Symbolic work and ethnographic imagination. An interview with Paul Willis
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Abstract
This interview with one of the first ethnographers of urban popular cultures reconstructs the career of Paul Willis from his education and his ambivalent relationship with the Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies to his investigations on consumption. With great freedom, he depicts the ethnographic imagination through the body as an instrument of research and as a means of imagination, the symbolic richness of sensuous experience, etc. Ethnography is thus shown to be an innovative social science methodology with political potential.
Keywords
- Paul Willis
- youth cultures
- consumption
- ethnography
- politics of methodology
