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THE DYNAMICS of POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES Book, Popular THE DYNAMICS OF POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES Ray B Browne Present-day recognition of the value of Popular Culture 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 intellectual 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 cultures 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 cultural studies 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, television, 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. Folklore 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.
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