[Week 6: Oct 7] A2. Ethnographic methods I

1. Cultural studies, Sociology and anthropology

1.1. Cultural studies: a field of inquiry about how culture is constitutive of and constituted by everyday life.

1.2. Two questions:

A. How and in what ways human beings use and make culture, why and to what end.

B. How culture and the cultural shape social relations and how culture takes its place in instigating or resisting social change.

1.3. Challenges from sociology and anthropology

A. Scale and breath
-Cultural analysis draws on limited number of respondents and is inadequately in representative-ness and generalizability.

B. Depth and duration
-Compared to anthropological ethnographer, cultural researchers spent a relatively short period of time at a particular site and fail to immerse themselves in it.

1.4. Scale and breath
-Cultural analysis is usually qualitative.
-Unlike sociological survey, cultural analysis explores "meanings" invested in cultural text or practices.

Examples:

Sociological questions: What is the sex, class and race of the consumers of Barbie dolls? To what extent girls agree with the sexual and gender image of Barbie dolls?

Cultural studies questions: What is the meaning of sex in Barbie doll? In what way people identify with the sexual appearance and gender features of Barbie dolls?

1.5. Depth and duration
-Cultural studies is concerned with the process and context of meaning production rather than long-term observation at a particular site.

Example:

-An anthropologist might conduct fieldwork in a girl's home and focus on the relationship between Barbie dolls and her personal growth over a year.

-A cultural researcher might combine the various media images of Barbie with girls' talk of gender and sexuality.

(Cultural studies challenges the assumption that "culture" is found within a particular physical or geographical boundary.)


2. Ethnography: articulating experience

2.1. Three aspects of articulating experience

Aspect I: Experience works as common sense concealing its relevance to social structures and changes.

Please avoid the following common senses:
-"Demand and supply": We tend to explain away cultural meanings of commodities by market forces.
-"Media corporate power": We reduce the complexity of cultural meanings to the power of big companies or media.
-"Nationalism" or "regionalism": We take all phenomena as national or regional characters.

Aspect II: Experience speaks of the social structures and changes.

Examples:
-The desire of little girls to acquire a Barbie doll.
-Two hygiene inspectors took off their hat in Hong Kong Disneyland.

Aspect III: The critic's experience and its social relevancy.

Example:
-"Why didn't I have Barbie doll?"
-"Why didn't I want to have a Barbie doll?"
-Why did I find Yan Yi-Snow White so "offensive" or abominable?

2.2. Anti-essentialism
-The instablility of experience
-The context of experience
-The inter-connected-ness of experience

2.3. Anti-reductionism
-Theorizing rather than THEORY
-The complexity of experience could not be reduced to a pre-given theoretical framework.

3. Some suggested procedures

3.1. Generating research questions
-What is the ideology of Barbie doll?
Ideology: a process of cultural negotiation
->How do people negotiate with the dominant values or stereotypes delivered by Barbie?

3.2. Articulating experience: thick description

「第一次看見芭比，是因為一個幼稚園同學。... ...」

3.3. Contextualization

-The context of personal history
-The context of toy industry
-The context of media
-The global context

3.4. Reflection upon one's own and others' experiences

*Example: "Emphatic femininity"
In what way does Barbie doll provide a role model?
-Barbie always looks feminine
-Appearance and demeanor
-Perfect, ideal, faultless, ... ...but not real at all
-Barbie's body shape is an exaggeration.
-Girls play with her hair and outfit (Barbie.com)

(Rogers 1999)

4. The importance of experience

4.1. "Surprise"
-Articulating experience as a "surprise" to our conventional wisdom.
Example: Barbie is not simply a sex object or a role model. It is a gender game for making femininity.

4.2. Identity
-Human beings are active agents whose self is projected onto and experessed in an expansive range of cultural practices, including texts, images and commodities.

4.3. The plurality of cultural meanings
Barbie Liberation Organization
Ugly girl

4.4. Self-understanding and re-positioning
-Reflection upon socialization and gender stereotype


Reading for next week:
Music Consumption and Gender Performativity: a case study of Jay’s fandom in China

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