ABSTRACT
The Birmingham version of British cultural studies is owed to pioneering work by Richard Hoggart as well as to historical work by E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams the founder of the culture-and-society approach to cultural analysis. Cultural studies borrow significantly from the explosion of interdisciplinary interest in interpretive theory, including postmodernism, poststructuralism, critical theory and feminist theory. The CCCS work shows that it is possible to be culturally pluralist while also endorsing a theory of needs that resists cultural hegemony on all levels of contemporary experience. Birmingham cultural studies has achieved this balance between pluralism and resistance in part through their theory of subcultures, which differentiates and regionalizes the portentous globalism of both high-culture and popular-culture arguments. The Birmingham approach to culture as practice and experience responds to two influential perspectives on culture orthodox Marxism and mainstream institutional anthropologies and sociologies of culture.
