The “Cultures” of Cultural Studies

Abstract

Like many critics associated with “cultural studies,” I draw on the definitions of culture elaborated by two of the most influential writers in the British cultural studies tradition: Raymond Williams and Dick Hebdige. These definitions are loose and multivalent; consequently, some contemporary work in cultural studies has tended either to reify the idea of “culture” as a kind of all-purpose explanatory ground for human behavior or to use it instead as a more respectable synonym for “niche market demographic.” The former tendency derives from cultural studies’ affinities with cultural anthropology, thanks to which “culture” is understood as the totality of and the motive for all social interactions (e.g., language, cuisine, childbirth rituals) within a nation, a regional population, or an ethnic group. The latter tendency derives from what usually are called “subcultural studies” after Hebdige’s 1979 book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, in which social groups associated with various coterie tastes in music, dress, or popular entertainment are alleged to practice counterhegemonic cultural politics in the Gramscian sense, that is, a politics of opposition to the dominant social and political order carried out by means of a “war of position.”