Identity and Everyday Life by Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P. Del Negro is another in the successful Music and Culture series dating back to the publication of Robert Walser’s 1993 Running With the Devil, through the most recent publication, Heidi Feldman’s 2006 Black Rhythms of Peru. This book speaks to scholars in the disciplines of performance studies, ethnomusicology, and folklore studies, using a conception of performance that is unique to the authors’ research and theoretical framings. They contrast in-depth, complex theoretical analysis with concrete ethnographic examples and applications, making it a very useful volume, particularly for readers interested in the arenas identified above.
This book takes on identity, one of the most perplexing notions in all three disciplines that the authors draw on for the volume. It is an invaluable resource for both student and professional ethnographers whose studies incorporate questions of identity, as well as for students who need a place to start and a bibliography to mine. In its discussion of the role of reflexivity this volume continues disciplinary discourse about perception and ethnographic research that are foundational to the ever-constant, ever-evolving, and ever-necessary examination of fieldwork practices, ongoing throughout the scholarly communities of folklore studies, ethnomusicology, and performance studies--the audiences to whom Berger and Del Negro direct their attention. What is remarkable is how much is packed into such a short volume, yet it remains readable with rich examples from both authors’ research.
One caution about how to approach this volume: even if you are interested in reading only one of the sections, read the whole volume anyway. Three of the five chapters began as independent essays, published originally between 1999 and 2002. Despite this, each chapter builds on its predecessor and the second half of the book is very dependent on the first for its framing. The most practical approach to this book is to start with the preface, where Berger and Del Negro lay out the theoretical framing for this collection of five essays, broken into two sections. The book as a unified whole takes as its focus processes of production and lived experiences of meaning, held together by the authors’ interest in balancing what ethnographers can learn from theoretical framings and from data, and the impact each arena has on the other. While the authors’ perspective is influenced by a carefully considered application of phenomenological theorizing, they are careful to articulate the limitations of this perspective.
Chapter 1 takes on the concept of the everyday, with Del Negro and Berger’s underlying premise that “everyday life” does not exist as such, but rather functions as a framework from which a dialectical opposition to “special event” can be used to understand expressive practices (4). They take a historical approach to framing the notion of “everyday” itself, connecting it to scholarship in American folklore studies, spanning research of the latter half of the twentieth century, from Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson (1956) through Sabina Magliocco (1993) (5), French scholarship in the research of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau (6), and British scholarship, notably that of Paul Willis (7-8). The authors focus on the importance of context, ideology, economics, and practice to determine if the concept of “everyday life” can be applied (11). Performance theory becomes the thread that makes the connection between everyday life and expressive culture as a way of exploring the expressive dimensions of what they describe as “pragmatic, mechanical, or insignificant” (22).
In chapter 2, Berger focuses on metatheory construction, specifically in the area of folklore studies. He specifically looks at the role that metatheory plays in scholarly understandings of theory and data. Berger’s interest here is in examining the kinds of questions that theory asks, the role that metatheory plays in theory construction, and the implications for theory building as a way of conceptualizing social practice and creative process. Tying back to the overarching concern of the book with the interrelationship between theory and data, he concludes the chapter by returning to this idea of the way data informs and develops scholarly understandings of theory.
In chapter 3, Berger takes the metaphor of the horizon and explores it as an illustration for the study of expressive culture and its relationship to the self, particularly in the arena of perceptual experience by both performers and audiences. He argues for a blending of cultural resources and participant agency that organizes the aesthetics of the “horizontal structures” of performance (45). Berger begins with a case study of a northeastern Ohio heavy metal performer and his audience, laying out the case for a horizontal perception of musical elements, some of which are close and some of which are smaller nuances experienced as more distant, or in other words, with less awareness. From this, he explores the idea of horizons in self-perception, and particularly the role of self in music. Berger suggests that individual agency controls an individual’s own perceptions of horizon by focusing one’s attention on one perceptual dimension in preference to another (49). He is particularly interested in the ways that the self “emerges” in the course of everyday experience and the ways that this illuminates perception of presence or absence of self in music (61). Notions of space are critical to Berger’s discussion, particularly in his use of spatial metaphors to describe relations of perception in musical experience. Berger concludes the chapter by presenting a methodology for studying self-experience in music that comes as an outgrowth of this concept of horizontal structuring of perception as grounded in social practice (87). I find the concept of horizontal listening particularly productive for teaching beginning fieldworkers the art and science of listening creatively to their field recordings, and to understanding why there are so many possible interpretations of a single set of data.
Chapter 4 presents Del Negro’s and Berger’s examination of the role reflexivity and reflexive language play in the performance of aesthetics. It very consciously grounds itself in Richard Bauman’s seminal 1977 Verbal Art as Performance, with the explicit intention of extending Bauman’s conception of performance theory in the arena of performance aesthetics. This chapter presents the best example of the dualistic approach discussed at the start of this review--it shifts dialectically between theory and data, considering the reflexivity of performance in the abstract, then discussing how the authors understand this in the context of Berger’s self-described phenomenologically-influenced ethnographic work with metal, rock, and jazz musicians in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, as well as Del Negro’s study of display events, particularly the passeggiata of Central Italy.
The fifth and final chapter takes the foundation established in the previous chapters in order to explore identity, not as a notion to be specifically defined, but as an interpretive framework grounded in the tradition of folklore studies. Del Negro and Berger identify a three-parameter model that incorporates dimensions of gender, region, and class in real-world representations of identity (139). In this chapter the authors bring together all the concepts in earlier chapters in order to explore their model in terms of situated interaction and everyday life.
In sum, this collection of essays has a lot to offer to scholars and students of ethnography at all levels, and is well worth having in one’s library. Readers will find a depth of discussion in arenas of metadiscourse, and clear connections between the most abstract ideas in the volume and real-life ethnographic data. It is a worthy contribution to the reflexive study of ethnography and its application in folklore studies, ethnomusicology, and performance studies, and it helps scholars in these disciplines find interdisciplinary common ground. If it has one flaw, it is that this collection does not articulate distinctions in how these disciplines approach these concepts, which could be confusing to students who are new to ethnography. Still, this is a minor flaw in light of the contribution the authors make to all three disciplines with this offering.
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[Review length: 1304 words • Review posted on March 26, 2008]