Cultural cringe in so many unnecessary words

Until a few years ago, New Zealanders seemed to have a considerable fascination with cultural identity, with their own "Kiwiness" if you like. However, in more recent times, perhaps as the nation has grown into its cultural skin, there has been a lesser degree of concern about it.

Of course, another reason for the waning interest might be that sociologists have hijacked the subject and buried it beneath layers of anaemic academia. The end result can be seen in Nick Perry's pretentious prolixity. The essays in Ruling Passions touch on things New Zealanders hold dear - rugby, shopping, gambling, television and so on - but Perry, who teaches film, TV and media studies at the University of Auckland, writes such dense prose that fascinating and thought-provoking information often gets lost in thickets of words.

To take two examples: the development of rugby from a community-building amateur sport through to commercial prostitution and the way shopping has evolved from the highly personal nature of the corner dairy to the total impersonality of internet trading have both had major impacts on New Zealand. Perry offers an understanding of what has happened and is still evolving. But his narrative thread winds through a maze that will deter readers with little knowledge of the sociological theories acting as intellectual roadblocks or the films and television programmes that offer pointers to cultural progress.

But, if nothing else, Ruling Passions is an object lesson in how culturally gauche we still are.

In an introduction, Ian Wedde sings Perry's praises not merely for his literary abilities but for showing us why the study of culture is important. The compliment is returned in one of the essays in which Perry describes Wedde as the country's most accomplished cultural critic.

Such mutual backslapping reflects a level of cultural insecurity now absent from most of New Zealand but clearly still alive and kicking among Auckland's chattering classes.

• Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.