Book reviews

Correction guides us on a whistle-stop tour of material Please note that in the Book Reviews Section of culture studies and its relation to an the December 2007 issue of the JRAI (volume 13, anthropology of the senses. We learn that issue 4), the bibliographic details of the reviewed different cultures create their own sensory book, Signe Howell. The kinning of foreigners: orders; that sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste transnational adoption in a global perspective, may be combinatory. Interestingly, the authors published on page 1040 of the issue, contained raise the possibility of considering pain and an error. The price of the book should be £45 speech as senses. We move rapidly through (cloth) and £15 (paper). recent intellectual debates in material culture towards what is described as the advent of the ‘sensory turn’–arecognition in material culture of the multi-sensorial qualities of the artefactual Anthropology of ‘the senses’ world – before ending with a neat summary of key points to ponder. This of course sets the stage for the volume’s impetus: the Edwards,Elizabeth,Chris Gosden & multi-sensory dimensions of artefacts, colonial Ruth B. Phillips (eds). Sensible objects: encounters, and museums around which the colonialism, museums and material culture. xiv, contributions are organized. 306 pp., maps, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New The first set of contributions leads with two York: Berg Publishers, 2006.£50.00 (cloth), papers examining the multi-sensory aspects of £18.99 (paper) African modernity. Geurts and Adikah begin with an exploration of a local concept translated as Over the last decade or so, a growing number of ‘feeling in the body, flesh or skin’ to reflect on anthropological studies have focused on the artefacts and enduring traditions in southeastern senses in society. These studies give a critique of Ghana, while Buckley provides a novel Western preoccupations with sight and hearing, examination of the relation between studio once indicators of so-called ‘civilized’ societies, photography and citizenship in the Gambia and move towards engaging with the through an ethos of elegance: the feeling of multi-sensory channels of human sociality. being cherished and wanted by the nation-state. This volume adds another to the list, with Sutton’s contribution provides an extremely colonialism, museums, and material culture as interesting insight into the interrelationship its focus. It consists of papers predominantly between the senses, skill, and memory in from anthropologists, but with contributions everyday cooking. Two short ethnographies from art historians, art experts, and of cooking in Greece and the US provide archaeologists, most of which were presented at examples of contrasting social contexts for the symposium ‘Engaging all the senses’ held in learning-how-to-cook. This paper stands out, Portugal in 2003. much like the work of David Howes, in that its The volume begins with an introductory strength lies in the fact that in exploring both chapter (Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips) which the technical and sensory aspects of cooking,

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it urges us to consider pluralistic ways of possibly imagine that what things really want is knowing. not necessarily to draw attention to themselves The sensory aspects of colonialism are but instead to shy away into the background. addressed in the second set of contributions. Graeme Were University College London Te Awekotuku leads with a study of Maori tattooing, considering pain as a sense. While this contribution provides useful historical and Geurts,Kathryn Linn. Culture and the ethnographic detail, more could possibly have senses: bodily ways of knowing in an African been provided about the process of gouging the community. xvi, 315 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. skin as a transformative and sensory process London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press, rather than in terms of social memory and 2002.£37.95 (cloth), £15.95 (paper) cultural identity. Indeed, the tactile skills acquired by Maori tattooists are left unremarked. Among the more subtle discussions of cultural Jonaitis tackles taste and smell in relation to differences can be found the idea that culturally pungent fish grease consumed by the conditioned experience might be grounded in Kwakwaka’wakw in British Columbia. In reading culturally divergent modes of perception. The this material, one really gets an impression of implications of this idea might seem merely the overpowering flavours that have offended reasonable to a phenomenologist but would the European palate. Barringer’s exploration of definitely pose an epistemological threat to an mass ritual concentrates on the senses of sight old-school empiricist. The issue has remained and hearing. He considers the performative peripheral not because of its potential aspects of Empire in India and in London significance but because culturally conditioned through musical performances and anthems. variations in perception are difficult to The final contributions encourage us to think investigate. Nevertheless, in concert with of museums as sensescapes. Classen and Howes classicists’ discussions of mnemonic devices in examine the history of touch in museums, the oral historical epics, anthropologists have formalization of seeing in exhibition spaces, and engaged in worthwhile reflections about the the consequent de-sensing of artefacts on senses, often revolving around sensitivity to display. While this paper provides some comparative differences in the transmission of wonderful insights into sensory relations, knowledge when based in literacy or orality. the development of handling galleries in Another area of reflection, more problematic ethnographic museums seems to have been methodologically though quite stimulating, has overlooked. Losche’s paper concentrates on an directed attention to kinesics and kinaesthetics, analysis of the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific that is, to body language and to body awareness Peoples at the American Museum of Natural in communication and learning. History and how attempts to contextualize A highly worthwhile contribution to this area artefacts through sound, space, and light of inquiry is Kathryn Linn Geurts’s Culture and encountered difficulties. Feldman offers a the senses: bodily ways of knowing in an African thoughtful paper on the relation between community. She states her main thesis on her bodies, objects, and the senses through a opening page: ‘Ultimately, this book will argue discussion of many Bushman casts and the that sensing, [or] ... “bodily ways of gathering thousands of shoes of Nazi concentration camp information,” is profoundly involved with a victims exhibited in museums, while Ouzman society’s epistemology, the development of covers a range of issues in museum and its cultural identity, and its forms of archaeological practice, concluding with a being-in-the-world’ (p. 3). Her introductory discussion of the senses, story-telling, and chapter provides an overview of anthropological identity formation in Southern Africa. This is precedents on the themes of her research. The particularly relevant to recent discussions by field location for her project is the Anlo-Ewe- archaeologists on soundscapes. speaking area of southeastern Ghana. It is Overall, the volume ought to be considered difficult to convey the impressive detail with as a starting-point from which to explore further which Geurts portrays the Anlo Ewe ‘sensorium’, the anthropology of the senses. This is especially that is, its sensory ordering of perception and so as, while the contributors have obviously set experience. She relies on a wide range of out to highlight the role of the senses in society, elaborately integrated data, and it is clear that rather frustratingly several papers tend to lose she was profoundly involved in her fieldwork. focus on the senses in their analysis. Perhaps this After a second chapter that provides was deliberate; as ‘sensible’ objects, one could ethnographic background on the Anlo Ewe,

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Geurts organizes her discussion into four parts. attempted such a complex cultural analysis, but The first part, chapter 3, focuses on Anlo Ewe even more to her credit is the extent to which conceptions of the senses, the linguistic she has succeeded. Geurts’s detailed categories with which Anlo-Ewe-speakers define descriptions certainly resonated well with my their own ways of perception and experience. personal experience of the Anlo Ewe area. I hope This chapter, where other studies might end, is that other scholars will want to engage the where Geurts only begins. The second part of wealth of material she presents and the larger her presentation, chapters 4 and 5, focuses on questions she raises within their own areas of what she calls ‘moral embodiment and sensory familiarity or expertise. socialization’. In these chapters, Geurts describes John M. Chernoff Pittsburgh, PA child-rearing from the perspective of kinaesthethics – in her words, how ‘balance, movement, and a more generalized feeling in Howes,David (ed.). Empire of the senses: the the body ... are critical components of an sensual culture reader.x,421 pp., bibliogrs. indigenous theory of inner states’ – bolstered by Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, 2005. extensive observations of customary practices £19.99 (paper) and symbolism showing ‘how these understandings are embedded in the child’s It is always a challenge to review an anthology. earliest experience’ (p. 84) In the third part of Firstly, it offers an embarrassment of riches, her discussion, chapters 6 and 7, Geurts making it a betrayal when chapters are left out broadens her focus to aspects of identity and of discussion. This is especially so in a collection personhood in Anlo Ewe culture at large. She so packed with exceptional contributions, from traces the etymology of the name Anlo as a anthropology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, specific bodily posture to points of significance sociology, museology, geography, history, law, in Anlo history and cultural practice, and she literature, and neurology. Secondly, anthologies provides a multi-dimensional discussion of the are often rich in their parts but seldom coherent notion of balance (physical, psychological, in their whole. Not so with this volume, one of literal, and metaphorical) from concepts of being many from the ‘Sensory formations’ series. human to manifestations in ritual and communal Chapters are cannily selected to make practice. In the fourth part of her discussion, connections and drive readers to their sources; chapters 8 and 9, Geurts both broadens and the introduction provides overall theoretical narrows her focus to examine notions of framing and contextualization within a broad individual health and illness reflected against academic literature; and the organizational Anlo cosmological and religious models, structure, with excellent section introductions particularly vodu, followed by an interesting and a final ‘Sensory bibliography’, makes it a reflection on such conditions as blindness, terrific teaching and reference tool. deafness, muteness, loss of mobility, or insanity, The anthology is divided into five parts. ‘The when aspects highlighted in her preceding prescience of the senses’ deals with the senses discussion of the sensorium are compromised. and cognition in two chapters that develop ideas In her final chapter, Geurts provides an of synaesthesia, or the interconnection of the interpretative analytic framework for her senses. In McLuhan’s ‘five sense sensorium’ the ethnographic presentation that revisits the senses are seen as being shaped by culture and ethnological situation she portrayed in her first technology rather than determined by biology, chapter. while Sacks’s case studies describing the new Culture and the senses is an ambitious book, worlds opened up for blind people by their grounded both in intensive field research and in condition challenge facile assumptions of multi-disciplinary learnedness. Geurts’s area of disability by suggesting that it is through inquiry poses difficulties because it requires the imagination that individual worlds are created. application of a variety of methods and types of ‘The shifting sensorium’ historicizes perception data. Examining the sensory bases of knowledge in chapters by: Stewart, whose account of the in cross-cultural context is fertile ground for the senses in philosophy and literature cautions appreciation of deep aspects of culture and against sacrificing the aesthetics of expression to cultural differences. We have so few systematic philosophical debates of the memory of studies like Geurts’s because few scholars have experience; Classen, whose examination of how entered this uncharted territory with the idea of feminine sensibilities have led to suspicions of going beyond launching a few tantalizing witchcraft suggests that not all aspects of speculations. It is to Geurts’s credit even to have existence can be forced into visibility; Mazzio,

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who uses a seventeenth-century ‘academic ideologies conveyed through sensory values and drama’ to portray a social sensorium in which the practices; thus ‘to question the sensory model is personified senses vie to demonstrate their to question the nature of reality’. Furthermore, superiority over each other (the debut of a young the ‘intersensoriality’ assumed by a cultural Oliver Cromwell as Tactus provides irresistible sensorium orders the senses into a ‘racial trivia); Roberts, who traces how mathematical hierarchy’, ‘regulated so as to express and analysis replaced sensory analysis in the history of enforce the social and cosmic order’. But even if chemistry; and Corbin, who asks if the historian the senses in different cultures are imbued with must remain ‘a prisoner of language’. meaning differently, and structured in different ‘Sensescapes’ features: Classen’s critique of hierarchical orders, are we justified in using such McLuhan’s essentialization of the senses of sight collectivizing expressions as ‘Andaman Islanders and hearing; Geurts’s challenge to neurobiologist certainly think so’ to clinch matters insofar as Damasio’s culturally naïve understanding of these meanings are concerned? This would human capacity; Feld’s riposte to anthropological appear to take too much at face value, offering a theories of emotions that build embodied cabinet of curiosities but leaving unaddressed understandings on an assumed a priori social and the question evoked: that if the senses are locked cultural character; Kondo’s description of ‘the into specific cultural meanings, where is the way of tea’, focusing (as if to substantiate Feld’s space for the ‘free’ body and personal aesthetic complaint) on meaning and exegesis rather than to express itself? sensation; and Roseman’s evocative account, Howes recognizes that the contents of this displaying both irony and pathos, of Malaysian book, and indeed the meanings and practices of forest-dwellers’ imaginative attempts to the senses, cannot be brought under a single participate in a global capitalist economy. common denominator. As language is needed for The last two parts (‘The aestheticization of expression, a paradox remains, but scholars must everyday life’ and ‘The derangement of the be vigilant not to allow a language-based model senses’) begin with a chapter on Thoreau’s ‘all to dictate ‘all cultural and personal experience sentient’ body (Friesen), whose obsessive ‘trail of and expression’. This vigilance, I would caution, scent’ recalls Susskind’s novel Perfume –agrim may also lead astray: Serres’s description of the reminder of what might happen if our senses got language-bound body, ‘preferring to dine on a the better of us. The ‘olfactory turn’ is continued printed menu than eat an actual meal’, is not through to museum design (Drobnick) and the necessarily logocentrism, as Howes infers; it can establishment of scent-free facilities for those also be seen as a desire to prolong the excitement suffering from dystoposthesia, an intolerance to of expectation, the imagining of a meal, which multiple sensorial stimuli associated with the continues to engage the senses. Is a sensation toxins and alienation of industrial capitalism imagined not a sensation? (Fletcher). The journey of the senses towards fully The real danger of a focus on the senses is fledged pathology was prefigured in the studies identified in Connor’s observation – that Serres’s of Strindberg (Ekman), and is evident among the world of the ‘free body’, enjoying sensations at homeless, struggling to minimize sensory leisure, is a ‘monism of the manifold’, solipsistic experiences as the carriers of ‘too much rather than relational. Is it because the senses are otherness’ (Desjarlais). This state of affairs makes insufficient for communication, always turning a materialist capitalist history of the senses inwardly? Are they more about a theory of value imperative, indeed urgent, and Howes’s than a theory of communication? Whatever the ambitious chapter returns to Marx to identify the answer, I came out of this reading with senses ‘lack’ (failure to ‘acknowledge consumption’) on all agog: I could smell better, see better, taste which such a theory might be built. Howes’s final better, feel better. Even if serious pathologies lie question – ‘what theory of value could possibly that way, at least it made me feel alive. capture the “aesthetic plenitude” of the current Lisette Josephides Queen’s University Belfast conjuncture?’ – is an invitation to further debate. Howes’s critical introduction makes two crucial points right away: that the human Korsmeyer,Carolyn (ed.). The taste culture sensorium never exists in a natural state but is reader: experiencing food and drink. ix, 421 pp., the product of culture, imbued with cultural bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, meaning; and that it is hierarchically ordered. 2005.£55.00 (cloth), £19.99 (paper) It follows then that, as well as giving evocative accounts of corporeal life, the ‘sensual A common trap for reviewers of food books is revolution’ also entails the analysis of the social the turn to food metaphors. We learn of a

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‘smorgasbord’ of a book, a ‘cornucopia’ of a contributions and enough sparkling papers to reader, ‘rich’ with ‘delicious morsels’, ‘tasty put the study of taste back where it should be: snippets’, and ‘succulent selections’. I could go on the tips of our tongues. on. But the point is made: switching to a Jeremy MacClancy Oxford Brookes University gastronomic register is neither original nor illuminating. If I called it unpalatable, you might respond it was just deadeningly Parkins,Wendy &Geoffrey Craig. Slow pervasive. living. xii, 180 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, New Korsmeyer wants to explore the range of York: Berg, 2006.£55.00 (cloth), £16.99 taste: a sensation both innate and profoundly (paper) cultural; a mode of distinction both evanescent and deeply rooted. A usually ignored universal, Our uses of food are culturally fundamental for it is a perfect theme for an imaginative editor. the ways in which we live and our forms of life: Korsmeyer does not stay put in one discipline the economy of perception, memory and but wanders widely. Thus there are tradition, the ecology of everyday practice, contributions by philosophers, biologists, material culture and tacit knowledge, the politics gastronomes, sociologists, plus the odd and conflicts related to economic interests and oenologist, chemist, or zen master, as well as the ways of managing the market. several anthropologists. Some contributions Slow living was intended by the authors, were written hundreds of years ago; others as stated in the preface, to serve as ‘the first emerge in print here for the first time. As is now book-length study of Slow Food’. Nevertheless almost de rigueur in readers of food, the mood is the reader should not expect a book-length occasionally lightened by the inclusion of a ethnography of Slow Food. This book aims, recipe or three. rather, at contextualizing the philosophy and the Some papers are brilliant, with unexpected impact of slow living ‘in the global everyday’ (to ideas jumping off the page. Trubek is good on use a phrase frequently used by the authors), the ramifications of terroir in France. Peynaud is with respect to food, but also to time, space, excellent on taste perception. Gronow on the pleasure, and politics. In other words, slow Soviet production of champagne and caviar as living is explored ‘as a response to globalization socialist kitsch makes some fascinating points. and its perceived impact on everyday life’ (p. 2). I wish I had written the section on artificial Slow Food is, therefore, only one possible flavours by Classen and her colleagues. example of the many ‘oppositional modes’ Some papers are more leaden, with their being developed – globally – as responses to authors clearly straining to prise out already globalization, and regional variations, say, from tired insights. The trouble is, with a topic so the American Voluntary Simplicity movement to eminently popular as food, academic writing the Italian Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, would about it can so easily verge towards the have made for an interesting comparative pompous or the platitudinous, for this is one ethnography of such ‘oppositional modes’ that topic in which we could all be experts. focus on ‘the global everyday’. The age of a few papers is already showing: In this work, though, a vast bibliography above all, those tolling the end of taste, thanks (covering, in the main, the approaches of to mechanization, modern markets, and sociology and cultural studies) aims firstly to marketing. But this is a death prematurely reveal the many layers and distinctions implied foretold, as the rise and rise of the organic food in the conscious use of a ‘slow’ manifesto, rather movement indicates. The fear, however, is that than a draconian or nostalgic ‘back to basics’ this recent lurch towards a self-styled approach. For instance, to live slowly does not gastronomic authenticity may just become yet mean necessarily to abandon the pace of another modern class-marker. A fine-grained contemporary life altogether, but rather ‘a knowledge of food becomes the latest hallmark commitment to occupy time more attentively’; of savoir-faire, while obesity-inducing, to live slow does mean to invest in pleasure and diabetes-provoking foods turn into a new so also to indulge in, rather than to withdraw symbol of the overfed, underprivileged. What from, the complexities of food preparation and next: hamburger chains or flavour industrialists connoisseurship – an attitude apparently more sponsoring T-shirts which shout ‘I am ironic than ascetic regarding ‘the global malnourished but proud’? everyday’. To sum up. This is a sufficiently captivating A ‘slow’ approach to the production, collection, with a good number of original distribution, and consumption of food should

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add a new dimension to the contemporary, cannot be considered the only result of their Western search for a newly discovered sensory effects, especially when they do succeed in approach to everyday experience – one that ‘bridging the gap between production and recognizes not only the diversity of sensory consumption’ (p. 133), as I argue elsewhere. worlds, but also their political importance in Secondly there is the risk of getting ‘caught up local and global conflicts, in the texture of local in a commodification of the “authentic” practices, and in the very substance of regional experience’ (p. 122) as yet another economies. Appreciating a local recipe means design-merchandise made available for the also recognizing a social, economic, and political high demand of affluent Western subjects. background to the know-how of skilful local And thirdly, I would add, there is the risk of practices and of the efficiency of local erasing the real actors from the scene – with competences that are handed down in time by their idiosyncrasies, internal conflicts, and genealogy or contiguity, apprenticeship or particularities – while in the very process of contamination. Slow Food can then be read as celebrating them as protagonists. part of a wider phenomenon – which I have Cristina Grasseni University of Bergamo elsewhere called ‘the re-invention of food’ – involving a new culture of taste: a taste for genuine food and a taste for life involving much more than just food-tasting. Art and archaeology Practice is the ultimate dimension for investigating slow living as a conscious engagement with tradition, revival, and their Nuttall,Sarah (ed.). Beautiful/Ugly: African ‘selective deployment’ vis-à-vis notions of and diaspora aesthetics. 416 pp., plates, illus., authenticity and conviviality (p. 8). Nevertheless, bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. the approach used to investigate practice here Press, 2007.£17.99 (paper) is mainly ‘textual and discursive’ rather than one based on ethnography and participant This is a beautiful book: an edited collection of observation (though participant observation and essays, covering a wide range of approaches, interviews do form an important part of the beautifully edited, and full of interesting images. research, for instance in the study of the network On the back cover the reviewers mention its of Città Slow in chapter 4). In particular, ‘theoretical sophistication’. I must confess that the focus is on the interplay and this is not the main quality I found in the book. cross-fertilization between levels of ‘personal The introduction by Sarah Nuttall, ‘Rethinking practice, public values and social organization’ beauty’, explores recent philosophical writings (p. 119), and how they can meld in a public on beauty in American academia that vindicate debate. the enlightened discourse of aesthetics. For For instance, the authors pinpoint public Nuttall, beauty cannot be understood without events as one core level of the political strategy looking at ugliness. The ambiguity between of the Slow Food movement: events are well beauty and ugliness is particularly evident from orchestrated, publicized, covered by the press an African point of view; the dialectical and serve the core purpose of ‘visualizing its relationship of beauty and ugliness is mediated concerns’ (p. 120). Philosophical, aesthetic, and by relationships of power; and arguments that ethical cogency, political empowerment, and propose to define beauty without reference to the ever-growing density and vastness of its ugliness would be ethnocentric. All these ideas networks of presidia are all brought to the fore are not really new: the criticism of ethnocentrism and made visible in powerful mise-en-scènes and disavowal of power in Western philosophy such as the Turin Salone del Gusto or the has been at the core of American cultural studies accompanying event Terra Madre, a gathering for the last thirty years. Having said this, this of representatives from all the peasant argument helps Nuttall bring together a wide communities that host a Slow Food presidium array of essays that may have only a couple of around the world. This is a powerful and things in common: they are about Africa, and successful strategy, which has nevertheless they deal with the aesthetics of everyday life. By raised a few reservations. Firstly the ‘deleterious ‘aesthetics of everyday life’, I mean everyday effects of sudden, substantial media coverage judgements of taste; in this sense the ambiguity on sustainable gastronomy projects in remote of beauty and ugliness, how one can become areas’ (p. 122) shows that such media-market the other, is an interesting subject. It is not short-circuits are pervasive and Slow Food clear why other forms of aesthetic judgement

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 437 like the uncanny or the kitsch are not necessarily contradict the orientalist discourse. considered, in particular when they are so The fact that many of the authors are from Africa relevant to several of the topics discussed in can be read in different ways: the dominance of the book – from sorcery to the use of a South African perspective, strongly influenced mass-mediated images. by American intellectual trends, is not necessarily Still, the chapters are very interesting, in a guarantee of scholarly independence. On the some cases fascinating. Mbembe’s paper on other hand, it must be said that most of the Congolese samba connects the history of authors do engage in complex and nuanced popular music in Congo to its recent history in a arguments which cannot be reduced to somewhat linear way that could have gained celebrations of the creativity of African recycling depth from some ethnographic engagement (or or the beauty of witchcraft. This is a volume just some interviews with the musicians) and a worth diving into, precisely because it is more transnational, Atlantic understanding of beautiful. movements in popular music. Indeed, very Roger Sansi Goldsmiths College similar forms of popular music have been produced in Angola, Brazil, and Jamaica in very different political contexts. Dominique Sabloff,Jeremy A. & William L. Fash Malaquais’s paper on a public monument in (eds). Gordon R. Willey and American Douala and the adverse reactions of the local archaeology: contemporary perspectives. xii, public to its ‘recycling’ aesthetics, which make 252 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Norman: African art popular in Europe, is fascinating. Univ. Oklahoma Press, 2007.$34.95 (cloth) Pippa Stein presents the case of school children in South Africa reproducing the forms of In 2002, the American archaeological traditional ‘fertility’ dolls when asked to make a community lost one of its most renowned sculpture. Not only are the dolls astonishingly scholars in Gordon Randolph Willey. Jeremy A. beautiful, but the stories of the children who Sabloff and William L. Fash are the editors of a made them are also very sensitively presented. thoughtful and timely volume worthy of its Mark Gevisser’s autobiographical stories of race subject. Though a mammoth undertaking and sex in South African swimming pools offer because of the breadth of work produced very sharp insights on discrimination through by Willey, this Festschrift is a model which aesthetic judgement. On a wider sphere of others should follow and an important ‘taste’, several papers deal with food, and its read for contemporary American transient meanings in countries where the excess archaeologists. of food is still a sign of wealth. A couple of In an age of narrowing research topics, papers on the Diaspora introduce the argument Gordon R. Willey’s work stands as an of the invention of an ‘African’ aesthetic in the outstanding example of synthesis and the New World, an argument that is not new but investigation of the ‘big picture’. His diverse which may be relevant in contrast with the interests ranged across the Americas and in African cases. Michelle Gilbert’s description of topics including settlement patterning, ceramic concert paintings in Ghana finally brings focus analysis, transcendence, and ideology, all of to the question of evil, sorcery, and the uncanny, which he built upon in his work. Throughout his marginally present in other papers. Mia Couto’s career Willey remained steadfastly committed tales about urban life together with J. Fox’s to the discipline of archaeology and the pictures of balcony living in Mozambique close development of new models to investigate the volume brilliantly. material culture and its production. His Two main topics emerge recurrently in the research has laid the groundwork for what book: the aesthetics of the recycled, the Système American archaeology has become today. D,thefriche, and the aesthetics of evil, of sorcery Consequently, this book is as much about and violence. Both topics have been critically Willey’s role as teacher, mentor, and friend addressed by several authors (Jean-Loup Amselle as it is about his prominence as an and Brigit Meyer among others), who argue that archaeologist. the Western interest in these issues is a renewal Structured around ten of Willey’s most of the exoticist, orientalist gaze on an Africa that influential writings, like Method and theory in is seen not only as ugly, but also as perversely American archaeology and ‘The Classic Maya attractive, precisely because of its ‘ugliness’. The hiatus: a rehearsal for the collapse?’ each reification of an ‘African’ aesthetics that this book chapter discusses and reviews Willey’s seems to propose at some points does not conclusions in conjunction with today’s

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interpretation, stressing that his methods and Saitta,Dean J. The archaeology of collective theories are enduring and continuing to leave action. xx, 140 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. indelible marks on the practice of American Tallahassee: Univ. Press of Florida, 2007. archaeology. The chapters are presented in order $24.95 (paper) of his fieldwork, starting with Willey’s seminal research in the Florida Gulf Coast of the This slender volume is an interesting study Southeastern United States (Jerald T. Milanich) concerned, as the Series Editor informs us through to his final work in the Mayan Lowlands (p. xiv), with reconstructing an aspect of the (Patricia A. McAnany, David A. Freidel, et al.). As ‘American experience’, specifically the Colorado Sabloff and Fash make quite evident throughout Coalfield strike and war of 1913-14, which the book, Willey was adept at conducting included the now infamous Ludlow Massacre. fieldwork and publishing results. The body of Emphasis is placed upon reconstructing knowledge he produced remains commanding ‘collective action’ and chapter 1 sets out the to this day. To the reader’s benefit, excerpts from theoretical framework and evaluates relevant, Willey’s publications are included in all of the topical, archaeological epistemology, largely in chapters. relation to ‘ownership’ of the past. A critical Though Willey spent only a comparatively historical archaeology is called for as a short time conducting research in areas such as mechanism for emancipating groups for too the Viru Valley, Peru, in the 1940s and Panama long excluded by middle-class archaeology. This not long afterwards, Sabloff and Fash had the is a relevant point and Saitta is writing from insight to solicit chapters that discuss this work. a historical archaeological perspective, As noted in ‘Peru’ by Michael Moseley and ‘The a disciplinary sub-area with a heightened intermediate area and Gordon Willey’ by Jeffrey sense of reflexivity in comparison to, for Quilter, both areas held Willey’s attention instance, prehistoric Near Eastern or African throughout his career and served as archaeology. foundational material for some of his most Chapter 2 sets out at greater length Saitta’s influential ideas expressed in works like An thinking on the ‘philosophical commitments’ introduction to American archaeology, volume II. involved in such a critical archaeology. This is These chapters, as well as others such as Joyce anchored within a self-defined ‘Pragmatist’ Marcus’s ‘Great art styles and the rise of archaeological framework, the American complex societies’, demonstrate Willey’s intellectual legacy of which is admitted in consideration of broader issues in the relation to, for example, Peirce, Dewey, and development of Mayan culture. Willey’s more recently Richard Rorty. The premises of progressive view on the influence of art and both objectivity and truth are rightly questioned ideology, for example, makes his legacy in New and the development of a ‘working-class’ (p. 12) World archaeology salient. archaeology signalled. Yet here, perhaps, the Sabloff and Fash’s book is well edited and privileged position of Saitta and his colleagues is quite readable. The illustrations, graphs, and all too apparent (and not fully acknowledged) in photographs are quite rich; the most notable dealing with recent events, actions, and their photograph being of Willey with eyebrow raised, material residues as opposed to the scraps and which appears in Toutellot and Hammond’s fragments most archaeologists have to deal with, ‘Serendipity at Seibal’. The ten chapters are which are further removed both chronologically framed by a gracious introduction and and in terms of ‘consciousness’ than those conclusion by the editors, which underscores discussed by Saitta. Hence his argument from their immense respect for Willey. Of note are the outset is constructed from a position of the references to Willey’s life away from empirical strength denied the majority and archaeology; his writing of archaeological allowing somewhat grander claims to be made. mystery novels and love of egg-drop soup Chapter 3 is concerned with the archaeology reminds us that there is life beyond academe. In of collective action. The tenets of processual and sum, Gordon R. Willey and American archaeology post-processual archaeology are briefly outlined, is a wonderful addition to the collection perhaps unnecessarily, for this is material that of any archaeologist working in one of should by now be well known to Saitta’s the many fields in which Willey did, as well assumed intended audience, that is, as anyone interested in the history of the archaeologists. Agency theory is considered at discipline. some length, which is understandable in C. Broughton Anderson University of examining collective action, and some useful Massachusetts Amherst critical points made. Less pertinent are the

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 439 references to Hodder’s work among the Baringo Williamson,Ronald F. & Michael S. or Leone’s on colonial Annapolis, again for the Bisson (eds). The archaeology of Bruce reason already cited, that this is well known. Trigger: theoretical empiricism. xiv, 304 pp., Conversely, ‘a contextual theory of material tables, illus., bibliogrs. London, Ithaca, N.Y.: culture’ (p. 33) could have been more fully McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2006.£60.00 developed, for though we get a later reference (cloth), £18.99 (paper) to ‘materiality’ (p. 68), this area of current archaeological interest and relevance is There are two common kinds of books about largely neglected when it could have been archaeologists. In a conventional Festschrift a profitably explored in relation to the data from collected gift of studies is offered for (it is hoped) Ludlow. the Master to bless and enjoy. Or biographical Chapter 4 is more successful in narrowing and analytical studies of the Master and his the focus on to historical archaeology, broadly works are written years later – and necessarily defined, again in relation to strategies for therefore largely from reduced evidence as it exploring the ‘archaeologies’ of collective action. chances to survive the papers, correspondence, Chapter 5 provides a logical progression into and other secondary sources; a good example is the presentation of the empirical data, firstly Trigger’s own fine book on Gordon Childe, historical evidence, and in Chapter 6,the shaped by the painful limits taphonomic hazard archaeological data. Both chapters (and indeed creates by the chance of which sources survive the whole book) are clearly written and the data and which perish. This generous and intelligent well presented, though it should be noted that book is a fine example of a genre we could more some of the illustrations are a little murky and often benefit from – a book written instead from one at least, of an archaeological unit, breaks personal knowledge at the time, and even with convention in lacking a scale (Fig. 6.7). the Master himself, Bruce Trigger, as a In general it is in the empirically grounded self-analyst. Pamela Smith’s now-annual series discussion that the strength of the volume lies of Cambridge ‘tea and memories’ meetings rather than in the attempt at constructing a exploring recent historical themes in hermeneutic of collective action too broadly archaeologists’ work are in the same spirit of construed. For recurrently, and this is perhaps recent and direct knowledge and memory, where the fault-line emerges between the so equally of special merit. grander claims and the specificities of the study, The book’s sixteen chapters are of quite the American emphasis is apparent. This is exceptional and consistent merit. I specially relevant even insofar as the definition of class ‘as enjoyed essays by Eldon Yellowhorn on ‘the a fluid set of processes’ (p. 64) is proposed. This awakening of internalist archaeology in the might be applicable in the Ludlow context (its Aboriginal world’ – because we increasingly universality even in relation elsewhere to the now hear indigenous voices speaking about the American ‘experience’ could be questioned), but archaeology, but still rarely indigenous voices is less so in other temporal and spatial contexts speaking about the archaeologist; by Randall where issues of ascription could be much more McGuire on Marx, Childe, and Trigger; and important rather than those surrounding fluidity. by Toby Morantz on Trigger’s ethnohistory. Hence chapter 7 is very successful for it I enjoyed all. concentrates upon the implications of the Trigger was unusual in the great range of material considered with regard to how they complex subjects he treated, always in depth, resonate in public consciousness today, why the always well informed, always astonishingly inequality of opportunity persists in America, thorough. Both Egyptian and North American, and, briefly, how it influenced and affected Saitta both archaeology and ethnohistory, both himself. The success of the discussion is because practice and theory, both single-authored books it is tightly bound to the Colorado case study, and the opening volume, in two physical whereas, in contrast, chapter 8 is less fulfilling in volumes, of the enormous edited Cambridge advancing claims which could be interpreted as history of the native peoples of the Americas. The too grand in their proposed potential impact. one I remember most learning from is his Native None the less, this is in part understandable for and newcomer: Canada’s ‘heroic age’ reconsidered we all want our research to have ‘impact’, and, (1985). His last full-length book, Understanding notwithstanding this criticism, Saitta is to be early civilization (2003), analysed over twenty commended for providing us with an interesting domains of human social life in the forms they study. took across seven civilizations, amongst them Timothy Insoll University of Manchester Shang China and the Yoruba people of West

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 440 Book reviews

Africa alongside the familiar Old and New world Ecology examples: 7 ¥ >20 = >140! It is an uneven, as well as an enormous, book, because even at 770 pages they have each to be dealt with Kosek,Jake. Understories: the political life of summarily, and really effective analysis was forests in northern New Mexico. xx, 380 pp., beyond the grasp even of this Master, I fear. An maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: escalating problem for us, as knowledge of the Duke Univ. Press, 2007.£14.99 (paper) particulars enlarges and multiplies, is the way in which these really ambitious works of synthesis, Trained as a forester, a geographer, and an and especially works which neither propose ethnographer, Jake Kosek is, at heart, a political grand theory in the abstract nor generalize from ecologist. Inspired by his doctoral supervisors a narrow case study but prove actual pattern Michael Watts and Nancy Peluso, as well as by across the material evidence, seem to be slipping the timeless teachings of Raymond Williams, into the now impossible to do. But Brian Fagan, Michel Foucault, and William Cronon, he offers a another Master of the Trigger generation and beautifully written monograph on forest politics contributor to this volume, also proves it still can in northern New Mexico, a marginal periphery be done. of an imperial centre. His analysis of the forest as Faced with the thousands of unanswered constructed through a range of scientific and e-mails in my inbox, I wonder not for the first discursive practices may not be original, but his time how a Master can be so productive. Not for central message that nature, race, and nation are lack of varied work at McGill in Montreal, where historically inseparable is a refreshing insight he was based nearly all his working life. But was relating to this particular area. working time really so much less crowded Ideas of New Mexico run deep in Western then? imagination as one of the violent far west Trigger’s active working life, from graduate frontiers of nineteenth-century North American 1959 2006 student at Yale in to his death in , state-building, a romantic island of persisting spans an era which may be remembered as American Indian and Chicano folk-ways, a one of ‘biff and baff’. BIFF!: old archaeology is heaven of hippy art and freedoms, and an axis of hopeless – we need a New Archaeology. BAFF!: sacred wilderness. For archaeologists and New Archaeology is hopeless – we need a anthropologists, it is the heartland of Kroeberian post-modern archaeology. And BIFF again!: ... historical diffusionism and Stewardian cultural Remembering some of those polemics, ecology. But the northern New Mexico that sometimes with cruelty of the criticism captures Kosek’s political imagination is peopled matched only by the weakness of the actual with social actors we usually do not hear about: worked example of the good new way to work, dispossessed, marginal Hispanics and Chicano I am easily persuaded that the more generous activists, environmentalists, government and quieter ways of Trigger’s working are foresters, workers from the not-so-distant actually more productive as well as more nuclear military-industrial complex at Los collegial. That collegiality goes beyond the Alamos, and dying piñon-juniper trees. college for, as Martha Latta’s essay reports, The New Mexicans Kosek worked with Trigger became uncomfortable with the constitute and reproduce their collective identity degree to which archaeologists had contrived not so much through the forest, but through to distance themselves from the living First ‘the land’, symbol of their historical roots and Nations: ‘The Hurons are not a group of material source of their livelihood. It is with two hundred rim sherds. They are a living much empathy that the author reconstructs their people who have ideas and concerns about memories of loss and dispossession, their their world and the ways in which they are sentiments of longing for land, and their sense pictured’. of heredity, which all become ‘central sites Trigger was the leading archaeologist of his around which people organize and protest generation in Canada. Perhaps it helps to be inequalities’ (p. 50). Kosek’s Hispano informants Canadian, of a nation famously touchy about do not shy away from confrontation, especially being mistaken for its US big brother, and with their favourite enemy, the Forest Service (in famously aware also of the special place of this region, public land is managed through one indigenous people today in the face of dominant single state agency), which embodies in their empires. paranoiac mindset the monolithic state. Chapter hristopher hippindale C C University of 5, my favourite in the book, brilliantly illustrates Cambridge how local despair turns into oppositional

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 441 identity against deeply felt injustice. Smokey, the ‘Studies in environmental anthropology and chapter’s hero, is an iconic representation of the ethnobiology’ series, under Roy Ellen’s able native wild bear, used as a cartoon character by general editorship. The theme uniting the the government in its forest fire prevention, and contributions is the need to place communities contemptuously dismissed by the Hispanic in their local contexts in addressing population as a paternalistic ‘white racist pig’ sustainability, while simultaneously allowing (p. 226). For Kosek, this is how ‘forest policy and for global circumstances; how they ‘blend practices become inseparably intertwined with traditional sentiments with fully modern the reproduction of forms of difference’. sensibilities ... to sustain ... sense of cultural However, like so many poor throughout the identity amid large-scale dislocations’ (pp. 9-10). Americas, these fourth-world underdogs are While not a new theme, the contributors draw forced to choose between either a politics of on some interesting ethnographic examples in equal redistribution, or one of community and discussing it. identity. The liberal dictate ‘either class or It comprises three parts. The first, entitled ethnicity’ stifles their subaltern politics, and, in ‘Local and global knowledges’, opens with a the process, silences and reifies their voices. The contribution from Claude Raynaut, Magda plight of the dispossessed living at the doorsteps Zanoni, Angela Ferreira, and Paulo Lana on of affluence and privilege is painfully captioned local communities around the Atlantic forest of by one of Kosek’s informants (p. 57): ‘[O]utside Parana State, Brazil. They point out that both of “Indian art” and “Indian gaming”, we have communities and forest have experienced become an invisible people, even to ourselves’ considerable change, the ecology that (p. 57). conservationists seek to protect being heavily The flows of material and symbolic influenced by humans. They illustrate how exchanges between the contrasting geographic different actors’ views of sustainable spaces inhabited by the poor and the wealthy is development may differ and clash, policy particularly well rendered in chapter 6, which privileging natural above social sustainability describes Los Alamos’s nuclear economy. It is, thereby leaving locals saying ‘we count less we are told, the third site in importance in the than the micoleão monkey or the parrot’. In the world for nuclear research and industrial second chapter, Thomas Thornton discusses the production. It is at Los Alamos that one comes outcomes of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims fully to realize the importance of ‘the material Settlement Act for local communities. He history of sentiments’ (p. 25), the fact that explores the intriguing possibility that local nature is ‘always already social’ (p. 28), and that subsistence values spiritually tied to place ‘the weakness at the heart of environmental might influence ‘deracinated, competitive, politics is that it does not take seriously the short-sighted, and often corrupt’ (p. 42) politics of nature’ (p. 273). These realizations, business corporations to prioritize sustainability. including the idea that regimes of management The next chapter, by Johanna Gibson, contrasts of nature and people are always plural and Australian customary land custodianship with interdependent, are used in the concluding capitalist property notions, nicely captured in chapter to further the debate on human agency an Australian musical where an Aboriginal and non-anthropogenic factors in the context of retorts ‘This land is me’ to a rancher’s assertion the uncertainties created by climate change. ‘This land is mine’. She argues that legal Will this emerging threat cause the rise of frameworks need to accommodate such new emancipatory politics, and will these different resource requirements or ‘obligations lead to new re-imaginings and possibilities, enriched by these inclusive systems of or, rather, will they degenerate into the same custodianship will be tragically inconceivable’ confrontations of nature, race, and class as those (p. 78). The final chapter is another interesting examined in this book? contribution by Dario Novellino, which I recall Laura M. Rival University of Oxford as a lively Durham AID seminar, illustrating how the bureaucracy that surrounds local Maida,Carl A. (ed.). Sustainability and claims to resources inhibits sustainable cultural communities of place. ix, 261 pp., maps, figs, practices among the Batak of the Philippines. tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: In their attempts to negotiate with the state Berghahn Books, 2007.£45.00 (cloth) and acquire legitimacy, they refer to kultura – a syncretic idea of cultural identity – When I first opened this book, I received quite a which they fear is threatened by outside shock. It is the latest volume in the Berghahn interventions.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 442 Book reviews

The second part, entitled ‘Local practices: The surprises include seeing no reference in a adaptive strategies and state responses’, opens book dealing with local issues and sustainable with Krista Harper investigating the widespread development to the local/indigenous knowledge perception in Hungary that all are vulnerable to initiative, which addresses several of the topics the environmental problems attributed to the discussed. And reference to social capital with transformation from state socialism to global no mention of development’s Sustainable capitalism. She shows through a discussion of Livelihoods Framework, where it features Roma health and civil rights that some are more prominently. Perhaps this is evidence that the vulnerable than others, arguing for attention to discipline is now so broad we easily lose sight of environmental justice for such marginal people. current cognate work. But the real shock was to The second chapter, by Deborah Pellow, focuses see myself rechristened Luis A. Sillitoe on the on the part played by the preparation and fly-page, not only disconcerting, but also out of consumption of food by migrants – in this case character for this otherwise well-edited volume. Nigerian Hausa to Accra, Ghana – in sustaining a Paul Sillitoe University of Durham sense of community. People express identity by sitting together eating prepared foods sold on the street. In the next chapter, Janet Benson Walley,Christine J. Rough waters: nature discusses attitudes to the economic and and development in an East African marine environmental sustainability of farming in park. xx, 308 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Kansas. Opinions vary between communities Oxford, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, over the inherently unsustainable beef industry, 2004.£36.95 (cloth), £12.95 (paper) dependent on overuse of groundwater supplies, generous government subsidies, and cheap As foreign tourists arrived at the newly migrant labour. The final contribution, by developed eco-lodge on the remote island of Barbara and Carl Maida, discusses the ‘Save Chole off Tanzania’s coast, brilliantly painted Open Spaces and Agricultural Resources’ white rocks lined their path to waiting initiative voted for by residents of Los Angeles, bungalows. The visitors complained that the who perceived a need to control urban ‘tasteless’ painted rocks spoiled the otherwise encroachment on farm land. Such land use natural experience. The rocks were not part of policy decisions, they argue, require the public the original expatriate designed camp, but rather be well informed about the issues. were added by Chole’s resident staff, who saw The third part, entitled ‘Social capital, civic them as a sign of development. The painted engagement and globalization’, opens with limestone rocks are just one of several Kenneth Meter discussing lessons about provocative metaphors used to explore the participatory research from the ‘Neighbourhood contradictions of nature tourism and Sustainability Indicators Project’ in Minneapolis. participatory development in Christine Walley’s He argues that the experiences of devising and well-written and engaging book Rough waters: implementing systemic indicators of nature and development in an East African marine sustainability offer a robust model for urban park. environments. The next chapter, by Carla Caser, The book examines the development of a considers the ‘built environment’ on Mustang marine park in Tanzania’s Mafia island chain in Island, Texas, employing Bourdieu’s social the late 1990s. Drawing on the Manchester capital concept to argue that the design of school of anthropology, Walley uses the concept physical space influences neighbourhood social of a ‘social drama’ or an extended analysis of networks. She discusses how different social conflict over time to examine competing groups manipulate and manage their space and interests in creating the park. By taking this sense of place to increase their social capital and approach she questions theories that posit a ‘power’. In the penultimate chapter, Richard view where globalization creates new spaces for Westra discusses Japanese understanding of local participation by subsuming state power to political economy, arguing that current less interested economic and non-governmental globalization trends do not suggest a ‘viable forces. She grounds the marine park controversy ecosustainable future’, whereas Green theory in the much deeper history of Mafia as a site and new socialist ideas do. The final chapter, by of plantation slavery and cosmopolitan Snjezana Colic, discusses consumption and development and its transformation into a rural globalization, pointing out that socio-economic periphery. This book is a must-read for anyone arrangements differ between societies whatever interested in the ways that international global trends. development and conservation projects shape

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 443 state-society relations and vice versa. It makes local claims for fresh fish encourages many important contributions to the fields of fishermen to sell their catch at sea to large anthropology, geography, and history, as well as ‘ice-boats’ or to fillet the fish before coming to inter-disciplinary scholarship in political ashore. ecology and development studies. Walley’s careful attention to how various Walley shows how complex historical actors – island residents, state officials, NGOs, connections are replaced by a pervasive and tourism industry expatriates – hold different discourse about poor and uneducated locals meanings of key project terms like ‘participation’ who destroy their environment by reckless and ‘development’ makes it a great book for fishing practices, including dynamiting. teaching in undergraduate and graduate Enlightened bureaucrats and international courses. The book contrasts two contradictory conservation groups propose a national marine conceptions of participatory development. park to safeguard the area’s fisheries and attract The first is an international model where all new forms of eco-tourism to the islands. Given stakeholders are equal in determining the goals efforts over the 1990s to promote community and outcomes of the project. Walley participation along with foreign investment and demonstrates why this technical understanding, international technical assistance, the park embraced by WWF staff, naïvely wishes away promises to be a model for community-based historical political-economic social relations. The conservation in Tanzania. Indeed Walley starts second view is grounded in Tanzania’s history of her story with a 1995 meeting at which Mafia’s socialist development, where participation residents wholeheartedly embrace the marine meant rural people being set to work to fulfil the park. The book is at its best when showing why government’s mandate. The book offers a residents, deeply sceptical about government compelling account as to why entrenched authorities and bureaucratic elites, would state-society models of participation are not enthusiastically welcome the conservation easily shed by the good intentions of global project. projects. Through in-depth interviews with residents Benjamin Gardner University of California, and by immersing herself in local politics, Walley Berkeley is told that dynamite fishing is not the result of poverty and ignorance, but is the province of outsider fishermen collaborating with government officials. These outsiders are History and linguistics unswayed by local social pressure exerted through kinship ties, historically used to regulate fishing rights on the islands. Aware of the Pollock,Sheldon. The language of the gods dangers of inviting the government to regulate in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and their waters, Mafia’s fishermen still believed that power in premodern India. viii, 684 pp., maps, the internationally supported marine park was bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. California the best way to stop dynamite fishing, assert Press, 2006.£48.95 (cloth) their rights as wenyeji or proprietors of the area, and provide employment to local youth. The This is a large, ambitious, important, and presence of the international NGO WWF gave exciting book, bursting with ideas at every level. residents hope that their interests would be It is hard to imagine how such a magnum opus taken into account. Despite such assurances by could possibly have been produced by an its expatriate technical adviser, WWF was academic working under the five- or eight-year ultimately beholden to state agencies and their cycle of RAE audit procedures. It asks some big interests. questions about language use, and the relation I particularly enjoyed chapter 4, where fish of language to power, from approximately 2,500 play a central role in Walley’s discussion of local years ago in South and Southeast Asian history perceptions of nature. Readers might at first right up to the present day. It does so in an imagine that by increasing local demand for explicitly comparative way, with two entire fresh fish, tourism could raise resident living chapters devoted to the nitty-gritty of the history standards. However, she shows why the of language use and policy in Europe. A commodification of fish leads fishermen and historian’s feel for detail and difference is their families to eat less fish, and that the combined with a sociologist’s drive to generalize expansion of markets diminishes the nutritional (not to mention a deep engagement with quality of local diets. She also illustrates how metropolitan theory that even today is rather

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 444 Book reviews

unusual in an Indologist), and the whole is literarization (being used for literature and underpinned by a seemingly effortless command praising power). All the while Sanskrit retained and synthesis of an enormous expanse of its position at the top of a complex hierarchy of inscriptional and literary Sanskrit and related languages, so that the notion of South Asians Prakrits. having a single ‘mother tongue’ has no sense. Pollock’s aim is to understand the role of Pollock demonstrates that this process of Sanskrit at different periods and to explain its vernacularization, under way in South Asia, relationship to power. The book offers a new as in Europe, long before modernization, periodization, or at least an entirely new way of industrialization, or print capitalism were even thinking about the periodization, of South Asian on the horizon, poses some very serious history. The richness of Pollock’s documentation questions to well-known theories of nationalism and the sheer number of diverse theoretical that see its crucible in the seventeenth and arguments being made may well limit the eighteenth centuries. book’s impact. Lesser mortals can only marvel at The third disjuncture occurred following Pollock’s skill in keeping so many balls in the air colonialism and the introduction of the idea – at the same time. It is not always an easy read. wholly foreign to South Asian ways of being – of Yet it is also full of pleasing aphorisms, such as: ‘Western linguistic monism’, or what Pollock ‘Whereas some regional languages such as New dubs ‘linguism’, which underlies the cultural Persian achieved transregionality through merit, and linguistic nationalisms of modern and others such as Latin had it thrust upon them South Asia. through military conquests, Sanskrit seems to There is also a side-argument about have almost been born transregional’ (p. 262). legitimation. Though Pollock evidently, and The overall story is built around three radical probably rightly, decided that there was no way disjunctures or cleavages in South Asian in which he could debate explicitly and in detail language history. The first occurred around 150 with previously advanced pictures and models of of the Common Era when Sanskrit, from having the sweep of South Asian history, at various been a liturgical language closely identified with points in the book he takes issue with Max Brahmanical Vedic rituals and not used (even by Weber specifically on the question of the most orthodox) for public announcements, legitimation. The combination of legitimation was suddenly transformed into a language of theory and instrumental reason, which he takes royal power adopted by dynasties ‘from Kashmir to be the scholarly conventional wisdom in to Kelantan’ (p. 257). This form of culture-power accounting for the Sanskrit cosmopolis, Pollock dubs the Sanskrit cosmopolis. is denounced as ‘not only anachronistic (Surprisingly – presumably because of his but intellectually mechanical, culturally concern to avoid the religious models and homogenizing, theoretically naïve, empirically explanations which have hitherto dominated false, and tediously predictable’ (p. 18). discussion of South and Southeast Asian history Tediously predictable and naïve some scholars’ – he nowhere alludes to the mandala model that handling of his Sanskrit source materials may underlay it.) A king’s grasp of Sanskrit grammar, have been, but Pollock’s own interpretations and the steps he took to support its study and show royal elites using Sanskrit as a way to preservation, were understood to be equivalent buttress claims to rank and privilege. His to his preservation of social order. Just how this fulminations against legitimation as an form of Sanskrit spread so far and so rapidly explanatory device will work only if he comes Pollock admits is far from clear (it was certainly up with a more convincing alternative. not, as in other empires, through military As Pollock himself has recently written, ‘The conquest or bureaucratic fiat). But that it did so, measure of a book’s importance is not how and that Buddhists and Jains, who for centuries much it gets right but how much it gets you to had abjured the use of Sanskrit as inappropriate think’ (‘Pretextures of time’, History and Theory for their religious purposes, suddenly and 46, 2007: 381). I am not competent to judge enthusiastically took it up, are incontestable many of the detailed claims he advances in The facts. language of the gods, but it does seem to me The second disjuncture – this one was spread that no future work on South or Southeast Asian over several centuries in most parts of the history can afford to ignore it. He gives us a new subcontinent – occurred roughly a millennium language and a new conceptualization in which later when local languages were subjected to to think about the periodization of South and vernacularization: the processes that Pollock calls Southeast Asia’s past. Even anthropologists, who literization (being written for the first time) and understandably may skim the earlier sections

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 445 with their detailed discussion of inscriptions and Gasco emphasizes the diversity in Spanish texts from over a thousand years ago, will need colonialism as played out in the Americas and to acquaint themselves with his ideas on the Pacific. pre-modern cosmopolitanism, vernacularization, Peter van Dommelen explores cultural and indigenism. hybridity in ancient Greek colonies as evident in David N. Gellner University of Oxford the Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements in the Mediterranean. Drawing upon more recent iterations of post-colonial theory, von Stein,Gil J. (ed.). The archaeology of colonial Dommelen distances himself from the encounters: comparative perspectives. xii, 445 conventional dichotomy between the ‘colonizer’ pp., maps, figs, tables, bibliogr. Oxford, and the ‘colonized’, stressing the importance of Santa Fe: James Currey; School of American situating colonial experiences within local Research Press, 2005.£17.95 (paper) regions rather than the ‘colonizers’ provenance’. Stein’s substantive contribution compares the This book originated as a seminar entitled ‘The fourth millennium BC Uruk colonies with the archaeology of colonies in cross-cultural Old Assyrian trading colonies of the early second perspective’, held between 19 and 23 March millennium BC. Although representing an 2000 at the School of American Research (now ‘unusual’ economic strategy within the known as the School of Advanced Research on Mesopotamian world, these colonies were the Human Experience) in Santa Fe, New organized in very similar ways, and they offer Mexico. a baseline for extrapolating the nature of Gil J. Stein, symposium organizer and volume colonization in other ancient societies. editor, sets the table by examining various Michael W. Spence employs practice theory paradigms previously employed in addressing to examine the Zapotec ‘diaspora network’ ‘colonies’ and ‘colonialism’. Employing the gloss within the Classic-period of central Mexico. He ‘colonial encounters’ – an attempt to sidestep uses Tlailotlacan, an ethnic enclave from the the obvious difficulties of distinguishing among western margin of Teotihuacan (beginning circa the interrelated concepts of colonies, AD 200), as a case study for understanding the colonization, and colonialism – the participants construction of Zapotec ethnic identity. Spence encourage a more synthetic understanding of argues that fine-scale considerations of the roles the interregional interactions that characterized of individuals (and social groups) are obscured ancient state-level societies and their constituent within the grand core-periphery models derived social groupings. By shifting to a broadly from world-systems theory and related comparative focus, these contributors question theoretical positions. and challenge the dominant role of the Kent G. Lightfoot reflects on the interactions colonizer, seeking instead evidence of that took place during the School of American indigenous agency in colonial encounters. The Research symposium, particularly the uncritical seminar participants emphasize the dynamics of use of concepts comparing colonial systems of economic, political, and symbolic interactions early capitalist Europe with those of non-Western across a broad range of ten colonial encounters and non-capitalistic settings. Drawing upon his during the prehistoric, pre-capitalist, and own research on Spanish and Russian mercantile early historic periods of both Old and New and mission colonial institutions of late 1700s Worlds. and early 1800s California, he highlights the Looking at colonial encounters in the ancient interplay of inter-ethnic, demographic, and Mediterranean, Michael Dietler emphasizes the chronological variability. importance of archaeological data generated The next two papers address colonial independently from documentary sources, encounters in the Peruvian highlands. Katharina and underscores the differing empirical and Schreiber writes about imperial agendas and theoretical implications of each. Dietler also local agency (the ‘multidimensionality’) within expresses discomfort with the ‘shared the Wari empire (of the Peruvian highlands). inadequacies’ of mega-concepts like Terence N. D’Altroy situates specific case studies ‘Hellenization’ and world-systems theory. within a broader comparative framework, Janine L. Gasco compares and contrasts demonstrating how Inka colonization Spanish and Mesoamerican worldviews of the reconfigured the social and ethnic landscapes sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Drawing of the Tawantinsuyu empire. upon her long-term archaeological study of the Susan E. Alcock examines points of Soconusco region (modern Chiapas, Mexico), convergence and divergence among four Roman

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 446 Book reviews

colonies in the eastern empire (modern-day raiding tribes that provoked him to create a new Greece and Turkey), suggesting that the strategic pan-Arabian solidarity as an armed prophet role of colonies is perhaps less pervasive than of monotheism and a skilled diplomat and previously believed. She argues for expanding strategist. The Islamic conquest of the Near the research agenda into the domains of East followed as an organic outgrowth of everyday life (including burial practices, Muhammad’s teachings. domestic architecture, foodways, and minor Though glancing at Hobbes and Machiavelli, cults). Irving M. Zeitlin pays more attention to Ibn In the final paper, J. Daniel Rogers provides Khaldun’s cyclical model of social conflict an over-arching, synthetic perspective on the according to which groups of nomads archaeology of colonies, colonizers, and those periodically conquered the settled agricultural being colonized. Because, by their nature, regions, bringing a new sense of justice and colonies are associated with states and empires, virtue to the function of governance, until after a they provide an effective window through which few generations the rigour that was needed to to view complex power hierarchies. establish sovereignty ebbed away amid Overall, the contributors emphasize the decadence and corruption. According to Zeitlin’s extraordinary degree of variability between and historical sources, Yathrib had come to be among various colonial encounters, in both dominated by Arabian Jews who developed new the Classical world and during the European methods of irrigation and cultivation, crafts, and ‘Age of Discovery’. They reject the globalizing practices of exchange. generalities of world-systems theory, Much of the remainder of Zeitlin’s argument emphasizing instead the failures of single, covers more trodden ground: how Judaism and homogeneous models of colonial practice and Christianity, and the hanifs or pre-Islamic Arab stressing the importance of shifting colonial monotheists, influenced foundational Islam, and agendas, political economies, cultural identities, how the Prophet retained virtually all the and especially power relations. These papers pre-Islamic religious institutions, such as Mecca, also criticize the ‘myth’ of the colonizer- the Ka`ba and the Black Stone, pilgrimages, colonized dichotomy, which vastly over-simplifies Ramadan, the name of Allah, jinns, while the complex realities articulating the colonial transvaluing them into a strictly monotheistic homeland, the colonies themselves, and the doctrine. indigenous communities within which the Zeitlin says in his preface that he began his colonies were established. effort to understand the Muhammad of history David Hurst Thomas American Museum of long before Islam became as topical as it is Natural History, New York today. He disclaims any motives other than scholarly ones, and shies away from imputing to Islam any essential or eternal traits, such as a Zeitlin,Irving M.The historical Muhammad. predisposition to wars of conversion. He viii, 181 pp., fig, bibliogr. Cambridge, Malden, concludes by noting that ‘the Islamic Empire, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007.£50.00 (cloth), like all empires, was only a temporarily £16.99 (paper) successful phenomenon, while the Islamic faith, in contrast, has endured’ (p. 164). The originality of this book, by an emeritus Zeitlin relies heavily on the Chicago scholar professor of sociology at the University of Fred M. Donner’s admirably clear and persuasive Toronto, lies in its application of a sociological Narratives of Islamic origins (1998), including framework to the accepted narrative of the Donner’s sharp critique of revisionist or foundation of Islam. Four preconditions, he ultra-sceptical writers on the origins of Islam. suggests, are necessary for the successful One of the most sceptical of all was the late transformation of any small sect into a mass John Wansbrough – whose counterparts in movement: widespread discontent, an ideology anthropology are perhaps Leach on the Bible with resonance, charismatic leadership, and and Lord Raglan on the biography of heroes. organizational planning. In the early Meccan Basically Wansbrough – in one of the most phase, discontent was very limited; the Prophet rococo of academic styles – set out to question Muhammad’s message found little resonance the link between Muhammad and the Qur’anic with the majority; his leadership was rejected; materials, on the grounds that there is little and he relied on preaching and warning. But independent historical or archaeological after the hegira to Yathrib (later Medina) in 622 corroboration of events before about 800 CE. CE, he found a Hobbesian state of war between Zeitlin appears not to have read Wansbrough’s

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 447 two books but is content to summarize for alternative and New Age treatment, on approvingly Donner’s critique of the national and transnational articulations of ultra-sceptics. Yet Donner himself has written ‘traditional’ medicine, the other to the effects of that ‘the revisionist critiques are not a passing transnational ‘border-crossings’ on how fad, but rather represent the beginning of a medicine is understood and theorized. Some of full-blown paradigm shift’ (Director’s the questions here have already received Introduction, ‘Islamic origins’, NEH 2000 considerable scholarly attention, with Alter one Summer Seminar, University of Chicago). It is of the principal scholars involved; we have likely that Wansbrough exaggerated his case, like become increasingly aware, for example, that many other intellectual innovators. the ‘Yoga’, ‘A¯yurveda’, ‘Traditional Chinese Zeitlin is quite happy to draw on the work of Medicine’, and so on, purveyed in the the second most radical of the revisionists, contemporary global marketplace are in large Patricia Crone, when she argues against the part recent products of modernist projects, influential view of W. Montgomery Watt that heavily influenced by biomedicine and other seventh-century Mecca had become a aspects of contemporary society. This is not to commercial and financial centre at the deny the possible value of these or other crossroads of caravan trade. Watt held that it was reconstructed forms of Asian ‘traditional’ the Meccans’ transition to a mercantile economy health-related practices, either for health or for that undermined the traditional order, the critique of biomedicine. The present volume, generating a social and moral malaise to which however, is primarily concerned not with such Muhammad’s preaching was the response. questions, but with opening up theoretical Crone thinks that Mecca was a pilgrimage site, space for understanding the interactions its economy limited to supplying essential between ‘Asian medicine’ and its increasingly provisions. Crone’s view, that Muhammad’s later globalized contexts. success was due to the divine validation of The eight studies here, varied in content, political structures and the creation of a militant approach, and chronological period, serve to people, fits neatly with Zeitlin’s model. But a bring many of the issues involved to the fore in a suspicion lingers that he may have been selective sustained and often engaging manner. The in his use of sources and played down the authors are mostly historians of medicine or difficulties inherent in this extremely contentious medical anthropologists; five chapters are by field of study. US-based scholars, the remainder by scholars From the point of view of anthropology, based in India (two) and the UK (one). Four Zeitlin’s use of the modern category ‘religion’ chapters deal, broadly speaking, with South Asia seems to be unexamined and to carry an and/or with medical traditions claiming origin in Abrahamic bias. Islam became ‘more than a South Asia, including Deepak Kumar’s religion’ in Medina after the victorious battle comparative study of British health policy in of Badr (p. 12), and the moral ideal of the colonial India and Dutch in the Dutch East pre-Islamic Bedouin ‘had little or no religious Indies, and three with East Asia and character’ (p. 53). However, Zeitlin’s approach is Chinese-derived traditions; the remaining novel and intriguing. chapter, Alter’s study of attempts by Indian Jonathan Benthall University College London practitioners of Chinese medicine to reclaim acupuncture as authentically Indian, directly raises the connections between the two regions. The South Asian group includes two chapters Medical anthropology on colonial medicine, both strongly influenced by post-colonial scholarship. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina focus on the proto-nationalist Alter,Joseph S. (ed.). Asian medicine and project of reconstruction of traditional medicine globalization. vi, 187 pp., bibliogr. (Unani and A¯yurvedic) on modernist lines in the Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2005. nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, £29.50 (cloth) including the creation of a new manufacturing and distribution system for A¯yurvedic remedies. This is an important collection of studies on a Kumar, as mentioned above, compares British significant group of topics. Joseph Alter’s and Dutch colonial health policies, over much introduction outlines two main sets of questions, the same time-frame. Alter’s acupuncture study one referring to the impact of the ‘transnational and Cecilia Van Hollen’s chapter on the politics hegemony of science’, and of the global vogue of ‘traditional’ Indian medicine for HIV/AIDS

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have a more recent focus but the continuities are Chinese ideas of moral rectitude and demonic evident, with Van Hollen noting how Mahatma possession. Gandhi’s nationalist critique of medicine as Alter’s introduction is well worth reading in capitalist consumerism (cf Alter’s earlier Gandhi’s its own right, and concludes with a remarkable body, 2000), has been reworked as part of the extended argument, building on his own sales-pitch for indigenous ‘A¯yurvedic’ HIV/AIDS previous work regarding positive conceptions of remedies. There are some chilling moments in health in A¯yurveda (‘Heaps of health,’ Current Van Hollen’s chapter, such as her description of Anthropology, 1999), against ‘medicine’ itself as a clinic providing the controversial T.N. Majeed’s the most appropriate framing concept for the ‘ImmunoQR’ therapy, where unmarried totality of Asian healing and health practices. HIV-positive men are informed that after six Maybe, Alter suggests, ‘alchemy’ would be a months of ImmunoQR medication they can get better choice (in the sense of a set of married without risk of passing on the virus to ‘experimental techniques dealing with embodied their wives (p. 104). Martha Ann Selby’s life and longevity’), in which case ‘medicine’ exploration of ‘Sanskrit gynaecologies in itself could be seen as a reduced, pragmatic postmodernity’ moves somewhat into high sub-set of alchemical procedures, and comedy, both in the egregious unsignalled ‘clinic-based healing [as] a metaphorical English rewritings of Sanskrit texts to which she instantiation, or fragmented mimetic points (menstrual blood becomes female ovum, reproduction, of immortality’ (p. 18). Such an subcutaneous worms are rewritten as purely approach might help us to ‘get past the metaphorical, and sexual desire is discreetly problematic of Science as the modern yardstick removed from the picture), and in the even for measuring medical legitimacy – its gold more bizarre transformations that ensue when standard or touchstone, so to speak’ (p. 19), and ‘traditional Indian’ approaches to women’s to open up space within which contemporary bodies become part of the American New Age transformations of ‘traditional’ medical systems marketplace. might be seen in other terms than how well or Two of the Chinese chapters deal with state poorly they fit the scientific model. health policy in the People’s Republic of China. The collection as a whole does a great deal Nancy Chen’s considers the complexities of to establish the need for such a space. It recent Chinese state policy on qigong,first deserves to be widely read. If the issues here are celebrated as a unique Chinese contribution to truly taken on board by scholars, they have the science but increasingly obsessed with the potential to move the study of ‘Asian medicine’ elimination of ‘false’ (i.e. ‘unscientific’ or to a new and considerably more sophisticated politically problematic) versions of qigong as approach to its object of inquiry. opposed to safe, biomedicalized versions. Her Geoffrey Samuel Cardiff University central focus, though, is on how science itself came to be seen as foundational within the Chinese nationalist project. Susan Brownell’s Karadimas,Dimitris. La raison du corps: study of Chinese cosmetic surgery’s trajectory idéologie du corps et représentation de from dangerous bourgeois deviation to source l’environment chez les Miraña d’Amazonie of national pride demonstrates how the ability Colombienne. 451 pp., maps, tables, plates, of biomedicine to appear as a relatively ‘empty illus., bibliogr. Paris: Éditions Peeters, 2005. frame’ (Brownell takes her cues here from John $79.20 (paper) MacAloon’s study of international sport as an ‘empty form’) has enabled it to be subtly Bodies within bodies; making bodies. Men’s appropriated as part of the nationalist project. faces and women’s vulvas made of bats; human Chinese cosmetic surgery claims technical vertebrae and hips made of fish spines and superiority to Western versions while also heads; placentas made of stingrays; and presenting itself, even in the widely popular umbilical cords made of worms – these are eyelid-reconstruction operations, as bringing some features of human anatomy which, out the essential features of Chinese ideas of according to the Miraña of Amazonian beauty, rather than imitating the West. The Colombia, are made of other bodies. Dimitri remaining chapter, by Vivienne Lo and Sylvia Karadimas’s book takes us through Amazonian Schroer on the concept of xie (‘deviant’) qi,is myth, ritual, and practice, showing how men an intriguing account of how contemporary and women’s bodies are made of a conjunction UK and European acupuncturists deal with of bodies of plants and animals, an practices deeply entangled with ancient understanding that brings this 700-strong group

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 449 of hunter-horticulturalists surprisingly close to author, this practice may reflect upon the the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Miraña’s heightened war ethos and But Miraña ideas go beyond a composite view of self-identification with blood feeding both human anatomy, since to them the bodies of animals and spirits. plants and animals, and the bodies of man-made Karadimas goes into great detail to reveal the objects, houses, gardens, lakes, and stars, may anatomical links existing, for example, between hide within themselves a common humanity women’s genitalia, men’s faces, and the bodies and transform into one another as well as of bats. His findings shed new light upon contributing to make one another. indigenous American iconography far beyond This is a book for specialists in body the current Amazonian area, since representation, political significance, and representations of bats are salient amongst iconography which gives priority to the study of various Andean pre-Colombian groups. The indigenous knowledge in its own terms and, at author’s novel readings of female genitalia, the the same time, carries implications for current placenta, and the umbilical cord with relation to debates on shamanistic cosmologies. Bodies may facial features, especially teeth and speech, also be animal in some respects and vegetable in resonate with findings from other Amazonian others, but they may ultimately be human groups, such as the Eastern and Western when, beyond their skin-deep differences, they Tukanoan, the Panoan, and Arawakan, amongst share a common internal anatomical structure. whom female reproductive organs are similarly As a Miraña man explained after skinning a dead associated with blood-feeding and poisonous jaguar: ‘Look, you can see he is a person, he has beings. Karadimas’s work therefore helps us the same arms, the same guts; like us, he has a draw a cross-cultural picture of the female body heart’. Hidden under the skin resides the human as the site of multiple agents linked to parasitism core called the ‘tree of knowledge’, made of the and predation. It also prepares the ground for heart and the veins that connect it to the head – future comparative studies of Amazonian and the tree’s canopy – and the stomach – the tree’s Andean iconography articulated around the roots. The heart’s main function is to ‘improve relationships between reproduction, war, and blood’, literally ‘making it good’. The heart bleeding using current ethnography to pumps blood, propelling it in circulation and illuminate archaeology. passing to blood the strength derived from food The reader looking for a more in the stomach. A person’s memory, health, phenomenological or experiential approach may emotions, and stamina derive from the be slightly discouraged at first by the fairly movement of blood through the ‘tree of abstract examination and renditions of myths. knowledge’. Diseases of various sorts are also Although one wishes one could get to meet due to blood flow, especially to imbalanced more subjectively embodied Miraña men and blood heat caused by foul smells. women in the text, the extraordinary wealth of The author provides a wealth of information analysis surely compensates for this apparent about how parts of animals and plants, their lack of material. Various theoretical questions smells and heat, impact upon anatomy and remain unanswered, nevertheless, with regard, blood, and are therefore bound to dietary for instance, to how Miraña’s understandings of restrictions. He gives special attention, on the blood and the body translate into gender one hand, to tobacco and coca, grown by men relations in daily life in the current context of and consumed during nightly meetings to guerrilla and drug-related political turmoil and empower speech, and, on the other hand, to economic change in Colombia. One also bitter manioc and chili, grown by women and wonders whether Miraña ethnography could used for cooking. Women’s bodies, however, are help us to address the theoretical gap that exists subjected to stronger restrictions than men’s between the perspectivist approach, pioneered bodies for they are seen as a major source of by Viveiros de Castro, whose views stand against disease due to their heat, that is, their menses. an analysis in terms of bodily substances, and Menstrual blood is conceived as a foul poison the French structuralist approach, which, after from which various animals and plants, Françoise Héritier, grants primary importance to including snakes, derive their own poisons. the symbolism of blood and other fluids. Since Surprisingly, however, copulation during the Miraña attach humanity to an internal menstruation is encouraged to secure anatomic structure enabling blood flow, they pregnancy, a practice which, to my knowledge, appear to fall into Héritier’s camp. Yet, like most is rare in Amazonia, since the menses are usually other Amazonian peoples, they also conceive of bound to sexual abstinence. According to the the skin as removable clothing, thus fitting

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Viveiros de Castro’s framing of perspectivism. man grew up either as a drug addict or peddler There is, therefore, a need to articulate Miraña inflicting terrible violence on women and and other Amazonian people’s notions of blood encircling them with a deep sense of fear and and gender with perspectivism to gain a wider insecurity, which, she argues, motivates them to and deeper comprehension of the Amazonian sterilize themselves as a means of security and body. control. The following chapter, by Tine Luisa Elvira Belaunde University of St Andrews Tjornhoj-Thomsen, deals with the related subject of procreative technology, but the analysis is based on data collected from Denmark. She Steffen,Vibeke,Richard Jenkins &Hanne deals with the uncertainty of women suffering Jessen (eds). Managing uncertainty: from infertility in their everyday encounter with ethnographic studies of illness, risk and the the biomedical world and the clinical setting. struggle for control. 283 pp., bibliogr. She focuses on the permanent emotional and Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, psychological trauma associated with infertility 2005.£30.00 (paper) and childlessness, and its consequences for these women’s identity problems, rather than on the Managing uncertainty is an immensely readable potentialities of a technological intervention. book and yet extremely rich in theory. Rarely In chapter 5, Mette Nordahl Svendsen deals does a single book manage to achieve this feat. with existential and moral aspects of cancer Theory has its presence not just in the genetic counselling in Denmark. She shows introductory chapter but in all the eleven how, for the healthy relatives of cancer patients, chapters of this book. Ethnography bridges the the resistance towards taking a genetic test or otherwise huge ontological and epistemological undergoing counselling in order to eliminate the gap between the Scandinavian and African possibility of being genetically at risk may well countries on which this book is based. A delay of arise from the fear of potentially damaging five years in its final publication is easily excused otherwise good family relationships. In chapter 6 when one sees the meticulous editing that has Paul Wenzel Geissler narrates his research gone into the book. Except for one or two biography based on a number of years’ typographical errors the book is absolutely experience on child health among the Luos in flawless. western Kenya, East Africa. He deals in particular In the chapter titled ‘Matters of life and with their social context in order to understand death’ the editors deal extensively with both why he and his research colleagues were classical and recent theoretical literature relating branded by the local people as blood-stealing to uncertainties of life. They also review killers, locally known as kachinja. He also shows important anthropological and sociological how the Luos used the idiom of kachinja as a literature on health, illness, and politics of symbol to protest against, or reject, research medicine. All this has a purpose – to challenge practices that do not try to understand in full the concepts of control and uncertainty with the the historical relationship between the researcher help of ethnographic data and by opening up and the researched. new frontiers for theorizing on uncertainty. The Chapter 7 by Marita Eastmond deals with editors argue that ‘our attempts to control the Bosnian Muslim refugees in Sweden. She shows conditions of our lives actually generate further how the bureaucratic system represents the uncertainty’ (p. 28). traumatized refugees ‘as lacking something, Jonina Einarsdottir’s chapter is on how the incomplete persons with diminished agency’ matrilineal Papel in Guinea-Bissau deal with (p. 155). On the other hand, the refugees are ‘non-human’ children. Through the ‘case-stories’ found to resist state medicalization in order to of Clara, Carlos, Marcelino and Celeste, the ascertain normality. The next chapter, by Vibeke author shows how the mothers try to delay the Steffen, is also on resistance to medicalization, in inevitable – being diagnosed of possessing iran this case to Antabuse medication for controlling or spirit. Once so identified it is the responsibility alcoholism. Steffen shows how the users soon of elderly maternal kins to ‘erase’ such children begin to cheat on use of the drug and claim, to avoid further misfortune to their lineage thereby, to have gained control over the drug members. itself. Anne Line Dalsgaard deals in the next Chapter 9 deals with the complex chapter with female sterilization in Northeast relationship between becoming mentally ill and Brazil. She conducted her fieldwork in a acquiring the identity of a mentally ill person. low-income neighbourhood where almost every John Aggergaard Larsen, the author of this

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 451 chapter, uses the biographies of Per and Eva – But, of course, there is – witness this volume two young and first-time mental health patients under review. Its basic propositions are sound: in Copenhagen, Denmark – to show how ‘community’ is a word in common use to diagnosis and psychiatric explanations help such express and (usually) to valorize a notion for persons to be more certain about themselves by which we do not appear to have any other facilitating comprehension of their behaviour. wholly satisfactory alternative. Therefore, Chapter 10, by Hanne O. Mogensen, deals with however variously, vaguely, deliberately, or lazily biomedical healthcare in eastern Uganda and it is used, we are bound to pay attention to it. what people do to gain access to such care. Secondly, we can expect, and should accept, More particularly the author argues that that its use will vary according to social, cultural, decisions to take a particular biomedicine are geographical, and historical circumstances. socially negotiated. Underlying the studies that constitute the book The last chapter deals with healthcare is their authors’ irritation with what Raymond practices in Bunyole in Eastern Uganda. In this Williams described as the ‘warmly persuasive’ chapter, Susan Reynolds Whyte deals with the character of community – in short, that it is a central theme of misery and the ways in which ‘hurrah’ word. people try to overcome it. In exploring the values that have been The most important contribution of this book associated with it, and the political uses to which is its exposition of social agency. The only it has been put, Creed reviews the historical weakness that I can see in this volume is that it literature authoritatively, ranging widely across overplays the concept of uncertainty. Matters of anthropology, sociology, and social history. life and death are not always as uncertain as the He concludes that it is impossible to divest volume would like us to believe: there are ‘community’ of its normative connotations, and matters that are completely certain, others are that therefore social scientists should continue to more certain than not, and some are of course worry about it. Worry? Anxiety about the absolutely uncertain. Life or death under total mis/ab/use of the English language is a uncertainty would be unmanageable. condition of life, even for those of us reared on T.B. Subba North-Eastern Hill University Wittgenstein’s injunction to look for ‘use’ rather than ‘meaning’. That, really, is what the authors of the various cases in the book attempt, with varying degrees of effectiveness, and, Migration and community regrettably, with the disregard now fashionable in anthropology for the intelligible use of English. Creed,Gerald W. (ed.). The seductions of Kate Crehan examines the rhetoric of community: emancipations, oppressions, community in a regeneration project in 1980s quandaries. xii, 320 pp., maps, figs, illus., inner London and poses the important question bibliogr. Oxford: James Currey Publishers, of whether this rhetoric empowers individuals or 2006.£17.95 (paper) subordinates and coerces them. She concludes that the proposition of ‘community’ enabled At least twice every decade, social collective action at the time, but that its efficacy anthropologists and sociologists address ‘the was only momentary. In due course, it became a problem’ of community. The problem lies in the memento of a bygone era. word’s lack of precision or specificity, and in the Mary Weismantel writes about ayllu,a values which it is used to imply. Over more than Quechua term widely found among Andean fifty years, the scholarly literature has grown cultures to connote a fundamental or obese with attempts to define, theorize, criticize, foundational sociality, which Andean abolish, re-create, and exemplify ‘community’, anthropologists have found to be as fraught with as a scientifically useful or usable term. It is, by difficulty as ‘community’ but to which is turns, ideological, sterile, too restrictive, too attributed similar persuasive power. vague. It is at odds with its colloquial use, or Michael Watts’s essay on Nigerian merely replicates it – thus doing little or nothing ‘petro-capitalism’ examines the tensions both to establish its analytical or descriptive integrity. within and among communities – which for him This writer has engaged reluctantly and are means of real or rhetorical association or periodically with the issue for forty years, on identification which we know by other terms: each occasion declaring publicly and grumpily chieftainship, ethnicity, and the nation. It is that there is nothing more to be said about it. unclear to me that anything is being argued

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here beyond the incontestable proposition that The central objective of the book is to unravel Nigeria is a complex society. the ways in which ‘human rights’ are There is a chapter by Aisha Khan on the appropriated by indigenous actors and are given applicability of ‘community’ to the Caribbean, meaning in their specific cultural and historical providing the occasion for a critical rehearsal of contexts of displacement and marginality. The the ethnocentric and ahistoric character of earlier author argues for an anthropology of human analyses of the region. Susan Lees demonstrates rights that contextualizes human rights claims the contestability and multivalency of socially and politically. Maintaining a ‘distance’ ‘community’ through a study of the legal and from cultural relativist critiques of human rights, political dispute that attended the attempt by a she shows how the displaced Catholics have group of orthodox Jewish families to demarcate taken up and re-signified the human rights an eruv within their New Jersey town. Essays by discourse and have found in it a way to frame Miranda Joseph and Peter Brosius on, their demands for human dignity. The analysis respectively, debt and restorative justice and shows how local meanings of human rights are environmental conservation are both very closely intertwined with understandings of faith scholarly but seem to be only tenuously related and Catholicism, reflecting the ‘option for the to the discourse of this book. poor’ of the San Cristóbal diocese (e.g. in the The best and most elegant chapter is notion that ‘rights are given by God’, p. 109). A contributed by the historian Gyanendra Pandey, major contribution of the book is to connect the in which, illustrating the changing uses of construction of meaning with the practices of ‘community’ in post-colonial South Asia, he human rights organizing, addressing forms of shows how it has been used to reconcile the mobilization and the defence of rights. It places apparently discrepant notions of primordial the Tzotzil Catholics in a broader and belonging and structure with those of the transnational human rights community that, contemporary nation. He concludes that through a network of local human rights words with evaluative content are, by their very promoters, reaches down to the community nature, susceptible to contradictory use and level. Thus, the study opens a window to further evaluation. questions, concerning the way indigenous That seems to me a fitting conclusion to this human rights promoters operate at the level of book, and puts the problem of ‘community’ into their communities, how their work resonates, appropriate perspective. The conceptual and how notions of human rights enter practices agonizing, the ponderous scholarship, do not of regulation and conflict resolution at the local resolve the problem, which, no doubt, will level. Crucial issues in this regard are the rights resurface again before long. It is a very small of women or the enforcement of community pinhead on which to accommodate so many rulings and responsibilities on individuals, which dancing angels. have become the subject of debate in many Anthony P. Cohen Queen Margaret University/ indigenous communities. University of Edinburgh A further objective of the book is to explore the agency of the displaced Tzotziles as co-participants in the construction of the Kovic,Christine. Mayan voices for human Catholic project in Chiapas. It presents a rich rights: displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas. analysis of the encounter between the diocese viii, 238 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. and indigenous communities over the past four Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2005.£12.95 decades which invites further inquiry into the (paper) intimate ways in which the diocese shaped indigenous subjectivity. A definite merit of the This study is one of the first to address Highland book is that it takes the displaced Tzotziles Indians in the urban periphery. It presents a rich seriously as believers. When discussing and compassionate account of Tzotzil Maya conversion, an interesting point raised is the fact families who have been expelled from their that women were often the ones to take the community of origin on the basis of religious initiative, finding in ‘the Word of God’ a space conversion and have settled at the fringes of the from which to challenge practices of alcohol fast-growing San Cristóbal de las Casas. The abuse and domestic violence and ‘construct new book presents indigenous narratives of gender roles’ (p. 25). conversion, suffering, and ‘the struggle for a Finally, the book provides a critique of dignified life’ and places these in broader social representations of the expulsions from and political developments in Chiapas. indigenous communities in terms of religious

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 453 conflict exclusively. It is argued that the experience in Guatemala and Canada with expulsions should also be understood as a Guatemalan refugees who have fled the political reaction to political dissidents posing a threat to violence in that country since the 1970s, and also the traditional community leaders (caciques) and on the gendered features of these narratives. Her correctly highlights the complicity of the state analysis is based on extensive interviews with government. The political subscript of Guatemalans in southwestern Ontario, Canada, conversion and expulsion is indeed crucial to the and in Guatemala itself. Nolin also analyses understanding of the dynamics of Highland Canadian immigration policy and testimonies communities. However, further layers should be from a UN-sponsored Commission for Historical added to the analysis of the micro-politics of Clarification, a kind of Truth Commission expulsion, considering the role of kinship and intended to heal the country, formed after peace inequalities in resources and wealth in accords between the government and guerrilla producing intra-communal fault-lines (the main forces in the 1990s. As Nolin notes, the political informants quoted on conversion are said to violence that forced this migration and has had a have been a relatively land-rich couple, but this subsequent impact on self-narratives and is not elaborated upon). The book adds to the subjectivities of those whom she interviewed is debate on the indigenous community in modern connected to modern forms of nation-building times. It highlights the strong commitment to and its racialist and racist legacy of the colonial community amongst the displaced Catholics, as period that has been devastating for the a value and as an organizing principle, while indigenous Mayan population. A putative also pointing to divisions, leadership crises, and European-heritage Latino population has community fragmentation. Whether these systematically and often perpetrated violence on dynamics, found also in other parts of Chiapas, Mayan communities throughout the country. point to a crisis or a re-invention of community The combination of the persecution of an urban is up for debate. professional middle class of union leaders, This study with its focus on other important academics, and so on, and leftist-inspired actors and discourses is a welcome addition to guerrilla war has resulted in a steady flow of the scholarship on contemporary Chiapas, which people making their way north, fleeing the has privileged Zapatismo. However, given that violence. This tragic history has compelled over the displaced Catholics are bearers of a very one million Guatemalans to flee north to similar agenda to that of the Zapatistas, the Mexico, the United States, and Canada in the book would have benefited from a more last thirty years, and the influx of asylum-seekers explicit treatment of their place in the political and the policies that constrain them are closely landscape since 1994 and the way they relate to connected to the anti-leftist geo-politics of US the EZLN. foreign policy. Many of the 14,000 or so Gemma van der Haar Wageningen University Guatemalans in Canada entered with the help of the American religious sanctuary movement and their Canadian partners, while a lenient, at least Nolin,Catherine. Transnational ruptures: up until 1987, Canadian government policy gender and forced migration. xviii, 246 pp., towards asylum-seekers offered an outlet for tables, bibliogr. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. desperate migrants that contrasted with US £50.00 (cloth) government efforts to deny asylum and deport Guatemalans. Since Glick Schiller et al. reframed migration The book is organized into three sections. studies through the lens of transnationalism The first section comprises extensive discussions (Towards a transnational perspective on migration, of the field of transnational migration studies, 1992), we have had a surfeit of studies seeking to how an analysis of gender is essential in studies uncover the social connections that migrants of the migration experience, and the importance maintain or develop across native, transit, and of reflexivity and activist scholarship especially host countries that force us to re-think identity when dealing with vulnerable communities. This and belonging. Nolin, a social geographer who is done through the lens of social geography borrows heavily from anthropology, argues that with ample citations of key anthropologists who in this body of literature insufficient attention has have worked on the conceptual terrain of been paid to the ruptures, denials, and transnationalism and those who have consequent sutures that characterize the contributed to studies in Guatemala. For this traumatic experiences faced by refugees. To do reader much of this literature review read like a this, Nolin draws on her multi-sited fieldwork dissertation and, thus, could have been edited

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down substantially. Section two presents in two handbook of international migration: the American chapters the historical context of violence in experience but with articles also focusing on or Guatemala and the subsequent implications of including the European experience. The changing Canadian immigration policies for the volume’s contributors address: state policy opportunities available for migration and a towards immigrants and their incorporation in discussion of the spatial distribution of Europe and the United States; an update on the Guatemalans in Canada. Regrettably, little phenomenon of transnationalism; the role of discussion of irregular migration is offered here. religion in migrants’ adaptation; the varieties of Section three offers the richest material with immigrant entrepreneurship; and an analysis in-depth narratives of several Guatemalans, of methodological problems in the study of the exploring how migration is forced by political undocumented and of the second generation. violence, and how its continuing threat and Stephen Casteles argues that the legacy found in the political schisms within the contradictory and compromising nature of different Guatemalan communities present in immigration policies in both Europe and the US Canada has led to the rupture of identities and is due to ‘the contradiction between the national communal life for the Guatemalans interviewed. logic of immigration control and the For Nolin, refugee transnationalism offers a more transnational logic of international migration in subtle account of the challenges in identity an epoch of globalization’ (p. 31). Migration formation, with feelings of belonging and policies reflect both the employer possibilities for community connections often (pro-immigrant) and local worker (often emphasized in the transnationalism literature. anti-immigrant) stances as well as ongoing Nolin’s narratives certainly offer powerful North (receiving countries)-South (sending testimonies of the difficulties her informants countries) relations. James Hollifield shows how had with establishing a sense of community, guest workers in Europe and temporary Mexican and the persistent consciousness of the absence labourers in the United States became of Guatemala in their constitution of permanent settlers and thereby affected state selves. Here, though, I think, we come up immigration policies. He calls for states’ against inter-disciplinary limits and different recognition of the rights of immigrants. expectations. In relating the ‘living geographies’ In an article considering the implications of of Guatemalans, and the ruptures found therein, legalizing dual citizenship, Thomas Faist, Jürgen Nolin argues that face-to-face communities have Gerdes, and Beate Ripple argue that permitting yet to develop, and that weak ties are the more immigrants to naturalize without losing their common form of sociality for Guatemalans in original citizenship status helps to integrate Canada; but within her own text she mentions them into the receiving country. They compare areas I wish she had explored more thoroughly, citizenship policies in Germany, the Netherlands, and ethnographically. Nolin’s own serious and Sweden. Gary Freeman looks at engagement with activism and its configuring ‘incorporation regimes’, distinguishing between effects on narratives for refugees, work in traditional countries of immigration, guest reception centres on behalf of asylum-seekers, worker countries, and countries affected by and mention of Guatemalan folkloric groups immigration from previous colonies. Modes of offer numerous sites for further elaborations incorporation are held to differ by state, market about new forms of identity, belonging, policies (i.e. labour utilization factors), welfare and constitutions of differing (ruptured) programmes, and acceptance of cultural communities. differences. Nicholas DeMaria Harney University of Western Three articles concerning transnationalism Australia follow. Steven Vertovec focuses on socio-cultural transformation of identity over immigrant generations. He argues that parents’ ‘bifocality’ Portes,Alejandro &Josh DeWind (eds). and practices such as the sending of remittances Rethinking migration: new theoretical and will affect children’s socio-cultural activities, empirical perspectives. vi, 453 pp., figs, tables, interests, and identities. Peggy Levitt and Nina bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, Glick Schiller deepen understanding of the 2007.£50.00 (cloth) dynamics of transnational social fields and point out that transnationalism brings with it a change Rethinking migration contains papers presented in the functions of the state. Min Zhou provides at a conference at Princeton University. It is an elegant typology of ethnic entrepreneurship, intended to be a companion volume to The distinguishing between middleman minorities

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 455 and enclave entrepreneurs, and the ethnic phenomena surrounding immigration in economy and the enclave economy, but also general. examining the relatively new phenomenon of Tamar Diana Wilson University of Missouri, transnational entrepreneurship. St Louis The next two articles focus on undocumented immigration. Douglas Massey and Chiara Capoferro examine the weaknesses in traditional census-taking in terms of tabulating Social anthropology numbers of the undocumented. They provide a number of arguments for the use of the ethnosurvey to measure the number and Conklin,Beth A. Consuming grief: characteristics of the undocumented, as well as compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian longitudinal changes in these characteristics. society. xxxi, 285 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Friedrich Heckmann looks at smuggler networks Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2001.$50.00 of immigrants into Germany. He describes the (cloth), $22.95 (paper) reasons for their rise and persistence and their adaptation to state efforts to stop illegal Beth Conklin’s investigation of mortuary immigration. cannibalism amongst the Wari, a The following two articles are concerned hunter-horticulturalist people of the with the adaptation of the second generation. Madeira-Marmore region of Brazil, provides a Hartmut Esser distinguishes between individual finely tuned insight into the emotional strength and social structural assimilation or integration invested in food and how it permeates daily of this generation. He offers a sophisticated existence and worlds of the after-life. Food is the mathematical model to map the conditions stuff of love both in this life and in the after-life. under which second-generation assimilation will It is the means by which bodies are made to take place. Rubén G. Rumbaut argues that grow robust, enabling them to work and differences in the age of migration can be found produce more food to feed self and kin. To the in the adaptation process. He distinguishes Wari, it is quite simply impossible to be healthy between the 1.75 generation (migrated at ages and yet sad or lazy. Health is willingness to 0-5), the 1.5 generation (migrated at ages 6-12), produce and rejoice, surrounded by kin, and the 1.25 generation (migrated at ages 13-17). showing good appetite and fluid blood He shows how these differences in age at circulation, conditions which are associated to migration to the United States affect deep breathing and an expanded heart. When immigrants from Latin America and the one works in the gardens, forest, and rivers, Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East, and Europe one’s breathing is deeper and heart-beat faster, and Canada. with better blood flow. This causes the The final two chapters look at the role of accumulation of fat. That is why hard-working religion in migrant incorporation. Charles men and women are robust. Illness, by contrast, Hirschman shows how both historically and is idleness and longing, two states which are contemporaneously migrants have used religion perceived to induce isolation, weight loss, poor to bolster their identity and show their breathing, bad blood flow, and a contracted commitment to community-building in the heart. United States. Riva Kastoryano examines the The body is thus the result of the love Islamic religion as ‘an emergent type of received and given, and it is always in the corporate ethnicity in France and Germany’ process of being made by others and making (p. 421), arguing that adherence to Islam is other people’s bodies through acts of feeding. superseding identity according to national Memory is also grounded in food. When people origin, despite the diversity of sects and are alive, they show how much they think about ethno-cultural groups. their loved ones by bringing them food. When Rethinking migration has a number of they die, they are remembered by how much innovative insights. The editors’ purpose – to food they produced, ate, and fed to others, and provide a companion piece to The handbook – their corpses become food to the living. Before has been at least partially met, though other definitive contact with Brazilian society, in the companion volumes could be imagined. 1960s, corpses were effectively consumed during The book should be read by scholars of big mortuary banquets to which members of all immigration to Europe and the United States surrounding Wari settlements were invited. and by those seeking theoretical insights into the Endo-cannibalism, that is, eating the body of

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 456 Book reviews

one’s dead, was conceived as the only endo-cannibalism regains a human face and the compassionate burial, necessary to enable both encompassing logic of loving through food is the departure of the diseased person’s spirit to made evident. Conklin’s book does not engage the land of the dead and the consolation of with current anthropological debates at great those left behind on this earth. length, but her findings bear important Several years after contact and the implications, especially with relation to the consequent prohibition by missionaries of meaning of predation and emotions. As for her performances of endo-cannibalistic burials, Wari approach to the place of love, feeding, and men and women still attempted to perpetuate memory in daily life, it is clear that Conklin owes their rituals, explaining that the thought of their much to the studies of what has been called the kin buried was too painful to bear and the British school of love in Amazonia, headed by feeling of their loss remained unappeased. Overing, Gow, Santos Granero, and McCallum, During the mortuary banquets of the past, amongst others, although she does not claim eating the cooked corpse was a service provided any affiliation. Classically, compassionate by the dead person’s affines to his or her kin in endo-cannibalim was analysed by Clastres and acknowledgement of the embodied ties of love Carneiro da Cunha, but in these authors’ views, existing between those who shared food the corpse was transformed into an other, an throughout their existence. Because several days enemy, and therefore endo-cannibalism did not might pass before all the guests arrived and differ much from exo-cannibalism, that is, the lengthy speeches were made in the memory eating of the bodies of enemies. The Wari used of the deceased, the corpse was often to practise both types of cannibalism, but as decomposed, and older people recall that the Conklin, and also Vilaça show, they differ taste could be revolting. Eating followed a slow radically in their emotional texture. The bodies of pace, with small bits of flesh being delicately enemies were eaten without delay or speeches, eaten using wooden sticks. the flesh swallowed with great voracity and But the Wari considered that the corpses of anger. their loved ones also became good food to their What remains to be explored is the own kin since, in their understanding, an aspect significance of emotions for Amazonian of the corpse transformed into the body of a perspectivism, as framed by Viveiros de Castro peccary, an Amazonian boar with highly prized and other authors. If, according to Conklin’s flesh. Peccaries were therefore human and study, the peccary hunt should be understood during the hunt they offered themselves to their as an expression of love linking the realm of the kin to be eaten by them, thereby fattening their dead and the living, it appears that the shared bodies. Hence, the bonds of love created humanity attributed to prey in Amazonian through the sharing of meals between kin were shamanistic cosmologies may rest upon their made possible by transformations into prey after emotional capabilities, as well as on their being death. Eating animal flesh, however, was not able to take a subjective position. Emotions, and regarded as the most important means of especially love and anger as two key forms of accumulating body fat. Corn, especially corn affect relating to food, body, and memory, beer prepared by women, was seen as the most would therefore have major cosmological nutritious food providing ‘fat of our hearts’. It implications. was also the safest food, since it did not imply Luisa Elvira Belaunde University of St Andrews contact with the blood of prey. Indeed, many illnesses were attached to contamination with the blood. To avoid this, people used to wash Gyatso,Janet &Hanna Havnevik (eds). away all traces of blood, thoroughly cook meat, Women in Tibet. xii, 436 pp., tables, illus., and use various plants as protection, especially bibliogr. London: C Hurst & Co., 2005. vegetable perfumes and red body paint. £45.00 (cloth), £20.00 (paper) Shamanism was also largely focused upon preventing and healing people after the Tibetan studies has been a major growth area revenge of animals brought about by blood in recent years, but the focus has remained contamination. primarily on the familiar domain of Tibetan One of the various merits of Conklin’s work religion and on the rapidly growing sub-field of is that it manages to dismantle the wall of Tibetan medicine. One could not say that exoticism surrounding endo-cannibalism by gender issues have been entirely neglected, but showing, through a study of Wari narratives, in comparison with other major Asian cultures its day-to-day emotional base. Hence, the literature in this area is not well developed

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 457 and we are still some way from an adequate insightful, but so varied as to allow for few anthropology or history of women in Tibetan generalizations. Robert Barnett’s substantial societies. The present volume, a well-produced (eighty-one pages) essay on women and politics collection of eight excellent studies (three by in contemporary Tibet should attract anthropologists, including Henrion-Dourcy’s considerable interest. Barnett deals with ethnomusicological study) which have little women’s roles both in formal state politics and more in common than that they are all in some in the underground resistance, mainly in Lhasa sense about ‘Women in Tibet’, illustrates the and the Tibet Autonomous Region, suggesting problem. Why, by 2005,dowenothave that both groups of women can be seen as thematically coherent volumes dealing with ‘involved in the same project: contributing to or more specific topics – the culture of gender in creating narratives or rituals ... which, by means contemporary Tibetan societies, for example, or of a “politics of difference”, sustain or promote the role of women in specific periods of the certain notions of the nation and of nationality’ history of Tibetan Buddhism? (p. 291). To their credit, the editors do not conceal the The two most specifically anthropological problem, noting that at this stage we hardly chapters are by Hildegard Diemberger and even know ‘what it is that we don’t know’ and Charlene Makley. Diemberger discusses female presenting the book as ‘not much more than oracles or spirit-mediums, using material from a preliminary step’ in the growth of our Lato in southwestern Tibet. She gives a detailed knowledge (p. 1). Certainly there is little sense of background to this largely female role, an a unified agenda about this collection. Whether assessment of how it has been transformed by choice or necessity, we have here eight through recent history, and a persuasive case for studies of largely distinct topics with little a specifically feminine source of ritual power thematic overlap, though a few individual within Tibetan society, grounded in the Tibetan Tibetan women are mentioned in more than one ecology, and existing largely in the interstitial of the chapters on contemporary Tibet (the spaces left by the male-dominated structures of Gesar bard Yumen or Yumi, first mentioned by secular and monastic power. This chapter is a Diemberger as a kind of female oracle, turns up very significant advance in our understanding of again in Henrion-Dourcy’s chapter as a singer, Tibetan spirit-mediumship, Tibetan popular and finally in Barnett’s as a political figure). religion, and women’s roles in Tibetan village Having said this, we should be grateful for society, and will be required reading for what we have here. The first three papers, all future scholars on these topics. It also has substantial and original, are historical: Helga important comparative dimensions, as with Uebach on court ladies during the early Tibetan Diemberger’s nuanced critique of Ioan Lewis’s empire (seventh to ninth centuries CE), Dan peripheral-central distinction. Martin on women spiritual teachers in the Makley’s chapter is another important and eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Kurtis original contribution, complementing and Schaeffer on the autobiography of an extending her work elsewhere (e.g. her eighteenth-century female hermit. Martin’s has, significant article in T. Huber (ed.) Amdo Tibetans perhaps, the widest implications, noting the in Transition, 2002). Using an analytic frame tendency for women to disappear from Tibetan influenced by Judith Butler and the ‘performance religious literature, and the importance of using of gender’ school, Makley examines nunhood sources as close as possible to the times in and gender at the former monastic settlement which they lived. and frontier trade-town of Labrang in Of the five papers on the modern period, contemporary Amdo (Northeast Tibet). She Tashi Tsering presents a useful if essentially provides the clearest account yet of the logic of descriptive survey of women in Tibetan Tibetan monastic celibacy, but what remains medicine, focusing on three women doctors in with the reader is the harsh reality of the lives of late twentieth-century Tibet and India. The the Labrang nuns today, the object of constant difficult relations between the refugee doctor derogatory gossip from both men and women Lobsang Dolma Khangkar, perhaps the best about their imagined sexual transgressions, but known of the three in the West, and the in reality forced to starve themselves through Dharamsala medical authorities, are instructive. constant fasting rituals in order to earn a bare The ethnomusicologist Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy subsistence. Makley convincingly describes how studies six women singers from the Tibet the verbal attacks on the nuns mirror local lay Autonomous Region, two of them now living in Tibetans’ anxieties regarding the multiple threats the West. Her case studies are detailed and posed by social change and Chinese modernity

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 458 Book reviews

to the monastery-household nexus, ‘the very to the Yuchi ceremonial cycle, beginning with a core of Tibetan social worlds’ (p. 284). chapter on the football game that signals to the Overall, this is an important collection of Creator that the ritual cycle is about to begin. papers for Tibetanists, with several contributions Next are the stomp dances. In this chapter of wider interest. There is certainly enough to Jackson emphasizes the intra-Yuchi and justify the book’s purchase for most major inter-Indian social interactions within which the academic libraries. It is to be hoped, though, ceremonies and dances are embedded. In the that this ‘preliminary step’ will stimulate others chapter on the Arbor Dance, Jackson highlights to take up the various projects relating to gender the importance of purity and renewal in Yuchi in Tibetan societies to which it contributes, and ceremonial life as well as the function of ritual that future collections will be able to adopt that holds the Yuchi community together by more coherent and unified approaches to more enunciating in ritual acts and oratory Yuchi clearly defined sets of questions. If there is one shared cultural norms and values. In the chapter thing that this book succeeds in demonstrating, on the Green Corn Ceremony, the climax of the it is the critical importance of gender issues for Yuchi ceremonial cycle, Jackson focuses on understanding many aspects of Tibetan society, story-telling and oratory as living traditions. including Tibetan religious life. Finally, the Yuchi ceremonial cycle ends with the Geoffrey Samuel Cardiff University Soup Dance, a ritual dance devoted to thanking the ancestors and to inviting them to participate in the ceremonies. Jackson,Jason Baird. Yuchi ceremonial life: Yuchi ceremonial life is multi-faceted and performance, meaning, and tradition in a polysemic, but primarily today it is about being contemporary American Indian community. Yuchi. As his Yuchi collaborators told Jackson, xviii, 345 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. being Yuchi is not about blood, it is about London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2003. participation. By participating in the rituals, £60.00 (cloth) Yuchis become Yuchi. Yuchi ceremony, then, serves to reinforce Yuchi identity and Books like Yuchi ceremonial life drew me to study separateness, something that they have been anthropology from the start. Based on years of doing for at least two hundred years. Sometime participant observation and in-depth interviews in the eighteenth century, the Yuchis attached with Yuchi ceremonial leaders, Jason Baird themselves to the Creek Confederacy, but they Jackson gives us an absorbing, detailed have since held to their separate identity. Today, ethnographic account of Yuchi ceremonial life. they are not a federally recognized group, and Although firmly suppported by the ideas and are considered and governmentally methodology of cultural and linguistic theory, administrated as a sub-set of the Muskogee this is foremost a book for and about Yuchi (Creek) Nation in present-day Oklahoma. As people. It is for the Yuchis as Yuchi leaders Jackson shows, Yuchis share much about enlisted Jackson as their ethnographer to record, contemporary ritual life with the Creeks and videotape, and otherwise document Yuchi other Woodland Indian people such as the ceremonies, stories, and dances. It is also a book Shawnees and Iroquois. And at almost every about the Yuchis in that Jackson, in good phase of the ritual cycle, both Yuchis and anthropological style, transports the reader to non-Yuchis are invited to and expected to the stomp grounds of Oklahoma and serves as participate in the ceremonies. In turn, Yuchis are our reliable and knowledgeable guide to, and expected to and do participate in non-Yuchi translator of, Yuchi ceremony and ritual. ritual events. However, instead of resulting in After introducing us to the Yuchis and the pan-Indian ritualism and an overall melding of small sub-set of Yuchi people who participate in separate Indian identities, Yuchi and non-Yuchi the stomp-ground ceremonies, Jackson then participants use their co-operation to maintain takes us into the stomp grounds with histories simultaneously both their separateness and and detailed descriptions of the three ceremonial similarities. Through intimate participation in grounds currently in use by Yuchi participants – both Yuchi and non-Yuchi ritual events, Yuchi the Polecat grounds, the Duck Creek grounds, people maintain distinct Yuchi ceremonial ways and the Sand Creek grounds. Next, Jackson through their own intra-Indian comparisons of details the structure of Yuchi ceremonial ritual events while also reinforcing their social leadership, the etiquette of ceremonial oratory, ties and cultural similarities with non-Yuchis. and generally how to behave while at the stomp Jackson underscores the fact that in cultural grounds. The second half of the book is devoted reproduction and change there are complex

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 459 interplays by which cultural borrowing and situation she describes is one in which, in many sharing simultaneously blur and reinforce social ways, borders might as well not exist. boundaries and identities. She describes security seals on shipping Mostly, though, Yuchi identity and containers and how easy they are to fake. separateness are also reproduced and Similarly, she describes the difficulty, perhaps maintained in Yuchi oratory, and Yuchi oratory impossibility, of inspecting shipping containers, permeates Yuchi ceremonial life. In his analysis of and the laxity of security at ports more speech acts, Jackson borrows from generally. These are, as she notes, designed to anthropological theory on discourse-centred facilitate rapid movement rather than to check it. interpretations of ritual in order to track the She describes her voyage on a freighter that process of ‘traditionalization’, whereby Yuchi visited a number of United States ports and then leaders, by reflecting on and connecting crossed to Europe. From before she entered the contemporary ritual life with a meaningful past, first US port to after she left the European port convert cultural forms into tradition. In a she was never asked to identify herself. Even complex turn, tradition is then used to when she flew out of that European country no authenticate ritual as being specifically Yuchi. one noticed that there was no record that she Through the telling and re-telling of stories by had ever entered it. modern Yuchi leaders, narratives take on their Tales of shipping containers and her own own natural history and encode changing border-crossing are the most straightforward cultural practices that are used to make and examples of the book’s many instances of illegal re-make tradition. Seen in this way, Yuchi trade and the apparent inability or unwillingness ceremonies and stories are not static, age-old of governments to deal with it. These range from practices, but rather practices that are dynamic, wrongly stating the contents of a shipment in changing, malleable, and configured for living in order to incur lower customs duties, to the modern world. In Jackson’s hands, then, transcontinental trade in protected varieties of Yuchi ceremonial life is not an anthropological fish. However, this breadth raises a question story about cultural continuity; it is not a salvage about what Nordstrom is trying to do, for she ethnography documenting quickly eroding appears to lump together all trade that violates sacred practices; rather, it is a Yuchi story about law, and so fails to distinguish the trade in pirated the historical process of negotiating and CDs from the trade in people. All of these may reproducing Yuchi identity, culture, and tradition violate a statute, but people worry about some in the modern world. much more than they do others, and policing Robbie Ethridge University of Mississippi practices reflect this discrimination, as they have done for as long as there have been police. In a larger sense, the tales of those Nordstrom,Carolyn. Global outlaws: crime, uninspectable containers may lie at the heart of money, and power in the contemporary world. what some readers, at least, will see in this book: xxi, 234 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: an inversion, and indeed celebration, of one of Univ. California Press, 2007.£13.95 (paper) the most visible public concerns of the present decade, and of many decades before – a This is a peculiar book, in part because it is concern with categories and boundaries. The about a topic anthropologists rarely study, neat categories of the illegal (bad, disreputable, networks of crime. The crime at issue ranges illegitimate) and the legal (good, reputable) from street children who sell smuggled simplify the world, and people become anxious cigarettes in a war zone to money laundering when these categories are threatened. and trade in unlicensed goods such as CDs and Nordstrom argues that this distinction is not branded clothing. It is also peculiar because much use in practice: the bulk of trade that Carolyn Nordstrom reports, and appears to take, violates law is carried out by large, reputable a number of different stances towards those corporations as part of their normal operations. networks in what may be more a work of public The same with boundaries. Current concern in affairs than one of description and analysis. many countries indicates that people get anxious While the topic is networks of crime, the when boundaries weaken or dissolve. Nordstrom descriptions are of individual places and shows, though, that when it comes to transport, activities taken to be part of networks, especially national boundaries generally are weak and international networks. So, Nordstrom devotes often are effectively non-existent. The notion of a lot of attention to border-crossings and boundaries, then, is not much help in trying to transport, particularly marine transport. And the make sense of how the world works.

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It is not very contentious to say that decades, they have indisputably become the boundaries and categories are less secure than most famous people of Ecuadorian Amazonia. they appear in the daily press and government Trapped in their own forest by encroaching statements. Nordstrom uses this insecurity to colonists and oil workers, the Huaorani have argue for the present failing of the modernist repeatedly engaged in attacks against oil camps project of nation-states and an orderly, rational and settlers, stealing their goods and, world. As she notes, in many ways the workings sometimes, spearing them to the ground in of the world simply do not conform. Instead, dramatic death. In the local imagination, their she wants us to look at transnational flows and iconic savagery reveals their being prototypical what she aptly calls ‘il/legal’ trade, at the auca, wild Indians roaming in the forest, as border-crossings rather than the borders, at the opposed to those living by the main rivers, category violations rather than the categories. providing labour and crops to white patrons and Global outlaws intrigues. The tales that it traders. Rival’s book explores their forest history contains are always interesting and often using both archival materials and the memories fascinating. Nordstrom’s point about the of those Huaorani men and women who now permeability of borders is compelling. But while speak Spanish, send their children to school, and it will intrigue, it is not clear that it will satisfy, have great fear of their ancient enemy bands because it offers too little consideration of how who remain in the forest. we ought to proceed, either intellectually or The book provides an insider’s view of the politically. This book, then, offers us a number of Huaorani’s daily routines, the ceremonial interesting tales about covert international performances, and the war expeditions of the transport and trade, combined with descriptions past and present. The rhythm of their existence of those who are part of it or who seek to stop was and is still kept by means of trekking, even it. What it needs is an intellectual frame that when living in close contact with other would turn these tales into a coherent indigenous Amazonians and colonists. They argument. spend most of the day wandering through the James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford Brookes forest within a 5 to 20 kilometre radius from the Universities communal house, moving from tree to tree rather than touching the ground, gathering seeds and fruits for food and other uses, such as Rival,Laura M. Trekking through history: the fishing, and actively managing the environment, Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. xx, 246 pp., transporting wild seeds to hunting tracks and maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. New York: natural clearings, and encouraging their growth Columbia Univ. Press, 2002.£46.00 (cloth), to supply their needs. Agriculture as such is £21.00 (paper) devoted almost entirely to manioc (Manihot esculenta) and peach palm fruit (Bactris gasipaes), Ever since Pierre Clastre’s study of the Guayaqui and the Huaorani devote only a small portion of of Paraguay, in the 1960s, the debate as to their time to these activities for they require whether the Amazon rainforest was home to considerable physical effort and pain. groups of people entirely dependent on hunting The author argues that the Huaorani’s simple and foraging, without agriculture, has been agriculture is not the result of the loss of divided between those who argued that heavy techniques and crop species requiring better reliance on foraging resulted from agricultural gardens due to encapsulation by colonists who regression and those who saw foraging as an force them to keep moving in the forest. Rather original cultural feature in its own terms. Laura she suggests that Huaorani agriculture is and has Rival’s study of Huaorani livelihood addresses historically been incipient, a feature which she the issue through an account of the history of a suggests puts them in the same category as people who made of trekking their dominant hunter-gatherers. Whilst I agree with the idea way of existence, relying for subsistence on that agricultural regression might not be an foraging and yet also practising some appropriate concept, it seems to me that Rival’s agriculture. rich ethnographic data are not being fully taken In 1956, a Huaorani band in the Curaray area into account in considering her own theoretical was encountered by Evangelical missionaries and arguments and, therefore, some threads remain two years later various bands were brought to loose. For instance, with regard to peach palm settle around the mission. Other bands have trees, on the one hand, she shows that these remained in the forest, refusing ‘peaceful’ trees are territorial markers of personal identity, contact up to the present. In the last two group memory, and kinship continuity. Peach

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 461 palm gardens grow in places where people people, plants, and animals as disseminators settled for a while and they keep producing long and carers as much as foragers and predators in after those people have moved out to other the food chain. This is also the case amongst locations and even die. Whenever ancient peach people who may be known as consecrated palm gardens are found, people rejoice, agriculturalists, such as the Secoya (Airo-Pai), remembering their ancestors and eating the Huaorani neighbours to the east, amongst bountiful fruits they left for future generations. whom I carried out fieldwork. They attend their The seeds, however, are not planted using a gardens every day and have a large variety of direct technique to introduce them in the crops, including bitter and sweet manioc, corn ground. Rather, they are left to germinate and plantain, and yet they conceive of the somewhere close to the hearth after cooking environment as ‘giving’, and value highly the and eating them. This leads the author to abundance of food while investing in peach conclude that the Huaorani do not deliberately palm trees very similar notions of personal cultivate peach palm trees, but that their identity, memory and social continuity as do the culinary activities favour their germination and Huaorani. Comparison with other groups who propagation. I find the idea of non-deliberate spend little time in agriculture, such as the Jodi cultivation puzzling given her own emphasis on of Venezuela, studied by Zent, who spend less the salient social significance of peach palm than 20 per cent of their time engaged in this trees, and especially of the fact that these are activity, is also needed to find alternatives to the regarded as property transmitted through the conceptual binary opposition between foragers generations. and agriculturalists that currently informs our A similar impression is given by Rival’s analyses. discussion of manioc cultivation. She argues that Luisa Elvira Belaunde University of St Andrews manioc cultivation is incipient because gardens are small, attended infrequently, and only sweet manioc is produced. Yet she states that Huaorani Scott,Michael W. The severed snake: manioc is known as the sweetest and juiciest matrilineages, making place and a Melanesian manioc of the area, so much so that it is often Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. eaten raw. One cannot help but wonder xxxiii, 379 pp., maps, illus., figs, bibliogr. whether such sweetness could have been the Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, result of agricultural selection, entailing a 2007.$45.00 (paper) considerable level of specialization. Generally, though, manioc is consumed on great festive This book about Arosi on the island of Makira is occasions, such as weddings and other welcome on several fronts. Of the main Solomon gatherings with neighbours and allies. The Islands, Makira has been the least researched – tubers are boiled and mashed into a paste to this is the first deep ethnography from the island make manioc beer, although it is drunk before since Charles Fox’s The threshold of the Pacific strong alcoholic fermentation occurs. The author (1924). Theoretically, Scott presents engaging states that the great social significance of manioc arguments about the interplay of Melanesian is similar to that of peach palm fruits, and that ontologies, place, and practice, and he also both crops help to limit the fragmentation of makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning Huaorani society into small separated bands. It is study of indigenous Christianities. therefore clear that Huaorani social existence is Within anthropology particular ethnographic heavily dependent on the collective ritual topics sometimes become entwined with specific consumption of both crops and that their theoretical approaches, and when those cultivation, although it may not take a great approaches become passé, the topics portion of their time, is crucial to their themselves, important as they may be, can be livelihood. relegated to the margins of study. A striking The author’s rich ethnographic analysis and recent example is kinship, which for years theoretical discussion provide key arguments virtually disappeared from many departments’ and materials to re-think further Amazonian curricula. Early on, Melanesianists found that people’s relationships to the environment, and African-derived kinship models did not fit well to break away from pre-determined views about with what they observed on the ground, even the difference between agriculture and foraging, where people said their groups were based on and even hunting and fishing. As Posey claims unilineal descent. A quite different approach to for the Kayapó, all these activities feed into one understanding Melanesian identities has another and entail close interaction between emerged, inspired most famously by Roy

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Wagner and Marilyn Strathern. It conceives of stingy assertion that itself belies the speaker’s persons not as defined by fixed identities but legitimacy as a true auhena member. rather as composites of their multiple and fluid Scott explores how social action is generated social relationships. Scott does not urge a return through the interplay of these discrete models to classic kinship theory, and he grants the of societal ordering, and competing Arosi relational approach’s value for understanding interpretations of the landscape and its aspects of Arosi life. But a central argument of residents’ standings within it. The situation is his book is that Melanesianists today give more complex still because the polygenetic insufficient attention to indigenous models that model of separate auhena origins and statuses ground identities in deep ontologies, including coexists and mingles with Christian models of but not limited to those based on descent. monogenesis, and the idea that Arosi truly Broadly following Sahlins, Scott presents Arosi as belong to and should behave as ‘one lineage a case study of what he calls ‘onto-praxis’, united under God and the Church’ (p. 35). Scott ‘the organization of praxis as the situational examines historical strategies of Anglican engagement of social agents with ontological missionaries who highlighted Arosi myths that categories’ (p. 20). He contends that crucial implied a single origin and identity, and he aspects of Arosi life can only be understood from analyses diverse and creative ‘ethno-theological’ this perspective. readings of Christianity found in Arosi today. At first glance Makira appears a hard case for Still another ideological strand here is that of this argument. Early in Scott’s research, Arosi life kastom, and Scott reconstructs its origins in the seemed amenable to the relational approach. Maasina Rule movement of the 1940s. Above all, People portrayed their former matrilineages, or movement members feared that foreign invaders auhena – independent in origin and grounded in would take Makiran lands if ownership was exclusive ancestral territories – as defunct. ambiguous. Dread of massive land alienation Starting in the nineteenth century, Makirans continues to animate Arosi desires to establish suffered severe depopulation from disease, and true auhena ownership. The Arosi ideological beginning in 1918, colonial officers responded by skein is far more complex than I can impart enacting social engineering schemes that here, and Scott does an admirable job of displaced people from their ancestral lands into disentangling it. His study will greatly interest coastal villages. Arosi told Scott, and each other, anthropologists and historians of Melanesia and that their auhena anchored in fixed territories beyond. had been lost to this history. Their lives were David Akin University of Michigan now ordered not by auhena identities and ancestral places but by relationships of co-operation, marriage, and exchange Tan,Chee-Beng (ed.). Southern Fujian: between families that shared shallow reproduction of traditions in post-Mao China. patrilineal links to matrilineages, and resided xviii, 190 pp., map, tables, illus., bibliogrs. on lands of other, now extinct auhena. ‘We are Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. Press, 2006. all people who have come from elsewhere’ $42.00 (cloth) (p. 64). But as individuals began taking Scott into This publication examines major anthropological private confidence, they revealed that such developments in the southern Fujian region of relationships were, by themselves, inadequate, mainland China. It is a highly important piece of and shared their concerns with a deeper work for the following two reasons. First, it ontological model. Each confided that their represents a successful long-term collaborative original auhena was far from dead, and was in effort between anthropologists in mainland fact the true owner of the coastal land on which China (Wang Mingming, Fan Ke, and Ding they now resided. They buttressed their claims Yuling) with anthropologists outside of China with renditions of lineage narratives and (Tan Chee-Beng, Siumi Maria Tam, and evidence from ancestral sites, objects, and Kuah-Pearce Khun Eng in Hong Kong and Pan names. These claims to living auhena status Hongli in Japan). Given China’s imperative need contradict each other, and must remain covert for international academic exchange, this serves since their public declaration sparks discord, and as a good example for future collaborative because of an ethical catch-22:trueauhena efforts. Second, this book marks the maturation generously allow others use of their land, and to of anthropology as an academic discipline in proclaim auhena status insinuates that others China. Except for the three Hong Kong-based reside on the land only at one’s pleasure, a anthropologists (Tan, Tam, and Kuah-Pearce),

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 463 the remaining four (Wang, Fan, Pan, and Ding) community (who are no longer Muslims), Fan represent the first crop of post-Mao, describes how people with the surname of Ding foreign-trained anthropologists who will join the have reconstructed their Arabic ancestry through backbone of anthropology in contemporary genealogy, claimed their minority status through China. With the assistance of their tutelage, the government’s ethnic classification system, anthropology can once again be considered a and proceeded to ‘restore’ some of their well-respected academic branch of science, after allegedly lost traditions. having been long suppressed during Mao Tse The second controversy that emerges in this Tung’s reign. Their involvement in empirical volume is: ‘Who provides the inspiration or social research is also needed in order to leadership for the revival of local cultures?’ Pan assess the roles of cultural tradition in in chapter 3 suggests that it is elderly men, China, as the country forges a new path of through their newly formed Old Folks’ development. Association (LRH in Chinese), who provide the Since 1979, China’s post-Mao reforms, under leadership roles for cultural revival, and they the policy of ‘Reform and Openness’, have seen further serve as mediators between state the revival of many traditional local practices in authorities and local society. The opposite view the southern Fujian province of China that were is presented by Kuah-Pearce in chapter 5, who suppressed during the Maoist era, such as Daoist argues that it is women who serve as ‘custodial rituals, ancestral worship, lineage organizations, guardians of rituals and religious practices local cults, and so on. The retrenchment of the in South China’ (p. 121). A close reading of state’s intervening hands in people’s daily lives her narratives, however, does not provide has created a much more tolerant and flexible much concrete evidence to support this environment in southern Fujian than in most argument. other places in China. This is because the local The third controversy in this volume is the government has created policies to encourage changing status of women and whether this has overseas Chinese to invest in China’s emerging had an impact on the traditional patriarchal industries. Amid dramatic social changes our family. The last three chapters, by Kuah-Pearce, anthropologists, based on ethnographic Tam, and Ding, all address these issues. They all fieldwork data, not only portray the cultural agree that women in southern Fujian have practices that are being revived, but also identify generally adjusted well throughout the era of three major issues that enlighten us regarding dramatic social change; and they have been the complexities involved in life within toughened during the recent transitions, and post-Reform China. have developed effective coping strategies for The first issue is whether current self-preservation and taking care of their families. state-initiated reforms are truly beneficial to the However, both Tam and Ding believe that even preservation or revival of the local cultural though women have more freedom and traditions. Wang, in chapter 1, takes a cynical decision-making power, they do not challenge view and argues that state officials are willing to the gender-biased system. Tam even suggests tolerate ‘backward’ or ‘superstitious’ local that these women have been unconsciously practices as long as they can lure back overseas reinforcing patriarchal society through the Chinese investors and produce tangible reproduction of their husbands’ patriarchal economic benefits. However, Wang’s utilitarian family. Kuah-Pearce, on the other hand, feels argument is not shared by two other researchers that women have become the new driving force whose studies are included in this publication. in social development. In chapter 4, Tan’s study in Yongchun shows This collection of research sheds new light on that many traditional practices, including our understanding of contemporary China ancestral cults, village temple worships, through the analysis of culture reproduction. By and seasonal festivals, have occurred here examining the dynamic interaction between the recently, even though this region does not have state and local southern Fujian society, the many overseas Chinese, is relatively poor, and authors attempt to identify the actors and agents lacks policies towards attracting external who are initiating social change, and their investments. possible impacts on the long-term development Fan, in chapter 2, counter-argues that it is the of Chinese culture and society. Their empirical local community that takes advantage of the work is likely to be highly valued by future state’s policies and it uses the policies to researchers not only in China, but also re-create its long-lost cultural heritage. In this internationally. interesting case study of a southern Fujian Arabic Shu-min Huang Institute of Ethnology, Taiwan

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Wilson,Tamar Diana. Subsidizing capitalism: provide the basis for endofamilial accumulation brickmakers on the US-Mexican border. xiv, 213 through the deployment of family labour. In the pp., tables, illus., bibliogr. Albany: SUNY loose structure the wife does not participate in Press, 2005.$51.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper) brickmaking but rather pursues other economic activities such as running a small store. Here one In this clearly written account Tamar Wilson might wish for more data, especially on family combines poems, stories, and concise analysis to decision-making and the distribution of earnings. reveal both the structural constraints and the In chapter 9, ‘The heterogeneity of subsidies’, agency of brickmakers in the northern Mexico Wilson compares garbage-pickers with city of Mexicali. Following an introduction in brickmakers and argues that although similar in which Wilson describes her methodology and many respects, the former are more like post-modern creative style, the first chapter is a ‘disguised proletarians’ than petty commodity brief story about the life of a brickmaker couple, producers because their access to the means of beginning with their arrival and the wife’s production, expensive vehicles for transporting participation in a land invasion. The story the materials they collect, is more limited. conveys the struggles of this hard-working Although Wilson begins chapter 9 by couple and the support they give and receive pointing out how brickmakers prefer their work from their neighbours and kin. Several other in the informal sector because of ‘self-imposed chapters (4, 6, and 8) similarly use stories or rather than other-imposed discipline’, she poems effectively to convey various aspects of ultimately concludes that brickmaking is not brickmaking and brickmakers’ lives. counter-hegemonic. First, it is a form of what Chapter 2 is a useful discussion of various Kearney (‘Class and identity’, in History in person, approaches that have been used to understand eds D. Holland & J. Lave, 2000) calls ‘jujitsu’ the informal sector. Wilson criticizes Marxist and domination, in which the efforts of workers neo-Marxist approaches for their limited ‘insure that the products of their labor benefit recognition of agency but acknowledges the the capitalist system’. Second, there ‘seems little utility of these approaches in analysing how the counterhegemonic consciousness’, as shown in informal sector subsidizes capitalism. Relying on the desire of most to become brickyard owners, a ‘modified “capitalist-populist” ’ approach, that is, ‘part of the system’. This argument could neo-Marxist and world-systems theories, and a be developed further with more data Chananovian model, she stresses Cook’s demonstrating that ownership is desired for its (Peasant capitalist industry, 1984) concept of capitalist profit-making and accumulation rather ‘endofamilial accumulation’, which she than for what Sylvia Yanagisako (Producing ultimately links to class dynamics and the culture and capital, 2002) calls non-capitalist transition from petty commodity production to imaginaries. petty capitalism. In the ‘Epilogue’, Wilson describes recent After describing six strata among brickmakers changes in brickmaking, especially increased in chapter 3, ranging from piece-rate workers to organization and union participation. She comes worker-owners, Wilson compares the roles and to the ultimate conclusion that the efforts of lives of brickmakers with those of peasants. She brickmakers subsidize capitalism directly by suggests that both groups subsidize capitalism providing cheaper bricks for capitalist and both can also experience class differentiation construction of malls, office buildings, and based on access to the means of production and housing, and indirectly by providing cheaper different stages in the family life cycle. In chapter bricks for workers’ self-built communities, thus 5 she describes and analyses the family labour reducing the wages capitalism must pay to involved in brickmaking. She argues that because workers. These cheaper contributions of labour of the neo-patriarchal structure of the family, the are made possible by self-exploitation and the significant contributions of women and children exploitation of family labour. are invisible. Although this point could be In sum, despite some shortcomings, the developed further – for example, by examining book provides an important addition to the the patriarchal structure beyond the family and literature on the informal economy, especially on the growing literature showing a more dynamic family labour and family accumulation and how pattern of gender relations, which are suggested such labour subsidizes capitalism. Its clear and by the realities she describes – the examination of concise manner makes it useful in courses on this invisible labour is important. Chapter 7 the anthropology of work, urban anthropology, distinguishes what Wilson calls tight from loose and poverty. patriarchal structures. Tight patriarchy can Frances L. Rothstein Montclair State University

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Theory As an anthropologist I am very interested in questions about the cultural effects of a social fabric maimed by war or disaster. However, I am Alexander,Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, aware that the prism of the trauma and memory Bernhard Giesen,Neil J. Smelser & discourse favours concepts such as ‘collective Piotr Sztompka. Cultural trauma and memory’ and obscures less obvious conceptual collective identity. ix, 314 pp., fig, table, avenues. This volume obviously draws upon 1989 bibliogr. London, Los Angeles: Univ. Connerton’s How societies remember ( ) and 1992 1941 California Press, 2004.£42.95 (cloth), Halbwachs’s On collective memory ( [ , 1952 £16.95 (paper) ]), and the reader only receives a glimpse of other dimensions of maimed cultural and social 144 This book emerged from a dialogue amongst fabrics, such as the destruction of trust (p. ), 19 researchers in the humanities and psychological the acceptance of impunity (p. ), or other sciences at the Center for Advanced Studies in affected cultural expectations. the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. The However, such topics, which are slightly point of departure of this debate is a recognition peripheral to the book’s main discussion of of the embeddedness of the notion of trauma in ‘cultural trauma’, become particularly important everyday language. The authors focus on when the research questions are extended to expressions such as ‘traumatized populations or non-Western societies. In the introduction, Jeffrey organizations’ or ‘national trauma’. In other Alexander briefly considers ‘these recent words, they highlight the trend to extend the outpourings of mass murder in the non-Western 25 scope of the primarily psychological notion of world’ (p. ) and he asserts the universal trauma to collectivities. Many social scientists relevance of the notion of cultural trauma. There might advocate a critical deconstruction of such is no doubt this group of researchers would conceptual slippage in media and political generate valuable analyses of non-Western discourses. Yet the contributors build upon such societies through the lens of cultural trauma, lay discourses on collective trauma to develop yet I am concerned with the blind spots such a a new concept of cultural trauma, from an paradigm might generate. Thus I would academic and largely sociological perspective. query the effects of catastrophic events on In other words, this book provides different cosmologies, ritual, and culture-specific power perspectives on an emerging theoretical relations. In particular, I would suggest adding framework in which the concept of ‘cultural questions about the specific effects of trauma’ plays a critical role. a global counter-insurgency culture on The volume includes a theoretical chapter (by inter-generational dynamics and the transmission Neil Smelser) which explores the link between of culture. Universalizing questions about psychological or psycho-analytical definitions of collective memory, identity, and guilt as it were trauma and the concept of cultural trauma. take for granted the primacy of modern or Subsequent chapters offer case material for a modernized identities and political systems. more detailed exploration and definition of The book, however, initiates an extremely cultural trauma. The selected examples concern important debate about the impact of four historical events central to Euro-American twentieth-century warfare on culture, or, in the political consciousness: slavery, the Holocaust, authors’ words, the issue of ‘cultural trauma’. I post-communism, and September 11. The would recommend this book to social scientists concept of cultural trauma thereby becomes a interested in cultures of violence. The argument heuristic device to ask questions about events brings up many further questions. One striking that shock the foundations of a social world, example concerns Karl Jasper’s notion of destroy a social fabric, and entail a loss of identity metaphysical guilt. This aspect of cultural trauma and violation of fundamental cultural denotes the demise of trust in the progress of presuppositions. The work of Cathy Caruth Western civilization in the aftermath of the (Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and Holocaust. Barbarism ‘in the heartland of 144 history, 1996) informs the analytical angle modern European culture’ (p. ) thereby throughout this volume, and provides, as it were, turned into a global trauma of humankind, a blueprint to make the leap from psychological and this book makes one think about the trauma to cultural trauma. Cultural trauma is cross-cultural conceptual ramifications of such a then explored through concepts such as postulated demise of trust in European collective memory and identity, collective civilization. lex rgenti repression and guilt, or collective consciousness. A L. A University College London

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Hartigan,John,Jr. Odd tribes: toward a the underclass, and other cultural forms such as cultural analysis of white people. ix, 359 pp., hillbilly and redneck. The popular uses of the illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke term in cultural forms, including in novels, films, Univ. Press, 2006.£15.95 (paper) and music, are also explored. The book argues persuasively that throughout its history (and From the 1980s onwards, there has been despite recent attempts to reclaim white trash as increased interest among anthropologists in a positive or transgressive identity), white trash researching the racialized position and identities sustains notions of pollution and degeneracy of of white people. This could be seen as one whiteness. Hartigan also traces the key role that response to the unease which resulted from ideas of family and dysfunctional or degenerate confronting the colonial tradition from which family have played in white trash. However, he anthropology emerged and its continuing could perhaps have traced more clearly the post-colonial concern with examining the lives gendered as well as classed contours of this and conditions of ‘Others’ ‘out there’. However, relationship. White trash, the book argues, is John Hartigan’s wide-ranging and challenging perhaps more about middle-class fears and book questions the idea that it is necessarily easy fantasies than anything else. Hartigan is not to move away from the distanced and concerned so much with establishing an objectifying anthropological gaze through this authoritative definition of white trash, but rather shift in focus. Using examples which range from to ‘analyze the work the term performs in Charles Booth’s study of poverty in London to marking and negotiating the social distinctions cultural representations of ‘white trash’ in that inform racial and class boundaries in the contemporary US popular culture, Hartigan United States’ (p. 123). asserts the dominance of the racialized lens The exploration of the complex relationship through which poor whites have been studied. between race and class is given further depth Whilst this raises potentially uncomfortable by drawing on Hartigan’s own ethnographic questions for the researcher, Hartigan is work. Using his research in Detroit, Hartigan reclaiming a space for anthropological or convincingly traces the varied and varying way ethnographic work on the study of race. He in which race is lived in a context that is highly argues that it is only through extended racialized, and yet not all social encounters are examination of cultural forms and the everyday necessarily about race. For poor whites living in that the continually shifting ground of race can urban Detroit, where they are now in the racial be mapped. The book constitutes an important minority, race is clearly always present as a and critical engagement with what is sometimes social category, but not always dominant: called ‘whiteness studies’. It is based on an ‘[R]acial meanings are often quickly rendered assertion both that whiteness can only fruitfully and asserted in Detroit, but there are also many be regarded as integral to the study of race and situations in which they are suspended, held in also that it is imperative to move away from a abeyance, or simply do not come to mind’ unified or hegemonic idea of whiteness (and (p. 212). The challenge is to construct an therefore race itself). A central concern of the understanding of race and whiteness that is book is to show the ways in which race and class alive to its presence and salience but also are co-constructed and interdependent in both sensitive to ambiguities and nuances in its their ideological construction and lived operation. This is a challenge that Hartigan experience. extends to anti-racist practitioners and In particular, through extended and researchers, who, he argues, risk essentializing fascinating examination of the historical and both whites and whiteness. For Hartigan, the continuing contemporary uses of the concept of key solution to this problem is to have a ‘white trash’, this book traces the ways in which rigorous awareness and analysis of the situated, race and class intersect in order to mark out the local nature of whiteness and its changing role shifting boundaries of whiteness (and race). in cultural dynamics. In treating whiteness as a White trash is traced back to its origins in the cultural artefact, he argues that ‘it is economy of slavery (in which it meant constituted in daily life through symbols, non-slaveholding whites). From the outset, an images, discursive logics and interpretive economic condition was naturalized as a repertoires, narrative genres, various forms of reflection of an essential, degenerate nature. body work and discipline and all the other Uses of white trash are mapped alongside other arbitrary conventions that characterize cultural terms drawn from the eugenics movement (such constructions’ (p. 283). as feeble-mindedness, imbecile), the concept of Bridget Byrne University of Manchester

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Lyon,David. Surveillance studies: an overview. Lyon argues, surveillance can hide as much as it viii, 243 pp., bibliogr. Cambridge, Malden, reveals, and rather than simply revealing Mass.: Polity Press, 2007.£55.00 (cloth), information, it creates new forms of knowledge. £15.99 (paper) Furthermore, Lyon stresses the importance of paying attention to the ‘embodied persons’ of The British government has been planning for surveillance. Surveillance is not just an abstract several years to introduce identity cards for system of information-gathering, but is aimed at all people resident in the UK. Against the a specific type of person, and in turn allows (or background of perceived security threats and a forces) them to act in particular ways. It is shrinking welfare state, senior police officers therefore important to understand what types of have argued that ‘we have to go to a place person are produced by surveillance practices, where we do know who people are’. For the how the objects of such practice understand and proponents of identity cards, if people ‘have experience these practices, and what spaces for done nothing wrong they had nothing to fear’. resistance or accommodation are created. As According to the British Home Office, biometric such, identity documents will not necessarily identity cards will create a universal form of produce an all-knowing state, but new citizenship, free from racial and class opportunities for people acting in the state to distinctions, by showing ‘that everyone belongs demand to know who we are. It is in this to our society whether they were born here, process that racialized and class-based notions of have chosen to make their home here or are entitlement and belonging can re-enter the just staying for a while to study or work’. relationship between states and citizens. Opponents, on the other hand, have called Lyon is one of the leading theorists of the biometric identity cards a fundamental invasion ‘surveillance society’ and has published widely of privacy that heralds the rise of an all-knowing on the topic. This book represents an overview surveillance state. People have marched through of the field, but is nevertheless original and London with supermarket bar codes tattooed insightful in its own right. Above all, it is written into their bodies, protesting at what they see as in a clear and precise manner. Interestingly, Lyon the Orwellian future promised by the new cards. argues that ‘surveillance studies’ take place at According to some, the new system of identity the intersection of sociology, geography, and cards and databases will create a ‘total life politics, but fails to mention anthropology. There history of every individual, to be retained even seems, however, to be plenty of space for after death’. mutual engagement. The field examines not The spectre of a universal, or near universal, only classic anthropological issues such as system of identity cards raises important classification and personhood, but also more questions about the forms of knowledge recent concerns such as the conditions of produced by identity cards and how they knowledge production and the social transform the relationship between implications of technological innovation. citizens-subjects and the state. However, a Tobias Kelly University of Edinburgh reading of David Lyon’s introduction to ‘surveillance studies’ suggests that the image of an efficient and all-knowing state, implicitly held Mauss,Marcel (ed. Nathan Schlanger). by both advocates and critics of the identify card Techniques, technology and civilisation. xiv, scheme, seems misplaced. Rather, the potential 178 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: danger comes from the ambiguity of identity Berghahn Books, 2006.£27.00 (cloth) documents, and their openness to abuse both by state officials and by their holders. Lyon Camille Tarot once referred to Marcel Mauss as argues that we need to avoid a ‘Big Brother’ ‘the illustrious unknown’. If this is true of the approach to understanding surveillance and French-speaking world, which has long instead need a theory of multiple types of benefited from fuller scholarly treatment of surveillance, which are often the products of Mauss’s life and texts, the remark applies even contingency, incompetence, and mission creep, more to his Anglophone reputation. In the rather than directed by a single hand. There is a second half of the twentieth century Mauss real danger of taking the claims about particular became almost exclusively associated with his surveillance technologies at face value, essay The gift (1925). As Lygia Sigaud has pointed and assuming that simply because their out, this essay’s renown as a key work of manufacturers claim they will produce seamless modern anthropology owes more to the efforts forms of knowledge, this is really the case. As of Lévi-Strauss and Sahlins than to its original

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reception by Mauss’s contemporaries. Moreover, of machines directly gave rise on occasion to a its central message – that the principle of the degree of romanticism, but it certainly flew in archaic gift is still intrinsic to capitalist the face of contemporary Durkheim-inspired economies – has been replaced by the trends in anthropology, which took refuge in commonplace understanding that ‘our’ rural exotica. We are reminded finally of Mauss’s self-interested markets stand opposed to ‘their’ humanity and humility, from which few would gift economies. It seems that Mauss’s fame has care to dissent. Whether he left us with an grown in inverse proportion to knowledge of his inspiring programme for studying technology, actual writings. however, is more moot. It should therefore be a matter of some Schlanger’s introduction is judicious and celebration that his occasional writings on informative, but the pickings from the great techniques and technology have been published man’s oeuvre are unavoidably slim, not just in in English. Nathan Schlanger is an archaeologist size, but also in their content. Of the 192 pages based in Paris and Cambridge and thus well here, Mauss’s original writings account for 57 placed to perform this task. His introduction is per cent. A long essay (forty-four pages) on substantial, being partly based on earlier ‘Technology’ based on 1935 lectures appeared as published work. He points out variations in the chapter 4 of the Manuel d’ethnographie (1947). conception of techniques and technology, This Manual of ethnography, edited with an settling for a traditional French approach to introduction by Nick Allen, will be published techniques as the objects and technology as shortly in the same series. Two essays – their cultural rationale. A lot hinges on Mauss’s ‘Civilisations: their elements and forms historical relationship to Durkheim, with (1929/1930) and ‘Techniques of the body’ (1935), technology as a major marker of their which is already well known in English differences. Durkheim started out with a friendly translation – constitute a third of this material; and nuanced attitude towards historical the rest is a series of short fragments. materialism, but his sociology marginalized Introduction, apparatus and illustrations add up technology (along with much else), and this was to the remaining eighty-two pages. confirmed by his ‘religious turn’. In the process, Like many others, I have fond memories of he stepped back from engaging fully with reading ‘Techniques of the body’. The modernity, and this was reflected in his neglect intellectual climate has moved strongly in of techniques. Mauss’s direction over the last few decades, Mauss was never simply his uncle’s man; but and there are lots of interesting sociological the First World War set him off on a radically anecdotes here: about British soldiers who new path, partly in response to the horrors of cannot use French spades, and girls in Paris and the conflict, partly because of Durkheim’s New York walking like Hollywood actresses. premature death. He engaged fully with modern But he does not take them anywhere. Forced to society, throwing himself into political bear the weight of being the most complete journalism, taking up the nation as his main expression of his interest in techniques, the piece object of research, and committing himself to a just does not stand up. It turns out to be totalizing vision, to the idea of l’homme total and conceptually confused, methodologically its counterpart, the ‘total social fact’. Three-fifths unrealizable as a project, and not even of the political writings assembled by Fournier sociological in any systematic sense – a dead (Écrits politiques, 1997) belong to the period end, in other words, which has deservedly led to 1920-5, at the end of which Mauss wrote The no further work in this line. There are signs in gift. Anglophone anthropologists are scarcely his later work that Mauss no longer cared for aware of any of this, and it is to Schlanger’s intellectual rigour, if he ever did. For example, credit that, with this volume, he compels wider he tells us that the original stimulus to his recognition of Mauss’s socialist modernism. He interest in this topic was an article on swimming raises the idea of ‘civilization’ in this context, in the Encyclopedia Britannica; but he cannot be showing that Mauss was open to the currents of bothered to look up the name of its author! world history while rejecting both extreme There is even a question about how soon his diffusionism and narrow nationalism. Mauss mind began to deteriorate. But I suspect that the came to give special emphasis to techniques in problem with this essay and much else here has his teaching and writing, suggesting that, as a a more specific cause. In The gift, Mauss rejected source of what is fundamentally equal in Durkheim’s sociological reductionism and humanity, they should be a major preoccupation embraced a vague notion of human totality; but of ethnography. His desire to confront the world in doing so, he lost analytical focus and even his

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 469 sociological roots. Here and elsewhere in this India. The movements under consideration volume, his attempt at being systematic ends up range from women’s groups, fair trade as an arid classification, offering today’s readers organizations, and indigenous rights activism to even less intellectual nourishment than before. religious reform groups and the scouts. The This collection is notable for the publication issues covered are also diverse and include land of a slender extract from a posthumous rights, women’s rights, anti-privatization of publication, ‘La nation’ (1953). This sixty-page water, HIV, and radical Islam. As such the reader article came from a book proposal of 1920, brings together an important range of case when Mauss set out to study the two great ideas studies that will be a point of reference across of the post-war world, ‘nation’ and ‘socialism’, many disciplines – anthropology, but also and their unity as the nationalization of socialism geography, sociology, development, and (an idea he borrowed from the British Fabians, political science. especially the Webbs). Schlanger’s excerpt is In reading together such a rich and diverse limited to a few pages concerning the idea in range of case studies, one is left with more general, that of civilization and technology. Like questions than Nash can answer about the rising everything else Mauss started as a book-length academic interest in social movements. Firstly, project, this was never finished. When taken what is particularly new about such with the bulk of the Écrits politiques, however, movements? Nash’s volume (e.g. Kasmir, this focus should be central to any assessment of Sylvian) shows how class-consciousness still Mauss’s mature work as a social thinker in the matters and that, contrary to the proposal of line of Jaurès and Blum. It is a sign of how some of the new social movements theorists, removed twentieth-century anthropology cultural issues are not necessarily the central became from reality that it was possible for motivating force of social movements. While Anglophones both to celebrate Mauss as an icon these continuities with older forms of and to remain ignorant of his genuine mobilization emerge, Nash’s collection is guided intellectual concerns. The present volume in its by the assumption that social movements are a small way begins to redress this unfortunate new form of response to the recent tensions situation, and the editor is to be congratulated created by globalization processes (e.g. the on his initiative. Of course, when we look more fragmentation of society, de-territorialization, closely at what Mauss did and did not do, his and privatization). This common assumption iconic status may be somewhat tarnished. But begs explicit analysis. How do the examples here his general example still has the power to relate to older forms of mobilization and inspire, and maybe that is what counts. articulating politics in the same regions? What, if Keith Hart Goldsmiths College any, are the comparative historical continuities and changes between the mobilizations analysed in the current context of globalization and those Nash,June (ed.). Social movements: an of earlier periods? anthropological reader. xiv, 344 pp., bibliogrs. Secondly, what are the ethical and analytical Oxford, New York: Blackwell Publishing, implications of comparing, beneath a single 2004.£60.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper) lens, collective organizations as different as a right-wing government-sponsored scout In recent years there has been a re-emergence of movement, religious reform groups, and interest in social movements – the collective indigenous rights activists? For instance, what resistance by people that rests in the terrain happens when the political work of one between mass revolution and everyday forms of movement undermines that of another? How are resistance, and that offers marginalized people the conflicts and politics between these different an alternative political voice to that which is organizations played out? What implications do offered by mainstream development, political such tensions have on how we theorize social parties, or Marxism-socialism. An movements or even on how we frame what anthropological reader on social movements is a counts as a social movement? What are the welcome contribution to a synthesis and analysis analytical advantages/disadvantages of treating of this interest. these very different kinds of phenomena as one? Nash’s reader is a collection of case studies If, as Nash proposes, ‘the growing autonomy from across the world – the essays focus on sought by the participants’ (p. 22) is one of the Central America, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, themes that unites the social movements in the Brazil, the United States, Thailand, Afghanistan, book, how do the tensions between structure Egypt, Southern Africa, Papua, Sri Lanka, and and agency play out comparatively, over space

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and time, in these varying organizational forms? they be our commitment to grounded holistic Do all the different forms equally enable their ethnographic scholarly research? What are the participants ‘a voice and space of their own’ implications of these positions in the ways in (p. 22), and to what extent is the issue of which we frame, pursue, write, and use our autonomy dependent on particular historical research? and social processes and contexts? Alpa Shah Goldsmiths College Thirdly, what is the relation of social movements to other forms of resistance? Social movements are often proposed as an alternative Ross,Marc Howard. Cultural contestation in to more violent armed rebellion. For instance, ethnic conflict. xix, 360 pp., maps, tables, the ‘peaceful’ Sarvadoya Movement in Sri Lanka illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2007. (Bond) is included here whilst the Tamil Tigers £45.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper) are not. Yet, it is clear that many of the movements here have a direct relation with Explanations of ethnic conflicts rarely draw on armed rebellion of class struggle. This is cultural accounts, according to Marc Howard demonstrated not only by the choice of cover Ross; and if they do, they tend to invoke culture photo of the People’s Front in Kathmandu, in simplistic and unsatisfactory ways. Ross, a Nepal, but also by some of the chapters. For political scientist, nevertheless has a soft spot for instance, women’s activism in Andhra Pradesh anthropologists, whose concepts of cultural (Reddy) is intimately tied to the emergence and worlds and their consistent attention to the spread of the extreme left-wing armed centrality of symbolic meaning in accounting for revolutionary Naxalite movement. In what ways ethnic (and other) conflicts, in his view, add an does ethnographic research enable us to blur the important dimension to the understanding of lines that are often drawn between social ethnic conflicts. movements and revolution? What are the Ross’s book consists of an empirically analytical and political implications? wide-ranging attempt to substantiate his view And finally, what should the anthropologists’ of ethnic conflict, which is based on a roles be in studying these movements? Nash ‘psychocultural’ model according to which tells us that her ‘main preoccupation in conflicts are not caused by cultural differences, organizing this anthology is to document, nor merely expressed through an overt, through case studies of social movements, the instrumentalized cultural idiom, but connected ongoing task of building the institutional to symbolically meaningful life-worlds in ways networks needed to transform the policies which ultimately have a direct bearing on the required to ensure social justice in the conflict dynamics. He talks of the ambiguity of globalization process’ (p. 4). This is an activist historical narratives, the importance of education anthropologist agenda – to provide activist in developing shared, fixed identities, the weapons by ‘generating a new vocabulary for significance of ritual events and symbols such as engaging with, documenting and analysing such flags, and, in a way indebted to Victor Turner, movements’ (p. 4). Yet, the best of the case about the expressive and instrumental poles of studies in the volume use ethnographic research collective symbols as they are employed in to show the complexity of particular situations politics. His cases range from the fraught but which warn against a simple celebration/support peaceful Castilian-Catalonian relationship, the of social movements. One notable contribution competing historical narratives of post-apartheid in this respect is that of Sylvian. An analysis of South Africa, and the marching season in Belfast, indigenous rights activism in the context of the to conflicts over Muslim headscarves in France San, Sylvian’s research warns against their and historical narratives in Israel/Palestine. culturally essentialist representations that stress The argument, strongly informed by indigenous people’s unique relation to the land. anthropological theory, is mainly directed These cultural representations exclude the against the so-called ‘realists’ of political science, material implications of political economy and whose view it is that conflicts are fought over class exploitation faced by the San. Such scarce resources conventionally defined (usually ethnographic analysis raises important questions land, economic resources or political power), as to the role of anthropologists in social but it may also be invoked against currently movements that the introduction to such a fashionable Darwinian approaches to conflict or collection might fruitfully have discussed. Should simplistic (and dangerous) cultural determinism. our priorities in researching social movements be Ross succeeds in demonstrating that the conflicts our activist positions and inclinations? Or should he describes as ethnic do, indeed, have

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 431-472 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 Book reviews 471 competition over scarce resources at their core, the nature of group identification and its but that a scarce resource may just as well be relationship to cultural differences. self-esteem or recognition as it may be land or Anthropologists, and not just political political sovereignty. scientists, should read Ross’s book, even if the The book is an admirable piece of work, and theoretical position he develops is a close relative it is an important contribution to – and a of familiar anthropological perspectives. Partly, corrective to much of the mainstream literature the book is recommended for its wealth of in – the political science of group conflict, but it empirical cases, some of them described in is not flawless. Notably, the use of the term admirable detail; but more important is the ‘ethnic’ in the title and elsewhere is unfortunate. convincing demonstration of a skill at which Many of the examples and some of the main anthropologists used to be rather highly cases in the book (such as the foulard accomplished, namely that of systematic controversy in France) have no ethnic element. comparison. A wider concept such as identity politics would Thomas Hylland Eriksen University of Oslo not only have been more accurate, but would also have encouraged the author to explain the particular form of the groups that emerge. Since Skalník,Peter. Anthropology of Europe: neither ethnic groups nor other abstract teaching and research. viii, 243 pp., tables, collectivities are natural, the prevalence of bibliogrs. Prague: Set Out, 2005. (paper) particular principles of identification needs to be explained or at least mentioned as something The essays collected in the volume Anthropology that needs to be accounted for. By connecting of Europe: teaching and research, edited by Peter his contested narratives, and their existential Skalník, build upon a workshop held in the East appeal, to historical events and their implications Bohemian village of Dolní Roven in 2003. The for the conditions of life in the societies in contributions, which are grouped into two question, Ross would have come closer to the general sections (‘Theoretical texts’ and cultural life-worlds which are at the centre of his ‘Research reports’), vary widely in topic, amount explanation. This would also have brought his of detail, and quality. Most of the articles work closer to anthropology, which in this case consider in an integrated manner both teaching would not have been a bad idea. and research, grounding broader theoretical It may also have added depth to the questions – for example, historical distinctions theoretical position if the author had between ethnology and anthropology, the distinguished properly between culture and contemporary status of ‘culture areas’, or the identity. He fails to problematize the uneasy fit debate over native anthropology – in concrete between cultural differences and ethnic contrasts discussions about the politics of hiring, funding, (at the core of this dilemma is the fact that and specific efforts to create common curricula culture is continuous while identities are and build new European institutions for discontinuous), and, as a consequence, his anthropological knowledge (such as the Max important final chapter, ‘Culture’s central role in Planck Institute for Social Anthropology). ethnic conflict’, conflates conflicts over political Several essays in the first section critically recognition and power (e.g. the South African interrogate the definition and meaning of case) with conflicts over meaning or values (e.g. Europe, particularly in the context of European the foulard affair). (EU) integration and the transition from state It would not seem appropriate to lament socialism in Eastern Europe. The authors put the lack of more references to relevant forward ambitious agendas for an anthropology anthropological research in a political science of Europe, even as they differ significantly over book which, in fact, takes the intellectual project how best to understand and study the object of of anthropology seriously. This is also not a analysis (Europe). Andrés Barrera-González, for problem with the book; instead, I should like to example, contends that much of the previous have seen the author engage with the anthropological work on European societies macro-sociology of the state – the state being represented anthropology in Europe rather than the common denominator of all his cases – and an anthropology of Europe. Barrera-González the social philosophy of groups, individuals, and argues that to realize the latter requires restoring rights. This would have enabled him to highlight anthropology as the ‘ “science of man” and/or the uniqueness of contemporary identity society’ (p. 10) in extensive dialogue with other politics, based on the institutional dimensions of social sciences (particularly sociology). This modern states as it is, and to probe deeper into vision of anthropology contrasts sharply with

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that of other authors, such as Hana Cˇervinková’s urban culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in embrace of the postmodern notion of particular Sarajevo, failing to return to the larger anthropology as cultural critique, Hana issue of how an examination of urban culture Novotná’s focus on global-local articulations can help anthropologists sharpen their within a postmodern frame, and Chris Hann’s theoretical and methodological approaches to attention to longue durée processes. Likewise, Europe. Barrera-González states his disagreement with Notably, several of the specific case studies Chris Hann, who in his piece urges the (such as Magdalena Elchinova’s analysis of reconceptualization of the field as Eurasia. myth and group boundaries in Bulgaria and Unfortunately, the opportunity to debate Macedonia) do not address explicitly the seriously the adequacy of the concept of Europe volume’s themes. As examples of itself (as opposed to the issue of how to define anthropological research on Europe, these it) that might have played out in these pieces articles offer material of interest but the reason does not materialize; Barrera-González, for for their inclusion in the book does not prove instance, embeds his complaint with Hann’s clear. Peter Skalník instead makes a strong case ideas into a footnote, rather than engaging the for the importance of critical re-studies in issues more centrally. anthropology, both in Europe and beyond, and Other authors take as axiomatic the notion of contributors offer (uneven) insights from a European anthropology, focusing instead on re-studies in Varsany, Hungary (Mihály Sárkány) what cultural commonalities might unite and and Dolní Rovenˇ (Skalník, Chapurukha M. thereby define Europe. Drawing on Morgan’s Kusimba, and Jirˇí Šubrt). Several authors – kinship classifications, Patrick Heady draws including Rajko Muršic, Hana Cˇervinková, and distinctions between Scandinavian, central Chris Hann – emphasize the political value of a Western, and Mediterranean patterns of kinship revitalized, public anthropology in and of terminologies, highlighting remarkable Europe, particularly in the post-socialist continuities between residential patterns and transition societies. Shocked by crude racial family structures (even as he gives virtually no depictions in contemporary Slovene textbooks, attention to either the political manipulation of for example, Muršic urges that anthropological kinship ideologies or the status of kinship in knowledge become a key part of public school Eastern Europe). Davide Torsello, reflecting on curricula. fieldwork in the Slovak village of Králová nad The contributors to the volume display Váhom, suggests that a focus on questions of varying levels of optimism or pessimism about trust can usefully inform broader study of the future of anthropology in and of Europe. Europe. Hana Novotná instead argues for Much of the collection’s critical analysis focuses popular culture as a common denominator of on post-socialist societies in Europe, raising the European identity, especially in light of the rapid question as to what degree the volume really disappearance of the rural, agrarian societies points towards a comprehensive agenda for the that engaged previous generations of anthropology of the wider European context. anthropologists. In keeping with this shift away The essays do not possess enough coherence to from the rural, Ždenek Uherek focuses on broad satisfy this reader, and the selection of topics differences in urban networks that have appears somewhat hodge-podge. This historically characterized various sub-regions of shortcoming, however, may follow out of the Europe (such as the Mediterranean, Central very fragmentation of anthropological studies of Europe, and the Balkans). Uherek then localizes Europe that the contributors hope to rectify. from broad questions to a specific analysis of Pamela Ballinger Bowdoin College

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