Isn “cultural studies” simply another way of saying “the study of culture”?
No. To be sure, most (if not all) instances of cultural studies somehow address the question of culture, but not all studies of culture count as cultural studies. This sort of hyper-literalness, after all, doesn’t apply to other fields: not all studies of women are examples of women’s studies, not all studies of America or Americans are examples of American studies, and so on. As it is, “studies of culture” also encompasses far too broad a turf. After all, given the range of common meanings for the term “culture,” anyone in the humanities, almost anyone in the social sciences, and a fair number of natural scientists can reasonably be said to be “studying culture” in one form or another. If this is all it takes to be doing cultural studies, then most scholars have been doing cultural studies all along — which renders the term effectively meaningless.
