British subjects: an anthropology of Britain

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 rather than, as Rapport writes, to offer a definitive anthropological account of Britain or British. Rapport argues for strengths of such an approach, as well as ways anthropology about can be paradigmatic of discipline's possibilities, skills and significance (p. 15). Such aspirations are largely borne by collection of 17 essays which make up this volume.The essays are grouped into five broad topical clusters: Nationalism, Contestation and 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 groupings is well thought and Rapport has written useful introductions to each cluster, drawing thematic intersections amongst chapters appearing in them. The first cluster begins with Anne Rowbottom's considerations of paradoxical relationship between hereditary privilege and democracy. Through fieldwork with people who regularly attend events where members of royal family appear in public, Rowbottom builds an argument about practices of vernacular religiosity amongst this dedicated group of people who call themselves Royalists. She demonstrates in turn how Real Royalists alternate between frameworks of difference and of unity in order to circumnavigate inherent contradictions of civil religion, constitutional monarchy, and democracy in Britain. The second chapter in this cluster is based on Isle of Man where Susan Lewis describes a different sort of civic event: Tynwald Day. She traces some of contested meanings this day holds and argues that despite such contradictions, event can still serve as a site of collective identity. Helena Wulff's chapter, exploring styles, is final contribution to this section. Her research, based on British Royal Ballet, demonstrates the ongoing symbolic construction of difference in transnational world of ballet (p. 79); ways in which aesthetics, dance styles, performance costumes, rehearsal clothing, and bodily decoration are employed towards these ends; and contradictions of a discourse of a national style in face of transnational flow of dancers.The second topical cluster, Strategies of Modernity, begins with a contribution by Sharon Macdonald. She draws on fieldwork at Museum of Island Life on 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 particular contours of social uncertainty, arguing that valorization of everyday things is a way of seeking existential anchors (p. 103) in 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 theme of social upheaval and strategies for managing it but within context of a former coal-mining town in north-east of England. Dawson is first author in collection to explicitly address gender relations. He does so through an exploration of ways in which 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 lived experiences of older people with notion of leisure practices as cultural resource. …

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