The anthropology of childhood: cherubs, chattel, changelings - By Lancy, David F

Book reviews

Archaeology, art,and architecture

Escobar, Ticio. The curse of Nemur: in searchof the art, myth, and ritual of the Ishir. xix,303 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Pittsburgh:Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 2007. $26.95 (paper)

The curse of Nemur is a rich and detailed accountof Ishir people’s body art, mythology, and rituallife. On the very first page, Escobar makes itclear that his book is ‘conceived not as anethnographic project but as a reflection on theart of the Ishir of the Great Chaco region ofParaguay’ (p. 1).

And yet, for anybody interested in theethnography of indigenous South America, thisbook is a compelling read. Perhaps it is not‘ethnographic’ in the sense that ethnographicdetails and the interpretative voice of the authorare often inseparable, making the book appearto be an intensely personal reflection on Ishirart, myth, and ritual. On the other hand, we getthe sense that Escobar’s refusal to pin downmeaning, his rejection of ultimate interpretationsand symbolic connotations of Ishir ritual, myth,and body decoration, are directly reflective ofthe richness, complexity, and interwoven natureof these aspects of Ishir life. In this sense, this isan ethnographic project which proceeds withgreat sensitivity, revealing relationships betweenknowledge and practice which defy our ownexpectations of what such a relationship shouldlook like.

For all the complexity and intricacy of thesubject matter, Escobar organizes the book intosix clearly distinguishable sections, namely Ishir

mythic epics, featherwork, body painting, ritual,shamanism, and recent Ishir history.

The chapter on myth is deeply absorbingbecause of the very stories themselves. Here welearn of death and deception, the rise and fall ofthe gods, and the fate of the Ishir, who mustforevermore deny the disappearance of the godsby bringing them back to life annually duringtheir Great Ceremony.

The sensory and aesthetic dimension of Ishirmythic and ritual life is brought to the fore in thechapter on featherwork. Escobar demonstratesvividly that the multiplicity and context-specificnature of Ishir featherwork imply that itsmeanings cannot be analytically pinned down toa single interpretative dimension.

The following chapters on body painting,ritual, and shamanism follow very much in thesame vein. Here, too, there are no simplerelationships between objects, practices, ordesigns and their respective meanings.

The book is written using a variety ofregisters: extracts from fieldnotes, descriptivenarratives, authorial analyses, letters, and directquotes. Despite the variety of voices andregisters in his writing, Escobar’s authorship isclearly dominant. At times, it is difficult to seewhat the difference is between fieldnotes andEscobar’s analysis. Evidently he is anexceptionally gifted writer of fieldnotes, but attimes these notes are already fully fledgedanalyses rather than the more factual notingdown of speech and practice, event and context,that ethnographers might ideally strive for. Forthis reason, it is hard to engage critically withEscobar’s analysis, since we have littleethnographic detail other than that providedwithin his own reflections. One of the problemsof using extracts, be they from letters, fieldnotes,

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 164-208© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010

or reports, is that at the end of the extract, thereader is so often left wanting to know whatcame next.

This problem is particularly acute in the finalchapter, on Ishir recent history, which ispresented through extracts from letters andreports by Escobar and others. This chapterbrings home to the reader just how difficult andpressurized Ishir life is. Their knowledge andpractices are threatened by the US-based NewTribes Mission and their livelihoods underminedby lack of access to land. It is also this finalchapter which makes the reader realize just howpolitically important is a book about Ishirindigenous knowledge in the form of myths, art,and shamanic practice. Rather than representingIshir people as purely defined by their struggleswith surrounding Paraguayan national society,Escobar has produced a book in which hedemonstrates how the complex relationsbetween art, myth, philosophy, ritual, andshamanism are central to who Ishir people are.

This book testifies to the resilience andstrength of a people who many might assumewould simply disappear in the face of outsidepressures. It engages seriously with Ishirphilosophy and worldviews, and for that Escobaris to be congratulated.

Escobar comes to Ishir mythology and art asa literary and art critic, but it would be a wasteto read his book purely in the spirit of literarycriticism, for the stories that the Ishir tell, theirbody art, and their rituals are far too interestingin their own right.

Elizabeth Ewart University of Oxford

Oliver, Paul. Built to meet needs: cultural issuesin vernacular architecture. xxviii, 445 pp., map,figs, plates, illus., bibliogr. Amsterdam:Elsevier, 2006. £38.99 (cloth)

Paul Oliver’s approach on a number of previousoccasions has been the production of massiveedited volumes, such as the Dictionary ofvernacular architecture of the world (1997),together with discursive editions such as Shelter,sign and symbol (1975) that address the issues ofvernacular architecture around the world. Theyhave formed invaluable contributions to theconstruction of a discourse on the vernacular,popularizing the modest and at the same timemaking it more academically accessible andcredible. Built to meet needs is no exception, butwhere it differs from many of Oliver’s previouspublications is that it is an edited volume of hisown writing – a retrospective assimilation of a

corpus of work submitted for publication andpresented at conferences over the last threedecades. This aggregation is explained in hispreface.

What it does is thematically present Oliver’sarticles, situating them in a manner which showsoff the development and maturing of ideas overthe years, and at the same time creating acontext. This also means that the subject matterand focus areas vary between the chapters,broadening the theme geographically and, atthe same time, allowing for comparativeinterpretation.

Sensibly, Oliver opens part I, in essenceintended to define the field, with an earlyexploratory question: why study vernaculararchitecture? This is then expanded upon toemphasize the place that this field occupies in abroader context, as well as offeringunderstanding as to the complexity of definition,and muddiness of the topic. The ephemeral andcontested nature of vernacular architecture isunderstood, and Oliver recognizes the challengeof working in a seemingly discipline-less world,noting that this is a positive element allowing forflexibility but a negative one in terms of its lackof structure (p. 19). Foregrounding theseproblems leads into the discussion topics thatfollow.

Social culture and its interface with thevernacular built environment is examined in thesecond and third parts, dealing with location ofbuildings in socio-cultural contexts and themechanics of transmission and tradition. Thepapers presented here are not temporally close,but rather spread over two decades, suggestinga constant engagement with the theme. Anearly paper (1982) suggests that the extension ofa romantic notion of the idea of vernacular isnecessary, and that emergent shack settlementsare little more than emergent forms ofvernacular architecture. Being able to embraceundefined issues such as this, which plague thestudy of the vernacular, as alluded to in theabove paragraph, adds a relevance to the field ofstudy which not only suggests a movement intodifferent arenas, but supports the moresustained use of the vernacular.

Parts IV, V, and VI do just this: they addressthe vernacular from pragmatic points of view.Critically, the need to situate the reality ofvernacular housing within poor communities,usually the worst victims of disasters, and howto manage the socio-cultural issues ofprevention, repair, and rebuild is aninterdisciplinary conundrum addressed by Oliveras long ago as 1978. Writing at the height of the

Book reviews 165


discourse in the 1980s, Oliver addressescontentious conservation through the reality onthe ground: the ‘conflict of values’ (p. 278)means that methods of ‘mothballing’ are ofteninappropriate both to the culture and thestructure, and interpretation perhaps has to besomething more detached, or sensitive. Theargument supporting the emergence of newvernaculars is also extended to the altering ofbuildings in contemporary, Western suburbia,reflecting the worldviews, value systems, andeconomies of the people who live in the houses.

Part VII concludes, suggesting the need andplace for vernacular architecture in thetwenty-first century. Sustainability is a largeissue, interfacing with the need for masshousing and the role of vernacular architecturein fulfilling this need, or not. What is the placethat vernacular architecture has for us in thefuture, what are the real issues that surround it,and what contributions can it offer? This in itselfbegins to transform the early discourse ofuncertain boundaries into something tangibleand relevant.

Importantly, Oliver has consistentlyaddressed the situation of architecture withinculture and cultural practices, thus fusing thedisciplines of architecture and anthropology tosome extent. This he continues to do in Built tomeet needs, addressing the plethora of issuesthat plague the construction, modification,evolution, and conservation of built forms oftraditional or vernacular mode. Simply andappropriately illustrated, this is a valuable assetto a collection of works on material culture.

Debbie Whelan University of South Africa

Rice, Prudence M. Maya calendar origins:monuments, mythistory, and the materializationof time, xviii, 268 pp., maps, figs, tables,illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press,2007. £14.99 (cloth)

Mesoamerica is well known for its ancientcalendars, elements of which were widely sharedamong the diverse cultures of the region, fromthe early Olmec to the late Aztec. In her newbook Maya calendar origins, Prudence Rice buildson an earlier controversial work (Mayan politicalscience: time, astronomy, and the cosmos, 2005)by addressing the distant origins of thesecalendars in the Pre-Classic period (before about200 AD) and the roles they played in thebroader development of Mesoamerican,especially Maya, rulership and political ideology.It is an important and challenging topic given

how few written records are left from that earlyera of Mesoamerican history. Unfortunately thispresents a large problem for the author from theoutset, for speculation and weak evidenceabound on the pages of Maya calendar origins. Itis not a very good book.

Rice’s central thesis is that ‘the basis ofpolitical power in Mesoamerica was related to anideology or ideologies of time, calendars, andknowledge of the cycles of nature and the skies’(p. 28). This in itself is hardly a novel,enlightening, or theoretically sophisticatedsuggestion. Political ideologies of Mesoamericahave long been seen as having a firm andexplicit grounding in calendrical ritual. Rice ismore probing in her assertion that theseunderpinnings of power and ideology have veryearly beginnings, indirectly traceable throughanalysis of mythology (especially the Popol Vuh),architecture, and iconography.

A well-argued and reasoned examination ofeven the Maya calendar in its social and politicalcontext might be welcome, but unfortunatelymany of Rice’s specific proposals areunconvincing or wrong, especially when theymust necessarily rely on hieroglyphic readingsand linguistic connections. To cite one of manyexamples, she repeats an incorrect assertion thatthe month named Mol relates to the day Muluk,because Mol supposedly has a ‘Muluk infix’(p. 60). Not so. Its infix is the syllable lo, used inthe spelling of the name mo-lo, for Mol, as anycompetent student of Maya hieroglyphic writingwould know. Unfortunately, this is illustrative ofmany other assertions that similarly fly in theface of established epigraphic and linguisticknowledge.

Even when I can agree on individual detailsof evidence, it is exceedingly hard to follow thelogic and flow of Rice’s discussion, especiallywhere she posits many loose and vagueconnections among words, images, and ideas inorder to interpret early Maya iconography. Tocite one case, her discussion of the word xok,‘shark’, and of fish symbolism (chap. 8) is highlyproblematic in many of its details, underminingsome of her larger points of argument. This andother portions of the book reminded me of theoutmoded ‘associative’ methods of analysis thatEric Thompson often used over fifty years ago,so it was perhaps not too surprising to see Ricecite several of Thompson’s outdated anderroneous ideas in support of her ownassertions.

Rice repeats and elaborates upon problematicideas presented in her previous book (Mayanpolitical science) devoted to Classic Maya politics.

Book reviews166


Her central idea is that Pre-Classic and ClassicMaya geo-political organization was temporallystructured, based upon a span of thirteenk’atuns (twenty-year periods) that she, followingMunro Edmonson, calls the ‘may cycle’. Weknow that in Post-Classic Yucatan the ‘seat’ of ak’atun period would shift from one kingdom tothe next, cycling through thirteen differentlocales over the course of about 260 years.However, this system is impossible to discern asa meaningful component of Classic politicalorganization. Having studied ancient Mayapolitics for some time, I feel that Rice is incorrectin many of these claims, and reaches far beyondthe available evidence. Simply put, tounderstand Classic Maya politics one needs tofocus on the written data from the Classicperiod, not the political world offifteenth-century Yucatan. Similarly, in order tounderstand the Pre-Classic one ideally shouldmake use of contemporaneous early sources,although these are few in number and difficultto understand at present. Without a bettersample of readable Pre-Classic historicalinscriptions in hand, I doubt we will ever reallyunderstand much about Pre-Classic Maya politicsand geo-political structure.

Herein lies the crux of the problem withMaya calendar origins. It strives to makesweeping observations about the importance ofthe calendar in the development of early Mayakingship, but draws on poor evidence, withoutmuch of a firm foundation in relevanticonographic, epigraphic, and linguistic analysis.

David Stuart University of Texas

Schneider, Arnd. Appropriation as practice: artand identity in Argentina. xv, 230 pp., map,illus., bibliogr. Basingstoke, New York:Palgrave, 2007. £42.50 (cloth)

In this volume Schneider explores theimplications of the proposals for theanthropology of art outlined in the volumejointly edited with Chris Wright (Contemporaryart and anthropology, 2006). The explicit aim ofthe book is to provide a substantive contributionto debates on globalization and the ‘traffic inculture’ through an engagement with identityand the production of art. The book addressesweaknesses in current work in the anthropologyof art and globalization, primarily by stressingthe role of individual artists as brokers indialogues and exchanges taking place acrosslocal, national, and global contexts. A furthercontribution is that here the ‘problem of

identity’ that Schneider sees as prompting arange of engagements with indigenous artforms is firmly grounded in the history of theArgentine nation-state, the alienation of landfrom the indigenous populations, and theinvisibility systematically applied to indigenouspopulations and cultures in the light of massimmigration from Europe.

The notion of appropriation is central toSchneider’s discussion of numerous examplesof artistic engagements with Argentine or LatinAmerican autochthonous art. Diverse sites forthe production and consumption of artisticobjects and skills, including film, photography,and ceramics, are explored and offer differentperspectives on class, gender, and ethnicity.The discussion is introduced through a vividdescription of the Buenos Aires art world,which in itself illustrates the contradictions ofthe Argentine condition. While underscoringthe peripheral position of Buenos Aires inglobal art worlds, or indeed in the globaleconomy more generally, Schneider’s accountof his encounters within the circuit of galleriesand exhibitions reveals the elite’s ambivalentrelationship with Europe, while remainingattentive to local demarcations of classprivilege.

Schneider’s participation in lectures andclasses, particularly as an apprentice in apre-Columbian ceramics workshop, affordeddirect experience of learning throughappropriation and illustrates his argument infavour of a greater emphasis on methodologiesof participation and engagement in theanthropology of art. Other chapters address anumber of facets relating to the intersections ofart and identity. For example, an engagingdiscussion of gendered and ethnicized aestheticsfollows on from the description of GabyHerbstein’s photographic exhibition and theresponses to her use of ‘Western’ professionalmodels to display fashions purportedly based onindigenous clothing. Schneider’s account of hisexperience while on location filming in aMapuche reservation and his participation in theexpedition led by artist Teresa Pereda to recordthe Feast of St John in a small rural communityreveal the persistent effects of structuralinequality and racism and their capacity todistort even well-intentioned attempts to capture‘the indigenous’ through creative endeavours.Not least of the problems here is thereproduction of fetishized notions of theindigenous in everyday life and commonsensediscourse, which underscore relationshipsbetween artists and indigenous subjects and

Book reviews 167


undermine the possibilities of communicationand expression.

Schneider has interviewed a wide range ofartists and records multiple sites for theself-conscious elaboration of identities. Hismaterial clearly shows the heterogeneity ofpositions in the politics of art and of identity.While the diversity of views suggested by hismany research subjects precludes the possibilityof a simplified account of identity or artisticwork, the concepts of globalization andappropriation are inadequate to the task ofproviding analytical purchase on the range ofissues raised in the volume. This deficit could beaddressed through greater engagement with thecurrent literature on the entanglements ofgender, class, and ethnicity and the politics ofexchange, to which the volume willundoubtedly make a useful contribution. Also,the insight Schneider borrows from Ricoeur,about the transformative effects ofappropriation, could usefully inform moredetailed discussions of the ethnography toexplore whether and how these artistic practicesresult in new self-understanding.

Methodologically, the book illustrates thepotential rewards of multi-sited ethnography,while the author himself draws attention tosome of its limitations, notably the lack of depthafforded by extensive fieldwork in a single site.This is especially evident where, as a member ofthe ‘creole artistic’ team, Schneider finds himselfin an ambiguous or awkward relationship with‘indigenous’ others, as in the filming inPatagonia or the Feast of St John expedition. Onthe other hand, the frustrations and obstaclesconfronted by the anthropologist, candidlyreported in the book, provide illuminatingglimpses into the enduring weight of history andthe often silent but compelling force ofinequality, alongside the multiple efforts ofindividual artists to transcend them.

V.A. Goddard Goldsmiths, University of London

Childhood and youth

Bolin, Inge. Growing up in a culture of respect:child rearing in highland Peru. xv, 214 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. TexasPress, 2006. $22.95 (paper)

Inge Bolin has written on many aspects ofChillihuani in the Peruvian High Andes:irrigation, women, environment and ecology,

development, medicine, rituals, and cammelidpastoralism. These publications, like thiseasy-to-read account of Chillihuani child-rearing,are the result of many field visits in an intense,ongoing relationship. Bolin admits that the placeand the people keep ‘calling her back’ because‘there is an intrinsic harmony in this village,combined with the herders’ dignifieddemeanour; their profound joy of living, and themelding of an enigmatic past that in some wayscontinues into the present’. This led her to try tounderstand the child-rearing processes thatreproduce harmonious culture within aninhospitable environment.

The ‘culture of respect’ in the title refers tothe Chillihuani consideration of and esteem forall aspects of the natural environment, all formsof life, and all people – male and female, youngand old, able-bodied and disabled. Her earlierbook about Chillihuani adults (Rituals of respect:the secret of survival in the High Peruvian Andes,1998) indicated that ‘respect’ is essential forsurvival in marginal environments; and that theneed for interdependence and cooperation isgreater than the aggressive urge to compete. YetBolin’s analysis of respect would be moreinteresting if she had contrasted this universalconsideration and esteem to the hierarchies ofdeference that go by the name of ‘respect’ inmost cultures, not least in mainstream Peruvianculture.

Nevertheless, the activities and social spacesof Andean childhoods have seldom beenrecorded, so that this book is a harvest of newinformation, even though Bolin raises some veryNorth American preoccupations in her analysis.She seems to have been amazed at first thatChillihuani villagers cooperate despite ‘grindingpoverty and environmental stress’ and surprisedat their apparent joy and fulfilment. In time, thisled her to mount a challenge to her earlierassumptions that childhood and adolescence areinevitably fraught with problems.

Growing up in a culture of respect is thus acontribution to traditional anthropologicalliterature on how processes of child-rearingresult in different cultural personalities andsometimes challenged Western notions ofchildhood, which began with Margaret Mead inComing of age in Samoa (1928). Bolin offersdescriptions of life-cycle events and rituals,together with other ‘growing-up’ activities, aswell as considering the relationship betweenplay and work in remote rural communities. Inother words, the focus – as in mostanthropological studies of children – is onchildren becoming adults, rather than on

Book reviews168


children themselves: as sociologist Jens Qvortrupputs it, Bolin sees children as ‘humanbecomings’ rather than as human beings in theirown right (Childhood matters: social theory,practice and policy, 1994).

The book seems strangely isolated fromadvances in the understanding of children andchildhoods in social science as a whole(exemplified by articles in journals such asChildhood and Children’s Geographies). Bolin’sdiscussions of the rights and responsibilities ofChillihuani children refer to ‘soft rights’ ofchildren taking an equal part in rituals alongsideadults, rather than to international legislation onthe human rights of children (United NationsConvention on the Rights of the Child, 1989),which has dominated research with childrenworldwide for two decades. This is notnecessarily a weakness. The rights-basedapproach to research on children all too oftenconcentrates on case studies of abuse,exploitation, and violence, in which conclusionsare drawn and policies instituted without beingbased on comparison with ‘normal’ childhoodsin the same social groups. There are far too fewexamples of the kind of ethnography ofchildhood Bolin offers, with the result that someinvalid causal relationships have been posited.

It would have been interesting if Bolin hadconsidered some existing ethnographies thattouch on child-rearing in marginal environmentselsewhere, in which children also learn to benon-violent (such as Signe Howell and RoyWillis’s edited Societies at peace, 1989). Even so,this book has more in common with theanthropology of peace than with ethnographiesof childhood.

Judith Ennew University of Malaya

Coe, Cati. Dilemmas of culture in Africanschools: youth, nationalism, and thetransformation of knowledge. ix, 241 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. London,Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005. £14.00

(paper)

Cati Coe’s Dilemmas of culture in African schoolsexamines the school as an ideologicalenvironment fostered by the state’s educationalapparatus with the goal of producing what itperceives as a ‘Ghanaian national identity’. Thisprocess sees ethnic, religious, regional, and classdifferences invariably played out or swept underthe unique appellation of ‘national culture’. Thework is based on archival research andethnographic analysis of three different schools

in Akuapem district, some 30 miles from Accra.While conducting fieldwork in the Akuapemdistrict in 1997 and 2002, Coe examined the linksbetween the twin processes of production andteaching, and asserts that the ways in whichculture is taught, learned, and experienced alsoconstitute the platform on which the efficacy ofnationalist programmes can be measured.

In the first part of the book ‘How culturebecame the property of the state’, Coeundertakes a historical analysis, beginning withthe establishment of the Basel Mission and theirfirst schools in Akuapem in 1835. The twochapters in this part present the influence of theChurch in the modernization of Ghana leadingup to the cultural politics of the colonial andpostcolonial nation-state of the 1990s. Theauthor shows through a vivid ethnography howboth missionaries and the colonialadministration have been ambivalent towards‘African culture’. This ambivalence has beentransmitted to the educated Ghanaian elite andhas eventually culminated at post-independencein debates over Ghanaian national culture. Asformal education became the task of the state,culture became a priority at school. In thisprocess, culture becomes reified from everydaylife practices to become an aesthetic illustrationof the past, which is stripped of meaning.Parallel to the state, the Churches developed amore antagonistic stance towards culture, whichthey saw as symbolizing the demonic.

In ‘How culture is reclaimed by its citizens’,the book’s second part, Coe explores theargument that in spite of the state’s attempts atcontrolling the discourse on culture in schools,other actors outside the school context, for themain part elders and local chiefs, are alsoengaged in producing narratives whichcontradict those of the state. Coe shows howteachers and students appropriate differentdiscourses on culture as they perform culture inthe classroom and during institutionalizedpopular cultural competitions. Thesecompetitions, which are organized nationally,are the setting for Coe’s most tellingethnography. The drumming and dancingprovide a ‘neutral place’ for Christians toparticipate in ‘culture’ and at the same time todemonstrate Christian piety and morality.However, participants hardly perceive thecultural knowledge transmitted by thesecompetitions as ‘deep’ in meaning like those ofthe festivals and sessions organized by elders atthe chieftaincy level, which Christian milieusperceive as inimical to identity construction. Coeconcludes that the Ghanaian state has been

Book reviews 169


unable to use schools to teach culturalknowledge for the ends of national unity andlegitimacy. Firstly, the version of Christianity thatpredominates among teachers and studentsassociates culture with the demonic. Secondly,local notions of the relationship between ageand cultural authority work to re-inscribe theexpertise of the elders and of chiefs, rather thanthe teachers. So, contrary to the state’s claim tocultural expertise, most students continue tohonour elders and chiefs as the only legitimatesources of knowledge about the past.

Coe perceives these school competitions asarenas in which the tensions between vernacularmodes of social participation and the promise ofthe clientelistic state are acted out. Herargument is tenable, though this reader wouldhave welcomed more ethnographic data fromthe different actors involved, if one were to avoidcasting the debate in terms that oppose the localto the national. An analysis of a rich corpus ofdata from elders, pastors, chiefs, youths, forexample, would have presented the reader witha fuller picture of the social significance ofdifferent cultural expressions.

Cati Coe presents us with a fascinatingexposé of the ambiguous position bothtraditions and schools play as institutions in theconstruction of nationhood. She implicitlydemonstrates that elders might play a role informal education. I recommend the book toscholars, students, and educational specialistswith an interest in cultural politics and formaleducation in Africa.

Trond Waage University of Tromsø

Evans, Gillian. Educational failure and workingclass white children in Britain. xii, 205 pp.,map, illus., bibliogr. Basingstoke: Palgrave,2006. £50.00 (cloth)

At the heart of this engaging account of whyworking-class white children are failing in schoolis the more complex question of what it meansto be working class in Britain. Situated inBermondsey, one of the most deprived areas ofLondon, this is a highly reflexive study of howthe forms of participation that underpinworking-class status, values, and ways of beingconflict with those required for success in formaleducation. Evans skilfully uses her ownmiddle-class status as a position from which toreflect upon and attempt to understand thisconflict. Her aim is to ‘provide some sense ofthe education [about working-class life] they[her envisaged middle-class readership] require’(p. 12).

This endeavour is largely successful, and iscarried out over three parts. In part 1 (chaps 2-4)Evans engages directly with the issue of socialclass. Ethnographic attention is on theperspectives and experiences of working-classmothers and daughters, through whom we areintroduced to the idea of what it means to be‘common’: being ‘down to earth’; not trying to‘talk proper’; ‘knowing what it is like to be skint’(p. 24). While class is fundamentally theoutcome of an ‘inextricable relationship betweenmoney and manners’ (p. 24), we are remindedthat the idea of a ‘homogeneous’ working classis none the less an erroneous one: there arevarying levels of ‘common-ness’, all of which arepositioned in relation to being ‘upper’ or ‘posh’.Evans also presents some tremendouslyinteresting ethnographic insights into therelationship between race, class, and territory.For instance, the reason why non-white people(namely blacks and Asians) cannot be ‘common’is because they are ‘complete outsiders’, from‘another place, another culture, a different wayof life’ (p. 60). Such insights are supplementedwith an occasional nod to the historicalbackground and deftly linked to ongoing socialand political concerns: the Stephen Lawrencecase, multiculturalism, immigration, the rise ofright-wing political parties throughout Britain.

It is only in part 2 (chaps 5-7) that the issueof class is explicitly connected to that of formallearning and educational failure. Here, the focuson mothers’ and daughters’ perspectives shiftssomewhat abruptly to boys and theirengagement with the competing demands ofthe classroom and the street. We are taken intothe classroom, where we are introduced to twoboys from years 5 and 6 who represent thekind of child caught between the differentforms of participation required by the homeand the school: the vulnerable ‘mummy’s boy’who struggles at school but finds self-worthfrom the small gang with whom he hangs inthe street; and the clever, capable boy whosedisruptive behaviour sees him regularlysuspended from school. What these boys havein common is a high degree of independence,through which they cultivate the kind ofdemeanour and deportment that standsthem in good stead on the street and at home,but that is not conducive to successfulparticipation in formal education. It is thisdiscrepancy, Evans argues, that helps to explaineducational failure amongst working-classwhite children.

The focus in part 3 (chaps 8-10) shifts to aconsideration of the role that objects and object

Book reviews170


exchange play in the learning process and in the(trans)formation of children’s peer relations andhierarchies. We are treated to a fascinatingexamination of the Pokemon trading card crazethat raged throughout Britain in 1999-2000 (andwhich continues today), which is used not onlyto illustrate the importance that particularknowledge or skills can give to a child’s personalprestige and self-worth, but also to examine thekinds of opportunities available to children totranspose aggressive, territorial conflicts intomore meaningful relationships. Comparingchildren’s bodily competence in relation tospecific objects and activities (e.g. football vsPokemon cards), Evans reiterates an earlierargument about how the physical dispositionand constraints on the body that formal learningdemands, and that the disruptive boys singularlyfail to achieve, contribute to the increasededucational failure of working-class whitechildren. We are also reminded of theimportance of recognizing what is meaningful toboys, in order to make formal learningmeaningful to them.

The book has no formal conclusion andtherefore no space in which the author clarifiesthe arguments and analytical claims that havebeen suggested throughout. Instead, the finalchapter provides us with a glimpse of thebiographies of several Bermondsey men who,after varying brushes with the law, have ‘gonestraight’. It is not entirely clear whether suchexamples represent a selection of possiblefutures that Evans imagines for the boys who areprofiled throughout the book, or if there is someother intended objective.

In addition to a clearer exegesis of theauthor’s claims, the book might also havebenefited from a more dedicated discussionabout how ideas of social class and being‘common’ in contemporary Britain correlatewith the politics of race and ethnicity. We arealso left wondering about the exceptions: thosefew boys (and girls) who do engage successfullyin the formal learning process, and whoconsequently manage to do well in school.While we are introduced to a small cohort thatEvans calls the ‘imaginative boys’ (p. 105), whoengage more fruitfully in the formal learningprocess, relatively little attention is paid to theissue of what sets these children apart fromthose ‘disruptive boys’ who are destined foreducational failure. There is also littleexplanation of how the analysis can beextrapolated from the unique situation inBermondsey to working-class communities inother parts of London and beyond, nor much

explicit engagement with broader theoreticaldebates or reference to other relevant material.

These are minor criticisms, however, in theface of the book’s vivid ethnography, engagingnarrative style, and obvious attempt to reach areadership beyond academe. Overall, themanner in which Evans illuminates theinextricable relationship between social class andeducational failure, but above all the way thatshe strengthens our understanding of what ismeaningful to a working-class white person,cannot be underestimated.

Peggy Froerer Brunel University

Lancy, David F. The anthropology of childhood:cherubs, chattel, changelings. xii, 466 pp., figs,illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2008.£55.00 (cloth), £19.99 (paper)

David Lancy’s The anthropology of childhood:cherubs, chattel, changelings is a significant anduseful contribution to the field in that it drawstogether the literature on the anthropology ofchildren from both the perspectives of physicaland cultural anthropology as well as history. It isvery much a study built upon the biologicalbasis for or interplay with culture which showsby continual contrasts how modern Westernsociety is uniquely a neontocracy. Lancycomprehensively makes the case for alternativerealities in which children are viewed either as‘unwanted, inconvenient changelings or asdesired but pragmatically commodified chattel’.He argues that the notion of children as cherubsis a narrowly culture-bound recent invention andthat the ‘reader will be brought to questionattempts to export our child-centered utopia tothe rest of the world, which cannot afford toignore the economic costs and benefits ofhaving children’ (p. 13).

Alongside its companion web-site(http://anthropologyofchildhood.usu.edu), it willprovide essential reading for a broad audienceinterested in how children are imagined andtreated in different societies as well as indifferent historical epochs. Inspired by SarahBlaffer Hardy’s Mother Nature (1999) and writtenin a highly accessible manner, it will beparticularly useful for undergraduate classes andfor those looking for a general overview of theanthropology of childhood. Arguably, thestrongest parts of the book are the historicaloverviews and the more contextualizeddiscussions, such as in the penultimate chapter,titled ‘How schools can raise property values’,and the stark final chapter, ‘Suffer the children’.

Book reviews 171


Above all, the anthropological and historicalmaterials brought together here have criticalimplications for those who value the notion ofthe sanctity of the rights of the child. This is ofspecial concern when addressing thedevelopmental paradigm in which human rights,justice, and democracy are so closely linked withprogrammes concerned with improving childwelfare. Indeed, Lancy considers our tendency tomoralize in these contexts where, for example, aboyfriend shakes to death his girlfriend’s infant.

Considering the moral and intellectualconsequences of such a position, although thisbook specifically attempts to bridge physical andcultural anthropology, it ultimately illustrateshow and why there is necessarily anunbridgeable divide not only betweenhumanists and more biologically orientatedanthropologists but also between those who arestruggling to achieve ‘good’ in the world andthose who merely criticize all such efforts as onlyhaving negative consequences.

Lancy’s study essentially argues that nothingcan be done about the suffering of children andtheir increasingly dire futures unless we changeour ethnocentric views regarding children andaccept the alternative reality of children aschattel and unwelcome changelings. As heconcludes about efforts to improve the lot ofchildren in the developing world: until weconfront our own ethnocentrcism, the FirstWorld will play a minor, ‘if not negative role’.There is a fundamental contradiction here.Lancy urges us to accept alternative viewsof children as chattel and unwelcomechangelings and yet blames the exploitation ofchildren on the global economic and politicalconsequences of Western consumerism.Moreover, if, as he argues, for most of humanhistory, and even today, children have been andare still regarded as chattel, why blame the Westat the same time as arguing that it is a Westernethnocentric value judgement to condemn theidea and practice of children as chattel andchangelings?

The key debate which this study may inspirecould be whether there is an irreconcilabledifference between cultural relativism and theenlightenment notion of universal human rights.And if so, what are the moral consequences?While the author maintains a relativist position,he takes an unqualified non-relativist position onthe attempts by international organizations toameliorate the suffering of children. Indeed, hecasts the deepest aspersions upon their efforts.One might ask then whether the author shouldnot have taken the same care in assessing the

efforts of the ‘international intelligentsia’ toimprove children’s welfare, never mindaddressing the UNICEF Convention on the Rightsof the Child, of which no mention is made.

From the bringing together of a selection of‘horror stories’ about child labour and poverty,the uninitiated will learn, for instance, that inMexico 7- to 14-year-old children make up 30 percent of the agricultural workforce, that in Africannations children are increasingly used for cheaplabour, virtually as slaves, and that in Asiannations daughters are ‘unhesitatingly’ and‘willingly’ sold into prostitution or dangerousfactory labour and industry as young as the ageof 5. In extending this litany, Lancy notes that allof this was commonplace in the West untilrelatively recently, and instead of condemningthese excesses, he concludes that child labour isnaturally a ‘contentious issue’.

Throughout the study this is the key point:that the West should not be attempting toextend a moral hegemony globally, especially incontexts where children are traditionallyunderstood to be chattel. Lancy argues that inthe pursuit of this hegemonic ideal, internationalagencies are doing more harm than good toboth the children and their communities. Whilethe effectiveness of aid and the ‘civilizingmission’ can no doubt be criticized, surely thatdoes not mean that we should not uphold thesanctity of the rights of children of the poor inall cultures and places? Nor does it mitigate theimportance of helping to achieve that goal evenwhen it runs contrary to local custom and value.The problem with the faith placed in culturalrelativism here is that it requires the sacrifice ofhumanitarian ideals on the altar of culturaldiversity and biological imperative.

My personal view is fundamentally opposedto Lancy’s view, even though I accept the factthat how children are imagined and treated isnecessarily culture-bound. Here are my own coreculture-bound beliefs as to what constitutes anecessarily humanistic and moral reply to Lancy.The moral primacy of the modernist universalsof ‘love’ and ‘justice’, of ‘human rights’ and‘common decency’, necessarily supersedes anyconsideration of biological fitness. Culturalrelativism and biological explanation are simplyincompatible with this position. Take forinstance, the study Lancy cites of bereavement:‘[P]arents’ expression of grief at the death of achild peak not in early childhood but rather atadolescence. By the teen years, a parent hasmade nearly 100 percent of their investment inthe child and will receive, if it perishes, zerogenetic return’ (p. 9). I find this suggestion that

Book reviews172


relative grief is a function of the success orfailure of reproductive success to rest upon amorally and spiritually repulsive argument.

Nevertheless, Lancy’s book successfully raisesthe question: what is being done to changethings for the better, against what odds, andwith what anthropological nuance? In all this, itis to be hoped, Lancy’s study will stimulatemuch more than a furious debate about theso-called civilizational ‘infantilization of theSouth’ and the failure of development. It is evenpossible that the long-term result of such adebate might be to drive more anthropologistsinto the ranks of the development community,where they will continue the complex struggleto ameliorate the suffering of the children of thepoor in the most challenging environments bothin the North and in the South. At the end of theday, it is all surely about how to useanthropological knowledge to best support theuniversal enlightenment-based right of allpeople for liberty, prosperity, and justice, and –dare one say – happiness. Towards those ends,beyond the fascinating compilation of suchwide-ranging attitudes that humans havetowards their offspring, Lancy’s unsettling ratherthan delightful book is to be highlycommended.

Jonathan Zilberg University of Illinois

Montgomery, Heather. An introduction tochildhood: anthropological perspectives onchildren’s lives. 296 pp., bibliogr. Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. £17.99 (paper)

As if piqued by Hirschfeld’s accusation thatchildren have been left out of anthropology,textbooks in the anthropology of childhood,which have been conspicuous by their absencesince Helen Schwartzman’s 1978 investigation oftheories of child play (Transformations: theanthropology of children’s play), are all pouringout at once. Following David Lancy’s retort, Theanthropology of childhood (2008, reviewedabove), and Robert LeVine and Rebecca New’santhology Anthropology and Child Development(2008), we now have Montgomery’scontribution to the field. While all of thesevolumes attest to the healthy liquidity of thesub-discipline, it is Montgomery’s excellentoverview of the subject that everyanthropologist specializing in childhood studieswill be kicking themselves for not havingwritten, covering as it does every aspect of thetopic and bound as it is to become a set textwherever the subject is taught.

Following the first few pages of the book,which reiterate Schwartzman’s discussion ofnineteenth-century anthropological views of thechild as primitive, the discussion moves on tothe Culture and Personality school of the 1930s,the Six Cultures study of the 1960s, and the earlytwentieth century British school: Malinowski,Firth, Richards, and Fortes. Montgomery thentraces the emergence of more recent child-centred anthropology to the theoretical lead offeminist studies of the 1970s, arguing that manyanthropologists who focus on children aremotivated to include in the discipline ademographic group seen to be vulnerable andvoiceless. A point that Montgomery might haveproblematized further is that while women keeptheir gender, children grow up. The equation ofwomen and children by anthropologists istherefore the same type of fallacy thatMontgomery herself later mentions the Tuaregmake when they equate their children to slavesand blacksmiths: while all three groups arepolluted and inferior, children are like WinstonChurchill, who when accused by a woman at afunction of being drunk reportedly replied ‘andyou’re ugly, but I’ll be sober in the morning’.Unlike women and slaves, children are armedwith a Churchillian riposte to their isolation, andMontgomery demonstrates how societiesguarantee this in the book’s final chapter,devoted to initiation.

Before we reach the end of childhood,though, we first need to know what a child is,and the second chapter lays down Ariès’s classicand provocative historical argument in Centuriesof childhood (1962) regarding the recentinvention of childhood as a foundation uponwhich Montgomery builds her review of socialconstructionist perspectives in anthropology,exploring the whole gamut of possibleconceptualizations of children, as equals at oneextreme, through helpless incompetents, tocannibal witches at the other (echoing hereLancy’s cross-cultural investigation of children as‘cherubs, chattel, changelings’). Chapter 3

covers cultural models of the beginnings of lifein the womb, including a discussion of spiritchildren and of reincarnation. Chapter 4

investigates the recently burgeoning literatureon fosterage, starting with the work of Jack andEsther Goody, and goes on to cover debates onstreet children and siblingship.

A fifth chapter is devoted to a trilogy oftopics, including linguistic approaches to thestudy of childhood, child play, and children atwork. Despite their tantalizing brevity, each oneof these sections is touched with the insight that

Book reviews 173


typifies the whole book. Chapter 6 is devoted tothe subjects of punishment and abuse. Havingreviewed the worst (Samoa and the UnitedStates, the latter alone with Somalia in havingrefused to sign the UN Convention on the Rightsof the Child and where ‘Close to 100 per cent ofparents use corporal punishment on toddlers’,p. 158) and the best (Bali, where it is unheard ofto beat a child, and children have their gazesaverted from anything unpleasant),Montgomery makes the argument that societiesthat punish children severely display higherlevels of inter-family violence, hierarchicalstratification, and social inequality. A second lineof inquiry examines whether one can adopt arelativist position regarding harsh punishmentwhile still reserving the right to condemn abuse.

The seventh chapter questions the Westernideal of the sexual innocence of children, andgoes on to enumerate case studies of sexuallyactive children, including those in Indiandevadasi cults, Thai child prostitutes (with whomMontgomery has worked), and the youngSambia male initiands with whom Gilbert Herdtworked. In an argument that is bound togenerate further debate, she stresses the agencyand resilience of young prostitutes and the needto contextualize child prostitution rather than tovilify it.

Not only will this work appeal to students,but it is also full of surprises for experts in thefield. The book is not without its inevitableomissions (a chapter on religion would havebeen welcome, cognitivist approaches are barelymentioned, the contribution of Francophoneanthropologists is under-represented, VictorTurner is missing from the chapter on initiation,as is Foucault from that on punishment), but thework’s longevity will happily ensure thatadditions can be made to the future editions thatare bound to come out.

Nicolas Argenti Brunel University

Diaspora, migration, andnationalism

Ho, Engseng. The graves of Tarim: genealogyand mobility across the Indian Ocean. xxvi,379 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. London,Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2006. £13.95

(paper)

This exemplary ethnography offers a distinctiveapproach to the ‘anthropology of mobility’, as it

eschews the ‘teleology of progress’ introducedby modernity’s technology-mediated mobility.The mobility it is concerned with preceded bothColumbus and Vasco da Gama’s voyages ofdiscovery. Indeed, it is about a process ofmovement of people and texts that began in thethirteenth century along shifting long-distancetrade routes, which engendered the formation ofa Yemeni diaspora, across the Indian Ocean.More specifically, it is about the migration of aparticular class of émigrés as religious scholars,adherents of a Sufi brand of Islam, the sada(pl. or sayyid sing.), who claim descent from theProphet of Islam, from Yemen’s southeasternregion of Hadramawt, and their rise toprominence throughout a swathe of societiesencompassing an ‘expanding transregional,cosmopolitan Muslim ecumene’ in the IndianOcean.

The author takes his inspiration from AmitavGhosh’s novelistic attempt to give voice toIndian émigrés in their diasporic travails in Egyptand Burma. In retracing the movement of theseHadrami sada, the author employs a conceptualworkhorse in the ethnographic studies of theMiddle East, namely genealogy. However, heemploys it not in its traditional elaboration asgenealogical charts of tribes in the configurationof segmentary polities, but through itsarticulation with the constitution of a diaspora asa transregional moral polity. Genealogy is notconceived in its ‘arboreal metaphors of tree,branches, root and soil’, but as an ensemble oftexts, in essence hagiographies of the mostnotable of sada families in Hadramawt, as theytravelled through a complex geography andwere further elaborated into a ‘canon’ of ‘hybridtexts by creole authors’. These textscircumscribed diaspora formation, as theyallowed ‘communities of diverse origins toarticulate with each other in new relations ofmutuality and moral engagement’.

These relations of mutuality and moralengagement are explored through threemoments of connectedness – ‘burial, travel, andreturn’ – that linked a sprawling diaspora acrossIndia, Malaysia, and Indonesia to Hadramawt,and which structure the ethnographic accountof this diaspora’s connectedness to place oforigin (i.e. the ‘graves of Tarim’). Ho’s strategy inconstructing his ethnography is an articulationof a multi-sited fieldwork and archival work ortextual exegesis through a spatial-temporalrecursive movement between texts and sites ofpilgrimage (i.e. graves) distributed across SouthAsia and Hadramawt. As the author explains,‘This work seeks the recuperation of

Book reviews174


connectedness – histories and geographies, andfamilies and bibliographies’. However, the text isnot a strictly historical account of the diasporicmovement of the Hadrami sada as much as a‘conceptual account of the[ir] modes ofmobility’. The focus of this ‘conceptual account’is the constitution of a transnational ‘sphere ofpublic transcultural textuality’ engendered bythe genealogical texts of Hadrami sada and their‘creole’ descendants, and their socio-religiouspolity formation effects. The substance of thenarrative is with the ways in which this class ofitinerant religious scholars was sociallyintegrated (through ‘creolization’ notassimilation) in these foreign lands where afar-flung moral community coalesced aroundthem; and how their creolized progenymaintained their religious authority and socialprestige through the moral sanctioning of theseever-evolving genealogical texts within asocio-politically diversifying diasporic contextand their multiple reverberations back inHadramawt.

Through the ‘interweaving of genealogy,theology, and history’ the author has producedan ethnography as hybrid text, as it straddles aninterstitial discursive space betweenethnographic interpretation and thematic or‘conceptual’ history. In effect, the text feels likean extensive commentary in the guise of afascinating historical tableau, which foregroundsauthorial performance in the construction ofethnography as an aesthetic object. This has aparadoxical effect on the reader: on the onehand, it induces a certain admiration for theauthor’s masterly subsumption of the materialthrough the breadth of his semiotic analysis andthe depth of his interpretative virtuosity; and onthe other, it leaves the reader perplexed aboutknowing a lot more about the author’sinterpretative predilection, but understandingrather less about the actual history of thisperipatetic class of Hadrami sada and theirdiasporic progeny. This is perhaps an intrinsicantinomy of ethnographic interpretation and ofanthropological discourse generally.Furthermore, this perplexity could have beenpartially assuaged had the author included a bitof self-disclosure in the preface, including, forexample, his interest in the subject (e.g. is he amember of this diaspora?) and his researchstrategy (e.g. the location and selection oftexts for his exegesis, and the determinationof his travel itinerary and choice of fieldworksites).

Finally, this is an ethnography that privilegesa particular audience and a certain type of use

that are both strictly academic. Indeed, it is atext that is ideal for debating, in a post-graduateseminar, the vital issues of contemporaryethnographic practice, such as the future ofethnography and its purposes vis-à-vis society,audiences, and research subjects. For thosebeyond the academy, especially the inhabitantsof the communities of research subjects, thebook might remain an enigma.

Serge D. Elie Yemen Center for Studies andResearch

Olwig, Karen Fog. Caribbean journeys: anethnography of migration and home in threefamily networks. ix, 319 pp., figs, bibliogr.London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,2007. £60.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper)

This study of three families’ respective historiesof migration from the Caribbean holds manypoints of interest both for Caribbeanists and forthose concerned more generally with migrationstudies. There is also something here forstudents of identity politics, both in the UK andin the USA. The study concerns three ratherdifferent families. The first, the Muirs, who werebased in the colonial centre of Falmouth onJamaica’s north coast, began migrating to NewYork early in the twentieth century and later hadmembers of their family move on to England.This family is perhaps the most securely middleclass of the three. The second family, theGastons, came from a small French Creolevillage in Dominica, although they had beenEnglish-speakers for some time. Among a largegroup of siblings, different ones moved to thecapital Roseau and then on to England, Canada,and New York. They pursued their father’saspirations for them to secure positions thatutilized their substantial education. It seemedthat these aspirations would be frustrated inDominica when issues of colour-shade began tobear on them in Roseau. The third family, theSmiths, came from Richmond Village in Nevisand are the poorest of the three groups.Originally estate workers, the family forebearshad become cultivators in their own right. Theyhad, however, remained poor, and thiseventually led to migration. Olwig remarks thatshe first began to work with this family in 1980,making her association – as it is with all thefamilies – a very long one. She shows how thevarious migrations have coincided withtransatlantic developments: the early migrationsto the United States, the mid-twentieth-centurymigrations to Britain, and the turn again to the

Book reviews 175


USA when quotas were eased just a few yearsafter Britain all but closed its gates.

The book provides two chapters on eachfamily group. The first chapter in each sectiondescribes the family base as seen through familymembers’ eyes. Each chapter provides a portraitof the family’s class and local status, educationand economic engagement, along with style oflife, religious affiliation, and so forth. The secondchapter in each section describes the migratoryexperience of each family group and the twistsand turns over decades – and, in one case,almost a century – that distributed relatives ondifferent continents. Most of these relatives havekept in touch with each other and, in mostcases, with their place of origin as well. Twofurther chapters in the book are comparative.They address the ‘foundational stories’ of eachfamily, their experiences with gender and race,and their sense of identity. The whole ispreceded by an excellent introduction thatdiscusses a range of analytical issues (towhich I return below) and also places thisparticular study within the context of theCaribbean’s extraordinary experience withmigration.

There are a number of points of real interestin this study. Olwig defends the method of lifehistory, dispersed fieldsites (or multi-sitedethnography), and a focus on networks andfields. These are hardly new tools of research.None the less, she argues that life histories, orstories, present an intimate side of migrationthat is often hidden in other accounts. It is wellto remember that Sidney Mintz first used the lifehistory method in 1960 to detail the ‘historywithin history’ of a Cuban ‘worker in the cane’.Interestingly, this method is one major way, anda very effective one, to access a ‘social field’ thatextends beyond the local. Life stories andnetwork analysis work extremely well together.Moreover, when Gluckmann proposed that suchfields should be the anthropologist’s focus, hecertainly had transnational relations in mind.Olwig also makes an interesting point when sheobserves that most migration studies are focusedon the receiving society – on the society towhich a person emigrates. By contrast, the focusof her book is on the manner in which hersubjects draw on their memories of home andplace, and their negotiations with relatives, togenerate an enduring identity for themselves. Inshort, she demonstrates that in terms ofsentiment and motivation, migration remains atwo-way street. Finally, she underlines that theidentity of her subjects has more to do withthese unfolding family networks than it does

with migrant community participation in thereceiving society. In other words, identity is itselfan intimate thing not always defined in terms ofthe dynamics of communities. Finally, Olwigmakes the point that the focus of her study isthe multi-stranded relations within each one ofthese family groups. Rather than a shallowmulti-sited study, this is, in fact, ethnography ofextremely dense and rich transnational relations.Locality, as opposed to space, is not definitive forthe phenomena analysed in this book.

The book has some other enticing attributes.All three family studies are portraits of the powerof respectability in Caribbean culture. Reputationand transgression have been to the fore for solong that it is good to see a study that revealshow values of respectability can also providestrong motivation to change, risk, andbetterment. Again, despite her disclaimer, thereis in fact quite a lot about race in Olwig’s book.The different experiences of the groups ofrelatives, and of individuals within each group,make very interesting reading. Finally, each casestudy involves an interesting summary ofethnographic research in the relevant Caribbeanlocale. It is interesting to see the ways in whichthese local milieux can bear on the migratoryexperience. Indeed, one is struck by how strongand coherent major aspects of Caribbean cultureare even as these families scatter themselvesacross the Atlantic. Does this soften the edges ofidentity politics and diasporas as well?

Diane Austin-Broos University of Sydney

Pelkmans, Mathijs. Defending the border:identity, religion, and modernity in the Republicof Georgia. xvi, 240 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,2006. £34.50 (cloth), £12.95 (paper)

Defending the border is a rich and engagingstudy of identity formations in the post-Sovietborder region of Ajaria, an autonomous republicin southwestern Georgia. By offering a‘biography’ of the Turkish-Georgian border itself,and a detailed account of lived experience onthe border and the surrounding borderlands, theauthor demonstrates how the demise of the ironcurtain has not only renewed borderpermeability, but also prompted a ‘fortification’of cultural boundaries by border-dwellers. Tograsp this heightened primacy of culturalidentities, argues Pelkmans, we need to assessthe ‘unexpected’ and ‘unintended’ ways inwhich the Soviet period has influenced ‘patternsof identification’ in the rapidly changing

Book reviews176


postsocialist settings. Instead of assuming thatemergent identity formations are either a returnto a pre-Soviet past, or an invention of thepost-Soviet present, the author offers a nuancedanalysis of how identity forms are ‘shaped andmodified to fit changing social and politicalcontexts’ (p. 219).

The book begins with the literal border (partI) in the divided Turkish-Georgian village ofSarpi. Delineated in the 1920s, the border,initially permeable, became ‘almost completelyimpermeable’ under later Soviet rule, a border ofrepression and fear. This increasing fortification,however, involved ambiguities at both villageand state levels. Soviet authorities had a‘bifurcated attitude’ towards the border –‘embracing the potential for expansion’ and yet‘fearing possible foreign infiltration’ – makingborder policies that were often ‘erratic’ and‘complicated’ (p. 37). The Sarpi residents whohad lived with the Soviet border recall it with a‘mixture’ of ‘positive memories’ about the Sovietcertainties and ‘deeply negative experiences’with the harsh border regime (pp. 24-5). Indeed,some villagers collaborated with that regime bytaking part in ‘civilian border militias’ thatdetected and detained illegal border crossers.Paradoxes and ambiguities also mark theperceptions and experiences of the borderopening. Whilst bringing renewed contact withthe Laz ethnic kin and lost relatives across theborder, this permeability has generated renewedattempts at defining and solidifying the ‘patternsof self and other’. Faced with the ‘economicsuperiority’ of their Laz kin in Turkey and withthe threat of being labelled Turkish by theirGeorgian compatriots, the Laz in Georgia havemobilized identities that proclaim their ‘culturalsuperiority’ over their Turkish counterparts. Suchmobilization, argues Pelkmans, has involved areinforcement of the Soviet ideologies: seeingethnic identity as primarily a ‘regional category’tightly connected to ‘ideas about Georgianness’.Given the ethnographic richness of the book, Iwas surprised the author did not extend hisfieldwork to the Turkish side, instead relyingon other ethnographic studies of Laz inTurkey.

Part II of the book focuses on the religious‘frontiers’ in post-Soviet Ajaria, emphasizinghow the possibilities of religious renewal inpostsocialist settings have not necessarily beenequal for all religions. Whilst the GeorgianOrthodox Church is expanding its influence inthe Muslim-majority Ajaria, identifications withIslam have become increasingly problematicand ambivalent. To assess the complexities of

this trend, suggests Pelkmans, we need toaddress both the post-Soviet changes and theSoviet past. Under Soviet rule, despite itsatheist ideologies, Georgian nationality becamemerged with Christianity, thus preparing ‘thegroundwork’ for the ‘later expansion’ ofChristianity in independent Georgia and for the‘(im)possibilities’ of renewed Islam in today’sAjaria. With the heightened ‘unity betweenGeorgianness and Christianity’ in the 1990s,Muslim Ajarians have found it increasinglydifficult to reconcile their religious andnational identity, and to observe Islam in astate that ‘privileges’ Christianity (p. 143).Many have opted for conversion to Christianity,‘complicating’ their positions within their localMuslim communities and, thus, redefining theboundaries of belonging. Pelkmans’s framing ofMuslim Ajarian identities in terms of ethnicityand nationality, though highly relevant andsuperbly detailed, carries the danger ofrepresenting an Islam that is purely ethnicand, thus, somewhat remote from otherforms of Islam beyond Turkey and Georgia. Acomparative discussion with Muslim religiousdynamics in post-Soviet Central Asia could havefurther enriched the text.

In part III, the author turns to the‘treacherous’ market economy and the‘hollowness’ of modern urban planning in theprovincial capital, Batumi. Here Pelkmans isseeking not merely to deconstruct ‘the myths’ oftransition and modernity by showing ‘therealities’ of socio-economic dislocations andpower asymmetries in postsocialist Ajaria, butrather to turn those myths themselves into‘ethnographic objects’. He illustrates how the‘dreams of modernity’ and ‘images oftransition’, embodied in new building projectsand consumer goods, can actually becomevital not only for ordinary citizens whendealing with socio-economic uncertainties,but also for the local elite when legitimizingtheir rule.

With the dearth of ethnographic studies onthe Soviet and post-Soviet Caucasus, Defendingthe border is a timely and sophisticated welcomeaddition for anthropologists of (post)socialistsocieties and borderlands, and for broadeningthe anthropological understanding of thechanges and uncertainties faced by Muslims inpost-Soviet settings. Given its ethnographicfinesse and theoretical provocations, this bookhas much to contribute to various comparativequestions.

Mahnaz Marashi School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Book reviews 177


Robinson, Kathryn (ed.). Asian and Pacificcosmopolitans: self and subject in motion. xx,237 pp., illus., bibliogrs. Basingstoke:Palgrave, 2007. £50.00 (cloth)

Ten of the articles published in Asian and Pacificcosmopolitans were first presented at amultidisciplinary conference entitled ‘Cultures,Nations, Identities and Migrations’ held at theHumanities Research Centre at the AustralianNational University in April 2004. They areauthored by a historian, an art historian, ahuman geographer, and a specialist in culturalstudies as well as by anthropologists. In line withthe themes of the conference and the theoreticalinterests of the time, they frame theirpresentations in terms of globalization, globalcultural flows, boundaries, transnationalism,migration, disasporas, cultural identityformation, multiculturalism, and hybridization.Richard Werbner provides a foreword andKathryn Robinson, the editor, an introduction.They make valiant attempts to tie thepresentations to ‘the growing intellectualmovement which is the new cosmopolitanism’,‘a cross-disciplinary movement of intellectuals’who emphasize ‘boundlessness’ and amediation among extreme positions ofuniversalism, multiculturalism, and otherpostcolonialisms (Werbner, pp. x, xii). They alsoemphasize the key importance given to the longhistory of interconnections spanning SoutheastAsia and the Pacific.

The articles deal with translocalinterconnections over time spans that vary froma millennium to a century or two, but theirwriters stay within the theoretical parameters ofthe 2004 conference and deal specifically withhow peoples of the region create and re-createidentities, maintaining continuity while takingcognizance of globalizing forces andtransnational cultural currents. References tocosmopolitanism and its literature are strikinglyabsent. Only Kirin Narayan, who examinesinterplay between ethnography and fiction in aNorth Indian setting, acknowledgesindebtedness to that literature.

Six writers deal with Asian and Pacificresponses over time to national andtransnational imports. Tony Day, a literaryhistorian, appraises a millennium of Asialiterature for shifting concepts of identity andselfhood due to cultural flows emanating firstfrom India and China and then from furtherwest, as traders, invaders, and empire-builderscirculated the universalistic faiths of Hinduism,Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity.

Pnina Werbner picks up the same themes ofinterconnectedness and continuities as she traceshow Sufi orders have retained the ‘same deepstructural logic’ throughout their internationaldispersal and at the same time have beenrecontextualized within local ecological andcultural habitats (p. 148). Melani Budianta, likeDay, uses literature as an ethnographic tool, inher case to chart shifting Indonesian meaningsof ‘Chineseness’ over several centuries, as thoseof Chinese descent were sometimes seen asgood citizens and economic assets, sometimesas threats to Indonesia’s independence andethnic solidarity, and more recently as possiblemediators with China as it becomes a majoreconomic player in the region. With each shift,those of Chinese ancestry have had tore-evaluate their definition and presentation ofself. Richard Eves and Alison Dundon invoke ashorter time span, of only a century, in theirexamination of varied New Guinea responses tosuccessive twentieth-century importations offundamentalist Christianity which clash bothwith other Western ideologies and with localpremises.

The remaining four writers deal withoutward movements from the region, two withhow international audiences respond toSoutheast Asian artists and two with the effectof outward migration on individuals andcommunities. Kenneth George and CarolineTurner discuss two contemporary Indonesianartists – the painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and thesculptor Dadang Christianto. Each has drawn onboth Western and Indonesian art styles to createa distinctive individual voice, marked by thehybridity and fragility so characteristic of thecontemporary world. Their art comments on thetragedy of violence, Indonesian as well aselsewhere, and each has found international aswell as Indonesian audiences responding totheir art.

Deirdre McKay and Nicholas Tapp look atredefinitions of self and the reordering ofcommunities in the wake of internationalmigration. McKay examines the redefinition ofgender roles and class status in the Philippinesas women have become international labourmigrants and the primary economic support offamilies left behind. Tapp is concerned with theextent to which Hmong from Southeast Asia areforming a new international diaspora in thewake of dispersals caused by the Vietnam War.Many became refugees in Europe, NorthAmerica, and Australia. He asks the pertinentquestions: who among the displaced attempt tomaintain contact and with whom do they make

Book reviews178


contact? Like McKay, Tapp is dealing with a first-or at most a second-generation phenomenon.

As to whether their experience is so differentfrom that of the many others who have movedinto, across, and beyond Southeast Asia and thePacific during the millennium covered by thisvolume, however, is an important question notaddressed here.

Elizabeth Colson University of California,Berkeley

Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios (ed.). WhenGreeks think about Turks: the view fromanthropology. vi, 216 pp., bibliogrs. London,New York: Routledge, 2007. £70.00 (cloth)

In the strained relation between the Greek andTurkish states over the last century, momentarydefining events spurred social and culturalchanges that had profound effects on particularcommunities and less perceptible onesthroughout the population. In an increasinglyspace-time-constricted world, this relationshiphas been thought of as encapsulated in theevents that took place between the Imia/Kardakcrisis of 1996 and the new rapprochement periodthat began in 1999. It is the set of these effectsthat this collection provides a glimpse of, takingas its starting-point the inquiry into ‘perceptionsof the Other’ and delimiting the scopelinguistically to the Greek side of the Aegean. Inthis sense, while much of the ethnographic datapresented may beg the question of change tenyears on, the volume is a worthwhile effort todefine what has remained stable in Greekperceptions of Turks throughout periods ofturbulence, calm, negotiation, indifference,stalemate, violence, and friendship.

Theodossopoulos provides a framing attemptin the introduction to the collection, arguingthat the inconsistencies and paradoxes of suchperceptions can be encompassed in the conceptof ‘hollow categories’: that is, ways of seeing theworld which are forever incomplete andmalleable, so that any given base can besupplemented by additional meaning thatmoulds the category into something that canaccommodate the paradoxes of change. This is auseful tool for conceptualizing uncertainty ingeneral, even though it does presuppose thatthe limits of ‘hollowness’ (beyond which thegiven category becomes a different category, oreven beyond which lies the un-categorizable) aresomehow known. Adding to this conceptualframing is Argyrou’s piece, in which he arguesthat how Greeks think about Turks is ultimately

conditioned by hegemonic structures of powerguided by Western concepts, which remainunchallenged even in what may appear asanti-Western discourse (e.g. of neo-orthodoxGreek thinkers). This provides the means forresistance that reaffirms hegemony so thatchanges that may push the boundaries of‘hollowness’ (e.g. of school history books) canbe resisted as anti-Western, bypassing theargument of racist anti-Turkism. Then follow twohistorical overview chapters by scholars whohave studied Greek concepts of Turks in thelongue durée. In an emotive chapter Millasoverviews the patterns that have guidedpresentations of Turks in Greek literature sincethe 1920s, making the crucial distinctionbetween the presentation of Turks as individualsand as abstractions that lies at the root ofpositive and negative imagery. Hirschon, in analso reflexive contribution, reviews her ownmemories of her informants’ memories inKokkinia during the 1970s, when the generationthat was uprooted in 1923 from Asia Minor wasstill alive.

From this follow five chapters each focusingon different locations where Greek views ofTurks might be considered of particular salience.Ors describes the ways in which GreekIstanbulites living in Athens speak of the‘homeland’ they long for in ways that unsettlethe distinctions that ethnic categorizationprescribes. Spyrou offers another example, thistime from Greek Cypriot elementaryschoolchildren, of how the formation of ethniccategories is conceptually negotiated. SantCassia, speaking of the representations ofmissing persons in Cyprus, argues for aconceptualization of the relation between Greeksand Turks as mediated by ‘desire’ forEuropean-ness, harking back to Argyrou’sargument. Tsibiridou, analysing the discourse ofan elite journal published in the Greek town ofKomotini, where many members of theTurkish-speaking minority live, uses the conceptof ‘heteroglossia’ to deal with the paradoxespresented by an ‘Oriental-type’ nationalistimagination. Yiakoumaki, on the other hand,exploring the discursive construction of ‘theminority’ in Komotini through the staging of anEU-sponsored food festival, argues for the needto incorporate local refashioning of ‘Europeanmulticulturalism’ into analyses of what mightenable critiques of nationalism.

The final three chapters of the volume couldbe considered ‘control studies’. Kirtsoglouexplores the ambivalence in the discoursesabout Turkey and Turks amongst a group of

Book reviews 179


junior army officers, while Theodossopoulosfocuses on the same ambivalence in the views ofmiddle-class town-dwellers in Patras. This isinterjected by Loizos’s chapter, surveying theachievements, tribulations, and future prospectsof what has been called ‘the bicommunalmovement’ in Cyprus.

The collection covers a broad range ofperspectives – geographical, thematic, andcultural – and is for this reason an importanttext for the anthropology of Greece, and indeedpossibly Turkey. Equally important are thequestions it leaves open for theconceptualization of dissonance andambivalence, on which a range of valuable toolsare provided.

Olga Demetriou International Peace ResearchInstitute Oslo (PRIO) – PRIO Cyprus Centre

Economics, livelihoods,and development

Bernardi, Bernardo. Africanistica: le cultureorali dell’Africa. 478 pp., bibliogr. Milan:FrancoAngeli, 2006. €23.00 (paper)

Bernardo Bernardi gave one of the mostoutstanding contributions to the development ofAfrican studies and social anthropology in Italyin the second half of the twentieth century.Long-term field experience (he began his workin Zimbabwe; Kenya and Ethiopia followed),world-wide academic connections, and aprofound knowledge of the history ofanthropology in all its articulations and trendsmade him a true forerunner of the currentopening up of Italian African andanthropological studies to the widerinternational environment. At odds with allforms of provincialism, Bernardi believed thedevelopment of Italian anthropology dependedas much on its national achievements as on itsactive participation in European and NorthAmerican disciplinary debates. His lectures andbooks taught generations of students toappreciate the cultural and spiritual richness ofAfrica, and to engage critically with the colonialburden of false exoticism and denigratingrepresentations, which Italian public opinion stillstrives to overcome.

Africanistica is Bernardi’s last book, publishedonly a few months before his death. It should beread keeping in mind the image of Africa as asavage land ravaged by conflicts and natural

calamities that seems to have gained renewedpopularity in this new millennium, after havingplayed such a large part in the self-legitimizationof late nineteenth-century European colonialconquest. As a matter of fact, Italy is a goodcontext in which to observe such dynamics ofdiscursive resurgence and their association withcontemporary policies aimed at controlling andreducing migration fluxes across theMediterranean Sea.

The book is both a tribute to the historicaloriginality of African societies and cultures andan attentive assessment of anthropology’scontribution to their knowledge and publicunderstanding. It consists of an introduction andthree large sections, the first devoted to thedevelopments of British anthropology, thesecond to French African studies, and the thirdto Italian ones.

The introduction addresses colonialism andits enduring cultural and political legacy. It alsoprovides a basic summary of African colonialhistory. Bernardi belonged to a generation ofscholars that witnessed both colonial rule and itsend and testified to the rapidly changingsocio-political condition of independent Africannations. His methodological remarks onanthropological fieldwork – which he describesas both a personal and a scholarly long-termengagement with the concrete diversity ofhuman experience – should be consideredagainst the tendency of some branches of Italiananthropology to privilege theoretical elaborationover accurate and informative ethnography.

For Bernardi, the building up of a soundknowledge of Africa entails the patient learningof at least one local language, and the crucialassistance of what he calls ‘local collaborators’,whose guiding and mediating role he sensitivelyunderlines. Both points are of contemporaryconcern in spite of what some postmoderncolleagues would call Bernardi’s ‘old-fashionedstyle’. African youth’s increased literacy inEuropean languages as well as theurban-orientated and multi-sited fashion of someresearches have minimized the learning of locallanguages at the risk of overlooking the internaldynamics of African societies and cultures.

The second point is equally sensitive. ForBernardi, ethnographic research is never anindividualist enterprise. Neither are its resultsreducible to the subjective exploration of theanthropologist’s intellectual and personalvicissitudes while in the field. It is instead aninteractive and collaborative effort in whichAfrican interlocutors have played their role sincethe beginning. Furthermore, for Bernardi,

Book reviews180


anthropological knowledge is cumulative.Contemporary ethnographic and historicalresearch rests on the rich documentation oftwentieth-century scholars along with theirtheoretical contributions on African idioms ofkinship, politics, and religion. The pages devotedto Isaac Schapera, whose ethnographicpragmatism and attention to the historicalanalysis of social change Bernardi dulyemphasizes, are particularly interesting for anItalian audience generally well acquainted withthe main representatives of British functionalism(like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes) butless aware of other fundamental contributions.

Some critics could contend that Africanisticaprovides only a gallery of authors (and not evenan exhaustive one) without any evaluation of thelimits of functionalism, by whose meansBernardi entered the field of African studies.However, Bernardi’s communicative simplicityand his unrivalled capacity for making complexissues rapidly understandable makes his lastcontribution highly appreciable. His tone isnever polemic, even when the issues at stake arepolitically sensitive. Substantial arguments aboutthe historical value of African cultures areillustrated in a simple and sober style. Indeed, itis a happy combination of solidity, simplicity,and sobriety that constitutes Bernardi’s lastinglegacy to Italian African studies andanthropology.

Alice Bellagamba University of Milan-Bicocca

Crate, Susan A. Cows, kin, and globalization:an ethnography of sustainability. xxvii, 354 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. New York:AltaMira Press, 2006. £19.99 (paper)

For a Siberian innocent, like myself, thisethnography provides a gripping account ofhistorical movements and transformations insub-Arctic practices of human ecology. The focalcommunities are the Viliui Sakha of Yakutsk. AsTurkic-speaking migrants from the south, theybrought with them a cattle- and horse-keepingculture from the fourteenth century, displacingthe hunting- and reindeer-orientated Tunguspopulations. Russian expansion brought the taxregime of sable furs to the region. The Sovietperiod brought collectivization of settlementsand productive resources, and, with miningfrom the late 1950s, the political ecology ofdiamonds has dominated the region. The bookargues that a post-collectivization, domesticeconomy of ‘cattle and kin’ has re-emerged asthe Sakhas’ main specialization for livelihood,

but their lack of political access to influence theimpact and benefits of mining leaves the Sakhapopulation and their economy in a precarious,unsustainable state.

The basic facts of cow-keeping in thesub-Arctic are chillingly exceptional. The animalsare stalled in wooden house-annex sheds for 220

days per year. Light enters through blocks of ice.Optimal numbers of cattle are kept for bodywarmth according to shed size. Thirty-fivedifferent kinds of dairy foods are used, includingtaar, a fermented milk-mash gruel, with addedfish and duck bones. An enormous amount ofhay is required, and since de-collectivization it isthe lodging and daily care of cattle, and theaccess to hay fields and the labour for its cuttingand storage, that preoccupies people inarrangements of reciprocal exchange for accessto hay, use of shed space, and circulation ofmeat products. The remnant versions ofco-operative resource pooling do not generatesufficient produce for cash, and the Sakhas’monetary income is mostly through statecompensatory distributions from mining.

The Sakhas’ ‘environmental ethic’ is referredto as a relationship from pre-Soviet times, but itscontemporary relevance is not ethnographicallyexplored, either regarding livestock care at aneveryday level, or in terms of movementstowards finding a means of political dialogueover mining. For instance, to gauge whether theethic has survived or been transformed, it wouldbe valuable to learn how cattle sicknesses areobserved and attended to. We are not told iftraditional healers are called, whether the salamahonouring strings for sky-deity protectors kept inthe cow sheds are more than just a tokencosmological symbol, or whether thehuman-cow relationship has been transformedby the introduction of higher-yielding Europeanbreeds and veterinary medicine since Stalin’stime. The practice of driving vehicles overprecious pasture and hay fields is noted to incurdisapproval, but the book lacks a fulsomedescriptive account of the critical labour processof haymaking, and the extent to whichpre-Soviet gender relations have been affectedby mechanization. As for ‘Knowing the land’, thechapter of this title only hints at a pre-Sovietethic of stewardship of nature, through mentionof ancestral sites and oral memories, and elders’critiques of how productive territories wereconsolidated under collectivization.

The theme of sustainable developmentbecomes paramount in the dramatic story ofhow the area has been affected by the diamondindustry, including underground nuclear

Book reviews 181


explosions, the first hydro-electric station builton permafrost, and water pollution. In this lastsection of the book, an entire chapter isdedicated to the case of north Canadiandiamond mining and indigenous rights. Toomuch detail is introduced that detracts from thearguments over sustainability perspectives thatcan be made from the compelling Sakhaethnography. The problems of the youth andtheir relationship to future livelihoods in theViliui region are treated by focus group andinterview techniques, letting them define anddebate sustainability. This generates normativeversions of how things were and ought to be,rather than shedding light on how the politics ofkinship, personhood, and economy differ nowfrom the conditions in which, prior tocommunism, wives came with a dowry of up totwenty cows and horses, and bride-price waspaid by a deferred schedule of animals in theother direction. Future livelihood scenarios arenot analytically tied back in to the knowledgederived from the Sakhas’ historical ecologicalpractice. Whereas the book does go intocomparative dimensions of mining industries’relations with indigenous peoples, systematiccomparison of the Sakha to other indigenouspeople of the former Soviet Union could havebeen instructive, to see how evaluating thepotential for empowered, active citizenries todefend ecological rights in dialogue witheconomic and territorial modernities gives verydifferent hues to the term ‘globalization’.

Ben Campbell Durham University

Luetchford, Peter. Fair trade and a globalcommodity: coffee in Costa Rica. xii, 226 pp.,tables, bibliogr. London, Ann Arbor, Mich.:Pluto Press, 2008. £18.99 (paper)

The proliferation of movements advocating fairtrade, organics, local foods, and slow food haspaved the way for a series of more-or-less criticalstudies by journalists, geographers, andanthropologists. Much of this literature isconcerned with the potential of suchmovements to create effectual alternatives to theexploitation of humans and the environmentinherent in the ‘global food system’.Luetchford’s study of fair-trade coffee in CostaRica is also motivated by this concern. However,while it does reveal some of the contradictionsof a movement that critiques global commoditymarkets but is also a part of them, this book ismuch more than an exposé of the ‘realconditions’ of fair-trade coffee-producers.

Instead, Luetchford seeks to understand fairtrade from the perspectives of Costa Ricancampesinos and co-operative managers and tosituate it within long-standing debates ineconomic anthropology concerning therelationship between morality and economy.

One of the strengths of this study is that itavoids defining Northern consumers as the keyagents of change in fair trade. Thus, the first twochapters provide an account of the Costa Ricansocial democratic project and state-backedco-operative movement, and present theintroduction of fair-trade schemes by EuropeanNGOs in the 1980s as an adjunct to this history.Luetchford argues that while fair trade hasstrengthened the producer co-operatives,co-operative managers approach fair tradestrategically, as one of several sales outlets thatthey can use to maximize benefits for their smallfarmer members. Further, managers areoften critical of the demands and attitudes offair-trade organizations. At the same time, asnon-producers, co-operative managers arethemselves open to similar criticisms bygrowers.

Three subsequent chapters focus on thelivelihood strategies of coffee-producers in theTilarán Highlands in the northwest of thecountry. These chapters reveal the inaccuracy offair-trade organizations’ representations offair-trade coffee-producers as independentsmallholders working their own land anddevoted wholly to coffee production. Instead,despite the fair-trade premiums, families of‘coffee’ farmers view the market as unreliableand unfair, and attempt to maximize security bydiversifying their economic activities.Furthermore, there are huge inequalities,especially between landholding families andlandless labourers. Indeed, at harvest timesfarmers are dependent on landless labourers,many of them seasonal migrants fromNicaragua.

Throughout these chapters the author payscareful attention to the ways in which farmers’livelihood strategies are shaped by the biologicalqualities of coffee bushes and the ecology of theHighland region. In a chapter on theintroduction of organic farming, he stresses thatcampesinos were concerned with the negativeeffects of chemical-dependent agriculture andsaw resonances between organic farming andtheir own traditional practices and ideas ofnature. However, as with fair trade, farmerscommitted to organic farming schemes onlyinsofar as such schemes helped securelivelihoods.

Book reviews182


The two final substantive chapters deal mostexplicitly with farmers’ moral evaluations of theeconomy. Crucially, for campesinos, value inagriculture originates not in the market, butrather in a divinely ordered nature and in thetransformation of that nature through humanlabour. For campesinos, people become humanthrough working the land, and ideally familiesshould sustain themselves through subsistenceagriculture. When it is necessary to obtain goodsand services outside the family, this should bedone through known, reciprocal relationships,rather than impersonal markets. In this idealsociety, no one is able to appropriate the valuecreated by others’ labour.

In the concluding chapter Luetchfordhighlights the extent to which Costa Ricanfarmers and Northern fair-trade consumers areinvolved in conversations about the economywith shared cultural origins. Not least, bothperceive value as inherent in nature and labour,and share a disdain for middlemen and acritique of the alienation produced by theseparation of production from consumption. Fairtrade, argues the author, attempts to bridge thegap between producers and consumers byintroducing an element of gift-giving into marketexchange. However, for Costa Rican campesinos,markets are fundamentally unpredictable andcan never be ‘fair’. This is a thought-provokingchapter, although it risks homogenizing theNorthern ‘fair-trade consumer’.

In Fair trade and a global commodity,Luetchford demonstrates the crucial role thatethnography can play in understanding both theinternational markets in foods and othercommodities and the social movements thatclaim to provide alternatives. A fuller picture offair trade will require ethnographies of fair-tradeconsumers and activists that are as rich andnuanced as this first-rate study of Costa Ricanproducers and co-operatives.

Jakob A. Klein School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Mosse, David. Cultivating development: anethnography of aid policy and practice. xix, 315

pp., maps, bibliogr. London, Ann Arbor,Mich.: Pluto Press, 2004. £17.99 (paper)

David Mosse’s book is advertised as acontribution to the anthropology ofdevelopment and policy studies, but can be readequally as an outstanding example of how to dothe ethnography of globalization. Its theoreticalsophistication, methodological rigour, and

attention to detail make it a work of enduringvalue. The author worked for more than tenyears as a development consultant for anIndo-British project in rural India concerned withthe creation and enhancement of livelihoods. Inwriting this account, he uses personalrecollections, participation in field activities,interviews, and various documents generated inthe project as sources of data. The theoreticalinspiration comes from actor-network theory,and especially from the work of Bruno Latour.The book negotiates difficult methodologicalquestions, such as: how does one submitone’s own participation in the designingof projects to one’s own anthropologicalgaze?

The main question Mosse asks is: how dodevelopment projects work? His conclusion,baldly stated, is that ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of aproject is socially produced through attempts tostabilize narratives and participation of actorsthat have a greater national or global reach. Thecrucial concept used throughout is that of‘translation’ from the field of science andtechnology studies. The author shows thattranslation of policy goals into practices is thework of skilled brokers who can make availablethe language of policy into institutionallanguages for the various stakeholders involvedin a project.

Within this theoretical framework theethnographic work that Mosse does is to trackhow the Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project wasactually implemented from the phase of projectdesign to fieldwork to reporting of outcomes.The most fascinating story is that of the mannerin which the project slides from being anexample of a ‘successful’ project to that of a‘failure’ not because anything changes on theground but because criteria about how tomeasure success and new ideas about the goalsof the project change at the level of theinternational donors. However, stepping outsidethe language of the policy spiel provides adifferent perspective that cannot find a placewithin the new scenario. The villagers point tothe reality of the material changes (improvedseeds, changing cropping patterns, soil andwater conservation bunds) and institutionalinnovations (Joint Forest Property ManagementCommittees, creation of village-level jankars –villagers appointed as links to outside agencies).These might not have led to increased incomeflows as the aims of the Project defined thecriteria of success, but they led to improved foodsecurity. Thus the question also becomes: whoseexperience counts, and for whom?

Book reviews 183


While Mosse makes very good use of thenotions of translation and stabilization, there areother aspects of actor-network theory that arenot assimilated in the analysis, leading to adeflection of some important ethical issues.Endnote 10 in chapter 1 brings our attention toan important feature of the theory, namely thatactor-networks are not confined to socialrelationships but also involve things. Phrasedotherwise, this means that agency rests onhuman-thing assemblages. In complextechnological environments, in particular, thishas meant that notions of responsibility havehad to be seriously reconfigured. Such ideas asthat of organizational regret rather than blameraise a new set of ethical questions, and,impressive though this book is, it shies awayfrom the full implications of such anunderstanding of the impersonal in social lifeand the diffusion of agency and responsibility.However, neither agency nor responsibility is aone-shot outcome, so I hope that a greatertraffic between science and technology studies,media studies, and anthropology will lead to arobust discussion of these issues. Mosse hasshown us one way of preparing ourselves to askthese uncomfortable questions.

Veena Das Johns Hopkins University

Stacey, Natasha. Boats to burn: Bajo fishingactivity in the Australian fishing zone. xix, 222

pp., maps, figs, tables, illus., bibliogr.Canberra: Australian National UniversityE-Press, 2007. $24.95 (paper)

Natasha Stacey, an anthropologist who teachesin the School of Environmental Research atCharles Darwin University in Australia, combineshistorical material with ethnography toilluminate a conflict of rights of access to marineresources. Her book is based on doctoralresearch carried out in the 1990s among Bajofisherfolk in the Tukang Besi archipelago(Southeast Sulawesi) and on Roti, Indonesia’ssouthernmost island. Often termed ‘sea gypsies’or ‘sea nomads’, the Bajo are part of the‘Sama-Bajau’, an ethno-linguistic group withscattered settlements in Indonesia, thePhilippines, and Malaysia.

While Bajo fishing was confined to SoutheastSulawesi in the seventeenth century, in theeighteenth century some of them relocated toRoti. From both locations, they have beenembarking with their sailing boats (perahus) ontrips to islands and reefs of the Timor andArafura Seas and to beaches along Northwest

Australia in order to search and collect trepang(bêche-de-mer) as well as trochus and turtleshells. With the extension and enforcement ofthe Australian Fishing Zone (AFZ) after theSecond World War, this activity has becomecontested, especially after a 1974 Memorandumof Understanding (MOU) between Australia andIndonesia granted rights of access to fishinggrounds in the AFZ to ‘traditional fishermen’only, defining the latter as those who ‘havetraditionally taken fish and sedentary organismsin Australian waters by methods which havebeen the tradition over decades of time’. In the1980s, some reefs became entirely off-limits forfishing due to being declared natural reserves.Acts of ‘illegal Indonesian fishing’ have becomemore numerous since the late 1980s, when theAFZ was being controlled more regularly byAustralian officials, but also following an increasein the demand for shark fins on internationalmarkets. Not only did this prompt trans-localtraders to become involved in Bajo fishing byproviding fishermen with credit for the purchaseof craft and gear for the right to buy shark fins,it also resulted in non-Bajo fisherfolk enteringparts of the Timor Sea previously exploitedexclusively by Bajo men. An increasingly strictenforcement of the MOU resulted in theapprehension and burning of craft as well as theimprisonment and condemnation of crew overand over again.

Several authors had demanded are-assessment of the MOU. Stacey’s book is animportant contribution towards this end. Shesucceeds by probing into how Australianmaritime expansion has influenced Bajo fishingand explores the effects of the MOU’s vague andstatic notion of ‘tradition’ on the ways in whichthe AFZ is enforced on the water and in court.Explicating social, cultural, economic, andhistorical conditions which underlie Bajo fishingin what counts as the AFZ today, she examineswhat is ‘actually happening on the water’.Furthermore, the author reveals why thevigorous Australian deterrence has remainedlargely inefficient, clearly explaining theeconomic predicament in which the Bajo findthemselves, and seeks to give advice for futureimprovement of the regulations.

Stacey’s book is a plea for Bajo rights. Shedemonstrates that while European explorersmapped and named islands in the Timor Sea,since the eighteenth century Bajo and otherIndonesian fishermen had been fishing regularlyin these waters. It is fascinating to read how Bajofishing in what is now the AFZ incrementallybecame visible to Australian state institutions,

Book reviews184


becoming problematic only late in the twentiethcentury. Evaluating the Australian policy, Staceydraws attention to several blind-spots andambiguities implied by the MOU. For example,in declaring Ashmore reef a nature reserve, itsenduring cultural heritage value for the Bajo wasdisregarded. Indonesian fishermen never playedany role in shaping the MOU. Moreover, Staceynotices that a more ‘cultural’ notion of‘tradition’ was implemented in the Torres StraitTreaty of 1978, which defines marine use rightsfor the Papua New Guinea fisherfolk of thisregion, which is adjacent to that covered by the1974 MOU.

Academic readers will probably want toknow more about the conditions of the author’sfieldwork. They may find the book lacking intheoretical and comparative scope, as in regardto discourses on theorizing postcolonial bordersor legal pluralism. Unfortunately, developmentsin the ten years prior to the book’s publicationare poorly covered (e.g. 1997 is the last year withdata on the number of apprehended perahus).Buyers are also likely to bemoan the book’s poorbinding, which cracks after one reading (it is,though, also available on-line). Yet despite allthat, and importantly, the book raises criticalquestions for public policy. As such it is to behighly recommended for specialists in thefisheries of Southeast Asia.

Götz Hoeppe Universität Konstanz

History, politics, and law

Cook, Noble David, with Alexandra

Parma Cook. People of the volcano: Andeancounterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru. xv,319 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.£60.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper)

People of the volcano is a history of an isolatedvalley in the highlands of Southern Peru. Theauthors have been working in the area since the1970s, and the photographs, description of theenvironment, as well as their meticulouslydocumented archival research demonstrate anintimate knowledge of the area.

They start out with some background on thepre-conquest period and social organization,based on early Spanish chronicles and somearchaeological research, but their focus isprimarily on the colonial period, for the mostpart the sixteenth and first half of the

seventeenth centuries. Cook and Cook areinterested in the Spanish institutions that had amajor impact on Andean peoples and thedebates that took place among Spaniards andbetween Spaniards and indigenous peopleconcerning colonial policies. The book thusincludes detailed descriptions of the encomiendasestablished in the Colca Valley in the sixteenthcentury and their later demise, the policy ofconsolidation of settlements by colonialauthorities and its social and ecological impacton people in the area, the evangelization effortson the part of the Catholic Church in the regionand the Church’s attempts to suppress Andeanbeliefs and practices, the complicationsintroduced by ever-increasing Spanish demandsfor corvée labour in the context of a decliningnative population, and the economic changesthe colony brought, ranging from theintroduction of new crops to the establishmentof silver mines in the area. Throughout thediscussion Cook and Cook pay particularattention to the demographic and ecologicalconsequences of colonial policies andinstitutions, but they remind the reader thatlocal Spaniards were also changed in significantways by the colonial experience. Cook and Cookend the book with a summary of their findings.

Cook and Cook take full advantage of theopportunities presented by regional history.Throughout the book they are able to show insome detail the specific effects of colonial policy,such as those instituted by the very activeViceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s. Butchoosing a region as the primary unit ofhistorical analysis also brings challenges. On anempirical level the most significant of these hasto do with a lack of source material on specificevents and topics. The authors overcome this bydeftly switching to the broader Andean contextwhen the material on the Colca Valley growsthin. The best example of this is their discussionof the civil wars of the 1540s, when largenumbers of Spanish settlers were in open revoltagainst the crown. Cook and Cook provide alively and fascinating account of this crucialperiod of the Peruvian colony, even though keyevents do not directly involve the Colca Valley.They are somewhat less successful in dealingwith a second kind of challenge presented byregional history, that is, making clear thebroader import of a meticulously researchedproject of this sort. While they do point out invarious places how the colonial experience ofthe Colca Valley was different from other regionsin Peru, it does not lead them to full-blowncomparative insights. Similarly they rarely

Book reviews 185


engage in debates or question the workingassumptions of other experts in colonial Andeanhistory. The exception to this is their discussionof dual organization and connected ideologiesand worldviews, which they feel do not get theattention they deserve in historical research.They make these remarks only at the end of thebook, and one is left wondering if there is moreto the failure by historians to adopt theseconcepts, which were first elaborated byanthropologists and Andean writers, outside ofthe fact that historians sometimes work in areaswhere Andean institutions and ideas weremassively changed by the early colonialencounter.

People of the volcano provides rich andspecific information on the sixteenth- andseventeenth-century Colca Valley that will beenormously useful to specialists in Andeanstudies. It also provides a fine-graineddescription of colonial institutions and theSpanish debates over control of indigenouspeoples and how to manage extraction ofresources from conquered communities. Itsusefulness thus extends well beyond Andeanstudies.

John Monaghan University of Illinois at Chicago

Graeber, David. Lost people: magic and thelegacy of slavery in Madagascar. xiii, 467 pp.,maps, figs, bibliogr. Bloomington: IndianaUniv. Press, 2007. $65.00 (cloth), $25.95

(paper)

David Graeber’s Lost people: magic and the legacyof slavery in Madagascar will be of interest toscholars of postcolonial identity, slavery, andviolence. Graeber begins by making a strong butimportant statement that anthropologists andother academics should remember: ‘Peopledon’t live their lives to prove some academic’spoint’; paying attention to the totality of ourinformants’ lives is ‘more respectful thanreducing the lives of one’s former friends toillustrations of a single theoretical argument’(p. xi). This approach allows Graeber not only toproduce a detailed account of Malagasy living inBetafo, but also to foreground the ethnographyand to draw readers into the lives of his ‘formerfriends’. Ancestors, astrology, and magic featureprominently in the account, and are seen asmediating the relationship between thedescendants of nobles and slaves.

Chapters 2 and 3 set the scene for the reader,explaining the principles of Malagasy societyand providing a discussion on royal authority

and negative authority. Royal authority appearsto have been particularly coercive. The Merinamonarchy relied on a vast slave labour forcekidnapped from beyond the highlands. Royalauthority was also underscored by the use ofamulets (ody and sampy) containing ‘harnessed’spirits meant to protect the monarch and torealize their desires. Under Merina rule, thepopulation was strictly divided into andriana(descendants of nobles), hova (free), and mainty(slaves). The andriana decided who could layclaim to any of these statuses, and theirdecisions were marked by important standingstones which stood as memorials of agreementsmade. For negative authority, a usefulexplanation is given of how ancestors and theelders exercise such authority, constraining theliving and the young, appearing to them indreams, and intervening to prevent them fromexercising certain options. Graeber argues thatthese relationships were profoundlyinterdependent. The elderly and ancestors reliedon the memory of the young and the living fortheir identity and presence to be sustained,while the young and the living depended on theelderly and ancestors for guidance and moralcontrol. The account also reveals how, long afterthe abolition of slavery in Madagascar,categories of domination remain but aresomehow ‘blunted’ by use of euphemisms.Graeber tells us that these categories are neverexplicitly articulated and that, in fact, the termandevo is treated as an obscenity and is hardlyused in conversation. Even in reference toslave-owning families who had slaves buriedwith them to take care of them in the afterlife, aeuphemism of ‘soldiers’ is used to describeslaves and their labour is described as ‘service’.

After the abolition of slavery in 1896 (fiftyyears after abolition in the rest of the IndianOcean islands), the divisions between royals,free, and slave became more blurred. As notedpreviously, the notion of ‘service’ remained andtaboos (fady) persisted regarding marriage toslave descendants (such marriages would defilethe deme and bring contamination). Theethnography centres on Betafo, a town inArivonimamo, on the outskirts of the capital city,Antananarivo. The community is dividedbetween the descendants of nobles (andriana)and slaves (mainty). In the past, andrianatypically lived in the city and arrived in placeslike Betafo only to collect a part of the harvest,to perform famadihana (an ancestor-appeasingceremony), or to be buried. In present-dayBetafo, slave descendants have gained control oflarge portions of land and resources. The

Book reviews186


community is turned upside down whenMiadana, whose name means ‘tranquil’ inMalagasy but is in fact a talkative woman ofnoble descent, arrives from Antananarivo withher husband, a government worker. It is hopedthat by returning to Betafo the husband’s healthwould improve and they would be able toregain control of their lands. But as newcomersunused to the constraints of cultural life in therural area, Miadana’s family begin to violate thetown’s various fady. She attempts to justify theirfaux-pas by arguing that the fady were either‘made up’ or not really part of custom. Theirlives progressively become more difficult, notonly because they are breaking taboos but alsobecause Betafo residents actively resist theirresettlement in the town. Miadana’s trials arenot described in those terms but in terms ofwitchcraft: ‘black people bewitched white onesso the white people would be in constantdistress’ (p. 190). Historical acts of aggression arealso brought up to torture Miadana’s family(p. 194), to the extent that her family isforbidden to draw water from a communalspring or to pass by a community member(slave descendant) house. The dispute is‘resolved’ only after Miadana’s daughterbecomes pregnant with Norbert’s (slavedescendant) son and Miadana’s familybequeaths a portion of land to their son-in-law.In the account, Miadana’s voice dominates,replicating historical relations of power, wherethe ‘subaltern’ (slave descendant), Norbert,speaks but not in a language understood byeveryone. Thus the trials of Norbert are not asfully articulated. He is presented as unreasonableand ‘pig-headed’, described as someone who isnot very intelligent and a person who ‘just can’tget over the fact of slavery’ (p. 197).

The chapter ‘Lost people’ and the account ofRainitamaina’s descendants attempt to reversethis portrayal of slave descendants. Graeberbriefly outlines the broad legacy of slavery andgives more attention to the active resistance ofBetafo residents to the return of nobledescendants. For slave descendants, land isimperative for subsistence and necessary for theburial of their descendants. The agency of slavedescendants is demonstrated in their striving togain property and other resources. Theastrologer Ratsizafy, an important figure in thestory (who appears every now and then as adrunk who sometimes makes insightfulcomments), not only obtains land purchasedfrom monies earned as an astrologer, he alsomarries an andriana and has two sons by her.Ratsizafy fails, however, to convince others to

support his half-andriana son, Pano. Despite hissuccess, there is continuous mention ofRatsizafy’s slave ancestry.

Reflecting on the growing literature on slavedescendants in the southwest Indian Ocean andthe Mascarene islands, Graeber’s workcontributes significantly to critical discussions oncontemporary experiences of slavery. Assomeone from Mauritius, seeking to understandcontemporary experiences of slave descendantsin the islands, I found Graeber’s book to be anilluminating read. It certainly unravels thecomplexity of hierarchical relationships in the‘ex-slave’ society and demonstrates how suchrelationships may endure, poisoning futuregenerations. However, he notes in the epiloguethat ‘by the time of writing, something is fallingout’. In this detailed ethnography, I felt thatsomething had indeed fallen out. In hisself-reflexive account of ethnography the authorargues that in the past the embarrassing orunpleasant subjectivities of one’s informantswere often omitted in the hope of achieving aseamless and objective ethnography. Theseerasures prevent us from acknowledging theessential humanity of those we encounter.Graeber sought to reintroduce thesesubjectivities in Lost people and to present theMalagasy as they ‘are’. However, this is notwholly possible, and it seems like the Malagasybecome caricatures embedded in ethnographystyled à la Pynchon and Dostoevsky. This hasproduced an entertaining if somewhatlabyrinthine account that detracts somewhatfrom the reality of slave descendants inMadagascar. In order not to marginalize theslave descendants further, I would have liked tohear their stories about people like Miadana andher husband. Furthermore, the responses of theBetafo andevo to the incoming andriana do notcome across as unco-ordinated, though Graeberseems to present it this way.

Finally, the author tells us that it is neitherpossible nor desirable to know everything aboutwhat was going on in Betafo. He also says that‘no-one was ever liberated inside a text, least ofall within a text that they did not write’ (p. 387).By letting us see the legacy of slavery out of thecorner of our eyes, by privileging the storyline ofthe andriana, Graeber (perhaps like theanthropologists he accuses of producing a linearnarrative bound in a singular theoreticalframework) constrains the stories of slavedescendants. Thus, what begins as an account inwhich once slave-owning noble descendants arethe ‘lost people’, with neither state norcommunity support, ends with slave

Book reviews 187


descendants as the real ‘lost people’, who evenafter gaining resources and ‘defeating’ theandriana become predatory in their dealingswith each other and continue to erodecommunal solidarity.

Rosabelle Boswell Rhodes University

Kelly, John D. The American game: capitalism,decolonization, world domination and baseball.175 pp., illus. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,2006. £6.50 (paper)

In February and March 2009, the second WorldBaseball Classic (WBC) was played amongsixteen qualifying national teams. Thechampionship was won by Japan, which hadalso won the first WBC in 2007 by beating Cubain the finals. This time, it defeated South Korea,which had ousted the US team in the semifinalround. Much was made of the success of theEast Asian and Caribbean national teams, andmany commentaries likened the WBC to thefootball FIFA World Cup.

In this lively polemic, John Kelly (no relationto this reviewer) insists that these assessmentsare doubly misleading. First, they overstate thenation-state as the crucial unit in this sportingcompetition. Moreover, they misrecognize thereal force behind the WBC, which is not aninternational federation like FIFA but a powerfulcommercial sports monopoly, Major LeagueBaseball (MLB), which operates the professionalbaseball leagues in the United States. TheJapanese national team may have won thechampionship game, but the MLB controlled therules of the game. The WBC is an instrument ofthe MLB to consolidate its control of worldbaseball, and Kelly uses this case as thecentrepiece of his analysis of the dynamics of‘the American game’ – which is not so muchbaseball itself as it is a broad economicimperialism, of which this new world stage ofbaseball is but an instantiation.

This is persuasive, and of broad relevancebeyond the seemingly special world of criticalsport studies because sports have generally beenoverlooked in studies of governmentality andglobalization. This is unfortunate becauseorganized sports were among the earliestnineteenth-century secular organizations todevelop imperial and international expanse.FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, andthe International Amateur Athletic Federation allpreceded the League of Nations, and modernsports regulations and organizations have beenpowerful arbiters of sovereignty, citizenship,

and governance (as well as race, gender, andclass).

Sport’s importance for any theory of globalcapitalism and governance is well demonstratedby Kelly’s study, but its real importance is todelineate the distinctive trajectory of baseball.Certainly some gifted and critical economistshave analysed baseball economics, in micro andmacro terms, and there are historians andanthropologists who have detailed the sport’scolonial and neocolonial arenas and its racialand ethnic orders. Kelly’s contribution is to bringthese two together as an argument that thecentury-long efforts of the MLB to controlbaseball as a capitalist enterprise reflect theparticular arc of American capitalism andenterprise behaviour. His is a brief for Americanexceptionalism: in sports, but, more significantly,in the lineaments of American capital.

Kelly’s analysis of this WBC tournament istriangulated by a historical sketch of criticalevents in baseball history and by a wide-rangingtheoretical palate. The former is a selectivechronology of a century of efforts by the MLB tocontain multiple threats to its expandinghegemony within the US and abroad. The latter,which will be of more interest to most JRAIreaders, is really Kelly’s ambition ‘to talk aboutbaseball in social theory and vice versa’ (p. 4).Bakhtin (baseball as a genre of game) is moreuseful to him than Durkheim’s search forelementary forms; Marx’s cramped notion of usevalue and Ronald Coase’s model of firmbehaviour are deficient in light of Weber(baseball as a genre of capitalist enterprise) andVeblen, who was especially prescient about thecapacities of the American firm to use Americanpower and law as cover for market domination.What this litany of theorists leads to, however, isMarshall Sahlins, because at heart this is Sahlinistanthropology, locating ‘rapid economic changewithin histories of cultural structure’ (p. 126) byexplicating critical events and uncovering thehistorically contingent and culturally meaningfulconditions of possibility for social action.

Inevitably, in a relatively short book, Kelly’sclaims are broad-brushed and under-specified,and they may well be nuanced in futurewritings. They are overstated, for instance,because mobilizing (or perhaps marketing)national sentiment is critical to the corporatesuccess of the MLB, which has depended on apowerful legal protectionism uniquely accordedbaseball and which has cannily played upon apeculiar American ideology about the nationalpastime. And Kelly’s argument for American(sports and capitalist) exceptionalism could be

Book reviews188


buttressed by closer attention to other powerfulglobal sports formations (e.g. football, athletics,rugby, and skiing), which centre on nation-statesas formal member units and constituencies.

Even so, this is a provocative and originalanalysis. The subject is baseball – how and whydiamonds are an (American) boy’s best friend –but, more lastingly, it is an exemplary historicalethnography of corporate imperialism.

William W. Kelly Yale University

Senghaas, Dieter. On perpetual peace: atimely assessment. vi, 232 pp., tables,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2007. £45.00 (cloth), £15.00 (paper)

Dieter Senghaas is a highly productive socialscientist who is a specialist in peace research. Hetook his Ph.D. from Frankfurt in 1967 for a criticalanalysis of deterrence. He has in recent yearsbeen an advisor at the Federal GovernmentSecurity Academy. Since many anthropologistsroutinely work in societies affected by war, andsome of them write thoughtfully about peacefulor warrior societies, this book might be ofinterest.

Senghaas refers several times to ImmanuelKant, who wrote an important essay, On eternalpeace, just over two hundred years ago whichhas also been drawn upon by thinkersconcerned to propose ideas such as ‘conviviality’and ‘cosmopolitanism’ when audaciouslyhoping for a less violence-prone world. WithKant as a legitimating ancestor, the reader mustexpect a rather serious-minded construction ofthe intellectual scaffolding for discussing theglobal system, and propensities to peace andwar. Senghaas spells things out thoroughly andrigorously. Much that he has to say strikes me assound, and reflecting without much distortionthe kinds of real-world situations which exist.When he thinks, for example, aboutglobalization, and tackles the question ofwhether we can sensibly think about ‘oneworld’ from a security point of view, he is keento point out that it comes in four contrastingmodels: the first, ‘de luxe’ and relativelyunproblematic; a second form which is pullingmarginal people in and allowing them somechances of upward mobility; a third form whichis sharpening inequalities and related struggles;and a fourth in failed or failing states, withmarkets in violence, and ‘cultural regression’.

Senghaas makes some play with what histranslator (apparently also German) terms the‘civilizatory hexagon’. This is not a spin-off from

Samuel Huntington, but more about thestructural conditions of the EU and other secureand prospering security zones. There are sixinterlocking features: the state monopolizesforce because the citizens are disarmed and solive by the rule of law, enjoy politicalparticipation, share a concern with social justice,a degree of interdependence and affect control,and a culture of constructive conflictmanagement. All this applies to the politicalelites.

Not that Senghaas thinks states and theirelites ‘act rationally’ all the time – far from it. Hepoints out that several major wars in thetwentieth century were undertaken with pooranalysis, incorrect information andunderstanding, and in the end led to theannihilation of the elites which chose them –the Japanese attack on the USA was one,Hitler’s attacks on the Allies was another. Heattempts to show analogies between Freud’sanalysis of how we work, cognitively andaffectively, and the way state elites choosecourses of action.

Senghaas draws from deep historicalknowledge, both of situations and of authors,and has an informed sense of the problems ofless developed societies, in addition toknowledge of war- and peace-making in the lasttwo hundred years. He knows that the securityachievements of the EU are conditions whichmany citizens in many states would like to enjoy,but he fully appreciates that such a vast securityzone can go backwards as well as forwards. Hewishes to remind his fellow Europeans that somany of the things they take pride in today werenot features of their states even one hundredyears ago, so he rejects any complacentself-congratulation and patronizing sense ofsuperiority among Europeans.

In a sense this book of linked essays distilsthe kind of thinking which has shaped the lastfifty years of EU and OSCE diplomacy – it is atheory and practice manual for the men andwomen in suits to have in their briefcases and ontheir hotel desks as they move around the worldtrying to promote conflict resolution, improvedhuman rights, and spread the simple messagewhich Europeans seem to have learned fromtwo catastrophic ‘world’ wars – peacefulco-operation is better for nearly everyone thanfighting.

I commend this book to anthropologistslight-headed from postmodern theorizing,because it is absolutely down-to-earth andclear-headed about the sense in which thenation-state remains a fundamental unit of

Book reviews 189


political security which shows no signs of goingout of business. That is not to suggest that moststates give their less-favoured citizens thesecurity they deserve, and there is perhaps toolittle in this book about the state as predator. Butthere have been relatively few state-to-state warssince 1945, and when they do happen they areshort. The long wars, and the common ones,have been civil wars, wars to make or remakenew states or break out of old ones. All theanthropological talk of hybridity,cosmopolitanism, transnational movement, andfuzzy borderlands cannot disguise the fact thatneither democratic nor autocratic politiciansshow any willingness to shrink their own statesor dissolve their immigration controls,particularly when they are democraticallyaccountable!

Senghaas is clear that states behave towardseach other most of the time with a great dealmore cooperation than conflict. He thinks that‘classic’ international law ended when the UN’sCharter made it an obligation on state membersto retain peace. In the twentieth century thegrowth of human rights universalism has been apowerful change agent. But, this said, Senghaasis no cosy optimist: peace-building is a projectand a process, and quite possibly one at whichwe all need to work indefinitely, particularly asclimate change, resource competition, anddistress migration sharpen the competitiveaspects of our worlds.

Peter Loizos London School of Economics andPolitical Science

Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic grotesque nonsense:the mass culture of Japanese modern times. xvi,369 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley:Univ. California Press, 2007. £32.50 (cloth)

This ground-breaking book by ProfessorSilverberg, who died in 2008, stands as proof ofher passionate engagement with the history ofJapan. She was part of a new generation of UShistorians working on that country, who see thediscipline of history not just as research into thefacts of particular cases, but rather, likeanthropologists, as a commitment tounderstanding the society and culture of theJapanese. As a feminist, her approach also ledher to include, in an almost Marxist manner, thelives of people normally seen to be ‘withouthistory’ (Eric Wolf, Europe and the People withoutHistory, 1982): that is, in the main, women aswell as the urban under- and working classes,

whose existence has to be deduced from themass culture of the era.

‘Erotic grotesque nonsense’ refers to theterms the Japanese themselves used to describeaspects of Tokyo’s urban culture at the beginningof the 1930s, but Silverberg extends the term to‘cover the mid-1920s into the early 1940s’ (p. 29)in order to understand how the openness ofJapanese society during the early Meiji and Taishoeras (1868-1926) gave way to the increasingrepression of the pre-war era. Her key trope inexamining the culture of Tokyo during this time istaken from film: montage. In three sections, sheuses a variety of sources to capture ‘some ofthe sense of fragmentation and dynamism ofJapanese modern culture’, and she also uses‘montage at the level of the organization of thechapters’ (p. 6). Thus Silverberg is able toconsider the modern girl as militant; caféwaitresses (from that new phenomenon inmodern Japan, the coffee shop); the Japaneseengagement with the already global filmbusiness (Charlie Chaplin was big in Japan);women’s magazines; the vibrant culture ofAsakusa and its criminal class; the ‘irony ofparody’ in Japanese films; and, finally, withvarious notes on gestures, code-switching, thereturn of the modern girl in the 1990s, and othermatters.

Erotic grotesque nonsense is a real tour deforce, an attempt to make sense of the lives of‘those living in the depths of poverty’ (p. 269)whose existence may have appeared to theirfellow Japanese as nonsensical, but who werethen sent to war and told to forget theeffervescent and cosmopolitan world that hadexisted before. Silverberg ends by telling us:‘The history of modern Japanese culture wassuffused by meanings and tensions, created andconsumed, and then not forgotten’ (p. 269) bythe very people who were told to do so. Herattempt to rescue this era is also an attempt tochange a post-war perception of the Japanese.That there has existed an exciting urbancounterculture since the 1970s is something sheattributes to these recollections of a pre-war lifethat was not always about economic success,hardworking businessmen, and loyal wives andmothers. In short, by presenting us withindividuals who flaunted the rules of society –‘modern’ girls who broke dress and moralcodes; audiences who loved the Marx brothersand discussed the politics of Chaplin’s ModernTimes; feminists who argued about marriage andthe nature of desire; or the Dickensianorganization of Asakusa beggars – Silverberg isattempting to rescue the history of Japan from

Book reviews190


the sort of chronicling that depicts its modernsuccess as the result of its very well-organizedgroupism.

It seems churlish, given how ill Silverbergwas towards the end of her life and as she hadto struggle to complete this book, to make noteof any of its lacunae. It could be said that theknitting together of the montages in theepilogue never really happens, or that the bookis poorly copy-edited, and both would be true.To focus on this, however, would be to detractfrom what is an exciting and important work, alife’s work, which had me recommending it toall my students before I was even finishedreading it. The ‘eye’ that Silverberg casts overthe Showa pre-war era is completelyanthropological and generous in tone. She seesthe Japanese as individuals, as people who areinteresting in and of themselves – I can make nobetter recommendation than that. This is a booknot just for Japan specialists, but for anyoneinterested in a history of cosmopolitism andmodern life.

Dolores P. Martinez School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Medical and psychologicalanthropology

Casey, Conerly & Robert B. Edgerton

(eds). A companion to psychologicalanthropology. xxii, 523 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford,Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.£85.00 (cloth)

Aimed at readers who are new to the disciplineof psychological anthropology as well as atexperts in the field, A companion to psychologicalanthropology is an ambitious work which coversvirtually every sub-field of the discipline in itstwenty-five chapters. Divided into five sections, itoffers a broad selection of contemporarypsychocultural perspectives on topics that rangefrom the ‘anthropology of emotion’ (Lindholm)through ‘practical logic and autism’ (Ochs andSolomon) and ‘drugs and modernization’(Winkelman and Bletzer) to ‘the politics ofremorse’ (Scheper-Hughes). With thisconcentration on the varieties of topic currentlyunder study in this field it is a valuable additionto more historically orientated books such asPhilip Bock’s Rethinking psychologicalanthropology (1988).

The introduction provides an interestingoverview of the history of psychologicalanthropology and a good background for thepresented contributions and the traditions intowhich they fit. It shows the difficulty thatpsychological anthropology faces in finding itsbalance between heteroglossia andethnocentrism and describes its split into amultiplicity of sub-fields. The attempt tosynthesize all contributions by extractingcommon themes and structures seems a bitforced at times, mainly because the book doescover so many of these heterogeneoussub-fields, but it gives a good idea of what toexpect from the text.

Part I, ‘Sensing, feeling, and knowing’, coverstraditional topics of the discipline, namely theanthropology of emotion and cognition. Itincludes an overview of the anthropology ofemotion by Lindholm as well as theoreticalconsiderations on everyday meaning-making(Garro), learning (Greenfield), and memory(Cole), but also has two chapters on ‘time andconsciousness’ (Birth) as well as on the reflectionof global processes and ideas of race inindividual dreams (Hollan).

Texts that deal with the topic ofcommunication in unusual and insightful waysmake up part II, ‘Language andcommunication’. Both Reynolds Whyte andWilce take on their subjects of narratives anddisability discourses from a decidedly globalperspective. While Reynolds Whyte providesinsights into the global spread and contention ofspecific narrative genres like lament, Wilce showsthe pragmatic ways in which Western disabilitydiscourses are used by certain Ugandans toachieve political ends. Ochs and Solomon, onthe other hand, use communication patterns togain insights into the practical logic of autisticchildren.

Part III, ‘Alienation, ambivalence, andbelonging’, covers the widest range of topics,which sometimes makes it hard to grasp thecommon theme of these twelve chapters. Thesetopics include considerations of the controversiesaround the concept of the person and the self inanthropology (Linger and Napier), the medicalconstruction of race and the bounded materialbody (Gaines and Lock), the inbetweenness ofemotions in immigrant communities (PrattEwing), the encoding of the fear of a richminority in the architecture of gatedneighbourhoods (Low), and a model forcomparative research of everyday emotion(Ewing, White, and Low). While Weisneer andLowe present an overview of childhood research

Book reviews 191


within psychological anthropology, the last fourchapters cover more ‘exotic’ topics such as ritualdrug use and the changes effected in it bycommercialization and legislation (Winkelmanand Bletzer), the limitations of psychoanalyticand Boasian theories of ritual practice and thenecessity for phenomenological approaches(Seeman), the effects of globalization on spiritpossession (Bourguignon), and endogenousunderstandings of bewitchment among theBantu (Devisch).

The four chapters of part IV, ‘Aggression,dominance, and violence’, are concerned withthese topics on different analytical levels and indifferent settings. While Hinton broadlyconsiders genocide as a modern phenomenon,Stein investigates symbolic violence in Americancorporations during downsizing, while bothColvin and Scheper-Hughes examine discoursesof violence and remorse in South Africa,concentrating on the effect of a globalizedtrauma discourse on understanding politicalviolence (Colvin), and the ‘politics of remorse’among white South Africans (Scheper-Hughes),respectively. The afterword draws together thesediverging topics by emphasizing the distinct roleof psychological anthropologists as dissenterswithin the discipline and its twin concern withspecific personal experience and the widerhistorical context of this experience.

There is a dearth of handbooks forpsychological anthropology, especially ones thatadequately present the broadness of its currentscope and the multiplicity of its approaches.One of the strengths of A companion topsychological anthropology is that its chapters dorun the gamut from practice theory throughpsychoanalysis to phenomenological andnarrative perspectives. It includes chapters whichare great overviews of important areas such asemotion and childhood as well as those offeringinteresting approaches to more specific topics atthe intersection of anthropology andpsychology, be they autism, dreams, orpossession.

In the broadness of its scope the book mightat first glance seem a bit overwhelming,especially as it is not always obvious how thesections were constructed and why certainchapters were sorted into one section instead ofanother. Part III, especially, could have been splitup into a number of smaller but more clearlyconsistent parts. However, the concise andhelpful introductions to every section as well asthe synopsis for every chapter that precedes thebook make it easy to select relevant readings andmake the book a valuable reference not just for

researchers involved in this area but for lecturersand students as well.

Maria Balfer Stanford University

Martin, Emily. Bipolar expeditions: mania anddepression in American culture. xiv, 362 pp.,tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. £19.95 (cloth)

In the time since the publication of this book, itslikely importance has grown in ways it implicitlyforetold. American cultural dominance, viaglobal markets and market values, spread thenotion that mania is a good or resource to beharnessed in a capitalist economic system drivenby concepts of productivity and an impetustowards acceleration. Banks have ‘crashed’,triggering economic depression, and manypeople are left wondering how nationalgovernments (in cultures also obsessed with riskmanagement) allowed, even encouraged, suchpatterns of economic activity.

This is a scholarly, creative, and reflectivebook. It examines the definition of and responseto manic depression in US culture, currently andhistorically, and how it resonates with Americansociety and values, generating both horror anddesire. Martin’s aim is not to debate dichotomiessuch as culture versus biology, or to contesttheir reality, but to look at manic depression as a‘culturally inflected condition’ whose meaning issocially situated and ‘entwined in thepresent-day imagination with economic successand economic failure’ (p. 29). It is not anauto-ethnography, as a wide range of researchmaterial is drawn on, but it is inspired byMartin’s own experience of bipolar disorder. Thefocus includes the rise of consumerism in healthcare, which grew out of earlier rights-basedpatients’ movements, but has been co-opted notonly by government policy enshrining aconsumerist version of patient-centred care, butalso the moves by pharmaceutical companies toprovide support to patients’ and relatives’support groups.

Detailed ethnographic material illustrates thework: for example, the funds and imaginationinvested by companies in harnessing potentialmarket opportunities through alignment withthe patient. The book also explores sensitivelythe paradoxes and pain experienced by people‘living under the description of’ manicdepression; a condition both highly stigmatizedand highly prized, with public attitudes thatcycle, in a curious parallel, between theextremes of mood thought to characterize

Book reviews192


bipolar disorder. In addition to a detailedhistorical review, and a research-based accountof patients’ groups, Martin looks at theAmerican media and public discourse to setideas about the creativity of mania, longdiscussed and even celebrated in relation toartists, alongside ideas about the creativity ofmarkets, and the celebration of certain kinds ofcharisma or leadership, in politics, business, andeconomics. The performative aspects of livingunder the description of bipolar disorder (BPD)in different settings are also discussed, neverforgetting that for people with BPD, thediagnosis is more than metaphorical. Similarlythe DSM – the Diagnostic and statistical manual ofmental disorders – is analysed as havingconsiderable illocutionary force, both in beingconstructive of categories of mental illness andin ordering them: the power of naming ormaking a text to call a thing into being.

Martin writes beautifully, in the sense thatthe work is engaging and accessible, whileexpressing complex ideas and narratives. Therange of sources referred to and woven togetherinto her argument is impressive. I found theillustrations of mood charts over timeparticularly striking. Is the ‘Moody Judy MoodJournal’ a supportive way to help children tounderstand and articulate their own feelings, ordoes it illustrate a further step in theself-disciplinary project of late modernity, whereyoung children are encouraged to learn andinternalize self- and public-surveillance as anorm? And does the use of such record systems,in itself, help to constitute reality? The threads ofa Marxist-Foucauldian approach can be found,and builds on Martin’s earlier work, but the styleis never polemical. The reader is presented witha range of salient evidence and argument andthereby encouraged to consider its implications.

The tide of bad debts and bank failures inAmerica turned to rough waves beyond itsshores. In Britain in 2008, the public learned thatFred Goodwin, the CEO of the Royal Bank ofScotland, which required a government ‘rescue’,had been promoted rapidly on the basis of hishostile takeovers of other companies, rather thana demonstration of management skills in a moretraditional vein, of prudence perhaps (see, e.g.,‘Hubris to nemesis: how Sir Fred Goodwinbecame the “world’s worst banker” ’, The Times,20 January 2009). This case parallels a numberof those covered by Martin in the US. This bookprovides a very welcome development(substantive and theoretical) in the field ofanthropology, but economists, politicians, andhistorians reflecting on the recent depression in

the US, and the ‘cold’ caught by other ‘Western’countries, would also do well to read it.

Christine McCourt Thames Valley University

Merli, Claudia. Bodily practices and medicalidentities in southern Thailand. xviii, 311 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. Uppsala: Univ.Library, 2008. $77.50 (paper)

This book, authored by Claudia Merli, exploresthe tensions between a ‘modern’, clinicalapproach to obstetrics and the ‘traditional’practices used by midwives in Muslim ethnicminorities, in Satun province of southernThailand. Through a detailed ethnography ofapproaches to both contraception and prenatal,birthing, and post-partum care, Merli arguesthat the implicit ‘bio-political’ agenda of modernmedical practices is to tame ‘unruly’ ethnicbodies and bring them in line with central Thaidevelopment policy. She makes the point, forexample, that Muslim women are viewed bygovernment officials to be undermining familyplanning strategies through their propensity formultiple births – and that interventions such ascaesarean sections are employed partly to makefemale bodies more compliant. Womenundergoing such procedures are advised aboutthe risks of having further births and encouragedto agree to sterilization to avoid furthercomplications. At the same time, ‘theimplementation of modern protocols’disempowers women, depriving them of theiragency and giving control to doctors, for whomefficiency is the primary motivation for practicesthat often involve cutting, suturing, andscarring. Yet, Merli notes, because thesetechnologies carry a particular authority,grounded in scientific knowledge, women areincreasingly turning to them.

By contrast, traditional approaches arepresented as more personal, centred on thepregnant woman – who is seen as a participantin the process rather than a patient. The bookdemonstrates the depth of knowledge held bylocal midwives, presenting their non-invasivepractices such as massage, the application ofheat, and other rituals as intrinsically logicalresponses to bodies that are treated holisticallyrather than simply as anatomy. The social andspiritual dimensions of these ancient methodsare also highlighted in Merli’s highly detaileddescriptions, implying that they strengthen therelationship between the woman and herhusband, as well as their connectedness tonon-temporal worlds.

Book reviews 193


The book provides an impressiveethnography on issues that are fundamental tothe human experience yet are not often tackledin such depth, perhaps because they are toovisceral and personal for many to take on as ananthropological study. In this sense it provides auseful addition to the existing body of literatureon Thailand in general and on biomedicalpractices more specifically. By far the mostinteresting and engaging parts of the book arewhere we learn about local people’s ownexperiences of being midwives, mothers, orfathers. These snippets provide a glimpse intothe human face of issues that are otherwise dealtwith throughout the book in a rather theoreticalway. Suffice to say, more of them wouldstrengthen the book considerably. Yet, there arealso sticking-points in Merli’s central theorizationthat prevent the book from being a trulyground-breaking piece of work.

Merli notes in the opening pages that herintention is not to romanticize traditionalknowledge and practices; rather she sets out topresent a study of the fluid interplay betweentwo ‘historically different’ worlds in order tohighlight complex paths of change in adeveloping country. Yet the way the informationis presented tends to reinforce and even create afalse division between these ‘worlds’.Throughout the book, there is disappointinglylittle emphasis on the creative elements of astruggle between two sets of knowledge. Merlishows little intersection or mutual influencebetween the approaches, nor does she point toways in which pregnant women and theirmidwives may choose certain elements of eachto enhance the birthing experience – andthereby exercise agency. Rather, she presentstraditional and modern medical approaches asirreconcilable paths, with the latter graduallysubsuming the former. At the same time Merlicreates her own knowledge hierarchy, portrayingindigenous methods as humane andempowering compared to new, impersonalpractices that have been imposed. It is notalways clear where the distinctions lie betweenlocal narratives of change and Merli’s own senseof nostalgia.

The bias towards the traditional is deepenedby the often rather ahistorical nature of theinformation. Accounts are often drawn fromtextbooks and outdated ethnographies or frommidwives’ descriptions from years past, givingthe impression of practices frozen in time –rather than constantly shifting to absorb andrespond to new influences. The balance of issuesis also not helped by the lack of context behind

the introduction of newer technologies andclinics. They are framed in terms of largelypolitical motives, as part of a developmentpolicy aimed primarily at assimilation andnational obedience, so that any positive motivesfall out of the picture. For example, there is littleindication of the impacts of the moderntechniques in terms of reducing levels of childmorbidity and maternal deaths. Furthermore,there is no mention of other external influenceson the lives of those living in the communitiesmentioned – what do people draw from themedia or from education, for example, and howdoes this impact on the choices they make ortheir attitudes to medical care?

Alyson Brody Institute of Development Studies

Mimica, Jadran (ed.). Explorations inpsychoanalytic ethnography. ix, 245 pp.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2007. £15.00 (paper)

Psychological anthropology, as the namesuggests, reflects a more general shift in thediscipline from the objective to the subjective,from a study of what people do to include whatthey think, an area in which psychoanalysts aretrained to be particularly sensitive. From itsorigins in Freud, Reik, and Roheim, therelationship between psychoanalysis andanthropology has proliferated into manydifferent approaches, of which psychoanalyticethnography can loosely be said to be one. Ofthe ten contributions to this volume, the lastfour are neither written by psychoanalysts norrooted in fieldwork. This review concentrates onthe remaining six.

The first essay, by the eminent psychoanalystSudhir Kakar, arises out of the disjunctionbetween his training analysis by a Germanpsychoanalyst and his cultural identity as anupper-caste Hindu. He makes a number ofimportant points. First, to understand what it isto be Indian is not something that can belearned; it has to be lived. In other words it isnot a matter of knowledge, but a state of being.Second, Kakar rejects the metaphor of ‘depth’ inrespect of psychoanalysis, placing culture andpsychoanalysis not vertically/hierarchically asaspects of the mind, but horizontally. Andthirdly, as both a practising analyst and anIndian, he feels himself as a split subject, dividedbetween two irreconcilable views of reality.Following Kakar, it is obvious that thepsychoanalytic model of the mind is rooted inWestern culture; as such, it can be ‘applied’ to

Book reviews194


other cultures and other peoples, but it is oflittle use for understanding them.

The second essay is a slight but charmingaccount by Florence Weiss and Milan Stanekworking in Papua New Guinea on a projectdescribed as a ‘psychoanalytically oriented seriesof conversations with Iatmul individuals’. Theproject was designed on the completely artificialassumption that an interview betweenethnographer and informant can be assimilatedto a session between analyst and patient. Onthis basis Weiss engaged in fifty hour-longconversations with a Iatmul woman calledMagendaua, which were presented to asupervisor in the evenings. It would have beeninstructive to eavesdrop on Magendaua’sversion of her conversations with the whitewoman.

Jadran Mimica presents a superb case studyof the father-son relationship among theYagwola of Papua New Guinea. Even his oftenimpenetrable prose cannot dim the dazzlingquality of his research. Although he claims towork within psychoanalytic metapsychology, healso says that psychoanalytic concepts, as theystand (the distinction between conscious andunconscious, inner and outer worlds, impotenceand omnipotence, life and death), do not fitwhat he describes as the ‘experiential realityof the Yagwola’. It seems the impressivefieldwork that distinguishes so manycontributions to this volume may owe moreto the length of time spent in the field than topsychoanalysis.

The fourth essay, by Waud H. Kracke, arguesagainst the view that in cultures where dreamsare stereotyped, they cannot be understood asthe expression of repressed wishes. While Iwould not wish to challenge his contention thatevery dream raises the question of when and bywhom it is dreamed, Freud’s theory of dreams iscontroversial in the West, let alone in itsapplication to the tribes of Brazil, such as thePaulinho, among whom he worked.

René Devisch, who worked among the Yakapeople of southwest Congo, starts from therecognition that ‘the anthropologist is, in his orher very person and experience, the privilegedinstrument of research’. I read with growingadmiration his sensitive, evocative account of hisjourney in and through the ‘other’ to achievenot only an understanding of the host society,but also a more critical appreciation of his own(‘Looking from “there” to “here” as if “here”were “there” ’). My own experience, as ananthropologist with a background inpsychoanalysis, did not achieve the same degree

of self-awareness, but then perhaps, for thatreason, it was more representative. Beginning asan ‘outsider’, the ethnographer moves tobecome an ‘inside-outsider’ (Devisch’s ‘nativeexile’), but never completely an ‘insider’ becauseof his or her history and maybe appearance.What distinguishes Devisch’s position as a manof conscience, seeking to take upon himself thesins of his colonizing forebears, is that heactively sought and monitored these changes,while for most of us it is something thathappens largely unawares, and it is only onreturn from the field that we find that we are nolonger completely at home in our native land.The ethnographic experience is inestimable: itoffers one the opportunity of becoming anotherperson in another place, but at the cost ofbecoming a stranger to one’s country andoneself. The dilemma, according to Kakar, resultsin some degree of detachment from bothpersonae, a position that seems to bring thediscipline closer to the independent spirit ofphilosophical inquiry than to the practice ofpsychoanalysis.

Craig San Roque, an analytical psychologist,has worked for many years among theAboriginal people of central Australia in anattempt to heal their addiction to the alcoholand drugs of the white man. The tragic historyof this encounter, an ‘ethnography of failure’,leads San Roque to re-examine the nature andpotentiality of the ‘Dreaming’ (Tjukurrpa) in ananalysis that makes use of the theories of Jung,Klein, and Bion. As an ex-patient of Bion, I findthe identification of the elements of the‘Dreaming’ with beta elements completelymistaken. Besides which, there are limits to whatwe can learn from psychoanalysis about culturebecause ‘it does not own’ the unconscious;there are innumerable fields (from the silentworking of our bodies to the structure of thelanguage we speak) ordinarily outsideconsciousness, about which the Freudianunconscious has nothing to say. There are alsolimits to how much can be achieved outside theanalytic situation by so-called ‘self-analysis’ (inFreud’s case always described as ‘heroic’). ButSan Roque adopts a flexible and creativeapproach which has opened him to new andadventurous ways of thinking about thetranslatability of culture. When, in commonwith other impressive contributions to thisvolume, he tells us that his fieldwork hasbenefited from the use of psychoanalysis, whoam I to question it?

Audrey Cantlie School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Book reviews 195


Method and theory

Harding, Sandra. Sciences from below:feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities.vii, 283 pp., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.:Duke Univ. Press, 2008. £12.99 (paper)

This latest book by Sandra Harding, theacclaimed feminist philosopher, is an ambitiousattempt at formulating a ‘progressive’epistemology and politics capable of moving‘modern sciences’ beyond their normativephilosophies and practices. Whilst critical ofmodernization theories that idealize scientificrationality and portray the emergence ofmodern sciences as an exceptionally Westernachievement, Harding finds postmodernism anequally unattractive alternative, particularly its‘disillusion with politics’, and its ‘silence in theface of needed social justice projects’ (p. 2).Eurocentric and androcentric epistemologies arestill, she argues, the prevalent logics of scientificknowledge production, privileging theperspectives of elite Westerners and men whilstmarginalizing the ‘standpoints’ of women andpostcolonials. To change the way science iscurrently done, to produce ‘reliable knowledge’that can deliver ‘social progress for themultitudes’ (p. 234), the understandings andexperiences of peripheral others must beengaged ‘from below’ in order to open up newepistemological and political vistas. Thistransformative project, self-acknowledged as ‘agargantuan task’ (p. 19), has been the drivingforce in Harding’s work for over two decades.With Sciences from below, however, she expandsher emphasis beyond feminist revisions andincludes postcolonial critiques of science as well.

The book is divided into three parts. In thefirst two parts, Harding surveys and synthesizesthree seemingly disparate fields of studies:postpositivist science studies, feministphilosophies of science, and postcolonialanalyses of science. In the final part, she usesthis intellectual synthesis to interrogate the‘persistent legacies of male supremacy andEurocentrism’ (p. 214) in modern sciences. Ifound her discussion on ‘Northern sciencestudies’ (chaps 1-3) detailed and informative,particularly the sections on Bruno Latour’sethnographies of scientific practice (chap. 1) andUlrich Beck’s sociology of science (chap. 2). Sheargues that esteemed ‘Northern’ scholars likeBeck and Latour offer valuable critiques ofpositivist science, rethinking science as sociallyconstructed and politically conditioned. She also

rightly points out that whilst these scholarsrecognize the value of feminist epistemologies,they do not seriously engage with them.Likewise, they seem only marginally familiar withthe postcolonial literature on science. Hardingattempts to fill these gaps through herdiscussions on feminist (chap. 4), postcolonial(chap. 5), and feminist postcolonial (chap. 6)science studies.

Harding’s organizing categories andconceptual assumptions to a certain extent limither theories and proposals. Her invoking ofbinaries – ‘Northern’ vs ‘Southern’, ‘from above’vs ‘from below’ – is quite inappropriate,obscuring how these categories can be mutuallyconstitutive. Her justification for using thesebinaries, a ‘valuable’ procedure for ‘fullyappreciating’ the enduring legacy of imperialism(p. 157), is not entirely convincing. She drawsprimarily on ‘standpoint approaches’ of socialistfeminists, neglecting psychoanalytic andperformative feminists. Inspired by the work ofMarx and Lukács, a standpoint approach startsresearch from the lives and situations of theexcluded, detailing how ‘everyday experience ofexploited groups’ are entangled with ‘thematerial and “conceptual practices of power” ’(p. 71). Whilst a standpoint methodology canopen new epistemological and politicalpossibilities, it can potentially omit the corporealand the psychic aspects of power and genderconstitution. Furthermore, Harding leavesanalytically unexamined the category of‘postcolonial’. Postcoloniality instead becomes aromantic project for capturing the authentictruths and silent voices of subalterns, withoutaddressing the ontological anxieties and socialfailures of postcolonial projects.

Harding concludes with ‘a methodologicalprovocation’ that anthropologists may findalready familiar. To understand modernity fully,researchers need to focus on tradition anddeconstruct the traditional/modern binary instandard narratives of modernity. Harding’s nextproposal is interesting but problematic: ‘start offresearch from “women’s lives in households” ’(p. 225). She defines households as productiveworkplaces, not only where women have keylabouring and caring responsibilities, but alsowhere a community’s social life is organized.Whilst Harding’s blurring of the private/publicbinary is important, her preoccupation with thegendered division of labour overlooks alternativesexualities and households, thusheteronormalizing the household economy.

This admirably ambitious and passionatelyargued book, supplemented by a comprehensive

Book reviews196


bibliography, will be most welcome to thoselooking for a clear and critical overview of thekey arguments in feminist and postcolonialscience studies and in sociology of science.Those after detailed ethnographies of everydaylives of scientists and scientific communities willfind the book predominantly theoretical.Nevertheless, activists and scholars interested insocially transformative science will find Harding’sbook an excellent guide for developing futureprojects.

Mahnaz Marashi School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Kirsch, Stuart. Reverse anthropology:indigenous analysis of social and environmentalrelations in New Guinea. xv, 272 pp., illus.,bibliogr. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford Univ.Press, 2006. $21.95 (paper)

Anthropology as advocacy has as a rule notsucceeded in efforts to representethnographically the local consequences ofabuses of power, mainly because activism callsfor careful selection and distortion ofinformation. Like the well-known video clips ofhuman rights abuse, but on a generalized scale,it has engaged in a process of editing that tendsto be narrowly orientated towards publicpersuasion, highlighting the virtues of rightsclaimants and starkly simplifying the sources oftheir oppression. One of the best qualities ofStuart Kirsch’s Reverse anthropology is that it goesbeyond the usual confines of research advocacyby providing a nuanced historical andethnographic depiction of a people in pursuit ofenvironmental and human rights. The twocentral stories behind the major grievances ofthe Yonggom people of New Guinea arecompelling enough to drive the narrativeforward: in one case the abuses of the Ok Tedimine, responsible for the catastrophicdestruction of a river and forest habitat and ofthe health and subsistence of those who livedwith its consequences; and in another case theYonggom experiences as political refugees inPapua New Guinea, in opposition to Indonesiancontrol of West Papua. These stories ofdislocation and political mobilization are toldfrom the beginning – all the way back to theearliest colonial encounters, the first,under-recognized inclusions of the Yonggompeople in global networks of trade and politics.

Kirsch has the moral awareness to includehimself in the picture, describing his relationshipwith the Yonggom people, including its

misunderstandings; and like any goodfirst-person storyteller, he includes an account ofthe changes in his own character that take placethrough the experience of encounter. A centralagent in this process of personal growth seemsto be the Ok Tedi mine. With its calculatedabuses, the mine almost ranks as a character initself, complicated by its grandiose ambitionsand its high-profile legal and political strategies.Kirsch interprets the character of the mine asmuch as he can from the Yonggom perspective,in part with the concept of ‘unrequitedreciprocity’, or ‘willful acts that disrupt orforestall what might otherwise be constructivesocial engagements’ (p. 95), and which theYonggom interpret, understandably, in terms ofsorcery. The explanation for this is simple: ‘Like asorcerer, the mining company refuses to takeresponsibility for its actions, including the socialconsequences of its environmental impacts’ (p.120). This is an example of the device of ‘reverseanthropology’ that gives the book its title. It isan effort to represent the Yonggom way ofinterpreting reality. The Yonggom are depictedhere with historical and geo-politicalthoroughness, which reveals them to bestruggling to understand and control, on theirown terms, a reality that is shifting and shuntingthem aside. In general terms, this ‘reverse’approach can be seen as a response to a moralcrisis of ethnology, to the effect that historicalabuses of anthropology call for a corrective, thatthere must be a dialogue leading to mutualunderstanding concerning the way a people orcommunity will be represented, that knowledgemust be empowering, or at the very least usefulin the pursuit of justice. The device of ‘reverseanthropology’ is an unusually nuanced answerto this challenge to the ethnographic project.

Despite its richness of detail there remainsmuch that this book does not discuss. So muchseems to be absent here, in fact, that there couldbe another book behind it, perhaps based onconfidences that cannot be betrayed andcollaborations that cannot be described. Giventhat Kirsch has several decades of experience asan advocate on behalf of his research subjects,there is relatively little here – probably becausethere is little that can be here – about thenetworks that involve or entangle the Yonngomin the instruments and processes of rights: theboard meetings with industry and/orgovernment officials, meetings sponsored byUnited Nations agencies, consultations withlawyers, the research and testimony of experts –all of this is alluded to but remains veiled. Inevery phase in the history of ethnography there

Book reviews 197


is always a kind of material that, for one reasonor another, remains off-limits; and in the currentintellectual climate this seems to be anythingthat reveals too much about the methods,blind-spots, and moral ambiguities of researchactivism. One of the virtues of Reverseanthropology is the richness of detail that makesit possible for the reader to see the outlines ofthe book that it is not.

Ronald Niezen McGill University

Kuklick, Henrika (ed.). A new history ofanthropology. xiii, 402 pp., illus., bibliogrs.Oxford, Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell,2008. £50.00 (cloth), £22.99 (paper)

Anthropologists do strange things to history.Our disciplinary socialization, intellectualtraining, and reformist ambitions urge ustowards a relentless presentism, more attentiveto emergent social forms than to historicallegacies. One casualty of our occupation withthe ‘here and now’ is that the history ofanthropology gets neglected. This bookredresses the balance. It is to a prominenthistorian of anthropology that we owe thiseclectic, stimulating, and wide-rangingcollection of original essays. Best known for herprovocative The savage within: the social history ofBritish anthropology 1885-1945 (1991), it is toKuklick’s credit that there are roughly equalnumbers of anthropologists and historiansamongst the eighteen contributors.

After a brief introduction, the volume startswith an essay by Harry Liebersohn entitled‘Anthropology before anthropology’, mappingthe field’s prê-terrain as shaped byEnlightenment missionaries and explorers, fromColumbus to Herder. The volume is thenorganized into five broad sections: ‘Majortraditions’, ‘Early obsessions’, ‘Neglected pasts’,‘Biology’, and ‘New directions and perspectives’.Each has three or four contributions.

The first section, ‘Major traditions’, offerschapter-length synopses of four historicallydominant national anthropologies: British,French, American, and German. Of all the essaysin the book, these are the most synoptic, bothattempting a discussion of important earlyancestors and exploring their legacy on thecontemporary field. Emanuelle Sibeud’s essay isan exception, restricting itself to a carefullygrounded account of the transformation ofethnology in France up to the 1930s. Kuklick’sown essay is an impressive summary ofscholarship on the ‘British tradition’, ranging

from its Victorian forebears through to thepost-war fortunes of social anthropology. LikeSibeud, Kuklick attends to the all-importantinstitutional backdrops to this history, drawingattention to the numbers of university postsavailable and the roles of professionalassociations.

The next section, ‘Early obsessions’, takes usinto less conventional territory. In ‘The spritualdimension’, Ivan Strenski explores the religiousbackgrounds of prominent anthropologists,whilst Barbara Saunders offers a ratherspeculative exploration of Locke’s philosophy,arguing that his political philosophy has to beread alongside his theory of epistemology.Taking Locke’s argument that colour sensationscan only make sense when transformed throughlabour, Saunders suggests that, as a result, ourLockean empiricist tradition has unexaminedassociations with an evolutionary socialhierarchy. Robert Ackermann returns us to saferground with a useful retelling of anthropology’sinfluence on, and engagement with, classics,from Frazer onwards.

The third part of this volume, ‘Neglectedpasts’, will appeal primarily to those interestedin world anthropologies and their histories.Charles Lindberg writes on the early traditions ofNordic anthropology, and in particular theinfluential work of Edward Westermarck (one ofMalinowski’s mentors). Donna Mehos discussesthe colonial networks fostered by Dutchethnographic museums, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikovwrites about late nineteenth-century Russiansocialist anthropologists, and how their politicalactivism related to their theories of the state,whilst Hilary Smith describes the emergence ofarchaeological sciences in China, and its ‘goldenage’ in the 1960s and 1970s.

The fourth section, ‘Biology’, brings togetherthree different essays that show the diversity ofanthropological approaches to questions of raceand culture. Thomas Glick writes about how thenineteenth-century theories of ‘polygenesis’developed in five different national settings, witha particular focus on Brazil as a ‘museum ofracial science’. Jonathan Marks offers a revealinghistory of two American eugenicists, CarletonPutnam and Carleton Coon, and their misuse ofthe ‘race’ concept within 1960s America. FinallyRobert Proctor uses recent findings frompalaeoanthropology to discuss the question ofhominid fossil diversity, and conflicts over thedate of emergence of ‘modern humans’.

The final group of four essays is more diversestill, brought together under the rubric ‘Newdirections and perspectives’. It includes an

Book reviews198


intriguing set of reflections on femaleethnographers and their fieldwork experiencesby Lyn Schumaker, a sophisticated account ofthe emergence of the field of visualanthropology by Anna Grimshaw, reflections onthe ongoing importance of regionalistanthropologies by Rena Ledermann, and a usefulpotted history of American applied anthropologyby Merrill Singer.

So there is something for everyone in thiscollection. Whilst not necessarily attempting anintegrative historical overview, the volume offersa fascinating smorgasbord of scholarship. Thechapters are likely to be read and citedindividually, and so the parts may be moreuseful than the whole, but the volume is atimely reminder of the many and variedassemblages of knowledge practices thatcharacterize anthropology. It is also a fine advertfor the quality of historical scholarship within,and of, the discipline.

David Mills University of Oxford

Ortner, Sherry B. Anthropology and socialtheory: culture, power, and the acting subject.188 pp., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.:Duke Univ. Press, 2007. £56.00 (cloth), £13.99

(paper)

The book is a collection of essays by SherryOrtner, one of the most prominent and widelyread American anthropologists. Ortner’s careerhas spanned four decades, and she is probablybest known for her work on gender. While themajority of current essays have been publishedpreviously as journal articles, their inclusion hereis accompanied by two new pieces placed oneither side of the volume. These new piecesprovide a succinct contextualization of Ortner’soverall theoretical orientation and developthemes and concerns that have been central toher work.

There are two main streams of thoughtoperating in this volume. The first is moreethnographic and interpretative and focuses onthe meanings and workings of class in USsociety. The second stream is more theoreticaland abstract and concerns the fate of theconcepts of the subject, subjectivity, and agencyin contemporary anthropology and sociology aswell as Ortner’s defence of practice theoryagainst rival systems of thought.

The volume is concerned with the ‘hiddenlife of class’ in the US, a project intimatelyrelated to Ortner’s investigations of her ownhigh-school graduating class, the Class of ‘58 of

Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey.This project, which has already produced awell-received monograph, charts the ‘relativeabsence of a discourse on class in hegemonicAmerican culture’ (p. 19) and looks into thedisplacement of class distinctions by other sortsof social difference. Not only do Americans,Ortner rightly argues, have a tendency to‘ethnicize’ and ‘racialize’ class distinctions, butthey also employ discourses on gender,sexuality, and generational attributes in order torender class inequality unrecognizable and thusdeal more successfully with the social dangersand personal anxieties that class dominationgenerates. In this regard, Ortner’sauto-ethnographic focus on mis-recognition isintrinsically related to an admirable commitmentto anthropology as culture critique. Her essay onGeneration X is arguably the volume’s best pieceand a must-read one for that. It provides asuccinct analysis of the changing class relationsin the US under ‘late capitalism’, the strategiesof class reproduction that upper-middle-classfamilies embark upon, and the ‘structures offeeling’ that inform and are informed by thishistory and these strategies.

Ortner’s theorization of class is not withoutsome problems, however. Despite citing severalkey post-Marxist thinkers as major influences,her model is ultimately a static one, missing theagonistic, struggle-centred definition of classrelations that is characteristic of this tradition.Moreover, and as Ortner herself admits, theanalysis often slides back and forth between an‘objectivist’ definition of class categories and‘subjectivist’ or native understandings, aproblem that might as well be an intractable onefor any ethnographically informed exercise.Lastly, what is argued to be a key characteristicof the US experience of class, namely class’sdiscursive domestication by other forms of socialdifference, seems to me to be a pattern that iswidely distributed across the contemporaryworld, and especially in the Southeast Asiansocieties I am more familiar with.

The ‘structures of feeling’ and strategies ofclass reproduction that Ortner describes withgreat lucidity in her ethnographic essays aretaken up as explicit theoretical challenges in themore abstract pieces. In these, she is concernedwith elaborating a more nuanced version ofpractice theory that engages more closely withquestions of power, history, and culture, and ismore attuned to the exercise of agency and thesocial formation of subjectivity. In particular, theintroduction to the volume makes the case forthe continuing importance of practice theory in

Book reviews 199


anthropological theorizing and sets the scene forits defence against what Ortner describes as theexcesses of poststructuralism andpostmodernism. Her centring of social theory onthe question of the human subject is offered as anecessary antidote to the ‘anti-humanism’ ofpoststructuralism while her qualified yetunwavering faith in anthropological knowledgeforms a critique of the nihilism implicit inthe ‘crisis of representation’ literature ofthe 1980s.

Ortner writes about agency and subjectivitywith eloquence and clarity. Her influencesinclude Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, andWilliam Sewell, Jr, and her analysis issophisticated and interesting. She is very carefulto show the ‘twofold truth’ of agency in termsof being both constituted by and constitutive ofsociety and history. This fits very well with herview of culture as both constraining andenabling of individual social actors. In addition,Ortner manages to avoid a reductivepoliticization of the concept of agency byintroducing the distinction betweenagency-as-cultural-projects andagency-as-power, though it is not often clearwhen and how culture becomes separate frompolitics, and vice versa. Despite all these obviousadvantages, her definition of agency as aproperty that is uniquely human createsintractable problems for ethnographicallycapturing non-Western points of view and doingjustice to them. I also think that it may possiblymisrepresent the anti-Enlightenment stance ofmany (pre- and) poststructuralists who, ratherthan being strict anti-humanists, explorehumanity as an unfixed and non-naturally givencategory.

All in all, this is a highly accessible book thatshould find a home in many people’s libraries(and on several course reading lists), whetherthey belong to professional anthropologists,sociologists, political scientists, or interestedmembers of the public.

Kostas Retsikas School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Parkin, David & Stanley Ulijaszek (eds).Holistic anthropology: emergence andconvergence. xii, 292 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.£42.00 (cloth)

This book, based on the September 2005 OxfordAnthropology Centenary Conference, presents apowerful case for anthropology that provides a

full and whole account of the contemporaryworld, as well as some dilemmas that have beenwith anthropology since at least a century and ahalf after the publication of Darwin’s On theorigin of species. Holistic anthropology is avaluable attempt to engage with someimportant questions that were in recent yearsmostly ignored by social anthropologists,leaving space for some fantastic theoriesbased on sociobiological (or evolutionarypsychological) explanations. This account alsotakes into consideration the need to involveother scholarly disciplines in anthropologicalresearch, which has, according to David Parkin(writing in the introduction), either been lost,or confined to the American-style ‘four-fieldapproach’.

Holistic anthropology brings together tenchapters (plus an introduction) by ten scholars,mostly from Oxford. The University of Oxford isslightly unusual for major British universities, asit traditionally has a strong presence ofbiological (or ‘physical’) anthropology. Thistradition is here powerfully represented by RobinDunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology,as well as by an outstanding contribution by thebook’s co-editor, Stanley Ulijaszek, Professor ofHuman Ecology and Director of the Unit forBiocultural Variation and Obesity. Elizabeth Hsu,a specialist in medical anthropology, presents aninteresting case of using a Foucauldiangenealogical approach in understandinginterpretations of traditional Chinese medicine,while an archaeologist, Chris Gosden, discussesthe role of holism in understanding theemergence of human intelligence. Socialanthropologist Laura Rival shows howdomestication of plants is related to the imagesof society in Amazonia, while her colleague,Laura Peers, presents a case study of BeatriceBlackwood’s research and teaching. HarveyWhitehouse wrote a chapter on the relationshipbetween evolution and history of religion, whileHoward Morphy, from the Australian NationalUniversity, presents a case study of approachesto interpreting Australian Aboriginal paintings. Inperhaps the most exciting contribution to thisbook, Tim Ingold, Professor of SocialAnthropology at Aberdeen, opens someintriguing questions dealing with the (in)abilityof evolutionary approaches to explainmovement, knowledge, and description. Finally,the volume’s editor, David Parkin, Professor ofSocial Anthropology at Oxford, writes aboutcrowds, as they emerge as an object of study,and not just an ‘influential global phenomenon’(p. 254).

Book reviews200


The holistic approach that the authors arguefor is primarily perceived as including biological(or, more precisely, biocultural) perspectives inthe study of humankind. Thus, it is not the questfor the epistemological ‘whole’ (of the kind thatRobert Thornton wrote about in his paper at the‘Writing Culture’ seminar, later published inCultural Anthropology in 1988), but an attempt torefine research methodologies and, by bringingtogether scholars with backgrounds in medicaland biological sciences, try to present aconvincing case for a certain ‘return’ to theintegrated anthropology that, according toParkin (introduction), already existed in the latenineteenth century. For example, in severaldecades of his engagement with variouspseudo-scientific evolutionist authors, Ingold hasalready argued that many of the ‘discoveries’ ofthe alleged biological foundations of humanbehaviour were critically discussed by some ofthe first anthropologists, including the firstProfessor of Anthropology at Oxford, EdwardTylor.

Taken together, the different approaches andcase studies presented in this volume amount toan important and refreshing perspective thatshould counter such pseudo-scientificexplanations, showing how contemporary socialanthropology, with this ‘interdisciplinary turn’,offers explanations that can help us understandthe interplay of culture, society, biology,genetics, and ecology, and leave fancifulsociobiological interpretations to where theybelong – in the realm of scientific folklore andmythmaking.Aleksandar Boškovic Institute of Social Sciences,

Belgrade

Social anthropology

Childs, Geoff. Tibetan diary: from birth todeath and beyond in a Himalayan valley ofNepal. xi, 217 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press,2004. £19.95 (paper)

At once the personal fieldwork diary of ananthropologist, and a diary writ large that tracksthe cycles of a Tibetan community over time,Geoff Childs’s masterful ethnography illuminatesthe concerns and aspirations of Himalayanvillagers as grippingly as it does those of ananthropologist at work. Childs sets out toexplore what happens to ordinary people – not

the erudite lamas, aristocracy, or politicalprotestors who dominate Western images of theTibetan world – in the span between ‘birth todeath and back to birth again’ (p. 4). Hesucceeds admirably, describing in clear, lucidprose how ‘cultural ideals and individualaspirations often collide’ (p. 4) in a contextwhere Buddhist philosophy shapes the form ofindividual and collective decisions, but thepragmatics of subsistence in a harsh Himalayanenvironment provides their content.

Childs draws upon both extensive fieldexperience and knowledge of Tibetan languagetextual sources to paint a methodologically richportrait of life in Nepal’s Nubri valley. Movingseamlessly between the 1700s and the present(with pauses at key historical moments along theway), Childs argues that ‘Nubri society isanything but static’ (p. 36). This seeminglysimple assertion challenges assumptions madeall too often about Tibetan communities inparticular, and so-called ‘small-scale societies’ ingeneral. The author skilfully deploys a range ofethnographic and textual evidence to show thatthere is no moment of rupture at which theresidents of Nubri become part of a globalizedor modern world; rather, he argues that thevalley’s location in a border zone between Nepaland what is now China’s Tibetan AutonomousRegion has always contributed to remarkablycomplex local conceptions of ethnicity andcitizenship, as well as religious identity andmoral orientation.

The structure of the book follows thelife-cycle itself, with chapters on birth,adolescence, marriage, old age, death, andreincarnation interspersed with additionalthematic chapters on Nubri’s geography andhistory, pilgrimage and travel, and the moralityof everyday life. Each chapter begins with aTibetan epigraph, a set of proverbs which takentogether provide insight into the humour andirony with which Tibetans interpret and expresslife’s ups and downs. My favourite is, perhaps,‘Better to drink arak (alcohol) with a heart ofgood intention than to go on pilgrimage with aheart of evil intent’ (p. 74). The deeper meaningof each proverb is illustrated through Childs’snarrative accounts of the life experiences of keycharacters in Nubri’s past and present, such asthe seventeenth-century lamas Pema Döndrupand Pema Wangdu, and Childs’s contemporaryhost in the village, Tashi Döndrup. It is the lattercharacter who becomes our guide through theentire book, as Childs artfully describes hisunfolding understanding of Nubri sociality as awhole through the particulars of his unfolding

Book reviews 201


relationship with Tashi Döndrup. The bookcloses with the sentiment that ‘to know TashiDöndrup is to know how to accept one’smortality with dignity’ (p. 168), and readers willby this time feel that they have also come toknow Tashi Döndrup intimately, as well as thesocial, cultural, religious, and geographicalconditions that shape his worldview.

Along the way, Childs tackles many of thefundamental questions that scholars working inthe Tibetan and Himalayan regions face, andskilfully links these to broader anthropologicalthemes. There is accordingly something ofinterest here for everyone, from first-yearundergraduate students to the mostknowledgeable area and thematic specialists.The author considers how to interpret the gapsbetween belief and practice; explores the extentto which the life-cycle is an individual orcollective experience; addresses genderdisparities in both religious and social life;explains the implications of polyandry forkinship and economics; ponders the role ofviolence in a Buddhist context; considers thetensions between spiritual and social success;and makes an argument for the power ofdemography as a tool for understanding livedreality. The anthropologist’s voice rings clearthroughout, and his arguments never appeardogmatic or theoretically driven, but ratheremerge from the wealth of empirical material athis command.

The fourteen pages of black-and-whitephotographs that appear together after chapter7 could have been more effectively interspersedthroughout the book from the outset, so that wemight have been introduced visually to thecharacters and places one by one as theyappeared in the text. Needless to say, this is aminor critique, since the richly descriptive textmore than stands on its own as an accessible,engaging introduction to everyday life in aBuddhist community in the Himalayas, as well asto the life of an anthropologist.

Sara Shneiderman St Catharine’s College,Cambridge

Daryn, Gil. Encompassing a fractal world: theenergetic female core in myth and everyday life– a few lessons drawn from the NepaleseHimalaya. xx, 295 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr.Oxford, Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2006.£60.00 (cloth)

This is an intricate book dealing with complexsubject matter. Daryn’s monograph is a carefully

worded argument for the application of the‘fractal of matrimonial encompassment’ as a keynotion for making sense of and interpretingHindu culture and society.

Building on Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept offractals, Gell’s roundabout causal pathways, andDaryn’s own fieldwork in the village ofThamghar in central Nepal, the authorinterweaves the fractal concept – ‘a family ofseemingly complex self-similar shapespossessing some highly unusual properties,formed by the reiteration of very simple rules, inwhich the whole and the part are identical in allbut scale’ – into the anthropology of Hinduismand Indology. On this note, pairing carefulethnography with Indological analysis is anotoriously difficult undertaking, and onewhich suffers no fools. A successful scholarmust demonstrate mastery in both disciplines,and Daryn succeeds admirably. While Hindurituals have long been an anthropologicalstaple, he argues, little attention has beenpaid to the ‘nature and principles behindtheir efficacy’.

Set out in nine chapters, Encompassing afractal world commences with a helpfulintroduction to the fractal concept itself. Whileto the reviewer, the image of Russian-doll-likefractals, layers nested with one another, works asa way of seeing or thinking, for ‘Hindus’,according to Daryn, fractals are not simplyimagined but literally constructed. Avoiding areductionist mathematical structuralism, theauthor presents fractality as ‘self-similarity withinan undivided entirety’.

The first chapter lays out the socio-economiclives of Thamgharians, illustrating that justbecause people have to work together, they donot necessarily have to like each other as well;while the second addresses male-femalerelations in the magniloquently titled‘Encompassing the ambivalent female core’. Inthis community in Nepal, the insoluble bondbetween a husband and wife is perceived as‘matrimonial encompassment’, an abstractmental image which has the capacity to becomedensely imbued with meaning which in factembodies the ‘template for the ideal modality ofexistence’. As such, then, matrimonialencompassment should be regarded as aprominent fractalic image dominating thelives of the high-case Hindu community ofThamghar.

The second section of the monographaddresses Hindu ritual and cosmology through adetailed investigation of the inner workings ofThamghar village rituals. In Daryn’s analysis, the

Book reviews202


jagya, a sacred microcosmic arena and a ritualperformance which is enacted within it, realizesa ‘cosmic fractal embodying the notion ofmatrimonial encompassment, ... the ultimateThamgharian modus operandi for procreating lifeout of life without the need of recourse to and inorder to avoid death’. The dramatic fire worship,hom, is the climax of the jagya and epitomizes itssignificance. Divine matrimonial encompassmentthus emerges as the process by which theuniverse of the jagya comes into being, withan ‘intimate notional conflation of marriage,sexual relations, gestation and rebirth’ at itsheart.

In the final section of the book, underwrittenby a precise depiction of the agricultural cycle,Daryn illustrates how the ‘prolonged andcomplex rice-cultivation cycle’ emerges as the‘ultimate path villagers follow for rectifying theiremotional landscape and social reality, in whatappears as an annual regeneration of the entirecommunity’. Tying this all together, the fractalicimage reflects the manner in which thecommunity of Thamghar conceive of their wholecosmos: from the tiniest grain of rice, throughthe family unit of husband and wife, to thehouse(hold) and agricultural rituals. The fractalmedium has become the message, and thefractal message the medium.

Encompassing a fractal world isethnographically rich (drawing on differenttechniques such as fieldnotes, personalreflections, and a number of well-chosengreyscale photographs) and analytically precise(excellent and consistent transcription of localterms, augmented by a glossary). Whilefieldwork was challenging, with the villageatmosphere characterized by ‘mutual animosity,suspicion, fundamental mistrust and anxiety’,the author studiously resists generalizations,describing fieldwork as rather like ‘participatingin a mystery play whose true plot revealed itselfonly at a later stage of the drama’. Unlike somuch contemporary anthropology, where theresearcher has neither the time nor patience toallow the ethnography to lead them, Darynallowed his appreciation of fractals as anorganizing concept for social life to emerge fromthe richness of his material.

One of the author’s bolder assertions liesburied in a footnote: not only is fractality thebasis for ritual efficacy in the Hindu world, but itmay hold the key for understanding ritualefficacy elsewhere also. Perhaps others will beencouraged to re-analyse their own work in thislight.

Mark Turin University of Cambridge

Garoutte, Claire & Anneke Wambaugh.Crossing the water: a photographic path to theAfro-Cuban spirit world. xiii, 258 pp., plates,bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.Press, 2007. £58.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper)

Crossing the water is not simply a ‘photographicpath to the Afro-Cuban spirit world’, as thebook’s subtitle and evocative cover wouldsuggest. It is an engaging and valuableethnography in its own right, one that goessurprisingly far in its contribution to the field ofAfro-Cuban religious studies. Written in sensitiveand unpretentiously clear prose, the authors areastute observers of the social, emotional, andspiritual nuances of Cuban religious life, makingof their foray a potential source of rich data forany scholar wishing to unravel the complexrelationships between Afro-Cuban cosmologyand practice, matter and deity, person and spirit.Taking as their axiomatic subject of study thefigure of Santiago Castañeda Vera – acharismatic priest of Palo Monte and Santería, aswell as a gifted spirit medium in the city ofSantiago de Cuba – whose influence in thefabric of their own spiritual lives theyacknowledge, the authors tell a story: of anaccidental encounter between two foreignphotographers and the man who was tobecome their religious godfather; of theirgrowing involvement with Santiago and hisextended ritual family; of solidarity and spiritualresponsibility; and of a collaboration ofanthropological vision and photographic talent.The result is a remarkable journey, both recordedvisually – through photographs of alternatelystunning subtlety and provocative viscerality –and carefully crafted in the details of theirdescriptions.

The book is divided into four main chapters,preceded by an introductory chapter, andfollowed by a brief afterword. In the‘Introduction’ the authors set out to provide ageneral ethnographic backdrop to Afro-Cubancosmology and ritual structure, to the history ofthe various Cuban ‘spiritscapes’ (p. 17), and toSantiago himself, whose religious career beganas early as the age of 8: as he says, ‘naci dentrode eso’ (‘I was born into this’, p. 19). Underliningthe fluidity and permeability of the Afro-Cubanritual cosmos, Garoutte and Wambaugh conveySantiago’s sense of duty and service to others(‘tengo un pueblo que atender’, he often says: ‘Ihave a community to take care of’, p. 9), as wellas the idiosyncrasies so peculiar to Afro-Cubanreligious spaces: ‘Santiago practices his religion,as he is wont to say, en mi manera (in my own

Book reviews 203


way)’ (p. 9). They also explicitly reflect on theirown place in such activities and in the lives oftheir friends and religious kin, whereparticipation is paramount, and often inevitable:‘The spirits do not differentiate between Cubansand foreigners, practitioners andnonpractitioners, or for that matter, believersand nonbelievers. To be present during a ritual isto actively participate; face to face with anoricha, a Palo mpungo, or a Congo spirit of thedead, you engage with that spirit’ (pp. 8-9). Theauthors’ research ethos works especially well inthe main chapters, where they navigate througha world of elaborate thrones, dolls, altars,recipients for the dead, and sacrificial offerings,weaving their accounts of Santería, Palo Monte,and Espiritismo, respectively, with bothtantalizing detail and anecdotal humour.

In Chapter 1, ‘I bow my head to the ground’,concerned primarily with Santería, Garoutte andWambaugh explore Santiago’s consecration tothe orichas, the gods of Cuba’s West AfricanYoruba legacy, to whom he dedicates a greatportion of his emotional and ritual effort. A childof the motherly Yemayá, an oricha associatedwith the sea, Santiago’s relationship to his‘guardian angel’ – Yemayá Okute (one of heravatars) – is perceptively analysed by the authorsas multi-faceted and ongoing: while her materialbody lies in an earthenware pot, ‘Santiagosustains Yemayá both physically and spiritually’(p. 31), an interpenetration most evident in suchmoments as Santiago’s striking birthday-in-saint(cumpleaños) celebrations. In chapter 2, ‘Ver paracreer (Seeing is believing)’, the authors delve intoan entirely other realm of spirit geography,depicting Santiago’s role as Tata Nganga, priestof Palo Monte, an Afro-Cuban religious practiceassociated with the arrival of the Bantu-speakingslaves to Cuba. Here, the dead are paramount,and with them, the healing power of nature.Garoutte and Wambaugh deftly lead us throughtales of procuring animals and other substancesfor offerings, possession rituals, and spiritconfrontations, as well as advice and cleansingsessions. In chapter 3, ‘It’s my war now’,Santiago’s protagonism as healer and protectorof his people comes to the fore, where socialand physical health are catalysts for action andunderstanding, embedded in the politics ofseeing through everyday life in Cuba. Finally, thefourth and last chapter, ‘I am not from here’,reminds us that the spirits of the deceased andother protective beings lie at the heart of allAfro-Cuban religious work. Garoutte andWambaugh’s description of a misa espiritual, aritual mass for the dead, their attention to the

importance of song, tempo, intent, and mood inthe unfolding of this collective rite of evocation,is especially convincing. Here Espiritismo isthoroughly Cuban, ‘crossed’ (p. 161), despite itsEuropean influences: from the appearance ofCongo and Haitian spirits to the Palo dead,Santiago’s spiritism functions as both aneconomy of ‘light’ giving and a means ofattaining crucial vision over earthly affairs.

The strength of this book is undoubtedlyaesthetic. The authors’ textual and photographiclayouts are stunning. But they have not achievedthis at the expense of ethnographic insight. Tothe contrary, they have produced a rare balancebetween the two, where text and image arenecessary voices in a rather engrossingconversation.

Diana Espirito Santo University of Lisbon

Glaskin, Katie, Myrna Tonkinson,Yasmine Musharbash & Victoria

Burbank (eds). Mortality, mourning andmortuary practices in indigenous Australia. xxi,237 pp., map, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Farnham,Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. £55.00 (cloth)

This book examines the ways in which death anddying have become part of the everydayexperience of Australia’s indigenous people.Despite living in a wealthy nation, indigenousAustralians suffer from significantly high rates ofmorbidity and mortality. Reflecting uponexperiences of Aboriginal and Torres StraitIslander peoples in post-settler society, thecontributors seek to understand the ways inwhich people live and deal with the regularityand frequency of death. The eleven chaptersfocus on mortuary practices and expressions ofgrief to contextualize the meanings andexperiences of contemporary indigenouspeoples. While the authors employ a variety ofapproaches to understanding the material, I willhighlight three themes that pervade the book.

Throughout the collection, the authorsdemonstrate the ways in which funerals andother collective expressions of loss reflect andcement social ties between individuals, families,and communities. For example, describing acontemporary Kimberley funeral service,Redmond (chap. 4) analyses the way in whichnotions of personhood are constituted throughthe temporal and social separations thatstructure mourning and mortuary practices.Macdonald (chap. 7), recounting the experienceof being entreated by a Wiradjuri woman toattend her funeral, argues that death is one way

Book reviews204


through which Aboriginal people strengthensocial relationships between one another as wellas reaffirm ties to land. Davis (chap. 10) notesthat tombstones in the Torres Strait embodynarratives that reinforce the importance of familyrelationships though totemic iconography aswell as reflect notions of family, religion, andidentity. Focusing on conflict surroundingmourning behaviour, Babidge (chap. 8) exploresaccusations of disrespect, when business can beperceived to take precedence over the ‘businessof death’. She asserts that notions of respectillustrate the processes which structure andreconstitute the social relationships of family.Smith (chap. 11) examines the phenomenon ofhaunting, arguing that the logic of ghosts allowsfor social possibility.

Another important theme presentthroughout many of the chapters in the book isthe way in which funerals and mourningactivities allow indigenous Australians to asserttheir own agency in an environment that isoften dominated by non-Aboriginal people.Through an analysis of funeral rituals, Tonkinson(chap. 2) explores the way in which Martupeople are able to exert autonomy and controlover their time and financial resources. Sheasserts that although funerals take an emotionaltoll on the participants, they also simultaneouslyaffirm the importance of the individual, family,and cultural ties. Focusing on the griefexperienced by a prison inmate who was unableto attend a funeral, McCoy (chap. 3) recountsthe ways in which being ‘sorry’ expresses thepersonal, social, and post-mission/colonialenvironment of contemporary AboriginalAustralians in the Kimberley. Barber (chap. 9)examines the mobility and death of elderlyindigenous people in a Yolngu homeland.Homelands, he argues, can be defined bydeath, as these settlements were established,in part, as a place for older people to both liveand die.

Thirdly, the authors focus on the inequality ofgrief and the impact that high rates of mortalityhave on indigenous people, communities, andthe anthropologists who live and work withthese individuals. Musharbash (chap. 1) exploresthe way in which mortuary rituals are not simplyinstitutionalized action but a real expression ofpublic grief. Illustrating how ‘sorry business’ hascome to epitomize Aboriginal experience inYuendumu, she argues that the high rate ofdeath has a profound effect on the community.Recounting the death of a friend, Glaskin(chap. 5) poignantly situates her ownrelationships with Aboriginal people, while

demonstrating the ways in which the effects ofconstant loss within a family or community arecumulative. Elliott (chap. 6) examinesdisenfranchised grief through the loss caused bythe removal of Aboriginal children from theircommunities. He argues that loss is not onlystructured by physical death but also by a lack ofmemory, as demonstrated by the grief expressedwhen a member of the ‘Stolen Generations’returned to Utopia after a thirty-five-yearabsence.

This book is a valuable contribution toanthropological understandings of indigenousexperience in Australia. The chapters are wellexecuted and draw from a diverse range ofethnographic evidence across the continent.Furthermore, the authors expertly tease outimportant theoretical insights regarding death,grief, and mortuary practices. Consequently, thisbook should be of interest not only to scholarsof indigenous Australia but also to anyone whohas an interest in the ways in which mortality,mourning, and funerals are situated within socialand cultural contexts.

Eirik Saethre University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Khosravi, Shahram. Young and defiant inTehran. ix, 224 pp., tables, bibliogr.Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2008.£29.50 (cloth)

Young and defiant in Tehran is a captivating bookabout the so-called ‘Third Generation’ in Iran,born after the 1979 revolution. Based in theupper-middle-class neighbourhood of Tehran,Shahrak-e Gharb, Shahram Khosravi has done athorough ethnographic study of the ways inwhich Shahraki youth resist the Islamic regime,and how they perceive what it means to be‘modern’. On the one hand, the book is an‘ethnography of suffering and anguish’ (p. 16);on the other, it is a detailed depiction of theways in which ‘modernity’ is framed, throughconsumption, self-assertion, and transnationalconnections.

The first two chapters outline how the Islamicsocial order has been put in place after therevolution, and how, in effect, the ‘machinery ofsurveillance’ (p. 169) has served as a‘criminalization of youth culture’ (p. 22).Khosravi recounts – in a moving, but factualvoice – his own personal experience of beingpunished by lashes for buying illicit alcohol in1984, and he aptly shows how the patriarchyand the ‘pastoral power’ of the state has beenenforced; and how the public sphere has been

Book reviews 205


sexualized through imposed veiling andsubmitted to the moralized, official ‘politics ofgrief’ (p. 48).

The next four chapters depict the youthculture of Shahrak-e Gharb in north Tehran. It isa ‘different world’, a ‘resort for the elite’, a sitefor ‘relative freedom’ and widespread discontent(pp. 57, 87), but it is also a ‘state of mind’ and alifestyle (p. 63), termed progressive, urban, andmodern, which young people from the lessaffluent south Tehran also strive to obtain bypaying daily visits. Golestan, the famousshopping mall in the neighbourhood, is seen asa ‘passage to modernity’, a place for performingsubjectivity and resistance. What the youngpeople consume in Golestan are mainly theaspirations and imaginations of being modern.

Khosravi has written a balanced and nuancedbook, revealing the sentiments of this ‘burnedgeneration’ (‘nasl-e sokhte’, p. 8), which is ‘lostbetween tradition and modernity’ (p. 163). Bydrawing comparisons with the hegemonicpowers of Stalinism and the Soviet Union,Khosravi avoids the stereotypical pitfall ofblaming Islam for all the wrongdoings of theregime, and he clearly stresses that the youth isas much opposed to the parental generation asit is to the state. Showing how consumerism isnot just a ‘global dictatorship of capitalism’(p. 92), but how it also serves as a major vehiclefor identity-making, as well as for the youths’longing for the West, is original and interesting.Likewise, Khosravi’s analysis of cultural classdistinctions, merging with dichotomies ofmodernity and tradition, adds important aspectsto urban anthropology in Iran.

However, the focus on defiance is also arestricting one. By solely mapping the youth’sendeavours as defiance, other kinds of agencydisappear from view, and although theimposition of the revolutionary social order ishistoricized, the Iranian state is presented asutterly monolithic and unchanging. Thepresidential elections of Khatami in 1997 andAhmadinejad in 2005 are mentioned, but nomajor distinctions are made between Iran of the1980s, 1990s, and now. Khosravi may believethat there are no significant differences (a pointwhich should have be emphasized then), or hemay be (too) loyally siding with his informants,reflecting their dismissive attitude towards thestate (i.e. politics does not matter; the clergy areall the same). But by conflating emic and eticviewpoints, we are left empty-handed inunderstanding where this upper-middle-classgroup of people fit into Iran’s greater politicaland social landscape. We get no clue as to how

President Ahmadinejad could ever be elected.And Khosravi’s focus on the ‘politics of grief’and ‘culture of weeping’ (pp. 48, 53) leaves usno indications of the hope and politicalaspirations following President Khatami’selection, which at least for a few years(coinciding with his fieldwork) made a largenumber of young people all over the countryoptimistically engage in student politics, youthorganizations, and a less restricted media.

By providing an ‘alternative’, anti-statenarrative of Tehranian youth, Shahrak-e Gharbhas become a preferred place for the Westernmedia (pp. 68, 116). Compared to thesesensationalist journalistic reports, Khosravi’sgenuine ethnographic work and illustrative,sound writing style provides a far more compleximage of Tehran’s youth culture, butinadvertently he supports the sameexceptionalist agenda. Further comparisons withthe countryside and lower social classes wouldhave benefited the analysis of these youngsters’worldview.

Janne Bjerre Christensen Roskilde University

Rack, Mary. Ethnic distinctions, local meanings:negotiating cultural identities in China. vi, 166

pp., bibliogr. London, Ann Arbor, Mich.:Pluto Press, 2005. £16.99 (paper)

This book records one of those ethnographicexperiences in which the researcher, frustrated inher original plans, discovers that these were afterall based on a misconception of the targetsociety. On her arrival in 1995 in the West HunanAutonomous Prefecture, Mary Rack hoped tostudy the Kho Xiong-speaking Miao in thehighland areas, but learned that they wereofficially out of bounds to ethnographicresearch. Instead she was obliged to work nearthe main administrative town and university atJishou.

Among locals she soon learned that thesense of common local belonging matteredmore than ethnic identity. Other forms ofidentification seemed more significant, forexample the sense of a regional moralcommunity. Local inhabitants did not speak ofethnic distinctions as much as of the differencesbetween indigenous people and incomers fromother parts of lowland China. The locals wereunified by a common culture that drew oncenturies of minority influences. For peoplemarginalized by recent economic change, theidea of the local was expressed in the revitalizedcult of the Celestial Kings, which figures in two

Book reviews206


of Rack’s most interesting chapters. Officialsresisted many attempts to rebuild the cult’stemple, but finally commercialized the rebuilttemple as a cultural relic, encircling it with awall. Locals resented the wall and the crasscommercialization, but participated in officialfestivals organized as national celebrations,using them as opportunities to contactspiritual powers accessible through mediums.In such rituals and the explanations concerningthem, local interests and sensibilities arejuxtaposed to the externally based authority ofofficialdom.

As for the concept of Miao as a clearlydefined ethnic group, it was fostered in the1980s and 1990s by elite groups, whether Miao,Han, or overseas. Elites mark the Miao as exotic,a notion underlying the tourist industry andencouraged by it. For Han Chinese, ‘Miao’identity reassuringly fits the concept of a unifiedHan culture, which is in fact exceedinglyheterogeneous. Miao identity, attached to themountain peoples of West Hunan andelsewhere, also becomes part of the politicalagenda of the international Hmong diasporafrom Laos and Vietnam, despite markeddifferences in language and history. At JishouUniversity, Rack explores the use of Miao as asign: the imagining of exotic Miao fosters asense of superiority over mountain culture, andthe imitation of what is supposed to be Miaodancing offers an approved sensual experiencefor habitually restrained Han Chinese students.Here Rack’s conclusions are similar to those ofTim Oakes and Louisa Schein in other provinces,except that she does not find that the minoritygroup necessarily benefits from its ownself-displays by reframing its own sense ofidentity (pp. 65-6).

Rack extends her argument to the field ofethnic studies in general, suggesting that thecommon scholarly research focus on minorityidentity may have more to do with identitypolitics in liberal democratic countries than withthe situation on the ground. She cites recentscholarship in a variety of contexts to argueagainst the notion of permanent and boundedethnic categories. She goes on to questionwhether ethnic groups are useful categories andwhether they should be the focus of researchat all.

This last argument seems to go too far andrisks a different kind of reductionism. It is widelyaccepted that ethnic (like national) identity canbe invented; surely then it can also be forgotten.Locals may remember the great revolt of the lateeighteenth century as a common trial, but

ethnic difference then must have been moresharply felt. Rack’s historical discussion is theweakest part of her book, mixing evidence fromdifferent periods and from neighbouringGuizhou province. Even West Hunan is highlydiverse across its three Miao counties. Rack’sfocus on the present-day prefectural capital ofJishou, in the best integrated of the threecounties, naturally revealed a greater sense ofcommon identity. Closer attention to the oldgarrison centre of Fenghuang or in thepredominantly Miao highlands would likelyhave uncovered a sharper sense of ethnicdifference.

Despite these cautions, and even though thereferences selected from comparative literaturesometimes overcome the ethnographic detail orare open to different interpretation (the case ofSerbs and Croats, for example), this readerfound the argument about ethnic and regionalidentities stimulating. Above all, Rack’s book is avaluable case study of the revival of local religionunder the Chinese Communist Party since 1979,especially on accompanying official/localtensions and the uses of national minorities.

Donald S. Sutton Carnegie Mellon University

Strecker, Ivo & Jean Lydall (eds). The perilsof face: essays on cultural contact, respect andself-esteem in southern Ethiopia. x, 417 pp.,map, bibliogrs. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006.€29.90 (paper)

Southern Ethiopia has long been ananthropological curiosity – a ‘museum ofpeoples’, in the Italian phrase. Its recentemergence as the likely home of our earliestancestors has only added to the region’s aura of‘remoteness’. The present collection is thereforewelcome, not only as a significant addition tothe ethnography of a ‘little known’ area, butalso, and especially, because it gives localpeople, their experiences and memories, centrestage. As Ivo Strecker explains, the project stemsfrom work at the South Omo Research Centre,which he and Jean Lydall have promoted forseveral years with support from Addis AbabaUniversity, the German government, and theJohannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Whilegrowing from the older German ethnographictradition, the Centre aims to highlighttranscultural contact and communication amongthe peoples of southern Ethiopia.Anthropologists, it is suggested, can join localefforts by these peoples themselves to debatetheir differences, adapt, and find friendship

Book reviews 207


where formerly there might have beenanimosity.

In highlighting the more personal aspects of‘culture contact’, ‘self-esteem’, and so on, theeditors have found inspiration in Americancultural anthropology, from Ruth Benedictthrough Goffman to Stephen Tyler. Thus Streckerfirst explores variants of ‘face’, arguablytranslatable, as between stratified and egalitariansocieties. His detailed portrayal of pride in thehistory of South Omo draws on Hamar accounts,both first- and second-hand memories, includingthe Amhara conquest. Several other chaptersfocus on history, though in different ways. FelixGirke offers a long analysis of early literature as itrecords ‘First Contact’ with the Dassenatch andArbore (Hor); but his attention is almostexclusively on the explorers rather than thelocals, and it is not made clear that the peoplesof southern Ethiopia had experience of‘outsiders’ long before the arrival of Europeanexpeditions. One might question the concept of‘First Contact’ anyway – at least for inner Africa,as against some Pacific island. Yukio Miyawakiand Taddesse Berisso do focus on localmemories of past conquest, whether by Amharaor the Italians, as the setting for their discussionsof ‘pride’ and self-esteem among the Hor andthe Guji-Oromo. Wolde Gossa Tadesse’s chapteron the Hor and Gamo emphasizes, as of coursethe older ethnographic accounts of specificgroups did not, the robust and often quiteancient patterns of social and economicexchange across wide areas of southern Ethiopia.The rooted quality of such interactions ispoignantly highlighted in Echi ChristinaGabbert’s study of ‘musical paths’ across theArbore valley between mountains to the eastand to the west; and the current potential forre-creating social ties is put in sharp relief byAlula Pankhurst in his eye-witness account of athree-day peace ceremony in Arbore in 1993.

While most contributions focus on individualnarratives or cultural analysis, Jon Abbink’s

chapter analyses the changing field ofsocio-political relations within and between twogroups – the largely pastoral Suri, now movinginto Dizi land. He traces the way that the ‘moralimagination’ of these groups vis-à-vis each otherhas shifted over time as former reciprocities havebeen cut off, boundaries have been drawn, andgovernment policy has changed. Abbink alsoprovides a warning about taking the languageof, for example, self-esteem too much at its ownevaluation; there are dramatic and violentpractices too. A language of prestige, which oncerelated to killing with spears and knives, doesnot easily rise to the advent of guns, especiallythe influx of automatic weapons in this regionsince the mid-1980s.

Jean Lydall takes the opportunity to discussthe background to much of what she hasrepresented visually in the Hamar films,especially Duka’s dilemma. A Hamar woman’s‘pained heart’ has to be balanced againsthurting the self-esteem or ‘imperilled name’ ofher husband. Two other thoughtful essaysfollow, by Susan Epple on the ambivalences ofself-esteem among Bashada widows, and byShauna La Tosky reflecting on the ‘lip-plates’ ofMursi women (famous now from David Turton’sfilms, the Mursi web-site, and Ethiopian tourism)as a source both of stigma and of self-esteem.

The book opens with three ‘theoretical’chapters: Anna-Maria Brandstetter on anoverview of ‘the study of cultural contact’, BayeYimam on the formation of personal names, andChristian Meyer on kinship ‘across culturaldivides’. Baye Yimam’s chapter also offers asubstantial, original study comparing Oromoand Amhara names in linguistic and socialcontext. The strengths of this collection,nevertheless, undoubtedly lie in the case studies,which in themselves are often of a qualitydeserving recognition well outside Ethiopianstudies.

Wendy James University of Oxford

Book reviews208


The anthropology of childhood: cherubs, chattel, changelings - By Lancy, David F

Documents

Transcript of The anthropology of childhood: cherubs, chattel, changelings - By Lancy, David F