In Language and becoming in African American women's hair care, Lanita Jacobs-Huey aims to provide an “ethnographic multi-sited account of how Black women use language to negotiate the significance of hair in their everyday lives.” Utilizing an anthropological linguistic approach, for over six years she collected data through participant observations in beauty parlors, at hair care conventions, and at cosmetology schools. She also conducted interviews and collected texts. She uses these data to examine the meanings that hair holds for African American women. In seven loosely connected chapters, Jacobs-Huey allows us to listen in on conversations that take place in beauty salons in South Carolina, northern and southern California, in hair care seminars, at a Bible-study group of African American cosmetologists, at comedy clubs, and on Internet discussion boards. She examines the contexts in which hair gets discussed, the individuals who engage in these conversations, the gendered talk surrounding hair, what these conversations reveal about the ideological stances and the political and racial identities expressed, and what inter- and intracultural conversations expose about the politics of Black hair and identity.
In addition to discussing the purpose of the study, laying out its guiding questions, and briefly describing the multiple locations where she collected data, the introductory chapter discusses some of the conceptual, theoretical, methodological influences as well as her personal ties to the topic. An African American academic, Jacobs-Huey began her research with a six-month pilot study in her mother's beauty salon. This initial study and the subsequent research examined in the book are grounded and informed by the literature on African American women's discourse practices that she characterizes as “sociocultural pragmatics.” After reviewing some of the conceptual lenses employed, Jacobs-Huey takes up the ideas of being and becoming, defining the former as “Black women's self-perceptions as individuals and members of a collective,” the latter as “their transition into different dispositions, ideological stances (or positions), professional statuses, and phases of life” that are central to her analysis.
The context of the first three chapters are the settings where hairstylists typically gather – beauty salons, cosmetology schools, hair care seminars – to practice, learn, and renew their craft. Chapter 1 examines interactions between professional stylists and their clients to illustrate that novice and expert stances do not inhere in the client/professional roles, but sometimes shift as clients attempt to assert their preferences, compelling hairstylists to reassert their professional expertise. Drawing on examples culled from observations in California and South Carolina, this chapter describes some of the verbal and nonverbal strategies participants use to negotiate these stances. Delicate balancing is required of participants as they simultaneously assert themselves and attempt to maintain harmony. The second half of this chapter, its centerpiece, consists of an in-depth analysis of an interaction between a stylist and her client as they negotiate over how the client's hair should be styled. This section highlights the various linguistic moves participants use to position themselves as expert and novice, and illustrates how participants deploy these moves at different points in the interaction and synchronize their moves to effect a positive resolution. Jacobs-Huey implies that such interactions occur frequently because many African American clients have taken part in home-based hair care either as “kitchen beauticians” or observers, and that conflicts are resolved satisfactorily because participants share cultural norms about language use.
The next two chapters focus on gatherings of hair stylists. Chapter 2 examines the discourse that occurs in hair-care seminars that stylists attend to upgrade their skills and learn new techniques, while chapter 3 analyzes the monthly meetings of Cosmetologists for Christ, a Beverly Hills, California Bible-study group. Both chapters focus on the metaphors facilitators and groups leaders use to socialize hair stylists to conceive of themselves, their profession, and professional expertise in particular ways. Chapter 2 explores the “doctor” metaphor and analyzes how facilitators coax and coach stylists to conceive of themselves as hair doctors, exhorting them to use technical language to mark themselves as experts and distinguish themselves from clients, thereby distinguishing their expertise from the lay knowledge of their clients, who are unfamiliar with the terms. The Bible-study group (chap. 3) combines prayer, testimony, and the exchange of business savvy, inspiring stylists to view their work as a divine calling. In addition to content analysis, Jacobs-Huey offers a pragmatic analysis, alluding to but not delving deeply into to aspects of performance in the discourse evident in these chapters.
Moving from settings where she could collect data in person, Jacobs-Huey continues to explore the meaning of hair in chapters 4 and 5. In contrast to chapters 2 and 3, which only hint at performance, in chapter. 4 she uses a performance theory framework to examine the routines of stand-up comedians in Los Angeles, specifically analyzing how the self-deprecating, parodic, and satiric jokes, humorous stories, and one-liners African American male and female comedians tell about hair reveal gendered notions of cultural authenticity. Chapter 5 analyzes discussions about hair that took place on the AFROAM-L discussion board. In a sophisticated analysis of the discourse strategies and the textual representations used to convey paralinguistic and prosodic cues, Jacobs-Huey shows how individuals present themselves as culturally authentic and use this authenticity to bolster their claims.
The final chapter combines data collected from hair-care seminars and from the AFROAM-L discussion board to illustrate the dilemmas Jacobs-Huey confronted on her journey as a researcher, comparing her experiences with the accounts of other women of color who have conducted research in their own communities.
Considering the significance, the symbolism, and the contested nature of African American hair, especially African American women's hair, it is surprising that it took such a long time for academics to undertake serious examinations of the topic. Jacobs-Huey is one of small group of such authors (e.g., Banks Reference Banks2000; Majors Reference Majors2001, Reference Majors2003, Reference Majors2004; Rooks Reference Rooks1996), whose research is acknowledged in this book. Others, like Harris Reference Harris1998, whose scholarship is overlooked are also to be commended for taking up this topic.
Beyond being a pioneering work in this field, this book has several strengths. Among these are its multi-sited focus and utilization of multiple theoretical, conceptual, and paradigmatic frameworks. Not only do these characteristics bolster the book's interdisciplinary nature, they also broaden its appeal. Successfully manipulating and integrating multiple conceptual, theoretical, and paradigmatic frameworks and disparate contexts into a seamless account, however, is a difficult challenge. One problem is the short shrift Jacobs-Huey gives to elaborating the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological elements informing her study. Except for discussion of the data collection and analysis techniques embedded in a few chapters, the author does not address this topic, preferring instead to focus the last chapter on the dilemmas of conducting research rather than the technical decisions involved in collecting and analyzing data. Some readers, believing that these discussions detract from the book and take up space better devoted to weightier matters, will not be concerned by this omission. Occasionally, however, I found myself wanting some information about data collection – for example, whether Jacobs-Huey witnessed the live comedy routines or viewed recordings of them, or how shifting from contexts where she was known and overtly collecting data to a more covert role affected her research. It is understandable that authors, fearing it might interfere with the flow of the text, might avoid placing such information in the text. Reporting such information in expanded endnotes, however, would have allowed readers looking for more details to satisfy their curiosity. Although Jacobs-Huey mentions that her work draws on the literature on African American women's discourse practices referred to as sociocultural pragmatics, except for a brief explanation of the ideas of being and becoming there is little exposition or explication of which frameworks, concepts, and paradigms will be applied, how these will frame and inform her study, or the works from which these are drawn. The result is that she overlooks the work of some scholars that would have enriched her study both substantively and conceptually. One example is Harris's (Reference Harris1998) anthropology dissertation that examined hair, culture and, self-construction among African American women. Another work omitted is that of Phillips, as well as the work of other anthropologists, many of them women of color, published in a special issue of Transforming Anthropology compiled by Phillips (Reference Phillips2004) and devoted to Black beauty culture. This is surprising, since Jacobs-Huey's linguistic analysis of hair talk among Black and White beauticians at a Black Hair Expo, reworked and appearing as chapter 5 in this book, was published in the special issue. Had she consulted other research, she might have found that the performance theory framework she has applied only to the routines of stand-up comedians in chapter 4 might also be relevant to the analyses undertaken in chapters 2 and 3. Not only would this framework have deepened and enriched the latter analysis, it might have strengthened the connections among several loosely connected chapters, currently linked only by a couple of sentences summarizing the previous chapter and announcing the subsequent one. Because Jacobs-Huey does not include a chapter that ties all the others together, utilizing one framework across several chapters could have produced a more coherent book. Last, by drawing on a greater range of authors she would have established a much stronger link to the larger scholarship on African Americans' discourse.
When Jacobs-Huey does integrate and coordinate the multiple threads of analysis, the results are quite good, as can be seen in several individual chapters that are well constructed and much better developed than others. Craftsmanlike work is particularly evident in the chapters that analyze the on-line discussions (chap. 5) and how knowledge is constructed and contested in women's cross-cultural hair testimonies (chap. 6).
Black hair, especially women's hair, is important in Black life but until recently overlooked by scholars. Writing in the special issue of Transforming Anthropology mentioned above, Rosado calls anthropologists to task for overlooking a topic that has such relevance in the Black community. Fifteen years earlier, Ralph Wiley (Reference Wiley1991), an African American essayist and commentator, wrote that the reason God gave Black people the hair she did was because, knowing Black people might be disadvantaged in the business world, she decided they would be able to organize businesses around their hair. Had Wiley lived to read Jacobs-Huey's book, he would have added that this book is yet another reason.
