The Dilemma of Subalterns Political Agency in Cultural History: a Comparative Study

In classical cultural history, the elites were considered to be agents of culture and politics, and thus, in this type of historiography, the cultural-political flows derived from ordinary people were not considered independent streams from the produced culture of the elite.However, one of the most important orientations of the new cultural history is the change in the subject matter of the study from elite to subalterns and ordinary people.The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of how, in the new cultural history, ordinary people and subaltern strata have become agents in construction of culture and politics.To answer this question, first, the position of classical cultural history on the issue of political agency and its application in the book "History of Culture in Italy" is examined. Then, in order to illustrate how this new cultural historiography has come to this orientation, while describing the stance of this approach, the book "The Cheese and the Worms: The cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller" is being studied as one of the classical texts of this stream. In order to achieve this goal, with the "exploratory" approach, "comparative method" was used to discover the possibility conditions of this agency.