BR - Cool places geographies of youth cultures

Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. by Tracey Skelton; Gill Valentine Review by: Thomas Herman Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 745-747 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American Geographers Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564111 . Accessed: 17/02/2012 04:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Association of American Geographers are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annals of the Association of American Geographers. http://www.jstor.org Book Reviews 745 however, Landscapes of Promise provides proof of the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Robbins recognizes that anthropologists, biologists, geog- raphers, and historians share much in common where environmental alteration is concerned, a point that is reflected in his list of references. Taking stock of Oregon's early American set- tlers, California's first governor, Peter H. Burnett, once commented, "I never saw so fine a popula- tion as I saw in Oregon most of the time I was there." According to Burnett, referring to the period 1843- 1848, Oregonians "were all honest, because there was nothing to steal; they were all sober, because there was no liquor to drink; there were no misers, because there was no money to hoard; and they were all industrious, because it was work or starve" (quoted in MacColl 1988: 3). Shortages of money and liquor notwithstanding, one thing is certain-Oregonians were industri- ous, a trait which has been indelibly stamped on the land in many and varied ways across the state. Key Words: environmental history, human-physical environment interactions, Oregon, Pacific Northwest. References MacColl, E. K. 1988. Merchants, Money, and Power: The Portland Establishrnent 1843-1913. Portland: Georgian Press. Price, E. T 1995. Dividing the Land: Early American Beginnings of Our Private Property Mosaic. Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press. Walth, B. 1994. Fire at Eden's Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story. Portland: Oregon Historical Society. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine, eds. London: Routledge, 1998. xi and 383 pp., maps, figs., photos., notes, refs., and index. $23.99 paper (ISBN 0-415-14921-5). Reviewed by Thomas Herman, Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA. It may no longer be accurate to say that young people are ignored by academic geography, but it was true for so long that this book still comes as a pleasant surprise. Through the 1970s and 1980s, environmental perception and cognition studies with children provided exceptions to that inat- tention. These works, however, were as likely to be produced by psychologists or cognitive scien- tists as geographers. Recently, geography's cul- tural turn has brought marginalized social groups and subcultures into focus and challenged schol- ars not only to recognize these social positions but actually to make use of them. The editors of Cool Places have themselves contributed significantly to the geographical study of young people and the cultures they reproduce, though their own re- search is regrettably absent from this book. Par- ticularly in Britain, the work of the Birmingham School has served as an entree into studies of youth culture and the charting of "maps of mean- ing." The impact of cultural studies resonates in both the title and content of this collection. Yet, in announcing the arrival of youth as a recognized focus of geographic research, it also aims to locate youth in broader, geographic frames of reference. In that respect, I view it as a landmark collection and applaud the editors and publisher for their leadership. The editors acknowledge their pioneering pur- pose in the introduction: "to explore the diversity in young people's lives in order to place youth on the geographical map and to demonstrate youth's relevance to a range of geographical debates" (p. 1). Illuminating the potent and productive inter- sections of critical geography and the study of youth certainly enriches human geography. I am sorry to say that the promise of this book has been only partially realized. The contributions are un- even in quality and are not able to maintain a sense of analytical rigor that would help to iden- tify geographies of youth cultures as something more than the explication of the "whereness" of often-idealized youth experiences. While that is a missed opportunity, there is sufficient value in the book to make it worth recommending to cultural and critical geographers and other social scientists who are interested in youth. Whatever the shortcomings of the volume may be, it is a starting point for connecting issues related to youth to the new critical geography, and is em- braceable as such. The contributions suggest many of the angles from which geographers might 746 Book Reviews approach youth, sometimes exhibiting potential while at other times demonstrating pitfalls. Standing alone in a potentially powerful field of literature, it is easy to heap expectations on this collection, so I will try to be specific in both my criticisms and my commendations. If the book provides nothing else, the introduc- tion provided by the editors is valuable as the most comprehensive review of the trajectories of inter- est in young people's geographies. An increasing number of geographers are turning to critical studies of young people. I think this opening chapter provides them an enduring resource, de- spite an array of copy-editing foibles. Following the introduction, the nineteen remaining chap- ters are organized into four parts: "Repre- sentations," "Matters of Scale," "Place: Geographies of Youth Cultures," and "Sites of Resistance." Each section has a brief introduction that summarizes and connects the main points of four or five contributions. The organization of the book is sensible, though the divisions might be seen to reflect a tendency of academic engage- ment with youth, to follow predictable rhetorical paths and theorize youth narrowly. Nevertheless, the volume affirms a growing interest in issues related to children and youth in the U.K. that is not as evident in the U.S. (only two of the con- tributing authors currently work in the U.S.). One criticism applicable to several of the con- tributions is that theoretical deployments and projections of youth take precedence over critical engagement with the diverse, everyday experi- ences of young people. Youth does appear at times in ways that correspond to ideal types, but some authors seem to be more eager to use these sim- plifications than to confirm or contest them. Richard and Kruger's chapter, which describes the rave scene in reunified Germany, exemplifies the potential for youth to be relegated to predict- able tropes and the embodiment of adult fantasy. Less grievous reductionism is identifiable in Hetherington's account of Britain's "new age travelers" and Lucas's piece on gangs in Santa Cruz, California. In these latter cases, media rep- resentations of youth are effectively mined to demonstrate the social construction of youth as deviant, but the contestation of simplistic and reactionary representations is undertaken only discursively. Well-precedented discussions of moral panic preclude the opportunity to convey and justify the perspectives and experiences of individuals being characterized. Unfortunately, such analysis shows only that the category of youth is constructed in opposition to notions of the public responsibilities of adulthood, including the management of order and capital. Once un- covered, that relation is not challenged from those marginalized social positions or grounded in the experiences of belonging to youth subcul- tures. The attractiveness of social theory may in some cases need to be tempered by the unglam- orous labor of documentation. Quite happily, another group of papers stands out for the extent to which they do engage with young people's everyday experiences. The use of vignettes throughout the book nicely supports authors' inclusion of subjects' voices. Though not always refined, contributions by Blackman (on resistant identities among a group of British schoolgirls), Malbon (on clubbing's relation to city life), and Bowlby et al. (on the experiences of Pakistani Muslim women in Britain's labor mar- ket) are sincere efforts to make the lives of youths both visible and instructive. These authors strug- gle to contextualize their analyses within broader theoretical discussions, but this is because they utilize ethnography to encounter some of the multiple locations and fragmented identities that are managed by young people experiencing the demands of public and private life. This willing- ness to do and take direction from ground-level work seems to be missing from some of the more theoretically sophisticated writing on youth cul- tures. Geographers may hesitate at the complica- tions and practicalities of such undertakings, and the temptation to take short cuts is under- standable but highly problematic. In reading Des- forges's paper on youth travel as consumptive identity construction, the reader may be dis- mayed to learn that the research hinges on inter- views with fifteen individuals, most of which are reported to be thirty-five years or older. Surely, the recollection of one's own youth is an impor- tant context for writing about youth, but it can also generate a confidence and familiarity that justifies empirical minimalism and extensive extrapolation. Working through the book, three chapters carry an extra burden of expectation based on the authors' past contributions. The contributions by Massey, Katz, and Ruddick follow arguments al- ready developed in their earlier publications. These authors bring solid theoretical insight that will be appreciated by readers new to this field and identifiable to those who already read the litera- ture. Massey and Ruddick develop the pivotal role of spatiality in constructing youth cultures. Book Reviews 747 Katz takes this an important step further by advo- cating solidarity with the struggles of youth and resistance to the processes by which interrelated developments at various scales erode youth's so- cial contracts and weaken the possibility of mean- ingful participation in public life. Because it incorporates a call for actively supporting just struggles, I think Katz's chapter helps to chart the important role that geographies of youth cultures can play in political critique as well as activism. Of the nineteen essays, Breitbart's discussion of "young people's designs for survival and change" sets itself apart from the others in re- sponding to the crises of, in this case American, youth by actively engaging young people's politi- cal consciousness and investigating ways in which their participation in the public sphere can be cultivated. Breitbart identifies herself as an astute observer of social constructions of youth, but more crucially, she demonstrates the wisdom to provide young people space to develop their own responses to deteriorating environments and disempowering political agendas. Her work dis- plays much of Bunge's commitment to social wel- fare with additional sensitivity to the susceptibility and opportunities for self-realiza- tion associated with urban childhood. I appreci- ate this essay as an example of the promise held by bringing the powerful critiques of the social construction of youth together with a commit- ment to increasing political empowerment. Both the projects she discusses and her own approach to her writing meet Katz's challenge "to produce historical geographies that foster self-determina- tion, social participation, and growth and change at all scales. . ." (p. 140). In gaining a foothold for geographies of youth cultures in the geographic literature, the con- tributors to this volume also present a challenge to the wider collection of scholars interested in these issues. As a whole, the book packages geo- graphic issues rather neatly and tends to employ youth as a discursive convention compatible with ready-made critical theories of gender or resis- tance or scale. If this book is used to define the field of geographies of youth around the cultural studies tradition, then it may perpetuate rela- tively uncompelling engagements with youth style in its various forms. If, however, this volume is identified as a leading edge and one form of critical geographies of youth, then its strengths can be usefully exploited as the literature on geographies of youth expands and diversifies. I hope and fully expect that the latter will occur, and that cultural studies will remain as one of the principle antecedents of critical geographies of youth. I look forward to the time when this book is joined in productive discourse by further writ- ings on young people's geographies. Key Words: youth, cultural studies, identity, repre- sentation, resistance. Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Lyn Spillman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xii and 252 pp., notes, refs., and index. $59.95 cloth (ISBN 0 521 57404 8); $18.95 paper (ISBN 0 521 57432 3). Reviewed by Brian Osborne, Department of Geography, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Albanians, Basques, and Catalans are only three near the head of a long alphabetical list of national identities running up to Xhosan, Yugo- slavs, and Zimbabweans. The continued assertion of such distinctiveness has stimulated a renewed analysis into the nature of nationalism and na- tional identities. Rather than being regarded as primordial entities, nation-states are increasingly seen as historical constructions that are con- stantly being reconstituted and reimagined (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1991). It is this context that has informed several excel- lent studies of the emergence of French, British, American and other national identities (Weber 1976; Zelinsky 1988; Kamman 1991; Colley 1992; Bodnar 1994; Gillis 1994; Ignatieff 1994). They all demonstrate how an emotive identifica- tion with the nation-state may be nurtured by invented histories and imagined geographies that strive to integrate fractions, sections, and edges into the body-politic. This is particularly true of many "settler" na- tions that have had to confront the multiple problem of occupying new lands, assimilating di- verse peoples, and cultivating a sense of common purpose. A veritable panoply of technological, Article Contents p. 745 p. 746 p. 747 Issue Table of Contents Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 545-771 Volume Information [pp. ] Front Matter [pp. ] The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946-1994 [pp. 545-574] Modeling Spatial Price Competition: Marxian versus Neoclassical Approaches [pp. 575-594] "Race," Space, and Power: The Survival Strategies of Working Poor Women [pp. 595-621] Constructing a Fault(y) Zone: Misrepresentations of American Cities and Suburbs, 1900-1950 [pp. 622-639] A Tale of Two Swaths: Urban Childhood Blood-Lead Levels across Syracuse, New York [pp. 640-665] Spatially Variable Historical Alluviation and Channel Incision in West- Central Wisconsin [pp. 666-685] Forum The Balkanization Metaphor in the Analysis of U.S. Immigration [pp. 686-698] In Memoriam: Dan Stanislawski, 1903-1997 [pp. 699-705] Book Review Forum Political and Intellectual Passions: Engagements with David Harvey's Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference [pp. 706-707] Moments, Margins, and Agency [pp. 707-712] A Politics of Possibility without the Possibility of Politics? Thoughts on Harvey's Troubles with Difference [pp. 712-719] The Sacredness of "Mother Earth": Spirituality, Activism, and Social Justice [pp. 719-723] The Humboldt Connection [pp. 723-730] Book Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 731-733] Review: untitled [pp. 733-736] Review: untitled [pp. 737-739] Review: untitled [pp. 739-741] Review: untitled [pp. 741-743] Review: untitled [pp. 743-745] Review: untitled [pp. 745-747] Review: untitled [pp. 747-750] Review: untitled [pp. 750-752] Review: untitled [pp. 752-754] Review: untitled [pp. 754-755] Review: untitled [pp. 755-757] Back Matter [pp. ]