KULTUURILINE PÖÖRE
Cultural Turn

Summary/Abstract: Cultural turn is a common name for three interrelated processes in social sciences and humanities: (1) a growing interest towards the study of cultural phenomena; (2) certain methodological and epistemological conundrums in these sciences that stem from the specific nature of cultural phenomena; and (3) attempts of theoretical conceptualization of cultural phenomena and culture in general. Historically these processes started with the elaboration of the ideas of the national esprit and Geist in the 18th and 19th century, and have during the 20th century resulted in the appearance of several new disciplines devoted exclusively to studying cultural phenomena – sciences like cultural history, cultural psychology, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, etc. The article is devoted to sorting out the ways in which culture and cultural phenomena have been conceptually understood in these sciences. I view them as strategies of seeing and approaching cultural phenomena, the strategies that determine the choice of the methodology that is used for investigating these phenomena. The oldest is the ethnographic strategy according to which culture is seen as an integrated whole of collective beliefs and ways of life that characterize a relatively independent unit of population, usually a nation. The subjective strategy views culture as those features and mechanisms of an individual psyche that derive from and depend on a social context. Here culture is usually approached as “learned behaviour”. The strategy of cultural phenomenology is more interdisciplinary, even though it is rarely used and sometimes even explicitly rejected in philosophy. It concentrates on the structures of experience that are not universal but communal, i.e. common to a certain group of people. The performative strategy concentrates on the practical behaviour of individuals, or on the praxis of social groups and societies, as for example in the studies of Bourdieu. The institutional strategy aims at the institutionalized rules of social practice. The ideological strategy, in contrast, searches for the commonly shared ideas (ideas that form a collective consciousness) that have obtained the status of logos for individuals and social institutions. The scientists using the functional strategy attempt to define the function of culture in the course of the struggle for existence of a human population, such as the collective management of individual emotions or regulating sexual behaviour. The expressionist strategy concentrates on the devices that give individual expressions the form that makes these expressions understandable to others. The substantialist strategy searches for the elementary unit of cultural reality – such as Foucault’s notion of les énoncés for example. The theoretical and methodological conundrum in social sciences and humanities, caused by the cultural turn, can be accounted for by certain fluctuations (spreading, partial and unreflecte

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