ABSTRACT
Ideology and hegemony, we have seen, are the ways in which power is entailed in culture. Power is also articulated, however, in the relation of class, gender and race and this raises the issue of cultural politics. This is the question of what counts in society and what does not, what is at the centre and what at the margins, which voices are heard and which silenced. 1 Cultural institutions like churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, the family and the law play a key part in establishing these priorities. Cultural politics do not necessarily establish patterns of inequality - all sorts of other factors like invasion, colonization, immigration and economics play their part here-but once established culture keeps such patterns in place and entrenches them. Think of the dense network of practices which determine caste - dress codes, codes about what is eaten, when and how, codes about living areas and access to water, all giving rise to distinctive forms of music, poetry and religious practice. Similarly, cultural codes are implicit in the distinction between white collar and blue collar workers, which characteristically involves different leisure activities, preferences in music, newspapers, types of literature read, television programmes watched; and between the sexes, as we can see from the paucity of women artists or composers in the Western tradition.
