Cultural Turns and Trans/National Studies

Both volumes under review share a common element: the relevance of anthropological studies in current cultural discourse and historical writing in particular. In her tour-de-force monograph Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture (CT), Doris Bachmann-Medick offers a wide and well-informed overview of the most recent developments in cultural studies and reflects on the turns in that field since the early 1980s. Her edited collection—The Trans/National Study of Culture (T/NSC)—offers a variety of case studies exemplifying the variety of cultural studies. Before analysing these two volumes, I would mention the growing and pervasive role of anthropology after about 1980. Anthropological studies have deeply affected the historical disciplines of late, as Jeremy Popkin has stressed yet again.¹

Cultural Turns

Bachmann-Medick, a specialist in cultural and literary studies (Literaturund Kulturwissenschaften) at the University of Giessen, is fully aware that anthropology became a leader in the social sciences, and her monograph charts the ways in which the interest in culture has changed the approach to social phenomena beyond the boundaries of academic discussion in the social sciences.

However, surprisingly, Bachmann-Medick is not explicit about how the various turns in cultural studies have affected the public understanding of and discourse on social events. More than she does, I would argue that anthropology has deeply transformed the perception of social in the last thirty years or so. Hollywood can give us an idea of how influential cultural anthropology has become. Denis Villeneuve's award-winning film Arrival (2016), based on a novel by Ted Chiang, recounts the story of a fleet of spaceships from a distant planet landing in various parts of the world. Parallel to other subplots, including the relativity of time dimensions, the movie features a major issue of twentieth-century anthropology, which the script conveniently updated for the post-Star Trek age. The encounter of different cultures and the process of creating communication between them ex nihilo—crucial for the linguist and the extraterrestrials (ETs) in Arrival, reminds me of anthropologist/linguist Edward Sapir's effort when he encountered Ishi, the only surviving speaker of the Yahi language, in the 1910s.

More broadly, the movie revisits the open question of how to focus on radically alien cultures. Like Sapir (and Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead, and so on) the leading actress achieves the fundamental objective of every form of anthropology—bridging the gap between groups that have to agree on basic pieces of linguistic information and then to understand each other in terms of culture. In Arrival she also saves the earth from a destructive clash between humans and ETs by returning to a founding value of modern anthropology, the secular faith in dialogue and mutual comprehension. The actress sums up Sapir's controversial stance as soon as she realizes she has entered a new dimension of time and knowledge: "There's this idea that immersing yourself in a foreign language can rewire your brain."² If you replace "a foreign language" with "a foreign culture," you are right in the middle of the set of questions that Bachmann-Medick raises. To what extent does the actress-linguist's success represent the undeniable resonance of anthropological studies? Bachmann-Medick does not explicitly ask this question, but the reader senses her skepticism about the real accomplishments of anthropology as a cornerstone of the humanities, despite her interest in it. CT's straightforward chronological structure helps explain its ambivalence on the matter. There have been a number of turns in the cultural sciences. Each of them has claimed to inaugurate a new vision of crucial aspects of the humanities and to increase the understanding of social phenomena.

The author asks two questions at the start, and her answers shape the way she makes sense of an obviously complex debate. What makes a turn? How many...