Page 29 - Culture and Cultural Studies

28 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Name three different types of cultural text.

– What are the common elements that make up a cultural text?
– What different features of each of the three texts can you identify?
– Can you distinguish any differences between a text and a practice?

The location of culture
For Raymond Williams (1981, 1983) culture is located, to all intents and purposes, within
flexible but identifiable boundaries. That is, culture is understood to be a facet of place.
Indeed it is constitutive of place. In so far as culture is a common whole way of life, its
boundaries are largely locked into those of nationality and ethnicity, that is, the culture of,
for example, the English or perhaps the British. However, globalization has made the idea
of culture as a whole way of life located within definite boundaries increasingly problematic.
In particular, that which is considered to be local is produced within and by globalizing
discourses. These include global corporate marketing strategies that orient themselves to
differentiated ‘local’ markets. Much that is considered to be local, and counterpoised to
the global is the outcome of translocal processes (Robertson, 1992). Place is now forged
globally by virtue of the movement of cultural elements from one location to another. For
example, population movement and electronic communications have enabled increased
cultural juxtapostioning, meeting and mixing. These developments suggest the need to
escape from a model of culture as a locally bounded ‘whole way of life’.
The processes of globalization suggest that we need to rethink our conception of cul-
ture. Culture is not best understood in terms of locations and roots but more as hybrid
and creolized cultural routes in global space.

KEY THINKERS

Homi K. Bhabha (1949– )

Homi Bhabha was born in India and educated at Bombay University and Christ
Church College, Oxford. He is currently Professor in the Humanities at the
University of Chicago, where he teaches in the departments of English and Art.
Strongly influenced by poststructuralism, Bhabha argues against the tendency to
essentialize ‘Third World’ countries into a homogeneous identity, claiming instead that
all sense of nationhood is narrativized. For Bhabha, the instability of meaning in

01-Barker_4e-4300-Ch-01 (Part 1).indd 28 11/11/2011 7:54:50 PM