POPULAR CULTURE

Popular Culture

Popular Culture:

Introduction

Popular culture is a malleable concept. It can be thought of as folk culture produced by people as an expression of their values and modes of existence, and it can be the opposite, an ideologically laden product imposed by an elite class in a display of power and social control (Illouz, 2003. Popular culture can be an ordinary part of everyday life as well as a site of intellectual and political struggle. It can be a participatory form within a community (actual or virtual) that engages the most populous mainstream in society, and it can be a mode of entertainment—an almost universal feature of most known societies.

Wall painting, body decorating, singing, and gladiatorial sports from the ancient world can all be regarded as forms of popular culture, as can Rembrandt's cottage industry products and Shakespeare's seventeenth-century theater. Items for inclusion in the category of popular culture are now so diverse that no single definition contains them. Thus, popular culture refers to any demotic form that appeals to the populace at large, and as such, it can function as a social bond and folk culture that is expressive of the people (Gans, (2005). In its early form, from the sixteenth century, the popular also implied the lowly, vulgar, and common

Discussion

Embedded in these views are assumptions that culture originating from the lower social orders, or appealing en masse to a mainstream, is both less interesting than highbrow culture and more heavily freighted with ideology. It also assumes that popular culture can be understood and interpreted properly from the vantage point of those in an elite intellectual position. Yet popular culture is not a homogeneous form; it has contradictions within itself as well as a range of diverse forms.

A new manner of thinking about popular culture was provided by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, established in 1964 under the leadership of Richard Hoggart, who had lovingly documented the working class culture of his youth in The Uses of Literacy (1958). Hoggart's approach was in direct opposition to the perspectives expressed by T. S. Eliot (1948) and F. R. Leavis (1948), who argued for a top-down approach to the civilizing influences of culture (Fiske, 2006). Hoggart's construction of the working class and its cultural practices and preferences was a major factor in defining the populist agenda of popular culture in the British context. He made explicit the link between the study of popular culture and representations of class and the distribution of privilege. He asserted the importance of art and culture as the means by which much of the individual's quality of life was revealed. Learning to read objects and practices in a critical manner was the key to understanding society. The dominant elite classes had expressed their own views through a monopoly over culture, and these values had been taken for granted. Now with the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the canonical elite forms of high culture were transposed into sites of ...