ABSTRACT

While the term ‘cultural studies’ may be used, broadly, to refer to all aspects of the study of culture, and as such may be taken to encompass the diverse ways in which culture is understood and analysed, for example, in sociology, history, ethnography and literary criticism, and even sociobiology, it may also, more precisely, be taken to refer to a distinctive field of academic enquiry. In this second use, its historical roots can be traced back to the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and thus to the formation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, originally under the directorship of Hoggart and then of Stuart Hall. From this body of work there emerged a multi-disciplinary approach to culture, drawing not merely on the orthodox approaches derived from the social sciences, but also on more radical approaches suggested by, for example, feminism, Marxism and semiotics. This miscellany of approaches facilitated the asking of new questions, and thus to a reconceptualisation of exactly what was entailed by the term ‘culture’. In particular, cultural studies can be seen to have set itself against the preconceptions about culture found in the traditional critical disciplines, such as literary criticism, aesthetics and musicology. While such traditional disciplines predominantly treated cultural products as objects or texts that could be legitimately, or even exhaustively, studied in isolation from the social and historical contexts of their production and consumption, the exponents of cultural studies sought to situate cultural products explicitly in relation to other social practices, and particularly in relation to political structures and social hierarchies, such as race, class and gender. An implication of this approach was that the cultural products to be studied could not merely be those selected and celebrated by an intellectual and artistic elite, but would rather be the material and symbolic products encountered in all strata and sections of society. Cultural studies can therefore be seen to be situated between an

approach to culture that is explicitly opposed to the celebration of high or elite culture, as represented, for example, in the canonical texts studied in English literature, or the subject matter of traditional musicology, and an approach that is more positively derived from the social sciences, and particularly from cultural anthropology and the sociology of culture.