question just how "natural" these things are and instead what to discover how the meaning arose, how it is expressed, and what people do with that meaning.

Question for /u/TheGreenReaper7, I have a copy of Maurice Keen's Chivalry sitting on my bookshelf in the 'to-read' pile. To what extent is this book still a major work in the study of Chivalry and how has it been left behind in the ~30 years since it was first published?

/u/itsallfolklore How do you work with oral histories and orality in folklore? I understand there has been a great deal of critique of early pioneers in the field such as the Grimm Brothers for writing down, well, essentially their own stories (middle class) dressed up in peasant clothes. How do folklorists deal with alternate or different folktales.

Also, I've been reading into erotic folk stories lately, any pointers you might have for me there?

/u/TheGreenReaper7 how would sexual masculinities be expressed? That is, what were they defined against? In England, for example, poets often defined themselves as masculine and asserted their masculinity by painting the Italian as effeminate, dissolute, and obsessed with buggery. Would this carry through to Wales or other places?

This one is probably for /u/itsallfolklore. I recently picked up a collection of Russian fairy tales, which I'm very much enjoying. One of the things that's struck me though is the similarity to those that I learnt as a child (in Ireland).

Some of this can be explained by open borrowing (eg Pushkin's Fisherman and the Fish) but it seems that a lot of elements of fairy tales are common (eg clever foxes, people-turning-into-animals, kidnapped wives, etc) across borders.

So is this a case of certain fairy/folk tales spreading across Europe? Or are these elements, and the stories that contain them, universal across peasant societies? Or indeed, are the various fairy tale taxonomies simply broad enough that you could use them to classify any tale, if you wished.

Basically: how did fairy tales or their elements of these spread over time? If that's too broad a question, I'd welcome being pointed at any reading.

[Edit: And, of course, thanks to everyone for doing this AMA.]

Directed at /u/Wedgehead, what sort of sourcework must you use to construct the identity of these Ancient Near-Eastern cultures? I imagine things that we might use now (diaries, letters) are somewhat few and far between.

Secondly, abstractly related to the first, how can we use Ancient Near-Eastern religious belief, or folklore (i'm thinking Gilgamesh) to construct how these societies viewed themselves or their neighbors?

/u/depanneur : How do histories of the imagination work? Do you trace elements such as "representations of werewolves" through chronicles and histories and how people would have thought about them?

Like histories of sexuality, I imagine it is immensely difficult to talk about people's imaginations, as they are especially unrecorded and undocumented until much later in the historical period. How do you deal with this diffuculty?

hello to user historiagrephour. Did Gael and Gall of the same religion in Scotland see themselves as having a more important connection than Gael and Gael of different Christian sects?

For everyone: What kinds of sources do we use, and in what ways do we use them?

I guess my question is mainly for /u/WedgeHead.

How do the cultures of the Acient Near East express their identity? Or, the other way around, what aspects do you study to arrive at an answer, what material do you use? And what social strata are present in the material, e.g., can you say anything about the middle/lower classes at all, or is it mainly elite communication?

Sorry for the many question marks and if the question comes of a bit broad! I'm mainly asking because my own research atm. goes into questions of identity and expression in Roman Germany, in the context of Epigraphic Culture. Which means that the things I look at are mostly names, liguistic peculiarities, the gods they worship and how they did that, the men/women they marry, their social status as well as iconography and portraits/statues (which allow us to look at the way people dressed or wanted to be portrayed to the outside world); so mainly funerary inscriptions and votive altars and the way they relate to the landscape and population around them - I'd find it very interesting to see how similar questions are asked in other cultural contexts (and with a different material corpus, I imagine)!

How do you define a culture and how frequently do groups of individuals assert that they belong to one culture when in some real sense they belong to another culture.

/u/historiagrephour how did concepts and particularties of marriage change in the late 1600s to the early 1700s? In my research, this is the period of time in which the English established a more or less five-step process when it came to marriage:

1. A contract between the the families for financial arrangements and exchanges of property (in cases where there were finances or property to be exchanged.)

2. The spousals--the exchange of promises spoken between the husband and wife in front of witnesses.

3. The proclamation of banns for three weeks prior to the marriage. The banns were a loud public announcement on behalf of the marrying couple for three weeks prior to the marriage, to allow people to dispute or contradict it.

4. The wedding in and the blessing of the Church (when the wedding actually took place in a church)

5. Sexual Consummation. Legally speaking, anyhow--surviving evidence shows sexual consummation happened among the lower classes before the marriage in many cases.

Does this hold true in Scotland as well?

Also, in English literature and culture the bordertown of Gretna Green is described as a sort of old version of a Las Vegas wedding, where people could run over the border and get married quickly. Do you have any information on this?

hello to user depanneur.
Is there any evidence that Irish people in the middle ages were consciously copying barbarian modes of dress and facial hair as reported in Latin texts?

A question for all panelists:

My studies tend to focus on the fairly traditional aspect of high politics, diplomacy, and war. From what I've come across, it seems that historians like me (who I'll call "traditionalists" for lack of a better term) by and large neglect the methodologies of cultural historians. They are far more interested in things like interest group dynamics, theories of institutional behavior, and ideology (but ideology as it's studied in political science/international relations departments, rather than by cultural historians). Likewise, cultural historians seem to neglect those aspects of politics that traditionalist historians focus on. I'm probably being somewhat myopic here, but it seems that cultural historians focus almost solely on the "holy trinity" of race, class, and gender. This isn't to say that cultural historians are unconcerned with politics. From what I've come across, it seems that a major argument of cultural historians is that everything is political. Yet there appears to be a distinct lack of concern by cultural historians about the "high politics" analyzed by traditionalist historians. There are exceptions to this, with Krisitin Hoganson's Fighting for American Manhood being the example that first pops into my mind, but there does seem to be a general disconnect between the methodologies and findings of traditionalist historians and cultural historians.

So, to finally get to my question: Do you think this disconnect between traditionalist and cultural historians exists? If so, what explains it and how can it be reconciled?

This one is for /u/Mictlantecuhtli specifically, although of course anyone can chime in.

I'm assuming that a great deal of work and debate goes into how we define a "culture," particularly when what we have left is mainly archaeological remains. I'm also guessing that there's a great deal of work on the margins of cultures -- stuff like "well this is definitely a shaft tomb, and that one over there is definitely not, but what about these things in the middle?"

I'm wondering if you can speak a bit to the other side of that, if possible. How do we study or how do we know what internal controls there were on a particular culture to, for example, keep building shaft tombs, or keep on creating guachimonton architecture, etc. Is it a conscious cultural choice, or is it something that people are so accustomed to that they don't even notice anymore? Who policed, internally, the outliers in that culture?

What is the difference between a historical culture and a historical ethnicity?

How broadly can we stretch the category of "a culture" and still have it be meaningful? I imagine "early modern Italian high-class ballet culture" could be a useful construct, but "Western culture" might be near meaningless.

I was wondering what you all thought about the interdisciplinary nature of cultural history. One of you mentioned above that often art history departments are less interested in the thing-ness of things than actual historians are nowadays, which made me think about my own relationship to historical studies.

It seems like you are all trained as historians - which of course means very different things in different schools, nations, traditions - but nonetheless you must find yourselves often bumping into problems that are of a specifically literary nature, or a specifically art historical nature.

I am trained in literary studies, but I would consider myself more of a cultural historian, and I often hear more textual people say that we are both bad historians and bad literary scholars. Jack of all trades, master of none!

Of course these people are wrong, but how?

How do you overcome these training hurdles? Or do you think that the specific methodologies of cultural history are "deep" enough to cover all your bases? Or do you believe that we have to be one kind of cultural historian - more anthropological, more literary, or more iconographic?

And finally, a practical question, why won't the rigid contours of academic departments soften to allow access to cultural historians? It often seems like if you have a degree in history, you can only work in history departments, and if you have a phd in literary studies, the only jobs open are in literature departments...

For /u/TenMinuteHistory

What effect did the massive societal upheaval of the early Soviet years have on the performing arts scene in Moscow? Did ballet remain largely unchanged? Did we see emerging styles of interpretation or dance as a result of the communist revolution? Finally, were there practical changes to the lives of ballet dancers as a result of the revolution, with regards to income, conditions and so on?

Thanks very much! :)

Have any of you visited the Treasured Possessions exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge? If so, what thoughts did you have on it? Sorry, I know this may be a bit location specific.

/u/Shartastic

Could you explain how the commercialization of sports has changed the ways that they are experienced and performed? How much has sportscasting changed over the time that it has existed in broadcast form? Is it fairly clear what era the announcer is from just in listening to them?

Also, in regards to African-American athletes, did their entry into mainstream sports have an effect on the civil rights movement, or was it more a byproduct of the civil rights movement?

Thanks.