Warring souls: youth, media and martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran by Varzi, Roxanne

Reviews

Amit, Vered (ed.). 2007. Going first class:new approaches to privileged travel andmovement. Oxford and New York:Berghahn. vi + 163 pp. Hb.: $60.00. ISBN:978 1 84545 196 7.

The anthropological study of travel has neverhad it so good. With a revived focus on‘studying up’ (Nader 1972), gone are the daysof following large group tours on and offbuses, sitting around a stage waiting forvisitors to show up for a performance, orstealthily trailing behind exhausted migrantworkers as they leave the factory gates toenter the dormitory walls. The volume underreview eschews the commonplace distinctionbetween labor migration and tourism travel infavor of exploring what happens, in acosmopolitan worldview, when people travelfor long-term engagements in relativelyprivileged socio-economic communities.

While most of the case studies in thevolume continue to focus on a type of labormigration, this is labor of the mostdistinguished, most well-paid kind: corporateexpats living in Indonesia (Chapter 3),award-winning cinematographers shuttlingbetween Mongolia, Poland, and Australia(Chapter 5), and ‘volunteers’ paying to work30 hours a week at a retreat in Hawai’i(Chapter 9). As editor Vered Amit notes inher introduction, it is these very people andtheir communities on whom scholars arecasting the theoretical net of‘cosmopolitanism’ and yet, as theethnographic case studies in this volumedemonstrate, ‘the elites once so identifiedwith [cosmopolitanism] . . . are not, it wouldappear, very cosmopolitan after all’ (p. 9).Expatriate wives describe their lives in Jakartaas a ‘bubble’; Japanese wives in middle-classAmerican neighborhoods feel obliged tomaintain a Japanese household to make the

inevitable transition back to the ‘real world ofJapan’ easier to bear when their husbands’tenure abroad ends (Chapter 2). For thisreason, this collection of chapters deserve tobe widely read and discussed – together, theydemonstrate the imperative for ethnographicresearch in conversation, but not necessarilyin cahoots, with reigning critical theories ofmodernity and the contemporary world.

The central argument is stated succinctlyby Amit: ‘[w]hat drives all forms ofmovement are the potentialities unleashed byexpectations and experiences of asymmetricaldistinction’ (p. 8). The case studies trace theunfolding of these expectations andexperiences in various contexts; of particularnote are chapters by Meike Fechter onexpatriate communities in Indonesia, KarenFog Olwig on the structure of migrationnarratives by middle-class Caribbean familiesin the United States, Canada, and Britain(Chapter 6), and Caroline Oliver on the‘aspirational mobility’ of elderly Britishretirees in Spain’s Costa del Sol (Chapter 8).While certain cases would benefit from moresustained ethnography, the absence of suchdetails speaks to the difficulties of studyingmobile subjects for whom travel is part andparcel of their socio-economic identities andlife opportunities (the cinematographersinterviewed by Greenhalgh are a case inpoint). To an extent, one may wonder how ananthropologist could do long-term fieldworkwith such traveling subjects – what are thelimits of anthropological theory when one’sinformants and collaborators consider theirtravel experiences as temporary ‘glitches’ inthe big picture of their lives unfolding? Thisbrings to mind the renewed importance ofNelson Graburn’s theory on the ritualisticfeatures of tourism (2001) and Julia Harrison’sBeing a Tourist (2003), where the analyticalemphasis is on the desire to travel, and the

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 1 99–135. C© 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 99doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00027.x

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many steps involved in preparing to travel,rather than the travel experienceitself.

However, it is not for all travelers thatsuch trips are temporary; certain studies in thecollection challenge the idea of ‘privilege’ andconfront the specter of class in modernmobility – chapters on ‘middle class migrants’(Chapters 6 and 7) address these subjects fromthe perspective of more semi-permanentmigration, or families and households whohave more or less settled in their destinations.These chapters also strongly critique thenotion of privileged travel; Torresan asksbluntly, ‘[i]s our perception of our ownwell-being as middle-class anthropologistsinfluencing our discernment of who is or isnot traveling under favorable conditions?’(p. 106). Who really is going first class? Is itthe ‘resident volunteers’ at the Hawaiianresort with more time, but perhaps a bit lessmoney, than the paying guests who also staythere? The specific distinctions betweencertain forms of more privileged travel andmigration remain, as yet, unanswered,although the case studies in this volume pointto the increased necessity of examining thesenew types of travel (and settlement, if onlytemporary or by season) as they emerge in themodern world systems of labor andleisure.

ReferencesGraburn, Nelson H.H. 2001. ‘Secular ritual: a

general theory of tourism’, in Valene Smithand Maryann Brent (eds.), Hosts and guestsrevisited: tourism issues of the 21st century.New York: Cognizant Communication Cor-poration, pp. 42–50.

Harrison, Julia. 2003. Being a tourist: findingmeaning in pleasure travel. Vancouver: Uni-versity of British Columbia Press.

Nader, Laura. 1972. ‘Up the anthropologist –perspectives gained from studying up’, inDell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing anthropol-ogy. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 284–311.

JENNY CHIOUniversity of California Berkeley (USA)

Arnold, David. 2006. The tropics and thetraveling gaze. India, landscape, andscience, 1800–1856. Seattle and London:University of Washington Press. 298 pp.Hb.: £28.99. ISBN: 0 295 98581 X.

In the book under review David Arnoldcontinues his exploration of colonialism in,and colonial discourses about, India, byconcentrating on the ways in which Europeanand British travellers, and especially travellingscientists, perceived and described the Indianlandscape and its natural features. The ‘gaze’in the title alludes to Foucauldian theories ofpower and subordination through the manyprocesses of monitoring, and Arnold arguesthat this ‘scientific and scenic “travellinggaze” was itself an ordering, even disciplining,mechanism that edited as well elicitedinformation and actively meddled in theconstruction of the knowledge it sought toshepherd and cajole into meaningful shapesand approved scientific forms’ (p. 31).Following from this, the book focuses on theway in which nature was represented throughscience, especially botany and furthermore,how these images of landscape, nature andenvironment constituted, shaped andarticulated colonial science.

The book is divided into six chapters inaddition to a comprehensive introduction anda thoughtful conclusion. The first chapter,entitled ‘Itinerant Empires’, introduces thereader to various forms of travelling in the19th century and the visual and textualrepresentations these produced. Arnoldargues that these representations mapped,ordered and subjugated the strange and thewild and created powerful images, which heexplores in more depth in the two subsequentchapters.

The second chapter, entitled ‘In a Land ofDeath’, draws attention to those experiencesand representations which portrayed India asa land of death, illness, brutality andheathenism, ‘as a series of morally frameddeathscapes’ (p. 76), for example in thedepiction of Puri and its environs as India’sGolgotha (p. 70). In the third chapter, entitled

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‘Romanticism and Improvement’, Arnoldturns to those images that presented India as aland of ruins, having fallen into chaos anddecay, and therefore in need of the improvingtransformations that produce a peaceful andsuccessful civilisation such as Britain itselfhad. Stressing the need for development andprogress, these images were imbued at thesame time with Romantic notions, whichArnold illustrates with an analysis of theconcept of the jungle.

The fourth chapter, ‘From the Orient tothe Tropics’, investigates the creation of theconcept of tropicality which is one of thecentral concepts of this book. Here Arnoldworks out the different pictures and qualities‘the tropics’ evoked; they stood for luxuriantplant life, the jungle, fecundity, pleasure andplenty, but also for hardship, poverty andheathenism. He convincingly demonstrateshow these images and concepts developedinto the blueprint which determined the wayin which colonial India was understood andconsequently administrated and ruled.

The fifth and sixth chapters (‘Networksand Knowledges’ and ‘Botany and theBounds of Empire’) are mostly devoted to thepersonal and professional circumstances oftwo well-known botanists who explored andstudied the plant life of the Indiansubcontinent: William Hooker and his sonJoseph Hooker. William Hooker never wentto India, but was in contact with a number ofprofessional and semi-professional botanistsspecialising in South Asia and, throughregular mail contact, developed networks thatJoseph Hooker later strengthened during hisjourney through India from 1848 to 1851; allof which resulted in Hooker’s masterworkFlora of British India (1875), which lists14,500 different plants. In these two chapters,Arnold provides a vivid documentation andanalysis of the personal and professionalbiographies of the Hookers, mainly based onarticles, reports, travelogues,correspondences, letters, diaries and notes. Hethus increases our understanding of howcolonial botanical science of the time wasshaped by such external factors as politics, theEast India Company, neighbouring sciences

and their paradigms, as well as personalcontacts and family relations. Thecategorisation and cataloguing of plants madethe strange familiar and tamed it; at the sametime, this process differentiated India fromthe West. Moreover, and this is one of the corearguments of this book, the botanicalappropriation and tropicalisation of Indiainvolved a Romantic evocation of the tropics,which was the scientific analogue of theprocess occurring in the travelogues of thetime, even though the real India with itssavannas and scrubby jungles did notcompletely match this image. Arnold goes onto argue that, by the middle of the 19thcentury, science in and about India as well asIndia itself, made a rapid shift (p. 228), as theRomantic spirit waned and ‘the scientific gazewas becoming less immediately dependentupon travel’ (p. 229).

This book will appeal to both historiansand anthropologists, not only because of itscombination of depth, accurate descriptionand theoretical analysis, but also because of itslively and enjoyable style. It will addsubstantially to our understanding of thehistory of colonial science as well as thehistory of India and, last but not least, it willenhance our own reflexivity.

GABRIELE ALEXUniversity of Heidelberg (Germany)

Baca, George (ed.). 2006. Nationalism’sbloody terrain: racism, class inequality, andthe politics of recognition. New York andOxford: Berghahn Books. vi + 110 pp. Pb.:£7.00. ISBN: 1 84545 235 6.

The underlying topic of the book underreview is an account of the link betweenracism and nationalism in diverse regionalareas. The eight short essays presented in thisvolume discuss ‘new’ practices of institutionalracism that have risen in post-racist ormulti-cultural nation-states despitedismantling officially sanctioned racism. Asall the contributors maintain, the coexistenceof racial reforms with deepening of racial andclass inequality is not paradoxical but


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inherently embedded in the politics ofnationalism and multiculturalism.

Viranjini Munasinghe compares racialmyths of mixed blood focusing on the NorthAmerican principle of hypodescent and onthe social exclusion of East Indians fromTrinidadian national identity. Joel Kahnelaborates the salience of race in nation-building in contemporary Malaysia whilechallenging the conventional view thatMalaysian racism is a legacy of colonialism.Diane Austin-Broos describes how Australianmulticulturalism and US civil rights discoursehave used racial concepts to moralise thenational order. Vijay Prashad shows how USneoliberal politics alongside colour-blindnesshave in fact made the Afro-North Americans’integration impossible. Jason Antrosio gives asuccinct account of the ideology of theneoliberal Colombian state making use ofracialising practices and politics ofrecognition. Elizabeth Povinelli attempts toexamine racialising practices through theconcept of intimacy, of what she calls ‘theintimate event’.

As George Baca, the editor of thevolume, claims in his introductory essay, thebook has been inspired largely by HurricaneKatrina’s devastating effects on one particularlayer of New Orleans’ inhabitants, whichilluminated the conflation of class inequalityand racism. Theoretical inspiration has beenfuelled by some of the scholars (BruceKapferer, Brackette F. Williams, inter alia),arguing that ‘racism and its passions arecreated by and subordinated to the nation’(p. 3), or that it is the nation-state and itscultural politics that ‘provides the very terrainof racism’ (p. 7). At first glance, theunderlying assumption of the book underreview that the connection between racismand the nation is the substance of nationalismis seemingly difficult to oppose, given the factthat most people live in nation-states in thecontemporary world, and that racism is stillalive. But the view that nationalism is anecessary condition for racism appears ratherschematic. Racism persistently crops upwhenever the political and socialcircumstances make it functionally pertinent.

Moreover, the attempt to reduce alldifferences – cultural, linguistic, etc. – toblood is a dangerous idea since it revives thelong-discredited theory of the biologicalnature of race.

Another problem rests on the way mostof the contributors treat – or better to say,avoid treating – the term race. They largelytend to mix terms like race, ethnicity, culture,minority, as if the Others – both inside andoutside the nation-state – are automaticallyanother ‘race’. The terminological confusionculminates in the last essay ‘The End of SocialConstruction: What Comes Next?’, whereinJohn Hartigan Jr. makes a critique of thesocial constructionist stance on race fuelledby the ‘current evidence’ from ‘raciology’,that is medical studies providing evidence fora biological basis to race, and also by theenduring power of popular beliefs in race. Hisstatement that ‘people can be quite usefullyand fairly accurately grouped according tocommonplace racial categories’ (p. 96) shouldnot leave any doubts about the author’sintention to disengage ‘race’ from socialsciences and place it in the close connectionwith biology. He challenges the commonlyaccepted premise in cultural anthropologythat race is a discredited concept in biologysince races are not biologically distinct.Paradoxically, he is the only contributor in thevolume who avoids the vague differentiationbetween ethnic/cultural and racial groups bysaying explicitly what race is and how it isclassified, though he has to call for ‘voxpopuli’ claiming that ‘there are indeed races,such as “whites” and “blacks”’ (p. 104).

Whatever social scientists write aboutrace, they may be sure to face critique. Thus,despite the indisputably valuablecontributions of some of the essays (byAntrosio, Munasinghe, Kahn, Prashad,Austin-Broos) to the debate on the new formsof racism, the central argument of the bookon the conflation between racism andnationalism remains boldly open with morequestions than answers. It seems somewhathazardous to venture general propositionsunless enough empirical research is conductedand comparisons are made. Yet, this tiny


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collection of essays may serve as a welcomecontribution to the better understanding ofthe complex issues on race and racism and ofthe diversity of racial conceptions survivingunder new disguises.

HANA HORAKOVAUniversity of Hradec Kralove and Universityof Pardubice (Czech Republic)

Bloch, Maurice. 2005. Essays on culturaltransmission. Oxford: Berg. xii + 174 pp.Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 1 84520 286 4. Pb.:£16.99. ISBN: 1 84520 287 2.

This is a collection of nine essays; seven ofwhich were previously published separatelyin books or journals. In the preface, MauriceBloch explains that this collection is largelyinspired by an effort to ‘bring together theethnographer’s experience of a fieldworkinganthropologist with his more fundamentalconsiderations about the place of cognitionwithin the historical process’ (p. IX). The firstessay ‘Where did anthropology go? Or theneed for human nature’ is a powerful call foran interdisciplinary approach to the subject.For too long, anthropologists have beenwandering in the haze of imprecision betweendiffusionism versus constructionism, resultingin the loss of the only core issue available toanthropology – the study of human beings.Answers to anthropological questions arebeing provided by zoologists, literaturescholars and psycholinguists. In this inaugurallecture, Bloch calls on anthropologists toreclaim their subject base, adopting a methodhe calls ‘position functionalism’ (p. 14). This,he defines as a commitment to ‘seeing cultureas existing in the process of actual people’slives, in specific places, as part of the widerecological process of life, rather than as adisembodied system of traits, beliefs, symbolsand representations’ (p. 16).

‘Ritual and deference’, the other newessay in this volume is a revision of an earlierargument that ritual was deferential to powerstructures – ideological and/or traditional.Anthropologists have long engaged with the

concept of ritual, pondering in particular overthe content and meaning of thesecommunicative acts. In an earlier publication(1974), Bloch had argued that attempts todecode the precise meaning of rituals weredisingenuous. In this later work, Blochidentifies deference – or rather an extremeform of ‘conscious deference’ (p. 136) – as thecentral character of the process.

The fact that the remaining essays havebeen published elsewhere, ‘often in somewhatobscure places’, does not devalue a collectionthat offers an opportunity to engage with themajor themes of Bloch’s work in one volume.I thoroughly enjoyed the essay on trees andwhy they are good to think with. Oak treeshave a strong historical significance here inDerry/Londonderry and throughout theCeltic world. Trees have symbolic functionsin many societies and this essay sets to explorethe connections and differences betweenhumans and trees. Bloch suggests that ‘it is theuniversality in the conceptualization of “life”that explains the universal aspect of plant andtree symbolism’ (p. 36).

Readers will like the article on‘commensality (the action of eating together)and poisoning’. This essay considers thedifferential significance of communal sharingof various types of food such as meat andpopcorn. The commensal dimension ofsacrifice (an old theme in anthropological andreligious fields) is also given attention here.The fear of poisoning emerges stronglythroughout the essay, reminding readers thatwhile the act of sharing food may be anexpression of kinship or community, it mayalso draw one into eating with those withwhom one may be in conflict.

Bloch is well-known (and sometimescriticised) for his engagement with otherdisciplines. One of the most intriguing (andchallenging) essays in this volume is hisanalysis of the concept of memes – whichmany anthropologists have ignored. In anattempt to ‘clear the decks’ on an issuechampioned by Dawkins and others, Blochargues for a unified approach from social andcultural anthropologists to the challengeoffered by memeticists. The chapter is entitled


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‘a well-disposed social anthropologist’sproblems with memes’ and Bloch clearly setsout the benefits of a concept of memes as a‘wonderful teaching device for the studentwho wants to learn about human beings ingeneral’ (p. 87). But beyond that, their valueas a concept is extremely limited. Moreover,the issue is potentially misleading, asmemeticists propose a fundamental similaritybetween memes and genes, and anevolutionary approach to the transmission ofcultures. Bloch argues that culturaltransmission is hardly a simple matter ofpassing on ‘bits and pieces’ of cultural life.Instead, it involves an act of recreation on thepart of the receiver. While memeticists havenot convinced him that memes actually existin reality, social and cultural anthropologistshave (in their refusal to engage with thearguments) become more theoretically vagueand pretentious.

Other thought-provoking essays in thisvolume focus on subjects such as Malagasycarvings and religious beliefs. Two essays areco-authored. Both Gregg Solomon and SusanCarey were involved in the contribution on‘what is passed on from parents to children’.This cross-cultural, cross-disciplinaryinvestigation draws on fieldwork inMadagascar and raises many interestingquestions on the process of culturaltransmission. The final contribution ‘Kinshipand Evolved Psychological Dispositions’ isco-authored with the French anthropologistDan Sperber and revisits anthropologicalthinking on the relationship between themother’s brother and the sister’s son inpatrilineal communities from a historical andcontemporary perspective.

Overall, academics and students will findthis book a particularly valuable introductionto the work of this controversialFrench–British anthropologist. The themeswhich have dominated his research are allrepresented here. Each essay is self-containedwith its own set of references, includingreferences to earlier writings of Bloch in thesefields. There is a very fine index at the back ofthe volume. The writing style is clear andaccessible and the subject matter goes far

beyond the subject boundaries ofanthropology.

ReferenceBloch, Maurice. 1974. ‘Symbols, song, dance

and features of articulation or is religionan extreme form of traditional authority’,Archives europeenes de sociologie 5: 55–81.

MAIREAD NIC CRAITHUniversity of Ulster (UK)

Bloom, Maureen. 2007. Jewish mysticismand magic: an anthropological perspective.London and New York: Routledge. xvii +231 pp. Hb.: £ 65.00. ISBN: 978 41542112 6.

Ce livre examine des sources anciennes de lalitterature hebraıque, en commencant par lesEcritures juives, notamment l’AncienTestament, puis les commentairesrabbiniques, c’est-a-dire le Talmud, avant des’appuyer sur des textes juifs plus recents. Apartir de ces textes, l’auteur souhaite montrerl’emergence et l’evolution de certains themeset pratiques de la tradition juive, en rapportaux rites sacrificiels hebraıques anciens, a lanature de la relation des juifs a leur Dieu et audeveloppement de la magie et du mysticismerabbinique. A travers le temps, l’aspiration desjuifs a acceder a une intime relation avec leurDieu a nourri une aspiration a approfondir eta affiner des theories et des pratiquespermettant d’acceder au divin. Les traditionsesoteriques des mystiques de l’Antiquitetardive ont ensuite ete transformees par dessavants et rabbins influents, pour donnernaissance a une reflexion kabbalistique nee enEspagne au 16eme siecle, puis au courantHassidique, dans l’Europe de l’Est du 18eme et19eme siecles. Il faut toutefois noter queMaureen Bloom se concentre ici sur la periodeancienne et, par consequent, a deliberementchoisi de laisser de cote la Kabbale et leHassidisme. Ainsi, ces themes datant d’aumoins deux millenaires representent, pourl’auteur, des elements qui encore aujourd’huiont conserve leur pertinence et restent visibles


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dans le judaısme contemporain; laconstruction culturelle et symbolique,sous-jacente a ces textes, permettrait ainsi decomprendre l’usage, de nos jours, au sein de ladiaspora et en Israel, d’amulettes ou de cartesou sont inscrites des formules faisant appelaux noms d’Abraham, de Jacob, de Sarah oude Rachel et que l’on trouve dans les chambresd’enfants, sur les murs et fenetres des maisonset des entreprises, et memes dans les vehicules.

Le livre offre une introduction riche etdetaillee des racines du judaısme antique(chapitre 2) et de ses sources ecrites (chapitre3), qui se revele utile a bien des egards pour encomprendre les origines et premiersdeveloppements. Puis le cadre theorique decette analyse de textes bibliques est presente(chapitre 4), interrogeant les notions de magie,de religion et de science, sans doute tropbrievement tant le theme est riche de travauxanthropologiques. Bloom evoque ensuitedifferents themes essentiels a lacomprehension du judaısme ancien: laquestion du lieu en tant que sanctuaire,temple et synagogue (chapitre 5), la relationau divin (chapitre 6), la frontiere entre sacre etprofane au principe des notions de purete etd’impurete rituelles (chapitre 7) et lespratiques, c’est-a-dire le sacrifice et la priere(chapitre 8). Le troisieme volet de l’ouvragetraite tout d’abord de la question du corpstelle qu’elle est abordee dans le Talmud(chapitre 9), avant de presenter l’evolution dela pensee mystique juive sur la nature de Dieudans la litterature des Hekhalot et laMerkavah (chapitre 10). On regretteraquelque peu que les imprecations,incantations magiques inscrites sur des bols etamulettes, ne soient traites en detail que dansles chapitres qui precedent l’epilogue(chapitres 11 et 12), tant l’usage de ces objetssemblait pouvoir etre au cœur de la reflexionanthropologique entreprise par l’auteur sur lamagie dans le judaısme.

A nos yeux, l’explication de coutumesd’aujourd’hui par une lecture de textesanciens, employee par Bloom, prete adiscussion, dans la mesure ou cette approchetend a donner une image fixe et perenne d’une‘tradition’ quelque peu essentialisee, ce qui ne

laisse que peu de place aux dynamiquesevolutives d’interpretation et dereinterpretation des textes que l’histoirenecessite (mais le judaısme contemporain, ilest vrai, n’est pas l’objet de ce livre qui ne visepas a proposer une perspective diachronique).De meme, l’approche dite anthropologique dece livre pose des difficultes, puisqu’il estmethodologiquement impossible de rendrecompte des pratiques et croyances reelles desJuifs dans l’antiquite. Il nous semble que lestextes ne permettent pas (ou peu) de savoircomment celles-ci etaient comprises et par qui— qui avait acces aux textes? Dans quellemesure existait-il une certaine latituded’interpretation? Comment l’autorite destextes s’etait-elle imposee et regulee? —autant d’elements qui manquent, noussemble-t-il, d’une veritable analyseanthropologique de la magie et du mysticismejuif ancien. En d’autres termes, le texte nenous dit rien, ou tres peu, de son usage et del’evolution de cet usage en fonction des enjeuxsociaux du moment. Ici encore, il s’agit de lamaniere dont on entrevoit la tradition, commeayant une certaine permanence et une certaineessence, ou comme un processus dynamiquede constantes interpretations renouvelees etcontextualisees. La reference a la Kabbaledans le champ politique israeliend’aujourd’hui, avec lequel l’auteur choisit declore son ouvrage, en est un parfait exemple.

VERONIQUE ALTGLASUniversity of Cambridge (UK)

Cherneff, Jill B.R. and Eve Hochwald (eds.).2006. Visionary observers: anthropologicalinquiry and education. Lincoln, NE:University of Nebraska Press. 304 pp. Pb.:£17.99. ISBN: 0 8032 6464 9.

Ce volume reunit huit contributions, pour laplupart inedites. Chaque participant al’ouvrage s’est interesse a la vie et a l’oeuvred’un ou deux anthropologues, dont certainseminemment connus tels que Franz Boas,Ruth Benedict ou Margaret Mead. Parfois, lacontribution se fonde sur l’existence decontacts personnels comme dans le cas de


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Virginia Young qui utilise ses notes prisesdans les cours de Ruth Benedict a l’Universitede Columbia dans les annees 1940. Ce livrenous propose une relecture originale desparcours intellectuels et politiques de neufanthropologues, nes essentiellement dans lapremiere decennie du vingtieme siecle et quiont passe toute ou la plus grande partie deleur carriere aux Etats-Unis.

En parcourant la table des matieres, sepose dans un premier temps la question descriteres de choix qui ont permis aux editricesde rapprocher le trio renomme sus-cite avecdes anthropologues bien moins connus, aumoins en Europe, comme Gene Weltfish,Hortense Powdermaker, Jules Henry, RuthLandes, Solon Kimball ou Eleanor Leacock.A part la filiation intellectuelle – Boas formaMead, Benedict, Landes et Weltfish parexemple – le fil rouge qui unit les chapitres dece volume est le theme de ‘l’education’,comprise dans un sens tres large.

La majorite des anthropologues etudiesse sont engages a un moment donne de leurvie dans ‘l’education’ populaire, c’est-a-direqu’ils (ou elles, puisque six sont des femmes)se sont efforces de faire connaıtre leurs idees aun public plus vaste que les etudiants quisuivaient leurs cours ou les collegues quilisaient leurs publications scientifiques. RegnaDarnell presente par exemple l’oeuvre de Boasen tant qu’ ‘intellectuel’, n’hesitant pas aprendre des positions politiques acontre-courant de l’opinion publique de sonpays d’adoption, les Etats-Unis; nousapprenons que Boas revendiquait la neutralitedes Etats-Unis dans la premiere guerremondiale, qu’il denonca le traite de Versailleset qu’il s’est oppose aux activites d’espionnageque certains anthropologues menaient auMexique dans les annees 1910 sous couvert derecherches ethnographiques. Dans la suitelogique de sa theorie culturaliste, Boas s’estinsurge contre les politiques racistes,antisemites et eugeniques, et avant tout contrecelles qui seraient adoptees par son paysd’origine, l’Allemagne. Il redigea ainsi des1938 un manifeste denoncant le nazisme,signe par plus de mille universitairesamericains.

Certains des anciens etudiants de Boassuivirent son exemple en militant pour lacause antiraciste. Mead, Benedict et Weltfish,tout comme Hortense Powdermaker (formeepar Malinowski), ont publie des livres agrande diffusion, visant un public jeune ounon instruit, des manuels pour l’enseignementsecondaire ou des pamphlets a destination dessoldats americains, pronant la toleranceinterraciale. Plusieurs contributions del’ouvrage font entrevoir le positionnementdelicat de certains de ces anthropologuesdevenus ‘educateurs du public’: tantot ilscollaborent avec l’etat, comme Benedict etMead qui redigerent des etudes sur les‘caracteres nationaux’ des peuples ennemispour l’Office of War Information aWashington, ou comme Weltfish et Benedictqui ensemble ecrivirent un pamphletantiraciste pour l’armee americaine en 1943,tantot ils entrent en conflit avec l’Etat: ladistribution du pamphlet en question futrapidement arretee parce qu’il contient desresultats d’etudes comparatives juges tropfavorables aux Noirs americains. Parfoisencore, leurs carrieres universitairessouffrirent de ces prises de position: oninterdit a Boas de donner une partie de sescours a Columbia en raison de ses opinionspacifistes pendant la premiere guerremondiale, et Weltfish perdit son poste au seinde la meme universite en 1953, annee ou ellefut interrogee par la commissionMcCarthy.

Les auteurs de l’ouvrage – et ceciconcerne surtout la deuxieme moitie duvolume – presentent egalement des travauxd’anthropologues portant sur l’education desenfants et adolescents, donc l’educationcomprise dans un sens plus traditionnel.Benedict s’interessa ainsi aux ressorts de lamotivation en comparant le role de lacompetition, de l’insulte et du sentiment dehonte dans plusieurs cultures. Mead et sonmari Gregory Bateson menerent des enquetessur les contextes d’apprentissage a Bali grace aune methodologie innovante faisant appel ades series de photographies. Powdermaker,Henry, Landes, Kimball et Leacock furent despionniers de l’ethnographie en milieu scolaire.


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Dans differents lieux, ils etudierent lesattitudes des eleves noirs ainsi que lescomportements des enseignants vis-a-visd’eux. Au gre des chapitres de VisionaryObservers, des projets novateurs animes parles anthropologues etudies sont mis enlumiere: Ruth Landes forma ainsi des jeunesenseignants californiens dans les annees 1950 adevenir ethnographes de leur propreenvironnement social; Gene Weltfish organisadans les annees 1960 un projet pedagogiqueinsolite durant lequel ses eleves firent desfouilles archeologiques puis restaurerent unemaison ancienne.

On peut reprocher aux editrices de cevolume une certaine redondance entre leurspresentations des contributions et les articleseux-memes. Cependant, etant donne que lesdeux types de textes sont somme toutebiographiques, les repetitions s’averentinevitables. Par ailleurs, des renvois internesentre les chapitres auraient pu etre menages.Certaines digressions paraissent peu utiles,telles que les huit pages expliquant les theoriesde Boas et de Dewey au milieu du chapitreconsacre a Gene Weltfish.

La critique la plus severe qui peut etreadressee au projet tout a fait louable deCherneff et Hochwald concerne le fil rougecense lier les chapitres entre eux, a savoir lescontributions des anthropologues a‘l’education du public’ ou a la rechercheethnologique sur l’education. Ce fil auraitparu moins fragile si tous les auteurs enavaient fait le guide rigoureux de leurquestionnement au long de leurs analyses. Infine, il echoit au lecteur de faire la syntheseentre les etudes individuelles. On resteranotamment sur la forte impression laissee parl’engagement militant de Boas et des boasiens,observateurs parfois visionnaires de leursociete et de la politique internationale (d’oule titre de Visionary Observers), mais quin’etaient pourtant pas depourvus d’unecertaine myopie, comme certainscontributeurs le soulignent: ainsi, Boas semobilisa peu pour les interets politiques desIndiens du Nord-Ouest americain, et Mead nes’exprima pas davantage sur les tests nucleairesamericains menacant les populations du

Pacifique qui lui avaient pourtant fourni sesprincipales donnees ethnographiques.

ANNE FRIEDERIKE MULLERAcademie d’Orleans-Tours (France)

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff (eds.)2006. Law and disorder in the postcolony.Chicago and London: University of ChicagoPress. x + 357 pp. Hb.: $70.00/£44.50.ISBN: 0 226 11408 2. Pb.: $28.00/£18.00. ISBN: 0 226 11409 0.

What do people mean when they write or talkabout ‘the postcolony’? Is the postcolony somonolithic a phenomenon that it deserves tobe referred to in the singular (a usage that fliesin the face of the general postmodern trend topluralise terms that were until recentlysingular – ‘histories’, ‘modernities’,femininities, etc.)? And if the postcolony is acoherent (if pathological) global phenomenon,how exactly might it be identified in therecent socio-political transformations inplaces as seemingly disparate as Brazil,Cameroon, Chad, Indonesia and SouthAfrica? Is the postcolony best understood as atransitional phase or as a new global(dis)order? Finally, what is the relationshipbetween the postcolony (generally associatedwith everything wrong in the state and societytoday) and democratisation (meant tohighlight all that is good in the post cold warera)? These are the questions that Jean andJohn Comaroff address in their introductionto this important volume, and which thesubsequent contributions go on to examine indetailed case studies.

Rosalind Morris exposes the spectre ofsexual violence in post-apartheid SouthAfrica, a spectre she analyses in terms of apolitical discourse on (and of) the lostgeneration of youth who brought the ANC topower but now find themselves unemployedand unremembered. In an extreme example ofthe ways in which the language of rights anddemocracy is perverted by the state, TeresaCaldera exposes the ways in which theBrazilian police wield the notion of humanrights as an impediment to public security


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that prevents them from exterminating theirenemies: precisely those, in many cases, whoare involved in social movements advocatingthe rights of slum-dwellers. Her analysis ofthe latter’s hip-hop lyrics shows that theyironically do not address ‘democracy’ or‘rights’, identifying instead with the Americanghetto. Nancy Scheper-Hughes again presentsus with the relation of the urban poor to thepolice in Brazil with her frank recounting ofher experiences over many years of workingwith the shantytown victims of police andvigilante death squads. Highlighting theparadox of the postcolony, Scheper-Hughesshows that the paramilitary death squadsemerged after the end of the militarydictatorship in 1985 at the same time as thestate was promulgating a new discourse ofenlightenment and child rights.

Patricia Spyer presents the eventssurrounding the civil conflict betweenChristians and Muslims in the IndonesianMoluccan Islands that took place between1999 and 2002, emphasising that thesereligious identities, as with comparableconflicts around the world, were not so muchthe cause as the consequence of the conflict.Peter Geschiere then continues hisexploration of the emergence of witchcraft asa juridical phenomenon in Cameroon,comparing it very fruitfully with the similaremergence of witchcraft accusations as anemergent obsession in post-apartheid SouthAfrica. Using official witch finders to identifywitches by occult means, the Cameroonianjudiciary’s attack on witchcraft isoxymoronic. In South Africa, the impetusseems to be to prevent rather than to instigatewitch hunts, but again the end result iscounterproductive. In both cases, thenebulous anxieties of the postcolony (anddemocratisation) are reified in the person ofthe witch, resulting in social movements thatthreaten the legitimacy of the state. From thenorthern extremity of Cameroon, JanetRoitman provides an exceptionally revealinginvestigation of cross-border smuggling andbanditry that provides further evidence of theinextricability of the state from criminalenterprises that are normally seen as a threat

to its existence. Presenting personal accountscollected from smugglers and robbers,Roitman traces the discursive linkages theseactors make between the violence of the stateagainst its citizens and the legitimacy of theirown illegal but ‘licit’ enterprises. The eighthchapter by Comaroff and Comaroff, and theninth by Achille Mbembe both serve asthoughtful afterwords to the collection.

The evidence presented in this book,which brings the critical potential of theanalytical model of the postcolony to the fore,is that democratisation and criminality,restructuring and insecurity, privatisation andpauperisation, progress and warfare gohand-in-hand round the world not bycoincidence, nor by accident, but because therealignment of the geo-political fault linesfollowing the end of the cold war hasinstituted a global process of which thehuman miseries exposed in this collection arebut local manifestations. For this reason, thepostcolony is not only a condition restrictedto the countries that gained theirindependence in the last century, but also apredicament fomented by and reciprocallyaffecting those metropolises from which theysevered their colonial bonds but with whichthey are still inextricably caught up. Not onlyis this collection a measure of the paradigm ofthe postcolony, it is also an engaged work ofpolitical anthropology set to have a lastingand salutary impact on the discipline.

NICOLAS ARGENTIBrunel University, London (UK)

Cruces Villalobos, Francisco. 2006.Sımbolos en la ciudad. Lecturas deantropologıa urbana. Madrid: UNEDEdiciones. 127 pp. Pb.: €6.14. ISBN: 84362 5291 8.

In this book, Cruces Villalobos bringstogether five articles, published previously inanthropology journals, to provide a tool forstudents who are taking their first steps in thesubject of Urban Anthropology. The aim is toshow students two ways of looking at thesubject: on the one hand, the book offers a


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complete vision of the problems, limits andtheoretical possibilities of UrbanAnthropology; on the other, it providesexamples of a meticulous ethnography thatillustrate in a simple way the symbolic andritual analysis carried out in different urbansettings. The book’s chapters can be dividedaccording to this dual vision: Chapters 1, 2and 5 deal with theoretical andmethodological questions, while Chapters 3and 4 look at two ethnographic researchprojects carried out in Madrid and Mexico,which attempt to take us closer to analyticalpossibilities offered by the specific vision ofUrban Anthropology. All in all, despite beingwritten for teaching purposes, this bookprovides an interesting and condensedapproach to the discipline of UrbanAnthropology.

In accordance with the abovementioneddivision, the first chapter provides a roughpresentation of how the discipline has takenshape (object, development, etc.). Accordingto the author, ‘Urban Anthropology refers toa tradition of ethnographic studies in andabout cities that began to becomeinstitutionalised from the 1960s onwards withthe generalized processes of urbanization andde-colonisation that took during World WarII in those states where anthropologistsusually carry out their work’ (p. 15). Fromhere onwards, the chapter embarks on a briefjourney through the origins and heritage ofurban study, from the classics to the analysismodels, passing through the contributionsmade by anthropologists in this field and itsinstitutionalisation as a discipline in the 1980s.Along this journey, Urban Anthropologyprovides a rich and complex approach to theUrban.

Chapter 2 is decidedly more theoreticaland discusses the concept of ‘ritual’. Thedebate on this term has generated animportant amount of literature in theanthropological tradition and the authorshows us the potential of applying it to ourdaily contexts. To do so, he introduces theproblems associated with ritual (semanticover-extension, secularisation of content andalternative categorisations) and at this point

he recovers the concept as a model of processand of the performative conceived as awatered-down form of sacredness. To theextent that ritual still makes its appearanceand its meaning is that ritual is a category thatis still a valid tool for interpretingcontemporary societies.

Finally, Chapter 5 lays out some of themethodological problems that urbananthropologists are faced with when workingin the field. The Urban v. the Rural, which isnowadays a questionable dichotomy, serves todiscuss the difficulties of the indefinite natureof the anthropologist’s social position and thepeculiarities of the context of interaction.Hence the title of the chapter: ‘An Intruder inyour City’.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide illustrativeexamples of the entire theoretical approach.Chapter 3 takes an analytical look at thecelebrations in honour of San Anton, patronsaint of animals, in the district of Hortaleza(Madrid) during the 1990s. The peculiarprocession of animals that circles the churchdedicated to the saint every year on the 17January in the city centre is the starting pointfor the author’s symbolic analysis of the city.This urban procession is a consequence of therevival, in the 1980s, of a number ofcelebrations that had fallen into disuse. In it, itis possible to see the modern reworking of thetradition and the evocative power of thesymbolic forms. As the author states, animalsin the city continue to be ‘good for thought’.Chapter 4, for its part, takes as anethnographic object the protest marches thatbecame more and more frequent in MexicoCity in the 1990s. The marches serve as apretext for the analysis of the transformationsthat took place in the public space incontemporary cities on the basis of theircapacity for generating culturally significantimages. On the basis of the marches, theauthor puts forward an analysis of thefragility of urban order, the transformation ofthe limits between the public and the private,and the increasingly theatrical and festivenature of public protest.

All in all, the book offers an initial andinteresting approach for those who are


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starting out in the field of UrbanAnthropology, proposing an anthropology ofthe city, centred upon our ethnographictradition and heritage, rather than on ananthropology in the city.

BEATRIZ SANTAMARINA CAMPOSUniversity of Valencia (Spain)

Early, John. 2006. The Maya andCatholicism. An encounter of worldviews.Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.xvi + 311 pp. Pb.:$59.95. ISBN: 0 81303025 0.

Le but de cet ouvrage est d’expliquerl’integration des rituels catholiques dans lesysteme religieux maya, en d’autres termes derendre compte de ce que l’auteur appelle‘l’anomalie’ de l’insistance des Mayas pourinclure dans leur ‘matrice rituelle’ la messecelebree par un pretre catholique ladino (nonmaya, creole). A la fois (ex-)pretre jesuite etanthropologue, l’auteur se trouvait sans doutedans une position avantageuse pour aborder lesujet.

Si les arguments ne sont pas tousnouveaux, Early a le merite de presenter unesynthese de materiaux ethnographiques ethistoriques pour l’ensemble de l’aire maya ens’appuyant en outre sur ses propresobservations effectuees au debut des annees1960 dans la region de Zinacantan (dans lecadre de l’ambitieux Harvard-ChiapasProject) et a Santiago Atitlan au Guatemala(ou il mena des etudes demographiquespendant les annees 1970). Le texte est agreablea lire, tres didactique, mais parfois un peurepetitif. L’iconographie est belle et lesindexes sont exhaustifs.

La delimitation un peu vague de la fin dela periode couverte – des premiers contactsviolents du XVIeme a la seconde moitie duXXeme siecle – n’est pas a mon avis assezexplicitee et meriterait d’etre argumentee (elleexclut en fait le mouvement deneo-evangelisation et de conversionsreligieuses des dernieres decennies, mais celaest passe sous silence).

En introduction (premiere partie)l’auteur se demarque de l’hypothese dusyncretisme en notant que cette notionn’explique pas la structure de la nouvellereligion qui serait issue de l’interpretationindigene du catholicisme. L’arguments’organise ensuite en quatre parties. Enexposant d’abord ‘l’anomalie’ (deuxiemepartie), l’ethnographie du deroulement desfetes patronales dans le village de Zinacantanmet en exergue l’insistante demande mayaquant a la participation d’un pretre catholique(chapitres 2 et 3), dont l’auteur donnedifferents exemples historiques (chapitre 4).

Les raisons de cette exigence seraient arechercher dans les ‘logiquesculturelles’ (troisieme partie) etl’interpretation des victoires espagnolescomme etant l’œuvre des saints, considerespar les May as comme les divinites tribales desEspagnols. D’ou l’utilite de les inclure dans lecontrat de reciprocite (ou covenant) avec lesdieux prehispaniques (chapitres 5-7).

L’auteur argumente de maniereconvaincante que cette assimilation des saintspar la continuite des representationscosmologiques a ete facilitee du fait que,jusqu’au milieu du XXeme siecle, seule uneminorite des Mayas etait reellement convertieau catholicisme (quatrieme partie). Bien plusque dans cette affirmation elle-meme,l’originalite reside dans la demonstration.L’argument s’appuie sur des notionstheologiques precises et une comprehensionpratique des limites logistiques et strategiqueset des contraintes demographiques,linguistiques et culturelles du travaild’evangelisation (statistiques a l’appui). Earlydefinit ainsi des criteres clairs – mais peut-etretrop restrictifs – de ce que serait une veritableconversion.

La derniere partie repond a la questioninitiale a partir d’un eclairage riche enexemples sur la perception maya de lachretiente espagnole. Compris dans le cadrede la cosmologie maya – pantheiste d’apresEarly – comme ‘emanations supplementairesde la force cosmique’ (p. 205), les saints sontdonc devenus necessaires (chapitre 12) d’ou


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l’exigence de les servir par le biais de la messe,du bapteme et du pretre catholique ladino(chapitre 13) eventuellement supplee par lesspecialistes des rituels mayas (chapitre 14).L’avenement du christianisme serait donccompris comme celui d’un nouveau cycle dedieux dans la metaphysique maya.

Bien que de tels arguments puissentparfois paraıtre quelque peu esoteriques,Early insiste – a fort juste titre – sur lesmotivations pragmatiques et les implicationspratiques tout a fait quotidiennes del’adoption des rituels catholiques (le bapteme,par exemple, comme acquisition du statut desujet de la couronne d’Espagne et commerituel chamanique pour proteger lenouveau-ne d’influences pathogenes). Enfin,la necessite du pretre ladino s’explique du faitque celui-ci est le mieux a meme de s’adresseraux saints, ceux-ci etant eux-memes desladinos.

Bien qu’a titre comparatif l’auteur fasse ajuste titre reference aux etudes sur la regionnahua (notamment celles de Gruzinski et deLeon Portilla), on peut s’etonner de l’absencede certaines references, notamment destravaux de d’A. Lopez Austin dont lesanalyses renforceraient l’argument de l’auteurconcernant la condition humaine etl’obligation de reciprocite envers les dieux(chapitre 5). On regrette aussi l’absence dereference aux travaux de l’ecoleethnographique francaise sur la region maya(en dehors de Ricard). Par ailleurs, il eut eteinteressant que l’auteur propose des pistespour un prolongement de son analyse et de cequ’elle pourrait apporter a la comprehensiondes evolutions religieuses plus recentes autourdes divers cultes evangeliques et de laneo-evangelisation catholique.

Quoi qu’il en soit l’ouvrage est tout a faitpertinent, au-dela des specialistes ethnologuesou historiens de la region mesoamericaine,pour tout lecteur qui s’interesse auxdynamiques coloniales, a l’etude comparativedes religions et aux processus de metissage etde recomposition culturelle.

NICOLAS ELLISONUniversity of Aberdeen (UK)

Eschenbruch, Nicholas. 2007. Nursingstories. Life and death in a German hospice.Oxford: Berghahn. xii + 135 pp. Hb.: £60.ISBN: 1 84545 151 1.

Le mouvement des hospices (hospicemovement) a aujourd’hui abouti a la creationd’institutions reconnues pour la specificite del’encadrement de fin de vie qu’elles proposentdans differents pays d’Europe occidentale.Ancre dans l’ideal moderne de l’autonomieindividuelle et dans la categorie biomedicaled’incurabilite (traduction francaise qui semblela moins mauvaise pour dying), ‘lemouvement des hospices s’est donne pourobjectif de rendre les malades en phaseterminale capables de vivre une fin de vieauto-determinee et digne’ (p. 7). Soutenuegalement par les travaux de sciences socialessur le ‘deni de la mort’ des societesoccidentales contemporaines (qui connut sesheures de gloire de la fin des annees 1950 a lafin des annees 1980), ce mouvement nes’implanta en Allemagne que progressivementa partir des annees 1980, et surtout dans lesannees 1990 (p. 9-10).

Ayant mene une enquete par observationparticipante et entretiens dans un hospiceallemand designe ici comme l’‘hospiceStadtwald’, Nicholas Eschenbruch livre avecNursing Stories une ethnographie fine et tresreflexive de ce monde social particulier. Ensoulignant qu’il offre une ‘connaissancesituee’ socialement (p. 15-16) et en explicitantla place d’adjoint du personnel soignant qu’ila occupee pendant ses enquetes, il insiste surl’articulation entre son ethnographie et sesreflexions anthropologiques.

A l’hospice Stadtwald, la rupture avec lescategories de l’hopital apparaıt clairementdans l’organisation de l’espace et duquotidien: de la moquette remplace lelinoleum, les animaux de compagnie peuventetre acceptes, l’heure des repas n’est pasimposee, les infirmieres (et les infirmiers) neportent pas d’uniforme. . . La pratique desinfirmieres est orientee vers le ‘bien-etresubjectif’ et la dignite des patients, autant quevers le soulagement de leur douleur physique.Pourtant Eschenbruch souligne aussi les


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paradoxes de l’ideal d’autonomie des patientsprofesse par les infirmieres, face par exempleaux patients cherchant une plus grandeautonomie encore et une implicationminimale du personnel soignant dans leur vie,les infirmieres pouvant alors se sentirfrustrees.

Le plus dur pour celles-ci en effet est lecontact avec les patients demandant tropd’attention, et avec ceux manifestant trop peu,ou pas, de reconnaissance au personnelsoignant: les commentaires (stories)qu’echangent entre eux les membres dupersonnel sont ici essentiels, et permettent defaire face a ces situations en leur donnant dusens et en s’encourageant mutuellement. Eneffet, les infirmieres cherchent aussi a fairevivre aux patients des ‘experiences positives’,et tentent assez systematiquement pour cefaire d’etablir une ‘complicite therapeutique’(therapeutic emplotment) avec ceux-ci en lesaidant a fumer une cigarette, a continuer amanger ce qu’ils aiment. . .

Enfin, dans le dernier chapitre,Eschenbruch evoque les pratiquesd’accompagnement des patients dans lesderniers moments de leur vie, l’attitude desproches face a la mort, et la place contestee (ausein du personnel soignant) de la ceremonied’adieu organisee au deces de patients ayantpasse un certain temps a l’hospice, rite dontl’adaptabilite au profil du defunt ‘est encoreen affinite’ avec la facon ‘reflexive etindividualiste’ de vivre sa fin de vie qu’entendpromouvoir l’hospice (p. 105). La conclusionprend essentiellement la forme d’une synthesetres efficace de l’ouvrage.

En fait, Eschenbruch s’engage dans cetouvrage dans une ‘anthropologie narrative’,comme il le dit lui-meme, et analyse finementla construction du sens, la forme et leslogiques des interactions dans l’hospice danslequel il a travaille. Mais cette anthropologienarrative est aussi une microsociologie quis’interesse assez peu au passe des acteurs(personnel soignant, patients) pourinterpreter, par exemple, la ‘reussite’ oul’‘echec’ relatif des relations avec tel ou telpatient. Si le contexte historique qui a vuemerger le mouvement des hospices est fort

bien restitue, apres la mise en perspectivehistorique initiale, il n’est plus fait referenceque de facon assez imprecise au statut ou a latrajectoire sociale de certains patients pourrendre compte de leurs resistances a s’engagerdans le type de relation que cherchent apromouvoir les infirmieres. L’anthropologienarrative d’Eschenbruch n’est certainementpas une sociologie dispositionnaliste, et saproposition finale selon laquelle le ‘monde dela vie est construit dans l’interaction sociale’(p. 119) peut aussi sonner comme uneoccultation du caractere structure (et passeulement structurant) des interactionssociales. L’ouvrage n’en presente pas moinsune ethnographie tres fine de ce que peut etrela fin de vie dans un hospice et un modeled’explicitation des conditions de productiondes donnees.

JOEL NORETFonds National de la Recherche Scientifique(Belgique)

Evans, Gillian. 2006. Educational failureand working class white children in Britain.London: Palgrave Macmillan. xii + 205 pp.Hb.: £50.00. ISBN: 978 1 4039 9216 1.

Pendant dix-huit mois, Gillian Evans a vecuau coeur du milieu ouvrier du quartier deBermondsey dans le Sud-Est de Londres et asu exprimer ses experiences et sesobservations dans un style captivant dans cetouvrage. Une grande partie de celui-ci se litcomme un Bildungsroman qui voit latransformation de l’auteur – une femme‘posh’ (bourgeoise, a peu pres) – en femme‘common’ (ou populaire), et qui apprend a enapprecier les avantages.

La problematique affichee des recherchesd’Evans est cependant l’echec scolaire desenfants (blancs), et en particulier des garcons,issus de la classe ouvriere. L’auteur se proposede comprendre, par le biais d’un travail deterrain dans et autour d’une ecole ‘en echec’,pourquoi la reproduction sociale continued’exister outre Manche malgre l’acces gratuitet obligatoire a l’enseignement depuis plus decinquante ans.


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Un rapport de l’Inspection des Ecolescite par Evans rappelle qu’en 2005 le contextefamilial et le niveau de formation des parents,surtout des meres, sont determinants pour lareussite scolaire des enfants. Ce constat, basesur des statistiques, est remarquablement bienillustre par les observations del’anthropologue. Dans la maison de Sharon,une mere ouvriere du quartier, par exemple,les bons resultats ou meme l’assiduite a l’ecolene font pas partie des attentes auxquelles lesenfants sont confrontes. Comme Sharon,beaucoup de parents du quartier n’ont pas lapatience d’aider leurs enfants dans le lentapprentissage de la lecture ou dans leursdevoirs.

L’ethnographie d’Evans permet pourtantde degager d’autres causes de l’echec scolaire.Les enseignants du quartier sont tout a faitconscients d’un nombre de raisons materiellesqui aggravent leur situation: le manque demoyens, les effectifs trop grands des classes,les programmes trop lourds a achever aucours d’une annee scolaire, au detriment deseleves faibles qui n’arrivent plus a suivre, leseffets d’une certaine segregation du fait queles parents les plus ambitieux du quartierchoisissent d’autres ecoles, plus performantes,pour leurs enfants, de sorte que les plus faibleset les plus difficiles se trouvent concentresdans l’ecole du quartier. Avec beaucoupd’empathie, Evans demontre que les garconsconsideres comme ‘perturbateurs’ par lesenseignants ont tout a fait l’envie d’apprendreet la capacite de se concentrer sur une tache,mais qu’ils dirigent toute leur energie vers unecompetition permanente pour le maximum deprestige aux yeux des autres enfants. Cetteformation et reformation continuelle des peergroups se joue pendant les matchs de foot dansla cour de recreation autant que dans lescouloirs et halls d’entree des tours ou dans larue ou il s’agit d’exceller dans d’autres formesde competition (bagarres, negociations,collection d’objets convoites). En salle declasse, ce ne sont pas les performancesscolaires, mais les prouesses verbales vis-a-visles enseignants ou les camarades intimidespar eux qui procurent du prestige auxgarcons.

Evans se demande comment remedier acette situation – toute cette energie decompetition, ne pourrait-elle pas etrecanalisee vers des buts plus scolaires? Laquestion reste sans reponse, tandis quel’experience de l’ethnographe semble suggererqu’un systeme de tutorat individuel et discreta la maison pourrait aider bon nombre de cesgarcons ‘perturbateurs’ a avancer dans leurapprentissage, Evans ne donne pasouvertement son appui a cette solution. Ledernier mot est laisse a un ancien braqueur duquartier, reforme apres avoir purge sa peine enprison, qui conclut que Bermondsey est un‘shithole’ et qu’il vaut mieux elever ses enfantsailleurs.

Le fait que le livre se termine par cetteconclusion pessimiste et quelque peusurprenante, non commentee par l’auteur,c’est-a-dire sans veritable conclusion, est sansdoute symptomatique d’un probleme plusfondamental de l’approche d’Evans. L’auteurconfesse dans une note (p. 176, note 2) qu’elleavait choisi de produire son ethnographieavant d’entamer la lecture approfondie destravaux existants; etant ainsi ‘naıve’ a dessein,elle esperait arriver a des conclusionsnouvelles. Or, une prise en compte desquestionnements existants de la sociologie etde l’anthropologie de l’education (on pensenotamment aux travaux de Bourdieu surl’education, dont les problematiques sontsouvent proches des preoccupations del’auteur) aurait d’abord permis d’affiner lequestionnement initial, puis d’aiguiser lesanalyses entreprises par l’auteur en etablissantdes comparaisons. En fait, la confrontationdes resultats ethnographiques tout a faitinteressants avec la recherche existante n’ajamais veritablement lieu, d’ou probablementl’absence regrettable d’une conclusion a celivre.

Sans doute encore plus que de proposerdes reponses a la question de l’echec scolaire,Evans a produit une ethnographieremarquable du quartier londonien deBermondsey, un quartier populaire dont lelecteur apprend a apprecier le mode de vie ensuivant les peripeties de l’ethnographe.Inspiree par les travaux de Christina Toren,


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Evans montre admirablement bien commenton ‘devient’ un habitant de Bermondsey: ils’agit entre autres de s’approprier le territoired’une certaine maniere, d’utiliser un certainlangage (grossier), de faire preuve d’un certainhumour (grivois) et d’exposer des signesexterieurs (bijoux, vetements) comme il faut.On vient a regretter que ce mode de vie‘traditionnel’ de Bermondsey soit en voie dedisparition, menace par la poussee centrifugedu marche immobilier londonien et par lagentrification des quartiers populaires quis’ensuit fatalement.

ANNE FRIEDERIKE MULLERAcademie d’Orleans-Tours (France)

Ferguson, James. 2006. Global shadows.Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durhamand London: Duke University Press. x +258 pp. Pb.: £13.99. ISBN: 978 0 82233717 1.

La question que se pose l’anthropologueamericain, specialiste de la Zambie, J.Ferguson est une question recurrente del’anthropologie africaniste: les anthropologuespeuvent-ils, doivent-ils parler de l’Afrique demaniere globale et generale tout en conservantune perspective anthropologique? Y-a-t-il unsens a parler de la crise africaine, toutparticulierement en anthropologie? Onpourrait repondre affirmativement car, a uncertain niveau de la realite discursive,l’Afrique existe et la globalisation ducontinent justifie une certaine generalisationou un mode de comparaison raisonnable.

L’ouvrage reunit huit articles precedespar une introduction: a part deux textes quiremontent a 1993 et 1996, tous les autres sontposterieurs au 11 septembre 2001, ce qui situel’ouvrage dans le registre symbolique, et, al’exception des deux derniers, ils ont deja faitl’objet d’une publication.

Par rapport aux publications precedentesde l’auteur, cet ouvrage est quelque peudecevant. Ainsi le chapitre 5 qui est le pluslong, (Chrysalis: la vie et le deces de laRenaissance africaine dans un journal internetzambien) est-il essentiellement une analyse

textuelle, certes contextualisee, mais qui nepeut aller tres loin dans son approched’anthropologie sociale, de cadres – dontcertains vivent a l’etranger – on-line. Pensonsegalement au chapitre 6 sur le conflit entre lemimetisme et l’appartenance, dont le point dedepart est encore l’analyse d’un texte: la lettrede deux enfants guineens decedes dans le traind’atterrissage d’un avion volant vers l’Europeen 1998.

Neanmoins un anthropologue peut seretrouver dans sa conception de laglobalisation: le capital traverse le monde maisne le recouvre pas; les formes globalesd’inclusion coexistent avec des formesglobales d’exclusion, elles ne sont pasmitoyennes et constituent des enclaves. Lecontinent africain est par consequentconstitue de taches ‘globales’ discontinues,qui correspondent le plus souvent a des lieuxd’extraction miniere, qui remettent en causeles notions memes d’Etat-nation et deterritoire public. De plus, ces enclaves sont leplus souvent protegees par des armees privees,mercenaires et non nationales: les Etats ontdelegue, abandonne ou se sont fait retirer defait leurs prerogatives legitimes de maintien del’ordre. L’exemple choisi est le cas du petroleangolais (voir le chapitre 8: Gouvernerl’extraction: les nouvelles spatialisations del’ordre et du desordre dans l’Afriqueneoliberale). L’analyse est pertinente maisnullement originale et malgre ses competenceszambiennes, J. Ferguson ne nous montre pasen quoi cette problematique globale a desincidences sur le travail de terrain, d’autantplus que les informations utilisees neproviennent pas de l’anthropologie. Pourtantune telle perspective en patchwork pourraitsans doute s’appliquer aussi aux passes‘coloniaux’de l’Afrique: les forts de la traitetransatlantiques, les ports et les lignesferroviaires de la penetration coloniale, lesperimetres reserves au developpement‘experimental’ ne constituent-ils pas des lieuxparfois isoles sans synergie globale surl’environnement social? La globalisationdesarticulee selon Ferguson est en fait unecaracteristique historique et sociale fortancienne et l’ordre neoliberal pourrait se


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resumer tout simplement par l’apparition dequelques types de ‘sites’ nouveaux.

Les autres chapitres portent sur lessocialismes africains (notamment tanzanien),l’ajustement structurel, la societe civile et ceque l’auteur appelle les topographiestransnationales du pouvoir. L’anthropologuedeplore, a juste titre, le faible nombre detravaux anthropologiques sur ces realites,mais s’il connaissait mieux les travauxfrancophones, il decouvrirait quel’anthropologie sociale du developpement, deses appareils, de ses ONG et de sesadministrations locales y constitue uneorientation classique depuis plus d’unedizaine d’annees. Il est certain que lescategories dominantes africaines des appareilsd’Etat, et celles occidentales des organisationsinternationales, en tant que categoriesegalement dominantes des societes africaines,ne sont absolument pas etudiees.S’interrogeant enfin sur la modernite, ilevoque les ‘vertus globales’ des mondescriminels et des modes illicitesd’accumulation.

Pourtant une consideration scientifique,morale et meme politique traverse toutl’ouvrage, et c’est elle qui sauve l’auteur etnous interpelle fortement. Selon Ferguson eneffet, les anthropologues, pour sauverl’Afrique des critiques d’arrieration et desous-developpement, dont elle est l’objetrecurrent, valorisent depuis deja denombreuses annees les qualites nouvelles, auniveau des comportements, mentalites etcultures, creees par le changement social et lamodernisation. En fait les societes sont entrain d’inventer leurs propres modernites etleur historicite serait tout aussi moderne quecelle de l’Occident ou des pays emergents. Aune difference pres a propos de laquellel’auteur apporte des anecdotes et des exemplessavoureux: celui des niveaux et genres de vie.Les Africains sont peut-etre ‘modernes’ maisils sont encore pauvres, tres pauvres et loin departager ce qu’ils avaient compris de lamodernite: l’aisance de la consommation, del’emploi et de la protection sociale (la Zambiedes annees 1950-60 restant un exemple parfaitde ce paradigme d’il y a plus d’un demi-siecle).

En s’attachant au ‘culturel’ sans lerecontextualiser dans l’economique bassementmateriel, quotidien, collectif ou individuel, lesanthropologues oublient la moitie de laquestion. Cette ombre est attachee a l’Afriqueparce qu’elle resterait encore largementinconnue et meme inconnaissable. La culturec’est aussi l’inegalite et l’aspiration a une viedecente et l’anthropologie ne doit pas oubliercette autre moitie de la question.

JEAN COPANSUniversite Paris Descartes (France)

Gingrich, Andre, and Marcus Banks (eds.).2006. Neo-nationalism in Europe andbeyond: perspectives from socialanthropology. New York and Oxford:Berghahn. vii + 303 pp. Pb.: £25.00. ISBN:1 84545 190 2.

The present book introduces ananthropological perspective on the analyticalinquiry of neo-nationalism. As such, it addsto the complexity of the ongoing debate in thefield. In Part I the editors, Andre Gingrichand Marcus Banks, elaborate a number oftheoretical and methodological aspects ofneo-nationalism, emphasising not only thecommunalities it shares with oldernationalism, but also what essentiallydistinguishes it from these earlier versions,and implicitly makes it appear as new. Thus,Gingrich presents the political context, andthe main characteristics of neo-nationalism inWestern Europe. His ideas are furtherdeveloped by Banks in an essay that focuseson the performance of neo-nationalism in theBritish context; concomitantly, hiscontribution details some methodologicalstandpoints for its, analysis.

Part II consists of essays that focus onWestern Europe. Analysing the politicalimpact of the integralist idea of a nation-wideimagined kinship, Marianne Gullestad arguesfor its centrality in the rearticulation ofNorwegian ethnic nationalism. Furthermore,Peter Hervik monitors the rise of a new waveof nationalism in Denmark between 1992 and2001. He observes that national elections andreferendums may function as catalysts for


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hostile discourses and policies against peopleof an ethnic minority background. In thesame context of parliamentary elections, ThijlSunier and Rob van Ginkel analyse the rapidemergence and fall of nationalism in theNetherlands, concentrating their academicinquiry on Pim Fortuyn, its charismaticleader. With neighbouring Belgium as a casestudy, Rik Pinxten addresses the issue ofBelgian neo-communitarianism. He arguesthat economic globalisation and cultural andideological traditions need to be taken intoaccount when investigating neo-nationalismand its relationship to democracy. In turn,Thomas Fillitz details in his essay the impactof the Freedom Party and its nationalistagenda on Austrian politics. He scrutinisesthe party’s conception of pan-Germancultural community, as articulated by theactivity of Jorg Haider between 1986 and2000. Fillitz aptly observes that the politicalmainstream eventually appropriated some ofthe party’s ideological cornerstones.Investigating the political landscape across theAlps, in Italy, Jaro Stacul observes thedynamics of identity and interrogates themeanings of neo-nationalist politicalpositioning. The province of Trentino is at thecentre of his anthropological inquiry; hequestions the limitations of an overarchingItalian neo-nationalism, noting the emergenceof a neo-localist trend, mostly active in theNorthern provinces. Monitoring the Frenchpolitics, Gerald Gaillard-Starzmann detailsthe uneasy relationship between the Frenchpolitical establishment and the radical FrontNational Party, observing the gradualapproach of the aforementioned to the Frenchright, and the subsequent mutation of some ofits extreme viewpoints into the mainstream.

Providing an integrative framework,Part III looks at the neo-nationalistmanifestations from a European viewpoint.Paying special attention to the relationshipbetween the nation and its fatherland, arecurrent theme in the neo-nationalistdiscourse, Gertraud Seiser uses Austria as anexample for her analysis of the opposition ofthe native farmers to the Common EuropeanAgricultural Policy. Subsequently, Maryon

McDonald discusses the translation of thenewly developed nationalist manifestations atthe EU level, and observes how they colonisethe available political interstices between thepro-European discourses that allow forcritique from within the Europeanconstruction.

Part IV offers a global perspective on thedevelopment of neo-nationalism, evidencingits emergence in such diverse geographicsettings as India and Australia. The rise ofneo-nationalism is investigated by MukulikaBanerjee in the context of Indian politics. Sheaptly interrogates the extent to whichnationalism can accommodate the neo-particle, and she argues that in the Indiancontext religious fervour can be seen as adefining attribute of the new nationalist wave.In turn, Bruce Kapferer and Barry Morrisscrutinise the sudden ascendancy andsubsequent fall of Pauline Hanson and thepolitics of new right on the Australianmainstream political stage. They observe thesimilarities the Australian right shares with itsEuropean counterparts, and concomitantlypoint at the contradictions that underlieAustralian egalitarianism.

Ulf Hannerz sums up the findings in hisAfterthoughts. Using the Swedish example offailed nationalism, he draws some generalconclusions on the nature of the new wave ofnationalism. He notes that these parties,under the leadership of charismatic people,manage to populate the mainstream politicalagenda with their anxieties about culturalhomogeneity, equality and economicprotectionism.

The present book constitutes, I wouldargue, an outstanding insight into thedevelopment of nationalism at the dawn ofthe third millennium. Its richness liesprecisely in these social anthropological viewsthat the contributions detail. It opens afruitful dialogue between anthropologists andpolitical scientists, and I would warmlyrecommend it to those interested in wideningtheir academic perspectives.

OVIDIU CRISTIAN NOROCELHelsinki University (Finland)


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Grasseni, Cristina. 2007. Skilled visions:between apprenticeship and standards.Oxford and New York: Berghahn. viii + 226pp. Hb.: $75.00. ISBN: 9781845452100.

This collection begins where the critique ofvisualism in anthropology left off, byreconsidering how the discipline approachesvision. As Herzfeld argues in his epilogue,anthropologists seem almost embarrassed bythe prominence of vision in their ownpractices and in the lives of those they workwith. Here, the centrality of vision isembraced through an emphasis on aneducation of attention in which skill isdeveloped through processes ofapprenticeship taking place withincommunities of practice. The volumecomprises nine chapters divided into threesections focusing on ecologies of practice,positioning gestures of design and schoolingthe eye in science and medicine. All take onthe problem of what constitutes skill, how itis acquired and how it is demonstrated.

Willerslev takes as his starting pointMerleau-Ponty’s assertion that vision puts theworld at a distance. Using this distinctivecapacity to contrast vision with other senses,he explores its significance for both Yukaghirhunters and anthropologists in enabling bothmimesis and detachment. Vision, he argues, isintegral for both self-creation and identitybecause it maintains separation whilstengaging with those that are ‘other’. Grasseniexplores how Italian farmers’ perceptions ofcattle are mediated and learnt through varieddevices, including advertising material andchildren’s toys. These provide ideal modelsenabling children to grasp the hegemonicaesthetics of their community of practice.Ronzon meanwhile, takes an ecologicalapproach to the visual skills of Italian dragqueens, describing how their environment‘affords’ artists with resources to work withor against in creating biographically drawncharacters. A visual appreciation of ‘camp’emerges through both discussion and visualactivity.

Part two focuses on the role oftechnology, both old and new, in mediating

vision and developing skill. Cohn examineshow medical imagers ‘play’ with images inorder to create desired results. He reveals thedialogical process through which images arecreated, challenging the objectivity ofscientific reports. In these processes, seeingand knowing are not separate but combinedand blurred in rarely articulated ways. Gunnproduces a fascinating comparison of learningamongst artists, anthropologists andarchitects that, more than other chapters,reflects on the ethnographer’s experience inboth learning skills and learning about skills.Skill is thus envisaged as the basis forknowledge, not its enacting. It is through theskills of drawing and writing that thoughts aremade visible and new connections emerge.Turnbull provides an intriguing comparisonbetween Beck’s systematised LondonUnderground map and the building ofChartres Cathedral, both of which representattempts to form a coherent whole out ofdisparate elements. It is thus only in hindsightthat ‘design’ emerges out of the varied actionsof a motley assemblage of individuals.

The final part considers the acquisition ofskilled vision and its performance. Saunders’investigation into radiologists’ practices in the‘CT suite’ explores the role of abduction inassessing radiological images. Skill isdemonstrated by fitting imagesretrospectively to general rules to provide adiagnosis. Bleichmar’s study of 18th centurynaturalists focuses on the use of books inproviding an education of attention throughthe systematic comparison of related forms. Anaturalist’s vision was thus trained to beselective and hierarchical and also relied onthe colonialist collection of objects.Roepstorff makes a bold attempt to conveythe skill of neuroscientists. This chapter isstriking in explaining the skill involved in‘reading’ a brain scan by illuminating a seriesof scans through the exegesis of a practitioner,which provides a narrative that renders theon-screen blobs meaningful. Whilst the readercannot become skilled in viewing these,Roepstorff demonstrates the possibility ofarticulating the contextualisation of scans byan expert viewer.


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I found the volume to be consistentlystimulating and was excited by a new visualanthropology dwelling not in the image but inhow people actually look and see. I wouldlike to have read more about the particularmethodological problems presented by vision.How does the anthropologist understandskilled vision and how do they ‘see’ howsomebody else sees? At times I was somewhatfrustrated, as perhaps the authors were, of thelimitations of representing skilled visionwithin the narrow framework of short articlesallowing little space to develop anappreciation in the reader of what it is to beskilled in seeing within a particular context.Once an anthropologist has grasped anappreciation of skill, how is this thenrepresented to their audience? But this is animportant and timely volume that does muchto further our understanding of vision. It willbe of great interest to researchers and studentsconcerned with studies of sensoryperception.

ANDREW WHITEHOUSEUniversity of Aberdeen (UK)

Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian moderns:freedom and fetish in the missionencounter. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press. xiv + 323 pp. Pb.:£13.95. ISBN: 0 520 24652 7.

In 1902 the Dutch Calvinist Reformed FreeChurch sent its first missionary to Sumba, asmall island in the eastern part of theNetherlands Indies, where the colonialadministration had allowed it to start theChristianisation of the inhabitants who stilladhered to their traditional ancestral religion.When Keane was there for his research in1985–1987 and again in 1993 approximatelyhalf the population were members of theChristian Church of Sumba, which hadbecome autonomous in 1947. Initiallyconversion had been a slow process, not leastbecause the Dutch missionaries wanted to besure that new adherents were fully committedto what they believed to be the most authenticform of Christianity in existence, including an

earnest desire to convince others. Keanehimself witnessed many highly articulatedebates between these Indonesian Calvinistsand followers of the traditional religion.

Although Keane gives the impressionthat the study of Christianity was not what hehad come for, he took up the challenge toexplain what was happening in theseencounters. He published several articles onthis topic, apart from a monograph on therole of customary poetic language. Six ofthese essays are presented in modified form inthe second half of the volume under review.In the first half Keane considers the largerframework within which his Sumbaneseexperiences may fit, touching upon suchtopics as the global influence of Christianity,the relationship between Calvinism andEuro-American modernity inspired by theEnlightenment, and historical developmentsin Indonesia during the 20th century. In thispart of the book he has to rely on selectedsecondary sources and lacks the space toexplore alternatives.

However, when it comes to histheoretical perspective, Keane’s argument is amodel of careful reasoning. He claims nomore than he can account for. The originalityof his approach allows him to concentrate onan extended discussion of the issues involved,rather than having to justify his interpretationof some existing theory. A key concept is‘semiotic ideology’, ideas people have aboutthe language they use, as well as about othermaterial means of communication. Such anideology is about the relationship of wordsand things with persons. The materiality ofthe former may contrast with agency andfreedom of the latter, but much depends onwhich other beings, apart from humans, arebelieved to possess agency and on the powerattributed to words. Keane sees clear parallelsbetween the way Calvinism articulates itsview on these matters and the more or lesstaken for granted assumptions of modernity,which is wholly secular in outlook.

Keane borrows from Latour the conceptof ‘purification’, the drawing of a clear linebetween human agency and naturaldeterminism. Both Calvinism and secular


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modernism insist on this separation in orderto protect individual autonomy against thethreat of the materiality of signifyingpractices. Hence Keane can define ‘fetishism’as the ‘imputation to others of a falseunderstanding of the division between humanand nonhuman, subject and object, an errorthat threatens human agency’ (p. 27). Anothercommon aspect of their respective semioticideologies is the emphasis on sincerity and itsmoral connotations. Sincere speech reflectsexactly what one thinks. This privileges thereferential function of language.

To catch the causal effects of a semioticideology he introduces the term‘representational economy’ to indicate thatwords, things and persons are situateddynamically within the same world with oneanother. But he makes clear that he does notwant to ‘portray a totalizable world in whicheverything is accounted for’ (p. 33). ForKeane each side of the missionary encounter‘extends away in numerous directions’ (ibid.).Because this kind of analysis seems to work sowell on Sumba, a first reading of his book isvery persuasive. Still, it may well be that thetools Keane fashioned cannot easily beadopted by others as he does not give anexplicit methodology on how to constructsemiotic ideologies from the observation ofsignifying practices. Moreover, to the extentthat one is conscious of the role of a specificideology, one can choose between alternativesif they are available. The kind of person one issupposed to be, or more specifically ideasabout agency, would then depend onsituational selection. This, at least, is theoutcome of anthropological research intomedical pluralism. Keane’s approach seems toexclude the possibility of a similar religiouspluralism, which may not be important onSumba, but appears to be widespreadelsewhere.

JAN DE WOLFUtrecht University (The Netherlands)

Kovats-Bernat, Christopher J. 2006.Sleeping rough in Port au Prince. Anethnography of street children and violence

in Haiti. Gainsville: University Press ofFlorida. xvi + 233 pp. Hb.: $59.95. ISBN:978 0 8130 3009 8.

Sleeping rough in Port-au-Prince exploreshow street children negotiate their sufferingin a setting that has become increasinglybrutal over the past decades. Through aperceptive ethnography detailing children’severyday social and economic activities on thestreets, Kovats-Bernat demonstrates thatstreet children take part actively in social andsymbolic processes through which theyproduce and reproduce culture.

The analysis is premised on a theoreticalnotion of adolescent identities stressing thedialectic of others’ expectations of a child’spersonhood and the child’s own perception ofhis/her selfhood and autonomy. Groundingthis notion in the Haitian context, Kovats-Bernat highlights the importance of civilsociety and the state in delineating what isexpected of street children socially. Theirself-identification is oriented primarily toother street children, while their sense ofautonomy is expressed in relations withadults, children living at home, other streetchildren and the state. Strangely absent in thiscontextualisation is a distinction betweenpeople in general and those closer to a childwhose expectations may influence his/heridentity formation at different times, e.g.biological or social parents, siblings and closefriends.

Each of the main chapters elucidates newaspects of children’s street lives. The first twochapters contextualise the use of urban spacein Port-au-Prince, whose vibrant informaleconomy transforms streets into pools oftrade and services. Here the boundariesbetween domestic and public spheres areporous and public space has been nicknamedthe peoples’ living room in local vernacular.For children this space implies a risk ofgetting stuck, of being entangled in the liminalsites of unstructured spaces, exposed tomarginalisation and exclusion.

Chapters 3 and 4 describe the changingpolitical economy of violence in Haiti, fromthe emergence of paramilitary gangs


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instrumental in political repression tofragmented groups of armed youth preyingon ordinary citizens. By routinely detainingstreet children as part of their fight againstgangs, Haitian police fuel a negative image ofthe children, linking them to randombrutality. As a contrast, Kovats-Bernathighlights that most street children undertakea range of minor economic activities andoccasionally beg and resort to petty crime.Street children do nevertheless reproduce acertain degree of violence within their ownranks. Hostilities concerning minuteeconomic territories are usually solved infist-fights and verbal abuse, but may escalateto razor cuts and so-called sleeping wars, inwhich the adversary is maimed while asleep.The intention behind such attacks iseconomic: by scaring away an enemy fromthe territory in question, conflicts areresolved quickly and do not undermine thechildren’s livelihoods.

Chapter 5 looks at the rise and fall ofchildren’s empowerment in Haiti anddescribes the life cycle of the orphanageLafanmi Selavi. What started as a pro-poorideology of meeting street children’s basicneeds and teaching them their rights ended asa fierce rebuke when the children stood up ina political manifestation against deterioratingliving conditions. Kovats-Bernat argues thatthe conflict around Lafanmi Selavi has hadlong-term repercussions for street childrenwho have since been misrepresented as violentand troublesome.

This book is a good example of how wellethnographies can illustrate complexphenomena. Children’s experiences and theintricacies of their realities are still new foci inanthropology. Especially the presentation ofindividual street children’s histories providesa spectre of nuances that opens up toadditional interpretations and areas whereKovats-Bernat could have taken his analysisfurther and perhaps also extended his inquiry.

In my view, the role of street children’srelationships with their families is underrated.Despite the fact that some children visitparents and relatives occasionally and save upto give them symbolic gifts, Kovats-Bernat

does not pursue that line of inquiry todiscover how children conceptualise materialaspects of asserting their identities vis-a-vistheir families. He appears to get stuck in atypology of families prone to produce streetchildren, and in a Western view on children’swork according to which work in publicspaces inevitably is a first step towards livingon the street.

This conceptualisation of families is farless nuanced than the conceptualisation ofchildren’s street lives, amongst others becausethe choice of informants does not extendbeyond the street. Moreover, street childrenare treated as one category, and yet the age atwhich they leave home may be key tounderstanding their family relationships andagency. Mature adolescents may set out tofind work because they want to contribute tothe domestic economy, not necessarily pushedby parents. They may want more autonomyand choosing the streets may stem from arejection of being treated like a child. In short,they negotiate their identity in the spacebetween others’ expectations of them andhow they would like to be seen.

Secondly, the conceptualisation ofchildren’s work does not take into account thegeneral use of public space. Moving about inthe peoples’ living room is not an anomaly inHaiti and contradictory adult practices begfor a more nuanced analysis. Theethnography shows abundantly that whilestreet children are misrepresented in publicdiscourses and unduly harassed by stateagencies, people – including police officers –support the children by employing them,paying for various services or giving themalms to buy food ‘because they work to eat’.Children’s work is thus seen as a virtue inmaking them acceptable persons.

These nuances would have helped toshow how street children negotiate theirsuffering. Additionally – but perhaps notpossible considering the political situation atthe time of Kovats-Bernat’s field research – itwould have been interesting to follow howthe Lafanmi Selavi project impacted onchildren’s agency back on the streets after itsdemise.


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Exactly because of its aptness for readinginto the ethnographic material and adding tothe analysis by angling it differently, Irecommend this book for undergraduate andgraduate teaching with particular emphasis onmethodology or child/youth studies.

DORTE THORSENThe Nordic Africa Institute Uppsala (Sweden)

Lock, Margaret and Judith Farquhar (eds.).2007. Beyond the body proper. Reading theanthropology of material life. Durham andLondon: Duke University Press. 688 pp.Pb.: £20.99. ISBN: 978 08223 3845 1.Hb.: £57.00. ISBN: 978 0 8223 3830 7.

Le corps est entre legitimement au sein del’anthropologie il y a pres d’un siecle. Onevoque volontiers a ce propos l’effortpionnier de Marcel Mauss et sa celebreformule ‘le corps est le premier et le plusnaturel des instruments de l’homme’ (1966:372). Si la voie ‘technologique’ initiee par lafigure de l’homme total guide aujourd’huiencore un certain nombre de travaux parmi lesplus interessants, une autre conception del’anthropologie du corps trouve sa pleineexpressiondans ce recueil: il s’agit de montrerqu’au dela de l’evidence apparente de soncaractere discret et biologique, le corps sedecline selon differentes definitionsconcurrentes, en fonction des acteurs et descontextes historiques et culturels. Enreunissant et commentant quarante-sept(extraits de) contributions precedemmentpubliees dans le domaine des faits sociaux ducorps, dans cet ouvrage les anthropologuesnord-americaines Margaret Lock et JudithFarquar engagent le lecteur dans cettedirection.

La tache, delicate, est conduite par deuxspecialistes de questions de medecine au seindes mondes contemporains, un interet quel’on retrouve en forme d’aboutissement del’ensemble. En effet, sous les dehorsapparemment modeste d’une somme critiquede textes abreges – multipliant les disciplinesde sciences humaines et les thematiques –l’ouvrage progresse au fur et a mesure des

sections qui le composent, selon uneorganisation logique qui rend sa lectureinteressante au-dela de la pertinence dechacun des essais qui le composent.

Il s’ouvre sur les extraits les plus ancienset l’entree difficile du corps dans les sciencessociales naissantes (partie 1). A l’exceptionnotable du cas des techniques du corpstheorisees par Mauss, le corps se trouvait alorsreduit au statut de symbole naturel, bon apenser dans l’economie des representationssociales. Ce schema, excluant l’experience aubenefice de l’esprit, eprouve ses limites dans laphilosophie continentale d’obediencephenomenologique (partie 2) et le modele del’incarnation (‘embodiment’). Cettedynamique du faire corps sera reprise a sontour par l’anthropologie (partie 3) en vue de seconstituer en alternative au modele dominantdu corps moderne elabore par la bourgeoisiedu 19eme siecle. Parallelement, l’analyse sedonne les moyens d’interroger avec une plusgrande acuite, sensorielle notamment, lanature du quotidien (partie 4), theorisecomme un espace vecu dont les conditions del’enchantement trouvent leurs origines dansde singuliers corps a corps.

Ainsi equipee, l’anthropologie disposedes lors des outils necessaires pour decrirel’ensemble des rapports sociaux a l’œuvredans la definition (symbolique etexperimentale) des corps. C’est tout d’abordle questionnement de la condition materiellede la domination qui devient possible(partie 5), depuis la remise en cause del’hegemonie des modeles bourgeois europeensjusqu’a l’analyse des dynamiques demarginalisation qu’elle presuppose. Degage decertains a priori, il devient alors possible deconsiderer les mecanismes de negociation desidentites en jeu dans ces contextes, tels qu’ilsse jouent dans la problematique des genres(partie 6). L’apport de Foucault est a ce titredeterminant, qu’il s’agisse de montrerl’historicite des categories sexuees ou leurproduction discursive, tant dans le senscommun que dans le developpement dessciences biomedicales. Le corps marginaliseest veritablement au cœur de la reflexion(partie 7) et, avec lui, le pluralisme des formes


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d’experiences en marge des modelesimposes.

A l’inverse, on peut chercher a donnercorps aux mecanismes de l’alienationcapitaliste (partie 8) et aux consequencesphysiologiques et identitaires de la disciplinedes corps inherente a l’organisationspatio-temporelle de l’industrie. Le corps,lui-meme, devient produit de consommation,inscrivant ses transformations dans deslogiques d’echanges symboliques et materiels.Qualite appreciable de ce recueil, lessituations decrites montrent que les processusde domination n’epuisent pas a eux seuls cequi se joue reellement. La derniere section del’ouvrage, consacree a la negociation de ladefinition du corps dans la formation et lacritique des biosciences (partie 9), montreainsi que la technologie n’est pas seulementl’aboutissement d’un processus denormalisation, mais qu’elle contient ensubstance d’importants dilemmes moraux. Lescategories qu’elle mobilise font alors l’objetde negociations qu’il faut considerer pourcomprendre ce qui se joue derriere l’univocitetrompeuse des notions de corps ou d’esprit.

Considere dans sa globalite, Beyond thebody proper est bien plus qu’un panoramaraisonne au cas par cas, chaque section faisanten effet l’objet d’une presentation critiquesoignee, accompagnee de suggestions delectures supplementaires. Il s’y defend aucontraire une certaine conception del’anthropologie du corps: un ‘nouveaumaterialisme’, elabore aujourd’hui par unnombre croissant de chercheurs dontplusieurs ont la parole ici. Ils ont pour pointcommun de questionner la multiplicite desdefinitions ‘du corps’en jeu dans differentscontextes socio-historiques, en privilegiant larealite et la dignite des experiences qui sejouent alors.

En raison de ce souci d’inscrire les texteschoisis dans une reflexion plus approfondie, lalecture de ce recueil s’avere passionnante,notamment pour les etudiants, a qui il estnaturellement destine, en sciences sociales eten sciences biomedicales. On regrettera deslors – mais etait-ce bien le lieu? – l’absence deperspective critique dans la presentation de ce

nouveau materialisme. En effet, de la matiereelle-meme il ne reste parfois que peu de chosedes lors que se trouve privilegiee lacontingence historique et sociale desdefinitions du corps normal au detriment deses specificites physiques. L’absence de retoursur l’actualite des techniques maussiennes esta ce titre tout a fait significative. Avec cela,disparaıt une part du projet initial del’anthropologie des origines, c’est-a-dire decomprendre la specificite du corps commemoyen, et non objet, de la pensee sociale.Finalement, a trop chercher au-dela du corpsmeme, ne risque-t-on pas d’enlever au corpssa consistance, au risque de ne plus etre enmesure de penser l’homme dans satotalite?

References:Mauss, Marcel. 1966 (1936) Sociologie et anthro-

pologie, Paris, PUF.

OLIVIER WATHELETUniversite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France)

MacDonald, Margaret Read. 2006. Tentraditional tellers. Urbana: University ofIllinois Press. 200 pp. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN:0 252 07297 9.

MacDonald has provided a valuablecontribution to the study of oral narrativesand storytelling by focusing on the peoplewho tell stories over the folklore. The authoris herself a professional storyteller and authorof dozens of books for adults and children.After a short introduction, ten chaptersintroduce ten people of diverse backgrounds,united only by their interaction withMacDonald as she participates in the worldstorytelling circuit. Each chapter opens with ahalf-page description of the socio-culturalcontext, followed by a page introducing theperson. The bulk of each chapter consists oftranscribed interviews MacDonald held withthe storyteller and ends with a couple ofstories from the storyteller’s repertoire. Welearn about their childhood and how theyexperienced storytelling and got into telling


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stories themselves. All of these people areself-reflective and articulate. Many have beenpublishing books and scholarly articles fordecades, and all but one chapter ends with aselected bibliography of the most importantpublications by each storyteller.

The first chapter is about Vi Hilbert, arespected elder of the Coast Salish UpperSkagit tribe, who has been telling andpublishing stories for several decades. She iscommitted to sharing and spreading the fameof her culture and even founded her ownpress as a venue for her own and many others’books. Curtis DuPuis, in Chapter 10, presentsa sharply contrasting example. He is amember of the Chehalis Tribe and restrictedfrom publishing the stories he learned fromhis elders by the strict traditionalist sense ofproperty rights of his wider family. He maytell his stories in sundry venues, and evenallow two to be published in this scholarlyvolume, but he may not disseminate widelythe stories that properly belong to the familyof Hazel Pete.

Two chapters provide examples of thepower of stories and storytelling forovercoming great personal andsocio-economic obstacles. Roberto CarlosRamos was given to an orphanage in urbanBrazil by his parents when he was five yearsold because they couldn’t feed him any more.He quickly became the ‘problem kid’,running away hundreds of times, until aFrench social worker took him at age 13 andadopted him. She and a storytelling cook inone of the orphanages are credited with savinghis life, and now he uses stories he learned as achild combined with autobiographicalvignettes in a performance style so engagingthat some audience members don’t rememberthat he performed them through an Englishinterpreter while in Washington. Makia Malowas banished to the leper colony in Hawaiiwhen he was diagnosed with Hansen’sdisease. Although medicines have halted theprogression of the disease, he lost his sight,was scarred, and is confronted with the socialstigma. Like Ramos, Malo’s performances andwritings inspire youth to aim higher withoutmoralising.

Several of the storytellers are explicitlyengaging text and oral performance. The LaoBuddhist monk, Phra Inta Kaweewong, hasbeen writing down oral stories for publishersin northeastern Thailand and learning andtranscribing old stories written on palm-leaftexts since the 1950s. Similarly, Lela KianaOman of Nome has been writing andpublishing Eskimo stories and legends so thatthey will be preserved for future generations.Leonard Same is a university professor inNew Caledonia, with over a dozen books andarticles published, and he tells stories informal and informal settings, struggling withthe problems of translation from his nativelanguage into French and transcription of oralperformances into books.

The final chapter on tradition is a nicediscussion of tradition and art, drawingprimarily on Henry Glassie’s ideas oftradition as dynamic, drawing upon the pastas a resource for making the future and notcodified in stone. Thus, readers (andaudiences at the kinds of events where theseten people often perform in ‘traditionalstorytelling’ festivals) should understand thatthe tradition behind traditional tellers is thematerial, out of which good storytellers shapeexciting performances that engage theimaginations of audiences, and notpre-packaged not codified, unchanging itemssimply handed down from one generation tothe next like buckets of water.

The reader, however, is left on his own tomake connections between the politics oftradition evident in Hilbert’s iconoclasticdissemination of stories versus DuPuis’conservativism. The fascinating issue ofliteracy and orality is not systematicallydiscussed, but only brought up occasionallyby some of the individual tellers. TenTraditional Tellers is a solid contribution tothe popularisation of folklore and bringsneeded attention to some wonderfulstorytellers, but it does not seriously engagemany problems that interest readers of thisjournal.

ALEXANDER D. KINGUniversity of Aberdeen (UK)


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Makris, G.P. 2006. Islam in the Middle East:a living tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. x +348 pp. Hb.: £55.00/$74.95. ISBN: 14051 1602 1. Pb.: £17.99/S29.95. ISBN:1 4051 1603 X.

Given the explosive growth in books onthings Islamic, the Greek anthropologist G.P.Makris felt a need to carefully position hisbook. However, in vindicating yet anotheraddition to a rapidly expanding literature, theauthor exaggerates the dearth ofanthropological and ethnographic approachesto the study of Islam. Apart from the author’smention of the contributions by Eickelmanand Gilsenan, the gap that Makris ostensiblyseeks to fill has already been filled byFrederick Denny’s seminal introduction toIslam. Also on a more specialist level there ismore available than ‘a handful of articles oroccasional book’ (p. 4). Importantcontributions to the study of Middle EasternIslam as a living tradition, including practicesand rituals, have been made by, for example,Unni Wikan, Willy Jansen and MarjoBuitelaar (who is later acknowledged for herrich ethnographic description of Fasting inMorocco). In another geographical area –Southeast Asia – anthropologists even tookthe lead in redefining the way Islam is studiedthere, when the findings of Bowen, Hefnerand Woodward challenged the approach ofeminence grise Clifford Geertz.

This does not diminish the value ofMakris’s contribution. Drawing on theconcept of ‘discursive tradition’ as developedby the ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre andanthropologist Talal Asad, a narrativealternating between the well-defined doctrineof a world religion and the local and translocallevels on which it is lived forms the red threadwhich holds this book together. It enablesMakris to present the production of Islamicorthodoxy as the indeterminable outcome ofcontinuous negotiations. Before moving tothe substance of an anthropological approachto the study of Islam, the author provides alsoa framework for understanding a few keyterms used throughout the book. Juxtaposing

the ‘West’ and the ‘Middle East’ as historicaland cultural constructs objectified throughdiscourse, Makris contrasts his open anddynamic understanding of these designationsto Huntington’s ‘crass essentialism’ (p. 6). Inregards to globalisation, he draws attention toits constitutive trends of culturalfragmentation and modernist homogenisationwhich simultaneously shape global reality.The framework is completed by a fourthterm: secularisation. Here Makris’s ownbackground has influenced his choice for thedefinition formulated by the EasternOrthodox Priest Alexander Schmemann,rather than more obvious ones provided bysociologists of religion.

Following a conventional overview ofIslamic history in the first chapter, the nextone commences with a consideration of fourdoctrinal foundations of Islam: Qur’an,Prophetic tradition, the consensus of theMuslims, and the principle of reasoning byanalogy. It is somewhat odd that Makrisblames other analysts for their ‘poor andlegalistic’ understanding of Islam as anorthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy when helimits his own discussion to these four sourcesof Islamic jurisprudence. Makris’s subsequentdiscussion of the community of believers orumma seems a bit too challenging for whatclaims to be an introductory text.

The rest of the book hinges on theimpressive third chapter: ‘Authority andKnowledge’. In his discussion of traditionalIslamic scholarly learning and education,Makris highlights the system’s inherent‘structural fluidity’, paying attention to bothits content and institutional features whichtogether constitute the world of the religiousscholars or ‘ulama’. Drawing on recentstudies by Zeghal and Moustafa, and using avocabulary borrowed from Levi-Strauss, hepresents an intriguing account of how the‘Textual Inundation’ (67ff.) that potentiallythreatens the vitality of (segments) of theliving umma is now being offset by thebricolage of new Muslim intellectuals, and anew oral tradition introduced by preachersusing audio-visual media. Here Makris relies


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primarily on the work of Charles Hirschkind,a student of Asad (who also provides Makriswith many of his theoretical cues).

The edifice that is the ‘House of Islam’ isgradually completed in the remaining fivechapters. Of particular interest in thediscussion of the ‘Five Pillars’ is the author’ssketch of the complex interrelations betweenzakat (alms-giving), attempts to define an‘Islamic economics’, social welfare, the role ofNGOs, and the closely related issue of comingto terms with the notion of ‘civil society’. Thesame Chapter 4 provides also ample materialtaken from anthropological research into theRamadan Fast. Africanists will appreciateMakris’s identification of the hajj as a factor inthe migration of West Africans towards thecontinent’s central and Red Sea regions. Thequarrying of fieldwork data is continued inthe next chapter on Islamic mysticism orSufism. Here, Makris points to its constituentfunction in the ‘totality of the Islamicexperience’ (p. 142), complementing thedimensions of theological and legaldiscourse.

Chapters 6–8 are dedicated to Islamicreformism and Islamism. Based on the workof Roff (incidentally again an expert ofSoutheast Asian Islam), again Makris takescare to underscore the comprehensive andsupranational as well as the local aspects ofthese trends affecting the whole of thecontemporary Muslim world, which can besaid to revolve around five key areas ofconcern: the question of the Islamic state; therelation with the West; defining the enemy; ahostile attitude towards Sufism; the place ofindividualism and the position ofwomen.

Although it would have benefited from aconcluding chapter, as it stands Islam in theMiddle East provides a comprehensiveintroduction to a living religious tradition thatis currently at the centre of muchinternational attention.

CAROOL KERSTENKing’s College London (UK)

Mimica, Jadran (ed.). 2007. Explorations inpsychoanalytic ethnography. New York andOxford: Berghahn Books. ix + 245 pp. Pb.:$25.00/£ 15.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 402 9.

Souhaitant se demarquer des debatsspeculatifs sur les relations entreanthropologie et psychanalyse, ce volumecollectif, dirige par l’anthropologue australienJadran Mimica, reunit dix etudes ayant pourambition de montrer l’interet de lapsychanalyse en anthropologie et, enparticulier, d’eclairer la pratiqueethnographique. Il rappelle d’ailleurs enintroduction la double exigence qui fonde‘l’ethnographie psychanalytique’ pour l’etudedes profondeurs de l’esprit humain suivantune dialectique du singulier et de l’universel:l’experience personnelle de terrain et de lacure. Mais ce qui domine invariablement lescontributions, c’est une theorisationpsychanalytique qui n’est pas forcementinformee par un travail de terrain (ni meme,par une visee clinique) et lorsque c’est le cas,les materiaux sont recodes et rendus opaquesplutot que producteurs de conceptsanthropologiques et d’intelligibilite.

Outre un politologue et un specialiste desreligions, les auteurs sont anthropologueset/ou psychanalystes. Il est donc possible dedistinguer deux grands groupes de textes:

Le premier groupe se compose de quatrearticles centres sur l’analyse dutransfert/contre-transfert dans la relationethnographique. Cette dimension estmobilisee dans l’article des anthropologuessuisses Florence Weiss et Milan Stanek, quis’appuient sur un travail deja ancien(Conversations au bord du fleuve mourant,Ethnopsychanalyse chez les Iatmouls dePapouasie/Nouvelle-Guinee, Geneve, Zoe,1987) pour degager, sur la base d’uneconversation avec une femme, le sens de laceremonie du Naven. En croisant parente etcosmologie, Jadran Mimica proposeegalement une interpretationphenomenologique et psychanalytique de larelation pere-fils chez les Yagwoia(Papouasie/Nouvelle-Guinee) en


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s’interessant, plus specifiquement, aux revesd’un homme apres la mort de son pere. Dansun style encore plus narratif et centre sur lapersonne de l’anthropologue belge, ReneDevisch retrace les quatre grandes etapessubjectives de sa carriere. De tous, l’article deWaud H. Kracke est peut-etre le plus lisible etinformatif, meme si sa these consiste adefendre la possibilite d’interpreter le senssubjectif des ‘culture pattern dreams’ (e.g. unefigure surnaturelle apporte un message aureveur) des shamans parintins du Bresilqu’il etudie.

Le second groupe, de loin le pluscomplet, se compose de reflexions generalessur le malaise dans la civilisation, la pratiquetherapeutique et son rapport a la culture ou,plus platement encore, sur des generalites quin’ont rien d’anthropologique. La dimensionnarrative est egalement tres presente dansl’esquisse biographique du psychanalysteindien Sudhir Kakar et la mise en perspectivede la psychologue bresilienne Renata VolichEisenbruch ou du psychologue australienCraig San Roque. Plus distrayantsqu’informatifs, les articles du politologueJames M. Glass, de l’historien des religionsDan Merkur et du psychiatre Shahid Najeebressemblent a des exercices exegetiques etsurinterpretatifs, tantot sur un registrespeculatif, tantot sur un registre poetique. . .

Au terme de la lecture, des questionsfondamentales demeurent pourtant sansreponses: a quelles conditions uneethnographie psychanalytique est-ellepossible? En quoi l’appel au terrain et al’analyse du transfert/contre-transfertconstitue-t-il une traduction methodologiquepertinente de la psychanalyse et de son cadrepratique dont la visee, n’est certainement pasla connaissance, mais une clinique du trouble?Plus radicalement encore, pourquoil’anthropologie aurait-elle besoin de s’equiperd’une theorie du mental pour produire sesconnaissances? Ce programme de rechercheimplicite se doit de demontrer a la fois safecondite pour resoudre des problemesanthropologiques majeurs et l’impossibilite dese dispenser d’une theorie du mental. Etpourquoi la psychanalyse plutot qu’une autre

theorie? Ce postulat paraıt egalement evidentpour les auteurs. Or, a cette etape de lareflexion, illustrer, classer ou recoder unphenomene avec la psychanalyse n’a aucuninteret theorique.

SAMUEL LEZEEHESS, Paris (France)

Onder, Sylvia Wing. 2007. We have nomicrobes here: healing practices in aTurkish Black Sea village. Durham, NC.:Carolina Academic Press. xxv + 304 pp.Pb.: $40.00. ISBN: 978 0 89089 573 3.

Ce livre offre un recit vivant, enthousiaste etengage du mode de vie partage par les villagesturcs bordant la Mer Noire. Ecrit dans unstyle personnel, il est extremement bienfourni en anecdotes, extraits d’entretiens etreferences a des etudes de cas menees pard’autres anthropologues. L’insertion del’auteur sur le terrain en tant qu’epouse d’unhomme provenant des villages etudies apermis des echanges confiants qui font larichesse du livre. Ceci contraste avec d’autresethnographies, moins privilegiees parce queleurs auteurs n’avaient pas de liens de sang.

L’ouvrage est organise d’une manieretraditionnelle mais efficace pour se plonger aucœur de la Turquie profonde, presentant 9chapitres qui evoluent d’une mise en situationgenerale a une description plus precise despratiques de soins de sante au sein des villages.Ils sont groupes en deux parties:

La premiere partie (les 5 premierschapitres) propose une presentation globaledu systeme de fonctionnement des villagesturcs de la Mer Noire. Le premier chapitreprecise d’abord la terminologie employeedans l’ouvrage. Le terme ‘tradition’ est iciutilise comme un processus marquant unedialectique entre le passe et le present, entre ceque les gens savent et ce qu’ils apprennent parla transmission d’une generation a l’autre etd’un individu a l’autre. Le terme n’est pasutilise dans le sens d’une ‘facon de fairedemodee et fixe’ (p. 28). Le terme ‘clinique’estoppose a celui de ‘traditionnel’ et evoque unecertaine localisation des pratiques (dans des


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institutions telles que les cliniques), unentraınement du personnel (impliquant uneconnaissance de la theorie biologique debase), des costumes portes (uniforme del’infirmiere, blouse du medecin) et l’usage decertaines technologies (thermometre,stethoscope, medicaments). Les chapitressuivants discutent de la place des femmes: lepassage du nid familial de la jeune fille a lamaison de son mari, parfois situee dans unvillage lointain; le respect et les services dus asa belle-mere; la division du travail entre lessexes; la mise en place de reseaux afin d’avoirtoujours des proches sur qui compter;l’importance de la religion et des croyances(notamment l’‘evil eye’ ou mauvais œil) dansla facon de concevoir le monde et la sante; lerole important des femmes dans la sante deleur famille dont elles sont tenuesresponsables et leur monopole dans la pose dediagnostics.

La seconde partie (les 4 dernierschapitres) precise les pratiques de soins desante mises en œuvre dans les villages. D’unepart, on decouvre les processus de guerisontraditionnels: l’expertise particuliere d’un‘bone setter’ et le prestige qui lui est associe,les remedes transmis oralement par les damesplus agees que l’on appelle ‘aunties’ (tantes) etles conseils glanes au cours de rendez-vousimprovises autour d’un the, qui privilegientl’usage de concoctions a base de plantes etl’utilisation d’incantations. D’autre part, onassiste a la montee en puissance de lamedecine clinique, qui se traduit notammentpar un nombre accru de visites a desprofessionnels de la sante installes dans lesvilles, par davantage d’accouchements al’hopital, ainsi que par l’installation dans lesvillages d’un centre de sante finance par l’Etatet imposant des pratiques occidentales (telleque la vaccination obligatoire pour les jeunesenfants).

Cependant, on regrette que laprogression des chapitres n’aboutisse pas a unchapitre conclusif qui systematiserait lesinteractions entre les pratiques de soinstraditionnelles et cliniques. En effet, l’objectifpresente par l’auteur en introduction etait unedescription du systeme de sante en action

ainsi qu’une demonstration de la negociationdes nombreux choix offerts aux patients suitea la co-existence de pratiques traditionnelleset d’une medecine clinique. Hormis quelquesextraits d’entretien presentant des bribes deconnexion entre les deux systemes de soins, iln’y a pas de montee en generalite quipermettrait d’appuyer l’argument de l’auteur.La these d’une interaction au quotidien n’estdonc pas defendue de maniere convaincante anotre sens.

Le titre, a cet egard, est egalement peuexplicite du propos soutenu par l’auteur. Wehave no microbes here laisse davantage penserque le systeme de la medecine clinique a peude prise sur les pratiques locales. Ce qui estaux antipodes de l’argument de Sylvia WingOnder.

En conclusion, ce recit nous offre unperiple savoureux au sein de la Turquie rurale,et, alimente d’extraits d’entretien petillants,dresse un portrait de femmes riche encouleurs. Cependant, il ne remplit pasl’objectif qu’il s’etait fixe dans l’introduction:demontrer l’interaction des systemes de soinsde sante. On attend donc avec impatience unesuite a cette introduction.

BARBARA BOVYFNRS-Universite de Liege (Belgique)Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,Paris (France)

Osgood, Cornelius. 2006. Winter: thestrange and haunting record of one man’sexperiences in the Far North. Lincoln, NE:University of Nebraska Press. Republishedby Bison Books. 264 pp. Pb.: .11.99. ISBN:0 8032 8623 6.

This is a republished edition of the 1953autobiographical novel by the famousYale-based ethnographer Cornelius Osgood.The novel documents the first full Arcticwinter experienced by the ethnographer in1928 on the shores of Great Bear Lake inCanada’s Northwest Territories, and the novelis marketed by Bison Books as a sincere andaccurate account of a lonely whitemanenduring difficult conditions in a stark and


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beautiful landscape. As such, it follows in thefootsteps of a quite large genre for this regionof the world including autobiographicalaccounts by Douglas Leechman, AngusGraham and anticipates the work of FarleyMowat and Rudi Wiebe. This novel is distinctfor its clear writing and engaging portraits oflocal settlers and to a lesser extent theenigmatic native characters representing the‘Athapaskan tribe’ now better known as theSahtu First Nation.

The foreword to this second edition,provided by Alaska-based adventure writerNick Jans, vouches for the authenticity of theauthor’s experience. It seems that the author’sdescriptions of his clumsy attempts to workwith food or fish, or to struggle with sleddogs rings true to those who chose the Arcticas their home whether they be in FortNorman or in Juneau Alaska. At this level Iwould also agree that the book is both candidand accurate. The ironic and yet caring waythat Dene people teach bush skills have notchanged much in 80 years even if my ownapprenticeship was with skidoos andkickers.

Re-reading the book now as ananthropologist who once lived in the region, Iwas struck by the author’s painstakingdescriptions of technique – an interest thatwould later be elaborated in his classic workson Ingaluk material culture and on the Hanand Peel River Kutchin [Gwich’ins]. As theauthor of the foreword notes, the descriptionsof how to set a net under the ice and of theecological and technical logic behind runningsled dogs are particularly well illustrated inthis volume. They serve as good proxies forunderstanding regional technical traditions,even if the accomplishments are labeled as theauthor’s own knowledge. What is valuable inthis account is the way that extremely subtlehints either from neighbours or fromstartlingly intelligent sled dogs lead the authorto a full understanding of how to travel andsurvive in this region. There is plenty here toquestion standard models of ‘culturaltransmission’. Here people and animals seemto whisper the things a person must know tosurvive.

It is not quite fair to portray this book asan account of one isolated man’s attempt atsurvival, as one reads in the foreword andbook jacket. For most of the winter, theauthor lived in the company of a caring ifreticent group of settler fishermen. What isstriking about the book today is how well itcaptures the fabric of Sahtu Dene andMackenzie Metis culture in the region. Thebook provides a good guide to understandingthe depth at which technique crossed culturalboundaries, and was shared. Today one gainsa clear picture of regional fur-trapping societyheld together by hybridity and mutual aid.The heart of the book’s plot lies in a slowlybuilding atmosphere of mistrust and jealousyin two fur trading communities – a renditionthat rings true in this account and one that isdifficult to find in Hudson’s Bay Companyledger books or letters from this period.

What is also striking, if not unsettling, isthe ease by which this ethnographer readilyaccepted settler stereotypes of First Nationpeoples people being eager to overhunt(‘slaughter caribou for their tongues’) or to becaught up in superstitious ritual. Of course,since this is a fictional account, it is not clearthe degree to which the author-as-ethnographer actually believed thesestereotypes (or instead was simply trying toportray a character). Since these stereotypesare not gently ridiculed by events in the book(unlike his misadventures in harnessing dogs)one has to assume that as of 1953 he stillthought them to be true. Given the furiousdebate now surrounding Shepard Krech III’srecent book, it would seem that doing one’sfirst fieldwork among Mackenzie Deneprovides no immunisation againstethnocentrism.

The publisher promises that the text is anaccurate reproduction of the original edition.There is no index. The author of the forewordwarmly approves the text’s sincerity althoughit seems that he knows little of the region (hemakes several mistakes in place names and inevoking context) or even Osgood himself(who is styled as a Victorian). What wouldhave made a valuable contribution to thebook would have been a short study of the


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aims of Osgood’s original research, which wasapparently funded by the Government ofCanada at a time before the invention of theEmergency Ethnology Programme. Anexplanation of why Osgood’s expedition wasa ‘failure’, as stated on the book jacket, wouldhave given the readers valuable context to alittle known period in the author’s life.

DAVID G. ANDERSONUniversity of Aberdeen (UK)

Pink, Sarah. 2006. The future of visualanthropology: engaging the senses. London:Routledge. xii + 166 pp. Pb: £19.99. ISBN:0 415 35765 9.

The book is noteworthy for the debates itraises about the future of visual anthropologyand for the analytical structure of the author’sarguments and statements. In the preface,Pink explains that the book arose from herconcerns with ‘issues related to how visualanthropology is situated (and mis-situated) inrelation to mainstream anthropology and inwider inter- or multidisciplinary contextsacross the social sciences and humanities’(p. xi). Pink tackles questions such as ‘howtheory and practice might be combined toproduce a visual anthropology that has astrong profile in and outside the academy andcommunicates effectively to both audiences’(p. 3).

The book is structured in five parts thatallow a proper analysis on three levels ofargument construction(theory–practice–theory), and at the sametime never misses an opportunity tounderscore the connections andinterdependencies among these levels. Partone comprises two chapters. Chapter 1 startswith a dense analysis of the beginnings ofvisual anthropology and its early interests insensory experience and the use of new visualtechnologies for research and representation.This is followed by a concentrated sectionthat lays the groundwork for the debate aboutthe opportunities and challenges of visualanthropology in the 21st century that will beexplored later in the book. Chapter 2 focuses

on the interdisciplinary issue within visualresearch, the ‘common interests’ ofresearchers who come from differentdisciplines – ‘reflexivity, collaboration, ethicsand the relationship between the content,social context and materiality of images’(p. 22) and the permanent awareness of thedifferences between subdisciplines. Thus theneed for a certain openness must be combinedwith more grounded information about the‘history of ideas in one another respectivediscipline and their historical development’(p. 38).

Part two explores visual anthropologywithin mainstream anthropology through itsapproach to sensory experience. In Chapter 3,Pink’s aim is to ‘re-think the potential role ofaudiovisual media in researching andrepresenting sensory ethnographic contexts’(p. 42). In pursuing this goal she brings intothe debate her theoretical and ethnographicalresearch developed in Spain and England oncertain topics such as gender, identity andsensory home, and some insights from theanthropology of experience and interculturalcinema. She underscores the potential ofmultimedia texts that ‘combine’ image andword to ‘represent sensory experience andmake explicit the anthropological theory’(p. 58) by taking into account the limits ofvisual methods and by grounding the researchwith theoretical arguments that allowanthropological statements. Chapter 4 offersthe empirical basis necessary to mould properstatements regarding new links betweenfieldwork and theory, research andrepresentation by acknowledging thepotential and limitations of film and writingand by highlighting the positive contributionof hypermedia as ‘anthropological text’.Using empirical data from her own research,the author opens the path for a criticalexamination of hypermedia as a way of‘bridging’ word and image.

In the third part of the book, Pinkexplores the Visual engagement as socialintervention (Chapter 5), by offering a criticalanalysis of applied visual anthropologypractice. She highlights the gains ofanthropologically informed projects that use


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visual methods for social interventionpurposes and their valuable contribution tothe development of academic visualanthropological practices. Although Pinkemphasises that ‘isolation’ characterisespractitioners within this field, sheacknowledges the distinctive identity ofapplied visual anthropology based on heranalysis of existing works and highlights thepotential of visual anthropology (largelydiscussed in Chapter 7), linking it with thepublic responsibility of anthropologists.

By analysing several hypermedia projectsdeveloped within academia or applied visualanthropology, in Chapter 6 Pink tries toreveal the potential of these multimedia andinteractive texts to ‘create the stronger linkswith writing and in doing so re-situate videowithin anthropology’ (p. 128).

The last chapter concludes byemphasising the main ‘roles’ of visualanthropology for the 21st century: offeringrenewed forms of comparative anthropology,drawing a conduit for the publicresponsibility of anthropologists, and makinga distinctive contribution to theinterdisciplinary field of social sciences.

The value of Pink’s book lies in its criticaland provocative approach to the future ofvisual anthropology. Therefore, one mayconsider the volume as a primarybibliographical contribution to the on-goingdebates on visual anthropology for the 21stcentury.

GABRIELA BOANGIUInstitute for Socio-Human Researches “C. S.Nicolaescu-Plopsor”, Craiova (Romania)

Santamarina, Beatriz. 2006. Ecologıa ypoder: el discurso medioambiental comomercancıa. Madrid: Catarata. 141 pp. Pb.:€12.00. ISBN: 8 4831 9283 7.

According to Beatriz Santamaria’s bookEcology of power, the last decades havewitnessed a long process by which theenvironmental phenomenon is beingnormalised and institutionalised, due to theinactivation of the subversive mechanisms of

this phenomenon. Therefore, thecontroversial nature of ecology has beenpushed aside.

Both symbolic ecology and politicalecology have been transforming theirdiscourse on the environmental issue in thelast decades, bringing in and producing newdiscussions, which, according to the author,rather than being novel, are a part of a longhomogeneous tradition, reinforcinginequality and increasing the growing trendtowards an unbalanced world. On the onehand, this book strives to present a pluralityof non-symmetrical discourses existing in theglobalised world. On the other, it alsoilluminates the grounds on which thenormalised and hegemonic ecological point ofview is based, identifying the differentmechanisms that impose a one-way-onlypolitical and economic reasoning. In otherwords, it tackles the implications of spatial,capitalist and modernist domination for theprominence of this universal and homogenousecological discourse of the latter decades.

The environment is basically shown as apolitical category, produced by diverseinstitutions, showing a reduction and shift ofinterest from the natural world to anexclusively cultural one. To understand howthe dominant point of view is created it isnecessary to focus on how cultural systemsestablish dynamic mechanisms to apprehendthe world and discriminate in it, resulting in adefinition of reality. In this sense, for theauthor, the processes of resistance,normalisation and institutionalisation arefundamental to explaining how theenvironmental phenomenon has been definedand how it has been built and legitimised inour cultural life.

The new asymmetrical discourse is thusshown to be legitimised through theconstruction of a hegemonic ecologicalmessage via different strategies that hide thereal nature of the environmentalphenomenon, namely its controversialdimension and its capacity to transform.Therefore, the environmental issue hides,through concealment and systematic denial,the hegemonic practice of exclusion. This


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means that it does not recognise the need toradically change our political and economicsystem and intends to resolve all problems bycarrying out small palliative actions. The fieldof intervention has in the process becomeinefficient and the message most strictlypolitically correct. In consequence, they haveboth become useless, as they deny the presentaccess to legitimate means for collective actionand construction of the future throughenvironmental education and technology.Finally, according to the author, re-structuredcapitalism, neo-liberalism and globalisationare only different faces of the same source ofpower that transforms people, societies andnature into simple market goods. Makingculture more natural and nature more culturalhas become a normalised instrumentunderlining that progress is much more than asimple ideology legitimising asymmetricalpower relationships, imposing its products,objectives and truths. The hegemonic point ofview and its particular political and economicrationality – its productivity, domination andcost-benefit logic – has turned nature into amarketable good.

Far from being a circumstantial issue, as acollateral effect in nature, the environmentaltopic is an obvious symptom of degradationwhich ought to imply a radical change in ourpolitical and economic system.Environmental and social degradation are twosides of the same coin, the outcome of a newimperialism that leads to and lends legitimacyto genocide and ecocide without limits. Forthe author, the environmental issue allows usto reflect on the world we live in throughpresenting its problems, dangers, risks as wellas our responsibilities.

MARIA ALBERT RODRIGOUniversity of Valencia (Spain)

Strecker, Ivo and Jean Lydall (eds.). 2006.The perils of face. Essays on culturalcontact, respect and self-esteem in southernEthiopia. Berlin: Lit Verlag. x + 417 pp.Pb.: €29.90. ISBN: 3 8258 6122 8.

The southern region of Ethiopia is mostcomplex in terms of peoples, languages and

cultural expressions. In the South Omodistrict alone, of which this book concerns,more than 20 different languages are spokenand each group have distinct culturaltraditions and varying social, economic andpolitical institutions. The South Omo districtwas one of the last areas to be put under(colonial) state administration during theScramble for Africa, as it was conquered andincorporated by the armies of EmperorMenelik II at the end of the 19th century. Thehistories and cultures of the South Omo havealways been peripheral to the masternarrative(s) of the centralised Ethiopian state,and they still are even after thereconfiguration of Ethiopia into an ethnicfederal system. The impressive collection ofpapers contained in this volume, however,will surely serve as a scholarly correction tothis neglect.

The point of origin for this study isexactly the changes brought about byreplacing the centralised Ethiopian state withan ethnic federal system, through a newConstitution adopted in 1994 whichabolished former cultural hierarchies and putsall ‘nation, nationalities, and peoples’ as equal.How do the people of South Omo remembertheir past, and what conceptions do theyentertain of each other are the researchquestions guiding this collection of papers.Furthermore, how are cultural images of the‘other(s)’ formed and changed throughculture contact?

The editors, Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall,the former a professor of anthropology andthe latter an anthropologist andaward-winning film maker, have researchedthe cultures and peoples of the South Omovalley for more than three decades. They bringtogether 14 contributors well versed in thecomplex cultural settings of south Ethiopia, inorder to explore the dangers inherent incultural contact, and more specifically hownotions of pride, honour, name andself-esteem come into play as people negotiatetheir identity, as individuals or collectives.They succeed admirably in this endeavour.

The book is divided into two parts – fourpapers with a theoretical or comparative


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orientation and ten empirical case studies – ofwhich the latter is organised into threesub-themes. In part one, a brief theoreticalintroduction on perspectives on culturalcontact is followed by two comparativestudies on naming traditions and kinship. Thesection ends with an expose of thesocial-political relevance of the notion of‘face’ (by Ivo Strecker), which is also the keymetaphor of the anthology.

The first group of papers in the secondpart of the book addresses ‘pride andresistance in the wake of conquest’, as theyanalyse how local peoples in South Omoexperienced the early stages of exploration,conquest and ‘colonisation’. The secondgroup of case studies concerns ‘combat,friendship and respect between equals’ andexamines processes of identity negotiationthat arise from encounters between variousgroups. The last section of papers has a genderperspective as it examines ‘women’s quest forself-esteem’. Here cultural contact isunderstood as the socio-cultural tensionsarising from contact between men andwomen.

The volume contains an impressive rangeof articles highlighting the ethnic variety ofsouthern Ethiopia. Although they vary inmethodological approaches and theoreticalambitions, they all speak on the same topic of‘culture contact’ and issues of self-esteem,which makes the volume surprisinglycoherent and focused. However, consideringthe rather short introduction to such avoluminous anthology, a concluding chaptercould have taken the argument of the volumeto a broader Ethiopian context and a moretheoretical level. For instance, Ivo Streckermentions in his introduction the case ofHamar contact with neighbouring groups,and how ethnic ‘boundaries’ may facilitatecontact in one context and distinctions inanother. This ‘revised’ notion of ethnicboundaries and how they actually may enablethe construction of cross-cultural relationshipis something Fredrik Barth and Anthony P.Cohen have theorised on in several recentpublications (see, for instance, Cohen 2000).Such a perspective could have been used to

facilitate a more rigorous and robusttheoretical framework to the current volume.Likewise, the South Omo cases presented doalso speak to practices among the dominantEthiopian groups and how they organise andperceive their inter-ethnic relations, in termsof conflict and peace. As such, the casespresented in the anthology do not representany cultural ‘periphery’.

This shortcoming does not at all devaluethe importance of the volume. Its greatstrength, beyond its ethnographiccontribution, is the interdisciplinary value ofthe analysis presented. The historiography ofconquest from local perspectives as outlinedin several contributions stand as an importantcorrective to the master narrative ofAbyssinian ‘civilising’ missions to includeperipheral groups under the domain of theImperial Crown. Furthermore, the casestudies presented on the dynamics of culturalcontact and self-esteem give valuable insightinto how comparative dynamics at a macrolevel is understood and negotiated, both inrelation to the struggle between dominatinggroups within Ethiopia, as well as to broadenour understanding of the bilateral conflictdynamics between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

The perils of face will thus serve as avaluable contribution to Ethiopian studies,and will be recommended reading for scholarsfrom varying disciplines, as well as policymakers preoccupied with understandingcross-cultural conflict dynamics and peacesettlements in the region.

ReferenceCohen, Anthony P. (ed.) 2000. Signifying identi-

ties: anthropological perspectives on bound-aries and contested values. London/NewYork: Routledge.

KJETIL TRONVOLLUniversity of Oslo (Norway)

Svasek, Maruska. 2007. Anthropology, artand cultural production. London and AnnArbor, MI: Pluto Press. vii + 264 pp. Pb.:£17.99. ISBN: 0 7453 1794 4.


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‘What is art?’ is the introductory and alsoomnipresent question in this syntheticanthropological work on art, artefacts,aesthetics and cultural production. In the firstpart of the book we can follow an exhaustiveanalysis of conflicting definitions of art andaesthetics in anthropology from evolutionismto contemporary theoretic approaches thatwere influenced by postmodern paradigmaticshift. This part of the book is comparable toteaching texts, providing a rather detailedoverview of anthropological approaches to artcombined with comparative fragments fromtheory of sociology of art, cultural studies andart history. Introduction to anthropologicalperspectives on art brings the reader to animportant, but hardly new conclusion: thereis no applicable anthropological theory of art,but predominantly generalising approachesand one-way answers to the key question‘what is art’. Although Alfred Gellproclaimed his object agency theory as thefirst anthropological theory of art, he, as themajority of theoreticians before him,produced similar ‘short-cuts’. Most theoriesof art have so far been based on case studiesfrom ‘classical’ anthropological fieldwork innon-western societies, and the focus was onlyon one part of process of art, either on anobject, production or consumption. At thesame time scholars claimed that theirapproaches have a cross-cultural and universalscope. It is thus more than understandablethat Svasek stresses the essentiality of findingalternatives to those approaches.

Similarly to other scholars, especiallythose working in the field of sociology of art(Bourdieu, Becker and others), Svasek definesart as a social process, and argues for ananthropological approach, which highlightsthe notion that experience and perception ofart are influenced and shaped by socio-political processes and individual lifehistories. Instead of considering art as auniversal category, she stresses the processualnature of artefact/object production,interpretation and experience in fields ofpower, and identifies different factors thatinfluence people’s experience andunderstanding of art. Thus, as an alternative

to the established anthropological paradigmshe proposes a processual relativist approachto art production. In the second part of thebook Svasek further develops this approach,and illustrates it with a variety of cases.

This second part, entitled ‘Objects,transit and transition’, is divided into sixchapters, four of which are discussions ondifferent aspects of art, followed by a casestudy and a concluding chapter. Svasek’sapproach is object-based, but she equallyincorporates and emphasises other parts of anart world, that is producers, consumers anddistributors of artefacts. Significance ofobjects in everyday life and their ability toevoke emotions is demonstrated with ananalysis of processes of commoditisation andaestheticisation. According to Svasek, objectsreproduce the agency of their producer andmost powerful among them even urge peopleto re-act upon them. Nevertheless, relativeefficacy of an object is related to socialconstruction of art.

How art production, consumption andmost importantly distribution are linked topolitical, economic, religious and other socialand cultural dynamics is highlighted in allfour main chapters. In this regard markets andmuseums are especially under scrutiny. Svasekalso compares art and other categories ofnon-art objects such as craft, kitsch,pornography and propaganda and thus showsthat the boundaries between them are shiftingor are very blurred. Here she again tacklessocial construction of art. Finally, Svasekexplores the processes and effects ofproducing art, as well as collecting andexhibiting it in local, national and globalcontexts. Processual relativist approach to artand artefacts is therefore substantiated withthe variety of cases that include Aboriginalpaintings, Inuit soapstone carvings, works ofcontemporary African artists, politicalmonuments in former communist states, flagsin Northern Ireland, or pornographic art inthe Red Light district in Amsterdam, to namea few.

Although this book does not provide aradically new anthropological theory of art, itis a rare and therefore most welcome


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anthropological piece of writing, striving toprovide a more correct and possibly moreefficient understanding of a complex world ofart. At the end of the book we do not get theanswer to the question ‘What is art’, but thebook clearly signals that there can only bemultiple answers, as well as pluralism ofapproaches to multi-layered concepts such asart. In Svasek’s words: ‘The definition of artand its boundaries is thus a process that needsto be understood by examining artisticdiscourses and practices against thebackground of long-term historical change’(p. 219).

KRISTINA TOPLAKInstitute for Slovenian Emigration Studies,Scientific Research Centre of the SlovenianAcademy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana(Slovenia)

Varzi, Roxanne. 2006. Warring souls: youth,media and martyrdom in post-revolutionaryIran. Durham and London: Duke UniversityPress. 304 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN: 0 82233721 5.

Warring souls is the most interesting bookanalysing youth cultures in post-revolutionIran that I have read. There have been quite afew attempts to describe the huge youthgeneration of contemporary Iranian society inthe English language during the last decade(e.g. Alavi 2005; Basmenji 2005; Moaveni2005; Nafizi 2004), but unfortunately thesepopular paperbacks seldom succeed in theirventure: searching for the nature of Iranianculture, language, religion and society.

In other words, it is very difficult todescribe today’s Iranian youth withoutleaning on simple stereotypes thatcharacterise images of Iran in the mainstreamWestern world press. The temptation toexoticise and alienate Iranians with referenceto political ideological discourses is big, andan extensive anthropological fieldwork is themain scientific technique to avoid a prioripatterns and get close contact to the youth inquestion. And this is exactly what Varzi did asthe first Fulbright grant awarded researcher in

post-revolution Iran. Her book is based onethnographic research conducted in Teheranand other Iranian cities between 1991 and2000.

Warring souls is a tour de force thatpresents novel theoretical perspectivesregarding the influence of the Islamicrevolution, the Iran–Iraq War and the media(especially visual media) on today’s urbanmiddle-class youth’s culture, lifestyle andfuture prospects. Varzi describes the‘revolutionary’ symbolic and intellectualdiscourses of Iran – the philosophy thatIranian children learn at school – which theIranian theocratic system has constructed andreproduced for almost three decades now.This is a part of Iranian history and societyusually missing in European andNorth-American interpretations of thiscontroversial and isolated state between Iraqand Afghanistan. Varzi provides a brilliantanalysis of martyrdom and demonstrates howremote some Iranian meanings are fromWestern concepts as individuality,independence, freedom, death andnation/state.

Varzi argues that by concentrating onimages and the performance of properbehaviour, the government’s campaign toproduce model Islamic citizens has affectedthe appearance of religious orthodoxy, andthat the strictly religious public sphere ispartly a mirage masking a profound crisis offaith among many Iranians. The ‘crisis’among young Iranians is anyway onlyevaluated vaguely, leaving the reader withmany questions and large generalisationsignoring internal differentiations – age, sex,class, local identity, religious identity, etc. – inIranian society.

The book, composed of ten chapters(including introduction and conclusion), has asubtitle ‘youth, media and martyrdom inpost-revolution Iran’. The strong focus onmedia, with thorough representations ofIranian movies and television series, makesthe book a cultural study with limited priorityto the empirical fieldwork with informantsand participant-observation. The book is nota classic social anthropological monograph


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but rather a rich text mixing many sources ofdata – media, literature, myths, pictures,interviews, etc. – in its ethnographic mission.Varzi has, with more success than many otherauthors, unveiled the complexities andcontradictions that characterise Iran today,and Warring souls is a must-read for youthand media researchers interested in thesocietal developments in Iran.

The problem when writing aboutcontemporary Iranian society is that societychanges quickly and not always as predicted.Nobody knows about the future. The powerstruggle between liberal/reformist andconservative/religious factions is naturallyinfluencing the youth generation’s culturalfreedom and way of life. Backlash followsprogress follows backlash. Warring souls, withits focus on media, symbols and myths, doesnot really investigate the foreign influence(political, economic, cultural) on Iraniansociety. The book has its strength in theanalysis of Iranian culture through media,literature and education. But Varzi is indeedconscious of the global character of modernmedia.

A strong separation of public and pri-vate spaces; modern media technologieslike the satellite, the Internet, faxes, andradio; and strong ties to a large expatri-ate community in the West makes it im-possible to stop the non-Islamic worldfrom infiltrating the clergy’s project –

and what the clergy blame, correctly, fora failure in policy. (p. 174)

Warring souls is an outstanding addition tothe anthropological literature on Iranianyouth in a schizophrenic age with lost hopesand paradoxical signals from the leaders ofsociety. Varzi demonstrates how powerful thesymbols, images and rituals of therevolutionary elite have been in Iran, even ifyoung people today don’t trust and believe inthis. They, however, have to pretend – at leastin public – to support the system. AsAyatollah Khomeini says in a quotation onthe first page of Varzi’s book:

‘The holy prophet said: “Afflictioncaused by the tongue is worse than thatcaused by the sword. Among all the things thetongue deserves to be imprisoned longer thananything else.”’

ReferencesAlavi, Nasrin. 2005. We are Iran. London: Porto-

bello Books.Basmenji, Kaveh. 2005. Tehran Blues Youth Cul-

ture in Iran. London: SAQI.Moaveni, Azadeh. 2005. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir

of Growing up Iranian in America andAmerican in Iran. New York: Public Affairs.

Nafizi, Azar. 2004. Reading Lolita in Tehran. AMemoir in Books. London: Fourth Estate.

FIROUZ GAINIUniversity of Faroe Islands (Faroe Islands)


Warring souls: youth, media and martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran by Varzi, Roxanne

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