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Saturday, 21 November 2015

CULTURAL STUDIES

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 aim of Cultural Studies is to examine cultural practices and their relation to power.
·         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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