In 1979, I attended a Sunday afternoon cooking class in Osaka with a small group of Japanese friends and coworkers. There were fewer than 10 people present in the kitchen showroom to learn how to make chanko nabe, a hearty one-pot stew. I do not remember the recipe, or much else about the occasion, except that we traded casual jokes and asides with the instructor, some of them playing off the fact that the dish is well known as standard fare used to bulk up sumo wrestlers. It is astonishing yet gratifying that scholarship on language and culture has advanced to the point that there is now a book entitled Language, social structure and culture: A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. The reader looking for insights into Japanese or American culture, social structure, or cooking classes as cultural events, may be frustrated or disappointed with this book, but for scholars interested in reading a forthright essay about genre theory, supported with transcripts and exhaustive counting of clause types, it will offer useful and stimulating reading.

Mayes sets out to accomplish an ambitious task. Her stated goal is to examine a common genre across two radically different cultural settings in order to discover how people instantiate social reality through spoken language. In chap. 1, she provides the context for the study, discussing genre theory, data sources, and giving an outline of the book. The data are comprised of cooking demonstrations from three Japanese classes and three American classes, which were audiotaped. Mayes attended two of the Japanese classes and all the American classes, and a research assistant attended the third Japanese class. Mayes transcribed selected segments of the American data, and another research assistant transcribed selected segments of the Japanese data. Chap. 2 presents a straightforward overview of the concept of genre in the social sciences, as well as some discussion of other relevant terms such as speech activity, frame, and schema.

Chap. 3 begins with a short summary of scholarship on participation structure and social position and then moves to an analysis of the data. The primary finding is that cooking classes in both cultures entail a type of “default” pattern of student-teacher role, which is constructed through a regularly patterned configuration of teachers as speakers and students as recipients/addressees. Mayes notes that while the participation structure stays uniform throughout the duration of the Japanese classes, it shifts over time in the American case, gradually incorporating other participation structures. She finds that the Japanese participants have more formalized or “professional” teacher-student relationships, with no stories, joking, or gossiping going on at all, while the American setting permits the development of “friendly relationships.” The comments, questions, and jokes in the talk of the American participants allow for digressions away from the recipe at hand, which in turn relates to changes in the participation structure.

Chap. 4 looks at the level of discourse, comparing similarities and differences in the patterns in the content of talk. Mayes finds that the Japanese view the cooking class as a serious, task-oriented event, while the Americans see it as an enjoyable social event. These patterns in content are said to reflect different expectations participants have about the cooking class genre. Chap. 5 examines the level of grammar by analyzing the task-oriented talk of teachers. The chapter includes several tables that document the frequency of clause types, with a particular focus on transitive or intransitive clauses. Chap. 6 summarizes the findings, emphasizing that recurring linguistic patterns constitute the structure of the cooking class genre.

One laudable aspect of the research is that Mayes laboriously probes the collected language data from the cooking classes to pinpoint where aspects of linguistic structure become conventionalized as part of the genre. Whether or not one agrees with her conclusions and assessments, the data are not hypothetical or remembered, and are available in transcripts for us to ponder or reanalyze. We should also be grateful that Mayes did not interpret the differences between Japanese and American cooking classes as stemming from any inherent, monolithic difference between Japanese and American “culture,” but rather from how the respective participants understand the particular social situation. I imagine that some scholars will welcome this book for its detailed linguistic analyses, painstaking quantification of clause types, and challenge to the scholarship on transitivity.

The primary weaknesses in the book relate to the author's overreaching aspiration to trace the creation of culture and social structure through situated talk. Although there is some discussion of social structure as it is understood in sociology, that material largely disappears in the ensuing linguistic analyses, and “culture” is even harder to locate. A roughly three-page section with the subheading “Previous work on Japanese culture” (104–7) reviews a few minor linguistic studies of Japanese speech events. Although Mayes says that she is investigating social structure, she attends to just one aspect of social life, the roles of teacher and student and how they are mutually constructed through speech. But even in this limited sense there is insufficient groundwork provided for us to understand the cultural and social meanings of this relationship. Mayes uses outdated research on Japanese high schools as the basis for characterizing the Japanese student-and-teacher model, even though adult cooking classes fall outside institutional school settings. The ethnographically rich articles in Learning in likely places (Singleton 1998), a book considered seminal in educational anthropology, describe how instruction is accomplished in the Japanese tea ceremony, calligraphy, classical comedy, pottery making, garage mechanics, and folk weaving, many of them learning situations that have much in common with the cooking class. An important finding in this volume is that mentorship, apprenticeship, and instruction are most often instantiated through observation and practice rather than through talk. By focusing on the cooking teacher's precise words and grammar, Mayes misses the primary Japanese cultural emphasis of adult instruction. When Mayes discusses use of honorifics by the Japanese teachers, she ascribes it to their high instructor status and gender, ignoring critical socioeconomic and regional dimensions. In a society where a large proportion of married women work, these nonworking housewife-students represent a specific social and class position. It would seem that accounting for the social placement of the participants, not just positioning them as “students” and “teachers,” would be part of our investigation of the social structures that are relevant to the use of language in these settings. Since Japanese teachers generally do not use honorifics with students, this is part of the social situation that requires much more discussion as well.

A major claim for distinction made by the book is that, unlike other studies, it compares empirical data from similar events. Yet closer attention to the ethnographic details reveals that these are not such similar events after all, despite their common categorization as “cooking classes.” The presumably affluent Japanese women in this study paid fees to take these classes, while the Santa Barbarans were enrolled in a free, state-funded course (aside from a nominal fee for materials). The Japanese classes were large and allowed students to enroll at any time, precluding the possibility of “friendly relationships” developing, as they did in the small Santa Barbara classes. It is not until halfway through the book that Mayes admits that student motivations for taking these classes were not at all comparable. The serious-minded Japanese women studying for their homemaker profession are more akin to the ambitious chefs at the Chicago Culinary Institute, whereas the Santa Barbara crowd looking for dates and distraction are similar to my group of Osakan friends, who learned to make chanko nabe solely as a leisure and social activity. Perhaps in the future someone might take a slightly different approach by comparing similar teaching events across cultures, regardless of the type of labeling used to identify them. Settings could be selected in terms of the similarity of type of learners and instructors involved, their motivations, their backgrounds, whether it is paid or unpaid instruction, and so on, regardless of whether it is classified as a cooking class or calligraphy lesson.

Mayes is only minimally successful in tracing the interrelationships among culture, social structure and language. She provides a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the grammar used by some speakers in a type of genre, yet presents a cursory and flattened understanding of the culturally embedded roles of “student” and “teacher.” Notwithstanding a reliance on empirical evidence, the manner in which real-life cooking classes are apprehended and represented is peculiarly bloodless, effectively stripping them of the emergent or inherent culture and social structure which is the putative aim of the study.