1. 1. Culture and Cultural Studies
COMM 301 CULTURAL STUDIES
1. Culture and Cultural Studies

2. What is Culture?
A British antropologist E.B. Taylor: “ Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”

3. Culture The social production of sense, meaning and consciousness.
The sphere of meaning, which unifies the sphers of production (economics) and social relations (politics)

4. Culture Culture may mean different things:
Welsh culture, working,class culture, intellectual culture, a cultured person or even a cultured pearl, bacterial culture...

5. Culture
The term culture is multi-discursive. It has different discourses and meanings.
What you have to do is to identify the discoursive context itself.
It may be the discourse of nationalism, fashion, literary, feminism.

6. Culture
What the term refers to is determined by the term itself in its discursive context.
Its established senses and uses result from the history of its usage within various discourses.
It stems, originally, purely, from a purely agricultural root: culture as cultivation of the soil, of plants.

7. Culture
If we apply this to people, the term offers a fertile metaphor for the cultivation of minds.
Culture was established as a term that referred to the naturalized right of the cultured to rule.
Therefore, the term was denounced by Marx as it meant works of wonder for the rich but meant rags and corruption for the poor.

8. Culture
It was also ignored by the capitalist and middle classes alike.
It was left to intelligentsia, especially its liberal-conservative, moralist-humanist literary element, to take up the concept.

9. Culture
It was established as the pursuit not of material but of spiritual perfection via the knowledge and practice of ‘great’ literature, ‘fine’ art and ‘serious’ music.

10. Culture
Outside the natural sciences, the term culture is chiefly used in three realtively distinct senses to refer to
1- the artistic creativity
2- the learned, primarily symbolic features of a particular way of life
3- a process of development

12. 1. Culture with a big ‘C’
In everyday talk, culture is believed to consist of the ‘ works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’. (Music, literature, theatre, film
Culture is believed to be ‘refined’ pursuits for ‘cultured’ people.

13. 2. Culture as a ‘way of life’
It refers to the creation and use of symbols which distinguish ‘a particular life, whether of a people, a period or a group, or humanity in general’ (Raymond Willams)
Only humans are capable of creating and transmitting culture because they create and use symbols.
A symbol is when people agree that some word, drawing or gesture will stand for an idea, an object or a feeling. A symbol convey a shared idea.

14. Symbols and shared meanings
A symbol defines what something means.
Sometimes a single symbol may have many meanings, (a flag may mean a material entity like a country or an abstract value such as patriotism.
To study a culture is therefore to ask the meaning of a style of dress, behaviour, a place, a word...

15. Culture and Society
Culture in this sense must be distinguished from the neigboring concept of society.
Society refers to the pattern of social interactions and relationships between individuals and groups.
Often a society will occupy a territory, be capable of reproducing itself and share a culture
But in some (large-scale modern) societies, several cultures coexist within the society.l

16. 3. Process and development
It describes the individual’s capacities.
It is the cultivation of a general social and historical process.

17. Different senses of Culture
For example, a play by Shakespeare might be said
to be a distinct piece of cultural work (1),
to be a product of a particular way of life (2), and
to represent a certain stage of cultural development (3)

18. Examples: Russian novelists: Tolstoy, Dostoyevski.
The work of Van Gogh

19. Becoming part of a culture
We become part of culture through socialization process.
Socialization takes place within the family, family-like groups, school.
Primariy socialization involves acquisition of language and a gendered identity.
Secondary socialization refers to all the subsequent influences which a person experience in a lifetime.

20. Cultural Studies
Some sociologists (Berger and Luckman) stress that human knowledge of the world is socially constructed.
We learn our world through our social situations and our interactions with other people.
If our understanding is structured by our social instituations then our view of the world may be partial.

21. Cultural studies
Thus, our knowledge of the world is inevitably perspectival. (cultural relativism)
Social roles and relationships shape the way we see and give meaning to the world.
But cultural relativism stresses the way that habitual, taken-for-granted ways of thought, as expressed in speech and language direct our understanding.

22. Some vital questions...
If knowledge is socially constructed, can there be such a thing as ‘true’ knowledge?
If perceptions and beliefs are always relative to social situation, then why should we believe any particular view?

23. Culture and Power
Since it is a product of interaction, culture is also a part of the social world, and is shaped by some forces which operate in a social world.
All societies are organized politically and economically. Power and authority are distributed within them.
Cultures are affected by the interests of dominant groups in societies.

24. Culture and power
It is inevitable that cultural attitudes will always be in conflict.
There are areas of power, negotiation, and resistance in many domains of life.
Four key araes of struggle and negotiation that concerned Cultural Studies are around ‘gender’, ‘race’, ‘class’, and ‘age’.

25. How does culture shape us?
The struggle and negotiation are often around the questions of cultural identity.
Identities are very often connected to place both locally and more widely.
It is clearly a case that these identities can cause conflict and disagreement.
The way such identities are constructed and how they reflect and inflect distributions of power are the concerns of Cultural studies.

26. Culture is ordinary For Williams culture has two aspects:
1- the known meanings and direction and
2- the new meanings and observations
Two senses of culture:
1- a whole life- the common meanings
2- the arts of learning – speacial process of discovery and creative effort
So, culture is both the ‘arts’ and the values and norms aand symbolic goods of everyday life

27. Antropological approach
Williams’s concept is anthropological since it enters on everyday meanings:
values, norms and material/symbolic goods
Meanings are generated not only by individuals by also collectives, so it refers to shared meanings.
Understanding culture as a whole way of life open up tv, newspaper, football, dancing, food to critical but to sympathetic analysis.

28. Activity:
What culture(s) do associate with this type of food? What does it tell us about life styles and values of this culture?
Many health experts are critical of fast food. How powerful is this message in our culture compared to the advertising that promotes this kind of food?

29. We explore culture in terms of (R. Williams):
İnstitutions of artistic and cultural production
Formations or schools, movements and factions of cultural production
Modes of production
Identifications and forms of culture
The reproduction
The organization of the selective tradition

30. In sum, culture for Williams is constituted by:
The meanings generated by ordinary men and women
The lived experiences of participants
The texts and practices engaged in by all people as they conduct their lives

31. High culture/ Low culture
A question of quality: Concepts of quality, form and beauty are culturally relative.
Form and Content: Some critics argued that the quality work is more subtle, complex and adequate in its formal expression of content
Ideological Analysis: we need to consider, from an inevitably value-laden position, its ‘ideological’ construction and potential consequences.
The problem of Judgement: Taste and cultural judgement mark out class boundaries, cultural competencies and cultural capital

32. Mass culture
It is considered as commodity based, inauthentic, manipulative and unsatisfying.
The arguement is that commodified capitalist ‘mass culture’is:
inauthentic because not produced by ‘the people;
Manipulative because its primary purpose is to be purchased
Unsatisfaying because it requires little work to consume and thus fails to enrich its consumers

33. Popular culture
There are a number of ways in which the term ‘popular culture’ has been used. For example:
It may refer to that which is ‘left over’ after the canon of high culture has been decided upon
It may pertain to the mass-produced culture of the culture industries
Contemporary popular culture is, primarly a commercially produced one and there is no reason to think that this is likely to change in the future. However, it is argued that popular audiences make their own meanings with the texts of popular culture.

34. What is the Subject of Cultural Studies?
Cultural Studies does not have a clearly defined subject area.
It is very broad and includes a whole range of cultural practices.
So, it differs radically from conventional disciplines such as physics or sociology or philosophy, each has its own clearly defined subject area or object of study.
It is ambiguous and it also lacks its own principles, theories or methods.

35. Cultural Studies functions by borrowing freely from social science disciplines and all branches of humanities and the arts.
Such as: Anthropology, linguistics, art theory, philosophy, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, musicology, political science.

36. Cultural Studies is not one thing
Cultural Studies is not one thing. It straddles intellectual and academic landscape from old established intellectual practices and modes of inquiry such as marxism, post-colonialism, feminism and post structuralism.

37. It moves from discipline to discipline, methodology to methodology.
It is a collective term for diverse and often contentious intellectual endeavors that address numerous questions, and consists of many different theoretical and political positions.
It is often described as an anti-discipline because it does not subscribe to the narrow/straitjacket of institutionalized disciplines.

38. Characteristics of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies has certain distinguishable characteristics that can often be identified in terms of what cultural studies aims to do:

39. 1. Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power.
It aims to expose power relationships and examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices.

40. 2. Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture as if it was a discrete entity divorced from its social and political context.
It aims to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyze the social and political context within which it manifests itself.

41. 3. Cultural in the cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.
Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.

42. 4. Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge to overcome the split between tacit (that is , intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) and objective forms of knowledge.
It assumes a common identity and common interest between the knower and the known, between the observer and what is being observed.

43. 5. Cultural studies is committed to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.
The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement.
Thus cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in industrial capitalist societies in particular.

44. How to do Cultural studies?
To understand how Cultural Studies is done, we need to equip ourselves with a few of its key concepts and principles.
-Semiotics
-Representation of the Other
-Discoursive analysis

45. SEMIOTICS
A major concept in cultural studies is that of sign. A sign has three basic characteristics.
1. It has a concrete form
2. It refers to something other than itself
3. It can be recognized by most people as a sign

46. REPRESENTATION OF THE OTHER
The process, and the products, that gives signs their particular meaning is representation. Through representation abstract and ideological ideas are given concrete form.
The representative entity outside the self- that is, outside one’s own gender, social group, class, culture, or civilization- is the Other.

47. DISCOURSIVE ANALYSIS
The notion of discourse binds all these concepts into a neat package.
A discourse consists of culturally or socially produced groups of ideas containing texts (which contain signs and codes) and representations (which describe power in relation to others).
As a way of thinking, a discourse often represents a structure of knowledge and power.

48. Let’s apply these to any concrete example:
A discursive analysis exposes these structures and locates the discourse within wider historical, cultural and social relations.
Let’s apply these to any concrete example:
What signs and codes does it contain?
What culturally significant meaning is it communicating?

49. Examples...
Indian food in England (Read the pages in What is Cultural Studies?)
Read ‘Ramadan Festivals in Turkey’