Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame

by Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence

Rodeo people call their sport "more a way of life than a way to make a living." Rodeo is, in fact, a rite that not only expresses a way of life but perpetuates it, reaffirming in a ritual contest between man and animal the values of American ranching society. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence uses an interpretive approach to analyze rodeo as a symbolic pageant that reenacts the "winning of the West" and as a stylized expression of frontier attitudes toward man and nature. Rodeo constestants are the modern counterparts of the rugged and individualistic cowboys, and the ethos they inherited is marked by they admire the wild and the free yet desire to tame and conquer.

Based on extensive field work and drawing on comparative materials from other stock-tending societies, Rodeo is a major contribution to an understanding of the role of performance in society, the culturally constructed view of man's place in nature, and the structure and meaning of social relationships and their representations.

Genres: Nonfiction

302 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1982

Reviews

[Sara Tiede · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly interesting topic with freshman level writing. As in, it felt like reading an entry level college essay that had been expanded into 272 pages.. It didn't have the technically suave familiarity of a more experienced scientific analysis, and it also didn't have the comfortable professionalism to make for a good lay reading.

The entire book often felt like an over eager student trying to impress the teacher. There was a significant amount of "In this chapter, I will show," and the matching conclusion, "now I have shown in this chapter," in the type of language kids learning how to form an essay use until they become comfortable enough to introduce and conclude their writing in more natural language. The author was nearly obsessively careful in never providing names or even stand in names for "informants", which felt like an overly worried student trying too hard to be professional to get the grade. Instead of sounding more professional, this led to occasional confusion, where as a reader I didn't know if a set of input she collected was supposed to have come from a single source or multiple. Even supposed well known or even "famous" rodeo related names were carefully avoided, only ever alluded to awkwardly. And yet, she tossed about references to actual people within quotations with no explanation at all of who the reference was about. Published in 1982, a reader either needed to already know, or look up, references spouted by rodeo clowns in quotation to Hollywood stars, current politicians, or even the fairly obscure Euell Gibbons (a wild botany author,) with often little contextual help. Quotations all came across is a similar stilted sort of tone which made me wonder if they were exact quotations, or her trying to clean up and make more clinical the actual things informants had told her. And her conclusions often seemed to whip-lash between trying to fall in line with previous ethnographic studies she based her study on, and trying to find her own original new claim.

All in all, I wanted to finish it, so I did, but I didn't really enjoy most of it. It was labored reading. I had considered suggesting it to a family member who I thought might enjoy the subject matter, but fairly quickly decided against that based on the awkwardness of tone. I hope someone might find at least the subject interesting enough, but it's definitely little free library fodder for me.

[Ireland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used this book as a source for my paper on the welfare of rodeo cattle for my Animal Welfare class. It wasn’t terrible. But it was a little bit of a slow read. I wasn’t much of a fan of the writing style, which may be why I didn’t like it much.