Culture and Everyday Life

Reconsidering different views on 'culture' - what it is, how it operates, and how it relates to other aspects of the human (and non-human) world, this book will prove indispensable reading for students of cultural studies and sociology. Culture is unquestionably a central topic in the contemporary social sciences. In order to understand how people think, feel, value, act and express themselves, it is necessary to examine the cultures they create, and are in turn created by. Here, David Inglis shows how the study of culture can be transformed by focusing in on how cultural forces shape, influence, structure - and occasionally disrupt - the day-to-day activities of individuals. Reconsidering different views on 'culture' - what it is, how it operates, and how it relates to other aspects of the human (and non-human) world - this new book covers key areas such as: high culture versus popular culture modern and postmodern culture globalization and culture culture and nature. Specific issues covered range from the everyday aspects of sportive play, artistic production and the mass media, to car culture and global cuisine, and students are introduced to some of the major thinkers on culture from Matthew Arnold to Bakhtin and Bourdieu. Written in a concise, student-friendly manner, theoretical arguments are illustrated with examples from film, architecture and daily life, making this an informative and indispensable introduction for those wishing to understand the complexities of culture.

′Bennett provides a well organized, very readable and interesting discussion of a number of significant everyday cultural forms and I am confident student readers will find the book very valuable′ - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth Culture and Everyday Life provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical models, issues and examples of contemporary cultural practice. Bennett begins by summarising and situating - in everyday settings - the key theoretical models applied in the study of existing cultural practices. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed, from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts and to ′the cultural turn′, which explored how various social identities are culturally constructed. Following this are themed chapters that cover a particular aspect of late modern culture, such as media, music, fashion, tourism and counter-cultural ideologies and movements. In each case a comprehensive literature review is provided and its theoretical and empirical relevance to our understanding of the relationship between culture and everyday life in contemporary society is explained. Lucid, meticulous and illustrated with a host of examples, this is a superb text for teaching and research in the Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies.