What is Popular Culture?

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Outline

Basic Questions

• What is culture?
• What is popular culture?
• Why study popular culture?
• Why study Japanese popular culture?

  What do we mean by culture?

• The best of the best (CANONS)
  • "general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development"
• Comprehensive view
  • "a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group"
• Signifying practices
  • "the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity"
• Where does popular culture fit?

  What makes something popular?

  (Because of the...)

• Producers?
• Consumers?
• Medium?
• Quality?
• Content?
• Availability?
• Mode of consumption?

  Who are the "people"?

• The folk? (minzoku)
  • Premodern; rural and/or urban
  • Tradition; organic; authentic
• The masses? (taishû, masu)
  • Modern, usually urban
  • Technologies of production and reproduction
  • Culture industry
• The non-elite? (minshû)
  • Local v. national/universal
  • Populism; resistance

  Oppositional or Opiate?

• Popular culture as a tool for ruling classes to pacify or distract the masses
  • Depoliticization
  • Dumbing down
  • Manipulation
• Popular culture an expression of independence from or resistance to values of ruling classes
  • Community (sub-cultures)
  • Transgression
  • Authenticity

  Politics of Culture

• Ideology
  • Distorted, manipulative world view promoted by ruling class (false consciousness; cultural as natural)
  • Any politicized and conflictual world view
  • Systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group
• Hegemony
  • Cultural domination achieved through joint exercise of power and persuasion to obtain consent of those who are subordinate
  • Dynamic process involving negotiation and change
• Hybridity
  • Both the result of and a challenge to (political, economic, cultural) imperialism

  Why Study Popular Culture?

• Part of our everyday lives
• Powerful commercial sector in advanced industrial nations
• Alternative set of texts to analyze social structures
• Way to examine members of a society who generally do not have much voice in official matters
• However, NOT a transparent window to the mind of the author, the consumer, or the times

  Why Study Japanese Popular Culture?

• As means to understand Japanese society
• Historical connections, particularly in the postwar period, between Japanese and American popular culture
• Prominence of Japanese popular culture in contemporary America today
• Study of that which is different can lead to better understanding of one's own environment

  Questions to keep in mind

• Who is producing the texts and how?
• Who is consuming the texts and how?
• Whose standards should be used to measure the "value" of a cultural text?
• What is popular culture being defined with and against?
• What is the relationship of popular culture to other aspects of society?
• To what end does one study popular culture?