No Dancin' in Anson: An American Story of Race and Social Change.

By Ricardo C. Ainslie (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1996. xxiv plus 342pp.).

Texas and Ontario are worlds apart, even leaving aside the century of difference in the topics of these two books. If this weren't apples and oranges enough, Lynne Marks is a social historian while Ricardo C. Ainslie is a clinical psychologist. Nonetheless, these two astute scholars share a concern with the politics of culture on the most immediate level, the local level. In particular, both wonder how leisure and religious attempts to control it made way for meaningful struggles about identity, among and within the diverse populations of small towns.

Marks' comparative study of three small urban centers in Ontario makes both empirical and methodological contributions that will interest scholars of gender, religion, work, leisure, sexuality, the family, and the public sphere in both Canada and the United States. Observing that religious history has often presupposed "a seamless Protestant way of life" (p. 3) studied at the rarefied level of intellectual history, Marks instead wants to know "what was actually happening beyond lectern and pulpit in the pews of neighborhood churches, and in the roller rinks and taverns that competed with the church pews for the allegiance of small town Ontarians?" (p. 6) To this end, Marks has got the goods; her evidence includes not only complete records of membership and attendance in all the churches in all three towns, but also rich family papers and newspaper accounts of puzzling incidents that she unravels with great skill. The author shows us how diverse religious experience could be even within individual families, how a flexible continuum of masculinity accommodated both the "rough culture" of the street and the respectability of the middle-class home, how husbands and wives locked horns over the temperance question, how fire companies, municipal bands, and sports teams both served and challenged religion, and most interestingly, how during the 1880s two working-class movements, the Knights of Labor and the Salvation Army, converged on the contested terrain of "true Christianity."

This is history about religion, but the author hastens to explain that it is not primarily religious history. Rather, Marks situates her work alongside that Bryan Palmer, Roy Rosenzweig, Steven J. Ross and others who study working-class cultures. But Marks observes tellingly that "most culturalist labour historians, while proud to follow E. P. Thompson's footsteps in other respects, have not followed up on his early recognition of the potential significance of religion to working-class culture." Most of us are not interested in remembering The Making of the English Working Class as a big book about Methodism.

Yet, Marks does far more here than resurrect E. P. Thompson's vision. For one thing, her book is "very much a work of gender history" (p. 9) by an author who started out to write a York University dissertation about working-class women's religion but soon found that she had to understand men's experiences, too, and to probe the meanings of masculinity, as well as femininity. Thus, we meet street-corner loafers as well as the ladies' auxiliary, infidel freethinkers as well as the "hallelujah lasses" of the Salvation Army, and both Knights and "Lady Knights" of Labor. Marks never assumes consensus or homogeneity within any of these subcultures, let alone among them; instead she keeps her promise to explore "the intricacies of cross-cutting and shifting identities." (p. 16) With remarkable subtlety and consistency, Marks attends in each chapter not only to class and gender as categories of identity, but also to "the different stages of the life cycle," (p. 10), showing how the often overlooked factor of age shapes cultures. She provides a model of how to recover "the messiness of actual historical experience" (p. 16) without writing a messy book.

Even more, Lynne Marks (who teaches history at the University of Victoria) demonstrates beautifully how to erase the customary distinctions between social and cultural history. Following Ava Baron and others who insist on both discursive and material analyses, Marks appears to be as comfortable and perceptive in crunching the numbers of the book's thirty-four tables as she is in drawing, discreetly and judiciously, upon gender and postructuralist theories to interpret crusades against dance halls, roller rinks, and even a bizarre 1895 campaign to stamp out that cradle of sin and radicalism, the strawberry ice cream social. Marks finds that Anglican elders viewed such popular events, which were largely organized by women, as threats to male autonomy in the church. She uses such incidents not only to explore issues of feminization, sacred space, and the creeping threat of "worldliness," (p. 78) but also to temper assessments of women's power and culture by Mary Ryan, Nancy Cott, and others. Throughout, Marks combines rigorous quantification and keen discursive analysis, without ever using theory as an escape hatch. She even describes a few cockfights (pp. 88-89) without trotting out Clifford Geertz.

Ricardo C. Ainslie's account of the repeal of a longs-standing ordinance against dancing in a West Texas town will be of less direct use to social historians but nonetheless suggests new directions for exploring the cultural and demographic changes that shape race relations and status disputes in the post-civil rights era. Ainslie, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, where he maintains a private practice, made nine visits to Anson, Texas, between 1987 and 1992. Ainslie assesses the local politics of identity by drawing heavily on Geertzian cockfights and "thick description." He adapts psychological theories of racial prejudice from Lawrence Kubie and others. Acknowledging that not all readers will find his method acceptable, the author takes an explicitly interdisciplinary approach that he dubs "psychological ethnography." Ainslie's particular interest is in psychoanalytic "traditions in which narrative is the centerpiece of method," and he begins with the promise that "this book is simple story-telling." (pp. xvii-xix)

Of course, small town stories are anything but simple, and Anson - population 2,644, in the heart of the Bible Belt - is no exception. Opposite the book's title page is a photograph of a big boat of an Oldsmobile, on the back window of which is scrawled defiantly, "LETS DANCE." As preface to the story of this slogan, Ainslie considers how two profound changes, one economic and one social, changed the face of Anson over the last thirty years. These are the postwar mechanization of agriculture and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both of which brought farmworkers from the fields into the town, its neighborhoods, and its businesses. As a result, the black and latino populations of Anson grew from 12 percent in 1965 to 34 percent in 1990. Ainslie sees the story of how "dancin'" came to Anson as "a reflection of a deeper underlying conflict about what kind of community its citizens could fashion out of a world that had changed immensely in the twenty-five years since the demise of Jim Crow and the social system of white domination it enforced." (p. 21) Ainslie's stories have a religious context, as well: Anson's city council and most of the town's officials and leading citizens were members of the Church of Christ, which proscribes dancing as sinful. Thus, Ainslie pits religious fundamentalism against changing demography to weave a story about the conflicts between "traditional and 'modern' world views." (p. 95)

Social, cultural, and economic changes converged, Ainslie believes, in 1987, when the town's 1933 anti-dancing law was challenged by a grassroots coalition of citizens. The rebels were mainly newcomers, led by several women of Mexican-American heritage and eventually aided by the ACLU. The "Footloose Club" (named after a popular film) was less concerned with civil liberties than with teenage pregnancy and delinquency, however. Parents wanted legal, chaperoned dancing and high school proms to provide a wholesome alternative for adolescents in a town where "there just isn't anything for them to do." (p. 96) Ainslie links the fight over dance to status anxieties among the town's moral guardians, one of whom told the author, "This 'good life' that people hear about has been glorified to the extent that everyone is trying to live it." (p. 228) Despite the Footloose Club's legal success and an exuberant victory dance, however, in the end the religious establishment in Anson continued to prohibit dancing by maintaining bureaucratic and other barriers. Into this larger story, Ainslie salts chapters that offer moving and illuminating case studies of townsfolk of various heritages, experiences, and points of view. Some of these people were instrumental in the dance fight, others more emblematic of diverse communities. Implicit throughout the book is that somehow the dance fight reveals changing race relations in the post-Civil Rights era.

Ainslie's intuition seems correct that this "story of race and social change" is bigger than Texas. He refers provocatively to the Rodney King case and other contemporary controversies. But he never succeeds in connecting the dance fight to the issue of race. His commitment to both narrative and theory is admirable but not smoothly executed. The book toggles endlessly between long, digressive stories and tendentious discussions of psychoanalytic theory - both elements frequently of unclear relevance. Some of these complaints are disciplinary; Ainslie is not a historian, and it is no criticism of him that his book shows how some boundaries remain firmly in place notwithstanding all our eager talk about interdisciplinarity. To offer only one example, throughout the book Ainslie analyzes "the psychology of prejudice" (pp. 117, 136) in terms that treat it, despite several important caveats, as an internal and universal phenomenon. Conceptually, he eschews the more familiar historical distinction between prejudice and racism, the latter being a process that involves structures of power, not merely personal bias. Such choices make the book unpersuasive yet provocative, and historians of the period may wish to follow some of Ainslie's cues. Reducing such stories to "an American version of the Balinese cockfight" (p. 87), however, may not be the most revealing approach. Sometimes a cockfight is only a cockfight.

Scott A. Sandage Carnegie Mellon University