Cultural

Studies & IP
Struggles
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE MEANING OF
CULTURE…
The word “Culture” is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a
racial, religious, or social group.

“Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values,

attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations,
concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group
of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.”-
Merriam Dictionary

Culture is a word for the 'way of life' of groups of people, meaning the way they do
things.

Cultural Studies
 CULTURAL STUDIES
What is Cultural Studies?
Cultural Studies is concerned with all those practices,
institutions and systems of classification through
which there are inculcated in a population particular
values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life and
habitual forms of conduct.

Cultural Studies is the study of how a society creates

and shares meaning.
Cultural Studies
 A BRIEF HISTORY OF
CULTURAL STUDIES
Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist
academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has
been subsequently taken up and transformed by
scholars from many different disciplines
around the world. - Wikipedia

Cultural Studies
?? ?
Why do we need to study Culture?
?
1Studying culture will help us to understand and explain
the patterns of behavior of societies, or cultural groups.

2 Studying culture will help us to determine what

behavior is universal across cultures and why cultures
differ from region to region.

3
Studying culture will help us to determine which human
behavior is instinctive, or innate, unlearned behavior, and
which behavior is learned.
Cultural Studies
Five Principles of
Cultural Studies
Five Principles of Cultural Studies

1 REALITY IS A SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION
Society creates the meaning of things in our
environment.

Because these meanings are constructed,

they are a perception of reality, not reality itself.

To understand a culture, we must understand how

they define reality.
Cultural Studies
Five Principles of Cultural Studies

CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION
OF THE OTHER
Our view of the world is created
*moral attitudes.
Distant Culture of Close by our cultural mores*. Habits, manners.
Other Origin Other

Those outside our culture who do not

share out mores are seen as “The Other”.

This approach leads to

misunderstanding and prejudice.

Cultural Studies
Five Principles of Cultural Studies

2 IDENTITY IS A SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION
Our culture defines social roles for individuals in our society called “subject
positions”

Every person has multiple subject positions within their culture.

Our identity is shaped by our culture’s expectations for our subject

positions.

Our identity is shaped by a tension between our own ideas (culturally

influenced) and the way our culture defines our roles.

Cultural Studies
Five Principles of Cultural Studies

3 BELIEFS ARE BASED ON

PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY
Beliefs are drawn from our culture’s view of reality.

If our culture creates the meaning of reality, then our beliefs are also
created.

If we perceive other cultures through the lens of our beliefs, then we

are seeing them as “The Other”.

To understand a culture, you should try to look at them through the

lens of their beliefs and examine how those beliefs were created – also
known as “cultural context”.
Cultural Studies
Five Principles of Cultural Studies

4 SOCIETY IS MARKED BY
A STRUGGLE FOR POWER
Those in power often shape how a society defines meaning and/or
mores.

This power relationship often leads to the powerful shaping what is

“right” and defining those without power as “the other”.

This leads to social inequality and a struggle for equality.

“Radical Multiculturalism” suggests that the only way to end this

inequality is to work towards the deconstruction of “the other”
model as a method of social/cultural understanding.
Cultural Studies
Five Principles of Cultural Studies

5 CULTURAL CODES CREATE IDENTITIES

FOR THE CREATOR AND THE RECEIVER
“Cultural Codes” are the ways in which a culture communicates/shares meaning
(i.e. language, advertising, laws, trends)

The creator of the cultural code is creating a target audience for who receives the code
– who they want to receive it and how they want them to use it.

In creating the code, the creator is demonstrating/shaping her/his own identity.

The receiver also shapes his/her identity by the way they respond to or use this code.

The creator and receiver are also influencing each other’s identity through their
interaction.

Cultural Studies
The Indigenous People and
their Struggles
 INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
What are the Indigenous Peoples?
Indigenous peoples, also referred to as First peoples, Aboriginal peoples,
Native peoples, or autochthonous peoples, are ethnic groups who are
native to a particular place on Earth and live or lived in an interconnected
relationship with the natural environment there for many generations
prior to the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Indigenous first emerged
as a way for Europeans to differentiate enslaved black people from the
indigenous peoples of the Americas, being first used in its modern
context in 1646 by Sir Thomas Browne, who stated "Although... there bee...
swarms of Negroes serving the Spaniard, yet they were all transported
from Africa... and are not indigenous or proper natives of America."

IP Struggles
 INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
What are the Indigenous Peoples?
Peoples are usually described as Indigenous when they maintain
traditions or other aspects of an early culture that is associated with a
given region. Not all Indigenous peoples share this characteristic, as
many have adopted substantial elements of a colonizing culture, such as
dress, religion or language. Indigenous peoples may be settled in a
given region (sedentary) or exhibit a nomadic lifestyle across a large
territory, but they are generally historically associated with a specific
territory on which they depend. Indigenous societies are found in every
inhabited climate zone and continent of the world except Antarctica. -
Wikipedia

IP Struggles
The Philippines is a culturally diverse country with an estimated 14- 17 million
Indigenous Peoples (IPs) belonging to 110 ethno-linguistic groups. They are mainly
concentrated in Northern Luzon (Cordillera Administrative Region, 33%) and Mindanao
(61%), with some groups in the Visayas area. The Philippine Constitution, in recognition
of this diversity and under the framework of national unity and development,
mandates state recognition, protection,
promotion, and fulfillment of the rights
of Indigenous Peoples. Further,
Republic Act 8371, also known as
the “Indigenous Peoples Rights
Act” (1997, IPRA), recognized
the right of IPs to manage their
ancestral domains; it has become
the cornerstone of current
national policy on IPs. - Wikipedia

IP Struggles
The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

1 VIOLENCE
Indigenous people are often beaten or killed during
evictions, or to intimidate them into giving up their rights.
Their homes are burned and their property destroyed.
Violence is more prevalent in resettlement situations, where
Indigenous people are forced to compete for limited
resources. Indigenous women and children are often more
likely to be raped than other groups because of their less-
than-human status in the dominant culture.

IP Struggles
The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

2 POVERTY
When assets are stripped, or the benefits of those
assets are diverted outside of a community, the
community becomes impoverished. Indigenous
Peoples suffer higher rates of poverty,
homelessness and malnutrition. They have lower
levels of literacy and less access to health services,
further contributing to their poverty.
IP Struggles
 The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

2 POVERTY
 Indigenous Peoples constitute about 5% of the
world’s population, yet they account for about
at the same level as those in a country with a
ranking of 78 on the UN Human Development
15% of the world’s poor Index. Canada as a whole ranks #6.
 Indigenous people make up the poorest  Poverty leads to desperation. In Thailand, more
demographic in every single country in Latin than 40% of Indigenous girls and women who
America. migrate to cities work in the sex trade. The majority
of females trafficked across state borders in south-
 In Guatemala 86.6% of indigenous people are
east Asia are from Indigenous communities.
poor, and in Mexico 80.6% of them are poor.
 In some countries, the poverty gap between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations is
widening. IP Struggles
The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

3 HEALTH
Indigenous health systems are intimately linked to
the health of the ecosystem, both physical and
spiritual. When our environment is destroyed or we
are removed from it, our ability to obtain these
necessities collapses. Health indicators for
Indigenous populations versus national rates
within their countries of residence indicate the
following conclusions:
IP Struggles
 The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

3 HEALTH
 Indigenous people have the same infectious  Chronic diseases—such as diabetes and heart
diseases but at much higher rates. disease—are more prevalent.

 HIV/AIDS is disproportionately higher  Increased alcoholism and violence are linked

among Indigenous people, especially to evictions and resettlement.
women.

 Endemic diseases such as yaws and leprosy

are more prevalent, and more likely to be
severe and frequently fatal.
IP Struggles
The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

4 CULTURAL
LOSSES
Cultural norms collapse when a community is
stripped of its assets, displaced from its homeland
and denied access to its sacred places. As
Indigenous Peoples are forced to assimilate into
the dominant culture, we lose the essential cultural
practices that preserve our well-being and make us
who we are. Eviction, environmental degradation
and assimilation result in:
IP Struggles
 The Struggles that IPs face up until
now…

4 CULTURAL LOSSES
 Loss of language. For most Indigenous societies, which
rely heavily on oral communication in every aspect of
societies and contributes to medicine, science and
technology.
life, this is devastating. Legal structures, cultural
practices, and the sharing of traditional knowledge are  With the extinction of whole cultures, the world’s
all inextricably linked to the specific language of the diversity is diminished and it becomes increasingly
community. Without it the society breaks down. difficult to learn from positive differences. Indigenous
Peoples provide the world’s best examples of
 Loss of clanship. Due to loss of cultural practices and sustainable living. Indigenous social and economic
diaspora, family ties break down. This results in loss of models, as well as our ways of looking at and solving
identity and sense of belonging. problems, are being extinguished.

IP Struggles
“Live in harmony with one another. Do not
be haughty, but associate with the lowly.
Never be wise in your own sight.” – Romans
12:16
That’s all, thank you. 