Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self.

In Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, Canadian ethnographer Grant McCracken seeks to establish himself as the Rem Koolhaas of coiffure. Hairstyles, he argues, represent a great deal more than protective covering for the cranium; they are designed and engineered like buildings. More significantly, for women they are the very vocabulary of self-invention, the outward manifestation of an inner metamorphosis. To read Big Hair is to plunge into a rat's nest of cultural signifiers, to look long and hard at the ravages of peroxide, excessive teasing, and hair spray: to probe that delicate bond between female client and hairdresser - or, as McCracken would have it, manipulator of symbolic materials. It is to emerge with an elementary grasp of the language of hair, no longer intimidated by its extreme incarnations, including the Hindenbergesque tufts that adorn the heads of women in Texas, the South, Nashville, and shopping malls on Long Island.

Despite McCracken's scholarly credentials - he received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago - his book is as much a send-up of academic analyses as it is itself such an analysis. "Scholars (especially the ones in the 'critical' and 'cultural' schools) have decided they may study the contemporary world without actually talking to anyone who lives inside of it," he writes. No such La-Z-Boy anthropologist himself, he has done extensive fieldwork in the salons of Toronto, and it shows. The strongest sections of Big Hair are based on first-hand accounts of the interplay between the stylist and the styled.

Unlike Mary Trasko's Daring Do's, a recent encyclopedic look at several centuries of hair, McCracken examines fashions from the '50s through today, making sense of their weirdness by relating them to the ethos of the times. The hideous, shellac-encrusted helmets of the '50s, for instance, seem a natural extension of a decade when Technology - the domain of men - was dedicated to subduing Nature. The period's oppressive spirit - its triumph of rigidity over sensuality and gentleness - is exemplified by this directive from Good Housekeeping: "Spray to Make Your Hair Behave."

McCracken credits English stylist Vidal Sassoon with breaking the hard-hair stranglehold. A valiant crusader against rats and rollers, Sassoon was persecuted in the '60s by the New York State Department of Cosmetology for refusing to burn and glue women's hair into submission. No timid esthete, Sassoon, a former Israeli commando, stood up to the bureaucracy that threatened to deny him a license. "Next to hanging," McCracken explains, "there's nothing like military service to concentrate the mind."

Except as a pretext for publishing campy photographs, McCracken's musings on movie-star locks are not particularly insightful. Perhaps trends come late to Canada, which would explain why he fixates on minor pop figures from the '80s - Morgan Fairchild, Lonni Anderson, Brigitte Nielsen - and ignores today's icons. Surely Marge Simpson belongs in a book on big hair, as does Hilary Clinton, with her apparent addiction to self-fashionings: the mercurial First Lady seems to have a new "do" every time she appears in public. Likewise, McCracken's short-list of big-hair cities slights Baltimore, home to auteur John Waters and the late Divine, whose combined genius produced that legendary celebration of tonsorial excess, Hairspray. Although McCracken omits drag queens from his study, his text is not without aspects of gender confusion - among them, the repeated application of the pronoun "her" to himself. "We," he writes in a passage about transformation, "can go from being someone who cares passionately about her social life to someone who wants nothing more than a solitary walk in the country."

Still, McCracken's strengths exceed his weaknesses, and he writes with considerable wit - useful for deflating the pretensions of shrill, alarmist commentators like Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf, whose tousled mane of "voluptuous hair" undermines her paranoid thesis. Wolf argues that fashion conventions victimize women; McCracken, by contrast, believes that a woman can use those conventions to express exactly what she - not the beauty. industry - wants. Ironic, he pointedly observes, that a woman who "wears the single most sexual and stereotyped haircut in the stylistic envelope," should express "dismay at the manner in which women are treated like objects in our society."

M. G. Lord is the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (Morrow, 1994; Avon, 1995).