Problematising Popular Culture

Abstract

All students of popular culture would acknowledge the intellectual debt they owe to Peter Burke’s seminal study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. In this impressively wide-ranging work, Burke laid down a powerful model of cultural change in early modern Europe. Culture he defined as ‘a system of shared meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artifacts) in which they are expressed or embodied’; by popular culture he meant the culture of ‘ordinary people’ or the ‘subordinate classes’, those below the level of the elite (though not necessarily excluding the elite). In the Europe of 1500, according to Burke, ‘popular culture’ was everyone’s culture. Although there existed a separate culture of the learned and educated few — the ‘great tradition’ — the elite at this time also participated in the ‘little tradition’ of the rest. The following three centuries, however, saw an increasing polarisation between these two traditions, with the result that by 1800 European elites ‘had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes, from whom they were now separated, as never before, by profound differences in world view’.

I would like to thank Peter Burke, Martin Ingram and John Rule fortheir comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of this essay.