Making sense of place: Exploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and...

Book Reviews

Mortality, mourning and mortuary practices

in Indigenous Australia, edited by Katie

Glaskin, Myrna Tonkinson, Yasmine Mush-

arbash and Victoria Burbank. Anthropology

and cultural history in Asia and the Indo-

Pacific Series, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing,

2008 xxiþ 237pp., series editors’ preface,

afterword, figures, glossary, index. ISBN:

978-0-7546-7449-8 (hardback).

DIANE AUSTIN-BROOS

Department of Anthropology

University of Sydney

� 2010 Diane Austin-Broos

Issues of mortality, mourning and mortuary

are a pertinent point of entry into Aboriginal

life today, especially as it unfolds in the more

remote regions of Australia. As most readers

of this review will know, mortality rates in

Indigenous Australia far outstrip those of the

non-Indigenous population. Moreover, the

process of death itself, both the events that

foreshadow it and its aftermath, are matters

that thoroughly absorb the residents of

Aboriginal communities. The issues are

pertinent, not simply because of the margin-

alised condition of a Fourth World people

that these deaths reflect, but also owing to the

depth of sentiment and endurance that they

reveal within Aboriginal communities. The

essays address the gamut of more and less

salutary lessons to be drawn from this theme.

The collection is a substantial one contain-

ing eleven essays. They describe different

aspects of death and mourning in commu-

nities from north-west Australia through

north-east Arnhem Land across the Top End,

to Cape York Peninsula and south to central

New South Wales. An important dimension of

the collection is the degree of commonality

evoked by contemporary mortuary practices,

all influenced now in various ways by the

encapsulating society. In addition to the

essays, the collection contains an Introduction

by the editors, a Foreword by the series editors,

Andrew and Pamela Strathern, and an After-

word by Howard and Frances Morphy. The

Foreword positions the essays in a broader

comparative perspective, referenced mainly to

the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, and to

some classical anthropological issues concern-

ing mourning practice, treatment of the body,

issues of sorcery, and ghosts. The Afterword

presents a longitudinal view over thirty years

of death and responses to it among Yolngu.

This framing of the essays is very effective and

combines with a really excellent Introduction

to the collection. In it, the editors discuss both

the current context of death in Aboriginal

communities, and the ‘anthropology of death’

as a human perennial. They summarise the

import of the collection when they remark

that ‘While death must be regarded as a

constant of human social life, the contexts of

its inevitability can nevertheless profoundly

shape experience of death and responses to it’.

In addition to these dual themes, the Intro-

duction draws out a number of pertinent

issues, including the importance of mortuary

practices, the inequality of grief, psycho-social

costs of death, and death as metaphor. It is not

possible in a short review to do justice to all

the essays, but in the space that remains let me

mention a few themes that impressed me in

this collection.

Because Aboriginal people today die

in ‘unprecedented numbers’ and amongst

Anthropological ForumVol. 20, No. 2, July 2010, 167–214

ISSN 0066-4677 print/1469-2902 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00664677.2010.487298

‘extreme social . . . inequality’, it is some-

times difficult to distil the fact that, beyond

the immediate conditions of life, Indigenous

ways of living and dying are involved in a

continuing dynamic of change. Marcus

Barber and Richard Davis in their respective

essays on Yolngu at Blue Mud Bay and Torres

Strait Islanders on Saibai each provide

fascinating insight into changes in the way

of death among Indigenous people. Barber

recounts the death over many years of a

remarkable leader and of his two adoptive

sons. Their respective stories and the manner

of their dying illustrate the enduring im-

portance of located identity and social

sentiment. Notwithstanding, Barber’s ac-

count also demonstrates the manner in which

widows in this remote outstation community

have attained a greater voice concerning their

subsequent residence and in the location of

graves. The decision to site two graves right

in the midst of the community demonstrates

not only changing gender relations, but also

the continuing influence of large-scale settle-

ment life in Yirrkala. Davis’s essay focuses on

the developing use of headstone epitaphs to

present narratives of the lives of the deceased

on Saibai. These narratives bring together

details of the deceased’s work life, family,

community involvement, clan identification

and so on. While the Yolngu at Blue Mud Bay

work at re-interpreting the local, in death and

memories of the dead, Torres Strait Islanders

elaborate relationships that stretch from the

local to the trans-national world of the

pearling industry.

In many parts of Australia, these forms of

dynamic, which reflect the imaginative re-

sponses of Indigenous peoples to encapsula-

tion, also bring unusual trauma. This is so,

for change in Indigenous lives has so often

come with acute marginalisation in Austra-

lian society. Katie Glaskin relates the death in

Perth of a Bardi man from the coast in the

Kimberley region. In the years directly prior

to his own death, he had suffered three major

bereavements. Glaskin demonstrates the ways

in which non-Indigenous legal and medical

procedures exacerbated the distress and isola-

tion felt by this man. With regard to Wiradjuri

in New South Wales, Gaynor Macdonald

describes the manner in which an Aboriginal

woman attempts to establish relatedness

through ‘demanding’ that Macdonald be

among the mourners at her funeral. In short,

these essays and others show the manner in

which Aboriginal people today, in a wide

range of circumstances, literally live with

death. As Anthony Redmond remarks, a self

that is constituted largely through relatedness

‘may experience very real states of disintegra-

tion’ or ‘erasure’ (as I describe it among

Western Arrernte) in these circumstances. In

addition, as many of the contributors make

clear, among them Musharbash, Tonkinson,

McCoy and Macdonald, the modern elabora-

tion of funeral procedures can make death the

theme of life. Again, as Tonkinson and

Babidge both describe, the very politics of

contemporary life are played out as they have

always been in Aboriginal death, but with the

prevalence of Aboriginal death today, these

matters are time-consuming, costly and often

unutterably painful. Craig Elliot’s essay on the

‘social death’ involved in the experience of a

member of the Stolen Generations brings a

different and complementary view on the

trauma in communities today.

As she traces the experience of grief among

Mardu at Jigalong, Tonkinson also underlines

the regenerative power of funerals. They are

large and frequent re-statements of related-

ness and social solidarity at just those points

where people may feel that their heads will

‘fly apart’. Similarly, in the final essay Smith

describes the role of ghosts in mediating both

past and future expectations in Aboriginal

life. As all these essays in one way or another

suggest, the strength to address the present

comes in large part from the institutional life

of Aboriginal people, shaped not only by

tradition but also by innovation past and

present. The object must therefore be to alter

present circumstances without changing in

168 Anthropological Forum

brutal or unthinking ways the selves of

Aboriginal people.

One final remark: These essays should be

read by a large audience both in Australia and

elsewhere. This being the case, I sense an effort

in the collection to strike a balance between a

strictly disciplinary language and one that is

more accessible. The subject of this collection

underlines that this is an ongoing task for

anthropologists: both to analyse issues pre-

cisely, and to communicate them widely.

Photographies east: The camera and its

histories in East and Southeast Asia, edited

by Rosalind C. Morris. Objects/Histories:

Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture

and Representation Series, Duke University

Press, Durham and London, 2009, 313pp.,

images, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-0-

8223-4205-2 (paperback).

LIANA CHUA

Gonville & Caius College

University of Cambridge

� 2010 Liana Chua

Photographies east is assuredly not a mono-

lithic narrative of the history of photography

in East and Southeast Asia. Eschewing pre-

tensions to comprehensiveness or systemati-

city, it revels in what editor Rosalind Morris

calls its ‘impossible coherence’ (p. 8), embra-

cing the sheer messy variety of photographic

types and textures in the region. The result is

a beautifully illustrated volume which makes

an important contribution to the histories

and anthropologies of Asia and photography

in general.

Forming a sinuous backbone to the book’s

nine essays is an abiding concern with

foreignness, a feature inextricable from many

Asians’ experiences of photography, which

influenced their relations to the camera while

also being appropriated and reshaped by it.

Morris’ absorbing piece on photography in

historical and contemporary Thai politics, for

instance, opens with King Mongkut’s use of

portraiture to augment his influence at home

and within British and French circles. Here,

photographs of him in Siamese royal regalia

and European military uniform were en-

trenched in a politics of representation,

forging his status in the ostensible act of

indexing it.

A similar interest in engaging, manipulat-

ing and even mastering otherness occurs in

Nickola Pazderic’s and Thomas LaMarre’s

essays. Pazderic briefly examines how Amer-

ican cultural references, deeply imbued in

Taiwanese experiences of modernity, are

reproduced by its burgeoning wedding por-

trait industry, framing couples in a romantic

fantasy which, paradoxically, also presages its

disappearance. LaMarre’s essay on Japanese

filmmaker Tanizaki Jun’ichiro exposes a

more ambivalent and complex form of

mimesis. Plagued by a ‘sense of a quasi-

colonial discrepancy between the West and

Japan’ (p. 259), Tanizaki used cine-photo-

graphic technologies to problematise, and

partially redeem, what he saw as the ugly,

inferior ‘Japanese face’. To this end, he

created a New/Oriental woman, a hybrid of

(Western) modernity and Japanese tradition

that both confirmed and transcended racia-

lised assumptions.

The tension between old and new Japan in

Marilyn Ivy’s essay is not racial but spatio-

temporal. Her study of Naito Masatoshi’s

strobe photography reveals the contrast be-

tween his portraits of rural Tono, ‘the shadowy

pre-enlightened world of Japanese folk’ (p.

230), and those of the gritty modernity of

postwar Tokyo. Yet Tono is not the only

‘other’ in the frame, for Naito’s images render

the city dark and strange, picking out destitu-

tion and decrepitude amid order and bright-

ness. On the other end of the spectrum, rosily

tinted by nostalgia, are the old photographs of

Chinese cities examined by Carlos Rojas, who

reveals how these inherently modern objects

perform the crucial role of ‘re/covering’ the

past, in both senses of the term.

Book Reviews 169

Issues of tradition and modernity also co-

mingle, or collide, in John Pemberton’s

chapter. For him, archival images of ceremo-

nies and industrial projects in the Netherlands

East Indies are keys to understanding Javanese

ambivalence over the mechanised edifices,

routines and relations of colonial rule: one

startlingly manifested in the images of sacri-

ficial buffalo heads stashed into the machinery

of a sugar mill. While Pemberton contem-

plates those fleeting spaces of encounter

between different parties, James Hevia offers

a bleaker take on the violence that could

penetrate those encounters. He discusses

photography as ‘an apparatus of action and

intervention’ (p. 87) for the Western powers

which occupied Beijing following the Boxer

Rebellion; here, the camera was an agent of

subjugation and humiliation, unforgivingly

prying open the Forbidden City to European

eyes and governance.

James Siegel also notes photography’s role

as perpetrator and proof of colonial violence,

disclosing its importance in facilitating and

documenting the 1874 Dutch invasion of

Atjeh. Unusually, his interest is in an absence:

why so few references to this period in

contemporary Acehnese secessionism? He

addresses this question by outlining a general

Acehnese resistance to memorialisation,

photographic or otherwise, in the waging of

holy war, the ultimate end of which is self-

annihilation. Finally, Patricia Spyer’s chapter

also deals with an absence of photography:

one enforced on her as she witnessed the

cassowary ritual of the Aru Islands, southeast

Moluccas. Her experience reveals the endur-

ing association of the camera with the

aggressive foreignness of the Indonesian state:

an association which mandates against its

deployment during the core of this emble-

matically Aruese ritual.

Cumulatively, these thoughtful, thickly

described essays make compelling reading.

Like other recent contributions to the field,

Photographies east rejects the notion of

photography as a singular Western techno-

logy, emphasising instead its ‘globally dis-

seminated and locally appropriated’ nature

(Pinney 2003, 1). The authors all deftly

embed photography within a broader socio-

historical matrix of representation, power,

politics and technology, reminding us that

there are always photographies rather than an

immutable globe-crossing Photography.

There are, however, moments when this

latter conception threatens to engulf the

analysis. As Morris notes, many essays were

written in the ‘grateful shadow’ of Roland

Barthes and Susan Sontag, among others (p.

14). Their influence is palpable throughout

the volume, and manifested frequently in

passages on photography’s ‘ambivalent tem-

porality’ (p. 13), associations with death,

violence, representational excesses and im-

plication in regimes of desire. Used carelessly,

however, such now axiomatic observations

can make specific case studies seem like mere

grist to the mill of photographic theory. Yet

what gets lost in the process is the grist of

old-fashioned anthropology: what our sub-

jects themselves think, say and do. For

example, Pazderic’s remark that Taiwanese

make a ‘v’ for victory sign when photo-

graphed, as if ‘vanquishing the gaze of the

camera’ (p. 192), makes sense in a Sontag-ian

discussion of photography’s intrusive, en-

tombing propensities; but I do wonder what

his informants might make of that sugges-

tion. Similarly, Rojas’ assertion that ‘[t]he

specter of death has long haunted photo-

graphy’ (p. 207) is substantiated in his own

interpretation of the Old cities images, but

would its subjects have felt the same way?

A related, mildly surprising, omission is

the issue of the materiality of photography, a

subject of increasing recent anthropological

attention (e.g., Edwards and Hart 2004). As

the Introduction notes, the authors have

‘turn[ed] to the photographic image and to

the history of its viewing for clues and

incitements’ (p. 14). Yet the ‘thinginess’

and artefactual agency of photography keep

seeping tantalisingly into their narratives:


through Naito’s strobe technology, for ex-

ample, the gold-leaf adornments on images of

Thai kings, or indeed the very portability of

photographic prints. However, apart from

Hevia, who treats the ‘photography complex’

as a Latourian network of human and

nonhuman actants (p. 81), few other con-

tributors delve further into this surely critical

facet of photography.

These minor quibbles aside, I found

Photographies east to be a gripping, marvel-

lously varied, trawl through the photographic

worlds of East and Southeast Asia. Like

photographs, the material contained in this

volume will undoubtedly exceed its initial

essay-frames, and stimulate interest and

debate for years to come.

References:

Edwards, E., and J. Hart, eds. 2004. Photographsobjects histories: On the materiality of images.London and New York: Routledge.Pinney, C. 2003. Introduction. In Photography’sother histories, edited by C. Pinney and N.Peterson, 1–16. Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press.

Gifts: A study in comparative law, by

Richard Hyland. Oxford University Press,

Oxford and New York, 2009, xxiþ 708pp.,

bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-0-19-534336-6

(hardback).

ROBERT CUNNINGHAM

Faculty of Law

The University of Western Australia

� 2010 Robert Cunningham

Gifts: they come in many forms, from the

potlatch of the First Nations of the American

Northwest to sperm donation in contempor-

ary society.

While the act of gift giving is perhaps as

old as human society itself, ‘the gift’ and ‘the

law’ have not always sat comfortably to-

gether, perhaps because gift giving exhibits

greater homage to customary norms than it

does to the law. In this sense, gift giving has

evolved autonomously from the law, raising

the interesting jurisprudential question of

‘how many customary norms would be

followed irrespective of legal sanction, and

the further question of whether society would

degenerate into a war of all against all in the

absence of Leviathan’ (p. 98).

In his comprehensive comparative law

study of gift giving, Hyland makes clear that

the law of the gift is a worthy subject of study

for comparative lawyers, scholars and social

scientists alike. Indeed, with respect to the

latter, Hyland ponders why social scientists

do not generally read books about law: ‘why

are legal questions less rewarding than the

diet of the Nambikwara?’ (p. xix).

When one examines gift giving, as Hyland

does, as a ‘total social phenomenon’ encom-

passing law, religion, politics, morality, eco-

nomics, aesthetics, and the family, it becomes

essential to reconcile the individual and the

social aspects of gift giving: the moment of

freedom and the moment of obligation (p.

13). In this sense, gift giving is paradoxical in

that ‘at one extreme it creates pathways of

good will and serves as a physical embodi-

ment of the sentiments of love and affection,

while, at the other, it imposes crushing

obligations and symbolizes relationships of

domination and dependence’ (p. 21).

It is this paradoxical theme that prevails

throughout Hyland’s comparative law ac-

count of the gift, leading to the postulation

that conflict between gift giving and egalitar-

ian social norms has prevailed since time

immemorial (pp. 7–8). This conflict was not

lost on the French revolutionaries, for

example, who banned gifts because they were

often employed by patriarchs to maintain

despotic control and entrench inequality. Gift

giving functioned in the family the way royal

prerogatives operated in the larger context of

the state, in that the successions law of the

ancien regime led to property being handed

down from the father of a family to his

Book Reviews 171

favourite son (pp. 1–2). In contrast, the

French Revolution recognised every indivi-

dual’s natural right to freedom and equality

by abolishing such ‘artificial and authoritar-

ian mechanisms’ (p. 550).

Hyland contemplates whether gift giving in

pre-modern societies differed from that

exhibited in modern societies (pp. 15–16).

While some anthropologists have attempted

to extrapolate altruistic tendencies from gift

giving behaviour in pre-modern societies, it

would seem that prestige and rank compete

with altruistic tendencies in both modern and

pre-modern societies. This status perspective

of the gift has led to scholarly musings

suggesting that in pre-modern societies, such

as the First Nations of the American North-

west, gift giving was merely a continuation of

‘warfare by other means’ (p. 17).

When the gift is seen in this way, as a tool

of status and dominion, it becomes easy to

appreciate the juxtaposition of the gift and

market exchange, in that the evolution of the

market economy was one means of escaping

the obligations inherent within a gift. That is,

‘whereas the gift signified dependence, ex-

change meant freedom’ (p. 36). Throughout

this process, the virtues of rationality and

freedom became associated with market

transactions, whereas gift giving was per-

ceived as an ‘irrational impulse, derived

either from emotions of affection, from the

desire for dependence, or from excessive

religiosity’ (pp. 36–7).

While gift and exchange can resemble each

other so closely that the gift may appear to be

nothing but a market transaction, gift giving

does provide economics with a direct chal-

lenge in that economists seek to explain

human behaviour in terms of rational, self-

interested action. After all, what is a gift but a

transfer that takes place outside the self-

interested realm of market exchange?

Hyland suggests that utility is one cause for

contemplation in the gift definition domain.

Commodities are meaningless if they are

useless, whereas uselessness can endow a gift

with meaning (p. 59). Man Ray’s art piece at

the beginning of Hyland’s work, entitled The

gift and depicting an unusable clothes iron, is

testament to this point.

Tips also provide pause for thought. Next

time you provide a tip at the end of your

restaurant meal, ask yourself whether it is a gift

or merely part and parcel of a market

exchange. Cultural context is obviously critical

here.

Within this context, Hyland explores the

development of the market economy and

how legal concepts have been reformulated to

create incentives for people to channel their

transactions through the market (p. 35).

These economic contemplations are no small

fry. In the modern economy, approximately 4

per cent of consumer expenditure is devoted

to producing gifts, a figure that exceeds

shipbuilding and coal mining (p. 44) , despite

empirical evidence suggesting that modern

gift giving creates a deadweight loss of

between a tenth and a third of the value of

the gift (p. 39).

It is the economic dimension of gifts that

has led to the implementation of laws

throughout history to protect donors. Since

ancient Rome, governments have been aware

that ‘[f]inding the proper path between

miserliness and prodigality required consid-

erable wisdom’ (p. 26).

Ultimately, gifts are often based on the

passions. It is for this reason that virtually all

societies have implemented laws concerning

the protection of the donor: ‘we feel fear

when we approach the edge of a tall building,

not because we might fall, but because we

might jump. That is the argument for

guardrails—and gift laws’ (p. 60).

Without completely prohibiting the act of

giving, the law in many jurisdictions has

often perceived the gift as a ‘dangerous act’,

and therefore created various obstacles so as

to make legally recognisable gifts as rare as

possible (p. 372). Hyland explores these

obstacles by contrasting civil law and com-

mon law perspectives.


In the Preface of his work, Hyland states

that, since his parents are no longer alive, no

one will ever read this book through from

cover to cover. Hyland is wrong. I read the

book from cover to cover. It is, undoubtedly,

a scholarly comparative work of significance

to anyone interested in the act of giving. It is

slightly Euro-centric at times, and after the

first three chapters perhaps best adopted as a

study reference rather than a stand-alone

read; but this might be expected from a

scholarly tome.

Ultimately, the end product makes con-

siderable headway into reconciling the de-

mands of the law with those of the practice of

giving, through an intricate and instructive

tapestry of comparative law (p. 595). The

account is probing and thought provoking, if

not a little descriptive and fragmented at

times. In the end, the reader is left question-

ing whether scholarship is a gift or, rather,

part of market exchange?

Fixing sex: Intersex, medical authority and

lived experience, by Katrina Karkazis. Duke

University Press, Durham & London, 2008,

xiiiþ 365pp., endnotes, bibliography, index.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-4318-9 (paperback).

SHARYN GRAHAM DAVIES

School of Languages and Social Sciences

Auckland University of Technology

� 2010 Sharyn Graham Davies

I almost passed up the opportunity to review

this book; the title, for some reason, made me

assume the text would be presented as an

authoritative work on how to treat inter-

sexuality. I am, however, very glad I opened

the cover. Fixing sex is an eloquent and

engaging exploration of the ways in which

intersexuality is understood, treated, and

experienced in the US today.

Karkazis presents a sensitive account of the

various intersex treatment paradigms and the

rationales behind them, yet she is clear on

what course of action should take place in

response to the birth of children with intersex

diagnoses: surgery should wait until children

reach puberty and can give their informed

consent. Although this may seem a reason-

able proposition, it goes against almost fifty

years of medical authority.

A key strength of the book is its coverage

of the history of the treatment of intersexu-

ality in the US from the 1950s until 2008. Of

particular interest is the review of the

protocols established by New Zealand-born

John Money, who developed the guidelines

that clinicians employed in their treatment of

infants born with ambiguous genitalia.

Working from a standpoint that gender is

largely cultural (a move away from the

prevailing notion in the medical establish-

ment that gender was based solely in

biology), Money argued that how children

were raised determined their gender. As such,

as long as children were assigned a gender

before they were two, they would naturally

assume that gender. Any genital ambiguity

had to be rectified according to this protocol

to ensure congruity; therefore, a small penis

was reconstructed as a vagina and a large

clitoris reduced to resemble normative size.

Underlying this treatment protocol was het-

eronormativity, and indeed a successful out-

come was gauged not by levels of happiness

but simply by an individual’s ability to engage

in vaginal-penile sexual intercourse. Karkazis

provides a critical analysis of this protocol,

showing not only the well-publicised detri-

mental effects, as pointedly attested to by the

John/Joan case, but also revealing that clin-

icians, including John Money, were frequently

driven by benevolent goals.

Karkazis interviewed numerous indivi-

duals with intersex diagnoses, their parents,

activists, and clinicians. While all attest to

sharing the primary goal of ensuring children

grow up happy and healthy, the choices made

to achieve these outcomes show the con-

tentious nature of intersex treatment. Post-

poning surgery until puberty may seem

Book Reviews 173

appropriate, since individuals can consent or

not to the surgery, will be more willing and

able to follow-up with post-operative care,

and another decade will see the development

of better surgical procedures. However, life

is fraught with difficulties for intersex

children and their parents, and the desire

for a child to appear physically ‘normal’ is

understandably powerful. Karkazis deals

compassionately with these contesting issues

and pressures.

My criticisms of the book are few and

there are just two points I will raise. First, the

book is somewhat repetitive. I am thinking

especially of Chapter 4, where I frequently got

the sense of rereading material. With judi-

cious editing, the text would have been

usefully streamlined. Second, and more sub-

stantially, the book’s implicit US focus is

problematic because this focus is assumed

and not explicitly articulated. For instance,

the title could have instructively ended with

‘in the US’. While the book certainly need

make no apology for a US focus, this

omission both in the title and throughout

much of the text gives the impression that ‘in

the US’ is not needed because readers will

instinctively know the book’s focus. Further-

more, this framing omission has the result of

presenting data as speaking to global experi-

ences and treatment of intersex, such that

readers are led to assume that the intersex

experiences and treatments detailed are to be

similarly found in other countries. Some

reflectivity on this issue would have been

welcomed. Linked to this omission is the

book’s assumption that US experiences

happen in a vacuum, sheltered from interna-

tional influences. Indeed, in the discussion of

factors that propelled intersex activists to

question medical authority, no mention is

made of cross-cultural material. For instance,

in many intersex accounts from the US,

authors note the powerful influence Serena

Nanda’s (1990) work on hijra in India and

Gilbert Herdt’s (1994) edited anthology,

respectively, had on showing them that sexes

and genders did not necessarily link neatly

together in a binary mould.

Fixing sex is a wonderful book that will be of

enormous value to individuals with intersex

diagnoses and their parents and families,

clinicians, counsellors, activists and aca-

demics. The book additionally has the ability

to empower intersexed individuals and their

care-givers to make considered and informed

decisions regarding treatment, and validates

those who refuse all treatment.

References:

Herdt, G., ed. 1994. Third sex, third gender:Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history.New York: Zone Books.Nanda, S. 1990. Neither man nor woman: Thehijras of India. California: Wadsworth Publish-ing Co.

Making sense of place: Exploring concepts

and expressions of place through different

senses and lenses, edited by Frank Vanclay,

Matthew Higgins and Adam Blackshaw.

National Museum of Australia Press, Can-

berra, 2008, viiiþ 331pp., figures, photo-

graphs. ISBN: 9781876944513 (paperback).

MICHELE D. DOMINY


Bard College

� 2010 Michele D. Dominy

A production of the National Museum of

Australia, this co-edited volume, which

focuses on the themes of land, nation and

people and explores in its varied case studies

the dynamic relationship between people and

place, derives from a 2006 Senses of Place

conference held in Hobart, Tasmania. Geo-

grapher Edward Relph provides a conceptual

chapter which argues for a pragmatic sense of

place that demands a ‘cosmopolitan imagina-

tion, which can grasp both the spirit and

extensibility of places, seeing them as nodes

in a web of larger processes’ (p. 322).


Philosopher Jeff Malpas concludes the book

with a warning against the conflation of

human connection to place with notions of

proprietorship and sovereignty, and by mak-

ing an argument for being ‘owned by the

places we inhabit’ rather than the reverse (p.

331). This unified conceptual framework

links seemingly disparate authorial perspec-

tives and ethnographic sites.

While Australian sites predominate, con-

tributors also explore Arctic coastal land-

scapes, the Long Kesh/Maze prison in

Northern Ireland, and place attachment on

New Zealand’s West Coast. The collection’s

diversity therefore derives not from its global

reach but rather from the remarkable variety

of Australian locales; the range of authorial,

disciplinary and professional perspectives;

and the broad array of senses, taken quite

literally, used in engaging one’s connection to

both physical and cultural landscapes. Locales

and sites include the Sydney Opera House,

the suburban garden, roadside memorials,

the automobile, the prison, the National

Museum of Australia and its outreach

programs, songlines, and the souvenir. We

hear from farmers, artists, essayists, archi-

tects, planners and designers, as well as

discipline-based academics. Supplementing

the text throughout are beautiful colour

photographs; a cartoon; family album

photographs; children’s and local residents’

drawings and narratives; topographic, ethno-

graphic and satellite maps; and images of

artwork. The most arresting photographic

images represent the Lower Whataroa Flats in

New Zealand by Kaylene Simpson (p. 256),

Northeast Tasmania by Shane Makinen (p.

268), the Mutitjulu Walk in Uluru-Kata Tjuta

National Park by Gordon Waitt (p. 288),

Lake Ballard and a sculpture by Antony

Gormley in Western Australia by Jane Mul-

cock (p. 300), and a view of Easdale Tarn

from Grasmere in Wordsworth’s Lake Dis-

trict (p. 324). These images convey the

specificity of geography and the colour of

landscape that define the authors’ passion for

place in New Zealand, Australia and the

English countryside.

Frank Vanclay introduces the collection by

acknowledging the elusiveness of the concept

of place and by explaining that the con-

tributors share an understanding of the

concept as ‘the coming together of the

biophysical, social and spiritual worlds’. It

includes attachment, familiarity, awareness,

commitment and belongingness. Integrating

the volume is a collective focus on places with

personal meaning and experiential impor-

tance for the authors. The contributors’

thirty-one short chapters (ranging in length

from four to twenty pages) cluster into four

parts: Narratives on the Experience of Place;

Understanding Indigenous Senses of Place;

Making Places; and Analysing and Utilising

the Sense of Place.

Readers will discover that the eight chap-

ters that hone most closely to sociological and

anthropological approaches are almost evenly

divided between the four parts; all are united

by drawing on Vanclay’s, Relph’s and Mal-

pas’s concepts of place. Celmara Pocock

examines culture heritage tourism by ex-

panding the notion of touch to encompass

imagined touch and anticipated memory in

the more inclusive haptic sense that engages

visitors to the Great Barrier Reef. Similarly,

Anangu ontologies of place, described by

Diana James in Part II include an aural

landscape, as well as the abstraction of

songlines that dip below the earth and bring

place into being. Trade and travel routes

characterise the ‘lineal place complexes’,

described by Stephen Long, that constitute

Australian Aboriginal cultural heritage on the

Georgina River. Chapters by Ruth McManus

and Jane Mulcock explore Making Place

through gardening by describing the reconci-

liation of grief in the suburban garden, and

the relationship between native planting and

belonging in Perth. Finally in Part IV, Colin

Goodrich and Kaylene Simpson identify the

specificity of the physical world in shaping

community and identity on New Zealand’s

Book Reviews 175

West Coast in particular, while identifying

notions such as ‘genealogical place attach-

ment’ that I would suggest transcend this

region and pertain more widely to rugged

South Island landscapes. Frank Vanclay, Jo

Wills and Ruth Lane emphasise ‘vernacular

heritage’ and argue that these outreach

programs of the National Museum of Aus-

tralia strengthen place attachment. David

Trigger’s sensitive consideration of displace-

ment and emplacement in both his own life

and family history and the lives of other

Australians helps the reader to think critically

about how contested and layered are senses of

indigeneity in Australia and other post-settler

societies.

The authors’ vernacular, quotidian and

local worlds serve as their field sites in

Making sense of place, and the title conveys

the book’s dual and distinctive purpose, both

in interpreting the significance of place to its

interlocutors, and in conveying the sentience

of place and a multivalenced sensuality of our

experience in it. In this way, the editors

succeed in building bridges, especially in the

post-settler context, between autochthonous

and settler-descendent attachment to place.

Collective creativity: Art and society in the

South Pacific, by Katherine Giuffre. Anthro-

pology and Cultural History in Asia and the

Indo-Pacific Series, Ashgate, Farnham and

Burlington, 2009, xviþ 163pp., figures, ta-

bles, appendices, bibliography, index. ISBN:

978-0-7546-7664-5 (hardback).

RODERICK EWINS

Centre for the Arts

University of Tasmania

� 2010 Roderick Ewins

Though the title gives no hint of it, the focus

of this book, which is actually a case study, is

Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. This fact is

significant because the work is less a study

about creativity and more a fascinating

picture of a tiny insular society, historically

disrupted, and now left endlessly dividing

itself amoeba-like into factions competing

about rights and identities. Struggles in art

and society: A story of contemporary Rarotonga

might have been a truer title.

That said, the book’s most glaring omis-

sion is the lack of any photographs of the art

that is central to the discourse, let alone of the

players: makers, sellers and users. Surely only

academic publishers (and ‘arts radio’ produ-

cers!) could convince themselves that words

suffice when dealing with visual art. It was

particularly frustrating during the author’s

otherwise most interesting discussion of the

several artist factions, their different ap-

proaches, and claims of copyright infringe-

ments. Most readers will be left forever

wondering what each of these might look

like, where they differ and overlap, and so on.

With those caveats, I should immediately

say how interesting I found this book, and

acknowledge the quality of the author’s

research. By the end, I felt I had a genuine

sense of this generous, proud, truculent, and

thoroughly conflicted little society. Giuffre

writes fluently and clearly, does not become

bogged down in jargon and appropriately

provides many references to relevant litera-

ture. This is not to suggest that the book is an

easy read, since it is too densely packed with

ideas. Its problem is one of digestion, not of

style.

The focus is immediately identified: a

‘Rarotongan arts explosion’ that has occurred

over less than two decades. Giuffre asks why,

and how, a place becomes a locus of creativity,

and what social systems are implicated

(p. 3), and foreshadows her conclusions that

in Rarotonga, at least, answers lie in the social

structures and networks of the ‘collective’.

Giuffre first considers theories about the ever-

elusive source(s) of creativity, then inevitably

moves to the safer ground of conditions that

may foster it.

By the end of the book little evidence

appears to have been adduced that the


collective can be credited with generating

creativity per se; that emerges as having been

stimulated by particular histories and needs,

and limited opportunities to deal with them.

What does become clear, however, is that ‘the

presence of a collaborative circle surrounding

the creators plays a crucial role in supporting

the deviant creation’ (p. 11), both politically

and practically. Those who lack support

groups, Giuffre asserts, are significantly dis-

advantaged.

Given the exceptional levels of inter-group

tensions Giuffre documents, I think she

passes too quickly over conflict as a stimulus

to creativity (p. 9). I have elsewhere (Ewins

1998, 2009) discussed artistic vigour in terms

of a bell-curve in which a certain level of

stress is optimal for creative enterprise but

the extremes of total comfort and total

disruption are both destructive of it (Kavolis

1972).

Giuffre tolls off the depressingly familiar

list of causes of post-contact change and

erosion of tradition and culture (religion,

disease, technology, diet, clothing, misce-

genation, land ownership, capitalism, educa-

tion, emigration). In terms of the book’s

topic, the most problematic of these have

been first emigration, from outer islands to

Rarotonga and thence to New Zealand, and

the countervailing re-entry of members of the

diaspora, often a generation or more re-

moved. Emigration began with annexation to

NZ in 1900, continued through autonomy in

1965, and was greatly facilitated when the

airport was built in 1974. Goods and money

flow in while people flow out; over 80% of

Cook Islanders now live overseas. As in many

post-colonial and diasporic situations, rapid

social, political and economic change has

provoked a responsive emphasis on indigen-

ousness, and identity markers. In the latter

category, art is always to the fore.

Added to the perceptions of threatened

identity common to most small societies in

the face of globalising forces, the issues of the

outward and inward movement of those who

claim indigenousness (and therefore under

Cook Islands law have a claim on a share of

the very limited land on the tiny islands),

help set the stage for great competition for

identity and entitlements. Many re-entrant

Rarotongans have had access to higher levels

of education and sophistication that give

them some advantages, but they have also

generally lost touch with many traditions,

including language, and those who have

‘stayed on’ use this to ‘trump’ them with

claims of more ‘authentic’ indigenousness.

In addition to its identity role, in a place

with limited employment opportunities, the

production of art (for tourists in particular)

has emerged as a prosperous industry. Here

again, Rarotonga fits the pattern of less

developed countries (LDCs), and also typi-

cally, the reproduction of their traditional

arts was begun very shortly after first contact

with the outside world, when islanders

observed the newcomers’ keenness to buy

up portable manifestations of their culture.

Today, control of cultural production, con-

sumption, and marketing is hotly contested,

since many layers of reinforced identity,

kudos and reward flow from it (p. 41).

Having set this scenario, the author

devotes the remainder of the book to a

detailed examination of the manner in which

the struggle for dominance is played out.

Giuffre reveals the interplay of issues such as

kinship and other group membership, ten-

sion between indigenous and non-indigenous

people, the tug-of-war between the tastes and

aspirations of artists, galleries, and consu-

mers. In particular, overseas-trained artists,

and some gallery owners, have raised issues of

the validation that must accompany a transi-

tion from producing simulacra of traditional

art forms to producing contemporary art that

remains distinctive to the Cooks, but meets

aesthetic and quality criteria that will stand

muster in the outside art world (in the first

instance in NZ). This is perhaps the area in

which the greatest distance remains to be

travelled.

Book Reviews 177

The final chapter of the book is the shortest

and, appropriately, the pithiest, drawing

together all the strands of empirical data,

theory, and analysis. The author reiterates

what she sees as the uniqueness of Rarotonga’s

‘art renaissance’, and ties this (correctly, I

believe) to the disruption of the social networks

with emigration and profound cultural change.

Contrary to this disruption is the forging of

new networks among the artists, lending much

mutual support. Here too, however, she

acknowledges the disharmony between artist

groups and sees it as ‘stimulating creativity and

innovation’.

Rarotongans have good reason to be well

pleased with Giuffre’s respectful and sympa-

thetic portrait of them and their world. If

only it had pictures!

References:

Ewins, R. 1998. Social stress, art and commu-nity. Imprint, the Quarterly Journal of the PrintCouncil of Australia 33: 2–4.Ewins, R. 2009. Staying Fijian: Vatulele Islandbarkcloth and social identity. Adelaide & Hon-olulu: Crawford House Publishing & Universityof Hawaii Press.Kavolis, V. 1972. History on art’s side: Socialdynamics in artistic efflorescences. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press.

Murray River country: An ecological dialo-

gue with traditional owners, by Jessica K.

Weir. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009,

xviþ 175pp., foreword, illustrations, shor-

tened forms, interviewees, bibliography, in-

dex. ISBN: 978-0-85575-678-9 (paperback).

DENNIS FOLEY

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

University of Newcastle

� 2010 Dennis Foley

This text not only provides a different view of

the destruction of our inland waterways by

mismanagement of resources but also pre-

sents an Aboriginal voice painting a land-

scape for the reader, allowing an insight into

the cultural fabric surrounding Aboriginal

lore and the importance (and story) of fresh

water. Weir simplifies the complexity sur-

rounding the mismanagement of Aboriginal

lands, without constructing blame and divi-

sion, unlike the endless political point scoring

and scurrilous press coverage that the public

has suffered in recent years, leaving many of

us cold and indifferent towards the debate

over the demise of the Murray/Darling

ecosystem.

Weir takes us into the words and minds of

people who live on the rivers, exposing

readers to the modernists, those who classify

our people in some archaic form, and

illustrating the negativity and bitter legisla-

tion that is against acceptable human rights,

this, of course, being native title. Above all,

the author puts common sense and fact into a

debate based on greed.

Murray River country is a story told using

simple vocabulary, which gives the reader an

insight into what my Elders would respect-

fully refer to as freshwater lore and knowl-

edge. An example that tears at our spiritual

beliefs of ecological management involves the

realisation that releasing dam water is

thermal pollution (p. 127). Cold black water

released from the bottom of dams is death to

an ecosystem that is found in the warm

western plains. The resultant rapid tempera-

ture drop ensures that those crustaceans,

shellfish and native fish struggling to survive

are given additional ecological hurdles. This

example is perhaps difficult for non-Indigen-

ous people to understand at first. Metaphori-

cally, think of a loved one in hospital who

needs a transfusion; however, several litres of

radiator coolant are pumped into his or her

veins instead. We believe the earth is alive,

albeit dying in this text, but still alive, and we

are a part of her. When she is poisoned, then

so are the keepers of her land. Weir writes of

an ecological disorder (p. 37) that has

produced an ‘ecodide’ (p. 144) where the

water is so polluted that ‘the river creatures


crawl out of it’ (p. 147). Would you like your

mother to be treated like this?

In the mismanagement of this great river

system, one of the driest continents on earth

has also forsaken the richness of its flora and

fauna, thus showing an additional ignorance

of Indigenous knowledge. Weir has captured

something commendable in her discussion of

Indigenous knowledge: the continual juxta-

position of modernists and ancients, or the

tongue in cheek statement that ‘this is not a

retreat to postmodern realism’ (p. 49). Weir

almost manipulates insider-outsider theory

so that the reader is an insider, but do not be

fooled by the scientific knowledge, for in this

process what is ‘real’ is, indeed, based on your

standpoint.

In the comparison of modernist and

Indigenous knowledge, do not exclude In-

digenous people from the landscape. People

are an intricate part of country, as are flora

and fauna. Resources like water are also more

than just a human need as interpreted by the

United Nations and the modernists (p. 53);

‘caring for country’ and Indigenous knowl-

edge include a wider interpretation of

ecology. When the ecology is gone and one

no longer has access to it, then Indigenous

knowledge is also gone, creating an ‘extinc-

tion of experience’ (p. 59), negating the

practice of beliefs and ceremony. Indeed,

over-extracting water is another form of

dispossession for the traditional owners (p.

59), as Weir illustrates: the loss of a lifestyle,

of traditional knowledge, where it is no

longer possible to collect duck eggs or live

within seasonal fluctuations in the gathering

of food within cultural lifecycles. The loss of

‘knowledge’, of ceremony, is ‘place-bereave-

ment’, for one is unable to teach the next

generation. The loss of ‘place’ linked to caring

for country is akin to the grief of losing a

close loved one (p. 61).

The role of natural resource management

programs is questioned and, on analysis, they

are found to transform ‘nature’ into the

subject of ‘controlling resources for the

irrigators’ (p. 72). In contrast, the traditional

owner’s management of resources is a field of

connectivity, repositioning human activity

within webs of ecological life, acknowledging

the co-dependence inherent in those relation-

ships (p. 73). Once again, traditional knowl-

edge and caring for country are juxtaposed

with the ‘modernist’ concepts of resource

management.

Within this discussion, native title is only

recognised when the traditional owners

demonstrate to the court that they have

maintained traditional laws and customs

since colonisation, yet Justice Olney, in the

Yorta Yorta case, discredits the environmen-

tal conservation of traditional owners (p. 74).

Weir then illustrates how cultural difference

was first used in colonising to exclude, then

negate, and now deny, rights. Weir correctly

points out how, in native title, the hyper-

separation of tradition is used within the

courtroom by one culture sitting in judgment

on another (p. 76). Weir’s dialogue goes on

to show how the modernist fails to under-

stand that culture is not only heritage but also

a project, one about process and practice

(p. 79); yet traditional owners are precluded

from dialogue in relation to their country.

Rather, it seems the instrumentalities that

make up the ‘modernist’ managers are, in

fact, adopting a monologue when engaging in

cultural diversity (p. 70).

Weir seems to tantalise the reader with side

issues at regular intervals. An example is

provided by the Wiradjuri Elder (Uncle

Tony) who regrets being employed in scrub

clearing by the very industry that killed his

waterways, stole his place, food and culture,

and was instrumental in the cessation of his

cultural practices (p. 63): a common story

shared by Aboriginal agricultural worker

gangs. Australia may have ridden on the

sheep’s back in colonial times, but in many

areas it was black agricultural workers who

helped clear vast tracks of land for the

pastoralist. The conflict experienced by Uncle

Tony tears at the heart of many Aboriginal

Book Reviews 179

men across Australia. Another issue that Weir

touches on is the economic importance of

ancient fish traps (p. 76). Indeed, when this

idea was raised among Aboriginal people, it

initially led only to laughter (p. 77). For

comparative research on Aboriginal econom-

ic management, read Heather Builth’s work

on the Gunditjmara peoples of Lake Condah

in western Victoria and their 8,000-year-old

aquaculture industry. Indigenous land use

management with economic surplus is not a

laughing matter; rather, I suggest it requires

deeper understanding and investigation.

In conclusion, Weir does not define In-

digenous knowledge in the scientific context of

the modernist; rather, she allows readers to

develop their own definition, perhaps to

understand the Aboriginal voice better. Take

your time in reading this text, for it is well

worth the investment, and remember: when

the river is dead, when the ecosystem is

destroyed, you can say you have read a text

that gave an Indigenous account of a place

once so rich, by an author who warned us.

Reference:

Builth, H. C. 2002. The archaeology and socio-economy of the Gunditjmara: A landscapeanalysis from southwest Victoria, Australia.PhD thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flin-ders University of South Australia.

Gossip and the everyday production of

politics, by Niko Besnier. University of

Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2009, xivþ 243pp.,

orthography and transcription conventions,

figures, endnotes, bibliography, index. ISBN:

978-0-8248-3338-1(hardback).

ILANA GERSHON

Department of Communication and Culture

Indiana University

� 2010 Ilana Gershon

In this engaging book, Niko Besnier shows

how large-scale structural changes affect a

Tuvaluan atoll, where everybody knows not

only what everyone else does, but also what

everyone else is believed to have done. There

are, after all, only approximately 350 people

on this eastern Polynesian atoll. Armed with

linguistic anthropology, Besnier turns to

gossip as the site for understanding how local

political relationships are worked out, as well

as how people respond to changing demo-

graphics caused by colonial and postcolonial

labour practices. The atoll, Nukulaelae, is a

small community, which has experienced

many of the historical changes that have

coursed through the Pacific over the past two

centuries. In the mid 1800s, the atoll lost

many of its men to a blackbirding raid, and

only slowly re-constituted itself. Then Samo-

an ministers converted those living on

Nukulaelae, staying for decades and continu-

ally promoting not only Christianity but also

Samoan assumptions of proper behaviour.

More recently, Nauru and New Zealand have

become centres of employment for migrant

labourers from Nukulaelae, and those who

stay behind depend heavily on remittances

for necessities as well as for the money to

participate in ritual exchanges. Their depen-

dence on remittances has only increased as

global warming leads to rising sea levels that

are destroying local agriculture. Besnier

elegantly ties together all these larger histor-

ical shifts, delineating the socioeconomic

structures that create the contexts for local

strife and ill-will. He effectively demonstrates

how one cannot understand sorcery accusa-

tions or gossip about overpriced piglets

without seeing these incidents in terms of

the larger shifts in people’s daily lives.

Besnier argues that gossip is a speech genre

through which people engage with larger

structural transformations. They also use

gossip to respond to the ever-present tensions

between hierarchy and egalitarianism present

on Nukulaelae. The discourse of egalitarian-

ism is the privileged discourse, allowing the

community to represent itself as harmonious

and peaceful, both to themselves and to


outsiders. Yet hierarchical tensions inevitably

emerge as people also use gender and age as

bases for dividing labour and responsibility. In

addition, people have increasingly unequal

access to resources because of different

families’ experiences with migration. Gossip

and public oratory are the two mutually

constitutive and opposing genres for exploring

these tensions. On Nukulaelae, gossip is a

speech genre roundly disapproved of and

frequently performed. Thus, it easily becomes

the concealed genre through which people can

express their anger and jealousy, assertions of

emotions that then occasionally, but not

always, leak into more public interactions.

Yet, as Besnier points out, gossip itself is so

fraught a genre that no one wants to be

labelled a gossiper. He shows in careful detail

how people use various strategies, such as

withholding information, to create fellow

gossipers and conversational exchanges in

which no single person can be held responsible

for how knowledge and criticism circulate.

Besnier moves easily between detailed analysis

of micro-interactions and historical overviews

of how global changes have affected the range

of possibilities available on this Tuvaluan atoll.

I want to highlight Besnier’s use of

reflexivity, an aspect that he manages so

beautifully that it could serve as a model for

future Pacific scholarship. In laying out his

ethnographic evidence, Besnier is careful to

bring not only himself but also his tape

recorder into the picture. He delineates how

his presence affected the way various in-

cidents unfolded and, in particular, how he,

as a European man, was read as wealthy and

eligible (despite his own view that he was

neither). The events Besnier analyses were at

times significantly shaped by his perceived

access to money (and his longstanding will-

ingness to share what money he had with his

fieldwork family). In addition, Besnier’s

transcription practices contributed, unwit-

tingly on his part, to how gossip circulated

and affected people’s relationships. In one

incident, a relative of a man who was

gossiped about transcribed the story about

him that was circulating. She would never

have known about the story if Besnier had

not hired her to help him transcribe, and

unwittingly to transcribe this particular con-

versation. Upset, she warned her relative, who

confronted those gossiping about him. Bes-

nier describes how central his tape recorder

was to this incident, contributing in a new

way to how gossip circulates in this commu-

nity. In these moments, Besnier manages to

write himself and his tape-recorder into the

analysis without seeming self-absorbed by

focusing on his own structural position and

the circulation of knowledge enabled by his

use of technology.

Gossip and the everyday production of

politics is a captivating book, beautifully

written and filled with funny and detailed

examples. By turning to gossip, Besnier deftly

shows how Tuvaluans experience the political

as personal. This book will appeal to linguistic

anthropologists, scholars of the Pacific and

Pacific diaspora and, in general, scholars

interested in a skilled depiction of how larger

socioeconomic forces affect the micro-interac-

tions of a small-scale community.

Arrernte present, Arrernte past: Invasion,

violence, and imagination in Indigenous

Central Australia, by Diane Austin-Broos.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and

London, 2009, 326pp., index. ISBN 978-0-

226-03264-1 (paperback).

KATIE GLASKIN

Anthropology and Sociology


� 2010 Katie Glaskin

This book is a contemporary ethnography of

the Western Arrernte, Indigenous Australians

from the Finke River and Macdonnell Ranges

region of Central Australia. Having closely

discussed the historical trajectory of colonisa-

tion in this area, and its impacts on

Book Reviews 181

Indigenous lives, Austin-Broos confronts

some of the troubled realities of the pre-

sent-day lives of Western Arrernte people.

The ‘invasion’, ‘violence’ and ‘imagination’ of

its subtitle belong here to both colonised and

colonisers, invasion and violence more ob-

viously so. The imagination of its subtitle is

what the colonisers imagine Western Ar-

rernte lives to be, and how they should be;

and Western Arrernte imaginings of what

their lives were and can be. It is also the

dissonance between these differently located

imaginings that, in turn, produces more

violence, both of the physical and the

structural kind.

This book adds to what is already a very

rich ethnographic record for this region:

Spencer and Gillen’s Native tribes of Central

Australia (1899), and T. G. H. Strehlow’s

corpus, which includes such texts as Aranda

traditions (1945) and Songs of Central Aus-

tralia (1971). Austin-Broos has a strong

ethnographic record to draw on, and puts

this to good use in drawing out the past and

the present in Arrernte lives. Her primary

concern is with the question of cultural

change, with what is happening for Western

Arrernte people as they have undergone

numerous transitions: from hunter-gatherers

to a more centralised existence in the

Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg, now

called Ntaria; followed by the decentralisation

into outstations beginning in the land rights

era of the 1970s. The first transition, from

hunter-gatherers to mission residents, en-

tailed a change to a localised domestic

economy ‘lodged on the periphery of Aus-

tralia’s market society’ (p. 4). The second

major transition, from the mission-spon-

sored days to self-determination policies

and the outstation movement, was supported

by ‘pensions, welfare, and small development

grants’, a movement that ‘left the Arrernte

marooned and unemployed as market in-

dividuals’ (p. 4). Austin-Broos sees here the

‘deep contradiction’ of this ‘state-sponsored

return to tradition’, one in which there is a

‘clash of the imaginaries’ as profound as that

which accompanied ‘initial invasion’ (p. 4).

In examining how Western Arrernte have

encountered and approached these changes

to their lives over time, Austin-Broos devel-

ops a carefully constructed thesis. Her argu-

ment, ultimately, is that ‘violence in Arrernte

life is equally a product of state policy, both

recent and long-standing, and of ontological

shift with both its emotional and social

ramifications’ (p. 268). Drawing on Paul

Farmer’s work on structural violence, Austin-

Broos argues that ‘cumulative structural

violence . . . provides the context for the

Arrernte’s current social suffering’ (p. 10).

How Western Arrernte have responded to

this cumulative structural violence, how they

have sought to make sense of their experi-

ence, is, in Austin-Broos’s view, through the

imagination, ‘that peculiarly human capacity

to respond with foresight and reflection to

the events that shape new practices’ (p. 10).

Here, she draws on Charles Taylor’s work on

social imaginaries, and argues that ‘imagin-

aries rely on representations that stabilize and

capture contingencies using them as vehicles

to convey regimes of value’ (p. 11). Arrernte

ways of being in the world can be seen as a

response to the cumulative structural vio-

lence colonialism has brought, and the

‘ontological shift with both its emotional

and social ramifications’ (p. 268) emerging

from this. Thus, what Austin-Broos is

portraying here is the way in which interac-

tions between Arrernte and Indigenous and

non-Indigenous others dialectically shape

and re-shape Arrernte ontology over time.

The tensions that arise between the dual

expectations of Indigenous Australians main-

taining ‘tradition’ while also being encour-

aged towards individuation and modernity

through engagement with welfare and the

market economy are aptly articulated. For

Austin-Broos, this is a clear instance of ‘when

imaginaries collide’ (Chapter 8).

For Austin-Broos, imagination is part of

Western Arrernte endurance: it is ‘a means to


connect the present with the past through

metaphor, creating continuity; and in the

form of social imaginaries to project a present

into the future and thereby instil new hope’

(p. 264). There is much in this book to

suggest the links between this notion of the

imagination as a kind of social imagining,

and its relationship to perception and

memory, although the connection between

these things is less explicitly theorised. For

example, Austin-Broos refers to homologies,

analogies made by Western Arrernte in their

encounters with non-Indigenous persons,

through which they have made sense of

‘new regimes of value and a new social order’

(p. 264). Such homologies—‘life as a travel

story’, ‘shifting’, ‘walkin’ round’, and Chris-

tianity ‘rendered as pepe [paper] and pepe

rendered in turn as ‘‘law’’’ (p. 264)—may,

indeed, reflect a metaphoric imagination, but

an imagination also based on perception,

which is itself mediated through memory

(Solms and Turnbull 2002, 154).

This is an appropriate point at which to

return to the ‘ontological shift’ Austin-Broos

identifies. She sees this as ‘first and foremost

economy in a broad sense and its ideology’

(p. 266); a ‘phenomenology of the subject in

which all humans are producing beings’

(p. 267). Thus, the ontological shift Austin-

Broos refers to is firmly anchored in the

material conditions of Indigenous existence,

and the imagination that is used in encoun-

tering these is not only thought, but practice,

too (p. 265).

Some of Austin-Broos’s arguments are

clearly reflected in her earlier work (for

example, the ways in which commodities

and cash, along with sedentarisation, have

impacted on demand-sharing as an expres-

sion of relatedness, as discussed in Chapter 5;

and see Austin-Broos 2006). I appreciated the

further ethnographic contextualisation of

these arguments here. Chapter 4 (‘Home

and away’) is an important contribution to

the ways in which settlement and colonisa-

tion have impacted on (or ‘redefined’, p. 129)

human-land relations. Beyond the welcome

contribution this book makes to theorising

the relationship between economy and In-

digenous ontological change, the issues raised

in it are highly relevant to broader debates

and concerns about the situation of many

remote-living Indigenous Australians today.

References:

Austin-Broos, D. 2006. ‘Working for’ and‘working’ among Western Arrernte in CentralAustralia. Oceania 76: 1–15.Solms, M., and O. Turnbull. 2002. The brainand the inner world: An introduction to theneuroscience of subjective experience. New York:Other Press.

Constructing Singapore: Elitism, ethnicity

and the nation-building project, by Michael

D. Barr and Zlatko Skrbis. Nordic Institute of

Asian Studies, Copenhagen, 2008, figures,

bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-87-7694-029-4

(paperback).

DANIEL P. S. GOH

Department of Sociology

National University of Singapore

� 2010 Daniel P. S. Goh

Singapore studies have long awaited a critical

scrutiny of the city-state’s ruling elite, but this

is not it. Constructing Singapore invites

natural comparisons with C. Wright Mills’s

The power elite and Pierre Bourdieu’s State

nobility, the two landmark sociological stu-

dies of the elitist underpinnings of American

democracy and French meritocracy, respec-

tively. Barr and Skrbis attempt to do what

these authors have done, to show that the

ruling elite maintains its hold on power

through an exclusive network reeking of

patronage, and that the elite renews itself

through the selection process of the achieve-

ment-oriented national education system.

Barr and Skrbis would have benefited from

engaging with the theoretical arguments of

Book Reviews 183

Mills and Bourdieu, of whom they seem to be

ignorant. I am very surprised that the Nordic

Institute of Asian Studies published this

work, which offers few new facts and an

extremely biased and hateful argument.

Barr and Skrbis begin with a theoretical

specification of the elite’s nationalism. Using

a continuum from ethnocultural to civic

nationalism, the authors argue that the

Singapore nation-building project moved

away from a civic republican model towards

‘a more ethnic-cum-racial form’ (p. 5) in the

1980s, when Chinese identity and values

played an increasingly central role. Implicit

in this view is the judgment that Singapore is

retrogressing from the ideal civic model,

‘where citizenship is based on a modern,

inclusive, ‘‘rational’’ model free of ‘‘primor-

dial’’ elements’ (p. 5). Besides the Eurocentr-

ism of such a view, Barr and Skrbis

completely miss Singapore’s postcolonial

specificity. The opportunity is lost early in

Chapter 2, when the authors analyse The

Singapore story, the elite’s official national

history, as it was narrated in a CD-ROM.

Barr and Skrbis take on a ‘sin by omission’

approach. For example, they interpret the

wholesale omission of colonial history and

the mentioning of Japan’s invasion of China

as a major event as confirming that Singa-

pore’s official history is ‘an implicitly Chinese

story’ (p. 24). Then, noting the omission of

Chinese communist resistance to Japanese

occupation and the part played by Chinese-

educated nationalists in the independence

movement, Barr and Skrbis claim that the

Chinese story is one that ‘plays up particular

aspects of the local Chinese culture and

history, as determined by the ruling elite’

(p. 26).

Why would the Anglophone elite want to

sinicise official history? Would they not

expose their own cultural inadequacies as

Chinese-but-not-quite? This puzzle intrigues

the student of postcolonial studies, who

would suspect that the narrative repression

is significant in the formation of the elite’s

very identity and a symptom of the elite’s

postcolonial angst: the Anglophone elite’s

grappling with their Chineseness as it was

essentialised in colonial racial discourse as a

mixture of industry and perfidy and as it was

realised in the potent revolutionary spirit of

their Chinese-speaking leftist foes.

Instead, Barr and Skrbis subscribe to their

own essentialism and reductive strongman

history to explain sinicisation in Chapter 3.

Contrary to historical studies of complex

Malayan Chinese worlds and their heady mix

of Peranakan hybridity and matriarchy, and

plebeian secret societies and spirit medium-

ship, Barr and Skrbis claim that Confucian-

ism defined the two important ‘cultural

impulses of Singapore’s Chinese commu-

nities’ of viewing social relationships as

rigidly hierarchical and venerating education

and scholarship (p. 45). Then, they claim that

Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister, drew on

these impulses, knowing ‘instinctively’ that

they resonated with the Chinese population

(p. 46), and started to implement them,

single-handedly (p. 92), in social policies. In

other words, Lee, with the complicity of a

Confucianist Chinese electorate, short-chan-

ged Singapore’s civic nationalism for an elitist

Chinese ethnonationalism. Effectively, Barr

and Skrbis affirm Lee’s claims to being the

authentic Confucianist and his genius as the

founding father whose autobiography is

synonymous with Singapore’s story. Con-

structing Singapore grants too much historical

agency to Lee in constructing Singapore, as

much as the man has given himself.

In the remaining chapters, Barr and Skrbis

argue that the ideological pillars of Singa-

pore’s ‘original’ civic nationalism, multiraci-

alism and meritocracy, are really rhetorical

disguises obscuring elitist Chinese ethnona-

tionalism. This is a rather extreme position,

given present scholarship, and would require

material evidence. Yet, the evidence presented

is very selective and primarily based on

interviews ‘snowballing’ from Barr’s friends

and academic associates. Most respondents


are well-educated Anglophone Chinese elites

themselves, who exist at the periphery of the

ruling elite networks. They are the loudest

critics of the system, and their opinions

cannot be taken at face value and definitely

not as representing facts. Limiting the

analysis of official history to one CD-ROM

is also problematic. As Barr and Skrbis admit,

other versions contained parts omitted in the

CD-ROM (p. 25). Singaporeans are inun-

dated with iterations of The Singapore story,

and there is much contestation over official

history, even among elite members. A CD-

ROM is hardly representative, and Barr and

Skrbis do not explain their selection bias.

Furthermore, elite beliefs are represented in

the book by Lee’s views, the actual impact of

which on the workings of the technocracy is

suspect. Elite discourse should be analysed in

its complexity, and not reduced to a Chinese

conspiracy.

Barr and Skrbis make much of the

‘lubricant’ (p. 70) patronage politics emanat-

ing from Lee’s, and his son and current Prime

Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s, circle down

through the elite administrative service to

the appointed leaders of heartland grassroots

organisations. Yet, patronage politics are not

exceptional to any political system, and they

are definitely not intrinsic to Asian systems,

as Barr and Skrbis remark in an offensive

Eurocentric aside (p. 260). They only signify

‘corruption’ if we take Weber’s heuristic ideal

type of an impersonal bureaucracy as a

normative ideal. It would have been more

productive if Barr and Skrbis had exposed, as

Mills did for post-War America, elite

power across state and semi-privatised cor-

porate institutions in today’s globalising

Singapore.

More interestingly, Barr and Skrbis discuss

state campaigns to promote the Mandarin

language as facilitating discrimination in a

Chinese-dominated economy, and survey the

education system as producing unequal out-

comes for the minorities. Their analysis of the

kindergarten system, dominated by secular

kindergartens run by the ruling party,

suggests that it has excluded Muslim Malays

because of their cultural and religious pre-

ferences and, therefore, deprived them of the

cultural capital to succeed in school in the

later years. However, Barr and Skrbis do not

discuss why the Malays make such a choice

compared with other minorities and the

majority Chinese, who have chosen to adapt

their cultural and religious preferences to the

education system. Their mention of discri-

mination against headscarf-wearing Malay

women is too brief and anecdotal. There is

no denying the persistence of institutional

racism in Singapore that should be studied

and criticised, as Bourdieu did for contem-

porary France. However, Barr and Skrbis

argue that the institutional processes and

outcomes represent Malays and Indians being

shanghaied into an insidious incomplete

assimilation ensuring their minority status.

This is provocative and exceeds academic

indulgence of the creative interpretation of

facts. Unsavoury pictures, such as one of the

national flag draped along with laundry

outside public housing apartments, reinforce

the biased tone of the book. Not surprisingly,

the book has already caught the eye of the

dissident fringe, claiming academic validation

of their conspiracy theories.

References:

Bourdieu, P. 1996 [1989]. The state nobility:Elite schools in the field of power, translated byLauretta C. Clough. Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press.Mills, C. W. 1959. The power elite. New York:Oxford University Press.

Cham Muslims of the Mekong delta: Place

and mobility in the cosmopolitan periphery,

by Philip Taylor. Asian Studies Association of

Australia Southeast Asia Publications Series,

Asian Studies Association of Australia in

association with NUS Press and NIAS

Press, 2007, xvþ 313pp., maps, tables, figures,

Book Reviews 185

endnotes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-87-

7694-009-6 (paperback).

ERIK HARMS


Yale University

� 2010 Erik Harms

This bold, extremely necessary and clearly

written book offers readers two things at once.

For academics interested in learning more

about an understudied population in Viet-

nam, it offers a solid, in-depth ethnography of

the Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta, as

well as an introduction to the specialised

literature on the subject. For critical-thinking

human beings interested in how ethnogra-

phies might contribute to policy debates, the

book offers a sustained challenge to the top-

down and patently ethnocentric state planning

and development policies promoted by both

the ethnic Vietnamese (kinh) majority popu-

lation and many foreign development agen-

cies. The author describes how state planners

largely based in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi

have misunderstood and misrepresented the

approximately 13,000 Cham Muslims of

Vietnam’s Mekong delta as a remote and

intensely localised marginal community ex-

cluded from modernity. Shifting the centre of

analysis to Cham perspectives, as the author so

carefully does in this richly peopled ethno-

graphy full of Cham voices, provides a

dramatically different assessment. The Cham,

Taylor shows, are cosmopolitan, multilingual,

engaged in long-distance trade, and exhibit a

much more dynamic history of movement

and translocal interaction than previously

known. Much of this can be attributed to

Islam, which, according to the author, ‘lifts

people out of such narrowly conceived

collectivities as the ethnic group, village or

the nation, connecting them to a global

community, the umma’ (p. 8).

The text itself is refreshingly straightfor-

ward, allowing the voices of Cham infor-

mants to guide the presentation of such

classic ethnographic topics as origin narra-

tives, religion and economic life. It is

precisely this ‘classic’ ethnographic form that

reveals potent insights about Cham forms of

modernity, and the text makes the infor-

mants, rather than the author, the centre of

attention. Based on interviews and data

collected in eight field visits over the course

of six years, the work is filled with telling

interviews, and the focus always returns to

the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of the

Cham themselves. While the ethnography in

some ways looks and reads like a classic

‘village study’, it reveals a multi-sited, trans-

local world that challenges the notion of the

Cham as fixed in space at every turn.

Revisiting common assumptions about Cham

origins, readers learn how Cham informants

not only assert commonly assumed connec-

tions with Champa and Cham communities

on Vietnam’s central coast, but also cite

origins in Malaysia, Thailand, Angkor, and

even places as far afield as Java and

Minangkabau. Taylor further describes the

ways in which Islam, which the Vietnamese

state seems to fear as a threat, provides an

idiom of universalism that unites the diverse

members of the community.

The straightforward, accessible ethno-

graphic prose reveals a complex world of

movement and cosmopolitanism, and the

author convincingly shows how the apparent

spatial fixity of the Cham both enables and

emerges from translocal movement. Instead of

static views of culture or place, readers learn

how locality is actually forged through his-

tories of movement and a mutually constitu-

tive conjunction of ‘places in motion’ and

‘culture in process’ (p. 187). Like a market-

place, which literally becomes a place precisely

because it engages the market and channels the

movement of goods, Cham lives show how

localities are sustained by those who move

around trading and how this movement is

itself made possible by distinctly local features

of the Cham lifestyle, including matrilocal

residence patterns (which allow men to roam


about for extended periods), and extensive

knowledge of boats forged in conjunction with

their riverside settlements, as well as the

cosmopolitan outlook of Islam, which helps

them transcend rigid ethnic classifications and

static origin narratives to link with the wider

world. ‘As such’, Taylor explains, ‘earning a

living from extra-local trade is not a departure

from but an extension of local orientations

and aptitudes’ (p. 202).

Most importantly, the book shows how the

Cham have been subjected to the misguided

ethnocentrism of development planners who,

despite their ambitions to ‘develop’ the

region, clearly do more harm than good.

The work provides an extended and tren-

chant critique of centralised state planners,

offering what the author calls ‘a rude dose of

ethnographic counter-evidence from the na-

tion’s periphery’ (p. 186). Taylor explains,

without mincing words, that ‘it is absurd to

view the Cham through the habitually

distorting label of minority ethnicity as a

people in need of uplifting by representatives

of the ethnic majority group whose own

cultural versatility may be considerably less

than that of the average Cham’ (p. 268). In

fact, many of the projects designed to

‘develop’ the Mekong Delta have proved

detrimental to Cham livelihoods. In particu-

lar, state policies designed to open up the

region to the market economy have cut into

Cham market niches and oversaturated the

region with outside market goods that

undermine markets for traditional Cham

weaving. Most poignantly, Taylor shows

how Cham travelling salesmen, who once

made a market niche out of inaccessible

regions, have been pushed out of the market

by ethnic kinh development policies.

Some readers might challenge certain

apparently functionalist assertions about

what Islam ‘does’ for the Cham Muslims.

For example, Taylor describes Islam as a kind

of instrumental choice when he claims that

the ‘promotion of identity in Islam can be

seen as a form of simplification: solving the

problem of too much diversity’ (p. 81). While

the notion that Islam is about ‘solving

problems’ seems stretched at times, such

claims must be read in light of the book’s

larger purpose, which is to provide a counter-

point to those who might paint religious faith

as backward behaviour in need of rectifica-

tion or modernisation. Furthermore, scholars

hoping for a detailed study of Islamic practice

in this area might be disappointed, because

the book is not really about Islam as religious

practice so much as an argument about the

role Islam plays in structuring social organi-

sation and framing identity. ‘Islam’, the

author explains, ‘is the single most important

focus for organizing space and time, structur-

ing the shape of their settlements and setting

the pulse for local time’ (p. 67). Yet this

approach ultimately resonates with the key

project coursing throughout the book: to show

that Cham social organisation is indeed viable

and highly adapted to the modern world. As

Taylor asserts, Cham social life and cultural

practices are not at odds with development

and marketisation but ‘might be superior

adaptations to doing business in this part of

the world’ (p. 219). Given the pace of

development in Vietnam, and the deep ethnic

chauvinism detailed in this book, one certainly

hopes that Vietnamese planners do take the

central message to heart. The book will be a

welcome addition to the study of Cham

Muslims, and to the developing literature on

the multi-ethnic, religiously diverse regions of

Vietnam’s south. Its greatest impact, however,

would surely come by making it required

reading for anyone, Vietnamese or otherwise,

involved in the purported development of the

Mekong delta.

Ethnography as commentary: Writing from

the virtual archive, by Johannes Fabian.

Duke University Press, Durham & London,

2008, 140pp., endnotes, bibliography, index.

ISBN 978-0-8223-4283-0 (paperback).

Book Reviews 187

TOBIAS HECHT

[email protected]

Claremont, California, USA

� 2010 Tobias Hecht

The long revolution against ethnographic

authority may have resulted in our knowing

less of the resources and field techniques of

the ethnographer suckled on Derrida and

Foucault than we do of our ancestors who

purported to be scientists. The new ethno-

graphy at times seems to totter between navel

gazing and the disembodied body. People are

ever scarcer in anthropology.

Ethnography as commentary: Writing from

the virtual archive does something very rare,

reminding us where anthropology’s revolution

might have taken us had it not become so

sober in its dissent. This book, by turns simple

and illuminating, revolves around a conversa-

tion the author had more than three decades

ago in the city of Lubumbashi, in modern-day

Democratic Republic of Congo. The author

asked a provider of health and protection to

perform a ritual of security for his home in this

city where break-ins, many of them com-

mitted in the houses of ex-pats, were frequent.

Fabian observed the performance of the ritual

and had a long conversation the following day

with Kahenga, who had provided the service.

It is this, the two men’s conversation, that is

the subject of Fabian’s book.

What then is ‘commentary’? It is made up of

many comments, as Fabian puts it. What is

done with those comments is critical. They are

to be placed in a virtual archive for ethno-

graphic texts (so often the invisible stepping

stones to the ethnographies themselves), allow-

ing access to anyone interested, including the

people observed and interviewed; but which

ethnographic texts? Fabian offers as an exam-

ple a long interview transcribed in the original

language and translated into English, the text

around which the book revolves. This text is

juxtaposed with an extended analytic, historical

and introspective text. The virtual mode of

commentary, he emphasises, is fundamental,

both because it allows for the unregulated

participation of readers and writers and

because it allows for the extensive presentation

of the ethnographic material, something dis-

couraged by traditional publishers. Fabian

makes the point that dialogical and herme-

neutic approaches (and others presumably) to

ethnography have the limitation of being able

to present pieces of dialogue and text while not

presenting the text itself.

These practical advantages [of com-mentary] are by no means onlypractical. They also have theoreticalsignificance: the possibility of a formof ethnography that is not predi-cated on the absence of its object or,to be more precise, on the objectbeing strictly descriptive or predo-minately expository, manages towithhold from . . . reader the eventsand documents on which it mustnevertheless ground its authority.When I propose commentary as analternative, this should not be mis-understood as just another versionof recent calls . . . for ‘giving voice’to our sources. (p. 10)

Unpretentiously written, the book takes

readers through the ritual itself, the work of

Kahenga (the provider of protection), and his

cultural and intellectual worlds. The work is

methodical, to say the least, alerting us to

such details as the brand of the tape recorder

used, but far from pedestrian. The language is

simple and the ideas are unusual when they

are simple, and imaginative when they are

theoretical. All too often, anthropologists have

presented high theory built on snatches of a

conversation in a language they understand

poorly. Here the move is not away from high

theory but toward a sort of grounding in the

marrow of anthropology, in what people do and

say and how they themselves explain their

worlds.

One problem with the genre of commen-

tary, an unfortunate term for its lack of


bounce and its ease of conflation with

something far more superficial than it is, is

that virtual archives are only as reliable as are

human fastidiousness and mechanical coop-

eration. Ethnography as commentary (p. 3)

mentions the location of the archive.

The URL is not correct, though; at least it

is not complete. (The correct URL is http://

www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/aps/vol7/kahengatext.

html.) The online introduction to the text,

presumably with commentary, was not avail-

able at all the day I tried to access it.

Technical pitfalls aside, this is a book that

will be of interest for readers concerned with

how anthropology is written and how it

might be written. It is simple to doff the

colonial trappings of a now extinct form of

ethnography. More difficult is for ethnogra-

phers to acknowledge and comment on their

primary sources. How many anthropologists

will place the original transcriptions of the

interviews for anyone in the world to see if

they reveal (not in Fabian’s case, so far as I

know) that they are miserable speakers of the

language of the people they are studying or

have attributed to the informant ideas that

they themselves seemed far more interested

in? The confessional ring of the new ethno-

graphy is cheap in comparison.

Javanese performance on an Indonesian

stage: Contesting culture, embracing change,

by Barbara Hatley. Asian Studies Association

of Australia Southeast Asia Publication Series,

National University of Singapore Press,

Singapore, 2008, 336pp., glossary, endnotes,

bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-9971-69-410-

4 (paperback).

WARD KEELER


University of Texas

� 2010 Ward Keeler

Southeast Asia has long been famous for its

many and lively performing arts. Java has a

particularly rich array of theatrical genres,

and these art forms are fortunate to have

found in Barbara Hatley a devoted and

sensitive observer and analyst. Her book

constitutes a summary statement of all she

has seen over 30 years of attending perfor-

mances and speaking with performers, while

at the same time tracking the political and

social events that have brought periods of

apparent cultural stasis (Suharto’s New

Order) and sudden, sometimes frighteningly

unpredictable, change. As her title suggests,

Hatley wants to demonstrate how closely

linked what happens on Javanese stages and

what happens in Indonesian political and

social life are. The result is a fascinating and

impressive analysis, one of the most thought-

ful accounts of how and why performances

matter to people any- and everywhere.

Before taking up Hatley’s specific ideas

about Javanese theatre, it is worth noting just

how tough an assignment she set herself.

Getting about Central and East Java has

grown somewhat easier over the past 40

years, since her first stay in Java in the 1970s;

but attending performances in villages, often

far from the main thoroughfares on which

some modicum of public transport exists, is

still not easy, especially when performances

start around nine in the evening and last till

some time after midnight, or two or four in

the morning. Even in town, getting from

place to place can prove difficult (taxis not

being available in Yogyakarta till many years

after Hatley’s first stays in the region). Then

there are the linguistic challenges. Hatley has

had to master both Javanese and Indonesian

in order to follow performances in both

languages, and to understand them as

spoken, often in highly stylised ways, through

miserable sound equipment amid what is

often a terrible din. Add in rivalries among

competing performers and troupes, monsoon

rains and government suspicions, and Hat-

ley’s determination alone arouses awe.

So, too, does her sensitivity to competing

conceptions of political and social life as they

Book Reviews 189

http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html



show up in various renderings of well-known

stories. Her third chapter compares various

enactments of historical tales from Java’s

conflict-filled past. It represents a model

application of redaction criticism to a genre,

ketoprak, rarely granted so much respectful

attention. Hatley points out how emphasising

one side or the other in a famous fight over

succession to the throne in Central Java, and

choosing which historical figures to glorify

and which to mock, places contrasting glosses

on familiar (and so, inalterable) events. In

this way, she shows how plastic history is in

the hands of performance troupes and thus

its usefulness in presenting competing per-

spectives on regional relations, political styles

and personal comportment, even when

historical tales are mounted by the relatively

low-brow, ‘little people’s’ genre of ketoprak.

More sophisticated genres, which are

much more clearly modelled after Western

forms, have depended upon highly educated,

often university-affiliated people, both for

performers and spectators. Starting in the

1970s, as Hatley shows, middle-class practi-

tioners responded to the increasingly heavy

hand of Suharto’s regime in conflicted ways,

struggling to find ways both to dramatise

their critique of a corrupt and repressive

government and, at the same time, to make

their performances effective and popular

among those ‘little people’ who were most

vulnerable to the authorities’ arbitrary and

exploitative ways. Was this best accomplished

through stinging, scripted political satire? Or

better through more familiar, down-home

practices derived from ketoprak? As many a

progressive-minded entertainer elsewhere has

discovered, consciousness-raising and enter-

tainment do not combine easily, and Indo-

nesian practitioners followed the same

contradictory impulses, to join the little

people in their everyday lives, to speak with

them, to them, for them, as others have done,

often ending up frustrated, or weary, or

maybe just a bit bored. Then again, suddenly

successful, immensely popular promoters of a

new ‘Muslim theatre’ genre moved quickly

away from a form they had created, too: no

genre in Java seems to resolve tensions among

conflicting aims and expectations in a way

that assures its longevity.

Still, tottering dictatorships often stoke

creative fires and Suharto’s New Order

certainly did so among Javanese theatre

people in the 1990s. Hatley describes the

thrills enjoyed by all as performers grew

increasingly bold in their critiques, as often

hilarious as serious, although in both cases

risky, of the aging leader and his regime; but

the age of reform following the New Order’s

fall brought only conflict and questions,

including what performers could use to

sustain their audiences’ attention once their

common enemy was gone. Javanese court

culture, much valued by the Suharto autho-

rities, now smelled musty at best, the

fountainhead of oppression and corruption

at worst. Optimistically, Hatley finds sugges-

tions in the first years of the current decade of

a new, more egalitarian strand in popular

performances, whether of variant forms of

ketoprak or other genres, such as the wildly

successful (if to this conservative listener

unpalatable) mixing of Western electronic

instruments with Javanese gamelan plus

dancing and repartee called campursari.

Hatley ends her history with an intriguing

account of how female performers have fared

since the 1970s, one that points up many of the

complexities of theatrical innovation over

those years. Improvised performances of

stories people know well allow the people on

stage, including women, to exercise their

agency in ways artists bound by a script can

only envy; but such ‘old-fashioned’ ketoprak

lost both prestige and audiences in the 1980s

and 1990s, having to yield to elaborate, and

scripted, performances controlled entirely by

men. At the same time, increasingly eroticised

media made attractive, young, female perfor-

mers stars in every genre. The question, not

unique to Javanese popular culture, is whether

women who empower themselves by virtue of


their apparent inclination towards vice are

advancing feminist causes or setting them

back. Hatley finds, nevertheless, that some

experienced female performers have found

original ways to subvert both gender and

prestige hierarchies.

In the great array of material Hatley relates

about troupes, stars, stories, performances,

and trends, she shows that there is a basic

struggle going on for the soul of ketoprak and

other Javanese performing arts. Will the

intimacy and local relevance of live theatre,

especially unscripted theatre performed in

smaller venues, withstand the competition

posed by large-scale, glitzy, commercialised

performances that enjoy the clout of nation-

ally promoted stars and extravagant produc-

tion values? Hatley sees in responses to the

2006 earthquake in the area south of the city

of Yogyakarta evidence that it will. We will

probably have to wait, however, for further

word from this extraordinarily knowledge-

able, well-connected and above all generous

observer of the Javanese performing arts to

know for sure.

Buddhism and postmodern imaginings in

Thailand: The religiosity of urban space,

by James Taylor. Ashgate, Farnham and

Burlington, 2008, 224pp., bibliography, in-

dex. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6247-1 (hardback).

PATTANA KITIARSA

Southeast Asian Studies Programme


� 2010 Pattana Kitiarsa

This book presents a significant rethinking of

the ever-changing landscapes of Thai metro-

polis Buddhism. It can be read both as an in-

depth analysis of new Buddhism-based urban

religiosity and as a thought-provoking post-

modern anthropological discussion of the

religiosity of urban space. Following the Asian

economic crisis in mid 1997, and situating his

fieldwork in contemporary Thailand’s increas-

ingly complex postmodern spatial contexts,

anthropologist James Taylor chooses to study

what he describes as ‘new Thai religiosity’ or

‘the religiosity of urban spaces’ (p. 1). These

include a wide range of religious occurrences,

such as a new religious movement of Wat Phra

Thammakai; a visual kitsch and carnivalesque

of the superman Buddha statue at Wat Sanam

Chan; a contesting cyber-Buddhism and its

online virtuosity, and the state’s concern over

the free-floating charisma of forest monks in

north and north-eastern regions of the coun-

try.

This book also contributes to a growing

scholarship of Buddhist studies in Thailand

and other Theravadin worlds of South and

Southeast Asian countries. Like some pre-

vious works on new religiosity/Buddhism in

Thailand by Alan Klima (2002), Peter Jackson

(1999), and Rosalind Morris (2000), Taylor

attempts to break away from studying chan-

ging Buddhist living traditions through the

lenses of conventional approaches (notably,

Weberian, structural-functionalist, and some

other modernist schools of thought). These

scholarly efforts have found their timely

theoretical refuge in emergent postmodernist

thought and its style, articulating, fashioning,

and reading the new urban religiosity

through signs and representations. Taylor

insists that ‘the attempt to make sense of the

religiosity of urban space requires generating

new ways of thinking religion and opening

possibilities that are latent in thought and

action’ (p. 19).

Seeking to capture the ‘newness’ of Thai

Buddhism as the religiosity of urban space is

deemed very important in this book. Taylor

argues that the resurgence of new religiosity

and sacred space emerges within post-eco-

nomic crisis Thailand, where ‘the whole Thai

psyche and national confidence was so

severely shaken and uprooted’ (p. 4). He

strongly believes that such proliferation of

new urban religiosity requires ‘a new way of

thinking’ (pp. 2, 19). He looks to a

comprehensive selection of postmodernist

Book Reviews 191

works and approaches set forth by leading

scholars, like Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudril-

lard, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze,

Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Henri

Lefebvre. For Taylor, a postmodern stance

‘permits contradiction and paradox to sit side

by side’ and ‘allows religiosity contextualised

by cultural re-enchantment, de-secularisa-

tion, and post-traditionalism, to become

more culturally visible and even more

relevant rather than remain in a more

marginal position in modernity’ (p. 2). He

also benefits from his postmodern standpoint

in defining his units of studies as ‘varieties of

cultural forms and religious transgressions

that constitute contemporary Thai Bud-

dhism, as articulated by its actors’ (p. 20).

This book commands both thought-pro-

voking and challenging qualities. However,

identifying certain religious practices as ‘the

new urban religiosity of the Thai post-

metropolis’ (p. 193) is rather problematic. It

opens up questions such as: how new is such

a new urban religiosity, what are the criteria

to distinguish between the new and the old,

are they historically valid, and why is ‘new-

ness’ deemed so important? Although Taylor

makes it clear that this book is not a historical

project and continuity is not his primary

concern, readers might still question him

regarding some rather thin ethnographic

content and historical depth. In addition,

postmodern tropes are applied too inten-

sively in places. An intensive application of

postmodern vocabularies and jargon tends to

diminish individual actors’ local agency and

voice. Notwithstanding this, no one can

question Taylor’s authority on the literature

of postmodernist thinking. He is well versed

in postmodernist language and well equipped

with its ammunition, and he has made

effective use of these.

The book lacks a consistent system of

transliteration and transcription of Thai

language terminologies. It does not carry a

section called ‘Notes on Transliteration’.

There is no explanation pertinent to the

principles of how Thai language words and

expressions are romanised anywhere in the

book. Throughout the chapters, awkward and

improper English/Thai or Thai/English trans-

lations are often spotted, such as ‘monastery

inside the city’ (wat yuu nai meuang) (p. 20)

should be wat nai meuang. In the Thai

context, the binary category of monasteries

should be wat ban vs. wat pa (village vs.

forest monastery) and wat ban nok vs. wat

nai meuang (rural/countryside vs. urban

monastery). Welaa pen-neung pen-thorng (p.

24) and krung-thai (p. 197) are misspelt. The

Thai translation of ‘a good western man’ as

khon dii farang puu-chai (p. 197) is quite

awkward. The meaning of ‘ordinary’ (phra

nok: outside) (p. 47) does not make sense, or

is rather colloquial. The use of Khanet

(Ganesha) (p.80) should be Phra Phikhanet.

In many places, the use of Thai terms in

parentheses is redundant and may confuse

non-Thai readers.

Nonetheless, Taylor’s book offers a sub-

stantial contribution to the studies of emer-

ging urban religious phenomena. He

connects the imagined, the real, and the

hyper-real religiosity to the spaces of urban,

cosmopolitan, and ‘glocal’ social life. He has

shown readers that urban space has increas-

ingly become the postmodern backdrop of

people’s religious creativity and meaningful

experience. He suggests that selective traces

and remnants of religious kitsch in city spaces

have ‘stretched our imaginings and sensibil-

ities in regard to forms and varieties of

religious experience’ (p. 204). This book

must be counted as a pioneering volume in

the postmodern studies of Theravada Bud-

dhism, as much as a notable contribution to

anthropology/sociology of post-metropolis

religion. As such, it will interest students

and scholars across disciplines and area

studies, such as cultural anthropology, re-

ligious studies, sociology of religion, and

Southeast Asian studies.


References:

Jackson, P. 1999. Royal spirits, Chinese gods, andmagic monks: Thailand’s boom-time religions ofprosperity. South East Asia Research 7(3): 245–320.Klima, A. 2002. The funeral casino: Meditation,massacre, and exchange with the dead in Thai-land. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Morris, R. 2000. In the place of origins:Modernity and its mediums in northern Thai-land. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rivers and resilience: Aboriginal people on

Sydney’s Georges River, by Heather Goodall

and Allison Cadzow. University of New South

Wales Press, Sydney, 2009, xii þ 327pp.,

photographs, endnotes, bibliography, index.

ISBN: 978-1-92141-074-1 (paperback).

BLAZE KWAYMULLINA

School of Indigenous Studies

University of Western Australia

� 2010 Blaze Kwaymullina

It was with keen interest that I received Heather

Goodall and Allison Cadzow’s Rivers of resi-

lience to review. I was already familiar with

Goodall’s work and had found her to be an

engaging writer who skilfully navigates the

complex sensitivities involved in Australian

Aboriginal history. I also knew her work tended

strongly to position Aboriginal voices in her

writing; so I was interested to see how these

voices would speak in Rivers and resilience and

how she would frame and navigate their stories

as an historian. I also felt some connection to

the book because it was about a river. I come

from freshwater people, too: the Palkyu people

of the Eastern Pilbara in Western Australia.

Knowing the complexities and importance of

freshwater to my own people, I was curious to

hear other people’s stories of water.

Upon opening the book the first thing that

struck me was its scope. This is a big story

woven together by hundreds of smaller ones.

Snapshots of individual life stories are framed

by photographic and archival sources dealing

with the history of Sydney’s Georges River

across an ambitious sweep of time. Given the

book’s size, my original plan was to read one

piece at a time; but, instead, I became engrossed

in the complex story it presents and read it from

start to finish in one sitting. Goodall and

Cadzow hold the reader’s interest by striking a

good balance between a broad descriptive

history and engaging personal stories.

This book is an important and critical

contribution for a number of key reasons. It

shows how strongly history and identity are tied

to place, and that an historical focus on ‘patches

of land inside any one set of fences’ (p. 8) can

obscure the more complex ways Aboriginal

people move through, and relate to, the

environment. In fact, this is one of the many

strengths of Rivers and resilience: it embraces a

complex historiography and connects a range

of relationships in telling the story.

The breadth of time covered in Rivers and

resilience is significant, as it follows Aboriginal

stories of the Georges River before colonisa-

tion, all the way through to the modern era.

Within this history are the complex experi-

ences and relationships Aboriginal people had

with colonisers, and the story of their

struggles, triumphs and tragedies as they

fought to retain their lands, identities and

basic human rights.

All of this book is interesting, but the way it

connects past colonisation to the present lives

of Aboriginal communities in Sydney is of

particular note. This temporal sweep reveals

sets of rich and complex stories in which the

realities of the past are intrinsically interwoven

in the present. We see that the cityscape has

not wiped away the power of the river and the

personality of a living landscape; it has only

obscured it by weaving a colonial story that

sits on top, anchored in built structures.

Although this story is framed by the

traumas of colonisation, it contains wonder-

ful humour and agency, which speaks of the

triumph of the human spirit in the face of

Book Reviews 193

overwhelming adversity. Though, at times,

some of the stories are tear-provoking, at

heart Rivers and resilience is a story of hope. It

strongly focuses on Aboriginal agency, on

clever, innovative thinkers and political

movers who are actively engaged in trying

to transform the colonial structures being laid

upon them. As Goodall and Cadzow write:

This process of building a new lifein the spaces in between settlementhas been little understood. In thisearly period we can find only tracesand hints of Aboriginal life, scat-tered through the records likebroken shells in a midden. Theycan only suggest rich tensions, thelaughter, the plans and the storieswhich might have accompanied thegathering and eating of oysters andmussels whose remains were leftbehind. (p. 55)

This is a story that informs all Australians. It

deals with our shared past and helps us

understand the interconnections between land,

identity and what it means to be human. The

stories of Rivers and resilience will remain with

me, and it has made its way on to my shelf as an

excellent reference text. The book is ideal for

secondary and tertiary students; its engaging

narrative makes for an easy read and I plan to

use it in my own teaching. The last words here

belong to the Tharawal Land Council:

Aboriginal significance gives anunderstanding of our past; enrichesour present and continues to be ofimportance to our future . . . theevidence of the manifestations ofAboriginal people’s relationshipwith our country is displayed inabundance throughout the valleysand ridges of the landscape. EachAboriginal site has its place; everyAboriginal place has its story inthe life of an Aboriginal family.Country is alive with stories.(p. 288)

Black politics: Inside the complexity of

Aboriginal political culture, by Sarah Mad-

dison. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2009,

xliiþ 294pp., foreword, abbreviations, acro-

nyms, endnotes, bibliography, index. ISBN:

978-1-74175-698-2 (paperback).

TESS LEA

School for Social and Policy Research

Charles Darwin University

� 2010 Tess Lea

The last few years in Australian Indigenous

affairs have been of such intense dynamism

and political flurry that many commentators

have been left floundering. Sarah Maddison’s

latest work offers a confident moral compass.

Beginning with a large brush stroke descrip-

tion of Australian settlement, Black politics

takes us through the history of key Indigen-

ous policy developments through to the

present day. Organised around documentary

analysis and interviews with thirty Indigen-

ous leaders (predominantly people who have

attained senior roles in different organisa-

tions, together with a smaller number of

people who have attained cultural leadership

outside recognised institutional bounds), it is

a mixture of polemic and history, policy

analysis and cultural critique, of the kind not

often found in contemporary commentary on

Aboriginal affairs.

With no pretence at being an anthropol-

ogist, Maddison does not set out to offer an

ethnographic account of black politics. Her

writing and that of her informants is set at a

distance from the immediacies of everyday

life structures of Indigenous groups across

the continent. This leads to some simplifica-

tions. For instance, she does not question the

caricature of anthropologists that some of her

Indigenous interlocutors supply, which

makes anthropology unique among all dis-

ciplines of knowledge in creating an image of

the ‘real’ Aborigine as the neo-hunter-gath-

erers in northern and remote Australia rather

than the urbanised sophisticate with angry


words from the south (p. 107). The novelty of

Black politics lies in its reassertion of an

unapologetic left politics that remains sure of

its ground; an ideological certainty that

comes as something of a relief in the

bewildered debates that currently character-

ise Australian anthropological forays into

matters of black policy and politics. For

Maddison, Indigenous Australia may be

diversely populated but it is united in its

oppositional stance to the dominant and

dominating interests of the White economic

and cultural order. Where others might

question the alleged triumph of neo-liberal

ideologies in order to reflect the increased

complexity and range of market cultures and

the inchoate and unfixed nature of policy

and the state, Maddison returns us to the

certainties of a political and economic order

in which the federal government of the day

is in charge, Indigenous people are in

contest, hard won ‘rights’ must be defended,

needs are seldom well met; yet because

Indigenous people are also endlessly creative,

enterprising and resilient, they will prevail.

Slow recognition of this endurance within

the nation state is symbolised in the new

ritual of acknowledging the traditional own-

ers of the country that visitors are convening

on (p. 51).

Clearly written and vindicatory, Black

politics is ideally approached as a primer

on Indigenous politics and policy history. It

belongs to a humanistic tradition of writing

devoted to the exposure of discriminatory

tendencies and racist tenets in Australia’s

structures of governance and control of

resources, in the hope that through better

understanding, a more inclusive and enligh-

tened Australia will prevail. Greater under-

standing, Maddison hopes, will lead to

increased levels of trust and mutual recogni-

tion. By stepping through what has come to

be the collective cultural memory of key

historical moments and ideological turfs, the

book offers the student of Indigenous

politics and policy an accessible register,

leavened with the wry insights of Indigenous

commentators. It is thus a useful reference

point for understanding key themes (auton-

omy and dependency; sovereignty and

citizenship; tradition and development; in-

dividualism and collectivism; indigeneity

and hybridity; and so on), with each chapter

tackling a new set of binary norms and

showing how they can be thought about

without losing one’s sense of ‘the struggle’.

The referenced complexity of the sub-title is

that of the manifold issues that Aboriginal

people have to navigate and form positions

on. We learn of what people miss following

the loss of ATSIC (the Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Commission that was

disbanded as an election promise by former

Prime Minister John Howard); what the

struggles to develop a national treaty and

continuing debates about sovereignty are

about; and even the challenge of leadership

when younger people gain a profile before

they have grey hair.

In this manner, Black politics is perhaps

most useful for its gathering of the words

and positions of differently situated Indi-

genous protagonists. We learn of the

differences between the influential Indigen-

ous leader, Noel Pearson, and others (pp.

129–30); and, most refreshingly, of Maddi-

son’s direct confrontation with the first

challenge laid at the feet of any non-

Indigenous writer who tackles race relations

in Australia: justify your right to speak. The

Foreword and Introduction are a delight.

Maddison describes her naivety as a young

woman who knew Indigenous Australia

through sepia photos in school texts of

tribal men and women from a long ago era;

and the shock of discovering contemporary

racism within the inner city of her early

youth centre experiences. With this growing

awareness came increasing levels of guilt,

which she loaded onto an older Aboriginal

woman, whose sage advice, ‘don’t be guilty,

just be angry’, Maddison clearly took to

heart. The passion of her retained rage seeps

Book Reviews 195

through each chapter. While there is much

that is familiar in Maddison’s account, a

refusal to acquiesce to complacent readings

of the current state of Australian race relations

animates the pages. But this is a description

Maddison might reject. She rebukes the many

people who told her she was brave for setting

out, as a White woman, to tackle such a tricky

topic as black politics with the implied

rejoinder: is it braver than living black in a

still racist country?

Unusually, Maddison also describes the

people who declined involvement in her

project. Marcia Langton did not want to be

interviewed and Noel Pearson politely ig-

nored the repeated requests. She does not shy

away from these contests but, showing the

same nerve that propelled the book, exploits

them, getting in a dig first at Langton by

revealing that her offence had been to

describe this powerful public intellectual with

the lesser tag of ‘activist’; and later asserting

that her work does what Pearson’s writings

fail to achieve in showing that the most

important political relationships between

Aboriginal people are with each other, rather

than with the state. Where Pearson ‘is

criticised by other Aboriginal leaders and

activists . . . because his primary political

focus is non-Aboriginal politicians in Can-

berra’ (p. xxxvi), Maddison sets out to look

the other way, to ‘the dynamics between

Aboriginal leaders and activists’ (p. xxxvi).

To the extent she achieves this goal, the book

is a valuable dossier of the views of key

players in the present historical period in

Australian race relations. The reader looking

for a well-theorised problematisation of the

cultural or historical blind spots within

sympathetic conventions for understanding

the plight of Aboriginal people in Australia

will be disappointed. Those in search of a

feisty rendition of key moments in black-

white affairs as these are understood and

recorded in seminal reports, parliamentary

debates, media releases and official policies

will be amply rewarded.

Key concepts in ethnography, by Karen

O’Reilly. Key Concepts Series, Sage Publica-

tions, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi,

Singapore, 2009, 234pp. ISBN: 978-1-4129-

2865-6 (paperback).

JOZON LORENZANA



� 2010 Jozon Lorenzana

This reference book is an engaging introduc-

tion to key terms and approaches to the theory

and practice of ethnography. It is Karen

O’Reilly’s second book on this methodology

intended for students or beginners in ethno-

graphic fieldwork. In her first book, Ethno-

graphic methods (2005), O’Reilly covers the

phases of ethnographic research from thinking

about the project, through fieldwork, to

writing up the ethnography. Key concepts in

ethnography is broader in scope, and covers

topics and terms not included in Ethnographic

methods. More than a list of definitions, this

book ‘summarises a broad range of issues

related to ethnography; presents a compre-

hensive yet critical understanding of a con-

cept; and can be dipped into as required or

read in its entirety’ (pp. 1–2). Readers would

have immediate access to the basic and current

concepts of the methodology. The book’s

format, accessible language, and the author’s

ability to explain complex terms and debates

through examples provide a grounded, critical

and interesting introduction to ethnography.

Although this listing excludes some important

concepts, it still accomplishes its goal of giving

the reader an overview of the issues and

expectations in the practice of ethnography.

In her Introduction, O’Reilly tells us about

her academic background and orientation,

which inform her understanding of ethno-

graphy. She is a sociologist with a reflexive-

realist perspective, and has intellectual ties to

both social anthropology and human geo-

graphy. She has taught both qualitative and

quantitative methods to undergraduate and


postgraduate students from different social

science disciplines. This perspective allows

her to draw implicit comparisons between

ethnography and other qualitative and quan-

titative methods. As a reflexive and realist

ethnographer, O’Reilly thinks that ‘It is

crucial that we conduct ethnography reflex-

ively with constant awareness of our role in

the research enterprise. However, this does

not mean abandoning any sense that there is

a real world we wish to learn about, and

which our research participants live in,

experience, feel constrained by, and help

create’ (p. 2). The author’s inclinations and

experience are evident in the critical distance

she maintains while defining concepts, and

the insights and practical advice that are

woven into her discussions. O’Reilly is

respectful, yet critical, of traditional princi-

ples in ethnography as laid out by one of its

pioneers, Bronislaw Malinowski. She invokes

these principles, but also points out their

limitations and how current ethnography has

addressed them.

The book provides an overview of concepts

and cross-referencing between related terms.

Each entry begins with a succinct definition,

followed by an outline of the topics covered.

The discussion is divided into sections and,

for some concepts, additional subsections.

Related concepts are bracketed in text or set

in bold to alert the reader. The last section

contains a list of key texts, references and

examples for further reading. The author

does away with an index, and in its place is a

list of alternative terms for the concepts. The

absence of an index makes it difficult to trace

the authors and studies that she cites as

examples.

As a list of concepts in ethnography, it is

worth noting what O’Reilly includes and

excludes. The standard concepts of access,

participant observation, rapport and ethics

are present, as well as tricky issues and

practices such as reflexivity, fieldnotes, gen-

eralisation, time, sampling and asking ques-

tions. The author also gives the reader a

critical discussion of current approaches,

such as critical, feminist, postmodern, multi-

sited, mobile, virtual and visual ethnogra-

phies, and the use of computer software in

processing ethnographic data. Just to illus-

trate the currency of O’Reilly’s list, the entry

on postmodern ethnographies includes,

among others, topics such as dialogic ethno-

graphy, polyphonic or layered accounts, and

auto-ethnography. Moreover, new ap-

proaches like global, comparative virtual

ethnographies are covered under mobile/

multi-sited ethnographies. O’Reilly always

takes a critical perspective when defining

concepts and approaches by pointing out

their strengths and limitations. Finally, she

tackles problematic concepts or practices in

ethnography, such as the covert-overt con-

tinuum in participant observation, emic

versus etic analyses, and the tug between

distance and empathy (going ‘native’) in

one’s relations with the people being studied.

What is lacking, however, is a discussion

on ethnography as representation, especially

in relation to the ethics of writing about

people. By explaining how ethnography is a

representational practice, the author would

have increased the reader’s awareness of

ethnography’s potential to construct other-

ness. Another term that is surprisingly absent

is Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’, an

ethnographer’s goal of describing people’s

actions or behaviour in context. O’Reilly only

cites Geertz’s description of the Balinese

cockfight as ‘a charming example of an event’

under the concept, fieldnotes. A separate

discussion on thick description would have

made readers aware of Geertz’s contribution

to ethnography.

O’Reilly’s book gives a clear sense of what

good ethnography is about through classic

and contemporary examples. This is where

the author’s wealth of teaching and fieldwork

experience is much appreciated. In her

discussion of fieldnotes (p. 70), O’Reilly

explains not only the importance of this task

but also elaborates on how it could be done

Book Reviews 197

given various opportunities and constraints.

‘One of my students who was doing research

in night clubs sent himself texts on his mobile

phone as this was less conspicuous than

writing in a notebook’ (p. 72). In this

example, the author shows that one could

deploy creative strategies to accomplish a

crucial task in fieldwork (that is, recording

observations, impressions), while still adher-

ing to appropriate behaviour and approaches

in the field. Not only does she share an

insight from her own experience but also

makes an effort to share another scholar’s

view on the matter. Quoting Annette Lareau,

O’Reilly reminds us that: ‘‘‘Field work with-

out notes is destructive and useless’’ (1996,

219); it detracts from the validity and

competence of the project. Here Lareau is

reminding us, intentionally or not, that it is

in fact this balancing act of stranger and

insider, of taking part and writing about it,

that is the essential nature of ethnography’

(2009, 90).

This reference book gives a clear idea of

what to expect from ethnography as a set of

methods and approach to generating knowl-

edge. In concepts like analysis, asking ques-

tions, participant observation, and rapport,

O’Reilly emphasises the cumulative nature of

data gathering and the evolving nature

(iterative-inductive) of the research’s design

in ethnography. She reminds us that time is

an essential component in the process of

ethnography, as researchers need time to

build relations with informants, to ascertain

patterns and changes in their actions and to

put them in context and perspective. Nancy

Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist from the

University of California-Berkeley who writes

a blurb for the book, notes O’Reilly’s ability

to put in writing the ‘hard to describe,

intuitive practices or tricks of the ethno-

graphic trade’. Scheper-Hughes also goes

as far as saying that this book is an

‘indispensable tool’, even for seasoned

anthropologists.

Despite some gaps in O’Reilly’s guide,

reading this book left me, a graduate student,

better informed and wanting to know more

about this methodology. Her list of key texts,

references and examples would surely be a

good lead.

References:

Lareau, A. 1996. Common problems in fieldwork: A personal essay. In Journeys throughethnography, edited by A. Lareau and J. Shultz,195–236. Boulder, CO: Westview.O’Reilly, K. 2005. Ethnographic methods.London: Routledge.

Global warming and the political economy

of health: Emerging crises and systemic

solutions, by Hans Baer and Merrill Singer.

Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2009,

238pp., bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-1-

59874-8 (paperback). Available in Australia

from Footprint Books.

ANN McELROY


University at Buffalo, State University of New

York.

� 2010 Ann McElroy

This book, the first volume of Advances in

critical medical anthropology (Merrill Singer

and Pamela Erickson, editors), aims to

establish a ‘critical medical anthropology of

global warming’ (p. 13). Noting that few

medical anthropologists have studied climate

change and health, Baer and Singer propose a

multidisciplinary approach integrating criti-

cal medical anthropology, political ecology,

and greenhouse gas theory.

The Introduction provides the explicit

premise that ‘global warming ultimately is

rooted in the capitalist world system with its

orientation to ever-expanding production

and consumption’ (p. 7), depleting natural

resources and creating health disparities.


Chapter 1 covers political and scientific

controversies over the causes of climate

change, particularly anthropogenic activities.

Details on the role of military defence and

war linked to global warming are particularly

cogent. Chapter 2 demonstrates local and

regional impacts of global warming on land

use and settlement patterns. Chapter 3 relates

weather extremes to regional and global

conflicts associated with food and water

shortages and introduces the authors’ con-

cept of health as determined by ‘access to and

control over the basic . . . resources that

sustain and promote life’ (p. 71). Socio-

political barriers to resources lead to inequal-

ity persisting over time, and human biology,

environmental forces, and inequality become

key interfaces through which human history

becomes embodied, ‘literally written ‘‘under

the skin’’’ (p. 73).

The fourth chapter analyses health risks

associated with increasing temperatures, pol-

lutants, and environmental diseases. Chapter

5 covers waterborne and vectorborne infec-

tions, including those related to environ-

mental disasters. The sixth chapter, on

disease transmission, focuses on ‘the syn-

demic perspective’ that Singer has introduced

elsewhere, explaining that diseases do not

exist in isolation, but are often found as

‘multiple diseases anatomically, chemically,

psychologically, and behaviourally inter-

twined in the same individuals and same

populations’ (p. 134). Connections between

famine and HIV/AIDS in southern Africa are

an example. Incorporating environmental

factors, the authors coin the term ‘ecosyn-

demics’. Global warming contributes to

ecosyndemic emergence of the ‘big three

diseases’ of malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/

AIDS, as well as ‘neglected’ tropical diseases

such as trypanosomiasis (p. 147). An infor-

mative case study of Hurricane Katrina in the

US concludes the chapter.

Chapter 7 covers various climate regimes

and international agreements. Focusing on

mitigation strategies to ‘transcend’ global

warming, adaptation is dismissed as posing

‘the danger of political complacency, fatalism,

and even cynicism’ (p. 161). Known as critics

of adaptation theory, it is not surprising that

the authors juxtapose adaptation and mitiga-

tion. They support their critique by citing

Alexander Thompson, a political scientist,

who considers adaptation a vague term. This

approach discredits anthropological work on

human adaptability by Emilio Moran and

others.

The final chapter proposes democratic

ecososocialism to transcend climate change

through political and economic transforma-

tions. The goal is an ‘authentic program of

mitigation’ (p. 8). Transcending is never fully

defined, but the gist is that a socialist system

will reduce resource extraction, energy use,

and production and consumption of goods

linked to greenhouse gas emissions and

global warming.

This work has many strengths, including

the broad international scope, the history of

organisations, international agreements, and

climate justice movements, and assessments

of how Australia, China, and the US have

dealt with (or avoided) the issues. Informa-

tion on disease etiology and epidemiology is

quite thorough, and material on heat exhaus-

tion and stroke, allergens and asthma, and

mould in Chapter 4 is more detailed than one

finds in most sources.

Chapter 2 includes interesting cases of

Australian farmers facing drought, coastal

inhabitants in Thailand and elsewhere with

rising sea levels, and mountain dwellers

affected by melting glaciers. Since my re-

search has concentrated on Arctic popula-

tions, the section on Inuit foragers seemed

promising, but certain statements proved

flawed. The belief that polar bears, upon

which ‘Inuit have long relied’ (p. 78),

traditionally served as ‘important food re-

sources’ in the Arctic (p. 60; also quoted on

p. 66), is becoming a modern myth among

Book Reviews 199

wildlife activists. In fact, bear meat (unlike

seal, whale, caribou, and fish) was never

a staple for Inuit. High on the marine food

chain, bear biomass was small even in tradi-

tional times. Their tissues often contained

toxic levels of vitamin A, and hunting them

was hazardous. With costs outweighing

benefits, bears were hunted only opportunis-

tically, as documented in elders’ narratives:

‘People rarely set out to hunt polar bears . . .

There was no specialised bear-hunting equip-

ment’ (Bennett and Rowley 2004, 62).

There are similar distortions in statements

that high altitude natives migrating to low-

land areas have physiological difficulties in

cities due to their ‘large hearts and low heart

rates’ (p. 59) developed ontogenetically at

higher altitudes. No source is given for this

claim. Baer and Singer intend to show how

climate change affects Andean farmers, but

they may be misinterpreting reports that

migrants to lowland cities sometimes experi-

ence temporary pulmonary edema after

returning to high altitude (Moran 2006,

164–65).

Most of the book is clearly written, but a

tendency to introduce neologisms is proble-

matic. ‘Syndemics’ morph to ‘ecosyndemics’,

and then to ‘supersyndemics’ in ‘margin-

alised and oppressed populations’ (p. 145),

and interfacing factors become ‘mega-inter-

actions’ (p. 73). Similarly, applying new labels

to old concepts gives an illusion of origin-

ality. Many infections categorised as ‘diseases

of global warming’ in this book have been

known as ‘diseases of development’ for

decades. Category inflation is obvious in the

index, where ‘diseases of global warming’ has

42 sub- and sub-subentries, more than any

other term.

The index is poorly constructed. For

example, ‘virus’ is not listed, nor ‘influenza’,

even though several pages are devoted to

H1N1 and H5N1 in Chapter 5. One must

consult ‘diseases of global warming’ to find

influenza. The index needs more cross-

referencing. Only two entries occur for

Australia: Australian Anthropology Society,

and Australian Broadcasting Corporation,

clearly insufficient for scholarly use.

There are 14 spelling and grammatical

errors in the book, probably par for this

length, but some indicate hasty copyediting,

including two errors in quoted material

(pp. 46, 66) and two homonym substitutions

(‘particles in disease fuel’ and ‘study of duel

exposure’, p. 102). Arctic appears as ‘artic’

three times (pp. 62, 85).

This work is aimed more toward social

scientists, climate scientists, and concerned

citizens than toward students. Nevertheless,

medical anthropologists would find this a

valuable, albeit unconventional resource.

Undergraduate readers may need clarification

of disciplinary principles underlying subsis-

tence type comparisons and Marxist criti-

cism.

Most problematic, in my view, is the

ideological thrust of the final chapter, which

claims that survival of humanity depends on

transcendance of global capitalism but gives

little direct evidence that democratic ecoso-

cialism would slow the pace of climate

change. The environmental track record of

socialist-communist regimes is not encoura-

ging. The Russian Federation’s ‘ecological

footprint’ (human impact on environment)

in 2003 was half that of the US and two-

thirds that of Australia (see Table 3, p. 41).

Yet Russia, a major producer and exporter of

oil and natural gas, has a long history of

environmental degradation.

Baer and Singer encourage an ‘engaged

anthropology’ (p. 198) to research vulnerable

communities, climate justice movements,

and corporations and their leaders contribut-

ing to climate change. Such projects are

laudable, but without systematic evaluation

of energy costs, environmental sustainability,

and health trends in a range of political

reforms, one cannot determine whether

ecosocialism offers the best solutions to the

problems that this book so thoroughly

delineates.


References:

Bennett, J., and S. Rowley. 2004. Uqalurait: Anoral history of Nunavut. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Moran, E. F. 2000. Human adaptability: Anintroduction to ecological anthropology. Secondedition. Boulder: Westview Press.

Karl Marx, anthropologist, by Thomas C.

Patterson. Berg, Oxford and New York, 2009,

xiiiþ 222pp., chronology, notes, bibliogra-

phy, index. ISBN: 978-1-84520-511-9 (paper-

back).

SEAN MARTIN-IVERSON



� 2010 Sean Martin-Iverson

The discipline of anthropology is overdue for

a serious reappraisal of Marx. Patterson’s

Karl Marx, anthropologist may prompt some

anthropologists to give some thought to his

relevance for the discipline, but seems

unlikely to spark a more thorough engage-

ment with Marx’s social critique. As the title

makes clear, the book is focused on the

anthropological dimensions of Marx’s own

thought, although Patterson also aims to

‘consider what his legacy actually is or could

be to the issues of anthropological impor-

tance today’ (p. 3). However, those seeking a

more comprehensive account of Marxist

anthropology should look elsewhere (includ-

ing, for archaeology, Patterson’s 2003 work

Marx’s ghost). What Patterson does offer here

is a close reading of Marx’s own anthro-

pological writing, and a solid recapitulation

of some of Marx’s key ideas, along with an

argument for considering Marx’s historical

materialism as a form of anthropology.

Patterson identifies many affinities between

Marx’s historical materialism and anthropo-

logical modes of thought, in particular their

shared concern with a holistic, empirical and

contextual approach to human societies.

Nevertheless, in reading Karl Marx, anthro-

pologist, I was often struck by how distant

Marx’s historical materialism is from the

dominant modes of thought in contemporary

cultural anthropology. Patterson, a senior

American archaeologist, adopts an expansive

‘four fields’ approach to the boundaries of

anthropology; he is not claiming that Marx

was an ethnographer. Still, what Patterson

identifies as anthropological modes of thought

could equally be deployed to characterise

Marx as a historian, sociologist, economist

and, especially, as a political philosopher.

In the first two chapters, Patterson histori-

cally positions anthropology and Marx (re-

spectively) in the context of Enlightenment

thought. Patterson argues that both Marx

and anthropology sought to bring together

the humanities and sciences to establish a

holistic study of humanity, and he is quite

thorough in identifying their theoretical

lineages. Clearly, both Marx and anthropol-

ogy owe an intellectual debt to Enlight-

enment attempts to subject human society

to rational and critical analysis. Yet, for me,

these chapters highlight the pointlessness of

attempting to contain Marx’s thought within

current disciplinary boundaries.

Patterson makes a strong argument for

regarding Marx as a materialist, but not a rigid

determinist. Active and conscious engagement

with the social and material world is central to

Marx’s view of humanity, and this concept of

praxis features prominently in Patterson’s

presentation of Marx’s anthropology. As

Patterson puts it, ‘Marx interwove the corpor-

eal organization of human beings and their

sociality with the diversity of their social

relations as they engaged in practical activity

to transform the raw materials of the environ-

ments to satisfy needs and to create new ones’

(p. 63).

Chapter 3, ‘Human natural beings’, links

Marx’s materialism with evolutionary theory.

Patterson argues that Marx (and Engels) drew

on Darwinian evolutionary theory to develop

a view of human beings which was social and

Book Reviews 201

historical, yet also grounded in our biological

nature. Patterson devotes much of this

chapter to differentiating Marx’s view of

social and biological evolution from Social

Darwinism and other attempts to naturalise

cultural categories and social hierarchies. He

does have a somewhat problematic tendency

to simply subsume Engels’s more determi-

nistic schemas within Marx’s thought,

although he also points out some of the

tensions within this composite.

Chapter 4, ‘History, culture, and social

formation’, tackles the concepts of social

formation, mode of production, and the

application of Marx’s thought to pre-capital-

ist societies. However, the chapter is rather

thin for what many would expect to be the

heart of the book, dealing as it does with

social forms that are classically anthropolo-

gical objects of analysis. Patterson presents

Marx as being concerned with uncovering

and identifying the underlying structures of

such societies, while defending him from

accusations of linearity and reductionism.

Instead, Patterson argues that Marx’s materi-

alist approach allows for an analysis of the

historical development of social relations that

takes into account their diversity and ‘messi-

ness’ while still presenting coherent models.

In Chapter 5, ‘Capitalism and the anthro-

pology of the modern world’, Patterson offers

a competent summary of Marx’s key argu-

ments regarding the historical development

of capitalist social relations, and the parti-

cular relationship it establishes between

property and power. This is, of course, the

central theme of Marx’s own work, yet in

some ways the least anthropological. Marx

has a lot to offer anthropology in terms of

developing a social and historical under-

standing of capitalism, but Patterson does

not quite succeed in properly reconciling

them here. Still, he does offer a clear and

concise summary of Marx’s view on the

development of capitalism, and connects it to

Marx’s broader philosophical views on social

relations, politics, and human nature.

Chapter 6 concludes the book with a brief

look at the relevance of Marx for contempor-

ary anthropology. Unfortunately this is the

weakest chapter. While Patterson argues that

Marx could and should be used to develop an

‘anthropology of engagement’ (p. 159), he

shows little engagement with recent develop-

ments in social theory or social movements.

Despite his own considerable body of work on

the social history of the discipline, Patterson

does little here to identify or explore the

connections between Marx’s work and current

trends in anthropological theory or practice.

Instead, he presents a strangely ahistorical and

abstract view of what a contemporary Marxist

anthropology could be, which is greatly at

odds with his own and Marx’s concern with

concrete historical context.

In this book, Patterson is primarily looking

for anthropology in Marx, rather than exam-

ining the influence of Marx on anthropology.

He presents it as a polemical work, but it falls a

little flat in this regard. There is a real need for

a critical examination of anthropological

readings and misreadings of Marx, along the

lines of Crehan’s (2002) book on Gramsci and

anthropology, but Patterson only makes half-

hearted gestures in this direction. His attempt

to address the potential for a critical Marxist

anthropology is rather perfunctory.

The strength of this book is as a coherent

summary of Marx’s historical materialism,

presented as an empirical and holistic ap-

proach to the study of humans as social beings,

as conscious agents shaped by their material

conditions of existence. It is also useful in

drawing together Marx’s scattered writings on

more or less anthropological subjects, and in

pointing out some of what Marx has to offer to

anthropological thought. Patterson succeeds

in teasing out some of the more anthropolo-

gical elements in Marx’s writing, but his

argument that Marx should be considered an

anthropologist as such is ultimately unconvin-

cing; I cannot help but think that a more

fitting title would have been Karl Marx, social

scientist.


References:

Crehan, K. 2002. Gramsci, culture and anthro-pology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press.Patterson, T. C. 2003. Marx’s ghost: Conversa-tions with archaeologists. Oxford and New York:Berg.

The collectors of lost souls: Turning kuru

scientists into Whitemen, by Warwick An-

derson. The Johns Hopkins University Press,

Baltimore, 2008, 318pp., abbreviations, end-

notes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-0-

8018-9040-6 (hardback).

JADRAN MIMICA


University of Sydney

� 2010 Jadran Mimica

The author is an historian of medical and life

sciences. The book is a chronicle-styled

account of the discovery of and the biome-

dical research into kuru, an infectious,

degenerative disease of the central nervous

system and a devastating example of the class

of pathogens called ‘unconventional viruses’

or, more recently, prions. Kuru was endemic

to the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands

of Papua New Guinea. The disease had

plagued them for a better part of the

twentieth century, but from the early fifties

it began effectively to go into irreversible

decline because of various public health

measures introduced by the colonial admin-

istration in conjunction with biomedical and

anthropological research. These efforts had

culminated in 1976 in a Nobel Prize for

Medicine or Physiology being awarded to Dr

D. Carlton Gajdusek, an indefatigable Amer-

ican scientist whose dedication to biomedi-

cine was coterminous with his life-project,

namely a gargantuan pursuit of his own

greatness (amply documented in his jour-

nals). In the gallery of so many individuals

who were variously involved with kuru

research, Gajdusek is undoubtedly a central

character and Anderson has rightly used his

biographical trajectory (Chapter 2) as the

pivot of the entire account. Two other

researchers also have to be pointed out:

Vincent Zigas and Michael Alpers. Zigas

was a war refugee from Estonia and physician

recruited into the public health service in the

New Guinea territory. In 1956 he had sent the

very first kuru blood and brain specimens to

the Hall Institute in Melbourne, and subse-

quently unstintingly collaborated with Gaj-

dusek. Alpers, a South Australian medical

doctor, joined Gajdusek in working with the

Fore in the 1960s, and remained his close

collaborator and friend through thick and

thin, including through Gajdusek’s Icarian

fall from grace in 1997 (Conclusion).

The importance and value of the book

derive from Anderson’s meticulous archival

research and interviews with 27 individuals,

most of whom were involved directly or in

some way associated with the mainstream

research into kuru (pp. 281–82). Among

these, 11 were PNG nationals; Anderson

himself visited the Fore area and conducted

interviews with seven of them. For the Fore,

kuru was caused by malignant human action

and its social-cultural reality was the subject

of Shirley Lindebaum’s classic Kuru sorcery

(1979). Lindenbaum’s and Robert Glasse’s

contributions to kuru research, which con-

solidated the understanding of the role of

Fore cannibalism in the etiology of this

disease, is dealt with in Chapter 7. Yet as

Anderson’s charting of the decipherment of

the kuru pathogen within the parameters of

the Western biomedical understanding

clearly shows, this was a protracted process.

In 1955, Zigas’s first ‘provisional diagnosis’

‘suggested that kuru was an ‘‘acute hysteria in

an otherwise perfectly healthy woman’’’ (p.

27). Assessments of more kuru victims made

it apparent that this was an organic disease

whose specific causal-pathogenic status fru-

strated both the field and overseas laboratory

research (mainly in the USA and Australia),

Book Reviews 203

the latter greatly facilitated by the kuru

specimens siphoned by the indomitable Gaj-

dusek. He was perceived by Australian interest

parties as an ‘interloper’ and ‘intruder’ and

many attempts were made to keep him out of

New Guinea, but all in vain. In 1959, Hadlow,

a veterinary pathologist, pointed to the

similarities between the human kuru brains

and the ones of sheep and goats killed by

scrapie. This led Gajdusek into developing an

experimental laboratory program for investi-

gating the transmission of kuru which now

became comprehended as an instance of the

‘slow’, ‘latent’, ‘temperate’ and, for a good

measure, ‘unconventional viruses’, but the

actual identity of the supposed kuru virus

remained enigmatic. This changed with the

introduction of a molecular entity named

prion, by Stanley Pruisner, a neurologist who

also received a Nobel Prize in 1997 (Chapter

8). Prions are transmissible protein particles

some 100 times smaller than viruses. With

Pruisner’s bio-molecular ‘conjuring’ (p. 202),

the decipherment and framing of kuru within

the parameters of Western biomedical science

were completed. For this reviewer, the chart-

ing of the prion phase (Chapter 8) is the

highlight of the book as a whole.

For Anderson, the prime conceptual in-

vestment is in his framing of the kuru

research in terms of anthropological theories

of Melanesian big-manship and gift ex-

change, especially as amplified by Marilyn

Strathern’s formulations of ‘partible’ person

and the Melanesian notions of agency. These

are combined with stock-in-trade phrases

characteristic of a confluence of post-modern

science studies and post-colonial studies

currently dominating much of Anglophone

academic discourses. Despite Anderson’s

dense documentation of how human sub-

stance (e.g., real human brains, blood and

tissue samples, payments) that trafficked

among various researchers and international

laboratories generated indebtedness, favours,

relations, and identity, his use of the

discourses of exchange theory fundamentally

comes across as an ornamental facade (e.g.,

pp. 95–7, 103–06, 133–34, 150–57, 217). The

fact is that Anderson is neither a practitioner

nor an ethnographer of biomedical research.

His lack of an ethnographic experience of the

‘laboratory life’ (to echo the title of Latour’s

most credible work), even remotely compar-

able to Gajdusek’s bush laboratory in the

Fore life-world of the fifties and the sixties,

becomes most conspicuous in Chapter 4.

Here, the artificiality of the Strathernian

version of Melanesian exchange, whose

adequacy Anderson takes for granted, cli-

maxes in proportion to his fascination with

Fore cannibalism and Gajdusek’s own assim-

ilations of it. However, the latter had

witnessed it (pace Arens) and, to be sure, he

himself also performed a few autopsies.

Anderson did neither, although in order to

build up his ethnographic sensibilities, if just

vicariously, he might have spent some time in

morgues (especially in New Guinea) talking

to professional corpse handlers and embal-

mers. I am positive that the experience would

be quite invaluable if for no other reason than

that of monitoring his projections. These

would be far more useful for thinking about

the transmutation of a living corpse into a

‘laboratory thing’ than the anthropological

discourse on ‘partible persons’. For example,

‘the autopsy became the point at which

negotiations over transactions of things and

persons condensed and hardened. It was

around the warm corpse that a tournament

of value took place, reshaping relationships

and refashioning identities among and be-

tween the Fore and the investigators’ (p. 100).

Such discursive circumscriptions primarily

key into the current Western academic

sensibilities feeding moral rhetorical color-

aturas that abound in the discourses of

science, post-colonial, and cultural studies.

Regardless of the specificities of the actual

Fore context and all sorts of counterfinalities

ensuing from Gajdusek’s actions, his entire

enterprise as a bush scientist unduly becomes

a vehicle for this external domain and its


rhetorical self-fulfilment. In short, a chapter

needed the most in the way of the author’s

capacity for ethnographic self-projection is

the least successful. The romance of the

science/magic-sorcery metamorphosis (p.

109) and the oscillation ‘contact zone/trading

zone’ (p. 113) are in the service of the moral-

aesthetic self-gratification and the self-repro-

duction of the academic community which

practises post-colonial discourses of science.

It is precisely in this milieu that all the

participants like to imagine ‘things that

became persons and persons who might

become things’ (p. 115) Those who know

better the life-worlds on both sides of the

contact zone between New Guinea and the

postmodern/postcolonial academic self-sty-

ling will be able to get the best of Anderson’s

book without confusing its discursive edifice

with the actual accomplishments of his

historical research into kuru, its victims and

scientists.

Reference:

Lindenbaum, S. 1979. Kuru sorcery: Disease anddanger in the New Guinea Highlands. Palo Alto,California: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Gardening the world: Agency, identity, and

the ownership of water, by Veronica Strang.

Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford,

2009, 317pp., figures, tables, bibliography,

index. ISBN: 978-1-84545-606-1 (hardback).

EMILY O’GORMAN

History Program, Research School of Social

Sciences

The Australian National University

� 2010 Emily O’Gorman

As supplies dwindle, freshwater has gained in

momentum as a subject of study in the

humanities and social sciences in Australia

and throughout the world. Veronica Strang

makes a valuable contribution to this growing

body of work with Gardening the world:

Agency, identity, and the ownership of water.

This book explores some of the cultural

dimensions of people’s relationships with and

use of water, focusing on the Mitchell and

Brisbane River catchments, both located in

Queensland, Australia. Drawing on extensive

ethnographic fieldwork in these regions

conducted between 2003 and 2007, Strang

analyses the diversity of understandings of

water by different individuals and groups.

She situates her work within the global

context of a mounting ‘ecological crisis’

and, more locally, Australia’s growing pro-

blem of water supply (pp. 2, 4). Strang argues

that understanding the complex cultural

aspects of these important issues is critical

to effective future solutions, much of the

onus of which rests with governments

currently dominated by natural resource

perspectives and ‘top-down’ management.

Thus, although the book is grounded in

anthropological theory and approaches, it is

explicitly aimed at policy makers (p. 6).

Given that the book focuses on two river

catchments from the same state in the same

country, its title, Gardening the world, is

somewhat misleading. The title does, how-

ever, reflect a dominant concept in the

book. The idea of ‘gardening’ feeds through

each chapter as a thread on to which

different understandings and uses of water

are hooked. As Strang explains in her

Introduction, the vision of an ideal, peaceful

and plentiful garden, ‘in myriad cultural

forms, hovers like a mirage on the edge of

the human imagination . . . This book is

about the imperative to ‘‘garden the world’’

that—though it may have this perfect vision

in mind—has spiraled into a seemingly

relentless desire for growth and expansion’

(p. 2). Strang discusses ‘gardening’ as a

literal activity (domestic gardens), as a

‘process of self-extension’, and as a meta-

phor for human interactions with environ-

ments more generally (pp. 34–5). Within the

‘garden’, water is fundamental and remains

at the heart of Strang’s study.

Book Reviews 205

A significant strength of the book is the

depth of research that it draws on. A total of

331 people were interviewed from a variety of

backgrounds in the Mitchell and Brisbane

River regions (p. 6). Strang has worked in

these areas for a number of years; for

example, she has worked with the Aboriginal

community in Kowanyama, located in the

Mitchell River catchment since 1982. While

the book focuses on a recent set of interviews,

it thus also rests on a longer trajectory of

research and fieldwork, adding weight to its

arguments. Strang skilfully uses the inter-

views in each of the chapters to show how

different people articulate their claims over

this highly sought after element.

This book has a relatively straightforward

structure. Following the Introduction, there

is a chapter that outlines Strang’s analytical

approach. This chapter provides a review of

relevant literature, mostly of anthropological

theory, but also brings in work from other

disciplines, such as history. It also establishes

Strang’s position, in accordance with other

theorists and philosophers, that environ-

ments ‘are the product of cultural practices’

(p. 29).

The remaining six chapters (all except the

Conclusion) are arranged around particular

ways in which water is related to, and

managed in, the Mitchell and Brisbane River

catchments. These chapters, in turn, focus on:

government management and policies as well

as ‘governance’ beyond formal institutions

(p. 55); Indigenous engagements with water;

agriculture; industry and manufacturing;

recreation, including domestic water use;

and ‘saving water’, which examines various

ways people are responding to the overuse of

water and environmental degradation more

broadly (p. 237). There is, as would be

expected, a small degree of overlap between

the chapters; however, they are not repeti-

tious. Instead, the multiple roles of agencies,

people and groups are explored.

For example, Government Owned Cor-

porations (GOCs) are first analysed in the

chapter, ‘Governing water’, but are taken up

in a number of chapters throughout the

book. GOCs have been recently established as

organisations intended to operate indepen-

dently from government in order to function

as economically efficient businesses (pp. 62,

71). GOCs include Queensland’s former

water departments, responsible for water

supply and waste treatment, such as Cairns

Water and South East Queensland Water, as

well as other previously state-regulated ser-

vices and infrastructure. One of these is the

highly lucrative Port of Brisbane, which

features heavily in the chapter on manufac-

turing and industry. The Port of Brisbane is

responsible for the traffic of much of the

State’s exports and imports, as well as

managing and leasing out extensive tracts of

riparian land. It became a GOC in 1994, and

since then has aimed to increase trade, and

thus efficiency and earnings, in accordance

with a private company model. However,

reliant on more water to support more trade,

the Port of Brisbane, as Strang notes, ‘like the

farmers . . . [is] caught between an impetus

for growth on the one hand and greater

competition on the other’ (p. 171). Indeed,

throughout the book, Strang critiques the

growth of neoliberalism, especially as an

answer to ‘difficult’ government problems

like water supply.

The scope of the book is huge and it is

testimony to Strang’s expertise and experi-

ence that she manages to convey so much

complexity in a direct, readable way. Perhaps

because of its breadth, however, some topics

are not always fully explained. For example,

in her brief discussion of the ‘masculiniza-

tion’ of water supply industries, Strang asserts

that the ‘domestic sphere’ ‘is still regarded as

a primarily feminine domain’ in Australia (p.

81). This statement, I think, needs some

qualification and further discussion. It would

also have been interesting to hear what

Strang’s interviewees thought about climate

change and how it might alter water flow

and availability. This topic is discussed


surprisingly little in a book aimed at contem-

porary decision makers. As a final point, Strang,

in her strong arguments for the recognition of

‘cultural landscapes’, runs the risk of over-

emphasising the cultural dimensions of envir-

onments, and backgrounding the role of

biophysical processes (p. 29). These are, how-

ever, minor criticisms of a very thorough study

that contributes substantially to thinking about

human-environment relationships.

In the Conclusion, Strang makes clear

policy recommendations, including the refi-

guring of water (and broader) management

structures to become more decentralised and

meaningfully shaped by local research. In

addition, Strang urges the establishment of

‘more inclusive and collaborative manage-

ment’ and a turn away from the privatisation

of water and services (p. 292). It is through

privatisation, she argues, that competition for

water is heightened and elites empowered to

the exclusion of minorities and the poor.

Centrally, Strang demonstrates that cultural

understandings of water need to be consid-

ered (and in many cases changed) in any

successful move towards sustainability.

Gardening the world is a very timely study

of an important issue. It is extremely well

researched and has real policy implications.

There is no doubt that this book will be of

wider interest, and appeal to many people

concerned with human–environment rela-

tionships.

Kinship and beyond: The genealogical model

reconsidered, edited by Sandra Bamford and

James Leach. Fertility, Reproduction and

Sexuality Series, Berghahn Books, New York

and Oxford, 2009, viiiþ 292pp., figures,

bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-1-84545-

422-7 (hardback).

ROBERT PARKIN

Department of Social Anthropology

University of Oxford

� 2010 Robert Parkin

Can we now talk about post-arboreal kinship

in anthropology? It would seem so, but then

for many this has been true since the efforts

to deconstruct genealogy as a universal mode

of thought by David Schneider from the

1960s. Certainly the thrust of the present

volume is to build on his work by interrogat-

ing and, where necessary, dismissing the tree

and other metaphors of vertical descent as

used in anthropology, as well as contextualis-

ing their use by anthropology’s subjects.

Many of these studies are vital and informa-

tive in their own right, yet there is still a slight

flavour of deja vu in reading some of them.

This is not only because of the precedent set

by Schneider’s earlier work, but also because

of the difficulties, even before he came along,

that proponents of the segmentary descent

model experienced in seeing actual local

communities as composed solely of (usually

agnatic) descent relations, rather than also of

affines and non-relatives. Perhaps the pro-

blem for people like Evans-Pritchard and his

ilk was that, unlike Schneider, they were

unwilling to draw the logical conclusion that

the model did not work after all. Also, it has

long been recognised that unilineal descent

introduces a bias in tracing relationships in

favour of links through one gender; that

genealogies are liable to distortion and

fabrication for political and other reasons;

and that genealogical memories can be

extraordinarily shallow, genealogical forget-

ting rampant. Similarly, even as Schneider

was writing, structuralists like Dumont,

Leach and Needham were replacing geneal-

ogy with category in their attempts to

understand prescriptive marriage systems.

Most fundamentally, the idea frequently

represented here, that earlier schools of

anthropology have inevitably equated geneal-

ogy with biology, is a simplification at best:

since kinship has long been recognised as

fundamentally social, not biological, then the

same must be true of genealogies too. What,

then, is actually new about volumes such as

these in the early 21st century?

Book Reviews 207

For a number of authors in this collection,

the answer is that vertical, genealogical modes

of thinking about relationships not only

represent conscious metaphors of relation-

ship or misconstruals of the social as

biological; in many cases they have also

blinded those who hold them, especially

anthropologists, to how their subjects see

themselves as related. In part this is because

of an alleged agnatic bias in such modes of

thought, which underplays or ignores the

significance of ties through women. For

Rebecca Cassidy this extends to horses, in

the sense that horse-breeders not only

privilege male links, but have also in effect

anthropomorphised horse-breeding by im-

posing human concerns (identity, morality)

onto it. Similarly, J. Teresa Holmes’s chapter

shows how the apparently inadvertent misuse

of a basically agnatic genealogical model by

the British in Kenya not only misinterpreted

the nature of Luo social organisation, but was

also used to deprive the Luo of rights to land

in favour of other local groups. As such, her

account is a welcome addition to existing

studies of the role of the state, colonial or

otherwise, in formulating ideas and practices

of kinship. Also, as is not uncommon in

Africa and elsewhere, and as Holmes’s own

informant Ruth showed her, ties through

women are at least as important in constitut-

ing local Luo communities. Yet Holmes

herself admits in an endnote that agnatic

ideas are important to contemporary Luo

identity and internal political struggles,

though it is not entirely clear whether she

thinks this is a solely modern development in

imitation of colonial models of ‘traditional’

social organisation, or also pre-colonial.

There is a similar ambivalence about Sandra

Bamford’s interpretation of Kamea notions of

inter-generational connection in Papua New

Guinea. Fathers and mothers contribute to the

formation of their children’s substance, but no

substantial link between parents and children

is recognised thereafter: instead, continuous

occupation of land and stories about ancestors

provide the inter-generational continuity we

might otherwise call descent. Yet this does not

involve either the non-recognition of parent-

child ties or a denial of the significance of

procreative sex. This means that a genealogical

form of representation is still valid for the

Kamea, provided it is not taken as indicating

recognition of a substantial tie between gen-

erations: this is precisely what Bamford

supplies in the figure in her chapter (p. 163).

Similar remarks apply to James Leach’s far

more abstruse chapter on the Rai, also of

Papua New Guinea, where land and knowledge

also link persons and generations. However,

there is a hint that blood is also recognised as a

metaphor of such connection, even though the

example given denies its applicability to that

particular case; or did this only come up in

response to Leach’s specific questions?

The two chapters by Gısli Palsson and

Hilary Cunningham on the genealogical map-

ping of almost the whole of Iceland’s popula-

tion, back several generations, show how

science itself is qualifying its former assump-

tions about vertical genealogies by taking into

account the possibilities of horizontal gene

transmission between species (through the

ingestion of food and bacteria). Thus a non-

hierarchical, matrix model of relations be-

comes more pertinent than the tree and

branches. Palsson in particular highlights

some of the issues involved in applying genetic

information to social relationships. While the

encrypted version of these data for scientific

use privilege the former, the web version made

available to the general (but solely Icelandic)

public prioritises the legal and social aspects of

relationships, mostly, it seems, to protect

socially illegitimate relationships from expo-

sure. We are also told that such socially

produced distortions and secrecy do not

necessarily introduce significant scientific er-

ror from the genetic point of view, suggesting

that the two aspects can be reconciled more

easily than is commonly thought by socio-

logically minded detractors of the former.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro surveys the

whole field of these issues in a wide-ranging

and typically masterly piece of work that draws


on both Amazonian material and the whole

history of anthropology; it should be read in

the original rather than in any reviewer’s

summary. However, it is Rita Astuti’s chapter

on the Vezo of Madagascar that provides the

greatest insights for me. Initially taking the

now standard view that Western notions of

genealogy do nothing to capture the Vezo’s

stress on the cultivation of multiple relation-

ships as a way of acquiring as wide a circle of

‘kin’ as possible, she shows successfully that

this does not exhaust their understanding of

kinship. Using methods drawn from cognitive

psychology, she argues that not only do they

have an understanding of procreative or

biological kinship; they can also distinguish

it from social (especially adoptive) kinship

(though admittedly mostly at Astuti’s deliber-

ate prompting). Astuti is explicitly not trying

to put the clock back to a pre-Schneiderian

genealogical paradise, but to my mind her

demonstration has two main implications: 1)

the Vezo have practical knowledge of kinship

as well as their very different collective

representations; 2) the latter represent trans-

cendence over the former. Inasmuch as

transcendence is a mark of the human

generally, could not similar remarks also apply

to the Luo, Kamea and Reite? It certainly can

to Rajasthanis, for instance, as Helen Lam-

bert’s work showed long ago.

Reference:

Lambert, H. 2000. Village bodies? Reflections onlocality, constitution and affect in Rajasthanikinship. In Culture, creation, and procreation:Concepts of kinship in South Asian practice,edited by M. Bock and A. Rao, 81–99. Oxford:Berghahn Books.

Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a

West Papuan place, by Rupert Stasch.

University of California Press, Berkeley, Los

Angeles and London, 2009, xvþ 317pp.,

illustrations, note on language, endnotes,

bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-0-520-

25686-6 (paperback).

LOURENS DE VRIES

Faculteit der letteren (taal en communicatie)

Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

� 2010 Lourens De Vries

When I studied the Korowai, Wambon and

Kombai languages in the 1980s and 1990s, I

always hoped that one day an anthropologist

would come to study at least one of these

societies. Future generations would then be

presented with a more complete picture of the

linguistic and cultural practices of the Awyu-

Ndumut groups, who live between the

Eilanden and Digul rivers in south-eastern

West Papua, formerly called Irian Jaya.

Rupert Stasch’s book on the Korowai as a

society of others is a remarkable and stunning

fulfilment of that wish. It is ethnographically

rich, presenting a wealth of data and material

derived from solid and thorough fieldwork.

At the same time, Stasch orders and interprets

this wealth of data in highly original,

theoretically innovative and often daring

ways.

Reading this book, I was struck by the

unexpected continuities connecting it with

older Dutch missionary ethnographers of

Awyu-Nudut-speaking societies, such as Boe-

laars’ (1970) description of Mandobo society.

After all, the Mandobo of the 1960s do not

share an ethnographic present with the

Korowai of the late 1990s, and Stasch writes

in a context entirely different from that of the

Dutch missionaries of the second half of the

twentieth century. Why this eerie feeling of

continuity? Partly, because a lot of basic

cultural patterns and practices of Awyu-

Ndumut groups, as described in older Dutch

sources, are highly visible and prominent in

Stasch’s description of Korowai society: the

extreme level of political fragmentation, with

dispersed, small and autonomous patriclans;

thoroughly egalitarian, kinship-driven, with

an emphasis on certain dyadic relationships

(such as mother’s brother–sister’s son,

wife’s mother–daughter’s husband), and the

fundamental distinctions between ‘humans’,

‘(male) witches’ and ‘demons’, distinctions

Book Reviews 209

that play central roles in a wide range of

frequent, highly visible cultural practices,

ranging from tree-house building to canni-

balism. Above all, they play a role in the deep

links to clan territories, the ancestral soil that

sustains and feeds people.

There are also methodological reasons why

Stasch comes unexpectedly close to these

older Dutch missionary sources. For example,

although contact history is not completely

ignored, he abstracts ethnography from ex-

ternal history, and leaves the role of exogen-

ous factors (missionaries, governments, oil

companies, tourism, anthropologists) to later

research. This gives his portrayal of Korowai

society a certain timelessness reminiscent of

older Dutch ethnographies. Stasch dares to

generalise and to abstract from certain factors,

a normal practice in academia one would

think, and the only way to make sense of the

overwhelming complexity of cultural data,

but one that is sometimes frowned upon by

anthropologists.

An innovative generalisation, and one that

creates discontinuity with older Dutch

sources, is Stasch’s central claim that Korowai

conceptualise human relations in terms of an

ambivalent dialectic of closeness and other-

ness, with an emphasis on the otherness of

fellow human beings, both within and out-

side the clan. For example, newborn babies, a

paradigm case of closeness in societies shaped

by Judaeo-Christian traditions, are routinely

classified as ‘demons’ (laleo) and enter the

category of humans (yanop) only upon the

mother’s acceptance and subsequent gradual

socialising as yanop. Many babies are not

accepted, including perfectly healthy ones,

and infanticide, similarly to the cannibalism

of male witches, was a routine practice

when I did my fieldwork in the area in the

1980s. Both infanticide and cannibalism

gradually subsided in the first decade after

the arrival of the missionaries. Stasch has

collected a wealth of new data on past

infanticide practices, a topic largely ignored

in earlier missionary ethnographic work,

although missionaries were highly aware

of this practice and sometimes tried to

interfere. As with other Korowai cultural

practices, Stasch convincingly interprets and

views infanticide through his central lens of

alterity notions, as they surface in the

distinctions between ‘humans’, ‘demons’

and ‘witches’.

Disgusted by sensationalist attention to

cannibalism, Stasch does not want to elabo-

rate on the witchcraft complex. Although

understandable, this is a pity because in

Awyu-Ndumut communities the male witch,

the xaxua, is perhaps the most prominent

example of the tension and dialectic of

closeness and otherness. A witch can be

anyone and they are everywhere; it can

be your husband, or son, or mother’s

brother, someone very close. Their outward

behaviour is totally normal, but their inside

is filled by a dark cannibalistic desire to eat

your vital organs. As the quintessential

repulsive and dangerous other, they are more

so than ‘demons’, and the core of a deep

distrust of others, even the other in oneself:

for example, sometimes people are afraid they

may have been turned into a witch, without

knowing, by sharing a pipe with another

witch.

Stasch writes a very smart and sophisticated

English, but at times I found sentences that

require an extraordinary amount of processing,

at least in the mind of a Dutch linguist. Take

sentences like ‘The time of people being together

is not selfsame but is intertemporal and

intersemiotic with other times’ (p. 254), or ‘I

argue that Korowai understand a pair to be less

an assumed unit than a racheting into tensility of

a problem of connection-and-disconnection’

(p. 73). Although in the context of the whole

book most of these sentences become mean-

ingful, in quite a few Stasch seems to have been

carried away by his undisputed mastery of

formulation. However, these are minor pro-

blems in a truly outstanding contribution to

both the field of anthropology and the study of

Papuan cultures.


Reference:

Boelaars, Jan H. M. C. 1970. Mandobo’s tussende Digoel en de Kao, bijdragen tot een ethnografie.Assen: van Gorcum.

Indonesian houses, Volume 2: Survey of

vernacular architecture in western Indone-

sia, edited by Reimar Schefold, Peter Nas,

Gaudenz Domenig and Robert Wessing.

Leiden Series on Indonesian Architecture,

KITLV Press, Leiden, 2008, 716pp., figures,

bibliography, index. ISBN: 9789067183055

(paperback).

ROXANA WATERSON

Department of Sociology


� 2010 Roxana Waterson

This book is the outcome of a multidisci-

plinary project of the Royal Netherlands

Academy of Sciences (KNAW), involving a

team of European and Indonesian anthro-

pologists, sociologists, and architects, to

expand the documentation and analysis of

vernacular architectures in Indonesia. The

first volume resulting from the project, to

which this is a companion, was published in

2003. Its focus was on diachronic studies of

continuities and transformations in a wide

range of both western and eastern Indonesian

societies, and a thorough analysis of the

diversity of types that often exists even within

a particular cultural group. The aim of this

second volume is to present a systematic

survey of western Indonesia, with a focus on

new studies of previously little-known and

poorly documented areas, such as Gayo and

Alas (included with Aceh in the chapter by

Peter Nas and Akifumi Iwabuchi), Enggano

(Pieter ter Keurs), Kerinci (Gaudenz Dome-

nig), and many parts of southern Sumatra

(chapters by Jan Wuisman on the Rejang,

Fiona Kerlogue on Jambi, Sandra Taal on

Palembang, and Bart Barendregt on the

rumah uluan of highland southern Sumatra),

as well as western Java (including chapters by

Robert Wessing on Sunda, and Bart Bare-

ndregt and Robert Wessing on the Baduy of

Kanekes). At the same time, it presents fresh

studies of the architecturally more celebrated

areas (chapters by Syamsul Asri and Marcel

Vellinga on the Minangkabau, Gaudenz

Domenig on the Karo Batak, and Alain Viaro

on Nias), which point out previously over-

looked aspects of their architectural tradi-

tions. These two volumes form the core of a

‘Leiden Series on Indonesian Architecture’,

which is continuing to expand with the

publication of ethnographic monographs on

particular architectural traditions, resulting

from recent PhD theses.

This volume contains 22 chapters, abun-

dantly illustrated with photographs and

drawings. Since there is no space here to do

justice to the ethnographic richness of each, I

shall concentrate on drawing out some of the

innovative and important themes developed

through the book as a whole. Firstly, the

inclusion of contributions from a number of

Indonesian scholars reflects the co-operative

conception of the project from the beginning.

Secondly, the fact that the contributors

include anthropologists, sociologists, and

architects greatly enriches the collection by

offering different angles of observation and

levels of analysis. The three contributions by

architect Gaudenz Domenig, for instance,

have a way of asking questions or making

observations about buildings that I believe

would not occur to most anthropologists,

simply because we are not trained to pay that

degree of attention to how a structure has

been put together, and his thoughtful ana-

lyses lead to original insights about probable

developments over time. His comparative

study of round houses (relative oddities in

the Indonesian architectural landscape) fills a

real gap in understanding of these forms.

Other chapters with a comparative focus

include that by Nathan Porath and Gerard

Persoon, who examine the lean-to structures

built by nomadic forest dwellers, and Lioba

Book Reviews 211

Lenhart’s study of the boat dwellings and

temporary structures made by sea nomads.

These categories of dwelling, easily over-

looked as they are, are actually of consider-

able significance in the history of peoples in

the region as a whole. The sociologists in the

project, headed by Peter Nas, have ensured

that anthropological concerns with groups

often living in rural settings have been

balanced by explorations of developments in

urban house and settlement forms.

All the contributions show a clear move

away from an older approach which tended

to distil actual variety into a single, suppo-

sedly ‘ideal’, type for each area; here by

contrast we find close attention paid to

variations within particular areas, and a

long-term view of changes. Furthermore,

there is an interesting stress on how seasonal

or life-cycle changes affect people’s lifestyles

and the structures they inhabit (as in Reimar

Schefold’s chapter on Siberut, where couples

oscillate between the intense sociality and

ceremonial life of the longhouse and the

relative privacy of their field huts, or Jan

Wuisman’s chapter on the Rejang, who often

start their married life in a field hut and move

into the village only later). A number of

chapters include analysis of modern concrete

bungalows and urban neighbourhoods (kam-

pung) as objects of study; these include those

by Peter Nas, Yasmine Shahan and Jan

Wuisman on the Betawi house in Jakarta;

by Atashendartini Habsjah on Jakarta kam-

pung; by Peter Nas, Leslie Boon, Ivana Hladka

and Nova Tampubolon on the full range of

meanings of the term kampung, from rural

village or place of origin to urban wards,

spontaneous or planned; and that by Reimar

Schefold on new buildings that constitute

‘adapted revivals’ of traditional styles. An

intriguing dimension is added to our ways of

thinking about architecture by Bart Baren-

dregt’s willingness to explore the significance

of ‘haunted’ houses, memory and emotional

attachment to places, in his chapter on the

South Sumatran rumah uluan. The very

longevity of houses, which can outlive any

of their individual members, makes them

repositories of meaning and seems to imbue

them with an agency of their own, so that

they come to be apprehended as ‘representing

a history that cannot be grasped in any other

way’ (p. 459). Finally, readers approaching

this book as an inspiration and resource for

further studies will find some chapters

noteworthy for their very thorough biblio-

graphies of little-known older or local

Indonesian sources.

In short, this admirable volume contains

many new and refreshing perspectives, and

represents a very substantial contribution to

our deeper and wider knowledge of Indone-

sia’s fascinating traditions of vernacular

architecture. At the same time, unfortunately,

it points to the fragility of many of these

traditions. Many of the buildings documented

in the Sumatran studies were already in an

advanced state of decay. I hope that this book

and its companion volume will be widely

distributed in Indonesia and that they may

inspire a renewed respect for this country’s

extraordinary architectural heritage, and per-

haps new collaborations to assist in its

conservation.

Family, gender and kinship in Australia:

The social and cultural logic of practice and

subjectivity, by Allon J. Uhlmann. Anthro-

pology and Cultural History in Asia and the

Indo-Pacific Series, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006,

xiiþ 198pp., footnotes, bibliography, index.

ISBN 0-7546-4645-9 (hardback).

MONIKA SWASTI WINARNITA

Anthropology RSPAS, The Australian Na-

tional University

Department of Anthropology, La Trobe

University

� 2010 Monika Swasti Winarnita

This book is about families in Australia.

It focuses on family experience such as


pregnancy and child rearing, being an

independent youth, husband and wife gender

expectations and general family relations. The

main contention is that Anglo-Celtic families

see the normal or typical family as a nuclear

family consisting of a married or defacto

mother and father with their biological

children. Homosexual, separated, single, di-

vorced or blended families are seen by Anglo-

Celtic families as alternatives and not the

‘norm’. Uhlmann thus argues against other

Australian academics who say that the

nuclear family model as a norm is in decline.

Taking a sample of 15 informants from

different families in Newcastle, New South

Wales, the book focuses on ‘true-blue’ (or

‘Anglo-Celtic’) Australians (p. 8). One ratio-

nale for the study is that we are accustomed

to studying ‘multicultural’ or ‘Aboriginal’

Australia, while the ‘true-blue’ community in

contemporary Australia has been overlooked.

The author treats Anglo-Celtic Australians as

just another ethnic category. He asks his

informants the universal questions about

family life. The anecdotes and stories are well

written and illustrate the main contention.

The theoretical approach draws heavily on

Bourdieu. Uhlmann argues that the nuclear

family is the ‘norm’ or ‘doxic’, according to

Bourdieu, and alternative types of families are

‘heterodox’.

Readers, however, may question whether

15 informants are sufficiently representative

of Newcastle, and whether the inhabitants of

Newcastle (‘Novocastrians’) are representa-

tive of Australia as a whole. Relying also on

publicly available statistical data to prove that

the nuclear family household is not in decline

in Australia is not, moreover, convincing in

giving a general understanding of Australian

families without providing more cultural and

social context.

Readers are given only one page of

information about Newcastle (under the

subheading, ‘The context of the fieldwork’).

This page describes the town during the

period of the author’s fieldwork, 1994–1996.

It points to the ‘winding down’ of the main

heavy manufacturing industries, such as the

steel-making company, BHP. The author

alludes to the effect of this background

economic situation on his informants, who

all came from the shrinking traditional

industrial working class. However, no link is

given to how experiencing such an economic

condition affects the informants’ universal

experiences of a prototypical family. Their

uniquely Novocastrian experience is not

described any further. Thus, more ethno-

graphic information about Newcastle is

needed to contextualise this sample. Uhlmann

did write that his work is not ethnography in

the narrowest sense of the word, but, rather, a

broader exploration of various theoretical

issues relating to the kinship practices ob-

served in the field (p. 3). The problem of

generalising a national trend through a small

sample, without an in-depth description of the

specifics and particularities of the place of

study, is still a major drawback of the book,

giving a sense of incompleteness.

This generalising tendency is apparent in

Chapter 2, which is a history of the Australian

family. Uhlmann suggests that the Australian

Anglo-Celtic perspective of the nuclear family

as the norm evolved from northern and

western Europe, England specifically. Austra-

lia, being a colonial frontier society, is

different, however, in having nuclear families

that include siblings, uncles or aunts, grand-

parents and boarders. This is frustrating as he

recognises Australian kinship practice as

being different from its European back-

ground. For an Australian reader, the cover-

all terms, ‘Anglo-Celtic’ and ‘European’, to

describe these families based on the dominant

British Isles cultural tradition, neglect Jewish

and other European migrant influences,

amongst others. The cover term, ‘Europeans’,

appears again in Chapter 5, this time

negatively, as it includes ‘coloured’ southern

European, Balkans and Middle East families,

all seen by Uhlmann’s informants as not

being ‘true blue’ Aussies.

Book Reviews 213

In Chapter 3, the literature review, Uhlmann

outlines his position and criticises the multi-

cultural approach of other scholars. He favours

approaches that produce constancy and im-

mutability, while other scholars favour flux

and change that see nuclear-family households

in decline. Hence, Uhlmann criticises other

scholars for ‘adopting a multicultural style . . .

of historical transformations, oppositional

styles, subversion, individual agency, resistance

at the expense of constancy and immutability’

(p. 25). His attempt to find constancy and the

‘norm’ against such multicultural approaches

needs, in turn, to be questioned. His main

argument, that this group of ‘Anglo Celtic’

informants should be treated as another ethnic

category of multicultural Australia (p. 8)

means that he himself relies on an idea of

multiculturalism to analyse his informants.

A critical assessment of ethnic categories in

Newcastle is lacking. Uhlmann fails to ques-

tion the meaning of ‘true blue’. He neglects

racial tension that exists in Newcastle, where

‘true blue’ has the connotation of ‘White’,

not ‘ethnic’. Australia’s extreme right-wing

groups, Blood and Honour and, specifically,

the Patriotic Youth League (based at the

University of Newcastle) were notorious for

international student racial hate activities on

campus as well as other racial hate incidents

in Newcastle and Sydney (see Thompson

2004; Bennett 2004). The tertiary education

industry is a service sector that Uhlmann

describes as increasing its share in Newcastle’s

economy, replacing manufacturing (p. 4). It

seems a grave oversight to ignore this aspect

of life in Newcastle.

Uhlmann’s work, focusing on theory and

kinship in a detailed ethnography of New-

castle, would benefit from comparative work

within a larger field of study; for example,

comparing his nuclear family study with

other anthropological kinship work that

describes varieties of family norms. His

informants do not find it important to be a

descendant of a particular ancestor or to

belong to a blood-ties filial category. Thus,

the kinship chapter is somewhat superfluous.

Uhlmann’s discussion of the practice

theory of his main theorist, Pierre Bourdieu,

has similar issues. Firstly, he introduces

practice theory, that is, how people go about

their everyday life, with a dismissal of the

theory’s concept of structure and agency

(false dichotomy). Additionally, there is no

explanation as to how these theoretical

concepts work (p. 169). Secondly, he does

not engage with other practice theorists,

for example, Ortner (2006), who criticises

Bourdieu’s theory and the idea that structure

and agency have a complex set of power

relations (important in the case of Newcastle

families).

This book contributes to Australian kin-

ship studies from an Anglo-Celtic family

perspective. Uhlmann’s approach is novel,

but lacks context. He describes what his

informants call ‘true blue’ Australian families,

without giving any explanation of why these

families represent the norm. Australian and

international readers who might be uncon-

vinced by his generalisation are left wanting

more: especially a fuller picture of what

makes Newcastle a representative part of

Australian life and how the fifteen Novocas-

trians are uniquely shaped by their inter-

nalised world view (habitus).

References:

Bennett, A. 2004. Race hate group unstuck.Sydney: Sun-Herald, 19 December.Ortner, S. 2006. Anthropology and social theory:Culture, power and the acting subject. Durhamand London: Duke University Press.Thompson, M. 2004. Neo-Nazi link to campusanti-foreigner campaign. Sydney: The SydneyMorning Herald, 31 August.


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