The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation

S I N G L E R E V I E W S

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape ofReligion. Scott Atran. New York: Oxford University Press,2002. 348 pp.

ROBERT A. PAULEmory College

Scott Atran’s explanation of the cognitive and evolutionarybasis of religion rests on a three-part definition. Religion is“(1) a community’s hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a coun-terfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents(3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as deathand deception” (p. 4). In Atran’s view, religion is not itselfan adaptation. However, it can manipulate evolved mentalmodules by means of supercharged releasing mechanisms,such as masks, rhythms, symbols, and so on. This enablesself-seeking individuals to form long-lasting cooperative so-cial bonds. Trust is engendered through the performance ofgenuinely costly sacrifices: cutting off a finger, subincisingoneself, burning one’s possessions, and so on. We are vul-nerable to such manipulation because of the “tragedy ofcognition”; thanks to our ability to produce “metarepre-sentations,” we can anticipate the death of ourselves andour loved ones, the self-interested lies of our fellows, as wellas other potential calamities against which there is no realprotection.

What makes this view “evolutionary” and not merely arehash of what everyone knows is the idea that certain so-cial passions, such as love, on the one hand, and vengeance,on the other hand, are hard wired as “emotionally eruptive”passions, which facilitate long-term commitment as the ba-sis of social cooperation. It is these passions that, whenstirred up by religious ritual and its powerful emotional im-pact, make having religion a different, more potent matter.According to theory, these eruptive emotions evolved be-cause it was essential during the era of our evolution, forat least some of us, to be able to kill or die for our socialcommitments, giving them binding force and overcomingour selfish trends to form groups that would cooperate (andbetter compete).

The key to how this trick is accomplished lies in themental module that prepares us to assume agency in theworld, unless it is proven not to be there, and, thus, to be-lieve in supernatural beings, good and bad. This capacitywas adaptive in the old days. It was then more prudent toassume that a noise or movement is a possible enemy orpredator and automatically take defensive steps; one can al-ways correct for excessive caution later. But if we are proneto see agency everywhere, why must it take the form of

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counterintuitive supernatural beings? The argument is thatimaginary beings, which minimally cross-evolved basic cat-egories (bodiless but sentient beings, winged serpents, talk-ing bushes), are attention getting, easier to remember, andmore readily transmitted than others. Atran cites experi-ments (pp. 100–107) in which subjects can more easily re-call a “minimally counterintuitive” image, such as a sob-bing oak or a melting grandfather than a bizarre one, suchas a nauseating cat or a blinking pencil. “Intuitive” images,such as a grazing cow, are recalled with the most ease. Thetheory is that minimally counterintuitive ideas are moresurprising and arresting and call attention to the categoriesthemselves, which then do the rest of the work. Religiousideas about supernatural agents are thus “selected” on thebasis of how readily they are noticed, transmitted, learned,and remembered.

It seems to me that the most salient quality about areligion is not how bizarre it is, or whether or not one isable to remember it. Also, this analysis does not accountfor real ethnographic data, nor does it make more than aslight dent in defining the wide and deep range of religiousideation in general. However, more attention to evolvedpsychological capacities and limits will enable us to betterunderstand all cultural phenomena, including religion, andso, this line of research should be encouraged. However,for this program to get beyond rediscovering what we havealready learned from Tylor, Durkheim, Malinowski, andcountless others, it will need to come to terms with culturalphenomena as organized, external, collective, symbolicdomains in their own right. It is to Atran’s credit thathe recognizes that culture is not something that can bemade to fit into the current version of the strict Darwinianparadigm, as he makes clear in his criticism of mimetictheory (pp. 236–262). Whether we can progress from thatrealization to richer and more inclusive theorizing remainsto be seen.

Feminist Futures: Women, Culture and Development.Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, and Priya Kurian, eds.New York: Zed Books, 2003. 309 pp.

SYLVIA CHANTLondon School of Economics and Political Science

In an age when the “en-gendering of development” is mak-ing ever-stronger calls for bringing men on board, it is per-haps strange to find such a spirited defense of a paradigmthat, amongst other things, seeks to put “women at itscentre” (p. 2). At first glance, I felt some antipathy to

142 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005

what I sensed might be an overly essentialist and roman-ticized view of how “Third World women” somehow holdthe secrets to global progress. As I read on, however, Ibegan to warm to the notion of “Women, Culture, andDevelopment” (WCD). Even if WCD arguably has moreappeal as a political strategy than as a conceptual frame-work, and one would not necessarily recommend FeministFutures to students as a “core text” on gender and develop-ment, the volume shakes up many conventional wisdomsand mantras and provides a refreshing and original take onfuture possibilities.

Given that WCD is a new and emerging paradigm, it isno surprise that there are different perspectives on the sub-ject. One of the coeditors, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, highlights,inter alia, that WCD “brings women’s agency into the fore-ground (side by side with, and within, the cultural, social,political and economic domains) as a means for understand-ing how inequalities are challenged and reproduced” (p. 8).This entails accepting that it is not possible (or even desir-able) to rigidly separate production from reproduction inwomen’s lives, as well as recognizing that women’s class,age, ethnicity, religion, and so on are integral to genderanalysis and practice. Although these notions have beenwell trodden in gender scholarship to date, more novel andinteresting is Bhavnani’s slant on raising the status of “cul-ture” (as lived experience) in research on women’s lives tothe same level as “development” (p. 8). In her view, this notonly provides for encompassing “more poignantly the ev-eryday experience, practice, ideology and politics of ThirdWorld women” but also may yield ideas for a more transfor-mative development that “attends to people’s lives beyondthe economic” (p. 8).

These views are broadly consonant with those of hercoeditors, particularly Priya Kurian, who through her workin environmental politics, concludes that indigenous cul-tures and knowledges are necessary to make EnvironmentalImpact Assessment (EIA) more gender aware and sustain-able. This, she feels, sets the WCD paradigm on a differenttrack to the conventional Women in Development (WID),Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Devel-opment (GAD) approaches, which she contends are linear,reductive, and guilty of portraying Third World women asvictims of oppressive cultural traditions.

Having set out their stall, the editors divide the bookinto three broad sections: (1) sexuality and the genderedbody, (2) environment/technology/science, and (3) thecultural politics of representation. These comprise chap-ters that are interspersed with groups of short essays on“Visions” pertaining to possibilities for WCD within thecontext of three interdisciplinary areas that the approachhopes to bring closer together: critical development stud-ies, critical feminist studies, and cultural studies.

As might be expected given the new and unfoldingterrain, not to mention the disciplinary and geographicalspread of the book’s nearly thirty contributors, diversityis the order of the day. Although some of the pieces leftme indifferent, five contributions were particularly impres-

sive. One was the “Visions” essay by Dana Collins, whichpoints up how the WCD approach provides important in-sights into the strategies used by women to deal with theconstraints of sex and gender, and global economic sys-tems. Another essay, by Linda Klouzal, raises the issues ofemotion and subjectivity and how these can be encapsu-lated within WCD. Julia Shayne’s essay on feminist scholar-ship on revolutions highlights the importance of interview-centered fieldwork. A final “Visions” essay by DebashishMunshi and Priya Kurian draws on women’s encounterswith cybertechnology in South Asia, including “informa-tion villages” run by women. The authors contrast the wayin which local women tend to use computers and the In-ternet toward “ensuring well-being and a meaningful life”([p. 191], e.g., by sharing information on practical mattersat the community level) with the aggressive, internationalmasculine world of e-business and “techno lust” in whichtechnology is separated from the social and cultural needs ofsociety.

Last but not least, an exemplary piece of WCD schol-arship is the chapter by Amy Lind and Jessica Share on“Queering Development.” This demonstrates how deeplyheteronormativity is inscribed in development discourseand practice. Concluding that sexuality is a survival issue,pertinent suggestions are made regarding future directionsfor LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) activism andresearch.

With more writing of the caliber demonstrated by theauthors mentioned above, I am sure the WCD approachwill enjoy greater exposure and popularity in years to come.

The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in India.Paul R. Brass. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.476 pp.

MANALI DESAIUniversity of Reading

The topic of riots in postindependence India has under-standably become a focus for recent scholarly work. PaulBrass’s book, the culmination of 28 years of studying poli-tics in the city of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, is a superb additionto this growing body of literature. The detailed recordingof episodes of violence and the circumstances surroundingit over the years, through in-depth interviews, documen-tary evidence, and considerable fieldwork in a single loca-tion, have yielded substantial methodological advantages.Rather than choosing a large number of cases and its atten-dant superficiality, Brass’s analysis of a single case enableshim to sort through a number of explanations for riots.Indeed, his comprehensive test of alternative theories leadshim to eschew the search for monocausal theories. Instead,he treats riots as political processes—as the productions ofspecific agents who are systemically aided in creating vio-lent formations.

Brass’s emphasis on agency in the cultivation of riotssits nested within a larger structuralist argument. Noting the

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similarities between machine politics in Chicago and riotsin Indian politics, he argues that no political party has hadan interest in dismantling the nexus of criminals, riot tech-nicians, police, politicians, and, generally, those who pro-mote the hostility and animosity that drive riots betweenHindus and Muslims. Riots have been useful to all partiesin whipping up communal support in times of intensifiedelectoral competition. However, Brass does not stop there.At another level, he presents a more dramaturgical perspec-tive, viewing riots as “theatre” or dramatic productions in-volving “preparation/rehearsal, activation/enactment, andexplanation/interpretation” (p. 15). From this perspective,riots are produced in places in which preparation and re-hearsal are continuous, ongoing activities.

Brass’s book is often forthright and angry. The mostpowerful indictment, and one of his most thought-provoking insights, is the often unwitting complicity ofscholars and other observers in the reproduction of the riot-producing system. He is scathing in his denunciation ofcurrently popular theories for their implicit “blurring of re-sponsibility.” Brass argues that the refusal to name the ac-tors (particularly the Hindu right) involved in producingviolence is tantamount to sanctioning it. It is a soberingand important critique of—and call for reflexivity from—acertain genre of social scientific scholarship.

Brass’s book takes the ongoing debate on riots andpogroms within India a big step further. He suggests thatrather than ask why riots happen (which is often ob-vious) we should turn our attention to the question ofhow they occur. His attention to process offers excellenttheoretical and methodological insights. However, despitethese major contributions, the book stops short in sev-eral ways. First, as a growing body of methodological de-bates within historical sociology indicates, process and cau-sation are not alternatives, unless causation is reduced toits most positivistic use. Second, his book demonstratessome confusion (despite his attempt to address the prob-lem) in using the term riot. Whether to choose the al-ternative and, perhaps, more appropriate term pogrom isa crucial choice that informs how one studies the phe-nomenon. Most episodes of Hindu–Muslim violence in-volve popular participation and considerable state com-plicity, as well as prior “preparation and rehearsal,” thusfalling somewhere between riots and pogroms. As he clearlyshows, moreover, Muslims are overwhelmingly the vic-tims of these episodes of violence. Yet, strangely, Brass ad-heres to the term riot, which does not advance conceptualclarification.

Related to this oversight is his theoretical treatment ofthe state. A glaring omission in his analysis is a discussion ofhow the postindependence state and civil society in Indiahave evolved over the past five decades, both in responseto growing conflict within the nation-state, as well as inresponse to external issues (e.g., the Kashmir crisis, relationswith Pakistan, globalization, and so on).

Absent as well is the much misused but crucial termcivil society. In what ways has this sphere of nonstate

institutions evolved through the penetration of Hindutvaorganizations, religious groups, and rightist religiousorganizations in general? Although Brass rightly indicts thefar-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for master-minding many of the riots, he does not analyze the effectthat the RSS and its brethren organizations have had intransforming the discourse in civil society. Yet, today, thereseems to be greater tolerance of such violence and, withthe exception of a handful of human rights organizationsand left-wing parties, the silence that follows from civilsociety is often resounding. Put differently, Brass’s analysisis meticulously attentive to space (attending to detail atthe level of neighborhood) but not to time. This reviewerhopes that this excellent text will open new avenues foranalysis of this deadly violence.

All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan: Evangelicalsin Catholic Mexico. Peter S. Cahn. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 2003. 197 pp.

ROBERT V. KEMPERSouthern Methodist University

In 1948, George M. Foster published what became a classicethnography, Empire’s Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan,in which he described in detail the religious practices ofa Mexican peasant community. In 1988, Foster’s student,Stanley Brandes, published Power and Persuasion: Fiestas andSocial Control in Rural Mexico, a brilliant analysis of the sym-bolic dimensions of religious rituals in Tzintzuntzan. Now,Peter Cahn, a student of Brandes, offers a monograph fo-cused on evangelical Protestants in Tzintzuntzan and theneighboring communities around Lake Patzcuaro.

Whereas Foster’s ethnographic description emphasizedthe practice of Catholic rituals that had been introducedto the community over four centuries, and Brandes ar-gued that fiestas could be observed as performances ofcommunity- and state-level powers, Cahn recognizes thatCatholic celebrations need to be reinterpreted in the lightof two new forces: evangelical Protestantism and global-ization. Focusing on fiestas as community practice, Cahndocuments that responsibilities for them have expandedfar beyond Tzintzuntzan. For example, individuals in thelarge emigrant group in Tacoma, Washington, not onlyreturn home to Tzintzuntzan or send remittances to sup-port the fiestas, they also have even replicated the fies-tas in the north. Thus, fiestas provide a significant mech-anism for building and sustaining community far beyondTzintzuntzan.

Emigration and wider participation in what once wasa tightly controlled cargo system have created opportuni-ties for evangelical Protestant groups to attract adherents inTzintzuntzan and in other nearby communities. During hisfieldwork, Cahn visited 14 different congregations aroundLake Patzcuaro but focused his attention on five evangeli-cal churches geographically closest to Tzintzuntzan. In ad-dition, he attended services and spoke with the leaders


and laity at the local Catholic parish church. His researchconvinced him that men and women do not becomeProtestants because of their “opposition to a domineeringmajority, but rather in relation to personal or familial crises.In particular, the affliction of alcoholism motivates menand women to seek alternative spiritual spaces where theycan repair their lives” (p. 39). According to Cahn, this “per-sonal approach to religious conversion . . . opens a space formutual tolerance” (p. 62).

To illustrate this point, Cahn offers a case study of theexperiences of a North American missionary who attemptedto establish a Protestant congregation in the nearby com-munity of Santa Fe de la Laguna. Despite being wellfunded, the missionary eventually was forced to abandonhis project. Subsequently, local evangelicals were able tofound a congregation in Santa Fe, but only after persuad-ing authorities that the converts would continue to partici-pate in the political and ceremonial life of the community.According to Cahn, “the example of Santa Fe illustrates thewillingness of evangelicals and Catholics to coexist peace-fully and suggests how they can participate in a mutual ex-change of beliefs and practices” (p. 91).

In practice, Cahn found that ways of being Catholicor Protestant need not differ greatly. Many individuals whojoin evangelical congregations continue to honor their god-parents, to pay their contributions for fiestas, and evenhonor the saints, especially the Virgin of Guadalupe. In theprocess, Tzintzuntzenos “acknowledge differences betweenthe faiths, but agree that no single faith holds a monopolyon divine truth. . . . As long as they promote a belief in Godto reward followers in the afterlife, all religions have theirmerits” (p. 120).

Throughout his book, Cahn challenges simplistic ap-proaches to measuring the economic, social, and politicalimpact of evangelicals in Latin American society. In his con-clusion, Cahn argues that “conversion supplements ratherthan supplants previous religious beliefs and practices formany evangelicals” (p. 168). He also documents the impor-tance of the continuity of community among the people ofTzintzuntzan, whether Catholics or evangelicals, local resi-dents or distant emigrants.

On June 10, 2004, on the day of the annual CorpusChristi fiesta in Tzintzuntzan, I happened to encounterCahn among the crowds in the vast atrium of the Catholicparish church. After he introduced me to his friends, twoevangelicals who had accompanied him to the fiesta, wetalked briefly and then went our separate ways—two an-thropologists (he Jewish and I Presbyterian) both involvedin the long-term study of a Catholic community trans-formed far beyond what anyone might have imagined whenthe Tzintzuntzan project began in 1945. Now, after twogenerations, we have come to the point in which Cahncan write that “all religions are good in Tzintzuntzan.”His excellent account of religious practices is a worthysuccessor to the works by Foster and Brandes; it too willbecome required reading for anthropologists and LatinAmericanists.

Shrunken Heads: Tsantsa Trophies and Human Exotica.James L. Castner. Gainesville, FL: Feline Press, 2002. 160 pp.

MICHAEL J . HARNERFoundation for Shamanic Studies

For about one and a half centuries, the Shuar (in prioranthropological taxonomy, the Jıvaro proper) of easternEcuador have been mainly known to the outside world fortheir now-defunct practice of making “shrunken head” tro-phies, or tsantsas, of enemies slain during raids on othertribes. The tsantsas, of course, are not heads that have beenshrunken but simply the whole skins of heads that, throughboiling, heating, and drying, have been reduced to aboutthe size of a fist. Only two other tribes, the Jivaroan Huam-bisa and the Aguaruna, are reliably known to have engagedin the practice, although there are hints from Peruviancoastal archaeology that it may have been more widespreadin prehistoric times.

James L. Castner’s study, in a “coffee table” book for-mat with numerous photographs, is a relatively seriousattempt by a nonanthropologist to summarize what isknown from the literature about tsantsas. To the author’scredit, he has generally attempted to use the most trust-worthy ethnographic information on the meaning andpractices surrounding tsantsas. This is not an easy task,for there is hardly any other subject on indigenous SouthAmerica that has encouraged the publication of so muchmisinformation.

Even anthropologists have not been immune to thetemptation of entering into unfounded secondhand spec-ulation about tsantsas. To take one recent example, a pairof ethnologists who lived with an adjacent, nonheadtakingJivaroan tribe, the Achuar, speculated at length in print thatthe peculiar nature of the tsantsas was an attempt by theShuar to disguise the individual identities of their victims.In reality, nothing could be further from the facts. The idealwith regard to headtaking was to kill a famous warrior soas to increase the prestige of the head taker among his ownpeople. To advertise the head taker’s competitive prowess,the real name of the victim was repeatedly sung during thepublic celebratory dances while the trophy was brandishedby the head taker. The blackening of the tsantsa skin withcharcoal was done not to hide the identity of the victimbut, rather, to prevent the avenging soul (muisak) of thevictim from seeing out of the head. This was done to keepthe muisak from causing a fatal “accident” to anyone in itsvicinity before it was finally “sent home” during the lastof three tsantsa celebrations. For the same reason, the lipswere sealed and two large red seeds were sometimes placedinside the eye openings of the tsantsa, to further block themuisak’s vision. I obtained these data during my 14 monthsof fieldwork among the Shuar, starting at a time (1956–57)when they still occasionally took heads, made tsantsas, andheld the dances of celebration.

This book could have benefited from a more rigor-ous use of citations for some of the statements, but it is

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unquestionably the most comprehensive illustrated workon tsantsas and includes an unprecedented quantity of pho-tographs, including 150 in color. A substantial portion ofthe volume is devoted to distinguishing between “true”tsantsas, that is the indigenous ceremonial trophies, and“nonceremonial,” or fake ones made for the tourist trade.Fake tsantsas are commonly made from monkey heads, theskins of various animals, and, sometimes, from unclaimeddead in city morgues. These bogus examples constitute theoverwhelming majority in commercial circulation and caneven be found on display as legitimate tsantsas at somemuseums.

This is definitely a useful reference work, particularlyfor museum curators attempting to determine what theyhave in their collections. Although visually the illustrationsare not for the squeamish, I suspect the book may also findits way into museum stores to satisfy the demands of apublic that seems always fascinated by “shrunken heads.”A liability of the publication is that it may serve as anunintended guide for the unscrupulous on how to makemore authentic-looking fakes.

The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse,Transition, and Transformation. Arthur Demarest,Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice, eds. Boulder: Universityof Colorado Press, 2004. 676 pp.

L ISA J . LUCERONew Mexico State University

Maya archaeologists need to make room on their shelves foranother book. The title says it all. The various authors, whocover the entire Maya lowlands, were not invited to partic-ipate because they all agreed on the events that took placeduring the Terminal Classic period (which ranges from c.A.D. 750 to A.D. 1050). Some, as the editors state, do notdiscuss causes for the Maya “collapse” at all but present up-dated culture histories of particular centers and environs.What we see less of, which is a good thing, is the appli-cation of center-specific histories to the entire Maya low-lands. What we see more of, another good thing, is archae-ologists taking into account pan-Mesoamerican events thataffected Maya history. One problematic issue is chronology;the Terminal Classic is a difficult period to tie down, and ar-chaeologists use various methods—ceramics, architecturalstyles, epigraphy, and radiocarbon and obsidian hydrationdating—in attempts to refine dates, sometimes successfullyand sometimes less so.

Another major issue is defining collapse, which in theMaya case was political in nature. Classic Maya kings lostpower in the southern Maya lowlands, so there no longerwas a need for royal trappings, including palaces, temples,public iconography, emblem glyphs, stelae, writing, andprestige goods. How and why did this happen? This is wherescholars do not agree, and this compilation of papers is nodifferent. Climate change has been bandied about for sev-eral years; increasingly, data from diverse testing programs

show that seasonal rainfall patterns indeed changed, result-ing in shorter rainy seasons, or, in other words, drought.Several authors brought up key questions, such as the fol-lowing: Why did many northern lowland areas experiencea florescence when Maya were abandoning centers in thesouthern lowlands? How does one explain the fact thatsome southern lowland centers lost political power beforedrought (the late A.D. 700s), especially in the southwesternlowlands?

Regarding the first question, a higher water table anddifferent local and regional effects to global climate changes(as discussed in the chapter by Geoffrey E. Braswell et al.)may explain in part the spurt in the north. Clearly, weneed to explore further the varying effects of climatechange on local patterns and histories (see Fagan 2004 fora broad discussion of how climate change affects histo-ries cross-culturally). Regarding the second question, ArthurDemarest, as well as others in the volume and elsewhere,notes that centers in the Petexbatun area were at war withone another. For example, Ruler 4 of Dos Pilas was capturedin A.D. 761 by a king (and former subject) from Tamaran-dito. It was soon abandoned after inhabitants, despite strip-ping monumental architecture of its facades to build pro-tective walls, failed in their attempt to save their homes.Other centers were also involved in conflict, most of whichwere abandoned. If drought did not cause people to aban-don centers, warfare certainly did.

I have my own questions, though. Why was there somuch conflict? And, more significantly, why was the politi-cal vacuum not filled at the end or after the Terminal Classicperiod? Governments throughout the world fall, only to bereplaced. Why not in the southern Maya lowlands? Perhapsincreasing competition occurred because of decreasing sup-plies of water. This would be particularly noticeable in anarea as densely settled, especially with centers, as in thePetexbatun region. I think the major reason the politicalvacuum was left vacant was because of long-term drought—that is, increasingly longer dry seasons that lasted severalyears (Lucero in press). Royal ceremonies were no longersuccessful in propitiating the gods to bring forth enoughrain. As a result, the majority of Maya discontinued con-tributing surplus to rulers, who once were able to showthat their closer ties to the supernatural world (gods andancestors) gave them special privileges, including exactingtribute.

In the introduction, Prudence Rice, Arthur Demarest,and Don Rice state: “The evidence presented here largelyargues against the concept of a uniform, chronologicallyaligned collapse or catastrophe in all regions of the lowlandsor even a uniform ‘decline’ in population or political institu-tions” (p. 10). Each center or area indeed has its own history,as each chapter illustrates quite well. Their histories con-join, however, in that kings, or any supracommunity polit-ical organization, failed to take hold in the southern Mayalowlands after the Terminal Classic. Classic Maya kingshipdisappeared for good; Maya people did not. As many chap-ters illustrate, some Maya migrated out of some areas in


all four directions, whereas others continued to farm nearcenters or in the hinterlands between centers. Communityfarming life continued for most Maya, as it does today.Although many questions are left unanswered, it is not thefault of the contributors: The subject simply awaits futureresearch.

REFERENCES CITEDFagan, Brian

2004 The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization.New York: Basic Books.

Lucero, Lisa J.In press Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya

Rulers. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of ModernIndia. Nicholas B. Dirks. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2001. 372 pp.

KALYANAKRISHNAN SIVARAMAKRISHNANUniversity of Washington

In Castes of Mind, Nicholas Dirks suggests that caste, a cen-tral social feature of India, took its present shape in the colo-nial encounter. He goes on to show how that happened, andwhat the consequences have been for postcolonial Indiaand for scholarship on caste. The argument is clear and im-portant. It is also, inevitably, prickling with controversy.

The scholarly work on which Castes of Mind is basedhas been overtaken by recent nuanced research by histori-ans. This work sometimes straddles precolonial and colo-nial periods with ease and reports on the interminglingof language, caste, and gender politics in the formationof Indian middle classes and new rural social hierarchies.At the same time, anthropologists have noted the blurredboundaries between fluid caste and tribe identities well intothe 20th century. In some cases, particularly in what arenow prominent adivasi (tribal) homelands like Jharkhandand Chattisgarh, the new anthropological evidence suggeststhat identity conflicts around caste, tribe, and notions of“indigenous distinction” became more pronounced in theperiod after the 1921 and 1931 censuses. In the light of suchnew scholarship, it is hard to know what Dirks means whenhe speaks of “caste as we know it today” (p. 5), because thereappears to be no easily unified modern view of caste in thelate colonial archive and such singularity of perception iscertainly absent in postcolonial Indian society.

Another troubling aspect of the central argument ofCaste of Mind is its resolute focus on a critique of LouisDumont’s account of caste as a spiritually anchored, distinc-tively Indian example of more universal systems of socialhierarchy. The modern career of caste has received ample,contested treatment that Dirks may have more usefully de-bated in the current book. As Dipankar Gupta (2002) hasconsistently argued, castes in different historical periods,and in different polities, worked as discrete categories ca-pable of producing multiple hierarchies. This enabled theirinsertion, from the colonial period onward, into social con-

flicts around issues of hierarchy and issues of difference. Thelatter—ideas of difference expressed by caste—became moresalient to Indian political society in the 20th century.

Queries about the central theses of the book cannot,however, diminish the value of its vast scope, excellent writ-ing, and attractive synthesis of key arguments that Dirksand others inspired by Bernard Cohn have made about colo-nial social engineering and colonial discourse in India. Dirkscovers a lot of ground and does it deftly. It is useful to bereminded in one place of the vast documentation of socialhierarchy, and serious efforts at its maintenance, that thecolonial state undertook after the 1860s in India. Castes ofMind, in its methods and theoretical concerns, gives inter-esting meaning to the claim of conducting ethnography inthe archive.

But in the limited colonial ethnologists examined, andthe narrow range of writings scrutinized, Dirks appears tooverdetermine his argument. Colonial representative cate-gories were fractured precisely because the language of rep-resentation was discordant and constantly in the process ofredefinition. This language was partly an imperfect trans-lation of powerful native voices and partly the product ofarguments within the edifice of colonialism. Therefore, de-spite its sweep across the entire colonial period and all ofthe 20th century, Castes of Mind remains trapped in a set ofhistoricist assumptions that might overestimate the powerand ingenuity of colonial states. The Marathas and Mughalswere using enumeration and shaping identities, as SumitGuha (2003) notes, in precolonial north and western India.Dirks could have asked how colonial categories were shapedby these efforts. On the other hand, he pays inadequate at-tention to fundamental social ruptures caused by democ-ratization in India after 1950. Sunil Khilnani (1997) is butone of the eloquent commentators on this point, which, in-creasingly, the systematic study of election politics in Indiais revealing in all its fascinating variety.

These criticisms do not, however, stop me from highlyrecommending this book. In fact, I hope my arguments withCastes of Mind will entice many others to read the book fullyand carefully. I say this because the book will be influentialin graduate seminars and theoretical debates across anthro-pology, history, comparative politics, and cultural studiesfor many years. Scholars of South Asia and all those inter-ested in new approaches to the study of colonial encoun-ters will profit from reading it. We must, in the final analy-sis, thank Dirks for finishing, so elegantly, a much delayedbook.

REFERENCES CITEDGuha, Sumit

2003 The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(1):148–167.

Gupta, Dipankar2002 Interrogating Caste: Understanding Hierarchy and Differ-

ence in Indian Society. New Delhi: Penguin.Khilnani, Sunil

1997 The Idea of India. New Delhi: Penguin.

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Witness & Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. AnaDouglass and Thomas A. Vogler, eds. New York: Routledge,2003. 375 pp.

KELLY McKINNEYMcGill University

In the spring of 2004, images depicting naked, hooded,prone, stacked, and leashed Iraqi men at the hands of tri-umphantly grinning U.S. military men and women circu-lated across the globe, betraying the hidden violence thatis integral to U.S. participation in the “war against terror-ism.” The global public’s exposure to these images becamethe impetus for testimonies of witness from those whoexperienced firsthand the events portrayed in the photosand those who witnessed them in their various represen-tations. Whose and what kinds of testimony to these trau-matic events will hold the greatest truth value? What rhetor-ical tropes form, as well as signify, witness narratives thatare credible and legitimate? Who can have victim status?What are the contexts of the production and consumptionof these images? What will be the role of the images in con-structing memory and history? What is the relationship ofseeing to knowing?

Although these events occurred well after the publica-tion of Witness & Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, editedby two literature professors, Ana Douglass and Thomas A.Vogler, it is precisely this type of phenomenon and thesetypes of questions that the volume engages. The result is atheoretically sophisticated and significant contribution tocontemporary critical inquiry devoted to trauma, memory,and acts of witness. This collection problematizes witness-ing, memory, and trauma in relation to a diverse range of sit-uations, sources, and events. The authors attend to these is-sues through several different disciplinary perspectives thatinclude the following: literature, philosophy, cultural stud-ies, and anthropology. An outgrowth of two graduate semi-nars at Rutgers University over ten years ago (20th-CenturyPoetry and Anthropological Approaches to Poetry), the re-sulting collection consists of an excellent introduction bythe editors and ten essays.

Central to this collection is the claim by Douglass andVogler that in post-poststructuralist discourses, we are see-ing a return to the “event” from the more exclusive focuson the “text,” but that the historical “event” has been re-configured as the “traumatic event.” In this new discourse,the “traumatic” is conceived as that which is unapproach-able, elusive, and unavailable to direct observation yet atthe same time undeniably “real.” Thus, the chapters in thisvolume grapple with the relationship between the signifierand signified, or between representations and the “real” ob-ject or event, without presupposing that the real is antici-pated, transparent, or immediately accessible (pp. 4–5). Foranthropologists who would rather not theoretically engagein such conversations and would prefer, instead, to proceedin their research without questioning the status of the real(whether that be history, experience, the body, etc.), many

chapters in this collection might be considered irrelevant or,worse yet, maddeningly poststructuralist or literary. I wouldnot fault the book on this basis except to say that the backcover categorization of the book as cultural studies and an-thropology is somewhat misleading: It is more informedby literature, philosophy, and cultural studies than byanthropology.

With that said, the introduction to Witness & Memory(at 53 pages) is impressive for its presentation of the cur-rent state of both popular and academic witness and traumadiscourses. Douglass and Vogler provide a comprehensivemapping of these discourses while their original insightsand contributions take witness and trauma studies to a newlevel. This introduction should become indispensable read-ing for scholars, including anthropologists, interested inthese topics. Douglass’s chapter on Rigoberta Menchu’s testi-monio, Joseba Zulaika’s chapter on his relationship to mem-bers of the Basque terrorist group ETA, and Kyo MacLear’sanalysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour are not only strong but alsomay hold special appeal for anthropologists, whereas KarynBall’s fiercely rigorous and intelligent chapter on Auschwitzand Lyotard, or Vogler’s accomplished chapter on poetryand witness, may be less appealing because of their subjectmatter and disciplinary approaches. Cindy Patton’s chap-ter on the obfuscation of gender by race during the O. J.Simpson trial analyzes a complex and difficult issue butis off-putting because of its strident tone, repetition, andother excesses of style. A chapter by William Douglass onTheodore Roosevelt and Claude Levi-Strauss, although writ-ten by and about an anthropologist, is one of the weakestchapters in the collection, theoretically and because the or-ganizing themes of the volume have negligible bearing onthe discussion.

With accurate expectations about the general disci-plinary focus of this book, anthropologists interested in itsthemes or in the anthropology of literature or visual culturewill find this collection challenging and valuable.

Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture. BurtFeintuch, ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003.237 pp.

KIRIN NARAYANUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison

All anthropologists interested in expressive culture will findthis book useful. This is an expansion and update of a spe-cial issue of the Journal of American Folklore published un-der the editorship of Burt Feintuch in 1995. That issue, likethis book, aimed to stake out common ground for ongo-ing conversations about expressive culture by identifyingkeywords. In each case, authors delve into the history of atheoretical term while also exploring how it might be recon-ceptualized to fit such contemporary contexts as flexibleaccumulation, the movements of people, fraught identitypolitics, or the expressive potentials of new technologies.


The keywords are group, art, text, genre, perfor-mance, context, tradition, and identity. In his introduc-tion, Feintuch points out that these words cluster togetheraround “creative expression in its social contexts” (p. 1) andare variously used in academic discourse, by public sectoragencies, and also in everyday conversations. The inher-ently interdisciplinary nature of folklore scholarship (andthe practical need for multiple disciplinary identities thattoday’s folklorists must cultivate) means that the discussionof each keyword also resonates across a range of disciplines.

The crown jewel in this collection is the openingchapter on “group” by Dorothy Noyes. In this confidentand often playful essay, Noyes reminds us of the “classist,racist and antimodern” associations around the categoryof “folk” (p. 11) and deftly summarizes diverse argumentsthat wrestle against such limiting associations in 20th-century folklore scholarship. Folklore’s comparative tradi-tion of tracing texts across far-flung spaces, she argues,“presupposes a network model, with individuals and ge-ographic communities as nexuses in a variety of relation-ships and social ties” (p. 15). Noyes goes on to draw onUlf Hannerz’s theorization of social networks in the globalecumene, showing how his delineation of segregated, in-tegrated, and encapsulated networks provides different so-cial grounds for the transmission of expressive practices.In counterpoint to empirical networks, Noyes also empha-sizes the importance of community as an imagined, shiftingconstruct that emerges partly from experiences of sharedperformance. I found this chapter wonderfully stimulating,opening out new ways to conceptualize complex transcul-tural movements and varying social impacts of expressiveculture in the 21st century.

The collection closes with a masterfully wide-rangingand bracing chapter by Roger Abrahams on identity, writtenespecially for this volume. Here Abrahams distills insightsgathered in the course of his long and illustrious scholarlycareer; each paragraph, it seems, might almost be unpackedinto its own provocative chapter. In less than 20 pages,Abrahams reflects on identity as mobilized in a range of dis-ciplinary contexts, historical moments, and contemporarypolitical conflicts. He critiques the notion of “wholeness”invoked by identity, calls into question the liberal traditionof perceiving identity as choice, and exhorts scholars to bemore cognizant of how market forces manipulate identity,as well as our own engagements with it.

Arranged between the contributions by Noyes andAbrahams is a range of other rewarding essays. Standingbeside Abrahams as titans in the field are Jeff Todd Titon,writing on “text” (including a fascinating, timely discus-sion on the possibilities of hypertext) and Henry Glassieon “tradition,” eloquently construed as “the missing piecenecessary to the success of a cultural history that wouldbring anthropology and history, with folklore as the me-diating agent, into productive alliance” (p. 181). Furtherinsights are articulated by Gerald Pocius on art as product,process, and behavior and Trudier Harris-Lopez on “genre”as “the springboard for connecting folklore studies to sev-

eral disciplines that emphasize the linguistic constructed-ness of all forms of discourse” (p. 126). Deborah Kapchanprovides a masterful overview of “performance” in its mul-tifaceted interdisciplinary complexity, including ethnogra-phy itself as a performative act. Mary Hufford, in an illu-minating discussion of “context,” points out that althoughearly folklorists tended to contextualize expressive culturewithin narratives of the nation-state, there is a contempo-rary urgency to look beyond the nation-state, spelling outthe contexts of expressive culture within global flows ofcapital and related frameworks of power.

Whether turned to for a quick overview, like areference book, or mulled through for more extendedengagement with particular theoretical positions, this vol-ume is a stimulating resource to draw from again and again.

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.Michael M. J. Fischer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2004. 496 pp.

PAUL RABINOWUniversity of California at Berkeley

Michael M. J. Fischer’s collection of essays exuberantly cutsa wide swath through a vast and labyrinthine literature oncinema, pedagogy, autobiography, computers, molecular bi-ology, museum studies, wood block prints, the AIDS epi-demic, and much more. Fischer has clearly spent the lastdecade or more assiduously and ardently reading, visiting,looking, viewing, talking, listening, writing, lecturing (thevenue for a number of the chapters), and above all, teach-ing. He leads us through a congeries of sites found in diversegeographical locations, largely in the present or recent past.Different readers will be taken by different things in thisrich collection—some by Polish cinema, others by a physi-cian’s woodcuts and the AIDS epidemic they refract andreflect on, others by meditations and brainstorms on cy-berspace, and still others on debates about the Yanomamiand how anthropologists of different stripes have treatedthem. As Fischer follows his unbridled curiosity where itleads him, it is no surprise that there is no fixed positionfrom which he proceeds any more than there is a singletheoretical perspective—indeed, one can sense that suchan attempt would feel quite stifling or disciplining to sucha free-wheeling spirit. Fischer has been navigating adroitlywith great force and urgency through a whole set of inter-locking discourses and practices; the interest and passionthat he brings to his very eclectic approach is tangible.

This collection of essays is not about a research agenda,the results of his own ethnographic work, or sustained the-oretical reflection. Rather, it soon becomes clear that Fischerhas spent the bulk of the 1990s contributing with body andsoul to the construction of an ambitious pedagogy. Thispedagogy—or the dream of pedagogy—is a very specificone wrought for a very specific site—the Science and Tech-nology Studies (STS) program at MIT. To my mind the col-lection’s distinctive contribution lies there. In 1993, when

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Fischer moved from Rice University, where he was an activecontributor to the anthropology department and its pi-oneering ethnographic cultural critique and the CulturalStudies Center, to the STS program at MIT, he had muchto learn. And learn he did. It was the voracious explorationof a sprawling terrain of diverse and ramifying knowledgesites (and the practitioners who created and inhabit them)that captured Fischer’s imagination and drew his energy.Fischer’s mode of taking up the material is rapid-paced, syn-thetic if open-ended, and self-consciously presentational.The challenge was how to create a new pedagogy at a placelike MIT (dominated as it is by engineers and natural sci-entists) that would build bridges, open avenues of com-munication, make possible new forms of interdisciplinarywork, and provide a space for unexpected hybrids: One thatcould warp and weave the skills and sentiments of youngengineers with those of film studies, fledgling anthropol-ogists with computer scientists, textual deconstructionistswith protein chemists. And perhaps, as unlikely and chal-lenging as any of those joinings would be to bring Derrideanhumanities people together with “writing culture” ethnog-raphers and feminist historians of science.

In a long central essay, Fischer presents a series of suc-cessive plans for a core course and a challenging series ofassociated modules that explore linked topics from bacteri-ology to cinematic cutting techniques. The chapter, as thisgives a taste of the high vernacular that Fischer prefers, iscalled “Calling the Future (s): Delay Call Forwarding,” and isdivided into two parts: “I. Las Meninas and Robotic-VirtualSurgical Systems: The Visual Thread/Fiber-Optic Carrier,”and “II. Modules for a Science, Technology, and SocietyCurriculum: STS@the Turn . . . [ ] 000.mit.edu.” These planscould well serve as a source book for advanced curricularprojects elsewhere.

The journey is an exhilarating one, and from theoutside one must wonder how it worked out. Clearly noteverything or everybody was aboard and, the connectionsmade were undoubtedly often no more than partial. Thenitty-gritty of the academic politics is glided over in thewhirl of metaphoric tripping from topic to topic, fieldto field, genre to genre, science to science, text to text,image to image, and all the possible combinations one canimagine that hold between and amongst them. Whateverhappened at MIT, there is much to learn from, and to savor,in Fischer’s contributions to that extended moment.

An Archaeological Study of Rural Capitalism andMaterial Life: The Gibbs Farmstead in Southern Ap-palachia, 1790–1920. Mark D. Groover. New York: KluwerAcademic/Plenum Publishers, 2003. 320 pp.

ELVIN HATCHUniversity of California

Recent research on 19th-century southern Appalachia hasproduced a rich body of literature with significant theoreti-cal implications, and Groover’s book is an important addi-

tion to the dialogue. It is the study of a farm near Knoxville,Tennessee, which was owned by the same family for severalgenerations; the research focuses chiefly on the period from1792, when the farm was established, to 1913. The studydraws on a variety of sources, including (among others) un-published census schedules, published census data, probateand tax records, and archaeological research. Most of thearchaeological work was conducted as part of an ongoingfield school at the University of Tennessee. The empiricalbasis of the study is excellent.

Groover describes the book as a case study of rural cap-italism: The farmers were surplus producers who were en-gaged in the commercial sale of farm products, and theydemonstrate the penetration of the world economy intothis part of the United States. During the 19th century, theKnoxville region was developing into a significant commer-cial center with transportation links to both the northeastand the south. The farm that Groover studied—the Gibbs’sfarm—marketed several agricultural products but mostly to-bacco and wool. They did not focus exclusively on com-mercial farming: They also produced most of what theyconsumed, and their livestock were fed from the farm. TheGibbs, like most of their rural neighbors, combined subsis-tence and commercial farming, and Groover estimates thatthe proportion was roughly 50/50. It is, however, possibleto argue that his calculations lead him to overestimate thecommercial side of the farm’s operation.

Groover’s study makes it clear that the Gibbs house-holds were oriented toward profits, and this leads him tothe theoretical conclusions mentioned above. Historiansof the 19th-century mountain South are divided on a keyquestion. Some argue that, by and large, subsistence farm-ers were interested in making money and in becoming partof the capitalist system, but that their opportunities for do-ing so were limited chiefly by a lack of capital and trans-portation. By this interpretation, development in the regioncame about when wealthier and more powerful owners ofcapital, primarily from outside, overwhelmed the local peo-ple. The conflicts that became so prominent in this part ofthe United States at the time were a product of competingeconomic interests. On the other side are those who arguethat a nonmarket orientation prevailed among subsistencefarmers, an orientation that emphasized barter and labor ex-changes, cooperation, and a form of egalitarianism. Fromthis perspective, local farmers were guided by a body ofmoral beliefs that placed them in opposition to the individ-ualistic, competitive, and acquisition-driven, commerciallyoriented capitalism. The conflicts that developed in the re-gion, using this viewpoint, were as much a result of incom-patible moral beliefs as competing economic interests. Thesubsistence farmers became the object not only of economicbut also cultural domination by “progressive” elements thatsought to civilize what were perceived as backward people.

Groover’s analysis seems to support those who see sub-sistence farmers in the 19th-century mountain South as pre-disposed toward capitalism and acquisitiveness, but his ev-idence offers even stronger support for the other side of the


debate. The Gibbs were interested in making money, butwere they oriented toward the accumulation of wealth asan end in itself? Was money a measure of social and per-sonal worth, and its pursuit a significant life goal? Groovermakes a strong case that the point of commercial trans-actions for the Gibbs, rather, was to acquire farmland forthe next generation. These were large households, and un-less they acquired progressively more land they would beleft without enough to provide for themselves. The Gibbs’spursuit of profits suggests a cultural orientation toward pre-serving their subsistence way of life, not toward the accu-mulation of wealth.

Put differently, the Gibbs may be viewed not as market-oriented protocapitalists but, rather, as subsistence farm-ers for whom market transactions were an adjunct. Thisdistinction is key to understanding the social, economic,and political dynamics, including the class structure, of themountain South, and it is central for understanding the in-fluence of the world system in this region. To what extentdid global market forces drive the regional economy duringmost of the 19th century? Groover’s evidence suggests thatthe world system was less important for many families thanhe contends.

Groover presents data on the Gibbs’s consumerism,which is relevant to this question. He shows that althoughthe Gibbs bought commercial goods, such as kitchenware,they were conservative in their purchases: Their emphasiswas on the utilitarian, which again suggests a culturalorientation toward subsistence farming rather than towardacquisitiveness.

The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the SlaveTrade. Robert Harms. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 466 pp.

SIDNEY MINTZJohns Hopkins University

The immense agroindustrial systems of commodity produc-tion that were created by Europe in the New World tropicsrested for centuries on enslaved African labor. That laborsupply was sustained by the slave trade, conducted eitherthrough semimonopolistic commercial companies, com-missioned and protected by the state, or through privateundertakings. Like the plantations whose labor the Africanssupplied, and like the sugar, rum, molasses, cocoa, coffee,cotton, and other commodities that labor produced, theslave trade was big business and, for the most part, consid-ered quite a respectable (if somewhat deplorable) businessin its time.

This book is based on the journal of a second officer on aslaving ship, although Robert Harms, historian and author,goes far, far beyond the journal itself in crafting his story. Inthe first pages of The Diligent, he describes how the journalon which the book is based was acquired (by Yale’s BeineckeRare Book Library), and how its authenticity was verified.Written by the Diligent’s second officer, it provides consid-erable detail (and some simple sketches) of the voyage and

its circumstances. It figures among the relatively rare ship-board eyewitness sources available for the study of slaving.Harms is entirely aware that a single voyage, no matter howcarefully documented, cannot represent the history of slav-ing: “The voyage of the Diligent was only one of the approx-imately forty thousand slaving voyages that forcibly carriedoff more than 11 million captives from the shores of Africaduring the course of four centuries” (p. xiv).

In his efforts to uncover the slave trade for his readers,Harms seeks to think outward from that single voyage tothe enormous canvas on which the voyage was ultimatelypainted. The story stretches from the obscure Breton coastaltown of Vannes, where the voyage begins; to Africa, wherethe “ebony logs” are boarded; to Martinique, where theyare sold; and back to France, where the story ends, grimly.

The author’s larger ambitions occupy 47 brief chapters,organized into 12 parts and an afterword. In these manyseparate beginnings, the threads that link a single voyage tothe social, political, religious, and economic life of Europe,Africa, and the New World are drawn out of the complexfabric in which they are embedded. In this way, the readercan see above and beyond the sailors, slave traders, and en-slaved to the capitalists, politicians, and theologians whosedecisions modulated and informed their actions.

Nearly every chapter provides a link. When Mme.Villeneuve brings her slave Pauline to France, where sheis to be educated at the Convent of Our Lady of Calvary,neither of them could know that the young slave’s decisionto become a nun would one day raise important questionsfor the French state concerning slavery, property, and citi-zenship. Similarly, when the Diligent sails down the Africancoast in search of its cargo, none of its officers could predictthat King Agaja’s war against the slave entrepot of Whydahmarked the growing strength of African rulers to operatewithout European sponsorship in the acquisition and saleof others.

Harms is zealous in his pursuit of detail. WhenSecond Captain Durand undertakes to determine the lati-tude of the Diligent by calculating the declination of the sun,the reader gets a one-page course in celestial navigation.When there are stops at Principe and Sao Tome, the readerlearns about race relations, internecine religious struggles,and the destruction of Sao Tome’s sugar industry. It is asmuch as anyone might wish to know about the functionalrelationships of slaving commerce to the many societies inwhich it flourished—and, perhaps, even a bit more.

Within the rich picture that the author provides, thetrip itself tends to lose some of its significance—not forlack of detail, but because there is so much beyond it thatdemands the reader’s attention. The aim of encompassingthe immediate and everyday in the life of captors andcaptives, while linking their fates to far larger and infinitelymore powerful forces, is estimable and has the salutaryeffect of making the reader lift his eyes mentally. But justas this work makes abundantly clear the great efforts ofits author, it is not an easy task for the reader because theback and forth of the larger chronicle requires considerable

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refocussing. This is an illuminating book, and a difficultbut rewarding read. In this book, readers are providedwith a close-up view of a single slaving expedition. Butone gets to the expedition itself only after the authorenables us to see the local, regional, and national factorsat work in making such undertakings possible (and usuallyprofitable).

West Indian in the West: Self Representations in anImmigrant Community. Percy C. Hintzen. New York: NewYork University Press, 2001. 201 pp.

COLLEEN BALLERINO COHENVassar College

With West Indian in the West: Self Representations in an Im-migrant Community, Percy C. Hintzen adds important mate-rial to studies of the Caribbean diaspora. Focusing princi-pally on the individual experiences of West Indians livingin the San Francisco Bay Area, Hintzen illuminates the com-plex means by which West Indian immigrants to northernCalifornia build and maintain their identities. In particu-lar, Hintzen demonstrates how racism, idealized images ofthe West Indies, and their own sense of foreignness shapethe way West Indian immigrants come to understand andrepresent themselves. Although most West Indian immi-grants to the United States live in spatially defined ethnicenclaves in New York City and Miami, the West Indianswhose lives are treated in this book are dispersed through-out the Bay Area. This, Hintzen suggests, presents a uniquechallenge. Lacking the political and social support of a co-herent and visible ethnic community, West Indians livingin the Bay Area are impelled to seek the political and so-cioeconomic benefits of affiliation with African Americans,even as they strive to distinguish themselves from that com-munity by playing up images of West Indians as a modelminority.

Hintzen’s book is based on participant observation,intensive interviews, and his own experience as a WestIndian in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first several chap-ters provide useful historical background on West Indianmigration and detail the central role of Caribbean festival,music, and food in public performances and individual rep-resentations of West Indian identity. Of particular interestto students of Caribbean festival is Hintzen’s discussion ofthe San Francisco Carnival, with its origins in white idealiza-tions of an exotic Caribbean and its function as a conduitfor multiethnic affiliation. Although Hintzen’s discussionof the strategic and public display of Caribbean culture em-ployed by West Indian immigrants tends to homogenizeWest Indian experience, I take this to be a factor of dealingwith a dispersed population, rather than of his scholarlysensibility. When Hintzen turns to the discussion of the ne-gotiations that individual West Indian immigrants under-take to formulate their identity and status, he reveals a keenand sensitive ethnographic eye.

The chapters detailing individual experiences of WestIndian immigrants to the Bay Area are the heart of the book.They are also the sections in which Hintzen makes the mostoriginal and important contribution. In these chapters,Hintzen uses rich and extensive interview material toshow the particular ways that individuals manage theiridentities as West Indian immigrants and U.S. residents.The individuals whose lives Hintzen describes vary by class,gender, migration and family history, and occupation; asa consequence, we see the multiple and complex factorsthat contribute to individuals’ maintenance or rejection ofa West Indian identity. As crucially, Hintzen brings to lightthe intricate and vexed relation of West Indians to AfricanAmericans and demonstrates that it is only against thebackdrop of the racialized social order of the United Statesthat the nature of West Indian experiences and identitiesin northern California can be fully appreciated.

A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mex-ican Transnational Families. Jennifer S. Hirsch. Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003. 376 pp.

LEIGH BINFORDBenemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla

This precise, finely crafted piece of ethnography treats thesexual and reproductive behavior of Mexican women resid-ing either in Mexico or in the United States at the time of theinvestigation. Jennifer S. Hirsch documents a generationaltransformation from heterosexual relationships based on“respect” (respeto) to those based on “trust” (confianza).She examines in considerable detail the consequences andcomplications of this transformation in the domains ofcourtship, marriage, sexuality, and fertility. A considerablestrength is Hirsch’s effort to distance herself from unilinealschemes that treat the companionate marriage ideal as in-dicative either of the move from tradition to modernity, oras representative of the individualist-based Western model.Hirsch notes how many Mexican women creatively com-bine elements of respect- and trust-based relationships inwhat might be thought of as the active transformation of“a globally available ideology into the specifically Mexicancompanionate marriage” (p. 271).

Hirsch works with and through an innovative method-ology involving the “pairing” of 13 migrant females re-siding in Atlanta, Georgia, with nonmigrant counterpartsin Degollago, Jalisco, and El Fuerte, Michoacan, two ruraltowns in Mexico’s historic migration zone. The meaningsof courtship, marriage, sexuality, and love were approachedthrough six semistructured life history interviews with eachof these 26 informants, ranging from discussion of “child-hood and family” (the first interview) to “dating, mar-riage, and sexuality” (the sixth). The pairing strategy, whichHirsch refers to as a “more systematized version of the snow-ball method” (p. 33), offers a degree of generalization notusually available with small-sample research, because each


U.S.-dwelling informant had a Mexican-dwelling, nonmi-grating counterpart close to her in age, marital and employ-ment experience, and family background.

Hirsch’s refusal to treat migration as the “deciding fac-tor” in the adoption or development of the companionatemarriage model, and to recognize that Mexican villagelife has not been stagnating during the last three decades,stands as one of the book’s strengths and provides an im-portant corrective to a body of migration literature thatseeks the root of most Mexican cultural change—especiallywhere women are concerned—north of the border. “Mexicois a moving target,” she notes, “and those very values thatare so often cast as traditional, in contrast to the modernUnited States, are in fact highly contested and in the pro-cess of profound transformation” (p. 208). Apart from mi-gration, then, changes in schooling, mass media, and theage at marriage “have had an important impact on Mexicansexual culture” (p. 82). If (some) Mexican migrant womenin the United States have an advantage, it pertains less totheir conceptions about gendered relationships and more toa greater potential—deriving from greater institutional pro-tections and economic opportunities—to successfully nego-tiate with their spouses.

Companionate marriages remains just as socially con-structed as respect-based marriages, which is to say thatthey should not be conceived as “liberating” in any gen-eral, ahistorical sense. Rather, they represent different waysin which women and men struggle over and perform genderinequalities. They are forms of relations that, even as theyoffer women the prospect of greater emotional pleasure,may also be more fragile, because men who have boughtinto the companionate ideal may feel justified in breakingoff a relationship that no longer provides the high level ofemotional satisfaction that they had come to expect.

I found the nuanced description and analysis of com-panionate marriage both thoughtful and convincing. Butthe book would have been better had the author providedmore than a cursory treatment of the social and historicalcontext of the Mexican sending communities. Given thelong history of U.S. migration from western Mexico, andthe large numbers of return migrants, migration-based and“indigenous” changes are not easily disentangled. AlthoughI think that Hirsch is probably correct in most of her claimsregarding the “causes” of the development and spread of theMexican version of the companionate ideal, her hypothesesmerit further examination in areas where migratory move-ments to the United States “massified” only during the last15 years.

This minor criticism aside, A Courtship after Marriageis an important contribution to the literature on transna-tional families and communities, and should inspire morepeople to critically examine hegemonic (heterosexual)models of sexuality and conjugal relations. Both the care-fully crafted methodology, as well as Hirsch’s reflectionson her social positioning and its effects on the results ofthe research, will prove useful for anthropologists of alllevels.

Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion. William Jankowiakand Daniel Bradburd, eds. Tucson: University of ArizonaPress, 2003. 235 pp.

PAUL GOOTENBERGStony Brook University

This engaging volume addresses the growing interest of his-torians, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars inboth colonialism (sparked by “post”-colonial theory andby resurgent empire) and the increasingly respectable andglobal interdisciplinary study of “drug-foods” (a field firstsown in the 1980s by anthropologist Sidney Mintz). It ishigh time—all puns aside—that the history of colonialismand drugs met. The book is a collective empirical elabo-ration of the editors’ 1996 ethnographic survey, which ar-gued that such substances—tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, coca,mate, and the like—served colonialism well, in terms of en-hancing exploitable labor practices and productivity amongnewly colonized peoples. It is a needed complement toglobal yet Eurocentric works that underscore the role playedby novel stimulant goods in European expansion, in the riseof capitalist culture, state building, and long-distance com-modity networks (especially Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s 1987Tastes of Paradise and David Courtwright’s newer synthesisForces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World).In this volume the impact on colonials is accented.

The book opens with a fine introduction to drugsand labor themes, exploring the myriad ways drug-foodssmoothed the way for colonialism: They were taken forconsoling and escapism, as well as for focusing work andcombating fatigue. Subsequent case studies (tobacco in Abo-riginal Australia or Papua New Guinea) show how theseplant commodities entered into native exchange, help-ing to mobilize new labor forms (sometimes by debt) andtastes (sometimes compulsively). Charles Ambler’s overviewof alcohol and the African slave trade sees the agency,rather than duplicity, of Africans seeking hard drink; sim-ilarly, a brief survey of spirits in the North American furtrade contests stereotypes of destructive genetic drunk-enness. Michael V. Angrosino’s contribution on rum and“ganja” in Trinidad fascinates with the cultural counter-point and conflict between these two intoxicants. An es-say on Namibia concerns the shaping of colonial states andidentities worked by good local lager; in Botswana, a kin andgender colonialist mixed economy was lubricated by alco-hol. A survey on earlier colonial coca in the Andes outlinesits shift from an indirect incentive to labor (mediated byayllus) to a direct stimulant (in Spanish-induced commer-cialism and wage labor). E. N. Anderson’s comparative lookat “Caffeine and Culture”—in coffee, tea, chocolate, colas,yerba mate, guarana—unpacks the world’s most ubiquitousand commodified of drugs, not only its alienated side butalso caffeine’s ability to inspire sociability and culture. Thebook ends on an editors’ summary of “New Directions” forstudy of drugs in work and trade and on the open questionof how drugs are and are not like other commodities.

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A few caveats: Readers may wonder, with so much hereon alcohol and tobacco, about other substances, such asopium, given its pivotal role opening colonial venturesthroughout Asia. The divided voices of colonial officials(with all their biases) are still heard over the quieter sub-altern laborer, a perennial dilemma in colonial histories.I was mostly perplexed by how “drugs” are conceived. Attimes, contributors fall into “addiction” discourse or whatsome drug specialists would critique as the “pharmococen-tric” fallacy—commonsense notions of drugs as chemicaldeterminants. Biochemistry aside, historically and ethno-graphically drugs have revealed themselves in an amaz-ingly changeable array of uses, social meanings, and sen-sations for body and mind, influenced by their cultural “setand settings.” For an anthropological survey, such social orcultural “constructivism” seems oddly downplayed for theconventional model—that alkaloids trap their victims andwork predictable physical effects (i.e., stimulating harder la-bor). Certainly this makes for a stronger central argument—that drug foods proved directly “functional” to Westerncolonialism—but that kind of functionalism is belied by thecomplexity and nuance of the case studies themselves. Howto explain, taking an obvious example, why cannabis wouldbe labor inducing in one cultural setting and a worrisomedistraction from work discipline in others? It also meanswe lose alternative or inner meanings of drug-food encoun-ters and experiences. In the perennial seesaw between struc-ture and culture, this book is mainly a Wallerstein, not aSahlins.

The next wave of studies will likely trace the discursivefeedback between drugs across metropole and periphery—how 19th century colonialism ultimately helped producea paradoxical Western promotion, revulsion, and then re-striction of certain drugs over others. This book, quibblesaside, is a fine contribution to historical anthropology andthe emerging field of drug history.

REFERENCES CITEDJankowiak, William, and Daniel Bradburd

1996 Using Drug Foods to Capture and Enhance Labor Perfor-mance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Current Anthropology37(4):717–720.

Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropolo-gies. Bruce M. Knauft, ed. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 2002. 329 pp.

HARRI ENGLUNDUniversity of Cambridge

The theoretical multiplication of modernities, conspicuousin the sociocultural anthropology of the past decade, en-counters refreshing irony and dissent in this volume. BruceKnauft describes his frustrations at the dawn of the newmillennium, when multiple, alternative, and vernacularmodernities were all the rage. Harboring a common desireto blaze a trail, he found his efforts to organize researchproposals and conference sessions around these themes du-

plicated, as it were, by countless peers. Donald Donhamsuggests a further irony. To invoke modernity, he observes,is to place oneself within a “supposed theoretical avant-garde” (p. 241), a quest for newness that is itself a productof the desire to be modern. Jonathan Friedman makes hay ofcurrent anthropologists’ nervousness about cultural conti-nuities and identifies in the notion of multiple modernitiesa “politically correct approach to difference” (p. 302). Theseand other ironies receive serious analysis in this collec-tion of chapters on, among other things, money, commodi-ties, evangelical Christianity, development discourses, radiobroadcasting, slave identities, capitalism, and revolution.The chapters indicate progress, to use a modernist notion,in the study of modernities: An enhanced self-awarenessamong their authors, evident in their misgivings about theassumed equality of the world’s modernities, and in theirquestioning of whether the desire to be modern is more ap-parent than real. What such concerns reveal are intensifyingdisagreements about the referents and utility of modernityas a concept.

Despite their shared propensity to reflexivity, the con-tributors do not write in one voice. Some seem preparedto discard “modernity” as an analytical notion, others tryto pin it down to specific historical conjunctures, and stillothers pursue the paradigm of multiple modernities with re-newed vigor. Holly Wardlow, for example, suggests that thegendered patterns of production and consumption amongthe Huli of Papua New Guinea make women and men“very differently modern subjects” (p. 163). Her argument,stressing each modernity’s requirement of “internal others”(p. 163), seems perfectly defensible within the paradigm,and one can already foresee the next step. Further decon-structions of “women” and “men” will make modernitiesmultiply like individuals; if not as individuals, then sepa-rate entities in interaction.

Several chapters seek to make the study of modernitiesmore responsive to the challenges of cross-cultural compari-son, notably Donham’s on capitalist history, Robert Foster’son trust relations, Lisa Rofel’s on gender, and Debra Spitul-nik’s on language use. All these efforts are laudable, but insome cases an unreflexive distinction between theory andethnography confines the authors’ insights. An example isFoster’s use of Anthony Giddens’s concepts of “distancia-tion,” “disembedding,” and “reembedding.” They are saidto facilitate Foster’s quest for “an explicit theory of moder-nity” (p. 75) that would make sense of a wide range of ethno-graphic cases. Despite a promise to “pluralize Giddens”(p. 65), it is Papua New Guinean realities that appear as plu-ral and particular. Thus, for example, Papua New Guineans’interests in the moral obligations of the modern state be-come particular instances of a metropolitan theorist’s con-structs, not elements of an alternative theory. The theoret-ical import of ethnography is circumscribed by its status asillustration.

More consistent insights can be found in the gemof this collection, Spitulnik’s thoughtful exposition ofthe use and abuse of linguistic evidence in ethnography.


More irony emerges when she notes how the academicfascination with the discourses of modernity has actuallyyielded little examination of naturally occurring language.A handful of vernacular terms have often been reified askey concepts, their multifunctional uses thereby obscured.Through an ethnographic and linguistic analysis of hermaterials from Zambia, Spitulnik shows not only how theidea of being modern is polyvalent but also how someconnotations cherished by social scientists, such as culturalhybridity, may not be lexically recognized at all. Her chal-lenge to the transparency of language demonstrates how itis only through a proper command of relevant linguisticpractices that the actual limits of linguistic evidence canbe established. Indeed, linguistic competence used to bea sine qua non for ethnographic fieldwork. If the notionof multiple modernities is now implicated in reifyingvernacular terms, does it also facilitate a modernist breakwith the past in ethnographers’ knowledge production?

Post-Socialist Peasant? Rural and Urban Constructionsof Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the FormerSoviet Union. Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff, eds.New York: Palgrave, 2002. 225 pp.

SUAVA ZBIERSKI -SALAMEHHaverford College

What does peasant mean in the modern world? This is atwo-pronged question examined in this important volumeedited by Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff. First, the col-lection aims to explore the formation of peasant identityin the aftermath of the postsocialist reforms of the 1990s.Second, based on theoretical insights gained within thepostsocialist “periphery,” the authors aim to expand con-ceptions of peasantry within “core” peasant literature. Thebook draws from countries in Eastern Europe, the formerSoviet Union, and Asia that share a socialist past and thefuture objectives of constructing an economy based on mar-kets and private property.

The editors problematize dominant conceptions ofpeasantry as intellectuals’ constructions of a rural “other.”Leonard and Kaneff assert that for both socialist and capital-ist thinkers, the term peasant derives from their respectivemacrolevel Enlightenment ideas about modernity. Froma Marxist–Leninist perspective, peasants’ small propertiesconstituted a major obstacle to the historic necessity of cre-ating socialism. For Western intellectuals, the “ruralness” ofpeasants was the antithesis of progress based on rationaliza-tion and industrialization. The authors posit that these twomodels of development impute backwardness to the peas-antry, characterizing them as an inherently insular forceoperating against the mainstream of history. An alternativeperspective advanced by Western political economists de-clares peasants to be individualistic economic agents, notdistinct from other capitalist players.

Rejecting either an inherent conservatism or utilitar-ian drive for economic gain as the peasantry’s univer-

sal attributes, the authors propose a constructivist per-spective to analyze the postsocialist peasants. Within it,the peasant world is explored in its totality on the mi-crolevel, rather than being assessed against the macrolevelblueprints of progress espoused by (urban) others. Thepeasantry in this collection denotes historically specific,proactive agents who orient their actions to complex lifecircumstances.

How well does the book access the postsocialist real-ity using this new concept of the peasantry? The collectivepicture emerging from these chapters portrays vast num-bers of rural and urban households involved in subsistence-oriented agriculture. Humphrey terms this developmentthe “peasantization” of everyday life. Many of the chapters(Czegledy, Humphrey, Perrotta) document collective mem-bers’ resistance to postsocialist decollectivization and theincreased cultivation of auxiliary plots for personal con-sumption. These practices run counter to the postsocialistreformers’ objectives of privatized and commercialized agri-culture. The picture appears less clear once the editors ex-plore the motives for the specific practices of those engagedin farming and their identities. Consistent with the con-structivist perspective, people employ divergent strategies,and their motives for specific agricultural practices cannotbe reduced to economic ones. However, the pattern of ap-plied strategies and of identity formation appears so widelydiversified that the editors openly concede that, in the post-socialist context, the term peasant “conceals more than itreveals” (p. 33).

I think that we could overcome such a disappoint-ing conclusion if we broaden the editors’ explicit analyt-ical critique to match the collection’s descriptive analyses.Although the editors challenge the core literature’s asser-tions about the peasantry’s backwardness, they leave un-examined presuppositions about objective delineation ofthe peasantry by rural–urban and agricultural–industrial di-vides. Yet, the major contribution of the chapters revealshow the postsocialist actors engaged in farming are dis-persed at both ends of these divides. Under the term peas-ant, the collection includes postsocialist industrial workers,state officials, and intellectuals cultivating their small agri-cultural plots, in addition to the full-time members of agri-cultural production collectives. These individuals’ diverselinks to land and to subsistence agriculture were formedduring advancing industrialization. Because of their intri-cate and diverse ties to an urban-based industrial economyand society, the postsocialist actors depicted in the collec-tion are “peasants no more” (Lopreato 1967), either in theirobjective characteristics or in their identities. Rather, theyare “post-peasants” (Geertz 1962:5).

Thus, the book achieves more than it claims. The au-thors’ analytical and descriptive analyses challenge the tra-ditional notion of peasantry in its subjective and objectivedimensions. By revealing the diverse structural locationsof the actors engaged in the postsocialist agriculture, thebook prompts the conclusion that the multiplicity of theirpractices and identities is not inexplicable but must be

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mediated by reference to systemic features of the realexisting socialism. With that, the book hints at a big-ger project—an analysis of socialism as an impetus ofpostsocialist transformations. This, in turn, problematizesthe postsocialist reformers and intellectuals’ claims aboutthe universalism of capitalist development in the modernworld.

REFERENCES CITEDLopreato, Joseph

1967 Peasants No More: Social Class and Social Change in anUnderdeveloped Society. San Francisco: Chandler.

Geertz, Clifford1962 Studies in Peasant Life: Community and Society. In Bien-

nial Review of Anthropology. B. Siegel, ed. Pp. 1–42. Stanford:Stanford University Press.

Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay An-thropology. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, eds. Cham-paign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 329 pp.

TOM BOELLSTORFFUniversity of California, Irvine

In their introductory chapter, the editors of Out in Theory sit-uate this compelling volume in a climate of disciplinary re-flection. In this atmosphere, attention to the theoretical andmethodological conditions of ethnographic production isidentified as a key precondition to further advances in an-thropological inquiry. Taken as a whole, this volume seeksboth to contribute to this ethos of disciplinary reflectionin lesbian and gay anthropology and to identify ways inwhich lesbian and gay anthropology can contribute to dis-ciplinary reflection more generally. A well organized andrich collection, this volume should sit on every anthropol-ogist’s shelf as an important reference and would be appro-priate for a range of graduate and undergraduate courses,including ones in lesbian and gay anthropology, the an-thropology of gender and sexuality, and anthropologicaltheory.

A tone of productively and generously critical engage-ment runs throughout the eleven chapters of this volume;although the book’s subtitle refers to the emergence of “les-bian and gay anthropology” (a moniker that, following theeditors, I will use throughout this review), this emergence isnever essentialized. The volume, thus, uses the phrase “les-bian and gay anthropology” as a starting point for exploringthe place of nonnormative sexualities and genders in cul-ture and in anthropology itself. Three linked themes emergethroughout: (1) the dangers inherent in the dominationof lesbian and gay anthropology by white middle-class gaymen; (2) the fraught yet productive relationships betweenfeminism and lesbian/gay anthropology (often taking theform of debates over the relationship between the categories“gender” and “sexuality”); and (3) the foundationally inter-sectional character of sexuality in relation to not only gen-der but also class, race, ethnicity, HIV/AIDS, and a range ofother social variables, often appended to declarative state-ments but not so often addressed with the care they deserve.

As the editors note, the volume can be roughly dividedinto two clusters of chapters. The first cluster of six chaptersrepresents, to my knowledge, the most theoretically sophis-ticated and carefully documented overview of lesbian andgay anthropology to date—a welcome extension of KathWeston’s pathbreaking 1993 Annual Review article on les-bian and gay anthropology (frequently cited throughoutthis volume). Gayle Rubin provides an important correc-tive to the widespread assumption that work on homosex-uality and transgenderism “began in the 1990s, is derivedalmost entirely from French theory, and is primarily locatedin fields such as modern languages and literature, philoso-phy, and film studies” (p. 18). Her chapter examines earlierinsightful and theoretically sophisticated work that remainsinfluential and repays close rereading. Evelyn Blackwoodexamines the emergence of theories of sexuality in the1970s and 1980s, with a focus on the tensions betweenmainstream work on homosexuality that was authored pri-marily by men and focused on men’s sexual practices, versusfeminist work that focused on understanding sexuality as amodality by which men oppress women. Blackwood alsoillustrates how later attention to female same-sex relationsand transgender practices “offered new insights to . . . theearly models of sexuality” (p. 85). Elizabeth LapovskyKennedy explores the history of gay and lesbian communitystudies in anthropology, showing how lesbian and gay an-thropology has been profoundly interdisciplinary since itsorigins. Lewin investigates the history of what is often seenas the “unhappy marriage” of feminist anthropology andlesbian/gay studies, suggesting that a “feminist-inspired fo-cus on gender” (p. 123), rather than queer theory, providesthe best hope for better relations. Chapters by William L.Leap and Robert A. Schmidt provide excellent overviews oflesbian and gay anthropology with reference to linguisticanthropology and archaeology, respectively.

In the second cluster of five chapters, a series ofanthropologists provide what are in effect case studies,drawing on their own research to ask broader questionsabout the character of, and possible futures for, lesbian andgay anthropology. It is in this set of chapters that queeranthropology begins to appear with some frequency as aproblematized but largely embraced term for rethinking theproject of lesbian and gay anthropology. Benjamin Jungediscusses bareback-sex amongst gay men in the contextof HIV prevention, and David Valentine investigates howthe lived experience of transgendered people demandsquestioning the separation of “sexuality” and “gender.”Martin F. Manalansan IV deploys his work on Filipinogay/queer men to investigate how questions of diaspora,globalization, and ethnicity provide avenues of challengingand productive inquiry for lesbian and gay anthropology.Jeff Maskovsky questions the assumption that lesbiansand particularly gay men “reek of the commodity” byexamining the erasure of poverty in lesbian and gayanthropology. Deborah Elliston draws on her research inTahiti to chart possible futures for queer anthropologythrough both feminist and queer frameworks. Her call for


a “queer politics of cultural respect” (p. 307) encapsulatesthe promise of queer anthropology and of this valuablevolume.

Somalia: Economy without State. Peter D. Little. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 206 pp.

CATHERINE BESTEMANColby College

Following the collapse of Somalia’s state structure in 1991and the failure of the international intervention to restoreorder and a legitimate government, media coverage of So-malia has been eclipsed by events in Afghanistan and Iraq.If the creation of more ungoverned territories draws atten-tion back to Somalia, Peter Little’s book will be an excellentsource of information about how an economy may con-tinue to operate in the absence of state structures. Little’sfocus is the rarely studied livestock trade linking southernSomalia and Kenya, which has boomed since 1991. BecauseLittle has conducted fieldwork with transborder traders forthe past 15 years, his book offers a comparative study of pre-and postcollapse trade.

Little shows the utter failure of the multimillion dol-lar U.S. and World Bank attempt to reorient the southernSomali livestock trade to the overseas export market dur-ing the 1970s and 1980s. This spectacularly expensive dis-aster encouraged immigration of nonlocal herders to theregion and contributed to the deterioration of grazing landand privatization of water points by wealthy herders andcivil servants. The export trade collapsed and the “unoffi-cial” transborder trade (which had been virtually ignoredby the Somali government and targeted for reorientationby the World Bank project) boomed. In tracing the historyof the livestock trade, he explains the political and histori-cal context that shaped clan hostilities and rural–urban dy-namics in the region, shedding particular light on the on-going violence in Kismayo. Because mobility is so criticalto herders’ success, this political and historical context ex-plains the differential ability of herders to succeed in thecontext of ongoing insecurity. For Somalia specialists, theseearly chapters provide a refreshingly evenhanded and in-formative overview of the region’s ecology and clan dy-namics. Nonspecialists will find the discussion of pastoralherding strategies, conflict avoidance, and rural–urban dy-namics useful.

One of Little’s goals is to challenge popular perceptionsof anarchy and tribalism in Somalia by giving an accurateaccount of how Somalis are managing in the absence ofstate structures. He explains how the livestock trade hasbecome more clan based as a result of the ways in whichSomalia’s militias have manipulated the clan system in theirskirmishes. He clarifies why this clan emphasis has createdparticular difficulties for Harti traders, whose activities havebecome more limited in the Kismayo area, while creatingopportunities for Ogadeen traders, who have more easilyredirected their energies to the transborder trade.

Little is also concerned with challenging the suggestionby conservative commentators that the health of Somalia’stransborder trade demonstrates the benefits of free-marketcapitalism liberated from state controls. To the contrary,Little demonstrates that although the trade is booming, pro-ducer incomes have not increased (because of stagnatinglivestock prices and rising grain prices), and herders andtraders struggle to manage without health services, wel-fare support, security, or access to education. Importantly,Little is careful to clarify that his findings about the healthof the transborder livestock trade are not generalizable toother populations in Somalia, such as city dwellers, womenand children, and minority communities, whose lives havebeen adversely affected by Somalia’s violence and instabil-ity. In general, Little shows admiration for the ability ofsouthern Somalia’s herders and traders to manage in theface of volatility and uncertainty but avoids overstatingtheir success by documenting the demands of their subsis-tence strategy. More ethnographic description of herder’slifestyles would add further richness and depth to the read-ers’ understanding of pastoral strategies.

Of particular interest is his description of the vital cur-rency markets that continue to utilize Somali shillings in theabsence of a state treasury, and the informal banking systemthat links Somalis using Somali shillings to money housesin Kenya, markets in Ethiopia, and international currencyexchanges in dollars.

Little concludes by noting that although the col-lapse of Somalia’s state government may have had littleeffect on southern livestock herders and traders becausestate institutions had been so weak (and, in some ways,detrimental to pastoralist herding strategies), a lingeringdistrust of state institutions and development projectsremains. A “radical localization” (p. 167) of politics hasreplaced state authority, characterized by an array of rebuiltcustomary social structures and a vibrant public discourseabout cultural practices and traditions. Nevertheless, Littleargues that Somalis need a state structure to oversee theprotection of natural resources, to negotiate on behalf ofSomali producers with overseas markets, and to balanceregional power dynamics, but he emphasizes that any newgovernment must support pastoral mobility.

The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective. IngridMonson, ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. 366 pp.

GREG DOWNEYUniversity of Notre Dame

Marked contrasts within The African Diaspora: A MusicalPerspective, edited by Ingrid Monson, reflect ethnomusicol-ogy’s uneasy marriage of musicological, anthropological,and performance studies perspectives. The more musicolog-ical contributions can be off-putting to nonspecialists; longtechnical discussions of recordings, for example, substitutetext for performance, and the intense biographical focus onspecific artists may grate on anthropological sensibilities.

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Monson’s introduction frames the collection with PaulGilroy’s rubric of the Black Atlantic—Gilroy privileges musicand dance as primary spheres for elaborating transatlanticblack culture—but only two chapters specifically discussGilroy’s ideas. The resulting diversity makes the collectioninconsistent but also produces some genuine surprises.

Three of the book’s chapters focus on jazz music.Grouping jazz studies with other African diaspora musicsis unusual, but overcoming the nationalist treatment ofthe genre and its internal debates proves difficult. TravisJackson discusses “ritual” dimensions of jazz, including thetemporal structure and social dynamics of performance.Jackson seeks an overarching “blues aesthetic” in academicand practitioner discourse that is a “diasporic musical traceor awareness” (p. 53). Jerome Harris offers an “ecology”of jazz festivals, tours, recording relations, broadcasting,music education, and government support from variousstates. He highlights crucial controversies: How the AfricanAmerican jazz community serves as the “arbiter of jazz le-gitimacy” (p.119), for example, in spite of more extensivefinancial support elsewhere, and the debate between per-formers championing a “canon” and those who prefer a“process” approach to jazz (p. 120). Finally, Monson ana-lyzes percussionist Art Blakey’s conflicted relationship withAfrica, contrasting his denials of African influence and hisconversion to the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam withhis compositions, which evidence strong African and Afro-Cuban traits.

Four chapters discuss particular musical genres incultural–historical terms familiar to anthropologists. LucyDuran details how urban women singers deploy huntingimagery in Mali. Lansine Kaba and Eric Charry explorethe historic emergence of Mamaya music in Guinea outof generational dynamics. Akin Euba, himself a composerof Yoruba folk opera and a musicologist, examines crucialcompositions in the development of this neo-African musi-cal theater. In an exploration of bele dance and drum stylein Martinique, Julian Gerstin asks why contemporary so-cial movements do not ally with renewal movements ofrural folk cultures. He explains their isolation as a resultof Martinican ambivalence, simultaneously a departementof France and, yet, culturally distinct.

In contrast to the text-centered and historic focuses ofother chapters, Steven Cornelius examines how a high sta-tus musical entrepreneur in southwest Ghana managed aparticular attempt by members of a religious cult to extortmoney. As Cornelius describes, both the head of the drum-ming school for foreigners and cult members used the hoaxto leverage “their positions by having framed their actionsin terms of divine authority” (p. 257).

Two of the more surprising chapters in the volumedefy easy categorization. Veit Erlmann describes the mu-sical transformations worked on the song, “The Lion SleepsTonight,” from its South African origin as “Mbube” bySolomon Linda in 1939, through cover versions by PeteSeeger’s Weavers (as “Wimoweh”) and the Tokens, to aperformance by the Mint Juleps and Ladysmith Black

Mambazo in a Spike Lee film. As Erlmann follows the songacross time, space, and genres, he highlights shifts in aes-thetics, the structure of musical repetition, and the song’ssignificance. Gage Averill and Yuen-Ming David Yih inven-tory military themes in Haitian music, noting how a sharedfocus on war provided fertile ground for syncretism betweenAfrican and European elements. Averill and Yih show, forexample, how European military drumming techniques af-fected features of vodun drumming (p. 279). As they explain:“In a country where much of the traditional music draws onAfrican aesthetics and performance practices, the preserva-tion of a European-derived repertory and performance prac-tice within genres that refer to power and hierarchy is . . . awindow into the contradictions of the postcolonial experi-ence” (p. 289).

Individual chapters will be of interest to specialists,but, taken as a whole, the volume is inconsistent; chaptersvary widely in length, style, focus, and sophistication. TheAfrican Diaspora rubric serves as a geographical catchallrather than a unifying intellectual lens. The volume’sdisjunctures demonstrate, perhaps inadvertently, that nosingle “musical perspective” on the African diaspora exists.The many musical genres arising from the diaspora do notall construct community in similar fashions, nor do theyeven share an underlying understanding of what music isor does.

Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland.Mairead Nic Craith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.232 pp.

WILLIAM F. KELLEHER JR.University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign

At the dawn of the 21st century, arguments about culturein a world of transforming nation states have proliferated.Debates about cultural citizenship, the politics of differenceand of universalism, and contests over recognition abound.New postsocialist states, imperialized ones, and establishednation-states dealing with histories of racial conflict or thearrival of new immigrants have had to engage cultural di-versity. At this historical moment, with the emerging mar-ket tyrannies connected to neoliberal policies and the risingstatus of security and capital-fostering institutions, seriousdoubts about states fulfilling the pluralizing desires of a het-erogeneous citizenry persist.

Paradoxically, these political conundrums present op-portunities for anthropologists. Anthropology’s researchmethods and theories position it as a potential evaluatorof contemporary efforts to address cultural struggles. Work-ing from the ground up, such an anthropology could fosterthe growth of a public: a group of citizens who ask them-selves what sorts of cultural programming work to fosterbelonging and who reflect on their effects.

Mairead Nic Craith begins such work in this book. Shequeries the programs, policies, and institutions of inclusionthat the British government—and, to a lesser extent, the


Irish one—have put into place to establish peace, reconcilia-tion, and a functioning democracy in Northern Ireland. NicCraith analyzes state and community efforts of peacemak-ing from the 1980s, when citizens of the two states began toacknowledge cultural practices as a source of political divi-sion, to the present. Her accounts of these differences pro-vide the crucial context for understanding why the ratheringenious peace process initiated by the Good Friday Agree-ment, the pact signed by the governments of the UnitedKingdom and the Republic of Ireland in 1998, has not pro-duced the expected effects.

Nic Craith depicts the struggles involved in cross-community communication in all their complexity. Shecogently reviews the literature on citizenship and culturalrecognition and pays particular heed to the debates onthe politics of universalism and of difference. Nic Craithinterprets Northern Ireland’s unionist and loyalist politi-cal communities, those that want to remain part of theUnited Kingdom, as advocating the politics of universalism,whereas their Irish nationalist neighbors, those who desireto belong to an island of Ireland republic, as deploying thepolitics of difference. Unionists fashion their political com-munity on questions of citizenship, whereas Irish national-ists desire their difference as historically colonized subjectsto be recognized with programs that will build equality, notmerely assume it.

Nic Craith uses these different political–cultural under-standings to elucidate how and why a cultural foundationthat enables communication across communities needs tobe established. The sharing of diverse historical narrativesor the ability to translate them, addressing these differenceswhile demonstrating civility, and the sharing of culturallyconfigured political values must occur before the new po-litical institutions can function. Although Nic Craith doesnot connect her work to organizational ecology, she showshow and why Northern Ireland’s “fitness landscape” is not asmooth but, rather, rugged one. Multiple problems charac-terize rugged fitness landscapes, and Nic Craith shows thatcitizens in Northern Ireland must scale many jagged peaksto make the transition from a state of war to one of peace.

Nic Craith analyzes state efforts to foster interculturalcommunication at a variety of sites and discusses the cul-tural work that must be done for the political landscapeto be smoothed. She carefully outlines how Irish national-ists and British unionists desire a parity of esteem for theirdiffering and often opposed institutions and cultural prac-tices. She describes a variety of differences: the struggles overlanguage recognition; the conflicts between state schools,the largely Catholic, maintained schools, and the integratedschools that have developed since the 1980s; the differinginterpretations of religious communities; the contests thatcharacterize popular culture, from the state broadcastingsystem to community festivals and national holiday ritu-als; and the attempts by history and heritage associations,particularly museums, to exhibit the array of cultural prac-tices that exist in Northern Ireland.

Nic Craith’s book has a global reach while it offersvaluable interpretations of Northern Ireland’s culturalspecificities. Ireland has endured both early modern andmodern colonialisms while being part of developed Europe.For these reasons, Northern Ireland provides a case thatexemplifies the contemporary cultural struggles of nationstates in the throes of decolonization and those strainingto accommodate new sets of immigrants who are in searchof economic, cultural, and political stability. Nic Craith’sbook offers insights not only for the particular historicalconstruction of Ireland’s dilemmas but also for a widevariety of transforming nation-states.

Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: TheMilitarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. EmikoOhnuki-Tierney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2002. 411 pp.

MATT TOMLINSONBowdoin College

Outside of Japan, many people think of the World War II“kamikaze” pilots as suicidal automatons, mindless menwilling to destroy themselves in the name of the emperor.This book by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney debunks the stereo-type, showing how many of the pilots were intelligent, evenbrilliant, students who agonized over their fates.

Her book is more than just an ethnographic corrective,however. She addresses several important theoretical ques-tions, including the motivational power of signs, specifi-cally the cherry blossom. By the time of World War II, oneexpression of Japanese imperial nationalist ideology was“You shall die like beautiful falling cherry petals for theemperor” (p. 3). During the war, a blooming cherry blos-som was painted on the sides of pilots’ planes; many pilotswore cherry blossom branches on their uniforms; and asthey took off on their final flights, appreciative onlookerswaved cherry blossom branches (see pp. 165–166). Consid-ering cherry blossoms’ prominence as symbols, and their as-sociation with violent sacrifice, the central question arises:To what extent did tokkotai pilots accept the imperial ideol-ogy (tokkotai is shorthand for “Special Attack Forces,” andis the term used in preference to kamikaze)? Although pi-lots evidently acted according to the imperial design—theydid, indeed, sacrifice themselves—did they think, feel, andbelieve that they were dying “like beautiful falling cherrypetals for the emperor?”

Ohnuki-Tierney’s answer is a nuanced considerationof signs’ polysemy, aesthetics, and the ways different so-cial actors “misrecognize” or misread the same signs (sheuses Henri Wallon’s term meconnaissance for this process).Cherry blossoms are notably polysemous, signifying lifeand rebirth as well as death, different social groups, andJapan itself. These multiple meanings are part of the rea-son that social actors can engage in communication whiledrawing entirely different interpretations. Overlaying the

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profusion of meanings is an aesthetic value of blossomsas “beautiful,” which makes their “referents . . . equallybeautiful” (p. 286). Another factor in her complex an-swer is the “naturalization” of aestheticized signs, whereina sign might “link the present directly to an imaginedprimordial past” (p. 259), helping to create, for example,visions of “pure” nations. Her discussion of aestheticiza-tion, naturalization, and meconnaissance is detailed andfruitful, and will be appreciated by scholars attempting tounderstand the semiotic mechanisms of nationalism andpatriotism.

To repose Ohnuki-Tierney’s question in her own words:“Was the pilots’ patriotism coterminous with the state ide-ology” (p. 248)? Her answer is no, and her historical ev-idence is devastating. She shows how pilots were coercedinto “volunteering” for missions (pp. 169–175). She ana-lyzes the diaries of five tokkotai pilots to show how theywere highly educated but idealistic young men who felt re-sponsibility for building a “new Japan” but were desperateand melancholy over the prospect of their deaths. As stu-dents, some of them read an astonishing range of philo-sophical and literary works in different languages, but itwas their intellectual breadth that helped encourage themdown their fatal paths. “They would have been able to re-sist the naked propaganda of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,”Ohnuki-Tierney writes, but “when the ‘general will,’ trans-formed by the Nazi and Japanese states, was seen as thegeneral will of Rousseau and Kant, they were disarmed anddid not suspect the wicked hand of manipulation” (pp. 16–17). In other words, the students were romantic idealists,inspired by great philosophers and literary figures, resignedto dying for Japan (and, sometimes, more specifically, formothers, lovers, and imagined women), but not for the em-peror himself.

In her concluding chapters, Ohnuki-Tierney broadensher theoretical scope, examining topics including national-ism, patriotism, global–local dynamics, and the inventionof tradition. Her arguments in these chapters are useful andwill appeal to readers looking to bridge the Japanese detailswith other ethnographic sites. They will probably alreadybe accepted by many readers—for example, that meaning isnecessarily polysemous, that local and global are interpene-trating and mutually constructive forces, and that there areno “pure” cultures, rendering terms such as hybrid and creoleproblematic.

Her ultimate conclusion about the power of cherryblossoms as symbols is satisfying for its combination ofboldness and subtlety: “The flower did not move [the pi-lots] to take action, but it made them not confront themeconnaissance between their thoughts and the state ide-ology” (p. 303). In other words, symbols can move peopleto sacrifice, but only when tangled within processes of nat-uralization, aestheticization, and misrecognition. Ohnuki-Tierney’s book is haunting, because one feels emotion-ally involved with the doomed pilots and, from an an-alytical distance, horrified at the cause and cost of theirsacrifice.

Engaging Humor. Elliott Oring. Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 2003. 208 pp.

ROBERT A. PAULEmory UniversityThis book is a collection of ten separate chapters, quite dis-parate in scope and approach but united around the generaltheme of humor. The first three are devoted to advancingthe theory that “humor” depends on the “perception of anappropriate incongruity; that is, the perception of an appro-priate relationship between categories that would ordinarilybe regarded as incongruous” (p. 1). Example: a patient com-plains to his psychiatrist, “no one believes anything I say,”to which the doctor replies, “you’re kidding.” The joke ishumorous because the doctor’s answer is appropriate, in-sofar as it is empathic and intended to be helpful, but atthe same time incongruous because it affirms the proposi-tion the doctor appears to be denying in his attempt to beunderstanding, and thus exacerbates the problem.

For Oring, the joke or other bit of humor need not re-solve the incongruity at all (as suggested by a rival theory),and, indeed, the quality of being humorous depends on theco-presence (hence, nonresolution) of both appropriatenessand incongruity. The joke about the psychiatrist does notresolve an incongruity but merely expresses it in a way thatalso seems entirely appropriate along a different channel oflanguage or thought.

Oring likewise does not agree that humor necessarilyinvolves qualities that have been previously proposed suchas superiority (Hobbes), aggression (Freud), or mechanicalrigidity (Bergson). To test the theory attributed to Freud that(tendentious) humor releases the inhibition of repressed im-pulses, in the chapter “The Humor of Hate,” Oring exam-ines the publications of a hate group, the White Aryan Re-sistance. The idea is that here is a group that has no qualmsabout expressing aggression openly, so that according tothe “repression-lifting” theory of humor, they should haveno need to resort to humor to convey their message. Or-ing claims that an examination of this material reveals thatthese hatemongers do indeed employ humor extensivelyon their home page, disproving the “repression-lifting” hy-pothesis. Oring’s argument itself suffers from several weak-nesses, the most important being that there is very littlethat is in any way funny about the material he cites. Thereare drawings that have the form of cartoons or caricatures,and things that have the appearance of riddles and jokes,but precious little that depends on the “perception of an ap-propriate incongruity,” aside from some wordplay in con-structions such as “Jewnited States” or “Latrino.” (I say this,by the way, not because I am offended by this material butas an analytical observation. This does not, however, implythat I am not indeed offended by it: I found the extensivecitation of it excessive and gratuitous.)

Another argument against Oring’s thesis in this chapterlies in his conclusion that “humorous communications domore than communicate the messages they contain. Humorimplies a community; a fellowship of laughers with whom


the humor is shared” (p. 56). The problem with this con-clusion is that (1) it adds a new dimension to the definitionof humor that is social and, thus, goes beyond the genericdefinition given in the earlier chapters and (2) it hardly rep-resents a refutation of Freud’s actual theory, which was that“in the case of aggressive purposes [humor] employs thesame method [bribing with a gift of pleasure in the form ofwordplay] in order to turn the hearer, who was indifferentto begin with, into a co-hater or co-despiser, and creates forthe enemy a host of opponents where at first there was onlyone” (Freud 1960:133).

Much more successful is the chapter “Humor and theSuppression of Sentiment.” Here Oring shows that althoughhumor may or may not serve to release repressions onsexuality or aggression in contemporary American culture,it certainly does so with the affect of “sentimentality.”Exploring the recent history of greeting cards, he shows howthe cynical and raunchy message in the genre of cards de-signed for people one cares about on special occasions hasmushroomed at the expense of the parallel genre of “senti-mental” cards, reflecting a taboo on the expression of nakedsentiment in at least some sectors contemporary society. Atrip to the neighborhood drugstore will provide graphic il-lustration of the truth of this thesis.

All in all, these are for the most part provocative andinteresting chapters. As a bonus, the book also contains alot of funny jokes.

REFERENCES CITEDFreud, Sigmund

1960[1905] Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious. JamesStrachey, trans. New York: W. W. Norton.

From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism andPopular Culture. Patricia R. Pessar. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2004. 274 pp.

NATASHA PRAVAZWilfrid Laurier University

In the halls of the academy these days, it is still com-mon to hear Gramscians heatedly defend their turf againstvulgarizations of the concept of “hegemony” incurredby poststructuralists and postmodernists alike. Conversely,“post”-oriented anthropologists get frustrated when politi-cal economists include token references to their position-ality in their otherwise highly modernist ethnographies.Rarely do we see any serious attempts at bridging the gaps ofold and tired dichotomies that hinder more than foster cre-ative ethnographic thinking. A welcome exception to thisrule is Patricia Pessar’s new book. Accomplishing the un-common feat of pleasing both audiences, Pessar’s accountof popular and elite millenarianism spans over the centuriesin an extremely rich and textured narrative about the in-terplay between apocalyptic thought, cultural practice, andpower relations in Brazil.

Beginning with an account of the role of Portuguesemessianism in legitimizing the colonial conquest, From Fa-natics to Folk points out that the explicit eschatology of

Jesuit missions and monarchical rituals of rule largely par-ticipated in the construction of a hegemony producing hi-erarchy and patrimonial authority as divinely preordained.After the ultramontane reforms of the late 1800s, however,millenarianism carried on as a popular form that had todefend itself from the attacks of church and state alike. In-deed, in the context of a crisis of hegemony, in which theemergent rural bourgeoisie and republican powers couldnot sustain a patriarchal pact, poor backlanders’ resent-ment was no longer held in check. Pessar contextualizesthe emergence of popular millenarianism as a reconstitu-tion of “personalistic and precapitalist values and relations”(p. 33), a form of popular culture where mystical subjectiv-ities awaited the apocalypse under the wings of messianicfigures such as Antonio Conselheiro and Padre Cıcero. Infact, one of Pessar’s most original contributions is to dis-lodge thinking on the Contestado, Juazeiro, and Canudosmovements as “case studies” by conceptualizing an inter-textual field in which to understand the semantic links be-tween the movements that are traced by different socialactors.

From chapter 2 on, the book centers more squarelyon a community of romeiros (pilgrims) who in 1945 settledaround the little known charismatic leader Pedro Batistaand, therefore, can be read as the original ethnography ofa contemporary messianic village in northeastern Brazil.However, the book continually resituates the narrative spa-tially and temporally in the context of previous movements,regional and national politics, the media, tourism, and localand international academic and funding connections, thuswidening “the circle of actors and institutions convention-ally included in studies of millenarianism” (p. 227).

Pessar goes on to conceptualize what she calls the“sacralizing process,” which includes four central activi-ties: “the separation of the religious figure from the polit-ical sphere by the obscuring of his family ties; the leader’spresentation of himself to potential followers as an ideal pa-tron; his capacity to create a performance that showcases hisdivine power and teachings; and the development of mira-cle stories by his devotees” (p. 46). Although the author usesthis analytic tool to understand how Pedro Batista becamea living saint, the framework should prove useful to otherstudents of messianic figures. This fascinating ethnographyexplains how Pedro Bastista managed to secure a safe havenfor his community by highlighting either eschatologicalthought or modern dispositions according to the contextand the times, in a complex history of accommodation andresistance vis-a-vis state authorities, local caudillos, and theinstitutional church. She does this while retaining a Turne-rian sensibility for the symbolic motifs and ritual practicesof penitence, and a keen awareness of the multivocality ofher field site.

Another key figure in the romeiro community of SantaBrıgida is Dona Dodo, a charismatic leader in her own rightwho complemented Batista’s role by leading the practicalaspects of traditional Catholicism, such as nightly prayers,saint’s day celebrations, and religious organizations. Pessarcarefully evokes the difficult space Dona Dodo had to

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negotiate as a woman after Batista’s death, having her legit-imacy as rightful successor constantly challenged by malerivals who ultimately failed in establishing widely acceptedconsensus around their leadership. Yet these later leaderscame to represent traditional values in an increasingly dif-ferentiated social field where modernity made itself presentnow in the form of media presence, urban culture, religioustourism, national interest in rescuing “folk” values, and thedispositions of current civil leaders in the community.

I would have personally appreciated a fuller discussionof the links between popular Catholic and Afro-Brazilianpractices of receiving saints (spirit possession), as well asa spelling out of the role of the caboclo (person of bothindigenous and European descent) within the context ofBrazil’s discourse of mesticagem (racial and cultural fusion)as national identity. Nonetheless, this does not take awayfrom an outstanding work in which folk sensibilities areunderstood in their own terms, as well as seamlessly in-scribed within larger regional, national, and internationalcontexts. In short, this book is a landmark in new forms ofethnographic writing.

Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinfor-mation in the Late Twentieth Century. Johan Pottier.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 251 pp.

DANIELLE DE LAMERoyal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium

This book comes as a relief to any expert on Rwanda whowould not have had the courage to force their way throughthe muddy waters of flowing literature and zesty papers intune with the appetite of uninformed readers and ill-at-easepoliticians.

Pottier situates his reflection on the production ofknowledge on Rwanda within the wider debate on thestakes of academic writing on Africa by Westerners, and heasks for the same scholarly criteria to be applied to Africanresearch published by African authors. He critically exam-ines the literature on Rwanda and eastern Congo and scruti-nizes the conditions of its production, taking into accountthe social and political settings of the area. In tune withsome other academic works, he sets this modern conflictand its economic and political stakes within the broaderscope of regional and international politics. His overviewof the “Build-up of War and Genocide” (p. 9) goes backto the migrations from Rwanda to Kivu and Uganda sincecolonial times and before. The interferences of contem-porary international policies with the local conditions arealso mentioned. The analysis goes well beyond 1994, andwarns about the use of powerful narratives—rather thanhistory—by the current Rwandan government: “Rwanda’sRPF-led regime has views about the past, present and fu-ture which are being propagated via . . . intersecting chan-nels . . . ranging from the academic world . . . down to ruraldevelopment policy” (p. 51).

The war and genocide were an outlet to conflictsover power and wealth: a tragedy executed without af-

terthoughts, through the rallying of frustrated and fright-ened people around slogans based on exacerbated ethnicfeelings. The media followed suit, as the image of an Africabogged down in tribal feuds suited their need for easy ex-planations. Pottier juxtaposes the realities with misrepre-sentations spread by “observers,” journalists, aid workers,and academics who improvised expertise in a country theybarely knew. He shows how misrepresentations contributedto the war in Congo, which suited the new Rwandan gov-ernment well: These misrepresentations hide the complex-ities of the recent past and the immediate future behinda screen of the “moral purity,” representing themselves asthe ones who “halted the genocide” (p. 3). An ignoranceclose to disdain of the local country people could be dis-cerned under colonial rule and after, which paved the wayto lethal manipulations. The current Rwandan governmentappeals to these biased sources while denying any right ofopinion to outsiders (p. 207).

Re-Imagining Rwanda achieves its author’s purpose. Thisanalysis of disinformation, written in English, was neededas the new Rwanda chose to rely on newcomers: Knowl-edge is constructed “for beginners by beginners” (p. 109).This break with the past is all the easier because the countryswitched its international language. Many previous stud-ies were written in French, whereas the “newcomers” aremainly English speakers. This book will help bridge thegap.

Pottier pushes his argument further than the genocideand its immediate aftermath, as disinformation seems to bepart of the international strategies of the Kigali government.Newly arrived benefactors are provided with a simplifiedmodel of recent history that “obscures relevant contexts”(p. 202), and the RPF “displays exceptional skill at convert-ing international feelings of guilt and ineptitude into admis-sions that the Front deserves the monopoly on knowledgeconstruction” (p. 202). The outcome is an influx of aid andinternational support.

Pottier’s background provides him with the toolsneeded for this critical analysis and allows him to includethe area of Kivu in his study. His knowledge of French andDutch allow him to cover the French and Belgian press. Still,one might long for more of an account of recent franco-phone academic literature. Pottier’s recourse to a secondarysource (p. 13) is unfortunate, as Iliffe’s interpretation ofCzekanowski seems partial. The reference to my own workon page 191 shows the ingaligali (the custom of keepingfields on their father’s property as an asset for repudiatedwomen) custom dwindling during the 1980s. Pottier missedmy point.

Finally, the author points to a recent issue on the dis-information front—land reform. Based on a report writtenin ignorance of the Rwandan populations, according toPottier, this project avoids taking grassroot level realitiesinto account. Subsistence farming has since long beenreplaced by a very unequal distribution of money, withcountry civil servants—or absentee landlords—being mostable to capitalize scarce land. The word survival seems ap-propriate when wondering how the majority of Rwandans


will live through this reform. This courageous book couldbe an eye-opener to the newcomers on the Rwandan field.If they take into account the essential need for stability inthe region, they will, then, apprehend the complexity ofany moral stance on Rwanda.

African Historical Archaeologies. Andrew M. Reid andPaul J. Lane, eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum,2004. 408 pp.

NEIL L . NORMANUniversity of Virginia

African Historical Archaeologies builds on recent scholarshipsuggesting local and historically contingent views of the po-litical, social, and economic processes at play on the Africancontinent (e.g., Stahl 2001). The 14 chapters are drawn fromarchaeological research across sub-Saharan Africa and are re-viewed in a conclusion by Peter Robertshaw.

Rather than attempting a synthetic treatment of histor-ical archaeology, the editors, Andrew Reid and Paul Lane,focus on the “constructive interaction” and tension thatcan occur when numerous lines of evidence and disciplinescommunicate. In proposing more flexibility and experi-mentation with the sources used to interpret archaeolog-ical data, the editors call for cooperative efforts with localAfrican communities, aiming to “encourage the develop-ment of links between contemporary populations and theirpast” (p. 3). Such a perspective acknowledges the inherentconstruction of historical archaeologies within the politicsof modern Africa and within the contemporary power re-lations in the world. Numerous attempts have been madeto broaden what constitutes the history of Africa; neverthe-less, history for the continent remains synonymous withthe accounts, exploits, and consequences of Europeans’ en-trance and interaction from the 15th century. By and large,the historiography of African historical archaeology has in-volved a close association with European primary sources.Thus, the so-called historic era at once frames the temporalboundaries of the book and presents a point of definitionalambiguity, as the chapters cover material from the secondmillennium B.C. to the present (see also Schmidt 1978). Inthe introduction, the editors critically reconsider what com-prises the historical archaeology of Africa by reviewing therange of sources (e.g., historic documents, ethnohistoric ac-counts, ethnographic material, oral histories and traditions)that have been applied to archaeological data: A number ofauthors in the volume engage this theme as well.

Several contributors explore untethering archaeologi-cal sites from European sources by focusing on the explana-tory power of other archaeological data in the face of tra-ditional documents. Richard Helm uses regionally basedarchaeological survey in concert with Mijikenda oral histo-ries to reconstruct settlement and migration patterns alongthe eastern African coast. Similarly, Innocent Pikirayi em-ploys extensive interviews and archaeological data to re-consider the “Refuge” archaeological period (c. late 17th to

the late 19th centuries A.D.) in the Eastern Highlands ofZimbabwe. J. A. Van Schalkwyk and B. W. Smith explorethe Maleboho War of 1894 through poetry, ethnography,archaeology, political cartoons, and rock paintings. They il-lustrate convincingly that local understandings of the wardiverged from conventional published sources. Likewise,Joanna Behrens uses landscape analysis techniques devel-oped by Martin Hall, and artifact analysis, to bring intofocus the context in which industrialized landscapes wereexperienced in South Africa.

Contextual analyses reappear in the work of Adria LaViolette, who writes about the tensions between exter-nal historical accounts, published and newly collected oraltraditions, and archaeological data at the 15th and 16thcentury palatial site of Pujini on Pemba Island, Tanzania,and the way such tensions can be more productive thanwhen multiple lines of evidence neatly correspond. JeffFleisher uses archaeological data to provide the local andinternational context behind political and economic de-cisions made by the 14th to 16th century sultans ofKilwa Kisiwani, in southern Tanzania. In so doing, he re-thinks the historiography driven largely by European ac-counts that interpret the sultans’ “Rebellious Conduct”vis-a-vis their own interests. Timothy Insoll questions thereliance on Arabic literary sources for the interpretationof archaeological material from the western Sahel and sa-vannah. He uses archaeological evidence to demonstratethat settlement structures at Gao were more complex andsocial boundaries more permeable than Arab historiansdescribe.

In the review and conclusion, Peter Robertshaw placesthe chapters within larger debates over the definition of andmethodology for historical archaeology. He offers one of themost provocative propositions of the volume by suggestingthat storytelling be employed by archaeologists to engagelocal communities in archaeological debates. His call for re-thinking not only the theories and methodologies appliedto historical archaeological material in Africa but also themedia through which they are presented to the communi-ties involved is laudable.

This volume presents an eclectic and lucid collection ofchapters that explore different paths for the constructionof historical archaeologies. It pushes the conceptual andmethodological bounds of the subdiscipline of historicalarchaeology on the African continent and, by implication,beyond. Anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists in-terested in the method and theory involved in engagingmultiple sources and perspectives, as well as the resultingpolitical implications of these efforts, will read this bookwith great interest.

REFERENCES CITEDSchmidt, Peter R.

1978 Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach in anAfrican Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Stahl, Ann B.2001 Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of

Africa’s Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maxi-mum Security Prison. Lorna A. Rhodes. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2004. 315 pp.

DYLAN RODRIGUEZUniversity of California, Riverside

Total Confinement focuses on local practices of power, dom-ination, (psychiatric) “treatment,” and governmentality atthe conjoined and overlapping sites of the “control prison”(known variously as “supermaximum or supermax prisons,”“maximum security prisons,” and “security housing units”)and prison “mental health units.” Although the prose issharp and the overall shape of the text holds up well, thereare a few theoretical and methodological problems with To-tal Confinement that require some elaboration, especially inlight of its ambition as a broad theorization of the emer-gent control prison regime. Perhaps most crucial, consider-ing Lorna Rhodes’s focus on technologies of bodily domi-nation, resistance, and “treatment,” is her failure to addressthe centrality of race, political subjectivity/affiliation, andgender to the state’s articulations of the unassimilable orincorrigible prisoner (that is, the categories of people whoare particularly targeted for incarceration in control units).

Although, to her credit, Rhodes does assert in the book’sintroduction that “historically, and in many prison sys-tems in the United States, [the prison’s ‘potentially abso-lute social exclusion’] is correlated with and profoundlylinked to race” (p. 7), she does not theorize from this al-leged correlation and profundity. This absence is stunning,especially considering that the inscription of racial, ethnic,and regional “gang affiliation” penal policies have becomea central facet of control prison expansion, as well as a pri-mary discursive element of its sustenance in the face ofwidespread criticism from a variety of progressive civil andhuman rights organizations, as well as from radical aboli-tionist campaigns and movements.

Although it may be beyond the scope of Rhodes’s studyto offer a rigorous or sufficient historical genealogy of thecontrol prison, a peek into the specificity of its recent(post-1970s) prototype forms would have been useful. It isRhodes’s focus on the formation of the control prison’s par-ticular bureaucratic and bodily technologies of power anddomination that ought to have situated her study within agenealogy of racialized and gendered punitive practices. Per-haps, she could have begun with the earliest articulationsof protosupermax penal practices in the state’s criminal-ization, discursive constitution, and penal torture of Blackand Third World activists, radicals, and liberationists duringand beyond the 1970s. There are inextricable connectionsbetween the control prison as a material institution, penallogic, and the recent history of U.S. state repression and itsresident state-sanctioned racist and white supremacist mili-tarizations (mediated through the apparatuses of the police,FBI, and judicial system).

Total Confinement is further delimited by the author’snarration of the Washington State prison system’s atyp-

icality in relation to broader regional and local articula-tions of (racialized) imprisonment technologies: “Becauseof the relatively small size of Washington State, its largelywhite prison population, and its progressive history, someof what I describe here may not be typical of other states”(p. 12). Yet it is precisely this atypicality—carceral white-ness and civic progressivisim—which might have provideda new trajectory of theorization for the significance of raceand state-mediated white supremacy in studies of prisonregimes across geographies and (racialized) localities. Thus,Rhodes’s qualification of Washington’s (racial and politi-cal) abnormality does not suffice as a reason to exclude ormarginalize a critical theorization of race and gender fromher larger examination.

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the author wrotethe bulk of this account as a professional affiliate ofthe Washington State prison system, sanctioned by aten-year (1993–2002) institutional collaboration betweenthe University of Washington and the Washington StateDepartment of Corrections. As a situated research prac-tice, Rhodes’s ethnography of imprisoned people (she in-terviewed over 90 “randomly chosen” maximum securityprisoners) remains relatively, and rather conspicuously, un-troubled and undertheorized when considered in relation toher everyday interaction, professional–institutional bond,and putative affective and personal connections with prisonguards, administrators, and mental health workers (shespoke with 40 prison staff for the study). The nuanced inter-actions that Rhodes narrates having shared with prison staffand colleagues blatantly contrast with the enforced andcoercive distance that she is forced to take from her im-prisoned interlocutors. Structuring and shadowing the un-folding of Rhodes’s study, then, is her own embodied (andinsufficiently self-reflexive) allegiance to the institutionalsanctity and security of the prison in relation to the “sociallyisolated” prisoners with whom she is critically engaged.

Despite these limitations, the book admirably navigatesits primary theoretical problematics and is perhaps mostproductively read alongside Terry Kupers’s study Prison Mad-ness: The Mental Health Crisis behind Bars and What We MustDo about It (1999). Rhodes’s book makes a productive con-tribution to the budding critical discourse around the ex-ponential expansion of the U.S. prison apparatus.

REFERENCES CITEDKupers, Terry

1999 Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis behind Bars andWhat We Must Do about It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia andIsrael. James Ron. Berkeley: University of California Press,2003. 262 pp.

AVRAM BORNSTEINJohn Jay College, City University of New York

Acts of state violence are not only structured by the level ofthreat, the regime type, and the culture but also by “clearly


defined social or geographic space where organizational ac-tion is shaped by notions of appropriate and legitimatebehavior” (p. 8). In settings like ethnic ghettos controlledlargely through bureaucratic means, states prefer to deploypolice-style methods. But in frontiers, where administrativemechanisms do not control a population, more destructivetactics are unleashed. This is the primary thesis of JamesRon’s Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel.

Based largely on interviews and an array of secondarysources, part 1 of the book depicts how ghetto versusfrontier status played a role in the breakup of Yugoslavia.In April 1992, Bosnia seceded and received recognitionfrom European powers but was not backed by military assis-tance. Bosnia became a frontier to the Serbia-Montenegroremainder of Yugoslavia: Serbian-based paramilitaries, localBosnian Serb crisis committees, and clandestine cross-border agents began committing massacres and other actsof “ethnic cleansing” against Bosnian Muslims. The Serbianregime in Belgrade supported those activities, but that sameregime stopped short of ethnic cleansing against Bosniancommunities inside Serbia, such as those in Sandzak,Vojvodina, and Kosovo in the early 1990s. These were ghet-tos, not frontiers, and the people in them were subjectto ethnic harassment, beatings, bombings, and discrimina-tion, but not bombardment and annihilation. Furthermore,it was when Kosovo slipped from Serbian hands and becamea frontier that the worst atrocities and ethnic cleansingoccurred.

In part 2, Ron describes how the frontier–ghetto frame-work manifests in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Withgreat clarity Ron describes the written and unwritten rulesof Israeli violence in the Occupied Territories and the pro-cedural aspects of checkpoints, beatings, arrests, torturousinterrogations, rubber bullets, and punctuated use of liverounds. But as violent as policing of the Palestinian ghettoappears, it is fundamentally different than the air and ar-tillery assaults the Israeli army made in the frontier ofLebanon, which caused far more deaths and hundreds ofthousands of internally displaced people.

The frontier–ghetto comparison is very simple, but it isan effective way to illustrate the broader question of howculpability and deniability play a role in state violence.Belgrade pursued plausible deniability among their owncitizens and international observers for events in Bosnia.Israel, too, denied any direct responsibilities for the mas-sacres of Palestinians by Christian Lebanese militias inBeirut, even though they were orchestrated by Israeli forces(p. 185).

Limits on violence in the ghettos and deniability ofatrocities in the frontiers are evidence for Ron’s broader, as-sumed argument that contemporary nation-states are sensi-tive to the increased salience of international human rightsnorms because of an explosion of international activismin human rights, driven by bodies such as the UnitedNations (UN), Greenpeace, and Human Rights Watch.While making this generalization, the author has manycaveats and exceptions, including the observation that Ser-

bian actions in Bosnia were harshly condemned and, even-tually, punished, whereas Israel’s occupation of the WestBank, Gaza, and Lebanon has brought more muted forms ofcriticism.

Ron’s descriptions lead to an ironic observation: Farfrom being an oppressed people’s redemption, receiving in-ternational recognition without troops on the ground todefend independence can change a ghetto into a frontier,inviting greater assaults and destruction. Although not fo-cused on the current al-Aqsa uprising, Ron suggests thatIsrael’s recent escalation of military tactics in the OccupiedTerritories is caused largely by the region’s slide from Israelistate power. Like Kosovo, as the West Bank and Gaza be-come increasingly peripheral, they experience a more vio-lent regime of domination (p. xiv).

The book worked well in my master-level seminaron comparative studies of violence. Area specialists, too,will benefit from Ron’s rich descriptions of the specificorganizational and institutional components of stateviolence. Without other supporting material, most un-dergraduates will find this book too focused on stateviolence to serve as an adequate introduction to the twoconflicts. Of course, it is not intended as a comprehensivedescription or explanation of the history of the formerYugoslavia or Israel–Palestine. It claims only to illuminatehow important bureaucratic inclusion or exclusion can bein times of violent crisis (p. 196), and it accomplishes thisgoal. Ron’s book is a solid contribution to both area studiesand violence studies.

Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Vincent Sarichand Frank Miele. Boulder: Westview Press, 2004. 287 pp.

LEONARD LIEBERMANCentral Michigan University

The coauthors promise to scientifically prove that the raceconcept and races are valid entities. Vincent Sarich is a phys-ical anthropologist, professor emeritus of anthropology atthe University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime sup-porter of the race concept. Coauthor Frank Miele is senioreditor of Skeptic magazine and a supporter of Arthur Jensen’swork linking race and intelligence.

Yes, human biological variations are real, but the raceconcept is not a useful way to conceptualize these varia-tions. Given the title and purpose of their book, the readeris likely to expect the book to begin with a definition ofrace, one that will serve as a guide to what is to follow.That definition does not come until the penultimate chap-ter when the coauthors state that “Races are populationsor groups of populations, within a species, that are sepa-rated geographically from other such populations or groupsof populations and distinguishable from them on the ba-sis of heritable features” (p. 207). Early in the book thecoauthors present illustrations to show that “all culturesthat have been studied have categorized people into es-sentially the same set of races recognized by the average

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person” (p. 33). The coauthors wish to demonstrate thatrace is an ancient idea. For example, there is an illustrationof a Greco-Roman jug with “the face of a Caucasoid on oneside and that of a black African on the other” (p. 41). Didthe creators of this and other illustrations have in mindthe definition of races as “populations” within a “species,”“separated geographically” on the basis of “heritablefeatures”?

The central flaw in the argument for the reality of raceis that despite acknowledgment of variation, their compar-ison of races is based on averages: “Variation, both bodyand behavior, both within races and between, is the norm,not the exception. However, recognition of average racedifferences, in our opinion, does not inevitably lead to racistattitudes or polices” (p. 223, emphasis added). I agree thatit is not inevitable, but racism is made much easier by us-ing averages. Moreover, it is almost always possible to finddifferences between populations based on averages, thencall them races, and deemphasize the variations. By this ap-proach all populations become races.

Sarich and Miele place considerable emphasis for the re-ality of race on comparisons with the alleged greater rangeof morphological differences among humans than amongchimpanzees or gorillas. But earlier they wrote that “thevery small genetic differences present today among hu-man populations tell us it wasn’t all that long ago thatthey were, in effect, one” (p. 126). So which is it, smallgenetic differences or much greater than among Africangreat apes? Answer: H. S. Kaessman and Savante Paabo re-port that “humans are unique in having little genetic varia-tion” in comparison to great apes (2002:1). Also, the coau-thors incorrectly report Richard Lewontin’s classic study,which is said to show that “15 percent of the varia-tion within our species is between races” (p. 161). In factLewontin reported only about 6.3 percent between “races”(1995:123).

In their effort to demonstrate the reality of races asvalid, the coauthors ignore clinal variation and environ-mental influences. An example concerns the track recordof the Kalenjin in Kenya. The coauthors write that “thereare major differences in performances by race, and real datashould make the case for race differences in sports perfor-mances obvious to all” (p. 124). Although Sarich and Mielegive only brief lip service to environmental factors, KenyanRunning (1996) by John Balard and Joe Sang presents thecomplex of sociocultural factors, which interact with alti-tude and relate to the high rate of medal winning amongKenyans. Another illustration of Sarich and Miele’s racialdeterminism involves hypertension:

taking account of race is the best way to determine whichdifferences are genetic and which are not. For example,African Americans have a higher rate of hypertensionthan do whites. This could be a genetic difference (part ofRushton’s matrix of race and life-history traits). It couldalso be the result of the socioeconomic differences amongthem. And, of course, it could be a mixture of the two.[pp. 190–191]

Lip service is given to environment but genetic determinismis favored. Oddly, Sarich and Miele do not tell the reader thatRichard Cooper, Charles Rotimi, and Ryk Ward examinedhypertension in seven populations and found it highest inChicago, intermediate in the Caribbean Islands, and lowestin the world in West Africa, where it should be the highest ifgenetics determine the differences. A leaner diet and moreexercise in West Africa contrast with Chicago’s fatty diet,less exercise, and greater stress from racism.

The book concludes with scenarios about how theUnited States and the world might live with race: The coau-thors prefer a meritocracy in which the “best and the bright-est move to the top—and to the United States” (p. 240). Andso they join the ranks of the race and IQ defenders such asArthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, andJ. Philippe Rushton. The book is characterized by erroneousscholarship and will appeal to those convinced of the real-ity of races and who, like the coauthors, “reject the need forpolicies to right past wrongs” (p. 7).

REFERENCES CITEDBalard, John, and Joe Sang

1996 Kenyan Running: Movement, Culture, Geography andGlobal Change. London: Frank Cass.

Cooper, Richard S., Charles N. Rotimi, and Ryk Ward1999 The Puzzle of Hypertension in African-Americans. Scien-

tific American (February):56–63.Kaessman, H. S., and Savante Paabo

2002 The Genetical History of Great Apes. Journal of InternalMedicine 251:1–18.

Lewontin, Richard1995 Human Diversity. New York: Scientific American Library.

Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization ofSouth and South East Asia. Sonita Sarkar and Esha NiyogiDe, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 344 pp.

KAMALA VISWESWARANUniversity of Texas, Austin

Trans-Status Subjects arrives at a time when area studieshas become transareal in scope, and rather stale interdisci-plinary paradigms have been superceded by newer transdis-ciplinary orientations toward the subject(s) of knowledge.Most transareal scholarship has focused on the intersectionsbetween South Asia and the Middle East, or what some pol-icy analysts are now calling the “greater Middle East.” It istherefore refreshing to see a volume attempt to trace the his-torical and emergent global connections between South andSoutheast Asia. The book contains 14 articles on Indone-sia, Borneo, Thailand, Bangkok, Singapore, and Vietnamon the one hand, Sri Lanka, India, and the Indian diasporain the Gulf and North America on the other. The editors,Sonita Sarkar and Esha Niyogi De, use the idea of “criti-cal postmodernities” as a means of charting the circulationand migration of hybrid subjects through and out of Southand Southeast Asia. These shifting “trans-status” subjects re-configure geography as both a metaphor for understandingpower and a mode for mapping new spatial alignments. Thevolume’s commitment to tracing “border alliances” and its


focus on gender relations and gender ideology make it animportant contribution to emerging feminist diaspora andarea studies.

Trans-Status Subjects is not a collection that can be sum-marized neatly or distilled into a singular message. Thebook is divided into three sections: (1) Figuring Genders inthe Colony and Nation: Native and Foreign, (2) Transport-ing Genders between the Village and City: Representationsand Resistances, and (3) Gendering Local–Global Circuits:Labor, Capital, and Subjects of Social Change. Althoughfilms and novels provide the cultural texts for analysis inmany of the articles, the first section is largely historical; thesecond, and unfortunately weakest section, is anthropolog-ical and sociological; and the third, and strongest section,is focused on diaspora theory and labor migration. The sec-tions are not meant to provide theoretical unity for ratherdiverse subject matter but, rather, to suggest strategies forreading across the papers, which would provide new in-sights into questions of travel and movement. For instance,colonialism is seen as either apposite to globalization or asmerely an earlier instantiation of it. The chapters in thefirst and third sections of the collection do not so muchspeak to each other as force a confrontation between differ-ent ways of understanding citizenship, economic mobility,and social status under systems of colonialism and global-ization so that structures of patriarchy can be seen operatingtransnationally.

Although Trans-Status Subjects is theoretically innova-tive in many respects, at numerous junctures throughoutthe book there is a tendency to rehearse received tenetsof transnational theories propounded more than a decadeago (Appadurai, Sassen, Soja, etc). The lack of attention toqueer or gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) theoryis also somewhat surprising, especially because much ofwhat is exciting about the field has been developed withinthe framework of South Asian diaspora studies. Similarlydisconcerting is the absence of any discussion aroundquestions about translation, especially with regard tocircuits of migration and questions of transdisciplinarity(What does it mean to translate across disciplines andnation-states or culture areas?). Nevertheless, Trans-StatusSubjects is a volume that pushes the analysis of culture intoforward-looking frames and is therefore recommendedreading for anthropologists of all persuasions.

Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology.Richard A. Shweder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2003. 419 pp.

MATTHEW C. GUTMANNBrown University

The recipes in this book are decidedly more intended forthinking with than cooking. As in other collections by thisauthor, this volume provides an impassioned defense of rad-ical pluralism and an introduction to the field of culturalpsychology that Richard A. Shweder has helped to found,

develop, and refine. Although most of the chapters in thisbook are reprints of scattered recent articles and four arecoauthored, on the whole they cohere, and the main argu-ments are clearly presented and sustained.

There are chapters that describe and discuss the fieldof cultural psychology—a discipline not to be confused, hesays three times on one page, with cross-cultural psychol-ogy (pp. 40–41). Another compares sleeping arrangementsin different cultures, the point of which is that the practiceof even teenagers sleeping with their parents is not inher-ently perverted or harmful. Perhaps the most entertainingchapter is on “Fundamentalism for Highbrows,” his addressto undergraduates at the University of Chicago, in whichShweder’s self-professed “postmodern humanism” is cleverand entirely over the edge in touting “the only true Ameri-can university” (p. 339).

The most confrontational chapter cautions “the en-lightened First World” against rushing to judgment andurges tolerance for female genital mutilation in parts ofsub-Saharan Africa; Shweder combines legitimate concernsregarding the hypocrisy of those who avoid any men-tion of male circumcision with the indefensible allegationthat fear about genital alternation making sex less enjoy-able for women may simply derive from “our own ethno-anatomical folk beliefs” (p. 192).

Along the way, we are also treated to a spirited chal-lenge to the evolutionary psychology notion that emo-tions and morality are universally the same and biologi-cally grounded. As in his discussion of the relation betweentheodicy and public health, Shweder alternates betweenimpassioned and witty defense of anthropological pluralistshibboleth and unfortunate and distorted readings of intel-lectual foes such as feminists-at-large. Like many a militarygeneral, at times in this book Shweder seems more adept atfighting past battles rather than addressing contemporaryones—in his case 19th-century cultural evolutionary theo-ries and imperial liberalizing projects that ranked cultures.

His critique of 20th-century modernization theory’sfailed predictions is salutary, yet along with the runningsubtext that the West is still not the best, many of the con-clusions of Why Do Men Barbecue? may prove provocativefor a general public but will remain unremarkable to most21st century anthropologists. That may be the point, be-cause this is a volume aimed at a broader readership. Fur-ther, one does not read Shweder for his views on inequalityand power, still less for his political analysis: Instead, oneturns to him for selected insights regarding cultural misun-derstandings and preconceptions. And he certainly knowshow to milk an anecdote.

Collisions between discrete cultures form a red threadin this text. Struggle, change, and power relations are not asinteresting to him as cultural stability and “staying power”(p. 343), for example, the resilience of religion in the face ofmodern science. Shweder’s is the billiard ball, freeze-framemodel of culture, in which boundaries are easily discerned,sometimes national in character. Despite periodic mentionof phrases like globalization, hybridity, agency, and cultural

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critique, and the recognition of factors like migration thatmay complicate the cultural homogeneity implied through-out this book, the conceptual framework in Why Do MenBarbecue? is proudly Geertzian. The idea of endogamousconflict, much less oppression internal to a society, is oflittle interest to him and barely acknowledged.

Just as many scholars used to conduct family studiesbased largely on responses by “heads-of-household,” as if alocal patriarch could effectively speak for all who dwelledwithin his domain, here culture is implicitly treated asconsensus bound and unconflicted. Thankfully, feministtheorists have since convincingly proved the salience ofdifference and inequality within families and households,and the importance of such conflict for change in genderand kinship relations. Just as much as in more advancedclasses, students in anthropology 101 classes (Shweder’sexpressed point of reference) need to be taught about in-equality within cultures as well as between them, and, per-haps most importantly, about the relationship of local andglobal inequalities.

Throughout this volume, Shweder seeks to distinguishhis views from radical relativism, to tease the limits of thedifferent-but-equal ethos, and to sing his paean to what heterms confusionism. A passage from a concluding chapteris characteristic of this earnestly whimsical concept andShweder’s approach to intellectual life in general. ContraE. O. Wilson and attempts to unify knowledge, he writes,“According to this nonconsilient Confusionist truth, theknowable world is incomplete if seen from any one pointof view, incoherent if seen from all points of view, andempty if seen from nowhere in particular” (p. 300). Trueenough, but not enough.

Une Science Imperiale Pour L’Afrique? La Construc-tion des Savoirs Africanistes en France 1878–1930.Emmanuelle Sibeud. Paris: Edition de l’Ecole des HautesEtudes en Sciences Sociales, 2002. 356 pp.

ROBERT GERARD LAUNAYNorthwestern University

The relationship between the formation of anthropologyas an academic discipline on one hand, and the Europeancolonial enterprise on the other, is by now a well worntheme. Not surprisingly, the British case has received themost attention, given that Britain was the world’s leadingcolonial power in the 19th and the first half of the 20th cen-tury. Yet the relationship played itself out differently in dif-ferent colonial settings. Sibeud’s dense study of early Frenchcolonial ethnography tells a somewhat different story.

The book focuses on the experiences of a specificcohort of ethnographers whom Sibeud labels “eruditscoloniaux,” a label that translates very imperfectly as“scholar/administrators.” They were particularly activearound the turn of the 20th century, in the years betweenthe Berlin Conference and the outbreak of World War I. Thebest among them were remarkable scholars in their own

right, most notably Maurice Delafosse, whose pioneeringcontributions to the ethnography, history, and linguisticsof francophone West Africa are still (if begrudgingly) ac-knowledged by specialists. The ideology that guided thework of Delafosse and his contemporaries was the con-viction that those individuals best equipped to carry outa rational, effective, and humane colonial administrationwere those who possessed an intimate knowledge of thelanguage, history, and culture of the colonized, acquired atclose range through long-term association. For a brief mo-ment, the colonial ideal of the broussard (bushwhacker) heldsway. It was fashionable, and even useful for their careers,for administrators to publish an article or two, if not alwaysof the highest caliber. Yet such an emphasis on fieldwork,on what one might call “participant colonization,” washardly a foregone conclusion. The scholar/administratorswere self-consciously at odds with the reigning paradigmof anthropological museology, centered on a racist cran-iometry that acknowledged no need for close contact withcolonized peoples, categorized as irredeemably inferior.

The central paradox of Sibeud’s narrative is that thesescholar/administrators ultimately found themselves doublymarginalized, by the colonial administration on one handand the academic establishment on the other. The colo-nial administration came to consider the scholarly preoc-cupations of its agents in the field as a distraction fromthe exercise of their duties, and the development of anyintimacy between administrators and their charges as arecipe for divided loyalties. The academic establishmentwas often unenthusiastic about their work. Durkheim andMauss were initially unimpressed, decrying the superiorityof Anglo-Saxon ethnography over French efforts. However,Arnold van Gennep, himself something of a maverick inFrench academic circles, was an ally, publishing their workin his Revue d’ethnographie et de sociologie. The reputationof these scholar/administrators was ultimately eclipsed bythe emergence of the Griaule school in the 1930s, an out-come that Sibeud argues was neither inevitable nor salutary.She contrasts the Griaule school’s construction of an essen-tialized, decontextualized, and ahistorical Africa with themore complex, if contradictory, depictions of the previousgeneration.

This is a nuanced and meticulously researched accountof the relationship of knowledge to power in French colo-nial Africa in the early years of the 20th century: It eschewsthe anachronistic moralizing that sometimes colors con-temporary accounts of colonial ethnography. The strengthsof the book lie in its detailed understanding of the microp-olitics of both the French colonial administration and ofParisian academic circles, and in its careful contextualiza-tion of the ideas of the scholar/administrators as comparedto their colonial, as well as academic, opponents and sup-porters. The one striking omission is any mention, muchless discussion, of French colonial studies of Islam in anAfrican context, most notably the work of Paul Marty, acontemporary of Delafosse and his cohort. The omission isall the more glaring in that the excision of Islam from the


purview of “authentic” Africanity reflects the triumph of theGriaule school over the tradition of scholar/administratorssuch as Delafosse, who read Arabic and was intensely awareof the role of Islam in West African society.

It is a pity that a book that examines in such close de-tail the careers of the scholar/administrators does not reallyengage with their ethnography as such.

We learn a great deal about the relationship of mem-bers of this cohort to one another, to other administrators,to academics, but, ultimately, not to the Africans whomthey simultaneously governed and described.

Landscape, Memory and History: AnthropologicalPerspectives. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds.London: Pluto Press, 2003. 246 pp.

NEIL L . NORMANUniversity of Virginia

Identity through the medium of memory and place, as itrelates to shifting and contested perceptions of landscape,are organizing themes around which the case studies inthis volume coalesce. Examining these themes against his-toric, ethnohistoric, geographical, and literary sources, theauthors provide time depth to the study of the processesthat inscribe meaning to elements of the physical and imag-ined environment. The authors complicate monolithic his-toric accounts of landscape by demonstrating the use ofhistory(ies) by various parties in attempting to fix, or blur,ideas of place. In the introduction, the editors situate thevolume within a broader body of anthropological scholar-ship and sketch the project that develops throughout theremainder of the text as the interpretation of the “verbalpictures,” which endow various locales with historic depthas well as subjectivity. The editors and nine of the ten au-thors are anthropologists. The tenth is a human geographer.

To lead off the case studies, John Gray mines the re-cent poetry of Tim Douglas and others to explore the am-biguities and ironies associated with poetic descriptions ofthe Scottish borderland. These descriptions both exalt cul-tural distinction and lament the region’s inexorable rela-tionship with England. Gray presents the region’s soddenenvironment as both discomforting and a source of border-land identity.

Invoking Theodor Adorno, Stuart McLean uses Irishbogs as a vehicle through which to engage history, geogra-phy, and archaeology, and to question the relation betweennature and history. He describes the bogs as positionedwithin numerous overlapping political discourses and preg-nant with tropes of disease and decay, making them targetsof modernity projects. McLean adeptly labors for an ade-quate vocabulary to describe the elusive nature of bogs,which at once capture human imagination as archetypi-cal natural spaces and, yet, offer potential spaces for de-velopment projects. Janice Harper addresses the forestedregions of Madagascar, which conservationists consider nat-ural spaces that reflect nonhuman life. She juxtaposes this

view with that of Malagasy forest residents, who see theforests as symbols and metaphors of shared histories andlocales of collective resistance against outside control.

Conflicting visions of politicized landscape reappear inAngele Smith’s study of 19th-century Irish ordinance maps.Smith assesses the maps as political tools used to create asense of order and control by British administrators andlanded gentry. However, mapping and labeling choices, andmultiple ways of perceiving the maps, leave open the pos-sibility for contestation at the local, regional, and nationallevels.

Monuments to the death of Aboriginal Jimmy Inker-man and European pastoralist Frank Bowman illustrate yetanother contested landscape that Veronica Strang uses toaddress the waxing and waning of Australian heroic ac-counts. In recent times, Aboriginal groups have used a mon-ument to Inkerman’s death as a framing point for cere-monies directed both within their community and outward,as “symbolic spears” (p. 124) hurled at those who would en-croach on Aboriginal controlled lands. Ruth Lane picks upthe tension over land use and land representation wherethe expansion of irrigated farmland has excluded Aborig-ines from lands considered sacred. Lane draws from hu-man geographers who foreground mobility “as a materialengagement of people with place” (p. 142) to explore dif-ferent conceptions of landscape by both groups.

The issues of mobility and a shifting conception oflandscape recur in Michael O’Hanlon and Linda Frankland’scareful examination of routes and roads across landscapesinhabited by Wahgi in Highland New Guinea. They arguethat the current Wahgi ambivalence for vehicular roads re-lates to perceptions of marriage roads, which “are valued fortheir connective properties but are equally seen . . . to posea threat to clan-based communities” (p. 168).

Pei-yi Guo examines the built landscape of artificialand semiartificial islets created by the Langalanga of theSolomon Islands. This chapter explores the poetics of land-scape, where artificial islands are viewed through the gaze oftourists as strongly associated with “tradition” or the past,while current Langalanga promote the sites as locales ofheritage.

In the concluding chapter, James Carrier considersNegril and Montego Bay, Jamaica, as a “disputed landscapeburdened by history” (p. 226). The bay region is caughtbetween fishers, who see seascape as a source of commodi-ties and sustenance, and conservationists, who suggest us-ing the bay for tourist development efforts. Carrier demon-strates how fisher groups come to terms with the seascapethrough notions of biodiversity, management planning,and “sustainable” commodity, while co-opting these argu-ments to support their own vision of the landscape.

The chapters articulate nicely with one another andbuild on the goals and themes outlined by the editors inthe introduction. However, issues of power as they relateto the production of history (cf. Trouillot 1995) are ad-dressed only tangentially throughout the volume and aresubsumed in the epilogue within a discussion of “heritage”

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versus “development” as reoccurring and competing narra-tives used to politicize landscapes. This volume nonethelessmakes an important contribution to historically informedanthropological studies of landscape.

REFERENCES CITEDTrouillot, Michel-Rolph

1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.Boston: Beacon Press.

Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Pamela Stewartand Andrew Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2003. 228 pp.

JAMES H. SMITHSpelman College

Overall, this is a thoughtful, exhaustive, and, at times, orig-inal review of the copious literature on witchcraft and ru-mors, as well as an attempt to synthesize the two litera-tures and to collapse the conceptual boundary separatingthem. Impressively, the authors review the entire anthro-pological corpus on these subjects, and the chapters fol-lowing the introductory section on witchcraft and rumorsengage the literature on Africa, New Guinea, India, Europe,and the Americas with impressive scope and attention todetail. The tone is descriptive, and the structure is orientedaround the diverse ethnographies the authors summarizeand draw relationships among; they make few original an-alytical points of their own. However, they do draw atten-tion to all of the major themes in this subdiscipline, suchas the relationship between witchcraft and class formation,and the responsiveness of witchcraft beliefs and accusationsto larger social structural transformations. The volume istherefore an excellent primer to this growing subfield ofanthropology. By synthesizing diverse literatures, the au-thors do come on some very interesting points, many ofwhich are nicely crystallized in diagrams; one memorablemodel relates particular forms of witch eradication with spe-cific social and political contexts over time, focusing onZambia. However, it would have helped if the authors hadforegrounded their key analytical points and orientations,rather than allowing summaries of other peoples’ works toconstitute the structure of the text. More importantly, theauthors could have done a better job of accounting for thedifferences that pertain with regard to witchcraft, sorcery,rumors, and gossip in the various regions on which they fo-cus (Africa, India, New Guinea, Europe, and the Americas).

One of the authors’ major contributions is the reintro-duction of an aspect of witchcraft studies that faded intothe background somewhat after the 1970s: mainly, the so-cial and political consequences, or what used to be calledthe “function,” of witchcraft accusations and movements.Thus, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern draw thereader’s attention to the interaction between localized be-liefs and practices and national politics, showing how thesenarratives about fortune and misfortune are, under certain

historical and political conditions, projected to the regionalor national level, and transformed in the process. In the fewplaces where analysis prevails over summary, the emphasisis more on mapping conflict and resolution processes thanon understanding the meaning or content of witchcraft be-liefs per se. However, it strikes me that these are insepa-rable processes that should be analyzed dialectically. Theauthors’ emphasis on function goes along with the text’soverarching focus on the conflict dimensions of witchcraftand rumors. This focus is a bit one-sided, given that Stewartand Strathern also emphasize the transformative and rev-olutionary potential of witchcraft beliefs and accusations.There is a precedent for a more positive view of witchcraftbeliefs: Years ago, anthropologists operating in a structuralfunctionalist vein argued that witchcraft functions as a so-cial strain gauge, encouraging redistribution so as to pre-vent excessive accumulation on the part of individuals orgroups. Moreover, witchcraft beliefs can become a meansof imagining and enacting social justice as the antithesisof the terror of the witch, and they can also give rise topolitical action that sustains communities in conditions ofextreme uncertainty. As the anthropologist Monica Wilsonnoted decades ago, witches are standardized nightmares,representing the most negative potentials of a particular so-cial moment, and, thus, they are also signposts that enablefundamental social change by representing what people,and society, should not be and do. For example, in Kenyain the 1990s, the discourse about devil worshippers in thehighest levels of government imagined a form of secretivepolitics destructive to national wealth and well being and,thus, fuelled a more positive social vision, in which makingdestructive secrets transparent to the public was sacralized.In this way, the global discourse of democratization and ac-countability was mediated, popularized, and made locallyrelevant through a discourse at once Christian and local.

All in all, however, this book is strong and will be ofgreat assistance to students and experts who wish to geta good handle on the unwieldy literature on occultism,religion and politics, and the social and political effects ofrumors and gossip.

Surrealism and the Exotic. Louise Tythacott. New York:Routledge, 2003. 260 pp.

CALEB SMITHDuke University

In the article On Ethnographic Surrealism (1988), JamesClifford connected the French avant-garde movement tothe contemporary academic discipline of ethnologie, arguingthat the Surrealists adapted the objects of non-Western cul-tures to a reflexive critique of European modernity. Surreal-ism’s taste for the exotic, from such a perspective, belongs toa general valorization of other cultures by Europeans whosefaith in Western technology, rationality, and progress wasdevastated by the World War I. In Surrealism and the Exotic,Louise Tythacott pushes Clifford’s insights to their limits,


in which Surrealism becomes less a French movement thana mode of intercultural contact—an imperial phenomenonin which a Western power, even as it consumes other cul-tures, discovers in them new forms of self-critique andsubversion.

Reconfiguring conventional geographies, Tythacottjoins scholars like Elisabeth Cowling, Jack Spector, MichaelRichardson, and Dickran Tashjian, who see the zone ofcontact between metropolis and periphery as Surrealism’sorigin—a major revision of earlier accounts, includingWalter Benjamin’s, which placed the Surrealists within thehistory of European industrial capitalism. Tythacott alsoworks in the recent tradition of Clifford, Edward Said,Marianna Torgovnick, and other critics who explore impe-rialist encounters not only for their violence but also fortheir novel, perhaps even liberating, effects in the West-ern imagination. Tythacott’s particular contribution is notsimply another revisionist reading of Surrealism, but a newintroduction to the movement’s history and ideas in thor-oughly postcolonial and postmodern terms. The book mayfind its greatest value as a textbook on modernism from acontemporary globalist perspective.

In an early chapter on the “Culture of Surrealism,” forinstance, the Surrealists’ interest in “found objects” andthe relics of Parisian flea markets is compellingly linked totheir interest in “exotic” artifacts. (Tythacott, a lecturer inArt Gallery and Museum Studies at Manchester, cataloguesthe Surrealists’ collections with an archivist’s sensibility.) Ineach case the object is extracted from its circumstances ofproduction and imported, with its subversive strangeness,into the modern Paris of standardization and mass produc-tion. The object’s disruptive power depends on its culturalhomelessness. Thus, the flaneur in the junk shop and theSurrealist ethnographer abroad share a common desire todiscover objects whose original use value has become ob-scure, perhaps destroyed with the society that producedthem.

At the same time, however, their common desire to“juxtapos[e] mutually alien world-views” (p. 2) and turnthe mundane into a dreamscape is part of their critiqueof metropolitan French society—and Surrealism’s attackon European modernity extends to imperialism itself, in-cluding its missionary, nationalist, and economic drives.On the other hand, Tythacott shows that the Surreal-ists’ estranging encounters with the “exotic” took placein precisely the channels opened by imperialism. Reposi-tioned this way, Surrealism looks like an agent of mod-ern imperialism’s self-critique. In this self-critical edge,Tythacott discerns the movement’s enduring value foranthropology.

Surrealism suggests a “reflexive” approach “in whichthe encounter with otherness provokes a re-evaluation. . . of the ethnographer’s conceptual premises” (pp. 2–3).In chapters on Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, Tytha-cott argues that Surrealism moved these two experimentalethnographers toward a productive interrogation of theirown roles as knowledge producers in relation to the ex-

otic: “Leiris’ affiliations to Surrealism enabled him to standoutside the mainstream anthropological perspective and hewas perhaps one of the first to critically reflect on the im-plications (political, moral, subjective) of the ethnographicencounter and to develop the seeds of what might be calleda post-colonialist or postmodern approach” (p. 212).

For all its attention to the movement’s excesses andblind spots, then, Surrealism and the Exotic attempts toreclaim Surrealism as an ancestor of contemporary, the-oretically informed anthropology. By a curious reversal,this reclamation tends to domesticate the Surrealists: Theybecome the spokespeople of now orthodox critiques ofEurocentric modernity. Readers who have lately cometo feel the limits of postmodernism and postcolonialityas theoretical frameworks may wish that the “subver-sive” impulse of Surrealism could be rediscovered in anew academic context. Could our encounter with theSurrealists provoke a critique, rather than a recognitionand reaffirmation, of contemporary theoretical premises?To answer this question we might have to distinguishbetween the historical movement and the critical impulseof Surrealism, where the latter would aim to defamiliarizethe dominant terms of knowledge production, includingthe postcolonialist and postmodern terms dominant today. Inany case, Tythacott leaves this question open, settling for agenealogy of contemporary approaches with internationalSurrealism at its roots.

Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the TrujilloRegime, and Modernity in Dominican History. RichardLee Turits. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 384 pp.

GERALD F. MURRAYUniversity of Florida

Anthropologists of the Caribbean will be interested in his-torian Richard Lee Turits’s book on the Dominican dic-tator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Faithful to the historian’scraft, he researched a 20-page bibliography heavy in pri-mary sources, but Turits also carried out 130 field interviews,many of them with older peasants reminiscing about lifeunder Trujillo. He encountered, as have anthropologists, amilitantly expressed nostalgia among older villagers for thisdictator nearly a half century after his death—a persistentloyalty few dead dictators enjoy. Academics and urban elitesnow demonize Trujillo’s memory. They dismiss this “goodold-days” mindset as peasant ignorance or false conscious-ness. Turits’s excellent book, however, makes us questionwhose consciousness warrants upgrading.

The story-plot of the book is clear. Shortly after his1930 coup, Trujillo developed a vision of modernizationand national economic independence based on agrarianproduction by an autonomous landowning peasantry. Hisimplementation of the vision was launched in 1934 with anaggressive agrarian reform program that titled existing peas-ant holdings, expropriated and redistributed the unusedland of the wealthy, and built irrigation systems to increase

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production and roads to increase access to markets. Peas-ants were ordered to report to him personally any local of-ficial guilty of negligence, corruption, or abuse. And woe tothe offender. Trujillo allied himself, as no other ruler hadever done before (or has ever done since), with the peasantsector, publicly dignifying them as the backbone of the na-tion, and putting his rhetoric into practice with a very realflow of land titles, irrigation canals, roads, and schools. HadTrujillo died earlier, he might have gone down in historyas an enlightened reformer, an anthropological hero whoseiron fist struck in favor of peasants and against regional war-lords and idle wealthy landowners. The causes of his trans-formation from hero to villain occupy the final chapters ofthe book.

Although it departs from the volume’s main theme,Turits’s treatment of Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of 15,000Haitians is particularly provocative, identifying territorialfears rather than the conventional bugaboo of anti-Haitianracism as the driving causal force behind the tragedy. Farfrom being anti-Haitian, long before the massacre Trujillonamed a road after the Haitian president, publicly kissedthe Haitian flag, and even boasted of his own Haitian an-cestry (p. 160). Why did the tragedy occur? And why amassacre rather than an expulsion? Turits’s blunt answeris delightfully refreshing: We do not know. In contrastingTrujillo’s premassacre friendliness to Haitians to his post-massacre scramble for justifications, however, Turits de-motes popular racism to the status of consequence ratherthan cause of the massacre.

This reviewer would propose a few anthropologicalcorrections. Turits’ repeatedly claims that Trujillo movedthe peasants from “ ‘nomadic’ pastoral practices to seden-tary farming” (p. 184). This is unfortunate terminologythat grates on anthropological ears; Dominicans werenever Bedouins. The shift was from swidden cultivationwith open livestock grazing to permanent agriculturewith fenced-in grazing, not from pastoral nomadism toagrarian sedentism. We can also quibble with some ethno-graphic details. Turits believes that Dominican civiliansin the north did not participate in the Haitian slaughter(p. 169). This reviewer interviewed northerners who mostemphatically did. The peasants who fought guerrillas forTrujillo were his macheteros, not machateros (p.253). Truitssays that the Spanish r sound in the Dominican border isnot rolled “at the end or in the middle of words” (p. 318).Wrong. The r in cara is not “rolled” or trilled in any Spanishdialect; it is flapped. Turits is referring to an unflappedDominican allophone before consonants or in word-finalposition. But such minor errors leave intact the integrity ofTurits’s thesis. One can treat with skepticism Turits’s hintthat it was Trujillo’s peasant connection that somehowkept him in power. Latin American dictators bereft ofa peasant base but with strong armies have done quitewell, thank you. But a positive peasant connection wasuniquely strong in Trujillo’s case, and Turits has broughtit finally to the prominence it deserves. His book forcesus to confront a contradiction between two academic

dogmas—the Dogma of Peasant Wisdom and the Dogma ofTrujillo-the-Monster. Either peasants are dumb or Trujillo’smonster status must be rethought and nuanced. Who arethe ideological dupes? Those soon-to-die octogenarianadmirers of the strong-handed dictator who longed forthe return of tranquility and respect? Or the true-believerpeddlers of electoral procedures, that snake-oil medicinegood for all countries and ailments? Turits skirts thesesensitive questions. But his honest assessment of the earlyTrujillo years, juxtaposed to the social chaos and institu-tional corruption generated by four subsequent decades ofelections, forces us to listen to these aging rural voices, todemythologize the sacred mantra democracy, and to askdeeper anthropological questions about the nature of theState.

Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in AndeanKnotted-String Records. Gary Urton. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 2003. 202 pp.

ROCIO QUISPE-AGNOLIMichigan State University

One of the most striking enigmas about Andean civiliza-tions is the idea that the Inkas, like other Amerindiancultures, did not have a writing system. However, as thescholarship of recent decades shows, the Inka were ableto record and preserve information. In his comment onCondori Mamani’s tale (1997) about the Inkas’ death causedby his inability to read a paper handled by a Spaniard, FrankSalomon stresses the contemporary Andean consciousnessof a writing system, different from Western writing. Inkasdid write, just not the way Spaniards understood it. Theyutilized a unique writing and statistical device called thekhipu. The khipu constitute one of the Inka notation sys-tems equivalent to Western writing that scholars from dif-ferent disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, linguistics,art history, history, and mathematics) are trying to deci-pher, decode, analyze, and “translate” today. The khipuwere knotted-string devices used for recording both sta-tistical and narrative information, most notably by theInka but also by other peoples of the Central Andes, frompre-Inka times through the colonial and republican erasand even to present day, in a transformed and attenuatedform.

Gary Urton’s study of Inka khipu has been recordedin several titles, which can be traced from 1988 on. Thisbook marks another step in the anthropologist’s researchon these Inka devices. Based on the computer technologysystem of binary coding, Urton’s book explores the possi-bility that khipu were structured primarily as a binary code.Urton examines different types of recordkeeping systemsto argue that the khipu were not only a mnemonic device,and they may, in fact, have worked as a writing system. Akey concept underlying Urton’s research is the “semiosis”(Charles Peirce’s concept that a sign is not a sign unless it cantranslate itself in another sign) between a sign (khipu), the


world represented by this sign, and its process of conven-tionalization. His central argument is that the physical fea-tures resulting from the manipulation of fibers in the con-struction of the khipu constituted binary-coded sequences.The majority of khipu studies have focused on the de-scription of patterns of numbers and colors (Marcia Ascherand Robert Ascher, William Burns, Leland Locke, CarlosRadicati, Tom Zuidema) but there is almost no informationof a possible binary coding system (p. 136). Once the bi-nary encoding of khipu has been established, Urton identi-fies seven levels of decision making or operations: material,color class, spin/ply, pendant attachment recto/verso, knotdirectionality, number class, and information type (deci-mal/non decimal). The next step is to search the way inwhich semantic values could be assigned to these construc-tions. Based on Peirce, the author proposes looking at theInka khipu as tokens of (among other things) the intel-lectual, syntactic, and semantic system of information ofAndean communities who produced khipu as a whole.Finally, Urton’s book reflects on linguistic principles ofmarkedness, insistence (frequency), parallelism, semanticcouplets (Bruce Mannheim), and two different kinds of bi-nary oppositions (mutual exclusion [a/non-a] and symbolicopposition [a/b]). On the results of this reflection, the au-thor sketches out a theory of interpreting the hierarchicaland asymmetrical signs of khipu as the basis for canonicalInka literatures, the components of which would have beenused for constructing narrative recitations.

Urton’s work stresses the necessity of a better and morecareful study of the khipu transcriptions contained in colo-nial Spanish documents. These could provide categories forunderstanding classes of meaning in Andean thought. Thiscould serve as a point of departure for developing inven-tories of classes of meanings in semantic, coupletlike ar-rangements, and encoded in the khipu by means of binarycoding. This book also contributes to expanding the proofthat khipu may work beyond the mnemonic function.

In addition to addressing the contributions of thiswork, its reading may give rise to questions at different lev-els of scholarly specialization. For example, were the khipuan initial stage of writing that was truncated with the ar-rival of the Europeans and the destruction of the Andeanworld? If that were the case, could that be one of the rea-sons why scholars have been unable to decode the infor-mation recorded in these devices? From the perspective ofan interdisciplinary researcher working with colonial docu-ments and their discourses, one wonders why there is suchan overwhelming absence of information on how exactlykhipu worked. In addition to these questions, khipu studiesshould address other Andean notions about recorded in-formation, such as quilca or qellqa (translated into Spanishas signifying “letter or document” or “letter [of the alpha-bet],” “to paint,” “embroidery,” and “wooden sculpture”).Based on colonial testimonies, it is possible that the khipuconstituted one of the possible actualizations of writing sys-tems that were contained in an abstract concept, such as“qellqa.”

Urton’s work is the final step on a long path that thisscholar and khipu studies have been taking for years. It isalso the beginning of an effective decoding of Inka records.It provides answers, raises questions, and proposes newways to approach record keeping in the Andean world.When we achieve the decoding of khipu, we will be ableto access unknown and fascinating aspects of the Andeancultures.

REFERENCES CITEDCondori Mamani, Gregorio

1977 Autobiografıa. Cuzco: Centro de estudios rurales andinosBartolome de Las Casas.

Salomon, Frank2001 Para repensar el grafismo andino. In Peru: El legado de la

Historia. Luis Millones, ed. Pp. 107–127. Sevilla: Universidadde Sevilla.

Histories and Historicities in Amazonia. Neil L. White-head, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.236 pp.

STEVEN RUBENSTEINOhio University

Anthropologists have long understood that culture changedoes not necessarily mean “culture loss” and have strug-gled to devise a theory of culture that could accommodateand account for this fact. This volume not only makes animportant contribution to this endeavor, it also convinc-ingly argues for a new theory of history as well. Neil White-head, in a volume coedited with Brian Ferguson (1992), hasalready demonstrated the importance of the historical en-gagement with colonialism in understanding Amazoniansocieties. Here he adds to the work of Jonathan Hill andothers (1988) who have enlarged our understanding of lo-cal conceptions of history itself.

In a profound and provocative introduction, White-head explains that his basic objective is to conceive ofhistory as something other than the passage of time. Ob-serving that both Amazonian and Western histories “arehistories of the mutual, mimetic, and entangled relationsof Amazonians and non-Amazonians over the last five hun-dred years” (p. x), he argues that local Amazonian historiesare essential for an understanding of colonial (which, inthe Amazon, includes the contemporary experience of in-ternal colonialism) history. He proposes an “ethnohistory”that goes beyond a contextualization of native discourseand practice, to include the “ethnography of historicalconsciousness.” This is what he means by “historicities”—“cultural schema and subjective attitudes that make the pastmeaningful” (p. xi). For Whitehead, such historicities, how-ever culturally situated, cannot be understood locally orin isolation, because it is precisely these historicities thatmediate the disjuncture between self and other in colonialencounters.

Alas, like many edited volumes, the following chaptersdo not always live up to the editor’s vision. Nevertheless,many are timely and important. Several make an important

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addition to Whitehead’s point by exploring the ways his-toricities take form through spatial relations. As DomingoMedina points out in the first chapter, maps play a crucialrole not only in representing Ye’kuana identity but also indefending their control over resources. The acquisition oflegal title to land has been a central concern for indigenousgroups in the Amazon as elsewhere, but as Medina empha-sizes, how land is used is as important an issue as title. In theAmazon, colonization is an ongoing process centering oncontrol over land. Several other chapters explore differentways in which geographic knowledge is encoded culturally,and space is simultaneously historicized and politicized.

Several chapters deal with questions concerning therepresentation of a collective voice and globalization. How-ever, these themes could have been more thoroughly in-terrogated and developed. Although all authors work attranscending the opposition between culture and history,they sometimes rely on other, related binaries—especiallyinside–outside and speech–writing. Many of the case stud-ies suggest ways in which the boundary between “inside”and “outside” is historically constructed. Too often though,the relationship between the two is described in mechan-ical terms, such as adaptation, resistance, and manipula-tion. This is a shame because indigenous activists oftendiscover that there is a fine line between agency and accom-modation. The concept of “historicities” seems designed towork against mechanical oppositions, and some contribu-tors contrast verbally encoded historicities that often fallon one side of this line or the other, with spatially encodedhistoricities that often overwhelm the insider–outsider bi-nary. Still, I wish more chapters had picked up on White-head’s allusion to the role of mimesis in these processes,and the implication that agency may be culturally encodedand, thus, at times, take unconscious form. Some contrib-utors suggest another way to transcend this binary: Theyexamine overlapping spheres constituted through variouscirculations that link indigenous and nonindigenous peo-ples, such as consumer goods (Scaramelli and Tarble) anddiscourse (Riley and Gasson).

Many chapters situate their subjects at a transitionfrom an oral to a written culture. Whitehead is wisely con-cerned about identifying the formal properties of signs withtheir cultural usage, and the attention to landscapes astexts suggests one way to further this project. Neverthe-less, most chapters reveal just how hard it is for anthropolo-gists to move beyond the metaphor of culture as text. Ama-zonianists might benefit from Andeanist Frank Salomon’sconstructive and sophisticated engagement with this issue(2001). Cormier’s chapter on Guaja, however, reveals thefull potential of Whitehead’s project; her analysis of howtheir myth and ritual act to decolonize history would be ofinterest to non-Amazonianists, and should be read by anyanthropologist interested in religion, politics, and history.

REFERENCES CITEDFerguson, R. Brian, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds.

1992 Warfare in the Tribal Zone. Santa Fe: School of AmericanResearch Press.

Hill, Jonathan, ed.1988 Rethinking History and Myth. Urbana: University of Illi-

nois Press.Salomon, Frank

2001 How Andean “Writing without Words” works. CurrentAnthropology 42(1):1–28.

Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophyof Archaeology. Alison Wylie. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002. 339 pp.

MICHAEL J . O ’BRIENUniversity of Missouri–Columbia

Most presses today shy away from collections of previouslypublished articles, especially if they are by a single author.Such books do not sell particularly well, and if it does toomany of them, a press can gain the reputation of being a resthome for shop-worn authors past their prime. From an au-thor’s point of view, however, there is a certain prestige thatcomes from having one’s papers between the same covers,if for no other reason than it signals, at least to the author,that what he or she has to say is important enough that itbears republishing. From the author’s standpoint, such col-lections are easy to produce. All you need to do is crank out aminimalist introduction in which you wax poetically aboutyour significant ideas and contributions, and once more,take aim at your critics, maybe just for old time’s sake. Interms of whether they are reviewed or not, most collectionsof essays are not worth more than a one-sentence commentin the books-received section of a journal.

Every once in awhile, however, an edited collectioncomes along that is an exception to the rule. Wylie’s collec-tion of articles is one of those exceptions, and it qualifies asa major exception. In fact, I cannot remember when I havebeen more impressed with a collection of single-authoredarticles. For one thing, Wylie was not content simply toreprint articles verbatim. Rather, she deleted extraneousmaterial (abstracts, acknowledgments, and the like) tostreamline them and added extensive endnotes to bringthe articles, which were originally published between 1982and 1999, up-to-date in terms of both the train of argumentand the references cited. The notes add immeasurably tothe value of the book. Some chapters are hybrids of twoarticles or an article and a conference paper. The firstfour of the 17 chapters—96 out of 246 pages of text—arenew, and they summarize Wylie’s philosophical views onarchaeology and set the stage for her various arguments inthe chapters that follow.

Wylie is only one of the several thousand profes-sional archaeologists out there who over the years havethought they had something to say about philosophy andarchaeology—two topics that in the 1970s, the heyday ofprocessual archaeology, became so interwoven that it of-ten was impossible to tell them apart. This is where Wyliebegins her story—in the intellectual mix that led to U.S.archaeology’s fascination with science and philosophy andthat ultimately helped bring about the antipositivist move-ment known as postprocessualism. Her discussion of therise of processualism and its emphasis on philosophical


issues such as deduction, induction, and falsification is anexcellent summary of a complicated time. To those of uswho remember the glory days of processualism, the namesof philosophers such as Carl Hempel, Ernst Nagel, and KarlPopper were forever etched in our memories. In some ar-chaeological circles their work, after it was translated intoarchaeological terms, became more important than any-thing most prehistorians had produced. The problem wasthat archaeologists, not philosophers, were the ones doingthe translating. For the most part this made about as muchsense as a philosopher discussing the conceptual basis offrequency seriation.

Wylie is one of only a handful of people whom I trust tospeak authoritatively on philosophical aspects of archaeol-ogy. This is because she was trained as both an archaeologistand a philosopher, as opposed to being an archaeologistwho took a class in philosophy during graduate school. Be-ing not only an archaeologist but also a philosopher, Wylie

can dissect the processualist arguments of the 1970s insteadof simply summarizing them. She can also move easily intoother areas of archaeology, such as ethics and gender stud-ies. In short, the breadth of knowledge that Wylie demon-strates in Thinking from Things is impressive. In one chap-ter she might be discussing professional versus commercialinterests in archaeology and in another chapter reviewingsome of issues growing out of the Native American GravesProtection and Repatriation Act. Or she might be defend-ing the use of analogy in one chapter and discussing genderpolitics and science in another.

All in all, the book represents an important work—wellthought out, well balanced in terms of tone (not overlypreachy), and well referenced. I had read most of the articlesbefore, but taken together they left me with the impressionthat if one were trapped in an elevator with Wylie, the livelyand wide-ranging conversation you could have would makefor an enjoyable wait.

The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation

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