My favorite feature reporting assignments are the ones where I get to immerse myself in a whole new group or subculture. I am perpetually intrigued by the way people filter and amplify their everyday experiences based on their ruling passions. I am slightly envious that they have found the lodestar that guides their lives.
So it's no surprise that I adored Shari Caudron's Who Are You People?
It helps that I could immediately identify with her -- "I wanted a grand, ferocious, larger-than-life fervor that knew no bounds," she wrote in the introduction. However, what really won me over was the curiosity, sense of purpose, and honest self-examination that she brought to the project. That, plus a relatable style that can only come from decades of writing for general-market magazines and a storyteller's sense of when to rely on anecdote and when to rely on reportage. This is a really fun read.
Moreover, it's an informative one. Although Caudron shares her first-person experiences at Barbie collectors' gatherings, a Furries convention and a pigeon race, she also provides plenty of meaty reporting on the subject. Moreover, she takes the book to a place I consider my personal Graceland -- Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library -- and digs deep, with the help of scholars, into the whys and hows of passionate hobbyists and the communities they create.
Caudron bills the book as a personal journey, but she effectively relegates herself to the role of leitmotif and lets the passionate fans shine as the real stars of the story. As a reader, I did get a satisfying sense of her progress on answering her "Why ...?" questions as I moved through the book, but that was sort of the dessert course; the real meat is in listening to hard-core fans explain why and how they find significance in Lego buildings or Josh Groban. And sometimes, Caudron uses her own personal story as a framing device for explaining the wherefores of a specific group: the furries chapter, where she admits to her discomfort and battles to figure out where it comes from and what it means, is ultimately one of the sweetest and most informative.
I think Who Are You People is one of my favorite reads from this year. The subject is engaging, and the writing is going to be a primer for anything I hope to do in the future.
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While reading this book, I was reminded of two others: Judith Levine's Not Buying It and Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists.
Clearly, Levine's work will be with me for a while, but the reason I thought of it here was because Caudron's approach seemed to be the antithesis of the Levine approach to a topic. Whenever Caudron hauls out her own personal biases, it's to ask how they're shaping her ability to perceive her subjects. That was refreshing. Also, Caudron examined how some passions may be the result of mass-marketing (i.e. Barbie, board games) and how they may create the opportunities for new markets (i.e. sci-fi conventions).
To be fair, Levine based her reportorial experiment around dropping out of a perceived (if poorly defined) culture, while Caudron was deliberately immersing herself in different subcultures. However, I think that how you spend defines a whole lot of subcultures (I am fascinated with the Grocery Game) and perhaps a better book than "I shop selectively for a year!" might be one in which someone talks to people who belong to shopping-based communities ("Bees Buzzing for the Best," SFGate, May 28, 06) and sees how they negotiate the tricky intersection of personal wealth and public sense of belonging. Then, you're set to examine how your shopping choices set you apart or weld you to a greater group.
Ronson's Them is like the dark twin to Caudron's work. It's been about three years since I read it, but it's about Ronson's forays into subcultures that coalesce not around pop culture or hobbies, but grim ideologies: Islamic fundamentalists, and American militias and separatists.
The question I have now, after contrasting Ronson's and Caudron's work, are the roles that moral conviction and mass marketing play in the genesis and perpetuation of a subculture in today's world. Good thing I have Ken Goffman's Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, Ann Powers' Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America and Joseph Heath's Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture in my reading queue.
The tongue of idle persons is never idle. Melchior.
Posted by: Melchior | 2006.10.27 at 14:29