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Culture And Cultural Studies

The concept of culture and how cultural meanings are formed and changed.

Culture and Cultural Studies Abstracts, Bibliography, Syllabus, Journals, Culture And Cognition, Fashion And Consumer Culture, Consumer Culture, Cultural Challenges, Fashion Culture, Cyber Culture, Cross Culture, Corporate Culture, Books on Culture, Popular Culture

What is Culture? We can define culture by defining what the concept includes.

Debates which have been going on about the concept of culture, the diverse forms of culture and the cultural trends during the past and present times.

Insight into what the culture debate means in our own lives and to provide some examples of how cultural meanings are formed, maintained, and changed.

Culture is the pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action, and artifacts.

Culture reflects the human capacity for learning and the devolution of knowledge to succeeding generations including intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it.

Culture includes all socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs and institutions.

Culture also includes customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.

If the process of learning is an essential characteristic of culture, then teaching also is a crucial characteristic. The way culture is taught and reproduced is itself an important component of culture.

Culture: (wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/ culture/culture-definition.html)
People learn culture. That, we suggest, is culture's essential feature. Many qualities of human life are transmitted genetically—an infant's desire for food, for example, is triggered by physiological characteristics determined within the human genetic code. An adult's specific desire for milk and cereal in the morning, on the other hand, cannot be explained genetically; rather, it is a learned (cultural) response to morning hunger.

Culture, as a body of learned behaviors common to a given human society, acts rather like a template (i.e., it has predictable form and content), shaping behavior and consciousness within a human society from generation to generation.

So culture resides in all learned behavior and in some shaping template or consciousness prior to behavior as well (that is, a "cultural template" can be in place prior to the birth of an individual person).

This primary concept of a shaping template and body of learned behaviors might be further broken down into the following categories, each of which is an important element of cultural systems:
* systems of meaning, of which language is primary
* ways of organizing society, from kinship groups to states and multi-national corporations
* the distinctive techniques of a group and their characteristic products

Several important principles follow from this definition of culture:

If the process of learning is an essential characteristic of culture, then teaching also is a crucial characteristic. The way culture is taught and reproduced is itself an important component of culture.

Because the relationship between what is taught and what is learned is not absolute (some of what is taught is lost, while new discoveries are constantly being made), culture exists in a constant state of change.

Meaning systems consist of negotiated agreements—members of a human society must agree to relationships between a word, behavior, or other symbol and its corresponding significance or meaning. To the extent that culture consists of systems of meaning, it also consists of negotiated agreements and processes of negotiation.

Because meaning systems involve relationships which are not essential and universal (the word "door" has no essential connection to the physical object—we simply agree that it shall have that meaning when we speak or write in English), different human societies will inevitably agree upon different relationships and meanings; this a relativistic way of describing culture - (wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/ culture/culture-definition.html)

Cultural Studies Central - Cultural Studies today is a simmering stew of the ideas, voices, and lives of people all over the world. It's the things we use and the people we talk about. It's life and life only. Cultural Studies Central is a gathering spot and central clearinghouse where those of us who live and breathe Cultural Studies can go to learn more and do more. Editor: Robin Markowitz (Torrance, CA, USA) culturalstudies.net/

What is Culture? - This Learning Topic proposes to explore the concept of human culture. Culture is not easily defined, nor is there a consensus among scholars, philosophers and polititicians (nor, probably, among the rest of us) as to what exactly the concept should include. We hope, here, to outline some of the broad-ranging debates which have gone on about the concept of culture during the past century. Furthermore, we hope to offer some insight into what the culture debate means in our own lives and to provide some examples of how cultural meanings are formed, maintained, and changed.-
wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/ culture/culture-index.html#top

Cultural Studies References and Links
Editor: Phoebe Sengers - www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/phoebe/mosaic/ cultural-studies.html

Popular Culture Studies - Bowling Green State University, USA.bgsu.edu/departments/popc/resources.html

Sociology of Culture

Culture of Consumption

Cultures of Taste

Making Sense of Mobility

Rethinking Music Sociology

Culture and Power

Confronting Culture

A Cultural Sociology

Sociology On Culture

Prime Time Animation

Visual Culture

Understanding the Cultural Industries

Contemporary Cultural Theory

The Claims of Culture

Glossary of Cultural Theory

Cultural Theory The Key Concepts

The Rise of a Jazz Art World

The Cultural Industries

Cultural Sociology in Practice

Cultural Theory The Key Thinkers

Picturing Justice, the On-Line Journal of Law and Popular Culture - usfca.edu/pj/

The Popular Culture Library, founded in 1969 and dedicated to the acquisition and preservation of research materials on American popular culture (post 1876), is the most comprehensive repository of its kind in the United States. - bgsu.edu/colleges/library/pcl/pcl.html

Cultural Globalization - zmk.uni-freiburg.de/CulturalGlobalization/

 

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