Popular Culture: Anthropological Perspectives

Catalog description

This course examines how different media and genres of popular culture serve as vehicles for understanding the contemporary world. We will begin with an overview of theories of popular culture from such perspectives as structuralism, Marxism, cultural studies, and post-structuralism in order to develop a critical framework for understanding the relationship between different genres and media of popular culture, and the dialectic of ""popular"" and "high" cultural forms and practices. We will analyze such concepts as hegemony, resistance, articulation, and hybridity in terms of their usefulness for understanding the dynamics of everyday life in a wide array of cultural contexts and media: music, dance, narrative, cinema, television, visual art. We then turn to specific case studies of popular culture in order to explore how popular culture influences the dynamics of everday life in America, the Middle East, India, and Latin America. As a result of the class students should gain a better grasp not only of contemporary world cultures but of the ways in which popular media and genres express some of the contradications of daily life in the contex