What is Cultural Studies and its limitations?

Vishva Gajjar

Roll No. 33

Paper No. 8 – Cultural studies

Topic - What is Cultural Studies and its limitations?

S. B. Gardi Deperatment of English

Bhavnagar University.

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What is Cultural Studies?

‘Culture’ word itself is hard to define.

‘Cultural Studies’ is loosely a group of tendencies, issues and questions arising from a social turmoil of the 1960s.

It is composed of elements of:

Marxism,

Post-Structuralism,

Post-Modernism,

Feminism,

Gender studies,

Anthropology,

Race,

Sociology,

Ethnic Studies,

Film theory,

Urban Studies,

Public Policy,

Post-Colonial Studies,

Popular Cultural Studies

-and those fields which concentrates on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division or alienation.

Lateron discipline of Psychology has also arrived in Cultural Studies.

It is to erase boundaries between 1. High-Low, 2. Classic-Popular literary texts and 3. Literature-Other Cultural Discourses.

As we know that Cultural Study refers many of the disciplines, it is natural that it will have limitations. We know that if we concentrate on more than one work at a time, we could not give every work the same importance and attention. Here, it happens with Cultural Studies too.

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.

1)    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 critic’s 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. Diversity of approach and subject-matter:

          The weakness of Cultural Studies lies in its strengths, particularly its emphasis upon diversity of approach and subject matter. Cultural Studies can at times seem merely an intellectual smorgasbord in which the critic blithely combines artful helping of texts and objects and then “finds” deep connections between them, without adequately researching what a culture means or how cultures have interacted.

2. Not fuelled by hard research:

          Cultural Studies are not always fuelled by hard researches.

i.e., Historians have traditionally practiced to analyse ‘culture’. Which includes scientifically collected data.

3. Lack of Knowledge:

Cultural Study 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 “deep play” of meanings or “thick description” of a culture that ethnographer Clifford Geertz identified in his studies of the Balinese.

In the essay of Geertz uses “deep play” word for the ‘cockfight’ which is illegal in his society. He explains as a context of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who defines “deep play” as a game with risks high that no rational person would engage in it. The amounts of money involved in the cockfight makes Balinese cockfight “deep play”.

And another words “thick description” is used in the field of anthropology, sociology, religious studies and human and organizational development. The “thick description” of culture means it’s not just explaining what culture is but also refers that in which context the meaning is developed.

4. Necessity of reading the classics:

                Sometimes students complain that professors who overemphasize cultural studies tend to downplay the necessity of reading the classics, and that they sometimes coerce students into “politically correct” views.

5. Whatever is happening at the moment:

                David Richterdescribes culture as

          “-about whatever is happening at the moment, rather than about a body of texts created in the past.

                 ‘Happening’ topics, generally speaking, are the mass media themselves, which, in a postmodern culture, dominate the culture lives on its inhabitants, or topics that have been valorises by the mass media.”

                 But he goes on to observe that if this seems trivial, the strength of cultural studies its “relentlessly critical attitude toward journalism, publishing, cinema, television, and other forms of mass media, whose seemingly transparent windows through which we view ‘reality’ probably constitute the most blatant and pervasive mode of false consciousness of our era” (Richter 1218).

                                                                                                                                             

6. Tempted to dismiss popular culture:

                If we are tempted to dismiss popular culture, it is also worth remembering that when the works like Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn were written, they were not intended for elite discussions in English classrooms, but exactly for popular consumption.

7. ‘Culture Wars’ of academia:

                 Defenders of tradition and advocates of cultural studies are waging what is sometimes called the “culture wars “of academia.

On the one hand are offered impassioned defences of humanism as the foundation, since the time of the ancient Greeks, of Western civilization and modern democracy.

On the other hand, as Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton has written, the current “crises” in the humanities can be seen as failure of the humanities; this “body of discourses” about “imperishable” values has demonstrably negated(cancelled) those very values in its practices.

   Conclusion: -

Thus, cultural studies work in different terms and it also having its limitations.  Whatever the emphasis, cultural studies make available one more approach-and several methodologies-to address these questions.