The curse of Nemur: in search of the art, myth, and ritual of the Ishir - By Escobar, Ticio

Book Reviews

The Curse of Nemur: In Search of the Art, Myth, and Rit-ual of the Ishir. Tigio Escobar. Pittsburgh: University ofPittsburgh Press, 2007. 302 pp., illustrations, maps, photos,index.

FRANCI WASHBURNUniversity of Arizona

NANCY J. PAREZOUniversity of Arizona

As founder and former director of the Museo del Barrio inAsuncion, Paraguay, Tigio Escobar is uniquely qualified towrite The Curse of Nemur, which offers insights into the nar-rative myths and art of the Ishir, a small, indigenous cultureliving within Paraguay’s Great Chaco plain. Working withthis group since 1986, Escobar states that he wrote the bookbecause he was “driven by the interest to understand a dis-quieting culture and to support their demands for land andfreedom of worship” (p. 6). His goal was to find the culture’scenter as well as its inherent heterogeneity without fallinginto the traps of romanticized primitivism or positing Ishirculture as a model for or an example of a theoretical con-struct. There are no conclusions in this book, only creativepossibilities.

Escobar’s way of understanding the Ishtar is not towrite an ethnography of their lifeways or to produce an eth-nohistorical study of their reactions and adaptations to in-vasion, colonialism, modernity, and capitalism but, rather,to understand how aesthetic sensibilities manifest them-selves in three cultural dimensions—art, myth, and ritual—as an integrated, multivoiced but blurry, dynamic system.He approaches his task through the lens of art criticism andits emphasis on multiple readings and by focusing on artis-tic acts not “in terms of an integrated event, explainable inand of itself, but insofar as it intersects with other kinds ofacts and doings, lighting their way every so briefly” (p. 1).He accomplishes this goal by approaching each dimensionfrom three angles (religion, shamanistic magic, and history)and by circling around and around concepts, intersecting,pulling back, and reintersecting worldview and philosophyabout power, sacredness, and beauty. In the process he of-fers raw data (field notes and observations), his place in the

narrative, Native voices, and periodic interpretations anddigressions.

As is common in indigenous studies, Escobar ap-proaches the Ishir by assuming that Indigenous people are“great artists and poets, creators of worldviews, inventorsof alternative ways and feelings and thinking in this world”(p. 4), and that this cultural aesthetic is what helps them sur-vive with dignity and healing in a world of incursions. Heuses a foundational text, which he calls the “Great Myth,”to explain the origins of the world, morality, epistemology,and all aspects of culture and behavior from the Ishir pointof view. But he does not treat this as a monolithic, stabletext. Escobar details dual versions of the Ishir creation storyalong with related myths, and how that cosmology shapesthe art, aesthetics, and day-to-day lives of the Ishir. Peri-odically, Escobar presents theoretical notes, commentaries,and interpretive sections to help the reader’s cross-culturalunderstanding.

The Curse of Nemur also includes related contextual-izing and operationalizing material about the struggles ofthe Ishir to survive in the modern world and their expe-riences with Euro-Western influences that did not alwayshave the best interests of the Ishir in mind. An example ofthe way myth and cosmology influence cultural practices,cultural interpretations, and adaptation is evident in themultiple meanings of color and design that the Ishir attachto feathers, body painting, and clothing worn in both theirdaily life and in their ceremonial practices. As an exampleof the latter, Escobar analyzes the Ishir’s experiences withEuro-Western influences, including information about thenecessity for them to earn their living by working for log-ging companies that are in the process of destroying boththe cultural and geographic landscape of the Ishir. The bookdoes not present a marginalized people grasping onto thelast vestiges of a way of life, but it underlines the value ofindigenous culture as “not only a site of dispossession andmarginality but also as a place of creativity and ethnic self-affirmation” (p. 4).

Escobar’s purposeful organization style can be discon-certing at first. Those who choose to read this book wouldbe best served to avoid reading the foreword by MichaelTaussig until the reader has progressed at least halfwaythrough the book. While Taussig’s foreword does provideinsights into the work and encourages readers to explore

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 591–613, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C© 2009 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01181.x

American Ethnologist � Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009

the material, his description of the book as “post-modern”(p. xi) may, in fact, discourage readers who may expect afractured narrative, delay of meaning, and closure that re-quires them to construct their own understanding of thetext. While the book’s organizational style may not fit es-tablished forms of ethnographic writing, it is not postmod-ern; it is clearly understandable, once one gets accustomedto the style, and, perhaps, more so because Escobar in-cludes field notes rather than simply drawing his narrativefrom them, and personal anecdotes about his respondents,the author’s personal reactions to their statements, and awealth of other information, interspersed with interpreta-tion. The reader here is treated to a look at how an ethno-grapher progresses through his work, how she or he comesto understand the material available, and how that materialthen shapes the ethnographer’s future readings and conclu-sions about that material. This is not a postmodern workbut, rather, a text that uses what Escobar calls a wander-ing style of ethnographic writing “around an elusive themeattempting multiple, lateral, occasionally intersecting, andgenerally unsystematic approaches” (p. 261), which, in thiscase, enhances understanding rather than limits it.

While this book will be of general interest to most read-ers who are fascinated with religion, art, aesthetics, andcultural meaning, it will be of specific interest for thosereaders who are concerned about the cultures and fatesof Central and South American Indigenous groups whoface rapid change and must of necessity adapt to thisrapidly changing world in which they find themselves.

Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin AmericanEvangelicalism. David Smilde. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2007. 262 pp.

ELIZABETH BRUSCOPacific Lutheran University

Permissible questions in the study of evangelicals in LatinAmerica have shifted significantly since the movement firststarted gaining scholarly attention in the late 1960s. Earlyon, scholars were primarily concerned about the impli-cations of an imported religious movement for the trans-formation of Latin American societies. Analysis was oftenframed within a discourse about Western imperialism, andconverts themselves were suspected of false consciousness.Since then, greater attention has been given to the particu-larities of context as well as to the interpretations of evan-gelicals themselves, with a resulting deeper understandingof the movement. As variable as, for example, the politi-

cal implications of evangelicalism can be in different LatinAmerican settings (see, e.g., David Stoll’s groundbreaking1990 book Is Latin America Turning Protestant?), there havebeen a number of undeniable consistencies throughout theregion, especially in terms of the outcomes of evangelicalconversion for women, the family, and the creation of alter-native masculine roles and identities.

Smilde’s book, based on participant-observation andlife history interviews, deals with the experiences of menfrom Venezuela’s popular sectors within the years lead-ing up to the Chavez administration. He tackles the vexingquestion: If conversion to evangelicalism in Latin Americais so effective in solving people’s problems, why doesn’t ev-eryone convert?

In a compelling review of theoretical literature, Smildelays the basis for viewing evangelicalism as a form of “imag-inative rationality.” In this approach, he is attempting tobridge the gap between interpretations of conversion fo-cused solely on individual strategy and those based exclu-sively on meaning and symbolism.

Smilde carefully documents and analyzes how his in-formants use evangelical thinking to conceptualize what hecalls akrasia—a “weakness of will” underlying drug and al-cohol addiction, or problems with gambling. Other trou-bles plague Caraquenos of the popular classes—street vio-lence, the culebra (vendetta attacks), economic insecurity,emotional and health issues, and difficulties in marital andother relationships, and Smilde shows how the men he in-terviewed make sense of these issues within an evangelicalparadigm. Smilde, like many other observers of the move-ment, has documented that conversion can result in self-reform. But, for him, this conclusion leads to a second ques-tion: If the convert decides to believe (for pragmatic pur-poses), doesn’t that erode the external validity of the beliefsystem and, ultimately, the efficacy of belief to achieve theseends? Smilde offers a philosophical discussion of the natureof belief itself, drawing on the work of Jon Elster and histo-rian of religion Jonathon Smith, among others. He skillfullyand systematically uses interview and testimony data to in-form his argument and illustrate how memories of conver-sion emphasize God’s role and deemphasize the role of theconvert himself.

In a similar vein, Smilde’s meticulous attention to thewords of his informants allows him to see that issues ofself and the family are not deemed (by Venezuelan evan-gelicals) to exist outside of the realm of spirituality. Thus,projects of personal transformation that focus on them arenot construed as “instrumental” within this conceptual sys-tem. The same cannot be said for business success and theprosperity gospel.

The section of the book on “relational imagination”shifts to a consideration of how the imaginative reality thatis Venezuelan evangelicalism is limited and framed by the

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Book Reviews � American Ethnologist

individual’s particular network location. This goes a longway toward explaining the question, “Why doesn’t everyoneconvert?” Smilde starts from the point of view that not allmeanings are available to all people, or, put another way,“not all culture is available in all contexts” (p. 153). A man’sposition within a social network, in particular his family,will certainly influence choices he may make about conver-sion in either direction. A man whose primary safety netis a nonevangelical family is not going to have the samefreedom of choice or inclinations toward change as a manwho is, as network analysts would put it, structurally avail-able. Smilde’s discussion of “modeling” and “ecological in-fluence” provides an important contribution regarding howindirect influences can affect the way the conversion pro-cess works.

Smilde applies the insights of feminist theorists, espe-cially Dorothy Smith and Carol Gilligan, to help understandthe reasoning of the men who participated in his study.He concludes that his informants don’t exhibit “hierarchi-cal reasoning” when thinking through problems but, rather,“relational reasoning,” in which impact on concrete otherstrumps abstract principles. For marginal men in Venezuela(and probably elsewhere), social networks are key to sur-vival, and, hence, it can be said that they think, at least inthis one respect, like women.

Smilde’s focus on religious conversion as a process orproject, rather than simply on the convert before and afteran event, is valuable. He well understands the importanceof “flat-footed, empirical research in particular historicalcontexts” (p. 220) and describes his meticulous methodol-ogy in two appendices. He carefully selected a sample of 84evangelical and nonevangelical men, focusing his researchon two different churches in Caracas. As a male researcher,Smilde found it was not possible to conduct one-on-onein-depth interviews “behind closed doors” with female in-formants, and so his conclusions pertain to male evangel-icals, although in a few places he extends them to womenby inference. Smilde diligently used tape recording in his re-search and includes verbatim transcripts in the text, not justof interviews but also of interchanges he witnessed duringparticipant-observation. These are fascinating and result ina much deeper appreciation for the religious worldview andexplanations of his informants.

This book is one of the best to be published on thetopic in the past several years. If it has a shortcoming, it isthe scant attention paid to the unique characteristics of ec-static worship that define this movement. Smilde’s evangel-ical informants are, as is common in Latin American, Pen-tecostals. As Smilde deftly illustrates, converts have theirreasons to believe. But the extraordinary transcendence inPentecostal worship provides an impetus of its own thatinfuses and ignites the conceptual system represented inthe words of testimonies and interviews and should not beoverlooked.

Reference cited

Stoll, David1990 Is Latin America Turning Protestant? Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Li Zhang and Ai-hwa Ong, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.viii + 282 pp.

YICHING WUUniversity of Michigan

The study of privatization and neoliberalism has becomeincreasingly more visible in anthropology and elsewhere.Growing out of a similarly titled workshop held in Shanghaiin 2004, Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong’s edited volume is a highlyvaluable contribution to this burgeoning field. This impres-sive volume brings together 13 solidly researched and com-petently written chapters to provide a fascinating presen-tation of the complex and contradictory processes of theproduction of social space and formation of power relationsin postsocialist China.

The questions posed in this collection are intriguing:How do pursuit of private initiatives, expressions, and livescoexist with political limits and state coercion? How areneoliberal principles—manifested in private accumulation,self-interest, and self-making—both reined in and enabledby the state-socialist logic of control? And, how can freemarkets, private property, and private pursuits flourish ina state-socialist configuration? In their editorial introduc-tion, Ong and Zhang argue that the major paradox in rela-tion to contemporary China is that private freedom can in-deed coexist with authoritarian state power. In arguing that,they challenge the disembodied liberal conception of civilsociety, which assumes that market liberalization wouldinevitably challenge the state. Instead, the book seeks todemonstrate how privatizing needs, desires, and practicescan articulate with authoritarian rule, and how the stateand the private sphere, government, and individuals maybe “engaged in the co-production of practices, values, andsolutions that usually do not have a liberal democraticoutcome” (p. 10).

The book consists of 13 contributions by scholars fromseveral disciplines—such as anthropology, geography, ur-ban planning, political science, economics, each explor-ing the issues relating to market, economy, politics, andculture from a unique disciplinary and methodologicalperspective. These studies show how the state is intimatelyinvolved in the making of the new subjects through de-veloping capacities of self-government, self-improvement,

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and self-expression. These new subjects, in the apt wordsof Ralph Litzinger in the afterword, “are at once private andpublic, at once of the state and of society, at once subjectedto the histories of the socialist present (socialism from afar)and to the neoliberal logic that the energies of the individ-ual can be productively developed only through the pursuitof economic self-interest in a free market” (p. 233).

The chapters appear in two parts. The six chapters inpart 1, titled “Powers of Property,” explore the ways in whichownership and control over property, land, business, and la-bor power are involved in the production of new forms ofsocial differentiations and inequalities. These chapters ex-amine the exclusionary practices and destruction of pub-lic spaces in upscale urban neighborhoods (Zhang); the or-ganizing efforts by urban homeowners against landlords toprotect their property rights (Read); the collusion betweenthe power of the state and the power of private property(Hsin); the struggle over the control over revenue and in-come in the context of China’s changing configurations oflandownership, finance, and taxation (Li and Sheffrin); theintroduction of transnational corporate codes of conduct,labor management methods, and labor rights (Pun); theappropriation of minority cultural images by transnationalcapital and the associated rise of social stratification amongChina’s peripheral populations (Schein).

Part 2, “Powers of the Self,” explores the new postso-cialist biopolitics in relation to market, home, workplace,and public culture, and the ways in which ethical prac-tices of the self constitute new forms of self-governing sub-jects. Chen’s chapter examines the privatization of biotechknowledge in China’s fast-growing pharmaceutical indus-try, focusing on consumption of wild animals in China’sSARS outbreak in 2003. Zhan’s fascinating chapter analyzesthe complexities and ambiguities of middle-class identityformation. Zhou’s chapter combines ethnographic observa-tion on and historical analysis of Internet cafes to explorethe formation and mobilization of self in China’s boom-ing cyberspace. Kohrman’s chapter is an account of the an-tismoking campaign in the southwestern Chinese city ofKunming, the capital of China’s “Tobacco Kingdom,” fo-cusing on the ways in which regulatory practices togetherwith ideas relating to urbanism and modernity lead to theemergence of a particular type of male subjectivity. AndAihwa Ong’s and Lisa Hoffman’s chapters offer insightfulanalyses of various self-fashioning practices of young urbanprofessionals who mediate multiple spheres of values andsociopolitical interests: market freedom and statist author-itarianism, the private and the public, the personal and thepolitical. They argue that privatization as technologies ofself-fashioning and self-ownership, instead of eroding thesocialist state, actually intersects with and paradoxically so-lidifies the sovereign power of the state.

In diverging from conventional notions of neoliberal-ization and privatization as profit-making activities limited

to the marketplace, the chapters in this book demonstratethat they may also be understood as a subjectivizing pro-cess that manifests in modes of thinking, managing, and re-alizing of the self. In doing so, the notion of “neoliberalism”is fruitfully expanded, from economic and political prac-tices to symbolic meanings and semiotic processes. Called“governing at a distance,” the neoliberal strategy underliesa mode of governance that develops and mobilizes the indi-vidual’s capacities for self-government, not by dismantlingthe authoritarian state apparatus but, rather, by enclosingthe multitude of private choices and expressions within thelimits set by the state.

Collectively, these chapters capture important dimen-sions of China’s ongoing socioeconomic, cultural, and po-litical transformations and are cohesive and compellingthematically. The contributors of the book refuse simplis-tic narratives of a totalitarian state repressing the bur-geoning civil society and seek to challenge the approachthat understands the politics of market capitalism throughthe lens of a universal liberalism. What emerges is a re-freshing perspective on the open endedness and fluidityof China’s postsocialist condition, in which a wide rangeof political, economic, and cultural possibilities are avail-able for negotiation. The book is likely to become trend-setting and exert long-lasting influence on future scholars,not only in the China field but also in anthropologicalscholarship on contemporary global transformations ingeneral.

Drugs, Thugs and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramasin Latin America. O. Hugo Benavides. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 2008. 233 pp.

CYMENE HOWEDepartment of Anthropology, Rice University

The breathless soap opera diva and gun-toting drug run-ners that populate the melodramatic world of telenove-las and narcodramas have risen to the category of popcultural obsessions in Latin America, and increasingly,North America. In Drugs, Thugs and Divas, O. Hugo Be-navides endeavors to understand political domination inLatin America through the lens of these melodramatic pro-ductions, finding that they embody ideologies of resis-tance and semiotic transgressions of the hegemonic or-der. He illustrates that the enthusiastic consumption ofthese productions is intimately—if ambivalently—linkedto Latin America’s postcolonial condition. As the conti-nent continues to grapple with immense social disparitiesand economic challenges, the hyperdramatic telenoveladiva and the scofflaw narcotraficante sate a desire for

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escapism and entertainment. But they also project newways of envisioning Latin American identities, both na-tional and transnational.

Benavides’s book takes analytical cues from mediastudies and cultural studies and discusses two interrelatedarenas where melodrama and Latin American social con-ditions coincide. The first half of the book focuses on te-lenovelas and presents a fine-grained reading of program-ming created in Colombia and Brazil. Benavides describeshow these telenovelas attempt to revise colonial legaciesand guide postcolonial transformations, arguing ultimatelythat it is through these consciously contrived images thatLatin American publics are better able to interpret them-selves and their worlds. Benavides treats the nuances ofrace and representation (particularly how indigenous andAfrican-descended peoples are portrayed and, often, omit-ted), the complex and ambivalent constructions of sexual-ity (overflowing in telenovelas and underplayed in narco-dramas), and the performance of gender (often stereotypedto the point of parody). The second half of the book sur-veys the terrain out of which narcodramas grow, what Be-navides calls a “narcosensibility” largely located on Mex-ico’s northern border. Rather than detailed readings of films,Benavides provides analytic portraits of contemporary so-cial dynamics, literature (scholarly and fictional), and folksaints. Narcodramas now dominate the Mexican film mar-ket and, Benavides argues, work to present and propagatea narcoidentity. Illegality is a key trope in narcoidentitiesin which an “othered” protagonist is revered, antinorms arevalorized, elite categories of good taste are rejected, and thereal villain is the state. In keeping with the everyday non-fictional drama that continues to unfold along the U.S.–Mexican border—for example, transnational flows of peo-ple, images, and capital—narcodramas represent an iconicrepresentation of postnational border subject whose law-lessness is his (given the relentlessly patriarchal inclina-tions of the narcodramatic genre it is always “his”) badgeof honor, his charm, and his appeal.

Telenovelas emerged in South America in the early1960s to be followed by Mexican narcodramas in the 1970s.During this same epoch Latin America saw a decline in statesponsored and elite intellectual projects. Although explic-itly coercive political relations and authoritarian regimesare now diminished, Latin America must contend with neo-colonial North–South relations, withered welfare states, ne-oliberal statecraft, and the challenges of democratic gov-ernance. Juxtaposing the popularity of escapism and theoften brutal conditions of Latin America’s political econ-omy, Benavides argues that lived realities are indeed ne-gotiated in, on, and through the screen of narcodramasand telenovelas as vast numbers of Latin Americans tunetheir channels, satellite dishes, and rabbit-eared televisions

to melodrama. Because it exceeds “reality” in its overtlyindulgent portrayal of human emotion—whether the sex-ual and romantic passions of the telenovelas or the vio-lent excess of the narcodrama vigilante—melodrama, forBenavides, illustrates how more subtle forms of politicaldomination and hegemony occur in quotidian ways. Thesedramatizations are in and of themselves screens for life,showing viewers the postcolonial condition in which theyfind themselves: aware that the promises of revolution-ary endeavor have failed to materialize, conscious of theglobal inequalities wrought by borders, and keenly awareof the frivolity of believing in political institutions thathave failed.

Benavides’s book is an important contribution to thegrowing body of anthropological literature that endeavorsto understand media as an ethnographic object. With anuanced, poststructuralist interpretation of melodramaticmedia spectacles, the book also draws from cultural stud-ies’ strengths and the theoretical armature of Foucault, La-can, and Martın-Barbero. Situated in Latin American, film,and media studies, Benavides’s work seeks to understandhow the context of Latin American life—from border cross-ing to patriarchal privilege—lures viewers into the fantas-tical world of thugs and divas. Benavides’s book thus in-vites readers to situate themselves in the imagined worldsof the narcodrama and telenovela as lived experience on thecusp of magical realism. While textual readings of telenove-las are relatively abundant, what sets Benavides’s work apartis the way in which he tethers the dramatic indulgencesof the genre to his analysis of postcolonial Latin Ameri-can subjectivity, and to those sensible experiences of de-privation that make the fictional world of the telenovela soappealing.

Benavides relays the “methodological conundrums” hefaced, attempting to account for a lifetime of exposureto melodrama and interest in the politics of Latin Amer-ica. He carried out field research in 15 cities in Mexicoand Brazil (speaking with artists, students, and intellectu-als) and conducting archival research. Partly because hechose not to pursue the more traditional research meth-ods of participant-observation and interviews, traces ofthis fieldwork are, at times, difficult to locate in the text.Readers seeking a more classic ethnographic approach willlikely find themselves appreciating the way in which Be-navides is able to ethnographically narrate the telenovelashe analyzes. However, the lived experiences of telenovelaand narcodrama viewers, their interlocution and dialogicengagement with melodrama, the expertise and knowl-edge production involved in the production of these me-dia spectacles, and details of the economic conditions thatallow for their manufacture are not as developed as theymight be.

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On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and theEmergence of American Cosmopolitanism. Maureen A.Molloy. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. x +200 pp.

RICHARD HANDLERUniversity of Virginia

This concise, unpretentious monograph provides a freshlook at Margaret Mead’s first four books in relation to widertrends in American intellectual life. Molloy reads Comingof Age in Samoa (2001a[1928]), Growing Up in New Guinea(2001b[1930]), The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe(1932), and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Soci-eties (2001c[1935]) as reflections of developing modernistdiscourses about nature and nurture, culture and the in-dividual, and sex and gender in American society in the1920s and 1930s. While she notes at the outset that Boasiananthropologists contributed actively to literary–intellectualdiscussions of American national culture, Molloy mainlytracks Mead’s books as reflections (albeit uncannily pre-scient ones) of larger discursive trends. Indeed, Molloyremarks that “to locate Mead’s work in its intellectual andcultural milieu . . . is simply to address Mead’s writings ascultural artifacts—to anthropologize them” (p. 5).

Molloy’s primary thesis is that Mead migrated awayfrom a Boasian culturalist position (adolescent behavior asa function of culture, not biology) to one in which “tem-perament” was understood as a biological given. With thisdevelopment, Mead was moving in sync with powerful cur-rents in American life, from optimistic calls in the 1910s forAmericans to remake themselves by remaking their cultureas one open to diversity and creativity, to the narrower, pa-triotic, even xenophobic ideology that grew in strength inthe 1920s, championing a white nationalism understood tobe grounded in “Nordic” blood. Molloy argues that Mead’sfirst four books represent fairly well-defined steps along thepath of this discursive development, from nurture to nature.

There are times when Molloy’s attempt to provideone-on-one matches between Mead’s books and particularstages of American intellectual trends seems strained. Forexample, Molloy sees functionalism crystallizing in Mead’stheoretical orientation in The Changing Culture of an In-dian Tribe, yet as she herself notes, the idea of an inte-grated, functionally (or organically) coherent society ap-pealed to American intellectuals and nationalists during theentire period covered in her book. Molloy attributes Mead’sfunctionalism to her connection to William Fielding Og-burn, on the one hand, and to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, on the other, without considering the influence ofBoasian configurationalism, a theoretical trend emergentexactly at that time, and one that Mead claimed to haveshaped through her ongoing discussions with Benedict. In

sum, given the rather general chronology of these ideas, itseems arbitrary to associate one book with one intellectualmoment or theoretical idea.

As is to be expected, Molloy sometimes misses the nu-ances of anthropological theory and its intradisciplinaryhistory. But her larger perspective is productive. She po-sitions herself at just the right distance from her subject,not too close to become overwhelmed by the tribal detailsof anthropology, but far enough away to be able to seethe discipline in its context in ways that anthropologiststhemselves might miss. She declines “to evaluate the ac-curacy of Mead’s ethnographies,” focusing instead on howMead “framed these interpretations in terms of her intel-lectual heritage, the sociopolitical state of the United Statesat the time, and her own intellectual trajectory” (p. 162).This is a wise choice. Very few scholars have the special-ized knowledge that would be needed to reanalyze Mead’sethnographic work. And, beyond that, American anthropol-ogists will probably never come to terms with the legacyof Margaret Mead. For almost half a century she was thediscipline’s public ambassador, and she did an enormousamount of research and writing. Some of her work was bril-liant, but much of it was banal or worse. She pontificated fartoo often on things she knew little about, and, in retrospect,much of what she had to say was confused (as Molloy thinksSex and Temperament was [p. 129]) or just plain wrong. Butsometimes Mead was right, and much of the time she hadthe ear of the American public. Molloy’s book is as good anaccount as there is as to why that was so.

References cited

Mead, Margaret1932 The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe. [n.p.]2001a[1928] Coming of Age in Samoa: Psychological Study of

Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics.

2001b[1930] Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Studyof Primitive Education. New York: Harper Perennial ModernClassics.

2001c[1935] Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.New York: Harper Perennial.

Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian-AmericanInternet Romance. Ericka Johnson. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2007. 194 pp.

NICOLE CONSTABLEUniversity of Pittsburgh

I have two distinct reactions to Dreaming of a Mail-OrderHusband. On the one hand, I am tempted to sing the book’s

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praises. Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband is a quick andcompelling read, reminiscent of a hybrid genre somewherebetween memoir, fiction, and journalistic ethnography. Itlacks in-text citations and has minimal endnotes. It shouldappeal to a crossover readership from undergraduates tononacademics—including men who are seeking or corre-sponding with prospective Russian brides. Such readers willlearn something about Russia, about women’s motivationsfor wanting to meet U.S. and other Western men, and aboutthe difficulties Russian women may face when they go tolive abroad.

The book is a direct, well-written, engaging depictionof six Russian women and their experiences as they attemptto meet a Western or U.S. marriage partner. Despite thebook’s subtitle, and despite the author’s academic trainingin information technology, most of the women met menby way of so-called mail-order bride introduction agencies,but corresponded primarily through letters (i.e., snail mail).Each of the main chapters centers on one main theme andone woman, each of whom the author has interviewed atleast once. The writing humanizes and individualizes thewomen, thus forming a subtle criticism of the notion ofa prototypical “Russian mail-order bride” while pointingto broad generalities about the Russian context based onthe author’s experience in Russia as a student and as aresearcher.

Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband provides some in-sightful information about the Russian context that, asa non-Russian scholar, I found most interesting. For ex-ample, Johnson asserts that both Russian women andtheir prospective husbands are critical of “feminism,” butthey are likely to have a different basis for their critiques.Russian women’s definitions of feminism are based on So-viet notions of feminists as women “who want to fly militaryairplanes,” and their criticism of feminism, Johnson argues,can be seen as an assertion of their heterosexual femininity(pp. 37–38).

On the other hand, as an anthropologist who has writ-ten about correspondence courtships and marriages in-volving U.S. men and Filipinas or Chinese women, I findthe book somewhat frustrating. The two main reasons formy frustration are the book’s minimal engagement with re-lated anthropological literature on cross-border or corre-spondence marriages (despite a claim that the book drawson interdisciplinary scholarship including anthropology),and the author’s minimal concern about her positionalityrelative to her methodology. For example, although most ofthe women with whom the author conducts interviews areinterested in meeting U.S. men, it is not until about a quar-ter of the way through the book that I was sure the authoris American—a factor that has relevance, given many of themen’s criticisms of U.S. women as “feminnazis” (p. 26).

Johnson poses the question of women’s motives forsuch marital desires. She concludes that, among other

things, Russian women place great importance in achievingmarital subjectivity in a context in which women’s chancesof (re)marrying—because of divorce, a child, or their age(in Russian they are considered over the hill at 23)—arelow. These three factors are strikingly similar to other schol-ars’ findings about women’s motivations for seeking for-eign partners, but given the lack of comparative informa-tion could be misread as unique to Russian women.

The chapter entitled “Tanya: Trafficking in Dreams”could have benefited from deeper critical engagement withother scholarly work. Whereas each woman is intended todepict a unique point, Tanya’s story is an entree for Johnsonto discuss trafficking of Russian women. As a fictional-ized story, the chapter might have worked, but as a schol-arly piece it is misleading. Tanya goes to the United Statesthrough a work visa opportunity, not as a bride or fiancee,and in Johnson’s concluding chapter we learn that the fearsexpressed by Tanya’s family and by Johnson were entirely illfounded. Tanya worked as a waitress and met a U.S. manwhom she later married. Yet, rather than use Tanya as a ba-sis for criticizing the ill-founded popular fears that conflatecorrespondence marriages with trafficking, Johnson usesthis example of a migrant woman (who is not a bride andwho was not trafficked) as a pretext to reinscribe and re-inforce popular fears and stereotypes about trafficking. Re-cent anthropological work suggests that there is little evi-dence of correspondence marriage as a form of traffickingand points instead to an overall exaggeration and hyste-ria around the topic reminiscent of earlier concerns about“white slavery.”

Several other important ideas are not referenced and,thus, give the impression of being the author’s own in-sights or unique to the Russian case. For example, Johnson’sdiscussion of “the political economy of desire” andher description of women’s self-ascriptions of feminin-ity (reminiscent of what other scholars have called “self-orientalizing”) are not referenced. In her conclusion, John-son asks why there are no Russian mail-order husbands.The answer to this question begs scholarly engagementwith the ideas of “global hypergamy” and “mail-order hus-bands” discussed by other authors.

Johnson’s earlier scholarly research in the former SovietUnion was on gender and the spread of Internet technology(a topic we learn little about in this book). In the course ofthat work she encountered women who were writing to U.S.men. Dreams of a Mail-Order Husband thus grew out of herearlier experiences: “I found I could not stop thinking aboutwhat the women I had met had said and done . . . the mate-rial would not let go of me” (p. 6). She is to be congratulatedfor writing a book that succeeds at the goal of going beyondthe “objectified and silenced” image of “Russian mail-orderbrides” in popular media and on websites (p. 6). Had I en-countered this book as a nonacademic study geared towarda general readership, my criticisms would not be so harsh. It

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is an intelligent and insightful book. Yet Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband raises deeper concerns about books that arelikely to appeal to broader audiences but lack adequate en-gagement with a relevant body of scholarship and, thus, fallfar short of their academic potential.

Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activismsince 1900. Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, eds. SantaFe, NM: School of American Research, 2007. 347 pp.

ANDREA SMITHUniversity of California, Riverside

Beyond Red Power attempts to disrupt the equation be-tween Native political activism and the Red Power move-ment. The editors argue that the manner in which theRed Power movement in general, and the American IndianMovement (AIM) in particular, has captured the politicaland scholarly imaginary within the United States has ob-scured the complexity and diversity of Native activism inthe late 19th and 20th centuries. This sizeable volume of16 chapters attempts to contextualize the Red Power move-ment within this broader terrain of Native activism.

The first section focuses on historical and legal ap-proaches to the study of Native politics. The most helpfulchapter in this section is that of Fred Hoxie. He challengesthe representation of Native politics within scholarly liter-ature, contending that Native politics are presumed to bereactive rather than proactive, concerned only with tribal–federal relations, and limited to formal relationships withgovernment entities instead of also extending to the cul-tural field or personal domain. This intervention sets a tonefor the rest of the volume by expending the field of what wewould consider to be Native organizing and activism. In ad-dition, the section is accompanied by a helpful diagram thathistorically locates major events, policies and with relation-ship to the Native movements at that time.

The second section, according to Daniel Cobb, at-tempts to resituate the prevailing policy narrative of thelate 19th and 20th century—in which Indian policy shiftsfrom assimilation to self-determination, to termination–relocation, to self-government—from the perspective ofNative organizations, individuals, and tribes that respondedto these policy shifts. He argues that “the persistence andflexibility of both individual concepts of identity and collec-tive notions of peoplehood could knock the so-called ‘pul-verizing engine of progress’ off its tracks” (p. 59). As withHoxie’s previous chapter, Cobb as well as most of the con-tributions in this volume, choose to highlight the role ofagency on the part of Native peoples with respect to the

development of Native policy. In this respect, this volumeseems to take a clear ideological stance within the continu-ing debates within Native studies as to whether “encoun-ters” or “colonization” is the best approach for studyingNative history. According to Cobb, this volume, borrowingfrom James Axtell, positions Native history as acts of en-counters that are “mutual, reciprocal–two-way rather thanone-way streets” (p. 57). This approach repositions Nativepeople as not simply passive victims of colonization. At thesame time, as Waziyatawin and Dian Million note, this ap-proach can also serve as an apology for colonization—inwhich acts of genocide and dispossession get recast as “mu-tual.” Here, the analysis of Glen Coulthard could be help-ful in resituating the debate. He notes that it is importantto look at areas of resistance, but one should also assessthe impact and the effectiveness of this resistance. In thisway, resistance does not become so analytically flattenedas to become meaningless. And in this volume, while thereis a tendency to celebrate resistance without a critical as-sessment of its effects, some of the chapters do provide acritical approach, particularly D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark’sassessment of the Society of American Indians. This stand-out chapter also provides a helpful intervention in how wecan assess the impact of Native activism by calling on schol-ars to not just look at formal organizations or tribal govern-ments but also to informal networks of Native activists thatmake significant impacts on the lives of Native peoples inways that often go unnoticed in the historical record.

In the third section, the volume looks at diverse formsof political activism in the contemporary moment. Issuescovered include Indian gaming, federal versus state recog-nition, cultural revitalization, and land–mineral rights.

The strength of this book is its broad reach, both ge-ographically and topically. At the same time, however, thisbreadth contributes to some incoherency in the volume. Itis not always clear how many of the chapters fit into the pa-rameters of the volume defined by the editors. The volumeclaims that the chapters contextualize the Red Power move-ment, but almost no chapters actually situate their analy-sis with respect to Red Power. Particularly in the last sec-tion, the volume seems to be a collection of motley issues inIndian country rather than a coherent set of chapters con-textualizing Red Power within a broader terrain of Nativeactivism.

In addition, despite the breadth of this volume, themodes of political organizing tend to focus on those thatreside within a capitalist framework and that assume theprimacy of federal or state recognition. The result is thatthe Red Power movement gets implicitly cast as the most“radical” version of Native activism by which the modes oforganizing described in this volume are set against. Thistendency is probably the result of the fact that most of thechapters focus on activism at the level of tribal governmentsrather than on grassroots organizations. Consequently,

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those forms of Native organizing that explicitly challengecapitalism and the politics of state recognition (and thatwould challenge AIM for failing to sufficiently do so) arenot covered in this volume. A focus on the indigenousenvironmental movement (such as the Indigenous Environ-mental Network) would have been a helpful way to dra-matize forms of Native organizing that are explicitly anti-capitalist. One chapter that does gesture in this direction isLoretta Fowler’s comparative analysis of tribal sovereigntymovements, in which she assesses the relationship betweentribal governments and grassroots movements and its im-pact on political vision and strategy. Readers could refer toGlen Coulthard’s critique of the politics of recognition for acomplementary analysis to the work offered in this volume.

In addition, with the exception of a couple of chapters,the volume does not sustain a gender analysis of Native po-litical organizing. Therefore, the volume misses an oppor-tunity to focus on forms of Native organizing that are fo-cused on internal reform rather than on external claims forrecognition. Some attention to the antiviolence movementin Indian country would provide a helpful lens for demon-strating how some Native organizing uses a frameworkof sovereignty to challenge internalized colonialism and itsresultant patriarchal ideologies within Native communities.It should be noted, however, that a few chapters, such as theones written by Daryl Baldwin and Julie Olds, do focus oncultural revitalization as political organizing, even if it doesnot have a specific gender lens.

Of course, no volume can adequately cover the di-verse ideologies, movements, and strategies within Na-tive communities, which is a central intervention the bookis making. This book does not seek to replace the “RedPower” paradigm for understanding Native activism with anequally restrictive alternative paradigm. Rather, it opens upthis field in a manner that will undoubtedly encourage fu-ture scholarly inquiry into new areas of research that maynot be directly covered in this volume. As a result, this vol-ume is an invaluable contribution to the study of Native pol-itics and political activism.

Globalization in Rural Mexico: Three Decades of Change.Frances Abrahamer Rothstein. Austin: University of TexasPress, 2007. 205 pp.

JANE L. COLLINSUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison

In 1996, the collaborative team of feminist researchersknown as J. K. Gibson-Graham wrote: “It is the way capital-ism has been thought that has made it so difficult to imag-ine its supersession.” The authors went on to suggest thatconceiving of alternative futures would be easier if we saw

our current economic system as the site of multiple formsof economy whose relations to each other are only partiallyfixed and are always under subversion (1996, pp. 4, 12). Inher new book, Globalization in Rural Mexico, Frances Roth-stein takes up Gibson-Graham’s project—challenging ourconception of capitalism as monolithic and omnipotent totheorize it better. Globalization in Rural Mexico is a col-lection of chapters drawing on Rothstein’s 30 years of re-search in the community of San Cosme Mazatecocho in thecentral Mexican state of Tlaxcala. This kind of retrospectivecollection is often marred by the fact that the older workfeels a bit dusty and remains mired in outdated paradigms.But Rothstein has done something different here. She hasgone back over her findings—previously reported in a num-ber of scholarly articles and her 1982 book, Three Differ-ent Worlds: Women, Men and Children in an IndustrializingCommunity—and has reanalyzed them in light of the neweconomic relationships of neoliberal globalization. Overthe years, she has consistently traced the ways that wageworkers in rural Mexico self-provision. In this book sheshows the crucial role that their labor outside the capitalistmarket plays in allowing households to cope with the newflexible labor regimes of the global economy—and she sug-gests that the ability to mobilize such support has liberatorypotential. In her words: “An unanticipated consequence ofthe growth of flexible labor . . . is that many of the newworkers being drawn into wage labor today do not cometo consider it the only or best option for survival and re-production. Consequently they can imagine a future that isdifferent” (p. 157).

To bolster this claim, Rothstein revisits her previous re-search showing how networks of kin and community sus-tained workers who entered the Mexican apparel industryand other waged jobs in the 1970s. Self-provisioning sup-plemented wages that were insufficient and mitigated therisk of job loss. While these complex forms of labor outsidethe market waned as households became more dependenton employment, the residents of San Cosme did not aban-don them completely, and, thus, were able to revive themduring Mexico’s economic crises in the 1980s. Rothstein ar-gues that, during the economic downturn, people relied on“lived experiences or recent memories of alternative prac-tices” as they built alternatives to factory work (p. 11).

The community of San Cosme has long been tied tothe fortunes of the global apparel industry, yet few of itsdenizens worked for maquilas supplying global brands.More often, they have labored in locally owned factories orhome enterprises under complex systems of subcontractingto produce clothing for Mexico’s national market. Paradoxi-cally, as the income of working-class Mexicans deterioratedover the 1980s, an opening was created for the community’slow-cost garment production (a niche increasingly filled inrecent years by Wal-Mart). Goods produced at the very bot-tom of the wage scale, Rothstein argues, were in demand

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among workers whose wages were rolled back under ne-oliberal globalization. The people of San Cosme could pro-duce garments cheaply because they used family labor andgrew much of their own food. Rothstein decries the self-exploitation of these practices, demonstrating clearly thatthe residents of San Cosme suffered under global neolib-eral policy shifts. But she observes that the self-provisioningpractices that unstable and insufficient work require havecontradictory effects. “Most analysts of flexible accumula-tion have stressed the advantages . . . for capitalists and thedisadvantages for workers,” she writes. “We need to alsolook at the disadvantages for capitalists and the advan-tages for workers” (p. 155). Residents of San Cosme investedtheir skills and meager earnings in small garment shops.They renewed the social relations on which these shops de-pend through more frequent and elaborate celebrations oflife cycle and community rituals. And they were able to doso because they retained an alternative vision of how eco-nomic life might be organized. These practices do not iso-late or completely protect them from the vicissitudes of thelarger economy, but they provide a larger measure of con-trol over one’s fate than factory work. The reconstructionand reinvention of such practices and the networks thatsustain them, Rothstein argues, provide a “fertile environ-ment for the maintenance of old and the development ofnew hybrid and/or alternative discourses and imaginaries”(p. 139).

Rothstein supports this guardedly optimistic theoriz-ing with ethnographical detail culled from 30 years of con-nection to San Cosme, covering the transformation of rit-ual kinship and communal obligations, the emergence oflocally run garment workshops where labor process andcredit are organized by relations of kinship, and chang-ing patterns of migration and consumption. She linksthese village-level processes to a long-term perspective onMexico’s development successes and challenges and to theglobal policy shifts within which they occurred. In the1970s, both Rothstein and the residents of San Cosme as-sumed that community relations would continue to de-teriorate as individuals were drawn into wage work and“modernity” arrived. Rothstein’s longer-term perspectiveshows the waxing and waning of these forms of self provi-sion in relation to changing patterns of capital accumula-tion and shifting national and international political agen-das. Reading this account can bolster our spirits in twoways. First, it shows the durability of ethnography, even asinterpretive paradigms shift and we discern new meaningsin our observations. Second, the book’s remarkable sugges-tion that hard-scrabble survival tactics may be looked atfrom another angle—as a form of prefigurative politics—offers new answers to the question posed by Gibson-Graham: how can we begin to imagine and construct alter-natives to processes of capitalist globalization that are oftenimagined as all-encompassing and all-powerful?

References cited

Gibson-Graham, J. K.1996 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique

of Political Economy. Pp. 4, 12. Oxford: Blackwell.Rothstein, Frances Abrahamer

1982 Three Different Worlds: Women, Men and Children in anIndustrializing Community. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Taino Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of theStranger King. William F. Keegan. Gainesville: UniversityPress of Florida, 2007. xvi + 256 pp., illustrations, 11 tables,glossary, notes, bibliography, index.

STEPHEN D. GLAZIERUniversity of Nebraska, Lincoln

In this seminal study, William F. Keegan—curator ofCaribbean archaeology at the Florida State Museum andprofessor of Anthropology at the University of Florida—explores how epic stories surrounding the encounter be-tween Christopher Columbus and the Taino have resonatedin over 500 years of history, myth, and oral tradition.Keegan’s study focuses on the 1494 capture and murderof the Taino cacique Caonabo. From events surroundingCaonabo’s capture and death, Keegan weaves a complexnarrative addressing salient aspects of Taino political andsocial organization, rituals, beliefs, and mythology.

This study represents an attempt to weave the writ-ten past together with the archaeological record, bothof which—as Keegan readily acknowledges—are filteredthrough the archaeologist (p. xiii). In contrast to much ar-chaeological writing, Keegan includes himself and other re-searchers (like Shaun Dorsey Sullivan) prominently in hisnarrative and gives much needed attention to how archae-ologists and historians play a role in the creation, interpre-tation, and analysis of archaeological and historical “facts.”It is impossible, Keegan asserts, to keep historians out ofhistory and archaeologists out of archaeology. He cogentlyadvocates a more comprehensive philosophy of archaeol-ogy in which myths, primary texts, and archaeological dataconverge to provide richer and more complex reconstruc-tions of the human past.

Keegan incorporates data often neglected—or pur-posely ignored—by archaeologists. He is very much con-cerned, for example, with Taino mythology and how mythsinform the archaeological record and vice versa. His ju-dicious reading of the early Spanish chroniclers (Oviedio,Las Casas, and Pane) and his thorough command of thearchaeological evidence combine to provide new insightsconcerning the legendary encounter of the Spanish andthe Taino cacique Caonabo. The main basis for Caonabo’s

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political power, Keegan contends, can be traced backto a single archaeological site (MC-6) on the MiddleCaicos Island of the Bahamas. MC-6 constitutes the largestknown village site in the Caribbean. Keegan makes a veryconvincing case for MC-6 as Caonabo’s village of origin, butthere can be no one-to-one correspondence between vil-lage size and political prominence. In aboriginal Trinidad,for example, village location—not village size—proved tobe the key predictor of political success. But aboriginalTrinidad lacked centralized political authority comparableto Taino political organization.

In chapter 1, Keegan introduces the widespread legendof the “stranger king.” He explores the legend’s meaningswith respect to both Christopher Columbus and Caonabo.Both Columbus and Caonabo possessed mythical qualities,and a dynamic interplay of myth and reality colored boththeir lives. The idea of a “stranger king” has been foundin many cultures, most notably in Sophocles’s play Oedi-pus Rex. The basic structure of the story is much the same:a foreigner comes from afar; he marries the king’s daugh-ter or wife, and then he deposes (by murdering) the king.Keegan suggests that during the first years of European con-tact, Columbus and Caonabo both became unwittingly in-volved in a contest to determine which of them would be-come the next “stranger king.”

Chapter 2, “The Legend of Caonabo,” recounts earlyhistorical evidence surrounding Taino–Spanish interac-tions with special attention to Columbus’s second voyage.On his second voyage, Columbus returned to Hispaniolaand found that the men he had left behind to establish asettlement at La Navidad were now dead and the settle-ment had been abandoned. A rival of Caonabo, the caciqueGuacanagari, informed the Spanish that it was Caonabowho was responsible for the deaths. A military expeditionwas sent to capture Caonabo, and Keegan asserts that theSpanish considered the capture of Caonabo “a defining mo-ment in the conquest of the New World” (p. 51).

In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Taino ter-ritory encompassed most of what is now Haiti, the Do-minican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Bahamas.Keegan provides a comprehensive overview of archaeolog-ical excavations conducted over this vast area, with spe-cial attention to the Bahamas. He gives a succinct yet de-tailed summary of major excavations at the MC-6 site anda number of other Middle Caicos sites as well (e.g., MC-8,MC-10, MC-12, and MC-32). Then, he offers an innova-tive theoretical framework that goes beyond the prevail-ing notion of archaeologists as “objective” observers. In-spired by Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope (1999) Keeganadopts chaos and complexity theory for the analysis ofSpanish–Taino encounters. If any terms can be used to ex-plicate the strained relations between 16th-century Span-ish and the Taino, chaotic and complex seem the mostapt. Keegan correctly points out that territorial boundaries

were highly malleable and that ethnic distinctions amongIsland-Arawaks (Taino) and Island-Carib were hotly con-tested. Many islands of the Greater Antilles might best bedescribed as “frontiers” (Figueredo 1978). Terms like Cariband Arawak should not be seen as opposing ethnic cat-egories but as part of a broad continuum of local identi-ties and shifting political alliances; for example, when earlychroniclers published word lists compiled in specific vil-lages, these lists do not represent ethnic or tribal identi-ties. Native word lists were compiled from whoever hap-pened to be in that particular village at that particulartime.

Chapter 4, “Kinship and Kingship,” meticulously ex-plores some of the major tenants of Taino political organi-zation. Keegan suggests that Taino social structure was flex-ible enough to allow for an outsider, a “stranger king,” torise to power through an interconnected network of “avun-culocal chiefdoms” (see William F. Keegan and MorganMaclachlan’s 1989 article “The Evolution of AvunculocalChiefdoms: A Reconstruction of Taino Kinship and Poli-tics”). Taino kinship rules, Keegan asserts, forced previouslydispersed males into a single location. This, he contends,set the stage for long-distance trade and solidified alliancesthrough marriage exchanges. In the Taino case, “avunculo-cal chiefdoms” situated a cacique’s sisters in one village asmembers of their mother’s clan and sisters owed primary al-legiance to their mother’s brother (their uncle) who residedin yet another village. Of course, such a system could eas-ily have resulted in social paralysis rather than territorialexpansion.

Keegan’s concluding chapters outline his (and ShaunDorsey Sullivan’s) extensive archaeological research in theTurks and Caicos Islands. Sullivan mapped the site inthe 1970s, did intensive surface collection, and conductedlimited excavations, while Keegan—who conducted moreextensive excavations in the 1980s—did faunal and soilanalysis. Keegan concluded that MC-6 is a late prehistoricsite occupied from about 1300 C.E. to the time of contact.He suggests that the site was occupied year round, andidentifies the cacique’s Caonabo’s residence as StructureVIII. MC-6’s layout, Keegan contends, is typical of Lucayansites. Material remains from the site consist of undecoratedPalmetto ware, stone and shell beads, and carved shells. Heargues on the basis of a preliminary spatial analysis that theMC-6 site was deliberately laid out to depict principles ofTaino cosmology. Structures are associated with unique as-tronomical alignments (e.g., the double rainbow) that sym-bolize a cacique’s power.

This study successfully synthesizes over 25 years ofpainstaking, innovative research and constitutes a muchbroader perspective on Taino myth and society than thatoffered by previous studies. Keegan’s prose is clear and con-cise, and his interpretations are erudite, original, and highlyprovocative.

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Reference cited

Figueredo, Alfredo E.1978 The Virgin Islands as an Historical Frontier between

the Tainos and the Caribs. Revista/Review Interamericana8(3):393–399.

Latour, Bruno1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Keegan, William F., and Morgan Maclachlan

1989 The Evolution of Avunculocal Chiefdoms: A Reconstruc-tion of Taino Kinship and Politics. American Anthropologist91:613–630.

American Karma: Race, Culture, and Identity in the In-dian Diaspora. Sunil Bhatia. New York: New York UniversityPress, 2007. xi + 270 pp.

LAURA KUNREUTHERBard College

Sunil Bhatia’s American Karma is an exploration of thesignificance of race and ethnicity among middle- andupper-class Indian professionals in the Connecticut sub-urbs. Writing as a “cultural psychologist,” Bhatia draws onthe ethnographic methods of anthropologists to compli-cate universal models of acculturation and assimilation thatcharacterize psychologists’ approaches to immigration. Sit-uating the struggles and privileges of this diasporic com-munity within their experience of American concepts of“race” serves as an important corrective to such psycholog-ical models that tend to interpret “culture” and “ethnicity”as variables that a person can choose to embrace or dismiss.As a book that engages in issues like race and the ambiguousnature of identity, significant to other diasporic communi-ties, it is a welcome addition to the field of diaspora studies.

In Bhatia’s initial two chapters, he lays out the key the-oretical and methodological issues he seeks to address inthe book. Bhatia situates the subjects of his study as post-1965 immigrants, who benefited from the Immigration andNaturalization Act that facilitated the immigration of manymore migrants from the Global South. Prior to this act, Bha-tia briefly discusses, there was one other significant waveof Indian immigration: the Punjabis, who worked on lum-ber mills and railroads of the Pacific West at the turn of the20th century. Immigration virtually halted after 1917, whenlaws passed that banned Asians from entering the UnitedStates until 1946, when Indians were given the right to be-come American citizens. In response to labor shortages andthe civil rights movement in the 1960s, the 1965 Act passed,which enabled highly qualified, skilled workers to enter theUnited States. Professional Indians, particularly those in thefield of information technology, thus began to seek class

and status mobility in the United States. As an effect of the1965 Act, these professional Indians began to embrace themyth of the “model minority”—a group of migrants whohave been particular successful within the United States—a myth that occludes their own privileged position prior toarriving in the United States. Bhatia’s aim is to complicatemodels of acculturation that rely on ideas like the “modelminority” by turning to Bakhtin’s notion of “voice” and thedialogical self, in which there are differing and often con-tradictory ideas about assimilation or acculturation withina single person.

Bakhtin’s concept of “voice” and the “dialogic self”serves as a key inspiration throughout American Karma,described most fully in chapters 3 and 4. In both chap-ters, Bhatia unravels the various nodes of difference (racial–cultural) and ambivalence that construct a diasporic In-dian professional self. Chapter 3 outlines the ways in whichBakhtin’s notion of “voice” challenges “a static, core, un-changing self” by drawing attention to the voice of “other-ness” professional Indians in the diaspora experience fromdominant U.S. culture (p. 117). Most strikingly, I sensedhow these professional diasporic Indians’ own privilege andclass status felt compromised when confronted with Amer-ican racism in their children’s classrooms, in their gatedcommunities, and in their jobs. Thus, it would have beenespecially revealing to also discuss in detail the “voice ofprivilege” that struggles alongside the “voice of otherness,”both constituting this particular diaspora subjectivity. Bha-tia notes that “many of the participants had good, profes-sional, well-paying jobs and were well aware of their priv-ileges, for others, the consequences of being different andbeing Indian were severe” (p. 151). I wanted to hear moreabout how people were aware of the privilege, and how thisknowledge affected their experience and narratives of cul-tural or racial difference. How do suburban elites relate tothe laboring class of Indians in the diaspora? To what degreedo they mutually reinforce racial stereotypes in the UnitedStates to distinguish themselves as class superiors?

Chapters 4 and 5 begin to tackle the ambivalent ex-perience of racial difference. Here Bhatia describes howprofessional Indians in suburban Connecticut circumventracial stereotypes by emphasizing sameness, universality,and merit as the primary basis on which they and their workis judged. Given that most of his subjects are scientists thisis, perhaps, no surprise. Very few, for example, reflect ontheir social position (no doubt generations deep) prior tocoming to the United States as a key factor in their success,a fact Bhatia occasionally mentions. When one of his sub-jects declares that racism is part of human nature, the manthen quickly removes himself from any such accusation byclaiming that he, like his fellow colleagues, does not thinkthis way because they are cosmopolitans. Such statementscall for greater reflection on the way social factors like casteand class make their way into the everyday discourse and

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practice of these professionals. To what degree are the un-spoken habits of class and caste central to their frequentdiscourse about universal knowledge, core humanity, merit,or sameness between scientists? These questions, unfortu-nately, lay at the margins of Bhatia’s analysis.

In chapter 6, Bhatia continues the theme of “enigma ofbrown privilege,” and shows the ways in which the profes-sionals he spoke with emphasized their closeness to whiteculture and their distance from “blackness” (p. 185). In anattempt to counter psychological universal models of ac-culturation, Bhatia argues that professional Indians in thediaspora negotiate the voices of “assignation,” which de-nounce them as racial others, and the voices of “assertion,”in which they themselves assert cultural sameness. Despitethe intent to complicate psychological notions of self, thedesignations of “assertion” and “assignation” depend on analready defined individual self that either asserts itself or in-corporates the assignations of others. This seems quite dif-ferent than Bakhtin’s dictum that “every voice is half some-one else’s,” in which the “self” itself is always already madeup of other’s discourse. Here is one clear tension in theethnographic, cultural approach Bhatia adopts and the fieldof psychology from which he writes.

Finally, chapter 7 addresses the classic dialectic be-tween life in the diaspora and the imagined or real connec-tions to “homeland.” For most of these professionals, the“return” to India is not imagined as a real one, though mostvisit India with their children almost every year. As in manydiasporic communities, we see that the home becomes thespace for the re-creation of “homeland” culture, helping toconstitute a “double-consciousness” that Du Bois has so fa-mously written of the African American experience.

While the material in American Karma was fascinat-ing, I found that the ethnographic observations (basedprimarily on direct interviews) were not always pusheddeep enough, and the analysis of class privilege was strik-ingly absent. Bhatia’s turn toward ethnographic methodsis nonetheless a laudable move to complicate psychologi-cal universals and toward understanding the ambiguities ofthis professional class identity that cannot be simply classi-fied as assimilation.

Rebel between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood,and Authority in Islam. Scott Kugle. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2006. xii + 305 pp.

EMILIO SPADOLAColgate University

Islamic modernists, along with anthropologists of Islam(Geertz and Gellner, among others), have generally con-

sidered Sufi saint veneration irreconcilable with juridicalthought. Recent studies of pre- and early modern Muslimsaints, however, describe a more nuanced history of theirinterdependence. Scott Kugle’s reading of the life and worksof Ahmad Zarruq (1442–94)—“the prime exemplar of Ju-ridical Sufism” (p. 36)—adds historical and analytical sub-stance to the literature. Kugle’s text moves between the15th and 21st centuries, between a particular history anda social theory of sainthood; it weaves this Moroccan-bornSufi’s story into the Islamic political and spiritual currentsof the day, and it challenges some tenacious ethnographicassumptions.

A good portion of the text (chs. 3, 4, and 5) examinesZarruq’s thought in relation to his life, from the waning daysof the Marinid dynasty in Fez, to Cairo and Mecca, and,finally, to Misurata, Libya. Orphaned shortly after birth,Zarruq found temporary refuge in competing Sufi circlesof Fez. In a state madrasa he studied juridical or “Usuli”Sufism, an intellectual school binding Sufi devotion to Is-lam’s legal “roots,” the Qur’an, the Prophet, and his piouscohort. Outside of school Zarruq devoted himself to a mag-netic Sufi leader of rising shurafa’, Sufis claiming politicalauthority based on their descent from the Prophet. In 1465,when shurafa’ overthrew the Marinid rulers, Zarruq con-demned the revolt on juridical grounds. Such rectitude wasdangerous: branded an enemy of the new regime, Zarruqfled his natal city for the east. Through pilgrimages to Tlem-cen and Mecca, devotion to a saint in Cairo, and study atal-Azhar, Zarruq eventually reestablished his name, forg-ing a textual call “to reform Sufi communities from within”(p. 134). Contemporary responses to Zarruq’s work, how-ever, were mixed: he gathered disciples east of Morocco,but his episodic returns to Fez yielded few converts andmuch contempt. He died in 1494 amongst his disciplesin Libya.

For Kugle, Zarruq’s enduring significance derives onthe one hand from his juridical Sufi reformism, and, on theother, from his counterexample for ethnographers and cur-rent anti-Sufi modernists and jihadis. Indeed, speaking tothe current geopolitical climate, the author is forthright inadvocating a Zarruqian “integral Islam” that welcomes Sufidevotion, that binds together islam (conforming to God’swill) and iman (faith in God and the Prophet) on the broadbase of ihsan (sincere virtue).

The author sees Zarruq’s integral Islam as the basis ofhis reformism, which, in sum, called for Sufi communitiesto coalesce around only those Sufis first trained as jurists.In this effort, the saint gave precedence to law: He “insistedthat his disciples be jurists first, then Sufis (rather then Sufisfirst, then jurists)” (p. 138); Sufism, he argued, is “not soundwithout jurisprudence” (p. 131). Kugle neglects to addressthe evident difference between “integral” equivalence andZarruq’s clear privileging of law. But his fine portrait of shar-ifian Morocco helpfully explains the saint’s stance: As an

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Usuli, Zarruq meant to bind Sufi practice to law; as a Sufi inFez, he called on law to guard saints from the corrosive willto power. Put simply, saints could touch Sufis, but no saint,sharifs included, should “expect to directly influence issuesof public order” (p. 139). Little wonder, then, that Zarruq’scall fell on deaf ears in Fez.

Kugle is a graceful writer and a thorough historian;his portrait of Zarruq draws on the saint’s letters andmanuscripts, on Zarruq’s Sufi predecessors’ works, onearly modern commentaries by critics and disciples fromMorocco to the Mughal Empire, and on more recent (18th-21st-century) modern assessments of his work. Kugle hasalso read a good range of secondary sources in the anthro-pology of religion. His challenge to anthropology takes issuemainly with Geertz. Like Vincent Cornell, he rejects Geertz’snotion of “Baraka” as a mystical power or gift “possessed”by saints (p. 100); sainthood, he argues, is social. It shouldbe noted that baraka for Geertz was eminently culturaland, above all, symbolic, yet Kugle’s emphasis on sacral-ity in circulation—“the cultural logic of sanctity” (p. 29)—issalutary.

Sainthood, he writes, accrues via the social circulationand recognition of relics or “secondary objects”: “the placesthey reside, things they touch, clothes they wear, or evenparts of their bodies” (p. 30). As scholars from Goldziheron have argued, the Muslim saint is a medium—and needsother media, if only the eyes of his audience. Kugle, how-ever, assimilates “cultural logic” to these “secondary ob-jects” and to political power generally (p. 104). The saint’sprivileging of law over devotion, and his claim of exceptionfrom society (p. 37) permits him not only to rebel againstsharifs but also “to rebel against the cultural logic of sanc-tity” (p. 155). Culture, apparently, is devotion cut loose fromlaw. The shortfall of this theory, in this reader’s view, arisesfrom Kugle’s willingness to follow Zarruq and exclude law,Zarruq himself, his writing—and, finally, texts in general—from the social and “cultural” forces of circulation. He doeshighlight the centrality of text to saints: “They are all in-cluded in the textual genre of hagiography. They all ‘madeit’ across the boundary of distinction” (p. 33); and Zarruq’sown texts circulated widely (p. 154). That sanctification ofhagiography among other relics, of hagiography as uniqueamong relics, must be considered part of the 15th-centuryMoroccan cultural logic, not beyond it.

Kugle has written a fine history of an intriguing politicalmoment. His focus on the antipolitical Zarruq refines Cor-nell’s model of the Muslim saint as one whose proximity toGod brings worldly power; and his vivid portrait of the shar-ifian “revolution” is a gift to scholars of Morocco’s still-rulingsharifian monarchy. Kugle, whose other work concerns themateriality of saints’ bodies, might have addressed the ma-teriality of hagiography. This concern, however, arises inadmiration of this book’s erudition and the author’s po-tential. To the benefit of anthropologists of Muslim soci-

eties, and of religion more widely, he has provided surehistorical footing to better grasp contemporary sainthood.

Kyongju Things: Assembling Place. Robert Oppenheim.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008. x + 281 pp., illus-trations, notes, references, index.

RACHAEL MIYUNG JOOMiddlebury College

In Kyongju Things, Robert Oppenheim offers an account ofthe material political realities that emerge around culturalartifacts and the role of these objects in shaping social re-lations in Kyongju, South Korea’s preeminent culture city(p. 1). By things, the author refers to “actual physical arti-facts, knowledge objects and conceptual forms, routinizedprocedures, and techniques, and subjectivities” (p. 11). Op-penheim demonstrates how a number of things, such as thehigh-speed railway, historical artifacts, landscapes, tapsa(practices of landscape study), ethical ideas of “Kyongju ap-propriateness,” activist subjectivities, and civic and state or-ganizations interacted within debates around preservationand economic development in Kyongju during the mid tolate 1990s. The text details how participants in Kyongju’sprojects of preservation and development use and inter-vene in things, and how these things emerge as “interactivestabilities” that “channel political possibilities and effects”(p. 3).

Oppenheim demonstrates the role of things in craftingunderstandings of place, in debates and decisions on landuse and preservation, and in the imagining of Kyongju’sfuturity. Kyongju emerged as a site of national impor-tance with Park Chung Hee’s establishment of the KyongjuTourism Comprehensive Development Plan in 1971. The in-stitution of archaeological and technocratic regimes aroundthe collection of national “cultural treasures” during thisperiod changed the relationship between the national citi-zenry and objects. Kyongju objects were interpreted as rep-resenting a glorious national past that legitimated the gov-erning power of the regime. While the national governmentcontinued to claim control of land and cultural objects, therole of Kyongju citizens and local government shifted dra-matically with the nationwide 1995 transition from cen-tralized state rule to local self-governance. This text detailsshifting politics around things and place during this pe-riod of localization by tracking the debates over preserva-tion and development by a variety of Kyongju stakehold-ers, including intellectuals, activist organizations, religiousgroups and figures, filial groups, politicians, and commer-cial interests. The text offers an important case of howpolicies implemented after South Korea’s democratization

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(1987) worked in sites beyond Seoul, and how political de-bates around local citizenship played out in the interrela-tionship between people and things.

The author presents an incremental account ofKyongju’s ontological politics beginning with the estab-lishment of Kyongju as a site of national significance in 1971and concluding with controversies around the proposedconstruction of a high-speed railway through Kyongju(1995–97). The first section, “Models” (chs. 1 and 2), de-scribes the formation of ideals and templates for actionthat prefigure the debate around the railway (p. 17), in-cluding the establishment of citizens’ organizations aroundKyongju festivals and the emergence of ideas about ethi-cal participation. The next section, “Levers” (chs. 3 and 4),evokes the “techniques and objects through which the co-herence of the railway routing was built more thoroughly”(p. 17) by discussing the emergence of local expertise andlocal advocacy on behalf of Kyongju objects and landscapes.The final section, “Assemblies” (chs. 5, 6, and 7), demon-strates how the ideas and practices detailed in earlier sec-tions come together in a railway plan (p. 17). This finalsection discusses the complicated processes of negotia-tion and collaboration that ultimately result in the suc-cess of a plan set forth by a coalition of Kyongju activistgroups. Through this cumulative approach, Oppenheim de-tails how people and things “as human and non-humanagents . . . act on and with one another” (p. 13) by tracingthe complex actor networks involved in political decisionmaking.

Kyongju Things presents an important ethnographicaccount of a new mode of ethical citizenship that hasemerged since South Korea’s democratization. Rather thanassuming the existence of a predetermined citizen-subject,Oppenheim offers an important way of thinking about howpeople and things come into being through their mutualconstitution and collocation. The interrelation of peopleand things shaped a kind of politics of place that shaped anddepended on notions of “Kyongju appropriateness.” Prac-tices of local knowledge garnered through tapsa informeda particular mode of experiencing place. Through projectsof care, citizens’ groups assumed a sense of custodianshipand responsibility for objects. Furthermore, local spokes-people used local expertise to assert agency over definitionsof place, and this use of local knowledge became leveragefor making specific kinds of claims about how land shouldbe preserved and developed.

The “models” of ethical citizenship and the “levers” oflocal expertise are brought together in a discussion of thehigh-speed railway line controversy. As a symbol of glob-alization, a high-speed railway line through Kyongju wastouted as an economic boon to the area by state developersand local backers. However, the routing of the train line be-came a point of intense controversy, as the initial proposalwas seen as having the potential to destroy historical and

spiritually significant artifacts. A virtual stalemate in the de-bate between “preservationists” and “developers” was over-come through the collaboration of a variety of Kyongju ad-vocacy groups who offered a multifaceted plan to addressa polarized debate. By drawing on ideas of local expertiseand ethical responsibility, a coalition of Kyongju activists setforth a plan that brought together diverse and contradictoryinterests, rather than simply defending or rejecting the orig-inal proposal.

In Kyongju Things, Oppenheim offers his own tapsa ofKyongju political culture in the mid to late 1990s. He tracesthe networks of connections between various actors—people and things, and how they operate within asym-metries of force in debates around democratization anddevelopment. Oppenheim demonstrates how a political an-thropology might take objects seriously by demonstratinghow objects matter at different times and in different sit-uations. While further consideration of the effects of theAsian financial crisis might have demonstrated just howlocal and national projects were connected to the volatileglobal economy, this account can be inferred through othertexts on this matter. The value of the text lies in its detailedaccounting of the assemblage of forces that shape debatesaround Kyongju’s past and future.

Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe,Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures. Jacqueline C. Djedje.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 337 pp.

KWASI AMPENEUniversity of Colorado, Boulder

Fiddling in West Africa is a culmination of JacquelineDjedje’s lifelong study of the fiddle in West Africa, whichhas so far resulted in a dissertation, over a half-dozen jour-nal articles, and contribution of chapters in multiauthoredbooks. Djedje’s engagement with this subject has led her ona wide-ranging intellectual journey into the realms of his-tory, ethnicity and musical identity, religion, gender, socialstatus, tradition and modernity, style analysis, and organol-ogy. Compared to other geographical and subject areas inAfrica, the fiddling tradition is unusually underrepresentedin African Musicology (p. 7), and, as a result, Djedje shouldbe applauded for her landmark publication. She divides hertext into four broad chapters, and within these chapters sheprobes into the intricacies of the fiddling tradition amongthree disparate cultural areas in West Africa, namely, theFulbe in Senegambia, the Hausa in Nigeria, and the Dag-bamba in Ghana (p. 8). As the author explains, her choice ofa “multi-sited ethnography” as a methodological construct

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is to avoid “using the findings from one ethnic group or so-ciety to generalize about the whole” (p. 8). It is also meant todiscourage the wrongly assumed notion that West Africanmusic is “homogenous, as opposed to a locus of diverse cul-tural and performance traditions” (p. 10).

In chapter 1, the author maps out the geographical, his-torical, and cultural landscape of what historians refer to asthe Sudan and rightly circumscribes Sudanic West Africa asthe site for her discussion. In creating a broad historical andtopographical portrait, Djedje skillfully draws together largeamounts of information in a variety of ways. These rangefrom sketching a history of Sudanic West Africa to matters ofthe “fiddle’s” classification, distribution patterns, physicalfeatures and construction, learning and playing techniques,performance contexts and cultural significance, and, finally,song types and performance style (pp. 11–42).

Because of the complexity of demographics in theSenegambian region, Djedje articulates a compelling nar-rative that identity construction is central to the Fulbe(p. 54). The author makes it abundantly clear that the Fulbein this region use many instruments; however, it is thenyanyeru (the fiddle) and the various performance con-texts and associated traditions that “signifies and distin-guishes the Fulbe from other cultures in the region” (p. 65).The immediate neighbors of the Fulbe include the Wolof,the Mande, and other groups resulting in ethnic identitiesthat are “constantly in flux” because of “interactions, inter-marriages, and overlapping social histories” (p. 43). More-over, the Fulbe are widely dispersed in West Africa, from theSenegambia to Cameroon. Noted for their dynamism anduncanny capacity to adapt, absorb, and integrate the fea-tures of other societies into their culture and identity, theFulbe participates in the globalizing forces of a pluralisticenvironment. The forces include the empires of the West-ern Sudan (7th to the 16th century), European colonizationin the late 19th to early 20th century, and the postcolonialreality in the 21st century. Minimal representation of Fulbemusic in scholarly writings contributes to the author’s con-cern about Fulbe identity. At best, the Fulbe are mentionedas part of music of the Gambia or Senegal. The only brightside of all these, according to Djedje, is that Fulbe music isafforded a balanced representation on commercial soundrecordings (pp. 59–60).

Unlike the Fulbe, identity construction is less of an is-sue with the Hausa in northern Nigeria; rather, it is the con-flicting attitudes about the goge (Hausa fiddle), the com-paratively low social status of professional goge musicians,and the leading role of goge in traditional religious worshipof Bori spirits that are central to our understanding of thegoge tradition in Hausaland (ch. 3). Known as “iskoki” inHausa, the worship of Bori spirits, which involves spirit pos-session, predates the introduction of Islam in the 11th cen-tury and although, presently, Islamic beliefs override tra-ditional religious beliefs in urban centers, “Bori continues

to be the dominant religion in the rural areas of northernNigeria” (pp. 103–104). Like European Christianity, Islam isa foreign religion imposed, through jihads and other means,on indigenous populations in West Africa. As a foreign re-ligion, Islam does not entirely address the spiritual needsof indigenes, and that is why the Hausa in urban cities stillincorporate spirit possession in their religious practice. Byparticipating in Bori, goge musicians are responding to the“spiritual and emotional needs” of those who have beensidelined by the imposition of Islamic religion (p. 142). Itis noteworthy that the ambivalence of the majority Islamicconverts and the schism between the rural and urban re-ligious practitioners has not diminished the patronage ofgoge musicians. In a society in which individuals wouldnot express their opinions in public, the Hausa depend ongoge musicians to compose topical songs and through theirpublic performances, comment on moral and social issues,express opposing views about government programs andpolicies, and keep government officials and administratorsin check (pp. 141–142). Besides iskoki, freelancing goge mu-sicians perform in nightclubs as a way of making a livingand surviving the capitalist economy in Nigeria.

Unlike the Fulbe nyanyeru and Hausa goge, theDagbamba gondze in northern Ghana is associated withchieftaincy, thus elevating gondze musicians to a higher so-cial plane (ch. 4, p. 169). Whereas history of the fiddle is lessdocumented and not well known by Fulbe and Hausa musi-cians, the history of Dagbamba gondze is “widely known bythe musicians and others in the community” (p. 169). Whatis more, the gondze use history to legitimize their profes-sion. Since the gondze is a court instrument, Djedje’s narra-tive is built around the institution of chieftaincy in Dagbon,particularly the Ya Naa’s (King’s) court in Yendi, the headof gondze in Bimbilla, the Tsimsi Tsugu festival, recitationof royal genealogy, singing praise songs in honor of Dag-bamba kings, and community celebrations associated withlife cycle of royals and nonroyals. Sadly, the chieftaincy dis-pute, which began in 1960 as a result of a dispute in royalsuccession in Dagbon, has seriously affected the gondze(p. 197ff.). Also known as the Yendi skin crisis, the disputehas had serious ramifications for the learning and transmis-sion of knowledge about gondze (pp. 208–209). Like the cit-izenry, the dispute has divided gondze into two camps and,thus, created a gloomy picture for the future of gondze inDagbamba.

For a work of this profundity and magnitude, the over-all clarity and consistency in Fiddling in West Africa isastounding. It is, in part, because of the structure of chap-ters 2 through 4. Invariably, the launching pad to the be-ginning of each chapter is a brief introductory paragraphthat sets the stage for the culture area, followed by a pro-totypical context for the particular fiddle, for instance: “TheNyanyeru in Performance” (pp. 43–45), “The Goge in Perfor-mance” (pp. 103–113), and “The Gondze in Performance”

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(pp. 169–175). Having triggered the interest in her read-ers with the above teaser, Djedje then delves into a de-tailed history of the particular culture and relevant topicsabout the nyanyeru (pp. 47–77), goge (pp. 114–151), andgondze (pp. 175–220), respectively. For the last section ineach chapter, the focus is on music analysis under the gen-eral rubric, “Form and Stylistic Feature of Songs” (pp. 77–102, 151–168, 221–241). Here, style analyses are combinedwith the profiles of three musicians in each culture areato explicate how “sociocultural factors affect performancestyle” (p. 153). The idea of focusing on the biographies andactivities of individual fiddlers in each music culture res-onates with the current paradigmatic shift in the human-ities and other disciplines as we reconsider our notion of“culture.” This new paradigm presupposes that it is throughthe activities of individuals, their responses to historicalcurrents, and the choices they make that, eventually, theyexpress shared culture. Additionally, Djedje combines thevoices of fiddlers and experts with her own reflexive voicethroughout the book. For each chapter, the author drawson a wide range of complementary literature, maps, pic-tures, and extensive endnotes (more on endnotes later) toenhance her discussion. Additional enhancing materials in-clude the appendix, which is a comprehensive listing ofthe one-stringed fiddle in West Africa, a comprehensivelist of references, a discography and videography, a thor-oughly written index, and a two-CD compilation of mu-sic examples that are available online for purchase. Rec-ognizing the sheer number of ethnic groups, even in WestAfrica, with fiddling traditions, Djedje makes a passionateappeal to scholars, in the concluding section, for “com-parable studies on fiddling” in other parts of the Africancontinent for “a fuller understanding of the fiddling’s mul-tiple identities within Africa and a continental Africanperspective” (p. 250).

Despite the strength of Fiddling in West Africa, thereare some issues for consideration. For instance, readers mayfind it difficult to understand Djedje’s motive for combiningissues of identity with stylistic analysis of songs. For the titleof this section: “Music and Identity: Profiles of Three FulbeFiddlers,” and similar captions in chapters 3 and 4, are con-trary to her statements in the preceding paragraph that shewas going to analyze three different songs to mirror the listof features on pages 77–78, 151–153, and 221–223. Readersmay find issue with this whole idea of providing taxonomyof “form and stylistic features of songs” because such an ex-ercise leads to gross generalizations. Instead, it would havebeen helpful for Djedje to transcribe a song, followed bymusic analysis to point out the said features. In the schemeof things, I find myself wondering if the profiles of the threeFulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba fiddlers did not belong to anearlier section in their respective chapters.

Another issue is that some of the chapters have pre-viously been published elsewhere and, although, the au-thor acknowledges it in the main text and in the reference,she failed to inform her readers whether the present bookor chapters are contractions or expansions of previouslypublished material. A case in point is Djedje’s contribution,“The Fulbe Fiddle in The Gambia: A Symbol of Ethnic Iden-tity” in Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music.Published in 1999 and edited by Djedje, most of the top-ics and pictures echo her discussion in the present bookand a word of caution to her readers is not entirely out oforder.

Finally, although endnotes are vital to a book of thisnature, some readers may find the author’s use of endnotesto be fairly excessive. In most cases, the endnotes disruptthe reading and it would have been beneficial for the au-thor to incorporate most of them in the main text. Thereare several instances where readers are sent to the end-note in two or three consecutive sentences as in endnotes9 and 10 on page 114 and endnotes 18 and 19 on page124 to name a few. The last issue is the author’s use of theumbrella term fiddle for the nyanyeru, goge, and gondze.Although Djedje argues convincingly for her choice (seeendnote 4, p. 257), I feel that prioritizing the English des-ignation over existing indigenous terms negates a crucialtheme in her book that West African music is not homoge-nous but diverse (p. 10). It is, precisely, the heterogeneity ofcultures in West Africa (and the rest of Africa) that makes themusic exciting and at the same time challenging for schol-ars to seek for alternate ways of representing the music. Theterm, fiddle, also begs the question: what is in a name? ForDjedje should have probed further into the values, ideas,and the etymology behind the choice of names in Fulbe,Hausa, and Dagbamba for an instrument with similar fea-tures. Since the 1970s, and through the remarkable worksof some scholars, we have been able to replace terms like“finger or thump piano” with the indigenous name, mbira.When it comes to drums, we have a long way to go as wecontinue to use descriptive terms including talking drumsfor some types of drums. For until we, as scholars, make theconscious, and rightfully so, effort to lead the way in usingindigenous designations for instruments, the true meaningand understanding of the music cultures of Africa will be anillusion.

Once we get past these concerns, we realize that Fid-dling in West Africa furnishes substantive and intelligentanswers to various questions about the nature and pur-pose of fiddling in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba. Djedjemakes a significant contribution to ethnomusicology withfar-reaching impact across disciplinary boundaries. Fid-dling in West Africa is an invaluable resource for studentsand scholars, as well as the general public.

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Reference cited

Djedje, J. C., ed.1999 The Fulbe Fiddle in The Gambia: A Symbol of Ethnic Iden-

tity. In Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music.Pp. 98–113. Los Angeles: University of California, Los AngelesPress.

Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereigntyand Identity in Native California. Les W. Field. Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 208 pp.

SHAYLIH MUEHLMANNUniversity of California, Berkeley

Abalone Tales is one of the inaugural volumes of Duke Uni-versity Press’s series entitled “Narrating Native Histories,”which aims to foster a rethinking of conventional method-ological frameworks for locating work on native historiesand cultures. Les Field and his collaborators have writtena rich and multifaceted account of abalone’s profound im-portance to native tribes of northern California. Motivatedby the premise that certain animal entities embody culturalmeaning and significance, the author and contributors ex-plore how abalone provides insight into native identitiesand struggles for sovereignty in northern California.

For thousands of years, abalone, a large molluskspecies native to California’s coastal waters, has been usedby Native peoples for food, as the material basis of adorn-ments and fishhooks, and as a central feature of traditionalnarratives. Abalone Tales weaves together perspectives froma variety of different contributors who provide multiple andoften divergent interpretations of the contemporary mean-ings and historical roles of abalone. Field’s cocontributorsinclude the chair and members of the Muwekma OhloneTribe, a Point Arena Pomo elder, the chair of the Wiyot tribeand her sister, several Hupa Indians, and a Karuk scholarand performer. The diverse combination of voices and gen-res provides a complex ethnographic rumination on theplace of abalone in processes of cultural revival and iden-tity formation among Native peoples of California.

The book is organized into three parts, with each sec-tion exploring connections between sovereignty, identity,and the relationships between native communities andabalone. Part 1, “Artifact, Narrative, Genocide,” examinesthe place of abalone in the histories of the MuwekmaOhlone and Wiyot tribes. The first chapter narrates thestruggle for federal recognition by the Muwekma OhloneTribe analyzing the place of abalone artifacts in this strug-gle. The chapter also examines the role of anthropologicalwork in the tribe’s erasure from both from the anthropolog-ical record and bureaucratic recognition. For the Wiyot ofHumboldt Bay, in contrast, abalone has played a significant

role in the tribe’s cultural recovery from the 1867 massacreat Indian Island. In chapter 2, tribal chair Cheryl Seidnerand her sister Leona Wilkinson both speak about the storyof Abalone Woman, a mythic being who, in traditional nar-ratives, is killed by her lover and transforms into abalone.The chapter discusses the relevance of this tale as a part ofWiyot cultural heritage, which can contribute to healing thetraumas of the past.

Part 2, “The Meaning of Abalone: Two DifferentAbalone Projects,” continues with the theme of abalone asa cultural trope. The chapters incorporate the voices of twonative intellectuals who discuss the centrality of abalonenarratives to their own tribes’ search for sovereignty. Inchapter 3, readers are introduced to Florence Silva, a PointArena Pomo elder, and her knowledge of abalone as a food,an entity in narratives, and a material for regalia. Chapter 4is written by the Karuk scholar and performer Julian Langand offers his perspectives on the significance of abalonenarratives within the larger project of revitalizing the Karukculture.

Part 3, “Cultural Revivification and Species Extinc-tion,” narrows in on specific questions regarding the role ofabalone in regalia and narrative as well as a source of food.Chapter 5 focuses on the Hoopa Valley reservation. Integrat-ing story telling by Vivien Hailstone and Darlene Marshalland interviews about Abalone Woman, the chapter high-lights the fusion of traditional and contemporary interpre-tations of regalia and narrative in the context of resurgentcultural forms in the Hoopa Valley. Finally, chapter 6 com-bines interviews and anthropological analyses of the de-cline of abalone species and the trope of extinction amongCalifornia’s unrecognized tribes.

A sobering and powerful insight that emerges over thecourse of the book is a glimpse of the impact that western“extinction tropes” have had on native groups in California.Field offers a devastating appraisal of how anthropologistshave historically been involved in processes of cultural ero-sion of Indian identities as well as implicated in the failureof some tribes to gain official recognition. This point res-onates with Field’s collaborators’ contributions that drawout interesting contrasts between the tribes struggling withlegacies of genocide and erasure and those less burdenedby these processes.

A related theme that recurs among the various voices inAbalone Tales is the idea that tribal sovereignty is insepara-bly linked to issues of cultural identity and revival. Identityis not essentialized in these discussions but instead formu-lated as constantly transforming in the context of express-ing social being within relations of power (p. 9). Field arguesthat for Indian tribes in the United States, identity forma-tion has been constrained by three distinct forces: The ex-perience of colonialism, the persistent state-led efforts todefine the meaning of Indian identity and police its bound-aries, and, finally, the complicit and sometimes contentious

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relations between anthropologists and Indians over defin-ing these identities.

In keeping with the theme of the series, the book is aself-conscious work of dialogical ethnography. Perhaps asa necessary corollary, the result is a slightly uneven narra-tive without a unilinear argument. Instead, views and ex-periences of abalone are refracted through Field’s own or-ganization of the text. Field’s engagement with the dialogicproject raises old questions about what it means to “elimi-nate” the authoritative voice of the anthropologist in ethno-graphic narratives, or whether it is even possible in the firstplace. But Field is careful not to overstate claims that heachieves such elimination. Rather than obscuring his role inthe text, Field makes explicit his motivation for the project,his organizing voice, and the power of his choices in themes,focus, and collaborators. One of the most compelling as-pects of the book is Field’s elegant narration of his care-ful and self-reflective progression through this process. Thisvolume is an important contribution to scholarship on in-digenous politics and cultural revival in native Californiaand will be of great interest to anthropologists engagedin methods of collaborative ethnography as well as nativecommunities interested in the tools of anthropology.

The Arab Jew: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Re-ligion, and Ethnicity. Yehouda Shenhav. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2006. 280 pp.

REBECCA L. TORSTRICKIndiana University South Bend

Yehouda Shenhav begins personally to introduce readers tothe “dilemma” of Arab Jews in Israel, his subject. His Iraqifather, we learn, made a career working for Israel’s intelli-gence community. Shenhav notes his father and his friendswere a “nature reserve” for the new state, which strippedArabness from many while allowing a few to continue liv-ing as Arabs “by license” (p. 3).

Much has been written about the tenuous position-ing of Mizrahim in Israel and the identities ascribed to androles allowed “Arab Jews” by the Israeli state. As a found-ing member of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, Shen-hav has noted in “Bond of Silence” that if Arab Jews wererecognized as a collectivity by Israeli society, that societywould have to reframe and reorganize many of its cen-tral premises. In this current book, Shenhav departs fromthis corpus by examining an earlier, prestate encounter be-tween Zionism and the Iraqi Jewish community. His goalis to elucidate why “the location of Arab Jews in Israel [is]so complex, so emotional, and such dangerous territory”(p. 9).

His chosen case, laid out in chapter 1, is the settlementestablished in 1942 by male workers of the Solel Bonehconstruction company—built not in Palestine, but nearAbadan on the Iran–Iraq border. Hired by the Anglo-IranianOil Company to build and maintain oil-refining facilities,the workers remained in the region for three years un-der British imperial auspices. The legal settlement providedcover for the illegal entry of Zionist emissaries who traveledto cities throughout the region where Jewish communitieswere found to urge them to immigrate to Palestine. A histor-ical “terminus a quo,” it was in Abadan that Zionism beganto systematically explore how to implement the million-person immigration plan for Arab Jews. Shenhav exploresthe networks through which Zionist nationalism workedin this “third space” of Iraq—a place neither Diaspora norEretz Israel. He notes its colonial dimensions—while theSolel Boneh workers were not “colonists,” they were part ofa larger British colonial presence. The essential dichotomywas that workers saw themselves as more akin to the Britishthan local Jews (the “others”), yet they were trying to recruitthese “others” as kinsmen to support the Zionist nationalistcause by immigrating. As he notes, the Solel Boneh work-ers themselves represented Bakhtinian polyphony: someworkers were there as true workers while others were emis-saries disguised as workers; some true workers supportedthe cause by teaching Hebrew or forming youth groups intheir spare time while others actively opposed and sabo-taged national activity.

In chapter 2, Shenhav develops a “phenomenology ofcolonialism” using Foucault’s concepts of “heterotopia” and“heterochrony” to frame the differing perceptions of spaceand time held by local populations, British colonial authori-ties, and the Zionist workers. He explores the fluid constitu-tion of Arab Jewish identity there within the frame of orien-talization. Was Abadan a colony, as many workers called it,invoking a European space, or a “moshava,” a Zionist space?Was the proper “human material” sent there to realize thenationalist mission? Who was a Jew and how was he differ-ent than an Arab? In marking the “otherness” of the Jews ofIraq, Solel Boneh’s emissaries were also attempting to “re-cruit the ‘other’ into its ranks” (p. 71). They spoke of localJews in disparaging terms: “They can be turned into ‘hu-man beings,’ but we shall not be able to accomplish thattask without the help of the people of the Land” (p. 72).Although the emissaries recognized that local Jews were“different” than Arabs, they could not articulate that differ-ence; only locals could differentiate between Jews, Arabs,and Christians.

In chapter 3, Shenhav demonstrates, using Latour, howZionism hybridized and purified the Arab Jews, as they be-came both religious and Zionist. Hybridization occurredas the Zionist leadership in Palestine adapted the earliermechanism of the shadarim, emissaries who went on reli-gious missions to seek support for the Jewish community in

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Palestine, to national ends in spreading the Zionist messageand recruiting immigrants. At the same time, those new net-works were “purified” by marking them as distinct from theparasitic practices that they replaced. In Iraq, secular Zion-ist emissaries bitterly complained about the lack of properreligiosity of Iraq’s Jews because they hoped to build on thatreligiosity and love for Eretz Israel. They projected religios-ity onto Iraq’s Jews in order both to de-Arabize them and tonationalize them.

In chapter 4, Shenhav explores debates over popula-tion exchanges, the right of return, and reparations. He il-lustrates how the Israeli state created a linkage betweenthe 1948 Palestinian refugees and the Arab Jews who immi-grated to Israel as a mechanism to block the Palestinians’call for right of return. He continues this line of reasoning inchapter 5, where he explores how the World Organizationof Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) attempted to con-tribute to the state’s agenda by claiming rights to propertyleft behind in Arab countries to transfer those rights to thestate, which could use them to counterbalance Palestiniandemands for reparations. As WOJAC attempted to recapturehistorical memory and advance its claims as an ethnic orga-nization, it laid bare a nationalism that had created ethnicdifference only to deny it, thus splitting the national logicand exposing its messiness.

This is a theoretically dense book but well worth the ef-fort to work through. In the end, I found myself wishing Icould read this work written from the Iraqi Jewish side ofcontact. How did they understand the Solel Boneh workers?Did they “Occidentalize” the Zionists while simultaneouslyyearning to recognize them as kin? The true tragedy is thatwe will never know. The generation that lived through thesetimes as adults is almost gone, their memories dying withthem. Shenhav, at least, makes us ponder what they mighthave shared, if asked.

Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits ofSincerity. Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J.Puett, and Bennett Simon. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008. 229 pp.

MATT TOMLINSONMonash University

At the core of this book stands the claim that ritual and “sin-cerity” are counterposed. Ritual, the authors write, is “per-formative, repetitive, subjunctive [‘as if’], antidiscursive,and social,” whereas sincerity is “indicative [‘as is’], unique,discursive, and private” (p. 115). The authors—two anthro-pologists, a religious studies scholar, and a psychiatrist—propose that this tension is generated in all societies and

in all areas of social life, not only religion. The marriageof anthropological, literary, and psychoanalytic insights ina compact volume is welcome. In some ways the book it-self can be seen as a ritual text, repeating its theme throughbounded variations as it gestures toward larger truths, withthe authors taking on a wide range of ethnographic, histori-cal, literary, and musical examples to show how this tensionis worked on but never resolved.

Despite its insights and erudition, I found the bookfrustrating for several reasons. First, the warrant for the au-thors’ argument is that we exist in a “broken” world, andthey seem to take it for granted that readers will agree.By “broken,” they mean such things as “fundamentallyfractured and discontinuous,” ambiguous, incomplete, andartificially bounded (pp. 11, 44–47, 99, 112). In describingthe world as broken, they acknowledge that they are ar-ticulating an understanding grounded in specific culturalcontexts, namely, ancient Confucian and Jewish scholar-ship (pp. 11, 180). They use this understanding to disturbscholarly tendencies to seek resolution and completeness,which is useful, but they take the understanding to be self-evident and universal, although it is neither. Calling theworld “broken” is an ontological claim that many would dis-agree with (see, e.g., Michael Scott’s recent monograph onArosi polyontology).

Second, the authors use the term sincerity to denote an“as is” orientation to the world in opposition to ritual’s sub-junctive “as if,” but the distinction seems overdrawn. Theylocate sincerity in movements that supposedly reject ritual’sformal aspects, from Protestant reformers stripping awayCatholic ornament to punk musicians abusing themselvesonstage. Although they acknowledge that they are using theterms ritual and sincerity as ideal types, and that the cate-gories interpenetrate, the authors push the distinction hard,especially in the book’s earlier chapters. Consideration ofWebb Keane’s recent work on the semiotic ideology under-lying Protestant ritual attempts to create sincere orienta-tions could advance the authors’ argument while perhapstempering its overstatements (such as their unsubstanti-ated reference to “the tendency of modern societies to rejectritual and diminish its usage” [p. 46]).

Third, one of the book’s strengths—the authors’ adven-turous use of examples from a wide range of historical andcultural contexts—is undercut by their use of invented ex-amples that prove the opposite of what they are supposedto. An example from page 117 exemplifies the problem. Theauthors begin by criticizing scholars who use survey dataon prayer to evaluate a public’s “religiosity.” They point outthat “such surveys make no distinction in types of prayer.”This is surely a fair observation, but to illustrate their pointthey write:

The Protestant housewife, mixing her cake batter whilepraying for a good visit with her friend, with whom she

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has had some difficulty and to whom she will servethe cake, receives the same ‘sociological’ significanceas the Jew praying ma’ariv (evening prayer) or the Mus-lim at jum’a (Friday prayer). Aside from the ideologicalaspects of such categorization, it is simply poor socialscience. The Christian is, phenomenologically speak-ing, doing something very different from her Jewishand Muslim counterparts. She is engaging in a volun-tary, discursive, indicative, and very private act. She issincere. The Jew and Muslim instead undertake a per-formative, repetitive, subjunctive, sometimes antidis-cursive, and social (even when done alone) act. Theyare doing ritual.

Objections come thick and fast: first, this housewife is not aperson but a stereotype, Maude Flanders made even morecartoonish thanks to the imagined detail of the cake bat-ter. Second, each of the characteristics listed for Jewish andMuslim prayers applies to her, too. She is performativelyacting to ensure the success of her visit. She has presum-ably prayed like this before, and her present action gainsforce from the repetition of previously “answered” prayers.Her prayer is subjunctive, as she asks God for an “as if”scenario in which her past difficulties disappear in the fu-ture. She probably adheres to nonlinguistic (“antidiscur-sive”) prescriptions for successful prayer, turning off the ra-dio, closing her eyes, and so forth. Finally, when she prays,she feels least alone, developing a social relationship withdivinity that creates intense emotional bonds. My third ob-jection is that the authors put the reader (well, me, anyway)in the position of arguing like this with silly invented exam-ples, which themselves are examples of poor social science.

Finally, the authors’ style of writing detracts from theforce of their argument. In their preface, the authors con-gratulate themselves on the success of their collaboration.I agree that they have been truly collaborative: remarkably,considering the number of authors and their different back-grounds, the book sustains a single authorial voice. Alongthe way, however, minor but irksome logical errors creep in,as when the authors write, in their discussion of a classicalChinese text, that “the world is inherently fragmented: thereis no foundation, there are no overarching sets of guide-lines, laws, or principles” (p. 34). But the term fragmenta-tion implies that there must be a foundation to crack apart.And this book follows the unfortunate trend of overusingthe term precisely, using it to mark the parts of their argu-ment that depend most on general assertions rather thanprecision (see pp. 26–30).

Despite these criticisms, this book deserves notice asthe product of interdisciplinary dialogue. Scholars of rit-ual and performance will appreciate the authors’ attempt toweave together anthropology, history, religious studies, andpsychology in a single pattern—even if the resulting patternis far less crisp and coherent than the authors depict.

References cited

Keane, Webb2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission En-

counter. Berkeley: University of California Press.Scott, Michael W.

2007 The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, anda Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands.Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture ofPrediction. Gary Alan Fine. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2007. 294 pp.

CAITLIN ZALOOMNew York University

Weather surrounds us and generates a continuous seriesof questions about the future. What should I wear today?Will my airplane land safely and on time before the thun-derstorm hits? Will the hurricane touch down in my city,or scrape the coast and head out to the ocean? Answersto both such mundane and consequential problems de-pend on the science of weather prediction. Gary Alan Fine’sethnography, Authors of the Storm, illustrates how forecast-ers, or operational meteorologists as they are known moreformally, construct their predictions, and, in turn, lead theiraudiences through the uncertainties of the day-to-day en-vironment. Fine follows weather forecasters at work in theoffices of the National Weather Service (NWS), one of thefederal government’s most respected and least controversialprojects. The NWS supplies weather information for localnews stations, air traffic control, and the military. Each ofthese ventures relies on meteorological predictions to directhuman activity: from the everyday choice of a commuter todrive or take the train to decisions on airplane groundings,the NWS produces knowledge of the future that shapes theflow of our technoscientific society.

Authors of the Storm skillfully employs the techniquesof shop floor ethnography, illustrating how meteorologistsconstruct their predictions. Fine leads his readers throughthe routines, emotions, and time pressures that character-ize meteorological work. Empirically, this is new ground fororganizational research, but familiar issues arise for readersin the anthropology and sociology of work and occupations.For instance, weather forecasters confront the conflictbetween workers’ skills and the juggernaut of technology.Operational meteorologists worry that, like their factorycounterparts, machines will replace them. Although knowl-edge workers are often set apart from factory laborers, dis-placement by machines is central to the daily concernsof both.

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Which can forecast better, humans or models? Thisquestion of machine accuracy versus human skill sits atthe center of forecasting practice. Facing this challenge, theforecasters’ relationship to their work turns on a questionof legitimacy, both the legitimacy of their own skill and thelegitimacy of their science more broadly. It is, of course,common to hear disparaging remarks about the accuracy ofweather forecasts. The meteorologists draw on the author-ity of science to support their claims and, at the same time,self-consciously negotiate their place at its fringes. How-ever, the weather room is a very specific kind of shop floor,one that exemplifies critical problems at the heart of con-temporary knowledge work.

Fine introduces meteorology as an example of a “pub-lic science,” or one that engages primarily with a lay audi-ence and not with other specialists. He offers the key insightthat weather forecasters’ efforts to garner authority at theedge of the scientific field actually shapes weather forecastsand the production of the future. “Public science” is also anapt description of meteorology because it links science togovernance, placing predictions of the future at the heartof modern endeavors to know and direct human activities.Today’s dubious economic environment has made forecast-ing more prominent than ever as federal strategies turn onthe answers such predictions offer: Will the recession turninto a depression? How long will the economic downturnlast? From the floor of the NWS, where operational meteo-rologists do their work, Fine generates insights that probemore general questions about how such predictions aremade.

In Fine’s skillfully produced ethnography, the weatherroom stands in for a range of contemporary fields whosemain object is the prediction and control of the future. Themeteorologists’ daily routines illuminate the contemporaryquest for knowledge. In particular, they place the identifi-cation and reduction of risk at its center. Uncertainty al-ways constitutes a problem for such systems, and the futureis the most radically uncertain of terrains. Theorists suchas Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann have located theuncertainties of the future at the core of modernity, wheretechnological tools create their own uncertainties and haz-ards. By showing his readers how weather is, in part, sucha technological artifact, Fine engages with these promi-nent concerns for anthropologists of modernity and scienceand technology. Authors of the Storm is an important andcompelling case study that deftly joins theoretical insightsand ethnographic detail to show readers how the future ismade.

Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Mar-garet Paxson. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson CenterPress, 2005. 388 pp.

JENNIFER PATICOGeorgia State University

Margaret Paxson’s Solovyovo is—and is not quite—whatits subtitle describes it to be: “the story of memory in aRussian village.” The book, based on in-depth participant-observation and interviews in the mid-1990s, presents inarresting imagery the everyday life of a northwestern Rus-sian village the author calls Solovyovo. It paints the kindof memorable tableaux that one might expect from a tal-ented novelist, and in this sense it indeed weaves a kindof story: a wide-ranging one that includes calendrical prac-tices and holiday celebrations, healing practices, the mean-ings attached to local landscapes, and both Orthodox andfolk forms of religiosity, spirituality, and engagement withotherworldly powers. Yet this story’s plot is far from straight-forward, as the ethnography resists presenting any easilysummarizable account of what happened in Solovyovo inthe 20th century—or, more to the point, of how all this wasremembered at the century’s end.

Most notably, this is not a story about how the endof socialism impacted Solovyovo’s villagers. Although Pax-son is careful to place them with respect to many eventsand institutions (pre-Soviet through post-), the collapse as“big bang” is notably absent here. Nor is this a story aboutthe continuity of primordial peasant values or Slavic souls.Paxson points out that scholars and pundits have presentedtwo broad kinds of answers to the question of “what comesnext” for Russia: one that assumes that a universalizing,all-absorbing capitalist marketplace will pull Russia into itsvortex and transform it into something culturally familiarto the West, and another that relies on essentialized notionsof cultural identity to imply that Russia and Russians willnever really change (pp. 5–6). While recent ethnographersof Russia have presented subtler pictures of postsocialistchange than those, Paxson moves further by eschewing any“before and after” narratives at all. Instead she dwells onlived, daily practices of remembering in which multiplehistorical experiences echo, paying particular attention tohow these memories are attached to both physical spaces(such as forests and other local landscapes) and symbolicones (“landmarks” of memory including calendars and rit-ual observances). The specific points of reference—from

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recollections of Soviet collectivization to individuals’ sto-ries of contact with otherworldly powers in the woods sur-rounding their village—come into and out of focus, spillingout in different directions and reconverging at other mo-ments in the book. This can be slightly dizzying, but it re-flects the author’s view that practices of memory are lay-ered, somewhat inertial, and not necessarily coherent.

For instance, in a particularly provocative chapter(“The Red Corner,” ch. 7), Paxson considers the physicaland symbolic space of the “red corner,” where icons havemingled with representations of tsars and party leaders invillage homes over time. The red corner provides a con-crete context for attending to how a range of seeminglycompetitive—but in many ways mutually resonating—figures of authority, protection, inspiration, and domina-tion figure in villagers’ day-to-day talk about past, present,and future. Paternalistic, sometimes vengeful national lead-ers share space in the village imagination with similarlymercurial Orthodox saints and “trickster beings” (p. 262) aspeople sort out how to deal with problems (economic, agri-cultural, health related, psychological) and ponder to whomthey should turn for assistance. In practice, the answer tothis question is not singular but reflects a multiplicity ofpasts and memories: “Komu obratit’sia? Tuda. Whither doesone turn? There, to that mixed and manifold place” (p. 262).This reading of the red corner exemplifies the book’s over-arching argument “that memory is cumulative and layered,and, yes, weighty” (p. 9).

What are the implications of this view for our under-standing of postsocialist transformations at large, or ofrural lives more specifically? Ultimately, Paxson suggeststhat because social memory “is supported by repeatedsocial actions that take place in some of the most mean-ingful . . . spheres of life: language and metaphor, narrative,ritual, religion, commemoration,” it is “stronger and moreresilient than it appears . . . desire, whether brutal orbenevolent, is not enough to re-cast the actions that carryand reproduce memory” (pp. 346–347). Paxson seems to

suggest, then, that Solovyovo’s villagers and their framesof reference are to some extent beyond the reach of thepoliticians, economists, or nonprofiteers who might wishto remake them. While new social memories are bound toaccrue as large-scale economic and political structures shift(and Paxson recognizes that privileged sites of memorysuch as the red corner “can become charged with massivepolitical power,” p. 262), it appears that these will neitherthoroughly penetrate village imaginations nor settle assuperficial veneers on essentially unchanging sensibilities.Rather, they seem likely to take up residence alongside thespecters that already occupy the corners and pathways ofthe local landscape.

The strength—and for many readers, I suspect, thedifficulty—of this book lies in the density of its voluminousdetails. Paxson is unapologetic about this stylistic choice:

So much has been said in ringing, essentializing tones,about the relative malleability and slavishness (or bravepersistence of bullheaded stubbornness) of Russian vil-lagers . . . I see this attention to detail not as an ethno-graphic indulgence, but as the one way in which thepicture of memory—at a bird’s eye distance from theforest to the trees—can be mapped. [p. 216]

Each chapter is lengthy, each a thick, often poetic, andsometimes meandering rendering of the concerns (“Radi-ance,” “Healing,” “Calendars”) that animate village life. Onemust read attentively to track Paxson’s analytical points ineach chapter and to keep hold of them to see how thethreads ultimately come together. This makes the book per-haps more appropriate for professional and graduate-levelaudiences than for most undergraduates (this may be par-ticularly true given that the narrative moves frequently andnimbly around a broad theoretical terrain, from anthro-pological classics such as Victor Turner to Russian literaryand folklore analysis). Engaged readers, however, will find agreat deal of value and subtlety in Paxson’s story.

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The curse of Nemur: in search of the art, myth, and ritual of the Ishir - By Escobar, Ticio

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