SOCIALICULTURAI. ANTHROPOLOGY 24 I

identity. Relatedly, some readers are likely to question the view that the Western ethnicity theories are as “Mendelian” and firmly rooted in descent as the editors and some of the other authors imply. T o promote this kind ofdebate is, however, one of the book’s general goals. The peoples of the Pacific have much of inter- est and importance to contribute.

Stealing People’s Names: History and Pol- itics in a Sepik River Cosmology. Simon J. Harrison. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 71. New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1990. 238 pp. $47.50 (cloth).

NANCY MCDOWELL Franklin and Marshall College

In Avatip, a Manambu community in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, the ownership of totemic names is frequently contested in public debates. In this book, Har- rison uses the occasion of these debates to ex- plore the relationship between cosmology and political action. The work is an exceptionally rich and powerful ethnography that has sig- nificant contributions to make to broader an- thropological theory. It establishes unequivo- cally, in this case at least, the falseness of the dichotomy between lived-in and thought-of worlds, between action and ideology.

The villagers ofAvatip seem to inhabit two separate spheres, one of everyday life, in which egalitarian relationships are dominant, the other of ritual, in which hierarchical rela- tions prevail. Although the symbolic order displays an ideology of inequality, secular life exhibits little such hierarchy. Harrison ex- plores the relationship between the ideology and the so-called reality: How is the disso- nance to be understsood? The explanation be- gins by denying the dichotomy. Ritual life, which contains the expression of hierarchy, is real life and is of the lived-in and experienced world; ritual behavior is just as real as other behavior. In performing the rituals, villagers create a hierarchical reality-it is notjust that ideas are expressed in ritual but that inequal- ities are brought into reality. Harrison refuses to “privilege one context over the other, and to consider one to be the lived actuality of which the other is simply a distorted or illu-

sory image. They are simply forms of action in an antagonism with one another” (p. 87).

Much of the ethnographic analysis is given over to showing how the direction of political action is a consequence of the existence of rit- ual hierarchy and secular equality. Because the hierarchical is ideologically present, it is always possible, and political actors attempt to incorporate its reality into everyday life as well as ritual life. Harrison’s focus on the re- lationship between cosmology and politics leads him to consider the relationship between history, structure, and ideology. He explores the dissonance between everyday equality and ritual hierarchy and locates within it a vector for historical change.

Harrison also questions a contrast drawn between different kinds of political systems in Melanesia. O n the one hand are those sys- tems, frequently labeled “Big Man” systems, in which power is based on the possession and exchange ofmaterial wealth. In these systems, things predominate (and anthropologists who study them tend toward materialist explana- tions). O n the other hand are those systems that seem to be loosely based on the nonmate- rial-frequently on ritual knowledge. Here, things are replaced by ideas, and knowledge be- comes the critical object (and anthropologists who describe these systems are prone to sym- bolic analyses). In Avatip, ritual knowledge, especially of totemic names, becomes the coin of the realm. These are not different kinds of systems but different definitions of wealth. In some societies wealth is material, while in oth- ers, like Avatip, knowledge is wealth and value; one can possess pieces of knowledge in the same way that one can possess ceremonial shell valuables or pigs. What differentiates the systems, Harrison argues, is whether they are open or closed: “the basic issue is not whether religion or economy is the determining factor but the degree to which the prestige goods- whether these a re material or immaterial, Kula valuables or magical spells-form a con- ceptually finite universe of values or a n un- bounded one” (pp. 199-200). The nature of Avatip realism (contra nominalism) is a major factor contributing to the system’s closure.

A short review cannot dojustice to the com- plex and subtle analysis Harrison provides. This is a very rich ethnography that makes substantial contributions to important theo- retical discussions in anthropology. Read it to appreciate it.