ABSTRACT
Cultural studies is an important and contemporary way of engaging in the study of culture. Over time many academic subjects – including anthropology, history, literary studies, human geography and sociology – have brought their own disciplinary concerns to the study of culture. However, in recent decades there has been a renewed interest in the study of culture in a number of other disciplines, such as economics, politics and psychology. In addition those disciplines that have long studied culture have taken a fresh look at how this can be done, drawing on new theories and contemporary methods. This renewed attention to culture across the social sciences and humanities is often known as the ‘cultural turn’. Moreover, attention to culture has also crossed disciplinary boundaries. The resulting activity, cultural studies, has emerged as an intriguing and exciting area of intellectual inquiry that has already shed important new light on the character of human cultures and which promises to continue so to do. In this book we adopt what can be seen as a ‘wide’ definition of cultural studies, which we will explore and define further as the book progresses. So as will become clear, this book does not simply concern itself with a version of cultural studies that was developed at and promoted from the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s (see Key Influence 1.3 on p. 31). Further, it does not restrict itself to those forms of cultural studies that even if they take a wider compass than the original work from Birmingham, continue to take their main inspiration from that approach. While there is little doubt that cultural studies is widely recognised as an important, distinctive but highly contested field of study, it does seem to encompass a potentially enormous area. This is at least partly because the term ‘culture’ has a complex history and range of usages, which have provided a legitimate focus of inquiry for different academic disciplines, which often use the term in distinctive ways. So in order to begin to delimit the field that this textbook considers, we have divided this chapter into four main sections:
1.1 A discussion of some principal definitions of culture. 1.2 An introduction to the core issues raised by the definitions and study of culture. 1.3 A review of some leading theoretical accounts that address these core issues. 1.4 An outline of our view of the developing field of cultural studies.
