Not by genes alone: how culture transformed human evolution - Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , -© Royal Anthropological Institute

Archaeology and history

Brady, James E. & Keith M. Prufer (eds). Inthe maw of the earth monster: Mesoamericanritual cave use. viii, 438 pp., maps, figs, tables,bibliogrs. Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 2005.$60.00 (cloth)

These fifteen original studies of Mesoamericancaves explore their relationships to political andreligious practices in the past and present.Introductory and concluding essays by theeditors provide historic context and proposecommon themes. The editors conclude that‘more than anything else … the new directionin cave research is developing out of anemerging recognition of the importance of Earth as a sacred and animate entity inindigenous cosmology’ (p. 403). They makeexplicit their assumption that cave use isfounded in a ‘pan-Mesoamerican ideology’ (p. 404), in which human places in the worldhad to be centred on a central axis. As theynote, ‘while dealing in such generalizations weneed to be cautious in order to avoid theperception of seamless and unifying theologies’(p. 406). They make an argument forconjoining distinct cases and abstracting fromthem a general set of principles as part of acomparative cultural project deeply rooted inMesoamerican anthropology.

The majority of the case studies in the bookdeal with the practices of Maya-speakingpeople. These chapters share a perspectivemost fully articulated by Evon Vogt and DavidStuart, seeking commonalities among Maya in the past and present, producing a culturalanalysis of persistent aspects of cave use, also

the focus of Andrea Stone’s examination ofcognized spatial models. The necessity ofexploring social variation in cave use andsymbolism, in tension with this generalizingproject, emerges from examination of otherchapters.

Doris Heyden identifies caves asmetaphorical wombs and suggests they wereused in rites of passage, in part based onethnography. Alan Sandstrom supports theidentification of caves with wombs, based onethnography of the contemporary Nahua-speaking people of northern Veracruz. Thisethnographically rooted interpretation isechoed by others authors, who identify caves as sources of earthly fertility, particularlyimportant for their role in the production ofrain. But the latter arguments rest on formalcosmographic and cosmological models,derived from texts and images made by and for ruling families in pre-hispanic sites. In thisview, caves were critical parts of politicalgeographies, establishing local places as cosmiccentres.

The tension between these twoperspectives, one based at the level of people’slives, the other at the level of politics, is notsolely due to the differences betweenethnographic and archaeological data. JanetFitzsimmons identifies Late Formative periodrain ceremonies in a cave in Oaxaca ascommunity-level actions. Jaime Awe, CameronGriffith, and Sherry Gibb identify monolithserected in caves in Belize with monument-making by high-status people, but the lack of specific portraiture or text on these cavemonoliths may instead indicate a practice ofcommunity-based monument constructionparallel to that celebrating rulers. There is an

Book reviews

464 Book reviews

interesting potential here to explore socialcomplexity in cave use that remainsunderdeveloped.

Key questions for such analysis would be:who entered these caves, on what occasions,and for what purposes? These questions areimplicit in the secondary argument of thevolume that ‘caves represent the optimalphysical spaces in which to attemptreconstruction of Pre-Columbian Mesoamericanreligions’ (p. 408). This theme is mostsatisfactorily addressed by Abigail Adams and James Brady, in a study that examinescontemporary ethnographic data in order todraw lessons for archaeological interpretation.

The argument that caves can be morereadily identified as sites of ritual action thancan other places, such as houses, drawsattention to a broader anthropological difficultywith which most contributors engage: thedefinition of what constitutes religion. Cavesare characterized as places where ‘religiousritual activities are clearly suspected or known’(p. 408). Ritual, as action, is explicitlycontrasted with beliefs. The shift advocated byCatherine Bell in Ritual theory, ritual practice,from a drive to define rituals to a considerationof the ritualization of some actions, would seemideal for a consideration of the effect achievedby shifting actions (in some cases also common to everyday life) to the highlydistinctive setting of the cave. Bell’s approachesto ritual and religion, grounded as they are inan attempt to understand religion in anotherliterate, stratified society (China), seemfundamentally better suited to the analysis ofMesoamerican religion than the work of MirceaEliade, the theorist of ritual cited most oftenhere, discussed in most detail by Keith Pruferbut also central to the chapter by CliffordBrown. If the important work of exploring the place of caves in Mesoamerican societies isto move forward, it will require a strongerfoundation for understanding the specialnature of the practices undertaken in caves.

Rosemary A. Joyce University of California,Berkeley

Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark vanishings:discourse on the extinction of primitive races,

. x, 248 pp., bibliogr. London, Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2003. £29.95 (cloth),£11.95 (paper)

Patrick Brantlinger’s book is a thoroughlyresearched and grim exploration of the

1800-1930

Victorian and post-Victorian discourse on the supposedly inevitable extinction of the‘primitive races’ of the world. This extinctionwas seen as an inescapable result of the self-exterminating savagery of such ‘primitives’, andas a process which European expansion andsuccess simply accelerated. In Darwinian termsthis was viewed as an outcome of the laws of‘the survival of the fittest’. Brantlinger draws ona great range of literature to examine how thisdiscourse of inevitable extinction played out inNorth America, Ireland, Australia, and NewZealand.

His examination of the way this discoursewas used to justify inadequate governmentaction in the face of the Irish potato faminesuperbly expands the structural dualism being highlighted. This dualism assumes theinevitability of progress for those following theiron laws of liberal political economy and theinevitable demise of the inferior backwardother. The supposedly ‘inevitable’ triumph ofcolonization and progress only makes sense in contrast to this ‘inevitable’ vanishing of‘primitive’ peoples. Yet Brantlinger alsohighlights the growing fear over this periodthat the very superiority and success ofEuropean civilization might be leading to adecadence which might bring on the extinctionof Europeans themselves, especially since those‘primitives’ were showing no sign of dying outof their own accord after all.

Brantlinger’s account might best beconsidered in the light of two largerencompassing frameworks: one concerninghumanity’s relationship with the natural world,and the other concerning the current ‘triumph’of neo-liberalism. In relation to the former: onthe one hand, we experience a daily barrage ofscientific facts concerning climate chaos andpossible human extinction; on the other hand,alongside this there is a powerful faith intechnology’s ability to solve whatever problemsit creates and a fear that we might ‘go soft’ andnot recognize that our well-being depends onsuch technological exploitation.

In the final paragraph of his Man and thenatural world (1983) Keith Thomas suggests thatthe early modern period had generated feelingsthat the very civilizing process that had enabledus to conquer the natural world might also bemaking us too comfortable and too soft torecognize that our well-being depends on thedominance (rather than appreciation) of nature.This is a powerful echo of Brantlinger’s thesis,and also ties into the second larger framework,in which the triumph of the neo-liberal West is


Book reviews 465

seen as an inevitable consequence of oursuperior rationality and technology. The West’sinevitable triumph in the ‘war on terror’contrasts with a sense of extreme vulnerabilityto being overwhelmed by the ‘other’, the lattersentiment being used as a means to galvanizepeople out of their presumed lethargy and intoa proper appreciation of how vulnerable theWest’s ‘open society’ is to the supposedlymindless destructiveness of the ‘terrorists’.

The contrast between the writings of JohnQuelch (a senior associate dean of HarvardBusiness School, writing in the WashingtonTimes, 24 August 2005) and John Gledhill(President of the Association of SocialAnthropologists, writing in his personalcapacity on the ASA ethics blog site, 5 August2005) is instructive. Quelch focuses on theneed for universities to keep an eye on theenemy within and control debate since a‘relaxed tolerance of diversity of opinion, evenextremist rhetoric, provides an excellent arenafor those seeking to quietly turn impressionableyoung minds in classrooms’. In contrastGledhill stresses that ‘more open debates tendto expose to greater critical scrutiny thepossible premises of national states’ globalstrategies and the role of different political,commercial and military backstage interests in shaping the behaviour of democraticgovernments’.

Brantlinger, having examined a previouslypowerful premise of such global strategies,ends his story with the apocalyptic fantasiespreceding the First World War. However, theprocesses of annihilation bound up with the‘inevitable vanishing’ premise that underpinnedthe British and many other European empires’attitudes elsewhere in the world was perhapsmost powerfully challenged by the Germansengaging on European soil in similar processesof annihilation during the Second World War.This marked a shift from the ‘inevitable’annihilation stage to the ‘inevitable’assimilation stage. Brantlinger’s account,however, emphasizes the way in whichannihilation had always accompanied attemptsat assimilation. Robinson’s 1830s attempts tomake the ‘indolent’ Tasmanian ‘blackfellow’work (p. 125) in ‘his apparently humane,Christian concentration camp’ (p. 126) werebelieved by Bonwick to have killed the finalTasmanians (p. 127). After the Second WorldWar decolonizing peoples in Africa andelsewhere became as assimilated into thenation-state model as the white settler societiesalready were. Especially in the latter,

marginalized indigenous peoples within thesecountries have increasingly resisted this processof assimilation into nation-state systems wherea language of universal equality is used tojustify a systematic reproduction of inequality.In this context anthropology surely has torelinquish its romantic attachments to being ‘ascience of mourning’ (p. 138) and also to beinga ‘science in denial’ and instead work toestablish the empirical ground on which thissystematic reproduction of inequality can bechallenged.

Justin Kenrick University of Glasgow

Brody, J.J. Mimbres painted pottery (revisededition). xxv, 235 pp., maps, illus., tables,plates, bibliogr. Santa Fe: School of AmericanResearch, 2004. $59.95 (cloth), $27.95(paper)

The 2004 edition of Mimbres painted pottery byJ.J. Brody is a welcome revision of a classic ofNorth American anthropology and archaeology.For more than two decades this book hasstayed in print, but given the developmentsthat have shaped archaeological theory since its first edition, a revision of the text was longoverdue. The impact of post-processualarchaeology, and the relevance ofanthropological studies on material culture andbelief systems can be clearly identified in theerudite and well-informed analyses of Mimbrespottery technology and iconography thatappear throughout the book.

The book was first published in 1977 by theSchool of American Research to respond to anincrease in interest in Mimbres archaeologyfollowed by a number of research projects thatspanned a period of three years, from 1973 to1976. The present version has retained itsoriginal format, with nine chapters, and agenerous assortment of black and whitepictures, complemented by twenty colourplates collated in the middle of the volume.

As the author says in his new preface, thebook has undergone a substantial rewrite.While chapters that deal with iconography and design analysis have remained virtuallyunchanged, many of the original chapters havebeen modified to keep up to date with themost recent developments in the study of thePre-Columbian Southwest. Some of the mostimportant amendments brought to the bookregard Mimbres chronology, taxonomies, andsome crucial theoretical considerations abouttheir expressive culture and ideologies.


466 Book reviews

The author has incorporated a considerableamount of current research that augments thealready rich corpus of Mimbres archaeologyoriginally summarized in the first version of the volume. The integration of these newdevelopments can not only help us construct amore rounded picture of the Mimbres socialworld, but also correct, in the words of theauthor, some ‘egregious errors’.

In light of changes in terminology andclassification proposed by several authors,Brody has substituted old time sequences withnew headings. As a result, we now encounterin the text ‘Classic Mimbres Period’ instead of‘Mimbres Phase’ and ‘Transitional (Mimbres)Black-on-White’ as a feasible heading that maydescribe previously unclassified material thatincorporated more than one element of twodistinct phases.

Whilst reluctantly bowing to the politicalclimate generated by today’s Pueblos’opposition to the old term ‘Anasazi’, Brodyadmits that no real substitute term exists todistinguish the unique regional style of theancient Pueblos of the Colorado Plateau fromother ancient Puebloan agriculturists.

Brody’s search for new interpretativeframeworks for understanding the Mimbressocial world is clear throughout the book. Inorder to illustrate how the author has achievedthis, I take as an example the discussion ofMimbres gender ideology that Brody examinesthrough a careful iconographic interpretation ofthe human figures painted in the pottery bowlsdescribed in chapter 3.

Brody’s discussion of the depiction of menand women in Mimbres pottery pays tribute to the recent work of Marit Munson (cf. M.Munson ‘Sex, gender and status: humanimages of the Classic Mimbres’, AmericanAntiquity, 65, 2000). Her painstaking analysis of elements associated with male and femalebodies found on Mimbres pottery has furtheredour understanding of the gender ideologiesthat underpinned Puebloan peoples’ materialproduction before the impact of the Europeans.

Munson’s careful examination of Mimbresgender imagery leads her to the conclusionthat several Mimbres males belonged to adifferent category of people that she calls‘contrary gendered’. The suggestion thatMimbres gender ideology included more thantwo institutionalized genders is sustained byBrody, who gives substantial proof of Munson’stheory. The integration of this theory in therevised edition of Mimbres painted pottery bears

witness to Brody’s attention to new ideas, but also to his desire to challenge what he sees as the theoretical limitations of manyarchaeologists, for whom representationalpainting is just an ‘aspect of the tangibleworld’ and not, as he suggests, the capacity tocreate ‘visual metaphors’ (p. xv).

Such arguments support Brody’s idea thatMimbres peoples communicated through theproduction of images not only concretepictures of their everyday life, but perhaps,most importantly, meanings that are not soeasily intelligible to today’s observers. TheMimbres’ complex ideological frameworks have only recently begun to be revealed andappreciated. With this new edition of Mimbrespainted pottery, Brody has added a new tasselto the scholarly study of this fascinating NativeAmerican people.

Max Carocci Goldsmiths College

Mitchell, Peter. African connections:archaeological perspectives on Africa and thewider world. xxiv, 307 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.Oxford, New York: AltaMira Press, 2005. $80.00(cloth), $34.95 (paper)

African connections seeks to present acomprehensive overview of African prehistoryand history supported by archaeology andearly documented accounts. The work focuseson how African cultures interacted with thoseof other lands as partners in exchangenetworks both within and extending beyondthe continent. In particular, the authorattempts to demonstrate that Africa was not apassive or submissive player in cross-culturalexchanges, but an active and equal partner.

Yet Africa presents a challenging complexityof cultures and biomes virtually impossible toencompass in a single volume. As the authorhimself states, ‘No one book can hope to coverthe richness of Africa’s past or the complexity ofits connections with other parts of the world’.Obviously, the author took up the challenge ofwriting African connections with full knowledgethat not all areas and subjects would receiveequal treatment, an unavoidable pitfall for suchan ambitious undertaking. Although the authorseems at times somewhat apologetic about theorganizational structure of the book, it is notonly logical but attains depth as well asbalance. The work excels in its reliance onmyriad sources from varied disciplines; itsinherent weakness is the sometimes superficialassessment of these works.


Book reviews 467

The book begins with a brief summary of Africa’s geography and an overview of itspalaeontological record for early hominids,including the now commonly accepted ‘Out of Africa’ scenario for modern Homo sapiens.This is followed by Africa’s participation in the agricultural revolution, whereby bothindigenous and introduced domesticates andthe roles they played in regional agriculturalcomplexes are discussed. The next fourchapters focus on different geographic areas(Northeast, West, North, and East Africa) andtheir interrelationships within the continent aswell as with cultures beyond Africa. Followingthis discourse is really the only chapter thatdemonstrates African cultural influencesthroughout the globe: ‘Out-of-Africa 3, achronicle of the slave trade’. The final chaptersummarizes and synthesizes the individualchapter topics.

In reading any scholarly work, severalquestions must always be asked: Did the authoraccomplish what he/she set out to do? Whatwas learned? How can this better my research?These questions are addressed by this volume,but perhaps not in the way the authorintended. Although the work does demonstratethe existence of dynamic, indigenous tradenetworks within continental Africa, Africanconnections, in general, promulgates the notionthat Africa was an unequal partner in cross-cultural relations, indeed a subjugated supplierof raw materials and slave labour throughoutmuch of its prehistory and history. The mostprominent example of Africa ‘giving to theworld’ is the historic slave trade, during whichmillions of people were forcibly displaced fromtheir homeland to toil for predominantly Euro-American landowners, an unfortunate andshameful episode that continues to reverberatetoday in politics, socio-economics, and popularculture.

The strength of African connections lies in the huge volume of resources used to compilethe text. Regardless of subject, one can findnumerous citations and entries for furtherreading and enlightenment. Unfortunately, the reader must be wary about how theseresources are presented and used because thereare a fair number of instances in which citationsare either inaccurate or simply incorrect. Forexample, when discussing ancient Egypt’simports from sub-Sahara, the author includes‘slaves’, which is simply not true. In discussingthe religious impetus for parts of Shi’ite sub-Saharan Africa, the author remarks that FatimidEgypt was a Shi’ite state. While true that the

ruling family during this period was Shi’ite, it isa stretch to characterize the country as such,given that the general population and evenmuch of the bureaucracy, remained Sunni.Another minor but troubling aspect is theauthor’s tendency to accept early texts at facevalue, forgetting perhaps that many earlytravellers, (e.g. Ibn-Batutta) included in theirchronicles second-hand accounts that wereoften exaggerated or erroneous.

Although the above examples indicateperhaps a cursory reading of original sources,other lapses are more blatant. In a discussionon early pottery use in Africa, the author citesdates in excess of 9000 BC, and suggests thatperhaps pottery innovation travelled frominterior Africa to Southwest Asia. Checking the original source, the dates given werenumerically accurate, but they wereuncalibrated BP dates, a not insignificantdifference of over 2,000 years! These examplesare not isolated occurrences, but arerepresentative of many such lapses foundthroughout the text. Readers must, therefore,be wary of uncritical acceptance of datapresented as ‘facts’, and should always turn tothe original citations for confirmation.

In short African connections is a worthyattempt to synthesize a tremendous amount ofinformation about a continent that is incrediblydiverse – both culturally and ecologically. Apatient and diligent reader can gleaninformation compiled from numerous sourcesand learn a great deal about Africa’s internaldynamism.

Douglas J. Brewer University of Illinois

Richards, Colin (ed.). Dwelling among themonuments: the Neolithic village of Barnhouse,Maeshowe passage grave and surroundingmonuments at Stenness, Orkney. xxii, 397 pp.,maps, figs, tables, illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: McDonald Institute 2005. £40.00(cloth)

The Orkney Islands are renowned for their richarchaeological heritage, which includes some of the best-preserved prehistoric monuments in Europe. The earliest of these, comprisingchambered tombs and the henges of Brodgarand Stenness, date to the Neolithic. Whileimportant in their own right, it is theoccurrence on Orkney of contemporarypermanently occupied settlements of stone-built houses that makes the Neolithic of thisregion largely unique in northwestern Europe.


468 Book reviews

Here the opportunity exists for scholars of theNeolithic to explore in detail both routine dailylife and ceremonial practice. It is not surprising,therefore, that Orkney’s Neolithic archaeologyattracted the attention of some of the greatprehistorians of the twentieth century, notablyGordon Childe and Colin Renfrew, both ofwhom undertook important campaigns offieldwork here. This volume provides a fittingaddition to such illustrious earlier work.

Dwelling among the monuments describes theresults of several seasons of excavation by ColinRichards and his team on the later Neolithicvillage of Barnhouse, situated in the heart ofthe great Stenness-Brodgar monument complexon Mainland Orkney. It also details smaller-scale work on other later Neolithic sites on theStenness peninsula and at the adjacent passagegrave of Maeshowe.

The bulk of the volume focuses on theBarnhouse settlement. Here excavation revealedthe remains of thirteen stone-built structures,occupied for three hundred years or so fromc.3200 BC, and associated with Grooved Warepottery. Analogous to contemporary structuresat Skara Brae and Rinyo, the Barnhousebuildings follow a common format, being ovalwith central hearths and internal stone-built‘furniture’. They are arranged in a looseconcentric fashion around a central area,maintained throughout the life of thesettlement despite repeated rebuilding ofindividual structures. A dual form of spatialorganization is suggested by the authors, withseparate drain systems and pottery in differentfabrics marking out the inner and outersettlement areas. Two structures stand apart as distinctive and different: the ‘double’ House2 with its complex spatial configuration andarchitectural ‘imagery’ that references passagegraves; and Structure 8, a massive communalsquare building surrounded by a substantialstone wall, belonging to the final period ofoccupation.

The story of Structure 8 is indicative of amore general theme that Richards teases outduring the course of the volume, namely that the landscape of monuments was ‘aformalization of the social landscapes of dailylife’ (p. 259). The same cosmological andcultural principles are shown to have pervadedroutine and ceremonial life in Neolithic Orkney.In other ways the connection was more explicit.Richards provides compelling evidence that the sequences at both the Stones of Stennesshenge and Maeshowe passage grave beganwith houses. Furthermore, the stones of a large

hearth – the focus, it is argued, for inter-communal activities – was removed from theBarnhouse settlement and placed in the centreof the Stenness henge.

Throughout, the intention is to flesh out thedetails of daily life through a focus on housebiographies and house activities: the routines ofproduction and refuse disposal, patterns ofmovement within buildings, the physical andmetaphorical centrality of the hearth, and soon. This is backed up by detailed specialistreports. Certain of the chapters could standalone as individual essays, such as that on theanatomy of the megalithic landscape byGarrow, Raven, and Richards, and theexploration of cultural life and social identity byRichards and Jones. A critique of the legacy ofcultural-historical approaches to the islands’prehistory, the latter emphasizes the situationalnature of social identity and how this wasworked through material resources such asarchitecture and ceramics, as well asparticipation in building projects.

Two aspects make this an importantvolume: first, the way in which it has enhancedour understanding of Neolithic social life andmonumentality; second, the innovativetreatment of what could otherwise have been aconventional archaeological monograph. It wasnever going to be dull – the archaeologyensured that – but Richards has created a finevolume by moving away from the conventionalformat of a normal excavation report, wheredry, disembodied description of the results andanalyses are followed by discussion andinterpretation. Here due acknowledgement isgiven to excavation as a creative andinterpretative act, and interpretation is firmlyembedded within the reporting of structuraldetails. Through a lively and engaging writingstyle, a sense is given of the unfolding ofunderstanding that comes about through theexcavation process. Here we have a rare thing:an excavation report that is enjoyable to read.

Joshua Pollard University of Bristol

Tilley, Christopher (with Wayne Bennett).The materiality of stone: explorations in landscape phenomenology. xv, 244 pp., maps,tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berg Publishers, 2004. £55.00 (cloth), £17.99(paper)

Christopher Tilley’s most recent book shows anew level of sophistication and integration with


Book reviews 469

alternative modes of scholarship, comparedwith his first book on a broadly related themeof ten years earlier, A phenomenology oflandscape: places, paths and monuments (1994).A number of factors have combined to makethis an extremely interesting book, even if (orperhaps because) it does not subscribe to theprecise approach of Merleau-Ponty which hepromotes in the initial chapter.

Firstly, the examples are better chosen.Instead of the tired examples revisited by mostBritish archaeologists within a short walk ofWessex, Tilley has taken a boat (or has he?) tothree informative and contrasting destinationswith rich sources of material. Secondly, hisvisits are accompanied by a level of thickdescription which provides an insight both intohis data and into the aspects of the data that hefinds interesting. The argument can befollowed more clearly because of the level ofdetail, and we can choose to accept at differentlevels his conclusions. Thirdly, there is anattempt to integrate elements and the differentsenses in what Tilley entitles synaesthesia. Heemphasizes participant observation, but thisintegration also draws convincingly on theobservations of other archaeologists who have preceded him, so his argument is not somuch one that rejects previous experience butbuilds upon it. Finally, he adopts a technique,used to great effect by Renfrew, Bradley, andother authors, of listing his conclusions in away that distils the essence. This type ofapproach allows the reader to approach hiswork at the level that time and interest allow.

The text starts with what Tilley describes asthe abstract part of the book, the theoreticalpresentation of Merleau-Ponty, whose essentialelement is the ordering of the world related tothe body. Here he allows himself some of therhetoric of the past, attacking the dry analytical accounts by some academics whohave no bodily experience of their subjectmatter.

The following three chapters present thewell-chosen case studies that contrast in scaleand type of material world, and the level ofTilley’s preceding personal experience. The first – on the Breton menhirs – sets these solid three-dimensional objects in context, byboth detailed sensual description and whatwould traditionally be entitled landscapesetting. The second, on a site completely new to Tilley’s experience – the Maltesetemples, explores principally the inside of three examples, a culturally constructed

interior that rarely survives in prehistory. Thethird, on an area he knows well – the Swedishrock carvings – unflattens the image of a rockface by recording interlinking detail. In another context, Tilley has spoken of theimportance of the nested scale of landscape,and it is perhaps one weakness of his analysisthat these examples are not entirely placed in a broader setting. For example, he criticizes those who view Malta in isolation, and yet he neglects the sensuality of the seaand almost certainly arrived at his destinationby air.

One curious aspect of Tilley’s approach isthe primacy he gives to a textual account of anoral society in his conclusions. He rightly statesthat the immediacy of writing up impressions isimportant, but surely the fluidity of sensualityis conveyed best by orality in much the sameway as the original prehistoric societies wouldhave conveyed their own embodiment. He is,though, more cautious in his introductionabout the success of text. ‘In a text all we canhope to do is to evoke the sensuous qualities ofplace and landscape in a multisensorial waythrough our choice and use of words and thetypes of narrative structures employed, and thisis the task of a richly textured carnalphenomenological “thick” description in whichwe truly attempt to reflect on the character ofour experience, as opposed to a thin andsensorily impoverished “analytical” account’.Against this he also conveys a reluctance to useexcavated material since this is only theexcavators’ experience and not directly hisown, and so he loses access to an importantsource.

The principal surprise was the curiously‘cognitive processual’ aspect of many of Tilley’s conclusions, which I found immenselystimulating. They gel well with many of myown thoughts on Malta, the one of his threeexamples of which I have most recentparticipant experience. Many of the substantiveconclusions are ordered cross-culturalgeneralizations about cosmology, the life cycle,dualities, ancestors, and the like, which arewidely found in ethnography. In summary, Ifound this book a thought-provokingexperience which overcomes a number of theproblems encountered in his book of ten yearsearlier, since it is no longer just the experienceof one modern individual.

Simon Stoddart University of Cambridge


470 Book reviews

Van Dyke, Ruth M. & Susan E. Alcock(eds). Archaeologies of memory. xiv, 240 pp.,maps, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden,Mass: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. £55.00(cloth), £16.99 (paper)

Historians of intellectual traditions will have adifficult job to explain why, at the start of thetwenty-first century, academics, but alsoliterary writers, have devoted so much of theirtime to writing about memory, a concept untilrecently almost forgotten. From Umberto Eco’slatest novel (The mysterious flame of QueenLoana, 2005), to Paul Ricoeur’s lastmonumental work (Memory, history, forgetting,2004), and Marc Augé’s essay on the necessityof forgetting (Oblivion, 2004), memory iseverywhere. Archaeology, in common withsocio-cultural anthropology and many otherfields in the humanities and social sciences, isexperiencing its own ‘memory-boom’.

This, however, is one of the most valuableand thoughtful books in this area to haveappeared in the last few years. The editors havedone an admirable job in assembling a groupof eight diverse but interlinked studies, as wellas two commentaries, prefaced by a lucid andinteresting introduction. The book (influencedby the writings of Halbwachs and Connerton)deals with social and cultural as opposed toindividual-cognitive memory, althoughcognitivist writings surface in at least one ofthe chapters. The essays focus on ritualpractices, places, narratives, andrepresentations and objects, and are dividedinto two parts, reflecting the background of theeditors, and the now increasingly obsolete (andironically, placed in doubt by the notion ofmemory and of the ‘past in the past’) divisionin archaeology between prehistory (based onthe absence of written sources) and historicalarchaeology (where texts are available).

That second group includes studies bySinopoli on fourteenth- to sixteenth-century AD South India, Meskell on pharaonic Egypt,Papalexandrou on the use of spolia inByzantine mainland Greece, Prent on the‘Minoan’ echoes in Early Iron Age Crete, andJoyce on the fifth- to tenth-century AD ClassicMaya societies. The ‘prehistoric’ part includesstudies by Lillios on engraved slate plaquesfrom the third millennium BC Iberia, Pauketatand Alt on the 1000–1200 AD Mississippianmounds, and van Dyke on the first and earlysecond millennium AD Chacoan architecture inthe American Southwest. The book ends with acautionary tale by Blake discussing the

Byzantine reuses of prehistoric Sicilianstructures, and a broad-ranging commentaryby Bradley, one of the first archaeologists tohave engaged seriously with notions ofmemory and the role of the ‘past in the past’.

This carefully edited and importantcollection demonstrates both the uniquecontribution that archaeology can make to thebroader discussions on memory, having aprivileged access to the materiality of the past(through which social memories are oftenconveyed and recalled), and the difficulties andtraps that this venture entails. To this reviewer,the most successful chapters were the ones thatpaid detailed and sustained attention to theproperties and formal qualities of materiality,and its sensory, bodily activation and reception(e.g. Lillios, Papalexandrou, van Dyke). It is thislink between the properties of materiality andthe human bodily-sensory engagement withthe material world that is key in understandinghow memory works. Archaeologists can learn alot from the writings of sensory-sensuousanthropologists (amongst them, most notablySeremetakis and Sutton). It is unfortunate thatkey mnemonic practices such as eating anddrinking receive scant attention in the book,even when the paraphernalia of eating anddrinking such as serving vessels are discussed.

The major influence of Connerton’s essay onhis book (and on most others on the sametopic) has already been mentioned, but hisdistinction between commemorativeceremonies and bodily practices is applied insome essays literally (despite his warning thatall commemoration is performative and bodily).And given that, despite what the early prophetsof globalization declared, we all still live in theera of the nation-state, an institution that oftenforges a distinctive and highly selective form ofcollective material memory, it is curious that nostudy in the book deals with nationalremembering and forgetting. Such a study,besides anything else, would have placed thewhole issue of continuity in a different light, asHerzfeld has already observed (ArchaeologicalDialogues 10:2, 2003).

Remembering and forgetting are also abouttime, or, to be more precise, duration. As HenriBergson has shown (whose writings seem tohave been almost forgotten or ignored,including by anthropology and archaeology),the durability of matter implies the co-existenceof multiple temporalities, a logic that clasheswith the epistemology of linear time uponwhich discussions on memory often rely.People have always reused and reinterpreted


Book reviews 471

the material traces of human action, and theofficially sanctioned, archaeological use ofthese traces (and their recasting as the‘archaeological record’) is but one, relativelyrecent reincarnation. The importance ofmemory studies in archaeology, therefore, goeswell beyond what these chapters state or evenimply. As Bradley intimated in his finalcommentary and as Olivier has already noted ina review of this and other similar books(Archaeological Dialogues 10:2, 2003), if memory is seen in the light of multi-temporality, it can de-centre and underminethe whole modernist project of linearprogression and monolithic time. Nor wouldthat be a bad thing.

Yannis Hamilakis University of Southampton

General

Babb, Lawrence A. Alchemies of violence: myths of identity and the life of trade in westernIndia. 254 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, NewDelhi: Sage Publications, 2004. £35.00(cloth)

Alchemies of violence confines itself primarily tomotifs in Rajasthani temple myths that figuremerchants in their tales of origin. Babb minesthese myths to conduct a structural analysis ofvariation in mercantile values for a cluster ofcastes that, since the end of the nineteenthcentury, have become a kind of imaginedcommunity – a mercantile community.

On Babb’s account, the origin myths ofRajasthani merchants resolve a fundamentalparadox presented by contrasts between theVedic conception of society ritually constitutedof varnas (castes) and contemporaryconceptions of society constituted of hundredsof occupationally specialized jatis (also castes).Babb explores this mythic alchemy and arguesthat it plays out differently for myths aboutmerchants than it does for myths about sagesand warriors. He pursues his argument in thecore chapters of his book, looking first at originmyths about Rajputs and Brahmans and, insubsequent chapters, origin myths aboutvarieties of Hindu and Jain trading castes. Whatemerges as the core of merchant identity is arejection of rituals of sacrifice and acommitment to values of non-violence.

Babb is most compelling in his presentationof mythic narratives and his analysis of jati-

based variation of myth motifs derived fromMaussian theories of sacrifice. His interpretationof cultural pluralities among Rajasthanimerchants will be of interest to India specialistswell versed in the relevant literature on identityformation, merchants, exchange, myth,sacrifice, ritual, and caste.

Babb is less successful in explaining thisvariation. One intriguing argument is that thereexists an intrinsic separation between casteswith political power and an affinity forviolence, and castes with wealth and an affinityfor non-violence. A second argument is thattraders necessarily operate as Simmelianstrangers, located at the interstices of moralcommunities and specializing in the morallyambiguous medium of monetary exchange.Such social positions, says Babb, are based ontrust, which is intrinsically incompatible withviolence.

Neither of these arguments allows room forpolitically powerful men of wealth or wealthymen with political power. Treating suchindividuals as exceptions (which Babb does)proves no rule unless it can be shown why theyare exceptional (which Babb does not). Thearguments are even more problematic formilitant merchant communities, including suchgroups as the Gossains of north India and theKaikkolars of south India (problematiccomparisons that Babb does not address).Finally, although the descriptive heart of Babb’s analysis characterizes a linear continuumin the degree to which different mercantile jatimyths embody non-violent values, it offers noinformation about whether this entails aconcomitant variation in degree ofcommitment to lives of trade over lives ofwarfare.

For social anthropologists and historians,Babb’s account raises interesting questionsabout the social nature of myths and the rolesthey play in the lives of traders. They aredrawn, apparently, from temple publicationsdating to the late nineteenth century andfinanced, at least in part, by donations fromtrading castes. They were subsequentlyrecycled in caste journals published by tradingcaste associations and in legal proceedings andgovernment hearings in which traders and theirrepresentatives gave testimony. But Babb doesnot show how the myths were shaped by theiruse in these and other public venues justcoming into existence in late colonial society.

Ideally, such social contextualization wouldhave involved a longer, more historicallyorientated book that compared colonial myths


472 Book reviews

and their public performances with both theirprecolonial and postcolonial incarnations. Sucha contextualization could have addressed thesmall but rich literature on Indian merchants in western, eastern, and southern India. Babbneed not, of course, have undertaken so broadan inquiry. But by neglecting to contextualizethe more limited sample of myths that form thecorpus for his investigation, he confers anunwarranted and probably unintendedtimelessness to the values his investigationreveals.

Finally, on Babb’s account, there is a strongsuggestion that Jainism should be credited bothfor the warrior/trading caste dichotomy and forinternal variation within the trading castecluster. Yet, while it may be the case that Jainmyths generate the highest score in Babb’smeasurement of non-violence, it does notfollow that Jain beliefs affected Hindu castes. Itwould have been useful, indeed, to examinesimilar contrasts in commitment to non-violence among south Indian warrior andtrading castes that are free from Jain influence.Such southern parallels raise questions about amuch broader, pan-Indian phenomenon thanhinted at by Babb; one that responds to otherhistorical processes than either cultural affinitiesbetween trade and non-violence or emulationof Jain-specific values.

David Rudner Washington University

Carrier, James G. (ed.). A handbook ofeconomic anthropology. xvi, 584 pp., tables,bibliogrs. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005.£135.00 (cloth)

James Carrier’s Handbook of economicanthropology is an outstanding collection ofessays in economic anthropology by leadingscholars in the sub-discipline.

The volume is organized into six parts:‘Orientations’, ‘Elements’, ‘Circulations’,‘Integrations’, ‘Issues’, and ‘Regions’. The widerange of contributions to the volume allows forcreative overlaps, variations, and contradictions.For instance the first part, ‘Orientations’, whichdiscusses established positions within the sub-discipline, presents two different views ofpolitical economy. J.S. Eades discusses the‘grand narratives’ of political economy –modernization theory, dependency theory,world system theory, and the informationparadigm – as ‘evolutionary narratives’ thatprovide a useful macro-level framework forunderstanding the grass-roots reality that most

anthropologists study. Meanwhile, DonRobotham calls for a humanist anthropologicalpolitical economy that combines a focus onhuman labour ‘as the motor of human history’(p. 44) with an ethnographic awareness of themultiple trajectories of economic life.

At the micro-economic level of thehousehold, Susana Narotzky focuses instead on‘provisioning’ as a process of construction ofmeaning and social relations that emergethrough activities of production, distribution,and appropriation. Stephen Gudeman proposesa model of the economy as a gestaltic dialecticbetween the realm of the community and therealm of the market, ‘each constituting acritique of the other’ and ‘existing in alleconomies’ (p. 97). Gudeman’s cognitive modelprovides an interesting comparative frameworkthat overcomes the dichotomy between ‘thereal’ and ‘the formal’ meanings of the economyin anthropology. Nevertheless, it fails to addressthe structural factors that underpin thereciprocal relationships between ‘the market’and ‘the community’ and the ‘mental divide’existing between capitalist and non-capitalisteconomies.

The second part – ‘Elements’ – discussesprocesses of production, circulation, andconsumption in different historical and culturalcontexts. Chris Hann’s chapter on ‘property’challenges the standard liberal model ofproperty emerging from the capitalist ideologyof possessive individualism as well as someanthropologists’ attitude of relativizingproperty almost to the point of confusingproperty relations with social relations. Labourorganization and extraction are central to PaulDurrenberger’s comparative anthropology ofpolitical economies. Unlike kinship andtributary societies, capitalist societies organizeproduction around the wage relationship andclass exploitation. Economic anthropologistsface the challenge of reconciling micro-ethnographies of labour organization and localunderstandings of the practical world forproduction with structural analyses of globalcapitalism. Drawing on his ethnography of theBhilai steel sector, Jonathan Parry shows thatthe uneven pace of industrial development inIndia contradicts Thompson’s and Polanyi’steleological narratives of the ‘greattransformation’ of society under industrialcapitalism. First, the Indian working class nevershowed the same commitment to work as theirWestern fellow workers, either because of thecolonial origin of Indian industrialization orbecause of the ‘primordial loyalties’ which


Book reviews 473

industrial capitalism relies on. Secondly, thereare no Tayloristic divisions of labour on theshopfloor of the Bhilai steel plant. Absenteeismis high, moonlighting is widespread, andproduction proceeds in a staccato fashion sothat workers have plenty of time for playingcards or catching up on some sleep. Finally, theIndian industrial proletariat does not engage informs of labour resistance against capital. Bhilaisteel workers’ lack of nostalgia for the ruralworld of paddy fields proves that Indianindustrialization did not involve great socialtransformations and new forms of labouralienation or resistance. Rather, industrialcapitalism is ‘just the latest variant of oldextractive relationships’ (p. 155).

Keith Hart’s chapter on money is a homageto Ronnie Frankenberg’s seminal essay oneconomic anthropology (1967), whichadvocated ‘scientific humanism’ as a way ofbridging economics and anthropology. Thechapter provocatively discusses the power ofmoney in people’s imagination and in real lifedue to its intrinsic dual nature – as symbol andmaterial object. The power of money emergesnot only in the minds of ordinary people, whosee it as an evolution of ancestral barter androoted in a mythical past, but also in theimagination of anthropologists, who oftencelebrate its disruptive impact on traditionalsocieties or its fetishizing effect in Westernsocieties. Anthropologists should not stigmatizemoney, but emphasize it. Money integratesdivisions and reconnects people’s ‘selves’,divided between the personal and theimpersonal realms. Hart concludes the chapterby opposing two kinds of money incontemporary society: the euro, just anotherproduct of state capitalism, and the ‘people’smoney’, that is, special currency traded involuntary circuits of exchange through theInternet, which provides the technological basisfor a more egalitarian and less fragmentedsociety.

The third part focuses on ‘Circulation’, fromformal ceremonial exchange to monetizedmarket. Yunxiang Yan considers gift-giving asthe primary mode of exchange in humansocieties. The author challenges theories of gift-giving centred on the principle of reciprocityand emphasizes the need to differentiatebetween gifts and commodities according totheir different level of ‘emotionality’. At theother end of the spectrum, Kalman Applbaumproposes to overcome traditional dichotomiesbetween the anthropologists’ ‘marketplace’ andthe economists’ ‘market principle’. He suggests

that traditional studies of local markets as wellas economic analyses of global commoditychains share a mercantilist view of globalizationand underplay the specific capitalist nature ofcontemporary marketing and the supply side ofconsumption.

Part four, ‘Integrations’ discusses economicactivity in different contexts of social life. Forinstance, Michael Blim, in his analysis ofdifferent cultures of capitalism, distinguishesbetween Western European and Japanese‘stakeholder capitalism’ – which rely on thevalues of collectivism, co-operation and trust –and US and UK ‘shareholder capitalism’ –emphasizing competition, risk, andindividualism. Maila Stivens stresses the role ofgender in production, exchange, andconsumption and provides a powerful critiqueto economists’ notions of ‘household’ and ‘thedomestic’.

Part five, ‘Issues’, deals with popular orcontroversial topics that have become ofanthropological interest. Mark Harris revisitsWolf’s seminal study of the ‘peasants’ dilemma’– of being locked between pre-capitalist andcapitalist class relations – in the context of thefluid economy of contemporary Amazonianpeasantry (caboclos). David Graeber reworksKlyde Kluckhohn’s ambitious project of acomparative ‘anthropology of value’ andproposes a structural-Marxist model of valueintended as a dialectic and public system ofmeaning that emerges from individual actions.Graeber considers Terence Turner’s workamong the Kayapo of Brazil a powerfulexample of ethnography of value ‘in action’ inthat it focuses on the performative and publicdimension of value creation and on thedialectical relations between materialproduction and the symbolic reproduction ofpeople.

Part six, ‘Regions’, focuses on specificeconomic themes that recur in anthropologicalregional literature. John Harriss’ lucid essaydiscusses recurrent themes in the economicanthropology of South Asia. For instance, thejajmani system of patronage of the lower casteby landowning families sparked a controversialdebate between substantivist scholars, whoread it as a system of non-market redistribution,and scholars who saw it as a form ofexploitation or even a construction of theanthropological imagination. Harriss alsoilluminatingly discusses Weber’s classic thesisthat the caste system prevented the emergenceof a capitalist free market in the light ofcontemporary studies on Indian


474 Book reviews

entrepreneurship and industrial relations. ChrisHann’s analysis of transition studies in post-socialist societies – societies of the formerSoviet Union and Eastern Europe – discussesthe ‘everyday economy’, ‘mafias’, and socialnetworks that emerged from the collapse of theinstitutions of central planning and the Westerneconomic logic that underpinned privatizationand the commodification of previouslyredistributive economic spaces. The authorclaims that anthropology – with its focus oncontinuity accompanying change and on theembeddedness of economy in society –provides a better framework than neo-liberaleconomics for policy-making in transitioncountries.

The volume is a remarkable contribution toeconomic anthropology and will no doubt be a fundamental tool for students, scholars, andexperts in the sub-discipline. Nevertheless,some readers will recognize echoes of an‘obsolete anti-market mentality’ in somecontributions to the volume and an implicitopposition running throughout it betweeneconomic and anthropological knowledge. As a consequence, the volume is suspendedbetween the radical potential of its revisitedeconomic anthropology and the discipline’sconservative past. This is most evident in BarryIsaac’s advocacy of Polanyi’s project of‘developing a cross-cultural comparativeeconomy by illuminating and critiquingWestern economies through the study ofancient and non-Western cases’ (p. 21).Polanyi’s project of political reconstruction of amore human neo-colonial capitalist order isunlikely to impress the younger readershipmore interested in critically re-assessing thevery premises upon which that order was built.

Unfortunately, Marxist contributions to thevolume fail to develop their political economyperspective into a comparative model of socialrelations of production of the kind suggestedfor instance by Parry and Bloch for exchange(Money and the morality of exchanges, 1989). It is also unfortunate that James Carrier’sintroduction does not discuss the historical andpolitical circumstances that call for a renewedinvolvement of anthropology in globaleconomic processes and debates, and thereasons for the absence of Western Europe andNorth America – central locations of theseprocesses and debates – from the regionalsection of the volume. An editor’s chapter on‘Occidentalism’ in economic anthropologymight have helped to redress the imbalance.

Mao Mollona Goldsmiths College

Chernoff, John M. Exchange is not robbery:more stories of an African bar girl. 425 pp.London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005.£16.00 (paper)

Exchange is not robbery is the second volume ofJohn Chernoff’s documentation of the life ofHawa, a bar girl and occasional ‘prostitute’ orashawo in 1970s West Africa, as recounted tohim by her during a series of taped interviewslate in that decade.

In the first volume, Hawa is in her earlytwenties and, following her rejection of anarranged marriage at the age of 16 to a manwho already has two wives, she finds herselffalling into the life of an ashawo in Ghana andTogo. The book traces her development from ayoung woman trying to manage her difficultcircumstances to one who is taking advantageof her relative freedoms. In this second volume,Hawa has returned to her native Burkina Faso,and her tales go between her work in thenightclubs of urban centres and rural lifeduring visits to her home village, where herfather is sick, along with reminiscences fromher childhood in Ghana. Her stories capturewell the marked contrast between urban andrural living, and the different opportunities anddifficulties they pose.

In the urban centres she tells of herencounters with the French, whom she viewswith some contempt, and laughs about herability to ‘boss’ and ‘bluff’ her way successfullythrough life, despite its obvious problems anduncertainties. In the rural setting she illustratesthe complexities of living in large extendedfamilies and the difficulties of successfullymanaging relations in such settings. She alsoreflects on her tenuous position given herunmarried status. The possibility of her father’sdeath illuminates her situation, expressed in hercomment that,

All my senior sisters and the younger ones whohave married, they will bring their husbands tothe funeral, and the husbands will start to killtheir cows and sheep. In our village way, mysisters’ husbands are the people who are killingthe sheep and cows. And I don’t have somebodyto do this. (p. 195)

Her situation stems from her continuingdecision to be independent; an option shechooses but one which leaves her ‘sufferingwherever she goes’, and one on which she isincreasingly reflecting as she becomes older.None the less, she appears certain and proudlydefensive of the path she has chosen,


Book reviews 475

describing marriage as ‘humbug’ andproclaiming to one woman, ‘Don’t pity me.Never, never in your life, if you see somebodylike me, don’t feel pity’ (p. 41).

While a fascinating tale, and despite verymuch welcoming the first volume, I found thisvolume somewhat frustrating. For one, thesecond volume was harder to follow at times,and despite grammatical and stylisticadjustments of the narrative by Chernoff, thoseunfamiliar with the context might find someparts difficult to understand. Thus, while thebook is a good illustration of the oral traditionof West African culture, it is not necessarily atradition that is easily transposed into thewritten form, and in a book of over 400 pagesthis might hamper readers from fully engagingwith Hawa’s tale.

A more serious issue is the lack ofcommentary. Chernoff maintains that Hawa’sability to make her point through her storiesmeans that she is best placed to critique herculture. When reviewing the first volume( Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute11:1, 2005) I agreed, suggesting in fact thatChernoff’s extended introduction resulted inreaders being presented with an analysis andinterpretation of Hawa’s experience before theyhad an opportunity to hear her testimony.However, in this second volume the lack ofcommentary left me with two related concerns.The first of these is that those unfamiliar withthe context may not grasp the significance ofcertain situations or comments without theauthor making these explicit. Furthermore, thishas the effect of presenting Hawa’s responsesto her situation as somewhat idiosyncratic. Insum, although Hawa’s tales enable one toescape the frequent ‘victim’ representation of Africans and get a picture of theresourcefulness and resilience of individualsdespite the intense hardships of their lives, thelack of commentary on the part of the author isin danger of detracting from why it is that theseindividuals are faced with such harsh realities inthe first place.

Despite these concerns, this volume, like itspredecessor, is a valuable resource; especiallyso given the lack of ethnography focusing onAfrican youth. This alone makes Chernoff’sbooks a welcome contribution. However, thedearth in literature on such contexts and issuesmakes it all the more frustrating that the wealthof data contained in Hawa’s stories may nothave been presented in the best possiblemanner.

Iman Hashim University of Sussex

Erlmann, Veit (ed.). Hearing cultures: essayson sound, listening and modernity. ix, 239 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: BergPublishers, 2004. £50.00 (cloth), £15.99(paper)

This collection brings hearing, the so-called‘second sense’ in the conventional Westernhierarchy of the senses, to the fore of culturalanalysis. The various pieces were first presented at a symposium held in Oaxaca,Mexico in April 2002, sponsored by theWenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch. The editor and conference organizer,Veit Erlmann, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology at the University of Texas,Austin, convened a number of distinguishedscholars from such fields as literature (Connor,Smith), cultural history (Gouk, Thompson), and media and performance studies (Bull,Carter, Kahn) to join with anthropologists(Hirschkind, Nuckolls) in exploring theborderlands of listening in early and latemodernity. I have awaited the publication ofthe proceedings of this symposium withparticular interest as I was invited toparticipate, but unfortunately unable to attend.The stimulating character of the conversationamong the participants resonates throughoutthis collection, which itself attunes the‘ethnographic ear’ to a range of unsuspectedand suggestive new frequencies.

The interdisciplinary and, indeed, inter-sensory orientation of this volume reflects theburgeoning interest in the subject of the sensesacross the humanities and social sciences,which is broadening and displacing establishedsight- and text-based paradigms (e.g. visualculture, writing culture). By hearing cultures inall their sonic diversity, instead of reducingthem to visual models or collages, texts ordialogues, the contributors are able to open upmany terrains for investigation which failed toregister in the earlier paradigms. Their analysesalso consistently call into question numerousdeep-seated, Western conceptual distinctions,such as orality/literacy, magic/science,music/non-music, meaning/noise,word/gesture, and even the five-foldclassification of the senses.

In his contribution, Bruce R. Smith arguesthat Shakespeare and other contemporaryplaywrights tailored their scripts to suit theacoustic qualities of the theatres in which theywere to be performed. In the following chapter,Penelope Gouk complexifies the generalunderstanding of a rise in the cultural


476 Book reviews

importance of sight and scientific rationality inmodernity by examining the survival ofhearing-centred (musical) and magical modelsof the world into the eighteenth century. In aparticularly intricate excursion into the hiddenhistory of listening, Doug Kahn brings out thecurious indebtedness of early twentieth-centuryWestern art music to Tantric cosmogony, withits central figure of the single cosmogenicvibration, as appropriated (and scientized) bythe French-American composer and theosophistDane Rudhyar in his doctrine of the ‘SingleTone’. In a related vein, Paul Carter presents afascinating theory of the creative potential of‘echoic mimicry’ and ‘mishearing’ in situationsof cross-cultural contact, such as Columbus’sencounter with the Taino, and migrantexperience generally.

Janis Nuckolls probes the bounds ofconventional linguistic analysis in her study ofhow the Quechua-speaking Runa of Ecuadorenact sounds from the natural world in order to share in the animacy of that world. In‘Edison’s teeth’, Steven Connor advances aphenomenology of inter-sensory perception,with particular reference to the ‘umbilicalcontinuity’ between hearing and touch (e.g.the screech of chalk on a blackboard which‘sets one’s teeth on edge’).

The question of audio technologies andtheir impact on the direction and experience ofmodernity is central to three essays in thiscollection. Emily Thompson recounts the globaldreams of 1920s Hollywood sound engineers,who sought to create a conduit tomodernization by ‘wiring the world’ for sound,only to see their new technology of sound film(or ‘talkies’, as they were called) taken over bynational governments and used to promote the growth of local film industries around theglobe. In ‘Hearing modernity’, CharlesHirschkind documents how the modernEgyptian state apparatus sought to harnesspreaching to the task of nation-buildingthrough all the media at its command, but wasthwarted by the increasingly popular use ofaudio-cassette tapes (which circulate outsidethe regulatory purview of the state) todisseminate ‘a contestatory Islamic discourseon state and society’. Finally, Michael Bull givesnew meaning to Raymond Williams’s notion of‘private mobilization’ through his study of howWalkman users aestheticize public space andderive a sense of empowerment from beingable to impose their own soundtracks on theenvironment and thus abolish distance in thevery act of traversing it.

Innovative and controversial as many of theessays are, they remain open to a number ofcriticisms and, indeed, several of the papersimplicitly critique each other. Steven Connorcan be called to task for the acultural nature ofhis account of the interaction of touch andhearing, and of his concluding assertionregarding how ‘we’ (academics? Westerners?humans?) should properly experience andunderstand the life of the senses. In contrast tothe phenomenological approach of Connor,there is Janice Nuckoll’s anthropological studyof how the vivid expression of the interaction oftouch and hearing among the Runa has beensubject to cultural change and is beingtransformed and diminished as the Runa areintegrated into the mainstream Spanish-speaking society.

Overall, the diversity of the subject mattercovered by the contributors to this volumeindicates the richness of the emergent field ofsound studies and suggests potential topics forrelated research in other sensory domains.Erlmann is to be congratulated for bringingtogether such a stimulating collection of essays,the insights of which he admirably synthesizesand develops in his introduction to the book.

Constance Classen Concordia University

Homewood, Katherine (ed.). Rural resourcesand local livelihoods in Africa. xii, 212 pp., maps,figs, tables, bibliogrs. Oxford: James Currey,2005. £50.00 (cloth), £16.95 (paper)

Rural resources and local livelihoods in Africapresents an excellent collection of multi-methodological studies concerned with localresource use practices and policy interventionin different environments throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It shares much withConservation in Africa (Anderson and Grove,eds, 1987), and The lie of the land (Mearns andLeach, eds, 1996), both of which KatherineHomewood contributed to. These influentialcollections radically challenged ‘receivedwisdom’ on the African environment, showinghow often conventional degradation narrativeswere misleading, and much environmentalpolicy intervention was inappropriate. Theconcerns of the present volume are less tochallenge than ‘to bring home to researchers,policymakers and practitioners the breadth andcomplexity of issues in rural resources andlivelihoods’ (p. 1), and to develop methods andapproaches that help capture this complexityappropriately.


Book reviews 477

Largely the product of the Human EcologyGroup of the Anthropology Department atUCL, the book’s emphasis is on thecombination of natural and social sciencequantitative research methods with archival andethnographic research, which each contributordoes in different ways. On this basis the papersprovide nuanced insights into rural resourceuse practices and livelihoods, offeringalternatives to dominant understandingsunderlying policy. Thus Jo Abbot shows that,contrary to conventional assumptions, the maincause of wood depletion in Lake MalawiNational Park is not the gathering of fuel woodfor domestic consumption by women, but themen’s growing fish-smoking industry, whilstSian Sullivan demonstrates that wild plantsconstitute sought-after delicacies rather than‘hunger food’ to Damara herders in Namibia.Kate Hampshire and Sara Randall argue that itis misleading to attribute high fertility ratesamongst the Fulbe in Burkina Faso totraditionalism; rather, they reflect the verymodern rationale of creating large networkswith many children distributed in differentcities and villages. Solveig Buhl provocativelyargues that, contrary to establisheddevelopment goals, Fulbe women are not infact interested in economic diversificationthrough farming and trading, because theyalready have heavy workloads in the domesticand pastoral domain and are wary of furtherexploitation of their labour through men.

Such grounded anthropological critiques ofdevelopment and conservation policy continueto be very valuable. Other contributions of thebook, however, go further and investigate theinteraction between local practices, theenvironment, and policy itself, highlighting thecomplexity of political and ecological processesthat determine the outcomes of policyinterventions. Thus Emmanuel de Merodeexamines the overall disappointing results ofstate wildlife protection in the Republic ofCongo, which is too expensive and breaksdown easily. Dan Brockington describes theeffects of state reserve management on boththe environment and local livelihoods aroundMkomazi Reserve in Tanzania, making theinteresting argument that the very resilience ofits grasslands means that it can tolerate quitehigh levels of illegal use of reserve land,thereby making community conservationneither politically nor ecologically necessary.

The role of institutions becomes even morecentral in the final two contributions onCameroon. Whilst Monica Graziani and Philip

Burnham explore legal pluralism and itsimplications for the 1994 Cameroon Forest Law, Barrie Sharpe’s historical account of theevolving interaction between local people,forest institutions, and forests themselves inSouthern Cameroon is particularly illuminating.Sharpe clearly illustrates how local political andresource management practices, such as thetreatment of ‘strangers’, have interacted over time with state forest policy, and he,importantly, considers logging concessions,which were so central to forest policy in WestAfrica over the course of the twentieth century.

Overall, the collection is well – perhaps toowell – organized: its chapters contain moreoverlap than its rigorous division into foursections, each separately introduced, suggests.In some ways this works against the overall aimof the book, to explore precisely the interactionbetween environmental change, resource usepractices, livelihoods, and policy. Its title, too,could have done more to indicate itsorientation around institutions and policy,which sets it apart from livelihood studies ingeneral, and makes it a valuable contribution toa number of fields, most notably politicalecology. The case studies it contains will notonly make excellent teaching material inanthropology, geography, and developmentstudies, they will also be of much interest topolicy-makers and practitioners. One can onlyapplaud that the radical critique now firmlyrooted in African environmental studies hasresulted in producing such sophisticatedunderstandings of the interaction betweenpolitical and environmental processes in Africatoday, and one would hope for furtherdevelopments in this direction.Pauline Von Hellermann University of Sussex

Klein, Axel, Marcus Day & AnthonyHarriott (eds). Caribbean drugs: fromcriminalization to harm reduction. xvi, 255 pp.,figs, tables, bibliogrs. London, New York: Zed Books, 2004. £49.95 (cloth), £16.95(paper)

Situated between the major centres of illicitdrug production in South America and Mexicoand the huge consumer market for illicit drugsin the US, the Caribbean plays a critical role inthe international drug trade. But illicit drugs donot simply pass through the island nations ofthe Caribbean on their way to other markets;they are produced and consumed by thepeoples of the Caribbean as well. Drugs like


478 Book reviews

crack cocaine (which may have been inventedin the Caribbean), heroin, and ecstasy havepenetrated the social fabric of most of theislands, adding to more traditional use ofmarijuana. Illegal drugs generate an estimated$3.3 billion in the Caribbean, accounting forbetween 20 and 65 percent of the totaleconomy in several islands. The appeal of drugslies in part in the social conditions of many ofthe islands, where residents suffer high rates of poverty, a rising cost of living due toprivatization, and international pressure todirect resources away from social programmesand into payments for external debt.

In this light, this edited volume provides auseful introduction and examination of keypolicy issues raised by illicit drugs and theirconsiderable impact on Caribbean societies,while exploring the changing social attitudesabout how to respond to the drug problem.The book focuses on: (1) the history and scaleof drug production and distribution; (2) therole of Caribbean Islands in the trans-shipmentof drugs to Europe and the US; (3) the policy challenge presented by drug use incomparatively small and underdevelopednations; (4) the considerable strain on theinfrastructures of Caribbean countries of drugcontrol; (5) the range of social responses, fromincarceration to prevention and harmreduction, that have been introduced by policy-makers on the islands; and (6) ethical dilemmasin collecting information on illegal behaviour.

The book comprises eleven chapters dividedinto four sections: background and context,policy responses, interventions, and drugeconomics, with a central unifying focus beingthe political and social difficulties faced bysmall Caribbean states contending withpowerful international drug-traffickingorganizations and the firm demand for drugcontrol from the US. As a result of these twinbut opposed forces, the prison population ofthe islands is spiralling while the fragile drugtreatment system has been overwhelmed.Although drug policies remain repressive, thereis a growing recognition that alternative policymodels are sorely needed. One suchmovement, seen in the Bahamas, Jamaica, andTrinidad, is a switch from sending convicteddrug-offenders to prison to sentencing them todrug treatment. A primary theme of this bookis exploring additional regional alternatives topunitive approaches, through exploration ofthe use of specialized drug courts, communityprevention, expanded treatment, harmreduction, differentiation of users in terms of

the nature of their drug problem and threat tosociety, and decriminalization.

The Caribbean is best known in the drugliterature because of ganja (which has beenused locally for 150 years), especially inJamaica, but regionally as well. A sacramentamong the Rastifarians, marijuana use has beenthe object of intense government repression. Asso often happens in the world of illicit drugs,however, the targeting of the Rastafari by thestate did not have the desired effect; ratherthan withering away, the movement grewbigger and spread to other islands. As Rastaideology has diffused, so, too, marijuana usehas spread throughout the Caribbean. Forcountries like St Vincent and the Grenadines,which lack major tourist industries and havebeen hard hit by the collapse of bananaexportation, the marijuana trade represents one of the few avenues of regular employment.

Countries of the Caribbean have tried torespond to the onslaught of drugs. In herchapter on the Cayman Drug Council,Catherine Chestnut discusses the emergence ofa national drug council involving a nationalplan for the prevention of drug abuse and forthe rehabilitation of drug-users. Marcus Dayoffers a chronological account, in diary form, ofa drug-user drop-in centre. The generalrecognition is that these efforts only scratch thesurface of need. As drugs have becomecheaper, they have become more prevalent,drug-related crime has soared, and the need forsocial action has become urgent. This urgencyhas led to a consideration of harm reductionapproaches, despite the antipathy of the UStowards non-punitive responses.

This is the dilemma engaged by Caribbeandrugs. While it offers no sweepingrecommendations for change, it does providethe reader with a broad awareness of thenature of the drug problem and its significantimpact on Caribbean societies. The book wouldbe useful in courses like Drugs and Society orthose on Cultures of the Caribbean.

Merrill Singer Hispanic Health Council

McVeigh, Brian J. Nationalisms of Japan:managing and mystifying identity. xv, 331 pp.,tables, bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Rowman &Littlefield, 2004. £26.95 (pager)

McVeigh has written an ambitious work. It isprobably the most comprehensive study of thenationalism of modern Japan. The book is well


Book reviews 479

researched and makes reference to virtually allrelevant literature in the field. McVeigh is,moreover, well versed in the Western literatureon theories of nationalism, providingcomparative remarks when relevant. As such,the book is a highly useful compendium on thesubject, and should be a desk copy of anyoneworking on Japan’s nationalism, culturalidentity, and the like.

McVeigh gives a working definition ofnationalism: ‘the modern belief that a largenumber of people share some (often ultimatelyundefinable) essence that requires politicalsanction and structure, that is, the “everypeople a polity” principle’ (p. 31). Starting withthis definition, he proceeds to explore an arrayof different kinds of nationalisms in Japan.Rather than seeing revolutionary changes,McVeigh generally sees basic continuity in thenature of Japan’s nationalism, barring certainshifts after the Second World War. His‘renovationist nationalism’ points to the view that the Japanese continue to attachimportance to the status quo ante. He labelsthis tendency ‘nostalgic nationalism’, and thisnostalgia is, according to him, embedded in theeveryday practices of ordinary people, hencehis notion of ‘everyday nationalism’. McVeighsees Japan’s nationalism proceeding along twobroad fronts: state sponsorship and a popular,grass-roots movement.

Of course, it is the business of the state topromote nationalism. This political sense of‘state/official nationalism’ is in fact what weordinarily think of in terms of nationalism. This‘state/official nationalism’ is also reflected in avariety of other nationalisms: ‘educationalnationalism’, in which the education-examination system streamlines youth’sattitudes and disposition towards life;‘economic nationalism’, in which the economicsystem of the nation and the ideologysupporting it have been by and largestructured by the state for furthering its owngoals; ‘ethnos nationalism’, in which the stateplays a critical role in creating, managing, andmaintaining the myth of Japan’s cultural andethnic homogeneity; and ‘state culturalnationalism’ (which includes ‘linguisticnationalism’), exemplified most prominently bythe Meiji-era Freedom and People’s RightsMovement.

These state-sponsored nationalisms havebasically gone hand-in-hand with a variety ofgrass-roots nationalisms. ‘Popular culturalnationalism’ heavily implicates the Japaneseconcept of ‘culture’, whose ingredients include

the Japanese notion of ethnicity, aestheticheritage, citizenship, and the idea of the purityof the Japanese blood (creating a ‘racializednational culture’). These notions are manifestedin ‘proprietary nationalism’, that is, the ideathat ‘individuals “own” nation-ness’ (p. 187).‘Popular ethnos nationalism’, which includes‘linguistic nationalism’, ‘peace nationalism’,and ‘racial proprietary nationalism’, emphasizesthe homogeneity and uniqueness of Japaneseculture. The discussion of ‘genderednationalism’, primarily based on McVeigh’sprevious study of a women’s junior college inJapan, revolves around the institutionalproduction of ‘good wives and wise mothers’,a slogan touted by both the imperial and post-imperial government. In ‘mainstream andmarginal nationalism’ McVeigh takes up themarginalized fundamentalist Mahikari religiousmovement, whose members adhere totraditional Japanese values which are beingforgotten by the mainstream Japanese.

McVeigh expresses a dismal view of the ideaof ‘Japanese citizenship’. For ‘citizenship’ or‘civic-mindedness implies tolerating diversity,while civility means following the same rules’(p. 269), such as, among others, universalequality, whereas ‘in Japan it is widely believedthat since there is (or should be) only one typeof ethnos in Japan, there is little need foruniversalistic, impartial rules that encourageexpressions of diversity, especially if it isperceived that such diversity threatens projectsassociated with educational or economicnationalism’ (p. 269).

While McVeigh admits the overlap of variousnationalisms, giving them discrete names anddeliberating on the subject in terms of eachname tends to lead (or mislead) one to believethat there are these ‘things’ called ‘economicnationalism’, ‘educational nationalism’, and soon. My way of looking at nationalism, instead,is that there are economic, educational, andother manifestations of nationalism, one andthe same. Also, in my view, nationalism is an ideology, whereas in his effort to makenationalism comprehend just about the entirespectrum of national, state, social, and culturalphenomena, McVeigh includes institutions,social systems, practices, and so on, some of which are only tangentially relevant toideology. These criticisms notwithstanding, thework under review is a masterful,comprehensive analysis of nationalism in Japan,whose methodology should be an example forthe study of nationalism anywhere.

Harumi Befu Stanford University


480 Book reviews

Napier, A. David. The righting of passage:perceptions of change after modernity. xv, 127 pp., bibliogr. Philadelphia: Univ.Pennsylvania Press, 2004. £24.50 (cloth)

David Napier has always been a refreshing voicein our discipline. Never one to go on a band-wagon or follow the party line, theoretical orpolitical, he has offered us, through his prolificwork, insights that are deeply grounded ininterdisciplinary knowledge, from art,philosophy, psychoanalysis, medicine, andothers. Who would forget the photo on thedust jacket of his 1992 book Foreign bodies – abeer can with a Peruvian (?) mask – beforeglobalization and hybridity became buzz-words. While his previous work has focused onart and performances, this new book movesinto his more recent interests in medicalanthropology, especially immunology.

The most important thesis of this book isthe direct challenge to postmodernism’s claims.This is not the usual criticism that it has notoffered alternative paradigm(s) or vision(s).Rather, Napier questions its premise from thevery basic epistemological point – ‘if thecontemporary world is as antistructural asproclaimed by postmodemists, how can any of us structure our thinking enough to recognized or describe our experience of it?’(p. ix).

Following his abiding interest in the self,Napier translates this question into the problemof the self ‘[If, as a postmodernist would claim,]the world we inhabit is soft and antistructural,one must either accept the inability of any of usto structure our own sensations or,alternatively, argue for some form of humanismthat sees an inherently structured self living atodds with its unstructured environment’ (p. ix).Posing the same question on the self as a socialactor, he argues that communication would nottake place among utterly chaotic flexible selves,and there would be no authors with coherentidentities, no theories to share and argue, nobooks to be bought, etc.

Napier’s own ethnographically based‘answer’ to this question is that the ‘effect ofseparating embodiment from meaning in thepostmodern world is actually the slowing downof human transformation’ (p. x, italics in theoriginal), on the one hand, and ‘a growingpsychological entropy – a significant decrease,that is, in human psychological growth’ (p. xi),on the other hand.

The body of the book consists of fivechapters and an epilogue. Despite the

basically philosophical questions that the bookposes, each chapter consists of delightful‘stories’ from the author’s lived experience.‘Dressed to kill’ (chap. 1) begins with a visit to a video store with his son, while he tells ushis own experience of ‘getting poisoned’ in Baliin ‘Self and other in an “amodern” world’(chap. 2). ‘The writing of passage’ (chap. 3) isabout his ‘encounter’ with his Italian friend’sfamily of twenty-four children and theirparents, and the mottled mass of his bodywhen he accidentally drove a scythe into ahornet nest. The ethnography for ‘Running inplace’ (chap. 4) is based on his six years offieldwork in a hospital, while ‘The all-whiteelephant’ (chap. 5) begins at the Yale UniversityCo-op, where he witnessed a blackbusinessman (he adds, ‘in this whiter-than-white place’) at the check-out counterinterrupting his work to help out a severelyhandicapped customer, and subsequentconversation with this man, whose brother was murdered in New Haven. The epilogue,titled ‘ “Discountability” and Transcendence’,begins with Napier’s dream of facing a largeaudience to speak about ‘the principle ofdiscountablity’.

Being an old-fashioned, perhaps high,modernist myself, I would have wanted Napierto pursue further the question/possibility ofwhether so-called ‘modernity’ and‘postmodernity’ should constitute (1) an either/or question, (2) a linear sequence in time/history, or (3) a juxtaposition, as proposed byBaudelaire, who first coined the term modern(moderne). These questions also lead to thehotly debated issue of the universality ofmodernity – should we think of ‘amodern’(Napier’s term), as critically modern (see‘Critically modern’ by Bruce M. Knauft in hiscollection Critically modern: alternatives,alterities, anthropologies, 2002), or as analternative to modernity (see ‘Alternativemodernities or an alternative to “modernity”:getting out of the modernist sublime’ by JohnKelly in the same collection)?

Indeed this relatively short book is anintellectual treat and a pleasure to read. Any scholar interested in the modern andpostmodern(ism), the self and the other, as well as such medical issues aspsychoneuroimmunology and stress, will find itprovocative and fascinating. It would be asplendid book for launching discussions onthese subject(s) in postgraduate seminars.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney University ofWisconsin, Madison


Book reviews 481

Van Der Geest, Sjaak & Ria Reis (eds).Ethnocentrism: reflections on medicalanthropology. vi, 152 pp., bibliogrs. Amsterdam:Aksant, 2002. €13.00

This intriguing little volume was produced bythe Medical Anthropology Unit at the Universityof Amsterdam to mark, according to thepreface, a quarter-century since its founding in1977. This origin explains the slightdisconnection between the purported theme ofthe volume and some contributions, all by staffand former students of the Unit. While all thechapters address the topic of ethnocentrism insome fashion, occasionally there is a sense thata decent piece of medical anthropologicalresearch has been contorted somewhat toaccomplish this.

Sjaak van der Geest’s introductory chapterprovides some illuminating background on thenature of ethnocentrism, pointing to themodern mis-rendering of anthropologist W.J.McGee’s original meaning when first used in1900. He intended the term to characterize anearly stage in the evolution of human thinking,within a schema associating expandingawareness of the scale of the physical universewith cultural development (thus in ‘primitive’culture ‘egocentric and ethnocentric views’dominate, whereas in ‘higher’ cultures humanshave become progressively aware of the relativeinsignificance of humanity – let alone particulargroups of humans – in the cosmos). Thisoriginal and thought-provoking,characterization of ethnocentrism was rapidlyreplaced by Sumner’s (1907) definition, whoseusage continues to be generally accepted.

Van der Geest moves on to claim thatanthropologists consider ethnocentrismindispensable to culture, while seeking tocontest it through a culturally relativistapproach. Turning to the link with medicalanthropology, he argues that the assumedsuperiority of one system (e.g. biomedicine)over another (e.g. an indigenous tradition), ofone group of professionals (doctors) overanother (anthropologists), and of a particularinterpretative schema over another(professionals over lay persons, or ‘other’cultures over one’s own), all constitute varietiesof ethnocentrism. While these moves arelogically defensible and hold analytic promisefor a revitalized comprehension of, for example,doctor-patient relations cross-culturally, as theyare worked through in the subsequent chaptersthe limitations of such a totalizing approachbecome increasingly clear.

‘Ethnocentrism’ is popularly assumed toinvolve some element of prejudice. The secondchapter, by Chris de Beet, on racist Euro-centrism in turn of the twenty-first centurySierra Leone, is therefore highly pertinent,although the ethnic policies described are notthe same as ‘ethnocentrism’ in its commonlyunderstood sense of being an unthinking, evenunconscious, orientation. As de Beet suggests,the operation and effects of such policies asethnic segregation on grounds of disease risk toEuropeans from the indigenous population andthe exclusion of black doctors from the medicalassociation constitute a ‘special kind ofethnocentrism that related to colonial or neo-colonial domination’ (p. 32). Kodjo Senah’schapter discusses ‘doctor-talk’ and ‘patient-talk’in Ghana, usefully observing thatethnocentrism entails an element of embeddedhostility. Senah argues that Ghanaian doctors’jargon-laden and overbearing communicativestyles indicate ‘physician ethnocentrism’ in acontext where medical authority is so reified asto be unchallengeable.

Similarly, Annette Drews argues in herchapter on birthing in Zambia that the coerciveimposition of biomedical obstetric procedureson labouring women (such as lying downduring contractions) constitutes‘ethnocentrism’ (sic) on the part of the medicalstaff. Els van Dongen concludes her chapter ona Dutch psychiatric hospital by arguing thatstaff exercise a more subtle but still pervasiveform of ethnocentrism when interacting withpatients by implicitly treating their ownconstructs as superior. Although individuallyinteresting, in these three chapters theprogressive stretching of the concept of‘ethnocentrism’ reaches a point where it ceases to have much leverage. It is questionable whether it is analytically sensibleto subsume entirely the effects of socialhierarchy, including the variable and particularcontributions of (for example) class, gender,and professional authority, under the rubric of‘ethnocentrism’, thereby forgoing attention tothe operation of power in these differentencounters.

The final chapter is perhaps the mostilluminating case study in the volume, due toits courageous (if naïve) reflexivity in providingan account of fieldwork marred byanthropological ethnocentrism – or arrogance– of a kind that should be all too familiar tomost medical anthropological researchers.Arguing again that the notion of ethnocentrism can be applied to professions


482 Book reviews

and disciplines, Sonja Zweegers reports on thetrials of doing field research using a medicallyqualified ‘interpreter’. She attempts todisentangle her own ‘anthropologicalethnocentrism’ (an assumption of disciplinarysuperiority, reciprocal to that of biomedicine)from the quotidian (cultural) form and fromindividual personality attributes. Her analysis isagain limited by a lack of attention to socialstructural influences of critical importance toher interactions – here, gender and possiblyage, as well as ethnicity (the Vietnamese doctor being male and the Dutch anthropology student female). None the less it is unusual to read so frank an account of a fairly common phenomenon inmultidisciplinary research across medicine andanthropology. Anthropologists who work withothers in the health professions in particularwill find some illuminating insights in thisbook.

Helen Lambert University of Bristol

Whitehead, Neil L. (ed.). Violence. ix, 306 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Oxford, Santa Fe: James CurreyPublishers/Sch. American Research, 2005.£45.00 (cloth), £16.95 (paper)

This volume, dedicated to the memory ofBegona Aretxaga, enriches anthropologicalapproaches to culture and conflict. It confrontsthe complexities in theorizing the relationshipbetween violence and cultural practices. It hasbeen derived from the School of AmericanResearch Advanced Seminar on ‘The Poetics ofViolent Practice’ and questions the role ofanthropology in relegating violence to themargins of culture.

The results of the seminar are summarizedin an important introduction by the editor andgive emphasis to an ‘anthropology ofexperience’ over an ‘anthropology of identity’.While the former focuses on political, social,and economic transformation, the latter is moreconcerned with meanings, emotions, andbodily practices which can lead to a betterknowledge of violence and its sources invarious communities.

In the opening essay, George comparessocial observations in a letter from anIndonesian painter with Geertz’s essay on theBalinese cockfight. Following it reflectively withexamples of his own ethnographic research inIndonesia, he draws out commentaries on theplace of terror and bloodshed in local cultures.

Whitehead’s essay uncovers the conceptualproblems faced by anthropology in studyingthe centrality of violence in culture. He arguesthat an understanding of the poetics ofviolence offers more credible representations ofothers and us, which would enable the West tocontest notions of ‘mindless’ terrorism. Theessays share a concern over neo-colonialismand how it determines the nature of indigenouskillings.

Hinton and Taylor examine the relationshipbetween local expressions of genocidalbehaviour and the state. Hinton focuses on theradio broadcast of a Khmer Rouge speech andthe narrative of a Cambodian woman whowitnessed a brutal political slaying in aBuddhist temple. Through this juxtaposition,the author critically examines the local‘vernacular’ through which acts of violence areculturally patterned, legitimized, and enforced.Taylor’s remarkable essay explores the symbolicaspects of illustrations in pre-genocidal popularliterature in Rwanda. The iconography providesmarvellous insights into the radicalization ofHutu ethno-nationalism. Taylor’s own presencein his writing, through his experiences ofevacuation, cross-fires, and the killing of hisTutsi parents-in-law, highlights the emotionalcosts of writing on violence.

‘An extraordinarily risky undertaking’: that ishow Jeganathan describes his own essay. Hemuses over Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s ghost,Lionel Wendt’s photography, andThamothampillai Shanaathanan’s political art,and attempts, often poignantly, to develop apicture of death and destruction in conflict-ridden Sri Lanka. Seltzer focuses on ‘the woundculture’ of reality television and describesbrilliantly the ethnology of principles, pity, andpublicness that emerge from ‘true crime’shows. He demonstrates how collective viewingof the spectacle of crime, investigation, andself-styled support groups leads to publicexasperation, belief, and feelings of sharedvictimhood amongst North Americans. Bothscholars remain concerned about thenormalization of the ‘grotesque’ (Jeganathan)or the ‘abnormally normal’ (Seltzer), ineveryday life.

Ellis contests an understanding of the war inLiberia as habitual ‘tribal’ violence. Headvocates an analysis of violence as a social andhistorical phenomenon, where its extrememanifestations also exist in ‘normal’ conditions.Nordstrom is convincing in her analysis of wartrauma in Mozambique, and argues that


Book reviews 483


instability endures in, and determines thenature of, post-war societies. Away from thebattlefields, even everyday things, ranging fromkitchen knives to public places used to displaythe dead, become infused with images ofconflict. While Ellis locates historicalantecedents of discord, Nordstrom contendsthat ‘violence has a tomorrow’.

Radical nationalist violence within Basquesociety and its resistance to the prevailing orderof democracy forms the core of Aretxaga’sessay. She attempts to ‘make sense’ of therelation between violence, narrative, and thelaw by analysing the trial of a small-townBasque youth who shot two police officers.Payne addresses key questions around thepolitical implications of confessional practicesin South Africa. She focuses on the muchpublicized confession of a Cape Townpoliceman, who admitted to torture andatrocity during apartheid. The authors offerdifferent analyses of controversial admissionsbefore a court of law (Aretxaga), or before theTruth and Reconciliation Commission (Payne),and show how violence is negotiated through a relationship between the actor and theaudience.

The volume has much to offer not only toanthropology, but also to other relateddisciplines. It counters understandings ofviolence as aberration, and contests media-disseminated and popular perceptions about‘the inherent savagery of the non-Westernworld’. Instead, the reader is offered a morenuanced understanding of conflict as culturalexpression. The contributors have successfullyreturned the victim, the victimizer, and violenceto the heart of culture.

Atreyee Sen University of Sussex

Material culture

Janowski, Monica. The forest, source of life:the Kelabit of Sarawak. vi, 154 pp., maps, plates,tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. London: BritishMuseum/Sarawak Museum, 2003. £25.00(cloth)

This book, a guide to two collections ofartefacts, was made for the British Museum andthe Sarawak Museum by Monica Janowskiduring her fieldwork among the Kelabit ofcentral Borneo. The book falls into three parts.

The first is an introduction to the mode oflivelihood and social life of the community ofPa’Dalih, which had at the time of Janowski’sfieldwork in the late 1980s still not beendisrupted by the destruction of the rainforest orby wholesale emigration. The second is acollection of 119 photographs, some showingthe artefacts, others illustrating their productionor use at Pa’Dalih. The third part is a series ofappendices, including a complete list of theartefacts. The book has a large format, toaccommodate the plates, and is elegantlyproduced, with line drawings in the text. Acouple of excellent maps show the populationareas on both sides of the Malaysian/Indonesiaborder.

The Kelabit have not been well served byethnography. In the decades after the SecondWorld War a series of studies of major ethnicgroups were carried out, following a plandevised by Edmund Leach. But Tom Harrison,director of the Sarawak Museum, kept theKelabit highlands as a private preserve.Meanwhile, his own writing was patchy andimpressionistic. Consequently, theethnographic resources on the Kelabit arescattered, and Janowski’s nine brief chapters inthe first part of the book make a usefulintroduction to them. They cover techniques ofmaking clothing, longhouse construction, wetand dry rice agriculture, and the use of jungleproduce. There is also a brief outline of theKelabit version of competitive feasting, as foundin much of highland Southeast Asia. Thebibliography is partial.

The value of the book is, however, as astudy of material culture. The initiative for thecollection evidently came from Janowski, andwas backed by Brian Durrans at the BritishMuseum. The result is a collection made overmany months by an ethnographer, with carefuldocumentation of the ethnographic context ofeach object. The contrast with most museumcollections from Borneo is very marked,including other holdings in the British Museum.Only too often provenance is vague, coverageis haphazard, and function a matter ofguesswork. This collection sets new standardsfor what can and should be accomplished, and we can only hope that there are morecollaborations of this type in future. Janowski’sstudy was made not a moment too soon, aslogging roads pushed into the furthest cornersof the interior. Its value will only grow with thepassing of years.

Peter Metcalf University of Virginia

484 Book reviews

Küchler, Susanne & Daniel Miller (eds).Clothing as material culture. x, 195 pp., figs,illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: BergPublishers, 2005. £50.00 (cloth), £16.99(paper)

Küchler and Miller have edited a useful andstimulating book on the significance of clothing in everyday life, focusing on it asmaterial culture, a topic that once was derigueur when anthropologists followed theNotes and queries format as they travelledbeyond home territory for fieldwork. In hisintroduction to The material culture reader(2002), Victor Buchli succinctly summarized the history of material culture studies inanthropology from early fascination withobjects in the mid-nineteenth century to adiminished interest during the twentiethcentury when concepts of social structure tookprecedence over interest in things. Clothing,however, even when included as part ofmaterial culture, was generally treateddescriptively, rarely analytically. Clothing asmaterial culture brings clothing into the fold ofcurrent material culture studies.

Nine excellent chapters follow Miller’s meatyintroduction about the importance of themateriality of clothing. Miller begins bypointing out that material culture studies havetaken two trajectories: one that scrutinizes theitems of clothing or textile in regard toconservation, design, or placement in museumcollections, and the other that scrutinizes itemsin some way for cultural significance. Incontrast, Miller says, the aim of this volume is‘to show how contemporary material culturestudies transcends and refuses such simplisticdualism’ (p. 1). Individual chapters movebeyond discussing identity projected by what isworn by an individual. Instead, they delve intoan individual’s feelings and sentiments aboutboth choice and the act of wearing thegarments. In women’s choices of outfits forparticular events, both personal and socialaesthetics, along with political, religious, andsocial commitments, are emphasized indecision-making about what to wear. Forexample, Özlem Sandikci and Güliz Ger providea detailed analysis of various headscarves forTurkish women which focuses on some headcoverings that primarily proclaim fashionabilityas well as others that proclaim modesty. SophieWoodward concentrates on an individual’saesthetics and illustrates how a clothing item orensemble does (in the case of Mumtaz dressingfor a wedding) or does not (in the case of Rosie

dressing to go out for dinner at a fashionablerestaurant) work out to have ‘an aesthetic fitwith the wearer’.

Re-use arises as a topic about materiality inboth Karen Tranberg Hansen’s chapter onsecondhand clothing in Zambia and LucyNorris’s chapter on recycled cloth in India. ForZambians, the affordability of secondhandclothes makes them attractive as an option fortheir wardrobes; they employ creativity inreworking these garments to becomeaesthetically pleasing and fashionable inZambian terms. Hansen’s examples are not farfrom those of Alexandra Palmer in Couture andcommerce: the transatlantic fashion trade in the

(2001), in which she analysed Torontowomen who bought Paris fashion gowns andthen altered them to be suitably proper to wearin Toronto. The story of the textiles recycled inIndia is more complex, involving the source ofthe textile and the process used for recyclingand selling. A ‘new’ blanket is not recognizableas being created from former clothing items,for it is woven from garments stripped of anyidentity, shredded, and recycled into thread oryarn known as shoddy, leading Norris toconclude that the ‘effacement of former livescreates a new exchange value located in theshoddy fibres’ (p. 101).

Suzanne Küchler published research onmaterial culture in Clothing the Pacific (2003). Inthis volume, she writes on the same topic ofPolynesian quilts and presents a highlycomplex picture of the production andconsumption of these quilts, especially thosefrom the Cook Islands, which are carefully sewnby women, highly valued, but primarily hiddenfrom view. The cloth itself, cut and pieced fromtextiles of vivid colours, is important because of‘its capacity to be cut and restitched, to absorband to decay, which allowed it to materiallytranslate ideas of performance and resemblanceinto new media and new social relations’ (p. 189).

Four other chapters also successfully provideexamples of how the materiality of a specificitem of dress or ensemble must be consideredin relationship to the wearer or user, as in thecase of Kaori O’Connor’s research on newfibres, and the three chapters related to thePacific by Amiria Henare on Maaori Cloack,Chloe Colchester on the revival of chiefly dressin Fiji, and Graeme Were on the use of calico inMelanesia as a source of patterns. Dressscholars from many disciplines need thisvolume in their libraries.

Joanne B. Eicher University of Minnesota

1950s


Book reviews 485

Religion

Aldhouse-Green, Miranda & StephenAldhouse-Green. The quest for the shaman:shape-shifters, sorcerers and spirit healers inancient Europe. 240 pp., maps, tables, plates,illus., bibliogr. London: Thames & Hudson,2005. £19.95 (cloth)

What do Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Dolittle, PabloNeruda, Bert Jansch, Graham Greene, EvaPeron, V.S. Naipaul, Alfred Lord Tennyson,Aeschylus, cannibals, zombies, whirlingdervishes, ritual murderers, and shamans allhave in common? Not only are they all in thislavishly illustrated popular archaeology book,they are used in correlations that stretch theimagination. Unfortunately, refreshing creativityprobably too often crosses into speculationhere. The authors, both establishedarchaeologists at the University of Wales,appear to be riding a commercial wave (thebook was a recent History Club selection) thatincludes shamanic art and/or archaeologybooks by J. David Lewis-Williams, Piers Vitebsky,and Mihály Hoppál.

The book is useful for its capsuledescriptions of a huge range of specific, mostlyEuropean, sites that may well have some link tobroadly defined shamanic world-views througha vast swathe of time – from the Palaeolithic tothe unevenly Christianized Middle Ages. One ofthe most poignant examples is the child buriedon a swan’s wing in Mesolithic Jutland (pp. 78-9). The final chapter on Celtic culture isdelightful when it weds shamanic themes toearly Welsh and Irish texts, bringing in materialculture evidence where possible. The argumentthat Irish seers and chanting Druids wereshamanic builds on themes developed earlierconcerning shape-shifting (between humansand animals) and gender-bending. This is notnew, but is well summarized.

The text is also strong where debates in theliterature concerning interpretations of specificsites are mentioned. Too frequently, however,what is presented at first as ‘perhaps’ shamanicis later explained in summaries moredefinitively. Most of the illustrations, especiallythe full-colour photographs, are excellent andstrategically placed near appropriate text.However, unwise judgements were made toconcoct cartoon-like re-creations of certainperiods or sites. (Figure 8 merges a lateMesolithic burial in Southern Scandinavia witha clichéd image of a loincloth-wearing, antler-

headed shaman derived from Starr Carr innorthern England.)

Especially problematic is the way in whichethnographic data are integrated witharchaeological materials. Poorly assimilateddata on contemporary hunter-gatherers ofAfrica and Siberia come from a few secondarysources. Ethnographic nuance and manyrelevant sources are ignored, including anotherpopular book published in the same series byJeremy Narby and Francis Huxley. RonaldHutton’s warning about the diversity of groupswithin Siberia, and Piers Vitebsky’s concernabout projections of altered states ofconsciousness back in time, are brieflymentioned but rendered irrelevant because theauthors are striving for generalizations aboutshamanism. This is the opposite of currenttrends in shamanic studies, where interpretativeshamanisms are more often stressed than anyover-arching ‘primitive religion’ called‘shamanism’. In addition, insights of VictorTurner into ritual and liminality are usedwithout credit. Similarly, familiar mythicdualities of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ beingbridged by ‘animal-helpers’ are evoked withoutdocumentation (e.g. p. 198).

Correlating shamanic world-views withknown archaeological sites is in generalchallenging. While what we know abouthistorically and currently documented shamansoften focuses on healing, the ephemeral andholistic nature of healing processes makesshamanic curing success difficult to documentfrom material culture. This could be a primeexample of the ‘paradoxes’ recognized in theepilogue, along with ambiguities inherent inthe evidence. Tantalizing sites include theattributed ‘doctor’s grave’ at Stanway in Essex(about AD 50), where a shamanic figure isburied with his ‘tools of the trade’. The authorsalso somewhat sensationally mention Scythianenjoyment of ‘a jolly good dope party’,something known from Herodotus’ famouspassage concerning ‘howling with pleasure’from hemp seeds burned over hot stones (pp. 85, 86, 122). Far less pleasurable thanconsciously shared intoxication must have beenthe effects of ergot poisoning, evident from theintestines of Tollund and Grauballe bog finds ofthe European Iron Age. Ergot is sometimeslinked to mass hysteria, far from the controlled‘soul-journeying’ of most shamanic adepts. Inretrospect, evidence for curing skills and theneed to be cured can sometimes get confused.

For many scholars, the sine qua non ofshamanic activity is inspired mediation among


486 Book reviews

various cosmological worlds for a purpose.How mediation is accomplished variesconsiderably, whether through ‘ecstasy’,‘trance’, consciousness altered with flute, rattle, and drum, or careful use of sacredpharmacopoeia. Equally diverse are specific,highly symbolic shamanic worlds. Far from amere three-part cosmos, shamanic cosmologyis often more complex than indicated here. Sotoo are the ways in which trickster-shamans‘perform’, in a complex blending of art andfunction that belies stereotypes about shamanicleadership, marginality, or super-human feats.Shamans are too creative to be placed underconstraints of having only certain kinds of‘helper-spirits’ or initiatory experiences,although many shamanic patterns reappearcross-culturally.

The ‘non-literate’ communities from which‘traditional’ shamans come are not easilystereotyped. The authors appear to haveaccepted an argument associated with WalterOng that suggests that legends, myths, andepics are learned in oral cultures through arepetitive ‘poverty of language’ (p. 83). Theyalso misconstrue the subtle work of thefolklorist Albert Lord by associating him withthis reductionist argument. Stress on simpleformulas for memorization negates themetaphorical richness and inspirational powerthat is at the heart of the best epic singing andshamanic poetry.

In sum, a closer reading of living andhistorical shamanic societies would improve this provocative work linking shamans toarchaeological cultural evidence. Like Bonnieand Clyde’s adventures, some of the flaws were embedded in the project from its start.However, one has to admire an effort that triesto shift our consciousness in creative ways. Ifjust one reader of this book becomes a brilliantarchaeologist of the next generation, then theextravagance and sensationalism may havebeen worth it.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer GeorgetownUniversity

Denton, Lynn Teskey. Female ascetics inHinduism. ix, 218 pp., tables, bibliogr. NewYork: SUNY Press, 2004. $65.50 (cloth), $21.95(paper)

Reading Lynn Teskey Denton’s Female ascetics inHinduism is a somewhat anachronisticexperience. The book is based on detailed fieldresearch in Varanasi in the late 1970s, written

up as a dissertation in the late 1980s, andincompletely revised in the early 1990s. Dentonpassed away in 1995; her husband and editorsat SUNY revived the manuscript in the late1990s and published the work in 2004. Luckily,ascetic life in contemporary India does not lookdramatically different than it did thirty yearsago – Hindu renunciation, after all, is a practicethat has endured thousands of years, throughcountless historical and political shifts. Despitethe pressures of modernity that have alteredmost ethnographic landscapes, Denton’sanalyses of the reasons for and manifestationsof Hindu women’s asceticism remain accurate,astute, and important.

Anachronistic elements of the book lie notin her data, then, but in Denton’s ethnographicrepresentations of women. The ethnography ofIndian religions has come a long way sinceDenton set out for the field, and assertions thatascetics alone pursue moksa (salvation), or thatHindu monastic institutions observe genderequity, seem dated after the work of Gold,Lamb, and Khandelwal (who contributed anupdated bibliography). Denton is absolutelyright in her general orientation, however,arguing that renouncers define themselves as agroup in opposition to householders:

The crucial point to note is this: The entry ofeither a woman or man into asceticism ismarked by a ritual rejection of the status ofhouseholder. For those who are not yethouseholders, it is a refusal; for those who are, itis an abandonment.

In addition, Denton usefully locates genderwithin the classic householder-renouncerrelationship: ascetic institutions protect womenwho simply do not fit in ‘by providing acontext in which women can legitimately liveoutside of marriage and respectably pursue, fortheir own benefit, a religious ideal’. Dumontwould be proud.

Denton’s analysis on the distinctionsbetween life as a woman householder and lifeas a woman ascetic is strengthened by thebreadth of her textual knowledge, but the book is also somewhat weighed down: she ismore concerned with textual reference than sheneed be for anthropological fieldwork of thisquality. Her fieldwork (like her writing) is freshnearly thirty years on, and it would have served her data well to let it loose, notpermanently tied to whether and the extent to which reality meets text. But that was thedominant question in studying religion inDenton’s day, and within this constraint, she


Book reviews 487

shows how religious texts are more usefulinsofar as they impact upon ascetics’ own viewsof themselves, and popular perceptions ofasceticism – how women’s renunciation isjustified despite not being technically allowed,for example – than they are as literalrepresentations of lived practice.

Similarly, the sociological information isworthy but overly complex, without quotes orvignettes that make ethnographic descriptioncome alive. The editor writes that Dentonintended to infuse the manuscript with lifehistories that she had collected. Their absenceis keenly felt: we could do with knowing a lotmore about the emotional, the experiential,and the circumstantial in her informants’ lives.More problematically, the details of asceticsociety are too complicated for even a generouseditor to compile correctly, and there are typosthat render some sections unintelligible to theuninitiated.

Relying on social structures to describe acommunity without also offering ethnographicdepth means that sociological patterns sit staticwithout the challenge that reality usually poses.For example, Denton relies heavily on aprimary distinction often quoted for Hinduascetics, that between Vaisnavism and Saivism.But even minimal ethnographic elucidationcompiled by editors and attached as anappendix to one of the chapters – on youngbrahmacarinis in three Varanasi ashrams –complicates the supposedly hard-and-fastdistinction in every instance. We glean fromunanalysed data that the nominaldifferentiation between Saivites and Vaisnavitesdetermines only sectarian division: ritualpractice almost always combines elements ofboth paths.

Still, Denton’s skills as a sociologist,anthropologist, textualist, and scholar ofreligion are all formidable – she gracefullycross-tabulates data; describes fascinating ritesof initiation; incisively assesses the relationshipsamong textual prescription, popular view, andascetic self-representation; and offerssophisticated analyses of the complex interplaybetween social life and spiritual life forresidents of India’s holiest city. The book worksbest if one thinks of the chapters as separateessays with overlapping information on the role of women in Hindu religious texts,contemporary ascetic sociology, and mysticpoetry. One wonders what eloquent newinsights Denton might have produced had shelived to synthesize the whole.

Sondra L. Hausner Save the Children, Nepal

Keenan, Jeremy. The lesser gods of the Sahara.xv, 298 pp., maps, fig., bibliogr. London,Portland, Or.: Frank Cass, 2004. £19.99(paper)

This collection of articles by the Director of theSaharan Studies Programme at the University ofEast Anglia and a Founder Board Member ofthe World Deserts Foundation originallyappeared in 2003 as a special issue of theJournal of North African Studies. It is among ahalf dozen welcome publications of the FrankCass Series ‘History and Society in the IslamicWorld’. Keenan, an anthropologist who hasbeen studying the Tuareg of Algeria for the pastforty years (cf. The Tuareg people of Ahaggar,1977, and Sahara man: travelling with theTuareg, 2001), here takes up matters of socialchange and contemporary political analysis. Histreatment is detailed and accompanied bycopious notes.

The Tuareg, ‘mythical blue-veiled warriors’,are composed of some two million speakers of a Berber dialect – Tamahak (Tamashek) – and spread across some 1.5 million squarekilometres of the Central Sahara and the Sahel,from Algeria to northern Mali and Niger withpockets in Libya, Burkina Faso, northernNigeria, and Mauritania. Half of them live inNiger, more than a quarter in Mali. The 30,000northern Tuareg of the mountainous regions ofAhaggar and Tassili-n-Ajjer in southern Algeriaare Keenan’s prey. His ‘excuse’ for studying sosmall a population: the exotic customs ofmatrilineality and the veiling of men at theoutset of his research, and now an‘ethnographic update’ following the army’sannulment of Algeria’s 1992 general electionsand the ensuing civil war.

What are some of the lessons that we learn about social change from Keernan’sinformative account? The extreme south ofAlgeria, what was the Tuareg homeland, covers about one-fifth of the country’s territoryand is increasingly important, strategically and politically. Today only 10 to 15 per cent ofits population are Tuareg, and among themthose under the age of 20 speak Arabic ratherthan Tamahak Berber as their primarylanguage. They are apparently peripheral to the ‘Amazigh’ (Berberist) movement of thenorth. The oasis city of Tamanrasset, with4,000 inhabitants in 1964, is now a crossroadsof some 150,000, and by Keenan’s account aplace of refuge and poverty, of social andhealth problems. The Tuareg attribute much oftheir current misfortunes to the Islamist


488 Book reviews

movement and the loss of tourism. In 1962, an estimated 90 per cent of the Kel Ahaggartribe were predominantly nomadic; in 1972around 50 per cent; today, probably 10 to 15 per cent.

What of veiling and matrilineality? MostTuareg men, at least in Tamanrasset, no longerwear the veil, ‘a symbolic manifestation of rolestatus’. The whole concept of ‘descent’ and the significance of the matriline have been‘downgraded’, and the intrusions of themodern world – certain Islamo-Arab influences– have led to the degradation of the positionand roles of women in social life and a threat totheir well-being and health. On tourism, highlydeveloped in the first decades afterindependence, it has, according to manyTuareg, brought the region to the brink of anenvironmental catastrophe. Some haveorganized into a group striving for alternativeforms of tourism. (Keenan himself has beencommissioned to make a report on thedevelopment of an environmentally sustainabletourism policy in the Ahaggar.)

The ‘lesser gods of the Sahara’ of the book’stitle and one of its chapters (and of adocumentary film recently made by Keenan)refer to the famous rock art frescos of Tassili-n-Ajjer. In the 1950s they were publicized as ‘thegreatest museum of prehistoric art in the whole world’. The French prehistorian HenriLhote claimed their discovery in a widely readbook published in 1958, an English versionfollowing in 1959. Keenan documents what hecalls the ‘intellectual dishonesty’ of Lhote’sclaim to have been the discoverer of thefrescos. Interestingly, he associates theworldwide acclaim given to the book and to anexhibition in Paris to French manoeuvring inregard to the future of the Sahara. It added, heargues, a massive ‘cultural’ dimension to the oiland military claims that France was staking outin the Algerian Sahara as the war of liberationreached its heights. The stakes were oil and gas discovered in 1956, and the Sahara as a site for atomic testing. Indeed in 1959, we arereminded, de Gaulle appointed JacquesSoustelle as Minister for the Sahara and AtomicAffairs.

The Algerians did manage to hold on to theSahara and its wealth. But so far they have notmanaged to make much of it. Keenan’s richlyinformative volume describes and explains how it is that the Tuareg await their day in thesun.

Kenneth Brown Mediterraneans (Maison desSciences de l’Homme)

Nicholas, Ralph W. Fruits of worship: practicalreligion in Bengal. 248 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr.New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2003, Rs 475(cloth)

Ralph Nicholas’s new book, a compilation ofconference papers and articles written between1965 and 1981, is essential reading for scholarsof Bengali religion and ritual. The ethnographicfieldwork on which it is based was carried outbetween 1960 and 1970 in Medinipur district,around 50 kilometres southwest of Kolkata(formerly Calcutta). As Nicholas explains in theintroduction, his administrative duties in theUniversity of Chicago and the AmericanInstitute of Indian Studies did not allow him topursue his field research beyond the 1970s. Ofcourse, much has changed in Bengal sincethen: massive political upheavals – includingthe rise of the Communists, land reforms, theinflux of refugees from Bangladesh, and theNaxalite movement – have transformed thelandscape of rural Bengal. The spread ofcinema halls and cable television have changedthe popular propagation of myths. An ever-increasing migration back and forth betweenKolkata and the districts makes it harder thanpreviously to demarcate differences betweenrural and city people. Nevertheless, the bookstands its ground.

The chapters revolve around popularBengali practices of worship (puja), the ‘work’(karma) that goes into them, and the ‘fruits’(phal) that they bear. For the most part,however, this is only a loose theme, and thechapters do not come together to form acoherent whole. Nicholas analyses the Bengalicalendar and the Hindu religious year, therelationship between Vaishnavism and Islam,household shrines and village temples, differentmanifestations of the Mother goddess (devi),and a Candi poem which is one of the sourcesfor Durga worship.

The last three chapters are devoted to anexploration of the smallpox goddess Sitala fromethnographic, historical, and textual angles.Nicholas’s articles on Sitala have long been wellknown, not least among those interested in thehistory of popular Indian healing practices. Tobe able to read the articles in relation to eachother will provide new insights even to thosewho are already familiar with parts of hisargument. The author’s rendering of word-by-word translations from Bengali ritual manualsrelating to Sitala might seem excessivelydetailed to the general reader, but will be ofgreat interest to specialists. For example, one of


Book reviews 489

the translated manuscripts, composed around1750, mentions a range of popular Bengalidisease categories that are still in use today.Some of them, e.g. ‘poisonous fever’ (bisjvara), might even be familiar to UK physicianstreating Bengali-speaking migrants.

Nicholas mentions Weber, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and symbolic anthropology among hisintellectual influences, but anthropologicaltheory is clearly not the ambition of this book.Yet it is Nicholas’s unusual combination ofethnography, history, and textual exegesis thatprovides an implicit commentary on howBengal has (or has not) been studied duringthe past forty years. One surprise, from today’spoint of view, is Nicholas’s insistence onecological factors. For example, he argues thatthe distribution of castes in lower Bengal is dueto the specific environmental conditions of theGanges delta. An ecological approach alsoforms the basis of Nicholas’s meticulousreconstruction of the emergence and spread ofsmallpox in the Bengal region since theeighteenth century. The astute way in whichNicholas combines a historical ecology ofsmallpox with the emergence of ritual practicesaround the goddess Sitala is unsurpassed.

Despite his interest in history, Nicholas neverlooks at the diverse influences of the Britishcolonial regime on Bengali society and ritualpractice. The many postcolonial histories thatwere written about Bengal over the pastdecades accentuate this gap in his approach.On the other hand, Nicholas’s work might beread as a reminder that not everything aboutBengal has to be explained in relation to theBritish colonial regime.

There are several additional shortcomings ofthe book that are easy to spot from today’svantage point: the complex relations betweenritual texts and ritual performances are notsufficiently discussed; the significance ofVaishnavism in rural Bengal is well represented,yet should have been balanced with a closerattention to Shakta ideas and practices; andNicholas’s insights are based on fieldwork withwell-settled agriculturalists from middle-rankingHindu castes, which might explain hisVaishnavite bias (this is, however, hard toassess, since a detailed description of hisfieldwork sites and the methodologiesemployed is not included).

Fruits of worship reminds us of how great ascholar of Bengal Ralph Nicholas was in hisactive years. After becoming a ProfessorEmeritus in 2000, Nicholas has again started toengage more actively in research and writing –

the fruits of his new labour are eagerlyanticipated.

Stefan Ecks University of Edinburgh

Wiegele, Katherine L. Investing in miracles: ElShaddai and the transformation of popularCatholicism in the Philippines. xi, 207 pp., illus.,bibliogr. Honolulu: Univ. Hawai’i Press, 2005.£21.00 (paper)

Despite both the title of the book, and the formof address used for God by her informants – ElShaddai, the ‘God who is more than enough’ –Katharine Weigele’s ethnography presents apleasingly uneconomistic reading of thisPhilippine ‘prosperity theology.’

Weigele’s account is based on fieldworkwith mainly poor urban Filipino people whoattend El Shaddai ‘happenings’ (gawain) or aredrawn to its teachings and radio broadcasts.The centre of the research is Manila, at thejuncture between the makeshift, warren-likedistricts of the poor and wide public spaces ofthe wealthy, spaces which are intermittently co-opted for vast gatherings of the followers of themovement’s leader, Brother Mike Velarde.Indeed a sensitivity to the placing of El Shaddaiwithin Manila’s environments is a greatstrength of the book; one gawain gatheringplace is the PICC plaza, where Imelda Marcoshad trapped construction workers buried alive,rather than lose time in building theInternational Film Theater.

The account that Weigele offers of ElShaddai is straightforward, but both interestingand valuable. That El Shaddai followers in theirthousands should group where so many poorpeople died under the Marcos dictatorship is,she argues, an act of self-assertion andoptimism, although it is not a politicized act.Indeed, the creation of hope, rather than the desire for money as such, is the mainmotivating force of El Shaddai. Manyexplanations of prosperity cults haverepresented them as simply the fraudulentextraction of funds by religious leaders, and asnaïve and credulous victimization on the partof the tithe-paying membership. This analysismight at first sight appear to fit a movementwhose followers are encouraged to bring theirbank books to meetings, and to hold theirumbrellas upside down in the air in order tocatch ‘blessings’ raining from the sky.

Weigele does not neglect the question ofthe circulation of finances within themovement, its occasional obfuscations, or the


490 Book reviews

lack of evidence for financial improvementamong its members. However, she argues, themain advantage conferred on members of ElShaddai is a renewal of self-confidence and afeeling of empowerment, which enables peopleto view their circumstances differently, evenwhen objectively they remain the same.Weigele presents this experiencephenomenologically as one of actual value toher informants, and, in doing so, avoids thewidespread tendency to imply that suchmovements are the result of ‘falseconsciousness’, and thus offers us a morecomprehensible account of its genuinepersuasive power.

The El Shaddai movement has borrowedmuch from charismatic Protestantisms, andWeigele is adept at showing in what ways, butit has remained within the Catholic Church,with which the vast majority of Filipinoscontinue to identify. In an interesting chapteron the ‘spiritual warfare’ which characterizessome El Shaddai communities, Weigele claimsthat El Shaddai is attractive to many peoplebecause while acknowledging the variety ofspirits and other forces which inhabit thePhilippine landscape, it makes a moreconvincing claim to be able to dispel thempermanently than either local shamans andhealers, or most mainstream Catholic priests.

If there are criticisms to be made of thisbook, they relate largely to the limits of itsexplanatory ambition. El Shaddai’s relationshipwith Protestantism and with the officialCatholic Church is made clear (although I amnot sure that the case is made that this is thefuture of Philippine Catholicism), but itsrelationships with other aspects of popularculture remain underexplored. Weigele’sargument circles around the longing of theFilipino poor for a sense of recognition, and thedistinctive ways in which mimcry may conferauthenticity and leadership; these themes arevery widely discussed in the literature, butWeigele only comments on one or two pointsof comparison (thus, Rafael but not Ileto, forinstance). Hedman’s material, which suggeststhat El Shaddai may be correlated with aparticular moment in Philippine popular andcrowd politics, is not addressed, and althoughmaking general references to theembeddedness of El Shaddai in popularCatholic traditions, Weigele does not pursuemany concrete instances of continuity ordiscontinuity. Given the intrinsic interest ofWeigele’s material, this reticence isdisappointing. Nevertheless, the book remains

a highly approachable and informative accountof El Shaddai, of great interest to Philippinistsand anyone interested in comparativeChristianities.

Fenella Cannell London School of Economics

Social anthropology

Earle, Duncan & Jeanne Simonelli.Uprising of hope: sharing the Zapatista journey toalternative development. xviii, 323 pp., maps,illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: AltaMiraPress, 2005. £27.00 (paper)

Many an academic who has taken those nicetheories out into the mud will recognize themoment of frustration that one of the authorsdescribes when a man from a remote junglecommunity recounted their plight and she‘wanted to tell him … that I was just anotherobjective anthropologist and I couldn’t do shit’(p. 101). Earle and Simonelli have written a veryhuman, readable account of theiraccompaniment of two Maya communitiesstruggling with dilemmas of development andautonomy in the Zapatista rebel-influencedLacandón Jungle region of Chiapas, Mexicosince the 1990s. The book is full of nuggets ofinsight that will make it valuable foranthropology students embarking on fieldwork,development practitioners, activists, andbroader audiences interested in the close-upfeel of a grassroots movement.

Interspersing oral histories of communitymembers, field notes of the authors and theirstudents, and historical commentary, the bookpaints a vivid ethnographic picture whileraising a number of important analytical issues.One central issue is the tension betweenobjectivity and advocacy represented by therole of the ‘outside’ academic, and relatedquestions of agency of those traditionallyregarded as ‘objects’ of study. The authorswaver between acknowledging the inherentcontradictions and trade-offs of their own rolesin these communities, and claiming (wishfully?)that they have somehow managed to helpwithout diminishing the agency of those withwhom they have engaged.

A second theme critiques concepts of‘development’ that are blind to cultural contextand driven by the agendas of non-governmental organization (NGO) funders. The‘developmental missionary position’ (p. 59) is


Book reviews 491

deftly illustrated, for example with adevastating and hilarious account of adisastrous housing programme in Guatemala,NGOs in Chiapas seeking to impose Westernliberal feminist constructs, or productionschemes without a marketing complement.Indigenous communities, far from beingpassive recipients, are shown creativelyadapting and subverting government and NGOprogrammes and building on this experience tobegin developing their own alternative modelof development within the Zapatista autonomymovement.

A third theme contrasts ‘conservationist’visions of preserving pristine rainforests, withan alternative model of populations living inharmony with the environment. Powerfulinterests on the ‘conservationist’ side want toevict inconvenient indigenous communities andgain control of the enormous biodiversityresources in the Montes Azules BiosphereReserve, using the language of sustainabledevelopment to promote mega-investmentschemes such as President Fox’s Plan Puebla-Panamá.

A fourth important theme is thepresentation of ethnic, religious, and politicalidentities as fluid and adaptive. The authorsmake their preferences clear, sympathizing withZapatista politics and noting the effect ofProtestant individualism in underminingaspects of community life. Yet they eschewsimple classifications of identity, examiningnuances of Zapatista villagers extendinggraciousness toward pro-government‘enemies’, or communities strategicallyinvoking seemingly lost elements of Mayacosmology and tradition.

A fifth critical issue is whether or how ruralsmallholder agriculture might be viable in anera of neo-liberal globalization. This isobviously a big question with implicationsbeyond just post-debt crisis Mexico, and theanswers are ambiguous. Defining self-sufficiency is tricky when, for example, the USgovernment subsidizes agribusiness productsdumped on the Mexican market in the name offree trade; Zapatista communities benefit fromsolidarity projects and fair trade marketing, butnot physical or social infrastructure from theirown government; and swelling US migrationand remittances complicate the picture. Termslike self-sufficiency and autonomy are notclearly defined, nor is the ‘capitalism withsocialist goals’ that the authors seem to findpromising. This suggests the limits ofethnography without a complementary macro

context of politics and political economy, whichmight help explain some of the apparent upsand downs of Zapatista resistance.

The micro/anecdotal approach leads tooccasionally questionable extrapolation from asingle observation, possibly a bit of poeticlicence in the interest of readability, and somerosiness about the cause, for example inreferences to ‘the amazing and functionalZapatista feminism’ (p. 91). The book seems onshaky ground when a particular incident isused to make inferences about, say, the role ofthe Mexican army, or the logic driving thegovernment’s agrarian counter-reform that‘modified’ Article 27 of the revolutionaryconstitution. The book is also sprinkled withmisspellings in Spanish and awkwardtranslations, perhaps a sacrifice of precision fortimeliness.

Earle and Simonelli make important issuesaccessible, and highlight the truly innovativeefforts of the Zapatista movement to resistdomination from above and from outside. Theirunapologetically committed scholarship seemsin keeping with Gramsci’s admonition tocombine pessimism of the intellect withoptimism of the will.

Richard Stahler-Sholk Eastern MichiganUniversity

Frese, Pamela R. & Margaret C. Harrell(eds). Anthropology and the United Statesmilitary: coming of age in the twenty-first century. xiv, 162 pp., tables, figs, bibliogrs.Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2003. £50.00(cloth)

As Robert Rubinstein argues in the first chapterof this book, anthropologists make fewattempts to write about the American military.Rubinstein, who himself writes on USpeacekeeping operations abroad, gives tworeasons for this: first, the practical difficulties ofgaining research access to the military and,second, the fact that most anthropologists donot much like the military. Many of thecontributors to this volume have some kind ofpersonal connection to the military: PamelaFrese is the daughter of a senior officer;Margaret Harrell works for RAND; Anna Simonsis married to a special forces officer and teachesat the Naval Postgraduate School; andClementine Fujimura teaches at the US NavalAcademy. However, even though theintroduction embraces ‘the opportunity … toassist the military in improving their mission


492 Book reviews

performance and the way they treat their own’(p. 8), it would be wrong to conclude from thisthat the contributors are uncritical of themilitary.

The contributors to this slender volumeeach focus on their own research interests and,as with most edited volumes, the result is apartial, scattered, and somewhat eccentricmosaic. There is, for example, no discussion ofmilitary ritual, of basic training, of the complexwebs of reciprocity between the military anddefence contractors, of the political ideology ofthe officer corps, of America’s extensivenetwork of foreign bases, or of the recentcontroversy about gays in the military. Moststriking of all, with the exception of AnnaSimons’s chapter on military advisers, there isno discussion of war – the mission for whichthese soldiers all train. Still, the individualchapters of this book add up to an interestingensemble.

The fulcrum of the book consists of twochapters by the editors, Pamela Frese andMargaret Harrell, examining the intertwining ofclass and gender in the military. Frese uses thereminiscences of white women in a retirementhome for senior military officers and Harrelluses interviews with one hundred militaryspouses to unfold this material. They depict amilitary obsessed with rank and class, so thatwives are ranked above one another inaccordance with their husbands’ ranks and thechildren and wives of officers rarely fraternizewith their counterparts from the enlisted ranks.Officers’ wives are expected to investconsiderable effort in entertaining and whatamounts to unpaid social work for the familiesof lower-ranking officers and enlisted men inorder to advance their husbands’ careers – aburden that has, paradoxically, increased asmore enlisted men have enlisted wives whoalso get deployed or wives who work. Officers’wives are to exude a refined ‘noblesse oblige’;enlisted men’s wives help their husbands bestby staying out of sight.

Joshua Linford-Steinfeld takes a differentangle on gender in a Foucauldian chapterlooking at eating disorders in the navy.Strikingly, navy men have a higher rate ofeating disorders than civilian women, and oftenresort to bingeing and purging, abuse of dietpills, and obsessive exercise. Much of thisseems to be a response to what Linford-Steinfeld calls a ‘paradoxical environment’ onnavy bases where doughnut stands sidle up tofitness centres and on ships where there isabundant fried food, little room to exercise,

and yet the possibility of being disciplined forbeing out of shape.

Clementine Fujimura, who, as noted,teaches at the US Naval Academy, looks at thepreference in the Academy curriculum forengineering and fact-based approaches tohistory and social science over more relativisticapproaches to knowledge favoured in literature and anthropology. She argues thatthe navy disfavours pedagogies thatindividualize students and is ambivalent aboutfamiliarizing its cadets with foreign cultures,even where there is a clear military rationale for doing so. The result is a rift between thecivilian and military higher education systems.

In a fascinating case study, Jeanne Guilleminexplores the plan, announced in 1997, tovaccinate all 2.4 million US military personnelagainst anthrax, and the resistance thisprovoked in the military. With the aid of outsidelawyers and physicians, 450 refused to bevaccinated, and many soldiers who did as theywere told nevertheless felt they were ‘guineapigs’. In the end the vaccination programmewas curtailed because of problems gettingFood and Drug Administration certification forthe flawed manufacturing process.

The most ambitious but also the leastsuccessful chapter is Anna Simons’s on militaryadvisers. Simons is interested in when militaryadvisers succeed and in when they fail, and inthe possibility that military advisers, likeanthropologists, could fail their vocations bygoing native. The chapter is packed with richdetail that ultimately overwhelms an interestingline of inquiry.

Putting down this book detailingclaustrophobic social codes, rampant eatingdisorders, forced vaccinations with unknownconsequences, and stifling approaches toeducation, I found my prejudices about militarylife confirmed. I am not sure if this was theauthors’ intention, but I am glad to have read itanyway.

Hugh Gusterson Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology

Gordillo, Gastón R. Landscapes of devils:tensions of place and memory in the ArgentineanChaco. xviii, 304 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2005.£69.00 (cloth), £16.95 (paper)

The Gran Chaco is an understudied SouthAmerican region where indigenous peoples


Book reviews 493

have been able to support themselves byforaging until recently. In Landscapes of devils,Gastón Gordillo studies the tensions betweenwage labour and hunting, fishing, andgathering in different places, analysing theexperiences of the Toba of the ArgentineanChaco. Gordillo discusses the class componentof these people’s aboriginality by reference totheir memories of ‘the bush’. The study issupported by an impressive compilation ofhistorical documents and photographsobtained in archives from Argentina, Paraguay,Bolivia, and Britain. The author’s methodology– based on extensive data collection, almosttwenty years of sincere relationship with thepeople in the field, solid archival research, andrigorous use of negative dialectic – hasproduced a unique ethnography of the tensionsof places and memories that could inspiresimilar type of work among other indigenouspeoples.

Gordillo describes his work as the mergingof the experiential dimensions of place-makingwith the local political economy by studyingthe materiality of memory, its embodiment inpractice, and its constitution as a social force inthe production of places. He integrates theToba’s memories about the Chacoan bush withtheir experiences with wage labour in sugarcane plantations, and their missionization byAnglicans from Great Britain. From 1890 to1960, the Toba would migrate seasonally to theplantations located at the foot of the AndesMountains. In the cane fields, the Tobaacquired an underclass identity that turnedthem into aborigines. The cane fields werefilled with memories of cannibal mountaindevils. (Gordillo’s analysis follows the lead ofMichael Taussig’s study on the connectionsbetween commodity fetishism and devilimageries, and between capitalist exploitationand cannibalism in estates, factories, andmines.) Although the plantations creatememories of disease and exploitation, they alsoevoke nostalgia for a lost source of wagelabour, commodities, and money. Decades afterthese seasonal migrations came to an endthose memories still shape the experience ofthe Chacoan bush.

The resilience associated with foraging isbased in the fact that fish, honey, game, andplant foods are always available to those inneed. This availability stands in contrast withthe commodified character of store-boughtfood. Many Toba refer to foraging as ‘the life ofthe poor’ and call bush food ‘the food of thepoor’. The bush is a collective place where

humans are connected to bush devils throughreciprocity relations, as much as they areconnected to one another through sharingnetworks. Foraging distinguishes the Toba fromArgentine cattle-ranchers and from otheraborigines who make a living with wagelabour. (In this sense, the Toba’s claims of local knowledge are contested markers ofaboriginality, class and gender.) Foragingalleviates their poverty but does not providethe money or commodities granted by wagelabour – and today some young men viewforaging in a negative light as they seek salariedjobs.

These contradictions contribute to creatingcounter-hegemonic values that denaturalizewage labour, Christianity, and private propertyas the only viable alternatives in the Chacoregion. The bush that people trek on a dailybasis is too immersed in their experience ofpoverty and state domination to producedreams of freedom. Yet, drained of animals andresources as it is now, this place is the onlything that many people have, a place thatwould enable ‘those who have nothing’ toforage until the end of the world, as the Tobasay.

Gordillo succeeds in tying together many ofthe contradictions embedded in the Tobaexperiences. The dialectic that he uses to studyplaces and memories destabilizes any notion of meaning as an ‘inner’ property of places.Gordillo shows that subjectivities and memoriesgain their cultural and historical agencythrough dialectical oppositions. The puzzlingrealization is that even when the memories ofthe bush have been produced by the sameforces that transformed the Toba’s ancestorsinto wage workers and impoverished foragers,the tense polysemy of the bush as a source ofnon-commodified abundance remains today. A future project would be to study how thememories of these places turn out after privateproperty and capitalist accumulation havethoroughly weakened the networks of sharingand reciprocity that unite the Toba and otherChacoan indigenous peoples.

Marcela Mendoza University of Oregon

Kürti, Lásló. Youth and the state in Hungary:capitalism, communism and class. xiii, 296 pp.,tables, illus., bibllogr. London: Pluto Press,2002. £50.00 (cloth), £16.99 (paper)

Kürti is an American-trained anthropologistwho was born in Hungary and who is currently


494 Book reviews

Chairman of the Department of PoliticalScience at the University of Miskolc. This bookis based on fieldwork conducted in the 1980sand 1990s among working-class youths inCsepel, an island in the Danube, south ofBudapest, which was incorporated into the city after the Second World War. In the lastquarter of the nineteenth century Csepel wastransformed from an agrarian society into amajor centre of the metallurgical industry, and in the twentieth it gained the sobriquet of‘Red Csepel’ for its alleged allegiance tosocialism. It became a showpiece of theHungarian communist regime and as such wasvisited by the Soviet leaders Brezhnev andGorbachev.

The theoretical influence of Eric Wolf isapparent, though not acknowledged, in Kürti’s concern to interrelate the political, theeconomic, and the cultural structures andprocesses, both formal and informal, over aperiod of about 130 years. During this timeHungary experienced several different politicalregimes and diverse economic systems, all ofwhich sought to mobilize the country’s youth,who were to form the basis of a new society.Kürti documents and analyses the responses of working-class youth to these variouseconomic and political programmes. Hedemonstrates that the category of youth is notmonolithic since it is fragmented in terms ofclass, gender, ethnicity, religion, and politicalideology, and was so even during thecommunist era, when the one-party stateattempted to exercise an ideological monopolyover youth culture.

Kürti’s fieldwork took place during the final years of the communist regime and thesubsequent restoration of a capitalist economyand a multi-party political system. Hedemonstrates that although Moscow imposed aSoviet regime on Hungary, there was resistanceto this imperialism, particularly among theworkers of iconic ‘Red Csepel’ and especiallyduring the revolution of 1956. Subsequentalienation from the regime was manifest evenamong the activists of the KISZ (the youth wingof the Communist Party). Thus one of Kürti’sinterviewees, the secretary of a KISZ committee,remarked that he had mastered variousdifferent trades in the factory because of his‘love for work’, which attitude he applied to hispolitical job. He remarked that this made him a‘mindenes’, which Kürti translates correctly as ‘ajack of all trades’ (p. 153). However, the termalso conveys the meaning of ‘a skivvy’, a

menial servant at the beck and call of one’ssuperiors, which ironically describes suchpeople’s position even if they themselves arenot aware of the situation.

The transition to a market economy since1990 has brought unemployment to many ofCsepel’s young workers, who have becomedisillusioned with the new system of partypolitics. Consequently they have soughteconomic and social support from theirinformal networks of friends and neighbours.Kürti’s discussion of these networks with theirobligations and reciprocities makes a significantcontribution to the study of moral relationshipsin an urban society.

This is a scholarly anthropologicalmonograph which is informed by otherdisciplines, but two of Kürti’s historicalobservations are debatable. The first is hisassessment of the impact of the Treaty ofTrianon in 1920, which dismembered Hungary.He claims that ‘the country benefited from thepartition’ (p. 169). Who in fact did benefit?Second is his unsubstantiated statement that‘hundreds of Jewish families from Csepel Island were sent to Auschwitz, Dachau andMauthausen, although many in Csepel weresaved through the collective efforts ofprogressive communists and intellectuals’ (p. 80). What is debatable is not thedeportation but the salvation of many Jews.Moreover, their saviours, few as they were, did not come solely from the ranks of ‘theprogressive communists and intellectuals’.

Kürti makes a significant contribution to thestudy of urban and industrial society, hithertoeschewed by Hungarian ethnographers, whohave focused on the peasantry and on ethnicminorities. However, his claim thatanthropologists have neglected to study youthis more contentious, especially since heneglects to mention the classic monographStreet corner society, by William Foote Whyte,first published in 1943 and still in print. Thisomission is all the more remarkable since heexamines the role of the streets as the domainof disaffected Csepel youth in the post-communist era (p. 252).

Overall Kürti demonstrates that the study ofboth communist and post-communist society inHungary, and elsewhere, needs to be informedby a knowledge and analysis of history,economics, politics, and culture, which heboldly, and on the whole successfully,accomplishes.

Leonard Mars University of Wales, Swansea


Book reviews 495


Nencel, Lorraine. Ethnography andprostitution in Peru. ix, 251 pp., bibliogr.London: Pluto Press, 2001, £60.00 (cloth),£19.99 (paper)

Lorraine Nencel’s book provides an excellentexample of what I suggest is a new kind ofstudy on prostitution in a developing worldcontext. These ‘new’ studies are characterizedby their deliberate attempts to step outside ofand reflect on dominant discourses onprostitution and the identities of women whoprostitute. Further, such studies are alsomarked by a methodological departure frommuch of the existing literature on prostitution,which tends to reveal very little in the way ofin-depth research, including ethnography withthe women themselves. As Nencel rightlypoints out, prostitution is, consequently, a‘loaded subject’ that is overwhelmed by moralstandpoints and value-laden discourses which,importantly, ‘affect women’s agencyprofoundly and are tightly woven into theirperformances as prostitutes’ (p. 4).

Within these restrictive discourses,prostitution is viewed either as inherentlyexploitative, harmful, and risky (whether itinvolves trafficking or not) or as only potentiallyproducing these conditions of exploitation,harm, and risk. In the former case the onlyviable solution offered is to dismantle sexindustries (e.g., through criminalization ofprostitution, or provision of exit programmesfor women in prostitution). This positionconstitutes the core of the abolitionistperspective. The latter group would,conversely, have it that the potential forexploitation can be overcome through effortsto empower and educate women inprostitution and, in some cases, their clients.This is the sex worker rights perspective.Central to this disagreement is a broaderdebate about choice: fundamental to sexworker perspectives is the view that if a womanchooses to work in prostitution her choiceshould be respected and efforts made to ensuresafe and fair conditions of her work. Thusemerges the conceptualization of prostitutionas a (legitimate) form of work. This is a positionthat anti-prostitution/abolitionist feminists donot accept, instead arguing that prostitution ismale violence against women, not work, andthat no woman in prostitution would activelychoose to be there. In both cases, Nencelwould rightly argue that the womenthemselves lack voice and agency.

Nencel treats these ‘moralizing discourses’,and their tendency to both misrepresentwomen in prostitution and reinforce negativestereotypes, as a serious problem in her book.She argues that ‘[t]he possibilities for change,and improvement in the situation [of womenwho prostitute], are limited to alternativesprescribed in the discourses’ (p. 5). To this endNencel introduces two concepts which areintended to assist in understanding thecomplexities of the situation of women whoprostitute in Lima and overcome some of thetendencies for reductionism and stereotypinginherent in much of the current literature.These concepts are ‘gendered enclosures’ and‘performance’. According to Nencel, genderedenclosures refer to the ‘repetitive, virtuallymechanical reproduction of events and gendermeanings that have influenced the lives ofwomen who prostitute similarly throughouthistory’ (p. 5). For her these enclosuresprofoundly affect (and restrict) women’sagency as they must move within andnegotiate alternatives for improvement in theirlives through options presented within theseenclosures. Nencel’s second concept ofperformance posits that, like gender itself,‘different versions of the prostitute areperformed’ (p. 6).

The concepts of performance and genderedenclosures are central to understanding boththe agency of women who prostitute in Limaand how femininity and masculinity areconstructed and expressed. Thus, for Nencel,gendered enclosures symbolize ‘the(re)production of gender meanings particularlybut not exclusively in discourses, and theperformance of gender identities which includethe reworking of gendered enclosure meaningsinto experience-based or subjective meaningsby women as agents’ (p. 6).

The book is organized in two parts to reflect Nencel’s concern with delineating thecreation of gendered enclosures and thefabrication of gender meanings; and relatingher fieldwork/ethnographic narrative, whichemphasizes the ‘ordinariness of women’s lives’ (p. 7). The first part of the book isparticularly interesting for me since it describes the historical development ofprostitution, the regulation of prostitution, and, most significantly, the reproduction of theimage of the prostituted woman, particularlythrough modern media representations. Thelast chapter in this first part of the bookexamines a subject that is rarely tackled in

496 Book reviews

studies of prostitution: the construction of malesexuality and, specifically, prostitution’sposition in the configuration of male sexuality.The second part of the book turns to theethnographic narrative. Nencel’s fieldwork wasconducted in two sites in Lima, which shecharacterizes not only in terms of locationwithin the city but, more pointedly, in terms ofday and night, reflecting the times whenprostitution and her ethnography mainly takesplace.

Overall I applaud Nencel’s book for itsattempt to move outside the restrictive andmoralizing discourses of prostitution, for itsmethodological rigour (doing ethnographywith women in prostitution is no easy task),and for its placement of women’s lives andexperiences at the centre, rather than themargins, of discussion about women whoprostitute in Lima.

Sallie Yea RMIT University

Olwig, Karen Fog & Eva Gulløv (eds).Children’s places: cross-cultural perspectives. viii,255 pp., figs, tables, bibliogrs. London, NewYork: Routledge, 2003. £18.99 (paper)

Despite a recent flourishing of anthropologicalinterest in place, there has been a tendency toignore the question of how place might bedifferently interpreted and experienced atdifferent stages in the human life cycle. Inparticular, very few anthropologists haveinvestigated how children see places asmeaningful constructions.

Children’s places, edited by Karen Fog Olwigand Eva Gulløv, is therefore an extremely timelyand welcome volume, examining as it does ‘the ways in which adults and children, fromtheir different generational vantage points insociety, negotiate “proper” places for children’(p. 1).

The volume offers ethnographic descriptions of children’s places in a range ofdifferent settings, from multi-cultural Torontoto rural Uganda, Aboriginal Australia, andCatholic and Protestant Belfast. As a reflectionof the institutional affiliations of the majority ofcontributors, four out of the elevenethnographic chapters deal with Scandinavia.

The introduction, by Olwig and Gulløv,gives a clear overview of certainanthropological notions of place. FollowingGupta and Ferguson (Anthropological locations:boundaries and grounds of a field science, 1997),

the authors stress how the ongoinganthropological idea of ‘the field’ produces anidea of culture as a locally circumscribed‘whole’. They note that this has had animportant impact on child research, wherestudies have been located in schools, clubs, andother places set aside for children. Against this,they stress the need to go beyond the ‘well-defined’ places of childhood in order toinvestigate the full variety of children’smovements and varying uses of places. Theythen nicely outline the three analytical foci ofthe book: place as a site of opportunity andcontrol, place as a site in the field ofgenerational relations, and place as a source ofbelonging.

Despite such a strong introduction, theethnographic chapters that follow are ofvarying quality and theoretical interest. Thismay perhaps be inevitable in an editedcollection on such a broad theme, thoughsome of the research presented seemed to beonly tenuously concerned with place. In theepilogue, Vered Amit rightly criticizes an olderliterature on ‘socialization’ that ‘often seemedto have more to say about the adults who were charged with this process of socializationthan the young they were supposedly shaping’ (p. 239). Unfortunately, this is acriticism which could also be aimed at some ofthe chapters in the book. For example, LauraHammond’s intriguing descriptions of the literalmarking of place on the bodies of Ethiopianreturnee children, through cutting andbranding, revealed rather more about adultreturnee’s fears and concerns for the futurethan the perspectives of marked childrenthemselves.

The best chapters in the collection manageto combine quality ethnographic informationon the varied experiences of different childrenwith a critique of the manner in whichinstitutional practices and conceptions ofchildhood attempt to demarcate the ‘correct’places for children. Francine Lorimer’s excellentchapter describes place-making among Kuku-Yalanji children in Southeast Cape York,Australia. She shows how, from an early age,these children are able to decide for themselveswhere to live, and when to leave for anotherplace and set of relatives. Lorimer argues thatchildren’s movements between places,including their enrolments and re-enrolmentsat different schools, follow the tracks made inan earlier generation, linking up with the‘settling down’ of various family members (p. 68). Lorimer concludes that despite the


Book reviews 497


agency of these children to draw upon kinshipnetworks in traversing different places, schoolswere ultimately geographically and sociallymarginal to their places and experiences, and itwas therefore hard for them to adapt to thedemands of the school system.

Olga Nieuwenhuys’s chapter presents a comparison of children in a village in South India and those involved in a non-governmental organization ‘street children’project in Addis Ababa. Drawing critically onthe work of Marc Augé (Non-places: introductionto an anthropology of supermodernity, 1995),Nieuwenhuys argues that the South Indianvillage school and the Addis Ababa project siteare both ‘non-places’ in the local landscapesince ‘what goes on there remains largelyunconnected to the relationships that lace localplace together’ (p. 106). Importantly, sheargues that an anthropology of childhood thatlimited itself to such ‘non-places’ would fail toappreciate the importance of those everydayplaces – such as the beaches where fishermenland their catches or the homes where potential ‘street children’ are apparently at risk– in which children’s relationships are shaped.

Overall, and despite some weaker chapters,this is an original and thought-provokingvolume that I would recommend equally tothose with an interest in the politics of placeand the politics of childhood.

Catherine Allerton London School ofEconomics

Price, David H. Threatening anthropology:McCarthyism and the FBI’s surveillance of activistanthropologists. xvill, 426 pp., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. £18.50(paper)

Beginning in the 1940s, the US Federal Bureauof Investigation (FBI) targeted for surveillancedozens of anthropologists who promotedequality among races, sexes, and economicclasses. In Threatening anthropology, David Pricemasterfully reconstructs this dark Cold Warhistory by focusing on approximately thirtycase studies involving suspected subversives.His research is based on more than 30,000pages of declassified government documents,interviews, and other sources.

Price begins by analysing the roots ofAmerican Marxism and the FBI under J. EdgarHoover’s ruthless leadership. It also describeshow public loyalty hearings and ‘witch hunts’

(collectively known as McCarthyism afterSenator Joseph McCarthy) helped erodeacademic freedom.

Individual anthropologists were impactedprofoundly. For example, in the 1940s, MelvilleJacobs and Richard Morgan (who publiclycritiqued racism) suffered devastating financial,personal, and psychological setbacks followingunfounded accusations of high-level communistmembership. When an Ohio museum directorsacked Morgan from his curatorial job,American Anthropological Association (AAA)officials took little interest. Throughout thisperiod the AAA was often indifferent to suchcases.

Those addressing the general public wereespecially vulnerable. Gene Weltfish wrote animmensely successful pamphlet for the military(The races of mankind), which providedevidence of racial equality in clear language.Millions of copies circulated, including acartoon version. She also denouncedcolonialism and racism in public speeches.Weltfish was accused of being a communistand subjected to a ‘show trial’ beforeMcCarthy’s congressional committee. Althoughshe never faced criminal charges, the trial led toher firing from Columbia and damaged futurecareer prospects. No eminent anthropologistssupported her.

Similarly, Ashley Montagu educated thepublic about racial issues, publishingapproximately sixty books (including the 1942bestseller Man’s most dangerous myth: Thefallacy of race, still in print today). Afterdelivering a fiery speech condemningMcCarthy, Montagu was fired from Rutgers.

FBI agents investigated Oscar Lewis andMargaret Mead, despite their loyal wartimeservice to the government. Some were suspectbecause of family ties, including Ruth Landes,who was born into a family of labour unionists.This background, together with her training atColumbia (perceived by agents as a radicalhotbed), was enough to draw the FBI’sattention for years. Still others, including PhilleoNash, Cora Du Bois, and Bernhard Stern, toname but a few, experienced intense FBImonitoring.

A few became FBI informers. Price includes ashocking 1949 letter from George P. Murdock toHoover, in which he listed a dozenanthropologists as Communist Party members.Such correspondence contributed to the fearprevailing on many campuses during the Cold War.

498 Book reviews

Price’s research reveals that the FBI wasprimarily interested in activist anthropologists.Anthropology was ‘threatening’ to the extentthat it effectively communicated with andmobilized broader publics. What most troubledHoover and the defenders of America’s powerelite was the connection of social scientists withpopular movements.

McCarthyism’s legacy deeply scarredtwentieth-century anthropology. David Aberleand Kathleen Gough belonged to the post-McCarthy era generation yet were subjected toFBI surveillance after expressing critical viewson US policies in Vietnam and Cuba. Aftermoving to Canada, their troubles did not end.Indeed, Gough was fired from Simon FrazerUniversity for political reasons related to heractivism.

Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, and MarshallSahlins came under FBI scrutiny in the late1960s following their involvement with thecampus teach-in movement. Teach-ins (inwhich faculty taught students and communitymembers about topics related to the USinvasion of Southeast Asia) helped topopularize academic knowledge. As the modelspread across the United States, it served as animportant catalyst for the politicization ofcollege campuses.

Threatening anthropology concludes bydemonstrating how even today, McCarthyism’seffects are still evident. After the Cold War’schill and the widespread emergence of self-censorship, it became much easier for twokinds of anthropology to gain prestige by thelate 1980s – a highly abstract postmodernapproach whose advocates frequently focusedon cultural trivia; and a particularly narrowbrand of applied anthropology serving privatebusiness interests and public bureaucracies.Applied anthropologists who used socialscience as a foundation for social justiceprojects became a rare breed. This is still truetoday. Consequently, ‘there are many morevictims of McCarthyism than could ever beestablished through a search of archives’ (p. 346). All anthropologists have been affected.

The book ends on a cautionary note. Price reminds readers that the post-9/11atmosphere, George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’,and new US legislation limiting civil libertiesmay provide official justification for futuresurveillance. Threatening anthropology gives usfair warning of a potentially rough road ahead.Roberto J. González San José State University

Samuels, David W. Putting a song on top of it: expression and identity on the San CarlosApache reservation. x, 324 pp., figs, bibliogr.Tucson: Univ. Arizona Press, 2004. $39.95(cloth)

What identifies an Apache Indian in the twenty-first century: moccasins, feathers,language, or rock-country-pop music? This isthe major question that Samuels tries to answerin the superbly written Putting a song on top ofit: expression and identity on the San CarlosApache reservation. Samuels’s answer is thatmodern Apache identity is as likely to bemanifested in contemporary music as it is to bemanifested in language or other specificallyApache forms, and that this manifestationinvolves a central problem of language, that ofambiguity.

Being Apache did not stop with thesurrender of Geronimo and the end of theIndian wars in the late nineteenth century.Indians continue to exist, but their existence asa viable independent ethnicity is marked bystyles, customs, and music that are oftenappropriated and adapted from generalAmerican culture rather than harking back tostereotypic nineteenth-century icons.

From the outsider’s perspective,contemporary music played by an Apache bandand forming the focus of a community’srecreation is an ambiguous symbol. Ambiguousbecause it seems to signal acculturation orassimilation to the dominant system, yet fromthe insider’s point of view it becomesquintessentially Apache. One of my ownpersonal remembrances of the White Mountain(Fort Apache) reservation when I began myown fieldwork in 1968 is the jukebox at JerryHartnett’s East Fork Trading Post incessantlyblaring out Merle Haggard’s hit ‘Branded Man’.It was at that time I personally realized thatthere was an intimate link between Apachesand contemporary music.

Samuels began his work with people fromthe San Carlos Apache reservation when he wasin high school. He went there during thesummer between his sophomore and junioryears as part of a ‘youth helping youth’ project.This began a correspondence and series ofvisits that ultimately culminated in the periodof fieldwork reported on in this book. Hebecame integrated into one or more families inthe community to the point that they began torefer to him as their ‘son, brother, cousin, etc.from New York’ and gave him a nickname‘Squirrel’, the giving of a nickname being a


Book reviews 499

well-established norm of the Apachecommunity.

As part of this study of ethnic identity hetook advantage of an opportunity to play in alocal Apache band called the Pacers. The Pacerswere all that was left of number of bands thathad sprung up on the reservation in the fifties,sixties, and seventies. During that period theremay have been a dozen or more bands thatplayed American popular music. They hadnames like the Cyclones, Dreamers,Shakedown, Black Point Valley Boys, theDominoes, and the Statics. A primary reasonthat only one band remains has to do with theincreased technological sophistication requiredtoday to play popular music professionally andthe cost of it.

The fifties through the seventies were aperiod in the history of American popularmusic when musical performance wastechnologically simpler than it is now, but alsowhen car and portable radios had becomemore available. Because of its isolation, therewere few radio stations that could be heard atSan Carlos, and those located a long way awaywere listened to in the evenings because of theincreased nighttime ‘skip’. Apaches wouldtravel to sites on the reservation wherereception was clearer, including one called FMHill, and listen to stations as far off asOklahoma City. FM Hill was one of a number oflocations named on the reservation and linkedto popular music. Just as Keith Basso notes inhis book Wisdom sits in places (1996) that olderplace names are linked to myths, so modernplace names also reflect and evoke memories ofpeople and events. These new place names areoften linked to popular music.

European-type music was introduced to thereservation in a number of ways, especiallythrough the Lutheran Church. Lutheranmissionaries began translating English hymnsinto Apache. Bands were also founded at theschools as part of the programme ofassimilation developed by government andChurch.

This training led to Apaches founding theirown bands and playing in live form the musicthey had been exposed to through the radioand records. This period of musicaldevelopment on the reservation has served tocreate a sense of history linking the currentApache sense of identity to American popularmusic. The development of these bands alsocorrelates with the replacement of the Apachelanguage by English. This is not to say that alltraditional symbols of identity have been lost; if

anything there has been an increase of girls’puberty ceremonies both at San Carlos and onthe White Mountain Reservation.

In the past, American anthropology focusedon Indians as its primary subject andbemoaned the breakdown and loss oftraditional culture. The message of this book isthat modern pop music is not disintegrationbut part of an ongoing process of integrationand creation, a process that has involved‘putting a song on top of it’.Philip J. Greenfeld San Diego State University

Van Hollen, Cecilia. Birth on the threshold:childbirth and modernity in South India. xv, 295pp., maps, bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ.California Press, 2003, £39.95 (cloth), £16.95(paper)

Little ethnographic work exists on howchildbirth is being transformed by biomedicalor allopathic institutionalization. Using themetaphor of kolams, which are decorativepatterns (made from flour) which adornthresholds of homes, this sensitive ethnographyon childbirth practices in Tamil Nadu illustrateshow meanings of childbirth – prenatal care,delivery, and postnatal care – have becomeirrevocably transformed through biomedicalinterventions and ‘modernity’ in recent times.

Van Hollen examines five processes ofchange: the professional practices andinstitutionalization of obstetrics; thetransformation in patterns of consumption andreproduction rituals; the emergence of newtechnologies for managing the pain of birth;the international mandate to reduce thepopulation in India; and, finally the role ofdevelopment agencies in propagatingbiomedical conceptions of reproductive health.She explores the ‘mixed feelings’ of working-class women and the modern birthing process,and how new rituals about consumption andexchange have altered the cultural constructionof women’s power (sakti) and pain (vali ), thustransforming understandings of gender.

Medicalization (locally seen as ‘beingmodern’) of childbirth is thus the processwhereby the biomedical establishment hasstandardized, professional guidelines thatincorporate childbirth in the category ofdisease, which requires that a medicalprofessional oversees the birth process anddetermines the treatment. Thus, medicalizationis used to refer to the diverse and unevenprocesses by which medical expertise ‘becomes


500 Book reviews

the relevant basis for decision making in moreand more settings’, always identifying the socialas biological. By pathologizing what is‘normal’, obstetrics and reproductivetechnologies have disempowered midwives andundermined ‘natural childbirth’.

Van Hollen’s study also highlights how thedevelopment discourse reinforces existinginequalities and social differences by equatingpoverty and indigenous (non-biomedical)practices with underdevelopment. Suchdevelopment discourses are very much in linewith colonial precedents, such as the Dufferinand Victoria Funds in the nineteenth century,which introduced a cadre of auxiliary nursemidwives and subsequently led to theestablishment of Obstetrics and a hierarchicaltier system with multi-purpose health workers(MPHWs). It is pertinent to observe the highlypoliticized manner in which women in thesubcontinent became ‘bodies that matter’, andkey to the post-colonial family planningprogrammer. The duties of the MPHWs is togather information about women’s health,educate women about prenatal care, deliveries,and postnatal care, and refer them to hospitals;home births are discouraged and have becomeless common as a result. Not surprisingly, thepresence of MPHWs creates tensions with thelocal midwives (maruttuvaccis) as their localpractices are frowned upon. But they continueto assist whenever necessary. Sometimes thepregnant mother delivers ominously, before sheis able to go to the hospital, ‘on the threshold’.

But giving birth in the hospital isaccompanied by deep anxieties for birthingmothers. The wards are overcrowded and thereis pressure to give birth to make way for otherwomen. In hospitals, there is little provision foremotional support, and women are scolded bydoctors and slapped by nurses. This haswrongly been interpreted to mean that thesewomen are being shown ‘love’. Far from it,slapping and shouting at a pregnant womanare ill treatment and such behaviour needs tobe censored. Many women are tormented by itand complain, as Van Hollen notes. Further, thebribery of state institutions and the fees theyhave to pay often lead women to greaterindebtedness.

As part of maternal and child health (MCH)policy for women, the accelerating of labourwith oxytocin drugs, such as epidocin andsinotocin, is widely prevalent. Despite thepotential high risks of labour-inducing drugsthey are routinely administered withoutsolicitation. The same applies to the routine

insertion of intra-uterine devices (IUDs) (pp.149-53), which women spoke out against butwere powerless to resist. IUDs were ofteninserted without acquiring knowledge, anddespite the harmful effects, such as pelvicinflammation, bleeding, and so on. However,while women had mixed feelings aboutcaesareans and episiotomies, ‘modernbiomedical technology’ was preferred by them.Pharmacists trained in both Siddha medicineand in allopathic medicine found that localsoverlooked their advice and preferred allopathicprescriptions, especially injections such asvitamin B12 (p. 65).

Given the significance of pluralistic medicaltraditions on the Indian subcontinent, VanHollen pertinently discusses how indigenousideas about herbal concoctions, hot and cold,and taboo foods inform ideas about the bodyand remain critical in ceremonial activities andtherapeutic measures. And, it is interesting tosee how such beliefs are selectively combinedduring pregnancy and postpartum. However, itis wrong to suggest that customs such ascimantham, which derive from these traditions,are not pre-colonial. There exists a powerfulbody of rituals to celebrate and protectpregnancy.

Tamil Nadu is considered a success state inIndia, as far as the provision and use ofallopathic MCH medicine is concerned. Thissuccess is measured by the rates of hospitaldeliveries in Madras (Chennai), which arehigher than those in the rest of India, and bylower female infanticide figures. Yet can theseterms of reference serve as a yardstick forwomen’s empowerment? That such discoursesof modernity and reproductive choice, whichexplicitly derive from biomedical/allopathicprotocols, remain unquestioned is extremelyworrying, not only because they lead to theroutine use of harmful drugs and coercivemeasures, such as IUD insertion withoutconsent. Particularly encouraging is the factthat such measures constitute MCH policy andcontinue to instil such knowledge in theirtrainee candidates. The government authoritiesand others in the medical hierarchy do notthink lower-class women can be regarded asmodern – although these women regardthemselves to be so by choosing to give birthin a hospital.

In this important account Van Hollen hasnot included the narratives of boys and men orthe voices of girls, which is disappointing. Yetthis is nevertheless a valuable contribution toour understanding of women’s reproductive


Book reviews 501

choices, childbirth, and biomedical interventionin India.

Kusum Gopal London School of Economics

Williams, Patrick (trans. CatherineTihanyi). Gypsy world: the silence of the livingand the voices of the dead. xi, 104 pp., plates,bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,2003. £9.50 (paper)

Wherever they live, the Gypsies are faced withthe problem of appropriating time and spacethat have already been structured and arrangedby the non-Gypsies, the Gadzo. In their effortto create their own world, different Gypsygroups resort to different tactics. For example,Hungarian Roma tend to fill up gaps aroundthem with friendly relatives and with loud talkin the Romanes language. In contrast, thespecific French Manu group from the MassifCentral which features in Williams’s bookorganize themselves around silence andinvisibility.

The meaning of Manu life starts at themoment when a loved individual dies. Theactions that surround death are largelyperformed (hence, they are not really rituals inthe conventional sense), yet these complexgestures and attitudes form an essential part ofManu moral values, which they briefly refer toas ‘respect for the dead’.

So what does Manu respect entail? To startwith, the Manu do their best to erase anyvisible traces of the dead person by eitherburning or selling his/her belongings. Ifrelatives decide that something is to be sold, itmust be to a Gadzo and without makingsubstantial profit, with the financial gain beingspent on decorating the tomb. Close kin mayalso decide to keep some of the deceased’sfavourite objects (gun, jewellery) or animals(dog, bird, or, in days gone by, a horse), whichwill then be treated with respect. Some ofthese may be hidden out of sight whilst othersare left amongst ordinary, everyday items.Since, however, there is no obvious sign tosingle out what belonged to the dead Manu ,respectful individuals will treat every objectwith care and respect just in case one of themwas such as possession.

During the ‘deep mourning’ period (soonafter the funeral), children, siblings, and spousemay also show their respect by restraining fromeating one of the deceased’s favourite dishes.Most importantly, though, close kin will avoiduttering the name of the deceased, that is, the

s̆

s̆s̆

s̆

s̆

s̆

romano lap (Gypsy nickname) by which she/hehas been known within the community. Thesenames will disappear with the individual andare remembered for only the three to fourgenerations while those who knew the personremain alive. Only the Gadzo name, family andfirst names, remain for visible eternity, asinscribed on the tomb. The unique Manu selfsoon joins the ranks of respected butindividually forgotten and nameless ancestors.

The Manu graves in the cemetery are muchthe same design as those of the Gadzos’though distinguishable in having richlydecorated trinkets placed on them by cousins,sisters, and brothers and by having a statuetteof a horse. The graves are meticulously tended,unlike places where the individual died. These‘places of the dead’ will be left overgrown withcars rusting in the middle of the vegetation, yetfor the Manu they are filled with meaningfulsilence which demands respect.

As time passes by, mourning individualsmay suddenly turn on the radio, start listeningto music, and eating the food they had beenavoiding until now. Eventually kin may alsostart talking about their dead, scrupulouslyobserving every little detail to avoid beingdisrespectful by ‘making mistakes and lyingabout them’. The mourners, one by one, returnto normal life, but, as Williams suggests, theyare transformed into civilized Manu es, whohave learned how to restrain themselves andhence how to show respect for the dead andthus live with integrity. In the final sectionWilliams offers an apt analogue about the hardtask of grasping the nature of Manu lifethrough their road signs as used at the time ofthe horses. Rags used to be hung on a treebranch as if the wind had blown them there, orcrumpled cigarette boxes were left lying by theroadside ‘saying’ a Manu had passed through.Or had he? Only another Manu could really besure of the answer.

Yet in this good translation by CatherineTihanyi, Williams shows that a Gadzo likehimself who has spent a lifetime with theManu and who certainly manifests love andrespect for them can develop a profoundunderstanding for their world and transmit thatunderstanding in a beautifully written text. Thisbook is a must for anyone interested inculturally constructed time and space, memory,performance of culture, Gypsy/Roma andManu cultures, anthropology, philosophy,silence, and the beauty of life.

Irén Kertész Wilkinson University ofRoehampton

s̆

s̆

s̆s̆

s̆

s̆

s̆

s̆

s̆


502 Book reviews

Wilson, Thomas M. (ed.). Drinking cultures:alcohol and identity. xv, 281 pp., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, 2005.£55.00 (cloth), £18.99 (paper)

Mary Douglas edited a book on ‘constructivedrinking’ in 1987 that showed how thepatterned behaviour of alcohol consumptionwas, in various ways, a positive influence in thelives of the majority of individuals andpopulations around the world where drinkingis accepted. That contrasted with the dominantview – scientific as well as popular – thatemphasized drinking as risky and dangerous,which is the case for only a tiny portion ofdrinkers in most communities. In this similarlyimaginative and innovative volume, Wilsonoffers eleven ethnographic case studies thatcontinue to bring an anthropologicalperspective, with abundant social and culturalcontext, to the costs and benefits of drinking.The editor’s introductory chapter clearly andsuccinctly explains how contrastinginterpretations of drinking are more differencesof emphasis than controversies over the natureof phenomena. The emphasis chosen here is on links between drinking, identity, andethnicity.

Brian Moeran focuses on a variety ofexchange relationships that take place within arural Japanese valley and how drinking shapesand expresses them. According to ClionaO’Carroll, many Germans ironically seek outIrish pubs for a feeling of camaraderie andtradition, while Irish men tend to drinkelsewhere in the capital city. Timothy Hallshows how beer has traditionally beenemblematic of Czech identity andegalitarianism. Despite the fact that young‘working-class’ Norwegians are fearful ofviolating social norms that strictly favouranonymity and conformity, many tend tobecome drunk and boisterous at weekendparties that are their favoured venues forsocializing (Pauline Garvey). According toJosephine Smart, the world’s largest per capitaconsumption of cognac occurs in Hong Kong(where per capita consumption of alcohol ingeneral is extremely low) as a result ofconspicuous consumption and extensive socialnetworks. The traditional pattern of Frenchdrinking, involving large quantities of mediocre wine with meals and throughout the day, is rapidly yielding to an emphasis onsmall quantity, higher quality, and diminishedfrequency, at least partly in response to

public health campaigns (Marion Demoissier).

The self-image of Yucatecans as pacific andromantic (at least in contrast with their moreaggressive and boisterous neighboursthroughout the rest of Mexico) is reflected indistinctive food, drink, and music (SteffanAyora-Diaz and Gabriela Vargas-Cetina). JonMitchell and Gary Armstrong show howdrinking by young males in Malta neatly linkswith their interests in sports, politics, and theexclusion of foreigners. Spaniards in the Basquecountry likewise do much to emphasize theirnational and political identity through drinking,as described by Sharyn Kasmir. A chapter ongangs of youths of various ethnic backgroundsin and around San Francisco nicely combinesquantitative with qualitative methods ofreporting and analysis; Geoffrey Hunt, KathleenMacKenzie, and Karen Joe-Laidler clearly showhow drinking patterns relate to dominantvalues of masculinity, self-respect, groupaffiliation, and violence. Despite the stereotypeof bars or pubs in the United States ascongenial and sociable places, Anthony Marus shows how they sometimes becomerelatively closed to those who are not regularpatrons.

This is a collection in which all of theauthors provide new data and freshperspectives on drinking in areas where thatsubject has not been well described or analysedbefore. That makes it a substantive contributionto our still-limited knowledge about drinkingpatterns and their meanings in cross-culturaland cross-national perspective. At the sametime, the authors’ varied but consistentemphasis on identity, reference groups, andsocial interaction makes this book relevant alsoto many social scientists who may never beforehave considered alcohol to provide a specialwindow on the world.

Dwight B. Heath Brown University

Theory and methodology

Bertholet, Denis. Claude Lévi-Strauss. 465pp., bibliogr. Paris: Plon, 2003. Price: €25.00(paper)

This account of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work isprobably one of the most comprehensivecurrently available in the sense that it covers


Book reviews 503


the entire period from his birth in 1908 throughto the end of 2002. It is divided into sevenchapters, each of which is further broken downinto fifteen short sections generally of aroundthree or four pages in length. The first fivechapters deal in turn with Lévi-Strauss’sbackground and youth, the years he spent inBrazil and then in New York, his return toFrance and early academic career there, and thework on myth which was his central intellectualpreoccupation for most of the 1960s. The finaltwo chapters focus on the decade leading up tohis official retirement from the Collège deFrance in October 1982, and on the impressiverange of activities which he has continued topursue since then.

With the exception of the first chapter, theemphasis is very much on Lévi-Strauss’sprofessional life, perhaps understandably givenwhat Bertholet describes as his subject’s ‘peude goût pour la confidence autobiographique’(p. 416). There is a reliance throughout onpreviously published sources. Althoughinterviews were conducted with a handful ofhis collaborators and colleagues at theLaboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, theinvolvement of Lévi-Strauss himself in theproject was limited, on his own suggestion, tothe correction of ‘factual inaccuracies’ in thefirst draft of the manuscript. The result is abiography that is likely to be of more interest tothe general reader (probably its intended‘market’ anyway) than to those already workingin or with anthropology, for whom it willcontain few if any surprises.

Bertholet is an experienced biographer,having already published studies of Sartre andPaul Valéry, but surprisingly his portrait of Lévi-Strauss lacks any critical distance from itssubject. Most of the information relating to thefirst forty years of the anthropologist’s life, forexample, has been taken directly either fromTristes tropiques or from his conversations withDidier Eribon in the late 1980s (the publishedversion of the latter is cited, often several times,on almost every page of the first four chaptersof this biography). There is generally noattempt to provide a critical assessment of thisinformation through comparing it with othersources, and Bertholet’s perspective tends to beindistinguishable from that of Lévi-Strausshimself (the only real exception on this, on the subject of the relationship between studiesof kinship and myth in the anthropologist’swork, can be found later in the book, on page 284).

When he is not simply providing a slightlyelaborated version of Lévi-Strauss’s ownaccount of his life and career, Bertholet appearsprimarily concerned to defend theanthropologist’s work against all criticism.Thus, the ‘antipathy’ towards Islam that Lévi-Strauss notoriously displays in Tristes tropiquesis described in positive terms as ‘breaking withthe usual platitudes on the question of Islam’(p. 199), while Bourdieu’s important andinfluential critique of Lévi-Strauss in The logic ofpractice is both caricatured and dismissed out ofhand within the space of one short paragraph(p. 367). This is a pattern that is repeatedthroughout the book: Bertholet summarizes themain points from one of Lévi-Strauss’s keyarticles or books, follows this with a fewsentences (rarely more) on criticisms that havebeen made of them, only to reject the latteroutright and come down systematically on theside of Lévi-Strauss against his critics. Thereader is left with the impression of a singularlyone-sided and partisan introduction to both theman and his work.

On a more positive note, Bertholet doesprovide some fascinating insights into Lévi-Strauss’s early experiences of political activism,including an interesting discussion of thearticles he wrote in 1928-9 for L’Etudiantsocialiste, a monthly publication produced by the Fédération nationale des étudiantssocialistes. The section devoted to Lévi-Strauss’scritique of Sartre’s Critique of dialectical reasonalso stands out as one of the livelier parts ofthe book (see pages 266-72), and there are anumber of amusing (although previouslypublished) anecdotes scattered through it, suchas an account of a dinner with French politicianPierre Mendès at which neither Lévi-Strauss norLacan uttered a single word (p. 195)! Bertholetwrites clearly, but his rather facile use ofstereotypical representations of Japaneseculture (p. 364) and ‘the British’ (p. 378) arelikely to make many readers cringe, as arestatements such as the following: ‘Lévi-Straussin the jungle of knowledge: a resurgence of thehunter-gatherer who lies dormant in each oneof us’ (p. 69).

In sum, this is a book that only scratches the surface of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work, andhas ultimately little to recommend it to ananthropological readership. The recent booksby Christopher Johnson and Marcel Hénaffprovide much better introductions to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, while readers interested in theanthropologist’s own views on his life and

504 Book reviews

career will find little here that is not already inthe published interviews with Eribon.

Robert Gibb University of Glasgow

Carneiro, Robert L. Evolutionism in culturalanthropology: a critical history. xiii, 322 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,2003. £26.99 (paper)

This excellent book is a comprehensive surveyof the social thinking of cultural evolutionismby one of the world’s leading advocates. Thebook also recognizes that evolutionism is aminority position within anthropology andarchaeology, and the author provides a full andfair account of the objections from itsdetractors. Postmodernism is, for example,included. This is telling since from the run ofperspectives on human social life that scholarshave tabled over the past one and a halfcenturies postmodernism and evolutionismarguably represent opposite extremes. Withpostmodernism the focus is the (almostfruitless) search for meaning and the dogmaticrejection of scientific narratives; withevolutionism it is culture traits and thepossibility of discovering laws relating to thedevelopment of human social and culturalforms.

The book is interestingly and effectivelyconstructed. It is not a simple chronology ofthe emergence and consolidation ofevolutionist ideas. Rather, taking an overview ofthe broad history of cultural evolutionism, itabstracts the key analytical considerations thathave recurred in debates in virtually everydecade: the specification of stages of humansocial life (e.g. band/tribe/chiefdom/state), thedelineation of the mechanisms by whichevolution occurs (natural selection? humaninvention?), and the determination of themotive forces of evolution (technology?warfare?). Thus Spencer, Tylor, White, Steward,and the rest are revisited in most chapters, and as the book unfolds, the reader comescumulatively to grasp the perspectives of theprincipal protagonists and how their respectivepositions both complement and contradicteach other.

Virtually all cultural evolutionism is,however, confirmed as being predominantlymaterialist. Also the author follows the gambitof as much as possible letting bothevolutionists and anti-evolutionists speak forthemselves. Through extensive quotations theevolutionists are helpfully revealed as

advancing subtle and cautious positions whichhave seldom been done justice to bymainstream anthropology’s caricatures over theyears; we also learn (is it surprising?) thatparticular evolutionists have not always beenconsistent in their arguments through theircareers. Unfortunately a reliance on quotationscan as much create as demolish caricatures. Inthis way, for example, structural Marxists cometo be represented as social thinkers for whomideology is the motive force of human sociallife, when an objective view should concludethat structural Marxism consistently presumesthat the economy determines in the lastinstance the conditions under which ideologymay or may not dominate in this way.

But as a ‘critical history’, the book is strongwhere it needs to be. This is in sorting out thedistinction between Spencerian and Darwinianviews of evolution, and the related contrasts ofunilinear and multilinear evolution and generaland specific evolution. For the author, culturalevolution implies different levels of complexityamong human societies (most convincingly inmy view this refers to political complexity), andthis means that the key yardstick by which aconcept can be admitted as havingevolutionary value is whether it helps addressthe question of how a more complex stage hasemerged from a less complex one. Whilstcultural evolutionism has been regarded bymany as politically suspect, the fact remains, asthe author demonstrates, that through thehistory of anthropology few significant scholarshave been able to eliminate evolutionarystatements from their writings.

I am certainly with Carneiro when he insiststhat all human societies/institutions havepreconditions and that these preconditions willhave relatively simpler manifestations. Anyanthropologist interested in social change whocouples this interest with questions aboutorigination and pursues such questionsthrough the methodology of comparisondefinitely needs to know about the fortunes ofcultural evolutionism: the relevance of thisbook would seem to be wide indeed.

David Riches University of St Andrews

Epstein, T. Scarlett. Swimming upstream: aJewish refugee from Vienna. ix, 209 pp., plates.London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005. £35.00(cloth), £17.50 (paper)

This is a very personal account of T. ScarlettEpstein’s eventful eighty years. It begins on a


Book reviews 505

tranquil note: Trude Grünwald, as she was thencalled, was born in Vienna into a middle-classJewish family. She enjoyed a happy andsheltered childhood, spoiled by her mother andtwo elder brothers. Her father found steadywork in Yugoslavia, and while providing for thefamily’s needs he became an infrequent visitor.

The Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938abruptly ended Trude’s childhood and usheredin a long period of turmoil and suffering. Thefamily was scattered, and after manyvicissitudes its members were eventuallyreunited in England, largely thanks to Epstein’sresourcefulness and determination. Her fatherand one brother were soon interned as ‘friendlyenemy aliens’, while the other brotheremigrated to Australia. For some time shebecame the only provider, and even when herfather and brother were released, Epstein’sincome was needed to make ends meet. Up tothe end of the war she worked for meagrewages in London and Manchester factories and put aside her ambitions to attend college.

The end of the war marks a new phase inEpstein’s life. She applied for British citizenship,and adopted the name Scarlett out ofadmiration for the heroine of Gone with thewind. She got a better-paid job that permittedher to fulfil her dream of studying at auniversity. After a year at Oxford’s RuskinCollege, she got a place at ManchesterUniversity studying development economicsand social anthropology. In 1954 she went toSouth India for a first period of fieldwork, thebeginning of a commitment that was to lastforty years. Epstein does not expand on theacademic and theoretical aspects of her long-term work in India, probably because she haddealt with them in an earlier book, Villagevoices: forty years of rural transformation in South India (1998), written jointly with A.P.Suryanarayana and T. Thimmegowda, and a film bearing the same title. In 1957 sheremarried and this time changed her familyname, to Epstein. Scarlett and Bill Epsteinwould jointly explore a field that was new toboth of them, New Guinea, and go on toproduce a series of original studies. Theirmarital bond was strong and stable, andendured through illness and calamity. Thefamily came to include their two devoteddaughters and their spouses and numerouschildren, and eventually even the mother-in-lawwho had long opposed Scarlett’s marriage toher son Bill.

While Scarlett Epstein’s academic career washighly successful, her personal life was markedby a series of misfortunes. There were seriousaccidents, miscarriages, acrimonious disputeswith her mother-in-law and with colleagues atthe Institute of Development Studies at SussexUniversity, a battle with breast cancer, and,finally, Bill’s long illness and death. ButScarlett’s indomitable spirit overcame all thesetrials. She speaks quite candidly about herdifficulties and, somewhat unusually,remembers very vividly how she felt onparticular occasions and what lessons for lifeshe learned each time. For instance, this is howshe recalls a disappointment in love thathappened some sixty years ago: ‘From thatmoment I decided that I would never becomeso vulnerable again. I had opened up the crackin my shell and it had cost me dearly’ (p. 87).She is often critical of her own emotionalresponses to situations. Thus she reacts to amiscarriage by saying ‘I was distraught andcould not stop crying. I was angry with myselffor believing that my life could ever be sosimple. I felt like an emotional ball, constantlybouncing up and down’ (p. 157).

Throughout the book Scarlett Epstein comesthrough as a sensitive and vulnerable, yetenergetic and resourceful person. This was notthe self-assured, work-driven and somewhatdistant Scarlett I had known for over fortyyears. As I read and reread the book, I blamedmyself for not having perceived all the richnessand complexity reflected in her autobiography.Still, I have always been fond of her, even in myignorant state. We can only be grateful toScarlett for having in this autobiography givenus so much of herself, and wish her manyactive and joyful years.

Emanuel Marx Tel Aviv University

Richerson, Peter J. & Robert Boyd. Not bygenes alone: how culture transformed humanevolution. ix, 332 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr.London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005.£21.00 (cloth)

This is a non-mathematical overview of theauthors’ attempt to make Darwinian sense ofcultural evolution. Chapter 1, ‘Culture isessential’, identifies ‘two main points’: ‘Cultureis crucial for understanding human behavior’(p. 3) and ‘Culture is part of biology’ (p. 4).Culture is defined as ‘mental states’, or‘information’, ‘capable of affecting individuals’behavior that they acquire from other members of


506 Book reviews

their species through teaching, imitation, andother forms of social transmission’ (p. 5, all italicsin original). The theoretical heart of the book is‘an account of how the population-levelconsequences of imitation and teaching work’(p. 8). Chapter 2, ‘Culture exists’, presentsevidence that much of humankind’s behaviouralvariation results from different culturaltraditions. The accumulation of smalldifferences is seen as a theoretically importantfeature of cultural evolution. Chapter 3,‘Culture evolves’, proposes that population-biology models, suitably modified, can proveuseful in testing cultural-evolutionaryhypotheses.

Chapter 4, ‘Culture is an adaptation’,investigates adaptive properties of culturaltransmission. The authors propose that ‘in lateinfancy, a suite of behaviors emerges in humansthat makes us very efficient imitators comparedto any other animal’ (p. 240); this suite, crucialto cumulative cultural evolution, was selectedby the rapidity of climatic fluctuation in thePleistocene. Yet ‘Culture is maladaptive’,declares chapter 5. Evolved penchants forimitation and for learning from models otherthan parents, the very things that make culturehighly adaptive, leave it vulnerable to thespread of maladaptive variants; thedemographic transition receives sustainedattention.

Chapter 6, ‘Culture and genes coevolve’,moves from a discussion of lactose tolerance to a development of the hypothesis thatintergroup competition selected for a set of‘tribal social instincts’ suiting us for life in in-groups, numbering a few hundred to a fewthousand – groups ‘marked by language, ritualpractices, dress, and the like’ (p. 214);contemporary social problems stem from ourhaving to live in much larger societies. Chapter7 is ‘Nothing about culture makes sense exceptin the light of evolution’. Admitting that theirmany examples ‘have sprawled across aconsiderable territory’ (p. 239), the authors‘remap’ with reference to logical coherence,proximate mechanisms, micro-evolution,macro-evolution, and adaptation/maladaptation. After calling for better modelsand data, they conclude by reverting to the‘stunningly surprising’ support they perceive inrecent evidence, from ice and ocean cores, ofPleistocene climatic fluctuation (p. 257).

The ultra-casual style can sound patronizing(e.g. ‘You are forgiven if you find this assertionsurprising’ [p. 81]). Substantively, the authors’

mentalistic definition of culture fits poorly withtheoretical stresses on imitation (mainlybehavioural) and on the incremental,cumulative nature of cultural evolution (surelymore salient materially than mentally – theirown leading examples being the marinechronometer and magnetic compass). Anapparent oversight occurs at pages 67-8 whenthe authors do not mention that the exampleunder discussion (a cultural analogue to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium) involves the implausibleassumption that mating in farming populationsis random with respect to fundamental farm-lifevalues. Another occurs at page 111, when theauthors appear not to notice how seriouslyfuture research that narrows the social-learninggap between humans and other species woulderode the foundation of their theoreticalstructure. The speculative leap from lactosetolerance to a set of instincts in Chapter 6seemed jarring, the regression to explanation-by-instinct, unsettling.

Readers seeking a set of interrelated law-likegeneralizations covering cultural evolution’stransformations will be disappointed. Theapproach is model-driven, and ‘explanatorymodels are not laws but tools to be taken up ornot as the situation warrants’ (p. 95). In myestimation, this ‘toolbox’ of models in search of applications is yet to produce resultscomparing favourably with what thematerialist-evolutionist strategy could boast aquarter-century ago (Marvin Harris, The strugglefor a science of culture, 1979, chap. 4).

Cogent, none the less, is the rebuttal (pp. 76-94) of arguments that certainproperties of cultural variation make itintrinsically impervious to analysis in terms ofnatural selection or population-biology typemodels; and I would echo Robert Carneiro’srecent acknowledgment (Evolutionism in culturalanthropology, 2003, pp. 177-8 – reviewed in thissection above) that this approach has helpedsustain cultural evolutionism through a seasonof neglect by ethnologists. Materialist andDarwinian approaches, moreover, occasionallyconverge; an example is the authors’ strikingrejection of ‘Great Man’ theory: ‘Even thegreatest human innovators are, in the greatscheme of things’, they suggest, less likeNewton standing on the shoulders of giantsthan like ‘midgets standing on the shoulders ofa vast pyramid of other midgets’ (p. 50). Thisbook offers a provocative look at an interestingproject.Robert Bates Graber Truman State University


Book reviews 507


Silverman, Sydel (ed.). Totems and teachers:key figures in the history of anthropology (2ndedition). xvii, 258 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford,New York: AltaMira Press, 2003. $75.00 (cloth),$29.95 (paper)

When this book first appeared, in 1981, thehistory of anthropology was a relatively small-scale endeavour. It had always been of interest:Lowie published A history of ethnological theoryin 1937, and, as we learn from a number of theauthors here, the history of the discipline was apopular topic in the seminars of most of the‘key figures’ discussed. But with hindsight wecan see that Totems and teachers appeared onthe scene just as the history of anthropologyreally took off – in large part due to theengineering and standard-setting of George W.Stocking, Jr. There are, today, scores of goodbiographies and analyses of anthropology’svarious national and transnational traditions, as well as histories of its key concepts, like culture. To this ever-expanding corpus, the re-issue of Silverman’s collection should bewelcomed.

Totems and teachers grew out of a series oflectures held at the City University of New YorkGraduate Center in 1976. The goal of the serieswas to have students of anthropology’s leadinglights reflect upon their teachers as bothintellects and personalities. The series wasinspired by a talk that Raymond Firth gave onMalinowski at the New York Academy ofSciences in 1971. Firth had given a picture ofMalinowski the man which, as Silverman recalls in the introduction, ‘electrified’ theaudience and which ‘many remembered … asthe most useful means for understandingMalinowski’s anthropology’ (p. xiv). Firth kindlyconsented to have his talk published in thecollection, alongside seven others: Franz Boasby Alexander Lesser; Alfred Kroeber by EricWolf; Paul Radin by Stanley Diamond; RuthBenedict by Sidney Mintz; Julian Steward byRobert Murphy; Leslie White by RobertCarneiro; and Robert Redfield by NathanielTarn. In this new edition, Carneiro’s and Tarn’sessays have been trimmed, the latter of whichto make room for a second portrait of Redfieldby Wolf. There is also a new chapter onMargaret Mead with essays by Rhoda Metrauxand Silverman. Following each of the mainportraits, there are short biographies of thestudents. Six of the chapters also includeexcerpts from questions and answers thatfollowed the lectures.

Silverman is perfectly up-front about thelopsided composition of the volume, which isthe result of time and money more thananything else. To be discussed, it was decided,the key figure in question had to be dead. (Thisis partly why Mead was not included originally;she was still alive in 1976.) He or she also hadto have a student in the New York City areabecause City University could not pay for thosefurther afield. In effect, then, Totems andteachers is an oral history of anthropologybased in, and coming out of, ColumbiaUniversity. With the exception of Firth andMalinowski and Tarn and Redfield, all of thecontributors were at some point in theirprofessional careers associated with Columbiaand/or the Boasian or post-Boasian Columbianetwork. This is not to say the key figuresthought of themselves as a coherent whole.They did not. Indeed, reading through theessays (which are arranged chronologicallyaccording to the main subject’s date of birth),one gets a sense of the squabbles and powerplays that helped define the institutional andintellectual landscapes. One of the volume’smain strengths is the way in which the historyof the discipline emerges across, rather thanwithin, the chapters. It is notable that Totemsand teachers manages to produce a wholegreater than – or at least distinct from – thesum of its parts.

Readers well versed in the history ofAmerican anthropology are unlikely to learnmuch new from these chapters; they do notbreak much fresh conceptual ground. (Teacherswill find the chapters on Kroeber, Malinowski,Benedict, White, and Mead especially useful inthe undergraduate classroom; Tarn’s essay, ifused, should be prefaced with some remarkson the links between anthropology and thepoetic sensibility.) But path-breakingintellectual discoveries were never, from whatthis reviewer can discern, the point of thelecture series. The point, rather, was to providea sense of the discipline’s history in ananthropological manner, which is to say withan eye toward the ‘informal’ and in some waysineffable social and personal dynamics thatshaped (and were shaped by) the subjects.While some of the essayists here do a better jobthan others in making that point, the projectthat the volume represents is an important onethat is still in need of exploration anddevelopment.Matthew Engelke London School of Economics

508 Book reviews

Starr, June & Mark Goodale (eds).Practicing ethnography in law: new dialogues,enduring methods. xiii, 209 pp., figs, bibliogrs.Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2002. £50.00(cloth)

The discerning essays in this volume evaluatelegal ethnography within diverse contextsranging from feminist participatory research,life history narratives, immigration politics,witchcraft, human rights discourse, biodiversityand its regulation, to the creation of trusts forelderly people. The volume is divided into two sections. The first – containing most of the essays – is titled, ‘Performing legalethnography’, and the second, ‘Practicingethnography in law’, is a continuum of the firstsection with reflections on fieldwork andparticipant observation.

The main themes focus on the specifictechniques used by the ethnographer: ‘Ethicresearch requires serious grappling withcomplex method and theoretical issues’; it ismuch more than ‘simply hanging out’. Criticalof positivism, the bedrock of much legalisticthinking, there is an emphasis that what needsto be acknowledged are the social processes ofconflicts and legal systems therein (often morethan one on account of colonialism), ratherthan disputes. There is a need to be committedto ethnographic method as anthropology is indanger of becoming too postmodern, toodistant from its roots to understand the cultureand social life of other systems through carefulempirical research.

Recent critical approaches to the tensionsand conflicts generated by the globalization ofcommunication networks, transportationsystems, and trade suggest that strategies fromthe ethnographic tradition can document non-legal political influences from transnationalsources. The history and power relations ofmultiple legal systems need to beacknowledged in specific cultural contexts inorder to gain a more institutionalunderstanding of the law. Theory and methodsare mutually constitutive; the process by whicheach constructs the other is not a simple staticone, as legalism tends to advocate.Ethnography is a process that develops overtime (encounters and experiences cannot bepredicted in advance) and that challengesfundamental methodological assumptions. Thisuncertainty should be expected and urgesethnographers to be flexible and adaptive. Theproject of ethnography does not end when theresearch does; rather, the researcher encounters

new theoretical literature that challengesworking assumptions about the nature andmeaning of research findings.

The essays highlight global/local interactionsidentifying local imperatives, structures andprocesses that are critical to the developmentof legal consciousness at all levels in society.Hirsch’s interactive politicized research withfeminist activist groups in Tanzania reflects onthe power dynamics in the raising of legalconsciousness. Parnell’s traversing of varioushierarchical levels, between the state and themarginal status of Sama Sama in Manila,reflects on the necessity to move beyondofficial understandings and to accommodatedifferent readings of it in larger social contexts.Kidder’s contrasting study of the Amish and theJapanese, and Coutin’s study of immigrantSalvadorans and Guatemalans, discuss therelevance and confining categories in thedefinition of personhood and identity.

Collier’s ethnography among the TzotzilMaya community is particularly noteworthy asshe explores developments of the last fortyyears using Tzotzil language and traditionalbeliefs. Rather than relying on formal legalismof the state, the Zinacantecos continuallynegotiate their relationships with others;disputants negotiate directly with one another.Griffiths’s illuminating work among the Kwenain Botswana shows how life histories overgenerations give a deep insight into how theprocreative relationships and marriagesbetween men and women differ and determinehow people make claims on each other.

Whether one works on legal documents fromthe archives (Merry) or observes disputes in thefield (Kritzer), the essays reflect the need formulti-sited ethnography. Undertaking researchin several sites is the way to comprehendlinkages that form the world system. Friedmannotes that the historical study of the law isalways interpretative, and can be regarded asethnographic work in the classic sense. ButNader emphasizes that it is necessary to re-affirm immersement in the field as central to theethnographic method, especially in the currentera of interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinarymoves. Such trajectories through which theoryand method develop allow an engagement withthe richness of subjectivities and chart thecomplex field of social relations, contradictoryvalues, and emotions that an adherence tolegalism often excludes. This volume is avaluable contribution to both the understandingand practice of legal ethnography.

Kusum Gopal London School of Economics


Book reviews 509

Wolcott, Harry F. The art of fieldwork (2ndedition). vi, 292 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, NewYork: AltaMira Press, 2005. $72.00 (cloth),$27.95 (paper)

First published in 1995, this edition has onlyminor changes except for a new last chapterand an updated bibliography. Wolcott writes in an informal style, drawing upon hisresearches among the Kwakiutl, in Botswanabeer gardens, and with educational matters inthe United States, among others. The work ispeppered with quotes from anthropologists,social scientists, and others. It is primarilyaimed at graduate students in anthropologyand other social sciences preparing for theirfirst major research. Wolcott views fieldwork asa single process that includes preparation forthe field, the actual research, and the writingand publishing of the subsequent analysis.

The author makes a strong case for thevalue of qualitative research, which he views asthreatened by quantitative research. The threatappears to be serious in educationalanthropology, his major field, where schoolstatistics play significant roles. To counter thescience in quantitative work he makes a casethat qualitative fieldwork is an art, having manyof the qualities of art, such as creativity,individual interpretation, and revelation. Whilefieldwork has clear analogies to art, a strongercase could be made for it as performance,which the author only occasionally refers to, asthe researcher creates, develops, and alters hisroles in terms of his cultural, political, and class background, personal life-style, and theresearch situation. But his is not a postmodernapproach.

Although Wolcott insists that quantitativeresearch is of value for gathering certain typesof information, what is missing is a seriousattempt to show how quantitative andqualitative approaches might be integrated infieldwork and the subsequent write-up.Anthropology today is moving toward the useof greater quantification, as in the increasingemphasis on applied work in whichanthropologists, working for governments andnon-governmental organizations, need tointegrate statistical data collected by others, aswell as by themselves, with their researchprogramme, whether it be on AIDS, femalecircumcision, or data on famines andagriculture. Yet Wolcott sees himself as an old-fashioned ethnographer in a world pressed toemploy computer-derived scientific data. Hehas often taught courses on fieldwork and

written two previous books on qualitativeresearch, clearly a main theme in his career.Another important area today, only brieflymentioned by Wolcott, is the increasing use ofarchives, particularly in historical anthropology,requiring specific training in the handling andinterpretation of documents.

Nevertheless, the author has many helpfulsuggestions for the first-time fieldworker. Thereare discussions on participant observation, onbeing an observer, on the dangers of politicaland conflict entanglement in the field, on theproblem of feeling independent from one’sprofessors during field research, yet finding oneenmeshed in another culture and in the needto write up the research under these samementors. Other topics include the matter of clandestine observations and personalsatisfaction in fieldwork. Wolcott distinguishesfieldwork in terms of methods of action fromwhat is in the researcher’s mind, indicating theissues involved in each case.

The new last chapter, ‘The art of discretion’,is out of place and should be set deeply withinthe book. In focusing on three of his researchexperiences, Wolcott deals with questions ofwhat to make public and what not to reveal,something that has preoccupied him in recentyears. In his Kwakiutl work he did not publishon murder and rape in the community, thoughperhaps these were indicators of obviousdecline. In his research on a project involving agroup of Oregon State schools, there wasconflict between the project leaders and theteachers; though Wolcott claims that his finalreport was fair, his sympathies clearly lay withthe teachers. The third research involved adisturbed young man who came to live on theauthor’s property for a while, part of whose lifeWolcott turned into an ethnographicbiography. Wolcott reveals that the relationshipbecame a sexual one. While his willingness togo public on this matter is admirable, I wonder how anthropologically objective hisbiographical study could be under thecircumstances. Also in the second case his deep sympathy for the teachers may havecoloured his report, despite his claims ofneutrality. The chapter thus turns away fromone concerned with what to reveal to deeperethical issues, which he does not fully address.In contrast, the final chapter in his book’s firstedition is a better ending, referring back to histheme of fieldwork as an art, or the art offieldwork.

Simon Ottenberg University of Washington,Seattle


Not by genes alone: how culture transformed human evolution - Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd

Documents