This chapter begins with the author’s introduction of the main problems and the idea of the work. The question about the political role in ethnography and its attempts to achieve social change is being formed. Since the work is not focused on global historical moments but on small events that provoked significant changes in everyday life, it remains to be seen whether such moments had a significant influence on the formation of historical development and influenced the direction of ethnography and anthropology.
The book was written by Lawrence Grossberg, who was born on December 3, 1947. He is an American scholar of cultural studies and popular culture whose work focuses primarily on popular music and youth politics in the United States. Grossberg is widely known for his research in the philosophy of communication and culture. The guiding thread in the head of the protrusion is the placement of semantic accents. The history of everyday life, historical anthropology, gender history, the history of generations, discourses, and the theoretical systems of individual adepts, predecessors, and founders. According to Lawrence Grossberg, if one takes a spatiotemporal map of the current state of cultural studies, one can also come across a classification according to models of cultural studies that reveal several correspondences from the side of the German cultural sciences.
While his previous work has primarily focused on the politics of postmodernism, his recent work explores the possibilities of alternative and emerging formations of modernity. In the book Cultural Studies, as the name implies, the author conducts research in the field of various cultural aspects of civilization. Culture as text, culture as communication, culture as difference, culture about sociopolitical space, culture concerning institutions, culture as discourse, and everyday life. The book focuses heavily on identity politics, the focus of many feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist research studies.
At the same time, all these experiments of mapping and concretization of discourse spheres also mean a significant narrowing down to thematic complexes. Chapter 23 of this book invites the reader to take a different path. Conventional thematic orientations here are opposed by the methodical orientation of the turns that develop perception attitudes, operational approaches and concepts, and analytical categories. Their ability to vary and shift accents, coupled with a more focused methodology, allows them to not only test specific research approaches for the degree of their cultural reflexivity but also localize them in a specific theoretical discourse.
The main argument of chapter 23 is the assertion that the author does not see a direct connection between creativity in culture and institutionalized scientific materials such as books, journals, and articles. The author wonders how it is possible to connect the scientific and creative sides so that they both work together to benefit culture and science. According to his statement, they are scattered and isolated, which harms both directions (Grossberg and Pollock). One can partly agree with this, but now popular science is becoming more widespread, which is why this statement cannot be accepted. It is much more simplified than ordinary scientific articles or books, but it carries the same information. In part, this is the crucial symbiosis that Grossberg could not find.
Nevertheless, many may agree with the author that much attention is paid to the human body. In this chapter, he states that society focuses on gender and reproduction systems (Grossberg and Pollock). Many can agree with this because it is a common phenomenon in public culture. The second statement by Grossberg concerns that “both male and female reproductive organs are metaphorically depicted in all major scientific textbooks” (Grossberg and Pollock, 411). This thesis is already more difficult to accept because, in all modern scientific works, researchers pay equal attention to studying the female and male bodies. Here, people can make a reservation that Grossberg’s book was published in 2005, and a lot could have changed since that time. The third thesis that can be distinguished from the chapter is the statement that people live in a completely post-natural environment (Grossberg and Pollock). However, this is not true because now the public, like large corporations, take care of the environment with all their might, trying to reduce the negative effects on nature.
Work Cited
Grossberg, Lawrence and Pollock Della. Chapter 23 Body Narratives, Body Boundaries. Cultural Studies 11.1. Routledge, 2005