Historical overview

If one understands the term mutation sociale (social transformation) in the sense in which it was established in French sociology around the work of Georges Balandier at the beginning of the 1970s, it is with just this kind of phenomenon that French society in the second half of the twentieth century was confronted: values and principles of social organisation no longer held, broke down and disappeared even while surviving as a reflex of thought and in the form of superficial ritualism. Meanwhile, new problems and new collective concerns developed under the effects of imported cultural behaviours, the impact of innovation, and the discovery of social forms unforeseeable from the vantage point of what France had been since the nineteenth century. In examining such a shift, the word 'culture' is to be taken in its widest sense. Thus, it refers not only to cultural objects produced and distributed by practitioners, but also and more generally to all of the styles of doing, thinking and feeling that distinguish a particular group, its conscious or semi-conscious shared beliefs. This is because a shift always affects, at differing rates, all levels of experience. It is also because culture, as a collective concern, has become broader in its contemporary definition, and its globalisation has become an important issue today. Finally, it is because many social and political problems can be, and are, treated as cultural issues.