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62 ETHNOGRAPHY

interest in labelling and its consequences for thought and behaviour. Such
empirical concerns could be integrated into conflict theories of society,
demonstrating aspects of the relations between larger social groups through study
of encounters between, for example, deviants and controllers.
In terms of our own much shorter history, one of the central foci of our work
has been to analyse and gauge the complex relations between representations/
ideological forms and the density or ‘creativity’ of ‘lived’ cultural forms. If the
‘structuralist revolution’ has warned against an inflation of the latter on any
naive humanist trust, its ‘theoreticist’ descendants warn against the all-engulfing
power of the former. It seems to us that the ‘post-Althusserian’ and even
‘Gramscian’ formulations conducted within theory still run the risk of inclining
towards a purely formalist account of cultural forms. What we want to mark is the
distinctiveness of a ‘qualitative’ methodological approach within the range of
those available in Cultural Studies. This is the capacity of the ethnographic
project, in Paul Willis’s terms, to ‘surprise’ us and, if not generate alternative
accounts of reality, at least question, compromise, negate or force revision in our
existing accounts. There is a certain principle of the connectedness of cultural
forms, as exposed (at best) through ethnographic study, which exerts a pressure
against merely dredging methodologically unreflexive data for examples of a
previously constituted theory. Of course, we recognize here the dangers of
empiricism and the difficulties of developing a theoretically informed concrete
account. The ethnographic interest at the Centre has undoubtedly been affected
and brought to a degree of self-consciousness by recent theoretical developments
discussed in Part One. Also, the method’s historic roots in Weberianism,
phenomenology, anthropology and, more recently, symbolic interactionism, give
it an in-built tendency towards either idealism in its theoretical categories or an
atheoreticalness which seems to suggest that theory can arise somehow naturally
from the data. It is this very weakness, of course, which is a strength against
theoretical reductionism. The problem, partially explored in Paul Willis’s article
extracted here, is to maintain the potential within this tradition to immunize
accounts against theoretical violence while transcending some of its other limits
in the overall materialist account of cultural forms.
We do not accept that the use of ‘qualitative’ methods automatically confines
the resulting account to a theoretical Weberianism or to a merely descriptive,
albeit ‘rich’, account. Even the early ethnographic work of the Centre, and
certainly Phil Cohen’s seminal article, part of which is extracted here, was
theorized and addressed to analytic and theoretical questions much beyond an
interest in ‘experience’ for its own sake or for its own guarantee. And later
ethnographic work, some of which is extracted here, is in an explicit and
developing relation with theoretical and critical concerns developing in the
Centre generally: Paul Willis’s work with questions of cultural reproduction,
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education and the labour process; Angela McRobbie’s with gender
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socialization, patriarchy and youth culture; Dorothy Hobson’s with the
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structures of female domestic experience and media discourses; Roger