Page 181 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

MICHAEL REAL

can be seen to bring together the lenses provided by the multiple approaches to
defining culture: the traditional ethnographer’s interest in unsophisticated,
seemingly non-rational culture, the elitist’s sense that cultural products crystal-
lize and express the group sensibility, the anti-elitist’s interest in working-class
people, the mass culture theorist’s attention to mass marketing and commodi fi-
cation, the feminist’s interest in expression idiosyncratic to paternal culture, and
the popular culture theorist’s interest in the unvarnished ‘what is’. Ethno-
graphers, elitists, mass culture critics, popular theorists, feminists, and post-
modernists all look through the lenses provided by popular culture de finitions
and theory and only collectively begin to come to terms with the complexity
of contemporary culture as actually lived and expressed. It takes all this and
more to create thorough examinations of phenomena as super ficially simple
but culturally complex as Disneyland, the Olympics, the World Cup, the Super
Bowl, or blockbuster movies.

Historical convergence: colonial anthropology and
media technology
As the nineteenth century unfolded, two movements developed that were
completely unrelated to each other yet destined to meet with signi ficant
consequences for cultural theory and popular culture. In the course of the
twentieth century, these separate movements came together, at first awkwardly
and in conflict but more recently with harmonious mutual benefits. The
movements were, on the one hand, the development of colonialist anthro-
pology with its previously mentioned attempt to define ‘culture’ among what
were then considered the ‘primitive peoples’ of the world and, on the other
hand, the development of new media of communication technology which
enabled humans to communicate over distances with speed and increasing
sensory completeness.
In our own time the coming together of these two movements has resulted
in what James Clifford (1988) calls ‘the predicament of culture’, a sense of
culture in which communication technologies, interacting with vastly
increased travel and commerce, contribute to an everyday life that is in every
part of the globe lived as a multilayered, syncretic complex of cultural impulses
and components drawn from a diverse, fragmented, heterogeny of represen-
tational beliefs, behaviors, and meanings. With cultural lives that are almost
everywhere heterogeneous and postmodern, in the convergence of anthropol-
ogy and technology we see at work the importance of the historical shaping
of concepts (culture) and definitions (elite, mass, popular, commodi fication,
gender, etc.), as well as the theoretical understandings they facilitate or impede.
It is in this historical-cultural context that the importance of ‘popular cul-
ture’ becomes more clear. Once dismissed as insignificant trivia, the popular
culture of music, film, radio, television, pulp fiction, advertising, telephone,
Internet, and the rest, has become a cultural force on the global stage that is at

170