Jewish mysticism and magic: an anthropological perspective - By Maureen Bloom

Book reviews

Antiquity

Bloom, Maureen. Jewish mysticism and magic:an anthropological perspective. xvii, 231 pp.,map, figs, illus., bibliogr. London, New York:Routledge, 2007. £70.00 (cloth)

The study of ancient Jewish mysticism and magicis currently undergoing a profound revolution,driven both by the availability of many newsources (mystical and magical texts foundamong the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewishamulets and incantation bowls, and ancientJewish magical texts found in the Cairo Genizah)and by the emergence of new perspectives fromwhich to view these rich archaeological andtextual remains.

Maureen Bloom’s wide-ranging study is abold attempt to study biblical and rabbinicJudaism from an anthropological perspective,with special emphasis on the relations betweenthe Jews and their God in antiquity and lateantiquity (and occasionally in later periods aswell), and on the recurrence of mystical andespecially magical impulses both in the HebrewBible and in rabbinic literature. Following someintroductory materials on ancient Jewish historyand its textual remains, the author devotesspecific chapters to such issues as the Jewishperceptions of God and of His covenant withHis people, as they emerge from the biblicalaccounts, and the all-encompassing Jewishdistinction between the ‘sacred’ and the‘profane’, with all the dichotomies and notionsof ‘graded holiness’ which this distinctionentails. The next chapter is devoted to thecentrality of sacrifice (and, after the destructionof the Temple in 70 CE, of prayer, and of

mystical contemplation and praxis) as the bestmeans of approaching God. This is followed by achapter on the care of the human body,especially in rabbinic literature, and on therabbis’ ideology of moderation in all humanactivities and their active use of medicine andmagic to ward off demons and illnesses. Thenext chapter deals with the Hekhalot literature (abody of pre-Kabbalistic Jewish mystical texts),which displays a great interest in God’s throneand the surrounding angels who worship Him,and in the mystic’s own ascent to these heavenlyspheres. This is followed by a chapter devoted toSefer ha-Razim (a book of magic written inHebrew, probably in late-antique Palestine) andother Jewish magical texts, in an effort to showthe close relations between Temple service,priestly action, prayer, celestial ascent, andmagical praxis, and analyse the Jewish magicaltexts’ assumptions about the origins of theirauthority and power. In each of these chapters,Bloom seeks to provide evidence from theancient Jewish sources and to analyse it withinthe specific context of the Jewish monotheisticenterprise. Finally, a brief Epilogue summarizesthe book’s main conclusions and stresses thatthe magic impulses found at the heart of ancientJewish monotheism are still alive and well today.This, of course, is one reason why Jewish magicfinally is accorded the attention refused it byprevious generations of scholars, who insistedthat the biblical and rabbinic prohibitions onmagic and divination uprooted all suchphenomena from mainstream Jewish society.

Bloom’s analysis tends to follow in thefootsteps of Mary Douglas, whose seminalstudies on Leviticus and Numbers demonstratedhow the biblical texts might be approached byexperienced anthropologists who do not share

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 890-935© Royal Anthropological Institute 2008

James Frazer’s infatuation with cross-culturalparallels and prefer the ‘thick’ description anddetailed analysis of specific cultural systems. ButBloom’s aim is to cover much larger bodies oftexts than Douglas ever did, and her worktherefore is more exposed to specific criticismfrom the experts in each of the specializedsubfields into which she ventures. Moreover,there is no doubt that the book could havebenefited from a greater familiarity with some ofthe more recent scholarship, especially inHebrew (and I am thinking of the works ofYuval Harari, Dina Stein, Jonathan Garb, YairLorberbaum, Nissan Rubin, and others, whocover some of the ground covered here). But inspite of such shortcomings, this book is a uniqueattempt to offer an anthropological bird’s-eyeview of long stretches of Jewish cultural history,and thus serves as a valuable reminder thatmysticism and magic are not a foreign implantinto Jewish culture, but were endemic in thatculture from its very beginning and down to ourown days. This claim fits well with the results ofother recent studies of ancient Jewish mysticismand magic, and thus bodes well for the future ofthese complex and hitherto understudied fields.

Gideon Bohak Tel Aviv University

Eidinow, Esther. Oracles, curses, and riskamong the ancient Greeks. xvi, 516 pp., maps,illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2007.£80.00 (cloth)

Classical scholars generally fall into threecategories: those who do not useanthropological materials; those who do but arestuck somewhere in the mid-twentieth century(and thus the ubiquitous references toEvans-Pritchard); and, in the smallest group,those who attempt to utilize currentanthropological writings and methods. EstherEidinow, in her ambitious and learned book,clearly falls into the third category. Indeed,this book can be recommended to anyanthropologist who seeks an example of asophisticated application by an ancient historianof insights and methods gleaned from theirdiscipline. The author’s purpose is to explorehow non-elite ancient Greek men and womenconstructed and responded to perceptions ofrisk in their daily lives. Eidinow had the novelidea of combining a study of oracular texts fromthe Greek sanctuary of Dodona (sixth to secondcentury BCE) with an examination of the corpusof curse tablets (sixth to first century BCE). Sheemploys a conception of risk as being socially

constructed that is derived from the writingsof Mary Douglas; but insights and analogiesare also taken from a wide range of othercontemporary anthropologists and sociologists.

The book is divided into two halves, the firstexamining the published oracle questions fromDodona and the second dealing with bindingcurses. Eidinow argues very convincingly thatcurse-writing during this period was essentially apre-emptive defence against future danger, anaggressive attempt to manage sources of risk.Equally convincing is her analysis of whyindividuals sought oracular guidance and whatkind of help they expected to receive. Byconsulting oracles, people addressed risks overwhich they had some control (e.g. should I goon this journey or marry this woman?). Bindingcurses, on the other hand, dealt with situationsin which the danger was perceived as beingimminent and out of the curse-writer’s control.Abandoning standard interpretations of oraclesas merely confirming things already decidedupon and of binding curses as being weapons ofdestruction in competitive power struggles,Eidinow views both oracles and curses astechniques for the management of risk anduncertainty. In addition to her original,insightful, and theoretically sophisticatedanalyses, she also provides a Greek text andtranslation of all of the texts that she examines.This collection on its own, even without thewide-ranging discussion, would make this avaluable book.

Although this elegantly written book is,by any standard, a work of originality andremarkable erudition, two problems are worthdrawing attention to. This is the firstcomprehensive study of the oracle of Zeus atDodona since the 1960s and for a veryunderstandable reason: only about 150 of the1,400 lead tablets that were excavated in 1875

have been published so far. Instead of waitingfor the publication of the remaining texts,Eidinow took the risk of working with theexisting materials. The late Anastasios-Ph.Christidis, the last surviving member of the teamentrusted with their publication, vouchsafed afew unpublished tablets and summarized thecontents of many more, and thus the text ispunctuated with expressions such as ‘ProfessorChristidis reported/told me that in theunpublished material there are also questionsabout x and y’. Eidinow’s decision to compile acatalogue of the oracles is justifiable, since thereis no sign that the remaining tablets will bepublished anytime soon; but the constantreferences to this body of unpublished material

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can come dangerously close to underminingthe author’s conclusions about the types ofquestions that were most commonly asked andthe kinds of people who asked them (the lastparagraph on p. 131 is an example).

Secondly, although Eidinow is deft in herapplication of theory in support of her argumentthat perceptions of risk and danger are culturallydetermined, her final summation is remarkablyunsurprising: ‘The concerns of the oraclequestions show which areas of life wereperceived as particularly likely to be sources ofmisfortune – marriage to the wrong person,travel, disease’. And as for the curse tablets,‘They demonstrate how in moments ofparticular crisis, other people were perceived assources of risk’ (p. 235). One could have reachedthese same conclusions, at least in the case ofthe oracle texts, by employing a traditionaltheory-free philological approach, since theoracles themselves pretty obviously deal withconcerns about marriage, travel, work, anddisease. But the long and adventurous journeythat Eidinow takes us on reveals a great dealbesides this simple conclusion, and thisimportant work sheds new light on the social,psychological, and emotional world of theancient Greeks.

Michael Attyah Flower Princeton University

Flower, Michael Attyah. The seer in ancientGreece. xviii, 305 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2008. £23.95

(cloth)

In The seer in ancient Greece, Michael Flowerconsiders many of the questions that have besetmodern scholarship about the nature and role ofseers (manteis) and divination in ancient Greece,as well as raising questions more rarely askedabout the contemporary formation of the imageof the seer. Much useful information is gatheredhere, including a thorough overview of theevidence for seers in warfare. Flower’s accountof the ancient material covers most of therelevant texts, and is augmented by epigraphicand (beautifully reproduced) iconographicevidence. There are illuminating discussions tobe found here (e.g. of oracular question types,pp. 101-2).

Flower offers this book as the first to bewritten about seers. This is true insofar as hedefines them as a profession that practised onlydivination, separate from others who made theirliving from a range of supernatural activities.His concern to identify this ideal type (p. 63),

however, overrides evidence (acknowledged pp.22, 27ff., 66) that manteis seem to have offeredother supernatural or ‘magical’ services. Hisdiscussion of ancient ‘magic’ and its relationshipto ‘religion’ compresses recent scholarship onthis subject, and does not consider how thesecategories – and attitudes towards them andtheir practitioners – developed. At one point heseems to suggest that the Greeks themselvesused these categories – and that we know whatthey thought about them (p. 69).

It is not always clear how the idealized seerfits Flower’s intention to describe the seerswhom people consulted from day to day.Other comments made by the author suggestthat his category of the seer compriseseducated members of the elite, highly paid,well-respected, at the centre of Greek life – andmale. (It is hard not to respond to the chapterabout female seers, placed at the end of thebook, as an after-thought; it focuses largely onthe problems presented by the role of the Pythiaat Delphi.) Flower’s description of the activitiesof manteis is thorough, and includes aprovocative attempt to explore the performativeaspects of divination, and the relationshipbetween a seer and his clients. However, thereare some inconsistencies in his analysis (e.g. thestatement that they are not messengers of thegods, p. 30, is at variance with later discussions,p. 39, p. 79 and chap. 8), and the admirableattempt at building a typology of divination isnot wholly clear.

Flower draws on an impressive range ofanthropological writings on African divination,using quotations to make, as well as support, hisarguments. Even so, there is still room for amore sophisticated theoretical analysis. Forexample, he states that he will take a neutralapproach to the evidence (p. 11) but does notdiscuss the difficulties of achieving such a stance.Two separate discussions about the question ofthe rationality of divination seem to come todifferent conclusions (pp. 13 and 105). Flowersuggests that we use anthropological researchon oracles to explore belief systems (p. 105), butdoes not examine crucial differences betweenthe beliefs apparently underpinning ancientGreek divination and those that prompt theAfrican divinatory practices that he cites, such asthe Azande poison oracle.

Flower underscores how one must readancient texts in context and with care, but someof his textual analysis is puzzling: for example,a sensitive discussion of representations ofdivination in Euripides sits uneasily with thesuggestion that a character’s speech might be

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taken to represent the views of the playwright(p. 141, see also p. 210), while the ambiguityintroduced by different sources is too swiftlydismissed (p. 118). There is also a tendency totake ancient accounts, especially those ofXenophon, at face value (e.g. pp. 112, 200).Flower’s description of the image-making of theseer examines the power of Homeric precedentin the conscious shaping of both literaryaccounts and behaviour. It draws particularattention to the intriguing role of the individualseer in this process, but could perhaps lay moreemphasis on the role of wider culturalinfluences, which unconsciously shape commonunderstandings.

The specialist may find him- or herselffrustrated by lack of detail (in particular byassertions of ‘what is generally thought’ withoutadequate supporting citations), and mightprefer, in parts, a more nuanced account of thedifficulties presented by both the evidence andmodern attempts to make sense of it. However,for both newcomer and specialist this bookcovers much relevant evidence, provides a usefulcompilation of the work of leading ancienthistorians and anthropologists in this area, andoffers stimulating insights into the figure of theseer.

Esther Eidinow University of Oxford

Art and archaeology

Gosden, Chris & Frances Larson. Knowingthings: exploring the collections at the PittRivers Museum 1884-1945. xv, 261 pp., figs,tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press,2007. £55.00 (cloth)

This book is the product of the RelationalMuseum – a research project conducted in thePitt Rivers Museum that set out to explore thenetwork of connections around the collectionsfrom the period of the museum’s inception to1945. It consists of a series of chapters on thecollections and their collectors, rather than anycomprehensive history of the museum. From theoutset, we are reminded that objects are centralto the way humans understand their world andother people in it, so that knowledge andidentity are partly social and partly material. As asystem of connections, the museum can beunderstood as a pivotal site for driving a largeand complex set of relationships betweenpeople who made, used, and exchanged

objects, and those who transacted these objectson their way to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Theauthors show how this relational model of themuseum is constantly in a state of flux as peoplemove in and out of the museum and objectspass in and out of their hands, constantly inmotion – leading to the gradual expansion ofthe collections as we know them today. Giventhe general impression that the Pitt RiversMuseum is a type of time capsule, left in itslate nineteenth-century state, what is strikingis how this book underlines the changes tothe collections over the last 120 years, eventhough this seems to be unknown to manytoday.

The authors’ research draws on archivalmaterials and the digital records of the museum.Of particular originality, they employ themuseum’s computer collections managementdatabase to interesting effect, creating a series ofstatistical analyses and pie charts of collectingrecords plotting out when certain types ofobjects were collected and in what year, as wellas numbers of objects accessioned from aparticular place over a ten-year period. Forexample, we learn through the database thecomposition of Henry Balfour’s collection, thefirst curator of the Pitt Rivers: it consisted mainlyof European objects (52 per cent), followedby African (22 per cent) and then Asian(15 per cent).

At the core of this project are key figures inthe museum’s history who pursued collecting asa form of scientific inquiry: Pitt Rivers, Balfour,Tylor, Beatrice Blackwood, Charles and BrendaSeligman, John Henry Hutton. Each character isassigned a one-page biography, a snapsnot oftheir life in the museum. While this mode ofpresentation offers little to scholars interested inEuropean collectors, what is more revealing iswhen the authors discuss the enchainment ofthe key figures in a network of relations with amyriad of other collectors and curators. Such afocus demonstrates how personal friendshipsand collecting preferences shaped the natureof the collections, and how changing ideasabout the nature of material culture constantlyshifted the boundaries between archaeologyand anthropology.

The book is filled with examples of howcollections were acquired through socialnetworking: for instance, we are told howBalfour’s interest in fire pistons arose from aconcern with the dispersal of this technologyacross Southeast Asia. Archival research revealshow a network of personal acquaintances andcorrespondence led to the amassing of fire

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pistons on Balfour’s behalf so that he couldpursue his inquiry further.

This book will be of interest to those whowant to learn more about the history of the PittRivers Museum, particularly those who have aspecific interest in the relation betweenuniversity museums and academicanthropology. It covers the early intellectualideas associated with ethnographic objects andreminds us of the university museum as akin toa laboratory space: a site of problem-basedresearch and learning. It contains a number ofillustrations from the notes of the curators,providing a useful insight into theanthropological theories of Tylor, Balfour, andothers. Yet, while this book repeatedly comesback to assert the significance of the naturebetween people and things, it is invariably thepeople whom we learn about. Indeed, while welearn that Balfour – trained in anatomy andmorphology – dissected and described objectsin order to understand the collection better,readers will most certainly feel that they stillknow as much (or as little) about those objectsthat compose the collections and the indigenoushistories of their makers as they did beforereading this book.

Graeme Were University College London

Greene, Candace S. & Russell Thornton

(eds). The year the stars fell: Lakota wintercounts at the Smithsonian. xii, 347 pp., maps,plates, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ.Nebraska Press, 2007. £25.00 (cloth)

This informative and beautifully produced andillustrated book examines a number of ‘wintercounts’ together on a chronological basis. Ittakes its title from the Lakota name for thewinter of 1833-4, when the Leonid meteorshower was seen in the Plains. It includes manyblack and white and coloured plates. Bypresenting a number of counts together, it aimsto produce a better basis for historicalreconstruction.

The term ‘winter count’ translates the Lakotawaniyetu wowapi, probably more accuratelymeaning ‘winter writing’ or ‘winter picture’, theword for winter – waniyetu – also denoting‘year’. These are chronicles kept by individuals(‘keepers’) among the Lakota and other Plainspeoples recording important events for aparticular ‘band’ or tioshpaye by the year inpictorial form. Thus a winter count consists of asequence of pictures, each one portraying aparticular event for a particular year. The oldest

counts were written on buffalo hide, usingnatural colouring materials, arranged in a spiralform with the first at the centre and othersfollowing outwards. Later counts were producedwith European material on paper, canvas, orlinen, using manufactured colouring materialsand often in horizontal lines. Some of these goback as far as the 1600s, though the majoritybegin in the 1770s (p. 4). The editors mentionthat, although there are a great many counts,most can be assigned to a small number ofwinter count independent traditions or ‘cycles’(p. 10). The counts treated are named after theLakota keeper, or, if he is not known, the owneror original location. They include AmericanHorse, Battiste Good, Cloud Shield, Hardin, IronDog, Lone Dog, Long Soldier, Major Bush, MatoSapa, No Ears, Northern, Rosebud, Swift Bear,Swift Dog, The Flame, The Swan, and WhiteCow Killer. A useful diagram on p. 13 shows thetime overlap of the seventeen counts referred toin the volume, the earliest being that of BattisteGood, covering the years 1700-1875.

The history of the available versions isinteresting since what we have (pp. 15-16) isoften a photograph or copy made by aresearcher of an original Indian-owned versionon hide or an artist’s reconstruction on buffalohide, made from a copy. However, as the editorspoint out, winter counts are part of a dynamictradition, since a count would often be buriedwith its owner at his death along with otherpersonal possessions. In preparation for that,copies were made by an apprentice, usually ason or nephew, and thus a count would covermore than one lifespan (p. 2). The editors alsonote that the counts may have been compiledfrom earlier oral traditions and that manyscholars think that the physical objects nowextant were not produced until the nineteenthcentury (p. 3).

The book has two prefaces, one by eacheditor, an introduction to the subject, anaccount of winter counts in the Smithsonian, anaccount of a winter count from the Rosebud, adetailed 229-page account and display of thecounts, a section on counts from other Plainstribes, an afterword by Emil Her Many Horses,a bibliography and an index.

The introduction refers to earlier studies indetail, putting the present volume in contextand detailing the history of the collection andrecording of these counts. It also givesinformation on other record-keeping traditions,including petroglyphs and biographicaldrawings that recorded the brave deeds of men,including war honours, successful hunts, and

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interaction with spirits, which could be recordedon tipis, clothing, paper, or in ledger books.These latter often include narrative orcommentary in Lakota written in the Latin script,writing having been introduced in the 1880s bymissionaries. A good example is Lakota warriorby Joseph White Bull (1968).

Chapter 2 has photographs of counts fromthe Smithsonian and also of some of the keepersof these counts. Chapter 3 gives an account of acount discovered in California in 1998, whichhad probably been collected in the 1800s byJohn Alvin Anderson, a photographer andmerchant associated with the RosebudReservation.

The display of the counts begins on p. 71 inchapter 4, starting with the year 1700-1 andending in 1920-1, also including Battiste Good’s‘Earlier Entries’, which include multiple-yearentries between 901 and 1700, each coveringperiods of approximately 100 years.

Chapter 5 covers in brief calendars from theKiowa, Blackfeet, and Mandan. The afterword byEmil Her Many Horses presents her personalcount for the years 1999-2005.

Bruce Ingham School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Hamilakis, Yannis. The nation and its ruins:antiquity, archaeology, and nationalimagination in Greece. xxii, 352 pp., illus.,bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2007. £60.00

(cloth)

Over the past quarter-century, anthropologicalstudents of nationalism have paid close attentionto the Greek case. The nation and its ruins adds adistinctive new voice and vision. The author, anarchaeologist, addresses a yawning lacuna: themateriality (or tactility) of the antiquarianlandscape in which a heterogeneous populationultimately acquired a visceral sense ofbelonging. Hamilakis shows how the ideologicalimperatives of the emergent nation-statechannelled what was already a strongattachment to the physical remains of the past,recasting admiration for the feats of distantpredecessors as pride in a past at once newlyancestral and vividly present.

Hamilakis emphasizes that the context of thattransformation was Western colonialism (thecondition that I have elsewhere dubbed‘crypto-colonial’ – a celebration of nationalindependence on terms dictated by powerfuloutsiders). He pursues his ingeniously duplexevocation of touch and empire through a series

of case studies: the establishment ofarchaeological institutes by both foreigners andGreeks; the entailment of the modernist scienceof archaeology in the creation of nationalcultural consensus; the role of ManolisAndronikos, discoverer of the ‘royal’ tombs ofVergina, in reinforcing the Greek incorporationof Macedonia in the nationalist programme; there-use of archaeology by the fascist Metaxasregime; the reproduction of classical antiquitiesamong leftist dissidents; and the battle over theElgin Marbles (with lucid re-telling of the lateMelina Mercouri’s campaign for their restitutionand of the subsequent transformation of theGreek position from insistence on nationalownership to arguments based on aestheticcontext and completeness).

Hamilakis also adds a new challenge tosimplistic separations of the modern from thepre-modern. While his use of the latter termseems inconsistent with his own statedopposition to allochronic and exoticizingformulations, his identification of symbolic andsensory underpinnings in the modernist project– notably in Andronikos’ ‘shamanic’ evocation ofdreams and of the sense of touch – is, while notwholly novel (arguments against the rationalityof the bureaucratic nation-state recognizeprecisely this point), useful in explaining howarchaeology so successfully pervaded thecollective Greek imagination of a shared nationalpast. He also makes space for the sometimestactically disguised divergences, couched alwayswithin the shared idiom of Hellenic antiquity andincreasingly dominated by the fusion of theclassical with the Byzantine that he dubs‘indigenous Hellenism’, between those whoespoused the virulent anti-communism of theCold War state and those who believed insteadthat the heroic struggle of the oppressedworking class and leftist intellectuals revived theancient spirit – a spirit the dissidents alsoperceived, from their own perspective, in suchantiquities as the columns of Sounion thatloomed out of the mists at the harshlydisciplined prison island of Makronisos.

Hamilakis is an erudite and elegant writer(though he should have been better served byhis copy-editor). He has begun to build anoriginal bridge between new anthropologicalwork on the senses and one of the mostconservative intellectual communities in Europe.Wisely refusing either to join the increasinglyunconvincing chorus predicting the demise ofnationalism or the equally crass fad ofcondemning it outright, he none the lesssucceeds in delicately probing its ironic internal

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contradictions and in tracing these to thecolonial forces that the archaeologicalestablishment itself resists acknowledging. Suchacknowledgement, as he shows, would subvertthe nationalists’ key claims to Europeanness anduniqueness (and, one might add, would exposethe racist overtones that the crypto-colonialdynamic has successfully injected intoindigenous heritage discourses such as thehostile reception, which he notes, of Bernal’sBlack Athena).

It is a pity that, as a self-declarednon-ethnographer, Hamilakis does not offer adetailed account of how tactility is sustained ineveryday encounters with the landscape;anthropologists can now bring visual techniquesto the study of both those interactions and theirtransmission. Occasionally, too, he exaggerates,as when he curiously insists that archaeologywas more important than folklore in establishingGreek national identity (pp. 86, 148). Suchgeneralizations represent a double fallacy: onthe one hand, they buy into the bureaucraticstate’s rhetoric of precision, as, ironically, doesHamilakis’s narrow reading (p. 105) of‘monumental time’ as straightforwardlydescriptive rather than as a labile discursivedevice; on the other, they perpetuate preciselythe simplistic material-symbolic dichotomy thathe elsewhere effectively undermines. Some maysimilarly wonder whether his emphasis ontactility reproduces the exceptionalist celebration– ironically instantiating ‘indigenous Hellenism’?– of Greeks-as-feeling-Mediterranean-people. Hisotherwise magnificently crafted argumentdeserves both a readership extending wellbeyond regional specializations and,concomitantly, better protection from suchpresumably unworthy misprision.

Michael Herzfeld Harvard University

Houston, Stephen, David Stuart & Karl

Taube. The memory of bones: body, being,and experience among the Classic Maya.324 pp., illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. TexasPress, 2006. $55.00 (cloth)

The memory of bones, penned by twoepigraphers and an iconographer, is not aboutbones but rather about the Classic Maya bodies– and the persons – that they once supported.The title is taken loosely from Mexican poetOctavio Paz: ‘a memory of other bones, aglimpse that touches, and words that burn’. Inthe preamble, the authors overview the variedintellectual threads underlying their investigation

of how the Maya viewed and represented thehuman body, especially the bodies of theirdynasts: the body ‘allows a fundamental reachtoward empathy and an entrée into pastexperience’; it ‘provides insights ... about theintersection of body and cosmos, being, spirit,and vitality’ (p. 2).

The book is organized into eight chapters,plus the preamble and an epilogue. Much of thecontent of seven of these sections has appearedelsewhere with Houston as lead author. Chapter1 introduces Maya bodies and the themes oflater chapters: ‘skin and surface; head, torso,and extremities; fluids, energies, and internalparts; ... sex, sexuality, and gender’ (p. 11). Thisintroduction is tough-going, as much of the textis a terse itemization of various terms – from theexpected (face, foot, male) to the unexpected(snot, drool, earwax) – in multiple Mayanlanguages. Chapter 2, ‘Bodies and portraits’, isan easier read, exploring the central theme of‘self and personhood’ beginning with the widelyoccurring and long-lived terms winik (man,human, person) and baah (body, head, face;image). Consideration of these terms leads toanalysis of Maya beliefs in ‘vitalizing energies’such as the soul and companion spirit (way),and ultimately to the equation between the rulerand personification of time.

Chapter 3, ‘Ingestion’, focuses on the socialrole of eating and consumption among theMaya, with due attention to the roles of cacao,maize dough and tamales, tobacco, andfermented beverages. These foodstuffs appearregularly in palace scenes painted onpolychrome pottery, indicating conspicuousconsumption at courtly feasts. So, too, doimages of enemas – accompanied by ‘signs ofjollity and merriment, along with music by smallorchestras’ (p. 117) – and occasional vomiting.

Chapter 4, ‘Senses’, begins with anintroduction to ‘synesthesia’: visual signssignalling other sensations not received visually.The authors then move to the words and imagesthat convey Maya concerns with smell, soundand hearing (including speech), sight, and, to alesser extent, taste and touch. All thesechannelled Maya perception and cognition oftheir world, and allow glimpses into thoseperceptions. Thus they also, in many respects,form the basis for the other chapters in thebook. Chapter 5 treats ‘Emotions’, whichmodern viewers must try to interpret throughthe lens of empathy. Emotional affect was notconveyed through classic texts but ratherthrough imagery, and is evident in fivecategories: terror of captives; drunken abandon;

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lust; humour/ridicule; and, rarely, grief/mourning. The imagery suggests that theMaya ‘unquestionably found an ideal inunexpressed emotion and rigid self-control’(p. 198), with emotional expression moreassociated with sub-humanity.

Chapter 6, ‘Dishonor’, addresses escalatingpatterns of humiliating captives and ‘eroticdegradation’, both – particularly the latter –involving explicit phallic imagery. ‘Words onwings’, the evocative title of chapter 7, addressesthe polyvalency of the word muut, meaningboth ‘bird’ and ‘news’ or tidings’: birds, in Mayamythology and iconography, represent oracularmessengers. Finally, in chapter 8, the authorsrefer to performative activities, including dance,music and instruments, and masked costumery.The Maya exhibited a sophisticated knowledgeof musicology and staging for processions,dances, and other contexts for the music of theirrattles, flutes, trumpets, and many kinds ofdrums, all made of pottery, shells, gourds, andbone.

The memory of bones is lavishly illustratedwith scenes from polychrome pottery andmurals (regrettably not in colour) and linedrawings of glyphs, stelae, and graffiti, bringingMaya senses, body-parts, and other themes tovisual reality. Discussions are amplified bycross-cultural analogies and references tophilosophy and literature, thereby situating theMaya in broader humanistic contexts. Animportant point, often restated, is that classicrepresentations of the body and being aredecidedly androcentric: Maya painters, sculptors,and scribes were male, and thus imagery wascoloured by a male gaze. I read the volume withrapt attention and prodigious admiration for theerudition of its authors. It will be immenselyappealing to archaeologists, art historians,linguists, and others who are captivated by theClassic Maya and their stunning representationsof the human form painted or carved with theirunique melding of reverence, humour, anddisgust.

Prudence M. Rice Southern Illinois UniversityCarbondale

Leick, Gwendolyn (ed.). The Babylonianworld. xxi, 590 pp., maps, illus., bibliogrs.London, New York: Routledge, 2007. £135.00

(cloth)

The reviewed book presents another volume inthe ‘Routledge Worlds’ series, offering athorough account of the ‘Babylonian world’.

Gwendolyn Leick succeeded in bringing togetheran international group of eminent scholars, eachof whom covered a topic according to his or herfocus and speciality. Thus, we have at ourdisposal thirty-eight articles on various aspectsof the Babylonian universe, providing insightinto its complexity and richness.

The contributions are arranged in seven partsdevoted in logical sequence to the mostimportant segments of the ‘world’, so as to giveas broad, and at the same time transparent, apicture as possible. The first part, ‘Land and landuse’, explores the necessities which served asthe basis for development of the urbanMesopotamian civilization. We find herediscussions of agriculture and husbandry, itscharacteristic methods and inventive approachesthat ensured continual flourishing of theMesopotamian economy; of the complex andchanging relations of cities to the hinterland; ofskilled agricultural management in the middleEuphrates region, whose environment, distinctfrom the alluvial plain of southern Babylonia,called for different treatment; and finally of theMesopotamian landscape’s hallmarks, the cities,their layout, public buildings, spaces, amenities,defensive systems, and residential quarters.

This is followed by a section called ‘Materialculture’, starting with an article on tradition andinnovation of architectural methods applied toshaping and re-shaping the outer form ofBabylonian cities (with examples from the OldBabylonian period) as well as their mostprominent public buildings, and on the stabilityand change of settlement and social patternsclosely connected with it. The next study isdevoted to perhaps the most characteristicrepresentatives of Babylonian material culture,the cylinder seals. It examines the materials fromwhich they were made, the techniques used fortheir production during three periods ofBabylonian history (Old Babylonian, Kassite,Neo-Babylonian), as well as the meaning ofscenes depicted and inscriptions carved. Thearticle is full of splendid photographs ofdiscussed seals and their impressions on clay.

The following contributions deal with itemswhich were subject to exchange with foreigncountries. First, raw materials (various sortsof metals, stones, wood, ivory, shell, andaromatic substances), notoriously lacking inMesopotamia, that had to be imported,particularly from areas to the southeast and eastof the alluvial plain as well as from the region onthe shore of the Persian Gulf, are discussed here.Second, the techniques of weaving anddecorating textiles, one of the major export

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articles, are analysed. The section continues withan article on visual art in various contexts(monumental, votive, on boundary stones andcity architecture) and ends with a discussion ofall documented kinds of food and drink enjoyedby the Babylonians.

The third section, ‘Economic life’, opens witha general overview of basic strategies exercisedto organize the economy effectively, from theearliest phases down to the second millenniumBC, and with an examination of the lens throughwhich we perceive them. It is followed by twoarticles on Old Babylonian economy focusing onthe changes developed at that time and on theirconsequences. Next comes an analysis of theNeo- and Late Babylonian economy. First ageneral one, describing the segments,institutions, and groups involved, and then amore specific one offering an insight into thehistory and dealings of the wealthy andinfluential Egibi family.

The fourth part, ‘Society and politics’, followsthe preceding one smoothly by aiming at thepeople and institutions creating and sustainingthe economy. It consists of articles on thecomposition of Mesopotamian society in theEarly Dynastic period (monarch, elites,commoners, slaves) and the roles of itsrespective strata; on the most essentialinstitutions controlling and fostering themajority of economic activities throughoutMesopotamian history – the palace and temple;and on the closely connected personality of theking, his ideology and efforts to maintain socialorder. The last two contributions, meanwhile,analyse the roles of two specific social groups:the Arameans and Chaldeans in the firstmillennium BC; and women from the OldBabylonian period onwards.

In the next section, ‘Religion’, the discussionshifts from social structures to the supernaturalrealm, the pillar of Mesopotamian worldview. Itopens with an examination of the role of femaledeities in Nippur under the Third Dynasty ofUr, before moving on to a superb treatmentof the development of the famous goddessInana/Ishtar’s image in Mesopotamian religiousthought throughout millennia. Various aspectsof the most important Babylonian male deity,Marduk, are then discussed. The last twocontributions deal with divination andanti-witchcraft techniques used to predict thefuture and to ward off evil, drawing on theexceptionally rich cuneiform literature devotedto these subjects.

These issues are intimately linked to topicstreated in the following part, ‘Intellectual life:

cuneiform writing and learning’, where the mostfamous themes of Mesopotamian intellectualendeavour – namely medicine, prolificletter-writing, mathematics, compiling of lexicallists to fathom the world and to educate, thetradition of exquisite literary works such as theGilgamesh Epic, astrology and astronomy, andthe emphasis on preservation and transmissionof cuneiform learning, culminating in the LateBabylonian period – come to the fore in sevenbrilliant articles.

The book is aptly closed by a section on‘International relations: Babylonia and theAncient Near Eastern World’. Complexinteractions between ancient Near Easternsuperpowers (Babylonia, Egypt, Hatti, Assyria) aswell as minor players (Ugarit, Emar, Judah, etc.)of the mid-second millennium BC down to theAchaemenid period (Persian empire) aredescribed in six articles looking at Babyloniafrom the perspective of its foreign partnersand/or adversaries.

In conclusion, we should congratulate theeditor on her choice of essential and interestingtopics dealt with by some of the mostcompetent scholars in a fresh, readable andmost up-to-date way. The publisher’s fitting andelegant book design is also to be greatlyappreciated. This volume is a must foranybody interested in ancient Mesopotamia.

Ludek Vacín School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Rainbird, Paul. The archaeology of islands. xvi,200 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Cambridge:Univ. Press, 2007. £40.00 (cloth), £14.99

(paper)

This is a short and concise book introducing anarchaeology of islands, or rather an archaeologyof the seas between them. Rainbird arguespersuasively that a study of islands is a study ofmovement as migrating humans spread acrossthe islands by way of land-bridges, sail, rowboat,or by floating and drifting. As such, this is aninteresting and engaging introduction to thissub-discipline for the anthropologist/archaeologist, and an introduction to thedelights of archaeology for the new reader.

Before sampling an archaeology of some ofthe seven seas, Rainbird introduces us to theconceptualization of islands, variously: oases inmetaphorical deserts; promised lands; isolated‘backwaters’; graveyards and quarantine zones;prisons and plantations; laboratories; colonies;and communication chains to the mainland.

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Islands have always been especially attractive toanthropologists pursuing a thesis of diffusionwith their unsullied societies (Radcliffe-Brownin the Andamans and Malinowski in theTrobriands). They still capture the Western (andGallic) imagination, as Gilles Deleuze suggeststhat the movement embodied in islands is ‘theconsciousness of the earth and ocean’ (p. 1).Furthermore, islands have a distinctivesocio-geography as bounded places linked byskills of locomotion; colonies illustrating theoriesof dispersal; places and spaces with maritimecultural landscapes; and maritime communitymembers with a differential synaesthesia andembodiment (the tastescape of salt on the windto detect land; the flow of the sea felt throughthe testicles to note currents and tides). Inbetween these places are gendered spaces –women are linked to the land and men to thesea.

Rainbird goes on to present evidence fromseveral key islands: Malta, a key Mediterraneanisland, was settled in the Neolithic period (5000

BC). Excavations reveal temples and embarkationpoints suggesting that Malta was a pilgrimageisland as well as a trading point. Elsewhere inthe Mediterranean, Rainbird suggests that seassuch as the Aegean be classed as seas withinseas, as ‘nurseries’ where seafaring skills can behoned close to a coast. We read, next, ofPohnpei and the Eastern Carolines in Oceania,where island colonization patterns fit thedirection of the prevailing winds but were moredeliberate than previously thought. Pohnpei wassettled 2,000-2,500 years ago and has remainssuch as breakwaters, mortuary structures,tunnels, and an extensive tidal canal system,giving it the label ‘Venice of the Pacific’. Rainbirdthen turns to Gotland off the Swedish coast,an island colonized by animals and humansfollowing a land bridge in the Mesolithic period(9,000 years ago). On Gotland there is evidenceof some 2,000 ‘ship settings’ from the LateBronze Age which prefigure Viking ship burials.These are ‘ships of the dead’, cremationstructures which show how important the seawas to the island’s inhabitants. Finally, Rainbirdpresents us with the Atlantic archipelago ofBritain and Ireland, conceptual mainlands formany of us, a notion that contrasts with islandsof similar size such as Tasmania, which isconceptualized by inhabitants and outsiders asan island (p. 141). Again, Rainbird focuses uponthe movement of people, domesticated animals,and planting and pottery practices, whichspread from the Continent in the Late Mesolithicperiod, with the development of Ireland echoing

that of Gotland. At this time, there were islandsoff the Scottish coast (Rum, Orkney, and theOuter Hebrides), with Ireland emerging from apost-glacial tie to Britain. It is thought that someof the smaller islands themselves would havebeen held up as ‘daymarks’, navigationmonuments such as Ailsa Craig at the mouth tothe Firth of Clyde. In the Irish Sea, hide-coveredcurrachs and long log boats were used for tradeand travel, styles of small boat still in usebecause of their lightness, buoyancy, andbeaching strengths. And Celtic was possiblythe trade language linking the region further.The sea, between the islands, can thusbecome the means by which communitiesare able to communicate between each other.

Jonathan Skinner Queen’s University Belfast

Sellet, Frédéric, Russell Greaves &Pei-Lin Yu (eds). Archaeology andethnoarchaeology of mobility. xvii, 290 pp.,figs, tables, illus., bibliogrs. Gainesville: Univ.Press of Florida, 2006. $65.00 (cloth)

Archaeology and ethnoarchaeology of mobility is ano-nonsense book which does exactly what itsays on the cover. The twelve contributions areequally divided into two sections looking atethnoarchaeological mobility and archaeologicalstudies of mobility, with case studies rangingfrom Australia to Portugal via Kazakhstan,Madagascar, and Sulawesi. Mobility is of coursea perennial archaeological favourite, and somevery familiar names and themes leap from thecontents page. But an initial impression of yetanother unreconstructedly positivist collection ofessays on the archaeological signatures oflogistical vs collecting foraging strategies isquickly dispelled: notable and very welcome inmany of the contributions is an emphasis on thecomplexity of real-world mobility and itsmaterial culture signatures.

The ethnoarchaeological papers continuallyundermine simplistic definitions of settlementand mobility: Binford questions the validity ofthe ubiquitous ‘band’ concept, while Greavesfocuses on the complexity of subsistencepractices, which defy simple characterization andare associated with highly flexible and variablesocial arrangements – of which mobility is onlyone. The theme is developed by Alvard’scontribution as well as by Kelly, Poyer, andTucker, who stress the contingent, ‘mosaic’nature of change in mobility patterns. As Politisdemonstrates, then, multiple levels of analysisare necessary – including material culture and

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campsite information – but also less obviousfactors such as behaviour and ideology that areoften ignored by monolithic archaeologicaland/or ecological approaches.

All this is given weight (and impressivereadability) by the extent to which the chapterscontain primary data, making the volume anexcellent source of information on a wide varietyof temporalities of mobility in diversegeographical and social populations. It is alsowelcome to see some – if not exactly new, thencertainly less mainstream – methodologies beingutilized. Researchers into mobility have beensurprisingly slow to embrace the potential of GIS(Craig and Chagnon) and GPS and imaging data(Alvard), and it is nice to see them representedhere as part of a genuinely broad-spectrumapproach to archaeological analysis.

After this excellent start it was perhapsinevitable that the archaeological section of thebook would be something of a disappointment.The vagaries of preservation of thearchaeological record do not often permit therichness of context of the ethnoarchaeologicalcase studies, and although the authors here takea laudably stoical and practical approach to thecomparative paucity of their data, a reader mightbe forgiven for wondering where a little moreintellectual boldness might have taken some ofthese contributions. Nevertheless, the collectionas a whole is strong, particularly in its diversityof methodological approaches and geographicaland temporal foci. It was a welcome surprise tofind work on osteological evidence, for example(Ogilvie), a potentially valuable resource onmobility all too often banished to specializedosteological volumes, where their insight isoverlooked by mainstream archaeologists.A broad-scale survey of Kazahstani pastoralmobility through time (Chang), while readingvery much like a work in progress, offers aninteresting insight into an unfamiliar region,although I was disappointed to find that Yu’spaper did not really get to grips with theJapanese data as I had hoped. The evidence itselfwas skimmed over only very briefly in a pieceabout projectile technology that seemed onlytangential to mobility. The final three papers,by Sellet, Thackers, and Veth, are much moretraditional archaeological analyses of prehistorichunter-gatherers and perhaps make a moreobvious counterpoint to the ethnoarchaeologicalsection of the book; all three strongly advocateconsideration of lithic and other data in theirsocio-geographical context, and highlight how avariety of lines of archaeological evidence can bedrawn together to give a much fuller insight into

mobility among prehistoric groups than simplyslotting sites and ‘cultures’ into pre-defined andover-simply characterized definitions.

Taken as a whole, then, the volume is a verystrong one. The ethnoarchaeological section inparticular contains some valuable primary data,while my disappointment with thearchaeological contributions stems from ageneral (and probably unavoidable) brevity,rather than any fundamental flaws in the essaysthemselves. The result is an inevitably curtailedpresentation of the relevant data and lacks thekind of extended discussion of the authors’conclusions, however tentative, that I wouldhave liked. Nevertheless – and regardless of thesheer weight of previous work on the subject –this collection more than deserves a place on theshelves of anyone working on mobility.

Fiona Coward Royal Holloway, University ofLondon

Development and economicanthropology

Ikeya, Kazunobu & Elliot Fratkin (eds).Pastoralists and their neighbors in Asia andAfrica. iv, 242 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus.,bibliogrs. Osaka: National Museum ofEthnology, 2005. (paper)

This book emerged out of a conference sessionon ‘Socio-economic interaction betweenpastoralists and other groups’ at theInternational Union of Anthropological andEthnological Sciences, Tokyo, 2002. It wouldprobably have been improved if the editors hadbeen slightly more rigorous in choosing whichpapers to select for publication. Although someare fascinating and present intriguing analysis,others are very descriptive and superficial. Athird group present incredibly detailed accountsof movements, personal histories, orhousehold-level data but completely fail toanalyse these accounts and go beyond them todiscuss their implications and interpretations.

The book has the admirable aim ofexamining the diversity of links betweenpastoralists and non-pastoralists and doing thisin the very diverse contexts of Eastern andSouthern Africa and Asia (Mongolia, Siberia,India, and Nepal). Although each chapter isself-contained (a little more cross-referencingwould have been helpful), both the introductorychapter by Ikeya and Fratkin and a further

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comparative chapter by Fratkin pull togetherand synthesize many of the emerging issues,demonstrating the critically important roles ofpolitical economy and human ecology inshaping pastoralist lives and livelihoods in bothcontinents, despite the apparently very diversecontexts. A common theme is how, underenormously diverse political regimes andeconomic histories, privatization of commonpasture lands is undermining the mobility andflexibility of many pastoralist populations andoften forcing the forging of new economicrelationships with non-pastoral populations.Here the flexibility of pastoral productionsystems takes new forms in terms of developingand exploiting these new relationships andfinding new ways of using livestock productionwithin viable livelihoods.

Some chapters seriously expand ourinterpretation of the idea of pastoralism. In otherchapters we are introduced to the readyresponses of pastoralists to new opportunitiesand markets. All the pastoralist populationsrepresented in this book have significanteconomic and social relations with othernon-pastoralist groups, however apparentlyisolated they might at first seem to be, and somechapters demonstrate the dynamism of these oldand new relationships, such as those of theTurkaan coming to terms with and exploitingthe implantation of a huge refugee camp ontheir territory (Ohta).

The book never really hangs together.It is marred by very poor translation andproofreading – which at times is merely irritatingbut sometimes actually impedes understanding.Some consistency about how terms are renderedwould have helped the non-specialist. It is hardto work out what sort of readership the book isaimed at. The relatively small number of scholarsinterested in pastoral production systems willfind something of interest, but the widegeographical spread and the diversity of styleand subject matter make it little more than acollection of papers with pastoralists as a centraltheme.

Sara Randall University College London

Mitchell, William P. Voices from the globalmargin: confronting poverty and inventing newlives in the Andes. xi, 268 pp., illus., bibliogr.Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2006. $50.00

(cloth), $21.95 (paper)

This book is the result of reflection on over thirtyyears of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, in both

the highlands and in Lima. Through the storiesof five individuals and two couples, the differentchapters give a broadly chronological account ofthe ways in which ordinary highlanders havelived their lives and responded to structuralforces of demographic explosion, globalization,and poverty, and to the political crisis of thePeruvian civil war. In their turn, they alsoaddress thematic issues, of ethnicity, gender,economic change, and migration both withinPeru and transnationally. Mitchell tells us thatthe book is meant to be accessible to the generalreader and so explicitly avoids a great deal ofdiscussion of anthropological literature, in favourof very personal, clear, vibrant, and intimatedescription of individual lives.

As such, it is a successful book, whichmanages to evoke a sense of time passing,things changing, in response (in part) to thewell-known criticisms of a certain generation ofAndean ethnographers for presenting theirsubjects as somehow out of the flow of historyor political economy. For Mitchell, the history ofPeru appears to be the inevitable flow ofincreasing poverty, which is explained almostentirely by a combination of demographicpressures and the (largely unspecified) influenceof globalization. Modernity is depicted as mostlyabout loss of culture – of the indigenousleadership institution of varayoc, of fiestas, andso on. Poverty comes to explain everything:gender relations and domestic violence,race/ethnicity, involvement in the civil war,migration, and so forth. None the less the bookincludes extremely important, detailedethnographic data on how Andeans buildlivelihoods, and how their strategies havedeveloped over time. So we have some veryuseful information on the increase in ceramicmanufacture in the highland town of San Pedroand on how that translated via migration toLima; also on wage labour on the coast of Peru;on disputes over agrarian reform processes inthe highlands; on migration to the United States;essentially on the myriad of livelihood strategiesof ordinary Peruvians, and on how they areaffected by shifts in the economy, both globaland local.

Mitchell is at his most powerful when hedescribes individual lives, bringing his researchsubjects to life through their stories andsometimes specific interview material; andthrough a description of his own role in theirlives and the ways in which he gatheredinformation about them. The chapters are onoccasion slightly imbalanced: one period in eachindividual or couple’s life is described in detail

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and the reader is then brought up to date in afairly sketchy way, but it is evident that this isdown to the patchy nature of ethnographic data.Indeed, the book also works as a description ofwhat ethnographers actually do in the field,what ethnographic fieldwork feels like, and howit aggregates over time. By the end, the readerhas a clear sense of what the family networkswere like that brought Mitchell to particularinformants and them to his book, and how theexperiences of his informants varied for differentgenerations, and so on. Mitchell also gives afrank and enlightening account of his ownmovements and concerns: for example, arecurring theme of alcohol consumption is atone point linked to his own problems withalcohol. Fortunately, he goes into no more detailthan that, and leaving such things unspecifiedmeans that the book stays just the right side ofthe line between a personal account and aconfessional.

The three final chapters on the civil war areextremely evocative, insofar as they convey veryeffectively the complications, coercions,betrayals, and messiness of the situation. Thedevastation wrought by Sendero and themilitary comes across constantly, in manydifferent ways. At times the individuals of eachchapter are made to stand for something greaterthan can really be sustained: ‘Triga’, forexample, only briefly dabbled in the drug trade,but his story becomes somehow emblematic ofthe imbrication of drugs and terrorism in onechapter. However, at others, the use of anindividual story brings the conflict to life. Forexample, the chapter on ‘Anastasio’ illustratesvery movingly the role of rumour, theambiguities of political positioning, andself-presentation: perhaps he was trying to fleeSendero, perhaps he was actively opposingthem – we are not sure.

There is little analysis beyond thepresentation of the individual stories, and nogroundbreaking arguments, but Mitchell gives ahighly effective, sensitive, and evocativepresentation of people’s lives, and so the readeris given the space to make up his or her ownmind about what the material speaks to. Inmany ways the method of making an argumentthrough individual life stories is this book’s mostinteresting analytical move. Through it, we aregiven a real sense of the lives of PeruvianAndeans in the latter part of the twentiethcentury; and Mitchell’s book works well as anintroductory text and for those already familiarwith the region.

Sian Lazar University of Cambridge

Rath, Govinda Chandra (ed.). Tribaldevelopment in India: the contemporary debate.340 pp., maps, tables, figs, bibliogrs.London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006.£15.99 (paper)

Tribal development in South Asia linkseconomics with the politics of recognition,and can co-opt preservation and heritagemovements or campaigns for affirmative actionor reservations. This collection of thirteen essays,carefully edited and introduced by GovindaChandra Rath, adds to this often heated debate.

The 83 million tribal peoples of India makeup 8 per cent of the country’s total population,and belong to 461 officially recognized groups.Divided into four sections, this volume dealswith the various approaches to tribaldevelopment since Indian independence, inparticular: the crises of the welfare state; tribalautonomy movements which have emerged inreaction to centralized planning models; landalienation among tribal communities; and socialopportunities and policy successes in tribalaffairs. In his introduction, Rath concludes that‘the mainstream development model has limitedimpact on the people living at the periphery,specifically on tribes’ (p. 57), a failure all themore tragic given that it is precisely thesemarginalized citizens who have been the targetof elaborate tribal welfare programmes.

The editor’s chapter, on Nehru and Elwin’sperspectives on India’s tribes, draws out thecommonalities and differences between thesetwo seminal figures. One of the paradoxes ofhistory is that ‘Elwin [had] wanted to keepthe tribes in isolation, but now the tribesthemselves claim their isolation in terms ofsocio-cultural identity and political sovereignty’(p. 89).

Barik reflects on the contradictions of andchallenges to Indian policy-making withreference to the rehabilitation of refugees in theKoraput district of Orissa, and the failure of aproject to resettle 35,000 displaced and 6,000

tribal families. In Barik’s evaluation, this resultedin greater alienation through tribal-settlerconflict. While the ‘positive trend in the case ofKoraput is that the tribes have faith in thedemocratic process’, it is also the centralizedplanning initiatives that are ‘greatly responsiblefor the woes of the tribes’ (p. 107).

The contribution by Fernandes is based onstudies of development-induced displacement inAndhra Pradesh, Goa, Orissa, and West Bengal,with a particular focus on tribal women.Rehabilitation, he argues, means ‘re-establishing

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the livelihood, culture and the remaining socialinputs’ (p. 129), an agenda all too oftenforgotten in development initiatives. Basu’spaper assesses how far the aspirations of tribalpeople were fulfilled by the creation of the stateof Jharkand in November 2000, and suggeststhat a form of ‘ethno-development’ based oncultural pluralism, internal self-determination,territorialism, and sustainability should shapefuture interventions. In conclusion, the authorraises a fundamental question: ‘[C]an tribaldevelopment be achieved within the existingnon-tribal state system?’ (p. 150).

Sarkar’s contribution on the Rajbhanshis ofnorth Bengal illustrates how their isolation fromthe development process coupled with theirperipheral social status has driven them towardsa movement for political autonomy. In thispaper, in common with others in the volume,there exists a sense that tribalism is in some formantithetical to the development agenda. In asimilar vein, Shankar’s article is a narrative onpost-independence transformation among theKol tribe of Uttar Pradesh, culminating in theireventual alienation from forest land. Shankar isavowedly interventionist: ‘[I]f the governmentcan set apart even 1% of its budget every yeartowards the acquisition of good quality land fortribals, it would invariably help in bringingabout a qualitative improvement’ (p. 180).

In their paper on tribal movements in Kerala,Chathukulum and John suggest that agriculturalsettlers have been the direct beneficiaries ofalienated land. The solution, they argue, is thattribal development must ‘proceed in a mannerbefitting the ethos of the people in anenvironment in which their developmentbecomes their own responsibility’ (p. 197).Kumar’s contribution on tribal land alienation inAndhra Pradesh reveals how the migration ofplains-dwelling non-tribal men to tribal areas haschanged the structure of land relations.Saravanan discusses the tribal economy of TamilNadu from 1947 to 2000 and shows how theposition of tribes as cultivators has over timebeen downgraded to that of agriculturallabourers.

The remaining articles on development andsocial organization are more quantitative in styleand address education, health, and developmentamong India’s Tolchha Bhutias, tribals in Orissa,and the Car Nicobarese. The final contributionends on an intriguing note befitting thiscollection: ‘[M]odern development has receivedwide acceptance among the tribal peopledespite its intrinsic nature of generatinginequality among them’ (p. 320). In short, then,

this is a helpful and diverse collection on a verytimely topic.

Mark Turin University of Cambridge

Stephenson, Svetlana. Crossing the line:vagrancy, homelessness and social displacementin Russia. x, 189 pp., bibliogr. Aldershot:Ashgate, 2006. £50.00 (cloth)

Svetlana Stephenson’s book Crossing the line is afascinating, powerful, and ultimately unsettlingaccount of homelessness in Russia. Drawing onextensive archival and ethnographic researchconducted between 1993 and 2005, Stephensontakes us into the lives of homeless Russians inorder to examine critically the social and politicaldynamics that produce homelessness in Russiaand the consequences of this state of non-beingfor those who inhabit the street. Stephensonshows convincingly that homelessness is aprogressive state of social dislocation producedby the intersection of competing and paradoxicalRussian policies regulating mobility, residency,identity, and social order.

Rather than presenting her analysis withinthe paradigms of victimization, morality, andpoverty that have characterized many recentapproaches to homelessness, Stephenson framesher analysis around the theme of space. In ahistorical context where Russia has long beenconcerned with protecting its territory andborders, Russian homelessness has emerged asthe byproduct of struggles over space. Duringthe twentieth century, the Soviet state managedits citizens through housing practices thatofficially located and registered individuals inspecific residences, a practice that has continuedin the post-Soviet period. It was through thishousing registration that legal citizen-subjectswere created and affirmed. Homeless people arethose individuals who are unable to lay legaland moral claim to legitimate spaces, mostnotably housing. In most cases, displacedcitizens once possessed legal claims to housingbut lost those claims through suchcircumstances as moving to a new city andbeing denied residency registration by the localregistration authorities; eviction from a sharedapartment by a spouse, lover, parent, child, orroommate; and the loss of one’s registrationdocuments to prove the legal right to occupy aresidence.

From the perspective of the Russian state,both past and present, people who becomedisarticulated from their official places ofresidence threaten the social order.

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Consequently, Russia has criminalizedhomelessness, and homeless Russians riskincarceration and abuse from local authoritiesrather than assistance or treatment. Sostigmatized is homelessness in Russia thatdisplaced individuals are even viewed withcontempt by other displaced persons andthe criminal community. As Stephensonconvincingly demonstrates, it is inappropriate toconsider Russia’s homeless as a community inand of themselves, because displaced personsrarely associate with one another. In this worldof the ‘anti-place’, misfortune is contagious andaffiliation means social death (pp. 37-43).

Once Russians are dislocated not just fromtheir homes but also from ‘the whole socialtopography’ (p. 5), this displacement graduallyleads to profound changes in their socialidentities. Stephenson illuminates the strategiesused by homeless Russians to remain integratedin ‘normal’ Russian society (e.g. working,attending public events, engaging in serialromantic liaisons to gain access to a bed andshower, and refusing to associate with otherhomeless people) and avoid ‘crossing the line’(p. 9), a state that results when individualsgradually internalize the blame for theirconditions and cease to exist as legitimatemembers of society. Because there is nopossibility of return once a person ‘crosses theline’ into despair and self-blame, Russia’shomeless are constantly navigating the dialecticsof displacement and re-placement (p. 9).

Stephenson’s analysis is presented in twosections: part I discusses the consequences ofdisplacement from home into public space; andpart II examines the circumstances that producehomelessness in Russia, including a historicalaccount of Russian regulation of social space,settlement regimes, and mobile persons.Stephenson successfully integrates historicalmaterials and compelling ethnographic evidenceto cover such topics as the role of Russianbureaucracy in creating and destroyingcategories of ‘the person’; the emergence ofanti-vagrancy and anti-parasitic legislation inRussian space-making efforts; stereotypes aboutsocial outcasts and ‘social waste’; purificationand cleansing tactics directed against homelesspersons; the nature of the street as an‘anti-place’; and the heroic efforts ofunderfunded charities to help a segment of thepopulation that has effectively been erased fromRussian society.

What emerges powerfully from this book isStephenson’s compassion for her subjects andtheir experiences. She is clearly an outstanding

ethnographer, and she successfully draws thereader into the complicated lives of herinformants and the even more complicatedsocial worlds they inhabit. She does notsugar-coat the realities of everyday life forRussia’s homeless, but it is clear that she issympathetic to their plight as they becomeincreasingly trapped by the competing andconflicting social, political, and economic forcesthat shape their everyday realities.

This fascinating book will be of great interestto scholars of homelessness, welfare systems,housing, mobility, and urban studies. This bookis also a much-needed contribution to the fieldsof postsocialist, European, and Russian studies,both for its subject matter and for itscompassionate approach to ethnographicengagement with individuals who have beenlargely overlooked in accounts of ‘the transition’.The text is very accessible and would fit nicelyinto undergraduate and graduate courses onsocialist and postsocialist societies, poverty andwelfare, and social justice.

Melissa L. Caldwell University of California,Santa Cruz

Diaspora, migration, andnationalism

Kneebone, Susan & Felicity

Rawlings-Sanaei (eds). New regionalismand asylum seekers: challenges ahead. xi, 243

pp., tables, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2007. £45.00 (cloth)

This book addresses some of the major trendsthat have affected forced migration over thelast decades. Adopted in 1951, the GenevaConvention Relating to the Status of Refugeeswas a European instrument that emphasized theright for individuals to flee persecution and seekprotection abroad. In 1967, a Protocol enlargedits scope to include the whole world, which ledto a globalization of asylum – as everybodycould seek asylum anywhere. Western states,which used to welcome East Europeans fleeingcommunism, became concerned with thisevolution in the 1970s, especially in a context oftighter labour migration policies following theoil crisis. Asylum has since then beenincreasingly perceived as a problem and as achannel for disguised economic migration,hence the emphasis on the (however artificial)distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’asylum-seekers.

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One of the strategies developed to addressthese concerns, and the one that is at the centreof this volume, is regionalism. Regions, it is oftenargued, would be the appropriate level ofgovernance in an era of globalization; statesalone would be unable to address some of thekey challenges with which they are confronted –ranging from global warming to terrorism – andwould need to join forces regionally to preservethe influence they once enjoyed as nations. Thiswould be a bottom-up process, whereby statesco-operate on a volunteer and ad hoc basis,unlike the more formal patterns of regionalorganizations – hence the notion of ‘new’regionalism. Applied to asylum, this wouldmean finding regional solutions to flows offorced migration, thereby going beyond strictlynational responses, but also countering theglobalization of asylum.

Within the European Union (EU), refugeesmust seek asylum in the first EU country theyenter and cannot move to another state if theirinitial request is rejected; there are also recurrenttalks surrounding the establishment of a singleEU asylum process that would see allasylum-seekers go through the same regionalgate. In addition, the EU has agreements withso-called ‘safe third countries’ to sendasylum-seekers back to the countries they havetransited through on their way to Europe. InNorth America, the United States and Canadaco-operate more than before on asylum policiesand signed a similar safe third countryagreement in 2002. In the Pacific, the arrival ofboat people off Australia’s coasts led to theso-called ‘Pacific Strategy’, wherebyasylum-seekers from Afghanistan heading toAustralia were kept in Indonesia via theAustralian-funded co-operation of theOffice of the United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) andthe International Organization for Migration(IOM).

This last situation was widely criticized byhuman rights organizations for failingadequately to protect refugees and for buildingupon the sole interest of Australia, to thedetriment of its poorer neighbour. A keyquestion in this book, therefore, is whetherregionalism can really ensure protection orwhether it amounts to a restrictiveexternalization of asylum-seekers, contained inalready poor regions that are unfairly asked tohost refugees while lacking the resources toprotect them. The book interestingly documentshow the UNHCR initially expressed similarconcerns, but later got involved in regional

approaches, notably through its 2000

Convention Plus and Agenda for Protection.While largely a matter of political realism, the

UNHCR’s move was also an attempt to adaptasylum principles to ever more restrictive policiesand to the challenge of protecting refugeeswithin complex migration flows. Regionalism isfurther expected to ensure consistency betweennational procedures, adjust asylum policies toregional dynamics, address ‘secondarymovements’ (i.e. the movements of refugeeswho move from places of asylum to a thirdcountry), and enhance solidarity between states.This last objective is usually framed within thenotion of ‘burden-sharing’, which refers to the‘fair’ balance of efforts between states in theirresponsibilities toward refugees, either throughthe physical redistribution of refugees or viafinancial support to regions most concerned.Burden-sharing raises considerable ethical issues,not least because it implies a kind of‘commodification’ of refugees.

Readers interested in forced migration willfind in this book an overview of recent trendsthat combines empirical material and analyticalreflections. While most chapters are of goodquality, they nevertheless miss a comprehensiveintroduction, as the editors of the volume do notwrap up the arguments developed in thecontributions. The absence of a strongintroduction is all the more regrettable given thefar-reaching implications of the topic, whichshould be of concern not only to scholars in thefield but also to any citizen interested in thissensitive political issue.

Antoine Pécoud UNESCO

MacClancy, Jeremy. Expressing identities in theBasque arena. xii, 212 pp., map, illus.,bibliogr. Oxford: James Currey Publishers,2007. £55.00 (cloth), £17.95 (paper)

MacClancy opens his book on Basquenationalism with the reasonable observationthat ‘without ethnographic understanding ofnationalisms ... we run very real risks ofmisrepresenting them badly’. He proceeds todefine his goal as that of investigating ‘who isusing what ideas when, how, for what reasonsand to what end’, and then discusses severalinfluential non-anthropological academics, all ofwhom are found wanting. The proposedsolution is to study the everyday culturaldimensions of nationalism, much, he says, asethnographers have examined ethnicity. As forthose anthropologists concerned with issues of

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nationalism in Europe, he asserts that, ‘save theodd worthy exception’, they commonly devotethemselves to ‘well-established general topics’such as party politics, language, and religion.Furthermore, none, he believes, has given thetopic ‘the monograph-length attention I argue itdeserves’. In contrast, he proposes to examinephenomena passed over by others, including therole of football, cuisine, and graffiti.

The author over-reaches in these claimsto singularity (and actually cites someethnographies), but a touch of authorial hubriscan be tolerated. Much more pertinent is thefact that we need insightful studies of the waysthat contemporary nationalisms and identitiesare conceived and manifested. Given thatnationalism does not exist in a vacuum, theethnographer should be willing to engage issuesof contestation, conflict, and even violence.There is no question, for example, that Basquecivil society and political culture have beentraumatically marked by terrorism and violence,but how we approach this matter is exceedinglyimportant, intellectually and morally.

The book consists of eight chapters.Following a ‘general matters’ introduction, theremaining chapters discuss different expressionsof Basque identity. A substantial amount ofground is covered, and what stands out for thisreviewer is the author’s angle of vision, or howhe situates these phenomena. Early in thesecond chapter we are told that much of theresearch is based on long-term fieldwork inNavarra, contested terrain and not part of theBasque Autonomous Community. The author’sfirst fieldwork, we learn, was a study of ‘theconfrontation between Basque nationalism andthe regionalism of Navarre’.

While Expressing identities is ofmonograph-length, chapters vary considerablyin style, length, and closeness to the subject.The strongest, including the one on the originsand remarkable success of the GuggenheimBilbao, ‘the world’s first franchise museum’, dealwith contemporary themes and situations. Thechapter on Basque food discusses the impact ofglobalism on food and diet, and looks at thesocial role of ‘gastronomic societies’. Similarly,the chapter on the place of football in theBasque imaginary allows us to follow changeand continuity in this much-loved sport. In therealm of art, we learn of the attempts to definea Basque artistic aesthetic, a commoncharacteristic of nationalist movements. Theessay on political graffiti includes striking imagesof ‘unofficial means of redefining surfaces’, andthus engages an aspect of everyday politics.

More problematic is the long chapter titled‘Biology’, mostly concerned with a time whennationalist intellectuals delved into ancientmyths and searched for archaeological andbiological markers of identity. The issue is notthat the chapter discusses outdated notions ofrace, but that it tends to reinforce a highly exoticinterpretation of Basque people and society.MacClancy, to his credit, explains that a Basquereviewer of an earlier version of the chapter drewattention to a lack of historical context and thefailure to recognize ‘the overall racist situation inSpain and Europe’. These arguments still seemvalid.

The book does little to clarify or contextualizethe larger political dimension. It is significantthat the index contains numerous references to‘nationalism’, but it is all Basque, ‘a mixed spaceof multiple voices’. Nowhere is it hinted thatthere may be another story, another player:Spanish nationalism. A framing along these lineswould have helped to clarify why for so manyBasques the experience of democracy,autonomy, and EU membership has been ratherdisappointing. It hardly helps, of course, that inthe emotional aftermath of the 11 March 2004

Madrid train bombings, the Spanishgovernment, without a shred of evidence,blamed ETA for the atrocity, a charge that mademany Basques feel like suspects. We need to becareful in the study of nationalism, particularlywhen it comes to issues of power, issues thattranscend how identities are expressed. Phraseddifferently, the key problems that needresolution in the Basque Country arefundamentally political rather than cultural, andthese include relations with the state.

Oriol Pi-Sunyer University of Massachusetts

Pierre-Louis, François. Haitians in New YorkCity: transnationalism and hometownassociations. viii, 158 pp., tables, bibliogr.Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2006.$55.00 (cloth)

This slender but informative ethnographyfocuses on the transnational connectionsbetween Haitians in New York and Haiti witha special focus on the role of hometownassociations in both the politics of Haiti andAmerican politics in New York City. Pierre-Louisoffers an excellent case study into the dualorientation of diaspora politics. It is a politicsthat intertwines a fight for ethno-racial rightsand citizenship in the city and is intimatelyentangled with the radical and uneven

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transformations in Haiti from dictatorship tostruggling democracy. The flourishing oftransnational studies has developed in manydirections, but there have been two centralpreoccupations, which can be broadly defined asfocused either on the political and materialimplications of transnational migrants or on thecomplex subjectivities, hybridities, andimaginaries constituted through globalmovements and connections. This book sitsfirmly in the former camp, with several richchapters exploring the everyday mechanics,ambivalences, and tensions surrounding thepolitics of an active diaspora.

Over the course of an introduction and sevenchapters, the reader is offered an account of theHaitian community formation in exile in NewYork and its connections to Haiti. The bookconsiders the attitudes of successive Duvalierregimes, which were hostile to the threat thatexiles posed to the authority and stability of theirdictatorships. We learn that François Duvalieradapted the term for a bitter anti-malarial pilldistributed in Haiti in mid-century, ‘Camoquins’,to refer to Haitian exiles and thus conjured upboth the idea of the foreignness of those in exileand the threat to the national body posed byHaitians who had fled the regime. Chapters 3

and 4 extensively detail the emergence of amore sustained, intertwined, ambivalent, and,occasionally, tense engagement between thediaspora’s hometown associations and placesfrom which they emigrated. Even thoughAristide’s first government eagerly engaged withHaitians overseas and created a new Ministry,the ‘Tenth Department’, to refer to them, andmany Haitians returned to work in the newgovernment, including the author, the tensionsbetween those who left and those who stayedemerged through almost every kind ofdevelopment project and interaction. Theattempt to influence their ‘homeland’ revealedboth to those returning exiles or Haitians whoremained in Brooklyn or Queens but engaged incommunity economic development projects inHaiti how differently they now engaged with theworld than did those who remained in Haiti.

Chapters 6 and 7 offer detailed discussionsabout the political activities of Haitians in NewYork City politics. The central dynamic which theHaitian community leadership, and Haitians ineveryday life in urban America, must address ishow to cope with America’s racial caste system,which situates them within the simple, brutal,and stark black/white divide, even if Haitianswish to distinguish themselves because of theirfrancophone and Creole identity. Chapter 7

offers a particularly interesting case of localpolitics when Haitians in Brooklyn asserted theirindependence from two power blocs, both anemergent English-speaking Caribbean politicalclass and an older African American one inBrooklyn Democratic politics. Haitians revealedthey would not be taken for granted with regardto their needs in either New York or Haiti.

One of the more pleasurable features of thisbook is how implicitly it contributes to a rangeof conceptual and policy issues that concernanthropologists, even if the reader is left to drawthese connections. The book reveals howtransnational migration studies can offer a richethnographic perspective with which to analysecontemporary issues such as neoliberalism anddevelopment, racialization and difference, andauto-ethnography. There are questions that Iwished were further explored. Despite thediscussion of nearly forty years of Haitian life inNew York, we are not given much insight intothe second and third generation born in the city.What is their engagement with Haiti, with thehometown associations, with Creole languageretention and cultural practices? The last issue,one assumes, will be crucial for the assertion ofan identity outside the dominant Americanblack/white frame. I would also have liked tohave had some more mention of links with otherparts of the diaspora in Miami or Montreal.Further, Pierre-Louis hints at his intimateconnections to the issues in the introductionthrough his experience growing up as a Haitianin New York and then later as part of Aristide’sfirst government, but I wished he used hissubjective experience more explicitly in hisanalysis in later chapters. Nevertheless, thisbook would be a very useful ethnographyfor teaching undergraduates and graduatesabout the complex connections oftransnational activities.Nicholas DeMaria Harney University of Western

Australia

Environment and ecology

Gezon, Lisa L. Global visions, local landscapes:a political ecology of conservation, conflict, andcontrol in Northern Madagascar. xiii, 224 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. New York:AltaMira Press, 2006. £17.99 (paper)

Madagascar is an ecological hotspot as over 80

per cent of its plants and animals are endemic.

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Saving this unique environment is considered aduty that goes well beyond the local Malagasy.International environmental agencies are eagerto do their bit to reach this goal, but theirenvironmental ambitions can be achieved onlyby including the Malagasy government and thelocal populations. The political dynamics thatthis engenders at the local level should be partand parcel of any anthropological study onnatural resource management in Madagascar.Lisa Gezon actually implements this vision in herresearch and offers an interesting analysis of theweb of power relations that are spun wheninternational, national, and local populationsinteract in the endeavour to save Madagascar’sexceptional environment.

The book opens with a lengthy, meticulousdescription of the research setting, aWWF-sponsored national park in NorthernMadagascar. The reader willing to plod throughthis long descriptive text is rewarded by thefascinating case study that follows. The first partof the book exposes the local ecology and theeconomic activities of the local Antankarana,who principally live from rice farming and cattleherding. The author provides insights into localpower structures between local leaders,long-term residents, migrants, stateadministrative units, and the conservationproject, which is largely driven by internationalfinancing partners. The interests of all thesepartners in conservation are obviously differentand dynamic. In the second part, Gezon showsthe complexity of this socio-politicalconfiguration through an analysis of the conflictsand tensions that arise in natural resourcecompetition. This analysis displays the author’sconsiderable empirical finesse while providing awealth of first-hand observation.

Theoretically, the study takes a politicalecologist approach, an epistemologicalperspective insisting on blurring the analyticalconcepts of ecology, humans, and politics. Themessage of this study is that the local and theglobal cannot be analytically separated as bothare dialectically intertwined and informed byeach other. I miss in this regard an engagementwith literature on Madagascar as a governancestate where transnational networks deeply affectconservation policy. An integration of thisdiscussion would have further enhanced thetheoretical vigour of the book. The theoreticalorientation the author now chooses limits thefocus of the study, emphasizing political powergames at the expense of other factors whichstructure these relations, such as the economiccompetition over resources that also go beyond

the local sphere (e.g. product demand fornational and global markets).

The study is somewhat lacking inmethodological justification, making little morethan cursory mention of methods used. Theresearch, however, has interesting intersectoraland multi-tiered dimensions that demandreflexive sophistication. In the same vein, thereader wonders about the ethical aspects of thestudy. What challenges did occur whenresearching a contested good like naturalresources where all interlocutors have their ownpriorities and very different (hidden) agendasthat many prefer not to disclose? Acting understrong pressure exerted by the InternationalMonetary Fund, the Malagasy government ishaving great difficulty implementing the PlanNational Foncier, its legislative scheme to registerland as individual title, an audacious propositionwhere many people, even internationally, asGezon shows, lay claim to the same piece ofland. Claims are derived from myriad sources oflegitimacy, ranging from the temporal to themetaphysical, that is, the ancestors. Gezon isremarkably quiet about these aspects that seemso relevant to her study.

This being said, my firm view is that thisbook is an important contribution to Malagasystudies and the dynamics of natural resourcemanagement, particularly in relation toconservation. The study is a must-read foreveryone interested in these issues, preciselybecause it offers ethnography and analysis whichlay bare the intrinsic foundations of the localpolitics dealt with and engaged in byinternational conservation agencies.

Sandra J.T.M. Evers VU University Amsterdam

Moran, Emilio F. People and nature: anintroduction to human ecological relations. xiv,218 pp., figs, tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford:Blackwell Publishing, 2006. £50.00 (cloth),£17.99 (paper)

This is a useful and original introduction to keyissues in human-environmental relationships andhow these have been approached from theperspectives of environmental anthropology,geography, and human ecology. It considershumankind’s fundamental problem: thatpopulation growth and unsustainable patternsof consumption are pushing the planet towardsecological collapse, and that we must think ourway consciously towards behavioural changesthat will pull us back from the brink. The textoffers a range of evidence illustrating the effects

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of continuing with ‘business as usual’ andsuggests some more sustainable alternatives.

It begins logically by describing themost pressing ecological issues: carbon dioxideemissions, climate change, deforestation,over-use of freshwater resources, andenvironmental degradation. It then considers theensuing social consequences: starvation,migration, armed conflicts, and the ‘cominganarchy’ when pressure on resources causeseconomies to collapse. It establishes the centralpoint of the book: that there is a fundamentaland urgent need for all societies to move awayfrom materialist values.

Having set out the key ecological and socialproblems, Moran considers some of thetheoretical frameworks that have been broughtto bear on them, looking at anthropologicalcritiques of Western culture-nature dualism andunderlining the greater utility of more holisticapproaches that regard humankind as anintegral part of nature. He remains optimisticabout human agency, maintaining that peopleare sufficiently self-interested and capable ofself-organization to change direction when it isnecessary – but observes that in order to do sothey require information about the trueecological costs of contemporary modes ofconsumption.

Chapters 2 and 3 lay further groundwork,comparing evolutionary and historicaldevelopments in a range of cultural contexts anddescribing how, in the past, unsustainableresource management caused some specificecosystem collapses. This leads seamlessly to aconsideration of the rapidly expanded scale andintensity of human activities in the last fiftyyears, and the globalized resource use that isnow leading towards ecological collapse on aplanetary scale.

Chapter 4 offers ways to think abouthumankind as part of an interconnected ‘web oflife’, with a role to play in ensuring itssustainability. This is a vision of the planet as aproductive ecosystem which human societiesmanipulate. Moran describes recent efforts toplace monetary values on ‘ecosystem services’,noting that in global terms these have beenvalued at double the entire GDP of all nations(p. 80). The chapter examines the effects ofhuman management in various environments,and gives a more detailed case study ofAmazonia.

In the second half of the book Moran turnsto questions about how societies think aboutand manage their environmental relationships,and why they sometimes mould local ecologies

without considering the longer-termconsequences. He stresses the importance ofreligion and ritual in upholding sustainableresource use in small-scale societies, and theneed for similar (or at least some kind of) moralleadership in larger social contexts. This leads toa discussion on governance, laws, andregulatory frameworks, and the role ofinstitutions and industry in enabling sustainableresource use. Moran is clear, though, that thereis also a need for wider collective involvement inprocesses of decision-making.

Chapter 6 considers efforts to promote moreecocentric alternatives to consumer orientationthrough deep ecology, bioregionalism,restoration ecology, and so forth. But, as Moransays, ‘these efforts are challenged by thedominant view of a consumer-oriented society’(p. 130). Thus in chapter 7 he returns to the keyissue: the ‘addictive’ patterns of consumptionthat became aspirational in the post-war era.The final chapter makes an unapologeticallysubjective plea for people to combinescholarship with a passion for change; to acceptthat, in material terms, ‘less is more’; and torevalue ideas about community and quality oflife.

The book offers a lively and well-researchedintroduction to human-environmental problemsand ways of analysing them, drawing creativelyon a range of scientific approaches. It presents alucid picture of global ecosystems and theimpacts of human activity over time, andexplains just how we have arrived at a pointwhere widespread changes in behaviour may bethe only way to prevent ‘a globally scaleddisaster’ (p. 151). The style is accessible, though Ifelt occasionally that the writing might havebenefited from a little more editorial polish(a luxury, I know, in these days of academicoverload and minimal publisher input). But thisis a minor cavil. People and nature is a thoughtfuland engaging text, which students ofenvironmental anthropology, human geography,and environmental studies will find illuminating.

Veronica Strang University of Auckland

Reynolds, Vernon. The chimpanzees of theBudongo Forest: ecology, behaviour, andconservation. xiv, 297 pp., maps, figs, tables,illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: OxfordUniv. Press, 2005. £32.50 (paper)

The pioneering field studies of Vernon Reynoldsand of his wife and collaborator Frankie amongthe chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest of

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western Uganda have long been recognized asclassics. They began in the early 1960s at a timewhen the long-term study of wild primatepopulations was at an early stage ofdevelopment, although Jane Goodall wasalready working at Gombe in Tanzania andother, somewhat scattered, data from the fieldwere becoming available. In those early days,the idea was rather new, even revolutionary, thatthe social dynamics of a primate community hada diachronic aspect that required the sustainedobservation of individual relationships overlife-courses or – as is now coming to berecognized – over generational time.Consequently, the understanding we now have– albeit still very limited – of kinship in primatesas a structuring element unfolding over time stilllay in the future, as did scientific awareness ofchimpanzees’ capacity for sustainedsocio-political strategies (see, for examples,Nicholas J. Allen, Hilary Callan, Robin Dunbar &Wendy James (eds), Early human kinship: from sexto social reproduction, 2008). However, theReynolds’s work of the 1960s was highlyprescient of these later insights, demonstratingas it did the strength of the classical ethologicaltradition of painstaking field observation anddetailed on-the-ground description.

Numerous publications have followed, andnow that almost half a century has passed it ispossible to think of primate fieldwork – and theBudongo studies in particular – as havingthemselves acquired traditions and a history toset alongside the specific histories of the primategroups that have been followed. This book is theproduct of a new phase of Budongo work,starting in the 1990s, during which the BudongoForest Project was established with fundingfrom a number of sources and new issuessurrounding conservation and chimpanzee-human relations have come to the fore. Thebook admirably situates the chimpanzeepopulation within a careful ecological analysisof the forest itself. This connects seamlessly withthe human presence and the impact of a longhistory (that word again) of economic activity,such as logging in the colonial and post-colonialperiods.

At the book’s heart, however, is detaileddescription and life-history narration of theanimals themselves. Much of the text followsthe form of direct field notes, written up andarranged under chapter headings such as ‘dietand culture’, ‘social organization’, ‘socialbehaviour and relationships’, ‘infanticide’, and‘intra-community killing’. While the typologiesimplied in the headings may give room for

debate, the overall approach is an undeniablestrength. For example, Reynolds narrates atlength a rare case of the killing of an adult maleby others within a single community. This cameinitially as a complete surprise to the observers,but Reynolds is able to make it intelligible in theframe of the victim’s known long-term socialconnections and their absence, and the detailedrecord of his grooming and mating partnershipsin the period leading up to the incident. In otherwords, Reynolds is able to produce a forensicaccount of the killing: one which carriesmeaning and conviction to human analysts.

The descriptive strength of Reynolds’saccount also gives rise to questions to which, atpresent, only speculative answers can be given.Thus, in discussing cases of infanticide, Reynoldsshows their connection with recorded patternsof male and female movement across groups,and asks whether chimpanzees could have anyawareness of gestation and its consequences forpaternity probability. This can be seen as aninstance of a more general question ofenormous interest to anthropology: namelywhat, if any, dimensions of sociality cannon-human primates such as chimpanzees be inany sense ‘aware’ of?

Reynolds’s final chapter is well-titled‘The human foreground’. His treatment ofchimpanzee-human relations is sympathetic,despite the patent threats to chimp survivalposed by habitat degradation and snaring. Norare the threats one-way only: cases areapparently well-documented of chimpanzeepredation on children in the Budongo area. Inthis respect the book contributes to a welcomegeneral move by conservation agencies, such asthe Jane Goodall Foundation, to address theproblems faced by chimpanzee and humancommunities as parts of an interlinked complex.The research done by the Budongo ForestProject on the local people’s beliefs about, andattitudes to, the chimpanzees living in the forestadjacent to their villages and cultivated land is ofconsiderable ethnographic interest. Worthnoting, for example, is the picture Reynoldspaints of a surrounding human population of‘opportunistic transients’: people who think ofthemselves as on the move, but in fact take upone local economic opportunity after anotherwithout moving on. It would be good to see thisstyle of co-description extended and deepenedthrough future collaboration betweenprimatologists and ethnographers.

In his vote of thanks to Jane Goodall on theoccasion of her RAI Huxley Memorial Lecturegiven in 2002, Reynolds spoke of her lifetime

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influence on redefining the notion of scientificityin primate field research. This book exemplifiesboth the strengths of the classic field tradition,and its capacity for creative transformation inresponse to current theoretical interests andurgent practical concerns.

Hilary Callan Royal Anthropological Institute

History, politics, and law

Bear, Laura. Lines of the nation: Indian railwayworkers, bureaucracy, and the intimatehistorical self. xii, 346 pp., bibliogr. New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 2007. £30.50 (cloth)

For a long time, the railway in India has beenseen as the harbinger of economic modernityand an emblem of national progress. As aproject, it was supposed to have transferredlaissez-faire individualism and capitalism intoIndia. Its organization of work and associatedprofessionalism was eulogized as the greatmodernizer that continually dissolved ties ofcaste and community in the specific practices ofrailway bureaucracy. This book challenges thefounding debates about the impact of railwayson Indian society. In the process, it helps usrethink not only the modernity of railways alonebut also their overall character in the colonialworld.

Based on archival work in the headquartersof Eastern Railway in Calcutta (nowadaysKolkata), and on ethnographic documentation ofthe railway workers and their families in therailway colony at Kharagpur in West Bengal aswell as among their networks spread overseveral locations, this book powerfully unpacksinterrelated notions of community, nation, caste,respectability, and race. While singularlyfocusing on the cultural history of IndianRailways, it explores the mechanisms throughwhich Indian society was carved out as anidentifiable arena for the introduction of statepolicies – a new kind of target for colonialinterventions. Contrary to the received wisdom,Bear asserts that the bureaucracy andworkplaces of Indian Railways generated many aprimordial distinction in the name of modernity.She singles out the Anglo-Indian community forher ethnographic gaze and offers us a peep intothe moral universe of the railways. To the extentthat the histories of the Anglo-Indian communityand the railways have been intimatelyintertwined, the present book can also be read

as an anthropological history of the formation ofthe Anglo-Indians as a ‘railway caste’.

While effortlessly moving within andbetween archives and ethnography, the chapterstrace the historical emergence of ethicalsensibilities, orientations towards the past, andinstitutional forms that structure the daily lives ofworkers today. Through these narratives welearn that modernity is not a seamlessexperience propelling one either into laissez-faireindividualism or the supposedly neutralcontemporary niches of national and globalcitizenship. Even when the railways diffused theauthority of the colonial state far and wide, itprovoked ethical outrage about this authority aswell. This outrage has played a constructive rolein the shaping of nationalist communities ofsentiments and political solidarities.

Arguably, the railway bureaucracy drewworkers into new calculations of communityidentities and led them to forge hithertounknown forms of nationalism. Indeed, thisself-fashioning fused ideas of jati (caste) withpolitical sentiments and class sensibilities. Thenewly constituted railway colonies and theirspatially and hierarchically segregated residentialpatterns have been the arenas where the ideasof bureaucratic honour, domesticity, andsocial distinctions underwent adaptivemetamorphoses. If for nothing else, the railwaysmust be credited with having created these newcontexts where endless politico-cultural dramastook shape and acquired varying forms.

On another plane, a scrutiny ofcontemporary railway morality reveals thehistorical interplay between archival technologiesand moralizing taxonomies. It demonstrates theentanglement of kinship, genealogies, andmemories. Bear discerns a constant yetsubterranean longing for the secular fixity of acaste/jati among the Anglo-Indians. Tracing themost authentic point of origin of the familyremains an obsessive concern with them even asthey emphasize conjugal love and ties formed inhouseholds. In Bear’s reading, the absence of afixed identity leads Anglo-Indians to conjure upsigns of cosmopolitanism by way of dances,dresses, letters from migrant relatives, idioms ofdivine Catholic community, and various otherreal and imaginary ‘ties to abroad’ (p. 288).

More importantly, Bear focuses our attentionon the category of race as a potent perspectivefor our understanding of Indian and Britishkinship. After all, family origins and racialaffiliations are implicated in languages of classin both countries. Not surprisingly, Bear isemphatic in acknowledging race as intrinsic to

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historical formations of notions of jati andpedigree. In the process, she makes visible manyunnoticed and intimate effects of colonialismand nationalism.

This fine piece of scholarship deserves to beread by all those who wish to contribute to thefield of historical anthropology. It is exemplary inaccomplishing such a judicious blend of richdata mined from different sources. It is amethodological treat for anyone aspiring for ajudicious balance between the meticulousdocumentation of the archives and theethnographic thickness of lived experiences.

Manish K. Thakur Indian Institute ofManagement, Calcutta

MacPhee, Graham & Prem Poddar (eds).Empire and after: Englishness in postcolonialperspective. vii, 211 pp., illus., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.£32.50 (cloth)

Two confessions: first, I am writing this upon StGeorge’s Day, now revived but long scorned asassociated with nationalists of the ultra-right;second, I live in London, am ethnically English,and truly British, with distant Scottish, Irish, andWelsh ancestors. According to the editors ofEmpire and after, I belong to an under-theorizedgroup, ripe for academic investigation.Exemplifying Hegel’s dictum that the Owl ofMinerva flies at dusk, it is because Englishnesshas either disappeared or seems to be about todisappear that academics are so anxious todefine and preserve it, as a source ofhistorical/cultural explanations.

Much of this collection is written by peoplewho grew up, live, or work outside Britain –such as the South African Vivian Bickford-Smith –or whose names are not English – Prem Poddar,Sheila Ghose, Bridget Byrne, Enda Duffy, GrahamMacPhee. There are two sections, ‘Nation andempire’ and ‘Postcolonial legacies’, with tenessays discussing the relationship betweenEngland and the British Empire with reference toIreland, Africa, the Middle East, and the Indiansub-continent. Three of the essays make specificreference to Irish and Islamic terrorism. Thebook’s purpose, say the editors, is to engage‘with the conflation of nation and empiresignalled by Englishness and its coding of Britishnational identity’ (p. 18).

Its overall conclusions are statements of theobvious: the power relations within the BritishEmpire and its aftermath can be analysed inoften contradictory, cross-cutting terms of race,

class, nation, and gender, with some interestgroups competing against others. The empire’seconomic aspects were and are often elided bydiscourses of Englishness, whiteness, civilization,and alliance against some outside threat. Yetdespite frequent references to it by variouscontributors, this Englishness is never actuallydefined.

Enda Duffy’s impressively well-written andscholarly work on Irish/English literary relationsmakes interesting comparisons betweenattitudes to Ireland and Africa, discussing thepervasive hatred of the English found in thework of James Joyce. Fenian terrorism, itsunacknowledged presence in the work of JosephConrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), seeminglyabout the role of Imperial Russia, is discussed byGraham MacPhee. In ‘Brit Bomber ...’, SheilaGhose discusses Islamic terrorism with referenceto Hanif Kureishi’s ‘My son the fanatic’ (1997)and The black album (1995). Although she doesnot mention it, the newspapers’ ongoing moralpanic about betrayal by ‘home-grown’ terroristsafter the London Underground bombings of July2005 ignored the fact that the tactics used weresimply a continuation of those formerly used bythe IRA, whose English-born and -bred ‘sleepers’would sometimes carry out atrocities in England.Less fuss was made about IRA sleepers, possiblybecause the Irish in England have always beensuspect.

Matthew Hart’s analysis of the New York 9/11British Memorial Garden, located on ‘GroundZero’, points out that its confusing but highlyromantic form (a geo-political map of the BritishIsles loosely based on the Union of 1707) andarchaic place-names (Rutland, Westmoreland)evokes the colonial period. A 1915 quotation fromRupert Brooke adorns the Garden’s officialwebsite: the memorial is to become ‘somecorner of a foreign field/That is forever England’.This approach manages to blur the economicand other imbalances between Britain and theUnited States, presenting the two nations asequals. Hart then discusses how Conservativism,the natural political allegiance for those Britonsworking in the World Trade Center, clings to avirtually extinct pastoral vision of England that,for a long time, has been undermined by theConservatives’ economic policies.

Colin Wright’s ‘Conserving purity, labouringthe past’ compares the rhetorical aspects of thenotorious 1968 ‘River of Blood’ speech by theConservative ex-minister Enoch Powell with the2001 hyperbolic witterings of Robin Cook,the former Labour Foreign Secretary. Wrighttakes both these speeches as indicating

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English/political attitudes towards immigration,yet neither of the speakers was truly English.One was a Welsh-sounding romantically inclinedNew Zealand classical scholar, the other aphilandering Edinburgh Scot. Both presumed tospeak for the English while pushing their ownagendas. Powell harked back to a nostalgicvision of England as the inviolably puremother-country of the Empire. Attempting tocurry favour with Asian voters, Cook proclaimedthat chicken tikka masala was now Britain’snational dish. This speech was seen by many asthe epitome of New Labour’s approach tomulticulturalism, with a tartan clique urging theelectorate to relish cultural diversity, whileignoring the social and economic problemstrailing in its wake.

Empire and after belongs to cultural studiesrather than to anthropology but is worthreading. Enda Duffy’s essay, in particular, isoutstanding.

Margaret Taylor

Mattei, Ugo & Laura Nader. Plunder: whenthe rule of law is illegal. x, 283 pp., bibliogrs.Oxford, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing,2008. £19.99 (paper)

Some scholars – and I am one of them – willhold that the supremacy of the West is comingto an end. Others will focus on the ways such aneconomic, political, and cultural complex ischoosing to stick to the status of supremacy overthe rest of the world. Mattei and Nader clearlybelong in this category. The former author is ascholar in international law, and the latter maybe called the ‘founding mother’ of legalanthropology. Together they wrote a book,which could be produced only with this doublecompetence and with the intellectual couragewhich is clearly theirs, about the structures andprocesses by which the presumably respectabletradition of the rule of law is blatantly used tojustify, to legalize, and to perpetuate plunderthroughout the world. The book is appropriatelydedicated to the memory of Edward Said.

Mattei and Nader set out to detail how amajor ‘Western cultural artefact’, namely therule of law, has its origins in feudal times inEngland, where it was used by a minority oflandlords to prohibit a majority in the rulingcouncils from redistributing wealth. Throughoutcolonial times this instrument of political rulingwas the cause of the death of millions, whichdrove none other than Adam Smith to voice hisobjection against its use.

Recently the rule of law was turned in asystematic way into an instrument of plunder,seeking to win consent ‘both in the camp of thehegemonic power and among the victims’ (p.33). In the bulk of the book Mattei and Naderdemonstrate how the (ab)use of the rule of lawunder neoliberal regimes in the North (most ofall the United States, but also Europe) yields anew and encompassing kind of imperialism.Ideas are stolen from other cultural traditions:because they do not have a status of intellectualprivate property there, they can be legitimatelypatented by Western firms, where they do havesuch a legal status. Automatically, they then nolonger ‘belong’ to the group from whom theyoriginated.

Over the past two decades the very idea thatthe market thus allows for the spread of ideasand goods, and that it is beneficial for humanityto facilitate rather than constrain markettransactions, has been installed. Even more, ‘theidea that market forces produce the law [ratherthan the other around] is now accepted’ (p. 97).Without doubt anthropology in colonial timeslegitimized plunder under the rule of law, sincea rather general belief in the superiority of theWestern worldview was rampant in thediscipline, as with laypeople.

But there is more. The ‘Washingtonconsensus’ currently upholds the demonizationof Islam with its one-sided decisions to wagewar on countries like Iraq by invoking a ‘war onterror’ as a contemporary version of the rule oflaw. Where institutions are absent, plunder canmove on without constraints. Where institutionsare present, they are attacked and abolishedbecause they are claimed to be weak, terrorist,or inferior in the words of defenders of the ruleof law. Thus, the authors hold, the rule of lawgradually becomes illegal by legalizing thesystematic plunder of other parts of the world.Mexico (NAFTA), Russia, the Middle East, andother examples are carefully documented. Thevery effect of these applications of the rule oflaw is that the ideology of the free market thusonly allows the winners further benefits, to thedetriment of the poor.

An intriguing aspect of contemporary use ofthe rule of law in the trend towards globalizationis that ‘it is the market that controls, anddetermines the political process and the law’(p. 147), instead of politicians as electedrepresentatives of the people controlling themarket. A direct consequence of this reversal isthat politics itself is subjugated to the market:corporations are seen to ‘invest’ more and moreopenly in particular political parties and

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individual candidates in order to get the‘justified’ revenue from this investment. At thelevel of the media and of education and culturea ‘market-friendly’ climate becomes animportant goal, and those who question this apriori value can now be labelled suspect. Thenow fashionable ‘Alternative Dispute Resolution’(ADR), started after the civil rights movementsof the 1960s, does exactly that: people arepersuaded by powerful groups not to stand ontheir rights, but to be lenient, understanding,willing to go for a deal, and so on. Finally, thePatriot Act in the United States crowned thisevolution by justifying a reduction of civil rightsand installing a climate of fear and anxiety ratherthan trust among citizens. Here the authors jointhe warnings of politicians (such as Al Gore),researchers on penal law and on poverty(Wacquant), and many others. The book endswith a few proposals to go beyond what iscalled the ‘illegal rule of law’. The tremendouslyrich and elaborate list for further reading offers asupplementary tool for research for the layreader and the scholar.

Without doubt this is an important book. Itgives a thorough scholarly analysis of the verynotion of rule of law: its historical origin, itspolitical institutionalization, and its furtherinterpretation and implementation in the era ofglobalization. The aim of the book is to establishconvincingly the link between the rule of law asa political and ideological instrument and theunrestrained plunder of resources andmanpower by capitalism, being the economicsystem whereby a small minority in the worldaims to take the wealth of all and turn it intobenefits for members of that minority. Theexamples in the book are to some extent known.But the way they are interpreted and used as anillustration of a now global system of pillage andplunder is new and quite inspiring. Of course,we know of some such scholarly work nowadays(Wallerstein, Klein, and Mandel, to name just afew, and of a different vintage). But a workwhich demonstrates how the technical andrather formal (and hence supposedly ‘objective’)thinking and practice of (the rule of) lawoperates is an important contribution in thedeep and truly scientific critical tradition forwhich our scholarly institutes stand.

Mattei and Nader have produced acourageous, intellectually refined, and superblycritical book about one of the main instrumentsof society-building in our culture. The bookshould find a wide audience in law classes, andin graduate courses of sociology, anthropology,and political sciences. It deserves to be the

subject of debate on campuses and, one mightstill dream, in the media.

Rik Pinxten Ghent University

Weir, Shelagh. A tribal order: politics and lawin the mountains of Yemen. xviii, 390 pp.,maps, figs, tables, illus., bibliogr. Austin:Univ. Texas Press, 2007. $50.00 (cloth)

The book is an ethnography of the district ofRazih, which is a rural agglomeration of over30,000 people divided into ten tribes, in thenorthern Yemeni highlands. Since the 1970s thisarea has been the favourite stomping ground fora generation of Yemen’s foreign ethnographers,as it is the domain of tribalism par excellence.Moreover, the dominant ethnographic modelwithin which this region was appropriatedwas the ‘segmentary society’ theory, whichexclusively focused on the nature of tribes andtheir interaction with the state. This bookcontinues this tradition but with the intentionof recuperating segmentary theory from the‘homogenizing generalizations’ ofanthropologists and their caricaturalreductionism of tribalism into ideal patterns ofalliances according to theory-prescribedsocio-organizational principles and in whichhuman actors figure as ideal types. The authordoes not hide her exasperation with the‘exoticization’ of tribalism in Yemen. In contrast,her aim is to use segmentary theory as aheuristic model, and not as a panopticparadigm, in which the theory’s axioms aretested against the empirical evidence.Accordingly, the author presents herethnography of Razih as an exception to theprevalent use of segmentary theory, and onewhich ‘challenges common assumptions abouttribes and states in North Yemen, and the natureof their historical relationships’.

The first part of the book, which is dividedinto three parts, is not only a contextualreconnaissance of the site of the ethnography,but also a useful primer on the infrastructuraldimensions of the tribal system: that is, theunderpinning socio-political processes, the keyinstitutions and actors, and their articulationwith environmental and economic factors. Whatthis shows is that tribalism is primarily rooted inthe practical exigencies of sustaining livelihoodsin territorial domains constrained by acontingent configuration of geographical,topographical, and environmental endowmentsand requiring political management in theabsence of an overarching political authority,

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that is, the state; or alternatively in remedyingthe latter’s institutional inadequacies or inconfronting its Machiavellian strategy. Thiscontext engendered the consolidation of ‘tribalgeo-political structures’ in which each tribeclaimed political sovereignty over a discreteterritory within defined borders, administered byshaykhs with exclusive jurisdiction.

The second part of the book describes therule-making conventions (qawa’id) of the tribalsystem’s adjudicative apparatus, in which themaintenance of order is a coveted cultural ideal,the pursuit of which is enshrined in thepolitical-legal mechanisms of tribal governance(hukum ‘urfi). The striking feature of tribal law isthe pervasive recourse to written documents ascontracts to enshrine agreements betweenparties regarding every aspect of daily life. Ineffect, these mundane aspects are the domainsof tribal law and the bases of tribal governance:land-use regulation, water rights allocation,border demarcation, management of inter-grouprelations through conflict resolution andreconciliation, markets protection, enforcementof collective obligations of corporate groups,and so on. These written agreements constitutethe extensive textual corpus of tribal regulationsthat span the early seventeenth to the twentiethcenturies, and which inform the ethnography’shistorical reconstruction of tribal practices.Moreover, their enforcement is pursued throughelaborate rituals and the scrupulous observanceof established protocols. In such a context,conflict and violence, although real, aremanifested with deliberate symbolic effects andare rules-driven. What the author demonstratesis that segmentary theory’s pillar axiom of‘balanced opposition’ reified in the maxim ‘I andmy brother against my cousin and so on’ andinstitutionalized in the feud is not condonedin tribal regulations. In fact, it is explicitlyprohibited in the rule against ‘ganging up’,which is expressed in the following maxim:‘Whoever transgresses must bear all thedamages and has neither brother nor cousin’.Ultimately, tribal governance’s ‘dominantideology and associated practices are firmlyoriented toward peaceful reconciliation’.

The third part of the book focuses ontribes-state relations and marks a transition interms of dominant institutional practices fromtribal governance to state governance and therelative primacy of shari’ah law over tribal law,and the corresponding displacement of thelocus of adjudicative authority from tribesto state. The author offers a historicalreconstruction of four centuries of attempts at

the political incorporation of Razih, as part of aprocess of national state formation: starting fromthe seventeenth century, when opposition to theOttomans’ occupation of North Yemen led totheir expulsion in 1635 and to the consolidationof Imamate rule until the 1962 Revolutioninstalled the Yemen Arab Republic, and up tothe unification of North and South Yemen in1990.

In describing the institutional changesintroduced by these different regimes, theauthor was guided by a rather limited objectiveof demonstrating the resilience and adaptabilityof tribal institutions. As a result, she unwittinglybetrays a certain romance of tribalism, as thechronic opportunistic disposition of triballeaders in accommodating external authorityprimarily with the aim of maintaining theirpolitical authority and economic privileges isconflated with the intrinsic viability of tribalinstitutions. More important is the absence of adiscussion of the local institutionalconsequences of the introduction in 2000 of theLocal Authority Law, which sought to displacethe hereditary rule of the shaykhs by electedlocal councillors. Nevertheless, the ethnographyoffers a valuable retrospective on the tribalsystem of North Yemen, as well as a welcomedcorrective to the ‘scholarly imaginings’ oftribalism inspired by the dubious axioms ofsegmentary theory.

Serge D. Elie CEFAS

Wesley, David A. State practices and Zionistimages: shaping economic development in Arabtowns in Israel. xv, 256 pp., maps, figs, tables,illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: BerghahnBooks, 2006. $75.00 (cloth)

This outstanding study of the structures andprocesses of development planning in theGalilee region of Israel addresses, head on, thequestion of whether social anthropologists usingethnographic methods are capable of makingsubstantial contributions to the understandingof modern states and their governments.Wesley’s book, which he describes as an‘ethnography of macro-order power relations’,settles the issue convincingly in the affirmative.He argues that his analysis of ‘the field in whichArab economic development in Israel takesplace’ is comprehensible only when set within abroader framework of analysis that encompassesthe workings of the state as a whole, with all thehistorical, political, cultural, and religiousassociations to which it is anchored.

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The book investigates the relations betweenJewish (including Upper Nazareth) and Arab(including Kafar Kanna and Meshed) towns inthe Zipporit industrial area near Nazareth at atime (principally between 1992 and 1997, whenthe research was conducted) when the IsraeliMinistry of Industry, together with otherstate and international Jewish agencies, wasinstituting a strategic programme of industrialdevelopment in the area. The setting is a regioncontaining a majority of Arab citizens in whichthere is a concomitant drive by the state toadvance not only its control of the territory butalso the historical project of what Soffer, aZionist geographer and planner cited by Wesley,terms the ‘de-territorialization of the Arabpopulation’ – partly by establishing mitzpim(‘outlook posts’) in order ‘to insinuate barriers inthe spaces between clusters of Arab towns’(pp. 30, 32).

With remarkable subtlety and a deftsensitivity to the detail of territorial,organizational, and linguistic bureaucraticmanoeuvring, Wesley shows how the industrialdevelopment of Jewish towns and settlements inthe area was promoted, whilst access to thefunds and benefits rendering such developmentpossible was systematically denied to the Arabpopulation. This double-headed strategy is, heargues, rooted in such historical dispositions asmodes of pre-state purchase and settlement ofland and the contemporary espousal of theZionist images (of the book’s title) andnarratives that speak of Arabs as being either‘traditional’ (and thus, by definition, incapableof economic development) or ‘threatening’, orboth.

But Wesley takes great care to avoid thekind of simplistic structural essentialism orreductionism that would leave us with naïve, ifintellectually and politically neat, visions ofpolitically and bureaucratically astute Jewishoppressors manipulating weak and disorganizedArab victims. In the penultimate chapter we areintroduced to a ‘discernible line of developmentduring the past decade and a half from Arabtown passivity and non-involvement in theplanning process to clearly articulated demandsfor inclusion’ (p. 168). Ideas and strategies ofjoint industrial areas involving co-operationbetween Jewish and Arab municipalities are nowbeing mooted, fought for, and even legislativelypromoted. Recently, for example, Arab Nazarethitself made a bid to become incorporated as apartner in the Zipporit industrial area withoutoffering to put any of its own land into theequation. Additionally, Wesley introduces us to a

number of Arab policy-related associations thathave become politically engaged in planningprocesses, and argues that their activities openup a horizon in which planning partnershipscould be imagined leading to ‘Jewish plannersseeing it not as threatening but as both properand desirable that Arab leaders and plannersparticipate fully in articulating not only localneeds, but also the goals of national andregional development’ (p. 188). Could it reallybe, in an imagined future, that Jews, Christians,and Muslims come to be incorporated as equalcitizens, both in law and practice, in a singlenational project?

As Wesley’s account moves towards itsconclusion it addresses equally fundamentalissues. These include the veracity of theassumption, commonly made following Weber,that bureaucracies of modern states tend to bedisenchanted, even-handed, and universalistic intheory and practice (p. 191); the question ofwhether Palestinian Israelis may ever be able toescape from their ‘sense of constant siege andthreat of dispossession’ (p. 192); and the centralissue of whether Israel and all its citizens couldlook forward to a time when a regime of‘planning that distinguishes between Jew andArab in order to assure the dominance of Jewishdevelopment might give way to planning thatmakes that distinction in order to promote Arabequality’ (p. 197). The very final paragraphallows us, for a brief moment, to glimpse theground base, as it were, upon which the wholework is based: namely the preoccupation withthe relationship between the land, as home tothose, both Jews and their Palestinian fellowcitizens, who live there. Wesley suggests thatthinking about planning for economicdevelopment in Galilee raises the question ofwhether the state remains ‘embarked on acourse of closing in on itself ... [and] eventualsuffocation’ or, alternatively, whether it mayembrace a future of ‘breath and life’ (p. 197).

There are various reasons why this is, bysome way, the most important book to datefrom Israeli anthropology. An ethnographic casestudy is presented that gets to the heart of thestate and its government. But it does so in a waythat frames the account as process rather thanclosed structure. A final thought, therefore, isthat Wesley has effectively invited Israelianthropologists to join the new historians intaking part in a project that invites the state toprovide the space and conditions for both Jewishand Palestinian Israelis to make a congenialhome – as fellow and equal citizens.

Tom Selwyn London Metropolitan University

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Method and theory

Coleman, Simon & Peter Collins (eds).Locating the field: space, place and context inanthropology. xii, 204 pp. figs, bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, 2006.£55.00 (cloth)

This collection comprises a detailed and cogentintroduction by the editors, and nine additionalchapters. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins’introduction situates the volume in the contextof recent theoretical debates about space, place,text, and fieldwork as well as the history of thediscipline, noting that anthropologists havedefined the scope and import of different scalesof temporality and spatiality for many decades.Moreover, despite the use of metaphors ofenclosed spaces in certain periods and studies,‘fieldwork has never been dependent on fixedplaces as such’ (p. 11). Unlike many editedcollections, this is a coherent volume. Itsauthors confront the place of anthropologyin today’s academy, focus onmethodological questions, and providepersuasive counter examples to moresimplistic paradigms.

Ulf Hannerz’s wonderful chapter traces hisfieldwork experiences in Washington, DC (USA),the Cayman Islands, Nigeria, and most recentlyforeign news correspondents working inlocations such as Jerusalem, Johannesburg, andTokyo. He notes that those projects ‘involvedstudying down, up (to a degree) and sideways’,‘backwards’ (in time) as well as ‘the role of thetechnologies of culture’ (p. 32). He contrasts‘anthropology by immersion’ with the neweridea of ‘anthropology by appointment’ (p. 34),arguing for the value of anthropologicalfieldwork that may be conducted in many placesbut leaves room for in-depth interpersonalencounters and improvisation. Leslie Bankdemonstrates the value of revisiting the methodsused in earlier studies. He contends that theXhosa in town trilogy produced by Mayer,Reader, Pauw, and their colleagues missed thecosmopolitanism of 1950s East Bank (nowDuncan Village in East London, South Africa)due to their ‘homemade’ (p. 45) method ofrelying mainly on interviews and other fieldworkconducted in and around people’s homes ratherthan on research in public spaces such asdance-halls and sports venues. Jo Lee and TimIngold’s chapter on walking in Scotland providesa superb account of their fieldwork and some oftheir rich ethnographic findings. They outline

three ‘resonances between walking andanthropological fieldwork’ (p. 68) and reinforcethe importance of embodied, creative,phenomenological fieldwork. Susan Frohlickfollows up with a reflexive chapter about howshe came to understand the importance ofdispelling a model of ‘localizing ethnography’(p. 99) in her study of Nepali climbers, andshows how important it is to study the‘immersion’ that forms part of the integrationinto various ‘circuits’ in which not justanthropologists and tourists but also othermobile fieldwork subjects travel. AnjoomMukadam and Sharmina Mawani provide atrenchant rejection of the use of labelling suchas ‘immigrant’, ‘transnational’, and ‘diasporic’individuals. Drawing on data from their study ofsecond-generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims ofGujarati ancestry living in London, England, andToronto, Canada, they outline a set of fivecriteria for what they term ‘post-diasporic’(p. 110) individuals. The following chapter byNicholas Nisbett on Bangalorean middle-classyouth carefully delineates how the cybercafé isnot a distinct space from the internet as onlineidentities are constantly being constructedalongside face-to-face ones in connection withthe same relations of ‘power and status’ (p. 137).James Leach’s important contribution showshow ‘[p]lace, like time, is inseparable from theongoing generation and regeneration ofpersons’ (p. 151) for Nekgini villagers on the RaiCoast of Papua New Guinea, rendering socialscience models based on delimited philosophicaltraditions problematic. Leach reminds us that wemust not ignore the challenges of very differentontological, phenomenological, andepistemological frameworks for living in theworld. Based on examples from the research thatshe undertook for her book on the Icelandicwriter Björg C. Thorlaksson, Sigridur DunaKristmundsdottir develops an interesting view ofbiography as anthropology, arguing that, inbiographical work based mainly on archivalsources, the idea of ‘the researcher as location’is just as important as that of ‘the field’ (pp.170-2).

Nigel Rapport closes this volume with aneloquent discussion of ‘diaspora, cosmopolis,global refuge’ (p. 179). He notes that theresidents of cities both large and small are in‘global transit between places and relations’(p. 188), calling on anthropologists to developwhat he views as ‘a capacity, even a duty, ... tooffer ideologies’ (p. 194) that promoteopenness. This book should be read widely,and will be a fundamental resource for training

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students in anthropological fieldwork andanalysis.

Sharon R. Roseman Memorial University ofNewfoundland

Errington, Joseph. Linguistics in a colonialworld: a story of language, meaning, andpower. x, 199 pp., bibliogr. Oxford: JohnWiley & Sons, 2007. £50.00 (cloth), £19.99

(paper)

This slim book covers a lot of ground,geographically, historically, and intellectually,though we may question just how profoundlythis ground is explored. Errington’s area ofexpertise and the focus of his major publicationsis that of language, society, and power inSoutheast Asia, especially the Javanese-speakingparts of Java. But here he has spread his netmore widely and documents acts of linguisticcolonialism and imperialism throughout theworld, from the Dark Ages work of Alcuin ofYork (here referred to as Alcuin the Scot),linguistic adviser to the illiterate Holy RomanEmperor Charlemagne, to the present-dayactivities of the American evangelical Protestantlinguistic organization the Summer Institute ofLinguistics and its alter ego, the Wycliffe BibleTranslators. In addition to the usual indexes andbibliography the book contains seven chapters,comprising 171 pages. The underlying argumentof the book, that language and empire haveoperated together, is presented in the first andintroductory chapter on p. 18, and comes notfrom Errington but from Elio Antonio de Nebrija,author of the first grammar of Spanish,published in 1492. (Errington misspells Nebrija’sname as ‘Anton’, for unexplained reasons.)

Over the next six chapters, the ways in whichimperial and colonial mentalities have interactedwith the spread and use of a number oflanguages are amply illustrated. The chapters arepresented in roughly chronological order, withsome well-chosen illustrations (though on p. 63

Maldivian and Sinhalese should be linkedhistorically with East Indo-Aryan languagesrather than with Gujarati, Marathi, and Konkani).Chapter 2 deals with language use bymissionaries, especially hispanophone Catholicsproselytizing in Mexico and the Philippines andrepresenting the sounds of the respectivelanguages, Nahuatl and Tagalog, with a greateror lesser success. (Tagalog gab’i ‘night’ on p. 63

should be gabi’.) The third and fourth chaptersdiscuss the rise of Indo-European comparativephilology, mostly at the hands of

nineteenth-century Germans, the family treemodel which they developed, and the racistassumptions which colonial linguists of the timeused (often inaccurately) to delineate thelinguistic realities which they encountered.Chapters 5 and 6 bring us to the later colonialperiod, in which European outsiders oftendecided where linguistic and tribal boundarieslay (with deleterious effects on the subsequenthistories of the apportioned territories) and inwhich local languages, often already widelydiffused, were appropriated and diffused bycolonial powers and their agents as a means ofmaking their territories easier to manage. Apostcolonial future, in which the relationship ofnative and outsider, speaker and investigator,and the role of newer literacies are discussed,can be glimpsed in the pages of chapter 7.

The empires which come in for both overtand implicit criticism for their arrogance inengineering and meddling with the linguisticorder are, it should be noted, those with theirroots in Western Europe. The use of linguisticideologies by Western European powers hasindeed often led to abominable behaviour, andmany of their actions seem to have beenactuated by malice, avarice, psychopathy,ignorance, and (to be generous) staggeringobtuseness and lack of empathy, but they arenot unique in this. Little if anything is said aboutthe role of speakers of a number of otherlanguages, such as Russian, Arabic, and Chinese,in obliterating large tracts of linguistic diversity(and often the people who spoke theseoverwhelmed languages) and of redrawinglinguistic boundaries at several levels in acts oflinguistic imperialism which continue to this day.Furthermore, although much mention is madeof Nahuatl, Quechua, Malay/Indonesian, andSwahili, Errington does not point out that theselanguages had already begun to spread theirinfluence and increase their areas of dominationlong before Europeans were even present (letalone dominant) in the areas where these arespoken. One thinks, for instance, of the networkof small Swahili-speaking coastal communitieswhich already stretched from Somalia toMozambique, or of the considerable basic-leveleffects of Malay from Brunei upon Tagalog.

Much is left unsaid. For instance, JosephGreenberg’s demonstration in the 1950s thatWolof, Seereer, and Fula are historically relateddespite the differing appearances of theirspeakers would have provided a fine correctiveto Errington’s comments on p. 85 aboutdifferential French colonial attitudes to thesegroups. Similarly, despite the impression

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Errington gives, the Proyecto LingüísticoFrancisco Marroquín owes much of its success tothe involvement of linguists trained at Berkeley,long the last holdout against Chomskyandoctrine. The number of proofreading errors ishigh and even affects the names of scholars suchas ‘Karl’ Meinhof and Frances ‘Kartunnen’ (forKarttunen); a nadir is reached on p. 62 with its‘Avestian’, ‘Umbric’, and ‘Lettisch’ for,respectively, Avestan, Umbrian, Latvian.

The overall impression is of awell-intentioned (if hardly original) work, butone which is highly partial in its animositytowards colonialism, and which is pockmarkedwith errors. As the work of a professor at Yale,this simply is not good enough.

Anthony P. Grant Edge Hill University

Moore, Henrietta L. The subject ofanthropology: gender, symbolism andpsychoanalysis. ix, 272 pp., illus., bibliogr.Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. £55.00 (cloth),£16.99 (paper)

This is a very well-written book on an importanttopic by one of the most gifted anthropologistsof her generation. Moore, in this nuancedvolume, draws our attention to a lack in ourcurrent anthropological horizon with respect todesires and social imagery. Hence she calls foran anthropologically supple theory of imagery,fantasy, and the workings of the pre-social thatgrants to subjects their ability for an internalworld and a capacity for agency. In short Mooreargues that socio-cultural anthropology for toolong has focused on theories of the social, ratherthan taking seriously the complex andtransformative field of the coming-into-being ofthe social. While arguing against ananthropological gaze that has classified some‘non-Western’ societies with restrictive labelssuch as patriarchal and ‘fixed by tradition’, sheshows the complexity of sexual difference, whichin the ‘Western’ psyche is labelled as part of anunconscious individual domain which, in othersocieties, is taken to dwell within the domain ofthe performative and collective.

Moore focuses on the coming-into-being ofsexed beings by analysing different secondaryethnographic material from, among others,Tanzania (Chagga circumcision rituals),Southeast Asia (Sambia initiation), and Melanesia(Gimi marriage and male rites of passage).Scrutinizing old debates on the universality ofphallic and oedipal psychoanalytical complexes,she explores how this ethnographic material

sheds new light on Western psychoanalyticaltheories of sexual difference and genderidentities. Moore suggests that we should moveaway from a focus on complexes and towardsthe broader question of how we become sexedbeings.

Supported by feminist critiques of Lacan andFreud, she analyses how, in specificethnographic settings (among the Sambia),sexual difference is not given but is revealedretroactively through a set of cultural, symbolic,and social relations that have to be performed inparticular ways. Hence distinctions betweenmasculinity and femininity are always inemergence, and ambiguously open toredefinition. Through the analysis of myths oforigin (among the Gimi), Moore argues thatorigins are difficult to locate. Rather, they reflecta radical uncertainty and the impossibility ofcoming to authoritative closure. It is thisimpossibility, then, that becomes themotor-engine of new cultural forms and socialrelations.

While analysing historically situatedproductions of sexed bodies and sexualdifferences, as among the Gimi, Moore arguesthat socially recognized patriarchal societies maybe driven by an ambiguous (ritual andmythological) interdependence betweenmasculinity and femininity. Unconsciousfantasies about betrayal, loss, and love aregendered even in their pre-oedipal forms. Henceethnographic material can provide traces of howthe imagery erupts in the symbolic and howfemininity and masculinity are complexly relatedand open to multiple and shifting post-oedipalinterpretations. This is one way in whichanthropology can contribute to psychoanalysis.

Moreover, Moore argues that psychoanalysisand anthropology can best contribute to eachother by exploring ways in which subjectsemerge relationally; how the materiality ofconsciousness is constantly (re)shaped by work,politics, and power; and how the connectionbetween agency, imagery, and the symbolic isboth embodied and linguistic. In fact, the use ofmetaphors and metonyms becomes a key fieldwhere these relations can be ethnographicallyexplored. And they do not point to a finished‘coherent model, but a set of incomplete andover-determined traces which are the product ofspecific and situated engagements’ (pp. 88-9).Gendered subjects emerge out of the complexrelational interplay of identification anddifferentiation, introspection and projection,within a matrix where a struggle is always atplay and never exhausted.

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Hence we need a theory of the subject andnot of the self in anthropology. This subjectshould be based not only on relationality andsociality but also in an understanding of the roleof those desires and the imagery that cannotfully be contained within discourse anddiscursive practices. In Moore’s view we need tomove beyond a Lacanian understanding of thecrisis of signification, identification and languageand integrate psychoanalytic views with anunderstating of how cultural meanings andsocial relations foster particular and changingrelations between ideology, the psychic realm,and power.

There are many angles worth discussing inthis book, and I will refer to just three of themhere. First, it is clear that Moore’s writing,formed and shaped within a tradition of Britishsocial anthropology, resonates with a particularethnographic literature. Work has been writtenon the processes of hybridization andracialization, at least in the context of theAmericas, that have engaged with the issue ofthe coming-into-being of the social through asedimentation and renarrativization of (colonial)histories. It is interesting that in the discussion ofthe historical, cultural, and psychoanalyticalformation of sexed beings, ethnographicreferences are made to early anthropologicaltexts, while there is little ethnographic mentionconnected to more contemporary debates oncritical race theory or racialized economies ofdesire.

Secondly, there has been a very importantline of feminist scholars who have explored therelation between history, desires, and bodies,centred on the study of the metamorphosis ofthe human, religion, and the gendered subject(see the work by Caroline Bynum, AmyHollywood, and Rachel Fulton). It is a pity thatby skirting the questions around an alterity ofthe divine in the complex interplay of sexuality,psychoanalysis, and religion, Moore misses thechance to flesh out the profound contributionthat a study of desire and the emergence ofsexual difference can make to a key concern foranthropology and history: namely the ontologiesof (gendered) humanness.

Finally, and this relates to the previous point,it is not clear how Moore’s theory of desire andsexual difference connects to history andhistorical sedimentations. There are importantavenues for the ethnographic exploration of howdesire shapes the agency of subjects as theyaffect the multitude. Maybe by daring furtherwith an analysis of the relation betweenpsychoanalysis, anthropology, and history,

Moore could have explored how ananthropology of traces and of sexual differenceis also about the introjections, circulation, andrepression of cultural and historical memories ina post-oedipal phase of the collective.

None the less, this is a very rich andthought-provoking book, written in a clearlanguage (accessible to an undergraduateaudience too), that is bound to become a classictext in the emergent cross-roads betweenpsychoanalysis, anthropology, and feministstudies. I recommend it highly.

Valentina Napolitano University of Toronto

Roth, Ilona (ed.). Imaginative minds. xxxvi,348 pp., figs, tables, plates, illus., bibliogrs.Oxford: Univ. Press for The British Academy,2007. £45.00 (cloth)

Humans have uniquely imaginative minds. Otheranimals think, but they do not play aroundwith their thoughts or become immersed inimaginary worlds. From a Darwinian standpoint,it is not immediately obvious why humanother-worldliness should enhance our chances ofsurvival or reproduction. Ilona Roth’s editedvolume claims to be the first interdisciplinaryattempt to address this question. What is thenature of human imagination? How and whymight it have evolved?

In her introduction, Roth invokes Aristotle,Hume, Kant, Blake, Wordsworth, Darwin, Freud,and Einstein to plead that ‘the imagination’merits serious attention as a topic in cognitivescience. But what exactly is meant by ‘theimagination’? In some definitions, the notion of‘daydreaming’ is central. In others, the crucialfeature is purposeful thinking – the ability toplan ahead. Literary and philosophical folk mightprefer to focus on ‘metaphorical’ thinking.Noting that these various attempts at a definition‘may seem somewhat unrelated’, Roth arguesthat ‘they have in common a reference to thehuman mind’s capacity to elaborate concepts,images, and ideas that do not correspond tocurrent or past reality, and that may never beactualized’.

This book is exceptionally interdisciplinary –so much so that it is often hard to discern anyfocus at all. The three opening chapters offer anevolutionary perspective, but have little else incommon. Archaeologist Steve Mithen presentsthe latest version of his theory that ‘cognitivefluidity’ in modern Homo sapiens can be invokedto explain the emergence of ‘metaphorical andsymbolic thought’. Since cognitive fluidity as he

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defines it already involves metaphorical thought,the argument reminds this reviewer of Molière’sphysician – who explained the sleep-inducingeffect of opium by reference to its soporificproperties.

More empirically grounded is Andrew Whitenand Thomas Suddendorf’s attempt to relatehuman imagination to great ape cognition.Human ‘imaginative powers’, they write, ‘didnot spring from nowhere’. Young great apesraised among humans have been observed toplay with dolls or toy animals ‘as if’ they werethe real thing. Presumably, then, these primatesare not entirely without creative imaginations.Somewhat flatly, the authors conclude that thecognitive capabilities of great apes fallsomewhere between those of monkeys andthose of humans, observing that we wouldexpect this in view of the intermediate size oftheir brains.

The final chapter in this opening section isSusan Blackmore’s argument that distinctivelyhuman imaginative capabilities do not servebiological functions at all. Instead, theirfunctions are ‘mimetic’. To illustrate the idea,she cites philosopher Dan Dennett on theevolutionary origins of music. One day,a distant hominid ancestor started bangingrhythmically with a stick ‘for no good reason atall’. A neighbouring ancestor – again for nogood reason – found its ‘imitator circuitstickled into action’. In this way, music wasborn – whereupon the memorable featuresof music itself began exercising selection onthe brain, adapting this brain to serve as avehicle for music’s own replicatoryinterests.

The remaining chapters include contributionson young children’s imaginary friends; thedegree to which pre-school children can be saidto be gullible; music considered as ‘biologicallygrounded structure and culturally embeddedpractice’; why people read novels; mentalimagery and its relation to creative thought;‘specialized inference engines’ as precursors of‘creative imagination’; metaphor and its relationto schizophrenia; and the light shed on humanimaginative powers by modern brain-scanningtechniques.

Readers of this journal will be disappointedby the almost complete absence of cross-culturalethnographic awareness or research. PascalBoyer might be described as an anthropologist,but his chapter contains no more ethnographythan any other. Pursuing his agenda as anevolutionary psychologist, he links the ‘collectiveceremonies’ and ‘rituals’ of most people in most

places to ‘the pathology of obsessive-compulsivedisorders’.

The British Academy symposium onImaginative Minds was held early in 2004.Anyone who has edited a volume arising fromsuch an event will know how much effort andtime is required to knock the disparate chaptersinto shape and ensure coherence of some kind.Judged in that light, Roth’s editorial work hasnot been a success. Although the assembledchapters are for the most part well-written andinteresting, the image of ‘ships passing in thenight’ comes inevitably to mind.

Chris Knight University of East London

Sanga, Glauco & Gherardo Ortalli

(eds). Nature knowledge: ethnoscience,cognition, and utility. xiii, 417 pp., figs, tables,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2003. £50.00 (cloth)

The nature-culture debate is one of the moststimulating areas of multidisciplinary discussionbetween the biological sciences andanthropology. This book offers both theoreticaldiscussions and case studies of forms ofknowledge about nature, the uses humans makeof these resources, and the social scienceperspective on nature conservation. The bookis based on a conference, ‘Nature Knowledge/Saperi naturalistici’, held in 1997 and organizedby the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Artiand the Department of Historical Studies of Ca’Foscari University, Venice. The book is dividedinto five main parts, simply called‘Classification’, ‘Naming’, ‘Thought’, ‘Use’, and‘Conservation’. I found this a very useful way oforganizing the book. Numerous verywell-known and respected contributors,including Brent Berlin (Athens, Georgia, USA),Roy Ellen (Canterbury, UK), Daniel Fabre(Toulouse, France), Jack Goody (Cambridge, UK),and Jane H. Hill (Tucson, USA), provide criticalassessments of specific aspects of their research.

A common theme of the book is the role ofuniversalist versus local models of classification.Berlin, for example, focuses on some universalprinciples of classification, while Ellen highlightsthe interface of general-purpose, or universal,models, and special-purpose, or culturallyspecific, ones. Overall, the chapter on‘classification’ provides a plinth on which all theother topics develop. Hill, for example, in herstudy on naming in Tohono O’odham, discusses‘what is lost if names are forgotten’. Sheconcludes that names themselves are part of the

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linguistic materials in which cultures are deeplyembedded, a point also made by contributors inLuisa Maffi’s crucial publication on this topic (Onbiocultural diversity: linking language, knowledge,and the environment, 2001).

The chapters vary greatly in their analyticalpower and clarity of presentation, and,unfortunately, due to the long editing process,more recent discussions have not beenincorporated. The book was published in 2004,or about seven years after the symposium. Aconsiderable body of work has accumulated inthis period and is therefore mostly missing.

Overall, however, the book is well-edited andmost contributions are written comprehensively.It will certainly be useful to researchers withan interest in cognitive aspects ofethnopharmacology, but also ethnoscience ingeneral.

Michael Heinrich The School of Pharmacy,University of London

Music and dance

Baulch, Emma. Making scenes: reggae, punk,and death metal in 1990s Bali. xiii, 226 pp.,illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 2007. £48.00 (cloth), £12.99

(paper)

This is a break from the norm of writing aboutBali. Emma Baulch explores the self-professedunderbelly of 1990s Balinese music culture in anuanced ethnography that demonstrates aserious and intimate understanding of thepeople and events she describes.

With a sure grasp of the theoretical debates,Baulch assesses the (non)applicability of Westernmodels of youth resistance drawn fromBirmingham School cultural studies, as well as arange of anthropological theories of alterity,resistance, carnival, and transgression, to theKuta/Denpasar cases. But I think her primarystrength is her attention to the ethnographicdetail; the arguments are substantiated byhaving gained exceptional access to the sceneand developed an exceptional rapport with herinformants. This, of course, is the ideal for anyanthropological or ethnographic project. But thescene that Baulch has accessed is a deliberatelyclosed and marginalized one, though it issituated largely in Bali’s most ‘open’ places:Kuta and Denpasar.

In the author’s words, the sidewalks of Kutashe entered in 1996 were

a gaping frontier land of whichanthropology rarely spoke ... they ragedwith charged encounters between touristsand street-side watch sellers, drug dealers,drivers, pimps, and whores ... punk jamschafed against the pop soundscapeemanating from the Hard Rock Caféacross the road. Mohawks, feignedbrawls, Bad Religion, metal spikes, heftyjackboots, and leather jackets thrived(p. 1).

This is an image that may possibly be familiarto travellers who have stayed in Kuta, Bali’slargest resort. But is not one that is found inbrochures or highlighted by Balinese culturalcommentators, and neither is it one thatanthropologists tend to write about. Baulch’swork deals with a range of groups that alldefined themselves as different from themainstream but, as the 1990s progressed,emphatically not ‘alternative’. And she enters analmost entirely male semi-subcultural domainthat frames itself in contrast to the ‘feminized’pop of mainstream Indonesian consumerism.(In fact, Baulch describes being one of only twowomen privy to the scene. The other, anupper-caste young woman called Dayu, was afascinating exception, given entry via herrelationship with Moel, of death metal bandEternal Madness.) This is not exactly paradiseBali.

The book is also the story of ngetop Balinesepunk band Superman is Dead and their role inestablishing the Bali punk scene, definitely theearly alternapunk scene, and arguably the widerunderground. It also explains the machinationsof the various contesting groups within thescene(s), who sometimes quite literallycompeted – in organized gigs and gatherings –and otherwise, as in the case of death metal’sPhobia, ‘gestured elsewhere’, to borrow theauthor’s phrase. This is fascinating stuff; I doubtthat many observers of Balinese society, orBalinese themselves, will have any idea of thedetailed differences and ‘othering’ that tookplace not from the perspective of counterculturejuxtaposed against mainstream, but between themultiple shifting identities created amongst thevarious groups. And these, of course, ‘othered’themselves against the reggae groups thatplayed in tourist bars. All, Baulch argues, aresomehow part of a peripheral Balinese Other ina love-hate relationship with Jakarta’s Indonesiancentre, rather than the predictable West. Thisrather radical and, to some traditionalists,surprising point that Balinese punk is somehow

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principally about Balineseness and regionalismrecurs throughout the book.

The emphasis on otherness and separationover community and duty, which Baulch ofcourse acknowledges as crucial to Balineseculture and society, is somewhat overstated.Even more detail of how the young men sheportrays exist and relate in the family-orientatedworld of the Banjar would be illuminating, aswould some analysis of death metal and punk’sinterface with contemporary gamelan. The maindifficulty I found with the text, however, was themarrying of the sometimes opaque style oftheoretical analysis with the much looserconversational mode of the ethnography. Whileconsistently vibrant and entertaining, it was notalways complementary. The mixed tone was alsoapparent across chapters.

Overall, though, this is the kind of workabout Bali that I would like to see more of. Itis truly contemporary. It deals with thecomplexities of a set of subcultural groupsjuxtaposed against and yet parallel to the localand national hegemonies. It recognizes theparticularities of these groups and many of theindividuals who people them, rather thanlumping them together as ‘youth culture’.Baulch does not simplify the issues, avoidpeople’s chaotic agency, or seek neatconclusions. Her work seems to embrace thecomplexity of the process of making scenes inBali. And it does all this while recognizing theglobal music scene and late capitalist culturaleconomy – what Appadurai called the ‘globalmodern’ – of which it is also a small, but noisy,part. This is a refreshing change.

Laura Noszlopy Royal Holloway, University ofLondon

Klein, Debra L. Yorùbá bàtá goes global:artists, culture brokers, and fans. xxxv, 220 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2008. £28.50 (cloth), £11.00

(paper)

Ethnographers can no longer disappear intorural villages, hoping to evade the modernworld. Debra Klein lived for several years inthe house of the bàtá drummer LàmídìÀyánkúnlé, in the small Yorùbá town ofEr n-Osunì` `. . . near to Òsogbo in Nigeria.Apprenticed as a drummer, she found she hadjoined a worldwide network of ‘patrons, clients,friends, co-performers, anthropologists, fans,students, and business entrepreneurs’ as ‘the

newest, and thus the most promising,collaborator’. Bàtá drumming continues to servean indigenous population in this tiny town, butit now also addresses audiences in America,Europe, and elsewhere. Klein therefore traces thetransformation of a local drumming traditioninto a ‘Yorùbá cultural movement’.

At the heart of this book is Làmídì Àyánkúnlé,and his family of performers. Klein tracks his lifeas he changes from a mere drummer into a‘representative of traditional Yorùbá culture’who juggles with modern officials, globalcommerce, and postgraduate students.

We are given a strong sense that Làmídì is,first of all, an artist and craftsman fighting tosustain his art. Bàtá drumming (more than, forexample, dùndún) has a close relationship to thecults of the Yorùbá gods, but traditional religionhas increasingly given way to Christianity andIslam, both of which are hostile to these gods.Despite his own family’s affiliation to Islam,Làmídì has therefore tried to sustain the qualityof his music by maintaining contact with theor saì.` ` and egúngún festivals, where each godhas its own specific bàtá rhythms.

A central theme is the inequality in thedrummers’ relations with commercial and otherpartners. Klein documents Làmídì’s sometimesbemused dealings with cultural officials whoknow little about the activities they try tocontrol. It seems the state has played anambiguous role, simultaneously celebrating andmarginalizing traditional performance for itsown ends. For a time, there was even a schemeto invent a homogenized ‘Nigerian’ culture toreplace the pre-existing local variety. By the1990s, state-sponsored artists were increasinglyexpected to have college degrees to symbolizetheir proficiency in traditional performance, aswell as the English language and modernpatterns of life.

Klein briefly looks at traditional art throughthe eyes of those Germanic ‘culture brokers’Susanne Wenger, Ulli Beier, and Georgina Beier,who, in an earlier generation, stimulated andsustained the renowned revival of traditionalculture in Osogbo` . and beyond. While thisfamous collaboration between foreigners andlocal artists and religious specialists was certainlybenign and counter-colonial in spirit, Kleinclaims that even this remained inescapablycolonial.

There is a lengthy discussion of the conflictsand rivalries that arise both within and betweenfamilies as the musicians manage the gapbetween the different professional worlds theyinhabit. The musicians might play for large sums

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one day in America and a week later for tinysums at an egúngún or or saì.` ` festival. Juniorfamily members might quickly acquire wealthand status unwarranted by their family position,thus embarrassing their seniors.

The book considers the growing fusion oftraditional bàtá with popular musical genressuch as fújì. It further examines collaborationsamong Yorùbá, German, and Americanmusicians, situating the artists of Er n-Osunì` `. . .within the history and discourse of ‘worldmusic’. Klein points to the divergence betweenthe self-conscious political ideals of the worldmusic scene and a quasi-colonial reality wherepoor artists are made use of by wealthyentrepreneurs, and indeed wealthypostgraduates, such as Klein herself.

Klein, a trained dancer, ventures into anengaging discussion of the aesthetics of danceand selfhood. Yorùbá dance, she suggests, is notjust a matter of ‘easy-to-perform’ dance steps. Itbecame successful only ‘when we were able totease our audiences by hinting at our insidersecrets on the dance floor’. The notion of acontrolled revelation of a ‘secret self’ existselsewhere in literature on the Yorùbá, and theinsight of her description is a sign of hersensitivity.

The drummers and dancers Klein describesare involved in a bewildering complexity ofcultural and economic relationships, at homeand abroad, with bureaucrats, scholars,entrepreneurs, family members, and ideologues.Nevertheless, she shows them to retain theirintegrity. Làmídì, the central figure, comes overas likeable and sincere, striving to maintain thequality of his playing despite the contradictionsof his situation. He and his fellow performers allretreat from time to time into big cities andforeign parts. Nevertheless, they return, likefarmers from the farm, to participate in the lifeof their town. Thus, despite the pressures, theyretain a solid sense of their own identity.

Anthony D. Buckley Queen’s University, Belfast

Magowan, Fiona. Melodies of mourning: musicand emotion in northern Australia. xvii,222 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford:James Currey, 2007. £50.00 (cloth), £17.95

(paper)

Fiona Magowan’s eloquent text makes excellentuse of music and emotion as intellectual vehiclesto interpret cultural life. Drawing on contextualanalysis and reflexivity to explain the social

and ecological significance of music andperformance among the indigenous Yolgnu innorthern Australia’s Arnhem Land, Magowan’sprivileging of ‘musicking behaviours’ (p. 45)presents an insightful means to understand how,when, and why Yolgnu women, men, andchildren participate in rituals that facilitate there-production of ecological and musicalperson/environment relationships. Magowan’score theme is that both song and theenvironment (landscapes, waterways, creatures,and plants) are central to Yolgnu people’ssensory awareness of, and demonstratedattachments to, place over time. She observesincisively that ‘songs hold people’s lives andhistories’ (p. 186).

Whilst foci include the contemplation ofYolgnu beliefs, practices, and ecologies from agendered perspective, and a key example is theritual process that surrounds funeral activities, itis also plain that Magowan is concerned to showthat music – the performance of dance and song– mediates all aspects of Yolgnu sociality. Shenotes also that music and dance in ‘traditionaland popular contexts’ are central to interactionswith non-Yolgnu, as evidenced, for instance, innegotiations about land, and as a means todisseminate broader ‘cultural understanding’(p. 42). As illustration, the internationallyrenowned Yolgnu band Yothu Yindi aredescribed as performing songs whereby‘ancestral forms [are blended successfully] withWestern musical instruments’ (p. 42).

A rich complex of ethnographic detailpermeates the text. Covering a range ofcommunities and settings, Magowan includesfine-grained background material about thenortheast Arnhem Land communities in whichshe undertook fieldwork (such as Galiwin’ku[Elcho Island], Yirrkala, Nhulunbuy [Gove], andRorruwuy), noting the impact of Christianmissions and modernity (pp. 35-43 [but seealso below]). Song texts and their translationsare included in most chapters, whereas othersare located as appendices (pp. 193-203).Epistemologically and methodologically candidabout data collection, including a series ofreflections that reveal a thoughtful awkwardnesswhen entering the field (e.g. pp. 3-8, 21),Magowan presents considered insights aboutthe value of patient, cross-cultural learning(including, and most importantly in thisinstance, from children, pp. 44-69), and theinspiration of music as a key trope inanthropological and ecological inquiry.

Magowan also canvasses theoretical issues,such as those that have emerged within the

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anthropology of sensory experience, and theanthropology of emotion (pp. 12-15), a topic shedescribes as a ‘messy’ one that sometimes leavescultural interpretation open-ended (p. 185).Gender relations and gender theory are exploredtoo (e.g. pp. 16-18), but with less rigour than theattention given to the anthropology of emotion.It would have been useful, for instance, to seethe discussion about men’s ‘control’ over musicperformances (e.g. pp. 16-17 et passim) expandedto allow epistemological room for control as aform of nurturance. The uncritical use of LloydWarner’s A black civilization (1937/1958) is alsoproblematic, in part because his representationof women has been challenged on a number ofoccasions, such as by Phyllis Kaberry inAboriginal woman sacred and profane (1939), andby Diane Bell in Daughters of the Dreaming(1983).

Another concern is that while the influence ofcontemporary socio-economic problems isshown as including declining levels of health(such as an increase in diabetes), and increasinglevels of premature death and suicide (e.g.pp. 35-8), the impact on Yolgnu social life andritual obligation remains fairly obscure. Readersmight have benefited from learning a little moreabout how, and to what extent, the transmissionof song and associated performance has beendirectly affected by the physical and symbolicloss of loved ones, and/or the degree to whichcertain men and women have become too ill toperform. What social, cultural, and emotionalstrategies have been enacted to accommodatesuch difficulties? That a ‘military presence’ in thearea resulted in new ‘incentives for Yolgnu men[at Galiwin’ku]’ (p. 37) is also a matter thatmight have benefited from clearer information,especially given the current situation inAustralia’s Northern Territory, where the formerfederal government’s ‘Intervention Action Plan’has been the subject of recent local, national,and international controversy.

Notwithstanding these concerns, Magowan isto be commended for the cultural intricacy andintimacy she weaves through the text and for thepoetic yet realistic homage she pays to thepeople among whom she worked. Melodies ofmourning will be especially valuable to thoseinterested in the ethnographies of Aboriginal andIslander Australia, musicology, cultural ecology,and the anthropology of emotion. The textembodies and expands knowledge andunderstanding about Yolgnu cultural life andhistory in a way that shares resonance with otherindigenous Australian settings. Magowan’s textalso shows that an interconnected focus on

music, performance, and emotion has richpotential to facilitate cultural analysis beyondthese domains.Sandy Toussaint Melbourne University/University

of Western Australia

Talmon-Chvaicer, Maya. The hidden historyof Capoeira: a collision of cultures in theBrazilian battle dance. ix, 237 pp., maps, figs,illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press,2008. £13.99 (paper)

Capoeira has become extremely popular inrecent years in Europe and North America. Thegrowing academic literature on it is notdisconnected from this popularity: quitefrequently, the researchers are also practitioners.In this regard, capoeira has many things incommon with another Afro-Brazilian tradition:candomblé. Like in candomblé, a recurrentproblem appears in this engaged literature oncapoeira: the relation to ‘Africa’. This is one ofthe main questions that Talmon-Chvaicer’s bookaddresses once again.

The author does a good job in summarizinga history that has been told already, and verywell, by other researchers (in particular, MatthiasAssunção), introducing some new research. Thehistory of capoeira is indeed fascinating: born inthe streets of colonial Brazil, its power may comefrom its unstable definition: capoeira is a game(jogo). But which kind of game? A martial art? Asport? A dance? A fight? Or all of these things?What made it powerful was its ambiguity, how itcould quickly turn from one thing to the other:from display of physical prowess to brawl, frommockery to rebellion. This ambiguity is alsocentral to understanding its role in the powerstruggles of late nineteenth-century Rio deJaneiro. Used by Conservative politicians as their‘left hand’ mobsters in the tumultuous last yearsof the Empire and slavery (pp. 84-5), theRepublican party identified capoeira gangs astheir enemy. The ‘game’ was finally forbiddenin Rio by the new Republic in 1890 and thecapoeiras were sent to a far-away island.Paradoxically, the chief of police who forbadecapoeira was a capoeirista himself, and hechallenged a member of the political elite whodefended capoeira to a showdown in a centralcafé. The police chief was publicly defeated, buthis enemy was then exiled for playing capoeira(p. 74). The capoeiras, therefore, were not justAfrican slaves, but included free black and whitepeople and mulattoes, including immigrants(some of quite high rank, such as the son of a

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count [p. 74]). Hence the repression of capoeiracannot be described precisely in terms of a racialdichotomy, just as capoeira cannot be describedexclusively as an African, slave, or black ‘game’,or as a ‘weapon of the weak’.

That is the paradox of this book: despiteshowing the complexity of the politics of race,class, slavery, and migration in nineteenth-century Brazil, the author insists in identifyingcapoeira as a form of resistance of the poorblacks against the white elite (p. 64). There is nodoubt that many capoeiras were poor and black,and that capoeira was always viewed withsuspicion and as a possible tool of subversion,but it is a bit disappointing that the authorreduces this complex history to simplisticdualisms. The ‘myth’ of capoeira as an Africanmartial art used by the slaves, as the authorherself explains in one her last chapters (pp.111-74), was born in the twentieth century. Therepression of capoeira in the streets obligedcapoeiras to practise in closed spaces; thus thefirst capoeira schools were born. Capoeiraeventually became a national sport, practised bythe Brazilian army; the sport of the Brazilian‘mulatto’ (p. 115). Mestre Bimba of Bahiadeveloped capoeira as a martial art, with thestyle that came to be known as ‘CapoeiraRegional’. Contemporarily, Mestre Pastinhadeveloped ‘Capoeira Angola’, in opposition toRegional: a less aggressive and physical form ofcapoeira, more concerned with thechoreographic aspects of the game, and with amore sophisticated discourse, that describedcapoeira as an African art used by the slaves todefend themselves from their masters. EventuallyCapoeira Angola became popular amongstintellectuals and artists, and, from there, alsoamong foreigners interested in the wider culturalaspects of the game.

Although Talmon-Chvaicer recognizes thatthe discourse of Pastinha is a ‘myth’ (pp. 152-6)she still insists in trying to find the ‘hiddenhistory’, the ‘African symbols’ hidden in capoeirapractice. For that purpose she makes referenceto a heterogeneous literature on ‘Central WestAfrica’, trying to connect it to contemporarycapoeira practices. Most of the notions,practices, and symbols she mentions, inparticular in reference to witchcraft (mandinga,corpo fechado, or patuá), are not specificallyAfrican, but they are demonstrably the resultof the colonial encounter that brought togetherEuropean, African, and to an extent NativeAmerican witchcraft discourses from the fifteenthcentury onwards in the Atlantic. In fact, thetraditional Brazilian notion that capoeira is a

‘mulatto’ game is quite true, with all itsambiguities. Maybe there is no need to look fora hidden truth to show that the history ofcapoeira can offer us fascinating insights on thecomplex politics of race, and not only in Brazil.

Roger Sansi Goldsmiths College

Religion and myth

Maxwell, David. African gifts of the spirit:Pentecostalism and the rise of a Zimbabweantransnational religious movement. xv, 250 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: JamesCurrey; Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2006.£50.00 (cloth), £18.95 (paper)

A carpenter by trade, and the son of aprominent traditional healer, Ezekiel Guti is notremembered as particularly outstanding bythose with whom he studied in Dallas in 1971,where, without a full mastery of English, ‘theshy retiring part of his character manifesteditself’ (p. 90). Yet in 1993, commandingadherents numbering 300,000-400,000 inZimbabwe, and with branches in ‘a dozen otherAfrican countries, as well as Britain, Germany,Australia and the USA’ (p. 5), this sameunremarkable man was declared ‘the spiritualfather of third world Christian leaders’ (p. 133) byPentecostals in the Bahamas.

The history of ZAOGA (Zimbabwe Assembliesof God Africa) that David Maxwell traces withsuch erudition in this book is not simply aboutthe extraordinary rise of an un-extraordinaryman, although that is part of it. In a way thestory of this ‘archbishop’ and ‘servant of God’reflects perfectly the contradictions, nuances,and intricacies of the historical development ofPentecostalism across southern Africa, and ofthis specific movement in particular. Renownedfor preaching domesticity and respectability evenas he constructed a leadership cult aroundhimself, Guti ruthlessly manipulated hislieutenants and rivals, harvesting foreign fundseven as he advocated tithing, talents, andself-reliance, railing against American missionaryinterference yet appealing to young urbanaspirations, denigrating ancestral worship as hemobilized witch-hunts, demonic exorcism,spiritual healing, and harnessed particularappeals to African authenticity. Maxwell rightlywarns that ‘there is a danger in devoting toomuch attention to ZAOGA’s leader Ezekiel Guti’(p. 138), yet, in a way, the remarkable trajectory

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of this man encapsulates exactly the questionthat so often confounds scholars and observersof Christianity in Africa, and the ‘born-again’movement as whole: what is it about suchcharismatic, evangelical, Pentecostalmovements that captures popular imaginationand support in the hugely significant ways thatthey do?

Maxwell not only shows that contemporaryPentecostalism is indeed a ‘highly successfulpopular religion’, he goes a very long way touncovering why this is so, and he does this byintegrating thorough historical research with anethnographic approach that is sensitive to theway such movements ‘address adherents’existential concerns for wholeness, purity,meaning and empowerment’ (p. 209) inparticular socio-economic contexts. Maxwell’srefusal to succumb to vacuous theoreticalgeneralization allows the empirical data to dothe hard work, challenging many comfortableassumptions about Christianity, missionization,globalization, and politics in postcolonial Africa.Tracing ZAOGA’s development back to and outof Pentecostal movements that arrived in SouthAfrica soon after the Azusa Street revival in LosAngeles in 1906, Maxwell shows that AfricanPentecostalism is not merely the result of a thirdwave of missionization, nor was it necessarilyopposed to either mainstream missions or theAfrican independent churches, which, for manyobservers, seemed poised in the 1970s and 1980sto define the future of Christianity in Africa. AFM,AOGA, and its successor, ZAOGA, have muchmore complex histories of intersecting,overlapping, and contested interests, strategies,and appeals.

Similarly, although Guti looms large inZAOGA’s own historiography, it is clear that it isthe intimacy of its localized manifestations, inhome meetings and prayer bands, or in the‘battle for Highfield’ between competingpreachers and their followers, as much as itscentralizing bureaucracy, or its ambitious‘transnational’ expansionism, that has beenresponsible for much of the movement’ssuccess, and the status of its coffers. Maxwellalso foregrounds tensions between themovement’s egalitarian appeal and principles,and the increasingly authoritarian nature of itsstructures. The continuing groundswell ofpopular support for ZAOGA lies in its stress onsocial reproduction, mobility, and security, andthe self-disciplining aspects of its notions ofmoral propriety and respectability. Yet the‘prosperity gospel’, Guti’s own grandiosity, andshifting relations with political elites in

Zimbabwe, and Pentecostal ‘big men’elsewhere, are also highly significant.

In Maxwell’s skilled hands, all theambiguities of Pentecostal Christianity’scomplex internal and external relationships areexposed, revealing why ‘questions concerningauthenticity are somewhat facile’, and how areligious movement can be at once local andglobal, authoritarian and egalitarian, evangelicaland developmental, individualistic andcommunitarian, and decidedly non-political yethugely politically significant. Perhaps most of all,Maxwell shows how African Pentecostalism atonce fits the neoliberal glove of ‘modernity’, asexemplified by ‘its love affair with the electronicmedia’ and its focus on development throughself-improvement, even as it has soaked up the‘spiritual and ideological resources of biblicalChristianity’ and ‘rejected neo-liberalism’scultural agenda of atomization that strips awayold networks of social support’ by forging new‘forms of communality and a new moral orderderived from sacred text and transcendentexperience’ (pp. 224-5). Maxwell is to becongratulated for this seminal text, whichwill be of great inspiration to a wideaudience of historians, anthropologists, andsocial scientists, as well as an alreadyburgeoning collection of scholars who havebelatedly begun to pick up on AfricanPentecostalism’s huge significance for Africaand for world Christianity.

Joost Fontein University of Edinburgh

Palmeirim, Manuela. Of alien kings andperpetual kin: contradiction and ambiguity inRuwund [Lunda] symbolic thought. xv, 175 pp.,maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. Wantage: SKPublishing, 2006. £45.00 (cloth)

This short monograph has been long in themaking. Fieldwork among the Aruwund tookplace in 1987-8 and 1992, both at the royalcapital of Musumb and in Nkalaany villages(Katanga province, DR Congo). Today, theMwant Yaav (Aruwund king) is subordinated tonational government, but his nobles (atubung)still pay him tribute. The monograph’s focus ison the symbolic paradoxes and mythicalconundrums, which are of a structuring nature.

The book opens with the Ruwundfoundation myth. Centring on the creation ofhumanity (‘perpetual kin’) and the passage to asuperior mode of life made possible through themaking of a king who came in from the outside(creating a line of ‘alien kings’), this myth comes

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in variants that complement the narrative upheldat Musumb. All variants are treated as equallyvalid. This is where the author departs from theposition adopted by historians in search of ‘true’versions. Palmeirim views Ruwund oral traditionas constituted by the main myth and by aconstellation of ‘minor myths’ that conveydifferent levels of local specificity andsymbolism. Besides her own field data,Palmeirim uses the ethnography of Portugueseexplorer Dias de Carvalho (1890) and of J.J.Hoover, who made detailed notes whenteaching at Musumb in the 1970s. The main epicand constellation of ‘minor myths’, some ofwhich exist only in the writings of Dias deCarvalho, are treated as a single conceptualfield.

The book’s main argument is that the heroesof the foundation epic are sustained throughtime by living dignitaries whose titles are tracedback to the oral traditions. This continuity isensured by means of ‘perpetual kinship’ and‘positional succession’, institutions analysed inthe 1950s by, respectively, Ian Cunnison andAudrey Richards. Palmeirim demonstrates thatthe relationship between the king and his noblesis marked by considerable ambivalence, so muchso that the king emerges as ‘both an alien and“one of us” ’ (p. 69).

Palmeirim also rethinks the theme of ‘cultureheroes’, scrutinizing the mythical image ofCibind Yirung, the Ruwund alien hunter and(allegedly) bearer of kingship. Taking a leaf fromthe oeuvre of Vansina and De Heusch, Palmeirimargues against ‘the historical approach’,proposing that the hunter prince be regarded asan ideological construct, not ‘as an elementarytheme or cliché built on some kind of historicalevent’ (p. 41). While sticking closely to DeHeusch’s interpretation of the Ruwund epic, theauthor challenges his insistence that we aredealing with ‘a system of oppositionscontrasting the incipient, uncouth and primitiveorder of Ruwej (the autochthonous heroine)with the new and more elaborate civilizationintroduced by Cibind Yirung’ (p. 44). Lookingsimultaneously at the dominant myth and at the‘minor’ myths, Palmeirim reaches a differentconclusion: both Ruwej and Cibind Yirung areambivalent characters that defy neatcategorization. Ruwej is ‘not straightforwardlyassociated with sterility’, while Cibind Yirungemerges as ‘a liminal hero ... not able to create anew social system alone’ (p. 53). As the datashow, a new political order is installed in asociety in decay thanks to the combined effort ofRuwej and Cibind Yirung.

Another key theme regards the principles ofhierarchy and equality, which are invoked incontinuous interplay. Highlighting a string ofdistinctions that exist for high office-holders,distinctions conveyed through insignia andsalutations, Palmeirim reveals how Ruwundideology brings egalitarianism and hierarchytogether, thereby providing good grounds forquestioning Louis Dumont’s thesis thathierarchy constitutes the ideology of traditionalsociety.

Continuing the theme of contradiction andambiguity, the final chapter details thearchitecture of the royal court and of minorcourts. These spaces, it is shown with clarity andconviction, are laid out in a manner whichreveals the symbolic ties between title-holders.This is a major ethnographic contribution sinceearlier observers had failed to note how regionalcourts and procedures are simplified forms ofwhat happens at Musumb. The book ends witha description of the royal installation ritual,presented in an appendix. As no enthronementceremony took place at the time of the researchvisits, this reconstruction is of necessity based oninterviews with numerous nobles, includingformer titled incumbents.

This monograph will appeal to readers withan appetite for seriously ‘thick description’ andstructuralist interpretation. While the theoreticalapproach may not be to everyone’s liking, andwhile navigating the forest of titles and titlehistories can leave the reader a little dizzy, thereis no doubt that Palmeirim is remarkablysuccessful in her ambition to present theRuwund epic as a story of exceptionalcomplexity.

Johan Pottier School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Reid, Anthony & Michael Gilsenan (eds).Islamic legitimacy in a plural Asia. xii, 197 pp.,figs, illus., bibliogr. London, New York:Routledge, 2007. £75.00 (cloth)

This edited volume is the product of one of aseries of workshops on religion and globalizationat the Asia Research Institute at the NationalUniversity of Singapore. It seeks to contribute topolemical debates concerning the possibilitiesand limits of plural forms of coexistence withinMuslim-majority states, as well as non-Muslimcommunities beyond, at two levels. Firstly, twochapters address a variety of ways in whichIslamic doctrines have been deployed by Islamicscholars, states, and movements to legitimize

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cultural pluralism, as well as exacerbate divisionsbetween Muslims and non-Muslims, andbetween Muslims. Secondly, the bulk of thebook comprises chapters exploring the complexways in which such dynamics of coexistencehave been and continue to be played out inspecific social, historical, and political Asiancircumstances. These chapters point to thediverse ways in which Asian forms of culturalplurality are the source of active reflection,contestation, and political strategizing byMuslim holders of political and religiousauthority in the region.

In the burgeoning body of literature onIslam’s place in the modern world and itscompatibility or otherwise with democracy andcultural pluralism, this book offers a fresh anddeeply informed set of perspectives. One reasonfor the book’s novelty is because it bringsthe work of scholars from very differentbackgrounds into conversation with oneanother: the connective dimensions of Islam inboth South and Southeast Asia are insightfullyaddressed, for example, by Anthony Reid in hisintroduction to the volume. Likewise, the bookincludes a candid and controversial, althoughvery scholarly, perspective on Islamic doctrinalperspectives on cultural pluralism by BassimTibi.

The book’s chapters address a variety ofthemes of significance for the study of Islam inAsia; three, however, are especially visible. Thefirst pertains to the complexity of Islamicintellectual discourses both today and in the pastconcerning the nexus of modernity, religiouspluralism, nationalism, and citizenship. BarbaraMetcalf is in classic form: dismantling theassumptions implicit in Amartya Sen’s Theargumentative Indian (2005), she highlights theways in which Sen’s celebration of the talkativeIndian who is sceptical of religious orthodoxy alltoo easily leads to the assumption that allmullahs are locked within some unchanging andinherently homogenizing orthodoxy. Nothingcould be further from the truth in relationship tothe religious scholar whose work Metcalfaddresses: the Indian Islamic scholar Madani.Madani, Metcalf shows, advanced argumentsabout Indian religious plurality that werescarcely if at all visible in the thinking of hismore secular-inclined peers. Similarly, MichaelFeener’s thoughtful chapter addresses the waysin which twentieth-century Islamist institutionsin Indonesia appropriated Western-derived legaldiscourses in ways that have come to shapecontemporary Indonesian conceptions of theIslamic social order.

Another key theme crossing the book is thechanging form of Islamic definitions of authorityand legitimacy. Bryan Turner’s article is asophisticated consideration of the ways in whichthe expansion of the print media and theinternet have led not merely to the fracturing oftraditional forms of Muslim authority, but also tothe creation of a world in which ‘self-expressivityand personal realization’ have emerged as a‘new form of spirituality’ (p. 68). These modernconceptions of individual autonomy sit,however, in an uneasy relationship with whatcould arguably be seen as a defining feature ofbeing Muslim – the importance of individualand collective submission to God. Turner’sthematic concerns with the dynamic nature ofIslamic authority and religiosity are pertinentlytaken up in many of the book’s historicalchapters. Nico Kaptein explores the ways inwhich an Indonesian Arab Islamic scholar gaveedicts in support of the Dutch colonialgovernment, partly in order to ensure supportfor an emergent movement of Islamic reformand purification. Likewise, Azmi Özcanaddresses some of the ways in which SouthAsian Muslims adjusted to the end of a source ofglobal Islam legal authority: the OttomanSultanate.

Finally, two very informative chaptersaddress more overtly political threats toMuslim/non-Muslim, as well as Muslim/Muslimforms of coexistence. Pakistan’s explosivecombination of military rule, Americanintervention, and Islamic activism is subtlyanalysed by Imran Ali, whilst the complexity,dynamism, and socially palpable effects ofMalaysia’s ‘Islamization race’ are considered byJoseph Liow. Both of these chapters illuminatethe complex, increasingly unpredictable, andmulti-guised ways in which Islamizing processescontinue to bring change to Asian politicalcultures.

In short, Islamic legitimacy in a plural Asia is anovel and well-timed contribution to the studyof Asia’s diverse Islamic traditions. It includesboth thought-provoking analytical essays andhistorically informed case studies about theongoing complexity and continuouslychanging nature of Asian Muslim plurality. Itbelongs on all postgraduate and undergraduatereading lists on the anthropology of Islam andworld religions and makes for refreshingcomparative reading on a culturally andhistorically connected region of the Muslimworld.

Magnus Marsden School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

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Social anthropology

Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The hiddenlife of girls: games of stance, status, andexclusion. xi, 329 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford:Blackwell Publishing, 2006. £55.00 (cloth),£19.99 (paper)

This book is a gold-mine. It is a rich source ofdata for anyone who is interested in howembodiment actually works in practice and whoneeds to understand, therefore, how socialcategories are not pre-existing structures.Harness Goodwin – a linguistic anthropologist –shows, through a multitude of brilliantly detailedexamples, how young girls build relations ofpower interactively, constituting their socialorganization out of on-going forms of affective,gestural, and linguistic exchanges that establishdisputation as the norm and which lead to thedevelopment of a particular behavioural stancevis-à-vis peers. These conflicts centre ondifferentiated forms of participation/competencein various kinds of playground games, leading tothe creation of a ‘world of [specific] value’, tothe shoring up of the rank and status of themost ‘popular’ girls and the victimization ofmarginal group members.

This is discourse analysis as its very best.Harness Goodwin provides an analysis thatallows for a profound appreciation of embodieddisposition/stance as an on-going evaluation ofcapacity for action within a particular field ofparticipation. Thus we come to understand whatHarness Goodwin, after Wittgenstein, means bya ‘language game’. Her subjects are 10- to12-year-old girls from a range of ethnicbackgrounds in a Los Angeles high school whichserves a mainly middle-class population.Following Goffman, Harness Goodwin takes asher unit of analysis the ‘situated activity system’and brings, thereby, an ethno-methodologicalsensitivity to the kind of childhood-focusedproject initiated by Opie and Opie over fortyyears ago. She focuses on games of hopscotch,jump rope, playing house, story-telling, gossip,and social class-indexed bragging sessions. Herbook makes an invaluable contribution to theanthropology of childhood and childhoodstudies but never in a way that suggests thatwhat goes in children’s interactions is marginalto the broader focus of concern, which is aserious engagement with social theory.

The power of Harness Goodwin’sethnographically rich data, collected throughinnovative audio- and video-tape methodologies

which allowed her to capture ‘naturallyoccurring’ interaction over a three-year period,allows her to challenge much of the establishedpsychological work on gender differencesamong children and on the development ofchildren’s moral reasoning. She shows effectivelyhow ‘moral rules are emergent from localsequential [constantly negotiated] contingenciesof action’ (p. 190) rather than objective sets ofstandards, and that girls are not (as previouspsychologically based research using othermethods would lead us to expect) moreco-operative in their interaction or tending moretowards relations of solidarity than are boys.Harness Goodwin shows how, in theirinteraction, girls are constantly probing theboundaries of acceptable behaviour; they bendand stretch the rules of the game and strategizeconstantly so that, ultimately, friendship is madeout of the on-going structuring of relations ofopposition to and contestation over the rules.This is what makes friendship so much fun and,as Harness Goodwin explains here, what alsomakes bullying inevitably cruel.

Harness Goodwin’s excellent analysis of peergroup relations leaves one wanting to know,however, what happens to these peer groups inthe classroom where the authority of the teacherand the institutionalized structure ofparticipation in a didactic situation mustinevitably transform the social organization ofthe girls’ clique. Like many micro-sociologicalstudies there is a failure to account for the effectof institutionalized structures on peer groups inwhich children, away from the supervision ofadults, become the ‘co-constructors of events’on their own terms. This is the only omissionfrom the book and the lack is a pity because itwould have been all the more fascinating werethe same rigour of method and analysis appliedto the classroom situation.

Gillian Evans University of Manchester

Karjalainen, Mira. In the shadow of freedom:life on board the oil tanker. 203 pp., tables,bibliogr. Helsinki: Finnish Soc. of Science &Letters, 2007. €20.00 (paper)

In the shadow of freedom is a monograph on theworldview of merchant sailors, analysed withinthe frame of comparative religion. The concept isan intriguing one, and Mira Karjalainen hasmanaged to pull together some uniqueethnographic material, subjected it to rigorousanalysis, and comes to interesting and usefulconclusions. The book examines discourses of

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‘freedom’, and the ways in which ordinarypeople construct and understand this contestedterm. The ‘shipworld’ is a fertile place forthis research because it is so loaded withexpectations and ideals of freedom, which sitside by side with a more conflicted reality.

The daily lives of most of the world’s peoplesincreasingly rely on ships that carry billions oftonnes of cargo across the oceans. Yet the livesof those working on these ships are typicallyobscured or wildly romanticized. Karjalainentrained as a merchant seaman in Finland andworked as a crew member of an oil tankerbefore returning to graduate school andcompleting a dissertation on her experience atsea. Her ethnography was conducted over arelatively short time – approximately five monthsat sea spread over three years, on board tendifferent oil tankers. In addition to participantobservation, she also conducted detailedinterviews with almost 100 crew members onthese ships.

The first part of her book discusses hermethods and the difficulties of conductingfieldwork in your own workplace. A portion ofher fieldwork was conducted while employed asa researcher by a shipping company, and shereflects on the effects of this problematicposition. The second part of her book is ‘ashipworld ethnography’, which has aninteresting discussion of the reworking of timeand space at sea according to the needs ofshipboard function and profitability. Thegendered nature of work at sea is also examined,and Karjalainen’s position as a woman in analmost entirely male workplace gives her insightinto these dynamics.

The remainder of the book analyses thediscourse and rhetoric of ship workers. Themetaphors people used to describe the ship andthose living and working on board are groupedthematically and discussed in detail, sometimesaccording to the rank of the speaker. Karjalainenconcludes that ship workers have twocontradictory ideas of freedom. First, there is thestereotypical and nostalgic image of the carefreeand super-masculine Jack Tar, a discoursewhich is mocked but also drawn upon bycontemporary sailors. The second discourse shecharacterizes as ‘freedom from freedom’. Manyworkers described the ship as a prison,graveyard, or machine – a place where theywere both not really living because they hadgiven up their powers to others, but were alsofreed because they were absolved ofresponsibility for their own lives. I found this tobe the most interesting part of the book, full of

complex and evocative metaphors. I wish,though, that Karjalainen had spent more timediscussing how people resolved the twocontradictory ideas of freedom. While thediscussion of each of the discourses was wellrooted in the realities of living and working atsea, it would be productive to explore theconsequences of living with thesecontradictions. Why would these twocontradictory ideas be existing side by side?What are the consequences of living in asituation where the idealized and publicperception of your life is so radically differentfrom the reality?

In her conclusion, Karjalainen says thatparts of her study could also be viewed as anethnography of work. I wish that she hadused this perspective to draw out somecommonalities and differences acrossworkplaces, rather than simply describing thissea-going workplace as unique. Karjalainenquotes Rediker’s description of ships as the firstglobal factories, and it would be interesting tobring this discussion to the present day usingthe complexities of the ‘freedom from freedom’discourse she describes.

Karjalainen also brings to life the isolatingand very hierarchical relationships betweenofficers and crew, and analyses a discourse thatincludes terms like ‘master’ and ‘slave’. There ismore than ample material here to illustrateand discuss Ortner’s recent call thatanthropologists should take seriously ‘thepower and pain of class relations’, butunfortunately she does not.

Karjalainen locates her study within Finnishculture and history, and I think here she is beingoverly modest. There are so few ethnographieslike this that it would be well worthwhile to lookat her material in a more globally comparativeperspective, as it is a valuable contribution tothe anthropology of the maritime world and ofwork more generally.

Penny Howard University of Aberdeen

Narotzky, Susana & Gavin Smith.Immediate struggles: people, power, and placein rural Spain. xxiv, 250 pp., figs, bibliogr.London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press,2006. £15.95 (paper)

Narotzky and Smith offer here a remarkableexample of collaboration, the product of aconversation between themselves and withengaged researchers on both sides of theAtlantic over the last several decades which itself

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draws on the long human conversation about abetter world. It takes the form of a historicalethnography of southern Alicante, a rural regionof Spain, where Gavin Smith has done fieldworksince the 1970s, latterly with Susana Narotzky, hispartner in another project undertaken innorthern Italy. The book addresses a widerange of theoretical, methodological, andpolitical questions; but first the ethnographicsubstance.

The title comes from Michel Foucault: peopleoften come into conflict with those closest tothem, not usually with the idea of liberation inmind. This study is concerned with how placeshapes both the exercise of power and responsesto it within a local dialectic of fixity andmovement. Its context is Spain after Franco,where there is much talk of a new ‘Europe of theregions’ and of a Spanish miracle, combiningneoliberal capitalism and social democracy.Narotzky and Smith are not at all impressed bythis scenario, even though the area they writeabout might be thought of as a candidate forsuch a renaissance. They argue that the woundsof the mid-twenieth century are still active; talkabout economic development based on flexiblecapitalism is mostly hype; people lead workinglives that are fractured and precarious, as theyalways have been. They call this ‘historicalrealism’; and they do succeed in showing ‘thepresent’ as lived history, thereby affirming theresilience of local people they have got to knowwell over a prolonged period.

The foundation of the narrative is a chapteron the Republic and Civil War in the 1930s,followed by one on the history of Franco’s ruleat the height of his power in the 1940s and1950s. For Spanish people this is very muchliving history and the events of the period arestill vividly contested, even though what reallyhappened is often disguised by officialpropaganda. The title of the second of thesechapters says it all: ‘Regulating social lifethrough uncertainty and fear’. Narotzky andSmith build up a picture of state repression andadministrative control generating a highlypersonalized pattern of economic relations,reminiscent of feudalism, which undermined anysources of solidarity. It was a time of terror and,for some, opportunity. Then, in the followingtwo chapters, they enliven this general historywith a number of individual case studies,including one of a family over four generations.Here they describe the variety of experiencewithin a framework of ‘patterned agency andhistorical conjuncture’. Through their detailedexamination of specific work experiences, they

bring to the conventional Mediterranean themesof honour and shame ‘a much more active,discursive, and indeed conflictive understanding’of what these terms mean. The result is anunusually insightful account of working-classculture.

The second half of the book addresses morerecent economic developments – the pattern offamily enterprise and varieties of labourorganization in a world where the lines betweenagriculture and industry, town and countryside,have grown increasingly fuzzy. Reflecting on‘Flexible structures and torn lives’, the authorssee far more continuity with the exploitationcharacteristic of the mid-twentieth century thanevidence of a brave new world in Europe. Manyscholars have colluded in mystifying theenduring economic realities that they identifyhere. Local people are stuck in a groove wherethe benefits of progress largely accrue to a fewothers. This section concludes with a discussionof the palliative effects of a politicization ofculture within the regional economy.

Immediate struggles is a landmark in historicalethnography. As an attempt to integrate alonger-term perspective on society with detaileddocumentation of individual lives, it has fewrivals. But the book has wider ambitions thanthis and they are expressed in two chapters thatframe the narrative. The conclusion, ‘The powerof ethnography’, is a brilliantly clear expositionof what Narotzky and Smith have learned fromthis exercise. However, I found the introduction,‘Toward an anthropological framework forstudying contemporary Europe’, unsatisfactory.First, whereas the concluding chapter focuses onwhat the authors have positively to say, theintroduction is more polemically concerned withthe conventional approaches and labels that dogthe field. Their analysis combines historicalpatterns, social institutions, and personalexperience which they call ‘concreteabstractions’, ‘instituted social practices’, and‘structures of feeling’, each phrase striving tocapture both poles of a dialectic. Lurking behindthis terminology is a desire to capture the ‘socialreproduction of capitalism’ and behind that torescue a class analysis suited to politicalstruggles of a less immediate kind. We learnwhere the authors have come from, but the lastchapter is a better guide to the main text thanthis one. Thus Marx’s distinction between‘absolute’ and ‘relative surplus value’ isintriguingly juxtaposed with Foucault’s betweenmonarchical rule and modern government.Subsequent reference to this idea is thendropped. It is a pity that readers may be

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discouraged by this dense introduction fromdiscovering the treasure contained in the book.

Keith Hart Goldsmiths College

Scheffel, David Z. Svinia in black and white:Slovak Roma and their neighbours. 244 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. New York:Broadview Press, 2005. $27.95 (paper)

This book by Canadian academic David Z.Scheffel is an account of an eastern SlovakianRoma community which, over a period of time,became fully marginalized and rejected by theirSlovakian neighbours, compelling them to live inthird-world-like squalor. The book is the result ofunorthodox research, as Scheffel worked in thevillage primarily as an aid worker, administeringvarious projects that he obtained funding forfrom the Canadian government and NGOs tohelp the Roma. Inevitably his academic workwas somewhat constrained, making itimpossible to carry out a standardethnographic study. Instead he focused on theissues that took him to the village in the firstplace and which were underpinned by his aidwork: the inter-ethnic relationship between theRoma and Slovaks and the reasons for itsdeterioration.

For his analysis Scheffel makes use ofhistorical documents as well as the views of theSlovaks and the Roma. He concludes that thepresent problem started and escalated duringthe five decades of socialist dictatorship. Thiswas a period when, under the slogan of‘universal equality’, various decrees wereintroduced to improve the life and lot of Romaand indeed provide many with regularemployment, better housing, and education. Yetat the same time a large number of Roma wereexcluded, especially in rural areas like Svinia,which, as Scheffel explains, was largely (thoughnot solely) due to the backwards mentality ofthe uneducated peasants. They not only resistedimplementation of measures aimed at the Romabut even hijacked them, whenever they could,for their own benefit.

Consequently, living standards of thepeasants improved considerably. They built newhouses with running water and gas mains,bought cars, washing machines, and otherhousehold luxuries, and, as a result, they hadless and less need of help from the Roma, to thedetriment of long-established patron/clientrelationships. With no other social arrangementto take its place, the socially and economicallydependent Roma were left behind. But there

were still attempts by some Svinian Roma tochange their lives in the early years of socialism.In the 1950s an entrepreneurial Roma familyfrom the lower-lying Gypsy settlement decidedto make use of the new land legislation bydemanding to have plots allocated to them nearthe higher-placed Slovak village. Thirty yearslater, however, without warning they foundthemselves on the street and had to watch theirconcrete houses being demolished. The villagersforced them to return to the lower Gypsyquarters on the grounds of what they describedas their antisocial attitude. Three decades ofseparation had had the effect on all concerned,and that return to the lower settlement onlyadded further stress to an already fragmentingRoma community. Meanwhile the social andeconomic gap between the Roma and Slovakvillagers widened, reaching a peak when theRoma eventually outnumbered the villagers,who in turn reacted with extreme anxietytowards and total rejection of the Roma. Scheffeldoes not put all the blame on the Slovaks inSvinia, however, or on the socialist system. Healso points out the part that the Roma played intheir own downfall by behaving very much thesame way as the Slovak villagers by focusingonly on the immediate wishes of their closefamilies while being destructive towards otherRoma and their own environment. He witnessedhow a number of innovations introduced by hisproject were destroyed.

Scheffel finishes his desperate account with aglimpse of hope that perhaps future EUlegislation and financial support may help thesituation, and that new generations growing upin both ethnic groups might learn to liveproductively next to one another. Before Iconclude with the praise which this bookdeserves, I would like to note some reservations.In my view, the author could have emphasizedrather more the centuries-long hegemonicstruggles between the various ethnic (andreligious) groups, such as the Czech, Hungarian,and Austrian minorities, which badly hit theentire region, including the Slovaks, thoughnever as badly as the socially lowest rankedRoma. Secondly, I missed references toimportant researchers who have worked onRoma marginality, albeit not necessarily in Slovakareas, such as Thomas Acton, Ilona Klimova,and Martin Kovacs, as well as the essentialcontributions that have been made by Romascholars and activists, such as Ian Hancock,Andrzej Mirga, and Nicolae Gheorghe. Havingsaid that, this book is an excellent addition tothe fast-growing literature of Roma studies, and

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a unique one due to Scheffel’s humanitarianwork for the Roma of Svinia.

Iren Kertesz Wilkinson

Varzi, Roxanne. Warring souls: youth, media,and martyrdom in post-revolution Iran. xi,290 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Durham,N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2006. £13.95 (paper)

This is a book of much promise. Varzi is aninteresting film critic, and Warring souls is in parta discussion of the Iranian films of the Iran-Iraqwar and the long-running televisiondocumentary series on the war by ShahidMorteza Avini. Varzi also has a special interest inmartyrdom and how it was inspired by the warand became an institution of the Islamicrepublic. One of her aims is to describe theenergy and commitment of the young Islamicrevolutionaries, many of whom lost their lives ina war which was bloodier than the trenches inFirst World War Europe. Varzi’s interest here isin how death has been configured by the Iranianstate, with its blood imagery, martyrs’memorials, and graffiti art. Varzi’s secondaryfocus is another group of youth who live withtheir affluent upper- and middle-class families inTehran at the beginning of this century. Theseare youth who loathe the Islamic regime andresist it in mostly under-the-radar posturing andconsumerist styles.

Varzi’s project is by implication comparative.She clearly hopes to surprise by suggestingconnections between quite different aspects ofthe Iranian state and society. The style of Warringsouls is also ambitious. Though the bookemploys the tone, critical apparatus, andoutward form of a conventional monograph,Varzi does not present a compelling logicalexposition of her study. Rather, she has adopteda loosely anecdotal narrative centred on her ownstory as an expatriate Iranian returnee. Herinnovation, which mixes Sufi parables,fieldnotes, and a fictionalized friend/alter ego,could have been rewarding as academicanthropology. However, the project founders, forseveral reasons.

First, the book is utterly exceptionalist. Varzi’sIran is presented almost as if internationalpolitics did not exist. Yet her focus on the twogroups of youths makes little sense withoutsome serious attempt to explain the backgroundto the Iranian revolution, the eventual victory ofthe Islamicists, the Iran-Iraq war, and thecontinuing isolation imposed on the Iranianregime. Second, ethnography-lite cultural studies

are often unpersuasive. Here, there is just notenough detailed material to understand, or feelmuch sympathy for, the pressures andcontradictions faced by the young people.Moreover, the actual interface between theworking-class and affluent youths is neverexplored. What were the job options for theyoung men who fought in the war or nowpolice the rich kids? And, how, indeed, have theaffluent secularist families managed to hang onto their wealth these past thirty years?

The book also feels close to a first draft, inpart because it is in editorial disarray. Names,places, theories, and films are frequentlyintroduced in ways that leave the reader withoutpurchase. Sometimes the necessary context orargument is never supplied; sometimes it turnsup later, almost by accident, or in a footnote.More important is a second area which suggestsa rush job. The footnotes of Warring souls areunusually discursive and many read as if they areVarzi’s immediate answers to questions raisedby her thesis examiners or readers for the press.But whatever their origin, the fact that thesefootnoted points have not been given their dueweight and integrated into a re-drafted, andmore cogent and coherent, main text isdisconcerting.

Consider, for instance, Varzi’s discussion ofsuicide. On the one hand, the level of generalityof her extensive account of war deaths meansthe reader gets little sense of the deep,confusing relation between the state’s ideologyof martyrdom, social options, the volunteer andconscript soldiers’ personal choices, and thelegacies and ghosts their deaths have leftbehind.

On the other hand, Varzi’s particularity canbe equally uninformative. In a brief vignettefrom 1993, she agonizes about themeaninglessness of her constrained personal lifeand a friend teases her with the suggestion ofsuicide. Then the text immediately jumps: ‘Sevenyears later things have only gotten worse’(p. 165) and there follows a brief account,apparently based on several different stories, ofclimbers retrieving the bodies of (presumablyyoung) suicides from the mountains aboveTehran. But that is it. We learn little else thanthat Varzi considers that ‘[t]he geography ofsuicide is never horizontal’ (p. 165), and thatsuicide attempts (by implication, among richerTehranis) are apparently on the rise (p. 167). Buthere Durkheim would weep. The only supportfor this statement is in a footnote: a ‘statistical’report leaked in 2000 suggests that ‘the rate ofsuicide in the country had exceeded the record

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by 109 percent in the years 1998 and 1999’(p. 256, n. 18). We do not learn whether thereare six, or 600,000, suicides a year, how thenumbers were collected, or who were killingthemselves. Drug-taking, abortions,hymen-repair, and prostitution (but not poverty,rates of employment, marriage, or incarceration)are similarly treated in melodramatic, fact-free,tabloid fashion.

There is a whole genre of autobiography byIranian returnees who share Varzi’s privileged

class position and deep antipathy to thetheocratic regime. Of these, perhaps MarjaneSatrapi’s graphic novel, and now animated film,Persepolis (2006), is most widely known.Persepolis is emotionally confident and has a surefeel for class differences and the political historyof the Islamic state. Varzi’s account lacks justthese things.Nancy Lindisfarne School of Oriental and African

Studies (retired)

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