Allow me to be the first voice of dissent--while this is a thoroughly researched ethnography, the analysis was myopic and simply not intensive enough. My primary disapointment in this book was the author's failure to account for graffiti itself--as a language, as text, as communication. So little has been written on this subject, but Mcdonald spends only the smallest amount of time discussing the way that graffiti "performs". Of course, you say, she is a sociologist, and this is a subcultural study. But Mcdonald spends a great deal of this book focusing on masculine/feminine identity and graffiti art as a way to "perform" masculinity or femininity, through exclusion and inclusion. Graffiti is contextualized as an expression of anomie and disenfranchisement, and the illegal nature is brought to the forefront. But this could easily have been a book about gang members in London, as very little in this book would have been different. So much can be written about the way urban youth mediate themselves, and why. This book just does not account for communication and, in focusing on its subjects, neglects the very interfaces and connections that allow them to communicate and differentiate. Finally, the greatest weakness of this book is that it makes NO attempt to historicize graffiti. It's as if graffiti first appeared in the 80's out of a cultural vacuum. Without any sort of historical context, the hobby discussed in this volume means very, very little. Like other dissertations written for public consumption, the book spends a great deal of time recounting the history of 20th century criticism, which will make you tap your foot and roll your eyes if you've heard all of this before. I enjoy the approach--ethnography is a very important methodology, first person narration and personal anecdotes are too often absent from academic work (but becoming more popular in recent years)and the author's insistence that her subjects review and revise her work in the footnotes is very endearing, and perhaps revolutionary. I just wish that this book had actually discussed graffiti--how do we understand subjects without understanding their symbolic order?
