The Ethnographic Imagination E-Book

Paul Willis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 302

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this book Paul Willis, a renowned sociologist and ethnographer, aims to renew and develop the ethnographic craft across the disciplines. Drawing from numerous examples of his own past and current work, he shows that ethnographic practice and the ethnographic imagination are vital to understanding the creativity and irreducibility of experience in all aspects of social and cultural practice.

Willis argues that ethnography plays a vital role in constituting 'sensuousness' in textual, methodological, and substantive ways, but it can do this only through the deployment of an associated theoretical imagination which cannot be found simply there in the field. He presents a bold and incisive ethnographically oriented view of the world, emphasizing the need for a deep-running social but also aesthetic sensibility. In doing so he brings new insights to the understanding of human action and its dialectical relation to social and symbolic structures. He makes original contributions to the understanding of the contemporary human uses of objects, artefacts and communicative forms, presenting a new analysis of commodity fetishism as central to consumption and to the wider social relations of contemporary societies. He also utilizes his perspective to further the understanding of the contemporary crisis in masculinity and to cast new light on various lived everyday cultures - at school, on the dole, on the street, in the Mall, in front of TV, in the dance club.

This book will be essential reading for all those involved in planning or contemplating ethnographic fieldwork and for those interested in the contributions it can make to the social sciences and humanities.

Leseprobe

I, Herodotus of Halicarnass, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the colour from what man has brought into being.

The History, Herodotus (translated by David Greene),University of Chicago Press, 1987

The Ethnographic Imagination

Paul Willis

Polity

Copyright © Paul Willis 2000

The right of Paul Willis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Transferred to Digital Print 2003

Reprinted 2005, 2006, 2007

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Willis, Paul.

The ethnographic imagination/Paul Willis.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-0173-1 — ISBN: 978-0-7456-0174-8 (pbk) — ISBN: 978-0-7456-6912-0 (ebook)

1. Ethnology—Philosophy. 2. Ethnology—Methodology. I. Title.

GN345. W52 2001

305.8’001—dc2100–037502

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon

by Kolam Information Services Pvt Ltd, Pondicherry, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Part I: Art in the Everyday

1       Life as Art

Experience is the poem

Language and experience

2       Form

Language and the language paradigm

Socio-symbolic analysis

3       The Social

Penetrations

Social reproduction

Part II: Ethnography in Postmodernity

4       The Quasi-modo Commodity

The commodity form

The cultural commodity form

The struggle between the commodity and the code

Cultural commodities and cultural practices

5       Penetrations in the Postmodern World

Cultural practices

Social becoming

6       Social Reproduction as Social History

Modernist sources of social stability

The crisis of masculinity

Postmodernist sources of social stability

Fetishism and invisible symbolic work

7       The Ethnographic Imagination and ‘Whole Ways of Life’

Social class

Methodologies of field, theory and writing

Cultural politics

Cultural policy

The treason of language?

Appendix: Homology

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Växjö in Sweden for providing partial financial support for my professorship at the University of Wolverhampton. This has allowed me generous time with which to work on this text. Thanks to the Ethnography Seminar in Wolverhampton and to the Graduate Seminar in Växjö for listening to and making many helpful comments on various presentations relating to material in this book. Heartfelt thanks to the friends and colleagues who have made detailed and specific comments on many, many previous drafts: Mats Trondman, Phil Corrigan, Huw Beynon, Marcus Free, Chris Rojek, Andrew Worsedale, Chris Barker, Jean Lave, Jim McGuigan, Christina Klosterberg and Helen Wood.

Paul Willis

Foreword

This book outlines an approach to method and understanding in the social sciences, an approach which I’ve termed the ethnographic imagination. The juxtaposition of ‘ethnographic’ and ‘imagination’ is meant to surprise, condition and change the meaning of both. The two may seem far apart, ethnography faithfully reporting ‘the reality’ of the everyday, imagination deliberately seeking to transcend the everyday. But, actually, for its own full development ethnography needs a theoretical imagination which it will not find, ‘there’, descriptively in the field. Equally, I believe that the theoretical imaginings of the social sciences are always best shaped in close tension with observational data.

Perhaps I could have called the book Ethnography and Imagination. But I mean to emphasize the ethnographic as conditioning, grounding and setting the range of imaginative meanings within social thought. Ethnography provides the empirical and conceptual discipline. Ethnography is the eye of the needle through which the threads of the imagination must pass. Imagination is thereby forced to try to see the world in a grain of sand, the human social genome in a single cell. Experience and the everyday are the bread and butter of ethnography, but they are also the grounds whereupon and the stake for how grander theories must test and justify themselves. They should be not be self-referenced imaginings but grounded imaginings.

The particular articulation of how the everyday and the social imagination are brought together depends on many things, not least the type of research question being asked, what drives the curiosity of the researcher. I will explore some of these in detail, but there is a broad conjunction which provides the main spine for how this book is organized. It underlies much of my own work and is relevant to many social questions and issues. This is the bringing together of ethnographic accounts of everyday life and aesthetic questions. I pose the question in this book: what happens if we understand the raw materials of everyday lived cultures as if they were living art forms?

A biographical vignette may help.

In October 1968 I registered as a PhD student at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham University, UK, to conduct a field study on Biker and Hippie cultures (subsequently published as Profane Culture, Routledge). The Centre was in an English Department and I had previously studied English Literature at Cambridge. Newly arrived at the Centre, I was asked to lead an early seminar analysing Blake’s ‘Tyger, Tyger’. Trained in the techniques of literary criticism, specifically in practical criticism and close reading, I struggled to analyse how the words on the page achieved their effects: ‘Tiger, Tiger’… OK… twice for effect, but why ‘burning’… that’s unusual, tigers don’t usually do that,…’symmetry’, OK, but why ‘fearful’? Why an industrial metaphor to describe an animal, nature and the jungle? That same night I was using the same techniques of ‘close reading’ to try to understand the bike culture in the city centre of Birmingham: why the ‘cattle horn handlebars’… that’s unusual… why the ‘chrome exhausts’ and ‘no baffles’ in the exhausts… that’s antisocial … why ‘no helmets’… that’s dangerous… why and how was an industrial product used for meaning-making in a flesh and bone, human world? Almost on autopilot, by chance or unconsciously, there I was trying to use the categories of art to understand an example of lived culture.

Practical criticism and ‘close reading’ techniques had come both to baffle and bore me at Cambridge. They seemed inturned, narrow and related only to judging canonical hierarchies, displacing altogether the life-enhancing breadth and openness which had inspired me, an unlikely candidate in many ways, actually drawn me into literary studies. By contrast and surprisingly, in the living context of the bike culture these techniques of practical criticism seemed full of life and promise. They seemed to grant significance where condescension had ruled. Almost accidentally and in drastic measure, I had reconnected what had been slowly drained out of literary studies at Cambridge – in a word the social connection, the connection with real life in all its tumbling profusion and messiness. At the same time, however, these same approaches and techniques, violently relocated to the social, also offered an immediate inoculation, so to speak in the other direction, against the flattening reductions of social science. Further and not least, my version of a transplanted practical criticism offered a productive, concrete and unfussy practice and methodology for the study of the real world. My afternoons and evenings were not so far apart. The dreaming spires and the spiral springs of the motor-bike world could be brought together imaginatively.

That is the same engagement I am trying for now on a grander scale: understanding the nitty gritty of the everyday as containing its own forms of symbolic creativity. Chapter 1 of this book sets the scene and traces through, in an evocative kind of way, some of the implications of bringing together ethnographic and aesthetic categories into the same frame. The rest of part 1 takes up the main issues and develops them in more analytic ways.

Perhaps this is an unusual book; method, theory, substance all in one. I aim to bring together, codify and extend the essential themes and concepts as they have developed in my work over the past thirty years. I aim to present not only a chosen methodological approach (ethnography) but also an allied theoretical approach, and also, overlappingly, theories for and some account of its subject matter, varieties and forms of lived everyday cultures: at school, on the dole, on the street, in the mall, in front of the TV, in the dance club. This Foreword supplies a map, some signposts and definitions, making clear some of the broad-brush assumptions that underpin my whole approach.

At bottom, you could say that in this book I am trying to outline an experimental, profane theoretical methodology. Imagine that I am a bit of an academic vandal, in the nicest possible and disciplined way. I take, develop or invent ideas (while immersed in the data) and throw them, in a ‘what if?’ kind of way, at the ethnographic data – the real world of the nitty gritty, the messiness of everyday life – to see what analytic points bounce out on the other side, pick them up again, refine them and throw them again. The problem with many empirical data, empirically presented, is that they can be flat and uninteresting, a documentary of detail which does not connect with urgent issues. On the other hand the ‘big ideas’ are empty of people, feeling and experience. In my view well-grounded and illuminating analytic points flow only from bringing concepts into a relationship with the messiness of ordinary life, somehow recorded.

Part of the difficulty in defining what I mean by the ethnographic imagination, and its focus in this book, is that, in general, I refrain from precise or neat definitions of concepts. I do not see the social sciences as comparable to the natural sciences (or an early version of them), requiring precision to mirror objectively and as exactly as possible separate elements in nature in order to determine the pattern of their relationships: discovering unchanging laws controlling the movement of atoms. As Blumer1 says, the social sciences can hope only to develop ‘sensitising concepts’ about the social world, approximate conceptions which are rough and always provisional guides to a changing and complex reality. Social science conceptions have to be fluid, not least because the subject matter with which they deal is comprised of, certainly in part, the views and thinkings of social agents themselves, if you like, deploying their own kind of ‘sensitising concepts’. Though in much more informal ways, they are trying to understand, for themselves, the world in which they have to operate. Atoms thinking for themselves! Even as they are in some sense determined from the outside. How to encompass this? By capaciousness and imagination, I reply. First step: use broad ethnographic techniques to generate observational data from real life, recorded with goodly inputs from subjects themselves and with sufficient finesse that you are able to register something of the internal ‘life’ of social atoms. Second step: experiment by bringing this into forcible contact with outside concepts, accidentally or inspirationally chosen, by trying to frame the whole with necessary complexity and to deliver analytic and illuminating points not wholly derivable from the field but vital to conceptualizing its relationships. Of course, the effects can be unpredictable when you throw concepts at things. You might just get shards, useless academic fragments in crazy piles. But the ambition, at least, is to tell ‘my story’ about ‘their story’ through the fullest conceptual bringing out of ‘their story’.

But these concepts which I throw at the data are not about scientifically understanding how human atoms respond to general laws. They are fallible, continually revised approximations of the relations of external forces to the interior life and movement of the atoms. Since these latter are fluid and dynamic and, changing in their own way, playing the same game, then, perforce, my own categories, ideas and concepts about them are bound, themselves, to be even more fluid and always provisional.

There is a further complication. Social agents are not academic sociologists or organized in obedient seminar groupings, so their practices of sense-making require some digging out, some interpretation – the further exercise of an ethnographic imagination. An important line of argument pursued throughout the book is that embodied ‘sense’ is often not expressed in language; sometimes, more strongly, it is organized against, or in tension with, language. Such meanings have to be translated into language. Furthermore, there are what we can think of as informal traditions of meaning-making, relating to gender, humour and self-presentation for instance. They are often sedimented in their own ways, long-running and semi-ritualized, so producing their own long durees and slow motion logics with respect to how quickly they can change and react to changed circumstances. The motives, meanings and lived dynamics of everyday culture are also multifold and organized for different questions and situations, with time scales enforced by different immediacies: getting to work, holding a family together, ‘getting a life’ through and on top of it all. All these are often unconsciously, chaotically or eccentrically organized with reference to each other, not rationally spoken, so requiring further interpretation.

Let us move on now to some more specific signposts and definitions. What about my practical methodology? There are many possible approaches to understanding the field of everyday culture. My approach foregrounds the experiences and practices of social agents, sensuously understood and ethnographically studied. But what do I mean by the ‘ethnographic method’?

It is the central spine of an overarching set of techniques, one of only two families of methodological approaches for generating primary data about the social world: the quantitative and qualitative approaches. On the one hand, you can send out questionnaires to generate responses you can count, concerning essentially the regularities of what people do – at school, at work, so many people going to the cinema, to the pubs, to the clubs, so often a week, spending so much, etc. This yields quantitative findings. On the other hand, you can make direct contact with social agents in the normal courses and routine situations of their lives to try to understand something of how and why these regularities take place. If possible participating in those activities yourself over a long period and through many situations, you witness and record in detail what they do, their practices in schools, in pubs, in cinemas. Through observation, interview and informal interaction you inquire into the meanings and values they attach to particular activities that are the focus of study, and further inquire how they see them in relation to wider and central life concerns and issues. This produces qualitative findings. Any one of the constitutive techniques of this ethnographic range of techniques can produce qualitative data, but it is only a combination of them over time that produces sufficient ‘quality’ data to generate an ethnographic account of a social or cultural form.

More directly, the ethnographic impulse is to be so moved with curiosity about a social puzzle – why do working-class kids get working-class jobs?; why are the unemployed so passive?; is TV an agent of passification? – that you are seized to go and look for yourself, to see ‘what’s going on’ as bound up with ‘how they go on’. Physical and sensuous presence then allows observation and witness and the use of five-sense channels for recording data relating to social atmosphere, emotional colour and unspoken assumptions. You can also sense for yourself important aspects of context and of the material and institutional features of the enclosures and regimes through which subjects pass, seeing for yourself how they use and manipulate surrounding resources in their cultural practices. This same physical presence also allows you to interact and to pursue questions and issues related to your puzzle, probing and reconstructing how subjects symbolically inhabit their worlds: what are their agendas, their de-codings, their stories, their uses of objects and artefacts.

What about art. What do I mean by it? Why use it? What I have said about fluidity and indeterminacy has to be firmly borne in mind here. What follows are starting points that my own work has developed and extended in ways which stretch my original metaphor, perhaps into unrecognizable forms. Following Marcel Duchamp, I could simply say, ‘Art is whatever I say it is.’ Finally, in effect, perhaps that is exactly what I do in this book: report the results and sum of conceptual developments over many years and move way beyond my starting-out points. But I also mean to utilize and lean on the sedimented meanings of art throughout. I know that proclaiming ‘life as art’ may come across as a cliché and banal. But all labels are or become clichés; that is why they stick. And I want my assertion to raise questions which stick. Essentially, what are the consequences of viewing everyday relations as if they contained a creativity of the same order as that held to be self-evidently part of what we call the arts. What analytic tools do we need to comprehend that the ‘sensitising concepts’ used by social agents might be indissolubly linked to aesthetic forms of feeling and knowing.

So, to my provisional definitions. Most basically I am using ‘art’ to specify a quality of human meaning-making. Human beings are driven not only to struggle to survive by making and remaking their material conditions of existence, but also to survive by making sense of the world and their place in it. This is a cultural production, as making sense of themselves as actors in their own cultural worlds. Cultural practices of meaning-making are intrinsically self-motivated as aspects of identity-making and self-construction: in making our cultural worlds we make ourselves. At least for those who have moved out of economic subsistence, perhaps the balance has tipped from instrumental to expressive struggle, so that humans now are concerned more with the making of their cultural world than with their material world. Even in their material struggles for survival, they grapple with choices in ‘how to go on’, so as to deal with practical exigencies in ways consistent with the maintenance of a viable cultural identity and its distinction and acknowledgement from others.

Crucially, this making of identity is achieved through creative cultural practices which produce something that was not there before, at least not fully or in the same way. With formal works of art as a result, legitimate artistic creativity shares in this defining feature, but not as its centre, only as its regional exemplification and reification. At the centre are lived cultural practices in which this creative aspect is bound up essentially with the cultural birth of the self, knowing the self as ‘home-made’ difference, however small, from all that has been received.

In everyday life this meaning-making and finding difference become ever more important. The old, ‘off the shelf cultural worlds no longer supply believable practices and materials. Class traditions, work, trade unions, organized religion, the family, parental role models, liberal humanist education – these things no longer believably place and fill identity in connected and homogeneous ways. No one knows what the social maps are any more, there are no automatic belongings, so, more than ever, you have to work for, and make, your own cultural significance.

I come now to the second main element of my provisional definition of art. This is that important and specifically creative aspects of meaning-making are accomplished through work upon forms. Meaning-making is not an internal quest, a search for an ever elusive (disappointing if found) true self as an unchanging inner essence or state of being or intrinsic soul. Meaning-making can be considered a work process involving its own kind of labour and expressive outcomes issuing into some kind of inter-subjective space. This work is never ‘done’: only by expressing themselves over time do human beings continuously reproduce themselves culturally. This process of labour requires, assumes and reproduces a locating cultural world through which self-expression is achieved.

Among other things, meaning-making is a form of cultural production which works upon materials received from this cultural world, remaking them. Formal notions of art have a developed self-consciousness about their crafts upon form, but only within secluded traditions of what constitutes the cultural world and its materials. Everyday cultural practices, by contrast, are unselfconscious and take the normal life world of everyday culture as their working context. There is, therefore, an important contemporary dimension in the provision of relevant forms. This may be in some narrow participation in ‘retro’ or contemporary cultural styles, or in absorption into some passion – football, Elvis, country and western. But it is also in the ordinary responsibilities of deciding ‘how to go on’ when ‘things have changed so much’, how to find moral bearings or criteria for making choices when tradition does not help much but when a range of clues are on offer in a complex and messy web of chats with friends about ‘what they’re into’, TV programmes, soaps, films, ads, talk shows, magazines, songs deliberately played or serendipitously caught, kissing you from the radio. Meaning-making is a ‘poetry (that) constructs a voice out of the voices that surround it’.2

The third and final element in my specification of art concerns a social connection, which is usually lost or suppressed in more formal and textual versions, though often the secret hallmark of great art. This is a poignancy in which social and structural location is articulated not as an ‘add on’ context but as an indissoluble and internal relation, a quality or property itself, of meaning-making. Social structure and process are encompassed as things to be made sense of, as providing fields of things to be discovered or understood, as carrying their own possible meanings, including ideological presentations, which can be adopted, contested, explained, refused. The combinations here of meaning-making, form and social connection, all condensed, produce elegance and economy deserving the name of art.

The social connection of cultural practices in the everyday is of great importance to the ethnographic imagination and is subject to a particular conceptual development here and throughout the book. The title of this book echoes, of course, that of the famous book by C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination. In it he defines his version of this social connection as ‘enabling us to grasp history and biography and the relations between them’.3 I follow this but want both to add some complexity, some middle terms, to this relation, and to be relentless in the pursuit of the internality of possible relations and strings of overlapping connection between the creativity of individuals and groups, ethnographically held, and wider structures. Everyday culture is the main middle term that I want to add as mediation between individuals and structures. I see the production of this symbolic realm as in part a result, upon conditions, of the creative self-activity of agents, also thereby producing and reproducing themselves. But the symbolic realm also operates at another, connected level, where it is involved, viscerally, in the maintenance and differentiated formation of the social whole or whole social formation, including the reproduction of the conditions upon which ‘self activity’ originally takes place. Hard as it may be, these are the further threads of hooped strings that I have to pull through the eye of my ethnographic needle.4

Part 2 of the book looks at how agents ‘self activity’ operates, under all developing aspects of my definition, within the new conditions of the commodization of culture and its universal, saturating, electronic mediation. As long ago as 1960 Asa Briggs defined a crucial shift produced by the industrialization and commercialization of the symbolic realm: ‘Massive market interests have come to dominate an area of life which, until recently, was dominated by individuals themselves.’5 This cultural realm, which so interests me, is now thoroughly dominated by commodity production for profit, bringing along with it the attendant commoditization of the cultural forms, relations and services that are the grist to the mill of everyday life. Successive chapters of part 2 deal with how the creative cultural activities of agents encounter this new domination of what was previously ‘their own’, with how this encounter colours the whole cultural realm and with how this changed realm is implicated in contemporary processes of differentiated social reproduction (maintaining social stability or inciting social challenge). There is no question that fundamental changes in the systems and institutions of cultural provision (the concentration of ownership, globalization, advertising, the privatization of distribution) have fundamentally changed both the lineaments of the cultural realm as a whole as well as fundamental aspects (relations and forms) of the whole social formation. But, crucial to note, from the point of view of the social connection as ethnographically imagined, economic and other forces do not do this directly. The role of the ‘creative self activity’, ethnographically registerable, of agents continues to be crucial to the indeterminacy and variety of how these technological and political-economic changes pass into (or are read into) cultural and social change.

There is a further point about the operation of the ethnographic imagination when it comes to structural issues. I argue that, like social scientists, social agents are, in their own way, concerned with larger structural questions, only in their case making sense of them as surviving and living out their consequences – for instance grappling with the meanings and effects of the current epochal and global restructuration of economic relations. I want to pursue the subjective fast tracks of experiential response without being overwhelmed by a welter of empirical data. It is necessary sometimes to sum up, or reach for the kernel of, structural form or change in conceptual and shorthand ways. Chapter 2, for instance, conceptualizes state education in a certain way, as embodying individualism and meritocracy. Chapter 4 presents a Marxian analysis of the cultural commodity, which I take as the central ‘driver’ of the bewildering and rapid cultural change around us. Of course not all ‘things’ around us are commodities; but many of them are, especially those concerned with sense-making, and, increasingly, the direction of change is that many more will become commoditized or formed in relations very much like them – anonymous production manipulatively organized by strangers for profit. My conceptually presented understanding of commoditization and cultural change influences the analysis of the whole of the second part of the book.

So, if you like, there are at least two types of conception operating in my view of the ethnographic imagination, two types of thing ‘thrown at’ the messy data: approximate conceptions encapsulating the scope and action of the creative cultural practices of agents, and approximate conceptions of that which, in situ, social agents are ‘making sense of. Perhaps there is a triple dynamic of understanding: my understandings of their understandings of an understood (conceptually held) world. Against charges of academicism in view of what my academic vandalism may produce, I can only offer the empirical part of my formulation of the ethnographic imagination. There is resistance against pure abstraction in observational data. I ask for patience: the abstract detours may be quite long. But what does not finally help to illuminate the nitty gritty of experience should be discarded.

In this book I refer throughout to my previous work – forgive the immodesty but I am trying to codify and systematize ideas developed over thirty years, ideas often umbilically attached to the ethnographic data with which I have worked. I need a clarity of focus in what I am trying to offer, and I can muster this only in relation to my own work. But I believe that the conceptual developments produced are applicable in a variety of ways to a variety of other empirical works, as well as to works in progress or planned. In particular I refer to Learning to Labour6 as the basic grounds upon which my perspective of the ethnographic imagination in ‘practical state’ was developed. Readers will need to know the main contours of this book which I shall now briefly summarize.

Learning to Labour reported the results and findings of a long-term ethnographic study, conducted in the mid-1970s, of a group of working-class white boys, members of what I called the counter-school culture – they called themselves the lads – in a working-class comprehensive school in an industrial town of the English midlands. I followed them through their last eighteen months at school and then into work, where I clocked on and worked alongside them, for a week or so, in their different jobs. I did qualitative work, with less depth, on five comparative groups. The puzzles leading me to the field were fairly straightforward. Why do working class kids fail? What is the role of their own culture in their ‘failure’? What were the continuities for them between school and work? Not all working-class students failed then, of course, but, then as now, middle-class school students were about six times more likely to go on into higher education than working-class pupils: I wanted to get at the inside story of this phenomenon. I observed ‘the lads’ around the school, sat in their classes, attended all their careers sessions, accompanied them to a limited extent in their social rounds, conducted regular, recorded group discussions and interviewed their parents at home.

The central vertical dynamic of their lived culture was a vigorous opposition to the authority of their teachers. ‘Who are they, telling us what to do when they’re no better than us?’ The central horizontal dynamic was a rejection of conformist pupils labelled as ‘ear’oles’ – i.e. always listening, never doing: ‘They’m prats, they never get any fun do they?’ This rejection was felt as a kind of distinction and superiority. ‘We can make them laff, they can’t make us laff.’ These positions and orientations were enacted and embodied through a strong, rough masculine style, embellished in various ways through smoking, drinking and stylish dressing. Also central to the culture was a devotion to and deployment of ‘the laff’, a ubiquitous form capable of turning almost any situation into material for jokes and ribbing: ‘it’s the most important thing in life, even communists laff’.

From an educationalist and careers point of view, the strangest thing about the attitudes and behaviour of ‘the lads’ was their low interest in, often hostility towards, academic work and the gaining of qualifications. From a sociological point of view, the strangest thing about their culture was the indifference it induced among them to the kind of work they thought of undertaking, in the event ranging from factory work to tyre fitting to brick-layers mate. I argued in Learning Labour that their own culture helped induct them, voluntarily, into the low-paid, low-status jobs that most would shun. Their own culture was involved in processes of social reproduction, surprisingly, in more effective ways than any intended ideological mechanism.

The book details some of the horseplay, adventures and confrontations of ‘the lads’ at school as well as some of their later experiences and cultural practices at work. Though I did not formulate the ethnographic imagination perspective at the time, what was precisely different and fresh about the book was its digestion and presentation of ethnographic, fine-brush data in relation to and through the practical methodological assumptions that the ‘anti-social’ culture of ‘the lads’ was creative and craftedly interesting in its own right and contained, embodied and embedded, often highly rational seeds of knowing and analysis about their current and future situations. Here was no sullen defeat, no cultural inadequacy, no simple ideological domination. They were not dupes or zombies. The sheer life, intelligence and wit of their cultural practices had to be recognized. At the same time, it was this same culture that helped deliver them, and those like them, into a life of manual labour (and later unemployment) in ways which seemed quite against their basic interests. There was a tragic irony at the heart of their culture.

There is more of this analysis, and extensions to it, in the book, as well as an update on the current experiences and prospects of those like ‘the lads’, but this summary is enough to give a context and meaning to early references in part 1.

Part I

Art in the Everyday

1

Life as Art

You were virtually the answer to our prayer, because do you remember, we used to make vague attempts at writing accounts of things we’d done at school, y’know what I mean, we’d had to make an essay… I thought that we were the artists of the school, because of the things we did, I thought definitely we had our own sort of art form, the things we used to get up to.

Joey on what he had made of my presence in his school in a group discussion recorded in the Appendix to Learning to Labour

Life as art? Caveats and elaborations aside, this provides a starting point, direction and compass for the ethnographic imagination. It gives a quick and fundamental bearing when you are lost or mired. It also helps to will an ambition to write, that representation should, to some degree, mirror, or more exactly recreate, or more exactly still be continuous with something of the original.

I want to reclaim art as a living, not textual thing and as inherently social and democratic. Art as an elegant and compressed practice of meaning-making is a defining and irreducible quality at the heart of everyday human practices and interactions. It is at the centre of the commonplace human uses of objects, expressive and other, producing and investing meaningfulness in our relations with others and with the objects and materials around us. It is the combination of these practices with their locating relations and materials that produces culture or cultural forms which are the stock in trade of ethnographic analysis, for example school cultures, subcultures, occupational and shop-floor cultures, small-group or individual cultural formations.

Joey offers no finished poems. His poems are situated, performative and embodied in and through his whole social life and activity at school. Maybe subordinated cultural meaning is not an abstract linguistic type at all. It is concretely articulated as that which ‘makes sense’ in, of and by the connection between different elements of a cultural form or set of practices – action, language, interaction, the use of objects and artefacts, bodily presence, disposition and style, configurations of gesture and posture, ways of walking and talking. Their life artistry – not a mentalized or condensed resistance – is what makes ‘the lads’ socially distinct, their cultural forms relatively hardy and resilient. This makes them personally independent and difficult for their mental-work-oriented teachers to handle.