Literature Review: Stuart Hall’s Articles
Introduction
From people’s earliest interactions with others, they begin to develop a sense of identity as individuals and as members of groups (1993;1999). The most basic form of identity is ethnic identity which involves the understanding of an individual’s membership in a social group which has a common culture. This common culture may be manifested by shared language, history, geography and usually physical characteristics (1989; 1999).
Nevertheless, it must be noted that not all of these elements need to be shared for people to identify with a specific group. In this paper, the researcher undertakes a literature review on Stuart Hall’s articles. In these articles, Hall claims that there is an interrelationship between language, identity and cultural differences. In general, this paper will be discussing this interrelationship and the reasons as to why Hall believes that they are important.
Culture, Language and Identity
Nowadays, the term “culture” has already become one of the most common words in all kinds of public discourse. It has been constantly heard from journalists and politicians, not to mention of academics especially those in all disciplines of Humanities. “Popular culture”, “research culture”, “mass culture” – there is almost no limit as to the applicability of the term in any context. If one looks at the subject of culture in a historical way, three things came out.
The first is that culture as a subject and as a social issue is definitely not the invention of this time. as a matter of fact, the farther we go to the eighteenth century, the more we find that culture, its nature and composition is the central issue in the field of Humanities. In addition, it was not really in the 1920s and the 1930s (period of modernism in the English speaking world) that culture became another word for “high art”.
The second is that from the beginning of the argument of culture in the eighteenth century, there has been a debate regarding the relative status and merits of its parts. Even though as a general theory, the farther one goes back to the eighteenth century, the more broadly culture is defined, this does not really represent that anything goes.
Lastly, the third is that culture has always been a burning issue in times of perceived change and conflict as it is in the moments of change that is has already become relevant to ponder on what is good and worth preserving in a society, what is essentially meaningful to its experience and its civilization.
The definition of culture even up to this date continues to be debated by anthropologists and other scholars. In one concept, Garcia (1994) defines culture as “the system of understanding characteristics of that individual’s society or of some subgroup within that society” which includes “values, beliefs, notions about acceptable and unacceptable behavior and other socially constructed ideas that members of the society are taught as ‘true’” (p. 51). The members of cultures go about their daily lives within shared webs of meaning (1973). Upon associating the two definitions provided by , one can assess culture as invisible webs composed of values, beliefs, ideas about appropriate behavior and socially constructed truths.
According to (1996) and (1983), an individual’s own culture is most of the time invisible to the individual himself or herself. However, it should be noted that they are the circumstances within which people operate and make sense of the world. As individuals come across a culture which is different from their own culture, one of the issues that they face is a set of beliefs that marked themselves in behaviors that differ from their own. It is in this way that people often discuss regarding other people’s cultures and not so much on their own. It has been perceived that an individual’s own culture is usually hidden from them. People even describe it as “the way things are”. Nevertheless, one’s beliefs, ideas and actions are not any more natural or biologically predetermined than any other group’s beliefs, ideas and actions. They have simply emerged from the ways one’s own group has dealt with and deduced the particular circumstances that it has faced. As conditions change, so do cultures; hence, cultures are said to be dynamic.
However, individual cultural identity poses yet another layer of complexity. Even members of the same culture vary significantly in their beliefs and actions. All peoples have unique identities that have been developed within their specified cultures. However, these identities are not fixed or static. For this reason, stereotypes do not hold up since no two individuals from any culture are exactly alike. It should be noted that despite the fact that living inside a culture will allow its members to become acquainted with their total cultural heritage of that specified society, no individual actually internalizes the entire cultural heritage. As a matter of fact, it would actually be impossible for any individual to acquire a society’s entire cultural heritage since there are as you might expect complicated and conflicting values, beliefs and ideas within the specific heritage which is a result of the conditions and events that individuals and groups experience.
In example, in China, arranged marriage has been an old cultural practice which is founded on the belief that families of potential spouses best known who would make a more desirable match. Nevertheless, this cultural practice has been more and more frequently rejected, that is partly due to the sense of independence from the family brought on by both men and women’s participation in the rapidly developing job market. The evolving experience of work is transforming cultural attitudes towards family and marriage. These different experiences and the culture of new values, beliefs and ideas that have been produced all contribute to the dynamic nature of culture.
As for (1997), culture is all about “shared meanings”. Language, in relation to culture, is the “privileged medium” wherein people make sense of things, in which meaning is produced and exchanged. In addition, meanings can only be shared by means of the people’s common access to language. Hence, language is the heart of meaning and culture and has always been regarded as the key storage area of cultural values and meanings.
Language operates in a representational system, wherein in language, people use signs and symbols – may be sounds, written words, electronically produced images, musical notes, even objects – to represent to other people their concepts, ideas and feelings. Language is actually one of the media through which beliefs, concepts and feelings are represented in a culture. Hence, it should be noted that the representation through language is fundamental to the processes by which meaning is produced.
As mentioned earlier, culture is said to be one of the most complicated concepts in the field of human and social sciences. There seems to be so many meaning of it. Traditionally, culture has been defined as to “embody the best that has been thought and said” in a society”, the sum of the great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy – the “high culture” of an age. According to (1997), for quite some time, high culture against popular culture was the classic way of framing the debate on culture. Lately, in a more social science context, culture has been coined to refer to whatever is distinctive about the way of life of a people, nation or social group as in the same vein to the definition of culture proposed by (1994) which is a set of beliefs, ideas and feelings.
The term “cultural turn” in the social and human sciences in particular to cultural studies and the sociology of culture has a tendency to highlight on the significance of meaning in the definition of culture. It has been argued that culture is not so much a set of things like novels, paintings, TV programs and magazines but rather as a process – a set of practices. Basically, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings, that is the giving and taking of meanings, between the members of the group or the society. When one says that two individuals belong to the same culture, this means that these two individuals understand the world in more or less the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings regarding the world in such ways that will be understood by both of them. Therefore, it should be noted, according to (1997), culture relies on its members or participants who interprets reflectively the happenings around them and making sense of the world in ways that are similar.
Nevertheless, this concentration on “shared meanings” sometimes makes culture seem too unitary and too cognitive. In any culture, there will always be a considerable variety of meanings about any topic, as well as many ways of interpreting or representing it. In addition, culture deals with feelings, attachments and emotions, along with concepts and ideas. How an individual will act is a representation of who he or she is – his identity; what he or she is feeling – his emotions; as well as which group he or she feels he or she belongs to – his attachment, which can be seen and interpreted by other people, even if the individual did not mean to communicate anything as formal as a message and even if the other person could not give a very logical explanation of how he or she came to comprehend what the action means. Primarily, cultural meanings are not only “in the head” – they organize and standardize social practices, influence the people’s conduct and in consequence, have real and practical effects.
It is important to highlight cultural practices when talking about culture, identity and language. The members of a specific culture are the ones to give meaning on people, objects and events. It is the people’s perception that gives these meanings and these meanings are quite a lot, not to mention that they are dynamic and changing as well. Even as simple as a building could mean to others as a building, an office, a home, a school depending on how people may look at the building. It is by an individual’s use of things and what they say, think and feel about them – how people represent them – that people give meaning to them.
To a certain extent, it is by the framework of interpretations that people bring meaning to objects, people and events. To some extent too, people give meaning to things with regards to how they use these things or incorporate such tings into our daily lives. Sort of like the use of a pile of bricks and mortar which makes it as a house, as well as what we think, say or feel about what makes a house a home. in addition, it is to some extent also that people give meanings to things by how people represent them like the words people use about them, the stories they tell about them, the pictures that they produce about them, feelings that people relate to them, approaches that people classify and conceptualize them as well as the values that people place on them.
Figure 1
The Circuit of Culture
We can then conclude that culture saturates everything in the society. Culture is what distinguishes the “human” element in social life from what is simply biologically driven. As to where these aforementioned meanings are produced, the circuit of culture (refer to figure 1) proposes that they are produced at different sites and passed through different processes or practices. Meaning is relentlessly being produced and exchanged in every interaction, whether personal or social. Meaning is also produced in various different media such as the modern mass media – the means of international communication, by complex technologies, which pass meanings between different cultures on a scale and with great speed. Moreover, meaning is also produced as people integrate things in different ways into the everyday rituals and practices of their daily lives. Nonetheless, it must be noted that in all the circumstances, language continues to be the privileged media through which meaning is produced and circulated throughout.
As to how culture and language connects to identity, it is through culture that people form their identities. Like for example, the Philippine culture. It has been a great pride to the Filipino people their hospitability toward other people even to people that they are not fully acquainted. this culture of hospitality exhibited by the Filipino people gives them an identity throughout the world which has been communicated and transmitted through shared meanings which is language.
Conclusion
This paper has discussed the interrelationship of culture, identity and language. This interrelationship of culture, identity and language has been relevant in the field of social sciences as it has allowed the researcher to comprehend more fully on the different interpretations of things, events and actions. Most importantly, drawing on Stuart Hall’s idea of this connection, one may be able to grasp more fully in understanding how meanings have been produced and how they relate to identity and culture.
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