short essay on cultural studies

Free Cultural Studies Essay Examples & Topics

There is a field in academia that analyzes the interactions between anthropological, political, aesthetic, and socioeconomic institutions. It is referred to as cultural studies . This area is interdisciplinary, meaning that it combines and examines several departments. First brought up by British scientists in the 1950s, it is now studied all over the world.

The scope of cultural studies is vast. From history and politics to literature and art, this field looks at how culture is shaped and formed. It also examines the complex interactions of race and gender and how they shape a person’s identity.

In this article, our team has listed some tips and tricks on how to write a cultural studies essay. You will encounter many fascinating aspects in this field that will be exciting to study. That is the reason why we have prepared a list of cultural studies essay topics. You can choose one that catches your eye right here! Finally, you will also find free sample essays that you can use as a source of inspiration for your work.

The work process on an essay begins with a tough choice. After all, there are thousands of things that you can explore. In the list below, you will find cultural studies topics for your analytical paper.

• The role of human agency in cultural studies and how research techniques are chosen.
• Examining generational changes through evolution in music and musical taste in young adults.
• Does popular culture have the power to influence global intercultural and political relationships?
• Different approaches to self-analysis and self-reflection examined through the lens of philosophy.
• Who decides what constitutes a “cultural artifact”?
• The difference in religious and cultural practices between Japanese and Chinese Buddhists.
• Exploring the symbiotic relationship between culture and tradition in the UK.
• Do people understand culture nowadays the same way they understood it a century ago?
• Which factors do we have to take into account when conducting arts and culture research of ancient civilizations?
• Día de Los Muertos: a commentary on an entirely different perspective on death.
• American society as represented in popular graphic novels.
• An analysis of the different approaches to visual culture from the perspective of a corporate logo graphic designer.
• What can French cinema of the 20 th century tell us about the culture of the time?
• Narrative storytelling in different forms of media: novels, television, and video games.
• The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the direction of pop culture.

In case you haven’t found your perfect idea in the list, feel free to try our title generator . It will compose a new topic for your cultural studies essay from scratch.

With an ideal topic for your research, you start working on your cultural analysis essay. Below you will find all the necessary steps that will lead you to write a flawless paper.

• Pick a focus. You cannot write an entire essay on the prospect of culture alone. Thus, you need to narrow down your field and the scope of your research. Spend some time reading relevant materials to decide what you want your paper to say.
• Formulate your thesis. As the backbone of your assignment, it will carry you through the entire process. Writing a thesis statement brings you one step closer to nailing the whole essay down. Think “What is my paper about?” and come up with a single sentence answer – this will be your statement.
• Provide context for your intro. The introduction is the place for setting the scene for the rest of your paper. Take time to define the terminology. Plus, you should outline what you will talk about in the rest of the essay. Make sure to keep it brief – the introduction shouldn’t take up longer than a paragraph.
• Develop your ideas in the body. It is the place for you to explore the points you’re trying to make. Examine both sides of the argument and provide ample evidence to support your claims. Don’t forget to cite your sources!
• Conclude the paper effectively. The final part is usually the hardest, but you don’t need to make it too complicated. Summarize your findings and restate your thesis statement for the conclusion. Make sure you don’t bring in any new points or arguments at this stage.
• Add references. To show that you’re not pulling your ideas out of thin air, cite your sources. Add a bibliography at the end to prove you’ve done your research. You will need to put them in alphabetical order. So, ensure you do that correctly.

Thank you for reading! Now, you can proceed to read through the examples of essays about cultural studies that we provided below.

571 Best Essay Examples on Cultural Studies

What is popular culture definition and analysis.

• Words: 1399

Raymond Williams’ “Culture Is Ordinary”

• Words: 1248

Nok Culture’s Main Characteristic Features

• Words: 1483

Similarities of Asian Countries

• Words: 2356

“Never Marry a Mexican”: Theme Analysis & Summary

• Words: 2244

Comparison Between the Body Rituals in Nacirema and American Society

Uae and culture.

• Words: 1210

Cultural Comparison: The United States of America and Japan

Comparing the us and italian cultures.

• Words: 2217

Culture and Development in Nigeria

• Words: 2718

Discussion: Cultural Roots and Routes

• Words: 1469

Filial Piety

• Words: 1120

Pashtun Culture: Cultural Presentation

• Words: 1083

The United States of America’s Culture

• Words: 1367

Philippines Dressing Culture and Customs

• Words: 1454

“Signs of Life in the USA” by Maasik and Solomon

The influence of ramayana on the indian culture, culture and health correlation, indian custom and culture community.

• Words: 2207

Power and Culture: Relationship and Effects

• Words: 2783

Art and Science: One Culture or Two, Difference and Similarity

Culture identity: asian culture.

• Words: 1101

The Beautiful Country of Kazakhstan: Kazakh Culture

• Words: 1644

The Luo Culture of Kenya

• Words: 3544

Taiwan and the U.S. Cultural Elements

• Words: 2265

Society, Culture, and Civilization

The jarawa people and their culture.

• Words: 1438

The Nature of People and Culture

Culture, subculture, and their differences.

• Words: 1157

African Cultural Traditions and Communication

• Words: 1114

Traditional and Nontraditional Cultures of the USA

Saudi arabian culture.

• Words: 1486

Ballads and Their Social Functions

• Words: 3314

Chinese Traditional Festivals and Culture

• Words: 2763

Three Stages of Cultural Development

• Words: 1165

Differences in Culture between America and Sudan

American culture pros & cons, what role does food play in cultural identity.

• Words: 1199

Cultural Diversity and Cultural Universals Relations: Anthropological Perspective

Kazakhstani culture through hofstede’s theory.

• Words: 1480

The Importance of Cultural Values for a Society

Wheeler’s theory and examples of pilgrimage, saudi traditional clothing.

• Words: 1815

The Role of Chinese Hats in Chinese Culture

• Words: 2307

Cultural Prostitution: Okinawa, Japan, and Hawaii

• Words: 2370

Trobriand Society: Gender and Its Roles

• Words: 3118

The Western Conception of Africa in “Things Fall Apart“ by Chinua Achebe

• Words: 2238

Symbol: The Basic Element of Culture

Impact of globalization on the maasai peoples` culture.

• Words: 1736

“High” and “Low” Culture in Design

• Words: 2560

Time in Mahfouz’s “Half a Day” and Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”

• Words: 1092

Etiquette in Traveling at Home and Abroad

Polygamy in islam, theory of the aryan race: historical point of view.

• Words: 2770

Body Ritual among the Nacirema

Stuart hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, japanese popular culture: anime, video games, and the film industry, non-material and material culture, sámi origin, culture, and customs, cultural appropriation: christina aguilera in braids, expanding chinese cultural knowledge in health beliefs.

• Words: 2291

Bedouin Tent : Review and Analysis

The sub-culture of the american circuses of the early 20th century.

• Words: 3909

Familial Culture and Individual Identity

Introduction to american deaf culture by thomas holcomb, the impact of ancient greek civilization and architecture on modern culture, the importance of understanding national culture, theodor adorno’s “culture industry” analysis.

• Words: 1489

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Subculture

• Words: 2000

Dubai’s Food, Dress Code and Culture

• Words: 1124

Cultural Studies: What is Folklore?

Analysis of arabic culture.

• Words: 1195

Indian Culture, Food, Temples, and Clothing

• Words: 1035

The Power of a Symbol

The essence of cultural ecology: the main tenets, gothic lifestyle as a subculture, cultural relativism: impact on individuals, the māori culture of new zealand.

• Words: 1326

Culturagram of African Americans Living in Jackson

Anthropological approach to culture, the phenomenon of queer customs, chinese manhua history development.

• Words: 5401

Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans’

Cultures of the middle east.

• Words: 2353

Cultural Change: Mechanisms and Examples

Islamic modernism and its culture.

• Words: 2204

Indian and Greek Cultures Comparison

• Words: 2789

Football Impact on England’s Culture

• Words: 1096

Indian Culture: Dances of Rajasthan

Exegeses-ruling class and ruling ideas by karl marx, natural resources and conflicts in asian countries.

• Words: 1567

Birthday Celebrations in the China

• Words: 1664

Significance of the Rite of Passage: Maasai Lion Hunt

“cargo cult science” by richard feynman, pop culture aspects and role in the united states.

• Words: 2777

Cultural Identity Case Study

• Words: 1943

African Folktales as a Reflection of Culture

Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism differences, civilization and barbarism in modern culture.

• Words: 1146

Blue Jeans in the US Culture

Atlantic canadian folklore by labelle and mcdavid, chinese foundations for moral education and character development.

• Words: 1435

African-American Cultural Group and the Provision of Services to African Americans

History of mexican festival, the mysteries of samothrace and its cultic practices.

• Words: 2846

Meaning of Culture and Its Importance

The bushmen: culture and traditions, popular culture and social change across cultures.

• Words: 1102

Dairy Products Impact on Human Health in Saudi Arabia

• Words: 6593

Music in China and Some East Asian Countries

• Words: 3039

Hells Angels as a Motorcycle Subculture

Greetings in etiquette in society by emily post, punjabi: the culture, masks and musical instruments as cultural artifacts, cultural differences in communication:western and eastern cultures, british punk zines as a commentary on the sociopolitical climate of the 1970s.

• Words: 2223

Shaman as a Priest, Pharmacist, Psychiatrist and Psychopomp

Asian youth gangs analysis.

• Words: 2451

African American Family Cultural Background

• Words: 1441

Indigenous Australian Culture, History, Importance

• Words: 2102

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English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Cultural Studies in Literature

Cultural Studies is a multidisciplinary field of academic inquiry that analyzes the production, distribution, and reception of cultural artifacts and practices.

Cultural Studies: Etymology and Concept

Table of Contents

Etymology/Term:

The term “Cultural Studies” originated in the mid-20th century and gained prominence during the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging primarily from British academia, it was initially used to describe an interdisciplinary field that sought to analyze, critique, and understand various aspects of culture, including popular culture, media, language, and everyday life. Rooted in a desire to break down traditional academic boundaries and incorporate perspectives from diverse disciplines, Cultural Studies aimed to explore how power, ideology, and societal structures shape and are shaped by cultural practices.

• Interdisciplinarity: Cultural Studies is characterized by its interdisciplinary approach, drawing insights from sociology, anthropology, literature, media studies, and other fields to analyze cultural phenomena.
• Power Dynamics: The field emphasizes the examination of power relations within cultural practices, investigating how they reinforce or challenge existing societal structures.
• Popular Culture Analysis: Cultural Studies places a significant focus on the study of popular culture, recognizing it as a site where societal norms, values, and ideologies are reflected and contested.
• Identity Formation: Examining how cultural practices contribute to the construction of individual and collective identities is a central concern, with attention to issues of race, gender, class, and more.
• Critical Theory Influence: Cultural Studies is influenced by critical theory, incorporating perspectives that question established norms and challenge dominant ideologies in various cultural contexts.

Cultural Studies: Definition of Term

Cultural Studies is a multidisciplinary field of academic inquiry that analyzes the production, distribution, and reception of cultural artifacts and practices. It examines how power dynamics, social structures, and identity formation intersect within cultural contexts. The field employs diverse methodologies, drawing from sociology, anthropology, media studies, and literature, to critically explore the complexities of contemporary culture.

Cultural Studies: Theorists, Works and Argument

Cultural Studies : Major Characteristics

• Example: In “The Taming of the Shrew” by William Shakespeare, interdisciplinary themes of gender, power dynamics, and societal expectations are explored through both comedic and critical lenses.
• Example: In George Orwell’s “1984,” cultural materialism is evident in the scrutiny of language, reflecting how power structures manipulate and control society through the manipulation of words and concepts.
• Example: J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series engages with reception theory as readers interpret the narrative, characters, and moral dilemmas, contributing to a diverse range of interpretations.
• Example: In Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” the concept of performativity is explored as the protagonist undergoes a gender transformation, emphasizing the performative nature of identity.
• In a similar vein, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s “Nervous Conditions” for African literature or Yan Ge’s “The Chili Bean Paste Clan” for Chinese literature exemplifies hybridity, fusing magical realism with historical elements to illuminate the diverse cultural tapestry of their respective regions.
• Example: In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Americanah,” intersectionality is central as the protagonist navigates issues of race, gender, and immigration in both Nigerian and American contexts.

These literary examples illustrate how the major characteristics of Cultural Studies manifest in diverse ways within the realm of literature, showcasing the field’s broad applicability and relevance.

Cultural Studies: Application in Critiques

• Cultural Materialism : A Cultural Studies critique of “The Great Gatsby” would delve into the societal values of the Roaring Twenties, exploring how materialism and the pursuit of the American Dream shape the characters’ identities and relationships.
• Postcolonial Analysis : Applying Cultural Studies to “Things Fall Apart” would involve examining the novel’s portrayal of the clash between Igbo traditions and colonial influences, highlighting the cultural disruptions and power dynamics at play.
• Feminist and Reception Theory: A Cultural Studies critique of “The Handmaid’s Tale” would explore the novel’s feminist themes, analyzing how readers’ interpretations contribute to the ongoing dialogue about gender roles, power structures, and dystopian societies.
• Intersectionality : Cultural Studies could be applied to “The Joy Luck Club” by scrutinizing the intersectionality of cultural identities within the Chinese-American immigrant experience, emphasizing how factors like gender, generation, and ethnicity shape the characters’ lives.

In each case, a Cultural Studies critique would go beyond traditional literary analysis, focusing on the broader cultural contexts and societal influences present in the works. It would explore how these texts reflect, challenge, or contribute to cultural norms, power structures, and identity dynamics, showcasing the versatility of Cultural Studies in literary criticism.

Cultural Studies: Relevant Terms

Cultural Studies: Suggested Readings

• Hall, Stuart. The Cultural Studies Reader . Edited by Simon During, Routledge, 2007.
• hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation . South End Press, 1992.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism . Vintage Books, 1979.
• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture . Routledge, 1994.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . Routledge, 1990.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Vintage Books, 1995.
• Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth . Grove Press, 1963.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present . Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation . University of Michigan Press, 1994.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk . Dover Publications, 1994.

Related posts:

• Eco-Criticism Literary Theory
• Critical Race Theory: Application to Literature
• Biographical Criticism in Literature
• Ecofeminism Literary Theory

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Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies

In the summer of 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, travelled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures on something called “Cultural Studies.” At the time, many academics still considered the serious study of popular culture beneath them; a much starker division existed, then, between what Hall termed the “authenticated, validated” tastes of the upper classes and the unrefined culture of the masses. But Hall did not regard this hierarchy as useful. Culture, he argued, does not consist of what the educated élites happen to fancy, such as classical music or the fine arts. It is, simply, “experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.” And it can tell us things about the world, he believed, that more traditional studies of politics or economics alone could not.

A masterful orator, Hall energized the audience in Illinois, a group of thinkers and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing Marxist approaches to cultural analysis. A young scholar named Jennifer Daryl Slack believed she was witnessing something special and decided to tape and transcribe the lectures. After more than a decade of coaxing, Hall finally agreed to edit these transcripts for publication, a process that took years. The result is “ Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History ,” which was published, last fall, as part of an ongoing Duke University Press series called “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings,” chronicling the career and influence of Hall, who died in 2014.

Broadly speaking, cultural studies is not one arm of the humanities so much as an attempt to use all of those arms at once. It emerged in England, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when scholars from working-class backgrounds, such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, began thinking about the distance between canonical cultural touchstones—the music or books that were supposed to teach you how to be civil and well-mannered—and their own upbringings. These scholars believed that the rise of mass communications and popular forms were permanently changing our relationship to power and authority, and to one another. There was no longer consensus. Hall was interested in the experience of being alive during such disruptive times. What is culture, he proposed, but an attempt to grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly possible?

Hall retained faith that culture was a site of “negotiation,” as he put it, a space of give and take where intended meanings could be short-circuited. “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle,” he argues. “It is the arena of consent and resistance.” In a free society, culture does not answer to central, governmental dictates, but it nonetheless embodies an unconscious sense of the values we share, of what it means to be right or wrong. Over his career, Hall became fascinated with theories of “reception”—how we decode the different messages that culture is telling us, how culture helps us choose our own identities. He wasn’t merely interested in interpreting new forms, such as film or television, using the tools that scholars had previously brought to bear on literature. He was interested in understanding the various political, economic, or social forces that converged in these media. It wasn’t merely the content or the language of the nightly news, or middlebrow magazines, that told us what to think; it was also how they were structured, packaged, and distributed.

According to Slack and Lawrence Grossberg, the editors of “Cultural Studies 1983,” Hall was reluctant to publish these lectures because he feared they would be read as an all-purpose critical toolkit rather than a series of carefully situated historical conversations. Hall himself was ambivalent about what he perceived to be the American fetish for theory, a belief that intellectual work was merely, in Slack and Grossberg’s words, a “search for the right theory which, once found, would unlock the secrets of any social reality.” It wasn’t this simple. (I have found myself wondering what Hall would make of how cultural criticism of a sort that can read like ideological pattern-recognition has proliferated in the age of social media.)

Over the course of his lectures, Hall carefully wrestles with forebears, including the British scholar F. R. Leavis and also Williams and Hoggart (the latter founded Birmingham University’s influential Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Hall directed in the seventies). Gradually, the lectures cluster around questions of how we give our lives meaning, how we recognize and understand “the culture we never see, the culture we don’t think of as cultivated.” These lectures aren’t instructions for “doing” cultural studies—until the very end, they barely touch on emerging cultural forms that intrigued Hall, such as reggae and punk rock. Instead, they try to show how far back these questions reach.

For Hall, these questions emerged from his own life—a fact that his memoir, “ Familiar Stranger ,” published by Duke, in April, brings into sharp focus. Hall was born in 1932, in Kingston. His father, Herman, was the first nonwhite person to hold a senior position with the Jamaican office of United Fruit, an American farming and agricultural corporation; his mother, Jessie, was mixed-race. They considered themselves a class apart, Hall explains, indulging a “gross colonial simulacrum of upper-middle-class England.” From a young age, he felt alienated by their cozy embrace of the island’s racial hierarchy. As a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease, “Where did you get this coolie baby from?” It became a family joke—one he would revisit often. And yet he felt no authentic connection to working-class Jamaica, either, “conscious of the chasm that separated me from the multitude.” The mild sense of guilt that he describes feels strikingly contemporary. And he had trouble articulating the terms of this discomfort: “I could not find a language in which to unravel the contradictions or to confront my family with what I really thought of their values, behaviors, and aspirations.” The desire to find that language would become the animating spark of his professional life.

In 1951, Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. He was part of the “Windrush” generation—a term used to describe the waves of West Indian migration to England in the postwar years. Although Hall came from a different class than most of these migrants, he felt a connection to his countrymen. “Suddenly everything looked different,” he would later remember of his arrival in England. He clipped a newspaper photo of three Jamaicans who arrived around the time he did. Two of them are carpenters and one is an aspiring boxer; they are all dressed to the nines. “This was style . They were on a mission, determined to be recognized as participants in the modern world and to make it theirs. I look at this photograph every morning as I myself head out for that world,” he writes.

Hall found ready disciples in American universities, though it might be argued that the spirit which animated cultural studies in England had existed in the U.S. since the fifties and sixties, in underground magazines and the alternative press. The American fantasy of its supposedly “classless” society has always given “culture” a slightly different meaning than it has in England, where social trajectories were more rigidly defined. What scholars like Hall were actually reckoning with was the “American phase” of British life. After the Second World War, England was no longer the “paradigm case” of Western industrial society. America, that grand experiment, where mass media and consumer culture proliferated freely, became the harbinger for what was to come. In a land where rags-to-riches mobility is—or so we tend to imagine—just one hit away, culture is about what you want to project into the world, whether you are fronting as a member of the élite or as an everyman, offering your interpretation of Shakespeare or of “The Matrix.” When culture is about self-fashioning, there’s even space to be a down-to-earth billionaire.

How did we get here, to this present, with our imaginations limited by a common sense of possibility that we did not choose? “ Selected Political Writings ,” the other book of Hall’s work that Duke has published as part of its series, focusses largely on the lengthy British phase of Hall’s life. The centerpiece essay is “The Great Moving Right Show,” his 1979 analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s “authoritarian populism.” Her rise was as much a cultural turning point as a political one, in Hall’s view—an enmity toward the struggling masses, obscured by her platform’s projected attitude of tough, Victorian moderation. Many of the pieces in this collection orbit the topic of “common sense,” how culture and politics together reinforce an idea of what is acceptable at any given time.

This was the simple question at the heart of Hall’s complex, occasionally dense work. He became one of the great public intellectuals of his time, an activist for social justice and against nuclear proliferation, a constant presence on British radio and television—though this work is given only a cursory mention in “Familiar Stranger.” Similarly, he doesn’t mention Marxism, his key intellectual framework, until the final chapters of that book. Instead, as in much of his more traditional scholarship, he focusses on his shifting sense of his own context. Culture, after all, is a matter of constructing a relationship between oneself and the world. “People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them,” he observed, in his 1983 lectures. “These futures may not be real; if you try to concretize them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed.” He could have been describing his own self-awakening.

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cultural studies

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

cultural studies , interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture . Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia . Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology , anthropology , historiography , literary criticism , philosophy , and art criticism . Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity , class , and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.

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A short history of cultural studies

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130 Culture Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Culture is a rich and diverse concept that encompasses various aspects of human society. When writing an essay on culture, it is essential to choose a topic that is not only interesting but also allows for in-depth exploration and analysis. To help you get started, here are 130 culture essay topic ideas and examples:

• The impact of globalization on traditional cultures.
• Cultural appropriation: the line between appreciation and exploitation.
• The role of social media in shaping modern culture.
• The influence of pop culture on youth identity.
• The impact of immigration on cultural diversity.
• The significance of language in preserving cultural heritage.
• Cultural stereotypes: their origins and consequences.
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures.
• The portrayal of gender roles in different cultures.
• The role of food in cultural identity.
• The impact of technology on cultural practices.
• The influence of religion on cultural values.
• Cultural assimilation versus cultural preservation.
• The role of museums in preserving cultural artifacts.
• The impact of music on cultural expression.
• The significance of traditional clothing in different cultures.
• The role of education in promoting cultural understanding.
• The impact of cultural tourism on local communities.
• Cultural differences in communication styles.
• The role of art in reflecting and shaping culture.
• The impact of globalization on indigenous art forms.
• Cultural practices surrounding birth and death.
• The influence of media on cultural perceptions.
• Cultural taboos: understanding and respecting diverse norms.
• The role of folklore in preserving cultural traditions.
• Cultural rituals and their significance in different societies.
• The impact of cultural diversity on teamwork and collaboration.
• Cultural expressions of love and romance.
• The role of family in transmitting cultural values.
• The influence of culture on healthcare practices.
• Cultural appropriation in the fashion industry.
• The significance of cultural festivals and celebrations.
• Cultural differences in parenting styles.
• The impact of colonialism on language extinction.
• The role of sports in promoting cultural unity.
• Cultural perceptions of beauty and body image.
• The influence of technology on traditional storytelling.
• Cultural differences in concepts of time and punctuality.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on self-identity.
• Cultural expressions of grief and mourning.
• The role of cultural heritage in sustainable development.
• Cultural differences in attitudes towards aging.
• The influence of culture on political ideologies.
• Cultural practices surrounding marriage and weddings.
• The significance of cultural symbols and their meanings.
• The impact of cultural diversity on workplace dynamics.
• Cultural differences in educational systems.
• The role of culture in shaping personal values.
• Cultural expressions of power and authority.
• The influence of culture on decision-making processes.
• Cultural differences in attitudes towards mental health.
• The impact of colonialism on cultural appropriation.
• Cultural expressions of hospitality and etiquette.
• The role of culture in shaping environmental attitudes.
• Cultural differences in approaches to conflict resolution.
• The significance of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconciliation.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards gender equality.
• Cultural expressions of spirituality and religion.
• The impact of cultural diversity on economic development.
• Cultural differences in concepts of privacy and personal space.
• The role of culture in shaping political systems.
• Cultural practices surrounding food and eating habits.
• The significance of cultural heritage in urban planning.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on intercultural communication.
• Cultural expressions of humor and satire.
• The influence of culture on consumer behavior.
• Cultural differences in concepts of success and achievement.
• The role of culture in shaping environmental conservation efforts.
• The significance of cultural heritage in disaster resilience.
• The impact of cultural diversity on healthcare access and outcomes.
• Cultural expressions of social justice and activism.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards disability.
• Cultural differences in concepts of leadership and authority.
• The role of culture in shaping peacebuilding efforts.
• Cultural practices surrounding gender and sexuality.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting social cohesion.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on media representation.
• Cultural expressions of protest and resistance.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards technology.
• Cultural differences in concepts of beauty and aesthetics.
• The role of culture in shaping educational policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting intergenerational dialogue.
• The impact of cultural diversity on cultural diplomacy.
• Cultural expressions of identity and belonging.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards immigration.
• Cultural differences in concepts of justice and fairness.
• The role of culture in shaping urban design and architecture.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting peace and reconciliation.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on employment opportunities.
• Cultural expressions of resistance and resilience.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards climate change.
• Cultural differences in concepts of morality and ethics.
• The role of culture in shaping public policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting social inclusion.
• The impact of cultural diversity on intercultural relationships.
• Cultural expressions of cultural hybridity and fusion.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards animal rights.
• Cultural differences in concepts of health and well-being.
• The role of culture in shaping immigration policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting sustainable tourism.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on educational opportunities.
• Cultural expressions of resilience and post-traumatic growth.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards artificial intelligence.
• Cultural differences in concepts of democracy and governance.
• The role of culture in shaping social welfare policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting human rights.
• The impact of cultural diversity on intercultural friendships.
• Cultural expressions of cultural preservation and revitalization.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards genetic engineering.
• Cultural differences in concepts of peace and conflict.
• The role of culture in shaping criminal justice systems.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting gender equality.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on access to financial resources.
• Cultural expressions of cultural resistance and decolonization.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards space exploration.
• Cultural differences in concepts of identity and belonging.
• The role of culture in shaping educational curricula.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting intercultural dialogue.
• The impact of cultural diversity on artistic collaborations.
• Cultural expressions of cultural exchange and cross-pollination.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards nuclear energy.
• Cultural differences in concepts of citizenship and belonging.
• The role of culture in shaping healthcare policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting environmental sustainability.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on access to housing.
• Cultural expressions of cultural resilience and adaptation.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards space ethics.
• Cultural differences in concepts of social justice and equity.
• The role of culture in shaping social media policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting cultural diplomacy.

Remember, these topics are just a starting point. Feel free to modify or combine them to suit your interests and research goals. Good luck with your essay on culture!

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Cultural Studies: A Theoretical, Historical and Practical Overview

Cultural studies has become an unavoidable part of literary criticism and theory. Cultural studies is an advanced interdisciplinary arena of research and teaching that examines the means in which "culture" creates and transforms day to day life, individual experiences, power and social relations. As a developing field of study it is important to know the beginning and growth of cultural studies as a field of knowledge. This article is an attempt to present an introductory information regarding the beginning, definitions, schools important theoreticians and practical aspects of cultural studies. This study is analytical in nature and historical information are presented mostly. The objective of this article is to give a quick understanding about the beginners in the field of Cultural studies.

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Introductory Notes on Cultural Studies

Introduction to Cultural Studies is a course of study for students pursuing a Masters in English Literature. As part of the course, it will be helpful for the students if they get a quick-tour kind of an introduction to the discipline called Cultural Studies. As a study of culture, the title presupposes a knowledge about what encompasses the word 'culture', we may attempt a definition of it first. Culture can be defined as an asymmetric combinations of abstract and actual aspects of elements like language, art, food, dress, systems like family, religion, education, and practices like mourning and 'merrying', all of which we refer to as cultural artifacts. It is assumed that values and identities are formed, interacted and represented in a society in association with these artifacts. Cultural Studies, therefore, is a constant engagement with contemporary culture by studying, analyzing and interacting with the institutions of culture and their functions in the society.

Chun Lean LIM

This course introduces students to the work and significance of representation and power in the understanding of culture as social practice. It helps students to understand the relationships among sign, culture and the making of meanings in society. From this base it approaches the question of ideology and subjectivity in the shaping of culture. With reference to various cultural texts and social contexts, we study examples of cultural production from history and politics to lived experiences of the everyday, from photography and art to cinema and museum, from popular culture to lifestyle etc. In appreciating divergent concerns in the critical analysis of culture and power, we focus on selected topics both mainstream and emergent, with an emphasis on contemporary developments in the Asian contexts. A brief account of the intellectual formations of Cultural Studies will be provided to allow students to appreciate the global, regional and local perspectives in the evolving field of study.

Joanna Dziadowiec-Greganić

Until recently, cultural studies was a part of knowledge that was treated by the academic world in an ambivalent way. On one hand, there was a belief that the humanities, including the social sciences, in some way belong to each other, with the understanding that they at least partly create a common field. On the other hand, there was a visible tendency to diversify the expanding specializations, by creating new disciplines of knowledge which were separated from the original core. Cultural studies were perceived as an eclectic type of knowledge embracing almost everything, starting with demography and archeology through sociology, psychology and history, also encompassing economics and cultural management. This situation was also expressed by the institutional structure of scientific disciplines. Nowadays it has become apparent that this postmodern fragmentization of culture is petering out. This has created the necessity of a new synthesis in the humanities. It has resulted in the institutionalization of ‘cultural studies’ for which the Polish equivalent can be expressed as ‘kulturoznawstwo.’ Moreover, in relation to postmodernism, (especially models of postmodern narration and phenomena such as over interpretation while analyzing an investigated object), which is a common feature of all the humanities, we may go beyond the postmodern canons. While postmodernism is becoming the subject of reflection in the history of knowledge, there are new methodological propositions coming to light. They are partly the continuation of but also the opposition to postmodern depictions. In that exact moment, cultural studies as a scientific discipline arises. These two reasons, one institutional and the other thematic, have become an invitation for discussion about the identity of cultural studies as a field of knowledge. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers who are engaged in research on culture. The discussion was not limited to their differences, but also included common points in particular disciplines. The research subject has taken the first step towards formulating a general methodology of the science of culture. The variety of presented research perspectives and the problems which cultural studies will face points towards the necessity of further ventures which would organize and order both subjects and methods of cultural studies research. The opportunity to take more profound reflections and desired polemics in this field will surely be included in the publication of the post-conference materials.

Dr. MANJEET K R . KASHYAP

The crossing of disciplinary boundaries by the new humanities and the “humanities-tocome”is lumped as “cultural studies” in a very confused way.The term, cultural studies, wascoined by Richard Hoggart in 1964; and the movement was inaugurated by Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and by The Uses of Literacy (1958), and it became institutionalized in the influential Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS], founded by Hoggart in 1964. It is evident that much of what falls under cultural studies could easily be classified under various other labels such as marxism, structuralism, new historicism, feminism and postcolonialism. Since the term has become popularized, I would not focus on why it is named so. Instead, the concern of this paper is to provide a deep theoretical understanding of cultural studies. Cultural studies analyzes the social, religious, cultural, discourses and institutions, and their role in the society. It basically aims to study the functioning of the social, economic, and political forces and power-structure that produce all forms of cultural phenomena and give them social “meanings” and significance.

Dumitru Tucan

JORGE GERMAN GARCIA HUGHES

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31, 460-467

Manfred Engel

Discusses differences between the concept of "Cultural Studies" in the English-speaking world and the German "Kulturwissenschaft". Also sketches the project of a cultural and literary history of the dream as an example for "cultural literary studies". All essays of the volume freely available under: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/crcl/index.php/crcl/issue/view/681

Simon During

Parvati Raghuram

© Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram and Estella Tincknell 2004 First published 2004 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this ...

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Essential Essays, Volume 1 : Foundations of Cultural Studies

Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. Hall appeared widely on British media, taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of New Left Review , and served as the director of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He is the author of Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History ; Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands ; and other books also published by Duke University Press.

David Morley is Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, and coeditor of Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, and Legacies .

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays —a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.

Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume's stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"; the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics; and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism. As a whole, Volume 1 provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies.

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Essential Essays, Volume 1 : Foundations of Cultural Studies By: Stuart Hall Edited by: David Morley https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413 ISBN (electronic): 978-1-4780-0241-3 Publisher: Duke University Press Published: 2018

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Table of Contents

• A Note on the Text By Catherine Hall ; Catherine Hall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Bill Schwarz Bill Schwarz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google
• Acknowledgments
• General Introduction: A Life in Essays Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-002 Open the PDF Link PDF for General Introduction:<span class="subtitle">A Life in Essays</span> in another window
• Richard Hoggart The Uses of Literacy , and the Cultural Turn [2007] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-004 Open the PDF Link PDF for Richard Hoggart <em>The Uses of Literacy</em>, and the Cultural Turn [2007] in another window
• Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-005 Open the PDF Link PDF for Cultural Studies:<span class="subtitle">Two Paradigms [1980]</span> in another window
• Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-006 Open the PDF Link PDF for Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992] in another window
• The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge [1977] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-008 Open the PDF Link PDF for The Hinterland of Science:<span class="subtitle">Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge [1977]</span> in another window
• Rethinking the “Base and Superstructure” Metaphor [1977] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-009 Open the PDF Link PDF for Rethinking the “Base and Superstructure” Metaphor [1977] in another window
• Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-010 Open the PDF Link PDF for Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980] in another window
• On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others \1986] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-011 Open the PDF Link PDF for On Postmodernism and Articulation:<span class="subtitle">An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others \1986]</span> in another window
• Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse [Originally 1973; Republished 2007] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-013 Open the PDF Link PDF for Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse [Originally 1973; Republished 2007] in another window
• External Influences on Broadcasting: The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting-Television’s Double-Bind [1972] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-014 Open the PDF Link PDF for External Influences on Broadcasting:<span class="subtitle">The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting-Television’s Double-Bind [1972]</span> in another window
• Culture, the Media, and the “Ideological Effect” [1977] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-015 Open the PDF Link PDF for Culture, the Media, and the “Ideological Effect” [1977] in another window
• Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular” [1981] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-017 Open the PDF Link PDF for Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular” [1981] in another window
• Policing the Crisis : Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition [2013] By Chas Critcher ; Chas Critcher Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Tony Jefferson ; Tony Jefferson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google John Clarke ; John Clarke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Brian Roberts Brian Roberts Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-018 Open the PDF Link PDF for <em>Policing the Crisis</em>:<span class="subtitle">Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition [2013]</span> in another window
• The Great Moving Right Show [1979] Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-019 Open the PDF Link PDF for The Great Moving Right Show [1979] in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002413-020 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
• Place of First Publication Open the PDF Link PDF for Place of First Publication in another window
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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 23, 2016 • ( 5 )

Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history/ criticism etc. to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural Studies researches often focus on how a particular phenomenon relates matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class and gender.

Discussion on Cultural Studies have gained currency with the publication of Richard Hoggart’s Use of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958), and with the establishment of Birmingham Centre for is Contemporary Cultural Studies in England in 1968.

Since culture is now considered as the source of art and literature, cultural criticism has gained ground, and therefore, Raymond Williams’ term “cultural  materialism”, Stephen Greenblatt’s “cultural poetics” and Bakhtin’s term “cultural prosaic”, have become significant in the field of Cultural Studies and cultural criticism.

The works of Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart with the Birmingham Centre, later expanded through the writings of David Morley, Tony Bennett and others. Cultural Studies is interested in the process by which power relations organize cultural artefacts (food habits, music, cinema, sport events etc.). It looks at popular culture and everyday life, which had hitherto been dismissed as “inferior” and unworthy of academic study. Cultural Studies’ approaches 1) transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history 2) are politically engaged 3) reject the distinction between “high” and “low” art or “elite” and “popular” culture 4) analyse not only the cultural works but also the means of production.

In order to understand the changing political circumstances  of class, politics and culture in the UK, scholars at the CCCS turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci who modified classical Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and social control. In his view, capitalists are not only brute force (police, prison, military) to maintain control, but also penetrate the everyday culture of working people. Thus the key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is that of cultural hegemony. Edgar and Sedgwick point out that the theory of hegemony was pivotal to the development of British Cultural Studies. It facilitated analysis of the ways in which subaltern groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination.

The approach of Raymond Williams and CCCS was clearly marxIst and poststructuralist, and held subject identities and relationships as textual, constructed out of discourse. Cultural Studies believes that we cannot “read” cultural artefacts only within the aesthetic realm, rather they must be studied within the social and material perspectives; i.e., a novel must be read not only within the generic conventions and history of the novel, but also in terms of the publishing industry and its profit, its reviewers, its academic field of criticism, the politics of awards and the hype of publicity machinery that sells the book. Cultural Studies regards the cultural artefact like the tricolour or Gandhi Jayanti as a political sign, that is part of the “discourse” of India, as reinforcing certain ideological values, and concealing oppressive conditions of patriarchal ideas of the nation, nationalism and national identity.

In Cultural Studies, representation is a key concept and denotes a language in which all objects and relationships get defined, a language related to issues of class, power and ideology, and situated within the context of “discourse”. The cultural practice of giving dolls to girls can be read within the patriarchal discourse of femininity that girls are weaker and delicate and need to be given soft things, and that grooming, care etc. are feminine duties which dolls will help them learn. This discourse of femininity is itself related to the discourse of masculinity and the larger context of power relations in culture. Identity, for Culture Studies, is constituted through experience, which involves representation – the consumption of signs, the making of meaning from signs and the knowledge of meaning.

Cultural Studies views everyday life as fragmented, multiple, where meanings are hybridized and contested; i.e., identities that were more or less homogeneous in terms of ethnicities and patterns of consumption, are now completely hybrid, especially in the metropolis. With the globalization of urban spaces, local cultures are linked to global economies, markets and needs, and hence any study of contemporary culture has to examine the role of a non-local market/ money which requires a postcolonial awareness of the exploitative relationship between the First World and the Third World even today.

Cultural Studies is interested in lifestyle because lifestyle 1) is about everyday life 2) defines identity 3) influences social relations 4) bestows meaning and value to artefacts in a culture. In India, after economic liberalization, consumption has been seen as a marker of identity. Commodities are signs of identity and lifestyle and consumption begins before the actual act of shopping; it begins with the consumption of the signs of the commodity.

Mall Culture

Mall is a space of display where goods are displayed for maximum visual display in such a fashion that they are attractive enough to instill desire. Spectacle, attention- holding and desire are central elements of shopping experience in the mall. Hence mall emerges primarily as a site of gazing and secondarily as a site of shopping. The mall presents a spectacle of a fantasy world created by the presence of models and posters, compounded by the experience of being surrounded by attractive men and women, cosy families and vibrant youth — which altogether entice us to unleash the possibilities of donning a better identity, by trying out / consuming global brands and cosmopolitan fashion.

The mall invites for participating in the fantasy of future possibilities. Thus, the spectacle turns into a performance that the customer/ consumer imitates and participates in. It is also a theatrical performance that is  interactive, in which the spectacle comes alive with the potential consumer. The encircling vistas, long-spread balconies and viewing points at every floor add to the spectacle, by providing a “prospect” of shopping.

Eclecticism is yet another feature of the mall, where, “the world is under one roof”- where a “Kalanjali” or “Mann Mantra” share space with “Shoppers Stop” or “Life Style” and “Madras Mail” shares space with “McDonald’s” and multiplexes, imparting a cosmopolitan experience. Thus eclecticism and a mixing of products, styles and traditions are a central feature of the mall and consumer experience.

Further, “the mall is a hyperreal, ahistorical, secure, postmodern-secular, uniform space of escape that takes the streets of the city into itself in a tightly controlled environment where time, weather, season do not matter where the “natural” is made through artificial lighting and horticulture, and ensuring that this public space resembles the city but offers more security and choice”

Media Culture

Media studies and its role in the construction of cultural values, circulation of symbolic values, and its production of desire are central to Cultural Studies today. Cultural Studies of the media begins with the assumption that media culture is political and ideological, and it reproduces existing social values, oppression and inequalities. Media culture clearly reflects the multiple sides of contemporary debates and problems. Media culture helps to reinforce the hegemony and power of specific economic, cultural and political groups by suggesting ideologies that the audience, if not alert, imbibes. Media culture is also provocative because it sometimes asks us to rethink what we know or believe in. In Cultural Studies, media culture is studied through an analysis of popular media culture like films, TV serials, advertisements etc.- as Cultural Studies believes in the power of the popular cultural forms as tools of ideological and political power.

Cultural Studies of popular media culture involves an analysis of the forms of representation, such as film; the political ideology of these representations; an examination of the financial sources/sponsors of these representations (propaganda advertisements by Coke after the report on pesticides in Coca Cola); an examination of the roles played by other objects / people in the propagating ideology (Amir Khan in the Coca Cola ad, after patriotic films like Lagaan, Mangal Pandey and Rang de Basanti). Cultural Studies also analyses whether the medium (say, film), presents an oppressive/unequal nature of institutions, like family, education etc. or glorify them; the possible resistance to such oppressive ideologies; the audience’s response to such representation and the economic benefits and the beneficiaries of such representations.

Contemporary Culture Studies of media culture explores what is called “media ecologies”, the environment of human culture created by the intersection of information and communications technologies, organizational behaviour and human interaction.

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Tags: Antonio Gramsci , cultural hegemony , Cultural Studies , Cultural Studies Essay , Cultural Studies key terms , Cultural Studies key theorists , Cultural Studies main ideas , Culture and Society , David Morley , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Mall Culture , media ecologies , Popular Culture , Raymond Williams , Richard Hoggart , Stephen Greenblatt , Stuart Hall , Tony Bennett

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Hi! Please can you provide me with citations for the quotes you include in the section on Mall Culture? thank you!

https://www.ijelr.in/3.3.16/17-19%20JUBINAROSA.S.S.pdf

• Key Theories of Raymond Williams – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes
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Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction

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Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction is a wide-ranging and stimulating introduction to the history and theory of Cultural Studies from Leavisism, through the era of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, to the global nature of contemporary Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction begins with an introduction to the field and its theoretical history and then presents a series of short essays on key areas of Cultural Studies, designed to provoke discussion and raise questions. Each thematic section examines and explains a key topic within Cultural Studies. Sections include: * the discipline * time * space * media and the public sphere * identity * sexuality and gender * value

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Simon During is a Professor in the English department at John Hopkins University. He has published widely in the field of Cultural Studies. His latest publication is Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, 2004)

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'essential reading for students studying culture' John Storey , The Times Higher Education Supplement 'a book of enormous usefulness' John Storey , The Times Higher Education Supplement  

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An essay on culture

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A Short History Of Cultural Studies

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The sage dictionary of cultural studies, interdisciplinarity in action: the centre for contemporary cultural studies, 1964–2002, high culture as subculture: brisbane's contemporary chamber music scene, ‘the future is an open future.’ cultural studies at the end of the ‘long twentieth century’ and the beginning of the ‘chinese century.’.

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Cultural Studies and the Culture Concept

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• https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000605

The aesthetic ordering of culture and the authorization of anthropological expertise

Mutable spatializations of cultures in movement, the culture concept, race and assimilation, genealogical work on the archive.

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My purpose in this paper is to complicate the genealogies of the concept of culture as a way of life that have held sway within cultural studies. I do so by reviewing key aspects in the development of this concept within the ‘Americanist’ tradition of anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas in the opening decades of the twentieth century and continued by a generation of Boas's students including Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber and Margaret Mead. I focus on three issues: the respects in which the ‘culture concept’ was shaped by aesthetic conceptions of form; its spatial registers; and its functioning as a new surface of government, partially displacing that of race, in the development of American multicultural policies in the 1920s and 1930s. In relating these concerns to Graeme Turner's enduring interest in the processes through which culture is ‘made national’, I indicate how the spatial registers of the culture concept anticipate contemporary approaches to these questions. I also outline what Australian cultural studies has to learn from the American evolution of the culture concept in view of the respects in which the latter was shaped by the racial dynamics of a ‘settler’ society during a period of heightened immigration from new sources. In concluding, I review the broader implications of the fusion of aesthetic and anthropological forms of expertise that informed the development of the culture concept.

• culture area
• anthropology
• way of life

There is little doubt that the concept of culture as a way of life initially provided the key authorizing concept for cultural studies as a distinctive intellectual and political practice. In endorsing Williams's definition, in The Long Revolution , of ‘the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’ (Williams cit. CCCS Citation 2013 , p. 884), the authors of the Fifth Report of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies identify three distinctive aspects of culture so defined: first, it interprets culture as ‘the whole pattern or configuration of values and meanings in a society’; second, it includes all forms of culture, whether ‘high’, ‘popular’ or ‘low’; and third, it views these expressive forms as an integral part of social life (CCCS Citation 2013 , p. 883). Yet the cultural studies literature has paid scant attention to either the distinctive intellectual qualities this concept acquired or the uses to which it was put in the ongoing process of refashioning that characterized its anthropological interpretation in America during the second, third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. Instead, following Williams's discussion in Keywords (Williams Citation 1976 ) and elsewhere, Footnote 1 it has rarely gone any further than to reference Edward Burnett Tylor's conception of culture as ‘taken in its wide ethnographic sense … that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society' (Tylor Citation 1871 , p. 1). This has also typically been evoked as an alternative to the evaluative hierarchies of aesthetic conceptions of culture. Considered assessments of the subsequent development of the concept within what is, for good reasons, Footnote 2 pointedly referred to as ‘Americanist’ anthropology have been notably lacking. Footnote 3

This is both surprising and regrettable. It is surprising in that many of the early formulations of cultural studies owe a good deal more to the intellectual legacy of the post-Boasian trajectories of the culture concept than they do to Tylor. The reference in the Birmingham Centre annual report to ‘the whole pattern of configuration of values and meanings' thus reflects the principles of the ‘configurational anthropology’ that Benedict introduced in her Patterns of Culture . Footnote 4 Williams also picks up on this aspect of Benedict's discussion when, in The Long Revolution , he says that ‘it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that any useful cultural analysis begins' (Williams Citation 1965 , p. 63). These perspectives formed a part of the intellectual milieu from which cultural studies emerged owing to the impact that American anthropology had on British debates about, and practical engagements with, culture in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly through Mass Observation. Footnote 5 The culture concept also shaped early American engagements with the analysis of mainstream American culture and its various subcultures – the R. Lynd and H. M. Lynd ( Citation 1929 ) study of Middletown, William Whyte's study of street-corner gang life (Whyte Citation 1993 ) and John Dollard's study of the relations between caste and class (Dollard Citation 1957 ), for example, which, in turn, significantly influenced CCCS's early work on subcultures (see Hall and Jefferson Citation 1975 ).

The neglect is regrettable for a number of reasons. Overlooking the twentieth-century history of the concept to claim, in Tylor, the conceptual foundations for a radical intellectual project is scarcely credible. Critical examinations of Tylor's concept have made clear its connections with Eurocentric cultural hierarchies, evolutionary conceptions of racial difference and genocidal colonial projects (Stocking Citation 1968 , Bennett Citation 1998 , Wolfe Citation 1999 ). The failure to disentangle the Boasian and post-Boasian development of the culture concept from Tylor's version has also meant that the more instructive lessons that this tradition has to offer cultural studies have not been articulated. Fortunately, though, in the process of abandoning it, American anthropologists have conducted a prolonged critical engagement with the American history of the culture concept, sometimes reflecting on its relations to the currency of culture as a way of life in British cultural studies. Footnote 6 The concept has been similarly probed by post-structuralist tendencies in American literary studies. Footnote 7 My purpose, in drawing on these literatures, though, is not to propose the culture concept as a model for cultural studies. There are, as we will see, good reasons why the concept fell out of favour within American anthropology, and no point is served by proposing its rehabilitation. I want rather to qualify and complicate how cultural studies has viewed its relations to its conceptual ‘pre-history’ and to identify some of the implications of this for its work in the present.

There will be three main aspects to my argument. First, I shall show that, far from offering an alternative to aesthetic conceptions of culture, the American culture concept was inherently aesthetic in its constitution. There is now a considerable literature exploring how Williams, in connecting the concept of culture as a way of life to the analysis of class relations, translated post-Kantian aesthetic conceptions into the politico-aesthetic project of the creation of a common culture – some of it favourable (Eagleton Citation 2000 ) and some more critical (Hunter Citation 1988 ). The aesthetic registers of the Boasian culture concept are different, focused more on the relations between race, nation and culture, but equally consequential. Second, I shall review Boasian accounts of the relationships between processes of diffusion and the organization of culture areas for the light they throw on the relations between space and cultural flows in ways that anticipated some the contemporary debates concerning the relations between culture, nation, globalization and processes of hybridization. Third, I shall argue that it was precisely the relations between the concept's aesthetic and spatial qualities that informed the concept's governmental deployment, in 1920s and 1930s America, as a resource for managing the relations between America's white ‘nativist’ stock and new generations of immigrants. This registered a departure from, while still remaining in the slipstream of, the earlier functioning of racial categories as the key means of managing the relations between different generations of immigrants and both Native Americans and African-Americans.

I shall, in addressing these concerns, relate them to Graeme Turner's ongoing engagement with the dynamics of Australian national cultural formation as perhaps the most enduring signature of his work. This is signalled by the titles of many of the books that he has written, co-authored or edited – Making it National: Nationalism and Australian Popular Culture ( Citation 1994 ); National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative ( Citation 1986 ); Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture ( Citation 1987 ); Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies (1993) – but is also present in other work: his recent studies of television, for example (Turner and Pertierra Citation 2013 ). Taken as a whole, his oeuvre offers a sustained intervention into debates concerning the distinguishing qualities of a national culture which, in its scope and depth, has no parallel in the cultural studies literature. Ranging widely across music, painting, film, television, literature, museums, exhibitions and everyday practices, Turner's historical canvass has stretched over the period from the occupation of Australia to the nationing projects of the post-Federation period, while also offering a closer examination of the changes that have characterized the ‘postcolonial’ projects of the post-war period. Footnote 8 Breaker Morant, Yothu Yindi, Marcus Clarke, the bicentennial celebrations of 1988, the Australian pub, Crocodile Dundee, the Heidelberg school, Tom Roberts, Jack Thompson, Peter Carey, Strictly Ballroom , John Laws and talkback radio, Alan Bond and the business sector, Malcolm Turnbull and republicanism: these are just some of the key figures, moments, texts and genres that Turner has discussed, placing them in the context of the changing coordinates of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and indigeneity that have shaped, and been shaped by, the dynamics of Australian culture.

Turner has also probed the distinctive qualities of Australian cultural studies by placing its approach to the relations between culture and nation in a comparative perspective. In his introduction to Nation , Culture , Text , he argues that ‘living in a new country’ involves ‘constant encounters with, and definite possibilities for intervening in, an especially explicit, mutable but insistent, process of nation formation’. This is contrasted to British cultural studies in which ‘“Britain” is exnominated; it is the unquestioned category which needs never to be spoken’, and to American cultural studies which Turner sees as steering clear of such questions given the tendency for ‘the American nation [to be] ritually spoken of in order to universalise itself – to, as it were, normatively Americanise the world’ (Turner Citation 1993 , pp. 8–9). He also suggests that Australian cultural studies exhibits a greater degree of hybridity than these more hegemonic national traditions, melding a wide range of theoretical traditions into a distinctive national theoretical formation shaped by the locally specific challenges of Australian conditions. Footnote 9 However, he sees these challenges as being more akin to American nation-culture formations than to British ones. Whereas Australia ‘has obsessively defined itself in opposition to Britain’, Turner argues, ‘its relation to America has largely been constructed in terms of similarity’ (Turner Citation 1994 , p. 95).

What he has in mind here largely concerns the repertoires of the Australian film and television industries. Yet, at least initially, the dynamics of Australian cultural studies were shaped more by Australian inflections of the class registers that typified British interpretations of the concept of culture as a way of life than by any direct engagement with the American tradition. Footnote 10 I want, then, to bend the stick in the other direction by exploring the processes involved in adjusting an imported concept of culture to the task of shaping a national culture that was to be defined against the elitist credentials of European humanist culture. From its initial application in studying the ways of life of Native Americans, the culture concept was subsequently applied in a search for a set of defining values that would distinguish American culture by finding these amidst the ordinary, everyday lives of regular Americans. Moreover, as a concept that was forged by a settler society to negotiate a new set of historical relations between a white north European ‘nativist’ stock, a radically depleted Native American population, an emancipated African-American population, and new immigrant populations from southern Europe, the American history of the culture concept also speaks directly to the roles that culture has played in Australia's post-war trajectories.

Let me go back to Williams who, in his Keywords entry on Culture, relies a good deal on Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions written by two Boasian anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn. The purpose of this survey was to disconnect the anthropological concept of culture from earlier European and humanistic traditions in order to place the study of culture on a purely scientific and American footing. Kroeber and Kluckhohn see this tendency as having had to struggle in face of the more established power of aesthetically evaluative European traditions. They thus note that although Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy was published only two years before Tylor's Primitive Culture , Arnold's definition of culture as the source of all sweetness and light was recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1893 whereas Tylor's usage had to wait until 1933 for its lexical validation. Their comments on T.S. Eliot have a similar edge to them. Eliot is congratulated for speaking of culture ‘in the quite concrete denotation of certain anthropologists' (Kroeber and Kluckhohn Citation 1952 , p. 32) as exemplified by his famous characterization of the activities that go together to make up the English way of life. But Kroeber and Kluckhohn take issue with Eliot's elitism – nicely satirized by Williams's characterization of Eliot's list as ‘sport, food, a little art’ (cit. Eagleton Citation 2000 , p. 113) in which the orchestrating principles of English culture (Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August) had clear ruling-class associations. Eliot is also taken to task for attempting to reconcile ‘the humanistic and social science views' (Kroeber and Kluckhohn Citation 1952 , p. 33) of culture as a misuse of the American anthropological tradition on which he drew.

Williams is critical of this aspect of Kroeber and Kluckhohn's discussion, insisting that the aesthetic and anthropological uses of the concept cannot be so easily disentangled. This bears crucially on their contention that Tyler's 1871 definition of culture and Boas's culture concept constituted the two key milestones on the royal road to the science they wished to establish. For in clasping Tylor and Boas together, they neglected the differences between them. These particularly concern the Boasian sense of culture as a creatively ordered whole in which the elements which comprise it are configured into a distinctively patterned way of life. Adam Kuper has succinctly summarized the difference between the two in noting that Tylor's definition amounted to no more than ‘a list of traits, with the consequence that culture might be inventoried but never analysed’ (Kuper Citation 2000 , p. 57). Boas also noted the difference. ‘Even Tylor,’ he once said, ‘thought that scraps of data from here, there, and everywhere were enough for ethnology’ (Boas cit. Benedict Citation 1943 , p. 3).

A number of issues coalesce here. The first concerns the transition from the style of armchair anthropology practiced by Tylor and the evolutionary assumptions underlying the typological method of museum displays which informed his collecting practices. Objects culled from diverse locations – by missionaries, traders, policemen or looters – were brought together in evolutionary sequences in testimony to a universal path of human development (Bennett Citation 2004 ). Although Boas cut his anthropological teeth in projects directed by Tylor, the problem space that he went on to develop was, George Stocking ( Citation 1968 ) contends, a quite different one in which the interpretation of fieldwork evidence made the specific patterns produced by the intermixing of the traits comprising any specific culture a particular historical problem that was not susceptible to any general laws of an evolutionary kind. Susan Hegeman develops this line of argument further seeing the Boasian fieldwork problematic as a key moment in the development of a new form of anthropological authority based on the anthropologist's unique ability to decipher the distinguishing qualities of other cultures. In place of a commitment to the collection of objects that could be put on display for all to see as evidence of a universal narrative of humanity, the Boasian paradigm substituted the more abstract object of ‘cultures' which required special methods of collection alert to the interrelations between objects, myths, rituals, language, etc., within a specific way of life accessible only to the trained anthropologist immersed in the culture in question (Hegeman Citation 1999 ). Each culture, as Boas put it, ‘can be understood only as an historical growth determined by the social and geographical environment in which each people is placed and by the way in which it develops the cultural material that comes into its possession from the outside or through its own creativeness' (Boas Citation 2010 , p. 4).

It is in the manner in which this creative capacity is conceived that aesthetic conceptions entered into the organization of this new form of anthropological expertise. This is, however, a matter that was subject to different formulations at different moments in the development of the culture concept. Boas was notably reticent on the subject, implicitly drawing on the Germanic tradition to impute the creativity of a people to their unique genius, a capacity which he sometime interpreted in terms of Herder's categories, sometimes in terms of those provided by Humboldt and sometimes in Kantian terms (Stocking Citation 1968 , Bunzl Citation 1996 ). As subsequently developed by his various students, however, the distinctive shape of a culture was re-interpreted in modernist terms as the result of a form-giving activity modelled on the work of art which, whether performed by individual or collective social agents, broke through inherited patterns of thought and behaviour to crystallize new social tendencies. The key intervention here was Edward Sapir's ( Citation 1924 ) paper ‘Culture, genuine and spurious’. Richard Handler summarizes the definition of culture proposed in this as consisting in: (1) ‘the idea that a culture is a patterning of values that gives significance to the lives of those who hold them’, (2) ‘that people's participation in the pattern is “instinctive” – in other words, unconscious’, (3) that in the case of genuine culture ‘the patterning of values is aesthetically harmonious’, and (4) that this harmony is expressive of ‘a richly varied and yet somehow unified and consistent attitude toward life’ (Handler Citation 2005 , p. 68).

It was this conception of a configurational order arising out of the form-giving principles that expressed the inner necessities of group life – of culture as ‘an integrated spiritual totality which somehow conditioned the form of its elements' (Stocking Citation 1968 , p. 21) – that differentiated the Boasian culture concept from Malinowski's functional conception of the social whole as an amalgamation of the pragmatic functions performed by different traits. As such it played two distinctive roles in the organization of new forms of anthropological authority. ‘Released from the burden of representing a coherent “humanity” and possessing a specialised knowledge of cultural diversity , Boas and his students became experts in the manipulation of cultural estrangement for the purposes of social critique’ (Hegeman Citation 1999 , 46). Their fieldwork amongst others – most notably the Native Americans of the western seaboard and the Plains Indians – provided the anthropologist with privileged access to principles of alterity which, echoing modernist conceptions of the work of art as a defamiliarizing device, could then be used to make the distinctive properties of American culture and society perceptible in new ways. Anthropology, as Robert Lynd put it, had a ‘priceless advantage over the other social sciences' (Lynd Citation 1967 , p. 156) derived from ‘tilling the overlooked field of primitive cultures in the backward corners of the world’ (p. 157) to give it a monopoly on the ‘indispensable raw material of the social sciences’. The primitive other constituted an experimental test tube in which, ‘boiled free of all the accompaniments of a capitalist economy’, he provided ‘for all the rest of us exact data on the range of human tolerance for institutional ways different from our own’ (p. 157) which could then be used in order ‘better understand and control our own culture’ (p. 158).

in so far as knowledge, emotion, and will are neither the result of natural endowment shared with other members of the species nor rest on an individual organic basis, we have a thing sui generis that demands for its investigation a distinct science. (Lowie Citation 1996 , p. 17)

Strictly speaking, material culture is not really culture at all. … Behind every artefact are the patterns of culture that give form to the idea for the artefact and the techniques of shaping and using it. … The use and meaning of any object depends almost wholly on non-material behaviour patterns, and the objects derive their true significance from such patterns. (p. 1)

Let me go back to Williams again. In opening his essay ‘Culture is ordinary’, it is the connections between place and way of life that Williams first looks to in order to convey a sense of culture's ordinariness. ‘To grow up in that country’, he says, ‘was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change’ (Williams Citation 1989 , p. 4). The country in question – the Border Country between England and Wales – is richly evoked by recounting a bus journey from Hereford to the Black Mountains. Orchards, meadows, hillside bracken, early iron works, Norman castles, steel mills, pitheads, the railway, scattered farms, town terraces – this is the regional scene that Williams starts with before populating it by describing his own working-class affiliations to it through his father and grandfather. But it is the sense of a wider spatially defined culture that comes first, and class second. The complex interplay between these regional and class coordinates also spills over into questions of Englishness as, with T.S. Eliot in his sights, he insists that it is working-class culture – and not the petty niceties of the English ruling class – that gives English culture, understood as a way of life, its distinctive coherence. Welsh culture too, of course; however, in this essay, it is Englishness that most concerns Williams in pinning his colours to the principles of ‘a distinct working-class way of life … with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment as … the best basis for any future English society’ (p. 8). Ways of life are thus defined spatially as well socially; they are regionally embedded; and the relations between them are nationally defining.

In highlighting the relations between place and way of life, Williams followed in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot who included among the three main conditions for culture ‘the necessity that a culture should be analysable, geographically, into local cultures' (Eliot Citation 1962 , Kindle loc. 70). And he acknowledges his debt to anthropologists in this regard: ‘By “culture”, then, I mean first of all what the anthropologists mean: the way of life of a particular people living together in one place’ (loc. 1687). Footnote 12 Although these connections between culture and place were, in the Boasian tradition, fluid and mutable, they have often been read as binding different ways of life, people and territories into essentialist relations to one another. There are a number of reasons for this. Some have to do with the interpretation of the culture concept in the context of American assimilationist policies in the late 1920s and 1930s in which the conception of America as a melting pot defined an emerging American national self-consciousness that was differentiated from European nationalisms (Gilkeson Citation 2010 , Mandler Citation 2013 ). Others derive from the territorialization of the culture concept during the 1939–1945 war and the post-war period when it was revised to refer to a field of national differences that were to be made commensurable with one another through the new geopolitical-diplomatic order of the United Nations (Orta Citation 2004 , Price Citation 2008 ).

Some of Boas's early work also echoed Herder's conception of culture as the expression of a geographically delimited people. Later, however, he rejected any sense that regional environments might be regarded as having a determining influence on cultures. ‘It is sufficient’, he wrote in 1932, ‘to see the fundamental differences of culture that thrive one after the other in the same environment, to make us understand the limitations of environmental influence’, adding, as a pointed contrast, that the ‘aborigines of Australia live in the same environment in which the White invaders live’ (Boas Citation 1982a , p. 256). The key questions here bear on Boasian conceptions of the relations between processes of cultural diffusion and the organization of cultural areas. These questions have been revisited in a substantial body of recent work which argues that the Boasian construction of these relations anticipates contemporary accounts of the relations between trans-border cultural flows and migration in breaking with the modernist order of nation states. It was, Ira Bashkow argues, ‘axiomatic to the Boasians that cultural boundaries were porous and permeable’, citing Robert Lowie's contention that any given culture is ‘a “planless hodgepodge”, a “thing of shreds and patches”’ as economically summarizing the view that any particular culture ‘develops not according to a fixed law or design but out of a vast set of contingent external influences' (Bashkow Citation 2004 , p. 445). These are brought into historically contingent, impermanent and unstable fusions with one another in particularly territorially marked culture areas, only to be later disaggregated in the context of different relations of cross-cultural contact and population migrations. Brad Evans similarly interprets Boas's significance as consisting not in his pluralization of the culture concept – something that Herder had already done – but in his conception of the ‘detachability’ of the texts and objects that comprise the elements of a culture from any organic association with any particular spatial or historical culture so that they might serve as ‘vehicles for the articulation and disarticulation of meaning across discontinuous geographies and temporalities' (Evans Citation 2005 , p. 15). Recounting Boas's role in the reconceptualization of folklore studies under the influence of turn-of-the-century developments in philology, Evans argues that these undermined earlier romantic and nationalist conceptions of an inherent connection between a particular people and a particular culture by reconceptualizing cultures as being, like languages, ‘public objects' formed by processes of historical interaction and migration beyond the control of individual speakers or speech communities.

The pattern of a culture, then, is not expressive of an essential set of relations between a people, place and way life but is a conjunctural and pliable articulation of those relations that derives its distinctive qualities from the creative, form-giving capacity of the people concerned. In turning now to consider how these spatial and aesthetic aspects of the culture concept informed the governmental rationalities that characterized the development of the relations between earlier ‘settlers' and more recent immigrants, and between both of these and Native Americans and African-Americans, I engage with recent re-evaluations of the relations between the culture concept and racial categories.

While the reappraisals of the Boasian tradition that I have drawn on above accentuate those aspects of the culture concept that resonate with contemporary accounts of processes of cultural hybridization, they are also careful to stress the differences. Moreover, many of the other qualities conventionally attributed to the culture concept – its rebuttal of hierarchical orderings of the relations between different cultures; its democratization of culture; and its critique of racial categories – do not withstand scrutiny. Although Boas contested the conception of ‘primitive cultures' as having had no history [‘even a primitive people has a long history behind it’ (Boas Citation 1974 , p. 68)] the distinction between primitive and civilized peoples was never entirely jettisoned. It informs Boas's account of the difference between ‘modern aesthetic feeling’ (Boas Citation 2010 , p. 356) and that of the primitive and, more forthrightly, it shapes Clark Wissler's characterization of primitives as ‘slackers in culture’ who, while they ‘have not stood still in so far as the content of their culture goes' are ‘in the manner of rationalisation … on the chronological level of past ages' (Wissler Citation 1923 , pp. 326–327). Footnote 13

The fact that your boy plays “button, button, who has the button?” is just as much an element of our culture as the fact that a room is lighted by electricity. So is the baseball enthusiasm of our grown-up populations, so are moving picture shows, thésdansants , Thanksgiving Day masquerades, bar-rooms, Ziegfeld Midnight Follies, evening schools, the Hearst papers, woman suffrage clubs, the single-tax movement, Riker drug stores, touring-sedans, and Tammany Hall. (Lowie Citation 1966 , pp. 6–7)

This bears on the third limitation of the culture concept: its relations to a set of biological race categories which excluded African-Americans and Native Americans from the machineries of assimilation that the concept established. This is not to discount the significance of Boas's persistent probing of racial accounts of human difference. ‘It has not been possible’, he wrote in 1920, ‘to discover in the races of man any kind of fundamental biological differences that would outweigh the influence of culture’ (Boas Citation 1920 , p. 35). This was, however, never a matter that he entirely put to rest. Throughout his career, and paralleling his ‘fieldwork’ among the Kwakiutal, the public school provided Boas with another context for collecting – not, though, stories, myths or languages, but anthropometric data relating to changes in the body types of second, relative to first, generation immigrants (Baker Citation 2010 , pp. 137–146). Boas conceived this work as a critical engagement with the problem space of anthropometry: ‘we have to consider the investigation of the instability of the body under varying environmental conditions as one of the most fundamental subjects to be considered in an anthropometric study of our population’ (Boas Citation 1982b , p. 59). However, while demonstrating the plasticity of bodily types in ways that suggested that immigrants might be just as malleable in their physiognomies as in their ways of life, Boas – and his followers – retained a distinction between ‘Caucasoid’, ‘Mongoloid’ and ‘Negroid’ as biologically differentiated stocks of humanity. Although not organizing the relations between these in hierarchical terms, these categorizations led Boas to place the Negro in a different position from the immigrant with regard to processes of assimilation. He interpreted this as not just a cultural process but as a physio-anatomical one that would likely depend on the disappearance of the Negro as a distinct physical type through miscegenation. Arguing that this would lead to a progressive whitening of the black population, he concluded that the continued persistence of ‘the pure negro type is practically impossible’ (Boas Citation 1974 , p. 330). Footnote 14 The situation with regard to Native Americans was different but scarcely more auspicious. On the one hand, in racial terms, they hardly mattered. The degree of intermarriage between Indians and settlers, Boas argued, had not been sufficient in ‘any populous part of the United States to be considered as an important element in our population’ (Boas Citation 1974 , p. 319). Nicely distanced from the urban centres of metropolitan America, Native Americans were not a part of the mix from which the future of America's population stock or its culture was to be forged. The ‘skeleton in the closet’ of Boasian anthropology, William Willis has argued, consists in the fact that, when applied across the colour line separating Caucasian from other populations, its lessons regarding the plasticity and conjunctural mutability of inherited cultures was translated into the enculturation of coloured people into white culture. ‘The transmission of culture from coloured peoples to white people was largely ignored’, he argued, ‘especially when studying North American Indians' (Willis Citation 1999 , p. 139). Either that or, in Ruth Benedict's conception, the cultures of the Indian and of white Americans had – after an initial period of interaction – come to face each other as two impermeable wholes, each unable to find any space for the values of the other within its own. ‘The Indians of the United States’, as she put it, ‘have most of them become simply men without a cultural country. They are unable to locate anything in the white man's way of life which is sufficiently congenial to their old culture’ (Benedict Citation 1947 , p. 1) and were thus located outside the melting point of an emerging American culture.

the civic story of assimilation (the process by which the Irish, Russian Jews, Poles, and Greeks became Americans) is inseparable from the cultural story of racial alchemy (the process by which Celts, Hebrews, Slavs, and Mediterraneans became Caucasians. (Jacobson Citation 1998 , p. 8)

Anthropology, Willis argued, was the discipline which, in one way or another, made non-white people into different human beings from white people. Whereas this had earlier been done by explicit racist ideologies, the Boasians achieved the same end through the concepts of culture and cultural relativism – sleights of hand, he suggests, which avoided black outrage at white dominance while retaining the status of non-whites as objects to be manipulated in a ‘laboratory’ setting, be it that of the field, the Indian reserve, or the public school. These were, however, more than just sleights of hand. They constituted, albeit partially and problematically, a displacement of not only race but also, as John Dewey recognized, Footnote 16 the primacy hitherto accorded individuals in liberal forms of rule as cultures, and the relations between them, were conceived as providing the working surfaces on the social – or, in Foucault's terms, the ‘transactional realities' (Foucault Citation 2008 , p. 297) – through which the relations between the populations constituting a multicultural polity were to be managed. This was, however, a polity with its own constitutive exclusions.

We can see, then, how the culture concept came to be aligned – in Turner's terms – with a project of ‘making culture national’ which American anthropology largely turned its back on during the critical fermentations of the 1960s. We can also understand the attractions of British cultural studies when, in the 1980s, its introduction to the American intellectual scene provided a critical alternative to this tradition. Footnote 17 If this owed a good deal to the influence of Williams's concept of culture as a way of life which, as we have seen, was defined primarily in terms of spatial and class coordinates, it owed more, over the longer term, to the work of Stuart Hall. For it was Hall who constituted the defining figure of cultural studies at its most critical point of entry into the USA and whose radical rethinking of the relations between race and ethnicity provided a productive alternative to the formulations of identity politics. Footnote 18

The entry of cultural studies into Australia differed in a number of ways. It took place earlier; it was significantly mediated through literary studies; and it was, initially, more responsive to the distinctive articulation of the relations between class, aesthetics and the concept of culture as a way of life that characterized Williams's project of a common culture. This is not, though, the perspective from which, in his key text of the 1990s, Turner engages with the making and remaking of Australian culture. It is rather Hall he looks to in order to understand hybridity as a process of cultural fusion of diverse elements into distinctive and mobile configurations that disrupt and contest the logic of assimilation while also providing an account of how identities are made and remade on the part of mobile forces that avoids ‘the trendy voyaging of the postmodern or simplistic versions of global homogenisation’ (Hall cit Turner Citation 1994 , p. 124). Turner does, so moreover, without defining national cultures as singular, bound in an essentialist way to a particular territory. It is rather a set of cultures in contentious dialogues and negotiations with one another that has to be reckoned with in the expectation that these will generate inherent contradictions which reflect Australia's ‘dual history as colonized and coloniser’ (p. 123) and as an immigrant country and in which immigrant cultures serve as a source of its future cultural dynamism.

If these represent the positive directions in which Turner urges that Australian culture should be remade, he is equally well aware of the forces arrayed against it. Some of these were identified by Ghassan Hage's account of the changing governmental articulations of the field of whiteness during successive phases in the post-1970s development of Australian multicultural policies, practices and discourses (Hage Citation 1998 ). There are strong parallels between this account and the governmental rationale that characterized the post-1924 deployment of the culture concept in America. They are, indeed, stronger than Hage recognizes. For Hage's focus on whiteness is restricted to its operation on and in the relations between different waves of Australia's migrant populations and their different degrees of whiteness. It accordingly pays little if any attention to the process through which Aborigines have been placed outside these frameworks. These issues come into sharper relief today when the political logics of Australia's multicultural programmes have become increasingly assimilationist while, at the same time, its immigration and Indigenous policies have introduced new forms of sequestration along racial lines with regard to refugees (through its border protection policies) while perpetuating long-standing forms of racial sequestration with regard to Indigenous Australians (through the Northern Territory Intervention and its successor programmes; see Macoun Citation 2011 ). A part of my concern, then, has been to suggest that the longer history of the culture concept in its Boasian and post-Boasian American formations affords a means of effecting a closer dialogue between the intellectual and governmental deployments of the concept of culture in Australia and America in terms of their shared properties as settler colonial societies with similar histories of immigration.

There is, however, a further value to be derived from a more critical and extended engagement with the conceptual prehistories of cultural studies. The concepts of culture with which we work always come to us wagging their histories behind them. But sometimes those histories are too foreshortened and partial. Hall recognized this when urging the need for ‘genealogical and archaeological work on the archive’ to counter the tendency to assume that cultural studies emerged ‘somewhere at that moment when I first met Raymond Williams or in the glance I exchanged with Richard Hoggart’ (Hall Citation 1992 , p. 277). I have therefore sought to draw a longer bow and to shift the angle of vision by looking at the history of the culture concept within American anthropology. I have, however, done no more than scratch the surface of a history that has had a long reach. It was a history in which culture was first conceived as an object of knowledge that was detached from those of psychology, biology and the environmental disciplines and affiliated to the emerging objects of sociological knowledge; it was a history in which earlier aesthetic conceptions of culture were refashioned to provide a new stratum of intellectuals with a means of acting on the social by guiding the relations between different ways of life; and it was a history in which this capacity came to be connected to the distinctive values of America's liberal and democratic ways of life to the extent that such adjustments of the relations between cultures were to arise out of the activities of their members rather than from coercive state edicts (Dewey Citation 1939 ).

It was also a history that helped to shape the roles that the culture as a way of life played in the early development of both British and Australian cultural studies. Footnote 19 Richard Handler, to recall an earlier aspect of my discussion, has commented on how Sapir's and Benedict's modernist concept of form helped to shape Williams' conception of the ordinariness of culture as something that is reshaped by the dynamic between the inherited repertoires of tradition and the creativity of a people. Handler also suggests that it is the notion of unconscious form that informs Richard Hoggart's account of working-class resistance to commercial mass culture. The ‘pattern of working-class culture’, he argues, ‘is alive – adaptive, resistant, persistent – precisely because its “bearers”, the “natives”, hold to it unconsciously’ (Handler Citation 2005 , pp. 163–164) albeit that this also accounts for, in Hoggart's estimation, its chief limitation: its inability to attain the forms of critical self-consciousness that are the hallmark of modernist literature. If this is one route, the literary route, through which the culture concept shaped the early formations of British cultural studies, its career, alongside a much wider set of initiatives that moved back and forth across the Atlantic during the 1939–1945 war and its immediate aftermath, Footnote 20 in pressing a case for culture as the most effective medium for the management of morale and the transformation of everyday habits, is another such route. We need to know more about both of these routes and, more crucially, their interactions to get a better sense of how cultural studies was initially shaped by projects aimed at the governance of conduct and the development of counter-conducts.

Notes on Contributor

Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in the UK. His main books include Formalism and Marxism (1979), Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987, with Janet Woollacott), Outside Literature (1991), The Birth of the Museum (1995), Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998), Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004) and Making Culture, Changing Society (2013). He is also a co-author of Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (1999) and Culture, Class, Distinction (2009).

Acknowledgement

The research for this paper was conducted as a part of the research project Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Practices of Social Governance& (DP110103776) funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). I am grateful to the ARC for its support.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

1 Evans ( Citation 2005 , p. 5) offers an especially pertinent discussion of the limitations of Williams' discussion with regard to the American development of the culture concept over the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century.

2 See, for example, Darnel ( Citation 1998 ). The good reasons I refer to concern the role the concept played in shaping a distinctive American sense of culture. However, having made the point, I shall henceforth use the more user-friendly ‘American’ in referring to this tradition.

3 The only source I have come across that affiliates its concerns specifically to those of cultural studies is Molloy ( Citation 2008 ), but this is to a rather loose sense of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary project. A search of the Cultural Studies website for ‘Boas' turned up only five references, two of which were to earlier papers of mine, where the Boasian tradition is addressed only incidentally. Searches of Continuum , the International Journal of Cultural Studies and Communication and Critical Cultural Studies turned up similar results.

4 In her correspondence with her publisher, Benedict notes that ‘Integrations of Culture’ or ‘Configurations of Culture’ were her preferred titles from the point of view of exactness, but she felt they were too ‘clumsy and Latinized’ compared to ‘Patterns' – ‘a pleasant English word’. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, Vassar College Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, Series XVI, Margaret Mead, Folder 120.27 Patterns of Culture. See also Modell ( Citation 2004 ).

5 Hubble ( Citation 2006 ) engages with Mass Observation as a prelude to aspects of cultural studies; Mandler ( Citation 2013 ) provides a detailed account of the role of anthropology in American and British approaches to the conception and management of morale in the 1939–1945 War; Groth and Lusty ( Citation 2013 , pp. 158–159) show the influence of the concept of ‘culture patterns' on Mass Observation approaches to the analysis of dreams.

6 The final chapter of Gilkeson ( Citation 2010 ) offers a detailed discussion of the reactions of American anthropologists to the importation of cultural studies.

7 See, for example, Brown ( Citation 2003 ), Hegeman ( Citation 1999 ) and Manganaro ( Citation 2002 ).

8 I place ‘postcolonial’ in quotes since – as Turner recognizes – Australia remains a settler colony so far it relations to Indigenous Australians are concerned.

9 Larry Grossberg has taken issue with this aspect of Turner's work, arguing that such processes of theoretical hybridization are a generally shared characteristic of the conjunctural, context specificity that he imputes to cultural studies as a practice. He has also lodged a wider objection to any attempt to articulate cultural studies to geography by seeking to define nationally specific traditions urging, instead, the need to ‘displace’ cultural studies. [I refer to the essay ‘Where is the “America” in American cultural studies?’ in Grossberg ( Citation 1997 )].

10 And, of course, Turner's own account of British cultural studies (Turner Citation 1996 ) played a key role here.

11 There was a good deal of overlap between the anthropological concept of culture and the concept of society developed by Parsonian sociology. See Kroeber and Parsons ( Citation 1958 ) for an attempt to legislate an agreed division of conceptual territory between the two disciplines.

12 See Manganaro ( Citation 2002 ) for a detailed discussion of the influence of American anthropology on Eliot.

13 While there are partial overlaps between Boas's and Wissler's work on culture areas, Wissler affiliated to the eugenic camp in opposition to Boas's position on the racial questions that divided early twentieth century anthropology. See Spiro ( Citation 2002 ).

14 Boas position here echoed the formulations of John Wesley Powell, the head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the key figure in late-nineteenth-century American anthropology. However, it has a longer history. It was a commonly held belief of slave owners in the mid-nineteenth century; Frederick Douglas ( Citation 2000 , p. 55) refers to it in his famous narrative of slave life. These aspects of the Boasian tradition help to explain why, although they had some personal and political connections, W.E.B. Du Bois never embraced Boas's culture concept (Evans Citation 2005 )

15 While there is not space to go fully into the matter, Julien Carter ( Citation 2007 ) builds on Jacobson's discussion to illuminate the sexual dynamics that accompanied these developments as new norms of heterosexuality reinforced racialized divisions between Caucasian and other groups through the unequal distribution of the capacity for governing the passions that they attested to.

16 Dewey's Freedom and Culture (Dewey Citation 1939 ) offers an eloquent discussion of the significance of the anthropological concept of culture in offering the potential to entirely transform the problematics of liberal government in these regards. I have discussed this elsewhere (Bennett Citation 2014 ).

17 See especially on this the final chapter of Gilkeson ( Citation 2010 ). Handler ( Citation 2004 ) also alludes to the perturbations occasioned among anthropologists by this intrusion of an interloper into what they had regarded as their key conceptual terrain at precisely the moment they were abandoning it.

18 Grossberg ( Citation 1997 ) refers particularly to the work of Hall and Paul Gilroy in this regard.

19 The Boasian culture concept also impacted on post-war French anthropology in varied ways. It contributed to Claude Levi-Strauss's conversion to pluralist and relativist understanding of cultures (Descola Citation 2013 , p. 75) and to the development of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. Bourdieu's familiarity with the work of Melville Herskovits, a Boas protégé, provided a model of distinctly cultural mechanisms of inheritance as an alternative to biological ones (Robbins Citation 2005 , pp. 16–20).

20 See, for an account of such projects more closely related to the social sciences, Rose ( Citation 1999 ).

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The Importance of My Culture

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