Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies

Interface between the Social sciences and the humanities.

Concerned with nature of mass culture and the workings of the culture industries.

• Culture industry includes popular culture, communication, consumer society, mass media,

• Jurgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdeiu, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francios Lyotard.

Cultural theory

• It is an attempt to conceptualize and understand the dynamics of culture.

• Historical perspective would ‘culture and nature’, ‘culture and society’, high and low culture, and the interplay cultural tradition and cultural difference and diversity

Culture

• Culture is not biologically transmitted but socially transmitted

• A symbolic and learned aspect of human society• The traditional ideas was developed by

anthropologists Tyler and Henry Lewis Morgan. For them it is a conscious creation of human rationality

• Contemporary ideas of culture came out with Franz Boas where he describes, compares and contrasts cultures.

Cultural Terms

• Cultural Assimilation/Integration• A process where an outsider, immigrant or subordinate

group becomes ‘indistinguishably’ integrated into dominant host society

• It implied that the subordinate group accepted and internalized the values and culture of dominant group

• This term is synonymous with the ‘melting pot’ term in the American culture

• Melting pot- societies formed by immigrants form many different cultures and religion to form a new hybrid culture

Cultural Diffusion• Spread of traits and attributes from one culture• It takes place because of the contact with different societies and

cultures• Developed in the 18 and 19th century• In opposition to cultural evolution, which was concerned with the

origins of human culture• Robert Lowie (1937) saw cultures as patchwork of borrowed traits,

the superior traits moving out from culture.• Some theorists believe that all human culture originated in one

place and spread out from there by diffusion. Eg the similarities between the Mayan culture and Egyptian culture. Or the all the older civilizations. Books written on them and BBC documentary on it too.

Cultural Materialism

• Most aspects of human culture can be explained in material terms

• The same technologies applied to similar environments tend to produce similar arrangements for the production and distribution of goods, which in turn tend to support similar sorts of social groupings, who organize and explain their activities in terms of similar systems of beliefs and values.

• Study of material conditions of socio-cultural life

Cultural Pluralism

• Also known as Multicultural society

• Cultural variety in terms of language, religion, traditions and value systems

• In opposition to cultural assimilation

Cultural Relativism

• Hold that concepts are socially constructed and vary cross-culturally

• For e.g. The reality is a social construct based upon the discourse of society

• Based on linguistic theories• ‘If language constructs the world, then reality is not

independently existing, but is shaped by cultural and linguistic categories’.

• E.g. Eating habits in the west and the east differ, prayers and purdah system, turbans. The Paris judgment, where the head scarf was banned in school, Structuralism