The sari – Mukulika Banerjee & Daniel Miller

Book reviews

Archaeology and prehistory

Byrd, Brian F. Early village life at Beidha,Jordan: Neolithic spatial organization andvernacular architecture. xiv, 442 pp., maps, figs,tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2005.£99.00 (cloth)

For almost half a century Diana Kirkbride’sinvestigations at Beidha in Jordan were regardedas the quintessential example of early village lifeat the southern end of the Fertile Crescent.Preparation of final excavation reports is always adifficult undertaking, all the more so when thefieldwork was directed by one individual and thetask of drawing the threads of the syntheticreport are conducted by another whoparticipated in none but the last of thelong-running seasons. Brian Byrd is to becommended for tackling such a massive task andfor the systematic and thorough nature of hisendeavours, this being the second volumepublished by him after that on the much lesscomplex Natufian remains underlying theNeolithic village.

As noted explicitly by Kirkbride herself, andreiterated by Byrd in the introduction, the fieldmethodology employed at Beidha was in directapposition to her earlier experience withKenyon’s narrow, deep sounding excavations atJericho, where not a single complete Pre-PotteryNeolithic structure was exposed. The Beidhaexcavations thus focused on providing extensivehorizontal exposures of the village to enableinvestigation of community organization andlayout.

The report comprises eight chapters.Chapter 1 examines current approaches to Near

Eastern later prehistory. Chapter 2 focuses onthe site setting, history of excavations and thegeneral occupation sequence of the site.Chapter 3 describes the methodology andanalytical tools employed. Chapter 4 presentsthe stratigraphy and chronology, including theproblematic nature of many of the radiocarbondates for fixing the precise duration of theoccupation, although the conclusion is thatthe entire sequence relates to the MiddlePre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). Chapter 5 detailsthe construction methods and modifications ofthe individual structures from the differentphases. Chapter 6 examines variability,continuity, and change in architectural layoutthrough the sequence, including the spatialstructure of the community. Chapter 7

synthesizes developments in communityorganization and the utilization of space withinthe village. Chapter 8 concludes by placing thearchitectural results within the broaderperspective of developments in the Near East.An abstract is provided in Arabic, while some450 photos, plans, and figures provide copiousdocumentation for the text.

The most radical change compared toKirkbride’s preliminary reports relates to thepresentation of the stratigraphy. Byrd simplifiesmatters by employing a three-fold model (albeitwith sub-phases), corresponding to what heultimately concludes to be the basic residentialarchitectural styles. These developed from theround and curvilinear houses of founder PhaseA, through sub-rectangular structures in Phase B,to the two-storey corridor buildings of Phase C.Here, it is of some interest to note that thepartial preservation of upper storeys in the latestphase had previously caused considerableproblems in stratigraphic assignment.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724© Royal Anthropological Institute 2006

Byrd views the site as having beencontinuously occupied throughout the MiddlePPNB, and believes that residential unitsthroughout were organized around the nuclearfamily. He sees the shift from Phase A to Phase Bas deriving from the catastrophic burning ofmost of the village, bringing about theabandonment of highly flammable timberedstructures as a construction element. However,architectural changes were tempered by othermechanisms, and the fundamental trendsthroughout the entire sequence included ‘first,the increased discreteness of individualhouseholds as the focus of activities andproduction; and second, the appearance andthen expanded importance of distinctive,significantly larger corporate buildings’ (p. 128).Furthermore, ‘distinction between public andprivate space increased over time ... storage andproduction were spatially segregated from theexterior and from most public portions ofdomestic buildings (the upper storey). Hence,access to knowledge regarding storage andproduction was more restricted and wellcontrolled’ (p. 129). The upper storeys of PhaseC corridor houses were for eating, sleeping,entertaining, and were physically separate fromthe storage and production areas in basements.This increasing compartmentalization ofactivities reflected more restricted socialnetworks.

The significantly larger corporate structures(most ostentatious in Phase A) are interpreted ashaving functioned for supra-householddecision-making, ceremonial, and politicalactivities, in contrast to the more segregatedritual/cultic area structures to the east side of thesite. Monoliths, large post holes, and massivecarved basins comprised significant componentsof such installations and structures, which alsolacked much of the refuse common in andaround domestic structures. Other publicarchitecture includes the village wall and steps,which appear to have acted as a buttress for thesoft sandy sediments on the south side of thesettlement. Still, Byrd sees no real evidence ofoverall village planning.

While some attention is paid to the spatialdistribution of furniture and some small findswithin structures, as well as patterns of garbagedisposal, detailed analyses must await anothervolume. Byrd is to be congratulated for bringingthis volume to fruition, the results of whichdocument one of the most important Neolithicsites excavated in the Near East.

A. Nigel Goring-Morris The Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem

Coe, Michael D. The Maya (7th edition). 272

pp., maps, figs, tables, plates, illus., bibliogr.London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. £9.95

(paper)

Michael Coe published the first edition of thisbook forty years ago with the intention ofproviding the public with a compact andreadable introduction to the Maya that peoplecould easily take with them when visiting themagnificent Pre-Columbian ruins in southeasternMexico and adjacent countries of CentralAmerica. That Coe is still improving the bookand that it is still a best seller testify to thebrilliance and endurance of both author andsubject. Just as an artefact, the present edition isa definite advance over, for example, themid-course fourth edition (1987), with moreillustrations, including many in colour, largerprint type, and better paper capable of resistingthe sweaty hands of intrepid tourists. Theseamless coherency of the book’s subsequenteditions over the course of Coe’s productive anddeeply influential career may derive from centralproblems and themes he posed to himself andhis readers from the outset: How did the Mayaadapt to their natural environments over time?What was the relationship between the Mayaand their neighbours as they emerged ascivilizations? What can we infer from theelaborate artwork and inscriptions of the Mayaabout their religion, politics, and socialorganization over time? And what happened inthe ninth century AD in what Coe calls theCentral Area (the southern lowlands) during theso-called ‘collapse’? I will touch on some of thenews in this edition.

Recent lake core analyses in the lowlands,combined with sediment analyses from coastalVenezuela, document several important episodesof drought in first millennium AD, and Coesuggests that drought may have impacted somesignificant events in Maya history, such as thecollapse of the great city of El Mirador, a slackingoff of elite activity in the mid-Classic called theHiatus, and the ninth-century collapse in theCentral Area. Maize is an especially droughtsensitive staple, and no matter how this complexrelationship between climate and culturaladaptation continues to play out, Coe iscertainly right to believe that the empiricalpatterns will be central to our understanding ofMaya political economy.

The Maya lived in a ‘world’ of manycivilizations, and they traded, allied, and likelywarred with their neighbours from the time ofthe first settled farming communities in the

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Preclassic or Formative period. As an expert onthe earlier Preclassic Olmec civilization with itsmajor centres in the Gulf Coast lowlandsadjacent to the Maya lowlands, Coe hasconsistently maintained that Olmec religious andpolitical institutions shaped and informed thoseof the later Preclassic Maya. In this edition Coedetails exciting new Late Preclassic muralsdiscovered by William Satumo depicting Mayakings and gods at the site of San Bartolo innortheastern Peten. Coe’s student Karl Taube isresponsible for the analysis of the religious andpolitical symbolism of the new murals and he ismaking a compelling case for the perpetuationof the Olmec maize god as the pivotal deity inMaya rites of royal sacrifice and accession.

Coe calls the decipherment of Maya glyphsover the span of his career a revolution, andindeed this edition contains a rich tapestry ofancient history peopled with kings, queens,conquerors, reflecting the advancement of ourability to read the ancient texts. The challenge tostudents of the Maya is how to assess the realitybehind the royal descriptions of events througharchaeological field research. Updating aperennial debate over the relationship betweenthe great Classic period highland Mexican city ofTeotihuacán and the Maya, Coe describes howDavid Stuart recently showed that the warlordSiyaj K’ahk’ (‘Fire is Born’) likely travelled fromthe west to conquer the major Maya city of Tikalin January of AD 378. Stuart identified amonument inscription on Stela 15 at the site of ElPeru, ancient Waka’, some 75 km due west ofTikal, that placed Siyaj K’ahk’ there eight daysbefore he arrived at Tikal. My currentarchaeological research project at El Peru-Waka’,co-directed with Héctor Escobedo, is confirmingthe significance of Siyaj K’ahk’s arrival there inearly January AD 378. Project epigrapher StanleyGuenter’s reading of Stela 15 links the arrival ofthe warlord with the accession of the local kingas a vassal. He and I also identified a secondWaka’ stela that not only discusses Siyaj K’ahk’but also portrays him posthumously as aTeotihuacano warrior some seventy years afterthe celebrated arrival. Clearly the kings of ElPeru-Waka’ regarded their vassal status to SiyajK’ahk’ with great pride and as pivotal to theirhistory. We continue to explore for furtherarchaeological evidence relevant to this episode.

The ninth-century collapse in the CentralArea is a fertile enigma that continues to inspirethe current generation of Maya experts as it hasall previous ones. Coe lists three major factors:dense populations stressing the fragile tropicalenvironment; severe episodes of drought; and

warfare. Of these, warfare has become evenmore prominent in this edition. Research duringthe 1990s in the Petexbatun by Arthur Demarestand the Vanderbilt project documented thatalong the Pasión River, population pressure anddegrading environment were not major factors.Rather, warfare on an increasingly destructivescale brought down the royal capitals and droveaway those who could flee. In late 2005

Demarest reported the final wholesale massacreof royal courtiers at the palace of Cancuen,southernmost major lowland capital on thePasión. Why the majority of Central Area Mayafought themselves into total demographiccollapse remains an open question, but thearrogance and short-sightedness of the rulingelite surely played a pivotal role.

So the story of the Maya continues, andCoe’s fresh take on it is engaging, accessible,and authoritative. One may hope that he willprovide yet another recounting before theturning of the great Maya cycle in 2012. Therewill surely be new discoveries and insights torelate.

David Freidel Southern Methodist University

McAndrews, Timothy L. Wankaranisettlement systems in evolutionary perspective.xiv, 125 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. La Paz,Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh, 2005. $21.00

(paper)

The southern highlands of Bolivia in the moderndepartment of Oruro along the Rio Desaguaderoare a harsh, unforgiving environment. Althougharid, cold, and hypoxic, the region was the sceneof the development and persistence of aremarkable archaeological culture – Wankarani.Thought to have existed from 2000 BC to AD250, it is best known for its tell-like mounds,some of which reach a height of eight metres,and elaborate carvings in stone of the heads ofllamas. Despite these interesting features, littlesystematic research on Wankarani had beenconducted until the 1990s, when Marc Bermannof the University of Pittsburgh, his Boliviancolleague José Estévez Castillo, and a number ofBermann’s graduate students initiated a series ofsurvey and excavation projects in the region.

In this slim monograph, Timothy L.McAndrews takes on the task of describingWankarani culture and crafting an explanation ofits development and evolutionary trajectory. Themonograph, which is based upon McAndrew’s1998 dissertation, is composed of seven chapters:‘Theoretical background’ (chap. 1), ‘Field

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methodology’ (chap. 2). ‘Cultural context andchronology’ (chap. 3), ‘Environmental setting’(chap. 4), ‘Wankarani settlement systems’ (chap.5), ‘Post-Wankarani settlement patterns’ (chap.6), and ‘The emergence and organization ofWankarani village-based settlement’ (chap. 7).Each is presented in both English and Spanishon alternating pages. This dual-language formathas necessarily led to an economy of descriptionof project findings. In compensation, someuseful data sets have been made available onlineat the University of Pittsburgh Latin AmericanArchaeology Database(http://www.pitt.edu/~laad), including the basicdata used for creating population estimates,descriptions of ceramics and projectile points,and a complete list of map data, site locations,and other descriptive information.

The goals of McAndrews’s research were to(1) determine the degree of nucleation duringthe sedentarization process; (2) examinesettlement location as a proxy measure of thetype of subsistence system; (3) describe thegrowth of the settlement system; (4) determinethe degree (if any) of inter-site variability; and(5) identify trends toward the establishment ofa settlement hierarchy (p. 1). His theoreticalorientation has been strongly influenced by thework of Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, whohave pioneered the modern anthropologicalarchaeology approach to the origins of settledvillage life in both Mesoamerica andMesopotamia. McAndrews’s work is thusprofoundly processual and firmly grounded in acultural evolutionary perspective, and exhibitsboth the strengths (clear problem orientation;good articulation of theory, method, and data)and weaknesses (primary reliance uponadaptationist causality of cultural change) of thisparadigm. His project consisted of full-coveragesurvey of two regional blocks and a samplingstrategy of an area between them. A single testunit excavated at a key site provided additionalchronological control, new radiocarbon dates,and a confirmation that mounds were likely tohave been occupied over hundreds of years.

The results of his research proved somewhatmixed. Because McAndrews found no Archaicperiod sites, no sense of the sedentarizationprocess could be determined. We haveWankarani mounds with no apparentantecedents. The absence of an Archaic has beenobserved elsewhere in Bolivia (the Valle deTiwanaku; the Taraco Peninsula near Chiripa)and is something of a puzzle since abundantArchaic materials have been found in Peru in theRio llave interior. Villages were tethered to

riverine contexts, suggesting an agricultural, oragro-pastoral, adaptation, although confoundingthis is a lack of non-mound Wankarani periodsites that may have served as seasonal pastoralcamps. Settlement system growth wascharacterized by slow population increase andvillage fissioning. Although some variability inactivity performance was observed, nosettlement hierarchy was identified.

I see this monograph as an important, butincomplete, first step in elucidating processes ofWankarani cultural change. McAndrews’sresearch has identified the outlines of theseprocesses, but many questions remain. In part,this is due to the limitations of survey data,which only provide information on the final useof the mounds. I also suspect that aspects of thesedentarization process are buried at their bases.To address properly the questions he has raised,excavation is necessary. I thus found it surprisingthat no mention was made of Courtney Rose’sdissertation excavations at nearby La Barca(Household and community organization of aFormative Period Bolivian Settlement, 2001). Itappears that McAndrews did not update hisdissertation to include archaeological and,importantly, palaeo-environmental datapublished since 1998. This is unfortunatebecause Rose’s work as well as new data onenvironment both support and challenge someof his findings and explanations of them.

Mark Aldenderfer University of Arizona, Tucson

McGhee, Robert. The last imaginary place: ahuman history of the Arctic world. 296 pp., maps,illus., bibliogr. Ontario: Key Porter Books, 2004.$39.95 (cloth)

It is rare to find a readable and engaging bookthat deals with a variety of intellectual issues in abroad geographical region and extensive timeframe yet proves well researched andincorporates the personal experiences andtransformations of the author. With RobertMcGhee’s The last imaginary place we haveexactly such a viable contribution to the historyand anthropology of the Arctic. The book’ssubtitle calls attention to the idea that McGhee’sproject is a human history, and I trust readerswill be convinced that McGhee successfully linksthe history of the Arctic to broader issues ofanthropological and humanitarian significance.

One noteworthy advantage of this book overother historical treatises of the Arctic is that itconsiders the Arctic region as an interconnectedcomponent within the rest of the human world.

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http://www.pitt.edu/~laad

Thus, the book brings the peoples and places ofthe Arctic out of the exotic, and emphasizes therole and effects of the developing world system.This approach aids the author in his main task:tracing the representations and images of theArctic as otherworld from ancient times to thepresent. The major issue which is pertinentacross the Arctic and has a major impact on thelives of its people is the view, mainly on the partof peoples living outside the Arctic, that theregion is a wasteland useful only for extractionof economically relevant resources. Concomitantwith this view is the position that Arctic peoplesare somehow living representatives of the StoneAge. McGhee eloquently dispels both myths andexplores the reasons behind the contradictoryfascination and fear of the Arctic amongexplorers, travellers, and others who have madethe Arctic their temporary home. Thus, the bookis useful for a variety of educational venues, suchas circumpolar anthropology, globalization andcolonization, and identity, beyond being anexcellent read for the educated layperson.

Alongside the books titular goal, McGheeprovides evocative and excellent discussions ofmajor archaeological discoveries in the Arcticmaterial and their implications, concisesummaries of the issues with which nativenorthern peoples have historically dealt, and apresentation of the forces likely to bring futurechange to the aboriginal peoples of the Arctic.McGhee begins the book with a brief discussionof the relationship between the expansion ofmodern humans, technological developmentsduring the Palaeolithic, and the challenges andconditions presented by the Ice Ages. Thispreface adds a new idea to discussions of humanevolution and a claim for the universalimportance of Arctic adaptations for thedevelopment of our species. The next chaptertraces the history of the Arctic in ancientthought, displays superb scholarship, anddemonstrates the path dependency ofotherworldly representations of the Arctic overthe millennia. This argument is carried throughseveral other chapters of the book and providesan overarching theme.

McGhee’s discussion of the importanceof hunting for Arctic peoples’ sustenance andcosmology is presented in chapter 3, along witha fulfilling overview of the archaeology of theTuniit and Inuit. The stereotypical image of theInuit is one of a people who have a long historyof adaptation to the high Arctic. The proof of thisview is the existence of ‘Palaeo-Eskimo’/Dorsetculture, or Tuniit. Those who accept this ideawould benefit greatly from McGhee’s discussion

of the archaeology of the Norse colonization ofGreenland and Canada, and the expansion ofthe ancestors of contemporary Inuit. McGheediscusses Inuit oral history of their origin andconquest of the region. This evidence, some ofwhich McGhee examined first-hand, links thepeoples of northern Canada with the peoples ofSiberia and northern Europe. Similarly, McGheehas an excellent summary of the history andcontemporary situation of the native peoples ofArctic Siberia.

One can learn a great deal about themedieval colonization of Iceland, Greenland, andNortheastern Canada and how this colonizationaffected the lives and cultural developments ofindigenous peoples from The last imaginaryplace. This well-written contribution to Arctichistory and anthropology shows how Icelandicand Greenlandic and Inuit historical narrativescorroborate the archaeological evidence. Severalchapters of The last imaginary place deal with theexploration of the Arctic by Europeans andAmericans in search of various passages to theOrient, sources of gold, whale oil, furs, ivory,and national and personal glory. Without atraditional concept of private property, Arcticpeoples were susceptible to the land-hungryand destructive powers of colonization,mercantilism, industrial development, andsettlement. McGhee’s final substantive chapterlooks at the relationship between indigenousArctic peoples and their land and resources,providing an instructive introduction to a largebody of literature on the topic of indigenousrights and Arctic peoples.

John P. Ziker Boise State University

Moffat, Alistair. Before Scotland: the story ofScotland before history. 352 pp., maps, plates,bibliogr. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.£18.95 (cloth)

Before Scotland is a good and engaging exampleof a new kind of archaeology book, in which thehuman story takes centre stage. Its title echoesthose by masters of previous generations,Gordon Childe’s Prehistory of Scotland of 1935

(and subsequent versions) and Stuart Piggott’sScotland before history of 1958 (and subsequentversions). Each has taken the same brief: to givean account of the land during the distant mistsof prehistory, before the time when there can bea more secure history with actual knownplace-names, persons, and dates.

In those old books, the material record is thefocus. Care and effort patiently tie the curiosities

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into a culture-history sequence; social inferenceis necessarily restricted. A generation ago,calibrated radiocarbon dating transformed laterprehistory, and with it has come the ever-finerknowledge of the sites and their specifics. A farmore detailed culture-history can now be thestarting-point for an account concerned morewith human lives and experiences. The singularmaterial anomalies remain: the chambered tomb(if ‘tomb’ is indeed what the megalithicstructure with human bones socially was) ofIsbister, with its bones of at least fifteensea-eagles; the mounded burial place (if ‘burial’is indeed the social word for this deposit) atIrthlingborough with the bones of 184 cattle. Butthere is a confidence now that we can makesense of the meaning of these things rather thansay nothing or unreliably speculate in animaginative but pointless way.

So we are given a strong and lively storyright through. As well as the famous old Scotssites like Skara Brae and Cairnpapple Hill, wevisit ‘Doggerland’, the low-lying lands off theBritish Coast in early post-glacial times whichwere flooded over to become the Dogger Bank,a famous fishing ground in the North Sea. Whenit comes to the Classical period, the Romans arepresented as the rapacious and exploitinginvaders they were, rather than welcomebringers of order, straight roads, and plumbing.I would have enjoyed the correspondingopportunity having been taken to present thesubsequent ‘Dark Ages’ instead as the ‘BrightAges’. They are indeed dark, if Scotland is seenas slipping beyond the radiating light of adimmer Mediterranean empire. They can bebright if they are seen as a period of northernadvancement, a time of gold and highdecorative arts, when the internal links betweenthe northern lands were a better engine of abetter advancement than had been the externalexploitations of an acquisitive Roman Empire.

The renewed and productive enthusiasm fora human story has instructive intellectualconsequences. It strongly advances continuitymodels over perilously long time-periods, as thepursuit of human experiences relevant to the farpast naturally tends to privilege any historicaland near-modern accounts that seem sufficientlyclose in place. The annual guga (gannet) hunton the rock of Sulasgeir by men from the Isle ofLewis is seen as

that rare thing, one of the last survivals ofan ancient way of life ... the people ofLewis claim that the guga huntgoes back to the 15th century ... the

overwhelming likelihood is that it goesmuch further back, all the way to thearrival of the early pioneers after theretreat of the last Ice Age.

With the seabird subsistence economy of St Kildain the later nineteenth century, and thecontemporary craft of making coracles withcanvas, it is made a lively part of the chapter,titled ‘The wildwood’, on the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of some 10,000 and more years ago.

A good and imaginative range of modernand historic analogues are seen as pertinent tolively accounts of these ancient matters. But yetagain, I am reminded of the paradox of recentrelations between prehistorians andanthropologists. Just as the prehistorians,starting famously in the ‘New Archaeology’ ofthe 1960s, have been in urgent need of socialmodels, social models which the anthropologistsshould know from their ethnohistories ofsocieties so unlike those of the modernWesternized world, we have found thatanthropologists had lost interest in thesematters, and preferred instead to follow thefashions of literary criticism, and the unhelpful(to archaeologists) games of postmodernism.Where can we offer the energetic and smartauthor of this book, a TV producer rather thanan academic, better and more systematic andmore soundly based social analogues than hisdependence on simple models of locallong-term continuity?

The book uses the device of separateexplanatory boxes, to say what ochre is and howwidely it has carried human meaning, or justhow chronologies came to be ‘BC’ or ‘AD’. Thepublishers call these valuable and quirky. Thetoo-cute and irrelevant ones – that there arefossilized prawns near the summit of Everest –should have been quietly killed.

Christopher Chippindale Rock Art ResearchInstitute, University of the Witwatersrand;

Australian National University; Cambridge University

Palka, Joel W. Unconquered Lacandon Maya:ethnohistory and archaeology of indigenous culturechange. xxi, 318 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus.,bibliogr. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2005.$65.00 (cloth)

This is the first archaeological investigation of thehistoric Lacandon Maya, and the first study inthe historical archaeology of the Maya area thatdeals with a tribal society without permanentstructural remains. As the author notes, most

Book reviews680


historical archaeology in the Maya area to datehas focused on more complex communities withindigenous and/or Spanish architecture, andmore complex archaeological features andartefact assemblages.

The Lacandon lived in small villages andhamlets of perishable structures in the remotejungles of the southern Maya lowlands, and theircommunities left few, if any, traces. Remainingtraces of these settlements include an occasionalhistorical report, increasingly scarce oral historyaccounts, a few non-indigenous fruit trees(mango, avocado), and scattered artefacts buriedbeneath the litter and topsoil of the forest.

The first five chapters of the book exploreLacandon history, archaeology, culture change,demography, and settlement patterns, andinclude a critical survey of the past research onthe ethnohistory and ethnography of theLacandon. The author draws on a large body ofhistorical and ethnographic material, and thisexcellent review (and bibliography) provides avaluable reference work. The Lacandon, whodescended from one or more early Colonial tribesof the southern lowlands – Ch’ol, Kehache, Itzaj,and perhaps other – crystallized as a distincttribal group in the late eighteenth century, whenthey are first reported in historical accounts.

Chapter 6 enters new territory with theaccount of the survey and excavation of severalsites in the Guatemalan Petén. The presence ofthe Lacandon in the Petén in historical times ispoorly documented – all the groups studied byethnographers are in Chiapas – so the researchfills an important void in their history. Most ofPalka’s sites are in the Pasión River/Petexbatúnregion, where he excavated three sites (Caobal,Matamangos, and El Mangal), as well as anothersettlement near Tikal, in the Central Petén. Theartefacts, coupled with historic information,indicate that they were occupied in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thesurveys of the sites included the use of metaldetectors, and the excavations involved shallowhorizontal exposures of large surface areas,which resulted in the identification of residentialareas and living floors with activity areas. Thefollowing two chapters present a description andanalysis of the artefacts, and discuss theirimplications for the reconstruction of Lacandonbehaviour, and transformations in their lifestyle,economics, and material culture.

The archaeological materials allow Palka todocument Lacandon culture change over a200-year period, providing a unique perspectiveunmatched by any other researcher. Along withother scholars who have studied the Lacandon in

depth, the author further dispels the notion ofthe Lacandon as an isolated, degraded ‘pure’descendant group of the Classic Maya, and addspersuasive new evidence that, like any othersurviving Maya group, they have undergonesubstantial cultural change. Moreover, the richinventory of trade goods recovered from thesites include a variety of items from non-localsources, such as bottles, ceramics, and metalartefacts, some manufactured in North Americaand/or Europe. This evidence of extensivetrading activities reflects long-term engagementwith the outside world – interactions withtraders, hunters, loggers, and other tribes in theregion, as well as visits to frontier settlements –further dispelling widely held notions that theLacandon were isolated and had few contactswith outsiders.

The final chapters address larger issues ofchanges in Lacandon social life and the impactof increasing interaction with the outside world,and the resulting impact on their own socialorganization, language, religious rituals,ideology, and identity. These transformations arehaving a dramatic effect, as many have left thejungle for modern settlements, and only ahundred or so survive in small residentialclusters in three main localities of the Lacandonforest of Chiapas.

The production of the volume is finely done.The text is thoughtfully organized and wellwritten, and lavishly illustrated with numerousdetailed maps, both of the Lacandon region andof individual sites, and many high-quality inkdrawings and photographs of artefacts,settlements, and scenes of Lacandon life. Theseinclude illustrations of artefacts from theexcavations, as well as god pots from variouslocalities across the lowlands. The photographsinclude many recent and archival illustrations ofLacandon individuals and families, settlementsand houses, and a large collection of historicaland recent pictures of Lacandon material culture,perhaps the most extensive ever published.

This superb study will be of interest not onlyto Maya archaeologists and historians, but alsoto archaeologists conducting research into tribalgroups worldwide.

Anthony P. Andrews New College of Florida

Pluciennik, Mark. Social evolution. 156 pp.,illus., bibliogr. London: Duckworth, 2005. £11.99

(paper)

Mark Pluciennik’s Social evolution is published inthe series ‘Duckworth Debates in Archaeology’,

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along with books on topics such as the Romancountryside, shipwreck archaeology, and stateformation in early China. Yet unlike some of theothers, it addresses both archaeological andsocial anthropological issues. It covers ideasfrom both fields, with both historical andcontemporary sources, and also thinkers likeMandeville, Montesquieu, Herder, WilliamRobertson, and Adam Smith in the eighteenthcentury. Pluciennik’s starting-point, however, isreally the seventeenth century, a case which hehas argued in recent, more specialized,publications. Although he seems tode-emphasize that period here, he does add toconsideration the suggestion that evolutionismhas its sources not just with intellectualarguments and empirical observations, but alsowith the dawn of colonialism and capitalism.Space precludes him from taking this too far inthis book, but it is an idea worth thinking aboutfor both students and historians ofanthropological ideas.

In the nineteenth century, evolutionism‘returned’ through the new disciplines ofarchaeology and anthropology and theirnewfound notions of ‘culture’. No doubtconstrained by his publisher’s word limit,Pluciennik gives less space to this interestingperiod than perhaps some readers would like,but he explains briefly the technologicalsequences introduced by Thomsen, Nilsson, andLubbock, and the interplay between culture and‘race’, for example, in Herbert Spencer’s works. Iwould have liked a little more on developmentsof the time in Danish and Swedish archaeology,as well as British archaeology, but whatPluciennik does include is wonderfully clear andengaging.

One of his best sections is that of the relationbetween the ideas of figures such as Morganand their implications for the likes of the USBureau of Indian Affairs (tellingly, originally partof the War Department) in the late nineteenthcentury, and throughout he encouragesrethinking relations between theory andpractice. Yet there are periods and developmentsmissing, such as the debates betweenmonogenists and polygenists in the earlynineteenth century which were so important inthe institutional construction of anthropology(e.g., the Ethnological Society of London versusthe Anthropological Society), and were alsosignificant in light of wider debates then onslavery and on the treatment of ‘natives’. Yet infairness, I acknowledge that this book is aimedmainly at archaeology students, many of whommight (in my view, erroneously) regard these

things as peripheral to the understanding ofevolutionism for their field.

The Boasians and neo-evolutionists of theearly twentieth century are covered in a littlemore depth, and included are botharchaeologists like Gordon Childe and socialanthropologists like Steward and White. Thereare also tantalizing comparisons to classicalChinese and Hindu conceptions of evolution(two of Pluciennik’s specialist interests in earlierworks), as well as reflections on classic Westernsocial theorists, notably Marx. The mutualinfluence of archaeology as politics and viceversa is a subject explained in the last chapter,on ‘the frameworks of social evolution’. Here weare treated to debates, for example, onnationalism and archaeology, and on regionaldiversity in broad categories like ‘Mesolithic’ and‘Neolithic’. This contains original material, andshould be a delight for students to explore.Pluciennik is explicit about the potential forethnocentrism in the history of ideas, and thatcertainly is worth some thought on the part ofhis readers.

In all, this is a wonderful little book forundergraduates in archaeology and in socialanthropology. It introduces them to key themesand key thinkers and to some of the largerissues of the disciplines through their historyand as practised today. However, it is, inten-tionally, a very short book, and its main failingis that the issues it covers are dealt with everso briefly. That said, it should provide a clearand inspiring introduction that will, one hopes,encourage students to delve deeper into someof the sources that Pluciennik summarizes. Itwill also at least show them some of the namesand issues that the idea of ‘social evolution’invokes, and challenge them to think deeperabout big ideas in archaeology and anthropol-ogy and, of course, appreciate their historicalsignificance.

Alan Barnard University of Edinburgh

Stringer, Chris & Peter Andrews. Thecomplete world of human evolution. 240 pp.,maps, tables, figs, plates, illus., bibliogr. London:Thames & Hudson, 2005. £24.95 (cloth)

The recent sensational discovery of a new typeof primitive hominid on the island of Flores,one of the Indonesian Sunda Islands, marks formany of us a turning-point in the study ofhuman evolution. The discovery highlights howlittle we actually know about human evolutionin Southeast Asia, and the growing rapidity with

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which our views need to be constantly revisedand updated. Perhaps this discovery marks anew era in the study of human evolution – oneof consolidation and strengthening of existingparadigms, not only by new fossil finds, but alsoby the application of relatively new molecular,medical, chemical, and radiometric methods. Weare therefore in the midst of a new phase inwhich we can further refine existing evolutionarymodels, and develop new ones that are basedon our growing ability to obtain a vast array ofinformation from CT-scans, radiometric methods,ancient DNA and taphonomical studies to namebut a few.

The complete world of human evolution byChris Stringer and Peter Andrews is written bytwo veteran researchers in palaeo-anthropologywho have not only witnessed some of the mostsignificant discoveries and breakthroughs inhuman evolution during the last few decades,but are also responsible for some of the majorparadigm shifts and phylogeneticreconstructions in the discipline. It is a book thatwill satisfy both non-scientists and lay readers asa new popular science volume about humanevolution.

The book’s main strength is its excellentcolour pictures, plates, tables, and figures,following a typical Thames & Hudson formatand layout. The textual part is at times very briefbut none the less succinct and offers theessential information about some of the maintopics in human evolution. The chapters providea concise up-to-date account of all the majoraspects of human evolution, which all in allgives the reader an excellent introduction to afascinating discipline in constant flux.

The first section, titled ‘In search of ourancestors’, contains chapters about humanvariation, palaeo-anthropology, the geologicaltime scale, various archaeological methods, andenvironments. This section provides the readerwith a crash introduction to some of the centraltheoretical and methodological aspects thatunderlie any palaeo-anthropological study suchas a brief introduction to radiometric datingmethods, excavation techniques, andtaphonomy. The second part of this sectionprovides six study cases from some of the majorfossil sites, such as Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, aswell as from non-African sites such as Rudabányain Hungary and Pas,alar in Turkey. These areparticularly informative as they provide thereader with specific details about how fossils aredetected, excavated, and recorded, and by doingso gives a glimpse into what it is actually like tobe out there in the field.

The second section, titled ‘The fossilevidence’, is straightforward with achronologically based structure. It deals with theevolution of ancestral apes, australopithecines,and the Homo lineage, and concludes with a fewchapters on the contribution of genetic studiesto the study of hominid evolution. The selectedchapters give a broad, brief state-of-the-artoverview about the fossil record. It is awell-balanced section that not only offersgeneral information about the main fossils butalso supplies the reader with the essentialcontext, namely the main theories, debates, andcontroversies that are associated with each find.Thus, Stringer and Andrews use their extensiveexperience to juxtapose skilfully betweenchapters that focus on a specific species andones that use a specific site, such as Gran Dolinain Spain, as a focal point of discussion about theearly occupation of Homo in Europe and thetransition from Homo Heildenbergensis to theearliest Neanderthals.

The third section, entitled ‘Interpreting theevidence’, covers a mixed bag of topics that arenone the less essential to those who wish togain a holistic insight into some of the morecomplex aspects in human evolution. It startswith two chapters on the evolution oflocomotion and the evolution of feeding, moveson to address the First Americans, followed byfive chapters on tools, and the reconstruction ofhuman behaviour. The chapters on the evolutionof locomotion and feeding are in my opinioncentral to human evolution and thus theirinclusion is particularly welcome.

In sum, this is a first-rate up-to-date accountof the main issues of human evolution. Thebook is enjoyable and is highly recommendedto those requiring a simple crash course intothe field. For anyone who is interested inhuman evolution and is looking for acomprehensive overview, this is a good placeto start. It may also serve undergraduates as itcan help them to set straight their chronology,fossil nomenclature, and geography and alsoprovide them with some essential references tomore academic sources on each of the topicscovered.

Ron Pinhasi Roehampton University

Trigger, Bruce G. Understanding earlycivilizations. xiii, 757 pp., illus., bibliogr.Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2003. £40.00 (cloth)

Understanding early civilizations is acomparative study of seven early civilizations. It

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is a monumental work of twenty-nine chapters,divided into three core sections which addresssocio-political organization, economy, andcognitive and symbolic aspects. The book haswell over 300,000 words of almost continuousprose with no more than a scatter ofillustrations. It makes minimal use of sectionheadings within chapters and has no truck withbox features, diagrams, and so forth. Perhapsconscious of the daunting prospect thisprovides to readers who have become used toideas and data being served in bite-sizedchunks, easily digestible but providing limitedacademic sustenance, Trigger suggests in hispreface that those primarily interested intheoretical issues might like to read no morethan nine chapters – four introductorychapters, a chapter that summarizes each ofthe core sections, and two concluding chapters.Do not do this. Read every single word of thisbook, even though you must sacrifice asubstantial chunk of your life to do so. It isbrilliant in every respect.

While Trigger declares that the book took nomore than three and a half years to write, it is ineffect a life-time’s work for he notes that as afinal-year undergraduate in 1959 he had writtenan essay comparing five ancient urban centres.In this work he selects seven early civilizations tocompare: the Old and Middle Kingdom of Egypt(2700-1780 BC); southern Mesopotamia(2500-1600 BC); northern China in the lateShang and early Zhou periods (1200-950 BC);the Valley of Mexico in the late fifteenth andearly sixteenth centuries AD; the Classic Maya(AD 250-800); the Inca kingdom during the earlysixteenth century AD; and the Yoruba and Beninpeoples of Western Africa from themid-eighteenth century to the beginnings of thecolonial era in the late nineteenth century. Tomake his comparisons, Trigger describes each ofthese civilizations in detail, drawing on a widerange of primary and secondary sources todisplay an astonishing breadth of knowledgeand depth of insight. This allows the book to actas a comprehensive source for information aboutall aspects of these civilizations, irrespective of itsachievement with regard to cross-culturalanalysis.

Trigger debunks an array of what have beeninfluential claims about early civilizations, suchas the arguments from Elman Service andMaurice Godelier that these were theocracieswhich relied on fear of the supernatural ratherthan military force for control of the lowerclasses, and Mircea Eliade’s argument for auniversal cosmic plan which influenced the

layout of cities and temples in all civilizations. Hereplaces these grand claims with meticulousattention to what the data actually tell us aboutlife in early civilizations, writing with an assuredand persuasive authority.

While explicitly about early civilizations, thisbook is really about the nature of anthropologyand the nature of being human. Trigger is asunhappy with extreme cultural relativism as heis about rationalism, the proposition thatpeople of all cultures behave in basically thesame way with cultural variation being nomore than epiphenomenal. Rather thantrying to resolve this deep-seated divide inanthropology by argument alone, he gets towork by identifying the precise ways in whichearly civilizations were similar and in whichways they were different. He finds that bothsimilarities and differences were present andrightfully declares that ‘to ignore thesesimilarities out of loyalty to hoary dogmas ofcultural relativism or historical particularismwould be as misleading as to ignore culturaldifferences in the name of unilinearevolutionism’ (p. 274).

Some of the differences can be explained byadaptation to different environments, notablythe different agricultural systems that wereemployed. Others derive from idiosyncraticcultural traditions, such as the specific art stylesdeveloped by early civilizations, although therewas a surprising amount in common withregard to subject matter. The similarities areprofound and far-reaching and cannot beexplained away by invoking similarities in thepre-civilization chiefdom societies of eachregion, as unilinear cultural evolutionists wouldwish to do. Neither are they found just at theeconomic and technological level: there arestriking similarities in cosmological schemesthat each civilization used to understand theiruniverse. Trigger concludes that to understandhow these similarities have arisen,anthropologists need to pay greater attentionto how biological evolution has resulted incertain psychological propensities within thehuman species to think and behave in somemanners rather than others.

This book is a monumental work and amagnificent achievement. It is not only aturning-point in the documentation andunderstanding of early civilizations, it is alsoprofoundly important reflection on the nature ofanthropology and the nature of the humancondition.

Steven Mithen University of Reading

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General

Arons, Nicholas Gabriel. Waiting for rain:the politics and poetry of drought in NortheastBrazil. xxvii, 251 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Tucson:Univ. Arizona Press, 2004. $36.95 (cloth), $17.95

(paper)

Very occasionally, a book happens along whichis so honest and raw in its treatment of anotherwise dispassionate subject (in this casedrought) that it can move the reader to tears.Nicholas Arons has accomplished just such a rarefeat in his poetry-studded narrative of thereasons for, and the multi-layered reactions to,the cyclical phenomenon of drought innortheastern Brazil. In his carefully rendereddescriptions of the dusty towns of the inlandsertão, as well as his recounting of the history ofwhat he terms ‘concentration camps’, wherethousands of refugees from the drought-riddeninterior gathered in coastal cities, Arons’s wordsdeliver an emotional punch. He skilfully exposesthe seamy politics of this most poverty-strickenregion of Brazil, a land which from the momentof colonization to the present has enduredendless hardship.

Certainly, the subject of drought is not a newone to Brazilianists, and the wrenching povertywhich accompanies such cycles as well as thedignity of the proud and resigned people of theNortheast who withstand such deprivation havebeen dissected by journalists and academicsstretching back for generations; one thinksimmediately of da Cunha’s Rebellion in thebacklands, Ralph Della Cava’s work on PadreCicero, and Robert M. Levine’s monograph onthe débâcle of the Brazilian military’s attempt torout the religious followers of Anthony theCounsellor from their latter-day Massada atCanudos. Anthropologists have also exposed theinjustices of this landscape (perhaps in Englishthe works of Nancy Sheper-Hughes and CandiceSlater are best known) while cinematographershave rendered the region familiar through theexperimental cinema novo films of Glauber Rochain the 1960s and, most recently, Walter Salles’sCentral Station (1998).

But what distinguishes Arons’s account fromprevious studies is his rare gift of writing witha compelling immediacy which privilegeshis position as novice in the region, whilesimultaneously taking the reader along for theride. As Arons takes his first steps towardsimmersion into the culture of the Northeast, thereader vicariously experiences his discomfort,

whether it is anxiety as he hitches a ride with areckless driver into the interior and recites everyprayer he can think of to survive the night,laughter as he successfully avoids being draggedoff to whorehouses, or stupor as he reels fromhis over-indulgences in beer-drinking (all in thename of research). Numerous fascinatingcharacters people his narrative: the local poetsPatativa and João Bandeira who wrote in thetradition of literatura a cordel (poetic chapbooks);endless streams of women daily carrying waterfrom distant wells to their towns; dusty, oftenlifeless, children who suffer so dramatically; andthe chain-smoking Dutch priest who ministers tothese poorest of the poor.

At the same time the reader is exposed to thepainful history of the region, especially theremarkable droughts of the 1870s, 1930s, and1990s, each of which killed thousands. Aronsclaims not to be a Brazilianist, but he is clearlywell versed in the prinicipal historical events andtexts of the region as well as its literature andcinema. More to the point, his observations areall meticulously referenced with academicprecision.

With a consistent eloquence, Arons recordsthe reactions of the local people to their lives,their resignation as well as their religiousfanaticism, and their sometimes violentresponses to the brutal reality of a federalgovernment that cannot (or will not) rectifyconditions to avoid the disaster of drought.The matter-of-fact way mothers speak of theirinfants’ death through hunger, the humiliationof Arons’s disfigured friend by the local bossesto whom he is serving dinner, the water-diviners’ lack of interest in ‘official’weathercasts, are all beautifully handled inexquisitely sharp relief.

If the resulting narrative is more poetic thanscholarly, the fault lies not with the author’slack of background but with his literary bent.Certainly the excerpts of local poetry which arewoven into the text are intended to reinforce thisimpression. Considered by themselves, thesepoems are sometimes amusing (as when Aronsasks a local poet to write a poem onhand-washing and proper toiletting), but moreoften than not, these snippets serve to reinforcethe impression of resignation so characteristicof this part of Brazil.

One might imagine that the author’s aim inwriting this book would be to arouse action, buthis conclusions perhaps only obliquely may beconsidered a call to advocacy. Rather, Arons iscontent to honour his new friends in the regionby re-creating in print the magical-surreal quality

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of the world in which they live. And, in thatgoal, he succeeds magnificently.

Roberta Marx Delson The American Museum ofNatural History; Drew University

Biehl, João. Vita: life in a zone of socialabandonment. 404 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2005. £21.95

(paper)

João Biehl’s book – Vita: life in a zone of socialabandonment – reads, in the best ofethnographic fashion, like a mystery thriller. Thesetting is a run-down philanthropic asylum insouthern Brazil that, during the years underobservation (1995-2003), harboured a motleycrew of elderly, physically handicapped, andmentally ill patients as well as domesticatedstreet-dwellers and rehabilitated drug-users. Ourguide through this maze is Catarina, a wiltedbeauty, sinking ever deeper into her wheelchair,who tirelessly scribbles, in near-obsessivedetermination, what she calls her ‘dictionary’.Having discovered, in this presumably psychoticpatient, a cogent partner in dialogue, theethnographer begins to perceive the apparentlydisconnected phrases written in her notebook asthe musings of a poetic subjectivity, seekingdesperately to be heard. Thus, the title of thebook’s introduction, copied from the openingpages of Catarina’s notebook reads ‘Dead alive,dead outside, alive inside’.

By leading his readers through the ‘thickdescription of a single life’, Biehl reveals a tale of‘social psychosis’, involving years of misdirectedgovernment health policy, medicalincompetence, and the gradual disappearance ofthe patient’s family. As he pieces together thefragments of this woman’s existence – firstthrough Catarina’s own narrative and thenthrough the careful tracking down of medicalrecords and family members – we discover arural worker who, as a young bride, and stillcaring for her invalid mother, migrates to theoutskirts of the state capital, where she andother family members find work in the shoeindustry. Complaining of persistent pain, andsuffering frequent falls, she is quickly let off fromwork, becoming one more victim of thecountry’s economic decline. Over the next fewyears, her periodic admissions to the region’sdifferent mental institutions register varieddiagnoses: schizophrenia, postpartumdepression, severe mood disorder. Catarina, herrelatives inform public authorities, represents ahazard to society: she refused to nurse her

premature baby (her third child), had burnedher husband’s documents and other belongings,and was known to attack people – in at leastone instance, with a knife. The inevitablesolution: emergency institutionalization inwhatever facilities available. Despite suchdamning documentary and visual evidence, theauthor raises doubt in the reader’s mind: couldthis pathetic figure be something more than araving madwoman – the role assigned to her bypractically all concerned?

This Bildung tale, told by the Brazilian-bornauthor, raised in places and circumstances notso different from those of Catarina’s childhood,is divided in two parts. During the first,reflecting broad erudition, the author calls onthinkers from Nietzsche to Lacan to ponderthe fate of ‘ex-humans’, left in ‘zones ofabandonment’ such as the asylum he studied.Here, his text dialogues not only with Catarina’smelancholy poetry, but also with the photos ofTorben Eskerod, who forcefully frames scenes ofutter abjection. In fact, despite the apt depictionof a two-tiered health system that in many casescondemns the Brazilian poor to sordid neglect,this is the part I find less interesting. The tone ofmoral indignation seems to point an accusingfinger at just about everyone (state officials,patients’ families, hospital and shelteradministrators, etc.), leaving ‘Catarina’santhropologist’ to restore humanity, bothmetaphorically and materially, where all othershave failed. These somewhat existential musingsbegin to make retrospective sense when Biehlfinally ventures outside the asylum,encountering a surprisingly warm welcomeamong the various members (brothers,ex-husband, children) of Catarina’s ‘abandoning’family. Here, the analysis acquires properethnographic nuance and the reader becomesaware of paradoxical situations that go beyondindividual volition.

Further, it is in this second half that theauthor realizes his stated ambition (inspired inauthors such as Arthur Kleinman and ByronGood) to link personal experience and‘meaning-making’ to large-scale powerprocesses. Evoking situations similar to thoseone might find in other Third (and even First)World countries, Biehl paints a glum picture ofBrazil’s recent policies for the mentally ill: modelprogrammes that, paradoxically, promoteprogressive exclusion. Representatives of theneo-liberal government greet the healthmovement’s pleas for de-institutionalization withenthusiasm since ‘community care’ involves somuch less financial input. Progressive

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psychiatrists speak glowingly of new forms ofcitizenship for the mentally ill, but are unable topress through necessary reforms and alternativeservices that might guarantee adequate homecare. The much idealized family, pat antidote toinstitutionalized care, never seems to be quiteup to the mark. The net result is a growingnumber of disorientated people either onthe street, or confined in unsupervised,philanthropic (and suspiciously commercial)shelters, run by unqualified volunteers – inCatarina’s case, mostly reformed junkiesor born-again proselytizers.

It is profoundly ironic that, despite theinvolvement of a small army of specialists –doctors, social workers, human rightsrepresentatives, among others – no one had evermanaged to arrange a neurological check-up forCatarina, one that would have revealed the raregenetic syndrome she, all her siblings, hermother, grandfather, and a good many of herover fifty cousins, aunts and uncles werecarrying: Machado-Joseph disease. Until theanthropologist came along, no one had thoughtof taking the necessary steps that would connectthis indigent woman to the pioneer researchprogramme in the nearby university hospital thatspecialized in exactly this disorder. Even more tothe point, this autosomal dominant disease,typical of populations of Azorean descent, ischaracterized by cerebellar ataxia (andprogressive physical paralysis); it is not knownto affect the patients’ mental health.

With the story’s climax and dénouement, thereader is provided with an object lesson of howgenetic knowledge, produced through theintermingling of agencies (the author’s andCatarina’s), renders a redefinition of personhoodas well as a realignment of family ties. In thisparticular ‘biological complex’, characterized bythe interplay of genes and environment shapingCatarina’s life cycle, ethnography stands as the‘missing nexus’ through which reality is not onlyunderstood, but transformed.

Claudia Fonseca Universidade Federal do RioGrande do Sul

Crapanzano, Vincent. Imaginative horizons:an essay in literary-philosophical anthropology.xiii, 260 pp., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2004. £13.50 (paper)

Following Serving the word, his recent book onreligious and legal literalism in America,Crapanzano’s new book is an investigation onthe faculty that, arguably, suffers the most under

a literalist hermeneutic. An elaboration ofCrapanzano’s 1999 Adolph Jensen lectures, thisbook’s concern is with the imagination, as thework of both individuals and cultures. Here,‘imagination’ is not taken to delineate some sortof highly structured ideational material thatstands as the terminal result of a process, as itdoes in tropes such as ‘imagined communities’,the ‘historical imagination’, or the ‘socialimaginary’. Rather, this book takes as its subjectthe act of escaping from obdurate, quotidianreality, the attempt to cross the ‘imaginativehorizons’ that stand between the here and nowand an only dreamed otherworldliness that isbeyond our ability to perceive because of itsspatial, temporal, or ontological distance.

For Crapanzano, the beyond of this horizon,which is portrayed through the spatial metaphorof the arrière-pays, or ‘hinterland’, is complex, fortwo reasons. The first is the common epistemicanxiety that arises from the act of figuring thesubjunctive, which is of interest only because ofits lack of existence. The second difficultyemerges from the first, as this picturing of theephemeral beyond serves to reduce it; the veryact of conjuring and articulating the imaginativebrings it into the realm of the here-and-now, ofrepresentation and of circulation, and henceundoes that unreality that was the very source ofthe imaginative’s initial allure. Afterwards, theimaginative qualities continue to exist only in theform of an aura or penumbra attached to therepresentation, if at all.

Despite the transient and otherworldly natureof his subject, Crapanzano argues that theimagination is suitable for ethnographicinvestigation. He turns his attention to how theimaginative is evoked, constructed, and situated,and to how these instantiations of theimagination reflexively relocate the borderbetween the here-and-now and the beyond ofthe imaginative (as well as retroactivelytransform the already articulated imaginativeitself). Crapanzano fleshes out this speculativeethnographic project through a series ofmontage-heavy meditations on fields that havebeen of recent or long-standing ethnographicinterest, turning his attention to ‘the between’,to the body, to pain, to trauma, to hope, to thetransgressive, to the erotic, to remembrance, and(finally) to world-ending and to death. In thesechapters, Crapanzano engages in a series ofvertiginous comparisons, drawn not only fromhis own fieldwork in places such as Morocco,South Africa, and Southern California, but alsofrom other sources – in one instance the Apachepractice of ‘speaking with names’ is set aside a

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snippet of Catholic Charismatic imagistic prayer;at another moment a mid-twentieth-centurySwiss villager’s psychic decomposition is put upagainst Highland Papua New Guinea race-tingedapocalyptic Christian narratives. Given the topic,Crapanzano fittingly takes the arts as evidence aswell, addressing in passing modern dance,Wordsworth, Navajo poetry, German Surrealism,and Romantic landscape painting (to listjust a few).

Broad and insightful, the vast majority ofthese discussions and juxtapositions are quicklysketched out in a purposefully inconclusiveway – the point is not to invalidate thetheoretical glosses on the ethnographic evidenceoffered by the original reporter (although hedoes offer glancing critiques of a wide range ofethnographers and theorists, such as VictorTumer, Judith Butler, and Elaine Scarry – as wellas Johann Gottfried von Herder and GeorgesBataille). Rather, the goal is to contrast howthe stances towards the possibility of theimagination found in these cultures, theories,and works are fixed or open. This largerdiscussion entails how, in these instances, theimaginative is either an object of longing or ofdread (or at times both), and hence is foreclosedor encouraged, and how in each instance thisconstellation of sensibilities regarding theimagination functions to shape the trajectory offurther exercises of the imaginative faculty.

There is a pleasure alone in reading eachof Crapanzano’s chapters, and his erudite,open-ended, and often purposefullycontradictory musings on these topics can wellserve as a tonic to anyone interested in ways inwhich these topics could be fruitfully reframed;those interested in phenomenological,psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, and existentialapproaches to anthropology will also findCrapanzano’s virtuoso readings and critiquesrewarding. The true worth of this book, though,is in bringing anthropological attention to afaculty which, despite the near ubiquity of theterm ‘imagination’ in the social scienceliterature, is rarely made the actual centre of athorough discussion of its own.

Jon Bialecki University of California, San Diego

Handelman, Don & Galina Lindquist

(eds). Ritual in its own right. vii, 232 pp., illus.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2005. £15.00 (paper)

This edited volume, full of new and originalperspectives, makes an important contribution

to the anthropological and historical study ofritual. While ritual has been accorded a pivotalrole in theoretical approaches ranging fromDurkheimian functionalism, via politicaleconomy, to symbolic analysis and performancestudies, rituals have all too often been explainedin terms of phenomena external to the ritualitself. The usefulness of this book lies preciselyin the serious attempt to transcend thelong-standing, even hegemonic, focus on ritualas a representation of broader social andcultural orders.

In his introduction, Don Handelman makes astrong case for making the inquiry into ritualforms the basis for a comparative endeavourorientated towards ‘the integrity of ritualphenomena as phenomenal’ (p. 3). Mindful ofthe futility of searching for a singular definitionthat can encompass all rituals, Handelman treats‘ritual’ as ‘a class of phenomena whose forms,in greatly differing kind and degree, arecharacterized by interior complexity,self-integrity, and irreducibility to agent andenvironment’ (p. 10). A key argument is that themore complex rituals are in their interiorconstitution, the greater their self-organizing andself-sustaining capacities, and the greater theircapacity to produce change through their ownoperations. Some of these ideas were introducedin Models and mirrors: towards an anthropology ofpublic events (1990), but Handelman’s thinkinghas since developed into a fullyphenomenological position.

The authors of the nine substantive chaptershave responded in different ways to thechallenge to discuss ‘ritual in its own right’ andthey are variously successful in their efforts topush ritual studies beyond the limits ofrepresentation. The two essays in the firstsection, ‘Theorizing ritual: againstrepresentation, against meaning’, provideincisive critiques of canonical studies of ritualand suggest alternative ways of conceiving ritualdynamics. Of special interest is Bruce Kapferer’stheoretically savvy chapter on ritual dynamics inwhich he develops a notion of virtuality,conceived as a self-contained imaginal space andas a method for entering within the process ofreality formation. The very disjunction of theworld of rite from its larger context is, accordingto Kapferer, the key to the continuing vitality ofmany rites. In his probing critique ofhermeneutic approaches to ritual, Don Seemannotes that such approaches fail to confront theradical alterity of pain as a dimension of humanexperience. The suggestion that Levinas’swritings on the ‘uselessness of suffering’ hints at

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a different phenomenology of ritual practice isintriguing, and it will be interesting to see thisargument developed more fully.

In the section ‘Experimenting with ritual’,Michael Houseman reflects on an experiment inwhich students were made to undergo a maleinitiation rite invented by the author himself.Given that the experiment was designed toillustrate Houseman’s ‘relational approach’ toritual, readers will not be terribly surprised tolearn that the efficacy of this ritual – as withritual in general – derived largely from therelational entailments of the co-ordinateinteractions that it entailed. The discussion of‘ritual condensation’ is lucid, and Houseman’sapproach resonates with the editors’ call formaking the interior organization of rituals theprime locus and focus of study. The solecontributor who rejects the claims of ‘ritual inits own right’ is André Iteanu, who arguespersuasively that among Orokaiva peoples ofNew Guinea ritual is encompassed by exchange.

The essays in the sections on ‘Ritual andemergence: historical and phenomenal’ and‘Healing in its Own Right: spirit worlds’ are ofmore uneven quality. Pirosky Nagy provides arich historical analysis of medieval religiousweeping as an ‘intimate ritual’ practised outsideof ecclesiastical control. Likewise, GalinaLindquist’s discussion of soul-retrieval ritualspractised in neo-shamanistic New Age circlesmoves into subtle realms of experience, stressinghow such ‘rituals of the mind’ are vehicles forre-constituting the self. Whereas Lindquistpushes for a greater focus on ritual imagination,Sidney Greenfield adopts an entirely differentapproach in his account of healing ritesperformed by Brazilian Kardecist-Spiritists.Finding that the participants enter into atrance-like state, Greenfield’s main concern isto explain how hypnotherapy affects thebio-physiology of patients by operating on thecellular and even genetic level. Readers will learnmore about ritual dynamics from AndréDroogers’s re-study of a 1970s Wagenia (Congo)boy’s initiation ritual. Given the title’s promiseto treat ‘ritual in its own ludic right’, I wasdisappointed to find play and spontaneityaddressed in terms of a cognitive approachinvoking a rudimentary version of connectionismand the parallel processing of schemata.

In the final section, ‘Philosophicallyspeaking’, Robert Innis looks critically at the lateRoy Rappaport’s work, Ritual and religion in themaking of humanity (1999), offering a complexbut rewarding discussion of tacit logic andembodiment. In the epilogue, Handelman

reflects on the interface between ritual and itssocial milieu, insisting that the self-organizingqualities of rite work always through a ritualimaginary that gives them relative autonomyfrom their social surrounding. In sum, despitethe uneven quality of the contributions, this finecollection of essays is a challenging andprovocative contribution to the study of ritual,and certainly one that ought to change the waysin which anthropologists conceive of ritual.

Kari Telle University of Bergen

Harper, Douglas & Helene M. Lawson

(eds). The cultural study of work. xviii, 481 pp.,tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. £22.95 (paper)

The cultural study of work accomplishes whatwell-edited volumes do: it introduces the readerto a coherent representation of a vast literatureand does so in accessible, useful ways. EditorsDouglas Harper and Helene Lawson skillfullyselect and frame the contributions oftwenty-three authors in terms of the place theyoccupy in this nearly sixty-year-old sociologicalinvestigation of culture in US work worlds. Whatis unusual about the volume is the juxtapositionof seminal scholarship from decades that mayspan thirty, forty, or even fifty years. Their choiceto display the field in this way correspondsclearly to the central mission of this volume asset out in the introduction. By emphasizing theethnographic history of the study of work insociology, the editors guide the reader to seehow different themes have emerged as the socialcontext of the times has changed.

Nurtured first at the Chicago School ofSociology, the analysis of work cultures had, bythe 1950s, become an important area of studywithin sociology. Studies of this time focused onperformers (like jazz musicians and teachers) inrelation to their audience, ideologies promotedby medical schools about future careers, andteamwork strategies in restaurants or inoperating rooms. With the social movements ofthe 1960s, critical studies of work appeared,including research about police on skid row(reprinted here) and social welfare agencies thatrationalized their work (in the Weberian sense).

New concerns about deviant types of work(strippers, prostitutes) and deviance (theft, druguse) in normal work settings came to the forein the 1970s, some of which is included here.Hochschild’s (1979) well-known work on airlinestewardesses (reprinted here) introduced thenotion of ‘emotion work’, inspiring an important

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new stream of scholars to study how workersadapt to various emotional states that may berequired of or suppressed by their work.

Not until the 1980s did gender become animportant focus within cultural studies of work,spurred by the expanding range of occupationsin which women began to be encouraged.Increasing numbers of feminist scholars alsogave rise to new investigations about thestruggles of women trying to balance work andfamily, as well as the difficulties for those whoperform domestic work and childcare for otherwomen. Contemporary studies of work arerevisiting many of the older, ‘durable’ themes byusing new methods and new analyses.

The editors’ concern with an historicallyinformed scholarship of work shapes the entirelogic of the book. In each of the five thematicsections, the authors provide orientating reviewsof the literature addressed in that section.

Part I, ‘Work as social interaction’, involvesthe ways in which social interaction exposesformal and informal work rules and permits vitalcommunication and negotiation, all of whichmay structure the environment and perceptionof work. Part II, ‘Socialization and identity’, dealswith how people become socialized into variousoccupations; how identities that relate to workare created and how they vary; and how thesubjective experience of work varies acrossdifferent types of careers.

Part III, ‘Experiencing work’, encompasseschapters that detail the practicalaccomplishment of various tasks, how emotionsare managed, and how time shapes theexperience of work in different settings. In PartIV, ‘Work cultures and social structures’, theeditors introduce studies that address thecomplex and contested meaning of blue-collarwork, professional work, and serviceoccupations. This section is particularlyinteresting because of the significant degree ofrecent change in these definitions and categoriesof meaning. Finally, Part V is devoted to‘Deviance in work’, a long-time focus in thesociology of work.

The editors note that today, scholars devotedto the cultural study of work must attempt tounderstand the forces of globalization – arethese forces eroding working conditions and jobsecurity? Are they changing ideas about workitself? This concern, which is well known toanthropologists, exposes the unfortunate extentof disciplinary disconnection across fields thatare closely related – sociology andanthropology. For scholars in the ‘anthropologyof work’ tradition, there are already dozens of

cross-cultural studies engaging the problems ofglobalization and work. This volume points tothe practical need for such parallel universes tointersect, to cross-fertilize, and multiply inproductive, new ways.

Readers might wonder about the absence ofany explicit discussion of theory as it has evolvedamong sociologists of work. Considering thehistorical approach of this volume, it would havebeen a wonderful opportunity to review, evenbriefly, how the frames of analysis have shiftedover time alongside the shift in thematicconcerns.

The cultural study of work is an excellentintroduction to the field, a pleasure to read, andwith its organizational and editorial strength, avolume that is likely to be of lasting value.

Katherine E. Browne Colorado State University

Kramer, Karen L. Maya children: helpers at thefarm. xv, 254 pp., tables, figs, illus., bibliogr.London, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,2005. £22.95 (cloth)

Over the past twenty years, interest in life history– documenting the pace and timing of lifestages – has become an increasingly importantand productive framework guiding research onhuman evolution and has highlighted animportant evolutionary puzzle: we have slow lifehistories, in particular long life spans and a longsub-adult period, but faster reproductive ratesthan our slow life history would predict. Humanfemales have short interbirth intervals, bearingoffspring in quick succession; women regularlyget pregnant again before their weanlings arenutritionally self-sufficient. As a result mothershave multiple dependent offspring to feed andcare for over a long juvenile period. Researchersare just beginning to address how muchoffspring ‘cost’ at different ages, how mothersmeet these costs without compromisingoffspring survival, at what age children becomeself-sufficient, and why it takes them so long togrow up. Karen Kramer’s book, Maya children:helpers at the farm, attempts to tackle some ofthese questions.

Kramer begins by laying out the co-operativebreeding hypothesis, that human mothers areable to increase their reproductive rates becausethey receive help. Weaned offspring requireprovisioning and caretaking and, unlikelactation, those forms of help can be supplied byindividuals other than the mother. Kramerdiscusses two important definitional andmethodological difficulties surrounding helping

Book reviews690


behaviour. First, what exactly is help and how isit measured? Second, what is the motivation foranother individual to help and how much helpshould they contribute? Kramer analyses the‘anatomy of help’ and suggests that therelationship between children’s work and theirparents’ fertility can be uncovered using modelsdrawn from wealth flows theory. The book’sgoal is to ‘build a case about children’s helpingbehavior and the role that children play insubsidizing the cost of their parents’ continuedreproduction’ (p. 27). Kramer’s thesis is that aschildren age, they become increasingly proficientat some skills but remain reliant on subsidies inother ways. Even though children maintain a neteconomic deficit until their teenage years,Kramer argues that their particular economiccontributions reduce the costs they impose ontheir parents. Parents then reallocate that energyto continued childbearing and supportadditional dependants. Thus, childrenthemselves provide the help required forco-operative breeding.

Kramer tests this prediction usingobservational and demographic data shecollected during the early 1990s from anagricultural population of Xculoc Maya living inthe Yucatan, Mexico. She devotes severalchapters to describing the ecology anddemography of her study group and herquantitative observational data collectionmethods. Her systematic approach provides anexcellent template for rigorous ethnographicresearch in the field that will be especiallyvaluable for graduate students. The soundnessof her quantitative data assures their value forfuture comparative analyses.

In the last section of her book Kramer utilizeswealth flows theory to analyse and interpretMayan household economics. Wealth flowsmodels are designed to assess parents’reproductive decisions by measuring the transferof resources and labour across generations.This approach attempts ‘to capture the costof children from the parents’ time budgetperspective’ (p. 139). Kramer begins byexamining how children spend their time andfinds that they begin to participate in householddomestic work as early as the age of 3 and theireconomic contributions increase as they getolder. Because individuals at different ages havedifferent consumption and production profiles,Kramer argues that the age composition of afamily has important effects on parental fertility.

By the end of the last section it is clear thatwealth flows models do not address many of theimportant co-operative breeding questions that

Kramer initially highlighted in the book. First,co-operative breeding specifically focuses on theindividual trade-offs that mothers, helpers, andoffspring face. Instead Kramer focuses on theeconomic trade-offs that parents face, obscuringthe critical reproductive conflicts of interestbetween the sexes that influence caretakingeffort. Second, the models aggregate theproduction and consumption of all members ina ‘household’, again concealing the differenttrade-offs faced by each household member thatare especially important aspects of co-operativebreeding. Third, a pivotal part of co-operativebreeding is about who cares for and provisionsdependants. While Kramer briefly summarizes inchapter 6 the time children spend participatingin childcare activities, she deliberately excludeschildcare from her production and consumptioncalculations. This omission underscores howwealth flows and co-operative breeding modelsare constructed from different, and oftendivergent, theoretical platforms.

Maya children summarizes Kramer’s excellentdoctoral and post-doctoral work on householdeconomics with clear methodological guidancefor future ethnography. Her attempt to placewealth flows models in a co-operative breedingframework should stimulate future researchfocused on the differences between these twoimportant theoretical perspectives.

Shannen L. Robson University of Utah

Nuijten, Monique. Power, community and thestate: the political anthropology of organisation inMexico. x, 227 pp., maps, tables, bibliogr.London, Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003. £50.00

(cloth), £15.99 (paper)

Monique Nuijten’s Power, community and thestate is an excellent ethnography and asignificant contribution to a rich and increasinglysophisticated literature on local rural politics inMexico. Located in a land reform community(ejido), it examines the practices of local powerand patterns of organization which characterizerelations between holders of land rights(ejidatarios) and agrarian bureaucrats. Nuijtenargues for a multi-sited and fragmented view ofpower against ‘top-down’ perspectives and anover-reliance on caciqual (political bossism)models of regional power relations, and uses ananalysis happily unencumbered by routineassumptions about the way clientelism works, orby normative views on the negative role ofcorruption which disguise the instrumentalityand the meaning of corrupt practices.

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An account of village dynamics since theagrarian reform reveals shifting loyalities andalliances; while kinship relations remainimportant, neither they nor party affiliationdetermines ‘stable factions’ within thecommunity. Access to land is central – and whileit is widely recognized that ejidal land rental,sale, and inheritance issues have regularlydeparted from agrarian law and instead reflectedlocal relations of power, few studies have offeredsuch insights into the establishment of‘alternative’ procedures and the ‘re-invention ofgovernmental techniques’ which give theejidatarios considerable autonomy and security(p. 90).

Nuijten argues that while modernistorganization perspectives would characterize theconduct of affairs in the ejido as ‘messy’ andnon-transparent, her ‘practice approach’ toorganization shows patterning and ordering ofpractice in gaining access to resources.Moreover, organizing through personalnetworks and attempting to resolve issuesthrough ‘corrupt’ transactions enables people toevade state intervention and control (p. 187),while the ‘idea of the state’ is reproducedthrough expectations, imaginings of conspiracy,the fetishization of official documents, and the‘fight against corruption’ itself.

A long-standing land dispute revealsejidatarios in a constant search for the ‘right’intermediary, while agrarian bureaucrats areeager to present themselves as such, in returnfor payment and reaffirmation of their status;both parties are implicated in the logic of thesystem. Nuijten notes that while intermediariesmight be expected to ‘fill the gap between localand higher levels’ (p. 5), what stood out herewas the lack of effective intermediaries: despiteinvestment in a succession of ‘rightintermediaries’, the ejidatarios’ case remainsunresolved. Here Nuijten develops an interestingargument about how political cynicism andhope co-exist despite repeated experience ofdisappointment, through a discussion of thestate bureaucracy as a ‘hope-generatingmachine’ (paraphrasing James Ferguson’sAnti-politics machine, 1990); gaps are never filledbut ‘keep people moving’ in the hope that thistime, they will be.

The book displays the strengths of a localistperspective, and arguably some of itsweaknesses; there is some neglect of the broaderprocesses within which these dynamics areembedded. Since, within the bureaucraticmachine, it is so systematically the case that it isonly rational to pursue personalistic networks

(p. 187), or that state intervention routinelyprivileges such networks, with divisive effects(p. 198), this begs closer consideration of thestrategic nature of these forms of interventionand their instrumentality in reproducing unequalrelations of power. (There is some underplayingof the significance of the Mexican politicalsystem as a one-party state, until the ruling PRIfinally lost the presidential elections in 2000 –not in 1997, as stated on pages 153, 206, and209, n. 3). While the nature and logic of theserelations are clearly portrayed, a sense of theintentionality of power is missing.

A commitment to showing how ejidatariosevade state power and carve out spaces ofautonomy within force fields – that hegemonicprojects are neither coherent nor ‘successful’ –rather neglects the effects of attempts to inscribethem. In this, the analysis is reminiscent of JamesScott’s Weapons of the weak (1985). Only rightat the end is there a brief discussion of recentchanges in Mexican politics, yet attempts toestablish neo-liberal hegemony involvedsignificant reconstruction of the ‘Mexicannational project’ and the position of ejidatarioswithin it, and were accompanied by aconsiderable degree of coercive force. Thebroader context of the changes to agrarian lawdiscussed in chapter 7 – the effectiveprivatization of ejidal land tenure – thusrepresented not only a ‘new way of governing’,but also the transformation of ejidatarios from‘social’ to ‘entrepreneurial’ producers in anattempt to inscribe neo-liberal normativity; thiswas one of a range of neo-liberal policyinitiatives which have decimated the ejidal sectorand both changed and strongly reinforced theconstraints within which evasion and autonomyare sought. From this perspective, the‘hope-generating machine’ works to reproducedepoliticization and subordination.

Kathy Powell National University of Ireland,Galway

Ramnarine, Tina K. Ilmatar’s inspirations:nationalism, globalization, and the changingsoundscapes of Finnish folk music. xxii, 262 pp.,map, illus., musical notation, bibliogr. London,Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003. £17.00

(paper)

For Tina Ramnarine, Ilmatar, mother ofVäinämöinen, the musician-hero of the Finnishnational epic Kalevala, continues to inspiremusic-making and musical change. This isimportant because it reveals continuities in the

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aesthetic and ideological representation ofFinnishness: Ilmatar’s inspirations wereinstrumental in the musical construction of amythical national past and continue to shapethe global soundscapes of Finnish ‘new folkmusic’ (uusikansanmusiikki). In examining ‘theconstruction of musical boundaries,appropriation, the transformative power ofmusical borrowings, and creative hegemonies’as well as ‘musical multiplicity and fluidity inidentity formation’ (p. 23) both historically andethnographically, Ramnarine uses the apparentcontradiction of ‘new folk music’ to make one ofher central claims: Finnish folk music emergeswithin the homogeneous space and time of thenation, and nationalist ideologies distinguish‘our’ music from ‘their’ music. Thus, thenewness of new folk music registers thepersistence of nationalist ideologies as well ascreative, intercultural, deterritorializing‘processes of musical borrowings from a globalsphere’ (p. 202).

As Ramnarine amply demonstrates, theseborrowings are nothing new. At least since thecreation of the Kalevala and the advent of Finnishnationalism in the nineteenth century, Finnishnational music has drawn upon Western(Germanic), Eastern (Slavic), and otherFinno-Ugrian traditions. Today, these borrowingsextend to Saami, Roma, West African, andCuban music, not to mention the well-knownphenomenon of Finnish tango. Thus, if Finnishfolk music emerged in the nineteenth century sothat ‘a Finnish national identity could beasserted in relation to Finland’s immediateneighbors’ (p. 43), Finnish new folk music,involved as it is with issues of ownership,commodification, and copyright, shows how‘musical processes within musical practiceslabeled “national” which involve musicalmultiplicity and turning to traditions beyondnational boundaries, emphasize the point thatthe nation is not a site of musical homogeneity’(pp. 195-6).

In moving beyond the truism that musicstyles are hybrid, Ramnarine accomplishes agreat deal. She connects the activities of earliernationalizing elites like Ilmari Krohn, Armas OttoVäisänen, Elias Lönnrot, and Jean Sibelius to thecreative work of Finnish new folk musicians likeVärttinä and JPP as they negotiate global marketsand aesthetics. She resituates long-standingethnomusicological concern with European folkmusic and the nation in the context of globalmusical change and the world music industry,brining full circle the musical construction ofdifference between West and East and North and

South and recasting notions of musicalhomogenization through her ethnographies ofmusical agency. Finally, she brings a musicaldimension to some mainstream approaches tothe anthropology of Europe: interest in theethnography of institutions and the state,post-socialist change and European integration,transnationalism, migration, and diasporicidentities.

Ilmatar’s inspirations is based on fieldworkthat Ramnarine did in the early 1990s, primarilyin the Folk Music Department at the SibeliusAcademy in Helsinki and the village ofKaustinen, the site of an important folk musicfestival. The book is divided into three parts, thefirst dealing with theoretical and historicalperspectives, the second with ethnographies ofnew folk music performance and transmission,and the third with the alignment of new folkmusic and the world music industry.Throughout, Ramnarine represents Finnish folkmusic as a mediation of Ostrobothnian(primarily instrumental) and Karelian (primarilyvocal) traditions that originated in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century nationalism andwere revived in the 1960s. New folk music,Ramnarine shows, emerged in the late 1980s andearly 1990s as the result of individual musicalchoices, the accelerating circulation andexchange of music and musicians within Finlandas well as globally, and the intervention of thestate. In her ethnographies, Ramnarine givespride of place to the musicians making thosechoices and in so doing meaningfully connectschanges in Finnish society and culture tochanges in musical sound.

That said, I wonder if Ilmatar’s inspirationsmight have benefited from a deeperengagement with the literature oncosmopolitanism as a way of further overcoming‘the limits of conceiving of both folk music as“national” expression and ethnomusicologyas the study of “music in place” (p. 215).Furthermore, Ramnarine often equatesborrowings from Estonian, Seto, Mari, and otherFinno-Ugrian music with borrowings fromCuban or Senegalese music, for instance. Theseare surely different, one having to do withFinno-Ugrianism and the other with certainmusic industry expectations. At the same time,both are not only borrowings butappropriations, and I feel that Ramnarine couldconsider the asymmetries and hegemoniesinherent in these processes in greater depth.Finally, I am curious about how the politics ofmulticulturalism in Finland relate to new folkmusic, especially as Russian-language education

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is being emphasized in Karelia and Somalisstruggle to make a home in Helsinki. Thesepassing criticisms notwithstanding, Ilmatar’sinspirations makes an important contribution tothe ethnomusicological and anthropologicalliterature and comes highly recommended.

Jeffers Engelhardt Amherst College

Samson, Colin. A way of life that does notexist: Canada and the extinguishment of theInnu. 388 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr.London, New York: Verso, 2003. £16.00

(cloth)

Samson’s treatise on the living conditions of theInnu of the communities of Sheshatshiu andUtshimassits (Davis Inlet, Labrador, Canada) is atimely and well-warranted appraisal of thetreatment of Aboriginal people within Canada’sliberal democracy. While written by a sociologist,this book makes a valuable contribution toanthropology by providing an apt example ofthe effects of colonial assimilationist policies onIndigenous societies. Furthermore, the writing isclear and makes use of personal observationsand narratives intertwined with theory to createan argument accessible to anthropologists.

The living conditions of the Innu of DavisInlet first came to the world’s attention in the1990s when the media began reporting onepidemic levels of substance abuse and suicideamong Innu youth. Newspapers and call-intelevision and radio shows were filled withshocked Canadians trying to rationalize how itwas that Canada had neglected or forgot aboutthese people living in such a remote place andtrying to figure out how the Innu could ‘allowthemselves’ to live in such deplorableconditions. At the time I was working withaboriginal elders in an area of the north on theother side of the country, who were concernedabout the effects of studies on deviance innorthern communities on academic and popularconceptions of northern lifeways. I was thereforealso concerned that Davis Inlet might become atesting ground for what these elders consideredto be a multitude of predatory social sciencestudies relegating aboriginal people to data.

Samson’s book provides an antidote for suchstudies. His analysis of political extinguishmentplaces the Innu’s social problems within acontext that answers the questions that manyCanadians were asking. Furthermore, it expandsthe examination beyond these initial questionsto the issues that Canadians were not facing,forming the basis for an argument against those

who believe that the only solution for the socialills of aboriginal people is for them to assimilateto the Canadian majority, and thus make theextinguishment of their traditional lifeways a faitaccompli. Samson’s long-term commitment (hiswork began in 1994) to exposing the Innupolitical situation is apparent in his frankdiscussion of these issues of such tragic scope.

Samson’s book proceeds by focusing eachchapter on how a different Euro-Canadianinstitution has been imposed upon a peoplewho have never signed a treaty or given theirpermission to be ruled by the Canadian state.Whether it is through housing, education, legalpractice, religion, or health, the Canadiangovernment has assumed that it has authorityover the lives of the Innu. Each chapter could beread separately as a case study of an imposedinstitution on aboriginal lifeways, with chapter 6

on education and chapter 9 on justice standingout as particularly demonstrative discussionsof the issues at hand. However, in order toappreciate fully Samson’s argument that politicalextinguishment works at multiple levels, thebook needs to be read as a whole. He establishesthat the imposition of institutions is maintainedthrough the evolutionary assumptions of theterra nullius doctrine of Canadian legal title, andthat each of these institutions has been forcedon the Innu ‘for their own good’ so that theymight progress and enjoy the benefits of beingCanadian. In response, as far as the Canadianstate is concerned, the only price for thisprogress is the extinguishment of theiraboriginal rights.

While I question Samson’s assertion that theInnu have only recently undergone the types ofradical changes to their lifeways that other NorthAmerican aboriginal groups have had to endurefor centuries, I am convinced by the argumentthat the attempts by the Canadian state toextinguish aboriginal title works on at least twolevels. At the surface, which receives the lion’sshare of attention by Canadians, extinguishmentis about the politics of land, resources, andmoney. At a deeper level, as Samson carefullydescribes, there is cultural extinguishment – anextinguishment of jurisdiction and autonomy.Samson argues that the disturbing images of theliving conditions of the Innu need to beunderstood in light of the interplay betweenthese levels. As Innu attempt to find some roomto resist the extinguishment of their political andeconomic lives, they find that the Canadianstate and its agents hold authority over theinstitutions which would give them theautonomy to do so effectively, and these

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institutions are working under the assumptionthat the Innu do not, or should not, exist. Underthese conditions, social problems can only beunderstood not by asking ‘how people canallow themselves to live like this’ but with a‘radical questioning of the assumptions uponwhich Canadian policies towards Aboriginalpeoples are based’ (p. 340). Asking thesequestions is important for any anthropologicalstudy of the relationship between aboriginalpeople and the Canadian state, and Irecommend this book for having done so.

Robert P. Wishart University of Aberdeen

Schiffauer, Werner, Gerd Baumann, Riva

Kastoryano & Steven Vertovec (eds). Civilenculturation: nation-state, school and ethnicdifference in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany andFrance. viii, 360 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2004. £50.00 (cloth), £16.95

(paper)

The collaborative research reported here asks towhat extent pupils studying in multi-ethnicpublic schools in four northern Europeancountries adopt the dominant model of culturalpluralism. The editors acted as supervisors forresearch carried out by four other scholars infour public schools, but authors and supervisorsvisited each other’s school sites and discussedthe contrasts among themselves. Together, theyseek to discover the everyday manifestations ofwhat they call ‘civil culture’, or the competenceto operate successfully in social life and withrespect to the state. The result isethnographically perceptive and analyticallysophisticated.

In the first section of the book, the authorsbuild up portraits of ‘civil enculturation’ througha series of contrasts: in school buildings, in waysof teaching national history and culturaldifferences, and in the place religion occupies inthe curriculum. This expository strategy workswell in building up a sense of the overallcountry contrasts. For example, we learn howDutch belief in the validity of cultural differencesand their doubt as to whether newcomers can fitin leads Dutch teachers to focus on universalethics rather than cultural difference, becausereferences to ethics allows criticism ofimmigrants’ values without claiming that Dutchculture is superior. By contrast, British teachersclaim that pluralism defines Britain and in theclassroom they celebrate cultural and religiousdifferences. The differences are visible on schoolwalls, school texts, and in school life.

Language ideologies offer valuableperspectives on these differences. In all fourcountries teachers promote the nationallanguage, but with different rationales. InBritain, all languages are valid as elements ofcommunity culture and English’s only professedadvantage is instrumental. In the other threecountries, pupils are expected to speak thenational languages for additional reasons aswell: as how one becomes French, or asnecessary for participating in Dutch or Germancivic culture.

The last section looks at how teachers andpupils resolve conflicts. Fine-grained contrastsbetween Dutch and German cases areparticularly instructive because the two societiesare relatively similar. German ideas of nationalbelonging are more clearly exclusive ofimmigrants than is the case for the Dutch, butteachers erect us/them boundaries in bothclassrooms. One particularly instructive contrastinvolves Turkish pupils invoking Islam as thenormative basis for an argument. Both Germanand Dutch teachers deem the referenceinappropriate but for different reasons: inGermany because referring to Islam ipso factoindicates insufficiently independent thinking bythe pupil, but in the Netherlands because thepupil thereby took insufficient account of otherstudents’ views.

In two brilliant final chapters, Sabine Mannitzdraws on classroom conversations to highlighteach country’s internal contradictions betweencultural ideas of national belonging and formalrequirements of citizenship. Exchanges amongGerman and Turkish pupils point to the conflictbetween the postulate that immigrants shouldculturally assimilate to German culture and theclaim that everyone should be allowed topreserve a private sphere of distinct culture.They also show a German propensity to drawboundaries that exclude some categories ofpeople in order to include others: pupils argueover where to draw these boundaries but theyagree they should be drawn. Dutch and Britishinclusive notions of ‘multiculturalism’, bycontrast, permit Turkish pupils to claim that theymay retain Turkish identity while becomingculturally equal citizens of Britain or theNetherlands. In neither country, however, do‘natives’ practise the inclusiveness that theypreach. The resentment at this contradiction isgreater in the Dutch than in the British schoolbecause the contradiction runs deeper in theNetherlands. French ideology is the only onethat directs pupils to ignore cultural differences,and it is only in the French case that pupils do

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not seem to have taken on the dominant modelof cultural differences in the ways they speak.The French model seems to be the least capableof absorbing everyday perceptions of difference.

One might object to the study’smethodology: how can a small number ofobservations in one school per country allow theteam to describe four distinct civil cultures? Ifound the claims wholly convincing, and Ibelieve that I did so because (1) they resonatewith so much other evidence about each of thefour countries, (2) the authors tried to controlfor variation on other dimensions as much aspossible (and are quite open about how difficultthis is), and (3) the authors are all distinguishedscholars on these questions in these countries;we trust their insights. The result is a trulyinnovative approach to contrasting ideas andpractices of building civil cultures.

John Bowen Washington University

Smart, Alan & Josephine Smart (eds). Pettycapitalists and globalization: flexibility,entrepreneurship, and economic development. 317

pp., map, tables, bibliogr. Albany: SUNY Press,2005. $70.00 (cloth)

This book brings together a series of papersapplying the petty capitalism concept toenterprises in developing countries and countriesin transition. The editors define petty capitalistson page 3 as ‘individuals or households whoemploy a small number of workers but arethemselves actively involved in the labor process’.More in line with the modes of productiondebate, they define petty capitalists on thefollowing page as an intermediate category,bounded by petty producers and subsistenceproducers, on one side, and by real capitalists onthe other. This implies that a decline in fortunesmay result in proletarianization orimproverishment, because petty capitalistsbecome petty or subsistence producers.

Where should we draw the line betweenpetty capitalists and small and mediumenterprises? On page 7 it is suggested that thesmall enterprises to which Piore and Sabel referin The second industrial divide (1984) are pettycapitalists. Until that book came out these pettyproducers were mostly seen as threatenedwith extinction, but regional ensembles ofinterconnected small firms reliant on artisanshipcould become increasingly important incomparison to mass production.

The editors prefer an ethnographic approachto the concept of petty capitalists. This approach

emphasizes the ‘meaningful experience of actors(more) than other terms like entrepreneur orfamily business’. They admit, however, someanalytical limitations: petty capitalists operate onthe boundaries between capital and labour,co-operation and exploitation, family andeconomy, tradition and modernity, friends andcompetitors. This raises the question whetherthe petty capitalist concept is a useful analyticalconcept and whether this approach really helpsto understand the phenomenon of micro andsmall enterprises.

The book is based also on a propositionconcerning the future of petty capitalism. Theproposition is that petty capitalists benefit fromglobalization in an era ‘where assembly lines aredeconstructed and scattered across the globe,and where rapid and flexible responses todesires can make the difference betweeneconomic success and failure’. In fact this is ahypothesis which needs to be rejected oraccepted after presenting the evidence in the tenempirical chapters. This first hypothesis is laterformulated as: petty capitalists have moved fromtrying to survive to participating in the globaleconomy. The authors also see petty capitalistsas driving forces of the contemporary globaleconomy. They assume that when the conditionsare made more attractive, petty capitalists maybe among the pioneers in taking advantage ofglobalization. This seems a second hypothesiswhich needs to be tested.

Let us look at the different contributions andsee what evidence these cases provide for thedifferent hypotheses. All authors use the samemethodological approach and analyticalframework. Two of the twelve chapters are notwritten by anthropologists and two chapters aremore theoretical. In the last chapter Michael Blimdiscusses the moral significance of pettycapitalism: it provides an alternative to societiesdominated by gigantic corporations. Similarly, inchapter 2 Hill Gates looks to relations betweenpetty capitalists and the surrounding politicaleconomies. She argues that there are fivevariants of petty capitalism: the domestic modeof production, petty capitalism under thetributary modes, proto-industrialization, pettybourgeoisies, and the informal economy. Thisdistinction is not used in the rest of the book,however. The editors provide a lengthyintroduction and the two geographerscontribute a chapter on Slovakia and one onTaiwan. Adrian Smith studied petty capitalists inSlovakia under the title ‘Capitalism from below?’This is more a political economy type of analysis.Jinn-yuh Hsu’s contribution on networks in small

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and medium enterprises in Taiwanesesemiconductor industries shows that suchnetworks tend to be based on classmates andfriends rather than kin.

In chapter 3 Gavin Smith and SusanaNarotzky analyse an effective networked clusterof small enterprises in Spain, using the industrialdistrict jargon. They take a historical approachand consider the regional economy that theystudied as an embedded regional economywhere labour is mobilized as dependentworkers. The workers are often femalehome-workers. The authors conclude that theregional economy is made up of strategizingpetty capitalists and entrepreneurial workerssharing a common local culture.

In chapter 4 Frances Abrahamer Rothsteindeals with the issue of flexibility in the garmentindustry in Mexico. She considers theimportance of having access to family and skilledlabour and uses the term ‘petty commodityproducers’ for the class position of those whoare simultaneously capitalists and workers. Sheends on a pessimistic note, saying thatproducers will end up working harder or willbe driven out of business by others.

Simone Ghezzi studies the importance ofde-territorialization in Brianza versus locality inan industrial district in Italy. She finds anindustrial district with many small firms, mostlyfamily-run businesses. Some of those started asartisans and became petty capitalists in duecourse. Ghezzi describes the dilemma of manyof these petty capitalist producers. They cannothire workers and have no money to invest. Atthe same time, she discovers that many try tobuild their own business out of faith in loyalty.Although Ghezzi uses the term ‘petty capitalists’,she is really talking about small firms functioningin a capitalist environment.

Hans and Judith-Maria Buechler refer to smalland medium enterprises in Eastern Germany.However, some of the units studied are small,others large or parts of larger companies. Theauthors focus on the trajectories of specific firmsto predict the future success of firms undercapitalism in the European Community. In theircontribution the authors do not use the term‘petty capitalists’.

Donald M. Nonini calls his chapter ‘Towarda (proper) postwar history of SoutheastAsian petty capitalism’. In fact he analyses inparticular the role of the state in Malaysia’sindustrialization process. He goes deeper intothe role of Chinese small business capital inMalaysia and argues that Chinese pettycapitalists became the antagonistic ‘other’

against whom the Malaysian state defined itsdevelopment policies. Nonini argues that thetransformations of the petty capitalists inMalaysia have been connected to policies fordifferent groups of the Malaysian population.

The last chapters discuss the importance oflabour standards and the solutions of labelling(Tom O’Neill for Nepal) or of fair trade (B. LynneMilgram in the Philippines). O’Neill considersthe sector around carpet export as pettycapitalist, and sees flexible specialization as thecontext for petty capitalist expansion asinvestment in labour cost is reduced bydecentralized micro production. Milgramdescribes the example of female petty capitalistswho have entered the global craft market ontheir own terms by forging linkages withalternative trade organizations (fair trade).

The study shows an enormous variety ofpetty capitalists. The editors noted already onpage 6 that even less than capitalism itself, pettycapitalism is not always the same kind of entityor process. Most contributors use the term, butthey refer to very different types of enterprises asfar as size and history are concerned. Some ofthese are based on family relations, some arenot. Some are modern, some are traditional, andsome are based on family (sometimes exploited),others on friends. If that is the case, onewonders what the distinguishing characteristicsof the petty capitalist concept are. Not all smallenterprises are petty capitalist. In that case itmakes more sense to start with a certain sizedefinition (micro, small, etc.) and study thecharacteristics in different situations.Subsequently the process of change, forexample through globalization, can be studied.That would make the results much morecomparable with all kinds of studies carried outby geographers, sociologists, and economists.

There are a number of interesting chapters inthe book. For example, Hsu’s concerning thedevelopment of the semiconductor industries inTaiwan and the importance there of classmatesand friends in networks, rather than kin.Secondly, some authors make clear thatglobalization means respecting internationalstandards, which often requires brokerage forsmall entrepreneurs. Also the emphasis onexploitation of family workers in smallenterprises is relatively new. Finally, thecontributions show the many faces of capitalismby using ethnography as a method. The bookteaches us the diversity of economic systems andtheir path dependency.

However, the book is also a typical exampleof monodisciplinary (anthropological) thinking

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with no efforts to catch up with what otherdisciplines have said on the subject of microenterprises, value chains, innovation, andcompetitiveness. In the 1970s economiststhought multinationals were causingglobalization. In the value chain approach, thesemultinationals only mobilize the chain, whichmay be fed by small and medium enterprises.What is new is that some chains (e.g. shoeproduction in India) seem to be mainly smallenterprise-driven. That does not prove, however,that petty capitalists are now really important inthese chains. That would require graduation andformalization, or brokers mediating between thelocal and international markets. Hence the casespresented do not show the usefulness of theterminology used, nor can they be considered tolead to the acceptance of the two majorhypotheses.

Meine Pieter van Dijk Erasmus University inRotterdam

Vallely, Anne. Guardians of the transcendent:an ethnography of a Jain ascetic community. 296

pp., plates, fig., bibliogr. London, Toronto: Univ.Toronto Press, 2002. £45.00 (cloth), £18.00

(paper)

To what degree do the roles of worldly social lifecarry over into the monastic world? And, morespecifically, to what extent and in what waysdo worldly gender roles project intoworld-renouncers’ lives? Anne Vallely addressesthese questions in a study of nuns belonging tothe non-image-worshipping Terapanthi sect ofthe Shvetambar Jains. Her research wasconducted over a period of slightly more thanone year at Ladnun, a Rajasthani town thatserves as a sectarian epicentre for theTerapanthis. During this year she was in intimateand prolonged contact with nuns and girlspreparing to be nuns, and the resulting bookprovides an empirically rich and analyticallyinnovative window into a lifeway ofextraordinary restriction and discipline.

Jain ethics and cosmology set Vallely’s stage.In the foreground are non-violence andasceticism, which together underlie a distinctionat the heart of Vallely’s materials and analysis:the contrast between the worldly (laukik) andthe transcendental (lokottar). She shows how thisdistinction is idealized in the opposed images ofgenerous householder and restrained ascetic,images that are ritually enacted in almsgiving, acore transaction in the religious life of Jaincommunities. In almsgiving, giver and recipient

interact as stereotyped ‘personages’ rather thanas individuals, and the symbolism denies that‘exchange’ has taken place, with the result thatthe ascetic recipient remains free of social ties tothe giver. Another key Jain ritual, one in whichmuch of the symbolism of mendicant-layrelationships is compressed into a singlepackage, is the rite of initiation of monks andnuns. Especially striking is the symbolicjuxtaposition of wealth and possessionlessness inthis ritual. As Vallely shows, the jewellery andluxurious dress of the young women candidatesfor nunhood make the all-important point thatworld renunciation is meaningless if it is a virtuemade of necessity.

Beliefs about demonic possession bringgender differences among Jain mendicants intosharp focus. Vallely’s materials show thatpossession absolves the possessed individual ofinappropriate feelings by projecting them ontoanother entity, and that sexual longings figureprominently among these feelings in the case ofJain nuns. Because of their allegedly ‘moreemotional’ nature, nuns are seen as morevulnerable to possession than monks. On theother hand (and in apparent contradiction),nuns are seen as sexually desireless, unlikemonks, who by contrast acknowledge and evencelebrate the difficulty of conquering their sexualdesires. This means that nuns have no recoursebut to sublimate such desires radically intofantasies about ghosts and demons.

The Terapanthi monastic community is rigidlyhierarchical and centrally controlled. As Vallelyshows, hierarchical values lend themselves wellto an intense devotionalism focused onveneration of one’s spiritual superiors, andalthough devotionalism is devalued by Jainism’spublic face, with its stress on ascetic valuesalone, devotion often strongly motivates peopleto adopt the ascetic path and undertake asceticpractices. This brings us back to gender, becausenuns tend to be seen (and to see themselves) asmore inclined to devotionalism than the monks,which in turn connects to stereotypes ofwomen’s emotional and nurturing proclivities.From the standpoint of the tradition’s publicvalues, this places nuns in a subordinate andliminal position, never completely disentangledfrom the worldly realm. Even their asceticpractice is regarded as not fundamentallydifferent from the practices of religiously seriouslaywomen. For the monks, by contrast, therupture is seen as much greater, because laymenexpress piety largely by means of generousgiving, not ascetic denial. Because of this, malerenunciation is thus more highly valued than

Book reviews698


that of nuns. Still, from the standpoint of thetradition’s highest values, renunciation is aboutrelease of the soul from worldly bondage, andthis is as true of women as it is of men.

These arguments are illustrated andsupported by excellent ethnography thatresonates with the spirit of friendship that Vallelyclearly developed with many of her informants.She is particularly adroit at making use ofethnographic vignettes as points of departureinto important issues. One of many examples isher description of the nuns’ preparation for aleading monk’s birthday celebration that shethen uses as an opening for a crucial discussionof Jain devotionalism. I commend the book tostudents of South Asian religions, whether or nottheir special interest is Jainism, and to anyoneinterested in the role of women in ascetictraditions.

Lawrence A. Babb Amherst College

History and anthropology

Gold, Ann Grodzins & Bhoju Ram

Gujar. In the time of trees and sorrows: nature,power, and memory in Rajasthan. xxv, 403 pp.,illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 2002. £18.50 (paper)

This book recounts perspectives of life as it waslived by ‘subjects not rulers’ in the formerkingdom of Sawar in Rajasthan (India). It is anoutcome of a collaboration between a US-basedcultural anthropologist and a schoolteacher whois a resident of this region. Bhoju Ram Gujar isnot a ‘shadowy’ research assistant here but aco-author in the shaping of this work. In thissense, the study breaks from existing, thoughincreasingly questioned, ethnographicconventions.

Drawing on the oral histories of inhabitants,the authors narrate a tale of ‘conjoined naturaland social transformations’ spanning the periodfrom the 1920s to the 1990s. Much of theinformation was obtained in the process ofenquiring into deforestation in this area. Theleitmotif of princely rule, despotic butcoterminous with an abundance of indigenousflora and fauna, runs through the book.

The study is envisaged as a contribution toscholarship at the intersections of nature (theterm being retained ‘not for accuracy but forambiguity, complexity and uncertainty’),subaltern consciousness, and memory. The

rendition is energized by ‘non-elite voices’ andthe book is composed of ‘nothing butmemories’, as the authors put it.

Since memory is the predominant resource,a chapter is devoted to ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’memory. Here arguments that treat memory asmaterial traces, performative actions, anautonomous arena and as both individually andsocially experienced are discussed as aforeground to the substantive account of rule asexperienced in the princely era. The themes inthe following chapters are denoted bysingle-word titles (’Shoes’, ‘Courts’, ‘Homes’,‘Fields’, ‘Jungle’ and ‘Imports’) that gathermemories and events evoked in recall.Transcripts of interviews are reproduced alongwith comments by the authors.

The rule-of-the-shoe (and a nuancedlanguage about when to wear them and takethem off as well as shoe-beatings) expressed thehierarchies of rulers over subjects in thememories of the inhabitants. If shoe-beatingsdecimated one’s honour, acts of resistancesustained it. Forced labour, oppressive graintaxes (different for each caste), and prohibitions(on wearing shoes or riding horse-back, forinstance) come to the fore in many a retelling ofthe court as actor. Women remembered thepre-dawn hours as ‘the time for grinding flour’,including grinding grain for the king’s horses.Carrying cots and delivering fire-wood to thecastle were recurrent chores undertaken bypeasants during this era. Trees growing in thefields could not be lopped, and the collection ofthe ruler’s share of the harvest was an eventdreaded by the farmers. They could not cut thecrops till the harvest was estimated, and theking’s men took an inordinately long time incarrying out the task. The wild pigs that the kinghunted could not be killed by the farmers eventhough they ravaged their fields.

Not surprisingly, then, the demise of thekingdom itself was spoken about as a time whenpigs who damaged crops could be huntedwithout fear of reprisals. Under the newdemocratic dispensation, described as therule-of-the-vote, trees were felled as the pursuitof self-interest was unchecked.

Archival documents pertaining to the feudalera scarcely focus on everyday objects such asshoes and grinding stones. Practices that areinter-semiotic between the domestic and feudaldomains are articulated in relation to theseeveryday objects in this bottom-up account ofrule. Small voices are indeed magnified, givingrise to a thick recounting of events that one doesnot otherwise encounter. What I treasure from

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this anthropological listening and telling is itsillumination of what is not captured in accountsof the region’s history that are based onsettlement reports.

On the other hand, when I compare therecounting of feudal taxation here with aconventional understanding of the region’shistory culled from revenue records, I am struckby how the rich detail fills out an alreadyexisting outline without changing its contours.While the authors argue for multiple truths, theireffort speaks more directly to similar statementsthat populate the narrative. The severalconversations reported are rarely conflicting.Moreover, allowing a small voice to the Sawarruler’s family would perhaps have extended therange of polyvocal narration to those who havebeen eclipsed in this story. An account frombelow may be as limiting as an account fromabove when meanings and subjectivities areforged and negotiated in the twists ofinterconnections.

Rita Brara University of Delhi

Mbembe, Achille. On the postcolony. 274 pp.,illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. CaliforniaPress, 2001. £29.95 (cloth), £10.95 (paper)

On the postcolony analyses the phenomenologyand political economy of the African continent,with a focus on francophone West Africa. Atpresent, Africans are grappling with the imposedneo-liberal notions of good governance, civilsociety, conflict resolution, and transitions todemocracy. Mbembe emphasizes the‘elementariness and primitiveness that makesAfrica the world par excellence of all that isincomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its historyreduced to a series of setbacks of nature in itsquest for humankind’ (p. 1). He criticizes thesocial sciences, particularly anthropology, for alack of engagement, resulting in representationsof Africa that are groundless assertions. Africanscholars are viewed as being torn betweentradition and modernity. Mbembe usesgrotesque imagery, and cartoons, to characterizethe absurd in the African post-colonialexperience.

Mbembe advances the position that it wasthe slave trade that thrust Africa into modernity.He suggests that the colonial period, followingon the heels of the slave trade, was characterizedby phallic domination. For Mbembe,‘postcolony’ is a term that problematizes theautonomy of the African state in the

post-colonial period. The colony’s hegemonywas rooted in and maintained by violence.

The exercise of violence dehumanized thecolonial subject. To soften notions ofcommandement, the colonialists engaged in a‘civilizing mission’ to give the ‘native’ a moraleducation. However, the ultimate aim was toacquire his/her labour (p. 27).

The emergence of the entrepreneurial classaround cash crops reflected growing inequalityin African colonies, which was predicated on theincorporation of these crops and mineralresources into the world economy. This classplayed a key role in the indigenization of thestate.

Although the post-colonial ruler was not atotal dictator, he did not hesitate to use violence,silence dissidence, vanquish rebellions, or tostage coups d’état (pp. 42-3). Some dictatorsengaged in redistribution of resources; however,on the whole, living conditions have notimproved in the post-colonial period, especiallysince the fiscal crisis of the 1980s and theimplementation of structural adjustmentprogrammes (SAPs). SAPs often requiredreductions in price supports, in the civil service,and in social programmes, and privatization ofparastatals. This has resulted in challenges tostate structures in Congo, Somalia, Sierra Leone,and Liberia (p. 49). Most of the continent has alack of access to new technologies, therebyexacerbating the lag between the computer timeof global financial operations and the ‘historictime of real adjustments’ (p. 53).

In the post-colony, there is an atomism inpower and decision-making, with conditionsbeing ripe for what the author calls ‘privateindirect government’ throughout the continent.This is characterized by barter in a casheconomy, the formalization of the informaleconomy, and the replacement of salaries with‘one-off payments’, in which corruption is thenorm (pp. 82-4).

Mbembe invokes phallic symbolism todescribe the colonial experience in thesubjugation, domination, and dehumanizationof men, women, and children. There are furtherimplications for the exploitation and extractionof Africa’s human, agricultural, and mineralresources. The ruler is mythologized andphallicized, his international image isexaggerated, and he is granted large publicdisplays of respect to his personage in thepost-colonial context.

Through various permutations, Mbembedefines the image of Africa. He characterizescontemporary Africa ‘as simultaneously a

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diabolical discovery, an inanimate image, and aliving sign’ (p. 240). Yet he grants Africa somenew possibilities: ‘[W]e must say that is notsolely disorder, chance, and madness, butemerges from a sort of violent gust, with itslanguages, its beauty and ugliness, its ways ofsumming up the world’ (p. 242).

Mbembe’s notion of commandement conjoinsthe ideology of the colonizer and that of thepost-colonizer. Mudimbe, in The idea of Africa(1994), views the continent as having been‘invented’ by Western intellectuals inanthropology, history, and philosophy. Heconsiders the incorporation of Marxistphilosophy as anti-colonial praxis, as adisjuncture which allowed post-colonials tograpple with their African roots. On thepostcolony provides a rather pessimisticperspective that minimizes the agency ofnon-ruling-class Africans and the post-colonialpotential for positive and sustainable socialchange in the long term.

In addition to Mudimbe, more constructive,related books include Shaw’s Colonial inscriptions(1995), which examines the intersection of race,sex, and class in colonial Kenya, and Carter’sStates of grace (1997), which explores religion,labour migration, and identity amongSenegalese in Turin, Italy, and Touba, Senegal.Such constructive yet engaged scholarship hasa significant role to play in transcending thepost-colonial image of Africa.

Betty Harris University of Oklahoma

Murray, Colin & Peter Sanders. Medicinemurder in colonial Lesotho: the anatomy of a moralcrisis. xiii, 493 pp., maps, tables, figs, plates,bibliogr. Edinburgh: Univ. Press, 2005. £50.00

(cloth)

In this monograph, Murray, an anthropologist,and Sanders, a historian, successfully revisit thegruesome medicine murders (the liretlo killings)that occurred in colonial Basutoland (nowLesotho) during the 1940s. The work is timely,given the incompleteness of G.l. Jones’s 1951

report on these murders to government, andalso because the high court files, the only sourceof primary data on these killings, is nowinaccessible to researchers. The authors draw onthese files and also on supplementary archivalsources and interviews they conducted withsurviving participants in these dramas.

Murray and Sanders contend that the widelypublicized medicine murders were the result of a‘competitive contagion’, sparked by the fierce

dispute between Mantšebo and Bereng for theposition of paramount chief. The murders alsooccurred against the backdrop of generalinsecurity about chieftainship created by theplacing system, in which senior chiefs placedtheir kin over subordinate chiefs to bring themunder control; administrative proclamationswhich drastically reduced the numbers ofrecognized chiefs; and treasury reforms whichcut the number of ‘Native courts’ from 1,340 in1946 to 121 in 1949. In these contexts chiefs usedpowerful medicines, manufactured from theflesh and blood of living persons, to strengthentheir social power.

The determined colonial attempt to endthese murders, particularly by the HighCommissioner, Sir Evelyn Baring, created aheightened sense of moral crisis, culminatingin the hanging of two of the country’s mostprominent chiefs, Bereng and Gabashane. Theauthors suggest that Basotho saw this fiercereaction as confirming the power of humanmedicine. They also show how chiefs andnationalist groupings developed acounter-narrative, which denied the use ofhuman medicine or involvement by chiefs in themurders. The narrative blamed the police andaccomplice witnesses for framing the chiefs, andfor aiming to destroy the country’s naturalleaders, to pave the way for its incorporationinto South Africa. Murray and Sanders describethe response by ordinary villagers as moreambiguous: many were repelled by the killings,but shared the belief in the efficacy andimportance of the chief’s medicine horns. ManyBasotho authors cast the murderers in the role of‘tragic heroes’.

The authors effectively debunk thenationalist theory (shared by some historians)that the killings were really a colonialconspiracy. This view fails to account for themutilated bodies and the overwhelmingevidence presented in the trials. The colonialauthorities are also shown as committed tokeeping Basotholand under British rule and topreserving chieftainship as a linchpin of indirectrule. Unlike Jones, Murray and Sanders see theeffects of the legislative reforms on chieftainshipand the Native courts as having an indirectrather than direct impact upon the killings.Medicine murders actually increased in the1950s; twenty-eight cases were reported as lateas 1968. But they were now instigated bytraders as much as by chiefs; became purelya judicial matter; and a sense of ‘moral crisis’disappeared. The new High Commissioner, SirJohn Le Rougetel, accepted medicine murders

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as a fact of life, and Leabua Jonathan’s post-colonial government remained totally silentabout them.

The authors support their arguments with adetailed statistical analysis of 129 court cases.This exercise reveals that 109 (78 per cent) ofthe 139 instigators were chiefs and headmen;relatively few murders were directly attributableto worries about recognition and the right tohold court; the accomplices were motivated bya sense of duty to obey the chiefs, compulsion,and fear; and courts generally treated thetestimony of accomplice witnesses critically,finding only 374 of the 1,042 accused guilty.

The monograph ends with a suggestivecomparison of the broader politicalcircumstances surrounding the Basutolandmedicine murders with those committed inSwaziland during the 1970s and in Venda duringthe 1980s. In the latter situations, where thekillings were condemned rather than denied,chiefs were integrated with the dominant andauthoritarian political class.

Medicine murder in colonial Lesotho is lucidlywritten and appropriately illustrated withgraphic photographs and interesting casematerial. It provides a detailed and convincinganalysis, is exemplary in its use of court recordsfor reconstructing historical processes, and willundoubtedly provide an extremely valuablesource for those who wish to understand the fullcomplexities of colonial encounters in southernAfrica. Unfortunately the monograph providesonly limited insight into everyday experiences ofchiefly rule and into the cultural meanings,rumours, and myths about medicine murder atthe village level. I also feel that broaderethnographic comparisons and more provocativetheorizing could have enhanced its appeal to abroader anthropological readership.

Isak Niehaus University of Pretoria

Salemink, Oscar. The ethnography ofVietnam’s Central Highlanders: a historicalcontextualization, 1850-1900. xxii, 383 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. London, New York:RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. £65.00 (cloth)

During the First and Second Indochina Wars theconflicting parties systematically manipulatedthe ethnic groups inhabiting Vietnam’s CentralHighlands. Anthropological knowledge provedserviceable for such objectives. This monographsituates the production and (ab)uses of CentralHighland ethnography in a larger historicalframework. It highlights changing and

intersecting spheres of interest (‘discourses’),economic, political, and military.

Salemink begins in the mid-nineteenthcentury, before the French captured Saigon andbegan to colonize Vietnam, and looks at earlystudies by European missionaries and explorers.Subsequent chapters follow a chronologicalorder. There are chapters on the French colonialadministration of the Central Highlands, theinter-ethnic millenarian ‘Python God’ movementin the 1930s, the First Indochina War, the USprotectorate of the anti-communist SouthernRepublic and its counter-insurgency strategiesfor the Central Highlands, and the American orSecond Indochina War. In a final chapter andbased on his own fieldwork in the 1990s,Salemink describes the changing circumstancesfor ethnography after the country’s unification in1975 under communist rule. Having examinedthe ways in which the Montagnards werestudied, represented, and manipulated for thelast 140 years (until 1990), the author wonderstoward the end of his book, ‘Do they needethnography?’ (p. 295). His answer is that incontemporary Vietnam, his Highland informantswanted ethnographic, non-state, narratives oftheir circumstances to be told to the outsideworld. ‘In all the upland provinces that theyonce populated almost exclusively, CentralHighlanders are now a numerical minority’(p. 295).

What the study brings into focus is arecurrent struggle for hegemony between twokinds of perspectives on the Central Highlanders,each reflecting a different set of intentions ofmilitary planners, administrators, and so on.One derives from efforts to appropriate theMontagnards, whether to ‘protect’ them fromthe Vietnamese majority or to recruit them formilitary operations. Ethnography serves hereto demarcate them as bounded entities, asanalogous to small ‘nation-states’. This Saleminkcalls the relativist perspective, which considersMontagnard values and customs in their ownright. The other perspective is an evolutionistone. It reflects intentions to deny anysignificance of the Montagnard way of life andto integrate these communities into a larger,modern, state, whether it is a colonial,neo-colonial, or post-colonial socialist one.

Ethnography is a Foucauldian discursivepractice in this study. Classifying the CentralHighlanders, recording their customary laws,and locating their settlements on maps had theeffect of representing them as spatially fixated,socially bounded tribes. That the Vietnamesestate today identifies fifty-three minorities is an

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outgrowth of this. The Montagnards themselves,as Salemink argues, did not originally perceivethemselves in this manner. Communitiespractised shifting cultivation, inter-mixedfrequently with other groups, and memberswere often unaware of their belonging to anylarger social entity. The ethnographicimagination of bounded tribes did not onlyassist officials and military planners, it actuallyled the Montagnards to recognize themselves inthis way. With the growing presence of USmilitary advisers and troops, the ethnographic‘tribalization’ transformed, to some extent, intoa pan-Highlander ethnicity movement. This‘side-effect’ of ethnography is a headache for theVietnamese state still today.

Salemink manages to balance an abundanceof fascinating historical and biographical detailswith a well-structured and accessible style ofexposition. All the praise notwithstanding, letme add a brief critical note. This study gets sopreoccupied with context that it ironically endsup taking context for granted. That is, theauthor fails to address his own methodologysufficiently. When one contextualizes, is onehighlighting contexts or actually creating them?As Salemink himself points out, both historianand anthropologist have to rely on the samehistorical sources when situating ethnographyhistorically. While his book is essentially aboutthe constructivist nature of ethnography, it doesnot consider the constructivist nature ofcontextualization. As a consequence, a whole setof assumptions about the ‘true’ nature of theMontagnards is built into his contexts andremains unreflected. A too sharp distinctionbetween ‘them’ and a modern state, whetherFrench colonial, US protectorate, or Vietnamesesocialist, runs through the book: fluid versusfixed, unbounded versus bounded, flexibleversus rigid, and so on. The question is notwhether or not these communities are fluid,flexible, and unbounded; rather, to what extentare they so? Salemink’s historical perspectives(contexts) on ethnographic perspectives(contexts) do not consider the fixed, rigid, andbounded aspects of the Central Highlandcommunities, which may differ from thosefavoured by bureaucratic states. One final pointon context: the book examines the changinghistorical contexts between 1850 and 1990, butthe front cover erroneously states ‘1850-1900’.This slip led me to wonder whether the colonialcontext had not in fact become anoverdetermining reference point for the analysisof later periods, as neo- and post-colonial. Allcriticisms aside, Salemink has produced a

thoroughly researched and carefully arguedbook.

Markus Schlecker Max Planck Institute, Halle

Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on thecolor line: W.E.B. Du Bois, race, and visual culture.xviii, 225 pp., plates, illus., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. £57.00

(cloth), £16.95 (paper)

Photography on the color line considers theparticipation of seminal African Americantheorist W.E.B. Du Bois in the ‘American NegroExhibit’ at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Smithsuggests that this was a formative moment in hisintellectual development. Du Bois’s contributioncomprised of four photographic albums,comprising some 363 photographs produced byphotographers who are now unknown, withthe exception of Thomas Askew, whom Smithis able to identify. The lack of accompanyingtext to explicate their significance highlightsthe cultural work that these visual imagesperformed in 1900, recognized at that timeas Du Bois was awarded a gold medal at thisexposition.

Smith argues that this emphasis on visualityby Du Bois in 1900 provides new insights intohow his work developed to analyse theproblematics of race that have shaped AfricanAmerican and diaspora studies to the presentday. This engagement with photographyenabled him to consider how visuality wasimplicated in objectifying racialized differenceand, Smith suggests, how key concepts, such as‘double consciousness’ and the ‘veil’, wereformulated through this objectified subjectpositioned within particular historicizeddominant ‘ways of seeing’. She argues that DuBois’s use of visual paradigms positions him as avisual theorist on race, and informed all hissubsequent work. Du Bois utilized photographyto contest the prevailing hegemonic ideologyof ‘scientific’ racism and its imposition ofessentialized racial hiercharchies thatunderpinned the exploitation of AfricanAmericans in the USA.

However, the constitution of this archivewithout text is ambiguous and resistant topresent-day interpretation, and Smith’s aim is torecuperate the positionings of this visual culturalwork at that time as a counter-narrative to suchdominant racialized hierarchies. She achieves thisthrough a close analysis of how the archive isconstructed by Du Bois. Portraits of AfricanAmericans in both frontal and side profile offer a

Book reviews 703


mimesis of the visual taxonomies deployed toinscribe and hierarchize the racialized subjectthrough photography. The subjects selected byDu Bois are an African American middle-classelite (or his notion of ‘the talented tenth’) whosestatus and position are ‘verified’ by these verysame visual procedures, used in the making oftaxonomies of race, to assert incontrovertibleevidence to the contrary. This counter-narrativeutilized not only class identities, but also diverseindividuals with physical characteristics thattransgressed the stereotypes by which normativetaxonomies of ‘race’ were constituted, blurringthe ‘colour line’ of the title. After presentingindividual portraits, the archive depicted thiselite within socialized spaces associated with thematerial trappings and visual exteriorization ofthe middle classes. These images of class wereconstituted within a sentimental register ofhome and domesticity that reshaped theviewer’s expectations (and gaze) to subverthierarchies of ‘race’.

A feature throughout is the selection ofyouthful individuals who offer new roles of theAfrican American and, perhaps as significantlyand visibly, have no personal experience ofslavery, which is as a consequence relegated tothe past within this archive. Then images ofurban spaces without human subjects featurethat position the middle-class elite in theirprosperous milieu, distinguishing their statusspatially. A few final photographs of run-downurban spaces juxtapose the environmentalconditions of poverty of non-elite AfricanAmericans to previous images in the album. Theabsence of the impoverished African Americansubject from these images, Smith suggests, isa strategy to emphasize the conditions ofenvironmental poverty rather than to evoke forthe viewer through their presence the prevailingnormative racialized hierarchy.

Smith reflects on the subordination ofwomen within this archive to male-dominatedmiddle-class mores of respectability. Thisinscription of normative gender roles (and ofrestraint and propriety) allied the AfricanAmerican middle class with their whitecounterparts and so, for both groupings, locatessexual aberration in the lower classes. This tacticprovides a means to undermine the sexualityembedded in racist representations througha shared class subordination of women inthe construction of the patriarchial family.Throughout, Smith argues that the Du Boisarchive cannot be considered in isolation butrather must be related to other archives. Thenext chapter provides a stark contrast in an

exploration of photographic imagery of lynchingthat maps out the extreme terrorizing anddisciplining of the African American body. Smithargues that this is part of the dominant visualarchives of that period, deployed in the makingof a white collective identity and forged in theextra-judicial complicities and brutalized powerof lynching by which individuals are located inrelation to the ‘colour line’, made immutable byviolence and maintained through thereproduction of its imagery. It is thisimmutability of the essentialized and racializedsubject that the Du Bois archive contests andseeks to undermine.

Although Smith emphasizes the importanceof this archive to the development of Du Bois’stheorizing on race and seeks to excavate itscultural work at the Paris Exposition, there isa tendency in one or two places to readbackwards from his writings after 1900. Thisgives a teleogical feel to the analysis that blurshis progressive intellectual development within aconcrete historical trajectory. The conventions ofthis archival imagery hint perhaps at more fluiddialectical processes and multiple positionings inits cultural work which require a more situatedand detailed historical comparison of the DuBois archive in Europe, where the exposition washeld, and in the USA, where it was constructed.The theoretical implications of the archive as aframe of analysis also could perhaps have beenexplored a little further – authors such as Taggand also Alan Sekula’s other writings on thearchive spring to mind. The contrast of the DuBois archive with the imagery of lynchingprovides a stark dichotomy, but, in lacking otherarchival comparisons, it misses a nuancing of thediffering kinds of cultural work of archives aswell as their interrelations. However, this book isan original reflection on the importance ofvisuality in the theorizing of Du Bois andhighlights the diverse and complex ways inwhich he problematized ‘race’ and racialization.

Charles Gore School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Method and theory

Barnhart, Terry A. Ephraim George Squierand the development of American anthropology.xvi, 425 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln:Univ. Nebraska Press, 2005. £38.95 (cloth)

For most non-archaeologists, non-NorthAmerican anthropologists, the name of Ephraim

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George Squier is likely to have little or nosignificance. His survey and archaeological workon the so-called ‘Mound Builders’ of NorthAmerica is relatively well known to Americanarchaeologists, but other dimensions of his workare known only among even more specializedaudiences. After his Mound Builders work,Squier served as a diplomat in Central Americaand in the Andes, and used his time in thoseregions to make important early archaeologicalcontributions. He was also involved in some ofthe early projects leading to theprofessionalization of anthropology in the US,including Smithsonian publications and theAmerican Ethnological Society, and contributedto the then current debates on race and thepoly- or monogenesis of humanity. Although notwithout faults, Barnhart’s study provides anilluminating survey of Squier’s lifework.

Barnhart set out to write an intellectualbiography of Squier, which he defines asconcerning ‘itself with the origin anddevelopment of ideas and with theirembodiment in the works of particular writersand in the collective discourse of their era’ (p. 6).The emphasis is thus strongly on the writtenproduct, and indeed the research reflected in thetext and citations is remarkable for itsthoroughness. Unfortunately, as a consequenceof this perspective, there is relatively littleexploration of the interactions of Squier’spersonal life and work; the discussions that arepresent (e.g. of his journalism and diplomaticcareers and how they enabled his archaeologicalwork) whet one’s appetite for more, and it isremarkable that Squier’s nasty divorce andconsequent mental breakdown are relegated toan epilogue. My own preference in intellectualbiography is to blend life and work in a morebalanced way. Furthermore, the latter part ofBarnhart’s purpose is relatively poorlyrepresented: the interplay of Squier’s ideas in thecollective discourse of the time is only lightlydeveloped through most of the book.

The reader gets little sense of how Squier’swork fits with the projects of the Bureau of(American) Ethnology, for example. The lastchapter carries the bulk of this component of thework, contextualizing Squier in the ‘AmericanSchool of Ethnology’ – a cluster of scholars thatincluded Samuel George Morton, Josiah ClarkNott, and George Robins Gliddon, and a body ofwork centred on questions of race and genesis;the term ‘ethnology’ originated in 1848 in theLondon Ethnological Journal. Squier’s threedecades of activity in the American EthnologicalSociety are noted – he ‘was its most active and

important member through the 1850s and 1860s’(p. 311) – but if a reader lacks understanding ofthe history of that institution, there is not muchoffered here to remedy that. Perhaps the mostimportant contribution here is Barnhart’sdiscussion of Squier’s The serpent symbol, andthe worship of the reciprocal principles of nature inAmerica (1851) – a little-known synthetic workthat attempted to demonstrate the psychic unityof mankind. Barnhart’s discussion here (chap. 8)lives up to the promise of intellectual biographythat he proffers, and the debate is one thatrepresents the period well.

In general, Barnhart’s writing is clear, but itlacks excitement. There also remains, even afterediting, considerable redundancy – at severalpoints a theme is restated several times in thespace of a few pages – and there are sectionswhere the amount of detail distracts from theoverall narrative flow (of course, if one is readingfor those particular points, the detail may wellbe appreciated).

Despite these flaws, I recommend the bookfor several reasons and constituencies. Thoseinterested in the history of Americananthropology and archaeology will find in itconsiderable detail not available elsewhere,about a man who was one of the mostsignificant figures in the mid-nineteenth centurybut today is little known. That audience shouldbe able to readily fill in the gaps in context andfit the information in with other scholars’ workson the Smithsonian, the Bureau of (American)Ethnology, and other figures of the time such asConstantine Rafinesque and Daniel GarrisonBrinton. Barnhart’s book would be particularlyuseful to those who teach on the MoundBuilders arguments, even in introductorycourses. Those interested in archaeological workin Central America and the Andes will similarlyfind much new information here to broadentheir appreciation of work in those areas. Butperhaps the biggest surprise, to me, was thecontribution to studies of nineteenth-centuryAmerican race theory, which was central to theemergence of anthropology and is seeingrenewed scholarly interest today.

Frederick W. Gleach Cornell University

Mauss, Marcel. The nature of sociology(trans. William Jeffrey, Jr). xii, 93 pp., bibliogr.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.£20.00 (cloth)

It is in some ways a little daunting to be askedto review a book consisting of two essays that

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have been available to the interested reader ofFrench for in one case over a century and inthe other for almost eighty years. But theappearance of these two essays (’Sociology’,written with Paul Fauconnet, and published in1901, and ‘Sociology: its divisions and theirrelative weightings’, published in 1927) inEnglish for the first time attests to thecontinuing interest in Marcel Mauss and thefact that re-readings of his work still providenot only fertile ground for new interpretationsof the Durkheimian school in general, but alsoa source of inspiration for scholars approachingMauss as a remarkably contemporary voice stillspeaking in many ways to current issues insociology and anthropology.

This slim volume, the result of the after-hourslabour of the late American legal scholar WilliamJeffrey, Jr, and prefaced with an extensiveintroduction and useful bibliography by MikeGane which sets the two essays in the widercontext of Mauss’s thought and writings as awhole, contains two of Mauss’s most significantmethodological writings which demonstratethat, at least up until 1927 and certainly withinFrench sociology, there was still considerableanxiety about the exact scope and sub-divisionsof sociology and the feeling that without preciseclarification of these divisions and their relativesignificance, the subject could not be said tohave achieved a genuinely scientific status. Whilethis subject may now seem rather a dry one, it isin fact highly significant that the classificationsset up by the editors of the Année Sociologique,most notably in the extensive reviews section ofthe journal, still profoundly influence theinternal structure of sociology, as a glance at thecontents page of any introductory text in thefield will reveal.

But if read as if they were contemporary textsin sociology, these essays reveal many otheraspects of Mauss’s work that have perhaps nothitherto been stressed. These include hisunderstanding of sociology as the science ofinstitutions; the transitions and dialogic natureof Mauss’s work, especially his complexrelationship with Durkheim, which mirrors insome ways that of Freud and Jung; hisarguments not against psychology as such, butwith the confusion of individual psychology withsociological explanation; his anti-philosophicalstance; and his recognition that some areas ofsociology that are still very under-representedin terms of the volume and quality of workdevoted to them – notably linguistics,technology, and aesthetics – are in fact essentialto the total sociological enterprise.

But perhaps most interestingly, while onedoes not immediately associate Mauss eitherwith politics or with applied sociology, theseessays reveal a keen interest in both. The lastchapter of his 1927 monograph printed here, nodoubt with the memory of the war still fairlyvividly present in his consciousness, is devotedprecisely to the issue of the true nature ofapplied sociology, which Mauss interestinglydifferentiates from what he saw as the ‘socialwork’ or civics dimension of American sociology.In Mauss’s view, prefiguring the work ofcontemporary French anthropologists such asJean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, application mustarise from what the latter calls ‘fundamentalanthropology’, or in Mauss’s own words:‘Science ... should be applied, but itsapplications should not be confused with thescience itself’. This being the case, the sociologyof politics becomes a legitimate part of generalsociology, and with it alertness to what todaywould be called social movements, since ‘thereis an entire domain, midway between action andscience, in the region of rational practice wherethe sociologist can and should adventure’.

Mauss’s work, certainly as revealed in thisslim volume, should be seen not as a completedsystem, but as an unfinished and not entirelyself-consistent project containing within itself amania for clear classifications and demarcations,an excessive rationalism, and a purism about thenature of science, coexisting with a remarkablymodern ecological view of the self as partof nature, a deep concern with the moralimplications of sociology, and an awareness ofthe absences in sociology that his generationhad not been able to fill. It is perhaps thesecontradictions that make it possible for him tobe claimed by the structuralists, on the onehand, and the likes of Bataille, on the other,while still remaining of interest to us now.

John Clammer Sophia University

Mauzé, Marie, Michael E. Harkin &Sergei Kan (eds). Coming to shore: NorthwestCoast ethnology, traditions and visions. xxxviii, 508

pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ.Nebraska Press, 2005. £19.95 (paper)

First presented at a Paris 2000 conference onNorthwest Coast ethnology by French,Canadian, and US scholars, the twenty papersin this collection are intended to represent themost comprehensive overview since the 1990

Northwest Coast volume of the Handbook ofNorth American Indians edited by Wayne Suttles.

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The conference was originally intended tocoincide with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 90thbirthday in 1999. He served as the honoree ofthe conference and provided a brief account ofhow his own interests in the Northwest Coastdeveloped. The focus is on the role of NorthwestCoast narrative traditions, both those recordedfrom Native speakers and others constructed byearlier anthropologists in the form of theirethnographic reports, now also treated as‘traditions’. The twenty-seven-page ‘Editors’introduction’ provides a useful commentary onthe broader state of Northwest Coast research aswell as an introduction to the following papers.

The seven papers in the first section, ‘Thelegacy of Northwest Coast research’, set thestage by reviewing the connections betweenLévi-Strauss and Boasian anthropology and/orby reaffirming Lévi-Strauss’s approach or theirown. Most useful here are the reviews by RegnaDarnell and Marie Mauzé plus the bonusinclusion of Frederica de Laguna’s reminiscencesof her own intellectual travels between Americanand European anthropologies, along with thehomage to her by her former student andliterary executrix, Marie-Françoise Guédon. (DeLaguna was unable to attend the conference anddied before the publication of this volume.) Thethree papers in the second section, ‘Texts andnarratives’, by Judith Berman, Robert Bringhurst,and co-authors Martine Reid and DaisySewid-Smith, all well-practised in the study ofnarrative traditions, provide a foundation for thestudy of aboriginal narratives through theirdetailed examinations of the logical structureand everyday practice of story-telling. SergeiKan’s description of American tourism insoutheastern Alaska in the late nineteenthcentury and Ira Jacknis’s description of theNorthwest Coast Hall at the American Museumof Natural History, which Lévi-Strauss visited in1941, leading him to proclaim Northwest Coastas one of the highest forms of art, comprise thethird section, ‘History and representation’.

All these papers serve as appetizers for theeight papers in the concluding section, ‘Politicsand cultural heritage’, which connect theLévi-Straussian and Boasian studies to currentNorthwest Coast socio-political andanthropological discourses. There are first-ratecontributions here, including especially the firstthree papers by Richard and Nora MarksDauenhauer, Aaron Glass, and Bruce Miller. Inone way or another all the authors in this sectionattempt to deconstruct earlier anthropologicalreports while recording attempts atreconstruction by members of Northwest Coast

communities. Earlier anthropologists arecriticized for codifying or ‘entextualizing’ fluidsocial practices, turning processes into products.Natives and some anthropologists today, on theother hand, are busily trying to convert thoseproducts back into cultural processesappropriate for current social and politicalconditions.

There is little to complain about in thisvolume. A few papers might be considered alittle light-weight, not unusual considering thelarge number included; a few references cited inchapters never made it to the masterbibliography; and no explanation is given forthis particular selection of authors. The mostnotable omission was Wayne Suttles (who sadlypassed away earlier this year).

Michael M. Ames University of British Columbia

Metcalf, Peter. Anthropology: the basics.215 pp., map, figs, illus., bibliogr. London, NewYork: Routledge, 2005. £9.99 (paper)

Although introductory textbooks in social andcultural anthropology have been used fordecades by grateful undergraduates, the moreconcise format seems to be a more recentphenomenon. Around half a dozen ‘very shortintroductions’ to anthropology have beenpublished in English in the last few years, whichindicates the existence of a market for this kindof book. Perhaps efforts to introduceanthropology as a school subject are beginningto pay off; perhaps the attention span ofundergraduates is shorter than it used to be; orthe cause may simply be that university reformsforce teachers to compress their courses. Be thisas it may, the fact is that one can now chooseamong a fair number of books which offer lessthan a fully fledged introductory textbook, butmore than just a selection of tidbits.

Peter Metcalf’s Anthropology: the basics isslightly too long to be considered a very shortintroduction (ten chapters, 200 pages), but ithas similar aims to Peter Just and JohnMonaghan’s Social and cultural anthropology: avery short introduction (OUP, 2000), Hann’s Teachyourself social anthropology (McGraw Hill, 2000)and my What is anthropology? (Pluto, 2004),namely to bring new students quickly into theanthropological way of thinking throughconcepts and cases, thus facilitating theunderstanding of more difficult texts; and to tellinterested outsiders what anthropology is about.

Introductory books of this kind should givethe novice reader a sense of the history of

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anthropology, they should describe some of itsglorious moments of discovery and centraltheoretical controversies, and they should offer areasonable number of illustrative cases; in brief,this kind of book should give the readersomething to think with, but also something tothink about. Metcalf does all this, coveringstructural-functionalism, Marxism, culture andpersonality, structuralism, and more, andintroducing Nuer, Trobrianders, Tikopians,Bemba, Atoni, and others; but his pottedhistories are scattered throughout the book andrarely show how ideas have developed (anexception being the two chapters on Africanpolitical systems and the relationship betweenanthropological theorizing and colonialism). Ingeneral, I find the book to be less cumulativethan others on the market. This may not be aflaw, since it makes it possible to read chaptersin a non-linear order, but it is slightlydisconcerting to have a page or so on thehistory of the four-field approach in Americananthropology stuck in the middle of the book(p. 87), several chapters after the account of thetransition from late Victorian to modernanthropology.

Written in a very accessible style, the bookcovers most of the central subject areas insocial/cultural anthropology, with a slightpreference for traditional rather than moderncontexts. Unlike other authors, Metcalf drawson his own ethnography (from Borneo) only toa limited extent, spreading out the canvaswide, and he also repeatedly invokes theexperiential world of the North Atlantic student.At its best, the book is able to create that senseof wonder and surprise which is so essential forthe motivation of young students soon to beconfronted with texts that might appear botharcane and tedious. The book effectivelydemonstrates why it is that gender, death, andnature can be studied as social constructions(he actually says that they are socialconstructions), it shows that kinship works inmany ways, and why it is that ethnographersneed to be reflexive in order to keep their owncultural bias in check.

Much has been written about the differences(or lack thereof) between the American andBritish/European anthropologies. Metcalf payslittle attention to the issue (and when, on page92, he speaks of ‘other national traditions ofanthropology’, he mentions only ‘newlyemerging nations’, neglecting Russian, Japanese,Dutch, and other significant non-anglophoneanthropologies), but his book may in itselfsuggest an emerging difference. He is extremely

careful not to offend the sensitivities of hisreaders by using language that might beperceived as racist or sexist (where Europeanstend to be more careless), and the book is alsostrongly normatively slanted, full of liberal (inthe US sense) political views. Metcalf repeatedlydraws explicit moral conclusions fromsmall-scale societies, rarely noting how cruel,violent, and oppressive many of them havebeen. Whereas a more even-handed or neutralview of traditional societies would have beenproper in most European countries, thiseagerness to convey a set of moral valuesalongside the intellectual content may tell ussomething about the ideological situation inthe USA.

Anthropology: the basics is a good read, withinstructive boxes and useful summaries, and itwill doubtless whet many’s appetite for more.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen University of Oslo/FreeUniversity of Amsterdam

Rapport, Nigel. I am dynamite: an alternativeanthropology of power. xvi, 283 pp., illus.,bibliogr. London, New York: Routledge, 2003.£21.99 (paper)

Locating agency in social scientific texts can be adifficult task. More often than not, when thesource of agency is apparently missing, it willeventually and almost inevitably turn out to besupra-individual. And while many of us assumethat agency lies somewhere between the devil(‘individuality’) and the deep-blue sea(‘society’), the default setting remainspredominantly oceanic. There have always beenthose who have taken the less popular course inlocating agency fairly and squarely in or with theindividual, and in recent years the champion ofthis cause has been Nigel Rapport, who duringthe last two decades has continued toforeground the primacy of the individual in theconstruction of social phenomena. However, inthis, his most substantial work so far, heingeniously develops earlier arguments andconfronts and responds in typically elegantprose to many of the most trenchant criticismsof his work to date.

I am dynamite is in three parts. In Part I,‘Propositions’, Rapport sets out in some detailhis standpoint, in terms of ontology,methodology, epistemology, and, significantly,morality. Above all else it is, avers Rapport, themulti-selved individual, unique, generative,transcendent, powerful, that constitutes theultimate reality in understanding social life. In

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ignoring the individual, anthropologists cannotdo analytical or interpretative justice to thecomplexities of social life. Rapport is quick topoint out that this is not to dismiss the reality ofthe social, but rather to locate its generationentirely in the work of individuals. He argues,persuasively, for a shift in emphasis in accountsof individuals’ actions from a reliance on‘because’ explanations to ‘in order to’ motives,admitting that human intentionality cannot andshould not be precluded or, worse still, occludedby reference to ‘social structure’ or some suchillusional construct.

Furthermore, in the individual lies the locusof power, and for this reason, among others,Rapport’s assertion that the individual is prior toall other possible sources of agency is a moralnecessity. An important means of securing one’sindividuality is the generation andaccomplishment of one’s ‘life-project’, a termwhich remains (intentionally?) ambiguous, inthat it manifests both ‘is’ and ‘ought’ qualities. Itis in pressing ahead with his or her life-projectthat the individual manifests power. Rapportdraws explicitly on the existentialists, and it isfrom Nietzsche that his novel theory of powerderives. It is Machtgefuhl – a term used by LeslieChamberlain to describe Nietzsche, and meaninga clear sense of one’s own power and of the useto which one’s talents should be put – thatconstitutes the axis around which this bookturns.

Indeed, Rapport offers Nietzsche as the firstof his four biographical examples, or‘Illustrations’, in the second part of the book,and a large proportion of I am dynamite(including, of course, its title) is a celebration ofthe philosophy of Nietzsche, from whomRapport derives much that is foundational to hisworldview. Given the extent to which Nietzschehas been misrepresented and misunderstood, itwill be interesting to see, following Rapport’saccount, whether his stock now rises amonganthropologists. The second and third‘illustrations’ are drawn from the lives ofindividuals personally known to the author: BenGlaser, his stepfather and Rachel Silberstein, afriend he met while sojourning in Israel. Theseare messier narratives and, for me, moresatisfying and convincing accounts of thelife-project. While there is considerable empathyin Rapport’s portrayal of these individuals, it is inthe fourth ‘illustration’, his account of the Britishpainter Stanley Spencer, that I find the mostinteresting and compelling example ofMachtgefuhl. Spencer, Rapport demonstrates,remained throughout his life ‘his own man’.

Drawing thoughtfully on the life-projectspresented here, Rapport demonstrates anapproach to doing anthropology which is good,in the sense of being both morally andinterpretatively strong. One hopes that otherswill further this work by embarking on their ownprojects in ‘individual anthropology’. Rapportdraws on an extraordinary range of authors, notonly from anthropology, but from philosophy,psychology, the biological sciences, literarycriticism, and so forth. I am dynamite iscontentious and controversial in equal measurebut is never less than engaging. Like allsignificant work, the book raises as manyquestions as it answers and it is sure to provokeconsiderable debate among academics and, onehopes, students. I am dynamite is a passionateand persuasive work, not only extolling butclearly demonstrating the virtues of taking theindividual in all of her or his complexity as thestarting-point for doing anthropology.Furthermore, it represents a considerablecontribution to the liberal and humanisttraditions and so deserves a wide readership.

Peter Collins University of Durham

Social anthropology

Allen, Catherine J. The hold life has: cocaand cultural identity in an Andean community(2nd edition). xv, 296 pp., maps, figs, illus.,bibliogr. London, Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. £15.50

(paper)

The subtitle of Catherine Allen’s excellent bookis not inaccurate, but it suggests both more andless than the book delivers. This is especially truefor the second edition reviewed here.

Certainly, the book examines culturalidentity in Sonqo, a small indigenouscommunity not far from Cuzco, in southernPeru, as well as the role of coca, and ofalcohol, in the Sonqueños’s lives. However, thebook is more centrally an elegiac description oftransformations that Allen observed in Sonqobetween her first fieldwork in 1975 and her 1985

return to the field. The even greatertransformations that occurred between 1985

and further visits in 1995 and 2000 aredescribed in the fifty-page epilogue whichdistinguishes the second edition from the first.

In broad outline, the transformations thatAllen describes are familiar ones. Increased ease

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of transportation and communication permitand promote a once isolated indigenouscommunity’s integration into the largersurrounding, and global society. Increasedintegration into the market economy, spurred bya state actively pursuing neo-liberal policies,leads to changes in crops, crop rotation,organization of labour, and social organization.More particular to the region are governmentresponses to the global ‘war on drugs’ thatrestrict transportation of coca leaves within Peru,limiting traditional patterns of access andconsumption.

Allen’s repeated field visits and long-terminvolvement with the community permit anoutstandingly ‘thick’ description of people’s livesand the effects of change on them. Allen firstdescribes the dense network of meaning withinwhich the Sonqueños lived, and the ways inwhich their physical, ritual, and social lives wereinterwoven, to locate individuals within acosmology intimately linking place, community,and daily life. Her discussion of ritual andpilgrimage are particularly effective. Theextended fieldwork also lets Allen trackindividuals and families over twenty-five years,describing the ways in which children’s livesdiverge from those of their parents. She is alsoable to show the numerous paths that thosedivergences take, including migration fromSonqo to Cuzco, and, in Sonqo, changes inresidence patterns, in home design, patterns ofreciprocity, and, ultimately, changes in religiouspractice, language, and ethnic identity.Moreover, although the links between all thechanges are not worked out in detail, the bookhighlights to great effect the interrelatedness ofchange occurring in different areas of people’slives.

The reader is always intensely aware thatAllen is describing real, three-dimensionallyrealized people so that it is impossible to seechange as an abstract process with no humanmeaning or impact. She repeatedly shows theways in which people’s hopes are fulfilled orconfounded, their expectations met or dashed,and the manner in which the structures thatprovided meaning and motivation for their livesare supported or corroded.

The intense human scale and the fineness ofAllen’s description are among the book’ssignificant strengths, but there are alsoweaknesses. The central narrative of ‘communitylost’ makes some aspects of Allen’s descriptionsseem romanticized. Allen makes an impressivecase that Sonqueños lives were encompassed bya web of meaning, but, as the books shows, life

was hard, mortality rates were high, and somepeople, at least, took rapid advantage of thenew opportunities presented to them. Withregard to coca and alcohol, Allen effectivelydescribes traditional drug use. As seems typicalfor autochthonous drugs, use was ritualized,sacralized, and integrated into daily life. Allenalso describes how the conjoined decline ofcommunity and desacralization of alcohol led toits abuse. However, other than placing the drugsin the region’s history, Allen leaves largelyunaddressed the question of why Sonqueñosconsumed coca and alcohol as they did. There islittle discussion of the drugs qua drugs or of theSonqueños’s view of their effects. Both questionsare central to a more complete understanding ofthe use of both drugs in Sonqo, and, in the caseof alcohol, of what changed over time. Thislatter question is particularly important giventhe apparently related rapid growth ofalcoholism and teetotal evangelical Protestantsects in Sonqo.

Finally, in Allen’s attempt to describechange’s impacts on so many aspects ofpeople’s lives, it sometimes feels that bits andpieces of description, though rich and thick, arestuck on rather than carefully worked in tocreate a work that is more integrated in a stylisticsense. This is particularly true of the epilogue.

The weaknesses, however, are minor. Overall,this is a fine ethnography that adds to theliterature on the region, on drugs, and on theimpact of the outside world on localizedpeoples.

Dan Bradburd Clarkson University

Banerjee, Mukulika & Daniel Miller.The sari. vii, 277 pp., plates, bibliogr. Oxford,New York: Berg Publishers, 2003. £26.99

(cloth)

The sari is a refreshingly unorthodox book aboutclothing that focuses on the contemporary sari‘not as an object of clothing but as a livedgarment’ in an India transformed by pockets ofrabid consumerism and by the needs of a largeand vocal middle class whose dress is a constantreinvention of the meanings of modern andrational.

The book tells us the multiple stories ofwomen – rich and poor, urban and rural –immersed in this modern life where the sariplays such a crucial role. It relies on many voices,some articulate and others diffident, to explorewhy the sari in India is the most commonlyworn dress and evokes so many contradictory

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feelings. The strength and charm of this book isthe ease with which it distils in an extremelyreadable, vivacious, and often witty manner theethnographic perspectives set within a broadercontext of social, political, and religious changes.The writing is never laboured but on thecontrary remains fluent, light, and pointed.There are indeed few footnotes and scarcely anydiscussion of fashionable theories. The authorsare supported in their narrative bybreathtakingly beautiful photographs of womenin their saris that immerse the reader in the‘tactile, sensual, emotional, intimate world offeelings’.

Each of the twelve chapters can be read as aseparate unit and not necessarily in the orderpresented, since this is not a history of the sari.Throughout the book we read about Mina’sencounter with the sari, as a young wife eagerto please her in-laws and much later as aconfident sari-wearer who criticizes women whowear the suit (shalwar-kameez). The secondchapter describes the intimacy of the sari, which,unlike any other garment, is dynamic, moveswith the body, is constantly on stage, cansupport or betray, and has a profound effect onthe way a woman perceives herself as anindividual. Chapter 3 analyses the wardrobe as amirror of a woman’s personality, with each sariembodying a moment in life. Chapter 4 explainshow wearing a sari constitutes a turning-pointfor an adolescent in the same way as a teenagerlearns how to drive a car. It also explores thesari’s association with sexuality.

Chapter 5 argues that although ancient textsdisplay an ideal of societal control over womenand their sexuality, many strictures regardingHindu women’s clothing are enforced bywomen over other women. Chapter 6 looks atthe working sari in today’s India, where manyurban women work outside the home. The sarias the working woman’s dress, frompolicewomen to Indian Administrative Serviceofficers, blends notions of comfort andfunctionality. But its meaning is ambiguous andcontextual: at work it may signal conformity, butit can also fulfil a function of power dressing formany women. Chapter 7 shows the intimatebond between saris and their wearer as theygrow old together: women tend to change theirtaste in saris as they grow older, leaving youngerones to wear bright colours and richer textures.Chapter 8 recounts the dilemmas of two womenon what particular sari to wear, the first onebefore a crucial board meeting and the other,her domestic help, before stepping out to workin this person’s house.

Chapter 9 takes us to three different settingsopposing buyers and sellers of saris, where theact of buying emerges as something involvingskill and knowledge and stimulating bothanxiety and pleasure. Chapter 10 explores thedevelopment of branding and the impact ofmajor companies as well as the dilemmas of thecontemporary handloom sector, caught betweena need to serve the mass market and a moreexpensive taste for craft saris. Chapter 11 surveyssome of the major arbiters of taste, from politics,film, and television soap operas, while makingthe point that fashion in saris is not the mainincentive to the sari-buyer. Chapter 12 looks atthe future of the contemporary sari and askswhether it will be overtaken by theshalwar-kameez or become a purely ceremonialdress like the kimono. The authors suggest thatthe sari will survive as the only Indian formaldress, an ‘elevated status’ to which no othergarment can aspire.

This is in short an excellent book where theauthors truly master their material and succeedin conveying their own enthusiasm for the topic.It will be of interest to a broad cross-section ofreaders interested in clothes and fashion, as wellas to social scientists, who should appreciate abook which manages to be both readable andrigorous.

Nira Wickramasinghe University of Colombo

Chatty, Dawn & Gillian Lewando Hundt

(eds). Children of Palestine: experiencing forcedmigration in the Middle East. xiii, 274 pp., maps,figs, tables, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2005. £45.00 (cloth), £17.00

(paper)

Children of Palestine is published as part of aseries on forced migration which featuresthematic volumes on generic refugee issues (e.g.impoverishment, psychological wellness, agencyand ethics, asylum-seekers) and volumesdedicated to particular refugee populations.Focused on Palestinian refugees – one of thelargest groups of ethno-territorial refugees theworld has seen in recent decades and thelongest-standing refugee population knowntoday – the volume features a generic angle (theimpact of forced migration on the lives ofchildren) and a regional comparative approach.Its five main chapters cover Palestinian refugeesin Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, andGaza, respectively.

Children of Palestine is a highly structuredvolume. Its five main chapters follow a distinct

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thematic mould which obviously reflects thevolume’s epistemological origins. In 1998 theAndrew Mellon Foundation approached theRefugee Studies Center at Oxford with asuggestion to organize a study of the impact offorced migration on Palestinian refugee childrenin Gaza. The Centre designed a largercomparative project that would cover refugeecommunities in the five locations. A third of thevolume (parts of the introduction plus threeappendices covering pages 181 to 265) informsthe reader of the elaborate procedures preparedfor the project. These included a researchstrategy, complete with conceptual andmethodological guidelines; hiring local (mostlyPalestinian) researchers; organizing a preparatoryworkshop in Cyprus; establishing a projectnewsletter to facilitate communication betweenco-ordinators (Chatty and Lewando Hundt) andresearchers in the field; and devising amechanism through which researchers sentperiodic progress reports to the co-ordinatorsand the funding bodies.

The result is a methodical and fact-filledbook. An indispensable contribution to thehistorical record of Palestinian refugees, Childrenof Palestine will certainly prove valuable forcare-giving organizations as well as national andinternational agencies seeking to transform thedire state of Palestinian refugees. Thisnotwithstanding, this top-down research project,funded by metropolitan bodies wishing toempower victims of a large-scale tragedy in theperiphery, mimics some of the characteristicsalluded to in recent critical assessments ofhumanitarian intervention in disaster areas: theknee-jerk scramble for analytical order; theemphasis on transparent, reproduciblemethodology; the concomitant assumption thata well-structured comparative approach is themost productive way of teasing out similaritiesand differences between sub-cases of what isostensibly a single phenomenon or category.

This comment is not restricted to proceduresof inquiry. It speaks to the analytical, theoretical,and political heart of the Palestinian refugeeproblem and its potential solutions. Palestinianrefugees became refugees as a result of aparticular process: Zionism’s colonization ofPalestine and Israel’s deliberate policy during the1948 conflict and immediately after it of securingas much territory as possible with as fewPalestinians as possible. But history, includingthe experience of the Palestinian refugees, didnot cease to evolve in 1948. For one thing, thestates and territories where Palestinian refugeesended up displayed vastly divergent policies

towards them. Jordan granted them citizenshipand freedom to settle anywhere. Syria deniedthem citizenship, restricts their freedom ofassociation, speech, and movement, but isrelatively lax in terms of employmentopportunities and education. Lebanon, wherethe fate of Palestinians has been subject toinvasions and incursions on the part of Israeland Syria, oscillates between draconianrestrictions on residence, employment, andpolitical freedom for Palestinians andhyper-liberal licence afforded to them to createsemi-autonomous territorial enclaves. The WestBank, controlled by Jordan from 1950 to 1967

and a part of the kingdom’s administrative orbittill 1988, but otherwise controlled by Israel since1967, saw various transformations of conditions,rights, and limitations imposed on Palestinianrefugees. This culminated in dramaticdeterioration caused by the militarization of theIsraeli occupation since the beginning of theOslo process in the early 1990s. Gaza, whereincredible space limitations seem to have beenthe dominant factor ever since 1948, likewisechanged hands between Egypt (1949–56,1957–67), Israel (1948–9, 1956–7, 1967–2004), andversions of Palestinian rule since 1994, creating acontinuum of unending, worsening hardship forthe Palestinian refugees.

Given their common memory of loss,treating all Palestinian refugees as a single entityis morally and politically understandable. Butgiven the historical, political, and economicvariations experienced by the sub-communitiesduring the last six decades, is lumping themtogether analytically justified?

Many of the previous surveys and studies ofPalestinian refugees were psychologically orpsychiatrically inclined, inevitably using Westernconcepts of selfhood, suffering, and trauma.Children of Palestine successfully moves awayfrom this by presenting a multi-disciplinary,ethnographically rich approach which looks atchildren in the context of their familial,communal, and societal environments. In eachof the five territories, researchers identifiedapproximately twenty families, then proceededto collect life histories of members of at leastthree generations since 1948. These were thenintegrated into a series of descriptive statementsof the communal history, main problems,coping mechanisms, and scopes for the futurewhich characterize the community.

Children of Palestine is a highly convincingand often heart-breaking chronology ofsuffering. Specific but highly representative,selective but fundamentally factual, each chapter

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of the book unfolds the endless saga ofPalestinian plight. Some of it is obviously uniqueto Palestinians and their tragedy, other parts arereminiscent of impoverished, de-developed anddehumanized communities in the Third World orin slums nearer world metropoli.

Informative and often gripping, thepredominantly descriptive volume, however,seldom soars in terms of analytical insight. Oneexception is Randa Farah’s chapter on Jordan,where the predicament of Palestinian refugees isrepresented in a particularly dynamic andinsightful manner. In spite of the fact that thevolume’s introduction already includes ahistorical background for each of the fivelocations, Farah’s historicization of thecommunity of Palestinian refugees in Jordan isfresh and analytically astute. Her literature review(pp. 91–2) and note on methodology (pp. 92–4),as well as her ethnographic accounts, arelikewise lucid and suggestive, moving effortlesslybetween the micro picture painted throughindividual memories and vignettes, and thebroader stroke of history and politics withinwhich they belong. Her discussion of physicaland social space is particularly illuminating,creating an interesting foreground for hercomments on coping mechanisms.

The Palestinians generally and Palestinianrefugees in particular are still struggling to havea voice in world politics. In this respect, an effortsuch as Children of Palestine, with its effectiveemphasis on bringing forward testimonies andobservations of refugees as interlocutors, is awelcome contribution. It would have been evenmore effective intellectually and politically hadthe vivid accounts emanating from the fieldbeen bracketed by more rigorous theoretical andanalytical introduction and conclusion.

Dan Rabinowitz Tel-Aviv University

Coronado Suzán, Gabriela. Las vocessilenciadas de la cultura mexicana: identidad,resistencia y creatividad en el diálogo interétnico.371 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr. Mexico: CIESAS,2003. (paper)

During the 1980s, Guillermo Bonfil, one of themore relevant and influential Mexicananthropologists, reasoned that as a consequenceof the failure of the ‘imaginary’ Mexican nationalproject that had been expounded by the socialelite since the independence of the state, theunavoidable task of Mexican socialanthropologists was to re-analyse the countryvia the analysis of the links between that

imaginary Mexico and the real one. Two decadeshence, and using considerably differentepistemological tools and methods from thosewhich were employed by Bonfil, it would seemthat this is what also inspires the work ofGabriela Coronado, who, from the perspectiveof the social narrative, examines the complexrelationships existing between indigenouspeoples, to whom she always refers as ‘Indianpeoples’, and mestizos, amid the convergence ofdifferent layers of self-identification in theburgeoning national identity, that of acontemporary Mexico which is not bound byits past.

Following Bakhtin’s heteroglossical principles,Coronado picks out the social interactions ineach cultural manifestation, which qualify assome sort of ‘text’ of inter-ethnic dialogue. Thisis the same dialogue which not only classifiesIndians and mestizos as different ethnicities, butalso assumes as a starting-point that the nationalsocial hegemony has been facilitated thanks tothe deliberate silencing and marginalization ofone of the parties – the Indians. Whilst givingcredit to the creativity of the Indian populationin the formation of the new country, the authorforgets, as if it had never existed, the third pillarof the national project, namely Africanimmigrants. She attempts to filter contemporaryMexican society through the lens of aninterdisciplinary conceptualization which is, attimes, subordinate to the presumptions of thetextual and semiotic analysis itself.

Notwithstanding this, it is tempting toimagine the Zócalo, the central plaza of MexicoCity, and by extension that of the entire country,as a narrative space where the symbols of thenation are imbued with new meanings thanks tothe appropriation – symbolic as much asphysical – of the space by representatives of theexcluded party: groups of Indians whocommemorate on a daily basis the traditionaldances of the concheros, those who sell cheaptraditional trinkets, or the Zapatista army,looming in the distant southeast. In thejudgement of the author, this appropriationpresupposes a ‘reconfiguration’ of thesesymbols, most notoriously in the case of thenational flag, which masks the displacement ofIndians from their position of primacy when,during the Colonial period, the pre-hispanicTemplo Mayor was confined to a corner of thesquare, half-hidden behind colonial buildings,the Cathedral and Palacio Nacional.

If the historical interaction ‘between twocivilizations’, Spanish culture and Mesoamerican,somewhat simplistically conceived of as being

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homogeneous cultures, has been basically arelationship of dominance and subordinance,the application of a ‘fractal logic’, whicharticulates more subtle and varied levels of socialcomplexity and inter-ethnic interaction incomparison to an analysis of society as a whole,allows us, according to Coronado, to understanda new dialogical version of local histories inwhich the Indian groups must incorporate the‘other’, represented by the mestizo, in theprocess of creating a new indianidad. This isanalysed in its various manifestations via anethnography which is broad and generalizedwhen looking at the Zapatistas and which is fine,detailed, and illuminating when it concentrateson the social processes which accompany thecreation of new local identities in the district ofCuetzalan, in Puebla state.

Beyond the problematic elimination of thesubtleties of indigenous identities, subsumedwithin the generic label of ‘Indian peoples’, andthe no less problematic analysis of behavioursinferred from texts produced in, and for,different contexts from those in which they nowfind themselves, the author manages to showhow Mexico’s indigenous past seeps from everypore of its national identity, crossing the chasmof a hegemonic discourse which it has alwayssought to deny, by the placement of the Indiansin a remote and mythical past. In this sense,Gabriela Coronado conceives of her text as partof a healing rite for a nation which has beenailing ever since it condemned Mesoamericanculture to the shadows. This being the case, thedemand that Mexico develop a non-exclusiveand more balanced national identity implies thatthe aforementioned culture be placed in thelight for all to see. For this to happen, Coronadoconverts herself into a loudspeaker ofinter-ethnic dialogue, clearly enunciating thewords of those who could not be heard becausethey were speaking in whispers.

Pedro Tomé (translated by Rafael Bloom)CSIC, Centro de Humanidades, Madrid

Fuller, C.J. The renewal of the priesthood:modernity and traditionalism in a South Indiantemple. xx, 207 pp., figs, tables, bibliogr.Oxford, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004.£17.95 (paper)

The renewal of the priesthood by C.J. Fullerrevisits, revises, and extends an ethnographicstudy undertaken by the same author in 1976-7.It examines recent patterns of socio-cultural andgeographic mobility among the Brahman priests

who work in the Sri Minakshi SundareshwaraTemple, one of southern India’s largest temples,relating these changes to the priests’self-conscious embrace of traditionalism,understood (following Eisenstadt) as theselective reclamation of older legitimatingsymbols as hedges against new symbolic orders(p. 160). The book’s ethnographic core is framedby an argument about the necessity ofapproaching modernization not through abstractuniversalisms – rationalization, for example – butthrough its culturally inflected forms and the‘folk understandings’ of the modern that arisefrom those processes. Fuller thus maintains,contra Giddens, that priests’ ideologicalinvestments in traditionalism are integral to thesocial and cultural project of modernity.

The book opens with Fuller’s recollection of a1976 encounter with a priestly family in Madurai;it is quickly followed by a description of thatfamily in 2001, at which point several membershad relocated to the United States. There, theyserved as priests in a newly constructed temple,also dedicated to Minakshi, in suburban Texas.Fuller notes that, at least for one of the priests,Sanskritic scriptural education had been a keyfactor in obtaining the overseas post. This settingtrope introduces the conundrum that Fullerseeks to unravel in the book, namely how andwhy aspects of the priesthood have changedover the past quarter-century, particularly interms of the value that has come to be assignedto Sanskritic education over that same period.The grand, much-delayed renovation ritual forMadurai’s Minakshi temple in 1995, described byFuller in the same chapter, serves as an iconicsign (in all senses) of this renewal. It is arenewal, moreover, that Fuller in his earlier workhad not anticipated, given the socio-economicdecline and demoralization among priests thathe documented in 1976-7.

In the five chapters that follow, the globalhorizon recedes as Fuller seeks to account forthe improved status of Minakshi temple priests.He examines patterns of priestly labour (chap.2), family and domestic life (chap. 3), andeducation (chap. 4), paying special attention tothe growth of schools dedicated to Sanskriticeducation and to priests’ increasing interests insuch training. Chapter 5 deals with recentpolitical developments, especially the impact ofmodern state formation and Hindu nationalistideology on temple activities in Tamil Nadu. Inthe book’s final chapter, Fuller assesses currentdebates on modernization and concludes: ‘inthe work and lives of the priests, we ... have acase study of ... not only how modernity can

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engender traditionalism but also howtraditionalism can constitute and promotemodernity while simultaneously emphasizingthe divine authority of tradition’ (p. 167).

The book, which is admirably free of jargon,is a useful ethnographic study that, paired withFuller’s earlier work, offers an extended casestudy of an important priestly community insouthern India. Fuller’s documentation of newforms and spaces of Sanskritic education isparticularly welcome, as is his dissection of therecent rise of Hindutva in southern India.Perhaps because I live and work in a state(California) that has a large population ofNon-Resident Indians and correspondingly largenumbers of Hindu temples, I would like to haveseen more attention to the transnationalprocesses and institutions that are responsiblefor, and impacted by, priests’ increased mobility.The book begins by invoking ‘globalization’through accounts of the unexpectedconjunctures that it occasions, but – apart fromdismissive comments about notions of ‘globalmodernity’ – there is very little subsequentdiscussion of the forces and institutions, be theypolitical, legal, economic, or cultural, thatmediate globalization and render traditionalisminto a mobile and dynamic ideology. How, forexample, does the mobility now experienced byMinakshi temple priests compare with that ofother priestly communities? How do templesdedicated to Minakshi outside India comparewith those in India? Is Minakshi, herself,re-imagined or re-framed in the course of hertransnational peregrinations? What sorts oftransnational resource ‘flows’ do Sanskritictraining institutions rely upon? What othertransnational circuits do priests participate in?These are just a few of the questions that Fuller’sengaging study invites.

Mary Hancock University of California, SantaBarbara

Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas:military training and political violence in theAmericas. xviii, 281 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. £14.50

(paper)

In this important, well-written and timely book,Lesley Gill turns a spotlight on the School of theAmericas (SOA), a US Army counter-insurgencytraining centre for Latin American militaries.During its fifty-year existence, SOA has produced60,000 alumni, many of whom are implicated asthe principal perpetrators of human rights

abuses. Gill pulls back the curtain on the makingof a repressive hemispheric military apparatus,and, simultaneously, exposes the linkagesbetween increased military violence andneo-liberal programmes. Gill argues that theselinkages are the basis of US empire in theAmericas.

Gill’s multi-sited, transnational ethnographyilluminates empire formation by exploring theexperiences and perspectives of three groups:US military trainers and Latin American studentsat SOA; coca-growing Bolivian and Colombianpeasants; and US activists aiming to shut downSOA. Traversing the frontiers between torturers,victims, and protesters, Gill vividly maps out thepoles of subjugation and opposition thatconstitute the force fields of US militaryimperialism.

Gill begins by connecting military recruitmentand retention to broader issues of culture andpower. She captures the pushes and pulls ofrecruitment by juxtaposing the differentexperiences of trainees and their families as theymove between a Latin American landscape ofdispossession and repression and an Americanculture of consumption. Latin American militariesprovide the primary avenue of social mobility forthe lower middle class, and professional soldiersare a caste-like group largely insulated from theconsequences of the social dislocations that theyuphold. SOA training is the surest route tomilitary promotion and success. The integrationof trainees and their families into an ‘Americanway of life’ is integral to the SOA experience. Gillargues that this broader SOA experience createsthe shared worldviews and personal relationsamongst Latin American and US personnel thatconsolidate US hegemony.

Gill’s primary foci are human rights abusesby SOA graduates and oppositional movementsof Andean peasants and US activists. Chapter 7,‘Disordering the Andes’, argues that both theheightened military violence and thedispossession and displacement of coca-growingpeasants in Chapare, Bolivia, and Putumayo,Colombia, reflect a shift in the post-cold war USmilitary’s strategy away from the communistthreat and towards a ‘war on drugs’. This shiftprovided a new rationale for bloated militarybudgets and continued US intervention.Consequently, SOA’s new mission was to trainsoldiers from prime coca-producing areas for thisnew war on drugs. The consequences forordinary coca-growing peasants caught betweenthe structural violence of neo-liberal economicprogrammes and military violence was tragic.This tragedy, however, fuelled powerful

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opposition movements, especially the FuerzasArmadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) andBolivia’s Movimento Hacia Socialismo (MAS). Gill’streatment of their evolution enhances ourunderstanding of the shifting political landscapethat, for example, recently propelled the firstindigenous peasant leader, Evo Morales, intoBolivia’s presidential office.

Demonstrating the necessary connectionbetween military violence and neo-liberaleconomic programmes, Gill exposes the keypolitical vulnerability of SOA. Chapter 8,‘Targeting the “School of the Assassins” ’,examines the development of the movement toclose SOA. Activists rooted in earlier liberationtheology and solidarity movements formed itscore and steadily exposed the connectionbetween SOA and human rights abuse. Two keymoments put SOA on the political defensive. In1996, activists disseminated recently discoveredSOA training manuals for infiltrating unions,peasant associations, and communityorganizations, and targeting political and peaceactivists for assassination. In the late 1990s, SOAWatch’s web page listed all SOA graduates, thusenabling human rights groups to connectalumni to documented cases of abuse.

Under increased public pressure, Congressslashed SOA’s funding in 1999. SOA reboundedby launching a public relations campaign thathighlighted its new human rights trainingprogramme and by opening its doors to socialinvestigators such as Gill. Chapter 6, ‘Humanrights and wrongs’, examines this programme.Gill’s participant observation during a week-long human rights programme in 2000

exposed the pervasive cynicism and contemptfor human rights ‘talk’ among participants, aswell as their scrupulous avoidance of socialjustice issues, accountability concerns, and USmilitary policy. The programme distanced SOAdiscursively from its cold war past. Yet SOAtrainees continue to be selected based on theirsuccess at ‘neutralizing’ internal enemies.Andean soldiers, for example, mustdemonstrate progress in the war on drugs,‘measured in terms of the number of arrests,searches, seizures, cocaine pits destroyed, and,in Colombia, by the dead bodies that thesecurity forces produce’ (p. 158).

Gill expands the definition of impunity toweave these disparate but connected storiestogether. More than the absence ofaccountability, impunity is ‘embedded in theprocess of social differentiation ... that extendsfrom the military and powerful civilian elites tothe oppressive economic policies of international

financial institutions’ (p. 13). Consequently, herbook opens up new horizons in ourunderstanding of social change enacted fromabove. She argues that impunity-fuelled violenceis necessary to maintain the ‘particular form ofcapitalist political and economic order in theAmericas’ (p. 239). Further, she contends thatordinary people facing or witnessing extremesocial dislocations and violence will continue todemand an end to state-sponsored terrorismbankrolled and organized by the United States.By mapping connections that others have for toolong ignored, Gill has produced a book ofimmense political and theoretical importance. Itshould be required reading for anyoneconcerned with peace and justice in our time.

August Carbonella Memorial University ofNewfoundland

Leopold, Mark. Inside West Nile. x, 180 pp.,maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, Santa Fe:James Currey Publishers/Sch. AmericanResearch, 2005. £45.00 (cloth), £16.95

(paper)

Mark Leopold’s Inside West Nile endeavours toexplain why the post-colonial history andimagery of the northwest of Uganda have beenso dominated by war and instability. The lastdecade has seen sporadic guerrilla opposition toYoweri Museveni’s regime there, in the early1980s the brutality of the Obote II governmentcaused the near depopulation of the area, whileUganda in the 1970s was dominated by WestNile’s most infamous son, Idi Amin. Leopold hasproduced a valuable addition to the literature onthe anthropology of conflict, but one whichemphasizes the analysis of the historical contextof contemporary unrest more than the livedexperience of those affected by violence.

The logic behind this approach wasessentially pragmatic. Leopold’s research inUganda coincided with a major upsurge in rebelactivity, so that he was almost totally confined tothe major town of the region, Arua. Withtraditional fieldwork out of the question, and notwishing to focus on refugees, Leopold chose toexplore the evolution of the image of West Nilersas people of violence. In his opinion, theguerrilla opposition within West Nile to thecurrent government is primarily a response toadministrative neglect and suspicion, which inturn results from outsiders’ perceptions thatWest Nile is somehow not really of Uganda, andthat West Nilers are instinctively prone toviolence.

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Leopold attempts to show that externalpowerholders have repeatedly projected violenceonto its victims, narrative creating reality byconstantly depicting West Nilers as uncivilizedsavages who are the source of their ownmarginality and misfortunes. He attempts toescape this false coherence and causality bytelling his story backwards. His major task, ofcourse, is to convince the reader that Idi Amin isunrepresentative of West Nile culture. Leopoldnotes that almost all writers on Amin emphasizehis origins, a Kakwa/Lugbara/Nubi from WestNile, in explaining his character and behaviour.Some accounts claim that Kakwa practisedhuman sacrifice and cannibalism; others arguethat by growing up in a stateless society, Aminlacked the civilizing influence of chiefly rule. Butmostly, writers have stressed Amin’s adoptedNubi identity. The Nubi were originally southernSudanese soldiers from various ethnic groupswho were incorporated into the British imperialarmy in Uganda in the 1890s. The Nubi wereregarded by British officers as true warrior stock,noble savages, who would keep the politicallythreatening southern Ugandan mission boysunder control. The Nubi population wasconstantly replenished throughout the colonialperiod by recruits from West Nile, whofrequently took on this supplementary identityas a means of expressing their resentmentagainst southern Ugandan assumptions ofsuperiority. Leopold’s analysis of thecomplexities of West Nile identity is particularlyrich. He shows skillfully how liminal the regionhas been in the modern era, a border country,economically marginalized, linguistically andculturally closer to the Congo and Sudan thanthe rest of Uganda. Amin’s antagonism toeducated elites, his poor education, and hisaggression are all, Leopold implies, a product ofWest Nile’s modern history, rather than inherentcharacteristics of West Nile culture.

The bulk of the book attempts to analyse theemergence of West Nile’s exceptionalism, itspersistent association with violence, savagery,and separateness. This is largely achieved,though one could argue that Kigezi in southernUganda was just as peripheralized by thecolonial economy, that Bunyoro in westernUganda was viewed by Europeans with at leastas much antagonism and suspicion, and thatAcholi suffered more from pre-colonial slaversand Egyptian imperialists than did their WestNile neighbours. What really distinguished WestNile was that it began the colonial period as partof the Congo Free State, was then transferred toSudan, before finally joining Uganda at the start

of the First World War. This peculiarconstitutional history is crucial in explaining thearea’s lack of integration with the rest ofUganda.

Ultimately Leopold’s argument that West Nileis more victim than perpetrator of violence islargely convincing, though the book might haveaddressed in more detail West Nilers’ views onviolent crime and concepts of honour andretribution. Moreover, he probablyunderestimates the extent of justified resentmentfelt in the rest of Uganda at the horrorscommitted by Amin’s West Nile soldiers in the1970s. Finally, it is not at all clear that thetechnique of writing history backwards avoidsthe risk of narrative coherence. Reversechronology makes it less likely that by-ways anddead-ends will be explored. None the less, this isa fine book, engagingly written, carefullyresearched, and open about its unavoidablelimitations.

Shane Doyle University of Leeds

Mabilia, Mara. Breast feeding and sexuality:behaviour, beliefs and taboos among the Gogomothers in Tanzania (trans. Mary S. Ash). xi, 139

pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2005. £36.50 (cloth)

This book, a rewritten Ph.D. dissertation, aboutthe interrelation between breast-feeding andsexuality, is based on thirty months’ fieldresearch (from 1989 to 1992) among the Gogo, aBantu-speaking agropastoral people living inDodoma region in Tanzania. The study was partof the paediatric implementation project withCUAMM, Doctors with Africa, an Italian NGO inwhich the overall aim was to assess the paradoxthat 50 to 60 per cent of Gogo children under 5

years of age suffer from (modest) malnutrition inspite of the prolonged breast-feeding practicethat often continues until the child reaches theage of 3.

Using ethnography and survey-basedresearch methods in a Gogo rural community ofclose to 4,000 people, focusing on 114

breast-feeding women and their infants,Mabilia’s study seeks to discover the cultural andsocial organizational elements which interactwith the infant feeding methods and to identifythe consequences of such factors for a child’sdevelopment and health. Inspired by VanessaMaher’s (edited volume) The anthropology ofbreastfeeding: natural law or social construct(1992), Mabilia goes beyond the biological nicheof breast-feeding and gives a rich and thorough

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analysis of the interrelated and inherentrelationship between the physiology (nature) ofbreast-feeding and the behaviour (culture) of thenurturing mother and the nurtured child.

The breast-feeding practice among the Gogo,as in much of eastern and southern Africa, ischaracterized by the child having access to themother’s breast whenever it desires untilsuddenly at the age of 3 it is weaned. Mother’smilk is, however, complemented with mixedfeeding, i.e. millet porridge, often from the ageof 3 months, which impoverishes the advantageof exclusive breast-feeding.

The complex cultural logic of the breastfeeding system and how the many post-partumtaboos partly guide but also dictate the nursingmother’s behaviour – especially her sexualbehaviour – rest on the notion that body fluidssuch as mother’s blood, semen, and mother’smilk have the ambiguous capacity to create lifethrough sexual intercourse, but also to causeand transmit sickness, evil, and even death.Thus, maternal milk turns ‘bad’ when suchsocial regulations are transgressed by themother. Consequently, if the nurtured child getsill with a prolonged diarrhoea, the mother maybe accused of killing her own child because shehas had extra-marital sexual intercourse.Conversely, if the child grows well, it is perceivedas evidence of the mother’s moral worth, farbeyond her role as a mother.

In the last chapter, Mabilia draws on Maussand argues that breast-feeding and thecircularity of giving and receiving milk, i.e.‘“good milk” : “good nurturer” = “rightgrowth” : “good mother” ’ (p. 103), can beconceived as ‘the gift’. The use of Mauss’stheory seems a bit too far-fetched, not because itis difficult to see the nursing mother as agift-giver, offering her maternal milk (’thesupreme gift’), or to see the nursing child as thereceiver. In Mauss, however, the receiver of thegift must, sooner or later, reciprocate with acounter-gift. Although Mabilia argues that thechild, by sucking the maternal milk, reproducesthe mother’s milk, ‘giving milk, receiving milk,to have milk again’ (p. 114), this seems to entail asymbiosis rather than an instance of Maussianreciprocity.

The tension between tradition and (modern)changes becomes obvious in the critical voicesof the elderly women when they admonishyoung mothers whenever they transgress therules and obligations of the breast-feedingsystem. The study would also have gained muchif such counter-discourses, as well as socialencounters between young women – and their

male partners, who are almost absent in theanalysis – had been given more space. Theethnography of ‘wicked women’, and the factthat women throughout much of Africa areeasily blamed – often through sexual shaming –for the spread and distribution of infectiousdiseases, as well as for the ill-effects ofmodernity, is disturbing.

The male-dominant political ideology ofbreast-feeding, which puts a heavy toll on theotherwise overburdened reproductive femalebody – leaving men without much responsibility– is a dangerous and risky cultural model. Theincreasing mobility among the young andsexually active generation and the highprevalence of HIV/AIDS should have spurredmore reflection.

Such criticism notwithstanding, the book isto be highly recommended for students ofinternational public health, African healthprofessionals, as well as for (upper-level) coursesin African culture, medical anthropology, andthe anthropology of body and gender.

Liv Haram Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala

Mead, Margaret. The world ahead: ananthropologist anticipates the future.x, 348 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2005. £50.00 (cloth), £16.95

(paper)

Margaret Mead is the Jack Kerouac ofanthropology. She wrote an enormous amount,quickly, and without revision. Much of what shewrote is forgettable, but occasionally there is realbrilliance in it. Also like Kerouac, Meadchronicled the American road, but whereasKerouac’s road was geographic,transcontinental, Mead’s was temporal, theAmerican national trajectory from its immigrantpast to its space-age future.

The current volume is the sixth in a seriesdevoted to Mead’s work on contemporaryWestern cultures. The world ahead presentstwenty-five essays (from the period 1943-77) thatthe editor, Robert Textor, considers ‘mostdirectly relevant to Anticipatory Anthropology’,that is, which ‘treated the future systematically’(p. 1). Yet there is much that is not systematic inthese essays, most of which were written forpublic occasions and audiences, and addresssuch topics as the family, peace and war, socialsecurity, urbanization, and the life cycle, allunderstood in terms of Mead’s ideas about theincreasing pace of social change in the modernworld. What strikes the reader above all in these

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essays is Mead’s willingness to makeauthoritative pronouncements, some of whichseem astute, and others, ill informed,contradictory, or erroneous.

Take, for example, a 1962 essay on ‘Thepsychology of warless man’. The premise is aninteresting one: that nuclear weapons havingmade wars between nation-states impossible,humanity will have to figure out how to livewithout such wars. For Mead, the problem isprimarily one of social change. Wheninternational peacekeeping bodies replacenational armies, she asks, what sorts ofinstitutions will evolve to control local-levelviolence? Yet despite repeated assertions thatwar is primarily a social phenomenon, and not amere matter of ‘hostility and aggression’ (p. 83),Mead also describes it as originating in man’s‘primitive impulse to protect his women and hischildren’ (p. 81). And in the end, Mead isworried more by the psychological than thesocial consequences of a ‘warless’ world: howare ‘young males’ going to ‘test their mettle’ inthis unprecedented situation (p. 84)? Despite theself-confidence with which she puts forwardsociological and psychological generalizations,the whole adds up to less than the sum of itsparts, precisely because the parts arecontradictory. And yet there are flashes ofbrilliance in this essay, as when Mead describesthe social solidarity of the modern nation-state interms that anticipate Benedict Anderson’sImagined communities (1983): ‘organizedinvocations of their imagination bound men to... fellow citizens whom they had never met’(p. 80).

Other essays justify the editor’s claims aboutMead’s skill as a futurist. Her statement onageing and retirement, delivered as testimony tothe US Senate in 1968, is not only cogent andcomprehensive, it remains as relevant today as itwas then. Not only are there sensiblesocial-democratic prescriptions on incomesecurity and medical insurance, there areanthropologically informed suggestions on therange of variations possible in relationshipsbetween older and younger persons, on culturalfactors affecting ageing, and on life-longlearning.

Mead’s most coherent account of Americanculture was the 1942 monograph, And keep yourpowder dry, reprinted as the second volume ofthis series. The insights she articulated there, onthe relationship between America’s immigranthistory and its family structure, and betweenAmerican moralism and child-rearing practices,reappear in these essays to good effect. But so

also does her willingness to shoot from the hip,and to generalize on the basis of little apparentevidence other than her own experience. Theresults are worth reading, but one must knowhow to separate the wheat from the chaff. SinceMead’s death, one hears anthropologists lamentthat we no longer know how to engage a publicaudience the way she did. We need toremember, however, that having access to anaudience does not guarantee that one knowswhat one is talking about.

Richard Handler University of Virginia

Poirier, Sylvie. A world of relationships:itineraries, dreams, and events in the AustralianWestern Desert. xi, 303 pp., maps, plates,bibliogr. London, Toronto: Univ. Toronto Press,2005. £42.00 (cloth), £20.00 (paper)

This is a revised version of a book originallypublished in French entitled Les jardins dunomade: cosmologie, personne et territoire dans ledésert occidental australien (1996). It is based onthree years’ fieldwork in Balgo (Wirrimanu) andnearby outstations in the northern part of theGibson Desert of Western Australia, part of thelarger Western Desert.

Balgo was established as a Catholic missionin 1939, populated by desert Aborigines, most ofwhom identify in broad socio-linguistic terms asKukatja and Walmatjari. The population of theBalgo area totals approximately one thousand.Administrative authority was transferred from theCatholic Church to state government in 1984.Catholic influence has continued, involvingmutual accommodation between the Churchand Aborigines (for whom priorities haveincluded maintenance of ritual life, high levels ofmobility, and return to outstations from the1980s). Bureaucratic administration of what isnow called the Balgo Hills AboriginalCommunity has not been a priority forAborigines, and has consequently been difficultto achieve. Nationally, Balgo has at times beenseen as a ‘problem’ and a dangerous place forhealth, education, and other government(mainly non-indigenous) staff, who have beenperiodically removed. It is telling that thecommunity office is located in the town ofKununurra, several hundred kilometres to thenorth.

Though readers’ sensibilities about history, aswell as objective circumstances, make it difficultto write about the Aboriginal world as if it wereautonomous, in a place like Balgo this seemsmore plausible than in a rural town or city. In

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the main, this is the strategy Poirier adopts –producing a worthwhile combination ofethnography and analysis. While approximatelythe first half of the book hews fairly closely tothe themes of other Australianist and WesternDesert ethnographers (particularly Fred Myers) –landscape as medium of social relations;personal identity as composed of relationshipsamong people, place and dreaming; thenegotiated, flexible, and permeable quality ofsocial relations – the second half deepens ourunderstandings of desert social practice andcultural themes through a close focus on dreamsand dreaming, with implications for Australianand wider comparison.

The creative dimension of Tjukurrpa or‘Dreaming’, by now a key concept inAustralianist ethnography, is ‘everywhen’ (asW.E.H. Stanner put it), continously present andpart of daily life. Western Desert Aborigines(among others) recognize dreaming in sleep(kapukurri) as closely linked to and a means ofinteraction with this vital dimension (see RobertTonkinson’s ‘Aboriginal dream-spirit beliefs in acontact situation’, in Ronald Berndt (ed.),Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, 1970). In orderto enhance receptivity, they emphasize keepingthe body ‘open’ (tintirrpuwa, ‘going through’ orpermeable) and use massage techniques toachieve this. Indigenous notions of dreamingalso feature a concept of travel by the spirit(kurrunpa), hence its ‘lightness’. Dreams may beshared, a further indication of the permeabilityamong persons and across different states (e.g.communication between living and thedeceased, between human and non-humanbeings).

Poirier gives many examples of dreams anddiscusses how people are socialized to bereceptive to the possible significance of dreamsin their daily lives: their potential as a kind ofcontinuously available messaging system. Thisextends recent Western Desert ethnography,which has pointed to the importance ofcontingency, possibility, permeability, andnegotiability as fundamental dimensions ofsocial practice, apparently contrasting withindigenous insistence on permanence (‘Law’),but actually providing means for constantreinterpretation of how things are. Poirier alsopoints to the need to understand the element ofhuman agency in indigenous ways of encryptingreinterpretation and innovation. She pursues thistopic through an analysis (in chapter 6) of ritualtransformation, principally the dream-inspiredreformulation of mythic pathways, actions, andidentities of figures celebrated in ritual, as

indigenous expression of politics and historicity.Throughout the book Poirier emphasizes thetheme of rhizomatic relatedness among allentities and agencies of the dwelt-in world, anindigenous cosmology which does not entertainthe bounding off of human from non-human,nature from culture, or the relevance of dreamsfrom daily life.

In conclusion, Poirier returns to otherdimensions of Aboriginal reality. She observesthat, on her last visits, Balgo residents have beencompletely absorbed in ‘sorry business’,large-scale mourning for deaths, many resultingdirectly from suicide, violence, and accident,often alcohol-fuelled, as well as poor health.While ‘sorry business’ is an enactment of socialresponsibility in indigenous mode, the first andlast chapters remind us of the profoundlydifficult issues facing remote communities likeBalgo, where active endogenous social life doesnot simply persist unmodified.Francesca Merlan Australian National University

Regan, Anthony J. & Helga M. Griffin

(eds). Bougainville before the conflict. xl, 566

pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogrs.Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005. $85.00

(cloth)

The island province of Bougainville is thefurthest from Papua New Guinea’s capital, PortMoresby. Geographically it is part of theSolomon Islands; mission links reinforced thatnexus, and many of the 200,000 people arguethat their black skins signal deeper differencesfrom the ‘redskins’ in the rest of the country.

When PNG applied to join the United Nationsin 1975, the national delegation (sponsored byAustralia, the colonial power) was led by EbiaOlewale, who had entered Parliament as aPapuan separatist. A rival delegation was led byFather John Momis, member for Bougainvilleand de facto chair of PNG’s ConstitutionalPlanning Committee. Frustrated in their drive forautonomy within PNG’s new constitution,Bougainvilleans were demanding separateindependence.

So fragile was the country’s unity that manycitizens – including many in Bougainville – didnot know where Papua New Guinea might be.In these circumstances, Momis might easily haverepresented PNG and Olewale a delegation ofPapuan separatists. The crisis that produced theactual alignment was the development ofPanguna copper mine in Bougainville, the mainsource of PNG’s domestic revenue and an

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essential element of the country’sindependence. But the mine also outraged thedispossessed landowners, who resented theenvironmental damage, the flow of benefits toPNG, and the influx of young, single ‘redskins’to operate the mine.

Panguna fanned the embers of Bougainville’ssense of separateness. Deft footwork by thenational politicians averted secession, butlandowners’ grievances accumulated until 1988,when Francis Ona’s militants sabotaged themine. As violence escalated, so did the claims ofthe Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) andthe ambitions of political leaders. Savage andconfusing civil war raged for eight years until aNew Zealand-mediated truce initiated therebuilding of peace. By then an economicembargo and guerrilla warfare had wrecked theisland’s cash economy and social services. PNG’sDefence Force, the BRA and the (anti-BRA)Bougainville Resistance Movement all fractured.The national government lurched betweeneconomic and political crises, the insurgentsfailed to win diplomatic allies, and both sidessuspected Australia’s actions and inactions. It hastaken eight years of patient negotiation torebuild a provincial government and restore ameasure of civility.

The case for secession insists thatBougainvilleans differ from other Papua NewGuineans, culturally and ethnically as well asgeographically and in the pigmentation of manyBougainvilleans. Bougainville before the conflictaddresses the question: ‘Was Bougainvillesomehow inherently different in the combinationof its mini-cultures? Or was it just another sliceof Melanesia, a microcosm that reflected theethnic diversity of Papua New Guinea and thewider region?’ (p. xxviii).

This ambitious volume is handsomelyproduced by Pandanus, the pre-eminentpublisher of Papua New Guinea studies. Withsupport from Australian aid, Rio Tinto, and theAustralian National University, it is helpfullyillustrated, and the editors and contributors havelavished affection as well as professional care onthe project. What is most impressive is not their(inevitable) failure ultimately to answer theheadline questions, but their exhaustive andmany-sided investigations. Its twenty-eightchapters include natural and social sciences,colonial and post-colonial history, and manyparticipant accounts, mainly by Bougainvilleans.

It is impossible to summarize the richness ofthese studies, memoirs, and vignettes. JamesTanis’s reflections (‘Nagovisi villages’) are typicalof the honesty and emotional power of many

chapters. He left university to join the BRA,fought through the war, engaged in peacenegotiations, and served as a minister inBougainville’s post-war government. He partedcompany with the mystical Francis Ona whenthe latter boycotted the peace process. In 2004,ignoring seven years of peace-making, Ona hadhimself crowned king of independentBougainville. His ally, Noah Musingku, anotherfantasist and creator of fraudulent pyramidschemes, became Prince David. Havingdescribed this hubris, Tanis reviews the pre-warcircumstances of Nagovisi and the land disputesthat led to Ona’s supremacy – and finally to hisdescent into absurdity.

This is not a run-of-the-mill monograph. Likeother perceptive writers, Tanis raises morequestions than anyone could answer. He asksabout the nature of PNG’s stake in Bougainville;he ponders Australia’s interests in Panguna; andhe wonders what unseen forces – global andregional – contributed to the tragedy. Heconcludes with the most radical of all questions:‘After gaining political independence fromcolonial masters, do all third world nations enjoyonly brief periods of real independence? Mustthey all then experience civil wars andrevolutions and go bankrupt and join the queueawaiting solutions from elsewhere?’

Donald Denoon Australian National University

Rydstrøm, Helle. Embodying morality: growingup in rural northern Vietnam. xx, 232 pp., tables,illus., bibliogr. Honolulu: Univ. Hawai’i Press,2003. £45.00 (cloth)

This monograph is a study of the different waysin which girls and boys learn to demonstrate‘good morality’ in Thinh Tri, a rural commune innorthern Vietnam. The main protagonists arenine girls and four boys, the oldest of whomwas 13. Extensive use is made of transcripts ofrecorded interactions between the children andother family members. Rydstrøm understandsmorality as a social practice that needs to beperformed appropriately. Central to her approachis a focus on the bodily dimension of learning, adimension that is crucial for the dissimilarexpectations of girls and boys. The author makesfrequent reference to Bourdieu’s work on practiceand the body as an important element in thelearning and enactment of symbolic schemes.Inspired by the attentiveness of local residents tothe children’s genitals, she draws on Derrida,conceptualizing Thinh Tri as a ‘phallocentriccommunity’. The villagers, she argues, think of

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femaleness with reference to maleness as ‘Other’,unmarked, or simply as not male. In this context,I found the notion of girls as ‘blank slates’interesting. While boys embody their fathers’lineage, girls are like unwritten pieces of paperwho require a more intensive upbringing.

In the central chapters 4 and 5, we learnabout the important Vietnamese concept tinhcam (lit. feelings) and that this is primarilyapplicable to girls. Rydstrøm conceptualizes tinhcam as a social practice whereby onedemonstrates ‘good morality’. It is about socialcompetence, the skills required to accommodateoneself to others and avoid confrontation. Boys,on the other hand, learn to put their foot down.In a later chapter, this contrast is shown to bereflected in different body styles. Women carrytheir bodies in a nimble manner, while menmove conspicuously and occupy much space.The book also includes sketches of differenthistorical contexts in which female morality wasdefined, embodied, and evaluated. The authorfinds both changes and continuities, but more ofthe latter. In another chapter, we are given abrief account of the contemporary educationalsystem at primary school level. Here, the authorlooks mostly at textbooks and finds very similarroles of assertive boys and submissive girls.

On the whole, I was not convinced thatBourdieu’s theory of practice was put to gooduse. That boys and girls learn to behavedifferently in Vietnam and that body posturesand bodily metaphors matter in this context isall rather obvious. The male-centredness inVietnamese culture I felt was often drawn toocrudely. Bourdieu’s work could have inspired amore subtle and complex account. The problemalso derives in part from the author’s ratherelusive use of key concepts, especially moralityand tinh cam. This surfaces already on page 3,where she writes that ‘ “morality” is a socialpractice’ and a few sentences further down,‘The relationship between social practice andmorality is a dynamic one’. Is morality a socialpractice or something else to which it has adynamic relationship? Later we learn thatpractising tinh cam is a social practice and thatthe actor thereby demonstrates good morality.At other places tinh cam seems to besynonymous with morality. Also, to argue thattinh cam is an almost exclusively female concernis rather daring, I think. This may reflect theauthor’s better access to female informants.

Another shortcoming is that the author tendsto take statements of her adult informants onmorality, education, and socialization almost atface value. This is one of the most important

domains in which socialist educationalcampaigns have ‘raised awareness’ over decades.On the other hand, the few places whereRydstrøm briefly muses on the impact ofMarxism-Leninism on local notions of‘socialization’, she fails to account for thecontinuities or overlaps with Neo-Confucian andFrench colonial education. Despite theseshortcomings, Embodying morality offers aninteresting and detailed account of earlychildhood in late socialist rural Vietnam. As such,it will be of interest to those working in Vietnamand those working with children elsewhere.

Markus Schlecker Max Planck Institute, Halle

Salamandra, Christa. A new old Damascus:authenticity and distinction in urban Syria. xii, 199

pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Bloomington: IndianaUniv. Press, 2005. £15.95 (cloth)

The long international demonization of theSyrian state has also left us with few scholarly orpopular studies of the country. This givesSalamandra’s study additional importance, andshe has chosen an interesting topic. Basedmainly on fieldwork between 1992 and 1994, thebook focuses on the notion ‘old Damascus’ asboth a market commodity and a factor in claimsto social superiority made by the well-to-do.

Salamandra has chapters on the history andclass demographics of the contemporary city,gender and display, and the partialredevelopment of sites in the old city. Herstrongest material comes in her penultimatechapter on the ‘practices of identity assertionand boundary construction’, which peak duringRamadan. Here we learn of class snobberies. Asone woman explains, ‘the poor fast out of belief,but elite Damascenes fast as a mode ofdistinction’ (p. 95). Indeed, the deeply secularbiases of many well-to-do Syrians is suggestedby the fact that the only reference to politicalIslam in the book appears when a librariansuggests ‘the media and public culture duringRamadan contribute to support for Muslimfundamentalism’ (p. 101).

We also learn that Ramadan involves a‘month-long competitive consumption spree forDamascene elites’ and that ‘Ramadan socializinghas begun to spead beyond the home, into theyoung but burgeoning world of Syrian publicculture’ (p. 98). Well-to-do Damascenes oftenbreak the fast in expensive restaurants withostentatiously nostalgic décor and cuisine.Salamandra describes these settings, and thefoodstuffs, well. Yet she makes no systematic

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attempt to locate their clientele sociologically interms of numbers, family background, wealth,or actual social relations with others of theirclass, and those richer and poorer thanthemselves. Equally we are offered little on theevolution of these new nostalgic styles, and lesson the scale and politics of the service sector ofthe economy. Rather, Salamandra’s argumentproceeds with brief, interesting examples linkedby assertion. It is lively, but ethnography lite.

Watching Syrian TV at home during Ramadanis another aspect of the evocation of oldDamascus. Salamandra gives a good account ofthe mix of documentary films on old houses,customs, and food specialities, ‘folkloric’ songand dance programmes, and historical soapoperas serialized throughout the month. TVschedules suggest how notions of ‘authencity’,‘tradition’, and ‘old Damascus’ are contradictoryand contested. The government, after all, isnecessarily committed to the idea ofhomogeneous national culture while favouringindividuals with particular regional, sectarian,and class interests. Old city nostalgia is attractivebecause the purported honourable, innocentpast contrasts with a corrupt present. Nostalgiaalso allows some people to celebrate a rootedDamascene identity, thus distancing themselvesfrom their Alawi rulers, and the rapidly growingcity that has always been home to a jumble ofpeasants and refugees, the latest fleeing Iraq.

Throughout the book Salamandra locates‘Damascene opinion’ (p. 109) via the commentsof a number of well-known public figures,mostly middle-class professionals of varied familyand political loyalties. Yet she fails to ponder thepundits’ social location, though each has playeda long, active role in shaping the ‘old Damascus’idiom. Rather, her ‘upper-middle-class orintellectual informants’ (p. 4) slide into a broad,problematic, category better glossed here as ‘thewell-to-do’. Salamandra herself variouslydescribes them as ‘the elite’, ‘Damascene elites’,‘old leading families’, ‘big families’, ‘notables’,and ‘socialites’. The labels most often refer topeople with family connections to the formerSunni aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie, butSalamandra seems also to have included more orless everyone she talked to as participants in aquite homogeneous ‘old Damascus’ discourse,among them the otherwise unlocated ‘librarian’mentioned above, a Damascene ‘Englishteacher’, and an ‘Alawi friend’. ‘Studying up’ isalways difficult for anthropologists; studying upwithout a clear methodology is a nightmare.

In short, Salamandra seems to have neitherthe information nor the inclination to offer an

analysis of class politics, yet this undermines herinterest in the relation between the ‘oldDamascus’ discourse and status competition. Weare offered no case material, family histories, orstatistics to indicate what actual resources, orsources of power, are contested by whom, inwhat settings, with what results. Nor do we evereven begin to glimpse how the ‘old Damascus’discourse has benefited, or been used to harm,other affluent people who may be Shíite,Christian, newly rich, Aleppine, or cousins whoshare a family name.

Salamandra’s interest in the ‘old Damascus’discourse, coupled with her focus on, roughly,scions of families notable during the FrenchProtectorate tends to conceal the past thirty-fiveyears of dictatorial rule by the Asads. It ignoresthe fact that everyone in Syria who has amodicum of wealth has also had, of necessity, tocompromise with the regime. In effect,Salamandra’s book has become a furtherexample of the very phenomenon she set out tostudy. However, if A new old Damascus is read intandem with Wedeen’s Ambiguities ofdomination: politics, rhetoric, and symbols incontemporary Syria (1999), then Salamandra’s eyefor cultural detail and her quirky writing stylecan add quite a feel for understandingwell-to-do Syrians today.

Nancy Lindisfarne University of Oxford

Topno, Sem. Musical culture of the Mundatribe. xiv, 589 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. NewDelhi: Concept Publishing, 2004. Rs900

(cloth)

Tribal music is a much neglected area of study inthe anthropology of India. This book by SemTopno is an attempt to fill this existing gap inthe literature. Consisting of six parts, the bookprovides a comprehensive coverage of all facetsof Munda life, linking it to their musicaltradition. As we know, songs and dance arepopular forms of amusement in tribal societies.Music is the reflection both of cultural historyand of everyday life experiences of the Mundapeople. The perception, conceptualization, andarticulation of ideas, attitudes, values, andemotions of the Munda people get expressedthrough their music, and the contents of theirsongs are derived from the natural world andsocial environment (p. 5). The author feels thatthe nature of song and dance in a particularsociety is determined by the economic resources,social cohesiveness, and political structure. Hefurther suggests that all auspicious occasions in

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Munda life – social, economic, religious, andpolitical – are celebrated with some sort ofaccomplishment of music and dance.

Music grows out of life and is deeply rootedin the cultural tradition of the Munda. Themaking of music and its rendering throughperformance is a continual process in which theperceived stable features of socially organizedenvironment are continually created andsustained. The three musical activities, that is,singing, dancing, and playing of musicalinstruments, are important features of Mundamusical tradition. Besides its role as a means ofamusement, Munda musical tradition is thestorehouse of the experience, knowledge, andwisdom of the community. In music theexperience of the perceptual world attains thestatus of a temporal character and its quotidianfeatures mingle with the celestial. It is in thisform that music carries the deeper meaning oflife. A piece of music, however, cannot beperceived in isolation, for it is related to a widersystem. The author describes a variety of Mundamusical instruments: wind, string, andpercussion. While wind and string instrumentsare used in all the occasions excepting dance,percussion instruments are used only duringdance. Every dance has its selective set ofmusical instruments. All the musical instrumentsin this community are handled by men, barringa few exceptions.

The music and dance of contemporaryMunda society do not conform to traditionalforms and style. In many Munda villages,traditional songs and dances are no longerperformed. The author feels that the influence ofmodern education and the impact of Christianityand Hinduization together have deteriorated theMunda musical tradition. The Munda of today

are an alienated and divided lot. They are fastlosing their self-esteem and cultural identity. Theage-old musical tradition of the Munda is slowlybut surely on the verge of extinction. In achanging scenario, even the performers aretreated as backward and uncivilized by so-called‘enlightened’ community members. Though allthe musical instruments are still in use,traditional forms, styles, and rhythms have beenreplaced by modern ones. The traditional songsand dances have further lost their melody andrhythms. In fact, the melodious sound of thedumang is no more heard on a regular basis in aMunda village.

However, it would have been better hadthe author provided full details of thebibliographical references. One finds manyincomplete references, while the details of someof the cited references are not found in thebibliography. Many of the references in thebibliography are not refered to in the text.Surprisingly enough, the author has not givenadequate coverage (only on pages 567–73) ofone of his major arguments as to how there hasbeen a degeneration of musical culture amongthe Munda. For a better understanding andappreciation, the author should have includedphotographs of the instruments used by theMunda. The book contains rich ethnographicdata, but these are not matched by a supportingconceptual and theoretical framework.

However, those limitations do not detractfrom the merits of the book, which will give itsreaders an awareness of the rich cultural fabricof the Munda while furthering theirunderstanding through the inclusion of manyoriginal songs of the community with theirEnglish translation.

Deepak Kumar Behera Sambalpur University

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The sari – Mukulika Banerjee & Daniel Miller

Documents

Transcript of The sari – Mukulika Banerjee & Daniel Miller