039379 Book reviews 20/1/04 2:43 pm Page 207

Sociology

Book Reviews
Copyright 2004
BSA Publications Ltd
Volume 38(1): 207211
[DOI: 10.1177/0038038504039379]
SAGE Publications
London,Thousand Oaks,
New Delhi

Andy Bennett and Kevin Dawe (eds)

Guitar Cultures
Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001, 42.99 hbk (ISBN: 1 85973 429 4), 14.99 pbk
(ISBN: 1 85973 434 0), 224 pp.
Reviewed by Andrew Conroy, Staffordshire University

Versatile enough to remain a key instrument in the production of popular (and

unpopular) music despite the threat of several musical revolutions, the guitar has
consistently been invested with a wide range of contradictory meanings. Its relation
to gender has often been uneasy, and a male bias persists in much guitar-oriented
music. It has signified traditional musical values, but also furnished punk with a
tool that was perfectly suited to its DIY ideology. As becomes apparent in Guitar
Cultures, discourses describing it as a plank of wood with six strings and a volume
control (p. 50) inadequately account for its effects on a wide range of disparate
social and cultural scenarios.
In western rock culture, one of the guitars primary connotations is that of artis-
tic authenticity. Pop stars (and, no doubt soon, Popstars) routinely use the instru-
ment to signify their entry into the stadium of the serious artist. When Robbie
Williams marketability was in decline, aligning himself with the indie-guitar
sound of Britpop enabled him to both make a statement of artistic intent and
expand his populist appeal. But, as co-editor Andy Bennetts chapter illustrates,
purists of the genre would doubtless be unlikely to see him as an authentic expo-
nent: sound is only one factor that constitutes the indie-guitar subculture.
The theme of authenticity and how it is constructed in different settings is one
of the key concepts running through Guitar Cultures. But, as becomes clear in this
ambitious and enjoyable reader, the meanings of the term vary according to social,
cultural and geographical context. Peter Narvaezs chapter Unplugged: Blues
Guitarists and the Myth of Acousticity describes how its subjects ideology of
authenticity is founded upon notions of musical expertise, tradition and a slavish
adherence to technical specifications. But the subjects of Andy Bennetts chapter on
Indie-Guitar culture have generally constructed realness in other ways, seeing
simplicity and a disdain for technical know-how and musical proficiency as the cor-
nerstones of authenticity. Even so, the indie-guitar scene has shifted and perhaps
become more expansive in its scope than is described here, and the plug in and play
ethic is now as likely to refer to a sampler, set of decks or a PC. Digital technology,

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208 Sociology Volume 38 Number 1 February 2004

home recording and sequencing software, and the massive impact of peer-to-peer
distribution, have opened up new territories for the post-Britpop wave of indie-gui-
tar bands, sonically and ideologically.
Despite focusing on a single subject/object, Guitar Cultures covers a range of
themes that chime with some of the core concerns of cultural studies. Illustrating the
baffling array of cultural and imaginary spaces the guitar is positioned in, the con-
tributors variously describe its role in identity construction and boundary marking,
also thinking about its symbolic associations with place. Guitar Cultures gives
absorbing accounts of the material production of the guitar, its meanings in relation
to performance and reception, and the various ways in which the guitar is con-
sumed/collected.
John Ryan and Richard A. Petersons chapter The Guitar as Artefact and Icon:
Identity Formation in the Baby Boom Generation neatly describes the guitars
importance to middle-aged men attempting to symbolically reconnect with their
youth. But it also shines light on the wider practice of collecting, illustrating how
objects whose use-value is finite can see their sign-value and exchange-value increase
as they mature: guitars whose original appeal was their affordability (as much as the
sounds they were able to make) have subsequently become almost prohibitively
expensive as demand amongst collectors rises.
Guitar Cultures would perhaps have benefited from the inclusion of a chapter
relating to the guitars relation to gender and sexuality, or from a more rigorous
journey into its (crucial) role in avant-garde rock. Likewise, Steve Waksmans use of
Edward Van Halen to think about the cultural contradictions of the guitar hero
and the relationship between the illusion of rock rebellion (p. 119) and the spec-
tacle of mass consumption that is so-called arena rock is strong, but slightly out of
tune with a zeitgeist where such rock performers survival is often contingent on dis-
courses of irony. But to have comprehensively accounted for all aspects of the gui-
tars cultural life would have been a mammoth undertaking requiring (at least)
several volumes. What the editors have overseen is a very useful addition to exist-
ing studies of popular music, providing a number of illuminating accounts of the
everyday local contexts in which the guitar can be found.

Tim Edensor
National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life
Oxford: Berg Books, 2002, 42 hbk (ISBN: 1 85973 519 3), 14.99 pbk (ISBN: 1
85973 519 3), viii+216 pp.
Reviewed by Judy Giles, York St John College

Tim Edensors book is a timely intervention in the recent discussions of national

identity that feature widely in sociological and cultural studies. Edensor challenges
directly those theories of national identity that focus primarily on the historical
roots and political lineaments of the nation and nationalism, arguing that national
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Book Reviews 209

identities are constituted culturally as well as historically and politically. Moreover,

the book proposes that popular culture is, and has been, a site where ideas, images,
understandings of the nation are circulated, reformulated and, increasingly in a
global context, re-distributed. Edensor takes issue with many of the best-known the-
orists of national identity, namely Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict
Anderson, Anthony Smith and John Hutchinson, arguing that, while these writers
have considered culture an important aspect of national identity, this has been
understood almost entirely in terms of high, traditional or official cultures.
National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, as its title signals, suggests
that national identity is constituted in numerous popular forms as well as in the
mundane and repetitious acts of our everyday lives.
The book begins with an overview of those writers on national identity, cited
above, and critiques the obsession to comprehend national identity as only evident
in spectacular displays, and at times of national crises like war (p. 11). Drawing on
the work of Michael Billig, it is proposed that ideas of the nation are conjured up
through the numerous signifiers and reminders ... that form part of everyday spaces,
routines and practices (p. 11). Edensor avoids the easy trap of simply constructing
an alternative set of populist signifiers of national identity to challenge those sanc-
tioned by tradition and official culture. Instead he demonstrates, through detailed
analyses of popular culture and quotidian experiences, the ways in which the every-
day basis of national identity is inevitably imbricated in the narratives and signifiers
of high and traditional culture. We constitute our sense of belonging to the imag-
ined community of the nation from a cluster of everyday habits, practices, images,
as well as from the spectacular displays of nation, staged by official culture and the
products of an ever-expanding global nexus. In order to conceptualize what he
means by a redistributed national identity, Edensor uses the metaphor of the
matrix to identify connections between localities with nation, performances in
parochial settings with a larger stage, the everyday domestic and the national quo-
tidian, the mundane with the spectacular, the location of places within larger spatial
frameworks, and representations and discursive fragments within larger texts and
image banks (p. 35).
The central chapters of the book focus on three areas in which national iden-
tity can be conceived in terms of the theoretical framework established in the intro-
duction. The first of these explores spatial constructs of the national by examining
geography and landscape, in particular iconic sites and rural ideologies which are
read in conjunction with the sites of popular culture, such as sports arenas, certain
urban areas, parks, etc. and the familiar, everyday landscapes of suburbia and home.
Chapter 3 focuses on the ways in which national identities are enacted and orga-
nized. Edensor uses the metaphor of performance to suggest the dynamic and pro-
cessual nature of identity formation. The idea of national identity as something that
can be performed allows us to see how the nation is staged and broadcast both in
national public events and in everyday customs and routines. Chapter 4 explores the
relationship between material culture and national identity, focusing in detail on the
ways in which cars embody ideas about the national. Not only is the symbolic
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210 Sociology Volume 38 Number 1 February 2004

representation of the car covered, but also the ways in which driving and the car
industries speak national identities.
In the final chapters of the book, Edensor concentrates in detail on the
Hollywood film Braveheart and the Millennium Dome, using these to exemplify and
expand the earlier discussions of space, materiality and performance in the consti-
tution of national identities. The list taken from the Andscape in the Self Portrait
zone of the Dome shows the profusion and diversity of contemporary ideas of the
nation in Britain. But it also suggests the multiplicity of associations and intertex-
tual clusters that can be made from these signifiers. Spectacular royal events jostle
with the familiar and taken for granted: my son is listed alongside Winston
Churchill, Shakespeare and Stephen Lawrence. A sense of national belonging no
longer centres around the official and the traditional but neither are these fin-
ished: decentred and diminished in power maybe, but constantly being reformulated
in fluid and inclusive ways that, as the author says render impossible fantasies of
cultural purity (p. 189). Edensors book challenges us to think about national iden-
tities in ways that focus on their increasing multiplicity and hybridity in the global-
izing context of contemporary culture.

Fred Inglis
Peoples Witness:The Journalist in Modern Politics
New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2002, 18.95 (ISBN: 0 300 09327 6)
Reviewed by Martin Conboy, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, University
College

Responding to a journalist concerning the subject of his book The News Revolution
in England, James Sommerville (1996) said:
it amounts to the idea that one cannot summarize anything as complex as an idea
or an event in a couple of sentences, and that the reason we dont realize this is
because of an enormous change in consciousness which we would call the News
Revolution.

In his new book, Peoples Witness, Inglis goes some way to indicating how jour-
nalism can deflate such claims by demonstrating how, throughout the 20th century
it has been able on occasions to reflect upon the complexity of political events. It is
consequently an extremely ambitious work which attempts to chart the impact of a
range of journalists work, on both sides of the Atlantic, on our historical knowl-
edge. Inglis does this not only by highlighting the careers of a cast of contenders for
the centurys most influential practitioners but by also selecting examples of their
writing which bring their work very much to life and in so doing allows the reader
to consider the very textuality of journalisms performance. It is an approach which,
at its best, bridges the institutional and the discursive to illuminate how, even if it is
the structures of the news media which ultimately determine the views of the world
we receive, the journalists themselves are far from complicit in the larger designs of
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their political and entrepreneurial masters. Ingliss modus operandi is a gift to edu-
cators keen to instil a sense of historical context into the study of journalism and yet
it is in all ways an extremely contemporary book right to the final contemporary
coda on the consequences of September 11.
The author has probing comments on journalisms range as a type of literary
and media product and takes an aphorism of Ezra Pounds that great literature is
news which stays news (p. 145) to examine some of the best that the journalism of
the 20th century has to offer. Overall, the theoretical concerns of the book are
woven in elegant fashion allowing him to make important points especially as jour-
nalism becomes progressively more established as a topic worthy of serious intel-
lectual and academic debate in the UK. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in
Ingliss synopsis of the history of the popularization of the press and its impact on
the public sphere, and here his observation, borne out in examples throughout the
book, of how a radical press survives as traces of a tradition within the practices of
individual journalists rather than a set of institutions is particularly compelling.
Although predominantly anglophone, the selection of journalists who worked in
other languages is of note for its relevance to some of the central themes of the book.
We read of Benjamin and his interest in the epic aspects of storytelling, Malrauxs
writing as action and Gramsci the polemical journalist rather than cryptic diarist.
However, in the light of what he highlights of Murrow and his resistance to
celebrity journalism turning peoples gaze away from himself (p. 182), it is a
shame that Inglis seems to become over concerned at some points with the heroic
personalities of the journalists in question. He is drawn into adventure narratives at
the very point where he should continue to hone his intelligently critical analysis.
For example, when writing of films which deal with journalism, it might have been
instructive to review the sublimely disruptive Ploughmans Lunch which provides an
antidote to the heroic view of journalism as a discourse then resists and combats
corruption while underlining how corruption can be a conscious and two-way pro-
cess of mutual satisfaction and reward between the news media and politicians.
Ultimately, Ingliss empathy for the heroic narrative detracts from the books
overall lucidity and makes it less than totally convincing. That there have been and
continue to be heroic journalists is self-evident. That such heroism takes its place in
an honourable tradition is also amply proven here. However, that herosim is a self-
conscious vocation within the discourse of journalism is less well justified as an
argument. The final point that these practices are the very things which have
enabled us to have a better understanding of the world as Peoples Witness is also
unproven and is possibly the most significant casualty of Ingliss admission on the
last page of the book that he has been dealing with journalism as an idealised form
(p. 376).

Reference
Sommerville, J. (1996) The News Revolution in England. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.