Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

so to speak. Once this context is established, the methodology of this text will
be laid out.
If ethnography once imagined it could describe discrete
cultures, it now contends with boundaries that crisscross
over a field at once fluid and saturated with power. In a
world where “open borders” appear more salient than
“closed communities,” one wonders how to define a project
for cultural studies. (Rosaldo 45)
In the above excerpt from Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social
Analysis (1989) Renato Rosaldo briefly summarizes his exploration of a
turning point in the discipline of Anthropology: The discipline’s shifting
notions and definitions of “culture” were a key issue in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and
still are to some degree. Where once we have worked with a singular and
ethnocentric concept of culture in the style of Tylor and Spencer, time moved
the discipline towards objectivism, but left it with the concept of a
homogenous culture. Some decades later, and we argue for cultural patterns,
which enable us to flee (but not abandon) last traces of imperialistic
ethnocentrism, while still maintaining a sense of human commonalities. As
culture moves from the concept of a homogenous community to the notion of
multiple border zones, the concept of the subject is directly affected, and that
of ethnography is indirectly so: Regarding the former, it seems very obvious
that a change of the concept of culture would directly affect the notion of the
subject (the object of study in the classical approach). As Rosaldo argues, the
“concept of a multiplex personal identity” began to join “its predecessor, the
‘unified subject’” (Rosaldo 166). Parallel to these changes, there is a change
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