E. P. Thompson and British Cultural Studies

One of the most interesting aspects of the Turner book was the work of E. P. Thompson. As a culturalist, Thompson believed that humans could affect the course of history through their actions. People are not simply living through history, but actively shaping it. Any mass movement could alter a course of events and change the outcome. If people acted together and with strong willpower, they could resist the power structure and act against the dominant class. The opposite view to culturalism, known as structuralism, saw humans more as idle objects that lived through events but never changed things. Thompson and the culturalists held an opposite view to these structuralists.

Thompson’s defined culture differently from many other cultural studies scholars. While other scholars studied a particular lifestyle to gain a sense of culture, Thompson saw culture as embodying conflicts between different lifestyles. Culture is not neatly defined as the same way of living for every person. Different groups of people have different traditions, customs, and general ways of living that are always impacting one another. Through these interactions, people are exposed to different practices and common cultural tendencies change over time.

In addition to cultural studies, Thompson’s work impacted the field of history. E. P. Thompson studied social history and rescued the working class from insignificance. Prior to Thompson’s work, historians tended to focus on the elite, dominant classes to understand culture. They felt that the lower classes could not possibly have any sophisticated cultural practices and also held no power to change society and so were not worth studying. Thompson felt differently and spent a great deal of time studying the working class. He believed that their lives revealed a great deal about power dynamics and that the working class people could actually change these power relationships over time. By seeing the idea of culture as more of a struggle from which the working class could not be ignored, Thompson’s work changed both the fields of cultural studies and history