Concluding remarks: Cultural Studies and anthropology

1. Two fundamental theoretical weaknesses in anthropology
1.1. Empiricism
-Is the meaning of reality is simply written on its surface?
-Knowledge is a direct and unmediated reflection of reality?
-Knowledge comes from the field?

1.2. Humanism
-An eagerness to show the truth about a particular group of human beings
-Culture is supposed to be a human product (institutional or symbolic)

1.3. Anthropology: an under-theorized discipline
-Playing down the importance of political economy, history and other theoretical concerns
-Example 1: Margaret Mead's Freudian assumption
-Example 2: Trobriander's use of British cricket

2. Cultural studies: an overtheorized discipline

2.1. The origins of cultural studies (The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)
-Re-negotiating the British culture in the post-war era
-Critique of media -->Reform in broadcasting policy
-Studies of subcultures (Paul Willis' Learning to Labor and Dick Hebdige's Subcultures): New political identities and projects
-Agency: The political possibilities

2.2. Theoreticism
-The influences of French theories: structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics
-The historical and discursive conditions of subjectivity

3. Theoretically Informed Ethnographic Study (TIES): The uses of field

3.1. A field, rather than a reified cultural object, is a place relevant to researcher in political-economic, social and cultural terms.

3.2. The impossibility of social agents' coming to any kind of selfhood or lived subjectivity (indeterminacy).

3.3. "Field" is a site for the process of subjectivity formation

3.4. Looking for "surprises" in the field

Willis, Paul. 1997. "TIES: Theoretically informed ethnography." Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Edited by Stephen Nugent and Cris Shore. London: Pluto Press, 182-192.