Production and Consumption of culture and Relation of Power and Culture

Production and Consumption of Culture And Relation of Power and Culture 

Name: 

Divya Parmar 

 Paper no:

205

Roll no:

5

Enrollment no:

4069206420210024

Email id:

divyaparmar07012@gmail.com

Batch:

2021-2023 (sem 3)

Submitted to: 

S. B. Gardi Department of English.

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University 

Introduction:

A cultural study is an innovative multidisciplinary field of research and teaching investigation of ‘culture’. It creates and transforms the individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. In research and teaching the culture is understood as the human expressive, symbolic activities and distinctive ways of life. It combines the studies of social sciences and humanities in order to draw methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural, anthropology and economics. It addresses new questions and problems of today’s world. It is devoted to understanding of the processes in societies and diverse groups with history, community life, and the challenges of the future.

 

What is culture?

"the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic" (Merriam Webster) 

culture, behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements. (britannica) 

 

Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music and is different all over the world. Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

Concept of culture: 

Culture can be anything as it is used culture shock, Canadian culture, multicultural; even it is more diverse in usage like non anthropologist and non- sociologist it may be agriculture or bacterial culture. And a continuum it may be global culture, world culture, cultural evolution or public culture or if one look at the base of way of life it may consider as rural culture, corporate culture, Canadian culture, youth culture. If one look at culture from a set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices it may be of high culture, to be culture, uncultured, culture event, counter culture, elite culture. And culture can be of identity. When one look the culture from the celebration perspective it becomes cultural diversity, cultural awareness, multicultural, intercultural, cross cultural and cultural exchange. And on the disparagement of difference it is cultural shock, deviant culture, pop culture, subculture and cultural assimilation. 

What is Cultural Studies? 

Cultural studies is a field of theoretical, political, and empirical engaged culture analysis which was initially developed by British academicians in the late 1950s, 60s and 70s. 

It has been taken up and transformed by many scholars in different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies are acknowledged today as interdisciplinary subjects and sometimes as anti-disciplinary. 

A cultural study is an innovative multidisciplinary field of research and teaching investigation of ‘culture’.

 It creates and transforms the individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. In research and teaching the culture is understood as the human expressive, symbolic activities and distinctive ways of life.

 It combines the studies of social sciences and humanities in order to draw methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural, anthropology and economics. It addresses new questions and problems of today’s world. 

It is devoted to understanding of the processes in societies and diverse groups with history, community life, and the challenges of the future. 

Objective of Culture Studies:

To promote and develop the teaching and scholarship of Cultural Studies. 

To promote and develop research in Cultural Studies.

To actively advocate for Cultural Studies as a discipline of study in university, industry and government forums.

To foster and develop networks of scholars engaged in Cultural Studies.

To mentor and provide support to students of Cultural Studies.

To deliver public events, including an annual conference, showcasing the work of the Association and its members.

To represent Cultural Studies in media and other public forums.

To be a national voice on cultural issues.

To promote links with other international Cultural Studies organizations and associations overseas.

To do all things necessary and expedient for the proper, full and effectual carrying out of all of the objects of the Association. 

Characteristic of cultural studies:

In his 1994 book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies.

The aim of Cultural Studies is to examine cultural practices and their relation to power. 

The objective of Cultural Studies includes understanding culture in all its complex forms and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.

Cultural Studies is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.

Cultural Studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit forms of knowledge (cultural) and objective forms of knowledge (universal).

Cultural Studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action. 

Importance of Cultural Studies:

The cultural studies provide the arbitrariness of disciplines and the failure of interdisciplines

It provides the idea of solving difficulties with the traditional rationale of the study of culture

It provides need for a Counter-Disciplinary Praxis

It gives ideas of Public Spheres, Popular Culture and Cultural Studies

It gives resisting Intellectuals

Cultural Studies facilitates education for teachers and policymakers. 

It provides materials for individuals to create identities and meanings and detects uses of cultural forms.

Cultural studies are valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and interpret one's culture critically.

Cultural studies allow us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. 

Production and Consumption of the Culture

Cultural studies believes that the 'Culture' of a Community includes various aspects: economic, spatial, ideological, erootic and political. Cultural studies therefore aims to include all these in its ambit. It seek to understand how particular objects acquire meaning and value in a society or community. 

Culture is not a natural thing - it is produced. Cultural studies is interested in the production and consumption of culture. The production and consumption of culture is linked to : 

Matters of class (who decides on what is produced?)

Matters of economy (who can afford it ?)

Matters of representation (How is the artefact marketed/presented?)

The production and Consumption of artefacts depends on the ability to do so and the ways in which these artefacts have been marketed and sold. In short culture is a product that is : 

Made

Marketed

Consumed 

(An introduction to cultural studies by Pramod Nayar)

The Internet’s Influence on the Production and Consumption of Culture: Creative Destruction and New Opportunities. First, technologies don’t change us. They provide affordances that allow us to be ourselves, to do the things we like or need to do, more easily.

The availability of these affordances may change behavior by reducing the cost (in time or money) of certain activities (e.g., watching excerpts from movies or comedy shows) relative to other activities (watching network television).The Internet is a moving target, a product not only of technological ingenuity but of economic strategy and political struggle. 

What we think of as the Internet in the advanced industrial democracies reflects a particular regulatory regime through which states allocate rights to intellectual property and, through regulation, influence the cost and potential profitability of investments in different kinds of networking technologies.

The Internet is a technology that unleashes powerful opportunities. But the realization of these opportunities is dependent on Human beings and their culture. 

Power Culture: 

In a narrowly defined version of cultural studies, the typical questions have been about the production or organization of meaning as a site of power. Cultural processes are important and interesting because they are a medium through which powerful social relationships are played out and in which possibilities for social betterment are opened up or closed down.

A typical way of posing ‘power questions’ has been in terms of identity, especially where identity is seen as a problematic issue, and where individual and collective identities are understood as being always created under social pressures. The cultural question can be asked differently. Implicit in the culture-as-power issue and the questions that arise from it is the idea that everyone participates, however unequally, in the cultural process of making meanings and fixing and shifting identities.

Yet the best known definition of the cultural, and perhaps still the dominant one in everyday use, tends to narrow the cultural field down to specialized, often elite, ‘high cultural’ practices and products which are distinguished from ‘common culture’ and which are ‘owned’ by experts or privileged groups. 

Culture influences the songs we sing, the steps we dance and the words we write. It also shapes our brains. Scientists have long known that neuroplasticity allows individual events to sculpt the brain's form and function. Now there is evidence that life experience as intangible as culture can also reorganize our neural pathways. Recent research has found that culture influences the way a person's brain perceives visual stimuli such as scenes and colors. So directly or indirectly power designs our culture.

Word count: 1521

Work Citation : 

Barla, Amrit. “Cultural Studies.” Academia.edu, 14 Mar. 2015, https://www.academia.edu/11420867/CULTURAL_STUDIES.

Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, http://cscs.res.in/courses_folder/undergraduate-courses/papers.2008-02-05.9798782311/paper-1.-introduction-to-cultural-studies.

“Culture Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture.

“Culture.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/culture.

Johnson, Richard, and Parvati Raghuram. “(PDF) The Practice of Cultural Studies - Researchgate.” Researchgate , Jan. 2004, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42791027_The_Practice_of_Cultural_Studies.

(Nayar #)

Work Cited

Nayar, Pramod. An Introduction to Cultural studies. second ed., New Delhi, Viva books private limited.