Blog: Is she cultured: a short intro to cultural studies
Today we talk about CS. Not computer science, but cultural studies. First, let me ask, what is culture? Some consider drinking wine to be more cultured than drinking beer. Or what do you think of when you hear 'she is cultured'? Is it that 'she' is educated, classy and listens to the opera? Or that 'she' is traditional and does not follow western practices? Whatever notion you think of, that is a descendant of your perception of the word culture. Now, what exactly is culture and how do you study it? There are different fields which study aspects of culture, such as border studies, anthropology or history. But today, we focus on Cultural Studies. At its core, cultural studies is interdisciplinary, politically engaged and denies the existence of 'high' and 'low' culture. This field considers culture as something that we do, not something we have or we are. It inherently deals with the questions of power, focusing on identities of gender, sex, class, ethnicity, among others. Developed in the mid-20th century, the term Cultural Studies was coined by Richard Hoggart, who also founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This centre played a major role in the development of this field, associated with the works of figures like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall.
As Williams says, culture is one of the most complicated words in the English language. To understand the need for the existence of CS, we start from the evolution of the meaning of culture. The word culture was initially used to mean husbandry, the growth of vegetation. Over time, cultivate developed as the main word to mean husbandry, and culture took the general notion of growth or development. Looking at the usage of civilisation, predominantly in European contexts, civilisation started to have an orthodox meaning while culture was seen as its alternative. European civilisation was considered better than lesser cultures. Then came industrialisation and the notion of culture changed to the sense of 'not material'. Industrialisation brought urbanisation and an increase in mobility. This led to a 'normalisation' of culture. During this time, figures like Arnold or the Leavises, part of the privileged educated minority, propagated the notion of high and low/mass culture. They believed that culture should be decided by them and that what working masses do is not culture. They used culture as a means of class divide.
This segregation formed the foundation for figures like Hoggart and Williams, scholars from the working class, to act on it and found Cultural Studies. A field that does not look at culture as high or low, but as meanings produced by human agents. It started dealing with issues of class and moved on to include other identities like gender, ethnicity and now many more. Another shift in the field happened with culture being looked at as not just meaning but as signifying practices that generate meaning and the structures that produce these practices. Hall's 'Circuit of Culture' acts as a good framework to understand any cultural phenomenon. It says that to understand or analyse a particular phenomenon, we need to look at Representation, Identity, Production, Consumption, Regulation and the interplay between these aspects.
Personally, I think this framework acts as a good tool to build the basis of a project. Let us take an example. Say, if I want to work on the prevalence of Domestic Violence (DV) cases during FIFA, I could start by thinking about how DV could be represented. Maybe through official police reports, web searches or social media posts. Then we look at the types of identities DV could construct: targets, victims, survivors, allies, perpetrators or masculinist fan identities. Which factors help produce DV? Existing gender roles, increased alcohol consumption or heightened emotions during matches, among others. We could look at the media narratives or general perceptions surrounding DV (Consumption) or at the laws and aids that support targets of DV (Regulation). After looking at all this, I can now decide that I want to focus on understanding the increasing prevalence of DV during FIFA by looking at web searches of victims, especially during emotionally heightened durations.
I think Cultural Studies provides us with a way of thinking that is extremely useful for Societal Computing. Inherently, there are many similarities between the two fields. Both do not take the existence of something for granted. They question how and why it came into place, what supported it and what consequence it has. Ultimately, CS says there is no cultured or uncultured; anything can be culture, and culture can be analysed. So, finally, do you think she is cultured?
PS: Most of the content here is based on Prof. Astrid Fellner's lectures on 'Foundations of Cultural Studies'.
- Written by Brahmani Nutakki
