Commentary

Audience semiotics, interpretive communities and

the ‘ethnographic turn’ in media research
Kim Christian Schroder
UNIVERSITY OF ROSKILDE, DENMARK

The concept of ‘interpretive community’ is one of the most used and abused in
reception research over the last ten years. We have invoked this concept as a
panacea to explain ad-hoc all sorts of social conditionings of the reception of media
messages.
In my teaching, for example, when I present a study of how black and white
teenagers produce different readings of a Madonna video (Brown and Schulze,
1990) I ascribe the difference to their membership of different ethnic interpretive
communities. When the boys and the girls in this study diffcr in their decoding I
say that this is due to their membership of different gendered interpretive
communities, adding that the meanings of the ethnic and gcndered interpretive
communities somehow ‘overlap’, ‘crisscross’, or the like.
Jensen (1990: 130) defines interpretive communities as entities ‘characterized not
simply by socioeconomic background variables, but simultaneously by their
discursive modes of interpreting media content’. Nevertheless, his article uses the
concept in at least two different ways, one of which contradicts its own definition.
First the article states that the old and young audience groups of the study (that is
demographic groups) ‘may represent different interpretive communitics’ (Jensen,
1990: 135). Here the culturaYdiscursive dimensions of the definition seem to have
disappeared. Secondly, the article claims that the two twelve-person workshop
groups, selected to represent a diversity of socioeconomic background and gender,
‘present themselves as an interpretive community in the sense of a social collective
with particular interests in communications and culture’ (Jensen, 1990: 142).
Clearly, one could easily think of other workshops whose members wouM make up
such a social collective, for instance if the members were brought together from a
neighbourhood community. But in this study to call the workshops ‘social
collectives’ seems to be a romanticization: the participants were isolated individuals
brought together for the sake of research. They are not, in my view, an interpretive
community, in any sense of the word.
My criticism of this particular article should not bc taken to imply that it is a bad
study; in other respects it is not at all bad. But I hope to have demonstrated,
through these examples of the imprecision with which the term ‘interpretive

Media, Culrure & Society (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 16 (1994), 337-347

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338 Media, Cultitre & Society

community’ is currently used, that we need to clarify the concept if it is t o be of any

real use in media research.
Such clarification is all the more necessary as I believe the concept of interpretive
community has been a catalyst which has facilitated the ‘ethnographic turn’ in
media studies. The moment we introduced the concept into our discourse, the
multiple readings found by early reception research became anchored t o an entity
that was both discursive and social, and which seemed to require further
ethnographic exploration - because the media were in a sense secondary t o the
everyday life of these communities. This development towards ethnography and
the everyday is now threatening t o write the media, as the focus of research, out of
existence (Allor, 1988; Radway, 1988; Ang, 1991).

Interpretive communities: a critical discussion of a productive

concept

In reception research today the concept of interpretive community is mostly used in

the plural: when we find multiple readings of media texts we ascribe them t o the
fact that people belong t o different interpretive communities.
When the concept was first brought into media studies it was used in the singular
to explain the uniformity of reading in one interpretive community (Radway,
1984): because the female buyers of romance novels in a specific American town
aggregated around one bookshop, which functioned as an interactive forum for the
sharing of reading experiences, they tended t o share interpretations of and norms
for the novels they all read.
In other words, Radway’s interpretive community is indeed a community, well-
defined and with finite membership, it embodies certain ‘reading strategies’ or
‘interpretive conventions’ (Radway, 1984: ll), and the meanings constructed by
the participants arise from ‘assumptions’ which they have ‘adopted by virtue of
prior participation in a specific interpretive community’ (Radway, 1984: 243).
Radway’s ‘singular’ use of the concept is transferred directly from Stanley Fish’s
seminal book Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (1980). Again, as clearly signalled by the title, the concern is not
ultimately with multiple meanings, but with- the constraints through which one
(academic, literary) community arrive at authoritative interpretations of literary
texts. Fish is concerned with ‘a way of reading, which, if it became accepted, would
be, for a time at least, the true one’ (Fish, 1980: 16).
For Fish an interpretive community is a social and institutional one (as opposed
to a semiotic one), whose club-like character is clear from the statement that it is
inhabited by ‘certified members’ (Fish, 1980: 357). Such membership means that
there are explicit and implicit ‘rules of the game’ that must be observed, certain
constraints on those who belong to the community and make sense within it.
Fish’s overriding concern is with the literary community, in which the practi-
tioners’ whole rukon d’itre is disagreement about interpretation. He therefore has
t o allow for the existence of ‘sub-communities’ within the larger community (Fish,
1980: 343); the ‘shared rules’ are neither monolithic nor stable, the subcommunities
may have their own rules t o supplement the basic shared rules of the institution as a
whole.
The introduction of this category of the subcommunity does not, however, solve
the problem of different interpretations arising in the non-institutional contexts of
everyday life. Here an individual’s reading of a text may be different from that of

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Schrdder, Audience semiotics 339

another individual not because they belong to separate secondary sub-communities

within the same primary interpretive community (with the exception of the shared
community of the language they both speak), but because they inhabit in different
proportions a whole range of interpretive communities. In everyday life people
hold multiple ‘membership’ of a number of primary interpretive communities,
institutional and non-institutional, whose signifying potentials intersect in different
ways in the individual consciousness.
In order t o understand the complex, socially situated interpretive processes of
everyday life it is necessary to adopt a semiotic and discursive view of interpretive
communities. Such an approach suggests that the answer to the question of where
social meanings come from must be sought along the lines of intenveaving cultural
codes. The framework within which we can conceptualize such signifying processes
could be called a ‘social semiotic of the media audience’ (Hodge and Kress, 1988;
Schrbder, 1988; Jensen 1991).
A social semiotic is a theory which sees culture itself as being produced from
intersecting code systems. Media material, in this view, is read in multiple ways
because each readerhiewer’s individual and social meaning potential leads t o
differentiated perceptions of the media text, as well as t o shared ones. Specific
readings, then, originate both in macrosocial factors (class, ethnicity, gender, age
and so on) and in the microsocial or situationalhnteractional relations which serve
their own social and discursive functions in addition to serving as mediating and
inflecting filters of the macrosocial relations.
In other words, the media text is a meaning potential which triggers the
recipient’s meaning potential, which is in its turn a product of his or her cumulative
social and cultural experience. Since these experiences are unique to each indi-
vidual, his or her meaning resources are ultimately unique. But since individuals
have belonged t o social groupings - which we have often called interpretive
communities - since they entered this world, they inevitably share a large
proportion of their communicative resources with other people.
Along similar lines, Jensen (1987) sees what he calls ‘communities of meaning’ as
‘the source of those codes of understanding that audiences apply in interpreting
media codes’ (Jensen, 1987: 28), arguing that ‘for reception-analytical purposes,
recipients are their codes of understanding’ (Jensen, 1987: 28). He thereby defines
audiences in purely discursive terms while also emphasizing that reception must be
‘understood with constant reference to the social and cultural networks that situate
the individual viewer’ (Jensen, 1987: 25).
If such theoretical reasoning can be seen as in some way representative for the
current understandings of interpretive communities within qualitative audience
research, we have arrived at a position where interpretive communities are
conceptualized in two interdependent ways: as situational and interactive social
networks on the one hand, and as discursive formations, or codes, on the other. In
both these capacities the role of the media is a secondary one, as the interpretive
competences of the audience originate elsewhere. It is thus a small step to claiming
that, ‘The central object of analysis for mass communication research thus can be
said to lie outside the media, in the cultures and communities of which media and
audiences are constituents’ (Jensen, 1990: 143). This is a theoretically valid
conclusion - and, incidentally, a fundamental tenet of critical media research in
Northern Europe since the early 1970s (see Negt, 1974) - and it points to a
research path that certainly should be followed. However, as leading scholars are
pulling in this direction, what I would not wish to see is a situation in which this
conclusion assumes the status and authority of theoretical dogma, as ‘the truth’,
within the interpretive community of qualitative audience research.

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340 Media, Cirltitre & Society

‘Interpretive communities’ as a theoreticai imperative towards

the discourses of t h e everyday

Ien Ang (1990) expresses concern that reception studies are too myopic, as they
isolate one moment in the cultural process as being of ultimate significance and
ignore the wider sociocultural conditions of audience practices. She suggests that,
‘what we need is not more ethnographic work on discrete audience groups, but on
reception as an integral part of popular cultural practices that articulate both
“subjective” and “objective”, both “micro” and “macro” processes’ (Ang, 1990: 244).
Similarly Radway (1988) explicitly seeks to dclcgitimate traditional reception
research of people’s media experiences, because these experiences are not, in a
sense, primary to their lives: ‘Our habitual practice of conducting bounded,
regionalized investigations of singular text-audience circuits may be preventing us
from investigating . . . the very articulations between discourses and practices we
deem important both theoretically and strategically’ (Radway, 1988: 366). She
suggests that, as researchers, we should not let ourselves be directed by the circuit
of mass-communicated products, because individuals have no identity as simply
receivers of such products. And we should realize that individualdsubjects precede
the media products they consume: they and their cultural repertoires have been
formed by multiple discourses (interpretive communities?) throughout their lives.
Therefore, what we must seek to understand are ‘the ways in which historically
concrete social subjects articulate together many ideological elements, discourses,
and practices across the terrain of daily life’ (Radway, 1988: 364). And ethno-
graphy should be our method, because it insists that ‘the social is always actively
constructed by living subjects’ (Radway, 1988: 373).
Radway is well aware that if we adopt the perspective of the everyday we are
entering the difficult territory of ‘the endlessly shifting, ever-evolving kaleidoscope
of daily life’ (Radway, 1988: 366) and may find it difficult to retain any sense of how
the media are integrated in this daily life - not to. mention our own role as
researchers in all that! As Radway herself acknowledges, as she proposes to study
the articulation of play and its hegemonic and counter-hegcmonie dimensions on
three cultural sites (the family, the school, the leisure world), the project of
everyday ethnography is ‘potentially unwieldy and unending’ (Radway, 1988: 369).
Ang (1991) proposes a similar research strategy and encounters similar problems
with respect to the relationship between the everyday, the researcher and the larger
society:

Our starting point must be the acknowledgement that the social world of actual
audiences consists of an infinite and ever expanding myriad of dispersed
practices and experiences that can never be, and should not be, contained in any
one total system of knowledge. (Ang, 1991: 155)

She proposes to capture the polysemic and polymorphic practices of everyday

culture through ‘the principle of “methodological situationalism” ’ (Ang, 1991:
162). We should never leave the micro-situations, never attempt to make
generalizations about the whole quilt, but only do a kind of gentle comparison of a
limited number of patches, because ‘generalisations are necessarily violations to the
concrete specificity of all unique micro-situations’ (Ang, 1991: 164). In what
appears to be a new theoretical and methodological orthodoxy of diffuseness, Ang
suggests that we should not attempt to add up results in order to say something

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Schr@der,Audience semiotics 341

about ‘the whole social world of actual audiences, because the very fluid nature of
that world resists full rcprcsentation’ (Ang, 1991: 164).
As I see it, to draw such practical conclusions from a (quite plausible) theoretical
position is tantamount to all but writing the audience out of reality, into the pure
realm of situational discourses -and empirical paralysis (see also Bird, 1992: 257).
In the following, I argue for a position that makes it possible to conceive of actual
audiences in a somewhat more tangible and generalizing manner, without ending
up with the sort of empiricist objectification that Ang sets out to combat.
I agree with Ang that, in principle, rheoreticully, ‘the world of actual audiences is
too polysemic and polymorphic to be completely articulated in a closed discursive
structure’ (Ang, 1991: 14). But then let’s get on with it and produce incompletely
articulated accounts of audience readings and practices which may, in spite of their
(no doubt) multiple shortcomings, provide illuminating insights into the polysemic
and polymorphic relationships between media and penple in the world we live in.

‘Interpretive communities’, as a methodological imperative

towards natural-group research designs

Even though the methodological implications for media studies of the ethnographic
turn have not been focal in the theoretical discussions above, the implicit
methodological agenda has clearly been one that calls not for engaging the
‘nomadic’ individuals of contemporary culture, but the groups and communities
that populate the situational terrain of everyday interaction.
The logic of such situationism is striking: since people live their lives and use
media in various interactive situations, this is where the researcher should engage
them. But, however they are composed, focus groups may be less than ideal
because the constraints created by group dynamics may exclude certain responses,
and because the groups in question are often in no way natural. For instance, the
studies of Morley (1980) and Jensen (1990) fail to capture genuine situated social
interaction because their designs merely bring together a number of otherwise
unrelated individuals.
However, even research which succeeds in engaging natural interactive groups
(such as the family, the peer group) may be problematic: each of the individual
members of such groups or communities belongs to many other groups or
communities. By choosing one of these, for example, the peer group, as the human
unit of research, the researcher unavoidably gives undue priority to that unit, to the
virtual exclusion, or at least obscuration, of all the other interpretive Communities
the individual belongs to.
Of course, in some studies the researcher is specifically interested in the
signifying dynamics andlor interactive practices of one such community: teenagers
and video films (Jerslev, 1992), families and everyday television (Lull, 1980; Jensen
et al., 1993), new communication technologies in the household (Silverstone,
1991), but there is a whole array of interesting questions concerning media
experiences and uses that transcend the single social situation of use, and the single
interpretive community.
If, say, we wanted to explore the role of broadcast news and its social signifying
processes among the population of a country, it would be impossible to do justice to
the vastness of this subject through a study of one interpretive community. To
interview familieshouseholds, for instance, is clearly insufficient if one wants to
capture the multiple interpersonal discourses through which people make sense of

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342 Media, Ciillure & Sociey

the news, not to mention those internalized discourses of the individual that
originate in his or her discursive socialization.
Taking myself as an example of the ordinary media user, among the inter-
personal news discourses I am involved in during the course of a day could typically
be the following: a t breakfast my family discuss whether a radio news story about a
change in mortgage laws may affect us. At mid-morning I have a telephone
conversation with a colleague a t another university; he is relieved t o have just
heard on the news that additional resources are being provided for universities,
because his two colleagues will now not be fired. Coming home in the late
afternoon I ask a neighbour about his trip to Seville; he replies that the Danish
Pavilion looked much smaller at the Expo than on the TV news. Finally, a t that
evening’s weekly dinner club of four neighbouring families, a vociferous discussion
goes on about the recent wave of refugees and immigrants t o Denmark; the news is
obviously the main source of the arguments they use to support their views.
My solution would be t o use the individual interview in the informant’s home as
the research setting that best does justice to the whole array of cultural discourses
that the individual inhabits -for the simple reason that it does not try t o build any
of them into the interview situation. Even if we want t o study ‘situated viewers’, we
d o not have to ‘situate’ them in natural or simulated groups in order to explore such
situatedness. Seeing the practices of a situational group like the family as the
analytical object does not mean that it can only be studied through a methodology
that regards family practices as also the empirical object.
In other words, a research design that privileges the individual reader does not
automatically prevent us from exploring the multiple sociocultural discourses that
partake in the construction of that individual’s readings and uses of television (or
other media).’ This is ultimately a n empirical question, wc might say, depending on
the actual terms we establish with the individual informants and on the questions
we ask them.

The mass media and their interpretive communities: towards a

platform for quasi-ethnographic media research

Kirsten Drotner, in a recent paper on ‘the everyday’ in media ethnography, laid

down the requirements of ‘real’ ethnographic work (Drotner, 1992). People come
first, she says, not the media. Secondly, a real ethnographer spends large amounts
of time with the informants over a long period of time. Thirdly, ethnography is
multilocational, it engages its informants in a variety of settings (home, school,
club, cinema and so on).
These requirements of media ethnography mean that the more we follow the
‘ethnographic turn’, the more will research that foregrounds the media a t the
expense of the everyday be delegitimated. In the following I attempt to describe a
type of media-audience study that tries t o combine a focal interest in the media
audience with more than just a side-glance a t the micro- and macro-social contexts
in which this audience is situated.

The reader as social facl

We may readily accept that individuals have been discursively constructed before
their encounter with any concrete media text, and that they therefore ‘precede’ the

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Schrdder, Audience semiotics 343

media as argued by Radway (1988). We may equally accept that no individual lives
his or her life as a ‘viewer’: for most of the time people live thcir lives without
seeing themselves as ‘audience’.
However, although we may only know audiences through discourses, they d o
exist outside the hazy world of discourses. And at least intermittently people do see
themselves as being at the receiving end of a mass-mediated circuit, both when they
pick up the phone to protest vociferously to the news-broadcasting institution over
some violation of their moral norms, and when in front of the soap opera screen
they immerse themselves into the imaginary community of pleasure-seekers.
In such situations people are the ‘receivers’ of media texts for the simple reason
that they do nor play the reciprocal role of ‘producers’ of those media texts: others
have put together the signs for the recipients in order that the latter may make their
own sense of them. This theoretical distinction between receptive and productive
roles is well-established within the ethnography of communication in connection
with the concept of ‘communicative competence’:

Knowledge of rules for appropriate communicative behavior entails understand-

..
ing a wide range of language forms . but not necessarily the ability to produce
them. Members of the same community may understand varieties of a language
which differ according to the social class, region, sex, age, and occupation of the
speaker, but only a few talented mimics will be able to speak them all. (Saville-
Troike, 1989: 23)

It is therefore legitimate to focus on how people-as-receivers make sense of the

particular corners of reality that are occupied by the media; and it is precisely the
use of a quasi-ethnographic method of reception study that may enable even a
‘limited‘ study of, say, news programmes to expand into a much wider exploration
of media as well as other social and political discourses. In addition to specifically
seeking knowledge about media readings and experiences a quasi-ethnographic
approach may use a media programme or genre as a research ploy - a plausible
trigger of discourses concerning general social processes.
To give a concrete example: having established that the proportion of corporate
responsibility advertising has increased significantly-over the last ten years, I
interview (twice) a number of individuals about how they respond to such (print)
ads (most of them dealing with the companies’ ethical and environmental concern
or their role as benefactor in local communities). The study seeks to illuminate, on
the one hand, both textual and generic issues (for instance, how people categorize
different advertisements they encounter; how they read and interrelate the visual
and verbal parts). On the other hand, it explores a number of more general
discourses about such micro-social practices as green shopping patterns, and
macro-social questions of political power, business responsibility and consumption
as a potential site of political empowerment (Schrdder, in press a).
This project thus studies the cultural meanings people create around a textual
phenomenon of everyday life of which they are the recipients. This textual
phenomenon in its turn triggers discourses about the wider political and social
issues that may be indicative of important changes in the hegemonic structures of
late capitalist society. Thus, even without starting with the everyday, and without
using ‘pure’ ethnographic fieldwork, this study will be able to present and
document politically relevant textual as well as micro- and macro-social insights.
Indeed, it is difficult to even imagine a natural interpretive community which this
study could use as the human unit of research.

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344 Media, Gtltitre & Society

The reader’s interpretive comniunities

Since individuals are not islands, but live in a sea of social meanings, reception
research must be able to explain how meanings and meaning potentials become
incorporated in each human being.
The most productive way of conceptualizing individual and cultural meaning
processes is one that builds on the work of the American semiotician Charles S .
Peirce (Schroder, in press b; Jensen, 1991b). Compared with the dominant
Saussurian approach, Peirce’s theory is superior in several ways: instead of seeing
signs as components of a static system, it situates signs in situations of use.
Moreover, Peirce does not confine his semiotics to the study of verbal signs, but
builds a theory which encompasses all human sign systems (Peirce, 1982).
In other words, a Peircean perspective conceptualizes the analysis of media
signifying processes not within a general, abstract linguistic system where meanings
are fixed, and are assumed to be transferred to the recipients’ minds, but in a
communicative context where meanings are only potential until actualized by
socially situated human beings. For Peirce the social situatedness of sign users is a
function of the interpretive communities they belong to. And, as with Fish’s use of
the concept rcfcrred to previously, an interpretive community for Peirce is an
interactive institution (namely the scientific community) that imposes constraints
on the process of semiosis among its members so as to enable them to arrive at
authoritative - if temporary - scientific truth.
In ethnographic reception research we need to retain this understanding of
‘community’: we must reserve the concept for those relatively close-knit interactive
groups whose discourses both enforce and develop the dynamics of meanings and
norms that characterize the practices of their members (families, peer groups,
groups at work, religious communities, and so on).
On this level of interactive social communities we need to set up a division
between, on the one hand, those social communities (such as the family or
neighbourhood) which are constituted independently of any media use, and those
which are constituted by some form of media use on the other.
It is only the latter which are, properly speaking, ‘interpretive communities’,
characterized by ‘the in sitrt sense-making activities of natural media use groups’
(Lindlof, 1988: 83). Examples would be teenage groups gathering around such
cultural forms as video films or rock music, adult cult film audiences, and Radway’s
group of female romance readers. Such interpretive communities may correspond
to natural sociostructural communities such as the family, but it is their media use
alone which defines them as an interpretive community.
We shall have to abandon the use of the term ‘interpretive community’ which
equates it with ‘socio-demographic group’. On the one hand there is something
intuitively plausible in the notion that people’s cultural codes and values are
affected or even produced by the class, gender, ethnic and age relations through
which they have been socialized. On the other hand, these categories have been
objectified and abused by the mainstream in social science research and their
precise modes of influence on the individual consciousness are unclear (see Milroy,
1987: 14). Unease with these categories has led to various attempts to conceptualize
such fundamental social influences in different terms. With respect to class, one of
the more persuasive attempts has been Bourdieu’s concept of habittls (Bourdieu,
1984), which has been aptly summarized as ‘the systems of dispositions structuring
individual practice, including social, political and cultural choices and preferences,
[which] is overdetermined by class belongingness and is internalised in early
childhood’ (Skovmand, 1985: 43).

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Schrgder, Audience semiotics 345

FIGURE 1

I
1. LANGUAGE AS HETEROGLOT

2. CULTURAL POSITIONINGS
(gender, class, ethnicity)

3. INTERACTIVE COMMUNITIES
t
(media-focused)
/
Interpretive communities \ Social communities
(non-media focused)

4. INDIVIDUAL RECIPIENT: REPERTOIRES

On the level of the individual, the working of ‘habitus’ ensures the active
presence of past experiences in the form of schemes of perception, of thought and
of action. Although these schemes are evidently mediated through the interaction
of micro-social communities like the family, the neighbourhood and the peer
group, the habitus which generates them transcends any of these communities.
When in media research we wish to take such subject-forming agencies into
consideration we should therefore not speak of them as ‘interpretive communities’.
One possibility is t o adopt the term suggested by Ang (1991): in a discussion of
situation-transcending factors she suggests the term ‘cultural positionings’ for those
dispositions people ‘actualize within concrete situations, such as those along the
lines of gender, class, ethnicity, generation, and so on’ (Ang, 1991: 184).
Finally, when we try to explain the sources of audience meanings we should not
forget the profound role of the language in the widest possible sense, not as a
system in the Saussurian sense, but as the overarching and heterogeneous symbolic
environment individuals live in, and out of which they create their own communi-
cative repertoires, through cultural positionings and interactive communities. This
is the sense in which ‘language’ in the singular is always already plural: ‘heteroglot’,
or inherently multilingual (Newcomb, 1984: 39).
Summing up, when in media research we try to conceptualize the recipient and
the processes through which meanings are created the reductive chart in Figure 1
may be of help as a heuristic device. In this chart the interpretive repertoires of a n
individual media user are seen as a product ofthe language community as a whole,
ofthe cultural positionings that become established in the course of the individual’s
life history, of the communicative interactions in the interpretive and social
communities of everyday life, and finally of the unique assemblage of these
influences constructed by the individual from moment to moment.

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346 Media, Citltitre & Society

The chart may be of some help to us when, in order to pursue a knowledge

interest in specific media experiences and uses, we make choices for the design of
our projects. We may wish to explore the nature of cultural positionings, as Jensen
did when he invited young and old Americans to discuss television in workshops-
on-the-future (Jensen, 1990). Or we may wish to explore the signifying dynamics in
interactive communities, as Morley, Silverstone and Hirsch are doing in their study
of communication technologies in the household (Silverstone, 1991). Or we may be
interested in studying through individual interpretive repertoires how people makc
sense of corporate advertising (Schrdder, in press a),
Whenever, as researchers, we have gone through the process of setting up
concepts and categories like interpretive communities and cultural positionings, we
are prone to delude ourselves that the world really consists of such neat labels. It
doesn’t. Rcadcrs of this article may ask themselves what cultural positionings they
inhabit, what real interactive communities have a formative influence on their
cultural codes? However, even in a world of fuzzy identities, the chart and the
reasoning behind its creation may induce us to be as precise as we can, even when
absolute precision is impossible.

Notes

1. As Jordin and Brunt put it, ‘the individual is not a “social atom”, the simplest
irreducible element of social life but, on the contrary, the most complex element,
the point at which a multitude of shifting social and cultural elements converge’
(Jordin and Brunt, 1988: 234).

References

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Ang, I. (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience. London and New York:
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Bird, E. (1992) ‘Travels in Nowhcre Land: Ethnography and the “Impossible”
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