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land makes use of Vygotsky to outline an approach to cognition as social activity, sug- gesting that the "compelling nature of re mantic pursuits comes about, or is constructed, in the process of learning the cul- tural system" (p. 63, emphasis in original). And D'Andrade, in his concluding remarks, observes that "Talk. . . is the external matrix of all deeply internalized cultural schema" (p. 230).

These perspectives, in line with the spirit of the volume to rethink our standard doctrines of emotion and motivation, provide fruitful avenues for future investigation. This book and its reformulation of the problem of m e tivation and culture represent a major contri- bution to psychological anthropology and are sure to be a significant reference point for anthropological theory for some time to come.

The Imaginq Networks of Political Power. Roger Bartra (Claire Joysmith, trans.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.254 pp.

MICHAEL KEARNw Unwersily of Calijmia, Everside

In this collection of 22 essays, Bartra experi- ments with ways of thinking about the state, power, and related themes. As a participant in the cultural turmoil of the 1960s he be- lieved that the powers of imagination could not be domesticated. But, somewhat disillu- sioned after the events of 1968, he concluded "that the imagination in power" (p. vii) could itself devise yet more powerful forms of sym- bolic mediation to perpetuate social inequal- ity. How is one to comprehend such dominance but by yet-morecreative imagin- ing? Thus, old problems are addressed in this book with refreshingly new ideas that lay to rest any Leninist ideas about the state and power as substantial entities that can be "smashed" or "seized." How then to concep tualize them so as to best inform democratic programs capable of making progressive changes in the structured inequality of both capitalist and socialist societies? Bartra offers a vision of power as immanent and pervasive, but even more diffuse and symbolic than Foucault's microtechnologies for control of the body and also unlike topdown hegemony or ideology.

Bartra's main metaphor of power is "net- works," not networks as means of communi- cation, but as simu1acra"which are present in

the actual constitution of exploitive relation- ships" (p. 224). Similarly, the modem state, per Sartre, is like a "space" rather than an instrument of domination. These simulacra are highly refracted reflections of a world of material persons and relationships in which material values and conditions--wealth, health, and prerogatives-are differentially distributed in patterns that are still best re- ferred to as class. Bartra's essays are not to be confused with extreme constructionism, which is but a contemporaly permutation of philosophical and cultural idealism, but in- stead as a serious attempt to do justice to the original Hegelian-Marxist project of identify- ing the role of simulacra in the real world of exploiters and exploited.

The persistence of class is Bartra's point of departure for, not just new theory, but new images of theory. Accordingly, each of the 22 essays, which correspond to epigrams taken from the 22 chapters of the Book of Revela- tion of the New Testament, is accompanied by an original drawing by Adela Trueta. Each of the drawings is inspired by the Tarot's 22 main arcana, and the reader is invited to seek relations between the essays, the drawings, the Tarot, and the Book of Revelation.

Perhaps the most fundamental issue that Bartra plays with is the triumph of solidarity over difference, which he approaches by clas- sical anthropological and newer philosophi- cal concerns with marginality-especially the way in which marginal and normal types are transposed into imaginary spaces, which so become the networks of power that ensure social cohesion in what otherwise would be an entropic condition. Bartra seems to be searching, notjust for new metaphors, but for a new type of metaphor. The conventional ones in the social sciences are often laden with misplaced concreteness, perhaps as a result of mimicry of the physical sciences, preoccupied as they are with qualities of and relationships between forces and material ob- jects in real space and time. But Bartra the anthropologist is concerned to explore im- ages which, if I understand him correctly, exist in a kind of holographic hyperreal space that suffuses lived-in space, and in which simulacra are more real than the real. These images of reality are not the inversions of a camera obscura, nor are they a false con- sciousness of hegemonic ideas devised by elite intellectuals, but like those concepts they are necessary to overcome the otherwise disruptive tensions of class.

Being a collection of free essays, this book cannot be judged right orwrong. Instead it is

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appropriate to say that it is amusing, provoca- tive, and worth reading by anyone interested in basic problems in social theory. As noted above, the central issue is one that has domi- nated most of Bartra’s earlier work, namely, class analysis within a Marxist framework pushed to the frontiers of contemporary the ory. Not interested in class? There is much here that can be applied to the analysis of gender, ethnicity, and other forms of medi- ated difference.

Magical Arrow: The Maori, the Greeks, and the Folklore of the Universe. Gregory Schremmp. New Directions in Anthropological Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.238 pp.

JONATHAN FRIEDMAN Uniomib of Lund ,

This is a strange work. Marshall Sahlins misleads the reader in his foreword to believe that this is to be a demonstration of the valid- ity of cultural determinism in the Sense that cosmologies, by encompassing the social, are its source. This is the “revelatory inclusion of the social and the practical in the symbolic” (p. xi). “Society is already constructed by the mental operations of which it is supposed to be the source“ (p. xii).

The aim of the work is to compare certain cosmological principles across cultural boundaries: Zeno’s famous philosophical paradoxes on time and motion, Kant’s “cri- tique of pure reason,” and Maori cosmology as it can be read from Maori mythological texts of various periods.

By “elevating” the discussion to the level of Zen0 and Kant, who dealt explicitly with ab- stract concepts and their implications, the specificity of Maori cosmology is reduced to the same kinds of questions. The three sources of discussion are Zeno’s critique of motion, Kant’s critique of the four antine mies of reason, and Lovejoy’s discussion of the “great chain of being.” In all three cases the more specific discussions are raised to general issues such as continuity versus dis creteness, or infinity versus the finite. Maori myths of the formation of species, of the discrete forms of the observable world in Maori cosmogony, are not analyzed in terms of their concrete categories and schemes, but are reduced to statements about the transi- tion from the undifferentiated totality to the world of separate entities, species, and cate- gories.

That the separation of the couple Sky and Earth is interpreted as an expression of the movement from unity to discrete forms can only be plausible if it can be demonstrated that Maori texts contain discussion of such abstract principles, so that the stories of per- sonified natural phenomena, of quasi-human heroes, are no more than metaphors for ab- stract metaphysical antinomies. The fact that genealogies and the “great chain of being” share certain properties, if interpreted in a most abstract way (i.e., that they move from an origin in the past to the present via a process of differentiation), appears to enable the author to assume that they are about the same thing. That the Achilles text of Zen0 makes use of animals and heroes, that is, of concrete mythical personages, is enough for Schremmp to conflate the two kinds of dis course. But in that case, Malthus’s theory of population growth is merely an example of the principle of plenitude. In this analysis, the

most encompassing structural frame of Maori cosmogony consists in the opposi- tion of pure unity and pure plurality, held together and betokened by the universal application within it (spanning both spiri- tual and material worlds) of the idea of separation. [p. 911

In the same abstract way, “the highly ritual- ized process of assemblage for hui might be viewed as an inversion of the process of COE mogony” (p. 97). One to many or many to one, a demonstration of the reversibility of cosmological schemata.

What is absurd about all of this is the very intellectual process involved, the strategy that finds similarities by abstraction. Splitting at- oms, Big Bangs, black holes, birth, genealogy, and chopping wood are all equivalent exem- plifications of the same “principle’’ of differ- entiation. So what? Why in all of this confusion is there no mention of Hegel or Spinoza, much better examples than Kant, who used the antinomies to argue against the metaphysics that Schremmp tries to extract from Maori mythology?

To my mind this appears an absurd exercise to the extent that no attempt is made to discover the nature of the mythical and phile sophical propositions themselves, but simply to point out that at the most general level of abstraction they deal with differentiation, unification, opposition, and so on. It is also surprising that the only interest in the Maori texts appears to be in that which can be ab- stracted from them and related to concepts of the composite versus the simple, freedom