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
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?
1
2
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Studying culture will help us to understand and explain
the patterns of behavior of societies, or cultural groups.
Studying culture will help us to determine what
behavior is universal across cultures and why cultures
differ from region to region.
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
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
Distant
Other
Culture of
Origin
Close
Other
Our view of the world is created
*moral attitudes. Habits,
by our cultural mores*.
manners.
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
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 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
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” 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
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
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
1
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 lessthan-human status in the dominant culture.
IP Struggles
2
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
2
❖ Indigenous Peoples constitute about 5% of the
world’s population, yet they account for about
15% of the world’s poor
❖ Indigenous people make up the poorest
demographic in every single country in Latin
America.
❖ In Guatemala 86.6% of indigenous people are
poor, and in Mexico 80.6% of them are poor.
❖ In some countries, the poverty gap between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations is
widening.
❖ Living conditions on Canadian Indian reserves are
at the same level as those in a country with a
ranking of 78 on the UN Human Development
Index. Canada as a whole ranks #6.
❖ Poverty leads to desperation. In Thailand, more
than 40% of Indigenous girls and women who
migrate to cities work in the sex trade. The majority
of females trafficked across state borders in southeast Asia are from Indigenous communities.
IP Struggles
3
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
3
❖ Indigenous people have the same infectious
diseases but at much higher rates.
❖ Chronic diseases—such as diabetes and heart
disease—are more prevalent.
❖ HIV/AIDS is disproportionately higher
among Indigenous people, especially
❖ Increased alcoholism and violence are linked
women.
to evictions and resettlement.
❖ Endemic diseases such as yaws and leprosy
are more prevalent, and more likely to be
severe and frequently fatal.
IP Struggles
4
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
4
❖ Loss of language. For most Indigenous societies, which
rely heavily on oral communication in every aspect of
life, this is devastating. Legal structures, cultural
practices, and the sharing of traditional knowledge are
all inextricably linked to the specific language of the
community. Without it the society breaks down.
❖ Loss of clanship. Due to loss of cultural practices and
diaspora, family ties break down. This results in loss of
identity and sense of belonging.
❖ Loss of traditional knowledge that sustains our
societies and contributes to medicine, science and
technology.
❖ With the extinction of whole cultures, the world’s
diversity is diminished and it becomes increasingly
difficult to learn from positive differences. Indigenous
Peoples provide the world’s best examples of
sustainable living. Indigenous social and economic
models, as well as our ways of looking at and solving
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. ☺