ABSTRACT
Several of the papers in this volume seem to operate from the assumption that the so-called cultural turn is mature, or even spent, as a purely theoretical enterprise. As an enterprise primarily of the 1970s and 1980s (also associated with overlapping labels like 'the postmodern turn' or 'the poststructuralist turn'), there was great ferment and stimulation in English-speaking academia over the study of culture, and the theory and practice of interpretation associated with it. I believe that the sense of the waning of the interdisciplinary fervour over the working out of new ideas at a sometimes indulgently theoretical level is very widespread at present. There now seems to be as widespread a preoccupation with developing the stock of ideas and styles of analysis as distinctive or experimental research programmes within those disciplinary traditions that were most affected by the cultural turn. While certain disciplines like geography (and less so anthropology) might have kept the balance between theoretical exegesis and empirical research traditions all along, there is a sense in which innovation for the moment has been recentred within the bounds of disciplinary authority rather than in their interstices – the sites of earlier interdisciplinary spaces built upon the critique and even, scorn of disciplinarity. Yet, in the sobering wake of the great awakening, so to speak, that the cultural turn was for many scholars in the social sciences and humanities, I think there is immense 14potential for a second wave of interdisciplinary fusions (partnerships, even) more fine-tuned and defined, along certain borders that crystallize as a result of affinities in how certain disciplines or disciplinary fractions responded to and assimilated the cultural turn. Reality, so to speak, signalled in the pervasive use of the yet poorly understood framing trope of globalization, is pressing upon the storehouse of theoretical imaginaries explored in the 1970s and 1980s. The task now is to experiment with research practices that both are rooted in distinctive disciplinary styles and arise from partnerships in how the cultural turn has defined affinities in modes of inquiry. 1
