Power In Cultural Studies

Power In Cultural Studies

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  Power In CulturalStudies Prepared by : Name : Anjali Rathod Sem : 3 (2022-24) Subject : Power in Cultural Studies Contact Info : [email protected] Submitted to : Department of English , MK Bhavnagar University
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  Table of Contents 0102 03 04 05 06 What is Culture? Four types of Goals Culture and Power What is Cultural studies? The Cultural Power of Law? Historical context of Cultural Agenda
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  What is culture? ❖ According to Oxford Dictionary , “the customs and beliefs, art, way of life and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively” ❖ Culture is a behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens , together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements. ❖ The classic definition of culture was provided by the 19th-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in his Primitive Culture (1871). Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (White)
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  What is CulturalStudies? ❖ Cultural studies are the critical analysis of the texts and practices of everyday life in contemporary society: an interdisciplinary enterprise involving both the humanities and the social sciences. - Oxford Dictionary ❖ Cultural studies are interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. ➢ Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. ➢ Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge. (Britannica)
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  Culture and Power ❏The centrality and instrumentality of power for achieving culturally nurtured goals, cultures foster normative standards for the legitimate use of power. This specific definition of power complicates the study of culturally nurtured standards regarding power. This makes it difficult to recognize that some cultures may promote the use of power for the benefit of others rather than for achieving status and prestige. If power is defined solely in personalized terms ,then cultural differences in power concepts cannot be observed. ❏ Cultural frameworks have had little to say about how culture nurtures views about the meaning and purpose of power. It emphasis has been on cultural patterns of inequality in the distribution of power. (Torelli#) ❏ In a narrowly defined version of cultural studies, the typical questions have been about the production or organization of meaning as a site of power. A typical way of posing ‘power questions’ has been in terms of identity, especially where identity is seen as a problematic issue, and where individual and collective identities are understood as being always created under social pressures. (Raghuram#12)
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  Four Goals ofCultural studies ❏ There are Four main goals in cultural studies , 1) Political, 2) Interdisciplinary, 3) Contextual , 4) Focuses on articulations. ➢ 1) Political Engaged : Politics is not an afterthought for cultural studies. It is a primary, central characteristic of the project. Cultural studies is not concerned with problems that are purely disciplinary in nature. ➢ Its choice of research projects is rooted in its efforts to intervene in “real world” events as a part of a broader struggle alongside and/or on behalf of disenfranchised and/or oppressed segments of the population. As such, any given cultural studies project derives its research topics from the desire to address a serious political problem of some ort: a social injustice that needs to be righted, a major structural or institutional inequity that needs to be challenged, a hierarchy of power that needs to be leveled, and so on. (Rodman #3)
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  Continue… ➢ 2) Contextual: Cultural studies , such questions are never quite so simple, as the relevant context for any given cultural studies project is never “out there” in some obvious and objective fashion. Context is simultaneously some-thing that the cultural studies practitioner selects from a range of real world possibilities and something that he or she actively constructs.(Rodman #5) ➢ 3) Interdisciplinary : Cultural studies’ relationship to the traditional disciplines has always been complicated. Cultural studies scholars can be found in a broad range of disciplines across the Humanities and Social sciences, including American studies, Communication , Education, English, Gender/Sexuality studies, History, Sociology, and Theatre.(Rodman #7) ➢ 4) Articulations: Articulation is cultural studies way out of the trap of essentialism. Essentialism assumes that the major relationships between different cultural phenomena. For example, a text and its meaning , a demographic and as specific political viewpoint are stable, its Fixed and inevitable. (Rodman #8)
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  Historical context ofCultural Agenda ❏ The rise of the cultural agenda seems to be related to five processes, each of which feeds cultural questioning in different ways. 1) The development of capitalist modernity. It has raised issues about ‘standardization’ and the loss of cultural value. 2) The construction of nations and national-popular movements. Citizens are addressed as sharing a cultural heritage. 3) The ‘cross-cultural’ encounters of peoples in processes of colonization, decolonization and the later forms of globalization, including tourism, international communications and the migration of people on a world-wide scale. 4) The growth of specialized forms of cultural production which create a relatively separated cultural sphere, in some ways abstracted from the ordinary daily production of meanings, often as ‘culture industries’. 5) The contemporary elaboration of these ‘media’ on a global scale associated with neo-liberal deregulation and with large scale and monopolistic capitalist corporation. (Raghuram#)
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  The Cultural Powerof Law? Colonizing Hawai'i - The Cultural Power of Law by Sally Engle Merry Merry indicates, emerge from the conjunction linking these two terms; a conjunction that points toward a certain theoretical exhaustion in the domains of inquiry that take "culture" and "law" as their objects. Merry's book provides ample illustration of each of Comaroff's suggestions for what more there is to say about law, culture, and colonialism. She outlines the discursive referents of law and legality in the Hawaiian context, both in the period preceding the importation by the alii of legal forms from New England and in the aftermath of that appropriation. She demonstrates the constitutive power of law to create a new, colonial society in the islands, tout court.(Maurer)
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  Conclusion To Sum up,cultural studies is a selective tradition which is interested in culture as a source of power, difference and emancipation, closely connected with social movements and with cultural critique. cultural studies is a way of being in the academy, of being academic, or not quite academic. In the current situation, when most or all humanities and social science disciplines have something to say about the cultural, this includes being especially attentive to the work of colleagues and students in or around other disciplines.(Raghuram#)
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  References ● Britannica, TheEditors of Encyclopaedia. "cultural studies". Encyclopedia Britannica, 26 Jul. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/cultural-studies . Accessed 23 October 2023. ● Maurer, Bill. “The Cultural Power of Law? Conjunctive Readings.” Law & Society Review, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 843–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1555094 . Accessed 23 Oct. 2023. ● Raghuram, Parvati. “The Practice of Cultural Studies.” January 2004, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42791027_The_Practice_of_Cultural_Studies . Accessed 22 October 2023. ● Rodman, Gilbert B. “Cultural Studies.” August 2017, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318858676_Cultural_Studies . Accessed 22 October 2023. ● Torelli, Carlos J. “Culture and Concepts of Power.” vol. 99, July,2010, https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/165792.pdf . Accessed 22 October 2023. ● White, Leslie A.. "culture". Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Aug. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/culture . Accessed 23 October 2023.