Introducing Cultural Studies

by Longhurst; Brian

• ISBN13: 9781405858434
• ISBN10: 1405858435
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-02-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

A rapidly changing world, in part driven by huge transformations in technology and mobility, means we all encounter shifting cultures and new cultural and social interactions daily. Powerful forces such as consumption and globalization exert an enormous influence on all walks and levels of life across both space and time. Cultural Studies remains in the vanguard of the analysis of these issues.

Author Biography

Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith, Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford and Elaine Baldwin are in the School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford. Miles Ogborn is in the Department of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Scott McCracken is in the School of Humanities, Keele University

Table of Contents

List of key influence boxes	p. xi
List of defining concept boxes	p. xii
Preface: a user's guide	p. xiii
Acknowledgements	p. xiv
Cultural Theory
Culture and cultural studies	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
What is culture?	p. 2
Culture with a big 'C'	p. 2
Culture as a 'way of life'	p. 2
Process and development	p. 4
Issues and problems in the study of culture	p. 4
How do people become part of a culture?	p. 4
How does cultural studies interpret what things mean?	p. 6
How does cultural studies understand the past?	p. 6
Can other cultures be understood?	p. 8
How can we understand the relationships between cultures?	p. 9
Why are some cultures and cultural forms valued more highly than others?	p. 10
What is the relationship between culture and power?	p. 11
How is 'culture as power' negotiated and resisted?	p. 12
How does culture shape who we are?	p. 12
Summary examples	p. 13
Theorising culture	p. 17
Culture and social structure	p. 18
Social structure and social conflict: class, gender and 'race'	p. 18
Culture in its own right and as a force for change	p. 19
Conclusion	p. 22
Culture, communication and representation	p. 25
Introduction	p. 25
The organisation of meaning	p. 26
Spoken, written and visual texts	p. 26
Communication and meaning	p. 28
Structuralism and the order of meaning	p. 32
Hermeneutics and interpretation	p. 33
Political economy, ideology and meaning	p. 37
Poststructuralism and the patterns of meaning	p. 39
Postmodernism and semiotics	p. 41
Language, representation, power and inequality	p. 42
Language and power	p. 44
Language and class	p. 45
Language, race and ethnicity	p. 46
Language and gender	p. 48
Mass communication and representation	p. 49
The mass media and representation	p. 50
Audiences and reception	p. 54
Conclusion	p. 57
Culture, power, globalisation and inequality	p. 58
Introduction	p. 58
Understanding globalisation	p. 59
Globalisation: cultural and economic change	p. 59
Theorising about globalisation	p. 60
Globalisation and inequality	p. 62
Theorising about culture, power and inequality	p. 65
Marx and Marxism	p. 65
Weber, status and inequality	p. 69
Caste societies	p. 71
Legitimating inequality	p. 72
Ideology as common sense: hegemony	p. 72
Ideology as incorporation: the Frankfurt School	p. 74
Habitus	p. 76
Culture and the production and reproduction of inequality	p. 77
Class	p. 77
'Race' and ethnicity	p. 80
Gender	p. 81
Age	p. 84
Structural and local conceptions of power	p. 87
Conclusion	p. 88
Researching culture	p. 90
Introduction	p. 90
Content and thematic analysis	p. 91
Quantitative content analysis: gangsta rap lyrics	p. 92
Thematic analysis	p. 93
Semiotics as a method of analysis	p. 95
Semiotics of advertising	p. 98
A semiotic analysis of a sophisticated advertisement	p. 101
Ethnography	p. 102
Conclusion	p. 105
Cultural Studies
Topographies of culture: geography, meaning and power	p. 107
Introduction	p. 107
What is cultural geography?	p. 109
Placenames: interaction, power and representation	p. 111
Landscape representation	p. 113
National identity	p. 117
Discourses of Orientalism	p. 120
Mobility, hybridity and heterogeneity	p. 125
Performing identities	p. 132
Living in a material world	p. 135
Conclusion	p. 139
Politics and culture	p. 140
Introduction	p. 140
Cultural politics and political culture	p. 141
From politics to cultural politics	p. 141
Legitimation, representation and performance	p. 146
Cultures of political power	p. 150
The cultural politics of democracy in nineteenth-century Britain	p. 150
Performing identities in conventional politics	p. 152
Bureaucracy as culture	p. 156
Performing state power	p. 163
Cultures of resistance	p. 169
Performing identities in unconventional politics	p. 169
The limits of transgression: The Satanic Verses	p. 172
Conclusion	p. 174
The postmodernisation of everyday life: consumption and information technologies	p. 176
Introduction	p. 176
Consumption	p. 177
Defining consumption	p. 177
Theories of consumption	p. 178
The consumer society	p. 181
The information society	p. 182
New information communication technologies	p. 183
The culture of new information communication technologies	p. 184
Consequences of an information society	p. 191
Technology and everyday life	p. 193
Conclusion	p. 197
Cultured bodies	p. 198
Introduction	p. 198
The social construction of corporeality	p. 199
Techniques of the body	p. 201
Mauss's identification of body techniques	p. 201
Young: 'Throwing like a girl'	p. 202
Goffman: body idiom and body gloss	p. 204
Culture as a control: the regulation and restraint of human bodies	p. 206
Power, discourse and the body: Foucault	p. 206
Civilising the body: Elias	p. 211
Eating: a disciplined or a civilised cultural practice?	p. 212
Representations of embodiment	p. 215
Fashion	p. 215
Gender difference and representations of femininity	p. 218
Representations of masculinity	p. 219
Representing sexuality	p. 221
The body as medium of expression and transgression	p. 223
The emotional body	p. 223
The sporting body	p. 224
Body arts	p. 225
Discoursing the fit body	p. 226
Bodybuilding: comic-book masculinity and transgressive femininity?	p. 229
Cyborgism, fragmentation and the end of the body?	p. 231
Conclusion	p. 234
Subcultures, postsubcultures and fans	p. 236
Introduction	p. 236
Power, divisions, interpretation and change	p. 237
Folk devils, moral panics and subcultures	p. 238
Stanley Cohen: Folk Devils and Moral Panics	p. 238
Moral panic updated	p. 240
Youth subcultures in British cultural studies	p. 241
Resistance through Rituals: the general approach	p. 242
Phil Cohen: working-class youth subcultures in East London	p. 243
Ideology and hegemony	p. 244
Structures, cultures and biographies	p. 246
Three classic studies from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies	p. 247
Paul Willis: Learning to Labour	p. 247
Paul Willis: Profane Culture	p. 247
Dick Hebdige: Subculture: The Meaning of Style	p. 248
Youth subcultures and gender	p. 248
The teenybopper culture of romance	p. 250
Pop music, rave culture and gender	p. 251
Youth subcultures and race	p. 252
Simon Jones's Black Culture, White Youth: new identities in multiracial cities	p. 252
The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and youth subcultures: a general critique	p. 253
Aspects of youth culture	p. 256
Some key studies of recent subcultures	p. 258
Rethinking subcultures: interactions and networks	p. 261
Fans: stereotypes, Star Trek and opposition	p. 264
Fans of Star Trek	p. 264
Fans of daytime soap opera	p. 266
Conclusion	p. 266
Visual culture	p. 268
Introduction	p. 268
Visual culture and visual representation	p. 269
Modernity and visual culture: classic thinkers and themes	p. 270
Georg Simmel: metropolitan culture and visual interaction	p. 270
Walter Benjamin: mechanical reproduction, aura and the Paris arcades	p. 273
The figure of the flaneur	p. 276
Technologies of realism: photography and film	p. 277
The development of photography and film	p. 277
The documentary tradition	p. 278
Colin MacCabe: the classic realist text	p. 280
Laura Mulvey: the male gaze	p. 281
Foucault: the gaze and surveillance	p. 283
Tourism: gazing and postmodernism	p. 284
The tourist gaze	p. 284
Postmodernism and post-tourism	p. 286
The glimpse, the gaze, the scan and the glance	p. 287
Visual interaction in public places	p. 289
Categoric knowing: appearential and spatial orders	p. 289
Unfocused interaction, civil inattention and normal appearances	p. 291
The city as text	p. 293
Marshall Berman: modernity, modernisation and modernism	p. 294
Reading architecture	p. 294
Reading cities: legibility and imageability	p. 298
Reading landscape and power	p. 298
Visual culture and postmodernity	p. 298
Postmodernism and capitalism: Fredric Jameson and David Harvey	p. 299
Jean Baudrillard: simulacra and hyperreality	p. 299
Digitalisation and the future of representation	p. 301
Conclusion	p. 302
Bibliography	p. 304
Index	p. 331
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.