Page 34 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 33

Ethnographic cultural studies has been centred on the qualitative exploration of values
and meanings in the context of a ‘whole way of life’ – that is, ethnography has been
deployed in order to explore questions about cultures, life-worlds and identities. As
Morley remarks, ‘qualitative research strategies such as ethnography are principally
designed to gain access to “naturalized domains” and their characteristic activities’ (1992:
186). However, in the context of media-oriented cultural studies, ethnography has
become a code-word for a range of qualitative methods, including participant observa-
tion, in-depth interviews and focus groups. Here, it is the ‘spirit’ of ethnography (i.e. a
qualitative understanding of cultural activity in context) which is invoked polemically
against the tradition of quantitative communications research.

The problem of representation Ethnography has tried to ‘represent the subjective mean-
ings, feelings and cultures of others’ (Willis, 1980: 91). In this way, ethnography has
relied on an implicitly realist epistemology. This assumption that it is possible to repre-
sent in a naturalistic way the ‘real’ experience of people has been the subject of consider-
able critique.

v First, it is argued that the data presented by ethnographers are always already an
interpretation made through that person’s eyes. That is, interpretation is not
objective but rather is positional. However, this is an argument that can be
directed at all forms of research. Here it simply gives rise to ‘interpretative
ethnography’.
v Second, there has been a brand of more telling postmodern critique. Here, in addi-
tion to pointing to the problems of realist epistemology, it is argued that ethnog-
raphy is a genre of writing that deploys rhetorical devices, often obscured, to
maintain its realist claims (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). In other words, the prod-
ucts of ethnography are always texts.

Clifford poses the second issue thus:

If ethnography produces interpretations through intense research experiences,
how is unruly experience transformed into an authoritative written account?
How, precisely, is a garrulous, overdetermined cross-cultural encounter shot
through with power relations and personal cross-purposes circumscribed as
an adequate version of a more or less discrete ‘other world’ composed by an
individual author? (1988: 25)

This argument leads to the examination of ethnographic texts for their rhetorical devices.
It also suggests the need for a more reflexive and dialogical approach to ethnography
which demands that writers elaborate on their own assumptions, views and positions.
Further, consultation with the ‘subjects’ of ethnography is required so that ethnography

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