Harris Berger & Giovanna Del Negro, Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, $24.95, 185 pages, ISBN 0-8195-6687-X (paperback)—Marylin Mell, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Writing about music is tricky. Writing about how music spreads from inside the cracks of everyday life and presses outwards is even trickier. Ah, Faustian urges!  If ambition is to be named as wily, then Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture is best judged against the design of its implicit goals. This work seeks to redirect the future of musicology and folklore studies by announcing the disciplines’ current shortcomings. Yet, to name deficiencies is not to overcome them. (If this were so, psychoanalysis would have a much quicker turnaround time, and the pockets of shrinks would be less deep.) Looking to the past and the future serves as this collection’s strengths. Identity and Everyday Life is divided into two parts. Part One, “Everyday Life in Theory and Practice,” contains two chapters, “New Directions in the Study of Everyday Life: Expressive Culture and the Interpretation of Culture” and “Theory as Practice: Some Dialects of Generality and Specificity in Folklore Scholarship.”  Part Two, “Self, Reflexivity, and Identity,” contains three chapters, “Horizons of Melody and the Problem of Self,”  “The Role of Reflexivity in the Aesthetics of Performance: Verbal Art, Public Display, and Popular Music,” and “Identity Reconsidered, the World Doubled.”  Three essays were previously published in The Journal of Folklore Research, Journal of American Folklore, and Midwestern Folklore.

Berger and Del Negro demonstrate strengths as they chronicle the recent history of the emergence of everyday studies. Henri Lefebrve’s Critique of Everyday Life (1947) contributed by focusing on the alienation of everyday life. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1974) gave emphasis to the problems of reproduction and resistance. Identity and Everyday Life highlights how de Certeau underscored the power embedded in everyday acts of resistance, and the need to extend Foucauldian insights so that social regimentation can be subverted by anti-disciplines, or situated acts that oppose institutional forces. In reassessing the importance of the everyday, there is a call here to move away from wrong-headed juxtapositions. Mike Featherstone’s (1995) cleverness in questioning the separation of the everyday from the heroic life is applauded. To break down this opposition between the everyday and heroic allows for a greater dialectical understanding. To liberate these categories, as when appreciating magical realism, is to see how a transformative magic lurks just below the surface in our common lives. The concept of the “grounded aesthetic” offers the most productive notion in Paul Willis’s Common Culture (1990). Here a set of aesthetic practices is seen as “woven into the fabric of the everyday activities of a particular social group” [8]. This insight helps to bridge the cultural divide between what is frequently termed high brow culture (literature, painting, music) and low brow (fighting, swearing, courting). By being more inclusive, analysis of the everyday becomes more democratic and fluid.

Identity and Everyday Life is passionately committed to using phenomenology as a focal point for revitalizing multiple disciplines. Berger and Del Negro locate a disturbing gap between the paucity of present studies of the everyday in music and folklore and the collection’s vision of how rich the interplay between the ediotic and the quotidian could be. Vulgar Marxist theory is dismissed as being critical of folklore theory since it draws attention away from the most pressing social issues. Yet, traditional humanist scholars are seen as willing to concede that folklore theory has offered real insights into the nature of expressive culture. Significantly, alterations in folklore theory eventually filter down to effect field practices, especially the collection of folklore materials. In “Theory as Practice” Berger uses these observations as his base for presenting theory, specifically the act of concept building, as practice. Returning to Husserl’s Ideas I (1913), Berger acknowledges the seminal influence of Erazim Kohak’s meditations on Husserl, especially his emphasis on experiencing eidos as a “seeing” or “seeing as” [27].

At the core of this project’s ambition is a desire to expand the boundaries of several disciplines: musicology, folklore, daily life, sociology, phenomenology, and cultural politics. This democratic urge to bypass pre-set boundaries and fuse disciplines can be taxing. Berger and Del Negro want to alter perceptual modes and re-frame theory and begin by insisting upon the need to problematize the term “everyday life.” In this series of five essays connections among expressive culture, dialectics, folklore, music, visual arts, reflexivity and identity are explored. Clearly, Berger and Del Negro seek to further the rich interplay between popular phenomena of the quotidian and its cultural manifestations. Perhaps it is because they are tiptoeing and trying to stretch (or even redraw) the boundaries between theory and practice, especially as dealt with in folk studies and popular music, that they can sometimes seem too opaque. This desire to speak across the formal boundaries of interdisciplinary fields leads to a rhetorical problem of audience. Is this meant to be cutting edge? Or is it meant to battle entrenched, even conservative positions which block the flow of new ways of thinking? Some of the collection’s obscurity, the difficulty of easily tapping into its rich nuggets, arises from the fact that the bulk of this project is comprised of previously published essays. A failure to synthesize the project’s overarching vision creates gaps in the frame of what they want to say. Identity and Everyday Life calls for greater democracy in appropriating anthropology’s wealth of warring perspectives on life. Allowing other cultures to interrogate standard western viewpoints can be exhilarating. In Bali babies are prescribed social identities at birth rather than choosing social roles as they age. Understanding that western views are arbitrary and contrast with positions held elsewhere in the world can be liberating. Berger and Del Negro implicitly argue that seeing outside the perimeters of our everyday prejudices could offer astonishing results.

Everyday life is a space previously seen through the biased prism of status. Berger and Del Negro want to force the public and professionals within the music field to be more inclusive and less hierarchic. Identity and Everyday Life might be most productively understood as a campaign lobbying for the interpolation of the phenomenological method within folklore studies, musicology, and popular studies. This collection vehemently opposes critical approaches which rely upon simple polarization. To juxtapose the “heroic life” and the everyday is to shortchange both. Instead, a new methodology using dialectics as its critical base might be tried. Consider the case of magical realism. In this recent literary genre, it is the rich interplay between how the marvelous creeps into everyday experiences which mesmerizes. Class status falls away as a useful critical category. Similarly, everyday life is a foundational idea in folklore studies. De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life observed how pivotal the production, marketing, and consumption of food was in the Croix-Rousse neighborhood of Lyons. To understand how food was distributed and enjoyed was to see with the greatest clarity how many of the citizens of Lyon lived. De Certeau’s scrutiny of a small scale group mirrored the Birmingham School’s concern for what is close enough to touch.

Ensconced within a critical field whose invisible hand is directed by the imprint of cultural hierarchy, what is served up best in this collection are exploratory observations rather than conclusions. Identity and Everyday Life is fueled by a desire to excavate the past and locate stultifying factors which block a fuller appreciation of everyday practices. At the core of this project’s ambition is a desire to expand the boundaries of several disciplines: musicology, folklore, daily life, sociology, phenomenology, and cultural politics. This democratic urge to bypass pre-set boundaries and fuse disciplines can be taxing. Berger and Del Negro want to alter perceptual modes and re-frame theory and begin by insisting upon the need to problematize the term “everyday life.” In a series of five essays connections among expressive culture, dialectics, folklore, music, visual arts, reflexivity and identity are explored. Clearly, Berger and Del Negro seek to further the rich interplay between popular phenomena of the quotidian and its cultural manifestations. Perhaps, it is because they are tiptoeing and trying to stretch (or even redraw) the boundaries between theory and practice, especially as dealt with in folk studies and popular music, that they can sometimes seem too opaque.