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Summary Key concepts/thinkers cultural studies midterm
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A thorough description and explanation of the key concepts and thinkers from the Cultural Studies book and lectures.
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Chapter 2Key concepts
Culture: word, not a thing, and the meaning lies in its use, so we should look at how the word
culture is used and for what purposes.
High culture: Arnold: “the best that has been thought and said in the world”.
* Cultural materialism: culture understood through representations and practices of daily life
in the context of material conditions of their productions.
Connections between cultural practice and political economy, so we should explore
culture in terms of:
● Institutions.
● Formations (=schools etc.).
● Modes of production.
● Identifications and forms of culture.
● Reproduction (selective tradition).
● Organization of the selective tradition.
# Marxism: historical materialism, attempts to relate production and reproduction of culture to
the organization of the material conditions in life. Main idea: culture is determined by
production and organization of material existence:
Base-superstructure: mode of production (base): economy, constituted by means of
production (machinery, factories etc.) and relations of production (class).
Base shapes cultural superstructure.
Culture is political, because: (1) expressive of social relations of class power (2) naturalizes
the social order as a ‘fact’ (3) it obscures underlying relations of exploitation.
Therefore, culture is ideological (ideology: meanings that purport to be universal
truths → myths Barthes).
Ideology: (1) general: binding and justifying ideas of any social group (2) Marx: production of
ideology interwoven with material production (3) Althusser: Ideological State Apparatuses,
ideology as lived experience not false, but as misrecognition of real conditions false,
involved in reproduction of social formations.
Hegemony: (1) see Gramsci (2) cultural studies: culture comprised of multiple streams of
meaning, but one is dominant. Hegemony is the process of making, maintaining and
reproducing these authoritative meanings.
Key thinkers
Raymond Williams:
- Began as a noun of the process connected to growing crops (cultivation).
- Later: cultivated person: about human mind/spirit.
- Culture as a ‘whole way of life’ (emphasized lived experience).
- Working-class experience/everyday construction of culture.
- Two aspects: (1) known meanings and directions (2) new observations and
meanings.
Two senses: (1) whole way of life/common meanings (2) arts and learning/discovery
and creative effort.
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