I’m not an anthropologist, so let me first quote from Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater’s book FieldWorking, which is the textbook where I first learned about subcultures:
We define culture as an invisible web of behaviors, patterns, rules, and rituals of a group of people who have contact with one another and share common languages…
In your fieldworking experiences, you will be constantly asking yourself, “Where is the culture?” of the group you are investigating. The goal of fieldworking is to find it. You will find evidence in the language of the group you study, in its cultural artifacts, or in its rituals and behaviors. Fieldworkers investigate the cultural landscape, the larger picture of how a culture functions: its rituals, its rules, its traditions, and its behaviors. And they poke around the edges at the stories people tell, the items people collect and value, and the materials people use to go about their daily living. By learning from the people in a culture what it is like to be part of their world, fieldworkers discover a culture’s way of being, knowing, and understanding (3).
This may sound a little abstract. The authors point out that it’s basically a kind of people-watching, “checking out how others talk, dress, behave, and interact” (1). You need to make these observations in a place where these people hang out; that’s your fieldsite. Once you’ve chosen a group and a place you can observe them, the next step is to get out into the “field” to take some notes. In the past my students have written about such groups as the following: waitresses, Stop & Shop workers, saleswomen at cosmetics counters, dog-walkers in the park, volleyball parents, dance moms, weight-lifters, phlebotomists, Boy Scouts, VFW regulars, polka dancers, karaoke singers, pizza delivery “boys”, preschoolers, wiccan women, Renaissance re-enactors, old-guy hockey leagues, garden club members, Bible study groups, gymnasts. I’m looking forward this semester to essays on some new subjects such as URI fraternities, New Bedford fishermen, Portuguese social club members, funeral home workers, long-distance runners, FFA officers.
In addition to the usual real-world fieldsite, you may want to consider a virtual fieldsite of some sort, that is, an online space where your subculture interacts (a social networking site like myspace, facebook, xanga, deviantart, Second Life or an online gaming community such as World of Warcraft).