Endowing the Popular Culture Movement:

The Development of Popular Culture as a Discipline

Paul Rich

University of the Americas-Puebla, Mexico

At the outset, note that this is one of a series of presentations at regional and national popular culture meetings about building a permanent endowment for the popular culture movement. The premise of the entire series of papers (given at Mid-Atlantic, Mid-West, Far West, Latin American and National) is that an endowment campaign - and perhaps the word "campaign" is not quite the right term because it suggests a more aggressive effort than at first might be appropriate or wise - is predicated on a vigorous discussion of just why at this time it is important tht we should be thinking about the longterm finances of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association.

Often in learned societies, and understandably, the subject matter gets all the attention and the machinery of the society gets little. That is as it should be. Nobody expects the Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics to spend its sessions on Harvard Business School management studies so their committees function better; people in a scholarly society are generally anxious to talk about the subject and not about the backstage running of the organization. That is even a virtue, but there do come times when considering the machinery which permits the subject to be explored and enjoyed deserves some notice, and the suggestion is that such a time has arrived for popular culture.

Acetates:

1. Societies: A Forum for Academic Societies

2. Age of Societies and Size.

3. Relationships of Institutional Charactristics

Popular culture is at an awkward but promising stage, rather like a teenager looking towards adulthood. The associations are no longer small, but their finances and those at Bowling Green have not been placed on the sort of permanent basis which will ensure that the regional and national organizations take advantage of the many opportunities which present themselves. To justify upgrading the financial situation means we need dialogue about what our expectations are for popular culture studies, and this first paper in the series of four deals with that question of what our expectations might be, which should have a high priority. Unless we are convinced that attention to funding will take us into really interesting areas that otherwise would remain unexplored, the enthusiasm we need for any sort of capital drive will be limited.

I expect that we not only should but can come up with a good list of what is possible if the budgetary challenges are met. The groundwork to this has to be partly historical and we should remind ourselves that we stand in a long tradition of academic or scholarly societies dating back to the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century. This I will discuss at the Mid-West meetings. We need to remind ourselves that our profession as scholars is very much tied to gatherings like this, and in a sense these kinds of gatherings which PCA makes possible are a descendant of the medieval schoalars gathering in Paris and Oxford.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, brainstorming about the future of popular culture finances requires looking carefully at how other academic groups have coped with growing pains, at areas which the PCA and ACA membership feel could produce growth, and at issues involving globalization and intellectual stimulation. Give consideration then to the proposition that one of the principal reasons for enhancing the movement's finances is that this is a special time for the development of new academic fields. Discussion is needed about the relationship between the movement's finances and the exciting prospect that it can provide the major academic home for some of the growing new disciplines - including for example criminal, gender, and subaltern studies.

So first and foremost on a fundraising agenda is to consider the opportunities that a PCA and ACA endowment would give. Money is very directly related to opportunity taking. As this audience is well aware, academic disciplines are largely a creation of the twentieth century and at critical times a nudge or push would have created a different assortment of what are the so-called mainstream academic subjects, if mainstream is defined at least partly by a university's departments and faculties.

Minority gender studies are a prominent example of these emergent subjects and an area where popular culturists do and can play an increasing role. Those who are studying popular culture already do a great deal with subjects which require studying gender. The increased inclusion of gender studies as part of the popular culture movement, including ethnic, lesbian, gay and other topics, illustrates this point about being storng enough to take advantage of opportunities. If these now fast growing disciplines centering on gender are to find their principal home in the popular culture movement, we need to undergird the publishing program and membership services.

If capital were available, the popular culture organizations would be the umbrella for much of the gender scholarship now developing. I think it can be argued that PCA and ACA already have a better regional setup than MLA and ASA. To use another metaphor, PCA is the academic island to which scholars would swim and find a home if PCA could extend itself.

Is the state of academia that much in flux that these opportunities actually exist? Well, the present fragmented situation, which is an opportunity for PCA, is illustrated by a sequence of acetates showing what happens on the last weekend of every May in Canada:

Canadian Learned Societies, Acetate Sequence A-F

Incidentally the Canadian experience shows the success of something also being tried by the new Latin American Popular Culture Association with its annual Mexican conference, and which might recommend itself to other regionals. There too the hope is to attract some of the small specialized societies, and the help given by North American members of the PCA and the ACA to the development in Mexico of this concept has been absolutely crucial.

Gender studies are only one example of the opportunities which exist because of the interdisciplinary and openminded nature of popular culture scholarship. With more money, the popular culture associations can be more aggressive in providing an academic home for new scholarship. To an extent, in doing this we are in a friendly competition with other academic movements and other disciplines, and success or failure largely depends on financing.

Of course, there are never going to be hard-and-fast lines of demarcation between academic fields, and good-natured acceptance of an interdisciplinary stance is in fact one of the main characteristics of the popular culture movement. Money is a way by which we can build a movement that will attract scholars who might otherwise set up shop in what for lack of a better word can be called our competitors. While there have been gender-related papers at American Culture Association and Popular Culture Association meetings for many years, at the same time similar papers have been presented at sociological and American studies and historical gatherings. The question is not whether that will ever cease. Indeed, there are always going to be a few papers at the American Political Science Association and American Historical Association meetings on Native American women and black gays, and the various anthropological and language associations undoubtedly will continue to offer occasional panels on women in the Polish American community and on the Old Order Amish use of surnames.

But a few papers do not make an association or society into the major watering hole. Which group will achieve the critical mass necessary to make its conferences and publications the recognized principal meeting ground depends on what canb e done by way of giving the PCA and ACA a solid permanent financial footing.

Is this a realistic view of the situation? Keep in mind that by no means are the fortunes of academic disciplines or societies static. Jockeying for position is always taking place. Disciplines caught flatfooted by the growth of knowledge can lag behind for decades. The fate of mineralogy is always an example that comes to mind. While it's professional societies still exist, they were not ecumenical enough to compete with geological and geophysical associations. The subject itself has remained a backwater. In contrast with the fossilization of minerology (to enjoy a play on words), there has been a recent resurgence of geography as a discipline, partly because professional movements such as the American Association of Geographers have redefined the field to include considerably more territory (pun not intended). The geographers realized that they were losing out to anthropology and political science, and they successfully exerted themselves to make geography more inclusive. This involved self-study of the AAG as a movement, including its finances, and after that appraisal some aggressive fund raising. The resulting heightened awareness extended to an appreciation of how crucial to finances the conventions are to the success of any academic society. Possibly one consequence of a self-examination by PCA members would be to show more responsibility for making each convention realize its financial potential. Conventions in the academic world are themselves being pursued by technology and are in danger of being outmoded unless their formats are revamped. (That is the theme of the fourth paper in this series, to be delivered at a roundtable at the Mexican conference in February.)

Acetates

5. State Output

6. Registerd Attendance

7. Employment Impacts

8. AAG Mortgage

Nothing said here about PCA and ACA is said in criticism. So far the popular culture movement has fared amazingly well, but that does not preclude more efforts to build programs to attract those in subjects such as gender which have shown growth and promise. The affinities between gender studies and popular culture studies are numerous. Popular culture meetings could be attracting far more gender specialists than have been attending. The simple fact is that many working on gender don't know about us.

To summarize this particular aspect of the problem, the popular culture movement is the natural home for many emerging areas of study. The fight for academic recognition is not over for many subjects in academia and this is where popular culture has a special expertise and experience. Some members of the academy persist in questioning whether gender studies, let alone minority gender studies, deserve a separate category. Of course they also question the validity of popular culture itself - popular culture and gender are subsumed in their eyes by social history and social history by history itself.

Popular culture supporters know that while perhaps popular culture could be subsumed by social history and thus by history in general, in practice unless a subject is treated distinctly and in its own right it doesn't get attention. Gross simplification or reductionalism is the same rationale behind the pressure for the suppression of gender studies, and the logic is about on the par with someone wanting to jettison cutlery and eat with their fingers.

If the matter of a lack of empathy comes into discussions of the academy's treatment of minority gender studies, popular culture scholars should be among the more sympathetic to new fields since theirs is itself a field which has had to struggle for recognition. Gender studies in general face the same difficulties that popular culture has faced in winning a place in the curriculum. Like popular culture, gender scholarship runs smack against a number of self-imposed constraints that academics have masochistically adopted.

This reticence when it comes to subject matter is not for lack of problems to probe and questions to answer. For example, Latino women's studies involve enormous numbers of lives. There are an estimated 17,000,000 Hispanic women in the United States, and study of their cultures is just beginning to win academic recognition. Quite simply, "Not many people in the United States know much about the history of one, much less most, Latino groups."

As an example, Mexican-American women's studies have had to face an almost deliberate ignorance of the considerable influence of Mexican-American women on American history. Theirs is a history that is ironically that of one of the oldest racial groups in the United States while at the same time being one of the youngest 'histories' in the sense of receiving serious academic attention. The fact that minority women were left embedded and one might say vulgarly undigested in the history of the United States means that there is an enormous amount of research to be done. Mexican women who found themselves inadvertently Mexican-Americans after the war of 1848, to take just one group, were like sheep, largely shorn of their property and dignity. After Mexico lost much of its territory to the United States, lynchings and murders kept Mexican-Americans in their place and they became aliens in their own country. A racist regime put them in their place. Mexican-Americans had no more opportunities in such a situation than did blacks. Many Mexican-Americans believed that the only way to get along was to become "Angloized". This process included the forgetting of their past. Like the fledgling study of the history of Puerto Rican women and of Cuban American women, the topic has lacked the usual attentions and amenities which the academy gives to a subject, including learned societies and professorships.

This is not denying that women's studies in general in the last two decades have become popular; few academic conventions these days lack a section on women's and gender studies. But gender scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon and whatever place it has achieved has come after considerable struggle. When, metaphorically, two new kids on the block are combined, as in the study of Mexican-American women which combines ethnic and gender studies, the result is not likely to be the favorite pursuit of the university Establishment.

So the various minority gender studies are fields which are still fighting for recognition and where, therefor, initiatives by PCA and ACA would be welcome. The struggle to be included in the tertiary catalog is not the only similarity and opportunity shared with popular culture studies. Another important similarity with popular culture is that these minority gender studies deal with "the common folk", with banjos getting just as much or more attention than cellos. There is thus a close relationship between gender studies of minority groups and the so-called 'subaltern' movement.

The affinities of popular culture studies are not only with gender studies, including those devoted to Mexican and Mexican-American women, but with developments such as subalternism, one of a number of additional movements which need to be invited into the popular culture tent. Subaltern studies are in vogue, "subaltern" having been enlarged in meaning since its origins in Asian studies and its original description as history-from-below. Its proponents now view it as "A word sufficiently elastic to embrace the [various] subordinated peoples of popular culture...". Whether social history or popular culture studies were sufficiently descriptive terms and subaltern studies is simply a more flashy way to describe such investigations could be argued. In any event, in regards to the study of "minorities" (Is any group really a majority? ) subaltern scholars encounter similar problems to those that face gender and popular culture scholars.

Then there is the new "criminal school", if it may be called that, one offshoot in a way of subalternism. It is concerned with social relationships among the marginalized whose past is hard to recover other than through legal records and hence inevitably becomes involved with gender issues. Latin Americanists now working in this field are akin to such pioneer French scholars as Yves Castan and Nicole Castan and to innovative British scholars such as J.S. Cockburn, J.A. Sharpe, and Douglas Hay. The criminal studies school is still "a minor subfield of social history" but it is making a considerable contribution to understanding of the evolution of Latin American society. Although the mention of legal cases conjures up thoughts of tables and statistics, criminal records are not the primary property of quantitative researchers. The number of cases that can practically be studied are usually a dangerously small base when it comes to quantitative conclusions, but such a sampling is an extremely strong base for the qualitative scholar. Neither members of the emerging criminal studies school nor popular culture proponents are noticeably overwhelmed with the notion that quantitative studies can replace qualitative studies. Criminal scholars share with popular culture scholars an interest in qualitative approaches: "Their ability to generate sociologically meaningful data for statistical analysis, while useful, is only a secondary part of their appeal....The main attraction of these records lies in the extremely rich quality of the depositions and testimonies given by poor women and men, including Indians and castas."

This list of fields which are already incorporated in popular culture scholarhip but which for lack of resources are not being fully exploited in terms of recrutiment of members and staging of promotional activities could be much extended. Much of the current foment in the academy, whether labeled as popular culture, subaltern, the criminal school or gender-oriented is over the subject of academic study.

Regardless of particular specialization, we are all acquainted with past studies preoccupied with treaties and the high life in which the complexity of society was ignored. The challenge now is to reconstruct a multi-tiered reality, which is in a sense what popular culture is all about. Study of the so-called gender minorities or any of the other areas I have discucessed is a necessary part of that process.

Popular culture thus has a global and ecumenizing opportunity, with the potential to help give proper due to the growing pluralism and ethnocultural mixing of the world. The need for the new scholarship is clear in regions like Latin America where history-making is not the activity solely of an élite as it has too often been but, as Margaret E. Keck points out is "the interaction between ...two processes: one a highly conservative process in which traditional forms of élite dominance have been maintained and even reinforced, and one in which new forms of political and social organization have arisen to challenge the status quo."

There is a tremendous amount of work to be done because, when new disciplines emerge as they are doing, it is not only current history that needs the insights and revisions that the fresh outlook provides. So does everything written in the past. It would be a mistake to think that the new scholarship only is concerned only with recent events. For example, it hard to have Mexican women's studies without investigating the past condition of Mexican women. The fact is that almost all past historical scholarship is probably going to have to be reinterpreted. This is evident in a number of recent works about colonial Latin America, notably by Steven Stern, director of Latin American programs at The University of Wisconsin at Madison. Stern is concerned with interjecting discussion about gender relationships among the marginalized in the highly formalized canon of Latin American history. He did several studies of Andean peasants before turning to Mexico. His newest and highly influential work deals with Mexico's late colonial period, 1760-1821. With this and his other books he has made a significant contribution to Latin American subaltern studies, a term he constantly employs.)

The research that he conducted in the original criminal record sources on which his Mexican book, The Secret History of Gender, is prodigious, useful to all those interested in recovering the lost history of Mexican women. He refers to this as "archival immersion", and that is an apt description. Moreover, added to this energetic combing of the archives is a vast bibliography of printed works which would gladden the heart of any popular culturist and that runs the gamut from Henry Abelove's The Lesbian and Gay Reader to Kersti Yllo's Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse.

Stern belongs at PCA conferences. Umberto Eco belongs at PCA conferences. People with affinities for PCA don't know the opportunities it offers. Stern is an example of what the popular culture movement has been preaching, that significant scholarship does not have to be on huge subjects like the Westward Movement or Reformation. Still, there persists a view that subaltern studies or criminal studies or gender studies or popular culture studies are per se not important. It is time that popular culture advocates reached out more strenuously to other victims of the academy and made common cause in asserting the value of the subject matter with which these several disciplines deal. Gender, subaltern and criminal studies have the same promise that popular culture studies do as far as potential for revising the picture of a society. The work going in these fields strengthens the arguments of social historians made years ago that apparently private stories of the working class which are described by more hidebound academics as trivial or even prurient are actually highly significant.

Now, there are of course a large number of ways in which an endowment fund to make into realities some of the good things we would like to see happen in thePCA and ACA and the regionals. Mcuh of this is standard but not currently being done:

9. For the Future

10. Reply Card

11. Foundations

12. Investment Income

13. God WWW

What is suggested here is that the first step is to let people dream and develop a wish list - but not for too long! Out of all the ideas hopefully offered will come the motivation for an approach to fund raising. Despite the obstacles, popular culture has a bright future. It has potential allies that will enable it to grow far more than it already has. An ingredient of success is going to be to do all that can be done to reach out to the other new disciplines and assure them that there is a place for them in the associations, meetings and journals of the popular culture community. An endowment fund is not the point. The point is what we can do together if we can articulate what we want the PCA and ACA to be in the years ahead and then have a program by which we can get the resources to make those ideas come true.