CULTURAL STUDIES

Introduction
• Cultural studies is a post WWII movement with its
origins emanating from continental European
thinkers like Freud, Marx, Engles, R. Barthes, Pierre
Bordieu, Michel Foucault, Lacan (France), Michael
Bakhtin, Ferdinand de Saussure.

• In England, the most prominent Cultural Studies

figures are Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 2

 Introduction
• Today, Cultural Studies is a quite spread out field.
• It is not a critical theory;
• rather it is a critical practice that borrows from a
variety of disciplines such as Marxism, Feminism, Film
Studies, Media Studies, Postmodernism,
Anthropology, Social Studies, Semiotics, Technology,
Sciences, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, and
Race/Ethnicity Studies;
• Cultural Studies is more of a methodology informed by
theory
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 3
 What is culture?
Definition I
• “Culture is the shared meaning we make and
encounter in our everyday lives [, …] the practices and
processes of making meanings with and from the texts
we encounter in our everyday lives.”
Storey
• Shared meanings:
– culture depends on shared meanings, the understanding
you have of something you share with other people.
– Culture is the MEANINGS WE ALL SHARE;
– it can be symbolism, a definition given to a particular word,
a specific perception of a social phenomenon.

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 4

 What is culture?
Definition I

• We make:
– culture is a shared meaning we make.
– These meanings are not handed down to us by
an authority above.
– Actually, we are actively involved in making
these meanings together.

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 5

 What is culture?
Definition I
• Encounter:
– We make these meanings through our dynamic
interactions with the world around us.
– So we not only make meanings but we encounter
shared meanings;
– it could be meanings that other people/groups have
made and that we have to integrate.
– So by integrating them in our daily behavior, we
indirectly contribute in making them as well.
– STOPPED HERE ON 25/10/2018

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 6

 What is culture?
Definition I
• In our everyday lives:
– these meanings we make are not special or
unique,
– they are made in our everyday life.
– They are everywhere;
– they are all around us, we are part of it and part
of its making.
– They are deep rooted in our lives navigating, just
like a fish swimming in the waters.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 7
 What is culture?
Definition
• Practices and processes:
I
– culture is practices and processes.
– It is the things we do; the things we go about doing
them.
• With and from:
– it is how we engage with the things we have
encountered as we live.
– It is also what we take from them;
– we give to them since we dynamically interact with
them in a reciprocal process
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 8
 What is culture?
Definition I
• Texts:
–not a book.
–It is anything that can be studied and that
meaning can be derived from.
–It can be a book, a movie, a painting, a rug,
a fashion design, hairstyle, tattoos…

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 9

 What is culture?
Definition II
• An “ensemble of beliefs and practices” that
“function as a pervasive technology of
control, a set of limits within which social
behavior must be contained, a repertoire of
models to which individuals must conform.”
Greenblatt

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 10

 What is culture?
Definition II
• An ensemble:
– it is a group not a single belief or practice but a group of
them.
– Culture is not just one of them;
– it is a group of many things all are working and
interacting together.
• Beliefs and practices:
– culture is things we believe in and things we do;
– all of them working together again.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 11
 What is culture?
Definition II
• Function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of
limits:
– these beliefs and practices have the responsibility of
controlling.
– Culture is an inescapable mechanism that controls society.
– These beliefs and practices intrude into our lives and
manage our ways of thinking.
– Culture kind of determines the way of life, somehow
controls it.
– It sets you limits.
– You cannot think of yourself operating outside these limits.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 12
 What is culture?
Definition II
• Within which social behavior must be contained:
– these limits contain social behavior, restricts its free
movements outside the periphery of cultural norms.
– There are behaviors that are sanctioned and there
are ones that are not sanctioned and the
unsanctioned ones have to be contained and
restricted;
– otherwise, the whole social consensus will implode
and culture can no longer function.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 13
 What is culture?
Definition II
• A repertoire of models:
– a group of things and models.
– You can act or operate only within this repertoire of things or
models.
– So there are good models and bad models
– for example, when Romeo was banished from Juliet, his love, he
started weeping, to which people reacted angrily by saying that
his weeping is a womanish behavior, men don’t weep.
– So Romeo is negatively modeling behavior:
– men do not act like this.
– It is ok when Juliet cries because she fits in within the right
repertoire of models;
– that is women can weep and cry.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 14
 What is culture?
Definition II
• To which individuals must conform:
– you do not have a choice;
– you must conform to culture because it is so
powerful in its imperatives.
– It cannot be resisted.

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 15

 WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?
• It is a critical field that seeks to ‘demystify’
and understand the functioning of culture,
particularly in the modern world, how
cultural production works and cultural
identities are constructed and organized, for
individuals and groups.
Jonathan Culler

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 16

 WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?
• The key words in this definition are “demystify” and
“understand”.
• This implies that culture is mysterious, that its
operations are opaque and tenebrous.
• So the job of a cultural studies specialist is to unravel,
demystify this complex system and understand how it
works,
• particularly how culture goes about organizing,
constructing and producing identities both as an
individual and as part of a group.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 17
 WHAT ARE THE GENERAL GOALS OF
CULTURAL STUDIES?
1. Bring “heightened attention to the beliefs
and practices implicitly enforced by
particular literary acts of praising and
blaming”. Greenblatt
•
2. Understand “the multiple ways in which
identities are formed, experienced and
transmitted”. Culler
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 18
 WHAT ARE THE GENERAL GOALS OF
CULTURAL STUDIES?
• Identities include individual and group
identities
– Group identities maybe defined by race, gender,
sexuality, age, ethnicity, religion, education,
economics, region, nation, political affiliation,
etc.
– Group identities may also be defined by one’s
sense of belonging or exclusion –one’s sense of
identification with any of the above.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 19
 HOW DO TEXTS WORK IN CULTURE? I

• By implicitly “enforcing beliefs and

practices”.
(Greenblatt)
–enforcing means this what you must do,
culture and cultural texts do these things
implicitly.

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 20

 HOW DO TEXTS WORK IN CULTURE? I
• By articulating “codes of behavior” in an active and
passive “process of acculturation”
• (Greenblatt):
– active articulation of codes of behavior means a direct
modeling; do this, do this, do that;
– passive modeling is showing it in a way that is
attractive or showing a particular model as being
negative or frightening but never comment on it.
– Obviously the most powerful articulation is the passive
one
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 21
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 22
 HOW DO TEXTS WORK IN CULTURE? I

• They not only “reflect” but “help to

shape, articulate and reproduce” those
codes, beliefs and practices.
• Texts reflect what happens but also
condition it: this is the way people act
and in so doing they help perpetuate
these modes of behaviors.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 23
 HOW DO TEXTS WORK IN CULTURE? II

• How do these texts enforce, articulate, reflect

and shape beliefs, practices and codes?
– Praise and blame (positive or negative, actively
or passively:
– the former through a direct act like censorship,
or
– passively through negatively representing it)

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 24

HOW DO TEXTS WORK IN CULTURE? II

–Containment and exclusion (consider it as

outside the consensus, weird but harmless
so you contain it) or
–(exclude it and consider I as an
unacceptable behavior)

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 25

 HOW DO TEXTS WORK IN CULTURE? II
• Reinforcement (perpetuate the act by doing it
many many times so that it is reinforced)
• Processes of blaming and praising,
containing ad excluding and reinforcing
are often passive, indirect and implied
rather than explicit (active)

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 26

 HOW TO DO CULTURAL STUDIES?
BY ASKING QUESTIONS
1. What kind of behavior, what mode of
practice does this work seem to enforce?
2. Why might readers at a particular time
and place find this work compelling/
Coercive/ compulsory?
3. Are there differences between my values
and the values implicitly enforced in the
text I am reading?
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 27
 HOW TO DO CULTURAL STUDIES? BY
ASKING QUESTIONS
4. Upon what social understanding does the work
depend?
5. Whose freedom of thought or movement might
be constrained implicitly or explicitly by the
work?
6. Whose freedom might be encouraged or
expanded?
7. What are the larger social structures with which
these particular acts of praise or blame might be
connected?
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 28
 APPLICATION 1

• LOOK AT THESE IMAGES AND ANSWER THE

QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 29

APPLICATION 1

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 30

APPLICATION 1

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 31

 APPLICATION 1

1. What beliefs about beauty/ feminity/ Juliet

are implicitly enforced by these images?
2. What codes of behavior are being
articulated?
3. How might these images reflect cultural
codes of behavior?
4. How might they help to shape articulate and
reproduce these codes beliefs and
practices?
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 32
APPLICATION 2 (HOMEWORK?)

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 33

 APPLICATION 2 (HOMEWORK?)

1. How does Avatar use praise to endorse,

articulate, reflect or shape beliefs?
– Remember praise might be implicit or explicit;
active or passive
2. How does Avatar use blame to endorse,
articulate, reflect or shape practices?
3. How does Avatar use exclusion to endorse,
articulate, reflect or shape beliefs?
– Who is excluded? Why? And how? (What form does
the exclusion take?) is the individual ever allowed
back in? Under what circumstances?
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES: 34