Cultural Heritage Product and Collection

The ‘‘cultural turn’’ of the past few decades has reconceptualized ‘‘culture,’’ even while making it the central focus of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. It rejected, among older theories of culture, the Parsonian conception that culture comprised a relatively consensual system of values and norms that provided evaluative grounding for the other subsystems of action.

The varied proponents of the cultural turn objected to this and other conceptions for a number of reasons. Its emphasis on internalization of objective structures restricted possibilities for human agency. It ignored the full range of human subjectivities, even while essentializing categories of status distinction.
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