Popular Culture

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POPULAR CULTURE

POPULAR CULTURE . The study of popular culture brings together three different yet related concerns: culture, the popular, and mass culture. Culture is the term used to denote a particular way of life for a specific group of people during a certain period in history. It also references the artifacts, narratives, images, habits, and products that give style and substance to that particular way of life. Mass culture is a term that highlights the profit motive that directs the production of certain products made available for commercial sale. It refers to both these mass-produced products and the consumer demand for them that justifies their widespread production and distribution. The popular makes reference to "the people," and as such there are in some discussions overlaps between "folk" and "popular" culture. What usually distinguishes the two in the common use of these terms is that whereas "folk" culture is presumed to refer to cultural products and practices that emerge from the people, often having a historical connection to a certain racial, ethnic, or geographically located group, popular culture usually refers to those commercially produced items specifically associated with leisure, the mass media, and lifestyle choices. Whereas there is therefore a great deal of overlap between mass and popular culture, the latter retains its populist impulse and thus tends to be less pejorative in tone than references to mass culture. In this sense elements of popular culture are presumed to be popular in that they are well liked by many people and they hold special meaning for certain groups of consumers at certain points in history.

Items of popular culture become important markers for identity construction in the context of a society increasingly defined by differentiated lifestyle segments or taste cultures. As such popular culture includes elements produced for consumption: (1) by the mass media industries, including products such as reading materials, music, visual images, photos, film, television, advertising, video games, celebrity culture, professional sports, talk radio, comics, and the World Wide Web; (2) by artistic and creative realms, such as live and performance theater, art, musical arrangements and performances, and museum installations designed for popular consumption; and (3) by manufacturers and other players within global capitalism who seek to link certain taste cultures with commercially available products. This latter category includes a seemingly endless variety of goods, including modes of transportation, fashion, toys, sporting goods, and even food—in short, anything that can be successfully packaged for consumers in response to their desire for a means to both identify with some people, ideas, or movements and to distinguish themselves from others.

The phrase popular culture first came into use in the English language in the early nineteenth century, when for the first time it was possible to manufacture and widely distribute cultural products with relative ease and speed. Prior to the emergence of a capitalist market economy with industrialization, the popular was a term with legal and political meaning that derived from the Latin popularis, or "belonging to the people." The term was used as a way to draw distinctions between the views of "the people" and those who wielded power over them. In the past therefore the term popular culture was used to reference the folk traditions created and maintained by the people outside of the purview of cultural authorities and away from the demands of labor. The term is still used in this way among historians who examine practices and products that were in existence prior to a commercially dominated marketplace.

By the late nineteenth century, however, the term popular culture had come to have a rather specific meaning in relation to presumed distinctions between the elite and the people that echoed presumed distinctions between superior and inferior culture, between the artistic and the vulgar, or between the sophisticated and the banal. These distinctions gained political importance as the industrial era progressed.

Theory, Criticism, and the Study of Popular Culture

As the working class that staffed the industrial landscape continued to grow in the late nineteenth century, concerns about both the influx of people in urban areas and the popular culture they favored came to be closely entwined. The bourgeoisie in industrialized Europe tended to view the shared artifacts of working-class culture as evidence of both their unity and their inferiority. Fearing an uprising similar to that of the French Revolution, early criticism of popular culture, known in the twenty-first century as the "culture and civilization" tradition, linked the growth of what critics viewed as inferior popular culture with concerns over the weakening of a social order that had been based on power and privilege. This tradition had its beginnings in the writings of Matthew Arnold. In his book Culture and Anarchy (1882), Arnold contrasted "culture" (now "high culture") with what he viewed as the anarchic and disruptive nature of working-class or popular culture.

Arnold believed that much of the problem of his generation lay in the emergent working class and its seeming refusal to adopt a position of subordination and deference to the elite. Part of the problem, in Arnold's view, was illustrated in the refusal of the working class to adhere to the suggestions of the elite in terms of which elements of "culture" to consume. This presumed problem was echoed in the writings and sermons of ministers and other religious leaders, who were particularly animated in their concerns about fiction, as will be discussed in a subsequent section.

The "culture and civilization" tradition of popular cultural critiques found renewed expression in the writings of F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, who began writing about popular culture in the 1930s in England. Believing that popular culture provided a dangerous distraction to responsible participation in democracy, they advocated that public schools engage in education about the ill effects of popular culture on young people. The Leavises promoted the idea of a mythic "golden age" of England's rural past, in which they believed a "common culture" (or "folk" culture) had flourished. Their many treatises aimed to keep the expansion of popular culture's influence under control so as to maintain what they believed were the truly valuable aspects of England's cultural tradition.

A similar strand of thought has long been a part of U.S. approaches to popular culture. In 1957 Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White published Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, a collection of essays that bemoaned the supposed dehumanizing impact of popular culture. Other popular culture critics, such as Dwight Macdonald (who contributed to the Rosenberg and White volume) and later Daniel Boorstin, Stuart Ewen, and Neil Postman, voiced similar concerns about popular culture's ill effects on society. In the shadow of the cold war, the contributors to the Rosenberg and White volume feared that a passive audience in the sway of popular culture could be easily brought under the influence of a totalitarian government.

A fear of totalitarianism animated the writings of scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt school as well, although their intellectual roots were in Marxism rather than in the Romanticism that often informed the nostalgia-tinged desire for a culture untrammeled by popular culture. Expatriates from Adolf Hitler's Germany, the scholars in the Frankfurt school feared the manipulative potential of popular culture through the workings of what they called the "culture industries." Bringing to their work a perspective informed by Hegelian philosophy, they articulated a critique of popular culture known as critical theory. Although often dismissed as overly pessimistic in that these scholars saw little potential for change in the relations between the privileged and the disadvantaged in society, the critical school inaugurated several important streams of thought regarding popular culture. Particularly influential have been the ideas of the critical theorist Walter Benjamin, whose attention to both the mass production and ideological role of images in contemporary society has been influential in debates of art, politics, and postmodernism. Equally important, the critical school spawned the scholarly tradition of cultural imperialism, which came to prominence in the 1970s as it explored the flow of mass media across transnational borders.

Critiques of popular culture that grew out of cultural imperialism tended to assume a central role for the media in the creation of popular culture. Similar to their predecessors in the critical school, popular culture was approached methodologically through an analysis of political and economic structures, with specific attention to the relations among governments, policy makers, and development efforts as they played out in relation to media. The theory was articulated among Latin American scholars of media and popular culture, such as Antonio Pasquali, Luis Ramiro Beltran, Fernandez Reyes Matta, and Mario Kaplun. These scholars, as well as Herb Schiller in the United States and Dallas Smythe in Canada, were concerned about the ways multinational media corporations were, through the organization of profit and commerce, able to dominate the development of media and by extension popular culture in smaller and less-wealthy nations.

By the 1980s, however, a new school of thought regarding popular culture had taken root in the United States and Europe. There were several reasons for the emergence of a critique that challenged the "high culture–low culture" and cultural imperialist assumptions of the time. In the mid-1960s "pop art" had called into question the very definition of art and high culture, foregrounding meanings made by the viewer of art rather than by the creator or the art critic. A similar revolution had begun with the emergence of reader-response theory in literary criticism, as theorists posited that what made for "classic" texts were assumptions often based in race, gender, and economic privilege and that literary criticism would benefit from an examination of meanings readers made of differing texts. With the advent of pop art and reader-response theory, along with the rising prominence of feminism, black, and cross-cultural perspectives and the emergence of social analysis informed by cultural anthropology, the cultural studies approach to popular culture coalesced in Great Britain, Australia, the United States, and Latin America.

Much of the early scholarship in cultural studies approaches to popular culture was motivated by a desire to demonstrate that audiences were not passive consumers of the products produced for them by the culture industries. Drawing upon the earlier scholarship of British cultural theorists, notably Raymond Williams, cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall, David Morley, Charlotte Brundsen, John Fiske, Ien Ang, Meghan Morris, Jesus Martin-Barbero, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Lawrence Grossberg, and a host of others set out to demonstrate that the reception of popular culture was much less predictable than previously thought. Pointing to such factors as the vast numbers of heavily promoted popular cultural artifacts that failed to find a positive reception in the marketplace, they argued that popular cultural artifacts must meet the emotional needs of their audiences in order to succeed in the cultural economy. Methodologies differed, although many embraced textual criticism, semiotics, audience reception research, and cultural history. In the increased recognition of the need for multiple voices contributing to analysis, feminists in the United States and Europe looked at how particular popular cultural artifacts speak to and in some cases offer symbolic resolution for the real tensions in women's lives, Latin American scholars explored the role of telenovelas in the creation of a collective identity that may be at some distance from national identity as it has been defined within a dictatorial government, and Asian scholars explored the intersection of cultural policy and popular cultural creation and consumption.

Within the context of an affluent United States in the 1990s and the rise of interest in postmodern theory, some cultural studies critiques of popular culture tended toward a populist celebration of popular culture. A reinvigoration of neo-Marxism through the emergence of postcolonial perspectives and critiques in anthropological methods, combined with a renewed interest in cultural history, everyday life, and issues of visual representation, have redirected cultural studies toward its central concern with the ways in which specific narratives and representations contribute to maintaining power relations as they are. Multiple methodologies are now applauded in the effort to provide analyses of the nuanced relations between power and agency, creation and consumption, consciousness and control, and individual and society in understanding the relations between popular culture and its audiences.

Early Popular Culture and Religion

Religious popular cultural artifacts have roots in the particular popular religious practices of every culture in the world. By the mid-nineteenth century the industrial market revolution of the United States and northern Europe, and later in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, had resulted in the increased availability of religious products in various forms. Some popular cultural items had distinct roles to play in relation to practices of piety that were embraced at the time. In the United States and in Europe popular art for the home and church featured biblical scenes as well as Christ's visage along with mass-produced statues of saints, angels, Mary, and Jesus and of course the family Bible. In China, although the nineteenth-century elite viewed Daoist practices as debased "folk" traditions, religious popular cultural practices endured through ritual theater, music, incense, chanting, and dance, all of which were designed to attract the attention of the gods and to communicate to them the human needs they were asked to address. Analyses of festivals and celebrations of China as well as those related to Hindu deities point to the difficulties of distinguishing between popular religion and popular culture, as it is impossible to consider these events apart from the locations in which they are held.

There is increasing evidence that items related to religious practices in other parts of the world were influenced by the colonial encounters of the nineteenth century. With the awareness of colonial British attitudes toward feminine bodies and modesty, for example, saris worn by women for ceremonial and religious festivals (as well as for daily wear) became longer in the nineteenth century, an influence found in styles of dress in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka among other places. In Nepal a change in traditional Buddhist meditation paintings also reflected this encounter, as the Rajesthani style gave way to European-style portraiture. Scholars of nineteenth-century Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist popular and "high" art similarly contend that it is virtually impossible to understand religious art and popular religious artifacts of the period without taking the colonial encounter into consideration.

In the early-twentieth-century Victorian society of the United States and the United Kingdom, sentimentalized and domesticized Christian art and objects became popular decor items among the well-heeled and middlebrow alike, making piety but one reason to own such products. Tea was served from tea sets depicting scenes from the Bible, and angel statuary and artwork decorated walls and furniture. By the early twentieth century people who embarked on leisurely travel purchased and sent home postcards embossed with biblical figures and scriptural messages. Each of these signaled an identification with Christianity but also with a distinctive worldview that underscored elite and middlebrow tastes. Not surprisingly therefore many of these products were made available to consumers not through official religious sources but through mail-order catalogs and department stores.

A significant increase in the rates of literacy among the general population at this time meant that commercial publishing expanded as well, making available new genres of reading materials, notably those written specifically for entertainment purposes. Fiction quickly became an immensely popular commodity, illustrated in the often-told story of how Charles Dickens was mobbed by fans when he toured the United States in 1848. Many religious leaders were skeptical, believing that practices such as fiction reading could rouse inappropriate passions and distract from a moral, faith-centered life.

Their skepticism about fiction did not prevent some religious leaders from seeking to harness what they believed to be the powers of the new medium, however. Some saw in the nascent publishing industry the opportunity to further their cause for Christian witness and education. With the rise of wood engraving, lithography, and later photography, religious leaders employed mass-produced images both for advertising and for didactic purposes. These visionaries produced some of the earliest best-selling printed popular cultural items in the form of devotional materials, magazines of missionary societies, readers for Christian schools, and fictional novels that purportedly advanced Christian moral messages. Members of evangelical voluntary societies, who in the mid-nineteenth century traveled from town to town distributing literature such as the Family Christian Almanac or other materials from the American Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union, offered many people in the United States their first exposure to modern mass media and its popular cultural artifacts.

Fiction writers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century often relied upon religious themes for inspiration as well yet produced less didactically oriented materials for commercial consumption, forming an enduring intersection of popular culture and religion in Western cultures and beyond. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) emphasized compassion and even Christian pity for the disadvantaged, whereas the novelist L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) as a means of reinforcing the importance of inner resources, such as courage and love, considered of spiritual significance among the Theosophical Society of which he was a part.

Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and Religion

"Christian kitsch," a derogatory term used to refer to sentimental material cultural products, is generally believed to have appeared less frequently among elite households in the United States and Europe after the decline of Victorian styles in the 1930s. Yet popular culture of the middlebrow and of other taste cultures continues to incorporate religious references within it. Precious Moments figurines, cross necklaces and angel lapel pins, Bible covers (or "cozies"), posters with God's "footprints," santos and votive candles, dashboard statues of the Madonna, items purchased in relation to religious pilgrimages, as well as the more ubiquitous bumper stickers, T-shirts, hats, and key chains with a variety of messages all comprise some of the materials that can be purchased to signify identification with religion in its various forms. Elite culture in the United States and Europe, rather than being devoid of religious popular cultural items, prefers the esoteric and Eastern, as found in such items as small indoor fountains, crystals, yoga mats and accoutrements, and African, Asian, and Latin American religious artwork. Research on the contemporary religious popular cultures of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and other traditions has much to contribute to understandings of how these religions have been encoded and commodified in the realm of items for sale in various contexts around the world. Existing work suggests that contemporary religious festivals and material objects associated with them extend an association with various religious, racial-ethnic, and taste cultures.

Throughout the twentieth century U.S. filmmakers incorporated religious themes and imagery into their stories, looking to sources such as the German passion play at Oberammergau to produce religiously themed epics. Many early films centered on Christ's life and death, such as Sidney Olcock's From the Manger to the Cross (1912) and Cecil B. DeMille's epic The King of Kings (1927). The pattern of borrowing from religious stories continued in the 1940s and 1950s. Films such as Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Quo Vadis?, The Robe, and The Ten Commandments were successful both at the box office and with critics. The religious epic Ben-Hur set an unsurpassed record of receiving eleven Academy Awards. The 1960s and 1970s saw the successful return of Jesus films with the 1961 remake of King of Kings, The Gospel according to Matthew, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Jesus of Nazareth. New genres such as satire and the art film influenced the production of religiously themed films of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Monty Python's Life of Brian, Jesus of Montreal, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Mel Gibson's widely publicized film The Passion (2004) reinvigorated the genre of biblical epic at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Various television interests have retained the broadcast rights for these films over the years, thus domesticating them from large-screen spectacle to small-screen rituals, airing frequently in conjunction with the U.S. holiday calendar.

Many less-celebrated films and television programs of the twentieth century have referenced Christianity in more popular ways through themes and characters such as angels, heaven and hell, and "the Big Guy upstairs." Stateside audiences during World War II frequented A Guy Named Joe, The Bishop's Wife, and Carousel, each of which featured a person who came from the realm beyond to provide heavenly assistance to those on earth. The guardian angel theme gained renewed interest near the close of the millennium. Film audiences of the 1990s saw Always and The Preacher's Wife (both remakes of World War II films) as well as Michael, City of Angels, and the satiric Dogma, while the CBS television program Touched by an Angel demonstrated the small-screen appeal of angelic helpers and haloed backlight. In the early years of the new millennium the popular CBS drama Joan of Arcadia posited a God who appeared in varying forms to a typically nonreligious teenage girl, while PAX television audiences enjoyed It's a Miracle! and even Pet Psychic. Before that spate of films and television programs, Oh, God! had garnered box office success in the 1970s, and the Catholic Church had been dubiously featured in relation to demon possession and devils in such horror films as Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.

The link of religion's dark side and horror remained throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with such entries as Stigmata, Priest, Seven, The Devil's Advocate, and many others in addition to the ironic references of the popular teen television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Charmed. The increase in cultural and religious pluralism in the latter part of the twentieth century was reflected in films, as reincarnation was popularly depicted in Hollywood films in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as well as in such entries as Heaven Can Wait, All of Me, Switch, Chances Are, Made in Heaven, and Hearts and Souls.

While these and other films were popular at the box office, religiously themed popular books remained on the best-seller list throughout the twentieth century. Charles Sheldon's In His Steps; Ralph Connor's (Charles Gordon) Black Rock; and Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills and The Calling of Dan Matthews were widely read and indeed outsold almost every other book in the period before World War I. The 1965 publication of The Gospel according to Peanuts sold ten million copies and served as a prototype for a series of popular books that emerged nearly four decades later, including The Gospel according to Harry Potter (2002), The Gospel according to the Simpsons (2001), The Gospel according to the Lord of the Rings, and even The Gospel according to the Sopranos. In the 1990s and 2000s books about angels, the Apocalypse, and the Holy Grail topped the best-seller charts, with the fictional Left Behind thriller series, penned by the fundamentalist writers Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and less didactically motivated books such as the thriller The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown and The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) by Mitch Albom. Meanwhile the Bible remained a best seller, including the fashion magazine format New Testament edition aimed at teenage girls, titled Revolve.

Conclusion

Religious groups of all backgrounds have long held what seem to be contradictory views on popular culture. On the one hand, they have been wary of entertainment, believing that it can rouse inappropriate passions and distract people from leading a moral, God-centered or ritually organized life. Yet on the other hand, throughout their history religious leaders, especially those within Christianity, have sought to harness the power of entertainment in their efforts to introduce their beliefs to nonbelievers. The twentieth-century development of the dramatic television and film industries in the United States provided new avenues for proselytization efforts while enlarging the reasons for concern. In the United States and Europe religious leaders continue to worry about popular culture's ill effects on morality and consumption practices, whereas religious leaders elsewhere in the world express grave concerns about the influence of U.S. culture's secular and materialistic representations. Despite the varied viewpoints on religion and popular culture, a revolution in the relationship between popular culture and religious leadership was begun in the earliest part of the nineteenth century and continues to play out.

The twentieth century ushered in an era of unprecedented popular culture materials, not only in written form but in oral and visual media as well. The sheer quantity of materials that have entered the commercial marketplace has made it virtually impossible to ignore the fact that popular culture and popular religiosity are now forever entwined. Religion has found a solid footing in commodified popular culture.