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Part I Reading Popular Culture M01_HASL8463_01_SE_C01.indd Page 1 07/10/14 /205/PHC00061/9780132708463_HASLAM/HASLAM_THINKING_POPULAR_CULTURE1_SE_9780132708 10:27 PM user ... Part I Reading Popular Culture Chapter 1 Thinking Popular Culture? Chapter 2 The Study of Culture M01_HASL8463_01_SE_C01.indd Page 2 07/10/14 /205/PHC00061/9780132708463_HASLAM/HASLAM_THINKING_POPULAR_CULTURE1_SE_9780132708 10:27 PM user ... Chapter 1 Thinking Popular Culture? INTRODUcTiON When Justin Bieber was arrested in 2014 for drag racing, driving under the influ- ence, and assault, and Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, admitted to smoking crack cocaine the previous year, was there something to learn about race, gender, and social privilege? What do frosh chants on Canadian campuses and the reaction to them tell us about sexism? Speaking of campuses, do the advertisements and web- site for your university or college tell you something about how the institution wants to be perceived by students? What’s shown in these ads? Are actual people presented on the website? Who are they? What are they doing? Do these visions of the campus contradict your actual experience of it? By combining popular culture, politics, identity, personal and group behaviour, and other aspects of social and cultural life, these examples, and the questions that arise from them, show how popular culture can be found at the centre of some of the more pressing questions of our societies. This textbook aims to help you build the skills necessary to undertake a serious study of popular culture. Its title, Thinking Popular Culture, can mean two things. First, it indicates that this textbook will help teach you how to think critically about popular culture and the roles it plays in society. Second, it can be read to mean that popular culture is itself a form of thinking about the world in which we live, that popular culture reflects—and reflects upon—the larger world of which it is a part. The different chapters of this textbook are intended to introduce you to the academic study of popular culture by exploring the various theories and methodolo- gies critics use to analyze cultural behaviour, cultural products, and cultural sites; each chapter will apply those methods to a variety of Canadian, American, and global examples of popular culture, past and present. Rather than simply explain these theories and methodologies, however, this book aims to actively draw you, as students, into the conversation, and through the examples, case studies, and ques- tions, ask you to continue its discussions both in and outside your classes. But before we begin our analyses of popular culture, we need to build some common ground—a sense of what our general field of study is and what foundations the following chapters will build on. So Part I will cover some basics: we’ll define what the phrase popular culture means and what purpose there is in studying it. More specifically, we’ll define the three terms of the title, but in reverse order: in this chapter we begin by discussing what constitutes culture and how it’s different from, M01_HASL8463_01_SE_C01.indd Page 3 07/10/14 /205/PHC00061/9780132708463_HASLAM/HASLAM_THINKING_POPULAR_CULTURE1_SE_9780132708 10:27 PM user ... but related to, such concepts as society, nation, and art. We’ll also look at the exact ways in which we can define the rather nebulous term popular, and why we can (and sometimes can’t) distinguish “popular” culture from other forms of culture. Next, in Chapter 2, we’ll discuss what it means to think about popular culture, looking at some of the history of cultural analysis and looking forward to the methodologies and theories of cultural study that the rest of the textbook details. In short, Chapter 1 defines the subject matter of this book, “popular culture,” while Chapter 2 introduces some traditional theories about the relationships between culture and the larger social and material world. Parts II, III, and IV then discuss the specific theories that lie behind and arise from the academic discipline known as cultural studies (which began to be developed in the 1960s), and how they can be used to analyze popular culture. WHAT iS CULTURE? In the Oxford English Dictionary, the word culture, as a noun, has three central definitions, each of which is broken down into more specific usages depending on context. These three central definitions relate to agriculture, religious worship (although this meaning is no longer in general use), and the human intellect and society more generally. It is, of course, the third use of the term that concerns us. Culture in this sense of the word is tied to the practices of specific groups or societies, such that one regularly hears references to “Canadian culture,” to take one example. The ease with which we use such phrases belies the complexities of the word culture, however. This is partly due to the complexity of contemporary societies (after all, Canadians are defined as much by their differences from each other as by any shared identity). But even more basically, the word culture is itself more contested than a straightforward dictionary definition might suggest. Indeed, the various schools of thought and ideas that this book describes—most of which are engaged in the critical analysis of culture—rarely agree on a specific definition of the term. Cultural critic Terry Eagleton, building on the work of many other cultural critics, makes the case clear: “‘Culture’ is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes con- sidered to be its opposite—nature—is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 1). As Eagleton goes on to demonstrate, however, we can frame in a general way what the term culture represents. He argues that it has evolved from describing the act of cul- tivating land to a more figurative or abstract sense of cultivating the human mind, both individually and collectively. In this sense, then, culture acts metaphorically: if a wild or untamed land can be transformed by human labour into a cultivated farm for the pur- pose of yielding more and better crops, so too can human activity itself be “cultivated” into something that yields us a social, spiritual, or artistic “crop.” If a farmland yields objects that we need to physically survive, the objects of this other kind of “cultivation” Chapter 1 Thinking Popular Culture? 3 M01_HASL8463_01_SE_C01.indd Page 4 17/10/14 /205/PHC00061/9780132708463_HASLAM/HASLAM_THINKING_POPULAR_CULTURE1_SE_9780132708 10:07 AM user ... give us a more abstract form of sustenance, whether we call it “art,” “music,” “politics,” or “entertainment.” In this sense, then, we can call “culture” those actions or products of human activity that go beyond our basic needs of physical survival and instead add to life elements of ­pleasure, or thought, or beauty, and so on. One way of understanding the distinction is as follows: although we need food to live, and so food as such may not be considered an ­element of culture, the practices and beliefs surrounding food—the way we cook it, what spices we add, how we eat it, what rituals we engage in around the act of eating, and even what kinds of digestible things we see as food and what not—may all be considered culture. Likewise, we may need shelter to live, but the specific design of houses or apartments, the material from which we construct them, and the colours we adorn them with may all be considered cultural. Even the act of sex, which may be “hardwired” into our and other animals’ genetic codes, could be considered biological rather than cultural, but the speci- ficities of courtship rituals and the proscriptions on where, when, and even how or with whom one should have sex may be considered, in most instances, cultural. We can gener- ally refer to this as the distinction between “nature” and “culture” (see Figure 1.1). With such a basic definition of culture, though, much is left out of the discussion that is necessary for learning how to study culture, and specifically popular culture. For that NATURE CULTURE Marble Sculpture Shelter Home Hair growth Hair style Figure 1.1 Nature/Culture Source: Serjiob74/Fotolia; Danilo Ascione/Shutterstock; Ljiljana Jankovic/Shutterstock; V. J. Matthew/Shutterstock; Nobeastsofierce/Fotolia; Gareth Boden/Pearson Education Ltd 4 Part I Reading Popular Culture M01_HASL8463_01_SE_C01.indd Page 5 07/10/14 /205/PHC00061/9780132708463_HASLAM/HASLAM_THINKING_POPULAR_CULTURE1_SE_9780132708 10:27 PM user ... more focused purpose, it may help to split our definition into three general categories: first, cultural behaviour or traditions—the actions in which people engage that can be considered “cultural”; second, cultural objects or products—the physical creations that humans make and/or use as part of their cultural activities; and third, cultural sites—the places people use, make, and/or transform in order to perform certain actions and/or use certain objects. Cultural Behaviour, Cultural Traditions In some academic disciplines, the study of culture focuses primarily on the behaviours engaged in by people who identify as belonging to a larger group. In this sense, “cul- ture” is often equated with large communities—from religious or ethnic groups to regions to nations—such that people can talk about “Roma culture,” “Maritime cul- ture,” or “Japanese culture.” As we’ll discuss in later chapters, such distinctions have been drawn to further different political aims, whether these are the liberatory agendas of peoples trying to throw off oppression or assertions that one group has the right to dominate another. For the purpose of defining culture in this opening chapter, how- ever, we can set that aside for the moment and say that there are aspects of human behaviour that are cultural in the general terms described above, and that we can study as such.
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