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Anthropology and history given by the people of Mapanja, and their removal from British and German colonial ambitions – that facilitated the deeply insight- Ardener,Shirley (ed.). Swedish ventures in ful, sensitive, and largely dispassionate obser- Cameroon, 1883-1923: trade and travel, vations gathered in this volume. people and politics. Memoir of Knud Knutson. Of the several memoirs and papers that xv, 288 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, Ardener brings together here, Knutson’s is the New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. most important, both in size and in signifi- £50.00 (cloth), £20.00 (paper) cance. Ardener first came across the unpub- lished manuscript when a local chief showed it to her in Buea, Cameroon, in 1997. It is Knut Knutson was, as Ardener puts it, ‘first published here for the first time, in Knutson’s and foremost an adventurer’, and the same original accented English that seems curiously goes for his companion George Waldau, who more inflected by Pidgin than Swedish, and accompanied him to Mount Cameroon in has been very knowledgeably annotated by 1882 for a stay that was to last fourteen years. Ardener.The memoir consists of twelve chap- One of the many surprises in this edited ters covering everything from the observations memoir is the youth of the two Swedes: when on local flora and fauna typical of Victorian they first arrived in Cameroon, Knutson was travellers’ accounts to descriptions of the key 25 and Waldau 20 years old. They had com- political events unfolding around the moun- pleted their education and perhaps – judging tain at the end of the nineteenth century, from the size of their arsenal and the dexter- including the annexation of the territory by ity with which they wielded it – some mili- the Germans and their bombardment of local tary training, but had little experience of villages. Knutson also gives a very honest business, politics, or diplomacy, and none of account of his and Waldau’s failure to fend for Africa. Their primary interest was not there- themselves on the mountain, of their debt to fore ‘colonial’: they were not, when they set the people of Mapanja, and of the deaths of out, intending to trade, acquire property, set their two servants. Moreover, he does not try up businesses (though they were to do all of to hide the way in which his desperate situa- these), or to work for any colonial enterprise. tion forced him to set up a trade in the wild Rather, these two young idealists seem simply rubber plants which he had happened to to have been compelled to set off for come across in the forest, nor the way in Cameroon by a romantic Victorian ideal of which political developments beyond his scientific discovery, wanderlust, and perhaps an control forced him to side with the Germans, inchoate sense of engaging in a gentlemanly despite his own and the Bakweri people’s mis- rite de passage into manhood. givings about them. As Knutson himself puts it, the works Knutson’s and Waldau’s accounts must be already written on Africa had ‘caused a great seen as coloured by the fact that the German sensation especially amongst the West Euro- imperial government abrogated contracts for pean youth’, and Knutson and Waldau set out the sale of land that they had negotiated on with the intention of doing nothing other the mountain, and the authors’ frustration than making ‘discoveries’, not only zoological with their ongoing legal battles is evident. and botanical, but also ethnographic. Along Nevertheless, there is no reason to distrust the with two servants who accompanied them, very detailed descriptions that the Swedes give they settled on the upper slopes of the moun- of the conduct of German officials, traders, tain, above the highest villages, where they and farmers, and of the way in which these lived primarily off the game that they shot. were seen by the local Bakweri and the immi- When the rainy season set in, however, the grant Kru (both of whom made up songs mist and fog rendered their rifles useless, and about them that Knutson – who spoke they were forced – half-starved and feverish – Bakweri and Pidgin – faithfully transcribed to seek shelter among the Bakweri of the and translated). Knutson’s memoir is balanced nearest village, Mapanja. It was the combina- by extracts from the diaries of some of those tion of many factors – the adventurers’ naive to whom he refers, as well as those of other idealism, their predicament and vulnerability, contemporary commentators on the region: the care and assistance that they were selflessly his friend Waldau,Sir Richard Burton, George 176 BOOK REVIEWS
Thompson, Hugo Zöller, and the quixotic congresses of the 1920s, and the emergence of Russo-Pole Rogozinski, Acting Chief Civil child rights activists – just as often from right- Commissioner over the colony of Victoria for wing dictatorships as from left-wing revolu- the British Crown and infamous liquor-trader, tionary movements. Focusing on this later known to contemporary French missionaries period, Rizzini’s study of Brazil’s child-saving as Drogue-Gin-et-Whisky. movement reveals once again how the infan- icolas rgenti tilization of the state’s citizenry led to the N A domination of children by the state. It was Brunel University here in the nineteenth century that the term ‘minor’ was coined to refer pejoratively to children perceived as a brutish, delinquent Hecht,Tobias (ed.). Minor omissions: children class that was to be rigorously monitored in in Latin American history and society. order to forge a patriotic and submissive viii, 277 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs., working class. London, Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Returning to an art-historical field, Benson Press, 2002. $45.00 (cloth), $21.95 looks at contemporary Haitian mother-and- (paper) child paintings as a means of discussing the marasa: one who enjoys a perpetual childhood In his introduction to this impressive history as a result of rejecting the social order. Benson of childhood in South America, Hecht sets explores the tendency amongst many artists to himself and his co-authors a challenge: to paint disturbing small-scale versions of adults write about children, and not – as so often in the place of children, and whereas Ariès (in happens instead – about adult concerns Centuries of childhood) was happy to see an regarding children. Carolyn Dean’s chapter absence of childhood in medieval European opens the book with an analysis of colonial paintings of children, she highlights the subtle Andean childhood as seen through a series of political significance of depicting the marasa,a paintings by anonymous indigenous artists of child-like adult in a country scarred by the the late seventeenth century. Dean argues that domination and infantilization of its people. indigenous Andeans were infantilized by the Peterson and Read follow with a chapter on colonial administration, and that the misbe- children in Latin American wars, usefully having children that pepper these paintings are countering a number of popular and academ- in fact reifications of adult Andeans conceived ic misconceptions regarding this issue the of as juvenile and mal-socialized, something world over: that children are passive victims of that has often been observed in regard to con- war, that they can only be traumatized by temporary post-colonial states in Africa (fol- their involvement in war, and that war results lowing Mbembe’s lead in Les jeunes et l’ordre in the loss of their childhood. In contrast to politique en Afrique Noire). these clichés, the authors show that children The next six chapters all broadly focus on are well informed about the causes and issues the emerging post-colonial states of Latin at stake in wars, and that they join them of America and their concern with childhood free choice (within a limited range of choices) as a source of danger and disorder. Lipsett- – not out of ignorance but rather as the result Rivera compares the Aztec huehuetlatolli of a rational decision to confront states that speeches recorded by the Spanish missionaries abuse their rights and threaten their survival. of Central Mexico to the discourses about More than any other contribution to this childhood that were later to be developed by book, this chapter shows that children are no the welfare state, revealing how children were less moral and political actors in society than disciplined, educated, and made to accept their are adults. class positions and social status by states in Veríssimo’s diary entry about her life in the need of citizens. Milanich shows how the streets of Recife, Brazil, vividly confronts the invention of a panoply of types and sub-types reader with the humanity of its author and of illegitimacy buttressed anxieties regarding her story, putting flesh on the dry bones of miscegenation and helped to support the academic work about children and young social inequalities of Latin American states, people, and jolting the reader out of the safety while Gonzalez attests to the human costs that of a familiar genre. Likewise, a prophetic after- the creation of these forms of social distinc- word first written in 1971 by the Uruguayan tion incurred among the foundlings of novelist, Cristina Perri Rossi, concludes the eighteenth-century Havana. Premo’s chapter whole with a dystopian vision that was, alas, on youth in eighteenth-century Lima further about to come true for many Latin American underlines the manner in which legal dis- countries. These two writers arguably bring courses emphasizing concern for young out the lived experience of childhood more people constructed youth as a dangerous sub- effectively than any of the academic contri- class, thus exacerbating socio-racial divisions butions to the volume, and if Hecht’s initial in the city. Guy’s survey of Latin America challenge that academic work on childhood similarly charts the connections between ille- should be about children and not about gitimacy, child abandonment, the child welfare adults’ concerns regarding them is successfully BOOK REVIEWS 177 met, it is wholly appropriate that it should be waned, even as collections, including one by largely thanks to them. Malinowski, continued to be made. It was not icolas rgenti until the 1980s, when museums’ ethnographic N A collections came under stringent criticism as Brunel University the misappropriated property of colonized peoples, that artefacts again became an impor- tant anthropological topic. O’Hanlon,Michael & Robert L. Welsch O’Hanlon’s introduction is a well-informed (eds). Hunting the gatherers: ethnographic col- discussion of many of the factors and prob- lectors, agents and agency in Melanesia, 1870s- lems involved in the procurement of artefacts 1930s. xii, 286 pp., maps, tables, illus., that grounds and anticipates the individual bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn essays. These include the varieties of collect- Books, 2001. £40.00 (cloth) ing, the context of colonialism, funding, the content of collections, issues of local agency, For the aficionado of Melanesian artefacts, this and ethical problems, as well as the ‘afterwards’ is a most welcome book. Eleven specialists, of collecting, including the dynamics of eight with museum appointments, have documentation and the question of duplicates. written articles on specific aspects of collect- For an edited volume, the papers are of very ing that, taken as a group, document the his- high quality and, with the exception of Chris torical and socio-cultural complexity of the Ballard’s tangential but interesting paper on often strange and compelling objects inhabit- New Guinea ‘Pygmies’, directly relevant to ing a museum’s glass cases. Reading this book the editors’ envisioned topic. The papers should irrevocably change how one looks at appear to be presented in no particular order an ethnographic exhibit. Instead of simply and I read them as they piqued my curiosity. seeing a spate of static objects, the reader is Four are concerned with individual anthro- made vividly aware of the social, political, pologists as collectors. The most famous of geographic, and monetary life of objects these, Bronislaw Malinowski, is the subject of before they were neatly sequestered in a care- Michael Young’s engrossing article. It traces fully designed and lighted exhibit for the the chequered history of Malinowski’s collec- visitor’s gaze. tion of Trobriand artefacts across oceans, in These wide-ranging articles, originally pre- and out of various storage facilities, and with pared for a colloquium in Oxford, augment a cast of high and low characters – some mis- our understanding of museums and their behaving, including Malinowski – before it objects by focusing on the collecting of finally came to rest in the British Museum, ethnographic objects. Michael O’Hanlon Berkeley’s Lowie Museum of Anthropology, writes in the introduction that and the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. Beatrice Blackwood, who was as the intention of the papers in this book deeply a ‘museum person’ as Malinowski was is to retrieve ethnographic collecting a ‘university’ one, is the subject of Chantal from what has become a selective iden- Knowles’s paper on Blackwood’s fieldwork tification with dispossession, and to rein- and collecting in New Guinea between 1929 vest it with its potential to illuminate a and 1937. It also interestingly traces her trans- variety of processes over a particular time formation from accomplished ethnographer frame, within a delimited ethnographic (Both sides of Buka Passage) to her abiding con- area and through the lens of specific col- centration on material culture as a curator at lectors (p. 5). Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Christian Kauf- mann examines the anthropological career of The book succeeds in doing just that. Felix Speiser (University of Basel Professor of The collecting years chosen for analysis run Ethnology and Director of the Basel Museum from the 1870s to the 1930s, a time-span of Ethnography) and his shift of interest from characterized by rampant colonialism and the bones and artefacts as evolutionary markers to ascendancy of anthropological theories of historical processes in the study of Pacific art cultural evolution and diffusionism wherein styles. Finally, Chris Gosden looks at the 1930s ethnographic objects were of strategic impor- collecting of John Todd, an anthropology tance. It was also the time when many of the student at the University of Sydney, in the world’s great metropolitan museums were context of colonialism, showing ‘that what established as homes for the myriad ethno- Todd took to New Guinea was as important graphic objects collected from around the as what he took away’ (p. 227). world as scientific specimens by missionaries, Tur ning to those other avid collectors – traders, colonial administrators, scientists, and colonial administrators, missionaries, and arte- curio-entrepreneurs. By the end of the 1930s, fact speculators – Michael Quinnell explores functionalism, with its emphasis on social the political ramifications of the collection processes rather than objects, became the made by British New Guinea’s famous admin- dominant anthropological theory and the istrator, Sir William MacGregor, while Helen intellectual infatuation with cultural objects Gardner’s paper on the pioneering Methodist 178 BOOK REVIEWS missionary, George Brown, examines his col- ‘[either] scattered or confined to quite specific lecting as it relates to the Christian ideal of areas’ (p. 2).The author makes effective use of the gift. Rainer Buschmann focuses on rhetorical questions and discrete subsections German New Guinea insightfully to explore (such as ‘unnatural vision’ and ‘reading narra- the tensions between the scientific and com- tives’), thereby encouraging the reader to mercial collecting exemplified by German reconsider often-unquestioned assumptions museums and colonial trading firms. Chicago’s about visual culture. Banks is well versed both Field Museum is justly famous for its topically and technologically, and jumps Melanesian collections, especially the A.B. nimbly from caste in India to the Kayapó of Lewis Collection, but Robert Welsch focuses Brazil, and from Polaroid to webcams. More- on the three less famous ones collected over, by choosing explicitly contemporary ref- variously by its Curator of Anthropology erence points, such as Jörg Haider or Quentin George Dorsey, a Hamburg curio dealer, and Tarantino’s now-cult film, Pulp fiction, he suc- an overseas employee of the German New ceeds in engaging younger readers on their Guinea Company. Lastly, Elizabeth Edwards own visual territory. makes a case study of Haddon and Seligman’s A number of sections are particularly strong 1898 Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition in and worthy of special attention. Discussing terms of the hitherto-little-examined relation- the presence of foreign objects and non- ship between collecting artefacts and pho- indigenous bodies in ethnographic films, tographs and the way in which meanings are Banks points out that in future generations, constructed. Concluding the book is a brief the ‘sight of “imported” artefacts would not epilogue by Nicholas Thomas, who, while be taken as mournful tokens of lost inno- acknowledging that the data are probably cence, but celebrated as cultural appropria- thin, regrets that the essays have less to say tions’ (p. 144). About the aptly named about indigenous agency and ‘the issue of HADDON web-based meta-catalogue of negotiation around the practice of collecting’ archival ethnographic film and footage, the (p. 274) than about European agency. author’s own creation, he is characteristically Overall, this is a rich collection of essays, modest.The existence of this online catalogue brimming with data and, for the most part, and of a supporting website for the book cogently analysed. It shifts the discussion under discussion,
Students would be well served to read this by the editors, throws into relief some of the book alongside James Monaco’s now-classic analytical distinctions offered in the ethno- How to read a film (currently in its third graphic chapters, but adds little more to what edition). In tandem, these background hand- is said there already. books are amply sufficient to prepare For me, a key problem is that memory is researchers in social science with enough only one of the relevant social processes that practical know-how, together with a healthy sustains ethnic conflict – as the title of the dose of reflexive understanding, to ensure the book tacitly states. Not to relate it systemati- responsible use of visual imagery in their cally to other factors means that history is work. Banks is at his best when he stresses the seen as the principal impetus of ethnic con- material nature of visual media and the cul- flict, and the re-envisioning of history is in tural nature of vision (bringing to mind John turn regarded as the recipe for conflict reso- Berger’s work), and in demonstrating how lution. As the final chapter states: ‘societies visual objects are entangled in social relations. torn apart by ethnic conflict must, at some In his introduction, Banks suggests that ‘good stage, face up to the past, especially if they visual research rests upon a judicious reading wish to deal with conflict in the long term’ of both internal and external narratives’ (p. (p. 179). 12). His own approach – critical yet mindful The notion of ‘ethnic group’ is also treated – does just this. as unproblematic. Barely any analytical atten- ark urin tion is given to what is at stake in relation to M T the wider world such that people find it University of Cambridge worthwhile to reproduce ethnic allegiances, enmities, and memories. Of course, folk ideas consider ethnic conflict in terms of history Cairns,Ed & Mícheál D. Roe (eds). The role and memory, and folk imaginations then con- of memory in ethnic conflict, xii, 199 pp., clude that repositioning history is the way that tables, bibliogr. Basingstoke, New York: such conflict can be defused. Palgrave, 2003. £47.50 (cloth) In fact, some of the more interesting ethno- graphic chapters in the book are devoted This book examines a number of case studies precisely to folk processes in this regard. in which ethnic conflicts are, it is claimed, For example, K. Burton and A. McCully talk fuelled by a sense of past and unresolved about conceptions of history in the school injustice. In particular, it explores the paradox classroom in Northern Ireland and of the that ethnic memories may sustain conflict in difficulties teachers experience in trying to this regard, but are at the same time empow- engage pupils’ personal and family memories ering in relation to the present. It also illumi- with formal historiography. B. Hamber and natingly notes that collective memories R.A. Wilson describe the work of the Truth (enshrined in the group’s symbols and senti- and Reconciliation Commission in South ments) may well not coincide with the Africa, and the way in which it tends to force memories of corresponding individuals (en- ‘closure’ in relation to past atrocities when shrined in personal experiences). The book individuals are clearly not ready for it. But one offers some tentative indication of how an might have hoped that analytical syntheses awareness of such issues and conundrums might produce some propositions as to why might facilitate the practical resolution of ‘folk’ do uphold their notions, especially since inter-ethnic conflict. Of course, it is made modes of conflict resolution are also under clear that memories are as much constructions discussion. In sum, although this is a not- of the present as precipitates of the past. uninteresting book, with some nice case The case studies offer an appropriate cover- studies, I also find it something of a missed age, notably on Black versus White Australians, opportunity. the Northern Ireland communities, Israel, and avid iches South Africa.There is interesting discussion of D R efforts to resolve ethnic conflict, for example University of St Andrews in the school classroom and in Truth and Rec- onciliation Commissions. But the book does not display very strong theoretical leadership. Hinton,Alexander Laban (ed.). Genocide: an The editors offer a brief introduction, mainly anthropological reader. ix, 302 pp., tables, devoted to summarizing the ethnographic bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden, Mass.: Black- chapters that follow. This is succeeded by P. well Publishing, 2001. £55.00 (cloth), Devine-Wright’s chapter, entitled ‘A theoreti- £16.99 (paper) cal overview of memory and conflict’. This usefully runs through a number of relevant per- This Reader addresses many aspects of geno- spectives on the stated topic, but only devotes cide: the international law, accounts of partic- a couple of pages to the question of conflict ular collective atrocities, the official rationales between ethnic groups as such;it has little voice offered for these acts, the cultural settings in of its own. The final chapter, again authored which the killings took place, and last of all 180 BOOK REVIEWS the effects on the surviving victim popula- The third section of the book begins by tions. Alexander Laban Hinton did his field- developing the related theme of ethnic cleans- work in Cambodia in the early and ing. Two articles have this focus, one on the mid-1990s. We probably owe the broad range partition of India and Pakistan and one on the of the pieces he has selected not only to his recent manifestations of violent ethnic cleans- perspicacity, but to the fact that the Cambo- ing in Yugoslavia. Then the focus of the book dian events of the 1970s did not easily fit the switches, and Hinton provides an essay on the official UN definition of genocide, since the model of ‘disproportionate revenge’ in Cam- category of persons identified for persecution bodian culture (p. 255). Hinton’s argument is was a political category. that ‘disproportionate revenge’ served ‘as a The UN Genocide Convention of 1946 template for part of the genocidal violence’ treats acts as genocidal if they were commit- that took place, though Pol Pot’s followers ted with the intent to destroy national, ethni- were mobilized in the name of class struggle. cal, racial, or religious groups. Not everyone The argument is an interesting one, though it agreed at the time that this was the way to did not altogether convince this reviewer. define the crime, nor has there been general Along a parallel line, Arjun Appadurai muses agreement since. The Reader addresses this on the meaning of bodily violation as ‘inti- problem directly by opening with a section on macy gone beserk’. His contention is that the concept of genocide. ‘extreme bodily violence may be seen as a The discussion of definitions in the articles degenerate technology for the reproduction of is not merely academic, but rather is an illu- intimacy where it is seen to have been vio- minating survey of the politically conceived lated by secrecy and treachery’ (p. 296). set of arguments that led to the wording of Three articles close the book, one by Linda the UN Genocide Convention. What is Green on ‘Fear as a way of life’ in Guatemala included is an essay by Raphael Lemkin, who in the 1980s, another by John Bowen on the coined the term; the text of the UN Con- myth of the inevitability of ethnic conflict in vention itself; and an informative article by the world. These are followed by an impres- Leo Kuper, who describes the debates that sive piece by Liisa Malkki on the conceptions took place in the UN before the adoption of Burundian refugees living in camps in of the draft. Those debates ended by quite Tanzania in the 1980s, the conceptions of specifically excluding political categories the administrators who dealt with them, and and cultural genocide. There were other the representation of the generic idea of ‘the controversies as well, some around the issue of refugee’ in instances of humanitarian inter- intent and the modes of enforcement. Legal vention such as that which followed the geno- considerations were prominent in these cide in Rwanda in 1994. discussions. This Reader will be useful for college teach- The Reader moves on to Helen Fein’s soci- ers and novice administrators. Each contribu- ological essay, which argues for an expanded tion examines dramatic and controversial interpretation of the Convention to cover issues of immediate concern. While the political groups and social classes. This is collection addresses genocidal disasters, its followed by Hannah Arendt’s famous chapter emphasis is on the differences among them, on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the and the varied interpretations that have been banality of evil’. The conceptual discussion made of their causes and their consequences. then continues in the hands of Zygmunt ally alk oore Baumann, who writes on ‘Modernity and the S F M Holocaust’. He argues that the Holocaust was Harvard University not a throwback to a savage barbarity; that, on the contrary, modernity was one of the nec- essary conditions for the way in which Hitler’s Kemper,Robert & Anya Peterson Royce genocide was rationalized and perpetrated. (eds). Chronicling cultures: long-term field The second section of the Reader develops research in anthropology. xxxviii, 353 pp., another twist on this argument with examples map, tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New of instances in which the modernity of the York: Altamira Press, 2002. $75.00 (cloth), colonial situation has devastated indigenous $29.95 (paper) peoples. A section from John Bodley’s Victims of progress makes this point, as does Michael Like surfers’ conquest of the largest wave or Taussig’s chapter, which is a reflection on running ultra-marathons, sheer size, length, Roger Casement’s 1913 report on the abuse or other quantitative dimensions can loom in and killing of the Putumayo Indians by rubber anthropology as in sport and business. Sheer traders in Colombia. His emphasis is on the endurance is a necessity in fieldwork – nec- way the Indians were imagined by their per- essary, if not sufficient – and ‘sticking it out’ secutors to justify their maltreatment. This is part of the folklore as well as the method- then leads to an essay by Eric Wolf on the ology of working in the field. Mostly, though, Nazi conception of what they were doing as attention has focused on the individual field- they engaged in genocide. worker and his or her single stint of a year or BOOK REVIEWS 181 so. This book differs: it chronicles not the brilliant literary excursus into fieldwork? Not ‘milers’, the Sebastian Coes and Roger even fieldwork proper, but a quasi-touristic Bannisters, but the ‘super-marathon’ races, the journey, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tr istes Tropiques. long-term projects which a single person may In comparison, most efforts at reflexive lead or initiate but which are then carried on ethnography bumble. by many and by multiple generations extend- The truth is that both kinds of fieldwork – ing over decades. By contrast with the long-term, short-term, organized, or adven- one-dimensionality of the sports analogy, the turous – are miraculously impressive. Heavy message of this book is the multiple dimen- attacks have been, and can be, launched sions of human life which come to light grad- against anthropological fieldwork of all kinds, ually over years of fieldwork in a single locale. whether heroically individualistic or organized Time is essential to reveal the meanings of a and longitudinal. Accusations include ethical space, and those meanings are never exhausted abuse, quandaries of method and truth, mis- because that space evolves over time. takes, and misunderstandings. Failure is a The projects described here are largely, human condition. But within that constraint, though not entirely, by Americans: the former fieldwork is a remarkable achievement on the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in Zambia and part of both fieldworkers and hosts.To sustain Scarlett Epstein’s work in India are largely this basic effort over generations demands a British. Not claiming to be comprehensive, very high level of organizational commitment the volume does not include, for example, and savvy; intensive individual efforts are European or Japanese projects, or long-term remarkable, too. work by missionary ethnographers, such as What, then, is the contribution of this Adriani and Kruyt in Sulawesi. The projects book? It fills a crucial spot in the history of began in the 1950s or 60s, usually, and they the discipline, detailing a type of fieldwork continue. They are predominantly led by of the second half-century of the discipline – anthropologists, but also involve other dis- the first half-century opening with the ciplines. And they have been markedly pro- expeditions, followed by the individualistic ductive in publications, training students, adventures of Malinowski and Mead – but engaging ‘natives’, and sometimes in affecting one which continues into our present era. In communities. Chapters include Richard Lee this continuation may lie germs of further and Megan Biesele on the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung; developments, for example, engagements Royce’s work with the Isthmus Zapotec; uniting natives and anthropologists as they Wade Pendleton in Namibia; Louise Lam- merge in sustained efforts at preservation and phere on the Navajo; Evon Vogt in the memory as well as transformation and adap- Chiapas; Lisa Cliggett, Thayer Scudder, and tation. Royce and Kemper unobtrusively Elizabeth Colson in Zambia; and Johansen provide a distinctive body of material to and White in southeastern Turkey. Royce and prompt tomorrow. Kemper describe their own involvement in ames eacock one of these, and they give an overview, but J L. P the actors largely speak for themselves, repre- University of North Carolina senting a series of generations. George Foster gives a spare and dignified account of a half- century of work and involvement, followed by Kent,Susan (ed.). Ethnicity, hunter-gatherers, the last essay of the book, by Peter Cahn, who and the ‘other’: association or assimilation in is just beginning. Africa. 360 pp., maps, tables, bibliogr. The approach of the authors is largely to London,Washington: Smithsonian Institu- narrate history, to tell the story of the project tion Press, 2002. £42.00 (cloth) and place as it unfolded over decades, rather than to summarize findings or concepts; these Susan Kent, who edited the collection under are noted, and extensive bibliographies are review here, died suddenly in April 2003, aged provided, but the emphasis is on how each 50. Her publications in the field of archaeol- project evolved rather than on what was pro- ogy and of southern African ethnography duced or learned as a theoretical summation. amount to seven edited volumes and more This is good strategy and is well done. The than sixty chapters and articles. Ethnicity, stage is set for a reviewer to reflect on both hunter-gatherers, and the ‘other’ is her last book, the process and contribution of these projects. and it is a particular testimony to the way in One reaction is a kind of envious admira- which she felt about recent debates in the tion. Those of us who barged into field situ- field. It originated in her initiative to bring ations impetuously can only mourn the together mutually supporting archaeological, struggle and waste of improvising a way to do ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence in our research in comparison to the advantages the aftermath of the ‘Kalahari debate’. In this of an organized institutional framework and debate, her critique of the revisionist position affiliation. was always very clear and is once more under- Yet creative perspectives and insights often lined by the three chapters (out of eleven in come from individual efforts.What is the most total) that she contributed herself. In her 182 BOOK REVIEWS introduction she revisits some of the key issues than is usually the case with edited volumes of the debate, and in another chapter she in anthropology. This is particularly true of investigates some of these issues with specific those contributors whose expertise lies reference to historical data which suggest that outside the narrow confines of the Kalahari the recent domination by Westerners has been desert. Like the Hadza case, the Pygmy data much more devastating for San than earlier provided by Köhler and Lewis put a number influence by Bantu-speaking agropastoralists. of points raised in the Kalahari debate into In her critique based on regional history she perspective, explicitly as well as implicitly. is seconded by Guenther and Lee, who, in Köhler and Lewis point out that the way in their respective chapters, provide more evi- which Pygmy and other hunter-gatherers dence from written and oral historical sources tend to relate to their social environment reg- to underline their argument for the recogni- ularly skews the data on which much of the tion of the autonomy and resilience of a for- revisionist debate has relied (p. 301). To illus- aging way of life in the region. trate the point, they show that Pygmies them- Kent’s third contribution to the volume is selves see their relation with villagers in based on archaeological evidence and includes parallel to their relation with game animals. In an original comparison between the southern order to reach a goal, Pygmies may learn the African case and North American data. Here, ‘language’ of the animal (and the villagers) and she uses evidence from North American slave- – as a Mbendjele man put it to Lewis – you master interactions to question the validity of may follow the villagers like you follow the the revisionists’ interpretation of archaeologi- elephant: ‘You must smear its fresh excrement cal remains of material cultural items from on yourself’ (p. 296). agropastoralists in San camps as evidence for The volume, therefore, clearly points at the subservience of San with regard to Bantu- comparison and analogy as the most promis- speakers. A similar point is brought home by ing ways ahead in the debate. A particularly Sadr’s chapter, which shows that the material appropriate strategy is outlined by Sugawara’s signature left by independent pre-contact chapter in this book. He complements the hunter-gatherers is very similar to that of evidence that deals directly with subjugation post-contact groups, and that a massive change and domination at face value by drawing can only be observed at a much later stage, attention to indirect evidence, for instance to when there is also historical evidence for cul- social practices such as naming children and tural assimilation and subjugation. Drawing an everyday conversation which may be directed analogy between his excavation at Thamaga at very different purposes but which also (southern Botswana) and the revisionist inter- permit an indirect insight into the way in pretation of data from CaeCae, Sadr concludes which domination occurred and in which it that there is no evidence indicative of subju- is being dealt with. All contributions empha- gation in the latter case (p. 46). The chapter size what Susan Kent had always advocated in by Marlowe, based on work with the Hadza her work, namely that claims of hunter- of Tanzania, similarly argues that the revision- gatherer subjugation have to be carefully ist debate about the presence or absence of evaluated by means of a comparative perspec- contact completely overshadowed the far tive, whether they relate to the ethnographic more important question as to what the record or to the interpretation of archaeologi- implications of contact are (or were). He also cal data. rejects an all-or-nothing answer to the ques- homas idlok tion as to whether present-day ethnography T W can provide insights into the prehistoric past University of Heidelberg and points out that with due caution evidence from ‘secondary foragers’ can be also used for this purpose (p. 248). He dismisses the revi- Kim,Choong Soon. One anthropologist, two sionist obsession with contact which in fact worlds: three decades of reflexive fieldwork reifies the pristine character of pre-contact in North America and Asia. xxvii, 249 pp., foragers. This point is also taken up by bibliogr. Knoxville: Univ.Tennessee Press, Barnard and Taylor, who argue on the basis of 2002. $30.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper) a regional comparison of southern African cases that only a recognition of the diversity When we were children, we may have had the of degrees and ways in which African hunter- good fortune to be handed a kaleidoscope by gatherers are subject to domination (not one of our elders. Peering deep inside, and contact!) will help anthropologists to do turning the device one way and then another, justice to the evidence and will help (former) we encountered beautiful formations beyond foragers to deal with dominating forces (p. our modest expectations. So it is with this 246). book. It, too, is a kaleidoscope, in the strict With a few exceptions, Susan Kent, as the sense of the term, for it offers views of ‘beau- volume editor, has succeeded in motivating tiful’ cultural formations. individual contributors to make reference to Choong Soon Kim, born in Korea in 1938, other chapters in the book to a greater extent comes to the writing of this autobiographical BOOK REVIEWS 183 account of ethnographic fieldwork experi- backgrounds have intersected with their field- ences after a long journey. His life began as a work experiences. member of an affluent family,‘one of the big In the closing chapter, Kim asks the landlords in a traditional pre-land reform rhetorical question, ‘Can I go home again?’, village’ (p. 3). After surviving the Second and answers,‘First, I must decide where home World War, the land reform of 1948, and the is – then perhaps, there will be an answer to Korean War, Kim had to find a way to pay for that question’ (p. 195). As a Korean who spent his own education at secondary school and most of his adult life in the United States, and university. During the late 1950s and early who (with his wife and children) came to be 1960s, he struggled to make his way through well integrated into academic life and into the Korean educational system, eventually American society, Kim’s story is a fascinating pursuing doctoral work in labour law at personal history of multiculturalism. Yonsei University, where he came under the In my view, the author is unduly modest influence of Pyong Choon Hahm, a Harvard- about his accomplishments, but perhaps this educated legal scholar with a strong anthro- reflects the Korean side of his personality pological orientation. As a result, from 1963 dominating the American propensity for self- to 1965, Kim had the opportunity to join a promotion. After quoting an old Chinese research team led by Hahm in studying saying to the effect that ‘when you casually Korean people’s attitudes towards law. What stick a weeping willow branch in the ground, Kim calls his period of ‘being an amateur it grows to cast a large shadow’ (p. xii), he goes anthropologist’ (p. 18) eventually took him far on to remark that ‘I have never grown big beyond Korea – to the graduate programme enough to cast any shadow’. in sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, One anthropologist, two worlds reveals that Georgia, in the United States. Kim is too modest to appreciate his contri- Though Kim arrived in Atlanta with virtu- butions to the discipline of anthropology and ally no money, with meagre command of to the field of American Studies, for in fact English, and even without his new wife he has shed light on the anthropological (forced to remain temporarily in Korea fieldwork experience through his autobio- because of visa problems), he prospered in the graphical reflections. Like a true kaleidoscope, American South, eventually obtaining a full this book offers cultural formations that are scholarship to enter the doctoral programme good, fitting, useful, and serviceable – in sum, in anthropology at the University of Georgia, ‘beautiful’. where he was mentored by Wilford C. Bailey. obert emper Their collaboration led to Kim’s dissertation R V. K research on the life patterns of pulpwood Southern Methodist University workers in a southern Georgia community (referred to by the pseudonym ‘Pinetown’), with a long-term return visit in the year 2000. Posey,Darrell A. Kayapó ethnoecology and Kim remained in the American South, culture (ed. Kristina Plenderleith). xviii, accepting a faculty position at the University 285 pp., maps, tables, figs., illus., bibliogr. of Tennessee at Martin in 1971. When he London, New York: Routledge Harwood arrived, he had no idea that he would spend Anthropology, 2002. £50.00 (cloth) some thirty years there before retiring (and returning to Korea to assume the presidency Whenever a compilation of articles by an of the Korea Digital University in Seoul). author appears posthumously, it inevitably From his academic home in Tennessee, Kim serves as a career retrospective. The volume was able to obtain grants and contracts to do under review was intended to showcase research among the Choctaw Indians in the Darrell Posey’s most important work with the 1970s (with a return visit in the year 2000), Kayapó, a widely known indigenous people of at a factory in Korea in the late 1980s (with Brazil’s tropical forest and savannah interior. follow-up visits in 1991 and 1998), and at a The collected papers thus focus on ethnobi- Japanese factory in Tennessee in the early ological and advocacy work with the Kayapó 1990s. rather than the full spectrum of Posey’s inter- His field research and his ideas about the ests, which in later life centred on intellectual meaning of being a Korean anthropologist property and traditional resource rights of living in the American South are reflected in indigenous peoples. his numerous books, articles, and reviews, The volume consists of twenty-one articles especially his well-known volume, An Asian penned between 1981 and 1997, weighted anthropologist in the South: field experiences with towards the beginning of this period, along Blacks, Indians, and Whites (1977). He con- with an appendix of plants used by the siders One anthropologist, two worlds to be a Kayapó and a glossary of Kayapó vocabulary. ‘cultural analysis of my career as an anthro- Five of the papers are co-authored, and several pologist’ (p. 1), following a recent trend are abridged in order to avoid redundancy. towards candid discussions of anthropologists’ Despite this, editorship has been exercised backgrounds and of the ways in which these with an extremely light hand. In particular, 184 BOOK REVIEWS there is no attempt to summarize the salient origin of wide-ranging environmental fea- discoveries or guiding themes of Posey’s work tures, a host of questions remain, including the with the Kayapó. degree to which such changes have been con- Prospective readers will undoubtedly be scious projects, the sociological and cultural attracted to the volume in order to evaluate conditions needed to reproduce specific eco- Posey’s guiding idea that Kayapó ecological logical effects, and the association with com- practice has much to teach Western science. plicating factors such as long-term climate Two examples are highlighted in the foreword change. Posey himself (American Anthropologist, by the noted ethnobiologist Brent Berlin: 1992, 94) commented that his studies on forestry practices aimed at concentrating useful ‘forest islands’, concentrations of useful arbo- species of trees within the savannah region itself real species overseen by Kayapó elders, were (apêtê) and the elucidation of the Kayapó system ‘clearly identified as preliminary studies’ (p. of natural classification as a culturalized natural 441). However, the preliminary character of history embedded in specialized social forms the results does not come through in the of transmission. Other ideas featured in the present volume and sufficient repetition may volume also require mention. Kayapó notions result in their slipping unnoticed into disci- of sociality lead to an elaborate classification plinary consensus, rather than serving as a of bees, wasps, and ants, described in several springboard for further research. chapters, including suggestions regarding A number of drawbacks will prevent species antagonism and biological controls, readers from using the book in the manner commensality, and symbiosis. Chapter 11 on that was apparently intended. The chapters stingless bees is, perhaps, the volume’s most sat- devoted to culture are fragmentary and do isfying. Several chapters report results of soil little to help us understand how the scientific analysis from Kayapó gardens, suggesting that virtuosity of the Kayapó is reproduced. Posey manipulation of soil nutrient content and pH repeatedly refers to lineages, for example (pp. over small areas aims to favour the growth of 21, 25, 42, 248), and cites them as repositories specific cultivars in intercropped fields. of knowledge, when it is well established that During his lifetime, Posey championed the the Kayapó have no descent groups. The idea that the defence of indigenous human ‘Notes’ and ‘Bibliography’ cite different jour- and land rights is enhanced by recognition nals (one of doubtful existence) as the source that indigenous peoples are sources of scien- for chapter 4, and one can find numerous tifically useful knowledge. This is stated most frustrating errors in many bibliographic clearly in chapter 8, ‘Indigenous knowledge entries, inexplicably including those of Posey and development: an ideological bridge to the himself. Additionally, although there is no future’, but the spirit of this essay appears to guide to the system of orthography for underlie the entire volume. Different chapters Kayapó terms, the glossary clearly includes argue, in effect, for superior Kayapó science in errors, a sprinkling of Portuguese terms not the areas of bee-keeping; species maintenance indicated as such, and no indication when through understanding of ecological associa- terms describing ‘nature’ (insect parts, for tions between plants, animals, and soils; example) also carry other meanings. The forestry management; species diversity; and chapter order is also suspect.Why is the more soil conservation practices in swiddens. Rather general introductory chapter on Kayapó gar- than simplifying the environment, indigenous dening (chap. 17) presented after two very manipulation seems to increase its diversity. detailed articles on Kayapó soil management Ultimately, Posey favours an idea, foreshad- in gardens? Overall, in the rush to get the owed by the geographer Nigel Smith, that volume to press, the editor may have under- black soil distribution in the Amazon basin cut the volume’s usefulness as a definitive indicates that the present complexity of the overview of Posey’s contribution to our tropical forest ecosystem itself may be a result understanding of Kayapó ethnobiology and of past human activity. ecological practice. In short, Posey explicitly advances the claim illiam isher that the Kayapó, and by implication other W H. F indigenous peoples, manage tropical forest College of William & Mary ecosystems to favour diversity. Although he is clearly influenced by notions of ecosystem and population regulation, Posey’s claim of Ramaswamy,Sumathi (ed.). Beyond appear- management goes further than existing ances? visual practices and ideologies in modern anthropological models and raises a series of India. xxix, 424 pp., plates, illus., bibliogrs. contentious problems, some of which have London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, been discussed in the literature. In my 2003. £39.99 (cloth) opinion, the volume editor errs in not explor- ing some of the issues connected with To celebrate ‘Martyr’s Day’ on 9 June 2000 – research on indigenous environmental man- the centenary of Birsa Munda’s death at agement. Although many Amazonianists are Ranchi jail – the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh increasingly convinced of the anthropogenic (HSS, Association of Hindu Volunteers) pro- BOOK REVIEWS 185 duced a semi-iconic poster of tribal India’s of Hindu mythology, popular artists could most famous freedom fighter, depicting Birsa both subvert the aura of colonial authority as a saviour of Hindutva or ‘Hinduness’. This and mobilize ‘local agendas’ of resistance. At Rightist organization’s appropriation of Birsa’s a broader level, Pinney suggests, the ‘affective image, and their communalization of his intensity’ embodied by producers, mediators, political legacy (at the expense of minority and consumers of these subversive allegories is religions, notably Christianity), is suggestive of indicative of the historical, and hence schol- the discursive flows and ‘intervisuality’ that arly, importance of ‘new interpretations and have defined visual practices and ideologies in new referents’. modern India. The theory of ‘intervisuality’ – Other contributors reinforce this point, the visual cross-referencing between different with reference either to mass-reproduced media and discourses – is central to Beyond prints or to the cinematic, documentary, and appearances? and enables a critical engagement propaganda films that have mobilized various with the movement of Birsa’s visual legacy kinds of nationalistic gazes. Mitter assesses between and within disparate world-views in how the imagery of Raja Ravi Varma united colonial and post-colonial India. Indian society before Independence, whilst In outlining the ideological aspects of cul- probing Walter Benjamin’s ideas on modernity tural practice, I echo the key issues addressed and reproducibility. Ramaswamy introduces in Sumathi Ramaswamy’s excellent volume. the notion of ‘geo-bodies’ to contextualize Most of the eleven established contributors prints of Bharat Mata (Mother India) in terms are concerned with the interface between the of their Bengali prototypes and their reap- artistic and the socio-political agency of pearance in later secularist and communalist people and things in modern India.The strong discourses. Kajri Jain analyses the agency of interdisciplinarity of the volume – which the printed image in collapsing false bound- brings into dialogue the methods and ma- aries between religiosity and the public terials of art history, visual anthropology, and sphere. Patricia Uberoi disrupts dominant sec- media studies – encompasses the workings of ularist and Hindutva promulgations of ‘unity- cultural hegemony, hybridity, and ambivalence in-diversity’ by locating the multivocality of in colonial and post-colonial eras. Together, prints that depict Sikhs. Srirupa Roy unravels the contributors generate a theoretical vitality the ‘diversity-speak’ disseminated through the and diversity that will prove invaluable to documentary films produced by the Govern- scholars and students of South Asian identities ment of India’s Films Division and Depart- and histories, as well of less specialized topics ment of Audiovisual Publicity. Philip such as colonialism, post-colonialism, diaspora, Lutgendorf traces the evolution of post- popular and public culture, and film studies. colonial anxieties around the ‘hardly hege- In expounding theories of ‘intervisuality’ monic’ deity Hanuman and his ‘chunky and ‘interocularity’, Ramaswamy elaborates monkey’ iconicity. Christiane Brosius decon- debates on the nexus between vision, visual- structs the resurgent semiotics of Hindutva ity, and modernity in South Asia raised by the as visualized in the video ‘God manifests editors of volumes already published, namely himself’ (that is, Rama) of 1989, asserting that Tejaswini Niranjana and colleagues in Interro- televisual broadcasts of Hanuman’s devotion to gating modernity (1993), Carol Breckenridge in Rama transform notions of citizenship into Consuming modernity (1995), Vidya Dehejia in deshbhakta, or devotional national service, a Representing the body (1997), and Rachel primary tenet of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Dwyer and Chris Pinney in Pleasure and the Sangh (RSS, Association of National nation (2000). Most of Ramaswamy’s authors Volunteers). outline their indebtedness to Pinney, who Although there is a bias towards the visual reasserts his own theoretical wizardry in an culture of Delhi, Beyond appearances? provides essay on ‘xeno-realism’, or the transformation a dynamic forum for the main exponents of of occidental representational modalities into the anthropological turn in studies of South anti-colonial experiences. Extending his thesis Asian popular visual culture, and will prove on ‘Indian magical realism’, Pinney invokes an inspiration for a generation of emerging the ‘xeno-real’ to investigate the strategies of scholars. popular nationalist resistance in Calcutta (now aniel ycroft Kolkata) during the early twentieth century. D J. R By fusing the established art-historical University of Sussex approaches of Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Partha Mitter with new insights in visual anthropology pioneered by Jyotindra Jain, Saunders,Barbara & David Haljan (eds). Pinney is able to analyse the ways in which Whither multiculturalism? a politics of dis- colonial authority was ‘hybridized’ or ‘partial- sensus. 307 pp., tables, bibliogrs. Leuven: ized’ by chromolithographic artists and drama- Univ. Press, 2003. Price: €30.00 (paper) tists. Pinney argues that through their visual appropriation of realism (or illusionist per- This book addresses one of the most im- spectivalism) and their political allegorization portant subjects which anthropologists of 186 BOOK REVIEWS contemporary Western societies can and the not-unrelated field of human rights should tackle. Multiculturalism is the accepted studies? and most widely used designation for the Secondly, the editors conclude that multi- form that cultural pluralism takes in those culturalism is not a singular phenomenon. societies, and encapsulates the ideologies, poli- This will not be news to anthropologists who cies, practices, and institutions which have will have observed, on the ground, the mul- been developed to accommodate the fact of titude of initiatives which constitute ‘actually diversity and difference and to address the existing multiculturalism’. Despite conver- problems which their ‘recognition’ entails. In gences, no two situations are the same – far Western societies, the diversity to which this from it – and there are major differences in refers stems variously from the presence of the forms that multiculturalism takes in, say, ‘indigenous’ peoples, regional minorities (and Britain or France. Indeed, comparison is vital, sometimes majorities), and (most typically) and it is disappointing that the potentially illu- immigrants and refugees: the Others who minating comparison of Belgium and Canada have come from elsewhere. The precise mix is not followed through in any consistent way. of multinationality and polyethnicity (to adapt The failure to do so means that the volume Kymlicka’s terms) varies enormously (consider lacks coherence. Italy, Britain, or Australia); none the less, the Thirdly, the contributors demonstrate once challenges posed by multiculturality, for again the doubts prevalent in academic circles example to liberal democracy, are in broad as to the value of multiculturalism as policy. terms similar, as indeed (again, very broadly) These doubts, which are summarized early are the solutions. in the volume in papers by Pieterse and The academic literature on multiculturalism Werbner, reflect concerns that multicultural- often concentrates on policies, legislation, and ism is contrary to the principles of liberal philosophical questions and, important though democracy; that social issues cannot be sub- these are, what happens on the ground is often sumed under ‘culture’, and may be overlooked poorly documented. We know all too little in a politics of cultural difference; that the way about what those engaged in implementing in which the ‘culture’ element is conceived in multiculturalism actually think they are trying ‘multiculturalism’ is essentialist; that multicul- to do, and how they actually go about it – turalism privileges patriarchy and disem- ‘actually existing multiculturalism’, as powers women, and so on. Pieterse also Schierup calls it. This collection is not atypi- argues, correctly, that multiculturalism can cal. Based on a conference of the Association only be understood in the context of global- for Canada Studies in Flanders, the volume ization and transnational migration, but when tries to encompass both theoretical and prac- he adds that ‘in this setting [it] is but the tical aspects of multiculturalism. There is an downstream of global politics and political introduction (by Haljan) and eighteen papers economy’, he surely underestimates the extent by scholars based mainly in Belgium, Canada, to which demands for it come as much from and the United Kingdom. These are grouped below as from above. Werbner’s discussion of into three parts.The papers in Part 1 (Pieterse, this complex issue is more nuanced. Bannerji, and Werbner) examine some general Finally, there is no going back to the understandings of multiculturalism in both monoculturalism and assimilationism of earlier historical and contemporary contexts. Part 2 epochs. For better or worse, and for all its deals with philosophy (van De Putte, Hirsch faults, in an era of transnationalism and glob- Ballin, Visker, Foqué, Vandervelde, Saunders, alization, some form of multiculturalism is and van Brakel), while Part 3 has a more inevitable.As the old soldier said:‘If you know empirical focus, as Haljan says, looking at a better ’ole, you go to it’. policy ‘as it works’ (Ceuppens, Billiet and col- alph rillo leagues, Duncan, Colin Coates, Berry, Ken R G Coates, Kunin, and Burstein). It is impossible University of Sussex to summarize these papers here, but they prompt some reflections. First, the contributors represent a variety Scheffler,Harold W. Filiation and affiliation. of disciplinary approaches, from law and xiv, 202 pp., figs., bibliogr. Oxford, political philosophy to sociology and anthro- Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001 pology, with some policy practitioners. Their contributions vary greatly in approach (and Taking from Fortes a distinction between fil- in length), but the sheer variety is telling and, iation, the relation of a child to his or her for those unfamiliar with the literature, parents, and descent, the relation between a reveals a great deal about the state of current person and his or her ancestors, Scheffler debates. For anthropologists, it represents an breaks from a previous position and follows opportunity to assess the strengths and Fortes in restricting the term ‘descent group’ weaknesses of their discipline’s own contribu- to groups formed by a patrilineal or matrilin- tion: the messiness of ethnographic realism eal rule. He then distinguishes between three versus philosophical rigour, perhaps, as in possibilities according to whether status is BOOK REVIEWS 187 acquired via a parent as a necessary and suffi- He reaches a similar conclusion, namely that cient condition, a necessary but not sufficient only de facto cognatic descent groups exist, for condition, or a sufficient but not necessary the Gilbert Islands and Tokelau. condition. The relation may be patrifiliation, Scheffler has set out his terms clearly and matrifiliation, or filiation where the sex of the argued his case carefully. Despite various dis- parent is irrelevant. Generalization across the agreements with Rivers and even Fortes, he range of societies where descent group mem- has chosen a position broadly within a promi- bership is acquired by means of one or other nent anthropological tradition, reserving the of the three logical possibilities is, he states, term ‘descent’ for the formation of groups, bound to be unproductive. Scheffler also indeed unilineal groups at that. His analytic acknowledges that the sex of the child might and ethnographic arguments also serve to also be relevant, but dismisses examples of par- emphasize the considerable variety, and com- allel and alternating descent as ethnographi- plexity, in forms of social groupings that cally mistaken. people have chosen to adopt. One issue which The nine possibilities that arise from the might have received somewhat more attention three combinations of conditionality and the is what the people themselves say about their three forms of filiation (patrifiliation, matri- institutions.When he says that a given society filiation, and undifferentiated) are not to be has no ideology of descent, presumably he described as rules of descent or descent rules, means that they make no such claims. It is but as rules of filiation. A person is a descen- possible, of course, that people may disagree dant of another only if the descendant is a among themselves, that their attitudes and child’s child of the other.While there are uni- statements may be ambiguous, or that they lineal rules of inheritance, there are no uni- may suspend judgement. Certainly not all lineal rules of succession. people will set out their ideologies of descent Examples of societies in which patrifiliation in terms directly translatable as necessity and is a necessary and sufficient condition to sufficiency. On the other hand, it is also pos- membership in a group include the Nuer,Tiv, sible that people might describe their unilin- Tallensi, and Gusii. In such societies, descent eal rules as necessary and sufficient, while in relations may have jural values. In societies, practice permitting other forms of acquiring such as the Swat Pathan, China, and India, descent group membership. The book ends where patrifiliation is necessary but not suffi- rather abruptly. Some readers would be helped cient, descent relations have no jural values. In by a summation of Scheffler’s position. societies like the Yakö and New Guinea High- arnes land communities, where patrifiliation is suf- R.H. B ficient, but not necessary, descent relations can University of Oxford also have no jural values. It is ‘quite inap- propriate to describe as a patrilineal descent group any group in which patrifiliation is Stone,Linda. Kinship and gender. (Second merely a sufficient condition for inclusion’. edition). xiv, 322 pp., tables, figs., illus., Only groups in which patrifiliation is both bibliogr. Boulder Colo.: Westview Press, necessary and sufficient can be called de jure 2000. $35.00 (paper) and de facto patrilineal descent groups. Jural social groups may be jural entities, jural col- As kinship studies have returned to the lectivities, or jural aggregates. anthropological limelight, it is unsurprising to The second part of the book reviews the see new textbooks on the subject: Ladislaw ethnography of the various societies listed as Holy’s Anthropological perspectives on kinship examples of the different possibilities of rules exemplifies this in the United Kingdom. Its of affiliation. Among the positions adopted parallel on my side of the ‘Pond’ is the volume here, Scheffler defends Evans-Pritchard’s under review. A second edition suggests that account of Nuer patrilineal institutions from Stone’s book is becoming a standard of sorts, various misinterpretations, while on the other which position, I hope to show here, is vir- hand arguing that the Yakö, far from being tually entirely undeserved. one of the better-described instances of Consider the key debate in the field in double descent, may have no descent groups recent years – whether kinship is a batch of at all. Not only that, but, according to Schef- ‘cultural constructs’ free of the imagined con- fler,Yakö groups lack an ideology of unilineal straints of human biology or has, instead, close descent. biological kin as its focal members every- Scheffler concludes with a reconsideration where. Utterly ignored in the first edition, it of his own Choiseul Island ethnography in is given only cursory attention in the second. which he originally argued that the people of David Schneider’s study of American kinship Choiseul possessed cognatic descent groups. is introduced, as is Harold Scheffler’s critique He has been persuaded, however, by Fortes and Schneider’s reanalysis of his Yapese mate- that ‘in the absence of closure by a descent rials. But only a single paragraph alludes to the criterion, relations of descent can have no dis- larger significance of these studies.There is no tinctive jural values or structural significance’. mention of Scheffler’s many other painstaking 188 BOOK REVIEWS analyses, or of the questioning of Schneider’s to a unilineal-cognatic dichotomy – this Yapese conclusions by several scholars, or of despite the fact that recent analyses of the other attempts to restore kinship to nomo- materials from Aboriginal Australia, North and thetic status by still others. South America, and perhaps other areas point Nor is there anything resembling a to very different notions. Tylor’s ancient command of the pertinent literature from the ‘marrying out or being killed out’ formula is Darwinian disciplines. The biology-culture resurrected for another fanciful recreation of distinction, now widely dismissed in these dis- ‘early humanity’.The overwhelming tendency ciplines, is left untouched, and the treatment towards local endogamy in Amazonia, parts of of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and Aboriginal Australia, Sri Lanka, and the evolutionary ecology is inadequate. Astonish- ‘matrilineal’ world is ignored. ingly absent is even a mention of the sub- This book is a sign of the times in anthro- stantial Darwinian literature showing that pology – and the times are very bad indeed. people generally favour close biological kin, It should be avoided by serious professionals and thus also the bearing of this literature on and students. the constructivist/extensionist controversy. arren hapiro The index shows more than two columns W S of entries under ‘women’ but nothing at all Rutgers University under ‘men’, in contrast to what one might expect these days in a book with ‘gender’ in its title. Yet the needs of children for close male kin in their lives, which most of the world has happened to intuit as a key com- Material culture ponent of fatherhood, is not dealt with here at all. David Blankenhorn, in his Fatherless America, has called the impending collapse of Joans,Barbara. Bike lust: Harleys, women and the nuclear family in the United States ‘our American society. xi, 271 pp., illus., bibliogr. most urgent social problem’, but Stone’s ‘most Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 2001. urgent’ need, apparently, is to author a ‘feel- $55.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper) good’ book for today’s reproductively irre- sponsible women and the men who – for a ‘The bike is front and center. It is not only night or two – love them. the means of entering the culture, it is the Lest this be thought too grave an indict- culture. It is both the symbol and the reality ment, consider her embrace of ‘the gathering of the culture. Without the bike there is hypothesis’, ‘put forth by female researchers’ nothing’ (p. 184). This quotation from Bike (p. 48) as competitive with ‘the hunting Lust: Harleys, women and American society illus- hypothesis’ of certain nasty male chauvinists. trates how a particular idea of group- We are told that the former ‘fit[s] the evidence relatedness emerges from people’s complete better’ (ibid.). But the only ‘human’ evidence and passionate engagement with objects of Stone considers is Richard Lee’s well-known specific significance, in this case Harley piece on !Kung subsistence. Just what this is Davidson motor bikes. Joans calls this phe- supposed to mean in analysing human evolu- nomenon of group-relatedness ‘culture’, but it tion is unclear. Even if we take Lee’s com- is unclear whether she is using the term mitment to Marxist eschatology at face value, ethnographically or analytically. Because she it exemplifies nothing more than (yet another) fails to make this distinction, the book fails instance of an economically productive class’s adequately to address what is clearly a fasci- subordination to a less-productive counter- nating theoretical problem.What can we make part: compare, say, slavery in the Arab world of the distinction between subject and object to this day or more ‘traditional’ women in the when it is clear that subjects can only make West.And the hunter-gatherer literature rather sense of themselves as particular kinds of strongly suggests that, even if hunting provides people in relation to their passion for specific fewer calories than gathering, it is none the objects which they share in common? How less more prestigious and far more important can we account for, and make a study of, the in dealing with the central civilizational emotional transformation – the passion – that problem, that is, the channelling of youthful object-mediated interactions make possible? male aggression. But this, like fatherhood, can How are these interactions structured and be elided in a confidence-building manual for how can the object seem to have an influence female undergraduates. of its own? Without this kind of analytical Despite the book’s faddishness, it has a engagement, Joans misses the opportunity to curious attachment to outworn conceptual- make her intriguing data relevant to contem- izations. Residential choices are presented as porary social theory. if they depended solely on post-marital ‘Culture’, meanwhile, has long been a moves, as in Murdock’s typology put forward contested term in anthropological theory, but in 1949 and anticipated decades earlier. it remains a widely used term in everyday Descent ideologies are considered according Euro-American life. Anthropologists are well BOOK REVIEWS 189 placed to document its usage and meaning, the effort of the (detective) work involved in but when working ‘at home’ they are in marking these moves. danger of falling into the trap of treating The core of the argument (made without culture as an unexamined assumption, a signi- reference to Gell’s Art and agency) is that fier of group-relatedness that needs no ana- images acquire a life (intentions) of their own, lytical circumspection.What is easily missed in as they are recontextualized by different such an account is a detailed sense of the people. This vitality means that the image is way that social relationships are organized and ‘a signifying complex that resists articulation lived on a day-to-day basis. Such detail would in an unambiguous and definitive way’ (p. 13). make a cultural description seem partial, Thus, in the first chapter, the focus is on the because ideas like culture and society must images of an indigenous group of Tierra del then be understood in terms of the represen- Fuegians, who were brought in 1881 to the tations of, and explicit abstractions concern- newly created Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris ing, the basis of group-belonging, which (which still can be seen in the Bois de anthropologists try to convey, and informants Boulogne) as a new kind of exhibition, and are required to explain, in ethnographic with great commercial success. The exhibit interviews. recreated Fuegian domestic life, with a Despite these shortcomings Joans has thatched hut, fire, and hunting displays (later nevertheless produced an interesting first-hand in the 1880s such spectacles with others account of the different kinds of groups that peoples involved mock battles and ritual have emerged, and are continuing to evolve, dances). Most of the Fuegians died. Mason’s out of the history of Harley Davidson own- intellectual sights are on the photographs of ership in California. These include a variety the Fuegians, which were used to make com- of groups who have in common relationships posite illustrations for French magazines. By with other Harley owners as a means of noting the artists’ biographical details, Mason escaping from conventional working life. shows how the images are part of a longer To gether they seek the freedom of the road, history of representation which goes back to but in different groups and in very different sixteenth-century portraits of the people from ways. Originally, this form of escapism was the the southernmost tip of the American conti- preserve of macho, subversive, white, working- nent (this analysis also includes a painting by class males (‘the outlaws’), but more recently one of Captain Cook’s artists on the Endeav- the prosperity of the Harley Davidson our) and anticipates their recovery by con- company has come to depend on the custom temporary artists. Thus, the Chilean Eugenio of RUBS (‘rich urban bikers’) and women Dittborn has created a picture called Histories bikers, who, once frowned upon, are now of the human face,VIII (p. 50), which juxtaposes increasing in numbers. images of Fuegians and portraits of criminals illian vans taken from ‘scientific’ work of the nineteenth G E century. This might seem tasteless, but it Brunel University makes obvious the reasons for the existence of both sets of images – they share the same history. Mason,Peter. The lives of images. 176 pp., This idea is developed in further chapters plates, illus., bibliogr. London: Reaktion by considering a range of material which Books, 2002. £25.00 (cloth) viewed in isolation appears relatively obscure – the first three-dimensional representation of This book tells a fascinating series of stories natives from the New World (which is in a about the travelling of visual representations church outside Oxford), engravings of natives across time and place. The quotation on the of Formosa in Lambeth Palace Library front cover from Aby Warburg’s The renewal of (London), and Meso-American codices. In pagan antiquity heralds the importance of an each chapter, the itineraries of images are analysis of the migration of images that does shown and variations on the theme are con- not fear border guards, disciplinary or worldly. sidered. For example, in the case of the Fue- Each chapter takes one particular set of images gians the images are connected with people and studies how they pop up unexpectedly in (artists and natives) and their movement, different parts of the world; the result is to whereas the second chapter, in a consideration trace the interconnections of various histories. of the tradition of vernacular portraiture of Mason thus develops a kind of Eric Wolf non-European peoples, reveals how the approach to the image.The scholarship behind engravings of Formosans were made by a man this book is impressive, and never oppressive who never left Europe: he had invented them – which it could have been in its juggling of from drawings and a text. Thus, the truthful- the detailed knowledge of history and biog- ness of images derives not from their docu- raphy (the lives of the subjects and the cre- mentary accuracy but from their conformity ators) and of traditions of representation. to the rules of ethnographic representation. Indeed, the writing has an athletic lightness as Mason reveals such discrepancies as meticu- it crosses continents and periods, concealing lously as a forensic pathologist. 190 BOOK REVIEWS
The delights here lie in appreciating both at an earlier stage of development.This theme the paths linking the images and the images is taken up by Inger Wulff in relation to the themselves. The author is fully aware that collections now held by the National using the visual as the source material for a Museum of Denmark. This collection came text creates its own methodological problems. mostly from Danish colonies, or was collected Images travel in different ways to texts and by Danes travelling or living outside Europe, have their own forms of efficacy; disciplining and it was organized in such a way as to the visual is more difficult than disciplining promote understanding of ‘the earliest devel- the textual. What is more, the boundary opment of mankind’. between fact and fiction is complicated by The link between museums and the colo- the obedience to implicit criteria of represen- nial project is drawn out by J.L.W. van Leur tation, as mentioned above. Mason has pro- in his discussion of the Ethnological Collec- duced a piece of work that marks out in an tion of the Indies Institution in Delft. This original manner its own genre of scholarship, institution was intended to prepare young faithful to history and to real connections, men for services in the colonies, and many of and one which disregards disciplinary knowl- its tutors contributed to its collections in the edges. At one point, Mason talks of a para- interests of an illustrative education. M.L.R. ethnographic genre (p. 79), which is a hybrid Djajasoebrata also makes the connection form with a diverse canon, mixing image and between collecting in Indonesia and the text, first-hand observation, analysis and con- pursuit of learning among the Dutch bour- jecture, detective work, and historical and geoisie, but contrasts this with the Protestant documentary material. This description is not missionaries’ tendency to destroy evidence of unlike Mason’s new book, which as such rein- an earlier culture. vents the way in which serious, original, J.H. van Brakel identifies a shift towards accessible, and valuable ‘ethnographies’ can be the understanding of ethnographic objects as made. ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ arts. This gave the arte- ark arris facts the status of valuable antiques. Collectors M H saw themselves as racing against time, since University of St Andrews the traditional cultures were rapidly disap- pearing as a result of contact with Western civilization. Art-collecting and the pursuit of Schefold,Reimar & Han Vermeulen (eds). scientific knowledge could both be encom- Treasure hunting? collectors and collections of passed by an ideal of salvage and preservation, Indonesian artefacts. vi, 324 pp., illus., bibli- as Sylvia Ohnemus shows in her study of the ogrs. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2002. Sarasin cousins, whose work was part of a €30.00 (paper) wider scheme to document disappearing cultures and populations that were considered The title of this book indicates its focus on to be descendants of prehistoric peoples. In collectors who hunted for valuable artefacts. similar vein, Sara Ciruzzi draws our attention The chapters explore the motives and to the scarcity value of objects collected by methods of individual collectors, as well as the the Italian scientist Elio Modigliani, who history of museum collections and the way in sought to document the original culture of which they came to be considered valuable. indigenous populations that were not yet con- It begins with an overview of the history of taminated by external influences. collecting in Indonesia by C. van Dyke, Paul Michael Taylor offers us a revealing who points out the early association of non- portrait of the American collector William European culture with the realm of nature, Louis Abbott, who saw his collecting as illustrated by the tendency of early ethno- working towards the expansion of science graphic collections to be kept in zoos. The that was increasing his nation’s prestige. Nico following chapter, by Hetty Nooy Palm, doc- de Jonge and Toos van Dijk also emphasize uments the transformation of ethnographic the scholarly motivations of collectors like objects from curiosities to objets d’art,provid- Wilhelm Muller-Wismar, who was well ing us with revealing portraits of the kinds of educated and from a well-to-do family. The people who collected in Indonesia in the early destruction of traditional culture impressed twentieth century. him in the field, and this became an impor- Ger van Wengen’s discussion of the tant spur for his collecting activities. Another National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden collector of this kind was Ernst Vatter, an reveals both the importance of the Dutch ethnographer who took the documentation of colonial presence in Indonesia and of the material culture very seriously, as revealed in prevailing doctrines of evolution in dictating Ruth Barnes’s chapter. Like many of the other the museum’s collecting policies.There was a collectors, he was convinced that he was perceived need for tangible evidence to seeing the last days of indigenous culture and demonstrate the evolution of human beings, hoped that his collection would eventually and potential collectors were urged to serve as evidence of the historical past of the collect material from ‘tribes’ considered to be cultures which he visited. BOOK REVIEWS 191
The book concludes with a consideration state produces persons, persons produce the of museums in Indonesia by Mohammed state. Amir Sutaarga. He argues that Indonesians The different chapters include a discussion have become more and more conscious of of the emergence of the Turkish Republic, the their own past, and their search for a national history of sugar production in Turkey,and per- identity in the process of nation-building has ceptions and representations of the state, as well fuelled their interest. The National Museum as case studies of a factory in eastern Turkey, attempts to express the current ideal of unity of sugar-beet-producing villages, and of sugar in diversity. For the citizens of newly inde- contracts established between farmers and the pendent nations, treasures from the past must Corporation. A discussion of the current era be considered as the material evidence of their of privatization rounds off the study. history. Museums must play a role in mediat- Alexander chose the Sugar Corporation for ing cross-cultural communication and the her study because it is one of the State Eco- ‘treasures’ they hold should be considered as nomic Enterprises that were created by the cultural ambassadors. Turkish republic in the 1930s. Sugar produc- Treasure hunting? hopes to break new tion, which is highly centralized, operated as ground in its systematic and comparative a means of subsidizing the rural population as approach, and in this it is largely successful, well as of disseminating modernist values. providing a wealth of historical information Referred to as ‘Atatürk’s minarets’, sugar fac- and at the same time offering important tories represented an attempt at internal col- insights into the social factors and individual onization, particularly in eastern Turkey.‘Sugar motivations that have shaped the history of families’, multi-generational families raised in museum collecting in Indonesia and of factory compounds, are a case in point, Indonesian collections in Europe and although Alexander intriguingly concludes America. Perhaps most importantly, these that this social engineering project was not studies reveal the ways in which museums especially successful. were often dependent upon individual collec- For this multi-sited research, the author tors whose educational backgrounds and moved between the central headquarters of interests were extremely diverse. the Turkish Sugar Corporation in the capital Ian Fairweather city of Ankara, a local sugar factory in Erzurum in eastern Turkey, and villages in the University of Manchester same region where sugar beet is planted. Her study shows that the state continues to play a central role in sugar production in eastern Turkey, where factories which operate at a financial loss are maintained for political Political anthropology reasons. Alexander argues that the state in Turkey remains highly patrimonial, despite the Alexander,Catherine. Personal states: making Kemalist rupture which transformed the connections between people and bureaucracy in Ottoman system. She claims that personhood Turkey. x, 267 pp., tables, figs., bibliogr. in Turkey is predicated upon being in a rela- Oxford: Univ. Press, 2002. £50.00 tionship of reciprocity based on a model of (cloth) kinship. She argues that the production of sugar is made possible largely through famil- The author of this monograph has an unusual iarity, personal knowledge, and trust between background for an anthropologist: she worked officials and farmers, a strategy which proves as a management consultant in information highly rational in the context of high levels technology for the Turkish Treasury. This of economic and political instability. In con- experience proves highly useful in her tradistinction to orientalist accounts, she ethnography of the Turkish Sugar Corpora- maintains that the opposition commonly tion. In Personal states, the author aims to give made between Western and other bureaucra- material form to the rather abstract debates on cies is a question of degree and emphasis. the nature of the state by conducting an According to Alexander, both Turkish and anthropological study of the relationship other bureaucracies combine Weber’s ideal between bureaucrats, engineers, and farmers types of patrimonialism and legal-rational engaged in the production of sugar in eastern organization. She claims that, despite the Turkey. Alexander argues in this study that oppositional terms through which the con- personhood and the state are mutually and cepts of contract and co-operation are con- relationally constructed through narratives and structed, sugar could not be produced without representations of persons engaged in a the support of alternative, informal relations of network organized on a familial model. trust and co-operation which coexist with According to her, the state is experienced as legal contracts. an effect of the networks of personal relations Alexander rejects a view of a monolithic in which actors are embedded, and, just as the state, preferring to think in terms of a 192 BOOK REVIEWS
‘personal state’ as a means of orientating a authority and effectiveness of the state are relational self. The state in this view is both assumed. produced in relation to, and produces, the The first half of the book provides an self by means of a familial model which has historical overview of Tanga, as well as of largely remained constant from Ottoman to Tanzania as a nation. Askew then turns to an republican times. ethnography of the various musical and dance Personal states is a well-organized, well- forms popular in Tanzania in the past and written monograph. The author’s inside present. Each genre, from ngoma and dansi to knowledge of the bureaucracy is strengthened taarab is a unique cultural expression, mixing with ethnographic research in the Sugar and accommodating different internal and Corporation, factories, and villages. Alexander external influences. These different musical successfully challenges orientalist approaches genres also serve to express and shape social to the state by comparing the Turkish bure- and political identities. The music that one aucracy with other bureaucracies, such as the listens to or hires for a wedding communi- British. Her case study makes concrete debates cates social and economic status, as well as on the nature of the state and makes room political affiliation. Askew then focuses her for agency, since she is interested as much in attention on taarab.The poetry in taarab, laced how the state is produced by persons as in with metaphor, allusion, and multiple mean- how persons are produced by the state. ings, is well suited to conveying (amongst Alexander’s discussion of the history of sugar other things) social critique, political com- production in Turkey carefully distinguishes mentary, and gender ideology. By means of between the high Kemalist period and the their tipping practices during specific songs at contemporary age of neo-liberal privatization. taarab performances, audience members com- One only wishes that she had spent more municate with the community and other time in beet-producing villages: her knowl- audience members their problems and their edge of the field seems most solid when it quarrels with others. comes to bureaucracy. All in all, this study is From this politics of the personal, Askew an important contribution to ethnographies shifts to the politics of culture by examining of bureaucracy and to debates on the nature national cultural policy over time. Recogniz- of the state. ing that ngoma provided an outlet for the eyla eyzi expression of both political discontent and L N cultural and social unity, colonial administra- Sabanci University tors were quick to establish a bureaucratic body to regulate and control performances and performers. At independence, the new Askew,Kelly M. Performing the nation: Swahili state expanded this bureaucracy. Faced with music and cultural politics in Tanzania. xviii, constructing a nation-state from 120 different 417 pp., tables, illus., CD, bibliogr. ethnic groups, Tanzania’s founding father, London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press Julius Nyerere, created the Ministry of 2002. £50.50 (cloth), £24.00 (paper) National Culture and Youth in 1962. Since then it has undergone many transformations Applying performance theory to her study of of both organization and focus. Initially, its nation-building, Askew explores the ways in emphasis was on promoting ‘tradition’ and which music and dance have played a part rejecting ‘modern’ influences in an effort in constructing a national culture and identity to assert an African identity. Over time, this in Tanzania. An ambitious book, Askew’s poorly funded and organized ministry was thoughtful and richly detailed ethnography to modify its definition of appropriate tradi- traces the relationship between music, politics, tion to mirror the political agenda of the and economic change from the colonial day, from the era of African socialism to period to the present. In analysing both policy the current period of multi-party politics and and practice, Askew’s work demonstrates that economic liberalization. Bands and their the state’s articulation of a national identity performances continue to be regulated and has been neither consistent nor entirely controlled to some degree by the government. successful. Relationships with cultural officers and As an observer and also, importantly, as a government agents are often crucial to per- performer in both dansi (popular jazz) bands formers’ careers. Askew’s ‘insider view’ allows and taarab ensembles, Askew is in a unique us to see how performers negotiate these position to provide a fascinating view of this relationships through both collaboration and musical world. She sees at first hand both the resistance. personal dimension and the wider politics The place of taarab in the development of involved in the lives and trajectories of these a national culture demonstrates well the com- musical groups. By focusing on performance, plexities both of Tanzanian politics and of and incorporating both micro- and macro- Tanzania’s cultural identity. During the early level politics, she offers a critique of state- days of statehood, taarab was excluded centred studies of nationalism in which the from national culture on the grounds of its BOOK REVIEWS 193 supposed foreignness. With the advent of and this resulted in the latter’s replacement by multi-partyism and economic liberalization more compliant tenants. In one village in the however, taarab,a very popular musical genre, same revenue area the ensuing violence was enlisted to help craft a new identity for claimed the lives of fourteen Santhals. But it Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the ruling was technological changes – canal irrigation, political party. Yet, ironically, while the party new crops and crop patterns, and the intro- lavished support on one band in particular, duction of tractors – that made it possible to this band did not ultimately produce songs cultivate the land with an altogether new that supported CCM’s politics. Rather, to intensity and to dispense with sharecroppers achieve popularity, the band had to avoid altogether. These innovations produced a either singing CCM’s praises or criticizing greatly enhanced demand for hired labour, a the opposition. Tanzanian citizens, weary of frenetic preoccupation with the scheduling of CCM’s long-standing dominance, would agricultural operations, and a tightening quickly have rejected such an overt attempt to surveillance over labour. Time discipline was manipulate their sentiments. as rigorous as in E.P. Thompson’s ‘Taylorist’ The search for a national identity and depiction of the factory regime, and was rein- culture in Tanzania continues. Askew shows forced by verbal and physical abuse, and by how this identity is created by musicians, arbitrary deductions from the wage. The politicians, and Tanzanian citizens at all levels increased demand for labour went, however, and demonstrates that it is not simply a top- with its cheapening, a phenomenon which is down, state-designed, and imposed process. explained by the overwhelming power of the While she emphasizes the dialogic nature of dominant class and the absence of opportuni- performing a national identity, she might have ties outside agriculture. supported this further by providing more Within the village, five principal classes are of the audience responses to the ‘traditions’ distinguished: maliks (dominant-caste Bhumi- and national identity that emerge in national har landholders); grihasts (landholders from contests and other musical events. This aside, other castes); a small class of tenant cultivators Performing the nation is an engaging and of mainly middle caste who do not work for thought-provoking work which will have others; petty cultivators who do so and who considerable appeal for readers in African are mostly ‘Dalits’ and ‘tribals’; and landless studies, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and labourers. These last two together constituted comparative politics. its underclass and accounted for 75 per cent atherine nyder of its households. Malik households accounted K S for 12 per cent, but owned nearly 80 per cent Queens College CUNY of the land. The malik-grihast distinction (which the villagers do not make) is crucial to a central Chakravarti,Anand. Social power and everyday thread in Chakravarti’s analysis – the relation- class relations: agrarian transformation in ship between caste and class. By virtue of their north Bihar. 311 pp., map, tables, bibliogr. membership of the dominant caste, Bhumihar London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, landholders are in the unique position of 2001. £35.00 (cloth) wielding ideological and political, as well as material, power. It is they who define ‘the This excellent study of agrarian class relations culture of exploitation’ and whose links with in north Bihar has some old-fashioned the local state underwrite their coercive virtues. It is compellingly documented, lucidly power. Following Godelier (religion or written, and deals with issues that clearly kinship may function as both ‘superstructure’ matter – and not just for Indianists. and ‘infrastructure’), Chakravarti sees caste as Based on fieldwork carried out between a religious institution that determines access 1978 and 1980 in Aghanbigha, a village in to the means, and structures the relations, of Purnea district, Chakravarti focuses on rela- production. No analysis of agrarian class rela- tions between the dominant class and an tions can afford to neglect it. The nexus that underclass of marginal cultivators and landless links the dominant caste with the local state labourers. The past two decades had seen a is, moreover, key to the hegemony of the shift from a situation in which the former dominant class, and allows it to pay wages that leased most of their land out to sharecroppers are lower in real terms than those paid in the to one in which they now dedicated them- 1950s and which are well below the statutory selves to profit-maximization and cultivated minimum. It also explains why Aghanbigha by means of hired labour. labourers are worse remunerated than others This was a consequence of social and in the region and why – unlike their coun- technological circumstances. Neither had terparts in central Bihar – they are incapable ‘primacy’. New land legislation led to an of meaningful resistance. Though they are exacerbation of class antagonism between the angry and resentful, and deploy ‘the weapons dominant Bhumihar landholders and their of the weak’ when they can, Chakravarti predominantly ‘tribal’ Santhal sharecroppers, argues that these change nothing. The only 194 BOOK REVIEWS salvation lies in left-organized class politics – contextualization in real peoples’ lives. Direct but in Purnea these are stifled by the Bhumi- quotations from workers and bosses are very hars’ stranglehold on the state. effective in this respect. Indeed, the thorough Though the class structure of the village nature of Jefremovas’s contextualization of has been progressively polarized, its underclass brick- and tile-making industries in the has not been significantly ‘proletarianized’. history, political and economic contexts, Most village labourers are ‘bonded’ to a malik gender relations, and the unusual household – most importantly through indebtedness. economics of many Rwandan families is a What then, asks Chakravarti, is the relation- striking feature of this book. ship between ‘free’ labour and capitalist devel- It begins with a description of the tech- opment? Though ‘unfree labour’ coexists with nology used in brick and roof-tile industries the maliks’ thoroughly capitalistic ethic of in Rwanda. Despite great differences in the profit-maximization, in the end he comes scale of these enterprises, the author shows down on the side of those who have argued that technology and labour processes that it is inconsistent with capitalism in its remained remarkably homogeneous in the ‘pure’ form.This is because it robs the labour- 1980s. Chapter 2 analyses the nature of labour ing classes of economic agency in the market, organization in three forms of industry – small and political agency in the forum of class peasant production, large capitalist enterprises, politics where they are incapable of constitut- and co-operatives, and examines the impact of ing a class for themselves – an argument that regional differences in access to land, labour, seems to be implicitly premised on some and power in shaping labour relations and perhaps-questionable teleological assumptions techniques. about the ‘natural’ historical destiny of the The third chapter develops the author’s proletariat. central argument that the regional variations That notwithstanding, this is a very fine in the organization of labour and the devel- book that belongs on the Indianist’s shelf opment of brick- and tile-making industries alongside such now-classic studies as Béteille’s in Rwanda are related to the history of Caste, class and power,Breman’s Patronage and centralization of land, resources, and power; exploitation, and Epstein’s Economic development the development of regional diversity; the and social change. But it is not only regional transformation of the lineage system; gender specialists who should read it. So, too, should relations; the recasting of ethnicity in pre- anybody concerned with the way in which colonial and colonial Rwanda; and changes to ‘traditional’ agrarian societies respond to the these structures in the post-colonial state. capitalist market, or with the nexus between Chapers 4 and 5 examine the reasons why class hierarchies and state power. It might family labour was so conspicuously absent usefully figure as an exemplary case study on from the brick and tile industries through a student reading lists in economic or political detailed description of household reproduc- anthropology. tion. Beginning with an interesting historical onathan arry analysis, Jefremovas contends that the transfor- J P. P mation of paternal control over resources, London School of Economics & Political Science and the impact of changes in social relations during the pre-colonial and colonial periods, resulted in household heads being unable Jefremovas,Villia. Brickyards to graveyards: from to control the labour of grown children. production to genocide in Rwanda. viii, 162 This analysis is built upon to present gender pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. New York: and domestic relations within the household SUNY Press, 2002. $59.50 (cloth), $19.95 and, with an emphasis on the importance (paper) of women’s subsistence agricultural labour, explains how such marginally lucrative indus- This well-written and thoughtful book pro- tries as brick- and tile-making remained vides a particularly fine illustration of the way viable. in which detailed fieldwork focusing on a Chapter 6 considers the specific cases of clearly defined and limited subject, in this case three women who had established brick- and brick- and tile-making industries in clay tile-making businesses. These case studies are marshes, can unfold to offer explanations that used to engage critically with the literature on contribute to understanding grand events such class and gender in Africa. Although this as the Rwandan Genocide. It certainly does chapter provides interesting ethnography not suffer from the historical amnesia charac- about women in Rwanda, it creates a change terizing so much current writing about in focus that weakens the flow of the argu- Rwanda. ment concerning the relationship between I particularly enjoyed Jefremovas’s pre- brickyards and graveyards. sentation of her field data on tile- and brick- Although Jefremovas provides a persuasive making industries, which produces an and historically informed account of how excellent balance between ‘raw’ technical, class, regional politics, power, land tenure, and economic, and methodological data and their the role of elite politics were more relevant BOOK REVIEWS 195 than ‘tribal’ animosity in establishing the The next four chapters turn their attention circumstances that led to the genocide, I had to Fiji, and in particular the connection hoped for something more from this chapter. between nation-state and community. Thus, In particular, I was expecting a more detailed since Independence, ‘Fiji’s chartering narrative analysis of the ways in which conceptions of has been contested, its official rituals have work, similar to those so carefully analysed in failed to settle the crucial questions, and, as a earlier sections of the book, had been used, result, “the nation” is a contested idea, not an transformed, or developed by those planning experienced reality’ (p. 142). Leaving aside the and implementing the genocide. matter of why an idea is not a reality, they The absence of an examination of the lan- consider the basis of this contested narrative, guage used by the génocidaires,which described which ‘is one justifying violence, division, and mass-killings and associated activities as work, inequality’ (p. 142). or of the remarkably work-like approach The basis of contestation is variously exhibited towards mass-killing in some of the described as blood, race, and ethnicity, but largest massacres, in which killers were repeat- boils down to the unoriginal contention that edly brought to churches and other places Fiji is divided primarily into ethnic, Indo- where their victims had congregated, particu- Fijian, and European communities. The argu- larly struck me and weakened the link, ment comes to a head in Chapter 4 subtitled implicit in the title, between brickyards and ‘Colonial communities in Fiji, 1936 to 1947’. graveyards. Here, it is proposed that the indentured Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book very Indians who worked the cane-fields, selling much. Jefremovas has produced an important their produce to the Australian-owned Colo- and timely contribution to the ethnography nial Sugar Refinery Ltd. (CSR), were con- of Rwanda. Her thorough research, multifac- structed through the colonial state as a eted approach to the analysis of her data, and community, in juxtaposition to the other clear writing-style make this a very suitable communities, as a means of representing them book for anthropology and development during strikes and war. Since ‘they cannot undergraduates and for all those with an represent themselves’, claim Kelly and Kaplan, interest in labour, the Rwandan Genocide, purportedly following Marx, ‘they must be and the Great Lakes Region. represented’. As disorganized indentured erome ewis migrants from different places and occupations J L in India, they had first to be given a ‘group London School of Economics & Political Science existence’ in Fiji (p. 87). Subsequently, as dis- persed smallholding cane farmers, the migrants and their descendants gained forms Kelly,John D. & Martha Kaplan. Repre- of representation in the colonial state. sented communities: Fiji and world decolo- In chapters 5 and 6, the authors show how nization.xiv, 243 pp., illus., bibliogr. the transition to Independence in 1970, the London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, coup of May 1987 and the subsequent lengthy 2001. £25.50 (cloth), £11.50 (paper) crisis, the constitutional settlement of 1997, and the parliamentary take-over of May 2000 In this collection of six essays, two United became moments which further emphasized States academic anthropologists who describe racial community representation and distance. themselves as liberals (p. 199) attempt to give The distance highlights the absence of the idea of community a new rendering. Set national community. against the argument regarding community The purported connection to Marx’s sense formulated in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined of representation is less than helpful. For communities, colonial and post-colonial Fiji is Marx, representation expressed a relationship the location for an ultimately unsuccessful between class power and state power. Thus, mixture of Karl Marx’s use of representation in The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Max Weber’s attention to ‘coercive appa- ‘Bonaparte represents a class, and the most ratuses, especially legal apparatuses that devise numerous class of French society at that, and enforce contract law’ (p. 8). the small-holding peasants’, at a moment Chapter 1, ‘Nations and decolonization’, when ‘the state seems to have made itself subtitled ‘On the actual origins of nation- completely independent’ of all classes. The states’, provides an account of ‘new nation- crucial word in the second phrase is ‘seems’. states’.The second chapter entitled ‘Time and For Bonaparte represents, above all, the par- the global: against the homogeneous, empty ticular forms of private property constituted communities in contemporary social theory’ by the diverse and often-contending factions takes direct aim at Anderson. Instead of con- of the French bourgeoisie (Kelly & Kaplan, ceiving nation-states and communities as pp. 88-9). ‘imagined’, Kelly and Kaplan believe they As Kelly and Kaplan correctly and repeat- should be seen in Weberian terms as embod- edly note, race has become the most constant iments of political power, a political commu- feature of political discourse in Fiji. Yet, to nity, and a particular form of human emotion. follow Marx, this is how Fiji seems. Beneath 196 BOOK REVIEWS the surface appearance, as the essence and at the heart of the kingdom, but are mobile, necessary ‘other side’ of reality, the accumula- indeed positively ‘mercurial’ (p. 52), and tion of capital continues.This accumulation is under the control of trading castes rather than the private property of particular individual kings, who must therefore compete for their capitalists, which is secured by the contractual favour. Vallabhas view puja as inherently forms and the means of coercion that Weber selfish, comparing it unfavourably with their understood and emphasized (p. 8). Had Kelly own practice of seva, the selfless service of the and Kaplan attempted, like Marx and Weber, deity purely because it is one’s duty to do so to understand the interconnection between (p. 60). It was, argues Peabody, this ‘same accumulation, private property, and the tussle soteriology, with its attendant devotional prac- among capitalists to individualize what is tices, which informed Zalim Singh’s unstint- socially created, they might have understood ing service to the maharao’ (p. 145). Their Fiji better.They would also have given Repre- mutual behaviour, however puzzling it con- sented communities a richer description. For tinued to appear to the British, thus con- when representation is reduced to the plural- formed closely to the defining cultural logic ist concern for ‘the institutions by which of their religion. collective will gains its spokespeople, repre- The ultimate demise of this symbiosis, sentation as in voting systems and so on’ (p. while immediately caused by jealousies among 28), then it is unlikely that communities will and between the rival potential heirs of both be any less superficially grasped. men, was ultimately the result of the treaties cott ac illiam forced upon Kota and its neighbours by the S M W British in 1817, under which they renounced Australian National University all rights to an independent foreign policy in return for continued internal self- determination. By making lines of authority Peabody,Norbert. Hindu kingship and polity and responsibility unambiguously clear, and by in precolonial India. xiii, 190 pp., maps, figs., transferring land between little kingdoms so illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, as to provide them with clear, fixed geo- 2003. £40.00 (cloth) graphical borders, the British did away with the ‘multiple and overlapping’ forms of sover- Peabody’s topic is the kingdom of Kota in eignty which had previously prevailed, in northwest India during the eighteenth and favour of a unitary state-formation which early nineteenth centuries, a period which ‘increasingly brought the maharao and the saw the gradual assertion of British regional rajrana into more direct, head-to-head forms hegemony. Kota dated as a political entity of competition’ (p. 156).Within three years of from c.1720, a product of dynastic segmenta- the signing of the treaty, Umed’s successor tion, and at the heart of the book is the Kishor Singh was at war with Zalim Singh. curious interrelationship between its longest- Even after his decisive military victory, how- lasting ruler, Maharao Umed Singh (ruled ever, Zalim Singh, to the great perplexity of 1771-1819), and Zalim Singh, its prime min- the British, would not hear of the maharao ister (rajrana) from 1764 until 1824. being deposed, but insisted that he be re- To Europeans of the period, Kota’s turned to the throne (gaddi) under Zalim’s political structures epitomized oriental despo- guardianship. The logic of seva still persisted, tism. But who was the despot? Was it Umed although Zalim’s heirs never bought into it to Singh, abandoned totally to the pleasures of anything like the same degree. hunting and the flesh – as the French trav- The introductory chapter tilts at a few too eller, the comte de Modave, assumed – or many orientalist windmills, and throughout Zalim Singh, constraining Umed into an one feels that Peabody assumes too readily infantilized relationship of dependence as a that Indian kingship manifests itself in the cover for his own illegitimate usurpation of same way everywhere. For example, Dirks’s power – as maintained by James Tod and rather different portrayal of the nature of land successive local representatives of the Raj? grants in the southern little kingdom of Peabody argues convincingly that ‘this vexing Pudukkottai (The hollow crown: ethnohistory of phenomenon of powerful regents and puppet- an Indian kingdom, 1987) is assumed to reflect kings’ (p. 149) was culturally consonant with problems in analysis (p. 82), when it could at the special characteristics of the Vallabha sect least as plausibly, in my view, be ascribed to to which most rulers in the region adhered. fairly obvious differences in the political Vallabha divine images have two characteris- histories of northern and southern India, such tics which distinguish them from Hindu as the differential impact of the Mughal images in general. First, the deity is believed empire, as well as distinctive, localized forms to be immanent within them, rather than of religious practice such as those described temporarily invoked there by the coercive above. imperatives of worship (puja). Secondly, these Overall, however, books such as this illus- images are not safely rooted in royal temples trate why kingship continues to hold such BOOK REVIEWS 197 fascination for Indianist anthropologists. Far study. Pottier questions the RPF’s functional from attesting to an obsessive antiquarianism presentations of Rwandan society, economics, or a wallowing in Raj nostalgia, anthropolog- and history and, in so doing, reveals the great ical interest in these issues arises precisely care the RPF has taken to engage with all because of what they reveal about the lives of major modern channels of information: news, their contemporary interlocutors. It is hard to media, academia, humanitarian aid, diplomacy, imagine any ethnographer of the villages, and development. temple towns, and former royal capitals of the Since April 1994, numerous politicians, subcontinent who will not find that their foreign diplomats, humanitarians, journalists, experience resonated with some aspect or aid workers, and academics have engaged in other of Peabody’s account. attempts to make sense of a situation seem- nthony ood ingly lacking any logic or morality.The search A G for instant understandings has led to the cre- University of Edinburgh ation of a model of Rwandan society and history that simplifies complex relations, obscures relevant contexts, and is rooted in Pottier,Johan. Re-imagining Rwanda: conflict, the political doctrine of the RPF. Pottier survival and disinformation in the late twenti- deftly unravels the exceptionally skilful way in eth century. xvii, 251 pp., maps, bibliogr. which the RPF manipulated international Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2002. £47.50 feelings of guilt and ineptitude into an accep- (cloth), £17.95 (paper) tance that the RPF should monopolize nar- ratives that represent events and analyses of In this courageous and important book, their causes. Pottier succeeds admirably in reaffirming the Pottier provides us with an insightful necessity of scholarly analysis, as enshrined in description of the build-up and aftermath of the academic monograph, to provide the basis Rwanda’s tragic genocide and ensuing war in for well-balanced and historically informed eastern DRC by re-examining the history of analyses of major events such as the Rwandan the region and presenting a variety of differ- Genocide and the subsequent wars in eastern ent points of view that dislodge and contex- Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), tualize the simplifying narratives that have formerly Zaire. Pottier rightly berates the been so unquestioningly accepted by the current trend popular in media reporting international community. Pottier reintegrates and analyses of conflict situations that tends more complex voices back into the debate. to prioritize the accounts of journalists and People whose experiences are more nuanced, aid workers over those of scholars who take whose stories are not simple and reducible longer to produce accounts than those to convenient catch-all concepts, such as demanding instant information are prepared ‘refugees’, génocidaires, ‘survivors’, ‘Tutsi’, and to wait. Pottier describes his task as that of ‘Hutu’, nor simplistic portrayals of history that recontextualizing the narratives which the serve the RPF’s hegemonic discourse. international community accepted as accurate Despite succeeding in his stated aims, the during 1994 to 1996. In so doing, he makes book’s structure is difficult to follow. For a disturbing analysis of contemporary knowl- instance, the introduction to the chapters and edge construction that serves as a warning to ordering of the text appears only at page 47. the media and international community. Rwanda continues to be exceptionally Pottier examines the many and diverse emotive to all who have witnessed events truth-claims that have emerged concerning there over the past decade and Pottier’s anger the crisis in Rwanda and eastern DRC since can occasionally be felt lurking beneath the 1994. This process leads him to offer some surface of his words. In particular, his resent- insights and perceptive reflections on how ment at the rejection of so much pre- contemporary knowledge is produced, and genocide scholarship, though justified, gives a manipulated. In particular, the skilful manipu- sermon-like tone to some passages. lation of information by the Rwandan Patri- Apart from these minor points, chapter 5, otic Front (RPF) to serve the interests of their ‘Masterclass in surreal diplomacy’, stood out new regime led to a merging of information for me as a superb anthropological analysis. and disinformation that was deliberately It is a brilliant example of how the detailed intended to create confusion. This confusion anthropological understandings of a culture as was then replaced by easy-to-grasp narratives lived by ordinary people can provide the best that were so seductively simple that newcom- basis for understanding and interpreting larger ers to Central Africa rarely questioned their and more complex events and (mis)represen- veracity or ideological underpinnings. tations at regional, national, and international By unravelling these narratives, Pottier levels. shows how depictions of reality in the Great This important book should be required Lakes Region have come to be led by polit- reading for anyone – from foreign diplomats ical visions and ideas, and not by empirical and politicians, journalists, aid and develop- 198 BOOK REVIEWS ment workers to academics – committed to This model is explored through analyses building a better Rwanda, and for anyone of localized southern European historical whose task requires an engagement with the processes: the making of a working-class Great Lakes Region of Central Africa. This movement in a village near Milan between book is relevant for students of anthropology, the World Wars; anarchism in Andalusia history, media, journalism, disaster manage- from the mid-nineteenth century to the ment, conflict studies, and development and Civil War; the strategy of the Communist emergency aid. Party in Tuscany during the Cold War; erome ewis ethno-nationalism in the Basque country and J L in the transformation of Yugoslavia into ‘the London School of Economics & Political Science former Yugoslavia’; and ‘hybrid’ mixtures of class and regional–ethnic elements in pop- ulisms in Occitania and Lombardy in the Pratt,Jeff. Class, nation and identity: the anthro- 1990s. pology of political movements. vii, 220 pp., These case studies are used to build an bibliogr. London, Sterling Va: Pluto Press, argument for the utility and necessity of 2003. £50.00 (cloth), £15.99 (paper) looking at both class and nation as essential elements of political movements in modern A joke common in socialist eastern Europe in Europe. Pratt is successful in this effort. The the mid-1980s had it that nobody believed in case studies are concise but thorough, and do Marxism any more except Western intellectu- illustrate the incomplete nature of analyses als. The sudden demise of European state that focus on either class or nation to the socialism and the rise of ethnic nationalism a exclusion of the other. Collectively, these cases few years later largely ended that Western illu- also illustrate the misleading nature of teleo- sion, affording prominence to works such as logical explanations of, for example, the inex- Anderson’s Imagined communities and Gellner’s orable rise of capitalism. Pratt is convincing Nations and nationalism, which sought to about the uneven character of political mobi- explain why ‘nation’ was, ultimately, so much lizations within states and regions. Perhaps more useful than ‘class’ as a symbol for polit- more importantly, he is also concerned with ical mobilization in the modern world. Yet showing the limitations of seeing similarities these works ignored class too completely. Jeff in political ideology and behaviour within a Pratt points out the glibness of Anderson’s region as thereby manifesting a common famous quip to the effect that while most regional culture in the usual anthropological states built tombs to unknown soldiers few sense. The workers of, for example, late had tombs of unknown Marxists, for there nineteenth-century Andalusia and Puglia were in fact many monuments glorifying the created very similar political movements on unknown workers who fought Communist very different cultural foundations.This is not revolutions. Pratt also notes that incommen- to say that the workers really did have no surable analytical paradigms have seemed to nation but labour, since they were also quite assume either that economic categories of consciously citizens of Spain or Italy. It is to persons are driven by material interests, or that Pratt’s credit that he uses his case studies to cultural subjects are consumed by passions. raise these issues so convincingly. His work is aimed at establishing a unified At the same time, he does not attempt to approach to the study of political movements provide generalizing explanations for political that can cover both class and nationalist behaviour.The conclusion of the work explic- politics. itly rejects such an approach, saying that Pratt outlines a model of several compo- ‘similar processes may generate very different nents. ‘Movement’ refers to linked forms of political movements’, while ‘comparable (not organization for political mobilization that identical) processes may be going on in very go beyond local patterns of work or recre- different movements’ (p. 200). The purpose of ation, and the repertoire of political action Pratt’s book is thus ‘to bring into one frame- (demonstrations, strikes, sabotage, guerilla work the analysis of issues as diverse as the warfare, insurrection) used by them. The labour process and identity narratives’ in order subject of such a political movement is an to help others ‘to think about the different actual or potential collectivity, and Pratt political configurations emerging and ask uses the term ‘discourse’ to refer to identity further questions about them’ (p. 201). This narratives that are used to try to position the is a rhetorical strategy reminiscent of that of collectivity in social processes and in time Franz Boas, who also used ethnography to and place. Pratt sees such discourses as being challenge the assumptions of generalizing the- positioned along an axis of time (‘a horizon- orists. When well done, this kind of work is tal axis running through past, present and indeed extremely useful. Jeff Pratt has done it future’) and a vertical axis of opposition to well. other groups. His identity discourse fuses obert ayden these axes to form ‘a history of enduring R M. H “opposition” ’ (p. 10). University of Pittsburgh BOOK REVIEWS 199
Religion by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus. (p. 16) tran cott A ,S . In gods we trust: the evolutionary What I find amusing is Atran’s studied refusal landscape of religion. xvi, 348 pp., illus., bib- to acknowledge the paternity of such ideas. liogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2002. £39.50 The book’s index lists Dostoevsky and Pope (cloth) Gregory VII but omits Durkheim altogether. Moreover, it remains quite unclear to me how The ‘most stable and recurrent cultural pat- religious transmission’s acknowledged depen- terns’, writes Atran in this readable and dency on coercive institutions can be squared provocative book,‘are generated by specialized with Dan Sperber’s and Pascal Boyer’s anti- core adaptations of the human mind/brain’ (p. thetical notion which Atran also accepts – 170). Within evolutionary psychology, this is namely, that ‘religious concepts need little in scarcely controversial – ‘stone age minds in a the way of overt cultural representation or space age world’ is the fundamental idea. instruction to be learned and transmitted’ (p. Where Atran differs from his colleagues is in 96). attempting to glue this model to a very dif- Atran is at his most entertaining in pouring ferent one, in which social strategies, com- acid on every rival theory he can bring mitments, and institutions loom large. To himself to acknowledge. Religion, he persua- explain religion, in Atran’s view, cognitive sively argues, did not originate primarily or approaches will not suffice. Religion for Atran exclusively to cope with death, maintain the is more than a mass of internal representations social order, recover lost childhood security, flitting between brain and brain. Instead, he act as a substitute for sexual gratification, defines it as ‘costly communal commitments explain the inexplicable, or transmit cultural to hard-to-fake beliefs in the supernatural’ knowledge. Somehow, the puzzle is deeper (p. 9). than such theories can reach. Religion I have never seen merit in the idea that involves belief in patent absurdities – such as biological, social, or historical facts can be psy- virgin birth, transubstantiation, or life after chologically explained. The currently fash- death. It can prompt you to starve, self- ionable tenets of evolutionary psychology mutilate, or adopt lifelong celibacy.To behave therefore seem to me a poor substitute for in such ways does not appear to be an evolu- interdisciplinary research into the origins and tionary stable strategy.‘Imagine’, writes Atran, diversity of human social and mental life. If ‘another animal that took injury for health, or you believe that gods and goblins – like con- big for small, or fast for slow, or dead for alive. tracts and promises – are institutional facts, It’s unlikely that such a species could survive’ then it is ‘human social institutions’ whose (p. 5). evolution must be explained.Atran touches on So what is the explanation? Atran dismisses institutions (p. 90), but only marginally and Richard Dawkins’s ‘parasitic meme’ idea – the externally – as if the ritual institutions of reli- notion of God as rampant computer virus. gion were no more than ‘conduits’ for the Neither is he kind to functionalist, behav- flow of other-worldly concepts whose origins iourist, group-selectionist, or game-theoretic lay elsewhere. It is the passionate commit- models. Unlike Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer ment of evolutionary psychology to repudiate – to whom he is otherwise close – he wres- Durkheim’s legacy in social science, and Atran tles with vigour against the constraints of does his best. But one has the sense of a narrow cognitivism. Communal commit- scholar striving to reconcile the irreconcil- ments? Costly beliefs? Almost every term in able, as if seeking to make amends with that his own definition of religion takes us beyond very tradition (Marxist, Durkheimian, social individualistic psychology – and back into the anthropological in the widest sense) which domain of politics, strategies, and power. Such evolutionary psychology set out to annihilate welcome developments only highlight Atran’s and replace. refusal to take the final step – to acknowledge ‘Religious ritual’, writes Atran in strikingly religious concepts as internally constituted by Durkheimian mode, the ritual processes through which commit- ments are made. survives cultural transmission by embed- There is no cheap way of signalling com- ding episodes of intense, life-defining per- mitment to an alliance.To generate trust, costly sonal experiences in public performances. signals are required. Among the many possi- These performances involve sequential, bilities, Atran includes a lifetime of celibacy, socially interactive movement and gesture building useless pyramids, slaying one’s live- (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and for- stock, chopping off a finger, and killing one’s mulaic utterances that rhythmically syn- firstborn. The more crazy and pointless the chronize affective states among group gesture, the more likely it is to convince. members in displays of co-operative Although it offers many insights, I found commitment. This is often accompanied this a patchy and ultimately disappointing 200 BOOK REVIEWS book. ‘Because there is no such entity as The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 religion’, we are told, ‘it makes no sense to offers a holistic analysis of Mewahang ritual ask how “it” evolved’ (p. 15). But if the texts by situating them within their social strategy of bonding through absurdities in context, and Part 2 is a detailed corpus of the human case became evolutionarily stable, ritual texts together with interlinear transla- is it not precisely the job of a Darwinian tions. The separation works well, allowing the to investigate how, when, and why? Bypassing texts in the documentary section to ‘speak for modern palaeoanthropology, behavioural themselves’ (p. 20). Similarly, the 200 pages ecology, archaeology, and interdisciplinary of meticulous analysis which characterize human origins research,Atran exempts himself the first section are free of dense linguistic from even trying. He is thought-provoking explication. and enlightening as he seeks to reconcile the It is the author’s contention that among the ‘cognitive’ and ‘commitment’ theories which Mewahang Rai, rituals are essentially speech in recent debates have competed for our acts and that these ‘speech acts do not differ support. But the whole endeavour reveals in a fundamental way from those in ordinary more about the limitations of his own psy- life’ (p. 2). The differences that do exist are chological paradigm than about the ‘evolu- marked by ritual language which is usually tionary landscape’ of religion. Darwin himself distinct from the vernacular. Distinguishing staunchly resisted all attempts to explain and defining the salient features of ritual human uniqueness by invoking special minds. speech and understanding their enduring Our brains are those of primates – designed power in Mewahang social life thus be- to distinguish fact from fiction. Primate cog- comes the focus of the study. The strength nition is Machiavellian, serving functions in of Gaenszle’s approach lies in his ability to terms of alliance-formation, politics, and blend textual and contextual approaches. power. As far as we know, apes cement their The nuanced analysis which results shows coalitions without needing cognitive absurdi- Mewahang ritual speech to be a resource for ties. If humans in this respect are so different, both the construction of meanings and for it remains a pressing anthropological task to social action. Having situated himself within explain why. the wider academic discourses on ritual and hris night performance, the author provides a lucid C K introductory overview to anthropological University of East London analyses of ritual and speech, indenting his discussion with subtitles such as ‘formality’, ‘poetics’, ‘performance’, and ‘competence and Gaenszle,Martin. Ancestral voices: oral ritual authority’. Gaenszle’s cogent presentation of texts and their social contexts among the the various debates will be of particular utility Mewahang Rai of East Nepal. xviii, 347 pp., to students and scholars interested in textual- maps, figs., illus., bibliogr. London, Berlin: ity and looking for discrete definitions of the LIT Verlag, 2002. €35.90 anthropology of performance. The author is careful to pay homage to Much of the material which informs the András Höfer and Nicholas Allen, both present study was collected in the village of accomplished anthropologists of Nepal known Baja in Sankhuwa Sabha District of East for their ‘ethno-philological’ approaches. Nepal, during the mid-1980s and early 1990s. While definitional debates are essentially In the course of his doctoral research on futile, I would feel more comfortable with the Mewahang Rai kinship and mythology along label ‘linguistic anthropology’ or ‘ethno- the western reaches of the Arun valley, six linguistics’, since the character and aims of days’ walk from the nearest road, the author such work echoes the very essence of what became fascinated with the ‘rich and living drives these underrepresented and often mis- ritual tradition’ (p. 21) of the muddum which understood subdisciplines. As befits a study of he encountered almost daily. The muddum, this nature, Gaenszle is transparent about his variously translated by Gaenszle as a ‘living, research methodology. When discussing the entirely oral “tribal” tradition which forms the dialogue between the ethnographer and his basis of Mewahang cultural identity’ (p. 3) and interlocutors, the author shows both sides to as a ‘tradition of speaking, consisting of dif- have their own perspectives and interests, ferent kinds of speech events’ (p. 4), is per- ‘sometimes approaching each other but never- formed in a ritual language. Struggling already theless retaining their differences’ (p. 22). with colloquial Mewahang, Gaenszle found Of the six analytical chapters, the first and this important ritual language to be ‘totally last are particularly engaging. Drawing on different, archaic and largely untranslatable’ (p. testimonies provided by local experts and 21). It is a credit to Gaenszle’s commitment village elders, Gaenszle presents a powerful to learning, analysing, and finally disseminat- indigenous exegesis of the muddum, which he ing these findings that this monograph should supplements with comparative data from be published some fifteen years after the com- neighbouring Kiranti groups.The recitation of mencement of his initial research. the Mewahang muddum, then, restores social BOOK REVIEWS 201 order and harmony through the enactment of and in many parts of northern India. Korom contact with an ancestral world. The link argues that they have coped with the non- between the present and the ancestral past is Shiite adherents by a marked separation realized through a ritual language which is the between public and private commemoration. ‘proper register of speech for dealing with The public commemoration includes, as I matters that concern the ancestors’ (p. 56). At said, parades and music that attract those out- the end of his analysis, Gaenszle returns to a siders. Parallel to this is a private commemo- central paradox of his work: that the desire of ration, which typically takes place in people’s the ethnographer to ‘scripturalize’ and archive houses and, Korom says, remains fairly strictly Mewahang oral traditions in no way guaran- Shiite. It expresses their distinctive interpreta- tees their continuity and survival. Easy answers tion of the commemoration, which is more to difficult questions are assiduously avoided, sombre and grief-laden than a naive partici- and Gaenszle neatly demonstrates that just as pant in or spectator of the public commem- there are ‘highly liturgical elements in oral tra- orations might expect. ditions’, so too are there ‘performer-centred Thus the sorts of ambiguities and tensions rituals in literate traditions’ (p. 199). In short that exist concerning the commemoration in then, Ancestral voices is an intricate work brim- Tr inidad are not distinctly Caribbean, much ming with detail and insight. It is undoubt- less Trinidadian. Rather, they are yet another edly an important addition to the growing example of a set of processes that have been corpus of Himalayan anthropology. going on for centuries. The Trinidad case is ark urin interesting in part precisely because it exem- M T plifies on-going processes. It is interesting as University of Cambridge well because the situation there is complicated by the tensions between Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean identity. From what Korom Korom,Frank J. Hosay Trinidad: Muharram per- says, the spectators of the Hosay processions formances in an Indo-Caribbean diaspora. viii, are predominately Afro-Caribbean; the partic- 305 pp., illus., bibliogr. Philadelphia: Univ. ipants are predominately Indo-Caribbean; Pennsylvania Press, 2003. £44.00 (cloth), among the participants, Shiites are a small £17.50 (paper) minority. The result is that the meaning of Hosay is Hosay Trinidad will interest those concerned profoundly complex. Much of the audience is with religion and those concerned with prone to see Hosay as another carnival, albeit Tr inidad. Its focus is the commemoration of one with an Indo-Caribbean flavour, and the the martyrdom of the grandson of the Tr inidadian government at various times has Prophet Muhammad, Husayn, central to Shiah sought to promote it internationally in just religious belief and practice. The book that way. For participants, which include describes the way that this commemoration Afro-Caribbeans, the meaning and identity of has, over the past thousand years, travelled Hosay is ambiguous. For some, it is primarily from Iran to India and thence to Trinidad, and an Indo-Caribbean affair; for some others, it the place of that commemoration in contem- is primarily an Indian tradition that links them porary Trinidadian ethnic politics. to their self-proclaimed ancestral home; for The history is long and complex. The yet others, it is a distinctly Muslim commem- aspect of Korom’s tale that is mostly likely to oration; for yet others again, it is a Shiite com- intrigue anthropologists is his presentation of memoration. And this ambiguity is facilitated the ways in which the commemoration has by the differentiation of the public proces- taken on a variety of different meanings and sional and private devotional dimensions of participants that extend beyond Shiite adher- the commemoration. As if the situation were ents and their interpretation of the events of not complex enough already, a few years ago Husayn’s death.As one might, perhaps, expect, Shiite missionaries, mostly based in Canada, Sunni Muslims also commemorate the mar- started to work in Trinidad, and one of their tyrdom; less expected is the participation of aims is to correct what they see as the errors Hindus that followed the spread of Shiah and improper accretions that have developed adherence to South Asia.With the movement around Hosay over the course of its history in of people from North India to Trinidad in the Tr inidad, and so to return the commemora- nineteenth century as indentured labourers, tion to what they see as its proper devotional both Shiites and the commemoration spread form. further afield, and in the twentieth century The history and contemporary situation the commemoration, the ‘Hosay’ of the book’s that Korom describes is intriguing and grati- title, attracted both adherents and spectators fyingly complex. Korom’s description is (Hosay involves parades with music) among framed in terms of a number of analytical Afro-Caribbeans who are neither Muslim nor frames and suppositions, notably that of the Hindu. distinction between the public and private Shiites are a minority among Muslims, and faces of the commemoration and the associ- a minority amongst a minority in Trinidad ated historical tendency of non-Shiites to 202 BOOK REVIEWS interpret the commemoration in their own a junior by a senior. There are no differences ways. Some of the other frames and supposi- in the relation of the ancestors to the seniors tions are more problematic. Especially, the and the juniors in either case. The differences presentation of the historical material presup- are that circumcision cannot be repeated, that poses a core of the commemoration across the big performances are more fun and emo- space and time, though given the limited his- tionally charged, and that what the authors torical material available the existence of this call ‘sensory pageantry’ is much more elabo- core is difficult to justify. rate in one case. These are the things which, Even though readers may have reservations according to the authors, should vary accord- about aspects of the work’s analytical appara- ing to whether we are dealing with one or tus, they are certain to be intrigued and stim- other of their type of ritual. Moreover – and ulated by the geographical and historical much worse for their argument – I cannot see scope of Hosay Trinidad, as they are to be how, in this case or any other which comes pleased with the careful description of the to mind, one could decide for significant complexities of the religious and ethnic iden- reasons whether any ritual is a case of either tity of the commemoration in contemporary or both of their types. Since I cannot define Tr inidad. their starting-point satisfactorily, the rest of ames arrier the book seems unconvincing, as I believe it J G. C will be to most anthropologists, not least Indiana and Oxford Brookes Universities because their definitions of ritual and religion raise old and familiar difficulties. Their aim is to demonstrate that their distinction predicts McCauley,Robert N. & E. Thomas in a most scientific manner certain other fea- Lawson. Bringing ritual to mind: psychologi- tures of religious rituals, yet (apart from those cal foundations of cultural forms. xiii, 236 pp., which are already contained within, or follow figs., illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. for obvious reasons from, their definitions of Press, 2002. £47.50 (cloth), £16.95 the two types) I either totally fail to see what (paper) those predictions are or can immediately think of counter-cases. This book is a reaffirmation and, to a certain Throughout most of the book the argu- extent, a modification of an argument devel- ment is presented as being in competition oped by the authors in an older work enti- with that presented by Whitehouse, who dis- tled Rethinking religion. Like the earlier book, tinguishes between modes of religiosity in it claims to be a ‘cognitive account’ of reli- terms of their manner of transmission. For gion. What this means here is that the argu- Whitehouse, one type relies on repetition, the ment focuses on the significance of types of other on the intense emotions that the per- agency, since much recent work in cognitive formance arouses, which, according to him, psychology has seen the folk psychology by can only occur when the ritual is performed which we interpret action in terms of beliefs very occasionally. The difficulty which the and desires as probably ‘the’ basic human authors have demonstrating the superiority of ability. their theory over his is one that I share.They, The emphasis on agency leads the authors too, have great problems in formalizing to distinguish principally between two kinds Whitehouse’s contrast sufficiently precisely for of religious rituals: ‘special agent rituals’ and it to be testable. In this case, the problem is ‘special patient rituals’. Special agent rituals what is meant by ‘frequent’ rituals, and for are rituals where God or the ancestors, here whom.With great ingenuity, they believe they called ‘culturally postulated supernatural have managed to give objective precision to agents’, are asked to do something to people, Whitehouse’s formulation, though – again – for example, initiate them or marry them, they do not convince me, but in any case their while special patient rituals are rituals, such as purpose is to show the greater predictive value Communion, where the patient is the focus of their types over his. Thus we are asked to of the action.This distinction, here simplified, judge between two ways of dividing rituals is key to the argument, and the authors are at and to see which predicts a number of other great pains to distinguish these rituals as two independent features. However, since I cannot obviously separate types, though they do this be clear in either case to which category of in a variety of ways. This is where my diffi- ritual any data I might consider belong, the culties begin. In nearly all the examples they process of adjudication can hardly begin. give, the diagnostic criteria they suggest yield In this review, I have used the language of highly contestable results, and this is even traditional science; thus I have talked of more so for cases that they do not consider. testing, predictions, and measurements. In this, In my book, From blessing to violence,I hope I have followed the authors’ style, yet they to have demonstrated at length that the go much further, making great use of very Merina are right when they say that their cir- complicated diagrams, as well as a tortuous cumcision ritual is simply an elaborate variant rhetoric often rendered so by an apparent of their most everyday ritual: the blessing of desire for precision – although this is precisely BOOK REVIEWS 203 what I have failed to find. The reason is that nineteenth-century British writers, is out of the basic data on which the ‘tests’ are to be place, worth a paper perhaps in the context of carried out are extraordinarily complex.What colonial perceptions of the Malay peninsula, the many different participants believe and and even then rather thin in not taking feel is only surmised by highly imprecise account of seminal works on that nineteenth- interpretations, and this does not lend itself century colonial vision such as Henk Maier’s to the establishment of suggestive scientific brilliant In the center of authority. The last part correlations. of the book, although dealing with topical This brings me to my final point.The back issues, does not really illuminate our under- cover of the book tells us that it explores the standing of the dynamics of the dialectic cognitive and psychological foundations of between modernization and the institutional- religious ritual systems; the front cover has a ization of Islam. Furthermore, it is surprising picture of a human brain; the contents are in this context that Peletz makes no mention peppered with references to authors in cogni- of Metzger’s useful account, Stratégie Islami- tive science; but, despite all this, I remain que en Malaisie, 1975-1995, which provides unclear as to what is explained by any cogni- ample detail regarding institutional aspects of tive finding – from psychology, for example – Islamization and the responses to it evoked in which has relevance for their theory con- the popular press. cerning the implications of their two types of The book should, however, be judged on rituals. its central part (pp. 63-238), where through aurice loch the cases which he documents and analyses M B Peletz makes some fine observations about London School of Economics & Political Science how proceedings in the religious courts need to be understood in terms of both the local Malay cultural context of hegemonic ideas of Peletz,Michael G. Islamic modern: religious the nature of men and women – men are courts and cultural politics in Malaysia. viii, disposed towards rational behaviour (akal), 339 pp., tables, bibliogr. Oxford, women are led by their passions (nafsu) – and Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002. the pressure for the introduction of European- £45.00 (cloth), £15.95 (paper) style procedural rules conducted with due legal ceremony. Briefly, Peletz’s argument There are three parts to this book, each of seems to be that the Islamic courts are gov- which reflects different anthropological erned by more equitable and rational proce- approaches to the themes touched on in the dures than Weber allowed for in his reference title. First, on the basis of archival research, to ‘kadi justice’, but that, none the less, the Peletz provides a brief overview of the litera- cultural ambience of the courts, dominated as ture on the Malay legal system from the fif- it is by an ethos which is both Muslim and teenth century onwards. Secondly, and this is Malay, tends to make things more difficult for the major part of the book, there is a presen- women than for men in issues relating to mar- tation and analysis of thirty-six court cases riage and divorce. I have doubts about the culled from two periods of fieldwork, in methodology by which Peletz has come to his 1978-80 and 1987-8. Finally, the reader is conclusions. He relies solely on the evidence given an account of recent debates about of the case history which appears in the Islam and about Asian values in Malaysia, and records, on what he has witnessed in the there are descriptions of some momentous court, and on the commentary and evaluation court cases, including the trials of the former of court officials, having consciously made the Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, choice not to follow up litigants in the after- which are the product of information gath- math of court decisions. ered during several short visits to Malaysia None the less, it is entirely reasonable for over the last few years. All three parts are to him to confine himself to the workings of be taken together as offering an appropriately the court when his intention is to demon- integrated overview of the nature of develop- strate what appear to be the determining ments in Muslim sensibility in the recent past. factors in decision-making, and his descrip- I am not convinced that in fact there is a tions are a model of clarity. The enchanting seamless whole here, and the connections account he gives of finding it difficult to con- between the parts seem to me to be some- centrate on what was being said because of what tenuous, but none the less Peletz’s argu- the noise being made by the kadi’s child ments deserve to be taken seriously, especially playing in the latter’s office where it had been those which derive from his personal obser- decided to hear cases, rather than in the vations and discussions with informants. As he formal court, wonderfully evokes the degree himself remarks, much anthropological work to which in Malay society the formal and the these days seems to be long on theory and informal combine to achieve a resolution rather short on ethnographic evidence. which is acceptable on all counts, equity in The historical overview of the first part, terms of Malay values, Islamic justice, and with its long summaries and discussion of modern governance. Although one may have, 204 BOOK REVIEWS as I do, one or two reservations about how various aspects of the Egyptian family- Peletz is actually reading the minds of the kadi planning programme. He interviewed doctors and the court officials, the evidence is vividly and those involved in family-planning clinics, presented. Consequently, this will be a valu- attended training sessions and seminars for able book for cross-cultural comparison for those being groomed to work in this field, but the contribution it makes both to legal also managed to do revealing interviews and anthropology and to understanding the artic- somewhat limited fieldwork in two separate ulation of Islamic values in contemporary communities, one rural and the other urban, settings. both with fairly poor populations who are, C. W.Watson unfortunately, representative of a good part of Egypt. This fieldwork allowed him to write University of Kent with authority on the pedagogic efforts of those promoting family planning, as well as to offer insight into the experiences of sexuality, the body, religion, and contraception of ordi- nary individuals. The fieldwork in Egypt is Social anthropology complemented by historical research that places what he observed in a longer-term per- spective of the Egyptian state, whether its rela- Ali,Kamran Asdar. Planning the family in tionship with foreign ideas and interventions Egypt: new bodies, new selves. xii, 233 pp., or its changing policies. bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2002. Ali speaks to the substantial literature on $55.00 (cloth), $22.95 (paper) the demographic transition by showing that the policies and practices of the family- Planning the family in Egypt is a critical anthro- planning industry have not been successful pological study of the institutions, practices, in persuading people to have smaller famil- and ideologies of a crucial project in Egypt: ies. Even the newer discourse about empow- the project to promote family planning. At erment of women and education is not once theoretically wide-ranging and ethno- convincing. However, what seems to be hap- graphically sensitive, the book is an important pening in Egypt is that family size is getting contribution to literature on development and smaller, but for reasons of poverty and because the demographic transition. It also contributes of the impossibility of life under the devastat- to the exciting debates in anthropology and ing conditions created by the policies of struc- post-colonial studies about modernity and its tural adjustment in the 1990s. institutions. Ali offers convincing arguments Anthropologists will be more interested in against most of the commonly held assump- the way this book offers a critique of the tions in the fields of population and planning, wider political economy and of the ideologi- showing that the liberal models of the indi- cal baggage of international development. vidual and the language of choice being Along the way, it offers fresh ethnographic promoted by the international donor organi- insight into little-known phenomena, such as zations, NGOs, and state organizations of the Egyptian men’s perspectives on contraception family planning industry are in equal measure and fertility, careful interpretations of the coercive and inappropriate: coercive in that alternative views of bodies and selves held by they seek to mould modern individuals in Egyptian women that challenge liberal femi- their image through pedagogy and participa- nist ideals, sharp analyses of the class-based tion in the institutions of family planning; forms of authority and knowledge being inappropriate in that (according to Ali’s inter- deployed in Egypt, and a considered reflection views and analysis of local ideas about the on the ways in which contemporary Islamism openness of bodies, the desire for fertility, may offer a challenge to the secular liberal and the interconnectedness of individuals in ideas of those promoting family planning as a families and larger communities) they do not solution to Egypt’s problems. Ali succeeds reflect or mesh with key concepts and goals wonderfully in using what he has learned of poor Egyptians, rural or urban. The heart about the cultural meanings attributed by of his study is the relationship between ordinary people to those parts of life that are attempts to impose new subjectivities and the targeted by the family planning enterprise – responses of people to the developmentalist the family, bodies, the individual – to chal- agenda. lenge the assumptions of the experts who The book is based on fieldwork of a some- determine policies and enforce practices. what unusual sort. In large measure because Although this book will be appreciated by of security restraints in the 1990s, Ali’s field- those who work on Egypt (if angering some), work did not involve long-term residence in it deserves a much wider audience. It speaks any particular community. But what was for- to the grand issues facing most developmen- feited in depth was more than made up for in talist states. It is an exemplary study of an range. Ali creatively pieced together a set of aspect of modern governmentality, to use field settings in which he could explore Foucault’s concept, that takes seriously the BOOK REVIEWS 205 work of power but is sensitive to cultural diversity in the community and briefly men- meanings. This book proves that eclectic crit- tions cultural factors, like gender roles, sorcery, ical theoretical inspirations (Michel Foucault, and witchcraft beliefs, that might have a Emily Martin, Partha Chatterjee, Sidney bearing on her study of motherhood and risk. Mintz) can bring out the deep significance of This is probably the weakest section of the what might seem a mundane subject. book, as the author does not sufficiently ila bu ughod connect certain historical and cultural infor- L A -L mation, such as utani or joking relationships, Columbia University or cattle-raiding among different ethnic groups in the region, to her principal theme of motherhood and risk. While containing Allen,Denise Roth. Managing motherhood, interesting material, this information does not managing risk: fertility and danger in West add much to her main story. Central Tanzania. xxii, 303 pp., map, tables, The third and final section, covering chap- illus., bibliogr. Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan ters 7 to 12, is the most compelling part Press, 2002. £42.50 (cloth) of the book. Weaving together first-hand observations with personal stories, and sys- Taking the Safe Motherhood Initiative of tematically examining the risks associated the World Health Organization (WHO) as with childbirth, Allen constructs a very pow- the point of departure, Denise Roth Allen’s erful and often-harrowing account of the ethnography provides an important contribu- experiences of childbearing women. Allen’s tion both to studies of women’s health and examination of ‘tradition’ convincingly illus- to critiques of development. Allen begins her trates how unimportant this category of book with the WHO’s archetypal ‘developing beliefs and practices is in understanding or world’ mother, one whose age, illiteracy, poor addressing the risks of motherhood. While health, ‘excessive fertility’, and rural existence ‘traditional’ beliefs are often seen as a threat put her on an early ‘road to death’. Pointing to maternal health, Allen shows that in out that this portrayal homogenizes women’s Bulangwa the taboos associated with preg- experiences across varied geographies, cul- nancy revolved not around possibly harmful tures, and socio-political environments, Allen food taboos (often assumed to contribute to aims for a more thorough and grounded poor nutritional status of the mother) but understanding of the circumstances that lead rather prohibitions on behaviour, such as the to maternal and infant mortality in develop- taboo against carrying rocks on one’s head, a ing countries. Her work among the Sukuma restriction both richly symbolic and practical. of Shinyanga provides a rich and vivid picture The case studies of specific women’s ex- of the circumstances women face from preg- periences in pregnancy and childbirth illus- nancy through childbirth. trate quite clearly the deficiencies in the Allen first examines how maternal health portrayal of Mrs X in the Safe Motherhood risk has been evaluated and what policies have literature. The author observes birth in both been formed in the colonial period of British hospital settings and in one local midwifery rule; by the international health community practice. One of the most powerful issues to and the Safe Motherhood Initiative; and, emerge in Allen’s study is the quality and finally, by the post-colonial Tanzanian state. expense of care available to women. For poor What is striking, although perhaps depress- women, the fees required for receiving bio- ingly not surprising in Allen’s account, is the medical care and a hospital birth are often out similarities that exist across these different of reach. If they are lucky enough to raise time-frames and geographic spaces. For this money, they are then subjected to often- example, Dr Mary Blacklock wrote an article overworked, and frequently hostile nurses in 1937 that heavily influenced colonial policy who slap them, tell them to lie down and not around the world. In it, she suggests certain to move so as ‘to give birth in the European steps to address maternal and child health: way’, ignore them, or chastize them for their ‘(1) improving native women’s access to the ‘illiterate’ ways. Those with higher socio- medical management of pregnancy and child- economic status are treated with greater birth, (2) eliminating cultural superstitions and respect, but are still subject to poor facilities traditional practices surrounding childbirth and overworked and frustrated staff. Poor and child rearing, and (3) increasing young treatment, combined with economic obsta- girls’ access to formal education’ (p. 20). Fifty cles, on the part both of the patient and of years later, the Safe Motherhood Initiative the hospital and its staff, are unfortunately emphasized these very same steps (albeit with unlikely to change in the near future in slightly different wording). this post-structural-adjustment era. Yet, given In Chapters 5 and 6, Allen provides an the convincing evidence in Allen’s book, these historical overview of Shinyanga Region, factors are clearly the most important ones for and then focuses on the pseudonymous site of policy-makers to address in their fight to curb Bulangwa, the location of her fieldwork. She maternal mortality. Allen’s work does much provides a sketch of the ethnic and cultural to challenge the assumptions embedded in 206 BOOK REVIEWS international development interventions and bring back their kills if females – faithful aimed at ‘Third World’ women. to an unusual degree – could offer paternity atherine nyder certainty in return. K S In the study of kinship, this model can be Queens College CUNY traced back to Malinowski’s doctrine of the individual family as the cellular unit of all human kinship. Malinowski’s explicit agenda Beckerman,Stephen & Paul Valentine was to discredit the ‘dangerous’ evolutionism (eds). Cultures of multiple fathers: the theory of Morgan and Engels, whose origins account and practice of partible paternity in Lowland had set out from collective parenthood. I have South America. 291 pp. map, tables, figs., always suspected (current fashion not- bibliogr. Gainesville: Univ. Press of withstanding) that Morgan’s scholarship and Florida, 2002. $59.95 (cloth) evolutionary insights were a good deal less ideological, more honest, and more accurate This volume is a rich compendium of pre- than Malinowski’s. But redressing the balance viously unpublished field reports from across in this area has taken longer than any of us Lowland South America. It consists of an could have imagined. excellent introduction, followed by twelve Napoleon Chagnon backed the Standard chapters in which a range of regional special- Evolutionary Model with his celebrated ists debate and dispute the implications account of male violence and jealousy among of their own and one another’s challenging the Yanomami. Championing the same model, and often-unexpected findings. Jargon free, Steven Pinker observes that ‘in no society do tightly edited, and with a consistent focus, the men readily share a wife’. This book offers a book should interest not only Americanists fuller picture by reminding us of a constella- but anyone concerned with kinship, gender, tion of alternative observations – such as that origins scenarios, sociobiology, or the history evolutionary fitness is related to infant sur- and evolution of the family. If you think you vivorship, and that it is in no woman’s inter- already know about such things – think again. est for her viable child by a previous partner Beckerman and Valentine offer the first to be subjected to the infanticidal attentions systematic account of a belief found of her current mate. Balancing these con- deeply entrenched in a substantial number siderations, women can pursue strategies for of Lowland South American societies. If a penalizing men who are excessively jealous woman has sexual relations with several men while instead encouraging tolerance and before and during her pregnancy, then all are co-operation. Given the enormously heavy in varying degrees considered biological costs of infanticide, why would it be in any fathers of her child. Becoming pregnant is not woman’s interests automatically to divulge an all-or-nothing event – it is a matter of information about paternity? Under condi- degree. Since a baby is formed initially from tions in which a partner might one day die sperm, all those who have sex with the or disappear women will enhance their repro- mother play a role in making and strengthen- ductive success if they strive to confuse pater- ing that baby. In the case of at least one nity, compelling mates to act on probabilities, Venezuelan community, the indigenous belief not certainties. turns out to be statistically well founded. A In an especially engrossing chapter, Cather- long-term investigation into the reproductive ine Alès (pp. 62-85) shows partible paternity histories of 114 Bar women (involved in a to be a significant factor among the total of 916 pregnancies) shows that infants Yanomami, where women engage systemati- with two fathers are significantly more likely cally in multiple sexual partnerships – calling to survive to age 15 than those with just one into question both the geneaologies and (pp. 27-41). socio-biological interpretations of Chagnon. The editors adopt a sophisticated modern Other chapters show that where residence is Darwinian framework, showing that they are uxorilocal and women have corresponding well aware of the wider evolutionary signifi- freedom to choose, they strive to limit male cance of their results. Most modern scenarios control over their reproductivity, confusing of human evolution invoke paternity certainty paternity and fostering varying degrees of as a key factor in the transition from African sexual tolerance. The groups discussed in this hominids to modern Homo sapiens. What is volume illustrate widely divergent patterns, sometimes termed the Standard Model of but the chapters are sequenced and organized Human Evolution links the emergence of a in such a way as to clarify the dynamics of sexual division of labour with food-sharing, variability across this vast region. large brains, lengthy juvenile dependency, and Partible paternity is most beneficial to chil- continuous sexual receptivity. Evolving human dren in those societies – such as the Canela females (so the argument runs) were burdened (pp. 86-104) – where sibling unity is valued with increasingly dependent children, making at the expense of marital bonds. Beckerman it difficult for them to find sufficient food on and Valentine interpret cross-cultural variabil- their own. But males would only go hunting ity in this respect as reflecting ‘a competition BOOK REVIEWS 207 between men and women over whose repro- dence in the racialized social hierarchies ductive interests will dominate social life’.The of Tanzania, where the power to control authors conclude that in small egalitarian soci- the labour of others derives not so much eties such as those under study, from gender or ethnicity as from access to the resources which enables some to command women’s reproductive interests are best the labour of others. served if mate choice is a non-binding, According to Bujra, domestic service in female decision; if there is a network of Tanzania has become not merely an artefact multiple females to aid or substitute for but a symbol of class. Having servants indi- a woman in her mothering responsibili- cates middle-class and elite status. It is also ties; if male support for a woman and her associated with expatriates and members of children comes from multiple men; and Asian ethnic groups who have managed to if a woman is shielded from the effects consolidate distinctly middle-class lifestyles, of male sexual jealousy (p. 11). despite the constraints of socialism. But domestic service is not only confined to This, then, is the authors’ tentative answer to wealthy households. Bujra shows how idioms the Standard Model of Human Evolution. of service are bound up with the short-term Conducting his research in a different part of migration of young people, mostly women, the continent, Lewis Henry Morgan founded between rural and urban families and across the study of kinship on the basis of intrigu- less-wealthy and poorer households. For these ingly similar conclusions. women and girls, service, submission, and hris night kinship inform the performance of domestic C K duties for both one’s own and relatives’ house- University of East London holds. Domestic service becomes an elabora- tion of household relations for the powerless occupying subordinate positions. Such rela- Bujra,Janet. Serving class: masculinity and the tionships are often transient. Young girls feminisation of domestic service in Tanzania. soon tire of servitude and are replaced by 222 pp., illus., bibliogr. Edinburgh: Univ. others keen to take their place in urban family Press, 2000. £14.95 (paper) homes. Serving class is a potentially intriguing book Domestic service in the houses of the rich about a phenomenon that is widespread across and middle classes in Tanzania is largely the many countries in Africa, and elsewhere. It preserve of men, yet domestic labour is almost provides an insight into the development and wholly the responsibility of women and scale of domestic service in a poor country, children. Janet Bujra considers the apparent from the early days of colonial rule to its paradox of this position in a book outlining unanticipated expansion during the socialist the history of domestic service in the country regime at a time when employment of others and the reasons why men continued to dom- was discouraged by the government. Bujra inate the sector until well into the 1980s. An shows how the formal role of the male account based on archival research and in domestic servant has been superseded by depth interviews demonstrates the strong link social changes which have empowered between domestic service as a kind of wage women to participate in wage labour at the labour and a twentieth-century masculine same time as demand for male house staff, identity bound up with labour migration and with the exception of gardeners and guards, earning a wage. Despite performing what are has declined. culturally considered to be demeaning female Where the book is less convincing is in its tasks, which most men would not publicly analytical framework, which insists on viewing perform in their own homes, Bujra argues that domestic service in Tanzania only in relation the male identity of the labourer is not com- to class. This perspective means that the crit- promised by domestic service, which is per- ical links between service, kinship, and domes- ceived by male servants in terms of work for tic hierarchies are underplayed, especially in pay rather than women’s work. relation to young women servants who often In recent years, women have begun to have some link with employing families. Sim- encroach on men’s monopoly in the service ilarly, the class perspective seems to legitimate sector, although they remain restricted to the omission of cultural factors from the those tasks conventionally associated with accounts of both servants and employers.This women. By contrast, men can transcend the is a pity. It is obvious from the cases presented gender division of labour in a service setting that different employers perceive their rela- where servant status seems to override the tionships with servants in very different ways, usual expectations about proper gendered depending on who the servant is and on the behaviour. Bujra argues that the social rela- employers’ own status and ethnicity. Tellingly, tions of domestic service can transcend gender Bujra disaggregates interviews and case studies in certain ways because domestic service is with servants and employers by ethnicity and primarily a class relation, and class takes prece- race. Disappointingly, there is little analysis of 208 BOOK REVIEWS the differences which emerge, differences in Thankfully, Farquhar does not argue that such areas as, for example, attitudes to service, Chinese people have finally had their desires the extent to which servants are regarded as ‘liberated’ with the end of socialist repression. those towards whom one has obligations, and She presents a far more nuanced argument the extent to which servants can be consid- about the desires and dilemmas – and the ered as members of one’s own household. beliefs about human nature – that have been Such an analysis would have shed considerable produced in the context of political, eco- light on contemporary political and social nomic, and social change. In her discussion of relations in the country, and on the perspec- the recovery of ars erotica, for example, Far- tives of the ordinary people who earn their quhar argues that the ancient texts present a living by subordinating their wills and desires philosophical canon about how the inherent to those who can afford to pay them. nature of things (xing) is revealed in the course aia reen of their characteristic activity, not in static M G visible structures or free-standing individual University of Manchester essences. But the contemporary reading reduces this rich canon to the modern cate- gory of sex (the term xing also means sex). Farquhar.Judith. Appetites: food and sex in Further, the ancient prescriptions for pre- post-socialist China. xii, 341 pp., illus., bib- serving male fluids have been linked to a liogr. London, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, contemporary anxiety about male impotence, 2002. £14.50 (paper) which in its turn is a representational dis- course infused with a national allegory about Farquhar’s elegant and evocative book about the failures of the past and the potential banal- embodied pleasures in post-socialist China ities of the future. provides delightful provocation for anthro- Farquhar also provokes anthropologists to pologists. Farquhar ranges over domains con- consider widening the boundaries of what we ventionally kept apart: food, sex, health, and should accept as legitimate ethnography. She medicine.These practices, what Farquhar terms presents an anthropological analysis of em- a ‘modern Chinese imaginary of bodily life’ bodiment in what she terms an ‘itinerant (p. 246), have become the object of the most ethnography’, through written and visual rep- intensive public discourse in China since the resentations of embodiment, as well as the use end of socialism. Farquhar has focused precisely of vignettes from her own fieldwork. Farquhar on what is distinctive about social life in China balances detailed interpretation with cultural today: the encouragement to trace the minute artefacts ranging from medical texts, novels, senses and pleasures of the body. sexology surveys, popular magazines, and The first half of the book, devoted to food, films. Her goal is to overcome what she sees includes chapters on medicinal meals, the as the dualistic tendencies in much anthropo- relationship between politics and feasting, and logical writing, that conceives of bodies and problems of excess and deficiency.The second texts as two separate levels of being. Instead, half addresses sexual desire in chapters on a Farquhar treats bodies as formations of every- national sex survey, sex education, and con- day life and everyday life as suffused with temporary recoveries of the ancient texts on discourses. ars erotica. Throughout, Farquhar convincingly Had Farquhar remained within one of the argues that these appetites are intimately con- sub-disciplines – medical anthropology, sexu- nected in the manner in which they articu- ality, or the anthropology of food – or had she late desires for a healthful body as informed used only ethnographic data from her field- by traditional Chinese medicine with a rejec- work, she would not have produced such an tion of Maoist politics through a passionate original text. embrace of pleasure. Farquhar refuses to con- isa ofel ceive of the body only in the language of L R symbolism or in the universal terms of phe- University of California, Santa Cruz nomenology. Rather, she beautifully delineates the historical and political production of embodiment. Farquhar argues that embodi- Fisher,William F. Fluid boundaries: forming and ment in post-socialist China is allegorical as transforming identity in Nepal. xviii, 295 well as concrete, coalescing beliefs about pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. New health rooted in Chinese medicinal theories York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002. £36.50 of flavours and fluids, post-Mao empiricist (cloth), £13.50 (paper) knowledge practices, cultural nationalism, modernity, the rise of a Chinese middle class, With a total population of under 13,000 the growth of a consumer economy, novel (according to the 2001 population census), the forms of gender differentiation, and cos- Thakali community of central western Nepal mopolitan imaginations. The writing, so are the subject of a remarkable volume of evocative, brings alive the everyday experi- published anthropology. By 1985, the Thakali ences of the appetites. were already the most-studied group in Nepal BOOK REVIEWS 209 in relation to their number: the subject of rigid than those of the people they study’ (p. over fifty published works by fifteen trained 195). In this vein, it is particularly interesting anthropologists. Since then, the number has to compare the present work with Michael only increased. Vinding’s The Thakali: a Himalayan ethnography For anthropologists interested in Himalayan (1998). It was Vinding’s stated purpose to populations, the Thakali make a natural ‘present a comprehensive ethnography on the choice. Research permission for the lower Thakali’, a claim which Fisher would never reaches of Mustang is easy to obtain and field- dare to make. The two books should be read work conditions are pleasant. According to an side by side, not only by the handful of schol- article jointly written by Gurung and Messer- ars specializing in Himalayan ethnography, schmidt (which Fisher never cites, but with but also by students interested in comparing which he implicitly disagrees), the ‘existence profoundly different ethnographic approaches of a cohesive sense of Thakali ethnic identity’ to the same ethnic community. has been the dominant factor in explaining Fisher has a particularly strong writing- the great attention given to the Thakali by style, combining personal anecdote (often as anthropologists (Contributions to the anthropol- the initial paragraph of a chapter) with vivid ogy of Nepal (ed.) C. von Fürer-Haimendorf, ethnography and the prudent application of 1974, p. 212). Alongside the traditional theory.The result is readable and illuminating, Thakali dominance in the trans-Himalayan careful but never plodding. The only quibbles salt trade and their present control of the would concern his overreliance on multiple trekking economy along the Kali Gandaki adjectives when just one would do and the River, their well-documented growing relegation of many interesting details to the alliance with Hinduism and concomitant copious thirty-five pages of endnotes (perhaps turning-away from Buddhism are issues which at the behest of the publisher). A few more have generated considerable interest among photos of Thakalis in urban locations or the scholarly community and amongst the involved in non-traditional activities might Thakali themselves. Fisher’s excellent and also have been welcome. long-awaited Fluid boundaries appears at the In short, Fluid boundaries offers a sophisti- crest of this wave. cated and intellectual evaluation of Thakali Fisher’s involvement with the Thakali culture and identity formation. The book is community dates back to 1983, when he an essential addition to the bookshelf of any conducted dissertation research in a region scholar of the Himalayan region, and of con- southwest of the traditional Thakali homeland. siderable utility to anthropologists interested In the present book, he refines many of the in social change, ethnohistory, and modern findings presented in his 1987 thesis and, in identity politics. so doing, takes his earlier arguments to a ark urin deeper level. Fisher demonstrates the paradox M T inherent in the desire for clear identity for- University of Cambridge mation: before the Thakali are able to return to a tradition, they are first obliged to create it. These processes of (re-)creation establish Gardner,Katy. Age, narrative and migration: the conventions and customs which have never life course and life histories of Bengali elders previously existed. So much so, in fact, that to in London. vii, 254 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, return to tradition, to become Thakali again, New York: Berg Publishers, 2002. £42.99 is to become Thakali for the very first time. (cloth) As Fisher puts it, in his own words: ‘Thakali culture is not composed of rigid institutional This book describes processes of migration and cognitive pieces that form stable and static and ageing from the viewpoint of elderly structures; it is instead flexible, permeable, and Bengalis living in Tower Hamlets, East malleable, with fluid boundaries’ (p. 12). London. It also offers a reflection upon the Taking issue with earlier anthropological ethnographic use of narrative and the kinds of studies of Nepal which have tended to isolate tale it can be made to tell; this concern, in ethnic groups, making them discrete and ahis- turn, reflects the circumstances and methods torical ‘timeless entities’ (p. 14), Fisher provides of the research. From 1996 to 1997, eleven a wealth of data to support his view of elderly men and sixteen elderly women, iden- Thakali culture as an ongoing process which tified through a community centre providing is continually renewed. Using the metaphor of day-care for elderly Bengalis, agreed to tell boundaries – national, geographical, social, their life stories to Gardner or her male cultural, and historical – the anthropologist research assistant (who carried out most of teases out conflicting narratives and re- the interviews with men). Gardner commuted examines them in a theoretical light. Previous from Brighton to conduct the research, after depictions are found to be wanting, leading making appointments with her informants. Fisher to make a provocative, if well- She notes that the relative formality of the substantiated, assertion: ‘scholars need to avoid research process had the ethical advantage making their conceptual boundaries more that, in comparison with more ‘conventional’ 210 BOOK REVIEWS participant observation (including her own elders’ negotiations with statutory and volun- earlier research in rural Sylhet, where she was tary agencies. While recognizing that much ‘by the end no longer sure of the boundaries of her discussion would apply to all elderly between participation and observation’), her people, she also explores the ways in which informants were probably always aware that cultural difference is important, in, for research was being conducted. example, aspects of belief and practice sur- One central theme in this book is the rounding death. With its references to a wide gendered shaping of narrative. Despite much range of anthropological themes and their common experience, men and women express expression and exploration through narrative, different concerns and project different this book will be of particular interest to stu- self-images. In their accounts of their early dents of medical anthropology. It will also be migration history, women tell of suffering of immense value to those involved in deliv- and separation from loved ones, through ering health and social services to ethnically stories that express acceptance of fate or diverse populations, and therefore deserves a hidden protest, and which tend to portray the wide readership. speakers as carers, downplaying their eco- lison haw nomic contributions to migration. Men, by A S contrast, talk of adventure, movement, and Brunel University work, themes central to ‘the construction of masculinity’, while presenting themselves as respectable elders. Much of the early migra- Harper,Janice. Endangered species: health, tion history is familiar from other sources, but illness and death among Madagascar’s people is here recast through these gendered lenses. of the forest. xvi, 273 pp., illus., bibliogr. The ethnographic and analytic value of Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, narrative is well established in the study of 2002 illness. Three chapters in Gardner’s book explore narrative representations of the body This important book is concerned with the in ageing, illness, and death. Gardner seeks to impact of Western environmentalism on a link contradictory images of the ‘homeland’ poor Malagasy community of rice farmers. (desh) and ‘abroad’ (bidesh) to aspects of the The Ranomafana National Park (RNP) in social and material circumstances of the lives southeastern Madagascar, established in 1990, of elderly Bengalis – to the fact that, for is one of thirty-six ‘protected areas’ on the example, significant changes to ‘traditional’ island. The RNP is financed and monitored patterns of household organization have by USAID, the World Bank, and the World occurred, whereby family members who Wildlife Fund.The project staff, other than at might otherwise be living together are dis- the lowest level, are either American or from persed across council flats. All her informants Madagascar’s urban elite. were dependent upon the state for their The project’s objective is the preservation incomes (by means of pensions, income of the region’s supposedly pristine ecosystem, support, and disability and sickness allowances) now endangered by deforestation. The local and lived in council accommodation. Because residents who practise swidden rice cultivation of their inadequate English, the women faced have been identified as the main culprits.They particular difficulties in finding their way are not allowed to enter the park, which has around the bureaucratic obstacles to accessing been their ancestral land for generations, services, which, Gardner writes, ‘seemed though they continue to do so illicitly.While overwhelming even to me, a native English- for the project management trees are more speaker’. Gardner reveals the contradictions important than land, to the forest residents and potential humiliations surrounding land means food, and thus swidden cultivation dependency in old age. For Bengali elders, is not a choice but a necessity. social dependency is, in ‘traditional’ ideal Harper argues throughout the book – terms, positive – where one is cared for by the which is based on fieldwork in a village on family; by contrast, professional English carers the edge of the park – that from its inception seek to preserve the social and bodily inde- the project has been based on an utterly mis- pendence of the elderly for as long as they guided concept of local ethnic divisions. can.Yet, ironically, state support for illness and Having established the misleading dichotomy disability is forthcoming only after depen- between Tanala and Betsileo, and having iden- dence and incapacity have been demonstrated. tified swidden cultivation as ‘fixed in Tanala Britain is seen as a place where bodily tradition’, the project fails to recognize that needs are met, in contrast to Bangladesh with local agricultural practices are not bound to its physical privations, yet the illness narratives ethnic identity, but result from the history of contain implicit critiques of care received that people’s varied responses to pre-colonial and probably reflect the Bengali elders’ general colonial outside rule. Differences in local disempowerment in their dealings with the farming techniques, Harper argues, have British National Health Service. Gardner doc- nothing to do with being Tanala or Betsileo uments the frustrations and tacit resistance of – in fact, local people recognize themselves as BOOK REVIEWS 211 both – but have much to do with internal here, exist all over Madagascar. My hope is social stratification based on ancestry and dif- that people working in development will read ferences in economic strength. this book and be moved to act against the lack The social divisions among the population of concern for the well-being of the local are significantly linked to issues of illness and population as exhibited by the management health, another central theme in Harper’s dis- of the RNP project. cussion. Indeed, much of the book is a va eller moving account of the extreme poverty of the E K people concerned, illustrated by stories of Zurich University malnutrition, illness, and deaths (which occur extremely frequently in the village), and of the ways in which people try to cope. But it is Mayer,Enrique. The articulated peasant: house- also the story of just how little the project hold economies in the Andes. xvii, 390 pp., management seems to care. The only health map, figs., tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, care measure – among those promised in Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, 2001. exchange for the abolition of swidden agri- £22.99 (paper) culture – which the project offers to the vil- lagers is birth control aimed at reducing the Enrique Mayer is a veteran scholar of the forest-cutting Tanala population. Otherwise, Andean region who has spent over thirty the project staff turn a deaf ear to the many years researching in Peru. He was a graduate severe health problems of the village residents. student of John V.Murra at Cornell in the late The announcement to one staff member of 1960s and has made a substantial contribution yet another death is met with indifference, and to anthropological studies of the Andean Harper rightly wonders what the reaction region, particularly in the fields of economic would have been had the dead been lemurs anthropology and human ecology. He has also rather than people (p. 160, n. 3). witnessed, and been part of, various theoreti- Endangered species makes a number of cal shifts in the discipline over the years. This important points. It exemplifies the danger of new volume brings together a selection of his imposing on people a view of the environ- essays for the first time. Some of these date ment as pristine nature, separate from the from the 1970s, others are reprints, some are humans who inhabit it and therefore needing translations from Spanish originals, and others to be rescued from human activity. It also are new material.While established scholars of demonstrates the continuities between pre- the region will be familiar with much of the colonial, colonial, and contemporary forest content of the earlier essays, for example from policies, all of them marked by the simulta- the volume in Spanish edited with G. Alberti neous protection of the forest from swidden (Reciprocidad e intercambio en los Andes peruanos, agriculture and its exploitation by commercial 1974), it is good to see these works printed companies. together in one volume and made accessible However, anthropologically, the account at to an English-speaking audience. times seems somewhat thin. For example, The essays take as their common theme the Harper does not seem to be aware of the household as an economic unit in Andean Malagasy concept of the person and is thus at society and the ways in which the Andean a loss to understand why villagers invest more household articulates with wider entities. resources in saving an adult than a child (chap. The introductory essay outlines different 8). Nor are the general points raised always approaches to the household in economic supported by sufficient ethnography, especially anthropology, the pros and cons of each, and regarding the impact of the RNP on the lives the ways in which they have been used by the of local people. author. Following on from this, the next two Harper promises to demonstrate that local pieces are ethnohistorical and conduct a power structures have been reinforced as a dialogue with Murra’s work: the first deals result of recent conservation policy and the with redistribution and trade in Inca society, establishment of the RNP, but, regrettably, and takes up the thorny question of whether these issues are not fully explored and are left markets were present in the Inca economy, unclear in the reader’s mind. Perhaps these and the second is a lively study based on a shortcomings should not be attributed solely sixteenth-century census (visita) of the com- to the author. In a disturbing account of munity of Tangor, where Mayer has con- events (introduction, epilogue), Harper ducted ethnographic research, that attempts to describes how the project management hin- get inside the head of an indigenous tribute- dered her research and tried to intimidate her payer of the time. The next four essays are so that no critical comments concerning the ethnographic and look at different aspects of RNP would be included in any future pub- economic life in the Andes – reciprocal lication. It is much to her credit that she exchanges (principally of labour); barter; the nevertheless did so. role of coca as a commodity and luxury good; This is an important book because national and profit and loss in Andean agriculture.Two parks, employing exactly the politics described of the remaining essays address the themes of 212 BOOK REVIEWS land use and human ecology: the first takes up Meisch,Lynn A. Andean entrepreneurs: Otavalo Murra’s concept of verticality and looks at merchants and musicians in the global arena. production zones in Andean communities, and xiv, 314 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. the second explores contemporary land use in Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2002. $50.00 the community of Laraos and, through a (cloth), $19.95 (paper) mixture of archival work and oral testimony, outlines the changes that have taken place in Based on close to three decades of research, land tenure over the past century. The final Meisch’s remarkable Andean entrepreneurs por- essay in the volume addresses the contempo- trays a people and a place as they are affected rary issues of neo-liberalism, the identification by globalization. The Otavalos, a Quichua- of Andean households as ‘the poor’ and poli- speaking, indigenous Andean ethnic group, cies aimed at ‘poverty alleviation’. come to life as they design fabrics for electric Established scholars will appreciate having Jacquard looms, compose songs blending access to Mayer’s essays within the space of reggae beats and Andean melodies, fight for one volume, but those new to Andean studies civil rights by means of a beauty pageant, and will find the work invaluable. In part, this is rent meeting-halls in Amsterdam and Chicago because of the author’s exceptionally clear so that hundreds of expatriates can come style of writing, but it also stems from his together on 24 June to dance in the fiesta of concern to contextualize his work. In putting Inti Raymi. The author’s argument is decep- this collection together, Mayer has done much tively simple. First, she outlines the organizing more than simply reproduce his earlier essays. themes of her analysis: entrepreneurship, ma- He provides each with introductory notes that terial culture (especially textiles), reflexive outline the background of academic debates ethnicity, transnationalism, and the narrowing against which they were written and post- base for asserting cultural differences.Then she scripts that revise his thinking in the light of writes,‘My basic argument is that Otavalos are current developments and explain how coping with globalization by relying on a debates have moved on since the time of combination of traditional values and practices writing. During the course of the volume, for and modern technology to preserve as well as instance, Mayer explains the background to to market their ethnic identity, including Murra’s thinking and to the contributions of others’ (mis)perceptions of them as Incas or Olivia Harris and Tristan Platt to debates on noble savages’ (p. 10). gender, complementarity, and reciprocity. The book’s strength lies precisely in con- Students would be well advised to read his textualizing what it means for this group ‘to comments in conjunction with the often- market’ their identity. Far more than a sim- cited essays to which he refers. Among the plistic assertion of an Inca heritage and close- more interesting postscripts are Mayer’s com- to-nature native wisdom (although certain ments on the ideological uses to which the Otavalos have promoted this stereotype), work of Murra and his followers had been put marketing identity interweaves many relation- by those wishing to examine neo-colonialism ships and narratives. It involves historical self- and Western notions of development. Some, consciousness, political rebirth, inter-ethnic he comments critically, have elevated his work conflict, transnational romance and sex, from the status of scholarly theory to that of tourism, a Weberian ethic of rational hard unquestionable ideology. work, and a faith in capitalist progress. Students seeking reflexive accounts of Meisch tells the story through a wide range Andean social life may be disappointed by this of materials. Moving well beyond her own volume. From none of the essays do we get a interviews and experiences, she samples care- detailed account of Mayer’s relations with the fully and broadly from travel writing, tourism communities he studied, nor do we become promotions, album notes from over 100 particularly well acquainted with individual recordings dating back to the 1960s, as well as social actors – in fact we get to know more colonial and early republican era primary of the imagined motivations of the sixteenth- documents. The book begins with historical century tribute-payer, Agostín Luna Capcha, background on ‘How the Otavalos became than we do of any contemporary inhabitant Otavalos’. Tackling the distinctiveness of of the Peruvian Andes. However, for those Otavalos among Quichua-speakers, Meisch wanting to understand the debates that have covers concrete historical experiences, such as underpinned Andean anthropology over the the horrors of obrajes (colonial textile sweat- past three decades, this volume is to be highly shops). But she also explores the history of the recommended. representation of Otavalos. Through the pro- Maggie Bolton paganda of Ecuadorian exhibits in the world fairs, they became ‘model Indians’ in the late University of Manchester nineteenth century, ‘intelligent, hard-working and sober’ (p. 29). Born of invidious ethnic distinctions and nationalist aspirations, the dis- course elevating Otavalos over other indige- nous people was to be embraced by both BOOK REVIEWS 213 locals and outsiders to project an Otavalo actually being distributed within such a dis- identity in ever-wider arenas. persed and diverse ethnic group. Meisch’s richest material lies in the three Andean entrepreneurs is a rare work in central chapters concerning the way in which anthropology these days. While it is the Otavaleños transform their textiles and their product of thirty years’ work, the writing has music to create their brand of indigenous none of the fustiness of a retrospective com- Andean prosperity. Her years of work in the munity study. Rather, Meisch tackles the region, not only as a scholar but also as a crucial concerns of post-colonial, transnational development-worker, teacher of textile tech- ethnography. This nuanced, warmly told niques, and textile-collector for museum exhi- account will be of great value to those inter- bitions garner a rich return. She traces the ested in globalization and tourism, Latin mechanization of weaving, the Peace Corps’ America and indigenous peoples, and craft role in launching sweater-making (now a and musical art. multi-million-dollar branch of the trade), udi olloredo ansfeld and the continual innovation of new products R C -M based on Otavalos’ ever-more worldly University of Iowa experience. Moving beyond crafts and music, she tracks the ways in which healing practices, residence Petryna,Adriana. Life exposed: biological patterns, and even the banal reality of potato- citizens after Chernobyl. xvii, 264 pp., figs., vendors in the weekly market all partake in tables, bibliogr. Oxford, Princeton: the changes prompted by tourism. She Princeton Univ. Press, 2002. £37.95 describes, for instance, how Spanish humoral (cloth), £13.95 (paper) principles inform traditional Andean medi- cine, and offers a wonderful, brief description On 26 April 1986, Unit Four of the of an older Otavalo woman’s encounter with Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded during a curandero (healer), who employed an X-ray tests. The radioactive plume rose an estimated image, an egg, tobacco, and cologne in his 8 kilometres, and the graphite core burned for treatment (p. 93). She extends the discussion days. Five thousand tons of quenching ma- to the links between Andean and Amazonian terials were dropped from helicopters but healers and the long journeys that urban increased the temperature of the nuclear core patients have made to well-reputed, provincial and spread the radioactive cloud over an even practitioners. Thus, when we finally read vaster area. Eighteen days later, Gorbachev about the ways in which curanderos ‘play up’ acknowledged the accident on Soviet televi- to New Age tourists who come to Otavalo sion. Tens of thousands of people had by seeking exotic ‘dream changers’ (p. 95), we can then been exposed to radioactive iodine-131, see how this new marketing both differs from resulting in a massive incidence of thyroid and yet extends long-standing habits of cul- cancers, many of which might have been tural interchange. avoided had iodine pills been distributed in The final three chapters turn directly to the the first week. In the years that followed, more question of globalization and the stress of than 600,000 military and civilian personnel growing competition, declining profits, and were put at risk in the course of clean-up worsening legal troubles in the international operations and the construction of a ‘sar- ‘underground’ handicraft and world-music cophagus’ to entomb the reactor, which is economy. Dwelling at times on somewhat now surrounded by a 30-kilometre exclusion obvious points, such as the Andean stereotypes zone. Nearly 9 per cent of the territory of offered in the cover-art of the CDs that Otavalo Ukraine (and 23 per cent of neighbouring musicians sell, Meisch underplays seemingly Belarus) is considered contaminated; around 5 more crucial stories. For example, do people per cent of its population (3.5 million people) who have for so long believed in international are classified as ‘sufferers’ and more than half entrepreneurship re-evaluate their faith as an a million were resettled. Estimates put the increasing number of Otavalos find themselves death-toll from Chernobyl-related illness failing in a Europe that ‘is burned out’ as a between 1993 and 1996 at over 100,000. market for Andean crafts (p. 190)? It is a dramatic and important story,and Life In the chapter, ‘Otavalo wealth and chang- exposed is a compelling book – despite an ing social relations’, Meisch provides an excel- overdose of overblown anthropological prose. lent analysis of the Yamor beauty pageant of The field research focused on interactions 1996, ethnic mixture in Otavalo’s private between ‘sufferers’ and the bureaucratic and schools, and the sexual liaisons between male medical apparatus of the state. The analysis Otavalos and female foreign tourists (gringas), was honed in Berkeley under Rabinow’s in order to illustrate the rising social power of Foucauldian tutelage. A short review can only a once-stigmatized ethnic group. Aside from convey the barest gist, but Petryna’s title is acknowledging growing inequality within a useful starting-point. The new market Otavalo communities, though, her analysis economy of the post-socialist Ukraine stops short of tackling how the new power is encourages people to ‘expose’ their lives to 214 BOOK REVIEWS radiation risks, and the differential value of the importance that wider kinship networks or lives of ‘sufferers’ is ‘exposed’ in the amount communities might have for them; nor of the that is paid to them in sickness benefits, pen- way in which ‘sufferers’ form collectivities to sions, and other benefits.As the state has with- put pressure on the ‘experts’ (as they plainly drawn from welfare provision, the ‘healthy’ do). Remarkably, no reference is made to find themselves ‘orphaned’, and (Chernobyl- Françoise Zonabend’s subtle study (The nuclear related) biological injury is for many the only pensinsula) of the fears and evasions of those way to make claims upon it. In resisting their who live around, and work in, the nuclear ‘abjection’, Soviet citizens have become the installations on the Cotentin peninsula in ‘biological citizens’ of the subtitle. Normandy, which might have provided com- The biological damage is inestimable, parative insights into the way in which people expert opinion deeply divided, and medical handle the daily experience of exposure to diagnoses heavily inflected by politics and invisible dangers. And if Petryna’s informants policy.The Soviet authorities predictably drew are ‘biological citizens’, whose bodies are the line narrowly – at the 237 victims who subject to continual monitoring by the state were airlifted out of the disaster site, of whom and become the basis for their relationship 134 were diagnosed as affected by acute with it, the extent to which they are ‘disci- radiation syndrome and 31 died.The exposure plined’ by the state and made amenable to its of the general population was supposedly power is unclear. They also subvert its pur- insignificant. The Ukrainian authorities poses. But these are merely loose ends in an counted ‘sufferers’ in the hundreds of thou- important study that will interest a wide sands. Partly to gain popular legitimacy and to anthropological audience. distance itself from the callousness of the onathan arry Soviet ancien régime, the newly independent J P. P state recognized that the pool of sufferers was London School of Economics & Political Science a sea. A larger swathe of territory was judged dangerously contaminated and biological damage was deemed to be done at lower Smith,Jennie M. When the hands are many: thresholds of dosage. Symptoms that had pre- community organization and social change in viously been regarded as stress related or psy- rural Haiti. xii, 229 pp., illus., bibliogr. chosomatic – fatigue, dizzy spells, black-outs, London, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001 and severe headaches – might now be radia- tion related. But each case had to be judged When the hands are many describes conven- on its merits, while the criteria for making tional forms of rural social organization in such judgements keep shifting. Haiti, focusing on groups that can be thought Given the desperate state of the Ukrainian of as agricultural labour co-operatives that can economy, where 50 per cent of the population also have general economic, political, and reli- lived below the poverty line in 2001,it is hardly gious aspects. surprising that many people volunteer to work The book begins with three chapters that in the contaminated zones.They can earn two place Haiti, the rural population, and the book or three times more and living costs are sub- itself in their larger contexts. Smith puts the sidized. Nor is it surprising, given unemploy- country in an extended historical context, ment and the lack of a safety net, that those from French colonization through to its dire who can claim to be Chernobyl ‘sufferers’ do economic and political condition in the twen- so, and devote enormous energy to working tieth century, and she locates Haiti in the their way up the hierarchy of ‘sufferers’ into nexus of aid, development, and outside inter- the ranks of the ‘disabled’, who are guaranteed ference that has had an important but gener- a pension and other benefits.Illness has become ally ineffective or harmful influence. Smith a career. It is an ironical inversion of the old addresses the the rural population’s material Soviet value of lichnost (which valorized com- position and their relationship with the mitment to work on behalf of the collectiv- Haitian urban elite, in which they are cast pri- ity), and involves a redefinition of the self marily as alien outsiders. She intends the book from active ‘worker’ to invalid. Given the to rescue rural Haitians from their common open-ended nature of the diagnosis, the representation as traditionalistic, passive, and whole process is inevitably susceptible to blat ridden with mysticism, a representation that (bribery), the soft-heartedness of the doctor would be familiar to those concerned with aid (who is all too aware that the worse the diag- and development projects in the country or nosis the better it is for the patient), and po- with common media images of Haiti. litical influence. Compensation levels reflect The next four chapters present different status, and occupational groups ‘suffered’ in forms of rural co-operative social organiza- proportion to political clout. tion. The first of these describes general pat- The ‘human actuality’ of all this comes terns of rural co-operative labour, and the across vividly in Petryna’s case histories. Her simplest forms of this in the area of Smith’s focus, however, is on atomized individuals or field work, the konbit and the kòve. In konbit households, and there is little sense of the a person with a substantial agricultural task BOOK REVIEWS 215 will invite specific neighbours and kin to opment bodies saw them as an obvious local come work, in what is usually an all-day affair counterpart, which led to the formation of in which workers are rewarded with food and groups solely to take advantage of the money drink. A kòve is typically a half-day, is not as these bodies disbursed. restricted to agricultural work, and workers The book ends with a chapter of Smith’s are not given food but are given cash. These reflections on the way that these organizations are the foundation for the more elaborate can contribute to the social, political, and eco- forms of organization described in the next nomic betterment of rural Haitians, and hence three chapters. to the relationship between development and The first of these is the atribisyon. This is a democracy as defined by rural Haitians, a def- small (seven-to-twelve member) and relatively inition that is not restricted to formal politi- undifferentiated organization based on the cal representation, but has a strong egalitarian neighbourhood, and many people belong to component. more than one. Its members regularly do This is an accessible, detailed study of co- kòve together, both for each other in a co- operative forms of social organization in a operative way and for others in order to earn section of rural Haiti, of the position of Haiti money.The money that the group earns is not in the world, of people’s political and eco- distributed to members, but is spent on a nomic aspirations, and of the recurring efforts group feast, usually celebrated on Haiti’s Inde- by outside agencies to shape the country. pendence Day, 1 January. Although Smith does not develop the theme, The second of these is the sosyete. This is a it is also interesting in light of the increasing mutual aid group as well as a work group, importance of ‘civil society’ in international offering support in times of illness or death. political-economic rhetoric. ‘Civil society’ In addition, occasionally it will adjudicate dis- sounds a fine idea, but this work makes it putes between members or act as a represen- clear that the phrase is not to be taken at face tative of a group member who is in dispute value, referring to social organizations and with someone from outside the group. As structures that exist independently of state and well, this sort of group may carry out religious market. Haiti is, in Smith’s account, full of functions at the funerals of members or to those. Yet generally they are ignored by aid celebrate ancestors. and development agencies, who seem not to The final sort of group Smith describes is want ‘civil society’, but civil society of a par- the gwoupman peyisan ( peasant grouping), best ticular sort, a sort that reflects a particular, considered as intentional, voluntary organiza- liberal political-economic vision. When the tions that are formed to bring about some sort hands are many illustrates that when the reality of social, political, or economic change or does not fit the vision, it is the reality that improvement. These emerged from govern- suffers. ment policy in the 1960s to create commu- ames arrier nity councils, apparently to extend state J G. C control in rural areas. Foreign aid and devel- Indiana and Oxford Brookes Universities