Page 99 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ETHNOGRAPHY

encompasses cultural qualities and attitudes, a seemingly natural
correlation is often assumed between genetic lineage and cultural
identity. By explaining cultural identity through biological makeup in
this way, the concept of ethnicity can lead to reductionist conclusions
and cultural essentialism: ‘they are like that because it is in their blood’
(Gillespie, 1995: 8).
As with the term ‘race’, one’s ethnicity can be construed as
something predetermined and inescapable. When this is coupled with
ideas of otherness, subordination, marginality and foreignness,
ethnicity can imply that a person’s culture and status are fixed and
unavoidable, and that this is what confirms them in that status.
Ethnicity is often employed in conceptions of the nation to
consolidate national identity as something typical of a particular
geographic territory. However, the national identity invoked by the
term ethnicity is generally not one’s own but that of other countries/
cultures.
Stuart Hall’s work was influential in developing new understandings
of ethnicity as something that everyone is part of. For Hall, ethnicity
‘acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the
construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all
discourse is placed, positioned and situated, and all knowledge is
contextual’ (Hall, 1988: 29). Ethnicity is crucial to identity formation,
yet it is not something predetermined or complete. Ethnicity, for Hall,
is a ‘project’, something that we continually shape and through which
we position ourselves.

See also: Diaspora, Multiculturalism, Nation, Race

ETHNOGRAPHY

A method of research that evolved out of the field of anthropology. It
studies a group ‘from the inside’. In anthropology this technique has
been used as a means of understanding non-Western people’s rites,
culture and means of survival. In communications research,
ethnography is concerned with understanding media audiences.
During (1993: 20) argues that the approach has been adapted within
cultural studies as a means of moving beyond theoretical discourses.
Within communications research, it is possible to identify three
types of audience research (During, 1993: 21). Quantitative research
involves undertaking large-scale surveys with a view to tracing a
particular trend or pattern amongst participants (see Bourdieu, 1984;

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