Doing Research in Cultural Studies

An Introduction to Classical and New Methodological Approaches

Paula Saukko

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761965053, 9780761965046
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

`This book is a goldmine for students…it is brilliantly conceptualized and brilliantly executed. With this book cultural studies finally comes of age methodologically? - Professor Norman K Denzin, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois

Doing Research in Cultural Studies outlines the key methodological approaches to the study of lived experience, texts and social contexts within the field of cultural studies. It offers a comprehensive discussion of classical methodologies and introduces the reader to more contemporary debates that have argued for new ethnographic, poststructuralist and multi-scape research methods. Through a detailed yet concise explanation, the reader is shown how these methodologies work and how their outcomes may be interpreted.

Key features of the book include:

- An innovative framework - combining different methodologies and approaches.

- A variety of `real-life? examples and case studies - enriches the book for the reader

- A set of practical exercises in each chapter - pedagogical and student-focused throughout.

The book has a flowing narrative and student-friendly structure which make it accessible to and popular with students, while the discussion of fresh approaches makes it also of interest to experienced researchers. It contains all the ingredients necessary to help the reader attain a solid grasp of analytical and practical challenges to doing effective research in cultural studies today.

1

Combining Methodologies in Cultural Studies

Main questions

Histories of cultural studies

On validity

Alternative validities

Combining methodologies

Conclusions

Exercise 1

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Main questions

• Empirical research in cultural studies is structured by an interest in the interplay between lived experience, texts or discourses and the social context. How have recent historical and intellectual developments complicated these three areas of research?
• Why is the classical notion that ‘valid’ research is objective problematic? What alternative notions of validity are there? What are the criteria for valid or good research?
• What are the shortcomings of the notion of ‘triangulation’, according to which one combines different methodologies in order to get closer to a ‘truth’? What are the shortcomings of the notion that different methodologies create different, possibly incommensurable ‘truths’? How does a notion of combining methodologies in terms of fostering dialogues between different approaches help to get beyond positivist notion of one truth and relativist notion of multiple truths?

The trademark of the cultural studies approach to empirical research has been an interest in the interplay between lived experience, texts or discourses, and the social context. One of the classical studies, addressing these three dimensions of social reality, is David Morley’s research on audience responses to the Nationwide current affairs programme and its coverage of the British Miners’ Strike in the 1970s (Morley and Brunsdon, 1999[1980, 1987]). Combining these three views allowed Morley to come up with new insights on the ‘active’ nature of media audiences and the mediated, social and political dynamics of a historical turning point. The task of this book is to outline and discuss ways of thinking, doing and writing research in cultural studies, taking the three-faceted interest in lived realities, discursive mediation, and the social and political landscape as a starting point.

However, as cultural studies has matured, and as several historical developments have made our social reality quite different from the one in the 1970s, some challenging questions have been raised about the feasibility of its project. Three fundamental questions have been particularly pertinent to research methodology. The first one asks: Has our interest in cultures that are radically different from our own, such as working-class or non-Western cultures, been warranted, and can we understand and do justice to these cultures? The second, and closely related, methodological question asks: How can we critically analyze culture in a situation where we as scholars, and research as an institution, are an integral part of this culture and its struggles? The third question takes a slightly different task and asks: Is culture the most important topic to investigate in the face of gruelling global economic inequality and exploitation?

To illustrate what these three questions mean, one may ask them from Morley’s study. First, one can ask, to what extent Morley attended to the nuances and contradictions of working-class life, and to what extent he read his hypothesis that working-class is bound to ‘resist’ conservative media coverage from his focus groups. Second, one may ask to what extent Morley’s hypothesis was informed by the Marxist idea that there is a correspondence between a socioeconomic position and an ideological one, and whether this made him turn a blind eye to other issues that did not fit the theoretical framework. Third, one may ask to what extent interest in cultural struggles – such as media content and interpretation – has directed attention away from analyzing the complex, global, economic and policy processes that shape industrial disputes and industries, such as mining. These questions do not, of course, render Morley’s landmark study irrelevant. They simply point out that there are alternative ways of studying lived experience, discourses and the social context, and that these alternative approaches are becoming increasingly prominent in cultural studies.

This book is structured around the three-faceted research interest of cultural studies in the lived, discursive and social/global dimensions of contemporary reality. However, besides discussing the classical ways of studying these three areas of life, it pays particular attention to new research approaches, such as new ethnography, genealogical research and analysis of globalization, that take seriously, and aim to respond to, the three questions that have been posed to cultural studies. However, before I proceed to discuss these methodological programmes, I take a detour to the history of cultural studies that helps to clarify the roots of its particular methodological approach as well as the roots of the contemporary methodological questions or challenges.

Histories of cultural study

Cultural studies emerged from the political and intellectual climate and situation of the Great Britain of the 1970s. This was a time, when the field of social research was structured by hard-nosed positivist empirical inquiry, often of a functionalist ilk, and traditional Marxist political economy (Hall, 1982). The more right-wing or ‘administrative’ research, doing surveys and small-group research, aimed to prove that pluralism and democracy have become a reality in postwar North America and Western Europe. On the contrary, the leftist intelligentsia, such as the Frankfurt School, did a series of piercing criticisms of popular culture and opinions to prove that the postwar consumer culture and media had killed all social criticism and dissent and created a nearly fascist ‘mass society’ (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979; Held, 1980).

In this somewhat polarized situation, cultural studies carved itself a space between and beyond these two positions. To do this, it welded together humanistic, structuralist and New Left Marxist philosophies (Hall, 1980). The humanist bent in cultural studies aimed to understand and capture the creative potential of people’s lived worlds, such as working-class culture (Hoggart, 1992[1957]). Structuralism and structuralist methods, such as semiotics, focused attention on linguistic patterns and tropes that recur in texts, such as popular culture, and that shape our thinking. New Leftism brought an interest in examining the connection between lived experience and/or a body of texts and the larger social, political and economic environment. These three philosophical currents enabled cultural studies to articulate a mediating space between right-wing optimism and left-wing pessimism that allowed the paradigm to examine how people’s everyday life was strife with creative and critical potential, while their lives and imagination were also constrained by problematic cultural ideologies as well as structures of social inequality. This ‘middle stance’ informed the classical Birmingham-period works on media audiences (Ang, 1985; Morley and Brunsdon, 1999[1980, 1987]), subcultures (Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1976, 1988), and the cultures of working-class boys and girls (Willis, 1977; McRobbie, 2000) (for overviews see: Hall et al., 1980; Gurevitch et al., 1982).

However, as the political and philosophical roots of cultural studies indicate, the methodological project has been riddled with tensions from the start. One cannot, without running into contradictions, bring together a phenomenological or hermeneutic desire to ‘understand’ the creative lived world of another person or a group of people, and the distanced, critical structuralist interest in ‘analyzing’ linguistic tropes, which guide people’s perceptions and understanding. Furthermore, neither the interest in lived realities or the cultures and languages that mediate our perception of reality bode well with the tendency to make statements about the social and political situation, which is always, to an extent, wedded to a realist quest to find out how the world or reality simply ‘is’.

In the early days of cultural studies these contradictions could still be smoothed by the positivist notion of scientific objectivity. However, in the early twenty-first century the discrepancies between the three classic areas of research in cultural studies have been both magnified and blurred by developments often grouped under terms, such as postmodernity, late modernity, post-industrialism, postcolonialism, late capitalism, more recently, globalization and neo-liberalism (e.g. Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1991; Rose, 1999;Tomlinson, 1999). Even if discussions around these phenomena have sometimes become markers of changing intellectual fashions, they point to important historical and intellectual processes or shifts that have changed social reality and research.

First, since the 1960s, women, blacks and various postcolonial people, and their movements, have accused institutions, including the state, education, media and so on, of institutionalized discrimination. They have also accused that research, which has always had a particular interest in underprivileged groups, has not depicted the realities of women, ethnic minorities or postcolonial people but used them to back up the scholar’s theoretical and political projects, ranging from colonialism to Marxism and liberal humanist feminism (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Said, 1995[1978]). Second, the increasing media saturation of our everyday life, ranging from the long hours we spend watching television to the more recent Internet surfing, has made our everyday life and experience more ‘virtual’ (Baudrillard, 1983). These new technologies and experiences have eroded our faith in the ability of media or science to ‘objectively’ describe reality for us, making us critically, or even ironically, aware of the way in which all understanding of the world is mediated by cultural images and discourses. Third, the late twentieth century witnessed a series of social, political and economic processes that undermined faith in postwar political and economic arrangements and ideologies. The collapse of state-run socialism in 1989 in Eastern Europe has been a blow and cause of reorientation for various leftist projects. Still, the Western postwar dreams of ‘progress’ or ‘modernization’, which were supposed to spread Western prosperity and democracy across the globe, were also dashed as these dreams never came true. Thus, we have awakened to the early twenty-first century, structured by a new division between an exhilarated talk about multiculturalism and the possibilities of creating and disseminating alternative, previously silenced knowledges and cultures, and steep inequalities and mistrust and feuding between different groups of people (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998).

Cultural studies as an intellectual and political project has actively played into and out of these historical and social developments. At the same time, these developments have given rise to new research and methodological orientations within, and on the borders of, cultural studies. Scholars grouped under the banner of new ethnography have developed new collaborative or dialogic modes of research that aim to be truer to the lived worlds of others. Poststructuralism has led to self-reflexive and genealogical analytical strategies, which critically investigate the historical, social and political commitments of those discourses that direct people’s, including scholars’, understanding of themselves and their projects. Analyses of globalization have come up with more ‘complex’ ways of making sense of economic, political and so on developments, which challenge traditional simpler or linear modes of analysis and prediction.

These new lines of inquiry arise from the same current historical situation, marked by greater ambiguity. Yet, they run into tensions with one another in a similar way that the three methodological currents contradicted each other in early cultural studies. The new ethnographic quest to be truthful to the lived realities of other people runs into a contradiction with the poststructuralist aim to critically analyze discourses that form the very stuff out of which our experiences are made. The aim to understand the ‘real’ complex, contemporary global economic and political processes and structures is also not easily combined with the new ethnographic and poststructuralist insistence that there are multiple ‘realities’. The question that these contradictions and challenges raise is whether we can still find some common ground to determine what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘valid’ research. In traditional methodological parlance, ‘validity’ is the beginning and end of all research, referring to a series of litmus tests that determine whether the research is ‘true’ or ‘objectively’ describes how things ‘really’ are. The current discussions point out that there are multiple realities, raising the question, whether research is a matter of opinion. If this was so, there would be no point in writing methodology books. I argue that there are still guidelines on what constitutes, if not true, then ‘good’ and valid research.

On validity

Mead and the ‘truth’ about Samoa

Before moving on to explain what I and others have meant by good or valid research, I will take my reader on a brief trip to a different time and place: to Margaret Mead’s research on Samoa of the 1920s (Mead, 1929). The reason for doing this is that Mead’s classical anthropology has become the focus of one of the major disputes over validity, as, soon after Mead’s death, Freeman (1983) pronounced that her work was totally non-valid, wrong, or simply a gross lie. This debate, which has become a staple of many books on research methods (e.g. Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Seale, 1999), usefully illustrates the issues and problems associated with traditional forms of validity, and helps to pave the way for a discussion on new validities.

Mead’s book, Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilization was published in 1929. In the book Mead sets out to study adolescence, asking:‘Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or the civilization?’ (Mead, 1929: 11). The study focused on adolescent females, with whom Mead as a young woman felt affinity, and she concluded that, unlike in the West, adolescence in Samoa was not a time of conflict and strife and that the budding sexuality of the young women was not a cause of great anxiety or repression. The opening paragraph of the book gives one a flavour of the picture of Samoan sexual life she painted:

As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place. (1929: 14)

In 1983 Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth that set out to refute Mead’s fieldwork. He argued that Samoa was not the harmonious and sexually permissive primitive society Mead had depicted, but that Samoans held premarital virginity in high esteem and that occurrences of violence and rape were commonplace on the islands. Freeman’s notion of Samoan sexual mores is captured in the following:

On a Sunday in June 1959, Tautalafua, aged 17, found his 18-year-old classificatory sister sitting under a breadfruit tree at about 9:00 in the evening with Vave, a 20-year-old youth from another family. He struck Vave with such violence as to fracture his jaw in two places. For this attack he was later sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. (1983: 237)

A heated public and scholarly debate ensued the controversy. Different stakeholders debated the issue in New York Times, and in a special issue of the American Anthropologist (Brady, 1983), a series of experts on Samoa attacked Freeman. They criticized Freeman for comparing Mead’s fieldwork in the small, remote island of Manu’a with his own work on the main island of Upolu. It was also pointed out that the Christian missionary influence would have had a greater impact on Samoan culture in the 1940s and 1960s when Freeman conducted his research than it did in the 1920s when Mead visited the islands (Weiner, 1983). Furthermore, it was noted that whereas Mead, as a young woman, used adolescent girls as informants, Freeman’s description derived from adult men of rank (Schwartz, 1983).

However, the greatest strife between the two scholars was their paradigmatic orientation. Wedded to a culturalist paradigm, Mead set out to argue that behaviours (such as adolescence or sexuality), which have been thought to be shared by all humanity, have turned out to be the result of civilization, ‘present in the inhabitants of one country, absent in another country, and this without a change of race’ (Mead, 1929: 4). Mead’s culturalist project, with its (sexually) liberalist undertones, was framed by, and stood in opposition to, the 1920s belligerently racist eugenic movement that explained variation in human behaviour in terms of genetic differences. Freeman, on the contrary, represents a later sociobiologiscal stance. This is illuminated in his concluding chapter in which he, referring to certain violent events in Samoa, argues that in such circumstances conventional behaviours are dropped and people are taken over by ‘highly emotional and impulsive behavior that is animal-like in its ferocity’ (1983: 301). In his view this aggression is a proof of ‘much older phylogenetically given structures’ that define behaviour in addition to culture. Thus, where Mead finds a harmonious culture, Freeman finds ‘primal’ or biological aggression.

The paradigmatic differences between the two authors are also reflected in their writing. Mead’s book is impressionistic in style, it reads, at times, as a romantic travelogue, aiming to capture the ethos of Samoan life. On the contrary, Freeman obeys the logic of classical scientific realistic reporting and his ‘refutation’ of Mead, strife with minute numerical details such as precise times of the day, reads like a police-report or a court case.

What this debate tells us, is not whether Mead or Freeman was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about Samoa. It rather illuminates that the ‘truth’ about Samoa is complicated by, at least, three issues. First, the fluidity of Samoa itself (different opinions, groups, historical change, and so on), second by the commitments that frame the research of the scholars (historical, political and theoretical investments), and third by the language (impressionistic or realist genre) used to describe Samoa. To elaborate on these three issues, first, Samoa does not hold still as a fixed object of study but ends up multifaceted, contradictory (Shore, 1983: 943) or amoeba-like, changing from one angle and instant to another. There are young girls, village elders, myths, customs, different rules, institutionalized and informal trespasses, rank-based and gendered social and political divisions, struggles and perspectives, all constantly evolving and transforming. Second, the anthropologist’s vision is coloured by her and his personal gendered, raced and aged inclinations and paradigmatic and political allegiances. As Clifford (1986) notes, both Mead and Freeman render Samoa a parable or allegory for the West, and their oppositional readings end up encapsulating the classic juxtapositions harboured in the Western notion of the ‘primitive’: Apollonian sensual paradise and Dionysian violence and danger. Third, the language proves not to be a neutral medium of communication but part of the message. Mead’s broad-brushed impressionistic style paints a dreamy, so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• I Thinking Methodologically
• Introduction: Locating Cultural Studies and the Book
• 1 Combining Methodologies in Cultural Studies
• II Studying Lived Experience
• 2 Studying Lived Resistance
• 3 New Ethnography and Understanding the Other
• 4 Between Experience and Discourse
• III Reading Discourses
• 5 Reading Ideology
• 6 Genealogical Analysis
• 7 On Deconstruction and Beyond
• IV Analyzing the Global Context
• 8 Analysis of ‘Reality’ and Space
• 9 Studying Multiple Sites and Scapes
• References
• Index