Understanding American Culture

Paper Summary:

The paper examines four areas of American culture; the film industry, the American novel, popular music and sport. The paper shows how these four cultural forms are all related to the wider social and economic context of American life, having developed out of peculiarly American conditions. The paper concludes, therefore, that to a very large extent, our understanding of American cultural forms demands an exploration of the economic, social and political context in which they have developed.

From the Paper:

"Ideas do not develop in a vacuum, but are fostered and shaped by the social, economic and political context in which they originate. The same is true of all human activity, both aesthetic and material. No matter how we define the term "culture", the particular form referred to is, to a very large extent, a reflection of the entire geographical, social and economic situation in which that culture is located. We may, for example, define "culture" as "thhe whole way of life" of a people, nation, or community, or we may opt for a narrower, perhaps elitist, definition, centring on the notion of "intellectual or aesthetic" pursuits. Whichever definition we choose, however, it seems absurd to suggest that any particular cultural form is wholly autonomous, that it could ever be studied independently of the social, economic and political context in which it has developed. This is not to fall into the 'trap' of suggesting that all human activity is completely socially or economically determined, but simply, as Karl Marx put it succinctly , to suggest that "people make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing"."

Sample of Sources Used:

• "Culture" edited by Jeremy Mitchell and Richard Maidment (from the series "The United States in the Twentieth Century", Hodder and Stoughton 1994. ISBN 0 340 59687 2. The quotes in the essay are all from "Culture".
• "Out of Our Past- The Forces that Shaped Modern America (Third Edition) by Carl N. Degler- Harper paperback 1984

More papers on Understanding American Culture:

• Research Paper # 145741 : "White American Culture"
• Term Paper # 92796 : "African-American Culture"
• Book Review # 122921 : "American Culture and Racial Anxiety"

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