This article considers intersections between cultural studies and New Testament studies. It ponders and focuses on possible approaches to the bearing of the ‘cultural turn’ on biblical studies. Following a brief consideration of cultural studies and its potential value for New Testament studies, four promising developments in cultural studies approaches to the New Testament are noted.
The late twentieth century’s ‘linguistic turn’ marked the beginning of a new consciousness in hermeneutics and even epistemology in New Testament (NT) studies.
These and other culturally sensitive developments and ideas are increasingly, but only gradually, being absorbed into biblical studies practices. Some two decades ago it was suggested that the combination of rhetorical emphasis and feminist theory would enable the ‘full-turn’ of biblical studies, but a paradigm shift in biblical studies has so far largely remained elusive due to the inability of rhetoric to link up with feminist, liberationist and postcolonial studies (Schüssler Fiorenza
Closely connected to what may be called lingering linguistic and incipient political turns, and also to a growing interest in cultural studies among NT scholars, references to a ‘cultural turn’ in NT studies
The cultural studies label is used for a broad field of academic work and research, including areas which intersect with and have an impact on biblical studies.
the study of everyday or popular culture, which began to find a niche in academia in the 1960s; in Britain … especially as it relates to social hierarchies, economic processes, political power, and identity formation; in North America … especially as expressed in the electronic media, with tools drawn largely from literary criticism and communication studies. (Vanhoozer, Anderson & Sleasman
However, describing cultural hermeneutics as ‘approaches to interpretation in which the social and cultural location of the interpreter (e.g. feminist, African-American) serves as a principle of interpretation’ (Vanhoozer
This cultural situatedness of interpretation fills out the cultural turn that followed in the footsteps of the linguistic turn (Chaney
Culture is notoriously difficult to define, but can be understood as ‘a social construction and integrated system of beliefs and practices’.
Moving beyond class-oriented ‘high culture’ or even the structural, systematic ‘anthropological culture’ (cf Geertz
[c]ulture is not a thing or even a system: it’s a set of transactions, processes, mutations, practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events (such as movies, poems or world wrestling bouts) are produced, to be experienced, lived out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic network of differences and mutations from which they emerged to start with. (p. 6)
Culture is both universal to all societies and particular in each case (Martin
It is at this point where the Bible comes into play, as it has been part of many cultures around the world and involved in such power negotiations, even if its current presence and its interpreters’ agency also indicate newness.
Northrop Frye (
The Bible … ‘simply swarms us’. Western culture and literature are saturated with its language and imageries. It has invaded colonies and has intruded into the political and social and cultural life of peoples who were not necessarily part of the biblical heritage … The overwhelming presence of the Bible was the result of modernity (Sugirtharajah
Emphasising its cultural role, David Tracy (
Given this socio-historical setting of the Bible in many parts of the globe, leaning towards cultural studies is both to be expected and new. On the one hand, the academic pursuit of cultural studies is an indication of the popularisation of culture, though not without some irony, of course. Displacing essentialist notions of culture as ‘the deposit or accumulation of knowledge or meaning produced by elites, or as a body of beliefs and values shared by all members of a group such as a nation or religious community’ opens up alternative engagements with culture. Rather than static deposit, culture is now understood as ‘the dynamic and contentious process by which meaning, and with it, power is produced, circulated, and negotiated by all who reside within a particular cultural milieu’ (Davaney
On the other hand, cultural studies as a way of investigating the NT can be seen as a form of ‘newness’ also in the sense Homi Bhabha used the notion:
The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation …. It renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent
‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present (Bhabha
Taking culture seriously in itself demands a different perspective on the past
To begin with, cultural studies include other voices in society in the interpretation of the Bible because it privileges a ‘polyphonic hermeneutics’ (Glancy
It would be foolish to try to prescribe or predict the future twists of the cultural turn in NT studies. During (
It is postcolonial theory as a particularly energetically pursued approach with important spin-offs within cultural studies that has, in recent years, consistently aided the interpretation of biblical texts. Postcolonial studies flowed from cultural studies, or became an aspect of new concern within cultural studies (Gallagher
The interpretation of biblical texts in the complex and often tension-filled situations and relationships between people and groups of people in the wake of the end of colonisation in Africa, and the fall of the South African apartheid regime – with the lingering effects and influences of these systems on the former colonies and ‘new South Africa’ – greatly benefits from postcolonial criticism.
As a result of feminist theory and gender criticism moving more and more beyond social history and the ‘recovery of woman’ project since the 1980s and 1990s, a different analysis of and approach to gender emerged. More attention is devoted to the rhetorical construction of men and women, of femininity and masculinity, of gender in texts and discourse, as well as to investigations of the social forces at work in this regard. Going beyond essentialist approaches, cultural studies is interested in the involvement of body with language and textuality and the connection between reading and other forms of cultural interpretation (cf Martin
Queer theory, generally believed to have been inspired by Michael Foucault and associated with the work of philosophers and sociologists such as Rubin, Sedgwick, Butler and Weeks, offers particularly valuable resources for cultural studies. A basic premise of queer theory is the denunciation that sexuality is a universal and eternal drive and the affirmation that sexuality is best viewed from a social constructionist position.
Proponents of cultural studies make regular use of a wide-ranging spectrum of insights, borrowed from contemporary anthropology and ethnography in particular, which include economics, history, media studies, political theory and sociology. The possibility of remaining neutral when engaged in cultural studies is summarily rejected, as engagement in cultural studies projects predisposes students towards active intervention in areas of cultural struggle (Leitch
However, autobiographical criticism becomes inauthentic when in an extreme postmodernist format it becomes individualistic and self-referring, ‘leaving the individual self as an isolated topography of cultural fragments, cobbled together into an incoherent narrative’. The focus on individuals then, ironically, replaces the old, exclusive concern of the author with a new, exclusive concern for the reader.
Acceptance of the inevitable subjective, autobiographical nature of NT studies does not avert attention from institutional and ideological concerns.
Cultural studies incorporates a distinct resistance element often referred to as a ‘leftist political orientation’, expressing criticism of aestheticism, formalism, anti-historicism and apoliticism. The traditional, conservative role of the intellectual as connoisseur and custodian of culture is regarded with great suspicion, if not rejected out of hand: ‘[T]he twin habits of isolating and of monumentalizing the arts and humanities are anathema to adherents of cultural studies’ (Leitch
This contribution is a brief attempt to show how the cultural turn has become evident in various biblical hermeneutical approaches, not an attempt to prescribe cultural studies as the new norm. Nor is it intended simply to replace the existing dominance of historical criticism which is under fire from various directions with another hermeneutical hegemony. The list of cultural studies developments in biblical scholarship is much longer, of course, but the four instances mentioned above signal some of the possibilities offered as well as correctives suggested in such work. At the same time, cultural studies, like any academic pursuit, carries with it potential pitfalls. One danger associated with a cultural turn is the balkanisation of knowledge, especially when traditional scholars withdraw to their ‘bounded communities’ away from the public realm, or when more liberal scholars engage in uncritical celebration of popular culture, or simply when social location and identity replace reason-giving as the source of legitimation and delegitimation for our positions (Davaney
Since ‘popular culture has emerged no longer as that to be disdained or overcome but as the domain of creative cultural contestation and construction’ (Davaney
This contribution is offered in honour of Graham Duncan’s contribution to religion and theology studies, for the friendship and academic cooperation that started as colleagues at the University of Fort Hare in the nineties, and in appreciation of Graham’s scholarship, academic dedication and wholesome human character.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
Richard Rorty’s edited volume of 1967 is sometimes cited as coining the term ‘linguistic turn’, but the linguistic turn’s many precursors could include many others such as Ludwig Wittgenstein.
During (
‘History itself, insofar as it is discernible by any human being, is just like a text in that it is constructed by a particular person in a particular time and place. And it must be interpreted like a text. There is, in the end, no escape from language and textuality’ (Martin
The political and cultural turns at times move in opposite directions: see e.g. Harrill (
For a brief discussion of how some scholars portray the cultural turn as growing out of the linguistic turn, and ‘the centrality of textuality for the writing of history’, see Martin (
In social history issues such as ‘class and status, family and household, slavery, patron–client structures, travel and communications, and the influence of economics and urban life on developments in early Christianity and late antiquity’ (Martin
Miller (
During emphasises that cultural objects comprise at the same time ‘“texts” (that is they have meaning)
‘“The people” are not just passive consumers of meaning, values, and practices devised by the powerful. They are the producers of culture on multiple levels, including through resistance to elites’ (Davaney
In cultural studies, ‘The goal of the historian becomes not the conscious or even unconscious intentions of the author, but the larger matrix of symbol systems provided by the author’s society from which he must have drawn whatever resources he used to ‘speak his mind’ (Martin
A cultural studies approach acknowledges both the value and the authenticity of popular readings without necessarily assuming the legitimacy or condoning the effects of any particular reading. Popular readings can also be ‘an uneven mix of insights, prejudices, contradictions, and images imposed by hegemonic discourse’ (Glancy
Cultural studies does not seek to exclude, or to take scholarly terrain hostage as it ‘seeks to integrate, in different ways, the historical, formalist, and sociocultural questions and concerns of other paradigms’; but it does seek to do so ‘on a different key, with a situated and interested reader and interpreter always at its core’ (Segovia
Or ‘a multilayered network of relations or total way of life encompassing the myriad relations, institutions, and practices that define a historical period or specific geographical location or formative community or subgroups within larger fields’ (Davaney
In the words of Boas (
Cosgrove
It was in film studies in particular that the focus shifted from the classic realist or representational text with its notions of empirical truth and the autonomous subject in a meta-position, or ‘the position of dominant specularity’. Renewed emphasis was devoted to the ‘theorisation of the subject position’, in terms of both the subject’s identity and their social location, leaning heavily on Althusser, Lacan and Kristeva in the formulation of these theories (Easthope
According to Bonnell and Hunt (
Cf also Brown (
‘It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure.
Cf eg the essays in the volumes edited by Exum and Moore (
The intentions and conscious thinking of authors do not disappear from view altogether, but no longer occupy the only or even the primary role in hermeneutics. In fact, the unspoken or unreflected assumptions or assumed meaning of authors needs to be placed in and filled out according to the prevailing culture. ‘The goal of the historian becomes not the conscious or even unconscious intentions of the author but the larger matrix of symbol systems provided by the author’s society from which he must have drawn whatever resources he used to “speak his mind”’ (Martin 2015:17).
Since conventional scholarship is rather reluctant to reflect upon its relationship with society generally (see Horsley
As Wimbush argues, the ‘cultural worlds of readers’ determine which texts are to be read, how they are to be read, what they mean – even the meaning of ‘text’ itself (
Segovia’s contributions on ‘cultural studies’ as an alternative interpretive paradigm for biblical studies are vital, and in particular his emphasis that text is more than means (as in historical criticism) or medium (as in literary criticism), or both (cultural criticism or socio-scientific criticism), since text also is construction (Segovia
Cf also Martin (
Cultural studies and analysis and its value to work on the NT, and sustained investigations of the theoretical stance(s) with regard to postcolonial theory in particular, have much value in the post-apartheid South African context: a grounded position pointing to the significance of postcolonial hermeneutics in biblical interpretation, both for explaining texts in historical, imperial settings and also for understanding texts in South Africa, influenced by our global (post)modern and often neo-colonialist world. Cf Goss (
In South Africa but also elsewhere, the academy in general and theology/biblical studies in particular increasingly become cognisant of and interact with contemporary contexts. Notwithstanding pockets of resistance, the tide is turning from detached, aloof scholarship to socially engaged academic work. Instead, socially engaged studies are only starting to establish some kind of a threshold for a more concerted effort to deal with contextuality effectively, responsibly and accountably. However, the remaining and still concerted drive
‘In a nutshell: what queer theory teaches us is that nothing is certain about sex and sexuality and that the social categories we have to organise, use and police it are contingent (they might be different and indeed are always in the process of becoming different). And the same is true, at the level of individuals and their bodies, for the pleasures and other intensities we take from sex, which although they may be offered to us as mediated through sex’s social categories, are also open to modification by new ways of incorporating and acting out (or performing) gender as well as sexual drives’ (During 2006:183–189).
Queer theory’s particular value is related to two important approaches, which again are related to its own development and subsequent procedures. Firstly, the socially constructed nature of gender and sex in society generally is taken as the point of departure rather than assuming a biological or physiological approach. In short, gender and sex are ‘queered’ through the exposure of the (powerful) systems and structures of convention which require, define and prescribe the form and function of sex and gender: gender and sex are manufactured entities! The second aspect of queer theory is often referred to as ‘queerying’; it comprises taking social constructionism in sex and gender a step further. Queerying relates to the theoretical and political accommodation of the role of social dynamics and power play in matters of sex and gender, identifying those that benefit from sex and gender constructions and their particular gains.
Regarding gender and sexuality, the ‘affective turn’ also holds great promise. It refers to investigations of spheres of experience that focus on the body and not only the mind (and feelings and emotions) beyond the conventional frameworks of representation. For a genealogical tracing of developments of the affective turn, see Clough (
Unfortunately this often amounts to little more than putting across a specific perspective, point of departure or institutional affiliation.
Very few attempts at the autobiographical approach that is reflective–critical endeavour are successful; see Kitzinger (2002) and Staley (
So, too, besides probing the assigning of value to (certain) cultures and laying the politics of representation, for Smith (
Another danger is obscure language. Andrew Louth (
The effect of the cultural turn for theology, Davaney claims (