Page 16 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 15

Culturalism and structuralism

In the collective mythology of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart (1957), Raymond
Williams (1965, 1979, 1981, 1983) and Edward Thompson (1963) are held to be early
figureheads representing the moment of ‘culturalism’. This perspective is later contrasted
with ‘structuralism’. Indeed, culturalism is a post hoc term that owes its sense precisely to
a contrast with structuralism.

Culture is ordinary
Culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the active, creative capacity of people
to construct shared meaningful practices. Empirical work, which is emphasized within the
culturalist tradition, explores the way that active human beings create cultural meanings.
There is a focus on lived experience and the adoption of a broadly anthropological defini-
tion of culture which describes it as an everyday lived process not confined to ‘high’ art.
Culturalism, particularly for Williams and Thompson, is a form of historical cultural
materialism that traces the unfolding of meaning over time. Here culture is to be explored
within the context of its material conditions of production and reception. There is an
explicit partisanship in exploring the class basis of culture that aims to give ‘voice’ to the
subordinated and to examine the place of culture in class power. However, this form of
‘left culturalism’ is also somewhat nationalistic, or at least nation-centred, in its approach.
There is little sense of either the globalizing character of contemporary culture or the
place of race within national and class cultures.

Structuralism
Culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product of active
human agents. By contrast, structuralism speaks of signifying practices that generate mean-
ing as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any given person.
Structuralism searches for the constraining patterns of culture and social life which lie out-
side of any given person. Individual acts are explained as the product of social structures. As
such, structuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of human agents from the heart of
enquiry. Instead it favours a form of analysis in which phenomena have meaning only in rela-
tion to other phenomena within a systematic structure of which no particular person is the
source. A structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with the ‘systems of relations’ of
an underlying structure (usually language) and the grammar that makes meaning possible.

Deep structures of language
Structuralism in cultural studies takes signification or meaning production to be the effect
of deep structures of language that are manifested in specific cultural phenomena or human
speakers. However, meaning is the outcome not of the intentions of actors per se but of the

01-Barker_4e-4300-Ch-01 (Part 1).indd 15 11/11/2011 7:54:48 PM