Culture [Paperback]

What are the qualities and properties that make something cultural? What does claiming something as cultural allow us to do?

Culture offers students a workable understanding of the category culture and explores how the realm of the cultural can be practically explored as a way of understanding the world.

Ben Highmore provides a clear and robust defence of the productivity of cultural analysis in a media saturated world, while also instilling a sense of modesty in qualifying what can and cant be accomplished in the name of cultural analysis.

With extensive examples and case studies throughout, the book demonstrates both the productivity and the limitations in orientating analysis to the cultural.

A thought-provoking and engaging examination, Cultureis an ideal introductory text for students of media and cultural studies.

A note to the reader  1. Introduction  2. Landscape  3. A Whole Way of Life  4. Politics  5. Experience 6. Death  7. Two Cheers for Culture? Bibliography

This book is full of things to think with, sometimes to argue with. Highmore roams around 'culture', thinking aloud, drawing in diverse materials, examples and experiences -- a painting by Turner, dirt, the clatter of Kinshasa, a hundred parakeets is a nursing home. The chapter on death manages to be both gut-wrenching and critically incisive, and is his finest work. In the end, Highmore argues for the study of culture that matters, and makes his case compellingly, sometimes surprisingly. He writes that 'culture gets under your skin', and so does this terrific book.

David Bell, Senior Lecturer in Critical Human Geography, University of Leeds, UK

Ben Highmore has written the up-to-the-minute introduction to the concept of culture that wlH