The tension in rave for girls comes, it seems, from remaining in control,
and at the same time losing themselves in dance and music. Abandon
in dance must now, post-AIDS, be balanced by caution and the exercise
of control in sex. One solution might lie in cultivating a hyper-sexual
appearance, which is, however, symbolically sealed off through the
dummy, the whistle or the ice lolly. This idea of insulating the body
from ‘invasion’ is even more apparent in the heavy duty industrial pro-
tective clothing worn by both male and female fans of German techno
music, a European variant of rave.
McRobbie argues that the overt ‘childlike’ connotations of the dummy and
the ice-lolly serve to construct a message: namely, that rave subculture
explicitly rejected the world of adult concerns, thereby simultaneously
expressing its anxiety about them.
The techniques used to ‘read’ the social practices (the enthusiastic
dancing, the fashion, the preferred foodstuff) consist of a sophisticated set
of strategies for decoding signs – again they are related to the techniques
used to interpret literary, visual and media texts. In isolation from
ethnographic practices, such interpretations of subcultures (especially rel-
atively powerless subcultures) have been criticised as further impositions,
this time of academics who force their own meanings onto the ambiguous
signs of the subcultural members themselves. Widdiecombe and Wooffitt’s
(1995) interviews with subculture members contain examples of those
members’ irritation with outsiders’ interpretations of their activities (see
Chapter 6). However, as Murdock notes above, taken as sophisticated dis-
cussions of the meaning potential of the social practices, such semiotic
interpretations have the merit of defending subcultural behaviour from the
charge that it is shallow and random. The clothing and behaviour of the
young girls is dignified by McRobbie’s analysis of it as part of a larger
system of meanings that respond to current social pressures.
Cultural studies today tends to combine semiotic analysis with ethno-
graphic surveys. McRobbie (1993) makes a strong plea for a ‘thick’
description of girls’ involvement in subcultural activity that portrays in
depth how they are actively contributing to the economic and social system
in which they are situated (e.g. subcultural activity offers some girls oppor-
tunities to adapt and sell on second-hand clothing designed for use in
raves). In another study of dancers, Thomas (1993, 1997) used ethnographic
techniques to explore how a young multicultural, mixed-sex dance group
explored issues of race and gender through their membership of a London
jazz-dance performance group. Although some semiotic skills are in
evidence in her analysis of three dances (Thomas, 1997), the burden of the
research lies in her observation of the dancers and her interviews with them
180
Intercultural Approaches to ELT
C:\Documents and Settings\Stephen Cracknell\My Documents\corbett\corbett.vp
13 August 2003 16:39:15
Color profile: Generic CMYK printer profile
Composite Default screen
on how
they
interpret the dancing. Her general findings are that British
culture ‘feminises’ dancing, so that the males in the group, while fiercely
proud of their performance, were more anxious than the females about the
extent to which they had to exhibit emotion on stage. She also found that
the black women felt more constrained than the black men by a white-
dominated society whose expectations tend to stereotype them as sexual
caricatures. Thomas’ research, like most ethnography, privileges not her
own interpretation of the dances, but how the dancers themselves make
meaning from their practices.
Again, there are challenges and possibilities in such research for ELT
teachers, particularly teachers of older teenagers and young adults. The
attraction of cultural studies for many of its researchers is that it takes youth
seriously. There are problems – as McRobbie and others note – for adults in
‘invading’ the arena of youth subcultures (anxieties which can be extended
to any outsiders imposing themselves on a subcultural community), and
indeed members may resist categorisation and interpretation by outsiders.
However, sensitively handled, social practices can become ‘textual
resources’ for use in the ELT classroom. The stylistic analyses used in
literary, visual and media texts can be adapted to the analysis of social
practice, and ethnographic techniques can be employed to explore subcul-
tures. Obviously, an intercultural ELT curriculum can usually only provide
for small-scale projects; nevertheless, there is scope for intercultural explo-
ration even within the constraints of an ELT course. The encoding-
decoding model of discourse can once more help organise investigations of
the subculture in question and guide relevant questions: Who are the origi-
nators? How did their styles and behaviours originate? What are the
economic and technological constraints upon the production of styles and
behaviours? What might the styles and behaviours mean? What are the
communication patterns between originators and consumers? How do the
originators and consumers make sense of their behaviours?
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
