Page 33 - Culture and Cultural Studies

32 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

studies have not been concerned with the technicalities of method but with the philo-
sophical approaches that underpin them; that is, methodology. The most significant
methodological debates within cultural studies have centred on the status of knowledge
and truth, as discussed above. These are issues of epistemology, or the philosophy of
knowledge. As we have seen, the realist argument is that a degree of certain knowledge
about an independent object world (a real world) is possible even though methodological
vigilance and reflexivity need to be maintained. Within cultural studies this point of view
has more often than not appeared in a quasi-Marxist guise. In contrast, for poststructur-
alists knowledge is not a question of discovering objective and accurate truth but of
constructing interpretations about the world which are ‘taken to be true’.

Key methodologies in cultural studies
Despite disputes about the status of knowledge, it is reasonably clear which methods are
most widely deployed within cultural studies, though researchers disagree about their
relative merits. We may start with the standard methodological distinction between quan-
titative and qualitative research methods. That is, between, respectively, methods that
centre on numbers and the counting of things (e.g. statistics and surveys) and those that
concentrate on the meanings generated by actors gathered through participant observa-
tion, interviews, focus groups and textual analysis. On the whole, cultural studies has
favoured qualitative methods with their focus on cultural meaning.
Work in cultural studies has centred on three kinds of approach:

1 ethnography, which has often been linked with culturalist approaches and a stress
on ‘lived experience’;

2 a range of textual approaches, which have tended to draw from semiotics, post-
structuralism and Derridean deconstruction;

3 a series of reception studies, which are eclectic in their theoretical roots.

Ethnography
Ethnography is an empirical and theoretical approach inherited from anthropology
which seeks a detailed holistic description and analysis of cultures based on intensive
fieldwork. In classical conceptions, ‘the Ethnographer participates in people’s lives for an
extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking ques-
tions’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983: 2). The objective is to produce what Geertz
famously described as ‘thick descriptions’ of ‘the multiplicity of complex conceptual
structures’ (1973: 10). This would include the unspoken and taken-for-granted assump-
tions that operate within cultural life. Ethnography concentrates on the details of local life
while connecting them to wider social processes.

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