What is Cultural Studies? by Dr. Meena T.Pillai

 

What is Cultural Studies?

Dr. Meena T.Pillai

Just as it is difficult to describe what culture is, it is difficult to describe what Cultural Studies is. Raymond Williams argued that culture is ordinary. However, how we read culture and make sense of its everyday practices is a political exercise. For example, if someone says, culture is not ordinary and that it can only be ‘higher’ forms of art and learning, it reveals a certain kind of ideology. But then what is ideology? It is the process by which ideas, beliefs and practices are based on power and reflect the interests of the dominant, while passing themselves off as natural and common-sensical. Thus, the cultural belief that men are the custodians of women reflect a patriarchal ideology. Cultural Studies looks at the nexus between knowledge and power, trying to analyze its ideological biases.

In fact, Cultural Studies does not claim to be a discipline at all; instead, it reaches across the boundaries of various academic fields and effectively brings together their diverse scholarship and theoretical frameworks. It equips us, as ‘cultural’ subjects, to understand the lived experiences, discourses, and meanings that shape our own self-identities, not as fixed truths, but as ever-changing constructions within different matrices of power. For instance, drawing from the methodologies of Cultural Studies, we might be able to read the ‘sari’ as a cultural text that binds together femininity, family, culture, and the nation, as opposed to thinking about the apparel only as a ‘natural’ aesthetic development. In other words, the various narratives, material practices, and objects that inhabit our ‘everyday’ and ‘popular’ become the focus of Cultural Studies — from traditional artforms, literary texts, genres, and cinema down to shopping malls, motorcycles, rap music, and protest movements, any cultural moment, pattern, artefact, or way of acting/thinking, could be placed and analysed within the rigorous, interdisciplinary critical framework of Cultural Studies, and could yield refreshing insights about everything that we hold to be familiar. One of the highlights of practicing this counter-discipline in an English Department in Kerala is that it offers an opportunity for us to introduce our own regional/local settings into the broader academia — in a Cultural Studies project, we may be able to discuss the patriarchal and sexist origins of theppu culture in Kerala while placing it against the gendered history of the state and emerging feminist readings; we might be able to contextualise the rise of online celebrities on social media platforms by examining how influencers market themselves in a digital economy of likes and shares. Thus, Cultural Studies offers our academic spaces the possibility of remaining political, while placing and acknowledging the personal/ethical locations/stakes of the student/researcher into the project.

 

It is a method that examines practices, performances, and cultural processes through an intersectional lens to understand the complexities of everyday life and the ways in which our habits, rituals, texts, objects, and beliefs are structured and overlayed with meanings. To effectively complicate the lived experiences of everyday realities, Cultural Studies situates itself in an interdisciplinary terrain combining critical and methodological imperatives of various disciplines of humanities and social sciences like anthropology, history, sociology, political economy, psychology, philosophy and linguistics, to name a few.

As a field of study, Cultural Studies evolved in the 1950s and 60s Britain as a reactionary response against intellectual practices that differentiated culture into ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’.  This inadvertently collated ‘culture’ with the tastes and behaviours synonymous with upper classes in a society and framed practices of the masses that were “popular” as its corollary that lacked refinement to be considered worthy of academic rumination. The turn to Cultural Studies is marked by a simultaneous engendering of the ‘popular’ and the ‘everyday’ as it sought to generate layered understandings for otherwise marginalized activities and dismissed social groups, dismantling the chasm between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

 The culture in Cultural Studies is political, protean, and processual. Practitioners of Cultural Studies investigate how cultural habits, mobilities, and consumption practices are regulated by social and legal norms, public policy, and mechanisms of production. It is concerned with the hegemonies that situate culture as an apparatus, leveraging and circulating signs of dominance in forms of lived realities in capitalist societies. Cultural Studies engage in a methodology that begins by interrogating hegemonic forces of cultural production that are political, aesthetic, economic, technological and ideological, to reveal structural politics of cultural artifacts, analysing how the workings of class, gender, race, sexuality, desire, leisure, labour, and citizenship, among many other parameters make our social relationships so complicated and multi-layered. It is a radical project that seeks to investigate patterns of ordinary life that had previously been deemed as not carrying the moral weight worthy of the ‘canon’.

 

 

 

Selected Bibliography

Du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Sage, 1997.

During, Simon. Introduction. The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During,

Routledge, 2013, pp. 1-31.

Fiske, John. “British Cultural Studies and Television.” What is Cultural Studies? A Reader,

edited by John Storey, Rawat Publications, 2012, pp. 115- 143.

Hsu, Hua. “Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies.” The New Yorker, Conde Nast, 17

July 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl and Lawrence Grossberg, editors. Cultural Studies 1983: A

theoretical History. Orient Black Swan, 2016.

Storey, John. “Cultural Studies: An Introduction.” What is Cultural Studies? A

Reader, edited by John Storey, Rawat Publications, 2012, pp. 1-13.

Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Routledge, 1990.