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A mutual interest? Ethnography in anthropology and cultural studies

by Charmaine McEachern

Introduction

Anthropology is evoked regularly in cultural studies. The field has taken up anthropological definitions of culture, anthropology's concern with meaning, and both ethnographic method and the critical evaluation which 1980s' reflexivity in anthropology directed towards the ethnographic enterprise. The massive expansion of cultural studies as a field of study (see Kellner 1995, Grossberg et al. 1992, Morley 1992), inevitably means that one of the ways in which anthropology has come to be known and understood outside the discipline as a set of epistemologies and methods, is through the prism of cultural studies' representations of it. This would suggest that a dialogue between cultural studies and anthropology is timely, if for no other reason than to allow anthropologists to speak for themselves.

Today, ethnographic method is probably the most problematic borrowing from and representation of anthropology. Although not exclusively an anthropological method, nor indeed by any means the only anthropological method, ethnography is often invoked in cultural studies with some reference to anthropology. Ethnography constructed in this way, has become very much the fashion in cultural studies. Often presented as carrying with it its own 'truth effect', ethnographic method has been seen as the answer to a range of questions and problems raised about cultural studies, particularly any continuing tendency to privilege the notion of text. Anthropology can usefully engage with this deployment of ethnographic method though, for its own purposes. Cultural studies has developed its version of ethnographic method shaped by first, its own agendas and politics and second, by the self reflections which have characterised much of anthropology since the 1980s. In this paper I seek to explore some dimensions of the former, in order to achieve the latter. Thus, within anthropology, I see an interrogation of cultural studies' usage of ethnography as a continuation of the self-reflexivity of the 1980s (Marcus and Fischer 1986, Marcus and Cushman 1982, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Clifford 1988). Exploring cultural studies' use of ethnography can help to raise some important issues for anthropology as it moves towards the millennium.

Popular culture and the left tradition in cultural studies

In May 1998, the Cultural Studies Association of Australia Newsletter published responses by various highly influential cultural studies scholars in Australia to questions of canon and important texts in cultural studies today (pp.25-32). Figures from, and work done by, the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies seemed to have a central place in the thinking of most respondents, though this of course does not preclude unique Australian developments and contributions to the field. This profound influence of Birmingham is where I want to begin.

Despite the many transformations in what has been done in the name of cultural studies since the 1960s in Birmingham, cultural studies today is marked by its inheritance from these development years. The current 'ethnographic turn' is deeply rooted in the field's past. A quotation from Stuart Hall, who was among the most influential of those researchers responsible for shaping the agendas of Birmingham cultural studies in the early years (Lave et al. 1992:261), gives us a key here. In a 1981 paper to The History Workshop, Hall said

Sometimes we can be constituted as a force against the power-bloc: that is the historical opening in which it is possible to construct a culture which is genuinely popular. But, in our society, if we are not constituted like that, we will be constituted into its opposite: an effective populist force, saying 'Yes' to power. Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism - a socialist culture - already fully formed - might be simply 'expressed'. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why 'popular culture' matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it. (quoted in MacCabe 1986:160)

In many ways this quotation says it all. The people's culture, increasingly rendered as popular culture, was the stated subject of cultural studies, constituted and interpreted within a Left paradigm that did two things. It evoked a very English (rather than British) dichotomy between high culture and low culture and, related to this, it attempted to give legitimacy to the culture of particularly working class people. So, within a field delineated in popular terms, suitable subjects of study for cultural studies were representations of working class people in news and current affairs and their popular pastimes, such as media, the pub, football hooliganism, reggae music and girls' magazines. Today, these have burgeoned massively and fascinatingly to include shopping malls, mega-events, the beach and other leisure places, video games, tourist sites, celebrities, film, television and rock music. The seriousness of 'ordinary culture' and therefore its appropriateness as an object of study, is thus the primary claim made by cultural studies from Hoggart (1958) onwards (Stanton 1996:349). This is precisely why cultural studies felt so much in tune with anthropological definitions of culture, using the work of figures like Geertz and Turner to illuminate their explorations (see Carey 1989). At the same time, the political agendas which underpinned these explorations, pulled in a different direction.

The politically Left agenda articulated by Hall shaped studies of this ordinary culture within a very particular structure. From a position on culture which accepted propositions about power and dominant ideology/dominant culture, the popular activities which involved cultural studies scholars were not just constituted as different but also, to varying degrees, implied opposition, which gradually became defined as resistance.(1) Hence the focus became not just subordinate culture, but the people's culture, popular culture, here formulated as the space of resistance as well as hegemony, the potential space of socialism. This was the encompassing frame for the emergence of all methods in the Centre, but especially ethnography. From the early days, power, culture, hegemony and opposition were locked together in complex and reinforcing ways.

Early in his tenure at the Centre, Hall described cultural studies as a series of 'raids' on other theories and disciplines (Lave et al. 1992:261). He thus conceptualised it as profoundly interdisciplinary. People's culture and 'raiding' came together to suggest the value of ethnography. Ethnography operated at the point of intersection of dominant ideological reproduction and popular opposition, to facilitate the articulation between 'the complex relations between representations/ideological forms and the density or "creativity" of "lived" cultural forms' which was described as 'the central focus of work at the Centre' (Grimshaw et al. 1980:74). Thus the movement is between the public and the personal, the dominant and the particular, the structural and the experiential. Paul Willis, an early practitioner (see Willis 1980, 1981 [1977]), also described ethnographic method as a remedy to the reification of theory which work on dominant ideological representations tended to produce. As Lave et al. suggest, the Centre's ethnographic moment was 'crucially important in moving beyond the text' (1992:273).

It follows that class was the major focus of ethnographic work at this stage. Originally ethnography was directed at what were described as 'subcultures', often influenced by a concern with definitions of 'deviance', which in turn focused on youth culture. Resistance through Rituals (Jefferson and Hall 1976), Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdidge 1979), Learning to Labour (Willis 1981 [1977]) are all examples of work which drew on these ingredients, in turn justifying the ethnographic turn and influencing further ethnographic work. Here cultural studies' use of ethnography diverged from that of anthropology, as ethnography too was radically and irredeemably tied to a Left politics, one which worked culturally within class and out of a notion of dominant culture. It was the relationship between what was seen as dominant (capitalist) culture and subcultures which generated the whole, and ethnography worked exactly around that relationship. Subcultures were of necessity seen as non-dominant, to some extent resistant and therefore working class. One argument in the Centre focused on the question of whether there could be middle class subcultures. The question was resolved in the negative; middle class kids could rebel but, as part of the dominant culture, they could not form subcultures. And as early as this the accommodation/opposition binary that has distinguished cultural studies work was present, here grounded in work on lived experience which was in turn framed centrally in class terms.

The assumptions about culture, domination and the role of the popular built into these ethnographies were both elaborated and extended in the work on media, both in the Centre and then as cultural studies was exported to places like Australia and the United States. Definitions of culture in which the focus was contestation rather than conformity privileged the media as a site of study (cf. Carey 1992). Imported as an increasingly fashionable conviction, ethnography became pivotal to the re-stating of the political aims of cultural studies, but in a totally transformed way. Socialism disappeared and resistance was both strengthened and transformed, its class base eroded and altered. Subcultures were dislodged by the invocation of 'the everyday' and the centrality of subjectivities. What is particularly important is that this new wave of ethnography was coterminous with a period of reflexivity in anthropology itself, one in which it was precisely the ethnographic method which formed a focus of interrogation. Cultural studies thus reworked its version of ethnography in the bosom of anthropology's critical stance towards the method and its outcomes. Anthropology has been closely implicated in an important dimension of cultural studies - its constant interrogation of itself, though at times it is the spirit of these critiques which seems to be honoured more than anything else. Media analysis in cultural studies provides a good example.

Media, audience and resistance Media was also historically a concern for cultural studies. Indeed one of the first publications of the Centre was Paper Voices, an 'analysis of change in British newspapers between 1935 and 1965' (Lave et al. 1992:260). Ethnographic method entered and was developed in the Centre's study of media via two routes; first, in response to the pessimism of theories of ideology influenced by the Frankfurt School and second, as an extension of feminist critiques of the male-centred nature of most of the subcultural work.

The broad Marxist base of much of the work done on media meant that production and other institutional contexts were a central focus, media being understood, through an ideology paradigm, as texts. But in the eighties the focus began to shift. Hall's highly influential encoding/decoding paradigm supported the notion of dominant (ideological) preferred meanings of texts as the result of encoding production practices (Hall 1993). It also made space for the audience, not only to decode the messages but also to produce their own alternative readings. As popular culture, media products were now understood as integral elements of people's everyday lives. With this crucial step taken, media products too were able to move from their negative valuation in terms of ideology and domination, to share the political aura surrounding 'popular culture'. This meant that 'real meaning' of media products shifted to oppositional, both in terms of the part they played in people's everyday lives and how audiences 'read' them. These two processes, reading and the part they played, were often elided so that any critical interpretation on the part of informants was enough to claim that the media products had actively and critically affected people's lives, often understood in terms of empowerment.

The feminist critique was fundamental to producing the kinds of sites in which to study this phenomenon. Centre feminists had criticised ethnographic work like that of Willis among young working class boys, for its sexism and ignoring of the place of women, mothers, sisters and girlfriends. For the Centre feminists too, the emphasis on publicly visible subcultures like football fans and gangs meant that the research agenda privileged boy culture over girl culture.

When applied to media work and compounded by the concern to privilege the subordinated, these critiques produced studies of female audiences. These have focused on the popular products of mass-produced media which were identified as feminine, notably soap opera, romantic novels, rock and pop music and women's magazines. Ethnography has been combined with the interpretation of fan letters, letters to papers and magazines, some production study work and attention to media publicity. Research itself then is very much multi-generic and, as Nightingale notes, it is interesting in this regard that while many accounts came to interrogate themselves and their ethnography in the spirit of 1980s anthropology, they still tended to treat the textual analysis aspects unproblematically (Nightingale 1993:158). While it was necessary to think critically about the doing of ethnography, fan letters or publicity material could be taken at face value, often using simple content analysis with all of its attendant problems.

What is ethnographic method thought to provide? How is this later manifestation offered as an innovation which has enriched cultural studies and its research base? I begin with a short piece by Hobson, since it is a good example of the kind of orthodoxy ultimately produced by this ethnographic turn. Hobson was an early researcher in this field, working innovatively with the British soap opera, Crossroads. Her work with audiences was all about trying to discover how women incorporated television into their everyday lives, to explore the meanings they gave to their use and reading of television soaps. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera (1982) focuses on housewives and shows the various ways in which women came to feel that they owned the program. This study was also extended into women's use of television at work. 'Women audiences and the workplace' (Hobson 1990) considers the responses of female soap fans to different soaps. The workplace is the telephone sales representative office of a pharmaceutical company with 17 female staff. Conversations at work, which focus on television content and the experience of viewing, are accessed through an extended interview with one woman, Jacqui. For Hobson this reveals a twofold process. These women use their television program to elucidate and elaborate their own emotional lives while, in turn, these provide the basis on which they make meaning from and of the program. Conversations thus move from discussion of content, to what they would do if they were in the same situation. Such a progression allowed women who were experiencing these situations to explore them within the group, but always at a remove, through fictional characters and events. Hobson concludes that

It became clear during the course of this interview and our discussions that this working group had used television to its and their best advantage, to advance their understanding of themselves and the world in which they lived. The myth that people who watch television are not using their time to the full is demolished by the range of views which these women expressed and explored through their use of television. (1990:70)

This kind of analysis contains most of the orthodoxies of interpretation of media as popular culture which have been exported to Australia and the United States. First, we find the redemption of media as previously constructed within a high culture/low culture dichotomy. Hobson explains early on that she sees this work operating in the tradition within cultural studies which seeks to establish that media viewing is not passive. Since this also demonstrates that consumers of popular culture are not simply dupes in some ideological process, media itself is revalued as culture. Ethnography here suggests that it is the work discussions which actually constitute media as popular culture, completing the communication process (1990:62). Second, the focus is on meaning, here understood as the meaning of the product. Third, having isolated this object of study, meaning is then held to inhere in reception, the point at which closure is effected and communication is complete. In many of these studies, 'ethnography' actually becomes code for audience reception. Production studies, even where they occasionally occur, are seldom dubbed 'ethnography' (contra McEachern 1994a, 1994b, Tulloch 1990). But more than this, there is a very real sense in which the programs only become meaningful in the act of viewing or reading. Much stress is given to the idea that products do not mean on their own. There is a tension here. On the one hand, they seem as empty vessels, to have meaning attributed to them by the variously located receivers. On the other, there is still the oppositional reading focus which, though transformed, has come through from the earliest forays of cultural studies into the analysis of popular culture. Here, media products must always carry ideological or hegemonic messages. Combined, the two tendencies produce a kind of formula - accommodation and resistance - and the polysemic text is the answer. Resistance is always privileged over accommodation given that it is the meaning that the audience makes which is privileged, and resistance is how informants are understood to actively incorporate the texts into their everyday lives.

The fourth orthodoxy is thus resistance in reading, a transformation from Hall's oppositional readings and a tendency which links this ethnographic side of cultural studies to the other more textual work characteristic of the American version of cultural studies. By down playing the class focus and thus removing the issue of socialism, resistance now has a critical focus only, becoming also the source of pleasure in the text. In all, this produces an optimistic view of the media (Nightingale 1993), a long way from the pessimism of Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. The overwhelming message is that media are benign, that people make their own messages. With the dissolution even of the category of audience or the unitary 'viewing subject' by people like Fiske (1991) and Hartley (1989), society itself, especially in its reproduction mode, begins to dissolve. Moreover, there seem to be cultural subjects and cultural subjects, for in such a formulation producers, media personnel of all kinds, never seem to be granted the same kind of reflexive or critical ability in relation to culture and identity (contra McEachern 1993, 1994a, 1994b). There is no place for the kind of cultural production, interpretation and reflection that Peace (inf:274-84) is insisting, quite rightly, characterises such figures. Instead, for a field which began, and still sees itself as such a critical force in cultural reproduction in capitalist societies, cultural studies has here produced an orthodoxy which would be highly satisfactory to those media workers whom I have researched who argue that media are 'only entertainment, they have no effect on people', though cultural studies scholars would rightly not accept those terms, since taking seriously the category of 'entertainment' is part of their enterprise. A more critical, and recent, look at the production of these orthodoxies therefore seems indicated.

Ethnography and identity

To address this issue, I want to cite another study of media and its female audience, Seiter et al. (1991) on women viewing soap opera in America, entitled '"Don't treat us like we're so stupid and naive". Towards an ethnography of soap opera viewers'. That it appears in a volume including Television, Audiences and Cultural Power in its title, indicates that it is entirely to be located within the kinds of discourses so far discussed. Although described as ethnography, it is based on 26 interviews of 64 participants divided into groups, the 15 male participants disappear almost completely in the interpretation of data, the interviews were relatively short, some of them less than an hour and the duration of research was a mere three weeks.

At the beginning of the article, the writers seek to locate socially the participants. Most were working class women who worked in the home. The article also reflects upon the interviewer/respondent situation, first to establish the 'othering' dimensions in it (some of the researchers were from another culture and others knew nothing of soap, which thus becomes the primary definer of social identity). Responsive to the strictures of anthropologists like Marcus and Fischer (1986) and the ways in which interrogations of ethnography have been taken up by cultural studies figures, like David Morley (1992), they raise issues emerging from the different social locations of themselves and their respondents: differences of education, class, employment status.

The interviews were done in the home of one group member, a common location for such ethnographic work, which is important. As the viewing context, the site where the product is actually made meaningful according to the orthodoxies, the domestic has been privileged in analysis (Morley 1992:184-6; Drotner 1994). This in turn unproblematically reproduces cultural dichotomies of public/private and masculine/feminine.

What this study ultimately wants to argue is that the viewing of soaps is very similar to what Radway (1984) found as the meaning of reading romance novels, a 'gesture of protest against the strictures of everyday life in patriarchal society' (Seiter et al. 1991:224). In one section heading this is literally called 'resistance' and viewing is here construed as resistance, encapsulated in the championing of the soap villain for her daring to transgress what they see as the ideological core of the story, the sacredness of the family. Evidence comes only from the interviews and largely involved the women favouring the breakup of marriages or having affairs. Resistance is represented as the women refusing passively to accept patriarchy's ideal mother role in their appreciation of the narratives and situations (1991:241).

Now, influenced by the work of people like Clifford and Marcus, the study does accept its own limitations as ethnography. It recognises that contact with the participants was limited and that the study's purview falls short of the 'whole way of life' version of culture which cultural studies claims to have imported from anthropology. Despite this, they have no hesitation in making large claims for their ethnography, either in the interpretations that they draw from particular passages in their interviews or from the totality of the interview experience. We see little to support it, but they still ultimately want to claim resistance and thus cultural empowerment for the things these women say.

Despite a certain level of refiexivity then, this study reproduces the

orthodoxies and thus the problems in much of the current usage of ethnography in cultural studies. Ethnography is applied to a radically circumscribed site and is narrowly applied (see Morley 1992:196). The meaning of media products in terms of social imagining and interrogation which would support and deepen the kinds of conclusions arrived at, has no other context beyond this immediate domestic arena. We are provided with no frame within which to locate both producers and viewers; not even, when it comes down to it, culture itself.

Understood as 'the everyday', as is often the case in these ethnographies, we are told that different kinds of junctures in women's housework routines provide different orientations to soap viewing, some seeing it as justified reward for getting all of the housework done before the soaps, but others, with less disciplined approaches to housework, feeling some degree of guilt as they juggle chores, child minding and soaps. Other family members mainly disappear from this account of everyday life, as do most relationships (contra Mankekar 1993). One of the interviewed groups consisted of a woman and her three daughters, all fans of a single soap, but even here we get no sense of the kind of relationships and intersubjective lives which might be being oriented through soaps and soap viewing (see Drotner 1994). There is, further, no evidence of an extended social context for these women. Their only context is the house where they relate mostly to the television. When it comes to the important argument about the meaning of these soaps being a collective collaboration between networks, we even have the story of two of the women watching in their own homes while keeping in touch by telephone to discuss what is happening! This study may have moved into ethnography to demonstrate how the meanings of soap are generated within everyday interactions of home and workplace (Seiter et al. 1991:228), but these women only seem real when talking about soap narratives and characters. Unlike the Hobson account of housewives and Crossroads, the researchers do not even do participant observation to see for themselves what the women do (and say) when they watch.

The ethnographic concern with empirical questions of culture as lived (1991:227) as stated in the introduction is examined at a remove - not 'as lived' but as 'told' or 'represented in the interview situation'. The insistence on seeing the media as making meaning in everyday interaction is ultimately only discursively rendered and explored. In allowing ethnographic method to occupy this space, there is a tendency to take at face value the claims of respondents. As Morley argues, in such ethnography there is a 'privileging of the conscious, easily articulated response' (1992:179).

Ultimately this produces a very thin view of meaning, certainly a very thin concept of culture. Despite the argument that consumption must be understood as cultural and symbolic process, this promise is not realised at the empirical level. Here, as elsewhere, the actual interpretation of data routinely orients meaning towards what are described in terms of capitalist or patriarchal ideologies, which is what provokes the interpretive resistance identified. Meaning is made through gender, through class. Indeed, given the confluence of ethnography and the centrality of identities like gender and race in these analyses, there is a very real sense in which culture itself is no more than the accumulation of these identities. Culture is gender, culture is race, ethnicity or class and these identities in turn become the primary identifiers of audiences. These become labels or appellations to be affirmed rather than explored for their content in a study which combines media production and consumption, social relations and social behaviour. Though studies may allude to the constitution of the female subject in reception, this tends to be a pan-cultural female subject whom we know to be thus because of her place within and in resistance to patriarchy, itself conceptualised in totalising ways. There is no real sensitivity to the possibility that audience studies might allow us to examine the differences in femininity and relations between women and men across the different cultures in which cultural studies works. In fact there is no effective sense in all of this that the postmodern culture of America may differ markedly from that of Australia or Britain. Rather, the results of any given study are often unproblematically imported from one culture to the other.

This brings me to the point where I want to pull everything back together and move between cultural studies and anthropology. In these media ethnographies I see the emergence of orthodoxies which carry with them some of the concerns of the earliest days, despite the enormous and demonstrable changes in cultural studies as it has spread around the world. I have argued that, with media as an exemplar, the version of culture is very thin in a lot of ethnographic work in cultural studies. I would also assert that though the work is always political it often produces a rather thin view of politics (cf. Gibson 1998). Further, the politics of the discipline means that certain, predictable, dimensions of culture never emerge into view. To demonstrate this and to conclude the paper, I want to provide a final set of speculations which return these problems of cultural studies' use of ethnography to one of its sources, ethnography in anthropology.

Ethnography as a suppressed politics

John Fiske has had a significant impact on the development of this style of cultural studies. From his studies of fans' resistant readings of Madonna as a subversive and transgressive model of femininity to his accounts of unemployed youth destroying the bourgeois pleasures of consumption for middle class adults in shopping malls, he has been a prominent figure in the generation of the orthodoxy that audience meaning making demonstrates real cultural power. His work exemplifies the illusion that 'active equals powerful'. In Power Plays Power Works, Fiske (1993) too does ethnography, in a manner characterised by all of the problems aforementioned. In his account of American homeless men, we never hear them speak, we never find out anything about them. We learn nothing of their background, who they are, what they do, who they relate to and how. The night in the shelter, homeless, becomes their sole quality and everything else flows from that. In a chapter which deals specifically with the important issue of the meaning of media violence, Fiske examines the video viewing choices that the men made and attended to the pleasure that they derived from violence. But his conclusions will not surprise you. The love of violence in films like Die Hard constitutes resistance on the part of these men. Resistance to what? To the system which customarily devalues these men, producing in them feelings of total powerlessness and failure. So violence in film, particularly in characters who are also loners, partly outside of 'dominant society' and particularly against establishment figures, is to be understood as 'empowering', as resistance to dominant society's usual evaluation of these men.

In order to demonstrate the facile consequences which can follow from this line of argument, consider the possible interpretation which could be placed on audiences' responses to the recent depiction of Pauline Hanson in the Australian media. We can focus on the famous Sixty Minutes story done by Tracey Currow. The massive numbers of people who wrote in to Sixty Minutes after the show, declaring their support for Hanson and chastising the program for attacking her, would, in a Fiske style analysis, be seen as resistant readers. These subordinated viewers have refused any preferred or dominant reading, they have resiled from any critique of Hanson, and instead are supporting her in ways which are entirely about attacking authorities of all kinds, government, political parties, the bureaucracy and the media which is complicit in structures of power. It would argue that this is a rising up of the Aussie Battlers of this country against the powerful 'Them', an empowering battle cry that 'we' are sick of being pushed around, particularly by people, including the media who haven't a clue about what it means to be living in 'the real world'. Consider a few quotes from viewers' letters which would facilitate this kind of claim of resistance or subversion:

Onya Pauline. Try as they might to make you look like some uneducated hick, you stood your ground and told the undeniable truth. You are the first truly honest politician we've ever had.

Isn't she merely a patriot trying to stop taxpayers' money being misspent and our country changed so it is no longer Australia?

And on the question asked by Currow about whether she, Hanson, was xenophobic, which Hanson required interpreting before answering in the negative:

What a smart-arsed question. You don't fool me 60 Minutes. By trying to crucify this brave woman, it's you who's shown yourself to be out of touch with mainstream Australia.

In other words, it would certainly not surprise me to find an analysis which used these letters as ethnographic (cf. Ang 1982) and entirely left out of reckoning even a taint of racism. This seems to be the problem. Although textual studies deal with racism in the media all the time, invariably producing critical accounts of racist discourse in media representations, ethnographic accounts everywhere find opposition, subversion, resistance to such 'dominant ideologies'. Yet here we have a situation which is the reverse and I suggest that the political framing, the sympathetic championing of the oppressed which is still an orthodoxy in the field, makes it almost impossible to study racism (or sexism) seriously within reception studies of popular culture and its adherents, since from a Left perspective this would criticise the subordinate (contra Carey 1992).

Conclusion

Cultural studies has been extremely successful in colonising this whole area of postmodern societies, in particular the role of popular culture. So there is not much comfort to be found for anthropology in simply rehearsing any perceived short-comings of cultural studies' employment of a methodology which we have come to regard as somehow uniquely our own. Cultural studies, despite the continuities I have claimed in this paper, has always shown itself ready to be self-reflexive, responsive to change. The current emphasis on 'the everyday' (Drotner 1994, Morley 1992, Silverstone 1994) represents just one of the kinds of interrogations of its own methods which have made it so resilient and influential. We need to be able to enter the debates, to treat the study of postmodern societies seriously in ways which capitalise on the strengths of our field. Peace's (inf:274-84) emphasis on cultural brokers as fundamental to the understanding of contemporary popular cultural practice and Palmer's (inf:265-73) on the spectacle are both indicative of the ways in which anthropology can deepen and extend the analysis of global events which cultural studies has customarily treated as text.

Media itself is surely another crucial arena of cultural production and practice which anthropology today ignores at its peril, certainly to the diminishment of any cultural account of postmodern lives (cf. Spitulnik 1993). The social imagination, myths of postmodern society, the cultural articulation of local and global places and ways of meaning; media of all kinds provide all these and more. An ethnographic method which is directed towards popular domains like the media, but with the kind of attention to detail and to change over time which is made possible by anthropology's applications of ethnographic method, can also draw far more complex links between media products and the social relations and situations in which they exist and are made to mean. It can theorise the meaningful contexts in which to interpret the representations of media and the processes involved in the performance of culture which is the work of so many media professionals. In fact, as both Peace and Palmer show, it puts the work of these media professionals well and truly back on the research agenda (see also McEachern 1993, 1994a, 1994b). And it can do this without the political agendas of cultural studies, providing other kinds of discourses about the media which may break out of the accommodation/resistance antinomy and be grounded differently, more deeply in the constitutive practices of culture. It can surely come as no surprise that, in performing culture (cfi Babcock 1978), cultural texts like media products reproduce in various forms the power relations embedded in culture. Yet there are surely other elements of culture worth considering, analysing, interrogating. What of the social imagination? What of the cohering elements of cultural practice and process? What of crucial processes of reproduction? The latter are surely not to be rendered irrelevant just because they do not fit some romantic conception of subaltern subjectivities. This is in rum a challenge for us to use and transform old methods and techniques in changed political contexts, to insist on the need for careful observation and careful listening which is theoretically informed, and a commitment to this kind of detail in any interpretation given the name of 'ethnography'.

I would argue that in effecting this transformation we must pay attention to how ethnographic method has developed in cultural studies, since it is here that we now have three decades of solid work in complex late capitalist societies from which to learn. In part, ethnography in cultural studies has developed in the ways in which I've discussed here, precisely because of the particularities of its subject societies, capitalist societies of the late twentieth century. As anthropology too takes up the challenge to explore such societies, it would do well to pay attention to the difficulties of ethnographic research which are attested to in the cultural studies form of ethnography. Just how do you do ethnographic research in such societies? In terms of my chosen topic here, how do you find out what the mass media mean to urban lives which are lived atomised in private spaces, fragmented by different forms of consumption and contradictory identity formations? Are more short, location bounded and fragmented periods of contact with informants inevitable here? Just how can we access people's taken-for-granted assumptions about the world as it is constituted through media products and media consumption (see Silverstone 1994)? We can learn a lot from cultural studies about doing fieldwork in new situations.

Although anthropology does not share the political embeddedness of cultural studies, we can also learn something from cultural studies' resistance conclusions and what I am arguing is a seeming inability to explore problematic dimensions of culture like racism. Although this same politics does not drive our studies, we too at times repress the more distasteful 'politically incorrect' elements of our informants and their lives. Brown (1996) even argues that the tendency to find resistance has also entered anthropology, and I would have to admit that I have used the resistance formulation in some of my own work on television producers and production personnel (McEachern 1993). I am arguing that cultural studies has difficulties dealing with the problematic elements of culture like racism because of the politics embedded in it from its earliest days. But will anthropologists be able to do any better where they have built up close relationships with their informants over months and years?

Cultural studies has shown no reluctance so far to engage with anthropology; my paper provides a different dimension to that engagement. It must be clear that we are not engaged in antithetical processes, but rather complementary ones. If Knauft is right that some anthropology itself has gone too far in terms of 'textualism', or in his words 'the privileging of literary self-consciousness and tropic creativity over sustained social analysis' (1994:118), then many people in anthropology and cultural studies are (or should be) together asking quite compatible questions about how to balance concerns of representation with thorough going analyses of social and cultural action and practice.

1. In his article on the earliest work of cultural studies, Gibson (1998) argues that the power necessary to define working class culture in the later terms of resistance was absent in the work of Hoggart and Williams, and that it was E. P. Thompson who insisted on this dimension.

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Publication Information: Article Title: A Mutual Interest? Ethnography in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Contributors: Charmaine Mceachern - author. Journal Title: The Australian Journal of Anthropology. Volume: 9. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 251. COPYRIGHT 1998 TAJA (The Australian Journal of Anthropology); COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group.

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