examine the contribution of raymond williams to cultural studies
Answers
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. His writings on culture, literature, politics and the mass media are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of arts and culture. His writings laid the foundation for cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.
In the 1950s and 1960s scholars like Raymond and Stuart Hall believed that the rise of mass communications and popular forms were changing the people's relationship to power and authority and to one another. According to them culture was an attempt to grasp these changes, it was a site of "negotiation".
Raymond Williams theory of culture which deals with Marxist in its class formation states that, “The capitalist ordering of social life has not changed.” Williams conceived a culture known as “customary difference” states, “Our customs is that which we are accustomed to and that which others are not.”
In his Culture and Society, “he reviewed mainly the Conservative English Tradition of social thought”. How the appeal is going to be depended on how it gets deployed. It can be done as conceived “ideas or ideals of perfection removed from material social life.”
“In a class-divided society, "culture" was opposed to business, urban massification, and possessive individualism.”
In his conclusion, Williams diagnosed the “ethos of service deriving from a feudal and hierarchical world. The idea of a "common culture" ("common" here denoting “full democratic participation and equality, not homogenized uniformity”) “is based on the unacknowledged but extraordinary creativity of millions of working men and women embodied in the collective democratic institutions of trade unions, cooperatives, and other grass-roots resources of self-empowerment”.