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Eastern Cherokee Fishing. Heidi M. Altman. Tuscaloosa:University of Alabama Press, 2006. 138 pp.

ARLENE FRADKINFlorida Atlantic University

Eastern Cherokee Fishing, by Heidi M. Altman, is a welcomeaddition to the corpus of literature on Cherokee ethno-ecology. Using a diachronic approach, Altman interweavesarchaeological, linguistic, and historical documentary in-formation with her own ethnographic field research toexamine traditional and contemporary fishing practicesamong the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians living onthe Qualla Boundary, western North Carolina. Her objec-tives are to understand the function of fishing in pastand present-day Cherokee economy, to examine indige-nous ecological knowledge and its adaptation to localchanges, to analyze the boundaries of identity construc-tion within the context of today’s ethnotourism, and tocompare fish terminology between Cherokee and Englishvernacular. The resulting publication is an informative pre-sentation of how Cherokee fishing evolved from a sea-sonally significant aspect of a mixed subsistence econ-omy in the past to a profitable, nearly year-round role ina cash-based tourist economy today. Moreover, from theperspective of fishing, Altman explores cultural, linguis-tic, and environmental changes, as related to aquatic re-sources, spanning the period from European contact to thepresent.

The book is divided into six chapters followed by sixshort appendices. The introductory chapter presents themethodology and theoretical approach used, the objectivesof the study, and a brief discussion of the Cherokee lan-guage. Ethnographic fieldwork includes conducting inter-views with local Cherokee and non-Cherokee people to col-lect life histories, folktales, and reminiscences about fishand fishing; arranging fishing expeditions to observe tradi-tional and modern fishing practices; and holding directedelicitation sessions to obtain names of fishes. Documentarysources are consulted for information on traditional culturalpractices and beliefs related to fishing.

Chapter 2 reviews Cherokee history in relation tochanges in the local environment. Perspectives on the en-vironment are gleaned from early contact narratives, laterethnohistorical documents, and recent ethnographic inter-views. Altman examines environmental changes resultingfrom the earlier impact of colonization and the later pro-

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 110, Issue 1, pp. 81–155, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00014.x

cesses of modernization, globalization, and economic de-velopment and their specific effect on local fish populationsand fishing practices. Chapter 3 traces the role of fishing inCherokee culture from precontact times to the present. Alt-man describes traditional fishing methods, Cherokee namesfor fish species captured and consumed, methods of prepa-ration, and fish food preferences.

In chapter 4, Altman examines Cherokee traditionalecological knowledge and its application as it relates tofishing. This knowledge is rooted in a cosmological con-ceptualization of the environment and in spiritual be-liefs about nature and finds its expression in oral tradi-tions. Altman examines myths, food taboos, and sacredformulas for beliefs and practices pertaining to fish andfishing. She shows how the Cherokee have maintainedand adapted their traditional ecological knowledge to thepresent day despite cultural, linguistic, and environmentalchanges.

Chapter 5 focuses on contemporary Cherokee life andexplores the relationships among tourism, fishing, andCherokee identity. Fishing is a significant component ofthe tourist economy and also plays a role in negotiatingspace and establishing ethnic boundaries on the reserva-tion. Enterprise waters for tourist fishing are separate fromreserve waters where tribal members continue to practicetraditional fishing methods. In the final chapter, Altmanpresents her conclusions and suggestions for further re-search.

This book presents a concise and easily comprehensi-ble account of fishing among the Eastern Cherokee. As adiachronic study, it effectively integrates documentary andethnographic data so as to view the shifting role of fish-ing over time as a continuous adaptive process. Althoughthe information drawn from ethnohistorical accounts andoral traditions has been recounted in numerous Chero-kee sources, Altman’s focus on documentation pertainingto fishing and aquatic resources imparts a unique perspec-tive. The ethnographic description of fishing as it relates totourism and Cherokee identity, presented in chapter 5, isthe most enlightening section, embodying the book’s mostsignificant contribution.

The book does have one major shortcoming. Theethnographic descriptions, although informative, lack thedetailed personal narrative texts typical of most fieldworkaccounts. More examples of life histories and individualstories as told by the informants themselves should havebeen included. Although some quotes are given, most

82 American Anthropologist • Vol. 110, No. 1 • March 2008

information relayed by informants is instead paraphrasedand briefly summarized. Thus, the actual voices of the peo-ple interviewed are not sufficiently heard. The use of ad-ditional first-person narratives would lend greater supportand authenticity to the facts presented.

Overall, Eastern Cherokee Fishing adds to our knowl-edge of the historical and present-day relationship be-tween the Cherokee people and their environment. Thisbook will appeal to undergraduate and graduate stu-dents of anthropology and history who are interested inNorth American Indian studies, especially of native peo-ples and cultures of the southeast United States. Researchscholars specializing in indigenous subsistence patterns,ethnoecology, and ethnotourism will find it an enlight-ening and unique contribution to the anthropologicalliterature.

Poor Families in America’s Health Care Crisis. RonaldJ. Angel, Laura Lein, and Jane Henrici. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2006. 254 pp.

KAREN COEN FLYNNUniversity of Akron

It is painfully ironic that the U.S. health care system is fail-ing to tend to one-sixth of the population, while policymak-ers attempt to forcibly impose the U.S. societal model onpeople living in Iraq and elsewhere. Even more paradoxicalare policymakers’ calls for the end of ethnic violence abroad,while in the United States poor people—largely AfricanAmericans, Mexican Americans, and Latinos—continue tosuffer the cruelty of a rigid, two-tiered, “have”–”have-not” medical system, in which skin color regularly deter-mines tier membership and, consequently, one’s qualityand length of life.

Poor Families in America’s Health Care Crisis, by sociol-ogist Ronald J. Angel and anthropologists Laura Lein andJane Henrici, documents the findings of the multidisci-plinary Three Cities Study, a four-year investigation intothe inequitable nature of the U.S. health care system asexperienced by over 2,600 low-income families living inBoston, Chicago, and San Antonio. These families’ perspec-tives, drawn from surveys and in-depth interviews, providea window into the complex realities of experiencing illnesswhile being poor and uninsured. But let us be clear fromthe start. The “poor” people included in this study were nei-ther passive victims nor solely those reliant on private char-ity or government-sponsored assistance. A large percentageof those who persistently and creatively attempted to ac-cess medical care by navigating the bewildering rules of amultiple-payer, means-tested system—for example, if certi-fication for Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for NeedyFamilies (TANF) were based on the same application formand issued at the same office, did a subsequent loss of eligi-bility for TANF mean a loss of that for Medicaid as well?—were the same people who often lacked suitable, long-termhousing and daily, nutritious meals: the U.S. working poor.

Yet Poor Families in America’s Health Care Crisis is not an-other book solely built around medical horror stories anddescriptions of survival strategies. Angel, Lein, and Henrici’sexpertise on health, welfare reform, and poverty—advancedby their long-term research interests and unmistakable intheir prior publications—provides historical and contem-porary contextual frames to further support the narrativespresented, as well as gives credence to their call for “a single-payer system in which the federal government would assurecomprehensive coverage for all citizens” (p. 207). This is anethnography of uncertainty and unpredictability, and theauthors succeed in highlighting how the confusing eligi-bility requirements, instability of coverage, and languageand cultural barriers inherent to our present system are in-timately connected to and intensify instability in all otherareas of poor peoples’ lives. While recognizing the vary-ing capabilities of the individuals who make up this under-served group, the authors’ argument is primarily a struc-tural one that diverts attention from myopic grocery listsof characteristics and behaviors of poor people to the struc-tures inherent to our political economy that appear to makepoverty and ill health unavoidable for millions of people.

The first third of the book examines the history ofthe United States’s distinctive employment-based systemof health-insurance coverage and government programs,and here the authors present their argument that thesestructures pose serious challenges to providing consistent,high-quality care to all. The next part delves deeply intothe data gleaned from the Three Cities Study, emphasiz-ing several key factors that determine unequal access tohealth care: variations in city and state policies; the factthat the more poor families relied on employer-based healthcare coverage (as opposed to public assistance), the lesslikely all family members were covered; and the relation-ships between skin color, ethnicity, and access to care. Inthe next section of the book, the authors further tease outsome of difficulties faced by various people emphasizing,for instance, the medical triage decisions mothers often areforced to make among their own children and to the ne-glect of themselves. The final chapter returns to the au-thors’ call for universal health care in ways that deftly andclearly address many of the conflicting concerns of human-rights advocates, big business lobbyists, and supply-sideeconomists.

Poor Families in America’s Health Care Crisis is a valuablecontribution to the literature on health care reform,welfare, poverty, and illness in the United States and willbe appreciated by scholars and practitioners alike. Writtenin easily accessible and clear prose in a total of 212 pages,it is appropriate for advanced undergraduate or graduatestudents, as well as others with more general interests insociology, anthropology, and poverty in the United States.More specifically, this informative book should be requiredreading for frontline emergency-room workers, Medicareand Medicaid personnel, health care and social-reform ad-vocates, employers, policymakers, and aspiring presidentialcandidates.

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Dominican-Americans and the Politics of Empow-erment. Ana Aparicio. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 2006. 210 pp.

CARLOS ULISES DECENARutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Dominican-Americans and the Politics of Empowerment ex-plores the political coming-of-age of immigrant and U.S.-born Dominicans in New York City. Although focusingspecifically on the role that younger Dominican Americanshave played in the development of coalitions and institu-tions to address the political, economic, and social priori-ties of this population in the United States, Ana Aparicio’sethnography demonstrates a keen awareness of the connec-tions that current organizing has with the broader histori-cal trajectory of this community. Dominicans have been agrowing presence in the United States since the 1960s, whenthe lifting of U.S. immigration quotas, the end of the 30-year-long Trujillo dictatorship, and a U.S. intervention setthe stage for a mass exodus that is generally perceived as a la-bor migration. However, the U.S. intervention and the gov-ernment of Joaquın Balaguer that rose to power made it apriority to silence political dissent. Indeed, many of the firstto immigrate and settle in New York were progressives andradicals who feared persecution by the Dominican govern-ment. Their settlement in New York allowed them to beginto organize with the initial objective of return and, as theimmediacy of that goal waned, to address local concerns.

Scholarship on Dominican immigration to the UnitedStates dates back to the 1970s. Much of this work underlinesthe distinction between first waves of political dissidentsand, later (and more predominantly), labor migrants, butAparicio’s work is the first to show the continuities betweenthe work of early organizers and current political mobiliza-tion. Unlike scholarship that privileges transnational circu-lation and its benefits and shortcomings in the daily livesof immigrants or in Dominican homeland politics, Apariciopresents actors concerned with countering the marginaliza-tion of Dominicans and other communities of color in NewYork.

Aparicio’s study keeps the transnational in view whileoffering an interpretation of the current reality of the sec-ond generation that demonstrates that their coming-of-agepolitically entails Dominicans’ awareness of the marginal-ization they share with other groups. The second genera-tion’s recognition of their racialization as black, Dominican,and Latino does not locate them in a space of contradictionbut, as Aparicio argues, pushes them to negotiate multi-ple identifications and develop political practices based onbuilding coalitions with other racial and ethnic groups inNew York. While much scholarship on the second gener-ation has privileged views of their ethnic insularity versusthe negative outcomes of their contact with native-bornminority groups, Aparicio’s ethnography argues that such aperspective does not aptly describe what she found: “Orga-

nizing with native-born minorities has been a crucial steptoward empowerment for Dominicans; this collaborationhas helped catapult the Dominican-American communityonto New York’s political landscape” (p. 167).

By drawing on fieldwork conducted with leadershipand organizations in Washington Heights and in the Do-minican Republic, Aparicio accounts for the changing andcontingent nature of organizing. Two broad tendencies sheidentifies among the organizations that have emerged inWashington Heights are, on the one hand, leaders and or-ganizations who develop infrastructures for the provision ofservices and, on the other hand, leaders and organizationswhose goal is to alter power structures and develop localforms of autonomy. It is in the context of the second formof empowerment that Aparicio traces the development ofDominican Nation, an influential group in which the lead-ership and voices of second generation Dominicans in NewYork have predominated. As she contends, the high visi-bility of young leaders in this and other emerging groupshave inaugurated a new moment in Dominican immigrantmobilization in the United States: one in which “national”concerns, although still referencing the homeland, now fo-cus on the future of Dominicans in the United States.

Within Dominicanist scholarship, the overview of thisvibrant political terrain is a pioneering contribution bothbecause of its attention to local organizing in the UnitedStates and because it highlights the efforts of Dominicanswho immigrated as children and who were born of immi-grant parents to shape the future of their communities. Asa study of the second generation, its focus on activism addsnuance to a literature often marred by reductive and prob-lematic interpretations of these realities.

Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History inColombia, 1846–1948. Nancy P. Appelbaum. Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 297 pp.

LEON ARREDONDOColby College

Muddied Waters is a rich account of the “daily workings ofthe [Antioqueno] colonization process” (p. 8) and the ex-pansion of the coffee economy in central Colombia. NancyAppelbaum integrates local, regional, and national histo-ries and moves between different levels of analysis, includ-ing processes of nation building, the formation of the cof-fee region, and local dynamics of land tenure and iden-tity formation. The author also reaches into the more inti-mate space of the confession booth, where a priest ordershis parishioners to plant coffee trees as penance for theirsins. This work is based on a wide range of sources thatincludes travelers’ memoirs, 19th-century published texts,local and regional archives, locally published periodicals,interviews, and oral histories. Riosucio, the site of Appel-baum’s study, emerged in the 19th century in the border-lands between Antioquia and Cauca. In contrast to mostcoffee towns, characterized by a central plaza with a church,


the “whiteness” of their inhabitants, and their “conserva-tive orderliness,” mixed-race Riosucio has two plazas fos-tering a series of oppositions around which local historicalnarratives are constructed: upper plaza–lower plaza, plaza ofthe whites–plaza of the Indians, Antioqueno settlers–localinhabitants, Conservative Party–Liberal Party.

Analysis of the production of racial categories and theways in which they are ascribed to regions constitutes Ap-pelbaum’s central contribution. She argues that the creationof a national discourse of racial and regional differentiationserved to organize the emerging nation-state into a hier-archy of racialized regions, and she builds her argumentthrough the examination of changing discourses of iden-tity as various groups—such as indigenous leaders, politi-cians, land speculators, lawyers, priests, settlers, foreigners,and local and regional elites—struggled over “natural re-sources and governance” (p. 24). As a point of departure, Ap-pelbaum discusses the key words raza, colonizacion, region,and comunidad (meaning, respectively, race, colonization,region, and community) to argue that they do not havefixed meanings and are constantly appropriated, opposed,and redefined.

Part 1 deals with the period 1846–86. It discusses therole of popular protest and partisan politics in the creationof stereotypes of Conservative Antioquia as a “fair beauty”and Liberal Cauca as the “dark beast.” Looking at coloniza-tion from the point of view of the colonized, Appelbaumanalyzes the role of Caucanos, who sought to whiten thepopulation and to promote progress, and that of indigenousleaders in promoting Antioqueno migration into northernCauca. By showing that colonization took place throughthe expansion of partisan networks, creating a geographyof political identity as some communities became liberaland others conservative, Appelbaum raises an aspect of col-onization of great significance for Colombia’s history of po-litical violence.

Part 2 deals with the period 1886–1930. Known as theConservative “white republic,” the centralizing tendenciesof this period had the effect of intensifying regional dis-courses of identity. This section details efforts by Maniza-les elites to define the new department of Caldas, formerlynorthern Cauca, as a region on the basis of its racial and“ethnographic” homogeneity and to define themselves asheirs of white Antioqueno progress. In contrast, and to sup-port their separatist goals, elites in Riosucio challenged defi-nitions of the region as homogeneous and white. By empha-sizing the blending of whites and Indians into a local razariosucena, they fostered a historical narrative that supersedeslocal dichotomies and celebrates Riosucio as a microcosm ofa mestizo nation. As Appelbaum argues, these debates tookplace within the same discursive field that equates regionwith race. This section also illustrates the contradictory ef-fects of paternalistic legislation aimed at protecting indige-nous populations as minors of the state. Indigenous leadersdeployed this legal framework to protect communal land-holdings and revitalize indigenous movements throughoutthe 20th century.

Part 3 explores how with their historical memories ofindigenous and black identities, indigenous and black peo-ple undermine the regional image of white Caldas and thelocal image of mestizo Riosucio. These memories, Appel-baum argues, challenge racialized definitions of progress andregion.

Muddied Waters offers new ways for thinking about re-gionalism, a central theme in Latin American history, andcontributes to studies that highlight the cultural dynamicsof frontier expansion, particularly to a critical reassessmentof Antioqueno colonization that focuses on culture, differ-entiation, and inequality. Appelbaum achieves a study ofAntioqueno colonization that integrates analysis of discur-sive fields with political economy.

Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past: Selected Papers fromthe 10th International Conference of the European As-sociation of Southeast Asian Archaeologists. Elisabeth A.Bacus, Ian C. Glover, and Vincent C. Pigott, eds. Singapore:National University of Singapore Press, 2006. 423 pp.

DOUGLAS D. ANDERSONBrown University

Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past is a collection of 36 confer-ence papers from of the European Association of SoutheastAsian Archaeologists held at the British Museum in Septem-ber 2004. The chapters cover a broad range of topics, in-cluding newly discovered and excavated sites from the LatePleistocene to the historic periods and themes centeringon the early prehistory, development of social complexity,early states, mortuary practices, urbanism, and trade.

Noteworthy is Rasmi Shoocongdej’s detailed prelimi-nary analysis of the Tham Lod Rockshelter in northwesternThailand, where early levels containing unifacially flakedcore tools date to nearly 36,000 years ago (TLR date). Also,four nearby terminal Pleistocene age burial sites—between12,100 and 13,640 B.P.—provide a nice sample for futureDNA analyses to help resolve questions of ancestry andHolocene population movements that have heretofore beeninterpreted through linguistic reconstructions.

The 40,000-year-old Malaysian site Bukit Bunuh pro-vides important new information on the technology of ear-liest Southeast Asian Homo sapiens. Natthamon Pureepat-pong identifies numerous core tools as hand axes, choosingto problematize the findings in terms of the Movius’s (handax) line and resurrecting a perspective that had long beendiscarded. Because some of these “hand axes” are unifaciallytrimmed, it would be of interest to know how they relate toHoabinhian core tools from the region.

The nature and distribution of Hoabinhian-like coretool types in Southeast Asia and beyond is also dealt withby Sandra Bowdler, who believes they represent a culturalhistorical spread through trade. Several other articles alsodiscuss the appearance and distribution of particular artifacttypes, especially pottery, which will inform future culturalhistorical reconstructions.

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Preliminary reanalysis by Ryan J. Rabett, Philip J. Piper,and Graeme Barker of faunal remains from the oldest levelsof Niah Cave, Sarawak, yields new information not only onthe subsistence practices of early man in island SoutheastAsia but also on the dating of human remains, includingthe well-known Niah human skull. The authors confirm theoriginal age estimation of the “Deep Skull” between 34,000and 45,000 years B.P.

Chapters on Neolithic archaeology pertain largely tointernational trade and farming-language dispersal recon-structions for Southeast Asia. Stephen Oppenheimer arguesthat Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood’s interpretations ofthe Austronesian-rice farming connection have gone awry,owing to an “over-reliance on a controversial putative lin-guistic homeland, and failure to deal [impartially] withparallel evidence” (p. 591). Whether one agrees with Bell-wood or with Oppenheimer, the article is important for themethodological issues raised.

In “Unpacking the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic,”Sue O’Connor seeks to explain why the Bellwood popula-tion replacement model, which she accepts or at least doesnot reject, is not evidenced in the region’s island archaeol-ogy. She concludes that Austronesian incursions into Wal-lacea met local populations who were already practicingmany of the subsistence techniques supposedly introducedby the immigrants.

Among six chapters on mortuary practices, the onewritten by Elisabeth Bacus on engendered identities is es-pecially interesting in that it shows the development of so-cial persona during Bronze Age Thailand. Other articles dealwith mental landscapes, not only as evidenced by mortu-ary practices but also by settlement studies in Vietnam andThailand.

An important series of articles sheds light on the tran-sitional prehistoric–early states period in Southeast Asiaaround the beginning of the Christian Era. Especially sig-nificant are sites in areas immediately south of Hanoi, inTra Kieu and the Cham area of middle Vietnam, and inthe Oc Eo region, southwestern Vietnam. Already in thelast few centuries B.C.E., presence of Chinese influence in-dicates considerable long-distance contact among China,Southeast Asia, and India throughout the earliest period of“Indianization.” Excavations of transitional sites near Oc Eoshow a greater degree of Indianization than further north,and here the Hindu and Buddhist influence is syncretizedwith local cults, such as the “Mother Goddess of the Coun-try.” Clearly, transition to state-level society in SoutheastAsia is complex, driven by local indigenous developmentsand wide-ranging trade contacts that belie a view of a simplelinear model of Indianization of the region.

Excavations in Indonesia, such as in Batujaya, WestJava, continue to yield evidence from pre- and early Indian-ized states periods but, thus far, details of the transition arestill unclear. Excavation of transitional sites in Thailand,like the moated site Promtin Tai, demonstrate the impor-tance of bronze and iron metallurgy in the developmentof early states, a conclusion repeated in numerous excava-

tions from mainland Southeast Asia. Generally, the processof state formation evidenced in these “transitional” sitesrelates to trade and wealth formation, although cause andeffect are still wide open to interpretation.

Recent excavations in Myanmar, especially Beikthano,provide new information on later developments of earlystates and show the key role in the consolidation of powerplayed by emerging religious hierarchies. With so few re-cently published data from Myanmar, San Shwe and ThanShwe and Elizabeth Moore’s chapters are especially valuableadditions to the literature.

The conference was honored by the participation of ar-chaeologist H.R.H. Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, whocontributed an article on the 10th- to 12th-century inscrip-tions from Prasat Phnom Rung, a Khmer Temple complexfrom Buriram Province, northeastern Thailand. The inscrip-tions provide interesting details on site locations, land-owing customs, and political organization of the period.

The volume is an important contribution to the archae-ology of Southeast Asia, authored both by reigning expertsin the field, including Ian C. Glover, Charles Higham, JohnMiksic, and Brian Vincent, and by young scholars who areaddressing new issues in prehistoric and historic archaeol-ogy of the region. An important lesson in this volume is thedegree to which Southeast Asian archaeology has maturedthrough respectful international cooperation between andamong local and foreign archaeologists.

Teaching Religion and Healing. Linda L. Barnes and InesM. Talamantez, eds. New York: Oxford University Press,2006. 386 pp.

CHRISTOPHER T. DOLEAmherst College

For several years I have taught an undergraduate seminaron anthropological approaches to healing and recovery.In unanticipated ways, I have found the course to be aremarkably cohesive introduction to major developmentsin anthropological thought over the past 50 years, mov-ing from symbolic, structuralist, and semiotic approachesthrough the performative, phenomenological, postcolo-nial, and poststructuralist. Bringing together a divergentcast of majors—from anthropology to biology, from neu-roscience to self-directed majors in universal peace andharmony—I am consistently surprised by students’ sharedwillingness to engage in advanced theoretical debates to adegree I do not find in other courses. As much as I wouldlike to credit the quality of instruction for the course’s fa-vorable evaluations, there is something about the study ofhealing that focuses anthropological thinking on the socialnature of subjective experience in ways particularly engag-ing for students. With this in mind, I received Linda Barnesand Ines Talamantez’s volume with much anticipation.

Published as a part of the American Academy of Re-ligion’s Teaching Religious Studies Series, the book is com-posed of an introduction and 21 chapters that are organized


into seven sections. Grounded largely in religious studiesyet interdisciplinary in scope, the volume is envisioned asa teaching resource that brings together different ways ofconceptualizing and teaching about religion and healing.With the exception of the introduction and thematicallyorganized resource bibliographies at its end, the book is acollection of course syllabi accompanied by commentariesby the author–instructor that address the course’s organiza-tion, dominant themes, learning goals, teaching processes,limitations, challenges, and so forth. The sections repre-sent a range of themes, some approaching the topic fromthe perspective of religious and cultural traditions (“Hindu,Tibetan, and Chinese Traditions,” “Native and Chicano/aAmerican Traditions”), others in terms of scholarly tradi-tions (“Through the Study of Shamanism”), and still oth-ers by the pedagogical demands of the course (“Course forCaregivers,” “Experiential Pedagogies”).

As these themes suggest, cross-cultural approaches toreligion and healing dominate the volume. The syllabi andcommentaries are of varying length and levels of specificity.While some may offer detailed, week-by-week reading andassignment schedules along with short reflections on thecourse, others can be schematic outlines accompanied byextended commentaries. Syllabi are geared to a variety oflevels and are based on courses designed and taught byfaculty in the humanities and social sciences. The volumealso includes examples of courses designed for health careproviders and other caregivers. Although scholars of reli-gious studies make up the majority of contributors, onefinds a rich assortment of disciplinary commitments, withanthropology’s presence being particularly strong. In all,the volume consists of an impressive variety of approachesto teaching healing and, with their respective justificationstaken together, makes an unexpectedly comprehensive casefor the significance of the study of healing and religion.

Barnes has been working for years to reinvigorate thestudy of religion, medicine, and healing within religiousstudies. As this volume illustrates, her commitment recog-nizes the need to draw on scholarship in numerous fieldsto adequately capture the complexity of healing processes.Barnes views such cross-disciplinary conversations as an op-portunity to push the study of religion and healing be-yond the routinely encountered assumptions within reli-gious studies that their combined relevance does not extendfurther than the topics of “faith healing” and bioethics.In this respect, Barnes has persuasively argued that thestudy of religious healing can serve as a productive meansfor expanding religious studies scholarship beyond textualsources. The study of healing, as compared to, say, medi-cal texts, she would suggest, compels the scholar of religionto work out the interconnections between textual meaningand lived experience, for this is where the power of lan-guage to shape or constitute bodily experience becomes in-escapably relevant. Such a demand to shift one’s attentiontoward experience may strike the anthropologist as unnec-essary, for experience is already, for most anthropologists,at the center of ethnographic inquiry. In this regard, for

those familiar with current anthropological work on heal-ing and recovery, the recurring anthropological sources inthe volume may seem somewhat dated. At the same time,for a volume that seeks to work across disciplines, that aimsto introduce scholars of religion to (medical) anthropolog-ical approaches, and whose audience is primarily religiousstudies, this limitation could be justifiable. Yet, if one of thevolume’s principal aims is to introduce anthropology to reli-gious studies, the scattered uses of anthropological sourcesneed to be more fully situated within the larger trends ofanthropology from which they emerge. While the volumeoffers little to the anthropologist looking for anthropologi-cal sources on healing, it does bring together a sizable bodyof scholarship in religious studies that may be unfamiliar tothe anthropologist.

In one of her contributing chapters, Linda Barnes re-counts her experiences as a young scholar of religion andanthropology struggling to put together a course on the his-tory of Chinese healing traditions. As a subject about whichshe had limited knowledge, she describes turning to friends,picking colleagues’ brains, and borrowing syllabi to designwhat I am sure was an outstanding course. Barnes and Ta-lamantez’s volume seems to represent precisely what shemight have wished for while putting the course together: acollection of course syllabi containing a diversity of disci-plinary approaches that can be mined for readings, turnedto for inspiration, or explored for the novel insights suchjuxtaposing approaches might produce. Healing, a topicthat has long been at the center of anthropology, has unfor-tunately fallen out of favor. As such, something like Barnes’sattempt to reinvigorate the study of healing within religiousstudies is sorely needed in anthropology. And if this comesto pass, one can only hope that an anthropological counter-part to Barnes and Talamantez’s volume would be equallyrich, thought provoking, and, ultimately, useful.

States of Violence: Politics, Youth, and Memory in Con-temporary Africa. Edna G. Bay and Donald L. Donham,eds. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.268 pp.

WENDI A. HAUGHWilliams College

Africa has been the setting for horrific acts of violence in re-cent decades, acts that have been called senseless or incom-prehensible in the Western media. This edited collection,which grew out of a Mellon-funded seminar series and con-ference at Emory University, seeks to make sense of such actsof violence by situating them within their sociocultural andhistorical contexts. It focuses on physical rather than struc-tural violence, and political rather than domestic violence.The 12 contributors represent a range of disciplines, includ-ing history, sociology, and political science; five are anthro-pologists. The ten case studies, primarily from western andsouthern Africa, succeed in providing rich, detailed portraitsof particular events, their precursors, and aftermaths.

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Coeditor Edna Bay provides a helpful introduction tothe project and the individual chapters, which are groupedinto sets highlighting particular themes: state structuresand insider–outsider distinctions, gender and generation,and the social construction of memory. In a second intro-ductory chapter, coeditor Donald Donham addresses phys-ical violence as a subject of study. He argues that onlyexplanation—with an eye toward prevention—justifies thestudy of this morally fraught subject, and he urges schol-ars to recognize the lies and obfuscation, hazy recall,and post hoc narrations that characterize the data ofviolence.

The case studies offer several different kinds of explana-tion. Both chapters in the first set explain violent events bysituating them within longer historical patterns. WilliamReno argues that violence during the civil war in SierraLeone was structured by prewar political organizations es-tablished to exploit the diamond trade; in areas with outsideleaders integrated into the central state, the violence was farworse than in areas with local leaders dependent on localnetworks of support. Joanne Davidson describes the expul-sion of Fula residents from a Diola community in Guinea-Bissau as consistent with historical patterns of incorpora-tion in which migrants never lose their status as strangers intheir host communities and are therefore vulnerable to be-ing singled out. She pays particularly close attention to thenarratives presented by people on both sides of the conflict;her brief discussion of the integration of earlier violent in-cidents into these narratives was intriguing and could havebeen developed further.

The second set of case studies explains violence pri-marily as a response to gendered or generational inequali-ties. Although this volume defines violence as physical, it isclear from these case studies that this physical violence isgrounded in the structural violence of poverty, inequality,and oppression. Martha Carey describes how young peo-ple in Sierra Leone—thwarted in their aspirations by age-based secret societies, corrupt politicians, and a decliningeconomy—carried out public amputations to send messagesto those in power. In Nigeria, Daniel Smith finds youngpeople struggling to reconcile the promises of developmentand democracy with the realities of poverty and corrup-tion. Vigilante groups operated by young men flourish inthis setting, supported by community members angered bythe failures of politicians and police. Neither author ad-dresses violence as gendered, the subject of Elaine Salo’schapter. In the Cape Flats, Coloured men have few op-portunities to meet the economic expectations of conven-tional South African manhood. Gangs enable boys to be-come men by developing toughness and proving loyaltyand enable men to enforce justice and police communityboundaries.

The final set of case studies focuses on the workingsof memory. Belinda Bozzoli carefully examines the con-struction of public memory at specific moments after theApartheid-era Alexandra rebellion in South Africa. She ar-gues that these public memories highlight nationalist mo-

bilization and state-induced suffering, erasing the youth-ful violence at the heart of the rebellion. Jocelyn Alexan-der and JoAnn McGregor explain how Zipra veterans, vic-tims of state violence during Zimbabwe’s postindependencecivil war, were invited back into the fold as the weaken-ing state sought more veteran support. Socially and eco-nomically marginalized, many accepted the invitation toparticipate in violent patronage politics, “forgetting” thecivil war and “remembering” the earlier liberation struggle.Timothy Longman and Theoneste Rutagengwa contrast theofficial memorials and nationalist discourses produced bythe Rwandan government after the genocide with privatelycirculated discourses about commemoration and ethnicity.Both state and citizens seek to avoid future violence, butmany ordinary citizens felt political manipulation was a ma-jor cause of the genocide and that it shapes the constructionof official memories.

More sustained attention throughout the book to therole indigenous narratives or explanations play in moti-vating or mitigating violence would have been welcome.Nonetheless, this volume brings together an interesting andinsightful set of case studies that can be read or assigned in-dividually or collectively.

Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework andSewing. Mary C. Beaudry. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2006. 237 pp.

BONNIE J . CLARK

University of Denver

Most of us think we know what pins are and what they areused for. As just one of the classes of items in Findings: TheMaterial Culture of Needlework and Sewing, Mary Beaudry re-veals that pins have had an incredibly wide range of sizesand uses, from binding burial shrouds to pinning up pet-ticoats, securing the veils of widows, and creating patternsin lace. Up to the 19th century, they were as likely to beused for sartorial purposes as the use with which we nowassociate them: the sewing of garments. And, indeed, whenthey were used for sewing, they were used primarily by non-professionals rather than by tailors and seamstresses.

In this concise volume, historical archaeologist Beaudrymanages to draw us into the wonder of not just of pinsbut the many other seemingly self-evident and mundanesewing-related artifacts found on medieval and later archae-ological sites in the British Isles and North America. In thiswork she has taken a ubiquitous suite of material cultureand challenged readers to rethink it as evidence of work, ofdress, and of the globalization of the textile trades. Beaudryalso highlights how these artifacts are often entwined withpersonhood, such as when scissors, needle or pin cases, andthimbles were either worn by women or engraved with theirinitials. She links these acts to needlework as a primarypathway for training in and the embodiment of feminineidentity.


The majority of the book is devoted to chapters thatinvestigate specific classes of artifacts related to needleworkand sewing: pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and more ob-scure items like lace bobbins. These chapters begin with anoften deep-time look at the objects, drawing on archaeo-logical evidence from around the world. Historical docu-ments brought into the discussion are investigated with aclose eye for the material and social implications of themanufacture and use of the items. Each chapter includesdetailed information about dating these artifacts, as wellas a discussion of archaeological examples. The detail andclarity with which these chapters are written—along withschematic drawings, historic illustrations, and photographsof archaeological artifacts—makes this book particularlyuseful for those who recover, interpret, or curate these ob-jects, whether in an archaeological laboratory or a museumgallery.

Each chapter also incorporates an interpretive casestudy, an example of how investigators can take the infor-mation about the material and social history of needleworkand sewing and apply it in robust and interesting ways. Inthe chapter on thimbles, Beaudry calls attention to the iden-tical small thimbles recovered from Magunco, a village es-tablished in the late 17th century for Christianized NipmucIndians in what is now Ashland, Massachusetts. Beaudrycogently argues that merely identifying these imported En-glish metal thimbles as artifacts of sewing or as signs ofacculturation misses the mark. The size of the thimbles in-dicates that the missionaries were targeting children, notadults. Training the young in sewing, whether at the poor-house or the mission, inculcates ideas about gender iden-tity, hygiene, and proper dress. In this case, “proper dress”would have been European-style dress, which required thekind of needle working tied to the use of thimbles. Onceone factors in the religious overtones of cleanliness and theavoidance of idleness, one starts to get a feel for the kindof ideological weight these small artifacts could have car-ried. Interestingly, the thimbles show little evidence of wear;as Beaudry points out, this is often the case with thimblesgiven to young people who often quickly outgrow them. Sowhether the young converts embraced this new skill is hardto assess from the remains at this site. But we can, Beaudryargues, use the evidence to suggest that “missionaries mighthave thought thimbles as effective as Bibles for their pur-pose of conveying Western, Christian ideals to convertedIndians” (p. 113).

This book goes far beyond a typical artifact guide. Witheach class of artifacts Beaudry challenges investigators toembrace the full interpretive potential of these items. Ata basic level, the information she provides can be used toidentify the broad range both of intended uses and usersof artifacts. But by highlighting the ways that these itemscame to have personal and social import, Beaudry pushesher readers to think about the many ways in which theseartifacts were woven into so many lives, from the womenwho punched the eyes of needles to the men who used themto sew sails.

Progress in Colour Studies, vol. 1: Language and Culture.Carole P. Biggam and Christian J. Kay, eds. Amsterdam:John Benjamins Publishing, 2006. 223 pp.

DAVID BIMLERMassey University

The 13 chapters in this volume began as talks given tothe 2004 PICS conference in Glasgow. They focus on cul-tural and linguistic aspects of color, leaving the psycholog-ical and psychophysical aspects be covered in a compan-ion volume. The shared intention of the authors was toexamine the origins of color words in various languagesand the pragmatics of those words (and color concepts)within language communities. The result is a snapshot ofthe state of research into “color” as an anthropologicalphenomenon.

Is it safe to assume that every language has a color lexi-con for us to research? In practice, some word might be usedto label hues and satisfy an insistent anthropologist, whileits core connotations lie elsewhere (e.g., succulence, dry-ness). Alternatively, the true meaning of some hue-relatedterm may be restricted in context, although it can be usedas a metaphor to describe a context-free paint sample. Ex-amples abound in English (palomino, russet, blonde). Thevolume opens with a chapter by Anna Wierzbicka, reportingprogress toward a formal framework of “Natural SemanticMetalanguage” in which the visual concepts of a language(and a culture) can be discussed without the preconceptionsinherent in the English color lexicon. Part of Wierzbicka’sargument is that many languages have no equivalent to theEnglish concept of “color”: that is, they have no superordi-nate term implying (and limited to) the abstractions of hueand saturation.

In the central chapter, Barbara Saunders goes further.She advances an account of “seeing” as a learned social ac-tivity rather than a biological process, replacing Empiricism(“the belief that there are sensations, as opposed to sensa-tion talk” [p. 95]) with an alterative epistemology based onthe pragmatist philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce andhis followers.

Except in passing, the various contributions have lit-tle to say about broader cultural milieu: issues such asthe symbolic associations of various color terms in somecultures were not the focus of the conference. An excep-tion is the closing chapter where Michael Huxtable dis-cusses color in medieval heraldry. In the conflict betweenthe evaluative use of colors (their hierarchy of symbolicvalues) and their role in providing a knight with a sta-ble identity within the structure of chivalry, Huxtable seesa microcosm of the medieval perspective on vision, inwhich “colour was as much a defining quality as shape”(p. 208).

The conference was a forum for exchanging techniques;thus, the chapters emphasize methodologies as much asconclusions. Part of the importance of this volume lies in

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the potential extensions of these techniques outside the do-main of color. Language databases and text corpora are usedby Adam Pawowski to test quantitative predictions aboutcolor terms and by Margarita Correia to examine the mor-phological and semantic differences in Portuguese betweencolor terms and other abstract nouns. One can easily imag-ine wider applications.

The scope for anthropological applications is not al-ways restricted to linguistic domains. To trace the dissemi-nation of a finer-grained color lexicon within a communityof Mayan weavers, Terri MacKeigan and Stephen Q. Muthapplied social network analysis, a methodology more oftenencountered in epidemiology or criminology.

As an outcome of this empirical approach to the use ofcolor language, several themes recur through the volume.First is the obvious fact that color lexicons evolve over time.A language may retain a color category but acquire a newword for it. Anders Steinvall notes an example from English:the abstract color word rose would now be considered as anonbasic hyponym, surviving mainly in lexicalized clicheslike “rose-tinted spectacles,” but until the later 19th centuryit was more salient than pink. In French, Isabel Forbes findsthat marron is displacing brun. When written corpora arenot enough to determine the earlier state of a color lexicon,one turns to modes of language (e.g., songs, traditional sto-ries) that preserve older usage as if in amber. Carole Houghexamines the “toponymicon” of English place names forclues to the lexicon and semantics of color in Old English.

Sometimes the new words entering a lexicon makedistinctions that were not previously considered salient.They may specify differences in hue, where an existing lex-icon focused more on other aspects of visual appearancesuch as brightness, luster, or texture. A second recurringtheme is the contribution to this process from textile com-merce and textile production. For Steinvall, textiles are acultural artifact where object color can dissociate from ob-ject identity: “the development of a rich terminology in Eu-ropean languages . . . took off in close connection with thedevelopment of a modern dyeing industry” (p. 70). Writ-ing about the transition between Old and Middle English,Carole Biggam suggests that the Norman French term bloi,in the course of its transformation into the English blue,gained generality and a degree of abstraction through itsuse for quantifying various grades of woad dyeing. Onemight speak of a Sumptuary Law explanation of lexicalembellishment: when new dyeing technologies provide aculture’s elite with fabric of some distinctive hue, onlythen is a specific term needed to single out that sector ofcolor space, so as to prohibit low-status individuals fromwearing it.

These remarks are not intended to review the chaptersexhaustively but only to indicate the diversity of topics theycover. This diversity makes it difficult to pin down the vol-ume as being only of interest to some restricted group ofreaders. At the very least, it can be recommended to any-one working in the field of color language as a cultural phe-nomenon.

Forensic Anthropology: Case Studies from Europe.Megan B. Brickley and Roxana Ferllini, eds. Springfield, IL:Charles C. Thomas, 2007. 250 pp.

ERIN H. KIMMERLE

University of South Florida

The edited volume, Forensic Anthropology: Case Studies fromEurope, offers 15 contributed case studies by 19 authors whoare leading scholars in the areas of anthropology, medicine,odontology, and crime scene and forensic investigations.This book demonstrates the unique contributions of an-thropologists to forensic investigations, using bioculturalperspectives, broad training, and diverse skills for humanand trauma identification. Overall, the book provides agood overview of the history of applied casework in Eu-rope and highlights important areas for continued research.Throughout, this book directly compares the U.S. to Eu-ropean context in casework, education, qualification stan-dards, protocols, and terminology, highlighting potentialdifferences and important areas for best practice standards.Moreover, this text raises a very important point regardingcontributions anthropologists can make in identification ofnot only victims but also perpetrators through morphome-tric, visualization methods such as facial identification orgait. This is a very unique contribution and critical pointbecause it means the role of anthropologists in forensics isexpanding.

There are several important and recurring themesthroughout the volume: the important contributions of ap-plied forensic anthropology to medicolegal death investiga-tions and the wide range of expertise it has to offer, the needfor population specific reference samples and continued re-search, and the changing role of forensics as a field with agrowing cross-cultural perspective. This book poignantly il-lustrates cases for which anthropological evidence was criti-cal to demonstrating a crime occurred, wherein the mannerof death interpreted from other evidence may have led tothe wrong conclusion.

The authors throughout this text provide literature re-views and demonstrate the relevance of anthropologicalevidence to the legal context. Case studies come from 12European countries, highlighting the importance of a cross-cultural perspective, variation in systems and procedures formissing persons protocols, and differences in methodologi-cal standards of identification. In numerous examples, whatis needed is cross-population data on biological variationand appropriate reference samples that reflect the demog-raphy, genetics, health, and biological characteristics of theunknown or unidentified remains. A key finding was em-phasized by the challenge of using the FORDISC program,a standard U.S. tool for sex, stature, and ancestry estima-tion because of the limited number of reference populationsglobally.

The growing trend of archaeology applied to forensicsis not a new occurrence but one that is gaining relevance.


The anthropologist on site at the crime scene is becomingmore common in both Europe and the United States. De-spite a growing body of research during the past 20 yearson decomposition and time since death estimation, thereis no ready-made formula for estimating the postmorteminterval (PMI). A few reliable methods such as in botany orsoil analysis provide PMI, yet far more research is needed todocument the range of variables affecting rural verses urbanenvironments and the full range of ecological systems acrossEurope. For example, forensic anthropologists uniquely facea variety of taphonomic conditions, including decompos-ing tissues, adipocere, and skeletal and mummified remains.There is a need for research on bone decomposition butthis data must be integrated with studies in decomposition.Moreover, working with cremated remains means workingwith small fragments and incomplete recovery, yet this vol-ume clearly demonstrates that human identification andtrauma analysis is possible.

Finally, this volume provides insight into contributionsof anthropologists and the emerging trend for forensic con-tributions to transitional justice initiatives in postconflictsocieties: the book provides the example of regions of theformer Yugoslavia. Through these examples, the need forpopulation specific data is reiterated. The importance ofdifferentiating trauma contributing to the cause of deathfrom postmortem artifacts because of attempts to concealgraves, variation in the burial environment, or access bycarnivores is explored with special consideration given topostmortem dismemberment and survival time among fa-tal injuries. Such issues are critical for correctly interpretingevidence and demonstrating the circumstances around adeath.

Overall, this volume makes a significant contributionto a growing body of literature, demonstrating the evolv-ing field of forensic anthropology today and the significantcontributions that investigations in Europe are poised tomake to the field globally.

Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the AntiquitiesTrade. Neil Brodie, Morag M. Kersel, Christina Luke, andKathryn Walker Tubb, eds. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 2006. 349 pp.

JENNA WALLACE COPLINHofstra University

The evocative title of this book promises a comprehen-sive look at a pervasive and urgent topic in archaeology:the antiquities market as a driving force for the destruc-tion of archaeological sites. The edited work delivers di-verse articles on topics ranging from long-term manage-ment to legal manifestations of this dynamic issue. Di-versity wrests this collection from remaining a solely ar-chaeological dialogue. However, the collection amassescommon knowledge among preservation proponents—specifically, archaeologists—without venturing far from thisbase.

Readers need not be archaeologists to comprehend thescope of destruction being levied against archaeological re-sources around the world. Even with such visibility, Christo-pher H. Roosevelt and Christina Luke’s accounts of damageand destruction to western Turkey’s tumuli at rates of upto 90 percent still are shocking (pp. 173–187). Looting inAfghanistan and Iraq during conflict structures or roundsout several authors’ efforts to define the import and urgencyof resolving issues of preservation (see, e.g., Prott, pp. 25–35; Brodie, pp. 206–226; Van Krieken-Pieters, pp. 227–235;Renfrew, pp. 245–257; Lazerus, pp. 270–283). This sense ofurgency, met with varied responses and mostly mild reso-lutions, only occasionally forces such extremes as preser-vationists seeking to return pieces by purchasing them onthe open market (Van Krieken-Pieters, p. 230), confirmingKathryn Walker Tubs’s assertion that “cultural heritage isnot being served by those who purport to be interested init” (p. 284).

The history and development of the U.S. and inter-national current legislative environment gives backgroundand context to Tubs’s assertion. The Hague Convention forthe Protection of Cultural Property and its protocols formlater political and legal stances of prominent players in theantiquities market outlined by Lyndel V. Prott (pp. 25–35),ones that now seem obvious and almost inevitable. Recentresponses to legal cases documented by Marina Papa Sokal(pp. 36–67) are clear clues to the motivations of differentplayers in the marketplace, including dealers, curators, andgovernments. Together these articles circumnavigate a mar-ketplace that is well known surficially but still seems theblack box inside.

Market forces intertwine with political and legal mo-tivation for managing the antiquities market. Morag M.Kersel (pp. 188–207) segments the market into three inter-related tiers and follows coins from Hebron to New York.Tracing the path of goods to final sale, Kersel simplifieswell-known market segments but clarifies elements of sec-ondary market spaces likely unfamiliar to most archaeol-ogists. Other cases offer means for negotiating this diffi-cult market space. Peter Watson’s estimates (pp. 93–97) ofthe market’s value—although creative—are rough and re-moved. Suggesting we involve banks in policing a mar-ket we cannot seem to understand absolves archaeologistsof responsibility. Robert D. Hicks (pp. 133–146), however,approaches the legal issue from another perspective andputs forth a protocol for the role of the archaeologist indocumenting and investigating looting events. Detailinghow archaeologists can help catch and bring to justicethose that destroy cultural heritage, Hicks forces a proac-tive responsibility back on the archaeologist. In a differ-ent but seminal case (Hollowell, pp. 98–132), the LawrenceIsland’s unique legal market in antiquities asks archae-ologists to continue research while market forces are atwork.

Archaeologists all acknowledge the urgency of dam-age being done, the existence of the market responsible forit, and the terrible loss of information that occurs when

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an artifact is separated from its context as a result of loot-ing. Tubbs concludes, “The prognosis for survival of archae-ological sites, and the potential knowledge they hold, isgrim” (pp. 299). Without dissipation of the tensions pro-duced by the disparate and passionate views held by par-ties involved, no resolution will have a lasting impact onthe destruction. To simply say the market is bad and weneed to make it illegal is not sufficient. To speak amongourselves about the atrocities will not change the realitiesof the destruction of sites. We cannot be the sole arbiters ofethics in any of these cases. We must converse with othermarket participants, such as bankers. We must plan to savecultural heritage, learning from sites with long histories ofmanagement like Copan (Mortensen, pp. 258–269). The au-thors and editors reveal little new information but providea compendium, a single source of varied information anddiscussion that can serve as a stepping-stone to the devel-opment and execution of focused efforts to be successfulpreservationists.

Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Iden-tities. Theresa Jill Buckland, ed. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 2006. 245 pp.

SALLY NESS

University of California, Riverside

Although its project is of a broader interdisciplinary scope,this anthology is in many ways a companion volume toTheresa Buckland’s earlier anthology, Dance in the Field: The-ory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography (1999). Thevolume’s authors, the majority of whom are senior scholarswith several decades of experience with conducting ethno-graphic research on dance, have attempted to bring a crit-ical historical focus to their work. In many—although notall—cases, this is done through personal reflections on theauthors’ own research careers, in which changes in both theobjects of their study and the methodologies employed toinvestigate them are examined as they have evolved overtime. The authors provide expert overviews of dance prac-tices from Oceania, Asia, Europe, and the United States, giv-ing the collection a strongly international as well interdis-ciplinary orientation.

It is a credit to Buckland that the results of the vol-ume’s critical interdisciplinary project, which could havegone awry in a number of ways, on the whole work well.The historical orientation in every case strengthens ratherthan dissipates the authors’ insights and puts their predom-inantly ethnographic work in a richer theoretical and em-pirical light. While the self-reflexive strategy employed bymany does not always yield the outcome one might hopefor, neither does it ever come anywhere near self-indulgentnavel-gazing.

The strongest contribution to the volume is Buckland’sintroduction. In high contrast to most anthology introduc-tions, this is a seminal piece of work. Buckland goes well be-

yond framing the chapters to come, concisely illuminatingthe changing, sometimes intersecting, position of ethno-graphic and historical dance research in relation to both oftheir larger disciplinary orientations. Although quite short,it is a masterful overview that nonexperts would find mostuseful in gaining a general understanding of these com-plexly connected fields.

The four chapters that follow present the volume’s rel-atively objectively oriented chapters, which range widelyin topic and analytical focus. Adrienne Kaeppler describesfour “moments” (p. 25) of Tongan dance history, document-ing the use of historical and ethnographic sources in herstudy of the laka-laka dance genre. Felicia Hughes-Freelandconsiders how historical claims for Hindu–Javanese origincurrently serve the contemporary practice and interpreta-tion of Bedaya performance in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. LynnManers considers symbolism and the play of memory in theperformance of folklore ensembles in the former Yogoslavia.Deirdre Sklar investigates the ways cultural identity may beshaped in terms of kinetic experience in the case of annualfiesta dancers of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Tortugas, NewMexico.

In the latter half of the volume, Janet O’Shea, Judy vanZile, Elsie Dunin, and Buckland herself contribute chap-ters that all follow a more explicitly self-reflexive template.O’Shea traces her changing methodological strategies withregard to her studies of classical Bharata Natyam dance. VanZile recounts the “discoveries and dilemmas” (p. 154) sheencountered in her use of iconographic representations ofKorean dance. Dunin examines the ethnographic and his-torical dimensions of her longitudinal study of Rom danc-ing in Skopje, Macedonia. Finally, Buckland provides an ac-count of the varying ways in which her researcher’s selfand the researched other were mutually constituted duringher investigations (beginning in 1976) of different formsof Morris dancing in England. This final piece is most suc-cessful in its exposure of the larger complex of social andcultural forces continually at play in the crafting not onlyof the ethnographic self and other but also of the researchultimately produced.

This is decidedly a specialist’s volume, intended for areadership at the graduate or postgraduate level whose pas-sion for the study of dance might equal the authors’ own.This audience will find the volume an important additionto their research library. The bibliographic contributionsalone are quite valuable. Each chapter is extensively anno-tated and contains a wealth of relatively obscure sources ex-tremely difficult for any but an expert on the topic to trace.However, the authors collectively also provide a fascinatingopportunity for a more general anthropological readershipto observe how a field of study that is generally positionedas quite far from the mainstreams of cultural anthropol-ogy has nonetheless understood itself to be deeply con-nected to—if not belonging within—the larger anthropo-logical project, and how it has formed its own scholarly un-derstanding of the discipline over the course of the last halfcentury.


REFERENCE CITEDBuckland, Theresa

1999 Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in DanceEthnography. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Primates in Perspective. Carolina J. Campbell, AgustınFuentes, Katherine C. MacKinnon, Melissa Panger, andSimon K. Bearder, eds. New York: Oxford University Press,2007. 729 pp.

MICHAEL F. GIBBONS JR.University of Massachusetts, Boston

Given its content, Primates in Perspective (hereafter Primates)is a bargain. Packed with intellectual history and state-of-the-art information, Primates is a celebration of SherwoodWashburn’s contributions to graduate training in the studyof wild primates, of the amount of material that has beengathered since the 1987 publication of Primate Societies, andof the primates themselves. Four of the five editors men-tion Phyllis Dalhinow’s positive influence on their careers.The book is in large measure a result of Professor Dalhi-now’s legacy. Primates is comprehensive. In its six sectionsare as follows: (1) background on the history of primatefield studies and primate evolution; (2) 17 chapters aboutprimates, the largest single section; (3) methods, including auseful chapter on molecular primatology; (4) reproduction,life history, and development; (5) ecology, with nutrition,conservation, and primates as prey; and (6) social behav-ior and intelligence, with a fascinating chapter on primateself-medication and more.

Implicit in the sequence of the primate chapters is ataxonomic hierarchy from primitive to advanced. DavidPilbeam taught me to avoid the value judgment implicitin these words by considering primitive as changed leastsince the common ancestor and advanced as changed more.This phylogenetic template serves well the study of com-parative anatomy and behavior between and within taxa.Variety and difference are not always functions of phyloge-netic propinquity, though. The book uses one or the otherof these perspectives depending on which one best illumi-nates an area of study.

Based on “morphology, molecules, and ecology”(p. 18), I found a slight bias toward splitting in classifica-tion. Although a lumper, I find the book’s bias a positiveslant. Students new to primate studies should be taughtthe taxonomic trends within the subdiscipline. Is this bookuseful for undergraduates? Yes: the way the material is pre-sented, Primates can be read at a number of levels. Simplyreading the references is an education in itself.

The primate chapters are not formulaic, but they dohave certain information in common: geographic distribu-tion, reproduction, diet, social behavior, and so forth. Notall of the chapters have exactly the same content, though.The authors do not speculate in areas where they have nodata, and not all of them have the same kinds of infor-mation. Throughout the book, the writing is consistentlyauthoritative.

The data on wild primates that we have now is geomet-rically more than that of 50 years ago. Time, and an increasein the number of fieldworkers, has allowed for more in-depth kinship studies, a greater understanding of allianceswithin groups, more detailed insight into the ecology ofmost species, and a lot more. G. Evelyn Hutchinson de-fined ecological niche as an abstractly inhabited hypervol-ume. The N of niche dimensions increases tremendouslyas researchers become more familiar with the primates andtheir space.

As our knowledge of primate niches grows, we can bet-ter determine just how intelligent a species is. If intelligencecannot be measured in a vacuum, then it must be measuredin context. The engineering adage that “things do best thosethings they are designed to do” applies nicely to adaptation,which is something most primates do well. As these stud-ies demonstrate, primates are intelligent at all levels and inall ways. They are more adaptable and faster at adaptationthan we originally thought, particularly in the context ofwhere they live. We have a duty to learn from them. Theyare our brain trust.

Primates carries a caution: “human and non-human pri-mates have been interacting for millions of years, and it isnow up to humans to decide how much longer the otherprimates will be around to continue this pattern” (p. 705).If there were no longer wild primates, perspective on our-selves as well as the likelihood of learning more things inmedicine, ways of adapting, possible models for modifiedeconomies, and countless other things would be lost. I recallGeorge Perkins Marsh writing the following for Man and Na-ture: “We are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscot-ing and doors and window frames of our dwelling for fuelto warm our bodies and seethe our pottage, and the worldcannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exactscience has taught it a better economy” (1874). He said thisalmost 150 years ago. Humans, unlike most other primates,are slow learners. The not-so-distant future will determineif we have been too slow. In the meantime, as Primates en-courages, we need to get as many researchers as into thefield as possible for both study and conservation . . . perhapstoward our own survival.

REFERENCES CITEDMarsh, George Perkins

1874 The Earth as Modified by Human Action. Electronicdocument, http://www.eoearth.org/article/Earth as Modifiedby Human Action, The: Chapter 01 (historical), accessed Oc-tober 17, 2007.

Smuts, Barbara B., Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, RichardW. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, eds.

1987 Primate Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Women in Anthropology: Autobiographical Narrativesand Social History. Maria G. Cattell and Marjorie M.Schweitzer, eds. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006.259 pp.

JUDITH K. BROWNOakland University

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Fourteen years in the making, this collection of autobio-graphical chapters has an aura of maturity, appropriate toits subject: the lives of older women anthropologists, whoentered the discipline in middle age. The authors were bornbetween 1913 and 1947 and received their doctorates be-tween 1969 and 1996. (Sadly, two of the contributors haddied before the publication of the collection.) Followingin the tradition of Hortense Powdermaker’s introductorychapter in Stranger and Friend (1986) and Margaret Mead’sBlackberry Winter (1972), but unlike Peggy Golde’s collec-tion Women in the Field (1966), the contributors describemore of their lives than their field experiences. This col-lection differs from all of its predecessors in focusing onwomen whose anthropological careers took shape later inlife. The authors recount their incredibly varied and color-ful private histories before becoming anthropologists. Theireventual epiphany in middle age is climaxed in receivingthe doctorate in anthropology.

Jay Sokolovsky’s excellent, brief foreword is followedby two introductory chapters by Maria Cattell and MarjorieSchweitzer (who not only edited the volume but were alsocontributors), which provide a context for the rest of thechapters. The editors have organized the very varied chap-ters into topic areas—a daunting task—and have providedan introduction to each.

Cattell’s opening chapter gives a brief summary ofthe demographic variables characterizing the contributors.Their backgrounds are varied in regard to both religion andsocial class. One contributor is African American. One isCanadian. Three of the chapters are by archaeologists. Mostof the dissertation research was done in North America. The-sis topics represent numerous subareas of anthropology, andthe granting institutions represent almost all areas of thecountry. All but one of the authors has children, and morethan half had four or more children. All of the contributorshave been married. Eight have had lifelong marriages, andabout half of the contributors have been single mothers ofdependent children. There are tales of amazingly encourag-ing and enabling mentors and peers. And there are tales ofbeing belittled, humiliated, and subjected to levels of sex-ism and ageism that would not be legal in the present day.

Later in the volume, the editors note: “We were man-aging homes, raising children, caring for parents, workingin paid jobs, and generally coping with the fullness of lifeas mature adults” (p. 109). One is filled with admirationfor the determination and hard work that enabled thesewomen to become professional anthropologists in the faceof overwhelming odds. And one cannot help but be drawninto a review of his or her own pilgrimage to the doctorate.Schweitzer provides an evocative context for these memo-ries in her chapter, recounting those aspects of U.S. historythat shaped the lives and the education of women in recentdecades.

A brief bibliography following each chapter, enumer-ating just a few selected works by each author, would havebeen of interest (as was done in the collection Women An-thropologists: Selected Biographies [Gacs et al. 1989]). The

present volume gives too little information on the achieve-ments of the contributors, although Cattell provides a verybrief summary of these accomplishments in her introduc-tory essay (e.g., they have published 20 books). A final con-clusion chapter might have been appropriate, providingmore detail about some of the professional achievementsof these anthropologists, because, after all, we are dealingwith a two-way process: not only were the lives of theseolder women fulfilled by the discipline but also anthropol-ogy has been enriched by their presence, their activism, thematurity of their points of view, and by their scholarship.

The basic format suggested by the American Anthro-pological Association (minimizing the use of footnotes anda standard bibliographic form) has not been followed. Un-fortunately, publishers have their own ideas, and authorsand editors are often forced to abandon the AAA guidelines.Also, the index of this volume is not sufficiently detailedand it is not sufficiently inclusive. For example, referencesto the authors mentioned in all the chapter bibliographiesshould have been indexed.

But this is a very brief “wish list,” which is entirelyovershadowed by the fact that the reader cannot help butbe engaged and informed by this newest collection of es-says dealing with women’s careers in anthropology. Theseremarkable anthropologists and their achievements placeolder, but not yet aged, women within the cross-culturalcontext of the nonindustrial world, where the middle-agedwoman is typically “in her prime” (as noted in In Her Prime[Kearns and Brown 1992]).

REFERENCES CITEDGacs, Ute, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre, and Ruth Weinberg, eds.

1989 Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies. Chicago:University of Illinois Press.

Golde, Peggy1986 Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences. 2nd

edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.Kearns, Virginia, and Judith K. Brown, eds.

1992 In Her Prime: A New View of Middle-Aged Women.Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Mead, Margaret1972 Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Simon and

Schuster.Powdermaker, Hortense

1966 Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. NewYork: W. W. Norton.

Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Familyin the New World Economy. Jennifer Cole and DeborahDurham, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.226 pp.

KAREN A. PORTERHanover College

Anthropologists in the third volume of Indiana Univer-sity Press’s “Tracking Globalization” series explore chang-ing intergenerational relations in China, Mexico, Madagas-car, Botswana, the Indian diaspora, and Western Europe.In the introduction, coeditors Jennifer Cole and Deborah


Durham characterize the restructuring of capital, growthof flexible labor, deterritorialization, sharp class divisions,structural adjustment policies, massive transnational migra-tion, and North–South national imbalances in age typicallyassociated with globalization. By anchoring abstract pro-cesses in carefully documented events and behaviors, con-tributing anthropologists recuperate functionalism’s focuson age, generation, and social reproduction while followingfeminism’s example of explaining how broad processes andintimate matters intertwine. Capturing globalization in pro-cess, they show how life unfolds in circumstances shapedby global factors but realized in local, quotidian forms ofteninformed by central cultural concepts.

For example, T. E. Woronov shows how the concept of“quality children” shapes today’s Chinese parents’ dual em-phasis on practical and affective child rearing and producesglobally situated, specifically Chinese persons whose ties tothe modern world coexist with ties to ancestors and otherkin. Interestingly, dual orientation appears to constrainChina’s economic growth and development, although sim-ilar constructs abetted exuberant economic expansion inother parts of Asia. For their part, Roger Magazine andMartha Areli Ramırez Sanchez establish how the deeplyrooted concept of ayuda, work for the household economy,sets up series of life-long exchanges that create and recre-ate family relationships in Mexico. The expectation thatchildren will provide for kin group and household mem-bers leads well-established migrant laborers in the UnitedStates to send remittances that enable the next generation,now conceptualized as “delicate,” to be schooled. Manysuch children desire occupations and lifestyles much differ-ent from those of parents or grandparents. This and othertransnational, intergenerational familial success strategiesdepend heavily, however, on fickle markets.

Jennifer Cole demonstrates how young Madagascanwomen pursue status, value, and wealth by making “freshcontact” with internationals in the informal sex economy.In today’s consumer society, these women upset existing hi-erarchies, distribute wealth in new ways, and create a newbody politic through their location within a flow of genera-tions. Deborah Durham illustrates how Batswana youth liv-ing in uncertain times use the concept of “empowerment”both to cultivate cautious independence and to extend so-cial networks. Many urban professionals in their thirties andforties who contribute to their parents’ upkeep and engagein civic life deliberately remain “youths” in home villages—despite exclusion from village domains of power—so as tonurture and expand complex relations of intergenerationalinterdependence.

Focusing on the aged illuminates the proliferation ofsymbolic and affective labor in the service economy. JulieLivingston uses the idiom of “motherhood” to analyze thetenuousness of intergenerational female kinship as livedand experienced in Botswana in the context of community-based rehabilitation care-giving. New knowledge and prac-tice of disability, shifts in global capital, and local strugglesover meaning dramatically increase demands not on moth-

ers but on grandmothers to be basic providers and primarycaregivers. Sarah Lamb demonstrates how decision-makingabout residence, care regimens, physical activity, and moreby aged diaspora Indians are channeled not only by per-sonal, microlevel relations but also by macrolevel processesentailed in the medicalization of death, dying, and old ageitself. The increasing role of immigrant labor in the capi-talistic delivery of affective and nursing home care repre-sents significant change across space as well as time andgeneration.

Analyzing demographics and policy changes, JessicaGreenberg and Andrea Muehlebach argue that many West-ern Europeans in the “third age” of healthy, energetic adult-hood may find themselves underemployed, unemployed, ormarginalized as pension changes, increased retirement age,and public welfare policies—each informed by age-neutral,universal human rights discourse—reformulate intergener-ational relationships. Pension reforms and the politics of ag-ing contradict contemporary European employment prac-tices, and many who are deemed to young to retire or tooold to work find themselves cut out of the labor marketduring their most productive years.

This volume does what anthropology does best: it pro-vides thick descriptions and conceptually rich, nuancedanalyses of contemporary people’s lives. The shared focuson intergenerational relationships divulges how economicand global flows transform family life but are also consti-tuted and shaped by them. A concluding chapter to tiethe volume together, extrapolate common themes, com-pare cases, and identify new directions for research wouldhave strengthened this praiseworthy volume, for the inter-relationship of family, body, and household relations, cyclesof intergenerational exchange, and larger-scale politicoeco-nomic forces will continue to be reworked, stretched, andoriented in new ways as people around the world negotiateage, generation, and the intimate politics of globalization.

Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Jean Comaroff andJohn L. Comaroff, eds. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2006. 357 pp.

AMY E. DEN OUDENUniversity of Massachusetts, Boston

How are we to understand the nature of violence and crimi-nality in postcolonial states? Are there particular manipula-tions and distortions of liberal notions of “justice,” “rights,”and “legality” that distinguish and frustrate the formationof democracies in the global south? These are two of themore general questions raised in the nine essays of this vol-ume edited by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, whichincludes case studies of violent postcolonial situations andspecific “domains of illegality,” in Janet Roitman’s phrasing(p. 249), in South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Cameroon, andthe Chad Basin.

In their theoretically acute introductory chapter, Co-maroff and Comaroff do not convey an essentialized

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“postcolony,” nor do they suggest that what they call the“dialectic of law and dis/order” (p. 41) in postcolonies marksa bounded historical moment or mere “transition” period.Rather, the postcolonial states of the “Brave Neo World,” asthey identify it (p. 3), tune us in to “history-in-the-making”(p. 41). Thus, the editors deflect readers from an assumedmechanical relationship between colonial and postcolonialhistorical processes. Nevertheless, this volume is crucial forscholars whose work grapples with colonialism and its ownmultiple forms of criminality and lawlessness. Indeed, if thequestion of how legality and legitimacy are constructed,normalized, and sustained is essential to understandingthe nature of the relationship between colonial lawless-ness and the elaborations of governmentality in colonialstates, then the history of emergent forms of postcolonialcriminality and facades of legality—and of a “new govern-mentality,” as Achille Mbembe brilliantly argues (p. 305),that is “founded on the multiplication of extreme situationsand the capture and assault of the body and life” (p. 306)for the purpose of controlling wealth and resources—mayserve to illuminate new discontinuities and connectionsbetween past and present, not simply affirm the hazi-ness of the boundary between colonial and postcolonialsituations.

Neither is violence and criminality in postcolonialstates analyzed here as simply a predictable “reaction” tothe imperial order and socioeconomic destruction wroughtby neoliberal policies. Moreover, postcolonial cultures ven-erate law and legality, and law-and-order scenarios andtheir attendant discourse—as disseminated in popular tele-vision dramas in South Africa, for instance—are engrainedin the sensibilities of the broad public, including the “out-laws” and “vigilantes.” Thus, Comaroff and Comaroff ar-gue that “criminal violence [in postcolonial states] does notso much repudiate the rule of law or the licit operationsof the market as appropriate their forms—and recommis-sion their substance” (p. 5). This is not to be understoodas mimicry alone, for there are “zones of ambiguity be-tween the presence and absence of the law” that have been“opened up under neoliberal conditions” (p. 5): these aresites of not only extreme violence but also disorderly in-novation. The enormous success and daunting creativity ofthe “huge industry” of “fakery” (p. 12) in the postcolonialworld is a case in point. Those whose postcolonial profiteer-ing is built on the circulation of counterfeit documents, cur-rency, brand names, and so forth, Comaroff and Comaroffnote, confound the counterfraud experts of the imperialNorth.

The chapters in this volume are impressive in the pre-cision of the ethnographic analysis of violence and crim-inality and, simultaneously, of the possibilities and limitsof agency within particular contexts of illegal activity. AsRoitman’s chapter explains, local understandings of whatis possible and practical, both morally and economically,in the complex exchange networks of the Chad Basin ren-der certain illegal acts, such as highway banditry, licit andnormal. Drawing our attention to the question of how the

language of law and order abets violence and masks lawless-ness, some of the chapters also powerfully make the pointthat law and discourses of justice (particularly human rightsdiscourse) are the only recourse for those subjected to ex-treme forms of oppression and violence and for those whocourageously seek meaningful political and socioeconomictransformation in the bludgeoned peripheries of postcolo-nial societies, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes poignantly illus-trates in her examination of death squads and their oppo-nents in northeast Brazil (ch. 4).

But is the violence and criminality analyzed here some-how unique to postcolonies? In their introduction, Co-maroff and Comaroff do emphasize that “the United Statesand the nations of Europe are themselves rife with corrup-tion” but are far better at fronting a “skein of lawfulness”(p. 38). Yet, they argue, criminality (perhaps, esp., crim-inality masqueraded as justice or as legitimate authority)and a symbiosis of rampant lawlessness and obsession withlegality—or “fetishism of the law” (p. viii)—seem “inflated,and more dramatically visible” in the postcolonial settingsaddressed here (p. 41). The failures of democratization inBrazil, for instance, and the viciousness of the racializedviolence inflicted, in the name of law and order, on desper-ately impoverished, marginalized populations—whether bythe Sao Paulo Military Police or the death squad known asthe “Guardian Angels” in Timbauba—are crucial examples(see chs. 3 and 4, respectively). Such perversions, as TeresaCaldeira refers to them (ch. 3), of the notions of “rights”and “justice” that the constitutions of postcolonial statesthemselves proclaim are the immensely bleak and painfulpoint of entry into the postcolonial dialectic of law anddisorder.

The normalization of violence and glorification of crim-inality are global issues, of course, also profoundly racial-ized in their northern settings. Reading this volume, onecannot help but think of the compelling early-21st-centuryexamples that the United States offers. There is, for exam-ple, “America’s white thug love” (Rhymes 2007:1), as onecommentator for the Black Agenda Report recently put it ina critique of the widespread worship of the HBO dramaThe Sopranos. There is the pervasive U.S. corporate crim-inality and grotesque economic vampirism brought intosharp relief by the Enron debacle, in the context of whicheven the lower rungs of this illicit operation—the Enronenergy traders—expressed their glee about bilking millionsfrom “poor grandmothers” as Enron-induced power out-ages in California inflicted misery. And what of the South-ern Poverty Law Center’s recent report citing a 63 percentgrowth in Ku Klux Klan chapters since 2000, as well asa membership expansion of 33 percent in other home-grown hate groups? Cultures of corruption and criminal-ity are surely a global phenomenon, as are “sedimenta-tions of violence” (p. 189), to borrow Patricia Spyer’s phras-ing, which reflects the cultural and political complexitiesof struggles over rights and resources. This volume urgesfurther interrogation of their multiple and overlappinghistories.


REFERENCE CITEDRhymes, Edward

2007 Singing Soprano, While Dissin’ the Bass: America’s WhiteThug Love and Ethnically Acceptable Violence. Black AgendaReport, Online Edition, June 11–17. Electronic document,http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5410/1/266/, ac-cessed October 17, 2007.

Cows, Kin, and Globalization: An Ethnography ofSustainability. Susan A. Crate. Lanham, MD: AltaMiraPress, 2006. 355 pp.

MARJORIE MANDELSTAM BALZERGeorgetown University

In 1995, I had an insightful conversation with an elderin Srednaia Kolyma region, Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Heexplained that villagers had retained “collectives” in thepost-Soviet period because distribution of meager resourceswould mean “each household would get only a half a cow.”While his far northern village was particularly poor, El-geeii village in the Suntar region of Sakha, which SusanCrate describes in Cows, Kin, and Globalization, is muchricher. Friends in the 1990s told me that they had matchedCrate with Elgeeii because of its reputation as an award-winning, wealthy “model.” Thus, the story that she tellsabout its families’ struggles for “resilience” in a globaliz-ing, diamond-driven economy is particularly poignant. Thestrength of this book is the voices of Sakha villagers: partic-ularly, but not exclusively, elders. Elders express nostalgiafor government support and once-strong local leadership,combined with recognition that consolidation into the El-geeii State Farm made villagers lose their pre-Soviet sense ofstewardship. Village households’ post-Soviet response hasbeen mixed, with a return (in new variations) to reliance on“cows and kin.” The process has been difficult because ini-tial (1992) distribution of collective lands was inequitable,favoring local elites. Still worse, the economically exploitiveand ecologically destructive diamond industry of Mirny hadin the Soviet period turned the nearby indigenous regionsinto worker-bee food suppliers and, later, cut those connec-tions for lower cost suppliers.

Crate explains the resulting dependencies in histor-ical as well as comparative terms. Her approach is “in-ductive,” citing ecological anthropologist Robert Nettingas a model. Claims for “experimental” writing are lessconvincing, given the uncritical ways she uses secondarysources and terminology. A more analytical use of termslike culture, peasants, population, rebellion, double burden, re-source curse, and Siberian curse would enhance the text. Afuller acknowledging of debates in Siberian history, eco-nomics, and indigenous politics would lessen the im-pression that relevant research was left undone (sourcesin English, Russian, and Sakha, a language she knowswell).

Several assertions are presented as facts, for example:“Sakha Republic is unique within post-Soviet Russia as

an emerging economic power with strong ethnic repre-sentation in its state apparatus” (p. 194). Other republicswithin Russia fit this description, especially Tatarstan, al-though recently recentralization under President Putin is amore salient theme. Although Crate claims “citizen’s out-rage about the environment . . . effectively undid the So-viet Union” (p. 194), its demise was far more complicated.Other concerns include using some statistics without datesor source details, long passages with reliance on one text,and reference to 26 post-Soviet countries.

Crate does raise important issues. She explains that “set-tlement history shows how Viliui Sakha have been boththe subduers, of the local hunting-gathering cultures whoinhabited the Viliui regions from early times, and the sub-dued, by Russian and later Soviet forces” (p. 290). While itmay be provocative to call early Sakha settlement in Tun-gus [Even and Evenk] lands “partial ethnocide” (p. 54),the problem of Native Siberian displacements is appropri-ately confronted. It has ramifications in current politics thatcould be probed, along with the famed “Yakutization” ofsome Russians in the 19th century. Another major issuethat could be more fully explored is the changing politicalcontext of post-Soviet land privatization and how repub-lic and federal laws resonate on the ground at various locallevels.

The issue of sociopolitical levels is key to Crate’s com-parison of Siberia with Canada and Papua New Guinea.Because power relations have been shifting in Russia, thequestion of who negotiates the diamond mining dealsis crucial. Local mining cycles are prone to “boom andbust” because shared expertise is urgent. As Crate con-firms, even the relatively positive example of Canadianrespect for indigenous stakeholders is problematic. Al-though Russian authorities are far from accepting republic-level or local ownership of subsurface resources, Crate’sprecis of Canadian negotiations should be translated forpotential Viliui Sakha activists. Northern Forum as wellas United Nations and Arctic Council programs could bediscussed.

As elsewhere in Russia and within Sakha, many have be-come disillusioned with corrupt government officials, lackof republic or regional start-up subsidies for local dairy in-dustries, and failed cooperation over ecological impact stud-ies. Yet a hopeful aspect of Crate’s interviews is that at leastsome educated young people wish to stay in or return totheir famed home village of Elgeeii, if they can be assuredof jobs supplemented with local subsistence resources. Thelynchpin of this continuity for the younger generation, sug-gested a former school director of the village of Elgeeii to mein summer 2007, will be renewed understanding of tradi-tional Sakha ecological values and spirituality. The applieduse of “elder knowledge,” as Crate puts it, may not be asstrong or consistent as it should be, but throughout theSakha Republic, post-Soviet educational programs have fea-tured local history and invited elders into the classrooms.They are racing against time, alcoholism, restandardization,and recentralization.

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The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppres-sions, Quandaries. Gerald W. Creed, ed. Santa Fe: Schoolof American Research Press, 2006. 320 pp.

GLYNIS GEORGEUniversity of Windsor

As this edited collection suggests, “community” is an im-portant political and discursive construct in spite of the ebband flow of its analytic popularity within anthropology. Theresult of a deconstructive project on “community” fundedby the School of American Research, the book explores the“making and unmaking of community” (p. 11) to challengeits positive valence; it seeks to counter top-down analysesto examine the interplay between community, hegemonic,and counterhegemonic projects.

Gerald Creed’s introductory chapters review the an-thropology of “community” and underscore our contribu-tions to complicating macrolevel approaches to culture andeconomy within the social sciences. Yet Creed argues thatEric Wolf’s attempts to historicize community and its dy-namics, and the analysis of community as strategic essen-tialism, remain underdeveloped. The composite meaningsbehind community—its ambiguity as a place, a “quality of re-lations” (p. 4), its role as an “empty signifier” (p. 7)—rendersit both socially significant and, yet, analytically limited.The resurrection of community as a feature of advancedliberal governance, however, foregrounds its changing sig-nificance in moments of modern rule. The contribution ofanthropology as reflected in these chapters is to foregroundthe dynamic and contested character of rule. Communitiesare examined as differentiated, as sites of contestation andmeaning making within colonial, postcolonial, and com-parative contexts.

Kate Crehan’s account of a 1960s urban regenerationproject in London’s east end is compared to the legallyconstituted “community” that informs South African ini-tiatives. Hence, the emancipatory possibilities of com-munity and the momentary quality of artist–activism re-flect a context in which community-making has less fixedpolitical dimensions. Susan Lees explores subjective, dy-namic understandings of community and differentiation.A conflict emerges within the Jewish diaspora and acrossthe wider “community” over the construction of an eruv(an ethnoreligious boundary marker) in a New Jerseysuburb. Two overlapping notions of “community,” bothidealized, emerge and parallel debates over exclusivitywithin the hegemonic framework of an “inclusive” UnitedStates.

The relationship between social–cultural differentia-tion and community are also explored in Michael Watts’saccount of conflicts amongst Nigerians who are differentlyaffected by the development of petrocapitalism. His analysispoints to the scalar and temporal features of communit(ies)and the colonial context in which ethnic identities and re-gional disparities were constituted. The analytics of scaleare also explored in Peter Brosius’s study of environmental

and conservation politics. Bottom-up community environ-mentalism, which dominated the 1980s, is superseded byecoregional approaches. “Conservation finance” and carto-graphic techniques reflect an emergent environmental gov-ernmentality; the urgency of environmental degradation iscoupled with strategic goal-making to support neoliberalagendas.

The relationship among governance, finance, and com-munity is explored more abstractly in Miranda Joseph’sanalysis of community as a construct within restora-tive justice models. Its links to, and expressions of, debtand credit—the juridical accounting of modern societies—renders this “alternative” mode of justice more hegemonicthan transformative.

Three chapters address intellectual shifts in “commu-nity” to interrogate how scholarship is implicated in the de-piction of particular social groups in the Caribbean, Indian,and Andean society. Mary Weisimantel examines how theayllu, a concept loosely tied to “community” was increas-ingly dismissed as an exoticized construct in scholarshipon Andean society. Yet, as reconfigured by Andean schol-ars and activists, the ayllu serves a strategic function inthe political imaginary, an expression against hegemonicmodernity and a means for reconfiguring Andean societyand territorial struggles. Aisha Khan examines scholarly de-pictions of the “absence” and “inherence” (p. 174) of com-munity amongst African and Indian Caribbean peoples re-spectively, and the centrality of “family” constructs in thesecharacterizations. The analysis of this plural society lendsitself more to class, diaspora, and deterritorialization thanto “community,” and its lived realities challenge the cen-trality of community as a tool of modern rule. GyanendraPandey’s concluding chapter is a reminder of the historicityof community and its construction within colonial modesof indirect rule wherein caste and religious identities werebounded and differentiated. The constitutive character ofcommunity renders it paradoxically both premodern andprofoundly political in postcolonial India.

Together, the chapters signal a more innovative ap-proach to governmentality studies, which mostly remaintop-down and Eurocentric in orientation. Governance ar-ticulates with colonial pasts, modes of social differentiation,and the dynamics of capital so that hybrid possibilities res-onate with complex histories. Their strength is to historicizecommunity and parse the various contexts in which com-munity is deployed, constituted, and represented. One crit-icism is that the title of the volume is slightly misleading inforegrounding “emancipations”: subjective constructionsof community and identity are woven into many chapters.Yet the conceptual dimensions of emancipation and its re-lationship to community do not appear to be as central asthe title might suggest.

This book is suitable for both upper-level undergradu-ate and graduate studies. It also reinvigorates our interestin “community,” particularly as it bears on current socialtheory. The book should appeal to both anthropolo-gists and interdisciplinary scholars who seek nuanced,


ethnographic, and transnational approaches to governmen-tality, postcolonial politics, and cultural practice.

Worldview, the Orichas, and Santerıa: Africa to Cubaand Beyond. Mercedes Cros Sandoval. Gainesville: Uni-versity Press of Florida, 2006. 417 pp.

SUSAN RASMUSSENUniversity of Houston

Like other aspects of culture, religion changes over time.There are myriad cases of new and revised rituals, cos-mologies, spirit pantheons, and myths. There are alsoconnections between religion, worldview, and politics. An-thropologists have proposed a number of theories to an-alyze religious change and pluralism. In recent years, theAfro-Cuban religion called Santerıa has become the focusof immense interest.

This book, the product of the author’s long-term re-search in Cuba, Spain, and the United States, is a valuableand timely contribution to studies of Santerıa. It opens upfresh perspectives on the rich religious history of the West-ern hemisphere and makes a major contribution to anthro-pology of religion, African diasporic studies, and Caribbeanstudies. Mercedes Cros Sandoval interweaves analyses ofinfrastructural processes and cosmological elements in ex-ploring the resilience of this Afro-Cuban religion, with itsYoruba roots, which was brought to Cuba by slaves and sub-sequently became not solely a form of resistance but also apowerful influence on other more hegemonic political andreligious institutions.

Key here is the flexible and regenerative worldviewof Santerıa. Cros Sandoval draws on Michael Kearney’smodel (1984) for analysis of worldview: coherent think-ing about the world, in which there is a fit or lack of fitbetween worldview and environment, and external incon-sistencies in a worldview result when its images or assump-tions are maladaptive for the “reality” that the worldviewmirrors, thereby promoting change. Kearney’s concept oflogicostructural integration is a functionalist typology, re-calling some classical theories, such as Anthony Wallace’s“mazeway” (1970). Santerıa followers, like those of revital-ization movements, have had to adjust to tensions underdominant powers: colonization and the slave trade. Theseconditions promoted dynamic creativity, in which someearlier beliefs and practices survived and others declinedor became modified.

This book focuses on the orishas (translated by this au-thor here as “divinities”) in Africa and the orichas (trans-lated as “gods” or “saints”) in Cuba, their continuities andchanges in time and space, and their functions and mean-ings in the lives of adherents. There is description of theSanterıa pantheon, its rituals, myths, and specialist healingpractitioners. Fortunately, the book moves beyond the old“salvage” anthropology and conventional retentionist ar-guments of some diasporic studies: Cros Sandoval not onlypoints out the African influences but also compares and

contrasts the Yoruba-based beliefs and practices in past andcurrent eras, and in continental Africa and in Cuba, explor-ing why some elements were functional and others not,and how adherents adapted to different conditions. Therewas selective representation of Yoruba orishas because someremained more relevant than others for adherents in slave-era Cuba. For example, slaves on Cuban plantations wereless able to preserve the Yoruba agricultural fertility ritu-als, and thus these figures tended to decline or became ab-sorbed into other divinities. There is historical backgroundon the Yoruba in present-day Nigeria and on Cuba. Yorubaand Cuban cultures have long incorporated diverse cul-tural forms, a characteristic reflected in Santerıa’s mix oftraditions.

There is also a description of the recent spread of San-terıa into the United States, among both Cuban immigrantsin Florida and New York and others of diverse ethnic andclass origins. Cros Sandoval explains its appeal and discussesthe impact of historical events, relations with the state,and diverse cultural settings. Some elite factions actuallyempowered Santerıa: in Cuba under Castro, Santerıa sur-vived by default because the regime persecuted the CatholicChurch. Castro and his inner circle deployed Santerıa to en-hance their own power. By contrast, in the United States,some elite nonadherents react with ambivalence to cer-tain Santerıa practices taken out of context, such as animalsacrifice.

The author refines the concept of “syncretism” by ana-lyzing not solely accommodations and borrowings but alsotensions among older African (Yoruban) elements, influ-ences of Catholicism, and newer interpretations of San-terıa: for example, the conflicts between African Ameri-cans who emphasize the older Yoruba worldview in theoricha pantheon and others who adhere more to the in-fluences of the Catholic cult of saints on this pantheon.The author correctly points out weaknesses in assump-tions of “loss” or “distortion” of transformed religiousforms.

The volume’s ambitious scope results in neglecting themore subjective experience of ritual symbolism and healingprocesses. The volume’s strength is the way it traces thecomplexity and power of Santerıa across a wide swath ofthis world.

REFERENCES CITEDKearny, Michael

1984 World View. Novato, CA: Chandler Sharp.Wallace, Anthony

1970 Culture and Personality. New York: Random House.

Environmental Change and Human Adaptation in theAncient American Southwest. David E. Doyel and JeffreyS. Dean, eds. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006.344 pp.

JOHN E. DOUGLASUniversity of Montana

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The study of environmental change and human societies isa very old subject for the archaeology of the U.S. South-west; recently, it was gist for one of the case studies inJared Diamond’s popular 2005 book Collapse: How Soci-eties Choose To Fail or Succeed. Although “regional abandon-ment” traditionally has dominated discussion of humanresponses to Southwestern environmental change, archae-ologists, with the aid of tree-ring climate studies, are work-ing toward a more nuanced understanding of how so-cieties reacted to changing landscapes. The authors ofthis book provide a window into this important researchby considering Jeffrey Dean’s “behavioral model” of hu-man response to environmental change. The model par-titions environmental stresses into two kinds: (1) “highfrequency,” typified by annual rainfall variation, which cy-cles within a human lifetime and may be buffered by var-ious means; and (2) “low frequency,” typified by arroyocutting, which occurs on a scale too slow for humans toanticipate.

The studies presented span the Southwest; the strongcoverage of the southern Southwest represents new territoryin a field traditionally dominated by studies of the ColoradoPlateau area. The occupation periods considered are equallybroad, ranging from the introduction of agriculture 3,000years ago to the protohistoric period.

About half the chapters examine the implicationsof tree-ring data for environmental reconstruction. Oth-ers examine environmental variability more broadly: no-tably, W. Bruce Masse and Fred Espenak stretch the def-inition of cyclical environmental change to include so-lar eclipses. However, the effectiveness of this provocativechapter is mixed: it convincingly argues that portentousastronomical events could be used as socioreligious cap-ital for change but failed to convince this reviewer thatthe broad social changes it examines are best understoodas linked to solar eclipses. By including this chapter, theeditors take the stance that social change cannot be re-duced to subsistence needs. Finally, the volume benefitsfrom several chapters raising criticisms of Dean’s behavioralmodel.

Exemplifying the substantive contributions of thisbook, the chapter by Donald Graybill, David Gregory, GaryFunkhouser, and Fred Nials discusses the heartland of theprehistoric Hohokam Culture in the Phoenix Basin. TheHohokam were the most densely populated and proba-bly most stratified society in the prehistoric Southwestand were highly dependent on canal irrigation from themajor rivers. The authors reconstruct the streamflow ofthe Salt and Gila rivers using dendroclimatological data.The chapter then explores the agricultural implicationsof streamflow variability, particularly flooding and flowregime differences between the rivers, and how Hohokamsociety might have been shaped by these events andcharacteristics.

The volume also raises theoretical issues, often inten-tionally but sometimes by illustrating current shortcom-ings. A shortcoming many will see is the need to provide

better linkage between environmental change and culturalchange, an issue brought up in the chapter by J. JeffersonReid, Graybill, and Ann Seiferle-Valencia. By expanding thekinds of natural events that are considered, and by attempt-ing to correlate precisely dated natural events (droughts,floods, or eclipses) to more imprecisely dated cultural events(settlement changes, abandonment, or cultural change), theidentification of causation becomes particularly difficult.For example, several authors discuss a specific settlementand cultural change, the Preclassic to Classic Hohokam tran-sition, for which one chapter (Michael Waters) sees low-frequency river downcutting as critical, another (Graybillet al.) emphasizes the role of floods and the destruction ofcanal systems, and a final one (Masse and Espenak) exploresthe significance of a solar eclipse. Although all these chap-ters integrate multicausal perspectives, the identification ofcausative links from a potentially endless list of natural cy-cles and cultural events seems urgent. A final theoreticalissue is that Dean’s “behavioral model” does not yet in-corporate a fully adequate model of human behavior. Thatissue is explored in two chapters: first, Alan Sullivan andAnthony Ruter show that not all inhabitants on the Col-orado Plateau react to environmental change in an agricul-turally centered manner; and second, Suzanne Fish and PaulFish present an innovative study of ancient farming land-scapes as interpreted by contemporary small-scale farmersto demonstrate that human knowledge and previous ex-perience strongly affects how environmental variation isapproached.

I found this to be a stimulating book that works hardto span the gap between natural science environmental re-construction and human decision making. The general ap-proach is neatly summarized by Dean’s chapter on archi-tectural change at an Arizona cliff dwelling, which providesthe plan map illustrated on the book cover. The map showsa single late-period household, which includes eight gra-naries. A documented increase in granaries was probablyprompted by a lowered water table, which forced agricul-ture into a rainfall-dependent mode; for a few years, thisstrategy appears to have buffered increased agricultural risk.The architecture of a single household is a reminder that hu-mans cannot know the future, but they do react to change,and these changes have consequences for the society as awhole.

Because of the well-presented analyses and thought-provoking approaches, this volume will interest many grad-uate students and professionals. All anthropologists inter-ested in the relationship between human behaviors andenvironmental change will find these studies provocative,particularly given the often high-resolution data brought tobear. Environmental archaeologists, above all those study-ing arid lands, will be interested in the methods andtheory embodied in these chapters. And, finally, South-western archaeologists of all stripes should take heed ofthe approaches and conclusions reached by these authorswhile furthering the interpretation of native U.S. Southwestsocieties.


REFERENCE CITEDDiamond, Jared

2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed. NewYork: Viking.

Immigrants, Settlers, and Laborers: The SocioeconomicTransformation of a Farming Community. Travis Du Bry.New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2007. 245 pp.

FRANCESCA BRAYUniversity of Edinburgh

The farming town of Mecca lies a few miles south of themanicured lawns of Indian Wells, on the way to the bar-ren and evil-smelling Salton Sea. Indian Wells is one of therichest communities in California. Its citizens are 93 per-cent white, many are retired, and they typically divide theirtime between the local golf courses and the Caribbean. Theinhabitants of Mecca are 98 percent Hispanic–Latino, overhalf are under 25, few can afford to own homes, and manyare immigrants: some with papers, some without. Many di-vide their lives between seasonal laboring in Mecca and jobsfurther north in California or further south in Mexico.

Since the 1960s, California’s agriculture has been dom-inated by agricultural corporations and has focused on pro-ducing increasingly capital- and labor-intensive, high-valuecrops for global markets. Table grapes average 220 laborhours per acre, strawberries 2,150. The demand for farmlaborers increases every year, and most farms are managedby corporations or by contractors. Under such conditions,one would assume that the exploitation of labor would beextreme and the chances of upward mobility slight. Me-dia coverage reflects stereotypes of migrant farm laborers ashelpless and deracinated victims, corralled in sordid camp,their only loyalties to their families and villages back inMexico. Travis Du Bry offers a sympathetic study of theMecca farm community in his book, Immigrants, Settlers,and Laborers: The Socioeconomic Transformation of a FarmingCommunity, which is part of an interdisciplinary series called“The New Americans” that examines how immigration ischanging the United States. His goal is to challenge suchstereotypes, documenting the civic as well as economic dy-namism of Mecca and the commitment of its inhabitantsto Mecca as a social community.

Long ago Mecca was a town of white pioneer farmerswith their hierarchies, heroes, and landmarks. Du Bry doc-uments the “wholly unexpected change” whereby develop-ments in the California agriculture sector provide “the ba-sis for which farm laborers are taking control and redefin-ing community” (p. 90). In the 1960s the abrogation ofthe Bracero program ruined the white family farmers, andMexican-origin laborers filled the vacuum. Some started upshops or businesses. Others bought land or set up as contrac-tors and began employing migrant laborers on their ownaccount. These old families are the new aristocracy. Per-manent employees with professional skills rank next, withseasonal employees at the bottom of the heap: “Length of

time in the community functions as the primary categoryof identity for Mecca residents, and is an accurate predictorof class position within the social structure” (p. 174). Thelong-time inhabitants are mostly bilingual; they own prop-erty, earn more, and serve on the council. Recent arrivalsfrom Mexico resent them as snobs but despise the indigeneimmigrants who cannot even speak Spanish.

Mecca’s population is too small for incorporation, andits council members—who come from the old families andhold meetings in English—appear to most newcomers tobe in thrall to the predominantly white, middle-class, po-litical authorities of Riverside County, indifferent to com-munity needs. The newcomers have won some signal vic-tories, however: the new school is named not after a whitepioneer doctor, as the council proposed, but after a localLatino hero and aide to Cesar Chavez. One advantage ofbeing an unincorporated neighbor of wealthy white citiesis that much of the county’s mandated social housing endsup in Mecca. Renting subsidized housing often serves as aspringboard to buying, and Du Bry rightly reminds us thatbuying a house is a passport to another social sphere: allof a sudden you have security, tax relief, credit, and sta-tus. Elsewhere Du Bry proposes a set of factors that ex-plain social status in Mecca, but luck in acquiring prop-erty seems to be key, encapsulating the importance of be-ing in the right place at the right time. Almost everyonein Mecca hopes to buy, but whether they can is contin-gent on availability, price, lending rates, earnings, personalhealth, and family responsibilities. Those who were luckyin the 1960s are established figures in Mecca. Today thosewho buy even a trailer are likely to stay and get involvedin Mecca affairs. The less fortunate will perforce drift awayand will be blamed for lacking commitment to the com-munity (p. 175). The goals and rewards of community inMecca and in Desert Springs are not identical, but they aremutually intelligible, and one of Du Bry’s achievements isto show how closely their material and symbolic resourcesintertwine.

Du Bry has written a vivid account of the emergenceof a significant category of “New Americans.” His clear andaccessible account will be welcomed as a teaching tool forundergraduate classes in anthropology, American studies,and global studies.

When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics ofAIDS in South Africa. Didier Fassin. Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2007. 365 pp.

HANSJORG DILGERFreie Universitat Berlin and University of Florida

This book offers a subtle and compelling analysis of oneof the most controversial issues of our times: the disturb-ing presence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa andthe equally disturbing response of President Mbeki’s gov-ernment to this challenge. Written with empathy and moralcompassion, When Bodies Remember approaches its subject

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from the perspective of the “anthropology of engagement.”Didier Fassin argues that “the North” and “the South” and“the Rich” and “the Poor” (problematic categories after all)have become entangled in a “shared destiny”: one thatshould be conceived less in terms of difference than inequal-ity, less as a matter of culture than history (p. xv). However,while Fassin recognizes the inevitable sense of uneasinessthat shapes encounters in a world built on domination andoppression, he reminds us to nonetheless remain open “todifferent readings, divergent understandings” of this world(p. 279).

Fassin presents a carefully constructed dissection of the“HIV/AIDS dispute” in South Africa. He argues that Presi-dent Mbeki’s step to challenge the scientific community’s“orthodox” views on HIV/AIDS should not be read as sim-ple denial or as a complete failure of the South African stateto respond adequately to the epidemic. Such a perspectivewould overlook the far-reaching health sector reforms putin place by the African National Congress (ANC) govern-ment beginning in the mid-1990s (e.g., the introductionof free public healthcare and a disability grant system). Thestrong focus on public health in the “AIDS controversy” hasalso precluded a more constructive discussion on the poten-tial positive contribution of Mbeki’s intervention: namely,focusing on the social and economic inequalities that haveprepared a fertile ground for the spread of HIV in the re-gion. Most importantly, however, the exclusive focus onpublic health causes us to lose sight of the fact that the pol-itics and experiences of HIV/AIDS in South Africa have be-come deeply entrenched in the region’s social, economic,and racial histories, which have imprinted their indelibletrace on the present.

According to Fassin, the strong reactions that eventslike Sarafina II or the government’s tenacious refusal to in-troduce AZT for the prevention of HIV transmission frominfected mothers to their children have evoked among ac-tivists, experts, and the media should be read as expressionsof different ways to read South Africa’s past, present, andfuture as well as of the social, racial, and moral implica-tions contained in these divergent worldviews. This situa-tion is complicated further by the fact that these disputesare being fought among former allies in the struggle againstapartheid. Furthermore, these disputes have been drawninto international discussions on the Trade Related Intel-lectual Property (TRIPS) agreement and the shifting ethi-cal standards employed in clinical trials for AIDS drugs inAfrican countries (p. 88). Taken together, these factors havecreated a “polemical framework” (p. 73) in which discus-sions on HIV/AIDS have become entangled in struggles fornational identity, anxieties about race in the new and oldSouth Africa, and the suspicions and alleged conspiraciesthat have marked social and political relationships underthese circumstances.

One of the book’s strongest aspects is the way it relatesmacropolitical developments and discussions to the biogra-phies of those living with, and dying from, HIV/AIDS. Thelife stories of the men and women Fassin interviewed in

Johannesburg’s townships reveal a world that is embeddedin long-standing histories of labor migration, poverty, andsocial and racial segregation. Deeply gendered accounts ofstigmatization and abandonment and—for women—of un-reliable and sometimes violent husbands are also a reflec-tion of the hopes, anxieties, and dilemmas that people areexperiencing in relation to the suffering that has pervadedtheir individual and collective lives. It is in these momentsthat the reader develops a strong sense of how individualbodies have become bearers of a collective history that holdsa tight grip over the present. Furthermore, these accountsof suffering are becoming a means for individual men andwomen to “attest to their own existence” (pp. 23ff., with re-ferral to Arendt 1959): they become embodied proof of thefact that people with HIV/AIDS have not been completely“crushed by the ordeals they have been through all theirlife.”

It could be argued that the accounts of individual suf-fering deserved a more central place in Fassin’s analysisrather than being relegated largely to the last two chaptersof the book. Equally, the otherwise theoretically compellinganalysis provides only a truncated and largely insufficientcritique of the “culturalist” studies on HIV/AIDS (ch. 3).Apart from these minor shortcomings, however, the bookpresents a unique and thought-provoking contribution tothe growing literature on HIV/AIDS politics in South Africa.It is emblematic of a kind of anthropology that wants to besocially useful, one that analyzes its subject not simply asa “matter of art for art’s sake” but, rather, to make things“less unjust, ineluctable, or unacceptable” (p. xxii).

REFERENCE CITEDArendt, Hannah

1959[1958] The Human Condition. Garden City, NY: Double-day.

Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on theNew Economy. Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey, eds.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 381 pp.

JEFFREY H. COHENThe Ohio State University

In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the NewEconomy, Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey have collected aninteresting and provocative set of chapters. Developed froma 2001 workshop on the New Global Economy, the editors(one of whom—Fisher—also contributes a chapter) have or-ganized their volume around two key issues. The first usesanthropology, and specifically ethnographic investigations,to explore, explain, and interrogate the collapse of the “dot-com bubble” and stock market (in particular, the NASDAQ)following the run-up in prices and values in the late 1990s.Second, the contributors reconsider the rise and meaningof the “new economy” as a sociocultural, globalizing phe-nomenon. Here again, the authors frame their discussionsof the new economy and advances in information and


communication technology in ethnographic terms. Theyuse anthropological fieldwork to explore the concept. Thecritical interest for the authors is how best to confront andcomprehend advances in information and communicationtechnology as these advances move from business centers(e.g., Wall Street) to market peripheries.

Each author is concerned with how local populations—whether in North America, France, urban centers of Africa,or Shanghai, China—cope with, respond to, and reinventinformation technologies for themselves. The authors are tobe commended for the strength of the chapters and the fi-nesse with which each approaches the growth and develop-ment of information and communication technologies andhow local communities and actors respond to that growth.Too often, the story of technological advancement is onethat “never gets off the boat,” to borrow a metaphor fromEric Wolf’s critique of Western colonialism in Europe and thePeople without History (1977). In other words, the editors usethe volume to show us, the reader, how new and changedtechnologies are localized, reconfigured, and reformulated.Local actors do not simply welcome new technologies; theyinteract and shape those technologies for their own needs.

The strength of the collection lies in the ways in whichthe authors weave clear ethnographic discussions with richtheoretical concerns. Combined ethnography and theoryallow us to more clearly understand the give and take thatexists between the creators and users of new technologies.This is particularly true of AbouMaliq Simone’s discussionof information technologies in urban Africa, Aihwa Ong’sanalysis of guanzi in Shanghai, China, and Melissa Fisher’sinteresting discussion of how Wall Street women navigatetheir roles and relationship in what the author describes asthe new economy.

Unfortunately, the collection is also plagued with sev-eral shortcomings. First, the chapter by Douglas Holmes andGeorge Marcus, although interesting, does not really fit withthe remainder of the volume. Rather than an investigationof new technologies, the authors present an argument forthe use of ethnographic research in unique and new situ-ations. The point is not lost on the reader, but the peoplewho will more than likely consult this collection are awareof the richness and value of ethnographic work as well as theconstructed nature of ethnographic knowledge. This chap-ter is also poorly placed because it comes at the start of thevolume and follows the introduction: a reader may be putoff and mistakenly think they are reading a theoretical takeon methods rather than a rich theoretical and ethnographicdiscussion of new settings and new anthropological situa-tions.

A second concern is the insular nature of the collection.Anthropologists have been interested in economic behav-ior, its social and cultural roots, and the contingent ways inwhich the economy is constructed ever since Melville Her-skovits first suggested that rational behavior was culturallyframed (1940). Furthermore, economic anthropologists arealready engaged in the kind of investigation that the editorshighlight. In fact, several recent meetings of the Society for

Economic Anthropology have focused on the new economyamong other issues covered here.

Regardless of my concerns, this is an interesting vol-ume. Readers will need to invest some effort to workthrough some of the examples, and this is not a book for thebeginner. However, for those of us interested in the “neweconomy” and in using ethnographic tools in new situa-tions, it will be useful. My hope would be that this volumefurther encourages a dialogue in our field as well as acrossanthropology and economics.

REFERENCES CITEDHerskovits, Melville J.

1940 The Economic Life of Primitive People. New York: AlfredA. Knopf.

Wolf, Eric1977 Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press.

The American Discovery of Europe. Jack D. Forbes.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 250 pp.

PETER S. WELLSUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Interactions between peoples widely separated in spacehave always been of great interest to scholars and to thegeneral public. In recent years, both new archaeological dis-coveries and new approaches to the dynamics of interactionbetween societies have led to important and popular exhi-bitions and publications. For example, recent excavationsat Jamestown have revealed evidence of closer relations be-tween natives and Europeans at the site; a major exhibitionat the Victoria and Albert Museum in London drew atten-tion to the complexities of interactions between Europeansand peoples of Asia; the Silk Road across Eurasia has becomea major theme of scholarly and popular attention; and theBritish Museum has mounted an extensive exhibition ofJohn White’s watercolor paintings of native peoples of whatis now Virginia and other parts of eastern North America.The book under review can be understood as a contributionto these many ongoing discussions about interactions overgreat distances and their effects. Its particular focus is earlycontacts across the Atlantic Ocean between the Americasand Europe.

The author’s main point is that the peoples of theAmericas had significant influence on the peoples of Eu-rope. Traditionally we learn about European explorationof the Americas from the early 11th century by the Norsefrom Greenland and from the late 15th century by the Por-tuguese, Spanish, French, and British. Forbes argues that weneed to understand the peoples of the Americas not as pas-sive recipients or victims of European activity but, rather, asactive agents in the interactions that strongly affected thesocieties of both the Eastern and the Western hemispheres.He suggests that contacts across the Atlantic began earlierthan commonly thought, initiated by peoples of the Amer-icas traveling to Europe.

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The book presents a great deal of pertinent information,with generally good footnotes and an extensive bibliogra-phy. Some of the points are well documented, especiallyin the final chapter entitled “Native Americans Crossingthe Atlantic after 1493,” which in detail discusses some ofthe effects of peoples of the Americas on thought and artin Europe. Elsewhere the author presents tantalizing data,mostly textual but some archaeological, that may representevidence for various kinds of interaction across the sea, butin most cases the evidence is not substantial enough toconstitute a solid case. Forbes argues that American peo-ples probably reached European shores before documentedEuropean voyages to the Americas. A chapter on the GulfStream shows that currents that often carry floating ma-terials across the ocean may well have carried people inboats. The author discusses much interesting evidence forboat-building among Native American groups, with perti-nent descriptions from European accounts of the late 15th,16th, and 17th centuries. The book includes fascinating il-lustrations of American watercraft published in the Euro-pean sources. The author cites a number of European textsfrom Classical, medieval, and early modern times that, heargues, refer to peoples of the Americas.

The book is interesting and thought provoking, but thearguments and data presented do not convince this readerthat we have solid evidence for peoples of the Americasreaching Europe before the second millennium C.E. This isvery different, of course, from saying that early Americanvoyagers did not reach Europe; some may well have, but thekinds of unambiguous archaeological evidence that woulddemonstrate that they did have not yet been identified. Thefew objects that Forbes cites as examples of American ma-terial culture in early European contexts are all problematicfor one reason or another. But this book helps to remind usthat we need to keep our minds open to the possibility thatsuch evidence may be found at any time.

There are a number of specific details with which onecould take issue. For example, there is no reason to thinkthat “the Gaels” from Iberia were “the last conquerors of Ire-land” (p. 37). Modern scholarship has demonstrated thatthe people known as Goths most likely did not migratefrom southern Sweden (p. 82), as earlier generations of re-searchers believed.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting book that raisesmany significant questions that could form the basis forany number of productive research projects in the future.

Assembling Flowers and Cultivating Homes: Laborand Gender in Colombia. Greta Friedemann-Sanchez.Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 207 pp.

ELIZABETH BRUSCOPacific Lutheran University

Although you would never know it from Hollywood por-trayals of the country, almost two-thirds of flowers sold inthe United States are grown in Colombia. Among nontra-

ditional exports, flowers are the leading earner of foreigncurrency.

Greta Friedemann-Sanchez, daughter of the lateColombian anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann, studiedthe impact of employment in floriculture on Colombianwomen’s lives. Assembling Flowers and Cultivating Homes isbased on her dissertation fieldwork in the Sabana de Bo-gota, a relatively peaceful part of this nation so plaguedby violence. This was formerly an area of large haciendas,and distinct from much agribusiness, the flower farms inthe Sabana were set up by and are largely still controlledby upper-class Colombian families. Foreign investment inthe industry began in 1998 when Dole bought four of thelargest farms.

Friedemann-Sanchez makes a convincing case thatfloriculture can be viewed as global assembly-line work andsets about challenging some of the assumptions about theimpact of such work on women. She argues that the flowerindustry brings about positive changes specifically in termsof women’s empowerment in Colombia.

This finding is surprising, as floriculture has a bad rep-utation both locally and with international NGOs. Flowercultivation requires heavy pesticide use, endangering work-ers’ health. There are also issues of job security, lack ofworker benefits, an unfair quota system, and lack of respectfor women’s rights. Recently, the Dole farms have been thelocus of union organizing, and after a vigorous antiunioncampaign, Dole closed one of its farms.

Nonetheless, Friedemann-Sanchez asserts that whilemany of these problems still exist, the floriculture indus-try has made advances. In response to national and inter-national criticism, in the 1990s the industry established theFlorverde Program, which holds workshops addressing con-flict and violence, childcare, housing, women’s equity, andliteracy. Although Friedemann-Sanchez may be overstatingthe case when she writes that “the industry has a clear goalof greater gender equality among the lower class” (p. 89),there are also workshops on domestic abuse and self-esteem.

The heart of the book directs our attention to the house-hold, and the study’s true strength is Friedmann-Sanchez’sinsistence on viewing the experience of this type of produc-tion within local contexts and imbued with local meanings.Rejecting the view that women are passive victims, she stillwrites that we must be realistic about the choices facingwomen “in a culture that devalues them on a consistentbasis” (p. 179).

The author presents a detailed analysis of the house-hold economies and intrahousehold bargaining processesof floriculture workers. Using principles from Nash gametheory, she considers a complex constellation of assets, in-cluding access to wage work, land ownership, social net-works, and even emotional stamina that empowers women(and men) in their domestic bargaining positions. She sug-gests that wage labor in floriculture, combined with otherresources provided by the industry (such as loans and theFlorverde workshops), are often enough to help women optout of abusive and draining relationships with men or to at


least enhance their bargaining position within their house-holds.

An intriguing part of the analysis is her consideration ofemic categories reflecting length of regional residency: themost recent migrantes came to the region to seek employ-ment in floriculture; the antiguos have been in the region forat least two generations; and, finally, the raizales have beenin the area for several generations and are descendants oforiginal hacienda workers. With expanded social networksin the region, raizales tend to have better lives and morestable households and to experience less domestic violencethan migrantes.

Changes in Colombian gender and family roles result-ing from rural proletarianization have been a focus sinceAnna Rubbo’s 1975 study of the expansion of sugar caneplantations in the Cauca Valley. Despite their differentopinions about the impact of capitalist expansion on ru-ral women, Friedemann-Sanchez’s description of householddynamics calls to mind Rubbo’s earlier discussion of thesame topic, and a comparison between the two cases wouldhave been a welcome addition to the analysis.

This is a valuable contribution to the study of womenand work, household dynamics, and social change in LatinAmerica. A deeper consideration of ideological dimensionsof gender is needed, however. There have been majorchanges in Colombian culture since Rubbo’s study 35 yearsago, yet aspects of gender identity and roles that seriouslydisadvantage women endure. Rubbo found that womenresorted to sorcery to mediate relations with men, andFriedemann-Sanchez’s alludes to the power of gossip inshaping women’s choices. It would seem that, whatever ma-terial changes may accompany capitalist expansion, it is es-sential to look at ideological transformations to understandthem and to predict their long-term effects.

REFERENCE CITEDRubbo, Anna

1975 The Spread of Capitalism in Rural Colombia: Effects onPoor Women. In Towards an Anthropology of Women. RaynaReiter, ed. Pp. 333–357. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace. Douglas P.Fry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 331 pp.

NEIL L . WHITEHEADUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison

This is an important and timely volume. Important becauseit directs our attention not only to the broad anthropologi-cal question of human capacities for violence and its collec-tive organization as “war” but also because it poses some keyquestions for anthropological practice itself. The volume istimely as U.S. society itself is at war, and anthropologists areforced to ask themselves what role their profession may ormay not play in such a society at war. In other words, theanthropological study of warfare cannot be separated fromthe historical and contemporary social context in which

anthropology itself is being practiced, and anthropologicalpractice is itself inflected with the cultural and political pro-clivities of its practitioners.

Central to the past and present debates within anthro-pology about warfare and violence are the assumptionsmade by some as to “basic” human nature and the resulting“inevitability” of human conflict through violent means.The central thrust of author Douglas Fry’s work is to ques-tion that picture of human nature via a careful and compre-hensive evaluation of the evidence cited from primatology,archeology, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology. Initself this is not a new project, but then neither is the Hobbe-sian assumption as to the necessarily brutal character ofhuman interaction. However, in an historical moment of a“war on terror,” the daily deaths and casualties in our warzone and the proliferating fear of random shooters and ca-sual urban violence, the Hobbesian assumption can appearall too plausible.

In this context, Fry’s key point—made repeatedlythroughout the discussions of primatology, archeology, andethnology—is that in fact humans are not at all innately vi-olent or warlike but have to be carefully induced, throughsocial and cultural means, to kill and maim each other. Ofcourse, many will immediately reference endemic violenceas proof that this is not the case, and so the interminableand irresolvable political discussion rumbles on. But along-side of that there still exists the possibility that new pol-icy alternatives might be generated if our focus were tobecome not the unanswerable question of why we are soviolent (unanswerable because there is no single or persis-tent reason) but, rather, the more relevant question of whythe study of war and violence so inhibit and distort betteracademic analysis of the issues.

This much being said, and worthy though the aims ofthe volume are, it also displays some of the key analyticalweaknesses of the “potential for peace” faction, which infact are no less distorting of a better understanding of hu-man violence than the “man as warrior” camp, otherwiseso adeptly criticized by Fry. In short, Fry does not allow forthe evident facts that people like to be violent, that violenceand warfare have important and valorized cultural roles toplay, and that even to suffer at times from the violence ofothers can be exciting and stimulating. The real roadblockto peace is a failure to understand the value of war and howit plays into the motivations of its perpetrators. Equally, theidea that human violence, whether interpersonal or interso-cietal, can somehow fade away is to misunderstand humancapacities for such behaviors as sacrifice, endurance, valor,and self-immolation of various kinds, as well as the con-tinuous cultural necessity to express such values in violentidioms. Violence, and its transient expression in the cul-tural construct of “war,” is fundamental to society becauseit is itself a social relationship not the absence of one.

This volume, however, is a valuable addition to theperennial debates on warfare and offers a very useful correc-tive to similar works that stress the more dismal aspects ofviolent human capacities. It is written in a very accessible,

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almost polemical, style and will therefore be best suited toundergraduate introductory courses rather than the gradu-ate level. Little of the work cited is new (and, in fact, thevolume overlooks some recent important volumes), but inmany senses this debate is out of time, not only because itsorigins are truly ancient but also because the idea that ouralternatives are “peace” or “war” is, in the age of “terror,”simply anachronistic.

Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development,and Multicultural Activism in Peru. Marıa Elena Garcıa.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 213 pp.

JASON PRIBILSKYWhitman College

My reading of Making Indigenous Citizens—and serendipi-tously the invitation to review it—came while doing field-work in Ecuador on a subject matter not far from the oneexplored in this book. I was researching the efforts of a sec-tor of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement to establish itsown public health program, autonomous from the healthministry and staffed by traditional healers, midwives, andbonesetters. In the rural communities where I was working,I was surprised to find that activists were getting, at best, afrosty reception; many villagers felt that activists were outof touch with local health needs and were all too willingto dismiss the political–economic realities of sick bodiesin the name of interculturalidad. As I pondered the puz-zling resistance of indigenous politics by indigenous peo-ples themselves, Marıa Elena Garcıa’s thought-provokingethnography on the work of community activists to pro-mote bilingual education in highland Peru and their entan-glements with teachers, parents, NGOs, and the state pro-vided a refreshing new way to think about the complicatednature of the native movements that have so stunninglygripped the Andes in recent decades.

What sets Garcia’s work apart from the growing book-shelf of studies on Andean indigenous politics is its concen-trated focus on Peru and specifically its head-on tacklingof the issue of the so-called exceptionalism of indigenouspolitics there. Distinct from movements in Ecuador andBolivia—which can claim the ousting of a sitting presidentin one case and the election of an indigenous president inthe other—Peru is appreciably less prominent. Garcıa startswith this finding but quickly discards the exceptional thesisto tell a much more compelling story of multicultural ac-tivism in the Andes. Activism is explored in three “sites” fre-quently overlooked in formulations of social movements:among villagers in rural Andean communities, among in-tercultural NGO activists and state educators in Cuzco, andamong indigenous students from throughout the Andeanregion participating in an intercultural education programin Cochabamba, Bolivia. The combination of these threefoci makes for a nuanced multisited ethnography with sus-tained attention paid to the complexities, ironies, and con-tradictions of modern indigenous politics. Perhaps the mostimportant message that unifies these otherwise disparate

field settings is a portrait of activism that transcends thewell-worn analyses of indigenous groups in opposition tostate forces. As Garcıa notes, “This is not simply a case of ru-ral communities and their advocates against the neoliberalstate, but rather a more complicated story of changing agen-das and alliances in which Quechua parents can mobilizeagainst pro-indigenous NGOs, and NGO goals can convergewith those of both the state and international developmentcommunity” (p. 3).

Garcıa divides her book into three parts: “politics andhistory,” “ethnographies,” and a concluding section thatframes the case of bilingual education initiatives in a largercritical discussion of multicultural citizenship and socialmovement theory. The opening portion covers familiarground for students of modern Peru. Skillfully utilizing sec-ondary sources, Garcıa succinctly tacks across, and weavestogether, relevant historical contexts (from the Indigenismomovement [1840s–1930s] to the multicultural policies of re-cent president Alejandro Toledo) to demonstrate the uniquerelationship between indigenous peoples and the Peruvianstate and the so-termed “Indian problem.” In her ethno-graphic work, however, she finds a more immediate andtraumatic history hanging over people’s head: the pro-tracted period of civil war that ended in the mid-1990s.Although Garcıa’s reading of history drives home the pointthat the wounds of violence are still fresh, I could not helpbut want to hear more from the villagers Garcıa befriendedduring her research. Yet, as a historical chapter, it works fineand helps to set up ethnographic material that follows.

The truly substantive ethnographic chapters of thebook focus readers in two directions: one toward rural com-munities and their mixed reception of bilingual languageinitiatives and another toward the work of interculturalactivists themselves. With respect to the former, Garcıademonstrates how education has long been tied to minor-ity rights in Peru and that parents’ lukewarm reception ofthe activists’ proposals are both products of historical mem-ory of previous top-down and paternalistic state involve-ment as well as a clear recognition of the marginal status ofindigenous identity (including speaking Quechua) in thePeruvian nation. In this instance, Garcıa finds the makingof an emerging indigenous activism that, although not asarticulated or public as movements in Ecuador or Bolivia,nonetheless presents similar challenges to the neoliberalstate. The case is compelling and the argument sound; how-ever, again I found myself wanting to hear more from theparents that Garcıa interviewed. In particular, sustained at-tention to their voices may help to more strongly connectthe ways local perceptions of children, their futures, andhopes for their educational success are tied to a larger fo-menting sense of citizenship.

This desired level of ethnographic description is thank-fully delivered in the analysis of the activists themselves.Focusing first on activists of a Cuzco-based NGO, Garciaexplores the tensions that arise when global ideas of multi-culturalism packaged in internationally funding mandatescollide with goals of local activists and rural teachers in their


interaction with highland families. In the arguably mostinnovative ethnographic section of the book, Garcıa em-ploys a kind of “studying up” of sorts as she presents a por-trait of indigenous intellectuals at the Program for Trainingin Bilingual Intercultural Education for Andean Countries(PROEIB) and their efforts to grapple with what constitutes“Indian-ness” in a modern world increasingly defined bythe exchange of knowledge and information, the prolif-eration of technology, and an assault on the meaning ofauthenticity. Her deep interactions and high level of rap-port with student intellectuals provides a rarely plumbedglimpse into the praxis of crafting indigenous identity.

Overall, Garcıa writes clearly and eloquently and hasproduced a book that would be simultaneously at home ingraduate seminars debating perspectives on indigeneity andauthenticity and in undergraduate Latin American ethnog-raphy courses. The minor shortcomings noted above aside,this book is easily among the best works to address indige-nous politics in South America in some time.

Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. John Ger-ring. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 265 pp.

DAVID SHULMANLafayette College

Case Study Research is a book with a mission. What JohnGerring aims for, and contributes with great success, is aconceptual manifesto and foundational guidelines that de-marcate the case study approach as a research methodology.Gerring’s starting point is what cheekily could be called thecase study method’s public relations problem. According toGerring, case studies are the basis for many highly influen-tial works in the social sciences, but, frustratingly, the casestudy approach is disrespected because its methodologicalunderpinnings are poorly understood and considered sus-pect. Gerring’s tonic to change this paradoxical status is toaddress how broad concerns of research designs, issues suchas discerning causality and generalizing from findings, ap-ply directly to the case study method. With an impressivecombination of rigor and comprehensiveness, Gerring cov-ers how the case study approach, in principle and practice,connects to those issues.

The book decisively addresses, but also transcends, twotraditional end points in the case study research literature:the definitional quagmire of identifying what constitutes“a case study,” and acidic arguments about the strengthsand weaknesses of one method versus another. In part 1 ofCase Study Research, Gerring delineates conceptual princi-ples that underlie and bound the case study approach. Inpart 2, Gerring focuses on practical techniques of case se-lection that enable researchers to use an intensive study ofa single case to understand a broader class of like cases.

For Gerring, a proper understanding of the case studyapproach begins with accepting a fundamental and in-evitable dual nature of cases: that a single case is almostalways simultaneously representative of a class of similarunits. By defining the case study as “an intensive study of a

single case . . . with an aim to generalize across a larger set ofcases of the same general type” (p. 65), Gerring evaluates thecase study method in a useful comparison to cross-case stud-ies. Single case studies and broader cross-case comparisonsare seen as constituting different levels of analysis ratherthan conflicting ones. Gerring also wants to make an argu-ment for the overall inclusiveness of the case study method.The intensive study of a case can be either qualitative orquantitative, with a large “N” or a small one, nested withinmultiple theoretical frameworks, and focused primarily onidentifying causal mechanisms rather than on description.

The capacity that an intensive study of a single case hasto address a broader set of similar cases is both a practicalquestion and a criterion. Gerring offers detailed guidelineson how to select cases (see pp. 89–90) and case study designsbased on different research goals, an experimental ideal asa template, and considerations of external and internal va-lidity. What trade-offs exist in picking a typical case? Whenwould a researcher want to pick a deviant case?

Gerring sees some strengths of the case study approachas offering proximal causal explanations, generating hy-potheses, qualitative depth, a delineation of causal mech-anisms, and an exploratory research focus. The case studyapproach is less efficient than cross-case, variable-orientedapproaches in the breadth of research propositions, gener-alizability, and for theory testing. The book is replete withbrief examples, mainly taken from political science and so-ciological studies, that cement Gerring’s ideas using existingresearch. The book succeeds in providing a thorough discus-sion that helps establish principles and practices for usinga case study approach. Gerring is one of those rare connois-seurs of methodological concepts who can write accessiblyand originally about complex methodological debates andtechnical issues in conducting research.

Case Study Research is written for social scientists in gen-eral, although interpretive ethnographers may feel slightedby the book’s overwhelming emphasis on issues of causal-ity and generalizing. Gerring prioritizes examining how thecase study approach can address causal mechanisms over afocus on descriptive approaches in case study research. Thispreference is demonstrable even down to the author’s fre-quent usage of “X” and “Y” throughout the book to describeresearch phenomena using the causal terminology of inde-pendent and dependent variables. Although Gerring playsto one crowd more than another, Case Study Research is agroundbreaking book that should be read by any social sci-entists and graduate students who wish to maintain theircontinuing education in methodology in general, and incomparative methods and case study research in particular.

Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge:Science and Citizenship in the Cultural Context ofthe “New” Genetics. Sahra Gibbon. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007. 221 pp.

JULIET M. MCMULLINUniversity of California, Riverside

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Cancer has evoked a significant amount of dread through-out the course of human history. Thus, research that sug-gests movement toward a cure, such as the recent “dis-covery” of the breast cancer gene (BRCA), raises hopes ofresearchers, cancer patients, their families, and health ac-tivists. Yet there is also concern about the focus and promiseof the “new” genetics. Findings that five to ten percent ofbreast cancers are linked to an inherited gene (p. 1) and thata cure promised by genetics may be decades away (p. 193)lead some to question the enormity of the effort and moneyinvested in understanding the workings of the breast can-cer gene. It is within this social and historical context thatSahra Gibbon examines the coproduction of breast cancergenetics as a gendered knowledge with significant implica-tions for “social, political or ethical agendas” (p. 196).

Situated between anthropology and science studies,Gibbon’s ethnography examines the meanings and prac-tices that drive the coproduction of breast cancer knowl-edge among lay people and scientists in the United King-dom. The book is organized in two parts. Part 1 focuses onthe social understandings and practices of breast cancer ge-neticists, clinicians, and “potential” patients. Part 2 exam-ines the role of health activists through their breast cancercharities and fundraising. Gibbon describes the processes bywhich the participants of breast cancer charities, the major-ity of whom are women, contribute to the production of agendered genetic knowledge and the enrollment of morefemale patients. We are also given insight into how geneticscientists and clinicians act as agents in accepting and re-sisting the expected benefits of scientific promises and thedemands of health activists. This book is not just about the“pastoral” workings of scientific authority on populations;rather, it interrogates the congruities and incongruities inmeanings and practices that reflect our attempts to giveform to the new genetics and meaning to lives disruptedby cancer.

Highlighting the concept of “care” is one strategy Gib-bon uses to tie the uneven practices and contexts describedin this work. For example, chapter 2 examines clinicians’use of family trees as a visual assessment tool for a “pre-dictive medicine.” This practice is framed as caring for thefamily by alleviating the fear of having the BRCA gene, oras motivation to encourage other family members to par-ticipate in genetic testing. The latter scenario simultane-ously plays on the gendered role of females as family nurtur-ers, an argument which is carried forward throughout thebook. Thus, the clinician cares for the patient through thepredictive capabilities of the new genetics, and patients nur-ture the health of their immediate and next generation rel-atives through the transmission of genetic knowledge. Forthe breast cancer activists, discussed in part 2 of the book,care is manifested through the memory of their friends andrelatives who have died from breast cancer. In their desiredeal with loss of their loved ones, Gibbon argues that thecharity and fundraising is a type of memorial, a monumentto cancer suffering and hope for the future of genetic sci-ence. Care and nurturing is one example used to explicate

the entanglements of gender with “the social, political, andethical” dimensions of breast cancer genetics. Gibbon worksat showing us multiple paths through which the genderedideology of care becomes a motivation for practices thatblur the lines between clinicians, activists, and patients.Her argument is further complicated as she stresses the ten-sions between fundraising and the fulfillment of scientificpromises, ethical obligations that impact patients materi-ally through the effects of genetic testing on insurance poli-cies, and rights to the National Health Service.

Gibbon’s book touches on contemporary issues in an-thropology such as illness and memorials, pastoralism andscientific authority, and genetics and biocitizenship. Thechapters cover a range of practices and contexts, from thedrawing of family trees to identify “potential patients” totours of genetics labs for breast cancer fundraisers. Thebreadth of social contexts structured by breast cancer genet-ics that Gibbon’s examines is impressive; however, it alsoleft me wanting more detail within each of the theoreti-cal and contextual sites discussed. The chapters can standalone or work as a whole, linked by the dread of cancer andthe hope of cure through scientific advances. Although thebook is ambitious in its scope, it is an important contribu-tion toward showing us how an examination of a specificdisease, like breast cancer, informs and organizes larger so-cial arrangements as well as individual daily lives.

The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status,and Exclusion. Marjorie Harness Goodwin. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 329 pp.

ROBYN M. HOLMESMonmouth University

In the tradition of her earlier book He-Said-She Said: Talkas Social Organization among Black Children (1990), MarjorieHarness Goodwin’s new book, The Hidden Life of Girls:Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion, utilizes children’severyday actions—specifically, conversations during play-ground activities—to illustrate how girls use languageto modify, structure, manipulate, and control their so-cial worlds. Through careful and painstaking conversa-tional analyses drawn from recent and past fieldwork ex-periences with ethnically and socioeconomically diversegroups, Goodwin challenges contemporary views of gender.Employing a linguistic anthropological framework, Good-win provides evidence to challenge contemporary dualisticnotions of men and women as they relate to competition,cooperation, and morality.

Goodwin situates her study in relation to anthropo-logical, psychological, feminist, and gendered frameworks.She provides detailed information on six inclusive fieldworkperiods and their respective participants and is mindful ofher ethnographic present throughout the text. Her viewsof children and the children’s view of the ethnographer areclearly discussed. Her unique use of videotaping (in compar-ison to observation and hypothetical dilemmas) is critical


to her ability to accurately analyze behavior and conver-sations situated at a particular point in time. Her focus onconversation analyses during “situated activity” is clearlyexplained, and bolded terms appear frequently to providedefinitions and emphasis.

In contrast to current notions of gender, through thesituated activities of hopscotch, her conversation analysesreveal that girls do indeed enter into disputes, manipulate,and test the rules of play. More importantly, she finds thatgirls do not shy away from conflict. Quite the contrary, theyseek out confrontation and are able to settle disputes with-out aggression.

By exploring the social dimensions of girls’ cliques, sheillustrates the active rather than presupposed passive na-ture of girls’ groups. In one proffered episode, the girls areconfronted with sexist adult attitudes with respect to theasymmetrical monopolization of playground space. Whenthe girls are told by a male coach and playground aide thata particular play space belongs to the boys, the girls do notwither or submit quietly. Rather they opt to compete forthis play space by confronting the boys, male adults, andvice principal. Their unified ability to address the preferen-tial treatment of boys with respect to playground territoriesresulted in a cultural and social change. In contrast to CarolGilligan’s vantage point, Goodwin demonstrates how girlsrespond to matters of justice.

The game of jump rope reveals interesting differencesin leadership styles between boys and girls and how thesechange with respect to playgroup composition and playerskill. For example, at times girls dictate orders to boys but aremore diplomatic in same-sex girls’ groups. However, boysare considered equal partners as they become more profi-cient at jumping. With skill comes power and authority.

The role of gossip as a medium by which girls assess,align, alienate, and control other girls is also presented.Goodwin illustrates the bidirectional nature of social rela-tionships by providing conversational analyses of an un-popular child with other group members. Here, the con-nection between language use and children’s social statusand position within the group is revealed. Goodwin demon-strates how girls define themselves by their social relation-ships and group membership rather than by the hierarchicalnature characteristic of boys’ groups. Thus, for girls, exclu-sion and ridicule are more powerful means by which theycontrol their social world. Appendices containing transcrip-tion symbols and complete verses of jump rope rhymes werefine inclusions.

Intended primarily for linguistic anthropologists andsecondarily a much broader audience, one shortcoming ofthe work is the lack of a detailed connection to the play,folklore, and anthropology and children literature. Rele-vant works by Helen Schwartzman, Lawrence Hirschfeld,Brian Sutton-Smith, and Linda Hughes’s work on the gameof “Four-Square” were either sorely missed or not discussedin relation to the current work. This would have solidifiedthe book’s appeal to a broader audience. Those not trainedin linguistics might find the work a bit difficult to follow.

Anyone interested in how children’s structure their so-cial worlds will find this book quite intriguing. Conversa-tion analyses reveal how girls use language during play-ground activities to establish their social order via stance,exclusion, and power. Goodwin challenges contemporarynotions of gender and dispels certain stereotypes typicallyassociated with girls. She reveals that girls are not alwayscooperative but, rather, compete with each other and boysin certain situations. Girls also do not shy away from con-frontation. Rather, they respond to and confront injusticeand are capable of creating change when they do so. Thiswork is an invaluable contribution to the literature on theplay of girls, linguistic anthropology, and gender.

REFERENCE CITEDGoodwin, Marjorie Harness

1990 He-Said-She Said: Talk as Social Organization among BlackChildren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Chiricahua Apache Enduring Power: Naiche’s PubertyCeremony Paintings. Trudy Griffin-Pierce. Tuscaloosa:University of Alabama Press, 2006. xvii + 185 pp.

JOHN R. WELCHSimon Fraser University and White Mountain Apache TribeHeritage Program

With this slim volume and enigmatic title, scholar-artistTrudy Griffin-Pierce and the University of Alabama Pressjoin the apparently futile quest to quench public and aca-demic thirsts for all things Apache. Part travelogue, partculture chronicle, and part art history of a suite of deer hidepaintings, Chiricahua Apache Enduring Power examines theunderstudied aftermath of the “Apache Wars” in terms ofChiricahua community processes and the reconciliation ofthe dominant North American progress narrative with pre-vailing Native American experiences of history as loss.

Seeking “to make history come alive from the Chiric-ahua perspective” (p. 132), Griffin-Pierce guilelessly leadswith her heart. A personal odyssey through landmarks ofChiricahua homeland in Arizona and exile in Arizona,Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, and New Mexico unfolds asthe narrative framework. The author interleaves vignettediscussions of place, people, and sundry theoretical notionswith reflections on the experience of exile and imprison-ment (1886–1913): how Chiricahuas felt and how these feel-ings shaped their actions, interactions, and destiny.

Accompanied by her own travel snapshots and famil-iar historical photos, Griffin-Pierce ponders conceptions ofplace plausibly shared with Chiricahua interns. Waking onemorning to warning signs at a Florida canal, she writes,“when the Apaches saw alligators, with their great reptilianheads and long slithery bodies . . . they considered them tobe the embodiment of evil. They were the denizens of darkor opaque water which, in itself, was the very substance ofdeath” (p. 48). On the next page, in an in situ descriptionof the Chiricahua men’s transfer from Fort Marion to Fort

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Pickens, Florida, where they were to be reunited with theirfamilies after months of sequestration, she writes, “I can-not imagine the horror of being herded into a train thatwas boarded up behind you . . . they lived in fear that at anymoment, they would be taken out and shot” (p. 49).

The book presents little by way of new primary data orencompassing theoretical treatment. What’s new is Griffin-Pierce. Through descriptions of seminal encounters andpersonal developments, she both establishes her vantageand engages readers in coming to terms with the insidioussensationalism behind most discussions of Apache historyand culture, with historical and current iniquities in Na-tive American–Euro-American relations, and with ongoingApache quests to reclaim their heritage.

The book’s greatest shortcoming is that it makes readerswait too long to learn about the deer hide paintings. Pre-sumably because the works were produced at Fort Sill, thefinal place of Chiricahua imprisonment and the second-to-last stop on Griffin-Pierce’s tour, only in the penultimatechapter does the discussion highlight graphical creationsby American Indian prisoners-of-war as windows into his-torical experience. The final chapter brings readers face toface with Naiche, the hereditary Chiricahua leader at thetime of their surrender, and his richly symbolic and lov-ingly crafted paintings of Apache womanhood feasts. HereGriffin-Pierce’s distinctive talents and experience at lastshow through. Although her interpretations are not earthshaking, they elucidate the paintings’ symbolic foregroundand offer carefully considered conclusions—well groundedin why Naiche was the way he was—of why the paintingsare the way they are. Here is a nicely illustrated, nonin-vasive, anthropologically infused examination of strikingpaintings by a man who lived the first half of his life em-phatically beyond the government’s reach and the secondhalf firmly in it its harsh and fickle grasp.

A number of inconsistencies merit comment. De-spite a stated interest in the amplification of NativeAmerican voices, Griffin-Pierce uncritically accepts someanthropological findings—for example, “small bands ofundifferentiated . . . Apachean peoples migrated southwardfrom Canada” (p. 17)—without reference to indigenous in-terpretations. The switches among reflexive, analytic, andtour leader narrative modes are abrupt. Juh’s “quote” ref-erenced on the top of page 27 is missing. The index andreferences are incomplete. In addition to tipping her hatto Erving Goffman’s concept of the total institution in re-lation to Chiricahua participation in federal prisons andboarding schools, Griffin-Pierce invokes Pierre Bourdieu,Talcott Parsons, Victor Turner, and other luminaries. Yetthese pithy theoretical notions are neither woven in to thebook’s themes nor critiqued. Serious students of Apache cul-ture and history will skip most of chapter 1’s culture survey;those that have read Chiricahua history closely can jumpto chapter 5.

In the absence of narratives authored by Chiricahuasand other American Indian POWs, Enduring Power offersan accessible interpretation to the postsubjugation Na-

tive American experience and a guide to the geographi-cal, cultural, and historical contexts for a unique corpus ofpaintings.

Exiles, refugies, deplaces en Afrique centrale et orientale(Exiles, refugees, and displaced persons in central and east-ern Africa). Andre Guichaoua, ed. Paris: Editions Karthala,2004. 1,066 pp.

MARGARET BUCKNERMissouri State University

Pope Benedict XVI has recently called into question theexistence of limbo in the heavenly realms. Perhaps, how-ever, limbo just descended to central and eastern Africa,where millions of refugees are stuck between countriesthat do not want them to stay and countries that do notwant them back. The film Hotel Rwanda (2004) popularizedthe Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the resulting flood ofrefugees. This book tells the rest of the story. It is a result ofSwiss government efforts to support research programs inthe region that could contribute to peace, reconstruction,and development.1

The first chapter is a detailed chronology for each ofthe countries concerned; it is followed by 11 independentlywritten chapters. Most of the book deals with Rwanda andthe Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), ex-Zaire, butvarious chapters also focus on Tanzania, Burundi, Congo(Brazzaville), and Rwandan refugees in Belgium. Only thesecond chapter has a truly regional perspective, and for thatreason it is perhaps the most enlightening. The almost 300-page appendix is an archival treasure trove of 28 documents,among them treaties, charters, reports, letters, and reports.

Nine of the 11 contributing authors are African (judg-ing by their names), many faculty at African universities.They cover a wide spectrum of disciplines: sociology, law,political science, history, demography, and psychology. Inline with those disciplines, research methodology is basedlargely on archives, secondary data, published accounts,and questionnaires. Almost all of the contributors havelived through the political, economic, and social turmoilthemselves. Whether they realize it or not, they reveal bothscholarly and native perspectives. Although a few chap-ters do include some theory (Bourdieu’s social capital, his“game” and “players,” and Foster’s image of limited good),most are documentary while also offering strong political orethical critiques. Finally, as explained in the introduction,each author had to estimate the risk he would take by car-rying out the research and publishing the results and hadto decide how much he could reveal without putting eitherhis informants or himself in danger.

In spite of the laudable efforts of the editor and au-thors, the book has a few rough edges: inadequate maps;long-winded chapters; occasional lack of sources; an infinitenumber of acronyms (although the list at the end of thebook helps somewhat); frequent ambiguity as to whetheran author is giving his own opinion or citing a source; and


the assumption that readers are familiar with the geogra-phy, history, politics, ethnic groups and languages of theregion, to name a few. Still, the volume holds together well,presents multiple viewpoints, and is written in a very ac-cessible French. The whole book reminded this reviewer ofForrest Gump’s famous box of chocolates: you never knowwhat you’ll get. For example, in the middle of a chapter onterminology is an enlightening section on why census dataand camp statistics vary so widely. Many such pearls makethe reading the long chapters worthwhile.

The book has several recurring themes. The pre-dominant one is the overwhelming complexity of thegeopolitical situation in the region concerned, making“studying up” (a la Laura Nader) critical. Historically, thecurrent “refugee crisis” has its roots in the 1885 Berlinconference that fixed colonial borders. During the colonialperiod and since independence, various waves of refugeeshave crossed borders for very different reasons, includingeconomic (famines), political (ethnic-based regimes), andsecurity (roving militias). Each of the “actors”—refugees,local villagers, camp administrators, United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), humanitarian NGOs,local politicians, roving militias, army commanders, stategovernments, international peace-keeping missions, andeven the IMF—have had their own motives, stakes, goals,and strategies, often at cross purposes. The global complex-ity was especially underscored in chapter 2. For example,the 1998 invasion of the DCR by Uganda, Rwanda, andBurundi was tacitly (and financially) backed by capitalistWestern powers eager to profit from the mineral and for-est resources in the eastern provinces of the DCR, whichwould be better exploited in a newly designed Great LakesTrade Region. The scheme was undone by Cold War pol-itics: the Marxist-oriented regime in Angola rushed mas-sively to the aid of its fellow anticapitalist government inthe DRC (which had earlier defended the Angolan causein the pre-Mobutu years) and kept Kinshasa from beingoverrun. There are many other scathing examples through-out the book of the direct involvement of the World Bank,the IMF, and the governments of the United States andGreat Britain in national and regional politics, especiallywith regard to refugee repatriation. In fact, almost everyauthor gives examples of how the refugees have been “in-strumentalized,” used as pawns by powerful actors at var-ious levels in political and economic games with very bigstakes.

Second, the book brings out the multiple conundrumsand ethical dilemmas faced by well-intentioned humani-tarian organizations and the UNHCR. When refugee campshave both “genociders” and victims, should the camps re-ceive aid? (A very telling letter written to that effect by Doc-tors without Borders is included in the appendix.) Who,among the dozens who claim such authority, are the legit-imate leaders that actually represent the refugees? Shoulddonors invest in humanitarian assistance and sanctuary,which would postpone a permanent political solution andeconomic development, or should they insist on the mas-

sive return of the refugees to their countries of origin, whichwould have unknown political and humanitarian conse-quences?

A third recurring theme involves the irreversible break-down of kin-based social organization in the refugee camps.In the DCR and Tanzania, in particular, there was a clashbetween “modern” camp administration based on egalitar-ianism, individualism, and “democracy,” on the one hand,and the more traditional values of seniority, hierarchy, andextended lineage-based family groups, on the other hand.Young people, often born and raised in the camps andknowing only instability and economic maneuvering, eas-ily become politicized, mercenaries, and traffickers of arms,drugs, and ration cards.

Various chapters also show how “nationality” playsinto the refugee game. For example, Rwanda does not al-low concurrent nationalities, so when the DRC grantedCongolese nationality to the refugees en bloc, they auto-matically lost their Rwandan nationality. Then when theDRC reversed that decree a few years later, hundreds ofthousands of refugees were left with no nationality at all.Many chapters also refer to ambiguous terminology, suchas refugee, internally displaced person, returnee, and sinistre,a term difficult to translate into English; how refugeesare labeled often has direct consequences in the kind andamount of assistance they receive. All the chapters give am-ple examples of the creativity, versatility, resilience, andadaptability of refugees. Many also discuss the contentiousrelations between refugees and local populations, often be-cause of the clash between the cash-based economy of thecamps and the traditional exchange-based economy of thevillages.

The volume offers much food for thought on more gen-eral issues as well. Starting with the chronology, the reader ishit in the head by the realization that Africa, and especiallythe Great Lakes region, has never been stable. The perma-nent, bordered, postcolonial States put an end to the earlierliving, breathing, almost organic polities in symbiosis witheach other. Editor Andre Guichaoua says it best (p. 107):recent outcomes of political crises in the region bring nosolution to one of the central problems at the origin ofthe conflicts, especially in the Great Lakes region, that is,the necessary fluidity of populations confronted by blockedState borders. In other words, political upheaval, with theresulting refugee “crisis,” has been ever present since thebeginning of the colonial period and has continued duringindependence. In this region, at least, postcolonial statesseem to be a failed experiment.

Overall, the book paints a dark picture of a politi-cal, social, economic, humanitarian, juridical mess on aregional—if not global—scale. It is groundbreaking in itsbroad context and its piercing questions about the mo-tives and strategies of the players involved, from individualrefugees to the World Bank. It reminds us that the refugee“crisis” in central and eastern Africa has stretched on fordecades, and international agencies (and the countries thatfund them) are running out of interest both in short-term

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assistance and long-term solutions. The reader is left withthe impression that the back-and-forth treaties of the lastfew years, especially in 2002 and 2003, will offer no morepermanent solutions than those of the 1990s. So, it seems,millions of African refugees will remain in their earthlylimbo.

NOTE

1. Another result of those same efforts, by the way, is a fabulouslywealthy database on the history and politics of the Great Lakesregion of Africa: see www.grandslacs.net.

REFERENCE CITEDHotel Rwanda

2004 Terry George, dir. 121 min. United Artists. Hollywood.

The Native World beyond Apalachee: West Florida andthe Chattahoochee Valley. John H. Hann. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2006. 250 pp.

JAY K. JOHNSONUniversity of Mississippi

The Native World beyond Apalachee is a logical sequel to JohnHann’s (1988) earlier volume on the Apalachee, dealing as itdoes with their neighbors to the west and north. Unlike thesubjects of his earlier work, who were the main mission Indi-ans of West Florida, many of these groups are poorly known,and others—the Apalachicoli, for example—are known pri-marily on the basis of English documents. Hann relies onthe Spanish archives, using many documents for the firsttime. It is this alternative perspective that makes this bookso important. Also, because the Spanish colonial presencein the South preceded the settlement of Charles Town andBiloxi by several decades, this book provides insight into thesocial dynamics of the first half of the 17th century, a periodthat has become increasingly important in our understand-ing on the native polities of the 15th and 18th centuries.

The book begins with an all important discussion ofnames. Table 1 relates the more familiar English names forthe various villages and groups to their Spanish equiva-lents. Not only are they much different, they also changethrough time. As Hann demonstrates, these equivalenciesare sometimes hard won, demanding a careful reading ofthe documents.

The next three chapters deal with the lesser knownneighbors, groups such as the Amacao, Chine, Chacato,Pacar, Chisca, and Pansacola. When possible, Hann dis-cusses linguistic affiliation, settlement, subsistence, andpolitical organization. However, some of these people areso poorly documented that they exist as little more thannames on the map. The Chacato are a notable exception.As the result of an attempt to murder a Spanish friar in1675 and the subsequent inquiry, Hann is able to derivea great deal of information about the Chacato and their

relationships with the Apalachee and the Spanish from theresultant documents.

The chapters dealing with the Apalachicoli are the heartof the book. Not only does Hann use the Spanish per-spective to provide new data on the origin of the villagegroups that came to be known as the Lower Creeks, he isable to discuss critical questions about mobility, leadership,and the beginnings of the Creek confederacy. The severalMuschogee- and Hitchiti-speaking villages along the Chat-tahoochee River north of the junction with the Flint weresometimes divided into a northern group referred to by theSpanish using the major village name of Caueta and othertimes, when grouped together with the southern villages,called the Apalachicoli.

Although there scattered early mentions of theApalachicoli, they become a major focus of Spanish interestafter the founding of Charles Town and the English threat toSpanish control of the South that the colony represented.The first Spanish mission among the Apalachicoli was es-tablished 1679 but abandoned shortly afterward. When En-glish traders were reported among the northern villages in1785, military expeditions followed. A fort was establishedin the region in 1690. In response, some of the Apalachicolivillages were temporarily abandoned. Hann documents therole played by the Apalachicoli in James Moore’s raid againstthe Spanish missions in 1704, as well as their part in theYamassee War against the English in 1715. The Apalachicoli,now known as the Uchise, continued to be an importantfactor in Spanish attempts to maintain a foothold in theSouth during the 18th century.

As a result of his close reading of the Spanish docu-ments, Hann is able to revisit many of the questions ad-dressed by the pioneers of ethnohistory: John Swanton,Verner Crane, and Charles Fairbanks, for example. It is in-teresting to see where they got it right and where they wereled astray by incomplete or biased data. For example, Swan-ton proposed that the Creek confederacy began in the 17thcentury. While the leaders of the Apalachicoli villages of-ten worked together, Hann finds no 17th-century evidencefor the kind of overall authority that is found among theCreeks during the 18th century.

Because the documentary data on the Indians of westFlorida are relatively scarce, this book allows a very goodinsight into the way that ethnohistory is done. In additionto providing a much needed alternative view of a criticalperiod of time, Hann’s careful balancing of fragmentary,often cryptic, and at times contradictory accounts is an ex-cellent example of the methods of documentary anthropol-ogy. This is an essential reference for anyone dealing withthe late prehistory of the South or working to understandthe historic Indians of the region regardless of whether ornot they are specifically interested in North Florida.

REFERENCE CITEDHann, John H.

1988 Apalachee: The Land between the Rivers. Gainesville: Uni-versity Press of Florida.


Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectiveson the Ecological Indian. Michael E. Harkin and DavidRich Lewis, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,2007. 367 pp.

DAVID COZZOWestern Carolina University

Tipping sacred cows is messy work. You are bound to stepin something, and then you are either reviled for stirring upa stink or praised for finding some good fertilizer. SheppardKrech III waded deeply into the paddock and tipped one ofAmerica’s most sacred cows when he penned The EcologicalIndian. In that book—his most well-known, if not infamous,work—Krech questioned the image of the American Indianas natural human being living in harmony with nature. Thebook under review, Native Americans and the Environment, isa response to Krech’s volume.

Native Americans and the Environment is basically theproceedings of the “Refiguring the Ecological Indian” con-ference convened at the University of Wyoming in 2002 toextend the discourse initiated by The Ecological Indian. Thelayout of the book is most democratic in its approach. Afteran introduction that provides some background and definesthe controversy, Krech is given the first chapter to give hisperspective and address the critics of The Ecological Indian.He is then pilloried or praised by his peers, then given thefinal chapter to respond to the volume’s contributors.

Not all aspects of The Ecological Indian are addressedin Native Americans and the Environment. In the former,Krech contrasts the image of the “ecologically noble sav-age” with the historic or prehistoric record on such topicsas the Pleistocene extinctions, the disappearance of the Ho-hokam, population collapse in the contact period, use offire as a management tool, and hunting or trapping prac-tices relating to deer, beaver, and bison. His respondentsrely on their areas of expertise to critique his challenge tothe popular image. Topics addressed include the politics ofrepresentation (Ranco), the complexities of the beaver trade(Feit), the dominant role of climate change in Pleistoceneextinctions (Kelly and Prasciunas), game harvest in north-ern Alaska (Burch) and on the Great Plains (Flores, Dorst,and Braun), historic and contemporary management of Na-tive fisheries (Harkin, Langdon, Nesper, and Schlender), andthe controversies surrounding the storage of nuclear wasteson Indian reservations (Lewis). While there is much over-lap, adding depth to the original text, there is ample newmaterial providing fresh perspectives.

Krech is never apologetic for destabilizing the blessedbovine, arguing that stereotypes, even flattering ones, doa disservice to the recipient population. This view is wellsupported by many of the contributors to Native Americansand the Environment. Krech’s notion is deemed unsettlingto the environmental community because it denies pro-ponents the ultimate nature-friendly role model and “isopenly threatening not only because it overturns this com-fortable utopia . . . but also because it suggests that individ-

uals or very small groups of people are capable of effect-ing irreversible (environmental) damage” (Harkin, p. 213).Reducing the varied viewpoints and activities of NativeAmericans to a romanticized image “freezes them in aninvented ethnographic present that has passed long ago”(Braun, p. 206), creating “a popular recollection informedonly by the fiction of television, film, and dime-novel im-ages robs all of us of our humanity and spirituality” (Nesperand Schlender, p. 302).

Myth busting is not without its ramifications. Krech’scritics in this volume, although few, are strident in theirchallenges to the premise of The Ecological Indian. This ap-pears mostly in relation to the issue of representation andhow it reflects on a skewed political playing field: “By exam-ining ways in which Penobscot bureaucrats used the ecolog-ical Indian stereotype to ensure ecological legitimacy andrecognition, we gain a better sense of the reality of con-temporary engagements with state control over Indian en-vironments, and what it means for a scholar like Krech todismiss the uses of this stereotype as “distorting culture”(Ranco, p. 43). Krech’s suggestion that the beaver conser-vation techniques implemented by Northern Algonquianpeoples were instigated by the policies of the Hudson BayCompany is attacked because it diminishes the role playedby indigenous management practices and beliefs: “Therewere two coexisting claims to authority, both very differ-ent from that of a modern nation state—a chartered trad-ing company and hunting band societies—and a set of adhoc accommodations, relationships, and sometimes part-nerships that linked them” (Feit, p. 85). The concern is thatremoving the perception of historical parity would bias con-temporary negotiations over resource management rightsaway from those who lack political power.

Krech keeps his afterword deliberately short as to not be“tedious.” He briefly addresses his critics but on the wholeappears to be pleased with the tenor of the volume. His orig-inal intent for writing The Ecological Indian—to expand thediscourse beyond the cliche—can be deemed successful bythe very presence of Native Americans and the Environment.

REFERENCE CITEDKrech, Shepard, III

1999 The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W. W.Norton.

Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of ModernMuslim Education. Robert W. Hefner and MuhammadQasim Zaman, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press,2007. 277 pp.

RACHEL NEWCOMBRollins College

In seeking explanations for Islamic radicalism, the U.S.media has focused disproportionately on the madrassasof Pakistan and Afghanistan as training grounds for bud-ding terrorists, with the resulting effect that educational

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practices throughout the Muslim world are imagined as uni-formly retrograde or medieval. This important collection ofscholarly essays aims to counter these stereotypes by of-fering a balanced view of the history and practices associ-ated with modern Muslim education throughout the world.While historically significant, madrassas alone do not en-compass the depth and heterogeneity of Muslim educa-tional practices today, and, in fact, the meaning of the termvaries depending on geographical and historical contexts.The chapters in this collection span a wide geographicalrange from Mali to Indonesia and are united by their con-cern with how Muslims have transformed educational pro-cesses to shape citizens who are both pious and prepared tosucceed in the modern world.

State power and intervention, the rise of nationalism,and colonialism have all affected education in the Muslimworld. However, although colonialism looms large in thesechapters, the authors are careful not to offer a reified viewof Muslim education prior to the colonial era. JonathanBerkey’s excellent opening account of madrassas in the pastand present emphasizes medieval madrassa education as aforce for stability but not stagnation. The informal trans-mission of knowledge through individuals rather than in-stitutions allowed for great variety and flexibility in whowas able to confer and receive knowledge.

During the colonial era, ideas of what constituted“Muslim education” were altered both directly and indi-rectly by colonial strategies. Alongside the study and mem-orization of Qur’an, hadiths, and Muslim jurisprudence,nonreligious subjects such as science, philosophy, and his-tory gained increasing importance, which they maintain tothis day in many Muslim schools. The creation of secularschools and universities led to competition with existing re-ligious schools, whose leaders sought not only to integratenew subject matter into the curriculum but also to institu-tionalize and formalize pedagogical practice. In Morocco,religious education lost its appeal as urban elites turned to-ward the French system of mass education, leading to themarginalization of madrassas and mosque–universities. InMali, colonial control over religious learning resulted ingreater identification with Islam on the part of a popula-tion that had not, prior to colonialism, considered Islam tobe central to the majority identity.

After colonialism, governments in many Muslim coun-tries sought greater control over educational practices, re-sulting in an often uneasy relationship between ‘ulama (thelearned group of Islamic scholars whose function in Muslimsocieties has been to determine correct religious practice)and state, as chapters on Pakistan and Egypt assert. Schoolscould serve as sites for the simultaneous transmission ofnational consciousness, religious identity, and the knowl-edge to perform in the modern world, demonstrated herefor Indonesia and Turkey. The schools of Fethullah Gulen inTurkey offer a particularly interesting case, as teachers ad-here to national curricular standards for secularism whilemodeling a conservative Islamic demeanor for their stu-dents. The epilogue by Muhammad Qasim Zaman provides

an intriguing glimpse at educational reforms in Shi’i Iranand Saudi Arabia, emphasizing the connection betweenstate power and the ‘ulama in circumventing or allowingreforms.

Two chapters focus on Muslim minority populationsin India and England. As Barbara Metcalf shows, in India,Muslim educational practices are diverse but often poorlyfunded, reflecting the marginalization of the Muslim pop-ulation as a whole as well as ethnic and linguistic diversityof Indian Muslim populations. In Britain, many Muslimsare drawn to Islamic education as a way to buttress embat-tled Muslim identities, although since the London subwaybombings in 2005, Muslim schools are seen with increasedsuspicion.

The authors focus on a number of important topics,but a few notable omissions exist. For instance, althoughmany of the authors mention that girls are also present indifferent forms of Muslim education, there is no chapterthat deals explicitly with the issue of gender or with howtransformations in educational practices have directly af-fected women. The effects of mass media on education arealso alluded to but never discussed in great detail.

In many places, the influence of colonialism and thenecessity of finding gainful employment have led Muslimsto debate not how to resist outside influences but how toadapt Muslim educational practices to the modern world.This valuable collection demonstrates how Muslim educa-tion attempts to shape devout, productive citizens who pos-sess both religious identity and the knowledge to thrive ina global economy.

Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Geno-cide. Alexander Hinton. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2005. 392 pp.

MARTHA LINCOLNCity University of New York Graduate Center

During the Khmer Rouge’s brief and ferocious four-yearreign in Cambodia, more than one and a half million citi-zens died at their countrymen’s hands. Landowners, intel-lectuals, and supporters of the ousted Lon Nol governmentwere targeted for their perceived disloyalty to the revolu-tion, but ordinary people also perished, sometimes for theirfailure to contribute to the “super great leap forward” andsometimes as the victims of neighbors settling scores. TheKhmer Rouge’s ambitions for the nation’s economic devel-opment were never achieved, but its human destruction wasat an industrial scale: between 1975 and 1979, one-eighthof Cambodia was slaughtered.

Democratic Kampuchea’s autogenocidal convulsioncalls into question the adequacy of anthropological meth-ods. What can cultural anthropology contribute to theoriz-ing an episode of mass violence? How should anthropolo-gists conduct research with the perpetrators and survivors ofa genocide? Finally, as anthropologists have too frequentlyleft the study of genocide to psychologists, historians, and


political scientists, how might the discipline equip itself the-oretically to address the human dynamics of acts againsthumanity?

Compelled by the dissonance between Cambodia’s self-image as “a gentle, smiling land” and its brutal recent past,Alexander Hinton interviewed perpetrators and survivorsof Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea (DK), attempting tounravel “the paradox of perpetration” (p. 4) and to bringthe genocide’s “microlevel” dynamics into focus. In WhyDid They Kill?, Hinton contends that the Khmer Rouge’stransformation of Cambodian society—via collectivization,the evacuation of urban centers, and the inversion of socialhierarchies—instituted a paranoid social logic that soughtto purify by destroying. Refusing to accept that KhmerRouge cadres were only “following orders” or to reduce theroots of atrocity to “cultural proclivity,” Hinton grounds hisanalysis of the Cambodian genocide in experiential, lin-guistic, and psychological dynamics. This is more than aquestion of intellectual preference: by refusing to theorizeat the macroscale, Hinton sides against a logic that wouldeliminate the local, the particular, and the individual.

In part 1, “The Prison without Walls,” Hinton exploresthe origins and motivations of the genocide, arguing thatthe Khmer Rouge motivated its “minions” via strategic ap-propriation of traditional Cambodian cultural schemata. Bystirring up class resentments and modal emotions such as“painful anger” (p. 74) and the desire for “disproportion-ate revenge” (p. 64), Khmer Rouge propaganda achieved“ontological resonance” in the minds of Cambodians andfomented an increasingly delusional search for “hidden en-emies” (p. 85).

Moving more deeply into the question of perpetratormotivation in part 2, “The Fire without Smoke,” Hintonquestions why it became honorable to participate in thegenocide, arguing that the Khmer Rouge’s manipulationof social categories legitimated violence toward individu-als who were, prior to the DK period, neighbors, familymembers, and friends. In chapter 4, “The DK Social Order,”Hinton traces out semiotic connections between Marxist–Leninist ideology and Buddhist philosophy, demonstratinghow these intersecting cultural models functioned as a dy-namic “palimpsest” that permitted “genocidal bricolage”(p. 181). In chapter 6, “The Dark Side of Face and Honor,”he argues that perpetrators used occasions of violence todemonstrate the ability to “cut off one’s heart” (p. 264).

The attribution of meaning to apparently senseless actsof violence is a very delicate task. Although Hinton correctlynotes that we ought not to regard genocide as “a floating sig-nifier of evil” (p. 4), his close reading of an especially graphictestimonial raises the question of the appropriateness of re-ferring to a human being as a “text.” Here, symbolic analysisseems inadequate to address an act of grotesquely materialviolence:

He [the victim] becomes a text upon which differenceis inscribed by violence—in this case by Ta Sok’s “largeknife.” By cutting into Touch’s abdomen, Ta Sok vio-lates a fundamental human barrier, the “social skin,”

and, through the resulting disfigurement and death, thor-oughly dehumanizes Touch. As if to confirm this loss ofhumanity, Touch’s last act before death is to scream inagony, producing sounds that are no longer human, butrather like those of “a wild beast.” [p. 291]

Despite this reservation, Why Did They Kill? representsan intellectually principled work whose political value isas significant as its theoretical contributions. While termi-nology like genocidal bricolage and genocidal priming mayundergo revision by anthropologists studying political vi-olence, these concepts are not only “good to think with,”they also enable social scientists and human rights observersto identify and challenge potentially genocidal situationsbefore they become disastrous. Hinton must be commendedfor his refusal to exoticize lethal behavior and for his effortsto make it legible and close to home.

The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility acrossthe Indian Ocean. Engseng Ho. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2006. 379 pp.

JONAH STEINBERGUniversity of Vermont

In his compelling new hybrid work of ethnography andhistory, Engseng Ho investigates the ways that genealogyand diasporic movement are mutually constitutive, eachmapped onto the other. Ho traces the transformation ofthis relationship over the historical memory inscribed in500 years of Hadrami sayyid texts and life histories. Ho’sbook fits well in a set of works that deal with continuitiesbetween historical and contemporary modes of global in-teraction, with the forms prefigurative of globalization illu-minated by such scholars as Janet Abu-Lughod and SeteneyShami. Ho’s text, with its panoramic and vast scope, de-mands a careful examination of current understandings of“globalization,” particularly with regard to their novelty.The cartographies of Hadrami movement across the IndianOcean, from Yemen to India, from Lamu to Aceh and be-yond, suggest transregional spheres of circulation predatingcolonial empire and modern markets.

At the heart of The Graves of Tarim is a captivating explo-ration of the transoceanic interstices between genealogies,names, journeys, gravestones, and histories of Islam, con-verging on the experience of the diasporic Hadrami sayyidsubject both abroad and in the homeland. The central claimis that genealogy and migration structure mutually deter-mine each other, that pathways of movement and kin re-lations form a single map of the Hadrami diaspora. Thisrelationship, Ho reveals, is inscribed in a wide variety ofpractices and histories, from the inscriptions on gravestonesto centuries-old manuals describing and prescribing move-ment across the ocean, from stories of modern histories ofreturn to the Yemeni homeland to the politics of Sufi tombs.

The past that Ho narrates is not as distant as it wouldseem. It is, in fact, an immediate and charged component ofthe present. The book begins and ends with a consideration

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of the ways that diaspora figures into the politics of shrinesand of gravestones of sayyid ‘Alawi saints claiming descentfrom the Prophet Muhammad, whose travels around theIndian Ocean in the name of Islam were critical in estab-lishing Hadrami pathways of movement and whose tombshave long served as important destinations for returningmigrants.

Ho sees in these graves “the meeting point of manyjourneys traveled by mobile persons and mobile texts” (p.xxvi). They structure the geography of a diasporic circuitof movement, an idiom of belonging in a place. The grave-stone is so appropriate a focus because “it is a particularlydense semiotic object, a compound of place, text, person,and name” (p. 24). The graves of the town of Tarim, inYemen’s Hadramawt, thus provide a potent material mo-tif of diaspora, pilgrimage, and return, a medium in whichdiverse symbols and texts of diaspora and homeland arefocused and concentrated.

The presentation of data, rich if a bit unruly, carriesthe reader across half a millennium of Hadrami travel, dis-persion, and return. In part 1, “Burial,” Ho sets the histo-riographic stage for the rest of the book by exploring thefoundations of discourse and practice laid by the trajectoryfrom Iraq to Tarim of the ‘Alawi sayyids, whose graves formthe pilgrimage sites described above. At the heart of this sec-tion are processes that turned Tarim from an endpoint formigrants to a “place of origins” (p. 93). In part 2, “Genealog-ical Travel,” Ho maps the intersections between kinship andmigration embodied in Hadrami sayyid travels and texts ontravel. Ho shows how texts guided travel and how travel pro-duced text in the development of a prescribed set of trajec-tories and journeys across the sea, and how the invocationof family names maintained threads of descent that linkedindividuals across space and over time. In part 3, “Returns,”Ho comes back to ethnographic and biographical materialin an exploration of the complex experience of return toYemen by muwallads, foreign-born Hadrami creoles, whosesense of belonging in Hadramawt can be ambiguous, con-fused, and incomplete. Ho continues in this section withan intensive discussion of modern transformations: he ex-plores here the ways in which colonialism and postcolonialYemeni politics reshaped, fixed, and redefined diasporic andcreole identities. It is in this context that we can understandthe ways that the graves of Tarim have become politicizedflashpoints.

The Graves of Tarim is a book about the social life oftexts and the textual geography of a diaspora. Intriguingis the book’s iconic resemblance to its object of semioticanalysis. It is both text and metatext. In the end the bookrecapitulates, performs, and enacts the very phenomenonit describes. It is a Hadrami genealogical text itself.

From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics ona Southern African Frontier. David McDermott Hughes.Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 285 pp.

MICHAEL MADISON WALKERMichigan State University

In From Enslavement to Environmentalism, David McDer-mott Hughes examines how people on both sides of theMozambique–Zimbabwe border come to conceptualize landand territory so differently. This ethnographic analysis, situ-ated in the Chimanimani-Sitatonga region, interrogates thepolitics of land allocation, ecotourism, and rural develop-ment in this border region. Hughes’ work traces the devel-opment of “cadastral politics” or the cultural pattern thatemerges when wealth in people is displaced by wealth inland.

Despite sharing ethnolinguistic similarities, Vhimba,located in Chimanimani District, Zimbabwe, became ter-ritorialized through processes of land appropriation whileGogoi, in Mossurize District, Mozambique, remained undersome form of forced labor from 1862 until 1992. Followingthe end of the Mozambique civil war in 1992 and multi-party elections in 1994, foreign timber companies threat-ened to alienate uncultivated land from Gogoi smallhold-ers. Hughes joined a countermapping team tasked withrecording and subsequently creating the boundaries of chiefGogoi’s chieftaincy to safeguard this land and strengthenthe community’s claims to land, thus making politics inGogoi cadastral. The final third of the book is devoted toquestioning liberal-minded conservation and developmentprojects in the two countries, asking how projects designedto eradicate racial segregation and empower rural communi-ties often result in weakening smallholders’ claims to landand natural resources. Hughes challenges the notion thatZimbabwean communal lands (formerly Native Reserves)and Mozambican rural communities should be opened tooutside investment, which threatens to undermine small-holders’ claims to land, and instead argues for the enclosureof these areas from what he calls “settler-led development”(p. 5).

Vhimba and Gogoi fell under the control of the GazaNguni kingdom from 1862–89. However, the arrival ofwhite settlers in what would become eastern Zimbabweintroduced a particular way of conceptualizing land andterritory based on exclusive ownership and clearly de-marcated boundaries. Smallholders’ experiences with landdispossession—first by white settlers and later by the South-ern Rhodesian Forestry Department and National ParksDepartment—made land the contentious issue that it istoday. In contrast, chief Gogoi’s people withstood variousforms of forced labor. Under the jurisdiction of the GazaNguni kingdom, men and women served as clients andcaptives to the political leadership. Thus, wealth in peo-ple (enslavement), not the control of land, created politicalpower within a sparsely populated frontier zone. Portuguesecolonialism perpetuated this system of wealth in peoplethrough the practice of forced labor (chibaro), and followingindependence, the rebel group Renamo conscripted peo-ple to serve in its ranks. Not until the end of the civilwar did political power in Gogoi not rest on a systemof wealth in people. These distinct historical conditionsshaped two radically different understandings of land andterritory.


Hughes’ ethnographic research provides a detailed ex-amination of how land is allocated in Vhimba throughprocesses of bargaining that is often not reflected in ac-counts of how land is allocated in Zimbabwe’s communallands. Furthermore, this work illustrates that nationality isa crucial variable in securing access to a less contentiouspiece of land. Village headmen repeatedly used Mozambi-can refugees to contest the boundaries of the ChimanimaniNational Park and the Haroni and Rusitu botanical reservesby settling them in these areas as a way of extending theirauthority and reclaiming lost lands. However, a discussionof the gendered nature of access to land and natural re-sources is surprisingly absent given the importance of gen-der in mediating access to natural resources.

Following the end of the war, refugees and displacedpeople, along with South African and Zimbabwean indus-tries, returned to Gogoi or arrived for the first time. Hughesprovides a reflective account as an “anthropologist-mapper”working with a countermapping team to record the bound-aries of chief Gogoi’s “territory” to strengthen the commu-nity’s claims to land in the face of a timber concession thatthreatened to appropriate smallholders’ land. However, hisexperience in Zimbabwe did not prepare him for what hesoon learned in Gogoi. The chief and other traditional au-thorities did not know the boundaries of the polity. Con-sequently, Hughes, along with the mapping team, arguedfor the enclosure of the chieftaincy to protect its land andnatural resources from outside intrusion, thus participatingin the territorializing process he set out to study.

From Enslavement to Environmentalism is an importantcontribution to the fields of political ecology, environmen-tal anthropology, and Southern African studies. Hughes hascombined archival research and ethnographic fieldwork toproduce a historically situated account of contemporarystruggles over land and development while raising funda-mental questions about the nature of environment and de-velopment projects in Southern Africa.

Poison Arrows: North American Indian Hunting andWarfare. David E. Jones. Austin: University of Texas Press,2007. 113 pp.

THOMAS S. ABLERUniversity of Waterloo

In this brief monograph, David E. Jones argues that poi-soned missile weapons were far more widely used in abo-riginal North America than the ethnographic and ethno-historical literature would suggest. Jones presents evidencethat poisoned arrows were used in every culture area ofNative North America. For most groups, the window inwhich this practice could be observed and reported was veryshort indeed, for use of firearms quickly replaced archery.As Jones points out, later ethnographic investigations oftenconfounded actual poisoning of arrows with treatment ofarrows with supernatural practices that promised a lethaloutcome from an otherwise nonmortal wound.

The 76 pages of text consist of a ten-page introduction,six short chapters, and a six-page conclusion. An appendix,notes, bibliography, and index make up the remainder ofthe book. The introduction discusses the development andoccasional use of biological and chemical weapons by greatpowers and rogue states in the 20th century, leaping fromthere to a discussion of poisoned arrows in aboriginal NorthAmerica. Jones’s interest in the topic of poisoned weaponrygrew out of his earlier work on the use of body armor inindigenous warfare. Jones dismisses the widespread beliefthat arrow poisoning was insignificant in North America.He cites cases of reputed wounds from poisoned arrows andargues that the denial of the practice in early ethnographicreports is often a result of its association with witchcraft.

In chapter 1, Jones relies heavily on the work of pop-ular science writer Edward R. Ricciuti to catalog poisonousplants available to Native North Americans, giving in mostcases both their botanical names and their common En-glish names. Chapter 2 discusses the knowledge and use ofpoisons more generally, focusing on the widespread suici-dal use of poisonous plants alongside the common practiceof poisoning fish. The next chapter provides data on theuse outside North America of poison on arrows and othermissiles. While Jones provides many claims that poison ar-rows were being used, the examples presented are widelyspaced in both geography and time. Skeptical readers maydoubt his conclusion that arrow poisons are “ancient, effi-cient, universal, and present as a potent weapon of warfare”(p. 30).

Arrow poisons in North America are surveyed in chap-ter 4. The data are arranged by culture area. For the mostpart, the name of the group is given and, if a plant poisonis being used, the botanical and common names are givenwhen possible. Snake venom is reported to have been usedover a relatively wide area, often obtained by encouraginga rattlesnake to strike the putrid liver from a game animal.The liver infused with venom would then be made intoa paste and applied to tips of arrows. The time of this re-ported usage of arrow poison is a very broad “ethnographicpresent.” Jones supplements this material in the next chap-ter with a smattering of other evidence of poisons used inwarfare, including poisoning musket balls after the acqui-sition of firearms, planting poisoned splints or thorns onthe paths of enemies, and poisoning enemy food. In thefinal chapter prior to the short conclusion, Jones venturesdeeply into prehistory. He enters into the Pleistocene ex-tinctions debate, which this reviewer long ago had thoughtwas a dead horse, and argues that Paleo-Indian hunters didindeed cause the extinction of prehistoric megafauna usingpoisoned spears.

There are minor errors that should not have made theirway into a book published by a university press. Jones doesnot seem to know that Moqui and Hopi are ethnonyms forthe same people. The 1947 paper Jones credits to WilliamN. Fenton was in fact written by John Witthoft, whereasFenton’s important work on Iroquois ethnobotany and par-ticularly Iroquoian suicide is ignored entirely. The odd end

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note seems to have been skipped so that the sources cited inthe notes do not seem to relate to the materials presentedin the text (see pp. 35, 38, and 45 and the endnotes formaterial cited there).

Criticisms aside, Jones has done a service by raising ourconsciousness of the issue. Although his book is unconvinc-ing as to the pervasiveness and importance of arrow poisonsin North American indigenous warfare and hunting, futurestudies in ethnohistory and ethnobotany certainly shouldnot ignore the issue that poison arrows may have existedand indeed may have been of importance.

Seeing and Being Seen: The Q’eqchi’ Maya of Liv-ingston, Guatemala and Beyond. Hilary E. Kahn. Austin:University of Texas Press, 2006. 242 pp.

EDWARD F. F ISCHERVanderbilt University

Accessible only by water, with a majority Garifuna popu-lation, the Caribbean costal town of Livingston fits onlyprecariously into most portraits of Guatemala. The placeitself is entrancing: a beach town of about 5,000 along-side the picturesque river jungle where early Tarzan movieswere filmed. Yet it can also be hot and muggy, with fliesthe size of small birds, and is a tourist town not especiallyfriendly to tourists. A place of contradictions, social spacein Livingston appears segregated, with the Garifuna major-ity living alongside Q’eqchi’ Maya and Ladino (mestizo)minorities. This ethnic situation complicates the conven-tional Indian–Ladino binary characteristic of other areas ofthe country.

Hilary Kahn has written a rich ethnography of thismost interesting of places, focusing her attention on theQ’eqchi’ Maya population. Kahn also intervenes in a num-ber of theoretical debates, bringing visual theories andmethodologies into conversation with social and culturalunderstandings. The fieldwork for this book comes from acollaborative video project Kahn started in Livingston; sheuses this experience to develop an innovative methodologyand representational style she calls “ethnographic verite.”Through the project, a group of Q’eqchi’ men and womenvideo recorded significant events in their lives and in thecommunity. (The moving image aspect shows up beauti-fully in the triptych frames used throughout to illustratethe text. These generally left me yearning for more of thevideo that made up the database for the ethnography.) Theresulting observations and community description are thusmultisighted and, through the mutual recognition of mis-recognition, lead to ethnographic insights about embeddedcultural logics.

With this methodological twist and with diligent self-reflexivity, Kahn covers much of the ground of a more tra-ditional community ethnography. We learn of traditionaldances and wedding rituals, the way a dead person’s spiritbecomes lodged in their possessions, stories of exploita-tion at the hands of foreigners, and exaggerated stereo-

types of Garifuna peoples. One consistent theme is a deeplyambivalent, even contradictory, relationship with foreign-ers. While exchange with outsiders often results in ex-ploitation, it can also serve to fortify in-group communitybonds. In the Q’eqchi’ imaginary, outsiders are linked toownership, morality, and power. The omnipresent Tzuul-taq’a mountain spirits, for example, are often portrayed aspale-skinned foreigners, simultaneously male and female,marked by a wild sexuality, and able to speak many lan-guages. In one instance it is said that foreigner miners sac-rificed a number of Q’eqchi’ to get permission from themountain spirit to mine. Even tourists do not have mean-ingful economic exchanges with the Q’eqchi’ for the mostpart: they leave AIDS and other illnesses, take photos, andspend what money they do mostly with the Garifuna andladinos.

Kahn draws judiciously from theories of visual repre-sentation, understandings of cognitive modeling, and cul-tural approaches to identity formation. Kahn’s emphasis isever on dynamic process rather than static portraits. She fo-cuses on the notions of “respect,” “ownership,” and “moral-ity,” presenting them as complex systems defined and real-ized in practice and firmly embedded in social networks.Kahn shows how ownership among the Q’eqchi’ is relatedto one’s position in a social network and to actual usage.Adapting Mary Douglas’s concept of “pollution,” Kahn por-trays morality as “action-in-place,” focusing clearly on theactive process of defining, negotiating, and living moralcodes influenced by idiosyncratic conceptions as well as so-cial norms. More revealing still is that respect in Q’eqchi’takes two forms: one accorded to outsiders (and the Tzuul-taq’a) and one based on interpersonal respect, which is anactive process in the community.

Kahn has written a fascinating ethnography of theQ’eqchi’ of Livingston and offers a creative strategy for re-flexive ethnography that does not lose sight of its humanis-tic purpose. The technique of “ethnographic verite” worksbrilliantly in penultimate chapter of vignettes that link to-gether many of the threads of the book. Kahn is right onthe mark about the virtues of ethnography as an episte-mology based on intersubjective understandings (and mis-understandings), although in the end I am convinced that“ethnographic verite” is just another way of accomplish-ing what good sensitive ethnography already does. Fortu-nately, Kahn has a sharp ethnographic eye and an engag-ing style. This work fills an important gap in the ethno-graphic documentation of ethnic relations in Guatemala,presents an innovative approach to ethnographic engage-ment, and should be of interest to scholars of the Maya aswell as, more broadly, those with an interest in collaborativeethnography.

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Re-ligion. Barbara J. King. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 262 pp.

MARTIN K. NICKELSIllinois State University


Evolving God is one of the most recent efforts by nontheolo-gians to explain the origin and evolution of religion. Theemphasis here is on “nontheologians” because theologiansseldom think in such terms about the origin of their reli-gious beliefs.

Barbara King is a biological anthropologist who hasstudied the behavior of apes and monkeys for 25 years. Herargument for the (natural) evolutionary origin of humanreligious behavior is rooted in what is probably the consen-sus view of most contemporary primatologists: that manymonkeys and presumably all of the apes have far richer cog-nitive and emotional lives than previously thought. Thatwe share an evolutionary ancestry with these animals isthe starting point for King’s thesis that human religious be-havior emerged over time from ancient ancestors. Conse-quently, she examines the archaeological record to assessthe evidence for when various aspects of human religiousbehavior appeared. She clearly falls in the camp of thoseanthropologists who think such prehistoric evidence existsat least by the time of the Neanderthals.

King summarizes her argument for the evolution of re-ligion in three steps: (1) “A fundamental characteristic of allprimates, the need for belongingness is most elaborated inthe African apes, our closest living relatives”; (2) “profoundchanges in emotional relating occurred as our human an-cestors’ lives diverged from those of the apelike ancestors”;and (3) “the hominid need for belongingness rippled out,eventually expanding into a wholly new realm” (pp. 5–7).

There are some essential ideas underlying her argu-ment. The first is the idea that “belongingness” (the emo-tional connections we share with others) is the basal emo-tion from which human religious behavior emerged. King’sconcept of “religion” is mostly that it is practice based onemotion in action (p. 103). The content of different reli-gions is of little concern to her as she takes the stance thatshe is agnostic about the reality of God, gods, and spirits.She does not want to argue that prehistoric humans sim-ply invented the idea of “God” (and, thus, can define it inas many culturally distinct ways as possible). Rather, shewrites, “My focus is on our prehistory, and on how—andwhy—we evolved God as that prehistory unfolded” (p. 9).Let us then jump ahead to her conclusion, where she states:

Hominids turned to the sacred realm because theyevolved to relate in deeply emotional ways with theirsocial partners, because the resulting mutuality engen-dered its own creativity and generated increasingly nu-anced expressions of belongingness over time, and be-cause the human brain evolved to allow an extension ofthis belongingness beyond the here and now. All of thesethings were necessary for the origins of the human reli-gious imagination. [p. 212]

I find it hard to think that such a view is consistent withanything but the idea that religion is a strictly natural phe-nomenon distinctive of humans, to be sure, but naturalnonetheless. King’s position is that she is—and can only re-ally be—agnostic regarding the issue of the actual existenceand nature of God, gods, and spirits.

So, what is noteworthy about this book compared toprevious works that have explored the evolutionary originsof religious behavior? One is King’s claim that the emotionalrelationships that monkeys and apes manifest are the deepevolutionary basis for human religious behavior. A seconddistinction is her idea that shamanism (a nearly universal“method,” not a “religion,” according to King) may wellhave served as a link between the evolved prehistoric stateof human empathy and the late Paleolithic practice of ex-pressing supernatural ideas and imagination through art. AsKing explains, “Complex, symbol-mediated behavior wasemerging at a new pace [at places like Lascaux] and on abigger scale than ever before; life was changing everywherein Europe, and some of those changes related directly tothe origins of religion” (p. 141). A third noteworthy aspect isKing’s discussion of recent books presenting either a genetic(Dean Hamer’s The God Gene [2004]), neurological (PascalBoyer’s Religion Explained [2001]), or religion-as-adaptation(David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral [2002]) explana-tion of religious behavior. She is critical (rightly) of all three,but it is difficult to see how much her model really differsfrom that of Wilson’s. Essentially, both she and Wilson con-struct models in which religious behavior (King’s sense ofbelongingness expanding) evolves over time and is selectedfor (grows) because it works to enhance a group’s survival.

In summary, this book is a nice addition to the bodyof research dealing with the evolutionary origin of religiousbehavior but is hardly the final one that will be written onthe subject.

REFERENCES CITEDBoyer, Pascal

2001 Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of ReligiousThought. New York: Basic Books.

Hamer, Dean H.2004 The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes.

New York: Doubleday.Wilson, David Sloan

2002 Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Natureof Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tibetan Borderlands. P. Christiaan Klieger, ed. PIATS2003: Tibetan Studies Proceedings of the Tenth Seminarof the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Ox-ford, 2003. Volume 10(2). Brills Tibetan Studies Library.Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill Academic Press, 2006. 256 pp.

HEIDI SWANKUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas

This edited volume highlights two current shifts in Tibetanstudies: a focus on marginal communities (geographic andotherwise) and a move toward greater engagement withcritical and social theories. The former is a response to thepreponderance of work in Tibetan studies that centers onthe people and history of Tibet’s three main provinces. Thelatter is a step toward making Tibetan studies of greaterinterest to scholars with similar theoretical—although not

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geographic—concerns. This volume is part of an ongoing ef-fort to bring Tibetan studies into greater engagement withtheorists working in other parts of the globe. Despite theuneven quality of these contributions, this collection sig-nificantly contributes to that effort.

I discerned three thematic threads organizing this vol-ume: (1) theories and concepts, (2) social institutions, and(3) shifting identities. The first—theories and concepts—is addressed in the chapters by Sara Schneiderman, MarkTurin, and Dibyesh Anand, which start off the book. Schnei-derman’s chapter complicates the notion of “ethnicity” bysuggesting that, as a dynamic system of inequality, eth-nicity is simultaneously negotiated by dominant and op-pressed segments of a society. Taking a linguistic turn,Turin offers that the common practice of extending linguis-tic classification, here Tibeto-Burman, to speakers of theselanguages results in treatment of diverse peoples as a ho-mogenous cultural group. Anand’s study of 20th-centuryarchived pictures and documents about Tibet and borderareas contributes to a larger project within Tibetan Stud-ies of critiquing Orientalist notions of the Tibetan plateauas Shangri-la. Work such as Donald Lopez’s Prisoners ofShangri-La (1998) and Thierry Dodin and Heinz Rather’sImagining Tibet (2001) are part of this larger project. Anandsuggests that framing Tibet as utopia provides the Westwith a backdrop for a reflexive critique of its values andsociety.

A second thread—social institutions—is addressed inwork by Feranda Pirie and Geoff Childs. Both studies high-light changes to social institutions along Tibet’s borders.Pirie suggests disputes and dispute resolution, long viewedfrom the secular perspective of maintaining village order,are moving from village-based councils into hands of for-mal institutions. Childs’s study examines shifts in the insti-tution of the family, suggesting that differences in numberof illegitimate births reflect the class composition of Tibetanexile communities and their integration into South Asiansocieties.

The final theme in this volume addresses issues ofidentity, an area of study receiving much attention in Ti-betan studies. Among these studies, there are two sub-themes: identities shifting toward greater affiliation withTibet and those shifting away. Ernestine McHugh’s, MariellePrins’s, and Jan Magnusson’s chapters investigate commu-nities seeking greater affiliation with Tibet. Magnusson’sand McHugh’s work highlight the roles of political move-ments and policy, respectively, in reintegrating Tibetan reli-gious and social conceptions of identity. Prins underscoresthe importance of Tibetan myth and folktales to identity(re)negotiation. In Sikkim, however, identity negotiationendeavors to project identities distinct from those of Tibetand Tibetan refugees. Anna Balikci-Denjongpa contributesto this argument through a study of religious space thatis distinctly local, while Vibha Arora presents conflictingnotions of Lhopo and Sikkimese identity from the perspec-tives of the Lhopo themselves and Western depictions ofthis community.

As an examination of Tibetan borderlands, this col-lection covers much of the border Tibet shares with sur-rounding regions and countries. Studies by Pirie, Arora, andBalikci-Denjonpa include areas at the Indian border, whileTurin, Childs, and McHugh work at the Tibet-Nepal bor-der. P. Christiaan Klieger’s work, criticizing the exoticiza-tion of a remote Tibeto-Burman speaking community, cen-ters on Myanmar’s border with Tibet. Prins’s and Wim vanSpengen’s studies focus on border communities between Ti-bet and China. Lastly, Magnusson’s work in Pakistan con-tributes to the notion of borderlands as at times politicallyand geographically discontinuous. Given the often cross-border concerns of this volume, however, I found it remark-able that none of the authors’ perspectives addressed issuesof transnationalism.

As this volume is seeking to increase Tibetan studies’engagement with the larger scholarly field, I am surprisedby the continued use of the Wyle system of RomanizingTibetan. There are several Romanization systems for rep-resenting Tibetan phonologically, one of which is TDHLSimplified, developed through the Tibetan and HimalayanDigital Library. Yet this volume still relies on a system thatincludes the many graphs that are written but not pro-nounced, making studies using Wylie inaccessible to non-Tibetan speakers.

Despite unevenness of contributions and other con-cerns voiced here, this volume makes some significant con-tributions to Tibetan studies and anthropology through itsexamination of border communities and focus on engaginglarger theoretical issues.

REFERENCES CITEDLopez, Donald

1998 Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dodin, Thierry, and Heinz Rather2001 Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies.

Boston: Wisdom.

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. JeffreyJ. Kripal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.575 pp.

SARAH M. PIKECalifornia State University, Chico

As scholars of the New Age movement well know, Esalen In-stitute on the Big Sur coast of California has played a pivotalrole in shaping the alternative fringe of the U.S. religiouslandscape since the 1960s. But historian of religions JeffreyJ. Kripal makes a convincing case in this definitive study ofEsalen: that the hot springs conference center so often sen-sationalized in the news for its encounter groups and sexualadventurousness has been at the heart of a historically andpolitically important movement to create a quintessentially“American” religion.

As Kripal sees it, the “religion of no religion” is the moreserious counterpart to the current proclivity of many livingin the United States to be “spiritual but not religious.” He


points out that “Esalen has provided real institutional sup-port for an emerging worldview not provided by either theuniversities, with their reason, or the churches, with theirfaith” (p. 442). And more importantly, “the religion of noreligion” has as one of its main sources of inspiration thegradual translation of Asian Tantric ideas and practices intoa U.S. vernacular. Kripal’s account, informed by his back-ground in Tantric studies, of how Esalen fused Asian tradi-tions with a U.S. spiritual quest is one of the book’s signifi-cant contributions.

Amusing anecdotes interspersed with philosophicaldiscussions and accounts of esoteric mystical experiencesmake the 500-plus page story of Esalen an enjoyable andinformative read. Esalen hosting a drunken Boris Yeltsin in1989, cantankerous gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls slappingthe young Carlos Castaneda to make a point about “reality,”and another young writer, Hunter Thompson, charging atEsalen’s founders with a shotgun in hand are just a few ofmy favorite passages. Esalen’s importance as a site for in-tellectual, artistic, and therapeutic creativity is reflected inthe many eccentric and visionary “door openers” who havebeen connected to Esalen: to name just a few, artists andmusicians like Joan Baez and George Harrison; body workerIda Rolf; Episcopal Bishop James Pike; physicist FritjofCapra; and writers Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and AldousHuxley.

Like the volume of essays on Esalen, On the Edge of theFuture (2005), which Kripal edited with Glenn W. Shuck,this book unapologetically privileges intellectual historyover everyday practice. Kripal brings up the Rorschach orinkblot analogy for Esalen favored by cofounder RichardPrice: Price originally used the analogy to make the pointthat he viewed Esalen through the influential texts andideas of Tantra and through his friendship with MichaelMurphy, the other Esalen founder, who wrote many booksabout the ideas embodied by Esalen.

As Kripal himself points out, this textually based per-spective has its blind spots. Although Esalen seminar leadersand researchers are a talented bunch, we hear more abouttheir grand ideas than about everyday life and more abouttexts than individual and communal rites at Esalen, suchas the full-body contemplative massage. Kripal notes thatEsalen’s baths are its central ritual space and that the focusof both ritual space and ritual practice at Esalen is on heal-ing and transformation. Transformation is a central themeof the book, but healing and ritual practices receive littletheoretical attention.

Some readers may also be deterred by the fact thatmuch of this study is about the lives and ideas of influen-tial white men. Kripal admits this problem without beingdefensive, amusedly mentioning the graffiti he noticed onEsalen’s entry sign: “jive shit for rich white folk” (p. 399).He argues that Esalen differed from many other male-runreligious movements, especially many of the new religiousmovements of the 1960s and 1970s, in its ongoing self-criticism and antiauthoritarian slogans like “no one cap-tures the flag” (p. 8).

Like Esalen itself, Kripal does not ignore contentiousissues, such as the struggle for gender equity. But the bookis an ode to Esalen, if a scholarly one. Kripal admits thathis broader utopian agenda is “the spiritual potentialities ofAmerican democracy” (p. 10) in the tradition of NathanielEmerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Thisgoal is perhaps best seen in one of the most important dis-coveries of Kripal’s research: Esalen’s role in citizen diplo-macy with Russia, supported by U. S. politicians, includingRonald Reagan. By tracking Esalen’s indirect influence onending the Cold War, to give one example, Kripal’s studysucceeds admirably in breaking down stereotypes aboutEsalen “hippies” and supporting his contention that spir-itual seeking can be compatible with science and politics.

REFERENCE CITEDKripal, Jeffrey J., and Glenn W. Shuck, eds.

2005 On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution ofAmerican Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

“When Women Unite!” The Making of the Anti-LiquorMovement in Andhra Pradesh, India. Marie Larsson.Stockholm: Universitet Service, 2006. 274 pp.

ISABELLE CLARK-DECESPrinceton University

This book recounts a story that many readers will find eth-ically pleasing. It tells how, in 1991, a group of poor ruralwomen from the District of Nellore in the South Indian stateof Andhra Pradesh drove the liquor contractors out of theirvillage to stop their men from buying and abusing alcoholicbeverages. These women’s actions launched the Anti-ArrackMovement, which in January 1995 succeeded in enforcingthe prohibition of alcohol in Andhra Pradesh. The bookretraces the origin and development of this movement, an-alyzing the ways in which voluntary organizations, politi-cians, and liquor traders either supported or opposed it.

First, author Marie Larsson reviews Indian social move-ments from the colonial period onward to show howwomen’s agitation against intoxicating beverages has deephistorical roots in India. As she recounts the specific events(the literacy campaign, in particular) that led underprivi-leged women to mobilize against liquor in Andhra Pradesh,Larsson considers the changing roles of men and womenin rural areas. To her the “gender of drinking” (Telugu menbooze while women usually refrain) and the abuses sufferedby women at the hands of drunken husbands explain whyTelugu women from all classes, castes, and creeds “united”against liquor traders.

Next Larsson shows how urban, middle-class activistscoordinated the actions of the Anti-Arrack Movement atstate level, translating its aims in terms of concepts (drawnfrom Marxist, feminist, or Gandhianist theories) that facil-itated collective action. She describes the businesspeopleand state agents who became the movement’s “advocates,adversaries and beneficiaries,” showing how the boundary

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between foe and friend fluctuated as politicians, govern-ment officials, and various liquor traders struggled overcollective interests and identities. At the beginning of themovement, for example, the state was dependent on rev-enue from liquor to finance its welfare schemes. Because ofthe protests against arrack, however, politicians soon real-ized that a ban on alcohol was an important issue in the elec-tion campaign, which finally led to the introduction of totalprohibition by the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in early 1995.Two years later, the new leader of the TDP withdrew theban because of a World Bank (one of the largest lenders inIndia) report that the alcohol embargo was a big loss to theexchequer. In a final chapter, Larson documents how themedia coverage and the gathering of participants in publicmeetings, demonstrations, and sit-ins (what she calls “rit-uals of dissent”) were essential in constructing a commonidentity and an “imagined community” of protest.

This is a well-organized book, and its argument thatcontemporary movements, no matter how localized (as wasthe antiliquor movement of Andhra Pradesh), are shapedby larger global processes is well supported by the ethnog-raphy. My main criticism is that Larsson idealizes the move-ment, emphasizing the sharing of aspirations and aims atthe expenses of factions and conflicts. To be fair, Larssondoes bring up the divisions between the folks who sup-ported violence and the folks who did not, between people’sloyalties to their movement organizations and the largerstruggle against alcohol, and between NGOs and volun-teers. But as the book’s title suggests (When Women Unite!),Larsson’s narrative thrives on “feeling of togetherness.” Itsposition is actually partisan, and this remains true even af-ter when the press, the politicians, and the women them-selves seem to let go or lose interest in the temperance cause.Moreover, despite the fact that the total prohibition was par-tially relaxed in 1997 and free licenses were introduced ayear later, Larsson cannot bring herself to “end the accountof the anti-liquor agitation with breakdown and defeat”(p. 248). Her inability to come to terms with the growingconsumption of liquor in Andhra Pradesh accounts for herdefinition of a social movement: a “process, or a sequence ofreactions, rather than a fixed organization and mass mobi-lization” (p. 17). Larsson can neither accept the movement’scollapse nor standstill; she wants the struggle against alco-hol to go on.

The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center. Stephen H. Lekson, ed.Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2006. 550 pp.

BARBARA J. MILLSUniversity of Arizona

This is a landmark book. It synthesizes the results of the lastgreat archaeological project that may ever be conducted inChaco Canyon. Starting in 1971, the National Park Serviceconducted a multiyear excavation and analysis project thatresulted in the expenditure of about six million dollars and

an impressive list of publications. The project was also thebasis for training a generation of Chaco scholars, many ofwhom participated in the writing of this book. Because ofpersonnel changes, it looked like there would be no majoroverview of the results. Happily, this book and the confer-ences and publications that preceded it as part of the “ChacoSynthesis Project” found a champion in Stephen Lekson,its central organizer. Several conferences were organizedaround key themes. Most of these were separately published(appendix A of the volume reviewed here provides detailson each). A large capstone conference was held at the Uni-versity of New Mexico in 2002 and a smaller Advanced Sem-inar in 2004 at the School of American Research (now theSchool of Advanced Research for the Human Experience).

The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon includes chapters bymost of the organizers of each of the thematic confer-ences, supplemented by additional chapters to providebetter regional, macroregional, and historical context, anintroduction by Lekson, and a concluding chapter by LynneSebastian. It is a grand pyramid scheme, but in this case, itbenefits everyone involved. The importance of the volumeis not only that it summarizes the results of the various con-ferences but also that the authors were given a chance toreconsider their conclusions, place them in wider perspec-tive, and compare with the others. A master Chaco timelinewas produced, which is included as a series of foldout pagesin the volume, showing changes in material culture, flora,fauna, demography, climate, building episodes, and manyother characteristics. In addition to the 12 chapters and thetimeline, there are 65 figures, eight color plates, and twoappendices.

The chapters that discuss the results of the thematicconferences are stand-alone works but remain best readwith the publications that came out of those conferences.These include H. Wolcott Toll’s chapter on “The Organi-zation of Production”; W. James Judge and Linda Cordell’son “Society and Polity”; Lekson, Tom Windes, and PeterMcKenna’s on “Chaco Architecture”; and John Kantner andKeith Kintigh’s on “The Chaco World.” In each case, thesechapters provide new insights since their respective publi-cations, although their real strength is in how they providesuccinct overviews of their themes.

Other chapters provide historical and regional contextto Chaco. A chapter by Richard Wilshusen and Ruth VanDyke looks at Chaco’s beginnings, bringing out how thefootprint of Chaco’s diversity can be carefully traced ow-ing to the quality and quantity of past archaeological re-search. Their discussion of origins combined with the graphin Toll’s chapter (figure 4.1) on the fluctuating percent-ages of imports through time, the chapter by Kantner andKintigh on the ups and downs of communities throughoutthe Chaco region, and two chapters by Lipe and Duff withtheir views from the north and the south all show how his-torically contingent and cyclic Chaco’s trajectory was.

If one reads the volume from cover to cover, there isa point at which one seems enmeshed in the details ofChacoan archaeology without much comparison to areas


outside the Southwest. This is made up for in two of the laterchapters, Ben Nelson’s on “Mesoamerican Objects and Sym-bols in Chaco Canyon Contexts” and Sebastian’s final chap-ter, “Chaco Synthesis.” Nelson uses putative Mesoamericanobjects found at Chaco to talk about the networks of ac-quisition, distinguishing among objects with different ori-gins. He draws on Mary Helms’s ideas about how distantobjects are used in ideologies of power. His argument is wellthought out, but the focus on these objects separates themfrom the use of other objects that were acquired at closerdistances but were also part of the geographies of ritual andpower critical to Chaco leadership and social organization.In addition, one major class of long-distance objects, shelltrumpets, is excluded from his discussion, yet there are moreof these from Chaco than any other site in the Southwestwith the exception of Casas Grandes.

Sebastian’s final chapter is a tour de force. It providesnot only an alternative interpretation on Chaco leader-ship but makes the most general contribution of all. In theSouthwest, Chaco is an anomaly: a historical phenomenonthat we can track with so much detail but about which no-body seems to agree. Sebastian takes up the challenge ofsynthesizing the project results by showing us how leader-ship strategies may have been constituted at Chaco withoutrelying on the dichotomization of ritual versus political au-thority. Leadership was clearly based in both (as the chapterby Judge and Cordell also points out). Even though Leksonacknowledges this in his introductory chapter, his relativelystark statements that great houses were “palaces” inhabitedby “kings and queens” beg for a more comparative and nu-anced discussion, one that Sebastian’s chapter delivers. Thecontrasting interpretations of these two chapters, based onthe same data, are fascinating examples of how far we haveto go in developing models about Chaco.

There are two major disappointments to this volume.First, the single biggest fact about Chaco is only discussedin a few pages: the centrality of Pueblo Bonito, and withinBonito the concentration of nearly all of the human re-mains in two areas of Pueblo Bonito along with tremen-dous quantities of ritually retired objects. Jill Neitzel’s editedvolume, Pueblo Bonito: Center of the Chacoan World (2003),should be read along with the volume reviewed here. Theconcentration of material at Pueblo Bonito is key to Chacosocial and political organization. That many of these itemswere placed in what look like two family burial areas, in-cluding the deposition of secondary burials and ceremo-nial items, begs further discussion, as was recently pointedout by Stephen Plog and Carolyn Heitman’s contributionin another SAR volume (2005). Lekson simplifies this depo-sitional complexity by referring to “retainers” buried with“kings,” but in not considering how those deposits were cre-ated and over what period of time, he breaks the cardinalrule of archaeology: context is everything.

The other disappointment to the volume is the lackof a chapter on Indigenous perspectives about Chaco. Thiswould have been possible to do but not easy. Lekson fullyacknowledges this lack but notes that the timing and poli-

tics were not right. The absence reflects the contested natureof the Chaco past. Chaco Canyon lies in the middle of theNavajo Reservation but is also claimed by many contempo-rary Puebloan groups. There is no immediate reconciliationbetween divergent Indigenous perspectives on Chaco, andso the topic of a separate conference was dropped.

These two disadvantages of the volume are made upfor by what is currently the best synthesis of data aboutChaco. Groundwork has been laid for the future, especiallyin Sebastian’s chapter where she enumerates a series of fu-ture research questions for the next generation of scholars.Lekson is to be congratulated for carrying the project tofruition and for stimulating his many authors to have donetheir jobs so well.

REFERENCES CITEDNeitzel, Jill, ed.

2003 Pueblo Bonito: Center of the Chacoan World. Washington,DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Plog, Stephen, and Carolyn Heitman2005 Kinship and the Dynamics of the House: Rediscovering

Dualism in the Pueblo Past. In A Catalyst for Ideas: Anthropo-logical Archaeology and the Legacy of Douglas W. Schwartz.Vernon L. Scarborough, ed. Pp. 69–100. Santa Fe: School ofAmerican Research Press.

On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology ofMedicine. Roland Littlewood, ed. Walnut Creek, CA: LeftCoast Press, 2007. 225 pp.

KATHLEEN M. BUCKLEYCatholic University of America

As the study of medical anthropology increases in com-plexity, the question arises as to whether what has been re-ported among cultures are systems of medical informationthat truly exist, are only views in the mind of a few infor-mants, or are possibly inaccurate models of anthropologists.This compilation of chapters on what is “known” and “notknown” in medical anthropology adds much to the discus-sion about the limitations and meaning of information thathas been gathered related to health and illness. The firstchapter by Murray Last on “The Importance of Knowingabout Not Knowing” lays the foundation by clarifying thedifficulties of assessing medical beliefs and practices in a sys-tematic manner. Part of the challenge of finding a coherentset of ideas is often related to finding multiple practitionersin medical matters with multiple bodies of theory, some ofwhich are neither consistent nor logical. Other difficultiesin identifying a rational medical system relate to externalinfluences, such as rapid changes in technology.

As I read this book, I noted a shift between core ex-planatory models versus political, social, or economic forcesas a basis for medical systems. For example, Rene Devisch in“Feeling and Borderlinking in Yaka Healing Arts” relates theYaka notion of “illness” to conflicts with blood relations.The healing rituals that are described seek to strengthenthose kin relationships. In contrast, with the fall of com-munism and the rise of capitalism in Latvia, Vieda Skultans

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discusses the change in psychiatric consultations from onein which the provider and patient shared the negative im-pact of the harsh economic times on their psychologicalwell-being to a more hierarchical system in which providersestablish clear boundaries between themselves and patients.

The challenges of using explanatory models in medi-cal anthropology are addressed in several chapters. In thechapter titled “On ‘Medical System’ and Questions in Field-work,” Gilbert Lewis ponders how an anthropologist whois studying the medical culture of a society should putthe facts together when respondents either choose not togive explanations for illness or are simply unable to doso. In his work among the Gnau people in New Guinea,Lewis attempted to analyze their explanations for illness.Although these explanations often included factors such asfood, actions, disagreements, and spirits, he found that in57 percent of the cases the illness remained unexplained.Simon Dein in “Models and Oversystematization in Med-ical Anthropology” also discussed problems with explana-tory models because the words people say do not alwaysreflect underlying concepts, which may be more sophisti-cated than their ability to convey. Furthermore, people mayhold within themselves conflicting explanations that arenot always logical.

One jewel of a chapter in this compact book is Sjaakvan der Geest’s “Not Knowing about Defecation.” Althoughanthropologists have traditionally been intrigued by the so-cial and cultural implications of ordinary daily life, it seemsthat they have greatly overlooked the study of practicessurrounding everyday defecation. Considering the reasonswhy we do not know much about this topic may be use-ful in understanding other everyday experiences that mayhave been relatively ignored by anthropologists. The writerprovides a variety of reasons for avoidance of the topic ofdefecation ranging from the usual embarrassment, shame,and disgust that accompanies such discussions to the fear ofbeing made to look and sound ridiculous. However, the ar-gument presented is convincing in that there may be muchto be learned culturally from this generally hidden practice(a category that anthropologists usually tend to study), be-ginning with the acquisition of culture through toilet train-ing in childhood to a greater understanding of the complexrelationship between “nature” and “culture.” One wondersif there are other routine practices that are often hiddenfrom the public, such as spitting or burping, that could of-fer a greater understanding of the parallels of health andillness, privacy and community, and dirt and hygiene.

This edited compilation is a delightful text containingmuch “food for thought.” The readings range from dis-cussing the problems with current theoretical models ofmedical anthropology to the conflicts and challenges offieldwork. Whereas much of the past study of medical an-thropology has focused on informants’ ideologies, there areinherent problems with this approach, especially when ex-planations are not forthcoming or are inconsistent. It maybe best for the future of medical anthropology to be built onnew paradigms that incorporate a macro view—including

social, economic, and political influences—to obtain greatermeaning.

Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis. OrvarLofgren and Richard Wilk, eds. Copenhagen: MuseumTusculanum Press, 2006. 164 pp.

PAUL E. MURRAYBard College

As anthropologists turned a generation ago from projectsmapping, charting, and diagramming cultural behavior infavor of approaches to culture as process and practice, shiftsof analytical metaphors signaled the change of fashion.Shedding system and structure, we took on flux, liminal-ity, and discourse. The postmodern turn registered an in-sight offered decades before by Max Weber, who, notingbehavior’s embeddedness within an infinity of data, in-sisted on the essential arbitrariness of the choice of an-alytic stance. Choose a stance—or metaphor—we must,if we hope to know anything. Yet what do we know ofour chosen metaphors, their implications, their ability toinform and confine observations, and, indeed, of theiralternatives?

Orvar Lofgren and Richard Wilk’s Off the Edge accom-plishes well their stated purpose: “to illustrate how differentperspectives may enrich cultural analysis and allow a bit ofplayfulness and experimentation into the process” (p. 5).The volume presents a cornucopia of metaphors throughbrief chapters that explore the possibilities of each: for ex-ample, the cream effect, warming, smoothing, bracketing,composting, the Doppler effect, stealth, back draft, silence,and sleeping. Tom O’Dell’s “Backdrafts” calls attention totensions that build inconspicuously beneath “a facade ofstability and continuity” (p. 113). Lars-Eric Jonsson’s “SlowMotion” recommends attending to cultural processes soslow they “seem absent or invisible” (p. 79). The collec-tion’s recurring theme is to notice cultural behaviors thatsomehow remain concealed or neglected, often because ofthe limitations of analytical fashion.

The contributors seek to expand the lexicon of cul-tural analysis by exploring the utility of words and imagesthat are themselves marginal to current professional prac-tice. The idea is to reverse the presumed usual practice ofidentifying cultural phenomena and then rooting about forapplicable labels. Lynn Akesson’s “Wasting,” for example,delves into waste and refuse as expressions of cultural or-dering. Her chapter explores the technical, practical, social,and moral dimensions of the transformations entailed inwasting for clues to understanding a range of cultural pro-cesses. She leaves readers with the suggestion of the ana-lytic power of a focus on the energy required “to keep thehidden and disgusting at distance” (p. 44). The most ef-fective chapters are those that, like Akesson’s, limit theirscope to a chosen metaphor and sketch it out in a waythat hints at possibilities. The volume’s experimental focusfades, however, for example, in Kirsti Mathiesen Hjemdahl


and Nevena Skrbic Alempijevic’s “Backlash,” where the pre-sentation of metaphor is more tightly tied to ethnographicdetail.

Collectively, the chapters serve as a form of medita-tion for the analytic imagination. The work’s greatest util-ity is likely to be discovered from a relatively aimless strollthrough its linguistic byways, including the checklist ofadditional metaphors attached by the editors to their in-troduction. Its unexpected pleasures carry the potential ofsnapping social researchers out of the mesmerizing effects ofprofessional jargon. Here is a volume to place in the handsof students when they become overcommitted to trendytheories.

Here, as well, is a place to rediscover the possibilitiesof good writing for ethnography. Kathleen Stewart’s beauti-fully written “Still Life” speaks of the “rhythms of flow andarrest” that constitute “ordinary life” and presents severalrichly described moments. Appreciation for mundane de-tail, so fundamental to ethnographic practice, often fails tofind its way into ethnographic reports. Reverence for the or-dinary in human life flows from a deeply embodied aware-ness of our humanity. Jojada Verrips’s “Aisthesis and An-aesthesia” calls for a renewed “aisthesis,” a more sensitiveawareness of the somatic basis of reality in our use of all ofour senses and emotional capacities. The habitual “ocular-centric” focus on mind and reason fostered in the socialsciences, Verrips suggests, profoundly limits the perceptionof social realities. He recognizes the limitations that inherein traditional academic languages to engage and convey anauthentically aisthetic encounter with reality and suggeststhat the effort to do so will require a “new literary turn inanthropology” (p. 33).

This engaging volume would have been well served bythe inclusion of some bibliographic recollection of otherswho have worked the same or parallel paths. Stanley Dia-mond’s ethnographic poetry and Paul Stoller’s observationson the senses in ethnography come to mind. It remains tobe seen whether cultural analysis will realize such changeby way of “slow motion” or “back draft.”

Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an In-donesian Archipelago. Celia Lowe. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2006. 196 pp.

ERIN P. RILEYSan Diego State University

The last two decades have witnessed a considerable amountof scholarship that problematizes the idea of “natural”nature and the science behind it. Issues of social jus-tice, empowerment, knowledge, North–South relations,and biopower are central to this work. Celia Lowe con-tributes to this scholarship with this ethnographic accountof Togean biodiversity conservation in 1990s Indonesia,Wild Profusion. As a science studies scholar, Lowe seeks tounravel how and by whom biodiverse nature was made inthe Togean islands. At the same time, she employs postcolo-

nial theory to situate her narrative within the context of theNorth–South hemispheric divide.

Lowe’s research in the Togean islands of Sulawesi cul-minates in a story that tells of the goals and interests of In-donesian scientists, the experiences of the Sama people andtheir own understanding of nature and nation, and of To-gean nature itself. In the first chapter, Lowe discusses howthe transformation of the Togean macaque from a “newform” to an “endemic species” was a strategic means forIndonesian scientists to legitimize a Togean conservationproject that would attract both international recognition oftheir expertise and significant international funding. Chap-ter 2 explores the process by which the Togean people them-selves became objects of study, reflecting a “transnationalsocial turn in biodiversity conservation” (p. 55).

Chapters 3 and 4 begin the story again, as emergingfrom the Sama people and their natures. Lowe illustratesthe interconnectedness of the land and sea and the inter-face of health, the body, and Togean nature in the lives ofthe Sama. Chapter 5 describes the live fish trade and theuse of cyanide as a “cosmopolitan enterprise” in which thedesignation of Togean people as suku terasing (those with-out development) results in the association of Sama ethnicidentity with environmental destruction. The final chapteracts as an epilogue to her story by considering what Togeanbiodiversity conservation has and will become in the post-Suharto, post–9/11, decentralized Indonesia of the 21st cen-tury. She envisions the demarcation of the Togean islandsas a national park in 2004 as an ending to her story but alsoas a beginning to a new one in which “new identities andnew natures will emerge” (p. 155).

To study Indonesian encounters with nature, Lowechooses to employ an analytic of “reason,” asserting thatit is problematic to describe Sama peoples’ way of knowingthrough the analytic of “indigenous knowledge” because“Sama knowledges have cosmopolitan dimensions that alsodo not fit within the ambit of indigenaeity” (p. 20). The ra-tionale for this choice, however, becomes somewhat diffusewhen, in her effort to disentangle Sama identity from en-vironmental destruction, she invokes the very analytic sheseeks to avoid: “whenever I fished with Jafir and others andobserved them fishing selectively for Napoleon, they em-ployed an ecological knowledge that enabled fish catch with-out poison” (p. 144, emphasis added).

Her rationale for an analytic of “reason” also rests onits ability to stimulate reflection beyond the notion of clearwinners or losers in transnational conservation. Yet the re-sulting message of her analysis on Indonesian environmen-tal law is that the big guys win and the little guys lose; Samapeople become “victims of degraded environments as wellas assumed perpetrators, while local bureaucrats and outsideentrepreneurs became well-off in the process” (p. 138). Herargument might have been strengthened by greater consid-eration of the similarity and difference among the Sama.Lowe acknowledges variability in opinions in the use ofcyanide among the Sama, but she never presents us with“cultural logics” behind this variability.

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A final quibble concerns the minimal treatment de-voted to an important point made in the preface: the storyof Wild Profusion is not antinature. Although she briefly ad-dresses a similar idea in the final chapter (i.e., the goal ofscience studies is not to claim that science is not “true”),explicit demonstration of this within the narrative wouldhave been a powerful means to debunk the notion of a “so-cial siege of nature.”

Despite these limitations, Wild Profusion is an eloquent,insightful narrative that employs a pleasing mix of histori-cal accounts, critical analysis, personal adventure, and oralfolklore. The effect of this blend places the reader front rowand center along her path between the human and wild pro-fusion of Indonesian biodiversity. Although I am uncertainwhether her ultimate goal of “introducing new possibilitiesof thought” will be broadly realized (i.e., accessible to allscholars of nature), this ethnography will most definitelyappeal to scholars and advanced students of the anthropol-ogy of conservation and postcolonial science studies.

Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, andSocial Change in Highland Ecuador. Barry J. Lyons.Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 350 pp.

LYNN A. MEISCHSaint Mary’s College of California

Haciendas in South America functioned as powerful hubsof rural social and economic life from the colonial era tothe late 20th century. Given their importance, it is sur-prising that ethnographers have paid them so little atten-tion. Barry Lyons fills a large gap with his excellent ethnog-raphy on the changes in the lives of indigenous workers(Runa, Quichua for an indigenous person, sometimes usedas a plural noun) on the former Hacienda Monjas Corralin Chimborazo, Ecuador. Monjas Corral was owned by theCatholic Church but administered by a series of renters. Un-til Ecuador’s 1964 agrarian reform, most of the hacienda’sworkers were huasipungeros: Runa who owed the haciendaheavy labor obligations in return for the right to farm aplot of land, collect firewood, and pasture their animals onhacienda property.

Lyons examines how indigenous peasants “who wereharshly oppressed and exploited” experienced, respondedto, made sense of, and now remember their experienceson the hacienda (p. 4). He frames his work with a care-ful critique of overly mechanical applications to the Andesof James Scott’s and Antonio Gramsci’s works. Although hefinds their ideas valuable, Lyons opts for more nuanced usesof resistance, coercion, and hegemony to examine three im-portant dimensions of hacienda social life: redistribution,reciprocity, and “the respect complex.” The last he definesas “a set of understandings, practices, and relationship cen-tered around moral regulation, elder-junior hierarchies, andnotions of ‘respect’ ” (p. 21). Young couples gained respectby sponsoring fiestas and being moral, respectful people.Runa elders were often hacienda overseers and collaborated

with hacienda officials in inculcating the importance of re-spect. Discipline included deferential greetings to haciendaand religious authorities, occasional beatings, and ritualwhippings followed by a blessing (pascuanchina) at Easteradministered by a Runa elder, a religious and moral lessonthat reinforced the hacienda hierarchy.

If Runa were enculturated to respect their elders, someof whom held such responsible positions on the haciendaas overseers, this worked to the owners’ and renters’ advan-tage (p. 81). Indeed, some Runa recognized the structuralambiguity of an overseer’s position and refused to acceptthe job. Lyons notes that “what stands out in accounts ofthe hacienda period is the constant tension between thehacienda’s labor demands and people’s household needs”(p. 144).

Liberation theology and Riobamba’s “Bishop of the In-dians” Leonidas Proano come into play when Proano de-cided to stop renting out the hacienda in 1962 and of-fered land to the Runa. Lyons’ arrives at some unexpectedfindings regarding this development. The huasipungeros re-fused the offer when the diocese proposed in 1963 that theyform a co-op and buy hacienda property. They distrustedthe church’s intention and worried about being confinedto small plots and losing access to pastures. Their ignoranceof agrarian reform and the end of the hacienda system ledthem to resist when it was not in their best interests to doso.

A contributing factor in this decision was the Runas’complete loss of historical memory, which jibes with myexperience in the Otavalo area. Monjas Corral Runa had noknowledge of the Incas, that the land they were workingon had once belonged to them, or, apparently, that therehad been indigenous uprisings in the region in the colo-nial era in 1760, 1764, 1778, 1781, 1797, and 1803. Theirsubservient status thus seemed to them to be eternal andnatural (p. 69). Obviously, it served the hacienda to keepRuna ignorant. Many older Otavalos have a similar lack ofhistorical knowledge; it is the younger generation and mem-bers of Ecuador’s indigenous rights movement who havelearned indigenous history. Eventually some Monjas CorralRuna acquired hacienda land. Lyons carefully analyzes theinterplay of liberation theology, the state, Protestant evan-gelizing, and emerging indigenous federations in shapingthe changes in Chimborazo that followed agrarian reform.

This work has many strengths, including Lyons’s atten-tion to gender issues. His oral histories include women, andhe examines how gender affected Runas’ hacienda experi-ences. Females, for example, were vulnerable to sexual ex-ploitation by hacienda officials. However, wives also turnedto hacienda officials for protection against spousal abuse.

Lyons’s ethnography is theoretically and ethnograph-ically grounded, well written, and carefully argued, withparticular attention to indigenous voices even when, or per-haps especially when, they confounded his expectations. Itis mandatory reading for anyone interested in indigenousissues and recent Ecuadorian history. One minor point: Lla-mas were not brought to Ecuador by the Incas (p. 37) but,


rather, were introduced in the first millennium B.C.E. (seeBruhns 1994:169).

REFERENCE CITEDBruhns, Karen Olsen

1994 Ancient South America. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Mestizo in America: Generations of Mexican Ethnicityin the Suburban Southwest. Thomas Macias. Tucson:University of Arizona Press, 2006. 175 pp.

ANA M. JUAREZTexas State University, San Marcos

Mestizo in America provides a fresh and timely perspectiveon a classic sociological topic (assimilation and accultura-tion) by asserting that the well-known Latin American con-cept of “mestizaje” (sociocultural and racial synthesis andhybridity) does not stop at the Mexican border but, rather,can be applied to Mexican American racial-ethnic and cul-tural identity and integration in the United States. Drawingon a quantitative analysis of the Current Population Survey,and an analysis of 50 structured interviews with third- andfourth-generation Mexican Americans in Phoenix, Arizona,and San Jose, California, Thomas Macias joins the debatesabout the process of immigrant assimilation.

The latest generation of assimilation scholars, stilltrained primarily in sociology, suggest that immigrants canbe fully assimilated yet still practice symbolic or optionalethnicity. Macias successfully shows that while MexicanAmerican patterns of social integration sometimes abide bythat of other Euro-American immigrants, they also docu-ment a clear challenge to the hegemony of “optional” orsymbolic ethnicity. Unfortunately, although Macias’ sug-gestion to use mestizaje to further the analysis of socialintegration is brilliant, the execution of the model doesnot quite live up to its potential. The majority of the bookreads like classic assimilation (or segmented assimilation)analysis, with less emphasis on the process of mestizaje.Moreover, many cultural studies scholars might questionthe novelty of integrating into a society while maintain-ing specific cultural and ethnic practices and identities andwonder about the absence of scholars like Renato Rosaldoand terms like transculturation. Nonetheless, Macias’s bookis a solid and essential contribution to Latino–Latina andChicano–Chicana studies. It will appeal to various audi-ences, including experts searching for recent findings andtheoretical innovation, scholars new to the topic, policy an-alysts in immigration and other areas, and students of alllevels from undergraduates to professional researchers.

The first two chapters distinguish various factors inMexican American and Euro-American social integrationand offer a somewhat superficial and “thin” analysis of “cul-tural resources” such as food, religion, gender roles, lan-guage, and media, based on his interviews. A third chap-ter examines Mexican American work and ethnic organiza-tions within the frameworks of structural and segmented

assimilation. Chapter 4, based on the quantitative analy-sis of data that is disaggregated by generation, native born,and foreign born, provides new, detailed, and original dataabout Mexican Americans and intermarriage and will be es-sential reading for scholars interested in this population.Concluding that ongoing immigration affects group sizeand inequality, thus making Mexican Americans more likea “multiple generation permanent minority” than assimi-lation theory suggests (p. 93), Macias finally highlights therole of race. Returning to his qualitative interviews in chap-ter 5, he describes and analyzes the ethnic terms used by hisparticipants and shows the importance of outside expecta-tions about Mexican Americans: almost all participants de-scribed being “assigned” or “wrongly assigned” ethnic iden-tities. Macias suggests that racial and phenotypic differencesand the stark reality of ongoing immigration limit MexicanAmericans’ ability to “mythologize” and romanticize theirheritage.

It is in chapter 6 that Macias offers his most innovativework on Mexican American integration. Briefly describingthe Spanish colonial casta system as simultaneously racistyet fluid, he suggests that movements like the Mexican Rev-olution and the Chicano movement drew on notions of“mestizaje” to challenge the social structure. Presenting atypology of mestizaje, he uses variables such as stability ofthe political climate, amount of inequality, and size of themestizo population to contrast the two countries. Althoughan original and provocative strategy, Macias’ initial typol-ogy suffers from several weaknesses. The racial underpin-nings of mestizaje are only made explicit for Mexico, andthere is no temporal overlap between his characterizationof Mexico (1600–1930) and the United States (1930–2006).The broad historical outline also overlooks some impor-tant considerations: for example, although mestizaje wasthe “master status” (p. 123) of the Mexican Revolution, itwas only one of several competing ideologies that split thecountry. Furthermore, while racial-ethnic categories may befluid, racist ideologies continue to thrive in Latin America.Also, while mestizos are and have been a small part of theU.S. population (p. 125), this is in part because dominantconstructions of race in the United States did not focus onracial mixture but, instead, were based on more dichoto-mous or binary categories. Despite these problems, Maciasrecognizes that Latinos construct more ambiguous and flex-ible categories than do other U.S. citizens and that theycould lead the way in helping other U.S. citizens recognizethe reality of mestizaje. Macias is right to replace assimila-tion with mestizaje on this side of the border, and the keywill be to continue not only to incorporate the notion ofhybridity and mixing but also to emphasize differences inracial-ethnic and social status inequalities.

The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violenceat Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown. Seth Mallios.Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 150 pp.

JANET E. RAFFERTYMississippi State University

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Marcel Mauss’s most influential idea—that gift giving andreciprocity are crucial in forming and maintaining alliancesin small-scale, nonindustrialized economies—forms the ba-sis for the arguments made in this book. The author, SethMallios, holds that such gift-based interactions character-ized the Middle Atlantic Algonquian groups with whom theearliest Spanish and English missionaries and settlers camein contact. The Europeans, in contrast, came from societieswith commercial economies. He argues that the misunder-standings that arose as a result of these different culturalframes led to conflict and eventual abandonment of thesettlements at Ajacan (1575–82) and Roanoke (1585–90),while Jamestown’s persistence also was in doubt from itsfounding in 1607 until 1613, the end of the period treatedby Mallios.

Mallios has devised an intriguing method to discernhow gift-based relationships turned into conflict-riddenones: analyzing surviving accounts of Indian–European in-teractions, incident by incident through time. The case ofAjacan is the least complex and most puzzling in termsof common-sense explanations. Spanish explorers in theChesapeake Bay area contacted the local Indians at Ajacanin 1561 and gave them gifts. The chief’s son (given thename Don Luis) went with the Spaniards to Mexico andSpain. He came back to his tribe with Father Segura and agroup of missionaries whom he had promised to aid in con-verting his people to Christianity. A series of imbalancedexchanges followed, with the Indians giving food and themissionaries a few trinkets. As a result, in Mallios’s view, “ingift-exchange terms, the clerics were slaves to the nativesfor offering insufficient tangible return gifts. According toSegura’s missionary socioeconomics, however, the Jesuitsowed the natives nothing. In presenting the unparalleledreligious gift of eternal salvation, the missionaries felt thatthey merited the indigenous food offering” (p. 48). Don Luisand his group moved away, so the missionaries began bar-tering for food with other groups. Thus, the situation was es-tablished that led to the missionaries’ deaths. Don Luis andhis fellow Algonquians reappeared, asked for axes to build achurch, then used them to kill the Spaniards. According toMallios’s analysis, this happened because rules of gift-basedreciprocity had been violated by the Jesuits when they em-ployed commodity exchange with other groups but failedto properly reciprocate gifts given by Don Luis’s group.

This example shows the author’s method, workingfrom a series of more or less well-attested historical events,interpreting them, imputing motives, and casting the alter-natively friendly and hostile relations between Indians andEuropeans in terms of gift giving and failures of reciprocity.This makes for a fascinating way to structure events and aninnovative way to interpret them.

The ethnohistorical research that is the basis for thesecase studies appears thorough and is presented plainly. Theusual beguilements of structural analysis—elegance, intri-cacy, neat categorization—are present. These lead the readerto believe that the researcher has achieved a new kind ofunderstanding of why events occurred as they did. An in-

terpretation is not identical to an explanation, however.The cultural rules divined from ethnohistoric data are un-verifiable; the author cannot do much beyond showing, ashe does, that the recorded events are consistent with suchrules. Also, structuralism’s reliance on cultural universals,such as gift-based exchange, glosses over the great culturalvariability that always exists, as well as discounting the im-portance of the material and economic aspects of exchange.

Mallios has written an interesting study that appliesstructural analysis ingeniously to illuminate early contactsituations. He handles historic records carefully and is sen-sitive to Indian groups’ rivalries and diversity. He also ad-mits that all societies display some combination of gift-based reciprocity and commodity transactions. This bookshows one way that an anthropologist can account forthe events discussed, which often have puzzled histori-ans. But it also shows weaknesses typical of a structural-ist approach and begs as many questions as it appears toanswer.

Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico. Joseph Masco. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2006. 425 pp.

CHRISTOPHER KELTYRice University

Joseph Masco’s Nuclear Borderlands is a great book. As thesubtitle promises, it is an ethnography of post–Cold WarNew Mexico, but it is also the kind of book one might usewith undergraduates to help them understand what anthro-pology is today and what it can do. It is clearly written;cleverly organized around its concepts, field sites, and peo-ple; and filled with conversation-starting details and com-plexity. Indeed, it is a multitalented book: it can do classicethnography (a chapter on the Pueblo Indians and their cos-mology); sociological commentary on identity (a chapteron Nuevomexicano inhabitants and workers); U.S. history(chapters on the science and strategy of the Cold War); andscience studies (a chapter on “mutation” and new formsof insect life). Even better, it is well timed; I look forwardto teaching it to my new students this fall, students whowere born in 1989 and for whom the massive, unavoidablecultural worldview in which nearly every previous livinggeneration was formed has become strangely inaccessible.What will they make of it?

Masco’s book is remarkable for the sustained way it isordered by its concepts and ideas, despite being a place-determined ethnography. The focus on Los Alamos Na-tional Laboratory (LANL) and New Mexico is inevitable,but it is the deft use of conceptual connection and story-telling that allows it to be about broader global changes andcultural logics. Concepts of secrecy, security (and hyperse-curity), mutation, econationalism, and radioactive nation-building resurface throughout the work and orient diversestories and peoples together as part of a cosmological fo-cus on the significance of the bomb. One might expect


an array of hip and emergent theorists to emblazon anaccount of post–Cold War, post–September 11 security: adab of Agamben, a soupcon of empire, but Masco is morestubborn. The only two concepts truly adequate to dis-cussing the bomb are the bomb itself: Marx’s fetish andFreud’s uncanny. For Masco, the bomb is not just one objectof study among others; it resolutely and profoundly ordersthe cultural landscape of the contemporary, both beforeand after the Cold War. Freud’s uncanny and Marx’s fetishare (modern) concepts similarly ubiquitous, determining,and misunderstood. Masco matches the bomb with its ap-propriate concepts, making fetishes and uncannies freshagain, denormalizing them the way his stories denormal-ize our experience of living in the Nuclear Borderlands. In-deed, Masco is at his best in twinning the philosophicalconcepts with stories and features of nuclear culture, as,for example, when Walter Benjamin’s discussion of shockand phantasmagoria is connected to the experience of“flashblindness” that occurs directly after seeing a nuclearexplosion.

Part 1 explores four separate groups engaged with nu-clear culture in and around LANL: the scientists at the lab;the pueblo Indians and the reservations of New Mexico; theNuevomexicano population; and the antinuclear activistswho connect their local concerns to wider social move-ments. The first part is sometimes delightfully cosmolog-ical in its focus; it ranges from the weird conundrums ofscientists’ “science-based stockpile stewardship” to the lit-eral cosmologies of the pueblo Indians and their struggleto preserve the sacred sites on the Pajarito Plateau. In ex-amining the lives of the four intersecting groups, Mascodemonstrates how to hold things apart and explore theircoexistence at the same time: the uncanny occupation of aworld transformed by the bomb permeates to the heart ofeach of these groups, even as they continue to make claimsbased on difference and equality. As Masco insists, there isno one model that would capture the lived complexity ofthe place (p. 37).

Part 2 explores the impact of the end of the Cold Waron nuclear secrecy and the biological effects of nuclear cul-ture. The Wen-Ho Lee case provides a jumping off point forexploring secrecy and “hypersecurity” inside and outsideLANL, and the ways in which these security concerns areracialized in new ways. Wildfires in 2000 provide a start-ing point for thinking through “mutation” and the newpolitical ecology of the post–Cold War world. It is in someways striking that for all the attention to “globalization”and new forms of life in anthropology, there has not beenmore obsession with the cultural significance of the Man-hattan project and its apparatus. It was, after all, the largestand most complex single industrial undertaking in history.It was completely secret and yet hysterically public. Gen-erations of people around the globe have grown up in andaround the bomb and its bizarre, “unthinkable” possibili-ties. Masco’s book should give us a way to make sense ofsomething that is far too close to everyone to miss and, yet,all too often ignored.

Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism,and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. J.Lorand Matory. Princeton: Princeton University Press,2005. 383 pp.

BAYO HOLSEYDuke University

Candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion that combines reli-gious precedents from what is today Nigeria with a myriadof other influences, is, as J. Lorand Matory notes, the lo-cus classicus for the study of the African diaspora. As such,it makes an ideal subject for his retheorization of transna-tionalism, globalization, and diaspora. In Black AtlanticReligion, Matory provides this retheorization through anengagement with an impressive array of scholarship andan ethnographically and textually grounded analysis ofcircum-Atlantic connections.

In this text—the sequel to his first book, Sex and theEmpire That Is No More (1994)—Matory makes at least fourmajor interventions. First, he argues that in contrast to thearguments of many scholars, transnationalism is not new.He forcibly and convincingly demonstrates that translocalconnections are not simply a product of the postcolonialage but, rather, that these connections have existed for cen-turies. Theorists of the African diaspora have long pointedto the massive movement of African peoples during theslave trade, thereby providing a largely unrecognized chal-lenge to contemporary literature on transnationalism. How-ever, such scholars have not tended to examine translocal-ism as an ongoing feature of the lives of black diasporicsubjects. As a result, the debate over diaspora usually con-cerns the degree to which beliefs and practices brought byenslaved people to the Americas are remembered or retainedafter the moment of rupture that their forced migration rep-resents. On the contrary, Matory argues that the connec-tions between Africa and the diaspora were not severed atthe moment of enslavement and, rather, that there has beena back-and-forth conversation across the Atlantic since the19th century.

Second, Matory argues for the inclusion of Africa in theBlack Atlantic. Traditional studies of the African diasporahave viewed Africa solely as the origin of cultural beliefsand practices in the diaspora. Matory demonstrates the dy-namism of African societies like those in Nigeria throughtheir dialogue with the African diaspora. For instance, heexamines the ways in which notions of “Yoru‘ba-ness” werecreated through a dialogue with Brazilian returnees duringthe 19th century.

Third, although many studies suggest that the mainte-nance of cultural beliefs and practices is a passive process,Matory stresses that it is highly strategic. This point is par-ticularly useful for retheorizing diaspora. Rather than view aconnection to a homeland as a fact made by history, Matoryhelps us to rethink it as an enactment by individuals andgroups. Through his analysis of the strategic use of an ongo-ing conversation, what he calls an “Afro-Atlantic dialogue,”

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Matory, in fact, creates a new model of the black diasporathat challenges both early studies of African retentions aswell as Paul Gilroy’s formulation of the “black Atlantic.”

Fourth, in elaborating on this dialogue, Matory notesthe significant role of commercial and religious elites andscholars, from the “English professors” of Brazil in the 19thcentury to more contemporary anthropologists and reli-gious leaders and the texts they created. In this way, hiswork links up well with broader discussions of black intel-lectual production. This focus is itself an important inter-vention as it uncovers the significance of literacy to themaking of the African diaspora, a rarely recognized fact.At the same time, the overall theoretical framework of thebook could be applied outside of the discourses of elites tothe conversations of ordinary religious practitioners who nodoubt also theorize the adoption of their religious practicesin ways that point to its strategic aims.

Matory’s focus on Candomble in making these argu-ments makes sense, he argues, because in diasporic commu-nities, religion operates as a “typical social glue” (p. 147).I would add to this argument that today popular culturalforms such as hip-hop also operate in this way, as do a vari-ety of public history discourses, which are certainly, in linewith Matory’s suggestion, not simply passive memories butstrategic productions.

As a renowned Africanist scholar, Matory’s attention tothe African diaspora is inspirational. His success as both anAfricanist and as a scholar of the African diaspora will hope-fully encourage scholars in both camps to read across thisacademic divide. With its many contributions, this bookshould be placed on any reading list of African studies, di-aspora studies, and globalization.

REFERENCE CITEDMatory, James Lorand

1994 Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Pol-itics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press.

Becoming Muslim: Western Women’s Conversionsto Islam. Anna Mansson McGinty. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006. 208 pp.

ROCHELLE DAVISGeorgetown University

Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe and theUnited States because of immigration and conversion. AnnaMansson McGinty explores the latter trend in a study ofnine women’s narratives about why they became Muslims.McGinty conducted interviews with six women from Swe-den and three from the United States between 1998 and2001, and she analyzes the interviews within the theoret-ical framework of psychological anthropology. All of thewomen but one had well-organized life stories and speak interms of personal agency or the hand of destiny in bringingabout their conversions. McGinty relies on “personal mod-els” as her basis for analyzing the women’s narratives. She

defines personal models as subjective phenomena: personalideas, emotions, and memories that are tied to the subjects’own “biographical idiosyncrasies” (p. 10). These personalmodels are in contrast to the “cultural model” that cogni-tive anthropology has developed to understand behavior.By examining the conversion stories through personal mod-els, the study seeks to show how the converts’ new ideas areintegrated into an “already existing cognitive framework”(p. 11) that results in “cognitive reconciliation” (p. 13). Thisreconciliation gives coherence to the women’s lives andexperiences before and after their conversions, without asignificant rupture narrative, and, thus, provides a meansto analyze “the reflective and continuous integration andreconciliation of diverse messages and representations intoa coherent ‘I’ ” (p. 13). This theoretical underpinning ofthe book is among McGinty’s strengths in this study allow-ing her to convey—effectively and without judgment—thewomen’s perspectives on the variety of issues she exploreswith them.

McGinty concludes that because of their coherentsenses of what the conversion means to them, the womenexperience a disparity between their self-image as Muslimwomen—who converted out of spiritual needs, a desire forstronger family values, a commitment to social justice, oran aspiration for women’s rights—and their negative en-counters with non-Muslim Swedes and U.S. citizens whonegatively stereotype them. Her chapter on the “looping ef-fects of meaning” (p. 127) shows how people are classifiedwithin dominant discourses, and when people change, theythus alter the meaning of the classifications. This discussionshows how the women relate their own senses of self to thesurrounding world that they feel part of, but which doesnot always include them. The Swedish women’s feelings to-ward being “Swedish” shows how the dominant discourseof what “Swedishness” means—modernity, equality, socialjustice—affects these women who are accused of betrayingthose values by becoming Muslim, yet the women still feeland identify themselves as “Swedish” who embody thosecharacteristics.

In McGinty’s discussion of gender and veiling, her anal-ysis builds on material by others who have shown how veil-ing can be both an inscription of power on women’s bod-ies as well as a potential destabilizing force to relations ofpower. Here and elsewhere, McGinty brings forth how thesewomen feel that they are embodying alternative feminini-ties as they go against the societal norms about dress andthe body in the countries they live in. Ultimately, McGintymakes sense of how her interviewees negotiate wearingthe veil in ways that are sensitive to the interviewees’ self-expression and self-conceptions.

Unfortunately, the book is marred by a frustratinglylarge number of mistakes. There are more than 25 ty-pos or missing words in the text and interview quotes(for example, “she has solution to this” [p. 149] and“my life was spiraling down hell quickly” [p. 69]). De-spite a well-informed understanding of Islam, the au-thor makes the all-too-common mistake of referring to


“Islamic friends” (the proper adjective for people is “Mus-lim,” never “Islamic” [p. 33]). Furthermore, the author as-signs pseudonyms to the women but in one interview failsto change the name, thus “outing” her informant (p. 116).The repetition of the same background information or storyalso seems a bit careless (e.g., pp. 49 and 65). Overall, thepoor quality of the editing and copyediting is surprising ina scholarly work from this publisher.

The material is rich and the author analyzes it closely,but only nine interviewees seems limited for a book-lengthtext. In addition, because McGinty only interviewed thewomen and did not interact with them in any other situ-ation, the analysis relies only on the interview transcriptswithout any contextual observations or other ethnographicmaterial. McGinty is, however, straightforward about thisaspect of her research and offers conclusions that are onlyabout these women’s personal worlds; thus, she limits heranalysis to theories of psychology, the self, and the individ-ual and their perceived relationship to society. The authordoes not generalize her findings to all Muslim converts, nordoes she make broad conclusions that overreach her mate-rial. Given the limited material she is working with and herclear approach, her conclusions and analysis seem defend-able, well-supported, and sound.

This book will interest those who work on the psycho-logical aspects of religious conversion and understandingthe self and more particularly on what it means to be aconvert to Islam in Europe and the United States. It pro-vides crucial material for understanding how Muslims are“othered” in the West, even when those Muslims are them-selves Westerners. I would recommend this book for audi-ences in upper-secondary-school and college-level courseson religion and psychology, and more generally for thoseinterested in the conversion to Islam and the multitudi-nous ways converts experience the resulting changes intheir lives.

An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politicsof Race. Heather Merrill. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2006. 257 pp.

SUSAN BRIN HYATTIndiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis

As the new millennium dawned, the world witnessedthe spectacle of immigrant riots erupting in France andEngland. One commonality among these events was thatthey involved men almost exclusively. In the media cover-age of European immigration, men appear as lawless rioterswhile women migrants are represented mostly as the pas-sive subjects of debates such as those regarding the wearingof Muslim garb in public places. On the whole, immigrantwomen seen as active agents have largely been missing fromthe public sphere.

In some respects, Heather Merrill’s book, An Alliance ofWomen, fills this gap by letting us hear the voices of some ofthe immigrant women who have journeyed mostly, but not

exclusively, from West Africa to seek work and better livesin Italy. Although Italy is not usually thought of as havingbeen a colonial power, Merrill reminds us that although itsimperial adventures were much more modest that those ofFrance or England, it also has colonial ties with Africa. And,following the work of Stuart Hall, she notes that the histor-ical domination of Africa by Europe is far broader than arethe relationships between any particular countries. Set inthe northern postindustrial landscape of Turin, once hometo the manufacture of Fiat cars, Merrill explores the rela-tionship between immigrant women and Italian women asthese two groups came together through the interventionsof a local feminist organization, Alma Mater. Establishedin 1993, Alma Mater came into existence to support immi-grant women in Turin, particularly with respect to jobs, andto facilitate “intercultural mediation.”

Although one would think that Alma Mater was the fo-cus of the book, this is actually not the case; the book is,in fact, two separate tomes that do not always mesh grace-fully. We are first introduced to Alma Mater in chapter 2,where Merrill describes the complexities of its founding andits problematic relationship with Italian feminism, migrantworkers, and local industrial (and male-dominated) politics.The organization does not really reappear in any detailedway until chapter 6, where we hear something more aboutthe immigrant women who sought assistance and solidar-ity from Alma Mater. The intervening chapters tell the storyof the development of working-class politics in Turin andof the fraught relationships between workerism, feminism,and Marxism in this industrial setting. Thus, the book is notas richly ethnographic as it might have been.

In terms of its theoretical orientation, the book artic-ulates nicely with both Marxist and poststructuralist un-derstandings of race and gender. The term scales is heavilyoverused, and the message that racial and ethnic identitiesinvolve complex intersections between the global and thelocal seems belabored (but, then again, perhaps our studentscannot hear this too often).

Merrill does have some very important points to make:in her discussion of the multiethnic neighborhood of SanSalvario, she documents the disturbing slippage that occursbetween anti-immigrant sentiment and law-and-order dis-courses, showing how immigrant communities are oftentargeted as supposed sources of crime. Her discussion of therole of NGOs (which Europeans often call the “Third Sec-tor”) doesn’t come until chapter 7; introduced earlier on,this might have served to frame and contextualize her dis-cussion of Alma Mater, which sometimes seems to lie out-side of the scope of her theoretical insights.

In her documentation of the interactions between theItalian feminists who founded Alma Mater and the immi-grant women it seeks to serve, Merrill shares some fasci-nating moments of conflict, yet it is hard to know whereMerrill herself stood in the context of these debates. Forexample, of the resentments that simmered between AlmaMater’s Italian leadership and immigrant women over thefact that most of the work available locally for immigrants

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was domestic service, Merrill writes, “In part, the tensionover this issue stems from an absence of class consciousnessamong migrant women, in contrast with an acute sense ofworkerism among a generation of Turin feminists” (p. 178).But, as Merrill also goes on to point out, most of the fe-male immigrants filling low-wage jobs in Italy come frommiddle-class backgrounds and their politics have been in-formed by postcolonial politics, not by the trade unionismof Turin. The failure of feminist movements to move be-yond the dominant middle classes in the countries wheresuch movements have been strongest has been the topic ofmuch writing, yet Merrill almost seems to share the feelingof the Turin feminists that this is a “problem” particular toTurin and that the failure to embrace feminist ideologies re-flects some weakness on the part of the immigrant women.

Toward the conclusion of her book, Merrill writes: “Theintersecting identities within Alma Mater . . . cannot be sub-sumed within any simple model of feminist politics . . . AlmaMater is far more complex than this, requiring an account-ing for vast and continually shifting differences in a world ofbroad and intersecting relations on multiple scales” (p. 188).That complexity of identities comes through most clearlywhen Merrill allows us to see that for all of their good in-tentions and relatively politically progressive politics, Ital-ian feminists are, like all of us, enmeshed in the contra-dictions of this present moment. Although they want toact as allies to immigrant women, these Italian womenalso seem frustrated by what they perceive as the never-ending “needs” of such women. It is within this debate thatechoes of the many “big” issues of our time—such as thelimits of multiculturalism as state policy or the degree towhich services should be provided by governments, ratherthan by volunteers—can be heard. Had Merrill given overmore of her book to a critical analysis of these encounters,she would have produced an even stronger contribution tocurrent work on gender and immigration in Europe andelsewhere.

The Language of Law School: Learning To “Think Likea Lawyer.” Elizabeth Mertz. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2007. 308 pp.

GREGORY M. MATOESIANUniversity of Illinois, Chicago

How do law school students become lawyers? What do theylearn and how do they learn it? In this eagerly awaited book,Elizabeth Mertz provides an in-depth analysis of how lawschool professors socialize their first-year law students to“think like lawyers.” Mertz is both a professor of law and alinguistic anthropologist, and she gives a rigorous insiders’account of discursive socialization in the law school class-room, focusing on language use and linguistic ideology. Al-though numerous studies have analyzed socialization in lawschool, this is the first study concerned with the situateddetails of discourse practices. She makes an impressive casethat “learning to think like a lawyer” inheres in dynamicrituals of learning to talk like a lawyer.

The book is organized around eight chapters and a con-clusion. Chapter 1, “Entering the World of U.S. Law,” intro-duces us to legal epistemology (what counts as legal knowl-edge) and the transformation in reasoning that professorsimpart to students, a legal worldview that filters, bleaches,and erases social and moral contexts to reach a core, puta-tively “neutral,” legal doctrine. For instance, in response toa student’s complaint regarding a legal case about salespeo-ple lying, “That’s not fair,” the professor replies, “No, no.Fairness is not something that I accept as a general proposi-tion” (p. 121). Chapter 2 provides an overview of languageuse and linguistic ideology in the classroom, in particular,how the Socratic Method is organized through language andlinguistic ideologies to constitute a specialized genre of dis-course, one that structures the authority of law and dialogicrelations in the adversary system. What is most fascinatinghere is how the language of law school dissects everydaynarratives to gain a detached and selective version of le-gal facts and realities. Chapter 3 covers the methodologyand data for the analysis: participant characteristics, inter-views, and the transcription of lessons in first-year contractscourses in eight different law schools ranging from elite toregional and local schools in the United States.

The next three chapters examine the contextualizationof language use in the classroom. In chapter 4, “LearningTo Read Like a Lawyer,” Mertz guides us through the (legal)metalinguistic processes that instruct students in reading le-gal texts (e.g., issues like precedent) and how this reading iscontextualized through Socratic pedagogic practices. Teach-ers show students how to sift through layers of text to reachthe core legal doctrine in wonderfully orchestrated dialogicmovements. In so doing, legal truth, justice, and facts areconstituted while simultaneously erasing social and moralcontexts, a process that prepares students for the forthcom-ing courtroom battles when they graduate. The next chap-ter displays variation in teaching style, such as modifiedSocratic exchanges and other lecturing styles. Chapter 6,“On Becoming a Legal Person,” is a tour de force and a stun-ning illustration of reported speech, footing, framing, roleplay, voicing, and participation and their relevance to lawschool socialization and pedagogy: how professors and stu-dents position themselves, other legal identities, and rela-tionships in the ongoing dialogue. In the process, studentslearn the pro and con arguments by projecting legal per-sonae from each side of the case (as well as the judge andjury).

The final two chapters change the mood from microlin-guistic analysis to social structures embodied in discursivepractice. Chapter 7 examines the relationship between dif-ferences in teaching style and school ranking, while chap-ter 8 focuses on the relationship among gender, race, andclassroom composition and how these variables intersectwith teaching style to affect the outcome of the learning ex-perience. Readers will find the delicacy and sophisticationof the fine-grained empirical analysis presented here a re-freshing corrective to the essentialistic claims of most priorstudies.


In sum, Mertz has produced nothing short of a master-piece in the linguistic anthropology of law and society, oneof those rare interdisciplinary efforts that comes along ev-ery decade or so. Just as important, the depth of the analy-sis is matched only by the eloquence of her prose. Her clearwriting, coupled with liberal use of data excerpts through-out the chapters and the fact the book is available in anaffordable paperback edition, makes The Language of LawSchool an attractive text for a number of courses in linguis-tic anthropology, discourse studies, legal discourse, law andsociety, and legal socialization at graduate, undergraduate,and professional levels.

Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zim-babwe. Donald S. Moore. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2005. 399 pp.

ERICA L. BORNSTEINUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

When Zimbabweans describe someone who can really speakShona they say, “He speaks deep Shona.” One might saythe same for Donald Moore’s exceptional book. It is deepethnography. Moore has a delicate task. The landscape hedescribes—of colonial and postcolonial land struggles—isnot only contentious. It is dangerous, both materially andbodily, for those whom he writes about. With such highstakes, Moore takes careful moral responsibility to trace theoverlapping and at times contradictory histories of rights tocultivate land. Theoretically sophisticated, he risks alienat-ing some readers with twists of phrase and dense language.Nonetheless, it is a timely book, which should be read byany scholar interested in southern African history and pol-itics, and indigenous land rights. For anyone who wonderswhat is going on in contemporary Zimbabwe and why, thisbook is required reading.

Moore structures the book around what he calls “situ-ated struggles.” Through colonial and postcolonial agrarianlegislation, he delves into the history of state (Rhodesianand Zimbabwean) land relocation schemes to demonstratehow postcolonial agrarian reforms echo colonial history inthe Kaerezi district of eastern Zimbabwe. Moore is dedicatedto describing complexity and is careful to present many per-spectives. One gets a sense of life in Zimbabwe, for Zimbab-weans. The ethnographic description is spectacular, trans-porting the reader to subsistence plots in rural Zimbabwe inthe early 1990s, with the smells, tastes, and political anxi-eties of those for whom the issue of land tenure is one ofsurvival.

For those who point their fingers at President Mu-gabe and blame him for the current economic and politicaldemise of Zimbabwe, readers of this book will agree thatthe blame is too facile as it does not take into account ei-ther the colonial evictions of the Rhodesian governmentor the hopeful era of promises immediately following inde-pendence. For those who point their fingers at the history ofcolonialism, readers will answer that the postcolonial state

has done its own damage, often in the well-worn path ofcolonial evictions and racialized dispossession. The territoryunder question is more than the nation, and Moore does anexcellent job of articulating the people in positions of powerwho have stakes in land allocation, beyond simplistic bina-ries of state–populace or colonial–postcolonial eras. Chiefs,rainmakers, headmen, village development representatives,and kin networks all have overlapping rule over people andland. What becomes clear by the end of the book is that tohave the right to own land in Zimbabwe, one has to “sufferfor territory.”

The book is filled with beautiful narrative descriptionsof social landscape. Evictions are not new in Zimbabwe.They were part of colonial rule, namely through rural reset-tlement to what were called Native Reserves. Colonial relo-cations to unproductive land served a disciplinary agendaof “development” that included surveillance and policing.Resisted by the anticolonial chief Rekayi Tangwena in theKaerezi territory, postcolonial villagization schemes andforced evictions seem to repeat history. What Moore makesclear is why Zimbabweans need land to farm, and why cer-tain farming schemes implemented by the state are anti-thetical to Zimbabwean cosmology and cultural practice.Moore makes it clear why people will not move to maline(the village resettlement scheme) and instead favor farming“freely.” Rural Zimbabweans considered self-selecting culti-vation plots to be a “foundational freedom independenceshould restore” (p. 264). A key question for the postcolo-nial government has been “how to rule . . . freedom” (p. 41).Historical with contemporary implications, Moore providesa social archeology of land dispossession, gently excavat-ing overlapping relationships of rule and resistance. Histo-ries are embodied, by particular people in particular times.The colonial memory of resettlement is the lens throughwhich Kaerezians view contemporary resettlement schemesand villagization in the 1990s. The land question is at theheart of both the colonial politics of apartheid and of con-temporary Zimbabwe. Yet unresolved, this book offers cru-cial material toward thinking about resolution, even moredaunting given the contentious history of the topic. Zim-babweans come across as apt critics of their environmentand lucid historians. It is Moore’s strength that he has pro-vided a literary context for Zimbabweans to be heard. Moorediligently takes great pains to reconstruct history throughthe perspectives of those who remember it, for whom thestakes mean life or death in Zimbabwe: land or landless-ness. We realize in this book that who has the right torule goes hand-in-hand with who has the right to allocateterritory.

Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity. KarenNakamura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 226pp.

CINDI L . STURTZSREETHARANCalifornia State University, Sacramento

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In Deaf in Japan, Karen Nakamura’s goal is to demonstrate“that the social and institutional history of postwar deafcommunities in Japan enabled an unusual form of per-sonal and mass organizational identity politics to emergein the 1970s and 1980s” (p. 2). Nakamura covers roughlyone hundred years of historical and social processes thatdirectly impact deaf people in Japan. Drawing on narra-tives of deaf Japanese individuals (mainly women), sheprovides evidence not only of shifting deaf identities butalso shifting identities in general (prewar–postwar, male–female, noneducated–educated). The text moves amongstmany topics and spaces, all critical to the larger goals ofthe text but difficult to navigate at times. Nakamura seemsto find herself in the position of needing to explain mul-tiple issues related to being deaf in Japan (some more tan-gential to the central goal than others); these include signlanguage (in general), Japanese sign language(s), languageideologies, identity politics (in general), Japanese identitypolitics, educational credentialism, and political economies(of language, of hearing, of gender, of class). Yet, in explain-ing these issues, Nakamura often relies on examples takenfrom the United States; this works to an extent but seems toassume a far deeper knowledge by the reader of how iden-tity politics, deafness, education, and social class articulatein the United States than the case may be, making it difficultto superimpose one set of examples onto the other.

In tracing the “organizational identity politics” of thedeaf community, Nakamura focuses on two organizations:the Japanese Federation of the Deaf (JFD) and D-Pro. Be-cause of a longer history, the reader comes away with astronger understanding and sense of JFD as an organiza-tion compared to D-Pro, which is a more recent formationthat drew directly from the American cultural Deaf model(p. 1). Nakamura notes that in contrast to the United States,Japanese society does not have access to an “ethnic minor-ity frame” on which to overlay deaf identity. As such, or-ganizations such as JFD (est. 1947) had to create what itmeant to be deaf in ways that were salient to Japanese peo-ple and society. In doing so, the JFD utilizes other sociolog-ical frames that had currency at the time: namely, insistingthat Japanese deaf people were equivalent to Japanese peo-ple “with all of the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural markers”therein (p. 6). The book does not note that this was sim-ilar to the existing “frame” of minzoku (ethnicity, people,nation) created during modernization (see Weiner 1997:2).

Nakamura follows the JFD from its humble beginningsin the self-proclaimed “pleading generation,” wherein sup-port from the government was mainly achieved throughbegging and pleading (p. 65), through to its sophisticatedmanipulation of bureaucratic culture to achieve an almostmonopolistic presence as the “voice” of the deaf in Japan(p. 132) until the various “D-groups” arrived on the scene.Nakamura ends her monograph with an exploration ofnew activist groups who cast deaf individuals—especiallythose who are “deaf of deaf”—as a separate identity andthus minority to the rest of Japan. Nakamura providesan introduction to these groups and shows how they dif-

fer in the ways that deaf identity is recognized and con-structed in Japan. However, their success or failure is notaddressed.

Overall this text can be read in various ways: as a long-overdue monograph on the Japanese deaf community (withleanings toward becoming a Deaf community), as part ofvarious monographs that deal with language and identityissues, and, finally, as a text that provides insight into theways in which identity politics established during modern-ization were tweaked and twisted during postwar Japan.Each reading will allow the audience to focus on differ-ent aspects of contemporary Japanese society via a groupof Japanese people who are too often “unheard.”

TEACHING NOTE

This text was used in an upper-division general education course(e.g., nonanthropology majors) on contemporary Japanese soci-ety. Students were pleased at the chance to gain insight into as-pects of Japanese society rarely expounded on in English, and theyfound the writing style to be accessible and interesting. As the fi-nal text in a series of various other Japan-related monographs andintroductory texts, students were somewhat prepared for manyof the implicit issues the book addresses (i.e., ethnic-minorityrights in Japan, Japanese education system, social class). Issuesof language politics and deaf (and identity) politics in the UnitedStates (or Japan) were less directly accessible to students. Assuch, the text provided students the opportunity to think criti-cally and comparatively about their own society and ways of be-ing in the world. As such, this book is highly recommended for theclassroom.

REFERENCE CITEDWeiner, Michael

1997 The Invention of Identity: “Self” and “Other” in Pre-WarJapan. In Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity.Michael Weiner, ed. Pp. 1–16. London: Routledge.

Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the PopularCulture of Oaxaca. Kristin Norget. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2006. 319 pp.

JAMES FITZSIMMONSMiddlebury College

Days of Death, Days of Life is a worthy addition to the grow-ing corpus of literature on Mesoamerican attitudes towardthe afterlife, death, and the body. Of particular interest isthe argument that, contrary to the view that death presentsa significant crisis to the social order, death in Oaxaca actu-ally reinforces society and serves as an opportunity not onlyfor existing groups to reaffirm themselves but also for newsocial orders to coalesce. Although I do not see these twoarguments as being mutually exclusive—that death can be acrisis and an opportunity—author Kristin Norget’s point iswell taken, as studies of death rites have historically tendedto give primacy to the former.


It is exciting to see several rituals being transcribed andtranslated for the wider audience; this will undoubtedlyserve as an invaluable resource for anyone working in theAmericas or abroad on similar issues. All too often in workslike this these rituals are abridged or narrated and in a senselose some of their poignancy. Beyond these concerns, how-ever, the author places death rites in Oaxaca within theirsocial contexts, successfully examining how the statementsand funerary practices of Oaxacans relate to their identi-ties and views of the world. An argument could be made,however, for a more thorough discussion of how the ritualsand conclusions of this work intersect with broader anthro-pological theory. Although the author does specifically ad-dress the absence of these considerations, noting that directcomparisons with other theories or debates in anthropol-ogy could “distract from, rather than augment, a reader’sunfolding understanding of an ethnographic work,” directtheoretical references—outside the ample citations and ar-guments in the notes—would further situate this study ofdeath rites in Oaxaca within the larger anthropology ofdeath. That being said, one of the central arguments in thebook is, as stated earlier, a counter to traditionalist perspec-tives of death; more explicit, as opposed to implicit, ref-erences to that effect would only strengthen this alreadycompelling ethnography.

Days of Death, Days of Life is an important work thatcontextualizes death rites within the history and culture ofOaxaca. Chapter 3 is a case in point. By recounting the var-ious stages of death in contemporary Oaxaca, the authormakes the case that death often invigorates relations in thecommunity: “Death does not threaten the social order somuch as provide an occasion to revitalize it.” For Oaxacans,biological death is not equated with social death; the deadas social actors continue to play a vital role in everydaylife and, in many ways, provide opportunities for commu-nities to renew themselves. Although this argument could,taken to its logical extent, minimize the disruptive aspectsof death in favor of its generative—and regenerative—socialproperties, the author does take care to highlight grief andthe “drama of death” in this and subsequent chapters. Like-wise, specific case examples from towns and villages in Oax-aca are used to support the idea that death is a journey ratherthan a single event for local peoples, with evidence of reli-gious syncretism—or at least reinterpreted Christianity—inlocal ceremonies and attitudes toward the dead. Of specialnote in chapter 3 is the author’s analysis of the PanteonGeneral municipal cemetery: its history and role in Oaxacanlife are followed by the observation that its architecture andspatial organization mirrors that of its corresponding res-idential community. Such considerations are reminiscentof work by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures(1973), wherein death can be seen to reflect and shape so-ciety.

At heart, Days of Death, Days of Life is about understand-ing the “popular culture” of Oaxaca by examining the waysin which death rites and attitudes are expressed. It provideskey observations on a historically underrepresented area in

the anthropology of death. Given the treatment of popularreligion and its historical context, the book will doubtlessbe a valuable source for sociocultural and archaeological an-thropologists alike.

REFERENCE CITEDGeertz, Clifford

1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic.

The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacan, Mexico: AnArchaeological Ethnography. Jeffrey R. Parsons. AnnArbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of MichiganPress, 2006. 377 pp.

JAMES R. MCGOODWINUniversity of Colorado, Boulder

This book concerns a daunting archaeological challengeand proposes a way to address it. On the one hand, duringMesoamerica’s Post-Classic era, the Lake Texcoco region inthe Valley of Mexico was site of a complex and highly pop-ulous civilization, which, the author notes, lacked pastoraleconomies to complement its agricultural ones. Thus, hesurmises, these societies made up this deficit by producingprotein-rich aquatic resources from the surrounding lacus-trine regions. And, indeed, the ethnohistorical record fromthe early 16th century through the mid–20th century is re-plete with descriptions of humans harvesting, processing,distributing, and consuming aquatic resources in this re-gion.

Yet, on the other hand, archaeological investigationshave yielded very little material corroboration of the aquaticeconomies that are described in the rich ethnohistoricalrecord. Part of the reason, the author notes, is Lake Tex-coco’s ongoing loss of area because of drainage and urbansprawl; another part is the postdepositional processes thatare particular to lacustrine environments and that hide orconfuse artifact assemblages; and still another part is thehigh relative perishability of most aquatic flora and faunaas well as of the human technologies that are used to pro-duce them.

Author Jeffrey R. Parsons’s main aim in this volume,therefore, is twofold: first to enhance general understand-ing of lacustrine human economies, and second to suggestwhat future archaeologists should look for in the lacustrineregions in the Valley of Mexico, as well as where they shouldlook to corroborate the ethnohistorical accounts of this re-gion’s formerly robust aquatic economies.

In the book’s early chapters, Parsons describes the Val-ley of Mexico’s lacustrine environments and how they havechanged over time. Then, in his third chapter, titled “TheHistorically Documented Utilization of Aquatic Resourcesin the Valley of Mexico, A.D. 1500–1970,” he summarizesnumerous eyewitness descriptions of the robust aquaticeconomies that were found in the Valley of Mexico from thetime of first European contact through the next 450 years,well past the middle of the 20th century. This chapter is

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a tour de force and provides some of the most interestingreading in the book.

Next, the author describes the various species of aquaticflora and fauna that the ethnohistorical accounts discuss,comprising a rich menu of edible flora and fauna as wellas flora to fabricate various items of material culture. Thisis followed by a description of the aquatic economy inand around the small Lake Texcoco settlement of Chimal-huacan, which the author observed during fieldwork therein 1992.

In the succeeding chapter, the author describes lacus-trine economies in several other world regions, hopingthese comparison frames will enhance understanding ofthese economies in general, as well as provide archaeologistswith insights to guide future archaeological investigationsof lacustrine economies in the Valley of Mexico. Hence,lacustrine economies are described from the Upper Lermadrainage in Mexico, the Great Basin in the western UnitedStates, the Titicaca Basin in southern Peru and Bolivia, theTigris–Euphrates Delta in Iraq and Iran, and the Lake ChadBasin in western Chad.

In his concluding chapter, Parsons recommends cer-tain locales in the Lake Texcoco region for future study andsuggests methods to analyze and interpret any future find-ings. Again he emphasizes the crucial importance of aquaticeconomies in this region in Post-Classic times, as well as thedifficulties of finding material evidence of their “aquatictool kit.”

The book is richly embellished with 80 tables, 65 fig-ures, and 111 black-and-white plates. Its title, however,The Last Pescadores of Chimalhuacan, Mexico: An Archae-ological Ethnography, does not seem quite apropos. Thus,while much of the author’s interest in this region’s aquaticeconomies stems from his fieldwork among the people ofChimalhuacan in the early 1990s and from his theory thatthese were perhaps the last vestiges of Lake Texcoco’s for-merly abundant harvesters of lacustrine resources, in factthere is very little description or discussion about these peo-ple, per se, and certainly not enough for the book to qual-ify as an ethnography of them. Therefore, I suggest that amore apropos title might be “Lake Texcoco’s Former AquaticEconomies: With Suggestions for Future Archaeological Re-search Informed by Comparative Studies of Lake Economiesin Other World Regions.”

Sheltering Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence inNorthern Italy. Sonja Plesset. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2006. 250 pp.

ANNE CHAMBERSSouthern Oregon University

Sheltering Women is an ethnographic study of grassroots ef-forts to counter heterosexual intimate-partner violence ina northern Italian community. But this description simplycaptures the book’s starting point. Sonja Plesset’s study isactually a nuanced and theoretically rich analysis of gender

relations in the broadest sense: a highly readable, intriguingaccount of the context and cultural meanings of genderedviolence.

Parma, the study’s focus, is a sophisticated and sociallyprogressive community located in the Emilia–Romagna re-gion of northern Italy. It has a population of about 170,000,a thriving economy, enduring pride in local traditions, anda history of feminist activism. Living in Parma for a littleover a year (between 1998–2000) and speaking fluent Ital-ian, Plesset developed a network of close neighborhood re-lationships. She also became a “loyal member” and volun-teer in two nonprofit women’s organizations that providea range of essential services for battered women, includingcounseling and shelter, but which operate from very differ-ent ideologies. The contrasts and similarities between thesetwo organizations provide a fine-grained lens for examin-ing the context, causes, and consequences of local genderrelations, violence, and power differences. Furthermore, be-cause these case studies unfold within a carefully developedanalysis of political, legal, social, economic, demographic,historical, and cultural factors shaping local life choices andthe groups’ respective goals, the two organizations’ differ-ences also reveal ambivalences, alternatives, and contradic-tions inherent in contemporary Italian culture.

Each organization’s ideology determines not only itsorganizational structure, clientele, style of operation, andservices but also its internal stresses and strains. The groupdubbed “Women United” is a local leftist volunteer asso-ciation with roots in the 1970s Italian feminist movementand the former Italian Communist Party. It aims to “pro-duce strong and independent women” (p. 47) through sup-port services that encourage women’s solidarity and assumeessential differences between men and women in society.Clients are helped to prioritize their personal needs, fulfill-ment, and autonomy. The leftist feminist ideology of thisgroup views motherhood and marriage as optional choices,secondary to women’s needs for personal security and self-determination. By contrast, Catholic-based “Family Aid”is a national volunteer organization that receives supportfrom local parishes and clergy but is not formally connectedwith either the Vatican or the former Christian Democraticparty. Its goal is to “fashion dedicated and capable mothers”(p. 47) by providing material support, role models, and edu-cation. Pregnant women and mothers with young childrenare helped and encouraged to “welcome every life” (p. 95)and helped to develop skills needed to achieve “personal,parental and economic autonomy” (p. 96).

Despite these marked differences in philosophy and ori-entation, both organizations coexist in the social fabric ofParma, drawing support from many of the same culturalassumptions, gender institutions, and historical develop-ments. As Plesset carefully explains, the groups’ ideologiesare “radically different and at the same time intimatelyrelated” (p. 49). For example, while the leftist group seestraditional patriarchal masculinity as the key cause of vi-olence against women, the Catholic group directs blameto current changes, ambiguities, and confusion in gender


expectations. The philosophies of both groups, moreover,have been influenced by ideas from the Italian feministmovement. Members of both organizations tend to sharea worldview emphasizing gender difference, opposition tothe traditional family model that subordinates women tomen, and concern about the effects of changed gender re-lations on Italian society.

Plesset’s chapter on “feminist uncertainties” providesa fascinating overview of these ideological differences andtheir development. Originating in the intense social ac-tivism and upheaval of the late 1960s, Italian feminismemphasized personal transformation and solidarity amongwomen, viewing the fight for equality within social, politi-cal, and economic structures that were intrinsically oppres-sive to women as an unproductive way to solve women’sproblems. Subsequent legal and political struggles concern-ing divorce, abortion, and legal rights have both polar-ized different segments of Italian women and inspired theircollaboration.

Italian society has undergone a substantial transforma-tion during the last 30 years. Plesset’s insightful discussionof changes in values and institutions includes the impres-sion management connected with bella figura (putting ona “good” social and personal display) and the local ten-dency to explain behavior in terms of mentalita (“world-view”). Causes and effects of plummeting birth rates, so-cial trends such as mammoni (“mama’s boys”) and mammo(men’s assumption of stereotypically “feminine” child-rearing duties), and changes in women’s legal status andaccess to divorce and abortion are all considered. Her sensi-tive discussion of “shame” experienced by many victims ofdomestic violence connects personal agency and conflictingdemands of tradition and modernity. The “performance” ofgender is shown to be fraught with decisions and difficultchoices for both men and women, and the chapter on “re-sistance” includes both personal dimensions and examplesrelated to the groups’ organization.

Finally, extensive endnotes in each chapter specifysources, provide subsidiary material, and raise further issuesregarding broad social patterns and historical processes inItalian society. The ethnographic and conceptual content ofthis wonderful book will appeal to researchers and studentsalike.

Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Tradersin the North American Fur Trade. Carolyn Podruchny.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 414 pp.

KENNETH B. TANKERSLEYUniversity of Cincinnati

This book is a new addition to the France Overseas Stud-ies in Empire and Decolonization Series of the Universityof Nebraska Press. It is beautifully bound, highly readable,well referenced, and affordable. The book grew out of theauthor’s doctoral dissertation and includes four previouslypublished articles. As broadly defined, the basic conceptual

framework of the book is the economy of the French Cana-dian voyagers (engages, servants, workers, and the coureursde bois) of the Montreal Fur Trade between 1763 and 1821. Itfocuses on the processes of production (extraction, transfor-mation, and elaboration), consumption (use), distribution(circulation, transfers from one social node to another), andexchange (two-way, hand-to-hand movements) of goodsand services that sustained or reproduced the voyager liveli-hood. The primary data include the writings of travelers;fur-trade bourgeois; and Scottish, English, American, andFrench Canadian district managers, company partners, andclerks—including their journals, letters, memoirs, books,and court cases. As such, the book is written from the colo-nizer’s perspective.

The author shows that voyagers were a diverse ple-beian population working in the competitive economy ofthe fur trade, which developed between the English-chartedHudson Bay Company and the Montreal partnerships ofthe North West Company in the post-Seven Years War era(also known as the French and Indian War). At this time,the European and Euro-American population dramaticallyincreased in North American while nonhuman animal re-sources were being depleted. This situation required thevoyagers to travel further and further west and north fromMontreal, which greatly expanded the geographic range ofthe fur trade. It was a competitive economy set in a highlyvaried landscape and led to the development of a voyagerculture with a distinctive cosmology, worldview, language,and arts.

The author investigates voyager working conditions,duties, and the associated performing arts. Because thedistances of the voyages increased, much of work wasperformed in canoes. The time-intensive labor of thevoyagers and territorial expansion of the fur trade re-sulted in the creation of the rendezvous, an annualmeeting at which furs were exchanged for supplies andgoods. From the perspective of voyager society, the ren-dezvous was more importantly a celebration filled withsong, music, dance, and story telling. Unfortunately, it isalso the rendezvous that has been a primary source ofmany stereotypic caricatures of voyagers in the popularmedia.

Most voyager stereotypes are directly related to single-minded views of sexual relationships between Europeanand Euro-American men and indigenous women. The au-thor argues that these relationships were far more complexthan the popular literature suggests. While the influencesof the French patriarchy cannot be ignored, sex was an im-portant aspect of the voyager economy, one that includedsex with indigenous women in trade as well as a trade in sexwith indigenous women. In this regard, the book does anexcellent job of establishing gender ideologies and roles, aswell as identity and ritual, from emotional relationships tofluid monogamy and marriage. The author also explores theprocess of “metissage,” the hybridization or cultural mix-ing of voyagers and indigenous peoples, and the creationof metis culture.

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The author collectively classifies all indigenous peo-ples of North America that interacted with the voyagers asaboriginal. This classification surprised me for two reasons.First, I could not help but wonder what variables or influ-ences we are missing in the voyager economy by ignoringthe diverse range of languages, traditions, customs, beliefs,politics, and localized social behavior by lumping every in-digenous culture into the single homogenized “aboriginal”category. Although the author acknowledges up front andthroughout the text that the cultural diversity of indige-nous people is beyond the scope of this book, I ferventlyhope that someone in the future will make it a focus oftheir research.

My second surprise was the struggle the author hadwith what word should be used to classify the indigenouspeople of North America. This difficulty has become com-monplace in anthropology with the terms Native Americanand American Indian so obviously associated with the biasof colonial politics. The problem originates from researcherstrying to lump diverse peoples together as one homogenousculture in comparisons that are made with Western society.In 1992, the United Nations Conference on the Environ-ment and Development adopted the Kari-Oca declaration,also known as the Indigenous Peoples’ Earth Charter. Theterm indigenous was used as a political identification to avoidracial indications and to identify people with their land andterritory rather than the color of their skin.

Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulti-cultural Bolivia. Nancy Grey Postero. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2007. 294 pp.

MARY RILEYUniversity of Illinois, Chicago

In Now We Are Citizens, Nancy Grey Postero has produceda compelling ethnography that examines the culturalconstruction of citizenship in, to use her term, “post-multicultural” and neoliberal Bolivia (p. 2). Through herhistorical examination of the evolution of the modern,liberal, democratic nation-state, Postero demonstrates thatcitizenship in Bolivia, far from being a universally uniformsociopolitical category, has a historicity of its own andexplains how the notion of what it is to be “a good citizen”under the neoliberal economic multicultural nation-stateis, in equal measures, adopted and rejected by the Guaranıand the poor of Bolivia.

In the introduction, Postero details her specific posi-tion in relation to the subject matter at hand. Her priorbackground in law and journalism clearly enhances heranalyses and the depth of her research. Extremely helpfulis her lengthy discussion of the terms multiculturalism andneoliberalism—which convey as many meanings as thereare people employing these terms—and she informs thereader of her definitions of these terms used throughoutthe book. By framing neoliberalism as philosophy ratherthan hegemony, Postero posits that individuals are free to

accept or reject such a philosophy, which in turn highlightsthe agency Guaranı leaders have in their interactions withneoliberalism.

In part 1, Postero provides a history and ethnography ofthe Guaranı. Chapter 1 analyzes the history and evolutionof race relations, segregation, resistance, and violent insur-rections since the time of the Spanish Conquest, showingthe bifurcate paths of colonialism in the Andean highlandsand the eastern lowlands of what is now modern-day Bo-livia. This historical treatment of citizenship is especiallyvaluable because it shows how elastic the category of “cit-izen” actually is, capable of expanding or contracting toinclude or exclude classes of individuals to suit the rulingclasses. In chapters 2 and 3, Postero presents an ethnog-raphy of the urban Guaranı in villages surrounding SantaCruz, showing the impact of urban expansion into theGuaranı villages and highlighting the similarities betweenthe lives of the urban Guaranı and the nonindigenous ur-ban poor. These chapters also document the growth of theindigenous movement side by side with the new citizenactivism movement during Bolivia’s express adoption andimplementation of the neoliberal economic model.

In part 2, Postero examines the pivotal role of one po-litical reform: the Law of Popular Participation (LPP), whichwas designed to provide an avenue to allow all citizens toparticipate in local development. Postero cites this momentas the point at which many Guaranı, for the first time, be-gan to define and see themselves as citizens of Bolivia, en-titled to the same rights and responsibilities as other, non-indigenous Bolivians, and that this realization subsequentlytransformed the nature and directionality of indigenous ac-tivism as it merged with the larger citizen activist movementin the late 1990s. Chapter 5 analyzes the varying results ofthe implementation of the LPP among Guaranı commu-nities. Chapter 6 demonstrates the linkages between neo-liberal economic reforms and the growing dissatisfactionof the Bolivian populace with neoliberal economics, andit shows how these escalated into the uprising of October2003 and continued to provide momentum for citizen ac-tivism and political participation thereafter.

In the conclusion, Postero states that because there arenew alliances across race and class lines in the wake of cit-izen activism, Bolivia is now, successfully, a postmulticul-tural state because this new activism does not proceed byarticulating its demands on the basis of race, ethnicity, orclass but, instead, makes its demands in terms of citizens’rights. It is here that Postero argues, quite correctly, for a def-inition of citizenship that is exercise-of-power based ratherthan rights based, because citizenship rights conferred onan individual are meaningless if that person cannot mean-ingfully exercise these rights because of structural inequal-ities or a lack of access to legal institutions and systems.

This book shows the complex interplay among indige-nous groups, the nation-state, multiple sociopolitical iden-tities within the neoliberal framework, and the limits ofneoliberal economics and multiculturalism. Postero’s work,insightful and illuminating, powerfully contributes to our


understandings of citizenship, citizen activism, and themutual shaping of indigenous identities and citizenship inBolivia. This book is also a welcome addition for scholars ofpolitical and legal reforms in Latin America.

A Pre-Columbian World. Jeffrey Quilter and Mary Miller,eds. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006. 395 pp.

JENNIFER MATHEWSTrinity University

This excellent volume arose out of the 2001 DumbartonOaks symposium, “A Pre-Columbian World.” The proposalof the symposium, in response to the recent trend ofhyperdifferentiating cultures and emphasizing geographicand cultural boundaries, was to examine commonalities ofthe pre-Columbian world. The subsequent well-crafted, 11-chapter volume examines “the Americas” through the re-search of scholars working in North, Central, and SouthAmerica. A number of themes emerge, including a callto Americanist archaeologists to remember that the geo-graphic and political boundaries that we have placed on theancient world are not real and that we should once againconsider the broader interactions that may have occurred.Several chapters convincingly examine these overlappingthemes of pre-Columbian cultures, including the follow-ing: Polly Schaafsma and Karl Taube’s masterful overviewof rain ceremonialism and symbolism in the Mesoameri-can and Puebloan worlds; Warren R. De Boer’s argumentfor comparisons with creation stories of the Hopewell andthe Olmec; Mary W. Helms’s evaluation of the use of serpentimagery, world trees, mirrors, and cacao among the Cocleof Panama with Mesoamerica and South American peoples;and Anna Blume’s consideration of animal hybrids amongthe Maya and European cultures.

Another major theme of the volume is reflection onthe reality of why we study what we study in Americanistarchaeology. Elizabeth Hill Boone’s chapter notes that, be-cause of chance, the environment and the material fromwhich objects are made—that is, what preserves in the ar-chaeological record—often dictates the importance that wegive them in that particular culture. Using three examplesof beautifully preserved objects (the Aztec Coatlicue sculp-ture, the Inka all-tukapu tunic, and the Olmec Las Limasfigure), Boone demonstrates that past scholars have usedthese objects as jumping-off points for interpreting culturalideology. Had each of these not been an exceptional objectbut, rather, one of many, we may have given them differ-ent importance. Simon Martin’s chapter also emphasizesthat singular objects can be problematic and that it is cru-cial to recognize repeated themes in the material record. Ar-chaeological objects include cultural “narratives” and wereused as mnemonic devices and relied on broader culturalworldviews for their understanding. Tom D. Dillehay andRamiro Matos provide a related argument that while phys-ical objects reflect broader cultural imprints and symbols,we must not fail to recognize local innovations and resis-

tance to adopting the cultural mandates. Enrique Flores-cano’s chapter underscores that our understanding of theancient world may be compromised by chance historicalevents. During much of the 20th century, studies at Teoti-huacan were limited while the great scholars were drawnto the splendor of the Maya. Similarly, the 1940s excava-tions at Tula drew the attention of the general public andscholars alike, perhaps leading to its identification as themythical “Tollan,” despite strong evidence that it was infact Teotihuacan. Mary Miller’s chapter contends that ourresearch is shaped by our scholarly frameworks, such as PaulKirchoff’s “Mesoamerica,” which keenly divided it from theUnited States and isolated the scholars that worked there.This is further supported in Robert L. Hall’s chapter on Ca-hokia, a site that, despite sharing Mesoamerican conceptssuch as feasts for the dead and blooding, has been virtu-ally ignored by Mesoamerican scholars. Although there hasbeen a resistance to looking at the similarities among thepeople of the Americas, in part because of a racist legacy ofseeing ancient Americans as a unified “barbarian” culture,this volume argues that it might be time to take a fresh lookat the relatedness, while still recognizing differences.

Each chapter forces the reader to reflect on the ways inwhich we as scholars frame the ancient world. These authorsalso remind us that before we became highly specialized inour study areas, we were once students of the cultures of theAmericas. It may be time to dust off our old books and arti-cles and remember that ancient peoples were not boundedinto neat categories and time frames, even if we would likethem to be. On a minor note, as this volume does attempt tobridge scholars of the Americas and their disparate research,it would be helpful to include a general map that locatesall of the sites discussed, as well as a table that lays outthe corresponding time periods of the different geographicareas. I also found it curious that the cover image (perhapschosen by the publisher) is of Zoomorph P from the Mayasite of Quirigua. As the cover art is often what draws one topick up a book and examine it more closely, it might havebeen appropriate to choose a more inclusive image.

This book’s broad and comparative nature makes it anoutstanding reference for scholars of archaeology, art his-tory, and history of the Americas; however, it would alsoprovide up-to-date and well-rounded readings for advancedgraduate student courses focusing on Pre-Columbian his-tory, art, or archaeology of the Americas.

A Machine To Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles.Paul Rabinow and Talia Dan-Cohen. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005. 199 pp.

HILARY CUNNINGHAMUniversity of Toronto

Paul Rabinow is a scholar well known for his ethnographicstudies of the biotech industry, but in this book he teamsup with an undergraduate student, Talia Dan-Cohen, to trysomething a little different. A Machine To Make a Future is not

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ethnography in the ordinary sense, but, rather, as outlinedin its introduction by the authors, it is an attempt to createa different kind of narrative about genomics and the oftenbafflingly complex world of commercial biotechnologies.Rabinow and Dan-Cohen pursue a new—and hands-off inanalytical terms—narrative by reproducing excerpts frominterviews with a variety of key players at Celera Diagnos-tics, an offspring of a U.S.-based, private biotech company.

The choice of Celera for this research is not insignifi-cant. This is the company originally headed by Craig Ven-ter, the geneticist who, during his tenure at the NationalInstitutes of Health, applied for the first U.S. patents onhuman brain sequences. Venter subsequently left govern-ment work to head up the private effort to map the humangenome using what he claimed would be a faster sequenc-ing technique. The interviews taken for this book are doneafter Venter left Celera and during a critical phase in thecompany’s transition to diagnostic products.

The book chapters are organized around a series ofthemes, and the commentary is deliberately light handed.Before readers launch into what are sometimes technicallydense excerpts, we are reminded that genomics laboratoriesare also fields of complex social relationships that, despitethe at-times impenetrable expertise of the various scientistsinvolved, are spaces dependent on trust, loyalty, and se-crecy. In this way, Rabinow and Dan-Cohen carefully makesure that even if the “science” sometimes mystifies readers,there are nevertheless interesting sign posts to observe anduse as navigational devices.

Thus, the most intriguing aspects of this unusual bookare the conversations themselves, particularly those revolv-ing around what genetic diagnostics are, the different waysin which scientists conceptualize genes and their relation-ship to disease, and how to set up a manufacturing plat-form for the production of the various elements involvedin creating pharmaceutical products that must be both eco-nomically viable and scientifically valid. Although the au-thors’ efforts to let their subjects “speak for themselves” donot always cover in depth some of the more controversialaspects of patenting, industrial espionage, and the move-ment of employees from one company to a competitor, theinterviews are nevertheless rich examples of how the scien-tific imaginations of the various players at Celera are shapedby the commercial, legal, and regulatory regimes that bothdrive and delimit their work.

Although Rabinow, as the primary interviewer, intro-duces modestly critical questions in these excerpts (admit-ting at one point that some of his own critics depict him asan apologist for commercial biotechnology), he is extremelyskilled in getting his interviewees to expound on their workin ways that are almost ingenuous at times. For those in-terested more in the science aspects of genomic research,the interviews are instructive in terms of how new innova-tive techniques (such as ribotyping) were developed in theminds of Celera executives and then deployed as capitalventures to attract investors. The contradictions surround-ing dynamic “science inventions” that emerge from within

the context of a circumscribing corporate culture (as well itscommercial focus on “target health”) are something thatRabinow and Dan-Cohen capture vividly, although theyscrupulously abstain from any editorial comment on it.

Although the authors have taken great pains to situatethe conversations and provide a basic glossary, this bookis not for the genetic faint of heart. The excerpts are likelyto frustrate those without a working knowledge of the sci-ence of genomics, and the lack of substantive critical anal-ysis that Rabinow provides in some of his other works isnot likely to please every reader (esp. those with a stronganalytical orientation toward a political economic critiqueof the biotech industry). Nevertheless, Rabinow and Dan-Cohen have successfully explored the world of commercialbiotechnology through a novel narrative style that is en-gaging and, indeed, engrossing.

Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan. Paula L.W. Sabloff, ed. Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2001. 122 pp.

CYNTHIA WERNERTexas A&M University

Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan was published asa companion volume for a museum exhibit at the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania, organized in cooperation with the Na-tional Museum of Mongolian History. The book is targetedat a general audience interested in learning more about so-cial and political life in contemporary Mongolia. Sabloffserved as curator for the exhibit and editor for this attrac-tive volume filled with over 120 full-color pictures.

Although Westerners tend to regard Genghis Khan asa ruthless conqueror who brought suffering and destruc-tion to the Eurasian continent, Mongolians view GenghisKhan as a national hero. After the fall of the Soviet Union,Mongolia made significant strides toward democratic re-form relative to other former socialist bloc countries. Thisbook explores the Mongolian concept of “democracy” andexamines whether nationalist images of Genghis Khan havehelped pave the way for democracy in Mongolia. The bookalso aims to highlight several general similarities betweenMongolia and the United States and to describe how Mon-golian material culture has changed in the past century.

The first chapter is written by a young Mongolianwoman, Munhtuya Altangarel, who grew up during the latesocialist years and has studied abroad. She starts with per-sonal recollections of her life before and after the economicand political transition that took place in the early 1990s.Among other things, she recalls the excitement of watchingpolitical demonstrations on the main square of Ulaanbaatarand the agony of food shortages after Russia reduced assis-tance to Mongolia. Her contribution covers essential factsabout the geography, demography, and history of Mongo-lia, interspersed with a few comments about her family his-tory. The personal touch adds a breath of fresh air to a chap-ter that would otherwise read like an encyclopedia entry,


although some of the personal stories are unfortunately toosuccinct.

Chapter 2 is a historical chapter written by Nasan Bu-maa, a Mongolian historian affiliated with the MongolianNational Museum. The author focuses on social and eco-nomic changes that take place in Mongolia during the 20thcentury. Key events include Mongolia’s declaration of in-dependence from China in 1911, the initiation of commu-nist rule in the 1920s, the Stalinist repression in the 1930s,and the emergence of a multiparty system in the 1990s. Thechapter provides a Mongolian historical perspective that re-flects a blend of both Marxist and democratic influences.For example, Marxist interpretations of history are evidentin the description of the feudal social hierarchies that ex-isted before communist rule, and democratic values emergein Bumaa’s critical review of the attacks on personal liber-ties that took place during the purges and the censorship ofscholarly writings on Genghis Khan.

In chapter 3, the art historian Eliot Bikales exploreschanges in Mongolian material culture in the past centuryin response to different styles of government and accessto imported goods. The first half of the chapter examineschanges in Mongolian clothing, especially the caftanlikegarment (deel). The second half of the chapter discusses howhousehold objects portrayed inside a traditional nomadictent (ger) have changed over time. Although this chaptercontains many interesting details (such as the transforma-tion of the family altar into a family showcase), the coverageis unequal in places. For examples, the author notes that thedeel was banned by Stalin but does not discuss whether thispolicy was successful. There is also limited coverage of howmaterial culture varies by ethnicity and social class, both inthe past and the present.

Editor Paula Sabloff concludes the volume with herchapter on Mongolian political culture. This chapter startsby describing the democratic principles that Genghis Khanintroduced to Mongolian society in the 13th century, in-cluding participatory government, rule by law, and equalityof citizens. The author draws intriguing comparisons withthe democratic principles established in ancient Greece.Next, using survey data from a cross sample of Mongoliansand a small sample of U.S. students, she argues that Mongo-lians and U.S. citizens share similar ideas of the character-istics necessary for a modern democracy. Survey data alsodemonstrates that a majority of Mongolians believe thatGenghis Khan practiced some democratic principles, and,thus, she argues that Genghis Khan has influenced Mon-golia’s embrace of democracy in the postsocialist period.These findings are interesting, although one would like tohear more about the potential limitations of her method-ology and how Mongolian conceptions of democracy varyby gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Although written for a general audience, this volumeis suitable as a supplementary text for an undergraduatecourse on Central Asia or contemporary Mongolia. It couldalso be used in a course on museum anthropology to discussissues of representation.

All American Yemeni Girls: Being Muslim in a PublicSchool. Loukia K. Sarroub. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2005. 158 pp.

ANNETTE HEMMINGSUniversity of Cincinnati

All American Yemeni Girls: Being Muslim in a Public Schoolpresents a rigorous, beautifully written ethnographic studyof how six hijabat Yemeni adolescent girls sought successat home, in school, and within their ethnic communities.Loukia Sarroub constructs a somewhat poststructural theo-retical framework that challenges static definitions of cultureand models of acculturation that fail to recognize the mul-tiple discursive spaces that ethnic groups inhabit and tra-verse. Her framework “uncovers” and “recovers” the mean-ings hijabat girls negotiated at the intersection of educationand religion, home and school, and immigrant students andteachers.

The girls were known as “hijabat” because they worethe hijab (scarf). All of them came from immigrant so-journer families with strong communal ties to their home-land. To be successful, they had to uphold their reputationsas good daughters, sisters, wives, students, and Yemeni Mus-lims. This entailed tricky negotiations of conflicting culturalprescriptions rooted in patriarchal family expectations, lib-eral public school ideals, and conservative Yemeni Islamictraditions. Despite restrictions on their appearance, move-ments, relations with men, and future aspirations, the girlsfound ways to enact culture and forge identities within, andthrough, “in-between” spaces and texts.

Sarroub presents the case of Layla as a representativeportrait of the hijabat girl. Layla had a primary affiliationwith her Yemeni family, Arabs in general, and Islam. In herschool, Cobb High, she was an achiever who associated withother hijabat girls and avoided contact with male peers.She and her friends were under constant, panopticon-likesurveillance, especially by newly arrived “boater” Yemeniboys. And each of them understood that if their reputationswere tarnished, they would be withdrawn from school andsent to Yemen where they would be married or, even worse,cursed.

Layla’s story is certainly a fascinating, if not rare,glimpse of the life of a young Muslim woman normallywell hidden behind the veil of the hijab. But Sarroub inthis account comes very close to making the kinds of static-culture generalizations that her framework is intended todispel. She states that “Layla’s story is the hijabat’s story”:essentially, she sees this story as how Yemeni American girlsnegotiate “the two worlds they inhabit” instead of recog-nizing the multiple spaces they actually occupy (p. 30).Fortunately, the framework is applied in much of the restof the book in a manner that yields original insights andchallenges prevailing assumptions. Sarroub offers a view ofliteracy in chapter 4 that illustrates how the girls used in-between texts to explore taboo topics and enter mainstreamU.S. culture. Chapter 5 is especially interesting in how it

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offsets prior research that portrays public high schools assites where ethnic minority students are marginalized orinstructional practices are “subtractively assimilationist” inways that divest adolescents of their cultures and languages(Valenzuela 1999). This evidently was not the case at CobbHigh, where administrators and teachers made a concertedeffort to accommodate Arab culture and where classroomswere socially inclusive oases for hijabat girls. When culturalclashes did occur, many teachers did what they could tomediate them through cultural bargaining. They were par-ticularly concerned about hijabat juniors and seniors who,they believed, experienced desperation with the realizationthat their options after graduation were very limited.

But most of the girls were, in fact, quite resourceful intheir negotiations. One of them was adamant that CobbHigh accommodate Yemeni traditions, yet she also man-aged to choose her own husband despite pressure at hometo accept an arranged marriage. Others entered communitycolleges or found work at a local community center. An-other was placed under FBI protection after she was kid-napped by her parents who wanted to send her to Yemenbecause she refused to marry her cousin, wear the hijab, andsettle in the neighborhood. Her life choices were ultimately,if not radically, her own.

This ethnography has obvious relevance to the post–September 11 United States. Sarroub acknowledges this ina concluding chapter that, among other things, considersthe effects of “wanding” people as they pass through air-port security. Yemeni Americans are not only subjected towandings by employed “wanderers” but also, in more sub-tle ways, by non-Arab U.S. citizens who perceive them aspotential threats. Wanding in all of its manifestations hascaused the now older hijabat girls to wonder about who theyare as U.S. citizens, Yemenis, Muslims, and individuals. Thistruly remarkable book makes us wonder as well.

REFERENCE CITEDValenzuela, Angela

1999 Subtractive Schooling: U.S.–Mexican Youth and the Poli-tics of Caring. New York: State University of New York Press.

Nuer-American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migra-tion. Dianna J. Shandy. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 2007. 203 pp.

A. PETER CASTROSyracuse University

Nuer-American Passages seeks to challenge “popular images”of African refugees as people coming to Western countriesfrom “ ‘Stone-Age’ societies” (p. 1). Dianna J. Shandy arguesthat these inaccurate representations ignore the dynamism,creativity, and resiliency displayed by African forced mi-grants, including their sophisticated use of social networksand technology. In support of this argument, Shandy ex-amines the experience of the Nuer Diaspora, tracing theirmovement from war-torn southern Sudan to East African

refugee camps and cities, and to resettlement, for a rela-tively few, in the United States. Of an estimated 700,000forced Sudanese migrants, about 25,000 have been resettledby public and private organizations in the United States.The Nuer people, whose way of life initially became knownto anthropologists through E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s influen-tial writings, constitute a significant share of this popula-tion. Shandy draws on ethnographic data collected in theUnited States from 1996 to 2006, as well as two months ofresearch in Ethiopia in 2004. Much of the information isbased on Shandy’s interviews with approximately 400 Su-danese (mainly Nuer) forced migrants, with two-thirds ofthem taking place in the United States. Participant obser-vation, archival research, and a document review also in-formed the analysis.

The book is organized into nine chapters: an introduc-tion (ch. 1); historical overview of the Sudanese conflict(ch. 2); description of the bureaucratic process for determin-ing refugee status and a demographic profile of Sudaneserefugees in the United States (ch. 3); refugee flight strategiesand experiences (ch. 4); negotiating Nuer cultural identity,as experiences with educational, religious, and cultural in-stitutions (ch. 5); gender, marriage, and familial authority(ch. 6); secondary migration, including its role as a liveli-hood diversification strategy (ch. 7); the importance of re-mittances in familial and social networks (ch. 8); and a con-clusion emphasizing Nuer agency and creativity in dealingwith the refugee migration process, such as making socialinvestments that continue to link Nuer populations in theUnited States and in East Africa. Shandy closes by notingthat the experiences of the Nuer as refugees resemble inmany ways the behavior and practices of “other kinds ofmigrants as currently statutorily defined” (p. 166).

Curiously, given its opening statement in chapter 1,the book only stipulates, rather than demonstrates, thatAfrican refugees are popularly represented as being from“stone-age” societies. What difference such “flawed repre-sentations” might make for the African refugee experiencein the United States is not clear. Unfortunately, Shandy didnot probe systematically how U.S. citizens perceive or treatNuer refugees, including the extent to which members ofthe host country exhibited racist or xenophobic attitudesor behavior. Doing so would help the reader contextualizeShandy’s fascinating finding in chapter 5 that Nuer refugeescurrently do not see themselves as victims of racial discrimi-nation in the United States. Where racial or ethnic tensionsexist, Shandy reports it is often with other Sudanese, AfricanAmericans, and Mexicans.

A major concern for critics of immigration in theUnited States is the claim that newcomers free ride on thebacks of the taxpayers by seeking out maximum welfarebenefits. Shandy uses ethnographic data in chapter 5 to re-fute the notion that the relatively frequent interstate movesby Nuer refugees are driven by the availability of public ser-vices: the welfare magnet hypothesis. Instead, their move-ments are influenced by a number of culturally and eco-nomically mediated considerations. Another compelling


part of the book is the description in chapter 8 of Sudaneserefugees in Ethiopia and the United States sending remit-tances to family members. Although Shandy does a goodjob of highlighting the role of remittances in subsistence,paying for schooling, or use in bridewealth, surprisingly lit-tle information is presented on the extent to which suchmoney or other livelihood activities might be contributingto material asset accumulation either in the United Statesor in Africa. It is not clear whether asset accumulation isoccurring or if the issue simply was not investigated (or notreported on).

Nuer-American Passages is a valuable book for anyone in-terested in the experiences of African refugees in the UnitedStates. It is generally well written, although undergraduatesand nonacademics may stumble or wonder about its occa-sionally stilted language (e.g., “By characterizing Sudaneserefugees as socially and politically constructed, I seek topoint out the ways in which their suffering conveys ne-glect by the rest of the world,” p. 46). One hopes that theconflicts that create refugees in Africa will soon come to apeaceful resolution.

Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America. HelaineSilverman, ed. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,2006. 301 pp.

JONATHAN HAASThe Field Museum

This volume brings together multiple case studies and dis-cusses the topic of archaeological site museums in an in-tegrated way. Although there have been numerous effortsto develop local museums, the majority of these have beenseat-of-the-pants, trial-and-error endeavors. Archaeologistsworking in any given area often recognize the need and de-sire for a local museum to honor the cultural heritage ofan area, bring in tourists, and give communities a sense ofownership of their past. The present volume does a master-ful job of bringing together multiple case studies to offera thoughtful and relatively systematic look at the develop-ment, politics, and hard realities of working with local com-munities to create successful site museums. Most articles fo-cus on the nitty-gritty of developing such museums underhighly diverse conditions in Latin America, and herein liesthe strength of this volume. Reading the chapters is likereading a how-to (or how-not-to) book on developing localmuseums. They offer valuable firsthand information aboutthe challenges, dangers, pitfalls, and rewards of working ona local level with communities to create site museums.

One consistent theme throughout the volume is theimportance of meeting with and listening to the people oflocal communities who are directly invested in the rele-vant archaeological sites. Working out common goals be-tween the archaeologist and the community is one of thetrue challenges to developing a local museum, and thekey to success is ample open conversation. These conver-sations provide a necessary venue for the expression of lo-

cal hopes, desires, and concerns, as well as articulation ofrealistic expectations about what can and cannot be ac-complished through a local site museum. The modular sitemuseums in Peru discussed by Luis Jaime Castillo Buttersand Ulla Sarela Holmquist Pachas and the site museum ofAgua Blanca in Ecuador examined by Colin McEwan, Marıa-Isabel Silva, and Chris Hudson show nicely how expecta-tions and community concerns can be brought togethersuccessfully. Christine Hastorf describes the long-term di-alogue with the community of Chiripa in Bolivia, and AnnCyphers and Lucero Morales-Cano do the same for the com-munities around San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan in Mexico. A bigpart of the dialogue of these personal, first-person accountscenters on the disposition and long-term storage of the ar-tifacts. Most local communities want collections to stay inthe immediate area. They do not want materials—be theysherds, soil samples, or stone monuments—taken away andplaced in some remote museum.

Editor Helaine Silverman’s chapter on the museumifi-cation of the ancient Inca capital of Cusco in Peru bringsout another of the paradoxes of archaeological museumsin Latin America. In this case, she argues that local and re-gional governmental and religious authorities want to turnhistoric Cusco into one big museum, a proposition at oddswith the daily lives of people who live there: “the livingpopulation of Cusco is regarded by the municipality as wellas the Catholic Church as a nuisance for foreign tourists”(p. 177). In this case, it is unclear who represents the “local”community, and there is a constant negotiation of conflict-ing values and priorities.

The question of financial sustainability over the longterm is a daunting issue for local site museums. It is onething to raise funds to build and inaugurate a museum witha beautiful public opening, but it is quite another to keepthat museum open and financially healthy over the years.The chapter by Karen Stothert about the Museum of theLovers of Sumpa in coastal Ecuador tells a particularly in-sightful account of the differences between getting a mu-seum going and keeping it going. The chapter by YoshioOnuki on the Kuntur Wasi Museum in Peru discusses therole of local community members in maintaining and run-ning the museum. Rolando Paredes Eyzaguirre, GracielaFattorini Murillo, and Elizabeth Klarich describe the res-urrection of the museum facilities at the Peruvian site ofPukara, and in doing so they relate how changing politicalconditions affect the rise and fall of local museums.

Substantial, reasonably well-funded national museumsenjoy more freedom to explore roles as more active agentsof conservation, education, and research. Linda Manzanilladiscusses how the nationally sponsored site museums atTeotihuacan in central Mexico could be transformed fromobject-focused art history museums to learning centers witha focus on anthropology. Carlos G. Elera and Izumi Shimadadiscuss the “proactive” role of the Sican Museum of Peruin “guiding public conception, use, protection, and under-standing of the past and its remains” (p. 217). In both ofthese cases as well as other discussions in the volume, there

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is a consideration of the larger role of museums as places ofpublic learning. What is it that museums should be com-municating? Local history? Local interpretations of history?Local or national pride? The knowledge of anthropologyand archaeology? The chapters in this volume provide vary-ing answers to such broad questions and effectively bringLatin America site museums into a global dialogue over therole of museums in the world today.

The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transform-ing the Human Landscape. Alan H. Simmons. Tucson:University of Arizona Press, 2007. 338 pp.

GEOFFREY A. CLARKArizona State University

One of several recent books on the emergence of food pro-duction, The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East focuses ge-ographically on the Levant and the island of Cyprus, withoccasional references to highland western Asia (the Zagrosand Taurus mountain chains). The time frame spans the sixmillennia between circa 13,500 and circa 7,200 uncalibratedradiocarbon years before 1950 (b.p.), when the core spec-trum of early domesticates (wheat, barley, rye; sheep, goats)first appeared in the Levant, as early or nearly as early as any-where else in western Asia. These plants and animals grad-ually diversified as they adapted to new environments and,ultimately, came to dominate the subsistence economy, dis-placing a number of hunted and collected species, a processthat took place with some regularity over circa one and ahalf to two millennia. The book appears to be intended asa text for upper-division undergraduate courses that surveythe origins (and, to some extent, consequences) of domesti-cation economies in the Old World. The overall bias is onein which the adoption of domestication economies sets inmotion human-caused environmental degradation evidentat various tempos and scales. This is best documented atthe Jordanian “megasite” of Ain Ghazal, north of Amman.The book is organized into ten chapters that roughly cor-respond to the late Epipaleolithic, the prepottery Neolithic(PPN), and the early ceramic Neolithic (PN).

A foreword by Ofer Bar-Yosef puts the work into abroader historical context. Author Alan Simmons has anexcellent control of the current literature (evident from themany post-2000 citations), and the work is empirically verystrong. There are structural similarities in all the main chap-ters: history of research, chronology, geographical range,material culture (artifacts, architecture), economy, settle-ment patterns, the people (physical anthropology), ritualbehavior, social structure and organization, and regionalinteraction. Most of the chapters are illustrated to good ef-fect by one or two case studies. Simmons has had a lot ofexperience excavating sites in the eastern Mediterranean(Ain Ghazal, Wadi Shu’eib, and Ghwair I in Jordan; Ae-tokremnos, Koletria Ortos, and Ais Yiorkis on Cyprus); in-formally written, the case studies lend a personal note to thework.

Chapter 1 is a brief resume of Simmons’s career inthe eastern Mediterranean; it also outlines the scope ofthe book. Chapter 2 comprises the conceptual frameworks(paradigms) that structure Neolithic transition research, or-ganized into several categories (e.g., general models, mod-els specific to the Near East, etc.). These topics are arrangedchronologically. They tell us what various scholars think (orthought) about why people made the shift from predationto domestication economies, which is the basis for all sub-sequent social complexity. Other than a broadly definedecosystemic approach consistent with contemporary pro-cessualism, Simmons professes no specific orientation. TheLevantine environmental context is summarized in chapter3, using five phytogeographic zones originally created by ge-ographers. A useful feature of this chapter is a paleoenviron-mental reconstruction identifying major shifts in tempera-ture and precipitation from the last glacial maximum (ca.20 kya) to the mid-Holocene (ca. 6 kya). Chapter 4 focuseson the Natufian (12.8–10.2 kya) and its contemporaries.It represents the major breakpoint within the Epipaleo-lithic and the earliest sedentary or semisedentary villages.When compared with the highly mobile Kebaran that pre-ceded it, the Natufian exhibits the first real domestic archi-tecture, a rich and varied cultural repertoire, the first skele-tal indicators of a sexual division of labor, a fairly elaboratemortuary program, specialized predation on gazelle, and ev-idence for long-distance exchange. There is a debate aboutthe degree and nature of Natufian social complexity. Mini-mally, they were complex foragers (Olszewski), maximally,simple and complex chiefdoms (Henry). There is no pri-mary morphological evidence for domesticates, but thereare many indications of the intensive use of wild plantsand animals that were later domesticated.

Chapters 5–8 deal with the prepottery Neolithic(PPN)—divided into A (10.2–9 kya), B (9–8 kya), and C(8–7.2 kya) phases—and the early ceramic Neolithic (PN,7.2–6 kya). Known until recently from only a handful ofsites, PPNA adaptations continue many trends first ob-served during the Natufian: a wide range of site typeswith large villages (Beidha, Jericho) likely housing 100–250 persons on a more or less permanent basis; more in-tensive cultivation of (still morphologically wild) cerealgrasses; possible domestication of rye; mortuary practices(esp. ritual decapitation); circular or oval houses; and spe-cialized hunting of gazelle and fallow deer. There is ashift in ritual manifest in the replacement of Natufianzoomorphs by female figurines; construction of substan-tial public works at Jericho, Gobekli, with (temporary?)centralized control of a large labor force; a reorganizationof social structure at the bigger sites; and, in the north,the first appearance of rectilinear architecture, which hasbeen taken by many to signal significant changes in socialorganization.

The PPNB, known from more than 100 sites, sees akind of “Neolithic florescence,” especially in the Levant.Most sites were small agropastoral villages two to fiveacres in extent. Domesticated einkorn and emmer wheat,


barley, peas, lentils, sheep, goats, and possibly cattle com-prise the subsistence economy, albeit in various combi-nations, depending on local circumstances. Hunting andgathering continue to be important. Architectural com-plexity is a hallmark of the PPNB. Villages consistedof multiroom rectilinear houses, and there is clear evi-dence at some sites for sizeable, nondomestic structuresof communal ritual significance. Whether—and to whatextent—PPNB societies were egalitarian or hierarchicallyorganized is vigorously debated. In the larger communi-ties, there was probably some degree of community lead-ership, although the nature of that leadership so far eludesus.

PPNC sites have so far been identified only in Jordan.Pigs were added to the list of domesticates, and there isevidence for some reversion to foraging, population dis-persal, and a mosaic of different adaptations. Unsurpris-ingly, these changes in the subsistence economy were ac-companied by major changes in social organization, as mostlarge sites are abandoned and people spread out over thelandscape.

The late PPNB and the PPNC are exceptional for an ap-parent shift in the major population centers from the westto the east bank of the Jordan, and for the appearance of 14“megasites,” which were communities exceeding 20 acresin extent and with estimated populations of approximately1,000–2,000 individuals. The best known is Ain Ghazal, inthe northern suburbs of Amman, where more than a decadeof excavations document a history of anthropogenic en-vironmental degradation and an eventual economic splitbetween those communities that settled down and empha-sized farming and those that dispersed and became pas-toral nomads (the classic distinction between “the desert”and “the sown”). Driven ultimately by climate change, ag-gregation and the pooling of scarce resources was initiallyadaptive but provoked accelerated population growth that,over time, resulted in the depletion of the local environ-ment, critical resource shortages, a reversion to smaller set-tlements, and the more egalitarian forms of social organi-zations that characterize the southern Levantine PN. TheCypriot Neolithic is summarized in chapter 9. Simmons wasthe first to show, at Aetokremnos on the Akrotiri Peninsula,that there was a pre-Neolithic colonization of Cyprus byhunter-gatherers who evidently rapidly extinguished theindigenous “megafauna” (i.e., pygmy hippos, elephants).Well-dated by radiocarbon to circa 12,500 B.P., Aetokrem-nos is circa 2,000 years earlier than the earliest Neolithic onthe island.

In sum, Simmons’s book is well-balanced and gracefullywritten and presents current information on the early stagesof food production in the eastern Mediterranean. The syn-thetic chapter on the Cypriot Neolithic is, so far as I know,unique. It will be probably be most widely used as an under-graduate text in survey courses (I plan to adopt it myself),but it should also be of interest and value to anyone whowants to see what the “big picture” of the early LevantineNeolithic was like.

Archaeological Anthropology: Perspectives on Methodand Theory. James M. Skibo, Michael W. Graves, andMiriam T. Stark, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press,2007. 309 pp.

PATTI J . WRIGHTUniversity of Missouri, St. Louis

This informative and thought-provoking volume is dedi-cated to the work and life of the archaeologist William Lon-gacre. The 12 chapters reflect works by four generations ofLongacre proteges. The chapters and the foreword by PattyJo Watson and epilogue by Lewis Binford logically connectaround themes that remain at the heart of Americanist Ar-chaeology and that figured prominently in Longacre’s ca-reer. These include the rise of New Archaeology and theintellectual history of archaeology in the late 20th century,archaeological methodology, analogical inference, ethnoar-chaeology, and reconstruction of ancient societies.

Drawing from the New Archaeology, Mark Leone (ch. 2)adapts ethnoarchaeology and middle-range theory to his-torical archaeology as a means to explore the tie between ar-chaeology and documents. His work takes a reflexive tone ashe tries to understand the social and political contexts ofarchaeological investigations and of historical documentsand makes archaeology relevant to contemporary issues.

In subsequent chapters, Alan Sullivan (ch. 3) andMichael Schiffer (ch. 4), like Longacre decades earlier, chal-lenge orthodoxy. Sullivan turns the tables on anthropolog-ical archaeology and calls for the development of “observa-tional and analytical methods and taxa that are appropriatefor investigating the phenomena that archaeologists actu-ally study” (p. 41). In reexamined hypotheses associatedwith Site 17 of the Upper Basin Archaeological Project, heillustrates how reliance on cultural anthropology for theo-retical and methodological inspiration can be problematic.One of the strengths of his chapter lies in his assessmentof hypothesis testing. Schiffer, like Sullivan, argues for anindependence of archaeology. In discussing the reconstruc-tion of social organization based on archaeological mate-rials, Schiffer builds on Longacre’s passion by introducingtwo new units: techno-community and cadena. These units,grounded in the “material nature of human life,” providefertile means for studying social organization archaeolog-ically. While archaeology can certainly benefit from thesechallenges and the development of new methods and so-cial units, passing over the richness of the ethnographiesand ethnohistories could be as counterproductive as com-plete reliance.

In chapter 5, James Skibo, John Franzen, and Eric Drakeuse performance-based analysis to strengthen an argumentbased on ethnographic sources as they take up the issueof analogy in archaeological research. Here, behavioral ar-chaeology converges with evolutionary approaches, as theauthors argue for a performance-based model of analogy. Inretesting the classic “smudge pits and hide smoking” argu-ment, Skibo et al. demonstrate how attributes can be linked

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to human behaviors based on the suitability of the attributesto achieve a delimited set of outcomes.

Miriam Stark and Skibo (ch. 6) provide a history ofLongacre’s Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project (KEP); theyhighlight the challenges of ethnoarchaeology and the con-tributions of Longacre and his students. Margaret Beck andMatthew Hill (ch. 7) and Mark Neupert (ch. 8) build on KEPresearch. Beck and Hill use ethnoarchaeological research tounderstand ceramic discard practices that structure, whileNeupert extends the research in the Philippines and focuseson understanding the behavioral organization behind ce-ramic production.

Izumi Skimada and Ursel Wagner (ch. 9), in combin-ing research on production and distribution of multiple,pre-Hispanic craft technologies found on the north coastof Peru, convincingly argue that a holistic approach canyield “data and insights into a wide array of the factorsthat shaped craft production and the complex feedbackloops that linked it to the broader material and nonmaterialworlds” (p. 196). Inspired by Longacre’s questions, PatriciaCrown (ch. 10) looks at the organization of craft produc-tion from the perspective of learning and teaching. Howdo unskilled individuals acquire the information and skillnecessary to become a competent potter? Crown modelsteaching and learning based on cross-cultural and interdis-ciplinary studies and compares that information with at-tributes of ceramics with archaeological patterning in theAmerican Southwest.

In the final chapter, Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whit-tlesey (ch. 11) take up Longacre’s concern with early-14th-century population aggregation in and around GrasshopperPueblo in east–central Arizona. Based on artifactual, archi-tectural, and burial data, they infer relative amounts of pop-ulation movement and the direction from which the peo-ple came. Finding that groups traveled over longer distancesand had limited interactions prior to their movement, Reidand Whittlesey resurrect the issue of how social integrationmight have been achieved, which is one of the key researchproblems Longacre identified for study at Grasshopper.

The editors, Skibo, Michael Graves, and Stark, intendedthis “volume not as a retrospective of Longacre’s career butas a means to build on the legacies of an archaeologicalparadigm to which he contributed and to extend his contri-butions forward in terms of Americanist archaeology” (p. 3).Those interested in the history of archaeological thoughtand ceramic analysis will find the volume especially ap-pealing. Moreover, Archaeological Anthropology succeeds inweaving the old with the new and challenging contempo-rary research. The volume makes a profound and lastingcontribution to the field that a wide range of readers willfind fascinating.

A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception andPopular Discontent in Nigeria. Daniel Jordan Smith.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 263 pp.

GABRIEL FERREYRA-OROZCOUniversity of Texas, San Antonio

In A Culture of Corruption, author Daniel Jordan Smith delvesinto the core of Nigerian society and gives us a detailedaccount of its most emblematic problem: corruption in day-to-day life. Studying corruption is a difficult task to carry outin any place, and Smith was able to undertake this study byvirtue of being an insider in Nigeria. As an in-law in theUbakala local community (he married a Nigerian woman),he witnessed corruption firsthand and obtained an internalperspective on how Nigerians cope with corruption everyday.

Smith intends to deconstruct and explain the connec-tion between culture and corruption in Nigeria society.This connection sheds light on how corruption is inter-twined with complex social and economic processes suchas patron–client relationships, kinship ties, postcolonialregimes, and the national oil industry.

Corruption is a worldwide multifaceted problem, andNigeria is no exception. Smith analyzes the different cat-egories of Nigerian corruption starting with the phenom-ena of e-mail scams. These e-mails offer millions of dollarsthrough bank account deposits through the use of ruses.This type of corruption grew exponentially in Nigeria af-ter the transition to democracy in 1999, when Internet andcellular technology flourished. According to Smith, youngNigerians accessing the Internet from cybercafes through-out the country are the basement of e-mail fraud organi-zations. Using scam letters, such as the deceased dictator’sdesperate widow template who needs a Western accountto deposit her fortune, these organizations have created aprofitable scam industry.

Smith also explains how everyday corruption occurs.For instance, the Nigerian factor, the notion that corrup-tion pervades the entire social body, is but one of the manyconceptualizations Nigerians have of corruption. The mostknown term is 419 (pronounced four-one-nine), “namedafter the number in the Nigerian penal code that dealswith specific form of fraud” (p. 19). Originally 419 re-ferred to specific types of frauds; through time, however,this number has become a powerful symbol indicatingany behavior based on ruses and manipulations of thetruth to obtain personal gain. Real estate scams, check-point extortions by the police, daily petty corruption ingovernment offices, and even the betrayal of love areexplained in terms of people’s deceiving mechanisms of419.

Another new ingenious form of corruption is throughnongovernment organizations (NGOs): in such cases,money is obtained from international donors to benefittheir founders only. Because of the well-known corruptreputation of the Nigerian government, development pro-grams fueled their resources to the NGO sector to guaran-tee money would be invested accordingly. However, partsof civil society have colluded with government officials tokeep the money for themselves. As Smith suggests, the strik-ing point is how Nigerians have improved their skills todeceive others while morally justifying their own corruptbehavior.


Overall corruption in Nigeria cannot be understoodoutside of politics. Institutions from the past—such ascolonialism, military government, patron–client patterns,and strong kinship ties—influence each other to produceand reproduce the problem of corruption.

Rampant crime and vigilantism are also associated withcorrupt practices. High rates of violent crime and the beliefthat the police not only protect criminals but also becomeperpetrators led most Nigerians and local governments tosupport violent vigilante groups, such as the Bakassi Boys, tofight crime in the late 1990s. Extreme violence, instant jus-tice, and public executions were some of the methods thesegroups used to deal with criminals. However, the vigilantesalso ended up killing innocent people, executing rivals, andpursuing their own interests.

In addition, phenomena such as witchcraft accusationsand increasing Pentecostal Christianity among Nigeriansare closely related to people’s perceptions of social andeconomic inequalities based on corruption. Nigerian soci-ety has a long tradition of reciprocal exchange by whichmembers of the community share their surpluses. Smithexplains that excessive accumulation of wealth by a fewindividuals, mostly because of corruption, leads to resent-ment from those that cannot access such resources; there-fore, witchcraft and diabolic ritual accusations respond tothis reality. Pentecostalism in Nigeria is influenced by peo-ple’s needs to explain and justify social and economic dis-parities caused by corrupt practices.

The bottom line is that corruption is the aftermathof extreme social, economic, and political inequalities thathas become an ethos. Paradoxically, ordinary Nigerians aretrapped between the need to participate in corruption tosurvive and the awareness of how these practices erode theirlives.

The book would have been stronger if the informa-tion and conclusions were based more directly on ethno-graphic data. A lack of qualitative analyses, questionnaires,and a clear or strong theoretical framework weakens theresults. Nonetheless, the anthropology of corruption is dif-ficult to undertake, and even a subjective account is valu-able. I strongly suggest this book to anyone interested inNigeria or the production, dynamics, and consequences ofcontemporary corruption.

Casting Kings: Bards and Indian Modernity. Jeffrey G.Snodgrass. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 226 pp.

NORBERT PEABODYUniversity of Cambridge

This superb book explores how a caste of poor, low-statusbards, known as Bhats, negotiate their social identity andsocial standing within the wider community in the NorthIndian state of Rajasthan. The principal weapon of thesebards in this endeavor is their “cunning” or “cleverness,”which they primarily express through their command ofverbal arts but also through other forms of deception or

misdirection. In the recent historical past, the Bhats workedprimarily as genealogists and storytellers for another low-caste group of rural agricultural laborers. But today manyof them migrate for much of the year to Rajasthan’s ma-jor cities, where they have adapted their storytelling skillsand become entertainers (particularly puppeteers) for a widerange of patrons including foreign tourists, middle-class ur-banites, development agencies, and government officials.Hence, the Bhats lead a seminomadic life, oscillating be-tween what might be thought of as a rapidly modernizing(and increasingly globally connected) metropolitan spaceand relatively more isolated village settings.

What is interesting about this slightly schizophrenic,peripatetic existence is the continued centrality of the dis-course of Indic kingship to how Bhats frame their relation-ship with their patrons, even when those patrons repre-sent the modern, democratic nation-state. Bhats continueto use idioms of royal fame (albeit tailored to suit the exi-gencies of modern life) in glorifying their patrons. And theyhave good reason for doing so, for in spreading the renownof their patrons within this idiom, they lace it with poly-semic meanings that are also menacing and destabilizing.Much of Casting Kings consists of analyses of what authorJeffrey Snodgrass calls “praise-abuse,” which Bhats deployto shame their patrons into being more generous with themand more respectful toward them. In this way they attemptto renegotiate, with varying degrees of success, their other-wise very low status within Indian society. But more thansimply repositioning themselves within an already estab-lished order, Snodgrass shows how the Bhats attempt tosubtly shift the very basis on which Indian social hierar-chy is founded to grounds that are far more flattering tothe Bhats themselves. Through their verbal art, they try tocreate a world in which fame is central and, as the spe-cialists in spreading and assuring this fame for all eternity,they establish a unique role and importance for themselves.However, in revealing the creative power of their verbal art,Snodgrass is careful not to present the Bhats as entirely self-constituting agents. Rather, he remains acutely aware of theconditions of possibility within which Bhats operate thatsubtly (and not so subtly) shape their art. The great skillof Snodgrass’s text lies in the sensitive manner in which heweighs up these influences (and the dilemmas they present)on Bhat creativity.

In pursuing this goal, Snodgrass makes important con-tributions to a number of other different debates concern-ing the nature of modernity, the performative dimensionsof language, and the foundations of the Indian caste system.This latter item receives perhaps the most sustained atten-tion in this text and deserves special mention. In seeing In-dic kingship as central to the Bhats’ construction of socialhierarchy in Rajasthan, Snodgrass, of course, adds yet moreweight to those arguments deriving from Arthur MauriceHocart that see the values associated with kingship (as op-posed to Brahmanical religion) as the key to understandingcaste organization. However, Snodgrass make several signif-icant modifications to this position. In particular, whereas

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most of Hocart’s followers privilege the position of the kingto the exclusion of all others, Snodgrass’s approach is moredeeply perspectival, insofar as he views the caste system aslying at the negotiated intersection of several competingconstructions of social rank. Of course, not all construc-tions have the same capacity to assert themselves, but theyare all present nonetheless.

Like the stories that Bhats recite, this book can be read atseveral different levels. The main body of the text is writtenin refreshingly straightforward, stylish, and engaging prose,which is remarkably free of jargon and technical language,thereby making this book suitable for advanced undergrad-uate and graduate courses in South Asian studies as well asmore general courses on modernization and social change.Moreover, Snodgrass’s rich and copious data on the Bhats’verbal arts will also interest those teaching linguistic anthro-pology. In addition, research scholars will want to read thedetailed footnotes to the book, which almost can be read asa separate monograph and where a surprising amount of so-phisticated argumentation on the above topics takes place.Indeed, this thoughtful and thought-provoking book war-rants repeated readings.

Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in NorthernKenya. Bilinda Straight. Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 2007. 275 pp.

JULIAN M. MURCHISONMillsaps College

Bilinda Straight’s book offers a thought-provoking look atSamburu experiences with the extraordinary and the mun-dane, as well as the theoretical underpinnings of semioticsand phenomenology. She successfully weaves together richethnographic detail with extended ruminations on theoriesconcerning reality, imagination, and experience. In the veinof Paul Stoller’s “sensuous” ethnography, Straight’s workforegrounds “expansive experience” (p. 8) and allows thereader access to semiotic encounters involving death, theextraordinary, and the mundane.

At an abstract level, Straight suggests that Samburulive in and experience a world in which the mundane andthe miraculous are both relevant and proximate. The bookopens with an account of the death of a young Samburugirl that Straight witnessed firsthand in Kenya in 1993.This tragic story offers a compelling entry into Straight’sfocus on the miraculous and the extraordinary, particularlyas they relate to death. Death and suffering are frequentconcerns and experiences for Samburu. However, Straightalso encountered stories of children resurrected from thedead and of visits to the home of Nkai (divinity). She in-sists that these miraculous stories are not simply to be readand analyzed as texts. Instead, they are part of a semioticsystem intertwined with a “radical intersubjectivity” (p. 9)that challenges many common Euro-American ontologicaland epistemological assumptions. Straight presents a con-vincing case that Samburu subjectivity and personhood are

predicated on a combination of shared substance, circulat-ing objects, and witnessed and shared experience. In thiscontext, things like the legacies of colonialism, the post-colonial state, race, and gender are important, but they arenot necessarily determinative of Samburu lived experience.

Although her extended theoretical explanation is con-tained in an appendix, from the outset Straight groundsher thinking in Peircian semiotics. Although clearly in-formed and inspired by the “literary turn” in anthropol-ogy, she thoughtfully critiques the work of Jacques Derridaand Jacques Lacan (among others), particularly in terms ofits implications for understanding and writing about real-ity and experience. She is wary of confining Samburu ideasand narratives to the realm of metaphor, symbolism, andimagination. She repeatedly seeks to contextualize Samburulived experience within the real suffering and the frequentlyharsh environmental and economic circumstances that theSamburu face. In some ways, Straight’s book is an extendedplea to avoid assuming that reality is always imagined orinaccessible to the anthropologist. While clearly interestedin language and symbols, Straight wants to return the focusto real and immediate experience, which is an integral partof her semiotics of “dense signs.”

While the work is very theoretical, the reader inter-ested in ethnographic detail will find that the entire workis informed by and infused with ethnography. One of themost intriguing aspects of Straight’s work comes in the waythat she connects Peirce’s ideas about “prescissing” withSamburu ideas about “cutting” (p. 10); in drawing this anal-ogy between the two linguistic and philosophical ideas,she allows the ethnography and the theory to inform eachother and to speak to each other. The reader learns a greatdeal about the Samburu lived world, including practical andmoral economies, and about Samburu being in the world. Inthis approach, Straight crafts a helpful way to wed a slightlyretooled phenomenology and ethnography.

In the end, this work reminds the reader of the chal-lenges in conducting and writing engaged and dialogicethnography that aims not to impose a particular ontol-ogy or epistemology in the course of study and analysis.Straight is conscious of her own experiences and the waysthat they shape her encounters with and analysis of Sam-buru ideas and experiences. Her work involves a deep inter-est in Samburu ethnophilosophy, but it constitutes muchmore than ethnophilosophy. In fact, chapter 7 (“Resurrec-tion”) examines Euro-American religious and biomedicalunderstandings of death and resurrection as much as it doesSamburu understandings. Then, in chapter 8 (“Loip”) shereturns us to loip, “one of the most semantically dense ofSamburu signs and one integrally related to personhood”(p. 158). Beginning with a notion of immediacy rootedin experience that is essential to her semiotic approach,Straight allows a glimpse of the intricate connections be-tween signs and experience and between the Samburu andtheir near and distant neighbors. In so doing, she promptsthe reader to think about the connections and cutting thatmake semiotics possible.


Straight’s book is a dense but very enjoyableread. She succeeds in bringing together the importanttheoretical concepts of “imagination,” “experience,” and“personhood” in thoughtful and insightful ways. Her workreminds the reader of the important ways that theory andethnography can mutually inform and illuminate, and thebook is an important contribution to the existing literaturefor both the area specialist and the theoretically inclined.

Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the AncientSouthwest. Alan P. Sullivan III and James M. Bayman, eds.Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 291 pp.

KATHRYN A. KAMPGrinnell College

Research in Southwestern archaeology has been dominatedby areas with large sites, population concentrations, andspectacular architecture and artifacts. One prevalent set ofmodels, which in various incarnations is over 75 years old,views these regions as the centers of development and thesurrounding areas as the margins. The validity of this per-spective is debatable. In fact, the notion of a “core area” maywell be a combination of actual archaeological evidence andthe artifact of concentrated archaeological research and ty-pology. The most frequently recognized core areas—the Ho-hokam, Chaco, and Paquime–Casas Grandes regions—haveinspired considerable research and theoretical discussion.Even when the peripheries are studied, a common focus istheir relationship to the core, and the search for similar-ities is often at the expense of more nuanced analyses ofthe hinterlands themselves. It is the rare edited volume onSouthwestern archaeology that contains not a single articleexplicitly on one of the Southwestern core areas.

Ten of the 12 chapters in Hinterlands and Regional Dy-namics in the Ancient Southwest examine cultural dynamicsin regions often considered hinterlands. The remaining twochapters, an introduction by the editors and a conclusionby Ruth Van Dyke, place the case studies into a theoret-ical context. The breadth of coverage is good, includinga range of areas adjacent to each of the traditional cores.Three of the articles (by Whittlesey on the Lower Verde Val-ley, Elson and Clark on the Tonto Basin, and Vanderpotand Altschul on the Middle San Pedro River Valley) are onareas proximate to the Hohokam; three (Hegmon and Nel-son on the Mimbres, Douglas on southeastern Arizona andsouthwestern New Mexico, and Bayman on the Papageria)treat zones near both Hohokam and Casas Grandes; and two(Schlanger on Mesa Verde and Duff and Schachner on east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico) deal with thearea that would have been influenced by the Chaco regionalsystem. In addition, there are two contributions on areas abit more distant from any of the traditional centers (Carterand Sullivan on the Grand Canyon and Coconino Plateau,and Rocek and Rautman on the Sierra Blanca and Salinasdistricts). Although the approaches vary considerably, all ofthe articles are written by regional experts, and the quality

of both the data analysis and theoretical underpinnings isuniversally high.

The contributions all address the relationship of the“hinterland” to the potential heartland. Some of the au-thors argue that a variant of the core–periphery terminol-ogy is useful for discussion their regions, while others to-tally eschew it. Whatever the approach, a major strengthof the volume is the authors’ almost universal attempts toavoid essentialist typologies in favor of more dynamic in-teractional approaches that Van Dyke characterizes as “re-lational approaches.” A common theme is the complexityof the regions themselves, their own cultural creativity, andthe economic, social, political, and cultural power and au-tonomy of the hinterlands. Even when styles are borrowedfrom a core area, as with Mimbres pottery designs, local arti-sans are making choices about what to emulate. Some areas,such as Mesa Verde and the ancestral Zuni region of east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico, have actedas heartlands during some time periods and hinterlandsduring others. Other areas fit some of the characteristics ofcores and other characteristics of peripheries, making themhard to categorize even within a single time period, and stillothers are never centers, remaining hinterlands throughoutlong occupational histories. Thomas R. Rocek and Alison E.Rautman emphasize the idea of heterarchy rather than hier-archy. This seems a particularly useful notion, because theinterpretation of a region’s roles depends on the scale ofanalysis, what artifact types are examined, and the frame ofreference. Once hierarchy becomes a less important for an-alytic models of regional systems, terms designating heart-lands and hinterlands should become a less common fea-ture of archaeological terminology as well. The very notionof a “core” implies a power differential: culturally, econom-ically, or politically. In turn hinterlands, peripheries, andmarginal areas are all by definition contrasted to some typeof central, more dominant zone. Although this volume pur-ports to concentrate on the hinterlands, the core areas are,in fact, a central element of most discussions. Heterarchyusefully analyzes cultural variation in terms of the units athand, rather than preconceived typological categories, anddoes not assume a priori the direction of cultural exchanges,whether of goods or influence. Hopefully, should this per-spective be truly adopted by archaeologists, it will put allareas on an equal footing in terms of theoretical interest.

Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient South-west will probably be primarily of interest to Southwesternarchaeologists. Nevertheless, it deals with issues of broaderconcern to archaeologists and, thus, should not be rele-gated to the realm of simply regional specialist literature.Of particular interest are the discussions of the nature ofregional systems, the tension between local autonomy andregional integration, the role of local cultures in decisionmaking and culture change, the types of interactions possi-ble with other cultural centers (whether or not they canbe characterized as heartlands or cores), the multiethnicnature of many regions, and the ways different types ofpower are negotiated within a regional context. Of even

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more general interest is the question implied by many of thecontributors, “Do notions of heartland and hinterland fur-ther the course of archaeological analysis or do they impedeit by encouraging scholars to view the world through par-ticular lenses?”

Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Michael Taussig. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006. 245 pp.

RICHARD SHAPIROCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies

Michael Taussig’s collection of essays innovatively exploresthemes, issues, and questions that relate to his consider-able body of work produced over the last 30 years, touchingon commodification, colonialism, shamanism, magic, rep-resentation, and violence, predominantly in South Amer-ica. This collection includes the newly written title chapterand seven reworked pieces originally published from 1993to 2003, traversing disparate geographical spaces and so-cial contexts. Taussig’s formidable scholarship reflects com-mitment to thinking at home in complexity, nuance, anduncertainty, organized to challenge political and economicdomination, systemic violence, and cultural homogeniza-tion. Through autobiography, philosophical exegesis, nar-rative, and story, Taussig opens the reader to sustained en-gagement with critical social thought and anthropologicallegacies.

The “intellectual force-field” in which his thoughtunfolds pays homage to Karl Marx, particularly as uti-lized by first-generation Frankfurt School thinkers, TheodorAdorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin, as well asFriedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Georges Bataille.Taussig brings these traditions alive to investigate dynam-ics of and in the present. How have processes of commod-ification trained, tortured, and transformed bodies? Howhave the forced flows of capital and knowledge affected rit-uals, meanings, and imaginations of subaltern lives? Whatresilience and resistance reveals the dignity and intelli-gence of subjugated beings? Can anthropology, as counter-memory in proximity to critical thought and devaluedcultures, destabilize the trance that captivates and anaes-thetizes, opening space for new thought, relations, encoun-ters, and alliances facilitative of joy, difference, and redemp-tion? Taussig honors these inheritances and the spectersof near forgotten ancestors by sustained inquiry that re-fuses the platitudes of the day, thinks out of season, andmaintains the question as the magical elixir that nour-ishes thought. The history of anthropology animates thepages as Edward Tylor, Franz Boas, E. E. Evans-Pritchard,Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, and others return fromthe grave, gently yet forcefully turned over by Taussig’s ex-cavation. The reader also benefits from multiple referencesto literary figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe andJean Genet, George Brecht and William Burroughs, RudyardKipling and Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Aimee Mann, andSylvia Plath. Critical social thought, literature, ethnogra-

phy, and history perform the task of “making the familiarstrange” and articulating the strange in ways that demandthat we take it seriously.

At work in Taussig’s thought is a rigorous critique ofmetaphysical truth as that system that promises knowabil-ity without remainder. Taussig thinks within a different un-derstanding of truth. The play of revealing and concealingat work in human efforts to understand and manipulate“reality,” the mix of faith and skepticism toward culturalrituals and holders of power and knowledge, are at workin modern science, as well as in indigenous practices amal-gamated under the category “shamanic.” That modern dis-courses of truth emphasize the progressive replacement offaith with reason and belief with knowledge does not se-duce Taussig. His notion of the nervous system indicatesthe blurred boundaries demarcating the archaic and mod-ern, revealing continuities in the way cultural constructionsperform mimicry of nature so as to harness and subdue itsmysterious powers. In a world dominated by calculationand utility, the fetishization of literality, of facts, objectiv-ity, and the real, Taussig reminds us that the humbler prac-tice of thinking draws attention to the unimaginable, theunreal, and surreal that also have status as events, practices,rituals, and longings. Violence, disappearance, torture, andloss precede with regularity at accelerating speed, system-atically produced horror forgotten in the very moment itpresences, noted thoughtlessly as a cost of progress. Taussighelps us remember Benjamin’s angel of history, moving fastforward toward the future with the accumulated debris ofthe past at its back. Taussig places these unimaginable atroc-ities, forgotten stories, and lost events before our eyes not asspectacle or cause for nostalgia but as memory-making nec-essary to mourning. Pausing the fast-forward movement oftime enables the messianic moment of “now time” to inter-rupt the happy consciousness of identitarian thought. Thisis Benjamin’s (counter) memory, in which redemption isincomplete and ongoing practice explodes on us as fragile(im)possibility. This is perhaps the place of hope for thosewithout hope, who live in worlds under siege, evaporatingas struggles incapable of victory continue in the rigged gameof globalization.

Taussig is relevant to a postcolonial anthropology inwhich critiques of domination multiply through inquiryattentive to complex intersections of race, class, gender, lan-guage, sexuality, culture, and nation. He practices anthro-pology as alliance with indigenous peoples, peasants, andworkers in the global south, drawing on crucial traditions ofcritical thought in the global north. His work can facilitateinquiry among those of us in closer relation to feminism,critical race theory, queer studies, genealogy, deconstruc-tion, and contemporary critique produced in postcolonialspaces. Taussig draws on a life of varied dislocations, yearlyhabitation with Columbian peasants, and scholarly immer-sion to leave traces of what is being lost in text, in memory.It appears that like the blind, black poet, Don Tomas Za-pata, Taussig has “no option but to keep on writing.” Foranthropology, for justice, that deserves our praise.


Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice. Niels Teunis andGilbert Herdt, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press,2007. 264 pp.

WILLIAM JANKOWIAKUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas

This collection brings together several well-grounded,ethnographically insightful, and overall balanced analysesof what it means to be sexually marginalized in several mi-nority communities: Hispanics, Koreans, and African Amer-icans. The chapters, taken individually or as a whole, in-sightfully document (with an emphasis on both insightfullyand document) the effects of social inequality on an indi-vidual’s sexual lives. In this collection, the authors bringa smart ethnographic view that explores the meaning andpractices of social oppression based on sexuality. The bookis not an ideological broadside. Rather, it is a systematicinvestigation into the habits, perceptions, and practices ofindividuals living with a stigmatized and undesirable sex-uality. The authors focus on the sociohistorical processesthat create and reproduce inequality in social and sexualdomains.

From Sonya Arreola, we learn that HIV-positive gayLatino men are stigmatized and shunned by their own com-munity. Moreover, Arreola finds a high prevalence of child-hood sexual abuse and unsafe sex amongst gay–bisexualmen. The risky behavior does not rise from early sexual ex-periences as much as it does from the perception of havinginvoluntary sexual experience(s). It is the involuntarinessor coercion of the early sexual experiences that results inan internalized and deep-seated sense of shame and humil-iation toward their sexuality. It also results in a high inci-dence, especially amongst gay Latino men, of unsafe sexpractices, arising from their self-loathing. In partial concur-rence, Rafael Diaz found it is the positive HIV status thatpushes Latino men into a social isolation that only furtherproduces a fragmented self-image.

Social shame is also evident in the remembrance ofKorean comfort women’s World War II experiences. Chun-hee Sarah Soh argues that the phenomena of comfortwomen are not atypical but should be seen as representa-tive of contemporary Korean women who are compelledto adjust and reorganize, like the comfort women, to thedemands and expectations of the market-driven Koreaeconomy.

Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez explores the sex lives of Mexi-can immigrant women and finds that women remain activeagents, albeit members of a subordinated social group withits own marginalized identities. Their marginality arisesfrom the contradictions in religious teachings that continueto foster a sense of guilt in matters of ethical posturing andsexual expression.

Richard Shuttleworth discusses the relationshipamongst disabilities, sexuality, and marginality. He finds,as one would expect, that the issues men face are those thatdeal with normative expectations of sex role performances.

Shifting ethnographic focus, the chapters by HectorCarrillo and Christopher Carrington explore factors thatoften get in the way of sexual pleasure. In addition, theyhighlight the importance of friendship bonds in the homo-sexual community. In a way, they have documented thatout of sex can come lasting friendship.

Brain de Vries and Patrick Hoctel perceptively probewhat it is like to grow old in gay–lesbian community. Theyfind an expanded notion of “kinship” and that connective-ness extends to those friends who are like family.

Jessica Fields’s chapter is the result of extensiveparticipant-observations of middle school administrators’,teachers’, and students’ understanding, valuing, and use ofsexual knowledge as it is taught and learned in sex educa-tion courses. She argues that an unintended consequenceof sex education is that it may make girls more vulnerableto boys who, with an understanding of women’s sexual-ity, may be able too more effectively abuse this newfoundknowledge. She offers no data, however, to support thisconclusion.

In the final chapter, Gilbert Herdt, Stephen Russell, Jef-frey Sweat, and Michelle Marzullo present the results of anintriguing study: heterosexual high school youth’s reactionto gay students. Specifically, the authors study an emergingU.S. trend of “coming out gay” in high school. They ar-gue that there are numerous gay–straight alliances (or GAS)forming across the United States. The authors further be-lieve this must be understood as part of the youth’s em-powerment movement, which suggests that certain formsof social inequality may be eventually overcome. The bookends, therefore, on a hopeful note: education, and with itenlightenment, can change an individual’s perception ofthe sexually normal and thereby contribute to the creationof a more expansive social landscape of sexual tolerance.

Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 B.C.):The Archaeological Evidence. Lothar von Falkenhausen.Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA Press,2006. 555 pp.

MAGNUS FISKESJOCornell University

China’s Classical Zhou period, widely revered as the dawnof Chinese civilization, continues to be regarded by many(esp. in China) as a paradigm even for the present time. Thehanded-down canon from this era remains a starting pointfor nearly every discussion of its history and contemporarysignificance.

Lothar von Falkenhausen, who is in his element bothin those venerable Classics and in anthropological archae-ology, here offers an erudite yet accessible alternative view.Taking the archaeological evidence seriously in its ownright and showing how it reveals a different story, hechallenges and overturns numerous taken-for-granted as-sumptions about ancient China. One of the most strik-ing examples is when von Falkenhausen shows how the

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wisdom advocated and “transmitted” by Confucius wasactually—contrary to what much contemporary literaturekeeps repeating—much more recently fashioned than any-thing suggested by Confucius himself (a radical conserva-tive, if there ever was one) as he went about glorifying animaginary antiquity. Another example is the ingenious useof demographic data and anthropological insights to ex-plain “lineage splitting,” channeling ancestor worship tocurtail the burdensome inflation of ancestors, and to re-fashion hierarchies of power among the living.

Such insights are made possible by a persistent and suc-cessful pursuit of social history and are built almost entirelyon fresh analysis of the rich archaeological materials un-earthed in the core areas of Bronze Age China. Confucius’scase is but one of many implications of the dramatic ninth-century B.C.E. overhaul of the key ancestor worship systemthat comes to light in the rich remains of ritual tool kits andsites but is never mentioned in the Classics.

The book lucidly explains, at every step, the meth-ods and thinking behind the conclusions reached. It openswith an overview of the expanding Bronze Age patrimo-nial Zhou kingdom and its setting, then proceeds to discussthe social transformations in this era, including the emerg-ing new distinctions of rank, gender, and Chinese versusOther. This is all situated within a powerful overall narra-tive of how Zhou-era society gradually coalesced internally,with Chinese-styled lineages as the chief building blocks,erasing cultural diversity across its region (in a process of“nivellation,” in Karlgren’s old phrase) and gradually de-marcating “China” from outsiders, while its early elites roseabove the rest, decisively distinguishing rulers from ruled.

The author ends with a searching review of scarcely orincompletely explored issues (e.g., populations; territorialexpansions; and social strata like soldiers, merchants, farm-ers, and slaves). In my view, the archaeological pursuit ofthe material and spatial orchestration and manipulation ofstate power—not least the intensifying reduction of popu-lations to the role of means of state power—is the would-be red thread that might have tied these concerns together.This might be pursued without much danger of veering intothe bad-theory trap of pigeon-holed stages of sociopoliticalevolution that the author (probably superfluously) warnsagainst.

After all, even if we dispense with evolutionism, andwith those tendentious but still ubiquitous teleologicalinterpretations that assign a mystical driving force to aChinese essence before any China even existed, and evenif we—still in keeping with the book’s successful overallstrategy—resist the temptations of relying on theories ofstate power found in the Classical texts, the fact remainsthat the Chinese empires did emerge out of the state for-mations of the Zhou era. They were built in the reshapedsocial landscapes so admirably explored in this book. Andin that regard, it is already useful in any renewed theorizingof kinship-to-kingship state (and empire) formation.

This book, a call to arms for more research and passion-ate debate in the same vein, deserves to be widely read and

used as a point of reference (it comes with a comprehen-sive index and a glossary, which admirably offers both briefexplanatory notes for the nonspecialist and Chinese char-acters for the specialist). A Japanese translation is appearingsimultaneously, and there is hope for a Chinese version sothat the many Chinese scholars the author has engaged canalso take up this formidable challenge.

By persistently adhering to his research approach, vonFalkenhausen has exploded the notion that we alreadyknew the basics about ancient and Classical China. He of-fers both an alternative outline and an outline of researchto come. Anyone who teaches on China, its traditions, andhow they color the present will have to engage with thisbook, as will China scholars and everyone with compara-tive interests in the worlds’ ancient civilizations.

The Chinese in Silicon Valley: Globalization, Social Net-works, and Ethnic Identity. Bernard P. Wong. Lanham,MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 267 pp.

CHUAN-KANG SHIHUniversity of Florida

In the recent scholarship on globalization and ethnicity,Bernard Wong’s ethnography, The Chinese in Silicon Valley:Globalization, Social Networks, and Ethnic Identity, deservesparticular attention. This book not only convincingly de-picts a Chinese American community, the image of whichsubverts the stereotype of overseas Chinese, but also offersa sweeping critique on the current theories related to thethree central themes laid out in the subtitle. Comprehen-sively engaging theoretical sources pertinent to the threethemes of globalization, social networks, and ethnic iden-tity, this book is the first in-depth ethnography exclusivelydevoted to the Chinese community in the San FranciscoBay area. The subjects of this ethnography share a com-monality in that they all engage in the high-tech industryand actively participate in the globalization process withboth their professional specialties and transnational socialnetworks. The importance of social network in the Chineseuniverse is nothing new to anyone familiar with Chineseculture and society. What this book can add to our knowl-edge in this regard, however, is that under contemporary so-cial conditions, the social networks pursued by the Chinesein this high-tech community have come to be built arounda set of social themes that are totally different from the tra-ditional ones. Whereas traditional Chinese in and outsideChina forged their social networks mainly on the bases ofkinship and place of origin, the Chinese in Wong’s descrip-tion utilize professional interests, alma mater, hometown,friendship, religious affiliation, and ideological convic-tion or political alignment to weave their social networks.In this community, “conspicuously absent are traditionalChinese lineage and clan associations, and the dialect andregional associations that are abundant in America’s China-towns” (p. 58). When it comes to social network, the “valleyChinese” are more like mainstream Americans than the


traditional Chinese. Globalization does not seem to havediminished the significance of localism as many theoristshave predicted. On the contrary, Wong finds that in thiscommunity “localism, local social networks, and traditionalinstitutions are maintained and even cultivated and usedfor economic globalization. Globalization and localizationgo hand in hand” (p. 44). Wong also finds that “globaliza-tion does not eliminate the transnational migrant’s com-mitment to an adopted country” (p. 224).

Being Chinese American himself and having a publica-tion record on comparable topics for almost 30 years, Wongis optimally situated for this valuable project. The breadthand depth of his expertise are apparent in the book’s all-around scope and finely carved facets, as well as the thor-ough and up-to-date literature citation. In addition to dom-inating sources that everyone in the field cannot afford tomiss, Wong does not let go of obscure yet suggestive schol-arly dynamics expressed in sources such as proceedings ofsmall-scale meetings. Wong’s discussion is supported by hissolid ethnography and statistics from authoritative sourcesat the local, regional, and national levels, not to mentionthose from his own fieldwork. The significance of the ma-jor findings goes far beyond the studied community andacademic concerns. Readers interested in a wide range ofcurrent social and economic issues can benefit from thisbook.

On the short side, this book is “The Chinese in SiliconValley,” yet the large numbers of “valley Chinese” whomake a living outside the high-tech industry are left outof the picture. The problem of unfitting title also infectssome chapters (e.g., ch. 6) and sections (e.g., pp. 50, 187,etc.). As the end product, the published version had not re-ceived the kind of thoughtful revision and careful editingthat the quality of Wong’s research and the significance ofthe project deserve. Although the central themes are fairlyclear and major arguments convincing, the text through-out the book is both loose and verbose. In different partsof the book, identical or similar ideas are repeated over andover, with the same or somewhat different wordings. Theredundancy makes the book less readable and weakens thepersuading power of the arguments. In terms of organiza-tion, the themes of adaptive strategy and ethnic identitycould be rendered more coherently by taking out chapter5 and dividing apposite contents into chapters 4 and 7 re-spectively. Moreover, a good number of inconsistencies andslips—for example, the number of informants (pp. 14–15),Fujianese explained as “a local Taiwanese dialect” (p. 22),the Romanization of Chinese terms (too numerous to list),just to mention a few—that could easily have been fixedwere not caught. This book can also take better advantageof the ethnographic approach by presenting more personalprofiles in more vivid details.

All in all, I would recommend this book to those whoare interested in global economy, ethnic identity, social net-works, culture change, and diaspora studies. It also would bea good textbook for any undergraduate courses that includea component about contemporary Chinese Americans.

A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of TwoChinese Sisters. Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Lanham, MD:Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 368 pp.

SHANSHAN DUTulane University

With elegant writing and a delicate anthropological touch,Sasha Su-Ling Welland offers in this book an intriguingbiography of two Chinese sisters, Amy Shuhao Ling andShuhua Ling, who are respectively her own maternal grand-mother and great aunt. The divergent yet intertwined pathsof the two sisters on three continents throughout the 20thcentury shed fresh and intimate light on the multiple sub-jectivities and experiences of Chinese elite women juxta-posing nationalist and transnational influences.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes thefamily background of the two sisters, born to the fourth con-cubine of an imperial scholar-official who later held suchimportant offices as mayor of Beping (Beijing) during Na-tionalist rule (1911–49). Although the sisters’ own repre-sentations of their shared past frequently conflict, Wellandsuccessfully presents the nuances of their long-enduringtensions and conflicts. For example, whereas the familyheritage that Amy passes on to her offspring suggests amonogamous-based genealogy and highlights her father’sglory in imperial exams, Shuhua’s literary writing, especiallyher English memoir, centers on her childhood experiencesin a polygamous elite family. Nevertheless, these discursiveoppositions seem to have sprung from the same troublingsource of two daughters who had extraordinary achieve-ments in a changing world—that is, the disappointment,shame, and stigma of their mother as a concubine with nosons.

The second part of the book discusses the sisters’ edu-cation and career development in China. While Amy andShuhua both strived to become independent modern girls,their professional trajectories in science versus literatureand art reflects the two sides of the intellectual debate overwhether cultural reform or scientific development could re-store China in the face of imperialist threats. Intimate de-scriptions of how some privileged women benefited fromboth traditional education and modern educational reformsbring fresh light on women’s diverse experiences in the early20th century, contributing to current critiques of the over-generalization of women’s oppression in traditional China.Welland smoothly situates the sisters’ lives in the historicalcontext of modern China, including fascinating descrip-tions of Shuhua’s personal interactions with the poet XuZhimuo, the writer Hu Shi, and artists Qi Baishi and ZhangDaqian.

Part 3 focuses on the sisters’ divergent transnationalexperiences and different connections to their homeland.In her early twenties, Amy won a scholarship to studymedicine in the United States and arrived Cleveland in1925 amidst a racist crackdown on local Chinese com-munities. Vivid descriptions of Amy’s career success and

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family life as well as honest critiques of her adoption of theracist attitudes of middle-class white America (p. 271) re-veal complex experiences of early Chinese American immi-grants. Sometimes, however, Welland’s reflective analysis ofher own ambivalence toward her grandparents, especiallyregarding such behaviors as the “cruel” treatment of hermother, also hints at generational gaps involving conflict-ing cultural norms (p. 269).

Established herself as a famous woman writer at heryouth, Shuhua was first introduced by Xu Zhimuo to West-ern audience as “the Chinese Katherine Mansfield” (p. 149)and was later delicately and closely connected to VanessaBell, Virginia Woolf, and the postwar Bloomsbury Groupthrough her lover Julian Bell, Vanessa Bell’s son who lec-tured in China and died in the Spanish Civil War. In contrastto Amy’s drive to assimilation, Shuhua’s strong attachmentto her homeland and culture seemed to have reinforcedby her transnational encounters. Shuhua’s English mem-oir depicted a traditional Chinese family from a child’s eye,her later paintings portrayed European landscapes from theperspective of a traditional Chinese artist. While Shuhuafrequently visited (sometimes at great risk) and eventuallyreturned to her homeland before her death, Amy only re-turned for one brief visit in the 80 years following her initialemigration. In this sense, the two sisters, respectively, livedtwo Chinese metaphors concerning one’s relationship totheir homeland—that is, Shuhua represents “falling leavesreturn to the roots” and Amy demonstrates that “roots growwhere the seeds land.”

Welland smoothly knits longitudinal collections ofAmy’s account of her life history, Shuhua’s autobiographyand fiction writings, retrospective interviews of relevantpeople, archival research, literature criticism, and theoret-ical analysis. Nevertheless, this book also raises questionsregarding whether the requirement to obtain informedconsent from, and protection of the privacy of, inter-viewees regarding sensitive information should also ap-ply to an anthropologists’ own close relatives, as withthe cases of Amy (pp. 195–196, 323–324) and Shuhua’sdaughter.

Overall, while a fine biography, this book is also aninformative and engaging work in the literary genre ofethnography, enhancing our understanding of women,education, and intellectual history in modern China,as well as exploring the experiences of Chinese immi-grants in the United States and Europe. I would rec-ommend the book to those interested in China Studies,Asian American Studies, and Women’s Studies, includingscholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduatestudents.

Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of theGlobal Food System. Richard Wilk, ed. Lanham, MD:AltaMira Press, 2006. 268 pp.

R. S . KHAREUniversity of Virginia

This is an excellent book on economic anthropology’s ap-proach to food studies, particularly industrial food systems.Food is now hardly peripheral to mainstream anthropology,and we look beyond binary symbolic, cultural materialist,or evolutionary explanations. This book’s binary title thuselicits an editorial comment: “The real world is far moreinteresting than any binary opposition or simple evolu-tionary sequence, and while simple terms may make forgood propaganda, they prove woefully inadequate as toolsof understanding the processes of change in food systems”(p. 23). Sidney Mintz’s opening chapter highlights the sameanthropological stance on studying food in industrial soci-eties. Advocating “food of moderate speeds” (p. 10), he con-cludes remarking that “good and healthy food for more andmore people is a reasonable goal, and that such foods canbe made available fast enough—and, more important, pre-pared at slow enough speeds—for all of us” (pp. 10–11, em-phasis added).

Richard Wilk’s introduction to the volume makes a se-ries of clear conceptual points identifying how economicanthropology and food studies today contribute to eachother: for instance, “the idea that an economy incorporatesmoral values as well as utilitarian motives is at the very cen-ter of the discipline of economic anthropology” (p. 23). AsWilk indicates, “food is by nature mobile, mixable, unfet-tered, and reflexively self-referential” (p. 18), and “the au-thors in this volume generally share a sense of alarm at thedirection of the industrial food system and are deeply awareof the complex politics of food” (p. 16). Fortunately, the 15diverse contributions of this volume share and expand onsuch conceptual issues.

The contributors to the second part discuss the fluidity-characterized “whole food economies” from the Yap (Eganet. al.), the Malian middle class (Koenig), Mexican peas-ants (Pilcher), Lao PDR (Van Esterik), and post-Soviet Russia(Caldwell). They show how the simple “traditional” and“modern” dichotomies break down in favor of the centralthesis of the volume that “linear narratives of evolutionarychange fail to describe contemporary food systems becausethey cannot grapple with the non-corporate nature of foodculture itself” (pp. 17–18). We also learn cultural specifics:“Yapese modernity” runs “in part through taste” (p. 44);Mali urban food system, both local and global (p. 64), re-lates to Mexico’s maseca, “slow food” countering Taco Bell(p. 78); Lao’s “hunger foods” (e.g., crickets and green treeant eggs) become “gourmet foods” in New York (p. 83); andpost-Soviet Russia’s “culinary tourism” mediates the pastand present (p. 107).

The third part of the book presents two chapters onJapan (Bestor and Whitelaw) and one on Philippines (Mate-jowsky). The authors explore “the contradictions and con-tingencies” in industrial food systems. Although identi-fied often by the mass production and homogenization,and by convenience, “consistent delivery,” and profit, thisfood system is now responding to consumers’ demand forculinary variation, flavor, goodness, and health. The fastfood industry must undergo “continual diversification and


localization,” belying, in Wilk’s words, “the much-anticipated flattening out of a McDonaldized world of uni-form burgers and franchises” (p. 20).

The last part examines the economic networks the“farmers’ markets,” community agricultural groups, andspecialized “boutique” food outlets forge today. The elitisthealth and gourmet foods undergo new commodification,whereby both moral values and high prices converge. Thus,for instance, the bottom-up handling of Chinese foods inNew York (ch. 11), the small-scale artisanal cheeses in NewEngland (ch. 13), and the “fair trade” Java coffee (ch. 15)illustrate how “an economy incorporates moral values aswell as utilitarian motives values” (p. 23), a point central toeconomic anthropology.

Publishing the papers presented at an organized con-ference as a volume, the editor carefully relates his ownconceptual comments and those of Mintz to the findingsreached by almost all well-focused, accessible, and infor-mative contributors. Together, they capture some crucialtrends in industrial food production, marketing, and thelocal–global consumption. The identifiers “fast,” “moder-ate,” and “slow” foods mean ever more to the industrialsocieties struggling to secure all those significant qualitiesthat food and nutrition for personal health and collectivewellness now require. To their credit, the contributors rangealong the staple, healthy, alternative, elitist, and trendyfoods. However, given such diversity along the global–localeconomic pull and push, the book required a concludingoverview or comment on “where we are headed,” extend-ing perhaps some of the crucial “intersections” Wilk andMintz had posited in their introduction.

Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora.Kevin A. Yelvington, ed. Santa Fe: School of AmericanResearch Press, 2006. 501 pp.

JEMIMA PIERREUniversity of Texas, Austin

In a 2001 review article, Kevin Yelvington argued thatthe current disciplinary concerns with such processes asglobalization, migration, cultural hybridity, cultural pol-itics, structure and agency, and resistance “can be pre-sented as ‘new,’ ‘cutting edge,’ or ‘hot topics’ only by elid-ing and implicitly dismissing foundational scholarship onthe anthropology of the African diaspora in the Ameri-cas” (2001:227). This was a bold and accurate challenge tomainstream anthropology to interrogate and rehistoricizeits canon. In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Di-aspora, Yelvington and the various contributors engage thepast and present of Afro-American anthropology to makean even more compelling case for a fundamental rethinkingof disciplinary practices of theory making and knowledgeproduction.

Afro-Atlantic Dialogues is a compilation of essays from a1999 School of American Research advanced seminar thatbrought together 11 leading, multigenerational scholars of

the African diaspora. Divided into four parts, the 12 chap-ters interweave the historical and political context of thedevelopment of African diaspora anthropology with the in-terrogation of key theoretical positions within the field. Thefirst part, “Critical Histories of Afro-Americanist Anthro-pologies,” begins with an exploration of the broad transna-tional network that informed the career of the discipline’smost celebrated diaspora scholar, Melville Herskovits. It alsoincludes chapters by Richard Price and Sally Price, two otherwell-known pioneers of African diaspora studies. The sec-ond and third parts (“Dialogues in Practice” and “The Placeof Blackness”) include ethnographic, historical, and the-oretical chapters that address some of the key themes ofAfrican diaspora theorization. The discussions here rangefrom archival research demonstrating the influence of U.S.-born African American expatriate religious leaders in 18th-century Jamaica (Pulis) to the early African presence in colo-nial Manhattan (Price); reflections of the Gullah–Geecheephenomenon of the South Carolina Sea Islands (Sengova);contrasting conceptions of “Blackness” in museum repre-sentations of Afro-Puerto Ricans, as well as in notions ofBlack music and representations of Africa in Colombia (Tor-res, Wade); and, finally, important theoretical innovationsin contemporary diaspora theorization (Matory, Singleton).The fourth part of the volume has only one chapter, a com-mentary by Faye Harrison that contextualizes all of thechapters within a call for the “rehistoricization” of the con-cepts, models, and methodologies of both diaspora studiesand broader anthropological research.

Afro-Atlantic Dialogues makes two significant interven-tions: (1) it exposes the significant role of African diasporastudies to the development of anthropological theory andmethodology, and (2) it provides in-depth interrogation ofand engagement with African diaspora theorization. In hisintroduction, Yelvington describes the collection’s theoret-ical and methodological approach as “dialogic,” an “inter-rogation of the anthropological self as much as the natureof the Other, as well as an acknowledgement of the an-thropological encounter in terms of prior interpretations”(p. 4). This collection, then, is about “dialogues,” not onlybetween scholars about African American identity but alsoamong various black agents in diaspora.

It is through this understanding that we can placeone of the more powerful chapters in the collection: Yelv-ington’s “The Invention of Africa in Latin America andthe Caribbean.” Through meticulous archival research,Yelvington maps the sociopolitical and intellectual terrainof the career of Herskovits, tracing his “social positioningwithin scientific social networks” (p. 38) to demonstratehow such positioning was related to the development ofhis theoretical positions. In captivating detail, Yelvingtonshows Herskovits’s dependence on black diaspora scholarsfrom the beginning of his career until the end. For exam-ple, Herskovits wrote his dissertation using the resources ofthe personal libraries of W. E. B. Du Bois, and he wouldlater rely on his ongoing correspondence with the Haitianethnologist Jean Price-Mars to help facilitate his research in

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Haiti, exchanging papers and books over time. (Yelvingtonalso uncovers fascinating details about the overlapping ex-periences of Ruth Landes and Herskovits, both former stu-dents of Franz Boas, with differing professional trajectoriesmarked acutely by sexism against Landes.)

In this captivating anthropological study of one of themost important figures of U.S. anthropology, we see theindispensability of people of African descent both as sub-jects and collaborators in the production of mainstreamanthropological theoretical knowledge, which has, never-theless, largely marginalized the contributions of scholarsof African descent. In this sense, Harrison’s commentarycalling for attention to “anthropology’s hierarchically situ-ated knowledges” (p. 391) is timely, as it addresses what shehas called, in a different context, the “race-coded gaps inanthropology’s history” (Harrison and Harrison 1998:17).Indeed, Herskovits was not the only person to expose theBlack Atlantic’s centrality to understandings of culture andsociety. There were a number of scholars engaged in Africandiaspora research that have been left out of the canon ofAfrican diaspora scholarship (within and outside of an-thropology). These scholars, Harrison reminds us, includeW. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Walter Rod-ney, Sylvia Winter, and especially St. Clair Drake, who didmore than any other anthropologist in advancing Africandiaspora scholarship. Obviously, “the anthropological au-dience has not been seriously reading the texts that theseother black intellectuals have produced” (p. 390).

Yet the focus on Herskovits’s sociopolitical trajectoryalso works to frame the theoretical theater on which wefind the development of African diaspora anthropology: theHerskovits–Frazier debate. It goes without saying that, foranyone engaged in the study of African diaspora commu-nities, this debate is a “prerequisite of understanding some-thing about the past of Afro-American anthropology” (p.9). All of the chapters in the collection engage with thisdebate on some level. What is significant here, however,is that the engagement with the Frazier–Herskovits debateis less about taking a side than it is about finding ways tomove beyond this apparently unnecessary theoretical im-passe. In that sense, the chapters in Afro-Atlantic Dialogueslead us to new theoretical and methodological directions inthe anthropological study of the African diaspora.

The chapter that lays out this new direction most co-gently is J. L. Matory’s “The New World Surrounds anOcean.” Here, Matory turns the intractable and ongoingcontroversial discussions of “roots” and “cultural reten-tions” on their heads, arguing that the “cultures of theAfro-Atlantic have continually been refashioned throughthe voluntary exchange of peoples, objects, and ideas”(p. 153). Following up on his earlier work (1999, 2005),Matory moves beyond conventional theoretical treatmentsof African and African diaspora communities to (1) demon-strate the “coevalness” of Africa and the Americas, (2) move

“Africa” from the past of the diaspora to an equal andmodern role Black identity formation, and (3) highlightBlack people’s agency and consciousness in the making oftransnational Black communities.

The focus on dialogic approaches—on Afro-Atlantic“dialogues”—is clear in all the contributions in the collec-tion. No doubt this is the result of Yelvington’s clear fo-cus in choosing workshop participants who shared com-mon ground regarding the fundamental theoretical con-cerns of African diaspora scholarship: namely, on “culture,”“Africa,” race and transnational notions of “blackness,” andthe historical and political context of knowledge produc-tion on the African diaspora (see pp. 6–9). In this sense,Afro-Atlantic Dialogues is highly successful.

The significance to modern history of the transatlanticdispersal and continuous movement of people of Africandescent remains largely unrecognized and underexploredoutside of African diaspora scholarship. Afro-Atlantic Dia-logues demonstrates its relevance to wider interdisciplinarydiscourses, however, particularly in light of the burgeoningscholarship on various “diaspora” communities, often with-out due acknowledgement of the long-term theoretical andmethodological contributions of studies on the African di-aspora. And although I have some minor quibbles about thecollection—such as Yelvington’s unnecessarily dense intro-duction, Richard Price’s gratuitous attacks on those he calls“militantly Africa-centric,” and, most importantly, the factthat the volume did not include many “Africanists”—thisis a powerful, sophisticated, and timely contribution to an-thropology and to African diaspora scholarship. Africanists,in particular, should take this text seriously, especially itsdemonstration that there is an Afro-Atlantic dialogue thatincludes the ongoing relationship between Africa and itsdiaspora, one that is “shaped by the history of Europeanimperialism and mediated by the economic, linguistic, andreligious consequences of that imperialism” (p. 175). Thisbook should be required reading for anthropologists andother scholars engaged in the study of culture, politics, andidentity today.

REFERENCES CITEDHarrison, Faye, and Ira Harrison

1998 Introduction: Anthropology, African Americans, and theEmancipation of a Subjugated Knowledge. In African AmericanPioneers in Anthropology. F. Harrison and I. Harrison, eds. Pp.1–36. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Matory, J. Lorand1999 Afro-Atlantic Culture: On the Live Dialogue between

Africa and the Americas. In Africana: The Encyclopedia of theAfrican and African American Experience. H. L. Gates, ed. Pp.36–44. New York: Basic Civitas.

2005 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, andMatriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Yelvington, Kevin2001 The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the

Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions. Annual Review of Anthro-pology 30:227–260.

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