ABSTRACT
The English novelist E.M. Forster titled his 1951 collection of essays Two Cheers for Democracy. The title points to his assessment of democracy which deserves ‘two cheers’, which ‘are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three’ (Forster 1951: 78). For Forster democracy ‘is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent it deserves our support’ (77). I am not interested here in Forster’s assessment of democracy but I do want to borrow his formulation. Culture, it seems, is something we can’t do without but it might be ‘quite enough’ to give it only two cheers. What I want is a more modest sense of what we can study in the name of culture, and where we need to admit to the limitations of a culturalist perspective. But I also want a more ambitious (ambitious but not bombastic) form of cultural study, one that works in the name of addressing reality rather than just addressing the ways that we point at reality.
