Cultural Studies - 205

 Five Types of Cultural Studies 

Name: Dhruvita Dhameliya

Roll no : 03

Semester: 3

Year:- 2021 to 2023

Subject:- Cultural Studies

Topic :- Five Types of Cultural Studies 

Email ID:

dhameliyadhruvita24@gmail.com

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

What is Culture:-

Culture is a word for the way of life of groups of people, the behaviour, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next generation. There are different Types of Culture.

Culture is the feature and knowledge of a particular group of people, bounding language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Culture is an integrated set of patterns of human activities, knowledge and belief within a community or social group and the symbolic structures. Culture is the purity of savour in the fine arts and humanities.

Culture is a circle of religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we meet visitors, how we behave with others, and a million other things. The outlook, attitudes, values, morals, goals, and customs shared by a society all are included in culture. Culture is a complex concept which impacts virtually every aspect of our lives both consciously and subconsciously.

“Culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it has both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort.” – Raymond Williams.

Culture is the expression of our own nature in our way of life and thinking in our everyday dealings in art, literature, religion, reaction and enjoyments as members of society. Culture is a system of values and beliefs which we share with others, all of which gives us a sense of belongings or identity.

Culture is important for all the things we do in this world. The beliefs that create religion, wars, the way of life and many challenges. The first thing we have to define is culture and why is it important in the work life. Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts: the essential core of culture consists traditional, historically derived and selected ideas and specially their attached values.

Schein (1990) defines culture as,

 "how people feel about the organisation, the authority: system and the degree of employee involvement and commitment"  he continues, adding that culture can be viewed as a widely held, shared set of values, beliefs and ideas Culture refers to society and its way of life. It is defined as a set of values and beliefs, or a cluster of learned behaviours that we share with others in a particular society, giving us a sense of belongingness and identity Because of this, cultural understanding is becoming even more important because of the call to interact with many individuals from other countries and other cultures further adds three basics components of culture, namely: 

1)What people think

2)What they do

 3)The material products they produce

 All forms of culture exhibit unique ways and value systems that aid and affect individuals in their perception and reaction to different life circumstances. Culture at its most basic level can be defined as shared symbols, norms, and values in a social organisation.

In America, we have a strong material culture based on production of certain items, like cars. America is proud of its car culture. We make cars; we drive cars; we use cars as symbols of our place in society, wealth, or feelings about the environment. Cars, plus the other things that we physically create as Americans, define our material culture. Now, material culture does not mean that it is an object that is bought and sold; it can also be something we all make. For instance, macaroni art is a common thing we all did as children. It is something that is common enough to unite us and therefore part of our material culture.

The other category is nonmaterial culture, or the intangible things produced by a culture. In other words, the parts of culture you cannot touch, feel, taste, or hold. Common examples include social roles, ethics, beliefs, or even language. As a culture, Americans believe in equality. But you cannot hold equality, or make it out of macaroni noodles. Equality is something that does not actually exist; it is an idea that a culture produces about the treatment of people. This is nonmaterial culture, and it is just as big of an influence on our lives as material culture is.

Five Types of Cultural Studies

British Cultural Materialism

New Historicism

American Multiculturalism

Postmodernism & Popular Culture

Postcolonial Studies

1:- British Cultural Materialism

Cultural studies is referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the "givens" of British culture. Edward Burnett Tylor's pioneering anthropological study Primitive cultural argued that "culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge belief, art, morals, low, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society". Claude Levi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive peoples, and then, with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams memorably states: "There are no message; there are only ways of seeing other people as masses" 

Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; leavisites promoted the "great tradition" of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.

2) New Historicism

A term coined by Raymond Williams and popularised by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield in their collection of essays Political Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism refers to a Marxist orientation of New Historicism, characterised by the analysis of any historical material within a politicised framework, in a radical and subversive manner. Cultural Materialism emphasises studying the historical context, looking at those historical aspects that have been discarded or silenced in other narratives of history, through an eclectic theoretical approach, backed by the political commitment arising from the influence of Marxist and Feminist perspective and thus executing a textual analysis—close reading that critiques traditional approaches, especially on canonical texts. 

 New Historicists believe in the textuality of history and the historicity of texts; they are aware of the political agendas of the text and hence are alert to the ways in which power exerts itself through implicit workings of ideology within the text. While they believe that New Historicists generate apolitical readings, in which there is no question of agency on the part of the marginalised, Cultural Materialists are consciously political, and aim at transforming the social order; as they seek readings that focus on the marginalised and the exploited, and also book at the possibilities of subversion and resistance in both the text and the interpretive act. They are conscious of the subversive potential of  literature for subcultural resistance and hence propose ‘dissident reading’, which interrogates the hidden political agenda and power struggles within a text.

New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissance and Romantic periods and has revised motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing. Much new historicism focuses on the marginalisation of subjects such as those identified as witches, the insane, heretics, vagabonds, and political prisoners.

3) American Multiculturalism

The term multiculturalism has a range of meanings within the contexts of sociology, political philosophy, and colloquial use. In sociology and in everyday usage, it is a synonym for "ethnic pluralism", with the two terms often used interchangeably, and for cultural pluralism[1] in which various ethnic groups collaborate and enter into a dialogue with one another without having to sacrifice their particular identities. It can describe a mixed ethnic community area where multiple cultural traditions exist such as New York City or London or a single country within which they do such as Switzerland, Belgium or Russia. Groups associated with an indigenous, aboriginal or autochthonous ethnic group and settler-descended ethnic groups are often the focus.

Multiculturalism, in the context of the “American mosaic,” celebrates the unique cultural heritage of racial and ethnic groups, some of whom seek to preserve their native languages and lifestyles. In a sense, individuals can be Americans and at the same time claim other identities, including those based on racial and ethnic heritage, gender, and sexual preference.

“Multiculturalism” is similar. Some things that are reasonably labelled “multiculturalism” are mostly bad, and others are mostly good. We can all imagine bad versions of multiculturalism — ones that dramatically undermine the social cohesion necessary to maintain order or defend the nation in war; ones in which many people in a modern economy speak mutually unintelligible languages; ones in which members of some subcultures feel comfortable violently attacking people, whether of their own culture or of others; and so on. But America is also founded on its own sort of multiculturalism, which has usually (though not always) stood us in good stead. Here are four constitutional manifestations of this multiculturalism.

4)Postmodernism & Popular Culture

The “post” in postmodern suggests “after”. Postmodernism is best understood as a questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in progress and innovation. Modernism insists on a clear divide between art and popular culture.

But like modernism, postmodernism does not designate any one style of art or culture. On the contrary, it is often associated with pluralism and an abandonment of conventional ideas of originality and authorship in favour of a pastiche of “dead” styles.

Though first used in the 1930s to describe a specific conservative counter-trend within Latin American modernism, the term “postmodernism” as we now generally use it refers to a specific style of art and thought that rose to prominence in the United States and Europe after World War II, reaching its full definition as a movement by the early 1970s. As the name implies, postmodernism is generally defined in relation to Western modernism, though the exact nature of this relationship is still contested. One thing almost all theorists of postmodernism agree on, however, is that, while it draws in significant ways upon the modernist tradition of “high” art, postmodernism also maintains a close connection with popular culture, bridging the gap between “high” and “low” art that many see as central to the ethos of modernism.

5)Postcolonial Studies

The field of Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s influential critique of Western constructions of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within the academy of the term “postcolonial” was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then, the use of cognate terms “Commonwealth” and “Third World” that were used to describe the literature of Europe’s former colonies has become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of the field and the definition of the term “postcolonial,” in a very general sense, it is the study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period. The European empire is said to have held sway over more than 85% of the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control over several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its disintegration after the Second World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature and criticism in our own times.

Post colonial refers to a historian phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism for the era, when countries in Asian Africa, Latina/o America, and the Caribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves. Many third words focus on both colonialism and the change that created a postcolonial culture.

Conclusion:-

So, these all are Five Types of Cultural Studies. To understand culture we have to understand cultural studies.

Word Count:- 2150

Works Cited

Crossman, Ashley. “The Definition of Popular Culture in Sociology.” ThoughtCo, 9 December 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/popular-culture-definition-3026453. Accessed 4 November 2022.

“cultural studies | interdisciplinary field | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/cultural-studies. Accessed 4 November 2022.

“Cultural Studies Overview & Theory | Cultural Studies Definition - Video & Lesson Transcript.” Study.com, 4 August 2022, https://study.com/learn/lesson/cultural-studies-overview-theory.html. Accessed 4 November 2022.

“What is cultural studies? | The British Academy.” British Academy, 18 August 2020, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-cultural-studies/. Accessed 4 November 2022.