Five types of cultural studies

Five types of cultural studies

  v Introduction

Before we go to the point that what is Cultural Studies? We have to understand what is Culture? In dictionary cultural means the art, customs, lifestyles, background and habits that characterize a particular society or nation. We have different culture like western culture, eastern, Latin, Middle Eastern and African culture etc. Now, let’s first see what culture is.

  Ø What is culture?

  ü Culture is the word that we have got from Latin word ‘cultura ’.

  ü ‘To honour’ and ‘ protect ’.

  ü Culture is a representative of communication.

  ü Culture is the structure of knowledge shared by a quite large group of people.

  ü “Culture is the learned activities of society or a subgroup.”

  Ø What is Cultural Study?

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

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

  v Five types of cultural studies:

There are five types of cultural studies. Now let’s check it out that how these five types of cultural studies differs from the other one. These Studies are:

ü British cultural materialism

ü New Historicism

ü American Multiculturalism

ü Post modernism and popular culture

ü Postcolonial studies

  Ø British cultural Materialism

Cultural studies are referred to as cultural materialism in Britain. Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture. “There are no masses; There are only ways of seeing other people as masses”

 Williams

Edward Burnett Tylor’s pioneering anthological study ‘primitive culture

“ Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which include knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, and any other capabilities and habits by man as a member of society”

  Ø Britain has two trajectories for culture

1—First leads to past culture preserver

2—Second leads to future Althussar insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people that the main function of ideology was to produce the society’s existing relations of production and that function is even carried out in literary texts.

Cultural materialists also revolved around more humanized and even spiritual insights of the great students of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian formalist Bakhtn, especially his extension of the dialog form.

  Ø New Historicism: ‐

New historicism is a school of literary theory, first developed in 1980. the term ‘new historicism’ was created by the American critic Stephen Greenbelts.  A new historicism looks at literature  in  wider historical  context, examining both how the writer ‘s times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer’s times, in turn recognizing that current cultural contexts colour that critic’s conclusion.

“The text is historical, and history textual”

Michael Warner phrases “History is always historicized”

  

Much new historicism focuses on the marginalization of subjects such as those identified as withes, the insane, heretics, vagabonds, and political prisoners. Laputa ''the where ''what did Jonathan swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels? It is a question that has political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set an ideology left over from the previous century. New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissances and Romantic periods and has revised motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing.

  Ø American Multiculturalism

          As a philosophy, multiculturalism began as part of the pragmatism movement at the end of the 19th century in Europe and United States. American multiculturalism was come into existence in 1964 with the passing civil right Act.

“Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest……….”

In 1972 Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard Lewontin found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. In the new country, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception.

As we discuss above that American Multiculturalism have its different four types like,

American identity is vested in a commitment to core values expressed in the American Creed and the ideals of Exceptionalism raises a fundamental concern that has been the source of considerable debate. Can American identity be meaningfully established by a commitment to core values and ideals among a population, The American Studies curriculum serves to illustrate this shift in attitude. The curriculum, which had for decades relied upon the “melting pot” metaphor as an organizing framework, began to employ the alternative notion of the “American mosaic.” Multiculturalism, in the context of the “American mosaic,” celebrates the unique cultural heritage of racial and ethnic groups, some of whom seek to preserve their native language and lifestyle.

  Ø Postmodernism and popular culture

Postmodernism

                 The term ‘postmodernism’ first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Postmodernism question everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true. Postmodernism possesses several element which are necessary which given by Jean Baudrillard. It also affected in

o   Building

o   Literature

o   Cinema

o   Painting

o   Music

o   Photography etc

Postmodernism like poststructuralist and deconstruction is a critique of aesthetic of the preceding age, but besides more critique post modernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition.

Postmodernism is not a method of doing philosophy, but rather a way of approaching traditional ideas and practices in non‐traditional ways that deviate from re-established super structural modes. This has caused difficulties in defining what postmodernism actually means or should mean and therefore remains a complex and controversial concept, which continues to be debated. The idea of the postmodern gained momentum through to the 1950s before dominating literature, art and the intellectual scene of the 1960s. Postmodernism's origins are generally accepted as having been conceived in art around the end of the nineteenth century.

Popular culture

There are four main types of popular culture analysis.

·        Production analysis.

·        Textual analysis.

·        Audience analysis.

·        Historical analysis.

Popular culture is the media, products, and attitudes considered to be part of the mainstream of a given culture and the everyday life of common people. Studying media culture is not only to focus on the ‘cultural aspects’ of any media but also paying attention to the economics of media.

This term as it is also known as Pop Culture so The term ‘Popular Culture' was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, the term has denoted the education and general “culturedness” of the lower classes, as opposed to the “official culture” and higher education emanated by the dominant class. The stress in the distinction from “official culture” became more pronounced towards the end of the 19th century 

  Ø Postcolonial Studies

            So far as my reading concerned about this study of postcolonial we can say that it is against colonialism because colonialism came into existence at the beginning of the century but slowly and steadily some people started to oppose against it so Anti-colonialism came into Enlightment so post-colonialism came into utilization oppose the colonialism though it came into later on but we can find the post-colonial study in the play.

Third world of writers :-

·        Frantz Fanon.

·        Homi k. Bhabha’s.

·        Salman Rushdie.

·        Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak

Post colonialism came into utilization to oppose the Colonialism though it came into later on but we can find the postcolonial study in the play A Tempest which is written by Aime Ceaser which also deals with the Postcolonial study because in this kind of study an Individual can find the conflict between colonizer and the colonized people as it is found in many of work of literature and the best example is A tempest which also highlights the same thing in the play. Many third words write focus on both colonialism and the change created a postcolonial culture.

  Ø Conclusion

  

So, cultural studies we can find five types of cultural studies. Which were helps to recognize the different cultures with the different communities and histories. Cultural Studies exists with particular ideas which shows particular cultural world. Sometimes popular culture can so overtake and repackage a literary work.