A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures of the Mega-City:A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures of the Mega-City

S I N G L E B O O K R E V I E W S

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa.Adam Ashforth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2005. 396 pp.

STEPHEN ELLISAfrican Studies Centre, Leiden

Adam Ashforth arrived in Soweto more or less by accident in1990. A historian preparing to do research on the transitionto democracy in South Africa, he hired a room in the vastAfrican township outside Johannesburg. He was adoptedinto his host family, and he has returned every year butone since 1990, making him perhaps the first professionalresearcher to write about Soweto on the basis of having livedthere.

His white skin, he tells us, never posed much of aproblem. A much greater obstacle to understanding lifein Soweto was Ashforth’s lack of spiritual knowledge. Hebecame particularly interested in what South Africans callwitchcraft, a word that Ashforth does not define extensivelybut that, he writes, refers to “malicious human action”(p. 80) carried out by mystical means, or to a force, gen-erated by intense hatred, that people experience as actingon them independently of their own will (p. 87). For manySowetans, witchcraft is the explanation for a wide range ofmisfortune, including infection with HIV/AIDS.

Part 1 of the book is an ethnographic description ofwhat Sowetans perceive as witchcraft and of the role itplays in their lives. Part 2 is an exploration of people’s ideasabout spirits and about pollution generally; the materialand invisible worlds in Soweto are joined seamlessly, asthey are in the rest of Africa. Finally, Part 3 of the book de-scribes how the state fails to deal with witchcraft and allegedwitches.

This book, written in an unpretentious and pleasingstyle, differs from much of the recent anthropological lit-erature on witchcraft in Africa in at least three significantrespects. First, Ashforth does not analyze witchcraft primar-ily in symbolic terms, as anthropologists habitually do (see,e.g., pp. 111–121 and 163). Despite being a self-describedsecular humanist, he takes his informants’ opinions aboutthe invisible world at face value for analytical purposes. Thisis a methodological approach that has long been standardin the scientific study of religion. Second, he situates peo-ple’s ideas about witchcraft in the context of some of theirother ideas about the invisible world, such as concerningthe spirits of ancestors, the Holy Spirit of Christian belief,

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 108, Issue 2, pp. 401–449, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2006 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of CaliforniaPress’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

and so on. Third, he considers how a population with astrong belief in witchcraft can be governed. The nub of theproblem here is that supposed witches, like the vast major-ity of traditional healers in South Africa, operate accordingto norms that lie outside the purview of postcolonial states,which employ terms of analysis and instruments of policythat have no direct purchase on the invisible world.

The quality of this excellent book is not diminishedby identifying a few points in which the discussion couldbe further elaborated or where, in the opinion of this re-viewer at least, Ashforth’s judgment is questionable. For ex-ample, in considering what governments might do aboutwitchcraft fears and witchcraft accusations, Ashforth hasmissed a broader literature, particularly on West Africa, thatcould have been useful. Similarly, he may be unduly pes-simistic in his assessment of the chances of registering heal-ers and of including traditional religion in school curricula,as a closer look at Zimbabwe and Zambia might have in-dicated. And, although Ashforth is to be congratulated onincluding in his bibliography some of the most salient liter-ature by South African theologians, his analysis of the possi-ble role of churches in providing a greater sense of spiritualsecurity is rather perfunctory.

A more trenchant criticism concerns Ashforth’s rejec-tion of the notion that the apartheid state in its last yearscontained a secretive network of operatives, dubbed the“third force,” that was intent on inflicting violence duringthe period of political transition. Ashforth’s point is welltaken that Sowetans’ perceptions of the invisible world ex-tends to the political realm, so that even after 1994 Sowe-tans account for their political problems by what amountsto a theory of witchcraft, now attached to the forces of theapartheid state. However, his account underestimates theactual historical role played in South Africa’s transition bySouth African counterinsurgency forces acting on the basisof a military–political strategy.

Not the least attractive aspect of Ashforth’s approachis his willingness to take positions sometimes avoided byscholars in search of an approach that escapes the charge ofEurocentrism. Thus, he is rigorous in his discussion of thework of “traditional” healers in Soweto (who often have lit-tle traditional about them) and of the notion of “indigenousknowledge” generally.

In short, Ashforth has shown the way for a discussion ofwitchcraft that goes beyond the “modernity of witchcraft”approach, above all in taking seriously the spiritual insecu-rity that abounds in Africa today.

402 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 2 • June 2006

Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy andLearning. Aretha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman,eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 349 pp.

ELSIE ROCKWELLCentro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados, Mexico City

The authors of this edited volume engage in discussionsof various concepts introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin and hiscolleagues/co-authors, V. N. Volosinov and P. N. Medvedev.Contributions generally focus on exceptional educationalexperiences with diverse populations, often in extremeconditions.

Editors Aretha Ball and Sarah W. Freedman set a uniqueorientation by stressing the theme of “ideological becom-ing” in a politically charged environment, in which indi-viduals struggle to create an internally persuasive discoursein the face of multiple authoritative discourses. In theirintroductory chapter, the editors draw on their work inSouth Africa and in postwar Bosnia and Rwanda to arguethat such issues as the choice of teacher-training practicesand languages of instruction transcend narrow disciplinaryperspectives and can benefit from the insights afforded byBakhtinian theory.

The volume is exceptionally coherent and well edited.Three commentaries written by graduate students whocorresponded with the authors accentuate the ongoing di-alogue. Most chapters address the teaching of literacy, aca-demic writing, and literary response with students whoselinguistic and cultural worlds contrast with those assumedin mainstream schooling. Nevertheless, approaches differsignificantly.

Two of the more absorbing chapters summarize long-term engagements with the Bakhtinian perspective. CharlesBazerman traces his appropriation of intertextuality as akey to academic writing. Bazerman recovers Voloshinov(as distinct from Bakhtin) to underline the predicaments ofsocial agency within the “textually dense worlds of moder-nity.” His formulation situates “individual consciousnesswithin a dynamic and complex social field” that includesthe “historically evolved, and continually mutating land-scape of text.” Bazerman censures current sanitized usesof Vygotsky and Bakhtin/Volosinov that exclude theirhistorical–cultural, Marxist perspective on language andconsciousness. He is nevertheless keenly aware of theneed to identify the intertextual resources and strategiesused in the production of texts within particular rhetoricaltraditions. Rather than prescribing particular schemas andskills, he proposes increasing knowledge of the intertextualworlds that writers can draw on to produce powerfultexts.

In another key chapter, Carol Lee demonstrates the cul-tural resources that her “underachieving” African Ameri-can students already possess and are able to deploy dur-ing their “apprenticeship into literary response.” In a rig-orously documented analysis of her own teaching, Leepresents her students’ discussion of the various layers of

symbolic meaning in a short film, Sax Cantor Riff as prepa-ration for their later immersion in a series of canonic texts.She argues that their entry into communities of discipline-based discourses requires the acceptance of the linguisticresources of African American Vernacular English. Thus,the students’ act of signifying both parodies and unearthsthe sense of literary signification that Lee intends to teach.This “double-voicing” plays with students’ hybrid ways ofspeaking to approach the inherent hybridity of literarytexts.

In general, the volume attempts to do justice to thecomplexity of Bakhtin’s perspective, while also renderingit relevant and accessible to educational practitioners. Notall chapters achieve a balance. Although acknowledging theomnipresence of dialogism in human interaction, some au-thors immediately prescribe methods that “promote dialo-gism,” implying that it is nonexistent in ordinary practice.An alternative view would focus research on the dialogicnature of any sort of educational talk or text, even thoughparticular instances may not be pedagogically commend-able. Bakhtin was particularly interested in the diverse nu-ances expressed in the repetition of other persons’ words.In classrooms, every act (including repetition) reveals po-sitions students and teachers assume in response to eachother. I maintain that a deeper understanding of this con-stant dialogism is necessary for the task of co-constructingsituated, relevant educational alternatives.

This book offers tools for research in this direction.Several chapters suggest novel ways to analyze the pro-duction of and response to texts. Attention to prosody,adjacency pairs, and indexicality would greatly enhanceanalysis of dialogic sequences. However, the challenge ofunderstanding “internal dialogism” as fundamental to theongoing creation of an “internally persuasive discourse”requires interdisciplinary bridges that are still under con-struction. Such an approach does not preclude attentionto the crucial issues of violence, social inequality, andexclusion that underlie many contributions to this book.It would allow structuring alternatives within educationalprocesses and social contexts that are always hybridand dialogic, despite the omnipresence of “authoritativevoices.”

Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca. Brian S. Bauer.Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 255 pp.

TOM D. DILLEHAYVanderbilt University

The pre-Inca archeology of the valley and city of Cuzco andthe cultural transformations leading to the rise of the Incaempire have attracted much archeological attention in re-cent years. The purpose of this volume is to examine “thesettlement patterns for each major time period in the his-tory of the Cuzco Valley” and the multitude of societiesand ethnic groups that comprised it through time. BrianBauer has put together a stimulating and, in some cases,

Single Book Reviews 403

provocative collection of cultural developments and propo-sitions that study the settlement, religious, social, and his-torical aspects of the valley. The volume contains severalhigh-quality chapters on the area, with emphasis on thepresence of the Wari empire, on the Inca sanctuary of Cor-icancha, and on ancestor worship and the royal mummiesof Inca lords.

The book consists of 12 chapters, an appendix, andextensive notes. One of the highlights of the book is19th- and early-20th-century photographs and drawingsof Cuzco and surrounding areas, which are published to-gether for the first time. Also provided is a highly usefulappendix of all radiocarbon dates for archeological sites inthe valley. Bauer wrote the majority of the chapters andcoauthored three with other archeologists (Alex Chepstow-Lusty, Michael Frogley, Bradford Jones, Cindy Klink, AlanCovey). The chapters are organized chronologically, begin-ning with the early Archaic period and ending with thecolonial city of Cuzco. The presentation of data in chap-ters is solid and thorough, and Bauer acknowledges theweaknesses in available information, making few inferentialleaps. In several instances, Bauer negotiates unclear pathsbetween fact, opinion, and speculation. He presents recon-naissance and systematic survey and excavation data thatmake possible new regional-scale models of settlement pat-terns and sociopolitical organization in the valley. Mostchapters discuss early independent farming communitiesgiving way to politically centralized hierarchical societiesthat culminate in the Inca state. Special attention is givento the variable influence of the Wari empire in the valleyand to the incipient formation of the Inca state betweenC.E. 1000 and C.E. 1400. In addressing the late pre-Incaand Inca periods, Bauer challenges the traditional viewsof some ethnohistorical works while developing a com-prehensive and testable model of cultural change in thevalley.

It is difficult to do justice to the many empirical andinterpretative considerations addressed in this work; I havetouched on only a few here. This volume is indispensablefor anyone interested in Cuzco and the Inca Empire. Thephotographs and drawings of historic sites provide a wealthof information and could stand alone as an invaluable ref-erence. Although all of the chapters would have benefitedfrom more consideration of the implications of the varia-tion in the data evident from the author’s analyses, theyall provide welcome new data and interesting discussions,which, it is hoped, Bauer and his colleagues will pursue insubsequent publications.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is limited discus-sion of the valley’s impact on adjacent regions in south-ern Peru. Further, the chapters could be more effectiveif more material culture (e.g., artifacts, architecture) wereillustrated to help contextualize the survey and excava-tion information for those less familiar with the local cul-tures. Also missing is a theoretical and comparative dis-cussion of Cuzco’s place in the broader social, economic,political, and ideological traditions of the New World’s

great preindustrial states. Thinking in terms of state forma-tion raises questions of political control, economic devel-opment, agency, identity, and diverse ideologies that seemto be productive ways to engage in a comparative studyof the Inca society and other preindustrial expansionisticsocieties.

To date, the archeology of the Cuzco Valley haslargely been defined by the city of Cuzco, the massivefortress of Sacsayhuaman, and the town of Machu Pic-chu in the neighboring Valley of Urubamba. Bauer andhis colleagues perform a great service in synthesizing apreviously scattered body of new and old archeologicalevidence for the pre-Inca periods and competently relatingit to the ethnohistory and archeology of the Inca period.The book goads the reader into realizing that much morework is needed to document the increasingly apparentcomplexity and variation in the political structure of thecity of Cuzco and the long cultural development of theCuzco Valley. In this regard, the book is an excellent sum-mary of archeological inquiry and solid current research,and it demonstrates that we need not wait two to threegenerations for Cuzco archeology to play a major role inunderstanding social complexity and polities in the CentralAndes.

A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspec-tives on Intertextuality. Richard Bauman. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishers, 2004. 184 pp.

ALESSANDRO DURANTIUniversity of California, Los Angeles

The term intertextuality was introduced by Julia Kristevasome 40 years ago to capture the dialogic quality of textsas originally articulated in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin’sand his associates and alter egos. Among the scholars whohave shown us how to identify and analyze intertextualityin oral performance (as opposed to written texts), RichardBauman is one of the most productive and theoreticallysophisticated. Bauman has been consistently attentive tothe aesthetics of the spoken word and to the properties ofperformance as a distinct mode of language use. For thesereasons, the publication of A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality is more than welcome.Readers who are not already familiar with Bauman’s workwill have an opportunity to read through a series of the-matically linked studies spanning a period of 18 years. Anewly written introductory chapter establishes the theoret-ical tone of the book and its key concepts: genre, perfor-mance, entextualization, and intertextual gap.

One of Bauman’s interests is the ways in which nar-rators offer cues or metapragmatic frames to help listenersinterpret what is being said. In “ ‘And the Verse is Thus’:Icelandic Stories about Magical Poems,” we are introducedto the kraftaskald, the Icelandic poet who is able to composea verse that has magical power and which allows him to get


control of an adverse situation and take revenge. Baumananalyzes how stories about kraftaskalds are contextualizedin such a way to reconstruct the line of tellers who keptthose stories alive. This is a process of traditionalization “asan act of authentication” (p. 27). A later chapter, “ ‘Go, MyReciter, Recite My Words’: Mediation, Tradition, Authority,”returns on the same themes in a cross-cultural frameworkthat provides evidence of their universal relevance.

The concept of “intertextuality” finds an ideal testingground in those situations in which one genre is insertedinto another, to create a “hybrid” (another Bakhtinian con-cept). In “‘I’ll Give You Three Guesses’: The Dynamics ofGenre in the Riddle Tale,” Bauman examines how the genreof the riddle finds its way in the middle of folktales. Heshows that certain formal properties of the riddle (e.g., itsambiguity, the implied unequal power relation between theknowing and the unknowing, the expectation of a cleverresolution) are easily exploitable for narrative purposes (e.g.,the hero or heroine’s ability to overcome adverse condi-tions). The mixing of genres is also the central theme ofthe chapter on the language of vendors in a Mexican mar-ket. In “ ‘What Shall We Give You?’: Calibrations of Genrein a Mexican Market,” Bauman starts out by describingtwo contrastive genres of market cry, which he renders inEnglish with the terms “calls” and “spiels.” Throughthe analysis of transcripts of audio recordings, we areshown that calls can go from simple lists of productsand their prices to more elaborate lines, displaying syn-tactic and phonological parallelism, as well as the pattern-ing of particular prosodic contours and the skillful use ofpauses. Things get interactionally more dynamic when twovendors alternate their calls, producing a collaborativeperformance. Spiels are used by vendors who deal with spe-cialized, less ordinary merchandise. In addition to descrip-tions and repetitions, spiels contain epigrammatic state-ments with risque innuendos and brief narratives directedto specific addressees but meant to be overheard by others.Having established the features of the two genres, Baumanpresents a functional–economic argument to explain in-between cases, in which the two genres are merged, he ar-gues, by vendors who offer goods that “fall in-between thelow-end necessities [of the calls] and the high-end specialtyitems [of the spiels]” (p. 79).

The mixing of genres is also discussed in a chapter inwhich Bauman expands on a phenomenon described byDell Hymes as “breakthrough into performance.” The termrefers to the situation, not unusual for ethnographers, inwhich a native consultant may suddenly step out of the in-terview genre to engage in the telling of a traditional story.Bauman points out that a sensitivity to these moments—and, more generally, to performance as a mode of speakingmarked by accountability for how something is said—is cru-cial for critical, reflexive ethnography.

In sum, Bauman has put together an empirically soundand theoretically rich collection of chapters that elegantlyillustrate the power of intertextuality in the social life ofverbal art.

A Companion to the Anthropology of AmericanIndians. Thomas Biolsi, ed. Williston, VT: Blackwell Pub-lishers, 2004. 567 pp.

SUSAN LOBOUniversity of Arizona

This is an odd book: It has both brilliant, often challengingideas and rich resources for scholars, practitioners, andstudents, but, at the same time, it is disappointing inwhat it fails to include and in its biases. It is one of Black-well’s “companion to” series focusing on various aspectsof anthropology. Editor Thomas Biolsi accomplishes achallenging task by including 27 original chapters bydifferent authors. Content synopsis, extensive referencelists, an excellent index, and cross-references enhance itsusefulness. Only available in hardback, the cost takes itbeyond the reach of many. Otherwise, I would recommendthat it be on everyone’s shelf.

Some of the chapters (see, esp. Loretta Fowler, “Poli-tics”; Eugene Hunn, “Knowledge Systems”; George Castile,“Federal Indian Policy and Anthropology”; Renya Ramirez,“Community Healing and Cultural Citizenship”; and PeterWhiteley, “Ethnography”) are particularly noteworthy byplacing their topic within the context of anthropologicalthought and also exploring contemporary topics.

Biolsi makes some bold editorial decisions, and he isowed respect for creating a thought-provoking book. How-ever, there are some troubling aspects as well. The somewhatnarrow, but richly developed, shaping of this book, give itits “odd” character.

It is dedicated to Vine Deloria, the subtext respondingto his 1969 and later works critiquing anthropology. Biolsisays in the introduction, “We have chosen to focus this book. . . on the native peoples of the United States. . . .its rationalein the colonial situation faced by native peoples” (pp. 2–3).The unifying theme is “native resistance, adaptation, and ac-commodation to the U.S. social formation” (pp. 2–3). Thus, thebook heavily emphasizes the U.S. relationship with feder-ally recognized tribes, as well as policy and legal issues espe-cially relevant to reservations. For example, Part 2 (“Politi-cal, Social and Economic Organization”) is characterized byFowler’s “Politics” and by Miller’s “Tribal and Native Law.”Part 4 (“Colonialism, Native Sovereignty, Law, and Policy”)has strong contributions by Biolsi’s “Political and LegalStatus (‘Lower 48’ States),” Castile’s “Federal Indian Policyand Anthropology,” and Larry Nesper’s “Treaty Rights.”“American Indians in the United States: A Political andLegal Focus” would have been more appropriate than itscurrent title.

The focus reduces the time frame of the depth andsweep of native legacy in what is now the United Statesand beyond and in the breadth of inquiry by anthropolo-gists. A slight nod is given to linguistic anthropology withJames Collins’s chapter, and the last 15 pages by LarryZimmerman are titled “Archaeology.” Physical anthropol-ogy is absent. Rebecca Dobkins’s fine chapter on “Art”


minimally represents the vast anthropological literature onmaterial culture.

The book’s geographic focus within the comparativelyrecent U.S. borders is particular problematical regardingnative peoples in what is now Texas, the Southwest, andCalifornia, considering the still-evident legacy of Spanishand Mexican influence. On one hand, this book movesaway from constraining ethnographic present and culture-area concepts, but, on the other hand, it has reconsignedthe contents to the limiting geographic and historical con-straints of the U.S. borders. A few authors urge the need fora hemispheric awareness; Ramirez, defying the ethos of thebook’s bias, notes the value of “bridging groups divided by‘colonial’ borders” (p. 408). However, there is no openingallowed here to pursue these necessary ideas.

There are frequent examples from Canada. In contrast,although some authors—including Hunn, Les Field, and Al-ice Littlefield—have worked south of the U.S. border, thereis no mention of native peoples in Mexico or further south.This contradiction, coupled with the stated U.S. focus, in-fers an underlying “English speaking–centricity.”

Because two-thirds of Indian people in the UnitedStated live in urban areas, the book is regrettably lackingin off-reservation and urban topics, as well as the dynamicsamong and within urban, rural, and reservation commu-nities. There is only Raymond Bucko’s mention of religiouspractices in urban areas and Ramirez’s examples in San Jose.

As Whiteley sagely observes,

Since World War II major anthropology departmentshad encouraged their graduate students to undertakeethnographic research overseas, and the prejudice thatAmerican Indians had lost their culture, been over-studied, or were otherwise no longer a worthy object ofstudy had become entrenched. Combined with the hos-tility expressed by Deloria and others to the anthropolog-ical project, these attitudes began to marginalize NorthAmericanist ethnography in the discipline. [p. 457]

Consequently many contributors note the lack ofanthropological literature related to their chapter topics,especially politics generally, political ecology, economics,and education. Littlefield mentions that the book relieson “historians, psychologists, sociologists, educators, andAmerican Indians themselves” (p. 321), making the bookinterdisciplinary, not strictly anthropological. Ultimately,this multidisciplinary approach is a strength, giving thereader a rich overview of the subject.

Castile observes, “In the larger arena of policy-makingwe have seldom offered usable solutions to the practical po-litical, economic, and social problems that energize federalIndian policy” (p. 280). Ramirez and Field give exampleshere of the benefits from collaboration between Indians andscholars. Field succinctly urges for the “application of an-thropological tools in Indian Country to accomplish tribalgoals” (p. 472).

During the period of diminished anthropological workon American Indian topics, the interdisciplinary field ofAmerican Indian/Native American Studies was established.

We have Vine Deloria and others, scholars and nonschol-ars, Indians and non-Indians, to thank for motivatinganthropologists to be responsive to native peoples and con-sequently releasing American Indian studies from the ex-clusive domain of anthropology.

Ultimately this book is not so much a reflection of whatanthropological American Indian scholarship is but, rather,what the contributors think it should and might be in thefuture. It will be discussed, referred to, and consulted widely,hopefully also stimulating increased work addressing con-temporary issues of importance to native peoples within theUnited States and beyond.

REFERENCE CITEDDeloria, Vine, Jr.

1969 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York:Macmillan.

Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We CanLearn from It. Robert Borofsky. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2005. 372 pp.

JOAN VINCENTBarnard College

The contribution of this book is both political and pedagog-ical. It is over 30 years since the Yanomamo of NapoleonChagnon’s ethnography became controversial within theacademy: Combatants are immediately recognizable fromtheir spelling of the name. Five years ago, the imminentpublication of journalist Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in ElDorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Ama-zon (2000) led concerned members of the American An-thropological Association to request that the actions oftwo of its members, Chagnon and medical anthropolo-gist James Neel, be reviewed by the association’s EthicsCommittee.

Robert Borofsky’s Yanomami is really two books inone. The political takes the form of an inflammatoryresponse to matters raised in Darkness in El Dorado and thewell-intentioned but misguided interventions of the AAA’sCommittee on Ethics. This is part of a programmed effortto expose the abuse of “the Yanamamo” among whomChagnon and Neel worked and to mobilize professional in-tervention. The pedagogical is an impassioned book aboutwidening discourse on the imbalances of power betweenanthropologists and the people among whom they work.The testimonials on its jacket from highly distinguishedanthropologists are equally passionate. Four of the five pro-nounce its value as an introduction to critical issues withinthe discipline. There is no doubt that Borofsky’s book per-forms a service for the profession and will doubtless headthe required reading for a course that, it is suggested, theAAA might require of all aspirants to the profession (p. 288).

This said, the book requires a lot from its readersand, perhaps, even more from the instructors who useit. Some may find Part 1 overly dominated by Borofsky’sviews on the controversy (p. 314.) Others may welcome hisstep-by-step guidance over 103 pages toward the ethical


dilemmas that are to be discussed in the Round Table pre-sentations of Part 2. These Borofsky initially (p. 20) likensto a jury trial but as challenges and counter-challengesmount over three rounds, a boxing match seems the moreapt metaphor. Six combatants argue the nature and validityof the charges made against the fieldwork practices ofChagnon and Neel. As master of ceremonies, Borofskysummarises the professional status and Amazonian expe-rience of each: a representative of an NGO, a Yanamamofieldworker, a colleague of one of the accused, a medicalhuman rights worker, a longtime resident with a missionaryorganization, and a professor long engaged in Amazoniahuman rights issues. Five are academics (pp. 73–75).Their photographs—along with that of Borofsky and DaviKopenawa, a controversial Yanomami activist—precedetheir dialogue (pp. 109–281).

The reader is left with conflicting testimony and inter-pretations. To aid the student reader, Borofsky heads eachexchange with what he considers to be the key accusationsmade, the issues raised, and questions the student mightconsider. An appendix (pp. 317–341) summarizes the posi-tions taken. At the end of the debate, the participants agreeon an open letter assessing the role of the AAA (one of thefew matters on which all six appear to agree) and offer-ing guidelines for any response its Ethics Committee mightmake on the questions raised by the Yanamami controversy.

Finally, Borofsky pleads (his term) with readers to de-cide (1) where they stand on the issues raised by the con-troversy, (2) whether blame should be directed at anyone,(3) how the Round Table letter and AAA final report mightbe faulted and improved, and (4) “how might the struc-tures that fostered the controversy and the disciplinary illsso openly displayed in it” be changed and “things set right?”(pp. 313–315).

Having made it clear that his book seeks “in empow-ering readers, to develop a new political constituency fortransforming the discipline” (p. 21), Borofsky ends by ad-vising his readers against waiting to know more: “There willalways be more references, more data, one could cite . . . Butessentially all the information you need to form your viewsis right here in this book. To allow others to intimidate youat this point with data that they possess but you lack is onlyto perpetuate academic status games” (p. 314). Case closed.The book ends with a millenarian call to go public withwww.publicanthropology.org.

Some 250 pages earlier, Borofsky quotes Kopenawaas asking, “Why are [these U.S. anthropologists] fightingamong themselves?” He answers: “This is a fight betweenmen who make money” (pp. 68–69). The royalties fromBorofsky’s Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What WeCan Learn From It will be donated toward helping theYanamami improve their health care. Case reopens.

REFERENCE CITEDTierney, Patrick

2000 Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Dev-astated the Amazon. New York: Norton.

Collective Guilt: International Perspectives. NylaR. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje, eds. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004. 339 pp.

ROBERT M. HAYDENUniversity of Pittsburgh

Guilt has two distinct meanings: legal responsibility (“shewas found guilty”) and emotional responsibility (“she feelsguilty about it”). This volume is concerned exclusively withthe emotional aspect of guilt, when the feeling is “widelyshared” by members of a group (ingroup) that their com-munity has committed great harm against another group(outgroup). Although many people may seek to avoid feel-ings of guilt, the authors in this collection seem mainly tobe concerned with ways to set up conditions to foster suchfeelings, as a means of promoting reconciliation betweenvictimized and perpetrator groups. As might be expected,German atonement for the Holocaust is raised almost im-mediately as a model, although there is explicit recognitionthat the case is unusual.

The 17 chapters begin with theoretical discussions oncollective guilt as opposed to collective shame. Guilt is afeeling held by individuals as self-identifying members ofcollectives, and the individuals need not themselves havecommitted any culpable action (in a concluding article,Elezar Barkun uses the very interesting and perhaps trou-bling term passive perpetrators, p. 312). Nylan Branscombe,Ben Slugoski, and Diana Kappen conclude that guilt is seenas being associated with members of perpetrator groups, be-cause of misuse of strength, and shame is found more oftenamongst victimized groups, as it is about weakness. Theseauthors also link guilt closely to injustice, constituting re-morse for the unjust actions of the person’s group.

The “international perspectives” represented are from avery limited range of societies. Three articles deal with Israel,another with Germany, two each with Australia and theDutch in Indonesia, one with Ireland, another with U.S. racerelations, and one with male collective guilt over genderinequality.

The studies involve the kinds of controlled psycholog-ical experimentation not commonly found in anthropol-ogy, but with some interesting results. A study of JewishIsraelis by Sonia Roccas, Yechiel Klar, and Leo Liviatan var-ied attributions of the same depiction of violence to theingroup (Jewish Israelis), the outgroup (Palestinians), anda third group (Serbs), and the authors found, not surpris-ingly, that “moral outrage” was highest when the acts weredepicted as having been committed by the outgroup, nexthighest when attributed to the third group, and least forthe ingroup. Interestingly, a study by Michael Wohl andNyla Branscombe showed that Jewish Canadians who wereasked to remember the Holocaust before answering ques-tions about the Palestinian–Israeli conflict assigned morecollective guilt to the Palestinians and were less willingto forgive them than were Jewish Canadian subjects whohad not had the Holocaust reminder, even though the


Palestinians obviously were not responsible for the Holo-caust. Clearly, perceptions of victimization limit the likeli-hood of feelings of collective guilt.

The importance of feelings of injustice and of ingroupvictimization, however, may raise questions not addressedin these studies—such as regarding attributions of collec-tive guilt in the legal sense as a political strategy. Frankly,when I was asked to review the book, it never occurred tome that the collective guilt in the title referred to a phe-nomenon of group psychology, because the term is muchmore often used in attempts to justify disfavoring membersof one group now on the grounds that their group com-mitted crimes in the past. Yet groups with long historiesof interaction are likely to have had periods in which eachhas perpetrated atrocities against the other, and feelings ofinjustice are apt to be mutual. To be more concrete, in-sisting that Hutus accept collective guilt for the genocideof Tutsis in the 1990s ignores the genocide of Hutus byTutsis a generation earlier. Something similar may be saidabout the Balkans. If Serbs were the major perpetrators inthe 1990s, they were the greatest victims in the far worseevents of the 1940s, so that demands for Serb collectiveguilt for the 1990s amount to demands that the childrenand grandchildren of genocide victims apologize to the chil-dren and grandchildren of perpetrators. Or so, at least, theywill think. In such cases, German remorse for the Holocaustis an inapposite comparison, because it is too clear cut: Itis not possible to find times in which Jews had victimizedGermans.

That this study does not consider the politics of legalguilt attributions weakens its normative force. Nevertheless,as a set of studies of conditions under which people assignthemselves guilt as “perpetrators” for crimes committednot by themselves but by their group, the volume hasmuch to recommend it.

Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under theFrench Flag. Katherine E. Browne. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 2004. 291 pp.

AISHA KHANNew York University

In Creole Economics, Katherine Browne convincinglydemonstrates the necessary relevance of cultural values, andtheir practice on the ground, in analyses of economic ac-tivity. Focusing on the informal economy, Browne arguesthat “most people, including scholars, do not associate eco-nomic behavior with cultural patterns” (p. 15) and, thus,miss the meaning and measure of the informal sector incontemporary society. A key consequence is that develop-ment projects and planning efforts are less (or not) effective.One lesson of Creole Economics is that rather than the failureof inferior cultures in explaining why economic develop-ment does not always work as metropolitan models suggestit should (a still-vibrant saw among many policy makers), itis neglect of the “irreducible complexities of local meaning

and practice” (p. xiii) that hinders proper understandingand thus remedy.

Brown’s entree into these issues is through what shecalls “creole economics,” culturally influenced forms of lo-cal economic strategies in Martinique that sidestep the le-gal claims of the French state (pp. 4, 48). A department ofFrance, Martinique remains politically and economicallydependent. For Martiniquais of color, an additional con-sequence of this dependence is a racial hierarchy that de-values them and excludes them from being fully “French.”Browne is interested in the ways that creole economics,and its associated cultural values and psychological moti-vations, both “strain the relationship with France and re-lieve those strains” (p. 10), as people choose certain pathsof economic noncompliance.

The cornerstone of creole economics is the debrouillard;in France, it is someone who is smart, self-reliant, and re-sourceful (p. 101), but in Martinique, it is someone “eco-nomically cunning and resourceful in unorthodox ways”(p. 11). Deriving from the slave plantation, Browne argues,debrouillardism calls on cleverness as an effective meansof survival in the face of superior power. Yet there is amoral imperative, as well, because debrouillardism is pasgrave (not serious). One might vend clothes from a suit-case or be an engineer moonlighting on the weekends,but criminal behavior causing victimization is outside thisconcept. Emphasis is on demonstrating cunning, which re-quires public, visible performance to accrue cultural capital.As such, debrouillardism fulfills the Martiniquais cultural–psychological need for autonomy, status, and respect, inaddition to meeting economic needs.

Given its slave antecedents and its contemporary con-figuration, Browne interprets creole economics, followingHomi Bhabha, as a subversive “third space” (p. 100) lyingbetween two distinct spheres, French hegemony and Mar-tiniquais “sense of dispossession” (pp. 84, 100), in which es-caping the rules and asserting cultural difference occur. Notall Martiniquais, however, valorize debrouillardism. Brownedivides interviewees into defenders, relativists, and objec-tors. The latter tend to be Christians, high-income locals(Afro-Creoles and bekes, or whites), or French metropolitansliving in Martinique. These schisms remind us that infor-mal economies are not confined among the poor; they linkthe entire society in buyer–seller dyads. Yet dyads illuminatethe apparent reinforcement of patron–client hierarchies, inwhich the affluent seem to offer comparatively little to oth-ers yet receive many informal economy services from them.

Men predominate in creole economics. Browne ex-plains this in terms of the Caribbean trope of reputation andrespectability: Afro-Creole men’s essential tension is withwhite bosses, so debrouillardism is an effective strategy toassert autonomy and cunning and gain reputation. Afro-Creole women’s essential tension is with men, so it is morecompelling for them to become independent financially,not through the risky business of cunning but by penetrat-ing the formal economy. The relatively few women who dowork “off the books” interpret it as aimed toward family and


household, which signals respectability. Although Browneshows that class is marked by gender distinctions, she mighthave pressed gender more vigorously for the significanceof class differences. Doing so would illuminate those fe-male debrouillards who do not have “regular jobs” (p. 186)and “relate to the satisfaction so many men describe”(p. 204).

Browne’s focus on “Afro-Creole” Martiniquais leavesout bekes and unnamed “other small minorities” (p. 15)—the former because they declined to be interviewed and thelatter because her argument hinges on historical perspec-tives from slavery. Yet given its analysis, this book helps usto ask other important questions about creolization. For ex-ample, because other Martiniquais are also culturally “cre-ole” in some respect, might there be additional contexts ormodes of creolization figuring into creole economics? Bekemen, too, in their own way, may also strive for the reputa-tion values of creole economics. Cunning in a plantationenvironment makes good sense, yet if cunning is cultur-ally recognized in Martinique, then it may also encompassbekes and others in a variety of manifestations. And if not,the question of where the boundaries (cultural, ideological)lie is a valuable one, as well.

Persuasive and engagingly written, Creole Economicsshould be required reading in anthropology, economics,and Caribbean Studies courses.

Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Formsof Whiteness. Melanie E. L. Bush. Lanham, MD: Rowmanand Littlefield, 2004. 328 pp.

NOEL IGNATIEVMassachusetts College of Art

This book explores how whiteness continues to exert hege-mony over U.S. life and how that hegemony could be un-dermined. It focuses on Brooklyn College, which is a largepublic institution with an ethnically and racially diversestudent body. Melanie Bush’s outlook is shaped by her yearsof experience in social justice and antiwar movements andher study of world systems theory. The research on whichthe book is based was carried out between 1998 and 2000,and consists of written surveys of opinion of undergrad-uate and graduate students across the college, discussionswith small focus groups of students and faculty and staffmembers, and her observations as a participant in campusactivities.

Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical conceptions under-lying the study. Her premise is that racial attitudes influ-ence social structures and are in turn influenced by them;much of her attention is devoted to examining the areasin which the attitudes and structures do and do not coin-cide. Bush locates her study within the critical scholarshipon whiteness, aligning herself with those who hold thatwhiteness was constructed as a tool of domination; conse-quently, she is dubious about efforts to forge a positive whiteidentity.

Chapter 2 explores students’ understandings of themeaning of whiteness. How do Jews, Italians, Latinos, andothers for whom ethnicity may have meaning positionthemselves in relation to whiteness? How do they see theadvantages of being white? We hear the students’ voices re-sponding to her questions, for example: “I never grew uparound white people, only Turkish, Russian, U.S.-born Jews,Pakistanis, Blacks, Spanish, Christians, ‘crazy’ lesbians, Mid-dle Eastern people” (p. 63). Some think “Brooklyn” is a cat-egory alongside Black or Hispanic.

Chapter 3 examines U.S. identity in relation to race.This is a topic of special contemporary relevance. A greatdeal has happened since Malcolm X, speaking for millions,declared himself not an “American” but one of the vic-tims of “Americanism.” To what degree do black and whiteBrooklynites, native born and foreign born, consider them-selves citizens and share views toward Arabs, Muslims, andillegal immigrants, as well as attitudes toward U.S. democ-racy and opportunity? As it turns out, more than was thecase and less than the defenders of the status quo mighthope.

Chapter 4 explores the rules of engagement: What sortof conduct is considered acceptable among whites whendealing with members of “other races”? This is the areamany students regard as the most crucial, because it dealswith their personal conduct in a direct way. With whomdo they socialize, and whom do they marry? According tothe survey, only 22.8 percent of U.S.-born whites now saythey disapprove of “interracial” marriage (more than othergroups, but still low compared to a generation ago [p. 63]).Perhaps as significant, nearly all seem to view the line asnatural, even when they are willing to cross it.

Who is to blame for poverty and the racial gap is thetopic of Chapter 5, and here the self-contradictions amongher subjects are flagrant. Sixty percent of U.S.-born whiterespondents agree that people of color are discriminatedagainst when applying for jobs, housing, and when ap-proached by the police, yet most feel that poverty is stilllargely the fault of the poor. It is evident that many peopleare in denial (pp. 76–187).

Chapter 6 is called “Cracks in the Wall of Whiteness.”After recapitulating the various mechanisms that reinforcethe status quo, it points to bases for potential challenge.Among these are the persistence of democratic ideals, therealization by some whites that they, too, may suffer theeffects of programs ostensibly aimed at cutting services topeople of color, and growing financial instability and hard-ship in the country as a whole. Bush stresses educationas a means of weakening the grip of whiteness; foremostamong her recommendations for the academy is curricularreform.

Bush brings to her work a keen ear for her subjectsand clear writing. If there is a shortcoming in the work,it lies in the author’s overreliance on what people say asdistinct from what they do. But then, what else could weexpect from a study carried out in a period characterized bythe absence of mass movements that could offer starting


points for the sorts of changes the author would like tosee?

Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility inTransnational Asia. Nicole Constable, ed. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 232 pp.

BONNIE ADRIANUniversity of Denver

Mix Claude Levi-Strauss on marriage exchange and ArjunAppadurai on the unleashing of imagination wrought byglobalization, and your result would be the fresh approachto the anthropology of marriage found in Cross-BorderMarriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, editedby Nicole Constable.

Ellen Oxfeld’s contribution traces the history of Hakkamarriage migration from China to India and, from there, toCanada. As Oxfeld puts it, “although one might categorizethese as cross-border, hypergamous marriage exchanges,each of these categories is rendered somewhat less certain”by her research (p. 31). To emphasize the crossing of na-tional boundaries is to miss a key point: These marriages areendogamous within a deterritorialized community, whichis true in about half of the cases collected here. Oxfeld’s rea-sons for problematizing the notions of “hypergamy” and“marriage exchange,” likewise, are echoed throughout thevolume and best explained by way of introducing the othercase studies.

The key concern with hypergamy revolves around theextent to which—and the ways in which—a seemingly hy-pergamous marriage entails a move “up” for a woman. Sixof the volume’s eight chapters describe situations in whichmarrying women travel to wealthier, higher status localeswhere, for them, life is harder than back home. Make thatfive chapters: The Filipina bride in the chapter by NancyAbelmann and Hyunhee Kim reneges on her promise tomove to the sex ratio–skewed farmlands of South Korea formarriage to a disabled man.

Nobue Suzuki reports that Filipinas who marryJapanese men experience high living costs in Japan amidacute pressure from home to remit funds to support theirnatal families. In Japan, they lead frugal lives and work longhours, enviously eyeing the comforts of family membersin the Philippines. If this is global hypergamy, those whoachieve it experience “fantasies of transnational transver-sal” (see chapter title). Couples often hope to relocate tothe Philippines, where they might at last realize thecomfortable, high status lives that folks in the Philippinesimagine for Japan.

In a similar case, Miao wives of men in Jiangsu, China—which suffers from a dearth of marriageable women—hadimagined how much better life there would be in compar-ison to Guizhou, from which Miao women have formed achain of female marriage migrants. Louisa Schein reportsthat the women often find themselves married into fam-ilies with an exceptionally high demand for labor. Folks

in Guizhou consider these marriages “spatially hyperga-mous” (a phrasing borrowed from William Lavely by manyof the volume’s contributors) regardless of the dispropor-tionate toil they exact from bitter Miao brides. Interest-ingly, Miao women are also the long-distance objects ofdesire of U.S.-male tourists in pursuit of Hmong authentic-ity, although Guizhou to U.S. marriage migration seldomresults.

The most extreme case of spatial hypergamy involvesconsiderable downward class mobility for professionalwomen marrying “up” in the world, from Vietnam tothe United States, by marrying down the class ladder toworking-class Viet Kieu men. Hung Cam Thai details animpending transnational marriage of individuals who findthemselves in unfavorable marriage markets because ofskewed sex ratios, products of war and migration in bothlocales.

Just as it complicates the “hypergamy” concept, thevolume also critiques notions such as “marriage exchange”and “bride trafficking” for their lack of attention to femaleagency, which is the central theme of several chapters.Emily Chao, for example, explores complicating factorsin discourses of marriage, elopement, and bride-nappingin southwestern China. Caren Freeman’s chapter onwomen of Korean ancestry in China who marry SouthKorean farmers reveals that Chosonjok women enjoyconsiderable strength to position themselves favorablyvis-a-vis their husbands and affines—so much so thatSouth Korean media now depict Chosonjok women asunpatriotric in ways that call into question assumptions ofracial unity. The Filipina and Chinese women of Consta-ble’s ethnographic contribution to the volume look morelike agents than victims in their marriages to U.S. men.Constable argues that women may use global introductionagencies to “achieve mobility through marriage” (p. 186)but that the kinds of mobility for which they strive are notexclusively or even primarily economic. They, much likethe U.S. men who court them, seek intimacies of a kindthey believe to be unavailable in local marriage markets.

Macrolevel contextualization is frustratingly absentfrom some chapters, perhaps only because of the unavail-ability of needed data. For example, to what extent are theagentive women highlighted here typical among marriagemigrants? I also wonder if the outsourcing of marriage af-fects the relative bargaining positions of men and womenin local marriage markets. In every instance described, mar-riage migration is available only to women. Does the avail-ability of long-distance marriage opportunity for womenforce local men in search of local brides to offer themmore autonomy or better treatment? Do men who expandtheir own marriage markets to include women from distantplaces undermine local women’s efforts to increase bargain-ing power?

Despite these unanswered questions, Cross-Border Mar-riages is an important addition to the anthropology of mar-riage and should be read by the scholars in many disciplineswho write on the topic of “bride trafficking.”


Understanding Commodity Cultures: Explorationsin Economic Anthropology with Case Studies fromMexico. Scott Cook. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,2004. 349 pp.

CASEY WALSHUniversidad Iberoamericana

This book is an important and timely contribution to an-thropology and Mexican studies. After some 40 years ofpracticing economic anthropology in Mexico, Scott Cookpresents a detailed reflection on some of the field’s majordebates and key concepts. The book comes toward the endof a long and distinguished career, and it presents the visionof a senior anthropologist who has participated in many ofthe discussions that are now the subject of historical inter-est by younger colleagues. The book is also timely for itsrelease at the beginning of the 21st century, as the resultsof North American Free Trade Agreement are beginning tounfold, and in the book Cook seeks to consolidate and ori-ent economic anthropology in order to better understandthis emergent globalized context. The central concept de-veloped in these pages, “commodity culture(s),” both helpsthe reader understand the theoretical orientation that hasshaped Cook’s rich ethnographic research over many yearsand provides a departure point for future work.

To flesh out his idea of “commodity culture(s),”Cook sets up a series of dialogues with other authors.He defines the field of economic anthropology by dis-tinguishing it from Marxist anthropology, substantivism,and anthropological political economy (among otherapproaches), all of which place an inordinate amount ofimportance on social and cultural factors and which failto concentrate on the fundamental problem of economicanthropology—material reproduction in concrete localsettings. Although Cook incorporates an idea of the social(classes, households, community) and notions of “culture”(sign value, identity) in his vision of the economic, heinsists the economy is fundamentally about the creation,circulation, and consumption of value.

Having narrowed the field of study, he is a solidposition to argue a main point of his book: that theMesoamerican economy should not be divided into twodomains (traditional–modern, precapitalist–capitalist, usevalue–exchange value, etc.). To make his point against the“dual economy thesis” prevalent in Mexican anthropology,Cook critiques the substantivist position that places em-phasis on the social organizations and cultures of indige-nous groups in Mesoamerica, referring the reader back tothe more limited economic domain of economic anthropol-ogy. Within this domain, Cook deploys a reading of Marxthat finds labor value inherent to the objects produced, ex-changed (or not), and consumed by people in Mesoamericaboth before and after the arrival of the Spaniards and thesubsequent development of capitalism. This expanded no-tion of the commodity allows Cook to establish a researchagenda that studies circuits of value creation through pro-

duction, market exchange, and consumption by individualsin concrete historical settings. Although much of the argu-ment is established negatively as an attack on the “dualeconomy thesis,” substantivism, and “ethnocultural sur-vivalism,” Cook discusses favorably an eclectic sample ofthinkers that includes anthropologists Robert Redfield andSol Tax, novelist B. Traven, and philosopher Daniel Little.Cook further rehabilitates the formalist perspective by ar-guing that individuals exercise a “prudent rationality” inmaking their economic decisions, although these decisionsare always made within limiting structural conditions. Ac-cording to Cook, this tendency to maximize is another in-tegral part of “commodity culture(s)” shared across the di-vide wrongfully established by the formalist–substantivistdebate. In his careful analysis of the literature, Cook reestab-lishes intellectual spaces crowded out by binary thinking.

The author states in his acknowledgments that thebook was the outgrowth of a review essay. Although thebook offers a careful reading of many works of economicanthropology in Mexico, this is perhaps its principal weak-ness, for much ink is spilt in discussing texts in great detail.Eight pages, for example, are dedicated to evaluating the ar-guments in Catherine Good’s book Haciendo la lucha (1988).These works, and Cook’s discussions of them, are rich andrewarding to the student of Mexican economic anthropol-ogy, but the reader wonders if such detail does not hinderthe accessibility of his larger arguments about “commoditycultures.” Some of this energy could have been devoted toincreasing the number of extremely interesting and help-ful ethnographic examples provided by the author fromhis field work Oaxaca and the U.S.–Mexico Border. Thereis also a relative imbalance between the chapters discussingMesoamerica, which has long been Cook’s area of exper-tise, and those focused on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands andon “The New Transborder Space” established by NAFTA,which are themes that Cook has come to more recently. Butdespite these weaknesses, the book provides a well-arguedstatement of the author’s intellectual position and estab-lishes an important research agenda for the years to come.It would be especially useful for advanced undergraduate-and graduate-level classes on economic anthropology, LatinAmerican anthropology, or the history of anthropologicalthought.

REFERENCE CITEDGood, Catherine

1988 Haciendo la lucha: Arte y comercia nahuas de Guerrero(Struggling on: Nahuatl art and commerce in Guerro). MexicoCity: Fondo de Cultura Economica.

“Love of Shopping” Is Not a Gene. Anne Innis Dagg.Towanda, NY: Black Rose Books, 2005. 210 pp.

MICHAEL J . MONTOYAUniversity of California, Irvine

“Love of Shopping” Is Not a Gene provides yet another salvoin the debate about the biological bases of human behavior.


Anne Dagg offers a challenge to the unsullied stereotypes ofviolent, aggressive human natures that purportedly perme-ate Darwinian psychology. Spawned of a controversy thaterupted in this journal (1998), Dagg begins with her ownrole in the debate over lion infanticide. Her erudite analy-ses of the hypothesis, and careful review of the research onwhich it is based, reveal that lions kill their cubs no morethan lionesses and, hence, claims of evolutionary advan-tages of infanticide are wholly speculative.

Focusing on what she calls “Darwinian psychology,”Dagg attempts to counter numerous myths about hu-man behavior within the scientific and popular literature—for example, that men are by nature sexually aggressive;women are coy and hearth oriented; war is an inheritedproblem-solving trait; IQ differences are biologically deter-mined; and so forth. In Love of Shopping, Dagg illustrates thatscience is not neutral but a cultural product in its own right.However important this message is today, Dagg’s analysesthemselves falter beneath cultural presumption. For exam-ple, Dagg asserts that research into the sex-loving Bonoboslost to the more violent chimpanzee, because “it is men whopublish books and articles about human aggression” (p. 26).This faulty science endures, explains Dagg, to fulfill a “cul-tural need reflected by the media to keep male-defined orderin society” (p. 30). Although science studies scholars mayaccept her analyses of the weakly supported claims of evo-lutionary psychology, Dagg offers little to convince readersof the link between gender, society, and scientific motive.

Critiquing the weak primatological foundations of theaggression hypotheses in Darwinian psychology, Dagg alsounpacks inheritance as a principle that makes evolution-ary thinking possible. Reviewing an intellectual history ofsociality and aggression, Dagg illustrates how aggression asan inherited trait cannot confer evolutionary advantage atthe exclusion of sociality. Both behaviors are options com-mon to our “ape-like ancestors” and are influenced by sex,experiences, culture, and personality. If either confers evo-lutionary advantage, it is sociality, argues Dagg.

Dagg persuades that the findings of evolutionary be-havioral science must be treated with the greatest of sus-picion. In chapter after chapter, Dagg demonstrates howthe conditions created by the research environment ex-plain many of the “observations.” For example, in assess-ing Goodall’s conclusions that chimpanzees wage war, Daggconvincingly asserts that it was Goodall’s feeding practicesin the field that created the conditions for chimpanzee vi-olence rather than a necessarily inherent trait. However,in a most unfortunate passage, Dagg attempts to evaluatethe evolution of aggression by examining the ethnographicaccounts of the Yanomamo people. She reports that theYanomamo feuds result only in symbolic victory but notserious injury, which “makes evolutionary sense” for con-flicts between relatives (p. 49). But the implication that wecan learn about evolution, or that we can go back in time, bylooking at the Yanomamo is to this reviewer as problematicas inferring the heritability of complex human behavioraltraits from chimpanzee research or as explaining a scien-

tific field through reference to the gender, race, or class ofits knowledge producers. The phantom of the great chainof being undermines Dagg’s otherwise important point, towit, careful attention to context, culture, and life conditionsbetter explain complex human behavior than evolutionarynaturalizations.

Readers should grant Dagg considerable pluck fortitling at such a formidable wind-making machine as evo-lutionary psychology. Further, for those unfamiliar with therange of evolutionary mythologies skittering about, Love ofShopping will likely serve as an eye opener. The chapters oncriminality, race, IQ, and the “gay gene” are solid primers onthe problems with Darwinian psychology. However, thoselooking for a definitive strike at research that advancesbiological explanations for social phenomena (gender in-equalities, rape, race, health outcomes, incarceration rates,or homophobia) will be better served by works that draw onempirical evidence to explain rather than simply point outthe persistence of weakly supported biogenetic theories.More syntheses such as Dagg’s are needed—particularlyones informed by anthropologies of knowledge productionand sociologies of science. Whether more careful attentionto science as a culturally productive behavior will prevailin the battle against shoddy scientific claims and thebad public policies that co-produce them remains to beseen.

REFERENCE CITEDDagg, Anne Innis

1998 Infanticide by Male Lions Hypothesis: A Fallacy Influenc-ing Research into Human Behavior. American Anthropologist100(4):940–950.

Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality ofImages. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds. London:Routledge Press, 2004. 222 pp.

SHELLY ERRINGTONUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

For most of anthropology’s 20th-century history, photog-raphy (whose convenient availability for amateurs coin-cided roughly with the expectation of fieldwork as profes-sional training) has been theorized as a research tool (e.g.,Collier 1967, a classic among many). In 1992, ElizabethEdwards’s edited volume Anthropology and Photography,1860–1920 signaled a shift in the study of photographyand photographs in our discipline by placing them firmlywithin colonial discourse, thus ushering in a new phaseof sophisticated historical and ethnographic work on stillphotography that situated photographs’ meanings withinlarger discourses of power and semiotic practices (such asPinney 1997, Poole 1997, and more every year or so). Pho-tographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, editedby Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, continues this trajec-tory by extending meaning explicitly to photographs’ ma-teriality. The book’s premise, as Edwards puts it in the use-ful and wide-ranging introduction, is to treat photographs


not only as two-dimensional images but also as three-dimensional objects—artifacts that circulate, are collected,have uses, are embedded in power relations, and are en-acted and performed by the human body. Yet they are notjust commodities either: The image makes the photograph aspecial kind of artifact. This is an ambitious and thoroughlywelcome premise.

Most of the contributors to this volume hold positionsas curators or archivists; they are people positioned to dis-cuss the material aspects of photographs—the albums inwhich they appear; their changing classifications; their con-texts of use, storage, and distribution (albums, museumwalls, playing cards, religious posters, and so on); and their“biographies.” Most of the contributors are also highly in-formed by the last decades’ many studies in material cul-ture. There is no doubt that the book’s main foil and maingripe is that the photograph is regarded as a self-containedtwo-dimensional image. Perhaps as a corrective to the two-dimensional approach to the photographic image, mostchapters include close-grained descriptions of their everyaspect (which I welcome), but too many repetitiously be-labor the assertion that the photographs are material ob-jects (which becomes tedious). Yet, just at the momentthe significance of photographs’ materiality is being dis-covered, it is being snatched away by digitization and theWeb, which represent the ultimate in dematerialization,claims Joanna Sassoon in the last chapter. Perhaps this istrue, but photographic images are not only decontextual-ized but also recontextualized on the Web, and whole newfields are being devoted to speculating about the implica-tions. The chapter, “Photographic Materiality in the Ageof Digital Reproduction,” is misleadingly titled to evokeWalter Benjamin but should have been called “AnArchivist’s Lament.”

The most exemplary and most enlightening of thesechapters link image, materiality, and historical contextand use to a larger theoretical orientation. Four chaptersthat I found especially suggestive and will use in teachingare by Glenn Willumson, Clare Legene, Nuno Porto, andClare Harris (in order of their appearance in the volume).Willumson’s “Making Meaning: Displaced Materiality inthe Library and Art Museum” shows with telling exampleshow photographs can be turned into Fine Art in themuseum and gives a brief history of how photographywas turned into Fine Art in the 1930s—with its own linearnarrative of masters and masterpieces—in the exhibitionsand writings of Beaument Newhall under the wing of AlfredBarr, Director of the New York Museum of Modern Art. (Itbrought to mind how tribal artifacts became fine art in thesame era and in the same venue). Legene’s “PhotographicPlaying Cards and the Colonial Metaphor: Teaching theDutch Colonial Culture” draws on Susan Stewart’s (1993)ideas about collections and miniatures to discuss educa-tional playing cards published by the Colonial Institute in1942, featuring sets of iconic (both photos and drawings)atemporal categories (physical types, musical instruments,etc.) in groups of four items each, from the Dutch East

Indies. Legene shows the double transformation fromhistorically specific photo to photo-icon of “type” and toyet more generalizing drawing of type, and she claims thatplaying the card-game reenacted collecting by colonialpowers. In “ ‘Under the Gaze of the Ancestors’: Photographsand Performance in Colonial Angola,” Porto writes aboutthe Gallery of Native Chiefs in a colonial museum in An-gola, where the museum became a cultural–political settingof the propagation and enactment of power. Harris’s “ThePhotograph Reincarnate: The Dynamics of Tibetan Rela-tionships with Photography” tells us that among TibetanBuddhists the distinction between things and people is notas clearly drawn as among Judeo-Christians. With that in-sight, Harris shows how distrust of the photographic imagewas transformed between the time of the tenth Dalai Lamaand the 14th, and how overpainting signifies and revealsthe uses of photographs for Tibetan identity in the diaspora.

Combining close viewing, serious scholarship, andexemplary readings, this book taken as a whole imagina-tively enlarges the possibilities for studying photographs ascultural and historical image-objects. In the best contribu-tions, one understands the physical processes of cropping,recontextualization, mounting, modifying, and enacting asrhetorical processes of meaning making. Photographs areneither just image nor just object but, rather, image-objectsthat are historically and culturally situated in complexways, including varying semiotic practices regarding thekinds of meanings that iconic representations with somephotographic content are asked to bear.

REFERENCES CITEDCollier, John, Jr.

1967 Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Pinney, Christopher1997 Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs.

London: Reaktion Books.Poole, Deborah

1997 Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the An-dean Image World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stewart, Susan1993 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the

Souvenir, the Collection. 6th ed. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress.

Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and PoliticalPractice in Africa. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2004. 263 pp.

DOROTHY L. HODGSONRutgers University

What is the relation between spiritual power and politi-cal power, between religion and politics? How do we ac-count for the recent flourishing of religious networks inAfrica and elsewhere, at the same time as the dominanceof secular forms of governance like “democracy”? Accord-ing to Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar in Worlds of Power,the study of the relationship between religious thoughtand political practice in Africa offers a unique insight and


essential corrective to common understandings of world af-fairs because “Africa may be in the vanguard” in such mat-ters (p. 3). They draw on examples from across the continentto argue that Africans draw primarily on religious ideas tounderstand and participate in the world as social and polit-ical actors.

After a brief introduction, the remaining chaptersexplore different themes or keywords that refract and re-flect the convergence of religion and politics: ideas, words,spirits, secrets, power, wealth, morality, transformations,histories. The authors use this creative structure to greateffect, weaving anecdotes and stories from different placesin Africa with primarily African secondary sources to an-alyze African ideas of power, the political uses of spiritualbeliefs and practices, and shifting ideas of wealth, morality,and justice.

The breadth of the book’s argument and scope of itsevidence are at once its greatest strengths and most trou-bling limitations. Ellis and Ter Haar offer smart, informed,synthetic accounts of the power of rumor, the prevalenceof secrecy, the moral valences of power, and contemporaryperceptions of evil in the context of democracy andeconomic neoliberalism. Perhaps most provocatively, theymove beyond an analysis of the relationship between re-ligion and politics to argue that most Africans believe that“power has its ultimate origin in the spirit world” (p. 4).Guided by this “widespread” belief, Africans, especiallyAfrican politicians, constantly seek to engage, placate, anddraw on spiritual power in order to expand and strengthentheir formal and informal political power. Despite the ef-forts of colonial and postcolonial imperialists to foster theseparation of church and state in Africa as a means toward“progress,” Africans have retained and recently reinvigo-rated their beliefs in the intertwined relation between thetwo. Blinded by Enlightenment traditions of the separationof church and state, however, most Euro-American scholarshave failed to see, much less analyze, the complicatedconnections between secular and sacred power.

The problem, however, is that these broad general-izations about “Africa” and “Africans” are based on selec-tive or even anecdotal evidence—stories of El Negro inBotswana, rumors of vampires in Malawi, the dilemmas of aLiberian Ph.D. seeking political office, excerpts from Africannovels and popular religious tracts. Based on these dis-parate sources, the authors claim, “Religious relationshipsnow constitute perhaps the most important way in whichAfricans interact with the rest of the world” (p. 2). The mostimportant way? Or, a page later, they claim, “African politi-cians . . . typically pay great regard to the spirit world as asource of power” (p. 3). Some perhaps do, but “typically”?Their ability to make such expansive claims is facilitated bytheir broad definitions of religion and politics, so that religionfollowing E. B. Tylor, entails “a belief in the existence of aninvisible world (p. 3) and is used throughout the book toinclude morality as well, and politics includes formal andinformal assertions of power. Occasionally, the distinctionseems to be reduced to little more than the difference be-

tween “ideas” and “practice.” The result is that all actionscan be understood as expressed in the “spirit idiom,” so thatthe analytic divide between religion and politics is erasedrather than probed.

Despite these issues, the book offers provocative argu-ments for anthropologists, political scientists, and othersto assess in more empirically rigorous and rich ways. Cer-tainly, the relationship between religion and politics needsmore careful analysis in Africa, as elsewhere. Moreover, therapid spread of Pentecostalism, rise in Islamic activism, andother processes suggest that the African continent is, as theauthors suggest, an ideal site to study these questions. Butmore systematic comparison and analysis of the histories,contexts, meanings, and practices of religion and politicsfrom places throughout the continent is needed before wecan begin to accept some of the broad conclusions aboutthe nature of “Africa” and “Africans” posed by the authors.In conclusion, the book is best considered as a source ofstimulating ideas rather than one of definitive conclusions.

Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates inRwanda. Nigel Eltringham. London: Pluto Press, 2004. 232pp.

DANIELLE DE LAMERoyal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren (Belgium)

As opposed to the countless accounts for horror that havebeen published after the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda,this book is in line with the book published by Johan Pottier(2002), aiming as it does at elucidating discourses aroundthis tragedy. Where Pottier examines systematic disinforma-tion and analyzes it within its broad political context, NigelEltringham relies mainly on interviews from Rwandans,both locally and abroad, to produce a “conflict-prevention”oriented study of the accounting by various members of theRwandan elite.

His starting point is that the genocide was a “deliberatechoice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keepitself in power” (p. xii). This is certainly so, but the elite wasnot restricted to an urban environment, nor was it as ho-mogenous as the interviews would indicate; moreover, thisargument should be further qualified. Eltrigham, in tunewith those he interviewed, leaves aside the dynamics en-shrined in the social practices of the countryside, the appro-priations of local history and of the connections with thewider world that made sense of the fight for ever-scarcer re-sources. This multifold synthesis of events gave special turnsto the relationship between specific types of elite and thepeople that civil servants call “the masses.” “The masses”(95 percent of Rwandans) are absent from the discourse ofthe interviewees. Talking about “the nature and continu-ity of absolutist ways of envisaging society” (p. xiv), this iscertainly a case in point.

What are the themes around which current debatesamong urban elite revolve? Ethnicity comes first of the fivemain topics. Eltringham relies on some of the best authors


on the subject (e.g., C. Newbury and D. Newbury) but doesnot make clear the “theoretical” views underlying the dis-course of his interviewees, who are, at this stage, left be-hind. We are more into the object of the book in Chapter2, in which the stances of various groups on the 1959–63antecedents to the genocide are well explained. An over-whelming parallel between the “Holocaust” and the geno-cide appears as a means of rejecting qualifications of primi-tive tribalism that have been all too frequent in the media. Itshould be remarked that this misleading connection occursunder an essentialist paradigm of ethnicity, well in line withthe accusations but also well in tune with a political dis-course appealing to the “West.” This is a rewarding register,but Eltringham does not provide us with a political analysis,striving, in a somewhat Platonist way, for conflict preven-tion. Also streamlined by ethnic perceptions is the collec-tivization of guilt that remains at the heart of allegationsand embitters debates. The need to identify individual re-sponsibilities keeps conflicting with this type of Manicheancategorization. The crimes perpetrated by the Rwandan Pa-triotic Army (RPA) remain problematic. Last, but not least,continuity transpires in the everlasting appeal to the pastand in the willingness to write a monolithic, official historyof, and for, the country. This is not new, indeed. But, con-trary to what the author writes, neither is it a heritage of thecolonial period. Even if we consider that Rwandan historywas written for the first time in the beginning of the colo-nial rule, it remains that this was done in close collaborationwith the court memorialists (Vansina 2004). Writing gavethe seal of modernity to a history that had been monopo-lized and controlled by the most fundamentalist fractionsof society. Is there anything new in this respect?

According to Eltringham, current debates of Rwandansabout their own history revolve mainly around ethnicityand the legitimation of supremacy. From 1994, it has beenpolitically incorrect to legitimate a fraction in power bylooking back to the past. It becomes, then, convenient toerase any trace of ethnical divide of which literature on pre-colonial times testifies. However, similar “ethnic” relationsexisted in many other states of the area. Comparatively,centralization and the absolutization of power are strikingfeatures of the Rwandan state. The political instrumental-ization of identities should be analyzed in the wide, inter-nationalized context of economic and political relations,past and present, but it has not been the author’s choice. Weread an interesting account and discussion of elite opinions.We must take care of contextualizing these opinions, andtheir accounting, by getting acquainted with the history ofthe country as a whole and as a part of the wider world.

REFERENCES CITEDPottier, Johan

2002 Re-Imagining Rwanda. Conflict, Survival and Disinforma-tion in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Vansina, Jan2004 Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Archaeology under Dictatorship. Michael L. Galaty andCharles Watkinson, eds. New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2004.218 pp.

ALAN H. SIMMONSUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas

Although archaeologists often are unwilling pawns of polit-ical events, we sometimes are conscious players. The latteris aptly demonstrated in Archaeology under Dictatorship,a collection of nine chapters dealing with how politicalideologies can shape archaeology. The papers include a de-tailed introduction by the editors, seven case studies, and asummary by Bettina Arnold, well known for her writings onarchaeology and dictatorships. The examples include pre–World War II Italian studies in Egypt, archaeology in “inter-war” Albania, two chapters on Italian colonial archaeologyin Libya, archaeological resource management in Spain un-der Franco, Turkish archaeology and the quest for the “orig-inal Turks,” and Greek archaeology in times of dictatorship.

Editors Michael Galaty and Charles Watkinson’s intro-duction observes that dictators frequently have recognizedthe past’s ideological significance and have manipulated ar-chaeology as a political tool. They contextualize the role ofarchaeology and politics, noting that this occurs in mostnations but can be more intense in totalitarian regimes, es-pecially when a dictator wishes to create and legitimize newideologies. They define dictatorships and then discuss a spe-cific example that sets the tone for much of the volume.Their interest in archaeology and dictatorships stems fromAlbanian archaeology, and it is here that it becomes clearthat Archaeology under Dictatorship will examine the issuefrom an historical (primarily, the first half of the 20th cen-tury) rather than contemporary context, with an empha-sis on Mediterranean Europe. There is nothing wrong withthis, but it does make the book’s title somewhat misleading,because of its circumscribed geographic focus and historicemphasis.

Galaty and Watkinson make several important con-cluding observations, many of which are relevant to thoseof us working in foreign countries. For example, they notethat Albanian archaeology is somewhat dependent on for-eign missions (at least financially), and that this relation-ship has led to a sense of a loss of control by many Al-banian archaeologists over their heritage, because thosewho control the purse strings also usually control the re-search. This has resulted in a desire by some younger Al-banian archaeologists for a return to a centralized researchfocus much as it had been under a more totalitarian regime.Thus, Galaty and Watkinson note that some have suggestedthat “attacking post-totalitarian archaeologies in young de-veloping nations constitutes a form of neo-colonialism”(p. 13). This is an interesting paradox: Many developingcountries lack the financial resources to conduct researchand must therefore rely on foreigners eager to work in theircountries. At the same time, there is a belief amongst somethat such an arrangement represents an assertion of power


by dominant (i.e., richer) countries. Galaty and Watkinsoncorrectly note the theoretical ramifications of such a re-lationship, especially from a postprocessual context. Thissituation is certainly not restricted to Albania; it occurs invirtually any country in which foreign researchers have astake. The editors conclude by noting that a comparativeand diachronic approach to archaeology under dictator-ship may contribute to the struggle that archaeologists ofyounger democracies face as their deal with “the legacy andchallenges of totalitarian pasts” (p. 14).

The remaining chapters are specific case studies, somemore readable than others. One common theme is that ar-chaeologists have not always been innocent participants inthe manipulation of how we understand the past. MargaritaDıaz-Andreu’s and Manuel Ramırez Sanchez’s discussion ofarchaeology in Spain under Franco notes that archaeology“lost its innocence” when postmodernism hit the discipline(an observation also made by others). Although acknowl-edging that archaeological practice has political implica-tions, they also note that archaeologists often are naive insuch situations (I would add that this is likely especially truefor those who have not lived under totalitarian regimes).

Bettina Arnold’s “The Faustian Bargain of Archaeologyunder Dictatorship” provides an apt conclusion and may bethe chapter of most widespread interest. She makes severalcompelling observations, such as noting that most of us willnot experience the trauma of negotiating between princi-ple and survival in totalitarian regimes (p. 191). She furthernotes (p. 192) that there typically are two themes of archae-ology under dictatorships: origins and spatial distributions,both of which have been used to justify land expansionand superiority. Archaeology, however, is a doubled-edgedsword for dictators: It has propaganda value but can alsopose a threat with discoveries contradicting the totalitariandoctrine (pp. 195–196).

Arnold also importantly discusses the implications offunding (pp. 201–202), something that should be a con-cern to all archaeologists especially given contemporarypolitical events. Here Dimitra Kokkinidou’s and MariannaNikolaidou’s observation (in their contribution on Greekarchaeology) that it is not only authoritarian regimes thatcan misinterpret and abuse history to political ends but alsoparliamentary governments (p. 155) should be underscored.One might wonder, for example, how an appropriate bal-ance can be achieved in protecting Iraq’s archaeologicalheritage (which, surprisingly, is hardly mentioned in thevolume) in light of the current conflict there. Is it appro-priate or ethical for Western archaeologists to accept U.S.-led coalition funding for what many consider an ambigu-ous war? This clearly is a complex question, but it shouldgive pause and certainly makes this volume a timely one.Although Arnold perhaps overstates that “the U.S. couldbecome a place in which archaeologists would face perse-cution under a dictatorship,” she is absolutely correct that“neutrality for [archaeologists] has certainly ceased to be arealistic option, if it was ever anything other than an illu-sion” (p. 210).

The Puerto Rican Syndrome. Patricia Gherovici. NewYork: Other Press, 2003. 296 pp.

DELIA EASTONNew York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

The Puerto Rican Syndrome opens with description of north-eastern Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican barrio being white-washed in preparation for its use as the futuristic backdropof the movie Twelve Monkeys. That the Barrio actually needsto be restored before it can acquire a convincingly gritty,“post-Apocalyptic” (p. 2) look, reflects the ineffectual, mis-placed paternalism of U.S. policies toward Puerto Rico andPuerto Ricans that Gherovici convincingly argues is at theroot of the “Puerto Rican syndrome.” This historically andpolitically situated inquiry, part ethnography and part psy-choanalytic theory, explores the social construction of thename that mystified U.S. army psychiatrists gave to a broadcollection of symptoms in the 1950s—including extremeanxiety, rage, and depression—which were experienced byPuerto Rican men who were veterans of the Korean War.

Drawing from her own historical research, Freudianand Lacanian theory, and case studies from her clinical prac-tice as a psychoanalyst, Gherovici argues that the PuertoRican syndrome is a form of hysteria, as Freud defined it,and, as such, “the Puerto Rican syndrome, like any hyste-ria, forces itself on us as an enigma that poses a question ad-dressed to the Other” (p. 20). The “Other” in this case is notonly the psychoanalytic other but also the imperialist oth-ers who colonized Puerto Rico in the first place. Gherovicisuggests that because of the indefinable nature of hyste-ria, the entire phenomenon has illuminated the “faultlinesand blindspots” (p. 52) of biomedical expertise. Similarly,the Puerto Rican syndrome, through a psychoanalytic andhistoric gaze, has the capacity to reveal the political and eco-nomic conundrums and hypocrisies of U.S. policies towardPuerto Rico. Psychoanalysis, Gherovici demonstrates, is anintegral and overlooked theoretical tool for both mappingand understanding the physical and psychological reper-cussions of U.S. colonialism on its colonial subjects.

Gherovici advocates for making psychoanalysis—something that is not readily available to Puerto Ricans,or for that matter anyone living in poor, urban areas anddepending on neighborhood clinics for health care—moreaccessible and presumably more affordable. Traditional psy-chiatry, with its premise on assimilation and adaptation tomainstream norms, is not necessarily an appropriate thera-peutic option for Puerto Ricans, because they have alreadybeen forced to conform to colonialist dictates. Unlike ear-lier studies that described ataques de nervios (lit., attack ofnerves) as a folk illness best treated through traditional heal-ing such as Espiritsmo, Gherovici argues that spiritualists,like psychiatrists, devalue individual difference and perpet-uate therapeutic dependency in their clients. By encourag-ing reliance on an all-knowing Other, both psychiatry andEspiritismo replicate the colonialist dynamic. Lacanian psy-choanalysis, by contrast, “underscores subjectivity, rather


than underscoring the myth of shared identifications”(p. 208).

With its focus on both the Puerto Rican syndrome andpsychoanalysis, there are places where a lesser scholar thanGherovici could have slipped into the broader generaliza-tions of culture and personality theory. Building on a PuertoRican psychoanalyst’s work, for example, she describes howthe “permanent union” (p. 218) theme common to both ofthe main political parties in Puerto Rico is both indicativeof Puerto Rico’s need for reassurance from the United Statesand a way of perpetuating a fantasy of an ideal relationshipwith the United States that will never be. Permanent unionis an unstable political status because the U.S. Congress canunilaterally vote to amend it. The ataque, Gherovici sug-gests, is an embodied parody of this unrealized idealization.Her case studies—in particular, her commentary about howataques were an apt response for Puerto Rican soldiers facedwith the double bind of fighting for a country in which theywere not full citizens—affirms and anchors these broaderspeculations.

A weakness of this work lies in the depth of its empiricalrichness. Gherovici’s theoretical framework is compellingenough to suggest extensions to the experience of ataquesin other cultural, historical, and political contexts. Shementions that further study is needed to explore the mean-ings of ataques experienced in other Latin American andCaribbean contexts. If the dysfunctional, quasi-familialrelationship between the Puerto Rico and the UnitedStates is so central to the experience of the Puerto Ricansyndrome, what is the significance of this relationshipto ataques experienced in other contexts? Is the ataquemore generally an expression of oppression and untenablesocial circumstance, as has been suggested elsewhere? Theanswers to these questions, perhaps addressed by Gheroviciin another book entirely, could increase the relevanceand accessibility of this work to nonacademicians andclinicians.

Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and OtherSubaltern Subjects. Dru C. Gladney. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2004. 414 pp.

GARDNER BOVINGDONIndiana University

Dru Gladney has probably done more than any other an-thropologist to convey the importance of China’s ethnicdiversity to non-China specialists. Although not the first topuncture the myth of a homogeneous China, he took thelead in explaining that myth—and what it concealed—toanthropologists and other social scientists beginning in thelate 1980s. He was also among the first scholars to introducepoststructuralist concepts to the study of Chinese culture.His work has thus helped integrate the study of Chinesesociety into larger theoretical debates within anthropology.

This book is a fine introduction to Gladney’s work,as it ranges more widely than any single article or mono-

graph he has previously produced. It collects many of hisshorter works originally published as journal articles orbook chapters, most originally written between 1987 and1999. Individual chapters consider topics ranging from eco-nomics to education, sex to cinematography, Sufism tocyber-separatism, fieldwork to foreign affairs, always withan eye to broad theoretical currents. As a group the chap-ters reflect Gladney’s extraordinary accomplishments as afield researcher with 20 years of experience, and his un-equaled access to Muslims of every description from elite topeasant in China, as well as Uyghurs and Qazaqs in CentralAsia and Turkey. They also show wide reading in culturalanthropology and literary and social theory.

What of his theoretical contributions to anthropology?Gladney’s 1991 work, Muslim Chinese (revised in 1996),genuinely advanced the study of identity by demonstrat-ing that it is not only affected by state actions; in somecases it may actually be invented by the state, and thencome to be accepted by the people so labeled, rather likePascal’s persevering skeptic who continually kneels to prayand eventually grows faith to suit the posture. The new col-lection demonstrates the special payoffs of studying non-dominant groups in an authoritarian nationalist state: Theyhave more to say than members of the dominant group be-cause they often feel alienated from, rather than able toidentify with, the state. His argument in Chapter 4 (firstpublished as an article in 1994) that states simultaneously“exoticize” and “eroticize” members of minorities—in otherwords, that Orientalism occurs not only between civiliza-tions but within them—has clearly achieved wide influ-ence. He has also efficiently dismissed Samuel Huntington’stheory of the “Clash of Civilizations,” here in Chapter 6,by demonstrating that two hypothesized civilizations con-verge in China’s Muslims. Finally, in the chapters makingup the final third of the book, he suggests the promise of aburgeoning “subaltern school” in Sinology.

Despite the book’s title, Gladney does not actually“dislocate” China. He makes non-Hans the focus of the nar-rative but cannot thereby make them central to Chinese cul-ture. And although he repeatedly claims to illuminate theconstruction of Han collective identity, what he really doeshere is suggest its vulnerability. In the latter half of the book,Gladney writes that “it is because the construction of Hanidentity is so tenuous, so questionable, and the position ofHan superiority so insecure, that the portrayal of the otheras sensual, immoral, and even barbarous becomes so im-portant” (p. 258). These are bold claims, which merit muchthought. Do Hans, who officially make up more than nine-tenths of China’s population, really consider their positionin China precarious? Can the tissue of Han identity really beso flimsy given the extraordinary number of books, newspa-per articles, and television programs devoted to articulatingand glorifying it? This book might more accurately be de-scribed as a prolegomenon to dislocating China.

The process by which the previously published workwas incorporated into this volume is somewhat disappoint-ing. The same information is introduced many times and


several passages are repeated verbatim in separate chaptersof the book. With few exceptions, the chapters are onlylightly revised versions of the originals. This was a missedopportunity, because Gladney’s most widely read and influ-ential pieces have provoked responses, even spawned newresearch agenda. One would have liked to see the new ver-sions cite and respond to a larger number of the works theyinspired.

These criticisms notwithstanding, the book deserves awide readership. For graduate students and scholars new toGladney’s work, it helpfully gathers some of his strongestpieces. For scholars interested in ethnonational politics inEast Asia, both in socialist and postsocialist regimes or instates with Muslim minorities, the book’s arguments andinsights are indispensable.

REFERENCE CITEDGladney, Dru C.

1996 Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’sRepublic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Once upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and VernacularRisk Perception. Diane E. Goldstein. Logan: Utah StateUniversity Press, 2004. 210 pp.

SUSAN MCCOMBIEGeorgia State University

Once upon a Virus is a story. It is a story about stories aboutAIDS. These stories might be described as urban myths,modern myths, or solidified rumors. Diane Goldstein usesthe term contemporary legends and makes the point thatit does not really matter what you call them; in fact, itdoes not even matter whether they are truths, part truths,or total fictions. What matters is that people tell them,and they reveal understandings of health, illness, and riskperception.

The first chapter begins with the common childhoodgame “Tag, you’ve got AIDS,” which the author uses to be-gin a discussion of concepts of “contagion” in children’sgames and the AIDS jokes that began in the 1980s. Accord-ing to Goldstein, these jokes largely began to be replacedby narratives (the contemporary legends) in the 1990s, asconcern shifted from the facts about the disease to whatwas unknown and uncomfortable. Telling the legends be-came a way to create dialogue. More than half of the chapteris devoted to a description of the field site in Newfound-land, with a description of the author’s methods of collect-ing data, the general environment and economy, and HIVstatistics. The subsequent chapters return to more generaldiscussion of contemporary legends about AIDS and the fo-cus does not return to Newfoundland in depth until halfwaythrough the book, where some of the descriptive informa-tion is repeated. It is never quite clear whether the bookis about AIDS legends in general or AIDS legends in New-foundland. Almost all of the examples are from the UnitedStates and Canada, leaving the reader hungering for moreexamples from around the world.

When we return to Newfoundland, the story becomes abit more interesting as we are presented with a “true” storyrelated to the “Welcome to the World of AIDS” legend. Thiswell-known legend involves an individual who has unpro-tected sex and wakes up the next morning to find a messagethat he or she has been exposed to AIDS. Goldstein’s discus-sion of her involvement with a legal case involving an HIV+man (Billy Ray) provides a good illustration of how legendand fact are weaved together in a local context.

I was struck by how the author alternated between theterms HIV and HIV virus. There was a time when the puristsamong us would correct people who used the redundantform, but it has become so commonplace that most havegiven up. I have accepted that the name of the virus hadbeen reified. What interests me is why Goldstein, like otherpeople, alternate between the two forms. As I searched for anonrandom pattern and considered her use of the term wild-fire transmission to describe the spread of the virus through arural Canadian community, I wondered if this was actuallya book about folklore or if the book was folklore itself.

Like any good story, Once upon a Virus caused me toponder. I began to have ideas, and as I read I became lesssure whether the ideas were my own or had been articu-lated in an earlier part of the book. In some places, I wantedthe author to go further in her interpretation. In others, Icast a skeptical gaze. For example, Chapter 6 contains aneloquently presented argument that needlestick narratives(movie seats and phone booths) are examples of resistanceto conventional medical authority and reveal the external-ization of risk from the home to the public sphere. Perhaps.One of Goldstein’s main messages is that public health of-ficials should take AIDS legends seriously because they af-fect health choices. It is not clear to me that AIDS legends,whether conspiracy theories or needlestick narratives, areactually associated with risky behavior, but I am willing toentertain the notion.

In the final analysis, the book is more than a storyabout stories. There is a good discussion of the typesof behavioral models that have been used by publichealth officials to explain risk behavior in Chapter 3,and the final chapter incorporates a nice critique of the“Know Your Partner” educational strategy. If you havestudents who are interested in AIDS, or students whoare interested in what contemporary legends reveal aboutthe societies they are produced in, this book is worth a look.

Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory inthe Argentinean Chaco. Gaston R. Gordillo. Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2005. 304 pp.

SILVIA HIRSCHFacultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Argentina)

The Chaco region of Argentina, one of the least ethno-graphically studied areas of South America, is inhabited bythe Toba and numerous other indigenous groups, whosecomplex history has been marked by state domination and


violence, labor migrations, evangelization, and environ-mental degradation. It is in this context that GastonGordillo’s book sheds light on the Toba’s contradictory andshifting construction of these factors and on the interplayof memory and place.

The bush, which is the Toba’s habitat, is a site of tensionand social contradiction. The “ancient ones,” as the Tobarefer to their ancestors, remember the bush as grasslandsover which they could roam freely, but the bush is nowtransformed in a wooded area invaded by settlers and eco-logically degraded. The bush is the site of marisca (hunting,gathering, and fishing), where the Toba forage for foods, incontrast to the world of work, which came to be associatedwith agriculture, herding, and seasonal labor. In exploringthe links between memory and place, Gordillo reminds usthat habitat is culturally constructed.

In the memory of the Toba, the bush was also the placeof state domination unleashed by the military against themand other Chaco groups. Military violence decimated theindigenous population and expropriated lands, paving theway for intrusion of capital and labor intensive forms ofagriculture. As a result of these state-initiated changes, thephysical and social landscape was permanently altered—thus bringing about the loss of lands, the arrival of set-tlers, the withdrawal of indigenous groups to the fringesof the region, and indigenous engagement in labor migra-tions. Again Gordillo provides a persuasive account of theinterplay of geography and historical experience.

In his chapter on Toba labor migrations to the sugar-cane plantations, Gordillo underscores the paradoxical na-ture of the experience. On the one hand, the Toba for thefirst time in their history were subjected to the “political-economy” of time and work: The plantations were, clearly,brutal sites of exploitation. However, on the other hand, forthe Toba they also provided an opportunity to acquire goods(foodstuffs, clothing, tools) and to be free from missionaryintrusion. While working at the plantations, the Indians en-gaged in uncensored dancing and shamanic practices, butthey also confronted the presence of payaks, devil-like be-ings that haunted and killed workers. In the bush, thesepayaks had been a positive source, associated with food andpower, but in the plantation, they now acquired negativeconnotations linked to political economy.

Working at the plantations also redefined how thedominant society viewed the Toba. They became “aborig-ines,” a category that linked ethnicity to class. The Toba,together with other Chaco indigenous groups, were nearthe lowest rung of the ethnic ladder of workers at the plan-tations, paid less than most others and living in worseconditions. Although the experience of degradation wasespecially difficult for the men, the Toba women at theplantation had a different experience, enabling them tobecome economically independent from their husbandsbut distancing them from their children. In recalling theirtime at the plantation, the Toba men and women de-scribe the experience with a mixture of fascination andestrangement.

By the late 1920s, the Toba established contact withBritish Anglican missionaries and invited them to settle intheir communities. The Toba took in these missionaries asa way of protecting their communities against settlers andmilitary raids. Missions became strongly rooted among theToba: They disciplined, transformed, and censored manypractices while granting protection and providing the skillsnecessary to adapt to the national society (literacy and newlabor practices). As the author aptly asserts, conversion “im-plied a cultural production reconfiguring practices, bodiesand places” (p. 93).

The bush, homeland to the Toba, was a place wherepoverty constituted part of the social landscape and abo-riginality another form of exclusion and marginality. How-ever, the experience of labor migration and contact withthe missionaries constructed the bush as a place of heal-ing and freedom. Although acknowledging the influence ofthe missionaries’ work, Gordillo aptly explores the multipleaspects of the Toba’s cultural resilience.

Gordillo’s analysis is nuanced and engagingly written.The strength of this book lies in its deep, ethnographicallygrounded, and historically situated research, as well asin its emphasis on the ambiguities, tensions, and socialcontradictions that construct memory and place. Stateviolence, labor migrations, and Anglican missionizationhave shaped the way the Toba recall their own experiences,and, in so doing, have also detailed how memory and placeare inextricably linked.

Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery andSelf-Knowledge. Don Handelman and David Shulman.New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 246 pp.

MARGARET TRAWICKMassey University

A tradition in South Asian literature is for people to writecommentaries on older literature—adage by adage, verseby verse. The commentator will explicate the older work,putting hard to read and elliptical verse into more readablecurrent prose and adding interpretations that may or maynot have been intended by the original author. Multiplelayers of commentary come with some works. In this way,old classics have been made available to wider audiences,ancient insights have been continually renewed, and com-plex philosophical systems have been built. David Shulmanand Don Handelman continue this tradition in their currentwork. The fruit of their labor in the book here reviewed istwofold. First, previously untranslated south Indian Saivatexts (about the god Siva) become available in translationto the modern Anglophone audience. And second, an orig-inal, and certainly thought-provoking, cosmic vision is of-fered for our contemplation.

That Saiva mythology is erotic to the hilt is no newdiscovery. The set of related stories here translated evokethe god Siva as the concentrated essence of sexual passionand power. But the interest of Shulman and Handelman


in this set of texts is philosophical and cosmological, farfrom the life of the body. They take us on a topographicjourney that reminds this reader of her youthful forays intopopular astrophysics: Space folds in on itself, time freezesand melts, the flow of energy slows to become inert matter,rents occur in the fabric of the universe, pieces of it break offand encyst, an object spinning at incredible speed creates avast gravitational force that pulls everything into its heartfrom which nothing can escape.

Through their interpretations of the old south Indiantexts, the authors ask direct questions about the nature ofGod. Strictly speaking, theirs is a theological essay morethan an anthropological one. The authors never claim oth-erwise and are not to be faulted for their choice of approach.

If I were to have a personal quibble with this book,it would be that the authors sometimes appear intolerantof alternative interpretations of the same or closely relateddata, even when those alternative interpretations are at leastas plausible as their own. For instance, they dismiss as sec-ondary the argument that “in Tamilnadu sorcery is firstand foremost a psychological expression” and countersorceryis thus “therapeutic and regenerative” (Nabokov 2000:48).They insist that “sorcery cannot be reduced to social re-lations” and that the “‘cosmic,’ i.e., cultural dimensions ofsorcery, are paramount” (p. 21). But how is the cosmic morecultural than the social and psychological?

The most compelling feature of this book is not theargument but the imagery. The old Saiva texts here trans-lated offer immediate intense sensory experience: blood,fire, hair, fingernails, drops of sweat, the winds of disease,the breasts and vulvas of women overcome and meltingwith desire as they stare intently at the penis of a nakedbeggar. Juxtaposed with that is the pure, abstract, emotion-less, quasi-mathematical imagery of the authors of this bookas they interpret the cosmic intent of the Saiva texts. Themaster trope is space, whose dimensions are interior andexterior.

This trope is a central to Tamil and Saiva literature,sculpture, and temple construction; Shulman and Handel-man explore some of its potentials. In addition to lust, anat least equal power explored in the stories here translated(and many others as well) is hunger. Siva comes to the for-est taking the appearance of a beggar, with a begging bowlin his hand. The wives of the forest sages fall in love/lustwith him and rush to feed him and be had by him sexually.What is so irresistible to these women about a hungry nakedbeggar? And how is sorcery (one of the words in the title)implicated in these stories? For the authors of the book, sor-cery is a metaphysical, or cosmic, process, entailing impris-onment of the self (even the self of God) and the perpetual,necessary instability of the relation between God and theworld. Sorcery entails alienation of oneself from oneself,whether by imprisonment or by some other means. Godbecomes ensorcelled when he is either cut off from a partor the whole of the world or too much immersed in it.

In the end, however, who can say whether, for theauthors of the old texts, hunger was a metaphor for the

cosmic or a down-to-earth animal need more terrifying thananything else imaginable? The latter view deserves more at-tention in this world, where so many are starving.

REFERENCE CITEDNabokov, Isabelle

2000 Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals.New York: Oxford University Press.

Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays to-ward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology. RichardHandler, ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.315 pp.

JOCELYN LINNEKINUniversity of Connecticut

One of the pleasures of reading a new volume in the Historyof Anthropology (HOA) series is the joy of discovery. Thehallmark of HOA is meticulous research into the lives of ourpredecessors, whose intellectual and personal relationshipsare carefully reconstructed from private papers, correspon-dence, and institutional archives. Every volume containssurprises—hitherto unrevealed or unpublicized connec-tions, encounters and collaborations, as well as a liaison ortwo. Although the biographical particulars are fascinating,the merit of what could be called “the HOA treatment”is that the work of individual scholars is contextualizedin complex ways. The subject’s standing in anthropologyis elaborated in relation to social location, personality,political movements, and the cultural–historical moment.Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions is the ninth HOApublication and the first to be edited by Richard Handler,who demonstrates herewith that he is a fitting successor toGeorge Stocking. In my view, it this is one of the strongestvolumes in the series, not least because of stellar chaptersby George Stocking and Maria Lepowsky. The book isa must read for baby boomer anthropologists and theirstudents, and it would be an excellent choice for a graduatecourse in the history of theory.

The primary theme of the volume is the establishmentof scholarly authority. In his chapter on 19th-centuryoccultism, Peter Pels investigates the formation of anthro-pology’s identity as a science. The Victorian ethnologists’rejection of occultism and theosophy—and, by association,philosophical idealism—was rooted in class antipathy.Scientific professionals saw themselves as an intellectualaristocracy, superior by virtue of a canon that vauntedquantification and objectivity. The chapter has obviouscontemporary relevance, as anthropologists continue tospar over the boundaries of the discipline.

Although we know in general terms that the contribu-tions of women and nonwhite anthropologists have beenlargely erased from the history of theory, the devil is inthe details—in seemingly insignificant acts of overlook-ing, dismissing, and setting aside. In its choice of subjects,this volume is the most gender-balanced in the HOA se-ries. Charlotte Gower—the first woman anthropologist to


receive a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago—is the protag-onist in Maria Lepowsky’s chapter. Ralph Linton and RobertRedfield figure prominently, however, and even Radcliffe-Brown makes an appearance. In light of the eventual statureof these male scholars, Gower’s truncated academic ca-reer makes for infuriating reading. Despite an institutionaland social milieu in which flagrant gender discriminationwas the norm, Gower interacted with her male peers asan intellectual equal and conducted innovative fieldworkin a peasant society. A gifted teacher at the University ofWisconsin, Gower had several male students—including SolTax, the focus of Stocking’s chapter—who went on to be-come well-known figures in the discipline. Her ethnogra-phy of a Sicilian community was lost in manuscript, how-ever, and remained unpublished for decades while Redfield’sbook on Tepoztlan became the touchstone for peasant stud-ies. Gower is the archetype of the excluded woman ancestorand her history is a road map of women’s systematic erasurefrom the history of anthropology.

The centerpiece of the volume is Stocking’s superbchapter on Sol Tax, an architect of the modern disciplineand the embodiment of “liberal democratic anthropology.”At 94 pages, the chapter resembles a small book and, in fact,Stocking notes that he intends it as part of a longer work onCold War anthropology. Although Tax has been excludedfrom the history of theory, his contributions to the disci-pline were enormous; he was, for example, the foundingeditor of Current Anthropology. His optimism, earnestness,and commitment to activism recall the ideals that inspiredmany baby boomers to become anthropologists.

Stocking’s chapter is a veritable minicourse on the de-velopment of the discipline as we know it. Another note-worthy feature is that Stocking here explicates his methodand practice as a historian of anthropology and positionshis own career in the context of Cold War and post–ColdWar scholarship. With refreshing reasonableness, he asks usto be gentle when evaluating the work and conduct of ourimmediate intellectual ancestors. Considering the role of in-dividual agency, Stocking also offers a definition of his con-cept of “resonance” that will be very useful to intellectualhistorians. Stocking’s chapter and Ronald Stade’s chapteron Austrian ethnographer Lucie Varga invite us to ponderthe role of Jewish identity in the development of anthropol-ogy’s theory and distinctive gaze. Varga was one of the earlyAnnales social historians. Although she is unknown in thediscipline, she authored what might have been considereda pioneering cultural–structural analysis of Nazi discourseand ideology in the context of German history. One of thecompelling “what if?” questions raised by Excluded Ances-tors is whether and how Varga might have contributed toanthropological theory, had she not died prematurely inNazi-occupied France.

A recurring lesson of Excluded Ancestors is that post–Cold War anthropology does not accord nearly enoughcredit to antecedent generations. In the competitive in-tellectual marketplace, the cachet of novelty has led to ashocking ignorance of the work of our teachers’ teachers.

In historical context, many of the latest concepts looklike new labels manufactured to sell old wine. The HOAseries demonstrates that there are few new ideas in culturalanthropology, underscoring the importance of teachingthe history of theory.

Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Exper-iments and Ethnographic Evidence from FifteenSmall-Scale Societies. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd,Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and HerbertGintis, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 451pp.

ERIC ALDEN SMITHUniversity of Washington

In the last two decades, economic experiments have shownthat people’s choices often deviate substantially from thosethat would maximize their immediate material payoffs. Al-though experimental results were quite consistent acrossdifferent countries, most subjects were college studentsand all were members of industrialized societies. Recently,Joseph Henrich and colleagues extended these methods tosmall-scale societies, attempting to measure the effects ofcultural variation, ecological adaptation, and social inter-action on decisions in some standard economic games. Thepresent volume, edited by two anthropologists and fourrather heterodox economists, details their findings. Theseare often surprising and always stimulating, and they con-tain broad (but contested) implications for a variety of socialsciences.

The basic research program summarized in this bookconsisted of running economic experiments in 15 forag-ing, horticultural, and pastoral societies scattered aroundthe globe, from Amazonia to Mongolia. The experimentswere directed by ethnographers conducting broader long-term projects in these communities. The book consists of re-ports by each ethnographer–experimenter, plus theoreticaland methodological summaries by the editors. The chap-ter authors have diverse theoretical orientations, includingbehavioral ecology, economic anthropology, cultural evolu-tionism, cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology,and economics. But all are committed to quantitative anal-ysis of rigorously collected ethnographic data.

To the extent practicable, the ethnographers fol-lowed a common protocol in conducting the experiments.Participants played the ultimatum game (UG) in all 15 so-cieties, and additional games (public goods, trust, dicta-tor) were played in some. In the UG, the experimenterprovides the stake (e.g., $100), and one player is allowedto choose the portion offered to a second player; shouldthe responder refuse the offer, neither player gets anymoney (which is retained by the experimenter). If thegame is played anonymously and only once per player(as was the case in all experiments reported in this vol-ume), the income-maximizing strategy for the first playeris to offer as little as possible, and for the second player


to accept any offer, no matter how small. There are twobasic findings reported here. First, like the college stu-dents and others who were the focus of comparable eco-nomic experiments in industrial societies, most of theparticipants in the small-scale societies make game choicesthat violate what the editors call the “selfishness axiom” ofmaximizing personal material payoffs. For example, modalUG offers typically reach 40 to 50 percent of the stakes. Sec-ond, the pattern of choices is much more variable across so-cieties (and in some cases even across communities withinsocieties) than is typically recorded in industrial settings.Thus, mean UG offers vary from 25 percent (Quichua,Ecuador) to 57 percent (Lamalera, Indonesia).

The advantage of experiments over naturalistic obser-vation is that the researcher can control for various factorsthat might influence outcomes, and, thus, hope to arriveat a clearer understanding of the effects of various hypothe-sized determinants. The disadvantage is that the “ecologicalvalidity” or relevance of the experiment to naturalistic con-texts can be questioned. If the experimental results are notsimply artifacts, we have to ask what they really mean. Theauthors have struggled valiantly to answer this question,but no definitive conclusions are attained. According to theoverview chapter by Henrich et al., a plausible hypothesisis that play in the games reflects daily life—that it reflects“differences among groups in the ways that group-memberstypically interact in the pursuit of their livelihood” and “ingovernance of their common affairs” (p. 28). More specif-ically, a multiple regression analysis finds that variationin “aggregate market integration” (an index measuring in-volvement in external markets, settlement size, and scaleof sociopolitical complexity) and “payoffs to cooperation”(an index of the potential benefits of multifamily economicproduction) together account for 47 percent of the between-society variation in UG offers. Although a valuable initialgeneralization, this conclusion runs into trouble when oneexamines detailed empirical patterns within and betweenthe 15 cases.

For example, Frank Marlowe’s chapter reports thatamong the Hadza, the only significant predictor of UG of-fers is camp size—the modal offer is 50 percent in largecamps versus 20 percent in small camps—yet food shar-ing between households is greater in small camps thanin large ones. So “generosity” in the UG is inversely re-lated to real-life food sharing, something inconsistent withthe editor’s generalization (but consistent with a signal-ing or reputation-based interpretation). John Patton, whoworked in an Ecuadorian community divided along ethnic–coalitional lines, found that members of the Achuar coali-tion make much higher UG offers (mode = 50 percent)than do members of the Quichua coalition (25 percent),yet members of these coalitions do not differ in levels ofcooperation in daily life (see Chapter 4). The editors list theAchuar as having higher market integration than Quichua(see figure 2.5), yet Patton (p. 113) says the opposite is trueand notes that the two coalitions do not differ in their fre-quency of between-household sharing of game nor in the

imbalance of such sharing (p. 119). They do differ in thestability of the coalitions and the tendency of higher sta-tus men to build coalitions by sharing meat, which Pattonargues explains the observed differences in UG offers. Sim-ilar findings are noted for the Tsimane of Bolivia (MichaelGurven) and for two lowland New Guinea groups studiedby David Tracer. These and other findings suggest that gen-eralizations regarding market integration and payoffs to co-operation are at best only part of the story (Smith 2005).Fortunately, these and other researchers have embarked ona new round of studies aimed at systematically exploringvarious anomalies and issues, and we can look forward tomore intriguing results in the near future.

REFERENCE CITEDSmith, Eric Alden

2005 Making It Real: Interpreting Economic Experiments. Be-havioral and Brain Sciences 28(6):832–833.

Claude Levi-Strauss. Michel Izard, ed. Paris: Editions deL’Herne, 2004. 482 pp.

BORIS WISEMANUniversity of Durham

This interdisciplinary volume groups together new essayson Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology by more than50 scholars and writers from around the world, as well asa number of lesser known pieces by Levi-Strauss himself.Its context is the renewal of structuralist thought (not justin anthropology) that is undeniably underway in Franceand perhaps elsewhere too. The editor, Michel Izard, isamong those closest to Levi-Strauss. He was, in 1961, oneof the founding members of the prestigious Laboratoired’anthropologie sociale and has already co-edited (withPierre Smith) a volume in homage to Levi-Strauss entitledBetween Belief and Transgression (1982).

Several chapters deal with the biography of Levi-Strauss, whose life story is inextricably intertwined withthe development of modern anthropology and, indeed,with the evolution of 20th-century thought. These chapterscover such diverse aspects of his life as his early involve-ment in politics as a socialist militant (he once thoughthe might become the philosopher of the French SocialistParty), the formative years spent as a lecturer in sociologyat the University of Sao Paulo (1935–38), and his periodof exile in New York (1941–44) when, as a Jewish refugeefleeing Nazism, he met Roman Jakobson and started workon the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1971). The majorityof the chapters, however, are concerned with Levi-Strauss’sthought: its reception, its interpretation, and, above all,its continuing relevance. As one reads these chapters, onecannot help but think that the true value of Levi-Strauss’sworks—in particular, in the Anglo-American world—hasbeen obscured by a number of misunderstandings, whichhave no doubt been made worse by problems of translation(in the broadest sense, including “cultural”), as well as bythe vagaries of intellectual fashions. One may legitimately


ask to what extent, in the popular imagination at least, aversion of structuralism invented retrospectively by “post-structuralists” has become substituted for the real thing.One of the most common misunderstandings regards struc-turalism’s alleged inability to handle history, which MichaelOppitz, an experienced field anthropologist, and FrancoisHartog address in their chapters. Philippe Descola returnsto Levi-Strauss’s philosophical positions and the commonmisconception that his positions are close to a form of ide-alism or mentalism.

The chapters as a collection show that the works of Levi-Straus are not reducible to the exposition of a method ordoctrine. They constitute a complex assemblage of texts, of-ten related by hidden connections, whose meaning in manyways remains to be discovered. Olivier Herrenschmidt illus-trates this point very well. He first read The Savage Mind(1962) when it appeared in the 1960s, but returned to itin the 1990s, having assigned it as reading for his studentsat the University of Paris X. Rereading Levi-Strauss’s clas-sic in this very different intellectual and political contexthe found himself discovering in it (not without a degree ofastonishment) a world of meaning he had not suspected.What came to the fore was not so much the analysis ofthe logic of classificatory systems, but remarks on the placeof affect (in particular, pity) on social relations. Affect wasconstrued, in an 18th-century tradition, as an elemental—one might even say “prehuman”—form of identification ofone living being with another. In the process, what is re-vealed is not only a possible explanation of one of the cen-tral problems raised by Levi-Strauss’s work on totemism—namely, why human beings appear to privilege animal andplant species in the construction of social nomenclatures—but also the ethical dimension of Levi-Strauss’s thought.It is not sufficiently understood that Levi-Strauss is a pro-foundly ecological thinker, whose critique of a “corrupt”humanism that places “Man” above other living beings, istoday more relevant than ever. Levi-Strauss’s original title,La pensee sauvage, takes on here its full significance, which islost in translation. As the francophone would know, the titleis based on a pun. A pensee, in French, is at once a “thought”and a “pansy”; here, more specifically, the pensee is a wildpansy, the Viola Tricolor. The kind of thinking with whichthis book is concerned is “wild” only in the botanical senseof the term.

A number of chapters, such as those by PhilippeDescola and Francoise Heritier, combine a critique of struc-turalism, necessary for its renewal, with an attempt touse its productive elements to forge new paths of inquiry.Descola’s chapter explores the contradictory meaningsgiven by Levi-Strauss to the contrastive opposition between“nature” and “culture,” according to the various contexts inwhich he makes use of it: as a tool for the structural analysisof myths and folk classifications, as a philosophical foun-dation accounting for the origin of society, or as an anti-nomy to be superseded in the edification of a (monist) the-ory of knowledge, which refuses the traditional oppositionbetween the mind and the objective world. He reveals the

continuing validity of the analysis of the categorical distinc-tions that structure a culture’s symbolic productions, whilstrejecting the Levi-Straussian reduction of these distinctionsto that between “nature” and “culture.” (As he points out,growing ethnographic evidence suggests that the cosmolo-gies of most nonmodern peoples do not divide the worldinto a natural world and a social world.) Francoise Heritier’schapter is part of the same systematic effort to conceptu-alize the future of structuralism. She may be said to rein-sert the body into structuralism. Where Levi-Strauss drawson linguistic analogies, Heritier draws on bodily ones. Cul-tural productions, including kinship systems, are seen interms of a dialectics of identity and difference whose ba-sis is not linguistic-style structures but bodily substances,among them skin and fluids, such as blood and semen.

One of the great strengths of this volume is un-doubtedly its interdisciplinary nature. The chapters of twophilosophers in particular, Claude Imbert (Ecole normalesuperieure) and Denis Kambouchner (Sorbonne), do a greatdeal to reveal some of the new directions in which Levi-Strauss’s thought—beyond the cliches that are repeatedabout structuralism—may be pursued. Imbert’s chapter isintriguingly titled “Qualia” (the plural of the Latin quale,lit. meaning “what sort” or “what kind”). These are sensi-ble qualities such as they are subjectively apprehended (e.g.,the way an apple tastes or a particular color looks). West-ern thought has always separated sensation from reasoning(i.e., logic). Imbert shows, amongst other things (if I haveread her correctly), that Levi-Strauss’s originality consists, atleast in part, of the discovery that there is a logic of sensiblequalities. Contrary to Plato’s injunction to the philosopherthat he or she must turn away from the sensible world topractice logic, Imbert argues that the first geometries areimmanent to the qualitative dimensions of reality: Theyare attributes of various kinds of sensible forms. Insteadof seeing sensation and reasoning as belonging to two dis-tinct registers, and the concepts that denote them as delin-eating essentially autonomous realms, Levi-Strauss imbri-cates logic in sensation and, indeed, in the “sensible.” Levi-Strauss thereby defines a new “contrat de realite” (Imbert’sphrase, p. 433) that one may see as being at the core of theelaboration of the many different kinds of symbolic systemsthat make up “culture.”

Kambouchner’s chapter is concerned with complexi-ties of Levi-Strauss’s understanding of the nature of “an-thropological judgments,” which he defines as the condi-tions of elaboration of a specifically anthropological formof understanding—especially as viewed in the light of cur-rent, and often heated, debates about cultural relativism.On the one hand, Levi-Strauss subscribes to a “classical”understanding of the notion of “cultural relativism,” onewhich recalls, for example, the positions of Boas or Kroe-ber: that value judgments made by one culture about an-other are rooted in that culture’s systems of belief and can-not therefore lay claim to objectivity. On the other hand,Kambouchner identifies a series of subtle attempts to rec-oncile relativism and universalism. His close reading of a


chapter of Tristes tropiques (“Un petit verre de rhum”) isilluminating. It follows the twists and turns—moral, philo-sophical, practical—of the anthropologist’s effort to “de-tach” himself or herself from the culture to which he orshe belongs to become immersed in another culture. Thiseffort co-exists with the problematic and never entirely suc-cessful transformation of an agent into an observer, withall its attendant dilemmas, in particular for the politicalactivist. In its concluding section, the chapter attempts tobring to light Levi-Strauss’s engagement with the concept of“civilization”—in particular, his discrete attempts to theo-rize an ideal of civilization. As a vocal denouncer of the rav-ages of monoculture, Levi-Strauss is less likely than manyto be blind to all that is corrupt in the concept of “civiliza-tion.” Anthropology, Levi-Strauss often repeats, is an ex-pression of the remorse felt by Western “civilization” in theface of the evidence of its own destructiveness; it is a vastsalvage operation launched in order to preserve as much aspossible of what remains before the process of destructionis complete. Yet, at the same time, Kambouchner shows,Levi-Strauss attempts to imagine a space between culturesthat is also the space of anthropological understanding, onethat corresponds to an ideal of civilization construed as a“coalition of cultures.”

Among the chapters by Levi-Strauss contained in thisnew volume, “Nous sommes tous des cannibales” (We areall cannibals) deserves a special mention. It is best describedas a deconstruction of the notion of “cannibalism” (thereis exocannibalism and endocannibalism, and cannibalismswhose aims are nutritional, religious, medical, etc.). Oncedefined in such a way as to encompass its many differentforms, it becomes apparent that the notion of “cannibal-ism” (in its broadest sense, the incorporation of parts of onehuman being into another) may not designate a particularly“savage” custom; instead, it can be read as an elementarymetaphor for sociability.

REFERENCES CITEDIzard, Michael, and Pierre Smith, eds.

1982 Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays inReligion, History, and Myth. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude1968[1962] The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society).

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1971 The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon

Press.1985[1962] La Pensee Sauvage (The Savage Mind). Rev. ed.

Evanston, IL: Adler’s Foreign Books.1992[1955] Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin Books.

Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and PeacefulSocieties around the World. Graham Kemp and DouglasP. Fry, eds. New York: Routledge, 2004. 231 pp.

LESLIE E. SPONSELUniversity of Hawai‘i

What can we learn from peaceful societies? That is the piv-otal question addressed throughout this anthology. The first

two chapters develop a mentalist theoretical and method-ological context; nine case studies elaborate on this context;and a final chapter refutes opposing views and then sum-marizes underlying commonalities among the cases.

In the first chapter, Graham Kemp critically analyzesthe concept of peaceful societies by exposing the sterilityof the persistent oppositions of Hobbes–Rousseau, nature–nurture, and absolute–relative peace together with their his-torical context and enduring political motivations. Basi-cally, he defines a “peaceful society” as having a worldviewwith accompanying values, customs, and institutions thattogether minimize violence and promote nonviolence. Ac-cordingly, peace is a dynamic process as well as a condi-tion. Kemp provocatively observes that “the threat of peacebreaking out is something a warlike culture needs to attendto in much the same way that the outbreak of violence issomething a peaceful culture needs to deal with” (p. 7).

In the second chapter, Ximena Davies-Vengoechea ar-gues that peace and war are not only alternative capacities ofhuman nature but also that they may actually coexist in realsituations as well. This has been the situation in Colombiaduring more than 50 years of civil war among a quarter ofa million people, while simultaneously a remaining 40 mil-lion pursue peace (p. 15). In other words, the phenomena ofwar and peace, as well as violence and nonviolence, cannotalways be reduced to simply either–or, all-or-none, always-or-never propositions. Davies-Vengoechea views peace asa life-enhancing, dynamic process, one that is the normalcondition in the daily lives of most humans, even those oc-casionally exposed to violence or war. Accordingly, peace isa choice, commitment, and way of being.

The above and other key points are further developedin particular cultural contexts by Alice Schlegel for the Hopiof Northern Arizona, Alan Howard for Rotumans in theSouth Pacific, Peter M. Gardner for the Paliyans of SouthIndia, Douglas P. Fry for a Zapotec group in Mexico, RobertTokinson for the Mardu of Australia, Robert Fernea for theNubians of Northern Africa, Clifford Sather for the SamaDilaut of Southeast Asia, Kristin Dobinson for Norway, andRobert Knox Dentan for the Semai of Central PeninsularMalaysia. This ethnographic sample is especially interest-ing because the Hopi, Zapotec, and Norwegians are peacefulsocieties, although they have been involved in intergroupviolence in the past. In contrast, the Mardu, Paliyan, andSemai have no known history of feuding or warfare.

In spite of the cultural and historical diversity amongthese cases, in the concluding chapter Fry identifies com-mon denominators in the creation and maintenance of apeaceful society, including core values that promote non-violent behavior; avoidance of violence; self-restraint andself-control; friendly peacemakers such as mediators; pro-cesses for reaching consensus and minimizing hard feel-ings; and social mechanisms to prevent and discouragephysical aggression. Furthermore, Fry critically analyzes thearguments of those who oppose the very idea of peace-ful societies as variously political, biased, incompetent, ordisingenuous.


This book follows several previous anthologies on theanthropology of nonviolence and peace, including thoseedited by Ashley Montagu, Nancy Howell, this reviewer, andothers. In combination with these and with the annotatedbibliography of 47 peaceful societies by Bruce Bonta (1993),the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies, and other informationon Bonta’s website (http://www.peacefulsocieties.org), thepresent book contributes to an accumulating ethnologicalrecord that honestly cannot be ignored any longer. Perhapssome of the apologists for war that Fry refutes will begin tak-ing this record into consideration. Unfortunately, however,this anthology illustrates the growing divergence betweenpeace studies and war studies. Far more attention needs tobe focused on the mutual relevance of these two arenas,as is suggested by Davies-Vengoechea in the example ofColombia.

Finally, although the year 2000 was declared by theUnited Nations to be the International Year for a Cultureof Peace, following the tragedy of September 11, 2001, andthe responses to it, the world seems to have almost forgot-ten about genuine peace. During such an anxious periodin world history, initiatives such as this book can providea glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Readers canlearn that peace is not merely an ideal but, in fact, an actu-ality in a significant number of societies, as is scientificallydocumented through ethnography.

REFERENCE CITEDBonta, Bruce D.

1993 Peaceful Peoples: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen,NJ: Scarecrow Press.

For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity, and Same-SexRelations in a Greek Provincial Town. Elisabeth Kirtsoglu.New York: Routledge, 2004. 192 pp.

DEBORAH R. ALTAMIRANOState University of New York at Plattsburgh

Sexuality, homoeroticism, performativity, gender identity,and friendship are central themes in Elisabeth Kirtsoglu’sportrayal of the young Greek women of a parea (a com-pany of close friends). Set in a provincial town outsideof Athens, Kirtsoglu’s ethnography delves into the lives ofthese women and focuses on a topic rarely discussed in suchintimate detail—female sexuality in Greece beyond the con-text of traditional heterosexual womanhood. Kirtsoglu, her-self a member of the parea, seeks to elaborate the ways inwhich “gender is not simply a fixed attribute of the person,but the point of interaction between subjective experience,cultural ideals, social values, and power relations” (p. 33).

In the opening chapters, Kirtsoglu introduces us to herparea, which comprises a cross-section of contemporaryGreek womanhood. The members range in age from teenagehigh school students to well-educated professional womenin their late thirties. Most of the women in the parea aresingle, but several are married with children. Some are justbeginning to explore the bounds of their sexuality while

others have had many relationships both homosexual andheterosexual. None of them self identifies as a “lesbian,”nor, the author points out, do any feel a special connec-tion to, or kinship with, the classical Greek lesbianism ofSappho (p. 10). Yet, within the parea, these women’s livesare centered on their intense erotic relationships with otherwomen. Furthermore, the author emphasizes that these ho-moerotic relationships all take place within and “dependon familiar cultural idioms of masculinity and femininity”(p. 24).

In Chapter 2, Kirtsoglu relies on her extensive graspof the literature to outline her theoretical approach to thestudy of gender and sexuality. Most specifically, she employsJudith Butler’s notion of “performativity” to analyze howthe women of the parea experience and construct their sex-uality and their gender identity within a patriarchal social–sexual milieu. For example, she uses the theory of performa-tivity as a framework for analyzing the women’s “sexuallycharged ‘female’ belly dance” (pp. 35–36), which they per-form at their main hangout, a family-oriented taverna. Thisdance, the author posits, represents a “public statement ofdesire” toward women and, yet, it is “symbolically codedsuch that it does not openly provoke the heterosexual ethosof the town” (p. 81).

In the following chapters, Kirtsoglu guides her readerthrough the various stages of the women’s erotic relation-ships as they progress from flirtation and courtship to sta-ble erotic unions, and, finally, through their dissolution.Kirstoglu’s discussion emphasizes how these complex ho-moerotic relationships are heavily ritualized and imbuedwith symbolic significance and rites of passage drawing thewomen into even more intense bonds of friendship, “fam-ily,” and community. In each chapter, she continually chal-lenges her reader to reconsider the basis on which gen-der, sexuality, and concepts of maleness and femaleness areconstructed.

Although the focus of Kirtsoglu’s ethnography is on agroup of women and their erotic relationships with otherwomen, this is not an ethnography of lesbianism in Greece.It is an insider’s view of a contemporary womanhood con-structed on complex levels of identity, sexuality, and friend-ship within a patriarchal society. Yet the author maintainsthat the parea should not be viewed as a unique case of“genderhood” but, rather, as “another expression of intra-cultural variation, one of the many different and contrast-ing frameworks for the enactment of the gendered self”(pp. 85–86).

Kirtsoglu sprinkles her ethnography with short vi-gnettes, but I find her entree into the world of the pareamost engaging in Chapter 6 when she lets her narrativesflow unencumbered by numerous citations and analyticalinterjection. Here she addresses how, given the intensedemands of the parea, individual women skillfully navigatebetween their public life of (hetero)sexuality, friends,family, and work and their homoerotic life expressedwithin parea. Although the dense vocabulary makes for achallenging read, which may be more geared toward the


scholar than the beginning student, the value of Kirtsoglu’sethnography is unquestionable. Her attention to a rarelydiscussed dimension of women’s sexuality is a significantcontribution to the ethnography of Greece and to thebroader theoretical literature on gender, sexuality, andperformativity.

Cord of Blood: Possession and the Making of Voodoo.Nadia Lovell. London: Pluto Press, 2003. 151 pp.

DIANA BROWNBard College

Spirit possession religions continue to offer riches for an-thropological analysis in this ethnographic study of vodhunin a Watchi (a subgroup of the Ewe) village in Southeast-ern Togo. Vodhun has been less studied here than in Benin,Ghana, and Nigeria, and Nadia Lovell opts for an experien-tially oriented, embodied analysis of villagers’ own concep-tualizations and practices of vodhun and their interactionswith the deities (also known as vodhun), over the theo-logical and taxonomic focus of Francophone predecessors.More than a religion, and far more than a set of ritual prac-tices, she asserts, vodhun “is linked to an understandingof Watchi identity, personhood, locality and territoriality. . . through a complex web of bodily images,” which con-nect humans to the territory and the cosmological land-scape they inhabit (p. 16).

At the center of her analysis is the “cord of blood”(hunka) of the book’s title, which refers to the linkages cre-ated among those (mainly women, 60–70 percent of thefemale villagers) who undergo initiation into the vodhunsecret societies through matrifiliation, with new initiatessucceeding their deceased maternal grandmothers. Drawingon myths, narrative histories, and extensive genealogies ofcult leaders, initiates, and their families, Lovell provides acomplex exegesis of various strands that feed into Watchivillagers’ conceptualizations of this symbolic matrix. Thecord of blood emerges as a gendered metaphor that sym-bolizes women’s procreative powers and matrilineal ties; itrefers both to the blood that links all humans to their moth-ers and to wombs, associated with the earth through claypots. These clay vessels evoke both the domestic sphere, inwhich they are used by women in cooking, and the reli-gious sphere, in which they form the receptacles placed atshrines, in which the deities are contained and which serveto ground and to situate human settlements. It providesa female narrative of belonging and identity, which worksthrough bodily imagery to connect humans in their dailylives to their deities and to their locality.

Lovell pays particular attention to issues of gender andspirit possession. Rejecting notions of female subordina-tion, she portrays complementary gendered spheres of ac-tion and power in which female linkages and solidaritiesand access to religious knowledge through vodhun increasethe status of its almost exclusively female initiates, andcounterbalance patrilineal filiation and virilocal residence

patterns and the secular powers of elder males. Critiquingmodels of spirit possession as a safety valve for oppressedgroups, she suggests that it may provide for and express thebreaking down of gender boundaries and the ambiguity ofgender attributes.

Cord of Blood is not for anthropological neophytes. Theauthor’s rendering of the complexities of descent and res-idence patterns among villagers, among the vodhun, andbetween humans and vodhun, combined with her explicitemphasis on the fluidity and malleability of these in dailyunderstanding and practice, make for a very dense narra-tive, which is at times hard to follow and requires rereading.The book also omits data on the social context of vodhunpractice—subsistence, daily patterns of activities, the gen-dered division of labor, political organization, ethnic com-position of the village—which this reviewer considers cru-cial to her argument. Her discussion of vodhun and moder-nity is abstract, decontextualized from transformations incontemporary Togo. She argues that vodhun is not inher-ently traditional; possession provides a powerful idiom forfacing what lies outside itself, at once resisting modernity,the state, and colonial and religious institutions and at thesame time enabling female adepts, those most excludedfrom modernity, to join in the process of modernity, embed-ding modernity within this religious complex, a role carriedelsewhere in Togo by independent Christian churches. Butshe does not discuss any of the dramatic changes occurringin the area, or their impact on the village, which by im-plication itself remains relatively unthreatened by moder-nity. This discussion might have benefited from the com-parative Latin American literature on diasporic versions ofthese West African possession religions. For any who mightdoubt vodhun’s capacity to adapt to and exist in the mod-ern sector, Brazilian Candomble provides an example ofa fully legitimized, “modern,” modernized possession re-ligion whose “authenticity,” like that of Togolese vodhun,has enjoyed state support and become a tourist attraction.

For professionals and advanced students of spiritpossession, gender, and West African religions, this bookoffers many rewards. Criticisms notwithstanding, it isa significant ethnography of vodhun and an importantcontribution to the comparative literature on this religionwith which all specialists will need to engage.

Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown: ReshapingArchaeological Assessment and Significance. Clay Math-ers, Timothy Darvill, and Barbara J. Little, eds. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2005. 339 pp.

L INDSAY WEISSColumbia University

We live today under the ascendant sign of heritage. Theword heritage seems to increasingly occupy every social andpolitical–economic current of change; indeed, the rhetoricsurrounding this phenomenon seems more and more thesedays to reside outside of the framework of nationalism and


to instead inhabit an imagined global space. The profes-sional resources and traditional remit of the archaeologistare, by contrast, much more localized, and so this situationleaves the archaeologist the very awkward task of teasingout the new boundaries of their own professional commit-ments and priorities from the seeming endless horizon ofexpectation and possibility evoked by heritage discourse.Here enters the new Cultural Heritage Studies series, thefirst volume, Heritage of Value, of which constitutes a deci-sive call to action for archaeologists and cultural resourcemanagers worldwide to once again wrestle with these verypressing questions of archaeological theory and praxis.

The volume sets out as its first obligation the clarifica-tion of core concepts such as “significance,” “importance,”and “value.” Timothy Darvill applies a hermeneutic ap-proach to these questions, puzzling over these ill-definedand vague categories and rendering explicit the particularsof the imagined community to whom current categories of“heritage valuation” seem relevant. Laurajane Smith pro-ceeds to articulate how research structures and disciplinarybiases (such as the scientism of New Archaeology) have his-torically led to a very problematic sampling of recognizedsites. These considerations turn to the concrete question ofwhat we do when these very imperfect modes of valuationand categorization inform government statutes, which, inturn, continue to legislate from a very dated set of intel-lectual premises, as Jeffrey Altschul explicates. The funda-mental dynamic operating behind these issues emerges inBarbara Little’s revisitation of Trouillot’s classic problematic:Which pasts become socially “visible” and which ones areconcomitantly silenced through the history-making pro-cess? Barbara Little wonders how is it possible that the pre-colonial past of North America—which constitutes a timespan 20 times as long as the colonial era and postcolonialera—only constitutes seven percent of listed sites on theNational Register? She adds, “The dearth of archaeologicallistings results in a deafening silence: a gap in the nationalmemory” (p. 120).

Indeed, the politics (and problematics) of recognitionhave, in many ways, come to be the defining situation ofmodernity and the case studies contributors have selectedfrom around the world indicate that this is certainly the casefor heritage politics. As Joseph Tainter, Bonnie Bagley, andClay Mathers et al. point out, for every heritage site chosenand highlighted, countless other narratives or cultural land-scapes are overlooked, deemphasized, or even destroyed.We live in a time of passionate archiving—including theaccumulation of evidence of cultural difference—but thereare often glaring omissions. Whether this cultural differ-ence comes to be about the project of redeeming the past,refiguring the archived records of this past, or rectifyingpresent inequities, recognition (which is the social appro-priation of these valued pasts) comes to be our basis foradmitting claims to cultural pasts. Indeed, demanding suchrecognition is for many a strategic political necessity—a factthat archaeologists would do well to recognize, as Ian Lilleyand Michael Williams point out.

As many of the authors in this volume warn, however,with a heritage dynamic based in the politics of recogni-tion, so also inevitably ensues the “cunning of recognition,”which is the potential violence of misrecognition or non-recognition. This is an especially important considerationin light of fraught historical claims in settler and postcolo-nial states. This dynamic would seem to be exponentiallyincreased when coupled with tourism’s drive for cultural au-thenticity and profit making. As John Carman states, “Ar-chaeological sites and monuments are measured and as-sessed for their value relative to one another against thevarious practical and productive uses to which they can beput. Instead of being about good citizens, strong nations, ora peaceful world, the discourse of heritage as we enter thethird millennium is about value for money and effectiveuse. It is about sound economics” (p. 48).

The question that seems most pressing, then, is theone raised by Gavin Whitelaw: How do we—in the faceof increasingly central claims of economic performance—come to accomplish political neutrality or our disciplinaryconstrual of a “democratic past” when increasingly pow-erful economic and identitarian stakeholders have cometo join the discussion? The case studies in this volumepresent the on-the-ground reality: that we simply cannot,and that, in fact, abandoning our disciplinary conceit topreeminent stewardship fosters a great deal more creativeand reflexive debate surrounding key concepts of heritageand the valuation thereof. We will look forward to moreanswers and similarly provocative questions in futurevolumes of the Cultural Heritage series.

The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on CulturalPrimatology. William C. McGrew. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004. 248 pp.

CRAIG STANFORDUniversity of Southern California

Often, when a senior scholar publishes a book with the wordreflections in the title, it is a warning sign the scholar has sim-ply done a couple of hundred pages of idle philosophizingabout the state of the discipline from which he is soon toretire. But The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on CulturalPrimatology is no such set of mere reflections. It is a tour deforce treatment of the emerging field of cultural primatol-ogy. Both an overview of the current state of research and acritique of some recent confusions in the literature, WilliamMcGrew sets out to place the study of nonhuman primatecultural behavior in cross-species context.

The definition of culture has always been a cottage in-dustry for anthropologists. The debate over whether to in-clude ape-learned traditions under the rubric of “culture”still rankles some cultural anthropologists 40 years afterJane Goodall first saw wild chimpanzees making and em-ploying a tool kit not very different from that used by themost technologically simple human societies. To primatol-ogists, culture is a term that, although invented by people for


people, simply requires a slightly more expansive definitionto be applied to a wide variety of higher animals. McGrewrespectfully submits his own defense of the use of culture,pointing out that there are few if any qualitatively uniquetraits displayed by humans that cannot also be found inother species. Speech is that form of primate social behav-ior most often said to be purely and uniquely human. ButMcGrew points out that the field of ethnography itself, sopremised on the idea that informants provide a narrativediscourse to an anthropologist, ultimately relies on the be-lief in the truth and reality of the informant’s narrative.The same philosophical problems of seeing into the mindof the subject exists whether we are trying to understandthe words of a human research subject (as opposed to hisor her behavior, which can be observed) and the motiva-tions behind the communication of nonhuman animals.McGrew’s point here is simply that whether one studiesnon- or semilinguistic apes or linguistic humans, there aremethodological pitfalls.

The book’s first section reviews the literature on learnedtraditions in a variety of animal taxa, demonstrating clearlythe continuum from nonprimates to primates. McGrewthen tackles the question of learned traditions in greatapes, focusing on tool cultures. There is great irony to thecurrent growth of cultural primatology, one that culturalanthropologists should appreciate. At the same time prima-tologists stress that five decades of primate research haveshown that biocultural universals linking us with other an-imals, they have also begun to point to the degree of culturaldiversity in great apes. Primatologists employ this double-edged sword at their own risk. One cannot plausibly ar-gue that we should generalize about human societies be-cause some aspects are biologically based at the same timethat one argues that understanding chimpanzee societiesrequires a great appreciation of cultural diversity. I believeMcGrew sees this and considers his own work on tool useto have pulled the two ends of the ape–human continuumcloser together as a result.

I found Cultural Primatology to be a goldmine of idea-provoking discussions, loaded with nuggets of research theintersections of which McGrew has made where few othershave. It proved highly worthy of a graduate seminar ontraditions in primates and other animals, and I continueto mine it for information. It should serve as a stimulus forcoming generations of students and researchers alike.

Some Other Amazonians: Perspectives on ModernAmazonia. Stephen Nugent and Mark Harris, eds. London:Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2004. 211 pp.

LOUISE S. S ILBERLINGCornell University

This is a welcome, but self-proclaimed as preliminary, ef-fort to add to scant literature on traditional, nontribalAmazonians. The editors have previously published onAmazonian caboclos (historical Amazonian peasantry), but

this book casts a wider net to include chapters on quilombos(maroon communities), piabeiros (ornamental fish catch-ers), posseiros (squatters), regatoes (river traders), and othergroups of poorly documented traditional Amazonians. Itis admirable to publish a multidisciplinary work, althoughthe volume makes little effort to engage with most of thecurrent debates concerning Amazonia, leaving the readerwith an impression of case studies left out in the cold,unevenly theorized and somewhat uncontextualized. Thebook would have been better served conceptually if its chap-ters, and particularly the introduction, had engaged withcurrent theory in or across the authors’ fields (anthropol-ogy, sociology, history, geography)—specifically, as regardspeasantry, identity, ethnogenesis, locality, property, de-velopment, democratization, decentralization, and socialmovements. Instead of a generalist outline of Amazonianregional history and simplified discussion of its concep-tualization in the literature (with no citations), StephenNugent’s introduction would have done well, at a min-imum, to discuss themes that do appear in several ofthe chapters—for example, kinship, patron–client relation-ships, and aviamento (debt-trading systems).

The political nature of identity, another key aspectof Amazonian social fabric, appears in chapters by NeideEsterci, Rosa Marin and Edna de Castro, and DavidMcGrath. For example, in the chapter by Esterci, there isan excellent description of how local identities of posseiroswere reworked into a “self-classificatory political category”(p. 132) through the struggle for land. But questions of landand resource rights and of related important Amazonianpolitical mobilizations are left largely untreated in thevolume, leaving the dynamic political nature of the regionand state- and nation-making unaddressed. And ethnicityis referenced only in the (poorly translated) interestingchapter on quilombos.

A notable absence here is work on other importantgroups in the pantheon of Amazonians, such as babassu-collecting women (oil palm); seringueiros (rubber tappers)and castanheiros (Brazil-nut collectors), which are two of thelargest, most visible groups; Japanese black pepper growersand frozen fruit pulp traders; and artisanal fishermen (withthe exception of the chapter on piabeiros, an arguably differ-ent subgroup). Chapters on these groups would provide amore coherent and inclusive set of case studies. The chapterby Raymundo Maues on malineza (evil) is delightful, but cu-riously distinct from the case-study nature of other chapters.

The editors chose to completely ignore “traditionalpeoples” as a possible category for their groups of “other”Amazonians. There is a small but growing body of work ex-ploring this term as a concept for nontribal Amazonians (cf.Cunha and Almeida 2000; Little 2002; Silberling 2003); theterm is also used widely, if loosely, in development circles.Traditional Amazonians, along with indigenous groups,have been anything but traditional in the ways they havemobilized international tropes of sustainable developmentto their benefit and have reached a resoundingly critical“moment” in Amazonian and Brazilian social history, a


point largely lost out on here. Instead, we are left wonder-ing what it means to be “Other” in Amazonia today: bothmarginal yet visible, poor yet rich with symbolic capital.

Nugent’s Introduction provides a number of provoca-tive comments on modernity but does not cite or en-gage any literature on modernity or alternative moderni-ties. This is regrettable, because his interesting statementsthat Amazonia has been dominated for the past 100 yearsby “experiments in modernity” (p. 5) whereas “Amazonianmodernity is not so much absent as unexplored” (p. 6) meshwell with the alternative modernities thesis.

Nugent’s other provocative point (again, no citations) isthat unsatisfying dualisms (primordialism–modernization)in depictions of Amazonians have contributed to thepaucity of work on “other” Amazonians. Furthermore,states Nugent, portrayals pitting outsider colonists and de-velopers versus Indians, plus a tendency to see Amazonia asan “imagined whole” (p. 2), have left no conceptual spacefor the rest of the (very diverse) population in the literature.It is an interesting thesis. But of greater interest might bea historical investigation into changing classifications andcategories of nontribal Amazonians and into how those cat-egories have today been radically shifted in struggles forrights to land, resources, and knowledge, coming to theforefront of national and international recognition, partic-ularly via highly visible efforts of seringueiros and quilom-bolas. Harris touches on these changes in his chapter. Al-though this book does present a refreshing departure fromnarrowly dualistic focus on indigenous peoples as the appar-ently only legitimate heirs of Amazonia, and on evilly de-structive colonists (or ranchers or loggers), it leaves “other”Amazonians appearing as a jumble of sui generis groupsscattered across the Amazonian social landscape.

REFERENCES CITEDCarneiro da Cunha, Manuela, and Mauro W. B. de Almeida

2000 Indigenous People, Traditional People, and Conservationin the Amazon. Theme issue, “Brazil: The Burden of the Past,the Promise of the Future,” Daedalus 129(2):315–338.

Little, Paul E.2002 Territorios Sociais e Povos Tradicionais no Brasil (Social ter-

ritories and traditional peoples in Brazil). Paper presented at theSymposium Natureza e Sociedade: Desafios Epistemologicos eMetodologicos para a Antropologia (Nature and Society: Episte-mological and Methodological Challenges for Anthropology),Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, June 19.

Silberling, Louise S.2003 Displacement and Quilombos in Alcantara, Brazil: Moder-

nity, Identity, and Place. Theme issue, “Moving Targets:Displacement, Impoverishment, and Development,” Interna-tional Social Science Journal 55(1):145–156.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. David Nu-gent and Joan Vincent, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publish-ing, 2004. 500 pp.

JAMES L. PEACOCKUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics mirrorsnot merely a narrowly defined subfield—politicalanthropology—but much that is current in social and

cultural anthropology and, in fact, in social sciences andcultural and international studies, generally.

Here is a list of chapter subjects: affective states, so-cialism, AIDS, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, development,displacement, feminism, gender, race and class, genetic cit-izenship, global city, globalization, governing states, hege-mony, human rights, identity, nations, intrapolitics, mafias,militarization, neoliberalism, popular justice, postcolonial-ism, power topographies, race technologies, sovereignty,transnationality, civil society. The range is wide, the qual-ity high, the scholarship sound, the writing for the mostpart lucid. The Companion is to be recommended as a com-pendium of current thinking by accomplished anthropolo-gists about timely issues and concepts, especially in relationto ethnographic approaches.

What questions might, then, be raised? My primary fo-cus is to delineate and locate the guiding paradigm. Thismust be done inductively; the editors do so only briefly, per-haps relying on the text this companion accompanies fordefinition. A succinct characterization of the volume mightbe politics viewed ethnographically within a framework ofcurrent social and cultural theory. That would be a start, butthen one would need to delineate what is common amongthe topics or domains to which ethnographic approachesto politics apply. One might note ideological perspectives,which tend to be critical of ways that power is wielded, lessappreciative of why.

Who is the audience and what is the likely impactof this book? Marshall Sahlins’s dust-jacket comment ad-dresses these questions. He states: “What is impressive aboutthis collection is the way many authors take received ideasfrom political science, political philosophy, cultural stud-ies, or world systems theory and, by subjecting them toethnographic scrutiny, transform them in new and pow-erful ways. Anthropology makes a difference.” His firstsentence is an excellent summary of what the work accom-plishes. His second sentence asserts impact: “Anthropologymakes a difference.” Does it, and if so, what kind of differ-ence does it make and not make?

If one is exploring current thinking among academicsabout politics in a theoretical and comparative context, thisis an excellent source to see how anthropologists weaveethnographic research and concerns into topics current inmany disciplines. To prove Sahlins’s point, one would needto go further and identify exactly how this ethnographicweave does shape the overall fabric of thinking about pol-itics: What key insights or concepts, other than ethno-graphic nuance, does anthropology provide? The Compan-ion does not summarize this way that anthropology would“make a difference.”

What else is the book not? It is not a synoptic textbook,summarizing key concepts. It is not a synoptic theory. It isnot a “how to” book at any of various levels—ethics (tellinghow to live or conduct collective lives) or strategy (suggest-ing how to do politics). It is sometimes a “how not to”—stronger on critique than prescription—not of strategies butof modes of governing, nation making, or sustaining, orprocesses such as globalization. Legislators I know already


articulate much about the “how to,” and few if any wouldbother with theoretical analyses until they get boiled downto the Economist or, more ominously, the local conservativeliterature of the John Locke Society.

In short, this Companion works the middle. Neither thedeepest or broadest concerns, ultimate meaning or “cul-ture,” which is the ground for more proximate categoriessuch as identity or power, nor the “on the ground” strate-gies for how to conduct politics are its focus. The result isnot, it seems, a single fundamental paradigm or transfor-mation of paradigms but certainly a more contextualizedawareness of the topics than is the case without anthro-pologists. They do indeed make a difference in this sense.Impact in the wider social sphere, however, would requiretranslation, identifying the key insights to be gleaned, anddistilling the insights into what lay citizens and policy mak-ers read at airport news counters.

None of this is really a critique of this excellent bookbut, rather, a critique of us, our discipline, and its need toapply and translate. This work is an excellent source forstudents, colleagues, and others who seek to know recentand current thinking by anthropologists about what couldbroadly be termed “politics.”

The Mexican Aristocracy: An Expressive Ethnography(1910–2000). Hugo G. Nutini. Austin: University of TexasPress, 2004. 386 pp.

MARISOL PEREZ LIZAURUniversidad Iberoamericana, Mexico

Several years ago Laura Nader said that it is important tohave a good knowledge of elites in order to understand theclass structure and mobility of society. This has not been thecase of anthropologists who have been singularly disinter-ested in the study of elites. With the exception of SugiyamaLebra’s (1993) excellent study of the contemporary Japanesenobility, anthropologists, as far as I am aware, have notheeded Nader’s suggestion. In the case of Mexico, for exam-ple, only two studies of plutocratic groups have been un-dertaken: one by anthropologists Adler Lomnitz and PerezLizaur (1987) and another by Hanono (2004). It is in thiscontext that the book under review must be placed.

Hugo Nutini’s book is the second of a series of threevolumes on the aristocracy, and it is an outstanding studyof this now-moribund social segment of Mexican society,whose origins go back to the Spanish Conquest. The study isa description and analysis of the Mexican aristocracy in the20th century, as it evolved from the ruling and social classof the country to a virtually invisible sector of the upperechelons of the stratification system.

Nutini analyzes the structure, ideology, worldview, andthe expressive mechanisms that have allowed the aristoc-racy to survive after they lost all political power and mostof their wealth by intermarrying with Mexico’s postrevolu-tionary plutocracy. In this short review, it would be impossi-ble to do justice to this complex book that includes so manysignificant descriptive and analytical topics. I shall therefore

confine myself to what seems to me its most significant con-tributions to anthropology in general and Mexican studiesin particular.

Nutini’s book is an important contribution to kinshipstudies in the urban context. Nutini demonstrates that thetraditional kinship categories that anthropologists have em-ployed in the study of tribal and folk societies are equallyeffective in the study of urban, complex societies, but theymust be considered alongside other variables such as con-centration in specific parts of the city, individual and familydegree of wealth, and strategies of upward mobility withinthe largely endogamous aristocratic group. Thus, Nutinidiscusses three main kin units: (1) the nonresidential ex-tended family, (2) the cognatic exocentric kindred, and (3)the name group. These units have exclusive and inclusivefunctions in the social and religious organization of the aris-tocracy and configure most of the life of the group. This isa useful approach to kinship, similar as that found amongthe elite family studied by Adler Lomnitz and Perez Lizaur(1987) and conceptually worthy of being tested in otherclasses of urban Mexican society.

Nutini also analyzes aristocratic religiosity in depth.He discusses the transformation of religion, as the groupevolves from an undisputed social and economic rulingclass to a rather marginal position in the superordinate sec-tor of the country’s stratification system. By the first decadeof the 20th century, chantries and several mechanisms ofexhibition and display (at the core of the aristocratic world-view) were gone. By the middle of the century, religion, rit-ually and ceremonially simplified, became mainly centeredon the household, which was by then devoid of any socialimplications. By the end of the century, religion for manyaristocrats, particularly the young, had become a philoso-phy of life without the rituals and ceremonies of orthodoxCatholicism.

Last but not least, this book is not just an exercise inurban ethnography but an in-depth study of expressive cul-ture. With respect to the latter, the book is unique, in thatthere are no other studies in the anthropological literaturethat deal specifically with the expressive culture of a singlesocial class. Particularly noteworthy is Nutini’s analysis ofclass formation and mobility; he demonstrates that in or-der to understand and conceptualize these processes, struc-ture and expression must be intimately complemented, andthat one without the other gives an incomplete accountof stratification. The book abounds in specific expressiveanalyses (the household as a shrine to the ancestors, re-ligious and social mechanisms of exhibition and display,entertainment and food preparation, and many others),which taken together constitute one of the most extensiveexpressive descriptions and analysis in the anthropologicalliterature.

Through this expressive analysis, Nutini attempts todifferentiate Mexican aristocrats from plutocrats. However,in my experience, many of the cultural “array” that are,according to Nutini, exclusive to aristocrats (including theancestor cult), are in fact not so, although some plutocrats’interest in conserving a genealogical memory are possibly


another manner of recognizing the social “superiority” ofthe aristocrats and of imitating them. And, precisely be-cause of its emphasis on expressive culture, the book, eventhough it deals with the group’s economic activities, leavesunanswered a large number of questions regarding the eco-nomic standing of aristocrats and the group’s relationshipwith other social groups in Mexico: How did they maintaintheir economic position until the beginning of the 21st cen-tury? And what was the role of urban development in thisprocess?

Despite this series of unanswered questions, Nutini’sbook is a very good and innovative ethnography. It shouldbe required reading for Mexicanists; students of kinship,class formation and mobility, and urban anthropology; andfor anyone interested in expressive culture.

REFERENCES CITEDLebra, Takie Sugiyama

1993 Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern JapaneseNobility. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler, and Marisol Perez-Lizaur1987 A Mexican Elite Family, 1820–1980. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Inside Deaf Culture. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 208 pp.

NORA ELLEN GROCEYale School of Public Health

In 1984, Carol Padden and Tom Humphries wrote the classicstudy Deaf in America, arguing that individuals with vary-ing degrees of hearing loss—and, indeed, often their hear-ing children—were members of a common culture. Theyshare a language (American Sign Language), a history (in-cluding residential schools), common experiences with thesurrounding hearing society, and, importantly, a strong andsupportive social network. The idea of “Deaf culture” fitwell into subsequent ethnic and minority studies and hasbecome widely accepted.

In this book, the authors revisit Deaf culture. Much haschanged: The deaf community, which in 1984 was strug-gling to define itself, has gelled and there is now a consen-sus that there is a “Deaf culture” and that it is one worthpreserving. Yet there are problems looming—cochlear earimplants and the human genome project—that threaten toweaken and divide this unique group.

In this second study, Padden and Humphries reviewcritical moments in U.S. Deaf cultural history. The presentvolume is not another introduction, and readers who seeka basic grounding on this fascinating community would bebetter advised to start with Padden and Humphries’ firstvolume, as well as classics such as Harlan Lane’s excellenthistorical review When the Mind Hears (1984).

What Padden and Humphries have done here is dif-ferent. In the first section, they select specific moments inDeaf history—a scandal at the Pennsylvania Institute forthe Deaf and Dumb in 1820, segregated African AmericanSchools for the Deaf prior to the 1970s, deaf clubs before the

1960s, and the rise of the American Theater for the Deaf inthe 1970s. Each of these moments has an important placein the emergence of today’s U.S. Deaf community. Paddenand Humphries do not use the term heritage, but, in fact,in this volume they help to document this little-researchedcultural legacy. Although the general reader may find thesetopics rather focused, for those interested in Deaf cultureor in how cultures develop a shared sense of identity, thesechapters will have relevance. Meticulously researched, thisalso makes for fascinating reading and represents a substan-tial contribution to U.S. Deaf history.

The final two chapters of the book differ both in scopeand style. Here Humphries and Padden recount how theybecame part of the Deaf community. Humphries, the onlydeaf individual in a hearing family and community, de-scribes his gradual and eventually enthusiastic embracingof Deaf culture. Padden, coming from a deaf family alreadydeeply steeped in Deaf culture, describes moving in theopposite direction; her enrollment in a community highschool broadens her understanding of what it means tobe deaf in the hearing world. This excellent discussion isa significant contribution not just to Deaf studies, but tothe general anthropological discourse on social and ethnicidentity.

The following chapters on the future of Deaf culture areequally important. The authors note the irony of the grow-ing popularity of sign language courses at the same time ascochlear implants and the human genome project threatenthe very existence of deaf populations. Cochlear implantshave become a common operation for deaf children and,increasingly, deaf adults. The debate is not about whetheror not to choose the operation. Rather the controversy—needlessly—lies in the insistence of medical experts thatchildren who have undergone the operation become ex-clusively part of the hearing community and learn onlyEnglish—even when sign language would be an asset forthose whose hearing remains limited. This repression ofsign language limits the communication options of deaf in-dividuals and reflects a uniquely (and absurdly) U.S. discom-fort with bilingualism that limits possibilities for childrenwho might otherwise draw on two linguistic and culturalheritages.

Padden and Humphries raise another important issueas they describe how modern genetics is coming closer to al-lowing parents to select traits in their offspring. How shouldadults with a family history of deafness respond to geneticcounselors who urge them to undergo prenatal testing?Will some be pressured into testing that they neither wantnor need? If a fetus is identified as deaf, will these parentsbe pressured into giving up the pregnancy by medical ex-perts or insurance companies? These two last chapters area bit out of sync with the early historic chapters but areimportant in themselves and will interest social scientists,disability advocates, and bioethicists.

This book represents a significant contribution to Deafstudies, as well as to social identity literature. Althoughthe first chapters will be of more interest to those alreadyknowledgeable about Deaf history, and the last two will


have a wider audience, the authors are to be commendedfor this eminently readable, well-researched, and intriguingvolume.

REFERENCES CITEDLane, Harlen

1984 When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York:Random House.

Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries1984 Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA.Mark Pedelty. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 340pp.

JOSE LUIS REYNAEl Colegio de Mexico

This is an unusual book and an impressive example of re-search. It approaches Mexican history through musical ritu-als. The context in which the research takes place is MexicoCity, another convincing demonstration of the centralizedculture we have had since its foundation, in 1325. MarkPedelty has the academic courage to face 700 years of his-tory in his book. Music as a genre successfully articulatesthis long period of time: from the Indian civilization (theAztec) to the Global era, the time of the free trade. The mu-sical rituals is his subject matter. However, as we read hisbook, we found a continuity in Mexican culture that canbe interpreted on the bases of musical rituals. These remainas an expression not only of a culture but also of the haz-ardous politics Mexico has had over time. Many can arguedthat all countries on earth follow the same track, no doubtabout it. However, very few can test the strong relationshipbetween musical rituals and culture over seven centuries.Pedelty does. Mexicans has shown their character and theirpersonality playing and singing, because in many periods oftheir history there was not another form of expression. Thisis a fact derived from the book we are dealing with. This iswhat this research is all about. This amazing collection ofinformation significantly contributes to better understandthe Mexican culture and helps, in many ways, to outlineour identity from a different angle: music rituals. This isenough to justify an outstanding work.

Mexico has been a centralized society. Before the con-quest, during the colonial period, and afterward, the heartof the country has been Mexico City. One voice and a mu-sical instrument function as mechanisms to liberate feel-ings of anger and happiness, the political opposition, thevictories and the defeats, and what else? In spite of thestrength influence of foreign music on our being, Mexi-cans are used to keep a place for the native creation. Thatwhich belongs to us. It is always present. The revolutionarycorridos during the beginning of the 20th century servedto create a sort of consciousness among masses of peoplewho did not read newspapers but listened to songs sung inthe streets, evoking the feats of the revolutionary leadersZapata and Villa, for example. A conclusion is inevitable:Those who want to understand a political movement in

Mexico cannot ignore the music behind it, because is thecomplementary ingredient.

For almost 700 years, ritual music in the Zocalo, themain square of Mexico City, has been the stage to cheerAztec emperors, Spanish viceroys, emperors, liberal presi-dents and dictators in the 19th century, and presidents inthe 20th century. Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, 11 timesthe president of Mexico in spite of an abominable reputa-tion, had the luxury of listening the nation anthem, whichhad been written and composed in 1854 to boost his ego.(By the way, with some minors changes, this is still Mex-ico’s national song.) Music, history, and politics make upa complex relationship: People learn what is happening inthe political sphere by a simple song. Politicians usuallytake note of what people are thinking of their performancefor the creation of another song. This is a simple way tolearn for both actors and an innovative approach to under-standing for readers. In this sense, this book successfullyaccomplished this goal.

Pedelty develops a master research to demonstrate thelink among different historical periods of time in whichmusic is the main protagonist, and he does not ignore itsimpact on the rest of the whole social and political body—in the church, in the street, in the political system. Mex-ican Cathedral, built in the Zocalo (in the middle of the16th century) over the Aztec pyramids, is the site in whichmany researchers have found music with a strong Euro-pean influence (e.g., Vivaldi), which let the conquerorsand their priests to take the Indian segments of society toparadise.

NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) ishappening in a time of drug dealers, proliferation of mafias,and corruption of the top levels of Mexican politicians. Peo-ple, in response, sing songs venerating the capos who at thesame time are delinquents and heroes. They are delinquentsbecause they are outlaws; they are heroes because they carefor their people.

It is my opinion that Pedelty has found a new streakto do social and anthropological research. His book is theevidence for this assertion. Those interested in politics andhistory must be interested in ritual musicals: A new worldwill be discovered.

Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terror-ism. David M. Rosen. East Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2005. 199 pp.

I LENE COHNPolicy, Information, and Resource Mobilization SectionUN Mine Action Service

The views expressed below are solely the views of theauthor and do not reflect the views of the United Nations.

In this extremely well-researched volume, David Rosen suc-cessfully illustrates the shortcomings inherent in the cur-rent efforts of many humanitarian agencies to “stop theuse of child soldiers” by urging the promulgation of in-ternational law that targets the unscrupulous recruiters


of children and by sponsoring advocacy campaigns thatdenounce the cruelty of war and the worldwide glut ofsmall arms. Rosen reviews current international law, whichregulates, enables prosecution, and, under certain circum-stances, even bans child soldier recruitment and use. Theprotectionist stance of many humanitarian and humanrights organizations involved in the development of thesenorms casts child soldiers as victims, denies their agency,and fails to acknowledge the specific sociopolitical contextsin which child soldiers live. Much energy has gone intothe elaboration of treaties that bind states or require actionagainst adult recruiters, whereas, in fact, largely children areinvolved in nonstate armed groups and many have joinedvoluntarily.

Most tellingly, the current approach has failed to reducethe incidence of child soldier recruitment. Monitoring byNGOs and the United Nations reveal no diminution in thenumber of children engaged in armed forces and groups. Areport to the UN Security Council on February 9, 2005, lists54 parties to 11 current conflicts that recruit children; andmany of these parties have been on the annual list for sev-eral years running. Humanitarian actors are now focusingon improved monitoring and enforcement of internationallaw and the commitments made in recent years by non-state armed groups to refrain from child soldier use. ButRosen challenges them to reconsider both the utility andthe premises underlying their efforts.

The research presented here is welcome indeed. Inter-national child rights advocates have long acknowledged theneed for, but failed to produce, research on (1) whethertrends in warfare have affected the extent and nature ofchild participation in armed conflict, (2) whether the avail-ability of small arms makes children more attractive as sol-diers, and (3) whether traditional or community values fos-ter or hinder child recruitment or enlistment. Rosen laysout the long history of child soldiering, showing, for exam-ple, that hundreds of thousands of children served in theUnion and Confederate armies of the American Civil War,more than are alleged to be fighting in all contemporarywars. His research also supports the conclusion that readyaccess to small arms does not help explain the attraction ofchildren for recruiters.

Rosen’s three case studies demonstrate that the currenthumanitarian approach is grounded on simplistic assump-tions that belie the complexities of the child soldier prob-lem. He questions whether international standards basedon a definition of childhood that extends to age 18 are validor even reasonable in all societies. He makes it plain thatregardless the definitions and age limits enshrined in inter-national law, some young people are simply better off—intheir own views as well as those of the adults around them—joining armed groups.

Clearly, some young European Jews confronting geno-cide reasonably decided their fate was no worse for joiningarmed resistance movements. According to Rosen, today’syoung Palestinian suicide bombers and the thousands ofchildren and youth recently terrorizing civilians as mem-

bers of the Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front (RUF)are only the recent manifestations of long political and so-cial histories of youth politics, armed youth mobilization,and structural violence in those societies. However, despitehaving shown that “child soldiers have always been presenton the battlefield,” it is not clear whether Rosen feels thisis an acceptable phenomenon, one that is far too complexto be reversed by initiatives at the international level, or,perhaps, even one that should be left to each society to de-termine.

Humanitarian advocates should heed Rosen’s messageabout the means relied on to “end child soldiering” andshould take note of the importance of understanding thechoices young people make in specific, complex politicalsituations or conflict settings. Perhaps local initiatives in-volving key members of children’s ecologies (peers, religiousleaders, family, and community members) are essential toinfluence the views and the decisions of young people in-clined to enlist. But solutions must be pursued, because eventhese detailed and extensively researched case studies fail toconvince the reader that the humanitarians are misguidedin the outcome they seek: to end the involvement of chil-dren in suicide bombings, wanton mutilation, rape, andhostilities.

One can agree with Rosen that the protectionistapproach taken to date by many international organiza-tions is simplistic and unlikely to succeed, but he fails todemonstrate that societies in which children are soldiersare societies that generally endorse this course of action.Most children and youth living in violent, unjust, orwar-torn societies do not engage in hostilities or terroristacts—not in the societies Rosen describes or any other.International efforts to codify universal standards thatprotect children and youth from experiencing the worstforms of violence, whether as perpetrators or victims,reflect universal aspirations and cannot be denounced asmere Western impositions. The pursuit of interventionsthat acknowledge the agency and capacity of many youthto make important decisions is not incompatible with theaim of preventing child participation in armed conflict.This is not an antiwar argument in disguise; it is therational impulse to regulate the conduct of war to enablethe achievement of military objectives without unneces-sary suffering. Wars can be fought without children, andefforts to achieve this are worthwhile. Those pursuing thisobjective would do well to read this book.

Culture, Biology and Anthropological Demography. EricRoth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 217pp.

SARA RANDALLUniversity College London

This book emerges from Eric Roth’s belief that humanbehavioral ecologists and anthropological demographers(defined here as social–cultural anthropologists) have much


in common, both in terms of theoretical approaches and do-mains of research and in that they could and should learnfrom one another. The book is therefore targeted at boththese groups, alongside conventional demographers whomRoth sees as more open minded to new methods and the-ories than social anthropologists. His main aim is “to ini-tiate a discussion” between the two fields and to set outshared theoretical and methodological commonalities. Heis not totally convincing in this regard, although he demon-strates a shared interest in many demographic phenomena,in particular nuptiality, reproduction, and child care; a simi-lar vocabulary (albeit, used with rather different meanings);and the fact that both theoretical approaches can be used tothink about and explain particular aspects of demographicbehavior. In reviewing the common ground and differencesbetween anthropological demography and human behav-ioral ecology, Roth draws on a vast range of research, span-ning eight centuries and including ethnographic examplesfrom all over the world. This plethora of references eventu-ally drowns the reader in examples and, too often, one losessight of his arguments.

The high points of the book are the analyses of thedemographic behavior of the population with whom hehas worked for many years—the Rendille camel herdersof northern Kenya. Chapter 2 uses his Rendille researchto “reconcile” the two disciplines through developingand testing hypotheses about marital decision making(which are essentially reproductive decisions) and illus-trating evolutionary approaches to marital decision mak-ing with informed ethnographic knowledge. This particu-lar population exemplifies idiosyncratic demographic be-havior that would fascinate researchers of any theoreti-cal bent and provides a rewarding context for combiningand juxtaposing both ethnographic and behavioral ecol-ogy approaches. It is the use of so many other examples,usually from a polarized theoretical stance, that is moreproblematic.

Chapter 3 reviews work on mating effort and de-mographic strategies focusing originally on polygyny andthen reiterating in considerable detail Monique Borgeroff-Mulder’s research on Kipsigis and Tom Fricke’s work onTamang as contrasting theoretical approaches to under-stand demographic change. However, the Rendille case pro-vides a richer and more coherent account than the reportsof others’ work and is by far most convincing demonstra-tion of the synergies between the disciplines.

In considering parenting effort and investment in chil-dren, the combination of the two theoretical approachesis the most convincing. Roth considers various cases, in-cluding the excellent example of Gambian reproduction,in which the emic interpretation of women’s limited phys-ical strength resembles the behavioral ecologists’ allocationof resources. Differential investment in male and femalechildren and issues emerging from primogeniture are ex-amined. Culture is seen as the determinant of whether pri-mogeniture is practiced (the Rendille and medieval Europeare the prime examples) and evolutionary theory is then

applied to understand what happens to the noninheritingoffspring (higher mortality or the formation of male bands).Infanticide and child abandonment might be consideredby many clear evidence of parental failure to invest in chil-dren (although behavioral ecologists argue otherwise) andanother wide-ranging review of different populations’ prac-tices is cited. The adoption of unrelated children, as exem-plified by contemporary China, cannot be explained by evo-lutionary theory; at the same time, much, but not all, of theevidence about child abandonment could be supported byevolutionary theory in terms of its relationship to poverty,although only by selecting the cases and evidence carefully.Ultimately Roth argues that both “biology and culture areessential to understanding parental behaviour” (p. 152) butthat it is the phenotypic plasticity favored by natural selec-tion that has allowed this situation to arrive.

Chapter 5 sets out a future research agenda that is ori-ented around sexuality and sexual behavior. There followsome extraordinary generalizations about African sexualityand sexual behavior regimes that are very discordant withthe book’s earlier pleas for anthropological demography andlocally specific cultural understanding.

The book is marred by poor proofreading—grammatical errors, wrong dates, misspelled names,and confused Rendille age sets (p. 33). “Female capacity formultiple organisms [sic]” (p. 159) is just one example. De-spite these irritations, the book should interest exponentsof the different disciplinary approaches, although someanthropological demographers may find the evolutionaryarguments quite challenging. Although the two approachescombine well in the specific cases of the Rendille and Ari-aal, for which personal experience is very illuminating, itis hard for the reader to retain the details and the logicbehind the huge numbers of other examples.

Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Cul-ture and Vice Versa. Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2004. 313 pp.

ROD AYAUniversity of Amsterdam

Reviews entail triage, especially this one, which may be asunfair to Sahlins as he is to Thucydides. The word limit rulesout proper comment on the two good parts of his book ifthe one bad part is to get comeuppance. The best part is anethnographic history of war between (and sedition within)the Fiji kingdoms Bau and Rewa from 1843 to 1855. Illus-trating the argument that ethnography and historiographyneed each other, it is right stuff for seminars. The other goodpart is a philosophical essay (also right stuff for seminars) onhistorical agency illustrated with the 1951 National Leagueplayoff and the 2000 Gonzalez child affair. With polemi-cal panache, satirical acerbity, and a wicked sense of fun,it shows not only that being in the right place at the righttime involves social location in a cultural order but also thatthe United States is a happy hunting ground for sportive


social critics—and Sahlins is a sportsman. The bad part is adiatribe against Thucydides, accused of begging “importantquestions about society and history” by supplanting culturewith “universal practical rationality” born of “innate self-interest” (p. 3). False and easily refuted, it gives the book itstitle.

Consider first the bad part: Sahlins says Thucydidesviewed “history as the expression of the worst in us”(p. 118). He replaced culture with human nature seen asself-interest—the “natural desire” for “power and profit”(pp. 120, 16). He committed the “ethnographic cardinalsin of ignoring what the people thought important” in thePeloponnesian War from 431 to 404 B.C.E., and, instead,“gave eloquent voice” to the “specifically Athenian ideol-ogy” of “competitive, self-interested human nature as themainspring of history” (pp. 119, 4). Revived in the 17thcentury “with the development of modern capitalism” andnow with the “global triumph of neo-liberal ideology” andits avatars “from sociobiology and evolutionary psychologyto rational choice economics and international relationsrealism,” he “got us into this mess” where “rational self-interest” is “generic human nature” and “acquisitiveness isan inevitable human disposition” (pp. 3, 124).

Sahlins says Thucydides presumed “culture didn’t mat-ter,” though culture (by Sahlins’s definition) includes so-ciety, the “specific structure of which” is a “symbolicallyconstituted order,” hence “ontologically a cultural forma-tion” (pp. 3, 139). In fact, Thucydides observed cultureconstraining choices too often to list, but five examples il-lustrate. One, Spartan organization slowed down decisionmaking—what Sahlins says Thucydides attributed to “char-acter,” Thucydides said Pericles attributed to “structure”(1.141). Two, the plague eclipsed prayer and divinationby killing believers and doubters alike (2.47, 2.53). Three,Athens panicked when subversives broke the phalli off stat-ues of Hermes before the armada left for Sicily (6.27). Four,despite defeat there, the Athenians decided to stay after alunar eclipse interpreted by fortune-tellers (7.50). Five, Syra-cuse (allied with Sparta) fought Athens best because (likeAthens) it was an affluent democracy with a large navy(7.55, 8.96).

Sahlins is right that Thucydides “missed out” a lot ofethnography because he took it for granted (p. 123). So doesSahlins, whose Americana are luminous to whoever knowsbaseball and civics, but not to anyone else. Like Thucydides,he omits what intended readers know. How to square thiswith his maxim that “it takes another culture to know an-other culture” (p. 5) is a good seminar topic.

Sahlins says Thucydides explained history by humannature alias “avarice and the will to power” (p. 3). Wrong.He took motivation as it comes—a fact for discovery, notstipulation. His asides on human nature (mostly quotedin speeches) boil down to the truism that people try tomake the best of their situation. Hence if they think vi-olence pays—if war and revolution have hope of successand the alternative is servitude—they go right ahead. Thatis why speakers on both sides observed that strong states

rule weak ones—better safe than sorry. And the motivesThucydides discovered were not only greed and ambi-tion: The commonwealth was uppermost for his modelstatesmen.

Sahlins says “Hume, Hobbes & Co.” viewed “relent-less self-interest” as the “universal mainspring of histori-cal action” (p. 118). Wrong again. “Men often act know-ingly against their interest,” Hume said (Treatise of HumanNature, 2.3.3), adding “even interest itself, and all human af-fairs, are entirely governed by opinion” (1985:51), echoingHobbes, who said “men’s actions are derived from the opin-ions they have of the good or evil which from those actionsredound unto themselves” (Leviathan, 3.42), and anticipat-ing Sahlins, who says “their interests depended on their cul-tural schemes” (p. 121). For opinion, read culture. Sahlinsmakes much of Hobbes noting a “restless desire of powerafter power,” but ignores the explanation—namely, a socialsituation where one “cannot assure the power and meansto live well . . . without the acquisition of more” (Leviathan,1.11). Sahlins also confounds Leviathan with Behemoth(Job 41, 40) and buys cliches like the Peloponnesian Warwas an “ideological battle of democracy and oligarchy” in-volving “class-based” civil war (pp. 18 19, 21), even thoughstatesmen never denounced the enemy regime, only enemyaction, and “democrats” and “oligarchs” were patron–clienthierarchies, not class–interest groups.

Now consider the best part: Sahlins is a world authorityon Polynesia, and his analysis of the worst Pacific war until1941 is virtuoso armchair anthropology based on Britishmissionary and military sources that report “raw women”and “cooked men” as spoils (p. 232) and cunning worthy ofThucydides—the war king of Bau (who once had a rival half-brother killed while he watched) “strategically converted”(p. 163) in 1854 so the Methodists got the Christian rulerof Tonga to take his side and win the war.

The ethnographic and historical facts—too intricate forreview—make a good read. Apologies to Sahlins.

REFERENCE CITEDHume, David

1985[1777] Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis:Liberty.

Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom inIndia. Yasmin Saikia. Durham, NC. Duke University Press,2004, 327 pp.

RAVINA AGGARWALSmith College

In recent anthropological writing, borders—whether sym-bolic margins, social distinctions, or political boundaries—are becoming privileged sites for the study of nationalismand are pushing political ethnography in new directions. Itis the border state of Assam in Northeast India that is thesubject of Yasmin Saikia’s Fragmented Memories. Like manyborder citizens, the people of Assam too have been requiredto surrender their distinctive histories of belonging to fit in


with the grand narrative of national history. And like otherIndian border states, Assam too has registered violent resis-tance to such national amnesia.

In documenting the history of the Tai-Ahom identitymovement in Assam, the author alerts us to the process ofcommemoration and to historiography itself, which is al-ways a selective exercise of power. Written with grace andclarity, the theoretical arguments are substantiated with animpressive body of historical and ethnographic data. Thebook is divided into two parts, the first of which traces shiftsin the designation of ahom over various periods of history.Through readings of royal genealogical texts called buran-jis obtained from public and personal archives, the authordetermines that in the precolonial period, the term ahomreferred to an administrative position designating officialsappointed from diverse ethnic groups of Ujani Aham in theupper reaches of the modern state of Assam. In contrastto the pluralistic interpretations of ahom in the buranjis,19th-century British colonial portrayals initially relegatedthe ahom to a fixed ethnic group that encompassed royalty;such portrayals then clustered ahom under the generic la-bel of assamese, a typology that denoted racial inferiorityand erased the history of local labor and its active role inshaping the land.

Saikia locates the roots of Assam’s marginalization inthe economic and political designs of empire and the per-sistence of discriminatory colonial policies in postcolonialIndia. She argues that imperial investment in Assam’s teaplantations, opium, and timber was facilitated by a seriesof frontier acts that demarcated the region as a restrictedzone and brought it under the control of the colonial state.What followed was a process of political and ideological re-construction whereby the local rulers were robbed of power,the Assamese language was obliterated by being categorizedas a dialect of Bengali, and the people were treated as unrulyand unproductive subjects.

After independence, a growing sense of alienation anddislocation set in when populations in Assam were facedwith little control over their own resources, economic im-poverishment, and sociopolitical disempowerment. The ex-perience of becoming second-class citizens in their ownhome generated antistate and anti-immigrant resistance.The Tai-Ahom movement intersected with the broaderAssamese movement in demanding autonomy and lan-guage recognition but, at the same time, diverged fromit by claiming a distinctive historical identity and assert-ing what the author calls “local nationalism” rather than“subnationalism.” It adopted the colonial classification of“ahom” as an ethnic category and imbued it with an idyl-lic past, which could then serve as a model for a betterfuture.

The second section of the book investigates the nego-tiation of Tai-Ahom identity by the organizations who cre-ated it; leaders who propagated it; histories that justifiedit; ideologies, emotions, and actions that supported it; andthe everyday people who practiced it. As a historian whois partial insider, Saikia’s tone is sympathetic but not ro-

mantic. She points out the convergences, contradictions,and inventions of the movement. Despite having been per-ceived as an antistate uprising, the movement was backedby some prominent government representatives; despiteits rejection of Hinduism, its religious practices were oftensyncretic rather than exclusive. Interviews with urban pro-fessionals, religious leaders, and youth groups also yield agood summary of the competing notions of “belonging”and “identity.”

Readers are introduced to the organized rituals andconferences through which Tai-Ahom identity and culturalmemory are performed. Even though anthropology readerswould have benefited from an extended discussion of theseperformative contexts, this segment offers compelling andinnovative insights into the construction of the “local.” Welearn that local aspirations gained momentum when theanticapitalist agenda of Thai scholars brought them to As-sam in search of their past. Links between what came to beregarded as a South Asian locale and the Southeastern re-gions of Burma and Thailand reveal the limitations of con-taining subjects within geographical confinements imposedby nation-states and area studies. A major contribution thebook makes is to place the local in history, thereby chal-lenging the trope of isolated borders and enabling us toconsider the local, national, and transnational associationsthat constitute identity.

For many of the reasons listed above, FragmentedMemories is valuable reading, not only for South Asianistsor postcolonial historians but also for anthropologistsworking on ethnicity, politics, and history.

Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.Peggy Reeves Sanday. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,2002. xv + 270 pp.

G. G. WEIXUniversity of Montana, Missoula

Can ethnography be conveyed as “anthropological mem-oir” (p. 11)? Peggy Reeves Sanday’s “quest to understandmatri-centered meanings and social forms in West Sumatra”relies on extended fieldwork visits to a matrilineal house-hold of three generations of Minang women. Her aim is toreassess and to refurbish the term matriarchy (adat matriar-chaat) not as “rule by women” but as a coherent system of“female-oriented social forms” (p. xi). She succeeds in disen-tangling what she calls the “maternal meanings” and Islam,as they sustain an ethnic heritage for four million Minangin Indonesia, from previous theories of matriarchy as the“female twin” to patriarchy (p. xi). However, her descrip-tion of Minang lives is infused with uncritical reflectionsof New Order Indonesia and its ideologies—specifically, aneocolonial melding of culture as tradition (cf. Pemberton1994). For example, she describes a hydroelectric dam mon-ument of a female figure holding a ceremonial rice bowland lightning bolt as “the merging of culture and nature inadat symbology” (p. 33). Therein lies the shortcoming, and,


yet, the pedagogical value, of this book. The author revivesa nostalgic celebration and containment of local culturescharacteristic both of Dutch colonial ethnology (adat stud-ies) and of Indonesia’s authoritarian New Order era (1966 to1998). To understand how and why such nostalgia persistsin accounts would require social history, rather than mem-oir, as a corrective genre to augment the important work ofethnography (cf. Rosaldo 1989, 1993).

Two methodological choices frame and define the nar-rative as uncritically nostalgic. First, Sanday presents re-cited myth as a precursor to historical narrative and rit-ual speech in life cycle events as prescribed and codified.Dutch colonial adat studies excelled at this approach, asJohn Pemberton and others have shown. Secondly, herhermeneutic interpretation of ritual speech and ordinarywords—cocok is translated as “a special fit,” describing “theintention of adat” (p. 99)—characterizes her goal “to un-lock the meaning of ‘female centered customs’ ” (p. x) andthe key tenets of Minang culture. The conundrum of thisapproach is that translation becomes treasure seeking, andnational ideology and culture are seamlessly joined in thefinal ethnographic narrative. Without a critical analysis ofthe work of translation, tradition—female or otherwise—will inevitably appear a prize pearl emerging from the roughshell of observed social life.

However, this ethnography is also traditional in thebest sense, seeking to preserve a current generation’s self-conscious recreation of cultural forms and social structurefor future Minang readers. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 on marriagenegotiations and ceremony are exemplary ethnographic de-scription, and the ethnomusicology in Chapter 10 is valu-able for students and researchers alike. Still, this book willdisappoint regional specialists, who are well aware of theways New Order officials valorized tradition to obscurean inherent violence toward regional autonomy, includ-ing heterogeneous expressions of ethnicity. Sanday also ig-nores other attempts to reassess Minang culture as politicalcritique, such as Jennifer Krier’s chapter on the inverted dis-plays of female power to reevaluate the role of adat in post-colonial law (Ong and Peletz 1995). She thus spares her read-ers, and herself, the cynicism of Indonesia’s state-sponsoredsuccesses to codify its own diversity in monuments, mu-seums, and textbooks as a peculiarly familial nationalism(Shiraishi 1997).

To her credit, Sanday cites doctor Taufik Abdullah, aMinang scholar and director of the Indonesian Instituteof Sciences (LIPI), who comments that Minang cultureappears to “synthesize contradictions” in ways that con-tinue to intrigue observers (p. 20). Abdullah belongs toa generation of senior scholars dedicated to an unstint-ingly frank analysis of state power and censorship of theNew Order era, particularly to studies of Islam. Sanday’sbook is an interesting example of a similar commitmentto comparative scholarship; she introduces new readers toa place where local gendered meanings predominate andinvites them to appreciate the internal coherence of itskin-based social order. This work is best read, and taught,

as a memoir of a significant feminist scholar who foundinspiration among Minang women because they sharedtheir lives and shaped her own. They helped her reflect onbroader feminist debates about portraits of social life, andshe clearly conveys the mutual respect and affection of thatendeavor.

REFERENCES CITEDOng, Aihwa, and Michael G. Peletz, eds.

1995 Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politicsin Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pemberton, John1994 On the Subject of “Java.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press.Rosaldo, Renato

1989 Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis.Boston: Beacon Press.

Shiraishi, Saya S.1997 Young Heroes: The Indonesian Family in Politics. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program.

Modern Clan Politics: The Power of “Blood” inKazakhstan and Beyond. Edward Schatz. Seattle: Univer-sity of Washington Press, 2005. 250 pp.

EDWARD SNAJDRJohn Jay College, City University of New York

This highly original and refreshingly interdisciplinary bookexamines clan politics in the Central Asian Republic ofKazakhstan. Schatz is a political scientist who skillfullyblends ethnography, archival research, interviews, and fo-cus groups to explain the role of clan (or subethnic) identi-ties in an arena that has transitioned from an appendage ofthe USSR to an independent nation-state. The result is a richlook at the resilience of clans both under imperialist Sovietpower and along the slow and patchy road to market-baseddemocratization.

The book’s three parts are nicely integrated, movingquickly from theory and history to a political ethnographyof clan dynamics among both government elites and localresidents. Challenging the Weberian notion that clan andstate, as “ideal types,” operate by deeply divergent logics,Schatz follows earlier political anthropologists working inpostcolonial contexts (e.g., Cohen 1981) by exploring thesalience of kin-based interest groups and blood loyaltiesbeneath the frameworks of nationalism and globalization.Drawing from sources in three languages, Schatz reminds usthat clans are complex phenomena that endure a variety ofhegemonies, adapt to new economic and political systems,and are actually co-constructed by those systems. Part 1considers how the three major (or umbrella) clans—Elder,Middle, and Younger—along with subclan divisions oper-ated as networks rather than fixed groups among pre-SovietKazakhs. Instead of fading away as vestiges of backward-ness, Schatz shows how early Soviet rule actually politicizedsubethnic identities. In fact, despite the state’s attempt toengineer national (ethnic) identities, its shortage economyinadvertently encouraged the persistence of clan organi-zation. It is the concealability of clan membership in the


public sphere that enabled these networks to survive inthe past and to transform politically in the transitionfrom Soviet rule. Thus, Part 2 describes clan conflict inpost-Soviet national politics, with President Nazarbaev(a member of the Elder clan) balancing clan interests atthe national level. Yet Middle and Younger clan loyaltiesappear to be vital links to power and influence at regionaland local levels. In Part 3, interviews with urban migrantsreveal that, although clan affiliation intersects with a rangeof other identities, people conceive of clan identity ascrucial to ethnic consciousness and economic success.

Although the book’s subtitle promises to look beyondKazakhstan, it does not really do so. Instead, in an appar-ent nod to political science readers, the conclusion offers ashort list of proposals for states to manage clan divisions.Other issues not covered but seemingly important to clandynamics are religion and gender. More information on therole of clans in the revitalization of Islam would be helpful,as many Kazakhs, although moderate, are active Muslims.Likewise, the link between subethnic identity and changinggender relationships could be further explored in light of re-cent research on women, customs, and economy (Werner2003). If clans endure as patrilineal forms, how are newergenerations responding to or revising these gender-boundpatterns?

But these shortcomings are minor considering thereach of the author’s integrated inquiry. Schatz has the keeneye of an anthropologist, noting the meaningful details inthe apparently mundane actions of social life. For exam-ple, he observes that Kazakhs wear their shoelaces looseas frequent visits to kin demand their easy removal at thedoor. In fact, this study’s main contribution is to the sub-ject of the construction of ethnicity itself. Kazakh identityis defined not only vis-a-vis the country’s sizeable Russiancommunity but also at the level of kin loyalty and action.Thus, the state-led ethnic revival, comprised of the expectedproclamations about authenticity and tradition in publicdiscourse, is manifested at the personal level as renewedinterest in genealogies, family experience, and the reinvig-oration of urban–rural relationships. To be Kazakh in thisnew world means exercising the nuances of genealogy asthese relate to broader challenges of education, economicviability, and social welfare. By showing us how ethnicity asclan network permeates the architecture of the postsocialiststate and society, Schatz’s study is a welcome addition to agrowing body of research about the nexus of state powerand local experience.

REFERENCES CITEDCohen, Abner

1981 The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in theDramaturgy of Power in a Modern African Society. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Werner, Cynthia2003 Women, Marriage and the Nation-State: The Rise of Non-

Consensual Bride-Kidnapping in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan. InThe Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies fromSoviet Rule to Independence. Pauline Jones Luong, ed. Pp. 59–89. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Imagined Differences: Hatred and the Construction ofIdentity. Gunther Schlee, ed. New York: Palgrave, 2002.280 pp.

AVRAM BORNSTEINJohn Jay College, City University of New York

What can (or should) anthropology do to work against con-temporary violence? Some ethnographers write and teachto evoke sympathy for suffering victims, hoping to depictthem as worthy of restoration or recognition from the pow-erful. Others try to explain the processes that depict peo-ple as so utterly different that they are treated as enemiesunworthy of dignity or protection. Imagined Differences isa collection of ethnographies, mostly by European-basedscholars, that examines such processes of differentiationin times of hatred. Following Anderson’s notion of “imag-ined communities,” whether a nation or ethnicity, these 11case studies with two introductions (by Gunther Schlee andElwert) put such social construction in antagonistic con-texts. Like Frederik Barth’s examples of boundary making,or even Edward Said’s critical studies of Orientalism, thiskind of anthropology illustrates how identity is constructeddialectically—within and against an opposing other—andnot essentially—or made up of key features—as it is oftenportrayed.

Most authors in this volume lean toward a model ofgroup identity formation that privileges political necessi-ties rather than “primordial” sentiments. Most explicitly,Venema

describes how French colonial administrators and in-digenous Moroccan elites have tried to remake Berber iden-tity to further their respective regimes. Kaiser shows howthe Francophile Arab regime ruling Algeria and its opposingIslamic resistance both publish descriptions of each otheras foreign-influenced, violent fanatics. Van Uffold’s chapteris, perhaps, the exception to this instrumental and politi-cal explanation of cultural construction. He describes themurder and funeral of a Protestant priest of the IndonesianChurch and argues that sometimes violence is an unwilledaccident, the product of a breakdown of rules.

Several chapters catalogue local markers or perceptionsof difference. Beller-Hann describes the residential, occupa-tional, educational, sartorial, gastronomic, and perceivedtemperamental differences between Han Chinese and theUighur, a Turkic Muslim group in Western China. Hanekediscusses how Oromo identity in southern Ethiopia hasmany classical features, like a common language, history,and social structure, but how no particular dimension aloneis sufficient to explain the claiming or attribution of thisidentity. Weyland describes how indigenous Christians inan Egyptian village conceive of themselves as “modern” andstereotype their Muslim neighbors as “backward.” Her chap-ter also reflects on how her own perceived identity as a Euro-pean Christian and her closer affiliation with local CopticChristians became part of the boundary defining process.Several chapters explore cultural differentiations in artistic


and folkloric production, such as Hobart’s descriptions of aBalinese play, or Rieger’s examples of Indonesian national-ism in (proto)Indonesian novels from the first half of the20th century. Kenny describes the symbolic history of theOrange Orders whose marches have led Protestants throughCatholic neighborhoods of Belfast and have erupted inviolence.

Although most of the chapters examine social differ-entiation in locations where there has been great strife andconflict, only two are concerned explicitly with the orga-nization of large-scale political violence. De Silva describesvengeance and the spiral of violence in Sri Lanka, not onlybetween government and resistance forces but also betweenTamil rebel groups. He argues that attacks have a mimeticquality and that they are often intended to enforce inter-nal discipline. Schlee describes the multiple lines of fractionand alliance, both local and international, driving the mur-derous violence and destruction of livelihood that was thebreakup of the Somali state.

Together, the works in this volume illustrate howconflict and violence against “out” groups create bordersand markers of difference that simultaneously create andreinforce a “we” group, what Elwert calls “endostrategicmobilization” (p. 48). Although some chapters in thebook are rich and coherent, the volume is uneven. Severalchapters are raw ethnographic descriptions with under-developed references to larger debates or questionablegeneralizations. Some of the individual chapters may beuseful to those sharing a geographic or topical specializa-tion, or appropriate as reading for undergraduates, but Iwould not assign the volume as a whole. Nevertheless,the book does push anthropologists toward (what shouldbe) one of the most basic questions of the discipline:How can we account for human difference, especiallywhen it structures violent conflict? The next questionanthropology must ask—which is not raised in this volumeor many other anthropological volumes on violence andconflict—is a much harder one to answer: What productivepath do researchers recommend given their observationsand scholarly conclusions?

Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins ofthe Civilized World. Irene Silverblatt. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2004. 299 pp.

SUSAN ELIZABETH RAMIREZTexas Christian University

Irene Silverblatt’s serious book, Modern Inquisitions, is a pas-sionate, scholarly, and reflexive analysis that is more than itfirst appears. This book, on several levels, invites reflectionand commentary. On its most basic plane, it is an innova-tive study of the Spanish Inquisition that follows and con-tributes to Richard Greeleaf’s pioneering and now-classicefforts on the substance and practices of that institution inMexico. It also offers a sharp contrast with the way thatsome scholars, like Serge Gruzinski, have used Inquisition-

generated sources. In this book, she argues, building on theideas of Hannah Arendt (and others), that the modern statewas formed in conjunction with colonialism and that theunderside of the modern world was born in the mix of bu-reaucratic rule, race thinking, and the capacity to rational-ize violence. Her genius is her focus on the Inquisition inthe Spanish empire and specifically on its workings in theViceroyalty of Peru as a tribunal of dynamic credentialedletrados (“lettered” or educated judges) as actual individualpersons with their own foibles, interests, biases, networks,and social context. This approach updates the earlier studiesof bureaucracies and bureaucrats by such authors as SusanSocolow (on Argentina), John Leddy Phelan (on Ecuador),and Mark Burkholder and Guillermo Lohmann Villena (onPeru).

To her scholarly audience, she presents, in her chapteron Inquisition as bureaucracy, the standards and rules thatthe Inquisitors were supposed to follow to serve and bol-ster the larger political system. These procedural conven-tions were designed to ensure dispassionate judgment andthe attainment of truth. The problems of practice were jeal-ousies, isolation and distance from the Metropolis, and thestruggle over control. The Suprema back in Madrid could dolittle to ameliorate the excesses of its Limeno letrados whojustified their breaches of rules and procedures—in legality,fairness, and morality—in terms of the defense of ortho-doxy (of “national security”) that it was at the same timetrying to define. The threats were (among many) those ofthe Portuguese, Judaizing, usurious, sabotaging spies whowere ready to seduce Indians and blacks to their cause (p.63). The examples of institutional lapses in procedure andrules, including safeguards against the notorious excesses oftorture, are too many to enumerate here (pp. 63–73).

She continues, in “Mysteries of State,” to define “thestate” as an ideology, a communal belief that cloaksconcrete relations of power (p. 79). The Inquisition activelyinvented this ideology, giving magistrates control overlife and death. It portrayed itself as a unified, autonomous,just and rational political assembly, but the dynamicsbehind and squabbles over decisions so poignantly detailedin the previous chapter show this characterization to bea sham. On the surface, the Inquisition proclaimed itselfa defender against Jews, adulterers, bigamists—all social,political, economic, and religious misfits—and worse. Itchampioned stability and order as it defined political andreligious orthodoxy.

But this orthodoxy had little room for outliers. Inthe next section, she shows how the imported concept of“stained blood” imposed a hierarchy that turned Europeansinto rulers, Indians into subjects, and Africans into slaves.Only the Europeans—and particularly the Old Christians—were free from pollution. In her last three substantivechapters, she explicitly discusses the consequences of theimposition of the concept as the bureaucracy’s battle todefine and institute conformity, focusing on “the Jewishproblem,” “the female/witch problem,” and “the Indianproblem.” Dangerous ethnic profiling overlooked the


differences within groups to stereotype potentially disloyalNew Christians who usurped trade and merchandising tothe detriment of Castilians. Merchants were equated withenemies, spies, the Portuguese, and the Jews. Furthermore,it was thought that they conspired with blacks and Nativesand allied with the Dutch. Women were no better. Theythreatened society’s morals. Silverblatt’s masterful analysisshows that the women persecuted by the Inquisition werenonconformist. They were described as mostly single,non-Indian, coca-chewing, mountain-worshiping, andInca-loving, and were defined as “witches” (p. 165). Finally,she shows how native identity was transferred from ayllu(lineage) to the Incas and finally to the category of theIndian. She thus shows that “Indian-ness” developed as afunction of colonialism. From these social categories thatordered confusions of nation and religion, religion andancestry, and ancestry and political loyalty, the magistratescreated a vision of humanity in which the Spanish werethe international ruling elite.

This base level of inquiry is concretely tied to specificcases gleaned from the records in colonial archives. If onelooks beyond the details and minor problems of the repre-sentativeness of her examples and an overterritorializationof native society, one can discern another, higher levelof analysis, aimed at those interested in theory relevantto the origins of the modern state. Her discussion is asmuch one of Spanish colonial practices and institutionsas a critical commentary on the present world order. Heranalysis shows the parallels between the rule of Spanishcolonial America and of the contemporary superpower.Her remarks in this regard, epitomized by the title ofthe book, take on additional meanings as inquiries intoourselves and the institutions that we and our antecedentscreated (or allowed to be created in our names) for manyof the same reasons and with many of the same problemsand weaknesses. At this level, her prose serves as a cogentwarning. For this reason more than others, I recommendthis book enthusiastically not only to those interested inLatin America but also to all students of global colonialism.

Gray Areas: Ethnographic Encounters with NursingHome Culture. Philip B. Stafford, ed. Santa Fe, NM: Schoolof American Research Press, 2003. 317 pp.

SATISH KEDIAUniversity of Memphis

This edited volume is the outcome of a School of AmericanResearch (SAR) advanced seminar on nursing home culturein the United States. It comprises ethnographic researchconducted by scholars from four distinct but related disci-plines: anthropology, nursing, human geography, and phi-losophy. The chapters explore how constructions of “self”and “home” in long-term elderly care are defined in thecontext of a struggle between a medical model of institu-tional care and a cultural model of domestic space. Draw-ing on richly detailed ethnographic research conducted in

a variety of nursing home settings, the contributors of thisvolume enrich the literature on a topic that is largely un-derstudied in anthropology.

In his introductory discussion, editor and contributorPhilip B. Stafford seamlessly interweaves multiple threads:the historical foundation of the contemporary nursinghome as an institution, major points of each chapter, a re-view of the state of scholarship on nursing home culture,and possible future directions for research, while present-ing a conceptual model that ties the chapters of the volumetogether. Addressing the book’s title, Stafford finds “grayareas” of ambiguity in accounts of nursing home life, as ev-idenced by literature across various disciplines, the contrib-utors’ chapters, and the original SAR seminar discussionsof the topic. He locates the “chief problematic” of such ac-counts in the rendering of residents’ habitus: “Can a homeand hospital coexist in the same space?” (p. 8). Stafford of-fers a model for understanding this ambiguity, arguing thatthe nursing home is a “contested cultural space upheld bysocial processes” (p. 10). Not just residents but also familyand staff use various interpretive strategies to assign mean-ing while living in two seemingly contradictory worlds: the“medical domain of treatment and clinical care” and “thedomestic domain of home and family” (p. 12). It is this con-tested terrain that is explored by the contributors: (1) howresidents make meaning of their existence in this space; (2)how different constellations of relationships are negotiatedamong residents, attendant family members, and institu-tional workers; and (3) how the dynamics between mean-ing making and relationship making emerges in the con-text of an alternative to nursing homes, the assisted livingfacility (ALF). According to Stafford, ALFs may offer pro-ductive strategies for “promot[ing] critical reflection andinterpretation of cultural meanings as an ongoing, delib-erative process” (p. 20) among residents, staff, and familymembers through the use of individualized service and careagreements.

Generally speaking, each chapter is unique in scope,whereas collectively they offer perspectives on nursinghome life by participants—patients/residents, their fami-lies, and the medical and administrative staff. In the sec-tion on “meaning making,” the range of methodologiesinclude Jeanie Kayser-Jones’s positivist study of emergentsocial changes as residents experience episodes of acute ill-ness, using event analyses of 216 case studies developedvia interviews taken over a five-year period in several nurs-ing homes. In contrast, Maria Vesperi employs a criticaltheory approach derived from rhetorical studies, incorpo-rating lengthy transcriptions of discussions with an elderlyrelative, “T. D.,” in an interpretive chapter on how Burkeanirony can be used to provide valuable, nuanced understand-ings of nursing home culture. “During his second career as anursing home resident,” Vesperi notes, “T. D. has been ableto see himself both as an individual and as a component ofa well-oiled machine” (p. 102). Joel Savishinsky investigatesthe crucial function of food as a bearer of meaning in a smallnursing home. His study, supported by other research on


consumption practices in institutionalized care for elders,further affirms the centrality of food in such settings be-cause “people who are deeply displeased with life may losetheir appetite for it and manifest this in literal, nutritionalterms” (p. 119). Drawing on various theorists on space andplace, Philip Stafford promotes a “phenomenological an-thropology” to understand how nursing home residents usespace and objects to re-create a home that “ignores” thewalls of the institution. Across a set of case studies, he ex-amines how definitions of home on the “outside” are notcontested by the institutional domestic space but rathercontinued in it. Using multisite research and ethnographicanalysis of Alzheimer’s Units (AUs) in nursing homes, NeilHenderson explores the “possible, nonobvious cultural un-derpinnings” of AUs’ expansion, given that research indi-cates they are “therapeutically impotent” (pp. 153–154).He concludes that both family members’ psychoculturalreasons as well as market demand—for a putatively morehumane mode of what is essentially “storage” of an in-capacitated relative—will result in AUs’ persistence, if notproliferation.

In the section on “relationship making” in nursinghomes, three chapters challenge stereotypes about resi-dents, family, and staff locked in necessarily confronta-tional relationships in the institutional setting. GrahamRowles and Dallas High provide in-depth case studies takenfrom a three-year ethnographic study of life in four differentnursing homes. Using participant observation, interviews,and event analysis, the authors develop a typology of eightbasic decisions made by family members, with a focus onthe influence of one relative designated as “point person.”In this way, Rowles and High demonstrate that, contrary toexpectations, family members do exert influence over thecare of dependent elders. For two years, Renee Rose Shieldstudied interactions between residents and certified nurseassistants (CNAs) at a home for the elderly with dementiaand at another more medicalized unit. Using interviews,observations, and surveys of the stakeholders, as well as herown experiences as a “nursing home daughter,” Shield de-tails CNAs’ views of family members and vice versa. LikeRowles and High, Shield documents the positive results ofcollaboration between staff and family members and sug-gests further the importance of distinguishing those charac-teristics of “home” that constitute good care. She also indi-cates the need to recognize the reflexivity of ethnographicwork in nursing home settings—in this case, that one daythese gerontological anthropologists will be old too. Inthe chapter that immediately follows Shield’s, MargaretPerkinson notes almost identical ethnic and class differ-ences between staff and residents, although like Shield shechooses not to explore their impact on the establishment ofboth work and personal relationships. Perkinson conductedresearch on caregiving roles in a large, urban, long-term,nonprofit facility using focus groups with residents’ fam-ilies and nursing home staff; their discussions were tapedand transcribed, then analyzed using the grounded theoryapproach. Her goal was to convey to families “the basics ofnursing home culture and to elicit input from both families

and nursing home staff in defining family caregiving rolesthat were productive and workable within that culture”(p. 236). In this context, anthropologists act as “culture bro-kers” to empower participants in developing positive col-laborations with facility personnel and to help “negotiatemeaningful roles” as caregivers.

In the third section, Paula Carder’s article on ALFs,reprinted from a 2002 issue of the Journal of Aging Stud-ies, details her 22-month ethnographic observation of threeALFs in action. Carder examined their “rhetoric of legit-imization,” the language used to articulate a different socialworld than the traditional nursing home’s “medical model”to evaluate its impact on the attitudes of stakeholders. Sheconcludes that ALFs are a “world in transition,” that moreresearch will be necessary to determine whether they areactually an improvement on the standard nursing home orsimply employ a rhetoric more consonant with a consumereconomy (e.g., autonomy, individuality, choice, with resi-dents who are not “patients” but “clients” or even “con-sumers”) without challenging the basic tensions betweenmedical and domestic domains in daily practice.

Gray Areas merits much attention—given the dearthof studies in this important area of gerontologicalanthropology—particularly for its exploration of the keycultural ambiguity of whether an institution established onthe medical model of a hospital can simultaneously be adomestic space. Although the chapters in the volume offervarying levels of critical engagement, together they makea compelling argument for the importance of recognizinghuman vitality and cultural vibrancy in the so-called sterileenvironment of nursing homes in the United States.

Commons + Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdis-ciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge.Marilyn Strathern. Wantage, Oxfordshire: Sean KingstonPublishing, 2004. 102 pp.

MICHAEL M. J . F ISCHERMassachusetts Institute of Technology

This slim volume (of four working papers) can servegraduate seminars as a kind of “notes and queries,” inconjunction with allied efforts to deal with the challengesof contemporary knowledge production such as BrunoLatour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Donna Haraway’sModest Witness@Second Millenium.FemaleMan c© Meets OncoMouseTM, Paul Rabinow’s Anthropos Today, or my ownEmergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.

Purporting to be concerned with the Cambridge Ge-netics Knowledge Park (CGKP) as one of a variety of in-terdisciplinary knowledge production sites—and, therefore,as access to questions about ownership of knowledge,commons, accountability, and communities constituted bymobile knowledges—the inquiry draws on what Britishanthropology once called “social organization.” Anoma-lously, however, one learns almost nothing (a coupleof pages) about her touchstone CGKP or other specificsites.


Instead, Marilyn Strathern surveys topics raised by sci-ence studies authors beginning with the sense that theworld we live in has outrun the pedagogies in which wehave been trained, and that efforts to alleviate the ensuingsense of crisis often involve instituting regulations, moni-toring, and reflexivity, including the subjection of social sci-ence itself to audit cultures (IRBs, ethics inquiries). MichelCallon is cited on “cold” versus “hot” situations (with sta-ble measures of outcome versus ones with unpredictableoutcomes, among which she counts mad cow disease); andHelga Nowotny is cited on Mode 1 versus Mode 2 knowl-edge production (Archimedean science used to reconstructsociety in classic Comtean fashion versus science as inter-nal to society where context “speaks back” and new knowl-edge often produces uncertainty and instability, requiring—Ulrich Beck might have been cited—more reflexive socialinstitutions of second order modernity).

Strathern discusses as her first example of mobileknowledge communities Taxol, the breast cancer drug (al-though, oddly, Jordan Goodman and Vivien Walsh’s studyis not cited). The Pacific Yew bark’s chemistry was analyzedwith public funds, but the semisynthetic drug was patentedand brought to market by Bristol-Myers Squibb. Patents,Strathern suggests, are devices for enabling knowledge totravel. Mario Biagioli’s work on authorship in science iscited to mark the differences between intellectual prop-erty (economic rights) versus academic publication (aboutcredit, origins, “relations among colleagues,” gift exchange,and moral rights). John Law’s account of why England’sindependent nuclear deterrent, TRS-2, failed (too manynew and complex specifications) illustrates a third “P”—patents, publications, projects—of mobile knowledge (mi-grating elsewhere from failed projects). Bruno Latour’s studyof the failed Paris intelligent subway system might also havebeen cited. To think about “what carriers tell us about thecommunities they form (people as a fourth “P”), she citesStefan Helmreich’s account of life scientists at the Santa FeInstitute importing naive folk ideas about U.S. gender, kin-ship, and religion into explanations of programming thebreeding of genetic algorithms. Finally we get two contrast-ing electronic civic environments, the European Networkfor Intelligent Information Interfaces (i3) piloted on islandsoff Denmark (as non-task-oriented, open to participatorydesign) versus Manchester’s InfoCity experiment (caughtin the top down pedagogical desires of museums). Similarproblems have plagued Programs in Public Understandingof Science, and the somewhat (rhetorically) more open Pro-grams in Public Engagement with Science.

Strathern provides two examples of intellectual com-mons and borderlands. The first is Andrew Warwick’s studyof how because Maxwell’s 1873 textbook was opaque tomost who struggled to teach it (too many fields, vocabular-ies, assumptions combined beyond the competence of anyone electrical engineer, physicist or mathematician), theircommentaries became the real textbooks. The second is theHouse of Lords and Privy Council case on whether or nota book produced by a student based on his notes of a pro-fessor’s lectures constitutes copyright infringement. What

was judged to be either public or private domain in thesecases concerned utility to the nation and shaped the futureof research universities.

Two contemporary cases distinguish economic andmoral rights: (1) whether a cell-line from virus infectedblood of a Hagahai man could be patented by NIH (and therole of the medical anthropologist who sent the blood); and(2) whether Cambridge University could claim the work ofits professors as its own intellectual property. The distinc-tion, of course, is familiar from Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur ledon, and the rights of artists in France of his day to proceedsnot just from first sale but from subsequent sales of theirwork. Ownership, Strathern summarizes, “is open to con-test, it puts the form of identity an academic might claimin relation to his or her own work into a field of identities,a network of social actors with their overlapping claims onthe ‘the owner’ ” (p. 62).

Finally, Strathern returns to the CGKP, governmentfunded to develop appropriate ethical, legal, and socialframeworks for genetic services (no indicators or mile-stones, only open-ended reports, reviews, and papers). Sheargues that interdisiplinarity can itself work as an indexof accountability (of the work of translation, of validationthrough multiple contexts). Not to be Pollyanna-ish, sheinvokes the old anthropological “conundra” of incommen-surable systems of knowledge: Papuan Pressure Groups de-manding compensation from the mines know they have toplay by transnational rules of validation even though theirculture (kastom) knows better (about underground spirittunnels). The index of accountability here shows a failure,a weakness in solidarity, a potential social point of futuretrouble (shades of Victor Turner’s Schism and Continuity).

REFERENCES CITEDFischer, Michael M. F.

2003 Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna J.1997 Modest Witness@Second Millenium.FemaleMan c© Meets

OncoMouseTM. New York: Routledge Press.Latour, Bruno

1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Mauss, Marcel1924 Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de lechange dans les

societes archaıques (The gift: The form and reason for exchangein archaic societies). New York: W. W Norton and Company.

Rabinow, Paul2003 Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.Turner, Victor

1996 Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study ofNdembu Village Life. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, andthe Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Deborah Thomas.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 358 pp.

COLIN CLARKEOxford University

Modern Blackness is a history and ethnography of thecultural politics of nationalism in Jamaica. Tracing


developments since independence in 1962, DeborahThomas surveys the evolution of nationalist ideologies,from the awakening of Jamaica as a creole nation—“Out ofMany, One (Black) People,” to parody the national motto—to an awareness of an identity rooted in an ethos of urban“blackness.” Thomas explores the dynamic links betweenglobal forces, the Jamaican nation, and local possibilities(represented by Mango Mount, a village in the foothills ofthe Blue Mountains about six miles north of Kingston).In the process, she critically evaluates the political, eco-nomic, and cultural factors that have a bearing on modernblackness.

The book has three sections, each consisting of twoor three chapters, dealing with the global–national (twochapters), the national–local (three chapters), and the local–global (two chapters). The first section explores the rela-tionship between emergent identities rooted in blacknessand Jamaicanness, and how these identities have been mo-bilized by perceptions of Africa, by a history of migration,and by the notions of “progress” as rooted in the respectablevalues of the sectarian churches. This leads into an inves-tigation of the evolution of cultural-development initia-tives during the period of Crown Colony rule (1865–1944),the ways in which these became institutionalized at inde-pendence through cultural policy, and the tensions thatemerged over time between creole multiracialism and moreexplicitly racialized identities.

The ways rural people negotiate a range of ideologiesand experiences to construct their own sense of belong-ing to the community and the nation is the focus of thesecond section, which also examines the consequences ofsocial mobility among the poorer elements in the MangoMount population. Thomas addresses the implications ofclass differences for leadership and definitions of develop-ment, and the extent to which local status distinctions areoverridden by a sense of being black within a national hi-erarchy of races. Finally, an attempt is made to assess howclass and ideological differences among community mem-bers have an impact on the state’s strategy to encouragepride in Jamaica’s history and in African cultural heritage—specifically discussing the 1997 reinstatement of Emanci-pation Day (originally August 1, 1838) as a public holi-day. Thomas shows that poorer community members couldappreciate the symbolism associated with the policy butdid not identify with it as providing a basis for their ownprogress and development.

The third section examines lower-class conceptions ofprogress, modernity, and mobility, and it highlights pop-ular representations of these visions. Modern blackness isshown to be “urban, migratory, based in youth-orientatedpopular culture and influenced by African-American popu-lar style, individualist, ‘radically consumerist,’ and ‘ghettofeminist’ ” (p. 23). In the conclusion, Thomas draws out theimplications of the research findings, arguing that

modern blackness is neither intrinsically divisive nor ex-clusionary. What modern blackness chiefly challenges

is the subordination of black people—politically, so-cially, economically, culturally—that was established dur-ing slavery, persisted throughout the creole nationalist era,and has been reestablished, though in somewhat differ-ent ways, by globalization, privatization and structuraladjustment policies. [pp. 269–270]

I endorse this line of argument about black subordi-nation and appreciate the influence of urban, black U.S.culture on modern youth in Jamaica. Yet many aspects ofJamaican folk culture often thought of as “African”—suchas the matrifocal family, Afro-Christian religions, and theuse of patois—are downplayed in this account of MangoMount, although they remain significant for older agegroups and are crucial for social stratification in larger, ur-ban communities such as neighboring Kingston. This is anaspect of scale that bedevils much anthropological and geo-graphical work, although in this instance Thomas strugglesvaliantly to make the scale linkages work.

The book is well written and based on detailed ethno-graphic work carried out by an anthropologist–dancer inJamaica in the late 1990s and presented as a doctorateat New York University. The text is accompanied byan extensive bibliography, notes, and a detailed index,but there are no photographs, tables, or maps. Thomasblends local, national, and global themes into a per-suasive narrative that touches on and integrates manyaspects of postindependence national life in Jamaica.This is a major contribution to the study of Jamaica atthe turn of the 21st century, and it is essential readingfor scholars and students alike. Duke University Pressis to be congratulated on including it in the new seriesLatin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations, thestated object of which is to rethink area studies and dis-ciplinary boundaries. This ambitious book is an excellentstart.

Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain JamesCook. Nicholas Thomas. New York: Walker and Co., 2003.467 pp.

GANANATH OBEYESEKEREPrinceton University

Nicholas Thomas’s work on Cook’s three “extraordinaryvoyages” is full of rich detail, although it is somewhat ne-glectful of the “extraordinary voyages” of the people whofirst settled in this vast Polynesian region. The book iswell written and focuses primarily on Cook’s Enlighten-ment persona. It is extensively illustrated with paintingsand sketches by ships’ officers, by the noted artist WilliamHodges, and the less illustrious John Webber. They exem-plify the stereotype of the South Seas as the “New Cythera”of Louis de Bougainville’s imagination. The one picture thatdepicts violence against native populations entitled “Thelanding at Erromanga” (in Vanuata) is absent. Like everyCook volume, Thomas’s also contains the beautiful portrait


of Poetua, the pregnant Tahitian noblewoman held hostageby Cook against her will while her people outside were cut-ting up their bodies and wailing in grief, demanding her re-lease. Thomas ignores the mentality of the artist who couldpaint this romanticized portrait in the pitiful context of vi-olence and suffering.

For Thomas, Cook and Banks were “embodiments ofEnlightenment inquiry,” although presumably like otherofficers, Cook sometimes “does not mention circumstancesand events that reflect poorly upon him” (p. 59). Not con-tent with omissions Banks “actually lied,” when in Tierra delFuego he left his two black servants to die in the cold with-out sending a search party to rescue them. Thomas’s Cookwas a “proto-anthropologist” who “took the human speciesas a unity, and he assumed that every particular people hadits own variations on broader human institutions” (p. 65).Cook had empathy for the Other and he felt that AustralianAborigines were “unambiguously human” and “very muchlike himself” (p. 114). In Tahiti, during the second voyage,Cook alone among his crew felt that expeditions’ impact onthe Maori, among others, “were not mixed or ambiguousbut plainly evil” (p. 185), although I cannot imagine Cookbeing concerned with human evil. Unhappily, Thomas doesnot give us information that substantiates these, to me, pre-posterous assertions.

For Australians, Cook is their nation’s founding ances-tor and Thomas gives us glimpses of his socialization in themythic persona of Cook. “In my schoolboy sense of Cook,I always supposed [erroneously, he admits] that Endeavourwas the name the captain gave the ship, a sort of emana-tion of the spirit that he uniquely possessed” (p. 19). Suchstray remarks help us understand Thomas’s ambivalent re-lation to Cook, documenting acts of outrageous violenceagainst native peoples and yet attempting to excuse them.This ambivalence appears in his discussion of colonialismand in his failure to acknowledge the work of postcolonialtheorists, which is surprising for someone who has writtenon colonialism in this region. For Thomas, Cook was onlya reluctant colonizer. Thomas writes, “He had been told totake possession of lands, and in this sense he was a colo-nizer, but Cook’s colonial interventions in Maori life weretentative and tactical,” although Thomas recognizes thatCook paved the way for the later colonial appropriation ofNew Zealand and Australia, the major figure in the latterbeing Joseph Banks (p. 100). Cook as colonizer is probablya reasonable assessment; but everywhere Cook went he didappropriate lands for the crown as instructed by the Admi-ralty. Although some of these actions were purely formal,Cook believed in his role as the emissary of the crown, nam-ing lands after royalty, after English places, and overpower-ing New Zealand in particular with toponymy. Thomas doesnot realize that taking possession, relabeling the alien land-scape with English names, and above all planting Englishgarden vegetables and releasing stock reflected a persistentstrategy in colonial expansion. Planting of gardens impliedthe implanting of colonial or imperial claims. In Cook’scase, some of these actions had great personal meaning,

particularly planting seeds and releasing English domesticanimals. Hence, his disproportionate anger when gardenswere destroyed or neglected and when his animals werestolen.

Theory hardly appears in this book, although this isnot true of Thomas’s other work. To me, however, the moststriking forfeiture of scholarship lies in his failure to usebibliographical references, which makes it difficult for us toconduct an argument with him. Thus, although his bookmay appeal to “Cookophiles” (my neologism), it is of verylimited value to us ethnographers, except as a source of in-formation. I will confess that I much prefer Anne Salmond’smore scholarly work, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: CaptainCook in the South Seas, also published in 2003 by Penguin,New Zealand.

REFERENCE CITEDSalmond, Anne

2003 The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the SouthSeas. Auckland: Penguin.

A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures of the Mega-City.James Diego Vigil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.213 pp.

MERRILL SINGERCenter for Community Health ResearchHispanic Health Council

The literature on the street gangs of the United States is likethe tide; it flows in (triggered by a new wave of moral panicabout the threat gangs pose to communities, regions, oreven the nation) and it flows out again (as the moral panicof a particular era subsides and stories about gangs disappearfrom the evening news and newspaper headlines). Thus, theliterature is clumped into periods of intensive productionseparated by periods of relative inattention. Each era has itsinfluential voices. Vigil is one of those voices in the con-temporary era, a period characterized by prolonged publicconcern about gangs. This is especially true in places likeLos Angeles, which Vigil, a longtime gang observer, callsthe “mega-city.”

As the dust jacket of his book notes, L.A. has right-fully been called the youth gang capital of the country.At 200,000 strong, there are more gang members in L.A.than there are inhabitants in many U.S. cities. And, asVigil emphasizes, they come in all the colors of the rain-bow, and it is this ethnic diversity that attracts the author’sattention.

In this book, Vigil focuses on Mexican American gangs,African American gangs, Vietnamese gangs, and Salvadorangangs: He begins his analysis with an overview of the gangphenomena in U.S. life. In Vigil’s perspective, one held bymany but not all gang researchers, “the street gang is anoutcome of marginalization, that is, the relegation of cer-tain persons or groups to the fringes of society, where socialand economic conditions result in powerlessness.” (p. 7).


Indeed, the groups Vigil examines are subject to “multiplemarginality” produced by the mutually reinforcing effectsof racism, social and cultural repression, fragmented insti-tutions, and poverty. Thus, as he rightly asserts, “structuralcauses must therefore be at the forefront of any serious dis-cussion of what causes gangs” (p. 13).

Yet each marginalized group has its own history, its ownculture, and its own unique, if not totally distinct, story. Inthis book, as a result, a chapter is devoted to describingthe history and experiences in the mega-city of each of thefour ethnic groups mentioned above, including the emer-gence and development of a set of home-grown street gangsthat reflect the particular nature of the social suffering eachof these ethnic minority populations has endured in theCity of Angels. Looking across cases, however, Vigil findsthat ultimately diverse groups facing similar social condi-tions, in which street culture overwhelms ethnic heritage,result in remarkable similarities in the formation of streetgangs.

After each of the “ethnic history” chapters, there fol-lows a life-history chapter that focuses on a single memberof a street gang from the ethnic group in question; his orher story is told with excerpts from interviews conducted bythe author and is woven together by Vigil’s insightful com-mentary. These chapters help to put a human face on theotherwise impersonal and experience-distant view of gangsthat drive moral panics in the general public. Exemplifyingthe value of these chapters is the comment by Arturo, a Sal-vadoran gang member, who tells Vigil: “My father left mewhen I was born. It just seemed like somebody was alwaysleaving me” (p. 157).

In sum, this book can be seen as starting out at the mostgeneral level: the social and economic conditions that breedstreet gangs. It then turns to an examination of how theseconditions interact with the cultures and histories of partic-ular ethnic groups to produce street gangs, street formationsthat have much in common amid some notable differences.The book concludes with a close-up examination of com-pletely unique cases of named individuals drawn from eachof the ethnic gangs under examination. In the final chap-ter, Vigil switches from research to policy and asks as havemany before him: What can we do to end the continualcycle of street gang formation? Although his recommenda-tions are not new—after all, it is likely the answer to theproblem of street gangs has been known for a long time—they are nonetheless important. As Hurricane Katrina re-minded us yet again, the problems of social inequality, rela-tive and absolute deprivation, poverty, and discriminationare still around, even if the politicians, social commen-tators, policy wonks, and news media stop talking aboutthem.

A Rainbow of Gangs would be a useful text for urban an-thropology classes, classes on ethnic diversity and disparity,and courses that examine U.S. social structure. It wouldalso make a thoughtful gift for senators, congressmen,and other policy makers on one’s Christmas shoppinglist.

Village Life in Hong Kong: Politics, Gender, and Ritualin the New Territories. James L. Watson and Rubie S.Watson. Sha Tin, NT: Chinese University Press, 2004.490 pp.

ELIZABETH LOMINSKA JOHNSONUniversity of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology

The first anthropologist to work in the New Territories ofHong Kong, the late Barbara Ward was also the first to ana-lyze the challenging “problems of unity and variation posedby the unique temporal and spatial span of Chinese soci-ety and culture” (1965:113). Her seminal chapter examinedthe problem of the identity of the Cantonese boat-dwelling,fishing people in the New Territories. Since that time, otherauthors (Hayes 1977:194–201; Strauch 1983:21–50) haveaddressed the differences between the small, relatively poor,single- or multilineage interdependent communities livingin hilly areas and the powerful single-lineage villages withlarge land-holdings, the “dominant lineages” of the NewTerritories. The problem of unity and diversity continues toengage China scholars.

Much of the anthropological research done in the NewTerritories cannot contribute solid information to this dis-cussion because it constitutes a patchwork of single studiesconducted by various people at particular places and times.This does not apply to the work of James and Rubie Wat-son, who have conducted intensive diachronic research intwo of the dominant lineages of the northwest New Terri-tories, the villages of San Tin and Ha Tsuen, and publishedtwo books and many papers based on this research. Con-cerned that their work would not remain accessible, theyselected 18 of their articles and chapters, six by Rubie andthe remainder by James, and combined them into a bookwith a newly written introductory chapter, maps, and a Chi-nese character glossary. The chapters are organized underthe headings “Village Social Organization,” “Gender Differ-ences and Women’s Lives,” and “Religion, Ritual, and Sym-bolism.” Their analyses end in the late 1970s, when the lastof their intensive fieldwork was done. As they say, “Thisbook is about the past, a time when the New Territories wasa very different place” (xii).

The great advantage of a book of this kind, compiledfrom separate publications, is that diverse problems can beexplored in one volume while maintaining the fundamen-tal focus. Both James and Rubie Watson are exceptionally at-tuned to unconventional and sometimes sensitive researchtopics. Among the many challenging problems they analyzeare class differences within lineages, the equalizing functionof a lineage banquet style that violates all norms of formaldining, women’s names, and ways of managing the terrify-ing presence of death pollution.

Their analysis of such diverse topics is not groundedin any one theoretical model but, instead, is situatedin a rich comparative perspective. Each chapter has asubstantial bibliography of sources wide-ranging bothin time and culture. Their enviable knowledge of the


anthropological literature allows deep analysis of their ma-terial. As persistent and painstaking ethnographers whoearned the trust of the villagers among whom they lived,they were able to gain in-depth information on the sensi-tive problems they studied. The end result is a solid andstimulating study of many features of Cantonese dominantlineage villages.

There are risks in immersing oneself in one kind of so-cial system. Despite their acknowledgement of diversity, theauthors, like many of us, sometimes write in generaliza-tions about “Cantonese villagers” and “Chinese lineages.”In their introduction they invite challenges, however, andby offering such rich information on dominant lineages,they make possible not challenges so much as astonishedcomparisons. As an anthropologist who works within a verydifferent New Territories social environment, I find it ex-traordinary that such a contrasting system existed only ashort distance away. As presented, the worldview and be-havior of the men, at least, of these dominant lineage vil-lages was founded on exclusion, hierarchy, and conflict.This was expressed through competition with other lin-eage villages for territory; brutal domination over tenants insatellite villages; the subordination of slaves, female bond-servants, and concubines; violence against young womenwho cut fuel outside the village; and the lack of full ac-ceptance of married-in women, who were never acknowl-edged as lineage ancestors. In men’s view, even the goddessTian Hou “in her local manifestation, was a jealous and—at times—vindictive goddess who did not tolerate rivals”(p. 287).

What is lost when a book is built from preexisting es-says? Those that may be less grounded in fieldwork (RubieWatson on bridal laments), or that are are somewhat tan-gential to the focus (James Watson on long-haired desti-tutes), cannot be edited. Furthermore, broader contextualmaterial is not included. There is little information on thecontrasting subsistence bases of Ha Tsuen and San Tin, forexample, or on the wholesale emigration of men of workingage from San Tin by the 1960s. Finally, although this bookis deliberately presented as a study of the past, the lack ofeven a brief update to the present gives the impression ofvillages frozen in time, as the authors do not summarize thedramatic changes of recent decades. This information canbe found in their other publications, however. Its omissiondoes not undermine the value of this comprehensive studyof dominant lineage villages in southeastern China.

REFERENCES CITEDHayes, James

1977 The Hong Kong Region, 1850–1911. Hamden: ArchonBooks.

Strauch, Judith1983 Community and Kinship in Southeastern China: The View

from the Multilineage Villages of Hong Kong. Journal of AsianStudies 43:21–50.

Ward, Barbara E.1965 Varieties of the Conscious Model: The Fisherman of South

China. In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology.Michael Banton, ed. Pp. 113–137. London: Tavistock.

Debt for Sale: A Social History of the Credit Trap. BrettWilliams. Philadelphia, PA: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2004. 145 pp.

E. PAUL DURRENBERGERPennsylvania State University

What happens when people that define themselves in termsof what they consume reach the limit of their spendingpower? In a land that provides virtually no social safety netfor retirement, housing, unemployment, pregnancy, child-birth, childcare, education, or healthcare, how can peopleprovide the security that the state provides in other indus-trial lands?

We use credit cards. Brett Williams explores the causesand consequences of U.S. citizens being easily able to putthemselves into often-unending debt to large financial in-stitutions, as well as the motivations and political machi-nations of such establishments as they expanded from therelatively secure debt of comparatively well-off wage earnersto the less-secure debt of the less well off and the poor.

She explains how the wealth that lending institutionssiphon from the poorest and least secure U.S. citizens un-derwrites the convenience use of credit cards for the moreprosperous who can pay their accounts in full at the endof each month. By expanding people’s ability to spend be-yond their incomes, credit cards create and bolster an artifi-cial middle class by disguising how much of our disposableincome we expend: In 2003, it was 130 percent (p. 3). At thelower end of the hierarchy are the people without plastic,the cash-only folks who fund the credit industry by payingusurious interest rates on loans to help them stretch inade-quate means from one payday to the next.

Williams shows how these relationships with debt severlinguistic and cultural connections with reality and turneconomic causality and connections upside down.

We feel grateful, generous, or independent when we getthe chance to spend beyond our means but these feelingsthwart our empathy for those in worse positions. We do notblame ourselves for debt but pathologize others for theirs(p. 126). Convenience users construct discourses of choiceand addiction to understand the overextended. In so do-ing, they ratify their self-congratulatory ideological certi-tude that everyone gets what they deserve in this eco-nomic democracy in which the meritorious rise to the topand the inferior sink to the bottom (pp. 52–53). Debtorsascribe to the same ideology and blame themselves be-cause they must deserve the consequences of their badchoices.

The obfuscation of realities on all levels results in eachperson having to deal with financial problems alone with-out joint cultural knowledge to draw on for direction. Whenwe turn to experts for guidance, we find deceit (p. 55). AsWilliams explains how financial institutions drain wealthfrom the poor, readers may wonder why only one in six ofthe poor suffer depressive episodes (p. 119), or why thereis so little rage in such a world dominated by “war and


occupation, harsh inequality, and assaults on our civil lib-erties” (p. 125).

Journalists have documented the important trends inmarketing and use of credit cards but have not linked theirproliferation with structural and cultural features such asa distressed economy; very mindful banking political andsales strategies bolstered by government research, subsi-dies, and regulatory polices; or ideologies of individualityand meritocracy (p. 57). Williams uses financial industryresearch and economic data to show the structural and his-torical and institutional relationships that trap people indebt and transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. She il-lustrates the vicissitudes of the trapped by telling the storiesshe and her students garnered in interviews and long-termfamiliarity.

This book takes a place in the growing literature of classand power in our land and raises questions that may be dif-ficult to approach ethnographically in the shadow worldsof government and finance. Especially when fieldwork isout of the question, one method of journalism that anthro-pologists might borrow is communicating with informantsin high places for their understandings of the systems theycontrol.

Although Williams shows multiple possible roles foranthropologists in this system—from creating obfusca-tory rhetorics to plumbing the cultural proclivities of sub-populations of a diverse citizenry to understand theirvulnerabilities—she does not recommend that we use ourskills to enhance the power of the wealthy. Rather, she ar-gues for reversing policies that allow predatory lending andthat privatize all security functions (pp. 125–131).

One way of drawing people into debt is via loyalty toaffinity groups. Thus, the Church of God in Christ offers acredit card—as does the American Anthropological Associ-ation. So do our loyalties turn against us.

The book is a useful review of the politics of a rapa-cious banking industry and the consequences for all of thepeople of the United States, as well as an addition to ourknowledge of how power shapes culture.

Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. Doris Witt.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 292 pp.

CAROLYN ROUSEPrinceton University

In Black Hunger: Soul Food and America, Doris Witt exploresrace politics in the United States through the lens of food.Her objects of study include a fictitious “mammy” who sellspancake batter; a gay white southern culinary philosopher;chitterlings; Nation of Islam food taboos; Dick Gregory’sfetishistic diets; Vertamae Grosvenor’s food-based critiqueof second-wave feminism; and hegemonic discourses aboutblack women, weight, fetal alcohol syndrome, and crackbabies. What emerges from this deeply critical, at times hu-morous, foray into African American food history is a the-oretical work as sensuous as the subject matter. Witt takes

the reader on a journey through popular food discoursesand along the way unpacks the signifiers of belonging, re-sistance, abjection, purity, and lust. Reading Black Hunger, Iwas reminded that food is not simply good to eat, it is alsogood to think with.

Claude Levi-Strauss describes cooking as a languagethat reveals structure and contradiction. Employing Levi-Strauss’s appreciation for food as cultural metaphor, Wittattempts to translate what Aunt Jemima and fruitarianism,for instance, have meant in the context of Reconstruction,Jim Crow, and the civil rights and black power movements.This heady project requires Witt to bring Hazel Carby, HenryLouis Gates, Margaret Homans, Anne McClintock, ClaudiaTate, and a number of other scholars of African American lit-erature and culture in conversation with Julia Kristeva, Sig-mund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Mary Douglas. Whatemerges is an engaging romp through some of the most in-teresting but largely neglected historical oddities that spanfrom Reconstruction through the 1990s.

Witt begins Black Hunger by examining the historicalessentializing of black women as mammies and cooks asrevealed through the fraught character of Aunt Jemima.The fact that Aunt Jemima may have originally been “awhite male businessman’s appropriation of a ‘German’ malevaudevillian’s imitation of a black male minstrel’s parody ofan imaginary black female slave cook” (p. 31), attests to thecharacter’s origins as a commodity fetish. Mammies sprungfrom the imagination of an entertainer and were perhaps nomore real than Eddie Murphy’s hypermacho Buddy Love inthe 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor. As Witt points out,Nancy Green, an ex-slave who played Aunt Jemima at showsincluding the World’s Fair, and actresses Louise Beavers andHattie McDaniel, who played mammies for film, were quitedifferent from the characters they performed. In the popularfilm Imitation of Life (1934), for example, Louise Beavers notonly had to be trained to flip pancakes for her role but shealso had to force feed herself to maintain her hefty figure.

Regardless of the questionable origin and authenticityof the mammy, food philosophers of the 1960s and 1970sreference either directly or indirectly the mammy as a sym-bol of a race and gender politics either to be embraced, as inthe case of Craig Claiborne, or to be rejected. Nation of Islamco-founder Elijah Muhammad, for example, associated thecooks (women) and the product (“slave food”) with filth,contamination, and the continuing pollution of black con-sciousness. Witt asserts that male food philosophers, includ-ing Dick Gregory, scorned or negated black women by dis-paraging what “mammies” cook. About Gregory’s fruitariandiet, Witt argues, “Gregory consciously understood himselfto be celebrating femininity via his valorization of rawnessand nature, femininity nonetheless threatened the bound-aries of the self as the maternal and so had to be abjectedas the ‘rotted’ ” (p. 136). Witt asserts that Gregory placedhimself on Levi-Strauss’s “unmarked pole,” which was notthe cooked or the rotted but, rather, the raw. In opposi-tion to the male philosophers, female food writer Verta-mae Grosvenor valorized soul food and the women who


produced it but problematically reessentialized blackwomen’s identities as cooks.

I think highly of Witt’s feminist critique of a neglectedpart of cultural history in the United States; nevertheless,there were moments while reading Witt’s exegesis that Ifound myself contemplating disciplinary borders. Witt is anEnglish professor and her “field sites” are, for the most part,written texts. As an anthropologist, I found myself longingfor the voice of those Witt critiques—particularly when psy-choanalysis becomes what seems to me an analytical crutch.For example, describing an article from the Washington Postentitled “Fruitful and Multiplying” about five African Amer-ican owners of vegetarian restaurants, Witt concludes, “Thearticle enacts a fantasy of erasing African American womenfrom their putatively solitary positioning in the scene ofblack reproduction. In their stead, African American menare inscribed as both father and mother, phallus and womb”(p. 150). Similarly, Witt uses broad strokes to paint Nation ofIslam food discourses as patriarchal, but without any inter-view data Witt fails to appreciate what drives black womento embrace Elijah Muhammad’s food philosophy.

Disciplinary issues aside, for any anthropologist inter-ested in North American cultural studies, food, and AfricanAmerican history, Black Hunger is required reading. Thebook is dense, but fascinating and difficult to put down.

REFERENCES CITEDImitation of Life

1934 John M. Staul, dir. 111 min. Los Angeles. Universal Pic-tures.

The Nutty Professor1996 Tom Shadyac, dir. 95 min. Los Angeles. Universal Pictures.

Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State ofKnowledge at the Turn of the Century. Arthur P. Wolfand William H. Durham, eds. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2004. 228 pp.

KATHLEEN BARLOWCentral Washington University

In the early 1980s, scholars declared the discussion ofinbreeding, incest, and the incest taboo at a stalemate.The problem seemed to hinge on whose argument aboutinbreeding avoidance in humans, incestuous impulses,and the reasons for incest taboos was most convincing—Sigmund Freud’s or Edward Westermarck’s. Freud’s positionthat humans are innately incestuous led to explanationsformulated around the Oedipus complex and the overcom-ing of incestuous impulses to create order in families andsociety. Westermarck proposed that natural (hence, biolog-ically based) inbreeding avoidance in humans producedsexual aversion among those raised in close association inearly childhood and that these innate aversions were ex-pressed socially and culturally as incest taboos. This book,the outcome of a conference (2000) marking the inaugu-ration of the new Department of Anthropological Sciencesat Stanford University, focuses renewed attention on West-

ermarck’s hypothesis in light of recent findings from ge-netics, biological anthropology, primatology, ethnography,history, psychiatry, and philosophy.

Most of the chapters examine the logic of and evidencefor Westermarck’s propositions. They consider questionssuch as the following: Are the elements of Westermarck’sproposition causally related? Do biological and behavioralresearch findings support such logic? Is inbreeding avoid-ance biologically driven or learned or both? Patrick Batesonframes the discussion as a challenge to our ability to under-stand complex relationships among genetic, environmen-tal, and social factors, and he cautions against succumbingto any too-easy determinisms. Alan Bittles shows that ex-isting evidence on genetic costs of inbreeding in humansneeds to be substantiated by research that includes socialand environmental factors.

Three crucial ethnographic cases—Taiwanese minor(sim pua) marriages, endogamous marriage in Israeli kib-butzim, and Lebanese patrilateral cross-cousin marriage—show sexual aversion among adults raised together as chil-dren. They are cited by many of the authors (e.g., Bittles,William Durham, Mark T. Erickson, Neven Sesardic, andArthur Wolf). In all three cases, low marriage rates andlow fertility in such marriages provide evidence of sex-ual aversion. That each society also encourages these mar-riages raises questions about the basis of aversion (bio-logical? learned? both?) and its relationship to culturalprohibitions.

Walter Scheidel and Hill Gates take up separate in-stances of the opposite case—preferred sibling marriages.Scheidel concludes that for Roman Egyptian sibling mar-riages, large age differences between marriage partners mayaccount for lack of aversion. Using mainly Malinowski’s Tro-briand data, Gates argues that under compelling culturalcircumstances aversion and taboo may be overridden at ahigh social cost.

Editors Wolf and Durham differ on whether Wester-marck’s hypothesis has carried the day. Wolf’s analysis ofhis Taiwanese data shows a strong correlation between earlychildhood association and sexual aversion. Durham argues,contra many predecessors, including David F. Aberle et al.(1963), that human societies could have and did recognizethe deleterious effects of inbreeding, which was then pro-hibited via incest taboos, possibly to avoid supernaturalpunishment. In his view, cultural incest taboos probablyarose through different processes than sexual aversion inindividuals.

Together the two co-editors argue for the importantidea that attachment and sexual aversion had to evolve to-gether. They suggest that the explanation for incest avoid-ance in humans and other animals, and for widespreadincest taboos in human societies, must lie in the dynam-ics of how these two propensities interact and are canal-ized through socialization processes. Here, one of Freud’smost important insights for which there is much empiri-cal evidence—namely, childhood sexuality—is given shortshrift. Anne Pusey’s summary of the primate evidence


and Erickson’s analysis of clinical understandings aboutpsychopathologies associated with incest suggest a use-ful revision of their idea. Pusey describes multiple studiesthat showed high levels of inbreeding avoidance in manyprimate species, but not absolute avoidance. The mainexceptions to avoidance were attempts by immature malesto mount or mate with close female relatives, who usuallyprotested vigorously. Pusey observes that full sexual matu-rity in primates develops over a long period of time, butsexual behaviors of various kinds occur earlier. Erickson re-views the strong correlation in humans between seriouspsychopathologies and experiences of incest at very youngages. He wonders whether some contemporary societies inwhich reported incest seems to be increasing underminethe kinds of socializing experiences that contribute to thedevelopment of strong attachment, sexual aversion, andhence incest-avoidant behavior. Wolf and Durham’s pro-posal about attachment and aversion might lead to under-standing a wider range of behaviors if it were looked at asco-evolution of attachment and sexual development, withaversion as one possible outcome.

The chapters take up specific aspects of Westermarck’sview, establish some common ground, and point to avenuesfor further research. The strength of this book is the presen-tation of views from many disciplines in dialogue with eachother. As such, it provides new perspectives on the complexand intricate relationships among culture, biology, and be-havior. Scholars and advanced students in biological andcultural anthropology will find it essential reading.

REFERENCE CITEDAberle, David F., Urie Bronfenbrenner, Eckhard H. Hess, Daniel R.

Miller, David M. Schneider, and James N. Spuhler1963 The Incest Taboo and the Mating Patterns of Animals.

American Anthropologist 65(2):253–265.

What’s Class Got to Do with It? American Society inthe Twenty-First Century. Michael Zweig, ed. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 2004. 211 pp.

JUDITH GOODETemple University

This volume, intended as a “resource for the newly emerg-ing field of working class studies” (p. 2), includes contri-butions from scholars and activists. Its goals include estab-lishing a higher profile for class analysis in the academyand examining prospects for class-based politics. There is apervasive sense that time is ripe for class-based movementsnow that Cold War anticommunist hysteria has abated andwages, benefits, and opportunities for secure meaningfulwork are disappearing.

Unfortunately, this collection falls short of its aim to as-sert a new vision incorporating recent insights about neolib-eralism and political subjectivity. Lacking a well-developedglobal framework, it largely stays within the self-containedboundaries of U.S. labor history as a linear sequence ofpolitical regimes, policies, and union organizational struc-

ture. Conflicts within labor are almost invisible. Differ-ent audience levels are imagined resulting in discordantvoices, theoretical frames, and empirical examples. Thetasks of sorting out these inconsistencies and raising crit-ical questions for future research are sorely needed eitherin the introduction or through more engagement betweenauthors.

The introduction and most sections of the book areintended for students and often seem simplified. Threechapters bring race or gender separately into class analy-sis. Anthropologists will not find anything new here andwill miss the insights of ethnographically grounded workon whiteness or on how class and racial identities inter-sect to affect women’s negotiations of work and family. Twochapters in a section focusing on youth argue for strategiesto help working-class students with their discomforts in theacademy. One chapter essentializes working-class culture intalking about “cultural conflict” and seems to argue for la-bor studies as a “safe place” for a “special needs” population.This veers uncomfortably close to a “self-esteem” therapy atodds with the book’s political analysis.

Only two chapters, those written by William Tabb andLes Panitch, out of 11 total use the global neoliberal frame-work characteristic of anthropological work on working-class experience and social movements. Both assume anaudience level very different from undergraduates. Thesechapters move beyond the labor movement to grapple withbroader shifts from Keynesian state interventions in themarket to neoliberal state enforcement of free markets. Eachauthor stakes a position in the voice and terms of currentdebates within the left and problematizes the concept andforms of class analysis glossed over elsewhere. Questions areraised about the need to look beyond work as a site of classstruggle and to rethink class structure because some profes-sional and managerial work, defined as outside the work-ing class in the introduction, is increasingly contingent,proletarianized, and devoid of meaning and control. Unfor-tunately, readers are left on their own to identify and rec-oncile the implicit contradictions between chapters. For ex-ample, Tabb asserts that the antiglobalization movement isreformist and needs to develop a class perspective, whereasPanitch views it as a class movement needing new tactics—less virtually organized protest and more locally groundedorganization.

Throughout the volume, the ways in which power ismasked by discursive constructions lurk below explanationsof the weakness of United States class politics: Cold Warsilencing; labor disunity produced by racially segmentedwork and the psychic “wages of whiteness”; the subjec-tive compensations of consumerism and identification withimperial power. Yet there is neither theorizing nor actualdemonstration of how cultural processes work. Academicsand labor activists make assertions about workers’ livesand beliefs. Evidence from anthropological work on labor,poverty, development, political ecology, and social move-ments could provide a complexity necessary for under-standing the contingent cultural processes through which


working-class people take on, reshape, or reject discoursesof power as political subjects in multiple sites of struggle.

Without theorizing culture and identity, a critical neo-liberal cultural barrier to political action is missed. Asmarket triumphalism combines with the governmentalisteffects of therapeutic expertise, a culture of self-blameis reinforced along with the belief that only those re-making themselves for the market deserve the “Ameri-can Dream.” Documenting and understanding how thisdivides and masks class interests for working-class peo-

ple is important to assessing the future of working-classmovements.

In spite of the currency suggested by the title, this vol-ume, while raising timely and important questions aboutthe future, reproduces much residual baggage from thepast to produce a limited vision of a new interdisplinaryterrain. Although many anthropologists have collaboratedwith labor studies scholars, individually and collectively,this volume demonstrates a need for deeper, continuousengagement.

Documents

A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures of the Mega-City:A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures of the Mega-City