Cultural Studies Lectures- Week 1
Cultural studies uses a broad, anthropological definition of culture, and studies both elite and
mass culture. It studies the tensions between these two, and looks at how ordinary people give
meaning to their lives through culture. This gives it a democratic edge.
Why Culture Matters?
Because it shapes how we think and how we (re)act
Because today global exchanges and communication are reshaping the outlines of our
culture(s)
Because studying culture allows you to understand globalization, nationalism, customs
and rituals of people, communities and groups.
personal space: Our sense of personal space is culturally determined; some people will be
used to stand verry close to one another, while others might find this rude and intimidating.
This is an example of how culture shapes the perspective of people.
What is culture? (according to Raymond Williams)
Culture is ‘one of two or three most complicated words in the English language.’
The word culture originally meant the tending or cultivation of something, mostly in
relation to growing crops (hence the noun agriculture).
o 18th Century: This sense of culture as cultivation was particularly associated
with the spiritual and moral progress of humanity culture was seen as an end
product, such as opera or as high-art.
The word culture developed from only cultivating the land to
cultivating the mind (= Bildung)
Culture as Lived Experience (of customs and practices) connected to a specific group:
a more anthropological definition of culture as a whole and distinctive way of life
o 19th Century: Due to the grow of Nation States, it became necessary to refer to
Culture in the plural in order to distinguish between the particular cultures of
different nations, but also between ‘the specific and variable cultures of social
and economic groups within a nation’.
Two definitions of culture
1. High Culture (Culture with a capital C): Culture is the best of what a society produces
a. Literature, Fine Arts, ballet, classical music etc.
b. Culture is a form of “human civilization” that counters the “anarchy … of the
raw and uncultivated masses” (Matthew Arnold)
c. Culture is… “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Matthew
Arnold)
d. Culture is… the high point of civilization, and the concern of an educated
minority (F.R. Leavis)
2. Ordinary Culture: Culture is a society’s way of life
a. Everyday lived experience of a group or community
b. Traditions and habits of a people
Culturalism: Is an anthropological and historically informed understanding of culture, in
which the emphasis has been made on the ordinariness of culture.
, Culture includes the active, creative capacity of common people to construct shared
meaningful practices.
o Focusses on values, norms and material/symbolic goods.
Williams Culture is the whole way of life, in which he included to culture mass
media, contemporary customs and his general idea that culture (and meanings) are not
generated by individuals alone but by collectives. Therefore, you should no look at the
elite group when researching culture only.
Historical Cultural Materialism: Explores how and why ‘cultural meaning’ is
produced and organized. It involves the exploration of signification in the context of
the means and conditions of its production. Cultural materialism is concerned with the
connections between cultural practice and political economy
o Means of production: These are the factors that are at play in producing
something (in our case: cultural meaning)
Cultural materialism urges us to ask: what different material and non-
material factors are at work in producing cultural meaning?
For example: In the 16th Century culture was created through way
different types of production (by trade, books and writings) then
nowadays (with internet and social media).
o Conditions of production: The conditions mean how this cultural meaning
relates to other, existing cultural meaning
Cultural materialism urges us to ask: how does a (new) cultural
meaning relate to other, existing cultural meaning in a society?
Williams distinguish three levels of culture:
1. The lived culture of a particular time and place: Everything that is happening around
you right now
2. The recorded culture: Selection of artifacts that communities want to safeguard for
next generations, this can be done in forms of art, writings etc.
3. The culture of the selective tradition: The factor connecting lived culture and recorded
culture (making selections about what to record and archive and what not)
Cultural materialism tries to research the cultural meaning behind a cultural practice: urges
you to study all of culture’s components:
Institutions: What institutions are involved in creating a culture?
o
Formations: What schools, movements and factions do we discern?
Modes of production: What material conditions can we identify in the production of
culture?
o Infrastructure and money involved
o Connection with the Marxist approach
Identifications/ forms of culture: How do people identify with a cultural practice?
o What aesthetic form was used, what does it mean to certain people? For
example reggae, the origins and values are being propagated and that is why
afro Americans and Jamaicans identify with reggae.
Reproduction: How is this culture re-produced, remembered, archived etc.?
o What values and meanings are carries or challenged?
, o How to reproduce a certain cultural production, without removing the value.
Organization: How is that archive and remembrance organized?
Raymond Williams wanted to understand how and why cultural meanings and practices
are enacted on a terrain that is not of our making, even as we struggle to creatively shape our
lives. So, how do we as a community take the already present (since people have been living
on this earth) set of cultural preferences and develop them further.
Culture is always both traditional and creative, both the most ordinary common meanings
(folklore and common practices) and the finest individual meanings (will lead up to a change
in the ordinary meanings). The term culture has two aspects:
1. The known meanings and directions: Which a community member is grown up to and
raised in.
2. The new observations and meanings: The attempt to create new practices and
meanings.
a. Every community struggles with adjusting his culture. This adjustment
requires creativity from the community.
We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life (= the the common
meanings) and to mean the arts and learning (= the special processes of discovery and creative
effort) between these two terms, a conjunction is taking place.
Leavisism (by F.R. Leavis, and influenced by Mattew Arnold):
Notion that culture is the high point of civilisation and the concern of an educated minority.
The concept of culture implied a distinction between culture and mass culture, an opposition
in which the term ‘mass culture’ signified an inferior and debased form of culture
Prior to the IR the English culture was divided between the Authentic Common
culture and the minority culture of the educated elites. At the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution, the authentic common culture was ‘down graded’ by the
development of a more Industrialised Mass culture.
Aims of the Leavisism; to define and defend the best of culture, and to criticize the
worst of (mass) culture.
Gaining access to the highly regarded "great tradition" doesn't just make the person
more educated and more culturally enriched, it also and more importantly redistributes
social capacities.
o Thus, belonging to the ‘high Culture’ would imply certain power.
Critics have argued that the qualification of the term quality to certain cultural products, have
been based of a hierarchical and class based institution without any legitimate grounds
although the qualification of what belongs to culture is still hard to make. Based on aesthetic
quality, the debate will be never ending.
Cultural relativism: The idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based
on that person's own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the
norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of
another.
, Problem with the justification of what belongs to culture, when it may not be judged
on aesthetics; what follows is that every popular product made by cultural institutions is
considered to have cultural value.
, or historical
materialism, is a
philosophy that attempts
to relate the production
and
reproduction of culture to
the organization of the
material conditions in life.
The foundations of culture
- A mode of production is
constituted by the
organization of the means
of production
(factories, machinery)
together with the specific
