Introducing Cultural Studies. For whom interested this book please contact me by dolla.chheng@gmail.com

1. Ch1: Culture and Cultural Studies
Instructed by Chheng Dolla
Contact: dolla.Chheng@gmail.com
P/H: 0883020847

2. Course Outline

3. 1.1 What is culture?
• Raymond Williams refers to the arts and artistic activity; the learned,
primarily symbolic features of a particular way of life; and a process of
development.
• Culture with a big “C”: as artistic activity – music, literature, painting,
sculpture, film
• As a way of life: A particular way of life is achieved through creation and use
of symbols (which convey shared ideas)
• Process of development: Earlier, Middle Ages refer to the tending or
cultivation of crops and animals (hence agriculture); a little later the same
sense was transferred to describe the cultivation of people’s minds

4. Con’t….
• Geertz (1980s): Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves.
• Conclusion, Language, Beliefs, Values, Norms, Behavior Passed from
One Generation to the Next. It can be defined:
• Material Culture – the material objects that distinguish a group of people,
such as their art, buildings, weapons, machines, hairstyles, clothing, and
jewelry
• Nonmaterial Culture – (also called symbolic culture) a group’s ways of
thinking (including its beliefs, values, and other assumptions about the world)
and doing (its common patterns of behavior, including language and other
forms of interaction)

5. 1.2 Issues and problems in the study of culture
• How do people become part of a culture?
• How does cultural studies interpret what things mean?
• How does cultural studies understand the past?
• How can we understand the relationships between cultures?
• Why are some cultures and cultural forms valued more highly than
others?
• What is the relationship between culture and power?
• How does culture shape who we are?

6. How do people become part of a culture?
• Culture is not something we simply absorb – it is learned
acculturation/enculturation  Anthropology
conditioning  Psychology, ex. psychoanalysis
socialization  Sociology
All concepts above pay attention on various social arrangements in
how humans learn about meaning.
The core issue of cultural studies is the interpretation of meaning,
and it involves issues of evidence and relativism

7. How does cultural studies interpret what things mean?
• Anthropologists see culture as shared understandings and groupings
in society
• Sociologists, ex. Berger and Luckmann (1966)  Human knowledge of
the world is socially constructed, or through social location (age,
gender, race, class) and interaction with other people. If so, we only
see the world from certain angles  relativism.
• Conclusion: There’s no true knowledge.
• Therefore, interpretation of meaning is a core issue of Cultural
Studies, and it relates to how we understand the past and present.

8. How does cultural studies understand the past?
• Traditions are not neutral and objective but culturally constructed
• While being constructed and reconstructed some things are included
and others excluded
• Culture studies attempt to study the patterns of the distribution of
power

9. How can we understand the relationships between cultures?
• Concepts of colonialism and globalization
• Limited point of view as there cannot be exclusive cultural blocs as
culture is also a matter of age, gender, class, status
• E.g. Coca-Cola and the neo-colonial references

10. Why are some cultures and cultural forms valued more highly
than others?
• High Culture: refers to a set of cultural products that are held in really
high esteem by society .
• Popular Culture: modern popular culture transmitted via the mass
media and aimed particularly at younger people.
• Low Culture: refers to works of art that are more associated with the
masses (non-elites).
• Hybrid Culture: Refers to the coexistence, harmony, and
synchronization of oral culture, written culture, printed culture,
mass culture, media culture, and cyber culture mixing all of them in
webs of meaning produced by individuals

11. What is the relationship between culture and power?
• Culture – a product of interaction: culture is also a part of the social
world and, as such, is shaped by the significant lines of force that
operate in a social world.
• Societies are organized politically and economically
• Culture as power is negotiated and resisted in four key areas – gender,
race, class and age

12. How does culture shape who we are?
• Concept of identity
• An example that gives the question of identity more prominence is
the way in which the origins of English studies in the nineteenth
century were closely linked to the growth of universal education.

13. 1.3 Theorizing Culture
• Music, fashion, technology, and values—all are products of culture
• Let’s finish our analysis of culture by reviewing them in the context of
three theoretical perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, and
symbolic interactionism.
• The main features of some leading theoretical approaches in cultural
studies are:
1. Functionalists
2. Conflict theorists
3. Symbolic interactionism

14. Con’t…
• Functionalists view society as a system in which all parts work—or
function—together to create society as a whole.
• Conflict theorists view social structure as inherently unequal, based
on power differentials related to issues like class, gender, race, and
age.
• Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective that is most
concerned with the face-to-face interactions between members of
society. Interactionists see culture as being created and maintained by
the ways people interact and in how individuals interpret each other’s
actions