Book Reviews

Rationality and Irrationality in Anthropologyanhu_1086 134..136

In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology. Maurice Godelier. Charlot-tesville: University of Virginia Press. 2009. vii + 254.

THOMAS GIBSON

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of RochesterRochester NY 14627

In his extensive introduction, Godelier makes it clear that his steadfast advocacyof a rationalist and scientific approach to the subject matter of anthropologyover the past 40 years evoked some sharp responses from his U.S. audience,many of whom had come to doubt their right to represent the “Other” at allduring the same period. He notes in response that the wave of philosophicalrelativism that arose in France 40 years ago receded there quite quickly duringthe 1970s, leaving the underlying rationalism and universalism of French intel-lectual culture intact. It was in North America that “French Theory” had itsgreatest effect, particularly in the humanities and anthropology. He argues thatanthropology and the social sciences are indeed in a state of crisis today becauseof decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization. Although these transforma-tions will require the “reconstruction” of anthropology to cope with new levelsof complexity in its subject matter, they need not lead to the “deconstruction”of the discipline.

Four chapters of this volume consist of a revised version of the Page-Barbourlectures delivered by Maurice Godelier at the University of Virginia in 2002.Interspersed among these four chapters are another four that “continue someaspect of the lectures or open on to other problems.”

In chapter 2, Godelier recounts the process by which fieldwork among theBaruya of New Guinea led him to abandon the thesis he ascribes to LewisHenry Morgan that certain societies are founded on kinship relations betweenindividuals, and the thesis he ascribes to Marx that all societies are based oneconomic relations between classes. Neither type of relation is able to supplythe conception of a social whole that self-consciously reproduces itself as suchthrough time. This occurs at the level of political-religious relations within agiven territory. These three or four levels of relations coexist with one another,but are not necessarily congruent in spatial distribution. In chapter 3, Godelieranalyzes seven societies to show how the political-religious sphere intervenesquite intimately at the very heart of kinship, in that, alongside the mother andthe father, some transcendental power always plays a role in the conception of

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 36, Issue 1, pp 134–136, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.© 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2011.01086.x.

a child. In chapter 7, he reflects on the way fieldwork among the Baruyachanged him both as a person and as a theorist, forcing him to rethink inparticular the autonomy of male domination of women from other forms ofdomination, and the primacy of the “symbolic” over the “imaginary.” In chapter8, Godelier applies this distinction to a new method of displaying objectscollected from cultures around the world more as art objects than as items ofmaterial culture, which he implemented in his capacity as the head of sciencepolicy for the new Musée des Arts et Civilizations, between 1997 and 2000.Although such displays tend to conceal the imaginary meanings they held fortheir original creators, as symbolic forms they can serve as the stimulus for newimaginary meanings among the museum-going public.

Animal Polemics

Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Sherryl Vint.Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. ix+269.

PAULETTE G. CURTIS

104 O’Shaughnessy HallOffice for Undergraduate StudiesCollege of Arts and LettersUniversity of Notre DameNotre Dame, IN 46556

Animals, as Sherry Vint observes, are not often believed to be the stuff uponwhich science fiction (SF) is built (p. 1). As this text shows, animals have factoredsignificantly in the SF literature, and their presumed lives and stories arereflected in an astounding number of works from the turn of the century untilthe present. The reasons for their ubiquitous appearance in the literature ofcreative extrapolation (p. 21) are clear. Animals are “strange” and “alien” inmany ways; and their strangeness and alienness, and their presumed inferior-ity, help humans define what it in fact means to be human. These characteristicsalso ultimately allow human beings to mistreat, denigrate, and subjugateanimals. Vint wants to change all of that. Aided with the theories of Derrida,Haraway, and others, who form the core of those working in the burgeoningfield of Human-Alien Studies (HAS), Vint argues for a radicalized view ofanimal agency, one that encourages us to “grasp animals as beings in their ownright” (p.6) and “enable(s) us to recover an encounter of mutual exchange ofgazes” (p.13). SF can and has played a part in reimagining animals and ourpotentially posthumanist relationship to them.

Vint’s goals are laudable and are largely achieved. Anyone looking for a storythat concerns the animal–human, or the best of the HAS literature, will find aplethora of interesting material to consider (although I was disappointed thatshe short-changed her discussion of Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau). And Vint’spassionate, persistent call for a redefinition of the human–animal divide will

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