Abstract
The “revival of ethnography” in the field of audience studies in the 1980s is not only a re-discussion of the traditional methods in communication studies, but also a result of the influence of the “ethnographic turn” in cultural studies that focuses on the television audience. This was in line with the need of film studies in response to the lack of empirical audience evidence in textual analysis theory. Bruce Austin, one of the representative researchers in the field of ethnography, presents to us through his study of “cult” movie audiences that ethnography as a method helps us with data collection but nevertheless lacks general analysis. In other words, ethnography as a method is only suitable for analyzing small groups, which fails to develop into a general theory in film study. Consequently, it is often taken as a method for data collection used in the film industry or history-reception studies. However, taking into account the research examples that such method engages in history as well as the current phenomenon of Chinese film culture, one could still employ ethnographic audience research as an intermediate paradigm to effectively make up for the lack of empirical audience evidence that is found between the traditional quantitative statistical analysis and the abstract analysis after film studies has become an individual academic discipline.
Keywords
ethnography; audience research; Bruce Austin; “cult” film
First Page
11
Last Page
22
Recommended Citation
Lu, Kang. 2022. "Ethnographic Audience Research as an Intermediary Paradigm: A Case Study of Bruce Austin's “Cult” Movie Audiences." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 42, (4): pp.11-22. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol42/iss4/2
