Page 66 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CULTURALISM

theoretical domains critical amongst which have been Marxism, structuralism,
poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis.
Today, a good deal of cultural studies work is centred on the question of how the
world is socially constructed and in particular with the themes of ‘difference’ and 43
identity. As such, the central strand of cultural studies can be understood as an
exploration of culture, as constituted by the meanings and representations
generated by human signifying practices, and the context in which they occur, with
a particular interest in the relations of power and the political consequences that are
inherent in such cultural practices.
Even though cultural studies can be understood as a kind of intellectual magpie,
it cannot be said to be anything. It is not physics, it is not sociology and it is not
linguistics, despite drawing upon these subject areas. For Hall, that which
differentiates cultural studies from other subject areas is its connections to matters
of power and politics and in particular to the need for social and cultural change.
In this view, cultural studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard
the production of theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Thus Bennett
understands cultural studies to be an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives
from different disciplines can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations of
culture and power. Here cultural studies is concerned with those practices,
institutions and systems of classification that enable a population to acquire
particular values, beliefs, competencies and routines of life. Further, cultural studies
seeks to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that can be utilized by
agents in the pursuit of change

Links Cultural politics, culturalism, culture, Marxism, poststructuralism, power,
structuralism

Culturalism This is a post hoc term that, within the development of cultural studies,
owes its sense to a contrast with structuralism and has little currency outside of
that debate. Thus within the mythology of cultural studies the figures of Richard
Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson are held to represent the
moment of culturalism that emerged during the 1960s and which is later
contrasted with the ‘structuralism’ of the 1970s. Theoretically, culturalism is
associated with the adoption of a broadly anthropological definition of culture that
takes it to be an everyday lived process not confined to ‘high art’. Thus, culturalism
stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the active, creative, capacity of people to
construct shared meaningful practices. Methodologically, culturalism has
favoured concrete empirical research and ethnography in particular with a focus
on lived experience in order to explore the way that active human beings create
cultural meanings.
In the hands of Williams, culturalism is a form of historically oriented cultural
materialism that traces the unfolding of meaning over time and investigates culture
in the context of its material conditions of production and reception. Additionally,
there is an explicit partisanship in exploring the class basis of culture that aims to
give ‘voice’ to the subordinated and to examine the play of class power within