Understanding Culture

Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering

Gavin Kendall, Gary Wickham

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9780761965152
  9780761965145
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781412932622
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of `doing? cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people?s lives and as markers of that ordering. The book reviews the state of the discipline of cultural studies and suggests a new theoretical and methodological orientation drawing on the work of: Foucault; scepticism, Wittgenstein; Harvey Sacks and John Law; uses insights from a variety of sources to examine the complex ways in which meanings are manufactured as lives are ordered in particular social settings: personal life, education, health, the city and law; and presents case studies that illustrate what the new cultural studies looks like, covering: colonialism, everyday life and identity, and technology.

Table of contents

• Covers
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cultural Studies with Just a Hint of Foucault
• Chapter 1 - Surveying the Field of Cultural Studies
• Chapter 2 - The Notion of Ordering as an Organising Principle for Cultural Studies
• Chapter 3 - Building a Method for Cultural Studies as the Study of Ordering
• Chapter 4 - Ordering Through the Cluture of Government - a Colonial Example
• Chapter 5 - Ordering Through the Culture of Law and Regulation
• Chapter 6 - Ordering Through the Culture of Everyday Life
• Chapter 7 - Ordering Through Routinisation - Technique, Technology and Self
• Conclusion: Reshaping Cultural Studies
• References
• Index