A Brief History of Neoliberalism – By David Harvey

Book reviews

Aid and economics

Atlani-Duault, Laëtitia (transl. AndrewWilson). Humanitarian aid in post-Sovietcountries: an anthropological perspective. xii,146 pp., figs, bibliogr. Bloomington: IndianaUniv. Press, 2006. £18.99 (paper)

At the time of the fall of the Soviet empire, HIV/AIDS had hardly penetrated the states of centralAsia and the Caucasus, one of the world’s lastregions to be affected. This book explains how aUN development agency, here called ‘IDO’,implemented its policy of HIV prevention andtreatment through the encouragement of localactivism. Laëtitia Atlani-Duault worked for IDObetween 1994 and 2003, both in the field and inheadquarters. She has used this privilegedrelationship to present an interestingly original,ethnographically orientated analysis of tensionsbetween the evolving ideology of a typical inter-national development agency during this periodand the expectations and manoeuvring ofcitizens who embraced its offer of support for‘civil society’ as a counterbalance to the power ofcompromised governments. This text is anupdated and reworked translation of a bookpublished in French in 2005.

The liveliest parts of the book are dialoguesalmost worthy of an Ibsen play, such as:

BETH: That’s where civil societyorganizations have a role. They areessential to creating an environment thatis open, tolerant and non-discriminatory,and to supporting the most vulnerableand helping them access HIV preventionprogrammes.

A PARTICIPANT FROM A LOCAL WOMEN’SNGO: You mean like support for peoplewho are infected.ANNA: Right, that’s an example. A lot ofHIV-positive people may not be able toreveal their sero-status, or are afraid tofind out, because of the environment theylive in.OLOZBIEK: ... On the contrary, the stateshould be taking measures to ensure thatthose people aren’t infecting other peopleon purpose! Like during Soviet times!(p. 61)

The most original part is where Atlani-Duaultoutlines the IDO’s distinction between (in heranalytical terms) the ‘white’ local NGOs, part ofthe ‘flowering’ of civil society, and the ‘red’ ones,those still in the grip of Soviet ways(pp. 84-98). In fact, successful local NGOs werecoming to terms with the new talk and practicesof IDO, sometimes ‘using them in their own waywith craft and finesse’, playing creatively with theIDO buzz-words as they had played with theplans of the old Soviet system (p. 100). Scepticalas the author is about the idea of a globalizing‘associational revolution’ that began to have cur-rency in the mid-1990s, she gives credit to localNGOs, supported by international developmentagencies, for helping to make possible the demo-cratic ‘revolutions’ that took place in Georgia,Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan between 2003 and 2005

(pp. 107-8). In various parts of the ex-SovietUnion, NGOs are now repressed, subjected tosurveillance, and accused of collusion withWestern intelligence services.

The author makes a good case for hiding theidentities of individuals and organizations, buther decision not to specify the countries she

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 666-710© Royal Anthropological Institute 2008

worked in is a self-imposed handicap inengaging the reader, as if the IDO’s tendency totreat them as interchangeable is taken forgranted rather than examined. I could not find asingle reference in her book to religion, Christianor Islamic, which is something of a tour de forceand unusual for an anthropologist. Thisapparent blind spot raises doubts when herattention turns to the sensitive topics ofhomophobia and a disinclination to usecondoms; but it was typical of much of theliterature on development until recently, whenan interest in religion has actually becomefashionable in the fashion-prone world ofdevelopment studies.

The book closes on a grim note. Publichealth in some of these territories, notablyUzbekistan, now badly affected by HIV, isreverting to the control of apparatchiks, whoseill-tailored grey suits are made by Atlani-Duaultto stand for the bad old days, while theopportunity to introduce integrated policies isrejected. Atlani-Duault acknowledges that theIDO’s pre-emptive measures to attempt to checkHIV were on the right lines. Do I detect a rathermore positive attitude towards the ‘associationalrevolution’ in her last chapter? If there is now areaction in some development circles against therhetoric of supporting ‘civil society’, this may bebecause earlier efforts to put the idea intopractice were often politically naïve andco-opted by states rather than because the ideaitself is basically misguided.

Jonathan Benthall University College London

Caldwell, Melissa L. Not by bread alone:social support in the new Russia. xv, 242 pp.,illus., bibliogr. London, Los Angeles: Univ.California Press, 2004. £36.95 (cloth), £14.95

(paper)

The late 1990s in Russia witnessed continuedsocial, political, and economic flux broughtabout by the collapse of socialism and thebreak-up of the Soviet Union earlier in thedecade. The persistence of economic uncertaintyraises questions about how Russians survived ona daily basis in this context of shortages,poverty, and hardship. In Not by bread alone:social support in the new Russia, Melissa L.Caldwell explores in rich ethnographic detail thecomplex strategies of everyday survival thatordinary Muscovites employed in their efforts toprovide for themselves, their kin, and the peoplein their social networks. As the formal Russianeconomy deteriorated, resulting in scarcities of

money and goods in stores, compounded byrising prices, the Muscovites at the centre ofCaldwell’s study managed to access andmobilize diverse resources to ensure both theireconomic survival and social well-being. Theethnography begins in a soup kitchen, runby an international food aid programme, butquickly moves beyond the cafeteria as itexplores how the exchange of materialgoods, services, and information creates,reinforces, and propels social relationships.Combining personal experiences withobservations of daily interactions in the soupkitchen and stories of her informants’ efforts to‘make do’, Caldwell underscores the deeplysocial character of economic exchanges inRussia.

Caldwell uses the term ‘alternativeconsumption’ to capture the diversity ofresources and strategies that Russians mobilizedin their everyday survival practices, andillustrates that a strong moral code governs thiseconomy (chapters 3 and 5 especially). Withinthe value system of this code, people invest intheir social relationships through reciprocalexchanges, and exchanges occur only aftersocial relations and trust have been established.In a period of uncertainty and scarcity, thesesocial relationships became key to survival,realized through hoarding and redistribution,co-operative shopping, recycling, and passingdacha foods to friends. As one of Caldwell’sinformants told her, ‘It’s not what you are, butwhom you know’ (p. 76). Exploring survivalstrategies through the lens of food aid allowsCaldwell to maintain a critical perspective on theassociations between survival and socialrelationships. Volunteers at the soup kitchen,especially those from North America, positionedthemselves in hierarchical relationships withrecipients and distanced themselves from themin order to maintain an ideology of aid based ona uni-directional model of charitable giving.Recipients, by contrast, attempted to createintimacy between volunteers and themselves inorder to forge the reciprocal relationshipsunderstood as necessary for survival. Caldwellreveals a sharp distinction between Westernnotions of poverty and economic crisis andthose held by Russians. Western scholars andnews sources writing about the economic crisisfocused on widespread food shortages andexperiences of economic poverty. Muscovites,however, pointed to those in situations of socialpoverty, or lacking social connections aschannels for procuring resources, as the mostvulnerable.

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Caldwell’s ethnography has significancebeyond the anthropology of Eastern Europe andpost-socialist studies. She urges us to rethinkhow we conceptualize cities and people’s placeswithin them by showing how people moveabout cities in their efforts to eke out a livingand by illustrating the complex and sociallydetermined circulations of goods and people.Caldwell uses a language and style accessible toadvanced undergraduates, and the abundanceof ethnographic vignettes and personal storiesaffords engaging reading for these students.Arguing that social and economic resources are‘mutually constituted and interdependent’(p. 6), the theoretical and substantive issues thatCaldwell raises about the relationship betweensocial relations and formal and informaleconomies, including the sociality of economicexchanges, could be the basis of productivediscussions in graduate seminars.

However, one shortcoming of Caldwell’sethnography is a somewhat uncritical analysis ofthe tenuous relationships between volunteers ofthe soup kitchen and the people whom theyserve, and the ensuing contradictions in helpand support, given the sociality of exchange.Caldwell reveals several dehumanizing elementsof these relationships, for example volunteersnot knowing the names of recipients who hadcome to the programme for years (p. 143), and acafeteria director yelling at a disabled man to eatmore quickly (p. 176). How do volunteersrespond when recipients ask for assistance withproblems other than procuring food (p. 173)?What are the consequences in terms of survival,either social or economic, for those individualsor social groups positioned outside any system ofsocial networks? Nevertheless, Not by breadalone makes an important contribution topost-socialist studies and anthropology moregenerally through its critical engagement withnotions and practices of exchange and poverty,and the role of social relationships in theseprocesses.

Jill Owczarzak Center for AIDS InterventionResearch, Medical College of Wisconsin

Elyachar, Julia. Markets of dispossession:NGOs, economic development, and the state inCairo. xiii, 279 pp., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2005.£60.00 (cloth), £14.95 (paper)

The final decades of the last century weredominated by the idea that ‘the market’ is themotor of social reform and economic growth. It

was the era of structural adjustment and rollingback the state, followed fairly quickly by thetouting of NGOs and micro-enterprise as thesafety-net for those impoverished by structuraladjustment. Markets of dispossesion is JuliaElyachar’s description of one effort to encourageNGOs and micro-enterprise, in el-Hirafiyeen, anew-built area on the outskirts of Cairo. Egyptwas in the throes of structural adjustment, andurban reform displaced a variety of craftsmenfrom their old locations in the city; el-Hirafiyeenwas where they were to be relocated andflourish.

Of course it did not work. The bulk ofdisplaced craftsmen abandoned the new town,the bulk of the ‘youth’ trained by NGOs to bemicro-entrepreneurs failed. On the other hand,not everyone lost. The United States Agency forInternational Development and the World Bankcould report on the number of programmes thatthey set up and on the money that they spent;consultants and contract staff for these bodiesgot paid; NGOs prospered; a handful ofEgyptian banks profited; and, in important ways,the state was strengthened rather than rolledback. Again, then, socialism for the rich and freeenterprise for the poor.

Elyachar describes how and why thishappened, and uses that description tochallenge the model of the free market thatdrove structural adjustment and themicro-enterprise programmes that came in itswake. The core of her argument is that thesesought to extend the reach of ‘the market’ (andthereby extract value from the people andnetworks who were dispossessed), but that this‘market’ was a flawed vision of how small firmswork. This is symbolized by the way thatinternational agencies and their client NGOsrejected the idea of craftsmen in favour ofmicro-entrepreneurial youth.

As Elyachar describes it, the economy ofordinary people in Cairo, and by extension inmost of Egypt, survived through a system ofartisanal production and commerce that lookedrather like Mauss’s total social phenomena. Itwas indistinguishable from (embedded in) a setof social, political, and religious relationships.The successful craftsman was an acknowledgedmaster of his trade, brought up to it and betterat it than his workers. He did not serve animpersonal market, but instead had a body ofcustomers. The economy of the shop and of themaster’s household were not easilydistinguished. Proceeds from the business wentto communal religious and political purposes,which solidified the standing of the craftsman.

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Craftsmen were not purely competitors, butoften co-operated in various ways. Adhering tothese practices did not simply make a successfulmaster, but protected the craftsman fromcriticism that he was only in it for the money,indifferent to his craft, his fellows, and hisneighbours. This sort of criticism was expressedin terms of the ‘evil eye’, associated with thingslike unexplained workshop fires and the suddenloss of trade.

The youth who were enrolled in the NGOs’micro-enterprise training schemes were taught avery different way of business. Not especiallyskilled in a trade, they were taught managementand how to think in terms of profit and loss.Their businesses would succeed, they were told,if they located and served the market for whatthey provided. They complained to Elyachar thatthey did not know what this market was or howto find it: would having a website help them toget it? They earned no respect, had little trade,and failed.

The situation that Elyachar describes isimportant, and she describes it well, includingmuch more about the nature of craftsmen andtheir craft than I have mentioned here. Thelessons of her tale would be more complex andmore compelling if, however, she had cast herwork in broader comparative terms. Hercraftsmen look like retail merchants in manyparts of Britain and the United States before theend of the 1800s. Many of them, too, sawthemselves, and were seen, as skilled craftsmenwho were part of a trade, rather than justentrepreneurs. Many of them, too, served abody of customers rather than an anonymousmarket. For many of them, commercial life wasalso a total social phenomenon. Whileknowledgeable readers can see suchcomparisons for themselves, it would have beeninteresting to have Elyachar’s reflections onthem. But even without them, Markets ofdispossession is a revealing and rewardingpresentation of what does and does not happenwhen people seek to extend the market’s sway.

James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford BrookesUniversities

Mosse, David & David Lewis (eds). The aideffect: giving and governing in internationaldevelopment. vi, 223 pp., bibliogrs. London,Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006. £18.99 (paper)

Published at a time when increasing numbers ofsocial anthropology graduates are beingabsorbed by organizations (whether NGOs or

governmental) concerned with internationaldevelopment, this edited collection sets out touse an ethnographic approach to aid, policyreform, and global governance in order touncover what Mosse terms ‘the hiddenprocesses, multiple perspectives or regionalinterests’ behind official policy discourses.

While traditional ethnography may be said toconcern itself primarily with social actors, theeditors here put their emphasis on developingan understanding of the current focus of aid onpolicy reforms rather than on conventionalinvestment projects. In his introduction, Mossenotes that the new aid framework has two keytheoretical underpinnings: neoliberalism andinstitutionalism. The management of aid hasshifted in focus from economic growth andtechnology transfer to the reorganization ofstates and societies along lines approved byinternational organizations such as the IMF andthe World Bank. Globalization works towardsminimizing the importance of the local and thespecific, instead emphasizing transnationalknowledge as exemplified in the discourse ofboth these funding organizations.

While the policies of these two institutions(and others) emphasize ‘partnership’ and localownership of development projects, the analysisby Gerhard Anders of Bretton Woodsneoliberalism (as exemplified by a set of loandocuments signed by international financialinstitutions and the Malawi government) showsclearly the instrumentalist nature of ‘goodgovernance’ objectives. Anders compares theseobjectives to computer programs that work onlyif others of the same brand are installed tosupport them. Jeremy Gould suggests thatglobal inequality is being maintained throughthe vehicle of global aid programmes that stress‘partnership’ but effectively render recipientnations and their governments, such as that ofTanzania, bound by puppeteers’ strings.Capacity-building, says Gould, is not carried outfor its own sake but is linked to specific policyagendas of the aid community.

Several contributors to this volume givesuccinct accounts of the trouble that aid workers(even senior ones) are likely to encounter if theyappear to be trying to bypass this system.Rosalind Eyben and Rosario Leon describe anddiscuss their own role in the diplomatic stormwhich arose in La Paz when the UK Departmentfor International Development was perceived tobe ignoring Bolivian aid procedures inpromoting voter education. Ian Harper pursuesthe part played by the tubercle bacillus inpromoting technocracy and the rise of neoliberal

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reform to the detriment of patient care in Nepal,and Aet Annist reveals how the rules of an aidprogramme to reduce poverty and socialexclusion in Estonia were manipulated to shutout an outsider who lacked access to thepolitical networks necessary to gain support forher views. Karen Coelho shows how theengineers and bureaucrats managing a waterutility reform scheme in Chennai, India,characterized the urban poor whom they weremeant to serve as an undeserving ‘public’, whilethe educated middle classes in the same areareceived better service because, as one engineerput it, ‘it is easier for us to convince them [of themerit of what we are doing]’.

Van den Berg and Quarles van Offord presenta coda in which they reflect on the importanceof acknowledging ‘disjunction’ in developmentpractices to improve academic understandingand administrative practices in development.

This volume is a timely contribution to theimportant issues of process in the debates oninternational development. However, it is notclear, despite the pleas of the final contributors,how the neoliberal juggernaut can be deflectedfrom its path.

Gina Buijs Walter Sisulu University

Archaeology

Breglia, Lisa. Monumental ambivalence: thepolitics of heritage. xii, 242 pp., maps, illus.,bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2006.£34.00 (paper)

Lisa Breglia coins the term ‘monumentalambivalence’ to frame her analysis of heritagearound a Spanish aphorism: ‘that which iseverybody’s is nobody’s’. This she takes as thecentral problem of heritage, as a parallel to the‘tragedy of the commons’ writ monumental. Heropening gambit is itself somewhat apocalyptic,describing as tentative, ‘the fate of hundreds ofthousands of archaeological and historicmonuments’ as ‘decades of highly centralizedcontrol’ give way to demands for ‘accountability,efficiency and profit’ from governments (p. 1).She further raises the spectre of a neoliberalprivatization perceived by citizens as a real threatto the integrity of historic monuments, andframes her argument in terms of the resistanceto private concessions at world heritage sitessuch as the Colosseum or the Taj Mahal. Inresponse, Breglia has two key arguments

throughout the volume. Firstly, she argues thatheritage sites are not universally state-owned,and most have a long history of privateownership already. Secondly, she suggests thatheritage sites are mired in local politics, disputedand territorialized, contingent upon local claimsand contests by various groups who feelownership of the sites.

She casts her book as an ‘ethnographic forayinto the intimate politics of monumentalheritage’, at two archaeological heritage sites inYucatan: Chichén Itzá and Chunchucmil, both ofwhich are sites of contested nationalisms,disputed ownership, and use. Her account firstlydetails the ownership histories of the sites,highlighting the separation between ownershipof land and the monuments on it, the latter inMexico having been claimed by the state, theformer remaining in private and, in the case ofChichén Itzá, US hands. It also shows thehistorical contingencies of colonial ownership,the audacity of US owners demanding rights inthe interests of archaeology, and how theinvention of the ‘site’ relied on theirpresumption that selling artefacts for high priceson American markets was intrinsically more validthan leaving evidence of preceding civilizationsin the ground and allowing otherwisesubjugated Mayans to sustain themselves fromthe land.

In the second part of the book we get a vividpicture of daily life on the sites, highlightingwhat has been called an ethnic division of labour(although Breglia does not use Van den Berghe’s1992 term [see Annals of Tourism Research 19,1992, 234-9]) between site-wardens,hotel-workers, entrepreneurs, site-managers, andarchaeologists. Breglia focuses on theappropriation of their custodianship aspatrimony itself by generations of wardens,detailing the conflicts this generates with othersliving on or from the sites. There is an implicitsympathy here with archaeology’s right toover-ride local concerns, and Breglia’s apparentsurprise that some people show a ‘decidedambivalence’ about whether sites ‘are indeed“heritage” at all!’ (p. 9) sits oddly with thetheme of local rights. Breglia offers acuteexamples of the archaeologists’ cack-handedattempts to curry local favour, but she couldafford to be rather more critical of the ambitionsof contemporary archaeology per se, and to offera more incisive critique of the internationalcontext that lies behind this politics of heritage.A sharper critique of the scientific discourses ofthe heritage movement would tie in to broaderdebates about the state of heritage. Instead,

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Breglia remains with the argument thatarchaeological ruins in Yucatan ‘are in practicesites of multiple, coexisting claims onownership, custodianship, and culturalinheritance’ (p. 8).

Her arguments are well supported by herethnography, but they would clearly benefitfrom a theoretical understanding of what shelabels neoliberal privatization and how it mightaffect the sites she discusses. What happenswhen privately held land moves into theownership of global corporations or privateequity funds, for example? How does thischange the circumstances for site-custodians orthe conditions of work of contract employees?How does this differ from workers in otherindustries? Breglia treats the pressure for stateselling-off of heritage entities as both inevitable– ‘a state needs to sell off its patrimony to be inline with global circulations of capital’ (p. 3) –and inaccessible – ‘this study cannot completelyaccount for the multiple ways in whichgovernments ... and others practice heritageacross the globe’ (p. 8). Without this moreincisive theoretical framework, Breglia cannotfulfil her initial task of evaluating howprivatization affects the site communities.

Transforming a doctoral thesis into apublishable book is no easy task, but refereesand publishers have a duty to ensure thenecessary steps are taken. If they are to survivein current publishing markets, academicpublishers will need to have more respect for theskills of good editors.

Simone Abram University of Sheffield

DeMarrais, E., C. Gosden & C. Renfrew

(eds). Rethinking materiality: the engagementof mind with the material world. viii, 280 pp.,figs, illus., bibliogrs. Cambridge: TheMacDonald Institute for ArchaeologicalResearch, 2004. £45.00 (cloth)

This important collection, the outcome of aconference with the same title held inCambridge in 2003, brings togethertwenty-three papers, mostly by archaeologists,an exception being the paper by the culturalanthropologist Mary Helms, whose ideas haveinfluenced much recent archaeological thinking.While the volume is divided into six parts, partlyon thematic and partly on chronologicalgrounds, there is much overlap between them.The majority of contributors are based in the UK,while the North American perspective isrepresented by five papers, plus the final

commentator (Cowgill), who admits thatdebates on materiality are still rare in NorthAmerican archaeology. Outside these two areas,there is a single contributor from the rest ofEurope and almost nobody from the rest of theworld, with the exception of a chapter’sco-author, based in Madagascar. There is noconceptual unity and homogeneity in thisvolume, and that is a good thing too. Theeditors open the volume with three separateposition pieces, an indication of a lack of a singleconceptual starting position. Renfrew discussesbriefly his concept of ‘engagement theory’,DeMarrais expands on the idea of‘materialization of ideology’, both firstdeveloped in earlier publications, whereasGosden diverges from the other two to explorethe links between human intelligence, emotions,and what he calls aesthetics, the sensuous andsensory experience of the material world.

The volume is representative of a broad,lively, and fruitful discussion that is currentlytaking place in archaeology, and also in materialculture studies, on the significance andusefulness of the concept of materiality (andimmateriality), on the ontological status andproperties of objects, things, and materials, andon the links between materiality, the humanbody, and the bodily senses, amongst others. Inthese discussions, phenomenology (especiallythat of Merleau-Ponty), Gibsonian, psychologicalperception theories (especially the concept ofaffordances), and the influence of Alfred Gell’sideas on the agency of things, loom large.

Here, the take-up of and response to theseideas is varied, and their archaeologicalapplication offers mixed success. A number ofauthors attempt to run with the editors’proposed concepts of engagement andmaterialization, but it is not clear how muchthese actually add to their own analysis; otherschoose to focus on much more developedconcepts, whereas the best papers are those thathave also found a way to flesh out a detailedcase study, remaining concrete, specific, andmaterial (e.g. Scarre on the properties, colourand texture, and meaning of unworked stonesused in prehistoric megalithic monuments).While a number of authors pay lip-service to theimportance of sensory experience, very fewactually take the issue seriously enough to showhow ‘a take’ on the senses can lead to fruitfularchaeological interpretations. There areexceptions here, including: the thoughtfulintroductory piece by Gosden. There are alsoexcellent papers by Andy Jones, whose work oncolour and memory in the British Neolithic and

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Bronze Age also delivers a powerful critique ofthe idea of material culture as a form of external,symbolic and memory storage (a thesisadvocated by several others in the volume) byshowing that remembering is too chaotic andcomplex to be dealt with using a simplisticstorage, recording-and-recalling analogy; byJohn Robb, who approaches the agency ofobjects by focusing on the ‘extended artefact’,that is, ‘the conditions, plans and meaningshumans surround it with’, and, moreimportantly, by showing how the eating ofdifferent kinds of foods in the Neolithic, fromcereals to beef, with their distinctive sensoryeffects and connotations, structured social life,temporality, and historical experience; by CliveGamble, arguing against using sedentism as ananalytical concept to talk about thePalaeolithic-Neolithic transition and proposinginstead the shift of emphasis from instruments tocontainers, including houses, building oncorporeal homologies such as the trunk of thehuman body as container, and its limbs asinstruments, and paying attention at the sametime to the experiential nature of tools,instruments, and houses; and by Boivin, whofleshes out the sensuous and socialconsequences of using soil and clay as a centralmaterial of resource in the Neolithic of theeastern Mediterranean and southeastern Europe.

Many other papers, of course, haveinteresting things to say, whether, for example, itis the critique of cognitive approaches toarchaeology (Malafouris), or the link betweenelaborate ceramics, feasting, and politicaleconomy, a largely ignored topic in the volume,in Aztec Mexico (Brumfiel). But if the desire ofthe editors was to overcome the mind-bodyduality, one should wonder, as does Rowlands inhis chapter, whether starting from aconceptually distinct entity called mind and anequally distinct and, at the same time,non-corporeal and abstract body (be it that ofhumans or non-human entities), withoutexamining their inter-dependence and theirmutual production and constitution, is the wayforward. Furthermore, while attempts such asthis are worthwhile and important, we shouldask, along with Ingold (see ArchaeologicalDialogues 14: 1, 2007, 1-16, and responses), towhat extent do these debates on materiality, andon the ontology of the object and its agency,take seriously the thingness of the thing, and therelational, physical properties of materials?Finally, to what extent can archaeologistsadvance a theory on materiality without aserious reflection on the inter-corporeal,

experiential engagement with the world,including a reflection on the sensory genealogyof the archaeologist’s own body?

Yannis Hamilakis University of Southampton

Hill, J. Brett. Human ecology in the Wadial-Hasa: land use and abandonment throughthe Holocene. xii, 194 pp., maps, fig., table,bibliogr. Tucson: Univ. Arizona Press, 2006.$45.00 (cloth)

The Wadi al-Hasa is a deeply incised drainagerunning east-west from the Jordanian Plateaudown to the Rift Valley, just south of the DeadSea. It has been the subject of three intensivearchaeological surveys since the 1970s, focusingon different parts of the drainage, and uponwhich Human ecology in the Wadi al-Hasa isbased. The book, based on J. Brett Hill’s doctoraldissertation at Arizona State University, is dividedinto eight chapters. The first four chapters (1.‘Land use and land abandonment: a case studyfrom west-central Jordan’; 2. ‘The costs andbenefits of land management through time,space and society’; 3. ‘History of the Hasa: fromthe origins of agriculture to the collapse ofempires; and 4. ‘The evolution of the physicallandscape’) constitute an excellent generalintroduction to the archaeological workconducted in recent decades in the region. Thenext two (5. ‘A history of abandonment andresettlement’; and 6. ‘A Geographic InformationSystem analysis of potential erosion’) constitutethe heart of the analysis, including a descriptionof methods, data, and basic results. The finaltwo chapters (7. ‘Reflections on the significanceand causes of environmental degradation’; and8. ‘Conclusions’) are summary discussions andconclusions.

The different surveys focused on differentparts of the drainage, the Archaeological Surveyof the Kerak Plateau, directed by J.M. Miller,focusing on the upland plateau north of thewadi and not extending into the incisedbadlands, the Wadi al-Hasa ArchaeologicalSurvey, directed by B. Macdonald, extendingfrom the wadi channel south into the badlandsand uplands further south, and the Wadi HasaNorth Bank Survey, directed by G.A. Clark,focusing on the north bank of the upstream areaof the wadi. None of the survey regions overlap.Hill is well aware of the pitfalls of comparingdata from different surveys, conducted withdifferent methods and with different goals, andmakes reasonable attempts to account for these

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differences. Statistical analyses of settlementclusters and chronological affinities within spatialunits reveal cycles of settlement florescence,followed by abandonments, with greatersettlement continuity or stability occurring in thenorthern plateau, and greater discontinuity inthe southern areas.

Although the analyses are accompanied bygraphs and several Geographic InformationSystem (GIS) density plots, only a single map,showing the general location of Wadi al-Hasawith respect to modern political borders, ispresented. Although satellite photos are avaluable tool, the fact is that they do not replacegood topographic maps with important site andplace names. For example, even as basic aregion as the Kerak Plateau, let alone the varioussites mentioned, does not appear on any figure.Furthermore, for a study in human ecology,basic maps such as rainfall, soils, andgeomorphology would have been invaluableaids to the reader, and in fact might havesuggested alternative conclusions.

The basic theme and ultimate conclusion ofthe study, based in large part on modellingpotential erosion relative to site locations, is thatthe differential patterns of settlement continuityand discontinuity were caused by thecombination of human-induced erosion(resulting from over-exploitation due either topoorly managed farming or to over-grazing),and historical-political exigencies (e.g. politicalhierarchies tend to over-exploit since feedback isindirect and negative feedback is irrelevant todistant authorities). The southern region showsmore potential erosion, and this is linkedcausally to the greater settlement instability inthe region. The conclusion that climatic changeand/or natural environmental degradation werenot responsible for these patterns derives fromthe claim that climatically there is little differencebetween the different survey regions, and thusclimatic fluctuations would not be expected toaffect the survey areas differentially.

There are three flaws to this argument.Methodologically, the northern survey region, incontrast to the southern, did not include thewadi itself, and was restricted to thenon-dissected plateau, perhaps an automaticenvironmental bias towards stability. Given this,the erosion noted in the southern area may be afunction of physical geography, withoutnecessary reference to the human effects onlandscape. Finally, an examination of rainfallmaps of the region shows that the southernsurvey region in fact receives less rainfall, andstraddles the edge of dry farming practicability.

Relatively minor shifts in rainfall patterns mightindeed more significantly affect the southernarea than the northern in terms of agriculturalpotential.

The hypothesis of human-induced erosion isimportant and GIS studies and simulations areindeed important tools for defining thequestions. However, ultimately, withoutgeo-archaeological research focusing on actualwell-dated landscape history, it remains only ahypothesis.

Steven A. Rosen Ben-Gurion University

Insoll, Timothy. Archaeology: the conceptualchallenge. 144 pp., bibliogr. London:Duckworth Publishers, 2007. £11.99 (paper)

This is a little book but it packs a big andimportant message. Its aim is to examinecritically the fundamental concepts that we useto interpret archaeological materials. Insoll’sconcern is how we unselfconsciously imposeconceptions shaped by the present on to thepast in ways that preclude accurateinterpretation. His task is to explore theunacknowledged limitations on our ways ofinterpreting in hopes of engaging moreprofitably with archaeological evidence. Insoll’sultimate concern is to ‘increase the range ofavailable interpretive possibilities’ in archaeology.

Separate chapters are devoted to questioningour scales of analysis, our notions of time, thecontemporary cultural contexts that shape ourconceptions of reality, and our currentrelationships with the natural world. In each ofthese chapters Insoll discusses how theconditions of modern life conceivably desensitizeus to ‘the key elements that once structuredhuman existence’.

Chapter 2 questions whether, as citizens of arapidly globalizing world that is unprecedentedin its scale and interconnectedness, we can trulyunderstand the ‘small, prescribed, andcircumscribed places’ within which the ancientslived. He also considers the material culture thatflows through these modern global networks.Given the extraordinary abundance of objectswith which we surround ourselves, are we abletruly to appreciate environments where materialpossessions are few, curated, repeatedlyrepaired, or procured from afar only at greatcost?

Chapter 3 takes aim at phenomenologicalmethodologies, querying whether we can trulyunderstand the meaning of cold, heat, dark,hunger, and dirt given the ‘comfortable

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ontologies’ of today. Insoll reaffirms the pointthat all sensory experience is ‘embodied’ andsuggests that we cannot even be certain that theassumption of similarity from Homo sapienssapiens today back to early modern forms isvalid. He includes a nice section on the role thatsmell and sound were likely to have playedwithin ancient social life. He is also good, likevarious post-processualists before him, on theconcept of death. Today death is technologized,medicalized, and compartmentalized, whereas itwas once a much more central, intimate aspectof past domestic life. Chapter 4 continues thisline of questioning by considering, among otherthings, how the modern emphasis on literacyand text desensitizes us to the value of oraltradition. Insoll alerts us to the likely importanceof the ‘aural dimension’ in giving meaning torock art and other symbolic images.

At issue in chapter 5 is our conception ofnature. Insoll explores some alreadywell-covered ground about how humankind’smodern distancing from nature affectsarchaeological interpretation. He suggests thatwhat might seem ‘wild/dangerous’ to us couldhave easily been considered ‘home/safe’ to theancients. Insoll also questions whether the wildcan be constituted by landscape alone, withoutits accompanying plant and animal inhabitants.For him, ‘the farther removed we are from directexperience of plants or animals the less “nested”in complexity our interpretations will become’.

These are just a few examples of theinterrogations Insoll invites in his effort toremind us of how archaeological interpretation isconstrained by contemporary experience.Although he complicates archaeologicalinterpretation, he is optimistic. In his concludingchapter 6 he champions a ‘critical realism’ thatassumes a real, knowable past but accepts thatour interpretations are always sociallyconstructed. He casts this position as a ‘thirdway’ that moves beyond positivism andpostmodernism. Insoll singles postmodernismout for particular criticism, and this is where areader may take exception. In contrast to Insoll,I think the positives of the postmodernintervention in archaeology clearly outweigh thenegatives, and that the discipline has beengenerally well served by this intervention. I donot see Insoll’s advocacy of critical realism asbeing much different from the advocacy of otherarchaeologists for ‘third ways’ that move ustowards more nuanced positions of ‘mitigated’or ‘guarded’ objectivity. In other words, theconcerns of the critical realist have not reallybeen neglected within the field. Although Insoll

and I might differ in our appreciation ofpostmodernism’s influence, we certainly agreeabout the knowability of the past and the needto expand the possibilities for interpretation inarchaeology.

In short, Insoll provides good service withthis book. We need to be continually vigilantabout the concepts we use in interpreting thepast. We have heard this advice for a number ofyears – indeed, it is the legacy of a ‘criticalarchaeology’ – but it is always good to bereminded of it. Insoll reminds us in a way thathe also intends to be clear and jargon-free.Mission accomplished on both counts.

Dean J. Saitta University of Denver

Pauketat, Timothy R. & Diana DiPaolo

Loren (eds). North American archaeology.xvi, 398 pp., maps, figs, tables, illus.,bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden, Mass.: BlackwellPublishing, 2004. £60.00 (cloth), £19.99

(paper)

The editors of this volume on North Americanarchaeology have set themselves an ambitiousgoal: ‘This book does have an agenda: no lessthan redefining the archaeology of a continent’(p. xi). Ambition indeed! The volume is acontribution to a series entitled ‘BlackwellStudies in Global Archaeology’ under theeditorship of Lynn Meskell and Rosemary Joyce.The general editors describe this series as beingdirected primarily at upper-divisionundergraduates as well as more advancedresearchers interested in comparative research.Neither they nor the volume editors see thesecollections as replacements for standard texts onregional prehistory.

The volume under review contains a prefaceand fifteen papers written by experts in NorthAmerican prehistory. A glossary and index arealso included. The geographic scope is ample,but, as the editors admit, not comprehensive orreally possible in a volume of this size. Missing,for example, is a chapter on the Arctic, althoughPauketat and Loren do discuss the Thuleexpansion in their historical overview of NorthAmerican archaeology. Whether by design orhappenstance, themes emerge from thesechapters. Five of them deal explicitly with thequestion of the emergence of social inequality(Kenneth Ames on the Northwest Coast,Kenneth Sassaman on the Archaic Southeast,Elizabeth Chilton on the Northeast, MicheleHegmon on the Southwest, and Stephen Leksonon Chaco and Paquimé). William Dancy’s

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chapter on Hopewell fits into this theme,although it is more about a thorough descriptionof what is known of Hopewell and less abouthow its non-egalitarian social order came intobeing. A further five chapters are focused uponhistorical archaeology (Stephen Silliman on thecontact period, broadly defined, Loren on Frenchand Spanish colonies and the creolizationprocess, Theresa Singleton on thepre-Revolutionary War African diaspora, andDean Saitta on the archaeology of the Americanlabour movement in the early twentieth-centuryWest). Four other chapters do not fit easily intothese two themes: James Adovasio and DavidPedler assess current thinking about thepeopling of the New World; Dale Henning writeson Plains archaeology from a solidly culturalhistorical perspective; Pauketat offers a chapteron the inherent variability of the Missisippiantraditional from a decidedly modern theoreticalstance; and, finally, Joe Watkins recounts thecontentious history of relationships betweenarchaeologists and Native Americans and howthat has played out in a variety of legal venues.

So how well does this collection of papersmeet the varied expectations of the editors ofthe series as well as those of the volume editors?As a (very) occasional instructor in NorthAmerican archaeology, I found most of thepapers very stimulating. However, I also believethat one of the intended audiences – advancedundergraduates – will have a difficult time withmany of the papers. It is not that they are poorlywritten or full of obscure references, but simplythat most undergraduates taking this class arenot likely to have a sufficiently deep backgroundin archaeology to understand the complexnature of many of the positions offered in them.But I do think that every instructor of NorthAmerican prehistory should own this book,because I think it will enrich their lectures andwiden their perspectives, whether they agreewith the positions taken by the authors or not.

I am less certain, however, that the volumehas reached the goal of ‘redefining thearchaeology of a continent’. Although everypaper in the volume is worth reading, I cannotsay that it has significantly altered my perceptionof North American archaeology in a fundamentalway, and, frankly, I am not sure what such aredefinition might entail. What comes closest toachieving this is the inclusion of the papers thatdeal with more recent times. Aside from theobligatory lectures on the contact period, mostcourses in North American archaeology areabout indigenous peoples, and anything beyondthis tends to end up in courses on historical

archaeology. By their inclusion of papers onmore recent times, such as Loren’s paper oncreolization and identity formation, the editorsmake a good case that this is an artificialdistinction. I heartily agree, and look forward toother attempts, like this volume, that promise tobroaden the scope of coverage of NorthAmerican archaeology.

Mark Aldenderfer University of Arizona

Ungar, Peter S. (ed.). Evolution of the humandiet: the known, the unknown, and theunknowable. xiv, 413 pp., maps, tables, figs,illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: OxfordUniv. Press, 2007. £68.00 (cloth)

This is a timely volume containing a wide rangeof contributions on the evolution ofPlio-Pleistocene hominin diets. The ‘known,unknown, and unknowable’ refers to a 2003

Sloan Foundation conference in whichcontributors from disparate disciplines presentedpapers on the evolution of hominin diets withthe aim of furthering our knowledge about thisrather poorly understood period. The outcome isa fascinating volume, edited by Peter Ungar,which contains twenty-four chapters (includingtwo introductory chapters and a summationchapter) written by key anthropologists,archaeologists, ecologists, primatologists, andanatomists.

Following the motto set forth by the SloanFoundation, all chapters address the known,unknown, and unknowable aspects in a widerange of research areas that share a commonfocus on hominin diets. By doing so, the authorsprovide the reader with invaluable insights asthey do not only outline current knowledge butalso refer to future areas which should beinvestigated and address factors that set theultimate limits to the kind of knowledge that canbe obtained. Each chapter is therefore not only aconcise and informative report on specificaspects relevant to the study of the evolution ofhominin diets, but also a window to someepistemological insights and more broadly tophilosophical questions regarding the nature ofscientific inquiry.

The book comprises five sections. In chapter1, Walker provides an overview on studies ofearly hominin diets. The next chapter, by Henryand Wood, provides an introduction to thehominin fossil record. Together these twochapters set the stage to the following section(section II), which contains seven contributionsto the study of diets from the hominin fossil

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record. These chapters fall into two broadcategories: contributions that examine thedentition and the masticatory apparatus bylooking at functional anatomy, biomechanics,and dental micro-wear, and others that focus onchemical analyses of bone and enamel. Chapters3 and 4 by Lucas and Ungar, respectively, dealwith the evolution of hominin dentition from afunctional perspective. The authors discussvariation in tooth size and cusp morphology inrelation to corresponding variations in hominindiets. Their contributions provide an up-to-datereview of major studies on tooth-wear in relationto mandibular and tooth morphology as well asan account of methodological aspects andpresent and future limitations.

In chapter 5, Teaford reviews studies ofenamel thickness and enamel micro-structureand the use of Finite Element Modelling (FEM).In chapter 6, Daegling and Grine review ourcurrent knowledge regarding mandibularbiomechanics. A major theme is the extent towhich biomechanical studies can successfullygauge variation in mastication, and, in turn,apply observations gained from both homininfossils and living primates to the study of dietand jaw forms of the early hominins. In hissecond contribution (chapter 7), Teafordelaborates upon studies of dental micro-wearand diets as evident from the analysis of bothfossil dentition and living primates (includingin vitro laboratory studies). The section on theanalysis of archaeological and palaeontologicalsamples is particularly informative as it providesan account of some of the major difficultiesencountered when attempting to assessquantitatively ante-mortem dental micro-wearin the context of variations in foodstuff and diet.The next two chapters discuss the reconstructionof early hominin diets based on the study ofstable isotope analysis of dental enamel andbone. Together they provide the reader with anoverview of recent advances in one of the mostpromising and challenging research fields inpalaeoanthropology.

Section III addresses the study of hominindiets on the basis of analyses of thearchaeological record. Chapter 10 (Blumenschineand Pobiner) addresses zooarchaeologicalaspects and particularly the analysis of cut marksvs carnivore tooth marks. The following chapter,by Bunn, focuses on taphonomic perspectivesbased on studies of the FLK Zinj archaeologicalsite and relevant bone assemblage. Central tothis chapter is the analysis of the taphonomy ofcarcasses and the reconstruction of hominin andcarnivore interaction spheres. It also brings forth

central questions regarding the role of meat inearly hominin diets. In chapter 12 Shea providesan overview of current knowledge regardinghominin stone-tool use for subsistence practices.It concentrates on a central question inarchaeological studies, namely to what extentcan we interpret variability in stone tool forms inthe context of the study of variations insubsistence-related tasks?

Section IV contains contributions onpalaeoecology and modelling. Both chapter 13

(Peters) and chapter 14 (Reed and Rector)address early hominin habitats. These chaptersexamine theoretical perspectives, actualisticstudies, ecosystems analysis, palaeoclimatic andpalaeovegetational reconstructions, and otheraspects that are pertinent to the study of earlyhominin habitats. In chapter 15 Sept introducesthe readers to palaeoanthropological modellingof hominin palaeoenvironments. These arediscussed in the particular context of earlyhominin diets. Chapter 16 (Wrangham) considersthe role of cooking in the evolution of humandiets and particularly the ‘cooking enigma’ –why cooking became a human universal and yetit does not appear to have had majorevolutionary effects. In chapter 17 Lambertfocuses on studies of seasonality and the role ofboth low-quality and high-quality foods amongliving chimpanzee and cercopithecoidpopulations. These are then discussed in thecontext of studies of hominin diet, andparticularly behavioural solutions to criticalperiods of food shortage following theirexpansion into increasingly seasonal habitats. Inchapter 18 Leonard, Robertson, and Snodgrassreview energetic models of human nutritionalevolution. The chapter addresses how changesin body and brain size and weight, body fat,metabolic rates, and other physiological andenergetic aspects relate to changes in nutritionalquality.

Section V contains the three closing chapters.Chapters 19 (Cordain) and 20 (Eaton) considerthe broader implications of studies of earlyhominin diets, in particular the study of bothpre- and post-agricultural modern humanpopulations. The book concludes with asummarizing account (Ungar) of the known,unknown, and unknowable regarding theevolution of hominin diets, on the basis of thevarious types of evidence (fossils, living primates,archaeological).

The contributions in this volume discuss adiverse range of topics. All chapters are of highquality and the skilful editing touch hasproduced an overall consistency of style. The

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result is an excellent volume which should beread by anyone who is interested in humanevolution, evolutionary anatomy, palaeoecology,and an array of related fields.

Ron Pinhasi University College Cork

Colonialism and politics

Buzalka, Juraj. Nation and religion: the politicsof commemoration in South-East Poland. xiv,237 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Berlin: LITVerlag, 2007. €29.90 (paper)

In the first paragraph of his book Juraj Buzalkamentions the 2005 elections in Poland thatbrought the Kaczynski brothers to power, sayingthat the leaders of the winning party expressedtheir thanks ‘for the support of the Catholic,nationalist, and xenophobic Radio Maryja’.Subsequently he reminds us that 95 per cent ofPoles declare themselves as Roman Catholic andrefers to a discussion in the Polish parliamentconcerning proclamation of Jesus Christ the Kingof Poland.

In autumn 2007, a political party led byJarosław Kaczynski was practically voted out ofpower. The beginning of Buzalka’s book wouldprobably be disturbing for many Poles voting forthe opposition party – as it was for me. Here itcomes again, I thought, a representation ofPoland as nationalistic, xenophobic, andconservative-Catholic. After carefully reading hiswork, I still think that such a beginning isunfortunate, as it does not do justice to thesubtle and ethnographically grounded analysisfound in the rest of the book.

Buzalka’s insights are based on his fieldworkamong Ukrainian Greek Catholic believers inGalicia (South/East Poland), but he presents hisconclusions as relevant for understanding Polishsociety en large. While his work is an importantcontribution to ethnographic studies ofnational/religious minorities in contemporaryEurope, it can be read as a generalanthropological study of political mobilization,national identification, and the role of religion inthose processes. He addresses a number ofissues which have drawn the attention of socialand political scientists working in EasternEurope: politics of memory; relations betweenreligious and national identities; civil society. Inparticular the concepts of post-peasantpopulism, artificial versus ordinary tolerance,and multiculturalism receive theoretical attention

in important and innovative ways in Buzalka’swork.

Quoting Polish anthropologist MichałBuchowski, who warned against trying to writea representative account of Polish ruraltransformations from a perspective of aparticular region of once-partitioned andtherefore diverse Poland, Buzalka states that inthe analysis of populism in Poland, the Galiciaregion should be the starting point. He claimsthat ‘despite the rest of Poland having beenstructurally different ... the political expression ofpopulism there was taken from Galicia and itspeasantry’ (p. 21). This is an interesting butcourageous claim. Although it is true thatright-wing populist parties draw much of theirelectorate from Galicia, this proves neither thatpopulism originates from this region nor that itis successfully transferred to other parts of thecountry.

Buzalka understands populism as a discoursethat can be combined with various ideologicaltraditions and institutional settings. In theGalician version, it proposes moulding societyand state according to the peasant conceptionof work, property, and administration, seeingthe peasantry as a class entitled to politicalleadership because of its innate spiritual andnational value. The author underlines thosefeatures of Polish populism-peasantism thatpresumably link it with Catholic doctrine, suchas obsession with nation, support for patriarchalfamily, and belief in the inherent value of ‘simplepeople’. He also claims that in contemporaryPoland we actually encounter post-peasantpopulism, because it resonates among peopleliving in urban centres yet retains both socialrelations that characterize peasant life as well asan idealized image of the countryside as thelocus of ‘authentic’ national culture.

However, it seems that Buzalka is himselfcaught up within the discourse of populismwhen he makes a distinction between theartificial tolerance of NGOs and state-supportedinitiatives celebrating difference between variousnational and religious groups in ways inspiredby the politics of multiculturalism. He contrastssuch a staged tolerance with an everydaycoexistence and life-sharing that he terms‘agrarian’ or ‘ordinary tolerance’. While agreeingwith Buzalka that state and NGO programmesthat (over-)use the notion of multiculturalismmay actually contribute to reinforcing differenceand confine people within clearly markedcultural compartments, I wonder if his notion of‘ordinary tolerance’ is not influenced by aromantic vision of village life, which is a feature

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of peasantism, the very discourse that heattempts to deconstruct.

Whether or not one agrees with Buzalka’sparticular conclusions, his book is notable andimportant. First, the boldness of his conclusionsis somewhat refreshing in anthropologicalwriting. Anthropologists tend to indulge inendless interpretations and reinterpretations,which, although interesting and enriching inthemselves, make our discipline somehowirrelevant for solutions-seeking policy-makers.Buzalka’s work is a good example of linkingpolitical analysis with anthropological sensitivity.Second, instead of focusing on theunprecedented strength and intensity of socialistinfluences and the exceptionality of post-socialisttransformations (as has been done in most ofthe anthropologies of post-socialisttransformations to date), Buzalka shows thatsome of the features of contemporary EastEuropean societies should be understood withreference to pre-socialist social practices. Hereminds us that the socialist past is not theonly past the East European societies have andclaim.

Agnieszka Halemba University of Leipzig

Chaturvedi, Vinayak. Peasant pasts: historyand memory in western India. xxi, 307 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ.California Press, 2007. £13.95 (paper)

This book is a brave and elegantly writtenaccount of various ‘acts of resistance’ againstcolonialism and nationalism among peasantsknown as Dharalas in the Kheda district ofGujarat, western India, during the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It isalso a critical intervention in the world of Khedastudies.

The greater part of the book examinespeasant politics in Kheda through the lives andmythologies of two enchanting characters:Ranchod and Daduram. Ranchod was a peasantwho boldly claimed the end of the British raj,and himself king of a new polity in 1898;Chaturvedi reassures us that this was quitecommon at the time. Daduram was a priest andsocial reformer whose name lives on in Khedathrough a sacred genealogy and a number oftemples. Separately, these two figures developedcritiques of the colonial and dominant elites ofthe region. Their activities brought them to theattention of the colonial government, and,consequently, they found their way into boththe imperial archive and popular memory. In the

final sections of the book, the author takes us ona tour of Kheda, tracing memories of Ranchodand Daduram.

To the non-initiated, the world of Kheda maysound parochial and obscure, but the district hasbeen written about often, most notably by thehistorian David Hardiman. Indeed, Hardiman’sassociation with Kheda, as well as with theSubaltern Studies Group, has ensured thatscholarship on the district has assumed arecognizable style and epistemological character.Chaturvedi gently, but provocatively, challengessome of the assumptions of this scholarship. Heargues, essentially, that the history of theDharalas is more subaltern than that ofHardiman’s Patidars. Why should this matter?The Patidars are well known to have participatedin Gandhi’s nationalist agitations and haveconsequently achieved iconic status as rebelliouspeasants at a national level. However,Chaturvedi suggests that their dominance at thelocal level was based on the exploitation andoppression of Dharalas both through coloniallegislation known as the Criminal Tribes Act andthrough participation in the nationalistmovement itself. The subaltern history thatHardiman resurrects for the Patidars obscures theunderlying histories of their Dharala underlings,both before and during the nationalist struggle.

The elegance of Chaturvedi’s book lies notonly in the careful and understated prose, butalso in the apparent honesty of the account ofwhat the research entailed. There are the usualunexpected intrigues discovered in the colonialarchive that give thrill to the chase, but there arealso wonderful encounters of serendipity andliving people in the fields of Gujarat, whichgrow increasingly compelling and frustrating asthe narrative of the book unfolds. Thecompulsion lies in the way the book is puttogether, structured around the revelationsafforded by a decade of research. The frustrationlies in the fact that the author exhibits morepatience and understanding of the deficienciesin the archive than with the stories of the livingfolk that he encounters along the way. Forexample, had Chaturvedi gone to investigate theshrine dedicated to Ranchod (discussed inchapter 56, of the sixty-four) with moreethnographic sensitivity, he would surely nothave turned up unannounced, have questionedsome random villagers, and, upon finding theyhad nothing to say to him, conclude that thisrevealed a ‘hidden history’. However, thiscriticism notwithstanding, there is a genuineelegance in the way material from archives, oralaccounts, and secondary sources is synthesized,

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and the meaning of changing registers ofunderstanding and identity is explained andexplored.

The Dharala material is called upon to maketwo broader arguments about the nature ofknowledge and power in colonial society. Thefirst engages with Partha Chatterjee, for whomanti-colonial nationalism divided socialinstitutions and practices into two domains: thematerial and the spiritual. For Chatterjee,anti-colonial nationalism maintained sovereigntywithin the spiritual domain, ceding the materialdomain to the colonial power. In contrast,Chaturvedi suggests the domains are notclear-cut and that to maintain power inpost-colonial India the anti-colonialists hadalready to have claimed a stake in the materialdomain. The second argument that Chaturvedimakes is more interesting and builds on RanajitGuha’s observations on the importance ofpeasant kings in nineteenth-century India.Chaturvedi suggests that kingship was a formof ethical governance for peasants, sanctionedby local custom, which also straddledChatterjee’s material and spiritual domains.However, given that the book is so very carefulabout historical change, the notion of kingshipevoked by Chaturvedi seems strangely staid andahistorical.

Peasant pasts is a fine piece of scholarshipthat deserves to be widely read.

Edward Simpson School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Gellner, David N. (ed.). Resistance and thestate: Nepalese experiences (revised edition).xv, 383 pp., map, tables, illus., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.£85.00 (cloth)

Nepal has been a prime site for anthropologicalfieldwork since it first opened its doors to foreignresearchers in the early 1950s. However,anthropological writings on Nepal took littleaccount of the Nepalese state until the stateitself became embattled during the 1990s. Thissubstantial edited volume looks at the Nepalesestate from various vantage points of resistance toit. Thus, although we must still wait for anauthoritative anthropological analysis of theNepalese state (even as the question ‘whichNepalese state?’ becomes ever more pertinent),we are here provided with some unrivalledopportunities to locate certain elements of thepopulation, variously identified and defined, inrelation to it.

The book is divided into three sections. Insection 1, ‘The state, development and local poli-tics’, Ian Harper and Christopher Tarnowskiexamine resistance to state centralization in thecontext of the DOTS treatment of tuberculosis,on the one hand, and community forestryprojects, on the other; Ben Campbell describesthe impact upon a mainly Tamang population ofthe ‘government environmental surveillance’ thatfollowed the establishment of the Langtangnational park; William Fisher describes thegrowth of ethnic sentiment (and the use of the‘more puzzled over than understood’ term jana-jati ) over a ten-year period in the district ofMyagdi; and Krishna Hachhethu describes therelationship between Nepal’s two largest politicalparties (the Nepali Congress and the CommunistParty of Nepal [United Marxist Leninist]) and theNepali electorate, pointing out that the study ofpolitical parties is the ‘least-developed area in theliterature on Nepali politics’.

In section 2, ‘The state and ethnic activism’,Karl-Heinz Kramer laments the chronicallyunrepresentative nature of the Nepali state;Giséle Krauskopff describes the way in which theTharu population of the southern Tarai belt hascreated and mobilized an ethno-political identityfor itself; and Marie Lecomte-Tilouine describesthe continued resonance of the cult of the rebelking Lakhan Thapa among the Magars of themid-western hills.

In section 3, ‘The state and Maoistinsurgency’, Colin Millard provides a glimpse ofhow the ‘People’s War’ that began in westerndistricts in the mid-1990s and spread throughoutthe country over the next five years was viewedin the valley of Dhorpatan in 1996-8; JudithPettigrew views the insurgency and the state’sresponse from the point of view of Gurung(Tamu-Mai) communities that have been unableto avoid becoming implicated and entangledin both; and Anne de Sales examines therelationship between Maoist ideology and thelong-standing ethnic grievances of the KhamMagar.

All of these chapters are valuable andinsightful and several have genuinely new thingsto say. They vary in length from twenty to fiftypages, but the longer essays are not necessarilythose that make the greatest impact. There arealso some repetitions of content, and writingstyles vary considerably, from the clear andsuccinct to the jargonized, such as the following:

For them [the Dalits], the Maoistdiscourse that explained the need toeliminate, not the people who filled the

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categories, but the categories themselves,resonated with their simultaneous andapparently paradoxical hatred of andreliance on (and even affection for)specific individuals within those categories(Fisher, p. 128).

I take it that the existence of institutionswhich regulate differential resource accessbetween persons, genders and groupsdoes not necessarily question thephenomenological dimension of thedwelling perspective, but the mediationsof social control, the hierarchies ofauthority, and the exclusions of propertyand inheritance need a politics ofenvironmental engagement tocomplement the phenomenology(Campbell, p. 98).

Although the volume focuses on resistance tothe Nepalese state and does not set out toanalyse the state itself, the editor’s introductioncould have asked a few more questions than itdoes about the construction of the Nepali state,and particularly its relationship and identificationwith the palace and the Shah monarchy. Theforms of resistance described here are relativelynew in a Nepali context, at least in terms of thescale and volume of their articulation, and this ispartly because resistance to the state prior to1990 was regularly construed as opposition tothe king.

These minor criticisms aside, the book is anextremely important and valuable contributionto the literature on Nepal. Several of its chaptersshould be on university reading lists worldwide,not just for the tiny handful of courses that focuson Nepal but also for courses with a broaderSouth Asian focus, or indeed courses on theseoverarching themes that have no regional focusat all.

Michael Hutt School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Identity, diaspora, and tourism

Adams, Kathleen M. Art as politics: re-craftingidentities, tourism, and power in Tana Toraja,Indonesia. xii, 286 pp., maps, plates, illus.,bibliogr. Honolulu: University of Hawai’iPress, 2006. £25.00 (paper)

This book explores the role of tourism in thecreation and reinvention of culture in Sulawesi,

showing how tourism is implicated in thecomplex processes involved in the politics ofidentity. As Adams so eloquently puts it, thiswork ‘explores the ways in which tourism andtourist arts are entwined with cultural identityand with the crafting of new sensibilities about alocal community’s place in the world’ (p. 17).

Adams discusses Torajan arts in terms of thedistinctive ancestral houses (tonkonan) as well asthe images and symbols inscribed upon themthat are transferred on to contemporarypaintings and wall plaques. These art forms alsonow include miniature replicas of the houses fortourist markets. Primarily sites of kinship andritual importance within the Torajan region,elsewhere the tonkonan were regarded by thepost-independence Indonesian state as a visiblerepresentation of the ‘backwardness’ and‘primitive’ lifestyles of non-Muslim,upland-dwelling people. This changed as stateauthorities began to perceive ‘tradition’ asmarketable, and tourism had a significant role toplay in the way that houses became objects ofconsumption. As Torajan migrants gained inwealth and status, they began to sponsorartisans to embellish their homes or add ricebarns in the traditional style, bringing Torajanarchitecture into Indonesia’s capital city andbeyond. As the cultural capital of the house formbecame increasingly obvious to the touristmarket, elements of the architecture (particularlythe distinctive roof style) became adopted morewidely, for instance in the building of touristhotels and in the roof style of the internationalairport. Furthermore, the images of tonkonanbegan to travel the world on packets of coffee,on tourist brochures, and as art objects inminiature.

Drawing on Scott’s study of resistanceelsewhere in Southeast Asia, Adams takes up thetheme of art objects as ‘weapons of the weak’.She reveals how some objects produced inToraja for tourist markets have been created witha critique of the current political regimeembedded in the images. Her informants spoketo her of how these objects were a means forthem to voice dissent more widely, althoughthere was a strong possibility that no one woulddecipher these messages without a soundknowledge of Torajan iconography. Adams alsotalks about the tensions created among theBugis, who formerly were the coastal-dwellingslave-raiders who preyed on the Torajanuplands. When Torajan art and symbolsinfiltrated the Bugis-Makasserese heartland, thebalance of power began to shift. However, whilesome may have regarded this as a mark of

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Torajan cultural ascendancy, at the same timeimages of the tonkonan were appropriated byBugis artists, and then re-created on silver wallplaques for sale to the tourist market. It isinteresting that while Adams links the use of artform to resistance, she never fully addresses thepossibility that Torajan art may simply beensnared within a display of cultural hegemony,with the balance of power never really havingshifted. The coastal-dwelling slave-raiders of oldcould be regarded as having exchangedslave-raiding for the raiding of Torajan arts andiconography. However, Adams doesacknowledge that the ‘weapons of the weak’may simply be ‘weak weapons’ (p. 192).

One minor criticism of this work would be astylistic one. The author chose to keep most ofthe theoretical material separated withinendnotes, and referenced using numbers ratherthan citing authors’ names within chapters. Thismeant that it was more of an effort to gain asense of how theory and ethnography wereintertwined. While this might be a bonus forreaders from outside the discipline ofanthropology, who may simply enjoy theethnography, it means that the theoretical andanalytical contribution of this work remains lessobvious and possibly less incisively developed.

The major strength of this book is in itsdetailed, beautifully written ethnography, whichincorporates polysemy, multivocality, and a longengagement with a field that has ranged from a‘village study’ to research beyond theboundaries of Southeast Asia. Adams’s researchspans several decades, and over the years herfieldsite has expanded to incorporate a translocalview of the Toraja: incorporating highlanddwellers in the ‘traditional’ heartlands ofSulawesi, rich migrants living in Jakarta,Indonesia’s capital city, and migrants to the USA.This attention to multiple fieldsites extends tomultiple interpretations of Torajan identity aswell as competing interpretations of the artobjects themselves. This provides the reader witha finely nuanced account of art and politics inthis region.

Fiona Harris University of Edinburgh

Ailon, Galit. Global ambitions and localidentities: an Israeli-American high-tech merger.viii, 181 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2007. £36.50 (cloth)

Identity is an important issue in management, ascompanies seek to maintain a corporate identityamong workers. This is hard when companies

merge, and harder when the merger isinternational. This book focuses on such amerger. The workers at issue are the Tel Avivemployees of ‘Isrocom’, an Israelitelecommunications company that merged with‘Amerotech’, an American company in the sameindustry.

Global ambitions and local identities beginswith two background chapters. The firstintroduces Isrocom and describes how Ailoncarried out her research. It also introduces twoapproaches to corporate identity in the businessliterature. One sees it as what is central to anddistinctive about a company, defined andinculcated by management and absorbed byworkers. The other sees it more sociologically, asgenerated from below and as having a range ofdimensions that can vary with people’s contexts.The second chapter describes the history ofIsrocom and its merger with Amerotech, theresult being a single company, ‘Globalint’,dominated by Isrocom. With this backgroundlaid, Ailon turns to identity.

The first aspect of identity that she describesis the ways that people did or did not seethemselves and their American fellows asmembers of a single company. As she describesit, they did not. She investigates this in twochapters. The first concerns directcommunication between Israelis and Americans;the second concerns the ways that Israeliworkers represented Americans to each other. Inboth, Israeli workers cast themselves and theAmericans as separate entities within Globalint,with the Israeli ‘us’ superior to the American‘them’. This bifurcation was not absolute:business was conducted, work got done, thecompany’s interests were served. However, forTel Aviv workers this was a company dominatedby Isrocom. So they did not reject the globalcorporation; they sought to appropriate it.

The second aspect of identity that Ailonconsiders is personal: how those Israeli workerssaw themselves as people in relationship withtheir local and American fellows. Once more, shepresents this in two chapters. The first concernspeople’s national identities as Israelis; the secondconcerns their work identities, based on the sortof jobs that they do in the company. These twochapters point in somewhat divergent directions.

National identity was very important. For herTel Aviv workers, the success of Isrocom and itsdomination of Globalint sprang from Israelinational characteristics; the weakness ofAmerotech sprang from American nationalcharacteristics. Israelis were, simply, harderworking, less cowed by authority, more flexible

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and innovative than Americans. There was anelement of irony in this, as the virtues that TelAviv workers saw in themselves were things thatthey saw as ‘American’, so that they ended upportraying themselves as being better Americansthan the Americans themselves.

The other set of personal identities that Ailondescribes are those based on the specific jobsthat people do, and she considers projectmanagers, computer programmers, HR staff andcorporate managers. Once again, workers talkedin terms of a superior Israeli ‘us’ and an inferiorAmerican ‘them’. However, things were morecomplex when workers reflected on specifictasks, meetings, and projects with specificAmericans. Here, occupational identities andvalues began to cut across national ones: theirattachment to an Israeli ‘us’ could conflict withtheir attachment to, for instance, aprogramming ‘us’. The people to whom Ailontalked did not all experience this tension, andnot all those who did resolved it in the sameway, so there seems to have been no clearmaintenance of either an Israeli-Americancontrast or an occupational unity.

In her brief conclusion, Ailon returns to thenature of identity in a global company. Notsurprisingly, she argues that the conventionalview that corporate identity is defined andimposed from the top is not very realistic. Shegoes on, however, to take issue as well with thepostmodern idea that people have a set ofpossible identities rather than a single one. Shenotes that people’s selection of identity issharply constrained by the expectations andpressures of those with whom they interact.

Global ambitions and local identities raisesquestions. What did things look like from theAmerotech side? What was the relationshipbetween Tel Aviv workers’ identities and theirperformance? How was management trying toshape workers’ thinking? The existence of thesequestions reflects, perhaps, the intriguing talethat Ailon tells as she wrestles with the complexand abstract notion of identity in concretesituations. The result is well worth her efforts.

James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford BrookesUniversities

Barber, Karin (ed.). Africa’s hidden histories:everyday literacy and making the self. x,451 pp., illus., bibliogrs. Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press, 2006. £18.99 (paper)

Literature scholars have spilled a great deal of inkon the published works of a small cadre of

African novelists. But novelists were not the onlyones doing creative writing in twentieth-centuryAfrica. In colonial Yorubaland, the traderAkinpelu Obisesan for over forty years madedaily entries in his diary. He regularly reviewedhis work, making marginal comments andhighlighting important passages. In South Africa,the healer Louisa Mvemve filled governmentofficials’ mailboxes with letters describing hermovements and documenting successfultherapies. She was using the government’s filesas a personal archive, relying on officials topreserve her papers and perpetuate hermemory. In the Gold Coast, the newspapercolumnist Mercy Ffloulkes-Crabbe wrote anautobiography, in two handwritten volumes,that buttressed her reputation as a respectablepublic figure. The essays collected in KarinBarber’s new edited book study these and othertexts that African writers have squirrelled away intrunks, suitcases, plastic bags, and otherrepositories. These ‘tin trunk’ texts, Barberargues, are a coherent field of creative writing(p. 7). Obisesan, Mvemve, and theircontemporaries were intermediate figures,insecure in their command over literacy anduncertain of their standing in polite society.Their sometimes prodigious literary output wasan aspect of their effort to manage theirreputations, to reinforce their claims on otherpeople, and to work out lines of social agency.Barber and her contributors bring this field ofliterary and political endeavour to light.

This collection shows that tin trunk textswere never only about their writers’ private lives.Africans shoehorned lists, account statements,testimonials, and other genres into theirpersonal writing, creating texts that were sociallyuseful. A.K. Boakye Yiadom’s autobiography ‘Myown life’ was written, by hand, in twonotebooks. As Stephan Miescher shows, the textwas, in part, evidence. In its pages Yiadomrecorded the expenses that he incurred innegotiating his several marriages, anddocumented the gifts that he exchanged withacquaintances and relatives. Yiadom wascreating social capital in his diary, transformingforgettable human interactions into evidencethat could be used in the future. AkinpeluObisesan similarly used his diary as a tool ofself-realization. As Ruth Watson’s chapter shows,Obisesan filled his diary with descriptions of thehonour that other people had paid him. Hethereby established his respectable character tohimself, creating the psychological wherewithalby which to act purposefully. Many of Africa’severyday writers composed with an eye on an

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audience that might be persuaded by theevidence that they laid out. Lynn Thomas’sengaging chapter on love letters in 1950s and1960s eastern Africa shows how young men andwomen used the post to establish the dates onwhich their sexual liaisons had taken place,creating thereby evidence to use in pregnancycompensation cases. Yiadom, Obisesan, andKenya’s letter-writers were using their skill inliteracy to clarify their social world, to representmutable social relations in advantageous terms,and thereby to gain leverage over other people.

But tin trunk texts were not only pragmaticvehicles of self-positioning. Africa’s writers wereengaged in innovative artistic work, and severalchapters of the book highlight the novelties thatthey created. Karin Barber’s remarkable chapterconcerns schoolmaster S.A. Adenle, who in the1930s and 1940s printed two Yoruba-languagepamphlets. Adenle was a lonely figure,labouring in provincial Osogbo. He worked tocreate a self-contained text. In form, the text waspeppered with artificial breaks that preservedeach line’s syllabic structure but made the textimpossible to read aloud. In content, the textwas organized as a series of tableaux illustratinga maxim. Adenle’s texts did not generateforward narrative movement, and neither didthey invite comment or elaboration. They weremeant for an abstract readership, not for animagined community of discourse. Their noveltyderives from the insularity of their author’s socialworld.

This is on many levels an exceptionallyengaging book. Analytically, it reanimates thetired study of identity politics by showing howAfricans used texts to represent themselves inthe social world. Methodologically, it expandsthe field of material that scholars can explore.The book is full of beautiful illustrations of textsthat have long been locked away in tin trunks.Barber’s contributors are literally bringing‘Africa’s hidden histories’ into public view. Butfor whom were these texts hidden?Methodologically, tin trunk texts are difficult forhistorians to find. But regardless of whether theywere locked away, texts were useful to politicalorganizers because they appeared to bepermanent, and available therefore for futuregenerations to read. As I have argued, archivingwas more than a technique of self-management(Derek Peterson, Creative writing, 2004). It was ameans by which African record-keepersshort-circuited human mortality, allowing theirpartisans to project themselves forward in time.By this means, political organizers invited peopleto commit themselves to projects that would

outlive them personally. Barber’s contributorssay nothing about the political work of archivalmanagement. This is not a criticism so much asit is a call for further research into the temporalhorizons that organizers opened up with theirtin trunks.

Africa’s everyday writers can have no betterintroduction to the scholarly world than KarinBarber’s exciting book. This is a volume thatshould command a wide readership.

Derek R. Peterson Selwyn College,University of Cambridge

Basu, Paul. Highland homecomings: genealogyand heritage tourism in the Scottish diaspora.xv, 256 pp., figs, tables, illus., bibliogr.London, New York: Routledge, 2007. £24.95

(paper)

‘The quest for roots is a quest for origins: ajourney to the “source” ’ (p. xi). In Highlandhomecomings, Paul Basu traces the variouspathways on which this journey may proceed inthe case of the Scottish diaspora: from familyhistories to internet portals and email-discussionlists; from globally organized clan societies tolocal heritage museums; from package tours topersonal trips to the homeland; fromperformances to souvenirs – and all the wayback again. Consistently traversing theonline/offline boundary, Basu takes GeorgeMarcus’s plea for a ‘multi-sited ethnography’seriously. Through a heterodox methodologyand ‘eclectic’ theoretical approach (p. 4), Basulays open the multidimensionality and deepambiguity of the homecoming drive.

This becomes particularly clear in hisdiscussion of the Scottish case as diaspora, wherehe makes creative use of Robin Cohen’s schemeof the features of a diaspora (Global diasporas,1996). The Scottish ‘homecomers’ predominantlysee themselves as members of a ‘victimdiaspora’. The major reference-point for thisself-conception lies in the so-called HighlandClearances of the nineteenth century, wheremany Scottish people were expelled from theirland in order to make room for large-scaleagricultural development. In the narrativesanalysed by Basu, the Clearances are oftenlikened to other historical incidents of violence,such as slavery, colonial genocide, or, mostprominently, the Jewish diasporic experience.Homecoming is consequently associated withhealing and frequently described in terms ofpilgrimage. Yet often ignored in theserepresentations are those features which would

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qualify the Scottish diaspora in Cohen’s terms asa ‘trade’ or ‘imperial’ diaspora, for economicprospects or colonial ambitions were as much atplay in the Scottish exodus and have inthemselves led to the expulsion and oppressionof indigenous populations. Focusing on theexample of Scottish migrant family histories inAustralia (chap. 9), Basu demonstrates how thepopular identification with exile and victimhoodlargely derives from the present (and stillprivileged) status of white middle-class people informer settler colonies. In seeking‘uncomplicated belonging’ (p. 208), hisinformants apply ‘a moral rhetoric of exile’ inorder to negotiate ‘a morally ambiguous historyof emigration and colonization’ (p. 193).Moreover, for Basu, the discourse of aboriginalitythat lies at the heart of the homecomingenterprise is not derived from the specificity ofthe Scottish diasporic situation alone, but rathercomes as a result of the ‘semantic migration’(p. 188) of concepts and meanings, where localand global references intersect.

This aspect can be further emphasized byacknowledging the fact that towards the end ofthe twentieth century, homecoming or ‘rootstourism’ has become a widespread practice, notonly among people of Scottish descent. Basuviews this articulate desire to return to animagined ‘wholeness’ as a challenge toacademic conceptions of contemporary identityas deeply fragmented and constantly re-formed‘on the move’ alone. Instead, he emphasizes theneed for ‘ontological security’ (AnthonyGiddens, Modernity and self-identity, 1991) andsuggests that ‘home ... is not to be found eitherin movement or in stasis but in the articulationof both’ (p. 8, original emphasis). Thegenealogical practices and itineraries of the‘imagineered’ Scots (see chap. 4) attest to thisambiguity. On the one hand, they draw onmetaphors of blood, ancestral kinship, cultural‘sameness’, and territorial attachment. On theother hand, the connections that are sought arehighly selective and the process of ‘kinning’ isnot just a matter of finding the ‘missing link’ butalso of wider popular trends and politicalcontexts.

Basu speaks of the destinations ofhomecoming as ‘shrines of self’ (p. 218), therebyreferring to the project of ‘self-seeking’ in latemodernity (p. 159). However, following theprinciple of identity formation as a result of bothchoice and situatedness, Basu does not assumethat those sites of memory are just arbitrary. Onthe contrary, he goes deep into the relationshipbetween landscape and memory, and his

analysis is particularly strong when it comes tothe imagined and imaginative power of thelandscape of the Scottish Highlands (as‘notional-material’ reality, p. 1) on hisinformants’ experience. Less clear are therelationships between ‘homecomers’ and localpeople, which the reader is offered, in the main,through the perspective of the former. Theconflict potential that lies in the missionaryimpulse of diasporic Scots to ‘teach [local] Scotshow to value their heritage’ (p. 86) or, evenmore so, in restitution claims (p. 205) wouldhave deserved further exploration.

On the whole, Highland homecomingsremains an intriguing study of a long-neglectedaspect of diaspora, namely that of homing-desireand homecoming-practice in all theirpsychological, performative, and political facets.

Katharina Schramm Martin Luther UniversityHalle-Wittenberg

Eisenlohr, Patrick. Little India: diaspora, time,and ethnolinguistic belonging in HinduMauritius. xv, 328 pp., maps, tables, illus.,bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. CaliforniaPress, 2006. £18.95 (paper)

This is a good study of a linguistically complexsociety. It is marred, however, by the heavy useof postmodern jargon. The reader has to hackhis or her way through a dense thicket of jargonthat infects the introduction before the booklapses into English prose. For example, translatethis sentence: ‘Diaspora as the paradigmatic caseof such “deterritorialization” of cultural practicesand identities (Appadurai 1996b) is then alsoinextricably linked to the issue of temporality,since deterritorialized or diasporic existence isdefined by temporal simultaneity in experiencinga diversity of place-bound cultural traditions’(p. 10). The author has an inordinate fondnessfor the adjective ‘diasporic’, which appears insentence after sentence.

Mauritius is a small volcanic island lyingsome 500 miles east of Madagascar. When firstencountered by the Portuguese in the fifteenthcentury, it had no human inhabitants and, infact, no mammals apart from bats. Its naturalresources – chiefly timber, plants, birds, and fish– were exploited by Dutch mariners, who didnot settle the island. It was not until theeighteenth century that the French madeconcerted efforts to colonize the island. Theyfortified it and planted sugar cane using thelabour of African slaves imported chiefly fromMadagascar. The French patois, known as

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Creole, became established and remains thelingua franca of the inhabitants.

The British conquered the Île de France in1810, restoring its original Dutch name,Mauritius. When slavery was abolishedthroughout the British Empire in 1835,Franco-Mauritian planters were faced with anacute labour shortage. They turned to India.Between 1835 and 1907 more than 450,000

Indians were brought to Mauritius from theports of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. By 1861

two-thirds of the population of the island wasIndian, a proportion maintained to the present.The greatest numbers of migrants came fromBihar and the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh).They brought with them their own variant ofHindi, Bhojputi, which still prevails among thosewho migrated from Northern India, but not, ofcourse, among the Tamil- and Telegu-speakers ofSouth India.

The British made largely unsuccessfulattempts to anglicize the colony, but theFranco-Mauritians remained economicallydominant. The language of instruction inschools became a hotly contested issue, first asEnglish versus French, and later, with theenfranchisement of the Indians, instruction inIndian ‘ancestral’ languages, especially Hindi.Despite years of controversy, Creole remains thelingua franca of the island, possibly because noone claims it as ancestral.

With the coming of independence in 1967,the struggle for cultural dominance becamemore acute as each community sought toemphasize its uniqueness. The Northern Hindus,who are the main concern of this book, usedlanguage as a defining cultural characteristic.The gradual extension of the franchise enabledthe schools to offer courses in Hindi and other‘minority languages’. They received help fromIndia, but the main struggles were within theisland itself. These struggles are well described.

Each community sponsors celebrationsemphasizing its cultural uniqueness. The largestand most spectacular of these is the annualShivrati pilgrimage to a lake in the southwest ofthe island. Pilgrims come from villages all overthe island dressed in white and carrying shrineswith brass lotas, or bottles, tied to them. Theseare used to collect water from the lake, which isthen transported back to the villages. The wateris thought to have spiritual as well as medicinalproperties. The book skilfully analyses the historyand usage of Shivrati in Mauritius.

Throughout the second half of the book, theauthor uses transliterations of Creole, Bhojputi,and Hindi to show the ways in which people

manipulate these languages, both consciouslyand unconsciously. This does not make for easyreading, despite the parallel text in English, butit does provide a linguistic picture ofcommunication, at the same time showing whya single language has not become dominant.

Altogether this is a valuable book and,suitably cleansed of jargon, should show theway for similar studies of other linguisticallycomplex societies.Burton Benedict University of California, Berkeley

Levy, André & Alex Weingrod (eds).Homelands and diasporas: holy lands and otherplaces. xii, 362 pp., bibliogrs. Stanford: Univ.Press, 2005. £19.50 (paper)

In social scientific history, up until quite recently,‘diaspora’ used to be the prerogative of Jews,and to a lesser extent of Armenians, and thisvolume on ‘homelands and diasporas’ isparticularly welcome for the new insights itprovides. In an almost ironic twist of history,Homelands and diasporas focuses on thediasporas of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians, aswell as exploring diasporas of other peoples andminorities. Hence the subtitle of the book, Holylands and other places. In brief, the collection isat once particular (to the Middle East conflict)and global, specific and comparative.

The collection is based upon a conference,which took place in 1999 in Israel’s southerntown of Beersheba, populated by Israeli Jewsand Bedouin Arabs. (It is therefore all the moreunfortunate that there is no chapter on theBedouin and their complex allegiances to aborderless homeland.) In the preface to thecollection, the editors explain that a previoussuch conference held many years ago in thesame town dealt with ethnicity. In many ways,they claim, ‘the book can be seen as a logicalcontinuation of the “ethnicity” theme’. And yet,as played out by different authors in the volume,important historical and theoretical differencesemerge. The volume attempts to go beyond thedifferences between diaspora and ethnicity topursue the meanings and salience of diasporasand their homelands. It appears that thedesignation ‘diaspora’ has succeeded in gainingacademic respectability, and, where ethnicityonce feared to tread, diaspora boldly appears.Nevertheless, throughout the book, diasporaand ethnicity are sometimes still usedinterchangeably.

Making sense of the term ‘diaspora’ is not aneasy task; unravelling the meanings of homelandmay be even more complex. In an incisive

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introduction, the editors go a long way in tryingto explore the intricacies of classic diasporas andmultiple ‘new’ ones, the recent appearance ofdiasporic centres which may challengetraditional homelands, and finally the globalinterstices between diaspora and homelands, assome groups and individuals engage intransnational contacts or commerce, or becomepart of multidirectional and internationalmigratory movements.

The Palestinian diaspora, analysed in threeseparate chapters, is one of the most intriguing.As Efrat Ben-Ze’ev demonstrates, for thoseuprooted, the lost homeland is concrete andpalpable. For those born in the diaspora,homeland has to be configured; therefore,modern technologies are employed, such asvideotapes (and today disks), internet sites, andfiction films to keep alive the imaginedhomeland.

In the final analysis, this is not so differentfrom what is going on in one of the ‘classic’diasporas, as described by Susan Katie Pattie. Inthe Armenian diaspora, itself internally dividedas to where and how the homeland exists, ‘[t]henew homeland replaces the old, but so, too, in acontinuing process, does the new diasporareplace the old’ (p. 65).

Sometimes the created diaspora adopts globalramifications. In the oft-contradictory narrative ofEthiopian Jews, so accurately portrayed by LisaAnteby-Yemini, Israel, the homeland, has turnedIsraeli immigrants from Ethiopia into an‘Ethiopian diaspora’, or even part of a ‘Blackdiaspora’, some of whom are now beginning toparticipate in a global economy and return‘home’ to Ethiopia, as Israelis. Interestingly,according to Sari Hanafi, transnational networksare not, in the case of Palestinians, an expressionof global capital, but, rather, a strategy of survivalin a world in which the centre of gravity of thePalestinian diaspora is weak.

A refreshing innovation in the book is theemphasis on the ‘spaces of interaction’. EdnaLomsky-Feder and Tamar Rapoport analyse theeffects of the return visits to Russia of formerUSSR immigrant students, who reside in Israel,and their relationship with the Russian diasporaand the cultural homeland. All this goes to showthe accuracy of Pnina Werbner’s maxim that‘diaspora is a place which is both a non-placeand a multiplicity of places’ (p. 44).

It is only a pity that in this excellent volumesome of the best scholarship (nearly two-fifths)has already been published in books andjournals.Shalva Weil Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Martinez, D.P. Identity and ritual in a Japanesediving village: the making and becoming ofperson and place. viii, 254 pp., maps, illus.,bibliogr. Honolulu: University of Hawai’iPress, 2004. $25.00 (paper)

This book joins a growing number ofethnographies that complicate standard imagesof rural Japan as being dominated by insularrice-growing farm villages, patriarchalhouseholds, and rigid social structures. Here thefocus is on a community that traditionallysubsisted in large part by harvesting productsfrom the sea through fishing and diving. Centralto the discussion are the ama, or diving women,mistakenly engrained in the popular imaginationas pearl divers, but whose actual occupation isgathering edible products such as seaweedand abalone. The author’s primary objective isto examine the role of ritual in identityconstruction, using the central themes of‘making’ and ‘becoming’, as applied to both theindividual and the village as a whole. Asecondary theme involves the mystiquesurrounding the ama and their relatively moreequitable social status compared to otherwomen in Japan.

The setting is the small village of Kuzaki,located along the eastern shoreline of ShimaPeninsula on the Pacific coast. Further inland isthe Grand Shrine at Ise, dedicated to the sungoddess Amaterasu. Kuzaki has traditionallyheld a privileged role in supplying Ise priestswith a specially prepared form of abalonethat is used as a daily offering to thegoddess.

The book begins by placing the ama withinwider issues involving women and gender. Itthen proceeds with detailed descriptions ofvillage organization, the intricacies of fishing anddiving as a way of life, the performance of ritualsdirected toward the spirits of sea and land, theencroachment of the tourist industry, activitiesand involvement of the elderly, and care for theancestors. As a result we gain a clear impressionof the life-cycle in Kuzaki and what it takes to beconsidered a ‘good person’ by the communityat large.

As in other ethnographies of Japan, womenare described as being relegated to thebackground but doing most of the work. Thiscarries over into the realm of religiousperformance, in that men assume the leadingroles in large public events involving the villageas a whole, while women attend to the moreregular private rituals for ensuring the protection

Book reviews686


of individual or household. In this particularvillage, however, marriage partners appearsignificantly more egalitarian and affectionate,perhaps because they depend upon one anotheras partners in an inherently risky enterprise. Infact an egalitarian ideal pervades thecommunity, as expressed through painstakingefforts to diffuse political power and the guidingconviction that good luck (in terms of largecatches, for example) must be shared withothers.

One problematic issue is the book’sdatedness, it being basically a reworking of fielddata collected during the author’s doctoralresearch in 1984-5. This in itself would not posesuch a problem (ethnographic data from all timeperiods being equally important to ourunderstanding of humanity) were it not for thefact that the theory that informs it andconclusions drawn from the data are equallydated. That rituals are polysemous will surelycome as no surprise to anthropologists; norwill the revelation that structure and agency(which the author equates with theaforementioned themes of ‘making’ and‘becoming’, respectively) are mutuallyconstitutive. Some of the most important recentanthropological work on ritual is missing fromthe analysis. A case in point appears on page197, where the author discusses previousresearch on Japanese ritual but cites nothinglater than 1989. Throughout the 1990s, a numberof Japan-orientated anthropologists examinedthe political manipulation of meaning,exercise of self-interested agency, andcommoditization of tradition within the contextof Shinto-embedded ritual. The author wouldhave benefited by attending to this morerecent work.

For example, the analysis plays heavily into aDurkheimian emphasis on preserving socialharmony; there is passing reference toinherent conflict but no consideration for thepublic airing and resolution of grievances withinthe performative medium of ritual itself.Likewise, beyond a brief acknowledgement thatritual changes over time (p. 163), no attention isgiven to the process of transformation. Thefieldwork from two decades ago would have lentitself nicely to a follow-up study so that wecould see the changes that have occurred withinthe community and better understand the roleof ritual in negotiating these changes as itacquired new meanings. In other words, theemphasis on ‘becoming’ could have beenusefully applied to the ritual performancesthemselves.

These deficiencies notwithstanding, there ismuch of interest in this book. In addition to thedescriptive data, the author’s insights into thefieldwork experience are interesting andvaluable. And the interpenetration of women’sritual with their occupational/economic activitiesis skilfully conveyed. It is ironic that the villagebegins to evoke the stereotypical images of ruralJapan only in recent years with the arrival ofgreater prosperity and a more sedentary lifestyle.Taken together with other recent ethnographiesthat suggest the same thing, one wonders towhat extent ‘exceptions’ such as Kuzaki were atone time the rule.

Scott Schnell University of Iowa

Notar, Beth E. Displacing desire: travel andpopular culture in China. xiv, 193 pp., maps,illus., bibliogr. Honolulu: Univ. Hawai’i Press,2006. £21.00 (paper)

Dali is the name of a town, a mountain basin,and an autonomous prefecture of the BaiNationality in the north of Yunnan province insouthwest China. An economic backwater closedoff to much of the wider world in the early1980s, by 2004 Dali was receiving over fourmillion tourists annually. This book tells thefascinating story of Dali’s rapid change underthe impact of tourism. Notar provides multipleethnographic perspectives on thistransformation, skilfully weaving togetheraccounts of tourists, entrepreneurs, farmers, andother relevant actors.

Notar is among other things interested inwhat she calls the ‘material after-effects’ ofpopular cultural representations. She highlightsthree particularly influential representations ofDali. The first of these is in the Lonely Planet’sChina – a travel survival kit. First published in1984, this guidebook’s descriptions of Dali as asite rich in colourful ethnic minority cultureattracted tens of thousands of foreign‘backpackers’ to the area in the 1980s and 1990s.On Notar’s account, these backpackers soughtout examples of ‘authentic’ indigenous culture,‘off the beaten track’. At the same time,however, they followed the guidebook closelyand demanded music and foods that werefamiliar from home. Entrepreneurs providedcafés that catered to backpackers’ longing forpizza and Bob Marley, and together theytransformed the townscape along what becameknown as ‘Foreigner Street’.

By the late 1990s, Foreigner Street had itselfbecome part of the itinerary of the growing

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numbers of Chinese middle-class tourists. Manycame specifically in search not of an ‘authentic’local culture, but of sites portrayed in popularfilms and literature, where they could dress upas ‘exotic’ minorities and perform key scenesfrom their favourite fiction. Middle-aged touristswere attracted to Dali by the film Five goldenflowers, a love story set amongst the Bai andreleased in 1959 during Mao’s radical campaignthe Great Leap Forward. Notar describes thesetourists as being ‘nostalgic’, yet ‘not for the timeof the Great Leap Forward itself, but for theromantic dream of socialist utopia that the filmdepicted’ (p. 58). In contrast, Dali villagersinterpreted the film as documentation of theirlandscape, prior to the environmentaldestruction brought about by the Great LeapForward and subsequent revolutionarycampaigns, and continued during the ongoingmarket reforms.

Transnational Chinese and young PRCnationals were often familiar with Dali fromHeavenly dragons, a martial arts novel written inHong Kong in the 1960s, and set in the eleventhcentury in what was then the Dali Kingdom. Atelevision series of the novel was filmed in 2002

at the new ‘Daliwood’ film set built outside Dalitown. Subsequently, Daliwood was turned into atheme park and sites from Heavenly dragonswere constructed all across the mountain basin,contributing to Dali’s transformation intosomething ‘like a giant theme park’ (p. 110).Indeed, already in the 1990s, sites had beenreconstructed to resemble more closely thosedepicted in Five golden flowers, and Dali’s oldtown had been partially rebuilt as a prettifiedreplica of itself.

Local inhabitants’ experiences of tourism arehighlighted throughout the book, and especiallyin the penultimate chapter. Here we learn thatfor many Dali townspeople and youngervillagers, tourism has brought new and excitingemployment opportunities. In some casesnew-found prosperity and improvedcommunications have allowed locals to presentthemselves as ‘modern’ and ‘cosmopolitan’.Older villagers, by contrast, were critical of theremaking of Dali. Villagers were particularlyangry about a new highway, built on some ofthe most fertile land for the benefit of tourists.The building of the road had displaced peoplefrom their land and homes with little or nocompensation, and the many accidents on theroad had claimed villagers’ lives and producedwandering spirits. Although no protests hadoccurred over land appropriations in Dali, asthey have elsewhere in rural China, the author

argues that villagers expressed theirdissatisfaction through stories of hauntedhighways.

Throughout the book, Notar makesthought-provoking points on topics such asnostalgia, authenticity, globalization, andethnicity. These are summarized butunfortunately not developed in the shortconcluding chapter. The section on landappropriation deals at some length withregulatory frameworks, but might have providedmore ethnography on the local politics of land.The illustrations, while informative, are oftenpoorly reproduced. Despite these shortcomings,Displacing desire is an excellent contribution tothe anthropology of tourism and to theethnography of Chinese reform. This engagingand clearly written book will make a usefulteaching resource on courses in Chinese society,tourism, and consumption.

Jakob A. Klein School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Medical anthropology

Boddy, Janice. Civilizing women: Britishcrusades in colonial Sudan. xxvii, 402 pp.,map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. £15.95 (paper)

This book will no doubt stimulate commentprimarily for its contribution to the ongoingdebate over female circumcision, or ‘femalegenital mutilation’, as the global opposition has‘gratuitously’ labelled it, according to Boddy(citing Shweder). Yet the scope of thisextensively researched book reaches far beyond‘FGM’ or Western campaigns to eradicate it, andwill be useful to scholars and students ofcolonial history more generally. The first chaptercovers the cult of Gordon, with a welcome freshlook at the literature his death spawned, in orderto establish the importance of the ‘socialmemory’ of Gordon for the British administratorsof Sudan. It also covers the wider ‘cult ofdomesticity’ and the masculine crusading ethosthat this memory reinforced. The second chapterprovides a similarly refreshing perspective on the‘gentlemen’s club’ that was the Sudan PoliticalService, and the irony that its members, isolatedfrom women in general, were ‘obliged to makelife-changing decisions for and about Sudanesewomen and girls’. The third chapter thenupdates the controversial role of anthropology in

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colonial administration, completing an openingsection on the ‘imperial ethos’ that goes beyondmerely setting the scene for the debate overwomen’s health in Sudan. The later discussionsof colonial medicine, relations between Britishmen and women in the colonial administrations,and the issue of female circumcision itself in thecontext of nationalism in Sudan and Kenya areof similarly comparative and wider relevance forcolonial and African studies.

The great strength of the book is itsjuxtaposition of the colonial medical ‘crusades’with a convincing and insightful exploration ofnorthern Sudanese views and beliefs. HereBoddy builds on her earlier research into the zarspirit possession practices among Muslimwomen in northern Sudan. Accounts of zar areinterwoven with the British archival material andtreated as both an archive and an indigenousanthropology. They provide an often amusinginsight into northern Sudanese perceptions ofBritish administrators, as well as of otherforeigners and regional or ethnic stereotypes.Boddy’s fieldwork also enables her to provide asensitive account of Sudanese understandings ofgender, spatial allegory, and the body, in orderto explain the meaning of ‘pharaoniccircumcision’ or infibulation. Just as courtyardhomes are meant to protect precious domesticspace from intrusion, so infibulation renders agirl’s body a smooth, impenetrable shellprotecting her womb, like a ripe watermelon. Atthe core of this ideal is the importance of red‘uterine blood’; the body is a microcosm of thewider social community which is built on thepermanency of patrilineal ‘bones’, yet nourishedby ephemeral maternal blood.

This understanding of infibulation as aprotective measure provides insights not onlyinto Sudanese definitions of gender andwomanhood, but also into the distinctionsdrawn between the domestic ‘homeland’ andthe world beyond, which are of wider relevanceto social and political delineations in Sudan. It iscontrasted with the debates among Britishadministrators and medical staff, who were moreconcerned with ascribing blame for thecontinuing practice either to Sudanese men orto the women themselves, and were oftenhamstrung by their fear of provoking the kind ofprotest against anti-circumcision legislation thatdid occur in 1946. The British approach, notunlike the Sudanese view, was ultimatelyconcerned with population growth in Sudanand hence the impact of infibulation onwomen’s fertility. Unlike later feministcampaigners, the British were primarily

concerned with the perceived likelihood ofproblematic births (and thus found thealternative excision of the clitoris relativelyacceptable, as well as male circumcision). Boddyshows that this concern was largely unfoundedgiven the birth rates in Sudan, but that theresulting focus on midwifery provided a‘convenient entry point’ into society for colonialmedicine and domestic ideals. Her discussion ofmidwife training by the Wolff sisters, inparticular, reveals some ironic unintended‘creolization’ of Sudanese and British medicalunderstandings: comparisons of human bodiesto houses; the use of baby dolls in trainingwhose genitals were as smoothly invisible asinfibulated girls; or preaching the danger ofmicrobes penetrating the ‘sealed tins’ of bodies.Some of the hygiene measures have beengradually adopted, together with use ofanaesthetics, but midwives have continued tomeet the demand for infibulation procedures.

Boddy’s concern to understand rather thancondemn the practice of infibulation may lead toaccusations of an overly relativist approach fromthose seeking to eradicate the practice. Yet shedoes not shy away from recounting the agoniesof the actual operation or its effects. She isperhaps rather one-sided in her discussion of itsmeaning for girls as a profound part of theirdevelopment; although ‘trauma’ is mentioned,the potential mental or emotional post-shockeffects are not explored. But this is not reallyrelevant to her approach; this book seeks not tosettle a moral debate but to explore both sidesof an early manifestation of the ongoingcontroversy. In that sense it is a pity that Boddybegins and concludes provocatively towards theanti-FGM campaign and with allusion tocontemporary Western ‘imperialism’; herchallenge to cultural imperialism is implicitenough in her empathic account of Sudaneseperspectives. Controversies aside, this ishistorical anthropology at its most impressive,melding documentary evidence and fieldworkinsights. The author admits the absence of morerecent fieldwork, which would have enableddiscussion of the effects of pressure from Islamicauthorities for the more limited sunna form ofcircumcision. As Boddy demonstrates,infibulation is not an Islamic practice, but isrooted in a particular northern Sudanese holisticview of the body, womanhood, and the homewhich largely proved as impenetrable to therather muddled British medical crusaders as thewatermelon-like infibulated female bodies itenvisioned.

Cherry Leonardi University of Durham

Book reviews 689


Ingstad, Benedicte & Susan Reynolds

Whyte (eds). Disability in local and globalworlds. ix, 324 pp., illus., bibliogrs. London,Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2007. £12.95

(paper)

In 1995 Benedicte Ingstad and Susan ReynoldsWhyte published a collection of essays thatsought to descry the category of disabilitythrough the lens of culture, in a variety ofsocieties. The book, Disability and culture, rightly,was well received. This second collection fromthe same editors aims to explore disabilityfurther by focusing on the theme of connectionsand disconnections between the local and theglobal, in both material and ideal forms, andacross different ethnographic settings.

The editors also wish to engage with thequestion of what anthropologists mightcontribute to the field of disability studies, one inwhich activists and activist/scholars themselveshave had a major role in challengingessentialized notions of disability. This is also afield of inquiry where – as Ingstad reminds us –activists have previously told anthropologists,‘These natives can speak for themselves’(p. 254).

The collection suggests that the editors’original question, ‘What is disability?’, is far fromexhausted. The case studies presented here arenot limited to the usual motor, sensory, orintellectual impairments, although these arerepresented, for example, in Haualand’s chapterconcerning the construction of shared culturewhen deaf people gathered for the Deaf WorldGames in Rome in 2001, and in responses toneonate disability in Israel (Weiss). Otherchapters address the transformed significance offemale circumcision for Somali refugee womenin London (Talle); infertility among differentsocial groups in India and Egypt, whichproduces suffering and social handicap (Inhornand Bharadwaj); and disability potentiallyprevented through the promise of genetherapies (Lock). In Japan, Traphagan argues,elderly people with disabilities are not ‘disabled’but bed-ridden, senile, or stroke ‘victims’, withconsequences for the way that social assistanceis conceptualized and provided. In Kohrman’schapter, Ma Zhun is denied a disabled person’sID because she does not meet the state’s criteriaof invalidity. But the official definition ofdisability has a complex origin that Kohrmantraces back to, among other factors, the CulturalRevolution, post-Mao policies, epidemiology asbiopower at work, and the PR strategies ofUnited Nations policy leaders.

After the introduction, in which the book’scross-cutting themes are discussed, the book’seleven chapters are divided into two sections.Part 1 presents chapters that ‘exploresubjectivities’ of disability (the local), while thechapters in part 2 address technology andpolicies (the global, or ‘globalizable’). Thisdivision seemed a little artificial to me aschapters in part 2 do certainly address subjectiveexperiences of disability, while those in part 1

also refer to supra-local forces that shape localsubjectivities. It is the editors’ own chapters,based on extensive fieldwork in Botswana(Ingstad) and Uganda (Reynolds Whyte andMuyinda), that perhaps most explicitly addressquestions of connections and disconnectionsbetween the local and the global. They wish toshow how national and international disabilitypolicies are put into practice in places far fromwhere they were first conceived. Both argue thatthe task of the ethnographer is to document thisprocess in local contexts as they are shaped byparticular economic, environmental, historical,and cultural factors. Inhorn and Bharadwaj gofurther by proposing specific ways in whichglobal international policy might be reframed toaddress limitations identified in their research.The collection raises a broad range of theoretical,methodological, and practical questions and somight have benefited from a concluding chapterdrawing these disparate strands together.

A clear contribution of this collection is itsdemonstration of the value of ethnographicaccounts in understanding locally situatedexperiences of disability, even as these areshaped in ways intended and unintended bytransferable technologies and supranational –and aspirational – policies. Three chapters wereparticularly noteworthy for me, for the quality ofthe ethnography achieved within the constraintsof a single chapter. First, there was Vas andAddlakha’s haunting accounts of the lives ofthree women (one with facial disfigurement, twowith psychiatric disorders). The authors proposethe notion of domestic citizenship to analysetheir data and to challenge the dominant notionof disability that has arisen out of and continuesto presuppose ‘the fetishized autonomoussubject of liberal political discourse’ (p. 146).Kohrman’s impressive chapter on the officialdefinition of disability in China wonderfullytraces how national and international factorscontributed to the codification of disability,illustrating how actors such as scientists,politicians, and functionaries actually shapebiopolitics at work. I would also mentionScheper-Hughes and Ferreira’s fascinating

Book reviews690


chapter from fieldwork in Brazil about how thepatient, Dombá, experiences and interprets hiskidney transplant, suffering, and healing in thelight of his own Suyá cosmology.

Christopher McKevitt King’s College London

Lloyd, G.E.R. Cognitive variations: reflections onthe unity & diversity of the human mind. viii,201 pp., figs, bibliogr. Oxford: ClarendonPress, 2007. £27.50 (cloth)

Sir Geoffrey is at it again. He is still trying tobridge the ever-yawning gap between ancientGreek medicine and Chinese medicine, of whichhe is an acknowledged savant of the formerdiscipline and an enthusiastic disciple of thelatter. On this occasion, he changes tack byapproaching the problem from a distant view ofuniversals of human psychology, taking intoaccount the work of psychologists andanthropologists on general problems ofperceptions of colour and space, humanemotions and rational thinking, and concepts ofcausation in various world cultures. The idea isthat comparisons of ancient Greek and Chinesethought will seem more plausible if presentedon a larger palette of psychology andanthropology.

As anticipated, the author is at his best whendiscussing Greek thought, and here is where thisbook offers real gems to the reader willing towade through the chapters on colour and spatialperceptions. In chapter 4, Lloyd gives a briefdescription of two different Greek terms fordisease, nosos and pathe (pp. 68f.), which couldbe used interchangeably. Lloyd explains thatwhile nosos usually refers to disease, pathe is amore general term encompassing mental illness,as well as a general term for suffering. Thisdistinction is important since one philosophy ofancient medicine, Methodism, refers to illnessonly as pathe rather than nosos, intending toavoid (fruitlessly) attributing cause to illness.Lloyd goes on to explain Aristotle’s view oftragedy as a form of katharsis or purging of thepsyche of its intense emotions, whilepost-Aristotelian philosophers saw reason andlogic as a means of achieving freedom fromanxiety or atarxia (pp. 72f.). These werepeculiarly Greek approaches to achieving mentalhealth, in contrast to other societies whoemployed magic and rituals with similar goals inmind.

Even more interesting is Lloyd’s discussionof ‘doctors’ or ‘health-care specialists’ in theancient world, and he argues that neither Greek

nor Chinese practitioners had legally recognizedqualifications or licences, but they werenevertheless healers highly reputed in bothsocieties for their knowledge and skill in treatingthe sick. More controversial, however, is hisfurther point that some healers had advancedbeyond the assumption that disease was causedby demons or spirits or could be cured by ritualsand prayer (p. 89). It may be true that ancientGreek medical treatises intended for the elitemay lack references to the roles of gods ordemonic forces in disease. However, it is quitepermissible for medical treatises to concentrateon symptoms and theories of humours withoutnecessarily referring to divine intervention inhuman affairs. Lloyd acknowledges this fact, butpoints to polemics by those who denied divineinvolvement in disease (p. 89). What we do notknow, however, is how widely accepted suchanti-religious arguments were among thegeneral population or among the physician’sclientele. Piety was likely to have been popularamong the ‘root-cutters’, ‘drug-sellers’, andmidwives who treated patients alongsideHippocratic doctors (p. 92), although we haveno surviving Hippocratic treatises on the virtuesof their treatments.

Two more thoughts are worth noting. One isLloyd’s idea of ‘cognitive deficit’ (p. 129), whichexplains why so many conflicting theories of thecauses of disease appear in ancient medicaltexts. Lloyd recalls the observation that, even inmodern medicine, the diagnoses oftenproliferate as the patient’s condition deteriorates.When faced with inexplicable symptoms ordisease, almost any explanation will do,including attacks by witches or the patient’sown deviant behaviour, and this appliesespecially to ancient medicine, in which causalitycould hardly be verified by observation. Thesecond point has been discussed by Lloyd in hisearlier work, namely the idea of ‘nature’ inGreek thought (chap. 7), which one mightassume to refer to some notion of ‘natural law’or an abstract idea of ‘nature’ as governing thecourse of disease. Lloyd’s concise review of theusages of phusis shows instead that originallythe Greeks used ‘nature’ in the sense of the‘character’ of some particular object (p. 133),and only later did a general concept of ‘nature’emerge in the sense of natural phenomena. Inthis latter sense, ‘nature’ was intended tocounter a notion of the divine: for example, anatural cause of a disease was preferable to theidea of a ‘sacred disease’, as exemplified by thefamous Hippocratic treatise of that name. This isa crucial semantic leap which Lloyd cannot

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adequately explain, but he then proceeds to adiscussion of nature vs nurture (here Greeknomos) as a concomitant theory. The semanticshift in the meaning of Greek phusis from‘character’ to ‘nature’ seems to be a problemworth pursuing in a future monograph.

M.J. Geller University College London

Luedke, Tracy J. & Harry G. West (eds).Borders and healers: brokering therapeuticresources in Southeast Africa. vii, 223 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Bloomington: Indiana Univ.Press, 2006. $65.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)

This edited volume draws upon a range ofethnographic accounts of the work of healers inSoutheast Africa to consider how the crossing,production, and maintenance of borders – bothliteral and figurative – is central to the medicineof the region. The regional context ofinterconnected social, economic, and politicalcrises and their effect upon the domain of healthand healing form the background for thecontributions to the volume. This collectiondocuments how people search for new anddisparate therapeutic resources along shiftinggradients of power, just as healers manipulatethe same vectors of power to attract clients,crossing and preserving boundaries whichinclude those between ‘traditional’ andbiomedicine, science and religion, as well asnational and international borders.

In recognition that themes of circulation andmovement of healers, healing apparatus, andtechniques have already received extensiveethnographic attention in this region, thevolume’s claim for discursive originality lies in itstheorization of the border realm. Arguing for afocus on the relationship between such forms ofcirculation and the authority that healers derivefrom them, Luedke and West’s introductionemphasizes how border-crossings of variouskinds enable healers to make the work of healingpossible and, simultaneously, how healersreinforce and draw power from the existence ofsuch borders. In his conclusion to the volume,Feierman argues that their work characterizes ananalytic shift in anthropology from a concern toexplain the differences between categoriesassumed to exist as distinct, unproblematicdomains towards theorization of the ways inwhich boundaries retain their power andpersuasiveness in a fluid world.

The first three chapters deal with theprofessional authority of ‘traditional healers’ inthe context of the neoliberal state. West

describes how traditional healers in northernMozambique draw power through rejectingaspects of their designation as ‘indigenous’ and‘traditional’, subverting the official governmentposition on traditional healers, which relies upona distinct separation between the realms of‘science’ and ‘traditional healing’. Also inMozambique, Luedke shows how aneneriprophet healers employ models of authoritywhich include the family, Christian churches,and the state in processes of ‘therapeuticentrepreneurialism’. Simmons’s contributionhighlights the difficult position in whichmembers of the Zimbabwean traditional healers’organization, ZINATHA, found themselves asthey tried to balance attempts to professionalizetheir work in a market-driven economy with aneed to remain ‘authentic’.

In the first of two following chapters onPentecostal healing, Pfeiffer continues the focuson professional authority. He highlights how agrowing concern with social inequality and themorality of accumulation in urban Mozambiquehas allowed Pentecostal churches to strengthenthe perception of a division between their own(free) healing work and that of traditionalhealers, increasingly perceived as greedy,inauthentic, and opportunistic because of theirhigh charges. Van Dijk suggests that regionalrather than global dynamics of Pentecostalchurches in Botswana have enabled adherents toexpress new forms of transcultural identity and achanging relationship to the nation-state.

The final chapters of the volume focus onparticular narrative practices as sites wheretherapeutic borders are created, preserved, andchallenged. Murchison’s description of thetelling and retelling of the story of an AIDS curein Tanzania highlights the importance of localactors in managing the boundaries of diseaseand treatment in the context of a globalepidemic. Colvin analyses shifting applications ofthe ‘Western’ therapy of traumatic storytelling inpost-apartheid South Africa.

Although at times predictable in its focus,this is a diverse set of ethnographic accountsthat provides some rich insights into the workwhich goes on around the boundaries of‘traditional healing’. However, the volume losesout as a collection of essays through its failure toconsider in similar ethnographic detail theborder work carried out in the various sites ofbiomedicine which are central to the landscapeof therapy in Southeast Africa. The onlycontribution in the collection to focus specificallyon biomedicine (Langwick) provides an excellenthistorical account of the way in which the

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boundary between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’medicine emerged in early twentieth-centuryTanganyika through hospital buildings, clinicalpractice, and scientific thought. However,Langwick’s essay retains the focus on the borderwork of ‘traditional medicine’ and, like Colvin’s,discusses aspects of biomedicine seen to comefrom ‘outside’ rather than indigenousbiomedical practice. While this criticism shouldnot detract from the ethnographic quality of thisbroad-ranging compilation, as a collection ofessays the lack of discussion on biomedicalborder work seems to be an arbitraryreinforcement of the very boundary that isproblematized in this volume.

Hannah Brown University of Manchester

Social anthropology

Anderson, E.N. & Felix Medina Tzuc.Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico.xviii, 251 pp., illus., bibliogr. Tucson: Univ.Arizona Press, 2005. $45.00 (cloth)

This engaging and interesting book is one thatethnobiologists and naturalists like myself willsavour, though, like my own ethnobiologicalstudies, I doubt if it is the kind of writing thatwill appeal to entrenched culture theorists. It isfocused specifically on animal-human relationsamong the Maya people of Yucatan, Mexico,and almost half the book is devoted to anannotated listing of the animals found in theregion and of the birds identified by theanthropologist in the area around the town ofChunhuhub in the state of Quintana Roo. Thebook is a joint effort combining the knowledgeof the anthropologist E.N. Anderson and that ofa local farmer Felix Medina Tzuc, whosignificantly is both literate and an importantpolitical figure in the town. But Andersonemphasizes that the book is essentially a ‘jointenterprise’ and that their relationship was one offriendship rather than simply that ofanthropologist and informant. The bookincludes several recorded conversations withDon Felix on his ‘life and times’, on bee keeping,and on hunting.

The study is comparable to that of EugeneHunn’s ethnobiological studies of the TzeltalMaya and essentially aims to record traditionalMaya knowledge and uses of animals. Itcomplements in many ways Anderson’s studiesof Maya ethnobotany and his more general work

on cultural and political ecology (Ecologies of theheart, 1996) and Anderson in fact firmly situateshis own ‘perspective’ within that of culturalecology. But he distances himself from thecultural ecology of Julian Steward. While otherscholars have misleadingly dismissed Steward asa Cartesian dualist (Balee) or environmentaldeterminist (Milton) – he could hardly be both!– Anderson critiques Steward for being aneconomic determinist (thus lacking a holisticperspective) and as having rather reifiedconceptions of culture and the state. Anyonewho has read Steward’s essays in Evolution andecology (1977) and his work on the politicaleconomy and subcultures of Puerto Rico willfind such criticisms somewhat overdrawn. Butaiming to avoid the extremes of methodologicalindividualism (rational choice theory) andculture theory (as well as structural Marxism),Anderson admits to a deep aversion towardslarge-scale abstractions. This does not stop himfrom using such abstractions as ‘First Worldeconomies’ and the ‘Maya’, which are all ofcourse perfectly legitimate! Yet althoughaffirming that the book is one of ‘politicalecology’, there is very little politics in the book,apart from issues concerning local resourcemanagement. One would not realize from thebook that the Mexican state has for more than adecade been engaged with a serious politicalrebellion, in the form of the Zapatistamovement, a rebellion taking place in theChiapas only around two hundred miles fromQuintana Roo. Even so, Anderson emphasizesthe importance of the power of multinationalcorporations and the Mexican government ineroding the power of the Mayan communities,though such factors have a marginal presence inthe text. This is not, then, a book of politicalecology; but it gives an excellent, and veryreadable and personal account of Mayaecological knowledge, specifically as it relates toanimals.

The book, which, incidentally, would benefitfrom a map of the region, consists of four shortchapters. The chapter on ‘The Maya and theanimal world’ gives an overview of the ecologyof the Quintana Roo region: the importance ofslash-and-burn agriculture (milpa) in creating amosaic of forests and regrowth areas that areconducive to a diversity of animal life; the varieduses of animals as domestic pets; and theimportance of animals as food. Meat, it seems, isgreatly liked and highly valued. Andersonemphasizes that animals are treated with loveand care, and that the Maya countryfolk’sattitude to wildlife, both mammals and birds, is

Book reviews 693


one of wonder and delight. But, as elsewhere,bats, nightjars and owls are animals of ill omen,and one species of opossum is thought to be amanifestation of evil spirits. Also, as elsewhere,animals have the status of spiritual beings, or atleast are manifestations of spirits, and are treatedas non-human persons. Animals are thus a partof the religious cosmology of the Maya: manyanimals are manifestations of witches (way,were-animals) and animals are under theprotection of various deities associated with theforest environment. But there is no detaileddiscussion in the book regarding Mayacosmology or the nature of their religiousbeliefs.

The chapter on bee-keeping highlights theimportant part it plays in Maya tradition, andthe export of honey is still a significant aspect ofthe Yucatan economy. Bees are treated withreverence, the honey of stingless bees (Melipona)being especially well liked. But increasingurbanization and problems with Africanized beeshas led to a decline in bee-keeping in recentyears. It is worth noting that Don Felix’s fatherhad more than two hundred hives and thatapart from wasp and bee larvae, the people ofQuintana Roo never eat insects. This is in strikingcontrast to other rural people in Mexico andindeed with people throughout the world (seemy Insects and human life, 2004).

Hunting was and remains an importantsubsistence activity throughout the Yucatan, andchapter 3 deals exclusively with hunting, whichis carried out primarily with guns, mainly rifles,and the Maya are crack shots, so Andersonreports. Hunting is usually done at night, andseems to be an exclusively male activity, themain animals hunted being the white-taileddeer, collared peccary, armadillo, and ocellatedturkey. But though in the past Quintana Roo wasa ‘hunter’s paradise’, these animals have nowbecome increasingly scarce. In fact, one ofAnderson’s prime concerns, expressedthroughout the book, is the depletion of wildlifein the area. Anderson relates this ecological crisisto several factors: a runaway population growth,uncontrolled hunting, habitat destruction, andthe lax enforcement of the state’s game laws.This despite the fact that the Maya themselveshave an explicit ideology and practice of gameconservation.

The final chapter is on animal nomenclature,and Anderson (and Tzuc) affirm that the richYucatec ethnobiological vocabulary is still verywidely used and is flourishing. In a briefinteresting discussion of ethobiology, Andersonseems to imply, rather oddly, that Roy Ellen is a

social constructionist and that Foucault hasaffinities with Scott Atran and Brent Berlin inbeing a ‘realist’. But with regard to his ownstudies Anderson affirms that althoughclassification is indeed a social construction, theMaya themselves are realists, recognizing that thenatural world exists independently of humansand that traditional ecological knowledge is aform of empirical science, though different fromboth ‘spiritual ecology’ and modern biologicalscience. As I do in my own studies, Andersonhighlights the importance of this empiricalknowledge and the fact that the Mayarelationship with animals is complex, diverse, andmulti-faceted, and is not easily described (cf.Bird-David and Ingold) in terms of a singleattitude or metaphor. Anderson thus concludesthat we can learn much from an understandingof Maya natural history: the importance of localempirical knowledge in managing harshenvironments and in addressing ecologicalproblems; in learning to be more respectfultowards other life-forms; and in keeping alive the‘search for truth’ – seemingly abandoned ordevalued by postmodern literary anthropologists.

Brian Morris Goldsmiths College

Hagen, James M. Community in the balance:morality and social change in an Indonesiansociety. xvii, 237 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers,2006. £28.95 (paper)

This deceptively ambitious book is bothintriguing and frustrating – it is intriguing in itsethnographic intricacy and frustrating in thealluring simplicity of its theoretical vision.However, it must be emphasized, it is this visionand the author’s readiness to engage with ‘big’questions that make it much more than awell-informed contribution to the ethnographyof eastern Indonesia. Indeed, it constitutes animaginative effort to turn some of thephilosophical work (Alisdair MacIntyre’s, MarthaNussbaum’s, etc.) associated with Aristotle’spractical philosophy and the recent revival of‘virtue ethics’ into an ethnographically informedperspective on the articulation of community,morality, and human agency. As it is almostimpossible to summarize the book in all of itscomplexity, I shall give a brief indication of themain topics and try to highlight the tenor of theoverall argument.

Focusing on the Maneo of Seram (Maluku,Indonesia), James Hagen’s book is anexploration of the ways in which community is

Book reviews694


created in and through specific forms ofinteraction with others (Maneo and non-Maneo),and in this sense it centres ‘on agency and thechoices that Maneo exercise in the course ofliving their lives, managing kin and exchangerelations’ (p. 149). In more theoretical terms, it isan attempt ‘to advance conceptualunderstanding of community’ – in the author’swords, ‘Conceiving community as interactions,and not reducing it to representation, sharedidentity, or the concertedness of action, reflectsback the properties of particular relationalmilieus’ (p. 12).

It is some of these properties he describesthrough an intricate analysis of settlementpatterns and history (chap. 1); kinship‘awareness’ (chap. 2); marriage practices (chap.3); the ways in which marriage creates newrelations (chap. 4); marriage payment exchanges(chap. 5); Maneo involvement with the widerworld (chap. 6); sorcery beliefs (chap. 7); andquestions raised by the sectarian violence thatbroke out in 1999, sweeping through the regionof Maluku as a whole (chap. 8).

Despite the existence of permanent villages,Maneo life is characterized by a kind of mobilitythat ‘cannot be explained by economic orpolitical necessity or pleasure’ (p. 3). Involvinganything from abandoning villages to fleeing tothe forest, it is the paradox of this mobility thatlies at the heart of Hagen’s discussion. Thecontingency of Maneo community invites a‘novel approach’, which, rather than taking the‘basic fact of association’ for granted andobjectifying it in terms of boundaries orbelonging, treats Maneo community ‘as anobject and consequence of choice’ (p. 2). Inother words, ‘decisions about where to live andwith whom offer insight into the way trust andmutuality are fostered’ (p. 3). This is not to saythat Maneo lives are not entangled in those ofothers, from the very beginning, but to suggestthat ‘the seemingly random movement ofpeople ... yields a kind of civility, a subtlebalancing and adjusting of mutual expectationsand understandings’ (p. xii). This civility ‘imbuesin people a practical awareness and sensitivity tothe concerns of others around them’ (p. xii).Thus, Maneo community is created throughchoices that embody the moral intent of thoseinvolved and manifest their commitment tofostering mutuality – it is a ‘moral’ project,wherein ‘morality inheres in people’sinteractions’ and ‘not in the transcendence ofthem’ (p. 22). Such moral choices are pragmaticchoices. Rather than being pragmatic becausethey are moral, however, they are moral because

they are pragmatic – pragmatic in the sensethat, as the author puts it (quoting John Dewey),they take into account the fact that ‘others dotake account of what we do, and they respondaccordingly to our acts’.

Hence, in a way reminiscent of Aristotle’sphronesis and the more general importance ofpractice in ‘virtue ethics’, Maneo communitydoes not inhere in abstract principles; instead, itis created through specific forms of interactionthat embody mutual understanding andmanifest Maneo ability to act with others inmind – from the seemingly random movementof people to marriage exchanges and the fear ofsorcery, it is the story of this mutualunderstanding (what inhibits or enables it) thatJames Hagen endeavours to tell.

Does he tell it well? Yes. Is it a story worthtelling? Definitely. The ethnography is bothintriguing and intricately presented. However,despite its elegant simplicity, I am not convincedby the author’s enthusiasm for Aristotle andvirtue theory. For one thing, I would suggest,there is a fundamental ambiguity in the relationbetween ‘community’ and ‘interaction’ – iscommunity a specific kind of interaction or thesite within which different interactions take placeand are evaluated? Similarly, in his emphasis onthe pragmatic nature of morality, Hagen seemsto conflate ‘facts’ with ‘values’, giving rise to atautology that makes immorality (amongst otherthings) rather difficult to explain. Lastly, in tryingto perceive sociality as the product of humanagency, he might be essentializing andmystifying this agency. Nevertheless, as I hopethat the focus of my comments shows, this is a‘big’ book – informed and provoking, intriguingand frustrating, it deserves a wide readership.

Dimitri Tsintjilonis University of Edinburgh

Henrich, Natalie & Joseph Henrich. Whyhumans cooperate: a cultural and evolutionaryexplanation. xi, 267 pp., figs, bibliogr. Oxford:Univ. Press, 2007. £45.00 (cloth), £19.99

(paper)

Why do humans co-operate? Socialanthropologists do not usually ask this kind ofquestion: we take co-operation for granted. But ifanthropology is the study of what it means to behuman, we should not be satisfied with this.From a Darwinian perspective, the evolution ofco-operation in the human species is notoriouslydifficult to explain. In no other species do we findlarge-scale, systematic co-operation betweenindividuals who may be biologically unrelated or

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even unknown to one another. Most of what istaken to be standard Darwinian theory wouldrule this out on theoretical grounds.

Natalie and Joseph Henrich have collaboratedto provide an excellent up-to-date overview ofcurrent debates addressing what they describeas ‘one of the great puzzles in the humansciences’ (p. 3). A strength of the book is itsclose interweaving of Joseph’s theoreticalmodelling and analysis with the results of hispartner Natalie’s eighteen-month ethnographicfieldwork among the Chaldeans in Detroit – amostly middle- and upper-class community offirst-, second-, and third-generation Catholicimmigrants from Iraq.

To explain co-operation among theChaldeans, the authors elaborate on an idea firstproposed by Darwin. In The descent of man(1871), Darwin wrote that his theory of naturalselection would be hard-pressed to explain theevolution of a human instinct for sacrificingone’s life for the common good. So might socialadmiration for heroism take over where instinctfailed, thereby inspiring men to perform nobledeeds by following celebrated examples? Iscompetition between ‘tribes’ – the fitness ofeach enhanced by the heroism of its members –the best way to explain man’s lofty ‘intellectualand moral faculties’? Darwin was prepared toconsider the possibility.

It has to be said that most evolutionarybiologists today would argue that Darwin wasquite wrong here. What is nowadays called‘group selection’ either does not work, or canoperate only under such improbable conditionsas to render the idea of only marginal interest.Henrich and Henrich disagree. In explainingdistinctively human co-operation, they treatgroup selection as one important mechanismamong others – alongside kin selection(co-operation between relatives), reciprocalaltruism (co-operation as ‘tit-for-tat’), and costlysignalling theory (‘showing off’ that one canafford to co-operate). Their main point is thatculture makes a difference. It is humans’ highlyunusual ‘evolved cultural learning capacities’that make ‘cultural group selection’ possible.Restrict your help to recipients with the sameaccent, dress, or religion and you can minimizeyour chances of being exploited or deceived.

I recommend this book as an introduction tothis field. It is comprehensive and clearly written,showing impressive mastery of the modellingand other relevant literature. If I feel ultimatelydissatisfied, the reasons lie elsewhere. I just donot think these authors are doing what theyclaim to be doing, namely explaining why

humans co-operate. When, why, and how didevolving humans begin transcending the limitsof non-human primate co-operation? Can wereconstruct the emergence of distinctivelyhuman cultural capacities without assuming thosecapacities in advance?

A study of the Chaldeans cannot measure upto this task. It is fascinating to learn, I suppose,that the Chaldeans disapprove when one of theirown starts dating a ‘Black’, a ‘Muslim’, or a ‘Jew’(p. 145) – a stance explained by the authors interms of ‘cultural group selection’ theory. Oragain, it is interesting to know that when a sumof money is donated during a funeral to a relativeof the deceased, the recipient keeps a carefulnote – returning a marked envelope with thesame sum at a subsequent funeral when the rolesare reversed (p. 118). But understandably enough– like any other ethnographer furnishing detailsof this kind – Natalie Henrich assumes from theoutset such background phenomena as‘religion’, ‘the family’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘morality’– structures of co-operation which (from aDarwinian standpoint) cry out to be explainedrather than assumed.

The authors can always come up with atheory for each Chaldean finding: kin selectionto explain why people favour relatives aspartners in a co-operative enterprise; reciprocalaltruism (or some other familiar principle) toexplain why they sometimes do not favourrelatives. But when the authors offer us theirown distinctive predictions at a more generaltheoretical level, the formulations amount tolittle more than truisms. Here is one thatcaptures the flavour: ‘Different human groupswill be characterized by different social norms,some of which will be cooperative, some not.Some norms will be maladaptive. Nonculturalspecies will not show this kind of variability’ (p.70). Readers of this journal may object that I amquoting out of context; other predictions offeredby the authors are arguably more exciting. Buthaving read the book from cover to cover, I wasleft feeling underwhelmed.

Chris Knight University of East London

Hirsch, Jennifer S. & Holly Wardlow

(eds). Modern loves: the anthropology ofromantic courtship and companionatemarriage. xiii, 234 pp., illus., bibliogr. AnnArbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 2006. $23.95

(paper)

This is a valuable and interesting book writtenby a group of scholars using rich and insightful

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ethnographic material from several societiesaround the world. The overarching thesis ofthe book is that what the authors call modernlove – defined as romantic courtship andcompanionate marriage – is spreadingaround the world. The authors argue thatpeople increasingly emphasize emotionalintimacy, companionate marriage, love, andindividualism in a variety of diverse settings,including Singapore, Hong Kong, PapuaNew Guinea, Pakistan, Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil,India, and minority groups in the UnitedStates.

As the title of the book – Modern loves –suggests, the authors explicitly link the increasedglobal emphasis on romantic courtship andcompanionate marriage with the increasedendorsement of the ideals of modernity. Theyargue that ordinary people value romanticcourtship and companionate marriage, at leastin part, because these aspects of courtship andmarriage identify a person as modern ratherthan backward, are part of a narrative ofprogress, and help facilitate other achievements.In addition, the idealization of romantic love asmodern gives young people arguments andcredibility that they can use in negotiations withothers.

The book also provides valuabledocumentation of the precise ways in whichthe ideals of romance and companionshipare incorporated into societies and cultures.This specificity makes it clear that thestarting-points, pathways, and outcomesof change vary across societies – a thesissignalled by the book’s plural title, Modernloves. In addition, the multiple modernloves are frequently seen as hybrids ofmodernity and pre-existing indigenouspatterns.

The chapter by Holly Wardlow is particularlypowerful, arguing that the Huli of Papua NewGuinea have been dramatically influenced bynotions of modern romantic marriageintroduced into the Huli culture by the massmedia and Christianity. She nicely documentsindividuals using the ideology of romantic loveto mark themselves as Christian and modern.She also describes how many Huli associatecompanionate marriage with modern objects,suggesting that the association of modern loveand modern possessions is strongly linked inpeople’s minds and motivations. Wardlow alsodocuments the fact that the new forms ofromantic marriage were introduced into asociety with its pre-existing alternative scriptsabout marriage. And she documents how

people wanting the new forms of marriage canbe sabotaged by those committed to thepre-existing indigenous forms of marriage andfamily life. Wardlow’s emphasis on Hollywoodvideos and Christianity as sources of modernideas concerning romance and marriage alsoshows the close linkage between Western cultureand the idea of modernity used by the authorand her informants.

Although the main story of the book isthe introduction of romantic courtship andmarriage from Western and Christian sources,the book also documents the fact that marriagepatterns described as modern can exist for manyyears and have nothing to do with the West.Wynne Maggi documents this among theKalasha of Pakistan, arguing that they havelong had a marriage system where love andaffection were important. She argues that thissystem contained the elements of love andaffection that people associate with modernity,but that this system was not the result of contactwith Western influences. Ironically, thisobservation makes the Kalasha and northwestEuropeans similar in that they both had romanceand companionship – elements frequentlyassociated with modernity – for many yearsprior to the supposed arrival of modernity itself.In fact, as I document in Reading historysideways: the fallacy and enduring impactof the developmental paradigm on family life(2005), it was the centuries-long existence ofromantic courtship and companionatemarriage in the West, together with thedefinition of the West as modern, that definedromance and companionship as elements ofmodern marriage. This linkage of modernityand Westernness is an important elementin the spread of Western ways around theworld.

The book also documents the fact thatromance and companionship outside theWest are not the only consequences of Westernideas for indigenous patterns of gender,sexuality, and marriage. Others include therejection of menstrual taboos and the prevalenceof joint decision-making in marriage. A centraltheme of the book is that the ideals ofcompanionate marriage can affect sexualinvolvement, use of condoms, and the risk ofinfection by HIV.

These many contributions of Modern loves areimportant, and I recommend the book toeveryone interested in the ways in whichmarriage and family life are changing around theworld.

Arland Thornton University of Michigan

Book reviews 697


Larsson, Marie. ‘When women unite!’ Themaking of the anti-liquor movement in AndhraPradesh, India. iv, 274 pp., figs, bibliogr.Stockholm: Univ. Stockholm, 2006. SEK 303

(paper)

With a striking cover image of a moustachioeddemon of drink, reclining, hairy-legged andheavily, drink in hand, on the back of a woman,who is bowed under the weight, pregnant, andweeping over an empty cooking pot, MarieLarsson sets out her study of the anti-arrackmovement in Andhra Pradesh in India. Under thetitle of a popular literacy campaign story, ‘Whenwomen unite!’, thought by some to havesparked the movement, Larsson examines itsbeginnings in 1991, when the women ofDubagunta in rural Nellore district, drove outliquor vendors from their village. The movementgrew to encompass a wide range of differentinterests in the state, including middle-class andurban activists, NGOs, elite-level bureaucrats,and opposition politicians, culminating in astate-wide alcohol ban. Yet how did thismovement, initially made up of poor, oftenlower-caste, women in scattered villages, get tothis point, and how did these diverse interestscome together under a single banner?

Answering this question, Larsson sets out tounderstand ‘how people’s political and privateactivities were able to be integrated into a largermovement’, and, particularly, asks what were‘the social mechanisms for mobilization and howdoes the translation from the private to thegeneral occur?’ (p. 8). More specifically,how and when did women with everydayhousehold problems transform these privatetroubles into a matter of common concern andmobilization?

Drawing on the work of Tarrow, Larssonsituates her work as a gendered perspective on‘social movements’ theory. From here, sheemphasizes the individual negotiations throughdiscursive constructions of gender andhousehold that both rural and urban womenmust enter into in order to participate in theanti-arrack movement. She highlights theimportance of the mass quality of the movementas its source of authority, and also its flexible,fluid, heterogeneous nature. This is important,she argues, for understanding how individuals,informal groupings, and networks of people,and not just formal organizations, areincorporated into the movement. The fluidityalso explains the different levels of people’sinvolvement, with bursts of activity reactivating‘submerged networks’ of association, and the

visibility of the movement across class, caste,geographical distance, and time.

With a comprehensive overview of socialmovements beginning with the colonial periodin India, Larsson shows how the early campaignin Nellore villages became famous for themovement, highlighting the importance of‘place’ in symbolically rooting the narratives thatsustain wider social movements, in thegeography of the region. Closely examiningchanging status and negotiation in thehousehold by women over the life-cycle, sheshows how popular discourses on femalepurity/impurity, auspiciousness, and feminineenergy (stree shakti ) shape a form of femalemorality, as an authority to act and a source of‘resistance’.

The politics of protest amongst middle-classmembers offers insights into their recruitmentand engagement in the movement and theirconstruction of the arrack problem (chap. 5).Covering the histories and charismatic leadershipof formal organizations that took up themovement, this chapter usefully underscores themediatory roles of middle-class activists betweenrural and urban people and opponents of themovement too, even as the intentions andsincerity of NGOs is questioned (how could onebe doing ‘sewa’/service yet still be paid?). Similarmediation appears in the subsequent chapter,outlining the political and commercial landscapeof opposition to the movement, from liquorcontractors, to those making their daily wagethrough the sale of arrack. But perhaps mostinteresting and useful is chapter 7, examining therole of the press and public protest in creating‘frames’ of shared experience through which asense of togetherness and ‘imagined collectivity’in the movement is produced. The sense ofpossibility, transformation, and ability toundertake actions well outside of everyday life,emerging through the ‘liminality’ and‘communitas’ (following Turner) of sharedexperience of protest and travel, grants aninsight into the practical production of meaningand sentiment in the experience ofdemonstration and protest, both in South Asiaand beyond.

This is a very detailed account of the Andhraanti-arrack movement, sometimes to itsdetriment. Occasionally, passages ofethnography might have brought more pointstogether and still retained the complexity of theirsituation, rather than the sometimes list-likepresentation which now and again risksobscuring the main argument by the sheervolume of detail and precise example. As this

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work is based on Larsson’s doctoral thesis, herdesire to cover ever angle is understandable andthe extent of examples and cases collected isimpressive. The book will no doubt be of interestand use to others working in Andhra, on issuesof alcohol and other forms of prohibition, andon social movements in India generally.

Cressida Jervis Read University of Sussex

Lentz, Carola. Ethnicity and the making ofhistory in northern Ghana. xi, 346 pp., maps,illus., bibliogr. Edinburgh: Univ. Press, 2006.£29.95 (cloth)

This book is the reworked and considerablyshortened version of Carola Lentz’sHabilitationschrift published in 1998 in German inan already abridged form, now with the additionof an epilogue that includes the debates onpolitics, ethnicity and regional identity innorthwest Ghana in the aftermath of theDecember 2004 presidential and parliamentaryelections. It ends with a (too) brief discussion(pp. 277-9) on the ‘inclusivist’ culturalist versus‘exclusivist’ political stances as regards localinterpretations of the interplay between ethnicityand politics, with none contesting the legitimacyof national ‘belonging’. For instance, there is noproject of cross-border ethnic unification,although missionaries dreamed of a Catholictrans-border community in colonial times (pp.160-3). The politics of recognition, about whichpeople argue, is thought and lived within thenational framework, an important observationwhen African states and boundaries are stillviewed as being artificial. This alleged ‘artificialnature’ – but even so-called ‘natural boundaries’are social and political constructs – is all toooften invoked as an explanation for all sorts of‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ conflicts in Africa that reflect alack of identification with a nation-state.

Confronting this widespread reductionism,history appears to be a powerful remedy.However, it is also a persuasive resourcemobilized for supporting conflicting claims. Thatis precisely the ambivalence that Carola Lentztackles in this book, while explaining thetransformations of ethnicity in northwest Ghana,and exploring the argument that ethnicity isalso, simultaneously, a category of social andpolitical analysis and practice (p. 3). To deal withethnicity implies having a broader look at theinterplay with other forms of collectiveidentification and social ties, as well as with thedefinition of public authorities. The historicaldepth of patriclans and earth shrine areas(chap. 1); the transformations of chieftaincy

(chaps 2-4); labour migrations (chap. 5);religious conversions (chap. 6); decentralizationand the intrusion of party politics (chaps 7 and8); social differentiation through access toeducation and urban life-style (chap. 9) – allthese elements have been continuouslyreworked in interaction with ethnic ‘belongings’,producing a tendency towards the piling up ofinstitutional and discursive repertoires, ratherthan their succession over time, as alreadyshown in other West African contexts. The‘cultural work of ethnicity’ (chap. 10) is acomplex and never-ending political negotiationabout origin, language, mapping, anddenomination.

The contextualization of ethnic discoursesfurthers the debate between primordialist andconstructionist views of ethnicity; in otherwords, to think ‘with’ and ‘against’ FredrikBarth. Changes in external boundaries areinherently linked with changes that areinward-orientated (see pp. 253-5, 268-9). Inother words, the changing fluidity of ethnicboundaries is intrinsically linked with otherinternal lines of differentiation and affiliation thatgive ‘content’ to ethnic belonging, which is notfixed but ‘historically contingent’ (p. 3). Thehistorical ethnography provided shows CarolaLentz at her best, thanks to the ‘groundedtheory’ perspective adopted by an author whoseconcern it is to nurture exploratory hypotheseswith rich material combining and cross-cuttingvarious sources and methods, rather than forcingfield data into the ‘Procrustean’ bed of apredefined theoretical framework. Actors’ agencystands at centre-stage and the relative historicalautonomy of social situations and arenas ishighlighted. The gap between local and nationalhistorical ruptures is clearly shown, as far asindependence is concerned. The ‘time whenpolitics came’ (i.e. party politics) represents amuch more important shift for villagers(pp. 199-200), while the ambiguities of thecolonial encounter and its enduring ‘freezing’effects on ethnic, social, and territorialboundaries are also well documented(pp. 116-19). The debate on colonial ethnographyand administrative and missionary (level of)knowledge (or ignorance) is also empiricallydealt with (pp. 72-103, 154, 160-71). What is madeapparent is that the relevant question is notabout colonial bureaucracy’s ignorance andknowledge, but rather the production and use ofignorance and knowledge in everydaygovernance.

At this stage, it is worth criticizing the bookby briefly reviewing four important and related

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issues of politics, village, class, and gender.Politics, as an emic concept, is equated withparty politics, mobilized by people to stigmatizeopportunistic behaviours, and related totradition as its opposite (p. 200). However,another sense of politics, that used as ananalytical and descriptive category, is present inmany places of the text without being madeexplicit. The chapter on youth and migrantassociations is a good example of this: ‘In viewof the gaps and disruptions hampering thefunctioning of local government during the1970s and 1980s, youth associations providedinstitutional continuity and an important forumthat represented local interests to thegovernment’ (p. 232). It might have beenrelevant to take some distance from emic viewsto reflect on politics as a specific ‘enunciationregime’ (Latour) binding individual interests andthe common good in a specific way. Such adiscussion on the nature of politics could havebeen usefully linked with the issues oflocal/national citizenship (pp. 247-51),territorial/social boundaries (pp. 234-7, 246-7),moral ethnicity, and brokerage (e.g. in relationto youth and migrant associations; p. 233).

This leads to a second line of criticismregarding the nexus of village/community/development. The author evokes the shift fromthe inter-war ‘chief-centred approach’ ofdevelopment to a village-centred approach inthe 1950s, albeit still bearing the hallmark ofpaternalism and populism (p. 187). She alsoemphasizes the function of developmentbrokerage (unsuccessfully) fulfilled by youthassociations and the related conflicts over projectlocation (pp. 241-2), without exploring themutual constitution of communities or villages,brokers, and development as a set of materialand symbolic resources. The weak reflection onthe village might be due to the regional or‘meso’ approach chosen by the author. It raisesquestions, however, as regards important formsof parochial patriotism (infra-ethnic orcross-cutting ethnic ties) which have beenstrengthened by (colonial and post-colonial)community-development approaches that meetthe state project of local anchoring via a policyof ‘villagization’. A similar comment could bemade about the social class issue, which is dealtwith by means of work-driven migration,education, and chieftaincy, without beingsystematically tackled. Last but not least, thegender issue seems to be absent from theco-production of history and ethnicity innorthwest Ghana, whereas Sandra Greene, forinstance, emphasizes its role in her Gender,

ethnicity, and social change on the Upper SlaveCoast (1996). Greene also risks a substantivedefinition of (pre-colonial) ethnicity bycombining kinship ties, time of arrival, andformer homeland, which would have beenworth discussing and comparing with Lentz’sproposal about ethnicity as a plural discursiverepertoire combining the idioms of kinship,moral community, and political mobilization(pp. 272-3). More generally, regardingcomparisons with other works dealing withsimilar issues in neighbouring contexts, thechoice made by the author of this excellent bookto write a ‘straight monograph’, thoughlegitimate, is sometimes a bit frustrating.

Pierre-Yves Le Meur Institute for DevelopmentResearch

Lyons, Barry J. Remembering the hacienda:religion, authority, and social change inhighland Ecuador. xii, 350 pp., tables, illus.,bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2007.£14.99 (paper)

The historical legacy of the hacienda throughoutthe Andes is an extensive and painful one. In thisrecent ethnography Barry Lyons adds to thisliterature by examining the hacienda complexfrom the perspective of the memories of some ofthe Indian servants that worked in theseinhuman conditions during the better part of thetwentieth century. Lyon carried out his fieldworkin the parish of Pangor, in Chimborazo provincelocated in the central highlands of Ecuador. Themain objective of the book, according to theauthor, is to address ‘some large questionsabout how indigenous peasants experienced,responded, and remember conditions on ahacienda’ (p. 4). At the same time this initialethnographic objective implies questions ofmemory, resistance and religion: How do peoplemake sense of such a painful historical legacy?What is the role of religion in such a complexpersonal and social enterprise? How is resistancearticulated in these particular cases? And finally,how did hegemony function in this rurallandscape of the Ecuadorian Andes?

Lyons seeks to answer these questions in thefour parts of the book. Part 1 (chaps 1 and 2)outlines the introduction to the book and alsoprovides a lengthy introduction to thegeographical region. Part 2 (chaps 3, 4, and 5),titled ‘Society and resistance’, details thecomplex structure of fiestas in the area, and themanner in which resistance and agency existedwithin the burdensome cultural privileges of

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being the feast-sponsor. Part 3 (chaps 6 and 7),titled ‘Respect and authority’, addresses aninnovative way of understanding respect as amode of both obedience and resistance that isanalysed in detail in two life histories. Andfinally, part 4 (chaps 8 and 9), titled ‘The legacyof the hacienda’, addresses the final historicalperiod of the demise of the hacienda thanks tothe agrarian reforms of the late 1960s and therole of Liberation Theology in empowering theseIndian communities in the Ecuadorian highlands.

At its best the book provides a very richethnographic description of what it was like tohave worked in, lived in, and survived the harshconditions of hacienda life. In this regard theauthor does well to transcend the traditional‘victim mentality’ which many authors havestereotypically attributed to Indians in the Andes.For Lyon, the objective is to understand howthese human beings were able to survive suchlevels of physical and emotional victimizationwhile still maintaining their culture andpersonhood. He provides a rich ethnographictapestry of life histories, interviews and details ofdaily life that informs us as to the varied mannerin which these oppressed communities wereable to resist and eke out a rich culturallivelihood in such unlikely conditions.

It is in this guise that, like most authorstoday, Lyon no longer sees hegemony as asimple monolithic tool of domination but, asGramsci himself outlined, as a complex array ofarticulations that are embedded in socialpractices and meanings: that is, ‘a socialphenomenon associated with patterns ofauthority, alliances, loyalties, and cleavages’(p. 254). It is in this sense that the role of one‘respected’, as lived by several of his informantsduring their days as exploited workers in thehacienda, is understood as hegemonic. In hisdiscussion the author shows how a localmeaning of ‘respect’ is articulated in ambivalentmanners which at times supported and at othersresisted the cruel domination of the land elite.This complex picture was further intensified bythe fact that Indian elders many times used therespect demanded by the hacienda bosses tosupport their own cultural authority over thenew generation. Therefore, the hegemonicarticulations that supported the unjust structuresof hacienda life also supported the dynamicculture of the Indian community, and vice versa.

Ultimately, Lyon’s contribution is to provide arich ethnographic picture of a painful part ofEcuadorian history, one which, as the authoralso recognizes, is far from over, and continuesto haunt the country today. I share the author’s

concluding hope that nothing like the oldhacienda system ever makes its way back, andthat this wished-for outcome requires thepresent legacy of racial shame, neo-colonialrelationships, and historical reparations to behonestly addressed.

O. Hugo Benavides Fordham University

Wilson, Thomas M. & Hastings Donnan.The anthropology of Ireland. xiv, 241 pp.,maps, figs, bibliogr. Oxford, New York: BergPublishers, 2006. £55.00 (cloth), £19.99

(paper)

The anthropology of Ireland has been accordedlimited significance in the development of thediscipline as a whole. With the obviousexception of the research undertaken in the1930s by Arensberg and Kimball, mostanthropologists would be relatively unfamiliarwith ethnographic work done either in theRepublic or in Ulster over the past seventy years.By contrast with the kudos attached to theanthropology of the Mediterranean, with whichit might appropriately be compared, Irishanthropology has fared poorly.

The publication of this book should go someway to rectifying this situation, for Wilson andDonnan persuasively argue that ethnographicwork conducted over the past three decades orso has been especially responsive to the fluidcharacter of Irish society and the changingnature of our discipline. With solid ethnographyto their credit, an impressive command of abroad range of Irish material, and a distinctfamiliarity with the new directions taken byanthropology in a globalized world, Wilson andDonnan skilfully handle both thesetransformative processes and the relationshipbetween them.

The marked historical contrast between theanthropology of Ulster and that of the Republicpresents no obstacle to Wilson and Donnan’soverall objective. As they rightly indicate, untilrecently the template for analysing social changein Ulster centred on the irreconcilable conflictbetween warring tribes, whilst that which wasimposed on the Republic was one of a dyingpeasant culture. In this book, ethnographiesfrom north and south are brought together toexplore and illuminate common processes.

In chapter 3, for example, which is about‘Controlling bodies’, work on sexual repression,lunacy, youth culture, and (exclusively from thenorth) paramilitary resistance is cleverly woventogether to show how people’s lives are

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regulated by the state, the church, and otherhegemonic institutions. In chapter 4, ‘Ireland’s“other(ing)” economies’, the informal economicpractices of Travellers, the long-termunemployed, cross-border consumers, and(chiefly from the north) the urban underclass areshown to provide each with a distinct sense ofidentity whilst also being troublesome toinstitutions of the state.

The recurrent theme throughout the book isthe extent to which collective identities haveproliferated throughout Ireland as a result ofincreasing integration into the European Unionand, more recently, by way of response to evenbroader global forces. The articulation ofinvolved ethnic identities has, of course, been afrequent topic in the analysis of the Troubles,especially the symbolically provocative paradesmounted by Orangemen. Wilson and Donnanusefully review this earlier literature, but theycouple it with less well-known analyses ofcultural performances like Riverdance and StPatrick’s Day celebrations, and the emergence ofall-Ireland sports teams, all of which pose newquestions about what it is to be Irish in morerecent times. ‘Irishness is shifting and relational’(p. 112) is how the authors summarize thistheme.

In chapter 6, they explore the originality andheterogeneity of collective identities generated inmore localized settings with reference to anumber of ethnographies in which communityand boundary, place and residence, ethnicityand discourse have been variously explored. Inthis chapter especially, the authors draw on theirown work in the border regions of CountyArmagh and County Tyrone, frontier zones inwhich the public enactment of identities can bea matter of life and death. ‘Transnational andglobal Ireland’ (chap. 7) broadens the horizon ofanalysis further by focusing on the way in whichEuropeanization has been accompanied by therise of racism, especially in Dublin and Belfast.Elsewhere, the authors propose, Europeanizationhas created alternative sources of power to theconservative and parochial machine politics ofthe past.

Wilson and Donnan conclude with the claimthat their book ‘has been about the constructionand reinvention of Ireland, or the many Irelands,on the one hand, and the anthropology ofIreland, or the many anthropologies of Ireland,on the other’ (p. 163). This is well warranted, fortheir coverage of involved and complex changesin the region and in the discipline is a significantachievement. One of the problems thatfrequently results from detailing how

community, religion, ethnicity, gender, and soon, provide the bases for novel forms ofpostmodern identity is that it is easy to lose sightof the critical historical continuities imposed byclass forces. This could have been avoided in thisbook by closer attention to the outstandinghistorical anthropology undertaken by Silvermanand Gulliver in Thomastown, County Kilkenny,which is given unwarrantedly slight attention inan otherwise balanced and comprehensivesynthesis.

Adrian Peace University of Adelaide

Xiang, Biao (transl. Jim Weldon). Transcendingboundaries: Zhejiangcun: the story of a migrantvillage in Beijing. xx, 198 pp., maps, illus.,bibliogr. Leiden: Brill, 2005. €76.00, $102.00

(cloth)

When China began pushing market reforms inthe 1980s, it created a golden opportunity forsinologists to determine why after the ChineseCommunist Party’s (CCP) almost half-a-centuryof anti-commerce and anti-profit-makingcampaigns, certain types of people were able tomake the transition into private enterprise moreeasily than others. How did these people learnabout market conditions, raise initial investmentcapital, and establish market networks tofacilitate production and trade?

Transcending boundaries is a compelling storyabout China’s post-socialist reforms, whichtraces a group of migrants from southeastChina’s Wenzhou Prefecture, Zhejiang province,who eventually established their semi-permanentenclave Zhejiangcun (Zhejiang village) in BeijingCity. Through diligence, skillful imitation, shrewdcalculation, flexible work schedules, andextended interpersonal networks, the Wenzhoumigrants turned Zhejiangcun into a productionand commercial hub of fashionable garments tomeet China’s burgeoning consumer demandsfor apparel in the mid-1980s. Soon Zhejiangcunnot only dominated China’s domestic clothingmarket, but also attracted international tradersfrom Russia and Eastern Europe, who came indroves for mass-produced leather jackets in theearly 1990s.

By using personal recollections from earlysettlers in Zhejiangcun, Xiang Biao, who was asociology student at Beijing University in 1992,(re)constructs nuanced, vivid, and oftentouching narratives about how the Wenzhoumigrants explored the region and its businessenvironment, recruited fellow workers andbusiness partners to form production and

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trading firms, and overcame or circumventedofficial regulations to meet market demand.Their business success created unforeseen wealthfor many of them. It also caused the horizontalexpansion of this enclave with continuous flowsof peasant migrants who, as the demand forcheap labourers continued, came initially fromWenzhou and its vicinity, but later expanded tothe entire Zhejiang province and China’s otherimpoverished interior provinces. This uncheckedurban sprawl, however, eventually createdconfrontations between the Party-State andZhejiangcun, as seen in the demolition of allforty-six illegally built residential compounds byBeijing’s municipal government in 1995. But thistemporary setback could not reverse China’sembrace of global capitalism, and by 1998

Zhejiancun was completely rebuilt by Wenzhoumigrants with a population exceeding 100,000.

While Zhejiangcun’s success provides aninsightful anecdote about China’s post-socialisttransformation, the central questions thatsinologists may ask include: Why were theWenzhou group the only ones who bravelyembraced this risky trend during the state’suncertain policy transition? What are thesocio-cultural characteristics that equipped themwith the necessary predispositions with which toachieve business success in this particularlocality? Xiang, based on his decade-longinvolvement in Zhejiangcun, identifies threeconverging factors which he considers essentialfor its success, the first being happenstance, andthe other two being socio-cultural in nature.

The historical accident occurred whenland-hungry Wenzhou farmers migrated duringthe more relaxed post-Cultural Revolution era toother parts of China in search of work. Onegroup journeyed to Inner Mongolia as tailors forcustom-made clothes in the late 1970s. As earlymigrants followed the supply source of cloth toBeijing – the capital city where nationwideresources were centralized – they realized thatthe cloth could first be tailored there beforebeing shipped to other regions. In 1984, all sixtailors and their families were brought toBeijing’s southern suburb, where land isabundant and housing cheap – thus establishingthe legendary Zhejiangcun.

Zhejiangcun’s subsequent expansion anddomination of China’s clothing market, based onXiang’s analysis, resulted from the twosocio-cultural factors of guanxi and xi. Guanxiincorporates the reciprocal interpersonalconnections based on shared commonalities,such as kinship, schooling, residence, work,and/or extended family, which many

anthropologists of China have discussedextensively. The term xi literally means circles orspheres, implying more formalized interpersonalnetworks among kinsmen and/or businessassociates. Even though Xiang has taken pains todistinguish these two operational concepts, mostsinologists would probably consider them to beessentially the same in denoting reciprocalinterpersonal networks.

Regional specialization in craft production inpre-modern China has long been acknowledgedand researched by sinologists. There have alsobeen extensive discussions about the importanceof the Wenzhou Model in late-socialist China’sdevelopment. Similarly, early research onindustrial and commercial development inTaiwan and Chinese communities in SoutheastAsia has identified the importance of reciprocalinterpersonal networks, flexible work schedules,decentralized production through outsourcing,and sensitivity to market changes – all essentialfeatures in Zhejiangcun’s successful garmenttrades. Xiang’s theoretical discussion about therise of Zhejiangcun could be tremendouslyimproved by consulting other published works,including Li Zhang’s ethnography Strangers inthe city: reconfigurations of space, power, andsocial networks within China’s floating population(2001), which also focuses on Zhejiangcun atabout the same period.

Shu-Min Huang Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Theory

Cameron, Deborah & Don Kulick (eds).The language and sexuality reader. xii, 322 pp.,bibliogr. London, New York: Routledge,2006. £22.99 (paper)

To someone with an anthropologicalbackground, this collection of excerpts aboutlanguage and sexuality can initially appearsomewhat strange: the majority of pieces drawon material from urban areas in the USA (all ofthe pre-1980s pieces, and all but four of thepost-1980s excerpts, out of a total oftwenty-three); and almost all the excerptsconcern the English language (all but three ofthem). Moreover, there was no mention ofstudies that have carried out comparisons acrossdifferent languages, such as Keith Harvey’sIntercultural movements: American gay in Frenchtranslation (2003). Instead, the Reader consists ofa collection of articles, ordered roughly from the

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earliest (1940s) to the latest (2006), thatshowcase diverse ways of describing, observing,analysing, and constructing a relationship of onekind or another between language and sexuality.

That chronological order is in fact the key toexplaining the selection: rather than chartingwritings about the diversity of possible relationsbetween language and sexuality in cross-culturalperspective, the Reader charts the way in whichdominant analytical approaches towards thatrelationship has shifted with time. What theselection shows is that, for Anglophone studiesat least, the strongest impetus in this field, fromthe 1940s right up to the present, has comemostly from the USA. As importantly, it alsocharts the interplay between academic research,and US-based political movements and socialconditions that were reflected in changes inanalytical approach from one period to the next.In that sense, the Reader is a valuable resourcefor anyone who is curious about the history ofideas, whether interested in language andsexuality or not: this is a relatively recentexample of how conceiving of the object andsubject of study not only is an outcome of itstime, but also, in true Foucauldian fashion,contributes towards generating the entities thatare studied.

The two editors of this collection certainlyknow a great deal about this process, for theyhave both contributed to the development ofthe field: Deborah Cameron is a sociolinguistwith an extensive background in feministapproaches towards the study of language andsexuality; and Don Kulick is an anthropologistwith an extensive background in linguistic andperformative approaches towards the study ofsexuality. Indeed, the collection ends with anexcerpt by Kulick, called ‘No’ (first published in2003), which argues, using the work of JudithButler combined with Althusser’s theories ofinterpellation, that language creates the sexualsubjects that it initially appears merely to reflect.That perspective is the end-point of the book,both literally and intellectually: the excerpts arepulled together to show how a field of studythat began with studying mostly malehomosexuals in urban areas of the USA in orderto identify the distinctive ways in which theyspoke then moved towards a concerted effort torecognize both more diversity and inequality,while creating positive identities and/orcommunities in the 1970s and 1980s, followed bya fairly thorough deconstruction and a movetowards theories of performativity in the 1990sand 2000s, which argued that identities arebrought into being by talk and performance

rather than the reverse. This shift is also madeclear in the structure of the book. The earlierarticles in part I (covering the 1940s to 1980s)tend to assume that homosexuality is anontological identity, so that language used istaken to reflect that identity. The later articles inpart I show how the secretive, illegal, andmedicalized ontological status of (male)homosexuality in the USA slowly changed as thelaws began to be relaxed, and as gay liberation,feminism, and other movements began todevelop, and, with them, analytical approachesbegan to change too. Part II of the collection,which covers the 1990s to the present, is abouttwice as long as part I and has three sections:‘Sexual styles and performances’; ‘Heteronorms’;and ‘The semiotics of sex and the discourse ofdesire’. The first section deals with ways inwhich people present themselves to the world,as a means to introduce the literature suggestingthat people’s identities emerge from theirperformances and not vice versa. The secondsection, ‘Heteronorms’, focuses on the powerand inequalities involved in how effective orineffective different language performancesmight be. It is notable that all these excerptswere written by women, reflecting the fact thatconcern over heteronormativity emerged fromfeminism more than it did from gay liberation orqueer theory. The final section, ‘The semiotics ofsex and the discourse of desire’, focuses moreexplicitly on performativity, on the momentsduring which certain kinds of relations orpersons are brought into existence throughlanguage – in this case, language relating to sex,gender, and/or desire. By the end of the book,some authors are arguing for an abandonmentof the notion of sexual identity altogether, onthe grounds that it is too constraining and fixeda concept to account for people’s variedexperiences (e.g. Valentine in a paper originallypublished in 2003).

The close attention to conversation analysisand speech fragments in many excerpts in part IIhas the advantage of breaking downhomogenizing and categorical assumptions fromthe earlier period, but the disadvantage of givinglittle away about the wider context. One notableexception is Abe’s paper on Japanese lesbian bartalk, which is exceptional in every way for thisReader – it is about lesbians, about Japan, andabout a language other than English. This paperbrings out how strongly the Japanese social andlinguistic context contrasts with the Anglophoneexamples offered in most of the rest of theReader. Including this excerpt in the Reader –along with an excerpt from Nakamura, which

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provides another Japanese example, and one byAhearn covering love letters from Nepal –highlights how the debate about language andsexuality has been strongly marked by theAnglophone context from which it came. It alsodemonstrates how such contextually specificapproaches might be applied elsewhere (asKulick’s own work in Brazil has previouslyshown), while hinting at how those approachesmight shift yet again as a result. To reiterate apoint made earlier, this adds to making the booka valuable contribution to the study of howconceptual perspectives develop, as well asproviding a resource for, and insight into, thequestion of the relationship between languageand sexuality.

Sarah Green University of Manchester

Evens, T.M.S. & Don Handelman (eds). TheManchester School: practice and ethnographicpraxis in anthropology. x, 334 pp., illus.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2006. £25.00 (paper)

When requested to review a volume thatpromised to introduce the Manchester School, Ifelt an uneasiness that might engross a ThirdWorld man on meeting with the ethnographythat claims to present him and his lineage to the‘civilized’ world. So, it is with mixed feelings thatI comment upon the work of Evens andHandelman, my old colleagues at the sameManchester research project. The volume, whichhad its origins in a conference workshop, isvaluable, in particular, for paying tribute to agreat figure in modern anthropology, the lateMax Gluckman. I have always thought thatGluckman did not gain the place he deserved inthe records of anthropology. The ManchesterSchool, for all those who carried out theirstudies and research within the premises of thetwo top floors of its Dover Street home, or wereinfluenced by the long list of ethnographiesproduced by its members, was no less ‘theGluckman School’. For better or worse, whetherthe research strategies and theories he advocatedwill survive or lose academic reputation,Gluckman stands next to Malinowski in hisunrelenting energy and forceful command asmaster and teacher of ethnographic fieldwork, apractice that seems to have lost ground incontemporary anthropology.

The volume opens with two landmarkchapters by founders of the School, Gluckman’slecture of 1959, and a 1982 paper by his closestudent, the late Clyde Mitchell. These are

presentations that advocate the basic elementsand credo of the ‘extended case method’.Gluckman, as usual in his generous manner,made efforts to relate to all those dedicatedfieldworkers who helped develop the method hecherished. Mitchell, for his part, returned to theroots of the method as already mythicallyassociated with Gluckman’s record and analysisof the official opening of a bridge in Zululand(M. Gluckman, Analysis of a social situation inmodern Zululand, 1958 [1940]). That case attainedthe reputation and status of an almost sacredritual within the pages of the Manchester Schoolgreat tradition.

The rest of the volume is uneven. ThreeManchester veterans of the same cohort, Evens,Handelman, and Bruce Kapferer, present theirmemories and interpretations of the School’sinnovations. Evens, whose research orientationand writings do not represent the typicalMancunian fieldworker, claims that the methodhas theoretical implications far more radical thanGluckman and his associates surmised whenthey first advanced its merits. Handelmanemphasizes in particular the close affinity ofGoffman’s interactionist agenda with theManchester method and its theoreticalperception of social action. (I attendedGoffman’s seminar in Manchester, where hewent on for hours uninterrupted by an attentiveaudience.) Kapferer portrays Gluckman’sintellectual career and the sources of histheoretical development. He emphasizesGluckman’s sensitive awareness about the roleof the individual without neglecting socialstructural processes, thus advancingDurkheim’s and Radcliffe-Brown’s perspectiveof the social system. Ironically, all threehad, as students, uneasy relationships withGluckman.

Except for Ronald Frankenberg and Sally FalkMoore, members of an older generation andclose associates of Gluckman, who offer theirinsights about a remarkable teacher and acolleague, the other six participants are of ayounger cohort who were attracted to themethod (Andreas Glaeser, David Mills, MarianKempny, Karin Norman, C. Bawa Yamba, andBjorn Lindgren). Limited by space, I drawattention to the recently deceased MarianKempny from Poland, a dedicated admirer of theSchool who also presents a list of the School’smembers. Karin Norman from Stockholm,meanwhile, presents two absorbing cases ofBosnian refugees in Sweden that demonstratethe power of the method in contemporaryethnographic work.

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In a book that aims to represent a School,one expects a comprehensive review of the workdone by its members as a way to appreciate itscontribution to anthropology, beyond that of afew ‘celebrities’ and members of the foundingcohort (Victor Turner in particular). Moststudents, the building blocks of the School, theirfields and research agendas are not exploredexcept for a few marginal notes. Thus the Schoolremains somewhat a mystery, a shadow society,for the reader unfamiliar with that body in Britishanthropology. No doubt, a volume based on aconference workshop cannot easily depict thecomplex structure of a professional institutionand avoid repetitions. Regardless of itsshortcomings, the volume draws attention to a‘golden era’ in the annals of anthropology,though some articles published elsewhere offeradditional analytical and historical dimensionsthat might supplement the present volume (e.g.R.P. Werbner, ‘The Manchester School inSouth-Central Africa’, Annual Review ofAnthropology 13, 1984, 157-85; M. Burawoy, ‘Theextended case method’, in M. Burawoy et al.(eds), Ethnography unbound: power and resistancein the modern Metropolis, 1991, 271-87; and M.Shokeid, ‘Max Gluckman and the making ofIsraeli anthropology’, Ethnos 69, 2004, 387-410).I am moved when reminded of the enthusiasm,the tension, and the feeling of discovery thatdominated the teachers and students seatedaround the big Manchester seminar table, whennovice anthropologists recently back from thefield presented their first ethnographic chapters,anxiously awaiting Gluckman’s response.

Moshe Shokeid Tel Aviv University/Ruppin Academic Center

Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus Himmelmann &Ulrike Mosel (eds). Essentials of languagedocumentation. x, 424 pp., tables, figs, illus.,bibliogr. New York, Berlin: Mouton deGruyter, 2006. $19.95 (paper)

This book is a collection of chapters on differentaspects of language documentation for theenlightenment of people (mostly but not onlylinguists) who wish to know more aboutsuccessful ways to preserve some of the world’slinguistic heritage. It has been put together by ateam of linguists, all of them seasonedfieldworkers, who have published extensively ona range of languages which they haveresearched in locales as different as the UpperXingu (in the case of Bruna Franchetto) andXinjiang (Arienne M. Dwyer). Most are involved

with the DoBeS (Dokumentation bedrohtenSprachen) Project funded by Germany’sVolkswagen-Stiftung, the purpose of the projectbeing to document languages in various parts ofthe world that are in serious danger ofextinction. Although work on documentingpreviously unrecorded and endangeredlanguages has been going on for the past fewcenturies, language documentation as anacademic discipline per se (and as somethingwhich can be studied at university level) hasbeen recognized only over the past decade or so(Peter K. Austin, director of the Hans RausingEndangered Languages Project at the School ofOriental and African Studies, where a Master’sdegree in language documentation is available,provides a chapter on data and languagedocumentation containing boxes full of usefulpractical hints for the neophyte and experiencedfieldworker alike.) Thirteen linguists havecontributed to this book; the most productiveauthor, co-editor Himmelmann, an Austronesianspecialist, has contributed three chapters andover seventy pages.

This is not a field manual of the sort that hasappeared sporadically over the past century anda half. It is not a ‘how to’ book like AlexanderKibrik’s The methodology of field investigations inlanguage (1977). Rather, its chapters read as acollection of considerations of issues, ethical andpractical as well as more purely linguistic, ofwhich fieldworkers need to be aware. Forinstance, Jane H. Hill’s chapter on ‘Theethnography of language and languagedocumentation’ is rich in anecdotes from herown experiences working on Uto-Aztecanlanguages in the US and Mexico which aredesigned to alert students and other readers tosuch issues as guarded community attitudestowards publishing materials on indigenouslanguages in areas where such languages are feltto be something not to be shared with outsiders(as she makes clear in her account of thecontroversies surrounding the publication of adictionary of Hopi). Here and elsewhere in thebook, the call for a kind of documentarylinguistics that is culturally sensitive to thewishes of the community whose language isbeing documented is very clear. Consequently achapter such as that on orthographydevelopment by Frank Seifart is an importantinclusion in this work, as much as is, forexample, a more linguistically orientated chaptersuch as the well-illustrated treatment of linguisticannotation provided by Eva Schultze-Berndt,which includes information based on her ownexperiences with Jaminjung in Northern Australia

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(a language in close contact with theEnglish-lexifier Kriol) on effective ways ofhandling a multilingual text corpus. BrunaFranchetto’s chapter on linguistic ethnography,informed by her work on Cariban languages ofthe Upper Xingu, discusses the importance ofcollecting and documenting ethnographic data(including information which will permit one todescribe the kinship system) together withlinguistic material. This chapter will be ofespecial interest to Amazonianists and othersocial anthropologists, even to those whonormally shy away from linguistics.

Most basic descriptive linguistic fields aredealt with, though not in the traditional‘phonetics and phonology outwards’ sequencewhich linguists would expect, and there is foodfor thought in all of them. So although John B.Haviland’s chapter on documenting lexicalknowledge will not teach the tyro how toassemble a dictionary from field notes, it willprovide insights into the ways in which linguistsstructure lexical knowledge within semanticfields and indigenously defined categories andhow they try to collect such material for analysis.Indeed the scope of the book is wide, dealingwith topics ranging from prosody to multimediaapplications and interfaces, and the writing isclear and broken up by numerous diagrams,screenshots, and illustrations. Some chaptershave separate appended bibliographies, butmost works are referenced in the majorbibliography, which is preceded by ten pages ofuseful (and largely web-based) resources.

Anyone intending to go into the field todocument a language should read this bookthoroughly before proceeding. It will not tellthem what to collect, but could save themendless intellectual frustration. It is a worthyaddition to the small but growing number ofbooks on linguistic fieldwork.

Anthony P. Grant Edge Hill University

Harvey, David. A brief history of neoliberalism.vii, 247 pp., maps, figs, tables, bibliogr.Oxford: Univ. Press, 2007. £8.99 (paper)

David Harvey’s lively and critical economichistory of the last three decades is a must-readfor economists, workers in the financial sectorand international development, and journalists,but is also important for an engaged generalpublic. It charts the global shifts in therestructuring of economic and social life towardspolicies that have focused on the allegedfreedoms of the marketplace, the creative

destruction of the Keynesian welfare state andsocial democratic politics, and the promotion ofthe interests of capital above all else – so muchso that capitalism as a mode of production hasnow become intensified as an ethic, and haspenetrated our political and social institutionsand, most worryingly, our values. The result hasbeen to re-establish the conditions for capitalaccumulation, to restore the power of anarrowly defined capital class, and devastatinglyto increase social inequality. This isneoliberalization.

How have so many people so easily ‘boughtinto’ this state of affairs? Harvey’s analysisshould be a warning to those who treat ascommon sense the protection of the politicalideals of individual freedom. These are the veryvalues that work as a system of justification forthe political project of neoliberalism, whichproposes that human well-being will bestadvance by liberating individual entrepreneurialfreedoms and skills within an institutionalframework of private property, free markets, andfree trade (p. 2). Harvey reminds us that morethan half a century ago, the economic historianKarl Polanyi warned that the market economywhich produces the freedoms that we highlyprize (freedom of conscience, speech, meeting,association, to choose one’s jobs) areunderpinned by bad freedoms. The latterinclude the freedom to exploit one’s fellows, tomake excessive gains without commensurableservice to the community, to keep technologicalinnovations from being used for public benefit,or to profit from public calamities secretlyengineered for private advantage (p. 36). Theconcept of freedom is turned into mere freeenterprise and the place of planning reduced tothe denial of freedom. Harvey links PresidentBush’s authoritarian drive to ‘help the spread offreedom’ to how corporations have withheld thebenefits of technologies such as development ofAIDs drugs, and to the question of whethercertain wars and disasters have been secretlyengineered for corporate advantage.

Harvey’s breathtaking global sweep includestracing Pinochet’s violent 1973 coup againstAllende, which preceded the neoliberalization ofthe Chilean state; the US Reagan and UKThatcher regimes of the 1980s, which liberatedthe powers of finance, curbed the power oflabour, and deregulated industry, resourceextraction, and agriculture; the 1978 liberalizationof the communist-ruled economy of Chinaunder Deng Xiaoping; and the brutality ofstructural adjustment policies imposed by theWorld Bank and the IMF on much of the Third

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World. These neoliberal regimes are shown todemolish institutions of political democracy byrestricting the freedom of the masses in favourof protecting the freedom of the few – theinterests of private property owners, businesses,multinational corporations, and financial capital.

Harvey, undoubtedly one of the mostimportant geographers of recent times, hasshown the ongoing importance of Marxistanalysis, bringing to centre-stage an analysis ofclass in a critique of global capitalism. A briefhistory of neoliberalism, while contributing to thisbroader project, opens up as many questions asit answers, and herein lie the research avenuesfor anthropology, of which I will raise a few. Thefirst is an analysis of class power. Harvey hasincorporated earlier criticisms of his work bytaking on board race and gender, yet henevertheless implies that class is foundational forcapitalism in a way that race and gender are not.Harvey is also unclear about whetherneoliberalism has restored the power of an eliteclass or in fact enabled the emergence of anentirely new class. The answer is probably both,and that class is always racialized and gendered,but it is one that anthropology should explorethrough research on the social relations thatcharacterize neoliberalism in different parts ofthe world. The second research avenue foranthropology is a comparative analysis of theimpact of neoliberalism in much of the worldthat is suffering its consequences. Harvey iscareful to emphasize the unevenness ofneoliberal globalization. However, we needdetailed studies, such as that being producedthrough the most recent books of JamesFerguson on Africa and Aihwa Ong on East andSoutheast Asian states, to show howneoliberalism is being taken up by differentregimes, what salience it acquires for differentpeople and why, and the ways in which itmarginalizes but is sometimes also co-opted bythe masses. And finally, and this is whereHarvey’s work is perhaps the weakest, the thirdresearch avenue for anthropology comprisesproposals of alternatives to neoliberalism. Harveysettles for a rejuvenated class politics, a strongsocial democratic and working-class movement,but with little theoretical insight into what thatchanging world should look like. This is perhapswhere anthropology has the most to contributeby revisiting the fruits of our own historicalproduce from which alternatives to neoliberalismcan emerge – the analyses of societies whereeconomic arrangements are embedded in socialrelations, where rules of reciprocity, communalobligations, and redistribution are the norm and

market relations the anomaly, and which after allhave formed much of human history.

Alpa Shah Goldsmiths College

Hawkes, Kristen & Richard R. Paine (eds).The evolution of human life history. xiii, 505

pp., figs, tables, bibliogr. Oxford: JamesCurrey; Santa Fe: School of AmericanResearch Press, 2006. £19.95 (paper)

This is an important and authoritative book,pioneering a new disciplinary field and in theprocess overturning much conventional wisdom.Some will view its conclusions as highlycontroversial, but the contributors are major andrespected figures in their fields. The evolution ofhuman life history is the published outcome of aseminar sponsored by the School of AmericanResearch in 2002. Unlike other multi-authoredvolumes of this kind, it is impressively coherentand tightly edited.

The volume consists of eleven chapters,including an introduction and three somewhattechnical appendices. One of the two editors –Kristen Hawkes – co-authored chapters 1 and 2

and singly authored 3 and 4; clearly, she is thedominant influence throughout. This reviewerfound her chapter 4 (‘Slow life histories andhuman evolution’) a tour de force. Subsequenttitles include ‘Primate life histories and the roleof brains’ (Carel van Schaik and colleagues),‘Lactation, complementary feeding and humanlife history’ (Daniel Sellen), ‘Modern human lifehistory’ (Barry Bogin), ‘Contemporaryhunter-gatherers and human life historyevolution’ (Nicholas Blurton Jones), and ‘Theosteological evidence for human longevity in therecent past’ (Lyle Konigsberg and NicholasHerrmann). Of more than specialist interest, thevolume is the latest instalment in a bold projectto restructure the science of human evolution asa whole.

Humans develop more slowly than the othergreat apes; we are the only living higher primateto have childhood and adolescent growthphases. Children depend on parents or othercarers for subsistence longer than do theoffspring of any other mammal, yet we weanour babies earlier than do most other apes. Wehave a higher survival rate, begin ourreproductive effort later, and have shorterinter-birth intervals. We have the longest lifespanof any terrestrial mammal, yet women stopbearing children in the middle of it.

This uniquely human combination of lifehistory features has only recently been properly

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recognized and described. Instead of seekingadaptive explanations for the components takenindividually, conventional wisdom tended toattribute the overall pattern to a single factor(e.g. ‘neoteny’), this in turn being attributed – atleast in the original ‘Man the hunter’ narratives– to paternity certainty and the nuclear family assupposedly characteristic of hominins since theemergence of bipedalism.

This book offers quite different explanations.It carefully examines the ‘Hunting hypothesis’ inboth traditional and updated versions,comparing it with what has come to be knownas the ‘Grandmother hypothesis’. ‘Man thehunter’ centred on male behaviour andespecially on male paternal care as the centralfactor enabling lengthened juveniledevelopment, an underlying assumption beingthat both sexes share the same productive andreproductive interests. The Grandmotheringhypothesis makes no such assumptions. Itattends explicitly to female life history trade-offs,proposing that slowed ageing is favoured by thecontribution that older females can make to thesurvival and fertility of their junior kin. Thesefitness effects from grandmothering result incompetitive advantages for lineages in whichageing is slower than in ancestral populations.This results in lower adult mortality. Longer lifeexpectancy in turn tips the balance of costs andbenefits in favour of a suite of further changes,including delayed first reproduction.

This book avoids the circularity of invoking‘special’ principles to explain why humans areapparently ‘special’. The authors concede thathuman evolution presents us with numeroustheoretical problems. But we are unlikely tosolve these if we make up the rules as we goalong. Monogamy is difficult to enforce; anymodel that sets out from paternity certainty asits point of departure has some explaining to do.The Grandmother hypothesis avoids problems ofthis kind. Its basic methodological premise isthat distinctively human life history details mustbe explained in terms of general life historytheory – that is, explained by relying on modelsapplicable to mammals including primates ingeneral.

This means focusing on females. It is not thatmales do not count. Unlike males in mostprimate species, men expend substantial effortproducing food destined to be consumed byfemales and juveniles. But the best way toexplain this is to avoid special pleading, relyinginstead on models that have proved productivein explaining male-female arrangements amongmammals more generally.

Life history questions such as when to stopgrowing and have the first baby, whether tohave singletons, twins, or more offspring perpregnancy, and when to wean and move on tothe next baby are questions about female lifehistories. As females make their choices in theserespects, males are presented withcorrespondingly changed trade-offs. Ifhunter-gatherer men are generous, energetichunters – which in general they are – it isbecause hunter-gatherer women ensure thatthey are kept on their toes. For mammals ingeneral, female strategies act as ultimatedeterminants. Humans may be ‘special’ insignificant respects, but human evolution isunlikely to have run contrary to Darwinian law.

Chris Knight University of East London

Povinelli, Elizabeth. The empire of love:toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, andcarnality. xiii, 285 pp., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2006.£60.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper)

The empire of love is both strange and wonderful.A reader familiar with Elizabeth Povinelli’s priorwork might pick up this small volume expectingto find an expanded version of her brilliant essay‘Notes on gridlock’, which showed how liberalforms of power have split the world. On the onehand, one finds the realm of the ‘littlegenealogy’ that makes up the heteronormativenuclear family. This is the homeland of anintimate form of love that provides a model forthe contract between subjects and the state. Onthe other hand, one finds the realm ofgenealogy, writ large, inhabited by indigenoussubjects whose relationships and practicesappear as maximally determined by the past.This is the homeland not of choice, but ofcoercion by the forces of tradition and ‘blood’.In both cases, the two poles infect one another:true love, like true inheritance, escapescalculation; it is supposed to ‘just happen’, evenagainst the subject’s will. Like Povinelli’s earlierwritings, The empire of love shows howindigenous people confront ‘a double bind –either love through liberal ideals ofself-sovereignty and deculture yourself, or loveaccording to the fantasy of the undying dictatesof your tradition and dehumanize yourself’(p. 228). But here, Povinelli lingers on thecorporeal costs of what she calls the ‘cunning ofrecognition’, not only for indigenous people,but also for other non-normative communitiescaught up in the liberal logic that she dissects.

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Povinelli finds food for thought in herlongstanding friendship with indigenous peoplefrom Belyuen in northern Australia and her morerecent acquaintance with the radical faeries, aNorth American counter-cultural movementconsisting predominantly of gay men. Peoplefrom Belyuen represent what some radicalfaeries experiment with becoming:‘genealogical’ subjects in close touch with aspirituality that some radical faeries associatewith a primordial homosexuality. The radicalfaeries represent what people from Belyuencannot become without losing the paltrybenefits associated with indigeniety: ‘autological’subjects who craft traditions suited to theirpersonal journeys through life. In three longchapters, Povinelli vividly renders the challengesfaced by both groups. In chapter 1, Povinelli’sexperience seeking treatment for a tropical ulceroccasions an extended reflection on the variabledistribution of death and disease amongautological and genealogical subjects. In chapter2, a pair of decorated conch shells and adecorated gourd sitting on the author’s desklead to an extended analysis of contests overcultural copyright. The final chapter tracks thedevelopment of the tension between whatPovinelli calls the ‘intimate event’ and the‘genealogical society’ across a broad swathe ofhistory, treating topics ranging from marriagelaw and the emergence of modern citizenship tothe relationship between kinship theory andcolonialism. Each chapter is an extended riff onthe ethical, political, and intellectual dilemmasposed by liberalism to anyone who does not fitits norms.

Reading The empire of love is like joining alively conversation, midstream. We feel welcome,

and we can feel the energy of the claims, evenas we wonder how it all began. Povinelli coversa tremendous amount of ground. She oftendoes so in a breathless series of short-handreferences, which may prove opaque to anyonewho does not share her take on, say, Césaire orLévi-Strauss. Some readers will find the bookintriguing. Others will be confused. This is ashame. Anthropologists seeking to rethink thestudy of kinship badly need Povinelli’s corrective.This book teaches us that the problem withkinship studies is not simply that anthropologistshave placed too much stock in carnal substanceslike blood, bodies, and genes. Rather, they havefailed to comprehend the forces that gave rise toa prejudice against materiality and apresumption that some identities are inheritedwhile others are self-made.

Still, The empire of love has much to offer, notleast of which is a vision of how ananthropologist might keep vigil with the woundsthat liberalism inscribes on bodies and minds.Just as Povinelli had to ‘exfoliate’ dimensions ofher biography as she travelled between NorthernAustralia and North America, all anthropologistshave to learn to endure the pain of separation asthey traverse incommensurable worlds. Povinellimakes this point without allowing us to forgetthat the cunning of recognition extracts a higherprice from some subjects than from others. Aspart of a series designed ‘to open the scholarlydiscourses on contemporary public culture’ to abroader readership, The empire of love is not anunalloyed success. But it is a brave and usefulbook.

Danilyn Rutherford University of Chicago

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A Brief History of Neoliberalism – By David Harvey

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Transcript of A Brief History of Neoliberalism – By David Harvey