during periods of change, when traditional ex- pectations are often unreliable in their fulfill- ment.

Although he is not expressing entirely new ideas, Lieban’s treatment of the etiology of sor- cery cases shows sensitivity to the relationship between sorcery fears and the dominant con- cerns of the sorcery victim. For example, in the rural data utilized, sorcery attacks were very often perceived to be a result of disputes over land. Land is a valued commodity, in short sup- ply and often in question as to ownership be- cause of decades-long governmental failure to complete the process of cadastral survey and is- suance of land titles. Further examples in a most interesting array of case studies concern problems of social control in other areas of life not adequately endowed with clearly under- stood alternatives and sanctions for behavior.

In reading this book, the reviewer was struck forcefully by the fact that, given appropriate al- terations in linguistic usage, most of Lieban’s findings would apply equally well to the west central Philippines. Perhaps this may serve as a limited but positive test of the reliability of the findings Lieban reports. Writings and comments of other Filipinists suggest also that for much of the Philippine lowland population at least, we appear to be dealing with a large number of local variants based on a limited number of dominant themes-whether the focus of study be kinship, obligation systems, or beliefs and practices about sorcery, witchcraft, and magic. One way in which this proposition might be tested fruitfully would involve the use of survey and sample techniques associated in the more often with the sociologist than the ant ro- pologist.

Although this review has been focused mainly on the parochial interests of a Filipinist, Lieban’s monograph clearly merits the attention of students of magic, folk medicine, and change generally. Der Totenkult der Ngadju Dajak in Sud-

Borneo: Mythen zurn Totenkult und die Texte zum Tantolak Matei. Erster Teil: Mythen zum Totenkult. Zweiter Teil: Hand- lungen und Texte zum Totenkult. HANS SCHARER. (Verhandelingen van het Konink- lijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volken- kunde, Deel 51, 1; Deel 51, 2.) The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. 2 vols., xv, 260, xi, 960 pp., bibliography of works cited, index. Gld. 75.-(both vols.) (paper).

Reviewed by RODNEY NEEDHAM, University of Oxford

This great work is at once an engrossing record of some vital features of a subtle civil- ization, a daunting example to ethnographers,

last

608 American Anthropologist [70, 19681 and a monument to the dedication and indus- try of the late Hans Scharer. A splendid ac- complishment, it is a necessity to any library concerned with religion, symbolism, Indonesian languages, or the culture history of Greater India. Yet its 960 dense pages are only the introduction to the work that was planned: there were to be four volumes, running to an estimated 2,400 printed pages, and the present volume is just the first. Even then, the com- plete enterprise was not intended to render a full account of Ngaju religion, but simply to describe the death ritual as one of the most important phenomena in the religious, eco- nomic, and social life. A projected fifth vol- ume was to have provided an integrated survey of the death ritual and its place in Ngaju re- ligious thought, but Scharer wrote instead his doctoral thesis for Leiden University, Die Gottesidee der Ngadju Dajak (Leiden: Brill, 1946), which has recently been republished in an English translation as Nguju Religion (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963). There also re- main, in Leiden University Library, a 253-page typescript, Die Bedeutung der Schiipfungs- mythe in der Kultur der Ngadju Dajak, and 237 copybooks of unpublished notes on mor- tuary rites, headhunting, witchcraft, agricul- ture, and law (there were originally some 800 such notebooks, which according to Schlrer’s estimate would have made about 12,000 pages in print), and it is reported that further un- examined materials survive in Switzerland.

It is a disquieting sign of the condition of the anthropological profession that these very circumstances indicate that Scharer was not an academic social anthropologist. (He certainly had no megabuck research grant.) He was instead a Protestant missionary with a true and outstanding gift for ethnographic research, a talent that was almost as remarkable as the culture to which it was devoted. In his intro- duction, stressing the wealth and complexity of Ngaju religious ideas, Scharer ruefully com- ments that “one cannot get at everything in a few years”-and this time scale alone makes one realize again how defective must be most of the evidence gathered by professional an- thropologists. The reasons for their probable failings are obvious enough, but what matters is not excuses but the quality of the scientific record of ideological systems, and Scharer’s material is an overwhelming demonstration of what might in ideal conditions be achieved by the professionals. Scharer himself modestly regards his own findings as provisional, but all the same he was more than seven years (1932-1939 and a large part of 1946) among the Ngaju. Moreover, when he made the en- quiries on which the present study is based, he had had no anthropological education but

Book Reviews 609

was a pure amateur; it was not until a forcibly extended home leave in Europe, during World War 11, that he studied social anthropology. It is thus all the more a scholarly tragedy that such a man should have died, by blood- poisoning in 1947, just when he had received the academic preparation to carry out what would surely have proved to be quite un- paralleled researches.

The volume now posthumously published consists of two parts, containing respectively myths and texts concerning mortuary cere- monies. The myths are given in prose transla- tion, with the exception of one that is in Ngaju with a parallel translation: Part I1 (pp. 261- 829) is very largely in the latter form, and the linguistic record alone, particularly the record of the sacred language (basu sungiung), is of singular value. The texts are followed by 127 pages of explanatory notes, which them- selves are a substantial fund of ethnographic information. The descriptive table of contents is usefully detailed, there is a bibliography of works cited, and an index of Ngaju words commented upon in the notes has been added. Scharer’s manuscript shows that he had in- tended to supply a general index to the even- tual four volumes, but he did not compile a separate one for this introductory volume. One is so grateful to the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde for having brought out this large, expensive. and well- composed publication that one hesitates to sound any note of dissatisfaction, but it has to be remarked that the absence of such an index is a severe deficiency, and that the index of Ngaju words is skimpy and defective. An- other source of possible difficulty for some readers is that Scharer quotes a considerable number of passages, some of them quite long, in Dutch, and, although it will be generally agreed that any anthropologist should be able to read German, it is rather unrealistic to expect a command of Dutch as well. No illus- trations have been included, apart from a couple of line drawings, and there is no map, but these are to be found in Ngaju Religion, which ought in any case to be read before Der Totenkult.

It is not feasible to make an overall evalu- ation of such a huge and detailed study, but one issue deserves special attention. Scharer has been often criticized, and on fair grounds, for making it dificult to distinguish his own interpretations from the ideas held by the Ngaju themselves (see, e.g., Waldemar Stohr, Das Totenritual der Dajuk, Koln, 1959, pp. 25-26). The Koninklijk Instituut suggests that the large body of additional material in Der Totenkult now puts the social anthropologist in a position to test the validity of Scharer’s

“grandly synthetic description,” and this is very largely true, hut at crucial points there still remains a certain dubiety. For example, Scharer refers to the depiction of sun and moon, to- gether with the Tree of Life (cf. Nguju Reli- gion, pl. X I ) , and asserts that “together they represent the perfection and integrity of the tribe” (p. 845, n. 34); or, again, he says that certain beads “are directly associated by their names with the Tambon [Watersnake] and the Underworld, and are thus also associated with the moiety which stands for the matrilineal aspect of the society” (p. 950, n. 385; italics supplied). Now Scharer was a student at Leiden, and he expressly acknowledges the advice of Rassen, who is well known to have been the exponent of an extreme venion of Durkheim’s theory of the social genesis of categories (cf. AA 1964, 62:174-176), so that it may be wondered, in the former instance, whether the Ngaju do see the sun and moon as representing the “tribe,” or whether this is a sociologistic inference. More fundamentally, the names of the beads, clearly given in the Ngaju text and independently translatable by reference to Hardeland (Dujacksch-Deufsches Wiirterbuch, Amsterdam, 1859), do indeed as- sociate them with Watersnake and Under- world, but they contribute no further evidence for any recognition by the Ngaju of a moiety organization or of matriliny. If moieties (Siammhiilften) do not exist as distinct in- stitutions, it is only misleading to frame an explanation as if they did; matriliny is not identical with “feminine” (a possible inter- pretation) but is a jural notion, having to do with incorporation and the transmission of rights, and in t h i s respect also the relevant new evidence does not confirm that the Ngaju subscribe to any such notion. Persuasive glosses have been put upon Scharer’s constructs (see, e.g., P. E. de Josselin de Jong, preface to Ngaju Religion, p. viii), but we may justifiably look for harder reasons to concur, and these appear not to be provided in even this latest work.

Considerations such as these do something to mitigate the first dismal conviction that ethnography of such high quality as Scharer’s is all that counts, and that the various intellec- tual stances and theoretical convolutions of academic social anthropology are essentially irrelevant to such understanding as he dis- plays. For Scharer himself may be a victim of scholarly prejudices, and his analytical pre- suppositions may well have lent a xenomor- phic cast to Ngaju religion as it is exhibited to us. Not only these possibilities, but also the very excellence and abundance of the empirical reports, demand that independent analyses be undertaken by academic anthro- pologists. (An analytical monograph on Ngaju

610 American Anthropologist [70, 19681

symbolic categories, promised in Sociologus 14, 1964:146, n. 14, was forestalled by the news that the present volume was to be pub- lished.) If his work was only the beginning for Scharer, it is also a new beginning for social anthropology in the analysis of sym- bolism and mystical ideology, a superb reposi- tory of invaluable evidence that should attract continued reappraisals for as long as there is a discipline (social anthropology or not) that is concerned to interpret alien modes of ex- perience. Die Religiiis-Magische Weltanschauung der

Primitivstarnme Indiens. Band II: Die Bhi- Ialu, Korku, Gond, Baiga. MATTHIAS HER- MANNS. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1966. xii, 571 pp., appendix, bibli- ography, glossary, index, map, 36 plates (70 pictures). n.p.

Reviewed by AGEHANANDA BHARATI Syracuse University

This is the second volume of Father Her- manns’ monumental ethnography of the prim- tive tribes of Central India. The volume follows the same plan as the f i s t (see review of Vol- ume I in AA 67:1300-1301). As in the pre- vious volume, one gets the feeling that the au- thor must have exhausted all that could be re- ported about the societies he investigated. The sheer amount of folkloristic detail and the re- production of informants’ reports on the minu- tiae of the oral cosmogonic, ritualistic, and magical lore is impressive, if not also oppres- sive. In addition to its folkloristic core, Her- manns inserts anthropometric and even genetic notes on the people he studied.

The various societies are presented succes- sively, with the identical formal arrangement for each: with minor modifications, the author narrates the origin of the barwo (magicians, di- viners, shamans-it never becomes quite clear which of these categories Hermanns wants to assign to the barwo and to his equivalents among the non-Bhil groups); myths of cosmic origin; and the methods of work pursued by the religious agents. Also included are some com- ments on the linguistic situation and a seem- ingly endless description of such magico-reli- gious acts, agents, and attitudes as “lamp-ora- cles,” “coin-oracles,’’ “water-oracles,” “salt-ora- cles” (p. 91 ff.). Hermanns omits nothing-in- terpretations that are perfectly acceptable to modern anthropologists of dispensations radi- cally different from his own, the life cycle, rites of passage, initiations, value orientations, sacri- fices, festivals, local diagnosis and therapy, sor- cery and witchcraft.

Of all the works on Indian tribes surveyed by

this reviewer during the past few years, these two volumes undoubtedly present the most thor- ough reports on local medicine (diagnostic, di- vinatory, and prophylactic) and on the beliefs and practices connecting diseases and cures with personal and supernatural sources. Her- manns is a stickler for completeness, and these volumes provide a veritable encyclopedia of Central Indian tribal materia medica. HRAF has published a complete translation of the Yn- mana by Hermanns’ ethnological fellow-travel- ers; it might not be a bad idea to put out a translation of these folk medicine and kindred sections, in both volumes.

The methodological shortcomings of this pro- ject have been pointed out in the review of the first volume (see above). Rather than repeat them, I shall point out a few that struck me as quite dysfunctional in this second volume. The entire summary (pp. 457-502) ought to have been omitted, as it is apt to estrange anthropol- ogists on this side of the Atlantic. Hermanns is the most prolific extant exponent of a virtually unrefined Kulturkreis and Hochgott approach. It appears that his insistence on minutiae re- flects a bad anthropological conscience; his bib- liography (pp. 555-559) does not list a single modern analytic author who has written on tribal and Hindu India. Hermanns is both a prolific reader and writer; it seems unlikely that he has not familiarized himself with the works of McKim Marriott, Morris Opler, M. Singer, G. Berreman, B. Cohn, etc., but he systemati- cally ignores them. His irksome summary adds chagrin to this omission: he pontificates on the “Creater God and his creation,” ‘‘on Man and his creation,” “on myths of origin and of termi- nation as revelation of the Supreme Being,” subdividing each of these sections of the sum- mary into the primitive view and the Hochkul- tur view. The intention is all too clear: in line with Schmidt, Koppers, Gusinde, and Fuchs, he prefers the,primitive view, as it is no doubt less fatiguing and frustrating to read a personalistic high god into it-whereas Great Tradition Hin- duism defies such efforts. But though one can have no quarrel with anyone’s faith, this partic- ular approach gravely slants the report. Her- manns constantly belittles or ignores the pro- cesses of Hinduization and Sanskritization that continue to modify tribal complexes. This vol- ume contains roughly 100 names of deities and well over 100 mythological patterns that are straight Hinduism. The Kiilturkreis approach initiated for India by Koppers singles out the ubiquitous bhagavcin as the high god; unfortu- nately, the tribal bhagavdn, a linguistic borrow- ing from the surrounding Hindu culture, is ei- ther so distant and so vague as not to have much effect in tribal life, or else he is a tribal