THE HEROIC JOURNEY IN POPULAR CULTURE Dhruba Karki ABSTRACT Popular culture integrates people in diverse settings. Individuals share ideas through materials they use, including food, dresses, movies, magazines, and holiday spots. In the past, people set for pilgrimage to holy sites; these days, they go on trekking through hills. Pilgrimages to consecrated sites have been replaced by people's journey to discotheque, fashion center and shopping complex in the modern time corporate world. What binds them together is the transformation of consciousness in line with the journey from the terrestrial to the celestial sphere. Specific human activities, including pilgrimage and business trip become popular culture when people make them significant parts of their lives. Sound and images of disco, jazz, hip-hop, and pop-rock have entered the streets and hotels equally in cities of the industrial world, from Lhasa to London, Karachi to Kathmandu, and Tokyo to New York, irrespective of their cultures and ethnic backgrounds. In today’s world of saturated media presence, images and icons of heroes and legends, motivated by commercial and popular appeal, are circulated with a greater speed, becoming simultaneously a shared mythic currency and continuity, the modern world embodiment of silk road business, and thus, crossing the East-West divide. Key Words: Popular, culture, humanities, hero, transformation, folklore. INTRODUCTION Popular culture is people's culture. An M Phil course on popular culture helps students understand everyday culture that they can imbibe through multiple texts, ranging from verbal to visual. Topics in this paper revolve across sports and advertisement, film and fiction, mythology and technology, and folklore and cyberculture. Central to the humanities program, Popular Culture inculcates in the university graduates civic sense of love and compassion to the humanity. Connecting the university academia to an ever changing world, this course assists to bring together the elite and the folk to the dynamics of the interdisciplinary interactions in training, knowledge and research. Popular Culture induces students to theories and texts based on science, humanities and management. Through representative visual or non-visual texts of contemporary American along with Nepali culture, students make connections between popular culture and the dynamics of the contemporary world. This course equips students with skills to analyze Dr. Karki is Reader in English, Central Department of English, T.U., Kirtipur, Nepal 26 THE HEROIC JOURNEY IN... popular cultures from multiple perspectives and instills in them sensibilities of global culture by interpenetrating all disciplines. Citizens, including academia and students with insights of interdisciplinary perspectives share the prospect of education in a rapidly developing world of democracy and information technology. Since culture developed together with the human species, it is shared and socially inherited. This course, crossing disciplinary frames of research and knowledge, disseminates interdisciplinary ideas and perspectives through popular cultures. Topics in this course are directed to prepare students as the most useful global citizens with a noble sense of humanity, aware of other people’s cultures while practicing one of their own. Knowing other people’s cultures heightens the intensity of your perception of your culture from different perspectives. Specific human activities become popular culture when people make them parts of their lives. Popular culture incorporates actions in which people spend much of their time, money, and energy. Sports, movies, music, dance, blue jeans, electronic media, and fast food have become increasingly popular across the world. Sound and images of disco, jazz, hip-hop, and pop-rock have entered the streets and hotels equally in cities of the industrial world, from London to Tokyo, and those of developing countries, from Kathmandu to Karachi. People spend money and time in concert, discotheques and dance bars. Youngsters in red t-shirts and blue jeans with images of celebrities visit colleges and fashion centers. In today’s world of saturated media presence, images and icons of heroes and legends, motivated by commercial and popular appeal, are circulated with a greater speed, becoming simultaneously a shared mythic currency and continuity. Culture is then a methodological calculation of actions and expressions of people no matter which part of the globe they live in. Within a purview of Stuart Hall’s cultural representations as interactive processes, John Storey, in Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, examines popular culture as more an everyday practice than an aesthetic manifestation: Culture in cultural studies is defined politically rather than aesthetically. The object of study in cultural studies is not culture defined in the narrow sense, as the objects of aesthetic excellence (‘high art’); nor culture defined in an equally narrow sense, as a process of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual development; but culture understood as the texts and practices of everyday life. (2) Shared by individuals irrespective of their geographic locations, culture operates as the textual site in new areas of the humanities of which popular culture is a significant branch. Human actions, behaviors, and materials of everyday use are considered identity markers of people living in diverse cultural spaces. Cultural icons and social events are mass mediated through video, film, and television, thus making them more TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY JOURNAL, VOLUME. XXIX, NUMBER , JUNE 2016 27 popular. Audiences face everyday images of Robocop, Superman, Batman and Spiderman on film and videos. Children and students in recent decades prefer their materials, including shoes, shirts and stationeries with images and logos of superheroes. Popular culture refers to common practices that unite people with similar belief systems, lifestyles, and worldviews. In Popular Culture Profiles, Ray Browne and Pat Browne define popular culture as people’s activities and engagements, incorporating rite and ritual, myth and media, and feast and festival. It is what people do while they are awake, and what they think about and what they dream of while they are asleep. It is the way of life individuals inherit, practice, change, and pass to their descendents (3). Understanding a people’s culture requires a closer observation of their actions and leisure activities. Knowing specific patterns of lives and their belief systems allows observers to understand those people engaged in those activities. Popular culture is not a product in itself, but a process of representing any cultural object. It is culturally constructed from interactive processes 28 THE HEROIC JOURNEY IN... between humans and media representations. Studying popular culture connotes an in-depth investigation into food the majority of the people eat, dresses they wear, magazines they read, and movies they view. In the fashion world, certain dresses, such as t-shirts or sports shoes become popular once they are worn by celebrities, and they become even more popular after the hero and the heroine wearing them appear in the television commercials. It unfolds connections between the hero and culture, business and aesthetics, and icon and technology. For an example, blue jeans are, originally rough dresses designed for American cowboys, have become fancy wears for special occasions for people of all age ranges. Similarly, fast foods, including McDonald, pizza and KFC have become special snacks for youngsters and adults and ordinary folk and the rich elite across the world. Likewise, the Olympics, the World Cup, television and video games, among others, have become popular among people, ranging from children to adults, from those in the developing countries to the highly advanced industrial world. Not only those sports athletes compete in TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY JOURNAL, VOLUME. XXIX, NUMBER , JUNE 2016 29 tournaments but also performances in television people watch become popular. Sporting the television, while viewing business company- sponsored sports tournaments, involves athletics and economics. When presented to audiences through television, a folk song becomes popular. Similarly, popular song becomes folk culture once it becomes a part of everyday life. A massive use of technologies and electronic media makes many of the world's indigenous cultures popular. The faculty of humanities, establishing connections between popular culture and the fast changing world, needs to be revitalized by bringing together various disciplines, so that the university can prepare the human resource the market needs while producing ideal citizens with a noble sense of humanity. Ray Browne further elaborates popular culture as the system of attitudes, behavior patterns, beliefs, customs, and tastes that define the people of any society. It is the entertainment, diversions, icons, rituals, and actions that shape a society’s everyday life. It is what we do while we are awake, what we think about and how we approach the thought, and what we dream about while we are asleep. It is the way of life we inherit, practice, change, and then pass on to our descendants (3). Popular culture is the current mature extension of folk culture, the culture of people. With improved means of communication and electronic media in American culture, folk culture expanded into popular culture – the daily way of life as shaped by the popular majority of society….