Apakah itu "Cultural Studies"?

Dalam buku yang berjudul The Cultural Studies Reader, edisi kedua yang disunting oleh Simon During (cetak ulang 2001) dalam kata pembukaan (hal. 1-2) dikatakan bahwa:

Cultural studies is not an academic discipline quite like others. It possesses neither a well-defined methodology nor clearly demarcated fields for investigation. Cultural studies is, of course, the study of culture, or more particularly, the study of contemporary culture, which can be analyzed in many ways: sociologically, by “objectively” describing its institutions and functions as if they belong to a large, regulated system; economically, by describing the effects of investment and marketing on cultural production; and critically, by celebrating either large forms (like literature) or specific texts or images.
Cultural studies appeared as a field of study in Great Britain in the 1950s out of Levisism, a form of literary studies named after F.R. Leavis, its most prominent member.

Untuk mengetahui bagaimana “cultural studies” berkembang, sejauh mana keberadaannya, dan bagaimana arah selanjutnya di masa mendatang, maka perlu juga untuk disimak salah seorang “pioneer” dari “cultural studies” yaitu Raymond Williams:

Raymond Williams was an early pioneer in the field of "cultural studies" -- in fact, he was doing cultural studies before the term was even coined. This excerpt is from an essay Williams wrote in 1958, entitled "Culture is Ordinary." Williams "forced the first important shift into a new way of thinking about the symbolic dimensions of our lives. Thus, 'culture' is wrested from that privileged space of artistic production and specialist knowledge ("high culture") , into the lived experience of the everyday".

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings.

Selanjutnya perlu disimak pendapat dari Carolyn Steedman dalam buku Simon During tersebut di atas (Ch4, p.46-47):

Cultural studies requires a historical sense … , history is to be encountered in the archives not just in texts. It is in the archives that abstracted narratives, like those provided by Raymond Williams, …
… I am enabled to say something about text-based studies of history, within cultural studies, … and about the text as a historical reality, …, but also constituting a reality, in and of itself.

Pendapat dari Stuart Hall (Ch 7, pp 97-99):

… when cultural studies was taking off as an academic discipline in the US, …cultural studies has many histories and legacies … the economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure.
My title suggests a look back to the past, to consult and think about the Now and the Future of cultural studies by way of retrospective glance. It does seem necessary to do some genealogical and archaeological work on the archive.

… Cultural studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories.
Pendapat dari Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Ch 13, p 169):
… Spivak asks two questions: what is it to be an American, and: what kind of cultural studies should exist in the US. … to be an American legally and politically is to enter into relation to that founding document, the Constitution, … into changing and negotiable narratives about the Constitution.
… cultural studies also needs to acknowledge the transformative power of capital, legal rights, and education …
DS/Halo Indonesia