In a 1989 article published by Annales under the title “Le monde comme représentation,”1 Roger Chartier articulated a conceptual framework for bridging the gap that had traditionally separated the history of mentalities from social and political history. While the former field—pioneered by Georges Duby, Robert Mandrou, and Philippe Ariès in the 1960s—had legitimized the study of collective beliefs, anxieties, and desires as historical phenomena, the latter remained largely devoted to more concrete, easily quantifiable factors such as structures, institutions, and material culture. Drawing on the anthropological and psychoanalytical premises that had informed the work of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Michel de Certeau, among others, Chartier emphasized the performative dimension of individual and collective representations in order to argue that they should be understood not only as evidence registering the exercise of social and political power, but as underlying catalysts of change in their own right. Like habitus, Pierre Bourdieu’s complex model of social causality and evolution, Chartier framed representation as a symbiotic “structuring structure” that deserved to sit at the heart of historical inquiry.
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Representations, History, and Wartime France
Brett Bowles
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2014
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–3 (3 total)
Book Reviews
Alice L. Conklin Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté by Emmanuelle Saada
Jason Earle Surrealism and the Art of Crime by Jonathan P. Eburne
Paul Jankowski Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–1945 by Sean Kennedy
Jean-Philippe Mathy French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States by François Cusset
David Lepoutre La France a peur. Une histoire sociale de l'« insécurité » by Laurent Bonelli
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2010
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 134–150 (17 total)