From: "Terry Threadgold" <ThreadgoldT2-AT-cardiff.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 13:36:33 GMT0BST
Subject: Re: CFP: "Ethnography & Everyday Life"


On 13 Aug 2002 at 0:37, mwolf-m-AT-bgnet.bgsu.edu wrote:
Can you give me details of the conference - where, when?
Terry Threadgold
> Dear List Members:
> 
> This is the first year that the Popular Culture Associate conference
> will be hosting an area dedicated to "Ethnography & Everyday Life" 
> what might be more widely thought of simply as "anthropology."  It's
> my hope as area chair to bring more anthropologists (as well as
> sociologists) into the Popular Culture Association, which is generally
> inundated by more textual approaches (scholars with literary studies
> backgrounds).  While the Birmingham School of cultural studies largely
> founded the employment of ethnography in popular culture studies, as a
> method it has latterly been decreasing in use.  The crisis in
> ethnography seemed to formally divorce contemporary culture studies
> from anthropology and sociology, and it now seems appropriate to
> reintroduce the three disciplines.  Similarly, the relationship
> between popular culture and everyday life is often elided in favor of
> monological "thick descriptions" of the popular discourse at hand. 
> Situating shared popular culture with the sort of individual accounts
> that ethnography provides will do well to further popular culture
> studies as a whole.
> 
> I should also clarify for those of you who don't normally focus on
> popular culture that "popular culture" isn't the same as "pop"
> culture.  Inasmuch as the two are interrelated, "pop" culture is
> properly music, cinema, genre literature, comic books, etc. 
> Basically, if it can be bought or implies an audience, it's "pop." 
> "Popular" culture, conversely, extends to include all of the shared
> lived experiences of everyday life.  As such it includes things from
> political and religious discourses to matters of kinship and language.
>  "Popular culture studies" is really an anthropology of modernity, but
> as an organization, the PCA has largely eschewed the discipline (and
> seemingly vice versa).  But that is not to say that these approaches
> are unwelcome: Studies of both "popular" and "pop" culture are
> encouraged at the PCA.
> 
> If this year's "Ethnography & Everyday Life" area is well populated
> with papers, and well attended, it will become a fixture at the PCA
> meetings in future years, providing anthropologists and sociologists
> with yet another avenue for sharing their research.  The PCA also has
> a history of choosing very desirable locales for its meetings, this
> years being New Orleans (April 16th  19th, 2003), so at the very least
> it can be a fine vacation.  I hope that the area will succeed, and I
> look forward to your participation.
> 
> 100 word abstracts are due by September 10th and can be sent to me
> care of <mwolfmeyer-AT-reconstruction.ws>.  If you have any questions or
> concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.  Please forward this
> message to possible participants.
> 
> Information on the PCA can be found at: 
> http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~pcaaca/pop.html
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Matthew Wolf-Meyer
> http://www.reconstruction.ws
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Professor Terry Threadgold
Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
Director, Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media Research
Deputy Head of School
School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
Cardiff University
Bute Building
King Edward V11 Avenue
Cardiff. CF1 3NB
Wales. UK.

Phone: 44 (0)29 20 874756 (w), 44 (0)2920 637601 (h)
Fax:44 (0)29 20 238832



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