One of the most consistently engaging and convincing aspects of Cantwell's study is that it makes it very clear how the concept of ‘ethnomimesis’ pervades the disparate cultural landmarks on display here, despite the apparent distance between, for example, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and the 1893 World's Fair. This notion of ethnomimesis, the ‘human social interaction …’ which ‘has a subtle and I daresay a natural life of its own – a process of imitation, communication, and representation …’ (p. xi), allows the reader to see these processes at work, in Harry Smith's imitation of ‘old-timey’ in the Anthology packaging and in the remarkable architectural imitation that made up the ‘White City’ in 1893. Cantwell also displays his characteristic knack for grounding his discussion in the most important cultural movements in recent history, from Romanticism to Modernism, further demonstrating the important historical and cultural contexts which have contributed to the process of ethnomimesis.

Cantwell introduces the discussion of ethnomimesis initially as a folkloristic preoccupation, ‘My own traffic with ethnomimesis began with the ballad wars, an old scholarly debate left over from the nineteenth century …’ (p. xiv), and shows how the concerns of Francis Child and George Lyman Kittredge are really concerns of ethnomimesis, of ‘imitation, communication, and representation’ (p. xiv). He begins his study with an examination of perhaps the most intriguing period of folkloristic ethnomimesis in 20th-century America: the folk revival. The attribution of meaning to music is what particularly interests Cantwell here and, as he states in the Introduction, ‘from the intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth century, when a peculiarly modern form of attention, arising from calculation and quantity, displaced older symbolic modes of contemplation …’ (p. xx). In terms of folk music and the folk revival, this attention manifests itself as differing ways of listening to music, and Cantwell's argument is that listening to music necessarily involves not only an aural experience, in phenomenological terms, but also an introspective experience in which the listener conjures up images that are associated with, or seem to be associated with, the music.

The discussion then moves into the otherwise regrettably underexplored area of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Cantwell develops some ideas from his earlier study of the Anthology in his Reference Cantwell1996 book When We Were Good: The Folk Revival and uses these to link the previously established conceit of listening as an imaginative experience, ‘every act of hearing is essentially imaginative …’ (p. 8), to Smith's collection. Anybody who can recall listening to the Anthology for the first time has to agree with Cantwell's argument: Smith's collection is ‘a faery land summoned out of the play of memory and sensation whose aim, as in all of Harry Smith's work, is to “make sense” of the world as mystery’ (p. 38). Another refreshing aspect of Cantwell's study in its entirety is that it continues to use the Anthology as a discussion reference throughout Part 1 rather than having it make a ‘cameo’ appearance. Cantwell's awareness of the cultural importance of Smith's collection is clear, and repeated appearances of the collection demonstrate the ethnomimesis at work in the ways in which the Anthology has been used since its release. There are few more effective illustrations of the social processes which have ‘a subtle and I daresay natural life’ of their own than the processes of listening, interpreting and performing which have impacted on the Anthology since 1952.

The second part of Cantwell's study discusses festivals, beginning with the most prominent folklore festivals in America, and through them looks at ‘how profound are the stakes for identity and even personality in the processes of festivity’ (p. xx). Again, these are social processes and human interactions that the study is interested in, ethnomimesis in other words, and, as Cantwell argues, the festival is not necessarily a cultural arena in which identity can be foregrounded. As the reader is informed, the American Folklife festivals, such as that of the Smithsonian Institution, are effectively an institutionalisation of folk culture that does not necessarily integrate their participants. There are obviously historical precedents for this institutionalisation of folk culture, such as the cultural projects of the New Deal and, as Cantwell points out, ‘folk festivals have their origins in an intellectual tradition that cannot wholly credit the full personhood of the participant nor thoroughly conceive his or her fundamental cultural difference as a difference’ (pp. 72–73). Cantwell articulates very effectively the prejudices and preconceptions, both social and intellectual, which underwrite the ethnomimesis of festivals for the remainder of the chapter. Examples of such prejudices and preconceptions range from the pioneering recording expeditions of John and Alan Lomax to the mess of contradictions which was the White Top folk festival in Virginia. As Cantwell rightly observes, ‘the careful field investigation of a folk community does, after time, gently do away with the conceptual frame that permitted the identification of the field to begin with, and gradually reveals particular people, with histories, personalities, and names …’ (p. 81). What this chapter shows is that an institutionalised and somewhat homogenised representation of folk culture as represented at a festival, ‘becomes wholly inadequate to account for the chemistry of personal encounter’ (p. 109).

Cantwell's study of the White City of the 1893 World's Fair is another fascinating exploration of processes of representation, particularly representation of something which has never actually existed in the way in which it is depicted. There are clear echoes of Cantwell's earlier chapter on the Anthology in which he concludes that Smith conjures ‘a faery land’. Similarly, the White City was ‘summoning to perception a scene, which, though constituted in its particular elements by what had been seen before in the world, can never have nor could ever exist in it …’ (p. 113). The argument powerfully put across by this chapter is that the White City is a monument to an imagined history, something which could also describe some work on folklore that presents folk music or folk tales as artefacts of a vanished tradition. This again demonstrates the relevance of Smith's Anthology in this discussion of ethnomimesis: in combining the 78 rpm records into a single collection, Smith constructed a monument to the same preconceptions and imagined histories Cantwell articulates in the chapter on festivals. Cantwell concludes, ‘Its hollow stylistic gesture, unrooted in the practical challenges of architectural science, while attempting to annex a history, both exposes its own want of history and saturates the field of temporality, in effect arresting or killing it …’ (p. 141).

In the third section of Cantwell's study, one of the most important chapters is the examination of what is called folklore's ‘pathetic fallacy’, a phrase borrowed from Ruskin's study of 19th-century painters but which, as Cantwell shows, can also be applied to the work of folklorists. What Cantwell incisively invokes with this phrase is folklore's inescapably ‘constructed’ disciplinary character, being predicated originally on the prejudices and preconceptions discussed in this study. Cantwell argues that, ‘folklore's “constructedness,” its “constituted” character, manifests itself precisely as such at the same time as its real political relations – and with them, therefore, the self-deceiving social-political sleight-of-hand that lies at the heart of the idea of the folk’ (p. 234). This assertion is especially important in Cantwell's study because it brings together much of what has previously been discussed, and by extension argues that the festival, the White City, and the Anthology are all complicit in this ‘pathetic fallacy’. These focal points of ethnomimesis induce the processes that constitute ethnomimesis, ‘imitation, communication, and representation’, through Ruskin's ‘contemplative fancy’. As the study stresses throughout, with regard to folklore, the contemplative fancy that encourages the interest can be debunked by investigation, but it is difficult to extricate the contemplative fancy from the facts unearthed by the investigation. Or, as Cantwell argues, ‘That the cultural process and the cultural product, however conceived, can never be finally disentangled from one another … I readily concede …’ (p. 234).

Ultimately, Cantwell's study is such a success because it draws on such a wealth of critical sources and studies such a diverse selection of cultural phenomena to demonstrate the prevalence of ethnomimesis across all these disparate areas. Cantwell undoubtedly achieves his aim of showing that ‘we share, as a society, a collective life that far transcends even our most urgent concerns as persons, families, and communities, and that nothing can be written or spoken that does not in some sense reflect what the larger membership enables and disables, permits and prohibits, demands and discourages’ (p. xi).