Review

Book reviews

CorrectionPlease note that in the Book Reviews Section ofthe December 2007 issue of the JRAI (volume 13,issue 4), the bibliographic details of the reviewedbook, Signe Howell. The kinning of foreigners:transnational adoption in a global perspective,published on page 1040 of the issue, containedan error. The price of the book should be £45

(cloth) and £15 (paper).

Anthropology of ‘the senses’

Edwards, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden &Ruth B. Phillips (eds). Sensible objects:colonialism, museums and material culture. xiv,306 pp., maps, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, NewYork: Berg Publishers, 2006. £50.00 (cloth),£18.99 (paper)

Over the last decade or so, a growing number ofanthropological studies have focused on thesenses in society. These studies give a critique ofWestern preoccupations with sight and hearing,once indicators of so-called ‘civilized’ societies,and move towards engaging with themulti-sensory channels of human sociality.This volume adds another to the list, withcolonialism, museums, and material culture asits focus. It consists of papers predominantlyfrom anthropologists, but with contributionsfrom art historians, art experts, andarchaeologists, most of which were presented atthe symposium ‘Engaging all the senses’ held inPortugal in 2003.

The volume begins with an introductorychapter (Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips) which

guides us on a whistle-stop tour of materialculture studies and its relation to ananthropology of the senses. We learn thatdifferent cultures create their own sensoryorders; that sight, sound, touch, smell, and tastemay be combinatory. Interestingly, the authorsraise the possibility of considering pain andspeech as senses. We move rapidly throughrecent intellectual debates in material culturetowards what is described as the advent of the‘sensory turn’ – a recognition in material cultureof the multi-sensorial qualities of the artefactualworld – before ending with a neat summaryof key points to ponder. This of course setsthe stage for the volume’s impetus: themulti-sensory dimensions of artefacts, colonialencounters, and museums around which thecontributions are organized.

The first set of contributions leads with twopapers examining the multi-sensory aspects ofAfrican modernity. Geurts and Adikah begin withan exploration of a local concept translated as‘feeling in the body, flesh or skin’ to reflect onartefacts and enduring traditions in southeasternGhana, while Buckley provides a novelexamination of the relation between studiophotography and citizenship in the Gambiathrough an ethos of elegance: the feeling ofbeing cherished and wanted by the nation-state.Sutton’s contribution provides an extremelyinteresting insight into the interrelationshipbetween the senses, skill, and memory ineveryday cooking. Two short ethnographiesof cooking in Greece and the US provideexamples of contrasting social contexts forlearning-how-to-cook. This paper stands out,much like the work of David Howes, in that itsstrength lies in the fact that in exploring boththe technical and sensory aspects of cooking,

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472© Royal Anthropological Institute 2008

it urges us to consider pluralistic ways ofknowing.

The sensory aspects of colonialism areaddressed in the second set of contributions.Te Awekotuku leads with a study of Maoritattooing, considering pain as a sense. While thiscontribution provides useful historical andethnographic detail, more could possibly havebeen provided about the process of gouging theskin as a transformative and sensory processrather than in terms of social memory andcultural identity. Indeed, the tactile skillsacquired by Maori tattooists are left unremarked.Jonaitis tackles taste and smell in relation topungent fish grease consumed by theKwakwaka’wakw in British Columbia. In readingthis material, one really gets an impression ofthe overpowering flavours that have offendedthe European palate. Barringer’s exploration ofmass ritual concentrates on the senses of sightand hearing. He considers the performativeaspects of Empire in India and in Londonthrough musical performances and anthems.

The final contributions encourage us to thinkof museums as sensescapes. Classen and Howesexamine the history of touch in museums, theformalization of seeing in exhibition spaces, andthe consequent de-sensing of artefacts ondisplay. While this paper provides somewonderful insights into sensory relations,the development of handling galleries inethnographic museums seems to have beenoverlooked. Losche’s paper concentrates on ananalysis of the Margaret Mead Hall of PacificPeoples at the American Museum of NaturalHistory and how attempts to contextualizeartefacts through sound, space, and lightencountered difficulties. Feldman offers athoughtful paper on the relation betweenbodies, objects, and the senses through adiscussion of many Bushman casts and thethousands of shoes of Nazi concentration campvictims exhibited in museums, while Ouzmancovers a range of issues in museum andarchaeological practice, concluding with adiscussion of the senses, story-telling, andidentity formation in Southern Africa. This isparticularly relevant to recent discussions byarchaeologists on soundscapes.

Overall, the volume ought to be consideredas a starting-point from which to explore furtherthe anthropology of the senses. This is especiallyso as, while the contributors have obviously setout to highlight the role of the senses in society,rather frustratingly several papers tend to losefocus on the senses in their analysis. Perhaps thiswas deliberate; as ‘sensible’ objects, one could

possibly imagine that what things really want isnot necessarily to draw attention to themselvesbut instead to shy away into the background.

Graeme Were University College London

Geurts, Kathryn Linn. Culture and thesenses: bodily ways of knowing in an Africancommunity. xvi, 315 pp., map, illus., bibliogr.London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press,2002. £37.95 (cloth), £15.95 (paper)

Among the more subtle discussions of culturaldifferences can be found the idea that culturallyconditioned experience might be grounded inculturally divergent modes of perception. Theimplications of this idea might seem merelyreasonable to a phenomenologist but woulddefinitely pose an epistemological threat to anold-school empiricist. The issue has remainedperipheral not because of its potentialsignificance but because culturally conditionedvariations in perception are difficult toinvestigate. Nevertheless, in concert withclassicists’ discussions of mnemonic devices inoral historical epics, anthropologists haveengaged in worthwhile reflections about thesenses, often revolving around sensitivity tocomparative differences in the transmission ofknowledge when based in literacy or orality.Another area of reflection, more problematicmethodologically though quite stimulating, hasdirected attention to kinesics and kinaesthetics,that is, to body language and to body awarenessin communication and learning.

A highly worthwhile contribution to this areaof inquiry is Kathryn Linn Geurts’s Culture andthe senses: bodily ways of knowing in an Africancommunity. She states her main thesis on heropening page: ‘Ultimately, this book will arguethat sensing, [or] ... “bodily ways of gatheringinformation,” is profoundly involved with asociety’s epistemology, the development ofits cultural identity, and its forms ofbeing-in-the-world’ (p. 3). Her introductorychapter provides an overview of anthropologicalprecedents on the themes of her research. Thefield location for her project is the Anlo-Ewe-speaking area of southeastern Ghana. It isdifficult to convey the impressive detail withwhich Geurts portrays the Anlo Ewe ‘sensorium’,that is, its sensory ordering of perception andexperience. She relies on a wide range ofelaborately integrated data, and it is clear thatshe was profoundly involved in her fieldwork.

After a second chapter that providesethnographic background on the Anlo Ewe,

Book reviews432


Geurts organizes her discussion into four parts.The first part, chapter 3, focuses on Anlo Eweconceptions of the senses, the linguisticcategories with which Anlo-Ewe-speakers definetheir own ways of perception and experience.This chapter, where other studies might end, iswhere Geurts only begins. The second part ofher presentation, chapters 4 and 5, focuses onwhat she calls ‘moral embodiment and sensorysocialization’. In these chapters, Geurts describeschild-rearing from the perspective ofkinaesthethics – in her words, how ‘balance,movement, and a more generalized feeling inthe body ... are critical components of anindigenous theory of inner states’ – bolstered byextensive observations of customary practicesand symbolism showing ‘how theseunderstandings are embedded in the child’searliest experience’ (p. 84) In the third part ofher discussion, chapters 6 and 7, Geurtsbroadens her focus to aspects of identity andpersonhood in Anlo Ewe culture at large. Shetraces the etymology of the name Anlo as aspecific bodily posture to points of significancein Anlo history and cultural practice, and sheprovides a multi-dimensional discussion of thenotion of balance (physical, psychological,literal, and metaphorical) from concepts of beinghuman to manifestations in ritual and communalpractice. In the fourth part of her discussion,chapters 8 and 9, Geurts both broadens andnarrows her focus to examine notions ofindividual health and illness reflected againstAnlo cosmological and religious models,particularly vodu, followed by an interestingreflection on such conditions as blindness,deafness, muteness, loss of mobility, or insanity,when aspects highlighted in her precedingdiscussion of the sensorium are compromised.In her final chapter, Geurts provides aninterpretative analytic framework for herethnographic presentation that revisits theethnological situation she portrayed in her firstchapter.

Culture and the senses is an ambitious book,grounded both in intensive field research and inmulti-disciplinary learnedness. Geurts’s area ofinquiry poses difficulties because it requires theapplication of a variety of methods and types ofdata. Examining the sensory bases of knowledgein cross-cultural context is fertile ground for theappreciation of deep aspects of culture andcultural differences. We have so few systematicstudies like Geurts’s because few scholars haveentered this uncharted territory with the idea ofgoing beyond launching a few tantalizingspeculations. It is to Geurts’s credit even to have

attempted such a complex cultural analysis, buteven more to her credit is the extent to whichshe has succeeded. Geurts’s detaileddescriptions certainly resonated well with mypersonal experience of the Anlo Ewe area. I hopethat other scholars will want to engage thewealth of material she presents and the largerquestions she raises within their own areas offamiliarity or expertise.

John M. Chernoff Pittsburgh, PA

Howes, David (ed.). Empire of the senses: thesensual culture reader. x, 421 pp., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, 2005.£19.99 (paper)

It is always a challenge to review an anthology.Firstly, it offers an embarrassment of riches,making it a betrayal when chapters are left outof discussion. This is especially so in a collectionso packed with exceptional contributions, fromanthropology, ethnomusicology, philosophy,sociology, museology, geography, history, law,literature, and neurology. Secondly, anthologiesare often rich in their parts but seldom coherentin their whole. Not so with this volume, one ofmany from the ‘Sensory formations’ series.Chapters are cannily selected to makeconnections and drive readers to their sources;the introduction provides overall theoreticalframing and contextualization within a broadacademic literature; and the organizationalstructure, with excellent section introductionsand a final ‘Sensory bibliography’, makes it aterrific teaching and reference tool.

The anthology is divided into five parts. ‘Theprescience of the senses’ deals with the sensesand cognition in two chapters that develop ideasof synaesthesia, or the interconnection of thesenses. In McLuhan’s ‘five sense sensorium’ thesenses are seen as being shaped by culture andtechnology rather than determined by biology,while Sacks’s case studies describing the newworlds opened up for blind people by theircondition challenge facile assumptions ofdisability by suggesting that it is throughimagination that individual worlds are created.‘The shifting sensorium’ historicizes perceptionin chapters by: Stewart, whose account of thesenses in philosophy and literature cautionsagainst sacrificing the aesthetics of expression tophilosophical debates of the memory ofexperience; Classen, whose examination of howfeminine sensibilities have led to suspicions ofwitchcraft suggests that not all aspects ofexistence can be forced into visibility; Mazzio,

Book reviews 433


who uses a seventeenth-century ‘academicdrama’ to portray a social sensorium in which thepersonified senses vie to demonstrate theirsuperiority over each other (the debut of a youngOliver Cromwell as Tactus provides irresistibletrivia); Roberts, who traces how mathematicalanalysis replaced sensory analysis in the history ofchemistry; and Corbin, who asks if the historianmust remain ‘a prisoner of language’.‘Sensescapes’ features: Classen’s critique ofMcLuhan’s essentialization of the senses of sightand hearing; Geurts’s challenge to neurobiologistDamasio’s culturally naïve understanding ofhuman capacity; Feld’s riposte to anthropologicaltheories of emotions that build embodiedunderstandings on an assumed a priori social andcultural character; Kondo’s description of ‘theway of tea’, focusing (as if to substantiate Feld’scomplaint) on meaning and exegesis rather thansensation; and Roseman’s evocative account,displaying both irony and pathos, of Malaysianforest-dwellers’ imaginative attempts toparticipate in a global capitalist economy.

The last two parts (‘The aestheticization ofeveryday life’ and ‘The derangement of thesenses’) begin with a chapter on Thoreau’s ‘allsentient’ body (Friesen), whose obsessive ‘trail ofscent’ recalls Susskind’s novel Perfume – a grimreminder of what might happen if our senses gotthe better of us. The ‘olfactory turn’ is continuedthrough to museum design (Drobnick) and theestablishment of scent-free facilities for thosesuffering from dystoposthesia, an intolerance tomultiple sensorial stimuli associated with thetoxins and alienation of industrial capitalism(Fletcher). The journey of the senses towards fullyfledged pathology was prefigured in the studiesof Strindberg (Ekman), and is evident among thehomeless, struggling to minimize sensoryexperiences as the carriers of ‘too muchotherness’ (Desjarlais). This state of affairs makesa materialist capitalist history of the sensesimperative, indeed urgent, and Howes’sambitious chapter returns to Marx to identify the‘lack’ (failure to ‘acknowledge consumption’) onwhich such a theory might be built. Howes’s finalquestion – ‘what theory of value could possiblycapture the “aesthetic plenitude” of the currentconjuncture?’ – is an invitation to further debate.

Howes’s critical introduction makes twocrucial points right away: that the humansensorium never exists in a natural state but isthe product of culture, imbued with culturalmeaning; and that it is hierarchically ordered.It follows then that, as well as giving evocativeaccounts of corporeal life, the ‘sensualrevolution’ also entails the analysis of the social

ideologies conveyed through sensory values andpractices; thus ‘to question the sensory model isto question the nature of reality’. Furthermore,the ‘intersensoriality’ assumed by a culturalsensorium orders the senses into a ‘racialhierarchy’, ‘regulated so as to express andenforce the social and cosmic order’. But even ifthe senses in different cultures are imbued withmeaning differently, and structured in differenthierarchical orders, are we justified in using suchcollectivizing expressions as ‘Andaman Islanderscertainly think so’ to clinch matters insofar asthese meanings are concerned? This wouldappear to take too much at face value, offering acabinet of curiosities but leaving unaddressedthe question evoked: that if the senses are lockedinto specific cultural meanings, where is thespace for the ‘free’ body and personal aestheticto express itself?

Howes recognizes that the contents of thisbook, and indeed the meanings and practices ofthe senses, cannot be brought under a singlecommon denominator. As language is needed forexpression, a paradox remains, but scholars mustbe vigilant not to allow a language-based modelto dictate ‘all cultural and personal experienceand expression’. This vigilance, I would caution,may also lead astray: Serres’s description of thelanguage-bound body, ‘preferring to dine on aprinted menu than eat an actual meal’, is notnecessarily logocentrism, as Howes infers; it canalso be seen as a desire to prolong the excitementof expectation, the imagining of a meal, whichcontinues to engage the senses. Is a sensationimagined not a sensation?

The real danger of a focus on the senses isidentified in Connor’s observation – that Serres’sworld of the ‘free body’, enjoying sensations atleisure, is a ‘monism of the manifold’, solipsisticrather than relational. Is it because the senses areinsufficient for communication, always turninginwardly? Are they more about a theory of valuethan a theory of communication? Whatever theanswer, I came out of this reading with sensesall agog: I could smell better, see better, tastebetter, feel better. Even if serious pathologies liethat way, at least it made me feel alive.

Lisette Josephides Queen’s University Belfast

Korsmeyer, Carolyn (ed.). The taste culturereader: experiencing food and drink. ix, 421 pp.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers,2005. £55.00 (cloth), £19.99 (paper)

A common trap for reviewers of food books isthe turn to food metaphors. We learn of a

Book reviews434


‘smorgasbord’ of a book, a ‘cornucopia’ of areader, ‘rich’ with ‘delicious morsels’, ‘tastysnippets’, and ‘succulent selections’. I could goon. But the point is made: switching to agastronomic register is neither original norilluminating. If I called it unpalatable, youmight respond it was just deadeninglypervasive.

Korsmeyer wants to explore the range oftaste: a sensation both innate and profoundlycultural; a mode of distinction both evanescentand deeply rooted. A usually ignored universal,it is a perfect theme for an imaginative editor.Korsmeyer does not stay put in one disciplinebut wanders widely. Thus there arecontributions by philosophers, biologists,gastronomes, sociologists, plus the oddoenologist, chemist, or zen master, as well asseveral anthropologists. Some contributionswere written hundreds of years ago; othersemerge in print here for the first time. As is nowalmost de rigueur in readers of food, the mood isoccasionally lightened by the inclusion of arecipe or three.

Some papers are brilliant, with unexpectedideas jumping off the page. Trubek is good onthe ramifications of terroir in France. Peynaud isexcellent on taste perception. Gronow on theSoviet production of champagne and caviar associalist kitsch makes some fascinating points.I wish I had written the section on artificialflavours by Classen and her colleagues.

Some papers are more leaden, with theirauthors clearly straining to prise out alreadytired insights. The trouble is, with a topic soeminently popular as food, academic writingabout it can so easily verge towards thepompous or the platitudinous, for this is onetopic in which we could all be experts.

The age of a few papers is already showing:above all, those tolling the end of taste, thanksto mechanization, modern markets, andmarketing. But this is a death prematurelyforetold, as the rise and rise of the organic foodmovement indicates. The fear, however, is thatthis recent lurch towards a self-styledgastronomic authenticity may just become yetanother modern class-marker. A fine-grainedknowledge of food becomes the latest hallmarkof savoir-faire, while obesity-inducing,diabetes-provoking foods turn into a newsymbol of the overfed, underprivileged. Whatnext: hamburger chains or flavour industrialistssponsoring T-shirts which shout ‘I ammalnourished but proud’?

To sum up. This is a sufficiently captivatingcollection, with a good number of original

contributions and enough sparkling papers toput the study of taste back where it should be:on the tips of our tongues.

Jeremy MacClancy Oxford Brookes University

Parkins, Wendy & Geoffrey Craig. Slowliving. xii, 180 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, NewYork: Berg, 2006. £55.00 (cloth), £16.99

(paper)

Our uses of food are culturally fundamental forthe ways in which we live and our forms of life:the economy of perception, memory andtradition, the ecology of everyday practice,material culture and tacit knowledge, the politicsand conflicts related to economic interests andthe ways of managing the market.

Slow living was intended by the authors,as stated in the preface, to serve as ‘the firstbook-length study of Slow Food’. Neverthelessthe reader should not expect a book-lengthethnography of Slow Food. This book aims,rather, at contextualizing the philosophy and theimpact of slow living ‘in the global everyday’ (touse a phrase frequently used by the authors),with respect to food, but also to time, space,pleasure, and politics. In other words, slowliving is explored ‘as a response to globalizationand its perceived impact on everyday life’ (p. 2).Slow Food is, therefore, only one possibleexample of the many ‘oppositional modes’being developed – globally – as responses toglobalization, and regional variations, say, fromthe American Voluntary Simplicity movement tothe Italian Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, wouldhave made for an interesting comparativeethnography of such ‘oppositional modes’ thatfocus on ‘the global everyday’.

In this work, though, a vast bibliography(covering, in the main, the approaches ofsociology and cultural studies) aims firstly toreveal the many layers and distinctions impliedin the conscious use of a ‘slow’ manifesto, ratherthan a draconian or nostalgic ‘back to basics’approach. For instance, to live slowly does notmean necessarily to abandon the pace ofcontemporary life altogether, but rather ‘acommitment to occupy time more attentively’;to live slow does mean to invest in pleasure andso also to indulge in, rather than to withdrawfrom, the complexities of food preparation andconnoisseurship – an attitude apparently moreironic than ascetic regarding ‘the globaleveryday’.

A ‘slow’ approach to the production,distribution, and consumption of food should

Book reviews 435


add a new dimension to the contemporary,Western search for a newly discovered sensoryapproach to everyday experience – one thatrecognizes not only the diversity of sensoryworlds, but also their political importance inlocal and global conflicts, in the texture of localpractices, and in the very substance of regionaleconomies. Appreciating a local recipe meansalso recognizing a social, economic, and politicalbackground to the know-how of skilful localpractices and of the efficiency of localcompetences that are handed down in time bygenealogy or contiguity, apprenticeship orcontamination. Slow Food can then be read aspart of a wider phenomenon – which I haveelsewhere called ‘the re-invention of food’ –involving a new culture of taste: a taste forgenuine food and a taste for life involving muchmore than just food-tasting.

Practice is the ultimate dimension forinvestigating slow living as a consciousengagement with tradition, revival, and their‘selective deployment’ vis-à-vis notions ofauthenticity and conviviality (p. 8). Nevertheless,the approach used to investigate practice hereis mainly ‘textual and discursive’ rather thanone based on ethnography and participantobservation (though participant observation andinterviews do form an important part of theresearch, for instance in the study of the networkof Città Slow in chapter 4). In particular,the focus is on the interplay andcross-fertilization between levels of ‘personalpractice, public values and social organization’(p. 119), and how they can meld in a publicdebate.

For instance, the authors pinpoint publicevents as one core level of the political strategyof the Slow Food movement: events are wellorchestrated, publicized, covered by the pressand serve the core purpose of ‘visualizing itsconcerns’ (p. 120). Philosophical, aesthetic, andethical cogency, political empowerment, andthe ever-growing density and vastness of itsnetworks of presidia are all brought to the foreand made visible in powerful mise-en-scènessuch as the Turin Salone del Gusto or theaccompanying event Terra Madre, a gatheringof representatives from all the peasantcommunities that host a Slow Food presidiumaround the world. This is a powerful andsuccessful strategy, which has neverthelessraised a few reservations. Firstly the ‘deleteriouseffects of sudden, substantial media coverageon sustainable gastronomy projects in remoteareas’ (p. 122) shows that such media-marketshort-circuits are pervasive and Slow Food

cannot be considered the only result of theireffects, especially when they do succeed in‘bridging the gap between production andconsumption’ (p. 133), as I argue elsewhere.Secondly there is the risk of getting ‘caught upin a commodification of the “authentic”experience’ (p. 122) as yet anotherdesign-merchandise made available for thehigh demand of affluent Western subjects.And thirdly, I would add, there is the risk oferasing the real actors from the scene – withtheir idiosyncrasies, internal conflicts, andparticularities – while in the very process ofcelebrating them as protagonists.

Cristina Grasseni University of Bergamo

Art and archaeology

Nuttall, Sarah (ed.). Beautiful/Ugly: Africanand diaspora aesthetics. 416 pp., plates, illus.,bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.Press, 2007. £17.99 (paper)

This is a beautiful book: an edited collection ofessays, covering a wide range of approaches,beautifully edited, and full of interesting images.On the back cover the reviewers mention its‘theoretical sophistication’. I must confess thatthis is not the main quality I found in the book.The introduction by Sarah Nuttall, ‘Rethinkingbeauty’, explores recent philosophical writingson beauty in American academia that vindicatethe enlightened discourse of aesthetics. ForNuttall, beauty cannot be understood withoutlooking at ugliness. The ambiguity betweenbeauty and ugliness is particularly evident froman African point of view; the dialecticalrelationship of beauty and ugliness is mediatedby relationships of power; and arguments thatpropose to define beauty without reference tougliness would be ethnocentric. All these ideasare not really new: the criticism of ethnocentrismand disavowal of power in Western philosophyhas been at the core of American cultural studiesfor the last thirty years. Having said this, thisargument helps Nuttall bring together a widearray of essays that may have only a couple ofthings in common: they are about Africa, andthey deal with the aesthetics of everyday life. By‘aesthetics of everyday life’, I mean everydayjudgements of taste; in this sense the ambiguityof beauty and ugliness, how one can becomethe other, is an interesting subject. It is notclear why other forms of aesthetic judgement

Book reviews436


like the uncanny or the kitsch are notconsidered, in particular when they are sorelevant to several of the topics discussed inthe book – from sorcery to the use ofmass-mediated images.

Still, the chapters are very interesting, insome cases fascinating. Mbembe’s paper onCongolese samba connects the history ofpopular music in Congo to its recent history in asomewhat linear way that could have gaineddepth from some ethnographic engagement (orjust some interviews with the musicians) and amore transnational, Atlantic understanding ofmovements in popular music. Indeed, verysimilar forms of popular music have beenproduced in Angola, Brazil, and Jamaica invery different political contexts. DominiqueMalaquais’s paper on a public monument inDouala and the adverse reactions of the localpublic to its ‘recycling’ aesthetics, which makeAfrican art popular in Europe, is fascinating.Pippa Stein presents the case of school childrenin South Africa reproducing the forms oftraditional ‘fertility’ dolls when asked to make asculpture. Not only are the dolls astonishinglybeautiful, but the stories of the children whomade them are also very sensitively presented.Mark Gevisser’s autobiographical stories of raceand sex in South African swimming pools offervery sharp insights on discrimination throughaesthetic judgement. On a wider sphere of‘taste’, several papers deal with food, and itstransient meanings in countries where the excessof food is still a sign of wealth. A couple ofpapers on the Diaspora introduce the argumentof the invention of an ‘African’ aesthetic in theNew World, an argument that is not new butwhich may be relevant in contrast with theAfrican cases. Michelle Gilbert’s description ofconcert paintings in Ghana finally brings focusto the question of evil, sorcery, and the uncanny,marginally present in other papers. Mia Couto’stales about urban life together with J. Fox’spictures of balcony living in Mozambique closethe volume brilliantly.

Two main topics emerge recurrently in thebook: the aesthetics of the recycled, the SystèmeD, the friche, and the aesthetics of evil, of sorceryand violence. Both topics have been criticallyaddressed by several authors (Jean-Loup Amselleand Brigit Meyer among others), who argue thatthe Western interest in these issues is a renewalof the exoticist, orientalist gaze on an Africa thatis seen not only as ugly, but also as perverselyattractive, precisely because of its ‘ugliness’. Thereification of an ‘African’ aesthetics that this bookseems to propose at some points does not

necessarily contradict the orientalist discourse.The fact that many of the authors are from Africacan be read in different ways: the dominance ofa South African perspective, strongly influencedby American intellectual trends, is not necessarilya guarantee of scholarly independence. On theother hand, it must be said that most of theauthors do engage in complex and nuancedarguments which cannot be reduced tocelebrations of the creativity of African recyclingor the beauty of witchcraft. This is a volumeworth diving into, precisely because it isbeautiful.

Roger Sansi Goldsmiths College

Sabloff, Jeremy A. & William L. Fash

(eds). Gordon R. Willey and Americanarchaeology: contemporary perspectives. xii,252 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Norman:Univ. Oklahoma Press, 2007. $34.95 (cloth)

In 2002, the American archaeologicalcommunity lost one of its most renownedscholars in Gordon Randolph Willey. Jeremy A.Sabloff and William L. Fash are the editors of athoughtful and timely volume worthy of itssubject. Though a mammoth undertakingbecause of the breadth of work producedby Willey, this Festschrift is a model whichothers should follow and an importantread for contemporary Americanarchaeologists.

In an age of narrowing research topics,Gordon R. Willey’s work stands as anoutstanding example of synthesis and theinvestigation of the ‘big picture’. His diverseinterests ranged across the Americas and intopics including settlement patterning, ceramicanalysis, transcendence, and ideology, all ofwhich he built upon in his work. Throughout hiscareer Willey remained steadfastly committedto the discipline of archaeology and thedevelopment of new models to investigatematerial culture and its production. Hisresearch has laid the groundwork for whatAmerican archaeology has become today.Consequently, this book is as much aboutWilley’s role as teacher, mentor, and friendas it is about his prominence as anarchaeologist.

Structured around ten of Willey’s mostinfluential writings, like Method and theory inAmerican archaeology and ‘The Classic Mayahiatus: a rehearsal for the collapse?’ eachchapter discusses and reviews Willey’sconclusions in conjunction with today’s

Book reviews 437


interpretation, stressing that his methods andtheories are enduring and continuing to leaveindelible marks on the practice of Americanarchaeology. The chapters are presented in orderof his fieldwork, starting with Willey’s seminalresearch in the Florida Gulf Coast of theSoutheastern United States (Jerald T. Milanich)through to his final work in the Mayan Lowlands(Patricia A. McAnany, David A. Freidel, et al.). AsSabloff and Fash make quite evident throughoutthe book, Willey was adept at conductingfieldwork and publishing results. The body ofknowledge he produced remains commandingto this day. To the reader’s benefit, excerpts fromWilley’s publications are included in all of thechapters.

Though Willey spent only a comparativelyshort time conducting research in areas such asthe Viru Valley, Peru, in the 1940s and Panamanot long afterwards, Sabloff and Fash had theinsight to solicit chapters that discuss this work.As noted in ‘Peru’ by Michael Moseley and ‘Theintermediate area and Gordon Willey’ by JeffreyQuilter, both areas held Willey’s attentionthroughout his career and served asfoundational material for some of his mostinfluential ideas expressed in works like Anintroduction to American archaeology, volume II.These chapters, as well as others such as JoyceMarcus’s ‘Great art styles and the rise ofcomplex societies’, demonstrate Willey’sconsideration of broader issues in thedevelopment of Mayan culture. Willey’sprogressive view on the influence of art andideology, for example, makes his legacy in NewWorld archaeology salient.

Sabloff and Fash’s book is well edited andquite readable. The illustrations, graphs, andphotographs are quite rich; the most notablephotograph being of Willey with eyebrow raised,which appears in Toutellot and Hammond’s‘Serendipity at Seibal’. The ten chapters areframed by a gracious introduction andconclusion by the editors, which underscorestheir immense respect for Willey. Of note arethe references to Willey’s life away fromarchaeology; his writing of archaeologicalmystery novels and love of egg-drop soupreminds us that there is life beyond academe. Insum, Gordon R. Willey and American archaeologyis a wonderful addition to the collectionof any archaeologist working in one ofthe many fields in which Willey did, as wellas anyone interested in the history of thediscipline.

C. Broughton Anderson University ofMassachusetts Amherst

Saitta, Dean J. The archaeology of collectiveaction. xx, 140 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.Tallahassee: Univ. Press of Florida, 2007.$24.95 (paper)

This slender volume is an interesting studyconcerned, as the Series Editor informs us(p. xiv), with reconstructing an aspect of the‘American experience’, specifically the ColoradoCoalfield strike and war of 1913-14, whichincluded the now infamous Ludlow Massacre.Emphasis is placed upon reconstructing‘collective action’ and chapter 1 sets out thetheoretical framework and evaluates relevant,topical, archaeological epistemology, largely inrelation to ‘ownership’ of the past. A criticalhistorical archaeology is called for as amechanism for emancipating groups for toolong excluded by middle-class archaeology. Thisis a relevant point and Saitta is writing froma historical archaeological perspective,a disciplinary sub-area with a heightenedsense of reflexivity in comparison to, forinstance, prehistoric Near Eastern or Africanarchaeology.

Chapter 2 sets out at greater length Saitta’sthinking on the ‘philosophical commitments’involved in such a critical archaeology. This isanchored within a self-defined ‘Pragmatist’archaeological framework, the Americanintellectual legacy of which is admitted inrelation to, for example, Peirce, Dewey, andmore recently Richard Rorty. The premises ofboth objectivity and truth are rightly questionedand the development of a ‘working-class’ (p. 12)archaeology signalled. Yet here, perhaps, theprivileged position of Saitta and his colleagues isall too apparent (and not fully acknowledged) indealing with recent events, actions, and theirmaterial residues as opposed to the scraps andfragments most archaeologists have to deal with,which are further removed both chronologicallyand in terms of ‘consciousness’ than thosediscussed by Saitta. Hence his argument fromthe outset is constructed from a position ofempirical strength denied the majority andallowing somewhat grander claims to be made.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the archaeologyof collective action. The tenets of processual andpost-processual archaeology are briefly outlined,perhaps unnecessarily, for this is material thatshould by now be well known to Saitta’sassumed intended audience, that is,archaeologists. Agency theory is considered atsome length, which is understandable inexamining collective action, and some usefulcritical points made. Less pertinent are the

Book reviews438


references to Hodder’s work among the Baringoor Leone’s on colonial Annapolis, again for thereason already cited, that this is well known.Conversely, ‘a contextual theory of materialculture’ (p. 33) could have been more fullydeveloped, for though we get a later referenceto ‘materiality’ (p. 68), this area of currentarchaeological interest and relevance islargely neglected when it could have beenprofitably explored in relation to the data fromLudlow.

Chapter 4 is more successful in narrowingthe focus on to historical archaeology, broadlydefined, again in relation to strategies forexploring the ‘archaeologies’ of collective action.Chapter 5 provides a logical progression intothe presentation of the empirical data, firstlyhistorical evidence, and in Chapter 6, thearchaeological data. Both chapters (and indeedthe whole book) are clearly written and the datawell presented, though it should be noted thatsome of the illustrations are a little murky andone at least, of an archaeological unit, breaksconvention in lacking a scale (Fig. 6.7).

In general it is in the empirically groundeddiscussion that the strength of the volume liesrather than in the attempt at constructing ahermeneutic of collective action too broadlyconstrued. For recurrently, and this is perhapswhere the fault-line emerges between thegrander claims and the specificities of the study,the American emphasis is apparent. This isrelevant even insofar as the definition of class ‘asa fluid set of processes’ (p. 64) is proposed. Thismight be applicable in the Ludlow context (itsuniversality even in relation elsewhere to theAmerican ‘experience’ could be questioned), butis less so in other temporal and spatial contextswhere issues of ascription could be much moreimportant rather than those surrounding fluidity.

Hence chapter 7 is very successful for itconcentrates upon the implications of thematerial considered with regard to how theyresonate in public consciousness today, why theinequality of opportunity persists in America,and, briefly, how it influenced and affected Saittahimself. The success of the discussion is becauseit is tightly bound to the Colorado case study,whereas, in contrast, chapter 8 is less fulfilling inadvancing claims which could be interpreted astoo grand in their proposed potential impact.None the less, this is in part understandable forwe all want our research to have ‘impact’, and,notwithstanding this criticism, Saitta is to becommended for providing us with an interestingstudy.

Timothy Insoll University of Manchester

Williamson, Ronald F. & Michael S.Bisson (eds). The archaeology of BruceTrigger: theoretical empiricism. xiv, 304 pp.,tables, illus., bibliogrs. London, Ithaca, N.Y.:McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2006. £60.00

(cloth), £18.99 (paper)

There are two common kinds of books aboutarchaeologists. In a conventional Festschrift acollected gift of studies is offered for (it is hoped)the Master to bless and enjoy. Or biographicaland analytical studies of the Master and hisworks are written years later – and necessarilytherefore largely from reduced evidence as itchances to survive the papers, correspondence,and other secondary sources; a good example isTrigger’s own fine book on Gordon Childe,shaped by the painful limits taphonomic hazardcreates by the chance of which sources surviveand which perish. This generous and intelligentbook is a fine example of a genre we could moreoften benefit from – a book written instead frompersonal knowledge at the time, and even withthe Master himself, Bruce Trigger, as aself-analyst. Pamela Smith’s now-annual seriesof Cambridge ‘tea and memories’ meetingsexploring recent historical themes inarchaeologists’ work are in the same spirit ofrecent and direct knowledge and memory,so equally of special merit.

The book’s sixteen chapters are of quiteexceptional and consistent merit. I speciallyenjoyed essays by Eldon Yellowhorn on ‘theawakening of internalist archaeology in theAboriginal world’ – because we increasinglynow hear indigenous voices speaking about thearchaeology, but still rarely indigenous voicesspeaking about the archaeologist; by RandallMcGuire on Marx, Childe, and Trigger; andby Toby Morantz on Trigger’s ethnohistory.I enjoyed all.

Trigger was unusual in the great range ofcomplex subjects he treated, always in depth,always well informed, always astonishinglythorough. Both Egyptian and North American,both archaeology and ethnohistory, bothpractice and theory, both single-authored booksand the opening volume, in two physicalvolumes, of the enormous edited Cambridgehistory of the native peoples of the Americas. Theone I remember most learning from is his Nativeand newcomer: Canada’s ‘heroic age’ reconsidered(1985). His last full-length book, Understandingearly civilization (2003), analysed over twentydomains of human social life in the forms theytook across seven civilizations, amongst themShang China and the Yoruba people of West

Book reviews 439


Africa alongside the familiar Old and New worldexamples: 7 ¥ >20 = >140! It is an uneven, as wellas an enormous, book, because even at 770

pages they have each to be dealt withsummarily, and really effective analysis wasbeyond the grasp even of this Master, I fear. Anescalating problem for us, as knowledge of theparticulars enlarges and multiplies, is the way inwhich these really ambitious works of synthesis,and especially works which neither proposegrand theory in the abstract nor generalize froma narrow case study but prove actual patternacross the material evidence, seem to be slippinginto the now impossible to do. But Brian Fagan,another Master of the Trigger generation andcontributor to this volume, also proves it still canbe done.

Faced with the thousands of unanswerede-mails in my inbox, I wonder not for the firsttime how a Master can be so productive. Not forlack of varied work at McGill in Montreal, wherehe was based nearly all his working life. But wasworking time really so much less crowdedthen?

Trigger’s active working life, from graduatestudent at Yale in 1959 to his death in 2006,spans an era which may be remembered asone of ‘biff and baff’. BIFF!: old archaeology ishopeless – we need a New Archaeology. BAFF!:New Archaeology is hopeless – we need apost-modern archaeology. And BIFF again!: ...Remembering some of those polemics,sometimes with cruelty of the criticismmatched only by the weakness of the actualworked example of the good new way to work,I am easily persuaded that the more generousand quieter ways of Trigger’s working areactually more productive as well as morecollegial. That collegiality goes beyond thecollege for, as Martha Latta’s essay reports,Trigger became uncomfortable with thedegree to which archaeologists had contrivedto distance themselves from the living FirstNations: ‘The Hurons are not a group oftwo hundred rim sherds. They are a livingpeople who have ideas and concerns abouttheir world and the ways in which they arepictured’.

Trigger was the leading archaeologist of hisgeneration in Canada. Perhaps it helps to beCanadian, of a nation famously touchy aboutbeing mistaken for its US big brother, andfamously aware also of the special place ofindigenous people today in the face of dominantempires.

Christopher Chippindale University ofCambridge

Ecology

Kosek, Jake. Understories: the political life offorests in northern New Mexico. xx, 380 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.:Duke Univ. Press, 2007. £14.99 (paper)

Trained as a forester, a geographer, and anethnographer, Jake Kosek is, at heart, a politicalecologist. Inspired by his doctoral supervisorsMichael Watts and Nancy Peluso, as well as bythe timeless teachings of Raymond Williams,Michel Foucault, and William Cronon, he offers abeautifully written monograph on forest politicsin northern New Mexico, a marginal peripheryof an imperial centre. His analysis of the forest asconstructed through a range of scientific anddiscursive practices may not be original, but hiscentral message that nature, race, and nation arehistorically inseparable is a refreshing insightrelating to this particular area.

Ideas of New Mexico run deep in Westernimagination as one of the violent far westfrontiers of nineteenth-century North Americanstate-building, a romantic island of persistingAmerican Indian and Chicano folk-ways, aheaven of hippy art and freedoms, and an axis ofsacred wilderness. For archaeologists andanthropologists, it is the heartland of Kroeberianhistorical diffusionism and Stewardian culturalecology. But the northern New Mexico thatcaptures Kosek’s political imagination is peopledwith social actors we usually do not hear about:dispossessed, marginal Hispanics and Chicanoactivists, environmentalists, governmentforesters, workers from the not-so-distantnuclear military-industrial complex at LosAlamos, and dying piñon-juniper trees.

The New Mexicans Kosek worked withconstitute and reproduce their collective identitynot so much through the forest, but through‘the land’, symbol of their historical roots andmaterial source of their livelihood. It is withmuch empathy that the author reconstructs theirmemories of loss and dispossession, theirsentiments of longing for land, and their senseof heredity, which all become ‘central sitesaround which people organize and protestinequalities’ (p. 50). Kosek’s Hispano informantsdo not shy away from confrontation, especiallywith their favourite enemy, the Forest Service (inthis region, public land is managed through onesingle state agency), which embodies in theirparanoiac mindset the monolithic state. Chapter5, my favourite in the book, brilliantly illustrateshow local despair turns into oppositional

Book reviews440


identity against deeply felt injustice. Smokey, thechapter’s hero, is an iconic representation of thenative wild bear, used as a cartoon character bythe government in its forest fire prevention, andcontemptuously dismissed by the Hispanicpopulation as a paternalistic ‘white racist pig’(p. 226). For Kosek, this is how ‘forest policy andpractices become inseparably intertwined withthe reproduction of forms of difference’.However, like so many poor throughout theAmericas, these fourth-world underdogs areforced to choose between either a politics ofequal redistribution, or one of community andidentity. The liberal dictate ‘either class orethnicity’ stifles their subaltern politics, and, inthe process, silences and reifies their voices. Theplight of the dispossessed living at the doorstepsof affluence and privilege is painfully captionedby one of Kosek’s informants (p. 57): ‘[O]utsideof “Indian art” and “Indian gaming”, we havebecome an invisible people, even to ourselves’(p. 57).

The flows of material and symbolicexchanges between the contrasting geographicspaces inhabited by the poor and the wealthy isparticularly well rendered in chapter 6, whichdescribes Los Alamos’s nuclear economy. It is,we are told, the third site in importance in theworld for nuclear research and industrialproduction. It is at Los Alamos that one comesfully to realize the importance of ‘the materialhistory of sentiments’ (p. 25), the fact thatnature is ‘always already social’ (p. 28), and that‘the weakness at the heart of environmentalpolitics is that it does not take seriously thepolitics of nature’ (p. 273). These realizations,including the idea that regimes of managementof nature and people are always plural andinterdependent, are used in the concludingchapter to further the debate on human agencyand non-anthropogenic factors in the context ofthe uncertainties created by climate change.Will this emerging threat cause the rise ofnew emancipatory politics, and will theselead to new re-imaginings and possibilities,or, rather, will they degenerate into the sameconfrontations of nature, race, and class as thoseexamined in this book?

Laura M. Rival University of Oxford

Maida, Carl A. (ed.). Sustainability andcommunities of place. ix, 261 pp., maps, figs,tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2007. £45.00 (cloth)

When I first opened this book, I received quite ashock. It is the latest volume in the Berghahn

‘Studies in environmental anthropology andethnobiology’ series, under Roy Ellen’s ablegeneral editorship. The theme uniting thecontributions is the need to place communitiesin their local contexts in addressingsustainability, while simultaneously allowingfor global circumstances; how they ‘blendtraditional sentiments with fully modernsensibilities ... to sustain ... sense of culturalidentity amid large-scale dislocations’ (pp. 9-10).While not a new theme, the contributors drawon some interesting ethnographic examples indiscussing it.

It comprises three parts. The first, entitled‘Local and global knowledges’, opens with acontribution from Claude Raynaut, MagdaZanoni, Angela Ferreira, and Paulo Lana onlocal communities around the Atlantic forest ofParana State, Brazil. They point out that bothcommunities and forest have experiencedconsiderable change, the ecology thatconservationists seek to protect being heavilyinfluenced by humans. They illustrate howdifferent actors’ views of sustainabledevelopment may differ and clash, policyprivileging natural above social sustainabilitythereby leaving locals saying ‘we count lessthan the micoleão monkey or the parrot’. In thesecond chapter, Thomas Thornton discusses theoutcomes of the 1971 Alaska Native ClaimsSettlement Act for local communities. Heexplores the intriguing possibility that localsubsistence values spiritually tied to placemight influence ‘deracinated, competitive,short-sighted, and often corrupt’ (p. 42)business corporations to prioritize sustainability.The next chapter, by Johanna Gibson, contrastsAustralian customary land custodianship withcapitalist property notions, nicely captured inan Australian musical where an Aboriginalretorts ‘This land is me’ to a rancher’s assertion‘This land is mine’. She argues that legalframeworks need to accommodate suchdifferent resource requirements or ‘obligationsenriched by these inclusive systems ofcustodianship will be tragically inconceivable’(p. 78). The final chapter is another interestingcontribution by Dario Novellino, which I recallas a lively Durham AID seminar, illustratinghow the bureaucracy that surrounds localclaims to resources inhibits sustainable culturalpractices among the Batak of the Philippines.In their attempts to negotiate with the stateand acquire legitimacy, they refer to kultura –a syncretic idea of cultural identity –which they fear is threatened by outsideinterventions.

Book reviews 441


The second part, entitled ‘Local practices:adaptive strategies and state responses’, openswith Krista Harper investigating the widespreadperception in Hungary that all are vulnerable tothe environmental problems attributed to thetransformation from state socialism to globalcapitalism. She shows through a discussion ofRoma health and civil rights that some are morevulnerable than others, arguing for attention toenvironmental justice for such marginal people.The second chapter, by Deborah Pellow, focuseson the part played by the preparation andconsumption of food by migrants – in this caseNigerian Hausa to Accra, Ghana – in sustaining asense of community. People express identity bysitting together eating prepared foods sold onthe street. In the next chapter, Janet Bensondiscusses attitudes to the economic andenvironmental sustainability of farming inKansas. Opinions vary between communitiesover the inherently unsustainable beef industry,dependent on overuse of groundwater supplies,generous government subsidies, and cheapmigrant labour. The final contribution, byBarbara and Carl Maida, discusses the ‘SaveOpen Spaces and Agricultural Resources’initiative voted for by residents of Los Angeles,who perceived a need to control urbanencroachment on farm land. Such land usepolicy decisions, they argue, require the publicbe well informed about the issues.

The third part, entitled ‘Social capital, civicengagement and globalization’, opens withKenneth Meter discussing lessons aboutparticipatory research from the ‘NeighbourhoodSustainability Indicators Project’ in Minneapolis.He argues that the experiences of devising andimplementing systemic indicators ofsustainability offer a robust model for urbanenvironments. The next chapter, by Carla Caser,considers the ‘built environment’ on MustangIsland, Texas, employing Bourdieu’s socialcapital concept to argue that the design ofphysical space influences neighbourhood socialnetworks. She discusses how different socialgroups manipulate and manage their space andsense of place to increase their social capital and‘power’. In the penultimate chapter, RichardWestra discusses Japanese understanding ofpolitical economy, arguing that currentglobalization trends do not suggest a ‘viableecosustainable future’, whereas Green theoryand new socialist ideas do. The final chapter, bySnjezana Colic, discusses consumption andglobalization, pointing out that socio-economicarrangements differ between societies whateverglobal trends.

The surprises include seeing no reference in abook dealing with local issues and sustainabledevelopment to the local/indigenous knowledgeinitiative, which addresses several of the topicsdiscussed. And reference to social capital withno mention of development’s SustainableLivelihoods Framework, where it featuresprominently. Perhaps this is evidence that thediscipline is now so broad we easily lose sight ofcurrent cognate work. But the real shock was tosee myself rechristened Luis A. Sillitoe on thefly-page, not only disconcerting, but also out ofcharacter for this otherwise well-edited volume.

Paul Sillitoe University of Durham

Walley, Christine J. Rough waters: natureand development in an East African marinepark. xx, 308 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.Oxford, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,2004. £36.95 (cloth), £12.95 (paper)

As foreign tourists arrived at the newlydeveloped eco-lodge on the remote island ofChole off Tanzania’s coast, brilliantly paintedwhite rocks lined their path to waitingbungalows. The visitors complained that the‘tasteless’ painted rocks spoiled the otherwisenatural experience. The rocks were not part ofthe original expatriate designed camp, but ratherwere added by Chole’s resident staff, who sawthem as a sign of development. The paintedlimestone rocks are just one of severalprovocative metaphors used to explore thecontradictions of nature tourism andparticipatory development in Christine Walley’swell-written and engaging book Rough waters:nature and development in an East African marinepark.

The book examines the development of amarine park in Tanzania’s Mafia island chain inthe late 1990s. Drawing on the Manchesterschool of anthropology, Walley uses the conceptof a ‘social drama’ or an extended analysis ofconflict over time to examine competinginterests in creating the park. By taking thisapproach she questions theories that posit aview where globalization creates new spaces forlocal participation by subsuming state power toless interested economic and non-governmentalforces. She grounds the marine park controversyin the much deeper history of Mafia as a siteof plantation slavery and cosmopolitandevelopment and its transformation into a ruralperiphery. This book is a must-read for anyoneinterested in the ways that internationaldevelopment and conservation projects shape

Book reviews442


state-society relations and vice versa. It makesimportant contributions to the fields ofanthropology, geography, and history, as well asto inter-disciplinary scholarship in politicalecology and development studies.

Walley shows how complex historicalconnections are replaced by a pervasivediscourse about poor and uneducated localswho destroy their environment by recklessfishing practices, including dynamiting.Enlightened bureaucrats and internationalconservation groups propose a national marinepark to safeguard the area’s fisheries and attractnew forms of eco-tourism to the islands. Givenefforts over the 1990s to promote communityparticipation along with foreign investment andinternational technical assistance, the parkpromises to be a model for community-basedconservation in Tanzania. Indeed Walley startsher story with a 1995 meeting at which Mafia’sresidents wholeheartedly embrace the marinepark. The book is at its best when showing whyresidents, deeply sceptical about governmentauthorities and bureaucratic elites, wouldenthusiastically welcome the conservationproject.

Through in-depth interviews with residentsand by immersing herself in local politics, Walleyis told that dynamite fishing is not the result ofpoverty and ignorance, but is the province ofoutsider fishermen collaborating withgovernment officials. These outsiders areunswayed by local social pressure exertedthrough kinship ties, historically used to regulatefishing rights on the islands. Aware of thedangers of inviting the government to regulatetheir waters, Mafia’s fishermen still believed thatthe internationally supported marine park wasthe best way to stop dynamite fishing, asserttheir rights as wenyeji or proprietors of the area,and provide employment to local youth. Thepresence of the international NGO WWF gaveresidents hope that their interests would betaken into account. Despite such assurances byits expatriate technical adviser, WWF wasultimately beholden to state agencies and theirinterests.

I particularly enjoyed chapter 4, where fishplay a central role in Walley’s discussion of localperceptions of nature. Readers might at firstimagine that by increasing local demand forfresh fish, tourism could raise resident livingstandards. However, she shows why thecommodification of fish leads fishermen andtheir families to eat less fish, and that theexpansion of markets diminishes the nutritionalquality of local diets. She also illustrates how

local claims for fresh fish encourages manyfishermen to sell their catch at sea to large‘ice-boats’ or to fillet the fish before comingashore.

Walley’s careful attention to how variousactors – island residents, state officials, NGOs,and tourism industry expatriates – hold differentmeanings of key project terms like ‘participation’and ‘development’ makes it a great book forteaching in undergraduate and graduatecourses. The book contrasts two contradictoryconceptions of participatory development.The first is an international model where allstakeholders are equal in determining the goalsand outcomes of the project. Walleydemonstrates why this technical understanding,embraced by WWF staff, naïvely wishes awayhistorical political-economic social relations. Thesecond view is grounded in Tanzania’s history ofsocialist development, where participationmeant rural people being set to work to fulfil thegovernment’s mandate. The book offers acompelling account as to why entrenchedstate-society models of participation are noteasily shed by the good intentions of globalprojects.

Benjamin Gardner University of California,Berkeley

History and linguistics

Pollock, Sheldon. The language of the godsin the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, andpower in premodern India. viii, 684 pp., maps,bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. CaliforniaPress, 2006. £48.95 (cloth)

This is a large, ambitious, important, andexciting book, bursting with ideas at every level.It is hard to imagine how such a magnum opuscould possibly have been produced by anacademic working under the five- or eight-yearcycle of RAE audit procedures. It asks some bigquestions about language use, and the relationof language to power, from approximately 2,500

years ago in South and Southeast Asian historyright up to the present day. It does so in anexplicitly comparative way, with two entirechapters devoted to the nitty-gritty of the historyof language use and policy in Europe. Ahistorian’s feel for detail and difference iscombined with a sociologist’s drive to generalize(not to mention a deep engagement withmetropolitan theory that even today is rather

Book reviews 443


unusual in an Indologist), and the whole isunderpinned by a seemingly effortless commandand synthesis of an enormous expanse ofinscriptional and literary Sanskrit and relatedPrakrits.

Pollock’s aim is to understand the role ofSanskrit at different periods and to explain itsrelationship to power. The book offers a newperiodization, or at least an entirely new way ofthinking about the periodization, of South Asianhistory. The richness of Pollock’s documentationand the sheer number of diverse theoreticalarguments being made may well limit thebook’s impact. Lesser mortals can only marvel atPollock’s skill in keeping so many balls in the airat the same time. It is not always an easy read.Yet it is also full of pleasing aphorisms, such as:‘Whereas some regional languages such as NewPersian achieved transregionality through merit,and others such as Latin had it thrust upon themthrough military conquests, Sanskrit seems tohave almost been born transregional’ (p. 262).

The overall story is built around three radicaldisjunctures or cleavages in South Asianlanguage history. The first occurred around 150

of the Common Era when Sanskrit, from havingbeen a liturgical language closely identified withBrahmanical Vedic rituals and not used (even bythe most orthodox) for public announcements,was suddenly transformed into a language ofroyal power adopted by dynasties ‘from Kashmirto Kelantan’ (p. 257). This form of culture-powerPollock dubs the Sanskrit cosmopolis.(Surprisingly – presumably because of hisconcern to avoid the religious models andexplanations which have hitherto dominateddiscussion of South and Southeast Asian history– he nowhere alludes to the mandala model thatunderlay it.) A king’s grasp of Sanskrit grammar,and the steps he took to support its study andpreservation, were understood to be equivalentto his preservation of social order. Just how thisform of Sanskrit spread so far and so rapidlyPollock admits is far from clear (it was certainlynot, as in other empires, through militaryconquest or bureaucratic fiat). But that it did so,and that Buddhists and Jains, who for centurieshad abjured the use of Sanskrit as inappropriatefor their religious purposes, suddenly andenthusiastically took it up, are incontestablefacts.

The second disjuncture – this one was spreadover several centuries in most parts of thesubcontinent – occurred roughly a millenniumlater when local languages were subjected tovernacularization: the processes that Pollock callsliterization (being written for the first time) and

literarization (being used for literature andpraising power). All the while Sanskrit retainedits position at the top of a complex hierarchy oflanguages, so that the notion of South Asianshaving a single ‘mother tongue’ has no sense.Pollock demonstrates that this process ofvernacularization, under way in South Asia,as in Europe, long before modernization,industrialization, or print capitalism were evenon the horizon, poses some very seriousquestions to well-known theories of nationalismthat see its crucible in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries.

The third disjuncture occurred followingcolonialism and the introduction of the idea –wholly foreign to South Asian ways of being – of‘Western linguistic monism’, or what Pollockdubs ‘linguism’, which underlies the culturaland linguistic nationalisms of modernSouth Asia.

There is also a side-argument aboutlegitimation. Though Pollock evidently, andprobably rightly, decided that there was no wayin which he could debate explicitly and in detailwith previously advanced pictures and models ofthe sweep of South Asian history, at variouspoints in the book he takes issue with MaxWeber specifically on the question oflegitimation. The combination of legitimationtheory and instrumental reason, which he takesto be the scholarly conventional wisdom inaccounting for the Sanskrit cosmopolis,is denounced as ‘not only anachronisticbut intellectually mechanical, culturallyhomogenizing, theoretically naïve, empiricallyfalse, and tediously predictable’ (p. 18).Tediously predictable and naïve some scholars’handling of his Sanskrit source materials mayhave been, but Pollock’s own interpretationsshow royal elites using Sanskrit as a way tobuttress claims to rank and privilege. Hisfulminations against legitimation as anexplanatory device will work only if he comesup with a more convincing alternative.

As Pollock himself has recently written, ‘Themeasure of a book’s importance is not howmuch it gets right but how much it gets you tothink’ (‘Pretextures of time’, History and Theory46, 2007: 381). I am not competent to judgemany of the detailed claims he advances in Thelanguage of the gods, but it does seem to methat no future work on South or Southeast Asianhistory can afford to ignore it. He gives us a newlanguage and a new conceptualization in whichto think about the periodization of South andSoutheast Asia’s past. Even anthropologists, whounderstandably may skim the earlier sections

Book reviews444


with their detailed discussion of inscriptions andtexts from over a thousand years ago, will needto acquaint themselves with his ideas onpre-modern cosmopolitanism, vernacularization,and indigenism.

David N. Gellner University of Oxford

Stein, Gil J. (ed.). The archaeology of colonialencounters: comparative perspectives. xii, 445

pp., maps, figs, tables, bibliogr. Oxford,Santa Fe: James Currey; School of AmericanResearch Press, 2005. £17.95 (paper)

This book originated as a seminar entitled ‘Thearchaeology of colonies in cross-culturalperspective’, held between 19 and 23 March2000 at the School of American Research (nowknown as the School of Advanced Research onthe Human Experience) in Santa Fe, NewMexico.

Gil J. Stein, symposium organizer and volumeeditor, sets the table by examining variousparadigms previously employed in addressing‘colonies’ and ‘colonialism’. Employing the gloss‘colonial encounters’ – an attempt to sidestepthe obvious difficulties of distinguishing amongthe interrelated concepts of colonies,colonization, and colonialism – the participantsencourage a more synthetic understanding ofthe interregional interactions that characterizedancient state-level societies and their constituentsocial groupings. By shifting to a broadlycomparative focus, these contributors questionand challenge the dominant role of thecolonizer, seeking instead evidence ofindigenous agency in colonial encounters. Theseminar participants emphasize the dynamics ofeconomic, political, and symbolic interactionsacross a broad range of ten colonial encountersduring the prehistoric, pre-capitalist, andearly historic periods of both Old and NewWorlds.

Looking at colonial encounters in the ancientMediterranean, Michael Dietler emphasizes theimportance of archaeological data generatedindependently from documentary sources,and underscores the differing empirical andtheoretical implications of each. Dietler alsoexpresses discomfort with the ‘sharedinadequacies’ of mega-concepts like‘Hellenization’ and world-systems theory.

Janine L. Gasco compares and contrastsSpanish and Mesoamerican worldviews of thesixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Drawingupon her long-term archaeological study of theSoconusco region (modern Chiapas, Mexico),

Gasco emphasizes the diversity in Spanishcolonialism as played out in the Americas andthe Pacific.

Peter van Dommelen explores culturalhybridity in ancient Greek colonies as evident inthe Phoenician and Carthaginian settlementsin the Mediterranean. Drawing upon morerecent iterations of post-colonial theory, vonDommelen distances himself from theconventional dichotomy between the ‘colonizer’and the ‘colonized’, stressing the importance ofsituating colonial experiences within localregions rather than the ‘colonizers’ provenance’.

Stein’s substantive contribution compares thefourth millennium BC Uruk colonies with theOld Assyrian trading colonies of the early secondmillennium BC. Although representing an‘unusual’ economic strategy within theMesopotamian world, these colonies wereorganized in very similar ways, and they offera baseline for extrapolating the nature ofcolonization in other ancient societies.

Michael W. Spence employs practice theoryto examine the Zapotec ‘diaspora network’within the Classic-period of central Mexico. Heuses Tlailotlacan, an ethnic enclave from thewestern margin of Teotihuacan (beginning circaAD 200), as a case study for understanding theconstruction of Zapotec ethnic identity. Spenceargues that fine-scale considerations of the rolesof individuals (and social groups) are obscuredwithin the grand core-periphery models derivedfrom world-systems theory and relatedtheoretical positions.

Kent G. Lightfoot reflects on the interactionsthat took place during the School of AmericanResearch symposium, particularly the uncriticaluse of concepts comparing colonial systems ofearly capitalist Europe with those of non-Westernand non-capitalistic settings. Drawing upon hisown research on Spanish and Russian mercantileand mission colonial institutions of late 1700sand early 1800s California, he highlights theinterplay of inter-ethnic, demographic, andchronological variability.

The next two papers address colonialencounters in the Peruvian highlands. KatharinaSchreiber writes about imperial agendas andlocal agency (the ‘multidimensionality’) withinthe Wari empire (of the Peruvian highlands).Terence N. D’Altroy situates specific case studieswithin a broader comparative framework,demonstrating how Inka colonizationreconfigured the social and ethnic landscapesof the Tawantinsuyu empire.

Susan E. Alcock examines points ofconvergence and divergence among four Roman

Book reviews 445


colonies in the eastern empire (modern-dayGreece and Turkey), suggesting that the strategicrole of colonies is perhaps less pervasive thanpreviously believed. She argues for expandingthe research agenda into the domains ofeveryday life (including burial practices,domestic architecture, foodways, and minorcults).

In the final paper, J. Daniel Rogers providesan over-arching, synthetic perspective on thearchaeology of colonies, colonizers, and thosebeing colonized. Because, by their nature,colonies are associated with states and empires,they provide an effective window through whichto view complex power hierarchies.

Overall, the contributors emphasize theextraordinary degree of variability between andamong various colonial encounters, in boththe Classical world and during the European‘Age of Discovery’. They reject the globalizinggeneralities of world-systems theory,emphasizing instead the failures of single,homogeneous models of colonial practice andstressing the importance of shifting colonialagendas, political economies, cultural identities,and especially power relations. These papersalso criticize the ‘myth’ of the colonizer-colonized dichotomy, which vastly over-simplifiesthe complex realities articulating the colonialhomeland, the colonies themselves, and theindigenous communities within which thecolonies were established.

David Hurst Thomas American Museum ofNatural History, New York

Zeitlin, Irving M.The historical Muhammad.viii, 181 pp., fig, bibliogr. Cambridge, Malden,Mass.: Polity Press, 2007. £50.00 (cloth),£16.99 (paper)

The originality of this book, by an emeritusprofessor of sociology at the University ofToronto, lies in its application of a sociologicalframework to the accepted narrative of thefoundation of Islam. Four preconditions, hesuggests, are necessary for the successfultransformation of any small sect into a massmovement: widespread discontent, an ideologywith resonance, charismatic leadership, andorganizational planning. In the early Meccanphase, discontent was very limited; the ProphetMuhammad’s message found little resonancewith the majority; his leadership was rejected;and he relied on preaching and warning. Butafter the hegira to Yathrib (later Medina) in 622

CE, he found a Hobbesian state of war between

raiding tribes that provoked him to create a newpan-Arabian solidarity as an armed prophetof monotheism and a skilled diplomat andstrategist. The Islamic conquest of the NearEast followed as an organic outgrowth ofMuhammad’s teachings.

Though glancing at Hobbes and Machiavelli,Irving M. Zeitlin pays more attention to IbnKhaldun’s cyclical model of social conflictaccording to which groups of nomadsperiodically conquered the settled agriculturalregions, bringing a new sense of justice andvirtue to the function of governance, until after afew generations the rigour that was needed toestablish sovereignty ebbed away amiddecadence and corruption. According to Zeitlin’shistorical sources, Yathrib had come to bedominated by Arabian Jews who developed newmethods of irrigation and cultivation, crafts, andpractices of exchange.

Much of the remainder of Zeitlin’s argumentcovers more trodden ground: how Judaism andChristianity, and the hanifs or pre-Islamic Arabmonotheists, influenced foundational Islam, andhow the Prophet retained virtually all thepre-Islamic religious institutions, such as Mecca,the Ka`ba and the Black Stone, pilgrimages,Ramadan, the name of Allah, jinns, whiletransvaluing them into a strictly monotheisticdoctrine.

Zeitlin says in his preface that he began hiseffort to understand the Muhammad of historylong before Islam became as topical as it istoday. He disclaims any motives other thanscholarly ones, and shies away from imputing toIslam any essential or eternal traits, such as apredisposition to wars of conversion. Heconcludes by noting that ‘the Islamic Empire,like all empires, was only a temporarilysuccessful phenomenon, while the Islamic faith,in contrast, has endured’ (p. 164).

Zeitlin relies heavily on the Chicago scholarFred M. Donner’s admirably clear and persuasiveNarratives of Islamic origins (1998), includingDonner’s sharp critique of revisionist orultra-sceptical writers on the origins of Islam.One of the most sceptical of all was the lateJohn Wansbrough – whose counterparts inanthropology are perhaps Leach on the Bibleand Lord Raglan on the biography of heroes.Basically Wansbrough – in one of the mostrococo of academic styles – set out to questionthe link between Muhammad and the Qur’anicmaterials, on the grounds that there is littleindependent historical or archaeologicalcorroboration of events before about 800 CE.Zeitlin appears not to have read Wansbrough’s

Book reviews446


two books but is content to summarizeapprovingly Donner’s critique of theultra-sceptics. Yet Donner himself has writtenthat ‘the revisionist critiques are not a passingfad, but rather represent the beginning of afull-blown paradigm shift’ (Director’sIntroduction, ‘Islamic origins’, NEH 2000

Summer Seminar, University of Chicago). It islikely that Wansbrough exaggerated his case, likemany other intellectual innovators.

Zeitlin is quite happy to draw on the work ofthe second most radical of the revisionists,Patricia Crone, when she argues against theinfluential view of W. Montgomery Watt thatseventh-century Mecca had become acommercial and financial centre at thecrossroads of caravan trade. Watt held that it wasthe Meccans’ transition to a mercantile economythat undermined the traditional order,generating a social and moral malaise to whichMuhammad’s preaching was the response.Crone thinks that Mecca was a pilgrimage site,its economy limited to supplying essentialprovisions. Crone’s view, that Muhammad’s latersuccess was due to the divine validation ofpolitical structures and the creation of a militantpeople, fits neatly with Zeitlin’s model. But asuspicion lingers that he may have been selectivein his use of sources and played down thedifficulties inherent in this extremely contentiousfield of study.

From the point of view of anthropology,Zeitlin’s use of the modern category ‘religion’seems to be unexamined and to carry anAbrahamic bias. Islam became ‘more than areligion’ in Medina after the victorious battleof Badr (p. 12), and the moral ideal of thepre-Islamic Bedouin ‘had little or no religiouscharacter’ (p. 53). However, Zeitlin’s approach isnovel and intriguing.

Jonathan Benthall University College London

Medical anthropology

Alter, Joseph S. (ed.). Asian medicine andglobalization. vi, 187 pp., bibliogr.Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2005.£29.50 (cloth)

This is an important collection of studies on asignificant group of topics. Joseph Alter’sintroduction outlines two main sets of questions,one referring to the impact of the ‘transnationalhegemony of science’, and of the global vogue

for alternative and New Age treatment, onnational and transnational articulations of‘traditional’ medicine, the other to the effects oftransnational ‘border-crossings’ on howmedicine is understood and theorized. Some ofthe questions here have already receivedconsiderable scholarly attention, with Alter oneof the principal scholars involved; we havebecome increasingly aware, for example, thatthe ‘Yoga’, ‘Ayurveda’, ‘Traditional ChineseMedicine’, and so on, purveyed in thecontemporary global marketplace are in largepart recent products of modernist projects,heavily influenced by biomedicine and otheraspects of contemporary society. This is not todeny the possible value of these or otherreconstructed forms of Asian ‘traditional’health-related practices, either for health or forthe critique of biomedicine. The present volume,however, is primarily concerned not with suchquestions, but with opening up theoreticalspace for understanding the interactionsbetween ‘Asian medicine’ and its increasinglyglobalized contexts.

The eight studies here, varied in content,approach, and chronological period, serve tobring many of the issues involved to the fore in asustained and often engaging manner. Theauthors are mostly historians of medicine ormedical anthropologists; five chapters are byUS-based scholars, the remainder by scholarsbased in India (two) and the UK (one). Fourchapters deal, broadly speaking, with South Asiaand/or with medical traditions claiming origin inSouth Asia, including Deepak Kumar’scomparative study of British health policy incolonial India and Dutch in the Dutch EastIndies, and three with East Asia andChinese-derived traditions; the remainingchapter, Alter’s study of attempts by Indianpractitioners of Chinese medicine to reclaimacupuncture as authentically Indian, directlyraises the connections between the two regions.

The South Asian group includes two chapterson colonial medicine, both strongly influencedby post-colonial scholarship. S. Irfan Habib andDhruv Raina focus on the proto-nationalistproject of reconstruction of traditional medicine(Unani and Ayurvedic) on modernist lines in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries,including the creation of a new manufacturingand distribution system for Ayurvedic remedies.Kumar, as mentioned above, compares Britishand Dutch colonial health policies, over muchthe same time-frame. Alter’s acupuncture studyand Cecilia Van Hollen’s chapter on the politicsof ‘traditional’ Indian medicine for HIV/AIDS

Book reviews 447


have a more recent focus but the continuities areevident, with Van Hollen noting how MahatmaGandhi’s nationalist critique of medicine ascapitalist consumerism (cf Alter’s earlier Gandhi’sbody, 2000), has been reworked as part of thesales-pitch for indigenous ‘Ayurvedic’ HIV/AIDSremedies. There are some chilling moments inVan Hollen’s chapter, such as her description ofa clinic providing the controversial T.N. Majeed’s‘ImmunoQR’ therapy, where unmarriedHIV-positive men are informed that after sixmonths of ImmunoQR medication they can getmarried without risk of passing on the virus totheir wives (p. 104). Martha Ann Selby’sexploration of ‘Sanskrit gynaecologies inpostmodernity’ moves somewhat into highcomedy, both in the egregious unsignalledEnglish rewritings of Sanskrit texts to which shepoints (menstrual blood becomes female ovum,subcutaneous worms are rewritten as purelymetaphorical, and sexual desire is discreetlyremoved from the picture), and in the evenmore bizarre transformations that ensue when‘traditional Indian’ approaches to women’sbodies become part of the American New Agemarketplace.

Two of the Chinese chapters deal with statehealth policy in the People’s Republic of China.Nancy Chen’s considers the complexities ofrecent Chinese state policy on qigong, firstcelebrated as a unique Chinese contribution toscience but increasingly obsessed with theelimination of ‘false’ (i.e. ‘unscientific’ orpolitically problematic) versions of qigong asopposed to safe, biomedicalized versions. Hercentral focus, though, is on how science itselfcame to be seen as foundational within theChinese nationalist project. Susan Brownell’sstudy of Chinese cosmetic surgery’s trajectoryfrom dangerous bourgeois deviation to sourceof national pride demonstrates how the abilityof biomedicine to appear as a relatively ‘emptyframe’ (Brownell takes her cues here from JohnMacAloon’s study of international sport as an‘empty form’) has enabled it to be subtlyappropriated as part of the nationalist project.Chinese cosmetic surgery claims technicalsuperiority to Western versions while alsopresenting itself, even in the widely populareyelid-reconstruction operations, as bringingout the essential features of Chinese ideas ofbeauty, rather than imitating the West. Theremaining chapter, by Vivienne Lo and SylviaSchroer on the concept of xie (‘deviant’) qi, isan intriguing account of how contemporaryUK and European acupuncturists deal withpractices deeply entangled with ancient

Chinese ideas of moral rectitude and demonicpossession.

Alter’s introduction is well worth reading inits own right, and concludes with a remarkableextended argument, building on his ownprevious work regarding positive conceptions ofhealth in Ayurveda (‘Heaps of health,’ CurrentAnthropology, 1999), against ‘medicine’ itself asthe most appropriate framing concept for thetotality of Asian healing and health practices.Maybe, Alter suggests, ‘alchemy’ would be abetter choice (in the sense of a set of‘experimental techniques dealing with embodiedlife and longevity’), in which case ‘medicine’itself could be seen as a reduced, pragmaticsub-set of alchemical procedures, and‘clinic-based healing [as] a metaphoricalinstantiation, or fragmented mimeticreproduction, of immortality’ (p. 18). Such anapproach might help us to ‘get past theproblematic of Science as the modern yardstickfor measuring medical legitimacy – its goldstandard or touchstone, so to speak’ (p. 19), andto open up space within which contemporarytransformations of ‘traditional’ medical systemsmight be seen in other terms than how well orpoorly they fit the scientific model.

The collection as a whole does a great dealto establish the need for such a space. Itdeserves to be widely read. If the issues here aretruly taken on board by scholars, they have thepotential to move the study of ‘Asian medicine’to a new and considerably more sophisticatedapproach to its object of inquiry.

Geoffrey Samuel Cardiff University

Karadimas, Dimitris. La raison du corps:idéologie du corps et représentation del’environment chez les Miraña d’AmazonieColombienne. 451 pp., maps, tables, plates,illus., bibliogr. Paris: Éditions Peeters, 2005.$79.20 (paper)

Bodies within bodies; making bodies. Men’sfaces and women’s vulvas made of bats; humanvertebrae and hips made of fish spines andheads; placentas made of stingrays; andumbilical cords made of worms – these aresome features of human anatomy which,according to the Miraña of AmazonianColombia, are made of other bodies. DimitriKaradimas’s book takes us through Amazonianmyth, ritual, and practice, showing how menand women’s bodies are made of a conjunctionof bodies of plants and animals, anunderstanding that brings this 700-strong group

Book reviews448


of hunter-horticulturalists surprisingly close tothe Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.But Miraña ideas go beyond a composite view ofhuman anatomy, since to them the bodies ofplants and animals, and the bodies of man-madeobjects, houses, gardens, lakes, and stars, mayhide within themselves a common humanityand transform into one another as well ascontributing to make one another.

This is a book for specialists in bodyrepresentation, political significance, andiconography which gives priority to the study ofindigenous knowledge in its own terms and, atthe same time, carries implications for currentdebates on shamanistic cosmologies. Bodies maybe animal in some respects and vegetable inothers, but they may ultimately be humanwhen, beyond their skin-deep differences, theyshare a common internal anatomical structure.As a Miraña man explained after skinning a deadjaguar: ‘Look, you can see he is a person, he hasthe same arms, the same guts; like us, he has aheart’. Hidden under the skin resides the humancore called the ‘tree of knowledge’, made of theheart and the veins that connect it to the head –the tree’s canopy – and the stomach – the tree’sroots. The heart’s main function is to ‘improveblood’, literally ‘making it good’. The heartpumps blood, propelling it in circulation andpassing to blood the strength derived from foodin the stomach. A person’s memory, health,emotions, and stamina derive from themovement of blood through the ‘tree ofknowledge’. Diseases of various sorts are alsodue to blood flow, especially to imbalancedblood heat caused by foul smells.

The author provides a wealth of informationabout how parts of animals and plants, theirsmells and heat, impact upon anatomy andblood, and are therefore bound to dietaryrestrictions. He gives special attention, on theone hand, to tobacco and coca, grown by menand consumed during nightly meetings toempower speech, and, on the other hand, tobitter manioc and chili, grown by women andused for cooking. Women’s bodies, however, aresubjected to stronger restrictions than men’sbodies for they are seen as a major source ofdisease due to their heat, that is, their menses.Menstrual blood is conceived as a foul poisonfrom which various animals and plants,including snakes, derive their own poisons.Surprisingly, however, copulation duringmenstruation is encouraged to securepregnancy, a practice which, to my knowledge,is rare in Amazonia, since the menses are usuallybound to sexual abstinence. According to the

author, this practice may reflect upon theMiraña’s heightened war ethos andself-identification with blood feeding bothanimals and spirits.

Karadimas goes into great detail to reveal theanatomical links existing, for example, betweenwomen’s genitalia, men’s faces, and the bodiesof bats. His findings shed new light uponindigenous American iconography far beyondthe current Amazonian area, sincerepresentations of bats are salient amongstvarious Andean pre-Colombian groups. Theauthor’s novel readings of female genitalia, theplacenta, and the umbilical cord with relation tofacial features, especially teeth and speech, alsoresonate with findings from other Amazoniangroups, such as the Eastern and WesternTukanoan, the Panoan, and Arawakan, amongstwhom female reproductive organs are similarlyassociated with blood-feeding and poisonousbeings. Karadimas’s work therefore helps usdraw a cross-cultural picture of the female bodyas the site of multiple agents linked to parasitismand predation. It also prepares the ground forfuture comparative studies of Amazonian andAndean iconography articulated around therelationships between reproduction, war, andbleeding using current ethnography toilluminate archaeology.

The reader looking for a morephenomenological or experiential approach maybe slightly discouraged at first by the fairlyabstract examination and renditions of myths.Although one wishes one could get to meetmore subjectively embodied Miraña men andwomen in the text, the extraordinary wealth ofanalysis surely compensates for this apparentlack of material. Various theoretical questionsremain unanswered, nevertheless, with regard,for instance, to how Miraña’s understandings ofblood and the body translate into genderrelations in daily life in the current context ofguerrilla and drug-related political turmoil andeconomic change in Colombia. One alsowonders whether Miraña ethnography couldhelp us to address the theoretical gap that existsbetween the perspectivist approach, pioneeredby Viveiros de Castro, whose views stand againstan analysis in terms of bodily substances, andthe French structuralist approach, which, afterFrançoise Héritier, grants primary importance tothe symbolism of blood and other fluids. Sincethe Miraña attach humanity to an internalanatomic structure enabling blood flow, theyappear to fall into Héritier’s camp. Yet, like mostother Amazonian peoples, they also conceive ofthe skin as removable clothing, thus fitting

Book reviews 449


Viveiros de Castro’s framing of perspectivism.There is, therefore, a need to articulate Mirañaand other Amazonian people’s notions of bloodand gender with perspectivism to gain a widerand deeper comprehension of the Amazonianbody.

Luisa Elvira Belaunde University of St Andrews

Steffen, Vibeke, Richard Jenkins & Hanne

Jessen (eds). Managing uncertainty:ethnographic studies of illness, risk and thestruggle for control. 283 pp., bibliogr.Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press,2005. £30.00 (paper)

Managing uncertainty is an immensely readablebook and yet extremely rich in theory. Rarelydoes a single book manage to achieve this feat.Theory has its presence not just in theintroductory chapter but in all the elevenchapters of this book. Ethnography bridges theotherwise huge ontological and epistemologicalgap between the Scandinavian and Africancountries on which this book is based. A delay offive years in its final publication is easily excusedwhen one sees the meticulous editing that hasgone into the book. Except for one or twotypographical errors the book is absolutelyflawless.

In the chapter titled ‘Matters of life anddeath’ the editors deal extensively with bothclassical and recent theoretical literature relatingto uncertainties of life. They also reviewimportant anthropological and sociologicalliterature on health, illness, and politics ofmedicine. All this has a purpose – to challengethe concepts of control and uncertainty with thehelp of ethnographic data and by opening upnew frontiers for theorizing on uncertainty. Theeditors argue that ‘our attempts to control theconditions of our lives actually generate furtheruncertainty’ (p. 28).

Jonina Einarsdottir’s chapter is on how thematrilineal Papel in Guinea-Bissau deal with‘non-human’ children. Through the ‘case-stories’of Clara, Carlos, Marcelino and Celeste, theauthor shows how the mothers try to delay theinevitable – being diagnosed of possessing iranor spirit. Once so identified it is the responsibilityof elderly maternal kins to ‘erase’ such childrento avoid further misfortune to their lineagemembers.

Anne Line Dalsgaard deals in the nextchapter with female sterilization in NortheastBrazil. She conducted her fieldwork in alow-income neighbourhood where almost every

man grew up either as a drug addict or peddlerinflicting terrible violence on women andencircling them with a deep sense of fear andinsecurity, which, she argues, motivates them tosterilize themselves as a means of security andcontrol. The following chapter, by TineTjornhoj-Thomsen, deals with the related subjectof procreative technology, but the analysis isbased on data collected from Denmark. Shedeals with the uncertainty of women sufferingfrom infertility in their everyday encounter withthe biomedical world and the clinical setting.She focuses on the permanent emotional andpsychological trauma associated with infertilityand childlessness, and its consequences for thesewomen’s identity problems, rather than on thepotentialities of a technological intervention.

In chapter 5, Mette Nordahl Svendsen dealswith existential and moral aspects of cancergenetic counselling in Denmark. She showshow, for the healthy relatives of cancer patients,the resistance towards taking a genetic test orundergoing counselling in order to eliminate thepossibility of being genetically at risk may wellarise from the fear of potentially damagingotherwise good family relationships. In chapter 6

Paul Wenzel Geissler narrates his researchbiography based on a number of years’experience on child health among the Luos inwestern Kenya, East Africa. He deals in particularwith their social context in order to understandwhy he and his research colleagues werebranded by the local people as blood-stealingkillers, locally known as kachinja. He also showshow the Luos used the idiom of kachinja as asymbol to protest against, or reject, researchpractices that do not try to understand in fullthe historical relationship between the researcherand the researched.

Chapter 7 by Marita Eastmond deals withBosnian Muslim refugees in Sweden. She showshow the bureaucratic system represents thetraumatized refugees ‘as lacking something,incomplete persons with diminished agency’(p. 155). On the other hand, the refugees arefound to resist state medicalization in order toascertain normality. The next chapter, by VibekeSteffen, is also on resistance to medicalization, inthis case to Antabuse medication for controllingalcoholism. Steffen shows how the users soonbegin to cheat on use of the drug and claim,thereby, to have gained control over the drugitself.

Chapter 9 deals with the complexrelationship between becoming mentally ill andacquiring the identity of a mentally ill person.John Aggergaard Larsen, the author of this

Book reviews450


chapter, uses the biographies of Per and Eva –two young and first-time mental health patientsin Copenhagen, Denmark – to show howdiagnosis and psychiatric explanations help suchpersons to be more certain about themselves byfacilitating comprehension of their behaviour.Chapter 10, by Hanne O. Mogensen, deals withbiomedical healthcare in eastern Uganda andwhat people do to gain access to such care.More particularly the author argues thatdecisions to take a particular biomedicine aresocially negotiated.

The last chapter deals with healthcarepractices in Bunyole in Eastern Uganda. In thischapter, Susan Reynolds Whyte deals with thecentral theme of misery and the ways in whichpeople try to overcome it.

The most important contribution of this bookis its exposition of social agency. The onlyweakness that I can see in this volume is that itoverplays the concept of uncertainty. Matters oflife and death are not always as uncertain as thevolume would like us to believe: there arematters that are completely certain, others aremore certain than not, and some are of courseabsolutely uncertain. Life or death under totaluncertainty would be unmanageable.

T.B. Subba North-Eastern Hill University

Migration and community

Creed, Gerald W. (ed.). The seductions ofcommunity: emancipations, oppressions,quandaries. xii, 320 pp., maps, figs, illus.,bibliogr. Oxford: James Currey Publishers,2006. £17.95 (paper)

At least twice every decade, socialanthropologists and sociologists address ‘theproblem’ of community. The problem lies in theword’s lack of precision or specificity, and in thevalues which it is used to imply. Over more thanfifty years, the scholarly literature has grownobese with attempts to define, theorize, criticize,abolish, re-create, and exemplify ‘community’,as a scientifically useful or usable term. It is, byturns, ideological, sterile, too restrictive, toovague. It is at odds with its colloquial use, ormerely replicates it – thus doing little or nothingto establish its analytical or descriptive integrity.This writer has engaged reluctantly andperiodically with the issue for forty years, oneach occasion declaring publicly and grumpilythat there is nothing more to be said about it.

But, of course, there is – witness this volumeunder review. Its basic propositions are sound:‘community’ is a word in common use toexpress and (usually) to valorize a notion forwhich we do not appear to have any otherwholly satisfactory alternative. Therefore,however variously, vaguely, deliberately, or lazilyit is used, we are bound to pay attention to it.Secondly, we can expect, and should accept,that its use will vary according to social, cultural,geographical, and historical circumstances.Underlying the studies that constitute the bookis their authors’ irritation with what RaymondWilliams described as the ‘warmly persuasive’character of community – in short, that it is a‘hurrah’ word.

In exploring the values that have beenassociated with it, and the political uses to whichit has been put, Creed reviews the historicalliterature authoritatively, ranging widely acrossanthropology, sociology, and social history.He concludes that it is impossible to divest‘community’ of its normative connotations, andthat therefore social scientists should continue toworry about it. Worry? Anxiety about themis/ab/use of the English language is acondition of life, even for those of us reared onWittgenstein’s injunction to look for ‘use’ ratherthan ‘meaning’. That, really, is what the authorsof the various cases in the book attempt,with varying degrees of effectiveness, and,regrettably, with the disregard now fashionablein anthropology for the intelligible use ofEnglish.

Kate Crehan examines the rhetoric ofcommunity in a regeneration project in 1980sinner London and poses the important questionof whether this rhetoric empowers individuals orsubordinates and coerces them. She concludesthat the proposition of ‘community’ enabledcollective action at the time, but that its efficacywas only momentary. In due course, it became amemento of a bygone era.

Mary Weismantel writes about ayllu, aQuechua term widely found among Andeancultures to connote a fundamental orfoundational sociality, which Andeananthropologists have found to be as fraught withdifficulty as ‘community’ but to which isattributed similar persuasive power.

Michael Watts’s essay on Nigerian‘petro-capitalism’ examines the tensions bothwithin and among communities – which for himare means of real or rhetorical association oridentification which we know by other terms:chieftainship, ethnicity, and the nation. It isunclear to me that anything is being argued

Book reviews 451


here beyond the incontestable proposition thatNigeria is a complex society.

There is a chapter by Aisha Khan on theapplicability of ‘community’ to the Caribbean,providing the occasion for a critical rehearsal ofthe ethnocentric and ahistoric character of earlieranalyses of the region. Susan Lees demonstratesthe contestability and multivalency of‘community’ through a study of the legal andpolitical dispute that attended the attempt by agroup of orthodox Jewish families to demarcatean eruv within their New Jersey town. Essays byMiranda Joseph and Peter Brosius on,respectively, debt and restorative justice andenvironmental conservation are both veryscholarly but seem to be only tenuously relatedto the discourse of this book.

The best and most elegant chapter iscontributed by the historian Gyanendra Pandey,in which, illustrating the changing uses of‘community’ in post-colonial South Asia, heshows how it has been used to reconcile theapparently discrepant notions of primordialbelonging and structure with those of thecontemporary nation. He concludes thatwords with evaluative content are, by their verynature, susceptible to contradictory use andevaluation.

That seems to me a fitting conclusion to thisbook, and puts the problem of ‘community’ intoappropriate perspective. The conceptualagonizing, the ponderous scholarship, do notresolve the problem, which, no doubt, willresurface again before long. It is a very smallpinhead on which to accommodate so manydancing angels.

Anthony P. Cohen Queen Margaret University/University of Edinburgh

Kovic, Christine. Mayan voices for humanrights: displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas.viii, 238 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr.Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2005. £12.95

(paper)

This study is one of the first to address HighlandIndians in the urban periphery. It presents a richand compassionate account of Tzotzil Mayafamilies who have been expelled from theircommunity of origin on the basis of religiousconversion and have settled at the fringes of thefast-growing San Cristóbal de las Casas. Thebook presents indigenous narratives ofconversion, suffering, and ‘the struggle for adignified life’ and places these in broader socialand political developments in Chiapas.

The central objective of the book is to unravelthe ways in which ‘human rights’ areappropriated by indigenous actors and are givenmeaning in their specific cultural and historicalcontexts of displacement and marginality. Theauthor argues for an anthropology of humanrights that contextualizes human rights claimssocially and politically. Maintaining a ‘distance’from cultural relativist critiques of human rights,she shows how the displaced Catholics havetaken up and re-signified the human rightsdiscourse and have found in it a way to frametheir demands for human dignity. The analysisshows how local meanings of human rights areclosely intertwined with understandings of faithand Catholicism, reflecting the ‘option for thepoor’ of the San Cristóbal diocese (e.g. in thenotion that ‘rights are given by God’, p. 109). Amajor contribution of the book is to connect theconstruction of meaning with the practices ofhuman rights organizing, addressing forms ofmobilization and the defence of rights. It placesthe Tzotzil Catholics in a broader andtransnational human rights community that,through a network of local human rightspromoters, reaches down to the communitylevel. Thus, the study opens a window to furtherquestions, concerning the way indigenoushuman rights promoters operate at the level oftheir communities, how their work resonates,and how notions of human rights enter practicesof regulation and conflict resolution at the locallevel. Crucial issues in this regard are the rightsof women or the enforcement of communityrulings and responsibilities on individuals, whichhave become the subject of debate in manyindigenous communities.

A further objective of the book is to explorethe agency of the displaced Tzotziles asco-participants in the construction of theCatholic project in Chiapas. It presents a richanalysis of the encounter between the dioceseand indigenous communities over the past fourdecades which invites further inquiry into theintimate ways in which the diocese shapedindigenous subjectivity. A definite merit of thebook is that it takes the displaced Tzotzilesseriously as believers. When discussingconversion, an interesting point raised is the factthat women were often the ones to take theinitiative, finding in ‘the Word of God’ a spacefrom which to challenge practices of alcoholabuse and domestic violence and ‘construct newgender roles’ (p. 25).

Finally, the book provides a critique ofrepresentations of the expulsions fromindigenous communities in terms of religious

Book reviews452


conflict exclusively. It is argued that theexpulsions should also be understood as areaction to political dissidents posing a threat tothe traditional community leaders (caciques) andcorrectly highlights the complicity of the stategovernment. The political subscript ofconversion and expulsion is indeed crucial to theunderstanding of the dynamics of Highlandcommunities. However, further layers should beadded to the analysis of the micro-politics ofexpulsion, considering the role of kinship andinequalities in resources and wealth inproducing intra-communal fault-lines (the maininformants quoted on conversion are said tohave been a relatively land-rich couple, but thisis not elaborated upon). The book adds to thedebate on the indigenous community in moderntimes. It highlights the strong commitment tocommunity amongst the displaced Catholics, asa value and as an organizing principle, whilealso pointing to divisions, leadership crises, andcommunity fragmentation. Whether thesedynamics, found also in other parts of Chiapas,point to a crisis or a re-invention of communityis up for debate.

This study with its focus on other importantactors and discourses is a welcome addition tothe scholarship on contemporary Chiapas, whichhas privileged Zapatismo. However, given thatthe displaced Catholics are bearers of a verysimilar agenda to that of the Zapatistas, thebook would have benefited from a moreexplicit treatment of their place in the politicallandscape since 1994 and the way they relate tothe EZLN.

Gemma van der Haar Wageningen University

Nolin, Catherine. Transnational ruptures:gender and forced migration. xviii, 246 pp.,tables, bibliogr. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.£50.00 (cloth)

Since Glick Schiller et al. reframed migrationstudies through the lens of transnationalism(Towards a transnational perspective on migration,1992), we have had a surfeit of studies seeking touncover the social connections that migrantsmaintain or develop across native, transit, andhost countries that force us to re-think identityand belonging. Nolin, a social geographer whoborrows heavily from anthropology, argues thatin this body of literature insufficient attention hasbeen paid to the ruptures, denials, andconsequent sutures that characterize thetraumatic experiences faced by refugees. To dothis, Nolin draws on her multi-sited fieldwork

experience in Guatemala and Canada withGuatemalan refugees who have fled the politicalviolence in that country since the 1970s, and alsoon the gendered features of these narratives. Heranalysis is based on extensive interviews withGuatemalans in southwestern Ontario, Canada,and in Guatemala itself. Nolin also analysesCanadian immigration policy and testimoniesfrom a UN-sponsored Commission for HistoricalClarification, a kind of Truth Commissionintended to heal the country, formed after peaceaccords between the government and guerrillaforces in the 1990s. As Nolin notes, the politicalviolence that forced this migration and has had asubsequent impact on self-narratives andsubjectivities of those whom she interviewed isconnected to modern forms of nation-buildingand its racialist and racist legacy of the colonialperiod that has been devastating for theindigenous Mayan population. A putativeEuropean-heritage Latino population hassystematically and often perpetrated violence onMayan communities throughout the country.The combination of the persecution of an urbanprofessional middle class of union leaders,academics, and so on, and leftist-inspiredguerrilla war has resulted in a steady flow ofpeople making their way north, fleeing theviolence. This tragic history has compelled overone million Guatemalans to flee north toMexico, the United States, and Canada in thelast thirty years, and the influx of asylum-seekersand the policies that constrain them are closelyconnected to the anti-leftist geo-politics of USforeign policy. Many of the 14,000 or soGuatemalans in Canada entered with the help ofthe American religious sanctuary movement andtheir Canadian partners, while a lenient, at leastup until 1987, Canadian government policytowards asylum-seekers offered an outlet fordesperate migrants that contrasted with USgovernment efforts to deny asylum and deportGuatemalans.

The book is organized into three sections.The first section comprises extensive discussionsof the field of transnational migration studies,how an analysis of gender is essential in studiesof the migration experience, and the importanceof reflexivity and activist scholarship especiallywhen dealing with vulnerable communities. Thisis done through the lens of social geographywith ample citations of key anthropologists whohave worked on the conceptual terrain oftransnationalism and those who havecontributed to studies in Guatemala. For thisreader much of this literature review read like adissertation and, thus, could have been edited

Book reviews 453


down substantially. Section two presents in twochapters the historical context of violence inGuatemala and the subsequent implications ofchanging Canadian immigration policies for theopportunities available for migration and adiscussion of the spatial distribution ofGuatemalans in Canada. Regrettably, littlediscussion of irregular migration is offered here.Section three offers the richest material within-depth narratives of several Guatemalans,exploring how migration is forced by politicalviolence, and how its continuing threat andlegacy found in the political schisms within thedifferent Guatemalan communities present inCanada has led to the rupture of identities andcommunal life for the Guatemalans interviewed.For Nolin, refugee transnationalism offers a moresubtle account of the challenges in identityformation, with feelings of belonging andpossibilities for community connections oftenemphasized in the transnationalism literature.

Nolin’s narratives certainly offer powerfultestimonies of the difficulties her informantshad with establishing a sense of community,and the persistent consciousness of the absenceof Guatemala in their constitution ofselves. Here, though, I think, we come upagainst inter-disciplinary limits and differentexpectations. In relating the ‘living geographies’of Guatemalans, and the ruptures found therein,Nolin argues that face-to-face communities haveyet to develop, and that weak ties are the morecommon form of sociality for Guatemalans inCanada; but within her own text she mentionsareas I wish she had explored more thoroughly,and ethnographically. Nolin’s own seriousengagement with activism and its configuringeffects on narratives for refugees, work inreception centres on behalf of asylum-seekers,and mention of Guatemalan folkloric groupsoffer numerous sites for further elaborationsabout new forms of identity, belonging,and constitutions of differing (ruptured)communities.Nicholas DeMaria Harney University of Western

Australia

Portes, Alejandro & Josh DeWind (eds).Rethinking migration: new theoretical andempirical perspectives. vi, 453 pp., figs, tables,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2007. £50.00 (cloth)

Rethinking migration contains papers presentedat a conference at Princeton University. It isintended to be a companion volume to The

handbook of international migration: the Americanexperience but with articles also focusing on orincluding the European experience. Thevolume’s contributors address: state policytowards immigrants and their incorporation inEurope and the United States; an update on thephenomenon of transnationalism; the role ofreligion in migrants’ adaptation; the varieties ofimmigrant entrepreneurship; and an analysisof methodological problems in the study of theundocumented and of the second generation.

Stephen Casteles argues that thecontradictory and compromising nature ofimmigration policies in both Europe and the USis due to ‘the contradiction between the nationallogic of immigration control and thetransnational logic of international migration inan epoch of globalization’ (p. 31). Migrationpolicies reflect both the employer(pro-immigrant) and local worker (oftenanti-immigrant) stances as well as ongoingNorth (receiving countries)-South (sendingcountries) relations. James Hollifield shows howguest workers in Europe and temporary Mexicanlabourers in the United States becamepermanent settlers and thereby affected stateimmigration policies. He calls for states’recognition of the rights of immigrants.

In an article considering the implications oflegalizing dual citizenship, Thomas Faist, JürgenGerdes, and Beate Ripple argue that permittingimmigrants to naturalize without losing theiroriginal citizenship status helps to integratethem into the receiving country. They comparecitizenship policies in Germany, the Netherlands,and Sweden. Gary Freeman looks at‘incorporation regimes’, distinguishing betweentraditional countries of immigration, guestworker countries, and countries affected byimmigration from previous colonies. Modes ofincorporation are held to differ by state, marketpolicies (i.e. labour utilization factors), welfareprogrammes, and acceptance of culturaldifferences.

Three articles concerning transnationalismfollow. Steven Vertovec focuses on socio-culturaltransformation of identity over immigrantgenerations. He argues that parents’ ‘bifocality’and practices such as the sending of remittanceswill affect children’s socio-cultural activities,interests, and identities. Peggy Levitt and NinaGlick Schiller deepen understanding of thedynamics of transnational social fields and pointout that transnationalism brings with it a changein the functions of the state. Min Zhou providesan elegant typology of ethnic entrepreneurship,distinguishing between middleman minorities

Book reviews454


and enclave entrepreneurs, and the ethniceconomy and the enclave economy, but alsoexamining the relatively new phenomenon oftransnational entrepreneurship.

The next two articles focus onundocumented immigration. Douglas Masseyand Chiara Capoferro examine the weaknesses intraditional census-taking in terms of tabulatingnumbers of the undocumented. They provide anumber of arguments for the use of theethnosurvey to measure the number andcharacteristics of the undocumented, as well aslongitudinal changes in these characteristics.Friedrich Heckmann looks at smuggler networksof immigrants into Germany. He describes thereasons for their rise and persistence and theiradaptation to state efforts to stop illegalimmigration.

The following two articles are concernedwith the adaptation of the second generation.Hartmut Esser distinguishes between individualand social structural assimilation or integrationof this generation. He offers a sophisticatedmathematical model to map the conditionsunder which second-generation assimilation willtake place. Rubén G. Rumbaut argues thatdifferences in the age of migration can be foundin the adaptation process. He distinguishesbetween the 1.75 generation (migrated at ages0-5), the 1.5 generation (migrated at ages 6-12),and the 1.25 generation (migrated at ages 13-17).He shows how these differences in age atmigration to the United States affectimmigrants from Latin America and theCaribbean, Asia and the Middle East, and Europeand Canada.

The final two chapters look at the role ofreligion in migrant incorporation. CharlesHirschman shows how both historically andcontemporaneously migrants have used religionto bolster their identity and show theircommitment to community-building in theUnited States. Riva Kastoryano examines theIslamic religion as ‘an emergent type ofcorporate ethnicity in France and Germany’(p. 421), arguing that adherence to Islam issuperseding identity according to nationalorigin, despite the diversity of sects andethno-cultural groups.

Rethinking migration has a number ofinnovative insights. The editors’ purpose – toprovide a companion piece to The handbook –has been at least partially met, though othercompanion volumes could be imagined.The book should be read by scholars ofimmigration to Europe and the United Statesand by those seeking theoretical insights into the

phenomena surrounding immigration ingeneral.

Tamar Diana Wilson University of Missouri,St Louis

Social anthropology

Conklin, Beth A. Consuming grief:compassionate cannibalism in an Amazoniansociety. xxxi, 285 pp., map, illus., bibliogr.Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2001. $50.00

(cloth), $22.95 (paper)

Beth Conklin’s investigation of mortuarycannibalism amongst the Wari, ahunter-horticulturalist people of theMadeira-Marmore region of Brazil, provides afinely tuned insight into the emotional strengthinvested in food and how it permeates dailyexistence and worlds of the after-life. Food is thestuff of love both in this life and in the after-life.It is the means by which bodies are made togrow robust, enabling them to work andproduce more food to feed self and kin. To theWari, it is quite simply impossible to be healthyand yet sad or lazy. Health is willingness toproduce and rejoice, surrounded by kin,showing good appetite and fluid bloodcirculation, conditions which are associated todeep breathing and an expanded heart. Whenone works in the gardens, forest, and rivers,one’s breathing is deeper and heart-beat faster,with better blood flow. This causes theaccumulation of fat. That is why hard-workingmen and women are robust. Illness, by contrast,is idleness and longing, two states which areperceived to induce isolation, weight loss, poorbreathing, bad blood flow, and a contractedheart.

The body is thus the result of the lovereceived and given, and it is always in theprocess of being made by others and makingother people’s bodies through acts of feeding.Memory is also grounded in food. When peopleare alive, they show how much they think abouttheir loved ones by bringing them food. Whenthey die, they are remembered by how muchfood they produced, ate, and fed to others, andtheir corpses become food to the living. Beforedefinitive contact with Brazilian society, in the1960s, corpses were effectively consumed duringbig mortuary banquets to which members of allsurrounding Wari settlements were invited.Endo-cannibalism, that is, eating the body of

Book reviews 455


one’s dead, was conceived as the onlycompassionate burial, necessary to enable boththe departure of the diseased person’s spirit tothe land of the dead and the consolation ofthose left behind on this earth.

Several years after contact and theconsequent prohibition by missionaries ofperformances of endo-cannibalistic burials, Warimen and women still attempted to perpetuatetheir rituals, explaining that the thought of theirkin buried was too painful to bear and thefeeling of their loss remained unappeased.During the mortuary banquets of the past,eating the cooked corpse was a service providedby the dead person’s affines to his or her kin inacknowledgement of the embodied ties of loveexisting between those who shared foodthroughout their existence. Because several daysmight pass before all the guests arrived andlengthy speeches were made in the memoryof the deceased, the corpse was oftendecomposed, and older people recall that thetaste could be revolting. Eating followed a slowpace, with small bits of flesh being delicatelyeaten using wooden sticks.

But the Wari considered that the corpses oftheir loved ones also became good food to theirown kin since, in their understanding, an aspectof the corpse transformed into the body of apeccary, an Amazonian boar with highly prizedflesh. Peccaries were therefore human andduring the hunt they offered themselves to theirkin to be eaten by them, thereby fattening theirbodies. Hence, the bonds of love createdthrough the sharing of meals between kin weremade possible by transformations into prey afterdeath. Eating animal flesh, however, was notregarded as the most important means ofaccumulating body fat. Corn, especially cornbeer prepared by women, was seen as the mostnutritious food providing ‘fat of our hearts’. Itwas also the safest food, since it did not implycontact with the blood of prey. Indeed, manyillnesses were attached to contamination withthe blood. To avoid this, people used to washaway all traces of blood, thoroughly cook meat,and use various plants as protection, especiallyvegetable perfumes and red body paint.Shamanism was also largely focused uponpreventing and healing people after therevenge of animals brought about by bloodcontamination.

One of the various merits of Conklin’s workis that it manages to dismantle the wall ofexoticism surrounding endo-cannibalism byshowing, through a study of Wari narratives,its day-to-day emotional base. Hence,

endo-cannibalism regains a human face and theencompassing logic of loving through food ismade evident. Conklin’s book does not engagewith current anthropological debates at greatlength, but her findings bear importantimplications, especially with relation to themeaning of predation and emotions. As for herapproach to the place of love, feeding, andmemory in daily life, it is clear that Conklin owesmuch to the studies of what has been called theBritish school of love in Amazonia, headed byOvering, Gow, Santos Granero, and McCallum,amongst others, although she does not claimany affiliation. Classically, compassionateendo-cannibalim was analysed by Clastres andCarneiro da Cunha, but in these authors’ views,the corpse was transformed into an other, anenemy, and therefore endo-cannibalism did notdiffer much from exo-cannibalism, that is, theeating of the bodies of enemies. The Wari usedto practise both types of cannibalism, but asConklin, and also Vilaça show, they differradically in their emotional texture. The bodies ofenemies were eaten without delay or speeches,the flesh swallowed with great voracity andanger.

What remains to be explored is thesignificance of emotions for Amazonianperspectivism, as framed by Viveiros de Castroand other authors. If, according to Conklin’sstudy, the peccary hunt should be understoodas an expression of love linking the realm of thedead and the living, it appears that the sharedhumanity attributed to prey in Amazonianshamanistic cosmologies may rest upon theiremotional capabilities, as well as on their beingable to take a subjective position. Emotions, andespecially love and anger as two key forms ofaffect relating to food, body, and memory,would therefore have major cosmologicalimplications.


Gyatso, Janet & Hanna Havnevik (eds).Women in Tibet. xii, 436 pp., tables, illus.,bibliogr. London: C Hurst & Co., 2005.£45.00 (cloth), £20.00 (paper)

Tibetan studies has been a major growth areain recent years, but the focus has remainedprimarily on the familiar domain of Tibetanreligion and on the rapidly growing sub-field ofTibetan medicine. One could not say thatgender issues have been entirely neglected, butin comparison with other major Asian culturesthe literature in this area is not well developed

Book reviews456


and we are still some way from an adequateanthropology or history of women in Tibetansocieties. The present volume, a well-producedcollection of eight excellent studies (three byanthropologists, including Henrion-Dourcy’sethnomusicological study) which have littlemore in common than that they are all in somesense about ‘Women in Tibet’, illustrates theproblem. Why, by 2005, do we not havethematically coherent volumes dealing withmore specific topics – the culture of gender incontemporary Tibetan societies, for example, orthe role of women in specific periods of thehistory of Tibetan Buddhism?

To their credit, the editors do not conceal theproblem, noting that at this stage we hardlyeven know ‘what it is that we don’t know’ andpresenting the book as ‘not much more thana preliminary step’ in the growth of ourknowledge (p. 1). Certainly there is little sense ofa unified agenda about this collection. Whetherby choice or necessity, we have here eightstudies of largely distinct topics with littlethematic overlap, though a few individualTibetan women are mentioned in more than oneof the chapters on contemporary Tibet (theGesar bard Yumen or Yumi, first mentioned byDiemberger as a kind of female oracle, turns upagain in Henrion-Dourcy’s chapter as a singer,and finally in Barnett’s as a political figure).

Having said this, we should be grateful forwhat we have here. The first three papers, allsubstantial and original, are historical: HelgaUebach on court ladies during the early Tibetanempire (seventh to ninth centuries CE), DanMartin on women spiritual teachers in theeleventh and twelfth centuries, and KurtisSchaeffer on the autobiography of aneighteenth-century female hermit. Martin’s has,perhaps, the widest implications, noting thetendency for women to disappear from Tibetanreligious literature, and the importance of usingsources as close as possible to the times inwhich they lived.

Of the five papers on the modern period,Tashi Tsering presents a useful if essentiallydescriptive survey of women in Tibetanmedicine, focusing on three women doctors inlate twentieth-century Tibet and India. Thedifficult relations between the refugee doctorLobsang Dolma Khangkar, perhaps the bestknown of the three in the West, and theDharamsala medical authorities, are instructive.The ethnomusicologist Isabelle Henrion-Dourcystudies six women singers from the TibetAutonomous Region, two of them now living inthe West. Her case studies are detailed and

insightful, but so varied as to allow for fewgeneralizations. Robert Barnett’s substantial(eighty-one pages) essay on women and politicsin contemporary Tibet should attractconsiderable interest. Barnett deals withwomen’s roles both in formal state politics andin the underground resistance, mainly in Lhasaand the Tibet Autonomous Region, suggestingthat both groups of women can be seen as‘involved in the same project: contributing to orcreating narratives or rituals ... which, by meansof a “politics of difference”, sustain or promotecertain notions of the nation and of nationality’(p. 291).

The two most specifically anthropologicalchapters are by Hildegard Diemberger andCharlene Makley. Diemberger discusses femaleoracles or spirit-mediums, using material fromLato in southwestern Tibet. She gives a detailedbackground to this largely female role, anassessment of how it has been transformedthrough recent history, and a persuasive case fora specifically feminine source of ritual powerwithin Tibetan society, grounded in the Tibetanecology, and existing largely in the interstitialspaces left by the male-dominated structures ofsecular and monastic power. This chapter is avery significant advance in our understanding ofTibetan spirit-mediumship, Tibetan popularreligion, and women’s roles in Tibetan villagesociety, and will be required reading forfuture scholars on these topics. It also hasimportant comparative dimensions, as withDiemberger’s nuanced critique of Ioan Lewis’speripheral-central distinction.

Makley’s chapter is another important andoriginal contribution, complementing andextending her work elsewhere (e.g. hersignificant article in T. Huber (ed.) Amdo Tibetansin Transition, 2002). Using an analytic frameinfluenced by Judith Butler and the ‘performanceof gender’ school, Makley examines nunhoodand gender at the former monastic settlementand frontier trade-town of Labrang incontemporary Amdo (Northeast Tibet). Sheprovides the clearest account yet of the logic ofTibetan monastic celibacy, but what remainswith the reader is the harsh reality of the lives ofthe Labrang nuns today, the object of constantderogatory gossip from both men and womenabout their imagined sexual transgressions, butin reality forced to starve themselves throughconstant fasting rituals in order to earn a baresubsistence. Makley convincingly describes howthe verbal attacks on the nuns mirror local layTibetans’ anxieties regarding the multiple threatsposed by social change and Chinese modernity

Book reviews 457


to the monastery-household nexus, ‘the verycore of Tibetan social worlds’ (p. 284).

Overall, this is an important collection ofpapers for Tibetanists, with several contributionsof wider interest. There is certainly enough tojustify the book’s purchase for most majoracademic libraries. It is to be hoped, though,that this ‘preliminary step’ will stimulate othersto take up the various projects relating to genderin Tibetan societies to which it contributes, andthat future collections will be able to adoptmore coherent and unified approaches to moreclearly defined sets of questions. If there is onething that this book succeeds in demonstrating,it is the critical importance of gender issues forunderstanding many aspects of Tibetan society,including Tibetan religious life.

Geoffrey Samuel Cardiff University

Jackson, Jason Baird. Yuchi ceremonial life:performance, meaning, and tradition in acontemporary American Indian community.xviii, 345 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr.London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2003.£60.00 (cloth)

Books like Yuchi ceremonial life drew me to studyanthropology from the start. Based on years ofparticipant observation and in-depth interviewswith Yuchi ceremonial leaders, Jason BairdJackson gives us an absorbing, detailedethnographic account of Yuchi ceremonial life.Although firmly suppported by the ideas andmethodology of cultural and linguistic theory,this is foremost a book for and about Yuchipeople. It is for the Yuchis as Yuchi leadersenlisted Jackson as their ethnographer to record,videotape, and otherwise document Yuchiceremonies, stories, and dances. It is also a bookabout the Yuchis in that Jackson, in goodanthropological style, transports the reader tothe stomp grounds of Oklahoma and serves asour reliable and knowledgeable guide to, andtranslator of, Yuchi ceremony and ritual.

After introducing us to the Yuchis and thesmall sub-set of Yuchi people who participate inthe stomp-ground ceremonies, Jackson thentakes us into the stomp grounds with historiesand detailed descriptions of the three ceremonialgrounds currently in use by Yuchi participants –the Polecat grounds, the Duck Creek grounds,and the Sand Creek grounds. Next, Jacksondetails the structure of Yuchi ceremonialleadership, the etiquette of ceremonial oratory,and generally how to behave while at the stompgrounds. The second half of the book is devoted

to the Yuchi ceremonial cycle, beginning with achapter on the football game that signals to theCreator that the ritual cycle is about to begin.Next are the stomp dances. In this chapterJackson emphasizes the intra-Yuchi andinter-Indian social interactions within which theceremonies and dances are embedded. In thechapter on the Arbor Dance, Jackson highlightsthe importance of purity and renewal in Yuchiceremonial life as well as the function of ritualthat holds the Yuchi community together byenunciating in ritual acts and oratory Yuchishared cultural norms and values. In the chapteron the Green Corn Ceremony, the climax of theYuchi ceremonial cycle, Jackson focuses onstory-telling and oratory as living traditions.Finally, the Yuchi ceremonial cycle ends with theSoup Dance, a ritual dance devoted to thankingthe ancestors and to inviting them to participatein the ceremonies.

Yuchi ceremonial life is multi-faceted andpolysemic, but primarily today it is about beingYuchi. As his Yuchi collaborators told Jackson,being Yuchi is not about blood, it is aboutparticipation. By participating in the rituals,Yuchis become Yuchi. Yuchi ceremony, then,serves to reinforce Yuchi identity andseparateness, something that they have beendoing for at least two hundred years. Sometimein the eighteenth century, the Yuchis attachedthemselves to the Creek Confederacy, but theyhave since held to their separate identity. Today,they are not a federally recognized group, andare considered and governmentallyadministrated as a sub-set of the Muskogee(Creek) Nation in present-day Oklahoma. AsJackson shows, Yuchis share much aboutcontemporary ritual life with the Creeks andother Woodland Indian people such as theShawnees and Iroquois. And at almost everyphase of the ritual cycle, both Yuchis andnon-Yuchis are invited to and expected toparticipate in the ceremonies. In turn, Yuchis areexpected to and do participate in non-Yuchiritual events. However, instead of resulting inpan-Indian ritualism and an overall melding ofseparate Indian identities, Yuchi and non-Yuchiparticipants use their co-operation to maintainsimultaneously both their separateness andsimilarities. Through intimate participation inboth Yuchi and non-Yuchi ritual events, Yuchipeople maintain distinct Yuchi ceremonial waysthrough their own intra-Indian comparisons ofritual events while also reinforcing their socialties and cultural similarities with non-Yuchis.Jackson underscores the fact that in culturalreproduction and change there are complex

Book reviews458


interplays by which cultural borrowing andsharing simultaneously blur and reinforce socialboundaries and identities.

Mostly, though, Yuchi identity andseparateness are also reproduced andmaintained in Yuchi oratory, and Yuchi oratorypermeates Yuchi ceremonial life. In his analysis ofspeech acts, Jackson borrows fromanthropological theory on discourse-centredinterpretations of ritual in order to track theprocess of ‘traditionalization’, whereby Yuchileaders, by reflecting on and connectingcontemporary ritual life with a meaningful past,convert cultural forms into tradition. In acomplex turn, tradition is then used toauthenticate ritual as being specifically Yuchi.Through the telling and re-telling of stories bymodern Yuchi leaders, narratives take on theirown natural history and encode changingcultural practices that are used to make andre-make tradition. Seen in this way, Yuchiceremonies and stories are not static, age-oldpractices, but rather practices that are dynamic,changing, malleable, and configured for living inthe modern world. In Jackson’s hands, then,Yuchi ceremonial life is not an anthropologicalstory about cultural continuity; it is not a salvageethnography documenting quickly erodingsacred practices; rather, it is a Yuchi story aboutthe historical process of negotiating andreproducing Yuchi identity, culture, and traditionin the modern world.

Robbie Ethridge University of Mississippi

Nordstrom, Carolyn. Global outlaws: crime,money, and power in the contemporary world.xxi, 234 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley:Univ. California Press, 2007. £13.95 (paper)

This is a peculiar book, in part because it isabout a topic anthropologists rarely study,networks of crime. The crime at issue rangesfrom street children who sell smuggledcigarettes in a war zone to money launderingand trade in unlicensed goods such as CDs andbranded clothing. It is also peculiar becauseCarolyn Nordstrom reports, and appears to take,a number of different stances towards thosenetworks in what may be more a work of publicaffairs than one of description and analysis.While the topic is networks of crime, thedescriptions are of individual places andactivities taken to be part of networks, especiallyinternational networks. So, Nordstrom devotesa lot of attention to border-crossings andtransport, particularly marine transport. And the

situation she describes is one in which, in manyways, borders might as well not exist.

She describes security seals on shippingcontainers and how easy they are to fake.Similarly, she describes the difficulty, perhapsimpossibility, of inspecting shipping containers,and the laxity of security at ports moregenerally. These are, as she notes, designed tofacilitate rapid movement rather than to check it.She describes her voyage on a freighter thatvisited a number of United States ports and thencrossed to Europe. From before she entered thefirst US port to after she left the European portshe was never asked to identify herself. Evenwhen she flew out of that European country noone noticed that there was no record that shehad ever entered it.

Tales of shipping containers and her ownborder-crossing are the most straightforwardexamples of the book’s many instances of illegaltrade and the apparent inability or unwillingnessof governments to deal with it. These range fromwrongly stating the contents of a shipment inorder to incur lower customs duties, totranscontinental trade in protected varieties offish. However, this breadth raises a questionabout what Nordstrom is trying to do, for sheappears to lump together all trade that violateslaw, and so fails to distinguish the trade in piratedCDs from the trade in people. All of these mayviolate a statute, but people worry about somemuch more than they do others, and policingpractices reflect this discrimination, as they havedone for as long as there have been police.

In a larger sense, the tales of thoseuninspectable containers may lie at the heart ofwhat some readers, at least, will see in this book:an inversion, and indeed celebration, of one ofthe most visible public concerns of the presentdecade, and of many decades before – aconcern with categories and boundaries. Theneat categories of the illegal (bad, disreputable,illegitimate) and the legal (good, reputable)simplify the world, and people become anxiouswhen these categories are threatened.Nordstrom argues that this distinction is notmuch use in practice: the bulk of trade thatviolates law is carried out by large, reputablecorporations as part of their normal operations.The same with boundaries. Current concern inmany countries indicates that people get anxiouswhen boundaries weaken or dissolve. Nordstromshows, though, that when it comes to transport,national boundaries generally are weak andoften are effectively non-existent. The notion ofboundaries, then, is not much help in trying tomake sense of how the world works.

Book reviews 459


It is not very contentious to say thatboundaries and categories are less secure thanthey appear in the daily press and governmentstatements. Nordstrom uses this insecurity toargue for the present failing of the modernistproject of nation-states and an orderly, rationalworld. As she notes, in many ways the workingsof the world simply do not conform. Instead,she wants us to look at transnational flows andwhat she aptly calls ‘il/legal’ trade, at theborder-crossings rather than the borders, at thecategory violations rather than the categories.

Global outlaws intrigues. The tales that itcontains are always interesting and oftenfascinating. Nordstrom’s point about thepermeability of borders is compelling. But whileit will intrigue, it is not clear that it will satisfy,because it offers too little consideration of howwe ought to proceed, either intellectually orpolitically. This book, then, offers us a number ofinteresting tales about covert internationaltransport and trade, combined with descriptionsof those who are part of it or who seek to stopit. What it needs is an intellectual frame thatwould turn these tales into a coherentargument.

James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford BrookesUniversities

Rival, Laura M. Trekking through history: theHuaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. xx, 246 pp.,maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 2002. £46.00 (cloth),£21.00 (paper)

Ever since Pierre Clastre’s study of the Guayaquiof Paraguay, in the 1960s, the debate as towhether the Amazon rainforest was home togroups of people entirely dependent on huntingand foraging, without agriculture, has beendivided between those who argued that heavyreliance on foraging resulted from agriculturalregression and those who saw foraging as anoriginal cultural feature in its own terms. LauraRival’s study of Huaorani livelihood addressesthe issue through an account of the history of apeople who made of trekking their dominantway of existence, relying for subsistence onforaging and yet also practising someagriculture.

In 1956, a Huaorani band in the Curaray areawas encountered by Evangelical missionaries andtwo years later various bands were brought tosettle around the mission. Other bands haveremained in the forest, refusing ‘peaceful’contact up to the present. In the last two

decades, they have indisputably become themost famous people of Ecuadorian Amazonia.Trapped in their own forest by encroachingcolonists and oil workers, the Huaorani haverepeatedly engaged in attacks against oil campsand settlers, stealing their goods and,sometimes, spearing them to the ground indramatic death. In the local imagination, theiriconic savagery reveals their being prototypicalauca, wild Indians roaming in the forest, asopposed to those living by the main rivers,providing labour and crops to white patrons andtraders. Rival’s book explores their forest historyusing both archival materials and the memoriesof those Huaorani men and women who nowspeak Spanish, send their children to school, andhave great fear of their ancient enemy bandswho remain in the forest.

The book provides an insider’s view of theHuaorani’s daily routines, the ceremonialperformances, and the war expeditions of thepast and present. The rhythm of their existencewas and is still kept by means of trekking, evenwhen living in close contact with otherindigenous Amazonians and colonists. Theyspend most of the day wandering through theforest within a 5 to 20 kilometre radius from thecommunal house, moving from tree to treerather than touching the ground, gatheringseeds and fruits for food and other uses, such asfishing, and actively managing the environment,transporting wild seeds to hunting tracks andnatural clearings, and encouraging their growthto supply their needs. Agriculture as such isdevoted almost entirely to manioc (Manihotesculenta) and peach palm fruit (Bactris gasipaes),and the Huaorani devote only a small portion oftheir time to these activities for they requireconsiderable physical effort and pain.

The author argues that the Huaorani’s simpleagriculture is not the result of the loss oftechniques and crop species requiring bettergardens due to encapsulation by colonists whoforce them to keep moving in the forest. Rathershe suggests that Huaorani agriculture is and hashistorically been incipient, a feature which shesuggests puts them in the same category ashunter-gatherers. Whilst I agree with the ideathat agricultural regression might not be anappropriate concept, it seems to me that Rival’srich ethnographic data are not being fully takeninto account in considering her own theoreticalarguments and, therefore, some threads remainloose. For instance, with regard to peach palmtrees, on the one hand, she shows that thesetrees are territorial markers of personal identity,group memory, and kinship continuity. Peach

Book reviews460


palm gardens grow in places where peoplesettled for a while and they keep producing longafter those people have moved out to otherlocations and even die. Whenever ancient peachpalm gardens are found, people rejoice,remembering their ancestors and eating thebountiful fruits they left for future generations.The seeds, however, are not planted using adirect technique to introduce them in theground. Rather, they are left to germinatesomewhere close to the hearth after cookingand eating them. This leads the author toconclude that the Huaorani do not deliberatelycultivate peach palm trees, but that theirculinary activities favour their germination andpropagation. I find the idea of non-deliberatecultivation puzzling given her own emphasis onthe salient social significance of peach palmtrees, and especially of the fact that these areregarded as property transmitted through thegenerations.

A similar impression is given by Rival’sdiscussion of manioc cultivation. She argues thatmanioc cultivation is incipient because gardensare small, attended infrequently, and only sweetmanioc is produced. Yet she states that Huaoranimanioc is known as the sweetest and juiciestmanioc of the area, so much so that it is ofteneaten raw. One cannot help but wonderwhether such sweetness could have been theresult of agricultural selection, entailing aconsiderable level of specialization. Generally,though, manioc is consumed on great festiveoccasions, such as weddings and othergatherings with neighbours and allies. Thetubers are boiled and mashed into a paste tomake manioc beer, although it is drunk beforestrong alcoholic fermentation occurs. The authorstates that the great social significance of maniocis similar to that of peach palm fruits, and thatboth crops help to limit the fragmentation ofHuaorani society into small separated bands. It istherefore clear that Huaorani social existence isheavily dependent on the collective ritualconsumption of both crops and that theircultivation, although it may not take a greatportion of their time, is crucial to theirlivelihood.

The author’s rich ethnographic analysis andtheoretical discussion provide key argumentsand materials to re-think further Amazonianpeople’s relationships to the environment, andto break away from pre-determined views aboutthe difference between agriculture and foraging,and even hunting and fishing. As Posey claimsfor the Kayapó, all these activities feed into oneanother and entail close interaction between

people, plants, and animals as disseminatorsand carers as much as foragers and predators inthe food chain. This is also the case amongstpeople who may be known as consecratedagriculturalists, such as the Secoya (Airo-Pai),Huaorani neighbours to the east, amongstwhom I carried out fieldwork. They attend theirgardens every day and have a large variety ofcrops, including bitter and sweet manioc, cornand plantain, and yet they conceive of theenvironment as ‘giving’, and value highly theabundance of food while investing in peachpalm trees very similar notions of personalidentity, memory and social continuity as do theHuaorani. Comparison with other groups whospend little time in agriculture, such as the Jodiof Venezuela, studied by Zent, who spend lessthan 20 per cent of their time engaged in thisactivity, is also needed to find alternatives to theconceptual binary opposition between foragersand agriculturalists that currently informs ouranalyses.


Scott, Michael W. The severed snake:matrilineages, making place and a MelanesianChristianity in Southeast Solomon Islands.xxxiii, 379 pp., maps, illus., figs, bibliogr.Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press,2007. $45.00 (paper)

This book about Arosi on the island of Makira iswelcome on several fronts. Of the main SolomonIslands, Makira has been the least researched –this is the first deep ethnography from the islandsince Charles Fox’s The threshold of the Pacific(1924). Theoretically, Scott presents engagingarguments about the interplay of Melanesianontologies, place, and practice, and he alsomakes a valuable contribution to the burgeoningstudy of indigenous Christianities.

Within anthropology particular ethnographictopics sometimes become entwined with specifictheoretical approaches, and when thoseapproaches become passé, the topicsthemselves, important as they may be, can berelegated to the margins of study. A strikingrecent example is kinship, which for yearsvirtually disappeared from many departments’curricula. Early on, Melanesianists found thatAfrican-derived kinship models did not fit wellwith what they observed on the ground, evenwhere people said their groups were based onunilineal descent. A quite different approach tounderstanding Melanesian identities hasemerged, inspired most famously by Roy

Book reviews 461


Wagner and Marilyn Strathern. It conceives ofpersons not as defined by fixed identities butrather as composites of their multiple and fluidsocial relationships. Scott does not urge a returnto classic kinship theory, and he grants therelational approach’s value for understandingaspects of Arosi life. But a central argument ofhis book is that Melanesianists today giveinsufficient attention to indigenous models thatground identities in deep ontologies, includingbut not limited to those based on descent.Broadly following Sahlins, Scott presents Arosi asa case study of what he calls ‘onto-praxis’,‘the organization of praxis as the situationalengagement of social agents with ontologicalcategories’ (p. 20). He contends that crucialaspects of Arosi life can only be understood fromthis perspective.

At first glance Makira appears a hard case forthis argument. Early in Scott’s research, Arosi lifeseemed amenable to the relational approach.People portrayed their former matrilineages, orauhena – independent in origin and grounded inexclusive ancestral territories – as defunct.Starting in the nineteenth century, Makiranssuffered severe depopulation from disease, andbeginning in 1918, colonial officers responded byenacting social engineering schemes thatdisplaced people from their ancestral lands intocoastal villages. Arosi told Scott, and each other,that their auhena anchored in fixed territorieshad been lost to this history. Their lives werenow ordered not by auhena identities andancestral places but by relationships ofco-operation, marriage, and exchangebetween families that shared shallowpatrilineal links to matrilineages, and residedon lands of other, now extinct auhena. ‘We areall people who have come from elsewhere’(p. 64).

But as individuals began taking Scott intoprivate confidence, they revealed that suchrelationships were, by themselves, inadequate,and shared their concerns with a deeperontological model. Each confided that theiroriginal auhena was far from dead, and was infact the true owner of the coastal land on whichthey now resided. They buttressed their claimswith renditions of lineage narratives andevidence from ancestral sites, objects, andnames. These claims to living auhena statuscontradict each other, and must remain covertsince their public declaration sparks discord, andbecause of an ethical catch-22: true auhenagenerously allow others use of their land, and toproclaim auhena status insinuates that othersreside on the land only at one’s pleasure, a

stingy assertion that itself belies the speaker’slegitimacy as a true auhena member.

Scott explores how social action is generatedthrough the interplay of these discrete modelsof societal ordering, and competing Arosiinterpretations of the landscape and itsresidents’ standings within it. The situation ismore complex still because the polygeneticmodel of separate auhena origins and statusescoexists and mingles with Christian models ofmonogenesis, and the idea that Arosi trulybelong to and should behave as ‘one lineageunited under God and the Church’ (p. 35). Scottexamines historical strategies of Anglicanmissionaries who highlighted Arosi myths thatimplied a single origin and identity, and heanalyses diverse and creative ‘ethno-theological’readings of Christianity found in Arosi today.

Still another ideological strand here is that ofkastom, and Scott reconstructs its origins in theMaasina Rule movement of the 1940s. Above all,movement members feared that foreign invaderswould take Makiran lands if ownership wasambiguous. Dread of massive land alienationcontinues to animate Arosi desires to establishtrue auhena ownership. The Arosi ideologicalskein is far more complex than I can imparthere, and Scott does an admirable job ofdisentangling it. His study will greatly interestanthropologists and historians of Melanesia andbeyond.

David Akin University of Michigan

Tan, Chee-Beng (ed.). Southern Fujian:reproduction of traditions in post-Mao China.xviii, 190 pp., map, tables, illus., bibliogrs.Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. Press, 2006.$42.00 (cloth)

This publication examines major anthropologicaldevelopments in the southern Fujian region ofmainland China. It is a highly important piece ofwork for the following two reasons. First, itrepresents a successful long-term collaborativeeffort between anthropologists in mainlandChina (Wang Mingming, Fan Ke, and DingYuling) with anthropologists outside of China(Tan Chee-Beng, Siumi Maria Tam, andKuah-Pearce Khun Eng in Hong Kong and PanHongli in Japan). Given China’s imperative needfor international academic exchange, this servesas a good example for future collaborativeefforts. Second, this book marks the maturationof anthropology as an academic discipline inChina. Except for the three Hong Kong-basedanthropologists (Tan, Tam, and Kuah-Pearce),

Book reviews462


the remaining four (Wang, Fan, Pan, and Ding)represent the first crop of post-Mao,foreign-trained anthropologists who will join thebackbone of anthropology in contemporaryChina. With the assistance of their tutelage,anthropology can once again be considered awell-respected academic branch of science, afterhaving been long suppressed during Mao TseTung’s reign. Their involvement in empiricalsocial research is also needed in order toassess the roles of cultural tradition inChina, as the country forges a new path ofdevelopment.

Since 1979, China’s post-Mao reforms, underthe policy of ‘Reform and Openness’, have seenthe revival of many traditional local practices inthe southern Fujian province of China that weresuppressed during the Maoist era, such as Daoistrituals, ancestral worship, lineage organizations,local cults, and so on. The retrenchment of thestate’s intervening hands in people’s daily liveshas created a much more tolerant and flexibleenvironment in southern Fujian than in mostother places in China. This is because the localgovernment has created policies to encourageoverseas Chinese to invest in China’s emergingindustries. Amid dramatic social changes ouranthropologists, based on ethnographicfieldwork data, not only portray the culturalpractices that are being revived, but also identifythree major issues that enlighten us regardingthe complexities involved in life withinpost-Reform China.

The first issue is whether currentstate-initiated reforms are truly beneficial to thepreservation or revival of the local culturaltraditions. Wang, in chapter 1, takes a cynicalview and argues that state officials are willing totolerate ‘backward’ or ‘superstitious’ localpractices as long as they can lure back overseasChinese investors and produce tangibleeconomic benefits. However, Wang’s utilitarianargument is not shared by two other researcherswhose studies are included in this publication.In chapter 4, Tan’s study in Yongchun showsthat many traditional practices, includingancestral cults, village temple worships,and seasonal festivals, have occurred hererecently, even though this region does not havemany overseas Chinese, is relatively poor, andlacks policies towards attracting externalinvestments.

Fan, in chapter 2, counter-argues that it is thelocal community that takes advantage of thestate’s policies and it uses the policies tore-create its long-lost cultural heritage. In thisinteresting case study of a southern Fujian Arabic

community (who are no longer Muslims), Fandescribes how people with the surname of Dinghave reconstructed their Arabic ancestry throughgenealogy, claimed their minority status throughthe government’s ethnic classification system,and proceeded to ‘restore’ some of theirallegedly lost traditions.

The second controversy that emerges in thisvolume is: ‘Who provides the inspiration orleadership for the revival of local cultures?’ Panin chapter 3 suggests that it is elderly men,through their newly formed Old Folks’Association (LRH in Chinese), who provide theleadership roles for cultural revival, and theyfurther serve as mediators between stateauthorities and local society. The opposite viewis presented by Kuah-Pearce in chapter 5, whoargues that it is women who serve as ‘custodialguardians of rituals and religious practicesin South China’ (p. 121). A close reading ofher narratives, however, does not providemuch concrete evidence to support thisargument.

The third controversy in this volume is thechanging status of women and whether this hashad an impact on the traditional patriarchalfamily. The last three chapters, by Kuah-Pearce,Tam, and Ding, all address these issues. They allagree that women in southern Fujian havegenerally adjusted well throughout the era ofdramatic social change; and they have beentoughened during the recent transitions, andhave developed effective coping strategies forself-preservation and taking care of their families.However, both Tam and Ding believe that eventhough women have more freedom anddecision-making power, they do not challengethe gender-biased system. Tam even suggeststhat these women have been unconsciouslyreinforcing patriarchal society through thereproduction of their husbands’ patriarchalfamily. Kuah-Pearce, on the other hand, feelsthat women have become the new driving forcein social development.

This collection of research sheds new light onour understanding of contemporary Chinathrough the analysis of culture reproduction. Byexamining the dynamic interaction between thestate and local southern Fujian society, theauthors attempt to identify the actors and agentswho are initiating social change, and theirpossible impacts on the long-term developmentof Chinese culture and society. Their empiricalwork is likely to be highly valued by futureresearchers not only in China, but alsointernationally.

Shu-min Huang Institute of Ethnology, Taiwan

Book reviews 463


Wilson, Tamar Diana. Subsidizing capitalism:brickmakers on the US-Mexican border. xiv, 213

pp., tables, illus., bibliogr. Albany: SUNYPress, 2005. $51.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper)

In this clearly written account Tamar Wilsoncombines poems, stories, and concise analysis toreveal both the structural constraints and theagency of brickmakers in the northern Mexicocity of Mexicali. Following an introduction inwhich Wilson describes her methodology andpost-modern creative style, the first chapter is abrief story about the life of a brickmaker couple,beginning with their arrival and the wife’sparticipation in a land invasion. The storyconveys the struggles of this hard-workingcouple and the support they give and receivefrom their neighbours and kin. Several otherchapters (4, 6, and 8) similarly use stories orpoems effectively to convey various aspects ofbrickmaking and brickmakers’ lives.

Chapter 2 is a useful discussion of variousapproaches that have been used to understandthe informal sector. Wilson criticizes Marxist andneo-Marxist approaches for their limitedrecognition of agency but acknowledges theutility of these approaches in analysing how theinformal sector subsidizes capitalism. Relying ona ‘modified “capitalist-populist” ’ approach,neo-Marxist and world-systems theories, and aChananovian model, she stresses Cook’s(Peasant capitalist industry, 1984) concept of‘endofamilial accumulation’, which sheultimately links to class dynamics and thetransition from petty commodity production topetty capitalism.

After describing six strata among brickmakersin chapter 3, ranging from piece-rate workers toworker-owners, Wilson compares the roles andlives of brickmakers with those of peasants. Shesuggests that both groups subsidize capitalismand both can also experience class differentiationbased on access to the means of production anddifferent stages in the family life cycle. In chapter5 she describes and analyses the family labourinvolved in brickmaking. She argues that becauseof the neo-patriarchal structure of the family, thesignificant contributions of women and childrenare invisible. Although this point could bedeveloped further – for example, by examiningthe patriarchal structure beyond the family andthe growing literature showing a more dynamicpattern of gender relations, which are suggestedby the realities she describes – the examination ofthis invisible labour is important. Chapter 7

distinguishes what Wilson calls tight from loosepatriarchal structures. Tight patriarchy can

provide the basis for endofamilial accumulationthrough the deployment of family labour. In theloose structure the wife does not participate inbrickmaking but rather pursues other economicactivities such as running a small store. Here onemight wish for more data, especially on familydecision-making and the distribution of earnings.In chapter 9, ‘The heterogeneity of subsidies’,Wilson compares garbage-pickers withbrickmakers and argues that although similar inmany respects, the former are more like‘disguised proletarians’ than petty commodityproducers because their access to the means ofproduction, expensive vehicles for transportingthe materials they collect, is more limited.

Although Wilson begins chapter 9 bypointing out how brickmakers prefer their workin the informal sector because of ‘self-imposedrather than other-imposed discipline’, sheultimately concludes that brickmaking is notcounter-hegemonic. First, it is a form of whatKearney (‘Class and identity’, in History in person,eds D. Holland & J. Lave, 2000) calls ‘jujitsu’domination, in which the efforts of workers‘insure that the products of their labor benefitthe capitalist system’. Second, there ‘seems littlecounterhegemonic consciousness’, as shown inthe desire of most to become brickyard owners,that is, ‘part of the system’. This argument couldbe developed further with more datademonstrating that ownership is desired for itscapitalist profit-making and accumulation ratherthan for what Sylvia Yanagisako (Producingculture and capital, 2002) calls non-capitalistimaginaries.

In the ‘Epilogue’, Wilson describes recentchanges in brickmaking, especially increasedorganization and union participation. She comesto the ultimate conclusion that the efforts ofbrickmakers subsidize capitalism directly byproviding cheaper bricks for capitalistconstruction of malls, office buildings, andhousing, and indirectly by providing cheaperbricks for workers’ self-built communities, thusreducing the wages capitalism must pay toworkers. These cheaper contributions of labourare made possible by self-exploitation and theexploitation of family labour.

In sum, despite some shortcomings, thebook provides an important addition to theliterature on the informal economy, especially onfamily labour and family accumulation and howsuch labour subsidizes capitalism. Its clear andconcise manner makes it useful in courses onthe anthropology of work, urban anthropology,and poverty.

Frances L. Rothstein Montclair State University

Book reviews464


Theory

Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman,Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser &Piotr Sztompka. Cultural trauma andcollective identity. ix, 314 pp., fig, table,bibliogr. London, Los Angeles: Univ.California Press, 2004. £42.95 (cloth),£16.95 (paper)

This book emerged from a dialogue amongstresearchers in the humanities and psychologicalsciences at the Center for Advanced Studies inthe Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Thepoint of departure of this debate is a recognitionof the embeddedness of the notion of trauma ineveryday language. The authors focus onexpressions such as ‘traumatized populations ororganizations’ or ‘national trauma’. In otherwords, they highlight the trend to extend thescope of the primarily psychological notion oftrauma to collectivities. Many social scientistsmight advocate a critical deconstruction of suchconceptual slippage in media and politicaldiscourses. Yet the contributors build upon suchlay discourses on collective trauma to developa new concept of cultural trauma, from anacademic and largely sociological perspective.In other words, this book provides differentperspectives on an emerging theoreticalframework in which the concept of ‘culturaltrauma’ plays a critical role.

The volume includes a theoretical chapter (byNeil Smelser) which explores the link betweenpsychological or psycho-analytical definitions oftrauma and the concept of cultural trauma.Subsequent chapters offer case material for amore detailed exploration and definition ofcultural trauma. The selected examples concernfour historical events central to Euro-Americanpolitical consciousness: slavery, the Holocaust,post-communism, and September 11. Theconcept of cultural trauma thereby becomes aheuristic device to ask questions about eventsthat shock the foundations of a social world,destroy a social fabric, and entail a loss of identityand violation of fundamental culturalpresuppositions. The work of Cathy Caruth(Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, andhistory, 1996) informs the analytical anglethroughout this volume, and provides, as it were,a blueprint to make the leap from psychologicaltrauma to cultural trauma. Cultural trauma isthen explored through concepts such ascollective memory and identity, collectiverepression and guilt, or collective consciousness.

As an anthropologist I am very interested inquestions about the cultural effects of a socialfabric maimed by war or disaster. However, I amaware that the prism of the trauma and memorydiscourse favours concepts such as ‘collectivememory’ and obscures less obvious conceptualavenues. This volume obviously draws uponConnerton’s How societies remember (1989) andHalbwachs’s On collective memory (1992 [1941,1952]), and the reader only receives a glimpse ofother dimensions of maimed cultural and socialfabrics, such as the destruction of trust (p. 144),the acceptance of impunity (p. 19), or otheraffected cultural expectations.

However, such topics, which are slightlyperipheral to the book’s main discussion of‘cultural trauma’, become particularly importantwhen the research questions are extended tonon-Western societies. In the introduction, JeffreyAlexander briefly considers ‘these recentoutpourings of mass murder in the non-Westernworld’ (p. 25) and he asserts the universalrelevance of the notion of cultural trauma. Thereis no doubt this group of researchers wouldgenerate valuable analyses of non-Westernsocieties through the lens of cultural trauma,yet I am concerned with the blind spots such aparadigm might generate. Thus I wouldquery the effects of catastrophic events oncosmologies, ritual, and culture-specific powerrelations. In particular, I would suggest addingquestions about the specific effects ofa global counter-insurgency culture oninter-generational dynamics and the transmissionof culture. Universalizing questions aboutcollective memory, identity, and guilt as it weretake for granted the primacy of modern ormodernized identities and political systems.

The book, however, initiates an extremelyimportant debate about the impact oftwentieth-century warfare on culture, or, in theauthors’ words, the issue of ‘cultural trauma’. Iwould recommend this book to social scientistsinterested in cultures of violence. The argumentbrings up many further questions. One strikingexample concerns Karl Jasper’s notion ofmetaphysical guilt. This aspect of cultural traumadenotes the demise of trust in the progress ofWestern civilization in the aftermath of theHolocaust. Barbarism ‘in the heartland ofmodern European culture’ (p. 144) therebyturned into a global trauma of humankind,and this book makes one think about thecross-cultural conceptual ramifications of such apostulated demise of trust in Europeancivilization.

Alex L. Argenti University College London

Book reviews 465


Hartigan, John, Jr. Odd tribes: toward acultural analysis of white people. ix, 359 pp.,illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 2006. £15.95 (paper)

From the 1980s onwards, there has beenincreased interest among anthropologists inresearching the racialized position and identitiesof white people. This could be seen as oneresponse to the unease which resulted fromconfronting the colonial tradition from whichanthropology emerged and its continuingpost-colonial concern with examining the livesand conditions of ‘Others’ ‘out there’. However,John Hartigan’s wide-ranging and challengingbook questions the idea that it is necessarily easyto move away from the distanced andobjectifying anthropological gaze through thisshift in focus. Using examples which range fromCharles Booth’s study of poverty in London tocultural representations of ‘white trash’ incontemporary US popular culture, Hartiganasserts the dominance of the racialized lensthrough which poor whites have been studied.Whilst this raises potentially uncomfortablequestions for the researcher, Hartigan isreclaiming a space for anthropological orethnographic work on the study of race. Heargues that it is only through extendedexamination of cultural forms and the everydaythat the continually shifting ground of race canbe mapped. The book constitutes an importantand critical engagement with what is sometimescalled ‘whiteness studies’. It is based on anassertion both that whiteness can only fruitfullybe regarded as integral to the study of race andalso that it is imperative to move away from aunified or hegemonic idea of whiteness (andtherefore race itself). A central concern of thebook is to show the ways in which race and classare co-constructed and interdependent in boththeir ideological construction and livedexperience.

In particular, through extended andfascinating examination of the historical andcontinuing contemporary uses of the concept of‘white trash’, this book traces the ways in whichrace and class intersect in order to mark out theshifting boundaries of whiteness (and race).White trash is traced back to its origins in theeconomy of slavery (in which it meantnon-slaveholding whites). From the outset, aneconomic condition was naturalized as areflection of an essential, degenerate nature.Uses of white trash are mapped alongside otherterms drawn from the eugenics movement (suchas feeble-mindedness, imbecile), the concept of

the underclass, and other cultural forms such ashillbilly and redneck. The popular uses of theterm in cultural forms, including in novels, films,and music, are also explored. The book arguespersuasively that throughout its history (anddespite recent attempts to reclaim white trash asa positive or transgressive identity), white trashsustains notions of pollution and degeneracy ofwhiteness. Hartigan also traces the key role thatideas of family and dysfunctional or degeneratefamily have played in white trash. However, hecould perhaps have traced more clearly thegendered as well as classed contours of thisrelationship. White trash, the book argues, isperhaps more about middle-class fears andfantasies than anything else. Hartigan is notconcerned so much with establishing anauthoritative definition of white trash, but ratherto ‘analyze the work the term performs inmarking and negotiating the social distinctionsthat inform racial and class boundaries in theUnited States’ (p. 123).

The exploration of the complex relationshipbetween race and class is given further depthby drawing on Hartigan’s own ethnographicwork. Using his research in Detroit, Hartiganconvincingly traces the varied and varying wayin which race is lived in a context that is highlyracialized, and yet not all social encounters arenecessarily about race. For poor whites living inurban Detroit, where they are now in the racialminority, race is clearly always present as asocial category, but not always dominant:‘[R]acial meanings are often quickly renderedand asserted in Detroit, but there are also manysituations in which they are suspended, held inabeyance, or simply do not come to mind’(p. 212). The challenge is to construct anunderstanding of race and whiteness that isalive to its presence and salience but alsosensitive to ambiguities and nuances in itsoperation. This is a challenge that Hartiganextends to anti-racist practitioners andresearchers, who, he argues, risk essentializingboth whites and whiteness. For Hartigan, thekey solution to this problem is to have arigorous awareness and analysis of the situated,local nature of whiteness and its changing rolein cultural dynamics. In treating whiteness as acultural artefact, he argues that ‘it isconstituted in daily life through symbols,images, discursive logics and interpretiverepertoires, narrative genres, various forms ofbody work and discipline and all the otherarbitrary conventions that characterize culturalconstructions’ (p. 283).

Bridget Byrne University of Manchester

Book reviews466


Lyon, David. Surveillance studies: an overview.viii, 243 pp., bibliogr. Cambridge, Malden,Mass.: Polity Press, 2007. £55.00 (cloth),£15.99 (paper)

The British government has been planning forseveral years to introduce identity cards forall people resident in the UK. Against thebackground of perceived security threats and ashrinking welfare state, senior police officershave argued that ‘we have to go to a placewhere we do know who people are’. For theproponents of identity cards, if people ‘havedone nothing wrong they had nothing to fear’.According to the British Home Office, biometricidentity cards will create a universal form ofcitizenship, free from racial and classdistinctions, by showing ‘that everyone belongsto our society whether they were born here,have chosen to make their home here or arejust staying for a while to study or work’.Opponents, on the other hand, have calledbiometric identity cards a fundamental invasionof privacy that heralds the rise of an all-knowingsurveillance state. People have marched throughLondon with supermarket bar codes tattooedinto their bodies, protesting at what they see asthe Orwellian future promised by the new cards.According to some, the new system of identitycards and databases will create a ‘total lifehistory of every individual, to be retained evenafter death’.

The spectre of a universal, or near universal,system of identity cards raises importantquestions about the forms of knowledgeproduced by identity cards and how theytransform the relationship betweencitizens-subjects and the state. However, areading of David Lyon’s introduction to‘surveillance studies’ suggests that the image ofan efficient and all-knowing state, implicitly heldby both advocates and critics of the identify cardscheme, seems misplaced. Rather, the potentialdanger comes from the ambiguity of identitydocuments, and their openness to abuse bothby state officials and by their holders. Lyonargues that we need to avoid a ‘Big Brother’approach to understanding surveillance andinstead need a theory of multiple types ofsurveillance, which are often the products ofcontingency, incompetence, and mission creep,rather than directed by a single hand. There is areal danger of taking the claims about particularsurveillance technologies at face value,and assuming that simply because theirmanufacturers claim they will produce seamlessforms of knowledge, this is really the case. As

Lyon argues, surveillance can hide as much as itreveals, and rather than simply revealinginformation, it creates new forms of knowledge.Furthermore, Lyon stresses the importance ofpaying attention to the ‘embodied persons’ ofsurveillance. Surveillance is not just an abstractsystem of information-gathering, but is aimed ata specific type of person, and in turn allows (orforces) them to act in particular ways. It istherefore important to understand what types ofperson are produced by surveillance practices,how the objects of such practice understand andexperience these practices, and what spaces forresistance or accommodation are created. Assuch, identity documents will not necessarilyproduce an all-knowing state, but newopportunities for people acting in the state todemand to know who we are. It is in thisprocess that racialized and class-based notions ofentitlement and belonging can re-enter therelationship between states and citizens.

Lyon is one of the leading theorists of the‘surveillance society’ and has published widelyon the topic. This book represents an overviewof the field, but is nevertheless original andinsightful in its own right. Above all, it is writtenin a clear and precise manner. Interestingly, Lyonargues that ‘surveillance studies’ take place atthe intersection of sociology, geography, andpolitics, but fails to mention anthropology. Thereseems, however, to be plenty of space formutual engagement. The field examines notonly classic anthropological issues such asclassification and personhood, but also morerecent concerns such as the conditions ofknowledge production and the socialimplications of technological innovation.

Tobias Kelly University of Edinburgh

Mauss, Marcel (ed. Nathan Schlanger).Techniques, technology and civilisation. xiv,178 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2006. £27.00 (cloth)

Camille Tarot once referred to Marcel Mauss as‘the illustrious unknown’. If this is true of theFrench-speaking world, which has longbenefited from fuller scholarly treatment ofMauss’s life and texts, the remark applies evenmore to his Anglophone reputation. In thesecond half of the twentieth century Maussbecame almost exclusively associated with hisessay The gift (1925). As Lygia Sigaud has pointedout, this essay’s renown as a key work ofmodern anthropology owes more to the effortsof Lévi-Strauss and Sahlins than to its original

Book reviews 467


reception by Mauss’s contemporaries. Moreover,its central message – that the principle of thearchaic gift is still intrinsic to capitalisteconomies – has been replaced by thecommonplace understanding that ‘our’self-interested markets stand opposed to ‘their’gift economies. It seems that Mauss’s fame hasgrown in inverse proportion to knowledge of hisactual writings.

It should therefore be a matter of somecelebration that his occasional writings ontechniques and technology have been publishedin English. Nathan Schlanger is an archaeologistbased in Paris and Cambridge and thus wellplaced to perform this task. His introduction issubstantial, being partly based on earlierpublished work. He points out variations in theconception of techniques and technology,settling for a traditional French approach totechniques as the objects and technology astheir cultural rationale. A lot hinges on Mauss’shistorical relationship to Durkheim, withtechnology as a major marker of theirdifferences. Durkheim started out with a friendlyand nuanced attitude towards historicalmaterialism, but his sociology marginalizedtechnology (along with much else), and this wasconfirmed by his ‘religious turn’. In the process,he stepped back from engaging fully withmodernity, and this was reflected in his neglectof techniques.

Mauss was never simply his uncle’s man; butthe First World War set him off on a radicallynew path, partly in response to the horrors ofthe conflict, partly because of Durkheim’spremature death. He engaged fully with modernsociety, throwing himself into politicaljournalism, taking up the nation as his mainobject of research, and committing himself to atotalizing vision, to the idea of l’homme total andits counterpart, the ‘total social fact’. Three-fifthsof the political writings assembled by Fournier(Écrits politiques, 1997) belong to the period1920-5, at the end of which Mauss wrote Thegift. Anglophone anthropologists are scarcelyaware of any of this, and it is to Schlanger’scredit that, with this volume, he compels widerrecognition of Mauss’s socialist modernism. Heraises the idea of ‘civilization’ in this context,showing that Mauss was open to the currents ofworld history while rejecting both extremediffusionism and narrow nationalism. Mausscame to give special emphasis to techniques inhis teaching and writing, suggesting that, as asource of what is fundamentally equal inhumanity, they should be a major preoccupationof ethnography. His desire to confront the world

of machines directly gave rise on occasion to adegree of romanticism, but it certainly flew inthe face of contemporary Durkheim-inspiredtrends in anthropology, which took refuge inrural exotica. We are reminded finally of Mauss’shumanity and humility, from which few wouldcare to dissent. Whether he left us with aninspiring programme for studying technology,however, is more moot.

Schlanger’s introduction is judicious andinformative, but the pickings from the greatman’s oeuvre are unavoidably slim, not just insize, but also in their content. Of the 192 pageshere, Mauss’s original writings account for 57

per cent. A long essay (forty-four pages) on‘Technology’ based on 1935 lectures appeared aschapter 4 of the Manuel d’ethnographie (1947).This Manual of ethnography, edited with anintroduction by Nick Allen, will be publishedshortly in the same series. Two essays –‘Civilisations: their elements and forms(1929/1930) and ‘Techniques of the body’ (1935),which is already well known in Englishtranslation – constitute a third of this material;the rest is a series of short fragments.Introduction, apparatus and illustrations add upto the remaining eighty-two pages.

Like many others, I have fond memories ofreading ‘Techniques of the body’. Theintellectual climate has moved strongly inMauss’s direction over the last few decades,and there are lots of interesting sociologicalanecdotes here: about British soldiers whocannot use French spades, and girls in Paris andNew York walking like Hollywood actresses.But he does not take them anywhere. Forced tobear the weight of being the most completeexpression of his interest in techniques, the piecejust does not stand up. It turns out to beconceptually confused, methodologicallyunrealizable as a project, and not evensociological in any systematic sense – a deadend, in other words, which has deservedly led tono further work in this line. There are signs inhis later work that Mauss no longer cared forintellectual rigour, if he ever did. For example,he tells us that the original stimulus to hisinterest in this topic was an article on swimmingin the Encyclopedia Britannica; but he cannot bebothered to look up the name of its author!There is even a question about how soon hismind began to deteriorate. But I suspect that theproblem with this essay and much else here hasa more specific cause. In The gift, Mauss rejectedDurkheim’s sociological reductionism andembraced a vague notion of human totality; butin doing so, he lost analytical focus and even his

Book reviews468


sociological roots. Here and elsewhere in thisvolume, his attempt at being systematic ends upas an arid classification, offering today’s readerseven less intellectual nourishment than before.

This collection is notable for the publicationof a slender extract from a posthumouspublication, ‘La nation’ (1953). This sixty-pagearticle came from a book proposal of 1920,when Mauss set out to study the two great ideasof the post-war world, ‘nation’ and ‘socialism’,and their unity as the nationalization of socialism(an idea he borrowed from the British Fabians,especially the Webbs). Schlanger’s excerpt islimited to a few pages concerning the idea ingeneral, that of civilization and technology. Likeeverything else Mauss started as a book-lengthproject, this was never finished. When takenwith the bulk of the Écrits politiques, however,this focus should be central to any assessment ofMauss’s mature work as a social thinker in theline of Jaurès and Blum. It is a sign of howremoved twentieth-century anthropologybecame from reality that it was possible forAnglophones both to celebrate Mauss as an iconand to remain ignorant of his genuineintellectual concerns. The present volume in itssmall way begins to redress this unfortunatesituation, and the editor is to be congratulatedon his initiative. Of course, when we look moreclosely at what Mauss did and did not do, hisiconic status may be somewhat tarnished. Buthis general example still has the power toinspire, and maybe that is what counts.

Keith Hart Goldsmiths College

Nash, June (ed.). Social movements: ananthropological reader. xiv, 344 pp., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Blackwell Publishing,2004. £60.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper)

In recent years there has been a re-emergence ofinterest in social movements – the collectiveresistance by people that rests in the terrainbetween mass revolution and everyday forms ofresistance, and that offers marginalized peoplean alternative political voice to that which isoffered by mainstream development, politicalparties, or Marxism-socialism. Ananthropological reader on social movements is awelcome contribution to a synthesis and analysisof this interest.

Nash’s reader is a collection of case studiesfrom across the world – the essays focus onCentral America, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia,Brazil, the United States, Thailand, Afghanistan,Egypt, Southern Africa, Papua, Sri Lanka, and

India. The movements under considerationrange from women’s groups, fair tradeorganizations, and indigenous rights activism toreligious reform groups and the scouts. Theissues covered are also diverse and include landrights, women’s rights, anti-privatization ofwater, HIV, and radical Islam. As such the readerbrings together an important range of casestudies that will be a point of reference acrossmany disciplines – anthropology, but alsogeography, sociology, development, andpolitical science.

In reading together such a rich and diverserange of case studies, one is left with morequestions than Nash can answer about the risingacademic interest in social movements. Firstly,what is particularly new about suchmovements? Nash’s volume (e.g. Kasmir,Sylvian) shows how class-consciousness stillmatters and that, contrary to the proposal ofsome of the new social movements theorists,cultural issues are not necessarily the centralmotivating force of social movements. Whilethese continuities with older forms ofmobilization emerge, Nash’s collection is guidedby the assumption that social movements are anew form of response to the recent tensionscreated by globalization processes (e.g. thefragmentation of society, de-territorialization,and privatization). This common assumptionbegs explicit analysis. How do the examples hererelate to older forms of mobilization andarticulating politics in the same regions? What, ifany, are the comparative historical continuitiesand changes between the mobilizations analysedin the current context of globalization and thoseof earlier periods?

Secondly, what are the ethical and analyticalimplications of comparing, beneath a singlelens, collective organizations as different as aright-wing government-sponsored scoutmovement, religious reform groups, andindigenous rights activists? For instance, whathappens when the political work of onemovement undermines that of another? How arethe conflicts and politics between these differentorganizations played out? What implications dosuch tensions have on how we theorize socialmovements or even on how we frame whatcounts as a social movement? What are theanalytical advantages/disadvantages of treatingthese very different kinds of phenomena as one?If, as Nash proposes, ‘the growing autonomysought by the participants’ (p. 22) is one of thethemes that unites the social movements in thebook, how do the tensions between structureand agency play out comparatively, over space

Book reviews 469


and time, in these varying organizational forms?Do all the different forms equally enable theirparticipants ‘a voice and space of their own’(p. 22), and to what extent is the issue ofautonomy dependent on particular historicaland social processes and contexts?

Thirdly, what is the relation of socialmovements to other forms of resistance? Socialmovements are often proposed as an alternativeto more violent armed rebellion. For instance,the ‘peaceful’ Sarvadoya Movement in Sri Lanka(Bond) is included here whilst the Tamil Tigersare not. Yet, it is clear that many of themovements here have a direct relation witharmed rebellion of class struggle. This isdemonstrated not only by the choice of coverphoto of the People’s Front in Kathmandu,Nepal, but also by some of the chapters. Forinstance, women’s activism in Andhra Pradesh(Reddy) is intimately tied to the emergence andspread of the extreme left-wing armedrevolutionary Naxalite movement. In what waysdoes ethnographic research enable us to blur thelines that are often drawn between socialmovements and revolution? What are theanalytical and political implications?

And finally, what should the anthropologists’roles be in studying these movements? Nashtells us that her ‘main preoccupation inorganizing this anthology is to document,through case studies of social movements, theongoing task of building the institutionalnetworks needed to transform the policiesrequired to ensure social justice in theglobalization process’ (p. 4). This is an activistanthropologist agenda – to provide activistweapons by ‘generating a new vocabulary forengaging with, documenting and analysing suchmovements’ (p. 4). Yet, the best of the casestudies in the volume use ethnographic researchto show the complexity of particular situationswhich warn against a simple celebration/supportof social movements. One notable contributionin this respect is that of Sylvian. An analysis ofindigenous rights activism in the context of theSan, Sylvian’s research warns against theirculturally essentialist representations that stressindigenous people’s unique relation to the land.These cultural representations exclude thematerial implications of political economy andclass exploitation faced by the San. Suchethnographic analysis raises important questionsas to the role of anthropologists in socialmovements that the introduction to such acollection might fruitfully have discussed. Shouldour priorities in researching social movements beour activist positions and inclinations? Or should

they be our commitment to grounded holisticethnographic scholarly research? What are theimplications of these positions in the ways inwhich we frame, pursue, write, and use ourresearch?

Alpa Shah Goldsmiths College

Ross, Marc Howard. Cultural contestation inethnic conflict. xix, 360 pp., maps, tables,illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2007.£45.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper)

Explanations of ethnic conflicts rarely draw oncultural accounts, according to Marc HowardRoss; and if they do, they tend to invoke culturein simplistic and unsatisfactory ways. Ross, apolitical scientist, nevertheless has a soft spot foranthropologists, whose concepts of culturalworlds and their consistent attention to thecentrality of symbolic meaning in accounting forethnic (and other) conflicts, in his view, add animportant dimension to the understanding ofethnic conflicts.

Ross’s book consists of an empiricallywide-ranging attempt to substantiate his viewof ethnic conflict, which is based on a‘psychocultural’ model according to whichconflicts are not caused by cultural differences,nor merely expressed through an overt,instrumentalized cultural idiom, but connectedto symbolically meaningful life-worlds in wayswhich ultimately have a direct bearing on theconflict dynamics. He talks of the ambiguity ofhistorical narratives, the importance of educationin developing shared, fixed identities, thesignificance of ritual events and symbols such asflags, and, in a way indebted to Victor Turner,about the expressive and instrumental poles ofcollective symbols as they are employed inpolitics. His cases range from the fraught butpeaceful Castilian-Catalonian relationship, thecompeting historical narratives of post-apartheidSouth Africa, and the marching season in Belfast,to conflicts over Muslim headscarves in Franceand historical narratives in Israel/Palestine.

The argument, strongly informed byanthropological theory, is mainly directedagainst the so-called ‘realists’ of political science,whose view it is that conflicts are fought overscarce resources conventionally defined (usuallyland, economic resources or political power),but it may also be invoked against currentlyfashionable Darwinian approaches to conflict orsimplistic (and dangerous) cultural determinism.Ross succeeds in demonstrating that the conflictshe describes as ethnic do, indeed, have

Book reviews470


competition over scarce resources at their core,but that a scarce resource may just as well beself-esteem or recognition as it may be land orpolitical sovereignty.

The book is an admirable piece of work, andit is an important contribution to – and acorrective to much of the mainstream literaturein – the political science of group conflict, but itis not flawless. Notably, the use of the term‘ethnic’ in the title and elsewhere is unfortunate.Many of the examples and some of the maincases in the book (such as the foulardcontroversy in France) have no ethnic element.A wider concept such as identity politics wouldnot only have been more accurate, but wouldalso have encouraged the author to explain theparticular form of the groups that emerge. Sinceneither ethnic groups nor other abstractcollectivities are natural, the prevalence ofparticular principles of identification needs to beexplained or at least mentioned as somethingthat needs to be accounted for. By connectinghis contested narratives, and their existentialappeal, to historical events and their implicationsfor the conditions of life in the societies inquestion, Ross would have come closer to thecultural life-worlds which are at the centre of hisexplanation. This would also have brought hiswork closer to anthropology, which in this casewould not have been a bad idea.

It may also have added depth to thetheoretical position if the author haddistinguished properly between culture andidentity. He fails to problematize the uneasy fitbetween cultural differences and ethnic contrasts(at the core of this dilemma is the fact thatculture is continuous while identities arediscontinuous), and, as a consequence, hisimportant final chapter, ‘Culture’s central role inethnic conflict’, conflates conflicts over politicalrecognition and power (e.g. the South Africancase) with conflicts over meaning or values (e.g.the foulard affair).

It would not seem appropriate to lamentthe lack of more references to relevantanthropological research in a political sciencebook which, in fact, takes the intellectual projectof anthropology seriously. This is also not aproblem with the book; instead, I should like tohave seen the author engage with themacro-sociology of the state – the state beingthe common denominator of all his cases – andthe social philosophy of groups, individuals, andrights. This would have enabled him to highlightthe uniqueness of contemporary identitypolitics, based on the institutional dimensions ofmodern states as it is, and to probe deeper into

the nature of group identification and itsrelationship to cultural differences.

Anthropologists, and not just politicalscientists, should read Ross’s book, even if thetheoretical position he develops is a close relativeof familiar anthropological perspectives. Partly,the book is recommended for its wealth ofempirical cases, some of them described inadmirable detail; but more important is theconvincing demonstration of a skill at whichanthropologists used to be rather highlyaccomplished, namely that of systematiccomparison.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen University of Oslo

Skalník, Peter. Anthropology of Europe:teaching and research. viii, 243 pp., tables,bibliogrs. Prague: Set Out, 2005. (paper)

The essays collected in the volume Anthropologyof Europe: teaching and research, edited by PeterSkalník, build upon a workshop held in the EastBohemian village of Dolní Roven in 2003. Thecontributions, which are grouped into twogeneral sections (‘Theoretical texts’ and‘Research reports’), vary widely in topic, amountof detail, and quality. Most of the articlesconsider in an integrated manner both teachingand research, grounding broader theoreticalquestions – for example, historical distinctionsbetween ethnology and anthropology, thecontemporary status of ‘culture areas’, or thedebate over native anthropology – in concretediscussions about the politics of hiring, funding,and specific efforts to create common curriculaand build new European institutions foranthropological knowledge (such as the MaxPlanck Institute for Social Anthropology).

Several essays in the first section criticallyinterrogate the definition and meaning ofEurope, particularly in the context of European(EU) integration and the transition from statesocialism in Eastern Europe. The authors putforward ambitious agendas for an anthropologyof Europe, even as they differ significantly overhow best to understand and study the object ofanalysis (Europe). Andrés Barrera-González, forexample, contends that much of the previousanthropological work on European societiesrepresented anthropology in Europe rather thanan anthropology of Europe. Barrera-Gonzálezargues that to realize the latter requires restoringanthropology as the ‘ “science of man” and/orsociety’ (p. 10) in extensive dialogue with othersocial sciences (particularly sociology). Thisvision of anthropology contrasts sharply with

Book reviews 471


that of other authors, such as Hana Cervinková’sembrace of the postmodern notion ofanthropology as cultural critique, HanaNovotná’s focus on global-local articulationswithin a postmodern frame, and Chris Hann’sattention to longue durée processes. Likewise,Barrera-González states his disagreement withChris Hann, who in his piece urges thereconceptualization of the field as Eurasia.Unfortunately, the opportunity to debateseriously the adequacy of the concept of Europeitself (as opposed to the issue of how to defineit) that might have played out in these piecesdoes not materialize; Barrera-González, forinstance, embeds his complaint with Hann’sideas into a footnote, rather than engaging theissues more centrally.

Other authors take as axiomatic the notion ofa European anthropology, focusing instead onwhat cultural commonalities might unite andthereby define Europe. Drawing on Morgan’skinship classifications, Patrick Heady drawsdistinctions between Scandinavian, centralWestern, and Mediterranean patterns of kinshipterminologies, highlighting remarkablecontinuities between residential patterns andfamily structures (even as he gives virtually noattention to either the political manipulation ofkinship ideologies or the status of kinship inEastern Europe). Davide Torsello, reflecting onfieldwork in the Slovak village of Králová nadVáhom, suggests that a focus on questions oftrust can usefully inform broader study ofEurope. Hana Novotná instead argues forpopular culture as a common denominator ofEuropean identity, especially in light of the rapiddisappearance of the rural, agrarian societiesthat engaged previous generations ofanthropologists. In keeping with this shift awayfrom the rural, Ždenek Uherek focuses on broaddifferences in urban networks that havehistorically characterized various sub-regions ofEurope (such as the Mediterranean, CentralEurope, and the Balkans). Uherek then localizesfrom broad questions to a specific analysis of

urban culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and inparticular Sarajevo, failing to return to the largerissue of how an examination of urban culturecan help anthropologists sharpen theirtheoretical and methodological approaches toEurope.

Notably, several of the specific case studies(such as Magdalena Elchinova’s analysis ofmyth and group boundaries in Bulgaria andMacedonia) do not address explicitly thevolume’s themes. As examples ofanthropological research on Europe, thesearticles offer material of interest but the reasonfor their inclusion in the book does not proveclear. Peter Skalník instead makes a strong casefor the importance of critical re-studies inanthropology, both in Europe and beyond, andcontributors offer (uneven) insights fromre-studies in Varsany, Hungary (Mihály Sárkány)and Dolní Roven (Skalník, Chapurukha M.Kusimba, and Ji r í Šubrt). Several authors –including Rajko Muršic, Hana Cervinková, andChris Hann – emphasize the political value of arevitalized, public anthropology in and ofEurope, particularly in the post-socialisttransition societies. Shocked by crude racialdepictions in contemporary Slovene textbooks,for example, Muršic urges that anthropologicalknowledge become a key part of public schoolcurricula.

The contributors to the volume displayvarying levels of optimism or pessimism aboutthe future of anthropology in and of Europe.Much of the collection’s critical analysis focuseson post-socialist societies in Europe, raising thequestion as to what degree the volume reallypoints towards a comprehensive agenda for theanthropology of the wider European context.The essays do not possess enough coherence tosatisfy this reader, and the selection of topicsappears somewhat hodge-podge. Thisshortcoming, however, may follow out of thevery fragmentation of anthropological studies ofEurope that the contributors hope to rectify.

Pamela Ballinger Bowdoin College

Book reviews472


Documents

Review