Limitations of Cultural Studies

Limitations of Cultural Studies

Name: Parmar Dipali K.

Roll No. : 26

Assignment Sem. 2

Email Id: dipaliparmar247@gmail.com

Submitted to: The Department of English, MKBU.

v  What is Cultural Studies?

‘Culture’ word itself is hard to define.

‘Cultural Studies’ is loosely a group of tendencies, issues and questions arising from a social turmoil of the 1960s.

It is composed of elements of

Marxism,

Post-Structuralism,

Post-Modernism,

Feminism,

Gender studies,

Anthropology,

Race,

Sociology,

Ethnic Studies,

Film theory,

Urban Studies,

Public Policy,

Post-Colonial Studies,

Popular Cultural Studies

-and those fields which concentrates on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division or alienation.

Later on discipline of Psychology has also arrived in Cultural Studies.

It is to erase boundaries between 1. High-Low, 2. Classic-Popular literary texts and 3. Literature-Other Cultural Discourses.

As we know that Cultural Study refers many of the disciplines, it is natural that it will have limitations. We know that if we concentrate on more than one work at a time, we could not give every work the same importance and attention. Here, it happens with Cultural Studies too.

Let’s see which its limitations are.…..

v  Limitations of Cultural Studies:

1. Diversity of approach and subject-matter:

          The weakness of Cultural Studies lies in its strengths, particularly its emphasis upon diversity of approach and subject matter. Cultural Studies can at times seem merely an intellectual smorgasbordin which the critic blithely combines artful helping of texts and objects and then “finds” deep connections between them, without adequately researching what a culture means or how cultures have interacted.

2. Not fueled by hard research:

          Cultural Studies are not always fueled by hard researches.

i.e., Historians have traditionally practiced to analyze ‘culture’. Which includes scientifically collected data.

3.Lack of Knowledge:

Cultural Study practitioners often know a lot of interesting things and possess the intellectual ability to play them off interestingly against each other, but they sometimes lack adequate knowledge of “deep play” of meanings or “thick description” of a culture that ethnographer Clifford Geertz identified in his studies of the Balinese.

In the essay of Geertz uses “deep play” word for the ‘cockfight’ which is illegal in his society. He explains as a context of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who defines “deep play” as a game with risks high that no rational person would engage in it. The amounts of money involved in the cockfight makes Balinese cockfight “deep play”.

And another words “thick description” is used in the field of anthropology, sociology, religious studies and human and organizational development. The “thick description” of culture means it’s not just explaining what culture is but also refers that in which context the meaning is developed.

4. Necessity of reading the classics:

          Sometimes students complain that professors who overemphasize cultural studies tend to downplay the necessity of reading the classics, and that they sometimes coerce students into “politically correct” views.

5. Whatever is happening at the moment:

            David Richterdescribes culture as

          “-about whatever is happening at the moment, rather than about a body of texts created in the past.

            ‘Happening’ topics, generally speaking, are the mass media themselves, which, in a postmodern culture, dominate the culture lives on its inhabitants, or topics that have been valorizes by the mass media.”

          But he goes on to observe that if this seems trivial, the strength of cultural studies its “relentlessly critical attitude toward journalism, publishing, cinema, television, and other forms of mass media, whose seemingly transparent windows through which we view ‘reality’ probably constitute the most blatant and pervasive mode of false consciousness of our era” (Richter 1218).

6. Tempted to dismiss popular culture:

            If we are tempted to dismiss popular culture, it is also worth remembering that when the works like Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn were written, they were not intended for elite discussions in English classrooms, but exactly for popular consumption.

7. ‘Culture Wars’ of academia:

          Defenders of tradition and advocates of cultural studies are waging what is sometimes called the “culture wars”of academia.

On the one hand are offered impassioned defenses of humanism as the foundation, since the time of the ancient Greeks, of Western civilization and modern democracy.

On the other hand, as Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton has written, the current “crises” in the humanities can be seen as failure of the humanities; this “body of discourses” about “imperishable” values has demonstrably negated(cancelled) those very values in its practices.

         

v Conclusion:

Whatever the emphasis, cultural studies makes available one more approach-and several methodologies-to address these questions. 

References

·       Guerin, Wilfred L. (1966). A handbook of critical approaches to literature. Oxford University Press, 2005.

·       images.google.com

·       https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Play:_Notes_on_the_Balinese_Cockfight

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