Lecture 1.

Understanding Cultural Studies

What is Culture?

Definitions of culture cover a wide range of perspectives. In order to describe culture, the following
words and phrases are being used: food, religion, language, music, region or geography, ethnicity,
clothes, and so on. Generally, there is always one person who raises his or her hand timidly and says, “I
think culture is more than that. It’s the things we don’t see, like our beliefs or views about gender.” Both
are correct—culture represents the things we see, the tangible, as well as the intangible things.

The iceberg, a commonly used metaphor to describe culture, is a great example for illustrating the
tangible and the intangible. When talking about culture, most people focus on the “tip of the iceberg,”
which is considered as making up 10% of the object. The rest of the iceberg, 90% of it, is below the
waterline. Most leaders in businesses, when addressing intercultural situations, pick up on the things
they see—things on the “tip of the iceberg.” This means that they never address the cultural issues and
problems that are underneath the surface level. Solutions become temporary band-aids covering deeply
rooted cultural systems.

Culture consists of the shared beliefs, values, and assumptions of a group of people who learn from
one another and teach to others that their behaviors, attitudes, and perspectives are the correct ways
to think, act, and feel. It is helpful if you can think about culture in the following five ways: • Culture is
learned. • Culture is shared. • Culture is dynamic. • Culture is systemic. • Culture is symbolic.

Cultures show up in many forms and are expressed differently. Yet all forms and levels of cultures
express and share three fundamental aspects: values, assumptions, and symbols. Values are
fundamental to understanding how culture expresses itself, because they often serve as principles that
guide people in their behaviors and actions. Our values, ideally, should match up with what we say we
will do, and our values are most evident in symbolic forms. Our values are supported by our
assumptions of our world. They are beliefs or ideas that we believe and hold to be true. They come
about through repetition. This repetition becomes a habit we form and leads to habitual patterns of
thinking and doing. We do not realize our assumptions because they are ingrained in us at an
unconscious level. We are aware of it when we encounter a value or belief that is different from ours,
when it makes us feel that we need to stand up for, or validate, our beliefs. Anthropologist GeertzGeertz
(1973) believed that culture was a system based on symbols. He said that people use symbols to define
their world and express their emotions. As human beings, we all learn, both consciously and
unconsciously, starting at a very young age. What we internalize comes through observation,
experience, interaction, and what we are taught. We manipulate symbols to create meaning and stories
that dictate our behaviors, to organize our lives, and to interact with others. The meanings we attach to
symbols are arbitrary. Looking someone in the eye means that you are direct and respectful in some
countries, yet, in other cultural systems, looking away is a sign of respect.

Definition for cultural studies

There are many ideas about what constitutes the centre of cultural studies. Seemingly, many of the
arguments about the shape of the field and the appropriateness of specific practices within it are driven
by the original disciplinary orientation of individual contributors. Thus, historians tend to be suspicious
of the textual analysis practised by those who originally trained as literary critics; the literary critics in
turn are often suspicious of the way in which sociologists or ethnographers accept statements from their
subjects without sufficient analysis and interpretation. Recently, some sociologists have been broadly

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critical of humanities-based cultural studies research that overlooks the usefulness of political
economy. It would be a mistake to see cultural studies as a new discipline, or even a discrete
constellation of disciplines. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field where certain concerns and
methods have converged; the usefulness of this convergence is that it has enabled us to understand
phenomena and relationships that were not accessible through the existing disciplines. All of that said,
cultural studies does contain common elements: principles, motivations, preoccupations and theoretical
categories.

Language and culture

At this stage only a couple of points need to be made about the way in which this tradition began.
Customarily, cultural studies is seen to begin with the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of
Literacy (1958) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution
(1961). Both Hoggart and Williams can be placed within a tradition of English literary criticism generally
identified with F. R. Leavis and noted for its concentration on the forms of literary texts and on their
moral/social significance. What was impressive about both Hoggart and Williams was their ability to
mobilize their methods of textual criticism so as to ‘read’ cultural forms other than literature: popular
song, for instance, or popular fiction. But there were clear limits: both writers suffered from the lack of
a method that could more appropriately analyse the ways in which such cultural forms and practices
produced their social, not merely their aesthetic, meanings and pleasures. To reconnect the texts with
society, with the culture and the individuals that produced and consumed them, involved a fundamental
reorientation. One was required to think about how culture was structured as a whole before one could
examine its processes or its constitutive parts. As Iain Chambers (1986) has suggested, ‘Explanations
based on the idea of totality, on the rational frame that connects the most distant and complex parts,
are characteristic of the great Continental schools of thought’: Marxism, classical sociology,
psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics. Within most of what follows, language looms as the most
essential of concepts, either in its own right or through being appropriated as a model for
understanding other cultural systems.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language is our starting point. Common-sense understandings of the
function of language would see it as a system for naming things; seemingly, an object turns up in the
material world, we apply a name to it and communicate this to others, and the word enters into usage.
Saussure sees it differently. For him, language is a mechanism that determines how we decide what
constitutes ‘an object’ in the first place, let alone which objects might need naming. Language does
not name an already organized and coherent reality; its role is far more powerful and complex. The
function of language is to organize, to construct, indeed to provide us with our only access to, reality.

This distinction might become clearer if we refer to Saussure’s proposition that the connection between
a word and its meaning is not inherent, or natural, but, in most instances, quite arbitrary; the word tree
means what it does to us only because we agree to let it do so. The fact that there is no real reason this
word should mean what it does is underlined by the fact that there are different words to express the
same concept in different languages. Further, there is no ‘natural’ reason the concept itself should be
expressed at all. There is no universal law that decrees we should distinguish between trees and, say,
flowers, or between trees and grass; that we do so is a matter of convention. Australian Aboriginal
cultures discern a multitude of differences among various conditions of what white Australian culture
sees as empty desert; their language has many words differentiating what whites simply call ‘bush’ or
‘scrub’. Even the way we ‘see’ the world is determined by the cultural conventions through which we
conceptualize the images we receive. When the first colonists arrived in Australia, their early paintings
of the indigenous peoples resembled current European aesthetic conventions of ‘the noble savage’.
They bore little resemblance to what we now see as the ‘real’ characteristics of Australian Aborigines.
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Those early painters represented what they saw through the visual ‘languages’ of their time. So, even
our idea of the natural world is organized, constituted, through the conventions of its representation:
through languages.

When Saussure insists that the relation between a word and its meaning is constructed, not given, he is
directing us to the cultural and social dimensions of language. Language is cultural, not natural, and so
the meanings it generates are too. The way in which language generates meaning, according to
Saussure, is important. Again, he insists that the function of language is not to fix intrinsic meanings, the
definitions of those things it refers to, as we might imagine it should. Language is a system of
relationships; it establishes categories and makes distinctions through networks of difference and
similarity. When we think of the word man we attribute meaning by specifying the concept’s similarity
to, or difference from, other concepts; crucially, we will consider what such a word tells us this object is
not: not boy, not girl, not woman, and so on. Cultural relations are reproduced through the language
system: to extend the previous example, the word man might also generate its meaning in opposition to
other concepts – not weak, not emotional, not sensitive, for example – that go to build up a particular
cultural definition of the male role within gender relations.

The insights contained within Saussure’s theory of language have a relevance beyond linguistics because
they reveal to us the mechanisms through which we make sense of our world. Specific social relations
are defined through the place language allocates them within its system of relations. Such an
explanation of language endows it with enormous determining power. Reality is made relative, while
the power of constructing ‘the real’ is attributed to the mechanisms of language within the culture.
Meaning is revealed to be culturally grounded – even culturally specific. Different cultures may not only
use different language systems but they may also, in a definitive sense, inhabit different worlds. Culture,
as the site where meaning is generated and experienced, becomes a determining, productive field
through which social realities are constructed, experienced and interpreted. The great contribution of
Saussure’s theory is that it directly relates language and culture; some may say it works too well, making
it difficult to separate them.

Saussure’s next step is outside the specific domain of linguistics. He argues that the principles which
structure the linguistic system can also be seen to organize other kinds of communication systems –
not only writing, but also non-linguistic systems such as those governing images, gestures or the
conventions of ‘good manners’, for instance. Saussure proposes an analogy between the operation of
language and the operation of all other systems that generate meaning, seeing them all as ‘signifying
systems’. This analogy has been widely accepted and adopted. The reasons for its attraction are pretty
clear. Language is a signifying system that can be seen to be closely ordered, structured, and thus can be
rigorously examined and ultimately understood; conversely, it is also a means of ‘expression’ that is not
entirely mechanistic in its functions but allows for a range of variant possibilities. Saussure’s system thus
acknowledges or recognizes the power of determining, controlling structures (analogous to langue), as
well as the specific, partly ‘free’, individualized instance (analogous to parole). It offers enormous
possibilities for the analysis of cultural systems that are not, strictly speaking, languages, but that work
like languages. The structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) adopted Saussure’s model to
decode the myths, symbolic systems, even the customary practices employed in the preparation of
food, of ‘primitive’ societies; and the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1973) applied it to the analysis
of the codes and conventions employed in the films, sports and eating habits (among other topics) of
contemporary Western societies in Mythologies. For such followers, there was little doubt that ‘culture
… was itself a … signifying practice – and had its own determinate product: meaning’ (Hall 1980a: 30).

Semiotics and Signification

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That cultural product – meaning – is of crucial importance. If the only way to understand the world is
through its ‘representation’ to us through language(s), we need some method of dealing with
representation, with the production of meaning. In his course in General Linguistics (1960), Saussure
suggests the establishment of a ‘science which would study the life of signs within society’ (p. 16).
Semiology ‘would teach us what signs consist of, what laws govern them’. Semiology was to be the
mechanism for applying the structural model of language across all signifying systems and for providing
a method of analysis that would be ‘scientific’ and precise. While it is not entirely scientific, semiotics –
as we shall call it here – has become a most useful method, the terminology of which is basic to cultural
studies and needs to be outlined at least briefly in this section.

The sign

Semiotics allows us to examine the cultural specificity of representations and their meanings by using
one set of methods and terms across the full range of signifying practices: gesture, dress, writing,
speech, photography, film, television and so on. Central here is the idea of the sign. A sign can be
thought of as the smallest unit of communication within a language system. It can be a word, a
photograph, a sound, an image on a screen, a musical note, a gesture, an item of clothing. To be a sign it
must have a physical form, it must refer to something other than itself, and it must be recognized as
doing this by other users of the sign system. The word tree is a sign; the photographic image of Brad Pitt
is a sign; the trademark of Coca-Cola is a sign, too. Less obviously, when we dress to go out for a drink or
to a club, our selection and combination of items of clothing is a combination of signs; our clothes are
placed in relation to other signs (the way we do our hair, for instance) that have meaning for those we
will meet there. We intend that these signs will determine our meaning for those we meet, and we fear
that the meanings we have attempted to create will not be the meanings taken: for instance, instead of
being seen as a part of a particular social scene we may be ‘read’ as poseurs or phonies. In this, as in
other situations, we signify ourselves through the signs available to us within our culture; we select and
combine them in relation to the codes and conventions established within our culture, in order to limit
and determine the range of possible meanings they are likely to generate when read by others.

In order to understand the process of signification, the sign has been separated into its constituent
parts: the signifier and the signified. It has become conventional to talk of the signifier as the physical
form of the sign: the written word, the lines on the page that form the drawing, the photograph, the
sound. The signified is the mental concept referred to by the signifier. So the word tree will not
necessarily refer to a specific tree but to a culturally produced concept of ‘tree-ness’. The meaning
generated by these two components emerges from their relationship; one cannot separate them and
still generate meaning. The relationship is, most often, an arbitrary and constructed one, and so it can
change.

Semiotics in practice

Roland Barthes (1973) has, in effect, extended this system of classification into semiotics. In his essay
‘Myth Today’, he has outlined an incremental signifying system in which social meanings attach
themselves to signs, just as connotations attach themselves to a word. This culturally enriched sign itself
becomes the signifier for the next sign in a chain of signification of ascending complexity and cultural
specificity. So, for example, the word outlaw has acquired social meanings that will be called up and that
will acquire further and more specific accretions when used, say, in a western film or in the lyrics of a
song played by a heavy metal band. Similarly, the meanings Arnold Schwarzenegger has accrued in his
Terminator films become part of what he signifies in subsequent performances (even when he plays

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slightly against them, as in Kindergarten Cop). Barthes’ particular concern in ‘Myth Today’ is with the
way cultural associations and social knowledge attach themselves to sign fields. He calls these
attachments ‘myths’, not meaning to suggest that they are necessarily untrue, but that they operate, as
do myths in what we think of as more primitive societies, to ‘explain’ our world for us.

It is easier to demonstrate the function of semiotic methods in practice than to explain them in the
abstract. The practices of advertising provide a clear demonstration of the processes of signification.
Advertising could be said to work by fitting a signifier to a signified, both cooperating with and
intervening in the semiotic process. Advertisers typically deploy a signifier, already conventionally
related to a mental concept they wish to attach to their product, as a means of providing their product
with that meaning. So, the manufacturers of Ski yoghurt in Australia run a series of television ads
featuring a particular life-style: sailboarding, hang-gliding, surfing, skiing. The arrangement of signifiers
within the images places great emphasis on the natural environment in which these activities take place:
water, snow, air. There is no obvious connection with yoghurt, but the life-style shots are intercut with
shots of the product being consumed by the same suntanned young things who were sailboarding. The
process of semiosis means that we stitch the signs together, connecting the yoghurt with the life-style
depicted. It is similar to the process of metaphor in writing or speech, in which two otherwise
unconnected ideas are syntactically linked and thus bleed into each other; each takes on some of the
meanings of the other.

The result, for Ski yoghurt, is the product’s incorporation into an idea of the natural, into the existing
myths of youth, and of a healthy outdoor life-style. As a consequence of advertising like this, yoghurt is
now a ‘life-style product’ as much as a food. This campaign emphasizes the product’s place within a set
of social, subcultural, fashionable, life-style relations more than it emphasizes Ski’s taste as a food – its
place within a culinary (if still fashionable) set of relations. Finally, the ads are informed by a myth that
links youth, health and nature, as if youth were not only more healthy and vigorous but also more
‘natural’ than other physical states. This operates in tandem with the apparently unshakeable myth that
certain aspects of one’s physical appearance are the key to all other states of wellbeing, from
employment to love to personal happiness and success. Such myths may seem transparently false, but
they do have surprising explanatory force. Television programmes such as Lifestyles of the Rich and
Famous reinforce such myths by knitting fame, financial success and glamour together in every segment.
To see the successful as exceptionally gifted, and implicitly to see oneself as ordinary and therefore in
need of the signifiers of success that life-style products might provide, is to accept the mythic
explanation offered for an inequitable and discriminatory economic and social structure.

Textual analysis

Semiotics has become part of the vocabulary of cultural studies. The method is widely deployed in the
analysis of film and television. Clearly, its value lies in its ability to deal with sound, image and their
interrelation. In television studies, particularly, semiotics’ break with an aesthetic mode of analysis and
its relative independence from notions of authorial intention are valuable. There is a link, however,
between aesthetic analysis and semiotic analysis: the strategy of calling the object or site of one’s
analysis a text. The term is appropriated from literary studies and depends upon an analogy between
the close analysis conventionally applied to literary texts and the close analysis cultural studies applies
to popular cultural texts. The objectives of cultural studies’ analyses of texts may differ markedly,
however, from those of predominantly evaluative modes of literary studies, such as the tradition
associated with F. R. Leavis in Britain. While many individual or groups of cultural texts may be
particularly interesting to us – the various formations of the Big Brother TV programme, for instance, or
the American TV series Ally McBeal – the point of textual analysis is not to set up a canon of rich and

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rewarding texts we can return to as privileged objects. Structuralist influence on the application of
semiotics to popular cultural texts has insisted that analysis should not limit itself to the structures of
individual texts, but should use such texts as the site for examining the wider structures that produced
them – those of the culture itself. As Richard Johnson (1983) has emphasized, while textual analysis is,
as we shall see, a major current within cultural studies, the text is still ‘only a means in cultural study’;
it is ‘no longer studied for its own sake … but rather for the subjective or cultural forms which it
realises and makes available’ (p. 35). Johnson is right to stress the importance of the text as a site
where cultural meanings are accessible to us, rather than as a privileged object of study in its own right.
The precise nature of cultural studies’ interest in these meanings is important, too; at its most
distinctive, cultural studies analysis is aimed towards a particular end – that of understanding the ways
in which power relations are regulated, distributed and deployed within industrial societies.

Core readings:
Scmitz, A. (2012). Cultural Intelligence for Leaders. Understanding Culture. Creative Commons.
Turner, G. (2003). British Cultural Studies. An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Additional readings:
Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies, London: Paladin.
Chambers, I. (1986) Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, London: Methuen.
Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A., Willis, P. (1980) Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson
Hoggart, R. (1958) The Uses of Literacy, London: Penguin.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Saussure, F. (1960) A Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, London: Peter Owen.
Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society 1780–1950, London: Penguin.