Everyday life and Cultural studies

Name: Deepti Joshi

Paper: Cultural Studies                                              

Topic: Everyday life & Cultural Studies       

Submitted to: Department of English, M.K University, Bhavnagar 

    

                           Everyday Life and Cultural studies

Contemporary cultural studies take everyday life seriously. As one community’s everyday life, their way of living, activates, tradition, rituals all combine refracts its culture. And cultural studies are mainly interested in Metropolitan cultures-as it is a multi layered and contracted. Every day life is about the practice of the routine life of one community’s life style. Through the study and observation of one community’s life style, its habits and interaction, we can know its culture.

But here what is crucial is that cultural study analyzing everyday life accounts for subjectivity in the people’s response, since experience is subjective.

Everyday life is specific to locations and cultures because everyday life in Manhattan and New-York is not the same as everyday life in India and Pakistan. Location affects the culture. In one country’s different states also has different culture because of location. For instance the culture or life style of the people of Lehn and Ladakh   is totally different than the people of Gujarat.Here location and weather affects their every day life and automatically its also affects the culture as I mentioned above that one’s everyday life refracts his culture.

Experience is the cornerstone of everyday life. Whatever we experience in our day to day life like clothing, traffic, food, social relation, the sense of community or entertainment constitutes our everyday life culture. Culture in order to make this shift from experience to reality, cultural studies underscores the textual aspect of experience.

Experience is expressed through language that how we speak with others and how we tell others our stories. When we listen to others we decode their meanings, we meditate their experience through the language and cultural codes that we share with them. For instance if any person from America visits India and see Indians worshiping cow than he will start decoding. For American cow is not related with any spiritual thing but for them cow is one kind of food so when any American sees Indian person worshiping cow then he will come to know that Indian culture.  Here I want to clarify one thing that though language does not exist here but still he decodes his past experience with his recent experience and in a way he finds different culture.

Cultural studies interest in everyday life proceeds from What Raymond William called “Lived culture” where culture is produced through everyday life. So basically culture is made by people and whatever is done by man in his day to day life presents his culture. Culture reflects through the food we eat, the fashion we adopt and the entertainment and festival we like to celebrate. If any person’s life everyday life produces culture than it’s also a one fact that culture is not static, it goes on changing generation to generation because our grandparent’s day to day life in their time was different than our life. So culture is not some distinct realm produced elsewhere to be produced by the people. But it is in the everyday that culture is made. In a way the aim of the cultural studies is to investigate this process of making culture and this process is linked with the power.

As I earlier mentioned that one’s experience is also reflects culture. Now one question aroused that how a cultural study does documents the experience of everyday life??

There are two common methods to analyze the experience.

1. First Method:-

                       Cultural studies asks people to record their experience of living within particular location because location affects everyday life. Than that recorded experience is documented by cultural studies as autobiographical source material and evidence for a particular culture and theorizes about it.  

And I think it’s an interesting way to document one’s experience and here agent need to be aware of using language because it may happen that his language may change whole meaning.

2. Second Method:

                                 Second method looks primarily at how structure generates representations, the addresser side of image then the addressee side. In this method power is given to addresser rather than to addressee. And in this method the content of representation is given greater role.

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 Here one fact is that every individual’s identity is not static but it goes on changing in context of his relation, location, activities, and profession. Thus everyday life is a place where the individual becomes central. The individual’s subjectivity is therefore a crucial element of the cultural studies of everyday life.

Everyday life is also a site of struggle over meaning. Conflict between the global and local-battle for supremacy, weather to our Khadi made by Indian or to use Egyptian cotton. Here fact is that our Khadi is so expensive in compare to Egyptian cotton so here problem is that our heart insists us to use our “Svadeshi Khadi” while our mind insist us to use Egyptian cotton which is cheaply available.Here we find no solution. Same we feel about entertainment like should we watch only Durdarshan programs when Star offers a lot more??

Even we can not watch Indian cricket team playing cricket in India because Durdarshan,Prasarbharti and Other local institution have foulded up and we are f being forced to watch on other private channels. Here I want to clarify that it is not about inferiority and superiority that how local culture is overpowered by other culture but it’s just an observation that how our culture is not now purely local.Our culture is now globalized in such way that we find different shades of other culture in it. For instance the a fabric shirt in which fabric o shirt is European and it is made in Chine by American company .Even our television channels that we like to watch are owned by American Rupert Murdoch. And all writing related to programs is done on Microsoft windows. So we come to conclusion that in our everyday life whatever things we are using are not purely Indian.

Everyday life today is hybrid of the local and the global. We don’t find pure local culture existing in metropolis any more. Even food, goods, clothing style, music, and dance forms of every country has crossed boundaries. We find our local dance form in other countries dance forms and we also hear beat classical music in different way in other county’s music. Our Indian food is now available in every corner of the world and Tony Blair has declared Indian food to be Britain’s “National Cuisine”

I f the local is homogeneous, the global is heterogeneous.Noe our contemporary everyday life is s mix of two, and it is difficult to see that where our culture (local) ends and the global one begins. And that is why this mix of the local and global has been termed the “Glocal”

 

Here one more fact is that though our local culture somewhere overpowered by Global culture, our everyday life adds local meaning to global cultural artefactual.For example in India McDonald adds local taste  to modify it’s menu.And we find Chettichan chicken topping on our Pizza. So companies from other country serve their products with adding local color to attract us.

Conclusion: 

                     Now at the end we come to conclusion that everyday life is dominated by global cuture.And everyday life is fiercely contested where the meaning of Global culture artifacts are re-invented and re-inscribed by native culture.