One homeland or two? The nationalization and transnationalization of Mongolia's Kazakhs

Book ReviewsBiocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. KaushikSunder Rajan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.360 pp.

KAREN-SUE TAUSSIGUniversity of Minnesota

Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s Biocapital: The Constitution ofPostgenomic Life is a theoretically and methodologicallyambitious text. It is at once an attempt to theorize ge-nomics in the context of globalizing aspects of highly capi-talized technoscience (p. 14) and to do so through a multi-sited ethnography that is an explicit response to Marcus andFischer’s 1986 call for experimental ethnography. As SunderRajan puts it, he seeks “to study locality and particularityin order to map a set of global systems, structures, and ter-rains” as a means of capturing the “complexities and multi-ple causalities that constitute contemporary social systemsand structures” (p. 30). Identifying genomics as one of therapid changes that mark the contemporary historical mo-ment, Sunder Rajan selects postgenomic drug developmentmarketplaces as a productive arena in which to track howcapital, biology, and processes of globalization are drawninto complex assemblages with a range of human and non-human actors. Sunder Rajan’s study moves across an arrayof domains in India and the United States, including labs,conferences, trade shows, genome start-up enterprises withjoint public and private funding in Hyderabad and Mumbai,and an e-learning start-up company in San Francisco.

Sunder Rajan argues that biotechnology represents anew phase of capitalism marked by “an implosion of cap-italism with ‘life itself’” (p. 171) in which biotechnology isinextricably entwined with capital. Bringing Foucault’s the-orization of the biopolitical into conversation with Marx’shistorical materialism (p. 14), Sunder Rajan argues that theconstitution of postgenomic life involves the developmentof social and material relations along with certain kinds ofinstitutional structures and subjectivities that are alwaysrooted in existing histories with the result that just whatpostgenomic life is now and will be in the future is consti-tuted in different ways in different places.

What is compelling about the book is its groundbreak-ing effort to move the anthropology of science beyond theindustrialized settings that have been the focus of so much

work in this emerging area of the discipline. Sunder Rajanmakes clear that the life sciences constitute a set of global-izing phenomena and, as such, play out differently in the di-verse social, historical, and economic specificities in whichthey are located. He offers an intriguing description of theestablishment of Genomed, a genome start-up companywith both public and private funding in Parel, a district inthe heart of downtown Mumbai, surrounded by poverty re-sulting from the destruction of the once flourishing tex-tile industry (pp. 83–97). Sunder Rajan invites us to imag-ine the constitution of the impoverished citizens of Parelas the research subjects through whom postgenomic drugdevelopment may well occur while pointing to the con-stitution of U.S. and European citizens as the consumerswaiting for the therapies imagined by postgenomic drugdevelopers.

Sunder Rajan also makes an appealing argument thatit is essential to take seriously both the fears and the hypethat surround contemporary genomics. He views the fearsas “dialectic components of the political economy” he isworking to trace (p. 208) while he considers the hype a “vi-sionary articulation that allows the . . . [creation of] the con-ditions of possibility for presents that allow those futuresto materialize” (p. 267). In taking this stance Sunder Rajanpoints to the social power of vision and promise and offersa very nice discussion engaging Haraway’s 1997 analysis ofgenetic fetishisms.

All this being the case and in spite of his claims thathe will not “subscribe to, or repudiate entirely” the fears orhype attendant on biotechnology (p. 208), Sunder Rajan ap-pears throughout the text more inclined to refuse the fearand accept the hype. This is most obvious when he repeat-edly writes about future genome-based therapies as if theyare real or likely to become actual commodities, for exam-ple, when he describes a therapy as “an object that makessick people better” (p. 210). While the vision, promise, andhope around genomics are clearly forms of future build-ing, one has to wonder if it is these phenomena themselves,rather than the therapies they point to, that make up thecommodity being bought and sold in the contemporarymarketplace.

A book that attempts the broad conceptual reach wefind in Biocapital demands a careful consideration of thedegree to which it realizes its ambition. Three missed op-portunities, where its ambition is underrealized, stand out

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 583–615, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C© 2010 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01274.x

American Ethnologist � Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010

in particular. The first of these is a technical issue havingto do with the structuring of the text that makes it read asif it is two books: the book itself and the narration of thebook. The latter (“in this chapter,” “in that chapter,” “I haveargued,” “I will argue,” etc.) is not only present to such adegree that it becomes a significant distraction, but it alsodoes not always correlate with what is in the text. This is par-ticularly striking in a passage where Sunder Rajan tells hisreaders that he will be investigating the hype about person-alized medicine “set against the contradiction at the heartof the pharmacogenomic promise, which is the fragmen-tation of pharmaceutical markets” (p. 153) but never actu-ally returns to elucidate this crucial aspect of the story ofpharmacogenomics.

Second, these kinds of absences speak as well to theethnography itself, which could have been thicker. If un-derstanding the market is crucial to understanding ge-nomics then surely ethnographic elaboration of the dy-namics around the crucial contradiction of personalizedmedicine—that it conflicts with big pharma’s desire forblockbuster drugs that can be prescribed for everyone—would elucidate important aspects of this story. Too oftenSunder Rajan makes broad claims extrapolated from whatappear to be one or two isolated conversations rather thansustained engagement in the sites he is investigating. One isstruck, as just one example, by the fact that in the discussionof the constitution of impoverished residents of Parel asresearch subjects for postgenomic drug development onlyone resident of Parel is quoted (a community organizer),and there is no description at all of actual efforts to recruitfrom this community.

Third, the book reflects a missed opportunity forSunder Rajan to fully situate his work in relation to otherhighly relevant conversations in the field. Sunder Rajan isone of a dynamic group of interdisciplinary scholars work-ing to understand contemporary genomics and, while heengages some of these scholars, there are some striking ab-sences. Mention of Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock’s 2003theorization of something they also named “biocapital” iscompletely absent. Monica Konrad’s 2005 coining of “pa-tients in waiting” is particularly relevant to Sunder Rajan’sdiscussion of the constitution of citizens in the UnitedStates and Europe as both patients and consumers in wait-ing but there is no reference to her work. Nor is there refer-ence to Catherine Waldby’s 2002 work on “biovalue.” Mar-cus and Fischer’s call for experimental ethnography, whichinspires Sunder Rajan’s project, has been extensively cri-tiqued since it came out over 20 years ago for its dismissal offeminist scholarship. This makes Sunder Rajan’s omissionof so many significant feminist voices that directly engageissues central to his work particularly ironic. It suggests thepersistence of an attitude toward scholarship that Cather-ine Lutz has vividly named “the gender of theory.”

References cited

Franklin, Sarah, and Margaret Lock, eds.2003 Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of the

Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Haraway, Donna

1997 Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan c©MeetsOncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience. New York:Routledge.

Konrad, Monica2005 Narrating the New Predictive Genetics. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer

1986 Ethnography as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Waldby, Catherine2002 Stem Cells, Tissue Cultures and the Production of Biovalue.

Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study ofHealth, Illness and Medicine 6:305–323.

The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status,and Exclusion. Marjorie Harness Goodwin. Malden, MA:Blackwell, 2006. 329 pp.

LAURA MILLERLoyola University Chicago

Good books often do the eye-opening work of debunkingpopular stereotypes. The Hidden Life of Girls is that kindof book, offering welcome relief from widely available yetflawed accounts of gendered speech. It accomplishes othergoals set out by Goodwin, but its achievement extends be-yond her stated aims. Discussion of the book might becontextualized in any number of ways, but only a few areconsidered here. I am most impressed by how Goodwinquestions gender stereotypes, engages with an appropriatemethodology, and looks at how class status is enacted.

Scholars have begun to critique a widely acclaimeddogma that asserts that women and men have fundamen-tally different ways of communicating. Deborah Cameron(2007) dismembers this myth using history, linguistic stud-ies, and other evidence to explain why it is so fashionable.Goodwin has a similarly important task in challenging stud-ies that depict preadolescent girls as having a nonassertive,nurturing linguistic style. It is not always a pretty picture,and we find in her data that girls bully people, ostracize oth-ers in an overt manner, brag about wealthy families, andspeak in ways that contradict claims by famous scholars, in-cluding media pundit and linguist Deborah Tannen.

Writing by Tannen and others is characterized by an es-sentializing, binary model of gendered discourse, accordingto which girls–women are cooperative, polite, and see socialharmony as their main goal, while boys–men are aggressive

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Book Reviews � American Ethnologist

and self-focused, concerned with status and face. Tacklingsuch an entrenched myth takes both finesse and good evi-dence, and Goodwin provides both. But to challenge com-mon perceptions, she had to ask the reader to look at anddigest what girls actually say and do when they are in theirown playtime environments. This sounds easy, but thereis something about natural language data that can be off-putting. It does not look like dialogue found in novels andmovies, and is messy and confusing. Transcripts of natu-rally occurring interactions are not aesthetically pleasing;they take up valuable print space so publishers don’t likethem either. One of Goodwin’s masterful moves is to lurethe reader in before they realize that some cognitive energymight be needed to process the forms and sequencing ofeveryday language.

Goodwin examines the stories, assessments, and in-sults that occur among a group of socially and ethnicallymixed preadolescent girls in Southern California. Decadesafter the inception of Conversation Analysis, there are stillvery few monograph-length studies that utilize its methodsand findings. Michael Moerman’s (1988) brilliant book Talk-ing Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis intro-duced it to a wide audience through microanalysis of datarecorded in a Thai cultural context. Unfortunately, his pub-lisher made him place the crucial transcripts at the endthe book, a flaw that Goodwin was spared. She larded eachchapter with transcribed excerpts from more than 80 hoursof recordings that were collected over a three-year period,convincing the reader of their importance. Some who arenot accustomed to looking at transcripts complain thatattention to bits of language is distracting, but as Goodwinillustrates, transcribed talk is not an interruption to an ar-gument, it is essential to understanding how social life is ac-complished. Of course, there are other productive methodsscholars have used for understanding local meanings, suchas interviews and analysis of a variety of texts, discourse,and narrative types. Goodwin, however, makes a good casefor why her methods are particularly appropriate for the re-search questions she poses. While engaged in jump ropeand hopscotch, telling stories and exchanging gossip, thegirls’ own local criteria and notions of morality, class, socialworth, and coolness are apparent in her tour through theirtalk and embodied behaviors.

The Hidden Life of Girls details how girls organize them-selves into cliques and perform alignments and attitudesto others. In particular, we learn how some girls are ter-ribly victimized. The gossip, whispering about others intheir presence, erasure of copresence, and forms of exclu-sion and bullying Goodwin describes might be eerily fa-miliar to professors on university playgrounds. Yet despitethe ubiquity of such behaviors, how someone gets placedin such a degraded status is rarely so well documented asit is here. The girls in her data ridicule others as “geeks,”

“butt ugly,” “weirdo,” and “Chimney Butthead,” challeng-ing claims that nurturance characterizes the way girls dealwith others. Goodwin likewise tackles the problem of howsocial class and other social roles are negotiated in languagepractices. We learn that girls position themselves and oth-ers through talk about things such as leisure activities (ten-nis in Palm Springs), consumption preferences (owning adigital pet, buying clothes from specific stores), and fam-ily wealth (how many homes their families own). The tran-script of three girls comparing the number of times theyhave been on an airplane (182) exquisitely makes it clearwhich among the three is working class.

Some critics, pointing to the fact that our key an-thropological concepts and methods have now dispersedto other fields, suggest that a discipline with historic tiesto colonialism ought to perhaps die a natural death. Yet,even using ethnographic research methods, many schol-ars outside anthropology retain culture-bound, class-basedcategories and viewpoints. Goodwin’s anthropological per-spective combined with close attention to naturally occur-ring talk allowed her to step outside these constraints tolocate girls’ own rules for conflict negotiation, class sta-tus, and concepts of morality. Goodwin wants to share hermind-blowing findings with a broad readership, so she ex-plains ideas in a way that an educated undergraduate anda language-data phobic scholar ought to comprehend. Thisimportant book has much to offer both scholars and stu-dents and is highly recommended as a class text and as aresource.

References cited

Cameron, Deborah2007 The Myth of Mars and Venus. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Moerman, Michael

1988 Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regenera-tion in Eastern Sudan. Amal Fadlalla. Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 2007. 210 pp.

SONDRA HALEUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Amal Fadlalla’s Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, andRegeneration in Eastern Sudan, although based on her dis-sertation, is greatly enhanced by her postdoctoral researchat Harvard and further fieldwork in the Red Sea area ofeastern Sudan among the poverty-stricken Hadendowa (a

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branch of the Beja). It is one of the best books written onSudan and on this general subject of how relationships ofpower, lack of power, and social conflict figure in women’snarratives about health, fertility, and reproductive issues.In Fadlalla’s eyes, women’s narratives and healing practicesrevealed broader socioeconomic problems such as povertyand global disparities. It is the first book written about thelives of Hadendowa women and the first to use their ownnarratives in documenting their own lives. She has, in fact,developed an accessible methodology for integrating mi-nority women’s voices into her larger framework.

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Em-bodying Honor is a beautifully written work. Fadlalla hasdivided the work into an introduction—“Weaving the Webof Regeneration,” and six chapters: “Famished Land: Gen-der, Identity, and Place”; “Historicizing Foreignness: Alter-ity, Disease, and Social Vulnerability”; “Performing Durarit[Honor]: Constructing Gender through the Life Course”;“Gendered Placenta: The Paths to Proper Fertility and Re-sponsible Motherhood”; “Precarious Trajectories: Manag-ing Reproductive Suffering”; and “Whose Modernity? Ne-gotiating Social Change.” The book is generously illustratedwith both black-and-white and color photos, the bibliogra-phy and index are helpful, and the glossary is excellent.

Fadlalla’s skill as a short-story writer and poet comesinto play in the elegance of the writing. The work is oneof the most readable ethnographies I have encounteredfor some time. Fadlalla has been able to transfer her po-etic style to this ethnography, lacing it with lovely narra-tives, poetry, and sayings. She has quoted many Hadendowawomen themselves, as well as Homer, Victor Hugo, theeconomist Amartya Sen, Hadendowa songs and proverbs,and the Qur’an. It makes the narrative very graceful. Eventhe more “academic” (as in theoretical) portions are en-hanced by elegant writing as are the sections that contex-tualize Hadendowa life within a political–economic frame-work, noting with subtlety the extreme poverty and harsh-ness of the land and life.

Furthermore, Embodying Honor is the best book writ-ten on Sudanese women (or on Sudan, for that matter) sinceJanice Boddy’s Wombs and Alien Spirits (1989). In somesense, Fadlalla’s work may overtake Boddy’s because of theway in which she incorporates so many social elements.They are both great books for some of the same reasons:a sound theoretical base, detailed and clear ethnographicdescription (that is highly readable and not dry), originalideas, and eloquent prose. Therefore, I can say withoutreservation that this is a major contribution to anthropolog-ical theory and Sudanese and African ethnography. As forSudan ethnography, Fadlalla is following in the footsteps ofsome of the best ethnographers of Africa who all worked inSudan, for example, Talal Asad, Ian Cunnison, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, S. F. Nadel, and Fredrik Barth.

Fadlalla’s work is not only a major contribution to Africanethnography but also to Islamic African ethnography andto women’s studies.

Fadlalla deals with themes that, in the hands of oth-ers, come across as ethnocentric and trite, for example,the theme of honor (durarit, so central to the story). Inthe hands of others, the theme of honor (as in honor andshame) is often a dichotomous treatment, uncomplicatedby the interventions of other factors outside of some per-ceived honor system. Her use of such concepts as “re-generation” instead of “reproduction,” in and of itself el-evates the study. That Fadlalla is able to give a feministtheoretical interpretation of material that might have beenspoiled by many others makes this a definite major contri-bution to women’s studies and feminist theories. For onething, Fadlalla has managed to raise the study of a Mus-lim group to a level that is striking but does not delveinto “exceptionalism,” a great failing in ethnographic andfeminist studies of Muslim women and African women. Infact, it is a pleasure to read a book about Muslim womenthat manages to avoid all the pitfalls of a pitfall-riddenfield—Middle Eastern or Islamic women’s studies. By deal-ing with women in their everyday lives, by participatingwith them in their daily tasks, by elevating without roman-ticizing, Fadlalla’s work ranks with Lila Abu-Lughod’s ex-cellent ethnographic work—Veiled Sentiments (1986) andWriting Women’s Worlds (1993), both also highly personalaccounts of Bedouin women’s lives.

That brings me to another main point about Embody-ing Honor, which is related to the advantage of having a Su-danese, an African woman, write this work. We have veryfew women writing about women in Islamic Africa, and theworks we do have are of a much lesser quality by far. Sucha view—almost from an insider (Fadlalla is not from theHadendowa group, although she is very familiar with east-ern Sudan from her early background)—is very valuable.Without being unsubtle, she subverts many of our stereo-types of Muslim, African, nomadic women, but as I said,without romanticizing. These are poor women strugglingagainst great odds (famine, poverty, sexism, various formsof colonialism); there is nothing romantic about it. In thissense, her work exceeds Abu-Lughod’s two ethnographiesmentioned above in subverting romanticism.

Fadlalla centers her work around particular symbolicconcepts such as honor and fertility, underscores the bodyspatiality of women, and unravels the Hadendowa con-cept of foreignness (which allows her to position herself, anorthern Sudanese, as balawait while unsettling our usualnotions of “insider” and “outsider”). In her own words,Fadlalla states that: “The focus of the feminization of so-cial vulnerability shifts attention from anthropology’s sym-bolic emphasis on gendered meanings of fertility to a con-ception of ritual symbolism and practices as diagnostics of

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historical relationships of power, marginality, and socialconflict” (p. 5), and that “Hadendowa women embody thecultural meanings of affinity, motherhood, and regenera-tion” (p. 85).

This graceful work manages to combine demograph-ics, poetry, and ethnography rather seamlessly, all the whilemaking a major contribution to the fields of African ethnog-raphy, women’s studies, feminist theories, Muslim studies,population and health, and Sudanese studies.

References cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila1986 Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society.

Berkeley: University of California Press.1993 Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Society. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Boddy, Janice

1989 Wombs and Alien Spirits. Madison: University of WisconsinPress.

An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. RuthBehar, photographs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 297 pp.

SHARI JACOBSONSusquehanna University

It’s hard to imagine who wouldn’t want to read An IslandCalled Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. Part memoir andpart ethnography, Ruth Behar’s theoretically rich and sug-gestive study of Jews in Cuba delves into topics as varied astourism, migration, and diaspora; the methods and ethicsof fieldwork; the quality of religious life in today’s world;the work of subject formation; socialist and postsocialistsocieties; and material culture. The text also complicatesmany studies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Jew-ish Diaspora by highlighting in new ways the diversity inthese fields. Finally, with prose that responds to the beauti-ful and provocative photographs taken by Cuban photogra-pher Humberto Mayol while Behar “spoke to and interactedwith people” (p. 261), the work is an innovative and collab-orative departure from the more typical use of photogra-phy to illustrate ethnographic text. Suitable for undergradu-ate and graduate students alike, An Island Called Home willprovide a variety of scholars with much to ponder.

One of the most productive aspects of the text is itsabundance of poignant and stimulating tensions that com-pel us to reflect anew on how we choose our projectsand produce our anthropological knowledge. Born in Cuba,Behar left the country as a small child when her family,along with some 95 percent of the other Jews, voted with

their feet against Fidel Castro and the nationalization ofprivate enterprise. But Cuba tugged at her heart and, be-ginning in the 1990s, she began to visit regularly, bringinggoods to loved ones and searching for elusive childhoodmemories that seem to have entered her consciousnessmore by way of family photographs than lived experience.In 2000, she embarked on a more “concrete search for theJews who make their homes in Cuba today” (p. 3), partner-ing with the award-winning photographer Mayol and evenleading a tour for American Jews curious about Cuba. Herdeft foregrounding of her own feelings of longing and dis-placement, her profound if received trepidation of all thingsrelated to Fidel Castro, her economic privilege as a citizenof the United States and ambivalence about tourism, andher acute appreciation for the political stakes of represent-ing anything or anyone Cuban usefully combine to high-light the complexity of conducting intellectually, emotion-ally, and politically ethical fieldwork.

An Island Called Home also speaks in perceptive andinnovative ways to what is far too often depicted as a vir-tually universal and uniform revival of religion. While it istrue that nearly all the Jews with whom Behar speaks inCuba have affiliated with synagogues, pursued b’nei mitvah(coming-of-age rituals), and learned to read Hebrew andchant Torah only in the past 15 years or so, Behar wiselyresists a unitary representation or explanation for this. In-stead, readers learn through her numerous informants ofthe varied social, cultural, personal, spiritual, and economicdraws of Jewish life in Cuba, each of which ebbs or flowsat different moments and in different ways for multifacetedsubjects. Although Behar may have been searching for theCuban Jewish life of her 1950s childhood, what she findsis sui generis: Jews with a singular Jewish grandfather; Jewswho are converts from Catholicism; Jews who hadn’t pickedup a prayer book in 40 years; Jews who find Jewishnessin physics, literature, socialism, and sugar cane; Jews whowere circumcised at the age of 69; Jews who arrive late to aninterview because they were tracking down a leg of pork forlunch.

Indeed, perhaps one of the most important contribu-tions of Behar’s book is the insight it offers into the com-plex work of subject formation. Many of the Jews she meetsby way of religious institutions weren’t Jewish before andnearly all the ones who were weren’t Jewish in the same way.Assessing this phenomenon, Behar notes the 1992 consti-tutional decree that modified Cuba from an officially athe-istic to a secular state, as well as ensuing legislation thatlegalized the use of the U.S. dollar in 1993. Thankfully, how-ever, Behar refuses to yoke her analysis of the “Jewish re-newal” to the hackneyed narrative of Jews who are finallyfree to return to their cherished traditions as the sun sets onyet another totalitarian socialist regime. Instead, she pointsrepeatedly to the hefty infusions of human and economic

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capital that come from American Jews and their institu-tions, detailing how they determinedly forge what is in Cubaa novel version of Judaism. Readers interested in subjectiva-tion will find much to consider here: just as Cuba negotiatesa future made economically uncertain by the end of ColdWar politics but with an ongoing U.S. embargo, the versionof Judaism that washes up on its shores arrives replete withthe same narratives, rituals, aesthetics, and “flotsam andjetsam” (p. 169) that characterize the dominant form of Ju-daism in its capitalist neighbor to the north.

Finally, Behar’s text speaks provocatively to questionsof material culture, specifically the complex and at timesseemingly paradoxical ways that objects acquire and main-tain institutional, symbolic, aesthetic, and emotional value.Indeed, some objects, for example, Ida Gutstadt’s father’sshirt from Auschwitz and Jaime Gans Grin’s postcard withcanceled stamps of Hitler—the writer of which “was deadby the time it arrived at its destination” (p. 224)—are socharged with meaning that their owners cannot even bearto possess them: Gutstadt’s shirt resides instead on thetallest shelf of a hidden closet in the majestic Patronatosynagogue; Grin’s postcard is passed on to Behar, its owner“glad to finally part with it” (p. 225).

Through An Island Called Home, Behar takes her read-ers on a journey that provokes, inspires, moves, and satis-fies. There are few ethnographies that are at once so intel-lectually rich and aesthetically fulfilling, so accessible andso stimulating. Scholars and students alike will benefit fromthis insightful and beautiful text.

Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity inSouth India. Cecilia Van Hollen. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2003. 295 pp.

MARGARET E. MACDONALDDepartment of Anthropology, York University

In social science studies of reproduction, we are quite fa-miliar with critiques of the medicalization of pregnancy andchildbirth. Cecilia Van Hollen’s recent book, Birth on theThreshold, offers another perspective on the topic of child-birth, biomedicine, and modernity. Her study amongst poorwomen in the city of Chennai and its environs, in the stateof Tamil Nadu, India, illuminates productive tensions be-tween tradition and modernity in women’s experiences ofchildbearing. But it does so without recourse to notions ofwomen’s universality and without portraying biomedicineas hegemonic. Rather, Van Hollen shows how biomedicinehas been localized and stresses that Tamil women’s cri-tiques of biomedicine are not counter hegemonic but con-cern the discriminatory way that services are provided. Oneof the things I like best about this book is that it challenges

readers to consider another set of sensibilities concerningthe medicalization of childbirth. Van Hollen describes withsubtlety and insight how and why Tamil women seek ac-cess to the same kinds of biomedical maternity care thatmany childbirth activists and scholars in North Americahave been fighting to curtail.

The central image of birth on the threshold is both lit-eral and figurative. Van Hollen opens the book with a storyof Mumtaz, a young woman who is in labor with her firstchild, waiting at her doorstep for the autorickshaw to takeher to the local government hospital. By the time the rick-shaw arrives, Mumtaz has already given birth with the helpof her mother and a village health worker, quite literally inthe doorway of her house. Van Hollen uses this evocativeimage of the threshold as a metaphor not only for the tran-sition of childbirth from the private space of the home tothe public domain of the hospital but also for “a shift in sys-tems of knowledge about the body in general and women’sreproductive bodies in particular” (p. 3).

The shifts Van Hollen describes are framed by theidea of the modernization of society through the bodiesof women. The “modernization processes” she addressesinclude: the professionalization and institutionalization ofobstetrics, changes in consumption patterns and repro-ductive rituals, the emergence of new technologies for themanagement of childbirth pain, the international mandateto reduce population, and development agencies’ agendato spread biomedical notions of reproduction. The au-thor’s combination of methods—archival, ethnographic,and documentary—to tell this story is a major strength ofthe book.

Van Hollen begins by recounting British colonial effortsto bring “enlightenment” to the dark recesses of Indian fam-ily life by transforming childbirth practices in late 19th andearly 20th century. By educating the Indian woman onmatters of sanitation and modern medicine, the Britishsought to improve maternal and infant health and therebyaddress the specter of depopulation of the labor force.Training programs for dais—traditional birth attendants—were launched as a stopgap measure, but the introduc-tion of professional obstetrics was seen as the real solu-tion. Contemporaneous counter arguments of local nation-alists, however, identified not Indian “backwardness” but,rather, the unequal distribution of health services as the realproblem—a critique that persists in the present day com-plaints of Tamil women, and one that Van Hollen returns tothroughout the book.

In post-Independence India to the present, Van Hollendescribes a range of options for birthing women—includinggovernment hospitals, private hospitals, and private prac-titioners at the neighborhood and village level with vary-ing degrees of medical training. Cost, distance, and con-gruity with women’s expectations of care are all factorsin women’s choice of maternity care. Van Hollen carefully

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illuminates the micro forces of decision and meaning mak-ing around childbirth—both its clinical and ritual aspects—stressing social and political context. Particularly com-pelling is her chapter on the meaning and management oflabor pain in which she shows how pharmaceutical aug-mentation of labor has become normalized in some partsof Tamil Nadu. She recites a common piece of knowledgeamong Tamil women that “the baby will only be born if thepains are strong” (p. 112). Women are understood to nat-urally possess the strength to withstand the pains of laborand, thus, pain (vali) is to be invoked not avoided in child-birth. “In Tamil Nadu,” the author concludes, “cultural no-tions about female power (sakti), local constructions of thebody, and traditional medical practices to accelerate labourpains combined with the political economic situations oflarge government hospitals make accelerating labour eco-nomically efficient and render the use of analgesics an un-affordable luxury” (p. 113).

Van Hollen’s analysis also avoids the dichotomizationof submission and resistance in the profile she offers ofShahida, a middle-class Muslim woman with an air of pro-fessionalism and some modern drugs, who attends deliv-eries in the village. Van Hollen reads Shahida’s popular-ity as a kind of resistance to allopathic medicine but onethat doesn’t invoke Western critiques of male-dominated,fragmented, medicalized births. Rather, she argues, localwomen’s resistance “took the form of the search for someaccess to the professional and technological aspects of birthoutside of the institutional structures which they felt hadnot served them well and which had attempted to eradi-cate what they saw as viable collective cultural practices”(p. 214).

How the shifting concerns of the modern state seek towork through women’s bodies is the theme that continuesto animate this book, as the author turns her attention topopulation health and family planning policy in India. Hereshe traces the back story of international donors pressur-ing India to meet family planning “targets” as a condition offurther aid and loans and shows how the rhetoric of mod-ernization is entrenched in such ostensibly progressive pro-grams as the Baby Friendly Hospitals Initiative and the con-cept of “reproductive rights.” With each example Van Hollenreturns to what Tamil women themselves say and do andthe importance of socioeconomic context.

Birth on the Threshold is clearly written and very en-gaging is its description and argumentation and thus is ahighly teachable ethnography. It makes important scholarlycontributions to critical medical anthropology for the wayit connects small ethnographic moments to larger forces ofhistory and political economy and presents local culturalexpression and experience as a deeply tuned response to lo-cal and global assemblages of power. Finally, this book is awelcome addition to a growing body of work in the anthro-pology of reproduction.

Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life.Thomas M. Malaby. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,2009. 165 pp., illustrations, index.

TOM BOELLSTORFFUniversity of California, Irvine

Increasingly, a range of Internet technologies—includingvirtual worlds, online games, and social networkingwebsites—have become sites of culture in their own right,interdigitating in myriad ways with actual-world sociali-ties even while they cannot be reduced to that interdigita-tion. Crucially, most of these emergent online socialities areowned by for-profit companies; we need to understand howthese companies implement their visions of online culture.

Gaining such an understanding is the primary projectof Making Virtual Worlds. An organizational ethnography ofLinden Lab, the company that made and now governs thevirtual world Second Life, it is a landmark work, a fascinat-ing study with wide relevance for scholars concerned withquestions of hierarchy, creativity, and contingency, partic-ularly in relation to the pivotal question of how forms ofcapitalist production shape social assumptions and dynam-ics. It would be mistaken to confine this book’s relevance toonline socialities, for it speaks to broad questions regard-ing governance, organizations, and capitalism. As I discussbelow, it is disappointing to see Making Virtual Worlds hob-bled by a rushed theoretical framework and ethnographicvagueness. However, I interpret these limitations gener-ously, as reflecting the challenges of exploring the organi-zations that literally code online worlds.

Making Virtual Worlds consists of an introduction andfive chapters. In the introduction, subtitled “A Developer’s-Eye View,” Malaby sets out the goals of the text. This isclearly an organizational ethnography, inspired above all byTracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (Kidder 1981) andPaul Rabinow’s Making PCR (Rabinow 1996), for which thetitle Making Virtual Worlds is a “respectful homage” (p. 4).Malaby notes that during the time of his fieldwork at LindenLab’s offices in San Francisco (December 2004 to January2006), the company grew from 35 to 67 employees as Sec-ond Life grew as well. Malaby had significant access to thecompany during this period and conducted participant-observation and face-to-face interviews with a range of em-ployees. Theoretically, he situates his analysis in literatureson governance, organizations, and bureaucracy, and also interms of game studies, an area in which Malaby has exten-sive expertise.

Chapter 1, “The Product,” is comprised of two parts.Malaby first offers readers a brief introduction to LindenLab before turning to the theoretical framework, whichis taken almost wholly from Pierre Bourdieu’s notion thatthere exist distinct forms of capital: market capital, social

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capital, and cultural capital. With little engagement with thesubstantial secondary literature on this framework, Bour-dieu’s typology is presented as truth rather than rubric.We learn, for instance, that cultural capital “has threeforms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized” (p. 37,in Bourdieu 1986:243–248). No possibility is raised thatthere might be two or four forms of cultural capital ratherthan three: Malaby simply treats Bourdieu’s theorization asa transparent representation of social reality. The theoreti-cal framework is not shaped by the ethnography itself.

Chapter 2, “Tools of the Gods,” turns in fascinating de-tail to the history of Linden Lab, showing how mundaneforms of decision making and office interaction shaped howemployees conceptualized their work and its implications.For instance, Malaby shows how a shift from “Achievementsand Objectives” documents to a bug- and feature-trackingapplication known as “Jira” influence how employees un-derstand what constitutes a “task” and how they are to col-laborate to complete such tasks. Malaby also explores howcertain books circulating around the office influenced thedesign of Second Life: particularly illuminating is the anal-ysis of how Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great Amer-ican Cities (1961) shaped a crucial decision regarding howavatars could “teleport” across the Second Life landscape.A vital insight Malaby brings to the table is that “faith in thetool-making tool of computer programming practice servedas the go-to practical means by which a public policy prob-lem could be answered” (p. 78).

By chapter 3, “Knowing the Gamer from the Game,” theBourdieuian framework has been largely sidelined in favorof the game studies perspective introduced in chapter 1.Drawing attention to scholarship underscoring indetermi-nacy in game play, Malaby’s working definition of “game”is “a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of con-trived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes”(p. 84). The convoluted and doggedly etic nature of thisdefinition reflects two problems compromising the broaderanalysis of which it partakes. First, the definition is so openended that it is difficult to imagine what aspect of humansociality would not fall under its purview. Second, the def-inition has little to do with Linden Lab: the game studiesframework appears not as research question but preethno-graphic postulate. It is indicative that Malaby opens chap-ter 3 with reference to a video game that some Linden staffplay (rather than Second Life itself); while there are someinteresting analyses (particularly the examination of how achess ranking system was used to prioritize company tasks),the game studies framework acts overall as a square holeinto which round peg after round peg is pounded. Thatsome virtual worlds are largely or wholly gamelike is be-yond doubt, as is the fact that the field of game studies hasmuch to offer the study of virtual worlds. But as designersand scholars of virtual worlds going back to Richard Bar-tle have noted, conflating virtual worlds with games forces

a series of unhelpful presuppositions into the analytic inquestion.

Chapter 4, “The Birth of the Cool,” explores ques-tions of simulation and a “hierarchy of creation” (p. 124)in Linden Lab’s design of Second Life. One case study con-cerns Linden Lab employees’ response to the unexpectedgrowth of dance clubs following an update to the virtualworld that allowed residents greater flexibility in avataranimations. Another case study examines the regimes ofaccountability and value shaping employees’ pursuit of “se-cret projects.” These themes are carried into the fifth chap-ter, “Precarious Authority,” which concludes the book bydrawing together concerns around bureaucracy, organiza-tional dynamics, and game studies. Drawing on anthropo-logical studies of ritual, Malaby suggests that questions oflegitimacy and authority will prove crucial to how we under-stand emerging regimes of governance with regard to onlinesocialities.

As this overview indicates, Making Virtual Worlds pro-vides groundbreaking insights concerning how Linden Labemployees understood their work and its implications. Itshould also be clear that the analysis is limited by overre-liance on a single theorist (Bourdieu) and the overexten-sion of a game studies framework to something doubly nota game (the company Linden Lab is not a game, and the vir-tual world they govern contains some games inside it butis not a game). For instance, there is no explanation as towhy the unexpected growth of dance clubs in Second Life,however contingent from the perspective of Linden Lab em-ployees, should be understood in terms of a model of con-tingency derived from the study of games.

The biggest disappointment of the book lies in itsethnography. Of lesser importance is the treatment of Sec-ond Life. Despite turning to the virtual world for ethno-graphic authority—every image of sociality in the book (in-cluding the cover) is a screenshot from within Second Life(see pp. 21, 103)—Malaby clearly focuses on the physical-world offices of Linden Lab. One strange omission, how-ever, is the failure to discuss how during the time of Malaby’sfieldwork, Linden Lab staff had virtual offices, located nextto each other in their own region of Second Life. How didthe layout and use of “Linden Village” shape their work?

The real limitation of Making Virtual Worlds, how-ever, lies in the weakness of its ethnography with regardto Linden Lab itself. The book has only 134 pages ofbody text—substantially less than Kidder’s or Rabinow’sworks—and many of these pages are devoted to exege-ses of Bourdieu and game studies scholarship. The ethno-graphic material provided in the remaining pages is sim-ply too thin to bear the analytical weight Malaby wishesto place on it. Malaby notes that “this book does not of-fer a comprehensive account of the practices, meanings,and history of Linden Lab as a conventional ethnographymight” (p. 4), not just because of the “small number of its

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employees” (p. 4) but because “the book has a differentaim . . . [it] illuminates ethnographically complex processesof governance, games, and creativity” (p. 4).

Unfortunately, this illuminative aim (not so “different”from many contemporary ethnographies) does not obviatethe need for the kind of careful ethnographic analysis hereindirectly denigrated as “conventional.” Most distressingin this regard is that save for two top-level staff (PhillipRosedale and Cory Ondrejka), Malaby makes no use ofpseudonyms or the other devices that ethnographers havelong used to specify their interlocutors, even in small fieldsites. This means that in a most un-Bourdieuian manner,the debates and decisions that took place within Linden Labare presented as intellectual abstractions rather than in-vested practices. Repeatedly we encounter statements like“[user] tools were not for tinkering ‘under the hood,’ asLindens put it” (p. 103), with no sense as to which “Lindens”said this, in what contexts. It may be that “Lindens on thewhole saw complex processes engaged by individuals pur-suing enlightened self-interest as the legitimate path to self-governance” (p. 104), but given the centrality of governanceto the analysis, discussing the exceptions to this “whole”would have been informative. Too often we find an an-thropomorphized Linden Lab who “[puts] forth an idealof agency for its users” (p. 59), or at best collectivities like“Lindens in marketing” (p. 113).

But how did actual staff interaction shape the mod-els and practices of the governance in question? LindenLab more than doubled in size during Malaby’s fieldwork:what were the consequences of this? What of the janito-rial and other support staff that are completely absent as“employees” of Linden Lab, but who are a crucial aspectof any organization’s political economic imaginary? Were“Lindens” involved in community management more likelyto be women? Indeed, kinship is one of the most obvious ab-sences in the analysis. As Malaby notes, Linden Lab employ-ees called themselves “the Lindens”; in Second Life theyeven appeared with the shared last name “Linden.” A rangeof thinkers, going back at least to Engels and includingmany feminist scholars, have noted the fundamental imbri-cation of kinship and capital (e.g., Yanagisako 2002). Howdid not just metaphors but practices of family and intimacyin a male-headed organization shape how “the Lindens”made and governed Second Life?

At times, there are tantalizing hints of the substantialethnographic knowledge that did not make its way intoMaking Virtual Worlds. In the conclusion, for instance, welearn that “there were moments of near-economic collapse,multiple hacker attacks, features added that fell flat, andsurprising bursts of participation from the least ballyhooedquarters” (p. 128). It would have been wonderful if Mal-aby could have shared more of these attacks and featuresand bursts of participation. (To whom does the mysteri-ous “least ballyhooed quarters” refer?) Such material would

emphatically not have rendered Making Virtual Worlds“conventional”—it would have rendered the book more ef-fective in precisely the kind of fine-grained organizationalanalysis needed to show how specific social dynamics, ir-reducible to company procedures and manifestos, playedpivotal roles in modalities of making and governance. AsGeertz observed, ethnography works through a “continu-ous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detailand the most global of global structure in such a way as tobring them into simultaneous view” (Geertz 1983:68). With-out the local detail, our ethnographic analysis is not uncon-ventional but, rather, adrift. It is thus in its role as a pointof departure—a “proof of concept,” in the phrase of LindenLab employees—that the promise of Making Virtual Worldslies. Malaby has opened a vital door to showing the power ofethnographic inquiry to chart the powerful role companiesthat own and govern online socialities will play in the yearsto come.

References cited

Bourdieu, Pierre1986 The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research

in the Sociology of Education. J. Richardson, ed. Pp. 241–258.Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Geertz, Clifford1983 “From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthro-

pological Understanding. In Local Knowledge: Further Essaysin Interpretive Anthropology. Pp. 55–72. New York: Basic.

Jacobs, Jane1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York:

Vintage.Kidder, Tracy

1981 The Soul of a New Machine. Boston: Little, Brown.Rabinow, Paul

1996 Making PCR: A Study in Biotechnology. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko2002 Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasyin Urban Tanzania. Brad Weiss. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 2009. 263 pp.

ANNE S. LEWINSONBerry College

Brad Weiss’s ethnographic study of popular cultural prac-tices in Arusha, Tanzania, provides a thought-provokinganalysis of African youths’ lives. As the book title im-plies, “hip hop” barbershops (male-centered settings whosedecor, workers, and clients display the globally distributedsymbols and ethos of hip hop) form the primary lens

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through which Weiss views this social category. The book’sreach, however, extends to other important urban locations,including buses, bars, homes, female-centered hair salons,tailoring stalls, and musical performances. Through de-tailed analysis of interviews, visual data, spoken exchanges,and observations of daily activities gathered during four re-search trips between 1999 and 2006, Weiss builds a convinc-ing argument that young African men draw on popular cul-ture to comment on their specific localities, constitute theirdaily worlds, and position themselves in the wider globe (al-beit consciously on its margins).

The book begins with a three-chapter introductionto the subjects of the study, their socioeconomic context,and an analytical framework. Three sections then follow,the first one describing the young men’s self-presentationsas tough survivors who can endure the assaults of ur-ban institutions and the world order. The second one an-alyzes their uses of hip hop metaphors and symbols toarticulate a marginalized-yet-engaged stance in the worldthat manifests in the sociality that they have fashioned(premised on excluding women or attachment to them). Athird section, divided into three chapters, explores youths’struggles to create viable adulthoods (families and liveli-hoods) and how their uses of popular culture genres (cloth-ing and hairstyles, television watching, and music-plus-religion) facilitate those struggles. Young female urbanitestake center stage in the first chapter of this section withan analysis of their popular genres and spaces (hair sa-lons, clothing, taarab music), as well as the discoursesdeployed to marginalize women. Weiss subsequently dis-cusses the widespread appeal of soap operas as an edu-cational tool for learning about the world, and finally ex-plores the simultaneous embrace of new religiosity (e.g.,observant Islam) with rap music performance. The analy-sis of each genre reveals experiences rooted in a local realitythat draw on the global domain (be it through fashion, bodyhexis, speech, celebrities, Sunset Beach, music, PentecostalChristianity, or Sunni Islam). A brief conclusion summa-rizes the changing dynamics in Arusha in 2006 as well as theargument.

When anthropologists analyze popular cultural prac-tices in places such as Tanzania, they face several signifi-cant challenges. Most theoretical models for studying pop-ular culture (drawn from cultural studies) fall on one sideof an analytical divide. Either they grant more power tothe “text” (a song, piece of clothing, TV show, etc.) andits creators, arguing that the texts carry messages that im-print themselves onto passive recipient audiences, or theygrant more power to active “readers” who attach mean-ings to the texts, freely using popular culture for their ownpurposes. This division particularly shows up in analyzingthe circulation of European- or U.S.-derived popular cul-ture in African societies, which often has been seen as ex-emplifying cultural imperialism or conversely as local peo-

ple triumphantly recasting imported goods into their ownmolds. Neither theoretical emphasis helps an anthropol-ogist to interpret how socially positioned individuals andgroups within constraining contexts draw on popular gen-res to address their situation vis-a-vis other groups, theirhistories, and the contemporary world.

Weiss navigates between these theoretical pitfalls byemphasizing that the youths in his study are simultaneouslyconscious of their global marginalization (exclusion fromwealth and prestige), constrained by their social–historicalpositioning, and using mass-circulated symbols and prac-tices to engage in locally meaningful ventures. As he shows,Tanzania’s specific context of liberalization involved a briefeconomic bubble (followed by a protracted bust), whichhas brought an emphasis on “self-fashioning” throughconsumption of popular genres, commodities, and styles.While Weiss acknowledges the impact of an individual-focused consumption-based definition of Self promotedby neoliberalism, he also seeks to break down the divi-sion between production and consumption by highlight-ing the new productive processes constituted through thecommodities. As well, by providing specific case studies, di-rect quotations, and descriptions, Weiss demonstrates thatthese young men are not simply passive consumers or im-itators. The term participation highlights that they do notcontrol the forms of hip hop, yet they actively enact them.While Weiss delineates the barriers that liberalization hascreated for youths’ movement into stable economic livesand families, he also highlights how the men employ hiphop sensibilities, celebrities, and symbols to generate asense of empowerment to keep on struggling. He showspowerfully “the potentials and constraints of this contem-porary situation without succumbing either to a critiqueof political economy that sees only dependency and frus-trated reaction to an order of domination or to a celebra-tion of the creativity that Africans have generated indepen-dent of the harsh realities they daily confront” (p. 238). Asa whole, Weiss creates a well-balanced analysis. In addi-tion, this book demonstrates how ethnographic researchinto popular cultural practices can produce deeply insight-ful understandings of the contemporary world.

Street Dreams has a few minor shortcomings. Some re-dundancies occur in the ethnographic examples and oc-casionally in the argument in different chapters. The sym-bolic analyses sometimes seemed overextended (such asof the term kijiwe), especially because this ethnically di-verse group is unlikely to share all the subtle semanticmeanings suggested. The analytical sections can be wordyin places, with double explanations of the same point. Fi-nally, it was unclear precisely how Weiss was using thekey concept of “value,” making the argument harder tofollow at points. As a result, while the subject and argu-ment in a selected chapter or two would give students greatinsights, the ethnography in its entirety probably would

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work less well in undergraduate courses. For researchersinto youths, gender, cities, popular culture, globalization,and African topics, however, this ethnography provides im-mensely valuable data and conceptual frameworks for fu-ture analyses.

Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment inAfrica. Parker Shipton. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2009. 327 pp.

BILL MAURERUniversity of California, Irvine

“It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world in whichMonsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghostwalking as social characters and at the same time as merethings.” Thus Marx, in Capital, quoted by Parker Shiptonnear the beginning of this fascinating book (p. 48). Cover-ing the history of land, belonging, and lineage among theLuo people of western Kenya, this book concerns itself withthe curious dynamics of freehold tenure in rural develop-ment policy and practice. Their hands bound by the mort-gage, Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do theirghost walking in the name of the old and still influentialtheory that all things must be property, all property mustbe liquid, and all liquidity must be leveraged in the nameof greater productivity and, thus, human progress. Shiptondeftly reveals the evolutionist doctrine guiding this theory,and takes us on a tour of the various dead men still walkingthe halls of despots, technocrats, and nonprofit do-goodersalike, from John Locke to Alfred Marshall and the architectsof the World Bank. But other ghosts figure in the Luo con-ceptions of land that get caught up in this theory of produc-tivity: the dead who are buried on the plot of land outsidethe house, securing the position of the living in a kin groupas well as warranting their enduring claim to territory andmembership, a claim now up for foreclosure because of thenew pragmatics of mortgage financing.

The title of the book is meant quite literally in this sec-ond volume of a planned three-volume magnum opus. Thefirst, The Nature of Entrustment (2007), was the winner ofthe 2008 Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Stud-ies Association and is a fascinating exploration of moraleconomies of compensation and exchange across gener-ations. The third, Credit Between Cultures, is expected in2010. The trilogy poses trenchant critiques of developmentpolicy—especially policies whose aim is to enhance ruralpeople’s access to credit and savings—but also provides arichly sympathetic ethnography of people in East Africa try-ing to maintain their own sense of life and livelihood. Forthose of you who have not been keeping up with Ship-ton’s work over the years, you’ve been missing out. Fortu-

nately, the book under review gathers up some of the di-verse strands of his research. It also adds to the anthro-pological literature on topics ranging from descent theoryto the anthropology of finance. Shipton has a keen graspof the hoary debates in our field, a knack for explainingthem clearly and concisely, and a gift for channeling theseghosts stalking our discipline and finding that they still haverelevant things to say about the most pressing issues ofthe day.

The cover image of rolling grassy hills, a small thatchedroof house and, slightly off-center, a cement or stone gravemarker beautifully evokes the attachments of the Luo to theland. So it is fascinating to learn that such burial practicesare a recent phenomenon, that people in this densely pop-ulated region have become “not less ‘clannish,’ but more,”and that grave placement and marking has come to stakea claim to descent and to “anchor . . . social identity for liv-ing persons and groups” (pp. 86–87). At issue is the verynature of modernity, of bureaucratic rationality enhancing“primitive” attachments to kin and land right at the mo-ment where the mortgaging of those attachments becomespossible. Shipton traces colonial-era efforts to, as one colo-nial writer put it, “throw the money about” (p. 139) to createa more politically palatable rural middle class and offsetthe rebellious tensions of the Mau Mau and other anti-colonial movements. Cadastral surveys and formal titlingallowed land to be “freed up,” to start ghost walking withcapital, which led Luo and others more firmly to try to se-cure their own ghosts to what became their “property,” in-vigorating some relationships of kin and ethnicity and ob-viating others. But titling and mortgages opened the newpossibility of “absolute loss of ownership” (p. 142), a fright-ening outcome in a world where previously rights werecross-cutting and diverse, where one person could claima right to hoe, another to swap, a third to transfer or relo-cate a wife to the land. Fields may have been bounded withsisal or other markers. But seasonal factors, the role of ani-mals in redistributing “plant energy and nutrients” (p. 71),and overlapping—but not necessarily competing—claims(pp. 71–72) themselves get foreclosed with the possibility ofabsolute ownership and absolute loss entailed in the mort-gage form.

Pointing out the morbid roots of the mortgage, Shiptontraces the history of the freehold mortgage process and itsinimical relationship to dry land agriculture, where sea-sonal oscillations involve a temporal cycle at odds withthe regularity demanded of the amortization table. Healso shows how land tenure and finance are bound up inEuropean ideas about savagery and civilization. His ac-count of the 1950s Swynnerton Plan, the first nationwideattempt in Africa to comprehensively title all land as in-dividual property (p. 143), echoes his telling of the tale ofthe American Dawes Act and the 19th-century traces of themoral ambiguity of the mortgage in “civilizing” the “savage”

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(pp. 30–33) that persist and can be discerned in the now all-too-familiar consequences of the mortgage financing cri-sis of the late 2000s (with the blame still often ascribed to“subprime” people rather than purveyors of the impossibledreams of property embedded in interest-only home loansor credit default obligations).

Shipton’s book stands as a warning to developmentplanners who would buy into these dreams. Take currentefforts to promote savings among the world’s poor. Implic-itly referencing Locke’s famous proclamation that moneyserves the store of value function because unlike apples andacorns, it does not decay, Shipton remarks: “currency infla-tion . . . can sometimes render money worthless even fasterthan grain in a granary might rot” (p. 36). This is a pow-erful and important work, written in an accessible style,and highly recommended for undergraduate and graduateclasses on property, economic development, and law.

References cited

Shipton, Parker2007 The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sa-

cred in Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.2010 Credit between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and Mis-

understanding in Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress.

Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans: Long-TermProcesses and Daily Practices. Maria F. Wade. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2008. 288 pp.

DANIEL LARSONCalifornia State University, Long Beach

Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans by Maria F.Wade is an ambitious attempt to synthesize historic infor-mation pertaining to the impact of Spain’s colonization andCatholic conversion of indigenous populations of Florida,Texas, northern Mexico, and Baja and Alta California. Theauthor examines various conversion strategies used by theFranciscans and Jesuits between the 17th and 19th cen-turies. She astutely explores the variable reactions by Na-tive American groups to European customs of religion, set-tlement, and economic expansion. Wade demonstrates thathistory matters and that both the Catholic Church andSpanish government were well experienced in encultura-tion processes designed during the Inquisition by trial anderror on European peasant communities. She explains thatthe European religious and political mindset viewed theNew World as one of good and evil where the masses ofhumanity were in need of guidance from higher author-ity with a divine capable of saving souls from hedonis-tic ways and an afterlife of infinite punishment, notions

that were incomprehensive in many ways to indigenouspeoples.

This book is well written and reflects an enormousamount of work of archival research. There is much to begained by reading this volume, but for the serious scholarlooking for explanation and empirical analysis, this vol-ume is best characterized as traditional historical narra-tive based on selective data and anecdotal information. Irecognize that opinions differ on the use of anthropologi-cal theory and the purpose of our research; however, it isimportant to identify and employ theory that may allow usto explain cause-and-effect relationships in missionizationprocesses as well as ethnographic research in general. I willrefer to these alternative theoretical perspectives and em-pirical studies below in my review. In spite of my reserva-tions, I believe this book is an important pioneering effort,and it should be read by those researchers and studentscaptivated by this topic.

The book is divided into three major sections. In theintroductory section, the author discusses several aims, in-cluding a commitment to “demonstrate the plight of themissionaries who felt trapped by the system they created”(p. xiii). Wade recognizes the diversity of motives and back-ground of each missionary, and she is astute to the impactof the individuals on missionization and conversion prac-tices. She characterizes the details associated with the dailyand yearly activities of indigenous peoples who resided inor near the missions. Importantly, there is an attempt tounderstand and contextualize the alternative conversionstrategies employed by the missionaries in diverse environ-ments among hunters and gatherers as well as precontactagriculturalists. Emphasis on the comparative approach isof great value, and there have been many recent efforts todevelop an explicit anthropological theory that can guidecomparative studies of cultural diversity.

In the second section, a well-organized and clearlywritten discussion related to the difference in beliefs and or-ganizations of the Jesuits’ and the Franciscans’ spiritual andstructural frameworks and how such perspectives playedout in the conversion of indigenous populations. This sec-tion provides an essential element necessary to the premiseof her book, which is “I aim to show the similarities anddifferences between Native preoccupations and reactionsto conversion and change in missionary practice” (p. xviii).The author suggests that we gain great insights into theminds of the missionaries as well as the Native peoples andthat perspectives differ dependent on the geographic re-gion, chronological period, ethnographic group, and mis-sionary sect. The study area is immense, and the culturaldiversity of the people within each microregion is great. Un-fortunately, anthropological constructs and classificationsystems often mask the diversity of indigenous cultures thatlived in close proximity and this hinders a scientific un-derstanding of cultural processes. The influence of settlers

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played a big role in enculturation and brought differentkinds of atrocities perpetuated in the name of Spanish greedand colonialism. This section is an interesting read and animportant contribution to our understanding of mission-ization processes.

In the third and final section of the book, the author ef-fectively summarizes everyday activities and annual eventsassociated with integrative religious ceremonies and eco-nomic tasks noting similarities and differences in culturaldimensions over time and space. Specifically, this informa-tion will be of value to those archaeologists and ethnohis-torians interested in the material culture of Native peoples,missionaries, settlers, and military personnel. The qual-ity and quantity of archival data ranges broadly from mis-sion specific architecture to speculations about previousstructures and artifact categories. The discussion of mis-sion records is important, but the value of how other an-thropologists have employed this empirical data is not ref-erenced here, which is a serious oversight in scholarship.Indeed, other researchers have used such records in inno-vative ways to enlighten us about the process of mission-ization. If the author included and reviewed this body ofknowledge, her arguments would have been more informedand compelling, especially for California.

The author clearly recognizes that European ways werenot completely assimilated, and that when these two cul-tures entered into unique interactions, cultural transmis-sion systems engaged, resulting in the emergence of newcultural structures that were neither all of one or the other.Self-organization theory is particularly applicable here andis truly a potential theoretical framework that can have aprofound impact on anthropological theory and researchrelated to missionization and cultural collisions. The inter-actions were complex, as pointed out by Wade, involving re-ligious institutions, missionary rules, royal decrees, and at-tempts to subvert the law and policies of both church andstate by Jesuits and Franciscans, as well as settlers. The au-thor’s aims are admirable and she explains her study ra-tionale in a straightforward manner. I would suggest thatfor anthropologists interested in the scientific study of re-ligion, enculturation, and group formation, that work car-ried out by Martin Novak and colleagues regarding networkformation is a rich source of theory that should be appliedto ethnographic research concerning colonization and reli-gious conversion. Coupling such an approach to advancesin cultural transmission theory, the neurosciences, and evo-lutionary cognitive studies will surely provide both prox-imate and ultimate explanation of human behavior. This,however, is my own research bias, but I am hopeful thatmultiple approaches will meld together into a new frame-work that will accomplish our diverse scholarly goals.

In conclusion, I would recommend that upper-divisionanthropology and history students as well as graduate stu-dents read this book for it contains a wealth of information

about an extremely important period in the history of theNew World. The author certainly deserves praise for the in-tensive labor required to complete this major undertaking.

Lives of Dust and Water: An Anthropology of Changeand Resistance in Northwestern Mexico. Marıa Luz Cruz-Torres. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. 325 pp.

CARMEN MARTINEZ NOVOFacultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Ecuador

Sinaloa, a northwestern Mexican state, is often representedas a cradle of violence, marijuana cultivation, and drug traf-ficking. While acknowledging this reality, the author of thisbook wishes to focus on another Sinaloa that less peopleknow, characterized by strong peasant and fisher identityand varied strategies of survival in the midst of great po-litical, economic, and ecological changes. Global demandfor commodities such as fruits, vegetables, and shrimp hasaffected these communities. The Mexican government hascarried out structural reforms in the 1990s to promote theprivatization of agriculture and fishing and its export orien-tation. This has allowed communities to sell their land andfishing resources to private companies, whereas the gov-ernment has provided less credit for subsistence activitiesand has reduced public expenses in social services. Further-more, the promotion of commercial agriculture and fish-ing for export has further deteriorated the environment onwhich these rural people depend. This book focuses on thevaried and creative strategies that rural people undertake tosurvive in this difficult context. Cruz-Torres highlights theimportant role of households led by women and solidaritynetworks for community survival. Another contribution ofthe book is that it focuses on a region and group of peoplethat is less studied by anthropologists: the north of Mexicoand mestizo peasants. Anthropologists working in Mexicohave tended to focus on regions populated by indigenousgroups.

Lives of Dust and Water contributes with a detailed his-tory and ethnography of two peasant and fishing commu-nities located in southern Sinaloa. One of the communitiesis an ejido, a form of communal landholding created as aresult of the agrarian policies of the Mexican Revolution.The other is a poor peasant community that originated fromthe dissolution of a hacienda (large landholding), and thatis characterized by small private property and a mixture ofwork in subsistence and commercial agriculture. Both com-munities, being located on the coast, combine agriculturewith the fishing of shrimp in nearby lagoons. One of themost important contributions of the book is the discussionof how poor peasants and fisherpeople use different strate-gies to survive that include subsistence agriculture, fishing,

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wage labor in commercial agricultural and fish farms, infor-mal businesses, and migration.

The historical section of the book is interesting, and itcovers from pre-Hispanic times to the present, and from aregional to a local approach. One contribution of this bookis to show how the Mexican Revolution was experienced atthe community level in this region through oral history. Par-ticularly useful is the discussion of how women could notbecome ejidatarias (with some exceptions) and how mencarried out most important decisions. However, womenparticipated in many lower-level committees that were es-sential for the functioning of the community. A shortcomingof the book is that the connection of ejidos to the rulingparty and the state, whose importance has been establishedelsewhere, is not sufficiently explored. A finding is that,despite what critiques to the ejido claim, ejidatarios im-proved their living standards and were better off than non-ejidatarios.

During the postrevolutionary period, fishing was or-ganized in cooperatives whose production was bought bythe government at a set prize. Later, the Mexican govern-ment experimented with the creation of collectively ownedshrimp farms as a form of rural development. However, ac-cording to the author, these farms provided few benefits forrural communities. A conflict arose between officially ap-proved fishing collectives and unlicensed newcomers anddealers. The political dimensions and the reasons for gov-ernment approaches to this conflict could have been ex-plored further by the author. The Mexican government isinterpreted as an oppressor of the unlicensed poor withouttaking into account its complex role as a mediator amongdifferent social groups and interests.

Then, Cruz-Torres explores what happens to peasantsand fisherpeople after the neoliberal reforms that allowedfor the privatization of ejidos and for the participation ofprivate companies in shrimp fishing. She shows that thepoor have sold or rented their land and fishing grounds toprovide for their daily needs. This has led to their greaterimplication in wage labor. Although the author notes someconsequences of neoliberal reforms in these communities,their effects could have been discussed in greater depth.

The section on household relations focuses mainly onthe pervasiveness of domestic violence and on how womenuse family and fictive kinship networks to make ends meetin difficult situations. As other works on gender in north-ern Mexico have shown, greater participation of women inremunerated activities seems to be the source of increaseddomestic violence. The author emphasizes the importanceof household strategies and networks, instead of socialmovements, as forms of female resistance. Other forms ofsurvival strategies based on solidarity discussed in this bookare rotating credit systems, food pooling, and childcareexchange.

Although the author claims in the introduction to beinterested in locating peasants in larger contexts, this isnot completely achieved in the book. The discussion ofthe relation of peasants and fisherpeople with the Mexicangovernment and Mexican politics could have been morecomplex. Also, the articulation of peasants with the globaleconomy could have been improved providing more con-text on global strategies and state policies. For example, thebook does not offer enough information about the globalpolitical economy of shrimp or of Sinaloan commercialagriculture. The reader is mostly left with the local point ofview on these issues.

The structure of the book also has some problems. Alarge section is spent in introductions, and the reader is dis-appointed to have to wait to almost page 200 to start readingthe best, more content-rich chapters. In addition, the bookhas a number of anecdotes that confuse the reader and thepoint of which is unclear.

To sum up, Lives of Dust and Water makes interestingcontributions to understand the varied strategies used byrural people, and particularly by women, to survive in a dif-ficult context of neoliberal reforms and ecological exhaus-tion. The book may be particularly useful for students andresearchers interested in rural histories, strategies, and inrural women, as well as those interested in northwesternMexico.

Women of Fes: Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco.Rachel Newcomb. Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2009. 236 pp.

DOYLE HATTUniversity of Calgary

There is no hint of the exotic in Rachel Newcomb’s Fez.Citing Edward Saıd’s critique of the Orientalist practice ofendlessly reproducing the standard themes that are handeddown in the academic literature, Newcomb avoids this bytraining her lens on a series of particular individuals anddealing with the larger structures of Moroccan society onlyincidentally, as they come up in the various discourses andrequire to be explicated for a reader unfamiliar with NorthAfrica. The reader thus apprehends and absorbs the culturalcontent seamlessly and without struggle, and, as noted,the content is purged of exoticism. The book is cast inthe tradition of Lila Abu-Lughod’s “writing against culture”paradigm, and the reader’s attention is drawn to the indi-viduals and their arguments, which, rendered into Englishby the author, could almost pass for discourses betweenand about men and women in any moderately cosmopoli-tan city in the world.

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Much of Newcomb’s narrative (her word) revolvesaround proposed reforms to the mudawwana, the Moroc-can code of family law governing marriage, divorce, andcustody of children following repudiation or divorce. Thiswas a key issue at the time of the fieldwork, and it anchorsthe book and allows the author to range widely around thesocial landscape as she explores the complexities and ambi-guities of gender relations. “Ranges widely around” is a fit-ting characterization of Newcomb’s coverage. The sequencein which various topics are brought to the reader’s attentionis perhaps a bit arbitrary, but the important thing is that theauthor guides the reader with a firm hand, deftly makingcultural or legal explanations as the need arises, and so thereader is not left to wonder where or why he or she is beingtaken in a particular direction, or how the new material fitsinto the old. The narrative proceeds smoothly and naturally,and the reader (or, at any rate, this reader) never feels over-whelmed by the richness and complexity of the material.

On the basis of information she provides, the authorwas born and raised a North American but has years ofMoroccan experience and married a Moroccan husbandduring the period of her study. Indeed, the photo of thebride being transported to her new house (a standardOrientalist trope, if ever there was one) is a photo of her-self at her own wedding in Fez. Her ethnographic stance wasthus appropriately marginal–liminal. During her fieldwork,she was a bona fide member of her local society, and, yet,she brought with her both her North American and her aca-demic personae through which to filter her experiences. Noone reading this book will doubt that the author has lived upto her aim of making available nuanced portraits of a varietyof Muslim women, sensitively and multivocally conveyed,in a domain of literature still dominated by stereotypes of“the oppressed Muslim woman.”

By its nature, anthropological understanding bobs un-easily in the waters between the Scylla of universal human-ity and the Charybdis of intercultural difference. Given heraim and her method, Newcomb necessarily tacks closerto the shore of universal humanity. In her rendering, herMoroccan women are endowed with intelligence, insight,humor, and fitful strains toward autonomy, even as they re-main bound by customs and traditions about which theyalso (with a few exceptions) evidence feelings of ambiva-lence. Far from being mindless “bearers” of their culture,they have a degree of consciousness of the social processesthat constrain them. But, of course, they appear thus be-cause of the methods Rachel Newcomb employed to meetthem, talk with them, and to select from her field notes thematerials she included in her narrative.

The book is intended in some measure as a correctiveto lingering traces of Orientalism, and it succeeds well inthis. Because the exposition is so well crafted, and guidesthe reader through the material with a sure hand, it is themost successful example of the “writing against culture”

genre I can think of. It is highly recommended to anyonewho would be interested in listening into the discourses ofreal people living in the midst of a changing society.

By rendering the social and cultural differences be-tween “them” and “us” transparent, Newcomb’s methodprivileges the universal humanity that unites them and us.But because the distinctive configurations of Moroccan in-stitutions and practices do not stand out in relief (this be-ing the characteristic of transparent things), it makes itproblematic for a reader who, having absorbed the para-doxes and ambiguities, comes to seek some sort of analyt-ical grasp over the institutions and systems that reproducethe cultural practices in question. There are possibly thosewho can finish Newcomb’s book and say, “Well, so that’s theway it is” and be content. As for myself, I was looking for-ward to the “conclusion” chapter switching voices to leavethe reader with some takeaway insights and conclusions(in the logical sense) about gender and the reproductionof power relations, and I was a bit disappointed that it wasmainly a reprise of the method. In the end, the mudawwanalargely fizzled out, and even Newcomb has to resort to termslike patriarchy to explicate the larger patterns of change-or-continuity. What others might have seen as the persistenceof (“exotic”) customs, Newcomb recasts as “nostalgia.”

In other words, although the book provides us withmuch a wealth of material to analyze, it does not take usfar down the analytical path. However, one cannot fault abook for being what it does not claim to be. Rachel New-comb’s book is an outstanding example of its genre and awelcome addition to the Moroccan ethnographic literature.

One Homeland or Two? The Nationalization and Trans-nationalization of Mongolia’s Kazakhs. Alexander C.Diener. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press,2009. 405 pp.

EDWARD SNAJDRJohn Jay College, CUNY

Between 1991 and 2001, some 60,000 Kazakhs livingin Mongolia migrated to the Republic of Kazakhstan.This large movement of people—most of whom werefrom the Mongolian Kazakh enclave of Bayan Olgi—followed in the wake of a massive out-migration of eth-nic Russians, Germans, and Ukrainians from newly inde-pendent Kazakhstan in the first few years after the collapseof the Soviet Union. Referred to as Oralmandar (returnees)by their Kazakh hosts, the experience of these migrantshas been mixed. Some willingly took up cattle herding inKazakhstan’s rural oblasts despite their having advancededucation and little experience with animal husbandry.

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Others found themselves unemployed and culturally iso-lated amidst the bustle of urban and largely Russified com-munities such as Almaty. By 2001, some 10,000 Oralmandargave up their quest to live in their “true homeland” and re-turned to Western Mongolia.

In this well-researched study, Alexander Diener bringstogether a wide variety of methods to understand how thevarious facets of Central Asia’s politics, history, and geog-raphy have figured in the migration story of Mongolia’sKazakhs. For example, while the Kazakhstani governmentacknowledges being ill-prepared to absorb these returnees,the state was instrumental in inviting Oralmandar “backhome” during the emergence of ethnonational sentimentat the beginning of the 1990s. At the same time, compet-ing visions of the nation-state in Mongolia offered littlesense of security for many of the country’s Kazakh minori-ties. Diener keenly probes what happens to these com-munities and their conceptualizations of place and spacewhen the supranational Soviet identity vanishes into thepast. Discourses of primordial kin ties to Genghis Khan, eth-nic pluralisms, civic cosmopolitanisms, and neotradition-alisms comprise the colorful tapestry of postsocialist iden-tity politics in both countries. But crucial to understandingthese emerging constructions of identity are the importantfacts of geography, topography, unemployment, natural re-sources, and international geopolitical relationships in anuncertain global system.

To examine these, Diener divides the book into fivesections, each addressing key segments of the migrationsaga including the origins, conflicts, and the compromisesinvolved in the movement of diaspora peoples in the re-gion. In parts 1 and 2, which cover first theory, then his-tory, Diener writes beyond Appadurai’s theoretical conceptof “ethnoscapes,” challenging the notion that “a world ofplaces and boundaries is giving way to a world of flows.” In-stead, deterritorialized people are reterritorialized, config-uring new meanings of homeland and place. Through con-cepts such as “stretching the homeland” and “scale jump-ing,” readers learn about the dynamics of placemaking thatinvolve skipping the state as a vital component of identityconstruction.

While Diener’s thorough reviews of theories on nation-alism and on the historical background of the Central Asiansteppe are outstanding in their own right, they provide theframework within which to understand the more detailedcase studies of nationalization projects in Mongolia andKazakhstan and the experience of Mongolia’s Kazakhs ineach of these domains. Thus, in part 3, Diener providesa fascinating discussion of the different ethnic identitiesin Mongolia—from the Khalka core to the much smallerBuryat and Uriangkhai communities—and their various po-litical, religious, and economic constructions and contem-porary expressions. We learn about the competing eth-

nonational and civic–territorial discourses of belonging inpostsocialist Mongolia and how ethnic diversity either sup-ports or confounds these tendencies. Readers also dis-cover the surprising role that Khalka hegemony—targetedtoward other Mongol ethnie—plays in maintaining anddefining the country’s Kazakh minority. At the same time,Diener describes the manifestations of ethnonationalismin Kazakhstan—a state in which Kazakhs themselves com-prised a minority during the socialist period—and the gov-ernment’s strategies to both promote and temper this ideol-ogy throughout the 1990s. Part 4 introduces the experienceof those who become Kazakhstan’s Oralmandar and tracesthe trajectories and politics of their migration story. For ex-ample, claims by ethnic Russians that Kazakhstan’s policiesof returnee resettlement are really thinly veiled missions topush out the state’s European nontitular peoples are chal-lenged with demographic data showing no such systematiceffort. Equally fascinating is the politics of reterritorializa-tion of Oralmandar who decide to go back to Mongolia.The Mongolian Kazakh community to which they returnposits—with a Geertzian irony—that Mongolia’s Kazakhsare closer to a pure Kazakh ethnie in terms of the preser-vation of traditions and language. Whether this commu-nity can fully participate in the newly emerging democraticMongolia as coequals remains to be seen, but the conarra-tives of placelessness and authenticity generated within thisgeopolitical space nevertheless provide a replacement forthe primordialist discourses of so-called Russified Kazakhs.

In part 5 Diener concludes that although most Oral-mandar have made the move to Kazakhstan permanent,they will likely continue to be “outsiders” lacking full inte-gration into their homeland and, thus, become more “de-territorialized than their kin remaining in Mongolia.” Thecomplicated case of these Kazakh returnees challenges us toconsider homelands and ethnonational identities as highlymalleable and constitutive, particularly in terms of the so-ciospatial dynamics on which identities are established,nurtured, and threatened.

This is a rich study that smartly incorporates demo-graphic, archival, and ethnographic material to understandthe specificities of liminality in the contexts of placemak-ing and place changing. Symbols, subsistence, and socialstructures all fall under the lens of Diener’s inquiry, whichshows us how particular migrations are far more complexthan simply an account of labor flows or political insta-bilities. The book includes over 80 helpful and informa-tive tables and figures as well as a lengthy bibliography ofsources in four languages (English, Kazakh, Mongolian, andRussian). It is a welcome addition to the growing social sci-ence literature that critically examines human movementacross borders, boundaries, and the creation and mainte-nance of community in a world that itself continues to moveunpredictably.

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Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Their Tem-poralities. Elizabeth Emma Ferry and Mandana E. Limbert,eds. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press,2008. 288 pp., photographs, references, index.

MICHAEL SHERIDANMiddlebury College

Its title and cover illustration (of oil derricks) notwith-standing, this book isn’t exactly about resources, and itisn’t exactly about time. The book is about depletion andscarcity, but not in the terms of sustainability science orneo-Malthusian analysis. Instead this volume (the productof a 2005 SAR seminar) argues that the way that a societyimagines and constructs a resource involves a particularsense of time. It may be unfair to describe a book by what itis not, but potential readers should be aware that this bookis more poststructuralist political ecology than environ-mental history. It is about “materialities” (not substances),“temporalities” (not time), “resource-making projects” (notresources), and “national projects” (not politics). This book(or perhaps I should say “this textual project”) will appealto readers seeking examples of scholars who question posi-tivistic assumptions of resources and time. It does not, how-ever, offer a clear framework for doing so, insisting ratherthat analysts appreciate the variable “instabilities” of theseconcepts. Readers who are less concerned with the opposi-tion of human subjects and nonhuman objects should readelsewhere in political ecology.

The book’s introduction sets out the editors’ visionof how resources relate to time: “to define somethingas a resource is to suspend it between a past ‘source’and a future ‘product’” (p. 6). Resources also appear tobe suspended between nature and culture, and althoughLevi-Strauss does not appear in the bibliography and in-dex, his structuralism is evident throughout. Ferry andLimbert do not, however, keep the reader in suspenseabout how they constructed the text. The chapter sequencemoves from tangible resources-as-objects (oil, silver, andwildlife) to more abstract discourses-as-resources (biodi-versity, bureaucratic categories, and nonexistent historicaldocuments). Mandana Limbert’s chapter on oil depletionin Oman discusses how both the Omani government andordinary citizens create and experience doubt and uncer-tainty about how long the oil will last. Instead of a modernist“teleology of progress,” Omanis have experienced an ever-looming (and never quite happening) crisis of oil deple-tion “within 20 years” (for longer than 20 years). ElizabethFerry shows how the ore from a Mexican silver mine is per-ceived as an ahistorical and decontextualized “nonrenew-able natural resource” when it is used for industrial appli-cations but not when it becomes a mineral specimen witha particular provenance in a collection. Silver therefore ac-

quires different temporalities depending on its social con-text. In the fourth chapter, Paul Nadasdy shows the “work-ing misunderstanding” between First Nations people andCanadian bureaucrats about the status of wildlife as “re-newable resources.” Although these groups are bound to-gether by community-based conservation programs, theyhave contradictory concepts about hunting. The bureau-crats discuss wildlife hunting in agricultural terms based on“cyclical time” (as crops being harvested on an annual ba-sis), while Yukon First Nations people experience “circulartime” through rituals that make each kill a reenactment ofthe same mythic hunt. Standard scientific wildlife manage-ment practices, such as catch-and-release fishing, are em-bedded in “homogeneous empty bureaucratic space-time”and, therefore, disrespectful to the animals from a First Na-tions perspective.

The subsequent chapters shift away from objects todiscourses. Celia Lowe’s chapter on biodiversity in Indone-sia discusses how supposedly value-free biological databecomes nationalized. Scientific data is therefore embed-ded either in the “temporality of evolutionary process” orthe “specificity of Indonesian history” (p. 112). A chap-ter on the history of exploration in southwestern Chinacompares colonial science with the geographic ritual cos-mology of the Naxi people. Erik Mueggler argues that theepistemological divisions between nature and society, andsubject and object, were “deformed” in the encounter be-tween rhododendron-crazed British scientists and theirNaxi research assistants who patiently collected botanicalresources. A chapter based on student work at the Univer-sity of Virginia describes how minority students becomeresources for American universities’ promotion of diver-sity. Courtney Childs, Huong Nguyen, and Richard Handlerpresent a Marxian analysis of institutional efforts to pro-mote racial diversity and argue that diversity policies basedon having “clear communication” about the “personal ex-periences” of racism tend to disguise and mystify politi-cal and economic inequalities instead of solving them. PaulEiss’s chapter on the spatial and social unit of “el pueblo”in the Yucatan reviews the history of land tenure and so-cial categories in rural Mexico since the Spanish conquest.He shows that notions of community identity emerge fromnarratives of dispossession and loss, so the lack of land,trees, and gold is itself a resource for social construction.In the final chapter, on the lack of historical documentsin Indonesia, Karen Strassler addresses Indonesian anxi-eties and hopes that key archival records could become re-sources for the production of a new, post-Suharto politicalculture. Saying that “documents are good to think” (p. 217),she describes Indonesian controversies about determiningthe “real” history of the postcolonial state, which thereforedemonstrates the “instability of history.”

I came away from the book with a sense of skepticismand doubt rather than an illuminating sense of suspension

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and instability. Many of these authors balance generaltheoretical assertions atop thin ethnographic foundations,which in turn are often weakly buttressed by a scarcity ofscholarly resources (data). Limbert shows how offhand re-marks by three Omanis constitute commentaries on the in-stability of modernity. Ferry writes more about the sym-bolic contrast of “corporeal” mines and “corporate” mineralcollections than the miners and collectors. Lowe discusseshow the recent discoveries of Homo flores and a coelacanthshow that science is not value-free in Indonesia, but thisstruck me as an example of straw man demolition with-out enough straw. Mueggler supports his argument by sug-gesting what he thinks the botanists’ Naxi assistants mighthave thought about collecting rhododendrons in the early20th century. Strassler’s chapter is based primarily on jour-nalism and its readers, so the analysis both describes andpractices the clipping of newspaper articles to produce apastiche of worries about the lack of evidence in Indone-sian historiography. Overall, I found that much of this bookfollows a pattern of using minute ethnographic details tolaunch general theoretical riffs on time and the distinctionsof nature–society and subject–object. The links between ev-idence and assertion are as unstable as the subjects be-ing riffed on, making me wonder if this is “ethnogriffing”rather than ethnography. This book will interest scholars ofpoststructural political ecology, but it is unlikely to attract amainstream readership.

Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadel-phia Music Scene. Tammy L. Anderson. Philadelphia: Tem-ple University Press, 2009. 231 pp.

AMY C. WILKINSUniversity of Colorado, Boulder

Most academic readers probably haven’t been to a ravebut have heard the hype. Raves are castigated—or occa-sionally celebrated, depending on one’s perspective—asspaces in which ecstasy-popping young people dance allnight to electronic dance music (EDM), sucking on lol-lipops and pacifiers. But there is more to raves than this.For Tammy Anderson, the music and community—an ethosknown as PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect)—found in tra-ditional raves are emotionally transformative. In Rave Cul-ture, Anderson takes the reader on a romp through thePhiladelphia rave scene, with brief stops at a range of ravevenues as well as detours to London and Ibiza, Spain. Thebreadth of Anderson’s ethnography provides outsiders witha panoramic view of rave culture, and conveys its dynamismand diversity. At times, this breadth comes at the cost ofgreater intimacy. I would have liked to know more about (at

least some of) the many people and places we encounter inthe book. I was also curious about how Anderson chose thevoices she represents in the text. The majority of rave partic-ipants are white, but many of the texts’ informants are not.

Anderson’s goal is to explain why and how thePhiladelphia rave scene has changed, and to speculateabout subcultural change more broadly. She begins thisproject by showing us that not all raves are the same. Theunderground, informal, warehouse parties that many of usimagine when we think of raves have been transformed intoa diffuse group of more commercialized, organized eventsin formal clubbing venues. What these parties have in com-mon is their use of EDM, but even this broad musical cate-gory splits into a number of genres and has been changed,she shows, by commercial interests that encourage differ-ent kinds of musical production and consumption. For ex-ample, formats on popular radio stations have created ademand for shorter pieces, supplanting a previous empha-sis on long, complicated pieces. This change, Anderson ex-plains, is not just about length but also about the music’semotional impact and the DJ’s role.

In chapters 2 and 3, Anderson divides the various raveparties and their participants into typologies, pinning themto a continuum between “authenticity” and “commercial-ism.” Take for example, the “weekly,” which is a party thatrecurs, as the name implies, every week. Such parties fallin the middle of Anderson’s continuum, boasting some ofthe qualities of authentic raves, such as a “vibe” of “intimatesolidarity,” but few of the organizational features. Like other(non-EDM) club nights, weeklies shut down at 2 a.m., ratherthan going all night, participants are unlikely to wear ravefashions, but instead don a more casual, alternative style,and so forth. Scene participants also vary in their adher-ence to “authentic” rave culture; for example, a number ofpeople—Anderson calls them “other party people”—attendevents for the party but without a commitment to either themusic or the values of the rave scene.

Anderson contends that the rave scene has trans-formed rather than declined (although throughout one getsthe sense that she really thinks it has declined). Movingbeyond single-pronged causal arguments, she argues thatchanges in the scene emerge from interactions between arange of factors, including generational differences, stateintervention (via, primarily, the 2003 Rave Act), scene frag-mentation, commercialization, and cultural elements of thescene itself. These elements work together to encourageand discourage particular patterns of participation and tosupport some styles of parties to the exclusion of others. Iwas particularly interested in her discussion of the effect ofgenerational differences on scene participation. Part of theproblem in sustaining the scene is that the long hours andheavy drug use interfere with other adult obligations, suchas work and family. Participants thus “age out.” At the same

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time, the scene has not successfully recruited a new gener-ation of participants; Anderson attributes this both to thecultural ascendance of hip-hop and to a moral panic aboutdrug use associated with the rave scene. Accounts of thescene’s failure to renew itself through a new generation ofparticipants, while convincing, come largely from the spec-ulations of older participants and not from the younger gen-eration themselves.

Anderson further tests her theory of cultural change bytaking us to the rave scenes in London and Ibiza, Spain.In contrast to Philadelphia, raves are thriving in both Eu-ropean cities. She attributes these distinct patterns to bothstructural and cultural differences. For example, she findsthat drug use is not only less culturally stigmatized in Lon-don and Spain but is also treated as a public health ratherthan a criminal problem. These differences reduce the so-cial, personal, and health costs of drug use and make it eas-ier for older adults to sustain participation.

Anderson notes that what it means to be “authentic” isdetermined, in large part, by who you ask, but she nonethe-less uses the concept of “authenticity” as a way to orga-nize the book’s material. Authentic raves are characterizedby, among other things, an informal, underground organi-zation, DJs who spin a range of musical genres and inter-act with the crowds, lots of dancing, illegal drugs, waterconsumption rather than alcohol, and, most importantly,to Anderson, “PLUR.” For Anderson and other rave “loyal-ists,” the PLUR ethos is central to the appeal of “authen-tic” rave culture. It is clear that she laments the diffusion ofPLUR in emerging scene segmentation and corporatism. Iam more skeptical about claims to PLUR than she is, per-haps because I have not experienced the kinds of connec-tion and emotional transformation that she describes. Inmy own research on Goths, however, I found that partici-pants boasted about a similar ethos but that these descrip-tions often contradicted observed race and gender dynam-ics within the scene (see Wilkins 2004, 2008).

Anderson’s inclusion of her own experiences in the textleads her to describe the book as an autoethnography, but Ithink this claim is misleading. Anderson was certainly a par-ticipant, as well as an observer, in the rave scene she chron-icles, but Rave Culture is not about Anderson. Rave Cultureshould be of interest to scholars and students interested inyouth cultures and broader issues of cultural change.

References cited

Wilkins, Amy C.2004 So Full of Myself as a Chick: Sexual Strategies and Gen-

der Egalitarianism in a Goth Subculture. Gender and Society18(3):328–349.

2008 Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex,Style, and Status. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and theRescue Industry. Laura Marıa Agustın. London: Zed, 2007.248 pp.

LORRAINE NENCELVU University Amsterdam

Laura Agustın’s book is an excellent resource for students,researchers, and NGO workers who have ventured into thedomain of working or researching “human trafficking.” Bysimplifying her language and omitting internal text refer-ences, the author aims to make this book accessible for ex-perts, academics, and extension workers. Academically, itsmerits can be sung for the way she managed to debunk ex-isting myths about migration and sex work; identifying theproblems, gaps, and silences in contemporary theories andby doing so, unclosing the fuzzy nature of migration for sexwork in its diversity. Agustın argues and illustrates that sexwork is one of the different but limited alternatives availablefor illegal migrants in Europe. She analyzes sex work withinthe group of service activities such as domestic help andpersonal care—showing that all these activities share simi-larities in regard to their exploitive and insecure nature. Shesustains that sex work must be analyzed within the broaderframe of migration theory to understand its complexity.This is one of the objectives of the book. Despite the sim-ilarities shared by these different activities, the multitudeof studies published on migration and “human trafficking”have isolated sex work from other migration options con-structing a separate category of victims that lack agency andautonomy. Agustın wants to understand how and why thisoccurs. The search for the answer to these questions guidesher throughout the book. Finally, a personal motivation ledher to this study, namely, being a sex work researcher andactivist and previously working in NGOs working with sexworkers and migrants, she wants to understand why the lifeof people who sell sex has not improved, in spite of organi-zations’ efforts and the many studies dedicated to this goal.

The book opens with a short introduction presentingvarious vignettes that immediately contrasts sensationalistmedia representations of migrant sex workers with the ac-tual motives for women choosing to migrate. These includeeconomic motivations but places them side by side with mi-grants desires for other things such as adventure and travel.From that moment on, the reader becomes aware that mi-grant women’s motivations and experiences are diverse andcannot be represented homogenously. The second chapterinitiates the development of Agustın’s theoretical argument.She defines a migrant as a traveler sharing a common pro-cess rather than identity with others. The chapter examinesdefinitions such as labor migration and “feminization of mi-gration,” to show, for example, that female migration is not

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a new phenomenon, criticizing studies that conceptualizethe “feminization of migration” as a recent development. Itzooms in on migrant sex workers and explains how “traf-ficking discourses” and the “rescue industry” define mi-grant sex workers as (trafficked) victims because of the waythey leave their home countries and arrive to Europe, that is,through debt bonding. The chapter counteracts these theo-ries of “trafficking” and highlights women’s agency. Usingempirical quotes, a picture is painted that portrays migrantwomen generally to be aware of the consequences of debtbonding. A distinction is made between being aware of theconsequences of debt bonding and finding oneself on arriv-ing in Europe in exploitative and violent work conditions—this distinction is generally not recognized in the traffick-ing literature. In the third chapter, she follows the sameroad of analysis criticizing the use of concepts such as in-formal sector, the types of work that migrants do, and theposition of sex work therein. She successfully analyzes sexwork as a supply and demand relationship. Sex workers aredepicted as individuals consciously offering services. Thequotes used to illustrate clients’ motivations reveal that farfrom being deviant, clients perceive buying sex as a demandfor a service.

Chapters 4 and 6 should be read together. By trac-ing in chapter 4 the historical development of “the rise ofthe social” in the 19th century, Agustın attempts to un-derstand how the development of the philanthropic dis-course that targeted the poor and particularly prostitutes inneed of help, is reflected in contemporary discourses andinitiatives of the “rescue industry.” The chapter illustratesthat it was in this period that the “prostitute” as a stigma-tized, victimized, morally weak identity was constructed.Chapter 6, based almost entirely on ethnographic fieldwork,dives into the world of governmental and nongovernmen-tal organizations’ activities and documents and shows thateven projects that distance themselves from antiquated la-bels such as the “prostitute,” replacing them with moreneutral terms like sex work, do not escape from the 19th-century notions of prostitution and help.

Critical analyses of the “rescue industry” are few andhard to find. Agustın should be applauded for her original-ity and her willingness to put herself in a vulnerable po-sition as researcher and activist. Still it is here, where cer-tain weaknesses can be found. While the link between the19th-century socially invented object “the prostitute” andthe contemporary category of the prostitute or sex worker isanalytically strong, the same does not hold true in relationto the development of 19th-century philanthropy and itsconnection to the contemporary “rescue industry.” Agustınexpects the reader to accept this assertion, but the analysiswould benefit by illustrating this link more explicitly. Per-haps this can be partially attributed to the fact that in chap-ter 6 the author loses her balance between herself as a re-

searcher and as an activist. Agustın’s report of her researchfindings expresses the irritation and annoyance she felt inthe field while accompanying outreach workers. Althoughshe rightfully concludes the chapter expressing the needfor help organizations to be reflexive about their work, thisconclusion is also applicable to the author. The researcher’slack of reflexivity concerning her own reactions and posi-tion makes her theoretical claim concerning the relation-ship between 19th-century philanthropy and the contem-porary situation less convincing. Nonetheless, after read-ing this book the reader will not be able to think, hear, ortalk about migrant sex work and trafficking the same wayagain.

Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethno-graphic Fieldwork. Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 203 pp.

KIRSTEN SCHEIDAmerican University of Beirut

The document is seven paragraphs long; the first five andthe final paragraph discuss a body of theories and relatedliterature. Paragraph number six, containing a mere tenthof the total word count, is the sole place for discussion ofresearch method. The document is Allaine Cerwonka’s Ful-bright application for her doctoral research into Australiannationalism. In its format the document mirrors the placegiven to methodology in the majority of ethnographies andgraduate training programs alike. It is included in Improvis-ing Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Field-work, coauthored by Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki, but thelarger volume physically inverts the theory to method ra-tio, and in upsetting the dominance and precedence oftheory, makes a case for reconceptualizing the relation-ship between the “how” and the “why” of ethnographicknowledge.

An established scientific model for anthropology hasassumed that theoretical perspectives should outline fieldmethods and the definition of data in advance. Yet, his-torically, according to Joan Vincent (1990), innovations inanthropological theory have generally followed from inno-vations in fieldwork rather than the opposite. Further, a re-spected mechanism for critiquing anthropological claimsis to reveal the moments in full-fledged ethnographies inwhich theory has overtaken data and produced totalizingaccounts. Meanwhile, graduate students are continually as-tonished, and rightly disturbed, by how little their theory-heavy training prepares them for working in the field. Manya manual has been created to get the cart back behindthe horse and help students navigate from well-justified

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proposals to successful, publication-rich destinations. Thatis not the aim of Improvising Theory. Neither an apology forthe messiness of fieldwork, nor a forewarned-is-forearmedaccount, the book is a concrete, convincing call for enrich-ing cultural theory by developing precisely those aspects offieldwork most frequently treated as problematic, such asthe fluidity of the fieldwork, the impinging character of non-research relationships, and, most of all, the researcher’s af-fective, often uncooperative self.

The bulk of Improvising Theory consists of a series of e-mail exchanges between Cerwonka and Malkki, extendingover nine months of fieldwork. Chattily, the exchange de-tails embarrassing nocturnal pub rounds, necessary billiardskills, awkward explanations of the research project, hostil-ity in a handful of informants, recurrent stomach cramps,the agony of awaiting official permission, a grumpy part-ner, a negligent landlord, inconvenient schedules, an in-auspicious nickname, and all manner of gritty personalexperiences, all the way to the anxiety of carrying other peo-ple’s secrets and the anguish of knowing that one’s genuinecare is accompanied by intellectual curiosity. Further, it isenhanced by beautiful prose, such as when Cerwonka de-scribes how:

the pain and experiences of these people are catchingmy clothes like burrs might during a walk through thewoods. . . . But today I am tired and raw. I am flusteredand frustrated by the pieces of lives I feel. I want to liedown, but when I do, all the words and fragments ofexperiences I have gathered up from people in my fieldsites are there. [p. 99]

Improvising Theory is foremost an excursus on anthro-pological frames of thinking, and it is among the most read-able discussions of theory this reader has encountered. In-deed, it often reads like a crime novel or a confession, withstrong, sympathetic characters and gripping dilemmas ex-pressed in conversational language, making it eminentlyaccessible to students of all levels. The importance of thismedium, however, is in how it serves as a means to the goal,which is not to humanize abstract knowledge-productionor demystify ethnography—in fact, a semimystical qual-ity remains to the extent that the reader realizes no recipefor success is on offer. Rather, in recreating the centralityof surprise encounters with the undisciplined “imponder-abilia of everyday life” the text reveals what models of cul-tural practice gain when conceived of as eclectic and flexi-ble processes of simultaneous data interpretation and datacapture. Transcending the limitations of the Malinowskianfield diary, Improvising Theory intertwines Cerwonka’s ex-periences with Malkki’s sometimes minute-by-minute ad-vice and insight, grounded in her own fieldwork experienceas much as in her daily life on the other side of the globe,

as well as in a set of books, films, and exchanges with otherpeople. Thus, fieldwork is vividly set within a vast, irrepro-ducible network of contingencies that generate the possibil-ity of fieldwork and its understanding simultaneously andunceasingly.

The selection Cerwonka makes of field sites is a casein point. Whereas her funding application implies thefield sites were known in advance, the e-mails show thatCerwonka remained uncertain about her sites until sevenmonths into her fieldwork, and that her continued ques-tioning of her choices shaped her understanding of nationalidentity as practice rather than an entity. At first, Cerwonkathought to contact ethnic clubs she found listed in a phonebook, but she was dissuaded by the bluntness of cold-calling. Several months later, Cerwonka responded to therecurrent themes of landscape, urban development, and in-digeneity by joining a gardening club. She also began in-terviewing policemen, who seemed to make a strong socialcontrast with the genteel gardeners. Yet a few weeks on, shenearly canceled the cops, uncertain that talking to such mo-bile people would benefit her research and discouraged byher discomfort talking to them. The contrast in her personalexperience of comfort with the gardeners and discomfortwith the cops prompted her to question her own social cat-egories, and from here she started to make stronger con-nections between the two groups as practices of relatingland to identity, seeing their parallel movements throughneighborhoods and the importance of their corporal, sen-sual connections to spaces of inhabitation. For the e-mailwriting Cerwonka, these insights are moments of “serendip-ity” (pp. 76, 122–123), but their “real-time” recording in thee-mail exchange demonstrates clearly they are the result ofCerwonka’s methodological suppleness that enabled her toattend, physically and intellectually, to unexpected patternsof living.

While the text tells little about Cerwonka’s eventualanalysis, Improvising Theory clearly demonstrates thatknowledge is not a set of prepackaged findings like a list ofclubs in a phone book. Rather, knowledge is “improvised”:it results temporarily from an interaction of affect, ethics,and empirical practices and contingencies that is neitherwholly self-generated nor teleologically justified. The impli-cations of this heuristic approach for fieldwork are tremen-dous, as it must become a process of heightening one’s“flexibility to question and reformulate ways of understand-ing the world” (p. 23) rather than of narrowing understand-ing of a culture down to a single, most representative, rightway. By definition, such fieldwork cannot be taught by ex-ample anymore than by admonition. However, Improvis-ing Theory is saturated with practical and innovative sug-gestions toward its realization. The articulation of the re-lationship between theory and method is enriched by theinterdisciplinary nature of the conversation, whereby the

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cultural anthropologist professor finds herself compelled toexplain the “weirdness” (p. 95) of her discipline’s sensibil-ity to the political scientist graduate student. The conjoint,questioning character of the text makes it highly relevantfor other disciplines that engage ethnographic methods, aswell as for courses on anthropological theory, ethics, andmethods.

Reference cited

Vincent, Joan1990 Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics.Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, eds. Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2008. 376 pp.

KRISTIN DOWELLUniversity of Oklahoma

For visual anthropologists and scholars of indigenous me-dia, the new collected volume Global Indigenous Mediaoffers a long-awaited text containing insightful and sophis-ticated analysis by indigenous media producers and in-terdisciplinary scholars of indigenous media with criticalattention to the culturally specific ways in which indigenousmedia are deeply entangled in indigenous politics, activism,aesthetic forms, and projects of identity formation. Indige-nous media defined by the editors in the introduction as“forms of media conceptualized, produced and/or createdby Indigenous peoples across the globe” (p. 2) is examinedas a form of expressive culture rooted in local indigenouscommunities while also increasingly generating a large im-pact in national and global media industries. This impres-sive volume covers a wide range of genres of indigenous me-dia from media produced in video collectives (chs. 3, 8) tocommunity-based radio (chs. 6, 7), to animations designedto increase Native language learning (ch. 4), to cinema (ch.2), and to television (ch. 12). The book provides wide cov-erage of the geographic scope of indigenous from the Inuitvideo collective Arnait in Nunvut (ch. 3) to activist mediain Chiapas (ch. 8), and Maori cinema (ch. 2) to Sami media(ch. 10). What is evident from these chapters is that indige-nous media is an incredibly vibrant vehicle for indigenouscultural engagement and political articulation.

Global Indigenous Media addresses the struggles facingindigenous media producers as they navigate the nationalpolitics of the settler states encompassing them and thepolicies of national organizations that often provide fund-ing, training, and distribution for their media. The schol-

ars in this volume do not shy away from addressing thecomplex ways in which indigenous media projects are en-meshed in the larger politics of defining and expressing in-digeneity and highlight the ways in which media serve asa political tool for expressing indigenous sovereignty in re-sponse to settler state politics. Divided into four sectionsanalyzing aesthetics and style, activism and advocacy, cul-tural identity, and new digital technologies, the authors inthis volume cover an array of issues raised in the produc-tion and circulation of indigenous media. How are indige-nous media rooted in the local tribal traditions and cul-tural aesthetics? How is media technology appropriated inways that speak to the needs of local indigenous communi-ties? What possibilities do media open up for the ongoingefforts of indigenous communities to maintain, document,and revitalize cultural traditions? How do indigenous film-makers navigate the bureaucratic regimes of governmentalorganizations that fund indigenous media while maintain-ing cultural autonomy in the production process? Who isthe audience for indigenous media and in what arenas doesit circulate? How do changing digital technologies alter orimpact the kinds of work produced by indigenous mediamakers?

These questions are deftly answered by the authors inthis volume who pay close attention to the national andglobal ways in which these media circulate, while also pro-viding an ethnographically grounded attention to the cul-tural and local specificities of this media. Indigenous mediascholarship—largely pioneered by Faye Ginsburg, whoseconcluding chapter in the volume examines the critical en-gagement of indigenous media makers in the debates sur-rounding the “digital divide”—is an interdisciplinary fielddrawing from visual anthropology, communication stud-ies, film and cultural studies, and Native American and In-digenous studies, and these diverse fields are representedamong the scholars included in this volume. One of the sig-nificant contributions of this volume is the consolidation ofthis interdisciplinary scholarship into a single text that isan invaluable resource for scholars and teachers in any ofthese disciplines. This volume will be particularly useful forvisual anthropologists who seek to include work on indige-nous media into their courses.

A challenge to those of us who study indigenous me-dia is that this scholarship is often dispersed, sometimestaking voice in more ephemeral places such as film festi-val catalogs and often housed in oral histories or memo-ries of key figures and media makers in this movement. Thisvolume presents key works on indigenous media and pro-vides crucial information regarding the rich and in-depthhistory of the emergence of indigenous media. For exam-ple, Amalia Cordova and Juan Francisco Salazar’s chap-ter on indigenous video in Latin America contains a vividdescription of the genealogy and history of governmentalorganizations, NGOs, and community-based organizations

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that have impacted the development of indigenous mediainitiatives and video collectives throughout Latin America,while emphasizing the challenges facing indigenous mediamakers in Latin America and providing a significant cross-cultural comparison to indigenous media projects in theUnited States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Like-wise, Kathleen Buddle’s chapter tackles the gendered pol-itics within Aboriginal community organizations as urbanAboriginal women “feminize public political space” (p. 130)on the airwaves through their activist radio programmingillustrating that Aboriginal media practices are not a sin-gular entity, but inflected with internal cultural as wellas gender politics. This chapter also illuminates the im-portance of grassroots media organizations in building asense of identity and community among urban Aboriginalwomen.

While it is impossible in the space here to highlight allof the scholars featured in the volume, each chapter in itsown way addresses the aim of the overall volume to high-light the goals of indigenous media makers and cultural ac-tivists who are “fashioning new technologies to articulateand negotiate the meaning of Indigeneity in the twenty-first century” (p. 23). One small critique of the volume isthat while film festivals are mentioned briefly in a few chap-ters, I would like to have seen a chapter devoted exclusivelyto an ethnographic analysis of the importance of the ever-growing international indigenous film festival circuit and itsimpact on building and strengthening global networks be-tween indigenous media makers. Venues such as the Sun-dance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Program,the ImagineNative Film and Media Festival in Toronto, theNational Museum of the American Indian’s Native Ameri-can Film and Video Festival, and the Message Sticks Festivalin Sydney are all vibrant and active sites where interna-tional indigenous media is showcased and connections arenurtured between indigenous media makers from aroundthe world. However, this volume is a brilliant explorationof the complexities of indigenous media around the worldthat will undoubtedly become a seminal work in visualanthropology. I highly recommend it for anthropologistsinterested in questions of the politics and poetics of in-digeneity, indigenous engagements with the national andglobal politics of settler states, questions of indigenous cit-izenship and sovereignty, as well as indigenous aestheticsand cultural traditions taking shape in new digital tech-nologies. Indigenous media makers have produced remark-able works from critically acclaimed art house cinema tocommunity-based documentation of local languages andoral histories. The scholarship represented in Global Indige-nous Media makes it evident that indigenous media mak-ers articulate sovereignty through visual and cultural formsby defining and expressing indigeneity on their own termsand supporting indigenous cultural autonomy on and offscreen.

Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenmentin the Himalayas. Kim Gutschow. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004. 360 pp.

SARA SHNEIDERMANSt. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge

Nuns in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition are subordinate totheir male counterparts—from the Dalai Lama down tothe youngest monastic initiate—because monks maintaina self-replicating upper hand in the gendered economy ofmerit that undergirds Buddhist life in the Himalayas. So ar-gues Kim Gutschow in this important contribution to theanthropology of Buddhism, which challenges the domi-nance of such gender-determined structures of inequalityby documenting them in vivid ethnographic detail.

Gutschow’s description of the lives of Buddhist nunsin Zangskar, a mountainous region of India’s Jammu andKashmir state, reads as a matter-of-fact account of thematerial realities that lead to women’s socioeconomicexclusion from the top levels of Buddhist institutional lifein practice rather than as an abstract theological critiqueof Buddhism’s ambivalence toward gender. This approachdoes much to “parse a middle way” (p. 220) through the po-larized terrain of extant scholarship on Buddhist women,much of which falls into one of two camps: “those who seekto deconstruct Buddhism for its innate sexism and thosewho search to recuperate its most usable aspect” (p. 220).Being a Buddhist Nun adds substantively to our ethno-graphic knowledge of gender, economics, and kinship in theHimalayas and South Asia, as well as to theoretical debatesover the relationships between theological ideals and insti-tutional practice, ritual and social power, and economic andsymbolic capital.

Despite a long-standing scholarly and popular interestin the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns, which has generatedseveral articles and memoirs (i.e., Anna Grimshaw’s 1994Servants of the Buddha)—not to mention films, websites,and nonprofit projects—this is the first full-length ethnog-raphy to at once engage with Himalayan nuns’ experiencesin depth and situate them within a broader social field thatextends beyond the nunnery walls. Hanna Havnevik’s 1989monograph focuses on the structure of a nunnery withina South Indian Tibetan refugee community but does notexplore the questions of economic and familial relation-ality with the surrounding monastic and lay communitiesthat comprise Gutschow’s primary focus. For this reasonalone, Gutschow’s book will quickly become required read-ing for students of the anthropology of Buddhism and theHimalayas, as well as for students of comparative religionwho seek to understand the social dynamics that shapeBuddhist lives, both male and female.

Two initial chapters locate Gutschow’s work withinthe broader fields of Buddhist and South Asian Studies,

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respectively. The latter contains valuable ruminations onthe pernicious role of caste within Buddhist communitiesthat are often wrongly presumed to be egalitarian. It also ar-gues for the value of engaging with individual Himalayancommunities on their own historical and political terms,rather than collapsing them into the overused and under-specified rubric of “Tibetan societies.”

Chapters 3 and 4 on “The Buddhist Economy of Merit”and “The Buddhist Traffic in Women” contain the heartof Gutschow’s argument, and display her ethnographicand analytical skill at its best. She demonstrates how theBuddhist ideology of merit—which in theory does not dis-criminate between rich and poor because the spiritual valueof generosity is supposedly calibrated to relative ratherthan absolute means—in practice leads to the consolida-tion of wealth among a privileged few, whom in the caseof Zangskar are always men. Because monks are perceivedas occupying higher-status positions than nuns (becauseof a complex set of historical, social, and theological con-ditions), laypeople perceive the former as more productivefields of merit and, therefore, concentrate ever greater eco-nomic and ritual power in the hands of the already higheststatus men.

This concentration of wealth leads, in turn, to a moreor less capitalist accumulation of land, cash, and ritual re-sources, which require an obedient working class to main-tain and reproduce. Enter the nuns, who, because of an em-bodied sense of gendered subservience that is reinforced bykinship practices in which women are objects of exchange,end up serving primarily as minimally educated, proletar-ian “support staff” that enable the monks’ bourgeois asser-tions of ritual power to proceed. In what might be the mostdifficult part of the argument for committed Buddhists toswallow, Gutschow argues that monks collude with laymenas full participants in the “traffic of women” through whichfemale labor is expropriated from the natal home, with theonly difference between wives and nuns being that the for-mer serve their in-laws while the latter serve the monasticinstitution.

This argument deemphasizes the ostensibly celibateaspect of nuns’ lives, which Gutschow later suggests isone of the conditions that (when actually maintained) mayenable nuns to transform their subservient position intoone of relative freedom and education when broader so-cial conditions allow. The final two chapters show how sub-stantial recent funding from international sources, coupledwith increased attention from the Indian state and visi-ble public statements from the Dalai Lama about the needto improve nuns’ status, have led to positive changes inboth the material realities of Zangskari nuns’ lives, andtheir self-perception as effective ritual agents. However,this transformation is far from complete, and Gutschowis explicit in her support of the ongoing agenda of nuns’empowerment.

This otherwise admirable engagement poses one ques-tion that remains unresolved. Gutschow returns repeatedlyto the concept of misrecognition, arguing, for example,that “the lay donors and monastics caught up in the econ-omy of merit systematically misrecognize this concentra-tion of wealth” (p. 17), while “the relations between nunsand monks appear to reflect a blatant misrecognition ofmonastic purity and power” (p. 159). If all this is indeedthe case, one wonders why Gutschow is so keen to sup-port women within an institutional structure that relies ona continued misrecognition of their own agency for its veryperpetuation. In other words, Gutschow seems to acceptthat there is something inherently meritorious about par-ticipation in Buddhist practices—which simply require arebalancing of power to rectify the partial misrecognitionsdescribed above—rather than viewing the entire complexof Buddhist belief as a large-scale misrecognition that maypresent much more intractable obstacles to the socioeco-nomic advancement of the women whose lives she is soclearly committed to enhancing.

References cited

Grimshaw, Anna1994 Servants of the Buddha: Winter in a Himalayan Convent.

Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press.Havnevik, Hanna

1989 Tibetan Buddhist Nuns. Oslo: Norwegian University Press.

So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Fail-ure in Urban Schools. Charles M. Payne. Cambridge, MA:Harvard Education Press, 2008. 300 pp.

MICAH GILMERUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Part memoire, part social scientific study, So Much Re-form, So Little Change draws on personal experience,quantitative crunches, and rich qualitative contributionsto demonstrate the ways the everydayness of strugglingschools undermines potential for change. Deftly makinguse of Weberian theories of bureaucracy and his own un-derstandings of interpersonal breakdown, Charles Paynedemonstrates the way change is undermined by incompre-hensible organizational infrastructure and the “sheer in-ability of adults to cooperate with one another” (p. 6). Like-wise, he effectively and at times affectively demonstratesthe futility of the way educational reform is generally ap-proached by those across the political spectrum. Accord-ing to Payne, “both liberals and conservatives have spenta lot of time pursuing questions of limited utility . . . What’sthe right program for these schools? What’s the right way toteach? What’s the information we need to get to teachers?”

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(p. 6). These questions, issues Payne’s prior research has attimes been focused on, he now asserts “are not such im-portant questions when there isn’t much likelihood of beingable to implement any of them well” (p. 6).

Three decades of experience in ultimately unsuccessfuleducational reform have made him skeptical of the magicbullet programs education departments crank out like partyflyers. In a litany that emphasizes both the flurry of educa-tional activity and its limited returns, Payne runs down justa few of the recent efforts, from the “standards-based re-form movement and the restructuring movement that pre-ceded it” to

policies calling for the end of social promotion; thetransfer of authority from traditional school boardsto mayors; the complete or partial reconstitutions offailing schools; state takeovers of failing districts; the$500 million investment of the Annenberg Foundationin improving schools; the National Science Founda-tion’s attempt to reshape science and math educationin the cities; the small schools movement, freshmanacademies, and other forms of personalization of theeducational experience; calls for much more intensiveforms of professional development and instructionalsupport, including instructional coaching . . . dozens ofcomprehensive school reform projects. [p. 3]

While many of these efforts have been at least partiallysuccessful, Payne asserts they have failed to fundamentallytransform the educational system because of the institu-tional and even interpersonal barriers he describes in de-tail. The impact of the aggregate of these factors are systemsthat are severely handicapped. The kind of systems whoseEeyoric tendencies “makes it likely they will fail to recognizegood fortune even when it is beating them about the ears”(p. 61). Yet, while Payne goes as far as to literally comparethese systems to “depressed individuals,” an in-depth anal-ysis of the emotional impact of teaching and educationalleadership appears to be beyond the scope of his project.While he talks about the messy, at times mean-spirited ac-tions of teachers and administrators, he doesn’t spend verymuch time talking about the complex of emotions that leadto such destructive behavior other than to describe them asthe product of dysfunction.

One poignant story in particular highlights bothPayne’s profound respect for the emotional impact ofteaching, and his propensity to turn from raw emotionto thoughts, beliefs, and other less affective notions morecommonly explored in social scientific literature. He re-counts a post-Katrina story in which civil rights hero JeromeSmith commented on whether the plan to make NewOrleans a charter-school bonanza would work. “Dependson the hearts of people running it,” Smith said. While Paynerightly notes that this comment “cut through to a moreprofound way of thinking,” his paraphrasing of the mo-

ment in a small way reintellectualizes the emotional impor-tance, the heartwork Smith described. “The Big Magic isn’tin the charters themselves,” Payne asserts, “so much is inthe thinking and understanding of the people who imple-ment them, in the approach they take, in the values theyhold dear” (p. 189).

This subtle but significant shift from “hearts” to “think-ing and understanding” is all the more significant in light ofPayne’s own warning earlier in the text. “We have to be care-ful about all reforms that are essentially cognitive,” Payneargues, “reforms which take the form of saying that we justneed to get some particular information into the heads ofpeople in schools, and that will make a fundamental differ-ence. It is an ahistorical, apolitical way of understanding theworld” (p. 63).

While Payne at times reverts to the intellectual ter-rain that a social scientist finds most comfortable, his effortis a refreshing attempt to bridge the disconnect betweenthe idea-driven world of educational reform and the affect-driven world of educational practice. As such, So Much Re-form . . . provides a seminal account that should be not justrecommended but also required reading for anyone inter-ested in education and change. Just as effective educationalreform demands that we not create a fetish for the new, thesexy, and the cerebral, it also compels a reexamination ofsome of the oldest, most ordinary ways of engaging youth.After all, change is not about flashing lights, big speeches,or new ideas. It’s about building communities of support,places that nurture good people to do the heartwork oftransforming our world.

“Brothers” or Others? Propriety and Gender for Mus-lim Arab Sudanese in Egypt. Anita H. Fabos. New York:Berghahn, 2007. 160 pp.

AMAL HASSAN FADLALLAUniversity of Michigan

In “Brothers” or Others? Anita Fabos gives a fresh lookinto the predicament of displacement that Muslim ArabSudanese exiles face in Egypt. Sudanese and Egyptian re-lations have long been shaped by colonial and postcolonialpolitical realities. Despite the tensions created by colonialhistories, sentiment and rhetoric of brotherhood during thedecolonization and nationalization periods have offeredpossibilities of unity. Fabos takes these relations back intime to show how colonial and postcolonial sociopoliticalties have influenced Sudanese migration to Egypt. Just asthe “brotherly” sentiment among the people of the NileValley granted Sudanese migrants semicitizenship rights inthe past, recent political tensions between the two nation-states have rendered Sudanese “others” who live “outsidestate citizenship expectations.”

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The main theme of the book focuses on Fabos’s iden-tification of adab, or propriety, a gendered “marker ofmoral personhood” that constitutes modesty, hospitality,and other idioms as a practical strategy by which Sudanesemigrants and exiles in Egypt assert both closeness to anddistinction from Egyptians. Such idioms allow Sudanese“a margin of flexibility” through which they can negotiatetheir placement in exile as they resist Egypt’s hegemonyand reconstruct their transforming social identities. Adabgoes further, however, to draw the boundary between Su-danese who claim rooted identities against EgyptianizedSudanese. As a gendered moral marker, adab stems from thegeographical and cultural ties of Arabism and Islamism thatare mapped on spaces and places such as homes, publictransportation, and mosques. These spatially marked cul-tural intimacies facilitate the incorporation of Muslim Su-danese into Egyptian society and Egyptian neighborhoods.The very source of cultural and moral closeness, however,provides a rich base for northern Sudanese to contest Egyp-tian social practices as lacking adab and proper moral be-havior. Thus, the author concludes, adab is an ambiguouscategory through which northern Sudanese seek to rootthemselves in Arab Muslim culture to protect themselvesfrom the claims of otherness they encounter in Egypt.

Fabos deployed her own positionality as a dual SwissAmerican citizen and as a “Sudanese wife” to enter the Su-danese community and to learn northern Sudanese adabpractices in Egypt. Her insider–outsider position allowedher to examine the identity dilemmas that Sudanese exilesencounter on a daily basis. Working as an NGO consultantalso enabled the author to conduct her study and to collectmost of her data among Sudanese in Cairo within the con-text of increasing NGO politics that geared toward providingservices to displaced refugees. Sudanese elite in Cairo se-cured funding for these NGOs from different donors to cre-ate their own communal public spaces within which theycould discuss urgent issues related to Sudanese culturalpolitics and the difficulties they face in exile. Through thesepublic forums, northern Sudanese elite attempt to rene-gotiate their hegemonic northernness in ways that respectgender, racial, and ethnic differences. Such newly formedpublic spaces also offer opportunities where cultural prac-tices associated with adab, such as generosity and hospital-ity, are “taken public.” Issues of corruption, misuse of NGOfunds, and inability to secure jobs, for instance, are negoti-ated within the context of adab. NGOs, according to the au-thor, offer Sudanese intellectuals the opportunity to prac-tice their “skills in respectable surroundings,” freeing themfrom the restrictive labor laws in Egypt.

Although such analysis of a mobile population isneeded more than ever, it seems that the author’s method-ologies have constrained her ability to capture the dynam-ics of such mobility. Reading through the chapters of thebook, I felt the author’s discomfort in trying to grasp the

constrained cultural dynamics displayed in the scatteredspaces within which refugees tend to express their voices.The multiple identities of Sudanese in Cairo, the gender andracial politics through which they negotiate a new Sudan,and the role of the Egyptian nation-state and its exclusion-ary policies toward Sudanese refugees, can hardly be un-derstood within a limited cultural category such as adab.Although it is an important cultural category that can of-fer a glimpse into the reconstruction of Sudanese identitiesin exile, it is not sufficient to attend to the cultural politicsthat guide Sudanese practices abroad. The analyses of adabseem confusing at times, and tend to constrain the fluidityof identity expression, while also obscuring the significanceof the multiple hegemonies Sudanese exiles face. Giving theadab category such a powerful weight over other culturaland political categories and practices is limiting.

Although the author alludes to the different historiesand class statuses of Sudanese migrants, expatriates, andexiles and their distribution in Egyptian neighborhoods, herstudy downplays the racial tension created through the re-construction of adab practices in Egypt. In one example sheshows how some northern Sudanese use adab and propri-ety codes to distance themselves from other Sudanese eth-nic exiles and refugees. But such racial tension also mani-fests itself in Egyptian media representations of Sudaneseand in Egyptian official attitudes toward northern Sudanesein general and refugee groups from Darfur and SouthernSudan in particular. The Mustafa Mahmoud riots—dubbeda massacre by diasporan Sudanese—which Sudanese inEgypt staged against maltreatment by the Egyptian stateand the United Nation High Commission for Refugees in2005, is a significant example. How do such representa-tions and attitudes reflect official state discourses and prac-tices? How do they shape the discursive practices of Su-danese and Egyptians on the ground? And how do suchracial tensions and attitudes also differ by class and historyof residence? All of these are important questions that war-rant further research and examination. The focus on adabas a discourse of ideal practice also glosses over the dif-ferent ways in which Sudanese in Egypt challenge thesepropriety codes or deploy them strategically in differentsettings.

Emerging anthropological research on diaspora andtransnationalism offers new insights and methodologies tohelp situate the practices of mobile populations in both na-tional and international political histories. The author’s fo-cus on how Sudanese intellectuals bring adab into NGOsettings, for instance, is valuable in understanding the mul-tiple meanings of place making and community building.Further research, however, is also needed to show howsuch meanings, at both NGO and community levels, areused to negotiate and challenge nativist practices of nation-states. The expanding neoliberal role of NGOs and their hu-manitarian and human right politics—and how it shapes

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migrants’ discursive practices—warrant further research inthe Egyptian context.

This book is a welcome contribution to such anthropo-logical debate and to the scant work on Sudanese transna-tional mobility.

Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora.Kevin A. Yelvington, ed. Santa Fe, NM: School of AmericanResearch Press, 2006. 501 pp.

DEBORAH A. THOMASUniversity of Pennsylvania

The chapters in Kevin Yelvington’s edited volume Afro-Atlantic Dialogues work together to decenter a view ofAfrican diasporas that relies in one way or another onnotions of cultural essentialism (as in earlier diachronicapproaches). Instead, Yelvington develops an analytic ap-proach that works through the framework of dialogue. AsYelvington argues in his introduction, this dialogic ap-proach requires “a critical concern with the historical fash-ioning of anthropology’s categories” (p. 4), and it necessi-tates, moreover, an “interrogation of the anthropologicalself as much as the nature of the Other” (p. 4). In otherwords, this is a volume that is as much about epistemol-ogy as it is about the various diasporas that constitute blackworlds, and one that interrogates the ways movement, in-teraction, and creativity have influenced anthropologicalscholarship on Afro-America. The focus on epistemologyhere is framed in relation to the power dynamics and in-equities within the discipline of anthropology and withinthe subfields of African American and Caribbean studies. Bythis, I mean that questions about what we see and don’t seeare explored as much in terms of global geopolitics as theyare in relation to institutional hubris or individual gatekeep-ing. Thinking through what we know about any world areaand why we know it inevitably reveals these sorts of dynam-ics, and it is this kind of critical endeavor that ultimatelypushes us to understand the production of knowledge as arelational field shaped not only by the specifics of who wentwhere, when, and how but also by the reasons underlyingour interest in these movements in the first place. Not allthe chapters, papers originally written for an SAR AdvancedSeminar in 1999 titled “From Africa to the Americas: NewDirections in Afro-American Anthropology,” present ethno-graphic or historical material that is new. Instead, manytake the long view on their own or their field’s scholarship,revisiting persistent themes and, in some cases, missed op-portunities. As a result, what stands out as the volume’s crit-ical contribution is this emphasis on epistemology and itsultimate advocacy of methodological strategies that crossthe boundaries of discipline and territory.

The volume is divided into three substantive sec-tions: “Critical Histories of Afro-Americanist Anthropolo-gies,” “Dialogues in Practice,” and “The Place of Blackness.”A fourth section, “Critical Histories/Critical Theories,” con-sists of summary comments by Faye Harrison. Where thefirst section focuses on reenvisioning the theoretical frame-works that have been used to think through Black Atlanticworlds within anthropology and on developing the dia-logue framework, the second provides examples of how thisframework might look in action. Yelvington’s exploration,in the first section, of the ways Melville Herskovits’s so-cial and intellectual relationships with scholars within theCaribbean (Jean Price-Mars, Fernando Ortiz, and ArthurRamos) influenced not only the institutional developmentof the field of Afro-American Anthropology but also the ca-reers of individual social scientists is particularly instruc-tive in terms of how social networks and theoretical posi-tioning are interrelated. His argument that the productionof knowledge is transnational in scope, and that thereforethe networks scholars forge with others working in and onregions also create dialogues that are integral to the shap-ing of fields, is echoed by Sally Price. Her chapter on howthe visual arts have been conceptualized throughout theAfrican diaspora over time notes that thinking across terri-torial, disciplinary, and classed–cultural boundaries withinthe art world has encouraged an approach to continuitythat takes seriously levels of both material and social in-teraction that might shape similarity and difference acrossdiaspora space. This issue is tackled in a somewhat dif-ferent way by Richard Price, who revisits the controversiessurrounding the publication of Birth of African-AmericanCulture to argue that we must think “event” and “history”together with “discourse” and “ideology,” and further thatwe must find innovative ways to represent these conceptssimultaneously (p. 136), something the chapters in the sec-ond section successfully do.

Randy Matory, John Pulis, Joko Sengova, and TheresaSingleton each variously use historical, ethnographic, lin-guistic, and archaeological tools to think through howmovements and circulations within diasporic space cre-ate new forms of cultural practice. They all also argue thatparsing the particulars of these circulations must lead usnot only to rethink origin narratives but also to reimag-ine some of our commonly held beliefs about creoliza-tion, syncretism, and transatlantic borrowing. Finally, thethird section of the volume most explicitly addresses thepublic impact of what anthropologists do, although thereare elements of this in all the chapters. Critically, here,the focus is on the relationships between place, race, andtime, and on how the presences and absences of blacknesswithin particular contexts—17th- and 18th-century NewYork City (Sabihya Prince); museum exhibits represent-ing Puerto Rico (Arlene Torres); recent transformations inthe relative salience of blackness and “Africanness” among

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Afro-Colombian activists (Peter Wade)—reveal how nation-alist narratives are framed in relation to racialized andclassed social orders. In all three chapters it is not just repre-sentation that is at stake but also the ways representationsmight be used to buttress or debunk notions of culturalessentialism.

Throughout the volume, the main focus is on how bestto interpret the relationship between creativity and conti-nuity within the African diaspora, the issue that for the bet-ter part of a century has preoccupied scholars, artists, andsocial and political activists. In this way, Afro-Atlantic Dia-logues privileges particular anthropological paradigms thathave been dominant within the field but gives shorter shriftto some of the very important and transformative work thathas characterized recent research within other disciplines.I’m thinking here especially of moves within historical andfeminist scholarship to bring together the fields of transna-tionalism and diaspora studies to interrogate the ways di-asporic dialogues shift over time, and of work in literarycriticism that attempts to think through diaspora in rela-tion to difference. In each of these bodies of literature, gen-der tends to hold greater space as an analytic category thanit does in this volume (a point also made by Faye Harri-son in her remarks), yet the emphasis on the constructed-ness of diasporic relations over time is similar. Moreover,Harrison’s point that more attention should also be givento how “contemporary diasporic situations intersect andinterplay” resulting in the development of “neo-racisms”(p. 384) is well taken, and more recent ethnographic workhas also been more explicitly attuned to this issue. Over-all, however, as both analytic exercise and polemical argu-ment, Afro-Atlantic Dialogues is a theoretically, historically,and ethnographically rich collection well suited for both ad-vanced undergraduate and graduate courses on the historyof anthropology and the African Diaspora, as well as thosedealing with issues related to race, nationalism, state forma-tion, and empire.

Reference cited

Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price1992 The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological

Perspective. Boston: Beacon.

The City’s Outback. Gillian Cowlishaw. Sydney: Universityof New South Wales Press, 2009. 272 pp.

EMMA KOWALUniversity of Melbourne

Gillian Cowlishaw is a major voice in Australian anthropol-ogy. Her previous three books have been widely read andhave profoundly influenced the way social scientists think

about indigenous Australians’ relations with the dominantsociety (Cowlishaw 1988, 1999, 2004), as have her manyarticles, chapters, and two edited collections. The currentvolume is no exception and also offers much to a generalanthropological audience. Her books trace her career tra-jectory from the remote Aboriginal community Bulman inthe Northern Territory, to the rural Aboriginal communityin the New South Wales town of Bourke, and now to theurban Aboriginal community in Mount Druitt, an impover-ished suburb in Sydney’s west. Urban indigenous commu-nities are where the majority of indigenous Australians live,but these communities have been of only marginal interestto anthropologists.

From the start, Cowlishaw is uncomfortable with ur-ban ethnography. She describes entering the field only re-luctantly, on the insistence of Frank Doolan, an Aborigi-nal activist-poet she knew from Bourke who now lives inMount Druitt. In the urban setting, Aboriginal people liveinterspersed with their white neighbors, and most do notfrequent Aboriginal organizations or “community” spaces.Frank helps her find Aboriginal research assistants, and shesets off recording the stories of Aboriginal people they intro-duce her to, stories of multiple generations of institutional-ization, of families dispersed, of alcohol and jail, of struggleswith the public housing authorities, of cruel foster parents,and of violent death. She transcribes them, prints them upnicely, and attempts to return them to her informants—anethnographer’s gift—although sometimes a deserted houseof broken furniture was all she could find.

This is a remarkably honest book that sets out to be“quarrelsome and awkward” (p. 226) as a method of pro-ducing “ambiguous knowledge” (p. 12). Explorations of theshattered and sometimes resilient lives of Mount Druittresidents are interspersed with reflections on the themesthat have preoccupied Cowlishaw throughout her career:whether the Aboriginal struggle for recognition can over-come the traps of marginality and authenticity and be asource of dignity and empowerment; why white sympa-thy and attempts at reparation are ineffective and, perhaps,harmful to indigenous people; and why some people areresilient in the face of structural violence and others seemtrapped in a cycle of violence and helplessness.

Many of her thoughts on the page are an implicit pro-cess of comparison between Aboriginal people in MountDruitt with those in rural and remote Australia, the sites ofher previous research. This is a comparison that many non-indigenous Australians make, explicitly or in their mentalprocesses, and her honest anthropological reflections getbeyond both racism and the fear of being racist to ask morefundamental questions: How can we understand an Abo-riginal community that does not appear to have a commonculture? What does indigeneity mean in a place where someindigenous people perform it consciously for consumption,some disregard it, and some simply struggle to overcome a

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legacy of marginalization? She shows, for example, how theattachment of progressive Australians to respecting “Abo-riginal culture” and rejecting “assimilation” contributes tothe experience of indigeneity at Mount Druitt as a lack ofculture. The book also marks a shift in the anthropology ofAboriginal Australians that is increasingly drawing on theliterature of social suffering to understand the contempo-rary Aboriginal condition (Cowlishaw mentions Bourgois,Scheper-Hughes, and Feldman).

Above all, the book is a meditation on ethnography, thisstrange profession of “loitering with intent in other people’slives” (p. 221). She vividly depicts the mutual seduction ofethnographer and field site, as both make promises to theother and assess their options. The descriptions in “FindingInformants” (ch. 2) of the daily practices of urban ethnog-raphy and the negotiations between Cowlishaw and her co-researchers are great reading and a brilliant teaching tool.Her reflexive, somewhat self-deprecating style invites thereader to experience the necessary banality of ethnographicresearch and the challenge of conducting social analysisacross a social divide:

Fieldwork is notoriously messy, fraught, painful andexhilarating, but it also entails serious boredom, andsome days are “wasted” trying to find people, travellingto a cancelled event, sitting around listening to banal-ities and repetitions that must be endured, for they dohave significance. One day I run into Mooney near theEmerton shops and he casually informs me that he is analcoholic; I note a puffiness that mars his youthful goodlooks. He confides that he is after a young woman, oneof a pair hanging around the open area where he andhis mates are drinking. Perhaps his enviable freedomis also onerous, his pleasure seeking haunted by some-thing darker, like a sense of futility. But then I would saythat, wouldn’t I? [p. 130]

The ethics of producing knowledge about the other isa recurring theme of the book. From the outset, she takesissue with indigenous scholars who question the ability ofnonindigenous researchers to know the indigenous other,locating both indigenous and nonindigenous scholars inthe power structures of the academy that can be recognizedbut not avoided. At the same time, the effects of her white-ness and privilege on the knowledge she produces are thesubject of frequent reflection, as the quote above illustrates.She is also attentive to what her identification with her in-formants may obscure, such as their commonalities withother marginalized ethnic populations in Mount Druitt.

One resolution she offers is the need for white anthro-pologists to study their own kind. The white people thatinteract with Aboriginal people (as partners, bureaucrats,and members of a reconciliation group) hover on the edgesof the ethnography. Cowlishaw recognizes that these non-indigenous agents, which cannot be disentangled from in-

digenous lives, deserve anthropological attention, and herown “ambivalent reluctance” (p. 126) at taking on that taskis the basis for further reflection on the anthropological at-traction and repulsion toward the radically different.

Overall, The City’s Outback is an outstanding bookabout marginality and difference, and the contribution thatanthropology needs to make.

References cited

Cowlishaw, G.1988 Black, White or Brindle: Race in Rural Australia. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.1999 Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial

Power and Intimacy in Australia. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen andUnwin.

2004 Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race.Oxford: Blackwell.

The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like aLawyer.” Elizabeth Mertz. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2007. xvii + 308 pp.

HADI NICHOLAS DEEBUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Elizabeth Mertz’s The Language of Law School: Learning to“Think Like a Lawyer” is a compelling account of the train-ing that socializes thousands of students a year into a pro-fession whose role in ordering social relations can hardlybe overstated. Whether the reader’s own field is anthropol-ogy (or another social science), education, or law, Mertz’slayered analysis tacks between the familiar and the new tobuild a thorough case for how the linguistic dynamics offirst-year legal education transform both social context andstudents. She then examines that transformation for what itmeans—for better and worse—in light of the political econ-omy of democratic capitalism and the diversity of universitystatus, geography, teaching experience, race, and gender inthe United States. These two main parts (2 and 3, respec-tively) are bookended by an introduction concerning theoryand methods and a capstone conclusion that revisits, froma solidly anthropological point of view, the importance andcomplexities of context.

Mertz’s first main argument expands on and integratesshorter pieces previously published to demonstrate howfirst-year contract law course professors impart a core lan-guage ideology that imbues legal texts simultaneously withsupreme authority and fundamental contestability. By ex-ample and by pedagogic coercion in classroom discussionsof case law—Mertz deftly unpacks how even professorswith informal styles still orient toward a legendary idealtype of Socratic dialogue (think The Paper Chase or LegallyBlonde)—professors teach students that what matters is an

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ability to run the underlying social context of a case throughthe “metalinguistic filters” (p. 62) of legal doctrine and pro-cedure continuously until (and even after) an authority pro-nounces. Through roleplaying and other deictic and voicingmaneuvers, professors sediment this “reading like a lawyer”into “thinking like a lawyer” (p. 97) in their charges’ own le-gal personae.

This analysis is powerful and powerfully supported. Aphalanx of legal scholars has exposed the various ways thatlaw does violence to human experience. But Mertz demon-strates precisely how the discursive mechanisms so centralto effectuating law are reproduced incipiently. To do so, shedeploys detailed transcripts of an entire semester of eightfirst-year contracts classes, supplemented by interviews.

Mertz shows convincingly that the filtering process oflaw school talk meshes with an ambient microeconomics-derived rational actor model to shape students’ visionof themselves and the parties they ventriloquize asprimarily—even solely—strategic, preference-maximizingagents. (I would embrace her circumspect suggestion thatthis marriage is not limited to the subject matter of con-tracts.) Important questions about epistemology—a termMertz prefers as more encompassing than power—areerased in the process, although Mertz is careful to note thatboth textual mutability in law and market commodificationin capitalism can also liberate by disciplining bias.

One question to pursue is whether or not this com-patibility is accidental or historically unique. In my owncontracts course during the exuberant heyday of the “eco-nomic analysis of law” a decade ago (Mertz does not pro-vide data collection dates but based on earlier articles theyappear to be the 1990s), a classmate disposed of a hypo-thetical by smartly asserting that a man with a gallon ofwater in a desert can rightly charge a thirsty wayfarer asmany thousands as the market will bear. As Mertz pointsout, the kind of analysis and counterarguments that anthro-pologists and their colleagues in other disciplines (not ex-cluding economics itself) would marshal would have beencharacterized immediately as secondary so-called policy,not pristinely legal, considerations. This vise is particularlytight under the current intellectual regime, but what mightit share with, say, Robert Cover’s (1975) account of the si-lencing of abolitionist judges by positivist formalism in the19th century, itself perhaps a strand of modernity’s scientis-tic discipline of discursive rectitude, or with more ancientdilemmas of law and undemocratic power?

In the second main piece of the book, Mertz askswhether the force of law school discourse has a racial orgendered dimension. The small sample of eight professorsaffords her only tentative generalizations, such as that thekey factor in increasing participation by students of colorseems to be whether their professors also are of color (it wasnot clear whether racial classification was made throughself-identification or observation, each of which might bear

differently on the findings). Several hundred students per-mit a more substantial quantitative and qualitative analysis.Mertz’s principal conclusion that white male students dom-inate participation may be unsurprising.

However, Mertz seems less comfortable using theessentialism-prone categorizations of race and gender nec-essary to engage the existing literature on pedagogy thanprying from them striking findings by means of the sub-tler linguistic analysis in the earlier part of the book. Forexample, women tend to participate more in longer thanshorter question-and-answer sequences, which suggeststhat the more formal (and traditional) a teacher’s method,the greater is female participation. Mertz discusses the nu-ances; the bottom line is that the “fine-grained” (p. 209)analysis she painstakingly undertakes through linguisticanthropology can both bolster and undermine receivedwisdom.

Another question to explore further, then, is whether(and how) the distortion of such subtleties in students’experiences articulates with that of the subject matter ofspecific issues and cases as both are run through themetalinguistic filters of law school. Law students will be-come advocates, judges, legislators, educators, parents, andmembers of communities. How might socialization andlegal analysis intertwine to reproduce the enduring con-tentiousness, both in legal reasoning and society at large,of icons such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v.Wade, as well as many other casebook entextualizations, inways more complex than a categorical lens of race or gen-der reveals? This longitudinal process is worth investigatingto understand better the danger of “alienation: of legal deci-sion making from ethics and of lawyers from socially sharedvalues” (p. 220) and, normatively, to defend the democracythat Mertz endorses from strangulation in one of its owncribs.

In my first week of law school, my property law pro-fessor recited the influential jurist Karl Llewellyn’s (1951)verse for first-year students, The Bramble Bush, in whicha man scratches out his eyes in thorns and then scratchesthem back in again with more. The Language of Law Schoolpins down the ideological patterns and force of this proudallegory for learning to think like a lawyer. One criticismis that Mertz’s own language consistently relegates “moral-ity” to extralegal context, although the bramble bush of so-cialization that Mertz penetrates itself is indexed to moralinflections—again, for better and worse. The understand-ably expedient shorthand is qualified in a note that ac-knowledges that the referentialist pretensions to neutralityof legal ideology in fact are value laden, but it leaves itselfopen to a reading that reinforces that ideology.

The Language of Law School would be a solid additionto anthropology courses and studies about education andsocialization, as well as those that address areas permeatedby U.S. legal perspectives, including power, institutions,

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globalization of various kinds, finance, and economics. Italso offers rich mines for future research to plumb, amongthem the questions noted above, the theoretical possibil-ities for interdiscursive dialogue, a corpus of institutionaltalk to enhance microdiscursive systematization, and anenticement to incorporate embodied and environmentalsemiotics with the linguistic dynamics. This book on legalpedagogy itself deserves a place in the curricula of anthro-pology, not to mention education and law, and of graduateprograms.

References cited

Cover, Robert1975 Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Llewellyn, Karl

1951[1930] The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study. NewYork: Oceana Publications.

Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Placein New Zealand. Sally McAra. Honolulu: University ofHawai‘i Press, 2007. 208 pp.

JONATHAN H. SHANNONHunter College of the City University of New York

In Land of Beautiful Vision Sally McAra explores how acommunity of Buddhist converts organizes itself in con-temporary New Zealand. She asks, how do people imag-ine and reimagine their connections to place in an eramarked by mobility and nomadic subjectivities? What is therole of settler history in forming the conjuncture of white(Pakeha) and indigenous (Maori) spiritual traditions andrelationships to place in modern New Zealand? What isthe role of material culture in negotiating the vernacular-ization of a universalist spiritual tradition? She addressesthese and other issues through a compelling mixture ofnarrative analysis, reflexive ethnography, and historical re-search to present a thorough picture of the contradictionsas well as hopes involved in the creation of a commu-nity of Buddhist practitioners in New Zealand. In the pro-cess her study sheds light on what happens to the peopleand the locale to which Buddhism is brought, as well aswhat happens to Buddhist practices when transplanted intoa New Zealand spiritual landscape already inhabited withspirits and a charged history of colonial and postcolonialtransformations.

Chapter 1, “A New Tradition,” situates the Friends ofthe Western Buddhist Order (referred to throughout some-what infelicitously as FWBO) in the context of Buddhistpractices in Europe and Asia. She traces the origins of the

group in the British convert Sangharakshita (ne DennisLingwood) and its subsequent growth to become amongthe largest Buddhist communities in Britain. The order issteeped in notions of personal growth and self awareness aspathways to Enlightenment, befitting, as the author notes,the high modernist character of many groups competingin the contemporary spiritual marketplace. The author in-cludes herself in this chapter as a fellow seeker, a fourth-generation “Pakeha” (European New Zealander) who main-tains an open and eclectic attachment to Buddhist practiceand was for a time a member of the FWBO group.

In chapter 2, “Unplugging from the Grid,” McAra out-lines the character of religious practice and the role ofBuddhism in New Zealand, then traces the complex arc ofthe establishment of the FWBO community center calledSudarshanaloka outside of the city of Auckland. She re-veals the contradictions inherent in the plan to create aspace of spiritual transformation in a land already inhab-ited by indigenous spirits. For the FWBO members, the re-lationship with the land is both central to their creationof a spiritual home and a highly charged arena for play-ing out colonial and postcolonial tensions in New Zealandsociety. These themes are further explored in chapter 3, “ASpiritual Home,” which examines the sometimes tense re-lationships between the FWBO centers in Britain and NewZealand, and between European New Zealanders (who of-ten self-identify as Pakeha) and indigenous New Zealan-ders (Maori), especially in terms of their relationships toplace and the larger question of whether Pakeha can evertruly be considered as “natives.” Thus, Sudarshanaloka be-comes a locus for struggles over what it means not only tobe a Buddhist in New Zealand but also a Pakeha becausemost Buddhist in New Zealand are of settler background.McAra implies that in many ways the assertion of a na-tional Pakeha identity through attachment to the land—aform of settler indigenization—is a direct response to Maoriattempts to reclaim their rights to the land. The FWBOcenter thus becomes a site for the negotiation of thesecontradictions.

The heart of the text lies in chapters 4 (“UnsettlingPlace”) and 5 (“The Stupa Is Dhardo”). Here McAra exploresthe spiritual and ecological sensitivities of the growing com-munity. Her argument centers on the establishment of Su-darshanaloka and the reconceptualization of the land asBuddhist space. Given the despoiling of the land in colonialand postcolonial times, the FWBO group saw the dedica-tion of their center as a way of healing both the land andthose who practice there. Her thick description of the localspiritual ecology and her analysis of narratives of belongingand emplacement reveal the numerous contradictions oftransplanting a universalist practice into a context of highlylocalized spirits and ecologies. One striking paradox arisesfrom the juxtaposition of narratives of ecological sensitiv-ity with the use of heavy machinery to develop the area and

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open it to users. She argues that talk about spirits and heal-ing of the land is possibly an attempt by FWBO adherentsto justify and legitimate their existence there—to indige-nize themselves and their spiritual practice. Her discussionof the construction of a massive stupa on lands contain-ing sacred logs and animated by Maori spirits shows boththe importance of material culture in Buddhist practice andideology, and the social efficacy of the stupa in transform-ing the community and anchoring participants to the land.The stupa was the focal point of their efforts to both indi-genize their practice in New Zealand and to differentiatethemselves from the FWBO centers in Britain.

Both of these themes are explored in greater detailin chapters 6 (“Interanimation”) and 7 (“‘Re-Visioning’Place”), which document the FWBO community’s efforts toconstruct a “land of beautiful vision,” a sacred place forboth them and Maori spirits. Drawing on Victor Turner,Barbara Myerhoff, Keith Basso, and others, McAra showshow the transformation of the land effected a transforma-tion of understandings of selfhood for the participants (her-self included). Attentive to the contradictions this entails,McAra reflects on the limitations of the desire to belong, therisk of mythification of the community’s narrative, and howdreams of “transculturality” through religious bricolage al-ways mask power dynamics and internal struggles for con-trolling the definition of place.

The book’s many strengths are its clarity of analysis andaccessible style, making it appropriate reading for under-graduate courses in religious studies and cultural anthro-pology, and as a resource for advanced undergraduate andgraduate students interested in the particulars of mobilecommunities of faith and issues of transnationalism, themateriality of signs, and reflexive ethnography. This readerwould have hoped for a more integrated study of the roleof gender in forming the order, and how that originary dy-namic was transplanted and transformed in the context ofNew Zealand societies, both Pakeha and Maori, having dif-ferent ideologies, especially when it comes to the concept ofstewardship of land and ecosystems. Nonetheless, this vol-ume will be a welcome addition to the growing (and oftenpolitically fraught) conversations about the role of religionand spirituality in contemporary society.

Networking Futures: The Movements against CorporateGlobalization. Jeffrey S. Juris. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2008. 378 pp.

KALMAN APPLBAUMUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

While there have been various thought pieces on the newconditions for ethnography in a globalizing world, the new

forms are still emerging from studies whose inherentlysupralocal questions are requiring its researchers to engagefieldwork in innovative ways. Networking Futures is an at-tempt to climb inside transnational activist networks an-imated by anticorporate and related ideologies. The self-consciously global scope of these movements is reflected intheir attempt to, in the words of the People’s Global Action(PGA) slogan, broaden their struggle to “be as transna-tional as capital” (p. 7). Juris seeks to describe this ambi-tion as an experiential narrative of “direct action” (princi-pally protests), and in terms of an organizational sociologyof how members of key organizations debate and, thereby,shape the activist networks that constitute the very exis-tence of the larger movements.

Juris introduces himself as a “militant ethnographer,”meaning that his work is “not only politically engaged butalso collaborative” (p. 20). He wishes his work to be use-ful to activists, whose company he shared as compatriotfor more than two years between the World Trade Orga-nization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999 and the anti-corporate globalization movements out of Barcelona in theearly 2000s. This position is less remarkable for its givingrise to political bias, of which I anticipated much morethan I found, than for the excellent access it conferred onthe ethnographer. The author’s sympathy to the organiza-tional challenges of the activists’ movements—much moreexplicitly than to their ideological purposes, which is hardlydiscussed—permits the reader insight into an unusual di-mension of activist life, namely, how they solve the problemof horizontal, democratic expansion of their organizationswithout turning into mirror images of the hierarchical be-hemoths they wish perhaps most to oppose: governmentsand corporations. The contradiction is mirrored by the si-multaneous aspiration to be both global and antiglobaliza-tionist (at least in the current political economic iteration ofit) at once.

The exposition of this organizational sociology from aninsider’s perspective illuminates several praxiological fea-tures of the movement. In successive chapters the book re-ports on and theorizes from a tolerable height the featuresof grassroots mobilizing, the theatrical aspects of direct-action protest, the effects of police crackdowns againstthe most anarchist fringes of the movement, and the en-abling role of digital technologies in the hopes the activistshave for catalyzing political transformations. The princi-pal investigation sites are meetings, protests, social gath-erings, and conventions at which members of neighboringor in some cases competing networked organizations rubup against each other and debate ensues. Indeed, debate,more than any other form of sociality, appears from theevidence presented in this book to be the most elementalconstituent of the emergent networks of social movementsagainst the globalization of conventionally empoweredinstitutions.

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One of the remarkable features of the continual plan-ning and debate sessions that seemingly constitute the net-works, at least in Juris’s depiction of them, is how staid theyappear to be. In their speech, the organizers more resemblebureaucrats focused on institutional forms than activist ide-ologues, street protesting hotheads, or fiery, leftist intellec-tuals. Juris’s activist informants are constantly saying thingssuch as: “[we work] as a network, through horizontal assem-blies, and with local autonomy in order to reach people withan open and less dogmatic style” (p. 69). Or, “We should notbecome a homogenizing structure. We have a series of coor-dinating tools, and we can continue coming together whenwe have things to discuss. I would sacrifice ‘unity’ to con-tinue building the movement of movements” (p. 111). Or“We all found that imagining transparent, non-hierarchical,and decentralized structures for a network of this type wasas thrilling as it was difficult” (p. 225). Even on the edges ofstreet protest, the movement’s goals seem far more focusedon solidarity and purpose affirmation than on communi-cating a clear rationale for action.

In light of the preponderance of evidence that con-forms to this kind, one could read this book and mistak-enly come to think that these groups organize and ex-

ist for the sake of continuing and growing the movementrather than in pursuit of worldly political objectives. Thenear omission of how the networks and direct actions inquestion engage with specific corporations, governments,or trade policies diminishes the utility and interest of thebook, particularly for American audiences who are likelyless informed than people elsewhere about the issues thatsparked antiglobalization movements in the first place.Discussion of activists’ own understandings of the issues,their recruitment and personal characteristics, or what theyhave so much at stake that keeps them involved in thisprobably costly (no mention of how all this is financed)and sometimes hazardous activity, are all given shortshrift.

These omissions may be laid at the feet of the emphasison structural analysis of the networks themselves qua socialforms, and because this contribution is unusual and sub-stantial I would be loath to offer too much criticism on thisbasis. Networking Futures charts a map for understandinghow “anti-corporate globalization movements are perhapsbest understood as social laboratories, generating new cul-tural practices and political imaginaries for a digital age”(p. 297). This is an important contribution.

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One homeland or two? The nationalization and transnationalization of Mongolia's Kazakhs

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