Paper no 8 What is Cultural Studies? ; And its Limitations

Name:  Jayti R. Thakar.

Paper No: 8 Cultural Studies

Topic of Assignment: What is Cultural Studies? ; And its Limitations

Roll No: 34.

Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English

M. K. Bhavnagar University


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•   What is Cultural Studies?

To define cultural studies we should have one glance upon that what is ‘Culture’?

According to Merriam Webster dictionary, Culture means, “the way of thinking, behaving, and living of people.”

 Another meaning of ‘Culture’ is ‘set of Standards’.

Moreover, the culture means, “the arts, and other manifestation of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” In other sense we can also say that, “ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people of society also known as ‘Culture’”.

Now, the question is what ‘Cultural Studies’ is?

“Cultural Studies are innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the way in which culture creates and transforms individual experiences everyday life, social relations and power”.

Now the prime concern is that where it (culture) can be studied? Or In which departments it has studied?

     

Also in other departments like,

·       Archeology

·       Botany

·       Agriculture

·       Philosophy

·       Geography

What Cultural Studies doing in English Department or in Literature Class?

A collage class on the American novel is reading Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple (1982).’ The professor identifies African American literary and cultural sources and describes the book’s multilayered narrative structure, moving on a brief review of its feminist critique of American gender and racial attitudes. Students and professor discuss these various approaches, analyzing key passages in the novel. Class members respond to these points, examining interrelationships among race, gender, popular culture, the media, and literature.

This class is practicing Cultural Studies. But, the word ‘Culture’ itself is so difficult to pin down; “Cultural Studies” is hard to define.

As Pratick Brantlinger has pointed out, culture studies is not “a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda,” but a “loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”

Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of, Marxism, post- structuralism, and post- modernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies. The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies.

·       Cultural Studies approaches generally share four goals.

a)    First, cultural studies transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. Cultural studies are not necessarily about literature in the traditional sense or even about ‘art’. Intellectual works are not limited by

their own “borders” as single texts, historical problems, or disciplines, and the critic’s own personal connections to what is being analyzed may also be described. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or her own political views part of the instruction, which, of course, can lead to problems. But, this kind of criticism, like feminism is an engaged rather than a detached activity.

   

2) Cultural studies is politically engaged.

Cultural critics see themselves as “oppositional”, not only within their own disciplines but to many of the power structures of society at large. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationship among dominant and “minority” or “subaltern” discourses. Because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. Such a notion, taken to philosophical extreme, denies the autonomy of the individual, weather an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic “great man” or “great book” theory, and relocation of aesthetics and culture from the ideal realms of test and sensibility, into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.   

3) Cultural studies deny the separation of “high” and “low” or “elite” and “popular culture”.

You might hear someone remark at the symphony or at end art museum: “I came here to get a little culture”. Being a “cultured” person used to mean being acquainted with “highbrow” art and intellectual pursuits. But isn’t culture also to be found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Cultural critics today work to transform the term culture to include mass culture, weather popular, folk, or urban. Following theorists Jean Baudrillard and Andreas Huyssen, cultural critics argues that after world war 2 the distinction among high, low and mass culture collapsed, and they site other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good test” often only reflects prevailing social, economic, and the political power basis. For example, the images of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of the British raj by writers like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal an entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other races, especially Asians. But, race alone was not the issue for British Raj: money was also deciding factors. Thus drawing also upon the ideas of French historian Michel de Certeau, cultural critic examine “the practice of everyday life”, studying literature as an anthropologist as a phenomenon of culture, including culture’s economy.

4) Finally, cultural studies analyze not only the cultural work, but also the means of production; Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such peraliterary questions as these; who supports a given artist? Who publishes his or her books, and how are these books distributed? Who buys these books? For that matter, who is literate or who is not? A well- known literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the American romance novel and its readers. Cultural studies thus join subjectivity- that is, culture and relation to individual lives- with engagement, a direct approach to attacking social ills. Though cultural studies practitioners deny “humanism” or “humanities” as universal categories, they strive for what they might call “social reason”, which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

  Limitations of Cultural Studies:-

Cultural studies though have few limitations like,

1.    It begins from somewhere and ends somewhere else. So its strength becomes weakness.

2.   It has another limitation is that the cultural critics doesn’t analyses the matter and doesn’t collects data as historians does. To put it bluntly, cultural studies is not always fueled by the kind of hard research (including scientifically collected data) that historians have traditionally practiced to analyze “Culture”.

3.   Cultural studies practitioners often know a lot of interesting things and possess the intellectual ability to play them off interestingly against each other, but they sometimes lack adequate knowledge of the “deep play” of meaning or “thick description” of a culture. And sometimes they (Cultural Critics) directly jump upon the conclusion.  

4.   Defenders of tradition and advocates cultural studies are waging what is sometimes call “cultural wars” or “academia”.

5.   The tone of cultural studies sometimes seems rather politically incorrect or anti- power.

  Conclusion:-

Thus, cultural studies work in different terms and it also having its limitations. 

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