All rights reserved.

May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Copyright 2016. Routledge.

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 Introducing Cultural Studies

This new, updated edition of Introducing Cultural Studies provides a systematic and compre-
hensible introduction to the concepts, debates and latest research in the field. Reinforcing the
interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies, the authors first guide the reader through cultural
theory before branching out to examine different dimensions of culture in detail – including
globalisation, the body, geography, fashion and politics.
Incorporating new scholarship and international examples, this new edition includes:

■■ New and improved ‘Defining Concept’, ‘Key Influence’, ‘Example’ and ‘Spotlight’
features that probe deeper into the most significant ideas, theorists and examples,
ensuring you obtain an in-depth understanding of the subject.
■■ A brand new companion website featuring a flashcard glossary, web links, dis-
cussion and essay questions to stimulate independent study.
■■ A new-look text design with over 60 pictures and tables that makes navigating the
book, and the subject, simple and logical.

Introducing Cultural Studies will be core reading for Cultural Studies undergraduates and post-
graduates, as well as an illuminating guide for those on Communication and Media Studies,
English, Sociology and Social Studies courses.

Brian Longhurst
University of Salford
Greg Smith
University of Salford
Gaynor Bagnall
University of Salford
Garry Crawford
University of Salford
Miles Ogborn
Queen Mary University of London

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EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2024 6:42 AM via NELSON MANDELA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 PRAISE FOR THIS EDITION

“depth,
Achieving an exceptional level of methodological breadth and theoretical
Introducing Cultural Studies proves to be a powerful resource for the new genera-
tion of cultural studies scholars and students. While carefully articulating an accessible
discourse for its readers and incorporating a good range of learning activities into each
chapter, this book covers key contemporary issues in cultural theory and explores the
shifting critical agendas in the field.
”
Dr Cuneyt Çakirlar, Lecturer in Communication,
Culture and Media, Nottingham Trent University, UK

“examples
A clear, accessible introduction to the issues, with good historical context and useful
” Professor Anne Cranny-Francis, Professor of Cultural Studies,
University of Technology Sydney, Australia

“cursory,
One of the biggest strengths is the text’s approach to presenting the theory: it is not
or worse, so in-depth that students become bored or overwhelmed. Examples
of technologies and how they figure into the larger concept of the post-modern are also
usefully presented.
” Dr Rita Kondrath, Lecturer in Cultural Studies,
Granite State College, University of New Hampshire, USA

“theories
Critically provocative and moves in the direction of more contemporary concepts and
from a range of key thinkers. An excellent foundation to a complex and chal-
lenging set of approaches without being overtly descriptive or dumbing things down. It
gives an incredibly strong overview with a clear sense of theoretical and critical integrity.
Dr Gareth Longstaff, Director – BA Media, Communication and
”
Cultural Studies, Newcastle University, UK

“book.
I am impressed by the depth and width of cultural theories and topics addressed in this
It also includes an excellent chapter on research methods in cultural studies. This
timely and welcome new edition offers an interesting, insightful, and solid introduction to
cultural studies.
”
Dr Kyong Yoon, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, University
of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada

“complex
A great deal of valuable material . . . it does a good job of introducing what can be very
theories in an accessible, yet still sophisticated manner
”
Dr Joel McKim, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies,
Birkbeck, University of London, UK

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 This page intentionally left blank

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 Introducing Cultural
Studies
Third Edition

Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith,

Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford and
Miles Ogborn

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 Third edition published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith, Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford and
Miles Ogborn
The right of Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith, Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford and
Miles Ogborn to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
First edition published by Prentice Hall Europe 1999
Second edition published by Prentice Hall Europe 2008 and by Routledge 2013
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Longhurst, Brian, 1956- author.
Title: Introducing cultural studies / Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith, Gaynor Bagnall,
Garry Crawford and Miles Ogborn.
Description: Third edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015212 (print) | LCCN 2016024690 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138915732 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138915725 (pbk) |
ISBN 9781315690070 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Culture—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC HM623 .I685 2016
(print) | LCC HM623 (ebook) | DDC
306.071—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015212

ISBN: 9781138915732 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781138915725 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781315690070 (ebk)

Typeset in AkzidenzGrotesk and Eurostile

by Keystroke, Neville Lodge, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton

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 CONTENTS

Visual tour xii

List of Key Influence boxes xvii
List of Defining Concept boxes xviii
List of Spotlight boxes xix
List of Example boxes xx
Preface: a user’s guide xxi
Acknowledgements xxiv
Publisher’s acknowledgements xxv

PART 1: CULTURAL THEORY 1

1 Culture and cultural studies 3

1.0 Introduction 3
1.1 What is culture? 4
Culture with a big ‘C’ 4
Culture as a ‘way of life’ 4
Process and development 6
1.2 Issues and problems in the study of culture 7
How do people become part of a culture? 7
How does cultural studies interpret what things mean? 9
How does cultural studies understand the past? 10
Can other cultures be understood? 11
How can we understand the relationships between cultures? 14
Why are some cultures and cultural forms valued more highly than others? 14
What is the relationship between culture and power? 15
How is ‘culture as power’ negotiated and resisted? 16
How does culture shape who we are? 17
1.3 Theorising culture 22
Culture and social structure 23
Social structure and social conflict: class, gender and ‘race’ 24
Culture in its own right and as a force for change 25
Performing culture and becoming 29
1.4 Conclusion: what is cultural studies? 31
Further reading 33

2 Culture, communication and representation 34

2.0 Introduction 34
2.1 The organisation of meaning 35

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 vIII CO N TEN TS

Spoken, written and visual texts 35

Communication and meaning 38
Structuralism and the order of meaning 44
Hermeneutics and interpretation 45
Political economy, ideology and meaning 51
Poststructuralism and the patterns of meaning 54
Postmodernism and semiotics 57
2.2 Language, representation, power and inequality 60
Language and power 60
Language and class 62
Language, race and ethnicity 65
Language and gender 66
2.3 Mass communication and representation 69
The mass media and representation 70
Mass media representations of gender 71
2.4 Audience research and reception studies 73
The behavioural paradigm 74
The incorporation/resistance paradigm 76
The spectacle/performance paradigm 79
2.5 Conclusion 83
Further reading 83

3 Culture, power, globalisation and inequality 85

3.0 Introduction 85
3.1 Understanding globalisation 86
Globalisation: cultural and economic change 86
Theorising about globalisation 88
Globalisation and inequality 89
3.2 Theorising about culture, power and inequality 94
Marx and Marxism 94
Weber, status and inequality 99
Caste societies 101
3.3 Legitimating inequality 102
Ideology as common sense: hegemony 103
Ideology as incorporation: the Frankfurt School 105
Habitus 108
3.4 Culture and the production and reproduction of inequality 109
Class 109
‘Race’ and ethnicity 113
Gender 115
Age 119
Structural and local conceptions of power 121
3.5 Conclusion 123
Further reading 123

4 Consumption, collaboration and digital media 125

4.0 Introduction 125
4.1 Consumption 126
Defining consumption 126
Theories of consumption 127

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 CONT ENT S Ix

Consumer society 130

Shopping 132
Fashion 134
Advertising 137
4.2 The information society 139
New information communication technologies 139
The culture of new media and digital technologies 140
Consequences of an information society 153
Technology and everyday life 157
4.3 Conclusion 162
Further reading 163

5 Researching culture 164

5.0 Introduction 164
5.1 Content and thematic analysis 165
Quantitative content analysis: gangsta rap lyrics 166
Thematic analysis 168
5.2 Semiotics as a method of analysis 169
Semiotics of advertising 173
A semiotic analysis of a sophisticated advertisement 177
5.3 Ethnography 177
5.4 Some new directions 185
5.5 Conclusion 186
Further reading 186

PART 2: CULTURAL STUDIES 189

6 Topographies of culture: geography, meaning and power 191

6.0 Introduction 191
6.1 What is cultural geography? 194
6.2 Placenames: interaction, power and representation 195
6.3 Landscape representation 198
6.4 National identity 202
6.5 Discourses of Orientalism 206
6.6 Mobility, hybridity and heterogeneity 212
6.7 Performing identities 221
6.8 Living in a material world 225
6.9 Conclusion 230
Further reading 231

7 Politics and culture 232

7.0 Introduction 232
7.1 Cultural politics and political culture 234
From politics to cultural politics 234
Legitimation, representation and performance 239
7.2 Cultures of political power 245
The cultural politics of democracy in nineteenth-century Britain 245
Performing identities in conventional politics 247
Bureaucracy as culture 254
Performing state power 261

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 x CO N TEN TS

7.3 Cultures of resistance 269

Performing identities in unconventional politics 269
The limits of transgression: The Satanic Verses 273
7.4 Conclusion 275
Further reading 276

8 Cultured bodies 277

8.0 Introduction 277
8.1 The social construction of corporeality 278
8.2 Techniques of the body 280
Mauss’s identification of body techniques 280
Young: ‘Throwing like a girl’ 282
Goffman: body idiom and body gloss 283
8.3 Culture as control: regulating the human body 286
Power, discourse and the body: Foucault 286
Civilising the body: Elias 291
Eating: a disciplined or a civilised cultural practice? 293
Obesity wars 296
8.4 Representations of embodiment 297
Fashion 297
Gender difference and representations of femininity 300
Representations of masculinity 302
Representing sexuality 304
8.5 The body as medium of expression and transgression 307
The emotional body 307
The sporting body 308
Body arts 309
Discoursing the fit body 311
Bodybuilding: comic-book masculinity and transgressive femininity? 314
8.6 Cyborgism, fragmentation and the end of the body? 318
8.7 Conclusion 321
Further reading 321

9 Subcultures, postsubcultures and fans 323

9.0 Introduction 323
9.1 Power, divisions, interpretation and change 323
9.2 Folk devils, moral panics and subcultures 325
Stanley Cohen: Folk Devils and Moral Panics 325
Moral panic updated 328
9.3 Youth subcultures in British cultural studies 329
Resistance Through Rituals: the general approach 329
Phil Cohen: working-class youth subcultures in East London 331
Ideology and hegemony 332
Structures, cultures and biographies 334
9.4 Three classic studies from the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies 334
Paul Willis: Learning to Labour 334
Paul Willis: Profane Culture 335
Dick Hebdige: Subculture: The Meaning of Style 336
9.5 Youth subcultures and gender 336

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 CONT ENT S xI

The teenybop culture of romance 338

Pop music, rave culture and gender 339
9.6 Youth subcultures and ‘race’ 340
Simon Jones’s Black Culture, White Youth: new identities in multiracial
cities 341
9.7 The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and
youth subcultures: a general critique 342
9.8 Aspects of subculture 345
Some key studies of more recent subcultures 347
9.9 Rethinking subcultures: interactions and networks 352
9.10 Fans: stereotypes, Star Trek and opposition 355
Fans of Star Trek 356
Fans of daytime soap opera 357
9.11 Conclusion 358
Further reading 359

10 Visual culture 360

10.0 Introduction 360
10.1 Visual culture and visual representation 361
10.2 Modernity and visual culture: classic thinkers and themes 362
Georg Simmel: metropolitan culture and visual interaction 363
Walter Benjamin: mechanical reproduction, aura and the Paris arcades 366
The figure of the flâneur 369
10.3 Technologies of realism: photography and film 370
The development of photography and film 371
The documentary tradition 373
Colin MacCabe: the classic realist text 375
Laura Mulvey: the male gaze 377
Slavoj Žižek: psychoanalysis and cinema 378
10.4 Foucault: the gaze and surveillance 380
10.5 Tourism and the tourist gaze 382
The tourist gaze 382
Postmodernism and post-tourism 386
10.6 The glimpse, the gaze, the scan and the glance 386
10.7 Visual interaction in public places 388
Categoric knowing: appearential and spatial orders 388
Unfocused interaction, civil inattention and public harassment 390
De Certeau: strategies, tactics and urban walking 391
10.8 The city as text 392
Marshall Berman: modernity, modernisation and modernism 393
Reading architecture 394
Reading cities: legibility and imageability 398
Reading landscape and power 398
10.9 Visual culture, simulacra and the digital 399
Digitalisation and the future of representation 400
10.10 Conclusion 401
Further reading 402

Bibliography 403
Index 441

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 A VISUAL TOUR OF INTRODUCING
CULTURAL STUDIES, THIRD EDITION

PEDAGOGICAL FEATURES
Introducing Cultural
position, especially, for Studies , third
instance, those edition,theoffers
approaching an an
topic from array of features
anthropological point specifically designed to

enhance understanding and encourage independent learning.

Key Influence Boxes

key influence 1.1

Raymond Williams (1921–88)
Raymond Williams
10
was a Welsh cultural analyst and literary critic. His ‘serious’ attention to
CULT UR E A N D CULT U R AL ST U D I E S
‘ordinary culture’ was a key influence on the development of the idea of cultural studies,
of which he is normally seen as a founding figure.
How
Born into a Welsh does cultural
working-class studies
family, Williams understand
studied at Cambridge the past?
before serving
as a tank commander Oneinhears
the Second World
much talk War. Heof
in England returned to Cambridge after the war
the traditional
to complete his degree. He taught for the Workers’ Educational Association during the
1950s, before returning to Cambridge to take up a lectureship in 1961. He was appointed
professor of drama in 1974.
Williams’s earliest work addressed questions of textual analysis and drama and
can be seen as reasonably conventional in approach, if not emphasis. His influence was
enhanced and reputation made by two key books: Culture and Society (1958) and The
Long Revolution (1961). The former re-examined a range of authors to chart the nature

pointed to the democratic potential of this ‘long revolution’ in culture. Williams distanced
and popular fiction have been included in the canon. For example, the poems of Derek Walcott
Important figures
himself from the are
elitist highlighted
and conservative in these Key
perspectives of F.R.Influence
Leavis and T.S.textboxes,
Eliot in argu- located throughout the
(St Kitts, Caribbean), the novels of Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) and those of Alice Walker (USA)
book. Each boxsocialist
ing for both offers a clear
aretransformation
now explanation
regarded and of itsconsideration.
cultural democracy.
as deserving literary subject,
Williams describes
emphasised these their
English studies significance
has also widened its to the
themes in Communications (1962), which also contained some prototypical media analy-
discipline, and lists appropriate resources to guide further research.

Defining
His The Concept Boxes
Country and the City

‘Tradition’ and ‘traditional’

defining concept 1.2

Derived from the Latin verb tradere meaning to pass on or to give down. Commonly used
in cultural studies to refer to elements of culture that are transmitted (e.g. language) or
to a body of collective wisdom (e.g. folk tales). As an adjective (‘traditional’)
- it implies
continuity and consistency. Traditions and traditional practices may be seen positively or
negatively. Where the past is venerated, traditions may be seen as a source of legitimacy
and value; in revolutionary situations the past may be viewed with contempt and seen as
a brake upon progress.
The term ‘tradition’ has a number of different meanings, all of which are central to how
culture is understood. It can mean knowledge or customs handed down from generation to
generation. In this sense the idea, for example, of a national tradition can have a positive
sense as a marker of the age and deep-rooted nature of a national culture. On the other
hand, the adjective ‘traditional’ is often used in a negative or pejorative sense from within
cultures like those of North America or Western Europe, which describe themselves as
modern. Here ‘traditional’, when used to describe non-European cultures and societies,
can mean ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’, terms that assume that all societies must mod-

These boxes providekindanof overview

imposition of the standards of one culture upon another to define it as in some
of seminal theories and concepts in cultural studies. They
way inferior. It is at least as important to consider what ‘modern’ societies can learn from
facilitate a basic understanding ofvice
‘traditional’ ones as theversa
cornerstones
(Diamond, 2012).of‘Traditional’
this rich,caninterdisciplinary subject.
also refer to social roles

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 v ISUAL T OUR xIII

Spotlight Boxes

SPOTLIGHT 1.1

Conrad on Africa
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We
were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phan-
toms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic
outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could
not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that
are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.

Spotlight boxes are a new feature for this edition of Introducing Cultural Studies. They look at
ideas in depth to unpack their meaning and significance to culture.

Example Boxes

EXAMPLE 1.3

Troilus
gives andfrom
to and takes Cressida
the others.

But when the planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny!
other disciplines to create new and changing formations.
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

These Example
Which
➤ the boxes
In iscultural
ladder of help
studies all
thehighstudents
designs,
concept to has
of culture apply keyof theories
a range andincludes
meanings which concepts by putting the topics
The enterprise
discussed in eachischapter
both high art sick.
and How couldlife.
into communities,
everyday
the context of real situations, texts or other cultural artefacts.

Suggestions forcrowns,
Prerogative of age, Further Reading
sceptres, laurels,

Further reading
Although they are not always easy reading, the best place to begin exploring the issues raised
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
in this chapter is to look at the acknowledged early ‘classics’ of cultural studies: Richard
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958), Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780–1950
And the rude son should strike his father dead
(1963) and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1968). Each of these
Troilus and Cressida I.iii.94–115
works has had a profound influence over the subsequent development of cultural studies.
Important stock takings of the field’s development are Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) and the substantial collection edited by
challenging the conception
Grossberg, Cary Nelson andthat his work
Paula is universal:
Treicher, Cultural that is, for
Studies everyone,
(1992). JohnallStorey’s
of the time. We
Cultural
might
Theoryask
andwhat groups
Popular of schoolchildren
Culture: An Introductionmake of Shakespeare’s
(2006) connects debates plays depending
about on class,
popular culture to

Eachies, The timeless

chapter
text-based natureand
concludes
studies of Shakespeare cancultures).
with aofcarefully
studies lived also be challenged
selected by studies
list
Some of these of that
feedshow
into athat
recommended
ideas the further reading, includ-
recent
texts have been
collaborative altered
work considerably
by Johnson, DeborahoverChambers,
the years and thatRaghuram
Parvati he was notandalways considered
Estella Tincknell
ing books,
as
(2004),
articles
important
The as
and
he is now.
Practice
websites.
Cultural Studies
of Cultural
This
studies. looks feature
at the takes
Distinctive
serves
changing as
conceptions
on the
a guide to
of Englishness
topic matter of cultural
independent study and
provides
–studiesaare
and its useful
providedpoint
relationships theof
intoDavidrestdeparture
of the
Inglis and world for
John –Hughson’sstudents
that caused wishing
Shakespeare
Confronting to deepen
to be(2003)
Culture and by their knowledge of a
rediscovered

particular area.

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 xIv vI SU A L TO U R

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 The rapid pace of social change raises issues of difference, identity and the impacts of tech-
nology and globalisation.
and followers These provide
release leading
their questions
tensions for contemporary
by taking cultural studies.
part in ritual
(Indian woman taking photograph in Peacock Court.) (Source: © Martin Harvey/Corbis.)

The book contains for studying culture and for taking culture seriously. However, the precise way in which forms
a number of supporting images and diagrams to help the reader to visualise
of culture connect to power remains a complex issue requiring careful investigation.
the material described in the text.

Definitions
Find out more about of Key Terms

have concerned cultural studies are around gender, ‘race’, class and age (for more on these
Feminism categories see pp. 24–5 and Chapter 3). These concepts define social relationships, which
Feminism describes
are often fraught. To take one area as an example, the concept of gender encompasses both
the broad how masculinity and femininity are defined and how men and women relate to one another.
movement that Gender definitions are points of struggle in many societies, since what it is to be a man and
has campaigned what it is to be a woman are never fixed. Indeed, these definitions themselves are, in part, the
against the product of a power struggle between men and women.
inequalities Feminist writers have been most influential in gender studies. Feminist discussion of
between men and
gender can be divided broadly into three arguments: for equality, for commonality or uni-
women, and the
form of academic
versality, and for difference (p. 208). The argument for equality emphasises the political
work which studies idea of rights. Equality between men and women is defined by abstract rights, to which both
and critiques sexes are entitled. Inequality can be defined by women’s lack of rights, for example to vote
gender inequality. or to equal pay. Negotiation here is around the concept of women’s rights. The argument
Find out more for commonality or universality stresses that although women may belong to very different
about feminism in
social, geographical and cultural groups, they share common or universal interests because of
Chapter 3.
their gender. Negotiation here is around the fundamental inequality of women because of their
Find out more about subordination in all societies. The argument for difference is more complicated; it rejects both
difference in ideas of simple equality and universality. Instead, it maintains that differences between men
Chapter 6. and women and between different groups of women mean that a concept of gender can never

Helpful definitions of key terms appear in the book’s margins. All terms also appear in the inter-
active glossary on the book’s companion website, www.routledge.com/cw/longhurst, allowing
the reader to test their knowledge.

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 v ISUAL T OUR xv

COMPANION WEBSITE
www.routledge.com/cw/longhurst

Visit the companion website for a whole host of resources that support and enhance this
textbook, including:

■■ Links to useful websites, organised by key topics

■■ Links to video material on relevant concepts and examples
■■ An interactive flashcard glossary, allowing you to test your knowledge of key terms
■■ Chapter-by-chapter discussion questions for use in seminars or independent study
■■ Essay questions to facilitate your exploration of ideas and concepts in more depth

Look out for the companion website logo in the text to direct you to the website for more
material.

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 This page intentionally left blank

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 KEY INFLUENCE BOXES

1.1 Raymond Williams (1921–88) 5

1.2 Michel Foucault (1926–84) 26
1.3 The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 31
2.1 Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) 52
2.2 Stuart Hall (1932–2014) 77
3.1 E.P. Thompson (1924–93) 96
3.2 Karl Marx (1818–83) 97
3.3 The Frankfurt School 106
3.4 Richard Hoggart (1918–2014) 110
5.1 Roland Barthes (1915–80) 170
6.1 Edward W. Said (1935–2003) 206
6.2 Paul Gilroy (1956–) 220
7.1 bell hooks (1952–) 233
7.2 Judith Butler (1956–) 243
7.3 Julia Kristeva (1941–) 244
7.4 Max Weber (1864–1920) 256
8.1 Donna J. Haraway (1944–) 320
9.1 Angela McRobbie (1951–) 337
9.2 Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) 349
10.1 Georg Simmel (1858–1918) 363
10.2 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) 367

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 DEFINING CONCEPT BOXES

1.1 Psychoanalysis 8
1.2 ‘Tradition’ and ‘traditional’ 10
1.3 Structuralism and poststructuralism 22
1.4 Subordination of women and patriarchy 25
1.5 Discourse 27
2.1 Semiology and semiotics 39
2.2 Narrative 46
2.3 Ideology 49
2.4 Meme 56
2.5 Representation and realism 61
3.1 Power 93
3.2 Hegemony 104
3.3 Feminism 115
4.1 Textual poaching and knowledge communities 147
4.2 Network society 151
4.3 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 158
4.4 Everyday life 159
6.1 Space, place and landscape 192
6.2 Essentialism and difference 208
6.3 Globalisation–hybridity 213
7.1 Identity 235
7.2 Colonialism and postcolonialism 236
7.3 Resistance and transgression 270
8.1 Ritual and symbolism 295
10.1 Modernity, modernism, postmodernity, postmodernism 395

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 SPOTLIGHT BOXES

1.1 Conrad on Africa 17

2.1 Speech codes 64
2.2 The Bechdel Test 72
2.3 Media effects and video game violence 74
2.4 Stuart Hall: encoding, decoding and ideology 78
3.1 Marx and Engels on ‘ruling ideas’ 98
3.2 Weber on status 100
4.1 The quantified self and gamification 141
4.2 The Internet and Web 2.0 145
4.3 Cyberpunk 149
4.4 Mobile telephones, devices and apps 160
7.1 Industrial Novels: Sybil, or the Two Nations by Benjamin Disraeli 245
8.1 Marshall Berman: the modern city and the embodied experience of the
pedestrian 285
8.2 Foucault: the body of the condemned 287
8.3 Kathy Acker: building a body 315
9.1 Structures, cultures and biographies 333
10.1 Elements of the image of the city 396

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 EXAMPLE BOXES

1.1 Azande 12
1.2 Trobriand Islanders 13
1.3 Troilus and Cressida 21
2.1 Semiotics of colonialism 42
2.2 Narrative in video games 48
2.3 ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’ 51
2.4 The ‘true’ meaning of Black Friday 57
2.5 Inglan is a bitch 66
2.6 The invisible man 71
2.7 Narcissism in pop music 81
4.1 The Devil Wears Prada 135
4.2 The London Symphony Orchestra and social media disconnection 154
4.3 #gamergate 155
5.1 Semiotic analysis of a Silk Cut ad 175
5.2 ‘Having a laff’ 179
6.1 Stockholm’s folk geography 196
6.2 Orientalism: self and other 210
6.3 Contact languages 215
7.1 Max Weber’s bureaucratic ideal type 254
7.2 MI6 and the architectural performance of power 258
8.1 Mauss’s budget of body techniques 281
9.1 Subcultures 333
9.2 Stanley Cohen’s critique of Hebdige’s reading of the symbolism of the swastika 344
10.1 The experience of modernity 392

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 PREFACE: A USER’S GUIDE

We think that cultural studies is one of the most stimulating areas of activity in intellectual life.
It is also something that is studied at different levels, forming an important part of the profile
of many university courses. There are many books on cultural studies. However, as we have
found in our own teaching, there are still relatively few introductions to the field that seek to
offer an overview and exploration of some of the most important avenues of research in the
field – hence this book, which deliberately and very consciously sets out to be a textbook for
students who are studying cultural studies as part of a university course.
In seeking to write an introduction we have not attempted to be completely compre-
hensive. We think that we cover the most important aspects of cultural studies, but ultimately
this can only be our interpretation of the field, written from particular standpoints. We have
organised the substantially revised third edition of the book into ten chapters divided into two
parts. Part 1, on cultural theory and method, contains five chapters. In the first we introduce
some different meanings of the concept of culture and the issues arising from these mean-
ings. This leads us to point to the importance of cultural studies as an activity that produces
knowledge that separate disciplines cannot. Our own disciplinary training and affiliations vary,
and we continue to work in universities, which are organised to reflect disciplinary concentra-
tions. However, we would all attest to the ways in which our contacts with cultural studies have
changed the ways in which we think, teach and research.
In Chapter 2 we examine some important aspects of communication and representation,
introducing critical issues of language and meaning. This is followed by a chapter concerned
with multiple dimensions and theories of power and inequality, which looks at these issues in
the context of globalisation. Chapter 4 considers the increasingly important changes brought
about in everyday life by consumption and technological changes, including discussion of new
media and new interactive forms of technologically facilitated social networking.
Chapter 5 addresses how culture is researched and how cultural studies knowledge is
produced. Together the five chapters in Part 1 address important general issues and debates
in cultural studies and provide a map around them. In these chapters, and in the rest of the
book, we are particularly concerned with the division of culture along the lines of class, race
and gender.
Part 2 of the book contains five chapters, which examine in some detail different dimen-
sions of culture. One of the most significant areas of debate across the humanities and social
sciences is over how to understand the nature and importance of space. Indeed, we would
argue that cultural studies has been an important impetus behind these debates. We reflect
these concerns in Chapter 6, which points to the ways in which culture cannot be understood
without significant attention to space, place and social change. Of course these academic
developments are contextualised by the increased pace of contemporary life and the ease
of communication and travel, which are producing new experiences of space, mobility and
cultural interaction.

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 xxII P REFA CE: A U SER’ S GU I D E

Another important dimension of culture and its study has been a redefinition of politics.
Often arising from many and ongoing social movements, there is now an understanding of
the way in which politics, as activity concerned with power, is all around us. In Chapter 7 we
address a number of issues raised by this expansion and change in the meaning of politics.
Despite the increasing significance of virtual and social-media-based existence, another sig-
nificant area of concern in contemporary life remains the body. We are all aware of the state
of our bodies and the forms of treatment for them when they are not functioning adequately.
Moreover, there is increased debate around new technologies of healing and body alteration.
Again, cultural studies has been in the vanguard of consideration of some of these issues –
a concern reflected in the subject matter of Chapter 8.
Culture can often be seen as all-encompassing in that many things and activities are seen
to be part of a ‘culture’. However, cultures are also divided along the lines of class, race, gender
and age, and by space and time. One important way of discussing and characterising such
divisions is through the concept of subculture. Chapter 9 is devoted to this area. In particular,
it examines work on youth subcultures, where much fundamental work of ongoing importance
has been done in cultural studies.
The final chapter of the book returns to some of the issues of representation outlined
in part 1. Using ideas about technological change and broad shifts in culture, we address
important developments in visual culture. Part of our concern here is to locate forms of visual
representation and the visual aspects of everyday interaction historically and spatially.
That is the outline of the structure and content of our book. We expect that you will read
those chapters that most interest you or will be of most use at any one time for a particular
purpose. To facilitate the use of the book, we have further divided all the chapters into sections.
You will find extensive cross-referencing between chapters and sections, but it is also impor-
tant that you use the table of contents and the index for these purposes as well. The sections
of chapters can be read on their own, but you will also find that they fit into an argument that
is developed through a chapter.
We have included other types of devices to convey our ideas: figures, diagrams, cartoons,
and photographs of buildings, monuments or paintings discussed in the text. We have also
included four types of box: Key Influences, Defining Concepts, Spotlights and Examples. You
will find Key Influences and Defining Concepts that are boxed highlighted in bold in the text; for
example, Donna Haraway. Defining Concept boxes such as Discourse provide an overview
to help generate a basic understanding. Spotlight boxes explore ideas in depth, such as the
‘quantified self’ in Chapter 4. Example boxes include case studies where a concept or method
is applied or significant examples are analysed to illustrate the points made in the text, as in the
Semiotics of Colonialism box in Chapter 2. Key Influence boxes address the most salient
aspects of the life and work of some of the major thinkers and research groups in cultural stud-
ies. We have tried in these to include three different types of influence: first, those who have
been particularly important in the development of cultural studies (examples include Richard
Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams); second, those writers who historically initiated
important general approaches that have subsequently been developed or become influential
in cultural studies (examples here are Karl Marx, Michel Foucault and Max Weber); and, finally,
those who were and are part of the ongoing development of cultural studies as it has become
more attentive to issues of gender, ‘race’, postcolonialism, cultural hybridity, and so on, such as
Judith Butler, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy and Edward Said.
This approach means that the majority of our Key Influence boxes represent white men,
some of whom are long dead. This in itself reflects the development of the field and the power
struggles that shape it. We wish that the situation were otherwise. However, it is perhaps of
some significance that even many of these white men were marginal to mainstream academic
life. We are also conscious of some of the names that are missing (for example Derrida,

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 PR EFACE: A USER ’S GUIDE xxIII

Lyotard, Jameson), which may mean little to you at the moment, but which you will come across
in this book and others you read. However, we have tried to box those people whose ideas are
most used in the book, reflecting the sense that this is our version of cultural studies.
All the Key Influence and Defining Concept boxes contain further reading that can be
used to deepen the understanding of the concepts, approaches and people they contain. In
addition to highlighting the Key Influence and Defining Concept boxes in bold and provid-
ing the page number to where that box occurs in the book, we use two other devices in the
margins of the book. First, you will find an icon and reference to where in the book you can
find the box and significant discussion of the concept or influence. Second, we have included
definitions in the margins of key terms that are discussed in the boxes at points in the book to
provide a quick guide where a concept is used in a different chapter. These marginal guides,
which are new for this edition, add to the ease of using our book and reinforce the point
that some ideas are discussed at a variety of places across the book. We have tried not to
overuse these devices. We have also included a guide to further reading at the end of each
chapter. Also new for this edition is the website www.routledge.com/cw/longhurst. Here
as each chapter notes you will find guides to a variety of resources and questions to help you
understand more fully cultural studies. The website is updated on a regular basis.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All books are the products of a number of influences. Textbooks are even more so. Many
people over more years than we would care to remember have affected this book. We would
like to begin by acknowledging this general debt. We are also particularly grateful to the
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks also to all at Routledge who have
worked so hard on this edition.
Gaynor Bagnall would like to thank Graham, Claire and Jack for their support and enthu-
siasm for all things cultural.
Garry Crawford would like to thank his friends and family for always being there, and most
importantly, Victoria, Joseph and Grace.
Brian Longhurst would like to thank the students who have worked with him on the mate-
rial in this book. His biggest and ongoing debts are to Bernadette, James, Tim and Sarah for
love, support, discussions and fun. His parents also can’t be thanked enough.
Miles Ogborn would like to thank the students on GEG5110 Society, Culture and Space
(formerly GEG247) at QMUL who road-tested the material for Chapter 6 and have shown
what works and what does not.
Greg Smith would like to thank other members of the book’s authorial team for instructive
discussions about a range of topics covered in this book. Particular thanks are due to Julie
Weir for permission to use her excellent photograph in Chapter 8.
The authorial team who produced this edition of the book was Brian Longhurst, Greg
Smith, Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford and Miles Ogborn. We would like to record our special
thanks to two authors for the first edition, Elaine Baldwin and Scott McCracken, who were not
able to participate in the second and third.

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 PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

IMAGES
Figure 1.1, Indian woman taking photograph in Peacock Court, Martin Harvey/Corbis, © Martin
Harvey/Corbis; Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.6, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6 from Plexels; Figure 2.5, Disneyland,
source: stocksnap.io; Figure 3.2, Billionaires who own the same wealth as half the world,
sourced from Oxfam, available at https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0ByRHC0gfquGO
WW9KWDNWbFMyQmc&usp=sharing; Figure 2.7, from S. Hall (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’,
in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in
Cultural Studies, 1972–79, p. 130, with permission of Taylor and Francis; Figures 2.8 and 4.4,
source: picjumbo.com; Figure 3.5, Occupy Wall Street protests, New York, America, 5 October
2011, courtesy of KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/REX Shutterstock; Figure 3.3, ‘World debt cartoon’,
from The Observer, © Chris Riddell; Figure 4.6, Tony Tallec/Alamy Stock Photo; Figure. 6.3,
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, National Gallery, London / akg images; Figure
6.4, Yinka Shonibare, Mr and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads, 1998, wax-print cotton
costumes on mannequins, dog mannequin, painted metal bench, rifle, 165 × 635 × 254 cm
with plinth, purchased 1999. National Gallery of Canada (no. 39849.1-5). © Yinka Shonibare
MBE. All rights reserved, DACS; Figure. 6.5, John Constable, The Hay Wain, National Gallery,
London / akg images; Figure 6.6, Paul Henry, The Potato Diggers, National Gallery of Ireland,
photograph courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland © DACS 2016; Figure 6.7, The world
according to Samuel Huntington. S. Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs,
summer 1993, fig. 1.2, Council on Foreign Relations, reproduced with permission of Foreign
Affairs; Figure 6.8, PRM 1981.12.1 Yoruba carving, 1930s, Pitt Rivers Museum, University
of Oxford; Figure 6.11, Joseph Banks with part of his collection of Pacific objects, National
Maritime Museum akg-images; Figure 7.1, Conchita Wurst, ‘A bearded Beyonce?’, source: AFP
PHOTO/JONATHAN NACKSTRAND; Figures 7.2 and 7.12 from Corbis; Figure 7.3, David
Cameron – the performance of financial control (source: Corbis) © Tim Graham/Corbis; Figure
7.4, Michael Foot at the Cenotaph (source: PA News Ltd.), PA/PA Archive/Press Association
Images; Figure 7.5, Jeremy Corbyn at the Cenotaph (source: PA News Ltd.), Tolga Akmen/
Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Figure 7.6, Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant and Jeremy Corbyn
(source: PA News Ltd.), PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images; Figure 7.10, The Toppling
of the Vendôme Column (1871) by unknown artist (source: reproduced by permission of the
Musée Carnavalet, Paris), akg-images; Figure 7.11, The Americanisation of the toppling of
the statue of Saddam Hussein (source: Reuters/Corbis) © Patrick Robert/Sygma/Corbis;
Figure 9.1 from S. Cohen (1973) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods
and Rockers, p. 199, with permission of Taylor and Francis; Figure 9.2 from J. Clarke, S. Hall,
T. Jefferson and B. Roberts (1976) ‘Subcultures, cultures and class’, in Resistance Through

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 xxvI A C K N O WLED GEMEN TS

Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, p. 34, with permission of Taylor and Francis;
Figure 10.4 reproduced with permission from J. Urry (1992) ‘The tourist gaze and the environ-
ment’, Theory, Culture and Society 9:3, 22, copyright Sage Publications Ltd. Reproduced with
permission of Sage Publications Ltd.; Figure 10.6, The Chartered Accountants’ Hall © VIEW
Pictures Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo.

TExT
J. Valenti (2007) ‘How the web became a sexists’ paradise’, The Guardian, online at www.
theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging, copyright Guardian News and Media
Ltd. 2016; Oxford University Press, ‘Social class and linguistic development: a theory of social
learning’, from A.H. Halsey, J. Floud and C.A. Anderson (eds) Education: Culture, Economy and
Society (1997); Cambridge University Press, ‘Classes, status groups and parties’, from Max
Weber: Selections in Translation, edited by W.G. Runciman, translated by E. Matthews (1978);
Springer Science and Business Media for ‘Throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine
body comportment, motility and spatiality’, by Iris Marian Young, Human Studies 3:1, 137–56
(December 1980); Verso for All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, by
M. Berman (1983); Verso for quotations from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, by Frederic Jameson, London: Verso (1991); Curtis Brown Group Ltd., London, on
behalf of David Lodge and Random House Group Ltd., Nice Work, by David Lodge, © David
Lodge 1988, published by Secker and Warburg; Georges Borchart, Inc., Editions Gallimard
and Penguin Group (UK) for Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault,
English translation © 1977 by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon), originally published in
French as Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison, © 1975 Editions Gallimard, © 1975
Allen Lane.
In some instances we have been unable to contact the owners of copyright material, and
we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.

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 Part 1

Cultural theory

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 This page intentionally left blank

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 Chapter 1

Culture and cultural studies

1.0 INTRODUCTION
Cultural studies is an important and contemporary way of engaging in the study of culture.
Over time many academic subjects – including anthropology, history, literary studies, human
geography and sociology – have brought their own disciplinary concerns to the study of cul-
ture. However, in recent decades there has been a renewed interest in the study of culture in
a number of other disciplines, such as economics, politics and psychology. In addition those
disciplines that have long studied culture have taken a fresh look at how this can be done,
drawing on new theories and contemporary methods. This renewed attention to culture across
the social sciences and humanities is often known as the ‘cultural turn’. Moreover, attention
to culture has also crossed disciplinary boundaries. The resulting activity, cultural studies,
has emerged as an intriguing and exciting area of intellectual inquiry that has already shed
important new light on the character of human cultures and which promises to continue so
to do. In this book we adopt what can be seen as a ‘wide’ definition of cultural studies, which
we will explore and define further as the book progresses. So as will become clear, this book
does not simply concern itself with a version of cultural studies that was developed at and
promoted from the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the
1960s and 1970s (see Key Influence 1.3 on p. 31). Further, it does not restrict itself to those
forms of cultural studies that even if they take a wider compass than the original work from
Birmingham, continue to take their main inspiration from that approach. While there is little
doubt that cultural studies is widely recognised as an important, distinctive but highly contested
field of study, it does seem to encompass a potentially enormous area. This is at least partly
because the term ‘culture’ has a complex history and range of usages, which have provided
a legitimate focus of inquiry for different academic disciplines, which often use the term in
distinctive ways. So in order to begin to delimit the field that this textbook considers, we have
divided this chapter into four main sections:

1.1 A discussion of some principal definitions of culture.

1.2 An introduction to the core issues raised by the definitions and study of culture.
1.3 A review of some leading theoretical accounts that address these core issues.
1.4 An outline of our view of the developing field of cultural studies.

In introducing our book in this way, we aim to show the complexity of the central notion of
culture and thereby to define some important issues in the field of cultural studies. The logic
of this chapter is to build from definitions and earlier conceptions of culture, some of which you
may be familiar with from earlier studies, to the idea of cultural studies, including that originally
practised at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (p. 31).

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 4 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

Learning objectives
➤ To understand different definitions of the concept of culture.
➤ To identify the principal issues in the study of culture.
➤ To learn about some of the leading theoretical perspectives in cultural studies.

1.1 WHAT IS CULTURE?

The term ‘culture’ has a complex history and diverse range of meanings in contemporary dis-
course. Culture can refer to the plays of Shakespeare or Superman comics, opera or football,
who does the washing-up at home or how the office of the President of the United States of
America is organised. Culture is found in your local street, in your own city and country, as well
as on the other side of the world. Small children, teenagers, adults and older people all have
their own cultures; but they may also share a wider culture with others.
Given the evident breadth of the term, it is essential to begin by defining what culture
is. ‘Culture’ is a word that has grown over the centuries to reach its present broad meaning.
One of the founders of cultural studies in Britain, Raymond Williams (p. 5), has traced the
development of the concept and provided an influential ordering of its modern uses. Outside
the natural sciences, the term ‘culture’ is chiefly used in three relatively distinct senses to
refer to the arts and artistic activity – which we will refer to here as ‘culture with a big “C”’; the
learned, primarily symbolic features of a particular way of life; and a process of development.

Culture with a big ‘C’

In much everyday talk, culture is believed to consist of the ‘works and practices of intellec-
tual and especially artistic activity’; thus ‘culture’ is the word that describes ‘music, literature,
painting and sculpture, theatre and film’ (Williams, 1983b: 90). Culture in this sense is widely
believed to primarily concern ‘refined’ pursuits in which the ‘cultured’ person engages.

Culture as a ‘way of life’

In the human sciences the word ‘culture’ has achieved wide currency to refer to the creation
Find out more about and use of symbols (p. 295) which distinguish ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people,
symbols in Chapter a period or a group, or humanity in general’ (Williams, 1983b: 90). Only humans, it is often
8. argued, are capable of creating and transmitting culture and we are able to do this because
we create and use symbols. Humans possess a symbolising capacity, which is the basis of
our cultural being.
What, then, is a symbol? It is when people understand among themselves that a word or
drawing or gesture will stand for either an idea (for example, a person, like a pilot) or an object
(a box, for example) or a feeling (like contempt). When this has happened, a symbol conveying
a shared idea has been created. These shared ideas are symbolically mediated or expressed:
for example, by a word in the case of ‘pilot’, by a drawing to convey the idea of a box or by a
gesture to convey contempt. It is these meanings that make up a culture. A symbol defines
what something means, although a single symbol may have many meanings. For example,
a single flag may stand for a legally and geographically defined entity like a nation and an
abstract value such as patriotism. To study culture is thus to ask what is the meaning of a style
of dress, a code of manners, a place, a language, a norm of conduct, a system of belief, an

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 WH AT IS CULT UR E? 5

architectural style, and so on. Language, both spoken and written, is obviously a vast repository
of symbols. But symbols can take numerous forms: flags, hairstyles, road signs, smiles, BMWs,
business suits – the list is endless.
Given the way that we have discussed culture so far, it might be thought that culture
is everything and everywhere. Indeed, some approaches to the study of culture take such a
position, especially, for instance, those approaching the topic from an anthropological point
of view. Thus to take an influential example, the nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward
Tylor (1871: 1) famously defined culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a
member of society’. This definition underlines the pervasiveness of culture in social life. It also
emphasises that culture is a product of humans living together and that it is learned. A similar
idea informs the definition offered by the American poet and critic T.S. Eliot:

key influence 1.1

Raymond Williams (1921–88)
Raymond Williams was a Welsh cultural analyst and literary critic. His ‘serious’ attention to
‘ordinary culture’ was a key influence on the development of the idea of cultural studies,
of which he is normally seen as a founding figure.
Born into a Welsh working-class family, Williams studied at Cambridge before serving
as a tank commander in the Second World War. He returned to Cambridge after the war
to complete his degree. He taught for the Workers’ Educational Association during the
1950s, before returning to Cambridge to take up a lectureship in 1961. He was appointed
professor of drama in 1974.
Williams’s earliest work addressed questions of textual analysis and drama and
can be seen as reasonably conventional in approach, if not emphasis. His influence was
enhanced and reputation made by two key books: Culture and Society (1958) and The
Long Revolution (1961). The former re-examined a range of authors to chart the nature
of the formation of culture as a response to the development of industrialism. The latter
pointed to the democratic potential of this ‘long revolution’ in culture. Williams distanced
himself from the elitist and conservative perspectives of F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot in argu-
ing for both socialist transformation and cultural democracy. Williams emphasised these
themes in Communications (1962), which also contained some prototypical media analy-
sis. Television was the subject of the later Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974),
which introduced the concept of ‘flow’. From the 1960s on, Williams’s work became more
influenced by Marxism, resulting in Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture (1981).
His The Country and the City (1973a) greatly influenced subsequent interdisciplinary work
on space and place. His vast corpus of work (including over 30 books) also addressed
drama, cultural theory, the environment, the English novel, the development of language,
leftist politics and, in the period before his death, Welshness. He was also a prolific
novelist.
The impact of Williams’s sometimes rather dense and ‘difficult’ writings was often in
terms of his overall approach, which towards the latter period of his work was defined as
cultural materialism, and emphasis rather than in the detail of his analyses. His lifelong
positive commitment to socialism, combined with the desire for equality in cultural commu-
nication and democracy, was influential on a generation of leftists. His status was further
enhanced by the use of his concept of structure of feeling to study various phenomena
from literary texts to urban ways of life. His work continues to be debated and used as a
reference point in writing about culture, politics and nationalism.

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 6 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

Further reading
Williams wrote a vast amount, so much so that his identity has been seen as that of ‘writer’.
The first reference is a revealing set of interviews, which combine the life and work.
Williams, R. (1979) Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: New Left Books.
Eldridge, J. and Eldridge, L. (1994) Raymond Williams: Making Connections, London: Routledge.
Inglis, F. (1995) Raymond Williams, London: Routledge.
Milner, A. (2002) Re-imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural Materialism , London:
Sage.
Smith, D. (2008) Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale, Swansea: Parthian.

❝
Culture . . . includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby
Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin
table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot
in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.
(Eliot, 1948, quoted in Williams, 1963 [1958]: 230)

Other approaches, less influenced by anthropology or the humanities, have tended to argue
that some areas of social life are more properly thought of as political or economic than cul-
tural and thus can in some fashion be separated from culture. Thus, those who would define
culture in the sense of ‘arts and artistic activity’ would tend to exclude some institutions and
phenomena that others who accept the definition of ‘way of life’ would see as part of culture.
There is little consensus on this matter, but we will use these analytic definitions to inform our
discussions of these issues in this book.
Culture in the sense of way of life, however, can be distinguished from the neighbouring
concept of society. In speaking of society we refer to patterns of social interactions and rela-
tionships between individuals and groups. Often a society will occupy a territory, be capable of
reproducing itself and share a culture. But for many large-scale, modern societies it may make
more sense to say that several cultures coexist (not always harmoniously) within the society.

Process and development

The earliest uses of the word ‘culture’ in the late Middle Ages refer to the tending or cultiva-
tion of crops and animals (hence agriculture); a little later the same sense was transferred to
describe the cultivation of people’s minds. This dimension of the word ‘culture’ draws attention
to its subsequent use to describe the development of the individual’s capacities, and it has
been extended to embrace the idea that cultivation is itself a general, social and historical
process (Williams, 1983b: 90–1).
The different senses in which the concept of culture can be used are illustrated in the
following examples. A play by Shakespeare might be said to be a distinct piece of cultural
work (sense: culture with a big ‘C’), to be a product of a particular (English) way of life (sense:
culture as a way of life) and to represent a certain stage of cultural development (sense: culture
as process and development). Rock music may be analysed by the skills of its performers in
creating a particular track (culture with a big ‘C’); by its initial association with youth culture in
the late 1960s and early 1970s and its association as different subtypes with subcultures at a
number of points subsequently (culture as a way of life); and as a developing and fragmenting

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 7

musical form, looking for its origins in other styles of music and also seeing its influence on
later musical forms (culture as a process and development).
In this book we shall examine all three of these different senses of culture. However, it is
important to note that these definitions and their use raise a number of complex issues and
problems for the analysis of culture, which we introduce in the next part of the chapter.

1.2 ISSUES AND PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF CULTURE

The three senses of culture identified in the previous part of this chapter have tended to be
studied from different points of view. Hence, artistic or intellectual activity has commonly been
the province of the humanities or literary scholar. By contrast, anthropologists and sociologists
have examined ways of life. Meanwhile, the province of the historian using historical documents
and methods has been to consider the development of culture. These disciplines have tended
to approach culture in distinctive ways and from different perspectives. However, as we shall
demonstrate in this chapter, one of the special merits of a cultural studies approach is that
it facilitates the identification of a set of core issues and problems that no one discipline or
approach can solve on its own. Let us explain what we mean through the identification and
exemplification of these core questions. As you will see, they both start and finish with the
issue of the relationship between the personal and the cultural.

How do people become part of a culture?

Culture is not something that we simply absorb – it is learned. In anthropology this process
is referred to as acculturation or enculturation. In psychology it is described as conditioning.
Sociologists have tended to use the term ‘socialisation’ to describe the process by which we
become social and cultural beings. The sociologists Anthony Giddens and Philip W. Sutton
(2013: 335) describe socialisation as the process whereby, through contact with other human
beings, ‘the helpless human infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person,
skilled in the ways of the culture into which he or she was born’. Sociologists have distin-
guished two stages of socialisation. Primary socialisation usually takes place within a family, or
family-like grouping, and lasts from birth until the child participates in larger and more diverse
groupings beyond the family, usually beginning with school in Western societies. Primary
socialisation involves such elements as the acquisition of language and a gendered identity Find out more about
(p. 235). Secondary socialisation refers to all the subsequent influences that an individual identity in Chapter 7.
experiences in a lifetime. Psychology and its sub-disciplines like psychoanalysis (p. 8) pay
particular attention to childhood and the conditioning that relates to the acquisition of gender
and sexuality. Gender refers to the social roles that different societies define as masculine or
feminine. Sexuality refers to the desires and sexual orientation of a particular individual. The
founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, argued that masculinity and femininity and the
choice of a sexual object are not directly related to biology, but are a result of conditioning.
Feminists have used Freud’s theories to oppose the idea that men are naturally superior, even
though Freud himself was not particularly sympathetic to feminism (p. 115). The concepts of Find out more about
acculturation and enculturation, conditioning and socialisation draw attention to the many and feminism in Chapter
various social arrangements that play a part in the ways in which humans learn about meaning 3.

and become part of cultures.

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 8 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

Psychoanalysis
defining concept 1.1
Psychoanalysis is the name given to the analytical method developed by Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939). He used his interpretative technique to treat patients as well as to analyse
literature, art and culture. Psychoanalytic theory has subsequently developed into a num-
ber of different schools, some of which have influenced feminist (p. 115), postcolonial
(p. 236), Marxist (p. 94) and postmodernist (p. 395) cultural criticism. Theorists who
have used psychoanalytic ideas, often very critically, include members of the Frankfurt
School (p. 106), Julia Kristeva (p. 244), Judith Butler (p. 243), Gilles Deleuze and
Slavoj Žižek.
Freud’s method of interpretation is first developed in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900). He describes how symbols in dreams represent condensed or displaced mean-
ings that, when interpreted, reveal the dreamer’s unconscious fears and desires. In
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), he shows how slips of the tongue and
the inability to remember words are also symptoms of unconscious mental processes.
Condensation, displacement and ‘symptomatic’ methods of interpretation have been
deployed by critics to decode cultural texts. Psychoanalysis has been particularly influen-
tial in film criticism. Freud developed a tripartite theory of the mind: the id or unconscious;
the ego, which adjusts the mind to external reality; and the super-ego, which incorporates
a moral sense of society’s expectations. Perhaps his most important work was on a theory
of sexuality. The psychoanalytic concept of sexuality posits a complex understanding of
desire. The fixed binarism of masculine/feminine given by earlier biologistic theories of
sexual difference tended to assume an equally fixed desire by men for women and by
women for men. In psychoanalysis, there is no presupposition that sexual desire is limited
to heterosexual relations. Rather, the adaptable nature of desire is stressed and an impor-
tant role is given to fantasy in the choice of sexual object. Freud’s work was still partially
attached to a theory of biological development.
The influential psychoanalytic critic Jacques Lacan argued that the unconscious is
structured like language. In other words, culture rather than biology is the important factor.
Lacan’s work has been important for feminist critics, who have developed an analysis of
gender difference using Freud’s Oedipus complex. According to feminist psychoanalytic
criticism, the context in which feminine sexuality develops is different to that of mascu-
line sexuality. Men and women enter into different relationships with the symbolic order
through the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex arises through the primary identi-
fication of both boys and girls with their mother. Paradoxically, it is the mother who first
occupies the ‘phallic’ position of authority. The discovery that the mother does not hold as
powerful a position in society as the father (it is the father who symbolises the phallus)
creates the crisis through which the boy and the girl receive a gendered identity. The boy
accepts his ‘inferior phallic powers’, sometimes known as ‘the castration complex’, but with
the promise that he will later occupy as powerful a position in relation to women as his
father does. The girl learns of her subordinate position in relation to the symbolic order,
her castration complex, but for her, there is no promise of full entry to the symbolic order;
consequently her feeling of lack persists as a sense of exclusion (Mitchell, 1984: 230).
In cultural studies the theory of the unconscious has allowed a more subtle under-
standing of the relationship between power (p. 93) and the formation of subjectivity. While
psychoanalysis has been found wanting in that it suggests but does not actually show how
the social relates to the psychic, that suggestion has been the starting point for some of
the most fascinating investigations in cultural studies.

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 9

Further reading
Mitchell, J. (1984) Women: The Longest Revolution. Essays in Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis,
London: Virago.
Thwaites, T. (2007) Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, London: Sage.
Weedon, C., Tolson, A. and Mort, F. (1980) ‘Theories of language and subjectivity’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson,
A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language, London: Unwin Hyman.
Pick, D. (2015) Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, S. (2006) How to Read Lacan, London: Granta.

How does cultural studies interpret what things mean?

Anthropology and some forms of sociology see meaningful action, the understandings that per-
sons attribute to their behaviour and to their thoughts and feelings, as cultural. This approach
to culture refers to the shared understandings of individuals and groupings in society (or to the
way-of-life sense of culture – see pp. 4–6). Some sociologists stress that human knowledge
of the world is socially constructed, that is, we apprehend our world from our social locations
and through our interactions with other people (Dennis, Philburn and Smith, 2013). If it is the
case that our understanding is strongly influenced by our social locations, then our views of
the world may be partial. This view suggests that while there is a real world that exists outside
of us, we can only view it from certain angles. Thus, our knowledge of the world is inevitably
perspectival. The perspectival view of the world is similar but different to the issue of cultural
relativism (see further later in this chapter). It emphasises the way that social roles and rela-
tionships shape the way we see and give meaning to the world, whereas cultural relativism
stresses the way that habitual, taken-for-granted ways of thought, as expressed in speech and
language, direct our understandings. An example of perspectival knowledge is the differing
accounts of the dissolution of a marriage given by those involved in and affected by it. The
explanation given for the break-up of a marriage by one partner will rarely coincide with the
explanation given by the other (Hart, 1976).
The sociology of knowledge, as this approach to understanding is known, suggests that
the sense that we make of the world can be made intelligible through the examination of our
social location. For example, it is sometimes proposed that one’s view of the world is linked
to class position, so that working-class people will have a different view of the world from
upper-class people. Sociologists of knowledge do not propose that our beliefs can always
be reduced to, or simply read off from, our social location, but they do suggest that these
world-views are cultural, and that culture has to be studied in relation to society. Moreover, the
interpretation of culture in relation to social location introduces further issues of evidence and
relativism. If knowledge is socially constructed, can there be such a thing as ‘true’ knowledge?
If perceptions and beliefs are always relative to social location, then why should we believe
any particular view, even the view of the person asserting this statement, since it too will be
influenced by the person’s location? In seeking to interpret a way of life of a different society
or a different group in our own society, why should we believe one interpretation rather than
any other? If we are to begin to adjudicate or evaluate different interpretations then we will
need to consider the types of evidence offered for the particular interpretation. Interpretation
of meaning is therefore a core issue in cultural studies, and as well as the aspects considered
so far it also relates to how we understand the relationship between the past and the present.

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 10 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

How does cultural studies understand the past?

One hears much talk in England of the traditional (see below) nature of culture: England is
seen by some to have a culture that stretches back over a thousand years. Within this context,
culture in English literary studies has often been conceived in terms of influence and tradition.
For T.S. Eliot (1932: 15), for example, ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets
and artists’. More recently, English studies has questioned the values of the canon, that is, those
written texts selected as of literary value and as required reading in schools and universities.
Texts that had been previously neglected have been introduced into school and university syl-
labuses. More women’s writing, writing by minority groups in British society, non-British writing
and popular fiction have been included in the canon. For example, the poems of Derek Walcott
(St Kitts, Caribbean), the novels of Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) and those of Alice Walker (USA)
are now regarded as deserving literary consideration. English studies has also widened its
outlook beyond the influence of other poets and writers to look at social and historical fac-
tors affecting the production of texts. It is now common for critics to look at, for example, the
Find out more about position of women in the nineteenth century when considering the novels of the period. Very
Edward Said in influential critics like Edward Said (p. 206) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have also looked
Chapter 6. at the history of European imperialism and asked how that history manifests itself in literature.

‘Tradition’ and ‘traditional’

defining concept 1.2

Derived from the Latin verb tradere meaning to pass on or to give down. Commonly used
in cultural studies to refer to elements of culture that are transmitted (e.g. language) or
to a body of collective wisdom (e.g. folk tales). As an adjective (‘traditional’) it implies
continuity and consistency. Traditions and traditional practices may be seen positively or
negatively. Where the past is venerated, traditions may be seen as a source of legitimacy
and value; in revolutionary situations the past may be viewed with contempt and seen as
a brake upon progress.
The term ‘tradition’ has a number of different meanings, all of which are central to how
culture is understood. It can mean knowledge or customs handed down from generation to
generation. In this sense the idea, for example, of a national tradition can have a positive
sense as a marker of the age and deep-rooted nature of a national culture. On the other
hand, the adjective ‘traditional’ is often used in a negative or pejorative sense from within
cultures like those of North America or Western Europe, which describe themselves as
modern. Here ‘traditional’, when used to describe non-European cultures and societies,
can mean ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’, terms that assume that all societies must mod-
ernise in the same way and in the same direction. Cultural studies is always critical of this
kind of imposition of the standards of one culture upon another to define it as in some
way inferior. It is at least as important to consider what ‘modern’ societies can learn from
‘traditional’ ones as vice versa (Diamond, 2012). ‘Traditional’ can also refer to social roles
in society which are often taken for granted, but which might be questioned in cultural
studies: for example, what it is to be a mother or a father.

Further Reading
Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (2012) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press (re-issue).

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 11

Peterson, R. A. (2000) Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.
Diamond, J. (2012) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies,
London: Penguin.

This particular example from the discipline of English literary studies shows that traditions are
not neutral and objective, somehow waiting to be discovered, but are culturally constructed.
In being so constructed and reconstructed some things are included and others excluded.
This reflects, according to many writers, patterns of the distribution of and the processes of
mobilisation of power (p. 93) in society. Let us clarify some of these points through another Find out more about
example. power in Chapter 3.
The kilt, tartan and Highland dress are presented, both in Scotland and outside, as
Scottish traditional costume. This garb is one of the most recognisable and visible compo-
nents of Scottish culture and is worn by Scottish people at a variety of special occasions. It is
thus presented to the non-Scots world as a component of Scottishness – the attributes of a
particular place and way of life. It also functions in this manner for many Scots who consider
the wearing of the tartan to be a method of identification with their cultural heritage. However,
it appears that the kilt as a traditional cultural form has been constructed and repackaged to
meet some historically specific needs. David McCrone (1992: 184) has suggested that ❝
a form of dress and design which had some real but haphazard significance in the
Highlands of Scotland was taken over by a lowland population anxious to claim
some distinctive aspect of culture at a time – the late nineteenth century – when its
economic, social and cultural identity was ebbing away.

Thus a widely accepted and representative cultural form is shown to have been far from uni-
versal but rather associated with and used by a particular group at a specific moment in time.
Furthermore, this means that the meaning of the kilt is constantly changing within Scottish
society. For example, in the 1950s wearing a kilt was thought effeminate or passé by certain
sections of the younger generation; however, with the increased salience of Scottish national-
ism the kilt has come back into fashion, and is often worn at occasions such as weddings and
formal dinners.

Can other cultures be understood?

An issue of reliability of evidence is also raised through this example as it may be difficult
to know precisely who wore the kilt and when. Further, it raises the problem of what has
been termed ‘historical relativism’. What this draws attention to is the extent to which we, as
contemporaries of the second decade of the twentieth-first century, dwell in a world that is
sufficiently different from the worlds in which our predecessors lived that it may be very difficult
for us to understand those worlds in anything like the same way that they did. How well can
we understand what was in the middle-class Lowland Scots person’s mind when he or she
adapted and adopted Highland dress? There are some similarities between the issues raised
under this heading and others thought more often to be associated with cultural relativism,
which we discuss next.
Further to the difficulty of studying culture across history, there is the parallel problem
of interpretation of cultures from different parts of the world or in different sections of our
own society. To what extent is it possible for us to understand the cultures of other peoples in

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 12 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

the way they do themselves? Will our understanding inevitably be mediated via the distorting
prism of our own cultural understandings? These problems particularly confronted European
anthropologists in their attempts to interpret the other worlds of non-European societies. Is it
possible to convey adequately the evident seriousness that the Azande accord to the consulta-
tion of oracles (see Example 1.1) or the conceptions of time held by Trobriand Islanders (see
Example 1.2), in texts designed for consumption by Western audiences who hold very differ-
ent temporal conceptions and ideas about magic and witchcraft? Novelists, sociologists and
journalists also face this problem in describing the ways of life of different groups in their own
society. Many quite serious practical difficulties can arise from this problem. For example, one
influential study of conversation (Tannen, 1990) suggests that the many misunderstandings
that occur between men and women arise because what we are dealing with is an everyday
version of the difficulties of cross-cultural communication. In the USA ‘women speak and hear
a language of connection and intimacy while men speak and hear a language of status and
independence’ (Tannen, 1990: 42). Men and women employ differing conversational practices.
Tannen observes that in discussing a problem, women will offer reassurance whereas men will
seek a solution. Women tend to engage in ‘rapport-talk’ while men are more at home lecturing
and explaining. Men tend to be poorer listeners than women. According to Tannen, women
engage in more eye contact and less interruption than men in conversation. Her argument is
that men and women employ distinct conversational styles that she labels ‘genderlects’. These
styles are sufficiently different from each other that the talk between men and women might
be appropriately regarded as a form of cross-cultural communication (see also Chapter 2).

EXAMPLE 1.1

Azande
The Azande, an African people, live around the Nile–Congo divide. The classic work
on their belief systems is Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande by E.E.
Evans-Pritchard, published in 1937. The Azande believe that many of the misfortunes
that befall them are caused by witchcraft (mangu). Mangu is inherited; the Azande
believe that it has the form of a blackish swelling in the intestines, and it is this sub-
stance that, when activated, causes harm to others. Even though individuals may have
inherited mangu, they do not necessarily cause harm to others, because it is only bad,
anti-social feelings that set off witchcraft. As long as a person remains good-tempered
they will not cause witchcraft. Since witchcraft is the product of bad feelings, a person
who suffers a misfortune suspects those who do not like her or him and who have
reason to wish harm. The first suspects are therefore one’s enemies. There are five
oracles that a Zande (singular of Azande) may consult in order to have the witch named.
After an oracle has named the witch, the person identified is told that the oracle has
named them and she or he is asked to withdraw the witchcraft. Usually named people
protest their innocence and state that they meant no harm; if they did cause witchcraft
it was unintentional. Evans-Pritchard states that Azande do not believe that witchcraft
causes all misfortunes and individuals cannot blame their own moral failings upon
it. Azande say that witchcraft never caused anyone to commit adultery. Witchcraft is
not the only system of explanation among the Azande; they do recognise technical
explanations for events: for example, a man is injured because a house collapses, but
witchcraft attempts to answer the question of why this house collapsed. All systems of

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 13

explanation involve the ‘how’ of events and the ‘why’ of events; the house collapses
because the wooden supports are rotten – this is the technical ‘how’ of explanation –
but why did it collapse at a particular time and on a particular man?
The ‘why’ of explanation deals with what Evans-Pritchard calls the singularity of
events: ‘why me?’, ‘why now?’ Religious explanations offer the answer that it was the
will of God; scientific explanations speak of coincidences in time and space; agnostics
may see the answer in chance; the Azande know that it is witchcraft. Evans-Pritchard
comments that while he lived among the Azande he found witchcraft as satisfactory a
form of explanation for events in his own life as any other.

EXAMPLE 1.2

Trobriand Islanders
The Trobriand Islands are politically part of Papua New Guinea. The best-known works
on the Trobriand Islands are by Malinowski, but E.R. Leach has written on Trobriand
ideas of time in ‘Primitive calendars’ (Oceania 20 (1950)), and this, along with other
work, is discussed in Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures by Anthony
Aveni, 1990.
The Trobriand calendar is guided by the moon. There are twelve or thirteen lunar
cycles but only ten cycles are in the calendar; the remaining cycles are ‘free time’ out-
side the calendar. The primary event of the Trobriand calendar is the appearance of a
worm, which appears for three or four nights once a year to spawn on the surface of the
water. There is a festival (Milamak) in this month, which inaugurates the planting sea-
son. The worm does not appear at exactly the same time every year and planting does
not take place at exactly the same time every year, so there is sometimes a mismatch
between worm and planting. This situation is exacerbated because the Trobriand Islands
are a chain and the worm appears at the southern extremity of the chain, so news of
its appearance takes time to communicate. The consequence is that the festivals, and
so the calendar, vary greatly in the time of their celebration from island to island. When
the discrepancies are felt to be too great to be manageable there is a re-alignment and
the calendar is altered to achieve consistency.
Trobriand reckoning of time is cyclical, associated with the agricultural year. Lunar
cycles that are not connected to this activity are not recognised, so there is time out
of the calendar: a difficult notion to grasp in modern industrial societies where time is
believed to be a natural and inevitable constraint upon activity. The Trobriand language
has no tenses; time is not a linear progression that, once passed, cannot be regained;
in the Trobriand system, time returns. Trobriand ideas of the nature of existence are
set not in time but in patterns; it is order and patterned regularity that locates events
and things, not time.

Hollis and Lukes (1982) include both historical and cultural relativism under the broad heading
of ‘perceptual relativism’ and argue that there are two different dimensions to be examined.
First, there is the degree to which seeing or perception is relative; that is, when we look at
something or seek to understand it, do we actually see the same thing as another person

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 14 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

colonialism
looking at it? Second, there is the extent to which perception and understanding rely on
language. These questions about perception remind us that, as students of culture, we must
Colonialism
constantly review who we are – where we come from and what our ‘position’ is – in order to
describes the
understand who and what we are studying.
direct control of
one society by
another through
How can we understand the relationships between cultures?
settlement and
military subjugation, This question of position raises another problem in terms of how we understand the relation-
often with a cultural ships between cultures. One conventional way of understanding this is to see cultures as
dimension. Find
mutually exclusive blocs that may interface, intersect and interact along a boundary or ‘zone of
out more about
colonialism in
contact’. For example, it would be possible to consider the interactions between the Trobriand
Chapter 7. Islanders or the Azande and the Europeans who arrived as part of the process of colonialism
(p. 236) (including, of course, the anthropologists who studied them and wrote about them).
This way of thinking about culture often describes these relationships in terms of ‘destruction’
of cultures or their ‘disappearance’ as one culture ‘replaces’ or ‘corrupts’ another. Another
historical example is the colonisation of Australia. Similar fears of Americanisation have been
expressed as McDonald’s hamburgers, Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans spread to Europe, Asia and
Africa through processes of globalisation (p. 213).
globalisation However, this point of view is limited in certain ways. First, it is impossible to divide the
world up into these exclusive cultural territories (see also Chapter 6). As we have pointed
Globalisation
describes the
out, culture is also a matter of age, gender, class and status – so that any such cultural bloc,
process of defined in terms of nation, tribe or society, will be made up of many cultures. This means that
intermeshing world we will be positioned in relation to not just one culture but many. Second, culture does not
economies, politics operate simply in terms of more powerful cultures destroying weaker ones. Since culture is a
and cultures into a never-ending process of socially made meaning, cultures adapt, change and mutate into new
global system. Find
forms. For example, the Trobriand Islanders took up the English game of cricket, but they did
out more about
so in terms of their own war-making practices. So cricket did not simply replace other Trobriand
globalisation in
Chapter 6. games; it was made into a new hybrid (p. 213) cultural form that was not English cricket or
Trobriand warfare. Finally, it might be useful to think about the relationships between cultures
in terms of a series of overlapping webs or networks rather than as a patchwork of cultural
hybrid
‘territories’ (see, for example, Chapter 9). This would mean that understanding the meaning
Hybridity describes of any cultural form would not simply locate it within a culture but would look at it in terms
processes of of how it fitted into the intersection between different cultural networks. For example, Coca-
cultural mixing
Cola has taken on different meanings in different parts of the world, signifying neocolonial
– often due to
globalisation –
(p. 236) oppression in India (and being banned for some time), while suggesting freedom and
which produce personal autonomy to British Asian young people in London. The Coca-Cola Company cannot
cultural forms (of control the meanings of Coca-Cola, although it tries through its advertising campaigns. Neither
music, food or art, do its meanings simply involve the extension of ‘American’ culture. Instead these meanings
for example) which depend upon the location of the product in a complex network of relationships that shape its
are different from
significance and value to differently positioned consumers.
their original inputs.
Find out more
about hybridity in Why are some cultures and cultural forms valued more
Chapter 6.
highly than others?
Find out more about In English literary studies, literature has traditionally been seen as part of high culture (sense:
network society in arts and artistic activity). Particular literary texts have been selected as worthy of study, for
Chapter 4. example the novels of Charles Dickens or the plays of Shakespeare. This process of selec-
Find out more about tion has meant the simultaneous exclusion of other texts, defined as non-literary or as less
neocolonialism in important and not worthy of study. It has also led to an emphasis on writing, to the detriment
Chapter 7. of other, more modern forms of cultural activity, for example film, television or digital media.

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 15

In a further sometimes taken step, some people regard the valued forms of literature or high
culture to be culture itself. Other excluded forms of writing or texts are defined as simply rub-
bish, trash or, in another often highly value-laden derogatory phrase, mass culture. This entails
a judgment of value, which is often assumed to be self-evident or obvious. Thus some forms
of culture are to be valued and protected and others written off as worthless and indeed posi-
tively dangerous. However, as we have already seen, such canons or traditions are not simply
given, as they are themselves constructed. Furthermore, as Hawkins (1990) has maintained,
texts and practices that are thought to be high culture and those defined as mass culture
often share similar themes. In addition, a particular text can be seen as high culture at one
point in time and popular or mass culture at another. The example of opera may be used to
illustrate this point. In Italy opera is a popular and widely appreciated cultural form, singers
are well known and performances draw big audiences who are knowledgeable and critical. In
contrast, opera in Britain is much more likely to be regarded as an elite taste, and research
shows that typically audiences for opera are older and are drawn from higher social classes
than those for other forms of entertainment. Yet in 1990, following the use of ‘Nessun Dorma’
from the opera Turandot, sung by Pavarotti, to introduce the BBC television coverage of the
1990 World Cup Finals, opera briefly rocketed in public popularity in Britain. In addition to
increased audiences at live performances in opera houses, there were large-scale commercial
promotions of concerts of music from opera in public parks and arenas. Television coverage
and video and compact disc sales of opera increased enormously and an album, In Concert,
sung by Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti was top of the music charts in 1990. The example
illustrates the important point that it is often empirically difficult to assign cultural practices to
neat conceptual categories that are stable over time.
The question of boundaries between levels and different types of culture and the justifica-
tion for them is an area of central concern for cultural studies. Some writers, often influenced by
postmodernism (see Defining Concept 10.1 on p. 395), have maintained that the boundaries Find out more about
between popular and high art are actually in the process of dissolving. Whether or not one accepts postmodernism in
this view, it is clear that the study of boundaries and margins and the ways in which they shift or Chapter 10.

become less important may be very revealing about cherished values, which are maintained within
boundaries. The relationships between cultural systems are a fruitful area for the study of the
processes of boundary maintenance and boundary change, linked as these topics are to issues
of cultural change and cultural continuity (sense: culture as a process of development).
Within social anthropology there is an established practice of demonstrating the value and
viability of cultures that are often regarded by the relevant authorities as poor and impover-
ished or as anachronisms and, as such, ripe for planned intervention to bring about change. By
contrast, Jared Diamond (2012) has written extensively on the nature of ‘traditional’ societies
and what can be learned from them. Studies by Baxter (1991) and Rigby (1985) have argued
that nomadic pastoralism – that is, a way of life in which people move with animals and in
which animal products are the staple diet – is a wholly rational and efficient use of resources
in particular circumstances. Such peoples are able to live in inhospitable areas where culti-
vation is not possible and enjoy a rich cultural, social and political life. Despite this evidence
there is pressure from development planners to enforce change through land policies that
compel pastoralists to give up their traditional way of life and become settled cultivators or
wage labourers. These examples draw attention to the issues of power (p. 93) and inequality Find out more about
in cultural and social life, to which we turn in the next section of the chapter. power in Chapter 3.

What is the relationship between culture and power?

Implicit in our discussions so far has been the issue of power (p. 93). Since it is a product of
interaction, culture is also a part of the social world and, as such, is shaped by the significant

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 16 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

lines of force that operate in any social world. All societies are organised politically and economi-
cally. Power and authority are distributed within them, and all societies have means for allocating
scarce resources. These arrangements produce particular social formations. The interests of
dominant groups in societies, which seek to explain and validate their positions in particular
structures, affect cultures.
One of the ways in which groups do this is through the construction of traditions and their
promulgation through the population. Thus it might be argued that the idea of a tradition of
British parliamentary democracy excludes other ideas of democracy and social organisation
that are against the interests of the powerful. Likewise, tradition in English literature excludes
and marginalises other voices. The definition of trash or mass culture might be seen to negate
forms of culture that are actually enjoyed by oppressed groups.
However, another way of looking at this suggests that such mass or popular forms are
actually used by those in power to drug or indoctrinate subordinate groups. Forms of popular
culture can in this view be seen to be like propaganda. For example, one commentary on mod-
Find out more about ern culture, that of the Frankfurt School (p. 106) of critical theory, argues that the culture
Frankfurt School in industries engender passivity and conformity among their mass audiences. For example, in
Chapter 3. this type of analysis the relationship between a media celebrity and his or her fans could be
seen to mirror the relationship between the totalitarian leader and his followers. Both fans
Find out more about and followers release their tensions by taking part in ritual (p. 295) acts of submission and
Ritual in Chapter 8. conformity (Adorno, 1967: 119–32).
Whatever view is adopted, it is one of the central claims of cultural studies that power and
culture are inextricably linked and therefore that the analysis of culture cannot be divorced
from politics and power relations. Indeed, we would argue that this is a very important reason
for studying culture and for taking culture seriously. However, the precise way in which forms
of culture connect to power remains a complex issue requiring careful investigation.

How is ‘culture as power’ negotiated and resisted?

Find out more about Given the interests of different groups in society, it is inevitable that cultural attitudes will often
resistance in be in conflict. Thus, the process of negotiation is endemic to societies and cultural resist-
Chapter 7. ances (p. 270) occur in many areas of life. Four key areas of struggle and negotiation that
have concerned cultural studies are around gender, ‘race’, class and age (for more on these
Feminism categories see pp. 24–5 and Chapter 3). These concepts define social relationships, which
Feminism describes
are often fraught. To take one area as an example, the concept of gender encompasses both
the broad how masculinity and femininity are defined and how men and women relate to one another.
movement that Gender definitions are points of struggle in many societies, since what it is to be a man and
has campaigned what it is to be a woman are never fixed. Indeed, these definitions themselves are, in part, the
against the product of a power struggle between men and women.
inequalities Feminist writers have been most influential in gender studies. Feminist discussion of
between men and
gender can be divided broadly into three arguments: for equality, for commonality or uni-
women, and the
form of academic
versality, and for difference (p. 208). The argument for equality emphasises the political
work which studies idea of rights. Equality between men and women is defined by abstract rights, to which both
and critiques sexes are entitled. Inequality can be defined by women’s lack of rights, for example to vote
gender inequality. or to equal pay. Negotiation here is around the concept of women’s rights. The argument
Find out more for commonality or universality stresses that although women may belong to very different
about feminism in
social, geographical and cultural groups, they share common or universal interests because of
Chapter 3.
their gender. Negotiation here is around the fundamental inequality of women because of their
Find out more about subordination in all societies. The argument for difference is more complicated; it rejects both
difference in ideas of simple equality and universality. Instead, it maintains that differences between men
Chapter 6. and women and between different groups of women mean that a concept of gender can never

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 17

be abstracted out of a particular situation. Negotiation, therefore, while not denying inequality,
will be around the specificity of differences. Critics of gender divisions struggle to redefine
cultural constructions of gender. Women’s movements, but also campaigns for lesbian, gay
and trans rights, seek to redraw the cultural boundaries of men and women’s experience. Such
political movements are often drawn into conflict with the law and social and political institu-
tions like religious organisations and political parties that do not wish the cultural support for
their dominance to be eroded or destroyed. In these examples it can be seen that the wider
frameworks of society (power and authority structures) influence and impose cultural beliefs
and practices to affect outcomes. We have already introduced a number of other areas where
culture can in a variety of ways be held to be connected to relationships and patterns of power.

How does culture shape who we are?

The above examples demonstrate that struggle and negotiation are often around questions of
cultural identity (p. 235). An example that gives the question of identity more prominence is Find out more about
the way in which the origins of English literary studies in the nineteenth century were closely identity in
linked to the growth of universal education. As a discipline English was, in the view of many Chapter 7.

commentators, designed to give schoolchildren a sense of a national culture (Batsleer et al.,

1985, as discussed in Ashcroft et al., 1989). Literary texts were used to inculcate this sense.
Consequently, although English literature was often presented as a proper study in itself, the
way it was taught was often designed, consciously or unconsciously, to encourage a particular
national identity, a sense of what it meant to be British (or often, more narrowly, English). In
teaching this sense of British identity, other national cultures or identities within Britain were
either treated uncritically as part of English culture or left out of the canon.
Another effect of this process, which some writers have detected, was to generate pride
in the British Empire. For example, the Nigerian writer and critic Chinua Achebe has criticised
the way that the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is still often presented as a great
example of English culture. The novel describes a nightmarish encounter with Africa from
the European point of view (see Spotlight 1.1). However, Achebe has demonstrated that the
representation of African culture that it contains is partial, based on little knowledge and thus
grossly distorted. Consequently, to read the novel as an English or even a European (Conrad
was Polish by birth) work of art is to receive a one-sided view of European imperialism in
Africa. Through such processes an English national identity was constructed which involved
constructing African identities in particular ways: as irrational and savage ‘others’.

SPOTLIGHT 1.1

Conrad on Africa
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We
were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phan-
toms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic
outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could
not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that
are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.
‘The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form
of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.

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 18 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that
was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to
one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you
was the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship
with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man
enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a
response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a mean-
ing in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1898), quoted in Chinua Achebe (1988: 6)

Find out more about Identities are very often connected to place (p. 192) both locally and more widely. We may feel
place in that we identify with a particular local area, a city, a region and a country and that the extent
Chapter 6. to which we place emphasis on one of these may depend on a context, for example, who we
are talking to at any particular time. However, it is clearly the case that these identities can
cause conflict and disagreement. Important issues in the study of culture concern the way in
which such identities are constructed and how they reflect and inflect particular distributions
of power. One important influence on identity that has been much studied in cultural studies
is the mass media of communication. Often seen in sociology as an active component of the
socialisation process, the nature, effects and uses of the media have formed aspects of many
specific research projects in cultural studies and its related activities – media and communi-
cation studies. The mass media has been the vehicle for communication of many of the texts
of culture, but has also been interwoven into ways of life. This has become so much the case,
especially with the development of digital and social media, that some thinkers have argued

Figure 1.1 The rapid pace of social change raises issues of difference, identity and the impacts of tech-
nology and globalisation. These provide leading questions for contemporary cultural studies.
(Indian woman taking photograph in Peacock Court.) (Source: © Martin Harvey/Corbis.)

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 I SSU ES A N D P R OBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 19

that contemporary cultural life cannot be divorced from media life (e.g. Deuze, 2012). Others
have explored the extent to which culture has become ‘mediatised’ in that many existing
forms and patterns of culture are increasingly impossible to consider separately from media
representations and practices (for example Hepp and Krotz, 2014).

SUMMARY CASE STUDIES

In order to examine some of the ideas contained in section 1.2, two short case studies are
given below: the family and Shakespeare.

The family
An examination of family life reveals some of the issues that we have identified in the study
of culture. For instance, within a family, adults have great power over the lives of children
because human infants are dependent on adults for their survival for relatively long periods
of time. One way of understanding family life is to examine relationships and processes in
terms of dominant and subordinate cultures. This approach has been used extensively by
many feminist writers who have sometimes mobilised the concept of patriarchy (see p. 25)
to refer to the assemblage of cultural and material power that men enjoy vis-à-vis women and
children (Pateman, 1989). The period of dependence of children varies from culture to culture,
both historically and contemporaneously, and a number of writers have commented that the
Western notion of childhood is a relatively recent concept (Aries, 1962; Walvin, 1982). Further,
in many parts of the contemporary world it is a mistake to think of the lives of children in terms
of childhood, as it is understood in the West; this period of growth and learning is seen quite
differently from that in Western societies (Diamond, 2012). Caldwell (1982), writing of India,
remarks that in Indian rural society there is the cultural belief and practice that wealth flows
from children to parents as well as from parents to children. He comments that typically in
Western society, resources flow in a one-way direction from parents to children and parents
do not expect young children to contribute to the material wellbeing of the family of origin.
However, in many parts of the world children are valued, at least in part, for the contributions
that they make to the domestic economies of family and household; there is what Caldwell
calls a ‘flow’ (1982: 142) of goods and services between parents and even quite young chil-
dren. For example, toddlers can join in gathering firewood, and this is a valuable contribution
in economies where this is the only fuel available for cooking and boiling water. This cultural
view of children is significant in understanding responses to family planning projects. Caldwell
argues that all too often Western cultural assumptions about family life and desirable family
size direct the policy and goals of these projects. Looking beyond the Western family to families
in other parts of the world reminds us of the heterogeneity and diversity of culture and alerts
us to the dangers for understanding in assuming that cultures and cultural meanings are the
same the world over.
Indeed, even in Western societies there is much cultural diversity in family practices.
Novels and academic studies point to the effects of class and power on family life. In the
recent past criticisms have been levelled against some traditional reading for children because
it portrays a middle-class view of family structures and relationships which is far removed from
the experiences of many children. Accusations of sexism and racism in literature for children
have also been made. These criticisms again draw our attention to the relationships between
general, diffuse cultures and local, particular cultures. Although we may identify an English
culture as distinct from, say, a French culture, it cannot be assumed that all English families
have identical cultures. This opens up the challenging issue of how particular local cultures
relate to the broader, more general ones of which they may be thought to be a constituent part.

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 20 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

It is also clear that family structures and organisation change over time, not just chrono-
logical, historical time, but also structural time, that is, as relationships between family members
change as a consequence of age and maturation. In all societies, as children grow to adulthood
the power of other adults over them diminishes. This occurs both as a result of physiological
change (children no longer depend on their parents for food) and also as a result of cultural
expectations about the roles of parents and children. These cultural expectations may be
gendered; for example, the English language idiom that describes adult children as ‘being
tied to their mother’s apron strings’ can be read as a general disapproval of adults who do not
leave the immediate sphere of their mother. Yet this idiom is overwhelmingly applied to adult
male children and thus expresses a view about the proper, expected relationships between
adult males and their mothers. Men are expected to be free from the close influence of their
mothers, whereas there is often felt to be an identification between adult women and their
mothers. Variables such as the sex of children, the number of children and the age of the par-
ents when children are born all affect the course of family life. In Victorian Britain, when family
size was bigger and life expectancy less than now, some parents had dependent children for
all their lives – there was no time in which all their children had grown up and left home. These
demographic and social factors greatly influence the course of family life and demonstrate
not only the heterogeneity but also the malleability of culture. All cultures are reproduced in
specific circumstances; ideas and values are interpreted and understood in the light of local
conditions and the representations that are circulating (for example through the media). This
last point brings us back to the issues of judgment and relativism in the understanding of cul-
tural practice that we raised earlier in this section. A cultural studies approach to a common
institution, in this case the family, demonstrates the power of cultural studies to generate a
wide range and number of potential areas of investigation. Some of these have been alluded
to in this example, but you will be able to identify many more. For example, what has been
the effect on cultural understandings of the family of the increasingly legal recognition of
same-sex marriage? and so on.

Shakespeare
The study of Shakespeare has always been central to English literary studies and to some
constructions of English identity (p. 235). Traditionally, in English studies, Shakespeare’s
plays and Shakespeare’s language have been presented as the essence of Englishness.
Find out more about
They have been made to serve as the defining features of a homogenous and unchanging
identity in
culture. Subsequent authors have often been judged in terms of how they fit into that tradition.
Chapter 7.
Because of this connection between Shakespeare and national identity, the position of these
plays in schools has become an important issue. The argument is sometimes put forward that
children must read Shakespeare in order to learn English and Englishness. Shakespeare’s
Find out more about
plays become valued over and above other forms of cultural production. As a result the teach-
colonialism in ing of Shakespeare, and English history, was also a part of colonialism’s cultural project
Chapter 7. (p. 236).
However, a cultural-studies-based approach asks rather different questions about
Shakespeare. Instead of taking Shakespeare’s position for granted, it asks what the social
position of the theatre was in Elizabethan times. Further, it asks how plays were written and
produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Evidence that shows a high degree of
collaboration between playwrights and adaptation of plays on the stage challenges the concep-
tion of Shakespeare as individual genius. He appears as part of a wider culture. Shakespeare is
then placed historically rather than his plays being seen as ‘timeless’ or ‘eternal’. The question
of the audience both in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and now is addressed. This
gives a sense of who the plays were intended for and how they have been received, further

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 I SSU ES A N D P ROBLEM S IN T H E ST UDY OF CULT UR E 21

EXAMPLE 1.3

Troilus and Cressida

But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny!
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! Oh when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But that degree stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnacy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead
Troilus and Cressida I.iii.94–115

challenging the conception that his work is universal: that is, for everyone, all of the time. We
might ask what groups of schoolchildren make of Shakespeare’s plays depending on class,
race and gender, or whether they have seen the plays in the theatre or in versions made for
the cinema.
The timeless nature of Shakespeare can also be challenged by studies that show that the
texts have been altered considerably over the years and that he was not always considered
as important as he is now. Cultural studies looks at the changing conceptions of Englishness
– and its relationships to the rest of the world – that caused Shakespeare to be rediscovered
in the eighteenth century as the national poet. This extends from studying different versions
of the plays to researching the tourist industry in Stratford-upon-Avon. It can also involve study-
ing the versions of Shakespeare that are produced in other parts of the world. These do not
simply show the imposition of English cultural meanings, but the complex processes of nego-
tiation within networks of cultural interaction which mean that Shakespearean history plays
were vehicles for discussing political authority in the Soviet Union, and which brought a Zulu
version of Macbeth from post-apartheid South Africa to the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s
Globe Theatre in London.
All of these processes of questioning and negotiation are of course political. They show
that the interpretation of Shakespeare is a matter of power. Margot Heinemann developed
this argument (1985) in her essay ‘How Brecht read Shakespeare’. She gave the example of
Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the late 1980s, who quoted from Shakespeare’s

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 22 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

play Troilus and Cressida (1601–2). Lawson used the quotation ‘Take but degree away,
untune that string/And hark what discord follows’ to argue that Shakespeare was a Tory.
However, as Heinemann pointed out, the character who makes the speech, Ulysses, is in
fact a wily, cunning politician, who is using the threat of social disorder to attain his own ends
(see Example 1.3).
All of these questions and issues derive from adopting a rather different approach to the
study of culture to that represented by English studies in its more conventional guises. They
are the sorts of questions posed by those adopting a cultural studies perspective and are
shaped by the core issues that we have identified. However, they also involve asking ques-
tions which lead us on to examining the theoretical perspectives used within cultural studies:
what is the relationship between the social position of the audience (for example, in terms of
race, class and gender) and the interpretation of the text? How can we understand the ways
in which the meanings of Englishness (and their link to Shakespeare) and the meanings of
Frenchness become defined as opposites? What ideas and methods can we use to interpret
plays in their historical context, or the contemporary meanings of Shakespeare within schools
or as produced for television? In the next section we introduce some of the most influential
ways of theorising culture.

1.3 THEORISING CULTURE

This section introduces theories of culture, which attempt to address the issues and problems
set out above and to unite them within frameworks of explanation. The bringing together of
diverse issues and problems into a single form necessarily involves a process of abstraction.
Theorists move away from the detail of particular instances and look for connections in terms
of general principles or concepts. This means that theories are often difficult to grasp at first
sight, couched as they are in abstract language. It may help to think of the issues and problems
just introduced as the building blocks of theories. But there is no escaping the fact that the
language of theory is abstract, and may well be difficult on first reading.

Structuralism and poststructuralism

defining concept 1.3

Structuralism is an intellectual approach and movement, which was very influential in the
social sciences, the humanities and the arts in the 1960s and 1970s. The basic idea of
structuralism is that a phenomenon under study (such as language or society) should be
seen as consisting of a system of structures. This system and the relationship between
the different elements are more important than the individual elements that make up the
system.
The Swiss linguist de Saussure is regarded as the founder of structuralism. In his
study of language, he drew attention to the structures (langue) that underpin the variation
of everyday speech and writing (parole) and analysed the sign as consisting of signified
(concept) and signifier (word or sound), founding semiology (p. 39) as the science of
the study of signs. The emphasis on the structure to be found below or behind everyday
interaction, or the variety of literary texts, was taken up by a number of (mainly French)
writers working in different areas of the social sciences and humanities. Examples include
Lévi-Strauss (anthropology) in studies of kinship, myth and totemism; Lacan (psychoanaly-
sis), who reworked Freud, arguing that the unconsciousness is structured like a language;
Barthes (p. 170) (literary studies), who examined the myths of bourgeois societies and

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 T H EOR ISING CULT UR E 23

texts; Foucault (p. 26) (history and philosophy), who pointed to the way that underlying
epistemes determine what can be thought in his archaeological method; and Althusser
(philosophy), who drew on Lacan’s reworking of Freud in a re-reading of Marx (p. 97)
which emphasised the role of underlying modes of production in the determination of the
course of history. Debate around Lacan was influential on the work in feminism of writers
like Kristeva (p. 244) and Irigaray.
Poststructuralism is an intellectual approach that started from structuralism and cri-
tiqued it. So, for example, it criticised the idea that there is actually a distinct structure
underlying texts or speech, blurring such distinctions. Moreover, it is critical of some of the
scientific pretensions of structuralism. Structuralism tended to work on the premise that
the truth or the real structure could be found. Poststructuralism is more concerned with
the way in which versions of truth are produced through interpretation, but this is always in
dispute and can never be resolved. The work of Derrida and Baudrillard exhibits some of
these poststructuralist ideas. Derrida shows how texts subvert themselves from within and
Baudrillard explodes the neat oppositions of sign and signifier, use and exchange value.
Many examples of structuralist and poststructuralist analyses can be found in cul-
tural studies. More formal structuralist analyses have sought to find the hidden meanings
of folk tales (Propp), James Bond (Eco), the Western film (Wright) and romantic fiction
(Radway). Poststructuralist influence is more diffuse, but can be found especially in more
literary forms of cultural studies and cultural theory, where the complexities of texts and
their multiple meanings are interpreted.

Further reading
Hawkes, T. (1991) Structuralism and Semiotics, London: Routledge.
Wright, W. (1975) Sixguns and Society, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Belsey, C. (2002) Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In this section we wish to outline the main features of some leading theoretical approaches in Find out more about
cultural studies. Broadly – and this is a beginning that can be filled out by looking at examples Karl Marx in
Chapter 3.
in the rest of the book – we start with functionalist and structuralist (p. 22) forms of under-
standing, which suggest clearly defined, and often rather rigid, relationships between culture postmodern
and social structure. From these we move on to theoretical approaches, which sometimes
Postmodernism
might still be called structuralist and are often influenced by Karl Marx (p. 97), that place
describes a range
emphasis on the understanding of culture and meaning through thinking about their relation- of activities in the
ships to political economy (for example, class structures and modes of production) and their arts and culture
importance within conflicts between differently positioned social groups. Finally we stress what which developed
are often called poststructuralist (p. 22) or postmodern (p. 395) theoretical approaches, between 1960
which retain a concern with politics (and some concern for economics) in explaining culture and 1990. Such
(see Chapter 7) but use a much more flexible sense of how cultures and meanings are made. forms share some
of the emphases
of modernism
Culture and social structure but inflect them
in different
Sociologists often use the term ‘social structure’ to describe ‘the enduring, orderly and pat- directions. Find
terned relationships between elements of a society’ (Abercrombie et al., 1984: 198). Society is out more about
often considered to be ordered, patterned and enduring because of the structure that underlies postmodernism in
Chapter 10.
it. Just as a tall building is held together by the girders underneath the stone and glass exterior,

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 24 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

so too society is held together by its distinct configuration of institutions (political, economic,
kinship, and so forth).
One version of this way of thinking, which was once very influential in sociology, can be
seen in the work of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. Parsons treats culture as nec-
essary for the proper functioning of society. In general terms culture – that is, values, norms
Find out more about and symbols (p. 295) – provides the linchpin of Parsons’s solution to the problem of social
symbols in order. This problem is an analytical issue concerning the sources of the enduring quality of
Chapter 8. social life – how is the regularity, persistence, relative stability and predictability of social life
achieved? Parsons maintains that culture is the central element of an adequate solution to
this problem because it provides values, the shared ideas about what is desirable in society
(perhaps values like material prosperity, individual freedom and social justice), and norms, the
acceptable means of obtaining these things (for example, the idea that honest endeavour is the
way to success). Culture also provides language and other symbolic systems essential to social
life. Parsons further maintains that culture is internalised by personalities and that individual
motivation thus has cultural origins. Moreover, two of society’s basic features, its economy
and its political system, are maintained by culture. Hence there is an important sense in which
culture ‘oils the wheels’ of society. In the functionalist view of Parsons, society, culture and the
individual are separate but interrelated, each interpenetrating the others. Culture occupies a
central place because on the one hand it is internalised by individuals and on the other it is
institutionalised in the stable patterns of action that make up major economic, political and
kinship structures of the society.

Social structure and social conflict: class, gender and ‘race’

The separation of culture and social structure is not limited to functionalist theorists. It appears
also in the work of theorists who argued that conflict is at the core of society and who under-
stood culture in terms of the structured relationships of politics and economics (or political
Find out more about economy). Karl Marx (p. 97), the nineteenth-century philosopher and revolutionary, and the
Karl Marx in social theorist Max Weber (p. 256) treated beliefs, values and behaviour as products of social
Chapter 3. and economic inequalities and power relationships. Although Marx’s ideas are very complex,
Find out more about some of his followers have argued that those who hold the means of production in society
Max Weber in will control its ideas and values. The ruling ideas of a society (its forms of law, politics, religion,
Chapter 7. etc.) will be those of the dominant class. These ideas will be used to manage and perpetuate
an unequal and unjust system. In this scheme, culture serves as a prop to the social structure,
legitimising the existing order of things.
Find out more about Feminist (p. 115) theorists have also seen culture as a product of social conflict; but
feminism in whereas Marxists see social conflict as between classes, feminists see gender relations as
Chapter 3. just as important. Two key terms in feminist theory are ‘subordination’ and ‘patriarchy’ (see
Defining Concept 1.4 on p. 25). Both these terms describe how men have more social and
economic power than women. Feminist theory focuses on the political and economic inequali-
ties between men and women. However, because women have often been excluded from the
mainstream of political and economic life, feminists have also emphasised the importance of
studying culture as the place in which inequality is reproduced. Because it is within culture that
gender is formed, feminists have studied culture in order to examine the ways in which cultural
expectations and assumptions about sex have fed the idea that gender inequality is natural.
Culture and conflict are also linked in the study of ‘race’ and racism. The concept of ‘race’
is often put in inverted commas because ‘race’, like gender, is also a social rather than a biologi-
cal category. Although people are often differently defined by ‘racial’ characteristics, there are
always as many differences within a defined ‘racial’ group as between ‘racial’ groups (Fields,
1990: 97). Fryer (1984) has argued that racial prejudice is cultural in the sense that it is the

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 T H EOR ISING CULT UR E 25

Subordination of women and patriarchy

defining concept 1.4

Subordination of women: a phrase used to describe the generalised situation whereby
men as a group have more social and economic power than women, including power over
women (Pearson, 1992). Men are dominant in society and masculinity signifies dominance
over femininity in terms of ideas.
Patriarchy: originally an anthropological term that describes a social system in which
authority is invested in the male head of the household (the patriarch) and other male
elders in the kinship group. Older men are entitled to exercise socially sanctioned authority
over other members of the household or kinship group, both women and younger men
(Pearson, 1992). It is often used to describe the situation of subordination of women as
described above.
Patriarchy has been criticised by some feminists as too all-embracing a term to
describe the different forms of male dominance in different societies.

articulation of popular beliefs held by a people about others who are felt to be different from
themselves. Racism, however, articulates cultural difference with structured inequality, using
perceptions of these differences to validate oppression. The argument is that cultural domina-
tion is an essential element of economic and political control. Just as feminists contend that
the cultural roles assigned to women (gendered roles) serve to account for their separate and
unequal status in relationship to men, so critics of racism argue that prejudicial values regard-
ing and attitudes towards colonised peoples developed as European imperialists slaughtered
them, took their lands and destroyed their cultures (Richards, 1990; Diamond, 1998).

Culture in its own right and as a force for change

However, culture need not be seen as dependent upon and derivative of the economic or
any other dimension of social structure. A very important case here is Max Weber’s (p. 256) Find out more about
account of the part played by the Protestant ethic in explaining the origins of modern capital- Max Weber in
ism. Weber argues that the beliefs of the early Protestant sects played a key causal role in the Chapter 7.
establishment of the ‘spirit’ or culture of capitalism, and thereby contributed to development of
the capitalist economic system. Many of the early Protestant groups subscribed to the teach-
ings of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, which maintained that the believer’s eternal salvation
was determined at birth and that no amount of good works could alter God’s decision. This
placed a tremendous psychological burden on believers, who had no way of knowing whether
they numbered among the elect (those who achieve eternal salvation in the life hereafter).
The practical solution offered by the Protestant religion to the anxiety thus generated lay in
the notion of vocation: the believer was instructed to work long and hard in an occupation
in order to attest his/her confidence and conviction that elect status was assured. Later, the
doctrine was relaxed so that systematic labour within a vocation and the material prosper-
ity that accompanied it came to be seen as a sign of election. The consequences of these
beliefs and related restrictions on consumption and indulgence were (a) to introduce a new
goal-orientated attitude towards economic activity to replace the diffuse attitudes that had
persisted through the Middle Ages, and (b) to facilitate the process of capital accumulation.
Weber of course was well aware that a number of factors other than the cultural contributed

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 26 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

to a phenomenon as complex as capitalism (Collins, 1980). His intention was to show how
ideas can be ‘effective forces’ (Weber, 1930: 183) in the historical development of societies.
Culture (here in the form of religious ideas and practices) can shape as well as be shaped by
social structure.

Michel Foucault (1926–84)

key influence 1.2

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian – indeed, these two categories
or identities become blurred together in his writing and thought – who has had a dramatic
and far-reaching impact on cultural studies through his work on the connections between
power (p. 93), knowledge and subjectivity.
Foucault’s varied career took him through several disciplines – including philosophy
and psychology – and various countries – he worked in France, Sweden, Poland, Tunisia
and Germany before taking up a position at France’s premier academic institution, the
Collège de France, in 1970. Significantly, his job in Paris was, at his suggestion, a profes-
sorship in history of systems of thought, and in this we can trace the themes of much of
the work that he undertook from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
Foucault’s early work traced changing modes of thought in relation to ‘psychological’
knowledges. His book Madness and Civilisation (1961) traced the relationship between
madness and reason, reading the reactions to madness, and the incarceration of the
mad, in terms of thinking about rationality as they changed from the medieval period,
through the Enlightenment’s Age of Reason and into the nineteenth century. The issues
that it raised were explored in varied and changing ways in his subsequent work. Careful
attention to the changing patterns of knowledge produced The Birth of the Clinic (origi-
nally published in French in 1963), The Order of Things (French original 1966) and The
Archaeology of Knowledge (French original 1969). Indeed, he used the term ‘archaeolo-
gies’ to describe all these projects. The connections between knowledge and power which
the treatment of the insane had revealed were further explored in relation to other mar-
ginalised groups in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (originally published
in French in 1975), his edited editions of the lives of the murderer Pierre Rivière (1975)
and the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (1978), and his study The History of Sexuality
(originally published in French: volume I 1976, volumes II and III 1984). In all of these
studies – which he called genealogies – he used theories of discourse (p. 27) to trace
the changing ways in which power and knowledge are connected in the production of
subjectivities and identities (p. 235).
Foucault’s impact has primarily been in the academic domain. He has changed think-
ing about power, knowledge and subjectivity, encouraging study of the ways in which
they are connected and how they change from context to context. In emphasising that
‘Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the analysis of society’ (Foucault,
1991: 247), he has encouraged thinking about the ways in which things – power relations,
ways of thinking, and ways of understanding ourselves and others – could be different.
This means that his influence has also been political. His attention to the forms of power
which shape institutions and subjectivities has been influential in, for example, campaigns
over prisoners’ rights and gay rights.

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 T H EOR ISING CULT UR E 27

Further reading
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed.
Colin Gordon, Brighton: Harvester Press.
Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow,
London: Penguin.
Kritzman, L.D. (ed.) (1988) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other
Writings 1977–1984, London: Routledge.
Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984) The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gutting, G. (2005) Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, S. (2003) Michel Foucault, London: Routledge.
Taylor, D. (ed.) (2010) Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, London: Routledge.

Discourse

defining concept 1.5

Discourse is a way of thinking about the relationship between power (p. 93), knowledge
and language. In part it is an attempt to avoid some of the difficulties involved in using the
concept of ideology (p. 49). It is a way of understanding most associated with the work
of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (p. 26).
For Foucault a ‘discourse’ is what we might call ‘a system that defines the possibilities
for knowledge’ or ‘a framework for understanding the world’ or ‘a field of knowledge’. A
discourse exists as a set of ‘rules’ (formal or informal, acknowledged or unacknowledged),
which determine the sorts of statements that can be made (e.g. ‘the moon is made of
blue cheese’ is not a statement that can be made within a scientific discourse, but it can
within a poetic one). These ‘rules’ determine what the criteria for truth are, what sorts of
things can be talked about, and what can be said about them. One example that Foucault
uses which can help us here is the imaginary Chinese encyclopaedia about which the
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story. Foucault uses this to challenge
our ideas about the inherent truthfulness and rationality of our own classification systems
and scientific discourses. In the encyclopaedia

[A]nimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present ❝
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair
brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long
way off look like flies.
(Foucault, 1970: xv)

Foucault’s aim is to problematise the relationship between words and things. He suggests
that there are lots of ways in which the world can be described and defined and that we
have no sure grounds to choose one over the others. In turn this also means that he is
dedicated to recovering those ways of knowing that have been displaced and forgotten.
Discourse is also about the relationship between power and knowledge. Foucault
(1980) argues that we have to understand power as something productive. For example,
it is not in catching a criminal that power lies but in producing the notion of ‘the criminal’ in
the first place. As he says: ‘There is no power relation without the correlative constitution

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 28 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the
same time power relations’ (Foucault, 1977: 27). To continue the example, it is the body of
knowledge – the discourse – that we call ‘criminology’ that produces ‘the criminal’ (and, in
the past, now forgotten figures like ‘the homicidal monomaniac’) as an object of knowledge,
and suggests ways of dealing with him or her. The criminal, the criminologist, the police
officer and the prison are all created together ‘in discourse’.
This does not mean that the world is just words and images. Foucault is keen to talk
about the institutions and practices that are vital to the working of discourse. If we think
about medical discourse, we soon realise that the forms of knowledge and language that
make it up are inseparable from the actual places where these discourses are produced
(the clinic, the hospital, the surgery) and all the trappings of the medical environment
(white coats, stethoscopes, nurses’ uniforms) (see Prior, 1988).

Further reading
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed.
Colin Gordon, Brighton: Harvester.
Purvis, T. and Hunt, A. (1993) ‘Discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology . . .’, British
Journal of Sociology 44, 473–99.
See also Key Influence 1.2: Michel Foucault

A more interwoven view of the relationship between culture and society is shown in the work
of the anthropologist Mary Douglas and of Michel Foucault (p. 26). They both stress in their
writings that our understanding of particular objects relates as much to the way we think about
those objects as to any qualities those objects may have in themselves. There is a reciprocal
relationship between thought and the object(s) of thought: a two-way process where objects
have qualities that make an impression upon us, but that impression is influenced by the ways
in which we have been conditioned, acculturated or socialised to think about that object.
Thought and object are, then, inseparably linked, but this does not mean that we always think
in the same way about things and that ideas never change. It does mean that change is the
outcome of reciprocal relationships, not a unidirectional causality from structure to culture.
This means that culture may influence structure, as well as structure influencing culture. The
recognition that culture is a force for change (not simply the object of change) leads to the
belief that culture can be examined as a system in its own right. For example, in Purity and
Danger Mary Douglas (1966) argues that ideas about dirt and hygiene in society have a force
and a compulsion, not simply because they can be related to the material world through ideas
about contamination, germs and illness, but because they are part of a wider cosmology or
world-view. Dirt and hygiene are understood within a culture not just in terms of their relation
to disease, but also in terms of ideas of morality, for example moral purity versus immoral filth.
Thus, a cultural understanding of dirt will have to take into account the meaning of dirt in more
than just a medical sense. It will have to understand dirt’s place historically, within a specific
culture: the ordering and classifying of events, which result from ideas about the world, give
meaning to behaviour. The state of being dirty is thus as much the product of ideas as it is of
the material world.
In turn, Foucault argues that social groups, identities and positions – like classes, genders,
races and sexualities – do not pre-exist and somehow determine their own and other cultural
meanings. They are produced within discourses (p. 27), which define what they are and how
they operate. So, for Foucault, even though there have always been men who have sex with

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 T H EOR ISING CULT UR E 29

men, there was no ‘homosexual’ identity, and no ‘homosexual sex’, before that identity and the
figure of the ‘homosexual’ were defined in medical, psychological and literary texts at the end
of the nineteenth century. That those discourses about homosexuality both produced moves
to regulate male sexuality – and therefore defined more clearly a group of homosexual men
– and provided the basis for positive identification with that term on the part of some of those
men meant that ‘homosexuality’ came to have a significant place within the social structure. In
Foucault’s theories there is no determinate relationship between social structure and culture.
Instead there is a flexible set of relationships between power (p. 93), discourse and what Find out more about
exists in the world. power in Chapter 3.

Performing culture and becoming

The sort of approach that argues that culture is produced by the ongoing repetition of dis-
courses and practices has been highly influential on cultural theory and cultural studies in the
recent period. In particular Judith Butler (p. 243) has argued that sex and gender are cultural Find out more about
phenomena that are reproduced by their ongoing performance. The use of ‘performance’ here Judith Butler in
is important as it communicates the idea that there is nothing natural, essential or universal Chapter 7.

about the forms that are so produced through these activities. Identities (p. 235) and cultures Find out more about
are produced through performance. They are not phenomena that are represented through identity in Chapter 7.
performance. Therefore in this account gender (and even more controversially sex) is produced
through social processes. Butler’s work has been influential in a number of fields and like
many other of the theorists and ideas introduced in this opening chapter will be considered at
a number of different points in this book, especially where the focus is particularly on power
and new forms of politics (Chapter 7).
Other approaches to the study of culture have also emphasised ideas of performance. In
sociology, for example, Jeffrey Alexander (working with various collaborators) has mounted
an argument for a cultural sociology that is radical in a number of ways. Rather than seeing
culture as dependent on social structure (as in some of the approaches summarised earlier in
this section), Alexander and the ‘Strong Program in Cultural Theory’ argue that culture ‘pos-
sesses a relative autonomy in shaping actions and institutions, providing inputs every bit as
vital as more material or instrumental forces’ (Alexander and Smith, 2002: 136). In Alexander’s
view contemporary (and indeed more classical) approaches have failed to capture the nature
and significance of culture. He is critical of approaches that we have already introduced
such as the functionalism of Parsons and the analysis of discourse and power in Foucault
(p. 26). In addition, despite its strengths, the work associated with the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies (p. 31) (which will be discussed at a number of points
in this book) also fails to sufficiently account for the autonomy of culture. Other sociologies
of culture (including that of Pierre Bourdieu; see p. 349) fail for similar reasons. Alexander Find out more about
goes on to consider the key components of what he sees as an adequate cultural sociology. Bourdieu in Chapter
These include drawing on techniques of ‘thick description’ from anthropologists like Geertz, 9.
which describe the complexities of culture as a text, and structuralist (p. 22) approaches to
classification, signs and symbols. In addition, this field of cultural sociology has increasingly
concerned itself with the analysis of narratives, drama and performance in the wider cultural
sphere. In particular, politics has been examined in this light. Again, we will have much more to
say on this topic in other parts of this book (see especially Chapter 7).
One clear example of this can be found in the work of Alexander and Jaworsky (2014)
on how the US president Barack Obama recovered his position from the significant defeats of
his Democratic Party in the midterm Senate elections of 2010, and the ongoing fall in his own
standing, to win a second term as president in 2012. Controversially, Alexander and Jaworsky
argue that ‘Cultural symbols and dramatic performances determined the fate of Obama’s

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 30 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

presidency’ (2). Politics in this argument, especially in Western societies with a 24-hour media
culture and social media, is about ‘producing and connecting performances to audiences who
will hopefully be voters’. In this view, ‘What voters interpret are mass-mediated performances’
(7). Thus, to summarise: Obama’s standing improved when he was better able to perform the
role of decisive, inclusive leader of a community rather than that of a manager who was pro-
gressively enacting legislation, which itself was subject to ups and downs. This is not to say
that such legislation is not important, but rather that winning elections is much more dependent
Find out more about on the staging and performances of symbols (p. 295), stories and narratives (p. 46) than
narrative in Chapter technical achievements. What is decisive here is the way in which what is desired is enacted
2. by the performance of it. This is also the general approach taken by Judith Butler (p. 243)
in her analyses of politics.
Other theorists have considered the way in which culture is always in a state of becom-
ing. Thus, for example, the work of the French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) has
been influential in cultural studies. Deleuze, who often wrote with the psychoanalyst Félix
Guattari, argues that philosophy and the humanities must break with ideas of representation,
as such approaches suggest that a clear difference can be found between the real world and
Find out more about the representation of it. Rather, experience is founded in affect – the experiential sensations
representation in that come from being alive in a complex world. In this view, human beings who feel and desire
Chapter 2. things are contingently connected to other humans and objects in complex and ever-changing
patterns. It is possible to think of human beings in a culture as experiencing machines that are
connected to other machines that may or may not have subjectivity in complex and contingent
ways. This machinic approach allows that exploration of how such relationships form rhizomic
relationships. The term ‘rhizome’ is adapted from its use in biological science to characterise
the complex root structure of a plant. For the sorts of approach influenced by Deleuze, the
situation, while starting from this idea, is even more complex, so that to capture this we should
imagine a root structure that has no real beginning or end, and where everything can be con-
nected to everything else. It is a system of connection that has no limits on the nature of the
connection that can be made. This suggests a mode of study that considers without assump-
Find out more about tion of priority how humans connect to animals or technologies, how humans are themselves
actor network machines and how these relationships are always in flux. This is an important argument of
theory in Chapter 4. actor network theory (ANT) (p. 158).
In considering theoretical accounts of the relation of culture and social structure we
have demonstrated the rigid determinism of the functionalists; the strong connections
between cultural struggles and the social relations of class, race and gender made by
Marxists and feminists; and the importance of culture in reciprocally shaping social structures
and social positions and identities argued by Foucault. Finally, we have quickly introduced
approaches that see culture forming complex patterns that are formed in the performance of
activity.

Approach Representative authors Conceptualisation of culture

Functionalist Parsons Symbolic – norms and values

Structuralist Marx Ideas and ideology
Interwoven Weber, Foucault, Douglas Beliefs, discourses and practices
Performative Butler, Alexander Ideology, symbols and narrative
Rhizomic Deleuze (and Guattari) Affect and desire

Figure 1.2 An introduction to theorising culture

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 CO N CLUSION: WH AT IS CULT UR AL ST UDIES? 31

These introductory remarks will be taken further in subsequent chapters that examine the
issues they raise in more detail.

1.4 CONCLUSION: WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?

What, then is cultural studies? Throughout this chapter we have stressed the linkages between
an activity that we have called cultural studies and the disciplines of sociology, history, geog-
raphy, English and anthropology. We have discussed a set of central concerns for these
disciplines, arguing that, given their common interests in culture, there are issues and problems
that they all must address. These central concerns we call the core issues and problems in
the study of culture. The shared interest in the topic of culture and the recognition of common
themes brought practitioners from different disciplines together in the belief that it is through
cooperation and collaboration that understanding and explanation will develop most powerfully.
This clustering of different disciplinary perspectives around a common object of study offers
the possibility of the development of a distinctive area of study characterised by new theories
and methods of analysis. It is this configuration of collaborating disciplines around the topic
of culture that we see constituting both the substance and the methods of cultural studies.
The arena in which this takes place can be labelled an ‘interdiscursive space’, capturing the
fluidity and focus that characterise cultural studies and contrasting the emergent, innovatory
themes in substance and method that arise out of collaboration with the traditional themes
of single disciplines. The metaphor of space also draws attention to the permeable nature of
cultural studies: there are no fixed boundaries and no fortress walls; theories and themes are
drawn in from disciplines and may flow back in a transformed state to influence thinking there.
The most influential place where these ideas came together to give an important initial
impetus to the development of an activity recognised as cultural studies was the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (see below) from
the 1960s onwards.

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

key influence 1.3

Also known as the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or the
‘Birmingham School’, the Centre was the key site for the development of cultural stud-
ies. Birmingham is now less influential as cultural studies has expanded to become an
international activity.
Richard Hoggart (p. 110) founded the Centre in 1964 initially within the English
Department. Hoggart was the first director, with Stuart Hall (p. 77) as his deputy. Hall
became director in 1968 when Hoggart left to work at UNESCO. Hall led the Centre
through its most productive period before leaving in 1979. His own deputy, Richard
Johnson, succeeded him. In the wake of upheavals in the social sciences and arts at the
University of Birmingham, the Centre became the Department of Cultural Studies, and the
activity has since become part of the Sociology Department.
Founded in many ways to develop the approach formulated by Hoggart in The Uses
of Literacy (1958), the Centre rapidly made its mark through its Stencilled Occasional
Papers Series, which included papers on topics as diverse as women domestic servants,
the Kray twins and the theory of Karl Marx. It also produced its own journal, Working
Papers in Cultural Studies. These were the sites for the first publication of many of the
Centre’s best-known writers, whose ideas later appeared in book form. By the 1970s, the

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 32 CU LTU RE A N D C U LTU RA L STU D IES

Centre’s activities were contextualised by a Gramscian (p. 52) Marxist emphasis on the
role of culture in resistance (p. 270) and hegemonic (p. 104) domination. This informed
the analyses in collective texts such as Resistance Through Rituals (1976), Policing the
Crisis (1978), On Ideology (1977) and Working-Class Culture (1979). The Marxist empha-
sis on class was contested by feminists at the Centre in Women Take Issue (1978) and
its relative inattention to ‘race’ in The Empire Strikes Back (1982). The work of Richard
Johnson led to a more historical approach in Making Histories (1982). Writers associated
with the Centre through this period include Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Angela
McRobbie (p. 337), Iain Chambers, Paul Gilroy (p. 220) and Lawrence Grossberg.
There are many others. The upheavals of the 1980s and the expansion of cultural stud-
ies made Birmingham less important, although it continued to publish a journal, Cultural
Studies from Birmingham, and books.
The Centre’s attention to youth culture, news, ideology, race, cultural politics and gen-
der in ways that took popular culture seriously from within an academic Marxist approach
was the key moment in the formation of the cultural studies approach. Authors once
associated with the Centre continue to fill some of the most senior and influential positions
in academic cultural studies. However, the points of view developed at Birmingham (the
over-unified idea of a ‘school’ is very misleading) are now only a part of the much wider
activity of cultural studies.

Further Reading
Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war
Britain, London: Hutchinson.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the
State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan.
Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds) (1980) Culture, Media, Language, London:
Hutchinson.

Richard Johnson (1986), who was head of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies for a
period, and many authors subsequently have pointed out the dangers of academic codification
in regard to cultural studies, suggesting that its strength lies in its openness and hence its
capacity for transformation and growth. He argues that cultural studies mirrors the complexity
and polysemic qualities of the object of its study, culture. The power of ‘culture’ arises from its
diffuseness: the term is used where imprecision matters, where rigidity would destroy what it
seeks to understand. ‘Consciousness’ and ‘subjectivity’ are key terms in Johnson’s portrayal
of cultural studies. ‘Consciousness’ is used in the Marxist sense of knowledge and also in
a reflexive sense to give the idea of productive activity. ‘Subjectivity’ is used to refer to the
construction of individuals by culture. Combining these two concepts leads Johnson (1986:
45) to describe the project of cultural studies as being to ‘abstract, describe and reconstitute
in concrete studies the social forms through which human beings “live”, become conscious,
sustain themselves subjectively’.
This project has been interpreted in cultural studies in terms of three main models of
research: (a) production-based studies; (b) text-based studies; (c) studies of lived cultures.
As you can see, there is a close correspondence here with the three senses of culture that
we elaborated earlier in this chapter. Each one of these areas has a different focus: the first
draws attention to processes involved in and struggles over the production of cultural items;
the second investigates the forms of cultural product; the third is concerned with how experi-

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 CO N CLUSION: WH AT IS CULT UR AL ST UDIES? 33

ence is represented. Johnson points to the necessarily incompleteness of these ventures; like
the wider arena in which they operate, they are fed by interactive communication. Each one
gives to and takes from the others.
In summary, we suggest approaching cultural studies as an area of activity that grows
from interaction and collaboration to produce issues and themes that are new and challenging.
Cultural studies is not an island in a sea of disciplines but a current that washes the shores of
other disciplines to create new and changing formations.

Recap
➤ In cultural studies the concept of culture has a range of meanings which includes
both high art and everyday life.
➤ Cultural studies advocates an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture.
➤ While cultural studies is eclectic in its use of theory, using both structuralist and
more flexible approaches, it advocates those that stress the overlapping, hybrid
nature of cultures, seeing cultures as networks rather than patchworks.

Further reading
Although they are not always easy reading, the best place to begin exploring the issues raised
in this chapter is to look at the acknowledged early ‘classics’ of cultural studies: Richard
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958), Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780–1950
(1963) and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1968). Each of these
works has had a profound influence over the subsequent development of cultural studies.
Important stock takings of the field’s development are Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) and the substantial collection edited by
Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treicher, Cultural Studies (1992). John Storey’s Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (2006) connects debates about popular culture to
the concerns of cultural studies. Richard Johnson’s ‘What is cultural studies anyway?’ (1986)
critically charts the possibilities of three models of cultural studies (production-based stud-
ies, text-based studies and studies of lived cultures). Some of these ideas feed into a recent
collaborative work by Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram and Estella Tincknell
(2004), The Practice of Cultural Studies. Distinctive takes on the topic matter of cultural
studies are provided in David Inglis and John Hughson’s Confronting Culture (2003) and by
Angela McRobbie in The Uses of Cultural Studies (2005). A good guide to key concepts in
cultural studies is provided by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris (2005).
For original recent work in cultural studies, the reader may wish to consult the following jour-
nals: Cultural Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, The European Journal of
Cultural Studies and New Formations.

Please visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/longhurst for

more information, including

■ web links to articles and recordings

■ practice essay questions
■ a flashcard glossary of key concepts and terms

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