This book is an ethnography of house signs: a tradition at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, in which outdoor signs identify houses rented by students. The signs tend to be witty, relying on puns, allusions to popular culture, in-jokes, and other devices to indicate that these houses are places where students have “fun.” What constitutes fun, as the author discusses in his opening chapter, is variable over time, as student populations reflect their generation. But the book is not an exploration of student fun in itself; rather, it is an exploration of how house signs reflect concepts of fun and student self-identification within a contemporary college town.
The author’s general exploration of fun, and more particularly student fun, is useful, but house signs reflect only a limited range of fun: namely, partying, and more specifically, the sex, alcohol, and drugs that define the fun of partying. Through interviews conducted by the author and his students with house residents, this study tries to elicit the students’ understandings of their own house signs, of the house signs of others, of the reactions of both non-student and student townsfolk to house signs, and of the various aesthetics and beliefs associated with this tradition. The result of this analysis is, however, only partially successful.
Problems arise with the approach taken by the author. Who is the audience for this book? Clearly, the book is not a jokebook for nostalgic alumni, despite the listing of witty signs and descriptions of fun that signs represent. This book is aimed at scholars, but all too often the author treats the subject as if he were writing a dissertation (which it never was). He shows his knowledge of semiotics, pragmatics, anthropological theory, and the works of Bakhtin and Richard Bauman among other scholars, but portions of his book are synopses of theories in which house signs become lost, rather than concise applications of theories to the subject at hand. Dissertation examiners need such synopses to judge the worthiness of a candidate, but scholarly readers want to see a detailed exploration of a tradition without digressions into theoretical literature that derail the book’s argument. The author has not managed the balance between presentation of theory and presentation of ethnographic description as well as he might have.
A greater problem is the author’s ethnographic approach. Most of the data that he presents derive from one-time interviews, carried out mostly by his students, with house residents. The study lacks any detailed ethnography of the larger society in which these signs (and students) are situated. The reader would have benefitted from more information on the social and academic community of Oxford, Ohio, or on a broader description of the place of fun within this community. Lacking are interviews with faculty, townsfolk, and especially landlords that would have given a fuller picture of the context of the house signs.
The house-sign tradition itself creates problems for any deep ethnographic treatment of the subject. In general, students have little invested in the signs; they have not given the signs much thought. In fact, the recurrent comment from students is that the signs should not be taken seriously. Thus, probing questions by interviewers work against the inclination of the students, forcing them to take the signs seriously. The result is often vague and contradictory answers to questions, or forced and leading questions by inexperienced interviewers. Student interviewees seem, in most cases, to free associate from the interviewers’ cues, which might reveal hidden significances—as the author implies—or which might be ill-thought-out, spontaneous, and changeable reactions from the interviewees. A detailed ethnography that did not rely so much on student reactions would make for a more convincing study of the social significance of house signs.
The least convincing chapters in the book explore religious and racial difference as expressed in house signs. House signs such as “Inn Pursuit” and “Crib of the Rib,” although cryptic, are meant to express the Christian ethos of the resident students, but interviews with these students show only weak associations with the house signs themselves and are, instead, somewhat superficial interviews on the religious and social beliefs of the residents—the signs are almost incidental to the discussion. The author concentrates on several house signs that incorporate the word ghetto (e.g., “Girls Gone Ghetto” and “Too Popular for the Ghetto”) to explore attitudes towards racial difference among students. Yet most students seem unaware that the ghetto referred to in the signs indicates anything more than their neighborhood, which is called The Ghetto. Interviewers have to force the students away from their natural associations with neighborhood to talk about the African American ghetto in Chicago or other such ghettos that divide people by race. In the end, the author discovered that students have attitudes towards race (which we all have), but has not tied these attitudes convincingly to the students’ associations with “ghetto” signage.
Perhaps the author is more successful in his exploration of the sexual aspects of the signs, since the students more naturally associate the fun of sex with the function of signage than they do religion or racial difference. His observation that female students object to male student houses that use female anatomy in their signs (e.g., “Liquor Juggs”), while not objecting to males making use of male anatomy (e.g., “Well Hung Over”) points to a genuine distinction in the expression of sexuality in this student community.
Whatever helpful insights this book offers are overshadowed or clouded by the style and approach that the author has chosen. Beyond the shortcomings already outlined, the author further derails his presentation by including unnecessary synopses of transcribed passages from the interviews; too often, rather than building on the information given in the excerpts, the author merely restates in standard English the views expressed in the transcriptions.
The overall impression of the book is that the author has taken his article on house signs previously published in the Journal of American Folklore (120 [2007], 445-81) and padded it out into an unnecessarily extended treatment of a somewhat minor phenomenon.
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[Review length: 1003 words • Review posted on January 9, 2012]