The Value of Ethnography

Abstract

As an anthropologist whose main methodological approach to the study of media industries is long-term ethnographic fieldwork, in my essay I want to highlight the importance of the issues of practice, social relations, and subjectivity to the study of mass media production as well as the utility of ethnography as a method. My approach to a large-scale market-driven media industry differs considerably from the legacy established by the Frankfurt School’s “culture industry” approach to the analysis of mass media, whereby the political economic structures of production preclude discussions of subjectivity, agency, and meaning. I contend that in order to understand the complexities of media production, it is necessary to examine producers’ sentiments and subjectivities in conjunction with questions of political economy. Regarding media producers as agents grounded in specific social, historical, and interpretive locations and their activity of production as comprising a domain of social practice complicates the discussion of commercial mass media production and takes it beyond simplistic assertions of the “bottom-line”—that somehow the pursuit of profit provides the limits of analysis.