INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND POPULAR CULTURE

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INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE, CULTURAL STUDIES,
AND POPULAR CULTURE
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OBJECTIVE

• Mahasiswa dapat menyebutkan pengertian culture,
  cultural studies dan popular culture. (C1)

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MATERIALS

• What is Culture?
• What is Cultural studies?
• What is Popular Culture?

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WHAT IS CULTURE?

• What is culture?
• 1. A general process of intellectual, spiritual
  and aesthetic development
• 2. A particular way of life, whether of a
  people, a period, a group or humanity in
• general
• 3. The works and practices of intellectual and
  especially artistic activity.
• (Williams, Raymond. 1983 Keywords A
  Vocabulary of Culture and Society.
• London Fontana, 2nd edn.)

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Continued

• The different senses in which the concept of
  culture can be used can be illustrated as
  follows (Baldwin, et.al, 2004 7)
• A play by Shakespeare might be said to be a
  distinct piece of cultural work (3) to be a
  product of a particular (English) way of life (2)
  to represent a certain stage of cultural
  development (1) .
• Rock n roll may be analysed by examining the
  skills of its performers (3) in terms of its
  association with youth culture in the late 1950s
  (2) and as a musical form, looking for its
  origins in other styles of music and also seeing
  its influence on later musical forms. (1)

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Continued

• Issues and problems in the study of culture.
  (Baldwin, et.al 7-23)
• - How do people become part of a culture?
• - How does cultural studies interpret what
  things mean?
• - How does cultural studies understand the
  past?
• - Can other cultures be understood?
• - 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 is culture as power negotiated and
  resisted?
• - How does culture shape who we are?

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WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?

• What is Cultural Studies?
• 1. In cultural studies the concept of culture
  has a range of meanings which includes
• both high art and everyday life.
• 2. Cultural studies advocate an interdiciplinary
  approach to the study of culture.
• 3. While cultural studies is eclectic in its use
  of theory, using both structuralist and
• more flexible approaches, it advocates
  those that stress the overlapping, hybrid
• nature of cultures, seeing cultures as
  networks rather patchworks.
• (Baldwin, Elaine. et.al. 2004.
  Introducing Cultural Studies. Harlow Pearson
  
• Prentice Hall. Revised first edition)

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Continued

• Some features of cultural studies (Agger, 1992
  2-23)
• - An expanded notion of culture.
• - Culture is us.
• - Culture is practice
• - Culture is conflict
• - Making space The decentering and decanonising
  of culture.
• - Production, distribution, consumption.
• - Popular culture and populism.
• - Dedisciplining.
• - Cultural studies and archemedian problem.
• - The rejection of absolute values.

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WHAT IS POPULAR CULTURE?

• What is Popular Culture?
• ... a set of generally available artefacts
  films, records, clothes, TV programmes, modes of
  transport, etc. Popular culture can be found in
  different societies, within different groups in
  societies, and among societies and groups in
  different historical periods.
• Popular culture for the mass culture critics is
  either fold culture in pre-industrial societies
  or mass culture in industrial societies.
• For the Frankfurt School, popular culture is the
  culture produced by the culture industry to
  secure the stability and continuity of
  capitalism. The Frankfurt School thus shares a
  theory which sees popular culture as a form of
  dominant ideology with other versions of Marxism,
  such as those put forward by Althusser and
  Gramsci.

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Continued

• The Marxist political economy perspective comes
  close to this understanding of popular culture,
  while variants of feminist theory define it as a
  form of patriarchal ideology which works in the
  interests of men and against the interests of
  women.
• While semiology stressses the role of popular
  culture in obscuring the interests of the
  powerful in Barthes view the bourgeoisie
  some structuralist theories see popular culture
  as an expression of universal and unchanging
  social and mental structures.
• Those writers who advocate cultural populism
  define popular culture as a form of consumer
  subversion which is precisely how they wish to
  evaluate and explain it.
• according to postmodernist theory, popular
  culture embodies radical changes in the role of
  the mass media which wear away the distinction
  between image and reality.
• (Strinati, Dominic. 2004 An Introduction
  to Theories of Popular Culture. London
  Routledge. Second edition)

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Continued

• Five factors that popular culture is serious
  business
• - Popular culture is basically fun but
  insubstantial, distracting people from the ordeal
  of workaday existence yet not bearing closer
  scrutiny except by quotidian television and movie
  critics
• - that popular culture betrays traditional
  cultural values and should be edified
• - that popular culture is simply a big
  business that can be understood in the strict
  terms of Marxs economic analysis of capitalism
• - that popular culture is imposed from the top
  down and has a certain totalizing impermeable
  quality that cannot be dislodged
• - popular culture as a relevant arena of
  cultural politics and hence political theory.
• (Agger, Ben. 1992. Cultural Studies as
  Cultural Theory. London The Falmer Press)