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Concept
Low culture
Summary
In sociology, the term low culture identifies the forms of popular culture that have mass appeal, which is in contrast to the forms of high culture that appeal to a smaller proportion of the populace. Culture theory proposes that both high culture and low culture are subcultures within a society, because the culture industry mass-produces each type of popular culture for every socio-economic class.
In Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1958), Herbert J. Gans said that the:
Aesthetic standards of low culture stress substance, form being totally subservient, and there is no explicit concern with abstract ideas or even with fictional forms of contemporary social problems and issues. . . . Low culture emphasizes morality, but limits itself to familial and individual problems and [the] values, which apply to such problems. Low culture is content to depict traditional working class values winning out over the temptation to give into conflicting impulses and behavior patterns.
Each social class possess their own types of high-culture and of low-culture, the definition and content of which are determined by the socio-economic and educational particulars, the habitus of the people who compose a given social class. Therefore, what is high culture and what is low culture has specific meanings and usages collectively determined by the members of a social class.
Physical artefacts from low culture are normally small, cheaply and often crudely made, in contrast to the often grand public art or luxury objects of high culture. The cheapness of the materials, many perishable, generally means that survival in modern times are rare. There are exceptions, especially in pottery and graffiti on stone. An ostracon is a small piece of pottery (or sometimes stone) which has been written on, for any of a number of purposes, among which curse tablets or more positive magical spells such as love magic are common.
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