Abstract
The
objective of this assignment is to simplify the “Cultural Studies” mostly the introduction to culture study. It
emerged in the process of globalization both national and regional in the west
and later in India. Cultural Studies become more prominent during the neo-
liberalism in Britain and U.S, later it become a global force/movement, and attracted
many universities and institution. Cultural Studies focused in this assignment
is concept of culture and its definition, what does mean cultural studies and
its impact on society, its emergence, objectives, characteristics and whose
culture is being studied. And cultural studies needs and useful in globalized
society; its importance in today’s current scenario and its scope, how the
studies look at different dimension of life of the people as such economic,
social, political, religion and so on.
Key words- Neo liberalism, cultural,
cultural studies, transdisciplinary
Concept
of Culture
Culture can be anything
as it is used culture shock, Canadian culture, multicultural; even it is more
diverse in usage like non anthropologist and non- sociologist it may be
agriculture or bacterial culture. And a continuum it may be global culture,
world culture, cultural evolution or public culture or if one look at the base
of way of life it may consider as rural culture, corporate culture, Canadian
culture, youth culture. If one look at culture from a set of shared attitudes,
values, goals and practices it may be of high culture, to be culture,
uncultured, culture event, counter culture, elite culture. And culture can be
of identity. When one look the culture from the celebration perspective it
becomes cultural diversity, cultural awareness, multicultural, intercultural,
cross cultural and cultural exchange. And on the disparagement of difference it
is cultural shock, deviant culture, pop culture, subculture and cultural
assimilation. And according to E. B.
Tylor 1871 Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense is
“that complex whole which includes
knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired my man as a member of society.” Culture is a way of life
which includes material objects, ideas, attitudes, values, behavior pattern
means “everything that people have,
think, and do as members of a society” (Ferraro, 2003). After all culture
is learned, unconscious, shared, dynamics, integrated, symbolic, relative and
so on.
Culture
Definition
Culture can be
define as ‘the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values,
attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial
relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions
acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual
and group striving.’
Cultural
Studies
A cultural study is an
innovative multidisciplinary field of research and teaching investigation of
‘culture’. It creates and transforms the individual experiences, everyday life,
social relations and power. In research and teaching the culture is understood
as the human expressive, symbolic activities and distinctive ways of life. It
combines the studies of social sciences and humanities in order to draw methods
and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history,
cultural, anthropology and economics. It addresses new questions and problems
of today’s world. It is devoted to understanding of the processes in societies
and diverse groups with history, community life, and the challenges of the
future.
Objective of Culture Studies
a.
To
promote and develop the teaching and scholarship of Cultural Studies.
b.
To
promote and develop research in Cultural Studies.
c.
To
actively advocate for Cultural Studies as a discipline of study in university,
industry and government forums.
d.
To
foster and develop networks of scholars engaged in Cultural Studies.
e.
To
mentor and provide support to students of Cultural Studies.
f.
To
deliver public events, including an annual conference, showcasing the work of
the Association and its members.
g.
To
represent Cultural Studies in media and other public forums.
h.
To
be a national voice on cultural issues.
i.
To
promote links with other international Cultural Studies organizations and
associations overseas.
j.
To
do all things necessary and expedient for the proper, full and effectual
carrying out of all of the objects of the Association.
Characteristic of cultural studies
In his 1994 book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main
characteristics of cultural studies.
·
The
objective of Cultural Studies includes understanding culture in all its complex
forms and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests
itself.
·
Cultural
Studies is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and
action.
·
Cultural
Studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome
the split between tacit forms of knowledge (cultural) and objective forms of
knowledge (universal).
·
Cultural
Studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of
political action.
Emergence of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is a
field of theoretical, political, and empirical engaged cultural analysis which
initially developed by British academicians in the late 1950s, 60s and 70s. It
has been taken up and transformed by many scholars in different discipline
around the world. Cultural studies are acknowledged today as interdisciplinary
subject and sometimes as anti-disciplinary. By and large most practitioners of
cultural studies are professional academics, Gilbert Rodman argued in his 2015 book, Why Cultural Studies? that the
filed must be understood to include some non-academic ones. A key concern
for cultural studies is the examination of the forces within and through which
socially organized people conduct and construct their everyday lives; rather
having a singular theoretical approach. Cultural studies are a diverse field
that encompasses a range of different theoretical and methodological
perspectives and practices. It is distinct from the discipline of cultural
anthropology, ethnic studies, ideology, class structures, national formations,
ethnicity, sexuality and gender. It involves variety of political and critical
approach like semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, critical race theory, post
structuralism, post colonialism, social theory, political theory, history,
philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication
studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history
and criticism. In 2002, the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of
Birmingham, UK, which was the world's first
institutional home of cultural studies, was closed due to the result of the Research Assessment
Exercise of 2001. The RAE, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led
UK government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs. While cultural studies continues to
have many critics, the field has become a kind of world-wide movement that is
to this day associated with a raft of scholarly associations and programs,
annual international conferences, publications, students and practitioners,
from Taiwanto Amsterdam and from Bangalore to Santa Cruz.
Whose
Cultural Studies?
Cultural studies refers
to multidisciplinary intellectual movement that has an oppositional history but
doesn’t have any site of domination rather there is free reproduce of
themselves. It is the study of anthropologist, English department and ethnic
studies faculty. (American
Anthropological Association “Whose Culture Studies?" - Renato Rosalda,
Professor Department of Anthropology Stanford University, Stanford) as
Renato explain cultural studies can be of American studies, French studies or
Indian studies; everything includes cultural to understand the society properly
of life style, pattern, livelihood, housing, festivals, foods, dressing and so on. It is the culture of one
particular groups, society and state in which it is being analyzed, interpreted
and given new dimension to it. The cultural studies also the hegemony in the
field; we always talk of super nation rather the third world country’s culture
and by following those it led them to narrow down the study of India or else
country, then tribe, community and family.
Nature
and Scope of Cultural Studies
Meaghan Morris puts
cultural studies as unprecedented international boom leading to intellectual
life. Cultural studies hold special intellectual promises and cut across
diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within
the current scene. Lata Mani in her cultural studies imagines- “a location
where the new politics of differences- racial, sexual, cultural, and
transnational- can combine and be articulated in all their dazzling plurality.”
It is too material, economic promise and intellectual achievement to its
current vogue. In U.S where the boom is especially strong many academic
institutions- presses, journals, hiring committees, conferences, university
curricular have created significance investment in cultural studies.
The cultural studies
identify the different dimension of study, varied effects, intellectual
history, varying definitions, current affiliations and affinities and diverse
objects of study and its possible future. Major categories of current work in
cultural studies- the history of cultural studies, gender and sexuality, nationhood
and national identity, colonialism and post colonialism, race and ethnicity,
popular cultural and its audience, science and ecology, identity politics,
pedagogy, the politics of aesthetics, cultural institutions, the politics of
disciplinarily, discourse and sexuality,
history and global culture in a postmodern age.
One way to understand
cultural studies is to suggest different domain, method and intellectual
legacy. The cultural studies doesn’t have any stable disciplinary base rather
it draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required
for a particular projects. Even cultural studies doesn’t follow any particular
methodology, no unique statistical, ethno methodological or textual analysis.
Its methodology is ambiguous in nature; although some thinkers try to give some
definition for cultural studies but it is impossible to agree on any essential
definition of cultural studies. As Stuart
Hall “cultural studies is not one things, it has never been one thing”
cultural studies needs to remain open to unexpected, unimagined, even uninvited
possibilities. There is no control over the study in the development; when
question arises ‘what cultural studies really mean’-it becomes impossible to
specify for all times and spaces; and it became difficult to defined and
conceptualized. Many believe ‘cultural studies cannot be just anything.’
Cultural
Studies as transdisciplinary
The transdisciplinarity
of cultural studies and its relevance to and promise for research in education,
sociology, psychology, curriculum studies, the arts, and semiotics. The author
(in one of the article “Visual Cultural
Studies and Human Rights”-published university of Illinois press by James
Sanders, The Ohio State University) argues that cultural studies not only
must sustain a serious commitment to social justice, democracy, and critiques
of manipulative consumptive performances but also that it should be more
attentive to issues of human rights, the (in) equitable distribution of
cultural significance, and the embodied sexualized subject.
Cultural studies has
shifted the field of art education's curricular focus from technical
transmission of formalist concerns, studio technologies, art historic studies,
criticism, and aesthetic valuations (which may or may not be in the interest of
a ruling elite) to a cultural pluralist curriculum concerned with the
production of meaning and distributions of power within research, production,
performance, critique, and historic study. This shift calls attention to
disciplinary distinctions between fine arts and social studies, curriculum
theorizing, pedagogy, and political performances. If art education is to
consciously respond to rapid changing of global social dynamics and contexts
concurrent with this collapse, it is the cultural studies which is committed to
social justice, democracy, and human rights. These challenges recognizes the
transdisciplinarity of cultural studies and its relevance to and promise for
research in education, sociology, psychology, curriculum studies, the arts, and
semiotics.
Importance
of Cultural Studies
1.
The cultural studies provide the arbitrariness of disciplines and the
failure of interdisciplines
2.
It provides the idea of solving difficulties
with the traditional rationale of the study of culture
3.
It provides need for a Counter-Disciplinary Praxis
4.
It gives ideas of Public Spheres, Popular
Culture and Cultural Studies
5.
It gives resisting Intellectuals
6.
Cultural Studies facilitates education for teachers
and policymakers.
7.
It
provides materials for individuals to create identities and meanings and
detects uses of cultural forms.
8.
Cultural
studies are valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and
interpret one's culture critically.
9.
Cultural
studies allow us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of
culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text,
institution, or practice.
Conclusion
Cultural Studies is to be informed by a political project that
gives a central place to critique and social transformation. First, it must imperatively
recognize the university particularly a set of relationship with the dominant
society. Cultural Studies as both a sphere of critique and as a medium of
social transformation it should lead to the second point a radical social
project, Cultural Studies must develop a self-regulating discourse;
containing a language of critique. The
discourse of Cultural Studies must resist the interests contained in the
established academic disciplines and departments; in order to retain its
theoretical and political integrity, Cultural Studies must develop forms of
critical knowledge as well as a critique of knowledge itself. Cultural Studies
needs to develop a theory of the way in which different social formations produced
and reproduced within the relations of power characterizing the dominant
society.
Reference
1. http://culturalstudies.web.unc.edu/resources-2/what-is-cultural-studies/
2. American Anthropological Association “Whose
Culture Studies?" - Renato Rosalda, Professor Department of Anthropology
Stanford University, Stanford
3. http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html
4. http://www.ehow.com/info_8546178_aims-objectives-cultural-studies.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies
6. http://www.csaa.asn.au/about/objectives/index.shtml
7. https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/wolff/wolff.html
8. Articles by James Sanders "Visual Cultural
Studies and Human Rights"-University of Illinois Press
9. "Cultural Studies: An Introduction" by
Lawrence Grossberg, cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler
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