Diaspora, Migration and Nationalism

Reviews

Archaeology, art, andmaterial culture

Fardon, Richard. Fusions: masquerades andthought style east of the Niger-Benueconfluence, West Africa. 207 pp., maps, tables,figs, plates, illus., bibliogr. London: SaffronBooks, 2007. £45.00 (cloth)

Having previously published on the Chamba ofeastern Nigeria, Richard Fardon uses this essay tocompare the Chamba masquerade to culturalpractices amongst their neighbours. Taking hiscue from an essay by Patrick MacNaughton,Fardon starts off with some stimulating thoughtson the uses of comparative anthropology andraises an interesting question: how does theanthropologist decide what to compare his orher selected practice with? Acknowledging thebenefits of MacNaughton’s formal analysis of thehorizontal masks found in many parts of Westand West-Central Africa, Fardon discounts the arthistorical interest in horizontal mask as merelyformal and reiterates the anthropologicalrelevance of form. Indeed, his essay takes theform of masks seriously and situates formalitynot in a history of art but in a comparativeanthropology of form. Whilst MacNaughton’spursuit of museological classification isconcerned with formal appearance, Fardonpursues how religious thought is formalizeddifferently depending on cultural context.Indeed, ‘if some neighbours of the Chamba havenot produced their own masquerades then itmay be because they materialize a similarthought style in a different way’ (p. 29).Consequently, Fardon’s regional analysisrequires openness towards the object of

comparison: ‘[I]its object of comparison isconstructed as we go along’ (p. 27).

After the introduction, we learn about theparticular motivations of the Chambamasquerade, which is a ‘theranthropic’ fusion ofbovine and human characteristics that make themask a composite of elements derived from theliving, the dead, and the wild – the elementsthat Fardon’s earlier work on the Chambareflected upon (Between God, the dead and thewild: Chamba interpretations of religion and ritual,1990) are summarized here to provide the basisfor further comparison. Suffice it to mention thatthe particular associations made by themasquerade surface in domains as varied ascults, hunting, rites of passage, and seasonalceremonies. In all of these different contexts,Chamba masquerades perform the powers anddangers inherent in people’s lives. Aftersummarizing his previous work, Fardon goes onto analyse the geographic distribution of thesmall variations between Chamba masks andestablishes the initial terms for the regionalcomparison of masquerades with which theremainder of the text is concerned. The chaptersdemonstrate that the differences betweeneastern Chamba and western Chamba masks fitinto a scheme of larger differences between themasquerades of ethnically differentiatedpopulations in this part of Nigeria.

The essay consists of several chapters thateach deal with a different ethnic group in theregion east of the Niger-Benue confluence. Eachchapter provides detailed information on themasks produced and collected in colonial orpostcolonial times. Undoubtedly, the mosttelling evidence is presented in the last chapter.The Dowayo people who neighbour theChamba share some of their religious style of

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 632-680© Royal Anthropological Institute 2011

thought yet have no masquerades, and make theassociations that Chamba materialize inmasquerade in quite different forms. Themortuary ceremony amongst the Dowayorequires that the deceased is prepared for burialby bundling the corpse in cowskin while his orhead is surmounted by a bull’s head. The corpsebundle shows remarkable formal resemblance tothe Chamba masquerade. Whilst theethnographic details of this anthropologicalcomparison cannot be given here, the authorconvincingly argues that amongst the Dowayobovine theranthropic fusions occur in similarcontexts as amongst the Chamba – but never inthe form of masquerades. A religious complex isindeed formalized differently in differentlocations. What an art historical analysis of formcould not have yielded is revealed through ananthropological comparison of performance.

This essay draws upon a wealth ofethnographic research by illustriouspredecessors. Unfortunately, whilst a lot ofevidence is presented, it is at times difficult forthe reader to tell the wood from the trees. Evenso, the author pursues his argument consistentlythroughout the text and the illustrations. Indeed,this essay is profusely illustrated with stunningphotographs from the field by Fardon and hispredecessors as well as beautiful colour plates ofChamba masks in mostly German collections.The illustrations and analytic diagramscontribute as much, if not more, to theargument and help to persuade the reader thatformal analysis can be pursued beyond masks soas to convey a regional complex of religiousthought. This essay is indeed a majorachievement in the anthropology of art. Theauthor engages the region’s ethnography andcollections across the world in order to producean anthropological analysis that illustrates thevalue of salvage ethnography in a part of theworld where these masks are increasingly rare.

Ferdinand de Jong University of East Anglia

Fardon, Richard & Christine Stelzig.Column to volume: formal innovation inChamba statuary. 159 pp., maps, tables, figs,plates, illus., bibliogr. London: Saffron Books,2005. £35.95 (cloth), £24.95 (paper)

During the 1970s, statues that were identified asChamba from West Africa suddenly appeared onthe world art market. Appreciated for their skilfulexecution, these statues were incorporatedwithin the canon of Chamba art, although theydid not conform to what was by then

recognized as the Chamba ‘style’. This leads theauthors of this book to an investigation intothese objects: ‘Are they what the art marketclaimed they are? Who made them, when,where and why?’ Richard Fardon and ChristineStelzig draw upon their respective expertises toaddress these questions in this ‘whodunit’ ofChamba art. Combining ethnographic research,archival research, and the testimonies of artdealers and collectors, they reconstruct afascinating history of Chamba art productionand its collection in colonial and postcolonialtimes. Tracing around a hundred statuesattributed to Chamba in museum and privatecollections, and relying on the ethnographicaccounts by Glauning, Frobenius, and Lilley,they address a considerable archive of material,an archive that looks dauntingly complex andchaotic to the uninformed reader. Although theprose of this volume is not quite that of a‘whodunit’, the solid investigation of thematerial is certainly convincing.

The book is organized in a clear andaccessible manner. The introduction presents theformal conundrum: how was it that this newbody of Chamba statuary differed so markedlyfrom the statuary collected in situ in the earlytwentieth century? After an inventory of therange of Chamba statuary in public and privatecollections across the world, it appears thatnone of the objects collected in the style thatentered the market in the 1970s were present incolonial collections. On the basis of thisinventory, the authors decide that it would beerroneous to take the statues that entered themarket in the 1970s as typical of Chambastatuary. Their collection can be traced back to avery brief period (1968-70), although statues thatseem to aspire to the same characteristics havebeen collected over a slightly longer period.

After a short investigation into the use ofChamba statuary, the book provides anethnographic description by Father MalachyCullen, who identifies the carvings as producedby the carver Soompa. The investigators thussucceed in identifying the carver who may haveproduced the particular works that entered themarket in the 1970s. While the historicalevidence does not discuss Soompa’s statues inaesthetic terms, the authors none the less feelthat his particular aesthetic achievements mustexplain why his statues were so highly soughtafter for use in local cults: ‘The canonicalvolumetric works we are attributing to Soompaare not only realized with what strikes us asgreat expressive flair, but they also reveal amastery of material that immediately

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distinguishes them from other works said to beof Chamba origin’ (pp. 100-1).

A subsequent discussion of the materialcondition of Chamba art seems to confirm thatall of Soompa’s works have been used in situand the authors suggest that Soompa actuallychanged the canonical style of Chamba art froman emphasis on the columnar to an emphasis onvolume. In the conclusions, further questionsabout Soompa are raised: how many statues didhe make, when, where, and how did his artisticinnovation come about? Unfortunately none ofthese questions can be answered with muchcertainty today, but we do know that afterSoompa’s death his particular trademark seemsto have disappeared with him.

Relying on a wide variety of evidence that isinterrogated with creativity and rigour, theauthors of this exercise in ‘rescue ethnography’have indeed succeeded in establishing a crediblepedigree for a particular category of Africansculpture. Not only have they thus establishedthe individual hand of another ‘master carver’,they have indeed written an art history of thesculptural production of a particular ethnic groupand one of its outstanding sculptors. This is aconsiderable achievement, as the material thatthey have had to rely on is disparate andsometimes simply unreliable. Profusely illustratedand with a useful inventory of Chamba art inchronological order of collection, Column tovolume offers a comprehensive account of animportant sculptural tradition that sets anexample for other collaborative projects toproduce knowledge from an incomplete archive.

Ferdinand de Jong University of East Anglia

Hendon, Julia A. Houses in a landscape:memory and everyday life in Mesoamerica. xvi,292 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogr.London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,2010. £68.00 (cloth), £16.99 (paper)

Houses in a landscape is a valuable book. Itspurpose is ‘to address the interrelationship ofmemory and identity as intersubjective socialpractices that extend across space and throughtime and are susceptible to analysis throughmaterial remains’ (p. 238). The author contendsthat exploration of intersections of archaeologicaldata derived from everyday life in domesticspaces with particular theoretical and conceptualframeworks will contribute to the study of socialmemory and identity. She views memory,forgetting, and construction of identity to beactive and dynamic processes. Hendon develops

a complex model integrating hot-buttonanthropological issues, including agency,landscape, feasting, engendered and embodiedknowledge, domestic life, semiotics, andperformance.

The book focuses on societies innorthwestern Honduras: the Copan River valley,Cerro Palenque in the Ulua River valley, and theCuyumapa valley. The straight-line distancebetween the most remote sites is approximately165 km, although foot travel through the ruggedlandscape would be further. The periodconsidered is the seventh through to theeleventh centuries (Christian Era), whichMayanists call the Late Classic and TerminalClassic or Early Postclassic periods. All threesocieties reached apogees in population size andsocial complexity during this time, but differedin particulars. Archaeologists have recordedsome 6,000 structures around Copan, one ofthe most important Maya kingdoms. Non-MayaCerro Palenque had more than 500 structures.Archaeologists have encountered 511 structures inthe Cuyumapa valley, also outside of Mayaterritory. Hendon indicates the societies hadtrade relationships with each other.

Houses in a landscape is challenging. Itsintricate and dense arguments will make thebook slow reading for anyone unfamiliar withthe concepts upon which it draws. This isexacerbated by Hendon’s reference to multiplecomplex concepts in overly long sentences. Forinstance: ‘Like the sculpted figures on certainCopan buildings, body decorations made ofbone, shell, clay, and stone help define apersonhood that abstracts from the ongoinglived reality of experience an idealization of thegroup’s identity constructed from bits andpieces of objects connected to present and pastmembers of the coresident community ofpractice and the sociological house’ (p. 192). Hershorthand phrases for concepts that may notautomatically resonate with readers verge onjargon. Examples include ‘cognitive stickiness’,‘distributed personhood’, ‘memorycommunities’, and ‘relational self’.

For a book focusing on ‘subjecting thematerial culture itself to a concentrated scrutiny,resulting in an extended, creative, and fruitfulengagement with the material remains ofhuman endeavors’ (p. 4), objects are surprisinglyanecdotal in supporting arguments andinterpretations. The book offers few quantitativedata about artefacts or maps that show locationswhere artefacts were recovered. Most of theeight tables are descriptive, and only two aboutballcourts contain numerical data. How many

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human figurines came from different societies,residential compounds, or settlement densities?How many grinding stones were found indifferent contexts in comparison to volumes ofsoil excavated? What radiocarbon or obsidianhydration dates are associated with objects?Neutron activation analysis might supportconclusions about movement of ceramicfigurines within and between societies.

A 2008 paper, Ian Kuijt’s ‘The regenerationof life: Neolithic structures of symbolicremembering and forgetting’ (CurrentAnthropology 49, 171-97), incorporates some ofthe same theoretical concepts as Houses in alandscape. In comments following Kuijt’s paperabout the Near East, anthropologists madenegative observations that also apply to thisbook. The prevalence of objects and practicesshould have been explored. Concepts presentedare hard to use for organizing and analysingarchaeological data. Comparison of data fromcontexts separated in time and space (and fromdifferent cultures in the book) may undercutarguments about construction of memory.

However, positive comments anthropologistsmade about the paper also apply to the book.The authors do not restrict themselves to theempirical in their quest to advance knowledgeabout societies. Both works are speculative,imagine alternatives, and push disciplinaryboundaries. They generate as many questions asanswers, which will be beneficial if they inspirearchaeologists to search for new types of data toanswer them.

In summary, I encourage scholars of theMaya and construction of memory to readHendon’s attractive and well-presented volume.Photographs and figures are reproduced clearlyand at appropriate scales. The text lackstypographical errors. There is a useful index andan extensive bibliography that is up to datethrough 2007 and includes a few entries from2008 and 2009. Overall, Houses in a landscape islikely to fuel scholarly debate and inspirearchaeological projects to test its conclusions formany years to come.

Stephen L. Whittington Museum ofAnthropology, Wake Forest University

Wengrow, David. What makes civilization? Theancient Near East and the future of the West.xx, 217 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr.Oxford: Univ. Press, 2010. £14.99 (cloth)

This book promises a lot and delivers evenmore, which is quite a feat for its small size. It

guides readers into the heart of the sourcesof civilization by mastering an impressivemultidisciplinary approach. An archaeologistwith a strong background in anthropology,Wengrow addresses Huntington’s muchdiscussed work The clash of civilizations (1996)by also incorporating sociological perspectives,such as the work of Johann Arnason. He doesso by focusing on the Ancient Near East, the‘cradle of civilization’, following the footsteps ofHenri Frankfort, and offering a comparativeperspective on Egypt and Mesopotamia missingsince 1951. Finally, a rare feat for anarchaeologist, he rounds up the discussion bysuggesting reasons for the lasting significanceof Near Eastern civilization for thecontemporary West, focusing on events aroundthe French Revolution.

The central thesis, formulated againstHuntington in a fair but lethal manner, is bothsimple and important. Wengrow starts fromMarcel Mauss’s anthropology of civilizations,recently made accessible in English (Techniques,technology and civilisation, 2006). Mauss arguesthat the rise and dynamics of civilizationscannot be understood in isolation, but onlythrough ‘ “the circulation between societies ofthe various goods and achievements of each” ’(p. 19). Following this hint, Wengrow considerscivilizations as ‘historical outcomes ofexchanges and borrowings between societies,rather than ... processes or attributes that setone society apart from another’ (p. xviii,emphasis in original). The methodologicalcorollary, important for archaeologists just asfor anthropologists, concerns not simply theneed for a comparative perspective, but also afocus on reconstructing how civilizationsemerged at various end-points of suchnetworks.

As Wengrow shows incisively andconclusively, the series of striking achievementsin the region (first large permanent settlements,agriculture, urban civilization, writing), out ofwhich our civilization emerged, were due tolong-term developments in exchanges betweenregions and cultures; ‘borrowings’ whicheventually came to be ‘camouflaged’ (chap. 1).Wengrow integrates into Frankfort’s frameworkrecent archaeological findings, often little knowneven to experts of this or another region andtime period, not to mention the general public.These include the discovery of major stoneconstructions built in the crucial in-betweenregion of Southeastern Anatolia by hunter-gatherers (Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Çori), linkedto obsidian routes and religious feasting

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(pp. 43-9); the role played by lapis lazuli in thedevelopment of exchange networks in theregion, owing to the ‘sticky’ attractiveness of thestone (chap. 2); the role played by metallurgy inthe rise of predatory elites, also reflected in thevast metal hoardings at the margins of urbancivilizations (pp. 95-105); or the Ubaid network,so central to the rise of urban civilization, forwhich Wengrow replaces the misleadingWallersteinian terminology of ‘world system’,propagated by Algaze, with ‘global village’(chap. 4). The first urban and dynasticcivilizations emerged, in Mesopotamia andEgypt, as a result of such millennialdevelopments, which then, on the one hand,successfully managed to distinguish themselvescompletely (p. 16, quoting Frankfort), and, onthe other, gave rise to an obsession withdynastic bloodlines that remained, until therecent collapse of the ‘Old Regime’, a centralfeature of ‘civilization’, and which we stillactively try to forget. This is the key argument ofpart II, where Wengrow returns to the present,confirming in substantial and not simplymethodological terms the significance ofcomparative archaeology for understandingcontemporary civilization.

In concluding, two comments can beformulated, not so much as criticism but tomark the limits of the book. First, whileWengrow does discuss recent research onSoutheast Anatolia, others, like Çayönü andArslantepe (ancient Meliddu), are ignored,though could have helped further to underlinethe significance of this region as an‘in-between’ or – using a term developed byanthropologists – ‘liminal’ area. Second, onemight argue that the book is not Maussianenough, in that the exchange networks thateventually grew into the first commercial urbancivilizations were originally based on giftrelations. The point is close to Wengrow’sargument, as he states that thesetransformations ‘cannot be adequatelycircumscribed within the realm of the“economy” [as they] touch upon fundamentalareas of social life such as trust, personalhealth, and hygiene’ (p. 69), but the complexprocess by which a gift network was eventually‘commercialized’ is not thematized. Still, theseare minor differences in emphasis and in noway detract from the remarkable achievementsof this short but dense and still entertainingbook, which should be read by allanthropologists and social scientists who donot forget about the ‘broad questions’.

Arpad Szakolczai University College Cork

Childhood, youth, andlife-course studies

Blatterer, Harry. Coming of age in times ofuncertainty. xi, 144 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2007. £37.50 (cloth)

What is adulthood? How does it differ fromadolescence and childhood? What does it meanto be an adult today? The answers to thesequestions remain for many of us taken forgranted. Framed within the position ofevolutionary psychology, adulthood representsanother stage in the physical and psychologicalgrowth of human beings. It is a stagecharacterized by certain normative ideals that arediametrically opposed to adolescence and oldage. This foregone conclusion is so embedded inour social imagination that even social scientists,Harry Blatterer reminds us, have failed to addressit theoretically and problematize it despite theemergence of wider socio-economic and culturaltransformations. Whilst policy-makers, themedia, and social scientists have continued todebate the transitions to adulthood, by stressingin particular young people’s perceived lack ofdesire to make the transitions, how adulthood isconstituted and continuously transformedremains problematically untheorized (p. 5).

In response to this lack of theoreticalengagement, Coming of age in times ofuncertainty provides an original approach toadulthood; and one that brings adulthood intorelief as a social category, intersubjectivelyconstituted and emerging within specific social,economic, cultural, and historical conditions.Harry Blatterer’s main argument is that despitewider social, economic, and culturaltransformations that have occurred globally overthe last decades, adulthood is still defined on oldnormative ideals. The dominant model of‘standard adulthood’, the author reminds us,emerged in much of the Western world soonafter the Second World War II (p. 13). Blattererargues how within the affluence and economicboom that followed the conflict, Hobsbawm’s‘golden age’ (The age of extremes: the shorttwentieth century, 1914-1991, 1994), thenormative ideals of adulthood, framed aroundthe ideals of independence/responsibility for selfand others/commitment/maturity, overlappedwith social practices, marriage/parenthood/independent living/work, in an economicenvironment in which financial security andlong-term jobs were achievable aspirations.

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Planning for the future was still possible formany a youth, who were able to make thetransition into adulthood and achieve arecognition as full persons. By contrast, from the1970s onwards, the restructuring of globalcapitalism around fragmentation,individualization, and flexibility has brought intorelief a new model of adulthood, one thatrequires individuals to be first of all self-reflexiveand to assume full responsibility for theiractions. Notions of self-realization and personalgrowth, of self-sufficiency, of flexibility havebecome fundamental tools in a context in whichtraditional institutions have been, and are in theprocess of being, removed from the provision ofthe welfare state. Yet, despite these dramaticstructural transformations, adulthood remainsunderstood within the parameters of old, andthe youthful ‘failure’ to settle down is still seen interms of ‘delayed adulthood’ (p. 20), anindication of individual desires to postponegrowing up.

How does that affect the making of youthfulsubjectivities? How do youths cope with thesedramatic uncertainties in a constantly andrapidly shifting socio-economic and culturalenvironment? It is here that Blatterer’s argumentprovides a convincing answer by advancing aninnovative understanding of adulthood as asocial process of recognition. Grounded in thework of traditional sociologists (includingDurkheim, Weber, Parsons), Blatterer successfullyand critically explores theories ofindividualization, the life-course, and biographyof modernity (such as Bauman, Beck, Giddens,and Honneth) to produce a substantialargument on the relation between adulthoodand social recognition. Blatterer argues that thenew adulthood is characterized by a normativeand temporal lag between different generations.Youths are trapped within this lag and suffer alack of recognition. They are seen as eternallytrapped in adolescence, and for this reasonnever fully reaching personhood as adults.Paradoxically this temporal lag has beenencouraged in recent decades by novel regimesof neoliberal governmentalities and byaggressive marketing techniques. Youth hasbecome a value per se, one that can be acquiredat any age. After all, isn’t 40 the new 20? As aconsequence, Blatterer tells us thatintergenerational relationships have beenredefined through de-differentiation. ‘As youthexpands and becomes an ethic of life per se, thehistorical trajectory of youth is undergoing areversal of sorts: from differentiation tode-differentiation’ (p. 80). While, on the one

hand, young and old appear perhaps closerthan ever, intergenerational tensions andmisrecognition bring into relief novel forms ofsocial and economic cleavages and an endlessquest for social recognition that produces arecognition deficit. As Blatterer points out, whileyouthful attributes are, on the one hand,mythologized, on the other hand ‘the sameattributes are at the core of the discourse thatposits young people as trapped in a perpetualadolescence – a discourse that ignores the socialconditions under which coming of age occurstoday’ (p. 82).

Coming of age in times of uncertainty consti-tutes a novel and sophisticated approach to thestudy of age in and beyond the Westerncontext primarily analysed by Blatterer – thelast two chapters of the book focus on researchthe author conducted in Australia. The bookwill appeal not only to scholars interested inage studies, but also to a wider readership, inand beyond academia, with an interest inunderstanding the ways in which neoliberaltransformations affect and impinge on the lifeof people in novel and unprecedented ways.With the recent cuts introduced for highereducation in the UK, and further draconianausterity measures imposed in many Westerneconomies, this book is a timely and informedaddition to an emerging critical scholarship ofneoliberalism.

Mattia Fumanti University of St Andrews

Rockhill, Elena Khlinovskaya. Lost to thestate: family discontinuity, social orphanhoodand residential care in the Russian Far East. xvi,383 pp., tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2010. £53.00 (cloth)

Lost to the state is a remarkable book whichlooks at the bleak and disrupted lives of childrenand young people in the Russian welfare system.It presents a depressing account of childrenwho, for reasons of neglect, abuse, orsometimes simple poverty, cannot live at home.To describe this book as cheerless is not acriticism of the author; on the contrary, sheprovides a rich and compelling picture of thesechildren’s lives. Rather it is a compliment to herskill in handling her data that she conveys thesometimes unbearable misery of these children’ssituations with such immediacy. Reflectinglong-standing anthropological and sociologicalinterests in bureaucracy and institutions, as wellas in kinship and the family, this book provides awealth of ethnographic data about vulnerable

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children in the new Russia, their relationships totheir parents, the state, and each other.

Although there have been dramatic social,political, and economic changes since 1991, thereare many continuities in both ideas andinstitutions of child welfare between the Sovietperiod and now. The restrictiveness of the modelof good motherhood and its manipulation bythe authorities remains a source of tension, as dothe gaps between what is legislated for andwhat actually exists in welfare provision.Resources remain stretched, and the poor, theold, the young, or the sick have theoretical rightsto services and help but limited opportunitiesto access them. While childhood in allcontemporary societies is characterized by abattle between the state and parents about theright to shape and control the child, incontemporary Russia this clash is particularlyfierce. Children occupy a contested spacebetween the family and the state – they are saidto be ‘everybody’s’, but the responsibility fortheir welfare resides with those whom the statedeems ‘good’ parents. When parents proveinadequate, however that is defined, the stateasserts its rights as a co-parent, looking afterchildren that their biological families cannot orwill not. Yet this is rarely straightforward, andboth parents and those into whose care theyrelinquish their children complain bitterly thatthe other does not take their responsibilitiesseriously.

Despite the institutionalized setting, differentideas of kinship are central to this book andRockhill describes the intersection betweensocial, biological, and virtual constructions ofkinship. She sees the relationship between stateand child as one of virtual kinship, with the statetaking on many of the positive functions ofsocial parenthood. At the same time, ideas ofhereditary delinquency and ‘bad blood’ hauntthese children. In an especially striking passage,Rockhill describes a baby home in whichchildren are fed and kept clean but restrainedwithin cots or on the end of leads and totallyisolated from the outside world. Children andtheir carers exist in parallel spaces in whichnurses and nannies actively avoid physicalcontact with the children, ignoring those whoreach out to them or demand attention,labelling them as spoilt. Not surprisingly, manychildren are (or become) developmentallydelayed – a state blamed not on poor care buton their genetic inheritance.

It is difficult to do justice to this complexbook in a short space. As a study of children ininstitutions, it is revealing and, thanks to the

outstanding writing, often very moving. It alsoprovides an excellent snapshot of life in thepost-Soviet era where welfare services arestretched to the limit and the vulnerable suffer.Rockhill is careful not to draw sweepingconclusions from her study. Not all children whogrow up in institutions become bad orneglectful parents in their turn, and several ofher case studies give cause for hope. The bookends with some useful comparisons with thesituation of children in other countries, but oneinsight which stands out is that while all Westerncountries claim to look after endangeredchildren, the rhetoric and the reality rarely matchup. For all the talk in the UK of ‘integratedpractice’ and ‘joined-up thinking’, childrenregularly fall through the net. Russia, too, has,on paper, an impressive system of careinstitutions and legislation to protect children,but, as a parent, the state lacks the humanityand ability to respond to the child as anindividual. This is a profound study of kinshipand its consequences which deserves a verywide readership.

Heather Montgomery Open University

Diaspora, migration,and nationalism

Fikes, Kesha. Managing African Portugal: thecitizen-migrant distinction. xxii, 195 pp., illus.,bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 2010. £55.00 (cloth), £13.99

(paper)

Notions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in Portugal areintertwined with its colonial past, as with morerecent immigration dynamics. However, theirdevelopment has been complex. In ManagingAfrican Portugal, Fikes argues that these notionscontinuously take shape within diverse arenas ofstate-induced regulation and modern citizenshipgovernmentality. She analyses the actors andcircumstances involved in the making of racerelations and ideologies in Portugal, highlightingthe country’s accession to the European Union.She illustrates these processes through anin-depth documentation of the work routinesof four Cape Verdean women, formerunlicensed fishmongers (peixeiras) who graduallybecome full-time domestics, between 1994 and2003.

After summarizing her focus and argument(introduction), Fikes begins her analysis of recent

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public Portuguese discourses on race. Chapter 1

discusses the Lusotropicalist myth, an ideologyof racial miscegenation promoted by theSalazarian dictatorship to legitimate Portuguesecolonialism. Despite racial hostilities experiencedby African immigrants in Portugal,Lusotropicalism portrayed the Portuguese asinherently non-racist, separating objectivelyrecognized ‘race’ from instances of ‘racist’discrimination (p. 39). Fikes traces the publicshift from Lusotropicalism to modernmulticulturalist discourses, endorsed from themid-1990s by new European citizenship idealscarrying strong anti-racist morals. Yet Portugal’sEU accession and European-induced stateregulation are shown to racially polarizePortuguese white ‘citizens’ and black African‘migrants’ – a theme Fikes pursues throughoutthe book.

The next three chapters are largelyethnographic. They depict the gradual forging ofthe ‘citizen-migrant distinction’ in daily workinteractions between Portuguese citizens andCape Verdean peixeiras. Chapter 2 describes theencounters between peixeiras and Portuguesevendors from whom they purchase fish at aLisbon market. These transactions take place asfamiliar and voluntary exchanges betweenindividuals. Fikes addresses the repercussions ofthe market’s closure by the state in 2003, underclaims of hygiene and health concerns. Besidesharming peixeiras’ subsistence, this closureeliminated a space of intimate exchangesbetween same-class Portuguese andAfricans.

Chapter 3 follows peixeiras selling fish arounda Lisbon transport hub, at a time of activepolicing of unlicensed sales. Fikes observes theirinteractions with clients, police, and otherpedestrians. She stresses the role ofdiscriminative policing (enforcing stateregulation) in amplifying the distinction between‘citizens’ and ‘migrants’: only black unlicensedvendors are harassed by the police, frequentlyusing racist remarks; passers-by legitimize thisdiscrimination daily through their indifference;and marginal white Portuguese (drug addictsand street-sweepers) are accepted by the policeas informers/collaborators against blackpeixeiras. According to Fikes, these multipleelements of selective policing, and the rationalespresented for them – namely urban orderand hygiene – enforce ‘whiteness’ as aparameter of legality and orderly citizenship(p. 100).

Chapter 4 describes peixeiras working asdomestics for white female employers/

supervisors. Distant politeness and unilateralinstructions characterize these encounters. Fikesstresses their consensual asymmetry, partlygrounded in new visa legislation requiring wagecontracts – under which ‘employers controlledthe migrant’s residency’ (p. 134). Fikes arguesthat Portugal’s modernizing momentum,evident in both policing of unlicensed sales andrestricting of migrant work visas, has pushedblack peixeiras into waged domestic jobs,thus widening the socio-economic gapbetween them and their middle-class whiteemployers.

Chapter 5 links this argument back to thetopic of racial ideologies, emphasizinggovernmentality processes. The author suggeststhat ‘anti-racism’ has become a personal moralattribute identifying the modern Europeancitizen, imposing politeness and/or compassionon interracial encounters, while allowing(‘neutral’) raced definitions of African migrants.With the immigrant’s compliance, a morallysanctioned distance has thus come tocharacterize normative citizen-migrantinteractions. Fikes extrapolates this phenomenonto other European neoliberal market economies(afterword).

While successfully integrating, in somewhatconvoluted prose, multiple variables within acomplex scenario, Fikes in certain respects paintsPortuguese society (quite literally) in black andwhite. Her citizen-migrant dichotomy seemswidely exaggerated. Besides equating whitenesswith middle-class Portuguese, it ignoresimportant populations of non-black immigrantsin Portugal (namely Eastern European).Furthermore, while seeking to avoid victimizingthe migrant (p. 11), Fikes’s description virtuallycriminalizes ‘citizens’, consistently illustrateddisplaying racist, arrogant, indifferent attitudestowards poor, socially immobile, physicallyscarred immigrants. Nevertheless, Fikesconvincingly links new regulation enforcementto the emergence of novel notions andpractices of citizenship. Her focus oncitizenship governmentality enables a fruitfularticulation between a macro-perspective(on state legislation and economic reform)and the micro-level approach to individualmotives and practices cherished byanthropologists. Managing African Portugalis an interesting, though biased, explorationof the social consequences of modernEuropean integration on ‘race’ ideologies andrelations.

Ana Mourão Brunel University (Ph.D. funded byFundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia-MCTES)

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Gardner, Andrew M. City of strangers: Gulfmigration and the Indian community inBahrain. xi, 188 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,2010. £39.50 (cloth), £12.95 (paper)

City of strangers is an ethnographic analysis ofthe lives of Indian transmigrants in Bahrain.Looking mainly at structural violence, AndrewGardner gives a strong general contextualizationof historical relations and future national plansmapping out how various parts of the Indiancommunity fit into the complex social web.

The book starts out with an overview of themigration history of Indians to Bahrain. In thelast hundred years, Indians’ roles in Bahrainshifted from employees of the Britishprotectorate to English-speaking merchants topost-oil boom labourers serving a growingconstruction industry unable to be fulfilled bythe small Bahraini population. Dividing theminto two groups, the ‘transnational proletariat’and the ‘diasporic elite’, Gardner tactfullyportrays the financial, linguistic, andbureaucratic forms of agency imposed ontothem as second-class, or even third- orfourth-class, residents. Pertaining particularlyto the proletariat workforce, the kafala system,a modern-day system of indentured servitude,is explained, making relevant links towardsthe argument and description of the structuralviolence that rules the community.

The fifth and sixth chapters broaden the view,looking at the public sphere via the (narrow)mediums of ethnic social clubs and the mainEnglish-language newspaper. Gardner positionsthe Indian community within the ‘nationalproject’, referring to the ongoing officialcampaign for future economic growth whichpromotes Bahrain as a ‘business-friendly’country. Neoliberal in its agenda, the campaigndescribes Bahrain as a booming place of capitaliststrength and the financial and service hub of theregion, which necessitates an underclassworkforce to build the country at good speed ona low budget. The seventh chapter moves awayfrom analysis of Indian communities andattempts to describe the social, bureaucratic, andprofessional contexts of the local population.

While two ends of the social class spectrumof the Indian community are being discussed,the generalization of the ‘Indian community’in Bahrain leaves some of the pointsunderdeveloped. While Gardner’s analyses areillustrative, there is a fair amount of polarizationthat defines his argument, marking the localpopulation on one side, and the Indian on the

other. Of the roughly one million residentspopulating Bahrain, there are 440,000 nationals(ArabianBusiness.com, 2008) and 290,000

Indians (IANS, 2006), the rest beinginternational foreigners. This demonstrates thedominant place the Indian nationality has inBahrain. Indians run the gamut from ‘unskilledlabourers’, indeed known to be exploited in fartoo many ways, to CEOs of multinationalcorporations and everything in between. Thus,the oversimplification of who the ‘Indian’community in Bahrain is shadows certain pointsof analysis. There is a naïvety here stemmingfrom what is communicated to be a single solid‘community’, denoting an expectation to beall-inclusive. Echoing Benedict Anderson’sseminal theory on the ‘imagined community’,I would like to link Anderson to Anh Longva’s1997 book Walls built on sand. This bridges intomy next criticism: Gardner’s apparent isolationfrom and thus lack of understanding of thehost culture in many instances. AlthoughGardner refers to Longva throughout his ownethnography, he fails to recognize the Gulf as a‘plural society’, one in which many types ofpeople, communities, and sects live side byside but do not necessarily mix except in thepublic realm, a point Longva makes in herbook. In fact, there is more synergy thandescribed, although perhaps not present in theareas researched by Gardner. For example,while Gardner names the Indian migrantworker charity groups (p. 99), he does notmention local or governmental organizationssuch as the Bahrain Human Rights Society,the Migrant Workers’ Protection Society, orthe Indian embassy. It would have been ofmuch interest to understand how locals definethe abuse that occurs in their own countryand what measures are taken to combat it fromthese various and nationally relevant angles.

Although an insightful and strongintroduction to the plight of transmigrantworkers in Bahrain, then, Gardner’s portrayal ofthe Indian community is simplified, polarized,and written through limited understanding ofthe Bahraini culture. The portrayal of theexploitation of the proletariat workers is,however, a very important and descriptiveone; and the prejudicial treatment endured bythe ‘elite’ is equally relevant, with new addedinsight into the Indian population in Bahrain.The points linking their position to the greaterneoliberal national plan are spot on andshould have a place in the greater argumentabout migrant workers in the Gulf.

Sheyma Buali Independent scholar

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Graburn, Nelson H.H., John Ertl &R. Kenji Tierney (eds). Multiculturalism inthe new Japan. ix, 252 pp., tables, bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.£42.50 (cloth)

This edited volume, divided into thirteenchapters, with a preface (Graburn) andintroduction (Graburn and Ertl), is based onconference papers originally presented in 2002

at the University of California, Berkeley. The aimof the volume is to ‘make clear to peopleunfamiliar with Japan that there are greatchanges taking place in many ways and levelsand in many positive directions leading, wehope, to a nation more fully aware and proud ofits cultural mosaic’ (p. vii). An introductorychapter by Graburn and Ertl sets out acomprehensive overview of multiculturalism incontemporary Japan. This chapter provides thereader with an understanding of the issuescovered in the subsequent chapters, importantlyproviding those with limited knowledge of Japanand Japanese society with a concise, yet clear,account of multiculturalism and national identityin Japan. The chapter includes brief summariesof each chapter that are interwoven into aninteresting presentation on the anthropology ofJapan.

There is no space to comment on each of thesubsequent chapters, so only a selection will bebriefly noted. The first chapter, by YasukoTakezawa, provides an account of the openingup of local communities affected by the Kobeearthquake in 1995. Takezawa describes howbefore the earthquake there was a lack ofcontact or trust between local Japanese residentsand ethnic minorities, notably Koreans, Chinese,and Vietnamese, living in Kobe. As a resultof the hardship that affected these minoritygroups, local Japanese provided assistanceand challenged laws that excluded themfrom compensation and other benefitsavailable to Japanese victims of theearthquake.

Chris Burgess’s chapter on foreign wivesliving in Yamagata, a remote prefecture in thenortheast of Japan, is rich and fascinating. Henotes the important role played by foreign wivesto seek to keep a low, accommodating profile,on the one hand, whilst seeking to transformattitudes towards non-Japanese, on the other.His description and analysis of local levelprocesses of integration and change is insightfuland one of the highlights of the volume.

Shinji Yamashita’s chapter on transnationalmigration of women to Japan touches on three

recent trends: Japanese women visiting Bali astourists then returning to marry local men;Japanese women studying in California; and,finally, women guest-workers, mainly Filipinas,who work in the entertainment or sexindustries and ‘sometimes marry Japanese men’(p. 101). Based on Yamashita’s own fieldwork,this short chapter does not allow for thedevelopment of her ethnography. Thetheoretical interpretation provided, based onOng’s concept of flexible citizenship, feels veryabrupt. This is unfortunate for there areglimpses within the chapter of a richethnography that could cast more light on therole of women in the development of amulticultural Japan and add further to theinsights provided by Burgess.

Ertl offers a fascinating chapter that considersthe public policy implications ofinternationalization and multiculturalism inIshikawa Prefecture. Specifically, he discusses theJET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching)programme and reflects on his own role as thetown’s ‘hired foreigner’. He ends his chapterwith an excellent discussion of the ‘personalitiesof multiculturalism’ that decentres it from afocus on ethnic diversity and minority rights andconsiders its manifestation as a politicalideology. In a separate chapter, Jeffrey Hesterfocuses on the experiences of ethnic Koreansliving in Japan. I read this chapter whilstrecalling the comments and experiences ofKorean friends who lived and worked in Japan.In a nuanced, if brief, chapter, Hester outlinesthe emergence of new types of ‘Japanese’ andillustrates the fragility of notions of ‘nationality’and ‘foreignness’.

On reflection, the chapters individuallyprovide glimpses of the subject, yet it is difficultfor the reader to decide if the apparent‘homogeneity’ of Japanese society has indeedbeen altered. Perhaps fewer and longer chapterswould have been preferable. The volume doesnot engage with the wider literature onmulticulturalism, nor are there comparisonsmade to develop the overall argument of thecollected chapters. This is my main criticism ofthe volume – the chapters are, if uneven,interesting on specific areas that a readerunfamiliar with Japan may find of interest. Thegeneral lack of reference to other anthropologicalworks beyond the anthropology of Japan,however, may limit its appeal. Finally, a minoromission is the absence of Chris Burgess fromthe contributors’ details at the end of thebook.

Richard W. Whitecross University of Edinburgh

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Environmental anthropologyand natural disasters

Ensor, Marisa O. (ed.). The legacy ofHurricane Mitch: lessons from post-disasterreconstruction in Honduras. xv, 222 pp., maps,figs, tables, illus., bibliogrs. Tucson: Univ.Arizona Press, 2009. $50.00 (cloth)

In recent years there have been an increasingnumber of studies of the ‘anthropology ofdisaster’. The modern subject has its roots in thepioneering empirical sociology of Samuel HenryPrince (who wrote about a disaster in the port ofHalifax, Canada, in the early twentieth century)and in Pitirim A. Sorokin’s (1940s) seminalinvestigations into why calamities tend to modifyour minds, conduct, social organization, andcultural life. More recently, the work of AnthonyOliver-Smith, first on Peru, and later in a broaderand increasingly theoretical sense, hasdominated the field. One of the intriguingaspects of this area of research is the repeatedquest to define its own object. The question:‘What is a disaster?’ has been asked very oftenindeed.

Oliver-Smith contributes a theoreticalintroductory chapter to the volume underreview. Here he advocates a form of politicalecology influenced by the work of Tim Ingold tounderstand disasters. He also distinguishes the‘disaster’ from the ‘catastrophe’ or ‘event’. Thedisaster, in this broad sense, has a past, present,and future and seems to encompass all theconditions of life which are in some wayconnected to the catastrophic event. While mostof the contributors attempt to write in line withthis definition, it is surely too broad and rendersthe object of the study diffuse. Tellingly, in thefinal chapter of the book a more conventional,and probably more useful, language is evoked ofa ‘disaster’ (now referring to the ‘catastrophe’)and an ‘aftermath’.

In the sixteenth century, the word ‘aftermath’referred to the second growth of grass after thefirst flush has been harvested. In my view, theanthropology of the aftermath is characterized bythe re-establishment of some very normal socialprocesses, notably grieving, understanding,remembering, and building. Reading across theliterature, aftermaths seem to have an almostcommon structure, crudely as follows:immediately after the catastrophe, traditionalsocial distinctions collapse; later, there ismourning/nostalgia/blame/anger, and a general

reflection on the nature of ethnic/regional/national identity; finally, there is thepoliticization of reconstruction and thereformation of social distinctions along the linesof caste/class/religion. It is, one hopes, obviousthat such processes have pre-catastrophic rootsand that history does not implode into themoment of the disaster leaving a tabula rasa.

This structure is used in this volume to greateffect, with chapters by different authors ondifferent aspects of the disaster being stitchedtogether to form a chronological account of thepast, present, and future of Hurricane Mitch.One chapter examines the making ofvulnerability in Honduras; another analyses theauthor’s personal experience of being in thedisaster; others examine the high politics, role ofgender, and grassroots practices ofreconstruction; while the final chapter reflects onwhat the disaster tells us about the currentassumptions and consequences of globaldevelopment policies.

Although the majority of the chapters arewritten by anthropologists, the book’s claim tobe an ethnographic approach to disaster is reallyrather thin. The chapter on gender, for instance,is largely a review of secondary literature; for thisreader, other chapters created a similarly largedistance between the page and events on theground in Honduras. I wish, however, to pointto the merits of two chapters in particular.

William M. Loker was in Honduras at the timeof Mitch. His contribution is an unusual andseemingly candid account (what else couldexplain the admission that in his diary he wrote‘the dude drives slow as molasses’?) of hisreactions to the tragedy as it unfolded. Asidefrom the thought-provoking analysis, thenarrative successfully evokes the chaos of thedisaster, as order and communication breakdown and personal desperation and uncertaintytake over as he lurches from one chanceencounter with authority to another.

The chapter by Roberto E. Barrios on thereconstruction of the city of Choluteca is asophisticated piece of ethnographic writing. Heshows clearly and sensitively how the verydifferent outcomes of seemingly similarreconstruction projects were due to the variedmanagement styles and the role of the citizenryin them. He succeeds in bringing a strongcritique of development paradigms productivelyinto the study of the aftermath.

Overall, the material in this book pointstowards the inadequacies of post-disasterrecovery efforts that limit themselves toalleviating the symptoms, rather than the root

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causes, of the social and environmentalvulnerabilities. Throughout, the authors havebeen careful to spell out the practicalimplications of their research for policy-makers;in this regard, and as an account of the disaster,the book is a success.

Edward Simpson School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Nader, Laura (ed.). The energy reader. xxv, 548

pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogrs.Oxford, Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell,2010. £29.99 (paper)

Civilizations have flourished and perishedbecause of their energy policies. The world as awhole may be endangered today because of asystematic and enduring misuse of the energypotentials of the planet. This might be anadequate summary of the consciousness theeditor of this volume wants to strengthen. Thisreader is a superb addition to the literature, sinceit brings together the best articles from a seriesof disciplines on the issue at a time of enticingdiscussions on energy shortage and on ways to‘solve’ this problem. Traditionally, both scientificand policy debates tended to focus on onesolution only: nuclear power, or oil, or anothersource of energy. Several texts in the reader(including some by Nader herself) demonstratethat such choices will cause only moreproblems. Some analyses of the pro-nuclearlobbies prove to be outright wrong, for instance.

Nader worked on issues of energy for someforty years. As an anthropologist she joinedcommittees with scientists, engineers, andbusinesspeople. This led her to conceive thebook in a particular way: part I aims to graspwhat the ‘energy problem’ would be, in all itsaspects. What happens when corporationsdefine the problem, or when laypeople andexperts together do so? Obviously, the problemis not given, but construed. In part II one finds aseries of papers focusing on how and whydifferent people will see energy (and theproblem) differently: an entrepreneur (Ford), apolitician, an ecologist, an anthropologist havetheir own mind-sets, and Nader urges us to takethis fact into account. Part III focuses on thepolitical setting: oil, uranium, and gasinextricably confront us with political tensions.Adopting human rights (Garrison) entails,consciously and openly, taking into account thelocal and the geopolitical aspects of energyproduction and consumption. Part IV deals withthe choices for a particular source of energy

against the background of the precedingchapters: why the nuclear option is a folly, and acostly one at that, and ethanol is not the newsolution, but rather an economically unsoundattack on food production and environment. Onthe other hand, renewable energy sources suchas solar and wind energies have a lot ofadvantages. The choice between thosealternatives is not only a technical or physicalone. It is a political one as well: the oldnon-renewable energies yield centralization andlarge-scale investments, as well as protectionsystems. The new alternative ones aredecentralized and virtually in the hands ofneighbourhoods and local firms. This leads up topart V, where the problem of the necessarypower shifts is addressed. Big corporations stickwith their ‘traditional’ interests, or are won overin cases described by social scientists. This iswonderful material which puts the discussion onenergy in a contextual frame where it can bedealt with in a sustainable and responsible way.Finally, part VI brings together some texts on theenergy choices we have when we choose as ademocratic society.

Interspersed in the book one finds tellingstories of particular cases which pull the wholediscussion back to earth: people, health, equalopportunities, a good life, and democracycount, next to profit, private ownership, anddisciplinary specialization. It is a remarkablemixture of all these perspectives in a delicatelybalanced panorama that the reader andresearcher will find in this book. At a time whenwars are still waged over oil and gas, and thewealth of one part of the world is dependingostensibly on the poverty and subordination ofother parts, the need for a volume like this needhardly be argued for. Now we have such a book,and I think Laura Nader has to be congratulatedon the particular range of choices andarguments she has assembled here. The book isuseful in present discussions, because it showsthe defaults in some of the argumentscorporations and governments keep repeating(such as ‘more energy equals more wealth’).However, it also leads the way to more balancedand much more open-minded scenarios,combining energy resources, societal choices,and issues of human responsibilities vis-à-vishumanity and the earth. By doing that, thescientific scope is refreshing, and the contextualconstraints and possibilities are anchored insidedecision-making. This a great book, which,moreover, shows how anthropology matters insuch a field.

Rik Pinxten University of Ghent

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Ethnographic film

Isaacs, Marc. All white in Barking/Men of thecity: two films. DVD, Second Run DVD, 2009.£12.99

All white in Barking was one of a series of filmsand documentaries featured in the BBC 2 WhiteSeason at the beginning of 2008. The seriestouched a nerve in the nation and wascontroversial, raising issues to do with thegrowing influence of the far-right British NationalParty, the increasing alienation of whiteworking-class voters, the significance ofpost-industrial decline in many British cities, andrapid social change arising from immigration.Attempting to tackle these issues head on, theBBC aspired to give to the neglected whiteworking classes of Britain a much-needed voiceand described them explicitly, in the run-up tothe series, as a new and mostly overlookedethnic group.

On 12 March 2008, after watching the firstdocumentary, Last orders by filmmaker HenrySinger – about the tragic decline of a workingmen’s club in Bradford – I was moved to writean opinion piece that was published in the‘Second Thought’ section of the Guardian’sSociety supplement. My fear was that despitemuch that was good about Last orders, it lackeda sufficiently nuanced analysis of working-classlife in post-industrial British cities, and thisomission, in the contemporary political andcultural landscape, was, I argued, a dangerousthing.

Glaring in its absence in Last orders, forexample, was any thread connecting Bradford’swhite working-class communities to PakistaniMuslim communities. This would have involvedtelling the story of a common working-classstruggle, and revealing what the White Seriesmade it hard for the British public tounderstand: that black and Asian people can beworking class too; that they have shared a longhistory of struggle – in trade unions, forexample – dating back to the 1970s; and thatthey were prepared to fight for the same thingsthat white working-class people wanted forthemselves and their families: betteropportunities in life, better standards of living,and better conditions of employment.

A similar style of filmmaking – revelatory,deeply personal, often heart-rending – is evidentin and typical of Marc Isaac’s approach tostorytelling. His characters willingly become sovulnerable, so exposed in their honesty before

the camera’s gaze, that the viewer isimmediately drawn in and compelled to look onand see what might unfold for these peoplewho put themselves at the mercy of afilmmaker’s curiosity about them. For all itsmerits and awards, however, All white in Barkingfails, just like Last orders, to tell enough of awhole story about the complexities of what isgoing on in post-industrial neighbourhoods inBritain and, hence, the film gives only a partialexplanation of the changes post-industrialBarking is undergoing.

What is important about Barking is that it isan area of the country – the East End of London– in profound economic transition, but there isnot a trace of this upheaval or even much of theeconomic history of his informants’ lives inIsaacs’s film. Not so long ago, Ford Motorsemployed tens of thousands of workers inBarking and Dagenham, but the company nowemploys just four thousand. Made in Dagenham– a feature film released in 2010 – tells of theworking-class community which grew uparound the manufacturing Ford workplace andspecifically follows the struggles of working-classfemale workers to win equal pay throughcollective action in the unions. Against thisbackground it is remarkable that the term‘working class’ is not used once in Isaacs’s film.Instead, Isaacs constantly, even insistently, leadsthe characters in his films to talk about racialdifference, as if that were all that mattered.

Had Isaacs focused more on the fate of thepost-industrial working classes in Barking, hissecond film, Men of the City, would have beenmore poignant. The promise of transition to aservice economy, dominated by the financialsector in London, which was supposed to be thesalve to Britain’s post-industrial malaise, is, inthis 2009 film, in recession. Isaacs uses the samenarrative techniques – drawing on thevulnerability of a diverse range of subjects, froma street sweeper to a hedge fund manager – toreveal the common humanity of men makingincredible sacrifices and fighting in differentways for survival in the City of London. Again,however, the juxtaposition of characters is notenough to give the film the context it needs tobe grounded in and properly revealing of theeconomic geography of the location. The factthat Isaacs is one of the East End’s native sonsmakes this omission of context harder totolerate. Viewers need to know that the City andits conjoined twin – the Docklands – areremarkable precisely because they exist right onthe interface of and within the East End boroughof Tower Hamlets. Here some of the poorest

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working-class Bengali families in Britain liveunder the shadows of the City’s skyscrapers,which substantiate the social world of finance ontheir doorstep, but exclude all but the initiatedfrom the wealth of profits.

Gillian Evans University of Manchester

Lancit, Matthew. Funeral season (la saison desfunérailles): marking death in Cameroon. DVD,English subtitles, 2010

Matthew Lancit is a young Canadian filmmakerwho went to Cameroon to be with his Frenchgirlfriend. She was working in the Bamileke townof Dschang, and as it happens their flat was nextdoor to the morgue. One thing led to anotherand the result is a film about ways of dealingwith the dead in the ever-evolving complex of‘Bamileke Tradition’. This is more concernedwith secondary funerals rather than burials(something that morgues have changed), whichcan happen many, many years after a person hasdied. These ‘cry dies’ (to use the Cameroonianpidgin English) or ‘funérailles’ (as they are calledin Cameroonian French) punctuate the dryseason months every year. They can only occuronce the family, friends, associated savingssocieties (tontines or rotating credit societies),and church and cult associations (where relevantdepending on the affiliations of the deceasedand surviving kin) have accumulated enoughmoney to pay for celebrations lavish enough forthe person concerned. In some cases nothingcan (should) be done until the family (on behalfof the deceased) has built a house in the natalvillage, and one cannot commemorate a personuntil their own parents have been themselvescommemorated. It is easy to see how anaccumulation of commemorative debt can pileup on a family group.

Lancit is not an anthropologist and makes noclaim to be one. What his film captures is boththe joyous (and somewhat chaotic) exuberanceof the organization of ‘traditional’ events inCameroon and also the feel for how chains ofconnection get established which shape whathappens in fieldwork. He goes to see atraditional doctor (he uses the term ‘witchdoctor’) but spends more time talking to hisinterpreter than the man he was supposed tobe interviewing. So he ends up going to theinterpreter’s home village. Similarly his tailorand a motorcycle taxi driver end up beinginterviewed and taking him to funerals. Wearrive in one village to interview the chief on thenight his installation is being completed, so we

hear the dancing but cannot see it, althoughlater we attend the public festivities that markthe completion of the succession. (The new chiefmakes a speech in English lamenting the demiseof tradition and the local language.)

Lancit is a player in all this. His Jewishnessfeatures as part of what makes him differentfrom his girlfriend and other ‘Europeans’. We seehim as an ingénue struggling with poor Frenchand discussing what is happening and whypeople are so concerned to do this. He is alsostruggling with his own memories, his owndead, so we see stills of the Cameroonian deadand then a clip of a video from his Bar Mitzvahand a still of his now dead uncle (whom he issaid to resemble).

Overall I enjoyed this film and can see a rolefor it in teaching since it so well conveys thecharacter and feeling of its topic. It asksinteresting questions yet does not pretend to bemore than it is.

David Zeitlyn University of Oxford

Ethnomusiciology

Kaul, Adam R. Turning the tune: traditionalmusic, tourism, and social change in an Irishvillage. x, 190 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.£40.00 (cloth)

Set in a small Irish village named Doolin, thisethnography explores the ways in which actors‘turn the tune’: that is, play with social andmusical structures that are changing due toglobalization, tourism, and migration. Throughdetailed ethnography, Kaul eloquently weavestogether local stories, global processes, andindividual voices, producing a fluent andcompelling account of change and negotiation.Achieving a rare feat, he combines insightfulethnography with evocative writing, makingthe book theoretically important toanthropologists while also approachable to ageneral audience.

Moving seamlessly between participants’words and anthropological theory, Kaul paints acomplex picture of changes in music and life.Beginning with the ‘old days’ as rememberedand told by the residents, we are introduced tothe different forms that music takes in responseto socio-political and economic changes withinand beyond Doolin. Renown, local musicians,the recording and broadcasting of traditional

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music, and the international phenomenon offolk music ‘revival’ are discussed alongside shiftsin tourism infrastructure, the Irish economy,migration trends, and Ireland’s entry to theEuropean Community. Kaul synthesizes localwith larger processes, illuminating unexpectedrelationships between music and differentaspects of social life. For example, seasonality,which underlines life in Doolin from its pre-1960sfarming economy to today’s tourist economy,also gives rise to different social worlds andperformance settings in music. Physical space isnegotiated seasonally in response to largertourist crowds, and so, for example,amplification (microphones) is used tocompensate for the noisier pubs. In response,musicians position themselves in a line, asopposed to a circle, and limit their chattingin-between tunes – an otherwise importantsocial element of sessions. Amplification alsomakes it difficult for other musicians to join atune, thus marking temporarily a strongerboundary between the musicians and theaudience.

The book is also about what it means tobelong, and the process of belonging to aplace and a music. Part 2, ‘Moving throughand moving in’, focuses on the people whomove through Doolin and their interactionswith the place. Arguing against a monolithicunderstanding of tourists, Kaul distinguishesbetween tourists’ motivations for travellingand the ‘intensity’ of their visit. We are giventhe multivocality that surrounds the terms‘local’ and ‘blow-in’ and the delicate processof negotiating belonging in the social,political, and economic life of the locale.Interestingly, ‘blow-ins’ can be acceptedinto the local music scene based on theirmusic skills alone as their social status issecondary.

Kaul argues that recent anthropologyrevolves around a much-discussed yet poorlygrounded local/global dialectic, illustratingthrough ethnography that ‘there is no either/ordichotomy here between the local and theglobal’ (p. 156). For example, novice musiciansin Doolin learn the music’s oral traditions andthe social etiquette of sessions by playing withestablished musicians. This marks the in situcharacter of learning traditional Irish music,demonstrating that certain aspects of musicalways remain local. When learning in Doolin,‘blow-in’ musicians embody the local style ofplaying. Upon leaving they take ‘locality’abroad, making the local global by passing onthis style to others.

The final part of the book, ‘Change andcontinuity’, focuses on the effects ofcommercialization, consolidation, andglobalization on the music, and explores actors’understandings regarding these shifts. Here Kauladdresses carefully issues that are familiar toanyone researching traditional art forms whileavoiding the simplistic dichotomies thatcharacterize some of the literature: the tensionsurrounding the ‘authentic’, shifting ideas ofownership and ‘copyright’, theinstitutionalization of folk traditions, therural/urban relationship in the dissemination ofmusic, shifts in aesthetics and in performancecontexts, and the role of the performer. Kaulargues for the importance of maintainingcategories like the ‘authentic’ and ‘tradition’,emphasizing their quality of being pliable andadaptable. He encourages attention toparticipants’ often conflicting discourses andthe different forms these categories take indifferent settings. Here, Kaul’s discussion ofthe phenomenological aspect of learningand performing is fascinating. This is animportant and yet under-researched area inanthropology.

In conclusion, Kaul’s book offers originalinsights in a very well-crafted and engagingethnography. Few studies manage to discussboth an art form and its socio-cultural context,and Kaul does so successfully withoutcompromising the breadth of his discussion. Theprevalence of participants’ voices and Kaul’scommitment to allowing ethnography to writetheory have resulted in a polyphonic, evocativeaccount. Beyond anthropologists,ethnomusicologists, and scholars of Irish andtourism studies, this book is important to allof us researching art forms in theircontemporary globalized, commoditizedcontext.

Eleni Bizas Independent scholar

Sterling, Marvin D. Babylon east: performingdancehall, roots reggae, and Rastafari inJapan. xiv, 299 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2010. £15.99

(paper)

In Babylon east, Marvin Sterling provides acomplexly composed description ofcontemporary Japanese engagements withJamaica, focusing on performances of Jamaicanroots reggae, dancehall music and dance, andRastafari. Performing Black Jamaican-nessbecomes a set of embodied practices through

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which Japanese men and women are able toconstruct identities alternative to dominantexpectations of ethnic and class-basedhomogeneity and gendered conformity. Thesealternative identities are firmly located in Japan,but their ongoing construction employs and isauthenticated by mobilizations of Jamaicanculture and language.

The introduction, first chapter (‘The politics ofpresence: performing Blackness in Japan’), andconcluding chapter (‘Jamaican perspectives onJamaican culture in Japan’) locate Sterling’s workand argument topically and theoretically. Thus,he describes perceptions of Blackness in Japan, aswell as the history of Jamaican popular culture inJapan, beginning with the mid-1970s popularityof Bob Marley. In the conclusion, Sterling locatesJapanese deployments of (Jamaican) Blackness interms of broader discourses of global racialperformativity, particularly what he calls theglobal postmodern. He also dislocates bothJapanese interests in others and Jamaican culturalglobalization from their respectively assumedEuro-American axes.

The ethnographic heart of Babylon east iscomposed of three middle chapters. In ‘Musicand orality: authenticity in Japanese soundsystem culture’, Sterling discusses how Japanesesound systems use experience in and deepknowledge of Jamaican culture, including patois,to socialize Japanese fans to authentic Japanesedancehall reggae and to insert themselves intothe transnational performative field of dancehallculture. There are, here, important globalcirculations involved in the locating of Jamaicanculture in Japan, ultimately as (also) Japanese.The next chapter, ‘Fashion and dance:performing gender in Japan’s reggae dancescene’, addresses several issues, includinggender, sexuality, race, class, commodification,consumption, and identity. Sterling focuses onJapanese dancehall donnettes, for whomperformance of reggae dance bothsubjects the women to moral scrutiny and,as in Jamaica, provides the women with away to express an autonomous, empowered,and erotic sense of womanhood. Chapter 4

(‘Body and spirit: Rastafarian consciousnessin rural Japan’) describes Rasta-identifyingpeople in rural Japan, focusing on a small‘Rasta yard’ in Nara prefecture. Sterlingargues that ‘while Rasta is used to critiqueaspects of Japanese society and history, it is alsoused to valorize the premodern [Japanese] rural’(p. 144) and the Rasta-identifyingJapanese presence there. While there areimportant differences in belief and practice, a

Jamaican Rastafarian worldview and set oflinguistic, culinary, medicinal, and otherpractices provide meaning and identity for theJapanese Rastas – or at least for the men(p. 180).

Chapter 5 (‘Text and image: bad Jamaicans,tough Japanese, and the Third World “search forself” ’) discusses textual representations ofJapanese encounters with and journeys toJamaica. This break from ethnography is, to thisreader, unsuccessful in its isolation. Discussion ofsuch fictionalized discourses could have moreconvincingly been interwoven into the priorthree chapters.

Sterling notes that Japanese dancehall artistsmay be categorized along similar lines to thosedefined for Jamaica by Norman Stolzoff (Wakethe town and tell the people, 2000), but also thatfew Japanese perform in styles (like gangster/gunman) that do not reflect Japanese realities.On the other hand, Sterling notes nationalistictendencies in recent Japanese reggae and,oddly, the absence of lyrical reference toJamaica. These and other observations areinteresting, if not troubling. However, onewishes that Sterling had addressed the politicsand poetics of lyrical choices and compositionsmore thoroughly throughout the book – a pointthat Carolyn Cooper (Sound clash, 2004)emphasizes as important in her criticism ofStolzoff’s work.

Having lived and conducted research in bothJamaica and Japan, I read Babylon east withparticular interest, and have learned much, butin describing ‘Japamaican’ (not his term)identifications, Sterling writes in a style thatmakes his discussions accessible to non-experts.Babylon east makes useful and complexcontributions to a number of discourses,including: work on popular music, globalization,gender, and race in contemporary Japan; workon Jamaican reggae and dancehall; and broaderconsiderations of Blackness, race, and culturebeyond the Black Atlantic, in Afro-Asia. This bookshould not be read as describing quixoticJapanese quests for identity and recognition oras ridiculing narcissistic Japanese materialistconsumption of global cultures. Instead, Sterlingcritically but appreciatively locates contemporaryJapanese identifications with and throughJamaican culture. His work should inspirereaders to learn more about performanceand identity formation in Japan, the trulyglobal spread of Jamaican culture, and otherAfro-Asian articulations, performances, andidentities.

James E. Roberson Tokyo Jogakkan College

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History and politics

Kürti, László & Peter Skalník (eds).Postsocialist Europe: anthropologicalperspectives from home. x, 326 pp., tables,illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: BerghahnBooks, 2009. £50.00 (cloth)

Recent years have witnessed heated debatesbetween Western and native anthropologistsdisputing the current hierarchies of knowledgein the anthropology of postsocialist Europe. Thisvolume, the tenth in the European Association ofSocial Anthropologists series, offers a ‘native’response to the debate, providing ‘ananthropological perspective from home’. Allcontributors are Eastern Europeananthropologists, and some have played asignificant role in establishing socialanthropology in their countries. And yet thevolume is not just an anthropology ofanthropologies but addresses several importantquestions: what are the grounds for treatingCentral and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a culturearea? Is postsocialism a concept in theanthropology of CEE? How far can one push thepostsocialist-postcolonial comparison, and howcan situated local scholarship contribute towider debates in anthropology? The two editorstackle even more sensitive issues in theintroduction, related to the perils of localethnographic traditions, their doubleengagement as anthropologists and citizens oftheir own countries, politics of fieldwork, themarginality of regional scholarship, andlinguistic hegemonies in social anthropology.One of the great merits of the volume is that itengages with these issues through excellentethnographies.

The case studies in this collection areframed by the postsocialist paradigm but offerin fact a broader historical perspective onpostsocialist transformations. As Kürti remarksin his contribution, the problem of transitologyand postsocialist studies is to extrapolate adramatic experience of change from a limitedtemporal and spatial frame to global processesand historical patterns of transformation. Theanswer, as aptly shown in several contributions,is to offer a longue durée perspective andcombine different scales in the analysis. Writingon property relations in rural Poland, Bukowskipoints out that postsocialist changes arejust one moment in a series of majortransformations in people’s relationship to landduring the twentieth century. By describing the

changing meaning of land, he exposes thesymbolic reorganization of culture, socialrelations, and labour practices in postsocialistPoland. Kürti’s own contribution offers a similarperspective on the Hungarian countryside afterthe inflow of foreign capital. Through along-term analysis of a ‘successfulentrepreneurial case’, he shows how localitiesare embedded in broader histories and globalprocesses but also how they alter thoseprocesses to their own benefit. A similarexercise, though with less historical andethnographic depth, is Stoiciu’s analysis oforganizational cultures in French and Romanianmultinationals. Stoiciu observes the localizationand regularization of transnational flows, thestrengthening of local identities, and thereproduction of socialist models of labour inpostsocialist enterprises. Bringing a differentperspective on economic transformation,Nagy discusses the reproduction of poverty inHungary, from the hidden poverty of socialismto today’s culture of homelessness. Urbanmigration remains a source of poverty andexclusion, especially without the welfare cultureof the socialist state.

Another major topic addressed here is theredefinition of the public sphere in postsocialistcontexts. Thus Bitušíková and Koštialovácompare women’s involvement in politics insocialist and postsocialist Slovakia, noticingstructural factors (religious, culturalsocio-economic, etc.) that reproduce genderinequalities today. They illustrate these cogentlywith a case of politics writ small: individualstories of two women-mayors from the Slovakprovinces. Kubica provides another example ofgendered activism (including her own) in herethnography of the first Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender festival in Krakow, an eventthat challenged normative definitions ofPolishness. Writing on the structuraltransformations of the Czech military after 1991,Cervinková offers a brilliant analysis of itscolonial-postcolonial condition. Mimesis was anessential condition of socialist Czechoslovakiaand remains so now when postsocialism leads to‘traumatic displacements of the objects ofmimetic desire’ (p. 92). The final scene, in whichCzech pilots and their outdated Soviet jets arepaid to play in an American action movie, is themimetic exercise par excellence. The embodimentof the Soviet superpower myth by Czech militaryproves the salience of particular configurationscreated by socialism and the Cold War. Othercontributors look for such continuities too,noticing the persistence of a ‘socialist habitus’ in

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Slovene society (Muršic’s analysis of the Slovenealternative music scene) and the ways in whichlocal political traditions shape their own variantof neoliberal democracy (Skalník on Czechpolitical culture). Based on surveys of Czechstudents and village politics, Skalník shows thatCzech politics are marked by a constantreference to past models, political parochialism,lack of participatory politics, and low civicactivism.

The topics covered in the volume prove notonly the contemporaneity of CEE scholarshipbut also the transnational nature of currentresearch, which forces regional specialists out oftheir localities. Both contributions dealing withmigration assume a transnational, historicalperspective on migration flows. Ciubrinskas,writing on Lithuanian transnational diasporasand their return ‘home’, observes how notionsof home(land) as localized forms of belongingare changing. Post-war Lithuanian migrantscultivated their ethnic identity in the diasporatogether with ‘the obligation to return’,thus preparing a new generation of ‘ethno-nationalist missionaries’ who went to Lithuaniain the early 1990s to bring Lithuanian cultureback to its motherland. Uherek, on the otherhand, looks at temporary labour migrationfrom Transcarpathia (Ukraine) to the CzechRepublic observing the historical patterns oflabour migration, specific stages in migrationflows, and their increasing regulation in recentyears.

In the afterword, Giordano considers thatthe big challenge of this volume is to provethe place of CEE anthropology in theanthropological community and separate itfrom the established local traditions. Theseethnographic traditions with their troubledpast and ideological overtones should thus bereplaced by the newly emerging anthropology.But contributors are rather silent on this pointand the two editors go a long way in provingthat CEE anthropology stands on its own inrelation to the West, without rejecting its localroots. The major contribution of the volumelays in its rethinking of the postsocialistparadigm from an insider’s perspective. Bytaking a longue durée perspective on theirsocieties, contributors explore cultural, political,and economic transformations, revealing thecomplex interactions between global processesand specific localities. Their scholarship proves,if still necessary, that Central and EasternEuropean anthropology is thriving both athome and abroad.

Vlad Naumescu Central European University

Robins, Steven L. From revolution to rights inSouth Africa: social movements, NGOs andpopular politics after apartheid. xvi, 192 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Woodbridge: James Currey;Pietermaritzburg: Univ. Kwazulu-Natal Press,2008. £50.00 (cloth)

Steven Robins’s collection of essays intersect ona key question: how are we to understand theexplosion of popular struggle after the advent ofdemocracy? Robins situates his approach againstthree misconceptions. First, easiest to dismiss, isthe notion of ‘the end of politics’, belied bymultiple political upheavals in neoliberal times.Second, Robins reads Mahmood Mamdani’swork on the legacies of colonial indirect rule asan argument for persisting dichotomies ofurban, rights-bearing citizens vs rural,culture-bearing subjects, which he counters withmediation and cross-traffic. Third, Robinscritiques Partha Chatterjee’s turn to AntonioGramsci on civil and political society. Chatterjeebuilds on prior work on limits to colonialhegemony, which could have been anopportunity to interrogate the strangecoincidence of activism and neoliberalism thatconcerns Robins. However, Robins readsChatterjee as missing ‘the agency of activists’(p. 15), which in turn misses thatgovernmentality works through subjectivationand therefore through rather than despite themobilization of agency. Indeed, much rests inthese debates on how one might think withGramsci (and Marx) and Foucault in rethinking‘hegemony’ and ‘biopolitics’ in contemporarySouth Africa as elsewhere.

Robins also connects his empirical work byquestioning radical critics of liberalism. Heasserts a notion of transition from the idea ofrevolutionary change to rights talk which can beused in varied ways (hence the title of the book).‘[M]illions of black working-class South Africansare highly literate in the language of rights,equality, citizenship and social justice’, assertsRobins (p. 16), and this prompts his rejection ofradical critics like Sangeeta Kamat who seeNGOs as narrowing radical political discourse.The essays that follow sit in tension with theradicalism that Robins considers past tense, anda universalist liberalism to come.

Hence, chapters 2 and 3 focus on indigenous‘identity’ and land rights among Nama andKhomani San people in the Northern Capeprovince. NGOs broker relations betweenpeople, donor agencies, and the state (notunlike Gramscian political society), but inRobins’s view this makes space for a

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self-consciously reflexive assertion of indigenous‘identity’ for the purposes of expanding theefficacy of rights. This is not always the outcome.In chapter 4, an apparently benign transnationaladvocacy network, Slum Dwellers International(SDI), allies with a set of Cape Town-basedorganizations, and Robins (p. 79) asks ‘whathappens when [SDI’s] models of horizontalnetworking land in settings characterized byvertical and centralized political cultures andstyles of leadership?’ These chapters return tothe book’s call for complexity andindeterminacy.

Chapters 5-7 turn to questions of HIV/AIDS,biomedical politics, and sexuality, with theconcerns about NGOs, rights talk, and liberalismrunning through them. Robins reviews thecoalition of AIDS activists, health and scienceexperts, scientists, and journalists who cametogether to take on former President Mbeki’sdeadly ‘AIDS denialism’. In Robins’s analysis, theTreatment Action Campaign (TAC), Médecinssans Frontières (MSF), and their alliesstrengthened biological and therapeuticcitizenship (following Rayna Rapp, AdrianaPetryna, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, and others), but thiscontradicted ‘patriarchal cultural ideas andpractices that prevented many women,including many of their own members, fromaccessing biomedical technologies andinterventions’ (p. 102). There is a parallel herewith Robins’s critique of shackdweller activism inchapter 4, and the irresolution is suggestive.

In chapter 6, Robins is moved by a set oftestimonies of people living with AIDS whobecame committed activists for the right totreatment, and this frames his scepticism aboutbiomedical ‘responsibilization’ as necessary forthe hegemony of biocapital and the neoliberalstate. The question is whether these positionsreally are contradictory at all if governmentalityworks through subjectivation. Chapter 7 turns tothe antinomies of sexuality rights incontemporary South Africa, the land of same-sexmarriage and high rates of violence againstwomen. Jacob Zuma’s rape trial in 2006

provides a window into the contradictions ofofficial discourse, and Robins turns incounterpoint to insights from historical andethnographic studies of sex, sexuality, andgender, particularly from Mark Hunter’slong-term analysis of social dynamics. WhileRobins’s analysis leads to quandaries andcomplexity, Hunter’s Love in the time of AIDS(2010) shows how site-specific ethnographic andhistorical research can explain broader structuraldynamics and political possibilities. Robins

concludes by reiterating that we ought to lookbeyond simplistic dualisms to actual strugglesover democracy and rights. What is mostpowerful in this book is a call to continue toresearch emergent forms of political life in SouthAfrica and elsewhere. This book should be readwidely and closely for this reason.

Sharad Chari London School of Economics andPolitical Science

Samatar, Ahmed I. & Margaret Beegle

(eds). Chinese worlds: multiple temporalitiesand transformations (St Paul. Minn.:Macalester International, Vol. 18, Spring2007). xxii, 339 pp., figs, tables, illus.,bibliogrs. (paper)

Chinese worlds: multiple temporalities andtransformations is a collection of papers resultingfrom an academic trip to mainland China andTaiwan by a group of faculty members ofMacalester College. It consists of two parts. Thefirst part includes seven papers written by Chinaspecialists of various fields: political history,anthropology, economics, geography, andliterary criticism. The papers mostly take theform of a review of communism in Chinesehistory (Meisner), of geopolitics of ‘GreaterChina’ (Chun), of nation and state in thecross-Strait relation (Wang), of contemporaryChinese fiction (Jing), of changing economicgeography across the Taiwan Strait (Wen), andalso of the Three Gorges Project (Shu). Theopening article by Meisner suggests aninteresting view that communism has been thehistorical agent for Chinese capitalistdevelopment by uprooting traditional culture,including Confucianism. According to theauthor, capitalism thus developed, in return,combines with the communist regime tosubstitute the nationalist enthusiasm of themillennial Chinese tradition. His interpretation isreflected in the arguments of many Chinaexperts who seek a so-called ‘China model’ inwhich dictatorial communist political power andthe development of a capitalist and marketeconomy are correlated.

Chun’s paper on the geopolitics of ‘GreaterChina’ examines critically but realistically theidea of Greater China in its economic, cultural,and political dimensions. In relation to the ideaof constructing a transnational community ofGreater China with the ever-expanding globalmarket of mainland China at its centre, hereminds us of the differences in the political,cultural, and social system of each community

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concerned. In Chun’s view, the idea ofre-creating Chinese culture can only be limitedgiven the significant heterogeneity of thepolitical systems and ideologies. The case ofHong Kong is given as an example in which analliance between business and the new regimewas declared while the regime suppressed thedemocratizing forces. Even communications likeStar-TV, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google havesuccumbed to ‘political correctness’ as the priceof admission into the Chinese market. As Chunrightly argues, as long as the communist orsocialist regime pulls the strings behind thesystem, economy, culture, and democracycannot in practice fit the noble idea of GreaterChina, which, according to the author, merelyremains political rhetoric.

All the papers included in this volumeconsciously or unconsciously touch upon thequestion of whether Chinese society has theautonomous power to vie with the state whenthe social basis of the modernizing state iscreated by the state itself. In this highly politicalstate, literature is also liable to politicalcorrection. Jing Kaixiang reviews the relationshipbetween fiction and politics in the post-Maoperiod, segmenting fashions into ‘scar’,‘introspection’, ‘root-seeking’, ‘modernistic andexperimental mode’, and ‘popular culture’literature. Despite the fact that post-CulturalRevolution literature communicates people’straumatic memories, these memories are in theend those chosen to be published by theauthorities. Jing therefore concludes that the realtragedy of contemporary Chinese literatureunder the political correction is that it is allowedto seek the illusion of desire but not a realisticdescription of life.

The thirteen papers in the second part werewritten by the members of the same researchteam but those who are not necessarily Chinaexperts. As essays based on short visits toChina’s major cities such as Nanjing andShanghai, and Taipei in Taiwan, in addition tothe Three Gorges Dam, their sketches seem attimes impressionistic, but at the same time theypresent fresh ideas that are worth noting forfurther study. Their subjects include the socialand political status of Muslims in China andTaiwan, and rural and urban landscapes. Somearticles discuss mass-communication andpopular political sentiment, while others presentideas for comparative studies of stock marketand criminal court between China and the USA.

It might be interesting to contrast the viewsand arguments of these American scholars withthose of the Chinese on such issues as the Three

Gorges Project and the state’s role in popularpolitical demonstrations, especially anti-Japaneseprotest in 2005, as different positions lead us torethink the weight of political influence uponone’s perspective on the same social issue.

One obvious lesson that we may learn fromthe papers in this volume as a whole is thatglobalizing China is under the supremacy ofstate power, which penetrates every sphere ofpolitical, social, economic, and cultural life, eventhat of science and technology.

Kwang Ok Kim Seoul National University

Shipton, Parker. Mortgaging the ancestors:ideologies of attachment in Africa. xix, 327 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. London, New Haven:Yale Univ. Press, 2009. £35.00 (cloth)

This volume, the second in a trilogy of workswhich focus on the Kenya Luo as anethnographic example, addresses the problemsof the transformation of relatively self-contained,rural polities sustained by subsistence farminginto participants in a modern polyethnic statewithin the community of nations. As has beenthe case in most agrarian communities, the landwas perceived both as a source of economicvalue and as a sacred trust received fromprevious generations and held for the next.While the histories, as told by themselves, orextracted by historians and archaeologists, mayindicate migrations, conquests, and themovements of families or lineages as a result oflocal disputes, both recently and in the fardistant past, the ideology of the sacred trustremains. The homestead head (wuon lowo) mayexercise power and authority over the residents,allocating or appropriating its resources as hedeems best, but the land itself is seen as beinginalienable.

In the first decade of the twentieth century,the eastern side of Lake Victoria Nyanza,occupied by the Nilotic-speaking Luo, theirBantu-speaking neighbours to the north andsouth and the Kalenjin people to the east, cameunder colonial rule. The Luo were soon recruitedas labourers into the colonial economy, andyoung men, in particular, became migrantworkers. The colonists characterized them asbeing strong, intelligent (i.e. quick to learnEnglish), clannish, and generally more to betrusted than the Kikuyu, who had lost much oftheir territory to the colonists. At Maseno, on theLuo and Luhya border, an outstanding schooland hospital was established by the ChurchMissionary Society, which the ‘sons of chiefs’

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were urged to attend and hence provide‘progressive Christian leadership’ for the nextgeneration.

Shipton explores the ideologies of ‘progress’which arose in Europe during the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, and manifestedthemselves as ‘modernization’ in the colonialcontext. Individualism and private property wereseen as keys to the development of East Africa,and Kenya, with its robust white settlercommunity, could lead the way.

Alas, some prerequisites for thetransformation of the rural subsistence economyinto part of an international free marketeconomy were simply not present. There wereno major long-term industrial or infrastructuraldevelopments which could absorb largenumbers of unskilled migrants and makepermanent urbanites of them. There wasminimal social security in the form of pensionschemes or unemployment insurance to cushionworkers against the vagaries of the businesscycle. Further, the introduction of tea, cottoncloth, famine relief programmes, and basichealthcare stimulated a rapid increase in thepopulation. Pax Britannica eliminated territorialexpansion through warfare for the ‘huddledmasses’ around the lakeshore. As Shiptonemphasizes, the Western route to relativeprosperity was unavailable to most of thegrowing population, and security continued tobe found in the adherence to the principle ofland as a sacred trust whose alienation cannotbe permitted. The promotion of individualownership, whether by governments seeking todevelop a progressive peasantry or by lessprincipled operators seeking to gain control ofland for their own profit, has been resisted. Evenwhen individuals have succumbed to thetemptation to mortgage ‘their’ land, kinsmenand neighbours have used all means, includingforce, to prevent the land from being alienated.

Having explored the ideological andconsequential policy failures of the colonialgovernment in its efforts to transform Kenya intoa broad-based capitalist and agrarian economy,Shipton provides a brief history of the pasthalf-century of the postcolonial governments’efforts in broadly the same direction. Land‘restitution’, much of which has benefitted thepolitically well-connected, has done little toboost the overall economy, and as the politicaldominance has shifted from British to Kikuyu, toKalenjin and back to Kikuyu, ethnic tensionshave threatened to tear the country apart. Nosolution is suggested to the fundamentalcontradictions between the rising material

aspirations of the educated and semi-urbanizedpopulations and the social security provided byinalienable land rights, save that ‘rural Africanpeople have perhaps suggested what we allmust do: to devise together our own localcultural mixtures of rights and duties, ofself-interest and sociability, of freedom andconnectedness’ (p. 254). Alas, history, bothpre- and postcolonial, suggests that brutalethnic conflict is an integral part of the ‘localcultural mixtures’.

Michael Whisson Rhodes University

Tate, Winifred. Counting the dead: the cultureand politics of human rights activism inColombia. xvii, 379 pp., map, bibliogr.Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2007. £12.95

(paper)

Winifred Tate’s Counting the dead makesimportant contributions to the anthropology ofrights and transnational normativities, civilsociety activism, participatory scholarship, LatinAmerica, and the politics of knowledge. It is also,of course, an invaluable ethnographic account ofColombia over the last fifteen years.

Tate’s personal story intertwines with herethnographic narrative. As she explains in thebook’s appropriately reflexive introduction, shecame to Colombia not as a student ofanthropology, but as a human rights activist,despite the fact that her ‘qualifications wereslim’. More than anything, her arrival inColombia in 1994 was the beginning of ajourney of ethically committed self-discovery.She was looking for something different, a wayto combine her passion for Latin America withher desire to act in the world. As she puts it, ‘Iyearned for the intense emotional rush of myfirst year in Colombia five years before ...Committed to a vague platform of social justicebut suspicious of institutional politics, I believedthat human rights activism offered [unlikeanthropology, perhaps] a life of excitementwithout moral compromise’ (p. 1).

What she found over the next decade wasmore than enough excitement to satisfy even themost intrepid traveller. But her multipleengagements with human rights activismrevealed a ‘culture and politics’ that wascharacterized by moral compromise, suspicion,bad faith, and ineffectiveness, on the one hand,and, on the other, acts of sacrifice and heroism,commitment to peace-building, and awillingness to challenge the dominant narrativesof the government and the military in the

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ongoing struggle with the Revolutionary ArmedForces of Colombia (or FARC in Spanish), whichbecame during Tate’s time in Colombiasomething of a Cold War relic that was forced totransform itself into an organization of drugtrade entrepreneurs and professionalextortionists.

After several periods in Colombia after1994, Tate returned finally as a hybridscholar-practitioner: although she was a Ph.D.student in anthropology working under theaegis of research grants and the imprimatur ofan American university, she neverthelessmaintained contact with the organizations sheonce worked with, which became, in a sense,the objects of her professionalized ethnographicgaze. To this extent, Tate’s personal andprofessional trajectory resembles that of theanthropologist Shannon Speed, whose study ofhuman rights activism in Chiapas, Mexico, waslikewise the product of an arc of participatoryengagement and anthropological training.

Tate’s book is an ethnographic history of anidea: the idea that human rights would providea way out of Colombia’s seemingly never-endingcycles of violence. As Tate herself acknowledges,‘Colombia is home to the longest-runningguerilla war in the hemisphere’ (p. 41). And theinterpenetration of guerrilla war with theColombian drug trade has led to a combustiblemix in which the politics of revolutionary socialchange have become difficult to disentanglefrom the profit activities of drug production andmarket protection. On the other side, thegovernment’s logics of violence and repressionhave also undergone their own transformation,as the war on communists and drug dealers inColombia has been reinscribed within a muchwider global ‘war on terror’.

Tate tracks these developments in Colombiaand beyond, which is a necessarymethodological move in light of thetransnationalism of human rights activism andthe knowledge that it produces. In the end, thisis for me the greatest contribution of Tate’sstudy: the way it recognizes and, even more,documents in rich ethnographic and historicaldetail the emergence of human rights activism inthe post-Cold War as a regime of knowledgethat is deeply imbricated within multiple politicaleconomies that might, or might not, beconsistent with the promotion andstrengthening of human rights. Certainly thecase of Colombia is extraordinary. As Tatedemonstrates so powerfully, the legacy ofdecades of military, political, and social violencein Colombia has bracketed the experience of

human rights activism in ways that make itdifficult to generalize to other cases of humanrights practice. But perhaps the enduringconsequences of Colombia’s legacies of violenceput distinct pressure on the processes of humanrights that reveal the contradictions andpossibilities that much more clearly.

Mark Goodale George Mason University

Legal anthropology

Holden, Livia. Hindu divorce: a legalanthropology. xiii, 259 pp., illus., bibliogr.Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. £60.00

(cloth)

In Hindu divorce, Livia Holden examinescustomary divorce and remarriage practicesamong low-caste Hindus in South Asia. Usingthe narratives of social actors involved indivorce in a variety of social contexts, Holdenlooks at the place of Hindu customary divorceand remarriage in the Indian legal system. Herdata come from sixteen months of fieldworkcarried out over twelve years in the district ofShivpuri in Madhya Pradesh in a village alsostudied by her mentor, the anthropologistProfessor Chambard. Her objective: to askwhether and how divorce and remarriageoffer women a way out of their unwantedmatrimonial situations and along the way topose questions about the relationship betweentraditional jurisdictions in rural areas of Indiaand the larger legal culture of Indian townsand cities and ultimately also in the UK andUSA.

Holden argues that in the part of MadhyaPradesh where she carried out her fieldwork, inspecific circumstances, customary law may infact provide more scope than statutory personlaw for women to divorce and remarrysuccessfully. Against this emancipatingtendency in customary divorce and remarriagestands the chauvinistic, Brahmanical version oftradition enshrined in statutory case law,emphasizing the sacramental nature of Hindumarriage and the impossibility of divorce forwomen. This Holden sees as a remnant of acolonial rewriting of Hindu law by the Britishwhich took the Hindu Sanskrit texts and theinterests of a ruling class of Brahmins as thebasis for a new legal culture. Contrary tothe Brahmanic discourse of the law courts,Holden shows how customary divorce and

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remarriage can offer women a choice ofspouse, which is unthinkable even in manyurban and middle-class contexts, and theopportunity to direct financial bargains throughthe establishment of a marriage contractstating the financial arrangements of acouple and even children’s inheritancerights.

Holden’s empirical research is found inchapters 3, 4, and 5 of the book, where shedescribes the case studies of women’sexperiences of customary divorce andremarriage taken from her fieldwork. She looksat the argumentation deployed by social actorson women’s behalf and then analyses the‘official’ discourses in the village and towns byexamining men’s representations of customarydivorce and remarriage practices in the publicsphere. Holden also describes the significantrole played by local notaries in managing toaddress the social needs of their clients withinthe official legal system. Notaries are shown torespond to and extend custom so that itacquires legitimacy beyond the local through asystem of providing affidavits. Notaries appearto coach their clients in their meetings,encouraging adequate performances of custom,at the same time responding to their clients’need for the legal protection the affidavits offeras proof that customary practices have beencarried out. Ostensibly, clients ask for theseaffidavits to avoid any claims by anex-husband’s family for financial compensationwhen a woman remarries. Holden examines theprocedure, showing how the collection ofstatement under oath has come to incorporatethe expectations of the various parties involved.She then turns her attention to argumentationaround customary divorce and remarriage inMadhya Pradesh and in Indian case law. Sheshows how challenges to the dominantBrahmanic discourse have been kept to aminimum by allowing divorce only as anexception among tribal and scheduled castes.She looks at the arguments by which judgeshave denied the existence of customarypractices, on the one hand, and haverecognized customary divorce practices, onthe other. In a final and interesting adjunct tothe work, Holden then looks at customarydivorce and remarriage in the context of SouthAsian migration in the USA and the UK andassesses the handling of customary divorce andremarriage practices within the UK and USjudiciary. She assesses cases taken from herPh.D. supervisor, Werner Menski, and her ownexperiences as expert witness. She presents

first-hand examples of the reports and discussesthe kinds of authority anthropologists claimwhen providing these reports.

The strength of this book lies in Holden’smultidisciplinary approach, which appliesfieldwork informed by a reflexive and feminist‘turn’ to legal scholarship. This highly readable,multi-sited analysis of Hindu divorce in Indiaoffers anthropologists and legal scholars anopportunity to think not only about law inSouth Asia, but also about the relation ofcustom to state jurisdictions generally, andwill give readers an opportunity to considertheir practices as researchers and their rolein relation to their own legal culture aswell.

Alex Verbeek School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Jenkins, Timothy. The life of property: house,family and inheritance in Béarn, South-WestFrance. xii, 181 pp., map, bibliogr. Oxford,New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. £35.00

(cloth)

Jenkins presents an anthropological andhistorical study of property and inheritance inthe foothills of the French Pyrenees. For anyoneinterested in combining anthropology withhistory on an ethnographic scale, France is anattractive country in which to work, thanks to itsmeticulous records of household composition,land ownership, and legal processes coveringseveral hundred years, and Jenkins takes goodadvantage of such resources. Béarn is aparticularly interesting region for anthropology,not only because Pierre Bourdieu grew up thereand (as Jenkins shows in an interesting chapter)his sociological perspective was shaped by earlyexperiences, but also because thenineteenth-century sociologist Frédéric Le Playbased his theory of stable and unstable familyforms on his research in the area. Jenkins tracesthe ramifying influence of Le Play’s ideas onsocial policy.

Thanks to Le Play’s original research, Béarn isthe type-area for the ‘stem family’, in whichfamily property is transmitted to selectedchildren with the aim of keeping the house andits reputation in good hands, while disinheritedchildren are dispatched to local towns,becoming, in the words of one of Susan Rogers’informants, ‘the rejects’ (Shaping modern times inrural France, 1991). For Jenkins, following Le Play,the ‘house’ and its family occupants constitutelocal civil society.

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Jenkins notes the paradox that generationsof social scientists claimed to be observing thedeath of the stem family, despite its survival tobe restudied by others. He refutes the popularview that an older form of ‘Roman law’justifying the stem family has been underminedby a newer spirit of individualism, concludingthat both tendencies have coexisted forcenturies, the first realized by heirs, the secondby non-heirs. He does, however, pay dueattention to social change, particularly withregard to new agricultural techniques, thegrowth of agricultural co-operatives, andurbanization.

Jenkins concludes his study with a ratherlightweight chapter on a minor novel of familylife set in nineteenth-century Béarn, whoseplot hinges on some of the historical andsociological themes analysed in the rest of thebook, and a much more penetrating dissectionof Bourdieu’s ethnography of the region.Among other interesting insights, Jenkinsuncovers the origin of Bourdieu’s conception ofhabitus, and the basis for his passive vision ofpeasant agency as the realization of age-oldroutines.

For the sake of completeness, it shouldbe noted that there are wider issues concerningLe Play’s theory that can only be addressed bycomparing the stem family’s effect on localsociety with the social consequences ofthe alternative partible inheritance in ruralnorthern France, which Jenkins only brieflymentions. Le Play was quite wrong toattribute the origin of partible inheritance toFrench Revolutionary legislation. It had beenpractised for centuries among smallholders innorthern France and Switzerland. Partibleinheritance is generally associated withnucleated communities, held together by ahigh level of village endogamy and a densenetwork of mutual aid sanctioned by thethreat of ostracism. Unigeniture is associatedwith an ideal of household self-sufficiency,minimizing inter-household networks ofmutual aid, and giving rise to isolated farmsstanding in the midst of their own land(G. Augustins, Comment se perpetuer? 1989,and T. Barthélémy ‘Les modes de transmissiondu patrimoine’, Études Rurales, 1989). Onesacrifices a close-knit community for thecontinuity of the ‘house’, while the othersacrifices the continuing association of thefamily with particular plots of land inexchange for mutual aid and communitysolidarity.

Robert Layton University of Durham

Medical anthropology

Hsu, Elisabeth. Pulse diagnosis in early Chinesemedicine: the telling touch. xv, 404 pp., map,figs, tables, bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press,2010. £60.00 (cloth)

In this book, Elisabeth Hsu has made apath-breaking study of The memoir of Chunyu Yi,who was a doctor of the early Han dynasty. TheMemoir is the earliest extensive account ofChinese pulse diagnosis – the examination ofmai (vessels, pulses, channels) – and forms partof The records of the historian by Sima Qian(c.86 BCE).

Hsu convincingly argues that the Memoir,previously considered the work of a singleauthor, is better seen as a compilation of shortertexts written by several authors and also editedover time. Further, she demonstrates that onlythe first ten of the twenty-five cases of theMemoir are likely to have been written by Yihimself (c.180 BCE). It is on these cases that Hsuhas her primary focus. Processes of diagnosisand prognostication by, and through, bodytechniques which involve touch as well ascomplex medical rationales are at the heart ofthe study.

The book has three parts: the first frames thefield; the second contains an annotatedtranslation of the entire Memoir into English(indeed its first complete translation intoEnglish); and the third provides a detailedanalysis and interpretation of the ten medicalcases attributed to Yi.

During the course of her study, Hsudiscovered that the cases of the Memoir wererecorded in a formulaic style. Formulaiclinguistic features were found in recurrentphrases pertaining to three different aspects ofa patient’s disorder: the name of the disorder,the cause of the disorder, and the diagnosticquality indicative of the disorder. In order toexploit the potential inherent in the formulaiccharacter of the text, Hsu developed themethod of ‘text structure semantics’, a heuristicdevice for the study of (formulaic) texts that aremeaning-orientated, and polysemous ormultivocalic. This is a tool of inquiry whichclearly recognizes that all signs acquiremeaning in the context of their operation, andHsu’s innovative method may indeed prove tobe useful for future inquiries into formulaictexts.

In the Memoir, we encounter for the firsttime a doctor who palpates mai and speaks of

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qi as coming from the viscera. Earlier textsreport of visual, auditory, and olfactoryexamination of mai. Hsu shows how a tactileexploration of mai provided informationabout the quality of qi at the time of thepalpation – touch causes presence. Thesynchronously felt quality of mai rather thanany cause in the past were vital to Yi’sdiagnosis and prognostications. The tactilefelt qualities of mai determined not onlytreatment (early versions of decoction,fomentation, fumigation, acupuncture, andmoxibustion) but even more often alsoprognostication – in particular the time ofdeath.

The study investigates more than fortyverbs of touch which link tactile qualities tobody internal processes (and hence toemotions). The naming of these verbs isderived from the immediate sensory andphysical context of the touch and relatedirectly and concretely to what they signify.In her description and analysis of processes ofmaking meaning through and by touch, Hsuturns to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce – inparticular, Peirce’s trichotomy of icon, index,and symbol, with an emphasis on icons andindexes as vehicles for, and producers of,meaning (here diagnosis and prognosis). Sheclearly demonstrates the potential of thisframework for anthropological studies of thesenses.

Yi’s patients were the nobility of the kingdomof Qi. Indulgence in wine and women was oftenidentified as the cause of their present ailment.Hsu suggest that the reporting of these medicalcases may contain a coded political critique. Thismay be why medical cases were included bySima Qian in his dynastic history (The records ofthe historian).

Hsu takes care to make it possible for thereader to follow the steps she takes in heranalysis – something which makes her studyeasily accessible also for those of us who are notsinologists.

In sum, Elisabeth Hsu’s original study, andcomplete translation, of The memoir of Chunyu Yiis beyond doubt an important contribution tothe anthropology of medicine and theanthropology of sensory experience. Shehistoricizes in an excellent manner and, as far asthis is possible, explores the medical practices ofYi according to its own premises. She does sowith regard to both medical rationale and thecorporeal techniques of physicians in earlyChina.

Anne-Lise Middelthon University of Oslo

Hyde, Sandra Teresa. Eating spring rice: thecultural politics of AIDS in Southwest China. xix,271 pp., maps, figs, bibliogr. Berkeley: Univ.California Press, 2007. £13.95 (paper)

As the ‘iron rice bowl’ which guaranteedwelfare under Mao was smashed by reformsfollowing his death, some of the subjects ofthis book – sex workers – rely on their beautyand youth to fill a rather more fragile bowl.They refer to these practices as ‘eating springrice’. This ambitious and captivating booksituates them within the cultural politics of sextourism in an ethnic minority region, thepolitics and aesthetics of statistics, and officialand local discourses on sexuality and AIDS. Itdraws on a decade of fieldwork, starting in1995, which involved documentary research,participation in a public health survey, andethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites with awide range of informants.

This study does not pose as a definitiveaccount of AIDS in Yunnan province, let aloneChina. Rather, it examines ‘everyday AIDSpractices’ (p. 3) and the cultural politics ofblaming behind the rise of the HIV epidemic. Itfocuses particularly on the intersection betweenHIV/AIDS and ethnic minority identities, withYunnan being one of China’s most ethnicallydiverse regions. From the outset, Hydedeconstructs ‘pattern thinking’ (p. 1) about AIDSin terms of risk groups, geography, and time. Itis well known that any society’s constitutiveoutsiders are often blamed for disease. PaulFarmer’s study of AIDS among Haitians (Aids andaccusation, 1992) cast light on the politicaleconomy which makes marginalized peopledisproportionately the bearers of disease. Hadshe conducted a similar study, Hyde would havefocused on injection drug users and poorvillagers infected through plasma donation,pointing to poverty, mismanagement, and drugtrafficking as key drivers of the epidemic.Tackling these drivers would have added animportant dimension (especially for the publichealth reader), but lies beyond the scope of thebook as it is conceptualized. Given the sensitivityof the topic, it would also have been anextremely difficult project to work onethnographically.

By contrast, Hyde focuses on a differenttype of outsiders, the Tai minority, andconsiders how they are imagined as a riskgroup and why they are blamed for the spreadof HIV/AIDS, despite evidence to the contrary.This is rooted in a long-standing culturalimagination of minorities as sexually

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promiscuous and uncivilized, and convenientlydisplaces blame for the epidemic onto thestate’s peripheries. The paradox is that astourism to Jinghong has grown rapidly sincethe 1990s, the area has drawn people frompoorer regions as sex workers to meet thedemands of sex tourists – both of thesetypically from the Han ethnic majority. Inhighlighting this tension, this book is not justabout AIDS, but also about how biopoweroperates in contemporary China, discoursesand practices of sexuality, the cultural politicsof ethnicity, the performance of ethnic identity,the politics of representation, and public healthdiscourse.

The book is divided into two parts. Thefirst, ‘Narratives of the state’, looks atgovernment officials, public health NGOworkers, and the production of statistical dataon AIDS. The second, ‘Narratives of Jinghong’,turns to life in one locality, and providestheoretically engaged ethnographic accounts ofbrothel managers, sex workers, and one oftheir customers, and the authorities attemptingto regulate them. I found chapter 6 to be themost enjoyable – both ethnographically richand analytically stimulating. It traces fourintersecting and competing ‘moral economiesof sexuality’: a liberal market morality, aparochial Maoist morality, a Han nationalistmorality, and an ethnic revivalist morality.Rather than presenting a linear progressionfrom Confucian sexual restraint to modernsexual freedom, Hyde argues that suchcompeting moral economies of sexualityoverlap with and partly account for thecontradictory representations of AIDS. Wheremuch of social science of post-reform Chinahas described its lack of morality – and sexualpromiscuity and prostitution could easily beconstrued as evidence of it – here discoursesand practices of sexuality are examined as sitesfor the making of moral worlds.

The moving and captivating ethnographicaccounts left me wanting more thickdescriptions of grassroots and rural experiencesof sexuality and perceptions of AIDS and theirposition within the wider moral and socialarchitecture than there is space for in one book.This is surely testimony to its remarkable value,ethnographically and theoretically. It is bothaccessible and sophisticated – a rare feat for anyacademic book. It should be on all graduate andundergraduate reading lists on anthropology ofethnicity, sexuality, AIDS, and contemporaryChina.

Anna Lora-Wainwright University of Oxford

Lakoff, Andrew & Stephen J. Collier

(eds). Biosecurity interventions: global healthand security in question. 307 pp., figs,bibliogrs. New York: Columbia Univ. Press,2008. £16.00 (cloth)

Pragmatist philosophy starts with the premisethat we live in an uncertain world and humanaction organized itself to mitigate theseuncertainties and underlying risks. However,recent approaches to risk management arethwarted by the fact that so many modern ‘risks’are unknown or incalculable, and thus attemptsto manage risks have no solid base. Moreover,the very processes of risk managementthemselves bring further risks. Biosecurity is acurrent and relevant example of this. Forexample, how can one prepare against abiological weapons attack when the perpetratorand biological agent used are unknown, as isthe likelihood of the attack? And should acountry start a smallpox vaccination programmewhen the risk of the attack is unknown but therisk of side-effects from the vaccine are?

What biosecurity is and how differentdomains of public health attempt to define andaddress it are highly problematic and constantlyin flux. Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoffhave edited a collection of nine essays withcarefully chosen case studies highlighting therange of difficulties and theoreticalcontradictions in attempts to achieve biosecurity.These focus on the relationships amongstlaboratories, health administrators, internationalorganizations, and policy-makers, and thetensions between the defence and healthsectors. Ethnographies of institutions, policyprocesses, and the spaces in-between are fewand this volume is a welcome addition.

Andrew Lakoff begins with a discussion ofhow the notion of ‘preparedness’ became apublic health norm and the difficulties inpreparing for unknown public health events.This is followed by Lyle Fearnley’s account of thefailure of syndromic surveillance as a policy.Rather than relying on traditional physician orlaboratory diagnoses, syndromic surveillancemonitors changes in pharmaceutical sales,emergency admissions, and alternative forms ofdata – instead of looking for a specific disease, itlooks for what could be a sign of an unknowndisease. Dale A. Rose critiques the US’s smallpoxvaccination programme in the early 2000s andhow the public health community tried to dealwith preparing for an outbreak of an eradicateddisease. This is followed by Erin Koch’s accountof the difficulties of implementing the globally

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standardized protocol for treating tuberculosis inGeorgia, making the point that technicalinterventions and treatment protocols are notvalue-free, but rather are prescriptive apparatus;additionally, their use at local levels may not bein line with global norms. Also looking at therole of ‘standardization’ in biosecurityinterventions, Peter Redfield discusses thehumanitarian kit – how the set of supplies fordealing with humanitarian situations hasbecome standarized. Nick Bingham and SteveHinchliffe then explain how the term‘biosecurity’ has multiple meanings and usagesacross disciplines and the difficulties at the nexusof agriculture and health, using avian influenza(H1N1) in Egypt as an example. Frédéric Keckalso points out the variations in the term’s usagein his charting of transformations in the Frenchfood safety sector. The book concludes with twoessays by Kathleen M. Vogel and Carlo Caduffwhich examine aspects of biodefence: therelationships between military and securitysectors and the public health sector and thetensions between transparency and security withregard to laboratory research. That is, if a publichealth discovery can be used for bioterroristpurposes, how should the scientific communityhandle this? The essays and themes are thenfinally summarized in an afterword by PaulRabinow.

This book would make an excellentcontribution to a reading list for undergraduateor postgraduate courses on social science andhealth. From the anthropologist’s perspective,however, some of the language and structure canbe frustrating. The book is good for an audienceof non-social scientists or as a way to convincethe biological sciences or policy-makers thatsocial science plays a role in understandingbiosecurity. As a consequence, though,anthropologists may find some of the theoryslightly simplistic or, rather, that the argumentsare laid out in such a way that one feels theauthors are trying too hard to make their points.That said, anthropology has a certain ‘taken-for-grantedness’ about why such issues should bedeconstructed and it is somewhat refreshing toread the authors’ justifications for doing so.

There were also a few distractinginconsistencies, such as authors using improperabbreviations for particular non-governmentalorganizations or other small inaccuracies indetails. One hopes these were simple oversightsand not reflections on the accuracy of the casestudies. Despite any shortcomings, the bookuses a useful mix of case studies, and theunifying themes of handling risk and uncertainty

– and the uncertainty of biosecurity itself as aconcept – are worth discussing.

Rachel Irwin London School of Hygiene andTropical Medicine

Nichter, Mark. Global health: why culturalperceptions, social representations, andbiopolitics matter. xiii, 268 pp., figs, bibliogr.Tucson: Univ. Arizona Press, 2008. $65.00

(cloth), $29.95 (paper)

‘Global health’ is a relatively recent term whoseuse is on the increase. It stands for an emergentarena of health-related research and practice,those that have evolved around issues ofgrowing concern, frequently transnational,linked to the escalating impact of globalizingforces. Mark Nichter, as scholar-activist, has livedthrough the shifts – the health issues at stake,the theoretical swings, and the changingpatterns and organizational forces attempting toaddress them – and is perfectly placed to guideus through this complex field. His writing,research, and practice embody across-disciplinary engagement of envious scopeand depth, and Global health is a welcomeaddition to the increasingly rich writings onanthropology as applied to health issues in adiverse range of settings. It is also amethodological challenge to those morebiomedically informed researchers andpractitioners who see culture as a ‘barrier’ to theimplementation of programmes. It demonstratesthe increase in understanding thatwell-conducted ethnography can bring to ourconceptualizing of the issues. Rich in casestudies, and reflexive on the history and theoriesof the emergent field, it is essential reading forthose of us concerned with applying socialscience research and findings to solvinghealth-related and development problems. AsNichter suggests, the book has two targetaudiences: practitioners from the social sciencesinterested in practical examples of health-relatedproblem-solving, and those activists interested inwhat theory has to offer ongoing engagementsand debates. In addition, I would add, it will beof value to all social scientists andanthropologists who feel that the distinctionsbetween theory and practice, between so-called‘applied’ and ‘pure’, have long been misplaced,and ones that Nichter rightly dismisses. As anexample of engagement and criticism, the bookis excellent.

The book is divided into three sections. Thefirst provides examples of ethno-physiology,

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local classificatory practices around health, andexamples of pluralistic ‘healing’ practices,pharmaceutical practice, and local responses topublic health attempts at dealing withhealth-related problems. This section draws onexamples from key bio-medically defineddiseases – tuberculosis, for example – in additionto ethnographic examples of child survival andwomen’s health. In part 2, Nichter teases apartthe representations and effects of ‘developmentspeak’, including critical reflection on the globalburden of disease narratives, the effects of riskgrouping, and new evidence-based initiatives, aswell as discourses of participation and the newfocus on human rights approaches to health.The third and final part looks to the future, as hesuggests arenas for possible new research. Thisincludes the field of ‘syndemics’. To illustratewhat this term means, Nichter cites the exampleof HIV and multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis(MDRTB), where we see ‘a mutually reinforcingrelationship between poverty, unemployment’and these conditions: poverty, migration, andrisky sex and prostitution lead to increased riskof HIV and tuberculosis; consequent pooradherence to medications relates to the need tomigrate and work; and poor management leadsto increasing MDRTB. Nichter also looks to newideas in epidemiology (eco-social issues,life-span work, and popular participation). Eachof these, he argues, should be more engagedwith users, and, simultaneously, includeethnographies of ‘transnational governance’,particularly as we are best placed to chart theeffects – positive and negative, intended andunintended – of such practices on the lives ofthose inhabiting the locales where we researchand work.

There are a number of criticisms that can belevelled at the text. Its structure may not be toeveryone’s liking, and there is as much ofinterest in the footnotes as in the main text itself.As such, the book can be read in a number ofways. As a text packed with practical lessons,examples, and reflections, but also – with overseventy pages of references, constituting a veryrich bibliography, and the extensive footnotes –it can be mined as a reference volume in its ownright. The more theoretical reflections, those thathave passed through medical anthropology andanimated the discipline over the last decade orso, are confined more to these footnotes.

None the less, in its broad reading andcross-disciplinary engagement this work acts asan exemplar that we can aspire towards, andhope to emulate.

Ian Harper University of Edinburgh

Method and theory

Wilson, Richard Ashby & Richard D.Brown (eds). Humanitarianism and suffering:the mobilization of empathy. viii, 318 pp., fig.,bibliogrs. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2009.£45.00 (cloth)

This edited volume originates from a Conferenceon Humanitarian Narratives of Inflicted Sufferingheld in 2006 at the University of Connecticut.The volume consists of thirteen contributionsfrom an international multi-disciplinary groupthat includes legal and humanitarianpractitioners and scholars in comparativeliterature and the social sciences (including twoanthropologists, Wilson and Slymovics). Wilsonand Brown position the volume as acomplement to an already extensive andwell-developed body of literature oninternational humanitarian law by focusing onthe topics concerning victims’ narratives ofsuffering, past and present, how these becomerepresented in media, literature, and humanrights reports, and to what effect.

An introductory chapter by Wilson andBrown lays out the framework for the volume.Historical analysis begins in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment when afundamental shift in public consciousnessemerges as a concern with the sufferings ofdistant others to whom the West had noapparent connection or moral obligation. Thisconcern, expressed as a view that crimes againstany humans amount to crimes against thehuman race, takes two directions: human rightsand humanitarianism. Wilson and Brown claimthat both share essential views of dignity andwelfare but draw important analytic distinctionsbetween them. The former comes from thehead. It is more political. Grounded ininternational law it includes a modern inventoryof entitlements and obligations as well asassumptions that recipients of human rightsinterventions will actively claim their rights. Thelatter is grounded in the heart. It is morepaternalistic. It views beneficiaries as being morepassive and apolitical. The stated point of thebook is to explore the tensions between thesetwo approaches and how they connect,disconnect, and overlap in a variety of historical,cultural, and political contexts ofsuffering. It is, however, humanitarianism as itfeatures moral impulses or ethical responses thatemerge from compassion, sympathy, andempathy that receives the most attention.

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The volume is divided into two parts thatseem to be inadequately introduced orsummarized as distinctive sections by the editors.Aside from the fact that part 1, ‘History andcontext’, does contain more history-basedchapters and part 2, ‘Narratives and redress’,deals more with narratives per se, each sectiontakes on issues of context and redress. Amongthe historical chapters of part 1, Kellow’sanalysis of the anti-slavery debates in thenineteenth-century United States and Britainclearly articulates the connections and tensionsbetween human rights (free the slaves) andhumanitarianism (make slaves’ lives better) laidout by Wilson and Brown in their introduction.Chapters by Forsythe and Brauman more fullyaddress contemporary issues as well as historicalones. Forsythe combines contemporary andhistorical approaches in his discussion ofhumanitarianism in war and other forms ofpolitical conflict. Focusing on transnational orglobal humanitarian organizations like the UnitedNations and the Red Cross, Forsythe describeshow each of these institutions ultimately dependsupon the grass-roots support of those who live inliberal democracies, who provide funds andpressure governments to act on concerns whereself-interest and compassion combine. In afascinating account of the 2004 tsunami,Brauman offers a critical and pragmaticassessment of the relative strengths andweaknesses of local versus international aidorganizations in coping with the disaster and itsaftermath. Part 2 features narratives of sufferingand the mobilization of empathy. Contributorsshare a concern with where exactly the politics ofpity might lead us. Jelin in her chapter arguesthat the politicized familism of mothers whobecame the voice for the disappeared inpost-dictatorial Argentina not only left littleroom for the discussion of wider social issuesbut justified a military coup. Suski investigateslinks between the pity-based humanitarianimpulses and notions of innocent andvulnerable children as good victims. She critiquesNGOs that offer individual child sponsorships asdirecting attention from the wider social issuesthey face. Waldorf’s description of Rwanda’spost-genocide gacaca courts recounts hownarratives of victims’ suffering that werelargely incomprehensible to outsiders elicitedlittle in the way of empathy or humanitarianresponse.

Although the book would benefit from anintroduction that paid more attention to theorganization and contents of the volume, someof the authors do the work of the editors by

referring to other chapters in their discussions. Aresurgence of anthropological interest inempathy and suffering, as well as current eventsin Japan and Libya, makes this a very timelyvolume that should appeal to a wide range ofanthropologists.

Dona Davis University of South Dakota

Wiseman, Boris. Lévi-Strauss, anthropology andaesthetics. xi, 243 pp., illus., bibliogr.Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2007. £50.00 (cloth)

The thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss has recentlybeen reconsidered as a ‘work’ (œuvre), as istestified by the title of his recent publication inthe ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. By this, ‘work’ istaken to mean a production of the mind thatinvolves both intellectual and sensitive capacitieswith a totalizing intention. Such a reappraisalforces us to go beyond the classical oppositionsbetween science and art, or betweenstructuralism and hermeneutics. Boris Wiseman,who was in charge of editing the Cambridgecompanion to Lévi-Strauss (2009), has reexaminedthis ‘work’ in terms of the relation betweenanthropology and aesthetics, with an admirablecapacity to reappraise texts thanks to the use ofexamples and comparisons.

By ‘aesthetics’, Wiseman means not a theoryof art but an operation that seizes the intelligibleor the sensible, what Lévi-Strauss calls, followingMerleau-Ponty, a ‘logic of sensible qualities’. Inopposition to Alfred Gell, who wants to keepaesthetics out of anthropology in order toanalyse the social effect of artistic objects,Wiseman brings aesthetics back intoanthropology as a philosophical dimension thatreturns to the romantic project of reconciling theintellect and the senses. This allows him to readtogether texts that Lévi-Strauss dedicated to artwith proper production of anthropologicalscience.

Wiseman starts from the texts onshamanism and symbolic efficacy thatdeveloped the first intuition of a mismatchbetween signifier and signified in the bodilyproduction of language, following the earlytexts on the ‘split representation’ in Caduveopaintings. These texts propose a decentredconception of aesthetics that compares andcombines signs in different contexts. In thisconception, the truth of the aesthetic object isnot in itself but elsewhere, and the work of themind is to produce it by following its dynamic.Such a conception illuminates the notion of‘operator’ in The savage mind, discussing

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Sartre’s notion of imagination: the aestheticemotion connects different aspects of theobject in a virtual analogon that discoversits immanent logic. The structuralist conceptionof the mind thus acquires a dynamic aspectthat existentialist or post-structuralist critiqueshave often misunderstood. A link is alsodrawn between structuralism and earlyconceptions of symbolism such as that ofBaudelaire, as James Boon had alreadyremarked.

This aesthetic conception raises a questionfor anthropology, namely that of thereconciliation by the mind of aspects that havebeen separated in the real. Boris Wiseman asks ifLévi-Strauss’s goal is, as Yvan Simonis hadstated, to overcome the discontinuity betweennature and culture and go back to a unity priorto the prohibition of incest. He strongly arguesthat nature and culture should be taken inLévi-Strauss’s work not as ontological realms butrather as two fields of relation that areinterconnected by chance. There is no mimesisof nature by culture, he says, but rather achiasma whereby each is projected onto theother according to transformational rules. IfLévi-Strauss sometimes talks about events thathave separated modes of perception of the real,such as the ‘Greek miracle’, his work does nottry to go beyond this event by positioning art asan intermediary discourse between savage mindand science.

In relation to this question of reconciliation,Wiseman illuminates the notion of the‘bricoleur’.The bricoleur totalizes only thoseaspects of the real that have been separated byan event that raises a problem for him/her.Following the metaphor of the river, a powerfultheme of Lévi-Strauss’s thinking allowing us tocapture the sedimentation of sensible elementsin the flux of memory, Wiseman describes thebricoleur as ‘an assembler of fragments’, ‘adweller of the river’s banks’ (p. 223). If theprioral quest of the ‘savage mind’ was a searchfor a society untainted by civilization,Lévi-Strauss’s works show that these societiesalways faced problems, from domestication tothe encounter with the West.

These two levels of analysis, aesthetics andanthropology, are related by a third level,which Wiseman calls the mythopoietic, aconception he borrows from Valéry as ‘ananalysis of the mind engaged in the creativeact’ (p. 170). Reading closely the Mythologics,he shows that myth, being conceived as anattempt to solve a logical contradiction bydisplacing it at different levels of reality, allows

us to expose the infrastructure of the mind inits development. Creativity becomes a collectivemovement emerging from the encounterbetween a mythical tissue and an interpreter:‘[O]ne never walks alone along the path ofcreativity’ (The way of the masks). HereWiseman touches one of the most debatedquestions in cognitive sciences, the possibilityof knowing one’s mind by the study of others’,and he gives a convincing argument thataesthetics and anthropology can contribute tothis debate.

Frédéric Keck Centre Nationale de la RechercheScientifique

Young, James O. & Conrad G. Brunk

(eds). The ethics of cultural appropriation. xvii,302 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. £50.00 (cloth)

This edited volume deals with the appropriationof cultural forms from non-Western culturesby Western societies, the conditions and the(often late) acknowledgement of suchborrowings, the limits of restitution of culturaland intellectual property, and the nearimpossibility of elaborating principles forsolving litigious cases, as each case has itsown history, particularity, and claims forcompensation of past outrage. The debatesover cases of appropriation detailed in thisvolume aim to define what counts as harmfulappropriation or ‘profound offence’ to asociety: they are tackled from an ethical angle.However, ‘not all moral appropriation fromother cultures is morally questionable’ (p. 4),the editors remind us, but only that which is aviolation of a property right or an attack on theviability or identity of a culture. Should an earlytwentieth-century ethnomusicologist (IdaHalpern) be blamed for having recorded songsfrom the Kwakiutl with the consent of theirchiefs, at a time when their culture was dying,because the records deposed in Westernuniversities contributed to thedisenfranchisement of these people (BurnsColeman, Coombe, and MacArailt)? Is theremoving of the Indian Scout from SamuelChaplain’s monument in Ottawa prompted bythe Assembly of First Nations’ decision underthe accusation of inappropriate representationof White-Indian relations a necessary move, ordoes it rather evacuate Indians from the storyof the founding of the city (Walsh and McIverLopes)? Does the human genome belong to anethnic group or to humanity (Pullman and

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Arbour)? Can scientists renounce doingresearch on human remains capable ofthrowing light on the history of humanitybecause by doing so they are profaningancestors’ remains (Scarre, and YoungbloodHenderson)?

There are several characteristics that makethis collection of essays an admirableendeavour: the breadth of questions anddisciplines covered – music, arts, archaeology,genetics, religion, ethnobiology – in aninterdisciplinary dialogue moderated byphilosophers; the passionate engagement of theauthors with the ethics of appropriation ofsubaltern cultures by dominant Westerncultures; the incisiveness of the debates overeach theme discussed (one author debatingwith another before giving his/her own pointof view in the shape of an individual article);the soundness of theoretical arguments and thestunning and provocative examples debated.Yet some of the strengths are also some of itsweakness: the volume is exclusively centred onthe appropriation from subaltern cultures, moreprecisely on American/Canadian appropriationfrom First Nations cultures, a specific contextof cultural dialogue doubled by Westerncolonization (and extermination); theory is tooclose to the nature of examples given to haveuniversal value for the theme of culturalappropriation; the denunciation of such casesof appropriation is not entirely neutral but goeson to politically shaky ground with the clearaim of conciliating parties in opposition andhas a clear pro-First Nation bias. This concernsounds outdated to a post-postmodernanthropologist, but this time the criticism onthe authority of representations does not comefrom inside the discipline but is triggered byFirst Nations’ claims; thus it becomes animportant field problem. How can a Westernanthropologist conduct fieldwork if everyrepresentation of indigenous culture s/he givesis to be considered either as a theft or as ahumiliating misrepresentation? Are indigenousvoices (those coming from elites trained inWestern universities generally) morerepresentative than the anthropologist’s onlybecause they are genetically linked to thecommunity studied? Anthropology was builton the non-vindictive outsider’s gaze; if thisgaze was to be systematically blamed aspotentially humiliating, cross-culturalcommunication in general would becomeimpossible.Monica Heintz University of Paris Ouest Nanterre

La Défense

Religion and spirituality

Frisk, Sylva. Submitting to God: women andIslam in urban Malaysia. xvii, 216 pp., illus.,bibliogr. Copenhagen: Nias Press, 2009.£16.99 (paper)

Sylva Frisk’s ethnography of middle-class Muslimwomen in Malaysia seeks to challenge somecommonplace ideas relating to the agency ofwomen in Islam. By examining the religiousideas and practices of orthodox Malay women inKuala Lumpur in their quest to improve theirunderstanding of their religion, Frisk hopes toundermine the notion of ‘agency as resistance’,particularly in relation to patriarchy, and ‘insteadpresents the pious women of this study asagents’ (p. 188) who find their agency through‘active submission’ to the received tenets ofIslam.

Frisk’s focus on largely orthodox Muslimwomen is an important contribution to theliterature on Muslim women in Southeast Asia,and especially Malaysia. Whereas discussionsabout Muslim women in Malaysia often lead tothe work of the Muslim feminist organizationSisters in Islam, Frisk describes for us the worldof orthodox women from the politicallydominant Malay ethnic group, whose views havebeen less well described in the academicliterature. Her account of their practices is almostentirely emic, in line with her goal ofunderstanding them ‘in these women’s ownterms’ (p. 190).

Drawing principally on fieldwork conductedin 1995 and 1996, but informed by visits toKuala Lumpur through to recent years, Frisk’sdescriptions of these women are divided intofour chapters which treat different aspects ofthe women’s relationship with Islam. The firstof these chapters looks at the ways in whichwomen have created spaces for learning moreabout Islamic texts, including making use ofspace within mosques. This chapter is followedby an examination of the women’s relationshipwith the ‘five pillars of Islam’, which includesthe declaration of faith, fasting duringRamadan, the giving of tithes, prayer, andundertaking the hajj. Tensions between notionsof authentic and syncretic Islam are addressedin her chapter on how women engage inurban group rituals such as weddings, beforefinally describing orthodox Islam’s impact ontheir relationships with men.

Among the things that come through inFrisk’s text is how a number of women turned

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to Islam in an attempt to find some missingmeaning in their lives or after being affected byphysical or personal misfortunes. ‘Aisha’, forexample, after suffering mistreatment by herhusband, turned to Islam, where she ‘foundcomfort and strength’ (p. 178). It seems that byplacing ‘her life totally in the hands of God’and accepting outcomes as ‘God’s will’, Aishawas able to construct her subjectivity in a waythat was more self-affirming and not assomeone who was solely the victim of anunkind husband. Those considering usingFrisk’s text to teach in both Western andMuslim contexts will be able to generatevibrant discussion over one consequence ofAisha’s submission to Islam. Frisk notes that hersubmission to God led Aisha to make a ‘logicaldecision’: Aisha decided to allow her husbandto take a second wife with whom he mighthave the son Aisha was unable to bear andwhich seemed to be a cause for bullying by hermother-in-law.

Likewise able to provoke discussion is theworried reaction of a Muslim woman describedin chapter 3 when a (non-Muslim) Chinesestall-holder greeted her with the Arabic phrase‘Assalamualaikum’ (peace be upon you), whichis in common use among Muslims in Malaysia.The woman in question gave the customaryreply of ‘Waalaikumsalam’ (and peace be uponyou), but was concerned that she had donethe wrong thing by responding to a non-Muslim in this way. Contrary to the norm inArab states, a religious teacher she later askedadvised her that in future she should notrespond in that way and advised instead that ifa non-Muslim were to greet her that wayagain, ‘a Muslim should just say “Goodmorning” ’ (pp. 84-5).

Those acquainted with Malaysia will be ableto see in the above story some of theethno-politics of the country, whereinMuslim-Malay ethno-nationalists seek to assertpolitical superiority through various practicesthat exclude non-Muslim/non-Malays. AlthoughFrisk flags this ethno-political context for herreaders, she deliberately side-steps discussion ofit (see p. 135), and other issues such as debatesover polygamy, in order to achieve her objectiveof crafting a view of Malay middle-classwomen’s Islam from within. And, on the termsthat Frisk sets for the book, it succeeds in givingreaders a thoughtful, well-observed, andsympathetic insight into the worldview ofmainstream Muslim Malay women in urbanMalaysia.

Julian C.H. Lee Monash University

Hüwelmeier, Gertrud & Kristine Krause

(eds). Traveling spirits: migrants, markets andmobilities. xi, 218 pp., tables, figs, illus.,bibliogrs. London, New York: Routledge,2010. £70.00 (cloth)

Religion is on the move. Of course, organizedfaith has never been static, and scholarship hasreflected its peregrinations. Missiology hascharted connections between Christianity,colonialism, and the march of the market; morerecently, migration from ex-colonies hasgenerated accounts of ‘reverse mission’ to themetropolis. Now the twelve contributors toTraveling spirits progress to the analysis ofcontemporary religious mobility, particularly ofspirit-centred mediumship and PentecostalChristianity.

The geographical spread of migrant originsincluded in this collection ranges from Mayotte(Lambek) to Vietnam (Fjelstad, Endres,Huwelmeiere), the Congo (Garbin), Haiti(Drotbohm), Ghana (Daswani, de Witte, vanDijk), Germany (Adogame), and Sweden(Coleman). The main focus is on migration fromthe South and East towards the North and West– Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, and the USA.But the flow of migrants and theiraccompanying spirits is not unidirectional:Fjelstad shows how the Vietnamese spiritsimported to Silicon Valley travel back to theirhomeland, revitalizing ritual practice. AGhanaian Pentecostal church studied byAdogame was founded in Germany, but nowflourishes in West Africa, as well as Europe andthe USA, carried by the to and fro of migrants.This church sets much store by the constantcross-national and cross-continental movementof its leaders and members, as do the otherPentecostal churches examined here. For they,together with the mediums who bring theirspirits with them, now operate in a globalcontext.

These transnational migrants maintaincontact not only with their sending andreceiving countries, but also with diasporicnetworks. All the contributors here illustrate themeans whereby theologies and practices travel –carried in person and by the written word, orthrough the intricacies of modern media thatcharacterize the global age: radio, television,videos, DVDs, audio cassettes, and now theInternet. In Swedish Pentecostalism, analysed byColeman, a discourse of mobility is constantlyreinforced by ‘globe-trotting preacher celebrities’(p. 189). Spirit-based religions themselves areinherently portable. Although successful

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Pentecostal churches seek converted warehousesfor their burgeoning congregations, there is noimperative to have a fixed geographical location;the spirits, Holy or otherwise, do not require aplethora of ritual paraphernalia, and lie latent inthe bodies of mediums and prophets as theytravel.

Spirits cater to the practical concerns of theiradherents. Daswani describes would-be migrantsasking Ghanaian prophets to pray for successfulvisa applications; the appeal of Vietnamesemediumship examined by Endres allowsentrepreneurial mediums to build up substantialclienteles. The ‘prosperity’ gospel preached bythe Pentecostal Holy Spirit Church speaksdirectly to ambitious migrants in Berlin fromVietnam (Hüwelmeier). The received wisdom isthat religious affiliations in the diaspora continuewith practical assistance, and offer a ‘home fromhome’ for migrants, providing the stabilizinginfluence of continuity and networks of support.But this is not unambiguous. Van Dijk’s piece onGhanaian female migrants to Botswana showshow church membership can fosterentrepreneurial ambitions. But those who areless successful in their business are censured,and excluded from church circles.

The spirits can also be a burden. Somemigrants, such as Vietnamese in Silicon Valley,want to be free of the onerous demands thatspirits make of their hosts, and find freedom intheir new life – but in vain. Drotbohm showshow disgruntled Haitian Vodou spirits canreassert themselves in their new context,mirroring the accusations of relatives left athome, complaining of neglect.

A significant focus of Traveling spirits is theactivities of spiritual entities, not only of theirmediums. But does Drotbohm veer too far fromsociological agnosticism by crediting them withindependent agency? ‘Spiritual entities’, heasserts, ‘have their own point of view and theirown agenda’ (p. 43). Lambek, in his originalanalysis of spirit behaviour, avoids the questionof supernatural reality. He defines the mobility ofspirits not only in terms of their geographicalmovement in mediums’ bodies, but as intrinsicto their nature, appearing and disappearing,moving between the material and the ethereal,coming into presence, and withdrawing.

More susceptible to human control than thespirits are the charms and incantations that runalongside Vodou and Vietnamese MotherGoddess religion. The relationship betweenPentecostalism and such indigenous rituals isuneasy: practitioners are officially rejected by thechurches, yet consulted as an alternative to Jesus

as a source of spiritual power. In Ghana, deWitte found that the antagonism betweencharismatic churches and the neo-traditionalAfrikania Mission is overt, despite secret overlap.Among Congolese Kimbanguists in London,tension between the Holy Spirit and possessionby indigenous spiritual forces has caused deepfissures in the church.

Conflict between older religious forms andritual innovation and adaptation is inevitable astechnology transforms the religious landscapethrough which migrants move. With its variedethnographies and common themes, Travelingspirits deepens our understanding of thecomplex connections between transnationalismand religion.

Hermione Harris School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Kapferer, Bruce, Kari Telle & Annelin

Eriksen (eds). Contemporary religiosities:emergent socialities and the post-nation-state.vi, 221 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford,New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. £15.00

(paper)

Pity the reviewer of a collection of eleven articlesas stimulating but thematically diverse as this, injust 750 words. Do you start by evoking thesatori-like flashes it has induced? Joel Robbins,writing on Pentecostal networks, cites a book byRandall Collins, Interaction ritual chains, whichclaims, developing ideas from Durkheim andGoffman, that human beings go through lifetrying to draw emotional energy from eachsuccessful interaction ritual so as to sustain thenext one. Kari Telle writes of a Hindu-orientated‘security group’ in Bali called Dharma Wisesa(Dharma Power), which has adopted thecommercial logic of branding with a logodepicting Lord Siwa: its stickers, banners, flags,T-shirts, and uniforms are known by theIndonesian term atribut. Jean Comaroff’sdiscussion of ‘fee-for-service’ faiths in Africa andAsia recalls one of the principal objections raisedby those in Europe who would refuseScientology the right to be considered anauthentic religion. Nils Bubandt shows how theScottish founder of the global Sufi orderMurabitun, Shaykh Abdal-Qadir, whichcampaigns for a return to a gold-based ‘Islamicdinar’, has been influenced by the controversialGerman philosopher Ernst Jünger.

Or do you hunt like a truffle hog for errors offact? John L. Comaroff makes a scintillating casethat law is now being sacralized (as in the ‘tidal

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wave of national constitutions (re)written since1989’) and religion juridified (as in a decision ofthe Pakistan Supreme Court that the Ahmadiyyamovement has no right to the ‘signs’ of Islam).But he is wrong to imply that in Indian law it isnew for gods to be ascribed a legal identity. Andin the editors’ introduction it is odd to see CAREInternational bundled together with WorldVision as co-operating closely with Pentecostalmovements, when CARE is as far as I know acompletely non-confessional NGO.

Or do you try to evaluate the collection as anintegrated contribution to knowledge – billed asan initiative to ‘rethink the relationship betweenthe religious and the secular’? The editors intheir introduction have either assumed that thereader is familiar already with long-runningacademic debates over these slippery terms (wellexplored in A.L. Bromley and D. Greil (eds),Defining religion, 2003), or they have approachedthe matter anew. A sentence such as ‘[r]eligionsand their rites, whether of the past or of thepresent, construct worlds for life that are tobe lived in and conditioned by theontological-cosmological ground and enclosureof the religious domain’ hovers on the edge oftautology.

Without disrespect to excellent articles inethnographic vein – Matthew Engelke on theBible Society of England and Wales’s adaptationto our century, Annelin Eriksen onPentecostalism in Vanuatu, Ton Otto on cargocults, Rohan Bastin on Sri Lankan religiouspolitics – the two most eye-catching articles areby Bruce Lincoln and Faisal Devji. Lincoln drawsa scholarly analogy between ancient Persianmaterials, detailing tortures inflicted by thepowerful on their enemies, and the notoriousphotographs of atrocities carried out byAmerican soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.He argues persuasively that these representativesof another ‘worried empire’ had internalized aconviction that the power they were exercisingagainst dehumanized and dangerous captiveswas ‘just, even divine’.

Faisal Devji pursues an analogy, already setout in his book The terrorist in search of humanity(2009), between Osama bin Laden andMahatma Gandhi. Devji takes seriously therhetoric of bin Laden and his ideologicallieutenant, al-Zawahiri, and he refreshinglyquestions received opinion about Al-Qaida byemphasizing its claims to ethical as well aspolitical commitment. It is true that Al-Qaida‘draws upon the forms and even the vocabularyof other global movements such asenvironmental and pacifist ones, all of which are

concerned with the fate of humanity as awhole’, and that it can expose the mismatchbetween the United States’ promise of freedomfor all and its actual foreign policies. Gandhi wasadmittedly a more complex personality thanhagiographies suggest. But he had such a flairfor conciliation that any historical parallelbetween him and the apparently immoveablebin Laden is surely perverse, when the keyquestion for the West with regard to Al-Qaida iswhether to consider the possibility of any formof negotiation.

The editors might have been wise to includein their introduction some indication thatelements in the American military have not beenthe only villains in recent conflicts, and thatAl-Qaida’s claims to ethical superiority areconfuted by such acts as the videoed beheadingof Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

Jonathan Benthall University College London

Masquelier, Adeline. Women and Islamicrevival in a West African town. xxviii, 343 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Bloomington: IndianaUniv. Press, 2009. $75.00 (cloth), $27.95

(paper)

With this, her second book on theHausa-speaking Mawri people of the Nigerrepublic, Adeline Masquelier places herself at thevery forefront of anthropologists of AfricanIslam. Her analysis of how women have bothembraced and resisted the reformist wave ofIslam which has swept over the little town ofDogondoutchi since 1980 is hung on an accountof the rise and fall of a ‘new Sufi’ preacher,Malam Awal, over the period 1997-2004. He isthe book’s anti-hero, while the women of thetown, of whose lives Masquelier writes withsuch insight and affection, are its collectiveheroines.

Though Islam is ancient in the wider region,up to the 1970s Dogondoutchi was stillsubstantially pagan. Thereafter Islam grewrapidly, to the extent that now Muslim identityis fundamental to the community’s moral senseof itself. The practice of Islam was traditionalist– in the sense of being received and fairlyunquestioned – with low levels of Qur’anicliteracy and high dependence on themediations provided by malamai (clerics), whotypically were Sufi adepts. The town’s placiditywas shattered in 1992, with the irruption of amilitant reformist organization from Nigeriacalled Izala, which fiercely attacked Sufipractices in the name of a return to the pristine

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principles of Islam. Izala’s utopian social vision,in the context of the crisis of the state since the1980s, and mounting poverty and inequality –Niger being ranked by the UN as the poorestcountry on earth – had a strong appeal, frompious elites to the disenfranchised young. Itsprescriptions ranged widely, but they boreespecially upon women, insisting strongly ontheir duty of obedience to their husbands, theirveiling and seclusion, and the advocacy ofchanges to marriage prestations whichundercut their autonomy and self-esteem. Bydemocratizing religious knowledge anddemanding individual assent, Izala created amore self-conscious and conflictual Islamicscene in Dogondoutchi.

So enter the charismatic Awal, whoproceeded to attack both sides – Izalas andtraditionalist clerics – and carve out a middleposition. Though he kept many Sufi practices towhich people were attached, he also sharedmany of Izala’s reformist views, especially as tothe position of women. With his fiery andentertaining sermons, his skilful imagemanagement, his reputed power to control thespirits of the wild, his readiness to challengeunpopular government policies, and the daringwith which he inserted himself into thelandscape and history of the area, he bid fair tomake Dogondoutchi a regional centre of Islam, amini-Mecca for the Awaliyya. Yet within ten yearsthis all started to crumble, as senior women inparticular, at first his most ardent followers,deserted him. They were turned off by hishellfire preaching directed mainly at the allegedsins of women, and disgusted by the mountingevidence of his own deceits and sexualimproprieties.

Masquelier’s book offers not just a very fine(and historically grounded) ethnography of thisremote corner of the Muslim world, but onewhich merits the attention of allanthropologists of Islam. She frames her studyin terms of Talal Asad’s ‘discursive tradition’approach, with particular attention to thedimension of power and resistance, but is moreprepared than he is to characterize Islam inparticular substantive ways. ‘If Islam is aboutsubordination, Malam Awal’s vision ... offemale subordination to husbandly powerturned out to be aptly iconic of Quranictradition’. And though, ‘as elsewhere in theMuslim world, the much debated women’squestion is dictated by men’s concerns, notwomen’s’, Mawri women are not disposed justto accept men’s prescriptions passively.Paradoxically, the fact that they are now

Islamically better informed than they were –something that Izala pressed for – has enabledthem to resist some of the reformists’programme. In the two richly detailed chapters,Masquelier analyses women’s defence ofwedding gifts and their sartorial creativitywithin the limits of the stricter dress codesimposed by the reformists. One of her keycontentions is that ‘women have ... become thefocal point of anxieties over the moralcommunity, its boundaries and its relations tothe wider world’; and while I find her accountof how this is so entirely cogent, there remainsa certain lack of clarity as to just why it is so.How far is it due primarily to local conditionswhich reformist Islam is able to address, andhow far is it the Islamic tradition itself which,as local people have grown in Muslimself-awareness, has been able to engenderthe anxieties to which it also proffers asolution?

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

Social anthropology

Cowlishaw, Gillian. The city’s outback. vii,264 pp., bibliogr. Sydney: Univ. New SouthWales Press, 2009. $39.95 (paper)

There has been little written on urbanAborigines, and in Australia this book has beenwidely praised as an innovative study for itsfocus on racism, its accessible style, andCowlishaw’s honesty about her fieldwork. Thebook centres on a project to record the stories ofpeople living in Mt Druitt, a suburb of Sydneyhousing one of the largest concentrations ofAborigines in Australia. The impetus for theproject came from Frank Doolan, a manCowlishaw met during earlier rural fieldwork.Doolan is a central character in the book andintroduces Cowlishaw to likely storytellers. Hecomes across as a man of considerable integrity,political courage, and selfless decency.

The stories were mainly collected in 2000.Threaded through them are the tragic,‘disrupted histories’ of stolen Aboriginal childrenwho were scandalously separated from theirparents and siblings. Doolan knows the distressof ‘talking under water’ and hopes therecordings may help ‘give some people theirstories back’. The story excerpts are vivid andmoving and should have been at the heart ofthe volume. However, the project foundered. In

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the preface Doolan is blamed for helping to‘sink’ it (p. iv), in part by introducing Cowlishawto too many people with ‘intractable problemsand pain’ (p. 162). To salvage something,Cowlishaw decides to write a ‘reflexive’ accountof her fieldwork, while imagining ‘someone elsedeveloping these stories ... for local residents’(p. 161).

I find the book unsettling. First, it is insularand gains no insights from colonial racisms fromelsewhere. In a footnote introducing one of thefew comparative references, Cowlishaw takesissue with Bourgois’s portrayal of the illegal and‘repugnant’ ways of Harlem crack dealers,because, as she explains in the main text,‘[c]onfronting readers with the words andpresence of the poor and their unruly emotions,without sanitizing the suffering anddestructiveness that exists on the streets, is likelyto lose the sympathy of those otherwise willingto listen’ (pp. 213, 248, n. 7; cf. p. 220).Bourgois, good journalists, novelists andhistorians, all know they must take sides toresolve this dilemma and trust their deep loyaltyto the people whose lives they describe or riskreplicating the inequality they seek to address.

Another problem is that the book is notbased on participant observation. Cowlishawlives at home and drives to and from Mt Druittto meet her interviewees (pp. 127, 132, and cf.60ff.). The storytellers are young, old, here andthere. Some Cowlishaw gets to know quite well,others not. She never managed ‘to reconnectwith Diana to see what she and David made oftheir own brief accounts of their lives. Now bothDiana and her brother are dead’ (p. 165). In afootnote we learn it was months beforeCowlishaw learned of their deaths, and twoyears before she visited Diana’s widower (p. 245,n. 6). Though we are told nothing more abouttheir deaths, their stories are rolled out in themain text without further comment to illustratequestions of authenticity and Aboriginal identity.

In short, we gain little real sense of therhythm of people’s lives, nor do we followthem and witness those moments whenideologies of race and class becomeinstruments of oppression which create andsustain hierarchy. Or the opposite. In May2000, an anti-racist demonstration of 200,000

people walked across the Sydney HarbourBridge. Cowlishaw writes of this (pp. 101ff.), yetwe learn nothing of how the demonstrationwas organized, how Cowlishaw heard about it,whether she considered marching with peoplefrom Mt Druitt, or what the storytellers, orDoolan, thought about it.

Third, there is an anachronistic naïvety of boththeory and method. Cowlishaw notes in passingthat anthropologists are beginning to study whiteracisms in Australia (pp. 198, 218, n. 2). However,she records only the stories of poor Aborigines.Those of their white kin and neighbours areexcluded, as are the voices of other white people– housing officers, policemen – who are also partof this world. So too are black-on-black relations,and racisms, almost totally ignored (cf. pp. 53,128). And there is no class analysis which mighthelp us to understand the ‘Commodore Kooris’and others with middle-class aspirations (seepp. 176ff., 185ff.). These omissions essentializedifferences of race and class.

Australian racism vis-à-vis Aborigines is nowpublicly acknowledged. But it is only part ofother still unmentionable racisms – often directedat poor Asians – which shore up the Australianstate and the imperial and present capitalistsystem. Doolan knows this, but his story comeslate in the volume. Cowlishaw is proud to be the‘urban cosmopolitan’ (p. 213), but it is Doolanwho comments that ‘the Palestinians deserve abit of ground’; asks – probably on behalf of thethousands of Afghan refugees who weredesperately seeking asylum in Australia at thetime: ‘Who told the Prime Minister he could stoppeople coming to our country?’ (p. 190); andidentifies with the struggles of other indigenouspeoples all round the world (p. 199). KevinGilbert was a nationally known political activist.Cowlishaw quotes Doolan: ‘I was about 14 or 15

[when I] read Kevin Gilbert’s Because a WhiteMan’ll Never Do It. People describe that now assome kind of political manifesto, and that was mybible in a lot of ways, and I still refer back tothings like that’ (p. 196), yet only a few pagesearlier we were told Doolan ‘avoids abstractconcepts, and does not seek rational, sociologicalexplanations of the distress he observes’ (p. 193).This is offensive, and particularly patronizingwhen it seems it is Doolan’s political analysis shefinds problematic.

Certainly, doing anthropology at home incircumstances of great inequality is full ofcontradiction. I wish this book were a morepersuasive demonstration of ‘the radicalpotential of anthropology’ (p. 37) and‘progressive’ analysis (p. 215). By September,Doolan had left Mt Druitt to join the TentEmbassy protest at the 2000 Olympics, ‘sointernational visitors, the journalists, will knowwhere to come and see us real blackfellas’(p. 191). Somehow, I’m not surprised.

Nancy Lindisfarne School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

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Goody, Jack. Ghana observed, Africareconsidered. vi, 357 pp., table, map, bibliogr.Legon, Ghana: Institute of African Studies,2007. (paper)

This book contains a selection of essays by JackGoody, some dating from the 1970s, while othersare more recent, and some have been written forthe collection. Goody’s main obvious legacies toanthropology today are as a meticulous andperspicacious ethnographer of Northern (andparticularly Northwestern) Ghana, and as the(visionary) legatee and flagbearer of a version ofRadcliffe Brown’s conviction of the importanceof comparison in understanding human societiesand behaviours in their diverse forms.

I’m now going to deviate totally from otherreviews I have written and write this in the firstperson. Jack was one of my teachers inCambridge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.While his early ethnographically focused books(The social organisation of the LoWiili, 1967, andDeath, property and the ancestors, 1962, one ofwhose themes, the dispersal of property afterdeath, was to become central to so much ofJack’s later work) were both instant classics,it was from the late 1950s that Jack (together,initially, with Meyer Fortes, Edmund Leach,and S.J. Tambiah) founded and edited the seriesof Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology,the thrust of whose content was comparative.The idea that the authority/political structure,whether groups had chiefs or were ‘acephalous’,had much broader implications for the livesof people in those societies was also firmly onthe Africanist agenda, and, as we see inGhana observed, is still significant in Jack’sthinking.

By the end of the 1960s, Jack’s pursuit ofcomparison had taken him well outside ofNorthern Ghana. Drawing from the HumanRelations Area Files, new work in the socialhistory of Europe, new theoretical insights fromphilosophy, classics, and elsewhere that Jack’somnivorous, but discriminating, mind took onboard, and, from the early 1970s, the possibilitiesthat computers could make much broader(if perhaps less valid) comparisons, Jack’s majorwork over the next two decades (and beyond)has ranged from hoe and plough agriculture,through systems of inheritance in Europe, Asia,and Africa and the impact of literacy on societies,to the more speculative works of the 1980sand 1990s, taking in his own account ofanthropology’s development in Britain in themid-twentieth century (The expansive moment,1995) on the way.

Ghana observed consists largely of a mixture ofthe comparativist post-1970 work and detailedchapters, almost memoirs, many of which havenot previously been published. The concerns ofthe 1960s and 1970s – of the importance of thekind of political structure (with or without achief) in determining broader social organizationand people’s lived lives; of the impact andconsequences of literacy (and education); ofinheritance and the conviction that dowry wasessentially a Eurasian phenomenon, and that theexistence of bridewealth distinguished Africansocieties from those in Eurasia – are apparentthroughout.

Much of the comparative material, andsome of the more focused, such as ‘The Earthin West Africa’, will read as somewhat datedand limited to younger scholars, especiallysince the thrust of anthropology has changedso much in the past thirty years. I’ve also longthought, based on Southern Ghanaianexperience, that if Jack had spoken to womenhe might have realized that dowry andendowing were key concepts in some Africansocieties. But immense insights for anycontemporary scholar are provided bythe ‘thick’ history and more personalreminiscences, included almost as an add-on inthe ‘Riots, rebellions and resistance’ chapter(ostensibly discussing Gluckman’s ideas onrituals of rebellion), of the external relations ofNorthern Ghana in the pre- and early colonialperiod; of the 1966 coup in the ‘Consensusand dissent’ chapter; of the emergence of amiddle class in Northern Ghana and of theeffects of ‘kalabule’ on local actors in the North(chap. 12); and of the changes wrought by thecoming of education (largely for men) inNorthern Ghana’ (chap. 11). Jack’s trenchantcomments on the origins of the contemporaryGhanaian state’s name in ‘The myth of a state’(and some insights into the process of thenaming of Ghana) are also fascinating toanyone who’s interested in Ghana, founding‘myths’, or both.

But the power of Jack’s ideas and writing,based on a vast range of sources and such alongue durée, are brilliantly demonstrated in therepublication, as the penultimate chapter, of‘The “civilizing process” in Ghana’, an all tooconvincing account of Norbert Elias’s sojourn inGhana as Professor at the University of Ghana,and his complete failure to take any account ofhis experiences in the country, the lives andideas of the people with whom he interactedand worked, into his own ideas and writing. ForElias, Africa and Africans definitely remained

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‘other’, even in the late twentieth century: sucha contrast with Jack himself.

Lynne Brydon University of Birmingham

Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz R. (ed.).Conceptualizing Iranian anthropology: past andpresent perspectives. viii, 278 pp., tables,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2009. £55.00 (cloth)

This volume collects essays presented at asymposium at the J.W. Goethe University inFrankfurt (Germany) in 2004. ‘Iraniananthropology’ refers both to the work of Iraniananthropologists and to that of anthropologistsworking on Iran. In her introduction, conferenceorganizer and volume editor ShahnazNadjmabadi outlines the aims of the publication:to trace the developments of anthropology inIran; and to set the direction for futurecollaborative research between anthropologistsin Iran and their colleagues abroad.

All contributions are noteworthy, but essaysby anthropologists based in Iran should be ofparticular interest to an international audience,since they analyse the situation of the disciplineinside the country. Anthropology came underintense scrutiny in the wake of the 1979

revolution and today its aims are still a matter ofdebate. Nevertheless, there are severaluniversities that offer Bachelors and Mastersdegrees in anthropology, as well as a number ofscholarly journals and research institutes, someaffiliated with ministries, some that operate asNGOs.

Nematollah Fazeli, who already wrote amasterful book in English on the history ofanthropology in Iran, gives a nuanced summaryon the topic and focuses on developments inpost-revolutionary Iran. He outlines how debateshave been shaped by the productive tensionbetween the critique of Western human sciencesand the centrality of questions about culturalidentity. Nasser Fakouhi presents synoptic tableson teaching and research activities and describesthe institutional challenges the discipline faces inthe context of the overall difficulties of Iranianuniversities. Along with Soheila Shahshahani –who also discusses gender issues in the academyand notes how the most famous Iraniananthropologists are all women – Fakouhiunderlines the intrusive attitude of sociology,and the uneasy relationship that academicanthropologists entertain with folkorists, localethnographers, and historians, who, in his view,do not follow rigorous methodologies or

scientific standards of accountability, apoint also raised by Bulookbashi from a lesscritical angle. As discussed by Fazeli andMarzolph, and acknowledged by these authors,folklore studies in Iran did play a major role instructuring a field of ‘popular culture’ thatgreatly interested nationalist intellectuals butwas also the result of the centuries-old genre oflocal historiography. One wonders if a more‘ethnographic’ engagement with thesepractitioners and their writings would bringanthropologists in Iran to reconsider their ownunderstanding of the discipline, their investmentwith European concepts, and their relationshipwith Iranian intellectual traditions. By attributingmore value to forms of anthropologicalknowledge that might not be commensurablewith current scientific paradigms but arenevertheless socially relevant, it might bepossible to propose alternative ways to thinkabout what it means to be human andilluminate some of the aporias ofanthropology.

The contributors to the volume who resideoutside of Iran are among the most well-knownfigures in the field (Adelkhah, Beck, Bromberger,Digard, Hegland, Marzolph, Mir-Hosseini,Shahbazi, Tapper). Most of these scholars begantheir researches before 1979 and were able topursue fieldwork afterwards, albeit withdifficulty. Most of them are Europeans or trainedin Europe. They reflect retrospectively on theirresearch (on nomads, peasants, folklore, gender,Islam, and applied anthropology), along withinsights about the ethics of fieldwork. Heglandsurveys research on Iran and describes the workof the other major researchers in the field whodid not contribute to the volume. Hegland’s isthe only essay that extensively reviews work byscholars living in North America and describesresearches carried out since 2000.

As Iranian scholars living abroad, Mir-Hosseiniand Shahbazi examine the possibilities and thechallenges of carrying out research in Iran asboth insiders and outsiders. Along with severalothers, their contributions challenge the line ofdemarcation between Iranians and non-Iranians.However, the volume as a whole reinforces thisdichotomy. Several authors do not seem toconsider that, as Hegland notes, most researchabout Iran is currently carried out byanthropologists who live, study, research, teach,and travel between Iran and other countries,defying any univocal relationship betweenanthropology and nation. As Adelkhah rightlyargues, ‘rescuing’ anthropology from the nationis one of its fundamental tasks. This would also

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contribute to the collaborative aims of thevolume.

This book might not go far enough inconceptualizing the relationship betweenanthropology and Iran, but it is certainly anindispensable tool for anyone interested inanthropological research on the country. Essaysare accompanied by bibliographies that oftencontain hidden or forgotten treasures. Acomprehensive bibliography of anthropologicalstudies of Iran in English collated by Heglandcompletes the book.

Setrag Manoukian McGill University

Petersen, Glenn. Traditional Micronesiansocieties: adaptation, integration, and politicalorganization. x, 278 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr.Honolulu: Univ. Hawai’i Press, 2009. £42.00

(cloth)

In this comprehensive work, Glenn Petersenadopts a cultural ecological perspective on theWestern Central Pacific, a region that has cometo be known as Micronesia. Petersen argues thatalthough Micronesia is a European category thatdoes not ground indigenous people’s identities,the construct makes sense in terms of thecommon cultural adaptational strategies sharedby settlers of this part of the Pacific. The salienceof these adaptations is borne out, he claims, bytheir deeply embedded, perduring nature.

This work paints Micronesian social practiceswith a broad brush, identifying general sharedfeatures of Micronesian societies. If the argumentwere entirely archaeological, Petersen would bea ‘lumper’ rather than a ‘splitter’. He relies onsocial and political organization to demonstratethat Micronesia is a viable culture area withcommon characteristics. One is organization intomatriclans with constituent matrilineages,flexible, expandable networks of kin that haveproved adaptive under the intermittent stress ofan environment made unpredictable bytyphoons and drought. A secondary principle isthe ‘interweaving of lineage and land’ (p. 185);while first settlement may give ranked ‘lineages’a priori claims to certain land parcels, activelyworking land provides a contravening way todemonstrate connections to land (pp. 105ff.).Connected with land, rank determined by‘matrilineal primogeniture’ (p. 176) forms atertiary adaptive component of Micronesiansocial organization; Petersen sees chiefs asfunctionally beneficial entities who organize andco-ordinate social activities and exchangenetworks (p. 185).

Petersen aims at a text for anthropologystudents, a work young Micronesians mayconsult for a ‘respectful account of theirancestors’ lives’, and an account that resonatesfor Pacific scholars (p. 3). Indeed, TraditionalMicronesian societies is the first work of its type inmore than a generation and unquestionably themost thoughtful work of this genre to have beenwritten. Yet the reason that similar works havenot been written recently is because of theproblematic nature of categories like‘traditional’, ‘Micronesian’, and‘(matri-)lineage-based society’. Of course, as anastute scholar with a sophisticated knowledge ofPohnpeian social practices, Petersen does notattempt to dodge all difficulties presented bythese categories. For example, his use of‘Micronesia’ is in direct response to DavidHanlon’s view of ‘Micronesia’ as a product ofEuropean imagination. In other instances,though, Petersen’s comparative agenda forceshim to accept Euro-American institutionaldomains (social, political, economic) ormatrilineality without question. These becomethe principles that unify Micronesia. Applyingthe lineage concept to Pacific societies isproblematic, but Petersen avoids thiscontroversy, most notably in his selective use ofthe work of David Schneider. Petersen referencesSchneider’s early work on Yap numerous times,but avoids any mention of Schneider’s A critiqueof the study of kinship (1984), wherein Schneideruses Yap to disestablish kinship as a viabledomain of comparative study, and imploresscholars to take seriously local Yapese ideasabout tabinau and genung. These, of course,were the categories Schneider had translatedearlier as ‘patriline’ and ‘matriline’ – analyticterms which, upon closer reflection, Schneiderfound to be entirely inappropriate. WhileSchneider recognized that the comparativemethod was unable to account for localcategories and social practices, Petersen musthave a universal matrilineal clan organization toground the social organizational unity ofMicronesia.

Petersen’s depiction of flexible socialorganization in the various societies ofMicronesia is appropriate, but analysing thoseflexible contours does not require an overlysimplified set of universalizing categories tomake sense of the complex cultural historicalprocesses that have shaped cultural practices inthese locales. Traditional Micronesian societies iswell grounded in the historical accounts and, attimes, Petersen brilliantly critiques those sources,recognizing, for example, that early Marshall

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Islands’ ethnographers refashioned Marshallesechiefs in the feudal mode and, in Kiribati, thatGrimble worked assiduously to explain awaymatri-biased features to purify his patrilinealdepictions. But Petersen’s incisive critiques areselective. In his own theorizing, categories likematrilineal clanship continue to drive theanalysis despite the multiplicity of local formsand practices that make ‘it’ up. Ultimately,Petersen’s theory forces him to resurrect akin-based society reliant, in part, on ‘acts ofprocreation’ that ‘can be conceptualized inessentially the same terms as Western notionsabout genetics’ (p. 110). Marshall Islanders,whom I know best, have no such geneticallygrounded formulations. If Petersen’s kinshipcategories are generalized Euro-American formsprojected onto the concepts and practices oflocal people, then ‘Micronesia’ remains unifiedonly through European and American symbolicmachinations. For this reason, I question ifPetersen’s argument justifies the classification ofMicronesia as a distinct culture area. However,his analysis is the finest comparative work todate that deals with this part of the Pacific. In hisattempt to write a ‘respectful account’ ofMicronesian pasts he is less successful, forwithout close attention to local voices, youngislanders cannot understand ‘why Micronesiansdo things the way they do them’ (p. 3).Nevertheless, Traditional Micronesian societies is amust-read for Pacific scholars and for others withan interest in the Pacific who have the time togive it a close and critical reading.

Laurence Marshall Carucci Montana StateUniversity

Urban anthropology

Ali, Kamran Asdar & Martina Rieker

(eds). Comparing cities: the Middle East andSouth Asia. xix, 349 pp., illus., bibliogrs.Oxford: Univ. Press, 2010. £15.99 (cloth)

The title Comparing cities might suggest that acomparative project between cities within thecountries of the Middle East and South Asia isundertaken in the twelve articles containedwithin the volume. Such a project nevermaterializes and one is left to wonder what thisedited volume is hoping to respond to or push interms of new research, ideas, and methods. Theinadequate introduction does not give a coherentaccount of what unites the disparate aims and

regional foci of the papers contained within itand nor could its paltry nine pages hope to doso. I am all for brevity and succinctness; however,we are rather glibly told in the introduction thatthe Middle East and South Asia are historicallylinked – the Indian Ocean complex is mentioned– that a space is required to explore the‘positionings’ of cities in the contemporaryworld, and finally that the volume’s aims are toattend to the ‘making and unmaking’ of the citiesof the two regions by global, national, and localprocesses. The last claim is so broad as to beirrelevant, and any hint of contextualization ofarguments and debates to be had within the textis simply not there.

The introduction, thankfully, is by far theweakest part of the book. The volume begins,proper, with Paromita Vohra’s visual essay,which is a beautiful meditation on loneliness,poverty, and the reveries of city life throughcharting her own entry into life in a single-tenement block of flats in one of Mumbai’spoorer districts. The photographs and captionsare full of pathos, irony, and wit and placegreat emphasis on the more intimateknowledges and understandings gained ineveryday experiences of dwelling in the city.All the other essays follow a more conventional,academic ‘article’-style form. In two separatearticles, Mona Fowaz and Yasmeen Arif, forinstance, write of the more hidden aspects ofcity life in Beirut, highlighting the inscriptionsof violence in the city’s spatial orderings andalso the forms of inclusion and exclusion asmanifested in the marginal spaces inhabited bythe poor, who live on the borders of legality andillegality.

Perhaps the oddest chapter to be found inthe volume is Ravi Sundaram’s ‘Re-visiting“everyday life” ’, almost two-thirds of which isdedicated to a quite irrelevant historical accountof the emergence of the category of the‘everyday’ as a serious philosophical andtheoretical category in Western thought.Sundaram asks, belatedly, whether a notion ofthe ‘everyday’ has any traction withcontemporary experiences. After raising figuressuch as Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin, andLefebvre, as crucial precursors to recent debatessurrounding the ‘everyday’, I had hoped theextended philosophical discussion might be ofsome pertinence to his larger argument. If thediscussion was pertinent, however, it was nevermade clear how as the last third of the chapterran through material on colonialism andurbanism in Dehli with virtually no referencemade to the previous sections.

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Partha Chatterjee ends the volume with apostscript which raises the problem of thenon-coincidence of the trajectories of the pastand future of the city of Kolkata. Chatterjee is ina sense asking for new histories which point lessto clean continuities throughout epochs andmore to disjunctures and breaks which are to beread into the city and the lives of its inhabitants.

If I were to attempt to suggest a unitivetheme or set of problematics which bring thedisparate chapters contained within the volumetogether I would suggest that each accountattempts to show how larger structural changesin South Asia and the Middle East have impactedupon the practices, material and ideationalforms, and experiences of the inhabitants ofcities in those regions. The introduction to thistext suggests that such a focus would redressthe lack of social histories that explore urbanlife-worlds in an era of de-industrialization andmajor structural changes such as are availablefor many cities in other regions of the world.Thus the interdisciplinary analysis throughoutComparing cities attempts to bring to light howtransnational flows of ideas and resources shapecertain responses to deprivation and marginality,yet also encourage political passivity andinaction.

I found this volume a strange, bits-and-piecesaffair. I would hazard a guess that most of thechapters were culled from longer articles, Ph.D.theses, and published and as yet unpublishedmonographs. Comparing cities should be awarning to future editors of volumes thatreaders require more than just a number ofarticles thrown together in one book to make ita worthy and coherent read.

Hayder Al-Mohammad University of Kent atCanterbury

Hancock, Mary E. The politics of heritage fromMadras to Chennai. xv, 277 pp., maps, illus.,bibliogr. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press,2008. $39.95 (cloth)

Mary Hancock’s book about the city of Chennai,formerly Madras, explores ‘the making of thepast – the creation of both spaces of the pastand the knowledges and sentiments glossed aspast-consciousness – in the present conjunctureof neoliberal globalization’ (p. 2). Several publicmemorials and monuments, and privately runheritage sites and museums, are discussed tolook at how the state and different social groupsrepresent the past and make claims upon it inrelation to an urban landscape continually being

changed by economic and political forces.Hancock argues that ‘the spaces and practices ofpublic memory are not only subject to control bymarkets and governing bodies; they serve also ascrucial representations of the principles thatundergird specific systems of governance’ (p. 4,original emphasis). The politics of heritage,however, are always contested; thus competingand often contradictory claims are made onChennai’s history from its seventeenth-century,colonial foundation, or even earlier, to itspresent-day status as a huge metropolis andTamil Nadu’s state capital.

After the introduction, the book is dividedinto two parts, respectively about Chennai’surban core and its outskirts. In part 1, chapter 2

looks at changing narratives of the city’s historyfrom its origins until 1996, when the DMK, thenthe ruling Dravidian nationalist party, replacedits ‘English’ name, ‘Madras’, by the Tamil‘Chennai’. Chapter 3 focuses on the memorialbuilt for M.G. Ramachandran, the state’s formerchief minister and leader of the AIADMK (theDMK’s rival), which particularly embodies the‘rhetorics of kingship within statecraft’ (p. 14)that remain important even in the modern,democratic, neoliberal state. Chapter 4, furtherdiscussed below, investigates a campaign todesignate a Hindu temple as a heritage site. Inpart 2, chapter 5 looks at regional tourist circuitsand how Chennai and its ‘traditional’ heritageare produced and marketed for today’s tourists.Chapter 6 is about DakshinaChitra, an interactivemuseum and cultural centre, which hasgenerated controversy about its elitist appealand ‘its embrace of a specifically neoliberalnostalgia’ (p. 176). Chapter 7 discusses a villagehousing project for poor people near the city,which has been led by an enterprising Dalit, aformer untouchable, and was designed to beboth cost-effective and authentically indigenous.Chapter 8 is a short conclusion.

Chapter 4 may be outlined to illustrate thebook in a little more detail. Tiruvanmiyur, asouthern suburb of Chennai, contains an ancientHindu temple of Marundeswarar (Shiva), forwhich the Indian National Trust for Art andCultural Heritage (INTACH) devised aconservation plan in 2000. INTACH, anassociation for heritage conservation, is run byupper-middle-class people who detest TamilNadu’s populist politicians, but neverthelesshoped to find common ground with thegovernment in a shared vision of civicimprovement for the temple and itssurroundings: for example, by restoring thetemple’s dried-up, rubbish-filled tanks – one

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objective that was partly achieved. INTACH’sproject leaders called for residents’ participation,but their modernist, ‘gentrifying’ ideas abouttemple conservation and the use of public spaceclashed with those of other groups, such as theshopkeepers and politicians occupying buildingsbeside the temple’s walls. Moreover, INTACH’ssecularist, historicist orientation towards religion– which opposed Hindu nationalism’s – alsodiffered from that of Marundeswarar’s ordinaryworshippers, for the conservation plan‘amalgamated the spatial practice of Hindu ritualwith that of modern citizenship and envisioned ahybrid representational space in which historicistvalues of heritage could be braided with thememory-work of Hindu praxis’ (p. 118).

Hancock’s interpretation is right, I think. Buther discussion of religion, secularism, and thestate is insufficiently focused on the specifics oftemple Hinduism in Tamil Nadu; rather, shedigresses about secularism in postcolonial Indiain general. She presents little evidence collectedfrom the temple’s priests, managers, devotees,or nearby shopkeepers, and her account oftemple Hinduism, albeit reasonable, is scripturalrather than ethnographic. Indeed, the bookoften digresses, and although it includesaccounts of particular individuals and reports ofdiscussions with people like the INTACH projectleaders, ethnographic detail about the diverse,competing social groups that are its subjects issparse, despite Hancock’s experience as afieldworker in Chennai. Last but not least, theprose is a problem. The passages quoted abovetypify much of the book’s style and long,difficult paragraphs abound. Dubious words like‘museal’ (of or pertaining to a museum) and‘musealization’ sometimes occur. Hancock has agood story to tell about an interesting city andit’s a pity that so much of it is opaque.

C.J. Fuller London School of Economics andPolitical Science

Herzfeld, Michael. Evicted from eternity: therestructuring of modern Rome. xiii, 373 pp.,map, illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2009. £51.50 (cloth), £19.00

(paper)

The author is admired for his original and subtleethnography and his openness to new ideas andtechniques of research: he has worked in Greecemainly, and has specialized, to everyone’sbenefit, in studies of compatriots, of artisans, ofpolitical and bureaucratic agents of change. In1999 he began a period of fieldwork continued

intermittently until 2007 in the central Montidistrict of Rome where he lived in an apartmentwith his wife, observing and participating in theactivities and preoccupations of the otherresidents.

These included Monti families with severalgenerations of depth; newly arrivedprofessionals, and immigrants mostly from (Igather) Ukraine. Students, professors, and othertransients contributed undisclosed proportionsto the unknown total. Some establishedresidents were professionals and publicemployees, but Herzfeld suggests that mostwere artisans (furniture, gold-smithing) orworking in services – taxi-drivers, bar-owners,restaurateurs, grocers. They were self-conscious,spoke to each other often in Roman dialect, andmay have been related by marriages.

Everyone tried to survive in a precarious anduncertain political and economic environment.They worried about housing. Herzfeld suggeststhat most residents were tenants, and that alllandlords tried to evict controlled-rent tenants tosubstitute them with wealthier families,contributing to the gentrification of the quarter.As the old Monti families saw it, an ancientcohesive multi-class Roman city-village wasreplaced by an impersonal incoherent categoryof wealthy European bourgeoise: housing hadbeen a right; while Herzfeld watched, it becamea commodity. He has two big set-pieces: ameeting of a residents’ association (pp. 198-212)and the struggle of eight families between 1986

to 2005 against eviction from their apartments(pp. 266-305). He is moved by their plight,angry about the injustice they suffer.

Herzfeld explores a series of ideas (originalsin; usury, indebtedness, and redemption;indulgence and amnesty; fear and precariousfriendship; civility, civilization, and civic duty)which he suggests are refracted in city andnational government, in the church, inmore-or-less-organized crime, and amongresidents. His discussions are illustrative ratherthan expository. Elements of the mosaic recur asthey are needed, and are never all in one placewhere they can be examined and tested.Herzfeld has already distilled them into anevocative panorama that reveals hisunderstanding as it excludes contestation. Acouple of friends and some politicians arenamed but otherwise he refers to people bytheir role or task. He had a good time with ataxi-driver who was a bibliophile and historian,and who had a friend with similar interests. Younever know their names, and they appear in thetext as (e.g.) ‘one of my book-collecting taxi

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driver friends’ (p. 90), ‘one of the taxi drivinghistorians’ (p. 111), and so on. Perhaps this is amatter of discretion: anonymity a protection forinformants. But when Herzfeld produces adramatic narrative account, it can be distractingto read about the words, actions, relationships of‘the merchant’, ‘the old administrator’, ‘thepolitical operator’, ‘the leader of the youngerbloc’, ‘the other older man’ (pp. 204-6). Readersmay get impatient trying to keep track of theidentities of actors.

You might think this a minor disadvantage ofa tactical decision to protect people who hadconfided in him, whom he liked, and who wereengaged in continuous and precarious strugglesto survive: schemes, plots, betrayals, concealedfriendships, and hidden support as well as minorillegalities and attempts to suborn the localstate’s men were part and parcel of their dailylives, their attempts to gain advantage over theirfriends and neighbours. But if you are concernedto investigate people’s stratagems and theoutcomes of their actions, you do need an easierway of keeping track of complex webs ofintrigue. However, with identities impenetrable,Herzfeld will be able to return to Monti toexamine other preoccupations: not housing,perhaps, but health, education, work, marriage,kinship.

If you know Herzfeld’s other works, you willrecognize and admire the linguistic and moralsensibility that suffuse this one. It is from thestudio of Putnam rather than, say, Tilly, and thatmay recommend it. If you wish to understandurban life, or Roman life, you will find itsuggestive and evocative, but not much help ifyou wish to compare tactics of survival therewith those in, say, Beijing or Bogota. Last andleast you will gain a puzzle to haunt you for along time (if not eternity): why is the samephotograph printed nine times?

J. Davis All Souls College, Oxford

Markowitz, Fran. Sarajevo: a Bosniankaleidoscope. xiv, 220 pp., maps, illus., tables,bibliogr. Chicago: Univ. Illinois Press, 2010.$70.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper)

This book offers a warm and well-writtenportrait of Sarajevo during its first post-wardecade. Markowitz focuses on theethno-national subjectivities of her informantsand places these identities in the historical andpolitical context of Bosnia and Herzegovina.While she navigates this politically and morallycharged field with sensitivity, her choice of focus

limits our understanding of the situation in thishybrid capital city and nation.

The book opens with a portrait of Sarajevo asa cosmopolitan urban setting where variouscultural traditions, religions, and ethno-nationalgroups meet and interact. The author makes nosecret of falling in love with this quality of theplace and its people, and she advocates it as ahopeful model for a more peaceful future hereand in other global crossroads. Then she turnsto the different ethno-national categories inBosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on theheterogeneity of the three major groups –Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats – and on thepolitically marginalized groups of (former)Yugoslavs, Roma, Slovenes, and Jews. An entirechapter is devoted to the Sarajevan Jewishcommunity, with whom the author, herself anAmerican-Israeli Jew, personally identifies. Thestudy of these marginalized groups, which todayare often unrecognized by the state, shows thatthe national partition of Bosnia and its peopleinto three homogeneous and incompatiblenations is a political construction. In socialreality, people are mixed by origin and blend intheir everyday practices. Markowitz shows thatSarajevans who live hybrid lives still letthemselves be classified as belonging to just onenation, as in the 2002 population count in theFederation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a distinctentity from Republika Srpska), but she fails toexplain why this is so. Similarly, we do notunderstand why they repeatedly vote for one ofthe three nationalist political parties.

While I sympathize with Markowitz’s idea ofSarajevo as it could be (and perhaps once wasand should again become), I believe that herchoice to focus on ethno-national identities andto interview relatively well-educated urbanpeople of mixed heritage gives us only a partialportrait of the situation. An ethnography ofpost-war Sarajevo should relate to theethnography of war in Sarajevo, since the mostdramatic changes in Sarajevans’ lives – includingthe deepening of their ethno-nationalidentification – took place during the massivepolitical violence of the early 1990s. AlthoughMarkowitz’s informants’ lives and consciousnesswere profoundly changed by the war, the waremerges only sporadically as a dark memory, aspeople describe their recollections of places andpast lives. In the same way, Sarajevans andBosnians who do not share the same mixedfamily background as the informants in thisethnography, and those who do not support ahybrid and pluralistic Bosnia, figure only at themargins of this study.

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Most importantly, an ethnography ofcontemporary Sarajevo should address thetransformations in the economy and socialconditions that were established quietly in theshadow of war and its nationalistic rhetoric.Sarajevans have long since tired of foreignersanalysing the ethno-national composition of thecity’s residents. They would like to see a projectanalyse the appalling economic situation, with apersistent unemployment rate of about 50 percent. Who will examine the extreme poverty thatdid not exist before the war? Who will scrutinizeneocolonialism, not in political terms, asMarkowitz begins to do in the last chapter, butrather in economic and social terms? Thecountry – and in this respect Bosnia andHerzegovina is similar to the other formerYugoslav republics – has been sold to foreignowners; the highest local salaries are paid byforeign organizations. Self-ruling socialism waseradicated during the war, and a primitive formof capitalism based on war-profiteering gainedground, vigorously promoted by foreigninterests. Health and education systems havebeen thoroughly reorganized. However, partyaffiliation still seems to be the best way to securea job and other social benefits, and patronageand clientism continue to prosper. In thiscontext, how have attitudes and patterns ofemployment changed? What are the continuitiesand discontinuities in social and health security?Last but not least, what roles are played byforeign actors with economic interests?

Markowitz found Sarajevans to be eloquentand wise interlocutors, and her writing stylemade this reader long to hear more from theseunknown yet familiar people, a distinguishingmark of fine ethnographic work. However, weare still waiting for an ethnography of post-warSarajevo that would portray socio-economicchanges as vividly as Markowitz has portrayedthe problem of ethno-national identities.

Ivana Macek Uppsala University

Violence and war

Arias, Enrique Desmond & Daniel M.Goldstein (eds). Violent democracies in LatinAmerica. vii, 324 pp., tables, bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2010.£70.00 (cloth), £16.99 (paper)

This book challenges the claim that evenmilitarily imposed ‘democratization’ is a

transcendent good by surveying the role ofviolence in Latin American democracies. It alsodemonstrates the value of dialogue betweenpolitical scientists, sociologists, historians, andpolitical anthropologists, bringing togetherdifferent styles of conceptual argument as wellas different scales and methods of empiricalresearch. Todd Landman’s chapter, focused on‘rights protection’, illustrates particularly wellhow a more abstract, typology-based,discussion can advance debate about solutionsas well as diagnoses of problems. Yet the bookalso advocates strongly for ethnographicresearch. Although Enrique Arias is a politicalscientist and Daniel Goldstein ananthropologist, both have produced innovativeethnography, the first on the multiple forms ofviolence implicated in the hidden relationsbetween politicians, police, community leaders,and drug traffickers in the slums of Rio deJaneiro, the second on ‘self-help’ communityjustice as lynching in Bolivia. The perceptiveintroductory essay by the two editors andArias’s concluding reflections neverthelesssucceed well in bringing out the widerimplications of their concept of ‘violentpluralism’. Their antidote to the idea thatviolence is an anomaly within ‘democratized’societies resulting from institutional deviationsfrom the normative benchmark of the UnitedStates and Western Europe, they use it todemolish the practice of adding adjectives like‘incomplete’ to ‘other’ democracies and thenotion of ‘failed states’. The studies presentedhere suggest that there is no simple route bywhich Latin American political democraciescould become less violent, because violencehas not only been institutionally integral tothe way state power is exercised and classprivileges are maintained within the region,but has also been exacerbated by its insertioninto a neoliberal capitalist internationalsystem.

‘Violent pluralism’ does not, the editorsexplain, imply equality of power betweenpolitical actors, but highlights how subalternviolence can be part of the struggle toconstruct more just and democratic societies.The book perhaps does not follow up thatidea as much as it might have done.Nevertheless, Lilian Bobea’s chapter on theDominican Republic shows how the oncestrong organizational capacity of poorneighbourhoods to challenge for a better dealcan decline, whilst also showing how youngpeople can be drawn into translocal and eventransnational criminal organizations that

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promise the kind of moral ordering denied by astate from which they feel excluded. There aretwo excellent critical analyses of Colombia: thefirst, by Mary Roldán, analyses local efforts tobuild more democratic alternatives to thetraditional party system around a platform ofnon-violence, and the second, by MaríaRamírez, deals more directly with thecompeting ‘violent non-state actors’, the leftistRevolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)and the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forcesof Colombia (AUC). Yet these chapters remindus that there are limits to the reach ofethnography in such violent conditions andthat we are restricted in our knowledge abouthow the world now looks from the perspectiveof the foot-soldiers of movements such as theFARC, many of whom are women. This isimportant, given that the claim that the FARChas simply become a criminal, ‘narco-guerrilla’,organization is the official pretext for seeking tophysically exterminate the enemy by allpossible means and refusing offers ofnegotiation.

Empirically grounded deconstruction of theprose of counterinsurgency is, however, verymuch what this book is about. It begins withDiane Davis’s strong demonstration, focused onMexico, of how institutional legacies from thepast that reflected strategic political choices intheir day continue to shape the present. RuthStanley’s chapter on the Buenos Aires policeimpressively qualifies Argentina’s reputation forbeing one of Latin America’s less violentdemocracies. Javier Auyero documents theclandestine role of the Peronist politicalmachine in orchestrating looting ofsupermarkets in the 2001 riots in the same city,offering a striking contribution to the generalissue of how relations between violent actorsand respectable political figures are integral tothe functioning of Latin American politics.Robert Gay usefully seeks to explore thespecific contribution of the drugs trade to theviolence of Rio de Janeiro: although, as heconcedes, some aspects of his analysis arespecific to that city, he is right to suggestthat similar combinations of circumstanceshave led citizens to turn to non-state actorsfor protection and conflict resolution inMexico. Some might criticize the editors fornot including studies of less violent cases,but given the apparent failure of initiativessuch as the Dominican Plan for DemocraticSecurity, a sobering vision seemsappropriate.

John Gledhill University of Manchester

Evans, Andrew D. Anthropology at war: WorldWar I and the science of race in Germany. xiii,293 pp., Illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago:Chicago Univ. Press, 2010. £18.50 (paper)

The interrelation between war and the socialsciences has come under intensified scrutiny inthe twenty-first century. In anthropology,concerns about the militarization of thediscipline and its practitioners have receivedincreasing public attention as a growingnumber of scholars are drawn into militaryconflicts as consultants or embedded supportpersonnel in war zones. The publication ofAnthropology at war by Andrew D. Evans is awelcome and timely contribution to theseongoing debates. With the measured gaze ofhistorical analysis, the author sheds new lighton a specific inquiry: the impact of war onscholarly discourse and practice. Evans revealshow German anthropology came to supportthe imperial mission during the First World Waras the discipline became ideologically driven topromote the study of race in the service of thestate’s nationalist goals.

The impressive documentation uncovered byEvans points to wartime as the crucialturning-point for German anthropology, whichtransformed from a previously liberal science toa nationalist tool with a racialist agenda. AsEvans points out:

This process began around the turn of thecentury as anthropologists increasinglylinked their science to the imperialexploits of the German state, but it cameto full fruition during the war, whenmembers of the discipline sought totransform their field into a tool that wouldserve the war effort (p. 8).

In his meticulously researched and carefullyargued study, Evans tracks the anthropologicaltransfiguration towards ‘the creation of a racist,ideologically driven pseudoscience in theservice of the state’ (p. 8). By interrogating thepractices of anthropological research, he mapsthe gradual intrusion of the culture of war intoall dimensions of academic life, includinginstitutional and professional dynamics,research and funding, government support forthe ethnographic museum, and individualconcerns with prestige and recognition.What factors propelled the politicalinstrumentalization of the discipline and itspractitioners?

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According to Evans, the emergence of racialscience as a dominant disciplinary paradigm wasin part symptomatic of the ideological shifts thatoccurred during the war. In this context,German colonialism receives diminishedattention. In a short section titled ‘Imperialopportunities’, Evans suggests that the push forempire came primarily from ethnologists orcultural anthropologists, who saw researchaccess to colonial subjects as advantageous fortheir scientific projects and for the status of theethnographic museum. Althoughnineteenth-century anthropological figures likeVirchow and Bastian initially opposed Germancolonial expansion, this ‘ambivalence aboutempire’ soon disappeared (p. 49). Initially thereis less enthusiasm for imperial ventures amongphysical anthropologists. Yet when synergized bywartime nationalism, a new generation ofanthropologists with vested interests in careeradvancement begins actively to promote thecolonial enterprise by studying ‘half-breeds’, the‘black races’, ‘bastardization’, and by devisingracial classifications (pp. 48-55). The subsequentturn to health and social problems asanthropological agendas further enhanced anexisting interest in eugenics. These ideologicaland conceptual shifts during the war years,including a commitment to genetics andDarwinism, more so than the colonialendeavour, pushed the turn against the liberalparadigm. In this context, Evans points toGermany’s ‘Sonderweg’ as a unique formation. Acomparison of nation-bound trajectories revealsthat anthropologists in France, Britain, theUnited States, and Russia showed littleengagement with the war. By contrast,Germany’s wartime efforts distinctly altered thedirection of anthropological research andideological commitments.

The fervent support of the war effort, asEvans shows, can be linked most directly to theemergent opportunities for anthropologicalresearch. German anthropologists were grantedaccess to prisoner-of-war camps as new sites forempirical investigation. The study of foreignsoldiers in German captivity, which includedForeign Legion troops and European nationals,promoted a paradigm shift centred on theracialization of the enemy and the colonial other.This had multiple consequences. Ideas ofGerman racial superiority emerged from theorder of power in these geopolitical confines.Since the camps were populated by men(soldiers, guards, prisoners), notions ofdifference and Germanness emerged fromgendered typologies. ‘Racial “types” and

statistical characterizations’, as Evans points out,were based on the ‘male form as the model ofhumanity’ (p. 140). In the artificially createdlaboratory of space and power, the use ofphotography became an additional means tocapture and document anthropological subjectsthrough a militarized gaze, which in turnproduced political and war propaganda images.

Evans has produced a fascinating,well-written, convincing account of how thewartime collaborations of anthropology andmilitarism shaped a virulent ideological agenda,whose catastrophic effects are attested by theNazi racial state.

Uli Linke Rochester Institute of Technology

Staudt, Kathleen. Violence and activism at theborder: gender, fear, and everyday life in CiudadJuárez. xvi, 184 pp., maps, tables, plates, figs,illus., bibliogr. Austin: Univ. Texas Press,2008. £33.00 (cloth)

In a city plagued by overwhelming drugviolence, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is also a placeof femicide ‘where more than 370 girls andwomen were murdered from 1993 to 2003’(p. x). This book by Kathleen Staudt captures thehorror of female homicide behind the statistics.The stark realities portrayed in the book areheartbreaking where one-third of the murdervictims are raped and mutilated and 70,000

women are at risk of physical violence(pp. 2 and 34).

Yet this book is not a simple portrayal ofviolence against women but one with multipledimensions. It is also a depiction which is basedupon many research strands borrowed fromqualitative and quantitative methodologiesinclusive of participant-observation. The studyincluded researching some ‘615 women agesfifteen to thirty-nine in Juárez’ (p. xiv). Half ofthe women participated in three workshopsabout domestic violence. The engagement inresearch also meant working with NGOs, theMexican Federation of Private Associations(FEMAP) in El Paso, Texas, and Health andCommunity Development in Ciudad Juárez(SADEC), as well as the University of Texas at ElPaso’s Center for Civic Engagement.

The book is important for exploring how tofind answers to the endemic violence againstwomen in this borderland city along theUS-Mexican frontier. Particularly, it portrays howmothers of murdered girls have searched forjustice and the problems associated with theMexican justice system for addressing

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gender-biased violence. Violence and activism atthe border establishes how several factorscontribute to female violence in Ciudad Juárez:the multitude of women who work in thefactories (maquiladoras) as part of a globaleconomy for cheap labour; the weakness ofgovernment institutions in Mexico to enforce therule of law; and the overall culture of hegemonicmasculinity in Mexico (pp. 143-4).

The book reveals how Juarense women takeactive roles against the injustices of Mexicansociety. Women’s activism against femaleviolence in Ciudad Juárez has been ongoingsince the mid-1990s. Juarense women, especiallymothers of victims, organized themselves andnetworked to put pressure on the police to takemore action to prevent the female homicides.Aside from protesting, slogans such as ‘Not OneMore’ (Ni Una Más) began appearing as well aspink and black crucifixes graffitied on walls andtelephone poles.

Violence and activism at the border is a bookwhich draws the reader’s attention to the severedilemma of femicide in Ciudad Juárez byexamining all aspects of these types of murders.Though it reads less like an ethnography than apolitical science monograph, it is grounded inthe approachable manner with which it portraysfemale violence. The major shortcomings of thebook include a lack of theorizing about gender.Even so, readers will find there is much tocommend as an analysis of Mexican domesticviolence and as a window into femicide inCiudad Juárez, Mexico.

J.P. Linstroth International Peace ResearchInstitute

Visual anthropology

Pink, Sarah (ed.). Visual interventions: appliedvisual anthropology. xi, 324 pp., tables, illus.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2007. £45.00 (cloth)

Visual interventions is the fourth volume publishedin a Berghahn series called Studies in AppliedAnthropology, the editor of which is also thegeneral editor of the series, Sarah Pink. Thevolume attempts to incorporate within anumbrella of applied visual anthropology differentareas of application: part I (‘Introduction’,chapters 1 and 2), part II (‘Medicine and health’,chapters 3, 4, and 5), part III (‘Tourism andheritage’, chapters 6 and 7), part IV (‘Conflict and

disaster relief’, chapters 8, 9, and 10), part V(‘Community film-making and empowerment’,chapters 11 and 12), and part VI (‘Industry’,chapters 13 and 14). The range of topics and theirorganization are appropriate.

Chapter 1 is an overview of ideas which Pinkpreviously published in earlier works. Appliedvisual anthropology is proposed as aiming atbridging the gap between applied and pureanthropology (p. 26). Was Margaret Mead’sseminal work with Gregory Bateson considered‘applied’ when their insightful research bridgeddisciplines of psychology, education, cognition,and physics, or ‘pure’ when it penetratedinformation theory, cognitive theory,psychological theory, and theories ofchild-rearing?

Pink overstates her case that ‘these casestudies together create a powerful argument foran applied visual anthropology’. Claims ofsubdisciplinarity (p. 11) are illusory since neitherapplied nor visual anthropology has a formalsubdiscipline status. Overstated claims ofmethodological and theoretical implications arecontradicted by rejections of method andculture.

A tradition of applied visual projects alreadyexists and should be built upon, such as thoseby Asen Balikci with the Netsilik, the Colliers’‘Vicos Project’ in Peru, and Worth and Adair’s‘Navajo Project’. New experiments mustnecessarily be subjected to scrutiny for academicstandards. The case studies in the volume do notconsistently show awareness or knowledge of‘the potential of visual anthropologytheoretically, methodologically andethnographically’ (as Pink states on p. 3), but dodiscuss ways the visual medium is being used indifferent applied projects.

In the volume we see Collier photography inMalcolm’s essay (chap. 2) integrating beauty ofpicture, vibrancy of tradition, and culturalmeaning (captions and pictures are both rich ininformation). Long before recent calls there wasa long-term recognized genealogy of appliedphotography. Jhala (chap. 8) describes howgovernment and donor agencies use audiovisualmessages to alleviate the suffering of Indians inGujarat from the 2001 earthquake. He sees thisas an appropriation of visual techniques forapplied purposes, itself revealing local values.This is an innovative twist of interpretation onboth visual and applied. Chalfen collaborateswith Rich (chap. 3) in a project showing thevalue of visual methods for health research.

Interestingly, Chalfen and Rich use nopictures in their chapter. Pictures used as

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page-fillers, without research purpose, diminishthe value of visual anthropology. Instead welearn about the effective use of visual tools toenhance understanding by health practitioners.With few exceptions (as in the photo stories ofLovejoy and Steele, chap. 14), picture use inother chapters is in terms of ordinary,unintegrated illustrations.

To visual anthropologists captions areimportant companions of information topictures. The editorial decision to make captionscryptic is unfortunate. Dianne Stadhams (chap.6) describes her project on tourism in Gambia,West Africa. She puts sensational captions belowthe pictures then assigns endnote numbers,linking to additional endnote remarks. Below apicture of children, itself superfluous, a tellingcaption states: ‘When I grow up, I want to be atourist’ (p. 119). While some Gambians gaineconomic benefits from tourism, it seems thatwatching the growing tourism in their country,children dream of careers as tourists. A key issueidentified by Stadhams (p. 132) for her project ofcreating a television programme is ‘what tourismmeans to and for Gambians’, an issue thatunfortunately gets lost in the chapter. Thisreported comment by Gambian children relatesto the overall effect of consumer-based industriessuch as tourism on the construction of dreamsof Gambians for their country’s future.

Has power from participation resulted inimproved lives of ordinary people? Do we haveinstruments to measure quality of life? SomeGambians are happy that tourism is bringingwork and spreading wealth, but what aboutyoung Gambians whose vision of the future isbeing distorted by dreaming of careers as lazytourists? This is where doing good anthropologycan benefit knowledge and future lives.

Fadwa El Guindi Qatar University

Strassler, Karen. Refracted visions: popularphotography and national modernity in Java.xxi, 375 pp., plates, bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2010.£65.00 (cloth), £15.99 (paper)

This intriguing and sophisticated book addressesthe complex interface of popular photographicpractices, history, politics, and identity in Java.Strassler’s engaging and original history usesmaterial from her Ph.D. fieldwork in Yogyakartaand interviews with photographers in othermajor Javanese cities. Her account oftwentieth-century photography is positioned at aturning-point in Indonesian history. The years

from 1998 to 2000 were a momentous time inIndonesia, when President Suharto’sthirty-two-year-old New Order Regime wasreplaced by the ongoing Reformasi(Reformation).

This book is also about what it means to beIndonesian, and Strassler joins otherIndonesianists to challenge Anderson’s thesis ofnation as ‘imagined community’. UsingBakhtin’s concept of refraction, she presents aheterogenous and emergent account of howindividuals situate themselves as Indonesiancitizens, demonstrating how the popularmediates between different sharedrepresentational forms and visual logics, ratherthan opposing or resisting them. Strassler alsoemphasizes the importance of the ChineseIndonesians for our understanding ofpostcolonial Indonesian national modernity. Theviolence during the politicial transition focusedon these long-suffering and long-standingscapegoats, who signify ‘the circulation of theforeign within the nation’ (p. 15). The closeassociation of the Chinese with photographyfrom the colonial period to the present is wellknown. This retelling, however, is also poweredby the ‘new visibility’ of the Chinese from late1999 following the lifting of the ban on publicexpression of Chinese culture which started in1967.

Strassler’s argument is structured in sixchapters, each examining one genre or ‘way ofseeing’, and many of the subjects and stories,photographers and photographs are Chinese.The first chapter explains how amateur ChineseIndonesian photographers participated as elite‘local cosmopolitans’ (p. 69) during Indonesia’sgradual globalization, as Fuji opened shop andphotographic competitions were inspired byUNESCO’s cultural heritage projects and globaltourism. The next chapter explains the role ofChinese studio photographers in enablingJavanese to become modern Indonesian citizenswhom we see posing against studio backdropsof modern scenes or even in model aeroplanes.Portraiture still allows the subject to performidentity and transcend its reifications: onephotograph shows three young women, twowearing headscarves, showing their portraits asChinese princesses, the influence of the HelloHong Kong Mania studio, which opened in2000. By contrast, identity photos in colonialand postcolonial state regimes ofvisuality/visibility have delimited and controlledthe individual. But individuals in turnappropriate such photos for memorials andother personal acts of documentation, as

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elaborated in the chapter on family practices ofdocumenting ‘rituals’ such as weddings. Thenext chapter returns to public politics andphotos of demonstrations by students. Adiscussion of the 1999 ‘Three Orders’ exhibitionof photographs from Indonesia’s three politicalregimes reveals changes both in representationsand in attitudes to them. This chapter typifiesthe narrative skill and personal tone of the book.It closes with the death of the photographerAgus Muliawan in East Timor (which gainedindependence in 1999), which had inspired theessay by the well-known writer GunawanMohammad that opens the chapter. After hisdeath his friends wanted to exhibit Muliawan’sphotographs, but the family wanted to keepthem private for fear of reprisals. Now many ofMuliawan’s photographs are made public in thischapter. This would have made a fitting close tothe book, but there is a final chapter aboutphotographs of a rather obscure charismaticfigure called Noorman which is used to developa discussion of authenticity and fakery, tocritique Benjamin’s unilineal theory of history,and to clinch, perhaps over-neatly, theunderlying argument about the double-circuit ofphotographs between the personal and thepublic. A brief epilogue reminds us thatStrassler’s research took place during and after a

political revolution and just before a digitalrevolution which brought cell phones and theInternet into everyday life for many in Indonesia,which now has almost 43 million Facebookaccount holders, second only to almost 147

million in the USA. Although Strassler makesreference to cinema, particularly in its influenceon studio backdrops, the materiality of stillimages is her focus, even in the discussion of the1999 wedding which was documented by twophotographers and four video teams.

Overall, this is a wonderful contribution toIndonesian ethnography and visualanthropology. Its argument is mostly clear andaccessible, although moments of intensepost-structural analysis à l’americain maydisengage some readers from the stories andimages generated by interpersonal ethnographicencounters invoked so effectively elsewhere. Thesix genres of popular photography are alsomarvellously illustrated with 127 photographs,mostly in colour. Duke University Press is to becongratulated on combining extremely highproduction values with the swift publication of alow-priced paperback. This will help to ensurethat this ethnography of popular photographywill influence future analyses of visual andexpressive cultures in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Felicia Hughes-Freeland Swansea University

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Diaspora, Migration and Nationalism