Cultural Studies As A Discipline

Culture is one of the most relevant elements that can define not only a society but also a country’s cumulative beliefs and system. Often noted as the origins of a country, culture is definitive in the sense that it harbors all the elements that can provide justification on the traditions and norms set by the society for its members. More often than not, the society members follow norms in order to create a harmonious community, and the beliefs and the traditions serve as the poles or grounding rules for each member to follow. Culture is very dynamic in the way that it can change over a variety of foreign influences but what is permanent about it is that original elements about it often lingers with the influences, therefore making it multi-faceted and broad. More importantly, culture serves as an individual and unique trait each society has, and therefore sets it apart from other countries and other societies.

In “Preface to Cultural Literacy” by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., he claims that old theories is not transmitted engought basic knowledge information to young children. First Hirsch points out that it is not teacher or students fault that students did not get enough information about society, but the fault of curriculums, practices, and theories that are not helping students gain the background information that will help students learn about the society. Another time Hirsch reports that Jean Jacques Rousseau theory is wrong about young children that they should not receive an information about society before they understand it. Last, Hirsch believes that history of all the theories in the past is not giving us enough background information that will

Society is made up of ordinary items that throughout the years are given value by outsiders, people who think outside of the world they are in, or by those, who are, from a different time period. Anthropologists have been able to study the differences in human cultures and how they have evolve. “There are now four major fields of anthropology: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology” (Dennis O 'Neil). Within these fields are subfields, visual anthropology is a very important subfield of cultural anthropology. Visual anthropology is the study of the history of human customs and culture through what one sees or perceives in various types of media. Therefore, “…the use of visual material in anthropological research…is the study of visual systems and visible cultures” (Banks and Morphy). Since media is seen as a representation of the truth, it is reasonable to say that it plays a major role in the accurate views of how society is. There are two categories in which I would like to describe how visual anthropology tries to describe human culture and custom: images and objects.

This paper explores the cultural,

According to cultural anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” In other words, culture is a concept that social organizations practice in order to explain certain phenomena in nature whether through mythology, rituals, art, music, and language. However, as explained by Ethan Watters in “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan,” culture is not permanent, since it has the ability, and more than ever in the present society, to “move across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation” (Watters 519). In addition, as demonstrated by Oliver Sacks in the articled called “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” it is a mistake to think that individuals are bound to behave in a way that culture told them to behave. Instead, individuals are free to create his or her own unique experience of interpreting the world. We might consider the “reality” that we live in to be fiction to the extent that we are willing to use different faculties and analyze what we are witnessing; this gives us the power, as individuals, to think and search for each of us’s unique interpretation of reality. .

“Among the elements of social and cultural structure, two are important for our purposes. These are analytically separable although they merge imperceptibly in concrete situations. The first consists of culturally defined goals, purposes, and interests … The second phase of the social structure defines, regulates, and controls the acceptable modes of achieving these goals." (Merton 672,673)

In the study of humanities, cultural assessment analyzes the subtle meaning of text, images, codes, beliefs and behaviors of a social group or community. However, it does not confine internal comprehension of the nuances of a culture within cultural norms in diverse work groups. Cultural analysis crosses the boundaries between social disciplines but also between formal and informal cultural activities. The major purpose of cultural analysis is to develop analytical tools for reading and understanding a wide range of cultural practices and forms, past and present.

Bevan & Sole (2014) proposes that culture is the cumulative knowledge deposits, opinions, morals, occurrences, outlooks, positions, consequences, orders, moments, spatial relations, the views of the world and the significant things that a collection of people has developed over generations throughout groups and personal endeavors. Culture is not stationary; it is lively and is continuously changing through human conduct, viewpoints, occurrences, concepts and manners including other things said.

that the ultimate authority depends on the credulity of the reader, not on the message of the

As part of this paper’s inquiry, insight will be drawn into the inner workings and uses of culture, and so it is necessary to provide a clear definition for the term as well. William H. Sewell Jr. does not constraint culture to a specific kind of practice or an action that takes place within a specific social setting, but defines it as a dialectic of system and practice, as a dimension of social life autonomous from other such dimensions both in its logic and in its spatial configuration, and as a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation” (47). Such a definition fits well within the contexts and boundaries that this paper seeks to explore.

In today 's society, culture is impacting our everyday life, experience and social relations; we are all categorized by our cultural “groups”, but this has changed rapidly throughout the years from one generation to the next. Cultural studies were developed in the late 1950’s, through the 1970’s by the British academic scholars. The British scholars were able engaged cultural analysis and the developed then transformed of the different fields, for example, politically, theoretically and empirically that are now represented around the world.

For the purposes of this piece, culture is defined as “the full range of human patterned experience” as described by Cole (1996) cited in Gla ̆veanu & Jovchelovitch (2017, p.113). This chapter also provides a description of the importance culture plays in psychological research.

Anthropology is the social sciences discipline that looks to understand humanity. In this discipline there are subdivisions such as cultural anthropology and primatology, and the beauty of anthropology is that you can more than you think, link some of your life event to some anthropological context.

Culture is not only a reflection of current social phenomena, but also is a long period of accumulation and the formation of the creation and development of the historical heritage, such as religions, beliefs, lifestyles, values, and so on. Therefore, different cultural backgrounds will

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1962) identify over 150 scientific definitions of the concept of culture. Indeed, many authors have tried to define culture and this is why there are so many definitions and that a unique one is hard to find. First of all, Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) assume that culture is a suite of patterns, implicit and explicit, “of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts” (p.47). Later, Hofstede adds that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991, p.51). This definition is the most widely accepted one amongst practitioners. For Winthrop (1991), culture is the distinctive models of thoughts, actions and values that composed members of a society or a social group. In other words,