ABSTRACT
The question, What is popular culture? is a vexed one, and not one for which an answer readily exists. What Rigby demonstrates is that the meaning of this concept will very often depend upon the motives of its user. Whether it invokes ‘the people’, or just ‘people’ depends entirely on the user of ‘popular culture’ as a concept believing in either of these terms. Certain theoreticians refuse the idea ‘the people’ because it implies a political unity they do not believe exists. Therefore, for their own purposes, popular culture refers to people, humans in the plural without any inference of collectivity. Conversely, for others, popular culture is the culture of ‘the people’, meaning-virtually speaking-the proletariat or working class and is opposed to a concept of high or dominant culture and is, in practice, quite categorical. For still others, popular culture is connotative of peasant culture (‘a people’ in other words); referring to nearly extinct, folkloric practices carried out by a minority population of subsistence farmers. Here again, the implication is that the peasants are the ‘true’ people, they are closer to their roots than everyone else and are therefore less corrupted by modern society.
