Introduction. Cultural studies is very young scientific field and focuses on the relations between social relations and meanings – or more exactly on the way social

 

Федеральное агентство по образованию

 

Государственное образовательное учреждение высшего профессионального образования «Санкт-Петербургский государственный инженерно-экономический университет»

 

 

 

Кафедра философии

 

 

Cultural studies is very young scientific field and focuses on the relations between social relations and meanings – or more exactly on the way social divisions are made meaningful. In general terms, culture is seen as the sphere in which class, gender, race and other inequalities are naturalized and represented in forms which sever (as far as possible) the connection between these and economic and political inequalities.

Cultural studies straddles the intellectual and academic landscape from old established disciplines to new political movements, intellectual practices and modes of inquiry such as Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism and post-structuralism. It moves from discipline to discipline, methodology to methodology, according to its own concerns and motivations. This is why cultural studies is not a discipline. It is, in fact, a collective term for diverse and often contentious intellectual endeavours that address numerous questions, and consists of many different theoretical and political positions.

In Western countries Cultural Studies is closely connected with Cultural Anthropology and appeared as a discipline in Great Btitain. British anthropology developed alongside the growth of empire; its preoccupations were fuelled by the need of the colonial administration to take the measure of its presumed superiority over administered nations, and to turn a knowledge of their social organizations and cultural traditions to the service of indirect rule.

For instance, Indians have been represented in colonial literature – in the novels of Rudyard Kipling(1865-1936) and E.M. Forster(1879-1970) for example – as cowards, effeminate, untrustworthy. The representative entity outside the self – that is, outside one’s own gender, social group, class, culture or civilization – is the Other. The most common representation of the Other is as the darker side, the binary opposite of oneself: we are civilized, they are barbaric; the colonists are hard-working, the natives are lazy etc.

For understanding and explaining this problem scholars use the notion of discourse whichbinds all these concepts into a neat package. A discourse consists of culturally or socially produced groups of ideas containing texts (which contain signs and codes) and representations (which describe power in relation to Others). As a way of thinking, a discourse often represents a structure of knowledge and power. A discursive analysis exposes these structures and locates the discourse within wider historical, cultural and social relations.

So, Cultural studies functions by borrowing freely from social science disciplines and all branches of humanities and the arts. It appropriates theories and methodologies from Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, History, Art Theory, Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Musicology, and Political Science. Almost any method from textual analysis, ethnography and psychoanalysis to survey research can be used to do cultural studies.

Historically, the name “cultural studies” derives from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964. In 1972, the Centre published the first issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies with the specific aim “to define and occupy a space” and “to put cultural studies on the intellectual map”. The works of Richard Hoggart (b. 1918), Raymond Williams (1921-88), E.P. Thompson (1924-93) and Stuart Hall (b. 1932), all of whom were associated with CCCS at various times, are regarded as the foundational texts of cultural studies.

Working-class intellectuals like Hoggart and Williams saw their task as endorsing the culture of common people against the canonical elitism (high culture) of the middle and upper classes. They celebrated the authentic popular culture of the new industrial working class. Their focus was on how culture is practised and how culture is made – or how cultural practice leads different groups and classes to struggle for cultural domination.

In many countries of Continental Europe, by contrast, the growth of anthropology (more commonly known as ethnology) was linked to emergent nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the efforts, on the part of adherents of each movement, to discover a national heritage in the traditions of local folk or peasant culture.

In North America the situation was different again: the United States and Canada had their indigenous Indian populations, and the first priority of many American anthropologists was to record as much as possible about the physical features, material artefacts, languages and cultures of extant Amerindian groups before it was too late. This was a kind of salvage anthropology.

An other facet to the diversity of anthropological approaches lies in the fact that anthropology, as it exists today, is not a single field, but is rather a somewhat contingent and unstable amalgam of subfields, each encumbered with its own history, theoretical agenda and methodological preoccupations.

In the American tradition of scholarship, it has long been customary to distinguish four such subfields of anthropology, namely physical, archaeological, cultural and linguistic. In the British tradition, by contrast, there are only three subfields, of physical anthropology, archaeology and social (rather than cultural) anthropology.

Most academic disciplines and their boundaries are, in fact, the fossilized shells of burnt-out theories, and in this, anthropology is no exception. The theory which, more than any other, established anthropology as a comprehensive science of humankind held that people the world over are undergoing a gradual, evolutionary ascent from primitive origins to advanced civilization, and that the differences between societies can be explained in terms of the stages they have reached in this progression.

Anthropology, then, emerged as the study of human evolution –conceived in this progressive sense – through the reconstruction of its earlier stages. Physical anthropology studied the evolution of human anatomy, archaeology studied the evolution of material artefacts, and social and cultural anthropology studied the evolution of beliefs and practices – on the assumption that the ways of life of contemporary ‘primitives’ afford a window on the former condition of the more ‘civilized’ nations.

In short, it was progressive evolutionism that unified the study of human anatomy, artefacts and traditions as subfields of a single discipline. Yet this kind of evolutionary theory belongs essentially to the formative period of anthropology in the nineteenth century and is, today, almost universally discredited. So what, if anything, still holds the sublfields together?

To the extent that contemporary anthropologists concern themselves with this question, their opinions differ greatly. Many cultural anthropologists, concerned as they are with the manifold ways in which the peoples among whom they have worked make sense of the world around them, find more common ground with students of philosophy, language, literature and the arts than with their colleagues in other fields of anthropology. Social anthropologists, who would regard their project as a comparative study of the generation, patterning and transformation of relationships among persons and groups, profess a close affinity – amounting almost to identity – to sociologists and historians, but have little time for archaeology (despite the obvious links between archaeology and history).

For their part, physical anthropologists (or ‘biological anthropologists’, as many now prefer to be known) remain committed to the project of understanding human evolution, but their evolutionary theory is of a modern, neo-Darwinian variety, quite at odds with the progressive evolutionism of the nineteenth century. Having vigorously repudiated the racist doctrines of the turn of the century, which cast such a shadow over the early history of the discipline, anthropologists of all complexions now recognize that social and cultural variation is quite independent of biogenetic constraint. Thus physical anthropology, cut loose from the study of society and culture, has virtually become a subfield of evolutionary biology, devoted specifically to the evolution of our own kind.

Yet despite these tendencies towards the fragmentation of anthropology, along the lines of the heavily institutionalized division of academic labour between the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, many anthropologists remain convinced that there is more to their discipline than the sum of its parts. What is distinctive about the anthropological perspective, they argue, is a commitment to holism, to the idea that it should be possible – at least in principle – to establish the interconnections between the biological, social, historical and cultural dimensions of human life that are otherwise parcelled up among different disciplines for separate study.

According to Ziauddin Sardar the history of cultural studies has provided it with certain distinguishable characteristics that can often be identified in terms of what cultural studies aims to do.

1. Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. Its constant goal is to expose power relationships and examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices.

2. Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture as though it was a discrete entity divorced from its social or political context. Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyse the social and political context within which it manifests itself.

3. Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.

4. Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (that is, intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) and objective (so-called universal) forms of knowledge. It assumes a common identity and common interest between the knower and the known, between the observer and what is being observed.

5. Cultural studies is committed to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action. The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement.

Thus in Western society Cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in industrial capitalist societies in particular. After such an approach culture is also the means by and through which various subordinate groups live and resist their subordination. Culture is, then, the terrain on which hegemony is struggled for and established, and hence it is the site of ‘cultural struggles’.

Clearly this approach to culture differs markedly from that of the Cultural critics for whom culture is the sphere of art, aesthetics and moral/creative values.

Unlike traditional academic disciplines, cultural studies did not have (or seek) a well-defined intellectual or disciplinary domain. It flourished at the margins of and by successive encounters with different institutionalized discourses, especially those of literary studies, sociology and history; and to a lesser extent of linguistics, semiotics, anthropology and psychoanalysis.

Partly as a result, and partly in response to the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s (which saw rapid developments internationally in structuralism, semiotics, Marxism, feminism) cultural studies entered a period of intensive theoretical work. The aim was to understand how culture (the social production of sense and consciousness) should be specified in itself and in relation to economics (production) and politics (social relations).

This required the elaboration of explicit and historically grounded theoretical models, and the reworking of certain central organizing concepts (for example, class, ideology, hegemony, language, subjectivity). Meanwhile, attention at the empirical level was focused on ethnographic and textual studies of those cultural practices and forms that seemed to show how people exploit the available cultural discourses to resist the authority of dominant ideology. In particular, spectacular youth subcultures (teds, mods, bike-boys, hippies, skinheads, punks) were studied as instances of ‘resistance through rituals’.

Subsequently, advances in feminist theory and politics challenged the monopoly of attention given to male subcultural activities. Cultural studies is currently at the stage of coming to terms with both feminism and multi-culturalism. The outcome of these encounters is not as yet fully worked through.

Throughout its short history, Cultural studies has been characterized by attention to the politics of both methods of study and academic disciplines. There has been a continuing criticism of the ideologies of objectivity and empiricism, and cultural studies makes explicit what other academic disciplines often leave implicit – that the production of knowledge is always done either in the interests of those who hold power or of those who contest that hold.

The modern literature of the general readers on cultural studies can be mentioned here: Cultural Studies edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treicher (Routledge, London 1992). Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin, London 1958); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Penguin, London 1966, first published 1958). What is Cultural Studies?, edited by John Storey, (Edward Arnold, London 1996) contains some good papers on American and Australian cultural studies. Vinay Lai’s South Asian Cultural Studies (Manohar, Delhi 1996) provides a bibliographical map of the thriving cultural studies industry in the Subcontinent. An insightful discussion of post-colonialism can be found in Robert Young’s White Mythologies (Routledge, London 1990). Edward Said’s Orientalism (Routledge, London 1978) is very popular in the West Cultural Studies programs. Sandra Harding’s anthology, Michael Adas’ Machines as the Measure of Men (Cornell University Press, London 1989) gives a penetrating insight into science, technology and the ideologies of dominance. A good overview of the cultural studies of technology is found in Techno-Science and Cyber-Culture, edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Matinson and Michael Menser (Routledge, London 1996). Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome Ravetz provide an accessible introduction to the cultural politics of Cyberfutures (Pluto Press, London 1996). But there are no substitutes for Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women (Free Association Books, London 1991). Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, 2 volumes, (Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine 1993) and Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press, Boston, Mass. 1990) show new tendencies in the Global World. Queer Theory/Sociology, edited by Steven Seidman (Blackwell, Oxford 1996) contains some papers on the popular discussion about construction of homosexual identity. Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora (Routledge, London 1996), Raymond Chow’s Writing Diaspora (Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1993) and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (Verso, London 1993) provide insights into Asian, Chinese and Black diasporas in the West. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon’s Cultural Politics (Blackwell, Oxford 1995) gives a comprehensive account of class, gender, race and the postmodern world. Malcolm Waters makes Globalisation (Routledge, London 1995) relatively palatable. John Tomlinson gives a very clear account of Cultural Imperialism (Pinter, London 1991). And Ziauddin Sardar’s Postmodernism and the Other (Pluto, London 1997) speaks about “the new imperialism of Western culture”. Anwar Ibrahim, The Asian Renaissance (Times Books, Kuala Lumpur 1996) provides a perspective from a different culture.

Besides this there are a number of introductions to anthropology: Social Anthropology (Leach 1982), Other Cultures (Beattie 1964), also dictionaries – The Dictionary of Anthropology (Barfield 1997), Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology (Seymour-Smith 1986), encyclopaedias – Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Barnard and Spencer 1996), Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (Levinson and Ember 1996), Robert Winthrop’s Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology (1991), and South African Keywords edited by Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp (1988).

Classical works on philosophy of culture should be mentioned as well: Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1982) ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, in S.Sontag (ed.) A Barthes Reader, London: Cape. Cohen, A.P. (1994) Self Consciousness. An Alternative Anthropology of Identity, London: Routledge. Collingwood, R.G. (1940) Essays on Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dumont, L. (1980) Homo hierarchicus, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1970 [1903]) Primitive Classification, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row. Gadamer, H.-G. (1976) Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Huizinga, J. (1924) The Waning of the Middle Ages, London: Edward Arnold. Lé vi-Strauss, C. (1963) Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books. Levy-Bruhl, L. (1985 [1910]) How Natives Think, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1986) The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Malinowski, B. (1948) Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays, Glencoe: Free Press. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1956) The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, New York: Doubleday. Parsons, T. (1977) Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory, New York: Free Press. Popper, K. (1966) The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 2), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Propp, V. (1968) Morphology of the Folk Tale, Austin: University of Texas Press. Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Sapir, E. (1956) Culture, Language and Personality, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1997) Existentialism and Humanism, London: Methuen. Weber, M. (1964) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, New York: Free Press. Whitehead, A. (1925) Science and the Modern World, New York: Macmillan. Wolf, E. (1974) Anthropology, New York: Norton.