CONTEXT IN CONTEXT

Abstract

Context is a term that has come into more and more frequent use in the last thirty or forty years in a number of disciplines—among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology. A trawl through the on-line catalogue of the Cambridge University Library in 1999 produced references to 1,453 books published since 1978 with the word context in the title (and 377 more with contexts in the plural). There have been good reasons for this development. The attempt to place ideas, utterances, texts, and other artifacts “in context” has led to many insights. All the same there is a price to be paid, the neglect of other approaches and also the inflation or dilution of the central concept, which is sometimes used—ironically enough, out of context—as an intellectual slogan or shibboleth. To analyze both the present situation and past ones, it is surely necessary to re-place context in its context—or better, in its many contexts, linguistic, literary, ideological, social, psychological, political, cultural, and material. It is also important to ask to whom—or against whom—a given proposition about context was directed (scriptural fundamentalists, for example, believers in eternal wisdom, formalist art historians, enthusiasts for generalization in social science,