Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis (review)

Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis, edited by Orvar Löfgren and Richard Wilk, is a delightfully quirky and wonderfully provocative collection of twenty-five short essays dedicated to inspiring new ideas about cultural analysis. It emerged from a 2004 interdisciplinary workshop where Löfgren, a professor of European ethnology, and Wilk, a professor of anthropology and gender studies, gathered twenty scholars from a range of fields—European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and archaeology—and asked them to “invent (or reinvent) an interesting cultural process, a fresh perspective for analyzing some kind of cultural dynamic” (p. 5). Five additional contributors were invited to join the project after the workshop. Following the editors’ introduction, “In Search of Missing Processes,” the twenty-five essays are organized into five sections: “Sensing,” “Ageing,” “Moving,” “Transforming,” and “Mystifying.” It seems obvious that Löfgren and Wilk conceptualized these groupings based on the essays and not vice versa, given the individual essays in each section (and the possibility of several of them being categorized in multiple sections).

“In Search of Missing Processes” provides a general overview of the theoretical and methodological concerns driving the project, while also establishing the playful, inventive, and ultimately inviting tone characteristic of the collection as a whole. The theoretical and methodological points that the editors seek to make are straightforward: the language we use to describe cultural processes and to analyze culture comes with baggage (often unwanted and perhaps even unnoticed) that may constrain our thinking, eclipse other perspectives, convey moral judgments, and so forth. Löfgren and Wilk suggest that attention to language in these contexts has been overshadowed by our reflexive focus on our own disciplinary constructions, but I would argue that these two trends go hand-in-hand. A fundamental part of the reflexive turn in academia generally has been rooted in an analysis of the very language we use. In addition, theorists like Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler (to name only a few) have certainly demonstrated the power of language in structuring social, political, cultural, and intellectual thought. The importance of Off the Edge, however, does not lie in its theoretical and methodological claims. Rather, it is the playful and inviting nature of the project that promises to open up discussion, to push us in new (or perhaps old) directions, and to get us thinking in novel ways.

Within this context, several of the essays work exceptionally well. Regina Bendix’s “The Cream Effect” indulges a decadent language of cream, calories, and desire to highlight the import of investigating the late modern, largely Western relationship between sensory pleasure and guilt—when and where does one prevail over the other? Richard Wilk’s “Smoothing” describes not the pleasures of the topic it addresses, “cultural smoothing,” but rather points out the myriad ways in which we use this phenomenon to render the chaotic mess of lived experience comprehensible, ordered, flat; “smoothing” is a process of simplifying cultural complexity and might just as easily be an effect of news media creating sound bites as academics offering holistic cultural interpretations. Kathleen Stewart’s “Still Life” is itself a still life; bits and pieces of narrative, of memory, sit together and make a portrait, an ordinary life. Drawing our attention to “still life” as both method and metaphor, Stewart inspires us to look to the ordinary and to find therein that which might transform the ordinary into a “liquid potency” (p. 91), much as a still creates spirits through the distilling process. Tom O’Dell’s “Backdrafts” draws on the language of firefighting to consider ways of recognizing the unrecognizable, the inconspicuous. Once a cultural phenomenon explodes onto the scene, signs of its coming are easy to identify and/or reconstruct, but O’Dell asks how we might see them before they ignite.

As with all edited volumes, some essays in Off the Edge are stronger than others. However, as you read through the collection as a whole, the...