Page 72 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies 63
as family audiences, specific audience subcultures or fan groups—as an empirical starting
point, treating them as sense-making cultural formations, just as anthropologists have for
decades taken up the task of describing and interpreting other cultures as meaningful
wholes. However, the very project of documenting a ‘culture’ is being increasingly
problematized within contemporary cultural anthropology. ‘Culture’ as such can no
longer, if ever, be considered as a transparent object of empirical inquiry, a finished
entity that can be discovered and documented as such by the ethnographer. On the
contrary, documenting a ‘culture’ is a question of discursive construction which
necessarily implicates the always (doubly) partial point of view of the researcher, no
matter how accurate or careful s/he is in data gathering and inference making. As James
Clifford has remarked:

‘Cultures’ do not hold still for their portraits. Attempts to make them do
so always involve simplification and exclusion, selection of a temporal
focus, the construction of a self-other relationship, and the imposition or
negotiation of a power relationship.
(Clifford 1986:10)

We do not need to succumb to the far-reaching but rather disabling poststructuralist
postulate of the impossibility of description emanating from this insight (as Culler
gestured towards) to nevertheless accept the assertion that all descriptions we make are
by definition constitutive, and not merely evocative of the very object we describe (cf.
Tyler 1987). Portraying a ‘culture’ implies the discursive knocking-up of a unitary
picture out of bits and pieces of carefully selected and combined observations, a picture
that makes sense within the framework of a set of preconceived problematics and
sensitizing concepts which the researcher employs as cognitive and linguistic tools to
make her or his descriptions in the first place.
However, while it might not have been too hard to hold such a picture romantically for
a full and complete representation of a self-contained reality when the ‘culture’
concerned is apparently some clearly limited and finite other culture—as in the classic
case of anthropology’s remote and primitive, small and exotic island in the middle of the
vast ocean, inhabited by people whose daily practices were relatively untouched and
uninfluenced by the inexorably transformative forces of capitalist modernity—it has
become quite impossible in today’s modern world-system to even imagine a full and
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comprehensive portrait of any such cultural formation. Contemporary culture has
become an enormously complex and thoroughly entangled maze of interrelated and
interdependent social and cultural practices, ceaselessly proliferating in time and taking
place in global space. In other words, there simply are no pristine, isolated, wholesome
‘cultures’ any more that can be cut out from their surroundings in order to be pictured as
such (see Marcus and Fischer 1986: chapter 4; Hannerz 1992). Today, all ‘cultures’ are
interconnected to a greater or lesser degree, and mobile people are simultaneously
engaged in many cultural practices at once, constantly moving across multidimensional,
transnational space. In Geertz’s words: ‘The world has its compartments still, but the
passages between them are much more numerous and much less well secured’
(1988:132).