A Word on Ethnography

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
(Japanese proverb)

My 'ethnographer's tent' has been pitched now between my 'natives' and subjects of study for 15 years. My studies inflected my sense of these cultural fields as much as my being part of them, a feeling that became ever stronger for the last five years. The main difference to Malinowski's tent pitched on Kiriwina beach in 1914 lies in the fact that humanity in general has become nomadic in a remote sense, the shifting and flowing has become quicker (not only in Western capitalism), we need to mark our tents now more distinctly in order to pick it out among an ever-growing number (cf. Appadurai 2000, Bauman 2001). Western culture is different from the cultures I have read about in books during the course of my studies, but by no means less of an academic field of inquiry and exotic in its own way (3). Today, everything revolves around images, texts and objects. This means we can now project our tents to places that exist solely by the imagining of individuals in interaction. Because this happens all the time, continually throughout our lives, it has a continual effect on our physical and mental being in the world. It shows in everyday events and practices which are described in academia as 'cultural', everyday cultural practices. Increased motion and mediatisation has also brought forth a plurality of possible modernities (Herzfeld 2001:12; cf. Marcus 1986) that imply, and indeed require, a multi-sitedness for ethnographic research. My fields in this sense are the personal lifeworlds of informants from Germany and the UK, as well as those of others reflected in internet homepages and in observation of music venue audiences and record shop customers.
In spite of the "hyperawareness that the velocity and immensity of changes are beyond the conceptional grasp of writers of various kinds to describe and interpret them" (Marcus 1996:introduction), the ethnographer as an observer of everyday culture picks out topics, develops an interest out of himself as a social agent in combination with the interaction with his environment, chooses to speak of certain issues while disregarding others. Therefore the ethnographic monograph is in fact a 'stereograph', since it speaks as much about the subjects of inquiry as it does about the inquiring subject. Responding to late modern thoughts about ethnography, I describe not only the observed culture but also, more or less consciously, my own. For these reasons I would follow Bruner (1993:6) in saying "that writing is a political act. Those who claim that what is literary is not political or that humanistic interpretive anthropology does not deal with political issues are dead wrong, as any act of representation of the Other is inherently political. (…) The aim is a balance that reduces the gap between subject and object, that represents both ethnographer and informant as having active creative selves". Cultural Studies' borrowing of the fiercely defended (cf. Niekisch 2002, Nugent & Shore 1997) ethnographic method to observe the everyday life with and of popular culture, the 'ethnographic turn' as it is called in literature (Alasuutari 1999, Göttlich et al. 2001, Muggleton 2000:24, Niekisch 2002, Nugent & Shore 1997), as much as sociology's 'discovery' of the worth of qualitative research (Bryman 2001, Flick 2002, Mayring 2002) have influenced the manner and style in which my data was gained, and reflect the arbitrary nature of boundaries of academic fields.
Having grown up with a keen interest in music, I have always felt drawn towards personal interpretations of the relationship between music and society. Being now equipped with conceptional tools, I took on the role of "native ethnographer" to explore the nature of the fluid and loosely structured social space I find myself in, letting myself be guided to a certain extent by implicit knowledge based on experience in the field. Contemporary methodology (cf. Kraidy 2002, Stauffer 1999) reflects the conflicts between insider and academic as much as those between visualisations and representations of 'natives'. My informants are 'native theorists' in the sense that they are a very restricted minority group that is characterised by high levels of education and cultural knowledge. Through topic-related autobiographical material, a kind of self-narration to overcome the paradoxes of the self, I hope to be able to make my angle and perspective on the discussed issues as transparently subjective as possible (Beer 2002, Bohnsack et al. 1999, Dewalt et al. 1998, Herzfeld 1997, 2001) and, as proposed by Marcus (1999) among others, to overcome the distinctions between subalterns, anthropologists and institutions and elites.
Further blurring distinctions between the observer and the observed, ethnography as a field method has evolved to become a highly politicised and stylised practice. With respect to this development it is here understood as 'observant participation' (4). In retrospect, I could claim about 15 years of participation and observation in this shifting field of musical cultures which has intensified for the last year for the purpose of data collection: I have finally re-acquired a turntable, consumed records, visited record fairs, used the internet for information and interaction, led countless conversations around the cluster of relevant topics. These practices were of course tied with the everyday pleasures of listening to music and going out, the things I would normally do without keeping my eyes open/wearing the academic's glasses.
In the course of the last century, the world has changed in ways that shattered the myth of scientific objectivity and positivism. It requires an acceptance of informed and interpretative subjectivity. I am convinced that in multi-sited and -voiced social imagined worlds, fluctuating between the local and the global, ethnography can only tell one of a multitude of versions of the same story - but always only our story (cf. Gupta & Ferguson 1997). For this reason, the result of this work is understood as an interpretation in Geertz's sense (1973; cf. Denzin 1997), some of it of n-th order, a description as thick as possible that revolves in hermeneutic circles. Ortner (1999:83) notes on studying 'public culture' as an anthropologist that "ethnographic understanding is built up through density, 'thickness' of observation over an extended period of time".

On Writing
"The author, alone with his pen, finds himself in a performance, and might as well be on a tightrope for the security he feels" (Eisenberg 1987:115). Late modern preoccupation with the forms and politics of representation established ethnographies as produced texts, and alluded to the social facts ethnographers establish through their representations (Clifford & Marcus 1986, Marcus & Cushman 1982, Marcus 1986, Rabinow 1986). The resulting 'crises of representation', the 'poststructuralist turn' (Agger 1992:92) which sparked the 'Writing Culture' debate in anthropology) extending to all social sciences have also opened textual possibilities based on the acknowledgement of the inevitability of subjective influence (Alasuutari 1995, Ellis & Bochner 1996). I am hoping to be able to present the qualitative data in a narrative and evocative style that includes life histories of informants, links with my own associations and uses of theoretical tools, and that presents a bricolage of cultural products and texts. One way of achieving this would surely be a dialogical approach as Keil & Feld (1994) use to illustrate the production of meaning in music. Recent developments lie in an acceptance of narrative literary forms of ethnography, the self-conscious composing of ethnography as a qualitative form of writing (Benson 1993, Boon 1999, Ellis & Bochner 1996).
The modern digital way of writing, the exploitation of the possibilities of home computers means that this text is itself a bricolage of arranged streams of thought. Text blocks can easily be shifted and transformed by minute changes in wording. Seemingly never-ending processes of re-editing cause meanings to shift almost imperceptibly. For this reason, cross-reading of text and data will unveil countless alternative possibilities in the messages conveyed in this text.

Method
3 years ago, preliminary research conducted with a fellow student (and also member of this taste culture and informant) was summarised in a term paper which helped immensely to formulate the first set of questions and identify the shared characteristics of taste. The few interviews recorded for this paper (and the survey conducted in a local record shop) have been supplemented by a larger number of unstructured depth narrative interviews (5), some of them group discussions, raising the data quantity onto 11 interviews at between 30-90 minutes each. The style in which the interviews were conducted was very informal since all informants are friends or, at the least, acquaintances removed by only one person. Lovatt & Purkis (1995) find that the study of popular culture may require "doing ethnographies with yer mates", extending the role of the intellectual to the subaltern, and see only advantages in the inquirer's more personal and informed ties with his/her field.
The aim that structured the interviews was to draw from casual conversation and genuine discussion the topics that were most important to the informants, and press these towards a confrontation with the irregularities, inconsistencies and contradictions of individual and collective social lives that surface through acts of consumption that may appear at first banal unspectacular and insignificant. In the process of data-gathering, I let my informants' statements and positions redirect my angle of research so it may become more of 'their story' than mine. For this reason, quotes have been chosen from these interviews which I will attempt to embed in the contexts where they originated, that is, connect the verbal expressions of these people with the social spaces they shape and live in, an attempt at 'radical contextualism' as formulated by Ang (1999; cf. Bohnsack et al. 2001). The scope of this text restricts this effort somewhat; to follow their arguments at greater length, all interviews would have to be discussed in detail (10-15 hours), and indeed, I would advise the interested reader to start by reading the interviews supplied in Appendix 1, or at least refer to the informant summary. In the course of the text, I have avoided cutting single-sentence quotes out of their context and instead referred to 'chunks' of interview by numbers in brackets to provide the needed context. These should at all times be read to avoid disjointed arguments and meaning.
To test the boundaries of the heterogeneous and restricted group of vinyl consumers and so to ensure the widest possible description, the informants have been consciously chosen from various acquainted circles, different taste, professional, and age groups. Only few of the interviewees actually know each other. Their common characteristics in spite of this selection process are that they are male, mostly middle-class and educated with levels of economic capital that allow a 'hobby' that may consume quite large amounts of money in extreme cases. A further characteristic turned out to be their 'post-adolescence', nearly all of them are in positions where they are relatively free from labour constraints. Throughout the text, I will relate this material to other qualitative and quantitative data, resulting in a bricolage of print and other media, as well as analyses of cultural processes, events and artefacts with theoretical tools.

Technicalities
The interviews are translations from the German originals, which are supplied in the appendices: those I deem most stringent and informative are supplied in the back of the printed edition, for cross-reference and contextualisation all of the interviews are provided on CD-Rom. Also on CD-Rom:
- a version of the bibliography with active hyperlinks to the URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) of internet sources referred to in the text,
- a hyperlinked list of internet sources,
- a navigable html-version of the whole text,
- visual data.
The interviews are numbered, numbers in brackets refer to the respective points in the interviews, numbers in bold mark the most expressive, explicit or important part for the argument presented in the text. If informants are mentioned in brackets without a number, I refer to information that is implicit in the interview on the basis of my background knowledge of the informants, or I refer to scattered 'bits' of information all over the interview or gained at unrecorded occasions. As regards their transcription, I have aimed to convey also the non-auditory expressions while maintaining good readability (6).
When I refer to vinyl consumers I do not intend to generalise about 'the' vinyl consumer but to combine my data on my specific group of informants with theoretical tools. In the same sense, the informants are referred to as 'record consumers', 'record collectors' or 'vinyl consumers', all meaning the same group.

(3) I understand this text as an exercise in European Anthropology, the aim of which is summarised by Dracklé (1996b:8): "Untersuchung von regionalen, nationalen und transnationalen Identitäten und ihrer Verflechtung, von staatlichen Institutionen und Eliten, Produktion und Konsum". At the same time, it is the often disregarded second function of anthropology as a science; to be a critical voice of one's own culture in contrast to what we learn about cultures alien to us (cf. Marcus & Fisher 1986). (back)

(4) Contrary to Malinowski's field, I had been a participant for a long time before beginning to observe a more or less well-known sphere of my own social life with acquired theoretical tools. In this sense my undertaking can be seen as somewhat of an infiltration of the taste culture of vinyl consumers by my alter ego, the anthropologist, reflecting the 'natural schizophrenia' of the ethnographic enterprise (cf. Herzfeld 1997, 2001; Stauffer 1999). (back)

(5) The interviews are, according to the following literature that guided the formulation and handling of the questions, understood as narrative depth interviews: Arksey & Knight 1999, Bernart & Krapp 1998, Bogner et al. 2002, Fowler 1995, Holstein & Gubrium 1997, Miller & Glassner 1997, Silverman 1997, Woolgar 2002.(back)

(6) Transcription notes:
Slashes (/) mark speech pauses or interruptions (like "erm…hmm…aaah"). A single slash means pauses of up to two seconds, with 2-second increments. Four slashes is any break in the conversation longer than 6 seconds, these may be commented in brackets [ ] as interruptions like mobile phones ringing, going to the washroom, etc., or refer to "stage directions", mimics.
(…) refers to parts of conversation that were left out due to repetitious or, in the relative context of my discussion, insignificant information.
{ } mark explanations of unfamiliar terminology or notes on translation problems.
(xxx) connotes unrecognisable speech.
Bold type means emphatic speech.
Punctuation is not grammatical but reflecting sentence rhythm. In the same manner, if a statement is not followed by a full stop, the next statement is usually a direct response.
Underlined parts are synchronic utterances and refer to in-speech interruptions and takeovers.

(back)