THE DYNAMICS OF POPULAR STUDIES

Ray B Browne

Present-day recognition of the value of Studies constitutes perhaps the greatest actual and potential breakthrough in the study of the humanities of all time - at least since the realization that human expression in every form reveals aspects of society useful in understanding the mind, sociology, and actions of culture. 1 Today's recognition is not so much new as it is really a return to a former attitude, which existed in Europe and America until perhaps the seventeenth century, when it was assumed that all levels of society, if not all aspects of society, were symbiotically related to all others. Peter Burke's excellent book, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, outlines how all societies worked together up until the sixteenth century, before seams artificially began to appear and, in rubbing together, created cultural earthquakes. 2

1 Portions of these pages came from my book, The Many Tongues of Literacy (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992). A similar version of this paper was originally published in Peter Freese and Michael Porshe, eds., Popular Culture in the United States (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1994). Used with my permission.

2 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

109 110 Ray Browne

But today's recognition is far deeper and broader and more significant than was the earlier. The current recognition, which developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was perhaps not so much a new as a deeper understanding of forces, a new dynamic, which at that time developed throughout society and finally reached academia. But it is now seen and heard everywhere. Yet there are still many people, more than just closed-minded elitists, who do not understand the comprehensiveness of the term culture, popular or otherwise, and many, including numerous academics, who look upon popular culture as consisting only of entertainment. It is essentially a question of definitions. Raymond Williams was undoubtedly too abstract when he looked upon culture itself as an "abstraction and an absolute," which resulted from a "practical separation of certain moral and activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society. " 3 Folklorist Robert Cantwell declares that the Enclosure Acts in England at the end of the Middle Ages began culture: "Enclosure is the parent of culture. " 4 But the changes in the way a people live merely cause changes in culture, not culture itself. And are surely older than the beginning of enclosure or urban congestion. A crude, but temporarily satisfactory, definition is that cultures began when a group - or even two - homo sapiens first tried to live together. Such scholars as Simon During are certainly short-sighted and off-track when they insist that are the study of contemporary culture. 5 And other critics who insist that media are our culture are simplistic ar.d do learning a great disservice because they are wearing electronic blinders that exclude most of the communicators

3 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1963).

4 Robert Cantwell, Ethnomimesis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 48.

5 Simon During, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993). Popular Culture Studies 111 in the world. Likewise Robert Cantwell is surely enthno-blind when he says the "folk cultures are inherently and fundamentally festive. " 6 On the contrary, folk cultures are survivalistic, meant to keep the people alive and together; festive is the bonus they create over and above survival. It is important that we understand what cultures are because definitions shape and control thinking. In its proper definition popular culture is redundant, since in a democracy all culture is of the people. Taxpayers eventually dictate culture; they pay the piper and consequently name the tune. In the Arts and Humanities in a democracy, elitists can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. In President John Kennedy's words, eventually the tide floats all boats at the same level. In the present-day outbursts of democracy, you can hardly identify the cultural status of a boat owner by where he docks his craft. Recognition of Popular Culture Studies as the wave of the future is a major breakthrough in academia because of the inclusiveness of the term and the political implications in the approach and because of the upsurge of interest in the humanities and the understanding that society is a dangerous wasteland without them. The humanities represent all those elements in life that make us human and make human cultures viable. Though cultures may seem to differ dramatically one from another, they all have in common humanity and the humanities, the greatest stabilizing and driving forces in all people and all societies. The humanities are those elements in culture which respond to the basic human needs in all of us: the common threads in all individuals and all societies, the ties that bind us together as homo sapiens. The humanities are a people's inheritance, their history, their totality of the present as well as of the past. The humanities are what the tribe's sages teach by word of mouth and example, by saga and epic, by book, , or any other medium, and what everybody sees on the streets of his or her daily existence. United States

6 Cantwell, Ethnomimesis, 7. 112 Ray Browne

President Bill Clinton was certainly correct when in naming October 1993 to be "National Arts and Humanities Month" he said: "Through the arts and humanities we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a society." Then he enumerated some of the expressive modes: "Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, theatre, film, and the folk arts all awaken our minds and our senses. They allow us to express our emotions, impressions, and attitudes about the human condition and the human experience. " 7 The humanities, new or old, for the past century or so have generally been studies along narrow disciplinary lines. Anthropologists, though one of the broader approaches to the study of humankind, have generally stuck to their disciplinary lines. Art historians have studied "masterpieces," "music scholars have stuck to classical music." Literary people, the mainstay of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary scholarship, have generally restricted their studies to the "canon" and what they call Literature with a capital L, ignoring many forms of printed material which are meaningful to millions of readers. studies have insisted on "tradition" in their material. American Studies scholars have by and large ignored and despised much of the culture of America. Popular Culture Studies, properly carried on, recognize that all aspects of culture - from the apparently trivial to the most obviously significant - are the threads in the sheets of life and all are important in human expression and understanding. Proper and full com­ munications among those threads must be understood. They provide the means by which people define themselves in their changing world. As the editors of the Literary History of the United States assert: " ... each generation must define the past [and the present] in its own terms. " 8 And if there is opposition to the new way of looking at the phenomena of life, that is only natural, and then must be reinterpreted.

7General Announcement, White House

8 Robert E Spiller, et al., eds., Literary History of the United States: History 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974)...... -- --- Popular Culture Studies 113

One of the fastest changing methods of approaching the reinterpretation of the past and present is changing theories and methodologies. Those of us who have travelled down the autobahn of scholars through the decades have seen the rusting litter of discarded theories lining the ditches, nearly all of which were at the time of their use declared to be finally the correct and only theory of cultural studies. Popular Culture Studies, though constantly fluid, has retained in its dynamics the steady constant which carries with it the past, the present, and the seeds of the future. That concept might not always be clear. Certain other confusions develop around the concept of Popular Culture. Many people see it as the arts and entertainment and nothing else. The list should be more inclusive. The present-day humanities are, as they have always been except for the past hundred years which fell under the elitist philosophy of British poet Matthew Arnold, the Popular Culture of everyday life - the means of communications, entertainments, diversions, rituals, psychology, religion, politics, love-hate, heroes, icons, the flora and fauna of existence - the whole swirl of people's various mixes of attitudes and actions. Popular Culture, serving the basic drive of the humanities, has always tried to democratize society, to make all people equal participants in life and the cultures it generates. "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred," observed Thomas Jefferson. Popular Culture is the stable of horses all people can ride. Popular Culture is the total life around us. As such, it is, of course, international and world-wide. As such, Popular Culture is the New Humanities. Sometimes popular culture gets caught up in unthinking appreciation and cliched labelling. According to Cosmo Landesman, in The Sunday Times, in an essay he called "Respect Your Oldies," Britain is currently wallowing in nostalgia, which, according to him, in the eyes of some has become "a dirty word." Stephen Bayley, Landesman says, calls it "the eighth deadly sin" because, he feels, "it shows contempt for the present and betrays the future." Whether nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin or a mere virus, in order to keep things in the proper perspective, it needs to be placed 114 Ray Browne in its proper position in the flow of understanding of Popular Culture. And it should be seen comparatively. Landesman concludes:

You have only to look at Germany, Russia and parts of eastern Europe to see just how innocuous the so­ called British obsession with nostalgia really is. There, longing for the past has led to nostalgia with a vengeance - the rise of racism, anti-semitism and extreme nationalism. Better a nation with a few silly heritage theme parks than one where hostels for immigrants go up in flames.

His concluding reassurance is, "as far as the past is concerned, it is time we turned on, tuned in, tried to relax. " 9 But it is surely easier to relax with a pint of Popular Culture Understanding in hand than without it. Movies, television, rock music, sports, outdoor entertainments, and the like are popular culture but certain other expressions of life are not considered popular culture and are not included. Other people see popular culture as something they call Mass Culture, and therefore unworthy of consideration. The term Mass Culture is largely a political term and evokes comments of condescension by nearly all academics. Communists despise the masses for political reasons, academics despise the masses because they presumably are untrained and unwashed. But academic barriers generally have a shorter shelf life than the Berlin wall and they are crumbling everywhere. The study of Popular Culture is breaking out throughout academia in more disciplines than ever before. In fact, the number and complexity of the development is almost mind-boggling. Let me develop some examples and point out their relevancy in the growing dynamics of P!)pular Culture Studies and show how complex and comprehensive the study of Popular Culture must be in order to approach thoroughness. All, of course, depend upon literacy, or literacies.

9 The Sunday Times, September 5, 1993. Popular Culture Studies 115

Here, again, corract definition is vital. In its latest statement on America's literacy, Time Magazine reported on the findings of the Educational Testing Service, based in Princeton, in its report Adult Literacy in America. 10 The test was to determine how many people over age sixteen could "sign a credit-card receipt but are incapable of writing a letter when they think their bill is wrong; those who can pay the correct change at the supermarket but have difficulty calculating the difference between regular and sale prices; those who can scan a newspaper story but cannot paraphrase its contents." In this test some ninety million Americans were declared "illiterate." But it must be obvious to the testers that they are gauging people's communication skills in an old language, that of the three Rs, Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic, which is hardly the language of the present. It is something like insisting that in order to be literate these days one must know Latin and Greek. Just as society has moved away from the indispensability of those languages, people have moved into new languages. People who cannot paraphrase a story they have read can sing rock songs by the score, can talk at great length about a movie they saw last night. People who cannot protest being cheated by the grocery store or tax accountant can, when properly shown how, lay brick, build highways, and service airplanes. They possess the language of the new everyday frontier, as their ancestors did. Many of the most active frontiers people of the nineteenth century could do no better than X their signature, yet they understood far better than their town and city cousins the language of nature. They were literate in those languages. The need for American educators and business people is, then, not to try to pull the contemporary American public back to the three Rs, but to recognize the new Rs, or the many languages of communications. It is terrifying how one can be literate in the three Rs and still be dangerously naive. We have all kinds of cliches about bookworms who do not know their way around on the streets, are not "street-smart." There are many examples . 60

10 Time Magazine, September 20, 1993, p.59. 116 Ray Browne

Minutes (October 10, 1993) broadcast a frightening example. Numerous corporations supply classrooms with documentaries which turn out to be disguised efforts to influence society through the minds of the students. For example, the EXXON Corporation recently provided a film to show in classrooms on the disaster to the ecology of Prince William Sound resulting from the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. The movie demonstrated that the spill had been thoroughly cleaned up and the Sound is actually in better shape now than it was before the oil spill . The teacher showed the film, apparently with no comment or suspicion, until a student protested that it was "all propaganda," then she reacted and began to do a little investigating to determine the degree of propaganda present. Currently, in numerous movies, the scientific community is the bogey. Jurassic Park is about an unprincipled geneticist who creates dinosaurs and then tries to control their reproduction. These two examples demonstrate that for the three Rs we must substitute Literacy in All Means of Communication (LAMC). Society cannot bear the consequences of our being unable to read the many communication devices around us. The many media both drive and reflect our culture. More important, our cultures perpetuate themselves through communication devices. Newsweek Magazine (November 8, 1993, p 5) illustrates the necessary variety of texts in advertising itself for use in the classroom. A father looks into his son's room and sees him sitting on the bed reading Newsweek. The father shouts, "Put down that magazine and do your homework!" The boy responds, "I am doing my homework." Then in large red print the copy says: "Educators: Give your students the fascinating "text" they'll open immediately and find hard to put down." Though self-serving, the ad­ vertisement represents reality. But literacy in Popular Culture is not easy because the languages are numerous and complex. The languages of all aspects of human experience and environment are all around us. Cultural historian Gunther Barth develops the thesis that there has always been a tension and lack of understanding - between people and the nature on which they depended and thrived. In a new environment, he suggests, people can exploit the passive environment, just as Popular Culture Studies 117 dominant strong people can exploit the weak. During that time of exploitation there is no need for two-way communication. The strong speak to but do not listen to the passive. They speak at their weaker members, not to communicate but to deliver orders. When the opposition to the powerful becomes strong enough to insist on being heard or is nearly exhausted and, therefore, must be cared for, as the earth is today, then there must be communication with the opposition. In this situation the earth must be allowed to speak. Not to develop this communication with the earth - not to become literate in the languages spoken by the physical surroundings - is to invite and encourage disaster. As Gunther Barth suggests: "With the ongoing destruction of irreplaceable natural resources, an assessment of the relationship between nature and culture ultimately involves the issue of life itself.'' 11 These languages constitute a virtual Tower of Babel. Anthony D Cortese, Dean of the newly established Environmental Literacy Institute at Tufts University, urges environmental literacy. "The notion of environmental literacy is to give all students a broad, continuing and repetitive exposure to environmental issues throughout the curriculum." He adds: "In a way, what I'm about is changing the three Rs of reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic to also mean reduce, reuse, recycle.'' 12 Naturalist Gerald Durrell, head of the survival zoo on Jersey Island in the English Channel, speaks to another kind of language of survival. To him a zoo is as important as a library in offering sources of information vital to humanity's survival. He might have been more inclusive, for a zoo is the life from which libraries are made. A zoo, therefore contains more languages than a library - and demands fluency in all of them if we are going to be successful in communicating with the forces that constitute

11 Gunther Barth, Fleeting Moments: Nature and Culture in American History (New York: Oxford, 1990), xviii.

12Anthony D Cortese, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 1, 1990, 11-13. 118 Ray Browne life on this planet. A rain forest has an even larger dictionary which must be learned. There is nothing new in this point of view. Thomas Jefferson's friend, artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), established a museum of artifacts in 1802 which was to house all knowledge. It contained "thousands of specimens, yet thousands are still wanting - in fact it ought to be a Museum, a of everything useful or curious - a world in miniature." Because he believed, as he wrote to Jefferson, "my museum is but part of an Establishment which in becoming national should embrace the exhibition of every article by which knowledge, in all its branches can possibly be communicated. " 13 Anthropologists and linguists recognize more and more the near-universality of language as manifested in the various activities of humankind. "Objects certainly "speak," that is they directly communicate a message through visible and tangible qualities such as form, colour, texture, size and so forth," said Victor Turner, a leading anthropologist. 14 In Pueblo Indian lore, says Barbara A Babcock, every piece of clay "sings." 15 And folklorist-anthropologist Roger Abra­ hams insists that there is a "language of festivals," just as there is a "language of arts." "The vocabulary of festival," he says "is the language of extreme experiences through contrasts - contrasts between everyday life and those high times, between the different parts of the occasion. " 16 He would have been more accurate if he had been less dramatic

13Charles Willson Peale quoted in David C Miller, American lconology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 23.

14Victor Turner, ed., Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington: Smithsonian, 1982), 6.

15Barbara A Babcock, "Clay Voices: Invoking, Mocking, Celebrating," in Turner, ed., Celebration, 960.

16Roger Abrahams, "The Language of Festivals: Celebrating the Economy," in Turner, ed., Celebration, 162. Popular Culture Studies 119 and extreme. The vocabulary of festivals is that of everyday life lifted to a higher and more spiritual level. James Deetz has observed many other aspects of culture in which we need to be literate. He notes: "In ways great and small, gravestones, grape pits, houses, refuse, cuts of meat, recipes, ceramics, furniture and cutlery inform us that a great change was worked between 1760 and 1800 on the world view of most Anglo-Americans." 17 In a similar vein, Robert Blair St George observed that: "houses, furniture, teacups, probate inventories, diaries, account books, newspapers, and tax lists may all warrant investigation in the course of a single topic." 18 In other words, these media demand and reward literacy in them. Both commentators might have been more inclusive. All artifacts and static evidence of culture are words in various languages. The life that these artifacts have, or once had, is the language that articulates them. The artifacts are the words, the arrangements in society are the grammar, and the impact is the language. So all evidence of the existence of humankind - archaeology, history, contemporary artifacts - are the congeries of world languages. All such evidences world-wide have much in common in words and actions but many differences in the grammars and interpretations. "Ground floors, upper chambers and garrets are fragments of a playful language that gives shape to complex ideas," observed St. George. 19 French historian Ferdnand Braudel felt that "Costume is language." Indeed, everything is a language, or part of a language. "Everything," says Braud el,

17 James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1987), 7.

18Robert Blair St George, ed., Material Life in America 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 5.

191bid., 7. 120 Ray Browne

"is connected. " 20 To understand the connections, one must learn all the languages. The concept was beautifully illustrated in a recent PBS Television series call "Connections," in which James Burke, the commentator, seemed to speak in all the needed languages as he demonstrated how most things in life are closely or remotely connected. From the preceding concept, it is only a short step from seeing the conventional book as subject to regarding the subject itself as book. For example, it is only a short step from a book on architecture to regarding a work on architecture as a book; a book about a building to seeing the building as the book. Jules David Prown acutely observed that from his analysis of , "Objects are signs that convey meaning, a mode of communication, a form of language. " 21 From a study of buildings as records of evidence, any observer can note that a society is known by the buildings it constructs. They convey both reality and aspirations. Such analyses suggests the logic of moving from a book about a shopping mall to taking the mall itself as a form of communication; from books about automobiles to automobiles themselves as means of communication. Thousands of other material objects convey messages that must be understood if one is to be literate in modern culture. What is true in the presence of objects is equally true in the absence of objects: space and blankness are equally important as voices of a culture. Equally important in the language of culture is the photograph, the object once removed. Astonishingly, people only recently recognized the importance of the photograph as more than a memento. For example, Richard Rudisill, Curator of Photographic History of the Museum of New Mexico, correctly points out that "far too many historians regard pictures, especially photographs, only as a means to

20st George, Material Life, 5.

21 Jules David Prawn, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material and Method," in St George, ed., Material Life, 9. Popular Culture Studies 121

decorate an otherwise totally verbal" statement. 22 Alan Trachtenberg, a leading interpreter of photographs as documents, along the same line observed that photos are in fact "words" resembling entries in a dictionary or facts in an encyclopedia, and when used together become literature and books. Individual photos strung together become sentences just as words grow into paragraphs. As Trachtenberg noted, "To recognize that an image is a kind of writing prepares us for the larger challenge of reading or making sense of a group of photos. " 23 "A film is a kind of book, a kind of language, a kind of speech act ... an expressive cultural 24 act, " says Lawrence W Levine, folklorist and noted historian. The implications of these recognitions of the language of photos and films are immense and far-reaching and need amplification. The truism that a picture is worth a thousand words is valid only if the viewer understands the language of the picture. People who are not literate in the language see the picture as a sign or symbol. To see beyond the symbol, the viewer must be literate in the language of the picture. The viewer must realize that, as what Rudisill calls "a sample," the picture is three-dimensional, the third dimension being the dynamic of what is pictured. In order to comprehend the full language, the viewer must understand the mechanics of photography; use of light, shadow, angle, type of camera, period of exposure and development, cropping, double exposure, and so on. In addition, the viewer

22 Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1971 ), 3.

23 Alan Trachtenberg, "From Image to Story," in Carl Fleishbauer and Beverly W Branna, eds., Documenting America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 44.

24 Lawrence W Levine, "The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s," in Fleischbauer and Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 30. 122 Ray Browne must comprehend the "social mechanics": the artifacts present, the social attitudes, the moods, the feelings, the atmosphere, the history, the geography, the emotions, the human actions and reactions. The demands of the language of photography are almost mind-boggling. In fact, the major reason most of us are photographically illiterate is the demands of the medium. To have fluency in photography, one must be expert in everything that can be included in a photograph. The same demands for photography are present in the various other languages in which we can be fluent. Movies demand this fluency, plus the infinitely more complex fluency in pictured , magnified tenfold by what is known as "virtual reality," which makes it difficult to tell where the screen ends and reality begins. "Perceiving nature as a rich and varied collection of living things linked one to another and to their substrata or inorganic environments," says cultural geographer Robin Daughty, "rejects the notion of nature as merely a stage or backdrop for human initiative and enterprise." 25 To be more accurate, Daughty should have insisted that all forms of life must be perceived as organic and social continuums. To get at the complexity of life we are now studying the social organizations in all kinds of animal communities - the predators as well as the prey: lions, deer, coyotes, gorillas, wolves, hyenas, whales, dolphins, bees, ants, termites, as well as other peoples, to see what we can and must learn from them, in order to copy or reject certain aspects so that human society can benefit. The models in these other societies might prove beneficial to our own. But to get the most out of them we have a lot of learning, or re-learning, to accomplish. One of the curses laid upon humanity at the expulsion from Eden, according to first-century Jewish historian Josephus, was loss of the ability to communicate with animals. Apparently before the Fall, it had been possible to communicate directly with other animals. Satan tempted Eve in the form of the serpent, which she understood. Communi-

25Robin Daughty, Place Images in Media (Savage, MD: Rowman and Little Field, 1990), 13, 125. Popular Culture Studies 123 cation between the earliest human beings and other animals seems evident. In The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan speculates that such communication was symbolic gestural, guttural communication to assist in the hunt and in protection. Gradually this communication has grown less immediate, as through the ages the communication system among homo sapiens has become more and more sophisti­ cated, abstract, and mathematical and, consequently, more distant from other animals. Many academics, until recently, have looked upon the ability to communicate among themselves as one characteristic which demonstrates humanity's superiority over other animals. But such an attitude merely reveals our arrogance and unwillingness to learn new means of communication. A mild example of this is our reluctance to learn the languages of people other than ourselves. But the problems of resisting new languages is more profound - and more difficult to remedy. Sagan speculates that our unwillingness derives from a fear of branching out to the complete world - a fear that holds us all, including regrettably, academics today. "Our difficulties in understand­ ing or communicating with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world," says Sagan. 26 Holbrook and Hirschman suggest that "mass-media vehicles may express and represent the values of the social and historical context that engenders them. " 27 They quote Frederick Galan as substantiation: "Signs must communicate something not only about themselves and not only about the general social context, but ... also about the producer of the message, as well as about the receivers of this message. " 28 They also quote : "All re-

26Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977), 125.

27 Morris B Holbrook and Elizabeth C Hirschman, The of Consumption (New York: Mouton, 1993), 62.

28 1bid., 118. 124 Ray Browne presentation can be shown to reveal plots of culture. " 29 Collectively artifacts and human expressions encode a whole . Talking about art as the record of history, William H Truettner remarked : "To read these images to westward expansion closely is to discover essential truths about the cultural basis of national identity. " 30 Even more explicitly, Alan Gowans, in a half dozen books throughout his career, insists that each and every individual work of art - or artifact - has its own messages, its own communication content. Each, if properly understood, can tell us the story of the culture in which it was created and used. Our task is to understand that language, and to discover the Rosetta Stone that will provide transiations of the many languages used around us by all forms of life, and the results of that life. The nearest thing we have to that Rosetta Stone is Popular Culture Studies because they reveal the many tongues being spoken around us. A scholar of such studies is likely to move among the different forms - music, films, TV, sports, for example - and to understand all the languages, at least on a superficial level. There are many other areas in the language of Popular Culture that I have not discussed for, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "All the World's Popular Culture." I have, however, tried to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the areas of communication. Let me turn now to Popular Culture Studies themselves. The study of Popular Culture is breaking out throughout academia. The American Anthropological Association has a popular culture section, the American Sociological Association has numerous papers which naturally cover all kinds of everyday culture. Speech and television and movie studies incorporate large sections - at times majorities - of popular culture sections. Historians have been slow at times

29Thomas A. Sebeok, A Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 215.

30William H Truettner, The West as America: Re­ interpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991), 28. Popular Culture Studies 125 to develop the obvious. In 1974, in his book Society and Culture in America 1830- 1860, Russel B Nye was prevented by Henry Steele Commager, the General Editor, from including a chapter on popular culture. But such an eminent historian as Daniel Boorstin has been using popular culture for decades in his readable histories. Now historians are moving en masse, as it were, toward new subjects and new approaches in popular culture. Historians Richard Wightman Fox and T J Jackson Lears credit Popular Culture Studies as being the cutting edge in their new thinking.31 Popular Culture Studies are influencing the directions in the study of law, medicine, religion, and, especially, Humanities Pro­ grammes. These new thrusts are being introduced in countries around the world. A scholar friend at the American Studies Institute in Hyderabad, India, tells me he is directing some one hundred dissertations and theses and at least fifteen of them are in Popular Culture. In June 1992 the American Studies Institute and USIA offered a two-week seminar course on American Culture which included, among many aspects of culture, the areas of and Popular Culture and Music. There are active beginnings of Popular Culture studies in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South America, Mexico, Turkey, and Japan. Mexico is the only country I know of with a Federal Cabinet-level Department of Popular Culture (which, incidentally, is almost exclusively concerned with ethnic folklore). Western Europe seems to be filled with paradoxes. In an article in the New York Times International section,32 special correspondent William E Schmidt wrote that in at least the superficial , North American popular culture - rock, films, fashions, advertising, MTV, and so on - is being modified in Europe: "America still provides aspirational models," Frank Brown, head of advertising sales at MTV Europe, said. "But it is increasingly a two-way flow,

31 Richard Wightman Fox and T J Lears Jackson, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

32New York Times, March 28, 1993, 3. 126 Ray Browne and the result is a kind of fusion that in Europe has resulted in a much more diverse, and much more varied, youth culture." But in more profound, longer-lasting aspects of Popular Culture Western Europe's interest continues. Germany, has an insatiable appetite for the study of the American Western nourished in the novels of Karl May and, lately, in movies, television, and clothes. At the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Historians of the German Society for American Studies, held on February 19-20, 1993 in Tutzing, Bavaria, over seventy scholars discussed various aspects of "War and Peace in the History of the United States." Surely, by its very nature, every aspect of war and peace is popular culture. Great Britain has long been interested in various fields of Popular Culture Studies. The 1993 meeting of the British Association for American Studies, held at the University of Sunderland, had all its sessions devoted to Popular Culture: "The Turnerian Frontier," "Other Frontiers," "Early America," "American Nationalism and the Crisis of the Union, 1844- 1865," "The Urban Aesthetic," "IT and American Studies," "Visual Images of Slavery," and "Foreign Policy." The 1994 meeting of the same group will again focus on Popular Culture: "Material Culture," "Civil Rights," "Labour History," and "The Body in Literature, Film and History." Similarly, France and Italy have a love affair with American Popular Culture. In southern France, for example, during the summer, the locals stage a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, dressed, of course, appropriately. France has always been infatuated with American jazz and . Both Italy and France study comics much more seriously than Americans do. Westerns are now being produced in Russia, with Russian actors and producers. Japan is rather advanced in its study of Popular Culture. There is a Japanese Popular Culture Association and a quarterly devoted to the field. Now universities and colleges are hiring scholars especially trained in the field. China is a special case. The Hong Kong-American Centre plans to host talks, seminars, and international conferences in various fields of American Studies. What they will find is that, generally American Studies means Popular Culture, fields in which younger Chinese have great interest. My Against Popular Culture Studies 127

Academia: The History of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association and Popular Culture, 1967-1988 has been translated into Chinese twice, published once in a journal and once as a book. Increasingly, Popular Culture artifacts, such as novels, comics, and movies, are being used to teach English as a second language and as evidence of American culture. In the humanities and literature perhaps developments in the Modern Language Association, which has an international membership, are most revealing. Of the 750 sessions at last year's annual meeting, seventy were in Popular Culture subjects. Let me give you some examples:33

322. World City, Third World City: Class and Colonialism in Later Victorian London 1. "Orienting London: John Thomson, the Albert Memorial and the (Post) Colonial City." 2. "Music Hall London: The Topography of Class Sentiment." 3. "Gazing at Royalty: Jack London's The People of the Abyss and the Colonization of London." 4. "H G Wells and Future London."

441. Can Popular Culture be Politically Correct? 1. "Black Popular Culture and the Problem of the Visual." 2. "The Silence of the Fags: or, What! Me Worry!"

459. Theorizing Working-Class Literature 1. "Linguistic Power and Theorizing Working-Class Writing." 2. "Images of Rural Women's Labour." 3. "Working or Class Literature: What's the Difference?" 4. "Working Class Consciousness in Jo Sinclair's The Seasons."

33PMLA. November 1992. The numbers are session numbers. 128 Ray Browne

And my favourite:

431. Dirt 1. "Dirt Poor: British Potato Eaters in the Early 19th Century." 2. "Dirty Words: Language, Class & Pollution in the 19th Century." 3 . "Where's the Dirt: Cleaning up in Hard Times."

It looks like next year's MLA annual meeting will have even more Popular Culture subjects. In the MLA Newsletter, Spring 1993, announcing the sections for the 1004th meeting, fifty-eight of the 520 sessions, or better than ten percent are on Popular Culture subjects. 34 Some of the topics seem somewhat general. For example, "Ritual and Ceremony as/in Cultural Texts. Ceremonial structures of ; ceremonial manifestations; performances," and "Burning Down the House. Refigurations of "home," "the family," and/or "the domestic" in contemporary cultures, including sexual and domestic practices, representations in popular culture, domestic law, domesticity in war zones, domesticity and consumerism on a global or local scale, domestic labour, the home as an imperial space, the familial metaphor (the corporate family, the royal family)," "Black Studies and Popular Culture, Intellectual inquiries that explore the underlying centrality of the black experience in the world of popular culture reveal some interesting correlations between distinct, and yet indisputably linked, societies." Some may be condescending and elitist but are nevertheless searching: "Channelling the Bard. Shakespeare on "low cult" TV shows, past and present (e.g. Beverly Hills 90210, Moonlighting, Car 54, Where Are You?)." Others are more precise: "Comics, the Final Frontier of Academia," comic books from a variety of theoretical perspectives (feminist, Marxist, reader-response, psychoanalytic, etc.). What are the specificities of comics in relation to other so-called mass media? Why have comics remained on the periphery of academic discourse?" I can hardly imagine the reaction that

34MLA Newsletter 25, no.1 (Spring 1993): 9, 13. Popular Culture Studies 129 this field of inquiry must have evoked among more conventional MLA members. Two fields of study, folklore and American Studies, have had delayed positive responses. Both at first looked upon Popular Culture Studies as threats rather than augmentations and consequently resisted the inclusion. But by and large folklorists have recognized that Popular Culture is a kind of "electronic" folklore and have included much of the material and called it folklore. Strangely, the greatest opposition may have come from American Studies people, who at first looked upon Popular Culture Studies as cheapening their elite approach to the study of American culture. To a certain extent these fears have been mollified, and Popular Culture materials are becoming more and more evident in the American Studies approach to culture. Among active members of the Popular Culture Association, about ten percent are active or past members of the American Folklore Society, about forty percent are active or past members of the American Studies Association. Meanwhile, the particular field of Popular Culture Studies is mushrooming. At the latest national meeting of the Popular Culture Association, 2,200 people attended. There has been an increase of ten percent each year. In addition to the national chapter, there are ten regional chapters that attract 150-200 people to their yearly meetings. They, too, attract new scholars every year. So far, Popular Culture Departments have not developed. As I suggested above, Popular Culture studies are carried on in other departments. In the early days we thought that arrangement proper and most effective. But experience has taught us that academic thrusts need departmental identity and support. Bowling Green State University is, so far, the only university with a Department of Popular Culture of which I am aware. To prosper we also need higher degrees. Bowling Green State University has an undergraduate major and a Masters degree and a concentration in the doctoral American Culture programme. Our Masters and Ph.D. graduates are being hired across the country. In the United States new programmes that incorporate Popular Culture Studies are generally in American Studies Departments, 130 Ray Browne because, I assume, they are better known and more traditional. It may be hard to generalize as to whether all these new approaches and efforts will be helpful or harmful to the proper study of Popular Culture. Undoubtedly some will be silly and deleterious, but by and large all efforts can only be beneficial. And, beneficial or not, they are irresistible. As society has become more democratic, more ethnopietistic, more nationalistic, more concerned with the assumed rights of individuals and groups, the importance of everyday culture among all different groups and people has become more obvious. So development of Popular Culture Studies has become inevitable. To some of us, it has been a long, slow time in coming.