Abstract

BRUCE, Beatriz. Cultural studies: between prescription and fragmentation. Cuad. Fac. Humanid. Cienc. Soc., Univ. Nac. Jujuy [online]. 2004, n.24, pp.45-61. ISSN 1668-8104.

The definition of the term "culture"; it involves complications and multipurposes that prevent to seize it for all and forever. Nothing is better before this problem of determination of a basic concept that to rake in the history the different meaning sources to understand and to clarify the plurality of the current echoes, being able to evaluate their fertility and heuristic validity. This diacronic semantic shows us that in the modern time they are profiled and starting from coexist two antinomic meanings that we categorize as: 1) ethical or normative conception of the culture, heiress of the ilustrated concept of progress and related with an absolute definition of the values. 2) anthropological or empiric conception of the culture, heiress of the romantic movement and linked with a relativiste definition of the values.    Each one of these conceptions defines different two ways to face the cultural studies but the limits of both positions reside in that in them is only captured the reification of the cultural manifestations but not the human activity, the practice that produces them. The cultural studies should overcome both visions returning to the classic conceptualization of the culture as a process but no as an object. To recapture the concept of the cultural studies in those terms allows to capture the complexity of the field that conjugates objectivities and subjectivities, universality and particularity, values and facts.

Keywords : Culture; Norms; Relativism; Practices.

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