The Ethnographic Imagination

Paul Willis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745601748, 9780745601731
• eBook ISBN: 9780745669120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Paul Willis, a renowned sociologist and ethnographer, aims to renew and develop the ethnographic craft across the disciplines. Drawing from numerous examples of his own past and current work, he shows that ethnographic practice and the ethnographic imagination are vital to understanding the creativity and irreducibility of experience in all aspects of social and cultural practice.

Willis argues that ethnography plays a vital role in constituting 'sensuousness' in textual, methodological, and substantive ways, but it can do this only through the deployment of an associated theoretical imagination which cannot be found simply there in the field. He presents a bold and incisive ethnographically oriented view of the world, emphasizing the need for a deep-running social but also aesthetic sensibility. In doing so he brings new insights to the understanding of human action and its dialectical relation to social and symbolic structures. He makes original contributions to the understanding of the contemporary human uses of objects, artefacts and communicative forms, presenting a new analysis of commodity fetishism as central to consumption and to the wider social relations of contemporary societies. He also utilizes his perspective to further the understanding of the contemporary crisis in masculinity and to cast new light on various lived everyday cultures - at school, on the dole, on the street, in the Mall, in front of TV, in the dance club.

This book will be essential reading for all those involved in planning or contemplating ethnographic fieldwork and for those interested in the contributions it can make to the social sciences and humanities.

Part I

Art in the Everyday

1

Life as Art

You were virtually the answer to our prayer, because do you remember, we used to make vague attempts at writing accounts of things we’d done at school, y’know what I mean, we’d had to make an essay… I thought that we were the artists of the school, because of the things we did, I thought definitely we had our own sort of art form, the things we used to get up to.

Joey on what he had made of my presence in his school in a group discussion recorded in the Appendix to Learning to Labour

Life as art? Caveats and elaborations aside, this provides a starting point, direction and compass for the ethnographic imagination. It gives a quick and fundamental bearing when you are lost or mired. It also helps to will an ambition to write, that representation should, to some degree, mirror, or more exactly recreate, or more exactly still be continuous with something of the original.

I want to reclaim art as a living, not textual thing and as inherently social and democratic. Art as an elegant and compressed practice of meaning-making is a defining and irreducible quality at the heart of everyday human practices and interactions. It is at the centre of the commonplace human uses of objects, expressive and other, producing and investing meaningfulness in our relations with others and with the objects and materials around us. It is the combination of these practices with their locating relations and materials that produces culture or cultural forms which are the stock in trade of ethnographic analysis, for example school cultures, subcultures, occupational and shop-floor cultures, small-group or individual cultural formations.

Joey offers no finished poems. His poems are situated, performative and embodied in and through his whole social life and activity at school. Maybe subordinated cultural meaning is not an abstract linguistic type at all. It is concretely articulated as that which ‘makes sense’ in, of and by the connection between different elements of a cultural form or set of practices – action, language, interaction, the use of objects and artefacts, bodily presence, disposition and style, configurations of gesture and posture, ways of walking and talking. Their life artistry – not a mentalized or condensed resistance – is what makes ‘the lads’ socially distinct, their cultural forms relatively hardy and resilient. This makes them personally independent and difficult for their mental-work-oriented teachers to handle.

I am not proposing here an art of free individual creativity and inspiration, now relocated to the everyday, democratically frolicking in the school, dance club and High Street instead of suffering, lonely in the garret. Against the dominant individualistic view, the creativities embedded in cultural forms are usually collective; where they are individual they can be seen as crystallizations of socially originated forms of meaning. Culture is crucially about identity, but social and positional as well as individual and self-inventing. Cultural identity is certainly about the maintenance of the self as a separate and viable force, irreducible to institutional role, ideological definition or dominant social representation. But the meaning-making involved is not free and open but instrinsically framed and constrained, as well as enabled, in specific and contingent ways, by powerful external structural determinations. It operates within material conditions and given or inherited formations of sedimented or textual meanings. As such the overarching importance, as well as the beguiling complexity, of structural determination has to be mentioned immediately, dewing the breath of ethnographic enquiry into individual or group creativity.

I share an interest in a human creativity which is capable of transcending position and context, but I also have an ethnographically imagined interest in a situated human creativity which exists not despite, but because of, finger printed from the inside by, outside structuration and determination, or which finds a local and lived transcendence in and through a kind of sensuous awareness of contexts, seen and unseen. Animals may suffer their material and social conditions dumbly and certainly without any insight into their causality. But one of the specificities of being human, of humanness, that which must be interleaved through any worthwhile ethnographic account, is that symbolic activity brings some sense of wider positionality and outside formation of the self: an awareness of causation, axis or support of cultural being and consciousness located somewhere other than at the geometric centre of the self. These problems and mysteries specify a humanness for us all just as surely as the physiology of our bodies specifies it, but it is not understood that they are apprehended, usually, not coldly, cognitively and rationally, but affectively, poignantly and aesthetically. My sense of social art is in an important sense just this: the sensuous and affective acknowledgement of the presence of structure, of the lived awareness of invisible as well as visible context, of even a minimalist silence (an empty canvas) speaking for the closing structures around it. These things occurring in a narrow life space enforce an economy of elegance and form, an artistry of controlling an unavoidable ‘excess of meaning’. This tension with and connection to a larger stage brings presence and importance. It brings the possibilities of creative ‘penetrations’ (see chapter 3) and culturally mediated forms of knowing and influencing who you are and where you are, and what kind of person you could or should be.

Of course, immediate poverty or immediate oppression produces immediate suffering, but external powers work more widely and subtly, the small grindings of which are the very business of ethnographic research. Large forces which it seems cannot be known directly or controlled personally produce something of the micropowers of the self. They reappear as small embodiments often in self-hood as resistance to power and, more strangely, through the very reproduction of that aspect of the self bound up with the reproduction of the countervailing powers. ‘The lads’ made themselves and went into work and so made that world which held the stage for their resistance. They celebrated their freedoms even in the forms of that unfreedom which approached, their artistry the very preparation for its opposite in a life of drudgery and compulsion on the shop floor. Oddly, it can be the contending force which does the work of reproduction. Unconscious formation and positivistic determination would be a kind of freedom compared with this: the complex, ever shifting, only partly knowable and controllable, always mediated experience of seeing into, perhaps as its mechanism or hair trigger, the closing trap of social reproduction.

The mystery of the relation between the general and the particular encompasses the contradiction that general social forces or determinations are enacted only through the particular will of individual agents, even though all or most of them may individually oppose, seek an alternative to, attempt to exploit in their turn, or remain indifferent to the whole which they also constitute. There is somehow a consciousness or subconsciousness (not Freudian, but a culturally articulated sense or meaning) of the self as both a separation and a discontinuity – with perhaps other like selves, a base for a genuinely independent vision – and also, simultaneously, as continuous with a larger, partially alien, even predatory whole: the self as a spot in the eye of the tiger.

In response to an ‘Art Attack’, that my ethnographically imagined sense of art ignores essential qualities of rarity and transcendence, I argue that it is not just the elites who have some experience of the complex and mysterious relations of the particular and the general. Everyone is involved, and these experiences of the masses are echoes, though never heard, of distant thunder, of the high and serious. Selection, distillation and translation produce from common experience the apparent timelessness and transcendence of textual art – their possibilities to produce inspiration as well as for distance and reification. But textual art should not become the false centre. The point remains that there is something rare and special about the symbolic stresses of the common and everyday that ethnography so routinely picks up and records. The fact that these experiences are both repeated and common does not make less of them, or make them any less human defining. They are an essential part of the creative finding of symbolic place and identity, of recognizable time and place in out-of-scale and baffling historical structures.

Experience is the poem

I argue that the ethnographically imagined possibility of making connections between art and everyday life is relevant to all the social sciences, actually to all ways of making sense of human place; but it arose for me as a historically conditioned feature of my biographical experience in an early stage of the formation of the British cultural studies tradition as it unfolded at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University during the late 1960s and 1970s. The contemporary currents of that tradition are flowing away from me now, so the reconstruction of its early history which follows is a personalized, recuperative and in part retrospectively rationalized account of this formation. The early history of British Cultural Studies can be seen partly as the product of a series of shifts or revolutions, associated especially with the work of Raymond Williams, but also with Edward Thompson and (selectively) Richard Hoggart, in the structure of an important strand of English social and cultural thought known as the Culture and Society Tradition.

From the early part of the last century through to the middle of the twentieth, this tradition had been concerned with the relations between ‘high’, principally literary culture and the surrounding society, understood especially through the pain and massive disruption associated with rapid economic and industrial development during the world’s first industrial revolution in England. On the one hand the interest was in recognizing how the texts and artefacts within high culture had recorded and grappled with the significance of dramatic social and industrial change. On the other hand, the aim was to recognize and promote the ways in which society was and might be affected by the rich store-house of high culture: how its elite were moulded as well-read (usually) gentlemen and how the dehumanized masses might be lifted to a somewhat higher level of civilization by exposure to what the major nineteenth-century figure in this tradition, Matthew Arnold, termed ‘the best that has been thought and said’. A whole liberal humanist educational tradition grew from these concerns, with Arnold himself, in his time, appointed as the first chief inspector of schools in 1851.

Throughout his work, but especially in the early books, Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams was the initiating figure and central contributor to a series of arguments which produced what we can think of as a double reclamation and rearticulation of this tradition: a reclamation first of its content, and then of its socio-symbolic form and location. The latter was of the greatest significance to me, and for my ethnographic appropriation of a transformed Culture and Society Tradition.

As to the first of these reclamations, Williams argued that much of the great literary tradition, even if selected by elites and absorbed by them as a constitutive part of their very culture and sensibility, including a felt mission to ‘improve’ the lower orders, could be seen equally as the property of the non-elite and dominated classes, and therefore available for their own direct social appropriation of oppositional or critical purposes. The Culture and Society Tradition was centrally concerned with an aesthetic and critical evaluation of the human impact of the unfolding of the world’s first industrial revolution: bearing witness to the spiritual as well as material depredation of the dark, satanic mills, to the obliteration of the colours and smells of the seasons by soot, smoke and grime (a particular theme of Ruskin, another major figure in the Culture and Society Tradition). Though the stance was conditioned very much by a conservative nostalgia for a disappeared – probably never existing – pastoral golden age blotted out by industrialism, the contemporary concern was very much for the welfare and condition of the new industrial masses. The aesthetic-aristocratic charges against industrialism – ugliness, the destruction of nature, the distortion of human nature – overlapped with some of the feelings and responses of the people inside the mills, who actually experienced their dark satanism. Of course, within the literary tradition there was no basis for collective working-class organization, and no economic analysis of exploitation. Indeed, an antithesis towards political economy held sway, itself a ‘plague on the human spirit’, said Ruskin. But it could be argued that there was a particularly English qualitative contribution here in the rich depiction of the coloured sensuousness and spiritual resonance, rather than merely the abstract nature, of the devastation wrought by the coming of the new industrial-capitalist social relations. Since the experience of the proletariat, rather than that of the literary and aristocratic elite, was precisely the material through which these transformations were worked, the aesthetic tradition belonged to them also. Workers should read poetry too as a rightful part of their patrimony: in part it was about them.

The second reclamation was more radical and, for me, more important because, though never followed by Williams, it laid out a clear basis for a critical and imaginative ethnography of the everyday. Since theirs was the raw material wrought and rewrought by the epochal upheaval of industrialization and urbanization, why not treat the working classes’ own experience itself, not poetic representations of it from the elite, as the direct substance of poetic response? Workers had access to their own cultural repertoire; they were their own symbolic resource. They were a site of critical-imaginative meaning-making concerning their own situation. The patterns and interconnections, the symbolic lights and depths, that were articulated in a poem were also articulated in real social relations. Experience could be the poem. And more progressive, liberating and full of light it might be, understood as such directly, rather than filtered through the writings of others, coloured with backward-looking romantic longings for a never-was arcadian past. The symbol-conscious literary critic, then, should place no greater burden of meaning on a poem than on actual lived practices. Literary criticism, as a kind of interpretative ethnography of language, could extend its methods to the real thing in new kinds of open and forward-looking cultural criticism. Reclaim as lived relation not only the content of poetry, but the poem itself!

This was how the weight and significance of the Culture and Society Tradition came to me. This was its concrete, practical bequest to me: to treat living experience and its immediate practices and symbolic materials as a poem. That meant, very importantly, respecting it in its own terms – ‘only the words on the page’ – and also looking at it very closely for its (important this, too) assumed-to-be complex meanings, and to see that these were produced more importantly in metaphorical, indirect and atmospheric ways than in literal or rational ways.

This double reclamation account of the transformations of the English Culture and Society Tradition is my version of events: a formulation tailored to give a history to my version of how cultural studies led (could have led, or should have led) to its own route of a distinctive ethnographically imagined line of studies. It would not be accurate to subsume the whole early history of British cultural studies under my version of events, not least because of the relative unimportance of anything approaching genuine ethnography to this history. Nevertheless, though none of them were ethnographers, I do claim a provenance from the founding fathers. Throughout his work Williams directs us toward the recognition and study of ‘ways of life’ rather than, or as well as, textual studies. Famously in The Long Revolution, he claimed that the trade union movement should be considered the art form of the working class. Thompson similarly lays stress throughout on the rationality and creative meaning embedded in common customs and practices, and on the self-making of living culture: again famously, ‘the working class was present at its own birth’. Strangely, but perhaps fittingly, in the unselfconscious descriptive practices of The Uses of Literacy, rather than in his conscious theoretical pronouncements, Hoggart gives us the clearest justification for, and model of, an ethnographic-like rich recording and reading of everyday habits, language and customs; in his case, of a concrete working-class way of life in the Hunslett of his childhood.

I have my own subsequent appropriation and critical development of the later history of an ethnographic ‘ways of life’ model. That is the subject of this book. The whole tradition can certainly be accused of insularity and a restricted vision focused primarily on class, male and white–ethnic relations. But traditions cannot think out of their historical skins, and the practical and abstract points I am learning from and taking forward are eminently transferable to other social and symbolic grounds. This early history, or my version of it, delivers and protects my starting out proposition, that living practices can be approached as if they were art forms. History, or the geological formations of knowledge as I encountered and made sense of them, made and makes this a durable and securely founded, rather than merely idiosyncratic, starting point.

Language and experience

In treating cultural experience as inherently formed through artlike creative cultural practices the ethnographic imagination recognizes that there are few unadorned ‘social messages’ written on the surface of everyday cultural forms. The latter’s embedded and localized meanings work through observable but often non-verbal modes of being and expression – that which only ethnographic techniques can record, so requiring aligned forms of theoretical understanding and analysis. As the next chapter explores more theoretically, the approach to the ethnographic study of culture that I am outlining problematizes the centrality and centredness of language in relation to the meanings embedded in cultural experience.

Meaning is usually taken to reside only in language, the principal instrument of reason. But is language so transparent in its meanings? Is it really a singular, unified and hermetic thing, carrying its own specific and unique ability to communicate? At the very least, I would argue that it is wrong to see language as all of a piece and consistent in the way it coheres and functions. There is, most basically, an obvious division between, broadly, literal-analytic language and figurative, non-analytic language. The former is more likely to be standardized and instrumental. It is concerned to show and explain relationships, patterns and relations of determinacy. It is self-sufficient, autonomous...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part I: Art in the Everyday
• Part II: Ethnography in Postmodernity
• Appendix: Homology
• Notes
• Index