How to read ethnography

Book reviews

CorrectionPlease note that in the Book Reviews Section ofthe June 2009 issue of the JRAI (volume 15, issue2, p. 428), the year of Ralph Bulmer’s death wasmistakenly given as 1999 (review of Ian SaemMajnep and Ralph Bulmer’s Animals theancestors hunted). He actually died in1988.

Archaeology, art, and visualculture

Algaze, Guillermo. Ancient Mesopotamia atthe dawn of civilization: the evolution of anurban landscape. xviii, 230 pp., maps, figs,illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2009. £20.50 (cloth)

An uninitiated reader may not realize that thisbook is the continuation of a much-discusseddebate within circles studying the prehistoricarchaeology of the Near East. The author himselfdevoted a monograph to this very subject in1993 (The Uruk world system: the dynamics of theexpansion of early Mesopotamian civilization), withthe same publishers. The 1993 book encountereda somewhat critical reception (as the authoradmits), but it was Daniel Potts in 2004 whocast serious doubts on the central thesis (‘TheUruk explosion: more heat than light?’, Review ofArchaeology 25: 2, 19-28). Potts comments thatstudies on this theme ‘rehearse the samearguments and summarize the same data overand over again’ (p. 20). His article is not listed inthe bibliography of the present volume.

Bearing in mind that the book handles acontentious subject, let me proceed to outlinethe fundamental arguments behind the so-called‘Uruk expansion’ in the fourth millennium BC.The basic assumptions are that the climaticconditions in fifth and fourth millenniaMesopotamia were wetter than now and begandrying out in the third millennium BC, by thetime writing was in full swing. The abundanceof river-water in the region during prehistory didmuch to encourage the rapid expansion ofirrigation-based agriculture, and agriculturalsurpluses encouraged the growth of urbancivilization as well as trade with other regions,less well-endowed agriculturally. Another resultof highly successful agriculture was thedevelopment of various types of industry, suchas textiles, which changed from producing linengarments made from flax to wool garments.These were much less labour-intensive toproduce, and wool was also more receptive todyes than was flax. Wool was produced fromsheep grazing on less fertile or marginal landwhile more productive irrigated fields could beused for food production. Rivers themselveswere as important for transportation andcommunication as they were for irrigation, sinceboats could carry much greater weight-loads ofproducts than could donkeys or overlandtransport in general, thus lowering the costs oftraded goods. Imported trade goods consistedmainly of wood roofing beams, a problem inSouthern Mesopotamia because of a generallack of trees, as well as various types of preciousand semi-precious stones, and wines.

These observations in the book are drawnfrom a variety of different kinds of evidence,some of which is archaeological and some rathermore theoretical and speculative. The author’s

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15, 630-674© Royal Anthropological Institute 2009

more theoretical suppositions hark back toantiquated economic ideas promulgated byAdam Smith in the eighteenth century andDavid Ricardo in the early nineteenth century,neither of which, in my view, is very convincingwithin the context of prehistoric archaeology.The author, for instance, relies upon the widelyaccepted notion of ‘elites’ in Uruk and elsewherewho direct economic and social structures,although this notion of ‘elites’ is woolly andunclear, mostly underpinned by the iconographyof a larger-than-life figure who is assumed to bethe ruler. This may well be true, but little morecan be said about how decisions were made inprehistoric society, or by whom, and the entiresubject turns into a cul-de-sac. A secondassumption is that Uruk established colonies or‘outposts’ in Syria and elsewhere, far fromSouthern Mesopotamia, as trading orcommercial centres, since traces can be found incertain sites of Uruk-style buildings, pottery,wool industry, and metal-working, and thesesites are not characteristic of the localenvironment. The idea of a Mesopotamiandiaspora specifically connected to Uruk isseductive but not actually provable, since theremay have been other Southern Mesopotamiancities with trading interests abroad, nor do wehave any written records to support theseassumptions.

In fact, most of the conclusions to be reachedin this study could be based upon documentaryevidence rather than on theoretical speculation.The author has done an excellent job of referringto early glyptic art on seals and sealings as waysof illustrating his points, and this type ofevidence is of crucial importance.Representations of different types of prehistoricoccupations and material culture is mostlydrawn from Pierre Amiet’s seminal work, Laglyptique mésopotamienne archaïque (1961).Other kinds of evidence can be drawn from themany archaic texts now published by RobertEnglund (‘Texts from the late Uruk period’, inMesopotamien: Späturuk-Zeit und FruhdynastischeZeit (eds) P. Attinger & M. Wäfler, 1998, 15-236),which offer precise data regarding theconsumption of fish, beer, various grains, andother commodities, as well as designations ofvarious kinds of professions, and much more.Despite the enormous difficulties inunderstanding and interpreting these data,much can be gleaned from earliest writing aboutsocial and economic organization of prehistoricSumer. Of course, using such materials raisesquestions as to whether inferences can be drawnfrom later evidence about earlier periods. How

much can we infer from archaic writing aboutprehistoric Sumer, particularly since writing itselfmay have encouraged and facilitated somerelatively rapid and significant changes in theeconomic and social order? The authorrecognizes these potential changes, noting theability in earliest written records to formulateabstract concepts, as well as allowing for a moreprecise institutional or historical memory ofevents, transmitted over generations.Nevertheless, although Algaze appears tosubscribe to Lévi-Strauss’s notion that the basicfunction of writing was to enslave other humanbeings (p. 138), he does not clearly explainwhether the new scribal profession belonged tothe ‘elite’ or not. Did scribes influence the ‘elite’or merely record what was happening? Thisexample is instructive in showing how very littlewe actually know about the structure ofprehistoric society, even after we are helped bythe advent of written records.

This turns out to be a rather controversial butnevertheless useful book which summarizesmany different points of view and theories aboutprehistoric Mesopotamia, taking into accountmajor themes and topics currently beingdiscussed. Although many inferences are toofar-reaching to be supported by the availableevidence, this monograph nevertheless offers anengaging narrative and a somewhat rosy pictureof life in early Sumer, attempting to explain thebirth and development of early urbanization andcomplex social structures. In any case, this is abook that one can recommend to students.

Mark Geller University College London

Becker, Cynthia J. Amazigh arts in Morocco:women shaping Berber identity. 239 pp., maps,plates, illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. TexasPress, 2006. £29.00 (cloth)

Cynthia Becker’s Amazigh arts in Morocco isfocused on the Ait Khabbash section of thefamous Ait ‘Atta tribal confederation inSoutheastern Morocco, and more specifically onwomen’s contribution to the maintenance of aninsular communal identity. Becker argues againstthe prevalent notion that women in the Muslimworld are limited to a private, domestic sphere,and she attempts to show how women’smaterial and performance arts are central to thepublic affirmation of ‘Ait Khabbash ethnicidentity’. The book is richly populated withphotographs, archival and contemporary, mostlyblack and white but some in colour. It includes alarge number of songs and poems rendered in

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Berber (mostly Tamazight), and translated by theauthor’s husband. At the time of publication,Becker was Assistant Professor of Art History atBoston University, and the book seems intendedfor an audience interested in art history, the roleof art in cultural survival, or the ethniclandscape of Morocco.

Amazigh arts begins with the assertion that‘women rather than men were the artists inBerber societies’ and that this is ‘unlike Arabgroups in North Africa’. Some will find thisbroad assertion troubling, but it accuratelyreflects the thinking of activist Berbers inSoutheastern Morocco. By ‘art’ the author ishere referring to textiles and tattoos, though inthe course of the book much attention is paid tothe aesthetics of weddings. Clearly art isgendered, and throughout the book Beckerexplains what each colour, motif, or practicesymbolizes, usually ‘beauty’ or ‘fertility’ in thecase of women. The importance of fertility islinked to the propagation of the Ait Khabbash asa group, which is the social level the authorfocuses on as ‘ethnic’. The other main locus ofidentity seems to be ‘Amazigh’, the much larger,transnational Berber community, though theAmazigh dimension is only emphasized inthe final chapter.

The first five chapters form the core of thebook. These deal with textiles, dressing thebody, dance performances, the adornment ofthe bride and groom at weddings, and thewedding ceremony. They are marvellouslydetailed and take the reader methodicallythrough the sartorial art of the Ait Khabbash andeach small step in their elaborate matrimonialceremonies. This is a sort of intricateethnographic scrutinizing largely missing incontemporary anthropological work.

Chapter 6 then turns to the legacy of slaveryamong the Ait Khabbash, and the art of theismkhan, the descendants of slaves incorporatedinto the Ait Khabbash tribal group. This is theshortest chapter in the book and perhaps themost problematic. The ismkhan are curiouslyboth part of and outside of the ‘ethnic group’that is the focus of the volume. Ismkhan areincluded in that they share the name AitKhabbash and many customs, but they may notintermarry with the non-ismkhan and seem toorganize their identity very differently thanthe rest of the ‘group’. Becker notes that ismkhanare valued for their healing abilities and thus‘enjoy a relatively high status’. She presentsthese relations as an ethnic division of labourrather than through the lens of race orracism.

The final chapter examines contemporaryAmazigh art, especially painting. Here Beckeraims to connect the themes of the rest of thebook to the new Amazigh movement, especiallythe valuation of women as symbols andconservators of culture, and the importance ofthe language, Tamazight. She explorescelebrated Amazigh artists from the region andthe way they put their heritage to work in newartistic media and changing socio-politicalconditions.

Overall Cynthia Becker has given us afine-grained portrait of the symbolic expressionof the Ait Khabbash, taking us through theintimacies of their marriage rituals and even intothe sanctuary of the groom’s tent on thewedding night. Clearly her personal involvementin the society in question brings us a more vividpicture than an outsider might achieve, thoughof course this also frames what sorts ofdiscussions are likely or possible. Given thespecificity of much of the book, it would beprofitably read alongside Remco Ensel’s Saintsand servants in Southern Morocco (1999),Katherine Hoffman’s We share walls: language,land, and gender in Berber Morocco (2007), and,for a sense of how women’s lives are changingmore broadly in Morocco, Rachel Newcomb’sWomen of Fes (2008). While not ananthropologist, Becker none the less contributesto a remarkable body of new ethnographicwork tracking the transformation of Moroccansociety.

David Crawford Fairfield University

Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Cycles of time andmeaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. xxvii,307 pp., figs, tables, plates, illus., bibliogr.Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2007. $55.00

(cloth)

Of the surviving indigenous Mesoamericanmanuscripts, the Codex Borgia and relateddivinatory almanacs most inspire the intriguewe feel when faced with something from aprofoundly different culture. In these screenfoldhand-painted manuscripts (c.1200-1521 CE),gods squat with clawed hands emerging fromskeletal bodies. Knives slice through sacrificialvictims, and deities wear distinctive face-paintapplied with informed precision. The sight ofblood arching through the sky and pouringdirectly into the mouths of enthroned godsincites horrified fascination. Numerous dotswith anthropomorphized figures mark theancient calendar, while more captivating still

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are the narrative passages occurring inotherworldly locations. The urge to decipherand understand is palpable, but the foreignnessconsistently reminds us of its possible futility.However, in Cycles of time and meaning in theMexican Books of Fate, Elizabeth Boone takesup this gauntlet, resulting in unprecedentedinsight into the strange workings of theseesoteric texts.

As Boone acknowledges, the divinatorycodices attempt to make concrete throughsymbols the ideas of priests and diviners, but, asshe says, symbols communicate ‘somethingwhose totality can perhaps never be adequatelyexpressed’ (p. 4). While she acknowledges themanuscripts’ opacity, she nevertheless presentsone of the most lucid explorations of theircontent, organization, function, and meaning.She explains the multiple calendrical systemsthat functioned simultaneously, and she doesthis in such an exceedingly clear fashion thateven the uninitiated can follow the system withrelative ease. The reader achieves a solidunderstanding of the 365-day calendar forcelebrating public events, the 260-day calendarfor personal guidance, and smaller rotationalsystems of twenty and thirteen days. Usingethnographic data, ethnohistorical texts, andvisual material, Boone artfully reconstructs theoriginal consumers of these books, the highlytrained sages who interpreted the texts for theirclientele, as she offers evidence of the use ofthe manuscripts to determine the name of anewborn infant or the destiny of an elitemale.

Boone’s use of a comparative approach helpsilluminate the commonalities between the texts.She carefully identifies the systematic visualvocabulary of the manuscripts by providingtables of key iconographic elements thatstructure the texts. These tables are useful toolsfor independent investigations of themanuscripts because Boone clearly illustrates thevisual system of day signs, supernaturals, humanand animal actors, and locative markers such astemples and rivers. The discussion of readingorder explicates the often complicatedmanuscript arrangement and further invitesreaders to understand how diviners could derivemultiple meanings and associations from theimagery and tailor the interpretation to specificcircumstances. A compelling result of thiscomparative method is Boone’s discussion ofthe visual integration of time and space. Shedemonstrates that in Mesoamerican thought,temporal movement was analogous to spatialmovement, and she presents several examples

where artists depicted rich cosmogonic tableauxof the four cardinal directions and the centre.Her meticulous identification of the variousdirectional iconographic elements offers fertilesoil for future investigations into preciseunderstandings of the Mesoamericanworldview.

Perhaps the greatest lasting contribution ofthe book will be Boone’s innovative reanalysis ofa particularly perplexing but also visuallystunning section of the Codex Borgia. Unlike therest of the codex, which is calendrically based,this portion of the manuscript is narrative informat. Boone acknowledges that she buildsupon the important iconographic contributionsof earlier scholars, but she refutes interpretationsof the section as a cycle of festivals to interpret itconvincingly as a creation narrative with theimportant Mexican god Quetzalcoatl as thecreator god. In a fascinating visual analysis, sheidentifies eight episodes in the creation cycle.The story is one where the world bursts forth ina blast of energy from a sacred turquoise bowl.Time, space, and the gods appear through themetaphor of birth, sacred bundles are opened toreveal the precious agricultural gifts of rain andlightning, and the ritual instructions for warfareand sacrifice are made explicit. Typical ofMesoamerican thought, a god is sacrificedto bring light and time to the newlydawning era.

The explanation Boone offers for the Borgia’snarrative pages is the final triumphant note to abook that beautifully invites readers into thecomplex religious texts once wielded by theelites of ancient central Mexico. Cycles of timeand meaning brushes away the impenetrabilityby schooling its readers with a clear andengaging text, easily read diagrams and tables,and fascinating interpretations. What was onceoff-putting to even many Mesoamericanists isnow made accessible to numerous scholars.

Annabeth Headrick University of Denver

Headrick, Annabeth. The Teotihuacan trinity:the sociopolitical structure of an ancientMesoamerican city. xiii, 210 pp., maps, figs,illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press,2007. $55.00 (cloth)

Teotihuacan, one of the largest cities in thePrecolumbian world, possessed a cosmopolitanpopulation and exerted its influence militarily orotherwise over much of central and southernMesoamerica. Despite this critical position inMesoamerican cultural history, scholarship has

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yet to identify its political or religiousorganization conclusively, or the language andethnicity of its population (this volume favoursNahuatl). These are the sizeable obstaclesconfronting the student of this spectacular andenigmatic city.

Annabeth Headrick tackles these issues andreceived scholarship, which has largely positedthat the city was a peaceful, harmonious one, byidentifying three competing spheres of influencein the political landscape of Teotihuacan: therulers, kin-based lineages, and military orders.After introducing Teotihuacan, Headrickchallenges the long-held belief that depictions ofrulers are lacking by suggesting that images ofthe so-called ‘Great Goddess’ are actually thoseof rulers (Fig. 2.8; pp. 26-33). If this reassessmentis accurate, the corpus of ruler portraits greatlyincreases and Teotihuacan corresponds moreclosely to what is known of political systems andtheir representation in other Mesoamericansocieties. Appealing because it explains theiconographic diversity of Great Goddess images,this hypothesis nevertheless requires furtherexploration within Teotihuacan’s iconographiccorpus. Chapter 3 investigates the systems ofkinship-based lineages housed in the city’snumerous apartment complexes and skilfullyexamines the artistic and archaeologicalevidence for effigy bundles that would havepreserved the remains of important ancestors.Evidence from Teotihuacan and otherMesoamerican societies makes for a veryconvincing argument that expands theunderstanding of an often-neglected category ofimagery. The fourth chapter probes the natureof the city’s military institutions, especially incomparison to the Aztecs’ Jaguar and Eaglemilitary orders. Based on the phenomenon ofnagualism documented in many Mesoamericansocieties, Headrick suggests that muralsdepicting the warriors in animal costumes andanimals as warriors were to be read as thehuman warrior transformed into his nagual. Thisis an interesting idea, but it would have to bedemonstrated how an entire class of peoplecame to possess the same nagual: aphenomenon to my knowledge not documentedin other Mesoamerican societies. Four additionalchapters explore the connective tissue betweenthese social institutions (chap. 5); themythological underpinnings of the system(chap. 6); the state’s coercion of warriors(chap. 7); and finally the raising of the worldtree ritual category (chap. 8).

As with any work, there are specific errorsthat should be noted. For instance, Headrick

contends that ch’iebal, the Tzotzil term for aclass of sacred mountains, is possibly formedfrom the root che’, meaning tree in YucatecMayan, even though te’ is ‘tree’ in Tzotzil(p. 48). For a variety of linguistic reasons thiscannot be the case. An erroneous etymologywould be a minor point were this analysis notused as evidence for interpreting the Tepantitlamurals (Fig. 2.7), which Headrick sees as arepresentation of the ‘sacred-tree mountain inwhich the ancestors and soul companions of alineage resided’ (p. 49). Loose handling of thelinguistic evidence undermines her claim, whichif presented differently would be perfectlyacceptable. Similarly the mythology derivedfrom Classic Mayan inscriptions relies ontranslations that the majority of epigraphers nolonger entirely accept. For instance, thetransliteration and translation of wakah-chan,‘stood-up-sky’, is better analysed as ti’ chan,‘edge/mouth of the sky’ (p. 149), a change ininterpretation which has consequences forHeadrick’s final analysis of the Tepantitla muralsand her general argument about the ritualraising of the world tree. Additionally, missingfrom the translation of the Quirigua Stela Cmythological text (p. 111) is the critical line jehlajk’ob, ‘the hearth was changed’, which followsthe date. The inclusion of this line would haveenhanced an already highly insightful discussionof Teotihuacan’s particular use of cosmologicalpatterns and mythological imagery foundthroughout Mesoamerica.

Considering the lack of direct textualevidence and the ambitious scope of thevolume, it is unsurprising that many ofHeadrick’s points, while compelling, are notalways convincing. In some instances thefrequent citation of analogies from otherMesoamerican and world societies dulls theedge of her observations. The most convincingarguments rely on evidence internal toTeotihuacan, with comparative materialsused to underscore the pervasiveness ofcultural patterns throughout Mesoamerica ratherthan being the argument’s primary supportingdata. However, the tentative nature of some ofthe interpretations should not be viewednegatively, and Headrick should becongratulated on her ability to place hersuggestive explorations of the art and society ofTeotihuacan clearly within and in contrast tocurrent theories. This book lays a valuablefoundation for new ways of approachingpolitical, martial, and religious representationat Teotihuacan.

Michael D. Carrasco Florida State University

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Segre, Erica. Intersected identities: strategies ofvisualization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican culture. xiii, 316 pp., illus.,bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2007. £50.00 (cloth)

This is a difficult and sometimes dense work. Thefirst two chapters explore the articulation ofMexican costumbrismo (a literary and visualgenre focusing on customs and human types)and its critics in the late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century print medium. It juxtaposesthe work of Guillermo Prieto, an exponent ofmestizaje (the mixing of European andindigenous races), in chapter 1, with the writingsof Manuel Altamirano, himself indigenous and aminister in the Diaz government, whochampioned a ‘national autochthony’, whichwas distinct from costumbrismo’s stereotypes andallegories. Segre traces this peculiarly Mexicanromanticism to nineteenth-century cuadros decostumbre (depictions of local landscapes, streetscenes, patriotic ceremonies and religious rituals,ethnic types and historical subjects). She arguesthat at a time when it was more common forwriters to lament the lack of or difficulty increating a national identity, cuadros provided thegerms for a national genealogy that partlyderived its style from travel writers andillustrators like Humboldt, Stephens,Catherwood, and Waldeck. Contributors to thisearly popular literature also evinced an interestin the camera obscura, daguerreotypes, magicallanterns, and early aerial photography, linking,early on, an interest in ethnology withphotography that would undergo differentformulations over time but, nevertheless, remainan important source of cross-fertilizationbetween the arts and sciences.

The contretemps between appearance andessence rehearsed to different effect in thejuxtaposition of Prieto’s mestizaje andAltamirano’s irreductive indigenism is furtheridentified within the history of Mexican cinemaand photography in the opposition betweenreproductive and critical and creative culturalproduction. Chapters 3 and 4 provide anintroduction to Mexican cinema, contrasting itsclassical period in the 1930s and 1940s – largelyrepresented by Emilio Fernández, often regardedas its founder, and focused on the idolization ofan indigenous, rural arcadia – with the 1950s,when cinema was refocused on the experience,and sometimes folklorization and comicalstereotyping, of the processes of urbanizationand industrialization. Seen as a ‘tabloidnewspaper for the illiterate masses’, in Juan

Tablada’s words, cinema became a new mediumfor propagating a revolutionary culturalnationalism by providing the allegories,metaphors, and visual style to idealize anenduring and romanticized countryside, freefrom social change, at the very time when,under the zealous reforms of Cardenas, ruralchange had never been more widespread andtransformative. Even when the cinema refocusedon city life, costumbrismo in the figure of theimmensely popular comedian Cantinflas,or the well-received urban adventures ofgentlemen-cowboys, remained a powerfultrope.

The next two chapters examine MarianaYampolsky, Graciela Iturbide, and other modernphotographers, including Flor Gaduño, NachoLópez, Pedro Meyer, and Gerardo Suter, who,dissatisfied with the nationalist cultural politicsof photography, redirected its formerreproductive function to make it a creative andcritical agent of production. Beginning bylooking at ‘surface and inscription’, anotherorchestration of appearance and essence,followed by the topos of veiling, and, finally,that of fragmentation and ruin, these latterchapters examine the emergence of a matureand independent photography finally freed fromcostumbrismo and state-sponsored nationalidentity projects. This is found, for example, inthe monumental work of Benítez and Benzi, LosIndios de Mexico (1968), where photographicdocumentation of indigenous subjects issupported by fieldwork experience and anappreciation of their real social and economicconditions.

While, as the author admits, there is nonecessary relation between the order of thechapters, one can discern a generalthematization of the work around Mexicanpolitical and cultural debates on tradition andmodernity. The uses of the picturesque andcostumbrismo reoccur constantly in differentguises, together with references to the latter’scritics and its inherent contradictions both withinthe development of cinema, photography, andliterature, and more widely in the context ofnational projects of economic and socialdevelopment.

The work has two shortcomings. Firstly, itsuse of generalization to assume, uncritically, thatwhat was happening in nineteenth-centuryMexico City was also the norm for the rest of thecountry is regrettable. Secondly, the author’sfailure properly to ground photography in thecomplex and changing social and politicalsituation that characterized the last decades of

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the twentieth century makes the text moredifficult and less coherent than it need be.Nevertheless, with its focus on the mechanicalarts and their role in articulating andproblematizing the changing relations betweenMexican tradition and modernity, Segre’s workprovides a useful addition to English expositionson this crucial period in modern Mexicanhistory.

Anthony Shelton University of British Columbia

Biography

St John, Graham (ed.). Victor Turner andcontemporary cultural performance. ix, 358 pp.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2008. £47.50 (cloth)

Cultural anthropologist Victor Witter Turner hasleft us a powerful and diverse set of intellectuallegacies. Frederick Turner (in Victor Turner andthe construction of cultural criticism (ed.) K.Ashley, 1990) provides a most vivid descriptionof Victor Turner as a ‘prophet of apocalypse’(p. 155) wandering across disciplinaryboundaries as if they did not exist, conversingeasily with elders of each in their own language,only to be seen later, several disciplinary fieldsaway, engaged in new conversations. Turner’scollective body of work is full of paradox. On theone hand, Turner was a great proponent ofstructure. He explicated the structure of ritual(separation, transition, or liminality,reincorporation). He laid out the structure ofconflict (breach, crisis, redress, reintegration orrecognition of schism). He explored the structureof symbols (from ideological pole to sensorypole), and the structure of symbolic analysis(expert exegesis, operational meaning,positional meaning). Yet, it was also Turner whogave us anti-structure, liminality that dissolvedstructure, and liminoids who lived outside ofstructure.

This most recent examination, Victor Turnerand contemporary cultural performance, consistsof an introduction by the editor and seventeenarticles by twenty authors, under foursubheadings: ‘Performing culture’, ‘Popularculture and rites of passage’, ‘Contemporarypilgrimage and communitas’, and ‘Edith Turner’.The volume seizes upon the twenty-fifthanniversary of Turner’s death to interrogatevigorously the relevance and applicability ofTurnerian thought in the twenty-first century.

The volume is not a love-fest or a Festschrift, butrather a serious intellectual engagement with theTurnerian enterprise.

The introduction by St John alone is worththe price of the book. Dense with the jargon ofscholarship, freshly minted phrases, theoreticallabels, and esoteric framings, as it need be todescribe the work of Turner, who made aprodigious impact across a spectrum ofdisciplines: from anthropology, sociology,history, and religious and theological studies, tocultural, literary, media, and performancestudies, to neurobiology and behaviouralstudies. Turner lived in a world of poetry andpilgrimages, experimental theatre and orthodoxreligions, classical literature and postmodernthought. His intellectual output truly transcendsconventional categories.

Part one, ‘Performing culture: ritual, drama,and media’, is essentially a reconfiguration ofTurner in response to contemporaryperformance theory. J. Lowell Lewis makes thecase that communitas, which Turner saw purelyin liberatory and redemptive terms, can likewiseprovide the context for rejection and revulsion.Ian Maxwell continues the critique ofcommunitas by unpacking the story of a Jewishhistorian swept along in the performative ‘flow’of a Nazi event who actually found herself withher hand in the air shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ MichaelCohen, Paul Dwyer, and Laura Ginters examineAustralia’s use of the media and ‘performancesof reconciliation’, including the openingceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games,to address national anxiety spawned by a historyof dispossession and displacement of indigenousinhabitants. Mihai Coman discusses the utility ofliminality in framing studies of media productionand media consumption. Simon Cottle showsthe useful juxtaposition of ‘social drama’ and themedia’s treatment of a racist murder inSoutheast London.

Part two, ‘Popular culture and rites ofpassage’, mostly illuminates inconsistencies inTurner’s distinction between the liminal and theliminoid as relevant to explicating severalcontemporary rites of passage: modern sports(Sharon Rowe), electronic music and trancetribes (Graham St John), internationalbackpacking (Amie Matthews), and wildernessimmersion experiences for theatre students(Gerard Boland).

Part three, ‘Contemporary pilgrimage andcommunitas’, puts Turner’s ideas in motion. LeeGilmore examines the journey to ‘Burning Man’,a New Age gathering in the Nevada desert thatis supposedly an escape from commoditization.

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Carole Cusack and Justine Digance snap ourattention back to the role of commodities asyoung girls go shopping for identity in a mall,seeking out corporate logos as tribal identifiers.Sean Scalmer examines the movement ofSatyagraha (Ghandi’s non-violent tactics againstthe British in India) to Britain itself in the 1950sas a style of protest against nuclear proliferation.Margi Nowak looks at parents of special-needschildren, sharing their narratives of vulnerabilityon-line, and moving from scared neophytes towell-seasoned advocates.

Part four, ‘Edith Turner’, clearlyacknowledges Victor’s wife as co-author ofeverything he wrote. Additionally MatthewEngelke, Barbara Babcock, Douglas Ezzy, and JillDubisch go on to show that engagement withEdith’s own work provides the necessaryframing to understand fully that of her latehusband.

This volume is a wonderful exercise inrethinking Turner through the lens of ourincreasingly digitalized and mediatized world.The only shortcoming might be the emphasis onbreadth, rather than depth. The articles are verybrief. Each author has space just to sketch out aninteresting framing of a Turnerian idea, buthardly enough to mobilize sufficient evidencefor a thorough demonstration of that frame’sutility.

James A. Pritchett Michigan State University

Worsley, Peter. An academic skating on thinice. xi, 281 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2008. £22.00 (cloth)

This vivid and attractively written memoir of along and (for an academic) eventful life neverloses sight of the truth that every biography isset against a wider history. Bearing in mind DrJohnson’s dictum that every man thinks less wellof himself who has not been a soldier, I mustadmit to a certain envy for that generation – ofwhom Peter Worsley is one of the last survivors– who found their way to anthropology as aresult of their war experiences. They had a muchmore diverse engagement with ‘the Other’, andthat in ways closely tied up with the currents ofworld politics, than most of their successors.And none of his age-mates was more engagedthroughout his career with the widerworld-historical picture than Worsley.

Born in 1924 into a middle-class Catholicfamily in genteel Wallasey, across the Merseyfrom Liverpool, Worsley went up to Cambridgein 1942 to read English. Within a few weeks he

had, with little fuss, both shed his Catholicismand joined the Communist Party. A year later, hewas called up and opted to join the King’sAfrican Rifles, which took him to East Africa andthen to India, though the Hiroshima bombingcut off the prospect of active service against theJapanese. Resuming at Cambridge in 1946, heswitched to anthropology – though wasdissatisfied with the old-fashioned stuff he wastaught – and on graduation returned to Africa,this time as an education officer with the ill-fatedGroundnut Scheme in southern Tanganyika. Onthe side he worked on the language andtraditions of the Hehe.

Starting as a research student under MaxGluckman, Worsley found that as a CP memberhe was repeatedly debarred by MI5 fromworking in colonial territories. His plans forfieldwork in Central Africa and then (havingmoved in frustration to the Australian NationalUniversity, Canberra) in the New GuineaHighlands, came to nothing. So he did his Ph.D.on Aboriginal kinship in northern Australia andlater had to write his classic study of cargo cults,The trumpet shall sound (1957), entirely from theliterature. MI5 struck again after Worsley’s returnto Manchester, embargoing an appointment atthe Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, and atGluckman’s suggestion he decided to migratefrom anthropology to sociology, joining thedepartment at Hull. One feels this may havebeen the right course anyway, since his politicalactivism – after 1956 he was prominent in theNew Left – inclined him to a social-structuralanalysis of historical situations that drew moreon Marx and Weber than the theoreticaltraditions of social anthropology. His mostwidely read book, The Third World (1964) – theterm itself, adapted from René Dumont’s tiersmonde, was largely given its wide currency byWorsley – was finished just before he movedfrom Hull to a sociology chair at Manchesterand proved to be the defining text of a newspecialism, ‘the sociology of development’. Theimpression of a sociological takeover of erstwhileanthropological territory was confirmed by hisprovocative 1970 paper, ‘The end ofanthropology?’

Most autobiographies lose some momentumafter the early years. The mature figure we knowsubstantially through his work, and it is the storyof what made this possible that fascinates us. Itseems typical of Worsley, too, that he is lessinterested in recording the high plateau of hisprofessional career at Manchester – negotiatingstudent unrest, the politics of running a largeand successful department, the round of

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reviewing and examining, his editorship of theleading sociology textbook of its day – than thecontinuing expansion of his intellectual andregional horizons: from the role played by hisManchester colleague, Teodor Shanin, indeepening his knowledge of the Eurasianpeasantry, to his extensive travels and academiccontacts in China, Latin America, and elsewhere.It shows in the mature statement of his views,The three worlds: culture and world development(1984), which had less impact than The ThirdWorld, perhaps because it came near the end ofthe era when the ‘second world’ was aninternational force. The ‘culture’ in the titlereminds us that Worsley was still ananthropologist among sociologists. Hecontinued to publish important work on topicssuch as medical anthropology and indigenousknowledge systems, leading to his undeservedlyneglected book Knowledges: culture,counter-culture, subculture (1997). Fewanthropologists have struck out so boldly, andwritten across such an extraordinary range as hehas. This memoir discloses the intellectual vitalityand generosity of spirit which underlay thatachievement. A final grouse addressed to thepublishers: the book really should have beenbetter edited and provided with an index(which the Berghahn website falsely claimsit has).

J.D.Y. Peel School of Oriental and African Studies

Diaspora, migration, andnationalism

Bashkow, Ira. The meaning of whitemen: raceand modernity in the Orokaiva cultural world.xix, 329 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago:Univ. Chicago Press, 2006. £40.00 (cloth),£16.00 (paper)

This ethnography of the Orokaiva of Papua NewGuinea is a rich, detailed, beautifully presented,immensely enjoyable, and thought-provokingbook which advances a general and importantargument about racial stereotyping and theformation of racialized categories. Bashkowexamines the cultural construct of ‘whitemen’for the Orokaiva. The construct seemingly refersto light-skinned European people: that is,according to Bashkow, how social scienceapproaches to race would interpret it. For theOrokaiva, ‘whitemen’ is a category associatedwith traits that are independent of white

persons. These qualities include broad notionslike modernity and development, but they centreon Orokaivan concepts.

Whitemen have ‘lightness’ – they areunencumbered by kin obligations; they makemoney easily; they organize people and objectsinto effective combinations that get things done;they perpetuate their renown through durableobjects and knowledge; and they move aroundeasily, extending their influence across space.Lightness is enviable, but also suspect, as itmeans lack of obligation and absence ofsociality. Whitemen have ‘soft’ bodies, whichhave not been hardened by labour and theforest, yet they also have wealth; they achievethis through their ability to avoid infighting andjealousy, characteristics that the Orokaiva thinkfundamentally undermine their own efforts toachieve wealth and modernity.

Whitemen have access to ‘brightness’ – thedesirable beauty of bodies and things – but theyavoid the jealousy that brightness generallyentails. They display their bright goods withoutfear of the envious claims and sorcery attacksthat the Orokaiva see as marring their own socialrelations. Whitemen consume light, wet, andweak foods – store-bought goods such as riceand tinned fish – which form their bodies, helpgive them their lightness and construct theirmodernity, but also disconnect them from theland.

On this basis, Bashkow argues that race isnot about persons at all, but about objects –although he includes in this rubric ‘institutions,places and styles of activity’ (p. 246). Bashkowrecognizes that the objectification of personsmight be an especially Melanesian trait, butcontends that the process has broaderapplicability. Race is not a matter of categories ofpeople, thought to have essential characteristicsor phenotypes, but is instead a performativeprocess, something people do using materialobjects. There is no nod to Judith Butler here,but a footnote acknowledges Mary Weismantel’sCholas and pishtacos (2001), which made asimilar argument for the Andes.

I think Bashkow’s notion of ‘person’ – assomething independent of institutions, places,behaviour, and objects – is something of a strawman, but the basic emphasis on racialization as aprocess that imbues not just bodies, but allthese other realms too is convincing and useful.Bashkow maintains that the persistence of race,despite its refutation in biology, cannot beexplained by inequality alone (although he latercontradicts himself rather by arguing that racecan only be overcome by tackling inequality), or

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by the inscription of race on the body, as thebodily signs of race are ‘arbitrary’ andinsufficient’ (p. 251). Instead, it can be explainedby the way ‘race is symbolically constructed inobjects, places, institutions and activities that areindependent of persons and hence materiallyappropriable’ (p. 252). Bashkow attributes theresilience of racial stereotypes to thisconstruction, rather than to the nature of humancategorization, even as he contends thatself/other category construction is a universalhuman trait (which one might reasonably takefor a reason for such resilience).

I applaud Bashkow’s argument – which hetakes further and deeper than many otherperformative approaches to race – and thebrilliant use he makes of Orokaivan ethnographyto sustain it. Yet there is a sense of a baby beinglost with the bathwater. The idea that race is notonly about ‘persons’ is, in my view, basic to anunderstanding of racial thinking, which connectsbodies to behaviour (and environments andobjects). The idea that race was not, in thenineteenth century, also about bodies isuntenable, and I would argue that, nowadays aswell, racial thinking invokes notions of bodies,blood, and, increasingly, genes and connectsthem to extra-corporeal dimensions. Also,Bashkow’s dismissal of the inscription of race onthe body (which may be arbitrary in principle,but is not therefore powerless) flies in the face ofthe significance of visibilization that variousscholars, from Fanon to Bhabha, haveemphasized. But I would thoroughlyrecommend this book to everyone interested inthe concept of race.

Peter Wade University of Manchester

Hansen, Mette Halskov. Frontier people: Hansettlers in minority areas of China. ix, 267 pp.,map, tables, bibliogr. London: C. Hurst &Co., 2005. £25.00 (cloth)

As pointed out by Eileen Walsh in a recentreview article, ‘[T]he anthropology of China’speriphery is pushing itself into a central positionin the anthropology of China’ (‘Anthropology ofChina’s frontier’, Social Anthropology 17, 2009,109-14, p. 109). Like much of this work, MetteHalskov Hansen’s Frontier people aims to shedlight on the socialist state’s ongoing project to‘open up’ and ‘civilize’ the frontiers. However,while most ethnographies of the Chineseperipheries discuss ethnic minority populations –the main objects of the ‘civilizing project’ –

Hansen focuses instead on the livelihoods andexperiences of Han settlers, who at certainmoments have been constituted as key agents ofthis project. Hansen demonstrates thecomplexity of the relationships between settlers,the state, and indigenous ethnic groups, as wellas among settlers. Drawing on ethnographicfieldwork as well as on fiction and documentarysources, she produces a rich account of theexperiences of Han migrants, which successfullyundermines ‘monolithic’ (p. 243) images of thePRC’s civilizing project, be it the positive oneproduced in official Chinese discourse or thenegative one circulating in popular Westernmedia.

Hansen has done research on Hanimmigrants in two quite different regions. Thefirst is the subtropical Sipsong Panna, a Taiautonomous prefecture bordering on Laos andBurma. The second is Xiahe, the centre of alargely Tibetan area in the highlands of Gansuprovince in China’s northwest. Hansen’s centralpoint is that Han migrants, whether in Tibetanor Tai regions, do not constitute a homogeneousgroup but that their experiences of migrationand relations with non-Han populations areshaped by the circumstances and time oftheir migration as well as by socio-economicfactors. In particular, Hansen contrasts thestate-organized migrants sent between the1950s and 1970s, and often ideologicallymotivated to ‘support the borderlands’, tomigrants arriving since the 1980s on their owninitiative in search of economic opportunities.Among the former group, she draws attention to‘class’ distinctions between cadres and workerson the state farms, as well as to generationaldifferences between settlers and theirdescendants. She also includes accounts of theless intensive Han settlement that occurred priorto the 1950s in her two areas. Her depiction ofthe social distance between, on the one hand,the descendants of these earlier migrants, whoare often integrated into the local cultures, andthe post-1950s Han migrants, who are not,contributes to her wider point concerning theheterogeneity of Han immigrants in ethnicminority regions.

The first substantive chapter, chapter 2,describes the patterns of Han migration andemployment opportunities in Xiahe and SipsongPanna. Chapter 3 discusses the ways in whichdifferent groups of Han migrants have adaptedto the frontier situation, and is particularlystrong on migrants’ education strategies.Chapters 4 and 5, in my view the two bestchapters, deal with Han immigrants’ different

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and changing notions of place and belonging.Chapter 4 describes Han settlers’ discursiveconstructions of ‘home’ and the ways in whichthese related to everyday practices andrelationships. The fifth chapter is a fascinatingaccount of how ‘social differentiations betweenHan immigrants were constructed on the basisof different reasons for migration’ (p. 158),and describes also how the children ofstate-sponsored migrants in Sipsong Pannastruggled to be accepted as ‘locals’. Chapter 5,‘Han immigrants’ images of ethnic minorities’,demonstrates that these images do not simplyreflect ‘dominant discourses’ in China on ethnicminorities, but are shaped by Han settlers’ ownmotivations for migration and by their positionin the social hierarchy.

By discussing and comparing two frontiersituations, Hansen is able to write somewhatmore authoritatively on ‘Han settlers’ thanwould have been the case had she focused oneither Sipsong Panna or Xiahe. On the otherhand, this requires her to devote a good deal ofthe text to describing the economies, ethnicmake-up, education structures, migrationpatterns, and so on, in the two areas. Had sheconcentrated on only one area, she would havehad space to provide more of the ethnographicportraits and migrant voices which make thelatter half of the monograph so compelling.While this reviewer would have preferred twomonographs to one, Frontier people is withoutdoubt a first-rate contribution to the study ofChinese migration and ethnicity, and a valuableaddition to the growing anthropological – andhistorical – interest in China’s peripheries. Thebook is also relevant to the broaderanthropology of migration, and in particular toscholars working on colonizers and colonialcultures, not least in contexts of ‘internal’colonialism.

Jakob A. Klein School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Harvey, Graham & Charles D.Thompson, Jr (eds). Indigenous diasporasand dislocations. x, 199 pp., maps, tables,illus., bibliogrs. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.£47.50 (cloth)

Indigenous diasporas and dislocations describesindigenous religions as increasingly mobileand interactive, both complementing andchallenging the cultural fabric of the hostsocieties. The notion of the indigenouscommunity, which traditionally encompassed

the local and the native, is brought in contactwith the notion of diaspora, which usedto be associated with the dispersed and therootless.

Contributors to the volume demonstrate thatthe indigenous religions are neither ‘rooted’ intheir locality, nor estranged and disconnectedfrom their host societies. Instead, an engagingnarrative of intertwining, sometimes collidingpractices invites the reader to partake in theexploration of the truly global communities.

The impetus for this book arose in theengagement of the contributors with theindigenous peoples both ‘at home’ and indiaspora. The volume celebrates the ‘agency ofthose ... generous hosts and partners indialogue’ (p. 4). Rather than positioningthemselves as merely academic editors orcontributors, the authors engage in dialoguewith the community members and with the hostsociety. Each dialogue addresses questions ofindigenous and global identity.

The three parts of the book representdifferent aspects of indigenous religions andtheir practioners’ identities: from (re)formationof identities to maintenance and performance ofidentities and to contesting the disappearance ofindigenous beliefs and practice.

The first part of the book reflects upon andchallenges the postcolonial, diaspora and bordertheories. Polarization of the terms ‘indigenous’and ‘global’ is contested, and the fluidity ofcomplex identities is emphasized. The(re)formation of identities occurs through theconstant tension, symbiosis, and interchangebetween the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, theindividual and the collective. Andrea AvariaSaverda, in the chapter on Mapuche ruralmigrants in Santiago, reflects that identity is a‘constant state of re-construction andself-elaboration, defined by relationships insideand outside ... cultural communities’ (p. 57). Inthe chapter on the Maori diaspora, GrahamHarvey speaks of the performances of theMaori’s own ‘inherited and self-chosenidentities’ and ‘hybrid-forming gap’ ofperformance space (p. 133). The malleability,fragility, and strength of identity challenge thepresumably opposing categories of place andmovement, migration and settlement. OluTaiwo, in the chapter on the influence of theYoruba’s diaspora, speaks of ‘plural non-linearidentities’, which defines the existentialexperience of the Orisha as ‘relative’, open, andundefined (p. 118).

However, as some contributors to the volumeargue, the volatility of postmodern identities

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should not be over-exploited. Paul Johnson, inhis contribution to the volume, reflects on thecontemporary characterizations of the world as‘sheer unbound flux and flow’, noting that it is‘nevertheless clear to even the most soberobserver that territory and boundaries are acentral concern of our time’ (p. 37). Despite thetransience and mobility of modern communities,people still long for home, for a place to belong,for fulfilment of a – perhaps illusory – dream oftheir own cultural uniqueness.

Kenneth Mello’s contribution on theWabanaki Indians’ relationship with the land inthe second part of the book, ‘Maintenance andperformance of identities’, recognizes a similartheme. Wabanaki have more or less successfullyresisted ‘modern life’ in favour of ‘traditionalactivities, understandings, and relationships’and ‘have attempted instead to hold on toceremonies and spiritual relationships that locatethem in their world and define them as people’(p. 102).

The third part of the volume, ‘Contestingdisappearance’, continues to assert theimportance of roots, place, and home. Indescribing her (native) Lumbee Indiancommunity in North Carolina, Malinda Maynornotes the strong relationship that her people stillhave with locality and home: ‘Why do wemaintain such personal ties to places so fardistant? Why do many of us return home? Andwhat do these ties say about how our identity asIndians is maintained?’ (p. 153).

(Post)modern theories of identity areillustrated by lively ethnographic description.Contributors to the volume provide often verypersonal accounts of the sight, feel, sound, andsmell of the regions and practices they describe.Local folklore and daily routine, poetryand hardship all figure into these richanthropological narratives. In her chapter on thediaspora of the ‘Ocean Island’, Katerina MartinaTeaiwa recites a popular song about theexperiences of the Gilbertese labourers, bothcelebrating the work and opportunity andrevealing hidden nostalgia. Other authors usespeech, poetry, and story fragments to illustratetheir narratives.

The volume provides rich ethnographicillustrations from diverse geographic regions.These range from Oceania, the Caribbean, andmost of the world’s continents whereindigenous religions flourish. Contributors to thevolume explore ‘historical and contemporarynegotiations of modernity’ by contemplating thenature of globality. The complex interactionbetween indigenous beliefs and those of the

host society provides a valuable context to thestudy of global cultures.

Helen Kopnina University of Amsterdam

Economics livelihoods, anddevelopment

de La Pradelle, Michèle. Market day inProvence. xv, 266 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006.£22.50 (cloth)

Whenever I visited the farmers’ market in northOxford, I had a strong impression that customerswere pleased to be there. It was a chance toaffirm an identity they wanted to have and beseen to have. This seemed almost as importantas buying the produce.

This essentially social value of markets is thecentral point of de la Pradelle’s book, amagisterial study into the complexity of thecommonplace. To her, the weekly gatheringalong the narrow streets of Carpentras,Provence, is an opportunity for stallholders andbuyers to stage petty performances: a bit ofribaldry, a lot of banter, and speedy response.The more skilled these playlets, the moreenjoyable they are to participants, andonlookers.

Of course this contemporary version of anancient market is an anthropologists’ mix ofhistorical continuity, staged authenticity, andlived experience. It is an open-ended publicceremony. Indigenes use it to reaffirm their placeand their market. For Parisian second-homers, itis a means to advertise their knowledge of localways.

Every seven days, the market re-creates amyth of community. Hierarchy is put aside for afew hours, as an egalitarian strolling of the stallsbecomes the order of the morning. Locals maywell know that they are collectively engaging inmake-believe, but in effect they complicitlyconspire not to break one another’s Fridaybubble of fun.

This is indigenous aesthetics masqueradingas economics, with a municipal employee asthe master of ceremonies, choosing where toplace stalls each time, to get the right mix, theright buzz. Denizens want to be entertained,and proud. He does not want to let themdown.

The dark star which gives this gathering itsedge is the truffle, for Carpentras is the most

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famous market for the most prestigious varietyof this smelly tuber. De la Pradelle gives asuperb structuralist analysis of it as natureuntamed, and of the secretive style of its sale.But she provides surprisingly little on exactlyhow brokers manage to keep the circle of buyersso firmly closed.

This is a relatively short book. At times,the author seems keener to give the results ofher study than the ethnographic details onwhich they are based. The danger becomesthat comments on participants’ motivations,unless backed by quotes, can appear aspsychologizing. Personally I was alsodisappointed there was nothing on the viewsof the African or neo-hippie traders, though Iaccept that may be a quirk of mine. Afterall, de la Pradelle was writing a conciseethnography, not an encyclopaedia of aProvencal market.

De la Pradelle carries her learning verylightly. She is more concerned to amuse readersthan score points off some unknown Parisiancolleague. Her text is exemplary, written in ascholarly but delightful style which refuses totake Anthrospeak seriously. Of course, herliterary style is seductively, deliberatelycharming. It is an insidious soft-sell, asmannered (albeit gifted) as the ploys ofthe stall-holders she portrays. A small difficultywith this approach is that, at points, it ishard to know if the humour was intended ornot. One woman visiting a stall openly wondersabout ‘the last time I had thrush’. Let uspresume she is referring to the bird some Frenchpeople eat.

The translation is excellent. My only query isthat, by the end of the book, I still did not knowwhat is meant by a ‘notions stall’. Enough tomake a postmodernist mind boggle.

Ethnography as entertaining as this wouldmake excellent reading for students in theanthropology of economics, and for thosehard-nosed economists who still regard us all asrational, asocial actors. By the same token, itmakes me wonder just how little of our buyingbehaviour is governed by price. Are we morepremodern than we like to think?

And yet, and yet. Despite all the sparkleand the chuckles, one niggle will not go away.If I had given an account of this book to mymother, a market habitué whose eye was assharp as her education was short, I am sure herresponse would have been, ‘The Frenchgovernment paid her to state that? She musthave been clever!’

Jeremy MacClancy Oxford Brookes University

Gow, David D. Countering development:indigenous modernity and the moralimagination. xiii, 300 pp., illus., bibliogr.London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,2008. £51.00 (cloth), £12.99 (paper)

Access to the services of NGOs became areality for most rural residents in Colombiaduring the early 1970s. The rural poor anddisenfranchised hoped that local NGOs wouldheed their voices and carry out their demands.However, rural NGOs depend on a network ofurban-based national and internationalorganizations staffed by professionals,academics, or former government officials. Whilethese support organizations provide valuabletechnical training, access to key resources andcredit, they frame demands within prevailingtheories about development and povertyeradication, which are based in turn on theirown vision of a ‘fair and good society’. Likemany social scientists who have questionedthe advisability of imposing Western prioritiesin development planning, Gow’s main argumentis that NGOs should pursue developmentpolicies that honour differing cultural visionand values.

In Latin America, the 1970s was alsoa period of grass-roots social movementsand of emerging indigenous mobilizationswith clear political ethnic agendas. One of theinitial and most successful Colombianindigenous movements brought togetherdisparate Nasa and some Guambianocommunities. The Regional Indigenous Councilof Cauca (CRIC) emerged in 1971 and alsoattracted the support of non-indigenousliberals, NGOs, and land-reform agencies.Gow documents the various transformations ofCRIC and its eventual participation, with otherindigenous representatives, in the ColombianConstitutional Assembly of 1991. These groupsmanaged to force the Assembly to legalize‘ethnic citizenship’ and to recognize thecolonial rights of communities to managetheir own affairs. Gow tells us how in CaucaCRIC not only became an important politicalforce but also offered the indigenouspopulation an alternative discourse aboutdevelopment and modernity. CRIC’s discourseemphasizes cultural and linguistic differences,yet it also recognizes that indigenouspopulations live in a changing world and thatindigenous communities must search for neworganizational and development alternativesthat reflect both their ethos as well as newrealities.

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The new constitution empowered Colombianindigenous communities to participate in theirown development planning. However, the casethat Gow examined was too dramatic an eventto allow him to evaluate how the process mighthave affected the outcome. In 1994, anearthquake destroyed three Nasa communitiesand their land resources. The only viablesolution was to relocate the affected population.Authorities urged each community to produce adocument that could be used as a blueprint forrelocation and ‘development’. Each communitycouncil was expected to engage its ownresidents and relevant outside experts in theirworkshops and discussions. Gow describes howthe discussion and planning process evolved ineach community, noting textual similarities anddifferences in the final documents produced.These documents recorded the voices notonly of the authors but also of significantparticipants. Gow relates textual differences tothe affiliation of advisers selected by eachcommunity and the varied backgrounds of themost prominent local leaders.

Gow also points out that communities didnot share the same histories or tensions withnon-indigenous neighbours. But they sufferedsimilar losses and the prospect of unfamiliarsettings. Not surprisingly, each communityfocused on how best to transmit to their childrenthe values and ‘knowledge’ which theyconsidered as central to their identity as Nasaand to their ability to comprehend and critiquethe world they lived in. Thus, all workshopdocuments and development plans stressedschooling and language training, though therecommendations varied from case to case. In achapter titled ‘Local knowledge, differentdreams’, Gow incorporates a Nasa definition ofculture as a way of living, thinking, andbehaving which allows the reinterpretation ofold values and encourages creative ways ofcoping. This is one of the most interestingchapters of the book. I only regret that Gow didnot identify the categories of knowledge morelikely to be reinterpreted.

Gow’s passionate concluding chapterurges us to struggle for social justice and toconsider ‘development’ to be a work inprogress. He also warns us that involvingcommunities in the design of plans does notimply that the poor and marginalized will bepulled out of poverty in the short run. In fact,two of the communities studied lost memberswho either returned to the original settlementor moved elsewhere. Gow acknowledges thatonly one community made a successful

adjustment and improved its livelihood. Hesuggests that its achievement rested on morerealistic aspirations.

Gow’s book also touches on anothertopic that should routinely be revisited byacademics and fieldworkers: what morallyengaged researchers, like him, must do to retaina critical perspective about their work. Hesuggests balancing moral engagement withcollaborative research in related topics. In thisparticular case he accepted an invitation toco-participate in studies on bilingual education,gender, and authority roles in Nasacommunities.

Although this is not a reader-friendly book, ithas much to offer and deserves to be read byacademics and planners.

Sutti Ortiz Boston University

Ulysse, Gina A. Downtown ladies: informalcommercial importers, a Haitian anthropologist,and self-making in Jamaica. xvi, 333 pp., map,bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ. ChicagoPress, 2008. £11.50 (paper)

From work on free trade and export-processingzones to analyses of neoliberal capitalism andflexible citizenship, the movement of people,goods, and capital across borders continues tochallenge our understandings of the gendereddimensions of globalization. Gina A. Ulysse’sDowntown ladies is an engaging and thoughtfulethnography of the symbolic and materialmeaning of globalization for femaleentrepreneurs known as Jamaican informalcommercial importers (ICIs), or small-scalevendors who travel abroad to purchase andimport clothing and other goods for resale inJamaica. Through an examination of theeveryday experience of being an ICI, Ulysseillustrates how ICIs create and take advantage ofthe spaces in the global economy to pursuetheir own dreams and aspirations. Whileacknowledging ICIs’ agency in the globaleconomy and the importance of the trade inindividual women’s life projects, Ulysseconcludes that ICIs represent the ‘by-productsand reproducers of globalization’ and, thus, mayonly minimally impact the financial institutionsand structures that continue to shape their lifechances.

Ulysse begins her ethnography with a reviewof the dual images of women in Jamaica and theCaribbean – the ‘strong’ Caribbean woman andthe ‘respectable’ Caribbean lady. In contrast tothe popular image of the higgler who sells

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produce in local Jamaican markets, ICIs move inpublic and transnational spaces, and access aworld through travel that historically only‘respectable’ middle- and upper-class womentraversed. Through their work, ICIs crossboundaries that often render ICI women literallyand figuratively ‘out of place’ with respect to theparticular configurations of race, class, andgender in Jamaican society. Given thecontradictions their visibility embodies, ICIsemploy a variety of strategies to navigate theirdaily interactions. For example, in the streetsand arcades of Kingston where they sell theirgoods, ICIs often perform an embodied‘tuffness’. In other contexts, such as Ulysse’sfascinating account of a short trip visitingdistribution warehouses in Miami andtravelling through customs, ICIs performother orientations through dress, demeanour,and style. Building upon Bourdieu’s notionof the habitus, Ulysse argues that ICIs’consumption patterns reflect a distinctive valuesystem that emerges from their desires toimprove the conditions of their family (andother forms of self-making) rather than theemulation of the elite and the normative valuesassociated with respectability. These practicesthus reveal the importance of attending to thematerial (i.e. political economy) and symbolicmeanings of globalization for ICIs.

Alongside her important analysis ofglobalization through the eyes of contemporaryvendors in the Caribbean, one of the uniquefeatures of Ulysse’s analysis involves her practiceof weaving the analysis of ICIs in Jamaica withnarratives of her own experience navigating thecomplexities of fieldwork, a practice shedescribes as the ‘political economy of reflexivity’.For example, in chapter 4 Ulysse attends to the‘socioeconomic politics of visibility’, which relies,in part, upon understanding the nexus of class,race, and gender through her account of herstatus as a Haitian anthropologist completingher degree at a large, land-grant institution inthe United States. She compares her owngendered passings, what she terms ‘crossingacross class’, to think through ICIs’ everydaynegotiations of race, gender, and class. Althoughthere are moments when the placement of thepersonal narratives disrupts the flow of theargument and readers may long for more of theperspective and voices of ICIs, these appear inthe text as an intentional attempt to integratefeminist theory and practice. With a fewexceptions, the inclusion of fieldwork reflectionsremains largely useful and illustrative of broadersocial phenomena.

An engaging and innovative ethnography,Downtown ladies will be of interest toanthropologists, sociologists, women andgender studies scholars and others studyingwomen, work, and globalization. Ulysse’sexperimental ethnographic narrative style will beessential reading to any course on feministtheory, field methods, and ethnography thattroubles the notion of the ‘nativeanthropologist’. Particularly notable in thisrespect are her efforts to denote the location ofwhite anthropologists throughout the text,turning on its head the practice of marking‘native’ anthropologists. Ulysse also impressivelyintegrates the work of Caribbean academics,whose voices often do not cross national borderswith the same frequency and impact as theirAmerican- and British-based counterparts. In sodoing, she achieves her aim of presenting thecontradictions, ‘textured subjectivities’, and‘complex agency’ of ICIs without falling victimto discourses of saving or celebrating theindividuals in her study.

Heather A. Horst University of California, Irvine

Ziegler, Catherine. Favored flowers: cultureand economy in a global system. 306 pp.,tables, illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.:Duke Univ. Press, 2007. £57.00 (cloth), £13.99

(paper)

A rose is a rose is a rose – but to whom, how,when, where and why? These are among thequestions explored in this beautifully conceivedand finely crafted analysis, which deserves tobecome a classic. To call it a ‘commodity chainstudy’ risks over-simplifying this marvellouslyrich work, in a field that has long sufferedfrom a degree of over-simplification andparochialism.

In brief, this is an ethnographic study of theglobal flower trade, and the chains, people, andpractices that link flowers developed and grownin South America, Europe, and parts of theUnited States with the American flower tradecentres of Miami and the New York metropolitanarea. The ethnography was carried out between1998 and 2005, and it is presented within thelarger context of the history of the flower tradefrom the nineteenth century onwards.

Methodologically, the cardinal points towhich the study is orientated are multi-siteethnography (Marcus); the cultural biographyof the commodity (Kopytoff); systems ofprovisioning (see B. Fine & E. Leopold, The worldof consumption, 1993); and the consumer-led

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approach exemplified by the work of DanielMiller. To all, Ziegler makes importantcontributions.

The full potential of the multi-site methodhas, as Marcus observed, rarely been fullyexploited, as it is here. ‘Multi-site’ does notmean simply carrying out fieldwork in morethan one locale, but ideally entails a moreprofound pursuit of the object through time andspace, resisting over-determination in search ofunexpected juxtapositions that produce newinsights. This can easily become the fieldworkequivalent of a split infinitive, galloping off in alldirections at once, and one of Ziegler’s triumphsis the skill and verve with which she literallygoes with the flow, while retaining analyticfocus. This in turn allows her fully to realize thepossibilities in Kopytoff’s cultural biography,with Ziegler showing how flowers acquiredifferent meanings as they pass along the chain,not from a distanced third-person perspective, asis usually the case, but serially through the eyes,words, and financial accounts of different actors.This plunges the analysis into the synergies,rivalries, and moral relationships and systems ofgovernance that drive or hinder chains,providing insights into the ‘middle persons’ andcomplex systems of provisioning through whichthe flowers pass.

The importance of these systems washighlighted by Fine and Leopold some time ago,but systems have tended to be overlooked infavour of production and consumption, withwhich they link and which are easier to study.Despite technological innovations, Ziegler showsthat personal relationships and flexible networksnot only persist, but are flourishing, expanding,and successfully competing with newtechnology, inviting a rethink of modernity andprogress, supply and demand, co-operation andcompetition, the distinctions between ‘personal’and ‘business’ relationships, and the differencebetween ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. Inmethodological terms alone, even before thefirst flower is picked, this is already an exciting,innovative, and immensely dynamic approachthat is enhanced by the following elements.

By focusing on flowers, it confounds Marx’sstatement in Capital that a perishablecommodity is not suited to be an object ofcapitalist production, and there is much in thisstudy that demands a reconsideration of Marxistcommodity fetishism and the nature ofcapitalism today. Second, the main part of theanalysis is situated in the New York metropolitanarea, the American commercial and culturalepicentre where flowers are sold and meanings

created, allowing Ziegler to include themagazines, society florists, and social trendswhich have been so influential in altering floralpreferences over the last century. She alsoincludes immigrant-run corner shops and thebudget supermarket trade; a rare and welcomecombination of studying up and studying down.Working ‘at home’ is arguably the mostdemanding form of fieldwork – how to make thefamiliar strange? Ziegler does this consummately– calling attention, for example, to the ‘stoopline’, the area in front of a store where goodscan be displayed and sold; sidewalks will neverlook the same again. The study endows apreviously take-for-granted word – ‘favour’ –with a host of new meanings that add nuancedunderstanding to the subject as a whole. Therange of sources is refreshingly wide and, finally,this study is a masterpiece of ethnography, awelcome move away from over-theorization andover-determination, which none the lessproduces more fresh theoretical insights than thefield has seen for a long time. To all of us whowork with commodities, Favored flowers is a truebenchmark. If any recent study deservesbouquets, this is it.

Kaori O’Connor University College London

History, politics, and law

Ashforth, Adam. Witchcraft, violence, anddemocracy in South Africa. xx, 396 pp., map,figs, plates, bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2005. £17.50 (paper)

Adam Ashforth’s book Witchcraft, violence, anddemocracy in South Africa examines apostmodern approach to understanding the risein witchcraft violence (i.e. violence againstwitches) in post-apartheid South Africa bybeginning with the local assumption thatwitchcraft is real. The question then arises, ‘Whyhasn’t a democratically elected governmenttaken steps to protect innocent people fromwitches?’ It is within this framework that onecan appreciate that spiritual afflictions and theircures are part of everyday life for many Africans,and members of witchcraft-ridden communitiesfeel they must, of necessity, protect themselves,even if it means the use of violence against thosewho cause harm.

Ashforth sets the backdrop for his discussionas he explains the correlation between ‘spiritualinsecurity’ (uncertainty arising from the action of

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invisible evil forces); the insecurity of daily lifefraught with poverty, inequalities, violence, anddisease; and competing authorities on how tomitigate the impact of such forces (pp. 61-2). Hecontends that, typically, witches are inactive andmanageable, but become aggressive withwitchcraft attacks endemic during times ofextraordinary social upheaval such as life inpost-apartheid South Africa, which is marred bysocio-economic inequalities, competition, andjealousy over scarce resources (p. 70).

In his analysis Ashforth examinesdichotomous and apparently contradictoryforces in the spiritual world. There are traditionalhealers, with the help of the ancestors (the goodguys), who identify and mitigate the impact ofwitches who are in league with witch familiarsand evil spirits (the bad guys); there is muthi,which is the term used for the medicine of thehealers and conversely the poison of thewitches; and finally there is the secretive natureof witchcraft, although its impact is all toopublicly visible. Thus the dilemma: how to bestlegislate against evil when good and evil are soinextricably linked (p. 287)?

Ashforth sublimely argues his thesis throughthe text of his book, and in his epilogue heneatly summarizes the problem of ‘living in aworld of witches’ without political protection.He explains that the Suppression of WitchcraftAct of 1957, which should have rid the world ofwitchcraft, instead outlawed the heart of Africanhealing – divination – thereby robbing people ofthe legitimate means of contacting the ancestorsto fight evil forces on their behalf. Ashforth statesthat such apartheid laws, which caused a rise inwitchcraft violence, have not been revised toreflect the new political order (pp. 286-7).Indeed, South Africa’s lack of political will forfighting witches has contributed to theescalation of witchcraft violence, whilemodernity’s attack on the ancestors throughpolitical means has reduced their power (p. 312).Adding insult to injury, the modern nation-statehas excluded spiritual insecurity from theirsecular domain by relegating it to the realm ofreligion and thereby at best ignoring evil forcesand at worst being seen to be in collusion withthem (p. 314). In the eyes of people who live incommunities with witches, managing thedangers of evil forces is an issue of public safety,not religion. Thus, even the Black African statehas forsaken her people to the evil devices ofwitches without even so much as access to theancestors to protect them.

Through his often-times poetic prose,Ashforth presents the story of Madumo – a man

besieged by witches and accused of witchcraftattacks. It is through his affiliation with Madumothat he comes to realize he had been mistakenlynaïve when he began his perilous journey intothe spiritual war that witches wage on humanity(pp. 316-17). By his own admission Ashforth doesnot live in a world with witches but ‘a bleakworld devoid of deity’ (p. 317). His submission tothe dangers of witches is incomplete and thushis experience of spiritual insecurity also remainsincomplete, causing him to conclude that ‘it isbetter to live in a world without witches’ and forhim a world without deities. For to have the evilforces of witches in the world means thatbenevolent forces such as ancestors, shiningdown their eternal love and protection, alsoexist. It is a hard trade-off to give up the loveand protection of one for the lack of threat bythe other – while still having poverty, inequality,and disease to explain. Ashforth crafts awonderfully humane academic text, but, alas,we must leave the ultimate political solution topeople whose ancestors have done battle in thespiritual realm and lived to narrate theexperience for those of us whose deities havesadly left this world.

Debie LeBeau University of Namibia

Doolittle, Amity A. Property and politics inSabah, Malaysia: native struggles over landrights. xi, 224 pp., maps, figs, tables, illus.,bibliogr. London, Seattle: Univ. WashingtonPress, 2005. £32.95 (cloth)

This book provides an extensive view of thehuman ecological dynamics in one of the mostbiodiverse locations in the world. The textderives from fieldwork in the vicinity of MtKinabalu in Sabah, extensive literature analysis,the original application of current theorieswithin the general field of political ecology, andunravelling some of the tangled threads of thehistory of local land tenure regulation.Simultaneously, whilst stressing the need toaddress the idiosyncrasies of place, history, andtime, the author builds on these theories andconcepts of power to provide a preliminaryformula for a meta-approach to communityconservation strategies which internationalinstitutions and NGOs would be wise to note.

In setting the conceptual scene, the authorstresses two principles. First, she supportsMichel Foucault’s argument that power isappropriated rather than implicitly possessed,and this theme prevails throughout, throughdescriptions of the oscillations of power between

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the state and indigenous individuals andcommunities. Second, she contends that stateinterventions in the present have ‘deep roots’ inthe past. The book then proceeds to unravel thehistory of land tenure regulation by firstexamining colonial governance. Despite anapparent tolerance of customary law within thecolonial regime, the pluri-legal system thatensued was necessarily shaped by various actorsto suit the volition of supervening imperial andinternational objectives. In line with theoscillation of power, however, it is noted that thecolonial legal regime also provided novel devicesto enable local people to appropriate power andthereby, in some cases, resist the usurping oftheir traditional territories. The progression ofthe postcolonial regime is then examined, butthis soon, and necessarily, merges with a currentethnographic examination of two Dusun villagecommunities and the impact of the state’smodernistic development-based endeavours.

The book also examines myths aboutindigenous attitudes to the landscape andsustainability and provides a refreshingperspective. In particular it collates and reviewsthe evidence for and against traditional methodsof shifting cultivation and positively supportsthis traditional method, albeit noting thecontinuing rhetoric against this agriculturalpractice, despite its low overall impact onprimary forest. From the perspective of mypersonal field experience in the location, moreresearch in this area by ecologists to examine thelong-term effects of traditional slow-cycleshifting cultivation might well demonstrate thatbiodiversity is enhanced by this process.

Although there is supportive reference to theAarhus Convention, the text does not dealextensively with the wider international legalperspective. This may be a deliberate omissionbecause Malaysia is not a signatory to the keylegislative instrument dealing with native tenure(ILO 169), which establishes, inter alia, the rightof indigenous peoples to determine their ownmanner of development. However, someexamination of the state’s disinterest in ratifyingthis crucial instrument might have revealedfurther threads of actual and potential powerappropriation and thereby provided furtherinteresting insights into the subject of the book.In some Latin American countries, where stateshave ratified and implemented ILO 169,indigenous groups actively appropriate thepower of its provisions to secure and protect titleand, more specifically, to empower them todetermine their own path of development.Bearing in mind, however, the author’s emphasis

on the importance of place and time, it may beunreasonable to expect the book to extend tocomparison with other parallel locations andjurisdictions.

The discourse may also have been enhancedby a precise examination of the legalmechanisms when examining colonial history toascertain whether the power that wasappropriated by indigenous peoples wassourced within particular colonial legalconcepts, which in Foucault’s terms may havethemselves comprised bodies of knowledge tocreate ‘truths’. Unfortunately, the author isunspecific about the nature of regimes when forthe most part she is examining symptoms ofBritish colonialism. Indeed she tends to refergenerally to ‘European’ systems whereas there isa world of difference between, for example,French, Dutch, and British legal approaches. TheEnglish system of equity and trusts, and theacknowledgement within English land law ofsubsidiary rights in land, such as profits àprendre, have particular relevance to the inquiry.Indeed, these legal mechanisms were deployedby the more benign of British colonialadministrators to build and support indigenous,customary ownership regimes which survive tothis day in other parts of the world.

Stuart R. Harrop University of Kent

Englund, Harri. Prisoners of freedom: humanrights and the African poor. xi, 247 pp.,bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. CaliforniaPress, 2006. £13.95 (paper)

Englund’s book contributes to an increasingbody of literature that seeks to elaborate on theway in which human rights should beunderstood as a situated practice. Drawing onfieldwork in Malawi from 2001 to 2003, Englundexplores the role of local actors in thedissemination of rights education and assistance.Civil society was once heralded as the future forsocial development, yet its limits to fulfil this roleare made clear through an ethnographically richaccount that illustrates the way in which socialinequalities are obscured and consequentlymaintained through the language of‘freedom’.

The first few chapters set out the corecritique of the book: that the simplistictranslation of human rights as individual‘freedoms’ serves to disempower the verypeople they seek to liberate. While human rightsallow for some flexibility in translation, Englundargues that in Malawi little care has been paid to

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these processes. As a consequence, a focus onthe abstract notion of individuals as equal rightsholders serves to undermine substantivedemocratization by obscuring the unequalcontext in which people operate. Englund’s textclearly illustrates this by highlighting how theMalawian definition of human rights as‘freedoms’ is not qualified with theaccompanying notions of ‘responsibility’.Moreover, following the end of three decades ofdictatorship, rights definitions have come to bedominated by the civil and political at theexpense of social and economic rights. Thisattention to language is important because itreveals the limits of the type of claims that canbe made through the ‘rights’ discourse. AsEnglund argues, safeguarding liberal democracyis less about the availability of public debate,and more about what types of debates arepossible. With a limited definition of humanrights, the ability of the Malawian poor to gettheir grievances heard is circumscribed, makingit ineffectual for the wider populace.

The real strength of this book, however,comes in its ability to explain why those withincivil society who are frustrated with the limits oftheir newfound democracy continue to promotethis restrictive definition of rights. Weavingtogether a comprehensive, contextualizedpicture of the actors involved, Englund illustrateshow activists are themselves embedded in socialinequalities. For those who volunteer to be civiceducators, the lure of status becomes attractivein a context where there are few opportunitiesfor young people to achieve adulthood. Thecentral chapters are therefore the highlight ofthe book, with rich ethnographic accounts thatdemonstrate the extent to which NGO activists,legal advisers, and volunteers working as civiceducators are complicit in reproducinginequality. They, too, become ‘prisoners’ of adiscourse of ‘rights as freedoms’, repeating thisAmartya Sen-like mantra in their own attemptsto maintain a position as ‘expert’ that sets themapart from the poor masses.

Echoing much of the literature that has comeout of a critique of development practices,Englund finds that civic education and thespread of human rights in Malawi are ultimatelydepoliticizing. Not only are civic educators andlegal advisers encouraged to maintain an officialneutrality on the political, but the focus onhuman rights as individual freedoms haunts theclaims process: grievances are treated asindividual cases rather than a shared experienceof structural inequality. As a consequence theinjustices experienced by the poor cannot be

heard in a way that challenges the roots of theirexploitation.

The book falters a little in the penultimatechapter, where Englund turns to ‘moral panics’in an attempt to show how, regardless of thelimitations of human rights, the poor havealternative means of expressing their grievances.This chapter is ultimately less satisfying in that itremains disjointed from the tightly wovenargument of the preceding chapters and lacksthe richness of these previous ethnographicaccounts.

None the less, a great strength of this book isin the way Englund is able to show how, despiteits universalist discourse, rights in practice areparticular. They are the product of the fusionbetween a discourse of the universal and thespecific historical and unequal contexts in whichthey are encouraged to emerge. In the Malawiancase, human rights as discourse and practice areshaped by the everyday aspirations of thoseengaged in civil society. In shifting our attentionaway from political elites to a focus on the actorsinvolved in the everyday dissemination ofdemocratization, Prisoners of freedom makes animportant contribution to the anthropologicalfields of development and rights, offering us arich, contextualized account of the way in whichthe practicalities of ‘living’ distort even the bestof intentions.

Natalie Djohari University of Sussex

James, Deborah. Gaining ground? ‘Rights’ and‘property’ in South African land reform. xv, 282

pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. London, NewYork: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. £28.99

(paper)

James provides a coherently argued, detailed,and nuanced account of land reform indemocratic South Africa, both as policy and as itplays itself out on the ground in the province ofMpumalanga.

The central argument of the book is thatfrom its inception, land reform has been doggedby a fundamental tension. Was it fundamentallyabout rights, with an emphasis on setting rightthe injustices of the past, on restoration andredistribution; or property, with an emphasis onland as a productive resource for the few(er)?Could one have both? James contrasts land as‘an idiom for citizenship once denied to SouthAfrica’s black majority’ with land as ‘restored ornewly distributed – seem[ing] to promise ameans to future livelihoods’. Thus, ‘Much of thepotency of “land talk” lies in the way these two

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modes of discussion intersect: a legal discourseon rights and an economic one on livelihoods’(p. 11) – and property. The book examines thisunresolved tension and – from James’sethnographic accounts and analysis – apparentlyirresolvable contradiction inherent in the natureof the land reform initiative in the South Africansituation.

James writes as an anthropologist, and whatis interesting and valuable is that she examinesthe way this rights/property tension plays itselfout in relation to various constituencies involvedin the land reform process, as well as to othercontrasts, such as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’,and private and public.

Central to the way in which the land reformprocess has evolved has been the ‘liberal legalculture’ of South Africa (p. 17), with its emphasison rights. James argues that the ideas aroundrights and community, and about communalrights to land, emerged from a dialoguebetween human rights lawyers and former‘blackspot’ landowners influenced by missionaryideas relating to land and peasantry. (During theBlackspot Removal Campaign the National Partygovernment in South Africa passed legislationthat forced black communities living onfreeholdings in white rural areas to leave andresettle on infertile land and in townships.) Thecentral legal concepts were thus a complexamalgam, ‘produced at the point wheredivergent groups intersect’ (p. 17).

Government officials, charged with givingshape to and implementing policy, formed acomplex category, with people moving betweenthe Department of Land Affairs and civil society.The shift in policy from a rights-based approachto a more property-based approach under theDidiza ministry, while a possible ideological shift,also reflected problems faced by officials on theground, having to ‘deliver justice’, who came tosee the property-based approach as a possiblemeans of sorting out claims, of simplifyingprocedures.

As the policy process subsequently movedfurther away from the rights approach, NGOs,which were initially influential, became caughtbetween the state and the landlessconstituencies they served. Serving many of thestate’s functions for it, they sought to maintain arights approach and maintain influence in bothcamps. The fallout around the Landless People’sMovement showed the problematic nature ofthis balancing act.

Space does not allow a detailed discussion,but James gives a nuanced account of thevarying positions of three different kinds of land

reform beneficiaries. These were returning Pedi‘blackspot’ landowners on Doornkop Farm(themselves internally differentiated); theirformer Ndebele tenants, together with otherNdebele people turned off farms, who hadmoved onto Doornkop; and former labourtenants on white farms, who form the basis ofthe Landless People’s Movement (and who,somewhat paradoxically, look to either farmerowners or the state for a quasi-paternalistic,protectionist means of access to the land, i.e. torights, rather than property).

The state is not always able to deliver byitself. Case studies show how different kinds ofbrokers (including state officials) facilitateinteraction between state policy and potentialbeneficiary or land-selling owner, and the waysuch brokers move between idioms (includingrights and property) and facilitate new identities– as well as the risks to which they exposethemselves.

Gaining ground? is groundbreaking in theway it moves between and synthesizes the widermacro-economic situation within which landreform is unfolding, the policy domain, and thelocal level, developing and sustaining a coherentand convincing analysis. My only reservation isthat it systematically deconstructs and debunksevery policy initiative: land reform, byimplication, is doomed to fail. James, theacademic, almost never tells us where she standson issues she raises. What does such aclear-sighted, empirically grounded, andrights-sensitive analyst think should be doneabout land reform in South Africa?

Chris de Wet Rhodes University

Juris, Jeffrey S. Networking futures: themovements against corporate globalization.xviii, 378 pp., map, figs, tables, illus., bibliogr.London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,2008. £51.00 (cloth), £12.99 (paper)

This book will be useful for those whoparticipated in the anti-corporate movement andnow look back with a sort of ‘what happened?’curiosity. An ethnographic account of thoseyears is a historical responsibility of thatgeneration, and here we have an importantfirst-hand account that puts the objectives andaspirations of the anti-corporate globalizationmovement in relation to the wider social andpolitical developments of the late 1990s and theearly years of the new millennium.

The fieldwork is well placed within thelocal-global dichotomy, placing the field within a

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local context (Barcelona) but casting the terrainover the entire globe, reaching from Seattle toPrague to Porto Alegre. In this sense the author,Jeffrey Juris, is successful in ‘travelling’ back andforth between a place-based ethnography andthe transnational spaces and networks thatinteract with that place.

In doing this, the book accounts for theconcrete practices through which anti-corporateglobalization networks are based, looking atpeople’s real lives within these networks.Especially interesting is how the book, too,becomes part of those very social practices it isanalysing. As Juris rightly says, ‘[D]ebates aboutsocial movement networks largely constitutesocial movement networks themselves’(p. 298).

As a consequence of this position, Jurispromotes the concept of ‘militant ethnography’as a methodological model to analyse themovement. Militant ethnography suggests amode of politically engaged fieldwork carriedout together with the activists. The bookexplores the reciprocity between anthropologyand the anti-corporate globalization movement,and how they each can benefit from each other.As Juris states, the ‘opportunity to study activismin Barcelona allowed me to link my intellectualand political concerns’ (p. 20).

Militant ethnography for Juris is

to build long-term relationships ofcommitment and trust, becomeentangled with complex relations ofpower, and live the emotions associatedwith direct action organizing andtransnational networking ... By providingcritically engaged and theoreticallyinformed analyses generated throughcollective practice, militant ethnographycan provide tools for activist(self-)reflection and decision making whileremaining pertinent for broader academicaudiences (pp. 20-2).

This is a valiant effort, yet, as with allexperimental things, it is especially hard to pulloff. In fact, there are some passages in which thepolitical bias is a bit too tangible, and the‘militant ethnography’ risks becoming politicallyaxiomatic, as many analytical starting-points aretaken for granted. In addition, militantethnography is not the kind of thing you canjust declare and do. I think a deeper reflectionon the specific problems/issues involved in beingboth the observer and the object of study might

have been appropriate, especially if the object isof a highly charged political and emotionalnature.

The book could also have benefited from amore theoretical analysis of resistance andpolitics. While it does a good job of reporting onthe anti-corporate globalization movement, andshows the subtle transformations of thatparticular utopian impulse from Seattle to thelatest Social Forum, the trouble might be that itseldom goes beyond the ‘reporting’ mode. Theauthor could, for example, have addressedpeople’s subjective experience of resistance asthe emotional substratum of the networks he isanalysing. Unfortunately, he seems to keep awayfrom the actual psychological issues involved formany of these people.

Nevertheless, on the whole, Networkingfutures provides an engaging overview of theanti-corporate globalization movement, andexpresses itself best when considering themicro-power struggles that animated thevarious protest networks. Juris exposes withconvincing clarity the internal policy quarrels,the micro-power struggles, and theorganizational impromptus that characterizedthe movement.

The author does a good job indemonstrating how the political values of themovement were ‘inscribed directly intoemerging network architectures’ (p. 289). Directdemocracy was both an objective and the modusoperandi of the movement. Juris reveals,therefore, how debates over organization were,in reality, coded struggles over ideology.

Yet, the most important contributionof this book is its forward-looking perspective.While so much of anthropology is concernedwith memory, history, and the past, studyinggroups of people brash enough to thinkthey are ‘making history’ is a refreshingnovelty. This book looks at the future, and triesto dissect that utopian impulse, that form ofconsciousness projected into the future, whichanimated a long season of anti-corporateprotests.

As Juris puts it: ‘Although the activistsexplored in this book seek to influencecontemporary political debates, they are alsoexperimenting with new organizationaland technological practices ... interveningwithin dominant publics while generatingdecentralized network forms that “prefigure”the utopian worlds they are struggling tocreate’ (p. 9).

Eduardo Albrecht School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Book reviews650


Malaurie, Jean (transl. Peter Feldstein).Hummocks: journeys and inquiries among theCanadian Inuit. xxvii, 386 pp., maps, tables,illus., bibliogr. London, Ithaca, N.Y.:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. £27.00

(cloth)

The lives of Inuit in Canada changeddramatically in the 1950s and 1960s. This is theperiod described by George Wenzel as thegovernment era, when the Canadiangovernment moved Inuit from their kin-basedcamps on the land to what were calledsettlements run by government Northern ServiceOfficers. Many Inuit moved to these places to bewith their children, who were taken to attendday schools or residential schools. A number ofInuit report they were warned that if they didnot move to a settlement, they would notreceive their monthly payments, while others saythey moved to be with their children or forbetter housing. A wage economy wasestablished and poverty was invented. Thistransition from the land began during a deadlytuberculosis epidemic in the 1950s, during whichtime many Inuit were taken to southernhospitals, often to die there, leaving Inuit in thenorth vulnerable. Gender roles changed,particularly for men, and a new, autonomousyouth culture developed in these aggregatedplaces where a large number of children grewup together. Arranged marriage almost stopped,and Inuit youth struggled through contradictorycultural models of sexuality and affinity.Intergenerational segregation began to take itstoll on a people who had what Julian Stewardcalled a family level of social integration, wherelearning, respect, and affection were stronglylinked across the age span. The government eraresulted in the most profound and rapid socialchange in Inuit history.

Hummocks is the first English translation ofthe author’s memories of the Canadian Arcticduring this government era, originally publishedin 1999. Jean Malaurie, the director of theCentre d’Études Arctiques at the École desHautes Études en Sciences Sociales inParis and an ethnohistorian, cartographer,anthropogeographer, and geomorphologist,takes us back to his days with the Canadian Inuitbetween 1960 and 1963, and then to the early1950s. Working on contract as a researcher andconsultant with the Canadian government,Malaurie spent these years in the 1960s in thenortheastern part of the Canadian Central Arctic.He travelled extensively with Inuit and spenttime in a number of camps/settlements, and he

describes his trekking across the land with Inuit,living in igloos, and sleeping under caribouskins. Malaurie is the first anthropologist todocument Inuit life and culture change from theannual reports of the Royal Canadian MountedPolice (RCMP), which the reader is taken throughto hear personal accounts from these officers. Bythe 1970s, Malaurie was working with Inuit andother researchers to assist in the move towardsInuit leadership and self-government that wasjust beginning, and influenced the Quebecgovernment in this direction for Nunavik, theInuit region of northern Quebec. Throughoutthe book he traces the interwoven strugglesbetween Inuit and a paternalistic government,finding that policy for Inuit was developed bytrial and error. The errors, Malaurie finds, werenumerous.

The early 1960s was a time of crisis for Inuit,and Malaurie found them living on the margins.He holds the ‘liberal economy’ responsible fortheir plight, which he credits with ‘reducingthem to cheap labour for a capitalist corporationwhose every feature was foreign to them’. Inuitlived in what he describes as ‘harrowing’ and‘abject’ poverty as they became dependent onsocial assistance from the government. He refersto the hypocrisy of the churches, who hebelieves should have encouraged local Inuitautonomy rather than fostering dependency.Church and state conspired in the assimilationprogramme, which included residential schoolsand an attempt to replace the atiq or soul-nameof deceased relatives given to newborns with‘Project Surname’ in the 1970s. The generationof youth in the 1960s, writes Malaurie, wassacrificed. The text moves from fieldnotedescriptions of travel on the land by dogsled,spirits of the land and water, shamanism andChristianity, traditional filial relations, andhunting, to meditations on disease epidemics,government policy and practice, the land,housing, and Inuit history and sovereignty.

Six appendices include an analysis of an Inukman’s diary from 1957 to 1962, which shows thenegative effects of what Malaurie callsdeculturation or cultural dislocation. This manreported that writing the diary kept him fromkilling himself. Another appendix contrasts thelow value of fur and the high cost of huntingand trapping, one of the contexts ofdispossession for these people.

What is not included in this monograph arethe voices of the bureaucrats whom Malaurieholds responsible for much of Inuit socialsuffering. In the recent book by David Damas,Arctic migrants/Arctic villagers (2004),

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government workers in the 1950s and 1960sare seen as benevolent and deeply concernedabout Inuit, yet also confused and protective,while planning and instituting the Arcticsettlement policy. Although not specificallyabout the rounding up of Inuit in settlements,Malaurie’s book is a welcome counterbalanceto the one by Damas, which provides thegovernment perspective but leaves out theviews of Inuit.

Given the massive change that began amongInuit in the 1950s and 1960s, a culture at thecrossroads, it is important to have those whowere there at that time, both insiders andoutsiders, document what took place and howit was experienced. Jean Malaurie was thereas an ethnographer and has given us a vitalon-the-ground exploration of this process andproduct.

Michael J. Kral University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/University of Toronto

Rycroft, Daniel J. Representing rebellion:visual aspects of counter-insurgency in colonialIndia. xix, 321 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford,New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. £19.99

(cloth)

Before the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny andRebellion in 1857, the Santhal uprising of 1855-6was one of the largest of its kind to confrontcolonial rule. In part because it mobilizedthousands of tribal Santhals and kept the Britishat bay for months, the rising has produced a richhistoriography. It was one of the paradigmaticexamples of popular revolt employed by RanajitGuha in his Elementary aspects of peasantinsurgency in colonial India (1983), which helpedlaunch subaltern studies. Guha’s analysis thereand subsequently of ‘the prose ofcounter-insurgency’ and of ‘dominance withouthegemony’ form, with Foucauldian panopticism,the main theoretical and methodologicalingredients for Daniel Rycroft’s enterprisingmonograph.

The engagement with Guha is both criticaland appreciative. In particular Rycroft lamentsthe neglect of visual forms of discourse inGuha’s work and that of other subaltern scholarsand their heavy reliance upon written andprinted texts; but he also shifts the locus ofdiscussion away from sources generated in Indiafor a limited and largely official clientele to theiractive reworking and re-presentation to amiddle-class, metropolitan audience in Britainthrough such influential media as the Illustrated

London News. Central to this representationalprocess is W.S. Sherwill, who was one of the firstEuropeans to write about the Santhals andparticipated in the armed suppression of theuprising. Sherwill is not an unknown figure, butRycroft seeks to establish him as ‘a historicallyimportant author and observer’ (p. 294), whoseauthoritative pictorial and written accountsshaped the Western construction of Santhalidentity and the representation of their uprisingin India and more especially in Britain, andparticularly through the sketches and narrativeshe provided for the Illustrated London News.Guha’s ‘prose of counter-insurgency’ is thuspictorially reconfigured and its hegemonic effectupon a British public given priority over anyIndian constituency. Moreover, Rycroft tracksback in time to trace the contribution Sherwilland others made to representations of theSanthals before the uprising, to India’s placewithin ‘the colonial exhibitionary complex’ (theGreat Exhibition of 1851) and the role of the 1848

insurrection in Ceylon in creating a‘counter-insurgency complex’ shortly before theSanthal rebellion. Rycroft looks forward, too,though too briefly to be more than suggestive,to the uprising that engulfed northern Indiabarely a year after the suppression of the Santhalrevolt.

Representing rebellion is an importantcontribution to discussions of colonialhegemony and domination in general and to‘visual historiography’ in particular. Itsimplications range well beyond the Santhaluprising and mid-century colonialism. It doesnot travel much beyond a colonially defineddiscursive domain (and so reveals little aboutSanthal identities or the uprising’s locallegacies), but it does elaborate effectively onGuha’s analysis of ‘the prose ofcounter-insurgency’ and makes telling use ofvisual tropes and techniques of intertextualityto show how images of the other were formedand given circulation. But the difficulty ofdiscerning intentionality from imageryremains, and while Rycroft’s explanationsare plausible, they are not always entirelyconvincing. To give two examples: on pp. 95-6he claims that the act of Santhal womenturning away from Sherwill in 1851 ‘to avoid [his]project of visual surveillance’ was a politicalgesture that prefigured rebellion four years later.Perhaps, but might they not have simply beenfollowing established norms of female modesty?Similarly, on pp. 212-17, Rycroft makes extensiveuse of the image of a banyan tree drawnoriginally by Sherwill and published in the

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Illustrated London News in 1856 as part of itscoverage of the Santhal uprising. Rycroft seesthis botanical trope as evidence of Sherwill’sscientific credentials and even, through the workof his engraver, the articulation of an Owenitephilosophy of progress and improvement.Rycroft seems unaware of the ancestry of thebanyan in European iconography and texts asthe antithesis of order, as a site for heathenshrines, a hang-out for dacoits, thugs, andrebels: its inclusion in pictorial narratives of theSanthal rebellion, even if fortuitous, is thus farfrom anomalous.

Rycroft tries hard to hammer his theoreticalpoint home: we are repeatedly told what toexpect in each chapter and section, only to bereminded again at the end. And too often thedividing line between what is self-conscious,self-legitimizing propaganda and what is generalcultural effect, arising out of presumptions ofcivilizational superiority, is blurred orunproblematized. But this is an ambitious bookand its unabashed commitment to theory andmethod makes it a major contribution to thescholarly investigation of hegemony andsubalternity.

David Arnold University of Warwick

Williams, Gwyn. Struggles for an alternativeglobalization: an ethnography of counterpowerin Southern France. vii, 185 pp., bibliogr.Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. £55.00 (cloth)

Since the 1970s a rocky, windswept plateau inFrance’s southern massif central has gained‘almost mythical status’ among activists onEurope’s autonomous left as a land wherepeople share a political conscience and a desireto resist the power of the state (p. 149). GwynWilliams’s new book opens up this mythicalworld on the Larzac Plateau to examine whatpolitics actually means in the everyday life of itsinhabitants. In doing so he shows the public andprivate work involved in being and becoming‘an activist’ here. He explores the collective workinvolved in organizing meetings, associations,networks, and campaigns, as well as theunderbelly of personal relations that facilitate orclose these flows of information; and heexamines the individual work of informing,shaping, and guiding the moral-political self aspeople strive to live coherent lives of reflectionand action.

The anti/alter/contra/counter-globalizationmovement continues to be a source ofintellectual engagement for contemporary

anthropologists who write about it as academicsand for it as activists. By using ethnography toask simply what Larzac activists think they aredoing and what they do, however, Williams’smodest book offers a deeper reflection onautonomous politics than muchactivist-academic literature. His book emerges asprecisely the kind of anarchist anthropologyenvisaged by David Graeber (Fragments of ananarchist anthropology, 2004): one which iscommitted to the analysis of alternative socialand economic structures, and one which iscommitted to presenting these alternatives tothe world.

In October 1970 the French governmentdecided, without any consultation from peasantfarmers, to expand massively a small militarycamp on the Larzac Plateau into a strategicallysignificant military base. Local opposition to theplan soon attracted the support of activists fromacross France, and over the next decade Maoists,anarchists, socialists, hippies, ecologists,revolutionaries, pacifists, intellectuals, andCatholic clergy were drawn to the Larzac. Thenon-violent and ultimately successful struggleagainst the camp’s expansion transformed theplateau; the activists who settled there nowoutnumber its original inhabitants. This struggleprovides activists on the Larzac with a ‘metaphorof origin’, marking the emergence of autonomyas a principal of social organization here.Williams’s book places this ideal in its context,showing how theories of ‘power as sovereignty’and ‘counter-power as a refusal to cedeautonomy’ have a deeper historical genealogy inthe French Republic. His contribution to socialtheory is to reframe the relationship betweenpower and resistance as a struggle overautonomy. Rather than asking whether or not itis possible to ‘live autonomously’, he argues, themore pertinent question is: how do peoplemake autonomy an important social category(p. 152)? On the Larzac, autonomy is somethingto struggle over, to increase, and to cultivate:a source of power and action.

In his introduction Williams describes thedifficulties faced by an anthropologist writingabout autonomous political activists andcontemporary social movements. Trying toremain detached, sceptical, and distant is, heacknowledges, immensely difficult when youwork with people whose commitments to socialjustice you share. It is testament to exactly thesekind of pressures that Williams ends up beingapologetic about his desire to understand ‘abunch of activists on the Larzac Plateau’. WhileLarzac activists see the circulation or acquisition

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of information as central – ‘one of thefoundations of the social movement’s strugglewith power’ (p. 132) – and vital for activists whostrive to keep themselves informed, engaged,and alert, Williams is reluctant to position hisown text within this knowledge economy. Hetreats his research as fundamentally differentfrom the tasks of organizing meetings,demonstrations, campaigns, that he undertakesas an activist. In his struggle for both disciplinaryrigour and activist authenticity, he hesitates toimagine his book as a political project or declarethat ethnography is a political act. This is ashame, because his text demonstrates preciselyhow ethnographic writing can provoke apersonal reflection on political choices and animpetus to action.

My only other criticism is that this book hasbeen published in an expensive hardcoveracademic edition likely to be bought only byuniversity libraries rather than a cheaper tradeedition that might have seen it distributed morewidely and read. I urge the author to join thecampaign for open-access anthropology(www.openaccessanthropology.net) and lobby hispublisher to make the text freely availableon-line.

Jamie Cross National University of Ireland

Medical and forensicanthropology

Butt, Leslie & Richard Eves (eds). Makingsense of AIDS: culture, sexuality, and power inMelanesia. xvii, 321 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.Honolulu: Univ. Hawai’i Press, 2008. £27.00

(paper)

In the anthology Making sense of AIDS: culture,sexuality, and power in Melanesia, editors LeslieButt and Richard Eves bring together acompelling and important collection ofanthropological research on human sexualityand the variable and often unique moral,psychological, social, and cultural factors thatinfluence vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in Melanesia.Collectively, the work highlights the importanceof understanding local customs, beliefs, values,and sexual culture and serves to illustrate theimportant contributions anthropologists canmake towards improving HIV/AIDS prevention,care, and treatment.

Individually, the works interpret a richdiversity of circumstances, experiences, and

challenges in voices that echo many of thecommonly found barriers to prevention, such asfear, stigma and discrimination, poverty, genderinequity, political and religious ideology, andlacks in education, healthcare infrastructure, andpolitical will. Each chapter also provides uniqueinsights into the ways that sexual culture andbeliefs about HIV/AIDS can disrupt social bondsand networks, increase the potential for violenceand persecution, and how stigma,discrimination, and social ostracism are used as ameans of defining the boundaries between socialgroups, classes, and cultures within differentregions and distinct populations withinMelanesia.

For example, Nicole Haley outlines how theongoing breakdown of essential human services(such as education, healthcare, andtransportation) at Lake Kopiago is the result of aunique set of geographical circumstances,political neglect, and cosmological beliefs. Haleynotes a number of vulnerabilities common torural populations while revealing how a beliefstructure which interprets atrophy as part of aninevitable destiny leaves the Duna of theSouthern highlands of Papua New Guinea farmore vulnerable to HIV than their urban cousins.Leslie Butt also describes how the adoption ofneutral biomedical language by elites (which isseen as necessary to counter the process of‘othering’ that has been used to shift the blamefor HIV/AIDS to Indonesians) also contradictstraditional beliefs and thereby exacerbates thevulnerability of highlanders.

Many of the selections highlight factors thatspecifically increase the biological and socialvulnerability of women and girls. For example,Maggie Cummings describes the dilemmas facedby Jenny, a well-educated young woman tornbetween kastom (tradition) and modernity, andhow trousers – and the women who wear them– are seen as a threat to traditional genderrelations and male authority in postcolonialVanuatu. Lawrence Hammar describes thevulnerabilities inherent in marriage andillustrates how moral discourse and prevailingsocial norms serve to justify gender inequity,sexual violence, HIV stigma and discrimination,and act as obstacles to sexual health andeducation for women and girls in Papua.Christine Salomon and Christine Hamiltonexamine vulnerabilities unique to Kanakwomen in New Caledonia, while Bettina Beerfocuses on sex workers in Markham Valley,Papua.

Many of the chapters also detail theimpact of clashes of culture. For instance, Jack

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Morin explores how the migration of Indonesianwaria (men who dress and identify as women) inresponse to government initiatives to legalize sexwork has impacted upon the sexual identity,behaviour, motivation, and risk of urban-livingindigenous Papua men who have adopted oradapted the waria identity. Morin presents casestudies that highlight risks common to sexworkers and those living as a ‘third gender’ in aculture with binary constructs, as well asoutlining factors unique to the sexualexploitation and marginalization of indigenouswaria that increase vulnerability to HIV.

Sarah Hewat describes how the clashbetween Western ideals of romantic love andtraditional values that censure premarital sexthreaten moral order, and how secrecysurrounding ‘illegitimate sex’ and participationin the ‘romantic underground’ also increasesvulnerability for women in Manokwari, Papua,as do local beliefs that good judgement inthe selection of sexual partners offersbetter protection than condoms. HollyBuchanan-Aruwafu and Rose Maebiru alsohighlight how the secrecy surrounding sexualityimpacts prevention efforts in the SolomonIslands. Meanwhile the chapters written byHolly Wardlaw, Richard Eves, Naomi McPherson,and Katherine Lepani further underscore theimportance of accounting for clashes betweenindigenous and foreign ideology and belief.

This volume demonstrates whyanthropologists are uniquely placed to informclinical and epidemiological studies, socialpolicy, and interventions related to HIVprevention, care, and treatment. It alsoemphasizes how ethnographic research is vitalto understanding the unique intervention needsof unique populations. This is a collection ofstudies that should appeal not only toanthropologists, but also to HIV/AIDS andsexuality researchers, frontline public healthand community-based service workers, peopleliving with HIV and AIDS, as well as those witha more general interest in regional culturalvariation.

Josephine MacIntosh University of BritishColumbia/University of Victoria

Mitchem, Stephanie Y. African American folkhealing. ix, 189 pp., illus., bibliogr. New York:Univ. Press, 2007. $65.00 (cloth), $20.00

(paper)

This book is less of a treatise on folk healingthan a polemic against racialist attitudes in a

historical perspective of the rules and livesof black Americans. By emphasizing thespiritual aspects of healing, such aviewpoint can easily be accommodated bothto the concept of healing and to the concept ofa need for justice, though ultimately it servesto strengthen the separateness of AfricanAmericans.

According to the author, AfricanAmerican folk healing sees sickness as arisingfrom situations that break ‘relationalconnections’ of the unborn, the born, and thedead, which are intertwined. All healing links inwith and emphasizes black identity and cultureand attempts to heal the effects of pastenslavement. Thus African American folkhealing flows into social activism of AfroAmericans.

American blacks continued to beseparate even after the emancipation act of1863. There was no attempt to understandblack culture. The Works ProgressAdministration in 1936, which aimed to provideemployment during the Great Depression,gathered 2,300 oral black histories, a surveycarried out mostly by white middle-classresearchers. The interviews related to folkhealing and provide essential information onpractices and beliefs during enslavement. Someracial bias inherent in white Protestant workerscame to misrepresent African American folkhealing as superstition, hoodoo, and faithhealing, all of which are negative categorieslinked to magic, witchcraft, and sorcery, andhence are ungodly.

‘Conjurors’ was a term that equated topersons with powers to remove evil spells, butthey had been seen as subversive by slaveowners since they could control the blacks. Tothis day hoodoo doctors study their peopleand provide advice that an experiencedpsychoanalyst might envy.

Yet healers or root workers were needed inthe absence of access to ‘white medicine’.Healing the ill and nurturing infants were rolesgiven to elderly enslaved women. Suchpractitioners worked until the middle of thetwentieth century, when state licensing ofpractitioners became law. Faith healing –Christian and other – goes hand in hand withfolk remedies. African American folk healing isnot a closed system; it is not frozen in time andnot limited to a single place. Instead it isadaptable to different conditions and culturalchanges.

To African Americans the body signals thespiritual life and also connects to the ancestors;

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thus health and healing are related to religionand spirituality, a holistic approach that includesinterpersonal relations in the concept of health.Institutional medicine may therefore be alien andprovide no communication between patient andhealers. Black folk healing helps to make senseof the world.

Though legal race separation came to an endin 1960 through the Civil Rights Act, economicpressures meant that discrimination continued.Folk medicine was seen as racist technology andblack nationalists see it as innate intelligence andanother form of black vindication. The cost ofbiomedicine is another factor in the continueduse of folk medicine, but the lack of respectshown to black patients also drives people to it.The book makes no mention that some of thesayings and practices quoted as ‘black healing’are folk remedies encountered generally inEuropean culture as well. They are attempts tohelp oneself.

It is alleged that in the 1970s and 1980s someblack women were sterilized without theirconsent in biomedical institutions and thatunnecessary hysterectomies were performed bystudents for practice. There is thus mutualmistrust, and blacks believe pharmacology has‘stolen’ some of their medicines. There isrecognition that biomedicine could not cure‘unnatural’ illnesses (hexed or jinxed). It is saidthat the persistence of American folk healing isdue to: (1) social marginalization of blackAfricans, which makes access to biomedicinedifficult; (2) cultural hybridity, whichincorporates Amerindian ways as well; (3)racism, which denies humanity to black bodies;(4) adaptation of practices with availability ofmaterials and new environments; (5) thedevelopment of commerce; (6) pragmatism,which seeks a direct line of healing; (7) efficacy –there are proven track records of remedies; and(8) a holistic approach which makes itcompatible with cultural ideas and customs. Theemerging black middle class, however, adoptswhite values and rejects folk healing andassociated practices, though some educatedpeople reconstruct traditional knowledge to fitin with their new lifestyles.

In the end the reader tends to beoverwhelmed by the constant interaction ofbitterness and resentment that it is alleged stillmotivates black American communities. Whilethere are brief sections on healing practices andbeliefs, they are always seen in the light of apeople in the diaspora and in the context of apolitical agenda.

C. Renate Barber Oxford University

Oppong, Christine, M. Yaa P. A. Oppong,& Irene Odotei (eds). Sex and gender in anera of AIDS: Ghana at the turn of themillennium. xiii, 339 pp., map, tables,bibliogrs. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers,2006. £29.95 (paper)

This volume contains a collection of articles on‘sexuality’ and gender in contemporary Ghanain the era of HIV/AIDS. It follows several recentlypublished volumes in anthropology andsociology that raise the question of how loveand sexuality are perceived, and the roles theseplay locally in times of global change and ofHIV/AIDS – both globally and in Africa inparticular.

HIV/AIDS rates are comparatively modestin Ghana (with an estimated 4.2 per centinfection rate). The first manifestation of theepidemic can be dated back to the mid-1980sand was noticed among female returneesfrom Côte d’Ivoire. Hence the editor’sintroduction focuses on changing genderroles in marital and extra-marital sexualrelationships in Ghana since the beginning ofthe twentieth century. Christine Oppong,known by Africanists for her edited volumeMale and female in West Africa (1983), haspersistently followed the issue of changinggender relations in postcolonial Ghana foralmost three decades. Therefore, theintroduction does not fail to offer a valuable andwell-informed overview of changes in maritalrelationships in different regions in Ghana thatare due to spatial and social mobility in thecountry. The collection closes with apolicy-orientated ‘Epilogue’ (Yaa Oppong) whichgives an overview of nationally initiatededucational programmes on HIV/AIDS. It spellsout the challenges these programmes are facing,such as the need to deal with a culture of silencearound sexuality or the necessity to create betterhealthcare, and to support gender equality inthe country.

Written by scholars from various disciplines,the articles are all of good empirical quality andinform the interested reader about a range oftopics such as complex gender dynamics leadingto commercialized sexual relationships and thespread of sexually transmitted diseases amonggold miners at the beginning of the twentiethcentury in the former Gold Coast (Akyeampong& Agyei-Mensa); the public national hysteriaabout witches who take away people’s sexualorgans (Sackey); or the sexuality of elderlywomen in a small town in Kwahu (van derGeest). Lacking in this volume is the perspective

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of Christian churches, which have a strongpublic influence on public and private moralreasoning with regard to sexuality. However, aclose reading of the articles reveals the existenceof a somewhat hidden, yet central issue whichresearchers, as well as educational programmes,on the transmission of HIV/AIDS have to dealwith: the ethics of discretion in thecommunication about sexuality in Ghanaiansociety. Anarfi, for instance, shows the oftenindirect but sometimes surprisingly outspokenexpressions of married women in the way theycommunicate their sexual desire to theirhusbands in urban Ashanti. Essah reports thecomplaints that schoolgirls voice in a secondaryschool in Akropong, Eastern Region, concerningthe lack of information they receive from theirparents on sexual matters. Van der Geest alsopoints out the existing culture of discretionrevolving around sexual matters in Kwahu-Tafothat he encountered during his research onelderly people and their relationships. Anexplication of the implicit nature of thiscommunication – also in the introduction –would have allowed for more reflexivity bothon the empirical findings and on what itmeans to research ‘sexuality’. It would haveserved our understanding of the internaldynamics of the manner in which sexualintercourse between partners in Ghana is beingnegotiated, as one of the authors, Anarfi,suggests (p. 169).

While all articles certainly deal with the statusof women, most of them deal with sexualrelationships and some with the danger of HIVinfection in these relationships. Neither theintroduction nor some of the articles, however,question the idea of ‘sexuality’ as a concept.Little attention is devoted to the question ofwhat it means for Ghanaian society that theconcern for HIV/AIDS transmission hasintroduced ‘sexuality’ as a publicly debatedsubject. The lack of conceptual development isalready reflected by the title of the book, whichpromises insights into ‘Sex and gender’. Thereader is left without much clarity of what theeditors understand by ‘sex’, which is a colloquialterm used mostly by young English-speakingpeople in the country and which has beenintroduced through the various media, includingthe internet.

Thanks to it being an empiricallywell-founded work on gender relations,specialists working on the region and the topicwill be interested in reading this book. Yet,owing to its conceptual weaknesses it fails tomake an important contribution to a deeper

social-scientific exploration of sexuality in theAfrican context.

Astrid Bochow Free University Berlin/AfricanStudies Centre Leiden

Skultans, Vieda. Empathy and healing: essaysin medical and narrative anthropology. x, 282

pp., figs, tables, bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2007. £45.00 (cloth)

This is a clever book. It is a collection of fourteenof Skultans’s important essays on affliction,psychiatry, narrative, and healing. All, except forthe introduction, have been republished intactfrom past collections, although few have been inmainstream anthropology. The essays (firstpublished between 1970 and 2005) continue toraise some important questions about therelationship between theory and ethnographyand the persistent ethical, emotional, political,and practical dilemmas that accompanyethnography.

However, the collection is also a narrative initself: it documents a senior anthropologist’spersonal and professional career, tracing herunfolding reflections on the conditions, nature,and purpose of social anthropology. In thisrespect the volume is an engaging andoriginal meditation on the interconnectionsbetween the personal, the social, and thedisciplinary.

Three ethnographic chapters introduceSkultans’s earlier ethnographic research. In theunusual position of an anthropologist from arecent refugee family who is conductingresearch not quite ‘at home’ (in Wales), Skultansinvestigates healing and communication in aSpiritualist church (the focus of her doctoralresearch) and women’s use of reproduction andmenstrual symbolism. These studies, along witha study of gendered beliefs and practices aboutmadness and its management in a Mahanubhavhealing temple (western Maharashtra), establishthe foundations of some of her later researchinterests. Although certain aspects of these earlyessays are stilted by the passage of time, theymark important innovations in anthropologicalviews on the social origins of affliction and onthe subjective dimensions of suffering. Theessays are a valuable reminder of a socialanthropology that combines methodologicaland analytical rigour with social critique.

The volume also includes several ofSkultans’s discussions, written over a thirty-yearperiod, on the complex connections anddisconnections between the projects of

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anthropology and psychiatry. ‘The spread of theblush’ (first published in 1977), a historicalanthropology that traces changing notions ofhuman nature, insanity, and embodimentthrough an analysis of early nineteenth-centurymedical texts, is a particularly welcome chapter.So, too, is Skultans’s final essay, an importantdiscussion on the ethics of ethnography inpsychiatry.

Skultans’s stance as a ‘critical realist’ issharpened as her ethnographic interestmoves to Latvia (her family’s homeland) fromthe early 1990s. In eight sensitive andunsentimental essays on affliction and memory,she listens to the traumatic experiences ofSoviet rule rehearsed in stories of personalsuffering. Over the subsequent decade shedocuments shifts towards more individualisticand punitive views of affliction as people try tocome to grips with the effects of radicalpost-Independence socio-economic reform.These essays never ignore the historical realitiesthat nourish particular metaphors of pain andprosperity.

As Skultans herself observes, she flourishes asa humanist anthropologist in Latvia. Here herconcerns focus more directly on issues ofsubjectivity (understood as the interplaybetween individual and collective events andexperiences); the challenges of spoken andtextual representation; and the development ofnarrative ethnography. Her ethnographyidentifies and exploits the overlaps betweennarrative as critical social practice (herinformants draw on a historical tradition oftestimony to exercise political consciousness), asethnographic method, and as therapeuticvehicle. This perspective, along with herengagement not only as native speaker but alsoas someone whose family experiences comeclose to those of some informants, destabilizesfixed differences between the researcher and theresearched.

Skultans’s essays trace her growingconviction of the importance of relationalunderstanding and of moral imagination in thepractices of ethnography as well as of healing(some of her accounts of the testimonialnarratives border on the psycho-therapeutic).While she recognizes the risks of entering others’‘moral landscape’ (p. 239), the chances of thisentry do not seem to be an issue. Althoughidentification in the ethnographic encounter iscertainly not ‘simply about shared culturalorigins’ (p. 226), shared historical experienceand first language must condition suchinvolvement.

These essays are uncluttered, incisive, and apleasure to read. The writer uses theory toilluminate rather than dominate ethnographyand is always aware of a readership beyondanthropology. Apart from Anthony Cohen’swork Self-consciousness (1994), later essays drawinspiration from eclectic readings of philosophy,sociology, literary criticism, history, andpsychoanalysis rather than contemporaryanthropology. Readers who want protractedmeanderings through recent anthropologicaltheory on, for example, emotion and empathy inethnography or the experiential possibilities ofstorytelling will be disappointed.

If anthropologists want to attend to wideraudiences and adjoining disciplinaryperspectives, this book is an inspiring exampleof how anthropology can be both challengedand enriched by such dialogue. Few havemanaged this with Skultans’s dexterity ordetermination.

Mary Adams University of Kent, Canterbury

Wagner, Sarah E. To know where he lies: DNAtechnology and the search for Srebrenica’smissing. xviii, 330 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press,2008. £12.95 (paper)

Faced with the request to review this book, I hadalready made up my mind that I would hate itfrom the moment I read the title. I have personalterritory in the Balkans, having been part of thefirst forensic team to enter Kosovo in 1999 andone of the last to leave in 2002. My Ph.D.student had worked on a successful newanthropological approach to help identifybrothers who had lost their lives in the fall ofSrebrenica and been recovered from the massgraves and I am an ardent supporter of the workand ethos of the International Committee onMissing Persons (ICMP) in Bosnia. Therefore Iknew I was going to feel frustrated at theauthor’s attempts to simplify this revolutionaryscience and the pioneer spirit of those workerswho have changed the face of DNA analysisacross the world. With dignity and consummateprofessionalism, they had picked up the piecesleft behind after the global impasse over whowould undertake the DNA analysis following theAsian tsunami of 2004, and when I have hadany questions in my own forensic casework, theICMP have always been willing to offer advice.So the author was treading on territories aboutwhich I felt strongly and for which it was goingto be a gargantuan challenge to convince

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me to want to read to the end without gettingcross.

I offer nothing but respect to the author andabject apologies for my being a short-sightedand bigoted scientist. There was nothingsensationalist about this book, nothinggratuitous, nothing belittling, and nothingthat would stop me reading to the bitter end.She has considered this fragile yet robustsubject from a gentle but objective perspective,with compassion but no hint of sentimentality.She permits you to accompany her as she talkswith those who have been left behind andsupports and guides your understanding whenthere is a clash of our cultures. This is a veryclever writer who has the rare ability to standback from a situation, analyse it, and thencome forward to portray it in words andsentiments that are understandable for all. Herbook cajoles us all to think about our identitiesand those of our loved ones and compare themto a situation that is so far removed from someaspects of Western culture that it is almostimpossible to imagine – but she instils gentleconfidence and faith that ensures that we willfollow her lead.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Centerattacks, the tsunami, and the London bombingswe became dependent on the three primaryforensic identifiers – dental comparison,fingerprint comparison, and DNA analysis – thatare the indispensable core of our industry. Yet inthe Balkans two of these were stripped away andat the outset most believed that DNA would notsolve the issues of identity because there wasonly familial DNA for the comparisons. Yet notonly the determination of the few pioneeringscientists but also the irrepressibility of thefamilies ultimately proved us all to be wrong,and out of the horror that was the Balkanconflict has arisen the scientific beacon of theICMP.

The Balkans and DNA are forever inextricablylinked, and Sarah Wagner has brought theirstory together, not in a dry and historical factualaccount, but in a form that is coated inhumanitarian awareness whilst paying duediligence to both the political agendas and thecallous intrusion of much of the media. She haswalked a very fine but carefully drawn line andachieved it with superb skill. I thoroughlyrecommend this book to all because, as onefather said to me when I questioned why hewanted to video his dead son in the mortuary,‘Some day people will tell us that this neverhappened’. We need these unbiased accounts toremind us of our social and historical

responsibilities and we need them as ourcollective conscience against complacency.

Sue Black University of Dundee

Method and theory

Fabian, Johannes. Ethnography ascommentary: writing from the virtual archive.ix, 139 pp., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.:Duke Univ. Press, 2008. £44.00 (cloth), £11.99

(paper)

Professor Fabian’s book outlines his vision forcommentary as an ethnographic genre, thepractice of which is facilitated by the existence ofvirtual/on-line open-access archives ofanthropological material. After defining what hemeans by ‘commentary’ in this sense, Fabianthen puts it into practice in relation to a textresiding in the Archives of Popular Swahili, onthe Languages and Popular Culture of Africa(LPCA) website. The stated purpose of thecommentary within the book is ‘[t]o re-presentthe document of an event in the past so as tomake it possible to confront it in the present’(p. 113). However, this simplistic summary beliesthe depths and subtleties of the book.

The archived text in question is thetranscription of a conversation which took placein 1974 between Fabian and Kahenga, a ‘herbalspecialist’ (munganga ya miti) whoseprofessional skills include performing rituals forthe protection of property as well as healingillnesses. Fabian had hired Kahenga to perform aprotective ritual – ‘Closing the House’ – in orderto protect his home in Lubumbashi, DemocraticRepublic of Congo (then Zaïre), from burglars.While Kahenga’s services had beencommissioned out of a sense of genuinepractical necessity rather than curiosity (oranything more cynical), Fabian none the lessasked to speak to Kahenga concerning the ritual.The event was tape-recorded and, some thirtyyears later, transcribed, translated, and theresulting text lodged in the aforementionedarchives – at http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html to be precise.

As such, the book has Fabian looking backat an earlier moment in his career from thevantage-point of seniority. Playing on the idea of‘Closing the House’, he states that Ethnographyas commentary is in all likelihood his lastacademic book. It is a highly reflexive work,and, if not quite intimate, it often has a

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conversational character of its own as the‘ethnographic commentary’ unfolds, seasonedas it is with learned observations and reflectionsupon issues both practical and philosophicalwithin social anthropology. These range frommatters of recording/transcription/translationof field data to genre in ethnography; thetext in ethnography; dialogue; and thecontemporaneity of ethnographic objects ofstudy. This list is by no means exhaustive.Although the commentary contains a wealth offascinating ethnographic data on the professionof ‘herbal specialist’ in 1970s Lubumbashi (notmy personal regional specialism), it was oftenthese reflections which I found most interestingand enjoyable.

The sense of conversational flow which thebook maintains is in part due to thenear-absence of references to other scholarshipin the commentary itself. Fabian is openconcerning this – again, the purpose of theexercise was for him to breathe life back into theconversation with Kahenga in order to confrontit anew, rather than to place the content withinthe existing body of knowledge on CentralAfrican magic and witchcraft.

So, what does Fabian mean by ‘ethnographyas commentary’? A tightly written introductionexplores the concept in detail, but to put itbriefly: on-line archiving makes it easy for socialanthropologists to deposit documentary materialfor relatively widespread public access.Commentaries upon this material offer analternative to other ethnographic genres.Open-ended, unrestricted (and even daringlyinconclusive) in Fabian’s vision, a commentaryilluminates the text to which it relates – and withon-line text and commentary co-present to thereader this enables ‘a form of ethnography thatis not predicated on the absence of its object’(p. 10).

The subtitle – Writing from the virtual archive– and the cover – a black background with arepeated pattern of green 1 s and 0 s in whichwords and phrases can just be discerned – givethe misleading impression of high-tech subjectmatter. Granted, it is technology that makes itpossible for anyone with an internet connectionand a copy of Ethnography as commentary toaccess the Archives of Popular Swahili and usethe book as its author intended, but theover-‘technified’ image devalues theethnographic substance to a certain extent.

Central African specialists and thoseinterested in genre and/or innovation inethnography will form a natural readership forthis book. However, Ethnography as commentary

has much to offer to anthropologists beyondthese groups. I particularly thought of students,and not just for the insights which Fabian givesinto fieldwork experience (as indicated on theback cover), but for the glimpse which the bookoffers into the thoughts of a distinguishedscholar and fieldworker towards the close of hiscareer.

Nicholas Swann University of Wales, Newport

Gay y Blasco, Paloma & Huon Wardle.How to read ethnography. vii, 214 pp.,bibliogr. London, New York: Routledge, 2007.£18.99 (paper)

The task of most textbooks in anthropology hasbeen to unfold a history of the subject. How toread ethnography is refreshingly unique in thatits concern is not to deliver yet anotherclassification of the impact over time upon thediscipline of its grand narratives. Rather, theemphasis is upon the ethnographic processitself. The aim of the authors is to teach studentsthe art of reading ethnography critically, that is,to think anthropologically about the processesinvolved in creating ethnography, in order todevelop an anthropological imagination of theirown. The authors are delivering an appealingroute for the reading and understanding ofethnography, one that endows the creativepowers of ethnography its proper due. A basicconcern of the book is to explore the role ofethnographic writing in the production ofanthropological knowledge. In throwing downthe gauntlet with respect to the high honourwe tend to accord the power of ‘theoreticalnarratives’ in the creation of ‘knowledge’, theauthors argue that it is not so much ‘progress’ intheory, but the practice of the arts attached tothe ethnographic process itself that is key to thecreation of knowledge in anthropology. Artfulethnography, they are saying, is the majormeans through which anthropology createsthat knowledge that is distinct to itself, in itsongoing quest better to understand therichness and variety that adheres to thehuman condition. It is grand theory that must,perhaps, take second place in suchknowledge-making, as it tends to providespecific means of perceiving and questioningthat may or may not contribute towardsunderstanding the specific knowledges andpractices of other peoples.

Why artful ethnography? This is not a trivialquestion, and it is one that is important to theauthors’ revised way of reading ethnography.

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They argue that the genres specific to thewriting of ethnography accommodate apowerful aesthetic that we tend to take forgranted. We usually do recognize ‘quality’ whenwe read the work of our colleagues, but to whatextent do we understand why? How do we talkabout such ‘quality’? How is it achieved? Is it arichness of detail that holds our attention? Asnarrative, is it a delight to read? And mostimportant, is it also believable? How to readethnography forces us to reflect upon theaesthetic as well as intellectual grounds throughwhich we do judge ethnographies and thegenres in which they are written. Gay y Blascoand Wardle argue that it is precisely such genresthat make ethnography a distinctive way ofknowing and presenting the world. Thus, theauthors are emphasizing the crucial place ofgenres in the creation of anthropologicalknowledge itself. It becomes their aim to laybare the central, often implicit, codes,conventions, stylistic devices, and sharedconcerns of our ethnographic modes of writing.In the process, the student is being taught thatethnographic concepts are tools for explanationand translation, not mere description.

One finds, in its progressive unfolding ofchapters, that How to read ethnography is acarefully crafted and powerful pedagogical toolfor classroom use, suitable for undergraduateteaching, and mandatory for postgraduate. Eachchapter unfolds a rich brew of well-chosenexcerpts from key ethnographies that arerobustly varied in theoretical orientations, stylesof writing and dates of publication. The new andthe old are juxtaposed: Monica Hunter (1937)alongside Bruno Latour (1996), Margaret Meadadjacent to Nurit Bird-David, Marilyn Strathern,and Richard Fardon. The older excerpts are ascaptivating as the ones from recent time,with the combining of authors becomingincreasingly fascinating as the chapters unfold.The rich brew of excerpts is framed by thelively commentary of the authors ever engagingin apt and spirited debate. Each chapterconcludes with a challenging reader’s exercise,motivating students (and also teachers) tobecome more sophisticated in their reflectionupon the ways in which ethnography createsknowledge.

Gay y Blasco and Wardle are concerned withexploring the complex framings, stylistic andotherwise, used in ethnography that endow itwith factuality. Big issues are being raised –politically, morally, intellectually – over just whatanthropology is, or should be, at its best. Theauthors take their own stand, for instance on the

question of anthropology as art or science, onthe importance of affective, imaginative levelsof engagement to the creation of goodethnography, and on choices in the creation ofauthorial voice. Large, and often unsettling,questions are being raised – politically, morally,intellectually – through this exploration ofethnography’s relation to knowledge creation.For instance, Keith Hart’s excerpt on his 1973

experience of researching the Ghanian informaleconomy (along with the author’s sensitivetreatment of it) is the most riveting (andcourageous) anthropological text I have readthat overtly dwells on such questions. Thereadership for How to read ethnography goes farbeyond the classroom setting, for, in reading it,the most experienced of us will find that we stillhave much to learn – and reflect upon. Oftenexciting, and certainly sophisticated, it is a workthat introduces profitable means for rethinkingmajor issues in the discipline. On the otherhand, when used as textbook, the experienceshould certainly lead to lively engagement andclassroom debate on the most satisfying oflevels. Hart’s remarkable contribution should setthe cats among the pigeons in any classroom, orseminar, discussion.

Joanna Overing St Andrew’s University

McLean, Athena & Annette Leibing (eds).The shadow side of fieldwork: exploring theblurred borders between ethnography and life.xviii, 302 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden,Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. £55.00

(cloth), £21.99 (paper)

I undertook my Ph.D. fieldwork in the touristresorts of Palmanova and Magaluf on theMediterranean island of Mallorca. My subject ofinquiry was concerned with social constructionsof ‘British’ (a label I use with caution but do nothave space within this review to explore)national identity by tourists in this context. Iembarked on my fieldwork in an idealistic frameof mind, having convinced myself that I wouldeasily collect the data I wanted. I had, after all,participated in a Master’s-level research methodscourse and developed a number of‘foreshadowed problems’ that would guide myinquiries. I was therefore well equipped for thetask in hand. However, I had not bargained forthe strong feelings of estrangement anddiscomfort, loneliness and self-questioning thatthe experience brought about. Hammersley andAtkinson have noted that in the situation of thefield a researcher often experiences feelings of

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estrangement as the result of ‘culture’ shockarising due to the ‘confrontation of theethnographer with an alien culture’(Ethnography: principles in practice, 1995: 102).Superficially I was not from an alien culture, Idid not have language issues as Englishappeared as the dominant language, andoutwardly I did not look any different from myinformants. However, I recoiled from theenvironment and at times actively hid: this wasnot the kind of holiday destination I wouldchoose and I therefore could not properlyengage. I had to work hard in the ensuingmonths on both an emotional and intellectuallevel to deal with the problems I encountered inorder to overcome the hostility I felt towards myenvironment and the people within it, and tocollect the data that I required.

In reflecting on my own position asresearcher, I am attempting to draw attention tothe contours of my place in the field andultimately the impact that may have had on myproduction of knowledge about that context:how I felt directed my course of inquiry. It iswith such knowledge that Athena McLean andAnnette Leibing’s edited collection appears tome to be an important and valuablecontribution to the debates concerning the roleof the ethnographer. In their volume the editorshave assembled a number of authors whocomment on a diverse range of areas ofanthropological inquiry and ethnographicencounters: for example, religious rituals(Thomas J. Csordas); an investigation into aparent’s life history (Alisse Waterson and BarbaraRylko-Bauer); reflections on violence (NancyScheper-Hughes); and the fate of a migrant(Rose-Marie Chierici). All authors in the volumeexplore their own subjectivities and locationswithin their area of inquiry, often including anacknowledgement of and reflection upon theepistemological groundings that they havebrought with them to the field. The reflectionson their personal positions, the thoughts,emotions and experiences that arise as a result,and their contribution to the understanding oftheir specific area of study are termed byMcLean and Leibing as ‘the shadow side offieldwork’. The book poses a fundamentalquestion regarding how far we as researcherscan realistically separate out who we are fromhow we create understandings of who they are.The collection of papers in the book does not setout to answer such a question, but toforeground such elements and remind us thatthey cannot be divorced from how we relate toand thus narrate the other. Importantly we are

asked not to ignore these aspects but toacknowledge and incorporate them as part ofthe processes of our productions of thediscourses relating to our areas ofinvestigation.

Bourdieu (The logic of practice, 1990) hasargued that objectivity prohibits practice, whichdemands involvement on behalf of theresearcher. For him this calls into question thenature of the relationship between the observedand the observer. He suggests that the observerdecides what is meaningful, makes the meaning,and by seeing the social world as representationmakes people actors within it. McLean andLeibing’s book goes a long way to challengingthe positivistic notion of objectivity thatBourdieu criticizes to suggest a more subjectiveand ultimately honest approach to our work. Todraw from another earlier commentary, JudithOkely contends ‘the anthropologist-writer drawsalso on the totality of the experience’ (‘Thinkingthrough fieldwork’, in Analyzing qualitative data(eds) A. Bryman & R.G. Burgess, 1994: 20). Thisbook brings that totality out of the shadows andinto the light. It is written in an accessiblemanner and should inform teaching of researchmethods at both an undergraduate andpostgraduate level, being a core text in thelatter. It should be a companion guideto us all.

Hazel Andrews Liverpool University

Robben, Antonius C.G.M. & Jeffrey A.Sluka. Ethnographic fieldwork: ananthropological reader. xvi, 616 pp., tables,illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden, Mass.:Blackwell Publishing, 2007. £65.00 (cloth),£24.99 (paper)

A comprehensive, and often compelling,collection, Ethnographic fieldwork approaches‘the field’ in its broadest sense. Its thirty-eightchapters, divided into ten sections, are a mix ofclassic and contemporary fieldwork accountswhich encourage the reader to reflect upon theanalytical value and limitations of differingfieldwork methods and relations.

Robben and Sluka explain in theirintroduction that while it has been subject tomany developments and reflexive discussions –as demonstrated by the vast literature on thesubject – fieldwork remains a central tenet of thediscipline and should be considered in terms ofits wider significance. Thus, although thisvolume can be used as a source of practicaladvice, it is less of a guide to formal research

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methods and more a collection of texts whichhighlight the complexity, scope, and diversity of‘the fieldwork experience’. The editors havetended to favour reflexive accounts in theirselection, but the balance between classic andcontemporary texts, and the wide range ofethnographic contexts in which these aresituated, ensures that this book does notfall into the trap of providing a mere set of‘navel-gazing’ fieldwork reflections, but ratherenables debates and discussions to be placedwithin their historical and intellectualtrajectories. This balance, coupled with theexcellent section introductions and the logicalmanner in which the sections are structured,results in the identification of key theoretical andconceptual threads, which in turn helps mould aseries of potentially disparate texts into acoherent reader.

The classic texts of Boas and Malinowski,which are featured alongside a contribution fromDegérando, open the volume, in part 1,‘Origins’, and provide the historical context forthe following chapters. Part 2, ‘Fieldworkidentity’, explores, through accounts byPowdermaker and Johnson, the influence ofgender and ethnicity on fieldwork relations andintroduces the themes of reflexivity andsubjectivity, which continue to be exploredthroughout the book. Sexual orientation andrelations are introduced into this discussionthrough the original contribution of Altork, whileCohen’s article on ‘Self-conscious anthropology’provides a springboard into part 3, ‘Fieldworkrelations and rapport’, which examines theintersubjective nature of fieldwork relations andstresses, especially through Berreman’scontribution, the importance of impressionmanagement.

The seminal critique of anthropology by VineDeloria, Jr, provides the starting-point for thereflexive discussion of ethnographicrepresentation and fieldwork conduct whichforms the thematic backbone of part 4, ‘The“Other” talks back’. These themes are examinedfrom the perspectives of both ethnographersand research subjects, with Greenberg andScheper-Hughes highlighting the role the mediaplay in shaping the manner in whichethnography is disseminated and received byresearch participants. The inclusion of thesecontributions is central in taking the discussionof fieldwork outside the confines of the academyinto the broader socio-political domain; a themewhich continues in part 5, ‘Fieldwork conflicts,hazards, and dangers’, and also in part 6,‘Fieldwork ethics’.

Fieldwork in sites of conflict is first introducedin part 3 through Robben’s account of workingwith the victims and perpetrators of violence inArgentina, and while part 5 examines this topicspecifically through contributions by Nordstromand Sluka, the section is not limited to thisethnographic subfield, but is made broader bythe inclusion of the chapters by Nash andHowell. These contributions, as with many ofthose preceding them, highlight fieldworkdifficulties and failures, and it is this topicwhich is developed further in the original andinsightful accounts of Bourgois and Pollock inpart 6.

New modes of fieldwork are ethnographicallyexplored in part 7, ‘Multi-sited fieldwork’, andpart 8, ‘Sensorial fieldwork’, in which thecontemporary chapters by Edwards and Zabuskyare coupled with the recent classics of Guptaand Ferguson, Hannerz, Stoller, and Olkes, andFeld to problematize ‘place’ and demonstratenew ethnographic ‘spaces’ and directions. Yetmore attention could be given to newtechnologies and fieldwork in virtual andimagined environments. Likewise, although theyrefer to ‘native anthropologists’ and conductingfieldwork ‘at home’ in their introduction,Robben and Sluka do not include anycontributions that explicitly address this topic,which is particularly salient among the graduatestudents at whom this collection is aimed.

Ethnographic fieldwork concludes with part 9,‘Reflexive ethnography’, and part 10, ‘Fictivefieldwork and fieldwork novels’, which includeclassic contributions by Rabinow, Crapanzano,Clifford, and Smith Bowen, although thevolume is, perhaps, also in want of its ownconclusion. However, despite the omissions, thisbook is an excellent reader and will no doubtbecome a valuable teaching tool and reading liststaple.

Emma-Jayne Abbots Goldsmiths College

Music, dance, and performance

Birth, Kevin K. Bacchanalian sentiments:musical experiences and political counterpointsin Trinidad. xiv, 258 pp., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2008.£45.00 (cloth), £11.99 (paper)

In his earlier title, ‘Any time is Trinidad time’:social meanings and temporal consciousness(1999), Birth argued that the idea of time is

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contextual and contentious in the struggle overmorality and identity, and that differences intemporal concepts mutually reinforce racial,ethnic, gender, age, and class boundaries.Bacchanalian sentiments sets forward Birth’santhropological exploration into the culturalconceptualization of time in his familiar site offieldwork – the rural village of ‘Anamat’ inCentral Trinidad – with new research questions.In Trinidad and the wider Caribbean, musicis an ‘important means for making andcontesting cultural claims about identities andthe nation’ and a ‘means for thinking andgenerating feelings about such claims’ (p. 12,emphasis in original). Considering its politicalimplications, Birth questions ‘what Trinidadianmusic does and how it is used’ (p. 3),particularly how it co-ordinates human practicesand behaviours, (re)defines personal and groupidentities, and affects memory based on whichone comprehends, periodizes, and realignshistory.

Two words represent how Birth theoreticallyand methodologically addresses the questions:‘counterpoint’ and ‘polyrhythm’. More notablethan the difference in their respective applicationto the melodic and metrical themes, theseconcepts denote the relationships of multiplethemes that are independent in contour butinterdependent in harmony. Birth considersthese musical terms more serviceable asmetaphors of socio-political processes than theaccepted creole/ization and hybrid/izationmetaphors. As with music composed usingcontrapuntal techniques, in socio-politicalprocesses in Trinidad, multiple ‘voices’,‘melodies’, and themes unfold, colliding andcolluding. Using musical, as opposed tostructural, metaphors, Birth argues, canhighlight the fluidity of image, idea,consciousness, and identity regarding variousdimensions of Trinidadian lives. In consequence,he expects, scholarly attention will be shifted tothe formative contexts, that is, the ‘complexinterplay of a variety of cognitively dynamic andemotionally charged processes of relating’(p. 18) wherein such thoughts and feelings areevoked.

The first chapter captures the mostresounding ‘voice’ – the state. For Eric Williams,the first leader of independent Trinidad andTobago, the decolonization process involvedengineering new cultural values and aestheticsthat embraced all social segments, as opposedto the ‘dividing-and-ruling’ colonial culture.Williams and colonized intellectuals proposed tovalorize certain musical forms from a mosaic of

Trinidadian musics as representatives ofTrinidadian ‘national’ culture and identity bydramatizing them at government-sponsoredshowcases. The following chapter demonstrates,however, how performers and audience thinkand feel their musical experience has‘counterpointed’ the state’s effort to tame ‘folk’music to serve political needs and produced‘unintended consequences’. Admitting the stateto be the dominant theme, Birth ‘choose[s] toprivilege the audience [or, more broadly,“nonperforming participants” (p. 92)]’ (p. 28).Concentrating his ethnographic observations onthe ‘microlevel attitudes, relationships, andforms of [participation]’ (p. 91), he illustratesthat Carnival, ‘Panorama’ (the annual nationalsteelband competition), and othergovernment-sponsored musical contexts actuallyengage the sentiments that reinforce the existingkinship, group- and community-levelrelationships against the state’s intention tosubordinate such primordial ties to nationalunity.

According to Birth, however, Trinidadianmusic simultaneously fragments and connects thefragments. The development within a cyclicaltime-frame has built a ‘temporally unfoldingannual rhythm of musical repetition and change’in Trinidad. Owing to this ‘rhythmicity’ (p. 214),Trinidadian music can evoke an intensiveexchange of conflicting images, ideas, andidentities, which would have otherwise remainedseparate, in the same temporal and spatial limits.Birth exemplifies this potential of Trinidadianmusic to weave subjectivities intointersubjectivity with two episodes of‘enigmatic’ political incidents: the attemptedcoup in 1990 (chap. 4) and the general electionsin 1995 (chap. 5). The ‘public processes ofmusical consumption coupled with groupdiscussions in public settings’ (p. 188) haveturned ‘unusual’ events and the experiencedhistory of terror into a thinkable and tolerablepart of shared cultural ordinariness. Articulatingin lyrics and rhythms, and renderingconsumable using bodies and senses inpublic, music is competent to develop themetaphor of ‘mix-up’ into the shared culturalmodels of Trinidadian nation, as opposed tostructured government policy towardscreolization.

This book makes gains for a wider audienceacross disciplines and geographic focuses. Theapproach to the resonance between the‘musical’ and ‘temporal’ complements historicalstudies of Trinidadian music, and the analysis ofhow the ‘audience’ interprets and uses musical

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experiences supplements the studies of text anddiscourse from music-makers’ and performers’standpoints. As one who is concerned withculture and nationalism, I believe that Birth’sexploration of Trinidadian sense of nationdrawing on ethnographic research in ruralvillages serves as a reminder that colonialTrinidad was divisive but relatively fluid,causing constant dialogues between differentsegments. This has been seriously disregarded inthe urban- and state-focused studies of‘nation-building’.

Teruyuki Tsuji Nova Southeastern University

Buckley, Anthony D., Críostóir Mac

Cárthaigh, Séamas Ó Catháin, &Séamas Mac Mathúna (eds).Border-crossing: mumming in cross-border andcross-community contexts. xvii, 327 pp., maps,tables, plates, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Dundalk:Dundalgan Press (W. Tempest), 2007. £48.00

(cloth)

The edited collection of essays that makes upthis volume looks at the genre of ‘mumming’ –a series of related European folk traditions inwhich disguised amateur performers visitneighbours’ houses to perform a play and toplay music. The performances typically follow acircumscribed ‘script’, and they are often bawdyand exciting affairs that contravene basic socialnorms.

Several overlapping themes emerge in thevolume, and it must be said that, despite myneat delineation below, many of the essaysaddress several of the themes simultaneously.

Some of the essays deal with the ways inwhich nationalism and ethnicity are recapitulatedin performances or, conversely, how theperformances are used to disrupt and challengethese definitions of community. Ray Cashmandescribes how the tradition has historically beenused by a community along the border withNorthern Ireland either to bridge ethnic andnational divides or to exacerbate them. In theScandinavian context, Christine Eike writes abouthow various non-Norwegian performance genreshave been absorbed into Norwegian traditions,while Mari Kulmanen similarly describes theintroduction of Hallowe’en into Finland. PaulSmith looks at the relationship between printedmaterial dealing with mumming in England andIreland. Likewise, Terry Gunnell analyses therelationship between performances in theShetlands and the Faroe Islands to those inScandinavia and the British Isles.

Most of the chapters address issues ofsocial change and the adaptation of tradition.For example, Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh usesarchival material and a recent projectdocumenting modern mumming performancesto describe how formal theatrical venues andmethods have changed the tradition in recentyears in Ireland. Carsten Bregenhøj writes aboutthe factors leading to the survival and loss ofmumming traditions in Denmark, while EddieCass looks at the development of English folkplays since their revival after the Second WorldWar. In an interesting essay, Caoimhe NíShúilleabháin describes how Irish immigrantfamilies in Newfoundland have carefullypreserved the ‘Wren Boys’ tradition ofmumming.

Another prominent approach might becharacterized as a formal ritual analysis in whicha particular mumming performance or set ofperformances is broken down into itsconstituent parts and related back to itsperformative context. The most explicitexamples of this analytical formalism are thechapters by Anthony Buckley, Séamas Ó Catháin,and Peter Millington. Buckley compares thestructure and motifs of a mummingperformance to a Catholic Mass and the Masonicritual induction into the status of ‘Third Degree’,while Ó Catháin makes use of linguisticdifferences between mummers’ rhymes in Irishand English to track how the tradition haschanged. In a chapter describing individuallyauthored or adapted mummers’ texts,Millington also uses a structural analysis toshow which motifs and themes must bemaintained in order for a performance toremain ‘authentic’.

Given the performance genre underdiscussion, it is not surprising that many of thecontributors use the notion of liminality todiscuss metaphoric border-crossing (e.g.cross-dressing and disguising) and also thecrossing of more literal borders. This is perhapsmost explicitly seen in Henry Glassie’sdescription of mumming in County Fermanagh,Ray Cashman’s discussion of mumming alongthe border of Northern Ireland, Jack Santino’semphasis on the creative aspects ofperformance, or Terry Gunnell’s piece on‘guising’ traditions in the Shetlands. Finally,most of the essays also deal with notions ofcommunity in one way or another, and howthese traditions either foster social cohesionor challenge it. Neill Martin’s chapteron guising in Scotland might be the bestexample.

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While the case studies are fascinatingreading on their own, unfortunately, given thenature of the topic, the volume as a whole isvery narrowly focused. The book is presumablygeared towards those who attended theconference out of which the volume sprungand also, as the editors suggest, performingmummers themselves. For that reason, it isunlikely to appeal to wider audiences outsideof the study of folklore or the study of Europe(and especially Ireland). This is exacerbatedby the fact that the editors only briefly broadenthe discussion in the very short introductoryessay. This is a missed opportunity. Much morecould be made from some interesting issuesbrought up in the case studies. As a result, nosignificantly new theoretical ideas about thestudy of ritual, performance, or communityemerge. That said, the rich ethnographicdescriptions in the volume will be welcomed bythose interested in European folklore (especiallyprimarily the British Isles and Western Europe)or, more generally, the study of performanceand ritual.

Adam Kaul Augustana College

Religion and myth

Fitzgerald, Timothy. Discourse on civility andbarbarity: a critical history of religion andrelated categories. x, 354 pp., bibliogr. Oxford:Univ. Press, 2007. £28.99 (cloth)

Timothy Fitzgerald of the University of Stirling isone of a group of scholars of ‘religion’, many ofthem American, who have engaged in a radicalreview of its definition, following the lead ofJonathan Z. Smith in Imagining religion: fromBabylon to Jonestown – ‘Religion has noindependent existence apart from the academy’(1988: xi) – and interacting with culturalanthropologists of various intellectualpersuasions such as Benson Saler and Talal Asad.Anthropologists will respond sympathetically toFitzgerald’s master thesis: that religion is not adistinct phenomenon to be analysed separatelyfrom economics and politics, and thatcomparative religion and world religions areartefacts of theologians. In many non-Westerncultures even today, and in Britain before theseventeenth to eighteenth centuries, he argues,religion should be seen as ‘encompassing’what are now generally identified as seculardomains.

The core of his book is a close analysis of thelexical field associated with the changingmeanings in English of the ‘religious’. Before thesplit between church and state, this used to becontrasted with irrational barbarism or heresy,until an originally ecclesiastical distinctionbetween the religious or regular clergy and thesecular or extra-monastic clergy mutated into adistinction overlapping with that between sacredand profane, but not identical to it. The deism ofthe Enlightenment, inherent in the language ofthe American Declaration of Independence, wasa transitional stage that gave way to thecrystallization, in the US Constitution, ofthe idea of religion as a voluntary organizationlicensed by a state which stands back fromreligion.

The semantic issue is complicated by anolder, Latinate sense of religion, meaning thepunctilious observance of ritual. Furtherdemonstrating the intricacy of Fitzgerald’stheme, one chapter covers a compendium,published in 1613 by an English vicar, SamuelPurchas, of narratives, both past andcontemporary, about peoples of the world.What Purchas meant by ‘religion’ was ProtestantChristian truth, but his ironic extension of theterm to other ‘religions’ meant its opposite –superstitions and pagan misunderstandings, inwhich he included Romanism.

These chapters leave a strong impression andshould sensitize any reader of anglophonehistorical texts on religion to the risks ofanachronistic and ideologically loadedassumptions. Fitzgerald leaves to other scholarsthe task of correlating his findings with Frenchand other sources.

The topical inferences Fitzgerald draws fromhis study are sometimes weak (e.g. when hetouches on present-day Islam). But hepersuasively argues against the embedding inUK school education of a tacit understandingthat ‘the same one sacred unseen Holy’manifests itself in different forms in differentcultures (p. 27). His claim that the modernreligious-secular binary is an achievement ofinsidious postcolonial rhetoric is a challenge tothose involved in officially sponsored initiativessuch as ‘religion and development’, ‘religionand conservation’, and inter-faith peace-making.Yet if this demystification is to be the main aimof ‘religious studies’, Fitzgerald is like a treesurgeon who saws off the branch he issitting on.

The rhetoric that underlies Fitzgerald’sown position on the discipline of religiousstudies seems to be a wish to downgrade, on

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the one hand, efforts to understand privatebeliefs and individual experience, and, on theother hand, efforts to compare differenttraditions. But first, historical research andethnography when imaginatively undertakencan provide at least a window into individualbeliefs. These clearly mattered greatly (to take anexample from the English sixteenth century) topeople who were burned at the stake forrefusing to recant. Second, a word such as‘religion’ is arguably no more tricky to handlethan various other key words used incomparative social studies.

Fitzgerald is also concerned to discredit theideal of scientific knowledge of the materialworld, and a fortiori of the social world: ‘Thesystem of binaries between spirit and matter,soul and body, supernatural and natural, turnsthe world into an object, or a system of objects,and us into master observers’ (p. 278). He givesno attention to the possibility of cumulative orreplicable knowledge.

Though stimulating, his book is annoyinglyrepetitive – for which Fitzgerald pleadsmitigation on the grounds that he had to meet aUK Research Assessment Exercise deadline forpublication. But a hotelier who rushes toprepare rooms in time for the season may notget the testimonials from guests that wouldotherwise be deserved.

Jonathan Benthall University College London

Fjelstad, Karen & Nguyen Thi Hien (eds).Possessed by the spirits: mediumship incontemporary Vietnamese communities. 186

pp., figs, illus. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ.Press, 2006. £19.95 (paper)

This collection of essays on the rapidly increasingphenomenon of Vietnamese spirit mediumshipcomes with a comprehensive introduction by theeditors and a masterly summarizing conclusionby Laurel Kendall. Both editors contribute theirown essays while Fjelstad also collaborates withanother contributor, Lisa Maiffret, on a separatepaper. Another main contributor, Kirsten Endres,also contributes to a further joint essay withViveca Larsson. The collection is extensivelycross-referenced.

The essays, based largely on recent fieldresearch, veer between the more ethnographicand the more theoretically orientated, but allshow a thorough knowledge of their subject andraise interesting questions about mediumship ingeneral, its relations to personal transformation,the state, and gender. From a practice until very

recently condemned as ‘superstitious’, the cultseems to be moving towards a more ‘theatricalperformance representing Vietnamese nationalculture’ (p. 13). Fjelstad and Maiffret also dealwith its transnational aspects as (mostly US)mediums begin to travel between California andVietnam.

In the concluding essay, Kendall notes thatthe contributors have gone well beyond anearlier paradigm, derived from the work of IoanLewis, which would have portrayed these largelyfemale cults of the ‘mother goddess’ as aperipheral form empowering women bycomparison with the more male exorcisticpossession cult associated with the heroichistorical figure of Tran Hung Dao. These twomain forms of mediumship now appear to bemerging, as the introduction (p. 10) notes andPham Quynh Phuong’s paper argues. And aftersome serious disavowals and understandablereluctance to indulge lightly in cross-culturalcomparisons, Kendall does nevertheless drawout some most suggestive ‘resonant’ threads(p. 164) across other East Asian (and SoutheastAsian) societies, particularly those influenced byMahayana Buddhism, where dancing musicalfemale mediums communicate with the spirits ofthe deceased or cultural heroes and deities, fromBurma and Thailand to China, drawing on herown work on Korean mediumship.

It is clear that the rituals examined herelargely form part of a modern, or made-over,tradition, and there has been considerablerecent work on them around and since the timethis book was prepared, such as the special issueof Asian Ethnology (formerly Asian FolkloreStudies) in 2008 (67: 2), entitled ‘Popular religionand the sacred life of material goods incontemporary Vietnam’ (ed. L. Kendall), and thework of Philip Taylor which many of thecontributors refer to. Several of the contributors,like Barley Norton and Pham Quynh Phuong,have their own books out and form some of thedominant voices in this field.

Ngo Duc Thinh provides a compellingoverview of the history of this ‘mother goddessworship’, while Pham Quynh Phuong providesethnographic details of the relationship betweenthe ‘Saint Tran’ cult and that of the mothergoddess possession cults. Norton’s piece onmusic and gender is also of great interest,arguing that mediumship provides flexibleopportunities for transgressing genderboundaries while still remaining containedwithin stereotypical gender frameworks. Severalessays discuss the recent concern with‘materialism’ and the sense of nostalgia

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displayed by some modern mediums for therecent past, when most popular religiouspractices were severely suppressed (e.g. Fjelstad;Larsson and Endres). The penultimatecontribution (Larsson and Endres) emphasizesthe importance of the ‘ritual community’ inwhich mediums are embedded (as do Fjelstadand Maiffret), and this is perhaps a topic onewould have liked to learn more about from thiscollection, in which fieldwork seems often to bebased on interviews with individual mediums.Other contributions deal with the vitalimportance of the therapeutic value ofmediumship (Endres; Nguyen Thi Hien; Fjelstadand Maiffret), and again one would like to hearmore of the medical system involved in theinitiations of mediums and their diagnoses ofillness. Kendall, in conclusion, notes the longassociation of ‘economics and a popularreligion’ (p. 179) in these areas – which ispointed to by Nguyen Thi Hien’s examination ofpaper offerings and competitiveness betweenmediums under the impact of the marketeconomy – and the continuing significance ofthe imagined pre-modern state (the ‘historicalimaginary of the pre-modern state’, p. 181) inthese novel, or revived, ritual formulations.Beyond the rational gates of bureaucracy, apopular ritual economy flourishes, yet now itsperformance elements appear to lendthemselves to its inscription within a nationalstory. This collection well approaches whatKendall (p. 168) notes as the ‘messiness,openness, and geographical and ontologicalfluidity’ of popular religion. The collectionincludes nice black-and-white illustrations.

Nicholas Tapp Australian National University

Makris, G.P. Islam in the Middle East: a livingtradition. viii, 348 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, NewYork: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. £55.00

(cloth), £17.99 (paper)

This useful textbook, with a judicious selectionof ethnographic examples, emphasizes‘transcultural similarities and universalaspirations as well as local interpretations’ ofIslam in the Middle East. With its focus on Islamas a living tradition, it is a welcome successor tothe author’s earlier Ph.D. account of hisSudanese fieldwork in Khartoum: Changingmasters: spirit possession and identity constructsamong descendants of slaves and othersubordinates in the Sudan (2000). That work is amodel of anthropological empathy at its bestand provides an excellent base for a view of

everyday Islam in the life of ordinary, and oftenoppressed, Muslims. The Middle East here isunderstood as ‘the vast region stretching fromMauritania and Morocco to Afghanistan andPakistan in Asia, via North Africa (including theSudan) and Turkey’. With this large canvas,Makris opens up a large vista of Islamic societiesto comparative sociological analysis in a deeperand more satisfactory way than Ernest Gellnerachieved with his ‘pendulum theory’ of mysticaland non-mystical modes of Islam. In Gellner’sover-simplistic analysis, this dichotomy was heldto correspond to that between illiterate rural andliterate urban communities. In a widerframework, Makris argues, Islamic ‘orthodoxy’ –that which is considered correct and traditionallyacceptable – is always in the making: ‘theunsteady, ever-changing result of an eminentlypolitical process’. If his ethnographic examplesof this process make little reference to Frenchsources, this seems justified in a work designedprimarily for anglophone students.

Islam, Makris emphasizes, is not an object (asthe classic ‘Orientalists’ often appeared to think),‘but rather a discursive tradition within the flowof history as concretised in particular societies atparticular times’. Thus, for instance, he notesthat ‘if anything, states create nations ratherthan vice versa’. Of course, careful examinationof the historical evidence in Islam, as elsewhere,illustrates movements in both directions,perhaps to a greater extent than the authorrecognizes.

Makris begins his vivid presentation of livingIslam, within these vast historical andgeographical coordinates, with an admirablyconcise review of Islam’s four doctrinalfoundations: the Qur’an; the Prophetic tradition(Sunna and hadith); the juridical consensus(Ijima); and reasoning by analogy (Qiyas andijtihad). With these and other sources oflegitimacy, Islamic Law (Sharia) retained from itsorigins ambiguity and dynamism, allowing it toreflect and define Islamic ‘truth’ in differentsocieties and times according to the ambientsocio-political conditions. Of course, as Makrisrightly stresses, study of the Qur’an as thepre-eminent sacred text does not invite believersto approach it critically and to engage indialogue as to what it might stand for. It mustbe accepted unquestioningly as the true Word ofGod, there being no interpretation or questionof this. It has to be admitted, however, thatwhile this is true in principle, modernist thinkersdo indeed interpret the sacred tradition when itsuits them. So, for instance, the reformistTunisian politician and intellectual Bourghiba

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famously argued that the Prophet’s approval ofpolygyny should not be taken literally, since itwas manifestly obvious that no man could, aswas enjoined, treat four wives equally. Hencewhat was really recommended was monogamy,allowing a husband to treat his wife properlyand to encourage her moral and educationaladvancement. Without citing this particularexample, Makris gives a sensitive account ofwomen’s status in Muslim societies, theirtraditional and modern situations and rights,and criticizes the limited ethnocentricjudgements of simplistic Western commentators,especially in the context of ‘development’.

Gender issues take us directly in MiddleEastern thought to the world of spirits, whereMakris draws primarily on his own and otherresearch from northeast Africa. Makris also treatsat appropriate length the cult of zar and relatedspirits. These, as he argues, are at the heart of‘popular’ Islam. This topic, as I recall beingforcefully reminded of at an internationalconference on the subject, is distinctlyunpopular with orthodox Muslim scholars andacademics, especially fundamentalists. Thetension here is especially heightened today withthe prominence of fundamentalist politicsthroughout contemporary Islam. Finally, itshould be recorded that this very readableaccount is accompanied by ample notes andreferences and a workmanlike index. The textmight usefully have included a survey of earlierwriters on the region, and its agreeable formatwould have been further enhanced if space hadbeen found for a selection of topical illustrations.

I.M. Lewis London School of Economics andPolitical Science

Rosen, Lawrence. Varieties of Muslimexperience: encounters with Arab political andcultural life. x, 268 pp., bibliogr. London,Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008. £18.00

(cloth)

In these twelve essays Rosen discusses a varietyof issues from Arab societies which have oftenattracted the interest of many in the West,specialists and the general public alike. Amongothers, these include suicide bombings, thestrength of personalism, the Danish cartooncontroversy, the poverty of representational arts,the allure of fundamentalism for Arab scientists,and a disregard of human rights.

Approaching the Arabic-speaking world as adistinct entity, the author argues that there issomething rather singular which can be called

‘Arab culture’. Rosen does not provide us withany clear sociological definition of it, but speaksin terms of partaking in ‘shared orientationstowards the world of everyday experience’ andin a ‘shared cultural base’ which lies beneath thevariety of everyday life that strikes the eye of thecasual but sympathetic Western traveller tothe Arab countries. Moreover, Rosen maintains,this ‘Arab culture’ cannot be properlyunderstood ‘without recourse to the religiousinvolvement of any concept’, though heacknowledges that religion alone does notsuffice for a full explanation of reality.

Two characteristics of ‘Arab culture’ aresingled out as explanatory tools for the issuesdiscussed in the book. The first concerns theidea of an ‘Arab self’. This, Rosen describes asfundamentally ‘indivisible’ – that is, notsuffering from segregation into potentiallydiscordant roles, as the case is allegedly in theWest; and as ‘relational’ – that is, consisting ofthe sum of its relationships with others, be theykinsmen, neighbours, or members of the tribe,market acquaintances and competitors, statefunctionaries and bureaucrats, political friendsand foes.

What is significant in this image of the self,Rosen maintains, is his (sic) continuousengagement in a never-ending negotiationprocess, which reveals the social world to be‘composed of running imbalances ofobligations, constantly fashioned and serviced,constantly in need of reciprocation’.

The second idea Rosen presents as central tothe concept of ‘Arab culture’ concerns therelationship between ‘tyranny’ and ‘chaos’. In acultural environment where doubt equalsunbelief and, consequently, threatens the orderand cohesion ‘of the community of believersthat makes possible the world created formankind’, freedom and Western democracy arenot necessarily perceived as alternatives totyranny, that is, to the rule of a strongpersonality who, through his connections toothers and his skill in negotiating, ruthlessly,even violently, has managed to elevate himselfinto a position of power.

These two ideas, the indivisible ‘Arab self’and the fear of chaos and its destructiveconsequences for the community of believers,which Rosen implicitly equals to society or socialorder, are employed by the author in the analysisof the issues discussed in each chapter of thebook.

Thus, a violent Arab dictator may be seen aslegitimate if, through his networks of reciprocalobligations, he has successfully negotiated his

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position with his dependants. In a similar vein,an Iraqi suicide bomber should not be seen as areligious fanatic, but as an actor who tries torecapture social order through martyrdom in asociety where the American occupation hasdestroyed the game of negotiation between theleader and his dependants, cancelled all avenuesof reciprocity, and not supplied an alternative.Then again, the rather opaque nature ofQur’anic text to many in the West is clarified ifwe approach the Holy Book as a collection ofimmutable revelations in the form of timelesscontext-independent propositions which cannotbe doubted. This absence of doubt or itsopposite, the cult of certainty, is also at play inthe case of the scientist who embracesfundamentalism.

I agree with Rosen that the premises uponwhich the construction of personhood is baseddiffer between cultures. However, I wonder ifsuch an understanding of the self as the one heproposes for the Arab world is the mostappropriate. Ideal types are analyticallyimportant, but are not accurate descriptions ofethnographic realities. Identities, indeed the veryconcepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’, have been shownby contemporary theory to be always in themaking within ever-changing historicalconditions. By this I do not mean solely thestruggles against foreign occupation andeconomic hegemony. I also refer to all internaldifferentiations of gender, class, as well aspolitical and religious/sectarian affiliations whichcharacterize the local histories of Arab societies. Ithink that Rosen’s valuable insight onpersonhood in the Arab world could deepenand develop further if situated more deeply in itsharsh colonial and postcolonial history in an erain which ‘selves’ and ‘others’ are recognized asshattered hybrids.

Gerasimos Makris Panteion University

Social anthropology

Arnold, Denise Y. with Juan de Dios

Yapita. The metamorphosis of heads: textualstruggles, education and land in the Andes. xiii,330 pp., maps, figs, tables, illus., bibliogr.Pittsburgh: Univ. Press, 2006. $35.00 (cloth)

This co-authored book proposes an Andean‘textual theory’ founded in cloth andconceptualized in opposition to a ‘Europeantextual theory’. Andean historical practices of

weaving, knotting, and braiding (e.g. theproduction of knotted textile kipu by the Inkas)are understood to shape contemporarypractices. There is thus understood to be ahomology between ancient techniques ofproducing textile artefacts and a host ofcontemporary practices included in a broadlydefined category of ‘textual practices’.

An Andean ‘textual theory’ is associated withlearning through dictation, recitation, andmemorization rooted in older ‘textual practices’,something which is taken to account for the lowlevel of literacy in Bolivia. Similarly, pupils’limited access to books in schools is interpretedas an expression of much older attitudes to kipu,perceived as living beings and attended byparticular principles of storage and ritualpractice. The school is understood as amediating institution between the nation-stateand community members. In this interplay,pupils are a form of ‘communal tribute, part of apact in which parents, as original landowners ...contribute to the state an annual “sacrifice” oftheir children in exchange for their communalrights to land’ (p. 87).

The authors are inspired by Derrida’s notionof the relation between voice and writing. Intheir interpretation of Derrida’s work theypropose that ‘voice underlies writing, whetherthis writing takes the form of weaving, kipu, orany other woven or braided vocal support’(p. 272). This results in a unique perspectiveboth on Derrida and on Andean ‘textualpractices’. ‘The voice’ is ultimately understoodas the ‘primordial voice of the Inka’, given lifemore than four centuries after his death in the‘textual practices’ of rural communities. Theauthors further draw on Viveiros de Castro’snotion of ‘ontological depredation [sic]’,understood as a mode of reconstructingthe Self from an enemy Other. Ultimately, thisapproach stresses Andean incorporation andappropriation of ‘foreign’ textuality rather thanstruggle.

While the book provides novel perspectiveson important questions, it is regrettable thatmany key terms are left undefined. Reference ismade to ‘constant land wars’, ‘agrarian reform’,and ‘educational reform’, while informants aredefined as ‘wise ones’. No contextualinformation is provided, such as the aims andcontents of the said reforms; what groupsstruggle over land and why; or how a ‘wise one’is defined and by whom. The authors assumethe reader is well versed in Bolivian history,politics, social relations, and culture. For thosewho are not area specialists (e.g. this reader),

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the book paints an abstract picture based onetymological and semiotic interpretations ofpractices.

While the authors aim to describe ‘the worldof children’, this is done at the level of a‘meta-language’, where children are butsymbols in an economy of meanings. The resultis a perception of children as passive pawns in atextual struggle between community memberswho hold to an ancient ‘textuality’ and themodernizing Bolivian nation-state, leaving themlittle agency in how these struggles are playedout.

The book is based on ethnographic researchin the community of Livichuco (OruroDepartment) and comparative studies carriedout by the authors’ students. It thus concernsthe wider Southern Andean highlands. It isstriking that only a brief note on methodology isincluded stating that these are ‘describedextensively elsewhere’ (a footnote refers to twopieces in Spanish and one article in English from1997). This lack of methodological transparency,combined with the use of Spanish terms that arenot translated, and the lack of contextualinformation, leaves the reader with a senseof having navigated a highly symboliclandscape in which the practical reality of landrights and struggles over education remainselusive.

In her article from 1997 (‘Using ethnographyto unravel different kinds of knowledge in theAndes’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies6, 33-50), Arnold called for a new focus inAndean ethnography that would study nativeAndean discourse, texts, and textual practices.The metamorphosis of heads contributes to thisobjective, and to creating new ethnographicapproaches to the region. In this light, it isperhaps a matter of regret that the book iscentred on its own closed circle of meaningsand does not attempt to communicate withthose unfamiliar with the region and itshistory.

Anna Portisch Brunel University

Buckler, Sarah. Fire in the dark: tellingGypsiness in North East England. xiii, 234 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: BerghahnBooks, 2007. £45.00 (cloth)

It is singularly appropriate that this volume ispart of the publisher’s ‘Studies in AppliedAnthropology Series’, since the author, Sarah(Sal) Buckler, has worked at the interfaceof local government and academia for many

years. With the current lack of growth inanthropology as an academic discipline in theUK, accounts produced by anthropologists whoare employed by institutions outside theuniversities is of particular interest, since it is inthese places that anthropologists will come,increasingly, to locate themselves. And if thisabsorbing book is anything to go by, then weshould look forward to the future withconfidence. This is a book written by someonewho has worked with Gypsies in the northeast ofEngland, rather than by one who has worked onthem. Throughout the text, Bucklerdemonstrates a close empathy with the Gypsies’points of view, beginning with a book title thatderives from a core metaphor used by membersof the group. The story starts, and stories arecentral here, with a meeting between localcouncil officials, Gypsies, and the author, whotogether attempt to solve a problem. Theproblem seems intractable and this intractabilityis the stimulus for the engaging account thatfollows.

The book is divided into three parts. In part I(‘The wasteland’) Buckler reviews and critiquesaccounts of community which tend towards astructuralist approach, focusing on boundaryand oppositional characteristics of groups andcultures. For Buckler, ‘culture’ is both creativeand contingent, facilitating rather thandetermining social action. She is especially alertto the ways in which groups such as the Gypsiesare often homogenized (by academics and localgovernment officials) and stripped of theiragency as individuals. Gypsies (at least in thenortheast of England) live in the spaces andplaces between ‘mainstream’ society and whatthe mainstream define as ‘Gypsy culture’. These‘wastelands’, which are presented as both realand metaphorical, provide a meeting-point forGypsies and gorgios (the Romany term fornon-Gypsies). Buckler talks again of thetranscending of boundaries in describing herfieldwork methods. She is disarming in heraccount of the ambivalence of her status inrelation both to the Gypsies for whom sheis an advocate and the council officers withwhom she has to work. At one point she findsherself in the Anthropology Department atDurham along with three Gypsy researchparticipants (and friends) – an inversion of ‘thefield’ increasingly likely to be experienced byanthropologists in the UK. Buckler goes on topresent a potted history of Teesside, the areain which the ethnography is set, making clearthat the Gypsies with whom she workedbelonged in Teesside, tending to return there

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after travelling and sometimes moving intohouses there.

The chapters in part II (‘The Fire’) provide anarticulate account of the ways in which storiesare constructive of the Gypsy moral universe andultimately of Gypsiness as a lived identity.Story-telling among Gypsies, argues Buckler, isdistinctive for a number of reasons, one beingtheir tendency not to read books. She goes onto establish the centrality of family in the storiesthat Gypsies tell. However, the stories thatBuckler presents, although certainly focusing onfamily, are similar to stories figuring inethnographic accounts from other Britishcontexts insofar as they tend to refer toparticular people living in particular times andplaces. The willingness of Gypsies to move toand fro between Gypsy and gorgio worlds isexemplified in an account of the baptism of aGypsy baby. The context is Yarm High Streetduring the annual fair. Buckler records thevarious exchanges between Presbyterianpriest and Gypsy group and offers a preciseanalysis of this social situation (as Gluckmanwould have called it). It is a wonderfullynuanced account in which Buckler drawsbrilliantly on the idea of ‘the inchoate’: aconcept developed by James Fernandez(Persuasions and performances, 1986) to describethose vague and partially defined experiencesand ideas relating to some ‘other’ whichindividuals and groups give shape to andmanipulate through, for instance, their use ofpronouns. It is a mode of analysis which isdeveloped in part III (‘The dark’). Buckler returnsto the meeting with which she began hernarrative and indicates, once more, the subtleways and means by which individuals (Gypsy orgorgio) more or less self-consciously definethemselves as ‘we’ against some imagined‘they’. Despite her criticism of ethnographicaccounts which allocate each individual to aculture, she herself talks of Gypsies whothemselves straddle two cultures – while otherindividuals and groups do not? And concludingthat both Gypsies and gorgios occupy oneculture but then adding that they are ‘membersof different traditions of practice’ (p. 204) isconfusing. At last then, and despite her bestefforts, Buckler struggles to escape the infernallogic of the binary opposition. This is less of aweakness, though, and more an interestingconundrum which will continue to provokedebate among and between scholars,practitioners, and those in-between for sometime to come.

Peter Collins Durham University

Endicott, Kirk M. & Karen L. Endicott.The headman was a woman: the genderegalitarian Batek of Malaysia. xii, 163 pp.,maps, tables, illus., DVD, bibliogr. LongGrove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 2008. $17.95

(paper)

Since I work mainly on urban anthropology inMalaysia and the Southeast Asian region, Ihesitated in accepting the invitation to review apublication that appeared at first glance to havelittle in common with my usual reading fare. Inhindsight, it proved to be a beneficial read infamiliarizing me with the lives of ‘fellowMalaysians’ seldom noticed except among thespecialists.

The Batek (or Bateq) speak a Mon-Khmerlanguage and are Semang nomadichunter-gatherers residing in the tropicalrainforests of the northeastern ecological nicheof Peninsular Malaysia. Their cursory physicalresemblance to African Pygmies, leading to theappellation ‘Malayan Negritos’, inclinednineteenth-century ethnologists to speculatethat they were the remnant of a ‘primitive race’displaced by more technologically ‘advanced’races in the distant past.

Presently numbering not more than 800-900,they aptly call themselves ‘the people/guardiansof the forest’, underscoring the pivotalimportance of the forest to their daily materialexistence, belief systems, and emotionalwell-being. Joined recently by Germananthropologist Christian Vogt and by Malaysiananthropologist Lye Tuck-Po in the 1990s, theAmerican anthropologist couple Kirk and KarenEndicott have been studying extensively theBatek since the early 1970s, and have publishedon various aspects of their lives.

This particular publication brings togethertheir cumulative knowledge on the Batek peoplespecifically to address the theme of ‘genderegalitarianism’, as suggested by the paradoxicaltitle of the book. Through accessible and lucidprose, the Endicotts provide a distilledethnographic account of the Batek way of lifewith an emphasis on their gender beliefs andpractices. While the original fieldwork data onwhich the book is founded are rather dated(gathered mainly in the 1970s), chapter 6 doesaddress shifts in gender relations arising fromchanged environmental conditions in theintervening years up to 1990. A 37-minute videodocumentary (filmed in 1990) also accompaniesthe book.

The Bateks live in small groups of betweenfour to twenty-five households, and re-locate

Book reviews672


after a week or so when they feel that theresources in the locality are depleted. A divisionof labour exists in the procurement of foodwhich is rationalized in physiological andmythological terms. However, the Endicottsargue that ‘the Batek value system does not givehigh prestige to some jobs while devaluingothers’ (p. 108). Indeed, it is the complementaryroles that both sexes play in ensuring a constantfood supply, whether in the shape of huntedforest game (like monkeys, hornbills, bamboorats, and pangolins) or gathered tubers, fromwhich the notion of gender egalitarianism drawsits ideological force. Significantly, in terms ofweight, tubers collected mainly by womenconstitute the greatest single source of food – itis a low-risk and high-return subsistence activity(pp. 82f.). In short, ‘the economic security ofBatek women was based on their being able todepend upon the group as a whole in additionto their own efforts’ (pp. 148-9).

Similarly, child-rearing is considered theresponsibility of both men and women. Parentsteach their children by example and by invokingthe authority of a third party to avert undesirableactions, sidestep coercion, and avoid physicalviolence as it would lead to a depressivecondition for the person disciplined. Platonicmale-female relationships, expressed innumerous ways – not least in the mundaneactivity of de-lousing head lice of both sexes infull public view – allow for more flexibleworking relationships across gender even whenone is already married. In the event of ‘gooddivorce’, children also acquire more parents whowill care for them.

Decision-making and leadership patterns arenon-competitive, and emanate from the ability,personality, and knowledge base of the person,whether male or female. It is on this point thatthe Endicotts draw the inspiration for the title oftheir book. In their fieldwork site, Tanyogn’sformidable abilities and personality hadprojected her as the natural leader of her camppeers. However, based on skewed informationand the conventional practice of a male-basedleadership polity, the state authorities hadunknowingly appointed her as the headman.

In 1990, the Endicotts conducted follow-upfieldwork on a re-settled Batek community sitedclose to Taman Negara (National Park). Theydiscerned changes to the social organization ofgender relations as the consequence of thecombined effects of logging, plantationagriculture, and of state-promoted Islamicproselytization of the Batek in order for them ‘tobecome Malays’. Whilst many have succumbed

to becoming nominal Muslims and tohorticulture, the Endicotts also note that theyhave also endeavoured to live their old ways asmuch as possible in the largest remainingcontiguous patch of rainforests left in TamanNegara.

This book provides an engaging introductorytext to the economic activities, socialorganization, and belief system of the Batek, andto the formidable challenges that they face incontemporary Malaysia.

Seng-Guan Yeoh Monash University

Lamphere, Louise, with Eva Price, Carole

Cadman & Valerie Darwin. Weavingwomen’s lives: three generations in a Navajofamily. xiii, 314 pp., illus., bibliogr.Albuquerque: Univ. New Mexico Press, 2007.$24.95 (paper)

In this well-written ethnography LouiseLamphere traces the lives of three generations ofwomen from a Navajo family in northwesternNew Mexico. Lamphere documents the race andclass issues in Navajo interactions with others,but also the strength and vitality of Navajoculture. She focuses on women because ‘there isno book that I feel adequately follows thetransformation of Navajo experience during thetwentieth century and details women’s lives aswell as those of their male kinfolk’ (pp. 2-3). Onereason for emphasizing women’s voices andorganizing the narrative from their perspective isto make the volume accessible to collegestudents. This also increases its appeal to ageneral audience.

The author avoids the shopworn trope of theNavajo as isolated from American society (whichthey have not been for centuries) partly bycomparing their lives with hers, while avoidingthe solipsism of many reflexive ethnographies.The result is a moving story of the Navajos’incorporation of new ideas and practices into adistinctly Navajo framework. The book alsospeaks to the importance of long-term fieldwork(Lamphere’s began in 1965), as she documentsimportant changes both in Navajo and in thelarger American culture, including the increasinginfluence of the national economy. Lampherecontests, however, the model that the Navajoassimilate along a continuum from traditionalto modern while ‘losing’ their culture alongthe way.

Eva Price, the eldest Navajo woman,envisions her family as a cornstalk with itsbranches. Her life in many respects fits a

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common conception of traditional Navajo lifewith its emphasis on place, kin relationships,weaving, and agriculture, including corncultivation and the use of corn pollen andcuisine in rituals. Eva notes that her story will beincomplete because, ‘In our tradition, you can’ttell the whole thing. You won’t last long if youtell everything ... it’s the old traditional way’(p. 5). Lamphere explains that among the Navajoknowledge is power and must be imparted in areciprocal manner. In addition, telling all ofone’s stories can shorten a person’s life. WhatEva does tell illustrates the significance ofweaving and of such rituals as the Kinaaldá, thegirl’s puberty ceremony. And while kin areimportant, marital bonds among the matrilinealNavajo are weak and the theme of divorce orseparation runs through Eva’s and the others’narratives.

Eva’s daughter Carole was born in 1948, atime of disruption and change following thereturn of Navajo who fought in the SecondWorld War, oil exploration, off-reservationlabour, the expansion of formal education, andMormon missionary activity, including theplacement of Navajo children with Mormonfamilies. Carole went to Utah under theplacement programme for three years as a child,but later celebrated her Kinaaldá. In themid-1960s Carole attended the Bureau of IndianAffairs boarding school and was in many ways atypical American teenager, but she was also apatient in a Navajo healing ceremony. Thencame a baby out of wedlock who died, anotherpregnancy (resulting in Valerie), marriage andtwo more children, alcohol problems in thefamily, and separation from her husband. Some

experiences, including Carole’s alternationbetween wage labour and welfare, were typicalof other American women.

Carole’s daughter Valerie was born in 1973,and spent considerable time with hergrandmothers, who grounded her in Navajoculture. She, too, had a Kinaaldá, in whichLamphere played the role of Salt Woman who‘moulds’ the celebrant. Valerie visitedLamphere’s anthropology classes to discuss thisexperience, enrolled in college, and had a babywith her boyfriend. After overcoming manyobstacles, in 2000 Valerie became the first in herfamily to receive a university degree (in healtheducation). She wore traditional Navajo dressunder her academic gown at graduation. Valeriethen obtained work as a patient servicesrepresentative in a local hospital, an appropriateuse of her education. These brief summaries donot do justice to the complexities and richnessof the women’s lives, or to the author’s carefulexplanations of what was particularly Navajoabout their experiences.

Forty-one black-and-white photographs addgreatly to the text, but two missing featureswould have been extremely helpful to readers.The first is a kinship chart, with a separate pagefor each woman. There are so many peopleinvolved in the story, with partners in and out ofeach other’s lives, siblings and half-siblings, andchildren living with different relatives or friends,that the narrative becomes confusing. Thesecond missing feature is a map. None the less,this is a valuable ethnography that honours thewomen’s stories while making them accessibleto readers.Lynn A. Meisch Saint Mary’s College of California

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