Home > Cultural studies

Cultural studies combines sociology, literary theory, film/video studies, and cultural anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, race, social class, and/or gender.

Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. Particular meanings attach to the ways people in particular cultures do things.

In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:

• Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power.
• It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analysing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
• It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.
• It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledgeKnowledge is the awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning. Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value. Knowledge is a te, to overcome the split between tacit ( cultural knowledge ) and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.
• It has a commitment to a moralMorality is a complex of principles based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs, by which an individual determines whether his or her actions are right or wrong. These concepts and beliefs are often generalized and codified by a c evaluation of modern societyA society is a group of people that form a semi-closed (or semi-open) system, in which most interactions are with other individuals belonging to the group. More abstractly, a society is a network of relationships between entities. A society is an interdep and to a radicalIn political science, the label radical denotes "one who desires extreme change of all or part of the social order". Britannica Deluxe CD2000). The term is said to have been used by the English parliamentarian Charles Fox who, in 1797, demanded a "radical line of political action.

Scholars in the United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly and the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s Years: 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 Events and trends. The British version of cultural studies often promulgated overtly politically leftist views and criticisms of capitalist mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the " culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams and Paul Gilroy .

In contrast, the American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom. See the writings of critics such as John Guillory . The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.

Some scholars, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture.

Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this rigidly deterministic view. They criticise the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product.

Another major point of criticism involved the traditional view assuming a passive consumer. Other views challenge this, particularly by underlining the different ways people read, receive, and interpret cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject, or challenge the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus away from the production of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming with identity. Stuart Hall has become influential in these developments. Some commentators have described the shift towards meaning as the cultural turn.

In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only includes the traditional high arts and popular arts , but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies.

Compare: culture, cultural history, cultural identity, culture theory.

See also: postmodernism, queer theory, popular culture, popular culture studies, gender studies, orientalism, critical theory, feminism, semiotics, social constructionalism, new musicology, Roland Barthes' Mythologies.

In a loosely related but separate usage, the phrase cultural studies sometimes serves as a rough synonym for area studies, as a general term referring to the academic study of particular cultures in departments and programs such as Islamic studies, Asian studies , African American studies, African studies , et al..