Method? What Method? Confessions of a Failed Structuralist

Abstract

By requesting that I provide reflections on [my] own methods of cultural historical the organizers of this conference have posed a very embarrassing question. My work does not fit neatly into any of the major trends in cultural or intellectual history of the past thirty years, such as social history of ideas, historical anthropology, or linguistic turn. Nor does it lend itself to any sui generis form of systematization. Thus I hardly could suggest that my work have paradigmatic value for other scholars. But it does have some symptomatic value, inasmuch as its seeming lack of coherent is, in my opinion, representative of many projects in the cultural-historical field. In the ensuing pages I will discuss my own research, but I will also attempt to address the larger issue of why it is so difficult to generate overarching methodologies for cultural history. Let me begin with an anecdote. The issue of my methodology has troubled me for some ten years now, and I can date the problem very precisely to early October 1984, when I began a fellowship at the