Popular culture and the importance of context

“Popular culture” is a term that usually refers to those commercially produced items specifically associated with leisure, media, and lifestyle choices. To study religion in popular culture, then, is to explore religion’s appearance in the commercially produced artifacts and texts of a culture. The study of popular culture has been a catalyst of sorts in the context of studying religion. Some have speculated that with the increasing presence of religion in commercially produced products and specifically in the entertainment media, religion may be reduced to entertainment. Others, however, have argued that religion has always been expressed and experienced through contemporary forms of culture, and thus its manifestation in popular culture can be interpreted as a sign of the vitality rather than the demise or superficiality of contemporary religions. Popular culture is worthy of study given its role in cultural reproduction. The study of popular culture and religion encourages scholars to consider the extent to which popular cultural representations limit broader critical considerations of religion by depicting and reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions of what religion is, who practices it and where, and how it endures as a powerful societal institution. Alternately, popular culture has been explored as a site for public imaginings of how religious practices and identities might be different and more inclusive than they have been in the past, pointing toward the artistic and playful ways in which popular religious expression can comment upon dominant religion, dominant culture, and the power relations between them. With the rise of an ubiquitous media culture in which people are increasingly creators and distributors as well as consumers and modifiers of popular culture, the term has come to encompass a wide variety of products and artifacts, including those both commercially produced and generated outside of traditional commercial and religious contexts. Studies might include explorations of religion in such popular television programs as Orange Is the New Black or in novels such as The Secret Life of Bees, but might also include considerations of how religion and popular culture intersect in practices of Buddhism in the virtual gaming site Second Life, in the critical expressions of Chicana art, in the commercial experiments of Islamic punk rock groups, and in hashtag justice movements. The study of religion and popular culture can be divided into two major strands, both of which are rooted in what is known as the “culture and civilization tradition.” The first strand focuses on popular culture, myth, and cultural cohesion or continuity, while the second explores popular culture in relation to religion, power, and cultural tensions.

I78 Reviews Nouvelles mythologies de lamort. By ISABELLECASTA. (Bibliotheque de Litterature Gen6rale etComparee, 67) Paris: Champion. 2006. 228 pp. E43. ISBN 978 2-7453-I495-6. Has our relation to death changed? This is the question Isabelle Casta sets out to answer inherwide-ranging, superbly documented study of recent popular culture in France, Britain, and theUS. Death, thedead, and theundead seem tobe ever-present indetective novels, supernatural fiction, films,and on television. Casta's guiding pre sumption is thatpopular culture tells us more about a society's imaginary than high art or theorycould. The book catalogues thedistinctivelymodern traitsof thecentral figures in thenew mythologies of death: the serial killer, the detective, and thepatho logist, togetherwith the legions of ghosts, vampires, and zombies who rise from their graves tohaunt our fictionand our dreams. The point here isnot that these figures aremodern inventions in themselves, but that something has changed in theway they are represented. The reader or viewer is spared no detail of the victim's suffering; the pathologist's examination of the corpse is described with meticulous accuracy; and the supernatural mingles seamlessly with the everyday as ghosts routinelywalk among us. Casta's study relishes theprofusion of gory evidence, piling example upon example to show theoverwhelming variety and coherence of her themes across a vast number of works. The cumulative effectof the analyses is impressive, as the book demonstrates both society's pervasive fascinationwith death and the stubborn belief that death is not the end. The key work here isBuffy theVampire Slayer. In 144 episodes of the television series and dozens of novels, Buffy is a sweet, attractive ado lescent in sunny California facing theordinary difficulties of growing up, learning to deal with familyand friends,not entirely keeping up with her schoolwork, and begin ning toexplore her emerging sexuality. She isalso theChosen One, living on the edge of theHellmouth, uniquely capable of defending humankind against Evil. She is the Slayer who kills demons and vampires but who also sometimes falls in lovewith them, sleeps with them, dies herself (twice) and is resurrected, before ultimately leading a band ofwarriors into the final, apocalyptic showdown which will decide the fate of theentireworld. The phenomenal success ofBuffy theVampire Slayer comes from its dazzling combination of teen drama and themes of Shakespearian proportions: death, sacrifice, and forbidden love.Casta takesBuffy very seriously, and the affectionate at tention she pays it,especially inher finalchapter, pays dividends as she demonstrates persuasively how it involves a verymodern take on some very ancient themes. The book represents an extremely valuable contribution to the academic study of popu lar culture and theway itencodes, mirrors, and informs society's attitudes towards death. Given that the author is clearly very familiarwith English-language culture, it is surprising that she does not make more use of scholarly work written inEnglish in the fieldofwhat is sometimes called hauntology. Moreover, her focus on popular culture means that she says little about the themes of death and the dead inmore rarefiedbut perhaps no less interesting contemporary texts. Itwould be interesting to know, forexample, how theghosts which appear innumerous modern filmsdo or do not relate to the spectres of Jacques Derrida's philosophy or, inpsychoanalysis, to the phantoms disinterred by analysts drawing on thework ofNicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. On its own merits, though, this is a fascinating and powerful book, driven by a sharp insight into the refusal of death which strikes against a knowledge of our own mortality: 'moi qui parle de lamort (des autres), je vaismourir' (p. 194). ROYAL HOLLOWAY,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON COLIN DAVIS ...

Animal sports and popular culture: Problems of continuity

This paper discusses the emergence of popular culture as an interdisciplinary subject of research. The simplest way to define the term 'popular culture's is a culture widely favored by many people. It refers to beliefs, practices and objects widely shared among people. Some of the examples of popular culture are romance novels, science fiction, photography, pop music, journalism, advertising, television, video, computers, Internet, etc. The study of popular culture entered a new phase in the cultural and intellectual history with the establishment of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) led by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. Two things happened to the study of popular culture as an interdisciplinary subject: (1) the study of popular culture has included wide range of issues (2) scholars have intellectual freedom in this field, and they show no interest in establishing clear boundaries around it. Popular culture is always defined in contrast to other conceptual categories such as folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, and working class culture. Thus, popular culture becomes the 'Other' for them, which largely depends on the context of use. Lastly, the paper discusses the role of popular culture in history, anthropology, sociology and literary theories. In theory, the study of popular culture is always around the debate on postmodernism. It assumes that postmodern culture no longer recognizes the distinction between high culture and popular culture.Key Words: Popular culture; Romance novels; Science fiction; Photography; Pop musicTribhuvan University Journal Vol. XXVI, No. 1, 2009 Page: 27-36

George Orwell is known as an acclaimed novelist, essayist, documentary writer, and journalist. But Orwell also wrote widely on a number of themes in and around popular culture. However, even though Orwell's writings might be considered as a precursor to some well-known themes in studies of popular culture his contribution to this area still remains relatively unacknowledged by others in the discipline. The aim of this article is simply, therefore, to provide a basis to begin to rethink Orwell’s contribution to contemporary studies of popular culture. It does so by demonstrating some comparable insights into culture and society between those made by Orwell and those found in the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. These insights are also related to four main areas of discussion: debates in contemporary cultural studies about the contested pleasures of popular culture and experiences; the relationship between language and culture; how social class needs to be defined not just economically but also culturally; and how one might escape cultural relativism when writing about popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a precursor to contemporary studies of popular culture insofar that some of the cultural themes he explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon.

It is difficult to keep up with the plethora of published monographs and edited books on Latin American and Latino/a popular culture. American university, as well as independent scholarly and commercial presses, have discovered in the past decade that such books have broad appeal. This was not always the case; twenty years ago it was difficult to find a press that would give a publication proposal on popular culture serious consideration. The unspoken response to such proposals seemed to be that the topic itself did not merit serious scholarly consideration. This trend persisted despite the wide U.S. and Latin American distribution of ground-breaking works published mainly in Latin America and Europe. Happily, this situation no longer exists; one finds entire categories in university and other press catalogues devoted to popular culture and cultural studies. In fact, the arrival of cultural and popular culture studies imported from abroad (e.g., Stuart Hall, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Armand Mattelart, and Ariel Dorfman) has given a strong boost to the acceptability of popular culture studies in the United States.

Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific: Popular Culture in Singapore and Sydney

The aim of this article is to explore some critical moments in the formation of 'popular' culture studies. This objective is not exhaustive, cannot be exhaustive in the space of a single article, since popular cultural studies have grown into an academic industry which not even five live-times of academic work by any individual can exhaust! This article is therefore, a rapid but hopefully, provocative view of understanding popular culture. The article uses the concept of myth to problematize some aspects of the debates of popular culture in some works by the Frankfurt school, the pioneering work of E. P Thompson, Stuart Hall and in the case of Africa, the work of Njabulo Ndebele. None of these works claim to be canonical in their treatment of popular culture. However, the problem identified in this article and therefore to be ad- dressed is that there still remains a certain condescending theoretical attitude in the definitions of what is popular by works indicated above. To be sure, each of these writers on popular culture have evolved from previous standpoints and yet it is still important, particularly from an African perspective where the popular is still viewed as inferior, to trace the genealogy of this mistrust of the popular. We argue that myths and symbols of popular culture should be viewed as social constructs; they do not represent the interests of everyone in the community in the same way, for ever.

Introduction. The study of popular culture as a source of law and a means of disseminating legal knowledge is considered a controversial issue due to the interpretive diversity and insufficient knowledge of the phenomenon under consideration. In this connection, the purpose of the study is a phenomenological analysis of popular legal culture as a fundamental tool of legal education.Materials and Methods. The methodological basis of research is a phenomenological method, terminological analysis and data systematization, carried out through interdisciplinary approaches (sociological, cultural, psychological), as well as a number of specialized methods (formal-legal, comparative-legal) for a comprehensive study of the popular legal culture phenomenon.Results. As a dependent component in the general social system, law cannot exist in isolation from culture, in particular popular culture, which is largely shaped and disseminated through media. Attracting media to the structures of popularization of law implies blurring the boundaries of objectivity and legitimacy of information entering the masses, which requires a deep study of educational structures in the field of popular law with the development of media education and media literacy.Discussion and Сonclusion. The phenomenological study of the concept of popular legal culture makes it possible to substantiate a new comprehensive definition of this concept with the definition of further ways of developing scientific thought in the field of law, sociology, cultural studies and media sciences.

MASS CULTURE: MODERN ASPECTS OF RESEARCH

This article explores the complex relationship of anthropology with the study of popular culture in southern Africa. In an insightful review of South African culture studies, Karin Barber argued a decade ago that while South African culture studies of the early post-apartheid era closely followed the model of British cultural studies, two of the British school’s characteristics were lacking in the South African studies, i.e., ethnographic depth and attention to audiences. These absences seemed astounding, Barber wrote, considering the distinguished history of South African anthropology. I present an intellectual history that charts the genealogy of southern African ethnographic studies of popular culture, starting from the 1950s when anthropologists studied a variety of popular cultural forms. This trajectory changed track with the emergence of a neo-Marxist political economy approach in anthropology, which was not much inclined to study “things cultural.” I show that South African culture studies of the late apartheid and early post-apartheid periods focused on reading mediated texts; deep ethnographies, on the other hand, were rare. This was due to the fact that after the retreat of anthropology, culture studies had become the domain of scholars, who had been trained in literary criticism, who were, for the most part, more interested in text and representation than in audiences. I conclude with a brief discussion of the current resurgence of anthropological studies of popular culture, including collaborative projects with media and literary studies, which investigate questions of difference, belonging, and citizenship through popular culture.

This chapter posits the concept of Pop Culture 2.0 as a means to mark important changes in popular culture of which scholars and teachers should contend. We propose a revised agenda in the study of popular culture and education, sitting in a position that is within the transdisciplinary configurations, concerns, and approaches of cultural studies, a field that is experiencing its own changes amidst a renewed sense of urgency and relevance in recent years. One issue is the shifting landscape of popular culture itself, which we approach from our researcher positions in the United States, and how the very conceptualization of what constitutes culture and the popular has radically changed in the wake of President Trump’s election to the office of President of the United States in 2016. A second issue, in some ways inextricable from the first, is accumulated effects of the recent postcritical turn in the humanities and social sciences. Scholars from various fields and areas of inquiry have taken up this turn in a spectrum of differing directions we consider in this chapter. We identify Pop Culture 2.0 as a movement of post-postmodern, post-twentieth-century popular culture forms that began to emerge during the US presidency of Barack Obama in 2008 and have been given a more recognizable shape and form of its content during the US presidency of Donald Trump in 2016.KeywordsPopular cultureCultural studies: Curriculum theoryPostcriticalSocial theory

This article examines why the study of popular culture has taken off as a subject of university course offerings and as a topic of scholarly inquiry since the 1980s. Placing the current explorations of popular culture in historical context, the article argues that popular culture's study and studies in the sociology of culture can illuminate many of the classic concerns that animate sociology and related fields, such as the social organization and power of institutions, debates about public life and the formation of public opinion, concerns about the relationship between consumption, social status, and politics of the privileged elite, and the role of media in the development of social movements and in individual and subcultural understandings. The article considers how popular cultural studies are currently shaping the study of social life, and concludes by considering trends that might be encouraged among students and emergent scholars seeking to study in this area.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53. By Thomas Hajkowski. Studies in Popular Culture. Edited by Jeffrey Richards. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Distributed by Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. xii+252. $89.95.Laura BeersLaura BeersAmerican University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 84, Number 2June 2012The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/664668 Views: 31Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Matthew Hilton. Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800–2000: Perfect Pleasures. (Studies in Popular Culture.) New York: Manchester University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 284. $74.95 Get access Hilton Matthew. Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800–2000: Perfect Pleasures. (Studies in Popular Culture.) New York: Manchester University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 284. $74.95. Frank Mort Frank Mort University of East London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 1, February 2003, Pages 262–263, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.1.262 Published: 01 February 2003