British Subjects

Abstract

Nigel Rapport, ed., British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002, 340 pages.Despite its subtitle, British Subjects is intended to highlight anthropological endeavour which addresses contemporary Britain rather than, as Rapport writes, to offer a definitive anthropological account of "Britain" or "British." Rapport argues for the strengths of such an approach, as well as the ways anthropology about Britain can be "paradigmatic of the discipline's possibilities, skills and significance" (p. 15). Such aspirations are largely borne out by the collection of 17 essays which make up this volume.The essays are grouped into five broad topical clusters: Nationalism, Contestation and the Performance of Tradition; Strategies of Modernity: Heritage, Leisure, Dissociation; The Appropriation of Discourse; Methodologies and Ethnomethodologies; and The Making (and Unmaking) of Community: Ethnicity, Religiosity, Locality. This placing of chapters within the groupings is well thought out and Rapport has written useful introductions to each cluster, drawing out the thematic intersections amongst the chapters appearing in them. The first cluster begins with Anne Rowbottom's considerations of the paradoxical relationship between hereditary privilege and democracy. Through fieldwork with people who regularly attend events where members of the royal family appear in public, Rowbottom builds an argument about practices of "vernacular religiosity" amongst this dedicated group of people who call themselves "Real Royalists." She demonstrates in turn how Real Royalists alternate between frameworks of difference and of national unity in order to circumnavigate the inherent contradictions of civil religion, constitutional monarchy, and democracy in Britain. The second chapter in this cluster is based on the Isle of Man where Susan Lewis describes a different sort of civic event: Tynwald Day. She traces some of the contested meanings this national day holds and argues that despite such contradictions, the event can still serve as a site of collective identity. Helena Wulff's chapter, exploring national ballet styles, is the final contribution to this section. Her research, based on the British Royal Ballet, demonstrates "the ongoing symbolic construction of national difference in the transnational world of ballet" (p. 79); the ways in which aesthetics, dance styles, performance costumes, rehearsal clothing, and bodily decoration are employed towards these ends; and the contradictions of a discourse of a "national" style in the face of the transnational flow of dancers.The second topical cluster, Strategies of Modernity, begins with a contribution by Sharon Macdonald. She draws on fieldwork at the Museum of Island Life on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, to explore "the 'fetishization' of past everyday life" (p. 89) as a form of cultural practice. Macdonald's illuminating piece describes how once everyday objects (tools, crafts, domestic items, mass-produced goods) come to reside in a museum, they become in effect sacralized, and in turn "de-alienated" from being "just" commodities. She goes on to contextualize this practice within the particular contours of social uncertainty, arguing that the valorization of everyday things is a way of seeking "existential anchors" (p. 103) in the face of social fragmentation as well as a way perhaps of talking back against an all-pervasive consumerism. The next chapter, from Andrew Dawson, takes up the theme of social upheaval and strategies for managing it but within the context of a former coal-mining town in the north-east of England. Dawson is the first author in the collection to explicitly address gender relations. He does so through an exploration of the ways in which the pursuit of leisure (allotments, writing poetry, attending local football matches) serve to help people "work out" social change, and postindustrial change in particular. Dawson interweaves ethnography of postindustrial transformations, gender relations, and the lived experiences of older people with the notion of leisure practices as cultural resource. …