Production of Culture

Focus and Relevance

As envisioned and practiced by Peterson and his close followers, the perspective focuses on the ways in which the content of symbolic elements (or cultural objects) is significantly shaped by the environments within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, preserved, and even consumed. Indeed, albeit originally conceived of as a tool for studying the intentional production of cultural items, the perspective has been extended to situations, environments, and places where cultural production is not consciously sought, for example, the production of identities and lifestyles by common (and usually young) people through the recombination of cultural industries' products in highly original and sometimes subversive ways—in this manner launching a bridge with cultural studies' researches on forms of resistance to the dominant culture. The idea of “production” referred to in this approach is therefore a very large one, and it includes all these processes and actions that contribute to molding the cultural object, including the production of meanings through appropriation by consumers, also called autoproduction by Peterson.

The cultural objects that have been investigated under the aegis of this perspective are many and different and drawn from different historical epochs. If the initial focus was on expressive symbols such as art works, scientific reports, popular culture's items (such as songs and soap operas), religious practices and doctrines, legal judgments, news, novels, and so forth, then along the way, the perspective has been increasingly applied to symbolic structures and forms generated not by purposeful action by some professional or organized cultural producer but existing as a by-product, or unintended effect, of the collective activities of meaning-making even by common people in their everyday life, be they organized in subcultures or networks.

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