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INTRODUCTION TO ETHNOGRAPHY AT THE CENTRE 63

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Grimshaw’s with structures of masculinity, ideology and the family. In all of
these areas, we would argue, the particular relation of theory and ethnography
has allowed a real complexity and an explanatory power which can be seen in
themselves as theoretical developments. It is to be hoped that in future the
emphasis of ethnography on substantive explanation, with all the necessary
complexity, precision and structure required in such work, will be supplemented
by theory and general concepts which have an adequate firmness and relevance
for the tasks which ethnography demands of them.
Still there exist certain conventions about how ethnographic work came about
and developed in the Centre and elsewhere, and it is worth briefly charting how
our interests have developed in relation to what are taken as the basic models.
‘Early’ forms of ethnography in the recent British context are taken to be
associated with work on subcultures, deviancy labelling and amplification theory
and the overall agenda of the National Deviancy Conference. In fact, this
‘sceptical’ revolution occurred mainly in theory, usually without (excepting
Becker’s pioneering work) serious or detailed ethnographic work. And, of course,
Phil Cohen’s seminal study of working-class culture and youth culture in the
East End was most noticed for its theoretical contribution of ‘magical
displacement’ which set the basic terms for much subsequent work, including
Resistance Through Rituals. In fact, it was this later work which saw the arrival—
though still patchily—of fuller ethnographic work in the articles by D.Hebdidge,
P.Willis, P.Corrigan and others. 8
We do not particularly want to question here the provenance of the ethnographic
method so much as to chart its subsequent development in Cultural Studies and
the work of the Centre. Most important, the method has been generalized now
for use in the study of central and mainstream cultural forms and for the study
and explication of these forms in relation to their material contexts—web of
external determinations—and the contribution they make to the social
reproduction of society generally and of its patriarchal and productive relations.
The aim is not merely to classify ideas or forms but to show the non-reductive
and non-mechanical relationship of these forms to basic material relationships.
Paul Willis’s recent work maintains an interest in the complexity and
multifacetedness of cultural forms but relates them to fundamental aspects of
school organization and the logic of the labour process to which working-class
kids are destined. Current Centre work is developing this interest in the area of
the transition from school to work of working-class girls and different
occupational and gender cultures of the workplace.
The increasing presence of feminist concerns in the ethnographic project is, of
course, no accident and a further indication of the potential for the method to be
emancipated from its Weberian or phenomenological roots. The feminist interest
in ‘qualitative’ methods springs from no idealist concern with self-generating (or
merely classified) ‘horizontal’ cultural forms, but from a directly theoretical
interest and a concern with determinations. For where the available Marxist
theories could not account for the specificity of female experience—its