Bal, Mieke, ed. The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation. Stanford:  Stanford UP, 1999.

This volume of essays serves a three-fold purpose. First, it is an announcement of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) as a new institutional player in the ever-expanding field of cultural studies. Second, it provides examples of the institute's theoretical positioning as the majority of the essays are based upon papers originally presented at the 1995 ASCA conference “A Practice of Cultural Analysis: A Workshop on Interdisciplinarity.” Third, and much more confusingly, it at times appears to be a call for “cultural analysis” as a corrective or alternative to the field of cultural studies. In the review that follows I will present the multiple issues exposed in this important collection and then address what I see as some of the problems in its understanding of cultural analysis.

The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation is edited and introduced by the esteemed cultural critic and founding director of the ASCA, Mieke Bal.1 Bal sets the ball rolling with an informative and exhilarating positioning of cultural analysis' role as “an interdisciplinary practice” that “seeks to understand the past as part of the present, as what we have around us, and without which no culture would be able to exist” (1). The challenge, according to Bal, is for this collection of essays to refute the view that “interdisciplinarity makes the object of inquiry vague and the methodology muddled” (2). As an initial attempt to explain these vague assertions, she turns to a Dutch graffito painted on a highway underpass during the 1980s. As a writer of art histories, Bal skillfully exposes the possible meanings of the public address to passing motorists (as well as for the artist and other authorities). The ambiguous message of the graffito, like many cultural artifacts, presents a problem to the reader in that we can never be sure exactly what was the author's intent/m