Popular Culture

Abstract

Popular culture comes into existence as a contrast with the then-normatively superior high culture associated with the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Conversely, various social actors have increasingly deployed the idea of popular culture as a means of affiliating themselves with the masses, illustrating their disdain for cultural elitism. In either case, popular culture comes to be defined by the taste of the masses, inflected with either positive or negative connotations. In different times and places, the forms of popular cultures that dominate differ as well. The transience of popular cultures ties them to sites of production and articulation, but these are in turn linked to peripheries from which cultural material is aggregated. Popular culture is also deployed in discussions of globalization as a force that crushes folk cultures. In this formulation, popular culture is synonymous with Western material culture, leading to the subsequent objectification of ‘authentic’ local cultures. Debates over the impacts of popular culture have been particularly vehement since the rise of the mass media. In academia, there has been a shift from broadly structuralist and Marxist critique of popular culture which views audiences as passive recipients to a post-structuralist critique that de-emphasizes the actual text and highlights the audiences’ roles in creating meaning. This is in contrast to the popular view, which still is concerned with the ways in which popular culture contributes to antisocial behavior.