Richard Hoggart’s Cultural Analysis of the British Working Class
Anthropological and Ethnographic Influences
The fundamental to an anthropological approach was to view culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. It is possible to see Hoggart as viewing the working class he describes in terms of a complex whole, but he doesn’t claim to be using the intellectual tools of anthropology. Another way Hoggart borders on approaches associated with the social sciences is that his work resembles, to some extent, ethnographic techniques. Ethnography is associated with the scientific description and understanding of races and cultures. One of the techniques that researchers within ethnography have at their disposal is participant observation, where researchers mix with a community and try to win its trust in order to give an insider view. Hoggart practiced this observation, giving him a great advantage over academics trying to integrate themselves into a community. He probed the kind of everyday knowledge that is usually taken for granted within a community and reflected the social practices which constantly reaffirm collective life.
Hoggart’s Critique of Mass Culture
Hoggart seems to have taken cultural analysis considerably further than Adorno and the Leavises. His book still shared much in common with the way those earlier critics understood and valued mass culture. Leavis and Thompson divided the culture of the common people into two types: traditional organic and mass (consumer) culture—valuing the one and disapproving of the other. However, Hoggart’s division was rather different. He divided the working class into two categories: the older (pre-1930s) working-class culture of his youth and the Americanized mass entertainment of the 1950s, described by Hoggart as the phenomenon of the milk-bars. He also referred in his book to the Teddy Boy culture that was taking hold in Britain. He notes that boys between fifteen and twenty wear drape suits and slouch. Hoggart speculates that most of these youths are of inferior intelligence and therefore more vulnerable to the debilitating mass trends of the day.
Two Categories of Working-Class Culture
For each category, Hoggart gave a different title in order to refer to or describe them. To pre-1930s working-class culture, Hoggart gives the title The Full Rich Life; to 1950s youth culture, he offers titles like Invitations to a Candy Floss World and Sex in Shiny Packets. It could be argued that Hoggart was more able to describe the complexity and functions of the first category, rather than the fear of contemporary 1950s youth culture, leading him to reject it.
Resistance to Mass Culture
In general, Hoggart does not see the working classes as passive victims of mass popular culture. However, he saw competitive commerce as potentially dangerous. For this reason, he never let go of the idea of active resistance, insisting that the working-class resistance is positive because they have a strong ability to survive change by adapting or assimilating what they want in the new and ignoring the rest.
Hoggart’s Legacy
Finally, what makes Hoggart’s approach different from that of Leavisism is his detailed preoccupation with, and above all, his clear commitment to the way cultural analysis has been broadened within cultural studies, and it provides a convenient bridge between the work of Hoggart and E.P. Thompson.