Culture, institution, conduct : the perspective of metaculture

What does it mean to be concerned with the institutional conditions and affiliations of Cultural Studies? What form do these take? What implications do - or should - they have for the ways in which Cultural Studies is conducted? In taking these to be the guiding questions for this collection, I shall approach them as part of a larger set of issues concerning the relations between culture, institution, and conduct. For this purpose, I interpret culture as a historically specific set of relations in which particular forms of expertise are entangled with institutional practices in forming and re-forming social conduct in varied and contested ways. I shall approach these forms of expertise - the disciplines of Heritage Studies, Art History, Literary Studies, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Public History, for example - as instances of "metaculture". And I shall argue that Cultural Studies is itself a form of metaculture, one that has been shaped by the longer history of the culture/institution/conduct plexus that, in turn, it has sought to reshape.