Four Goals of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture (including popular culture) and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.
The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.
Origin of word 'Cultural '
‘Culture’, derives from ‘Culture’ and ‘colere’ meaning ‘to cultivate’. It also meant ‘to honor’ and ‘project’ by the 19th century in Europe it tasted of the upper class (elite).
‘culture’ is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Elite culture controls meanings because it controls the terms of the debate.
Culture studies looks at marker popular culture and everyday life. Popular culture is the culture of masses. A culture study argues that culture is about the meanings a community or society generates. A cultural study believes that the ‘culture’ of a community includes various aspects: economic, spatial, ideological, erotic and political. Culture is not a natural thing it is produced, cultural studies is interested in production and consumption of culture. Emphasis on discourse and totality are at the center of cultural studies. It believes that we cannot ‘read’ cultural artifacts only within the esthetic realm.
Stuart Hall’s work has been a trendsetter in cultural studies and inaugurated the field in Britain. Hall’s essay of ‘encoding’ and Decoding ‘set the scene’ for cultural studies of the media. The essay argued about meaning within the texts – songs, painting, TV soaps takes help of codes to organize. ‘Culture’ which makes a society “a cultured society”.
Margaret Mead: “Culture is the learned behavior of society or a subgroup.”
Clifford Geertz : “Culture is simply an ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”The tone of this early version of cultural studies was set by students of the British New left, especially Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.
Function :
What cultural studies does is to interpret signs of culture such as the ones listed above as part of a power struggle to acquire, maintain or contest meanings. The ‘Critique’ component of cultural studies explores the political significance of the signs of signs as what they mask or gloss, what they refinance, cultural studies, studies the language in and through which meanings are made in a particular culture. Cultural studies questions how such meaning reflects the power struggle within that culture studies explores how certain meanings are privileged in that culture at the cost of others.
“A cultural study is the analysis of cultures' systems of meaning – production and consumption.”
Steven spielber’s movies and oprah Winfred show point out, examine inter-relationship among – race, gender, popular culture, the media, and literature. The director and anchor, both of them question cultural conventions. Historical and contemporary aspects are on the oprah Winfred show, in Hollywood films. The TV Programmers in our country also presents various cultures. Gujarati, Bengali and Rajasthan TV soaps on channels are famous now a days. Such movies also run well in theaters for a long time.
Elaine Showalter in her essay on feminism talks about the different cultures and contexts. She talks about American culture as well as French culture. Ronald Barlher, Claude Levi-Straurs, Jacuque Derride and Michel Foucault all had to say one or the other thing about culture in their critical essay. A culture study has connections with maxims, the new historicism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, popular culture and postcolonial studies.
Four goals
(1) Cultural Studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
(2) Cultural studies are politically engaged.
(3) Cultural studies deny the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ from elite and popular culture.
(4) Cultural studies analyze not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.
(1) Cultural Studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
A cultural study is practiced in such journals as critical Inquiry, Representation and boundary. Italian Opera, a Latino ‘telenovela’ the architectural styles of prisons, body piercing – and drawing conclusions about the changes in textual phenomena over time-such things are found in these kinds of newspapers cultural studies not simply or essentially about literature in the traditional sense or even about “Art”. Lawrence Grosberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula. Trencher stresses that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to “cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene.” Intellectual works are not limited by their “borders” as single text, historical problems or disciplines, and the critical personal connections to what is analyzed and described. Henry Giroux and others write in their “Dalhousie Revise” manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are ‘resisting intellectuals’ who see what they do as “an emancipator project” as it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher education. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or his own political view 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.
(2) Cultural Studies is politically engaged:
The cultural critics see themselves as “Oppositional” not only within their own discipline but to many of the power structures of society at large. The cultural critics question inequalities within power structures and try to find out the models for restructuring relationships among the dominant and “minority” of “Subaltern” discourses. The meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. This type of idea, taken to a Philosophical extreme, demise the autonomy of the individual whether an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic “Great man” or “Great Book” theory and a relocation of esthetics and culture from the ideal realms of taste and sensibility into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.
(3) Cultural studies diminish the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or elite and popular culture.
These days cultural critics work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture, whether popular, folk, or urban. Jean Belldrillard, Andreas Huyssen and some other critics of cultural studies argue that after World War II the distinction among high low and mass culture collapsed. They look forward to other theorists like Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases.”
For example, the images of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of British ray by writes like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal and entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of white superiority and world wide domination of other races, especially Asians wherever British or French or any other whoever ruled the colonist tried to show their culture superior. But race alone was not the issue for the British raj: money was also another determining factor. Thus, drawing also upon the ideas of French Historian Michel de Certeam, cultural critics examine.
“The practice of everyday life”, studying literature as an anthropologist would, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture’s economy. Cultural critics describe ‘what’ is produced and how various productions relate to one another. They are not determined to find out which one is the best work. Their aim is to reveal the political economic reasons ‘why’ a certain cultural product is more valued at certain times than others.
Changing boundaries among disciplines high and low can make cultural studies just plain fun. Some of these examples are as follows:-
Disney’s pirates of the Caribbean: The curse of the Blach Pearl (2003)
R.L. Stevenson’s long John Silver in ‘Treasure Island’ (1881)
(4) Cultural studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.
Marxist critics have recognized the importance of such par literary questions such as –
‘Who supports a given artist?’
‘Who publishes his or her books, and how are these books distributed’?
Who buys books?
For that matter, who is literate and who is not?
A well-known analysis of literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the America romance (novel) and its readers, “Reading the Romance: women, patriarchy and popular literature, which demonstrates the textual effects of the publishing industry’s decisions effects of the publishing industry’s decisions about books that will reduce its financial risks.”
Another contribution is the collection ‘Reading in America which is edited by Cathy N. Davidson, which includes essays on literacy and gender in colonial New England, urban magazine audiences in eighteenth – century New York city, the impact upon reading of such technical immolation as cheaper eyeglasses, electric lights, and trains, the book – of the month club and how written and texts go through fluctuations of popularity and canonicity. Thus we can say that literature is not separate from our past, present and future.’
Cultural studies joins subjectivity with culture in relation to individual lives with ‘engagement’ a direct approach to attacking social malpractices. The practitioners of cultural studies deny ‘humanism’ or ‘the humanities’ as universal categories. The practitioners strive for what they might call ‘social - reason’, which often resemble the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.
Gerald Graff and James Phelan absolved, “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 inquiry “why teach the controversy?” they noted 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 hope lessee compromised by racism, sexism and homophobia; professors can acknowledge these difference and encourage students to contract a conversation for themselves as “the most exciting part of their education.”
Word count:-
1,710
No comments:
Post a Comment