Birmingham Center for
Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS)
--focus on the production in practice of
diverse working-class identities, lives,
styles, cultures, and their modes of
appropriation and transformation
PRACTICE APPROACHES
 Move beyond binaries to focus
equally and simultaneously on both
sides of the story (structure/agency,
individual/society, culture/society)
 Emphasis on everyday life, which is
where agency and structure
happen
 Emphasis on power, dominantion,
inequality
CAPITALISM: An economic system
in which people work for wages, land
and capital goods are privately owned,
and capital is invested for individual
profit.
CAPITAL: Assets that are used in the
production of goods and services
(money, labor, human capital,
resources of various kinds).
SURPLUS VALUE: The difference
between the pay a worker receives and
what the employer gets for the product
the worker has produced Focus on
profit.
USE VALUE: What a particular
product can be used for.
EXCHANGE VALUE: What a
particular product is worth on the
market.
KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF
CAPITALISM:
1. private ownership and control of
the economic instruments of
production, i.e., capital
2. the gearing of economic activity to
making profits
3. a market framework that regulates
this activity (supply and demand)
4. the appropriation of profits by the
owners of capital
5. the provision of labor by workers
who are free agents
CLASS
Williams Keywords:
 group (objective); social or economic
category
 rank; relative social position; by
birth or mobility
 formation; perceived economic
relationship; social, political and
cultural organization
Marx:
 those who own property: the
capitalist class, or the bourgeoisie
 those who are propertyless: the
proletariat
Who is the ethnographer? How is
she/he positioned?
What does the ethnographer want to
demonstrate or argue? How is she/he
engaging in larger debates and
discussions in anthropology?
What concepts does the ethographer
use? How does she or he define these
concepts?
How does the ethnographer relate
general theory to cultural specificity?