Research Practice for Cultural Studies

Ethnographic Methods and Lived Cultures

Ann Gray

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761951759, 9780761951742
• eBook ISBN: 9781446229033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

?This is an Excellent textbook and a valuable addition to the growing field of ?how to? books providing advice and guidance for practitioners and students wishing to undertake fieldwork of an ethnographic nature.... this books deserves to be high on your reading list?

- Active Learning in Higher Education

`Gray?s book tells us an important story, starting from the epistemological and methodological background of a number of key studies in the Birgmingham tradition, it explores how to make use of these research experiences and how to deploy "experience" as a tool for research? -

Roberta Sassatelli, School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia

How is culture `lived?? What are the best ways of investigating cultural life? This timely, assured and accessible book has three objectives. First, it seeks to give a critical selective account of the main ethnographic methods that have influenced cultural studies. Second, it offers practical guidance on the craft of research, from formulating a topic to presenting it in written form. Third, it provides help with key questions of evaluative criteria and values in the research process.

This is one of the first cultural studies books to address the question of the research process in detail. Students who want to do empirical research will find the book to be an indispensable resource that will enable them to focus on the correct issues and ask the right questions for effective research. The book develops a set of research practices that are appropriate to a critical understanding of culture, power and everyday life. It will rapidly establish itself as the lecturer?s stand-by and the student?s friend for all issues relating to qualitative research in cultural studies.

Part I

ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS

one

Grasping Lived Cultures

If at the end of the twentieth century ... one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to grasp the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the social anthropologist’s ethnographic practice. (Strathern, 1999)

‘What is cultural studies?’ This is a question with which, as students and researchers within cultural studies, you will no doubt be familiar. It is one that is just as likely to be posed by curious friends and family as in the many weighty articles in books and journals that have attempted to provide answers. The very necessity of this question and the generation of lively debates and disagreements as to what constitutes cultural studies are indicative of some of the key characteristics which have shaped this book. These are the lack of clear-cut boundaries and disciplinary certainty that suggests a ‘field of inquiry’ rather than a fixed and stable discipline. As such, what can variously be described as ‘cultural studies’ will take on different contours and raise specific topics, issues and questions in different locations which, in turn, will be shaped by intellectual paradigms as well as national cultural contexts. Indeed, the debates and discussions that inform the different manifestations of cultural studies produce different emphases, foregrounding different aspects of culture. However, the many undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in cultural studies simply must, through selection and often simplification, produce one version of cultural studies for their curriculum. The point is that what might constitute this field of inquiry is open for discussion and tentative. What I consider to be important is to think about how we can make sense of the ways in which culture is produced in and through everyday living, what Raymond Williams called ‘lived cultures’, the focus of this book (Williams, 1981: 11). Meaghan Morris recently posed what, especially in relation to research methods, I think is a productive question. She asks, ‘What does cultural studies do?’ (my emphasis). Put this way, the question demands a different kind of response, one which requires more practical and substantive examples in order to demonstrate the concerns of the field. To begin to answer her own question, Morris draws on Henri Lefebvre and his notion of the ‘critique of everyday life’ which she suggests is at the heart of cultural studies (Lefebvre, 1990): ‘an investigation of particular ways of using “culture”, of what is available as culture to people inhabiting particular social contexts, and of people’s ways of making culture’ (Morris, 1997: 43). This formulation provides some markers for identifying the concerns of cultural studies as a field of enquiry and it specifically points to that aspect which is central to this book: the cultures of everyday life. In addition, it insists on the materiality of culture. Here culture is not a free-floating set of ideas or beliefs, nor is it exemplified only by a canon of great works of art or literature. The meanings, processes and artefacts of culture are produced, distributed and consumed within particular material circumstances. In other words, texts and practices are both products of and constitutive of the social world. This is made up of a whole range of organisations, from, for example, institutions of the media and other cultural producers, the family, education and various agencies of civil society to everyday practices within specific social groups. Therefore, any attempt to understand culture and cultural processes must take account of this always complex set of material conditions. Questions of power and access are also contained in Morris’s formulation. Thus, to ask who has access to specific and legitimised forms of culture and who is excluded is to raise questions about the determinants and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. There are powerful forces which shape cultural processes and products. Cultural studies, however, acknowledges that people can and do engage actively in their uses of cultural artefacts in making sense of their own and others’ lives.

Thus, Morris’ formulation is already suggestive of the terrain of cultural studies concerns. Culture is understood as being actively produced through complex processes. It is broadly the production of meaning, or ‘signifying practice’ that happens at every level of the social and at every moment within cultural processes. This leads to questions about how and in what ways human beings make culture, why and to what end. How culture and the cultural shapes social relations and, more broadly, how culture takes its place in instigating or resisting social change. In order to begin to investigate these complex sets of relationships which are present in cultural processes we require a variety of methods ranging from textual analysis, observation, different ways of gathering knowledge and information from individuals and groups, such as diaries, different kinds of interviews and participant observation. Morris puts great emphasis on ‘lived experience’ in her formulation and this will be the focus of this book. However, ‘texts’ which includes written texts, e.g. literature, the press, but also visual, e.g. film, photography, advertising, aural, e.g. music, radio, and other kinds of symbolic artefacts, e.g. fashion, will clearly feature in our field of research. Thus it is important to identify some of the key issues in relation to texts and lived experience, and indeed, the consumers of those texts.

In the late 1950s, Raymond Williams wrote tellingly of the highly selective nature of the literary canon, which works were included and which excluded, and called into question the way in which the academy approached the text (Williams, 1958). Alongside the canon of literary texts were methods of analysis that privileged the text and sought to identify the inherent meanings within the text. Building on Williams’s insights, those working within the emerging field of cultural studies looked for methods of analysing texts which did not necessarily follow the existing approaches from, mainly, literary studies. Such scholars brought different kinds of questions to the text. They were not interested in finding the inherent meaning within the text but in the significance of different elements of the text in constructing what could be a multiplicity of meanings. In addition to this they were critical of evaluation which was implicit in the very selection of the texts for study. Of importance here was the work of structuralist Roland Barthes (1977) and that of the formalists, such as Propp (1968), which provided the necessary concepts for more ‘scientific’ modes of textual analysis. This was to look at how the text worked through different elements such as narrative structure; character function; cultural codification, etc. and what kind of ‘reality’ the text constructed. In addition, Roland Barthes’ collection Mythologies (1972) expanded the very notion of ‘the text’ to such activities as a wrestling match, consumer goods such as cars and children’s toys and the images and language of advertising, and exposing the ideological nature of the text. Barthes’ work informed much of the early work on textual analysis, especially the analysis of advertisements, visual texts and popular fiction. It provided a way of departing from the evaluative study of texts and placing them within their social, cultural and political contexts. Barthes’ work and that of his followers ‘read’ texts within a perceived cultural and ideological context, but it was not obvious how to figure out the relationship between the text and its social context and, in particular how readers interpreted the text. As Angela McRobbie (1992) observes, there is still a distinction within cultural studies between ‘text and lived experience’. I now want to look at why this distinction might still maintain.

The social and the textual

The perceived division between the social and the textual can be seen more generally within the structures of the academy. Broadly speaking, it can be defined as the split between the social sciences and the humanities. It assumes different objects of study and has developed particular concepts and methods. The divide has created much friction within the emerging field of cultural studies, spanning both disciplines, and many have insisted that ‘true’ cultural studies must go beyond an analysis of the text itself. They argue that texts must be understood within particular material conditions. These are usually identified in terms of a ‘circuit’ made up of the different stages of production, text and reader. The analysis of texts themselves, no matter how sophisticated the framework, nor how broadly a text might be defined, they argue, is of limited use in understanding the circulation of culture and the production of meaning. In other words, the text must be seen as both a product of particular social, cultural and historical conditions and as an agent in circulation. Richard Johnson, who succeeded Stuart Hall as director of the CCCS, presents a more subtle argument in suggesting that it is important to clarify how ‘the textual’ is understood. He cites scholars who have investigated bodies of literature for their broadly discursive practices in the engendering, for example, of imperialism (Said, 1978) and suggests that the re-evaluation of bodies of texts, or genres such as this are involved ‘not so much in the literary text itself, but more in the “larger social text’’’ (Johnson, 1997: 465), that is the discourses of power which operated in constructing those texts, which becomes the object of study. In considering the status of ‘the textual’ in cultural studies it is useful to quote Stuart Hall: ‘To me, cultural studies is impossible without retaining the moment of the symbolic; with the textual, language, subjectivity and representation forming the key matrix’ (Hall, 1996: 403, quoted in Johnson, 1997: 464). Thus, for Johnson and Hall the textual is a crucial element in cultural studies, but as they suggest, it is the expanded notion of the textual which informs such research.

By way of example, let us consider a cultural form like the soap opera. Produced by television and some radio broadcasting organisations, structured through particular generic conventions, transmitted via television and radio and watched or listened to by large numbers of people. The text itself can be subject to analysis and in relation to national identity, race, class, gender and sexuality. But, is that where the soap opera text ends? What about the many auxiliary texts which accrue around a popular soap opera; the tabloid press, the gossip magazines, other television genres, for example, the chat show, books and the more ephemeral yet significant chat and gossip conducted between fans or casual followers of the serial? Everyday chat about television, and especially long-running serials, provides important social currency, and here we move into how the consumption of soap opera, and other popular forms, construct identity, a sense of self and relationship to others. This simple example should alert us to the dangers of marking dividing lines between the text and the social.

Thus, we can concur with Johnson when he questions the split between the social and the textual insisting that it is a ‘phoney’ division. Furthermore, he insists that the social is textual and the division does not serve cultural studies’ intent which is to tap into cultural structures and formations, through and via evoking responses to questions, discussions, conversations, as well as observations. But it is the case that the academic study of texts, cultural artefacts and the ways in which they are used and understood, have been marked out for particular study and for the purposes of analysis. For most of us, however, popular media forms, and other ‘texts’ are entwined in our everyday lives, they provide a shared social and cultural currency and their images, catch-phrases and characters often settle into the sediment of popular memory. Furthermore, we draw on the rich resources of narrative, image, style which circulate within the symbolic worlds of media in thinking about ourselves, who we are and who we might become.

This emphasis on the ‘lived’ and the ‘social’ in the development of cultural studies in the late 1960s and 1970s, clearly required a range of methods which would enable the researchers to explore specific practices and contexts within which cultural texts and artefacts were produced and consumed. These developments will be addressed in Chapter 3, but for now I want to look at what existing methods were available to researchers in the 1970s who were attempting to ask new questions of new social phenomena such as youth subcultures, popular culture and the media. Two relevant disciplinary areas were sociology and anthropology. In this period, sociology itself had begun to move towards more qualitative and interpretive methods and the notion of ‘lived cultures’ proposed by Williams was suggestive of an anthropological approach. It will be useful to explore briefly some of the key distinctions between sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.

Sociology, anthropology and cultural studies: different questions, different methods

It is perhaps when looking at methods and methodologies that we can shed the most light on the differences between, and within disciplinary areas. Cultural studies has appropriated a range of methods from different disciplines, for example, textual analysis, historiography and historical analysis and psychoanalysis and drawn upon them as and when they are appropriate to its object of study. When specifically seeking to investigate the social practices of lived cultures it has drawn from methods developed within sociology and anthropology. Thus we can identify a range of methods that sociology labels ‘qualitative’ and which anthropology labels ‘ethnographic’. In adopting and sometimes adapting research methods more associated with other disciplines, projects carried out under the umbrella of cultural studies have been the subject of critique from both sociological and anthropological perspectives. At this stage a brief examination of the nature of the critiques can effectively reveal what is distinctive about the cultural studies approach to the cultures of everyday life and the necessary adaptation of existing methods. The criticisms inevitably point to absences and shortcomings and can be categorised as follows:

1 Scale and breadth. The most common critique from sociology is that the studies focus on specific examples, they draw on a limited number of respondents and are therefore inadequate in representativeness and generalisability, two key criteria of validity in sociological research.

2 Depth and duration. The dominant critique from anthropology is that cultural studies research tends not to immerse itself in the cultural or social site or the worlds of their respondents. There is little attempt, they argue, to provide broad context over time of the subjects and their cultural practices.

According to the thrust of these critiques, research carried out in the name of cultural studies is neither sufficiently broad nor sufficiently ‘in-depth’ to satisfy certain established criteria. The assumption here is that cultural studies conceptualises the subject, the social world and even the cultural in ways which are commensurate with the sociological and anthropological approaches. The methods employed by cultural studies researchers have certainly been shaped and influenced by the demands of existing approaches and this book will explore how they engaged with and were critical of them. But for now, I want to over-simplify the implications of the sociological and anthropological critiques in order to make my point about the distinctiveness of the cultural studies approach.

Scale and breadth

It is important to think about what is produced through adopting different kinds of methods. Survey methods, drawing on large samples, can usefully reveal social patterns or overall trends. For example, through large data sets we can establish how many people go to football matches, or how many people watch EastEnders. Surveys could go further and identify which social classes go to football and watch EastEnders, and to some extent, the reasons they give for doing this. Thus a sociological project using these kinds of methods is preoccupied with the study of ‘population’ (Johnson, 1997). While it can ask an infinite range of critical and analytical questions about this phenomenon and develop theories, concepts and categories for understanding, via a whole range of methods, quantitative and qualitative, it will, in the main, be seeking to produce some representative and generalisable results which can shed light on the movements, formation, dimensions, changes in that broader population. It is the case that empirical studies using qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews, while eliciting deeper accounts from respondents, tend to be seen as adjuncts, or preliminary to the necessary larger-scale study. But what surveys cannot do is to explore the questions which are important for cultural studies, such as, the reasons for investments in such texts and/or practices, what meanings they have for people in their everyday lives, and the significance of how they account for this engagement. Furthermore, cultural studies would seek to explore how these practices might relate to identity, to a sense of self and to social relations, questions that a larger sample would not necessarily deliver.

Depth and duration

Anthropologists insist that work carried out by cultural studies in its ethnographic mode does not engage sufficiently with the subjects of their research. This requires us to think about the value, and indeed the practicalities of ‘immersion’ in the ways of life of our subjects. This assumption about ‘proper ethnographies’ is redolent of the by now much criticised intrepid anthropologist exploring a hitherto unknown ‘field’ and ‘culture’ in a specific place and time. But, quite apart from matters of intrusion involved in long-term ‘observation’ the kinds of contemporary cultures we are interested in are those which, to a greater or lesser extent, we inhabit ourselves. Thus, we are already to a certain extent, participant observers in our studies. But, more fundamentally, John Fiske (1996) suggests that the critics are somehow missing the aims of the researchers who are, he insists, primarily ‘interested in meaning making’. I would concur, but go further and su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Ethnographic Methods
• PART II: The Research Process
• References
• Index