2 Culture, Popular/Mass Culture I

Dr. Saradindu Bhattacharya

Section 1 – Culture: Etymology, Definition, History and Significance

The word ‘culture’ has its roots in the Latin noun cultura, meaning “cultivation”, and the past participle verb form colere, which means “to till, tend or guard”. The key to understanding the meaning of ‘culture’ lies in its etymological history: culture signifies human endeavour to make something more out of what is merely available to us in the natural world. Thus, culture may be said to have emerged when human beings began to grow crops and live together in small farming communities for the first time. The invention of agriculture enabled the human race to develop certain common modes of working and living together, which formed the basis of all culture. The metaphoric use of the term ‘culture’ to signify the refinement of certain essentially human qualities dates back to the ancient Roman orator Cicero, who coined the expression cultura animi to mean “cultivation of the soul”. In medieval France, the term ‘culture’ also meant “to protect or honour”, reflecting the extension of the concept to the individual’s sense of possessing something that is valuable and therefore ought to be defended. In 18th century Europe, the Enlightenment brought knowledge and intellectual labour into the limelight and established the notion of culture as the improvement of the individual’s mind through education. In the 19th century, the term ‘culture’ acquired a broader social connotation and was increasingly used to mean the collective beliefs, ideas and customs of a certain class of people. It was during this time that ‘culture’ became associated with notions of taste, refinement and inheritance as it was mostly used to refer to the habits and customs of the upper classes of society. The division between people who were perceived to ‘have’ culture and those who did not became evident as culture itself became a marker of social distinction.

In the 20th century, the term ‘culture’ has been used by anthropologists and sociologists to encompass the entire range of the modes of thought, action and communication that human beings use to organize their experiences of living in society. Since the 1960s and 70s, a growing academic interest in the everyday rituals, opinions and beliefs of the middle classes, coupled with the rising influence of mass media in their lives, has reoriented the significance of the term ‘culture’ and brought under these within the purview of the discipline of cultural studies. For contemporary social scientists like Raymond Williams, ‘culture’ is located not only in great works of art and literature but also in the common objects and practices that enable ordinary men and women derive meaning to their experience of belonging to and functioning within particular social institutions and domains, such as family, school, office, and so on. Since cultural studies as a branch of formal academic study itself had its origins in Marxist social theory, its practitioners examine ‘culture’ not merely as an expression of people’s tastes and opinions but as a site of class negotiations. Culture is not something that we are simply born with, rather it is the result of acquiring and performing very specific ways of speech, thought and conduct that help us define our position in every sphere of our existence. In fact, cultural studies concerns itself with the ordinary and the everyday precisely because it is in the common experience of existing within a web of differential social relations that each of us situates and understands his/her identity. Thus, for instance, the ‘culture’ that a student of English literature ‘has’ depends not only on the number and the range of ‘literary’ texts she studies in class but also on her construction of an individual identity in terms of an inculcated literary ‘taste’ as well as the expression of the same to classmates, friends and family, and (future) students. Moreover, this acquired literary taste has to be shared and accepted as valuable by those with whom the student interacts – both at a personal and an institutional level – for it to become an index of her cultural identity. Culture is thus a set of very consciously and deliberately constructed norms of thinking and behaving (in other words, codes) that an individual follows not only in order to make sense of the ‘knowledge’ s/he has but also to apply that knowledge to the social contexts within which s/he must function. It is also important to remember here that culture does not signify a static entity or an immutable set of beliefs and practices held to be true and valuable universally; rather, it is constituted by constantly evolving ways of interpreting the objects, practices and rituals around which we organize our existence as social creatures. In other words, culture is not a product but a process – one that exists and derives its meanings only from the actual practice of everyday life by individuals belonging to it.

Section 2 – Types of Culture (1): High Culture vs. Low/Popular/Mass Culture

The idea of culture as referring only to a very specific set of ‘artistic’ qualities found in select works of literature, theatre, painting, music, sculpture and architecture became popular in 19th century Europe. This definition of culture, based on the discriminatory criterion of ‘taste’, was the result of persistent arguments made by critics like Matthew Arnold, who declared that culture represents the highest level of human achievement: “the best that has been thought and said in the world”. Contrasting his notion of culture with anarchy, Arnold sought to make a case for culture as the sole preserve of those who have the intellectual refinement to appreciate works of art on the basis of standards of judgment acquired through formal education that was affordable only to the elite sections of society. Thus, such standards not only excluded a large number of cultural objects and practices from the definition of ‘culture’ but also disregarded the ‘tastes’ of the working classes as invalid criteria for defining or assessing culture. This narrow definition of culture, now referred to as ‘high culture’, represented the anxiety of the ruling classes to maintain their traditional social power in the face of the emergence of a massive population of working class people caused by the Industrial Revolution. The conscious and deliberate move to equate elite or ‘high’ culture with civilization effectively marginalized the customs, practices, beliefs and opinions of the working classes. This form of cultural elitism continued into the first half of the 20th century as influential critics like T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis glorified literary texts accessible mostly to the upper classes and contributed to the formation of a canon that excluded texts that were popular with the masses. Thus, while the works of Shakespeare and Milton were considered as representing the highest literary ‘standards’ and ‘high’ culture, the inexpensive and hugely popular ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the Victorian age were supposed to lack any literary merit and were therefore dismissed as representing ‘low’ culture. The notion of ‘high’ culture thus operated at two levels of discrimination: first, it identified a universal ‘standard’ of artistic merit and taste that was exclusive only to the social elites; second, it discredited the cultural expressions and opinions of the working classes for failing to meet this ‘standard’.

Following the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and the emergence of mass media like television and cinema in the 20th, this distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture became not only theoretically untenable but also strategically unsupportable. This became especially evident after the two World Wars, when a large number of young men and women started opting for higher education and discovered that their cultural beliefs, practices and preferences had no representation at all in the curricula prescribed at colleges and universities. Thus, popular culture started gaining academic attention and cultural studies as a formal discipline was inaugurated with the establishment of the Birmingham School in 1964. Concurrently, new developments in critical theory such as post-structuralism and feminism challenged established ways of ‘reading’ texts and thereby created a space for alternative readings and re-assessment of the canon. The assembly-line production of consumer goods created a degree of homogeneity in the market that blurred the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural products; at the same time, the influence of mass media like television shows and films on vast sections of society called for serious engagement with these ‘pop’ cultural forms within the academia. On the other hand, ‘high’ cultural texts have been rendered popular through their re-invention in popular forms. Thus, Shakespeare’s plays are no longer only the subject of academic inquiry but also raw material for numerous productions on television and film. This democratization of the ‘literary’ text has indeed effected a transformation and expansion of its cultural value and brought Shakespeare back into the domain of the ‘popular’ from which he had originally derived his cultural currency. In fact, the definition and nature of art itself has undergone a significant revision in the age of (potentially) infinite reproducibility through technology. Thus, Mona Lisa is now no longer restricted to the visitors to the Louvre or students of art learning about Da Vinci’s technique from voluminous books on painting, but is available to anyone with access to the internet. While it would be inaccurate to claim that the emergence of mass media has abolished all distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, it has certainly made the boundaries between the two more porous by creating larger audiences for both. The mass production and consumption of goods in modern industrial societies – ranging from food items, fashion accessories, technological gadgets to means of entertainment and leisure – makes for a ‘culture’ wherein the uniqueness of any particular object or practice is subsumed by the possibility of its redistribution among a homogenized audience.

Section 3 – Types of Culture (2): Folk, Urban, National and Sub-cultures

While social class has been the preeminent factor for distinguishing between various cultures, with the evolution of industrial cities and networked economies, geographical location has also emerged as a significant factor that determines the forms of cultural expression that individuals and groups engage in. In pre-modern societies, where means of production, trade and communication were restricted both in terms of scale and expanse, cultural objects and practices were limited only to people living in close proximity to one another. Thus, specific forms of culture, such as rituals relating to sowing of seeds or harvesting of crops in agrarian societies, were restricted to a relatively smaller community of people inhabiting a common geographical area. These rituals and practices, emerging from and unique to a community of people sharing a common economic mode of livelihood, represent what is now called ‘folk’ culture. Though folk culture originates from and appeals to those who collectively share the meanings created by its constitutive objects and practices, it differs from contemporary popular culture in that it is not mass produced with the objective of profit-making. It is more local and organic in nature and lacks the uniformity that cultural objects and rituals produced and distributed in industrial societies possess. However, in the age of mass media, ‘folk’ cultural forms and artifacts are often appropriated by producers of mass culture and integrated into the economic processes of generating profit. Thus, for instance, ‘bhangra’, which was originally a folk dance form popular in the province of Punjab, has now been commercialized on a national and global scale thorough its recurrent use in popular Hindi film music. Similarly, trade fairs both in India and abroad showcase the indigenous ‘tribal’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘folk’ culture of our country by offering for sale a variety of products – ranging from spices and pickles, terracotta jewellery, jute and khadi garments, to bamboo and cane furniture – that have traditionally been produced and consumed locally by people living in subsistence economies. In contrast to such cultural production, limited mostly to rural pockets, a distinctly ‘urban’ culture has emerged concurrently with the rise of cities all over the world in the age of industrialization and mass media. Since space and time come at a premium in urban habitats, the everyday negotiations between city-dwellers and their surroundings become the subject of various urban cultural forms and phenomena. Thus, poems about the New York cityscape or the London subway (including graffiti on railway platform walls) or popular ‘band’ songs describing the joys and frustrations of living in a populous city like Kolkata are elements of contemporary urban culture. Similarly, the experience of visiting a shopping mall, now an integral feature of all major cities across the world, represents contemporary urban culture as it not only enables the consumerist ritual of shopping that brings city-dwellers together under the same roof but also embodies, both spatially and temporally, the city itself in a sanitized, controlled, microcosmic form.

Another way of distinguishing between different forms of culture is to examine the institutions that are involved in the promotion of the beliefs and practices underlying those cultural expressions. In most societies, the state exercises a major influence on the creation and popularization of certain common ideas about belonging to a nation, which give the individual a sense of his/her identity as a ‘citizen’. The objects and customs through which these ideas are codified constitute what is known as ‘public’ or ‘national’ culture. For instance, the rules prescribed by the constitution of India about the use of symbols such as the national flag, national song and national anthem serve to instill a sense of loyalty, respect and patriotism amongst the citizens of the country. The circulation of these symbols in public spaces like schools and colleges, government offices, police stations and on important ‘national’ holidays such as Independence Day and Republic Day reinforce the idea of being an Indian and thereby propagate an official ‘public’ culture of Indianness. While such official discourses of common identity often dominate the public domain, there are other modes of cultural expression that consciously seek to challenge the established norms of society and thereby create a ‘counter- culture’ or ‘sub-culture’. For instance, the emergence of the hippie culture in the 1960s was a reaction of the youth against the standards and ideals of Western consumer societies: through psychedelic rock music, use of recreational drugs, outrageous fashion statements and sexual experimentation, the proponents of this counter-cultural movement deliberately went against the dominant social norms of morality and productivity. In the age of mass media, however, sub- cultures are often absorbed into the mainstream by means of the appropriation of their unique or resistant elements by the dominant forms of cultural expression. Thus, the element of rebellion in the rock music of the 60s was rendered popular and acceptable by the massive number of albums that were commercially produced and distributed across the UK and the US for the next couple of generations. In fact, in the age of digital media, what starts out as sub-culture in one part of the globe often goes ‘viral’ and becomes part of a global youth culture. Thus, within a decade of its first occurrence in New York in 2003, the flash mob has become a global urban phenomenon, primarily through the participation of youth and by means of its popularization on the internet. Sub-cultural phenomena are thus often short-lived and integrated into popular culture through the ubiquitous network of mass media in contemporary global society.

Section 4 – Culture as Representation

Though culture is the very fabric into which each individual’s thoughts, feelings, ideas and actions are woven, it cannot be said to exist in an essential, unmediated form. In other words, though culture may condition the ways in which each individual sees and projects his/her own identity in society, it does not result from the individual’s free choice; rather, it is the effect and the process of the interaction and negotiation between the individual and the economic and social structures within which objects and practices become significant to both. For instance, the preoccupation of contemporary Indian youth with attaining a ‘perfect’ body is a direct consequence of the popular cultural representation of film celebrities like Salman Khan, Shilpa Shetty and Hrithik Roshan as embodiments of the ideals of health and beauty. The ‘image’ of the perfect body as being both desirable and achievable is created by means of persistent visual representation of these celebrities – not only through their films but also through allied media such as television advertisements, billboards, newspaper coverage and online reports about them. The mass production and consumption of a range of grooming products endorsed by these celebrities not only generates economic profit for the booming health-care industry in India, but it also enables ordinary men and women to participate in a culture of self-improvement. The mushrooming of gyms across urban and semi-urban centres in India post-1990s indeed marks the confluence of a media-genic youth culture of fitness and health with the market forces of a newly liberalized economy. The ideals of health and beauty that the celebrity stands for are thus rendered replicable in acts of self-fashioning and self-representation. For an individual who aspires to such an ideal body image, the cultural practice of investing time, money and physical labour into the shaping of his/her own body derives its value from such acts of representation as well as reinforces its popular meanings.

Culture is not only the effect of sustained representation of objects and customs across media but also often the very subject of such representation. The role played by mass media in representing a multiplicity of cultural products and phenomena is crucial to understanding how culture operates in contemporary globalized society. Specific aspects of religious and communal practices are often highlighted in media as representing the culture of an entire population or nation. Thus, a typical Bollywood entertainer like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham glorifies the Punjabi festival ‘karva chauth’ (in which wives fast through the day for the long lives of their husbands) not only as representing quintessentially Indian values but also as functioning as the social glue that holds together dispersed NRIs abroad. The export of ‘Indian’ cultural values through the medium of cinema does not only yield economic profit to the distributors and producers of the film but also creates and reinforces the popular image of India as a country of traditional family ethos, perpetual festivities and garish extravagance. Increasingly, the transmission of cultural ideas and rituals takes place across national boundaries: thus, the celebration of Valentine’s Day in Indian cities and towns started as a new ‘trend’ in the mid- 1990s and soon gained momentum as greeting card companies, chocolate and gift stores and popular music recording labels jumped into the foray to claim a slice of the profits generated by this youth phenomenon. While conservative political factions have vociferously condemned such cultural expressions as violating and corrupting ‘Indian’ values, young Indian men and women continue to celebrate the occasion every year within as members of a global community who overrule traditional norms of interaction between the sexes. In recent times, the Italian tomatina festival has become immensely popular (especially after the cult road film Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara made it look ‘fun’ on screen) with urban Indian youth, even as social activists cry out against the wastage of food in a country where starvation deaths are still fairly common. It is evident that cultural practices and values can no longer be contained by exclusive national identities in a context where mass media address a globally networked audience.

Section 5 – Culture as Identity

The notion of identity is tied up closely with the objects, practices and beliefs one associates with at the individual, social and national level. In fact, the idea of culture is integral to the notion of the ‘human’ as a category distinct from all other life forms and the natural world which we inhabit. This distinction is the very basis of our understanding of civilization as well as the operative means through which we differentiate between social groups and communities. Thus, though in theory we may talk about universal human values and norms, in practice culture often signifies more specific notions of belonging to a community based on factors like class, race, nationality, and so on. Culture is, in fact, always differential and exclusionary, in that any group defines and delimits its identity by means of highlighting how it differs from others and laying down rules that govern participation in its practices. Such rules essentially constitute a normative framework for the process of signification within the group, that is, they function as codes by following which its members make meaning out of their own beliefs and actions within a ‘cultural’ context. The process of cultural signification is often enabled through very specific uses of language in institutional contexts. For example, a student of English literature at a university learns to describe the features of various literary genres in terms of disciplinary jargon like perspective, tone, mood, irony, and so on, as well as to encode her response to literary texts in these terms. The pre-established norms of literary appreciation are thus organized and reinforced by the student in the process of acquiring and applying the prescribed use of language that defines the limits of the discipline. The students’ identification of herself as someone who is able to correctly ‘understand’ the ‘meaning’ of literature – in other words, as a member of the academia –thus arises from her ability to partake of the codified language that represents the ‘unique’ value of the texts she reads. This kind of language also necessarily excludes certain cultural objects and expressions in order to define and defend the values it seeks to represent. Thus, a teacher of English literature in India would probably face far greater institutional hurdles to include Chetan Bhagat rather than Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie as prescribed reading for a course on the contemporary Indian English novel. The idea of a particular ‘literary’ culture (tied up with its institutionalization in colleges and universities) is predicated on determining certain ‘standards’ both in terms of the texts that are included within its purview and of the ways in which they can be interpreted; these ‘standards’ are then accepted as valid and applied as common norms by those who ‘belong’ to this culture, thereby establishing and securing their own identity as scholars of literature. The ‘culture’ that an individual imbibes from and practices through an object thus derives its value from the commonly accepted social norms associated with it but is also determined by the meanings s/he makes of his own relationship with that object.

It is this mutually constitutive nature of culture and identity that is at the basis of all acts of meaning-making in society. Such acts of cultural expression enable the individual to locate his/her identity within a network of social relationships, often combining elements of uniqueness with ideas of commonality. Thus, for instance, a musician performing a gothic-rock version of a popular Tagore song declares his own artistic distinctiveness (his awareness of and ability to combine a modern Western model of musical composition with a traditional form of the lyric), while at the same time also announcing his cultural affiliation to what is popularly perceived as valuable and integral to Indian culture. The identity of the musician in this case is located and performed at the intersection of the roles he chooses to play as a creative artist and as an Indian. Increasingly, within a global context, we assume multiple identities at the same time as cultural hybridity has become the very fabric of our existence. Thus, when in 1998 idols of goddess Durga were mounted on models of the Titanic (instead of the deity’s traditional mode of transport, a lion), following the release of the hugely successful movie about the ill-fated ship, the assumption as well as the appeal of such representation to the residents of Kolkata lay in their cultural awareness of both traditional Indian mythology and contemporary popular American cinema. While cultural hybridity is a necessary consequence and condition of global communication and exchange of products and ideas in the age of mass media, there is now also an undeniable impulse towards maintaining and defending distinct national identities. Thus, at international sporting events such as the recently held Commonwealth Games, the spirit of competitiveness is very closely aligned to common notions of national achievement and pride. Though the ‘games’ comprising the event itself mostly focus on individual skill and training, the performance of the participants is popularly perceived as a reflection of collective national talent. In fact, the event itself becomes a spectacular occasion for and a media exercise in displaying the unique culture of the host nation to an international community. Opening and closing ceremonies of such sporting events often feature cultural performances and tableaux that symbolize the distinct national identities of the participants even as they come together as members belonging to a common, trans-national sporting community. The performance of culture is, therefore, essential to as well as dependent on the multiple identities that individuals have in society.

REFERENCES:

• Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
• Jenks, Chris. Culture. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Prespectives in Cultural Studies. London: U of California P, 1991.
• Oswell, David. Culture and Society: An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New York: Sage, 2006.
• “What is Popular Culture?” mini-lecture by Lance Eaton, North Shore Community College, Massachusetts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZtcv6XedgQ
• “Mass Culture Theory”, mini-lecture by Lance Eaton, North Shore Community College, Massachusetts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2qLiMbpi10
• “Commerce and Culture: Shakespeare’s Theatre”, lecture by Prof. Paul A. Cantor, University of Virginia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrkJ5xVtaA
• “Commerce and Culture: The Serialized Novel in the Nineteenth Century”, lecture by Prof. Paul A. Cantor, University of Virginia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQQbSMLyrR4