Culture is Ordinary
Not high falutin
I've started a non-credit university cultural studies course at UBC called Hum (short for Humanities 101).
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture (including popular culture) and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.
(wiki @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies),
The course I'm doing is focused a lot on indigenous issues.
Interestingly, cultural studies stands somewhat opposed to the traditional humanities topics like Literature or Philosophy or Anthropology which are viewed as bastions of Western, male dominated ideology.
Full disclosure: for me cultural studies seems very close to what I used to think of as post-modernism so I find it pretty challenging to be quiet and listen. But so far so good.
This week our reading include an essay called 'Culture is Ordinary" by Raymond Williams who was one of the founders of cultural studies in the late 1950s. Williams was a country boy from Wales who ended up at Cambridge. He was not impressed at the culture he found there.
Basically - I think he found the culture of Cambridge to be 'stuck up'; with a high opinion of itself combined with a sense of entitlement obsessed with a narrow range of interests and fashions.
He found the lively culture of the village he came from to be far superior because it was firmly grounded in the work and ritual and play of everyday life.
The idea nestled into my structure of understanding like it had always been there.
And in a way it always had been there; just not articulated as well as Williams did.
I grew up listening to rock. Beatles, Stones, Grateful Dead . . .
They weren't considered to be culture. Culture was opera and symphonies.
Basically, culture was the music that rich people could indulge in.
The same applied to the other arts; from pictures to stories to dance and on to sculpture.
These are things that ordinary people do all the time - but they aren't rich and the productions are modest.
Consider the difference between an orchestra and a garage band.
The former is generally a big organization with a big hall and lots of professional musicians.
The latter was a bunch of high school friends with a few guitars and a drumset.
The symphonic orchestra was/is extraordinary culture .
Extraordinary culture had very many more spectators than creators. This can make it very profitable for promoters.
Ordinary culture often has more creators than spectators.
I'm using 'culture' here in a narrow sense; referring to art.
The word has a much broader sense. Culture can be thought of as - what a society is like.
Each society feels different; that difference is culture.
We feel the culture of a location by walking down the street and interacting with people. The more we learn about the society and its history the richer the culture seems.
Contemporary extraordinary culture is different now than when Williams was writing. Back then they barely had TV and record players. The mass culture we experience today was just getting started.
With extraordinary culture you might get an audience to creator ratio of (say) 1000 audience members to 50 performers (20:1).
With mass culture we get audience to performer ratios like 10,000,000 to 1 Mass culture can be extremely profitable.
Since mass culture is so popular the images and ideas it presents become seen as 'normal'.
With mass culture an unexpected thing happens. A society can have many mass-subcultures that interact in unexpected ways.
Subcultures can be big enough that they become self-sustaining silos of a 'normal'.
So the ordinary cultural experience on the street is that there is a lot of variety which is in tension with the normality of life within a silo.
And back to Williams - Ordinary culture is necessarily richer than extraordinary culture.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.