BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 625

ultimately fed the resistance fighters in both the villagesand the towns, an economy the British ruthlessly at-tempted to disrupt through such humiliating tactics asinvasions of home and body searches. This section isimportant for recalling the vicious measures the Brit-ish took to quell resistance, a matter too often glossedover in the histories. By filling in the role of women inthe revolt of the 1930s, Swedenburg is able to histor-icize the participation of women in the Intifada of the1980s, which he discusses at some length. The com-parison reveals, among other things, the depressingextent to which not only women's contributions toarmed struggle tend to be forgotten but also their callsfor self-determination to be suppressed by the patriar-chal nature of the nationalist movement.

Swedenburg is at his most perceptive and originalwhen, for example, he looks at different styles of head-dress and the complex ways in which they can marknot only class and region but also allegiance or antago-nism toward Palestinian nationalism; or the way inwhich he reads, provocatively and disturbingly, the Is-raeli Holocaust monument or the site of Masada. Myone criticism is that his use of the subaltern frame-work, though valid and illuminating for the Palestiniancase, also unproblematically reifies its notion of the"popular." We are told in this book of the revolt's

"popular base," of its "popular classes," and so forth,but the reader is often irritatingly left wondering justwho or what this "popular" might be in the specificinstance under discussion.

Answers are occasionally given in terms of terri-tory and landholdings, lineage structures, village com-position, significant political leaders, and so forth, butthey are not enough, and they are not illuminatingenough, to leave the concept of the popular more thana vague and slightly mysterious symbol. And finally,though it is quite interesting and indeed necessary tosuggest a link between the Intifada and memories ofthe revolt, one might ask which memories of resis-tance the 1936 revolt drew on. It is almost as if itsprang up "spontaneously," and Swedenburg impliesas much in certain places of his text, yet one cannothelp wondering whether it too has historical antece-dents and whether or not they can be investigated. Forexample, is it too farfetched to think that the Arabrevolt of 1916 was also remembered by the peasants of1936, both as an anticolonial/nationalist struggle andone that relied on guerrilla tactics? Yet these short-comings do not detract from what is a remarkably suc-cessful attempt to uncover the field of contested histo-ries, forgotten histories, and even future histories of thecontinuing struggle for Palestinian self-determination. •

The Balance of Textual Power

CHARLES LINDHOLMBoston University

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: OralHistory and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. An-drew Shryock. Berkeley: University of California Press,1997. 359 pp.

Reading Andrew Shryock's brilliant book is anevocative and challenging experience, both intellectu-ally and morally. His research is part of an excitingnew approach that brings anthropological insight tobear on the texts and narratives previously the exclu-sive domain of Orientalists and folklorists. But wherethese experts were concerned primarily with transla-tion for its own sake, Shryock has more theoreticalends in mind. He compares the oral histories of someof Jordan's Bedouin tribes in order to show that talesof the heroic deeds of violent and generous ancestorsare central to each group's conception of itself andprovide the rhetorical basis for their continued con-tests with one another. Moreover, he demonstrateshow the advent of literacy, as well as the struggle forthe power to write a definitive account of an authentic

tribal genealogy (one that necessarily represses alter-native versions), is an essential aspect of the present-day national political landscape in Jordan.

Shryock skillfully interweaves many voices in hisaccount. The heroic narratives themselves, as re-corded from the rousing declamations of knowledge-able elders, are used to stimulate the recitation of op-posing versions from men of other tribes. The authorargues that traditional Bedouin historical discourse ischaracterized by just such multivocality and irreduc-ible contradiction. This is because narration of thepast is, in its very nature, rooted in the particular inter-ests of antagonistic lineages and clans. Segmentarylineage ideology, almost killed off by recent anthropo-logical writers, is here resuscitated in a new and moresupple guise, as Shryock skillfully reveals how princi-ples of genealogical opposition provide the Bedouinwith a kind of imaginary blueprint that they can use tomake sense of their divisive universe.

With the onset of literacy, the story becomes evenmore interesting, since writing concretizes what wasformerly fluid and makes one version "official." Shryock'sown narrative is therefore rendered extraordinarily

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complex and morally ambiguous, since each tribalspokesman hoped that Shryock's account would vali-date his tribe's superiority and demonstrate the falsityand baseness of his rivals. Indeed, Shryock does arguethat some narratives can and do compel the silence ofothers by their rhetorical richness and poetic beauty(as one old reciter says, "a story without a poem is alie"); these powerful tales are also often more compat-ible with other external accounts (taken from colonialhistories and travelers' stories) and, thus, more believ-able.

It is greatly to his credit that Shryock does notdeny history its actuality and is willing to render ver-dicts about which narratives are most convincing. Ashe notes, such reasoned judgments about historicaltruth are in the great tradition of Islam itself, wherescholarship is devoted to determining the veracity ofstories about the life of the Prophet. This goal is ac-complished not only by determining historical plausi-bility (as in Western historical research) but also byjudging the character of those who recite the story.

Denying the truth of a narrative necessarily impugnsboth the virtue of the teller and the virtue of those whotold him.

Because he decides which stories are most com-pelling, Shryock inevitably will be seen as insultingsome of those elders who have recited their historiesto him. He also will be seen as abusing the hospitalityof the charismatic and protean Dr. Ahmad 'Uwaydial-'Abbadi, a local Bedouin, a well-known anthropolo-gist, and a political activist whose efforts to claim thehighest place for his own clan are placed into deepdoubt by Shryock's research. Shryock recognizes thepotential consequences of his own attempt at authori-tative writing; he also embraces moral ambiguity andknows that his work has perhaps altered the balanceof textual power in the heated Jordanian politicalscene. At the same time, he also realizes that writtentexts have not yet replaced the oral tradition amongthe Bedouin and probably never will. What is mostimportant about this indispensable book is that itshows why this might be so. •

On the Anthropology of Literacy

RICHARD J. PARMENTIER

Brandeis University

Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writingon a Polynesian Atoll. Niko Besnier. Studies in the Socialand Cultural Foundations of Language, 16. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995. 234 pp.

Niko Besnier's Literacy, Emotion, and Author-ity, a meticulously researched and analytically sophis-ticated exercise in the ethnography of literacy, dealswith two prominent genres of written communication,personal letters and sermons, found on the Polynesianatoll of Nukulaelae. This, the smallest island of theTuvalu Group in the central Pacific Ocean, with apopulation of less than 400 people, all of whom occupyone small islet on the western side of the lagoonwould, at first glance, look like a perfect place to studyoral speech genres rather than literacy. But as it turnsout, thanks to Besnier's extensive field research from1979 through 1991, it is precisely the pervasiveness offace-to-face orality that gives Nukulaelae literacy itsspecial marked qualities. And it is these distinctivequalities that enable Besnier to employ the genre ofthe ethnographic monograph as a springboard for pro-found reflection on the current status of research onliteracy and as a foundation for his programmatic re-formulation of an ethnographic research strategy that

gives equal weight to linguistic forms, social contexts,and ideological norms.

In step with the main thrust of recent ethno-graphic work on literacy, Besnier rejects as simplisticand mechanical the "autonomous" model of literacy,according to which literacy (especially alphabetic lit-eracy) has certain automatic causal or facilitating con-sequences, including cognitive and personality con-figurations and sociocultural ramifications. First,because (it is claimed) written communication createsa spatial and temporal distanciation between the eventof encoding and the event of decoding, literacy en-courages context-independent cognitive skills. Sec-ond, because the medium of literacy tends to be someenduring, even precious, object (stone, parchment, pa-per), literary products tend to become commodifiedtargets of economic manipulation. Third, becausecompetence in the written register marks elite classesor specialized groups, literacy inherently promotes in-creased social inequality or hierarchy. Fourth, becauseliteracy appears to its users as powerful if not magi-cally efficacious, it will become more highly valuedthan the orality it supplants. And finally, the net resultof all these factors is taken to be a fundamentallyasymmetrical historical dynamic following the intro-duction of literacy into a nonliterate social setting,such that hegemonic power accrues to the bringers ofliteracy and powerless passivity to the receivers.