Roll No:18
Std:M.A.Sem:2
Sub:Paper No 8(C)
The Cultural Studies
Assignment Topic:Cultural
Studies And Features Of Cultural Studies
Submitted To:M.K.Bhavnagar University
Year:2015:2017
Brief About Culture:
It is clear that Cultural
Studies involves studying culture,what may not be nearly so obvious is just
what culture is.The ambiguity of the concept of culture is notorious.some
anthropologists consider culture to be social behaviour.for others,it is not
behaviour at all,but an abstraction from behaviour.To some,stone axes and
pottery,dance and music,fashion and style constitute culture;while no material
object can be culture to others.yet still for others,culture exists only in the
mind.
American anthropologist
Margaret Mead says that:
“Culture is the learned
behaviour of a society or a subgroup.”
Raymond Williams,one of the
founders of cultural studies says that:
“Culture includes the
organization of production,the structure of the family,the structure of the
institutions which express or govern social relationships,the characteristics
forms through which members of the society communicate.”
We can conclude that:
Culture is the ensemble of
social processes by which meanings are produced,circulated and exchanged.
Culture is the site of the
production of meanings,not the expression of meanings,which exist
elsewhere.some meanings may be quite stable,os course,but others may be highly
and rapidly variable.
Meanings migrate from one
context to another,sometimes ending up very far from where it was started.they
are always getting,displaced,diverted,reworked and exchanged.
We should add that culture is
not a single unified process,but an ensemble of processes.they may work
together tightly,but in other cases they may be in considerable conflict with
one another.we shall have to keep the disparate nature of cultural processes
clearly in mind as we proceed.
Cultural Studies:
Cultural Studies is an
exciting field of study.it has become the rage amongst progressive of all
sorts:not least because culture as a theme or topic of study has replaced
society as the general subject of inquiry among progressives.Cultural studies
has made its presence felt in academic work within the arts,the humanities,the
social science and even science and technology.it appears to be everywhere and
everyone seems to be talking about it.but what exactly is “Cultural
Studies..?”The term “Studies” suggests a broad field of inquiry like:business
studies or management studies.
Cultural Studies does not
habe a clear defined subject area.its starting point is a very broad and all
inclusive notion of culture that is used to describe and study a whole range of
practices.this makes cultural studies radically different from such
conventional disciplines as physics or sociology or philosophy,each of which
has its own clearly demarcated subject area or object of study.apart from the
ambiguous nature of its subject area,cultural studies also lacks its own
principals,theories and methods.but it does not have its own very distinct and
distinctive history.
Cultural studies functions by
borrowing freely from social science disciplines and all branches of humanities
and the arts.it appropriates theories and methodologies from
anthropology,psychology,lingustics,literary criticism,musicology,philosophy,political
science and art theory.Almost any method from textual analysis,ethnography and
psychoanalysis to survey research can be used to do cultural studies.cultural
studies takes whatever it needs from any discipline and adopts it to suit its
own purposes.
All this makes it very
difficult,if not impossible,to agree on any basic definition of the natyre of
the beast that is cultural studies.cutural studies is not one thing,it is many
things.it straddles the intellectual and academic landscape from old
established disciplines to new political movements,intellectual practices and
modes of inquiry such as Marxism,Post:colonialism,Feminism and Post
structuralism.it moves from discipline to discipline,methodology to
methodology,according to its own concerns and motivations.
This is why cultural studies
is often described as an Anti Discpline:a mode of inquiry that does not
subscribe to the straitjacket of institutionalized disciplines.
Features Of Cultural Studies:
1)Power Relation & its influence
& shape on Cultural Practices:
Cultural critics assumes
‘Oppositional’roles in terms of power structures,wherever they might be
found.Veeser credited the new historicists with dealing with ‘Questions of
politics,power,indeed on all matters that deeply affected people`s practical
lives.’and of course there are the large emphases on power in the matter of
Jonathan Swift`s Laputa.
Let us turn towards the
approach Shakespeare`s “Hamlet”,with a view to seeinh power in its cultural
context.
Rosrencrantz &
Guildenstern:
Two characters that can study
unde the approach of Cultural Studies.After the play within the play,Claudias
is taking privetly with Rosencrants and Guilsenstern,who were Hemlet`s fellow
friends and students from Wittenberg.in reaction to Claudias`s plan to send
Hemlet to England,Rosencrants delivers a speech that:if read out of context:is
both an excellent set of metaphors and a summation of the Elizabethan concept
of the role and power of Kingship.
Some passage is a thought and
imagistically successful passage,worthly of a wise and accomplished statement.
Guildenstern had just agreed
that he and Rosencrantz would do the king`s bidding.the agreement is only a
reaffirmation of what they had told the king when he first received them at
court.both speeches are wholly in character,for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
among the jellyfish of Shakespeare`s character.easy it is to forget which of
the two speaks which lines indeed easy it is to forget most of their lines
altogether.
If ever we wished to study
two characters who are marginalized,then let us glimps upon Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern.
The meanings of their names
hardly match what seems to be the essence of their characters.Murray J.
Levith,for example,has written that “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are from the
Dutch German:literary,’Garland Of Roses’and ‘Golden Star’.Although of religious
origin,both names together sound singsong and odd to English ears.their
jingling gives them lightness,and blurs the individuality of the characters they
label.”
In short,Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are no more than what Rosencrantz called a “Small Annexment”,a
“Petty Consequence”,mere nothings for the “Massy Wheel” of kings.through this
we can conclude that that type of characters have same speech as hero has
though they have not much attention as hero has.we seemed in various movies
that supporting characters sometimes gave the idea that hoe to meet hero to
heroine and then hero take action on that.sometimes what happen that supporting
characters are more important than hero.For Example:
In the novel:’Tughlaq’ by
Girish Karnad.
2)Cultural Studies is not
simply the study of cultural as though it was a discreat entity divorced from
its social or political context.its objective is to understand culture in all
its complex forms and to analyse the social and political context within which
it mainifests itself.
3)Culture in cultural studies
always performs Two Functions:it is both the Object of study and the Location
of political criticism and action.cultural studies aims to be both an
intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise
4)Cultural studies attempts
to expose and reconcile he division of knowedge,to overcome the split between
tacit and objectives (first that is intuitive knowledge based on local cultures
and secondly universal),forms of knowledge.it assumes a common identity and
common intrest between the knower and the known,between the observer and what
is being observed.
5)Cultural studies is
commited to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of
political action.the tradition of cultural studies is not one of value free
scholarship but one commiited to social reconstrauction by critical political
involvement.thus,cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures
of dominance everywhere,but in industrial capitalist societies in particular.
6)Features of Cultural
Studies is that it share four goals:
1)Cultural Studies transcends
the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
2)Cultural studies is politically
engaged as we discussed above the power relation which is related with
political things.
Cultural critics see
themselves s ‘Oppositional’,not only within their own displines but to many of
the power structures of society at large.they question inequlities within power
structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among
dominant and ‘Minority’ or ‘Subaltern’discourses.
3)Cultural studies denies the
sepration of ‘High’and ‘Low’or elite and popular culture.
4)Cultural studies analyse
not only the cultural work,but also the means of production.
Conclusion:
In short,we can say that as
we dicussed the characteristics of cultural studies.it also have some own
limitations.the weaknesses of cultural studies lie in its very strengths,particularly
its emphasis upon diversity of approach and subject matter.cultural studies can
at times seem merely an intellectual smorgasbord in which the critic blithely
combines artful helpings of texts and objects and then “Finds’deep connections
between thrm,without adequently researching what a culture means or how
cultures have interacted.
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