RLG211

Lecture 2 Notes

What is ‘culture?’

Derived from the Latin word cultura (n.) via cultus (adj.), the past participle of colo, colere (v.): to
cultivate, nurture – figuratively, to worship or honor.

- Cultus means that which has been cultivated/nurtured.

- The same etymology that gives us the word culture also gives us the word cult.

Two lessons etymology can teach:

1. Culture is an activity or a process, not just a thing; cultivation takes work.

2. In Roman writing, a cultus is any group that shares a common way of life oriented around a common
point of reference; there are cults to gods, cults to emperors, etc.

- Cult ‘cultivates’ an ‘us’/’we’ that differs from a ‘them’/’they’ (us vs. them).

Forms of Culture

Folk culture: for making and preserving communities based on kinship, extended familial belonging, and
ethnic belonging.

- Circulated and sustained primarily though personal transmission – in homes, community

gatherings, etc. Moves at the speed of the movement of people.
 E.g. passing on a story from generation to generation, singing a song, etc.

Popular culture: for making and preserving communities based on common frames of reference that
don’t explicitly depend on kinship or ethnic belonging.

- Circulated and sustained primarily through impersonal transmission – through media for mass
dissemination (e.g. print, television, radio, internet). Moves at the speed of the medium.
- The idea of focusing on popular culture is that cultures other than high cultures are worth
studying as well.

High culture: for making and preserving communities based on status or prestige.

- Circulated and sustained both personally and impersonally. Moves at a variety of speeds.
- E.g. higher society, like someone going to the operas, intending to show a difference in status.

Folk culture is about personal belonging, cannot be transmitted without someone from that culture
being near you (circulated personally), whereas popular culture would be able to be transmitted from a
distance, can circulate impersonally.

Pop culture objects are looser in meaning because they don’t interpret themselves for you (unlike folk
culture), but you also do get the same object as everyone else (similar to folk culture).

Both about making and preserving a ‘we’, just transmitted differently that causes different effects.

We want to think about where the line between folk culture and pop culture is.
RLG211
Lecture 2 Notes

Ojibway Story of the Birch Tree (video):

- Appreciation for birch trees and nature.

- Birch trees watch over you, they care for you so you must care for them in return.
- Also includes instruction for medicinal treatment via the birch tree.

Folk or pop culture, why?

- It could be seen as both folk culture and popular culture, where as a folk culture, it can be seen
as passed on from the elders to the young, transmitted personally. As a pop culture, it can be
seen as passed on from YouTube, an impersonally transmitting medium.

How does sharing stories like this help create a culture/community?

Folk culture: the fact that it’s orally communicated makes it less accessible to others, making the people
who know about it as part of the ingroup.

Pop culture: you are not expected to follow the teachings, or like the instruction. This changes our
relationship to the story.

Technologies of Culture: Story and Narrative

Narrative is often a key component of many forms of media, from written stories to films and television –
even music and photographs often contain or imply narratives.

A basic toolkit for the analysis of narratives: setting, theme, protagonist, antagonist, plot, conflict,
resolution, point of view.

Setting: where and when does the story take place?

Theme: what is the story about at the level of issues and ideas?

- Is it didactic (meant to teach a specific moral lesson or viewpoint on a theme) or nondidactic

(avoid taking a stance/telling you what to think)?

Protagonist: whose actions does the story follow?

- NOT necessarily a hero (e.g. Joker).

Antagonist: who or what presents a challenge, obstacle, or conflict for the protagonist?

- NOT necessarily a villain (e.g. Batman).

Plot: what actually happens?

Conflict: can be internal or external; what question or tension driving the story?

Resolution: how is the conflict resolved?

Point of view: is the story told to us by one of the characters or not? (first, second, or third person?)

- What does the narrator know or not know? (omniscient or limited?)

RLG211
Lecture 2 Notes

* Tragedy/comedy won’t be tested on; we can ignore it.

* If something is not covered in lectures, we can expect to not see it.

Culture as an object of study: the Brimingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

- Founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham.
- Gave rise to the ‘Birmingham school’ of Cultural Studies: a distinctive approach to the study of
mass, working class culture (instead of the more traditional emphasis of the study ‘high culture’,
like classical music or ‘canonical’ literature).
- Produced important stuff like Policing the Crisis (1978): study of the role of news media in
producing panics about muggings and immigrant crime waves and the effects of these panics on
British politics and policing.
- Key figures: Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie.

Birmingham school theorists were unsatisfied with two things:

1) Elitest studies of culture that reproduced the prestige of high culture objects by limiting their
study to the ‘greatness’ of so-called ‘great works’.
2) Deterministic accounts of power and society that couldn’t account for the reality of
disagreement, struggle, and change.

Determinism in action: Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970)

Karl Marx (1818-1883): The elements of a society directly concerned with the production of goods form
the base or infrastructure of that society. Elements of a society that only indirectly concern the
production of goods (e.g. government, family, religion, literature, art, etc.) are a society’s superstructure
– they exist to support the base, not the reverse.

- The relationship between base and superstructure is basically a relation of cause and effect.

Althusser argued that Marx was mostly right, but that the base-superstructure relationship was
reciprocal rather than one-way – each shapes the other, in a circle.

Althusser also argued that the social superstructure exerts power in two ways:

Repression: violence and the threat of physical force (e.g. the police).

Ideology: the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (e.g. churches and
schools).

If repression determines what individuals can/can’t do, ideology determines their sense of what it is that
what they do means.

- Repression is what you can and cannot do, ideology is why do you do it?
RLG211
Lecture 2 Notes

Key problem according to Birmingham thinkers: how to account for the fact that people don’t simply
internalize the dominant view of the meaning of their actions, but constantly negotiate and contest that
meaning.

- People don’t just internalize things; ideology is not deterministic basically.

Their proposal: culture is the space where meanings are contested.

Birmingham school thinkers looked to writers and scholars of the past for inspiration – especially the
‘Frankfurt school’ of critical theory, an approach to social theory exemplified by a generation of German-
Jewish scholars working in and around the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1940s. These
writers shared their interest in the study of mass media and working-class culture.

The Birmingham school’s emphasis on mass and popular culture as a space for debates and conflicts
over meaning has spread beyond cultural studies, and now forms an important feature of contemporary
studies of gender, sexuality, race, religion and politics.

- Basically other studies like gender, sexuality and religion also realized that studying pop culture
instead of white, rich people would probably be more useful for finding meanings.

Look at key terms for review for terms coming on quiz.

Key Terms for Review

- cult, culture, cultus

- folk culture, popular culture, high culture
- setting, theme, protagonist, antagonist, plot, conflict, resolution, point of view
- didactic and nondidactic storytelling
- base, superstructure, repression, ideology
- the ‘Birmingham School’ and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
- the ‘Frankfurt School’ and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research