Page 72 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Introduction to ethnography at the Centre
Roger Grimshaw, Dorothy Hobson, Paul Willis

The extracts in this section have been chosen to show something of the use and
development of this broad ethnographic range of work at the Centre. Also, we
have borne in mind the general demand for particular articles which are no
longer available in our original publications. Our extracts are not organized
according to substantive terrain or specific theoretical focus, and this whole
section should not be taken as a guide to the current state of ethnographic work
at the Centre nor to the form of its theoretical/methodological integration in
current projects. What we have attempted in the limited space available to us, is
to indicate the presence within Cultural Studies of a method—through shifting
theoretical and substantive focuses—which continues to offer, it seems to us, an
important mode of the production of concrete studies of the cultural level.
Historically, ethnographic work has arisen from an awareness of the benefits of
personal participation in, and communication with, an integral group involved
with a characteristic way of life or cultural form. Developed intensively to tackle
the problems of studying ‘alien’ cultures, ethnographic studies have come to be
used more and more as a tool of mainstream sociological investigation. A
reawakened interest in verstehen, subjective meanings and sociological
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phenomenology after the breakdown of the dominance of structural-
functionalism has accompanied a growing interest in methods capable of
delivering qualitative knowledge of social relations, with all the rich distinctions
and tones of living societies. Theoreticians such as Schutz and Cicourel have
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become the reference points for this change of interest from quantitative
statistical methods to qualitative modes of inquiry able to use documents,
artefacts and records of various kinds, as well as the direct observation and
interviews usually associated with ethnography. Within anthropology the study of
ethnographic materials has become a launching-pad for the theoretical method of
structuralism whose doyen is Lévi-Strauss.
Symbolic interactionism has enabled some measure to be taken of the nature
and consequences of transactions between separate groups, such as public
agencies and their clients. The emphasis of symbolic interactionism, represented
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by theorists like Blumer, has been to record empirically social action and
interpretation which are oriented to immediate others. Hence there developed an