反思“始终局外人”:伯明翰学派青年文化研究民族志方法论探析

Rethinking Outsider-out Ethnography:On Methodology of Ethnography in Birmingham School’s Youth Subcultural Studies

伯明翰学派当代文化研究中心在20世纪70年代对第二次世界大战后英国工人阶级青年文化进行了大量研究,关于其方法论中的民族志,一直存在争议。通过批判文献阅读和比较分析,从伯明翰学派青年文化研究的代表文本来看,其研究工作以文本分析为基础,而非严格的参与观察。这种“始终局外人”的民族志书写方式,就思想史而言,可以归因于早期英国文化研究的政治立场、新马克思主义对理论的辩证态度、英国本土文化主义与欧陆结构主义思潮的矛盾。然而,在批判性青年研究的框架下,如何结合经验性的描述和理论性的分析,仍是研究当代青年问题面对的难题,在这个问题上,伯明翰学派出身的民族志学者威利斯的文化分析方法,可供借鉴。

In the 1970s,the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS)of Birmingham school made extensive research on working-class youth subcultures in post-war Britain.Methodologically,whether ethnography is employed in subcultural studies remains a dispute.Through critical literature review and comparative analysis,this paper argues that the unconventional way of ethnographic writing,from the history of intelligence,could be understood as the interplay of the investment of cultural studies with its embedded criticalness,the neo-Marxist ambiguity towards theory and the contradiction between culturalism and structuralism,respectively generated in Great Britain and the Continent.How to engage in ethnographic work and how to develop critical discourse alongside remains a methodological concern for youth cultural studies and Paul Wills’s works act as a fruitful resource to draw on.