Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (review

Book Reviews

SINGLE BOOK REVIEWS

Food in the Ancient World. Joan P. Alcock. Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 2006. 276 pp.

STACIE M. KINGIndiana University

Food in the Ancient World describes foods produced and con-sumed from the beginnings of Egyptian Predynastic (4000B.C.E.) to the end of the Roman Empire (C.E. fifth century),focusing on four civilizations: the Egyptians, Greeks, Celts,and Romans. Joan P. Alcock’s sources of information areGreek and Roman texts and Egyptian hieroglyphs, iconog-raphy, and archaeology. Because the Egyptians, Greeks, andCelts were later subsumed under the control of Rome, thebook concentrates most heavily on the Roman Empire.

After three lists, including biographies of classical au-thors, bibliographic information for major sources, and atimeline, chapter 1 provides summary information abouteach civilization. Alcock reviews extant population esti-mates and provides details about climate, natural environ-ments, planting cycles, systems of land tenure, agriculturalpractices, and patterns of trade (esp. of Rome).

In chapter 2, Alcock highlights individual foods, de-scribing where, how, and by whom each was cultivated,used, and consumed. The exhaustive list ranges from cere-als, legumes, fruits, and meat to crustacea, beverages, weeds,and dairy products. The chapter reads like a series of en-cyclopedia entries, combining data from primary classicalsources and archaeology. Information about each civiliza-tion is dispersed throughout the entries.

Chapter 3 describes food-processing techniques, cook-ing methods, and technologies used by the Greeks, Romans,Egyptians, and Celts. Alcock discusses the different settingsin which the elites ate as compared to members of the lowerclasses. People in power viewed bars, taverns, hotels, andancient versions of fast-food restaurants with suspicion be-cause of the subversive political discussions and competi-tive drinking that often accompanied people’s visits to theseestablishments.

In chapter 4, Alcock examines each civilization in moredetail. The author traces the development of agriculture, in-troduction of new foods, and changes in food consumptionchronologically as they relate to major cultural historicalevents. The author provides details about the political poli-

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 108, Issue 4, pp. 883–929, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2006 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of CaliforniaPress’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

cies that had effects on production and diet and weavesin an interesting discussion about the relationship amongfood production, economics, and the power of the elite (anobvious bias of classical writings).

Chapter 5 focuses on the ways that foods were con-sumed in daily meals and during special occasions. Alcockdiscusses the categories of people that participated in re-ligious ceremonies, banquets, and festivals; the materialsattendees were expected to supply; and other activities thataccompanied the events (courtesans, music, dancing, etc.).This section is important for scholars interested in socialand material aspects of feasting. The chapter also describesthe foods associated with warriors and military, religiousceremonies, funerary practices, and social taboos surround-ing particular foodstuffs.

The final chapter describes the particulars (and pe-culiarities) of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Celtic diets.The author provides a brief overview of humoral theoryand its impact on diet in the ancient world. AlthoughMediterranean diets were healthy and well balanced and theCeltic diet depended on high-protein animal products, eachvaried in quality depending on the season. The best foodswere often diverted to the army or market towns. Alcockalso summarizes paleopathological indicators of health andlife expectancy data based on skeletal analyses. People con-tended with obesity, as well as dental problems and illnessesstemming from nutritional deficiencies, from which thepoor suffered more often than the wealthy.

This book is an excellent basic reference for foods,diet, and nutrition in ancient Egypt, Greece, Britain, andRome. However, the chapters and subsections often seemdisjointed because they are not tied together with intro-ductions or conclusions. Alcock avoids in-text citation toenhance the readability of the text, but this makes it lessuser-friendly to an audience eager to see sources. Instead,footnotes and a selected bibliography are compiled at theend.

The four ancient civilizations are at times presented astimeless and unchanging, which I think can be attributedto the organization of the volume. Discussions of Rome,Greece, Egypt, and the Celts are arranged by topic and,in these short sections, it is difficult to go beyond essen-tializing statements. My biggest disappointment with thebook was its title. The borders of the ancient world, to me,

884 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006

extend far beyond these four civilizations in both timeand space. Although I would not assign this book as a textfor a class, I would use it as a reference for designing alecture on foods in ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt, and Iwould highly recommend it to an undergraduate writing aterm paper on a related topic. The volume is unique in itslevel of detail, organization, and compilation of data fromvarious sources in one easy reference guide.

Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community. E. N.Anderson with Aurora Dzib Xihun de Cen, Felix MedinaTzuc, and Pastor Valdez Chale. Tucson: University ofArizona Press, 2005. 274 pp.

GARRETT COOKBaylor University

E. N. Anderson’s readable study of Maya rural economy—based on 14 months of fieldwork between 1991 and 2001,and the collaboration of indigenous experts listed ambigu-ously as “with” the author—explores development dilem-mas in contemporary Quintana Roo. Culture is holistic and,therefore, political ecology is about religion and moralityas well as environments, economics, and politics. Politicalecology based on the “free market” approach is dominatedby the interests of giant government-backed firms, doesnot support little communities and sustainable economies,and promotes the most serious unrecognized threat to hu-manity’s future—the “worldwide rural environmental cri-sis” (p. 211). Anderson reveals why development using thisapproach fails, offers solutions to the rural crisis rooted inlocal culture and tradition, and calls on us to move beyondcritical anthropology to identify alternatives to the neolib-eral “free market” models that constituted the religion oflate-20th-century planning for development.

The “wise use” view—that traditional cultures of in-digenous groups manage their environments effectively—represents the best starting point for sustainable develop-ment programs. In the village of Chunhuhub, each stageof regrowth in the cyclically cleared and burned forest isutilized for different resources. The forest, when properlymanaged, produces more value than cattle ranching, yet thegovernment sponsors cattle. Successful, sustainable adap-tations like the diversified Sosa farm (pp. 79–86) and thePlan Forestal (pp. 100–109) demonstrate that wise use devel-opment is practical and effective. Anderson follows JamesScott to argue that monocropping is the religion of govern-ment planners. Controversy over development in Yucatanis not about rational economics, then, it is a cultural—and,ultimately, political—conflict, because there are entrenchedelite interests in monocropping. The key to wise use successis the development of new forest products and new mar-kets, so that the traditional system, working with its valuesand knowledge base, might intensify production on its ownterms, in response to population growth.

Unfortunately the most able young people are leavingChunhuhub, and ecological knowledge is not being passedon effectively. New churches and an emerging local version

of Mexican civic culture, which lacks the moral stance onnature and balance of the traditional religion, are weaken-ing the prospects for wise use development. Furthermore,Mexican fatalism is an obstacle to innovation. “Rural andimpoverished Mexicans are so used to putting up with theinevitable that they put up with the evitable as well” (p.180). Chapter 7 explores the dilemma in developing themost promising wise use resource, Maya ethnopharmacol-ogy; here, Anderson possibly provides too much botanicaldetail for nonspecialists and—in the ethically sound interestof protecting Maya intellectual property—not really enoughdetail for botanists or pharmacologists. Anderson finds thatthere is no Maya entity to hold collective intellectual prop-erty rights: “There is . . . no way of assigning a particularremedy to ‘the Yucatec’ or any one community” (p. 193),and Anderson cannot suggest a good way to create one. Theintellectual property issue remains a serious impediment toboth development and to ethnographic reporting.

Of failed Mexican government development plans, An-derson notes funny little goofs like rabbit production but“most extreme are the genuine tragedies of big dams andcattle deserts—the results of plans so insane that they haveruined half of rural tropical Mexico” (p. 210). The real im-pediments to development are unfair terms of global trade,lack of knowledge of marketing, and above all else lackof accountability on the part of the elites that design theplans. Locals view plans as election year devices: “Thus theytreat the plans as milpas: things to be cropped for a yearor two and then abandoned” (p. 209). On rare successfulplans, Anderson writes: “These latter they treat as orchards:something to be cultivated and tended for the long run.Orchards are, in fact, the prime example of such plans”(p. 210), although the author has made it clear that sus-tainable tropical wood industries, forest-based Maya phar-macology, and diversified agricultural production of special-ized tropical crops coupled with effective marketing wouldand should extend this list. In a vision reminiscent of AlvinToffler’s electronic cottages, Anderson imagines combinedhigh- and low-tech forest-knowledge-based household in-dustries revitalizing Chunhuhub and Quintana Roo.

This provocative book offers a compelling vision andimportant advice to a new generation of developmentexperts. The writing is sometimes funny and sometimesa little bit cranky, as when Anderson writes that “moneyearmarked for things like clearing rain forest for cattle,or providing pesticides and herbicides to farmers, is in-finitely better spent on beer than on its intended goal”(p. 208), but it is always forthright, intelligent, and original.

The Kuhls of Kangra: Community-Managed Irrigationin the Western Himalaya. J. Mark Baker. Seattle: Universityof Washington Press, 2005. 272 pp.

NEERAJ VEDWANMontclair State University

This book provides a comprehensive account of the per-sistence and transformation of kuhls—the centuries-old

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community-managed irrigation systems in the westernHimalaya—under conditions of intermittent environmen-tal stresses and ever-increasing pace of socioeconomicchange. It accomplishes the task convincingly, with unusualclarity and flair, utilizing an array of variables ranging fromendogenous factors, such as the size of the community andinternal socioeconomic differentiation, to exogenous ones,including the role of the state and the relationship betweenmultiple kuhl systems. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, thesynthetic theoretical framework comes alive with Mark J.Baker’s extensive use of careful observations of diverse socialsituations, practices, and beliefs that comprise the “warpand weft” (p. 197) of the kuhl systems in the Kangra valley.

One of the principal goals of the book, which it success-fully accomplished, is to extend the analysis of commonproperty regimes, especially their capacity for successfulmanagement and durability, from an almost exclusive focuson organizational features, such as the existence of writtenrules, to their embeddedness in the regional social and po-litical context. To this end, Baker crafts a complex “explana-tory tapestry” (p. 20), weaving together theoretical insightsfrom such diverse fields as organizational theory, state-society interactions, and rational-choice paradigm. Theanalysis, based on the syntheses of an impressive amountof biophysical, sociocultural, and political–economic data,is remarkable for its coherence and the seamless narrativeit supports in the book.

A main achievement of the book is its explicit atten-tion to scale, spatial as well as sociopolitical, in shapingthe heterogeneous institutional arrangements characteriz-ing the kuhl regimes that have endured in the region. Theevolution and the dogged persistence of kuhl regimes can becomprehended satisfactorily only through an understand-ing “of the myriad ways in which kuhl regimes articulatewith the cultural, political, institutional, and environmen-tal processes that together constitute Kangra’s regionality”(p. 204). Moreover, as opposed to the often-mechanicalviews of the functioning of self-contained “systems” thatproliferate in studies of common property resources, Bakerprovides ethnographically rich and illuminating descrip-tions of social interactions that are the lifeblood integrat-ing and animating the dynamic practice of community-managed water resources management and the relativelystable configurations of ideas that sustain it.

The “inductive” approach followed throughout thebook helps avoid simplistic caricatures of such complex andoften internally divided entities as the state. Despite thefact that “kuhl regimes constituted sites for pre-colonialand colonial statemaking in Kangra” (p. 133), the state’srole has not just been that of an interloper. In contrast, theoutcomes associated with the dialectical processes of statemaking and community making are contradictory. At times,the state’s role vis-a-vis the kuhl regimes is that of a facili-tator, albeit in ways characteristic of its historically specificcomposition and imperatives. For example, the state inter-vention has, in some cases, led to the infusion of much-needed resources into systems that were stressed because ofincreased socioeconomic differentiation, whereas in others

it has led to the atrophying of the local social organizationand capacity that had underpinned successful kuhl manage-ment. The interdependence of kuhl regimes—which pro-vides the much-needed redundancy of resources essentialfor long-term sustainability in face of recurring environ-mental perturbations—has also been undermined by thestate sponsoring of kuhl regimes.

In the last several decades, the kuhl regimes have un-dergone significant changes. Again, with close attention todetail, Baker demonstrates how geography and social in-equities, including those of caste and class, intersect withthe broader economic changes in the region to produce dif-ferential outcomes locally. In some cases this has translatedinto a greater role for the state, which promotes specifickinds of organizational responses such as kuhl committees.Such committees have proliferated rapidly, often at the ex-pense of the traditional authority enjoyed by kohli (watermasters).

The durability of kuhl regimes is rooted in the land-scape features of Kangra valley, mainly its mountainous to-pography, which circumscribes the scope for state interven-tion, as well as in extant cultural institutions and practices.The latter includes such ascribed positions as that of kohli,and widely accepted notions of generalized reciprocity inthe rural areas. The relative lack of socioeconomic differ-entiation in the region, as manifested in fairly equitableland ownership, still overrides the divisive impact of in-creased household participation in the nonfarm economy,thus keeping alive the common interest in the preservationof kuhl systems.

The book contains a wealth of information related tothe ethnographic, historical, and sociocultural aspects ofhuman–environment interactions in an important regionof South Asia. For this and its skillful integration of theoryand empirical evidence, it will be invaluable to colleaguesand advanced students alike.

The Osteology of Infants and Children. Brenda J. Baker,Tosha L. Dupras, and Matthew W. Tocheri. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 2005. 178 pp.

JOANNE BENNETT DEVLINUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville

Exposure to the nuances of the subadult skeleton is a mustfor all who study human remains. This reference providesa framework with which to appreciate the growth and de-velopment of the human skeleton. The authors draw ontremendous field experience and analytical familiarity inthe bioarchaeology of subadult remains. As an extremelyaffordable field and lab manual, this volume will facilitateimproved discovery, recovery, and interpretation of the im-mature skeleton.

This book is divided into four parts: (1) bone biologyand archaeology, (2) the cranial skeleton, (3) the postcra-nia (infracrania), and (4) quick reference materials. Part 1,divided into two chapters, lays the foundation that is fol-lowed throughout by reminding readers of the importance


of and the potential difficulties in recognizing subadultbones. Chapter 1 provides cursory accounts of anatomicalterminology and bone development. Although brief, this isappropriate given the likelihood that the majority of readersare well versed in the adult skeleton. Nonetheless, the styleand overall approach of the text will support the novice os-teologist. Chapter 2 contains an insightful presentation ofsubadult specific excavation approaches and curation prac-tices, with several illustrations and photographs from recentfieldwork.

Intensive coverage is afforded to the subtleties ofgrowth and development in the skeleton through a system-atic approach to each element. The focus on each bone be-gins with a discussion of the features that exhibit variationat major stages during maturation. Secondly, each bone orsignificant portion of a bone is considered with respect toother bones that possess similar features that may hamperelement identification. In addition, techniques useful in thesiding of the bone are presented. Often the authors make ap-propriate and useful comparisons to the adult form. Thesediscussions are supported by labeled pen and ink drawings.Many of these figures depict the element at multiple ages,and when possible and appropriate, the illustrations are lifesize.

The text follows the standard progression through theskeleton, beginning with the cranial vault in chapter 3, fol-lowed by chapters on the facial skeleton and the dentition.Given the focus of this text, a discussion of the dentitionmust include both deciduous and permanent, which theauthors do in great detail and with numerous illustrationsof each tooth. The authors promote a five-step approachfor the correct classification of each tooth: (1) tooth type,(2) permanent or deciduous, (3) maxillary or mandibular,(4) position tooth holds, and (5) right or left side, finallyarriving at which specific tooth is represented.

Moving below the skull, the authors dedicate part 3 tothe infracranial skeleton, which is divided into four chap-ters beginning with vertebrae, followed by the ribs andshoulder, the arms and legs, and the hands and feet. Theauthors effectively focus on particular features or regionsthat are significant in the subadult skeleton: for example,the ilium, pubis, and ichsium are presented separately. Inaddition, attention is drawn to the appearance of epiphy-ses before, during, and following union. This portion of thetext is strengthened by the number of illustrations, bothleft and right sides, which depict many of the bones in pre-natal through adolescent forms. Part 4 consists of a singlechapter of reference charts to facilitate rapid element identi-fication and general age estimation. Materials include tablesof epiphyseal appearance and union, dental crown calcifi-cations, and comparative illustrations of long bones fromutero through juvenile period. Part 4 is undoubtedly, as in-tended, a quick reference.

A presentation of the subadult skeleton can be adifficult task given the dramatic changes that occur fromthe fetal period through the juvenile years, however,this book is fairly successful in providing straightforward

techniques to recognize subadult bones. The authors donot promote detailed age-specific developmental events,rather, their intention is to outline the general attributesof bone maturation in a manner that can be effectivelyused to improve discovery, recovery, recognition, andidentification of subadult remains. Although the authorsdirect the readers to consult other developmental texts,this book should be considered an affordable supplementto any osteology library.

The Sweet Potato in Oceania: A Reappraisal. ChrisBallard, Paula Brown, Michael Bourke, and Tracy Harwood,eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 227 pp.

SHIRLEY LINDENBAUMGraduate Center, City University of New York

The recent flood of publications on food and foodproducts—codfish, potato, salt, spice, sugar, coffee, andchocolate—draws attention to the ability of foods to trans-form the lives of both producers and receivers, to their shift-ing status as luxuries consumed first in high society andthen by the masses, and even to the idea that the sensa-tions themselves have a history. All these accounts, how-ever, pivot around Western desires and tastes, or the linksbetween commodity consumption and global processes ofcapitalist development. The Sweet Potato in Oceania is a dif-ferent sort of venture. The West is not at the center of thispicture. As Chris Ballard’s masterly opening chapter notes,the sweet potato “problem,” first defined by Douglas Yen in1974, established a line of historical inquiry concerning theapparently multiple introductions of the crop to Oceania.James Watson’s earlier provocative contribution (1965) onthe nature of its adoption and impact in New Guinea set intrain a second, sociological wing of inquiry, the two lines ofresearch that still animate investigators some 30 years later.

The contributors to this volume now agree that thesweet potato was first domesticated in the Americas, in thebroad area of modern Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru. Questionsremain, however, on the mode, direction, and chronologyof the transfer from the Americas to Oceania. Most agreewith Yen that human agency, rather than natural dispersal,was the mode of transfer but contest arises about when andby whose agency. Yen had proposed a tripartite rather thana unilineal transfer: a prehistoric Kumara line from Peruto central Polynesia, a Portuguese Batatas line of the 15th–16th centuries from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, andthe Spanish Kamote line from Mexico to the Philippinesduring the 16th century. New Guinea forms the point atwhich the three lines are said to converge.

The chronologies of the Portuguese and Spanish trans-fers and the identities of the actors involved now drawlittle fire. The case for the prehistoric Kumara line toPolynesia, however, is still debated. Based on the work ofseveral authors in this volume, R. C. Green’s synthesis ofthe evidence for the Kumara line of transfer extends Yen’searlier paradigm and proposes an initial introduction of

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sweet potato to the Cook Islands at about C.E. 1000–1100,followed by diffusion to Aotearoa, New Zealand, by C.E.1150–1250, to Hawai‘i by about C.E. 1100 or 1200, and toRapa Nui by C.E. 1300. An introduction to Polynesia muchearlier than C.E. 1100 is said to be unlikely.

This first wave of sweet potato diffusion, associatedwith the colonization of “outer” Polynesia, is followed bya second wave involving a spread westward through cen-tral Polynesia by Polynesian travelers and traders and theEuropean explorers and missionaries of the 18th and early19th centuries. The sweet potato then traveled to Tonga andNew Caledonia by the 1770s, to Fiji by 1804, to Samoa andRarotonga by the 1830s, and, finally, to the southern CookIslands by the 1850s. Ballard predicts that future scholarswill fine-tune the details in Green’s persuasive reconstruc-tion but will not embark on wholesale revision.

Disagreement continues over the timing and nature ofsweet potato’s introduction to island New Guinea. Withno direct archaeological evidence, this issue remains un-resolved. The consequence of its arrival, however, providesa heartier and more rewarding discussion. The huge popu-lations in the central highlands encountered by Europeansin the 1920s and 1930s were found cultivating sweet pota-toes for their own subsistence, as fodder for their pigs, andas their main wealth item, thereby contributing to impres-sive forms of leadership and complex systems of ceremonialexchange. Some now propose that this high degree of agro-nomic and social elaboration could only have resulted froman evolutionary process extending over many centuries;others see the conversion to sweet potato as a revolutionaryevent that led to the remarkable transformation of highlandsocieties. This latter position, first proposed by Watson, isnow generally accepted for the central highlands, althoughthe explanation fits the highlands fringe areas less well.

This is an exciting collection of chapters, for whichwe have to thank Paula Brown, who in 2001 suggested toBallard that it was time to assess recent developments inOceanic sweet potato research. We are exposed to the find-ings and research methods of a wide array of disciplines—linguistics, archaeology, genetics, oceanography, compara-tive ethnography, botany, and crop genetics. The maps andvariety of figures are informative and often elegant. Thestunningly precise 18th-century illustrations of sweet pota-toes and yams on pages 66 and 67 are to Oceanic schol-ars what Audubon’s illustrations are to birders (2003). Thesweet potato has recently made another quiet return voy-age to the Americas where, in addition to its culinary use,it can now be found as a decorative addition to windowboxes and street plantings in the streets of New York, andperhaps elsewhere, extending the transglobal sweep that be-gan some ten or 11 centuries earlier.

REFERENCES CITEDAudubon, John James

2003 Audubon’s Birds of America: The Audubon Society BabyElephant Folio. Rev. ed. Roger Tory Peterson Institute, ed. NewYork: Abbeville Press.

Watson, James1965 From Hunting to Horticulture in the New Guinea High-

lands. Ethnology 4:295–309.Yen, Douglas E.

1974 The Sweet Potato and Oceania: An Essay in Ethnobotany.Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.

The Struggle for Self-Determination: History of theMenominee Indians since 1854. David R. M. Beck.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 290 pp.

BERNARD C. PERLEYUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

David Beck has successfully tackled the daunting task ofwriting a tribal history. This volume is an excellent chron-icle of Menominee tribal history from the reservation pe-riod to today. The book is a meticulous documentation ofa long period of extensive tribal transformations throughwhich the Menominee people struggled to preserve and as-sert their tribal self-determination. The narrative is a richlydetailed weaving of the social, political, and economic re-lations between the Menominee and the non-Menominees(to use Beck’s terminology).

This is the second volume of Beck’s two-part history ofthe Menominee Indians and picks up the historical narra-tive from the 1854 establishment of the Menominee reser-vation to today. Beck adopts a historical writing method hepurports is a contribution to the recent trend that includesnative voices in the telling of tribal histories. This method,Beck claims, is an important corrective to the “right” his-tory, which privileges dominant society’s values and in-terpretation on one hand, and the “left” history, whichidentifies the enemy of Indian peoples “in imperialism andcapitalism” on the other. He criticizes both historical analyt-ical positions as processes that objectify American Indians asthe “reactive participants” (p. x) or as museum objects. Beckadopts a rhetorical strategy he refers to as “giving voice”(p. xi) to the historical actors so “that the motivations ofboth the Menominee and non-Menominees who partici-pated in the history [can] be told” (p. x). Beck asserts thatthis narrative strategy should not “simply add Native voice”(p. xi) but, rather, “it must be part of the analysis” (p. xi).Beck’s narrative is structured on parallel timelines (illus-trated on pp. xii–xiii) that present the significant economic,political, and social historical events along a horizontal axisthat can be read diachronically while the analytic domains(economic, political, and social) and the Menominee andnon-Menominee relations can be read synchronically. Inshort, Beck’s narrative goal is to provide a polyvocal and in-tertextual “thick description” of the Menominee “strugglefor self-determination” (see title).

This history is a chronological presentation of eventsthat Beck argues are significant in Menominee history.Within the chronological presentation, the author presentsa wealth of direct quotes from principle figures in the eventsdescribed. However, in the first half of the book the directquotes of non-Menominees greatly outnumber the quotesfrom Menominee people. Menominee voices are relegated


to the status of reported speech of reported speech. Whatpuzzled me all the more is that Beck’s notes indicate hehad access to documents providing Menominee reportedspeech. The first half of this history unfortunately privilegesnon-Menominee voices over Menominee voices, therebyfalling short of Beck’s own goal of balanced representation. Ihad hoped for more direct quoting of Menominee voices so Icould discern their motivations for myself as Beck promisedin his preface. I expected and would have welcomed theMenominee voices in the Menominee language as a possi-ble solution to Beck’s critique of other tribal histories. To befair, Beck does include more extensive direct quotes fromMenominee voices in the second half of this history.

As Beck points out, it is not enough to “simply add”Menominee voices, they “must be part of the analysis”(p. xi). The juxtaposition of voices in the second half ofthis history fulfills Beck’s promise of not objectifying theMenominee as “reactive participants” (p. x) or as museumobjects. Beck convincingly presents the Menominee as ac-tive agents in the negotiations in oppression–resistance,wardship–self-determination, and victim–agent relation-ships. However, despite the affective intensity that suchstruggles and negotiations entail, Beck’s polyvocal “thickdescription” presents peoples and events dispassionately inthe practice of the presumed historical discourse of impar-tiality. The most serious shortcoming of this history is itsfailure to capture the intensity of Menominee experiencesof starvation, dispossession, destitution, anger, resistance,and triumph.

Those criticisms aside, this is a valuable book for anumber of reasons. First, it presents a detailed history ofthe Menominee tribe’s internal as well as external strugglesto assert self-determination and will be a valuable resourcefor comparative studies of tribal histories. Second, theinterweaving of Menominee tribal history with Wisconsineconomic and political motivations as well as the shiftinggoals of U.S. American Indian policy clearly illustrate theunstable ground on which tribal self-determination isasserted. And third, the extensive detail provided in thenarrative is clearly organized and presented. This bookprovides an excellent case-study for upper-division courseson American Indian self-determination.

The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation inIndonesia. Tom Boellstorff. Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2005. 282 pp.

ABRAHAM D. LAVENDERFlorida International University

Having taught human sexuality from a cross-cultural per-spective to college students for over 25 years, I am alwayspleased to see a new contribution to the literature, espe-cially when an area of sexuality and a geographic area of theworld are brought together in a manner not previously ana-lyzed. This book discusses the interaction of sexual identityand national identity in the fourth most populous nation

in the world. The book also makes a major contributionin studying sexuality in a nation that is over 90 percentIslamic and has the largest number of Muslims in the world.As the author, Tom Boellstorff, himself suggests, anothermajor contribution of this book is the geographical area ofstudy. He notes that previous studies have emphasized spe-cific regions or groups rather than “Indonesia” as the fieldsite, whereas this book emphasizes the nation of Indone-sia, possibly making this book the first ethnography of In-donesians. This book can be read as a study of same-gendersexuality and identity, with emphasis on how this sexualityinteracts with other variables such as nationalism. Or thebook can be read as a study of nationalism, with empha-sis on the influences of globalization, the mass media, theWestern world, and other variables, with sexuality servingas the subject of analysis. The choice is the reader’s.

This book is timely, emphasizing changing forms of so-cial life in an era of globalization, a concept that is very im-portant to the author’s analysis. Boellstorff invents the termdubbing culture as a metaphor for conceptualizing contem-porary globalizing processes. In the late 1990s in Indonesia,dubbing of Western television shows was banned becauseIndonesians were concerned that dubbing would blur theline between Western culture and authentic Indonesian cul-ture. This led to one of the greatest constitutional crisesin Indonesia’s history, hence the author’s contribution of“dubbing” as a specific concept. He argues that dubbing isparticularly relevant to understanding gay and lesbian In-donesians, and discusses how the Indonesian terms gay andlesbi are transforming ostensibly Western concepts of “ho-mosexuality.” He argues that concepts like “homosexual-ity,” “sexuality,” and “gender” do not explain non-Westernrealities (he also correctly states that they do not completelyand accurately explain Western realities). In effect, Boell-storff argues for a rethinking of ethnography in a world thatis already globalized. From his perspective, even in a global-ized world with Western hegemony, non-Western cultures“are not doomed to the status of reruns” (p. 88). In effect,simple translation is no longer sufficient.

The author specifies that this book is written for cul-tural anthropologists, for those who “hang out with con-temporary peoples” to learn how these people think andlive. While the author does not devote a specific section tohis research methodology, he does note in various parts ofthe book that he has often worked as an activist; that mostof his fieldwork was with men because “as a man, spend-ing time with women was more difficult: no researcher everhas equal access to all social groups within a particular fieldsite” (p. 12); that his knowledge is based on participant-observation and other qualitative methods; and that thedata is based on 22 months of activism and fieldwork over a12-year period (1992–2004). He strongly believes that glob-alization presents “a real need for qualitative studies of theglobal” (p. 20). In this book, he is interested in asking newquestions and seeking new visions of social justice (p. 5).

Boellstorff does not hesitate to challenge domi-nant themes within anthropology. He strongly criticizes

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anthropology’s emphasis on difference, writing that “anunfortunate consequence of the focus on difference withinanthropology and cultural studies has been the ceding ofsimilitude to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology”(p. 26). He is concerned with how “we in the West” decidewhen two things are different or the same and states thatdominant theories of knowledge in Western academia,with emphasis on differences, should be challenged. Hisgoal is to encourage a new paradigm for understandingall sexuality in different cultural perspectives. Boellstorffalso argues that the notion of cross-cultural research mustbe rethought because “crossing” frequently has alreadyoccurred before the ethnographer’s research begins. Hestates that the question of whether there can be a historyof sexuality is becoming more important because ofpostcolonialism and globalization. Boellstorff’s challengesmight lead to some conceptual revisions, or they might becontroversial, or both. Regardless of one’s own views, thisis a stimulating and challenging book to read.

La domination masculine. Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: Seuil,1998. 142 pp. (English translation, Masculine Domina-tion. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press,2001. 133 pp.)

ABDELMAJID HANNOUMUniversity of Kansas

By 1964, Pierre Bourdieu imposed himself as a major socialscientist in France by publishing three books at once—allthree had to do with Algeria, a region that was marginalin social science, and were written from within sociol-ogy, a discipline that was marginal among the graduatesof the Ecole Normale. Also, at a time when intellectualswere either Marxist or anti-Marxist, Structuralist or anti-Structuralist, Bourdieu somehow managed to transcend thefirst dichotomy and pioneered a whole dimension of socialanalysis that he called “the symbolism of economic goods”(1977), by which he meant that there is a symbolic dimen-sion of economics with its dynamics that has real and ef-fective effects on material goods. Yet Bourdieu remained asocial scientist with a heavy structuralist background. Thisis as clear in his early essay on the Kabyle House (1979)as it is in his most recent essay on Kabyle women (1998),based on the same fieldwork he had undertaken in colonialAlgeria between 1958 and 1962.

La domination masculine makes an important contribu-tion to anthropology not only because it offers an under-standing of male domination cross-culturally but also be-cause it places Bourdieu at the center of his analysis of theKabyles of Algeria. Neither contribution is unproblematic.

Bourdieu maintains that, despite various conquests, theKabyles of Algeria have kept almost entirely intact an an-drocentric social organization. Although long shared byMediterranean societies, this structure is now found onlyin weaker form in Europe. This makes Kabyle society, forBourdieu, an ideal place from which to grasp male dom-

ination, despite the fact that the Kabyles themselves maynot recognize it. Bourdieu’s intent is to strip the legitimacyfrom male domination through an historical investigationof how it is perpetuated and made self-evident within thedomestic sphere, the school, the church, and the state.

According to Bourdieu, in these institutions a habitusforms that perpetuates domination. From an early age, boysare taken away from their mothers and initiated into theworld of men, for whom the concept of “honor” (so mas-culine and antithetically feminine) is central. The publicspace is believed to be a male domain and is, indeed, dom-inated by men. Private, domestic space belongs exclusivelyto women. Positions of authority and power, such as thosein politics and finance, are considered manly. Even whenwomen hold positions as nurses or teachers, these occu-pations are seen as extensions of domestic roles. Bourdieuneglects to note that Margaret Mead long ago articulatedthis idea:

In every known human society, the male’s need forachievement can be recognized. Men may cook or weaveor dress dolls or hunt hummingbirds, but if such activi-ties are appropriate occupations for men, then the wholesociety, men and women alike, votes them important.When the same occupations are performed by women,they are regarded as less important. [Mead 1949:125]

But, Bourdieu tells us, women remain, after all, as inarchaic societies, not only a means of communication andexchange, as shown by Claude Levi-Strauss, but also, moreimportantly, a currency by which men preserve or enhancetheir symbolic capital. One recognizes in this early femi-nist anthropologists’ criticisms of the concept of “the ex-change of women” (see Rubin 1975). Surprisingly, however,Bourdieu pays little attention to the reasons why nations areoften written about and symbolized as feminine.

Bourdieu argues that there is no discourse on sexualityamong the Kabyles but, instead, a cosmic sexualized order.He takes as an example the Kabyle house. It has masculineparts, which are high, hard, right, and of course, better;and feminine parts, which are low, soft, and left. Bourdieu’sproject is linked to Virginia Woolf in that it aims to questionthose mythical categories that make male domination themost natural, most effective, and most accepted form ofdomination. It is also linked to Michel Foucault in that itintends to examine the archaeology of the unconscious.

The strength of the division between male and femaleappears self-evident and does not need to be justified, be-cause it is not recognized. The division is of course arbitraryand is not inscribed in the things of this world but, rather,imposed on them. Thus, there is a room for a rival con-struction using the same categories that construct objects.The male body can also be constructed negatively by us-ing the same categories of “soft” and “low” used to describethe female body. The principle of male domination is in-scribed in the body, which makes the sexual act itself anact of domination and possession. Moreover, applying thesame categories of domination to themselves, women tendto denigrate their own bodies. Female genitals in Kabylia are


considered ugly, even repulsive. Similarly, in France, manywomen are unhappy with their bodies, because of imagesimposed by the fashion industry. Male domination is so en-trenched that women not only accept it as natural but alsosee its absence as demeaning for them: For example, accord-ing to Bourdieu, French women prefer older and taller menwhose signs of domination are visibly present. On the otherhand, when women in both France and Kabylia show signsof domination in a relationship, they are denigrated. Theyare believed to have reached low in their choice of a partner.

One has to investigate the rites in institutions to seehow the family, church, and state reinforce, accentuate,and perpetuate male domination, Bourdieu contends. Thus,if the Kabyle house, as Bourdieu maintains, is sexualized,with both masculine (and, therefore, positive) and femi-nine (and, therefore, negative) parts, the Kabyle nation iswritten and told in feminine terms. It is in fact the Kahina,the woman said to have resisted the seventh-century Arabinvasion, who for the Berbers today embodies their strug-gle, their history, and, ultimately, their present (Hannoum2001a). It is worth noting that Bourdieu does not refer toany of the abundant literature about Kabyle women bywomen anthropologists and historians, some of which con-tains a rival representation of women.

Despite Bourdieu’s insistence that this book is based onhis fieldwork (again undertaken in colonial Algeria), mostof the literature that Bourdieu uses is U.S. feminist writ-ing. This by no means makes his work a simple reproduc-tion of an existing literature. Bourdieu uses his key concepts(“habitus,” “symbolic power,” “symbolic violence,” etc.) todifferently and forcefully articulate feminist ideas and giveto them a new interpretation. By showing how the cate-gories of the unconscious are formed and perpetuated notonly in domestic space but also in public space, Bourdieushows how habitus operates for both women and men.

Nevertheless, Bourdieu does not explain how theKabyles have kept intact an androcentric structure that haschanged everywhere else in the Mediterranean. The verycategories by which the Kabyles think of the world are Ara-bic and are used not only in Algeria but also in the entireMaghreb: hurma (sacrality), haram (sacred), nıf (lit., “nose,”metaphorically it means nobility or the point of honor),tahramiyat (devilish cunning), manyuk (screwed), qawwad(pander), and so forth. The name Kabyle itself is derivedfrom Arabic and has been used since the 1830s by theFrench. By the end of 1830s, the Kabyles had been con-structed by colonial power.

Bourdieu seems doomed to add to a long list of pastEuropean misrepresentations. In the early colonial period,it was believed that the Kabyles represented a primitivedemocracy (Daumas and Fabar 1847; see Hannoum 2001b).Then the Kabyles were believed to have preserved Greek andRoman cities (Masqueray 1983). With Bourdieu today, thesame Kabyles preserve an old androcentric structure thathas changed everywhere else.

Bourdieu ought to have first deconstructed the cat-egories regulating the discourse about the colonized

originally constructed to assure domination. As it is, he re-veals mechanisms of one domination and perpetuates an-other, which undermines his whole project.

The job of translator is often taken for granted and israrely mentioned in a review. Translators give their ownvoice to the original text. They perform someone in anotherlanguage. Anyone who reads Bourdieu in French wouldrecognize the challenge his work poses for the translator.Yet, Richard Nice has, for the most part, met the challenge.However, there are occasional mistranslations. The wordconnaissance/reconnaissance is always, except once, trans-lated as knowledge/recognition, while a more appropriatetranslation might be cognition/recognition. Nice also trans-lates gouverner as “to be in charge”; a better translationwould be “to govern.” Most French references are men-tioned in the English translation, but occasionally onlythe French reference is mentioned despite the existence ofa translation. Overall, though, Nice’s highly skillful workmanages to reproduce not only the intent of Bourdieu’soriginal work but also its style.

REFERENCES CITEDBourdieu, Pierre

1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

1979 Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World, the Senseof Honour, the Kabyle House or the World Reversed. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Daumas, Eugene, and Maurice Fabar1847 La Grande Kabylie: Etudes Historiques. Paris: Hachette.

Hannoum, Abdelmajid2001a Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend

of a North African Heroine, the Kahina. Portsmouth: Heine-mann.

2001b Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria. History and An-thropology 12(4):315–341.

Masqueray, Emile1983[1886] La formation des cites chez les populations

sedentaires de l’Algerie (Kabyles du Djurdjura, Chaouia del’Aures, Beni-M’zab) (The Kabyles were Berbers from the moun-tains of Kabylia, which include the Djurdjura, the Biban andthe Guergour ranges). Reedited by Fanny Colonna. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud.

Mead, Margaret1949 Male and Female. New York: William Morrow.

Rubin, Gayle1975 The Traffic in Women. In Toward an Anthropology of

Women. Rayna Rapp, ed. Pp. 157–210. New York: Monthly Re-view Press.

Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Matti Bunzl. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 2004. 292 pp.

ULI L INKERochester Institute of Technology

In this study on European modernity, Matti Bunzl traces theexclusionary logic of Austrian nation-building after 1945by focusing on the cultural dynamic of Jews and queersin late-20th-century Vienna. More specifically, Bunzl an-alyzes “the historical conditions that enabled the publicemergence of queer Jews” (p. 2). In the aftermath of WorldWar II and the Holocaust, the marginalization of what the

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Austrian national imaginary had defined as archetypal Oth-ers initially persisted. For most of the 20th century, as Bunzlshows, the Austrian state perpetuated the stigmatizationand persecution of these subaltern groups. A radical turn-ing point in the national body politic emerged during thefinal decades of the last century, when ethnic and sexual dif-ferences came to be celebrated and embraced by a nationwith postmodern and supranational (European) ambitions.Bunzl documents the transformation in the public represen-tation and self-understanding of minority groups, which inthe 1990s “became an integral aspect of the city’s lived real-ity” and of a political field that now “invited the affirmativearticulation of Jewish and queer difference” (p. 5).

In three major sections, titled “Subordination,” “Re-sistance,” and “Reproduction,” Bunzl traces the gradualformation of a new cosmopolitanism that enhanced theincreasing visibility of Jewish and queer communities inpostwar Vienna. Bunzl describes his book as an “empiricalproject,” based on “fieldwork and archival” research con-ducted between 1994 and 2001 (p. x). The ethnographic di-mensions are, however, somewhat thin. For instance, Bunzlstates: “In interviews conducted with Austrian Jews whohad returned to Vienna in the immediate postwar years,experiences with antisemitism were a constant theme”(p. 45). But what follows is not an account of concretememories. Rather, the text continues with general asser-tions: “Narratives of such experiences were frequently set inVienna’s schools. There Jews were subject to unique formsof surveillance that reinforced their identification as peren-nial outsiders . . . painful experiences that occupied promi-nent places in many postwar Austrian-Jewish narratives”(p. 45). But what specifically were those experiences? In thishistoriographic text, the author’s narrative voice prevails.Despite the frequent mention of ethnographic interviews,much of the manuscript is based on documentary materi-als. Although the author aims to untangle the formationof subjectivities, there is a disturbing paucity of the mul-tiplicity of voices, life stories, and testimonial accounts byindividual subjects.

Although this book, as Bunzl states, is an attempt “toadvance an argument about the trajectory of modernity inthe German-speaking world” (p. 9), the study ignores muchof the relevant literature: works by Birgit Rommelspacher,Uli Linke, Yasemin N. Soysal, Katrin Sieg, and DagmarHerzog, among others, are missing. I therefore find it pre-sumptuous of Bunzl to speak of “silences” in the scholarlyliterature, especially when these silences are partially fab-ricated by the author himself. Such apparent gaps in aca-demic engagement might account for specific intellectualmishaps, such as the assertion that by a focus on the “symp-toms of modernity”—Jew and queers in Austria—Bunzlclaims not to “restrict” himself “to the question of racialOtherness” (p. 17). True enough. But in turn, he seems tooverlook that within the cultural discourse of nationalism’sexclusionary project, the fabrication of difference operatesthrough a synchronicity of sexuality and race. During thefirst half of the 20th century, specifically in fascist discourse,

homosexuality was racialized as much as Jewishness wassexualized and feminized. Race and sex were intrinsicallyintertwined in central European nation-building (bolsteredby colonialism) and in the Nazi era. A chapter on these en-tanglements seems to be centrally missing. A discussion ofsuch recombinant modes of Othering would have strength-ened the analytic dimensions of the manuscript and shedlight on the perpetual synchronicities of Jewish and queersubjectivities in Austria. Indeed, sexualization and racial-ization are those operators of Western modernity wherebycertain subject positions are produced by and in specificpolitical fields.

Such a focus would have made sense in light of Bunzl’sconcluding insights, considering that Bunzl attempts todocument how the production of modern subjectivitiesis inherently connected to the national project. The dis-position toward either national homogeneity or pluralismis, as Bunzl argues, a formative principle of the mod-ern/postmodern state and “suggests a powerful continuitybetween . . . the disciplinary apparatuses that produce andsustain their subjects” (p. 217); today’s Austria is “char-acterized by an affirmation of alterity that fortifies ratherthan deconstructs Jewishness and queerness as categoriesof subjectification” (p. 218). From this perspective, this is abook well worth reading.

Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation: Alcoholamong Quichua Speakers in Otavalo, Ecuador. BarbaraY. Butler. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico press,2006. 452 pp.

MAXIMIL IAN VIATORIIowa State University

Barbara Y. Butler’s book is an examination of changes in thedrinking practices of Quichua-speaking Runa in the smallAndean community of Huaycopungo (located in the can-ton of Otavalo, in northern Ecuador) between 1977 and2000. Specifically, Butler explores how the ceremonial con-sumption of alcohol in Huaycopungo shifted from beingregarded positively, as an important means for religioustranscendence, to being viewed negatively, as a catalyst forthe community’s disintegration. Butler attributes this shiftto economic, social, and political changes that altered thecosts, both economically and socially, of ritual intoxica-tion. Butler argues that individuals in Huaycopungo aban-doned ceremonial drinking because it had become a drainon the community’s economic resources and contributedto an increase in social problems, such as spousal abuse. Inits place, Quichua speakers in Huaycopungo adopted prac-tices of moderation, which Butler asserts contributed to animprovement in the social and material prosperity of thecommunity.

Butler divides her book into two main parts: beforeand after 1987. In 1987, Ecuador suffered a devastatingearthquake that left hundreds dead and many buildingsaround the country destroyed. The people of Huaycopungo


interpreted the earthquake as a pachacuti (the Quichua wordfor a “world reversal,” p. 231)—a sign from God that theyshould stop drinking to the point of intoxication. Accord-ing to Butler, prior to the earthquake many individuals com-plained about the problems associated with public drinkingto drunkenness yet defended the practice as a central com-ponent of their religious life. This pachacuti gave the inhab-itants of Huaycopungo license to reevaluate and alter theirreligious practices without betraying their sacred traditions.

Part 1 consists of a “traditional ethnography” (p. 21)of the symbolism of ritual drinking in Huaycopungo basedon Butler’s dissertation and postdoctoral research in thelate 1970s and early 1980s. Butler reconstructs the peo-ple of Huaycopungo’s idealized view of ritual drinkingas maintaining reciprocal exchange in their communityand distinguishing them from non-Indian mestizos. Ad-ditionally, Butler demonstrates how this view was used inHuaycopungo to justify alcohol consumption even thoughit had begun to cause social and economic problems formany individuals in the community. Part 2 is an explorationof the social and economic costs of drinking based on shortfield visits that Butler made to Huaycopungo between 1987and 2000. In this half of the book, Butler examines how thegrowing influence of Protestantism and Ecuador’s indige-nous movement in Huaycopungo led community membersto moderate their drinking and renewed their interest inother aspects of traditional Runa culture.

By combining all the phases of her research inHuaycopungo into one book, Butler provides readers withfirsthand ethnography that spans almost three decades.However, despite this strength (or, perhaps, as a result of it)Butler’s book fails to provide a coherent and concise ethnog-raphy of culture change in Andean Ecuador. There are sev-eral reasons for this. First, Butler’s text is twice as long as nec-essary because Butler often strays into extended discussionsof issues that, while being tangentially related to her mainargument, are better suited to footnotes. As a result, Butlerdoes not maintain a clear thread throughout the chaptersof her book. Second, the data in parts 1 and 2 were gatheredby Butler using different theoretical and methodological ap-proaches during different time periods: Her research before1987 (part 1) is based on a symbolic and hermeneutic ap-proach, while her work after 1987 (part 2) is grounded ineconomic materialism. The result is that there is no con-sistent data baseline or theoretical framework between thetwo halves of the book for examining the quality and quan-tity of the changes that occurred in Huaycopungo. Finally,Butler rarely treats the reader to the voices, rationales, orthoughts of individual Quichua speakers in Huaycopungo.Instead, Butler too often relies on essentialist portraits ofher research subjects as representatives of a generalized An-dean perspective in which all Quichua speakers do “x” andthink “y” (e.g., see p. 190). Consequently, Butler fails to con-vey the ethnographic complexity of the processes, practices,and individual actions she studied.

Considering the above issues, I do not think that But-ler’s book is suitable as a general text for anthropologists

interested in culture change. However, given the extensiveamount of data that Butler presents in this volume, thisbook is a valuable reference for scholars and students ofAndean and Ecuadorian ethnography.

Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Inter-action. Christopher Carr and D. Troy Case, eds. New York:Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005. 807 pp.

BETH MCCORDBall State University

Gathering Hopewell is an edited volume of 21 researchers whoendeavor to personalize Hopewell. The volume is dedicatedto Stuart Struever, an archaeologist with an impressive ca-reer and a devotion to archaeology. The volume and thework it presents are also impressive. The editors’ goal forthe book is to personalize and humanize Hopewell in a man-ner that generalized structural or normative models do not.Three themes are carried through each article to personalize,contextualize, and generate interregional Hopewell interac-tion from local scenes.

The scope of the work is comprehensive in the pre-sentation of the data and use of theoretical models. Top-ics cover social, political, and cognitive organization andstructure. Information on social roles, prestige and ranking,clans, symbolism, gender, ritual gatherings, interaction, andartifact-specific studies are presented. The research investi-gates specific sites, artifacts, human remains, art, and rawmaterials within multiple levels of contexts. In addition topresenting overviews and critiques of previous work andproviding the reader with a foundation for Hopewellianstudies, the authors include new information. A compan-ion CD contains numerous tables of raw data that will beuseful to future researchers.

While the work is impressive and will certainly play arole in Hopewell studies across the eastern United States,some of the interpretations require evaluation. Each of thestudies relies heavily on context, but some of the data pre-sented from early excavations cannot support the interpre-tations. For example, in chapter 7 the lack of chronolog-ical knowledge and reliance on earthwork shape and sizefrom sites that were built and used over time negate someof Christopher Carr’s conclusions concerning tripartite al-liances. In chapter 3, Carr recognizes that different earth-works served different functions, but the contents of sites,whether artifacts or human remains, are nonetheless com-pared equally. There is an inconsistency in building sta-tistical models to test the data, such as Carr and D. TroyCase’s exploration of leadership roles in chapter 5, and thereliance on “reasonable estimates” in determining the sizeof mortuary gatherings as Carr, Beau Goldstein, and JaiminWeets do in chapter 13. Wesley Bernardini and Carr’s reviewof copper celts in chapter 17 relies too greatly on equat-ing size to prestige. To personalize Hopewell, ethnographiesfrom the Eastern Woodlands provide comparative data forBrett Ruby, Carr, and Douglas Charles’s work on community

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organization and Chad Thomas, Carr, and Cynthia Kel-lar’s exploration of totemic clans in chapter 8. However,the cyclical nature of many ceremonies noted in ethno-graphies is pointedly ignored when Carr, Goldstein, andWeets determined gatherings are not cyclical in chapter 13.Overall, the volume and individual articles are well struc-tured. Some articles are concise and independent such asRuby and Christine Shriner’s study of Mann site ceramicsin chapter 15, but other articles such as Carr’s introductionto social and political organization in chapter 3 are moretedious.

The works contained in the volume present a re-freshing view of Hopewell. The effort of all the authors iscommendable. The volume challenges long-held ideas andprovides descriptive reporting with cognitive models. Carr’sreinforcement of the multifaceted nature of Hopewell anddemystification of an Ohio Core in chapter 16 is a radicalidea contra to conventional Hopewellian studies. The richpresentation of insights to symbolic meanings of artifacts,particularly Gina Turff and Carr’s presentation of panpipesin chapter 18, certainly adds a personal dimension toarchaeological studies. The volume provides numerousmodels and data for further testing. In all, the volumeexpresses the rich nature of Hopewell, not only the materialremains but also the people who produced them.

The Emergence of Culture: The Evolution of a UniquelyHuman Way of Life. Philip G. Chase. New York: SpringerPress, 2006. 227 pp.

ELIZABETH WEISSSan Jose State University

Philip G. Chase’s main thesis is that “human culture is amanner of governing behavior, one that coexists with waysof doing so that we share with other species but that isunique by virtue of its emergent nature” (p. 65). Chaseseems to be trying to divorce human culture from nat-ural selection. He discusses how human culture is differ-ent from animal culture because it emerges through so-cial interaction, is based on coding that modifies behavior,and cannot be understood at the level of the individual.Chase uses examples of maladaptive cultures, such as theShakers’ celibacy vows, to emphasize how different humancultures compare to cultures driven by natural selection.Previously, anthropologists have explained maladaptive be-havior through meme theory; that is, anthropologists pro-posed that humans learn in part by believing others, whichhas the negative effect of humans sometimes adopting mal-adaptive behaviors.

To illustrate the cultural qualitative differences betweenhumans and other animals, Chase summarizes the litera-ture on great ape research in language, tool use, and behav-ior. His concludes great apes have the cognitive abilities forcoding behavior, but they do not display this type of cul-ture naturally. He states that individual needs—rather thanbehavior modification for group success—drive great ape

behaviors. Although Chase provides a thorough summaryof ape research, he fails to convince this reader that thedifference between ape and human culture is qualitativelydifferent. Animal cultures are less encompassing and lesscomplex, but one can only understand behaviors, such asdominance, maternal care differences, tool modification,grooming, and hunting, within a group context.

If we accept Chase’s argument that the differences be-tween human culture and other animal culture are qual-itative, then the question of when the ability to have acomplex culture dependent on codes arose needs to be ad-dressed. To answer this question, Chase turns to paleoan-thropology and the evidence of language origins. Chapter 4has an excellent review of the skeletal anatomy required forlanguage and the various fossils that display the anatom-ical ability to speak. He also has a fine section on fossilendocasts and the development of language areas in thebrain. From this evidence, along with the early stone toolevidence, Chase determines that by the Middle Pleistocene,hominids had the ability to use language and, thus, codingthat would enable complex culture.

With the above-mentioned conclusion, Chase statesthere are three hypotheses on the cause for the uniquenature of human culture: (1) it is a by-product of humanevolution (e.g., Spandrel’s of San Marcos argument); (2) itevolved to relieve anxiety (e.g., death); or (3) it was selectedfor group benefits that encourage altruism. For Chase tosupport the first two hypotheses, evidence of elaborate cul-ture, such as rituals and symbolic artifacts, should be visibleat the same time that the ability for language appeared (i.e.,the Middle Pleistocene). The group benefit hypothesis, onthe other hand, would take a long time to appear because itrelies on the emergence of culture from social interactions.Chase tests these hypotheses with a review of the archae-ological evidence of symbolic artifacts. He gives examplesof symbolic artifacts, such as ochre with crosshatched linesand shell beads. All of the examples that he designates assignificant signs of symbolism come much after the MiddlePleistocene (around 50,000 years after the end of the MiddlePleistocene). Thus, he asserts that this supports the groupbenefit hypothesis. However, there is a fallacy in that lackof early evidence does not mean that symbolic artifacts didnot exist. Hence, we cannot say the other hypotheses areinvalid, just that there is no support for them yet. Chaseexcludes all evidence of burials, which some may argue isan essential part of elaboration of culture, and dismissessome early questionable artifacts. He also attempts to dis-tinguish between symbolic artifacts and those artifacts thatare purely iconic or aesthetic.

I should mention a few stylistic points. Chase severaltimes raises points that he then dismisses as not pertinentto the subject at hand; these probably should have just beenremoved from the text. This book is initially hard to followbecause of hair-splitting definitions of terms, such as coding,culture, and behavior. Repetitive examples (e.g., cooperativehunting) and phrasing (e.g., lively debate) deter from thereadability of the book. Statements of inability to evaluate


data, which occur after the ape and paleoanthropologysections, deter from the reader’s confidence in the author.

Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: NativeStruggles over Land Rights. Amity A. Doolittle. Seattle:University of Washington Press, 2005. 224 pp.

ANDREW WILLFORDCornell University

This very welcome book offers important insights into thelogic of development in Malaysia, as well as its impact onlocal struggles for land rights. Amity Doolittle has writ-ten an exemplary work that utilizes ethnography, politi-cal economy, and historical analysis. It skillfully demon-strates the impact of colonial policies concerning nativeland rights and commercial development on postcolonialdevelopment discourses in contemporary Malaysia. Fromthe theoretical rubric of political ecology, Doolittle arguesthat political rights (and struggles over identity) and landrights often overlap and congrue.

The book opens with the seemingly inexplicable actof burning nature reserve land by local people in Kina-balu Park, Sabah. The media-driven political response tothe “senseless” act is to blame the “destructive” behaviorperpetrated by “backward” indigenous people. With thisvignette, Doolittle suggests a motif that will recur through-out this study in which the modernist ideologies of rationalplanning and development are predicated on an image ofthe backward native who must be uplifted through stateintervention. We soon learn that in the colonial era, in thecontext of Sabah, land laws were designed to protect nativesfrom their own purported improvidence. For example, W.E. Maxwell’s influential statement on Land Tenure in 1884comes to influence and limit the commercial use of nativeland, while not prohibiting its acquisition by colonial in-terests, thus influencing a paternalistic pattern of land usefor natives.

In addition to the discussion of what are called “pa-ternalistic protectorate laws,” limiting native use of landto subsistence and prohibiting the sale of the lands,Doolittle also draws attention to the racializing myths ofindigenous cultivation that underpinned much legislationand that produced a imagined polarity between the ra-tional and scientific use of land in the name of devel-opment, as opposed to the backward and irrational na-tive worldview, with its purported destructive patterns ofshifting cultivation. The author deftly shows the ironiesin these ideological compulsions—for example, in theLadang Ordinance of 1913, forest destruction caused bynative shifting cultivation is limited whereas exemptionsfor more destructive land uses by colonial tobacco plantersare protected by the law. Many such examples are givenin which the greater expenditure of environmental dam-age is symbolically displaced through the blame on thelesser expenditure of damage caused by native shiftingcultivation.

Through historical analysis, we come to understandthe legal and ideological parameters that influence landrights claims by the Malaysian state in the name of moder-nity and development. With ethnographic case material, forexample, in the study of the Govuton Native Reserve, we seehow the colonial codification of native land restricts con-temporary native residents to “use rights” on reserve lands,which ultimately restricts social mobility, credit, and cap-ital accumulation. Moreover, Doolittle also presents muchevidence to demonstrate how the cultural logics and moraleconomies of local residents often clash with the homoge-nizing discourses of development and modernity, and theirenshrinement in legalized land-use patterns through state-bureaucratic structures that manage reserve lands or, inother cases, develop and compensate for appropriated na-tive lands. The analysis, for example, of the oftentimesconflicting relationship between statutory and customarylaw in the reserve lands reveals not only the limits ofstate power—and the failures of development discourse toconstitute its subjects completely—but also an entangle-ment with statutory law, in some cases in the name ofcustomary law. This ultimately consolidates state power,Doolittle notes, while, ironically, revealing its ideologicalfissures. But in so arguing this important point, Doolittledoes not develop this insight to its full potential. By demon-strating how the patronizing mindset of the governmentmakes itself felt through its Islamization and Malayaniza-tion “civilizing” discourses, she notes that locals perceivethis heavy-handedness, yet even in resisting this, many areinsidiously incorporated into the political process that sub-ordinates them. This is fertile ground for investigating theambivalence of contradictory ideological commitment andthe ultimately powerful ideological effects it can produce.If, for example, state power and Malaysian modernity, asDoolittle argues, are built on the perceived inadequaciesof native people, then, while Doolittle’s evidence is com-pelling, one might expect that nationalist discourse is moreunstable than is intimated here, shadowed by its backwardothers.

That said, this is an impressive, well-written, andwell-researched book that offers many useful insights intothe politics of development and resistance. It is also auseful book for NGOs and activists, as it provides a usefulanalysis of the term indigenous and how such a word mightcome to embody different meanings in the long duree.

Pilgrimage and Healing. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkel-man, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005. 268 pp.

CELIA ROTHENBERGMcMaster University

This edited collection brings together ten studies atthe intersection of pilgrimage and healing experiences.Ethnographically diverse and thematically coherent, thecollection is engaging and compelling, if not particularlytheoretically innovative.

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Several themes run through the studies: the typicalcombinative approach to healing used by those who haveaccess to a range of resources; the social fact that typi-cally more women than men turn to alternative healingresources, such as those available on pilgrimages; the rela-tive autonomy of popular religious practices from formal,institutionalized religious structures; the (post)modernityof the ancient practices of both pilgrimage and healing;and, finally, the complex ways that healing and pilgrimage“work” for those inclined to engage in them. As a whole,the chapters are at their strongest when ethnographicallydemonstrating what healing means and how pilgrimage aidsin its achievement, and at their weakest when trying to un-cover how the process of healing is universal and mecha-nistic, centrally located in our brain’s chemical composi-tion, and, thus, presumably (and problematically), outsideof culture.

The ethnographic diversity of the volume will be of par-ticular interest to readers looking for a variety of examplesto use for teaching and comparative purposes. Four chap-ters examine material from Catholic pilgrimage sites. Sid-ney Greenfield and Antonio Mourao Cavalcante’s chapterdiscusses a pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Francis in northeast-ern Brazil undertaken after a cure attributed to the saint hasoccurred, although the authors’ central interests lie moreproblematically—and, in my opinion, less interestingly—in the psychobiological mechanisms, such as altered statesof consciousness, that may have enabled the cure to takeplace. While their observations on pilgrimage stem fromfieldwork and compelling ethnographic detail, their theoryof healing is based on decontextualized, biologically basedmodels that the authors accept as facts without questioningtheir specific cultural constructions and that they hold to bemore true than informants’ beliefs. Lena Gemzoe examinesOur Lady of Fatima shrine in Portugal, focusing on the rela-tionships among vow making, female pilgrims, the figure ofthe Virgin Mary, healing experiences, and the pilgrims’ di-alectical opposition to the official discourse of the CatholicChurch. Lindsey King looks at the role of the ex voto (anoffering to a saint or divinity, usually given in fulfillmentof a vow) for pilgrims at the shrine of St. Francis of Assisi inBrazil, empowering them to circumvent formal Church in-tervention and create and release a potent symbol of disease.Simon Coleman looks at a Catholic shrine near Walsing-ham, highlighting how pilgrims engage with its “sacral-ized architecture” that embodies both myth and history toachieve restoration.

Deana Weibel provides a compelling examination ofCatholic pilgrimage sites in France, but she also notesthe presence of many pilgrims at Rocamadour who arenot Catholic but “religious creatives,” people whom manywould describe as “New Agers.” Rejecting this label in fa-vor of one she feels to be more useful and accurate, Weibelhighlights the ways in which the discourses of healing, ill-ness, and pilgrimage intersect and stand distinct from oneanother for religious creatives and Catholics. Lee Gilmorealso draws attention to those some may call “New Agers”—

attendees of the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s BlackRock Desert. Resistant to commodification and commer-cialization and stressing self-sufficiency, attendees describefeeling transformed by their time spent in the desert, whichculminated in burning a giant human effigy.

The four remaining chapters round out the collection’sethnographic offerings. Susan Sered examines three Rachelcults in Israel, highlighting the relationships in Israeli soci-ety between illness, women, and the role of female saints.Jill Dubisch writes about the journey made primarily byVietnam War veterans on motorcycles across the UnitedStates to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,DC, drawing out the healing experience as both deeply per-sonal and political. Stacy Schaefer examines the use of thePeyote plant in northern Mexico among the Wixarika peo-ple. More convincing than biological models of neurons,Schaefer argues that peyote and tobacco have been used tocreate and uphold some culturally specific “deep structures”of the Wixarika people. Larry Peters examines the practiceof pilgrimage among Tamang shamans as a way of provid-ing community healing and a means of initiating shamancandidates.

Certainly the collection could have benefited from theinclusion of studies related to Islamic and Hindu pilgrimageand healing practices. Yet, despite its obvious tilt towardCatholic material, the ethnographic evidence presented isnicely diverse, including not only “New Agers,” Catholics,and Jews but also those engaged in secular pilgrimages andhealing experiences as well. The body–mind dichotomy isalive and well here, at least in many of the chapters, and isnever fully resolved, but the collection does push us to askhow we can conceptualize the workings and meanings ofhealing in relationship to one of its most vivid locales: thepilgrimage site.

Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings inLaw and Culture. Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams,eds. New York. New York University Press, 2005. 450 pp.

ALLEN W. BATTEAUWayne State University

Commodification—the buying and selling of goods andservices in markets—is as old as civilization. As a namedproblem, it consists of creating a cash nexus for objects andactivities that many think should not be offered for imper-sonal sale: human lives, certainly, but maybe also somaticmaterials, body parts, intimate services, sexuality, identity.All of these have been problematically commodified. Every-one opposes slavery, considered as the buying and sellingof human beings. Such matters as the existence of adop-tion markets—the buying and selling of babies—also meritclear-eyed, unsentimental appraisal.

Rethinking Commodification, an edited volume of 38essays primarily by legal scholars, attempts this unsen-timental appraisal. It examines current activities in theappropriation and marketing of babies (“The Economics


of the Baby Shortage”), cell lines (“Moore v. the Regentsof the University of California”), sex (“Sex in the [For-eign] City: Commodification and the Female Sex Tourist”),culture (“Culture, Commodification, and Native Ameri-can Cultural Patrimony”), and identity (“Kwanzaa and theCommodification of Black Culture”), among many issues.Although the diversity of chapters is matched by a similardiversity of viewpoints, the overall tone is one of explo-ration, rather than either approbation or condemnation.

The book uses Arjun Appadurai’s definition of com-modity as “any thing intended for exchange” (p. 35). Inother words, the critical part of a commodity is not anycharacteristic of its “thingness” but, rather, intentions andexchange—the manner in which it enters into social circula-tion, shared, if one wishes, in relationships of balanced, gen-eralized, or negative reciprocity. Commodification is gener-ally thought of as a diminishing of the constraints of social-ity, although Appadurai’s definition suggests that it createsnew circuits of value.

The book consists of two parts: The first presents someclassical views of commodification in terms of markets forbabies, body parts, and civic obligation. Many of the chap-ters here are drawn from the law and economics litera-ture, although contrasting voices from Patricia Williamsand Martha Jane Radin, the former a journalist and thelatter a leading critic of the Chicago law and economicsschool, are also presented: Williams examines the incon-gruities of adoption procedures, while Radin discusses thedouble binds created for relatively powerless agents in a le-gal regime presupposing complete equality.

The second part of the book examines different casesof commodification from a variety of theoretical perspec-tives: cultural and intellectual property, identity, intimacy,personal care, family relationships, body parts; the past (pat-rimony), presence (intimacy), and future. On the frontiersof commodification are futures markets anticipating or per-haps driving upticks in the values of anything. An exampleof this last is the Pentagon’s aborted proposal for a “Pol-icy Analysis Market” in which investors (punters?) wouldprovide, through their investments, information on likelytrends. This touching faith in the infallibility of markets wasapparently impervious to the Enron debacle.

Although some of the chapters are predictably ideo-logical, others offer new and insightful analysis. Perhapsthe best example of this is Deborah Stone’s chapter, “ForLove nor Money: The Commodification of Care.” Stonemakes the point that it is not the buying and selling ofservices, so much as their rationalization that creates moralhazards. Rationalization is a sequela to commodification,in which something of value, having been placed on themarket, now finds its primary providers’ benefits dimin-ished through corporate competition, today on a global-ized scale. In Stone’s words, “The political and managerialcontrol of money is what restrained and changed the waynurses, therapists, and aides cared for their patients” (p.282). A good reason for laws against prostitution may notbe the elimination of the world’s oldest profession but,

rather, an inhibition of multinational corporate chains ofbrothels.

In a concluding chapter, Joan Williams and VivianaZelizer note that commodification can often be liberatory:When all that a woman owns is her body, the opportunityto sell her sexual services, and to control the conditionsof and proceeds therefrom, is certainly a step up from thechattel slavery of some marriages. Noting that markets arevery efficient in conveying the oppressive forces of race,gender, and class advantage, the larger issue may be findingways to inhibit these forms of oppression. Until that dayarrives, restrictions on the efficient operations of marketsmay be a necessary evil, at least from a law and economicsperspective.

Despite a wealth of insightful, provocative, and wide-ranging chapters, perhaps what one notices most about Re-thinking Commodification is its nearly complete Western ori-entation. Although it examines instances of commodifica-tion on all continents (sexual tourism by both men andwomen in Africa and the Caribbean; markets in body partsin South Asia), the relationships whose commodity statusis called into question seem to be relationships imposedby Western and perhaps colonial regimes. This may not besurprising in a book with only one contribution from an an-thropologist (Appadurai). The Western–modern–industrial–bureaucratic regime that commodification entails, althoughcertainly advancing all over the globe, is not, despite theclaims of its ideologues, the totality or perfection of humanpossibility. Finishing this book, one wished for a similar,distinctly anthropological riposte, perhaps titled along thelines of Alternatives to Commodification.

Ciuliamta Akluit: Things of Our Ancestors: Yup’ik EldersExplore the Jacobsen Collection at the EthnologischesMuseum Berlin. Ann Fienup-Riordan, ed. Seattle: Univer-sity of Washington Press, 2005. 420 pp.

JENNIFER KRAMERUniversity of British Columbia

What do museum objects mean to the descendents of thosewho made them? Ciuliamta Akluit answers this question.In 1997 eight Yup’ik elders and educators traveled to theEthnologisches Museum Berlin to see 2,000 Yup’ik objectscollected by Johan Adrian Jacobsen in Southern Alaska be-tween 1882–83. They spent 15 days viewing the entire col-lection and recorded over 50 hours of discussions in Yup’ik,which were translated into English by Marie Meade. AnnFienup-Riordan, their guide and photographer, calls this“visual repatriation” and explains “what we sought was notso much the collection’s physical return to Alaska, but thereturn of the history and pride that it embodied” (p. xviii).Uniquely, the Yup’ik expressed gratitude toward the collec-tor and the museum for caring for their objects. This bilin-gually printed book is the product of their work. Its strengthis its exemplary status as participatory action research andcollaborative museology.

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The chapters in this book reflect the actual experi-ences of the Yup’ik in the museum storage room. On eachday, the elders turned their attentions to a specific museo-logical category of objects and these objects elicited com-mentary on names, functions, manufacturing techniques,regional styles, and aesthetics and often inspired qulirat (tra-ditional tales). For example, chapter 1 is titled “First day:Tools for ocean hunting,” chapter 2 “Second day: Bows andarrows for hunting and war, chapter 10 “Tenth day: Danceregalia,” and so on. Sixty-six black-and-white photographsaid the reader in visualizing the objects that the elders wereexamining.

While ostensibly about material culture, this bookis really about people—their childhood memories of tra-ditional lifeways, their experiences of assimilation, andtheir hopes for cultural revitalization. In the introduction,Fienup-Riordan provides biographies of each of the Yup’ikwho made the journey to visit their cultural patrimony inGermany. The eldest, Wassilie Berlin, was 81 years old andspoke only Yup’ik. His cultural background offers the readera glimpse of understanding in how far he traveled from hishome to do this important work.

The book gives the appearance of being quiet, but thevoices of the people are animated, proud, respectful, and fullof humor. The Yup’ik delegation transformed anthropologi-cal material culture into moral teachings, ceremonial songs,hunting lore, dance steps, and vehicles for cultural pride.There is a lightness and joy in the telling that the readerwitnesses as each speaker is inspired to share their knowl-edge about historical, contemporary, supernatural, ethical,and genealogical subjects. But there is also sadness present,because the elders recognize the quality of workmanship;knowledge of the land, sea, and sky; ritual behavior; andintricacy of values implicit in the objects made by their an-cestors. From this recognition comes a palpable sense of lossof a self-reliant way of being that ensured survival in a harshenvironment.

Because of the privileged access we are granted togentle dialogue, strong emotional reactions to the past,and concrete lived experiences, one wonders what wasleft out. Fienup-Riordan describes the conversations as“lightly edited” (p. xxiii), but we also know how self-awarethe elders were in their determination to record culturalknowledge for posterity. What part of the process of work-ing together has been excluded? This is hardly a criti-cism of this rich text, only a desire to hear more of thelogistics, personal exchanges, and actual experiences inGermany.

The enduring message of this book is to listen tothe qanruyutet (teachings) of the ancestors and to returnto a way of “living within the drum” (pp. 111–115).This is a meaningful metaphor on which the elders linger: Itis a way of living in harmony with one’s community and be-ing true to Yup’ik identity. This theme is scattered through-out the book but especially summarized in the last chapter,which is tellingly titled “Fifteenth day: I have hope thatthey gain more knowledge of who they are.” Herein, the el-

ders reflect on their journey and how they wish their workto inspire Yup’ik youth. One man expressed his feelings:

perhaps if [our young people] begin to look at picturesand written explanations of these cultural objects, theywould start to understand how our ancestors lived andsurvived for centuries. Once they begin to understandthat, they might begin to have faith in their cultural iden-tity and turn to our old ways, seeing that our ancestorslived rich and productive lives. [p. 171]

May the courage and generosity of these Yup’ik eldersand educators inspire others to such tasks of visual repa-triation and cultural reclamation. This book would be avaluable addition to any applied anthropology, materialculture, or indigenous knowledge course and shouldencourage others to participate in collaborative museology.

The Secret Cemetery. Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher, andGeorgina Neophytou. New York: Berg, 2005. 298 pp.

LYNN RAINVILLESweet Briar College

Using the “language of stones and flowers,” authors DorisFrancis, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou wrotean engaging analysis of visitors and mourners at six ceme-tery landscapes in and around London. While conductingthe research, Francis and Kellaher were at the University ofNorth London. Today, Francis is a Research Associate at theMuseum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico,while Kellaher is Principal Research Officer and Director ofthe Centre for Environmental and Social Studies in Aging(CESSA) at the London Metropolitan University. GeorginaNeophytou is a Research Associate at CESSA.

This book’s approach is unique among cemetery studiesbecause it focuses on the living visitors, not the permanentresidents. Through questionnaires, observations, archivalresearch, and interviews, the authors reveal what survivorsdo when they visit the cemetery, and how the cemeteryhelps the bereaved cope with their loss. Whereas most ceme-tery studies focus on one religion, socioeconomic class, orethnicity, Secret Cemetery uses a wide range of examples. Forexample, the authors discuss Jewish, Muslim, and Christian(Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican) mortuarybeliefs. They outline mortuary rituals for each religion, in-cluding the preparation of the body, wake, burial, and thefirst year of tending the grave.

In the first half of the book (chs. 1–4), the authors dis-cuss metaphors that connect the cemetery landscape withgrieving and mortuary rituals. These include associationsbetween one’s domestic home and one’s final resting place,nature (as evidenced through gardening) and the body. Theauthors conclude that “graves and cemeteries, like other do-mestic spaces . . . speak to relationships of power, ownership,and agency” (p. 46).

In addition to studying the material culture of deathpresent at the cemeteries—flowers, memorial gardens, andgravestones—the authors conducted archival research. For


example, a 1929 advertising brochure for the City of Lon-don cemetery illustrated a popular euphemism. Instead ofdiscussing death, the brochure offered up nature as a pallia-tive for grief, where the “charm of nature” served to “refutehuman grief” (p. 41).

The authors concluded that class divisions were repli-cated within the Christian cemeteries when the middle classwas encouraged to purchase a cemetery plot (decorated withroses) in lieu of a country estate. In contrast, orthodox Jewspreferred “functional and austere” cemetery landscapes andthey did not “flower their people” (p. 51).

In the second half of the book, the authors demon-strate how cemetery visits enable the survivors to mourn,commemorate, and remember the deceased. In “Negotiat-ing Memory” (ch. 5), the authors discuss long-term com-memorative practices at the graveside. This includes in-teresting practices, such as a Jewish daughter who short-ens her mother’s self-composed and verbose epitaph to “awoman of exceptional ability” (p. 109). The authors ex-plore religious differences in mortuary rituals, from lim-ited, annual visits to the grave (in the Jewish Cemetery)to mandatory, regular visits (in the Cypriot Greek Ortho-dox sections). In the next chapter, “Keeping Kin and Kin-ship Alive,” the authors focus on how cemetery visits en-able survivors to maintain relationships with deceased fam-ily members and help transfer kinship ideology betweengenerations.

Chapter 7, entitled “Cemeteries as Ethnic Homelands,”reveals how immigrants use the cemetery as a substitutefor their homeland through personalized burials, cultur-ally instructive walks through the grounds, and gravesiderituals that link personal memories with culturally specificrituals.

In the last chapter, “Change and Renewal in HistoricCemeteries,” the authors discuss how older cemeteries arereinterpreted as sites of community history and collectivesignificance (p. 198). They explain why older burial sitesthat are no longer in use still have visitors who wish to visitancestral graves, to claim a sense of belonging to the past,or to feel part of a generational chain. They also documentneglected cemeteries that are threatened by constructionand the reuse of Victorian-era graves.

The book’s helpful appendices contain the question-naires used in the study and examples of cemetery deedsand notes from cemetery visits. A table that summarizedthe number of informants, and their ethnic and religiousbackgrounds, would have been a useful addition.

It is ironic that despite hundreds of interviews, ques-tionnaires, and firsthand observations of cemetery visitors,the book is titled The Secret Cemetery. The authors explainthis in the last pages of the book: “Cemeteries . . . exist toobscure the terrifying fact of death through ritual practice”(p. 214). They continue, “All cemeteries, however, holdsecrets for present-day users and visitors to decode andalso to ‘plant’ for future generations” (p. 213). Whetherone sees cemeteries as “secrets” waiting to be decoded oras accessible open-air museums, I hope more visitors take

the time to visit them and appreciate their rich culturallandscape. This book would be a good guide for such a visit.

The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialismon the Black Sea. Kristen Ghodsee. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2005. 226 pp.

JULIE HARTLEY-MOOREBrigham Young University

Kristen Ghodsee’s The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Post-socialism on the Black Sea is a fascinating ethnography ofwomen working at various levels of Bulgarian tourism.The book revolves around the personal stories of severalwomen: Dora, a 42-year-old head chef; Svetla, a secondary-school student preparing for university entrance exams;Desi, a waitress who speaks five languages; Gergana, a youngmother and a chambermaid at a ski resort; Sonia, a 36-yearveteran of the Hotel Intercontinental reception desk; andProlet, the owner of a small tour company. Ghodsee relieson trajectory adjustment theory to explain how women intourism were able to transition successfully to capitalism(pp. 12–13).

Tourism was one of the few Bulgarian industries toexpand after the collapse of communism and the intro-duction of a market economy and privatization in 1989.Today tourism accounts for ten percent of the country’sgross domestic product (p. 3) and, as the biggest gener-ator of foreign exchange, it supports Bulgaria’s macroe-conomic stability (p. 59). In contrast to much of the re-search on global tourism, Ghodsee found that in postsocial-ist Bulgaria, tourism jobs are relatively highly compensated,high-prestige positions in relation to other employment op-portunities. Job competition in tourism is fierce, but de-spite high unemployment rates for men, women dominateeven upper management in Bulgarian tourism. The gender-ing of tourism labor results in distinct benefits to womenrather than the economic marginalization that character-izes women’s experiences with tourism in many other partsof the world. Bulgarian tourism continues the socialist pat-tern of gender-specific forms of cultural and social capital.Under communism, men were funneled into technical edu-cation and industrial work, economic sectors that declinedin the new economy; women were given general educationand filled most service-sector slots like education, medicine,law, and tourism. In communist ideology, tourism employ-ment was seen as a natural extension of women’s domesticlabor (p. 111), and the long off-seasons that characterizesea and ski resorts allowed women time to attend to fam-ily responsibilities. The state encouraged and paid for ad-vanced professional training, higher education, and studyof foreign languages for female tourism workers. Interac-tion with tourists provided opportunities to meet foreign-ers, many of them Westerners, to practice using foreign lan-guages, to gain some understanding of capitalist culture,and to accumulate hard currency through tips. This gen-dered cultural capital, Ghodsee concludes, “prevented men

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with similar qualifications from entering the sector and dis-placing women” when communism collapsed (p. 111).

Ghodsee’s emphasis throughout the book is on howwomen in tourism have successfully weathered Bulgaria’scapitalist transition; as she argues, the 18 percent ofBulgarian women employed directly or indirectly in tourismare a significant enough number to “challenge commonperceptions that Bulgarian women in general were morenegatively affected by the economic transition than men”(p. 5). Oddly, though, the book concludes with a dis-cussion of NGOs, their “political economy of begging”(p. 165), and what Ghodsee calls “feminism-by-design” (aplay on the capitalism-by-design orientation of many devel-opment projects). By focusing on microcredit, job-trainingprograms, and attention to domestic violence, gender dis-crimination, and pornography, Ghodsee claims, NGOs de-flect “attention away from the three key actors that are pri-marily responsible for the disappearance of the social safetynet that once supported Bulgarian women and their fami-lies: structural adjustment policies of the World Bank, thestabilization programs of the IMF, and the complicity ofthe Bulgarian government” (p. 167). Ironically, this is whatthe book itself does by glossing over these key actors andfocusing the entire concluding chapter on the failures ofNGOs. While this discussion is compelling, it seems tangen-tial to the rest of the book’s focus on how women “reallocatestocks of capital” and “adjust their trajectories” under thenew economic system (p. 108).

Overall The Red Riviera is a very appealing book. Itstheoretical position is clearly explained and its use ofpersonal narrative is effective. Ghodsee’s description oftourism under communism, where it was not constrainedby free-market competition and formed a crucial part ofsocialist ideology and practice, is especially interesting.The book will appeal to those interested in tourism, labor,gender, and postsocialism, and because it is so accessiblywritten, it will also work well for undergraduate classes.

Women in Tibet. Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik, eds.New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 436 pp.

MARCIA CALKOWSKIUniversity of Regina

Offering an enticing array of such examples of Tibetan fe-male agency as the subtle sarcasm of a medieval hermitess,mediums who muffled their oracular voices during the Cul-tural Revolution, another medium who channeled Chair-man Mao, the assumption of a nun’s appearance as a radicalgender act, and the secret taping of protest songs by impris-oned nuns, this book makes a very important contributionto a growing body of literature on the lives and contribu-tions of Tibetan women and to the ethnography of Tibet.The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, whichaddresses women in traditional Tibet, Helga Uebach drawson ancient texts to gain insight into the lives of imperial Ti-betan ladies, including the role played by the Tibetan em-

peror Songtsen Gampo’s sister in securing her husband’scountry for her brother. Dan Martin identifies 11th and12th century women spiritual leaders, including prophets,lineage holders, leaders of popular religious movements,lesser teachers, and nuns. Kurtis Schaeffer completes thissection with an examination of the earliest known Tibetanwoman’s autobiography: that of Orgyan Chokyi, a nun andhermitess. Schaeffer observes that her prayer to be rebornin a male body is coupled with her assertion that she wouldmake far better spiritual use of a male body than would anyman.

In the book’s second part covering modern Tibetanwomen, Hildegard Diemberger’s discussion of female ora-cles is particularly rich ethnographically. She describes con-ditions that predispose individuals to become oracles, orac-ular initiations, oracular accoutrements, trance states, andrecurrent themes in oracular practice. She traces the vicissi-tudes of oracular status in post-1959 Tibet, from the crim-inalization of oracles during the Cultural Revolution to aliberalization policy categorizing them as acceptable prac-titioners of local custom, and to their current ambiguousstatus as possible criminals, potential counterrevolution-ary activists, or useful resources for cadres seeking localcooperation. Tashi Tsering’s invaluable nuanced accountsof the lives of female medical doctors reveal, for exam-ple, that an internationally renowned female doctor whoreceived formal Tibetan medical training in Tibet was de-nied admission to the Tibetan Medical Institute in Dharam-sala in 1962 by the Council for Religious Affairs of the Ti-betan government-in-exile, on the grounds of her femalegender. Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy presents the biographiesof six female performing artists who gained celebrity sta-tus during six different periods of recent Tibetan history:an opera star, a folk singer, an epic bard, a specialist inChinese propaganda songs, an innovator (and defector) inthe Tibetan pop music genre, and a defector who gainedworld renown after launching her musical career in exile. Al-though the epic bard attributed her career success to the pos-itive gender discrimination applied by the Chinese Com-munist Party, Henrion-Dourcy does not find that genderhas played any particular role in shaping the Tibetan per-forming arts. Henrion-Dourcy identifies the common con-cerns in the lives of all six performers as the negotiationof Tibetan identity and a professional career in contempo-rary Tibet. Charlene Makley utilizes a performance-basedapproach to investigate the basis of a strong local antipa-thy directed to nuns in Labrang. She argues that whereasmonkhood is viewed as a superior masculine gender status,nunhood does not represent the complementary case forwomen. Rather, Makley asserts, nuns could be understoodas transgressing gender lines by emulating the renuncia-tions of monks as well as their external physical appearance.Thus, Makley views local gossip about nuns, which centerson violations of celibacy vows, as indicative of an attemptto reassign nuns to traditional gender roles. Because suchgossip about nuns is, however, prevalent in Tibetan com-munities, Makley endeavors to contextualize local hostility


toward nuns in terms of an amalgamation of political, eth-nic, historical, and economic pressures. The volume is com-pleted with Robert Barnett’s analysis of women and politicsin contemporary Tibet. Barnett guides us through the intri-cacies of the roles of female nationalist leaders in the theaterof Chinese politics and Tibetan perceptions of these roles, aswell as of two distinct strategies that Tibetan women havepublicly pursued: constructionist and resistance politics.While outsiders and female nationalist leaders have optedto focus on practical achievements approved by the state,contemporary resistance politics has been mainly shapedby nuns. Barnett observes that thus far only nuns “haveconstructed a narrative of themselves as political agents”(p. 356). Of particular note is Barnett’s conclusion that bothfemale nationalist leaders and resistance activists share acommitment to asserting Tibetan identity and “collectiveself-enhancement” (p. 365).

This fine volume will generate considerable interestand, I expect, a demand for an even wider considerationof Tibetan female agency that might include attention toTibetan businesswomen and, perhaps, the role of womenin the identification of male-reincarnate lamas.

Engaged Anthropology: Research Essays on NorthAmerican Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology,Papers in Honor of Richard I. Ford. Michelle Hegmon andB. Sunday Eiselt, eds. Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 2005. 263 pp.

KRISTEN J. GREMILL IONOhio State University

The festschrift tradition lends itself to the production ofeclectic volumes whose chapters have little in common ex-cept the fact that their authors share some degree of intellec-tual kinship with the honoree. However, this volume tran-scends the limitations of the form and stands on its ownmerits as a collection of chapters on public anthropologyfrom a North American perspective.

All the chapters in this volume, assembled to honorUniversity of Michigan anthropologist Richard I. Ford,are appropriate for inclusion in that they are clearly re-lated to Ford’s work and are written by his studentsand colleagues. The editors have done an excellent jobof ensuring that the volume is coherent in theme andthat the individual papers are of high quality (andfree of annoying typographical and grammatical errors).Their introduction takes the form of an interview withFord that provides key background to the chapters thatfollow.

The chapters, although not divided into sections, aregrouped according to which elements of Ford’s legacythey emphasize: public anthropology, the U.S. Southwest,the Eastern Woodlands, or museum collections manage-ment. Throughout the volume, the authors acknowledgeFord’s contributions to ethnobotany, ecological anthropol-ogy, and the archaeology of trade and exchange. Most of

the chapters reflect the contemporary shift away from apreoccupation with scientific standards of verification andtoward a more interpretative approach to anthropologicalknowledge.

The first nine chapters deal with the archaeology andethnography of the U.S. Southwest. Chapter 1 is writtenby an artisan rather than an academic, which sets a toneof respect for the insights that descendent populations canoffer the archaeologist. In it, potter Felipe Ortega uses theexample of micaceous pottery, whose creation and use isheavily invested with meaning, to illustrate the limitationsthat he believes hamper archaeologists who work within amaterialist paradigm. In chapter 2, Michael Adler discussesthe collaboration of anthropologists and tribal representa-tives in determining cultural affiliation, highlighting someof the differences between the academic ethics of full dis-closure and dissemination of data with the secrecy requiredin traditional knowledge systems of the Pueblo peoples.In chapter 4, Kurt Anschuetz contrasts Anglo-Americanand Tewa concepts of “landscape”; like Adler, he is opti-mistic about the potential for collaboration to enrich bothcommunities.

Aside from chapters 13 and 14 (by Catherine S. Fowlerand Claire McHale Milner, respectively), which highlightmuseum collections, and Jeffrey R. Parson’s personal reflec-tion on Ford as a colleague (ch. 15), the remaining chap-ters address topics in North American prehistory. Chapter3, by Severin M. Fowles, contrasts the Tewa ideology of fe-male spiritual significance with the relatively limited roleplayed by women in ritual activities. The conclusions—for example, that women lost some of their ritual im-portance by shifting to solitary rather than communalmaize grinding—are well argued and consistent with avail-able evidence (although old-style processualists may notbe convinced). In chapter 5, Heather Trigg and Debra L.Gold use migration records to model population growthin colonial New Mexico, concluding that later historicpopulation levels could only have been achieved throughconsiderable intermarriage between Spanish and Nativepopulations. Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Michelle Hegmon ad-dress the puzzling scarcity of plant images in southwesternart and show that some apparently abstract motifs may ac-tually be stylized representations of maize. Paul E. Minnisand Michael E. Whalen (ch. 7) present new data on feast-ing at Casas Grandes. John D. Speth (ch. 8) and StephenPlog (ch. 9) both address the issue of trade and exchangeamong southwestern communities. Speth’s analysis of ex-change between the Plains and the Southwest argues con-vincingly that the value of bison as a resource drew groupsof the Southern Plains into the competitive world of in-terregional trade. In chapter 10, Katherine A. Spielmannand Patrick Livingood identify constrasts in the meaningsand social uses of exotic goods in three North American re-gions: Ohio (Hopewell), the Southeast (Mississippian), andthe Southwest. H. Edwin Jackson (ch. 11) presents a synthe-sis on the role of the now-extinct passenger pigeon in south-eastern subsistence. David Anderson’s chapter 12 argues the

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case for historic California groups as appropriate analogs forprehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Southeast.

The chapters in this volume are diverse enough toattract readers from many specialties while remaining trueto the common goal of celebrating Dick Ford’s career.The range of interests and topics exhibited by the authorsaccurately mirror the diversity of Ford’s contributions toNorth American anthropology. This book is a fitting tribute.

A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of theHigher Latitudes. John F. Hoffecker. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 2005. 225 pp.

L ISA M. HODGETTSThe University of Western Ontario

The arctic was the final frontier in the human settlement ofthe globe, the last place on earth to be colonized by humans.It was a chilly, inhospitable place for a naked ape. Its coldtemperatures, marked seasonality, and the limited diversityof plant and animal resources represented major challengesto human occupation. Yet many groups devised the meansto thrive in arctic environments. The sophisticated cloth-ing, shelter, hunting implements, and transportation sys-tems used by the aboriginal peoples of the circumpolar re-gion are a testament to the ability of cultural innovation toovercome physical limitations.

At first glance, the title of this book might suggest anexamination of the human occupation of the arctic follow-ing the end of the last ice age. In fact, it is much broaderin scope, both temporally and geographically. It begins inMiocene Africa with an ancestor shared by chimpanzeesand humans and ends with a discussion of how the ColdWar impacted the circumpolar region. The expansion of hu-man settlement into progressively colder habitats providesa novel lens through which Hoffecker views human evolu-tion and the development of many archaeological culturesin Europe, Siberia, and the North American Arctic. He tracesthe anatomical and social developments of our tropical an-cestors that allowed them to spread throughout the entirenorthern hemisphere.

Hoffecker divides his discussion of human settlementof the north into five main stages: the occupation of themiddle latitudes, the colonization of western Europe, theNeanderthals, the dispersal of modern humans, and thecolonization of the Arctic. The early chapters focus on theemergence of Homo habilis and Homo erectus and the dis-persal out of Africa. They highlight the role of bipedalism,more developed cognitive abilities, and an increasing di-etary reliance on meat, which allowed hominids to leavetropical woodlands and move into Eurasia. Subsequentchapters deal with the early occupants of Europe, fromHomo heidelbergensis, whose anatomy and technology werevirtually indistinguishable from their African contempo-raries, to Neanderthals, who displayed pronounced anatom-ical adaptations to cold but left only limited evidence ofcold-related technologies. The book then moves to mod-

ern humans, who maintained a warm-weather physiquebut developed complex tools, tailored clothing, and shel-ters allowing them to spread rapidly across the forests andcold steppes of Europe and Siberia. The final chapters tracethe rapid colonization of the subarctic and arctic regions ofEurope, Siberia, and North America following the last glacialmaximum. They emphasize the importance of an increas-ingly sophisticated hunting technology and trace a shiftfrom a broad-based terrestrial economy to a marine one.

This is a highly readable account, clearly intendedfor a nonspecialist audience. To accommodate its broadscope in a very reasonable 142 pages of text, it compressesmany details. It gives only brief mention to importantdebates and entire archaeological cultures. Taxonomicquestions related to the study of hominid evolution arelargely ignored, as is much of the variability within thearchaeological cultures that are presented. However, thisdoes not detract from the great strength of the book, whichis to paint, in broad strokes, the journey of a tropicalape to the far north. No other book places the humanoccupations of the Arctic in such a deep temporal context.In an age of increasing specialization within our discipline,its wide-ranging coverage is refreshing. This explorationof northern prehistory becomes an exploration of all ofhuman prehistory, emphasizing the interconnectedness ofpeople everywhere. Its long-term perspective also serves tohighlight the accomplishment of circumpolar peoples pastand present whose structures and carvings reflect a richnessof life that goes far beyond mere survival. This bookwill appeal to undergraduates looking for an accessibleintroduction to human evolution and the archaeologicalcultures of the north. It also makes engaging reading foranyone who specializes in a small piece of this very largepuzzle and wants to broaden their horizons.

Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, andEffects. Michael Jackson. New York: Berghan Books, 2005.216 pp.

JENNIFER HASTYPacific Lutheran University

Michael Jackson’s latest book is a collection of medita-tions on cutting-edge issues in anthropology, studded withethnographic vignettes from his diverse field experiences,and collectively integrated through his own intersubjectiveversion of existentialist philosophy. Exploring such themesas mourning, violence, organ transplants, indigenous landstruggles, and human rights, Jackson identifies the intersub-jective forms of reason and practice through which humanbeings understand and cope with events, reinventing them-selves and their possibilities in the process.

While the chapters are full of insights into the spe-cific plights of the particular groups and individuals Jacksonhas studied, the most remarkable aspect of his ethnogra-phy is the use of existential concepts in an adamantly retroattempt to reground the comparative humanism of the


discipline. For Jackson, the objective of anthropology is “tounderstand, through empirical means and expedient com-parisons, the eventualities, exigencies, and experiences ofsocial being” (p. xxviii). The generality of this project pointsto the price of reinventing universalism while remainingmindful of poststructuralist and postcolonial concerns overpower, representation, and historicity. While the ethno-graphic frame of “events, exigencies, and effects” widensthe lens of analysis to an unwieldy angle, Jackson bringsfocus to his project by turning to central problems of exis-tentialism. Time and time again, Jackson turns to HannahArendt’s notion of “natality” to show how people bridgethe gap between freedom and determinism through “gen-erative or initiatory” acts such as storytelling, ritual, play,affective expression, and magical reasoning.

A writer of fiction and poetry as well as ethnography,Jackson is a master storyteller. The “events” that inspire hisexistential ruminations are conveyed in vivid detail withcareful sensitivity to the multiple experiences and perspec-tives of participants. The chapters develop rhizomatically,shifting through scenes and concepts, avoiding synthesisand closure. As with existentialist philosophy, it seems it isup to the individual reader to impute meaning to the cross-cultural connections and reflections upturned in Jackson’sfertile narrative. The effect is uneven. In chapter 5, Jackson’shumorous commentary on having the same name as a con-troversial celebrity in the United States sits uncomfortablywith Malinowski’s account of spells and magic—the pointof this juxtaposition remains unclear. In the next chapter,however, theory and narrative coalesce in a powerful dramashowing how Jackson’s son worked through the grief andexistential crisis of losing his grandmother by improvisingritual, narrative, and performative play.

Analytically, Jackson is at the height of his talent whenaddressing the experiences and consequences of humansuffering. Conveying the stories of displaced and brutal-ized peoples, Jackson dramatizes the social performativityof voice and silence, how people use narrative to situatetheir individual experiences in socially meaningful contextsrather than allowing their tragic circumstances to isolateand alienate them. In his critique of human rights discourse,he points to the impotence of individualistic notions of sub-jectivity and entitlement in complex sociocultural arenaswhere people more readily turn to intersubjective strategiesof identity and survival.

Despite the ambitious title, Existential Anthropology isnot a manifesto for an entirely new and different kind ofanthropology but, rather, a call for a return to comparativehumanism. While this may be a laudable project, if we areto follow in Jackson’s path, anthropology must come toterms with the rather overwhelming critique of humanismwaged by structuralist and poststructuralist social theoristsover the past three decades. Overlooking such postexisten-tial critics as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Jacksonmakes noble but essentialist claims about human naturethroughout the book. For example, “I take it as axiomaticthat all human beings need to have a hand in choosing

their lives, and to be recognised as having an active partto play in the shaping of their social worlds” (p. 127). As afoundation for professional ethics and progressive politics,yes, such a commitment is crucial to the study of humanity.As a universal social fact, however, the individual drivefor self-determination is highly contingent on political,historical, cultural, psychological, and even circumstantialfactors. One might counter that human beings also havea need for collectivity and belonging, forms of mergedidentity that help them to share or shirk the burden ofdifficult personal choices and relinquish sole responsibilityfor their individual destinies. Herein lies the problem withhumanism: What counts as human is entirely up for grabs.As a basis for reenvisioning comparative ethnography,Jackson’s existential anthropology holds promise; however,the theoretical challenges of poststructuralism deservecareful consideration.

Looking Reality in the Eye: Museums and Social Re-sponsibility. Robert P. Janes and Gerald T. Conaty, eds.Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. 196 pp.

REBECCA J. DOBKINSWillamette University

The authors of the nine case studies collected in this anthol-ogy take as a premise that the mission of museums shouldcentrally include “social responsibility,” and that such amission can coexist with fiscal sustainability. The editorsbegin with a widely shared observation that recently mu-seums have tended to focus on one of two rarely overlap-ping pursuits: showcasing market-driven blockbuster exhi-bitions, with increased revenues and attendance as the goal,or prioritizing community connections and relevancy, withsustainability as the key goal. The idea for the book origi-nated in a 2002 Canadian Museums Association panel onmuseums and social responsibility, and the case studies arepredominantly from Canada with three others from NewZealand and the United States.

The editors, both archaeologists, argue that the (West-ern) museum world is currently engaged in a search for sig-nificance. They contend this search grows out of dissatis-faction with the West and its emphasis on a human–naturedivide, preoccupation with money as the measure of worth,and misconception that markets create communities. Theyassert that museums are privileged workplaces where an al-ternative path can be developed, and that a socially respon-sible agenda can lead to organizational renewal and sustain-ability.

While the idea that museums exist for a social purposeis not new, up until the last few decades that purpose inthe West has largely been to reify dominant ideology. Inthe mid–20th century, the eventual transformation of somemuseums was set into motion by formerly colonized peo-ple who demanded that human remains and cultural trea-sures be returned to their communities of origin. Two chap-ters offer portraits of these transformations: one by Maori

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museum professional Paul Tapsell about Maori ancestral re-mains associated with the Auckland Museum and the re-cent reclamation of control over those remains by Maoripeople, and the other by Gerald Conaty and Beth Carter ofthe Glenbow Museum in Calgary about the development ofa permanent exhibit about Blackfoot-speaking people. Thelatter project was done in partnership with First Nationscommunities and, for the Glenbow, represents a significantdeparture from the process leading to the notorious 1988exhibit The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s FirstPeoples, which attracted protest by the Lubicon Cree whowere frustrated with lack of treaty negations and objectedto the corporate sponsorship of Shell Canada Ltd., whichwas drilling for oil on Lubicon traditional lands.

In other articles, museum professionals working in art,history, natural history, and science museums provide ex-amples of how to proceed down an alternative path, withgreat pragmatic detail about working with community part-ners, corporate funders, and museum audiences. Notwith-standing all the lessons of the volume, I believe the con-tributors miss an opportunity for constructive self-scrutiny.For example, while several authors link their institutions’shift to socially responsible agendas to increased fundingfrom corporate and government sponsors, none providesustained attention to the implications of relying on suchsources for community collaborations.

There are also other significant unexamined assump-tions in several of the chapters. One presumption is thatmuseums can discern what social change should look like;they just do so by different means. There does not seem tobe consistent recognition in the volume that the processof identifying goals for social change is a positioned one,dependent on a theoretical understanding of the sourcesof social problems. For example, several case studies fo-cus on behavioral dimensions of social problems (e.g., theantismoking program The Unfiltered Truth of the LibertyScience Center in New Jersey; antidomestic violence exhi-bitions in the Calgary Police Service Interpretive Center),suggesting that social change can be achieved by individ-ual “choices.” More holistically, The Human Factor exhibitat the Royal Saskatchewan Museum attempts a very ambi-tious interpretation of the historical, ideological, and eco-logical factors that have resulted in the global environ-mental crisis, and it posits itself as a form of “societaltherapy” to heal the human–nature divide. Ruth Abrams ofthe Lower East Side Tenement Museum argues persuasivelythat the historical perspective can be a powerful tool forsocial change; her museum addresses larger societal needsof immigrants as a fundamental dimension of its mission.While the affirmation of museums as social change agentsis inspiring, the volume could have reached another levelby consistently elevating some of these broader issues to thesurface.

These minor improvements aside, Looking Reality in theEye brings together valuable case studies for museum pro-fessionals involved in strategic planning processes and forcourses in museum studies, ethics, or applied anthropology.

Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application. SatishKedia and John van Willigen. Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 2005. 376 pp.

CARLA GUERRON-MONTEROUniversity of Delaware

The 21st century has witnessed a resurgence of inter-est in academic circles on the ways in which anthro-pologists could or should be involved with the press-ing human problems that they document. This newlyheightened awareness is by no means uncontested. Someanthropologists consider applied anthropology “one of theframeworks for the discipline’s goal of pragmatic engage-ment” (Rylko-Bauer et al. 2006:178). Others argue that an-thropology should only be concerned with offering newtheoretical and ethnographic venues to understanding hu-man problems. Applied Anthropology: Domains of Applicationis a timely and welcome addition to this debate.

Applied Anthropology provides a very comprehensivesummary of the history of applied anthropology and itsconnections and influence on academic anthropology. Thebook is composed of an introduction and a conclusion byeditors Satish Kedia and John van Willigen, and nine chap-ters, each addressing a particular domain of applied anthro-pology. The editors convincingly demonstrate that appliedanthropology is not a recent “invention,” and that it hasbeen intrinsically linked to the development of anthropol-ogy since its origins as a comparative science. The editors’introduction also covers a discussion of the theoretical andmethodological contributions of applied anthropology.

Nine chapters address some of the most important do-mains in applied anthropology. All of the chapters are simi-larly organized. The contributors provide a useful historicalsummary of the domain and its relevance today, in addi-tion to its theory, method, practice, application, and currenttrends. Case studies illustrate the scope of application of thetheories. Consistency in the topics covered is an essential as-set of the book, although some authors offer more thoroughdiscussions of the theoretical development of their owndomain, thus merging praxis and theory more effectively.Thomas McGuire, for instance, masterfully traces the the-oretical roots of applied environmental anthropology fromcultural ecology to political economy to political ecology.Similarly, Anthony Oliver-Smith provides a comprehensivehistory of applied anthropological research in displacementand resettlement.

Two chapters discuss development. Peter Little uses acommunity-based conservation project among Kenyan pas-toralists to illustrate current interest among developmentanthropologists in addressing global issues such as biodi-versity conservation, the impact of structural adjustmentprograms, and global markets. He remarks that, to be ef-fective, anthropologists must learn the language of policymakers and macroeconomists. Oliver-Smith tackles the dif-ficult issue of forced displacement and resettlement of pop-ulations as a result of large-scale infrastructural projects,


using as case material hydroelectric dam projects. He alsoindicates anthropology’s role as the foundational disciplineof development-induced displacement and resettlement re-search (DIDR).

Three chapters address the related topics of food, nu-trition, and health. Robert Rhoades argues that in only25 years agricultural anthropology has become a strongand viable domain. The importance of the anthropo-logical view of agriculture as it relates to cultural be-liefs and practices is illustrated with three cases fromthe International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. David A.Himmelgreen and Deborah L. Crooks highlight the in-terdisciplinary nature of nutritional anthropology and itsimpact on public policy. Three case studies document therole of anthropologists in programs for low-income His-panic families in Connecticut and Florida. The domain ofmedical anthropology is reviewed by Linda M. Whitefordand Linda A. Bennett. They emphasize the ever-present eth-ical issues in their domain, and illustrate the effectiveness ofmedical anthropology’s biocultural perspective with a casestudy of the 1991 cholera epidemic in Ecuador.

Thomas McGuire addresses environmental anthropol-ogy, using the subdomain of maritime anthropology—specifically, the case of the collapse of the northern codstocks in the early 1990s—to pose the question of how toeffectively manage a communal resource. This case study isalso used to discuss the applicability of political economyand cultural ecology to environmental anthropology.

Marietta L. Baba’s chapter examines the utility of an-thropological knowledge and skills in business and indus-try. This domain belongs to an older tradition with roots inthe 1930s when anthropologists participated in the inter-pretation of working environments in the industrial sec-tor. The author presents two case studies, one on usingthe ethnographic approach to conceptualize new productsamong working families in the United States and the otheron corporate organizational culture.

Nancy P. Greenman highlights how cultural acquisitionhas formed the core of anthropological studies of education.Anthropologists have contributed to the redefinition of lit-eracy and to the specificity of how and what children learnin every culture. Rather than using case studies, Greenmanfocuses on career trajectories of accomplished educationalanthropologists Jane Schensul, Harry Wolcott, and DavidFetterman.

Robert C. Harman discusses how applied anthropologycan contribute to the field of gerontology and to a betterquality of life for the aged because of its holistic, compara-ble, and emic nature. His case studies focus on malnutritionand quality of care among the elderly in the United Statesand Scotland.

Finally, in their concluding chapter, Van Willigen andKedia address future trends in applied anthropology. Read-ers would have benefited from a lengthier discussion of thechanging power relations within the discipline, also cov-ered in the conclusion. As the authors indicate, the his-tory of academic and applied anthropology is the history

of power relationships between anthropologists and theirstudy subjects. Academic anthropology has responded tothis challenge by being reflexive; applied anthropology hasresponded by producing work where anthropologists andstudy subjects are engaged in a collaborative or participa-tory relationship.

The contributors cite scholars from the United Statesand abroad, and have conducted research nationally and in-ternationally, and some of the case studies refer to interna-tional projects. However, the focus of Applied Anthropology ison the development of the subfield in the United States. Al-though this is not by any means a shortcoming of the book,it is worthy to note that it centers on the history, theoreticaland practical development, and present state of applied an-thropology in the United States (and, to some extent, theWest). Anthropological application, theoretical approach,and training are not the same worldwide. Anthropology inother parts of the world is at once inherently theoreticaland practical, as scholars navigate the public policy, aca-demic, and nonacademic worlds simultaneously (Guerron-Montero 2002).

Applied Anthropology is a thoroughly researched andwell-written book. It will be a very significant reference toolfor practitioners and academics in the United States andabroad. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate studentswill also find this book informative, comprehensive, andapproachable. Departments interested in expanding or im-proving their curriculum to incorporate an applied compo-nent will welcome the book, as the editors and some con-tributors have been careful to identify areas where graduateprograms could focus their attention in training students inapplied anthropology, considering that students themselvesare asking to be trained with the “real world” in mind.

REFERENCES CITEDGuerron-Montero, Carla

2002 Introduction: Practicing Anthropology in Latin America.Practicing Anthropology 24(4):2–4.

Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, Merrill Singer, and John Van Willigen.2006 Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present, and

Future. American Anthropologist 108(1):178–190.

Tattoo: An Anthropology. Makiko Kuwahara. Berg Press:Oxford, 2005. 288 pp.

MARK C. DIABUNESCO Asia/Pacific Cultural Heritage Cooperation andProtection Office and Research Institute for Humanity andNature

Despite the simple but elegant title, Tattoo: An Anthropologydetails the implicit sociocultural complexity of an explicitart form and symbol of expression with which we are all fa-miliar in a very overt way (if not anthropologically). MakikoKuwahara discusses a single aspect of cultural expressionand a single process: tattooing. The volume is the pub-lished version of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation from Aus-tralian National University. As she states in the introduction(“The Corporeality of Tattooing and Identities”), the “study

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examines how people situate themselves in the world, phys-ically and ideologically” (p. 1). She states that the body isboth a social and cultural construct built within a socialand cultural context. The context for this ethnography ontattooing is contemporary French Polynesia—specifically,Tahiti.

Rather than deal with the reinvention of tradition andethnic identity as other studies (cited by the author) havedealt with, Kuwahara focuses her examination on two as-pects of tattooing: (1) the historical discontinuity (or in-terruption) of Tahitian tattooing (because of Christian sup-pression beginning from the 1830s and its revival in the1980s) and the effect that this hiatus had on understand-ing the practice of tattooing, and (2) the importance tied tothe spatiality of tattooing. By spatiality, the author explainsthat tattooing and tattoos are situated and conceptualized(by modern Tahitians) in an everlasting time and borderlessspace.

The corporeality, or the body as a form of identity, isan important aspect of this ethnographic work, highlightedby the questions investigated in this work—namely, what isthe meaning of the body when related to tattooing? Why dopeople mark the body? What are the consequences of thismarking? What is the relationship between the body, theself, and the society? And do people get tattooed simply oftheir own free will? (p. 3). These questions form the primaryresearch issues that the author investigates, and she does sowith great detail in the remaining chapters. Each questionis answered thoroughly and framed within an appropriateand explicit theoretical paradigm.

Chapter 1 (“Discontinuity and Displacement: Placeand History of Tattooing”) outlines the history of Tahitiantattooing and how it is entrenched within the ethno-graphic social and cosmological system and its trans-formation with European/Christian contact. Chapter 2(“Practice and Form”) is explicitly materialistic in form andsimply describes the process, practice, motifs, and designsof Tahitian and Polynesian tattooing and the basic trap-pings of tattoo artists; this chapter provides a strong visualimpact with a suite of good quality field photographs oftattoos. I was satisfied in being presented with both thestandard image of basic motifs and tattoo styles and im-pressed with the visual impact and expertise of the artists(not to mention the creative and imaginative design andsubject qualities). It is important to imagine both the his-torical perspective and contextual influences on art styles:What are their origins and influences and how pervasivewere design styles among different ethnic groups? I won-dered how much influence tattoo motifs had on ceramicstyles and imagine prehistoric Lapita ceramics as basing ce-ramic styles on tattoo motifs (or vice versa). Essentially,a more focused discussion on the historical developmentof tattooing would have been useful and, indeed, seemsessential.

Chapter 3 (“Marking Taure’are’a: Social Relationshipsand Tattooing”) focuses on the “who” of the tattoo worldthat Kuwahara associated with and that formed the ba-

sis of her observations. She situates tattooing within acommunity of tattoo artists. Most tattooists are men, andKuwahara discusses the idea of male taure’are’a or the im-portance of adolescence and the creation of a sense ofself and ethnic identity that tattoos embody. Chapter 4(“Exchanges in Taputapuatea: Localization and Global-ization”) addresses the interface between the tattooistsand nontattooists and examines how knowledge andethnicity articulates and is transmitted with respect toTahitian identity. Chapter 5 (“Dancing and Tattooing atFestivals: Tahitian, Polynesian and Marquesan Identities”)explores geopolitical issues in French Polynesia and detailshow the political manipulation of tattoo-based art festivalsis used to preserve the idea of French colonialism. Finally,we venture within the confines of a unique context fortattooing: the prison setting (ch. 6, “Inscribing the Past,Present and Future: In Nuutania Prison”). In this chapter,Kuwahara attempts to interpret the modification of tattoo-ing based on style and motif as well as the use of tattoos asa means of expressing inmates’ changed status in society.This is expressed by the alteration or removal of a tattoo orthe refusal to have one.

As mentioned above, the author uses an explicit the-oretical paradigm so important for situating any ethno-graphic work within the discipline and understanding thefocus of the social issues being investigated. Kuwaharaplaces her theoretical paradigm directly within that ofMerlau-Ponty’s (and Husserl’s) phenomenology. The con-cept of “corporeality” is fleshed out by citing the ideas ofMichel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu who give primacy tothe body as being the locus of social control. Recent feministtheory is also an influence, in that the construction of bothsex and gender is the body, which creates networks of socialsignification through messages and texts. Issues of ethnicity,gender, and age are outlined thereby providing the readerwith a clear image of the concepts that run throughout thebook.

Her recording methodology consisted of field notes,photography, video, and audio tape. Three primary field-work excursions were conducted between 1998–2000 and2002–03. The author discusses her personal anxiety of nothaving a tattoo despite being pressured by the tattooists andothers with whom she worked and observed. She claimsthat her body was constantly objectified within the realmof gender, age, and skin color. Although she does state thatthis duality and her refusal to get a tattoo both expandedand limited her work, perhaps an unassuming tattoo in theright (perhaps obscure) location would not have compro-mised her principles. Indeed, as she noted, it would likelyhave given her more subtle insight into the cultural ethosand identity of tattoo artists and the weltanschauung of herown research focus for over the past decade.

Critiques of the presentation and design of the bookare few and far between. Plates are appropriate and clearand the length is not excessive. A larger text font wouldhave made for easier reading, but otherwise there are noglaring copyediting or production problems. The concepts


are clearly presented as is the purpose of her research. Theresults and the historical context are also well described.I think the author’s research would have benefited fromanother case study and context (in addition to the prisoncase) within Tahiti to demonstrate the changing natureof tattooing. Additionally, a comparison to another areaof the world (i.e., commercial tattooing in the “West,” aNorth American Native group, or another Oceanic group,e.g., perhaps the Maori) with this contextual detail wouldhave been welcome within the confines of a published book(that may have some market value) rather than in an orig-inal scholarly doctoral dissertation. I would also liked tohave seen some quantitative comparisons to design stylesand preferences—perhaps tables comparing the repetitionof styles and patterns and the distribution within Tahitiancommunities based on gender and age ratios (i.e., malesto females, age groups) and outside the community in herresearch areas, accompanied by maps of those styles and de-signs. For example, where do they originate? How far backin time can we track designs and motifs? Is there oral his-tory regarding the antiquity of styles and their inspiration?Do they appear on other media?

Finally, it is possible that some specialists in this fieldmay feel slightly frustrated that this work may be lessexplanatory (or rigorous) with respect to theory (was theremore in the original dissertation?). Essentially, however,I would highly recommend this book to cultural anthro-pologists studying design and symbolic representation,decorative arts and design, sociology of art specialists,specialists in Oceanic anthropology, and undergraduateanthropology students.

Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End ofLife. Susan Orpett Long. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘iPress, 2006. 287 pp.

NANCY ROSENBERGEROregon State University

In Final Days, Susan Long gives us a clear, sensitive explana-tion of the changing attitudes and actions involved in theprocess of dying in Japan. Through interviews with doc-tors, nurses, families, and patients, Long paints a pictureof people coping with the technology of transplants, theknowledge of prognosis, and the possibility of palliative carewhile simultaneously using meanings from their historicalculture to figure out how to cope. Joining Margaret Lock’sbook on brain death, Long’s book fills a postindustrial nichein a Japanese anthropology literature replete with bookson ancestors, funerals, and old age. Long is the right per-son to write this book because she is an expert in Japanesemedicine and kinship and has done work with bioethicistsin a U.S. hospital setting.

Long’s main question is how Japanese finesse and shifttheir historical cultural meanings around death in contem-porary circumstances. This is framed within the larger ques-

tion of how Japanese ways of hierarchy, harmony, and con-sensus fit with the “universals” of Western bioethics. Longalso compares Japanese practices with those in the UnitedStates. These frameworks set up another question: Whatdoes the autonomy of the patient mean in the bioethicsof dying in Japan? Early on, Long suggests the need for anethnoethics that considers behavior on the ground. Hav-ing studied medicine and kinship in Japan for many years,Long designed her research so as to capture the social ne-gotiations that she knew occurred around the sick and dy-ing. She represented the multiple participants in the dyingprocess, interviewing 20 patients multiple times and 14 pa-tients once; 29 family members; 38 physicians of variousspecialities; 14 nurses; and nine journalists, social workers,and other relevant professionals.

Theoretically, Long uses the concept of “culture,” butshe defines it as conflicting ideals in a context of insti-tutional and economic constraints (p. 149). She identifiesmultiple “scripts”: ideal symbolic narratives that influencedecisions and represent alternative paths—some custom-ary, some consciously constructed, and many under publicand private debate. Long avoids the concept of “discourse,”which would have invited more attention to power differ-entials among scripts.

Technological changes vie with concepts surroundingthe “good death” in Japan. Death should be peaceful andcalm (yasuraku ni), and death should occur with familymembers—children and grandchildren—present so the dy-ing eye can be met (shinime ni au). Long states that Japanesehave a “near obsession” about the latter, to the extent that“ceremonial CPR” is given to keep the person alive untilthe requisite people gather around the bedside of the dyingperson. People wish to die quickly or else of gradual old age,preferably on tatami (i.e., at home); yet the achievement ofsuch desires is fast receding in an age of cancer, chronic ill-nesses, and high technology, whereby 78 percent of peopledie in the hospital. The dying person should be taken care ofby doctors and family who are trustworthy and respect thepatient’s desires but also know the patient well enough tomake the right decisions on his or her behalf. One particu-lar family caregiver should protect the patient, encouragingthem to fight with hope, while the patient should show agrateful attitude.

Difficult questions flow from these ideals. Given thestrong pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry aswell as doctors’ training toward high-tech treatment, whatcomprises a calm death or a death with dignity in contem-porary Japan? How does a caregiver protect the patient fromunnecessary stress such as the knowledge of a terminal can-cer diagnosis, yet respect the patient’s wishes, which areonly ever partially known? How is the contemporary gooddeath negotiated?

In chapters that focus particularly on changing atti-tudes toward disclosure of terminal diagnoses, transplants,and palliative or hospice care, Long’s main answer is thatdoctors, families, and patients are willing to live with a

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much higher level of ambivalence than those in the UnitedStates. Together they go through “triadic negotiations”: a se-ries of verbal and nonverbal communications. The patient’scharacter or social identity is a key component in family anddoctors’ decisions: Is the person strong enough to cope witha transplant or a terminal cancer diagnosis, or will they justgive up hope and experience a death that is far from peace-ful? Ironically, 77 percent of people polled would wish to betold about their condition, but only 33 percent say they inturn would tell their family members about their medicalcondition; protectionism seems to vie with self-determinedindividualism.

The way it usually works is this: A key person in thefamily gathers a consensus from the larger family, then ne-gotiates with the doctor, who will be the one to discloseterminal conditions to the patient. Beset with choices in apostindustrial world, families and doctors tend to err on theside of treatment, following the dominant medical modelbacked up by medical training and national health insur-ance. Alternatively, the family and doctor might decide towithhold treatment, as both find it difficult to withdrawtreatment once given. In Japan, advanced directives andliving wills are not widely known, not legally binding, andusually seen as giving direction but not requiring partic-ular action. Passive euthanasia (withholding or withdraw-ing treatment) is technically illegal, although used, andactive euthanasia (hastening of natural death), althoughrarely used, is legal under strict circumstances. Althoughfew and mostly Christian, hospices are growing in num-ber, and according to Long, they are slowly adapting toJapanese ideas about dying. Contrary to popular opinion,Japanese doctors are often relieved when treatment is with-held, sometimes feeling that families keep the patient alivejust to allay their guilt. Thus, conflict does occur but re-mains unacknowledged by ethics committees, unlike inthe United States. Japanese doctors respect family decisionsmore than U.S. doctors do; according to Long, U.S. pa-tients’ families are seen as an obstruction unless patientsare incompetent to make decisions for themselves. Giventhe emphasis on family, a wider range of examples fromLong’s interviews with 29 family members would have beeninteresting.

Long argues that various scripts are available in Japanbesides the high-tech medical one, with the doctor andequipment at the center of all decisions, and the paternal-istic, surrogate family script, with family at the center indecision making. Some people opt for the “developed na-tion” script defended in Western bioethics, in which theautonomy of the patient is key. Others follow a caregiverscript in which a compromise is reached between familyprotection of the patient and respect of the patient’s indi-viduality without full autonomy. Long provides a case studyof a Japanese man who disagreed with his wife and decidedagainst a heart transplant in the United States. (Brain deathwas still not legal in Japan in 1996 and even now organs arerarely harvested.) The book would have profited from more

short case studies representing the other scripts as well as asense of how fully each was represented in Long’s sample.Nonetheless, Long shows that contemporary Japanese havechoices.

Ultimately, Long emphasizes the caregiver script ofcompromise between family care and full patient auton-omy. She holds it up as the “less efficient yet . . . richer ap-proach” that Japan has to share with the United States:that tolerance for ambiguity can allow a compromise be-tween historical patterns of relationship and modern waysof death; that self, autonomy, and choice can be partial andshared within the close social relationships of family—one’sconvoy through life, a la Sylvia Plath.

Long’s study has much to offer to the discussion of au-tonomy in Japan. She could have used her material to definethis Japanese style of autonomy more clearly, for example,by putting something other than capacity to make decisionsat the center of autonomy. Perhaps Long could develop ar-eas of autonomy such as the continued ability to keep fight-ing, the importance of self-reliance within a group, or theability to perform one’s appropriate role within a drama;here the patient respecting the family’s right to make thefinal decision.

In the end, Long should have returned specifically tothe question of bioethics and what Japan can offer to thisWestern-centric field. Because she does not, the book’s les-son seems to be directed at her U.S. readers in general ratherthan to bioethnicists, and Japan gets held up as the modelthat those in the United States should learn from, as it hasin the past. This contradicts Long’s well-argued points thatJapan has multiple scripts. In addition, although Long im-plies that the United States has multiple scripts around dy-ing just as Japan does, the depth to which the reader cantake the comparison between the United States and Japanis never clear. Long does a good job of introducing vari-ous statistics about dying in the United States. But from theone U.S. case study given and other comments, the reader isleft with the idea that U.S. families are not part of decisionmaking—that in fact they may even be estranged from fam-ily members at death. If the book is translated into Japanese,more case studies or a discussion of the various scripts inthe United States should be added. Perhaps Long shouldwrite another book about the ethnoethics of the U.S. wayof dying.

Long has made a worthy contribution to the literatureon death in anthropology and in Japan. Her book is notonly informative, it paints dilemmas and offers alternativesthat resonate with our own lives, our own deaths, andthose of our loved ones. Long’s book expands and bringsflexibility to the “universal” principles of Western bioethicsaround the dying process. It opens the possibility that theprocess of dying in the postindustrial world will not bemandated by the Western philosophy or by biomedicalideals but that, instead, it will be worked out in a reflexiveprocess including individuals, families, histories, andbioethical principles.


Film, Ethnography, and the Senses: The CorporealImage. David MacDougall. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2006. 274 pp.

SARAH EVERSHEDPitzer College

David MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker whosework in India has focused on the topic of corporeality andthe ways children live their lives against the backdrop ofa boarding school. From his time spent in Northern Indiaat the Doon School, MacDougall produced five films cen-tering on the children’s lives as neither part of “a homoge-nous society, nor in a multiply fragmented global one, butin both” (p. 106). MacDougall uses his most recent book,Film, Ethnography, and the Senses: The Corporeal Image, to ac-complish a variety of tasks: to explain the corporeal natureof ethnographic film and the role of ethnographic film inrelation to textual explications; to explore the Doon SchoolChronicles using the concepts related to social aesthetics;to expose the difficulty of representing children in film; toreconsider the Doon School after some temporal distance;to consider the history of Indian photography in general;to do a critical analysis of an early 1900s postcard photog-rapher Jean Audema; and, finally, to explore suggestions forthe future of visual anthropology. His ambitious task is ex-ecuted with precision, clarity, and a profundity that is rarein theoretically astute books of such varied topics.

MacDougall begins the book with an insightful expla-nation regarding the benefits of cinematic ethnography incontrast to textual explications. He argues that the visual de-mands understanding a “relation between seeing, thinking,and knowing, and the complex nature of thought itself”(p. 2). Thus, the cinematic should not be read as a linguisticentity: Writing contains thought and experience whereasphotography contains looking and being; writing is cumu-lative and film is composite; writing loses the nonverbalaspects of communication, film exaggerates them. He goesfurther to explain that film is constructed in a triangular re-flexivity in which the photograph or film reflects the pho-tographer in the “moment of their creation” and the pho-tographer in turn has a relation to the subjects (p. 3). Filmdoes not have an indexical relation to real life. Rather, itpoints out, describes, and judges life through utilizationof hyperboles and diminutives. Furthermore, in its openendedness, the viewer is “at liberty to take from the im-ages meanings that were never attached to them, perhapsnever even imagined by the filmmaker” (Taylor 1996:77).His densely theoretical introduction equips the reader withthe intellectual sophistication necessary for the absorptionof the subsequent chapters.

MacDougall continues with an explanation of how artconnects the self with physical world. The “bodies in film”he describes include the actor–subject, the spectator, thefilmmaker, and the actual body of film. He explains thatfilms are symbolic bodies: They have both physical com-ponents and sensory–muscular–emotional responses. The

body of the film creates a level of corporeal identificationin spectators who may find themselves enveloped in themimetic qualities of the film and responding emotionallyand physically to the image on the screen. MacDougall ex-plains that film should be a “constant interplay of stim-ulus and bodily response between screen and spectator”(p. 20). MacDougall skillfully explains the interactivity anddynamism of film. Film, he argues, is autonomous from aca-demic writing. In the early days of ethnographic filmmak-ing, film was seen as auxiliary to the text with no inherentimportance. Yet this is an erroneous thought pattern, writesMacDougall, because text includes only a select literate au-dience, it is not multicultural because of its exclusivity ofsymbolic language (i.e., written words), and furthermore itloses sensory experience. In anthropological writing, the in-dividual is easily lost, people become types rather than facesor bodies, and writing creates distance from subject and en-courages a vocabulary of abstraction. MacDougall describesfilm as an open system, with inherent individuality; filmfurthermore “situate[s] people in continuum of physicalspace and material objects that is historically and culturallyspecific” (p. 55). MacDougall’s most cherished characteristicof film is its ability to synthesize a polysensual experiencein its imagery, sounds, sights, and utilization of synesthesia.In short, writing is description, film is depiction.

MacDougall’s main focus is on the “aesthetic dimen-sion of social experience,” which he criticizes is not ex-plored widely in human sciences (p. 59). He suggests anethnographic future that focuses on embodiment and phe-nomenology and a reflection on the process of seeing. He isin line with his contemporaries such as Faye Ginsburg, whoargues that “films embody in their own internal structureand meaning the forms and values of the social relationsthey mediate” (1994:6). Both statements adopt sentimentsof phenomenology. MacDougall and Ginsburg both call foran embodied filmmaking in which the meaning encodesthe being (as social relations and values). Although phe-nomenology, as a quest for experiential knowledge, is fo-cused on finding reliable data in a concrete way, it is drivenby a desire to expose the process and essence of conscious-ness. Furthermore, it aims at returning the human subjectto the center focus, a reaction against positivist attitudes(Eagleton 1996:51). Anthropological writing “entombs theliving” and decenters individuality, a trait worthy of dissolu-tion (p. 45). MacDougall seems to imply that ethnographicmedia, as the panacea to writing, is in need of a renewal inphenomenological terms. His call for more aesthetics hasimplications for the future of ethnographic media, which isseemingly headed toward a state of high reflexivity; a statethat is in line with what MacDougall calls “the experienceof seeing” (p. 60).

MacDougall opens the next section with a chapter deal-ing with the issues of filming children in both fiction andnonfiction contexts. The basic fundamental problem, heargues, lies in the reduction of children’s lives to formulasthat the adult mind can understand. Childhood, in effect,is an experience of a distant Other, and this, he explains, is

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problematic for filmic representation. MacDougall believesthat films about children are inevitably about how the adultfilmmaker perceives them. It is this distanced perceptionthat reproduces the myths (both positive and negative)surrounding childhood. He explains the responsibility offilming children is “to explore this otherness and superi-ority against the grain of a more insidious sentimentality”(p. 75). MacDougall despises the mode of sentimental-ity, for good reason: It ignores thinking and agency. Hemaintains that the most effective films are those thatshow how children maintain ambivalence toward theadult world (p. 76). The next two chapters deal with theDoon School and how it played a role in the children’slives as an influence as well as a social landscape to beinfluenced. He gives a brief account of the school’s originand structure. In the final chapter he explores some ofthe films in the series in relation to each other and theeffect of making the films several years after they wereshot to temporally give distancing with respect to thechildren filmed. The chapter concludes on a personal note,demonstrating how the process of filming, editing the film,and showing it to the children influenced MacDougall’sown life. These chapters were in line with MacDougall’schampioning of the film as a process of self-discovery andthe necessity for self-reflexivity, because the film itself isan emanation of the filmmaker’s mind and body, whichshould not be separated with the knife of the Cartesianduality.

The “Photographic Imagination” section focusesinitially on the photographic history of India. MacDougallmasterfully explores the class and caste issues surround pho-tography and the photograph as a landscape for recognizingdisparity between ideal and evidential. He follows this chap-ter with a fascinating, yet somewhat out of place, descrip-tion of the postcards of Jean Audema, a colonialist photog-rapher whose style, MacDougall argues, is slightly differentin its playfully posed nature. MacDougall argues, almostconvincingly, “his pictures suggest that he knew there wasmuch more to his subjects than photographs could reveal”(p. 185). Yet MacDougall’s thin amount of information re-garding the personal life and history of Jean Audema leavesthe reader feeling skeptical of MacDougall’s claims thatAudema was almost a “pre-post-colonialist” who caredabout the individuality of his subjects. Nevertheless,MacDougall uses this opportunity to explore the tragicallydehumanizing effects of colonialist photography in hisattempt to find some scrap of humanity in the entirearchive of the time.

In the section titled “The Ethnographic Imagination,”MacDougall opens with a brief history of visual anthropol-ogy and its relation to the changes in anthropology and thelarger sociohistorical context. He makes the distinction be-tween visual anthropology that “studies visible forms” andthat “uses the visual media to describe and analyze culture”(p. 217). He continues to explore the topic of indigenousmedia and its connotations for the future of visual anthro-pology. He explores the unanswered question of “whether

the visual can attain a more productive role in anthropologyas a medium of enquiry and discourse” (p. 224). MacDougallconcludes this chapter by explaining that anthropologistsneed to learn how to “rethink anthropology through a vi-sual medium” (p. 225).

MacDougall’s final chapter explores the history of vi-sual anthropology and gives a detailed and prophetic de-scription of where he thinks the visual should go—and itis not in the direction of Heider but, rather, in the vein ofthe experimental revolutions of Rouch and Marshall, whofreed themselves from the constraints of the Academy andreinvented the visual image to encompass the essential el-ement of performativity. His final statement explains thatthe very things people originally thought were “the weakestcontributions of visual anthropology—its ability to conjureup bodies and places and personalities—were actually itsstrengths” (p. 273).

REFERENCES CITEDEagleton, Terry

1996 Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Ginsburg, Faye1994 Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic. Anthropology Today

10(2):5–15.Taylor, Lucian

1996 Iconophobia. Transition 69:64–88.

The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A PhylogeneticApproach. Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden, and Stephen Shen-nan, eds. Oxford, U.K.: Cavendish Publishing, 2005. 291 pp.

RICHARD MCELREATHUniversity of California, Davis

KARI SCHROEDERUniversity of California, Davis

Studying the co-occurrence of ecological and other socialvariables across societies—in an attempt to understand thecauses of human behavioral diversity—has a long history.Within anthropology, many know the comparative methodbetter by the debates that shadow it: Galton’s Problem andthe “units of culture” debate. Within biology, similar de-bates over species diversity have equally long histories, but,unlike anthropology, biologists seem almost entirely unani-mous on how to proceed. This edited volume, The Evolutionof Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach, assembles thelatest efforts to apply tools built to aid comparison withinbiology to cultural macroevolution.

It is worth noting that the borrowing of comparativemethods from biology is not plainly colonialist in its intent.Ruth Mace states in the introduction, “Human adaptation isabout culture as much as it is about genes” (p. 1). The intentis to take cultural dynamics seriously, not suppose geneticevolution is an appropriate model of cultural evolution. Wemay argue that the authors have not yet built a satisfactoryview of cultural evolution, but it is unfair to charge themwith not trying. It is also important to note that the authorsof some chapters actively disagree with others (e.g., about


the appropriateness of treating cultures as units), and thiskind of disagreement is healthy, we think.

The book is divided into two complementary halves.The chapters in the first part of the book employ phy-logenetic comparative methods to reconstruct culturalphylogenies—“trees” of descent relationships among soci-eties or cultural traits—and then assess whether culturalevolution is plausibly treelike (exhibits phylogenetic sig-nals). These cultural phylogenies are then applied to thestudy of cultural adaptation in the second part of the book,in which they are used mainly to address Galton’s Problem.The ensemble is essential reading for a scholar interestedin pioneering research on the origins and maintenance ofcultural diversity.

Despite our general enthusiasm for the reconstructionof cultural histories and the comparative method, we havedeep reservations about much of the work summarizedhere. Criticism has been launched against the application ofthe phylogenetic comparative method to cultures becauseof strong evidence that cultures are not related through abranching process; rather, cultural traits are subject to hor-izontal transmission (borrowing) and cultural groups to fu-sion. The phylogenetic comparative method makes sensefor species-level and higher taxa, because biological speciesare generally independently evolving. If lineages are notindependently evolving, it is not useful to represent theirhistorical relationships as a tree.

Thus, the first part of this book attempts to build acase for the vertical transmission of cultural traits and cul-tural groups, an idea on which the application of the phy-logenetic comparative method in the second part of thebook rests. Mace introduces the second half by saying thatvertical transmission was established in the first half, yettheir evidence for vertical transmission is unconvincing.Subjects of study range from the Austronesian and Bantulanguage families to basketry assemblages in California andTurkmen rug styles. Evidence of nonbranching evolutionabounds. For example, the split-decomposition graphs ofthe Austronesian (Greenhill and Gray) and Indo-European(Bryant, Filimon, and Gray) language families show consid-erable reticulation (nonvertical signature). Similarly, boot-strap values and posterior probabilities for the maximumparsimony (MP) and Bayesian Bantu language trees pro-duced by Clare Holden, Andrew Meade, and Mark Pagelshow very weak support for deep relationships. Peter Jor-dan and Stephen Shennan conclude that geography, ratherthan linguistic affinity, is of primary importance in the pat-terning of basketry traditions.

The lack of support for vertical transmission is evenstarker when one considers the data tested. The languagefamilies analyzed in this volume are more likely than oth-ers to have evolved through a branching process, becauseof their hypothesized recent and rapid geographic expan-sion. Furthermore, most of the language phylogenies areconstructed with the Swadesh list, which consists of wordsprechosen because they are resistant to borrowing.

The lack of support for vertical transmission is furtherhighlighted when the assumptions of vertical transmission

implicit in a tree are considered. Trees assume vertical trans-mission. A valid test of treeness would compare the fit of thedata to a tree with the fit of the data to one or more nontreemodels. Failure to directly evaluate nontree models of sim-ilarity can lead to unfortunate conclusions. For example,Mark Collard and Jamshid Tehrani construct an MP treeof Turkmen rug characters and, given a Consistency Index(CI) of 60 percent, infer that 40 percent of rug charactersare transmitted horizontally. CI only measures the conver-gent reevolution (homplasy) in the tree; to infer that this isa direct measure of the amount of cultural exchange seemsunfounded when homoplasy is already minimized throughthe construction of an MP tree. In fact, an MP tree with highCI values could easily be derived from randomly generatedtrait data.

We have deep reservations, mixed with cautiousoptimism about the second half of the volume as well.But we expect that most scholars, like us, will have a hardtime accepting comparative methods based on culturalphylogenies until the phylogenies themselves can bebetter supported. We think there are two strong messagesgoing forward in this area of research. First, a lesson maybe learned from human population biologists who nowgenerally employ networks rather than trees to analyzegenetic data. We must at least directly evaluate networkmodels before assuming that trees are adequate. Second, inbiology, no method of historical reconstruction or compar-ison would now be taken seriously before it was subject toa test of its validity. This can be done through simulation,wherein explicit models of cultural evolution are usedto generate data to which the analytical method can beapplied. While such tests do not tell us how evolutionactually works, they do tell us if the method is valid whenits assumptions are met, and in what ways it fails whenthey are not. Additionally, such tests have the virtue offorcing us to be explicit about the model(s) of culturalevolution we are assuming. Given the lack of clear modelsof cultural evolution in this volume (and elsewhere), wethink such an exercise will be well worth the trouble.

Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Cur-rencies, Lateral Reason. Bill Maurer. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005. 217 pp.

GREGORY STARRETTUniversity of North Carolina at Charlotte

The U.S. artist James Boggs draws money. He sketches one-sided copies of U.S. and other national currencies, convinc-ing waitresses and shop owners to accept them in paymentfor purchases. After giving the recipient time to meditateon the exchange, he sells the (“real”) change and the re-ceipt to a collector, who then tracks down the bill’s newowner to purchase the works, whose value has been createdin the process of transaction. The bill has been effectivelyexchanged as currency not despite its obvious falsity, butbecause of that falsity, because it was clearly not money atall, but art.

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Bill Maurer examines the oscillation of similar moneyforms and practices through different frameworks of value.He argues that alternative monies and systems of financedemonstrate the fragility of monetary exchange as such,which works not because it rests on a foundational senseof value but because as practical systems of transaction,its principals are engaged in ongoing conversations aboutthe place of exchange media within broader landscapes ofmorality, theology, and “mutual life.”

The case studies Maurer uses to explore these issuesare Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF), an international in-tellectual and practical project to free capital accumula-tion from the taint of riba (interest), and a local currencysystem in Ithaca, New York, called HOURS, which can beused in payment for many types of goods and services andeven stored up in accounts at the local credit union. IBFand HOURS practitioners justify the development of al-ternative currency and finance systems as corrections to“conventional” systems, which either violate principles oflocal autonomy and community or distort exchange bydistributing unjust rewards. But each alternative is thenfaced with conundrums regarding its alternativeness. IBFdiscourse, although sometimes based on moral argumentsor the idea that contemporary advances in economic the-ory are prefigured in the Qur’an as the articulation of God’sown cosmological order, is nevertheless faced with the factthat its avoidance of prohibited interest rests on techni-cal operations indistinguishable from “non-Islamic” alter-natives. HOURS, the result of previous experiments withbarter dyads and networks, pegs itself to the U.S. dollar.This creates problems of equivalence when making changeat the Farmer’s Market or receiving pay in HOURS, for ifthey represent the same sort of value, what is the point ofan alternative? And if they represent different sorts of value,then can one reasonably expect to receive change in dollarsfor an HOURS note spent?

Analysts on the “outside” of these practices often de-ride such alternative financial structures as fakes, as ideo-logical rather than economic projects. Maurer shows thateven practitioners question the foundations, definitions,and senses of value encoded in alternative exchange sys-tems, and that this questioning drives the system forward,just as the endless questioning of terms and concepts inthe social sciences provides the motor driving the system ofintellectual and practical work. In fact, according to Mau-rer, IBF and HOURS have no real inside or outside. Bothare based on readings of conventional finance, history, an-thropological case studies, and sociological theory, so thatthey “are part of one field, not two, and are densely in-terconnected, indeed, constituted as separate objects bytheir very interconnection and their attempt to purify theirconstant hybridization” (p. 41). Far from being a liabil-ity, it is in fact the “gimmicky quality” (p. 56) of curren-cies like HOURS that makes them work as they “oscillatebetween the various worlds they inhabit and construct”(p. 57).

On a larger scale, these alternate financial systems actas an illustration of the peculiar interconnectedness of an-

thropology and its objects. The deeper argument of MutualLife, Limited is that “anthropology, like Islamic banking andalternative currencies, is a series of experiments . . . withthe social significance and constitution of transactions”(p. xv). When Maurer’s interlocutors urged him to readMarcel Mauss or used Frank Capra films to illustrate IBFideals, it became apparent that anthropology stands onthe same ground as its content. Both our intellectual andour practical activities lie alongside and inform theirs, butours can hardly be used to analyze theirs in a sense strictlyseparate from their attempts to analyze themselves in thecontext of “conventional” financial techniques, theologies,or conceptual systems. These alternatives highlight thatconventional finance itself, along with the anthropologythat seeks to develop an adequate representation of it, is amoral as well as a technical endeavor.

Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape. Roderick J. McIntosh. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 261 pp.

KENNETH G. KELLYUniversity of South Carolina

The Ancient Middle Niger is a welcome addition to the ar-chaeological literature on urbanism and complexity andalso serves as an excellent case study of the methodologyfor the archaeological understanding of regions. Further-more, it is about time that the important results of archae-ological research on the African continent reach an audi-ence wider than the usual suspects of regional specialists.The book is a volume in the Cambridge Case Studies inEarly Societies series and as such should bring the remark-able societies of the Inland Niger Delta to undergraduateand graduate students as well as the interested lay public.Roderick McIntosh’s readable and engaging tale is sprinkledwith anecdotes and asides that bring the continually reflex-ive process of archaeological investigation to the forefrontand that demonstrate how theoretical, methodological, andinterpretive processes are all intertwined.

The Ancient Middle Niger is focused on understandingand explaining the apparent incongruity of the rich archae-ological evidence of complex societies in the Inland Deltaregion of present-day Mali with the lack of evidence thatsupports traditional hierarchical notions of state formation.In essence the question as put forth by McIntosh is howto explain the presence of “cities without citadels”—thatis, cities without the usual trappings one expects to findarchaeologically in complex societies, the so-called hall-marks of complexity derived from Mesopotamian modelsof urban complexity such as temples and despots and redis-tribution. Could urbanism have followed a different pathfrom village origins to city life? What about pathways thatrecognized heterarchical possibilities? How might broadlyheld Mande cultural values be germane in these devel-opments? Chapter 1 poses these basic questions and de-scribes in very understandable terms the apparently stag-gering task confronting two graduate students in 1977


(one of whom was the author) when they first set eyes onthe enormous mounds of Jenne-Jeno and its neighboringsites.

Chapter 2 details the unique aspects of the environ-mental setting of the Middle Niger where seasonal floodsradically transform the landscape and have led to cooper-ative occupation of the landscape by a variety of special-ized groups, including herders, fishers, and farmers. Fur-thermore, a detailed understanding of the environmentalvariability is presented, demonstrating that a very sophisti-cated understanding of the importance of soil type, aspect,and other characteristics extended over 2,000 years into thepast. Human activities have further transformed these land-scapes in significant ways, and an underlying cultural eco-logical perspective is present throughout the book.

Chapter 3 presents McIntosh’s theoretical model to ex-plain how the Middle Niger developed its social and oc-cupational complexity in a challenging environment with-out developing coercive structures of authority such as areusually posited. The model proposed is the “pulse model,”which unites a growing number of specialists—herders, fish-ers, farmers of various varieties of grains, blacksmiths, andso forth—in a web of mutual interdependence yet permitseach group to maintain a traditional level of independence.As the microenvironmental occupational specialists, eachidentifying with distinct “ethnicities,” were cast togetherin the microenvironmentally diverse basins of the MiddleNiger during oscillating periods of aridity and moisture,strategies of mutual accommodation and tolerance devel-oped as a way of overcoming unpredictable periods of re-source unavailability. McIntosh argues that the archaeolog-ical evidence of clustered settlements of specialists in theMiddle Niger corresponds to the presence during the his-toric period of ethnically distinct specialists in the regionwho relied on complex relations of interdependence; theserelations articulate within a set of what he calls Mande “coreconcepts.”

Chapters 4–5 recount the specific archaeological strate-gies that have provided the data with which to develop andexplore the pulse model for Middle Niger urbanism. Sufficeit to say, the large, deep Jenne-Jeno settlement mound hasproduced a vast array of archaeological data, ranging fromthe mundane pottery and grinding stones to evidence ofmetalworking and other specialized activities. McIntoshweaves these data into examples that help to supportthe notion of heterogeneity at Jenne-Jeno. To furtherexplore the significance of the Jenne-Jeno urban complexmaterial, chapter 5 describes regional survey strategiesemployed to investigate the complementary settlements ofthe urban hinterland. The hinterland strategies identifiedsimilar self-organized settlement complexity in the regionsurrounding Jenne-Jeno, and similar regional perspectivesin adjacent regions are also described. The book closeswith a comparison of incipient urbanism in three areas—Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China—with the Middle Niger,demonstrating that the process of urbanism has been avariable road, with particular regions each demonstrat-

ing some combination of heterarchical and hierarchicalprocesses.

Thicker Than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symboland Ritual. Melissa L. Meyer. New York: Routledge, 2005.264 pp.

ANDREW P. LYONSWilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario

There are dangers in interdisciplinarity. The author ofThicker Than Water is an ethnohistorian who wishes to an-swer more questions about blood than many anthropolo-gists would dare to ask. She ably demonstrates the salienceof gender opposition, complementarity, and antagonism inthe symbolism of blood in a sweeping cross-cultural analy-sis. The faults in her argument reflect to some degree faultsin her sources. Many readers may not have the patienceto go beyond the first two chapters. This would be a pity,because they are not really necessary to the argument pre-sented later on.

Melissa Meyer suggests that because knowledge ofblood’s importance informs so many actions in so many cul-tures, and because of the universality of red as a multivocalsymbol, the blood–redness complex should perhaps be con-sidered as an example of gene and culture coevolution. Thelatter concept leads to her use of Chris Knight’s (1995) some-what bizarre theory of the sex strike, which assumes thatmany aspects of blood symbolism may be traced to the Pa-leolithic in the African Rift Valley shortly after Homo sapiensemerged. The division of labor between women who had tospend long periods nurturing their offspring and their menfolk who left the home base for extended periods to huntwould have put women at a disadvantage but for their se-cret weapon—menstruation. Because menstrual blood wasused as a negative sexual signal, the ability of women to syn-chronize menstruation enabled them collectively to with-draw their sexual services if they were not included whenhunters shared their kill. Thus began human society: theincest taboo; dual organization; decoration with ochre; ma-triliny, which preceded patriliny; and classificatory kinshipterminologies. Meyer admits that there is no evidence formenstrual synchrony in the Paleolithic but considers thatKnight’s main error is to fail to appreciate that blood maysymbolize sexual antagonism. A symbolic opposition be-tween men’s blood and women’s blood developed in thecontext of the more patriarchal institutions that arose afteragriculture began.

Meyer reviews the literature on ideas of conception,birthing rituals, and initiation as well as the rules and rep-resentations surrounding menstruation. She wisely arguesthat an understanding of folk ideas about human biologyand cosmology is necessary if one wishes to contextual-ize life-cycle rituals. She rightly insists that cross-culturalanalyses should not ignore the perspective of both genders,noting that there is a dearth of literature on female initi-ation because of the predominance of male ethnography

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and male bias and also because female initiation is not al-ways a collective project. Discussing male initiation rituals,she stresses that male blood is shed in an attempt to imitatethe power of females, which is evinced by the loss of bloodin childbirth and menstruation. She criticizes Bruno Bettel-heim and others who noted this pattern a long time ago, be-cause they did not examine female initiation. Meyer followsan interesting section on beliefs and practices surroundingmenstruation in non-Western cultures by an exposition ofmisunderstandings of menstruation, their effects on Vic-torian and Edwardian medical science, and their banefulconsequences for Victorian women.

The last major chapter deals with blood sacrifice, “real”and symbolic, animal and human. The influence of NancyJay’s Throughout Your Generations Forever (1992) is acknowl-edged. Meyer discusses the Nuer, the Tallensi, Hawai‘i, theOld Testament, West African kingdoms in the 19th cen-tury, and medieval Christianity. She observes that bloodsacrifice inevitably demonstrates patriarchal connectionsand purposes. Agnatic ancestors may be acknowledged andthe future of the line secured. By sacrifice the patrigroupensures its social reproduction: The pouring of blood insacrifice resembles the loss of female blood in biologicalreproductive processes. Meyer follows Jay in comparingthree African kingdoms—Benin, Dahomey and Ashanti—all of which practiced human sacrifice. Supposedly, Ashantihuman sacrifice was somewhat less bloody than the com-parable rites in Benin and Dahomey because the Ashantiwere matrilineal and, therefore, somewhat less hierarchicaland closer to gender equality than comparable patrilinealpolities. As Harriet Lyons observed a decade ago in a re-view of Jay’s book (Lyons 1996:91), it is a little improperto compare R. S. Rattray’s scholarly accounts of Ashanti in-stitutions to the horrified reactions of the British Press tosacrifice in Benin, written as part of the justification of apunitive expedition. The latter part of this chapter tracesthe development of the medieval cult of the sacrament,which became a focus of patriarchal power in the medievalChurch; it was also closely linked to myths of blood li-bel, which were the excuse for frequent outbursts of anti-Semitism.

The book’s argument might have been stronger ifmore use had been made of the work of Victor Turner,whose informant remarked, “Red things act . . . both [for]good and ill” (Turner 1962:154). Overall, Thicker ThanWater has unusual virtues and striking faults, a fact thatmade this reviewer’s task unusually difficult. It may attracta considerable readership and it cannot be ignored byanthropologists because it may have influence outside theboundaries of our discipline.

REFERENCES CITEDJay, Nancy

1992 Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion,and Paternity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Knight, Chris1995 Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lyons, Harriet1996 Review of “Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice” by Catherine

Bell, and “Throughout Your Generations Forever” by NancyJay. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1):90–94.

Turner, Victor1962 Three Symbols of Passage in Ndembu Circumcision Ritual:

An Interpretation. In Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations.Max Gluckman, ed. Pp. 124–173. Manchester: Manchester Uni-versity Press.

The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern NorthAmerica. George R. Milner. New York: Thames and Hudson,2005. 224 pp.

ROBERT RIORDANWright State University

George Milner has written a book on the eastern mound-building cultures for the Thames and Hudson Ancient Peo-ples and Places series that, while aimed primarily at the in-telligent and interested reading public, will certainly findconsiderable use in undergraduate and graduate archae-ology courses as well. Milner’s descriptive narrative flowsbeautifully, is almost jargon free, and is devoid of in-textfootnotes. Boxed inserts are scattered throughout the vol-ume that elaborate on topical issues and important sites.Milner’s stated intent is to show “how people lived at dif-ferent times in the past, not the many details about pot-tery, stone tools, and building remnants that fill technicalreports” (p. 8).

After an opening chapter that briefly sketches the en-vironmental setting and the history of archaeological re-search in the eastern United States (“A Heavily Forestedand Thinly Peopled Land”), the following two chapters ad-dress the cultural foundations that underpin the easternmound-building cultures. The Paleoindian and Early Ar-chaic cultures are discussed in a chapter entitled “MobileHunter-Gatherers,” and Middle and Late Archaic societiesare covered in “Sedentary Hunter-Gatherers.” The treat-ment of mound building begins there, with mention of theArchaic shell-mound cultures along the coastlines and inte-rior rivers, and short takes on the Watson Brake and PovertyPoint ceremonial centers as well as a few other southeasternArchaic mound sites.

As archaeologists will expect, the heart of the volumeis devoted to coverage of the Woodland and Mississip-pian periods. Chapters cover the Early to Middle Woodland(“Builders of Burial Mounds and Earthworks”), Late Wood-land (“Villagers Facing Great Change”), and Mississippian(“Chiefs Come to Power”). The volume is rounded out witha chapter on “Northern Villagers: Late Prehistory” and “ATrail of Tears: Native and European Contact.” A short list-ing of archaeological sites open to the public precedes thenotes, bibliography, and index.

For an area as large and culturally diverse as the easternwoodlands, the sheer amount of material with which onemust be conversant—and current—is staggeringly large,and the need to achieve a balance in the interpretationspresented must be daunting to prospective authors of new


syntheses like this one. Choices must frequently be madebetween competing ideas, and Milner takes clearly definedpositions, usually providing his rationale for doing so. He isnot a fan of the overkill hypothesis. He notes the continuedambivalence about the earliest occupation of Meadowcroft,noting that its biological assemblage fails to fit the usualideas of a boreal environment. He supports lower popu-lation estimates than many have favored, with respect toboth the number of people who lived at particular sites (heestimates as few as 3,000 at Cahokia, for instance) as wellas the projections for the total population of the area northof Mexico just prior to European contact (he suggests fourto six million). In a related way, he plays down the amountof effort and societal involvement that mound building re-quired, noting the “mischievous effect of big mounds onthe fertile imaginations of writers over the past two cen-turies” (p. 145). He is very interested in the subject of lead-ers and leadership in these developing societies. He believesthat, despite the existence of elaborately furnished graves,Middle Woodland Hopewellian leaders lived much like ev-eryone else, and that the Middle Woodland was a time of“unusual harmony.” Mississippian chiefs are also cut downto size: While a degree of social inequality is evident, he ar-gues for “the very real limits of chiefly power—it was moreshow than substance” (p. 160). I predict that graduate stu-dents will echo that statement for years to come. Even theimportance of maize is shown to have varied temporallyand geographically, and Milner stresses that it cannot beuniformly implicated with the rise of social complexity.

This is a beautifully produced volume, printed on heavyglossy paper stock. It is illustrated with a selection of 20color plates that depict both sites and artifacts, and 131figures (plans and line drawings and black and white pho-tographs). The latter include, by my count, 35 spectacularlysharp images of sites under excavation before 1960, manyapparently reproduced from original negatives. These in-clude depictions of the scary tunnel openings of 1897 intothe Carriage Factory Mound near Chillicothe, HopewellMound 25, Modoc Rockshelter during its excavation, andnumerous WPA-era images including Carlston Annis, theRobbins, Wright and Craig mounds, Bessemer, Moundville,and Jonathan Creek.

This is the most concise account available of the last2,000-plus years of eastern North American prehistory. Itwill give equal pleasure to those who may casually leafthrough it or those who read it in detail.

Cultural Landscapes in the Ancient Andes: Archaeolo-gies of Place. Jerry D. Moore. Gainesville: University Pressof Florida, 2005. 270 pp.

GORDON MCEWANWagner College

Jerry Moore has written an important and fascinating bookthat will compel many archaeologists who deal with the ar-chitectural remains of complex societies to reconsider their

interpretive approach. Moore argues the need for develop-ing an archaeology of place based within holistic anthro-pology. In his introduction, he presents this volume as anattempt to expand archaeological inquiries into the affec-tive aspects of culturally defined and constructed spaces. Todemonstrate his thesis, Moore explores four sets of researchquestions and answers them through extensive and highlyimaginative use of ethnoarchaeology.

The first set of questions, discussed in chapter 2, ad-dress a fairly simple problem regarding the distribution ofhouses in a community. He asks whether it is “possible toreconstruct the spatial ambits of ancient voices? How mightthe placement of houses reflect varying levels of social cohe-sion and contention in nonhierarchical societies?” (p. 219).Ethnographic data from a wide spectrum of modern soci-eties indicates that the distance that sound travels in normalconversational and whispered tones governs the spacing ofhouseholds constructed of sound-permeable materials. Hesuggests that in tense social conditions spacing is greaterthan in relaxed cohesive groups. Applying this to Forma-tive Period Andean archaeological settlements, he sees atool for recovering social dynamics reflected in communitypatterning.

Moving to a more complex question, chapter 3 consid-ers the connection between religious authority and the builtenvironment. With the appearance of complex and monu-mental architecture in the Formative Period of ancient Peruthat has been widely seen as religious in character, ques-tions have arisen regarding the nature of the societies thatbuilt these temples. Were these structures the products ofemerging theocratic states or do they reflect low-level egal-itarian societies motivated by the religious authority of ec-static shamans?

Moore’s ethnoarchaeological approach finds thatethnographic data from contemporary shamans shows thatdifferent forms of ceremonial architecture are associatedwith shamans and formally structured canonistic religiouspractitioners. Ethnographic shamans operate without anyceremonial architecture in public areas like plazas or men’shouses. Canonistic religious practitioners, in contrast, op-erate within substantial ceremonial architecture. However,canonists and shamanistic practice are not mutually ex-clusive. He makes the important point that canonists canand do incorporate shamanic practices within the frame-work of their religious practice. Therefore finding vestigesof shamanic practice is not evidence that ecstatic shaman-ism was the primary basis of religious authority. This insightwill have important implications for the interpretation ofthe political structure of Peruvian Formative Period societiesof the Chavın stylistic horizon.

Turning to another use of space as the venue for proces-sions in chapter 4, Moore argues that the dynamics of an-cient societies can be revealed by the cultural modificationof space. Processional pathways, especially those definedby architecture, provide knowledge of the form of a publicevent that can be useful even if its meaning and significancehave been lost. Studies of ethnographic data on processions

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indicate that the organization of public displays reflectshow societies reiterate or challenge social relationships. Ar-chaeologists should see a unification and interdependenceof data in a processional event that in other contexts wouldbe treated as separate categories. Processions incorporatea suite of elements including architectural space, portablerepresentational objects, musical instruments, drinking ves-sels, textiles, costumes, and other artifacts that when con-sidered holistically represent past dynamic behaviors thatmay not be evident if the elements are analyzed in isola-tion from one another.

Memory and architecture are addressed in chapter 5.Moore laments that the “house” has been studied in theAndes as merely the material representation of the house-hold, a passive container of human activities. In generalthe house has not been considered as a place where soci-eties encode and display statements about themselves. Hesuggests that we should consider the existence of “housesocieties” based on the existence of noble or royal houses,which as they are at the apex of society reflect the most in-formation about the society as a whole. He suggests the hy-pothesis that large compounds found archaeologically onPeru’s north coast, especially those at the Chimu capital ofChan Chan, are evidence of house societies and that thecompounds functioned to encode memory of the past. Thearchitecture is testamentary documentation of the culturalmemories that a particular group wanted to preserve.

Moore’s archaeology of place opens new dimensionsand avenues that go far beyond the limitations of thecultural materialistic approach. He shows with a stunningclarity why archaeology must be holistic anthropology ifwe are to understand the cultural dynamics of past societies.

Socialization, Land, and Citizenship among AboriginalAustralians: Reconciling Indigenous and Western Formsof Education. Raymond Matthew Nichol. Lewiston, NY:Edward Mellen Press, 2005. 480 pp.

COLLEEN MARIE O’BRIENUniversity of Georgia

While scholars have written extensively about indigenousknowledge systems—most recently on their loss or trans-formation amidst changing social, economic, and environ-mental conditions—few have focused on the underlying ed-ucational practices, and even fewer have addressed how his-torically based power structures transform indigenous edu-cational systems. Raymond Matthew Nichol addresses bothin Socialization, Land, and Citizenship among Aboriginal Aus-tralians: Reconciling Indigenous and Western Forms of Educa-tion, by examining issues of education and pedagogy amongAboriginal Australians and offering alternatives for integrat-ing traditional educational practices into current Westernmodels. Nichol, an anthropologist with over 25 years of ex-perience in the Australian public educational system, setsout to unravel the complex processes of Aboriginal cultural,social, and economic exclusion that have helped to shape

the educational system in Australia. Nichol supports theseviews with anthropological, educational, and historical re-search, including an ethnographic study based in the com-munity of Murrin Bridge, New South Wales, Australia.

In the opening chapter, the author lays a foundationfor traditional learning styles among the Wangaaypuwanand Wiradjuri, two Aboriginal groups of central and west-ern New South Wales. Nichol explains that, in stark con-trast to Western models, traditional educational practicesrely largely on a model of learning that stresses observa-tion, imitation, and teaching through story and oral tra-dition. Nichol follows this in the subsequent two chap-ters with a case study on the school at Murrin Bridgeand a presentation of dominant educational research ide-ologies. Chapters 4–7 form the backbone of the book, inwhich he lays out a historical overview of the role of ed-ucation in the lives of Australian Aboriginal populationsfrom the 1970s through the early 2000s, including pro-cesses of culture contact, assimilation, self-management,and resistance. Here Nichol discusses the role of educa-tion as an agent of change and a vehicle for implementingstate policies, examining the issue within the scope of “cit-izenship,” a process by which the Australian governmentattempted to instill principles of obligation, involvement,participation, and social action into its members. Chapters8–9 provide an overview of the research derived from field-work, interviews, and questionnaires among school teach-ers, administrators, and government institutions. In thesesections, Nichol discusses the plight of indigenous edu-cation via school policies and curricula at Murrin Bridge.Drawing on this material in chapters 10–11, he providessuggestions for how to reconcile indigenous and Westernpedagogy.

The most interesting part of the book explores the dif-ferences between traditional and Western educational mod-els and the implications for Aboriginal identity. The wayNichol sees it, Native peoples developed holistic, contextualeducational models: holistic in that they met a greater rangeof a child’s mental, social, and spiritual needs, and contex-tual in that they existed within religious beliefs, commu-nity practices, and the rituals of everyday social life. Here,education promoted group cohesion, solidarity, coopera-tion, and identity, thus encouraging children to becomefully functioning “members” of their culture. This social-ization in turn maintained the system by providing orderand continuity, in particular by regulating access to knowl-edge and information. Nichol criticizes the Australian ed-ucational system, arguing that rather than providing Abo-riginal children with a relevant and appropriate education,it may have undermined their identity in an effort to as-similate and integrate them into Western society. In thisvein, he asserts that “schools perform their function of re-producing an unequal social order, of perpetuating socialinequality” (p. 134). Rather than helping children growand prosper in society, the system thus may have rein-forced and maintained social inequalities as a form of classcontrol.


While at times the many topics addressed—rangingfrom identity, culture, citizenship, society, race, andhegemony—may seem disconnected, Nichol succeeds inweaving them together by using education as a commonthread. His holistic approach to the Aboriginal educationalexperience is one of the books greatest strengths andanthropologists can learn from his method of combiningethnographic and historical data together with practicalaccounts from indigenous teachers and his own extensiveknowledge of the Australian educational system. Further-more, while Nichol writes the book from the perspectiveof Aboriginal Australians, many of the issues raised—suchas land change, power, and authority—have global ap-plications. This book will be engaging to those readerswho wish to gain an understanding of the Aboriginalexperience of education as well as to practitioners whowant to incorporate traditional learning styles into Westerncurricula.

Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and CulturalAuthority. Pal Nyıri. Seattle: University of WashingtonPress, 2006. 134 pp.

ROBERT SHEPHERDGeorge Washington University

Anyone who has been to China in recent years, whetheras a researcher or tourist, has likely experienced tourism,PRC style, an approach that undercuts assumptions aboutseemingly normative ties between authenticity and culturalpurity or historical antiquity. Pal Nyıri’s Scenic Spots: ChineseTourism, the State, and Cultural Authority is a timely analy-sis of the significant increase in domestic tourism in Chinaover the past decade and the role this plays in an ongo-ing state project of nation building and modernization. AsNyıri notes, tourism studies in anthropology and relateddisciplines have more often than not focused on the im-pact of foreign tourism on local places. Only in recent yearshave researchers begun to pay attention to the role domestictourism plays in the traditional fieldwork space of anthro-pology. With literally millions of Chinese citizens travel-ing on vacation each year, Nyıri asks a simple yet crucialquestion: Where are they going and why? In other words,what makes a particular place a destination for both (state-affiliated) producers and (citizen) consumers?

In China what gets toured and why, it turns out, is verydifferent from what European and North American touristsare conditioned to seek. Nyıri begins with a brief overviewof travel in Chinese history, emphasizing a long traditionof categorizing “scenic spots” (mingsheng) such as moun-tains and other nature scenes based on how these sceneswere described by famous literati and other elites (p. 10).While tourism was rejected as a “Western” practice duringthe Mao years, revolutionary sites such as important birth-places and battle scenes functioned as pilgrimage sites forRed Guards. Following the 1978 “opening up” of China,authorities initially emphasized foreign tourism. However,

since the early 1990s, domestic tourism has become a ma-jor catalyst for further state-directed development, partic-ularly in minority areas such as Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan,and Yunan. As part of this tourism boom, authorities haverevived and appropriated the concept of “mingsheng” tomark new sites, ranging from nature preserves and zoosto newly constructed “old towns” and historic sites suchas Mao’s Mausoleum (p. 15). This construction of destina-tions is successful because the romantic ideal of travel asa solitary pursuit has never translated well in the Chinesecontext (p. 62). In contrast to an idealized Euro-Americanpursuit of authenticity and a former Soviet Union emphasison physical exertion and selflessness, Chinese norms define“good” travel as a correct interpretation of already markedsites (p. 64). In particular, travel in China is grounded ona “different way of approaching and responding to nature,lacking the modern Western taboo on human intervention”(p. 67). As Nyıri points out in his description of Ermei Shan(Mount Emei) and Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan, formainstream Chinese tourists, authenticity is not rooted inpurity of either nature or material culture: Cultural perfor-mance is both expected and valued, rather than the realnessof everyday life (which, after all, many have plenty of expe-rience with). Just as wilderness is not necessarily viewed aspristine nature but simply as wild and therefore dangerous,a good trip is not solitary and introspective but profoundlysocial.

Nyıri firmly rejects the suggestion that Chinese are ex-amples of “posttourists”—supposedly savvy travelers whorealize that pursuing the “real” is a fruitless quest and, there-fore, accept the irony of commodification. Rather than get-ting the joke and playing along, he argues that most Chi-nese tourists quite willingly take part “in the rehearsal of ahigh modern hegemonic discourse” (p. 84)—one that con-firms, for example, Han stereotypes of “happy colorful” mi-norities.

And what of resistance to this? Nyıri briefly notes theemergence of a backpacker subculture among urban youngChinese but dismisses it as insignificant, arguing that thereis little critique of marked tourist sites or focus on historicalcontext among these groups. This “self-service travel”(zizhuyou), rather than functioning as an alternative tostate-orchestrated tourism, is instead framed as a modernlifestyle choice, one that emphasizes individual “feelings”(pp. 88–89).

Nyıri closes with a very brief discussion of a new phe-nomenon: Chinese group travel to foreign destinations. Un-fortunately, he devotes very little space to this importanttopic, while hinting at the intriguing ways in which for-eign sites are reworked within a framework of dishistori-cized mingsheng, so that, for example, the River Thames,Buckingham Palace, Madame Tussaud’s, and “London fog”become some of the official “scenic spots” to visit in London(p. 105).

Despite these limitations, this is an excellent, albeitshort, introduction to an exciting field of study, organizedand written in a way that makes the information accessible

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to nonspecialists and appropriate to undergraduate coursesin contemporary China as well as to tourism studies.

Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria:Abakaliki during Colonial Times (1905–1960). SimonOttenberg. Lagos, Nigeria: Spectrum Books Limited, 2005.373 pp.

DANIEL JORDAN SMITHBrown University

Relatively few ethnographic monographs seem genuinely—much less primarily—aimed at an audience in the place ofstudy. Simon Ottenberg’s account of colonial Abakaliki insoutheastern Nigeria is a striking and unusual example. Ot-tenberg, a preeminent anthropologist of the Igbo people insoutheastern Nigeria, explains in the preface his purpose-ful decision to publish what he describes as his “last ma-jor work” at a Nigerian press to increase the readership inNigeria. Primarily a historical narrative, Farmers and Towns-people in a Changing Nigeria offers a multifaceted and de-tailed description of the emergence and growth of Abaka-liki, a backwater town at the northern edge of the Igbo-speaking region. Ottenberg undertook the fieldwork thatforms the basis for the book in 1960. His history of thetown relies on a combination of interviews and observa-tions from 1960, archival research, and published scholar-ship, mostly by Nigerian researchers. The tone of the bookis “old school” in the sense that the author is relatively ab-sent in the text and the perspective is very much a bird’s-eyeview, presenting a description of history, social organiza-tion, political dynamics, and cultural practices in an objec-tive style. Because the book covers such a long historicalperiod (at least compared to an account of an ethnographicpresent), in-depth individual life histories and engrossingcommunity case examples are not possible. Yet there is adegree of detail, precision, and complexity with regard tothe description and analysis of social organization that re-calls the masterful accounts of the best mid-20th-centuryanthropology. The extent of Ottenberg’s information andthe sheer scope of his study are impressive, and reading hisaccount is a reminder that new generations of anthropolo-gists rarely achieve this level of comprehensive knowledgeabout the places they study.

In my view, the book makes four substantial contribu-tions to the literature. First, it provides a unique and fine-grained analysis of the extension and mechanisms of colo-nial authority in a relatively remote region of the conti-nent, demonstrating with remarkable complexity and pre-cision both how colonial power functioned in a systemof indirect rule and how Nigerians adapted to, adopted,and co-opted colonial practices for their own purposes. Sec-ond, Ottenberg reveals the multidimensional ways in whichcolonial institutions shaped independence movements andpostcolonial Nigerian politics, governance, and culture. Thehistory of Abakaliki shows that not all of these legacieswere negative. Indeed, the book is commendable for the

balance with which colonial influences are described, eval-uated, and criticized. Third, the book offers an unusuallymeticulous account of the emergence of an African town.During the period Ottenberg covers, Abakaliki was trans-formed from a settlement of just a few hundred people thatcould hardly be characterized as “urban” into a large andexpanding town that would eventually become the capitalcity of Ebonyi State. Ottenberg traces the growth of the townin its economic, political, and social dimensions, providinga natural history of urbanization in an African colonial con-text that offers both exhaustive empirical material and ev-idence that will be useful for comparative analysis. Fourth,as the title suggests, Farmers and Townspeople in a ChangingNigeria focuses specifically on rural–urban dynamics in theevolution of Abakaliki. As is true in many contexts of ur-banization, the nature, scope, and substance of rural–urbanrelations are crucial for understanding the social history ofthe town and the processes of change taking place in thesurrounding and interconnected rural areas. Ottenberg of-fers a detailed and insightful perspective on these processesutilizing unusually rich data.

Ottenberg explicitly shies away from theory in thebook, preferring to document the history in a dispassionateand descriptive account. However, I believe there is muchfodder for theoretical analysis in the monograph, and Iwish that Ottenberg had been more willing to suggestand explore some of the theoretical implications of hismaterial. I wonder whether the relatively descriptivenature of the book is driven not only by its historicalfocus and Ottenberg’s anthropological lineage but also byhis expectation that the book’s primary audience will beNigerian. One suspects that as with Meyer Fortes, whoseaccounts of the Tallensi have reputedly been invokedto settle local disputes about “tradition,” the people ofAbakaliki will find Ottenberg’s account of their town tobe an invaluable resource. The style and tone of the bookleave the impression that the author anticipates such apossibility. I have little doubt that the people of Abakalikiwill be proud of this book, and that is surely an importantlegacy.

Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory andArchaeology of Indigenous Change. Joel W. Palka.Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 319 pp.

NORBERT O. ROSSVanderbilt University

In Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeologyof Indigenous Change, Joel Palka rightfully attacks the im-age of Lacandon Maya as direct descendents of the classicMaya who inhabited the Maya ruins of lowland Chiapas(Mexico) and the Peten (Guatemala). Instead of being anisolated indigenous group frozen in time, Palka describesthe Lacandon Maya as a more or less cohesive tribe strug-gling to make a living within the “tribal zone” of colonialand postcolonial Mexico and Guatemala.


The author is rather ambitious in his goals:

The following pages discuss variation in Lacandon so-ciety through time and how these changes came aboutthrough discrete historical, cultural, and geographical cir-cumstances. The research . . . demonstrates how and whyLacandon Maya culture changed through time by com-paring their distant past with recent ethnographic con-ditions. [p.4]

This goal is worthwhile as little is known about the forma-tion and transformation of southern Lowland Maya groupsduring colonial times. As a result a more detailed account ofthe different Maya groups in the area, their emergence, andtheir transformations through interplays of self-chosen iso-lation and interethnic relations is much needed. However,there are several caveats to such a goal. First, close to noarchaeological research has been conducted on LacandonMaya sites and only a fraction them have been identified.Second, given the lack of large settlements, identificationof these sites is very hard. Finally, the facts that most ofLacandon Maya material culture perishes fast in the rain-forest and that ceremonial sites could differ markedly indistance and kind limit the possibility of archaeologicalresearch.

For all these reasons, Palka’s focus on historical archae-ology of the Lacandon Maya is to be applauded. Yet thesevery same reasons make the above outlined goals of un-derstanding cultural change among the colonial LacandonMaya almost impossible. As a result, the most importantcontribution of this book is not in the area of archaeology orresearch conducted by the author but in bringing togetherdifferent authors working on the subject of cultural changeamong Lacandon Maya from the colonial time (de Vos) un-til today (Bruce, Boremanse, and McGee). This is of specificinterest to the novice, as it allows easy access to informa-tion, some of which is already out of print or only avail-able in Spanish. However, it is the archaeology of LacandonMaya settlements that experts were waiting for. This wouldhave constituted novel knowledge and working more exten-sively along these lines might have provided new and muchneeded insights into the history of lowland Maya. It is herethat the book falls short of its goal. Trying to encompass toomuch, Palka gives up his focus on historical archaeology ofthe area, the topic I for one was most interested in. In oneand a half chapters, Palka presents mainly field note–typedescriptions of pilot studies. In fact the author notes on sev-eral occasions that more research is needed, and it was this“more research” that I hoped to find in this book.

As is, Unconquered Lacandon Maya has little to offerfor the expert, who is very likely to be familiar with thesources used by Palka. As stated, the archaeological dataare limited and do not provide information beyond whatis already known.

All in all, the approach of the book—or, rather, theresearch outlined at the beginning of the book—is laud-able. However, the author does not live up to his ownhigh standards and expectations. The book might be ahelpful tool for the novice to get acquainted with lowland

Maya history. It does not offer many new insights to theexpert and one hopes to see Palka focusing more on thearchaeological research he started among the LacandonMaya.

Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices.Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman,eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 301 pp.

NINA L. ETKINUniversity of Hawai‘i

Health disparities worldwide are attributed in large mea-sure to differential access to resources, including pharma-ceuticals. Decisions in drug discovery and distribution areincreasingly based on economic return, rather than on af-fordable treatments for diseases that affect the most peopleand that are responsible for the most morbidity and mortal-ity. Direct-to-consumer marketing contributes to the med-icalization of lifestyle, while some equally needy marketsare ignored. Paradoxes prevail: The continued use of drug-resistant antimalarials contributes to escalating death rates,the industry fails to make low-cost drugs available, andantidepressant sales increase among economically disad-vantaged populations whose arguably more urgent healthneeds are not met.

The editors envision the globalization of pharmaceuti-cals as a nexus, “a complex web of transitions that is a multi-scaled movement with political, economic, and ethical di-mensions” (p. 20). The ethnographically based individualcontributions to this volume explore the economic, cul-tural, and scientific processes that underlie expansion of thepharmaceutical industry and how health disparities emergefrom and are exaggerated by market-driven medicine. Theseauthors instruct us how community identity and healthare influenced by the nuanced and complex intersectionsof “Big Pharma,” NGOs, government regulations, and indi-viduals. The issue of who receives treatment echoes throughevery stage of pharmaceutical production, from preclinicaltesting to human subjects research, merchandising, distri-bution, prescription, and consumption.

The AIDS epidemic has drawn especially heavy criti-cism about the expense of treatment from professional andlay sectors. In a Ugandan case study, Susan Reynolds Whyte,Michael Whyte, Lotte Meinert, and Betty Kyaddondo de-scribe access disparities based in power and position. Onthe same theme, Joao Biehl explores Brazil’s AIDS program,which has been widely praised as an inspiration to interna-tional medical activism. His critique applauds the success ofthe program and also reveals that inequities in access stillexist, especially for Brazil’s urban poor.

Andrew Lakoff analyzes the market manipulation ofantidepressants in the context of Argentina’s economic cri-sis in 2001. He illustrates how pharmaceutical marketersconnect authorized knowledge to clinicians’ prescribing be-haviors, thus blurring the boundaries between clinical sci-ence and capitalism. Similarly, Kalman Applbaum reveals

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how best clinical practice is invoked by U.S. pharmaceuti-cal marketers in Japan, where the increasing prescriptionof new antidepressants represents agent-driven expansionof global markets. In a chapter on psychotropic pharma-ceuticals, David Healy examines how the industry shapesclinical and lay perceptions of mental illness in the UnitedStates and England: Marketers create or increase product de-mand transposing conventional educational programs andcelebrity endorsements to the domain of research; for ex-ample, Healy illustrates how psychiatric disorders are reifiedand their treatments promoted by clinical trials and ghost-written articles in symposium proceedings and professionaljournals.

Anne Lovell describes how France, once strongly op-posed to pharmaceutical treatment for addictions, in 1996became the first country to introduce a synthetic opiateas the first-line treatment for problem opiate use. She fol-lows the history of the marketing of an addiction phar-maceutical that has become a primary source of revenuein France. Veena Das and Ranendra Das’s ethnography inDelhi neighborhoods explores connections between practi-tioners and households, taking issue with terms such as self-medication and noncompliance, which, they argue, patholo-gize the actions of poor people and draw attention awayfrom how “global and national policy, regional markets,and livelihoods” (p. 172) shape patterns of pharmaceuticaluse.

The accelerating growth of the pharmaceutical indus-try rests on an expanding foundation of human subjectsresearch, which increasingly draws on populations in low-income nations. Adriana Petryna considers the ethical im-plications of the globalization of commercial clinical trialsand examines the interplay of international, state, and eco-nomic domains.

This volume contributes to the literature of phar-maceutical anthropology, reinforcing a portrait of thepharmaceutical industry as a business that is concentratedin a handful of large commercial entities that invest heavilyin research and marketing. The range of themes is narrow:for example, three in the volume deal with the same sub-ject of psychiatric medications. Timely issues that are notcovered include (re)emergent infections and the evolutionof drug resistance, to which pharmaceutical marketingcontributes heavily. The individual chapters are strongscholarly, and primarily anthropological contributions. Irecommend the book for libraries and for academics andother professionals.

Beyond Black and Red: African–Native Relations inColonial Latin America. Matthew Restall, ed. Albu-querque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 303 pp.

ANGELA CASTANEDADePauw University

Challenging historical accounts from colonial LatinAmerica, this collection of essays utilizes new methods of

research to uncover alternative interpretations surroundingAfrican–Native relations. While the nine chapters recognizeevidence of hostile relationships between African and Na-tive peoples, they also highlight the complexity inherentin these encounters. Editor Matthew Restall describes thisapproach as the hostility–harmony dialectic. Within thisanalysis, Restall identifies cultural areas that include iden-tity, community, and culture change in which this hostility–harmony dialectic is reproduced. What were the majorfactors that influenced African–Native relations? How didcolonial powers manipulate these subordinate groups?What tools did African and Native communities use to con-test their positions? And what impact did African–Nativerelations have on colonial society? Along with presentingevidence to support historical notions of a hostile relation-ship between these groups, the chapters in this anthologyoffer new insight into the field of colonial Latin Americanhistory by shifting the focus from the colonizer to the in-teraction between subaltern groups.

Given the multiplicity of locations within Latin Amer-ica to evaluate the relations between African and Nativecommunities, this analogy does a thorough job presentinga broad range of examples as well as evaluating the spe-cific context in which each case study is conducted. Theseinclude such diverse geographic and topical areas such asFlorida, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, while focusing on is-sues of identity, marriage, labor, and miscegenation. A com-mon theme binding the chapters together is the struggleexperienced by both African and Native groups in colonialLatin America. Both groups suffered within the colonial sys-tem, which sought to create antagonistic relations betweenAfricans and Native peoples. Ultimately, the differences be-tween each group were filtered out as each had to confrontthe harsh realities inherent in their struggle to survive, as il-lustrated in Kris Lane’s chapter on the experiences of Africanand indigenous peoples in mining camps throughout colo-nial Spanish America.

Writing on the military experiences of African and Na-tive soldiers, Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall analyze ex-amples of conflict and collegiality between the two groups.They note the various roles colonial military service playedfor each community, highlighting differences in region andtype of region as influencers on group identity in Mexico.For many of these groups, military service became a mech-anism to gain access to privileges and control over indi-vidual and group identities. Likewise, Native peoples andAfricans also used the Spanish legal system as illustrated inRenee Souldore-La France’s chapter on Colombia. Acts of re-sistance by both Native and African groups are highlightedthrough an analysis of the use of language in court doc-uments. Complaints of exploitation, property claims, andabuse by priests are all examples of court cases that reflectedthe use of the colonial system as a tool for resistance by Na-tive and African peoples.

By illustrating the complexity inherent in African–Native relations, this research also advances new interpre-tations on the process of mestizaje (the mixing of races), a


concept essential to understanding historical and contem-porary relations in Latin America. Restall argues that cre-olization is an applicable model to describe the continualAfrican–Native interaction illustrated in three main areasdefined as interculturation, informality, and chronic inten-sification. The chapters in this anthology support this ap-proach by offering new evidence to better understand theconstruction of multiracial populations and interethnic re-lationships found today in Latin America. For example, Stu-art B. Schwartz and Hal Langfur’s chapter on Brazil examinesthe colonial process of ethnic labeling and the creative newcategories produced via African and Native contact. Simi-larly, Norma Angelica Castillo Palma and Susan Kellogg an-alyze the impact of multiracial societies in central Mexico.Their chapter demonstrates the flexible and multidimen-sional nature of racial categories, illustrating how free Afro-mestizos cultivated stronger indigenous rather than Africanlinks to their heritage and identity. Moreover, their recon-struction of economic activities and social lives help un-cover the everyday lived experiences of these historicallymarginalized groups.

Beyond Black and Red is a significant study on marginal-ized peoples, their histories, and their forms of conflict andcooperation. Moreover, it contributes to our understandingon the promise and limitations of colonial documents byreinforcing the need for a more holistic reinterpretation ofAfrican–Native relations. The nine chapters compiled inthis anthology, while not dismissing the presence of hostileAfrican–Native relations, illustrate the fluid and sustainedinteraction between these two groups. This anthology isa valuable collection that highlights the diverse social,political, and cultural responses of African and Nativepopulations to unique local and national contexts.

Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and LegalComplexity. Dik Roth, Rutgerd Boelens, and MargareetZwarteveen, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2005. 313 pp.

NAMIKA RABYCalifornia State University, Long Beach

In editing and contributing to this book, Dik Roth, Rut-gerd Bolens, and Margareet Zwarteween have pulled off adifficult task of bringing together a treasure trove of cross-cultural data from a social science perspective on the glob-ally critical field of water resource management. With alarger and justifiable focus on irrigation management (giventhat the largest quantity of the world’s water is in this do-main and also perhaps influenced by the area of expertiseof the majority of contributors to this volume), it also cov-ers domestic and industrial use of water and ecological andpolicy implications of intersectoral water transfers. LiquidRelations argues convincingly for context specific solutionsto water resources management. This work is satisfying tothe anthropology audience at many levels.

Illustrating that “the devil is in the details,” this work—which includes ten well-integrated case studies representingdiverse geographies from Africa, Asia, and the Americas—depicts the complexity and dynamics of sociocultural con-texts and their impact on water resources management. Thiscomplexity covers gender, ethnicity, and social class in thecontext of exercising water rights. It illustrates the relevanceof case studies often dismissed in applied settings as anec-dotal and argues the case for the relevance of insightfulethnography in the understanding of water managementissues in such settings.

Taking this bottom-up approach, Liquid Relations arguesagainst universal solutions imposed by international de-velopment agencies for managing water resources, whichhave proven time and again to be technically driven so-lutions, bureaucratically imposed by central governmentsand, therefore, unsustainable.

At the center of this discussion is an examination ofwhat water means to communities. The multivalent sym-bolism of water and its perceptions as a community resourceis broadly applicable to non-Western paradigms while itsperception purely as a commodity that is capitalistic marketdriven is a Western artifact. Given its scarcity and there-fore the need for finding sustainable management solu-tions, these two viewpoints are often counterposed as pol-icy solutions (with an ethnocentric bias toward the latterapproach) in international development programs. LiquidRelations shows the futility of such an approach.

Addressing further the issue of on-the-ground complex-ity and diversity, Liquid Relations examines the followingdimensions of water resources management: impact of irri-gation on other types of water use, indigenous perceptionsand use of water, groundwater and its conjunctive use, andnational water policies. This in turn builds up to a holisticframework for examining water rights as a sociolegal con-struct. In addition, this social complexity in any given con-text generates a multiplicity of such rights and a principletheme of the book is the politics and power dimensions ofthe “haves” and “have-nots” in this contested domain ofwater availability, scarcity, control, and accessibility. Differ-ent case studies examine the outcomes when such rightsare usurped, rights are legislated on to unreceptive cultures,and when biparty negotiated outcomes are arrived at. Cen-tral to this discussion is the distinction between the con-cepts of “categorical rights that are attached to persons andproperty objects and concretized rights embodied in socialrelationships” (p. 7). The interplay between these two typesof rights and the need to understand the resulting hybrid isthe focus of the book.

Each chapter also points out the critical role ofcommunity-based organizations in countervailing the in-equitable tendencies of the market-driven approaches ofinternational development programs. Such organizations—including water user associations, village developmentcommittees, cooperatives, and NGOs—have historicallymaintained the participatory demand-driven dimensions of

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community water resources management by giving accessto the poor and the marginalized. Such groups presentedin this work include women, urban renters, smallholderfarmers, and sharecroppers. One chapter in particular, enti-tled “Routes to Water Rights,” addresses the practical impli-cations of such a strategy for irrigation management trans-fer programs.

Liquid Relations is also a larger commentary on therelentless process of culture change and modernizationand their unequal impact on different segments of acommunity. In addition to its contributions to the field ofanthropology of water resources management, legal andpolitical anthropology, and community management ofwater resources, it is also a highly readable addition tothe literature in these fields and therefore could serve as atextbook for courses on these topics or on the related topicof international development.

Being Goral: Identity Politics and Globalization inPostsocialist Poland. Deborah Cahalen Schneider. Albany:State University of New York Press, 2006. 211 pp.

MARYSIA GALBRAITHUniversity of Alabama

Being Goral is an important contribution to ethnographiesof postcommunist East and Central Europe. The mono-graph explores the ongoing and changing significance ofclass hierarchies and ethnic identity among the Gorals ofZywiec, Poland. The author uses this case to illustrate thedeclining significance of the nation-state relative to localand global levels of political and economic organization,and the weakening of national identity relative to localidentity and global integration. The Gorals are an interest-ing group because they are defined both from within thecommunity and by Poles outside of the region as a dis-tinct ethnicity, but one that has never aspired to politicalautonomy. Although the Gorals are most strongly associ-ated with farmers in remote mountain villages, the studyexplores the varied uses and portrayals of Goral identitywithin the small city of Zywiec, where two elite classes, theprewar elite and the neocapitalists, compete for local powerwithin emerging democratic structures and globalizing mar-kets. Deborah Cahalen Schneider deftly weaves a portraitof the Gorals of Poland via analyses of local history, publicdiscourse, key events such as Pope John Paul II’s visit, andthe particular experiences of the many Poles she knew andinterviewed.

Schneider makes the risky but effective choice to high-light her ethnographic analysis of past and present classconflict in Zywiec before detailing her theoretical framingin relation to other studies of class, ethnic identity, andpostsocialist reforms. Thus, her criticism of the “transitionparadigm”—as she calls the assumption of a unidirectional,uniform progression from state socialism to a more effec-tive capitalist world system—is especially convincing when

it follows her description of the messy, particular effects ofGoral encounters with global business interests.

Similarly, she begins her chapter on elite class struggleswith only a brief overview of Karl Marx’s and Pierre Bour-dieu’s treatments of class, saving her more detailed consid-eration of earlier studies until she has outlined class hier-archies in Zywiec under socialism and postsocialism. Hercase material helps to illustrate her contention that, con-sistent with Bourdieu’s claims, class is as much a matter ofsocial and cultural capital as it is a matter of economic cap-ital. Schneider also makes the point that this case is distinctfrom many other core–periphery studies of class conflict incolonial contexts in that it occurs within Europe and in a re-gion with a history of small-scale capitalism, and it involvesdifferent ethnicities that are nevertheless all “white.” Be-sides showing the links between this region and other partsof Poland as well as Poland and other Central European na-tions, Schneider makes a convincing case for comparisonswith other nation-states at the periphery of Europe such asSpain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. She identifies particu-larly compelling contrasts with Maddox’s study of changingclass power dynamics in the Andalusia region of Spain.

A strength of the study is the attention it pays to his-tory; Schneider considers the effects of Poland’s variousperiods of occupation and autonomy on the Zywiec re-gion and shows how Zywiec resistance to pronational cam-paigns has contributed to the declining significance of thenation-state. This section further challenges the transitionparadigm by emphasizing ongoing cultural and structuralfactors, including elements of class, the region’s location atthe periphery of centers of power, and Goral reliance onfamily and community networks. She also argues that re-cent market reforms further limit the significance of thenation-state relative to local identities and global capital-ism. Focused primarily on events up to 1995, the bookleaves open the question of what has occurred since then,particularly in light of Poland’s membership in the Euro-pean Union in 2004.

Schneider emphasizes that elites who vie for power inpostsocialist Zywiec evoke ideals of both “traditionalism”and “modernism.” The prewar elite and the neocapitalistsemploy these idioms in different ways, sometimes pittingthem against each other and sometimes suggesting theircomplementarity. She also considers the ways in whichnonelite classes employ conceptions of Goral identity bothin their everyday lives and in contestations with membersof the elite classes. She makes good use of her own diffi-culties finding a place to live in Zywiec and case studiesof two households to show how different class positions aswell as the relative strength of kin networks can lead to verydifferent access to opportunities in the emerging capitalisteconomy.

In sum, Being Goral provides a valuable view into lifein postcommunist Europe by focusing on ethnic identityand class conflict expressed through the idioms of tradi-tionalism and modernity.


Quintana Roo Archaeology. Justine M. Shaw and JenniferP. Mathews, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005.308 pp.

JOHN E. CLARKBrigham Young University

For over a century, Quintana Roo has been the slighted sis-ter of Maya archaeology. Everyone knows she is in the hall,but few ask her to dance. This modest book hopes to changeher dance card and restore some balance to archaeologi-cal reporting. By size, Quintana Roo represents a fifth ofthe Maya lowlands, yet only three sites (Coba, Tulum, andCozumel)—out of thousands—consistently appear in pop-ular summaries of Maya archaeology, and then only as apostlude to Classic civilization or a prelude to the SpanishConquest. Missing are at least two millennia of history fortens of thousands of people who were part of the lowlandMaya story. This book is the first broad treatment in Englishof the archaeology of region.

The 22 contributors to this volume hope to fill the ar-chaeological void between Belize and Yucatan by present-ing fresh data for sites recently or currently under investi-gation. They have put together a useful reference book withnew information, but not one that will alter the status quoanytime soon. The data are still too ungrounded, underil-lustrated, and raw to bring Quintana Roo into the largerpicture. The book is best appreciated for groups of chaptersdealing with separate projects, or topics, rather than as asynthetic or comparative work.

Following a comprehensive bibliographic chapter byMarıa Jose Con Uribe of past work and of the scores of re-cent projects carried out in the state the past decade, theremaining 14 chapters are organized by area: north, cen-tral, and south Quintana Roo. The coverage is uneven, withsix chapters devoted to the northern sector around modernCancun, four chapters to the Yo’okop region of central QR,and four miscellaneous chapters for the south. Importantsites described in the book include T’isil, San Gervasio, andSan Angel in the north; Muyil and Yo’okop in central QR;and Margarita, Lagartera, Kohunlich, and Dzibanche in thesouth. These were large and magnificent cities during theClassic period, and with roots in the Preclassic.

Because of its design as do-it-yourself-synthesis, thebook’s importance will depend on what individual read-ers bring to it. Three chapters deal with art: murals andsculpture from San Angel, carved stone monuments fromYo’okop, and four-stone altars for the southern region.Three chapters address issues of ceramic chronologies andcultural history but only one illustrates sherds. Changingsettlement patterns and population swings are describedfor the Yalahau, Yo’okop, and Chetumal Bay regions. Asan outsider to the archaeology of Quintana Roo, I mostenjoyed the three chapters that offered some comparativeanalysis, all of them dealing with southern Quintana Roo.Laura Villamil and Jason Sherman compare the urban pat-terns of dispersed and nucleated settlement at Margarita

and Lagartera, contemporaneous and neighboring cities.Enrique Nalda compares Kohunlich and Dzibanche, twocities located 30 kilometers apart. Contrary to his expec-tations, he did not find the expected evidence that thelarger city of Dzibanche dominated the smaller Kohunlich.Finally, Thomas Guderjan’s summary of the developmentsaround Chetemal Bay is useful and, I hope, signals the direc-tion future studies in Quintana Roo will take: comparative,synthetic, and simplified for outside consumption. The ear-liest sites in each region date to the late Middle Preclassicand the latest to the Late Postclassic. Better documentationof the earliest sites will help track the spread of sedentary vil-lage life and ceramics from Belize and the Peten into north-ern Yucatan. One surprise in the various site descriptions isthat the earliest ceramics in Quintana Roo are more relatedto those from Komchen of northern Yucatan than to thosefrom Belize or the Peten.

This is a book by experts, writing like experts, forexperts. To get the most out of the book, one must befamiliar with local phases, ceramic complexes and types,and architectural styles. As a representative of the supposedtarget audience—outsiders blissfully ignorant of QuintanaRoo archaeology—I read the book to discover what Ishould factor into my understandings of the lowland Mayastory. The answer is: very little, at the moment. Most ofthe exciting finds in Quintana Roo illustrated in Mexicanpublications are not represented in this book. For those leftwith a hunger for more Quintana Roo archaeology afterreading this book, I recommend the popular treatments andcolor photographs in Arqueologıa Mexicana (nos. 14, 54, 76).

Totems and Teachers: Key Figures in the History ofAnthropology. Sydel Silverman, ed. New York: AltaMiraPress, 2004. 258 pp.

JACK GLAZIEROberlin College

Anthropologists teaching courses on culture theory or thehistory of anthropology and others concerned with thesetopics will welcome the second, revised edition of SydelSilverman’s valuable book. Originating in a lecture seriesat the CUNY Graduate Center in 1976, Totems and Teach-ers appeared in 1981 and remained in print for nearly 15years. The book does not pretend to be comprehensive, andthe editor acknowledges “glaring omissions” of major an-thropologists owing to financial constraints restricting theproject. The lectures examined the lives and works of an-thropological luminaries, no longer living, as interpretedby prominent scholars who, in most cases, were students orcolleagues of the subjects. Reappearing in the new edition,the eight original eponymous chapter titles and contrib-utors are Franz Boas (Alexander Lesser), Alfred L. Kroeber(Eric R. Wolf), Paul Radin (Stanley Diamond), BronislawMalinowski (Raymond Firth), Ruth Benedict (Sidney W.Mintz), Julian H. Steward (Robert F. Murphy), Leslie A.White (Robert L. Carneiro), and Robert Redfield (Nathaniel

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Tarn). Only the Malinowski chapter by Firth derived froma prior lecture. Silverman has preserved both the brief butinstructive texts of discussions following six of the lecturesand the biographical profiles of the distinguished contrib-utors. The most substantial editing occurs in the shortenedpaper by Tarn on Redfield and the addition to that sectionof a new, more cogent paper by Eric Wolf. Also new is achapter on Margaret Mead by Rhoda Metraux and SydelSilverman.

While the totemic metaphor might suggest uncriticalpartisanship, Silverman and her colleagues have generallyprovided even-handed assessments of their subjects. Dia-mond’s encomium to Paul Radin comes closest to pure de-votion, and in the subsequent discussion he concedes noth-ing to Lesser’s persuasive critique of Radin.

By contrast, Firth’s admiration for Malinowski is notunalloyed. He dismisses Malinowski’s penchant for grandgeneralization because it inhibits explanation of culturalvariation. Firth also finds Malinowski’s economic anthro-pology insufficient in many respects. Likewise, Mintzwrites appreciatively but critically of his first anthropologyteacher, Ruth Benedict, from whom he parted theoreticalcompany early on. Although convinced that she was rightin her conclusions about cultural coherence, order, and con-straint, Mintz observes that Benedict provided no method-ology or practical research strategy for operationalizing herviews. He is also critical of her indifference to history.

By 1981, most of the featured ancestral figureshad achieved a scholarly apotheosis. Paradoxically, manyinfluential perspectives had become so much a part ofthe discipline that their original provenance was ignored.Totems and Teachers helps to reconnect germinal ideas tothe lives and careers of their originators. In this way, thebook coheres by presenting sociocultural theories as morethan abstract concepts and models. The nine celebrated fig-ures in Totems and Teachers advanced the discipline throughachievements occurring at particular historic periods withina context of biography, institutions, conflict, and profes-sional relationships. Totems and Teachers admirably exploresthese configurations and enhances understanding of someof our most influential forebears. It also provides a timelyreminder of the genuine courage of predecessors such asBoas and White; each faced costly opprobrium and retalia-tion for opposing the political and religious orthodoxies ofhis time.

Murphy’s illuminating discussion of Steward, particu-larly during his Columbia years (1946–52), is emblematicof the book’s intent. Steward had long since abandoned thedistributional approach of his teacher, Kroeber. He took in-stead a radically different course toward materialism as wellas toward cause–effect relationships in culture that owedsomething to the teaching of Robert Lowie. Steward exer-cised great influence in the Columbia anthropology depart-ment, which in turn influenced him. The Boas legacy, stillpalpable in the early postwar years, emphasized a kind ofcultural realism fully compatible with Steward’s outlook.His anthropology also suited the times and the sensibilities

of his students, many of whom—including Sidney Mintz,Eric Wolf, Marvin Harris, and Murphy himself—were re-turning veterans whose young lives had been shaped byeconomic depression and war. A perspective emphasizingthe determinism of food scarcity or power or material privi-lege resonated with their experience and politics. Benedict’sethereal and poetic cultural patterns, although not her pleafor social justice, seemed more relevant to a former world.

Silverman reminds her readers that in the 25 yearssince the first edition of Totems and Teachers, five of theoriginal eight contributors—Stanley Diamond, RaymondFirth, Alexander Lesser, Robert Murphy, and Eric Wolf—have passed to the other side, joining the ancestors aboutwhom they wrote. The reappearance of Totems and Teachersfittingly renews their scholarly memory.

Archaeology of Asia. Miriam T. Stark, ed. Malden: Black-well Publishing, 2006. 364 pp.

ROWAN FLADHarvard University

This volume commendably provides English languageaccess to the burgeoning literature on Asian archaeologyand contributes new perspectives on these data. As isalways the case with edited volumes, it is difficult to do itjustice in a short review.

The chapters are divided into four thematic sections.The first concerns the sociopolitics of archaeological prac-tice and interpretation in three regions: Southeast Asia (withdiscussion of China, Korea, and Japan), the Korean Penin-sula, and Japan. The second section concerns “formativedevelopments”—specifically, the origins and spread of agri-culture. It comprises two chapters: an outline of the evi-dence of plant domestication in East Asia and a discussionof the spread of farming diasporas in Southeast Asia. Thethird section concerns the emergence of complex society.Of the four chapters, three focus on various aspects of earlyChina, and one addresses a more macroregional scope byexamining trajectories in China, Korea, and Japan. Finally,the last section concerns peripheries of ancient states withchapters on the following: (1) frontier relations in Han-Dynasty southern China, (2) nomadic states in Mongoliaand Inner Asia, (3) South Asian foragers that participated inlarger regional systems, (4) the spread of Buddhism as anideological system beyond political borders, and (5) SouthAsian imperial landscapes.

The volume’s diversity is both its main strength andweakness. Taken as a whole, it introduces readers to Asiandata that relate to a variety of important archaeologicalquestions. For example, the recent plant domestication datacontributes to discussions of this topic in other geographi-cal contexts. Furthermore, focus on concepts such as “impe-rial landscapes” (Carla Sinopoli) and “identity formation”(Gideon Shelach and Yuri Pines) similarly place Asian datain a comparative framework. Perspectives included rangefrom evolutionary–processual approaches (Liu Li and Chen


Xingcan) to those that focus on explicitly “postprocessual”issues, such as discussion of the discursive spaces withinwhich interpretations of Japan’s past are placed (e.g., KojiMizoguchi). The volume is self-consciously a collection ofarticles that provide entry into these and other topics andtogether compose “an archaeology of Asia”—which appar-ently was the original title of the book, and the loss of theindefinite article in the published title is actually a disserviceto the reader.

It is a disservice because the volume cannot compre-hensively represent the entirety of Asian archaeology. Thecollection’s diverse articles lack strong integration, partic-ularly among the four themes. Section 1 is internally co-hesive, but considering the inclusion of South Asian paperselsewhere, a shortcoming is the lack of any treatment of thesociopolitics of archaeology in South Asian contexts. Like-wise, section 2 seems incomplete for the same reason. Thethird theme is relatively coherent and interdigitates wellwith some articles in other sections because of the over-lapping geographical focus of the various chapters, all ofwhich treat the traditional core of civilization in China’sYellow and Wei River valleys. The topics relate to the dis-cussions in the first section, to the outline of agriculturalorigins in the second section, and even to the discussion ofperipheries of Chinese empires found section 4. Otherwise,the chapters in section 4 are generally not integrated withthe remainder of the volume.

A corollary of this problem is the very loose definitionof Asia as conceived in this volume. Articles deal with vari-ous parts of East, South, Southeast, and even Inner Asia, butmost of Central Asia, and Southwest Asia are more or lessunmentioned. At one point in the introduction (p. 7), Eastand South Asia are said to be “one region,” although themeaning of this is unclear. Furthermore, the potential fordrawing links between the regions of Asia that are discussedis not reached, and issues that are dealt with well for EastAsia (such as the origins of agriculture and the sociopoliticsof archaeological practice) are not discussed for South Asiaat all.

The volume contains a few inconsistencies or question-able statements as well. For example, whereas Sarah Nelson(p. 40) and Miriam Stark (p. 4) suggest that Jomon ceram-ics are the earliest in the world, Anne Underhill and JunkoHabu point out (pp. 124–125) that there may be multipleregions with equally early pottery production in mainlandEast Asia. Secondly, the statement that the earliest dates forbronze metallurgy in Asia come from China (p. 9) overlooksearlier bronze production in West Asia. Anatolian arsenicalbronzes almost certainly predate the earliest alloyed copperobjects in China, which Liu and Chen place in Majiayaoculture contexts circa 3100 B.C.E. (p. 164). Furthermore,additional inconsistencies are evident in the format of thecitations in the various chapters and transliteration conven-tions in both the references and the chapter texts. Althoughthese detract somewhat from the usefulness of the citationsin some chapters, they do not affect the readability of thetext.

As an introductory text, Archaeology of Asia is a valu-able resource for its intended audience (upper-divisionundergraduates, according to the introduction by theseries editors) and for researchers, including those whowork in Asia. Although some experts might find certainsummary sections a little superficial, generally speakingthe contributions are richly informative and theoreticallysophisticated.

Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian.Orin Starn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 352 pp.

REGNA DARNELLUniversity of Western Ontario

The story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, has become inextri-cably linked to continuing evaluation of the moral valenceof Boasian anthropology in its heyday. Both among anthro-pologists and the general public, Ishi has come to symbolizethe high cost paid by Native Americans for manifest destinyas rationalized by their conquerors. But Orin Starn is carefulto maintain the ambivalence, contextualizing Ishi’s storywithin “the anthropology of that time” (p. 140). Whencontrasted to the California ranchers and farmers whoexterminated remnant bands of local Indians, the rescueefforts of Alfred Kroeber, Thomas T. Waterman, and SaxtonPope to make a viable home for Ishi at the Hearst Museumof the University of California at Berkeley may seemsalutary and well intentioned. But the unintended conse-quences of their appropriation of Ishi as scientific objectand “informant” become more salient when read againstcontemporary ethical standards. Moreover, life in “civiliza-tion” exposed Ishi to tuberculosis, which took his life in1915, a mere four years after he became a cause celebre.

Ishi the person remains elusive. He was not a reflexiveman, said very little about his previous life, and was invari-ably polite to those who helped him construct a new one.If there is a devastating critique, it does not arise from Ishihimself. Starn’s story of Ishi’s romanticized notoriety setsthe context for his expose about the fate of Ishi’s brain afteran autopsy that Kroeber tried to prevent. That Ishi’s brainwas separated from his body and sent to the SmithsonianInstitution for study by physical anthropologists has onlyrecently become public. Motives and many details stillremain obscure.

Starn personalizes his quest for the truth about Ishi’sbrain. The reader peers over his shoulder at the trail toIshi’s past, in life and after death. Starn sharply criticizesTheodora Kroeber’s 1961 book, imbued with “wifely loveand loyalty” (p.161) and whitewashing Kroeber’s actionsand emotions. Starn simultaneously acknowledges her so-cially resonating critique of the genocide of California In-dians, with Ishi as its symbolic icon. He is considerably lessreflexive about his own standpoint. For the professionalreader, the narrative often drifts into being more aboutStarn than Ishi or his brain. Nonetheless, Starn also per-formed the detective work necessary to locate the brain at

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the Smithsonian, after multiple denials and contradictoryalibis, and to begin the saga of its repatriation. Despite thepermissibility of joint repatriation under NAGPRA, Ishi’sbones ultimately were repatriated to the nearest linguisticrelatives of the Yahi rather than to the local Maidu who hadlong sought justice for Ishi’s remains as the contemporarystewards of his homeland.

Starn compares other cases of Native American repatri-ation, “atonement and reconciliation” (p.168), amassing animplicit global indictment of the physical anthropologist’sarrogance in claiming the “unambiguous . . . prerogative”to study such remains “in the name of science” (p.180). Therepatriation story is inseparable from “twenty-first centuryidentity politics” (p. 277) and thus remains incomplete,because it will always be read in some context, invoking thepossibility of infinite recursion. This rhetoric may resonatefor introductory students or the general public, but thevalue of the book for anthropologists rests in exposing theerrors, omissions, and cover-ups that refract disciplinarymyopia and self-castigation. Starn has served us well bylaying out this story and by the tenacity with which he haspursued its tendrils.

Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates.Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds. New York:Berghahn Books, 2005. 146 pp.

MELISSA CEFKINIBM Almaden Research Center

Opening with a question underlying anthropology’sphilosophical imaginary—“what is our position as anthro-pologists in the worlds that we study?” (p. 1)—Anthropologyand Consultancy: Issues and Debates explores the experiencesof anthropologists who have intersected with developmentprojects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). This work promisesinstructive contributions to the rethinking of ethnographicwork, the nature of anthropological knowledge, and thepotential of anthropological engagement in the context ofglobalized late capitalism.

The eight authors pose questions of their work as con-sultants to or in interaction with governments, NGOs, andcorporations on projects regarding such areas as economicdevelopment, mining, and biodiversity conservation. Asthe authors conducted ethnographic research independentof the development projects they describe, their reflec-tions on the question of positioning are framed largelythrough comparisons between their work as consultantsand as “mainstream,” “non-consultative,” or “pure” an-thropologists. While the difference between academicallypositioned anthropological research and consultants whoare contracted for the purposive application to policy andsolution designs is clear, the very difficulty in appropriatelynaming this distinction speaks to the challenge and importposed by the opening question.

One productive comparison is that of differingconceptual dimensions of understanding and practice. John

Richard Wagner argues that the kinds of knowledge pro-duced in the context of development work are differentlyvalued. The biological diversity conservation effort he ex-amines unraveled because of inadequate understanding oflocal communities. Yet he suggests that knowledge support-ing promotional uses and meeting political expectations,in this case biological and ecological information, trumpedthe kind of anthropological understanding that might havehelped overcome those challenges.

Revealing the immediacy with which personal aspectsof positioning are experienced, several authors explore howtheir relationships with people in the sites of their workwere felt to have shifted when they were there as consul-tants, intersecting with intractable questions of moral andethical positioning: Does work for outside interests com-promise anthropological standing? Are generalized state-ments of cultural difference always harmful, even when inthe interest advocacy? Is “mainstream” ethnography pa-ternalistic, extractive, and a more compromised form ofengagement?

Richard Scaglion offers a curious take on such is-sues. Having previously researched customary law and le-gal change, he was hired by the government of PNG fora project to integrate Melanesian customs into the na-tional legal system following independence from Australia.Scaglion provides an engaging tale of the many conceptual,legal, administrative, and logistical challenges he faced.He illuminates the kinds of constraints imposed by con-sulting. He also reveals, however, a simplified view ontothe problematic posed by the question of positioning. Hisdescription of his changed status from a fieldworker on atight budget who “lived a life much like my hosts” (p. 54),eating, waiting in line, or flagging down a passing car fortransportation, to a privileged government official with abudget, a car, and political pull bespeaks a sense of discom-fort. He concludes with a description of his return to thefield, again as a “pure” anthropologist having shed the ti-tle and position of government agent and thus assuagingthe guilt that dogged his consulting experience, as if theonly privilege anthropologists need be concerned with isthat made apparent through face-to-face interactions withparticipants at the time of the fieldwork encounter.

Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern’s hopeful asser-tion that the volume examines both dilemmas and oppor-tunities of anthropology and consultancy (per the title oftheir introduction) is somewhat forestalled by such treat-ments, suggesting that it is less the positioning of anthro-pologists that is under examination and more so uniquelythat of the consultant. Paige West, in an article that wonthe American Anthropological Association’s Anthropologyand Environment Junior Scholar Award, provides a valuableadvancement toward the aspirations of the editors. Whilenot employed directly as a consultant, West’s ethnographicwork became enmeshed with that of an NGO for wildlifemanagement. She offers a trenchant critique of how NGOsadopt the language and knowledge claims of anthropology.She aptly exposes a fundamental dilemma: the desire for


anthropological work to be seen as relevant while at thesame time judging particular interpretations and uses of an-thropological concepts and knowledge as insufficient. Im-plicit in her article is a critique of anthropological expertiseand the question of what role actual anthropologists mustplay as carriers of that expertise.

Stewart and Strathern state that they do not viewconsultancy as a “special domain of enquiry, different fromothers” (p. 21) and that reflections on consultancy “speakin an urgent way to issues in anthropology at large” (p. 21).This volume opens the door to the possibility of pushingbeyond a rehashing of problems attendant to “applied”work and, instead, theorizing across “pure” anthropology,consulting, and other forms of engaged anthropologicalpractice to probe what can be learned from the dilemmasand to ask what these practices offer the ethnographic en-terprise and anthropological understanding more broadly.

A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work ofL. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Linda Stone and Paul Lurquin.New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 227 pp.

KAJA FINKLERUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This is an unusual academic book. By means of the lifeand works of one scholar, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, theauthors present an overview of the four-fields approach—archeology, linguistic, biological, and cultural—to anthro-pology. Using this methodology, Cavalli-Sforza attemptsto create a unified theory of human physical and culturalevolution by focusing on population genetics, humanmigration, and development of language and complexsocieties.

Moreover, we learn a great deal about all the subjects onwhich Cavalli-Sforza has made contributions—includingbacterial genetics and, of course, human genetics, whichhe began studying in 1952. Subsequently, Cavalli-Sforza fo-cused on population genetics to also explain physical vari-ations and their causes within and among human groups.

Linda Stone and Paul Lurquin interweave Cavalli-Sforza’s biography, intellectual interests, and debatesamong the views of his detractors with a lucid presentationof genetics and the ways in which it illuminates, accordingto Cavalli-Sforza, human and cultural evolution. In doingso, the authors’ present interesting details about Cavalli-Sforza’s life. The excursion into Cavalli-Sforza’s youth givesthe reader a glimpse of modern Italian history and Ital-ian scientific florescence during and especially after WorldWar II. In the discussion of Cavalli-Sforza’s collaborationswith French scholars, we learn about the history of the1968 student upraising in France and how it has affectedCavalli-Sforza’s collaborative efforts there. In the presen-tation of these historical interludes the point is madethat Cavalli-Sforza was not interested in politics, yet heseems to have been on the side of all politically correctissues.

The authors anticipate all possible criticism of Cavalli-Sforza’s work. He has been accused of being a racist andthe authors claim that he is not; they point out that arche-ologists, linguists, and biological anthropologists have ac-cepted his various theories, including the single theory ofhuman origins, which hypothesizes that all human beingsliving today have common ancestors who emerged out ofAfrica about 70,000–100,000 years ago. Cultural anthro-pologists have contested his work. The authors attributethis rejection to the postmodern perspective, lucidly ex-plained by them, which has presumably dominated culturalanthropology.

Cavalli-Sforza regards cultural and biological evolutionas closely interconnected. One need not necessarily sub-scribe to postmodern theories of science to reject biologicalreductionism in explaining social and cultural processes.A cultural evolutionary approach, arguably, tends to leaveout a contextualized understanding of a people’s economicand political history, social processes, human agency, andall that distinguishes humans from other primates, includ-ing our unique ability to manipulate complex symbols. It isdifficult to accept biological reductionism that suggests, forexample, that similar to genetic drift, cultural drift has ledto the prevalence of religiosity in the United States (p. 107).

There seems to be an inherent contradiction in Cavalli-Sforza’s work as depicted in this book regarding his conceptsof race. Cavalli-Sforza argues, as I believe most anthropol-ogists would, that race, as it is popularly understood, hasno validity; yet Cavalli-Sforza’s Human Genetic DiversityProject tends to emphasize the biological differences be-tween populations, notwithstanding the single origins the-ory. We have a common ancestor, and we are genetically allthe same, but still we are not because this project seeks tofind biological differences among the world’s populations.A major criticism of contemporary emphasis on people be-ing delimited by genes is that such biological markers maylead to a racist ideology, no matter how benign the inten-tions of the investigators may be.

Indeed, biological differences may exist amongst vari-ous breeding populations, as for example human leukocyteantigen vary among groups, as noted by the authors; but ge-netic markers impose a biological fixity rather than fluidityon human groups, especially in the age of globalization andmass migration. We may simply be switching from definingdifferences among populations on the basis of invisiblerather than visible biological characteristics, which maylead to creating new social communities, using genetic cri-teria. The authors note that Cavalli-Sforza has been accusedof exploiting indigenous populations among whom geneticstudies of isolates are often done. In defense of Cavalli-Sforza, the authors stress that the project has not patentedany genetic materials and that it is highly transparent.

The book is recommended to anthropologists who arecommitted to the four-fields approach in anthropology andto students in any field interested in learning about theintellectual life and growth of an exceptionally prolificscholar.

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The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming theFeminine in Religion and Medicine. Barbara Tedlock.New York: Bantam Dell, 2005. 350 pp.

MARJORIE MANDELSTAM BALZERGeorgetown University

Barbara Tedlock is an engaged anthropologist who practiceswhat she studies. For many years she has embodied theempathetic feminist scholar who bridges many boundaries,especially indigenous insider–intellectual outsider, popularwriter–academic. Her latest fascinating monograph is themature work of a confident scholar, bringing many dis-parate pieces of evidence together in a sweeping summaryof the integral role of women in religion and medicinethrough many centuries.

Tedlock reclaims the significance of balanced, gender-salient power in many “traditional” and “contemporary”healing practices based on spirituality. Drawing from di-verse references and experiences, she concludes that gender-sensitive spiritual and healing equality “does not meansameness” (pp. 281–282). While she may occasionally over-stress the importance of women, this should be seen asa corrective, not a fault. Particularly moving passages de-pict her upbringing, including visits to the log home ofher wise, nonconformist Ojibwe grandmother-medicinewoman. Tedlock’s life exemplifies the familiar pattern ofthirst for Native knowledge skipping a generation. She alsoendured a serious childhood illness, an early sign of thewidely recognized need for future healers to suffer to moreeffectively perceive and receive curing ability. Her educa-tion deepened with anthropological training and initiationin a contrasting (Mayan) cultural context. In Guatemala,she and her anthropologist husband Denis Tedlock learnedlessons of partnered, gender-complimentary energy as wellas the importance of social and psychological perception inshamanic holistic healing. Tedlock’s strongest evidence ofearly female shamans comes from the magnificent Mayantemple complex in Yaxchilan, where a Lady of the JaguarShark Lineage resides in richly symbolic stone portraiture.She also suggests that a woman buried during the UpperPaleolithic at Dolnı Vestonice (Czech Republic) with a fox,flint spearhead, and red ochre was a shaman. Later gravesfrom the Far Eastern Neolithic reinforce female shamanconnections somewhat less circumstantially, given the longethnographic record of female and male shamans in Siberia.In an analytic leap to the famous fertility figurines of thePaleolithic (e.g., Venus of Willendorf), Tedlock intriguinglyexplains they could have been used by midwife-femaleshamans as teaching models.

Comparative at a time when many ethnographic stud-ies are rooted in specific cultural contexts, Tedlock regalesreaders with personal experiences in Mongolia as well as theAmericas. In 1999, she found rapport with a well-knowncharismatic shaman, Bayar Odun, and saw her adaptedspirit-calling seance. The shaman evoked (the text clev-erly says “took possession of”) a spirit that “howled like

a wolf or growled like a bear” (p. 61). Tedlock widens ourdebate on “possession” by refuting the predominance ofmale hunter-shamans in Northern Asia. Her targets includearm-chair historian Mircea Eliade and psychologist Geza Ro-heim. She convincingly warns against essentialist theoriesclaiming men are more likely to experience “soul flight”while women are more prone toward possession. Occasion-ally, seances could be discussed with fuller local or regionalcontext. She mentions a Buryat shaman who wears braidedfringe covering the face “so as not to frighten the audience”(p. 48). Historically, in many Siberian seances shamanicdress served more to attract spirits, and elaborate head-dresses with veil-like fringe became realm-demarcating pro-tection for the healer and spirits. Seance participants weremore active than the word audience implies, and some spir-its were deliberately frightening.

Several chapters revisit other controversial issues—forexample, one chapter brings new insight into old debatesabout psychedelics. A telling case depicts Andes womenwho use the San Pedro cactus and whose creative altars (ac-cording to Bonnie Glass-Coffin) include paired objects withmasculine and feminine healing powers. Creativity is pro-ductive theme, with women harnessing and weaving theirvital powers derived from eroticism, menstruation, andfertility. “Menstrual taboos” and “couvade traditions” areinterpreted by building on the pioneering work of ThomasBuckley and Alma Gottlieb. Somewhat more challengingare Tedlock’s correlations concerning cross-culturally simi-lar Goddess figures, women prophets, and her (albeit non-judgemental) use of the word cult. Some correlations bridge(others may say elide) contrasts in the social and politi-cal settings of shamans who work in such diverse contextsas urban Korea or village Siberia. I particularly enjoyedher description of the widespread phenomena of shamanic“gender switching, bending, blending or reversing” (p. 250).

In sum, Tedlock has shifted the way we view the fem-inine in diverse historical and current shamanic practicesby daring to be strategically cross-cultural. She concludes,“This is an exciting time for those of us who study, workwith and practice as shamans” (p. 282). Her optimism iswarranted, given the millennia that various shamanic be-liefs have survived through the creativity of shamans. It ispoignant, given the historical record of frequent repressionof shamanic practices. Although references are generouslymade, several attribution details and anthropologists (MaryDouglas, Joan Koss-Choino, and Galina Lindquist) couldbe better incorporated in a second edition, because thisbook is likely to become a classic.

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The LastSoviet Generation. Alexei Yurchak. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2006. 331 pp.

JOHN P. Z IKERBoise State University

Arguing from a critical semiotic perspective, AlexeiYurchak’s book explains how the end of the Soviet Union


was utterly unexpected yet not fully surprising. The bookis a major contribution to the ethnography of postsocialistEurasia because it traces the historical, linguistic, and socialprocesses that produced forms of art, discourses, meanings,and social networks that characterized late Socialism. Be-yond that, it shows how and why the end of the SovietUnion was a major blow to the rituals, morals, rules, formsof art and music, humor, and social associations that had be-come predictable and seemingly immutable during the lastSoviet generation. The book is valuable as a critical theoreti-cal overview of major postmodernist writers, and it is a satis-fying explanation of why the Soviet Union collapsed whenit did and why the collapse was so fast. I recommend thisbook for upper-level undergraduates, graduates, and pro-fessionals who are interested in political process, discourse,and postsocialism.

Yurchak attacks the abovementioned problem by ex-plaining to the reader the significance of prevalent para-doxes, ambiguities, twists, and incongruities, giving thereader a rich ethnographic window into the lives of the lastSoviet generation (those born in the 1960s through 1980s).The sample of people highlighted in the book lived in sev-eral urban settings, focusing particularly on Leningrad (nowSt. Petersburg) but also including others such as Yakutsk andNovosibirsk. The homogeneity of the socialist system para-doxically allowed for an incredible degree of agency amongthe last Soviet generation, and Yurchak’s account describesthe interconnectedness between the system with its author-itative and circular discourse and the creative activities, art,and discursive and social forms people living in the systemproduced.

The central paradox of the book—termed “Lerfort’sparadox,” after Claude Lerfort, who described the conflictbetween theoretical ideals and the practical concerns of po-litical authority in a modern nation-state—is applied in theSoviet context as the conflict between the progressive ide-als of liberation under Communism and the practical issueof total control to prevent dissent and counterrevolution.Yurchak traces the history of the Communist party’s author-itative discourse in the book to show how the language ofcontrol went from innovation to maintenance and homo-geneity. It was Joseph Stalin who played the major role as“external editor” of state discourse until near the end of hislife, when he emphasized “natural laws” and a “pragmaticmodel” of language with the effect of increasing normaliza-tion of discourse. For example, Yurchak describes how ev-erything from party speeches, images (of Lenin), and otherrituals, such as voting and May Day and Revolution Dayparades, became hypernormalized in the 1950s. Anotherrelated set of concepts in the book is the difference be-tween “constantive acts” and “performative acts,” drawingon the ideas of linguist John Austin and critical readings ofhis work. Constantive acts can be true or false. Performa-tive acts can only be successful or unsuccessful. Rejecting abinary opposition of speech utterances, Yurchak describeswhat he calls a performative shift in the discourse of late So-cialism. For the average citizen, the concern was not with

the literal meanings of the “authoritative discourse” (fromMikhail Bakhtin). Rather, by performing the expected roleat Komsomol (Communist youth league) meetings, for ex-ample, participants established connections that allowedfor more creative sociality. Such informal associations werenot in opposition to the authoritative discourse and formalgovernmental structures, but they were part of a “mutuallyconstitutive” process.

What Yurchak terms “deterritorialized milieus,” for ex-ample, were social networks that depended on socialist val-ues that supported, ironically, critical thinking and liberalwork shifts as well as production of technological items suchas short-wave radios and reel-to-reel recorders. Unlike so-cialist activists and dissidents who were engaged with theSoviet authoritative discourse largely on the constantive di-mension of “clear truths,” most normal people created aparticular common sociality that was not interested in thesystem. Rather, they created new collectivities, relations,and pursuits after “deep truths” with their own ethnicaldimension, vocabulary, and style of communication. Anexample of one of these is the music tusovka, a noninstitu-tionalized milieu where people acquired, shared, and playedmusic and that was based on shared values of hanging out,sarcasm, and a lack of any political theme. When MikhailGorbachev added the voice of external commentator backinto the Communist Party’s authoritative discourse, the dis-course was no longer homogeneous and immutable, andthe creative worlds and meaningful forms of sociality oflate socialism began to lose their frame of reference.

Yurchak has given us a great inductive work in whichwe get to know several characters who were professionals,students, musicians, and laborers. The book helps usarrive at a better understanding of what kind of freedomthe people of the last Soviet generation had and how itdeveloped.

Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet,and Political Participation in China. Zhou Yongming.Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005. 290 pp.

SHARON CARSTENSPortland State University

Will the Internet change China? More specifically will itcreate opportunities for the free exchange of ideas and po-litical participation necessary to support the developmentof democratic reforms and civil society? Or will the con-tinuing strict control of communication systems by theChinese government limit the potential emancipatory ef-fectiveness of this new technology? In Historicizing OnlinePolitics, Zhou Yongming argues that these commonly askedquestions about the impact of the Internet in China areoverly narrow and miss the complexity of Internet usagesin China by both Chinese citizens and their government.Through a comparative examination of the political uses oftelegraphy in late-19th- and early-20th-century China andthe Chinese Internet today, Zhou demonstrates that it is not

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only that technology changes things, but also how technol-ogy is used in specific historical contexts that matters.

In the first half of the book, Zhou chronicles the rela-tively slow acceptance of telegraphy in the 1860s by the lateQing government who feared that foreign control of thisnew technology might add to unfair Western advantages.Although other studies have claimed that telegraphy wasrejected because of conservative Confucian views of West-ern science and popular beliefs in the negative geomanticeffects of telegraph poles, Zhou skillfully counters these ar-guments and describes how demonstrations of the strategicuses of rapid communications between the Chinese govern-ment and troops at its borders led to rapid construction oftelegraph lines, under Chinese control, in the 1880s.

Primarily used for official government communica-tions in its first 15 years, telegraphy increasingly served as aconduit for expressions of alternative political opinions andpolitical mobilization following the 1894 Sino–Japanesewar. Zhou carefully traces the close relationship betweenthe advent of telegraphy and the development of mod-ern Chinese newspapers, whose foreign ownership allowedthem to print information and opinions previously understrict government control. While newspapers initially re-lied on telegrams to print more current news and informa-tion, they later featured the publication of public or circulartelegrams that often expressed dissenting views on govern-ment matters, such as a joint telegram to Beijing in 1900signed by 1,231 influential figures that protested the Em-press Dowager Cixi’s attempt to replace Emperor Guangxu.In the following decade, political elites used telegrams toorganize and advance causes such as constitutional govern-ment, significantly opening up avenues for political partic-ipation outside of official government circles. Nevertheless,Zhou points out that the move toward constitutional gov-ernment supported by newspapers and public telegrams waseclipsed by the 1911 revolution, which propelled the coun-try in different directions. And he offers this as a caution-ary tale about similar assumptions of the Internet movingChina toward democracy.

China embraced the Internet in the 1990s much morequickly than it had the telegraph a century earlier. No longer

fearing foreign control of this new technology, the Chi-nese government viewed the Internet as a tool of modern-ization that could enhance communication between gov-ernment offices and agencies and expand opportunities tospread government messages, such as through the People’sDaily Online Strengthening-China Forum. With the rapidexpansion of online access through home phone dial-upsand cyber cafes, the government focused its efforts on thecontrol of online information rather than trying to con-trol users. Thus, individuals in charge of websites and bul-letin boards have been required to police their content.Zhou provides detailed information on a range of diverseChinese websites and online writers including three differ-ent intellectual websites; several politically oriented writerswith no official connections; and a military-focused web-site with strong nationalist and antiforeign messages. Ex-amining the history of these sites, their range of politicalmessages, and government responses to them, Zhou ob-serves that while the Internet has expanded political ex-pression for Chinese writers, allowing them to voice opin-ions not found in government-controlled print media, self-censorship remains critical, for writers know that any sug-gestion of organized antigovernment dissent will bring swiftretribution.

The final chapter compares the impact of the telegraphand the Internet on Chinese political expression and par-ticipation during these two distinct periods, both markedby strong nationalist sentiments and rapid socioeconomicchange. Zhou argues that the public telegraph was moreeffective in mobilizing public opinion and action thanthe Internet because the messages of its elite writers weremore highly respected and because there was more free-dom to publicly organize than is currently possible. Here,as throughout this book, Zhou’s carefully articulated ar-guments bring both complexity and clarity to the ques-tion of the relationship between new forms of informationtechnology and the nurturing of civil society, whether inChina or elsewhere. Lucidly written, Zhou’s analysis aptlydemonstrates once again the fruitful combination of his-torical and contemporary analysis in addressing key socialissues.

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (review

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