Page 75 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

64 ETHNOGRAPHY

oppressed form often first recorded in an ethnographic moment—it was
necessary to return to experience and the subjective plane both to record and to
substantiate this reality as a firm critique of available theory and to find materials
towards the preliminary construction of alternative and more adequate theories.
The privileging of ‘the personal’ was first developed in the Women’s Liberation
Movement through small-group consciousness-raising, where women learned to
talk about personal experiences and to recognize that their experiences were
shared by other women. Part of the ethnographic project for feminists has been to
give a voice to the personal experience of the women and girls who are studied in
the research.
The Marxist tradition had always emphasized the prior necessity of the
analysis of fundamental economic structures in order to understand other
features of social life. Unfortunately, the ambition of deducing other cultural
features from basic economic structures, as Marx projected in Capital, has
proved intractable beyond the preliminary stage of tracing correspondences and
echoes between such spheres of activity. It is only comparatively recently, with
the emergence of theorists of alienation and relative autonomy, the
representatives of ‘Western Marxism’, that the possibility of adequate cultural
analysis within a Marxist tradition has arisen. In our view, the complex bridging
operation between economic, patriarchal and other social domains must run side
by side with, use and be used by, a reassessment of the theoretical principles,
method and concrete contributions of ethnography. Ethnography does not simply
‘illustrate’ an open concrete Marxism but helps to develop and internally test it.

The articles
The first extract (pages 78–87) comes from Phil Cohen’s early influential article,
‘Subcultural conflict and working-class community’, which marked the
beginning of a long arc of Centre interest in subcultures and the use of the
ethnographic method. The article is based on his experience of a localized
working-class area and proposes an original view of how the disintegration of a
community is related to the forms of its youth cultures.
Paul Willis’s article (pages 88–95) arises out of the early discussions of the
Work Group on the status of the ‘human objects’ of the ethnographic method. It
is interesting as a preliminary attempt to critique the implicit positivism in
mainstream ‘qualitative’ methods and to outline a project for the more critical
use of the method. He argues that a commitment to self-reflexivity engages the
investigator’s subjectivity, challenges previous assumptions and sets out fresh
lines of inquiry, precisely when positivism withdraws into a cataloguing of
factual and unanalysed descriptions. In some ways it marks the limits of a radical
humanist version of the method, affirming it and taking it to a logical conclusion,
but it also attempts to show how this might be combined with certain analytic
Marxist categories—a project attempted, however unevenly, in his later Learning
to Labour.