Keiko Ikeda
A Room full of mirrors: High School Reunions in Middle America
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, x, 205 p.
ISBN 0-8047-3435-6
Reviewed by
Teachers College, Columbia University
in Journal of Anthropological Research, 55: 494-5
Keiko Ikeda, Japanese, educated in anthropology at the University of Illinois, and former professor at Hamilton and Barnard Colleges, has produced a fine example of a minor ethnographic genre: the well-trained Other writes for US about America. She writes with the appropriate surprise tinged with amusement at the oddities of altogether lovable natives: middle-aged and older men and women who organize and attend high school reunions "in Middle America." This is framed with bows to contemporary anthropological fashions. Hsu once wrote in this genre from a culture and personality point of view. I did from a structuralist one. Ikeda refers to Ricoeur and recent developments in discourse and identity theory. All who write in the genre must, however, assume something that is both the strength and dangers of the genre: "America." For the duration of the book and the earlier research, we are "Other" to "Americans," if only because we are continually reminded, by our informants, professors, publishers, readers, etc., that we are not "American." Assuming the position of the Alien-among-Us is not a matter of personal choice and it is more than a rhetorical move. For the Chinese, French, Japanese, etc. who may be caught in American universities, the experience of finding oneself Aliens-among-Us is so powerful that it is difficult to face how scandalous is any telling of this experience in all the settings at the ritual and rhetorical centers of the United States when it is improper to affirm the reality of America
This is a major theoretical challenge and Ikeda's book would be more useful anthropologically if she had addressed rather than ignored it (as she ignores most of the work in the ethnography of the United States). One can assume that this ignorance is rhetorical: This book is clearly written for a general audience. Still, brief reference to what has also been seen over the past 60 years need not have taken away the pleasure of reading this well-written text. For one who is aware of this work on towns and high schools, Ikeda contributes to the now somewhat underground debate that she picks up briefly at the end of the volume: Some of the most mundane rituals common in the United States, and the most sacred, have been astonishingly stable over many years, both in their form and ideological rationalization. A strong argument can be made that they are becoming ever more consistent with what we must call "America." When Ikeda concludes her book with comments about the high school reunion as a counterpoint to the stress of on the detached individual, it would have been most appropriate to add a reminder about the consistency with which "Others" have said similar things about the ideological practices they observed in the United States. Too few anthropologists face this systematically, particularly the native-born who also write about the United States. I hope that Ikeda will take the time to pick up this challenge in future more technical papers.
As it is, the book is useful as another documentation of one persistent ritual form in American civil religion, a form all the more interesting that, as Ikeda notes, it has no place in the State apparatus that controls other rituals (e.g. the sports events or graduation ceremonies organized by schools). High school reunions are quintessentially "voluntary rituals" and all the more interesting (by contrast to local clubs and churches) that the people who come together have little ties to each other except more and more distant and partial joint histories. As Ikeda notes, the first mystery is the force that compels a very few individuals to organize the reunion and the second is the other force that compels some of those invited to attend. References to concepts like "hegemony" would have had their place here, along with a critique of some of the uses of the term: After all not every one attends reunions and much ambivalence is expressed, as a well as a multiplicity of explicit "reasons" for attending (many of which Ikeda mentions through extensive quotes from her tapes). But this diversity only strengthens the theoretical problem: what is this compelling force? To call it "American" or "hegemonic" is to state the obvious, but not to explain much.
As it stands, her book would fit well in an undergraduate course on the anthropology of America, as a text from which to raise questions about America.