Limitation of cultural studies

 Name: Panchasara Jignesh k.​

Roll no: 8​

Enrollment No: 3069206420200013​

 Paper No: 205  Cultural Studies

Batch: 2020-2022​

Email: jigneshpanchasara5758@gmail.com

Submitted To: S.B. Gardi Department of English MKBU

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What is cultural studies?

Cultural studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary field of study, which came into being in the UK in the post-war years. It emerged out of a perceived necessity on the part of two of its founding figures, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. It came to fruition, however, in circumstances that, as its third founding figure Stuart Hall often acknowledged, contested its legitimacy.

Black-and-white image of a long empty street with houses stretching into the horizon. In the shadows of the buildings, a row of women are scrubbing the doorsteps of their homes.

Housewives scrubbing their front doorsteps in Liverpool, from 'The Best And The Worst Of British Cities', published in 1954. Photo by John Chillingworth / Getty Images Why did it seem necessary to give an academic label to the kind of research Williams, Hoggart and then Hall were engaged in? Each of these thinkers knew there was a minor tradition of studying culture ‘from below’; that is, the cultural practices and rituals of everyday life associated with ordinary people, or with groups and populations who did not belong to the powerful social classes or to the political elites. All three figures were trained in English Literature. Williams looked to writers like D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, whose work drew on experiences of poor mining or farming communities as they were undergoing transitions and displacement brought about by urban modernity. Richard Hoggart grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Leeds and went on to become a ‘scholarship boy’. He produced what quickly came to be seen as a classic work, puzzlingly titled The Uses of Literacy, which was based partly on his personal memory of the habits, rituals and everyday lives of the people who lived in his own neighbourhood from the interwar period through to the post-war years. He documented how women clean their front doorsteps and gossiped over the fences as they hung out the washing. The popular women’s magazines they read, often with lurid covers, brought some glamour and excitement amidst the hardship. These lives did not appear in official histories and Hoggart aimed to show their richness and solidarity. Stuart Hall came from Jamaica in 1951 as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford. His intellectual formation took place in the heightened atmosphere of the CND movement, the ‘New Left’ and the anti-colonialist struggles of the 1960s.

‘Culture’ itself is hard to define.

‘Cultural Studies’ is loosely a group of tendencies, issues and questions arising from a social turmoil of the 1960s.

It is composed of elements of Marxism,Poststructuralism,Postmodernism, Feminism,Gender studies,Anthropology,Race,

Sociology,Ethnic Studies,Film theory,Urban Studies,Public Policy,Post-Colonial Studies, Popular Cultural Studies and those fields which concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division or alienation.

Later on the discipline of Psychology has also arrived in Cultural Studies. It is to erase boundaries between 1. High-Low, 2. Classic-Popular literary texts and 3. Literature-Other Cultural Discourses. As we know that Cultural Study refers to many of the disciplines, it is natural that it will have limitations. We know that if we concentrate on more than one work at a time, we could not give every work the same importance and attention.

Limitation of cultural studies?

1. Diversity of approach and subject-matter

          The weakness of Cultural Studies lies in its 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 helping of texts and objects and then “finds” deep connections between them, without adequately researching what a culture means or how cultures have interacted.

2. Not fueled by hard research

          Cultural Studies are not always fueled by hard research.

i.e., Historians have traditionally practiced to analyze ‘culture’. Which includes scientifically collected data.

3.Lack of Knowledge

Cultural Study practitioners often know a lot of interesting things and possess the intellectual ability to play them off interestingly against each other, but they sometimes lack adequate knowledge of “deep play” of meanings or “thick description” of a culture that ethnographer Clifford Geertz identified in his studies of the Balinese.

In the essay Geertz uses the word “deep play” for the ‘cockfight’ which is illegal in his society. He explains as a context of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who defines “deep play” as a game with risks high that no rational person would engage in it. The amount of money involved in the cockfight makes Balinese cockfight “deep play”.

And another word “thick description” is used in the field of anthropology, sociology, religious studies and human and organizational development. The “thick description” of culture means it’s not just explaining what culture is but also refers to the context in which the meaning is developed.

4. Necessity of reading the classics

          Sometimes students complain that professors who overemphasize cultural studies tend to downplay the necessity of reading the classics, and that they sometimes coerce students into “politically correct” views.

5. Whatever is happening at the moment

            David Richterdescribes culture as “-about whatever is happening at the moment, rather than about a body of texts created in the past.

            ‘Happening’ topics, generally speaking, are the mass media themselves, which, in a postmodern culture, dominate the culture lives on its inhabitants, or topics that have been valorized by the mass media.”

          But he goes on to observe that if this seems trivial, the strength of cultural studies its “relentlessly critical attitude toward journalism, publishing, cinema, television, and other forms of mass media, whose seemingly transparent windows through which we view ‘reality’ probably constitute the most blatant and pervasive mode of false consciousness of our era” (Richter 1218).

6. Tempted to dismiss popular culture

            If we are tempted to dismiss popular culture, it is also worth remembering that when the works like Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn were written, they were not intended for elite discussions in English classrooms, but exactly for popular consumption.

7. ‘Culture Wars’ of academia

          Defenders of tradition and advocates of cultural studies are waging what is sometimes called the “culture wars”of academia.

On the one hand are offered impassioned defenses of humanism as the foundation, since the time of the ancient Greeks, of Western civilization and modern democracy.

On the other hand, as Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton has written, the current “crises” in the humanities can be seen as failure of the humanities; this “body of discourses” about “imperishable” values has demonstrably negated(cancelled) those very values in its practices.

                                    Thanks

Works cited 

Guerin, Wilfred L. (1966). A handbook of critical approaches to literature. Oxford University Press, 2005.

The British Academy. 2021. What is cultural studies?. [online] Available at: <https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-cultural-studies/>

People.bu.edu. 2021. Academic Animadversions: Interview: The limitations of Cultural Studies approaches. [online] Available at: <https://people.bu.edu/rcarney/acad/artmleigh.shtml>