Introducing Cultural Studies

Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith, Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford, Miles Ogborn

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317426011
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Cultural & Social Anthropology

This updated, new edition of Introducing Cultural Studies provides a systematic and comprehensible introduction to the concepts, debates and latest research in the field. Reinforcing the interdisciplinary nature of Cultural Studies, the authors first guide the reader through cultural theory before branching out to examine different dimensions of culture in detail – including globalisation, the body, geography, fashion, and politics.

Incorporating new scholarship and international examples, this new edition includes:

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• New and improved 'Defining Concepts', 'Key Influences', 'Example ', and 'Spotlight' features that probe deeper into the most significant ideas, theorists and examples, ensuring you obtain an in-depth understanding of the subject.

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• A brand new companion website featuring a flashcard glossary, web links, discussion and essay questions to stimulate independent study.

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• A new-look text design with over 60 pictures and tables draws all these elements together in an attractive, accessible design that makes navigating the book, and the subject, simple and logical.

Introducing Cultural Studies will be core reading for Cultural Studies undergraduates and postgraduates, as well as an illuminating guide for those on Communication and Media Studies, English, Sociology, and Social Studies courses looking for a clear overview of the field.

Part 1

Cultural theory

Chapter 1

Culture and cultural studies

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Cultural studies is an important and contemporary way of engaging in the study of culture. Over time many academic subjects – including anthropology, history, literary studies, human geography and sociology – have brought their own disciplinary concerns to the study of culture. However, in recent decades there has been a renewed interest in the study of culture in a number of other disciplines, such as economics, politics and psychology. In addition those disciplines that have long studied culture have taken a fresh look at how this can be done, drawing on new theories and contemporary methods. This renewed attention to culture across the social sciences and humanities is often known as the ‘cultural turn’. Moreover, attention to culture has also crossed disciplinary boundaries. The resulting activity, cultural studies, has emerged as an intriguing and exciting area of intellectual inquiry that has already shed important new light on the character of human cultures and which promises to continue so to do. In this book we adopt what can be seen as a ‘wide’ definition of cultural studies, which we will explore and define further as the book progresses. So as will become clear, this book does not simply concern itself with a version of cultural studies that was developed at and promoted from the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s (see Key Influence 1.3 on p. 31). Further, it does not restrict itself to those forms of cultural studies that even if they take a wider compass than the original work from Birmingham, continue to take their main inspiration from that approach. While there is little doubt that cultural studies is widely recognised as an important, distinctive but highly contested field of study, it does seem to encompass a potentially enormous area. This is at least partly because the term ‘culture’ has a complex history and range of usages, which have provided a legitimate focus of inquiry for different academic disciplines, which often use the term in distinctive ways. So in order to begin to delimit the field that this textbook considers, we have divided this chapter into four main sections:

1.1 A discussion of some principal definitions of culture.

1.2 An introduction to the core issues raised by the definitions and study of culture.

1.3 A review of some leading theoretical accounts that address these core issues.

1.4 An outline of our view of the developing field of cultural studies.

In introducing our book in this way, we aim to show the complexity of the central notion of culture and thereby to define some important issues in the field of cultural studies. The logic of this chapter is to build from definitions and earlier conceptions of culture, some of which you may be familiar with from earlier studies, to the idea of cultural studies, including that originally practised at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (p. 31).

Learning objectives

➤ To understand different definitions of the concept of culture.

➤ To identify the principal issues in the study of culture.

➤ To learn about some of the leading theoretical perspectives in cultural studies.

1.1 WHAT IS CULTURE?

The term ‘culture’ has a complex history and diverse range of meanings in contemporary discourse. Culture can refer to the plays of Shakespeare or Superman comics, opera or football, who does the washing-up at home or how the office of the President of the United States of America is organised. Culture is found in your local street, in your own city and country, as well as on the other side of the world. Small children, teenagers, adults and older people all have their own cultures; but they may also share a wider culture with others.

Given the evident breadth of the term, it is essential to begin by defining what culture is. ‘Culture’ is a word that has grown over the centuries to reach its present broad meaning. One of the founders of cultural studies in Britain, Raymond Williams (p. 5), has traced the development of the concept and provided an influential ordering of its modern uses. Outside the natural sciences, the term ‘culture’ is chiefly used in three relatively distinct senses to refer to the arts and artistic activity – which we will refer to here as ‘culture with a big “C”’; the learned, primarily symbolic features of a particular way of life; and a process of development.

Culture with a big ‘C’

In much everyday talk, culture is believed to consist of the ‘works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’; thus ‘culture’ is the word that describes ‘music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film’ (Williams, 1983b: 90). Culture in this sense is widely believed to primarily concern ‘refined’ pursuits in which the ‘cultured’ person engages.

Culture as a ‘way of life’

In the human sciences the word ‘culture’ has achieved wide currency to refer to the creation and use of symbols (p. 295) which distinguish ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group, or humanity in general’ (Williams, 1983b: 90). Only humans, it is often argued, are capable of creating and transmitting culture and we are able to do this because we create and use symbols. Humans possess a symbolising capacity, which is the basis of our cultural being.

Find out more about symbols in Chapter 8.

What, then, is a symbol? It is when people understand among themselves that a word or drawing or gesture will stand for either an idea (for example, a person, like a pilot) or an object (a box, for example) or a feeling (like contempt). When this has happened, a symbol conveying a shared idea has been created. These shared ideas are symbolically mediated or expressed: for example, by a word in the case of ‘pilot’, by a drawing to convey the idea of a box or by a gesture to convey contempt. It is these meanings that make up a culture. A symbol defines what something means, although a single symbol may have many meanings. For example, a single flag may stand for a legally and geographically defined entity like a nation and an abstract value such as patriotism. To study culture is thus to ask what is the meaning of a style of dress, a code of manners, a place, a language, a norm of conduct, a system of belief, an architectural style, and so on. Language, both spoken and written, is obviously a vast repository of symbols. But symbols can take numerous forms: flags, hairstyles, road signs, smiles, BMWs, business suits – the list is endless.

Given the way that we have discussed culture so far, it might be thought that culture is everything and everywhere. Indeed, some approaches to the study of culture take such a position, especially, for instance, those approaching the topic from an anthropological point of view. Thus to take an influential example, the nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Tylor (1871: 1) famously defined culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society’. This definition underlines the pervasiveness of culture in social life. It also emphasises that culture is a product of humans living together and that it is learned. A similar idea informs the definition offered by the American poet and critic T.S. Eliot:

key influence 1.1

Raymond Williams (1921–88)

Raymond Williams was a Welsh cultural analyst and literary critic. His ‘serious’ attention to ‘ordinary culture’ was a key influence on the development of the idea of cultural studies, of which he is normally seen as a founding figure.

Born into a Welsh working-class family, Williams studied at Cambridge before serving as a tank commander in the Second World War. He returned to Cambridge after the war to complete his degree. He taught for the Workers’ Educational Association during the 1950s, before returning to Cambridge to take up a lectureship in 1961. He was appointed professor of drama in 1974.

Williams’s earliest work addressed questions of textual analysis and drama and can be seen as reasonably conventional in approach, if not emphasis. His influence was enhanced and reputation made by two key books: Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). The former re-examined a range of authors to chart the nature of the formation of culture as a response to the development of industrialism. The latter pointed to the democratic potential of this ‘long revolution’ in culture. Williams distanced himself from the elitist and conservative perspectives of F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot in arguing for both socialist transformation and cultural democracy. Williams emphasised these themes in Communications (1962), which also contained some prototypical media analysis. Television was the subject of the later Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), which introduced the concept of ‘flow’. From the 1960s on, Williams’s work became more influenced by Marxism, resulting in Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture (1981). His The Country and the City (1973a) greatly influenced subsequent interdisciplinary work on space and place. His vast corpus of work (including over 30 books) also addressed drama, cultural theory, the environment, the English novel, the development of language, leftist politics and, in the period before his death, Welshness. He was also a prolific novelist.

The impact of Williams’s sometimes rather dense and ‘difficult’ writings was often in terms of his overall approach, which towards the latter period of his work was defined as cultural materialism, and emphasis rather than in the detail of his analyses. His lifelong positive commitment to socialism, combined with the desire for equality in cultural communication and democracy, was influential on a generation of leftists. His status was further enhanced by the use of his concept of structure of feeling to study various phenomena from literary texts to urban ways of life. His work continues to be debated and used as a reference point in writing about culture, politics and nationalism.

Further reading

Williams wrote a vast amount, so much so that his identity has been seen as that of ‘writer’. The first reference is a revealing set of interviews, which combine the life and work.

Williams, R. (1979) Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: New Left Books.

Eldridge, J. and Eldridge, L. (1994) Raymond Williams: Making Connections, London: Routledge.

Inglis, F. (1995) Raymond Williams, London: Routledge.

Milner, A. (2002) Re-imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural Materialism, London: Sage.

Smith, D. (2008) Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale, Swansea: Parthian.

Culture… includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

(Eliot, 1948, quoted in Williams, 1963 [1958]: 230)

Other approaches, less influenced by anthropology or the humanities, have tended to argue that some areas of social life are more properly thought of as political or economic than cultural and thus can in some fashion be sep...