Search

In the last twenty years Cultural Studies have had a remarkable impact on the academy in Britain, inspiring new approaches to research in both the humanities and the social sciences, and yet cultural studies scholars continue to see themselves as under attack from the traditional disciplines. This essay suggests a number of reasons for this, examining, in particular, the problem of cultural studies' "populism", and focusing on the difficult relationship between cultural studies and media studies. While it is indisputable that we now live in mediated societies, that such grand social science concepts as citizenship, socialisation, authority and globalisation can only now be understood by reference to the media, it also remains true that we can distinguish between media studies and cultural studies approaches to contemporary life by reference to different academic identities and styles. From this perspective, cultural studies is not a discipline as such but an ongoing disciplinary critique. It is defined by its importance and its marginality.

Artikeln är en översiktlig reflektion om kulturstudier och kulturforskning i nutid och framtid.

In the USA, Cultural Studies, by concentrating on culture, "difference" and "otherness", is in the process of establishing itself as a new academic discipline. Some see Cultural Studies as a possible alternative to both "Black Studies" and "Women's Studies". In the present article, possibilities for the development of Cultural Studies are discussed. The author warns that Cultural Studies, like the new ethnography represented by Clifford's and Marcus' anthology Writing Culture, could become yet another discipline which while theorizing about "otherness", "difference" and reflexivity, in practice continues to exclude the voice and presence of "the Other" in its research. Is Cultural Studies to become nothing more than an expression of "the latest hip racism", featuring white, predominantly male, researchers who continue to (if in a somewhat more refined manner) interpret the experiences of blacks/coloureds; or can Cultural Studies use the opportunity offered to become a meeting-place for multiple discourses from numerous different perspectives? The article concludes by exhorting the concerned researchers and university lecturers to take advantage of the anti-racist, radical potential of Culture Studies. We ought not to content ourselves with sophisticated discussions about forging new concepts about "the Other". Instead, we ought to welcome those voices which have traditionally been excluded from the academic discussion and therewith challenge the dominant power structures construed around race, sex and class.

During its thirty year history Cultural Studies has developed from an interdisciplinary meeting ground and a "street-urchin of Academia" to a discipline, with its own traditions and routines. Such a process often involves a rather unconscious framing of research and teaching — a tendency to overlook some aspects and to overexploit others. The paper takes a critical look at this transformation, especially at the way in which interests in "everyday life" has been narrowed down considerably. Latterly, too much research in Cultural Studies has tended to favour a "reading of culture", focusing on the symbolic and expressive aspects of consumption, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of creativity.

In recent years Cultural Studies has spread throughout the world, transforming Departments of Literature into particular Departments of Cultural Studies. In this article I attempt to examine the importance of Cultural Studies through an analysis of my own development as a scholar and teacher. In the beginning of my career in the early eighties, I was attracted to Cultural Studies becaise of its serious treatment of popular culture. The cultural circuit, a cornerstone in the methodology practiced at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, implied a challenging new way in which to study the relationship between texts and culture, focusing on different readings employed by different, lived cultures. However, there's an important link missing in the cultural circuit, namely the historical dimension. In order for Cultural Studies to become the necessary new paradigm for the study of literature, replacing the older humanist and modernist paradigms, it must also take into consideration the historical canonization of culture, focusing its study on high and popular culture, not only on contemporary cultural phenomena and marginalized subcultures. In this way Cultural Studies can challenge not only old paradigms in the study of literature, but in other areas of humanistic and social studies as well.

In this introduction, the background to the boom in Cultural Studies in the USA is presented. When this field of research, unwilling to define itself as a discipline, was exported from the Birmingham CCCS, it changed its main direction "from class struggle to the politics of pleasure", from the study of lived experience to textual analysis of representations and discourses. In Swedish ethnology one notes a similar development, although fieldwork and ethnographic description still retain their central importance to our way of doing Cultural Studies.

Inspired by postmodernism, criticism has been directed against the tendency in the field of cultural studies to apprehend culture as an homogeneous entirety. This criticism is usually rubricized as "the reflexivity and representation debates". The assumption that culture is a priori common for a given group of people is the result fo the definitions which the concept has been given, but also of the way in which the researcher collects his material. The purpose of the present article is to examine and discuss the criticism of the concept of culture and its relevance for ethnological methodology. The article touches upon the problem of the ontology of the concept of culture and its connection with the ambition of interpreting and seeking implications in people's life-worlds. Re-defining culture is not an effective enough way of unburdening the concept of these presumtions of homogeneity. Instead, this article proposes employing the term cultural phenomena. The degree to which homogeneity/complexity is to be found in a given culture is an empirical question. Finally, the article presents some thoughts on how the field between ethnography's descriptive and more interpretive components can be opened up to scrutiny.