Cultural Studies och etnologin

Abstract

In this introduction, the background to the boom in Cultural Studies in the USA is presented. When this field of research, unwilling to define itself as a discipline, was exported from the Birmingham CCCS, it changed its main direction "from class struggle to the politics of pleasure", from the study of lived experience to textual analysis of representations and discourses. In Swedish ethnology one notes a similar development, although fieldwork and ethnographic description still retain their central importance to our way of doing Cultural Studies.