Visual Literacy: Visual Culture and Culture Concepts

Vocabulary flashcards covering key definitions, theoretical models, and figures from visual literacy and cultural studies lectures.

Visual Culture

The study of images impacting society or society impacting images; encompassing material artifacts, buildings, images, and time-based media made by human labor and imagination to serve aesthetic, symbolic, ritualistic, practical, or ideological-political ends.

Culture (vs. Nature)

What humans have done or added to nature through their inventiveness and labor; historically juxtaposed against nature and functioning partly as a framing device.

Anthropocene

Our current geological era (from Greek anthropo- meaning 'human' and -cene meaning 'new/recent') in which human activity has impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change.

Anthropogenic Mass

The mass of human-made materials, which according to a 2020 Nature magazine study outweighed the mass of all living beings (biomass) for the first time in history.

Base

In Marxist theory, the material resources and means of production (labor, industries, machines, technologies)—i.e., the economy—which determines the superstructure.

Superstructure

In Marxist theory, the 'spiritual' phenomena of a society—including ideology, art, religion, science, and philosophy—that are determined and weakened if the economic base falters.

Ideology

A shared set of societal values and beliefs, identified by Karl Marx as 'false consciousness' and described by Louis Althusser as that by which we are unconsciously constituted as subjects.

Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci's concept that the bourgeoisie (middle class) develops a cultural ideology rather than using violence, economic force, or coercion to maintain the status quo; dominant ideologies within it are always in flux.

Civilization

A synonym for culture with broader and evaluative connotations meaning 'mannered', which paradoxically usually increases the potential for destructive power.

High Culture

The traditional level of culture associated with royalty, the aristocracy, and the upper middle class.

Middle-brow Culture

The traditional level of culture associated with the bourgeoisie / middle class and lower-middle class (petit bourgeoisie).

Low Culture

The traditional level of culture associated with the proletariat / working class and underclass (lumpenproletariat).

Kitsch

Visual artifacts judged to have little or no aesthetic value.

Camp

A sensibility that recodes kitsch as valuable by seeing value through its status in invoking class standards of bad taste, turning the viewer into a 'connoisseur of kitsch'.

Connoisseur

A master of taste who masters the rules of a subculture.

Cultural Capital

A concept formulated by Pierre Bourdieu proposing that, similar to money, everyone has some degree of access to culture.

Folk Culture

A cultural category associated with rural societies (in decline) and linked fundamentally to place making.

Mass Culture

A cultural category associated with modernity, industrialization, and mass communication, typically made by professional designers and artists.

Popular Culture

A cultural category distinguished by being made by untrained people for the masses.

Participant Observation

A central research methodology used in anthropology and sociology to study cultural meaning and symbolism.

Pluralist Culture

The sum of many cultures operating as a flexible, dynamic process.

Trans- / Cross-Cultural Study

An analytical approach that searches for commonalities across cultures, such as Carl Jung's exploration of archetypes in Man and His Symbols.

Intercultural Study

An analytical approach that examines the specific ways different cultures interact with one another.

Multiculturalism

The principle of incorporating values and ideas that do not merely reflect the dominant group's ideology, carrying the inherent danger of tokenism.

WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance)

An international arts organization founded in 1980 by rock musician Peter Gabriel along with Thomas Brooman, Bob Hooton, Mark Kidel, Stephen Pritchard, Martin Elbourne, and Jonathan Arthur.