The constant gardener
Popular Culture
Latham Hunter,
McMaster University
Definitions of popular culture tend to be wide-ranging, given the flexibility in the meanings of both "popular" and
"culture." The term can indicate a specific set of traditions enacted by a specific group of people, or the mass
homogenization of contemporary society. It can indicate the commercial culture brought to us through mass produced
goods (including the mass media), or the simple elements of everyday life. Ultimately, the study of popular culture
is concerned with how relations of power are structured through the practices and texts which make up the bulk of
people's daily activity. As such, it often focuses on popular texts — romance novels, Hollywood films,
advertisements, sporting events, video games, contemporary music, and so on — and on the conditions of
their production and consumption.
The concept of "popular culture" has spread quickly in academia and now challenges the traditional perception of
"high culture" as intrinsically more valuable to our development and enlightenment as human beings. There are two
basic theoretical stances from which the study of popular culture has been approached. The first stance holds that
people who enjoy popular culture are part of an uninformed, undiscerning mass which simply accepts and enjoys
whatever is packaged by the culture industry as mass entertainment. The other is based on the idea that popular
culture encourages populist power: it envisages popular culture as a giant storeroom from which we may select those
elements which appeal to us or meet our needs. In mass culture theory, simple entertainment is perceived as a kind
of opiate for the masses, whereas in populist theory entertainment is not simple at all, but rather a vital and
empowering way in which people may abandon the pressures of everyday life and social subjugation by selecting or
rejecting whatever cultural products do not meet this need. This populist stance clearly suggests a greater degree
of individual autonomy in our society.
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Image courtesy of Geoffrey Rockwell from Dictionary of
Words in the Wild with permission.
There is an emerging sense among scholars that with the arrival of globalization, we are entering a "post-cultural"
phase. A new awareness of the multiplicity of cultures, and their subsequent blending in globalized fora, has led
to the blurring and breaking down of the boundaries that separate and define cultures. For instance, the growing
sense that the Western ideals of human rights should spread around the globe subverts certain cultural traditions
which do not fall in line with those ideals. The ensuing clash often results in a gradual eradication of the
cultural tradition (as with female circumcision, for example), or a reshaping of that tradition into a more globally
"acceptable" form. Ultimately, we are left with a less local, more global, version of a culture which is less
distinct from other cultures, given that it has been informed by an increasingly world-wide set of ethics, ideals,
and cultural products. The latter of these are, more and more, defined by their hybridity. In music, for
example, a famous English pop singer recently teamed with an Arabic vocalist to create a song that samples equally
from Western urban dance beats and traditional Middle Eastern patterns and instrumentations.
This emerging hybrid cultural production is, in part, produced and circulated thanks to the increased digitalization
of our culture, which allows for the rapid and wide-ranging dissemination of information and products (particularly
music, computer software, and visual media). Such a trend obscures the physical origins of cultural production
— the idea of something being produced in a specific place — which unsettles some of the more
traditional markers of cultural authority; markers such as nation, race, and language. The subversion of these
elements, based in large part on shared, clearly defined geographies, raises new questions about the stability,
jurisdiction, and authenticity traditionally associated with place and origins, and those who would define
themselves as belonging to, coming from, or owning place. The computer software industry, in particular, has
been the locus of such questioning, as corporations, copyright laws, and national and legal jurisdictions struggle
to determine what forms of dissemination are permissible, and whether or not they can be controlled or limited
accordingly. We can see this kind of contestation in the legal battles over music file sharing on the Internet.
Perhaps the most crucial way in which globalization has influenced popular culture is in its development of
flourishing export processing zones. These zones, commonly in third world countries, are now the sites of
production for the bulk of Western cultural products and are another example of how the authority and authenticity
of place is being obfuscated in contemporary popular culture. It is in this respect that autonomy is most
threatened by globalization, as millions of workers' basic human freedoms are eroded through locked factory
compounds, slave wages, and dangerous working conditions. In the Western world, a slightly less tangible erosion of
individual autonomy has established itself thanks to the rise of third world export processing zones: multinational
corporations typically based in the West are now primarily concerned with the production and marketing of a
lifestyle, or brand, which has led not only to a service-based Western economy where jobs provide access to a
"lifestyle," branded product (as at retail outlets such as Starbucks and Nike stores), but also to a culture where a
rising consumer debt load indicates the degree to which individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources in
order to purchase goods which will, supposedly, indicate a kind of cultural belonging, or mastery. Typically, these
"lifestyle brands" are American, but are marketed and coveted globally, leading to criticism of the United States as
a cultural empire which runs roughshod over other cultures and their cultural products, thus creating a kind of
global homogenization.