2 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS
only one entry that is explicitly sociological,
while history – which only rates a cross-
reference in the 1968Encyclopedia– merits
a full entry on cultural history. Psychology,
though, still features strongly – more so
than in 1968, and more so than any other
discipline, with entries onCultural Expression
and Action, Cultural Psychology, Cultural
Variations in Interpersonal Relationships,
Culture and Emotion, Culture and the Self,
Culture as a Determinant of Mental Health,
and one on the psychological and educational
aspects ofCulture-Rooted Expertise. The
biological sciences, which did not figure at
all in the 1968Encyclopedia, make a strong
showing, with four separate entries addressing
different aspects of cultural evolution and
a fifth focused on culture in nonhuman
organisms. The same is true of geography and
the environmental sciences, with one entry
on cultural geography and two on different
approaches to the analysis of cultural land-
scapes. Economics and archaeology complete
the list of established disciplines that are
featured, with two entries addressing different
aspects of development economics and one on
archaeological approaches to culture contact.
Cultural studies has an entry of its own,
as does the cultural study of science, and
there are a number of entries focused on
general issues – one on culture shock, an entry
surveying contemporary views of culture, and
a further entry on the function of culture as
an explanatory category. Perhaps the most
distinctive addition of all, however, is a series
of entries focused on questions of cultural
management and administration – topics that
did not figure at all in the 1968Encyclopedia.
There are two entries on cultural policy, an
entry on cultural property that is focused
on the repatriation of ancestral remains, an
entry on cultural resource management that
is concerned primarily with the conservation
of cultural heritage, and a connected trio of
entries focused on questions of cultural diver-
sity, cultural rights and cultural assimilation.
This is, of course, only a rough and ready
way of gauging the increasing prominence
of cultural concerns within contemporary
academic inquiry. It is, nonetheless, sufficient
to show that, although no doubt often
overdone, references to the ‘cultural turn’ in
the humanities and social sciences do register
a real and significant shift in the objects of
attention that intellectual work has addressed
over the past 30 years or so. It is also clear
that this change in intellectual priorities is
related to a change in practical priorities
as questions of culture and its management
have been accorded increasing significance
across a wide range of social and political
concerns. Indeed, the entries in the 2001
Encyclopediatend, if anything, to under-
represent the degree to which culture is now
registered as a matter of pressing practical
concern. For it takes little account of the
degree to which cultural resources of various
kinds have become increasingly important
to the value chains of advanced economies,
with the consequence that references to the
‘cultural industries’ or the ‘cultural economy’
are now a part of everyday political and
policy concern just as much as they are areas
of special attention in emerging academic
sub-disciplines.
These relations between culture as an
object of intellectual attention and the degree
to which, at the same time, questions of
culture have assumed an increasingly pressing
economic, social and political significance
have played a central role in our conception
of the architecture for this handbook. The
chapters commissioned for Part I thus focus on
the various intellectual frameworks that have
been proposed for the analysis of culture, and
of its social and political articulations, as the
‘cultural turn’ has prompted both a realign-
ment of the concerns of traditional disciplines
(history and art history, for example) and the
development of new interdisciplinary intellec-
tual formations (material culture studies, for
example). In Part II, by contrast, our attention
focuses on a range of contemporary political,
public or policy issues that are defined
primarily in cultural terms (multiculturalism,
the changing organization of cultural property,
and sexuality, for example) and whose study
draws on one or more of the intellectual
frameworks reviewed in Part I. In Part III,
finally, we focus on the development of