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Date: 06 Aug 1994 08:22:04 -0800 (PST)
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DANIEL WIGHT, Workers not Wasters:  Masculine Respectability,
Consumption and Employment in Central Scotland.  Edinburgh:  A
Community Study.  Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
(Distributed by Columbia University Press) Price: $45.00
 
Susan Parman, Department of Anthropology, California State University,
Fullerton
Fullerton, CA 92634
SPARMAN@csu.fullerton.edu
 
        This book belongs to the Edinburgh Education and Society Series,
which is a socially conscious, explicitly reform-oriented series concerned
with the application of social science to social policy (other books in the
series examine social security, the relationship between unemployment and
health, and public housing schemes).  Dramatically different from conceptions
of European communities with which most American anthropologists are
acquainted through Arensberg's Irish Countryman, Pitt-Rivers' The People of
the Sierra, Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, and many
other community studies (with their connotations of dialectical opposition to
urban settings, relative isolation and homogeneity, embodying the
romanticized, rural, "traditional" folk), the book is nevertheless a study of
and
quest for community--but community in gritty, urban-industrial, global guise.
It belongs to the passionate ethnographic genre of  Rena Gazaway, Oscar
Lewis, and Colin Turnbull (The Ik, not The Forest People), all of whom are
concerned with how human beings salvage a sense of order out of the crises
of poverty.  Its passion is occasionally muted by jargon ("empirical sociology
of consumption," "theoretical marginalisation of social status") and the
thunder of numbers that American anthropologists are more likely to
associate with sociological surveys than with an ethnographic case study.
The main research theme of the book--how is unemployment affecting a
people for whom "work" is a significant moral concept--reflects, perhaps, the
complicated association of British social anthropology with moral philosophy
(which is another story);  but its inductive qualities render it an effective
ethnography of an industrial lowland village, a social anthropologist's window
on the world of Scottish life conveyed in "Grey Granite," the third in Lewis
Grassic Gibbon's trilogy,  A Scots Quair.
        As an ethnography of working-class culture, Workers not Wasters
explores the meanings, significant distinctions, and interactions of actors in
the community of "Cauldmoss," a village of 1500 people located between the
Firths of Forth and Clyde, less than an hour from both Glasgow and
Edinburgh.  Based on long-term participant observation conducted during the
early 1980s under a research project directed by the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, the research in Cauldmoss also
involved the use of questionnaires and is linked to an eclectic theoretical base
(Durkheim, Douglas, Weber, Sahlins, Bourdieu;  cognitive categories and
social class, semiotics and praxis).  We hear many voices, including the
almost painfully honest, reflexive ruminations of the ethnographer, which
exist alongside statistical tables and population charts.  The book not only
fulfills its mission of tracing the cultural distinctions made in the community
of Cauldmoss (the relationship, for example, between changing patterns of
consumption and how to avoid being perceived as a snob;  the contradictory
pulls of upward social mobility and community belonging;  hedonism,
collective leisure, acceptable and unacceptable forms of expenditure;
categories of respectability under conditions of unemployment), but it
provides a good description of current research in British and especially
Scottish ethnography (there have been several evaluations of the current
status of Scottish ethnography, and Wight places his work in their context).
The ethnographic scent smells true--bringing back clear memories of my year
as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburghy when my best friend was
the daughter of a coalminer from a small village, now suburb, to the south of
Edinburgh.  As the father worked less and less as the mines closed down, and
spent more time gambling, or in the pubs, the talk, the explanations, the
inventions of the self were very similar to scenes that Wight invokes in
Workers not Wasters.
        The book's strength is also its weakness.  Firmly based in the context
of British ethnography, the work remains largely parochial, lacking the cross-
cultural comparison by which the effects of economic deprivation in different
cultural contexts could be more fully evaluated.  I felt, at the end of the
thickly packed 238 pages of text, slightly claustrophobic, longing for a larger
view--of  "community" in a more generic sense, of a conception of labor and
life-purpose that transcended the connotations of "employment ethic";  of
contrasting conceptions of work resulting from the effect of different cultures,
different histories, different stratification systems.  But such would have been
icing on the nourishing, thick fruitcake of Scottish weddings;  this cake is
well
formed, well baked, and, to borrow an overused Levi-Straussian metaphor,
good to eat.