Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, 8th edition

Cultural metaphor

A B C D E F G H I

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L M N O P R S T U V

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to be read as such by someone unfamiliar with

either.

The notion of cultural capital is linked to

class, gender, ethnic identity and status, in

that some cultural capital is more highly valued

than others by the dominant groups within a

society – and indeed possession of such cultural

capital is often widely taken as a sign of member-

ship of these groups. There is among these

groups a tendency to denigrate popular cultural

capital. Popular cultural capital on the other

hand can be seen as a rich source of responses

to, including resistance to, social subordination.

See culture; highbrow; taste cultures;

youth culture.

▶Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Routledge, 1984) and

Th e Field of Cultural Production (Polity Press, 1993).

Cultural Indicators research project See

mainstreaming.

Cultural industry See frankfurt school of

theorists.

Cultural memory Th at which the community

recalls, re-encodes in a process of making sense

of the present. Cultural memory contrasts

with what has been termed instrumental or

electronic memory – that which can be numeri-

cally encoded and recorded, as on a computer.

In Communication, Culture and Hegemony:

From the Media to Mediation (Sage, 1993),

Jesus Martin-Barbero writes, ‘In contrast to

instrumental memory “cultural memory” does

not work with pure information or as a process

of linear accumulation’; rather, it is ‘articulated

through experience and events. Instead of simply

accumulating, it fi lters and weighs’.

It is not, says Martin-Barbero, ‘a memory we

can use, but the memory of which we are made’.

What threatens cultural memory infl icts damage

on culture itself, particularly in cultures where

tensions exist, dramatically, between tradition

and progress. Says Martin-Barbero, a part of

whose book focuses on media development in

South American countries, ‘in the dilemma

of choice between under development and

modernization, cultural memory does not count

and has no place’: a situation he and other schol-

ars of cultural change view with dismay.

Cultural metaphor Generally an image, or a

series of images, seen to represent a culture. Th e

expression ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’

attempts to classify the English – perhaps even

stereotype them – by means of a dominant image

or practice. In this case a number of character-

istics are drawn together in the image of home

as something to be defended as though it were

a castle – private, self-contained, constructed to

C. Wright Mills in Power, Politics and People
(Oxford University Press, 1963), ‘the cultural
apparatus is the lens of mankind through which
men see; the medium by which they interpret
and report what they see.’ It is composed of ‘all
the organizations and milieux in which artistic,
intellectual and scientifi c work goes on, and of
the means by which such work is made available
to circles, publics and masses’.
The cultural apparatus features large in the
processes of guiding experience, defi ning social
truths, establishing standards of credibility,
image-making and opinion-forming, and is
‘used by dominant institutional orders’. It confers
prestige, and the ‘prestige of culture is among
the major means by which powers of decision
are made to seem part of an unchallengeable
authority’.
Wright Mills goes on to argue that, no matter
how internally free the ‘cultural workman’, as
he names the artist or intellectual, he/she is
intrinsically part of the cultural apparatus which
tends in every nation to become a ‘close adjunct
of national authority and a leading agency of
nationalist propaganda’. culture and authority
overlap, and this overlap ‘may involve the ideo-
logical use of cultural products and of cultural
workmen for the legitimation of power, and
the justifi cation of decisions and policies’. See
consensus; hegemony; ideological state
apparatuses.
Cultural capital French philosopher Pierre
Bourdieu (1930–2002) makes the distinction
between economic capital and cultural capital –
the latter being the knowledge, tastes, attitudes,
values and assumptions which individuals or
groups possess with regard to various cultural
artefacts and endeavours, in particular those
of what might be termed legitimate culture –
though defi nitions of such legitimacy are open
to debate. An individual’s cultural capital clearly
may infl uence the way in which messages are
encoded or decoded. Advertisers, for example,
often make assumptions about the cultural
capital of the target consumer groups when
constructing advertising messages.
A popular record of the late 1960s may be used
as the soundtrack in a television commercial not
just because of its musical merits, but because
its location within a particular youth culture
may be felt to give the product connotational
and ideological meanings related to the desire
for freedom and independence. Th e messages
may be read this way, though not necessarily
accepted, by consumers familiar both with the
song and with the youth culture, but is unlikely