A summary of Chapter 2: Questions of culture and ideology.
Barker, Chris and Emma A. Jane. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 5th Edition. Los Angeles: Sage, 2016
● RAYMOND WILLIAMS: born in the working class in wales, wrote about the
experience of the working-class culture and a commitment to democracy and
socialism. His work was influential in the development of cultural studies through his
understanding of culture as constituted by ‘a whole way of life’. His anthropologically-
inspired grasp of culture as ordinary and lived legitimized the study of popular
culture. His work engages with marxism but is critical of its economic reduction.
- The word culture came from the cultivation( growing) of crops and was broadened to
the human mind or spirit. > this led to the idea of the cultivated or cultured person.
● A more anthropological definition of culture: ‘a whole and distinctive way of life’
(emphasized ‘lived experience’)
● MATTHEW ARNOLD: Described culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said
in the world’. Reading, observing and thinking were said to be the means towards
moral perfection and social good. Culture as the form of human ‘civilization’ is to be
the counterpoise to the anarchy of the ‘raw and uncultivated’ masses. > justification
for high culture
● LEAVISISM:
- F.R Leavis Q.D Leavis
- Shares with Arnold that culture is the high point of civilization and the concern of an
educated minority.
- F.R argued: prior to the industrial revolution, England had an authentic common
culture for the people and a minority culture of the educated elite >‘organic
community’ with a ‘lived culture’ > this has been lost to the ‘standardization and
leveling down’ of industrialized mass culture.
- Important tasks:
- 1. To define and defend the best of culture represented by the cannon of good works.
2. To criticize the worst of mass culture represented by advertising, films and popular
fiction.
- Cultural studies struggled against such definition and through which it defined itself.
- Leavism can be said to have opened the terrain of popular culture for study by
bringing the tools and the concept of ‘art and literature to bear on it.
● Raymond Williams: culture is ordinary
- The everyday lived character of culture as ‘a whole way of life’. He concerned with
working-class culture and its everyday construction of culture. politics which stresses
democracy, education and the long revolution. (the march of the working class
through the institution of contemporary life leading to the democratization of culture
and politics.)
- Culture has two aspects:
1. The known meanings and directions, which are trained.
2. new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested.
- The word culture is used in two ways:
1. To mean a whole way of life.
, 2. To mean the arts and learning - the special processes of discovery and creative
effort.
- Culture is both the ‘arts’ and the values, norms and symbolic goods of everyday life.
While culture is concerned with tradition and social reproductions, it is also a matter
of creativity and change.
● Meanings are generated not by individuals alone but by collectives. Thus the idea of
culture refers to shared meanings.
To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the
world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and
feelings about the world, in ways which can be understood by each other. Thus
culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening
around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world, in broadly similar ways. - HALL
● The anthropological approach to culture (Williams) > had the pragmatic consequence
of splitting off the concept from the ‘arts’. It helped to legitimize popular culture and
opened up television, newspapers, dancing and other everyday artifacts and
practices to critical but sympathetic analysis.
● Culturalism: Anthropological and historically informed understanding of culture.
Stress on the ordinariness of culture. Class culture, socialism, democracy.
● Richard Hoggart: The uses of literacy
Hoggart’s legacy is the legitimacy accorded to the detailed study of working-class
culture, that is, to the meanings and practices of ordinary people as they seek to live
their lives and make their own history.
● John Hartly: Argues that notions of literacy need to move beyond the sorts of critical
reading and media literacy approaches taught in schools, and instead be extended
into the teachings of digital literacy
● Edward Thompson: Class is a historical phenomenon forged and created by people.
● Cultural materialism (Williams):
- Theory of culture >the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life.
- 3 levels of culture:
- Lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that
time and place.
- Recorder culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of the
period.
- Culture of the selective tradition, as the factor connecting lived and period culture.
- The purpose of cultural analyses is to explore and analyze the recorded culture of a
given time and place> he seeks to reconstitute the ‘structure of feeling’ of a culture.
- Cultural materialism: that culture can be understood through the representations and
practices of daily life in the context of the material conditions of their production.
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