Required reading:

• Miller, Daniel "Appropriating the state on the council estate," Man, 23: 353-372, 1986
• Myerhoff, Barbara "Life not death in Venice," in The anthropology of experience. Edited by V. Turner and E. Bruner, 261-285. University of Illinois Press, 1986

These notes are the thirteenth in a series of fifteen lecture for my class Culture and Communication. This is the fourth in a series of lectures on the most powerful critiques of structuralist thinking about cultural patterning and systematicity in interaction.

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1. Williams, Gramsci, hegemony and the popular
   1. another approach to the problem of ideology and superstructures given various developments in the social sciences, particularly the anthropology of everyday life and "culture"
   2. Gramsci's question about the "acceptance" by the people of that which could be shown "objectively" to subjugate them. The role of intellectuals, the media, educators, etc.
   3. A new way to look at art and literature in relation to its social contexts; and a new field of investigation in industrialized societies concerning the "popular"
   4. Williams and cultural studies.
2. The collapsing of hegemony into the related concept of habitus.
   1. were partially developed in specific reaction against social theories that focused on the division of labor in society, and its implication for the development of classes and other such groupings within complex societies. These theories appeared:
      1. "static" in that they did not explicitly consider the possibility that
         1. classes arise historically through processes of struggle
         2. classes require specific work by people involved in all the classes to maintain them.
      2. unconcerned with the possibility of productive activity by the people involved, particularly those in the "ruled," "oppressed," or otherwise "subaltern" classes. That is
         1. when class position is used as a variable mechanically explaining variation in behavior, then the analyst will find it difficult to consider that people in their local circumstances might be, or become aware of their limitations, and act on them
         2. when class position is treated as a condition with which people produce their lives, then the groundwork is laid for resarch that makes of the people's awareness something like "an independent variable. "
            1. the difficulty here lies with the evidence to be used as evidence of "awareness."
   2. the emphasis on power (Foucault), resistance (Willis), and the futility of resistance ().
3. Such points had been made repeatedly but those who made them still had to deal with the historical fact that few among the classes or groups easily identifiable as "oppressed" seemed to act on the basis of the agency that they were granted.

   It would seem that something was preventing them from acting, and the concepts of hegemony or habitus might appear to do the trick by proposing that individuals came to accept the legitimacy of their position through the pedagogic activity of institutions such as the school (or the media).

   1. i.e., if you can be made to believe that you have failed "fairly," then you cannot contest your fate.

   The problem with this hypothesis is that it returns investigation to where it started, that is with the working hypothesis that social position is always the independent variable "causing" (and thus explaining why) people end up where they do.

4. Starting in the 1980s, and building both on Williams and Bakhtin, and inspired by Lévi-Strauss on bricolage we have people investigating directly what people in local circumstances do with their conditions.
   1. Miller is prototypical.
      1. The paper can be read in the spirit of Lévi-Strauss's pages on culture as transforming biology, except that now "biology" is the social and historical conditions that people find as they get born.
      2. It might also be read, controversially, in the spirit of Benedict's understanding of what happens when populations isolate: each kitchen then becomes the artifact of a minor sub-sub-culture
         1. One might thus hypothesize that the patterning of the kitchen somehow replicates the patterning of the living room, and probably other practices of this household also.
   2. Myerhoff contributes something similar but from a very different source. She is part of a kind of spiritual rebellion against the apparent intellectualism of (Lévi-Straussian) structuralism. Like the tenants in the British "estate," the Jewish senior citizens of Venice (California!) makes themselves visible (that is distinct) through their own ritual (artistic) activity.
5. Examples
   1. from classroom life: joking within the lesson (Mullooly 2003)
   2. suburban life in Ireland

Some questions (in the context of this course)
What can the emphasis on local construction make one forget? Identify one difference between Fiske and Miller on 'popular' culture Relate Miller on kitchens to Jakobson on sounds. How might the senior citizens in Myerhoff's paper be considered American?