Media Cultural Studies' Uncomfortable Embrace of Ethnography

Abstract

This article explores ethnography's place in media cultural studies by examining obstacles that have frustrated ethnographic practice. The author argues that although audience ethnographies developed in cultural studies have nourished theory, most disparage fieldwork in favor of more abstract theoretical exercises. Resistance studies, postmodernism, and anthropology's encounter with post-structuralism are examined in relation to this tendency in cultural studies. Conclusions are drawn that some ethnographers already offer new methodological approaches that could provide a point of departure for the reinvestment in media ethnography. However, to make these approaches useful, audience ethnographers must reconsider the heuristic value of doing fieldwork. Moreover, new ethnographies could help contextualize and strengthen the more abstract theorizing of cultural studies by providing links and revealing tensions between private appropriations and structural determinations.