AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST BOOK REVIEWS Single Reviews Social Anthropology and Human Origins Alan Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 182 pp. Mary Prendergast volume he reintroduces his theory to explain the coevolution Saint Louis University of kinship structures, symbolic thought, and language in tandem with increasing group size and brain size. Anthropology’s four fields are in constant fission and fusion, The book isalso thought provoking when upending com- with departmental “divorces” (a` la Stanford, Harvard) and re- mon assumptions: for example, considering alternatives to newed efforts to remain integrative (Emory, Arizona State). simple forager–producer dichotomies or reversing ethno- Alan Barnard’s latest book is a contribution to the latter. At graphic analogy to consider how early humans were more a time in which publication and funding pressures can en- like hunter-gatherers than, say, farmers or office workers. courage hyperspecialization, this is a refreshing and readable Finally, he offers a critique of sociobiology basics such as synthesis of the methods, data, and theoretical perspectives kin selection, citing the well-established principle that kin- of social and biological anthropology, linguistics, and ar- ship distances, particularly among hunter-gatherers, are not chaeology as applied to human evolution. It is reminiscent, necessarily based on biological distances. as Barnard acknowledges, of a simpler time in which early However, most of Barnard’s insights are only relevant anthropologists were jointly interested in the essential ques- to the latest stages of the evolutionary process: the Middle tions of being human, regardless of methodology. Barnard’s Stone Age “symbolic revolution”; the dispersal of our species goal is ambitious—“to help establish a social anthropology and implied social, linguistic, and artistic developments; and of human origins” (p. xii)—and, perhaps inevitably, it is not the eve of the Neolithic transition. These are Barnard’s foci, quite realized. despite a rather uneven review of 6 million years of paleoan- Barnard’s starting point is that biological anthropologists thropological data and the implication that such a chronologi- and archaeologists, on the one hand, and social anthropol- cal sweep will be covered. Archaeologists studying the above ogists, on the other hand, fail to engage with one another, are already well aware of the works cited by Barnard: for ex- partly because of a lack of relevant knowledge and partly ample, hxaro and potlatch exchange systems, and immediate- out of mutual neglect (or disdain). The book concludes and delayed-return schemes, have a long history of consider- with suggestions as to how a new subdiscipline on human ation in the Late Pleistocene archaeological literature. This origins might be created within social anthropology. In be- begs the question: What can researchers studying the first tween, Barnard highlights well-developed bodies of data and 5.8 million years of human origins take from Barnard’s book, theory—regarding group dynamics and mobility, sharing other than the accusation that they need social anthropology? and exchange, language and symbolism, and kinship—that Some interesting comparisons are made between ethnogra- he believes can offer insight to those who study primatolog- phy and primatology, and research apparently bridging the ical, genetic, fossil, and archaeological data. gap (chimpanzee reciprocity) is cited. But the book will be Barnard is at his best when drawing on his expertise in dismissed by many biological anthropologists for errors or hunter-gatherer language, kinship, and modes of thought— uncritical citations, for example, regarding dates and paleoe- for example, distinguishing between basic communication, cological reconstructions for some early hominids, as well with hypothesized origins in sharing and kinship, and “full as highly debatable or outdated suggestions, such as that language” with possible origins in myth telling. He draws un- Sahelanthropus, Orrorin,andArdipithecus might be australop- usual cross-disciplinary comparisons, for example, between ithecines, that australopithecines were hunters, or that they the hypothesized role of grandmothering in early Homo and had near-human manual dexterity. the joking–friendly relationships between alternating gen- Archaeologists, too, will quibble with many of the de- erations among hunter-gatherers. Toward the end of the tails. For one, Barnard’s repeated mentions of ethnographic AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 4, pp. 698–712, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. c 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01528.x Book Reviews 699 analogy lack depth and appropriate references, for example, would have benefitted from an editor with a clear vision of to the work of Alison Wylie (1985) or the many archaeol- the intended audience. The subject chapters discuss social ogists who base their work on her philosophy. As another theory and primatological, fossil, genetic, or archaeological example, Barnard states that there is “a lack of archaeologi- data in separate threads, without making the meaningful ties cal evidence one way or another” in the early Homo hunting that are obviously Barnard’s goal. Instead, we hear exhorta- versus scavenging debate, a claim that will surprise all those tions to, for example, “share our conjectures and rekindle involved (p. 135). our dying flame of interest in the grander issues of animal and Barnard aims to explain how social anthropologists can human relations,” with few concrete suggestions as to how help human origins researchers, but this leaves open the one might do so (p. 30). One hopes that Barnard intended to question of whether the book is aimed at the former or the first make a case for the existence of a “social anthropology latter and at what level of expertise. The prose is accessible of human origins” and that we can await a more rigorous, but also disjointed: some aspects of the reviews of fossils or in-depth study down the line. kinship systems are so basic that one assumes a student au- dience, an idea reinforced by the glossary; other discussions REFERENCE CITED of anthropological theory seem to presume prior knowl- Wylie, A. edge and at the same time cry out for deeper treatment and 1985 The Reaction against Analogy. Advances in Archaeological stronger linkage to questions of human origins. The book Method and Theory 8:63–110. Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa Brenda Chalfin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 297 pp. Adia Benton real and imagined, of state bureaucratic influence; and per- Brown University sonal, affective, and embodied dimensions of state authority as negotiated at crucial sites of mobility, trade, and reform In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin sheds light on the com- (cf. p. 11). plex, and often unexpected, relationship between neoliberal These four themes roughly map onto the book’s or- reform and state authority. Drawing on a year of fieldwork ganization. Chapter 1 provides a historical account of how in Ghana’s Customs Service and archival and policy research, Ghana’s customs authority has long been central to reformist Chalfin challenges claims that neoliberal restructuring is agendas. Concerned with the ways “the state is configured characterized by “diminution of the state’s sovereign author- as a field of power in its own right, as much as a force ity at the territorial frontier” (p. 237). Rather, state power operating on others” (p. 43), chapter 2 outlines theoreti- is both augmented and segmented by neoliberal reform; cal and methodological tools available for investigating and what constitutes “state presence” shifts over time and place understanding the “sociality of the state” (p. 51) and the and is linked to dense, multilayered, and shifting networks “day-to-day techniques of rule” (p. 45). of power. Drawing inspiration from medical anthropology Chalfin provides vivid descriptions of customs and insights on “bioavailability” and “experimentality,” Chalfin border control at Aflao, a town situated at the Ghana–Togo also argues that Ghana’s amenability to neoliberal reform, border, in chapters 3 and 4. She shows that, rather than or “sovereign availability,” is rooted in the “longstanding being a site of breakdown of or resistance to state authority, strength of the country’s bureaucratic apparatus, the fragile the border illuminates “the character and constitution of nature of political accountability, and the increasing impos- state power within Ghana as a whole” (p. 85). In addition to sibility of economic autonomy” (p. 15). being “incomplete, both unfinished and unstable” (p. 87), Chalfin identifies four prevailing themes emerging from the border is also palimpsest, where past attempts at bu- a study of neoliberal restructuring and sovereignty vis-a-vis` reaucratic reform shape contemporary negotiations related Customs Service, which I modify slightly here: the historical to what—from the minutiae of customs officers’ uniforms emergence of indirect and evidence-based modes of gov- to the spatial orientation of office buildings—should be ernance in Ghana and the place of the customs authority in subject to state regulation in these sites and who can claim that history; the contradictory effects of neoliberal principles authority to oversee the sundries of border movements. like transparency, efficiency, and accountability on modes In chapters 5 through 7, Chalfin describes