And the person who has given all this conflictual activity the most detailed elaboration in recent times is the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu's tremendous output of work hasn't had much impact on cultural criticism in Australia, partly because sociology here doesn't have a high profile. Alas, the innocent days of semiotics are pretty much over. Culture is no longer encrypted into a site, waiting passively for some bright spark to come along and decipher it and so enlighten the rest of us. And, of course, this is where things get complicated.
Few people do ethnography well.
Semiotics gave the cultural field a clear set of identities, laid out 'objectively'. But ethnography means getting up close and personal. As a result it can thoroughly confuse things, so that it can seem at times as if culture 'happens' everywhere, all over the place, without order. Cultural Studies in Australia was never so 'totalising', and the authors know it. Bourdieu isn't the only influence, however.