Popular Culture Primer (lang Primers)

Popular Culture PRIMER John A. Weaver PETER LANG Popular Culture PRIMER PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford John A. Weaver Popular Culture PRIMER PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weaver, John A. Popular culture primer / John A. Weaver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Popular culture. 2. Culture—Study and teaching. I. Title. HM621.W38 2005 306—dc22 2004016764 ISBN 0-8204-7114-3 (paperback) ISBN 0-8204-7642-0 (hardcover) Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/. Cover design by Lisa Barfield The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources. © 2005 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 275 Seventh Avenue, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10001 www.peterlangusa.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in the United States of America Table of Contents 1 From Culture and Images to Popular Culture Images 1 2 Traditions of Popular Culture Studies 25 3 Films, Television, Music, and Fan Cultures 47 4 The Cultural Studies of Technoscience 71 5 Cultural Studies of/in Education 93 Suggested Readings 111 Index 135 This page intentionally left blank C H A P T E R O N E From Culture and Images to Popular Culture Images Culture “a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour” (Williams, The Long Revolution, 1961). Cultural Capital a term coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe how people define the meaning of culture to obtain and maintain power in society. Since the advent of the term “Western Civilization,” there has been an attempt to distinguish between the culture of those with power and those without it. For those in power, their beliefs, morals, and tastes were sanctioned as the right forms of culture or signified as Culture with a capital “C.” This Culture represented a set of social codes in which those people who were Cultured knew the right books to read, the proper ways to interact at social gatherings, the proper forms of dress, the holiest way to worship a god, the correct modes of speech, and the proper culinary tastes. It was these codes, or what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital, that marked their possessors as privileged from other people. The people, often referred to condescendingly as “the masses,” who did not understand or share these sanctioned values possessed their own social codes, but these codes did not have the same power and therefore the same weight in society to persuade or influence opinions. Since the twentieth century, this Culture has been challenged. The Culture still exists, but the influence of 2 Chapter One aristocratic or traditional tastes on its definition has been limited. Now, popular culture has a much more dramatic influence on how Culture is defined. This introductory chapter will chart the rise of the notion of Culture, discuss its decline, delve into the rise of popular cultu