''The popular'' in American culture

Journal/Book: Annu Rev Anthropol. 1996; 25: 4139 El Camino Way, PO Box 10139, Palo Alto, CA 94303-0139. Annual Reviews Inc. 127-151.

Abstract: This review contrasts the relative lack of interest in ''popular culture'' within anthropology with the close, increasingly critical attention this concept has received within cultural studies. Rejecting both a production-oriented model of a manipulative mass culture imposed from above and a reception-oriented model of an expressive culture of the people, cultural studies scholars broke with essentialized conceptions and redefined the popular in Gramscian tenus, as a zone of contestation, a site where the struggle for hegemony unfolds. The review uses this approach to relate the production of popular culture to class formation in the United States. Against overemphasis on the ideological effectivity of popular culture and a revisionist tendency to redefine it in affirmative, politically essentialized terms, the review suggests that contradictions and instabilities characterize all stages of the popular cultural circuit: commodity, text, and lived culture.

Note: Review EG Traube, Wesleyan Univ, Dept Anthropol, Middletown, CT 06459 USA

Keyword(s): popular culture; mass culture; hegemony theory; domination and resistance; identity formation

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