문화연구와 문학적 상상력: 인종기술학적 하위문화 연구에 대한 비판적 검토

Cultural Studies and Literary Imagination: A Critical Review of Ethnographic Studies of Subcultures

Cultural Studies has often been mentioned as a practical alternative for the humanities alleged to be now in crisis. If one of the driving motivations propelling the Cultural Studies is to eliminate the distance between the academy and lived experience, therefore bringing in the political impulse back to the anemic academy, the current hailing of Cultural Studies as a desideratum contains a self contradictory uncanniness. Cultural Studies should not mean a 'deus ex machina' to solve all the problems the humanities face on every condition. This article is aimed to examine the ethnographic studies of subcultures since the late 70s up to now, as a way of figuring out in what sense Cultural Studies might be a possible rescue for the ailing humanities. "Subcultures" studies have been claimed as the most remarkable achievements in the field. Besides, three representative researchers mentioned here-Janice Radway, Dick Hebdige, and Paul Willis-have adopted the ethnographic methodology as a key approach to measure the precise caliber of the people's artistic creativities and put them alive through the strictures of structural determination. My article shows that these three researchers, though starting from different scholastic climate and dealing with different objects, draw an identical trajectory of a considerable degree in terms of their treatment of the study objects or their understanding of individual agents. First, they all start from the proposition that men and women addicted to subcultural practices are not passive victims or dropouts from the established society. Far from it, it is argued that they are active creators of their own culture. Then, all three endeavor to identify the concrete locales of 'articulation' for those subcultural creativities by which subcultural practices may turn into effective and durable cultural activities of resistance that would survive the determining pressures of the social structure. The ethnographic imagination is adopted for this purpose: that is, to find out the solid and sustainable site of articulation between the individual creativity and social determination. However, judging from three representative studies of subcultures, my study shows several gaps that make the identified articulation less persuasive and even self-contradictory. In their development to explain the articulated relations, mostly by the aid of the Gramcian concept 'hegemony,' those studies come to reveal deeply unstable fluctuations in the use of 'creativity,' finally to revise some of their starting propositions.