Popular Culture (Volkskultur)

Definition

In Wolfgang Kaschuba's chapter, popular culture names one of "two major systems of order [that] have coordinated and organized the 'life of the many' in its everyday context during the modern period" — the other being workers' culture (Kaschuba, p. 172). Popular culture is the culture of late feudal lower strata, characterized as a producer culture, a "culture of material praxis," shaped by "reproduction of life itself as well as the material means for life" (pp. 174–176). It is not a unified "culture from below" but "a relational concept … pointing up kindred possibilities for experience and language—'a kind of minimal platform of understanding between the group culture of those segments of the population subject to domination'" (p. 174). The concept of the "folk" it carries was "repeatedly reappropriated and used in the modern period by social groups themselves … as a framework for locating themselves in social reality," expressing "a group-transcending collective 'we'" and Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling" (p. 173).

Key Thinkers

• Wolfgang Kaschuba — the chapter "Popular Culture and Workers' Culture as Symbolic Orders" (no author page yet — see log).
• E. P. Thompson — the plebeian culture and moral economy that Kaschuba builds on.
• Raymond Williams — "structures of feeling" and "alternative ideas about the nature of social relations."
• Norbert Schindler — the "other civilisation" and the "minimal platform of understanding."
• Marshall Sahlins, Robert Redfield, Fernand Braudel — the historical-anthropological frame ("little tradition," longue durée).
• Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Burke, Michel Vovelle — the European research Kaschuba invokes.

Related Concepts

• Workers' Culture — the industrial successor with which popular culture interlaced.
• Moral Economy — the normative core of popular culture.
• Everyday Life — the sphere of symbolic orders.
• Habitus — the "structural variants of group or class habitus" through which culture is transmitted.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the historiography in which popular culture is studied.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Kaschuba's chapter (pp. 169–197), especially "Concepts of Culture" (pp. 172–174) and "The Culture of the Producers as the Culture of Material Praxis" (pp. 174–178).

Open Questions

• Can "popular culture" be retained as a category without naturalizing the very "folk" it names? Kaschuba argues for cautious use, but the concept remains ideologically loaded.
• What happens to popular culture's "producer" character once the material basis of reproduction (land, craft, household production) disappears?