Assignment P.08- What is Cultural Studies and It's Limitations.

Topic Name- What is Cultural Studies and It's Limitations.

Name – Khasatiya Reena K.
M.A. Sem – 2
Roll no. – 29
Email id. – khasatiyamili21@gmail.com
Paper no. 8 – Cultural Studies
Submitted to – Department of English MKBU
Total Words – 1, 442
Plagiarism -

• Introduction
Before we go to the point that what is cultural studies ? We have to
understand what is Culture? In dictionary cultural society or nation. We have
different culture like western culture, eastern, Latin , Asian and African culture
etc. Now let’s first see what is culture is...

• What is Culture?
• Culture is the word that we have got from Latin Word ‘Cultura.’
• To honor and protect.
• Culture is representative of communication.
• Culture is the structure of knowledge shared by a quite large group of
people.
• Culture is the learned activities of society or a subgroup.

What is Cultural Studies?
 Cultural studies is the art of understanding contemporary society , with
an importance on politics and power cultural studies is an umbrella term used to
look at number of different subject . Categories studied include media studies
including film and journalism. Sociology, industrial culture, globalization and social
theory.

Cultural is made by different types of group of people, defined by everything from
language , religion, food, social lifestyle , music, and arts. Today, in the United
States as in other countries populated largely by immigrants , the culture is made
by the many groups of people who are leading the country.

• Growth and Development
Cultural studies are an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary
criticism. It generally concern the political nature of contemporary culture, as well
as its historical foundations , conflicts , and ethnic studies in both objective and
methodology. Researchers concentrates on how a particular medium or message
relates to matters of ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or
gender.

Cultural studies approaches subjects holistically , combining feminist theory ,
social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory,
film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies,
museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various
society. Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed
somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field’s inception in the
late 1970s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson
and Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the center for
contemporary cultural studies at the University of Birmingham. This included
overtly political, left-wing views, and criticism of popular culture as Capitalist
mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the
“ culture industry” . This emerges in the writings of early British Cultural Studies.

Cultural Studies is relatively undeveloped in France , where there is a stronger
tradition of semiotics, as in the writings of Roland Barthes. Also in Germany it is
undeveloped, probably due to he continued influence of the Frankfurt School ,
which has developed a body of writing on such topics as mass culture, modern art
and music.

• Importance
The importance for cultural Studies of participating in oppositional public
spheres. It should take place more extensively in public . Although many
universities are public institutions, they rarely consider them part of the
public sphere.
We are engaged together as resisting intellectuals in a social practice that
allows both parties to construe themselves as agents in the process of their
own culture formation. An obvious concretization of this praxis might be a
woman resisting the view of women proffered in a canonical novel. This
instance is a reflection of resistance to large scale social practices that
oppress women. Such resistance needs to be produced.

This means that we need to become involved in the political reading of
popular culture. As long as such cultural artifacts are examined as merely
the materials that make up a fixed culture, their disciplinary descriptions
will do no more than create storehouse of knowledge having almost
nothing to do with lived culture , much less its transformation.

• Salient Features
Some researchers , especially in early British Culture studies, apply a
Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence
from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism
Of Louis Althusser and others. In a Marxist view , those who control the
means of production essentially control a culture.

Other approaches to cultural studies , such as feminist culture studies
and later American developments of the field, distances themselves
from this view. The writer Julia Kristeva was an influential voice in the
turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art
and psychoanalytical French Feminism.
Ultimately, this perspective criticizes the traditional view assuming a
passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways people
read , receive and interpret cultural texts
A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies , based on
the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies.

Limitations of Cultural Studies

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 fueled by hard research:
Cultural Studies are not always fueled by hard researches.
i.e., Historians have traditionally practiced to analyze ‘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 Richter describes 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
valorizes 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”

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 defenses 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
In this all context of our discussion of cultural studies, the idea of a text
not only includes written language , but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyle : the text of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful
artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of
culture. Culture for a cultural studies researcher not only includes
traditional high culture and popular culture, but also everyday meanings
and practices.

References
· Guerin, Wilfred L. (1966). A handbook of critical approaches to literature. Oxford University Press,
2005.