Cultural Materialism

Abstract

Cultural materialism as a historical materialist theory of the production of culture is attributed to the British Marxist Raymond Williams. As part of the post-World War II British New Left, the significance of ordinary, everyday culture was crucial in overcoming the limitations of previous Marxist accounts of culture as part of a mechanist base/superstructure societal model. Equally, Williams, while based at the Department of English Literature in Cambridge, also took forward and went beyond the traditions of English literary criticism. Cultural materialism developed a powerful set of conceptual and empirical tools to study the ways in which cultures emerge, and hegemony is produced through cultural formations, practices, and institutions. Relating everyday cultural practices to wider social formations as whole ways of life and structures of feeling has become part of cultural materialism's contributions to the emerging field of cultural studies. Here, as well as in human geography, Williams' influence has been significant: (1) in its particular understanding of culture as everyday; (2) through a range of studies which explored culture in relation to community, place, and political commitment; and (3) as critique of individualized and apolitical concepts of culture and cultural studies.