Of Incorporation. Particularly Salient Here Is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's
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Reviews 73 of incorporation. Particularly salient here is to a thesis that O’Brien could have explored: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s prediction that while Asians have succeeded in American while part of the Latino and Asian popula- society—evidenced by their levels of educa- tion may ‘‘become white,’’ others will become tion and income, termed ‘‘the model minor- ‘‘honorary white’’ (such as Chinese, Japanese, ity’’—they have not gained social Koreans, Asian Indians, and lighter- acceptance. Tuan posits that intermarriage skinned Latinos), while still others will within the larger ethnic group has a different become ‘‘collective black’’ (Cambodians, meaning than intermarriage with whites, as Hmong, Laotians, and darker-skinned Lati- the intent is to form a bulwark against the nos, along with American blacks). loss of their Asian or Latin cultures, customs, One of the most interesting findings is the and languages. profound generational divide in these atti- Rather than the whitening and the brown- tudes between the first immigrant genera- ing theses, which are too stark, O’Brien pro- tion and their children. For as one might poses ‘‘a color-nuanced understanding’’ that expect, O’Brien finds that Latin American pays attention to the unique hybrid space of and Asian immigrants brought their preju- the racial middle. Ultimately they have the dice against blacks with them, and were potential to create a powerful antiracist reinforced by the American context. But force. their children grew up in a post-Civil Rights Lastly, O’Brien also fails to note that the movement America, and are far more inclu- white population is quite diverse. There sive than their parents. And now that inter- was a time when white supremacist atti- marriage rates are triple what they were 50 tudes were dominant, but now those move- years ago, O’Brien finds that intermarriage ments have become fringe groups, as with whites is accepted, while blacks contin- plenty of attitudinal research shows. These ue to be seen as undesirable. She does not days, rather than the hegemony of the white, address what the meaning of intermarriage Anglo-Saxon culture of the past, many within the larger ethnic group (e.g., Japanese white, middle-class Americans can be found with Koreans, Cubans with Puerto Ricans) eating sushi and chilaquiles, doing Tai-Chi and means to them. yoga, and playing soccer, while considering A major weakness of her work lies is the the teachings of the Buddha alongside those limited number of theoreticians whose of Jesus and Moses. work she covers: she fails to take into Despite its shortcomings, O’Brien’s book account the work of Mia Tuan, who studied has opened a useful path of study regarding various groups of Asians in California (all the racial middle. Hopefully, others will third generation and above, the descendants widen that path. of nineteenth-century Asian migrations), with respect to whether they were to be For- ever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian The History of Media and Communication Ethnic Experience Today (Rutgers University Research: Contested Memories, edited by Press, 1998). Tuan also addressed many of David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley. New the same issues: residential segregation, pat- York: Peter Lang, 2008. 390pp. $34.95 paper. terns of intermarriage, and the like, with ISBN: 9780820488295. a large sample. Mia Tuan’s work, in turn, was guided by Mary C. Water’s Ethnic SARAH E. IGO Options: Choosing Identities in America (Uni- Vanderbilt University versity of California Press, 1990). Waters first [email protected] established the way in which identity forma- tion took place for the descendants of Euro- In The History of Media and Communication pean immigrants who had become Research, David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley successful and lived in suburbs. Tuan have accomplished that rare feat: an edited explored the process of identity formation collection that adds up to far more than the for third or higher generation Asians. Her sum of its parts. Moreover, they have analysis of the descendants of the old Asian brought a good deal of coherence to what immigrants in California, for example, leads even scholars and practitioners will admit Contemporary Sociology 39, 1 Downloaded from http://csx.sagepub.com at ASA - American Sociological Association on May 28, 2010 74 Reviews is a dizzyingly incoherent field, equal parts Park’s, which restores the classic Personal sociology, social psychology, political sci- Influence (1955) to its proper intellectual ence, journalism, rhetoric, and cultural stud- milieu, enabling us to see it as a work that ies. The goal of the volume is to give departed fundamentally from most contem- communication and media studies a his- porary social scientists’ deep concerns about tory—or rather, to give it a rigorous, honest conformity. The legacy for communication one rather than a Whiggish past that mainly studies, he suggests, was an idealized model serves disciplinary and professional needs of the public sphere based on face-to-face in the present. Lamenting the existing his- interaction. In the same vein, William J. Bux- tory of communication research as ‘‘anemic ton’s discussion of the competing strands of and notably unreflective’’ (p. 1), the editors communications research within the Chi- are out to chart (and guide) an emerging cago School of Sociology brings nuance to subfield. a falsely homogenized tradition. He locates What is striking about this effort is that a path not taken in early media studies there are few agreed-upon strands of com- (only to be rediscovered decades later), an munications history apart from canonical, approach that attributed as much power if contested, lists of ‘‘founders’’ (Kurt Lewin, and meaning-making to audiences—here, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Carl Hov- moviegoing East Harlem juveniles—as to land, and the like) or key studies (the Payne the medium. Fund studies of moviegoing, wartime Many essays are of the debunking variety. morale, and propaganda work, and above Sue Curry Jansen effectively shows how all, Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz’s Personal Walter Lippmann has been misread by com- Influence and its finding of ‘‘limited effects’’). munications scholars eager to codify Equally striking is the immaturity of the a behaviorist, mechanical scholarly tradition field at large. The editors’ call for basic archi- as a foil to a more democratic Deweyite one. val work, for attention to political-economic Similarly, Deborah Lubken traces the career context and institutions, and for awareness of the ‘‘hypodermic needle’’ theory of all- of the parallel historiography of the other powerful media influence, supposedly over- social sciences indicates that the history of thrown by the discovery of ‘‘limited effects’’; communication studies is at its rudimentary she doubts whether anyone ever believed in stage of development indeed. the former theory, seeing it instead as a use- The collection is divided into three parts: ful weapon in disciplinary battles and in the state of the historiography, institutional drawing a firm line between experts on the histories, and ‘‘people and places in the his- media and mere laypeople. And Jefferson tory of the field.’’ Essays range from accounts Pooley elegantly summarizes the ‘‘new’’ of the establishment of media studies in dif- and darker history of communications that ferent national settings (newspaper science has taken root since the mid-1990s, which in Germany and cultural studies in Britain, links the field less to progressive scientific for example), to quantitative analyses of the achievements (not to mention ‘‘limited topics tackled by media researchers in the effects’’) than to propaganda and psycholog- past, to histories of key organizations such ical warfare initiatives sponsored by the as the International Association for Media Rockefeller Foundation, the CIA, and the and Communication Research, to intellectual State Department. biographies of figures in the field both well As with all such volumes, it is impossi- known (Lazarsfeld) and forgotten (William ble to summarize the contents. But several McPhee, Paul Cressey). themes emerge strongly: the late-bloom- There is an inevitable unevenness to the ing historiography of the field related to contributions. The one piece to deal directly its mid-century birth, the need for institu- with gender, for instance, offers undigested tional as well as externalist histories to questionnaire responses about female schol- challenge well-worn origin myths driven ars’ experiences rather than a bold vision of by charismatic individuals and studies, how feminist communication studies might and the peculiar disciplinary shape of unsettle the field. This is more than made ‘‘media and communication studies,’’ up for, however, by rich essays like David which arguably has been far more Contemporary Sociology 39, 1 Downloaded from http://csx.sagepub.com at ASA - American Sociological Association on May 28, 2010 Reviews 75 successful institutionally than it has been intellectually. The Problem of Order in the Global Age: Systems Nearly all of the essays address this last and Mechanisms,byAndreas Pickel. New theme, either implicitly or explicitly. Several York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 218pp. grapple with the trajectory of communica- $74.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781403972446. tions research as it moved from a concept THOMAS BURR to a field to a discipline, to borrow the sche- Illinois State University ma laid out by J. Michael Sproule. Veikko [email protected] Pietila fruitfully explores the ‘‘social’’ (orga- nized and institutional) versus ‘‘cognitive’’ This is a difficult yet worthwhile book. The (intellectual) consolidation of a discipline author’s style is dense and abstract—some like media studies. In the process, he exposes might say a fitting style for political the problematically dualistic nature of com- theory—and the reading is slow going, munications as a field, its roots not simply but it has its virtues and is worth tackling. in ‘‘science’’ but in the need to provide jour- Andreas Pickel examines the problem of nalists with professional training.