Review of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. American Anthropologist, March 2007, Vol. 109,...

S I N G L E B O O K R E V I E W S

Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s CreoleSoul (The City in the Twenty-First Century). Roger D.Abrahams, with Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and RobertFarris Thompson. Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2006. 102 pp.

JAMES DALE WILSONConnecticut College

Growing numbers of social scientists have directed theirwork toward a general audience to engage in debates onpressing social issues or matters of public policy. At a timewhen the reconstruction of New Orleans is in the nationalpolitical spotlight, four recognized scholars of Gulf Coastand Caribbean culture have collaborated on a work (the di-vision of labor is not specified) that argues forcefully for aholistic and culturally sensitive approach to the city’s re-construction. Blues for New Orleans uses Mardi Gras andits symbolisms to shift attention away from New Orleans’smost visible assets—its French Quarter, its businesses, andits oil industry—and toward its mostly poor African Ameri-can neighborhoods that were the worst hit by Katrina, andthat are currently at risk of whole-scale condemnation. Thework foregrounds the cultural complexity of those neigh-borhoods, and of New Orleans as a whole, and, thereby,underscores the potential impact of an ill-conceived recon-struction process.

Using the annual Mardi Gras festival as a lens, the au-thors alter the reader’s geographical focus such that New Or-leans is visualized “not as the bottom of United States, butas the crown of the Caribbean” (p. 1). In so doing, they alsoarticulate the cultures of New Orleans and the central GulfCoast with Old World cultures of the Mediterranean, WestAfrica, and Native America. This geographical and culturalframework helps the book’s chapters—essentially discretechapters that concern not only Mardi Gras but also suchdiverse subjects as baseball and baton twirling—to more orless cohere.

On the one hand, Mardi Gras is presented in its histor-ical context: as part of a broad, pan-Caribbean culture ofcelebration, in which the complex social enmeshment ofslaves, planters, and overseers was persistently dramatized.Many of Carnival’s revelries are portrayed as mnemonic ac-tivities that recalled a history of bondage and resistance. Onthe other hand, the authors connect the historical record ofCarnival and its legacy of “artful resistance” with broader is-sues concerning the nature of Creole culture in present-dayNew Orleans and other parts of the central Gulf Coast.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 1, pp. 201–231, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rightsand Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/AA.2007.109.1.201.

Moving back and forth through time—sometimesin an unnecessarily circuitous fashion—the work brieflytours Creole communities in Louisiana and the GreaterCaribbean, revealing fluid patterns of cultural expressionthat have long transcended national boundaries. MardiGras proves an effective porthole on the region’s culturalcontinuities and on processes of creolization. Moreover,New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, with its ever-changing stylisticsynthesis, offers a compelling model of creolization as a dy-namic process. The authors demonstrate effectively how,throughout the city’s annual celebrations, constituent ele-ments of a diverse cultural lexicon manage to coexist despitedeep-rooted hierarchies of race and class.

Appropriately, the authors give special attention to thecomplex symbolisms of New Orleans’s black Carnival—the “other Mardi Gras”—in which conflicts between areaelites and poorer neighborhoods were often evident. In-deed, the vibrancy and complexity of Carnival are felt mostpoignantly when the authors remind us that many of NewOrleans’s most famous merrymakers—the Mardi Gras Indi-ans, the Zulu paraders, the Baby Dolls—hail from neigh-borhoods that were flooded and devastated by HurricanesKatrina and Rita. By situating those neighborhoods withina larger pan-Caribbean cultural universe, this work accen-tuates the fact that, without a proactive plan for reconstruc-tion, the United States will likely lose one of its most com-plex African American cultures.

As a whole, Blues for New Orleans provides a sense ofhow pervasive Mardi Gras is and was, and also a sense of itsdynamic quality: how it has been invented and reinvented.In discussing Mardi Gras, the work also suggests an alterna-tive narrative of life in the United States that is character-ized by hybridity and a flow of ideas and styles beyond na-tional boundaries as well as beyond boundaries of race andclass. The work contributes most, perhaps, in its attentionto cultural processes that are either misunderstood or ne-glected in national discourses on race that map culture ontoethnicity in too facile a manner. Along with other schol-arship on the Black Atlantic, this work argues for a morenuanced perspective on race that counters the tendency ofmany U.S. citizens, and other groups, to think of race inmonolithic or nationalistic terms. This nuanced perspectivecan only be achieved, however, if the reader also acknowl-edges that received narratives of U.S. hierarchies of race andclass—understood most often in terms of black and white—were tragically reinforced, if not given legitimacy, by whatU.S. citizens saw on their televisions during and afterKatrina.

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Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas.Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G. Lee, eds. New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 301 pp.

KYEYOUNG PARKUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Displacements and Diasporas is an interdisciplinary volume,edited by anthropologist Wanni Anderson and historianRobert Lee. The volume is a welcome addition to pub-lications on the increasingly popular topics of diaspora,transnationalism, and migration. It expands the scope ofAsian American studies, as it currently undergoes reconfig-uration driven by globalization, in particular trans-Pacificconnections. It has been pointed out that “the contradic-tion between claim to America and the claims of diasporahas been a central tension in the development of an AsianAmerican culture distinct from immigrant ethnic cultures”(p. 9). It is a noble attempt to focus on displacement asthe key theoretical framework, including the often over-looked emotional or subjective dimensions that go beyondthe current literature on socioeconomic or political dimen-sions of displaced people and their livelihood. Accordingto the editors, “Displacement shares with diaspora the no-tion of physical dislocation, banishment, and exile, butemphatically draws attention to the cultural dimension”(p. 11). In addition, they identify four existing forms ofdisplacement: “physical/spatial displacement, cultural dis-placement, psychological/affective displacement, and intel-lectual displacement” (p. 11).

The volume has four parts and each part starts with anintroductory chapter. These introductory chapters add clar-ity but could illuminate defining characteristics of the the-oretical framework. Part 1 attempts to provide the overar-ching framework to the volume. Part 2 showcases works byalready established scholars such as Walton Look Lai, JeffreyLesser, and Evelyn Hu-DeHart in the realm of Asians in LatinAmerica via historical analysis. Part 3 employs ethnographicinquiry, dealing with less-studied research subjects such aschildren of Laotian and Indian immigrants in the UnitedStates, as well as Vietnamese Canadians. Part 4 ends thevolume with a couple of chapters that critically examinethe production of knowledge, more specifically ethnic–areastudies or anthropology in the age of globalization or mul-ticulturalism.

In chapter 4, Look Lai deals with an intriguing topic onimages of the Chinese in West Indian—and, in particular,Jamaican—history. The century-long passage from foreign(often indentured) sugar worker to peripheral minority pe-tite bourgeoisie to prized multicultural citizen does closelycorrespond to the host society’s economic assessment ofChinese: from economic resource to economic growth toeconomic threat. In the following chapter, Hu-DeHart por-trays a more materialist inquiry among Chinese laborersand merchants in Cuba, Peru, and Mexico. In the caseof Mexico, from the late 19th to the early 20th century,Chinese transformed themselves from low-wage workers

to merchants fairly quickly. Also, despite anti-Chinese vi-olence during the Mexican revolutions, the Chinese solidi-fied their position in the local economy, for instance, dom-inating the local retail trade in Sorona. The next chapter byLesser poses a challenge to the diasporic framework sug-gested by the editors, while skillfully demonstrating theimportance of domestically based studies. It examines in-tegration strategies of Japanese immigrants and their chil-dren: from Japanese claim on indigenousness to postwarultranationalism. In chapter 7, Bernard Scott Lucious ex-plores the affective, emotional, or existential dimension ofdisplacement among multiply uprooted Vietnamese Afro-Amerasians via Black-Atlantic and Asia-Pacific diasporas.

In chapter 9, Louis Jacques Dorais examines aspects oftransnationalism among the Quebec Vietnamese, in whichnetworks have been developed along kinship relations, withthe majority having relatives in three different places inthe world. In the next chapter, Anderson conducts a psy-chological anthropological study of Rhode Island Lao fe-male college students, documenting their struggle to nego-tiate Laotian and U.S. gender/family ideology. In chapter 11,Sunaina Maira studies second-generation Indian Americanyouth and their Indian remix music, which she interpretsas their attempt to mediate between the expectations of im-migrant parents and those of mainstream U.S. peer culture.

In chapter 13, Nancy Abelmann problematizes the lackof understanding toward the recently transnationalized andglobalized world in our organizational, institutional, andideological configurations of academia. In the last chapter,E. San Juan Jr. painfully notes that “the university itself hasbecome a conduit if not apparatus for transnational busi-ness schemes” (p. 227). As an alternative, he urges us “toattend to the political economy of differences” or “the prob-lem of power” (p. 286).

Unfortunately, the displacement framework of thisvolume has not been reflected in the chapters. Nonetheless,it is still a valuable contribution to push for new questionsof displacement in the study of diaspora, transnationalism,and migration. It would be stimulating material for anyanthropology graduate seminar on migration, transnation-alism, or diaspora, as well as for courses in Asian Americanstudies.

Structure and Meaning in Human Settlements. TonyAtkin and Joseph Rykwert, eds. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,2005. 370 pp.

EDWARD SWENSONUniversity of Lethbridge

More than a century ago, Lewis Henry Morgan correlateddifferent house forms with distinct types of social organi-zation. It was relatively recently, however, that anthropolo-gists turned their attention to the cultural and political sig-nificance of settlement and architecture. Today, it is widelyaccepted that the built environment materializes social

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relations, shapes conceptions of place and social memory,inculcates cultural values, and expresses a diverse array ofmeanings, ranging from the ecological and psychologicalto the aesthetic and ideological. Tony Atkin and JosephRykwert have successfully assembled a cross-disciplinaryteam of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, geogra-phers, architects, and urban planners to explore these com-plex and important issues.

The 24 chapters in the volume cover everything fromthe origins of settlement (Rykwert and Atkin) and thehistory of settlement-pattern studies in archaeology (Gor-don Willey) to engaging architectural criticism. The lat-ter are commonly grounded in the social lessons that pastbuilding traditions and even animal architecture (JuhaniPallasmaa) hold for contemporary urban renewal plansand landscape design. In fact, an exciting goal of thecompendium is to encourage dialogue among archaeolo-gists and planners to promote culturally meaningful, eco-logically responsible, and socially relevant architecturalprojects. Rykwert and Atkin pose the question of whether“meaningful structures continue to exist in human set-tlements after they are transformed by international con-sumer culture and place-defying technology like that ofthe present day,” and they assert that archaeologists havemuch to offer architects through their privileged under-standing of the “social intentions” and “cultural mean-ings” embodied in past settlements (pp. 10–11). Indeed,the analytical focus on meaning favors the emic side ofthe problem, and many of the contributors adopt a ratherconservative stance, critiquing modernist agendas for ignor-ing the past and excising historically charged symbolismand culturally significant aesthetics from architectural pro-grams (see chapters by Rykwert and Atkin, Augustin Berque,Stephan Feuchtwang, Stanislaus Fung, and Tsutomu Iy-ori). Other authors (Suzanne Blier, Atkin, Laurie Olin, andDavid Leatherbarrow) more sympathetic to the inevitabil-ity of change argue for innovative design plans that harmo-nize anthropogenic landscapes with the social environmentwhile achieving ecological balance and a higher state of cul-tural consciousness. Pietro Laureano, for instance, presentspreindustrial oases centers of North Africa and SouthwestAsia as an inspiring model for how scarce resources can beconserved, consumed, and recycled without degrading theenvironment or offending aesthetic sensibilities.

Designing “meaningful” settlements to restore a senseof place and to confront problems of global alienation andconsumer-driven environmental destruction remains a no-ble, although romantic, ideal. Unfortunately, few concreteplans are actually proposed to achieve such ambitious goals(but see chapters by Feuchtwang and Michael Sorkin). More-over, there is a paradoxical tendency by several of the au-thors to essentialize concepts such as “nature,” “earth,” and“body,” and they subsequently disregard the cultural rela-tivity of these constructs. For example, Berque condemnsJean Nouvel’s glass edifice housing the Foundation Cartierin Paris for disconnecting architecture from the earth andviolating the “world” (p. 102). In contrast, Leatherbarrow

lauds Nouvel’s immaterial, diaphanous walls for absorbingand projecting surrounding “natural” foliage while pro-moting interconnectivity between building and environ-ment (p. 349). As a general counterpoint, Fung’s analysisof Chinese landscapes demonstrates the fluid and non-fixed relationship between architecture and meaning (re-ligious, ecological, or moral), an important argument ig-nored by many of the contributors. M. Christine Boyer’schapter even reveals that the patron saint of modernistarchitecture, Le Corbusier, was influenced by “primitive”designs; his utopian vision of rational, forward-looking ar-chitecture is imbued with atavistic philosophical meaning.Denis Cosgrove’s analysis of 21st-century nomadism andLawrence Vales’s probing investigation of the ideologicaltension between private and public housing in the UnitedStates further reminds us that the valorization of varyingsettlement configurations is often determined by histori-cally contingent political and economic forces (and not byuniversal ideals of place or pristine nature).

Readers may be disappointed that the volume con-tributes little new to theoretical discussions on settlement.Beyond Berque’s phenomenologically inspired theory of“trajection” and T. J. Ferguson and Robert Preucel’s useof Peircean semiotics, few innovative approaches are pro-vided to decipher the dialectical relationship mediating ar-chitectural practice and social reproduction. Indeed, manyof the contributors champion the long-standing theoriesof Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, Yi-Fu Tuan, and PaulWheatley without adding significant theoretical insights tothese enduring structuralist models. Nevertheless, it mustbe said that the case studies convincingly prove that the cityas cosmogram (or exemplary center) characterized manyancient settlements cross-culturally. Compelling examplespresented by Rykwert and Atkin, Wendy Ashmore, DavidO’Connor, Blier, Larissa Bonfante, Gregory Possehl, andRykwert illustrate how built forms simultaneously representmacrocosms of the body, microcosms of the universe, andspatial archetypes of celestial and worldly power.

Although historical change and the complexities ofpolitical relations shaping spatial experience are consid-ered (Ashmore, Iyori, Ferguson and Preucel, Blier, Atkin,and Thomas Campanella), questions of power are surpris-ingly deemphasized in the volume. It is remarkable, for in-stance, that the influential theories of Henri Lefebvre, DavidHarvey, and Michel Foucault are absent in the varied dis-cussions. Moreover, in neglecting power, the authors tendto reify elite spatial ideologies within particular societiesas homogenous and universal, eliding the polyvalent andcontested meanings of architecture. With the exception ofFeuchtwang’s analysis of the revitalization of feng shui ar-chitectural programs in China as a challenge to modernistbuilding projects, most of the contributors fail to acknowl-edge the creative and varied ways agents subvert the con-straints of hegemonic built forms.

Despite these minor criticisms, the volume succeedsin presenting a wide spectrum of thought-provokingcase studies that comparatively showcase the structural


commonalities and historical forces linking cultural–symbolic systems with built aesthetics. Although it wouldserve poorly as a general textbook, there is much of interestwithin particular chapters for anthropology courses onlandscape, space, and urbanism.

E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. DebboraBattaglia, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.281 pp.

SEAN P. O’NEILLUniversity of Oklahoma

This collection of chapters takes an appropriately earth-bound perspective on a wave of popular culture that hasswept the nation and world over the past half-century—namely, the universe of human discourse on extraterrestri-als. Popularized in science fiction and spread through folk-lore and the Internet, talk of extraterrestrial life has perme-ated our popular culture for decades now, often in the formof familiar narratives about UFOs, alien abductions, cropcircles, ancient visitations, or undecipherable otherworldlycodes. By returning to earth from the “outerspaces” of thepopular imagination, this book is the first major work totake a thoroughly anthropological look at the subject. Ul-timately, the authors succeed in demonstrating that deeplyhuman concerns follow us even into space, saturating eventhe most radical discourses about life beyond this earth withprofoundly familiar anxieties about race, language, culture,power, science, and religion. Informed by the fundamentalprinciples of anthropological thought, this book will pro-vide stimulating reading material for classroom discussionson current popular culture.

The work opens with a critical history of discourse onextraterrestrials in Europe and the United States, after aninitial overview chapter that ties together the major themesin the volume. In “Ufology as Anthropology,” ChristopherRoth traces discourse on space aliens back to the 19th cen-tury, where it first emerged as a peculiar blend of science,religion, and racism. He goes on to identify a series of strongracial overtones in many of the popular images associatedwith extraterrestrials. Bent on world domination after flee-ing life in their devastated homelands, these foreign in-vaders are curiously portrayed as being weak, cerebral, anddependent: Such a portrait bears obvious parallels to eth-nic stereotypes leveled against immigrants or foreign pow-ers during the Cold War era. Anxieties about miscegenationalso make a predictable appearance in the history of ex-traterrestrial lore, a concern that is especially acute amongthose who believe that human races are the work of alienscientists. These themes reemerge in later chapters.

Contributing to the same project in the social psy-chology of popular discourse, David Samuels uncovers themany folk theories of language that have been projectedonto extraterrestrial life forms in his chapter, entitled “AlienTongues.” For instance, he shows that the fictional languageKlingon of Star Trek fame has been deliberately engineered

to strike English speakers as sounding harsh, a trait thatis consistent with the bellicose cultural ways of those whospeak the language, after the fashion of Humboldtian orWhorfian projects in nationalistic linguistics. Other sciencefiction writers have found political overtones in the univer-salism of Chomskyan linguistics, while finding an antidoteto the implicit fascism of such a universal grammar in theextreme relativism of the Whorfian linguistic project.

The remaining chapters contribute to an emergentethnography of E.T. culture, based on fresh fieldworkamong those who accept these discourses as “fact,” not meresci-fi. Susan Lepselter travels to Area 51, where she grappleswith the uncanny experiences of those who insist they havewitnessed UFOs, though without “license” from the gov-ernment or society at large. Battaglio writes about her per-sonal encounters with the Raelian religion, whose found-ing premise is the belief that aliens created life on Earthand whose charismatic leader continues to guide his flockbefore the eyes of onlooking social scientists. For true be-lievers, UFOs, crop circles, and even alien DNA are routinelytaken as evidence for the soundness of their faith. Ventur-ing into the cyberworld, Mizuko Ito examines the popularphenomenon of video gaming, where millions of childrenaround the world (esp. in Japan and the United States) crossthe imaginary threshold between reality and hyperrealityon a daily basis, continuing the struggle to conquer spacealiens for the benefit of humanity. On a somewhat philo-sophical note, Richard Doyle provides a very surreal lookat the inexplicable experiences of several high-caliber sci-entists who have reluctantly shared their close encounterswith powerful forces of alien intelligence, sometimes un-der the influence of strong psychedelics. Finally, on a moreserious note, Joseph Dumit investigates the claims of thosewho suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, who as a grouphave increasingly been turning to otherworldly explana-tions of their suffering after years neglect from the medicalprofession.

Ultimately, this work breaks new ground for anthro-pology by shedding light on an important aspect of ourpopular culture—one that is often overlooked in theliterature of our discipline, despite its relevance to centralthemes like race, language, culture, power, politics, andreligion. Although the volume is not an encyclopedia onthe subject, this book does provide a very balanced look atsome of the central themes and dominant movements inthe emergent “extraterrestrial culture” of the modern world.

The Chattahoochee Chiefdoms. John H. Blitz and KarlG. Lorenz. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.328 pp.

CLIFFORD T. BROWNFlorida Atlantic University

The lower Chattahoochee River meanders in a fertile valleythrough the coastal plain between Alabama and Georgia.The lower Chattahoochee is that portion of the valley south

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of the fall line and north of the junction with the FlintRiver, where the Apalachicola River begins. In this inter-esting book, John Blitz and Karl Lorenz present an archae-ological study of Mississippian-period social and politicalintegration in the lower Chattahoochee valley.

The core argument of the book is that Blitz’s fission–fusion model of Mississippian political organization is supe-rior to the conventional simple–complex chiefdom cyclingmodel of the later prehistory of the southeastern UnitedStates. The fission–fusion model suggests that polities wereshort-lived entities formed by the periodic aggregation ofsmall autonomous political units, probably unilineal de-scent groups. Those polities would rapidly devolve intosmaller units again. The authors attack this problem of po-litical organization by studying both ceramics and settle-ment patterns. They analyzed over 50,000 potsherds fromnine mound sites (most of the mound sites in the region)and seriated the contexts, producing a detailed chronologycomposed of seven discrete periods between C.E. 1100 and1650. This chronology is the most important element of thestudy, because all their subsequent analyses rely on it.

Using their new ceramic chronology, Blitz and Lorenzexamine the occupational history of the mound sites in theregion. They find that the mound sites were occupied forrelatively short intervals and then abandoned, and weresometimes occupied again after a hiatus. The authors adoptDavid Hally’s view (1996) that mound sites within an 18-kilometer radius were part of the same polity while moredistant sites belonged to different polities. Combining thismodel of settlement with their refined ceramic chronology,they document the complex waxing and waning of smallpolities in the lower Chattahoochee. They conclude thatthere is little evidence for the cycling of simple and com-plex polities: At no time were large and small mound centersfound within the same polity. They argue that the fission–fusion model of polity evolution describes the data better.

The authors next study the shifting distribution of ce-ramic styles in the region. They use ceramic type frequen-cies to establish “ceramic style zones” and examine changesin the zones through time using their refined ceramic se-quence. The style zones were generally larger than the poli-ties, suggesting that social integration occurred on a largerscale than political integration. This exercise is not com-pletely successful because the authors had difficulty sepa-rating temporal from geographical variation.

The four appendices present important data, includingdescriptions of the excavations, mostly unpublished, thatproduced the artifacts studied. The appendices also containartifact tabulations, including the results of an interestingmodal analysis of the ceramics. Other appendices describethe methods used in the ceramic analysis and the statisticalmethods employed in the ceramic seriation.

The ceramic seriation is the key to the whole study, soit deserves scrutiny. Blitz and Lorenz used seven ceramictype frequencies from 21 proveniences to perform the se-riation. It is unfortunate that they did not publish thesedata as a table because I could not reconstruct them. The

authors used hierarchical cluster analysis, k-means clusteranalysis, and multidimensional scaling (MDS) to create theseriation. They present neither the methods nor the resultsin enough detail to allow one to evaluate or replicate theirconclusions. They also do not state which of the three setsof results (which are not identical) produced the final se-riation. There are weaknesses in the statistical discussion.For example, they suggest that the y-axis of the MDS plot(figure D.2) represents geographic space (i.e., site locations),yet the scatterplot of the data presents a curve typical ofMDS seriations, in which both dimensions represent thechronological ordering.

The final seriation may be correct, but the authors failto prove it with their presentation of data. One could argue,based on the limited results they include, that the Rood IIIphase should be split into two subphases. Without moreinformation, however, the reader cannot know why theymade such choices. More important, they did not provethat the seven periods they defined are discrete temporalunits. There could be gaps or, more likely, overlap amongthe phases, which would appreciably alter the conclusionsof the study.

This is a significant book. It offers thoughtful argu-ments on important issues, such as the initial Mississippianmigration to the region. It is well organized, cogently writ-ten, and presents important new archaeological data. Al-though I have reservations about both the seriation and the18-kilometer-polity-size argument, nevertheless, I foundthe book to be quite interesting. It should be read by allinterested in Mississippian political structure.

REFERENCE CITEDHally, David

1996 Platform-Mound Construction and the Instability of Mis-sissippian Chiefdoms. In Political Structure and Change in thePrehistoric Southeastern United States. John F. Scarry, ed. Pp.92–127. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Medi-ation. Steven C. Caton. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.341 pp.

RICHARD ANTOUNState University of New York at Binghamton

This book can be read at four levels: first, as an insightfulexample of the methods and techniques of social anthro-pological field work; second, as a source for understandingtribal culture and society in the Arab Middle East; third, asa rich example of the content and significance of tribal po-etry; and, finally, as a humanistic account of the trials andtribulations of social anthropological research.

Caton tells us that in their academic training anthro-pologists come to understand the scientific status of field-work notes as opposed to the status of the diary as a placeto vent frustrations, but he soon reveals that “My diary en-tries inevitably bled into my field notes” (p. 135). Throughparticipant-observation and transcription, Caton discusses


not only his collection of data on tribal conflict, conflictresolution, and poetry but also letters from his mother andhis academic advisor, read while in the capital, San’a, pro-viding an excellent example of how “the field” “leaks.” Hediscovers that what he initially views as a distraction fromhis study of tribal poetry—a case of honor that occurred inthe village of the “prophet’s descendants” (sada)—becomesthe main vehicle for recoding and analyzing that poetry.Politics and poetry were inextricably linked. It was partlythrough a key informant-turned-friend, who witnessed therendition of poetry, memorized it, and worked with himon its interpretation, that he came to understand both thepoetry and the society. Caton has written a book that he de-scribes as an “ethno-memoir,” the aim of which is to bringthe two narratives [field note and diary] in closer proximityto each other” (p. 135).

The “case of honor”—the kidnapping of two girls fromanother tribe by a young man from Caton’s friend’s ownvillage—led Caton to understand the difference betweenhow tribal law was supposed to work and the way it ac-tually did. He wrote, “I thought that unless the girls werefound, there would be no solution” (p. 103), but an in-formant replied, “Even honor can be carried too far, Seif[Caton]” (p. 103). Caton also learned the close relation-ship between local conflict and the national political sys-tem. The former “set off tremors along the ramifying faultlines of the political system” among the “competing ethnicgroups (sada, tribe, and servant group)” (p. 171) at the re-gional level, the national level (Khawlan district vs. NorthYemen), and at the international level (North Yemen vs.Saudi Arabia). At the point when he arrived in Yemen in1979, Caton understood that tribal leadership continuedto be face-to-face, “depending more upon the charisma ofspeech than upon print” (p. 81). The sada, among whomhe lived, denigrated colloquial speech including tribal po-etry. But the surrounding tribes “took considerable pridein their spoken language” as an extension of the “glori-ous days of ancient Yemen” (p. 81). By 2001, when he re-turned to Yemen after a 20-year absence, Caton realized thata successful politician from the rural area had to spend aconsiderable amount of time in the capital, lobbying in-fluentials, to provide the amenities necessary for the homedistrict (water, electricity, roads), and that this would nec-essarily jeopardize the face-to-face interpersonal relationsthat had always characterized tribal life. In the course ofworking and living in Yemen, Caton raised questions thatresonated far beyond Yemen: What is the state? What is itto be a “prisoner of the state”? At what point do you com-promise your honor? He also summarized the Arab tribalview of the use of force: “Force, or rather the threat of force,should always be used in a dialectical relationship with me-diation and negotiation. . . . Understanding the use of forcein this way entails working patiently with partners in highlycomplex situations, accepting the vulnerability that comeswith such partnerships, and perhaps, most important of all,the negative possibility of uncertainty and contingency”(p. 339).

Caton recorded tribal poetry at weddings, funerals,cases of honor, and religious events. Different genres in-cluded panegyrics of the Prophet, zamil, the ancient qasida,anashid (hymns), razfa, and bala. Bala literally translates as“basil,” and this herb’s aromatic properties are thought tohave healthful properties and bring good luck, which there-fore makes both the poetry style and the plant appropri-ate for weddings. Almost all poetry comments on currentevents and has political—among other—implications. Atone wedding Caton observed, six men recited bala poetryback-and-forth spontaneously, each poet leaping into thecenter of a circle of dancing men and shouting the lines ina high-pitched voice. The first line set the meter and rhyme,and if the lines that followed did not conform, the audienceshouted, “Broken line!” Caton notes that then “the poetmust scramble to come up with an alternative” (p. 199).

Finally, and not least importantly, one must note thehumanistic value of the book. Yemen Chronicle records veryfaithfully the small victories and large disappointments offield work and the accompanying oscillation of feelings.On being asked again “Where was I from? What was Idoing in Khawlan? Why was I studying poetry? Who wasgiving me money for this research?,” Caton recounts,“The grilling made me nervous, and my stomach began tochurn” (p. 151). The anthropologist explores his occasionalneed to fake it: “I listened to the poems with what I hopeappeared to be rapt attention, my brow wrinkled withthe effort of concentration. . . . Jesus, what a bloody faker, Ikept saying to myself, and when someone asked me if Iunderstood, I would nod, yelling over the din, Jesus, whata bloody faker” (p. 205). Caton recounts feeling ingratitude,rudeness, and the loss of temper, all aimed at a good Yemenifriend: “Was it because I was tired that I was so crabby?Or was there something deeper, a need on my part toreassert my control over the project [gathering data for hisdissertation], which I felt had been slipping away from mefor quite some time?” (p. 215). But he also shares with thereader a small high after sharing bread, beans, and pricklypear along the road: “Sharing food is such a symbolic actof community, acceptance. . . among Arabs that I felt mymood lift” (p. 237). For its humanistic account and itspoetic renditions, as well as for its methodological andsocial anthropological description and analysis, this bookwill be of great value for anthropologists, social scientists,students of the Middle East, and the general public.

Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and theSearch for Justice in a Southern Town. Melissa Checker.New York: New York University Press, 2005. 273 pp.

NORA HAENNArizona State University

In this highly readable account, Melissa Checker follows thelead of a Georgia grassroots environmental-justice group topush anthropologists in two directions. In the first, Checkerfulfills the promises of activist anthropology. She offers an

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eight-page appendix explaining her field methods, whichcentered on volunteering with the Augusta neighborhoodgroup the Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Commit-tee (HAPIC). In its 30 years of existence, HAPIC activistshave pressed for solutions to community concerns rangingfrom the implementation of streetlights and flood controlto crime prevention. In the 1990s, the group’s work em-phasized health concerns associated with toxic pollution.Checker’s volunteerism served as a platform for participant-observation with the group’s members. All proceeds fromthe book’s sales will benefit HAPIC. Through these com-mitments, Checker demonstrates activism in practice andprovides a path for readers to follow. Appendix B, enti-tled “Getting Involved,” lists contact information for 23environmental-justice groups.

The second direction in which Checker pushes an-thropologists builds on HAPIC demands that environ-mental sustainability always be accompanied by socio-economic equity. Checker’s writing points to a series ofbinaries that prevent this goal. These binaries includeAfrican American–white racial distinctions, conservation–toxic clean-up, and environmental preservation–economicdevelopment. In broad strokes, Checker locates the an-tecedent of these binaries in an environmental movementbuilt on white, middle-class interests in landscape preser-vation: For example, John Muir and the early days of theSierra Club come to mind. This response to industrializationcontrasts with one centered on toxic clean-up, a concernof urban people of color since the 1970s and an approachthat can be unsettling to people, even environmentalists,who benefit from economic structures. Checker argues, con-vincingly, that a conservation–toxics binary among U.S.environmentalists has allowed middle-class whites to de-cline the deeper reforms necessary to create sustainability.Landscape preservation may take place, but the economicand political arrangements that foster environmental de-cay go unaddressed as long as environmentalism remainsa way to reinforce white, middle-class privilege. Anthropo-logical theory does not always help researchers or activistssurmount these oppositions. Instead, Checker says anthro-pology makes its own contribution to the list of binariesby insisting on a separation between material and sym-bolic approaches. This contrasts with groups like HAPICwhose work at the intersection of racial identities and toxicpollution necessarily combines materiality and symbolism.By Checker’s reckoning, material and symbolic strategieswithin social movements “are two sides of the same coin”(p. 34).

By locating these binaries at the center of her analy-sis, Checker finds that anthropologists can identify the in-tractable aspects of socioecological settings and think aboutamelioration. In the HAPIC case, that aspect would be race,and the issue cannot be overemphasized. HAPIC is com-prised of African Americans whose organization resonateswith the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This historymeans that HAPIC takes a particular stance toward environ-mentalism. Some African Americans argue that 1960s envi-

ronmentalism undermined civil rights efforts by distract-ing white supporters. Additionally, white opposition to thelocation of industrial facilities in their neighborhoods leftminority communities vulnerable to contamination. Thus,African Americans who have taken on environmental is-sues have done so by redefining “environment” to mean abroader social setting deeply scarred by racism. The sitingof a toxic dump near African American communities is anexample of this racism, but so is the fact that African Amer-icans, prejudiced in employment opportunities, may onlyafford homes in polluted neighborhoods.

Checker’s narrative could easily center on points of con-flict or contests won and lost, but she never loses sight ofthe meaning structures that motivate HAPIC’s work. In par-ticular, what does it mean when one’s home is feared to betoxic to one’s health? For people who are first- or second-generation homeowners, for whom home ownership sig-naled an escape from sharecropping and a chance to right ahistory of racial subordination, the insult of toxic contam-ination takes on specific connotations. Checker remindsreaders that homeownership in the United States has beencharacterized as a “perfected citizenship” (p. 81). As home-owners, HAPIC members seek nothing short of a chanceto participate in the “American Dream” on equal footing.Toxic pollution strikes at this possibility by attacking peo-ple’s bodies as well as their homes. Arriving as it does ona history of attempts by whites to disenfranchise blacks,toxic pollution appears to HAPIC members as part of a con-tinued effort to stunt their autonomy and membership inU.S. society.

In sum, Checker has written a fine book. Assigned tostudents interested in urbanism, science and technologystudies, race relations in the United States, environment,or social movements, the book is sure to spark thoughtfulconversation.

Gender, Water, and Development. Anne Coles and TinaWallace, eds. New York: Berg, 2005. 240 pp.

CASEY WALSHUniversidad Iberoamericana

Gender, water, and development are themes of deep the-oretical and practical importance. Gender forms a centralpillar of the critical anthropology that emerged during the1970s, and the interest in development has moved from be-yond those working to achieve it to those who question themodernist principles that support the very concept. Water,a subject whose time was thought by many anthropologiststo have come and gone, has again become a research prior-ity of a reemergent ecological focus that responds to a realcrisis in the supply and management of that resource.

The introduction and 11 studies that comprise thisedited volume explore some of the many possible issuesthat arise at the intersection of these three themes, pri-marily through the examination of cases of developmentinstitutions in Africa and Asia working to incorporate a


gender approach to their efforts to provide domestic wa-ter systems to needy populations. While the cases describedvary widely, the authors all insist on the importance of gen-erating ethnographic knowledge about the complexity oflocal situations, and share the understanding that gendergoes beyond simply adding women to the conversation. Intheir chapters, the authors address questions of power, cul-ture, and inequality that are organized along lines of class,caste, language, ethnicity, and race as well as gender. Thisethnographically sensitive understanding of local situationsis based as much in a theoretical perspective that recognizesand values complexity as in a practical effort that seekslasting improvements in the lives of the people who aretargets of development efforts. While local complexity isforegrounded in the studies, this complexity includes thedevelopment agencies and their workers in the field. Fur-thermore, the contributors are careful to include the largerpanorama of development funding priorities, UN discus-sions, and national priorities. A number of chapters con-sider these dynamics between the local and the global in ahistorical perspective.

The book is especially interesting when the authorstreat the contradictions and conundrums that are so of-ten present in development work and theory. Far from pro-viding a “blueprint” for enacting a gender-sensitive devel-opment, the chapters insist on the context specificity ofdevelopment and the need to include local people andtheir perspectives—local women and their perspectives tobe sure—in the planning and enactment of developmentprojects. But for various contributors, this respect endswhen local people and perspectives reproduce oppressionsorganized along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, caste, age,and gender. This is a central problem in the gender and de-velopment discussion noted by the editors in their helpfulintroduction to the volume: Is the goal of gender-aware de-velopment to ensure clean water for the greatest numberof people, or is it to liberate people from gender oppres-sion? This question is part of a larger debate present in theanthropology of development and gender, and in appliedanthropology in general, about the limits of interventionand tolerance.

Another important issue that is treated briefly by someof the contributors is the contradiction inherent to water-related development in the neoliberal age between the ideathat access to water is a universal right and the equallystrong idea that water use and management should be or-ganized through market mechanisms. A number of authorsshow that development institutions and agents must attendto these fundamentally opposed concepts. An escape fromthis contradiction—to achieve universal coverage as wellas cost recovery—can only be found in universalizing themarket relation between service provider and user—that is,universalizing the commodity status of water. These aspectsof the culture of neoliberal water management could be ex-plored more in research on gender, water, and development.

Although the book does an excellent job exploring anddescribing issues surrounding gender and development on

a theoretical and practical level, its treatment of water isnot as rich. Aside from one chapter that discusses the long-term resignification of water together with changing ecolo-gies, landscapes, and gendered power relations in England,another that frames political mobilization of women wa-ter users in Cameroon in the literature on the “social pro-duction of nature,” and a third that presents an interestingdiscussion of geology and gender in an area of the Sudan,“water” remains in this book mostly a context in which tounderstand development and gender. Considering the long-standing interest of anthropologists working in an ecologi-cal tradition in the dynamics of water use and management,and the recent florescence of political ecology approachesto water scarcity and conflict, the book lacks a more rigorousconceptualization of water.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is an impor-tant source for those studying problems of gender indevelopment work around water. It would be appropriatefor courses on development and gender. It would alsobe valuable to development practitioners interested incomparing experiences of gender mainstreaming and othergender and development-related topics.

Southwest Archaeology in the Twentieth Century. LindaCordell and Don Fowler, eds. Salt Lake City: University ofUtah Press, 2005. 312 pp.

RISA DIEMOND ARBOLINONational Museum of Natural History, SmithsonianInstitution

Linda Cordell and Don Fowler’s new edited volume providesa much-needed addition to the history of Southwestern ar-chaeology. The chapters were originally part of a 2001 Amer-ican Anthropological Association symposium thematicallyfocused on a retrospective of Southwestern archaeology inthe 20th century. This volume is not an exhaustive histori-cal overview; instead, the chapters highlight the issues thathave been important and remain important in the regiontoday. Most of the chapters also have some focus on therole Southwestern archaeology has played in the broaderdiscipline of anthropology. Together, they offer diverse per-spectives on the history of archaeological research in theSouthwest, including northern Mexico.

The book is divided into two major sections. Chap-ters in the first section detail the early days of South-western archaeology. An introductory chapter by Fowlerand Cordell provides a brief overview of the volume andthe origins of Southwestern archaeology. Next, Fowler dis-cusses the formative years of the discipline in the Southwestfrom 1890 to 1910 in more detail and provides a help-ful overview of the major themes through time, includingceramic analysis, discussions of ethnicity, migration stud-ies, and collaborations with Native Americans. James Sneadpicks up the years 1910–20 when a common research tra-dition emerged in the Southwest, with a “cadre” of archae-ologists. J. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittelesy focus

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on archaeological work in Arizona, specifically on sevenparticular years (1930–37) when Emil Haury and his col-leagues redefined the prehistoric landscape with their dis-cussion of Mogollon, Hohokam, and Salado cultures. Bypresenting this one story, they illustrate how early figureslike Haury advanced the discipline. Barbara Mills provides ahistory of archaeological field schools in the Southwest andtheir impact more broadly on the formation of the “NewArchaeology.” Jane Kelly and A. C. MacWilliams present ahistory of archaeological work in the northwestern Mex-ican states of Sonora and Chihuahua that contrasts withthe early days of the discipline in the United States. Theirchapter not only connects the two areas as part of the samegreater Southwestern region but also examines the institu-tional differences between the practice of archaeology inthe two countries. Two chapters offer insight into the shiftfrom the public to the private sector in Southwestern ar-chaeology. William Doelle and David Phillips examine thereasons behind the rapid growth of Cultural Resource Man-agement in the Southwest, and Cordell rounds out the firstsection of the volume with an insightful look at the currentstate of Southwestern archaeology.

Chapters in the second section examine issues andthemes important to the practice of Southwestern archaeol-ogy today from an historical perspective. This section is lesscoherent than the first, but the chapters are still very en-gaging. Stephen Nash and Jeffrey Dean examine the roleof paleoenvironmental reconstruction and its impact onall aspects of archaeological research in the Southwest. Thechapters by Bruce Huckell on the first 10,000 years of pre-history and by James Ivey and David Hurst Thomas on his-toric mission archaeology focus on the history of researchand current challenges in two understudied time periods inthe Southwest. The next three chapters by Stephen Lekson,Robert Preucel, and Katherine Spielmann, respectively, ad-dress the timely issues of complexity, ethnicity, and the useof ethnographic analogy. Each provides a lively discussionof these topics from both historical and personal perspec-tives. It would have been great to have even more chap-ters like these. David Wilcox finishes the volume addressingquestions about the future of Southwestern archaeology inrelation to its past.

Many of the chapters illustrate the cyclical nature ofresearch themes in the Southwest. Some of the ideas thatinterested early archaeologists like Edgar Hewett and A. V.Kidder went out of fashion for 50 years before becoming thefocus of intense interest again today. The authors are quickto point out, however, that the focus on recurrent themesis more nuanced today than it was in the past.

This volume is well edited and is a terrific resource forboth working Southwestern archaeologists and upper-levelstudents of Southwestern archaeology. The chapters arethematically linked, but the editors admit that they haveexerted a “light editorial hand” in bringing the collectiontogether. Although this lends some lack of coherence tothe whole volume (some chapters are more historical,others are more personal), each chapter is well written

and interesting. Cordell and Fowler have assembled anexcellent series of chapters addressing the history of themajor themes in Southwestern archaeological discourseand the archaeologists who created that history. The collec-tion demonstrates the relevance of work in the Southwestto the broader discipline of anthropology and providesa significant contribution to the field of Southwesternresearch.

Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontierin Early Modern China. Pamela Kyle Crossley, HelenF. Siu, and Donald Sutton, eds. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2006. 378 pp.

RICHARD H. THOMPSONJames Madison University

The ten meticulously researched chapters in this volumeexplore the various strategies employed by China’s last twoimperial dynasties, the Ming (C.E. 1368–1644) and Qing(C.E. 1644–1911), in managing relations along their ethnicfrontiers. This little-studied topic has important contempo-rary significance inasmuch as 60 percent of China’s terri-tory is occupied mainly by non-Chinese (Han is the ethnicdesignation for those who define themselves as culturallyand linguistically “Chinese”) classified by the People’s Re-public today as “minority nationalities.” Although China’sstate boundaries under the Ming excluded the western re-gions of Xinjiang and Tibet, imperial control was extendedover these areas during the Qing, whose boundaries approx-imated those of present-day China. Both dynasties thus es-tablished patterns of state–ethnic relations that impact onthe present regime.

As a “history of cultural difference” (p. x), this volumesuccessfully undermines the “sinicization” discourse preva-lent in past studies of China’s ethnic management strate-gies. This discourse argues that acculturation to Han lan-guage and culture and assimilation into Han society werethe cornerstones of late imperial policy. Although both dy-nasties employed a “civilizational” rhetoric that viewed theemperor and the state as champions of Chinese morals andauthority and sought to extend this civilization to the fron-tiers, this was “a rhetoric of moral transformation, not ofacculturation alone” (p. 9). This was especially the casefor the Qing, a non-Han dynasty that sought to maintainits Manchu ethnic distinctiveness both institutionally (bymeans of the banner system based on Mongol, Manchu,or Han membership) and culturally (by requiring Han towear the queue). In many cases, the Ming and Qing statesrecognized and made use of traditional ethnic leaders whomaintained a high degree of autonomy over their “natives”and whose own power and prestige were heightened by im-perial recognition. Other times and places saw the exten-sion of state bureaucratic institutions of control over in-digenous regions where many, under favorable social andmaterial circumstances, came to identify with the domi-nant Han society. As the editors note in the introductory


chapter, “Governance as it actually happened was a productof organizations, cultures, and economic interests” (p. 12).The goal of these chapters is to identify the particular his-torical moments and structural constraints that influencedimperial choices and native responses to this wide array ofgoverning strategies.

As Jonathan N. Lipman observes in his chapter “AFierce and Brutal People,” detailing Qing legal descriptionsof Islam and Muslims, Chinese views of ethnic others“partook of the struggle between understanding Othersas inherently different and understanding Others as havinglearned differently” (p. 84). The discourse of race implied bythe first view was opposed to the latter civilizing discourseof the second, and they contended with one anotherin the writings of high Qing officials administering thefrontier. Which view prevailed depended on a host oflocal economic and political conditions indicating bothflexibility and expediency on the part of the state whosestrategies were always designed to maintain order andprevent conflict. This theme is implicit in all the chaptersthat are grouped into four categories: (1) “Identity at theHeart of the Empire,” with three chapters devoted to theethnically based banner (military) system of the Qingstate, the making of Mongols in the Ming and Qing, andQing views of Islam and Sino-Muslims; (2) “Narrative Warsat the New Frontiers,” with chapters describing imperialpolicies in the northwestern (Xingjiang) and southwestern(Yunnan and Guizhou) frontiers; (3) “Old Contests ofthe South and Southwest,” which describes Ming–Qingapproaches to indigenous minorities such as the Yao, Miao,and Li; and (4) “Uncharted Boundaries,” which deals withthe mysterious mountain dwellers known as “She” and theDan river pirates of the Pearl River Delta. What is missingfrom this otherwise remarkable and exhaustive treatmentof state–ethnic relations is any consideration of Tibet andof Tibetans as understood through the Chinese imperialgaze. Although this volume is of primary interest to Chinascholars and historians, anthropologists and other studentsof cultural difference can benefit from the detailed insightsconcerning ethnic consciousness and state managementstrategies in despotic, preindustrial societies.

Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy inNicaragua. Elizabeth Dore. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2006. 252 pp.

DAVID GREENAWALTUniversity of Georgia

Myths of Modernity is a superbly crafted work that will appealto scholars of gender and class relationships in Latin Amer-ican history. Combining theories of capitalism, class, gen-der, and ethnicity, Elizabeth Dore provides a well-researchedhistory of social and economic transformation in the ruralcoffee-growing community Diriomo, Nicaragua, that chal-lenges traditional academic views regarding Latin America’stransition to a capitalist economy. By focusing on a single

community, Dore does not attempt to revise national his-tory, only to demonstrate that interpretations of history arenot universal and not all Latin American socioeconomictransformations led to capitalism.

In Myths of Modernity, Dore’s central thesis is that gov-ernmental efforts to encourage expansion of Nicaragua’scoffee industry through land privatization and social trans-formation led to the development of systems of patriarchyand peonage that inhibited the transition to capitalism. In-formed by oral histories, life histories, and archival docu-ments, Dore disputes theories that systems of patriarchyand peonage in Central America were forms of incipientwage labor. Conversely, coffee plantations established non-capitalist systems of labor that were based not on wagesbut, rather, on coercion and consent. Of fundamental im-portance in this book is that class, gender, and ethnicityare not experienced separately. These concepts representdifferent ways of expressing political relationships; thus, itis impossible to understand one without focusing on theothers.

By the 20th century, Diriomo had undergone a num-ber of changes: The state had privatized common property,Indians had become ladino peasants, a system of debt pe-onage had evolved, a dual system of patriarchy (from aboveand from below) had developed, and women had gainedlimited rights to own property. The unique circumstancesof social and economic transformation in Diriomo led theauthor to draw on Polanyian theories of capitalism, to viewpatriarchy and gender through the lens of Stern’s genderedauthority and Joan Scott’s materiality of gender, and to in-terpret ethnicity as a social process.

In discussing capitalism, Dore argues that modernitycan exist without capitalism, but capitalism cannot existwithout modernity. Following Polanyi’s description of cap-italism, Dore distinguishes between capitalist societies (inwhich prices are regulated by markets) and noncapitalist so-cieties (in which prices are regulated by custom, hierarchy,kinship, power, and chance) to underscore the paradox ofcapitalism: that people enter markets of their own free will,but then stay active in markets by necessity. After reviewingdifferent theories of landlord–peasant relationships, Dore’skey point is that not all social transformations are rooted incapitalism.

Dore contends that patriarchy cannot be understoodwithout thorough analysis of gender relationships. Theauthor’s understanding of patriarchy and debt peonageis guided by Stern’s concept that all “politics are genderpolitics.” Emphasis is placed on the dual nature of patri-archy: Patriarchy from above represents the power of coffeeplanters, while patriarchy from below signifies the author-ity of elder males. As social transformation took place inlate-19th-century Nicaragua, liberal reforms had contradic-tory effects for women; elite women were prevented fromowning property, but lower-class women, if they remainedunmarried, were permitted to own their own land. Theauthor attempts to reunite patriarchy with gender theoryusing the concept of “dual patriarchy” and then aims to

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equate ethnicity with class, which she admits fits for somecases, but not for all.

Discussion of ethnicity in Myth of Modernity appears tobe truncated and superficial. One of Dore’s central tenetsabout ethnicity is that Indians stopped identifying them-selves as Indians after their system of communal land tenurewas abolished. In this interpretation, the defining charac-teristic of “Indianness” was their use of common propertyand their subjugation to forced labor. Using this limited def-inition of ethnicity, the author ignores other factors, suchas language and worldview, that may have painted a verydifferent picture of ethnic communities. The author doesnot adequately show that there was a major shift in iden-tity. Simply because the commons were privatized does notnecessarily mean that Indians stopped identifying as Indi-ans. It is just as plausible that racism and unequal treatmentled to a shift in identity.

Myths of Modernity is aptly titled because Sandinistascholars in the 1980s believed that Nicaragua’s coffeeeconomy signified a complete transition to capitalism,which laid the groundwork for their socialist revolution.Dore argues that the Sandinista regime “invented history”to justify their own economic policies. Because they did notadequately understand the history of Nicaragua, the socialand economic policies implemented by the Sandinistasultimately met with failure, and disillusioned peasantshelped to vote them out of office in 1990.

Labor in Cross-Cultural Perspective. E. Paul Durrenbergerand Judith Marti, eds. New York: AltaMira Press, 2006.330 pp.

L IL IANA GOLDINFlorida International University

This volume is the result of a call for papers for the 2001Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropol-ogy on the topic of labor. A peer-reviewed set of 14 chap-ters is included, in addition to an introduction by the edi-tors. The book is organized into three parts: (1) households,with cases from rural Mali, a Philippine fishing commu-nity, and Mexico; (2) firms and corporate entities, with casesfrom Latin America, North America, and Japan; and (3)states—premodern to transnational—with examples fromMesoamerica, Thailand, and North America. Most chaptersare written by economic anthropologists exploring variousaspects of labor dynamics, including the organization ofwork, gender, various production forms (cooperatives, wagework in agriculture and industry, and volunteer labor), andethnohistorical and contemporary cases of labor practiceswithin states.

The editors sought to elucidate how the lessons fromeconomic anthropologists working in diverse areas of theworld could inform research with organized labor in theUnited States. As such, most of the chapters represent aconversation between neoclassical economics, institutionaleconomics, and various substantivist and Marxist perspec-

tives. Overall, the chapters point to the shortcomings ofneoclassical economics to make sense of complex labor ar-rangements around the world and over the course of time.Relying “more on observation than on assumption,” theauthors document the embeddedness of the economy inbroader social relations in the form of various socioeco-nomic networks, households, and firms connected to globalproduction chains.

The volume seems to echo the view of many economicanthropologists who, while acknowledging the insertionof the societies they research into global capitalism, high-light the local expressions of capitalism into a wide array offorms. The various chapters show the alternative strategiespeoples engage in so as to cope with the cold and tangiblehand of structural adjustment policies. In addition, studiesincluded here evaluate classical economic assumptions inthe light of ethnographic cases and show that some mayhold true under ideal circumstances, but that local adap-tations include an array of other considerations not eas-ily measured or accounted for in classical models (see SuttiOrtiz’s evaluation of transaction costs in two Latin Ameri-can cases and Barbara Dilly’s assessment of the role of vol-unteer labor in small communities).

A strength of this contribution is that the volume’squality is quite even, often a difficult goal in works of thistype. Local-level descriptions and analyses of ethnographiccases, particularly in the section on households, contributeto a better understanding of the ways in which communi-ties adapt and experience the impact of globalization. Forexample, Dolores Koenig’s chapter shows the role that ex-tended households play in Mali. These households do notcustomarily “pool” or “share” resources; instead, they di-versify in nontraditional ways while still facilitating theirmembers’ independent use of resources. In turn, diversifi-cation and independence generate new reciprocal obliga-tions within the household. These households constitutesources of opportunity, innovation, and survival in global-ization. We have seen similar ways in which extended ru-ral households in Central America have been able to copewith unfavorable economic conditions, and we have alsoseen how the lack of social networks has contributed to ex-treme poverty and marginality in urban cases. Using whatshe describes as a “loose institutional economics” (p. 81)perspective, Susan Russell shows that social relations andpersonal ties impact the lives of Philippine fishermen intheir decision making as they also employ economic calcu-lations based on transaction costs, creating hybrid systemswith both capitalist and noncapitalist elements.

Sections 2 and 3 document historical changes inlabor dynamics, including the incorporation of women inproduction (U.S. coal industries), the creation of women’slabor cooperatives in Japan, and the central role thatlabor and labor control has played in holding traditionalstate societies in power while at the same time limitingresistance efforts (examples from Viking Age Iceland andnorthern Thailand). Archaeological analyses from Oaxaca(Kowalewski et al.), for example, show an interesting


development in the city’s urban transformation, whichrequired new labor processes, further intensification ofproduction, and organized collective rather than individ-ual work. In accord with the now extensive literature ontransnationalism, several authors urge scholars to takea holistic perspective to examine the impact of globalmigration beyond the simple new sources of income andlabor for employers. Concepts traditionally studied byanthropologists in small-scale communities can open upnew interpretive frameworks of complex transnationalsites, as reflected in Christian Zlolniski’s and TamarDiana Wilson’s chapters, in which networks contributeto new capitalist adaptations or, in Wilson’s words, inwhich “the proletariat has never been atomized” (p. 297).There is a good combination of theory, ethnography, andhigh-quality research in this volume, including a usefulintroduction by the editors that is a contribution in itself.The book’s emphasis on labor makes the volume moreinnovative than more general economic anthropology col-lections. I would use it in teaching graduate-level economicanthropology courses, and I have already taken advan-tage of some of the insights it provides for my own research.

Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900. Carlos A.Forment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.454 pp.

KIRAN ASHERClark University

In this first of two volumes on democracy in Latin America,Carlos Forment offers a survey of public or “associative life”in Mexico and Peru from the mid–18th century to the late19th century (the second volume will focus on Argentinaand Cuba). Forment argues that “civic democracy, under-stood in Tocquevillian terms as a daily practice and form oflife rooted in social equality, mutual recognition, and polit-ical liberty” (p. xi), was firmly rooted in the region by themiddle of the 19th century. Based on research on thousandsof voluntary associations, he argues that Latin Americanspracticed “sovereignty of the people” (p. 29) in their every-day lives, and in social, civic, and economic associations,even as they turned “their backs to states” (pp. 154, 192)that were often authoritarian and despotic.

This account of public life in Latin America is both em-pirically and theoretically ambitious, as Forment attemptsto historicize the social sciences, especially comparative pol-itics and political sociology. The early chapters and theconcluding remarks engage with four sets of scholars: Toc-queville and Tocquevillians studying the changing charac-ter of public life (Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, JohnDewey, and Charles Taylor, among others); Latin Ameri-canists concerned with the origins of authoritarianism anddemocratic “transitions” in the region (Fernando Cardosoand Enzo Faletto, and Jorge Domınguez); postcolonialistswho trace the effects of colonial legacies on democracy inThird World countries (Partha Chatterjee and Mahmood

Mamdani); and political theorists studying polyarchicalregimes in the modern world (Robert Dahl and MichaelWalzer). In these short but wide-ranging “conversations,”Forment contextualizes the emergence and developmentof “sovereignty of the people” (p. 29) in Latin Americaas an alternative to state- and market-centered forms ofdemocracy.

In the rest of the book, Forment engages 19th-centuryLatin Americans through an extensive review of secondaryand primary sources (mainly newspapers). Part 2 is an ac-count of the Catholicism-infused, authoritarian, and closednature of late-colonial (1760s–1820s) public institutions inthe region and the varying degrees to which Mexicans andPeruvians rebelled against them. These groups broke withcolonial habits and structures by appropriating Catholic ter-minology and tropes (“passion,” “reason,” and “judgment”)to reinterpret their realities and sense of personhood. Ac-cording to Forment, Mexicans became “rational adults” and“sovereign citizens” more successfully than did Peruvians.Forment then describes how hundreds of civic and eco-nomic associations were established and inculcated with a“civic Catholic” sense of self and public life.

Chapters 5–16 are dedicated to semithick descriptionsof public life in Mexico and Peru “across four terrains—civil society, political society, economic society, and publicsphere.” In the first half of the 19th century (1820s–50s),Latin Americans acquired democratic civic culture by prac-ticing it in a burgeoning number of public associations.Forment contends that civil and economic society flour-ished later and less well in Peru because, unlike most Mex-icans, “the overwhelming majority of Peruvians remainedattached to their old authoritarian habits” (p. 130). “Asso-ciative life” in both nations became institutionalized in thesecond half of 19th century (1850s–90s) at the same timeas state and market forces were becoming consolidated.

A wide range of spheres—community-developmentgroups, artisan guilds, patriotic and ethnic associations,cooperatives, literary and scientific societies, professionalgroups, mutual-aid societies, and so forth—practiced “livingdemocracy.” This democracy-in-practice and the numbersof public associations often waxed and waned, dependingin part on the degree of authoritianism within the nation’spolitical regimes. Accounts of various associations illustratehow public life in Mexico and Peru was imperfect, dis-jointed, asymmetrical, fragmented, and culturally hybrid.Forment’s narratives are detail rich, with supporting datacarefully documented and organized in tables, charts, andmaps. They are likely to be of interest to specialists but provea little tedious for the general audience the author aims toreach.

Forment’s work is more useful at showing that LatinAmericans had a tradition of everyday democracy in publiclife than at eschewing teleological explanations aboutthe “first world” origins of democracy. This is because hedepends too much on descriptions to support his claims,and because the links between 19th-century narratives and20th-century scholarly theories are often ill defined and

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implicit. Yet Forment’s call to heed the relevance of historyand his analytical claim that “democratic life in LatinAmerica arose from the fissures between daily practices andinstitutional structures” (p. 429) are timely interventionsfor today’s scholars of politics.

As Pastoralists Settle: Social, Health, and EconomicConsequences of Pastoral Sedentarization in MarsabitDistrict, Kenya. Elliot Fratkin and Eric Abella Roth, eds.New York: Kluwer Academic, 2005. 280 pp.

CAROLYN K. LESOROGOLWashington University

This volume brings together a diverse body of work re-garding sedentarization of pastoralists in northern Kenyafrom the perspectives of ecology, economics, and health,including considerable attention to the impact of seden-tarization on women. The editors conceptualize “sedenta-rization” as a process of change, providing both opportu-nities and challenges and entailing both positive and neg-ative consequences for various segments of pastoral com-munities. The individual chapters document these changesusing a range of research methodologies, time scales, andsamples, although much of the book centers around the ed-itors’ long-term research project on Rendille (one of the pas-toralist communities in Marsabit) sedentarization. As Pas-toralists Settle is a significant contribution to the literatureon contemporary livestock pastoralism in Africa as it ana-lyzes one of the primary trends shaping pastoralists’ livestoday.

The book opens with two introductory chapters bythe editors that provide background information on EastAfrican pastoralism and the process of sedentarization.These chapters are especially suitable for readers unfamil-iar with the topic, as they explain the basics of pastoral-ist systems and the factors (e.g., population growth, lossof pastures, drought, impoverishment, conflict, and urbanmigration) leading to increased settlement of Kenyan pas-toralists over the 20th century. The authors do not presentany unifying theory to explain sedentarization but do claimthat the volume will bridge the “debilitating dichotomy” instudies of pastoralists between more qualitative interpretiveapproaches and more quantitative natural science ones. Awide range of methods are used across the various chapters,but most emphasis is placed on quantitative and survey ap-proaches, sometimes supplemented by in-depth interviews(e.g., esp. the final two chapters). Of course, interpretationof quantitative results requires considerable knowledge ofthe communities, demonstrated by many of the authors,and the use of methods here seems appropriate given thetypes of questions investigated.

Following the two introductory chapters are 11 chap-ters focusing on specific aspects of sedentarization, includ-ing the following: the role of ethnic conflict in seden-tarization, ecological processes, economic and livelihooddynamics, nutritional and health consequences, and impli-

cations of sedentarization for female circumcision and fe-male education. Chapters 3 (John Galaty) and 4 (H. JurgenSchwartz) are historical approaches to the topic. Galatydraws on archival sources to describe how British bound-ary making led to increased conflict: As pastoral groupswere compressed into smaller territories, they sought in-creased security near towns, contributing to sedentariza-tional. Chapter 4 documents the process of reduced mo-bility of Rendille pastoralists using spatial data from aerialand ecological surveys (from the 1980s) and discusses pos-sible consequences of increased sedentarization. Both ofthese chapters would have been stronger if they had beenbrought more up to date with recent data on the patternsthey discuss. The speculations about effects of sedentariza-tion in chapter 4 are actually the subject of subsequentchapters and therefore appear rather obsolete by compar-ison. Chapter 5 by John McPeak and Peter Little, for in-stance, presents results from a recent (2000–01) study ofpastoral risk management strategies, showing that sedenta-rization occurs among both wealthy and poor pastoralists,and that it provides greater opportunities for the wealthywho continue to be linked with pastoralism while the poorare limited to less remunerative activities.

The middle chapters (6–11) present results of severalstudies of the economic and health effects of sedentariza-tion, mostly from the Rendille Sendentarization Project,which suggest that the effects of sedentarization are diverse.Settlement sometimes provides new economic opportuni-ties for women and the poor as they gain access to resourcesthrough education, trade, and agriculture, but nutritionalanalyses demonstrate that settled populations tend to havepoorer nutritional status because of reduction of milk andincrease in grains and sugar in the diet as well as increasedworkloads, especially for women. Nutritional status alsocorrelates positively with wealth, and since poverty is oneof the main reasons for settlement, it follows that there willbe poorer nutritional status in settled areas. Chapters 12 and13 (by Bettina Shell-Duncan and Eric Roth, respectively) dis-cuss implications of settlement on the practice of female cir-cumcision and female education. Interestingly, settlementhas not led to a lessening of demand for female circumci-sion but, instead, has increased medicalization of the prac-tice. Increasing female education in settled areas is alteringattitudes away from traditions that tolerate premarital sextoward a positive view of female chastity before marriage.However, the extent to which practice follows attitudes isunclear.

The strength of this volume is the variety and qualityof empirical data presented. The high number of copyedit-ing errors can be distracting, and background material re-lated to sedentarization is repeated in many chapters, cre-ating redundancy. There is also no unified set of theoret-ical or policy-level conclusions arising from the analysis;perhaps this is precluded given the diversity of studies andfindings. In spite of these shortcomings, the volume con-tributes much to our understanding of the complex processof change facing pastoralists today.


Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflictin Melanesia and the West. Simon Harrison. New York:Berghahn, 2006. 182 pp.

ELLEN E. FACEYUniversity of Northern British Columbia

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is clearly and convinc-ingly written, covers a large number of fascinating and di-verse ethnographic cases, and its central theoretical propo-sitions are well worthy of consideration and debate.

While it bears directly on both ethnicity and national-ism, the author, Simon Harrison, states that these are notthe primary focus of his book: “Rather, it is an argumentabout the nature of social identity . . . with the aim of ex-plaining why conflicts and social divisions seem often to beassociated with fraught perceptions of mutually hostile re-semblance” (p. 12). It is also a critique of social conflict the-ory. Harrison begins with Rene Girard, Georg Simmel, andL. A. Coser, then moves through Gregory Bateson, FredrikBarth, Abner Cohen, Annette Weiner, Michael Taussig, JeanComaroff, Roger Keesing, Robert Tonkinson, and others, us-ing theories of language change, symbolic analysis of iden-tity, and the politics of culture. His points are groundedin a comparison of Pacific, mostly Melanesian materials,with European and some North American ethnographiccases.

Parts of Harrison’s argument will be familiar from his2002 article, “The Politics of Resemblance: Ethnicity, Trade-marks, Head-Hunting,” but he has greatly developed andexpanded his earlier thesis. At the most general level, heraises a challenge to there being a universal notion of “cul-ture” in the “a culture” sense. More particularly he ques-tions the assumption that “ethnic and national identitiesare most usefully understood as based on perceptions of dif-ference. . . . The problem with this view . . . is that represen-tations of difference and alterity, though of course central toethnicity and nationalism, nevertheless always seem to bebound inextricably to perceptions of similarity” (pp. 62–63),hence his focus on “mimetic conflict.” He contrasts culturaldefinitions of the person (“relational” vs. “individual”) andrelates these to what he claims are correspondingly contraryways of conceptualizing “culture,” “property,” and ways inwhich symbolic practices may be acquired, stolen, and man-aged to create and maintain collective identities.

There are minor weaknesses in the book. A few of his ex-amples of distinct ways of thinking are less convincing, forexample, the Druze versus Old Order Amish as representinguse of “exclusivity” versus “purity” as a basis for relating toOutsiders and to Outside cultural elements (p. 125). Surelythere are groups who use exclusionary methods, yet alsoproselytize, which does not fit the “purity” notion: Wouldnot Mormons, for example, fall into that category? Harri-son does admit that that might happen but does not seeit as grounds to question the dichotomy. In various placesthroughout the book, however, he does emphasize that heis not simply elaborating a pair of opposed choices or pat-

terns but more so a cultural emphasis in one direction orthe other.

I found Harrison’s brief foray into witchcraft—half apage—to claim a lot with too little explanation, especiallyon such a long and exhaustively studied subject. Also, is heindeed comparing Melanesia and the West—or primarilylowland Papua New Guinea societies and western Europe?This will always be a problem with such a general level ofcomparison; in this regard the book is a bit unbalanced,weighted toward the Melanesian examples. This is not sur-prising, given that this is Harrison’s area of greatest exper-tise, but the goal he sets himself cannot be fully met becausehe tells us so much less about the modern Western modethan about the Melanesian. This suggests that his is a farlarger task than could reasonably be expected to be fullyexplored in 154 pages.

Nonetheless, he has definitely got hold of somethingimportant here. These are not arcane matters; they are verymuch reality or real-world issues. In Canadian public cul-ture, for example, there is almost daily reference to ideasand claims such as those to which Harrison draws our at-tention. There are seemingly endless debates in the mediaabout whether treating people differently is a good thing, ademocratic thing, in a country that wears its multiculturalreputation like a badge of honor, while a large proportionof the ethnically mainstream public (white Anglo-Saxonand English speaking) denies the legitimacy of special ac-commodations on the basis of difference, trumpeting that“equality means treating everyone the same”—regardless ofwhether doing so is disadvantageous to particular minorityindividuals or groups because they are, in fact, not the same,and, therefore, equity would sometimes require differentialtreatment.

Fracturing Resemblances is well worth reading forHarrison’s rethinking of social conflict theory as well as forhis insights on the social negotiation of symbolic practicesin the context of both internal and external struggles forpower.

REFERENCE CITEDHarrison, Simon

2002 The Politics of Resemblance: Ethnicity, Trademarks, Head-Hunting. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute8(2):211–232.

Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange.Amiria Henare. New York: Cambridge University Press,2005. 323 pp.

TERRI CASTANEDACalifornia State University, Sacramento

Imagine an antique specimen tag still affixed to an 18th-century artifact by means of a fine silk string. Barely dis-cernible in faded brown ink, a collector’s name is pennedin beautiful, measured script above a long-obsolete cata-log number. A gentle turn of the tag yields further detailabout the item’s history and acquisition, perhaps a date and

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donor’s name or the price for which it sold at auction some70 years ago. Supporting file documents—photographs, let-ters, journal entries, exhibition records—offer other storiesstill, bringing to light and to life more than 200 years ofchanging hands, places, and contingent social relations. Al-ready generations-old and treasured when gifted to a seafar-ing explorer, it was carried back as a scientific “specimen”to the drawing rooms, curiosity cabinets, and antiquariansocieties of Scotland to be marveled over, measured, classi-fied, and made to serve as the very embodiment of Maorisociety and a distant, Othered landscape increasingly or-dered by European expansionism, Christian missionizing,and unilinealist social theories. Variously gifted, sold, andsafeguarded by generations of public and private heirs andinstitutions, it stands as a tangible and lasting link betweenlives and places, future and past.

In Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange, AmiriaHenare plumbs the depths of such social and historicalconnections. Meticulously charting the passage of Euro-pean and Maori objects, ideas, and people between Scotlandand New Zealand over the course of nearly three cen-turies, she demonstrates the unparalleled value of “think-ing through things” (p. 1). Indeed, “things,” and theirmovement through time and across space, served as bothher principal source of ethnographic data and as the com-pass directing two years of fieldwork that carried her—likeone of the many artifacts whose influence and trajecto-ries she sought to map—from the “land of [her] birth—New Zealand—to Scotland, the land of [her] ancestors,”and often back again (p. 10). Calling for a revival of an-thropological engagement with museums and artifacts, twoloci of knowledge on which 20th-century anthropology inEurope and the United States could not turn its back tooquickly, this historical ethnography of museums in Scot-land and New Zealand simultaneously analyzes and extendsa tradition of material culture research that never fell fullyfrom favor in Henare’s homeland, where the presence ofMaori taonga (material culture) served to keep the episte-mological potency of objects in a sustained disciplinaryfocus.

Taonga first entered the urban centers of 18th-centuryBritain following three Pacific voyages led by Captain Cookbetween 1768 and 1780. Although each expedition in-volved the ceremonial exchange of European and Maorigoods, the European objects gifted to Maori peoples heldno status even remotely equivalent to the taonga Maori en-trusted into Cook’s safekeeping: carved greenstone weaponsand cloaks of woven flax and kiwi feathers. Yet, removed todistant lands, these treasured objects were received and in-tegrated into a scholarly world that perceived them not asobjects of ancestral power or prestige but, rather, as em-bodiments of a primitive place and past. Henare tracks thesocial import and physical movement of such objects intothe collections of Scottish museums and scholarly societies,where they joined a growing corpus of scientific specimensthat bolstered Enlightenment preoccupations with the so-cial, moral, and technological progress of humanity.

While Maori artifacts provided empirical data thathelped to fuel imperialist activity in New Zealand andthroughout the British Empire, they also served to rational-ize Enlightenment-inspired “improvements” much closerto home. Tracing the shared circuits traveled by material cul-ture, collectors, and the major thinkers of the day, Henareshows how the self-same theories and experimentations insocial progress that Britain deployed in its Pacific outpostsalso helped to dispossess Scottish Highlanders from theirancestral homelands, as urban landlords sought higher agri-cultural yields and rents from farmers whose families hadworked the land for generations. These Land Clearances ofthe late 1700s, and the often poignant narratives of forcedmigration to countries and colonies half a world away, havelately inspired a proliferation of provincial museums acrossthe rural Scottish landscape. The stories they tell, like thoseof the Maori now recounted in many of New Zealand’scontemporary museums, are largely voiced through theuse of treasured family heirlooms, letters, diaries, andoral narratives passed from down through generations.Interpretive storylines also turn on common themes—language loss and social fragmentation that accompanieddisplacement—and celebrations of tradition, survival, andcultural renewal made possible, in part, by “things” thattraveled through these earlier times and places. But Maoritaonga and treasured Scottish heirlooms connect theseseemingly disparate historical processes in far more ironicand meaningful ways, since many families forced fromtheir homes and farmsteads during the Clearances werealso emigrants to New Zealand where, as the dispossesseddescendants of romanticized Highland clans, they par-ticipated in the removal of Maori from their aboriginalterritory.

Henare’s exhaustive research and wide-ranging analy-sis tacks back and forth from Dunedin to Aberdeen, the18th century to the 21st century, Elsdon Best to E. B. Tylor,and Maori meeting houses to Clan Donald Visitor Centre,weaving together a genealogy of people, objects, and ideasonce intimately intertwined but seemingly disarticulated bytime, space, and the movement of material culture researchin and out of anthropological vogue. The author uncov-ers and reconstitutes these links, providing us with a com-pelling example of why an epistemology of “things” is ascritical to anthropology’s future as it is to our understand-ing of its past. Although focused principally on Scotlandand New Zealand, Henare’s extraordinary curatorial sensi-bility offers new and refreshing insight onto a broad sweepof issues and theoretical debates animating 21st-century an-thropology and museology. Readers will be impressed bythe systematic fieldwork and empirical analysis that under-girds this text, but they will also appreciate the fact thatmuch of what Henare has to say is grounded in her ownancestral ties to pioneering ethnologists and early mate-rial culture research in New Zealand. In this regard, boththe ethnographer and her book form new threads by whichto materially interweave the Scottish and Maori future andpast.


Human Ecology in the Wadi Al-Hasa: Land Use andAbandonment through the Holocene. J. Brett Hill.Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. 194 pp.

ISAAC I . ULLAHArizona State University

Far too commonly, archaeological monographs are nar-rowly focused surveys of the archaeology of a region or timeperiod. Despite the somewhat specific-sounding title, BrettHill’s book is not one of these. Hill uses the Wadi Al-Hasain Southern Jordan as a case study of the nature of humanimpact on the environment throughout the Holocene (ca.10,000 B.P. to C.E. 1918). He creates a new methodologywith high-end geographic information system (GIS) soft-ware to examine the relationship between settlement pat-tern, environment, and landscape change. Because of this,his book will interest not only Levantine archaeologists butalso any researcher interested in the long-term effects ofhuman land use and land use decisions.

Hill begins with an overview of theoretical concerns.Significantly, he uses the conceptual framework of the An-nales school to separate the short-term benefits of land usedecisions from the long-term effects those decisions have onthe landscape and on the range of possible future decisions.The concept of scale is important here, and Hill makes thepoint that any land-use strategy can be seen in both posi-tive and negative light as scale narrows or expands. He alsoclarifies the often misused term degradation, explaining itsuse in his work as “the declining abundance or availabilityof land resources to past human populations” (p. 24). Thisoverview of theory is followed by two chapters that set thescene for the rest of the analysis by summarizing the archae-ological and historical record as well as the geomorphologicand paleoenvironmental evidence from the Hasa valley andsurrounding areas through the Holocene.

In the book’s fifth chapter, Hill applies a series of spatialanalyses to examine the continuity of sites through time, aswell as the duration between reoccupations of an area. Thedata indicate that sites in the southern part of the study areawere abandoned more frequently than those in the north,which were more continually occupied through time. Inter-estingly, the northern part of the study area is characterizedby fertile rolling plains that are much less susceptible to ero-sion than the more marginal environment of the southernHasa. The analysis also indicates that more recovery timewas needed after periods of extensive settlement in the moremarginal areas of the Hasa than for periods of less-intensiveuse.

Hill then constructs GIS-based models of site catch-ment and land-use intensity for each time period and cal-culates erosion potential for the entire Hasa region as well.He uses anisotropic cost surfaces to determine “zones of useintensity” around sites from each time period and, then,as a measure of settlement success through time, he calcu-lates cumulative use intensity throughout the Hasa. Usingthe Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), he then

calculates the percent soil loss (PSL) at each pixel of theHasa DEM. An examination of PSL within the highest useintensity zones of sites shows not only that are sites in thesouth consistently located in areas with much higher PSLthan those in the north but also that sites from time periodsidentified as having high rates of abandonment as well aslong abandonment periods were located in areas with thehighest PSL.

This pattern indicates that the people of the moremarginal southern Hasa cyclically abandoned and resettledthe area through time. The cycle was related to both theemergence of new land use techniques as well as changesin the political hierarchy of the area. Abandonment andland degradation in the Neolithic and the Calcholithic ap-pears to be related to enormous amounts of technoculturalchange in periods where agropastoralism was a new and asyet underdeveloped subsistence strategy. In the later timeperiods, however, the tension between the demands of dis-tant political forces, regional security and stability, and theneeds of local people influenced the degree of land use and,therefore, land degradation.

Hill has constructed an extremely thoughtful, welllaid-out, and elegantly argued examination into the natureof human land use in the Southern Levant since thebeginning of agriculture. He couples sound methodologywith innovative technological solutions to define patternsdeceptive in their seeming simplicity—ones that couldnever have been determined with conventional analyses.It is also obvious that he wrote this book with a wideraudience in mind, which I believe makes this a pivotalwork in the struggle to show why archaeology is importantfor today’s world. Hill makes it clear that archaeology isour only tool to understand the long-term consequencesof our actions not only for us but also for future generations.

Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. Don Kulick andAnne Meneley, eds. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher–Penguin,2005. 246 pp.

DAVID A. HIMMELGREENUniversity of South Florida

Human fascination with fat is complex and multifaceted.Don Kulick and Anne Meneley state that fat “conjures im-ages of repulsion, disgust, and anxiety for some, but asso-ciations of comfort, delight, and beauty for others” (p. 1).As the contributors to this volume show, fat imbues us withnotions of good and bad, strength and weakness, healthand illness, attractiveness and unpleasantness, and wealthand poverty, in addition to different meanings regardingeroticism.

Rebecca Popenoe examines the role cultural values playin determining ideal body types. In “Ideal,” she describeshow young desert Arab girls in Niger are force-fed to fat-ten them up in preparation for marriage. “Fat bodies areappreciated where food is hard to come by, and thin onesare admired in places where food is abundant” (p. 17). Lena

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Gemzo explores the relationship between religion, fasting,and sanctity in “Heavenly.” Gemzo discusses cases such asthat of Alexandrina of Balasar, a young Portuguese womanwho gave her life to Christ through “holy anorexia,” inwhich avoidance of food is equated with the forsaking ofsexual desire. In “Talk,” Fanny Ambjornsson describes theintricate ways in which Swedish teenage girls talk with oneanother about fat. This analysis shows that it is socially moreacceptable for thin, attractive girls to talk about being fatthan it is for girls that are actually overweight. In “White,”Mary Weismantel focuses on fat’s association with healthand strength among Andean Indians. She suggests that theevolving tale of the pishtaco, a white foreigner who attacksIndians, drains their fat, and sells it, reflects the history ofexploitation and racialized economics among indigenousgroups in South America.

Lypodystrophy, a condition that leads to loss of sub-cutaneous fat in the face and accumulation of hard fatin the trunk, is often found among people receiving an-tiretroviral treatment. In “Chaos,” Mark Graham discussesthe irony of drugs that allow people to lead relatively nor-mal lives but leave some looking like they have advancedAIDS. In “Leaky,” Kulik and Thas Machado-Borges focus onthe obsession with weight loss among the middle class inBrazil, one of the richest nations in the world with hugeeconomic disparities between rich and poor and black andwhite. As the authors suggest, by losing fat, middle-classwomen can show their wealth and perceive themselves asbecoming whiter. In “Oil,” Anne Meneley explores the pop-ularity of olive oil in North America and its associationswith health and with a slower pace of life and shows howoil producers capitalize on these associations in marketingtheir product. In “Lard,” Jillian Cavanaugh explores the de-sire of Bergamascos to revive the “sense of shared commu-nity, identity, and history” (p. 143) through the consump-tion of locally produced lardo (white pig fat). Cavanaughshows how traditions are revived and repackaged to con-form to current norms in a postindustrial consumer culturein this region of Italy. In “Spam,” Julie Harrison discussesthe popularity of spiced ham in Hawaii, where it has beenincorporated into a myriad of cuisines. As she shows, Spamhas become an identity symbol that allows native Hawai-ians to distinguish themselves from tourists and mainlan-ders. In “Phat,” Joan Gross looks at the life of Puerto Ricanrapper Big Punisher (Christopher Rios). A victim of childabuse that may have resulted in an eating disorder, Riosrose to fame in hip-hop where living big and being physi-cally large are symbolic of power. In “Pissed Off,” AllysonMitchell examines how fat activists proudly display theirrotund bodies in theatrical performances as a way of valoriz-ing their physical size and of reeducating the public aboutbody image, eating disorders, and health and beauty stan-dards. Finally, the chapters “Porn” (Kulick) and “Chasers”(Matti Bunzl) explore fat and eroticism in adult films tar-geted at different audiences. Kulick discusses how films thatfeature obese women do not focus on sexual acts but, rather,on the consumption of food by women in various stages

of undress. Bunzl describes the marketing and content offilms of chubby men who have sex with one another orwith other nonchubby men.

This is an important, edited volume that addresses themany ways in which people across the world give meaningto fat. This is an informative, enjoyable, and easy-to-readbook that should be on the book shelves of not only so-cial and behavioral scientists but also of public health re-searchers, clinicians, and the general public.

Connectivity in Antiquity: Globalization as Long-TermHistorical Process. Oystein S. LaBianca and Sandra ArnoldScham, eds. London: Equinox, 2006. 175 pp.

DAVID JOHNSONBrigham Young University

This volume contains chapters discussing globalization as along-term historical process using archaeological examplesfrom the Middle East. The chapters are based on ManuelCastells’s theories on globalization as outlined in The Riseof the Network Society (1996).

The first section examines Castells’s concept of “spaceof flows,” the nonsubstantial dimension in which infor-mation is transmitted and transactions conducted withoutphysical proximity. Thomas Levy’s chapter proposes thattechnological changes produce transformations of socialstructure and that the development of metallurgy in theChalcolithic period was analogous to the development ofinformation technology in the modern age. Two periodsare discussed: (1) the Chalcolithic, when copper metallurgyfirst appeared, leading to the development of the earliestchiefdoms in the Beersheva region, followed by (2) the EarlyBronze, when there was a decrease in social complexity withan increase in metal production in the resource zone. Thoseexcluded from the initial technological revolution took ad-vantage of weaknesses when a vibrant technological cen-tered society floundered. William Collin’s chapter discussestrade connectivity in Mesopotamia in third and fourth mil-lennium B.C.E. as a system of independent-producing re-gions rather than an axial-based system. The focus is mainlyon Upper Mesopotamia and the integrated trade system thatdeveloped in Western Syria, a network stimulated by lo-cal opportunity rather than external exploitation. WilliamThompson postulates an ancient space of flows based ontrade goods, a network of ports and inland cities, and socialelites as the stimuli for the flow of goods and information.Thompson outlines, in a well-reasoned argument, a hypoth-esis that world-system development has advanced over timein a pattern of periods of production innovation followedby periods of diffusion punctuated by intermittent crisis.Thompson further hypothesizes that this pattern has beenrepeated three times with ancient (3400–1200 B.C.E.), clas-sical (l200 B.C.E.– C.E. 930), and modern (930 C.E.–present)phases.

The second section examines cognitive globalizationin history. Both Paul Ray and Bethany Walker examine


nonmaterial aspects of culture as significant factors in glob-alization. Walker examines the Muslim practice of pilgrim-age (hajj) as a factor that can reinforce either a global orparticularist collective identity, concepts that Castells sawas challenging each other in the last part of this century.Walker traces the history of the hajj as a factor in creatingnetworks in the Islamic world and argues that state controlof the Muslim pilgrimage has created both a global Islamicidentity and resistance identities based on local images ofwhat it means to be Muslim. Ray examines the Persian pe-riod (539–332 B.C.E.) in Transjordan as an early example ofcognitive globalization based on long-distance trade con-nections to the Mediterranean and South Arabia, a networkof administrative centers and roads, and a common cur-rency and language (Aramaic), which broke down barriersof culture and language and led to a long-range exchangeof ideas and material culture.

Sheldon Gosline argues that Castells’s concept of a “par-allel development” of institutional and cultural innovationto sustain the new economy based on technological innova-tion is socialization, and that the primary tension in humansystems is the interplay between the forces of socializationand globalization with socialization dominating through-out history with punctuated periods of globalization. Therole of these two forces in human history is discussed, aswell as the way they have been viewed in various theoret-ical models such as Marxism, models of state formation,and systems theory. Gosline concludes that the processesthat lead to globalization are the affect that brought aboutthe historical effects of change.

The final section deals with Castells’s “power of iden-tity” as a historical concept. Two chapters discuss how iden-tity changes over time. Jenny Cashman examines the shift-ing concepts of what was considered “foreign” in Egyptduring the New Kingdom: Global connectivity led to wide-range reactions as the foreign other became incorporatedinto Egyptian representation and construction of identity.Meanwhile, Leif Manger examines the more fluid bound-aries of Hadrami migrations from South Yemen and theeffects on society ending with the bin Laden migrationto Saudi Arabia. Sandra Scham examines how resistancemovements constructed with Internet technologies makeuse of the past, highlighting the examples of ecofemi-nism, which associated with goddess worship, and Afro-centrism, which was based on Bernal’s concept of a “blackAthena.”

The chapters are well written and the volume presentsimportant ideas on globalization in the past. My only crit-icism is that none of the chapters deal with two of themost significant intellectual and ideological movements,Hellenism and Christianity, both of which have impactedour modern worldview, nor how they fit into Castells’s con-cepts of “connectivity” and “globalization.”

REFERENCE CITEDCastells, Manuel

1996 The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement inTwentieth-Century Nepal. Sarah LeVine and David N.Gellner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.377 pp.

INGRID JORDTUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Rebuilding Buddhism is a collaborative effort informed bythe complementary expertise of two authors: female asceti-cism (Sarah LeVine) and Newar Buddhism (David Gellner).The ethnography explores the complex ways in whichMahayana, Vajrayana, and Tibetan Buddhist traditions in-terplay with the introduction of Theravada Buddhism fromSri Lanka and Burma, engaging state politics and leadingto a revivalism that has invigorated Newar ethnic iden-tity. LeVine and Gellner show how Theravada monasticismhas reformed lay expectations so as to undercut Mahayana–Vajrayana monastic traditions and forms of lay support or-ganized along caste lines. Theravada Buddhism thus func-tions as a reformer of prior practices. The authors documentTheravada Buddhism’s modernist transformation as a reli-gion oriented toward universal accessibility of the teachingsirrespective of gender, caste, or even virtuosi status.

This represents a significant ethnographic contribu-tion. Most studies of Buddhist revitalization have been situ-ated entirely within a single country, conveying an artificialboundedness that does not account for the real-life dynam-ics of the religiopolitical geography in the region or transna-tionally. Coming into view are the new ways in which na-tionalist politics engage with Buddhist renewal, the growthof feminist Buddhist movements, the encounter with oth-erwise noncontiguous sects, and the ways in which theseencounters impact the effort in Nepal itself to assert iden-tity as against nationalist Hindu majority.

The authors’ starting point is the emergence of worldor “modernist Buddhism” in 19th-century Sri Lanka. It wasthen that Buddhism ceased to be a purely regional religionand, through the influence of figures such as Dharmapala(1864–1933), began to engage with modernist discoursesregionally and around the world. This engagement wouldhave “considerable influence on . . . religious developmentsin Nepal” (p. 7).

While not discounting traditionalist tendencies of re-vival, the authors are specifically interested in demonstrat-ing how reaffirmation of practices of monasticism has beenthe means through which modernist Buddhist forms (ashave developed in Sri Lanka and Burma) came to be adoptedby Nepali monks and nuns who trained in those countries.They also became the models supported by educated layleaders who were “inclined to a rationalist and moderniz-ing view both of Buddhism and of life in general” (p. 289).

In the first two substantive chapters, the Theravadamovement is explored as a transnational movement withmodernist tendencies aimed at universalizing the teachingsand asserting a clearer demarcation from Hindu practices inthe context of identity politics and nation state–building.

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After the fall of the Rana regime and state sponsorship ofHinduism, the Theravada message spread through the trans-lation of texts and religious tracts into the Nepal Basha lan-guage. This expanded the lay community. Recruitment ofmonks was a slower process, but LeVine traces the biogra-phy of the monk Gyanapurnika who went to Burma fortraining in 1956. In 1960 the nun Dhammawati traveled toBurma to receive her education. The nun’s order took offsignificantly after 1963, and this is recounted in the nextchapter.

In chapter 5 changing attitudes to Buddhist practice de-velop for the laity as the Theravada movement emerges asa fundamentalist movement confronting caste relations inthe community of practitioners. Chapter 6 addresses theissue of uniformity of practice in the monastic commu-nity. The focus on monasticism is the key to understandingNewar Buddhist revitalization because it reconfigures hier-archical social arrangements organized around principles ofHindu caste. Chapter 7 returns to the status of nuns, thistime inflected by the movement to establish full ordina-tion for nuns in accordance with imported feminist ideasof equal status for monks and nuns and by a feminist Bud-dhist movement to reinvigorate the Theravada women’smonastic order through ordination in the Mahayana tra-dition where the order is still continued today.

Chapter 8, entitled “Winds of Change: Meditation andSocial Activism,” traces the introduction from Burma ofvipassana meditation in the 1980s. In Nepal, vipassana wasaccepted easily because it had egalitarian appeal, because itwas not connected to a monastic hierarchy, and because itappeared to be “both Buddhist and scientific or modern”(p. 229).

The final two chapters move the camera back out tooverview height to consider comparatively other revivalmovements, such as the Tibetan Buddhist revival. At lastthe authors offer a summary of implications and compari-son between the revivalism of the Newars and the Sherpamovement as analyzed by Sherry Ortner in the 1980s.

The authors state in their introductory remarks thatthey “seek to provide as rich and as many-sided anethnography and ethnographic history of this local formof Buddhism modernism” (p. xi) as they can. The result is asplendidly rendered ethnography that advances a wealth ofinformed analysis about Buddhist renewal in Nepal whilesuggesting many insights into the process of Buddhistrevitalization throughout the region.

Changing Places: Environment, Development, andSocial Change in Rural Honduras. William M. Loker.Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2004. 227 pp.

MARK MOBERGUniversity of South Alabama

The El Cajon region of Honduras is home to a hydro-electric project that is among the ten largest dams in theworld. Constructed during the 1980s at a cost exceeding

$800 million the El Cajon dam represented a massive in-frastructural investment for the poorest country in Cen-tral America. Having conducted archaeological and ethno-graphic research in the area prior to the dam’s construc-tion, and again throughout the 1990s, William Loker wasuniquely situated to assess the social and ecological impactsof the project. The result is a fine-grained portrait of thecommunities displaced by the dam, and a searing indict-ment of development programs designed without the con-sent of those most severely affected by them.

As described by Loker, the El Cajon project aboundswith painful ironies. It produces 60 percent of the country’selectrical power, yet the households in its vicinity lack anyelectricity of their own. Instead, much of its power fuelstextile factories that have sprung up in recent years aroundthe burgeoning city of San Pedro Sula. About 40 percentof the agricultural land previously available to residents ofthe El Cajon region was flooded by the project, promptingmassive outmigration (some 348 people left from the townof Montanuelos alone, out of an initial population of 869).Thus, the dam has created both the power required for Hon-duras’s maquilas (assembly plants) as well as much of theirwork force, for many of the displaced now compete for in-dustrial wages averaging $100 or less per month. A govern-ment program to compensate residents for the lands andhomes they lost to floodwaters was grossly underfunded atless than one percent of the total project cost; furthermore,it provided no allocations at all for the majority of residentswho did not possess titles for the land they cultivated. Ofthe scanty funds that were set aside for compensation, mostremain unaccounted for, having likely been misappropri-ated by corrupt project officials. Finally, a bungling effort toprovide short-term employment to displaced rural residentssowed divisions and threats of violence between those em-ployed on a reforestation project and farmers whose landswere targeted for reforestation.

That poor people are almost always harmed by hierar-chically designed development projects is by now a familiarstory to most anthropologists. What makes Loker’s tellingof it particularly persuasive are his ambitious methodol-ogy and comprehensive evidence. Beginning with ArturoEscobar’s Encountering Development (1995), anthropologistsin recent years have broadly critiqued development ideol-ogy at the discursive level, emphasizing the rhetoric of de-velopment planners and institutions rather than the livedexperiences of the communities affected by them. In a re-freshing contrast, Loker looks beyond the El Cajon project’srhetoric, which actually invoked the values of sustainabil-ity and social equity, to reiterate the ecological and mate-rial underpinnings of the development process. He does sothrough an analytical framework that he calls “the ecologyof practice,” an approach emphasizing both ecological con-straints on livelihoods and human agency in responding tothem. Thus, while the poor who live on the margins of theEl Cajon reservoir have almost all been victimized in someway by the project, they are by no means passive. Throughintensified sociability and strategic use of compadrazgo (lit.,


“coparent”), residents have tried to offset their decliningeconomic viability through increased reciprocity and fic-tive kinship. Yet such strategies also tend to undermine thecapacity of the poor for collective action against the stateand its development agenda, for intensified patron–clientties inevitably come at the cost of a more “horizontal” class-based politics.

Loker’s meticulously assembled data concretely demon-strate the ways in which the dam has reduced living stan-dards for most rural residents while threatening the region’secological sustainability. To anthropologists steeped in thediscipline’s nihilistic excesses of the 1980s and 1990s, hisunabashed embrace of quantification and statistical testing,reflected in tables of soil test data, input usage, wealth mea-surements, and landholdings, are likely to appear anachro-nistic. It is also likely that relatively few recently trainedcultural anthropologists are equipped to assess that por-tion of the story told through Gini coefficients, t tests, andPearson correlations. Yet all can appreciate the powerfulethnographic images interspersed with Loker’s quantitativedata, such as the displaced farmer who daily rows a smallboat to new, inferior lands on the opposite shore of the lake:“One day he told me how his heart ached each time hecrossed the lake, floating above his lost lands and home”(p. 149). Like many anthropological accounts of develop-ment, Changing Places does not shrink from speaking truthto power. Unlike many recent accounts, however, it does sowith both passion and unassailable evidence.

REFERENCE CITEDEscobar, Arturo

1995 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmakingof the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture. Susan McK-innon and Sydel Silverman, eds. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2005. 330 pp.

JONATHAN MARKSUniversity of North Carolina, Charlotte

I suppose it is only fitting that I should be a bit baffledby a book that calls itself Complexities. Its intent is veryadmirable—to rebut some reductionist scientific fads—andthe contributions are of uniformly high quality (some ofthem revisiting issues also addressed in the recent volumeWhy America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong). What is perplexingis the failure to tell the reader exactly what they are bash-ing, and why. Reductionism, to be sure, but the editors’reluctance to parse the term may leave readers wonderingwhat actually is wronger in, say, Steven Pinker’s reductionof mental processes to neural structures than in Newton’sreduction of gravity to math. Or why Richard Dawkins’s re-duction of culture to memes should be considered worsethan Gregor Mendel’s reduction of heredity to merkmalen.And, for that matter, why the anthropologist’s insistencethat culture is more than a summation of learned behav-iors should be righter than the creationist’s insistence that

the history of life is more than the differential replicationof genes, cells, and organisms.

For the present purposes, let us just accept that “reduc-tionism” is generally bad, while acknowledging that the ed-itors specify that they are not against all reduction, againwithout specifying what might count as “acceptable” reduc-tionism and why.

Kathleen Gibson opens with a forthright rejection ofthe blanket assertion in evolutionary psychology that ourspecies evolved particular behavioral adaptations to anessentialized life in Pleistocene Africa. Gibson quite rea-sonably emphasizes instead the evolution of adaptability.William Foley provides a classic anthropological exerciseby adducing ethnographic data to falsify a statement aboutlinguistic universals. On a related theme at the end of thebook, John Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz explore theopposition between structural linguistics and sociolinguis-tics, and its implications for anthropology. Katherine MacK-innon and Agustın Fuentes contribute a rousing critique ofthe neo-Ardreyan theories currently being promoted by pri-matologists at Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and elsewhere. Theyexplore primate sex roles, aggression, and whatever rela-tionships these may actually have to human behavior. Al-though apes certainly do kill one another, it is far from clearthat coalitional killing by males, infanticide, and killing byfemales all represent “the same thing.” Moreover, the rela-tionship between dominance and paternity, as revealed byDNA testing, is far from simple, and it varies from speciesto species and year to year. And, yet, the “demonic males”theory continues to enjoy success in the derivative literatureand physical anthropology textbooks.

Mary Orgel, Jacqueline Urla, and Alan Swedlund tackleevolutionary psychology’s “waist-to-hip ratio” (or WHR),which is to human evolution what The Jerry Springer Showis to the dramatic arts: fascinating to follow, but leavingyou wondering whether people really can be that stupid.The basic idea of the WHR is that modern U.S. male collegestudents, when shown pictures of women in bathing suitsand asked which ones they prefer, tend to opt for womenlike Marilyn Monroe over women like Margaret Thatcher.When extended to males elsewhere, and treated as inde-pendent data points, the statistical preference for the moviestarlet is taken to be an indicator of a basic human nature,in which men evolved (back in a mythologized PleistoceneAfrica again) to focus on women whose waist-to-hip ratiolies around 0.67 (as in the ratio of the last two measure-ments of 36–24–36), and presumably to accept only grudg-ingly as mates any deviants from that standard. Orgel, Urla,and Swedlund bring ethnography, human biology, history,gender studies, and basic scientific epistemology to bear intheir critique of WHR research. While I am enough of a pes-simist to doubt that it will do much good, it is certainly niceto see it laid out here.

Coeditor Susan McKinnon contributed the chapter thatI found the most valuable; it cogently explains the nonbi-ology of kinship. Bouncing the chapter off a glib commentby Pinker to the effect that “motherhood” is self-evident

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and unproblematic, McKinnon helpfully begins by prob-lematizing it, and then proceeds to recover a century anda half of anthropological studies of kinship. Her take-homepoint is delivered forcefully and compactly: Human kinshipis never a simple genetic calculus. The value of this chapterfor students and for colleagues in cognate areas lies in directproportion to the level of unsophistication evident in evo-lutionary psychology, and in its predecessor, sociobiology.

Lynn Meskell is the only representative herein of thatanthropological subfield, which consciously strives to readhuman behavior from patterns of potsherds, walls, andchipped stones. Perhaps that is good reductionism, so it goesunremarked; Meskell’s target is the narrower issue of infer-ring “Mother Goddess” cults from such patterns, especiallyfrom the Turkish Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk. In chapter 8,Alan Goodman and Tom Leatherman finally tell us some-thing about reductionism, before effectively critiquing itsapplication in matters of human biology. They unify themesof nutrition and consumption—that is to say, the effects ofglobalization on the body. In a sense this chapter is exem-plary of swimming against the reductive tide in biologicalanthropology.

It is noteworthy that the four contributions from bio-logical anthropology in this volume are by scholars whoseintellectual pedigrees coalesce back to only two classically“holistic” biological anthropology doctoral programs: Mas-sachusetts, Amherst, and California, Berkeley. And of thosetwo, only the former still exists.

The sad fact is that most biological anthropologists whoare interested in genetics are generally more concerned withbeing absorbed by genetics than they are with using geneticsanthropologically. Indeed, the two chapters in the presentvolume that query genetics at all are by medical anthropol-ogists (Margaret Lock on Alzheimer’s and Karen-Sue Taussigon disease genetics more generally), not by biological an-thropologists. Perhaps the volume is the richer for it, forgenetics and anthropology are historically, and to a signif-icant extent epistemologically, antagonistic, and biologicalanthropologists are commonly reluctant to confront thatfact. Taussig’s valuable insights into medical genetic theoryand practice are valuable precisely because of the ethno-graphic distance she is able to maintain; biological anthro-pologists are far more likely to try and “go native”—that is,to become geneticists themselves and write about geneticsfrom perceived self-interest, rather than to try to retain acritical and analytic perspective on the subject.

In teaching biological anthropology, I am constantlyburdened to explain why the textbook (whichever one itis) covers mitosis but not bioethics. Or why it does not ex-plain the difference between a human being and a tumor-ous growth. Or if exotic tribes are going extinct, then whyshould it be a priority to save their blood? Do AshkenaziJews have high IQs because they have alleles for it, asprominent genetic anthropologists are arguing again? Whatmakes Yanomamo blood the property of Penn State and notof the people it came out of? Is it connected to the contro-versial “racial percentage” research going on there? If the

FOXP2 gene is really a master language gene because its pro-tein differs in human and chimp, what does the fact that it isstructurally identical in chimp and rhesus macaque mean?And what does having the chimpanzee’s DNA sequence tellus that we did not already know, or that is worth caringabout?

To fail to engage the reductive issues raised by genetic ormolecular anthropology leaves a gaping hole in the book’scoverage. Aside from that, the editors have assembled anengaging collection of chapters, which do not finish, butwhich at least start, a discussion of just what “the holis-tic study of our species” might actually entail in the 21stcentury.

REFERENCE CITEDBesteman, Catherine, and Hugh Gusterson, eds.

2005 Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: AnthropologistsTalk Back. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction.Brian Morris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.350 pp.

CYNTHIA FOWLERWofford College

Religion and Anthropology is a new prototype for the ethnog-raphy of religion. This singular new text has two concurrentstorylines. In the main storyline, Brian Morris, an Emeri-tus Professor at the University of London, presents morethan 27 case studies to illustrate the multiple ways that re-ligion is linked to history, society, economy, and politics.The subplot develops around the power struggle betweenstructural–functionalism and postmodernism. The heroesin this drama are Karl Marx, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, VictorTurner, Max Weber, Melford Spiro, Eric Wolf, and GananthObeyesekere. The villains are Mircea Eliade, Clifford Geertz,Mary Douglas, and the “dizzy” intellects whom they haveinspired. Stories A and B converge in sarcastic commen-tary comparing theoretical orientations such as in this ex-cerpt: “Boddy largely engages in what Gellner describes as‘hermeneutic intoxication’. . . Boddy seems to get lost in ex-travagant lyricism . . . Boddy even suggests, and this is theacme of vacuity dressed up as postmodern profundity, that‘mimesis is dependent on alterity, the existence of an Other.’True!” (p. 95).

Morris promotes the sociological approach as the mostsuperior framework for analyzing religion. He delivers onthese claims in Religion and Anthropology with many inter-esting lessons about the causes and effects of religious ideas,ritual practices, and social organization. One fundamentallesson in the book is that syncretic religions are commonaround the world. Millenarian cults in Melanesia, for exam-ple, combine elements from traditional belief systems withcomponents of colonial ideologies.

Another basic lesson is that religious communitieschange through time in response to group relations andglobal processes. Kimbanguism, which originated as a


prophetic movement in response to the negative impactsof Baptist missionaries in the Congo, began incorporatingelements of Protestantism and, eventually, became a main-stream, “routinized” religion. In Evenki society, the role ofthe shaman has changed through time: In the beginningthe shaman was a clan leader; it became a secretive positionas a result of oppression by orthodox Christians, Buddhists,and Soviets; now the shaman symbolizes ethnic pride.

A third fundamental lesson is that the relationship be-tween religious forms and society varies cross-culturally. An-thropologists often use analytical categories to sort intracul-tural diversity. Islamic scholars see great and little traditions,high and low types, clerical and ecstatic versions, scrip-tural and mystical forms. “Buddhist” practices have beenpartitioned into monastic and folk; Nibbanic; Kammatic;Apotropaic; otherworldly Buddhism; and worldly spirit re-ligion. Morris’s opinion is that relationships between dif-ferent religious forms within single communities are bettercharacterized as symbiotic.

Using the techniques of comparative ethnography,Morris explores correlations between religious practices andstatus. People who occupy the centers of power tend topractice doctrinal forms of religion while people in theperipheries—such as the women and lower-status men whoparticipate in Sudan’s Zar cults—tend to practice ecstaticforms, including healing ceremonies and spirit possessions.The development of Protestant Buddhism and a new re-ligious culture in Sri Lanka is linked to the emergence ofurban poor and middle classes in combination with pop-ulation growth, rural impoverishment, urbanization, andcentralized power. At the global level, ecstatic rituals arepracticed not only by people living in tribal systems butalso by those in most other social systems. Tribal religions,in fact, tend to be less mystical, focusing instead on prag-matic issues such as healing and food production.

An intriguing theme throughout Religion and Anthro-pology is the concurrent transformation of religion and po-litical economy. Morris explores the role of the state inshamanism among Haitian peasants, Tantric Buddhists inTibet, and the Hamadsha Brotherhood in Morocco. Anton-ism in Zaire is examined as a protest against Christian impe-rialism. The emergence of Papuan cargo cults is explained asa response to the changes in religion, agriculture, and laborthat accompanied colonialism. The role of gurus in Hindunationalism in India is explored. The spread of global capi-talism is linked to the emergence of the New Age movementin Europe and North America while urbanization is con-nected to the emergence of neoshamanism in Denmark.

In the midst of the extraordinary wealth of ethno-graphic facts that are at the heart of Religion and Anthropol-ogy, Morris preaches against “extreme” hermeneutics andchastises scholars who make “a fetish of cultural differ-ences” (p. 177) while advocating for those who combine“the interpretive understandings of subjective meaningswith a social scientific perspective” (p. 13). Morris’s sermonwill likely invigorate “Marxists, emergent materialists,critical realists” (p. 74) and other members of the choir, but

his intolerance for postmodern “elitists” (p. ix) may annoyinfidels and their sympathizers.

Celebrating Transgression: Method and Politics inAnthropological Studies of Culture. Ursula Rao and JohnHutnyk, eds. Oxford: Bergahahn, 2005. 256 pp.

EDWIN S. SEGALUniversity of Louisville

This collection of 15 chapters in honor of Klaus PeterKopping is dedicated to an exploration of transgressions.In doing so, it makes the point that cultural anthropology’score method is transgressive and has always been so, evenwhen not recognized as such by its practitioners. Simplyby asserting that we “know” because we have “been there,”anthropologists have, since the 19th century, crossed theboundaries between “us” and “them.” In that process, ourtheories, especially in their insistence on common human-ity, have been especially transgressive, when viewed againstthe backdrop of “commonsense knowledge.”

Participant-observation is, above all else, a methodol-ogy centered on localized phenomena. In the contempo-rary world, where globalization is an economic and quasi-political reality and in which both macro- and microculturalboundaries are increasingly permeable, this methodologicaland theoretical focus on the local seems somewhat paradox-ical, or possibly out of step, with major trends in research.All of the chapters in this collection take the perspectivethat “all culture is local,” but each local study also has somelarger impact that is usually carefully drawn out.

The book has three parts: Fieldworks, Performances,and Infringements. Much of the first section examines therelationships among knowledge, method, and location. Themost abstract of these, as a scene setter should be, is GeorgeMarcus’s lead chapter; the other four pursue a transgressivestance by focusing on fields of study as exotic today as theresidents of a Tiv village were when Laura Bohannan wroteReturn to Laughter (1954). The settings include journalistsin India, visitors to a concentration camp turned Holo-caust memorial, ng’anga (traditional healers) in Zambia, andourselves—that is, anthropologists coping with moving be-tween cultures. Each chapter ends with a discussion of theextent to which the knowledge gained through participantobservation also constitutes a political statement.

In the contemporary world, dissemination of theseknowledge collections is a situation very different from thatfaced by 19th- and early-20th-century ethnographers, whocould rely on distance, illiteracy, and limited systems ofglobal communication as protective barriers. In the early21st century, we can be certain that anthropological analy-ses will be read by those who have been analyzed and possi-bly put to unintended uses. The most clear-cut and compas-sionately stated example in this volume is Kaori Sugishita’sstudy of traditional healers in Zambia.

The second set of chapters is somewhat more locationfocused, although Alexander Henn’s contribution is less so.

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All six focus on one aspect or another what might wellbe called “doing culture.” They range from the highly in-dividualized focus of Victor Crapanzano’s discussion of asingle individual’s encounter with gender performance toBurkhard Schnepel’s discussion of the Dance of Punishmentritual in Orissa, India.

Some of the pieces in this festschrift seem to strain abit to make a point of dealing with transgression, and atthe same time many of the chapters reinforce, rather thantransgress, the boundary between European and U.S. cul-tural anthropology. This is true both in terms of literaturemost often cited, as well as in discourse style. A case inpoint is Beatrix Hauser’s discussion of dancers and perfor-mances during the Thakurani Jatra, a three-week festival inOrissa, India. Most of her fine discussion of the relation-ships between possession and costuming would have beenenriched by comparison, however slight, with data drawnfrom the West African–Afro-Caribbean–Afro-Brazilian reli-gious complex.

The editors claim that the third set of chapters exam-ines anthropology “as a form of politics.” Here, the questionof just what is meant by politics becomes relevant. Three ofthe four are discussions of someone else’s work. Two fo-cus on Michael Leiris, described as a “surrealist ethnogra-pher,” and one reexamines Adolf Bastian. The final chapter,by John Hutnyk, comes closer to an idea of politics some-what in accord with my own. We have always known thatour work has political implications. Our experiences withProject Camelot, as well as the later efforts to use the geo-graphic and ethnographic data of anthropologists workingamong the Hmong and other mountain peoples of Viet-nam in pursuit of military objectives, are all too painfulreminders of the political potential of anthropology. OnlyHutnyk’s final chapter really addresses the issue we all needto keep in mind: There is no longer any body of anthro-pological research or collection of knowledge that can es-cape the potential of political implications on some levelor another. For that reminder alone, even though manyof the chapters are densely written, this volume is worthperusing.

REFERENCE CITEDBohannan, Laura [also listed as Elenore Smith Bowen]

1954 Return to Laughter. New York: Harper and Brothers–Doubleday.

Culture, Society, and Economy: Bringing ProductionBack In. Don Robotham. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publi-cations, 2005. 189 pp.

PETE BROWNUniversity of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

The subtitle says it all: “Bringing Production Back In.” DonRobotham offers an unabashedly Marxist perspective onglobalization. He develops his argument through a detailedcritique of major cultural and sociological theories of glob-alization. His argument is that these theories are not eco-

nomic enough, that the emergence of corporate–monopolycapitalism represents a crucial and irreversible trend, the re-ality of which is lost on cultural and social theorists.

There are three themes running through his book. One,lightly developed, is Robotham’s perspective on globaliza-tion. Two, the bulk of the book, is a critique of the culturaltheories of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and the sociologicalones of Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash and John Urry, andManuel Castells, as well as a critique of localization theoriesassociated with Colin Hines and the International Forumof Globalization (IFG). Three, Robotham argues that theoryis the means to conceptualize alternatives to the injusticesand inequalities in the contemporary global world, theoryas praxis.

Robotham argues that the liberal economy, the small-scale competitive economy described by Adam Smith, isgone for good. Contemporary capitalism has produced amore integrated global economy controlled by massive fi-nancial institutions and corporations. The global divisionof labor, not the market, he argues, has transformed notonly the economic but also the social, political, and cul-tural aspects of contemporary life.

It is in the cause of their transformation that the dif-ference between Robotham and those he criticizes clearlyemerges. For Robotham, production relations determine.Robotham says he does not conceive of the economy asa base that removes human agency. Rather, citing Marx, hepoints out that human agency is constrained by a mode ofproduction. Robotham argues that this conception removesthe hoary problems of base–superstructure and structure–agency. Perhaps for him it does, but turns of phrase suchas “operating within the logic of a capitalist mode of pro-duction at a particular stage of its development” (p. 12)or “the economic foundation (in the broadest sense) onwhich these cultural phenomena rest” (p. 13) do little torevitalize our thinking of globalization or to provide viablealternatives.

Robotham asserts that “the economy is the centralforce in our social, political, and cultural life” (p. 12). IfRobotham’s book had provided a rich and detailed discus-sion of this argument, supported with examples from theglobalized world, it may have been quite interesting. In-stead, Robotham builds his argument through a critique,often esoteric, of other theorists. In a Marxian-inspiredtwist, he accuses (my interpretation) these other theoristsof dwelling in the noisy sphere of the surface and notdoing the hard work necessary to reveal the workings ofthe hidden abode. Cultural theorists make the fundamen-tal mistake of elevating culture over the economy. StuartHall privileged the intellectual and cultural and in theprocess, Robotham claims, drained politics of economics,and reduced politics to cultural politics (p. 26). In theprocess, Robotham criticizes—he dehistoricizes an ongo-ing process, elevates consciousness to agency, thereby sub-jugating all to a cultural will. Gilroy, Robotham argues,privileges Foucauldian-style disembodied discourses as thecause of people’s actions. Racism, in Gilroy’s work, becomes


a cultural phenomenon totally abstracted from economic,political, and social forces.

Robotham credits Giddens for being aware of thecontradictions, injustices, and hostilities of the runawayworld (Giddens’s term). But Giddens creates the impres-sion, Robotham argues, that all societies, developed anddeveloping, face risk equally (patently wrong, he asserts)and in so doing “risk becomes an abstract metaphysicalquality” (p. 63). Giddens’s search for a solution throughrational cosmopolitanism is nothing more than a revivalof Durkheimian organic solidarity, Robotham claims. Lashand Urry, Robotham states, argue contemporary capitalismis disorganized because the spread of neoliberal reforms andflexible production systems destroyed old-style monopo-lies. This transformation produced, Lash and Urry contend,“a more informed, critical and demanding citizenry . . . andthis can only mean greater democracy and accountability”(p. 84). Robotham argues this is hardly an accurate pictureof the global proletariat and an oversimplification of newstyles of production. Robotham labels Castells’s approach“dot.sociology” (p. 100). Castells’s main point, Robothamargues, is that contemporary capitalism has dissolved intoa network of informational flows in which the individualis left adrift. Robotham argues this perspective ignores thecentrality of transnational corporations, and Castells’s solu-tion, a return to an eclectic romantic communitarian ethos(p. 101), is some form of primordialism. To localist argu-ments of the antiglobalization movement, Robotham offersa friendly critique pointing out that local and small are nowinseparably connected to the global economy.

Robotham’s book builds toward a central theme: alter-natives to globalization. But in the end, he returns to clas-sic Marxism; his alternative “is socialization of the meansof production . . . [and] a partially socialist market” (p. 149).After many pages of biting criticism, this is what he comesto. And this is feasible?

Puebloan Ruins of the Southwest. Arthur H. Rohn andWilliam M. Ferguson. Albuquerque: University of NewMexico Press, 2006. 320 pp.

KATHRYN KAMPGrinnell College

Puebloan Ruins of the Southwest is a revision of ArthurRohn and William Ferguson’s Anasazi Ruins of the South-west in Color (1987). While this lavishly illustrated book isaimed primarily at an interested, intelligent, and nonprofes-sional audience, it may be useful to some non-Southwesternarchaeologists as a teaching reference for introductorycourses. Its title is, however, a misnomer. Rohn claims to“provide a complete picture of the prehistoric and historicPuebloan peoples of the American Southwest” (p. xiii). Infact, the book covers only a fraction of the Pueblo world,completely omitting groups such as the Mimbres, Sinagua,Cohonina, and Salado. Similarly, several highly accessibleruins and impressive areas such as Walnut Canyon, Tonto,

and Montezuma’s Castle and Well National Monuments aremissing from the discussion, although the Sinagua sites atWupatki National Monument are included. While in thecurrent political climate, it may have been viewed as insen-sitive to retain the original designation “Anasazi,” a simplesubstitution of the word Pueblo leads to a sense of confu-sion. It also renders many of the generalizations provided inthe introductory materials even more inaccurate than theywould be if claiming to refer to a more limited geographicscope.

A general introduction is followed by more detaileddescriptions of selected regions that concentrate on ma-jor sites accessible to visitors. Rohn and Ferguson beginwith a brief overview of pre-Hispanic chronology and thenembark on discussions of a variety of topics organized bymaterial culture type (architecture, ceramics, basketry andfiber utensils, and stone and bone tools, etc.) or by topic(physical appearance and disease, government and society,spiritual concepts and rituals, migrations, etc.). The textis clear but sometimes a bit bland, perhaps because it at-tempts to provide generalizations that characterize such abroad area, rather than exploring the variability that existedin the Puebloan world or engaging the reader in the dy-namism of current controversies. Authors of works aimedat a nonprofessional audience are in a difficult position,because a certain level of generalization is necessary. Never-theless, most generalizations that attempt to describe broadregions have exceptions. Furthermore, there is controversyabout many of the interpretations presented and some ofthe excitement of discovery is actually lost when these areignored. A book such as this one could provide a vehiclefor informing the public about the archaeological reasoningprocess and the use of data, rather than simply enumerating“facts.”

Similarly, citations are an issue. A lack of citations maybe appropriate for a nonspecialist work, and recommendedreadings at the end of each section would have compen-sated; sadly, these also are lacking. The select bibliographyis quite dated, with most references from the 1980s andbefore.

The book is abundantly illustrated, including aerialphotographs of sites and numerous, sometimes spectacular,color photographs of artifacts and sites. Color maps showthe locations of sites and regions against a topographicbackdrop. Although the maps are all visually attractive, theyare also often hard to read since some of the colors on labelsmerge into similarly colored backgrounds. Furthermore, ona number of the maps the color scheme used visually re-verses the topography so that depressed areas such as riverdrainages appear elevated (e.g., figure 2–1). The inclusionof the site plans for many of the ruins discussed is partic-ularly useful. They have not, however, been redrawn to asimilar scale and style that would make comparisons moreseamless. Throughout the book, artists’ depictions of Pueblolife taken from previously published sources provide ad-ditional visual interest. The quality of the illustrations isvariable, however. The drawing of a pueblo at Hovenweep

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(figure 2–94) is particularly disturbing, as the scale of thehumans in relation to the structures is redolent of a visita-tion of giants. Contextual descriptions of the illustrationsand their biases are lacking, and some of the more interest-ing recent depictions that attempt to interpret phenomenasuch as birth, death, famine, and alternative gender roleswould have been an interesting inclusion.

Despite these drawbacks, Puebloan Ruins of the South-west is a handsome, useful, and informative source for theavocational visitor to Puebloan ruins of a broadly definedfour corners area. For the professional, it provides a nicecompendium of photographs and site plans.

REFERENCE CITEDRohn, Arthur H., and William M. Ferguson

1987 Anasazi Ruins of the Southwest in Color. Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press.

Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Freder-ick H. Smith. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.339 pp.

MICHAEL ANGROSINOUniversity of South Florida

In 1996, Frederick H. Smith was involved in the excavationof an 18th-century burial ground on the island of Barbados.Someone in the crowd of onlookers pointed out the need tooffer libations in honor of those buried at the site and soonproduced a bottle of rum, the contents of which was pouredon the ground as people implored the spirits of the dead torest in peace and leave the living alone. This incident crys-tallized for Smith the centrality of rum in Caribbean society.His book, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History, isthe fruit of the scholarship that was inspired in part by thatimpromptu ritual.

The book examines the how the role of alcohol withinthe plantation system of the Caribbean has evolved sincethe 16th century. Rum was an economically significant by-product of the sugar regime that dominated so many ofthe islands. It was also a means by which the planters wereable to ensure a docile and dependent labor force. Alco-hol played very different roles in the traditional societies—Africa and India—from which most of the bonded laborersof the West Indies were drawn. Enslaved Africans came froma culture in which alcohol consumption was intimatelytied to spiritual practices, while indentured Indians wereheirs to religious traditions (both Hindu and Muslim) thatwere strongly opposed to any use of alcohol. Both groupswere led to reinterpret both the symbolic meanings andthe economic saliency of rum once they became part of aglobal system of production, manufacture, and trade thatlinked the Caribbean, North America, and Western Europe.The legacy of the plantation regime continues to influencethe social, political, and economic life of the contemporaryCaribbean.

Smith draws on documentary, archaeological, andethnographic evidence from Africa, Europe, and the Ameri-

cas; the discussion of Indian culture and society and on thecircumstances of the Indian indenture is less detailed bycomparison, although it is more than adequate within thelarger scope of this book. He focuses on the economic im-pact of Caribbean rum, although he interprets economicsin a satisfyingly broad manner so as to include a con-sideration of the contribution of rum to plantation rev-enues, the role of rum in bolstering colonial and post-colonial economies, and the impact of rum on the At-lantic trade in general. He also deals with factors that arenot strictly speaking economic in nature but which hada decided influence on the plantation economy in theWest Indies: war, competition from other alcohol indus-tries, slavery and emancipation, temperance movements,and, in our own time, globalization. Moreover, he paysdue attention to the social and sacred uses of rum and tothe social consequences of alcohol abuse, demonstratinghow drinking patterns differed among the social groups inboth colonial and postcolonial times in response to boththeir cultural backgrounds and the circumstances of theirengagement with the plantation regime. The analysis ofthe economic history of rum is thus a way to encom-pass the interlinked forces of class, race, gender, religion,and ethnic identity that make up the mosaic of Caribbeansociety.

The explicitly interdisciplinary nature of Smith’s ap-proach makes the book suitable for a variety of readers. Itsmost obvious constituency is the community of AtlanticStudies scholars, but it is also designed to appeal to histori-cal anthropologists interested in colonialism in general, tostudents of culture contact, and to those concerned withthe African diaspora, slavery, and plantation life. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary field of studies devoted to al-cohol (and other addictive substances) use–abuse representsanother likely audience.

Smith acknowledges his intellectual debt to SidneyMintz, whose pioneering analysis opened the door to thestudy of the meanings attached to the commodities in-volved in the colonial mercantile system. But Mintz andhis followers tended to focus on the meaning of commodi-ties, such as sugar, among the consumers in Europe andNorth America. Smith broadens the scope of that analysisby looking at the meanings such goods held for the labor-ers and the planters who produced them. Moreover, otheranalysts have concentrated on sugar itself, which was themainstay of the Caribbean economy, and have treated rumas a secondary by-product of the plantation system. Smith,however, gives rum its due as a commodity in its own right.As he notes, “The rise of rum making underscores the eco-nomic efficiency of Caribbean sugar planters, who turnedthe waste products of their sugar factories into a highlyprofitable alcoholic commodity” (p. 2). Smith has made animportant contribution to the field of Atlantic studies byturning his scholarly attention to this once-scorned “waste”by-product of the plantation system and by highlightingits economic, social, cultural, political, and psychologicalsignificance.


The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoar-chaeology. Joanna R. Sofaer. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006. 188 pp.

KATHLEEN BLUEMinnesota State University, Mankato

Although a cursory glance at the title and cover art mightconfuse some readers as to the book’s content, the subtitle,A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology, should clarify the situation.Joanna Sofaer is not interested in mortuary archaeology orthe body as art or any other of the purposes and construc-tions that the body might be put to after death, per se. In-stead, she is concerned with bridging the divide between thefield she calls “osteoarchaeology” (more generally knownas bioarchaeology in the United States) and archaeology,specifically interpretative archaeology. The basis for this di-vision resides in the fact that archaeology itself straddlestwo apparently conflicting perspectives: the science-basedempiricism best illustrated by the approaches and method-ology of osteoarchaeology and the “body as social construc-tion” understandings of social (cultural) anthropology. Theauthor contends that this division is an artificial creationbased largely on presumptions. When dissected by Sofaer,these preconceived ideas are revealed to be essentially inerror.

The book is divided into six chapters, with chapter 1serving as an introduction to the topic as well as a briefoverview of the role of scientific and humanistic approacheswithin the discipline. Chapter 2 continues delving intothe historical nature of the divide and charts the “body”in its conceptual course from physical description to be-havioral aspects, and from there to its late arrival as amanipulated object and cultural construct. In chapter 3,Sofaer addresses the “perceived binary structural opposi-tions” (p. 31) that underscore the division between os-teoarchaeology and interpretative archaeology. These areatheoretical–theoretical, dead–living, inside(unfleshed)–outside(fleshed), and nature–culture, whereby the first termis seen as associated with osteoarchaeology and the secondas reflective of interpretative archaeology. Sofaer makes afairly strong case against these dualities, both on a struc-tural level as well as a factual basis.

In chapter 4, Sofaer directly tackles the topics of ma-teriality and material culture. Despite the fact that humanbodies are generally conceived of as something more thanobjects, the author argues that “people are materially cre-ated through their relationships to other people, to objectsand to material resources in general” (p. 84) and are there-fore entities that can be studied in the same manner as othermaterial culture. In chapters 5 and 6, the author expandson this theme by examining two primary areas of both os-teoarchaeological “expertise” and archaeological interest:Chapter 5 deals with sex and gender, while chapter 6 exam-ines the slightly less controversial (currently) topic of age.In these chapters, Sofaer finally moves beyond theory topractice by providing case studies and concrete examples.

It is her contention that the archaeological body cannotsimply be understood as a static physical unit but, instead,should be seen as a product of the interplay between biol-ogy and culture. Bone is dynamic: It records its insults, itsuses, and its illnesses, none of which occur in a biologicalvacuum but are instead mediated by cultural factors such asgender or socioeconomic class. An individual’s physical en-vironment, geographical location, and chronological timeframe may also play a role, and these too have cultural un-dertones. The body is reflective of action and emerges as aprocess, which while individual, encodes attributes that canbe viewed at the populational level because of commonali-ties such as age, gender, occupation, or lifeway.

In its thrust, the book seems primarily aimed at inter-pretative archaeologists of the British Isles. With regard tothe methodology and conceptualization of osteoarchaeol-ogy presented in the book, osteo(bio)archaeologists will beless than overwhelmed. We already conceive of our fieldin this manner (preaching to the choir, so to speak); it isinstead to the archaeologists that Sofaer is pleading hercase. Having said that, however, I laud the arrival of an ar-ticulated theory of osteoarchaeology. Osteoarchaeology isnot atheoretical, but its practitioners have primarily beenabsorbed in refining methodologies and assessing popula-tional attributes rather than explicating on a theory of thediscipline.

This is a serious oversight, and Sofaer’s text is one ofthe first to address it. It is apparent that a coherent andaccessible theory is badly needed in the field. As such, thisvolume is a welcome addition to the osteoarchaeologist’sbookshelf. In addition to its thought-provoking and carefulanalysis of the subject, the book is also richly researchedwith over 35 pages of citations. And as for interpretativearchaeologists, I would argue that Sofaer amply supportsher argument that the body, in all its cultural and biologicalmanifestations, is indeed a resource worthy of investigation,as well as within the scope of anthropology as defined bythe social theorists.

Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future: TheDuna People of Papua New Guinea. Andrew Strathernand Pamela J. Stewart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2005. 190 pp.

PATRICIA L. JOHNSONPenn State University

Western popular imagination has associated highland NewGuinea peoples with a number of stereotypic labels de-signed to emphasize the difference between “us” and“them.” Perhaps the most difficult of these to deal with wasthe term traditional, often used to suggest approval, con-trasting the supposedly unchanging nature of these soci-eties with the disregard for or ignorance of the past said tocharacterize modernity. After an initial period of romanti-cized and perhaps self-serving focus on tradition, anthro-pologists have moved on to the much more interesting

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questions of how people manage to accommodate tech-nological, political, ideological, and economic innovationwithout losing their own unique histories, and how theyrevise and recreate those histories. We have also moved toa greater recognition of the variability of “modernity” anda greater emphasis on the process it entails. Few books pro-vide as thorough and nuanced an investigation of thosequestions as this study of the Aluni Valley Duna of South-ern Highlands Province.

For the Duna, neglect by both government and mis-sions has proved both a blessing and a curse. The area wasdeclared pacified by the late 1960s and the governmenthas done little more in the area since then. Notably, roadshave not been provided and no programs of economic de-velopment have been promoted, to the distress of localpeople. Continuing a pattern noted by Andrew Strathernsome years ago, the Duna migrate to work as coffee labor-ers in Western Highland Province, where the preference forentrepreneurship rather than wage work continues. Dunaland, consequently, remains primarily in subsistence andthe land shortages seen in heavy coffee-growing areas havenot developed. The Duna are also highly aware of, althoughnot part of, both the Porgera mine in Enga Province and theOk Tedi mine in Sundaun Province. Although they havebeen largely spared the environmental degradation that ac-companies these projects, they also have not had the ben-efit of the payments made to people in those areas. As partof pacification, the government required nonviolent settle-ment of disputes, encouraging recourse to village courts, yetthey have failed to establish such courts in the Aluni Valley,making it impossible to carry out this mandate locally. Aswith the absence of economic development, there are bothadvantages and disadvantages to this failure, since the func-tion of magistrate has devolved to local leaders whose socialand cultural knowledge has made settlements more likely.

A similar lack of interest in the area has characterizedpostconversion activities by Christian missionaries. BothBaptist and Seventh Day Adventist churches remain, runby local leaders whose instruction in doctrine is minimal.Although traditional religious practices and beliefs were dis-counted and discouraged, considerable confusion exists onthe part of both church leaders and church members, sinceclear alternatives to those traditions have not been pro-vided. The dilemma is obvious in the case of witchcraft be-liefs, which continue in the area, and witchcraft remedies,which the churches cannot provide.

Trying to understand these problems and how theAluni Duna deal with them illustrates the difficulty of ex-ploring the complex realities of people’s lives using ill-defined and affect-laden terms such as traditional and mod-ern. In situation after situation, these people have coped byemploying strategies and understandings that defy classi-fication as one or the other pole of this false dichotomy.As an example, after the escape of mining effluents intothe Strickland River, and a concurrent outbreak of illness,Duna presented multiple explanations that included thefollowing: the ingestion of food (fish, plants, and pigs)

that had been affected by poisonous pollutants in theriver; witchcraft; poisonous pollutants combined with thewitchcraft to which those pollutants made victims moresusceptible; and the disappearance of the spirit who guar-anteed the well-being of wild plants and animals because ofher displeasure at the river’s pollution.

One of the great strengths of this book is the detailedethnography that Strathern and Pamela Stewart provide.Explication of the history, social organization, religious sys-tem, and traditions of leadership of the Duna gives read-ers insight into changes and the response to changes vil-lagers have devised that would be impossible without theethnographic background. I would like to have seen morethan passing reference to the Bougainville conflict, whichdiverted government resources from almost all infrastruc-tural development or maintenance, especially in highlandareas, and which fostered an understanding that violencewas an acceptable means to desired ends. That is, however,a small complaint about an excellent and important book.

Migration and Economy: Global and Local Dynamics.Lillian Trager, ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005.332 pp.

JANET BENSONKansas State University

Migration and Economy, the result of a 2003 Society for Eco-nomic Anthropology conference, begins with a story aboutthe “rootedness” of residents of Vacherie, Louisiana, andhow social scientists have often viewed “traditional” soci-eties as sedentary. In contrast, the editor, Lillian Trager, sug-gests that mobility is a normal aspect of human life, nota phenomenon requiring unique explanations. Trager ar-gues that migration should be studied “in relation to othercentral phenomena, such as family and kinship groups,resources and livelihoods, and political and other forces”(p. 2). The present volume, consisting of an introductionand nine chapters, examines migration in a number of set-tings and from different approaches while focusing on sev-eral key themes. Part 1 of the book emphasizes the issuesof “migration, households, and social stratification” (p. 3),while part 2 deals with remittances and other exchangesbetween migrants, their families, and their communities.

The editor, who has extensive experience studying in-ternal migrants in Africa, argues three major points. First,internal and international migration are not unrelated pro-cesses and should be examined together. Existing litera-tures tend to focus exclusively on one or the other, butthis volume includes chapters on both. Second, “theories ofmigration need to incorporate both macrolevel forces andmicrolevel institutions to consider a variety of central ques-tions” (p. 3). And, third, migration should be considered anongoing process, not a one-time event, with consequencesfor the families and home communities of migrants. Thelast two points are likely to be unobjectionable if not ob-vious to readers familiar with migration research. The first


is more controversial but seems eminently sensible, sincesimilar, though not identical, processes are involved. Italso allows the editor to increase the comparative mate-rials available by including African cases. Chapters focuson Mali, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Kazakstan, Puerto Rico,and Oaxaca; while one chapter discusses Mozambiquanand Portuguese migrants, another compares migrant remit-tances to development aid.

The editor’s introduction includes a useful overviewof migration as a global phenomenon. Trager also reviewsleading theoretical perspectives, discusses how economicanthropology has contributed to the study of migration,and poses several questions for further research: What arethe implications of social networks for citizenship, nation-ality, and ethnicity? What effects do these social networkshave on individual households and local development? Andwhat are the cultural and symbolic contexts for migration(e.g., notions of “modernity” or even “manhood”)?

Chapters in part 1 address such topics as the eco-nomic strategies of highly mobile Puerto Rican fisherfolk(Perez); how multilocal networks benefit affluent Malianhouseholds more than poorer ones (Koenig); why someOaxacan households do not migrate (Cohen); variationin economic risk-taking among different Kazak groups(Sancak and Finke); and the “cosmology of consumption”in Cote D’Ivoire, where travel to “Beng” (“land of thewhites,” p. 164) involves transformation of personal iden-tity (Newell).

The four chapters in part 2 of the book, which I findparticularly interesting and provocative, demonstrate theimportance of understanding remittances within their so-ciocultural contexts. Do migrants act against their own in-terests, perpetuating more poverty, or do remittances freeother resources for “productive” use (p. 194)? This is ahighly contentious issue and the answer to these questionsis probably “it depends.” Certainly house construction, acommon use for remittances, can have very different impli-cations in different cultures and settings. Silvia Grigolini’schapter on Oaxaca, for example, argues that investment inhousing is economically advantageous for young migrants,allowing them to separate from their families and, thus,control further investment decisions. Trager’s chapter onNigeria demonstrates how Yoruba women migrants con-tribute to their home communities and advance their ownstatus, while Stephan C. Lubkemann addresses the ques-tion of why migrants who do not intend to return con-tinue to send money home, build houses, and maintainother linkages. Finally, Robyn Eversole examines the de-bate regarding whether or not remittances promote devel-opment and argues that migration is a key grassroots eco-nomic strategy in many parts of the world. Although noteveryone will be persuaded by this perspective, determiningto what extent migration raises living standards or reducesvulnerability is an empirical issue. Migration can be con-sidered a risk management and survival strategy that hasserved human beings well during their long history on theplanet.

Migration and Economy is a useful volume, the result ofcareful ethnographic research and a comparative approachto some of the economic issues involved in migration.The inclusion of chapters from countries not commonlydiscussed in the literature is particularly welcome. I recom-mend it to anyone interested in migration research.

Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Foodfrom Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Richard Wilk. New York:Berg, 2006. 236 pp.

GRACE MORTH FRASERPlymouth State University

What a marvelous book this is. Richard Wilk takes usthrough almost four centuries of globalization concepts andwith great clarity discusses how the processes of change asthey relate to food are not removed from the local scenebut, rather, directly impact the Mayan farmer or the Creolelogger in the small country of Belize. Conquest and pillagegave way to the concepts of “colonization” and “race.” Em-pire building gradually succumbed to nation building in thelate 20th century, and “culture” is now the concept of de-bate. During each of these periods, food is subject to intensescrutiny in terms of origin, types, and local preferences. Thefocus is not on local versus global but on local and globaland the interconnections between the two.

Unlike other studies, Wilk’s book examines the move-ment of goods to the colonies and suggests that the demandfor manufactured items by poor colonies has played a largepart in creating the wealth of the capitalist world.

Buccaneers and baymen in Belize both were dependenton the maritime ration, and new industry developed inEurope to produce standardized ship’s rations. The authorpoints out that this food economy is a direct ancestor tothe one that feeds the world today. The first global diet wasindustrial rations, and this was the beginning of Belize’salmost total reliance on imported food. When combinedwith the food snobbery of the “forestocracy”—a colonialelite who would not eat local foods and a merchant classwho discouraged local food production—it is no wonderthat many writers concluded that Belize had no nationalcuisine.

In 19th-century Belize, ethnic diversity was consider-able, with Garifuna, Maya, African slaves, free coloreds, andEuropean colonists all occupying economic roles created bythe British. Rather than looking at food as an ethnic marker,the author considers how this diversity has melded into Be-lizean foods. Concepts such as “branding,” “hybridity,” and“creolization” were as relevant then as they are today. Socialvalues are reinforced by the types of food consumed, andone’s reputation and respectability also are related to theconsumption of imported food. Public food is high-statustinned food while private food is low-status “bush” food,grown on small “invisible” plots, often by women.

That politics, food, and culture are inextricably linkedis clear from the following: When the government of Belize

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decided to subsidize some crops in the 20th century, thechoice was based on cultural and political importance.Thus, long-grain white rice and red kidney beans, not blackbeans and corn, proclaimed Belize as British and Caribbean,not Spanish and Latin American. There have been manyschemes to improve animal husbandry and agriculture toreduce dependence on imports, but they have failed becausethe problems/issues are not under local control but are, in-stead, part of the international political economy and repre-sent global inequality. After independence, there were someattempts to decolonize by changing the names of roads andplaces. When a politician tried to decolonize food, however,he found himself in trouble as local food was still thoughtof as primitive, while the new nation needed modern (pro-cessed and imported) food.

The ambivalence of Belizeans toward local foods is aresult of colonialism, and it was not until emigrants beganto return home that there was anything you could call “Be-lizean cuisine.” A rising interest in local cuisine was also in-fluenced by expatriates, the Peace Corps, and tourism. TheRoyal Rat incident boosted national pride, and daily foodshave become important symbols. Belize, unlike other smallCaribbean nations, has managed to maintain control of itssmall-scale tourism, and efforts are underway to focus onsustainable agriculture to increase food independence.

I am curious as to why Belizeans seemingly were loatheto admit there was “Belizean food” in the 1970s. I beganethnographic research in the Eastern Caribbean during thistime period and barely could keep up with the local dishesmade with local foods that were shared with me with greatpride. Perhaps the difference is because of fewer ethnicgroups on islands versus the mainland? Slightly differentcolonial experiences? Nationalism?

If you have any interest in globalization, consumerism,the Caribbean, or food, this is a must-read book. It is intel-lectually challenging but very readable, and the author’ssense of humor is enjoyable. In addition, the notes and bib-liography sections are extensive. The author’s grasp of factand theory provides fascinating glimpses into the past aswell as a greater understanding of the present and perhapsthe future.

Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contempo-rary Southeast Asia. Andrew C. Willford and Kenneth M.George, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program,2005. 210 pp.

SUSAN M. DARLINGTONHampshire College

Aimed primarily at Southeast Asianists, and requiring somebackground on Southeast Asia to provide the contexts for itscase studies, Spirited Politics raises critical theoretical ques-tions relevant wherever religion, politics, and the identityof the nation-state intersect. At a time when the world isfocused on efforts to understand religious manipulationsof politics, political interpretations of religion, and clashes

between political and religious visions of the world, Spir-ited Politics sheds light on the complexities and dynamicsof these concerns.

The collection of nine chapters is well framed throughan introduction by Kenneth George and Andrew Willford,in which they lay out the book’s themes. These includecultural nationalism, identity politics, the relationship be-tween modernity and religion (one that the authors ar-gue remains as strong as ever, countering the position thatmodernity brings secularism), citizenship, and authentic-ity. Individually, different chapters focus on particular inter-pretations of these concepts; as a whole, they demonstratethe fluid nature of religion, politics, and the nation-state.Their stories illustrate contradictions within the evolvingintersection of religion and politics, as well as the ways inwhich individuals negotiate these intersections to reaffirmtheir identities. Although the authors take varying positionson these themes, the chapters complement each other welltheoretically.

Several authors examine how politicians use religiouspractices in creative ways to promote their positions.Thamora Fishel documents how Thai political candidatesbecome hosts of rural funerals to build political networks,incur reciprocal obligations, and increase spiritual meritand moral potency. In the process, they contribute toa rethinking of Thai Buddhist economic logic, itself aresponse to modernization. Similarly, politicians in thePhilippines, shown by Smita Lahiri, appropriated a con-troversial pilgrimage site to promote a particular form ofcultural nationalism, placing the local site on the nationalscene and, thereby, changing its meaning both locally andnationally.

Although an emphasis on elite political influence in thenation-state underscores even the chapters that focus onminorities, several chapters complicate local–state dynam-ics. Andrew Abalahin’s examination of the evolving place ofConfucianism under Indonesia’s Pancasila state (in whichConfucianism has fallen in and out of official recognition asa “religion”), Erick White’s study of public reactions to thepopularity of spirit mediums historically in Thailand, andWillford’s presentation of a Tamil Hindu medium withinthe Islamic Malaysian state all introduce perspectives of eth-nic and religious minorities and their relations with thedominant, and often hegemonic, identities in SoutheastAsian societies. The underlying argument is that nationalidentities based on particular religious and ethnic affilia-tions need a counterbalance, an “other” against which theycan define themselves. George’s chapter on the Indonesianpainter A. D. Pirous illustrates how identities shift as oneindividual negotiates a changing political scene and cor-responding political, ethnic, and religious identities. Whilefocusing on Pirous’s interpretations of Islamic art, and whatit means to be Indonesian versus Acehnese, George uses thiscase to explore the broader implications of a nation-state’sefforts to define art and religion in a political landscape.

In another case study of the influence of the “other,”Fenella Cannell examines the impact of Christianity on the


way in which U.S. citizens viewed the Filipino people dur-ing U.S. colonialism. Although her argument on the often-downplayed influence of Protestantism on colonial policyis well grounded and provocative, the heavy emphasis onthe theoretical concepts of “fetishism” and “idolatry” fitsless well with the volume as a whole.

Suzanne Brenner’s chapter on Islam and gender politicsin Suharto’s Indonesia similarly incorporates a strong theo-retical discussion, but one which informs and expands theissues of the book. She contrasts Muslim gender activistswith secular feminists, showing ways in which Islam canbe simultaneously interpreted as adversely affecting womenand fostering social justice. Here the debate is less on inter-nal minorities than on how concepts foreign to Indonesia—Western and East Asian capitalism, global Islamism, and hu-man rights and feminist discourses—confront each other asthey challenge and influence Suharto’s authoritarian regimeand its social policies.

The richness of the ethnographic details and historicalcontexts that run throughout Spirited Politics makes thebook engaging, bringing to life individual stories that beliemuch larger issues. The theoretical complexities invokedare, for the most part, well integrated with empirical casestudies. A single position does not emerge from these chap-ters, but the importance of understanding the dynamicrelationships between religion, political life, and nationalidentities comes across clearly. The separate chapters standon their own, but the book as a whole is well worth readingand pondering.

Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mex-ican Immigrants in Silicon Valley. Christian Zlolniski.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 249 pp.

J . A. ENGLISH-LUECKSan Jose State University

Christian Zlolniski has produced a rich ethnographictapestry that will benefit scholars of U.S. immigration, la-bor, and community politics, and the growing body of so-cial scientific work done on the Silicon Valley region. Hisis a focused long-term study of an East San Jose barrio hecalls “Santech.” His ethnographic research spanned the pe-riod between 1991 and 1998. In 2004, Zlolniski returned tocapture the changes that had taken place in his informants’lives in the aftermath of the dot-com bust and the post–September 11 immigration angst. By looking both deeplyat individual lives and broadly across years, this book con-nects the microscopic detail of individual choices to themacroscopic changes of economic globalization.

This book is set in Silicon Valley, but it is not aboutthe region writ large. Instead, it takes some of the pe-culiar facets of the region—the unevenness of the high-technology economy, the high cost of living, and the cul-tural complexity—as structural characteristics that moldthe experiences of a very specific community. Santech iscomprised mostly of Mexican immigrants, documented

and undocumented, who live alongside others that occupythe lowest strata in the dynamic class structure of SiliconValley. These denizens combine low-wage jobs, informaleconomic exchanges, and public and nonprofit support tosurvive.

Historically, Mexican immigrants have played a role inthis Northern Californian region from the days in which itwas dominated by agriculture, through the era of high-techmanufacturing, and into the current “information econ-omy.” However, as was pointed out repeatedly, not all workis remote, and the physical edifices of high-technology needto be cleaned. Such service work cannot be outsourced aslow-wage work in other global regions. The book developsits ideas through a series of case studies based on individ-ual workers. Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists delves intothe lives of the said groups by looking closely at the workpractices, household activities, and community politics ofpeople living in Santech. Organized around those variousactivities, the chapters segue from individuals in the low-wage sector to those who inhabit the informal economy,including women who ultimately develop their informalefforts into political mobilization.

Stories, such as that of the janitor Luis, serve as startingpoints for unraveling organizational constraints. Zlolniskicarefully parses the relationships between a high-tech par-ent company, a subcontractor responsible for cleaning, theService Employees International Union (SIEU) union local,and the participating workers, primarily giving voice to thelatter. The stories take us beyond the triumph of the “Justicefor Janitors” campaign to the aftermath of unionization.Ultimately, the janitors’ efforts to improve their workingconditions are undermined by the bleak realities of postin-dustrial intensification, as less do the work of more. Thelooming presence of the INS destabilizes employment forundocumented workers.

Zlolniski carefully develops the immigrants’ participa-tion in the informal economy. Laura’s snacks feed the bach-elor janitors, Arturo’s paletas (street-vendor popsicles) salesmask a kind of flexible low-wage franchising, and Gustavo’sdental business provides needed low-cost medical serviceswhile allowing him to accumulate capital for a dental officeback in Mexico. These activities reflect the nuanced waysinformal work can support, supplement, and provide an al-ternative to low-wage formal employment.

This book is not solely about work, per se, but alsoabout how that work shapes and is shaped by the house-hold division of labor. Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activistsis careful not to romanticize or reify Mexican immigranthousehold strategies; rather, it examines how each system ofmultiple-family households and multiple-household fami-lies plays out in the lives of individual women. Women aregiven agency in this interpretation. Similarly, the final por-tion of the book develops the stories of women whose rolesas mothers and family members take them into commu-nity politics. Bilingual education, power politics in schoolsite councils, neighborhood engagements with landlords,and the obtainment of drivers’ licenses for undocumented

Single Reviews 231

migrants are focal points that lead women from issue ac-tivism into ethnic politics as they learn to recast their iden-tities and mobilize their efforts.

This book is a vital addition to many bookshelves inboth immigrant studies and the anthropology of work.There is much to recommend it, including engagingethnography, a deep and abiding connection to the com-

munity, and a nuanced analysis. Structurally, the epilogue,which is based on the author’s 2004 fieldwork, literally over-flows with current political issues and ideas. Many of theinsights of that section would have been better integratedwith the rest of the book than placed at the end. However,this minor point should in no way deter scholars from thisfinely crafted and important book.

Review of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. American Anthropologist, March 2007, Vol. 109,...

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