Name: Gohil Umaba. B
Roll
No: 15
Topic: Limitations of cultural studies
Paper
No: cultural studies
Limitations
of Cultural studies
Cultural
studies is a field of theoretically , politically, and empirically engaged
cultural analysis that was initially
developed by Britishacademics in the late 1950s 1960s and 1970s and has
been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different
disciplines around the world. Cultural studies are avowedly and even radically
interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as interdisciplinary. as cultural
studies scholar toby miler has written “ cultural studies is tendency across disciplines , rather than discipline
itself”. Although most practitioners of cultural studies are professional academics,
gilbert rodman has argued in his 2015 book why cultural studies? That the field
must be understood to include some non- academic cultural analysts and
practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which
socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their
everyday lives.
Cultural
studies can at times seems merely an intellectual smorgasbord in which the
critic blithely combines artful helpings of text and objects and then finds
deep connections between them. Without adequately researching what a culture
means or how cultures have interacted. Cultural studies concentrates upon the
political dynamics of contemporary cultural, its historical foundation,
defining traits, and conflicts. cultural studies views cultural studies views
cultures not as fixed , bounded , stable and discrete entities , but rather as
constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. Cultural
studies combines a variety of
politically engaged critical approaches drawn from and including semiotics, Marxism,
feminist theory, ethnography, critical race theory, postructualism, post
colonialism, social theory, political theory, history , philosophy, literary
theory, media theory, film/ video studies communication studies
,politicaleconomy,translation studies , museum studies and art history/
criticism to study cultural phenomena in
various societies and historical period . thus , cultural studies seeks to
understand how meaning is generated , disseminated, contested, bound up with
systems of power and control, and
produced from the social, political and economics spheres within a particular
social formation or juncture.
Cultural
studies practitioners often know lot of
interesting things and possess the
intellectual ability to play them off
interestingly against each other’s , but they sometimes lack adequate
knowledge of the “ deep play” of meaning
or “thick description” of a culture that ethnographer Clifford Geertz identified in his studies of the Balinese.
Sometimes students complains that professors who over emphasizes cultural
studies tend to downplay the necessity of reading theclassics, and that they
sometimes coerce students into “politically correct “views.
During
the rise of neo – liberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both
became a global force/movement, and attracted the ire of many conservative
opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. Some
left –wing critics associated particularly with Marxist forms of political
economy also attacked cultural studies for allegedly overstating the importance
of cultural phenomena. The aim of cultural studies is to examine cultural practices
and their relation to power,. For example, a study of a subcultural
wouldconsider their social practices against those of the dominant culture the
middle and upper classes in London who control the political and financial
sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white.
The
objective of cultural studies includes understanding culture in all its complex
forms and analysing the social and political context in which cultural which
culture manifests it. Cultural studies are a site of both study/ analysis
analysis and political criticism/ action. Only would a cultural studies scholar
study an object, buts/he wouldconnect this study to larger, progressive
political project. Cultural studies attempts toexpose and reconcile constructed
divisions of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature.in the late 1990s
restructuring at the University of Birmingham led to the elimination of
Birmingham school and the creation of a new department of cultural studies and
sociology in 1999. Then in 2002 theUniversity of Birmingham’s senior
administration abruptly announced the disestablishments of css, provoking a substantial
international outcry.
Marxism
has played animportant originating roleas being a one of the firs critiques of
culture- and has a hence been reflected in the history of cultural studies. The
early Frankfurt school of sociology were particularly influenced by Antonio
Gramsci, and the members of them later Birmingham school were in the early
1970s influenced by structuralism of althussser.
The
development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonants with
work in other fields exploring agency, a theoretical concept that insists on
the active, critical capacities of subordinated peoples. Insistence on
accounting for the agency of subordinated peoples runs counter to the work of
traditional struucturalists. Some analysts have however been critical of some
work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of or even
romanticizes some forms of popular cultural agency .cultural studies often
concerns itself with agency at the level of the practices of everyday life and
approaches such research from a stand point of radical contextualism. In other
words, cultural studies reject universal accounts of cultural practice,
meanings and identities. The move from a structuralise account in which capital
is understood to structure social relations in relativelyhomologous ways
to review of hegemony which power
relations are subject to repetition,
convergence and reticulation brought the
question of temporality into the thinking of structure . It has marked a shift
from a althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibilities of
structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the
contingent sites andstrategies of the reticulation of power.
In
recent decades , as a capitalist culture has spread throughout the world via
contemporary forms of globalization, cultural studies has generated important
analyses of local sites and
practices of negotiation with and
resistance to western hegemony .cultural
studies criticizes the traditional view
of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways people
read , receive and interpret cultural texts or appropriate other kinds of
cultural products , or otherwise participate in the production and the
circulation of meanings . On this view a consumer can appropriate, actively
rework or challenge the meaning circulated through cultural texts. Cultural
studies drawing upon the developing semiotics , uses the concept of text to
designate not only written language but also televisions programs , films ,photographs,
fashion, hairstyles, and so forth ; the texts of cultural studies comprise all
the meaningful art effects of culture.
The
task of cultural analysts is to engage
with both the knowledge system, and the text , and observe and analyses the
ways in which the two interact with one another – and with one other knowledge systems, including the one being
deployed by the analysts him herself. This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, its capacity to
illuminate the hierarchies within and
surroundings the given text and its
discourses .cultural studies has evolved
through the confluence of various
disciplines- anthropology, media and communication studies , literary studies ,
education, geography, philosophy, sociology, politics and others . While some
areas of the cultural studies have meandered into political relativism and ‘postmodern’
conception of the subject and emancipation, at its core cultural studies
provides a significant conceptual and methodological framework for cultural,
social and economic critique.
Cultural
studies has also diversified its
own interests and methodologies , incorporating a range of
studies on media policy , democracy , design, leisure, tourism, warfare and
development .many cultural studies practitioner’s work in department of
English or comparative literature. A
cultural study has also had substantial impact on sociology.There are some
differences between sociology as a discipline and field of cultural studies as
a whole while sociology was founded upon
various historicworks purpose fully distinguishing the subject from
philosophy or psychology, cultural studies had explicitly interrogated and criticized traditional understandings and practice of disciplinarily.
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