Dan Rose. Patterns of American Culture: Ethnography and estrangement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. 123 pp.
John D. Dorst The written suburb: An American site, an ethnographic dilemma. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. xii + 220 pp.in
Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 15:81-83
Welcome to the brave new world of post-modernist ethnographies (or is the ethnographies of post-modernism?).
Rose does not use the word but he has carefully crafted his book to give it a de-constructed look that makes it hard to evaluate as anthropology, or even as anthropology-fiction--since a third of the book is dedicated to an "oneric flight through America" (p. 78), a collage of pretend extracts from letters "to his mother," "to his advisor," from fieldnotes and other stereotypical artifacts of ethnographic research in an unnamed site. The rest is a highly "written" account of selected vignettes and people from a well-to-do suburb of Philadelphia contrasted to other vignettes and people whom Rose had met when he "lived with black people" (p. 19) in South Philadelphia.
Dorst does use "post-modernism" continually. The book itself is altogether traditional once one has recognized that this is not a "community study," certainly an impossible genre--and not simply for the contemporary United States. Still, it can be read as focusing on the interrelated symbols, rituals, visual and dramatistic performances, that are the public face of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, an extraordinarily constructed suburb of Philadelphia and Wilmington, the ritual (de)center of the Andrew Wyeth high cult(-ure). It is an informal formal analysis, a reading of "'authorless texts, that is to say, texts for which it is trivial to identify their immediate producers" (p. 209), a reading which Dorst qualifies as "unashamedly anti-humanistic" (p. 209)--though I fail to see why highlighting properties of the world human beings have constructed together and are now inhabiting should be so considered.
I do find Dorst's a useful book while Rose's is only interesting as an artifact, at best an experiment demonstrating the danger of taking the "postmodernist" critiques of the ethnographic genre too seriously. Both do operate with funny mannerisms. Both deliberately construct an audience that is not problematic, an audience that has no problem with a speaker's use of indexes like "America," "suburban," "we," rhetorical processes which many in anthropology would precisely want to question. Both are written by people who go to great extent to construct an identifiable and unquestionably actual self for us, the audience, to take into account. These books are not written by decentered ghosts inscribed by an audience: they are written by "I," an ex-hippie-estranged- graduate student, a man with a battered car, who (does not) get arrested by "Police Commissioner Rizzo's dreaded Highway Patrol" (Rose, p. 1-19; Dorst, p. 209-210), a triumphant individual who sees nothing ironic in the use of first person pronouns and verbs of action in such a context-- "'I' began..., witnessed..., was forced to..., discovered..., ..." Modesty is not a postmodern virtue. Rose and Dorst are serious people doing serious work in a world that does not appreciate it.
Given deconstructed strictures about post-modern selves, these failing are amusing. They do not detract from the value of Dorst's book. He has done something never quite done this way: he has brought forward a type of behavior and analysis that we, the anthropological tradition, can use as we evolve. Dorst, however, does not help us use his work and it may be that we have to do it against him if we read him the way Rose reads this tradition. For both systematically refuse to take it into account. Rose, while he does footnote a few of his comments, did not compile a bibliography. Dorst did, but his does not mention ANY earlier anthropological work on the United States or, even more narrowly, "America." Gone are the Lynds, Warner, West, Gans, Vidich and Bensman, Schneider, Singer, Myerhoff, Varenne, Greenhouse, Neville, Perrin--to name but a few of those who have made a tradition which Dorst and Rose bury more or less aggressively.
And yet Dorst's book must be read in the context of such books as Gans' study of Levittown, another carefully planned suburb--though certainly not according to the same plan. It should be read alongside Warner's, and then Singer's discussion of civic rituals in Newburyport or Myerhoff's accounts of Fairfax. It is illuminated by their work, and it illuminates theirs, particularly since Dorst has an excellent sensibility for the visual, architectural, and landscape aspects of cultural organization. In this context we can make sense of the question which Dorst keeps on asking, the question of the status of "post-modernism" as either a label for a cultural form which can be described structurally, or as a form of analysis of general value because it is more sensitive to the conditions of human performance than those we have inherited. Dorst leans to the latter understanding, but does not then proceed to see that, if postmodernism has something to say when it insists on in- scription, on the arti-factual, the skillfully crafted aspects of human performance, on what has traditionally been called the "cultural," it is speaking about all human behavior, not simply the behavior of postmodern peoples. Dorst did not visit the homes of the people who live in Chadds Ford. This is a practical right (one cannot do everything), but we will gain more by not fighting over whether Chadds Ford is more post-modern than, say, Middletown. It is probably more useful to see everyday life there also as authorless inscription and collective artifact, than it is to see it as the functional correlative of corporate industrialism.
The ethnographic problem with Dorst's work is his failure to read all the signs available to him, some of which he does mention--though this fact is proof that this is good work. Take his brilliant analysis of the museum and its glass wall. Yes, indeed, it has been carefully constructed to appear all surface with no indication of its own depth. But it has a depth that is carefully de- picted, de-inscribed on at least some of the artifacts Dorst presents, for example the gallery guide brochure he reproduces (p. 178). There we have grey- tinted voids, unlabelled enclosed areas, spaces for which there are no guidance, the spaces--one suspects--where the offices, the computers, the janitorial closets, reside. In there, unmentionable activity practically inscribes space.
A book with which I productively disagree becomes part of my personal canon. Dorst's will take a place there. Rose's won't, but I would not speak for you.