Category: Culture and Identity
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Dominic Strinati – A Critique of Mass Culture Theory
mass culture is not homogenous, its consumers are not passive and there are no distinct high or folk cultures.
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Herber J. Gans: The Plurality of Taste Cultures
Herbert Gans criticised mass culture theorists by suggesting there was a plurality of cultures in America, each of equal value.
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Mass Culture
Mass culture refers to standardised, simplified cultural products produced for profit. According to Dwight Macdonald mass culture was harmful to society.
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Lucien Goldmann – Class and Literature
Lucien Goldmann is a marxist theorist of the arts who argued that social class shapes the worldview of authors.
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Marxism and Culture
Culture is what distinguishes humans from animals, but under Capitalism culture becomes a tool of the elite used to repress the masses. However, there is capacity for individuals to rise above false consciousness and usher in communism which is where the spontaneous production of culture can happen under free conditions.
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What is Culture?
A simplified sociological definition of culture is ‘the whole way of life of a group of people’, which is abbreviated from Ralph Linton’s (1945) more extensive definition of the term: ‘The culture of a society is the way of life of its members; the collection of ideas and habits which they learn, share and transmit…
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Four Types of Culture
Folk culture, mass or popular culture, high culture and low culture