Assignment Paper: - EE-205-B, X
Topic : -culture studies and
Topic : -culture studies and
its four goals
Student’s name : - Vala Neeta T.
Roll no :- 22
URL :-valaneeta391011.blogspot.com
Semester :- M.A. Sem.ii
Batch :- 2010-11
Submitted to Dr. Dilip Barad,
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University
Introduction:-
Culture:- The word Culture comes from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor).
Culture refers to the following Ways of Life, including but not limited to:-Ø Language: -
The oldest human institution and the most sophisticated medium of expression.
Ø Arts & Sciences: -
The most advanced and refined forms of human expression.
Ø Thought: -
The ways in which people perceive, interpret, and understand the world around them.
Ø Spirituality: -
The value system transmitted through generations for the inner well-being of human beings, expressed through language and actions.
Ø Social activity: -
The shared pursuits within a cultural community, demonstrated in a variety of festivities and life-celebrating events.
Ø Interaction: -
The social aspects of human contact, including the give-and-take of socialization, negotiation, protocol, and conventions.
In general, it refers to human activity; different definition of culture reflects different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity. Culture studies combines sociology literary theory, film studies, cultural anthropolar to study culture phenomena in industrial societies.
"culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society"
"set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs".
What is “Culture Studies”? The word ‘culture’ itself is so difficult to pin down, culture Studies is hard to define.
Ø As Elaine Showalter’s “cultural” models of famines difference, “culture studies” is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices.
Ø As Patrick Brantlinger has point out culture studies is not,
“a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda”
but a “loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”
Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, culture studies is composed of elements of Marxism, post structuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, popular culture studies, and post colonial studies: those fields that concentrate on social and culture forces that either create community or cause division and alienation.
Ø For example:-
ü Roland Barthes on the nature of literary language
ü Claude Levi- Straus on anthology.
Cultural studies were influenced by structuralism and post- structuralism.
§ Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” of the world/text distinction, like all his deconstruction of hierarchical opposition, has urged-or enabled-culture critics
“to erase the boundaries between high and low culture, classic and popular literary texts, and literature and other cultural discourses that, following Derrida, may be seen as manifestations of the same textuality.”
v The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies.
Ø For example:-
ü Jacques Lucan’s psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems.
ü Michel Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens. A tyrannical aristocrat does not just independently wield power but is empowered by “discourses”- accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking- and practices that embody, exercise, and amount to power. From punishment to sexual mores, Foucault’s “Genealogy” of topics includes many things excluded by tradition historians, from architectural blueprints for prisons to memoirs of “deviants.”
Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. Particular meanings attach to the ways people in particular cultures do things.
Ø In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:
Ø Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power.
Ø It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
Ø It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.
Ø It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (cultural knowledge) and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.
Ø It has a commitment to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies often promulgated overtly politically leftist views and criticisms of capitalist mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences:
o For example:-
Paul Gilroy.
In contrast, the American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the libratory aspects of fandom.
o For example:-
The writings of critics such as John Guillory. The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.
Some scholars, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture.
Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this rigidly deterministic view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product.
Another major point of criticism involved the traditional view assuming a passive consumer. Other views challenge this, particularly by underlining the different ways people read, receive, and interpret cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject, or challenge the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus away from the production of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming with identity. Stuart Hall has become influential in these developments. Some commentators have described the shift towards meaning as the cultural turn.
In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only includes the traditional high arts and popular arts, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies.
Culture studies approaches generally share four goals.
First, culture studies transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. Second, cultural studies is politically engaged. Third, culture study denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture. Finally, culture studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.Ø First goal of culture studies:-
First, culture studies transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
Practiced in such journals as critical inquiry, Representation, and boundaries too, culture phenomenon of a text-
For example,
Italian opera, a Latino tenelovela, the architectural styles of prisons, body piercing- and drawing conclusion about the changes in textual phenomena over time. Culture studies are not necessarily about literature in the traditional studies sense or even about “art”.
In their introduction to cultural studies, editors Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler emphasize that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to
“cut across diverse social and political studies interests and adders many of the struggles within the current scene.”
Intellectual works are not limited by their own ‘borders’ as single texts, historical problems, or disciplines, and the critic’s own personal connection to what is being analyzed may also be described. Henry Girous and others write in their Dalhousie Review manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are “resting intellectual” who see what they do as “an emancipator project” because it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institution of higher education.
For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or her own political views part of the instruction, which, of course, can lead to problems. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity.
Ø Second goal of culture studies:-
Second, cultural studies is politically engaged.
Culture critics see themselves as “oppositional” not only within their own disciplines but too many of the power structures of society at large. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationship among dominant and “minority” or “subaltern” discourses. Because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. Such a notion, taken to a philosophical extreme, denies the autonomy of the individual, where a traditional humanistic “Great Man” or “Great Book” theory, and a relocation of aesthetics and culture from the ideal realms of taste and sensibility, into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.
Ø Third goal of culture studies:-
Third, culture studies denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture.
You might hear some remark at the symphony or an art museum: “I came here to gat little culture.” Being a ‘cultured’ person used to mean being acquainted with “highbrow” art and intellectual pursuits. But isn’t culture also to be found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Culture critics’ today work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture, where popular, folk, or urban. Following theorists Jean Baudrillard and Andress Huyssen, Cultural critics argue that after World War 2 the distinctions among high, low, and mass culture collapsed, and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste” often only reflects prevailing social,
Ø For example,
The image of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of the British raj by writers like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal an entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other races , especially Asian: but race alone was not the issue for the British raj: money was also a deciding factor.
Thus, drawing also upon the ideas of French historian Michel De Certeau, culture critics examine “the practice of everyday life” studying literature as an anthropologist would, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture’s economy. Rather than determining which are the “best” works produced and how various productions relate to one another. They aim to reveal the political, economic reasons why a certain cultural product is more valued at certain times than others.
Transgressing of boundaries among disciplines high and low can make cultural studies just plain fun,
Ø For example, of a possible cultural studies research paper with the following title:-
“The Birth of Captain Jack Sparrow: An Analysis.”
For sources of Johnny Deep’s funky performance in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The curse of the Black Pearl (2003). You could research cultural topics ranging from the trade economics of the sea two hundred years ago, to real pirates of the Caribbean such as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, then on to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long silver in “Treasure Island (1881), Erról Flynn’s and Robert Morgan’s memorable screen pirates, John Cleese’s rendition of Long Silver on Manty Python’s Flying circus, and , of course, Keith Richard’s eye make up.
Ø Forth goal of culture studies:-
Finally, culture studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.
Marxist critics have long the importance of such paraliterary questions as these:
Ø Who supports a given artist?
Ø Who publishes his other books, and how are these books distributed?
Ø Who buys books?
Ø For that matter, who is literate and who is not?
A well-known analysis of literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the American romance novel and its readers, Reading the Romance:
Women, patriarchy and Popular Literature, which demonstrates the textual effects of the publishing industry’s decisions about books that will minimize its financial risks.
Another contribution is the collection Reading in America, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, which includes essays on literacy and gender in colonial New England; urban magazine audiences in eighteen century New York City; the impact upon reading of such technical innovations as cheaper eyeglasses, electric lights, and trains; the Book-of-the-Month Club; and how writers and texts go through fluctuations of popularity and canonicity. These studies help us recognize that literature does not occur in a space separate from other concerns of our lives.
A cultural study thus joins subjectivity- that is, culture social ills in relation to individual lives- with engagement, a direct approach to attacking social ills. Though cultural practitioners deny “humanism”or “the humanities” as universal categories , they strives for what they might call “social reason,” which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals
Conclusion:-
First of all, it is increasingly clear that by the year 2050 the United States will be what demographers call a “majority – minority” population ; that is, the present numerical majority of “White”, “Caucasian” and “Anglo”- Americans will be the minority, particularly with the dramatically increasingly numbers of Latina/o residents, mostly Mexican Americans. As Gerald Graff and James Phelan observe, “it is a common prediction that the culture of the next century will put a premium on people’s ability to deal productively with conflict and cultural difference. Learning by controversy is sound training for citizenship in that future”. To the question “why teach the controversy?” they not that today a student can go from one class in which the values of western culture are never questioned to the next class where Western Culture is portrayed as hopelessly compromised by racism, sexism, and homophobia: professor can acknowledged these differences and encourage students to construct a conversation for themselves as “the most exciting part of education”
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