Page 25 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

daily life alter from culture to culture, and in terms of gender and class within
the same cultural community.

Links Consumption, encoding-decoding, hermeneutics, reading, resistance, text
2
Acculturation The ability to ‘go on’ in a culture requires the learning and acquisition
of language, values and norms through imitation, practice and experimentation.
The concept of acculturation refers to the social processes by which we learn the
knowledge and skills that enable us to be members of a culture. Key sites and agents
of acculturation would include the family, peer groups, schools, work organizations
and the media. The processes of acculturation represent the nurture side of the so-
called ‘Nature vs Nurture’ debate, and are looked to by cultural theorists as
providing the basis on which actors acquire a way of life and a way of seeing.
The central argument of cultural studies is that being a person requires the
processes of acculturation. Here personhood is understood to be a contingent and
culturally specific production whereby what it means to be a person is social and
cultural ‘all the way down’. While there is no known culture that does not use the
pronoun ‘I’, and which does not therefore have a conception of self and
personhood, the manner in which ‘I’ is used, what it means, does vary from culture
to culture. Thus, the individualistic sense of uniqueness and self-consciousness that
is widespread in Western societies is not shared to the same extent by people in
cultures where personhood is inseparable from a network of kinship relations and
social obligations. Subjectivity can thus be seen to be an outcome of acculturation.

Links Constructionism, culture, identity, language, subjectivity

Adorno,Theodor (1903–1969) As co-director (with Max Horkheimer) of the Institute
for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, the German-born Theodor Adorno
was a key figure in the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ that later relocated to the United
States under threat from the Nazis. Adorno explores culture through a combination
of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory to argue that commodity culture is a form of
mass deception that generates standardized reactions that affirm the status quo.
This involves not just the overt meanings of ideology but the structuring of the
human psyche into conformist ways. By contrast, critical art for Adorno is that
which is not oriented to the market but challenges the standards of intelligibility
of a reified society. Specifically, Adorno praises the ‘alien’ nature of avant-garde
modernist art such as the atonal music of Schoenberg.
• Associated concept Avant-garde, capitalism, commodification, culture industry.
• Tradition(s) Critical theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis.
• Reading Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1979; orig. 1946) The Dialectic of
Enlightenment. London: Verso.

Advertising Advertising is at the core of contemporary culture and at the heart of
debates about postmodernism, globalization and consumer culture. Thus, amongst
the markers of postmodern culture are the increased emphasis given to the visual
over the verbal and the general aestheticization of cultural life in which advertising