Cultural studies moves beyond ethnography’s presentism toward structural configurations

Evidence

Both projects share the “abiding commitment” of ethnographers “to the principled exploration and reconstruction of social worlds,” their “engagement with … fellow men and women,” and a “commitment to the interpretation of local and situated cultures.” 6 (Our concern was to use such a starting point—concrete events, practices, relationships, and cultures—to approach the “structural configurations that cannot be reduced to the interactions and practices through which they express themselves,” as Bourdieu, another sympathizer with ethnographers, put it. 7 In other words, we sought to emulate the ethnographic imagination but also to move beyond the focus on the here and now of everyday “interactions and practices” by locating them in the histories taking place behind all our backs. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1043

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: How does ‘the histories taking place behind all our backs’ — invisible structural forces — get made visible in Hall’s conjunctural analysis? This is the methodological crux worth pursuing.

Related

• Cultural study is permanently displaced because signifying practice eludes direct linkage to social structures (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies must remain permanently open-ended and responsive to external influences (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies engaged Marxism through its omissions, not its established doctrines. (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural Studies replaced Marxist base-superstructure with complex notions of determination (similarity 0.79)
• Structuralism reframed culture study from decoding social contents to cracking codes (similarity 0.79)
• Ongoing theorizing, not finished Theory, is what Cultural Studies requires (similarity 0.79)
• Social movements and historical conjunctures generate theoretical moments rather than merely consuming them (similarity 0.78)
• Cultural Studies emerged by displacing culturalism with Gramsci, structuralism, semiology, and discourse theory. (similarity 0.78)
• Cultural Studies lacks a single origin and instead constitutes multiple unstable formations (similarity 0.78)