Richard Hoggart and Culturalism: An Analysis
Theme 3: Hoggart
Culturalism is a school of thought that includes the works of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams. It emphasizes the study of culture as crucial for a full sociological and historical understanding of a given social formation. Hoggart’s contribution to cultural studies is often attributed to two key factors: the publication of his book, The Uses of Literacy (1957), and his founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964). This center provided a vital context for scholars to be trained and for a cultural studies group identity to evolve. His book helped establish Hoggart as a major voice in discussions of media and popular culture. The title of his book is closely linked to the expansion of obligatory education in Britain, making it particularly significant.
Unlike the Leavises, Hoggart was raised in a working-class family in Leeds, giving him an ‘insider view’ of communal working-class urban life, consciousness, culture, and experience. He was interested in how mass literacy impacted the lives of working people: specifically, how they used this ability and whether it was being used for positive or negative purposes.
In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart reflects on how the working class may be defined. He offers a detailed description and discusses the meaning of everyday events in the lives of working-class people, applying close readings of popular music, newspapers, magazines, and fiction, without necessarily condemning them. He suggested that working-class life could be ‘a full rich life’.
His work was written about the working classes by a man from the working classes, drawing on valuable personal knowledge to challenge the more simplistic versions offered by the Scrutiny Circle.
However, Hoggart acknowledges that the working class is not a rigidly defined concept, as there could be overlap between wealthier working-class families and the lower middle classes. He also argued that different working-class groups distinguished themselves from each other. He concentrated on the working-class culture of the 1920s and 1930s and compared it with the contemporary mass culture of the 1950s.
Hoggart’s way of understanding working-class life is reminiscent of approaches associated with the social sciences, such as Anthropology and Ethnography.
A fundamental aspect of an anthropological approach is viewing culture as a complex whole, including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. However, when describing the working class, Hoggart doesn’t claim to be explicitly using the intellectual tools of anthropology. Another way Hoggart’s work resembles approaches associated with the social sciences is through ethnographic techniques.
Ethnography is associated with the scientific description and understanding of races and cultures. One technique is participant observation, where researchers mix with a community and try to win its trust in order to provide an insider view. He probed the kind of everyday knowledge that is usually taken for granted within a community and reflected the social practices that constantly reaffirm collective life.