The way I like doing cultural studies is to treat a culture like a text, and to treat the society like the author of the text. How do you do cultural studies? Inevitably, there are various ways. In other words, while much history attends to the “high culture” of the ruling class and elites in a society, many cultural studies shift their focus to the “low culture” of the general public.Īs such, it is often necessary, when doing a cultural studies project, to determine whether the culture you’re looking at is a mainstream culture (sometimes called a dominant culture) or a subculture. Popular culture has become a central concern of cultural studies. It asks why we do the things we do - “we” as particular individuals living in societies, and “we” as cultures and sub-cultures developed by societies. Why did a certain culture emerge out of a certain society? How does a certain culture work? What’s the logic at play in a certain society? Where did a certain cultural formation come from? How does a culture perpetuate itself? How does cultural change occur?Ĭultural studies attends to the social and political context in which a culture develops and manifests.Ĭultural studies attends to the assumptions, motives, commitments, and structures of social life. In contrast to history, which addresses the particular facts of a society – who did what when – cultural studies attends to the conceptual implications of a society. Moreover, cultures have their own rhetorics: a culture could rely upon the logic of a metaphor, or it could invoke the pastoral mode. In other words, cultural studies does history as literary studies.įrom the perspective of cultural studies, for example, there are genres of culture: a culture could be tragic or comic based on its congruence with the literary genres of tragedy and comedy. The text can be a literary document (a novel or poem), or some other artistic document (a film or photograph), or what is called a “cultural artifact” (a hairstyle or political slogan), or an event (a campus riot or ) In fact, in cultural studies, a text need not be a material document at all. In cultural studies, a text is not simply a book. The definition of a text in cultural studies is significantly broader than the definition of a text in traditional literary studies. If a literary text is the product of an individual author, a cultural text is the product of an entire society, or at least a sub-culture within a society. Cultural studies is explicitly interdisciplinary, employing the methods of both the humanities and the social sciences, and drawing upon materials and theories from disciplines such as literary studies, sociology, psychology, history, economics, and politics.Ĭonceptually speaking, cultural studies originates in the idea of textuality - that is, in the idea that our world is full of texts, or things that we humans have created, and that we can interpret those “cultural texts” in the same way that we interpret “ literary texts” more traditionally understood. Institutionally speaking, cultural studies is a field of academic inquiry that developed in Great Britain in the 1960s-80s and has been taken up and transformed by various academic movements in various ways since the 1980s.
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