Page 88 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

FROM WAYS OF LIFE TO LIFESTYLE

becoming increasingly seriously undernourished had become so great that
she had been forced to withdraw. When I discussed this case with colleagues it
was suggested that her problem with food, her obsessional fear of obesity, was
a consequence of cultural expectations. Cultural norms of slimness were dis-
played in advertisements, fashion photographs, and generally in the discourse of
magazines so that a gullible reader, as perhaps this student was, felt forced to
control and drive down her body weight.
The third example has become very familiar in most European cities. This is
the situation of entrepreneurs creating ‘Irish’ drinking houses, pubs, as places
that are attractive particularly to young people. I have put ‘Irish’ in quotation
marks because the pubs are themed environments. They are built, or existing
places are adapted, to represent an iconography of a traditional Irish village pub.
The simulation is conveyed through seating, decor, signs, drinks, and possibly
appropriate music played over a sound system. The pub may employ people
who speak with an Irish accent, and occasionally sponsor live performances of
traditional Irish songs and dances. These places are then offering a dramatiza-
tion of a particular strand of Irish culture. While clearly not the real thing, as
they are not located in an Irish village, they purport to be authentic. They
employ a number of devices to represent or simulate an Irish cultural form that
is recognizable and attractive to customers.
Each of these uses of culture can be criticized as not being very sophisticated
and indeed could be condemned as superficial or even patronizing. The
instances work though, it seems to me, as representative of the sorts of ways
culture can be invoked in everyday life as a sense-making resource. Such a
practical use is, however, not constrained by the way they also suffer from the
more serious flaw that the culture that is invoked in each case has a curious
status. It exists as something that is there, recognizable, has an existence – even
effects – in the world and yet its power works for some and not others. The
culture that is employed in these sorts of situations is a collective entity that is
not co-terminous with a distinct social group. The umbilical link between
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culture and community that I mentioned above has been broken. In mass
societies it has become apparent that there are a multiplicity of overlapping
cultures with differing relationships with social actors, and with the further
consequence that they can make sense in a number of different ways.
fl
What I mean by this is that, as is evident in the examples briey described,
the sorts of ‘explanation’ culture can provide have different ramifications. For
instance, the culture of slimness affecting the anorexic girl operates as a myth of
a certain sort of beauty that idealizes largely unattainable norms for a majority
of women. It therefore can be seen to have the e ffect of requiring women to
strive against inevitable failure so that they fail to see or understand themselves
as they really are. It therefore works as an ideological strategy that underpins
male supremacy or patriarchal social relations (on ideology in a culture of mass
communications, see Thompson 1990).
In contrast, the conceptualization of Nigerian, or perhaps more widely

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