AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
BOOK REVIEWS
Single Reviews
Lone Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and the South Asian
Experience in Texas by Ahmed Afzal.
New York: New York University Press, 2015. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12451
Shabana Mir
American Islamic College
An important addition to the ethnographic study of
Muslim and Pakistani Americans as well as the broader
anthropological study of immigrant lives and transnational
identities, Lone Star Muslims trains a remarkably wide lens
on Pakistanis and Pakistani Americans in Houston. To his
considerable credit and using multisited methods, Ahmed
Afzal ensures diverse coverage of various sectors of Houston
Pakistani communities. Moreover, by disrupting the cultural
assimilation narrative and by deconstructing homogenizing
notions that tend to privilege Sunnis, middle-class profes-
sionals, and heterosexuality in Muslim communities, the
book complicates how we understand Pakistani American
immigrants in ethnically diverse metropolitan cities
today.
As indicated above, the book focuses on understudied
subjects such as the identity work of Ismaili professionals,
gay Pakistani men, and participants in Pakistani festivals and
Houston-based Pakistani radio stations as case studies in the
examination of Pakistani Muslim American cultures. This di-
verse coverage ensures that we cover considerable theoreti-
cal grounds in terms of race, class, work, gender, sexuality,
religiosity, and sectarian identity. The author is a Pakistani
American academic with firsthand experience as a racialized
Pakistani Muslim male who has struggled through difficult
immigration and employment experiences in the United
States. He conducted thorough ethnographic fieldwork in
Houston, including interviews, impromptu conversations,
observations, and archival analysis in a variety of Pakistani
settings.
The Introduction delineates the racial, political, and re-
ligious context of Pakistani Muslim American lives in the
United States and in Texas. Afzal juxtaposes the post9/11
uptick in racism and state and cultural surveillance with
the framing of Pakistani Americans as an educational and
economic model minority. Chapter 1 sets the geographic
scene of the Houston area in relation to its Pakistani and
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 1, pp. 176225, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12451
Muslim spaces, zooming in on Hillcroft Avenue and Sugar
Land in southwest Houston. Chapter 2 features the expe-
riences of Pakistani Ismailis who are former employees at
Enron, once an important segment of the Houston econ-
omy. Having lost their cherished jobs, these people shed
light on the intersection of their religious identity with racial
and class tensions in the neoliberal capitalist economy. De-
spite their multiple transnational networks, these Pakistani
Ismaili Muslim Americans are also intensely local and de-
voted to Houston as home, with a kinship-centered rather
than purely individualistic approach to upward mobility and
meritocracy.
Via the personal narratives of Pakistani entrepreneurs
and poor workers, chapter 3 brings the reader to the new
transnational Muslim heritage economy as it flourishes in
such large cities as Houston and as it brings Pakistani identity
into conversation and overlap with other immigrants in the
region. In contrast with public commendations for successful
middle- and upper-class immigrant professionals, the much
less acknowledged yet poignant narratives of the working
poor demonstrate how class, privilege, surveillance, and
state policy combine to flatten the socioeconomic diversity
and erase the roles of privilege and exploitation in supposedly
model minority communities.
In chapter 4, tellingly titled I Have a Very Good
Relationship with Allah, Afzal examines spaces of tension
and reconciliation between spiritual and sexual lives for
Pakistani American gay men. He troubles the heteronorma-
tive analysis of scholarship on Pakistani Muslim Americans as
well as the assumption of nominal religious affiliation among
gay Muslims in scholarly and popular work. He skillfully
walks a fine line in his study of multiply hyphenated
(p. 124) gay Pakistani Muslims, interrogating the con-
struction and mobilization of homogeneous, universalized,
Eurocentric, depoliticized, and consumption-oriented
sexual cultures, on the one hand, and the incorporation of
patriotic, nativistic rhetoric into gay cultures, on the other
hand.
The Pakistani Independence Day Festival, the focus
of chapter 5, embodies religious affiliation in a manner
unlike the dominant secularity of ethnic cultures in the
C 2016 by the American Anthropological

United States, though community leaders find themselves
shifting the focus of the festival to a localized Houston
tradition in order to navigate the difficult public spaces in the
face of post9/11 surveillance. In chapter 6, Afzal focuses
on Pakistani radio programming in Houston to show how di-
asporic constructions of Pakistani nationhood intersect with
visions of transnational religious community. The conclud-
ing chapter emphasizes the importance of alliances between
Pakistani Muslims and other communities in the surveillance
state.
Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile
by Diana Allan.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 328 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12452
Leonardo Schiocchet
Austrian Academy of Sciences
The refugees of the revolution are victims first to the fall of
the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon
in 1982 and second to the Oslo Agreements preannouncing
the formation of the Palestinian National Authority to the
preclusion of the rights of Palestinian refugees. To Diana
Allan, younger generations of refugees from Shatila and
other camps in Lebanon, now feeling hopelessly forgotten,
emphasize their sheer poverty over nationalist discourse.
If an awaited Palestinian state occludes its refugees, then
who are the Palestinians and who represents them? While
Shatila refugees are asking themselves such questions,
Palestinian politicians now dispute authority and national
branding not only with notable families and timeworn
village leaders but also with international NGOs and foreign
activists.
The presumed primacy of economic deprivation over
nationalist ideology is among the hottest topics not only in
contemporary Palestine studies but also in much of the an-
thropology of social suffering. For that, and for its excellent
ethnographic quality, Allans timely book has been among
the most debated novel works in the field since its release.
The introduction recounts how Allan was taken aback
by her initial project focusing on narratives about al-Nakba
(the catastrophe; how Palestinians refer to their loss of
Palestine in 194748), as she learned in Shatila that center-
ing on past suffering conceals present suffering and casts the
refugee question into an ideological rather than a pressing so-
cial matrixa desirable move for politicians but not for the
refugees themselves who remain unrepresented. The next
six chapters are ethnographic and support her arguments as
follows: chapter 1 presents the politics of commemoration in
the camps. Important to NGOs, activists, and scholars, this
Book Reviews 177
Ultimately this book shatters any notions of a mono-
lithic Muslim or Pakistani American community and spurs
deeper investigations into the study of model minorities,
gay Muslims, and the construction of transnational North
American immigrant identities, avoiding certain familiar pit-
falls of assuming Anglo and secularizing cultural assimilation
trajectories. This book is recommended for scholars, gradu-
ate students, and advanced lay readers of immigration, South
Asian Americans, Islam in the United States, and religion and
sexuality.
cottage industry of commemoration (p. 40) is informed
by an international rightsbased discourseespecially the
Right of Return of Palestine refugees, enshrined on
UNGA Resolution 194. Chapter 2 features Shatila refugees
developing inventive forms of solidarity, such as the jamiyyat
(informal savings collectives), to tackle the imperative of
economic survival (p. 73) in the face of the failure of Pales-
tinian official leadership to provide equitably. Chapter 3
demonstrates how siphoning electricity from the Beirut mu-
nicipality to the camp has reordered political practice in
Shatila, thus standing as an example of how new forms of
solidarity redefine ontologies of power (p. 109) and iden-
tity. Chapter 4 treats the gendered socially embedded ritual
(p. 138) of dream talktalking about dreams as a form
of prophecy and divination as a means to project possible
futuresas an intersubjective practice (p. 139): that is, as
an affective counterpart to other kinds of reciprocal rela-
tions (p. 149), having both evocative and performative
power (p. 155) with transformative force in the everyday
lives of the refugees (p. 159). Chapter 5 presents emigra-
tion talkthe practice of talking and planning around the
high-stakes gamble of emigrationas a technology of the
imagination and a migration of the self akin to dream
talk (p. 167). Here, desired emigration is discussed along
with the rhetoric of the right of return. While, according
to Allan, both are commonly portrayed by politicians and
scholars alike as inherently opposed, citizenship and nation-
ality are not isomorphic. Chapter 6 answers to the question
of whether the Palestinians still wish to return to Pales-
tine, claiming that refugees do not always think that tawt.n
(taking up another citizenship) and rallying for the return
are mutually exclusive. Finally, she concludes that topics
such as identity (huwyya) and belonging (intima) are only
meaningful to Shatila refugees through the micropolitics of
camp life and its neighborly networks and rituals (p. 215).
Thus, more than nationalist ideology, it is the dispositions
arising from the refugee condition, through the uncertainty
178 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
and hardship of daily life, that create the conditions of pos-
sibility informing the refugees experiences and reflections
about themselves.
Lingering in the background of these well-crafted argu-
ments, however, is perhaps one main limitation: Allans spo-
radic claim regarding the primacy of economic survival over
political imagination. Dispositions associated with refugee-
ness and nationalist discourses are not always competing
to shape the experience of refugees and their sense of the
self. Palestinian refugees often conflate refugeeness with
Palestinianness, both often permeated by renditions of na-
tionalist themes. Allans argumentation often emphasizes
survival (p. 25), for example, by locating .sumud (stead-
fastness) squarely in the realm of nationalist discourses to
the exclusion of the various ways it, resignified, inhabits
the refugees experiences (pp. 12, 34, 38). Yet, just as
The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya
Community by Dean E. Arnold.
Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. 352 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12453
Christina Halperin
Universite de Montreal
Dean Arnolds The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization
in a Maya Community presents the culmination of a lifetime
of research on contemporary ceramic production in Ticul,
Yucatan, Mexico. His study, compiled from 12 visits over
the course of more than four decades, examines how Maya
potters, their families, their production units, and the spaces
used to produce pottery changed over the generations.
The books principal contribution is to the field of eth-
noarchaeology. As Arnold professes in the Preface, he was
trained as an archaeologist and thinks like one. Thus, his lin-
guistic and ethnographic field research among contemporary
potters is guided by questions about the ancient past and how
we might know this past better by studying contemporary
craftspeople. Interwoven throughout the book is the idea
that ethnoarchaeology is wonderfully hermeneutic. Arnold
makes use of both foundational (e.g., Costins [1991] con-
cepts of scale and intensity; Brumfiel and Earles [1987] scendents, Alfredo Tzum, is Arnolds principal informant.
concepts of attached and independent producers) and The remaining chapters (chs. 47) are less detailed, with
more recent (e.g., Hirths [2009] concepts of intermit-
tent crafting and multi-crafting) archaeological models of
craft production to guide his work. All the while, his earlier
work and this more recent book haveand undoubtedly
will continue toguided archaeological practice. Despite
the books ethnoarchaeological focus, it is also an ethno-
graphic testament in its own right on how craftspeople and
their families brought about and were subject to the unfold-
often, she emphasizes a more complex relation between
nationalism and experience, as her dialectics between sen-
sorial experience and embodied memory, along with her
superb ethnography, suggest (p. 215).
Along with this limitation comes a note of caution to
Allans claim that dislodging the conceptual potency of
nationalism (p. 223) is taboo not only among politicians
and policymakers but also in activist scholarship (p. 222).
Such scholarship is perhaps not as pervasive as one might
think from reading the book, especially given that not all
those defending the conceptual potency of nationalism are
necessarily under its spell. Allan seems to agree that to
deny this completely would be as counterproductive as a
normative reading of nationalismand, I would add, just as
counterproductive as a normative reading of the imperative
of economic survival.
ing of global capitalist relations in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries.
Arnold chose to tell the story of many of these changes
as a narrative, a departure in style from much of his earlier
work. These narratives recount transitions for traditional
Maya potters who produce their crafts in household settings
(chs. 3, 4, and 5), craft entrepreneurs who had no previous
background in pottery production (chs. 6 and 7), and the rise
and fall of pottery production patronized by tourist hotels
and government-funded workshops (ch. 8).
The people of these narratives and their agency are most
intimately felt in chapter 3. It is in this chapter that Arnold
reaches back into oral history to tell the tale of the Tzum fam-
ily origins and the development of early pottery-producing
families, which are colored through the challenges of the
War of the Castes, Porfirio Dazs iron fist, and blights of
smallpox. These origins are brought into the ethnographic
present through the Tzum family descendents whose
networked ties form a large component of the practicing
potting community in Ticul. This chapters ethnographic
richness is of no surprise because one of the Tzum family de-
accounts mainly centered on who in the family genealogy
takes up, passes on, or leaves behind the potting tradition.
Nonetheless, there are glimmers of humanity throughout,
such as the description of Anastasia Xiu, who taught her
husband, Diognicio Coboh, to make cooking pottery. She
often hit him on the head with a pot to reprimand him if his
workmanship was poor. Indeed, he never did well at the
craft.

The lack of personal and contextual detail in later chap-
ters is countered by the numerical breadth in the number of
families surveyed over the course of almost half a century.
Such a survey is accompanied by photographic documenta-
tion and schematic floor plans of production spaces. It is in
chapter 9, Why Did the Spatial Footprint of Production
Increase?, that the benefits of such an extensive compara-
tive database is best showcased. In this penultimate chapter,
Arnold shows how the increase in production space and the
growing separation of living and pottery-production space
related to a feedback cycle of weather, climate, increases
in the amount of pottery produced, and access to capital to
invest in larger architecture with cement walls and roofs.
In this sense, changes in pottery production (e.g., increases
in production intensity; shifts to the production of tourist,
ritual, plant, and suitcase vessels; greater reliance on non-
kin related labor) occurred alongside changes in vernacular
architecture from small pole and thatch buildings to cement
and lamina (metal roof) buildings of a range of sizes.
Thus, in combining narrative with comparative survey,
Arnold tracks (1) the rapidly shifting and often erratic orga-
nization of pottery production on the scale of seasonal con-
ditions and household lifecycles and (2) the seemingly linear
changes of pottery production that occur alongside sweeping
global social and economic movements. Despite the inter-
Temiar Religion, 19642012: Enchantment, Disenchantment
and Re-enchantment in Malaysias Uplands by Geoffrey
Benjamin.
Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2014. 480 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12454
Diana Riboli
Panteio University
Temiar Religion, 19642012: Enchantment, Disenchantment and
Re-enchantment in Malaysias Uplands by Geoffrey Benjamin is
a fascinating journey interconnecting space and time, theory,
methodology and practice. Covering almost five decades of
history, this collection of essays pursues an in-depth anal-
ysis of the religionand, by extension, the cultureof
the Temiars, a Mon-Khmer speaking group of Peninsular
Malaysia.
This volume is an invaluable contribution both on a
micro-topic and macro-universal level. Until the 1970s,
the economy of the Temiars, a segmentary, noncentral-
ized group, was based on swidden farming supplemented
by hunting, fishing, and some trading of forest products.
Following political, economic, social, and religious pres-
Book Reviews 179
mittent and erratic nature of household pottery production,
Arnold finds that household production units were much
more stable than entrepreneurial workshops, government-
sponsored workshops, and workshops attached to tourist
hotels, as they outlasted the latter in the long run. These
patterns among others, however, are only the immediate
findings of the book. To be sure, the future will hold further
insights as archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists tackle back
and forth between this study and their own field research.
REFERENCES CITED
Brumfiel, Elizabeth M., and Timothy K. Earl.
1987 Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies: An Intro-
duction. In Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies.
Elizabeth M. Brumfiel and Timothy K. Earle, eds. Pp. 19.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Costin, Cathy L.
1991 Craft Specialization: Issues in Defining, Documenting, and
Explaining the Organization of Production. In Archaeologi-
cal Method and Theory. Michael B. Schiffer., ed. Pp. 156.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Hirth, Kenneth G.
2009 Housework: Craft Production and Domestic Economy in
Ancient Mesoamerica, vol. 19. Malden: Archaeological Papers
of the American Anthropological Association.
sures accompanied by dramatic environmental degradation
and pollution, in the last decades the Temiars became in-
creasingly dependent on cash. This is a common situation
for indigenous groups the world over who face the conse-
quences of lack of land and human, social, religious, and
political rights.
The essayswritten in different chronological
periodsdescribe the shift from Temiars tribal autonomy
to a peasant-like or proletarian status (pp. 23, 342). The
central focus of Benjamins analysis on religion and morality
produces a particularly convincing interpretation and expla-
nation of the major changes in the lifestyle of this group due
to national and international external agents.
Aside from its ethnographic importance, this long-life
study offers an invaluable contribution to the history of an-
thropology. The authors theoretical path starts in the 1960s
in a functionalist and structuralist framework influenced by
legendary names such as E mile Durkheim, A. R. Radcliffe-
Brown, Edmund Leach (supervisor of Benjamins doctoral
180 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
thesis), and the (recently published at the time) works of
Claude Levi-Strauss. With the passage of time, this path
develops into a more mature approach, filtered by the We-
berian theoretical prism recalled in the title of this work.
The collection of essays starts with the historical
reprint of Benjamins Ph.D. thesis (chs. 38) based on field-
work carried out in 196465 (Benjamin 1967). As high-
lighted by the author (p. 5), this was probably the first thesis
in British anthropology to employ the word religion in its
title. It was a (brave) choice to which Benjamin remains
faithful throughout his life.
In line with Clifford Geertzs ideas, the thesis addresses
not the problem of what religion is but what it doesand
how it does it (p. 51). Through a stunningly rich ethno-
graphic description of Temiar cosmology and mediumship
practices, Benjamin employs Levi-Strausss structuralism
to drive the analysis on binaries, offering the reader a
deep insight into Temiar culture and, I am tempted to say,
philosophy. As in other animistic complexes, in Temiar
religion subjectivity is extended to flora, fauna, mountains,
spirit guides, and the cosmos in general. Cosmology
and religion appear to be organized by the principle of
opposition between categories: head-soul versus heart-soul;
hair versus blood; ground versus off-the-ground; village
versus forest; seasonal fruits versus tigers; ownable versus
unownable.
The author struggles but, in the end, manages to reduce
these oppositions into two categories: nature and culture
from a conceptual point of view and evil and good from a
moral point of view (p. 207). One even more valuable theme
emerging in his research is the role accorded by Temiars
to the autonomy of the individual since his or her early
childhood. Benjamin is among the first scholars to highlight
the mechanism(s) through which autonomy does not lead
to antisociality but, on the contrary, to mutual respect and
cooperation.
The volume continues with excerpts from the extensive
correspondence between Leach and Benjamin while the au-
Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship
by Victoria Bernal
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 208 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12455
David OKane
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
The Martyrs occupy a central place in contemporary
Eritrean national identity: they were the men and women
who sacrificed themselves for Eritreas independence from
Ethiopia in the liberation war of 19611991, and in the
thor was in the field (ch. 9). Leachs comments demonstrate
that the ethnographic data on Temiar religion helped him
accept Levi-Strausss ideas more readily than previously
(p. 219).
The subsequent chapters deepen the focus on Temiar
religion and critically follow the course of historical events
and related changes. Chapter 10 focuses on mediumship as
a theory of other minds (p. 243), while in chapter 11
the author compares Temiar animism with other indigenous
religious systems of the Malay Peninsula.
The last two chapters (presented at two conferences, in
1996 and 2008, respectively) are more politically engaged.
Drawing and expanding upon Max Webers and Ernest
Gellners theories, Benjamin analyzes major religious
changes among the Temiars as a process of enchantment, dis-
enchantment, and re-enchantment. In the 1970s, socioeco-
nomic changes, along with religious and cultural pressures,
pushed many Temiars to embrace apparently rational reli-
gions (p. 307). Some of them became Muslims, while others
turned to the highly monotheistic Bahai religion (ch. 13),
which has nowadays almost disappeared from Temiar life.
Chapter 14, based on recent fieldwork, is particularly
relevant, being the first published account of Temiar Chris-
tianity and of Aluj Slamad, a new endogenous, monotheistic
and named religion (p. 370), which probably emerged at
the end of the 1990s.
I wish the author had made clearer how he defines
animisma term used in almost all of his chaptersin light
of the recent, rich anthropological discussion and consequent
re-theorization of this concept. But this is a minor critique.
The depth and richness of Benjamins long-life work and his
skills as a fieldworker, a linguist, and a theoretician make
this volume a masterpiece, which reminds us not (only) what
anthropology is but also what it doesand how it does it.
REFERENCE CITED
Benjamin, Geoffrey.
1967 Temiar Religion. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
subsequent border war with Ethiopia of 19982000. That
19611991 war brought the Peoples Front for Democracy
and Justice (PFDJ) to power in Eritrea, and left it with the
legacy of a political culture of authoritarianism and secretive
control of information. Secrecy by the PFDJ regime over the
number of dead in the border war of 19982000 led Eritrean
diaspora oppositionists to build an online Martyrs Album,
to commemorate those who had fallen. This memorial was
a direct challenge to the ruling regime and to its politics

of secrecy, manipulation, and repression. It was, Victoria
Bernal argues, just one exercise in Eritrean infopolitics
(p. 30), a concept she introduces to analyze the political
struggles over the control and dissemination of information,
especially those which take place in the artificial zones of
cyberspace (p. 32).
During the three decades of the liberation war, thou-
sands of Eritreans left their country as refugees. Today,
that diaspora spreads across the Middle East, Europe, and
North America. Its members were assiduously organized
and mobilized by the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front,
the predecessor to todays PFDJ. The structures of orga-
nization built up in that period were carried over into the
post-independence era and still bind many members of the
diaspora to the unelected ruling regime in Eritrea today.
When Eritrean independence came, however, it coincided
with the emergence of the Internet as a mass phenomenon
and a political game changer (p. 171) in a world where
citizenship and sovereignty are undergoing tectonic shifts
(p. 171). The first bridgehead of the Eritrean diaspora in
cyberspace was the Dehai mailing list, in which both news
stories about Eritrea and debates about the past, present,
and future of the country were shared Eritrea and across the
diaspora. Later, after the political shocks of the 1998 war and
after, Dehai was joined by rival, oppositionist websites such
as Asmarino.com and Awate.com. These sites have taken
the struggle for a truly free Eritrea into cyberspace. Bernals
work suggests that while the emergence and formation of an
Eritrean opposition in cyberspace may have been enabled by
the new technologies that became available from the 1990s
onward, they were not determined by those technologies.
Rather, the use made of those technologies was determined
by the political conditions in Eritrea and its diaspora. While
the networked nature of the Internet may allow for the
creation of more or less egalitarian and open online commu-
nities, such communities can never fully insulate themselves
from the politics and social dynamics of the offline world.
Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal
California by Robert L. Bettinger.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 312 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12456
Kenneth Ames
Portland State University
In Orderly Anarchy, Robert Bettinger seeks to explain the an-
thropological questions posed by aboriginal California: Why
didnt agriculture spread to and take root there? Why didnt
social complexity as usually understood (e.g., permanent
Book Reviews 181
This is clear in the connection Bernal makes between
infopolitics, biopolitics and bare life. In Eritrea, as in so
many other places, women remain assigned to the category
of bare life (p. 30): this means that they are denied full
membership in the political community and therefore
denied full civil and human rights. The most important
part of Bernals work is her chapter on the participation of
Eritrean women in the diasporas online battlefields. Before
the liberation war, women in both the Christian and
Muslim communities in Eritrea suffered low social status.
The Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (the predecessor to
todays PFDJ) attracted considerable international attention
for its apparent success in raising Eritrean womens status
by revolutionary means. Not all of this legacy has been
squandered, but much of it has. For many years, for
example, there have been recurring and credible allegations
of rape and sexual exploitation of female army conscripts
by male army officers. These cases have been extensively
discussed and denounced in Eritrean cyberspace, though
not necessarily by Eritrean women, who remain underrep-
resented in online forums. As Bernal sees itand her work
is based on extensive and thorough researchthe Eritrean
cyberspace remains a gendered space, a public sphere that
is coded as male and in which womens statements are not
accorded the same weight of authority (p. 157) as those of
men. The real liberation of Eritrea must mean the liberation
of Eritrean women, and this appears to be as difficult a task
in the online world as it is in the offline world.
Bernals excellent and significant book might perhaps
be faulted for being overly focused on the Eritrean commu-
nity in the United States and their particular relationship to
Eritrea and their host country, but this is a minor problem
at most. Future research will, hopefully, take the insights
Bernal presents in this ethnography and develop them fur-
ther. In particular, her concept of infopolitics will have,
I believe, relevance and applicability beyond the case of
Eritrea and its diaspora.
ranking, political institutions, etc.) develop, except possibly
in the Santa Barbara Bight? Why were its dense popula-
tions organized into small tribelets? He also advances the
case that while all hunter-gatherer societies are as evolved as
agricultural societies, the outcomes do not always mirror ex-
pectations based on the evolution of agricultural chiefdoms
and states: very small-scale societies are as much the result
of cultural evolution as is the modern Chinese statethey
are not fossilized examples of the ancient human condition.
182 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
The orderly anarchy of the books title is a system with- in these sedentary societies, money replaced reputation,
out formal authority or publically enforced government
(p. 243). It is orderly because it works.
Orderly Anarchy has ten chapters. Chapter 1 sketches the
issues the book addresses and introduces Joseph Jorgensens
trait-based Western North American Indians samples on
which Bettinger relies heavily and ethnographic California.
Chapters 2 through 4 form the heart of the book. In chapter 2,
Bettinger presents many of the key theoretical models (e.g.,
ideal free distribution) and empirical generalizations (e.g.,
travelers and processers) he uses; introduces intensive hunt-
ing and gathering (processers with food storage) and lays out
his central argument that the introduction of the bow and
arrow led to the evolution of intensive hunting and gathering
and an evolutionary shift to smaller group sizes. Chapter
3 is a detailed examination of the development of intensive
foraging in Owens Valley, on the eastern slope of the Sierras,
the example on which much of his case rests. Chapter 4
argues for the evolution of the private ownership of gathered
foods, initially pinyon and acorns, and how this affected
social organization via postmarital residence patterns and
rules of descent. He measures these changes via kinship
terminology.
Chapter 5 applies the framework detailed in the previ-
ous three chapters to California west of the Sierras. Chap-
ters 6 and 7 focus on the evolution of social organization in
California, arguing for diversification and a progressive sim-
plification. Here he explains the development of patrilineal
tribelets from patrilineal bands and the eventual dissolution
of patrilineal tribelets into bilateral house groups, changes
driven partially by the effects of private property, the impor-
tance of womens labor, and a declining need for defense.
This is accompanied by increasing emphasis on individual
autonomy and the almost complete disappearance of gov-
erning institutions. Chapter 8 addresses the origins of money
in California: strings of shells and shell beads as a medium of
exchange. Money is an expression of the cultural emphasis
on individual autonomy and independence. Circumstances
required knowledge of others character and reputation in
order to make exchange possible. Lacking that information
The Archaeology of Wakas: Explorations of the Sacred
in the Pre-Columbian Andes by Tamara L. Bray, ed.
Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. 336 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12457
Peter Kaulicke
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
The Archaeology of Wakas is the outcome of two meetings
organized by editor Tamara Bray. The second one shares
making long-distance exchange feasible. Chapter 9 exam-
ines how large-scale social cooperation could occur in the
resolutely atomistic societies he describes. To answer this,
he invokes motivation crowding: how it is possible to get
prosocial behavior in situations with few rules. He also ex-
amines organizational authority and individual autonomy in
aboriginal western North America, finding two poles(1)
the orderly anarchy of California-Great Basin with its high
autonomy and low authority and (2) the hierarchical low
autonomy, high authority Central and Northern Northwest
Coastwith considerable variation in between. He suggests
the two poles are alternative adaptive strategies. Chapter 10
summarizes the books arguments, contending that orderly
anarchy is not the ancient human condition, reemphasizing
that it evolved relatively recently. He extends the idea of
orderly anarchy and hierarchy as alternative strategies and
not necessarily always better or worse. The book ends on
a reflection on how the concept might be useful today in
meeting current organizational challenges.
Among the strengths of the book are Bettingers em-
phasis throughout on the importance of social organiza-
tion. While the introduction of the bow and arrow is the
technological deus ex machina that triggers the develop-
ments he charts, effects were dependent on how groups
were organized, although some readers will see technolog-
ical determinism. Other strengths are the stress on private
property and the argument that modern and recent hunter-
gatherers have their own lengthy evolutionary trajectories
and are not stalled somewhere in a Herbert Spencerian
trajectory.
There is much here with which to disagree and pick. It
will irritate many, especially those who dislike formalistic
or functional-evolutionary approaches to the human past. It
frequently is ex cathedra in its pronouncements. There is
no formal anarchy theory. The book is well written, tightly
reasoned, and intellectually stimulating, but I want to dis-
prove whole chunks. Still, it is a significant contribution to
hunter-gatherer studies and to the archaeology of western
North America.
the main title of the book and the uncommon but correct
glottalized version of what is usually written as huacas. Ar-
chaeologists often use the latter version to refer to any pre-
Hispanic monumental architecture reflected in postconquest
toponyms, while the term huaca (or waka in this publication)
is taken as a specifically Andean expression of sacredness, dat-
ing back to colonial times, related to Inca culture and society,

but the subtitle is more general and lets readers know to ex-
pect more universal definitions for a wide geographical area.
Twelve contributions by 13 authors, almost all of them
North Americans, are ordered in a loose chronological
order, from contemporary orientations to something like
pre- or proto-wakas. Not all are archaeologists, and only
one of them is treating the Cuzco area, the homeland of the
Inkas and the origin of the waka concept. Bray understands
waka as a fascinating point of intersection with respect
to notions of materiality, agency, and personhood (p. 4)
inspired by modern notions of animism. In line with
this perspective, she interprets colonial sources in a brief
and rather uncritical way, notwithstanding the profound
intervention and reinterpretation by Spanish missionaries
as a convenient catchall designation of anything suspect of
idolatry. Anthropological (Catherine J. Allen) and linguistic
approaches (Bruce Mannheim and Guillermo Salas Carreno)
combine modern ethnographic evidence with colonial
sources, thereby supporting Brays ontological lead. A
larger part is dedicated to Wakas in the time of the Inkas,
basically written by archaeologists and an art historian
(Carolyn Dean). Their task is to verify Brays optimistic
conviction that archaeological phenomena may offer
unique analytical purchase for the investigation of alterity
and sociality or ontological diversity (pp. 10, 11). The
protohistoric situation in which archaeology and nearly
contemporaneous (ethno)historic evidence can and should
be contrasted, however, demands more critical and separate
analyses of early written sources and related material culture
before applying anthropological analogies and models.
Only two of the five archaeologists who contribute to this
section quote Cristobal de Molina (2010[ca.1575]) and Juan
de Betanzos (2015[1551]), and only one references Polo
Ondegardo (2012[1571]), mostly in translations or outdated
editions, while they rely more on later sourcesthat is,
those after the time of the Inkas or secondary literature
(for recent editions of Molina, Betanzos, and Ondegardo,
see References Cited). Instead, they use various related
terms such as willka, huanca, illa, ushnu, and others as mere
synomyms for waka. The mentioned early colonial authors,
however, make clear distinctions between an elite Inka reli-
giosity with related materiality and folk religions as well as
numerous largely unrelated regional cults. In these sources,
the ruling Inka is treated as a waka together with his material
representations in life and death. While the Cuzco idols
were destroyed long ago, the adoratorios (shrines) are still
extant. In the Sacsahuaman Archaeological Park at Cuzco,
many of these oddly shaped but esthetically appealing rocks
(for Cuzco archaeologists, they are huacas, according to
contributor Steve Kosiba) abound, but they are not system-
atically studied. Instead of being spots on imaginary lines (the
famous ceque system), they form part of an extremely com-
Book Reviews 183
plex, interconnected ritual and cultural landscape with built
and rock architecture, sophisticated water management,
human burials, and offerings. It is to be hoped that Kosibas
ongoing project at Guanacauri, one of the principal Inka
sanctuaries and wakas, will lead to a clearer archaeological
picture.
The last section, titled Deeper Histories of Wakas
in the Andean Past, is limited to two case studies that are
chronologically, culturally, and geographically disconnected
with Inka, such that any other site according to Brays model
also could have been chosen. In this sense, the term history
surprises: although Anita G. Cook sees some possible con-
nections between Wari and Inka Cuzco, this would be absurd
in the case of Formative Konkho Wakane (John W. Janusek)
on the Bolivian altiplano. However, Krzysztof Makowskis
chapter on Pachacamac, a famous sanctuary near Lima in Inka
times, could have had more potential for deeper history,
but the author insists in a complete transformation of the
site during Inka occupation and downplays earlier evidence.
He does not intend to define their waka nature but spec-
ulates that the Pachacamac (syncretic?) deity was brought
from the north coast by the Inkas. In his epilogue, John R.
Topic presents what is probably the most convincing fusion
of archaeological and historic data.
All in all, the ontological turn forcefully defended by
the editor is problematic in its application to the extremely
complex concept of wakas, using terms sometimes dan-
gerously near to New Age Spiritualism. More balanced and
precise critical analyses of the written sources in the form
of better modern editions and much better archaeological
databases are badly needed in order to contrast them
with models like the one that forms the basis of this
book.
REFERENCES CITED
Betanzos, Juan de.
2015[1551]Suma y narracion de los Incas [Narrative of the In-
cas]. New edition. Francisco Hernandez Astete and Rodolfo
Cerron-Palomino, eds. Pp. 107437. Lima: Fondo Editorial
de la Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru.
Molina, Cristobal de.
2010[ca.1575] Ritos y fabulas de los Incas [Account of the
rituals and fables of the Incas]. Paloma Jimenez del
Campo, ed. Madrid/Frankfurt: Parecos y Australes/
Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Ondegardo, Polo.
2012[1571]Pensamiento colonial crtico: Textos y actos de Polo
Ondegardo [Critical colonial thoughts: Texts and other doc-
uments by Polo Ondegardo]. Gonzalo Lamana Ferrario, ed.
Lima: Institut Francais dEtudes Andines, Travaux de lInstitut
Francais dEtudes Andines 294, Centro Bartolome de las Casas,
Archivos de Historia Andina 1048.
184 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United
States by Denise Brennan.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12458
Anthony Marcus
John Jay College, CUNY
Since October of 2000 when the United States Congress
passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the FBI has or-
ganized dozens of antitrafficking task forces across the United
States, billions of dollars have been spent on international
legislation and compliance reporting, and antitrafficking has
become an international movement. Despite this visibility,
surprisingly little is known empirically about the life worlds
of traffickers and victims. Only a handful of studies have
attempted to observe and analyze, in situ, their lives and
meaning production. Instead, most data on human traffick-
ing derive from victim testimonials in institutions of rescue
where housing and social services are typically dependent on
reflecting an interested script and impressionistic reporting
by law enforcement personnel. United Nations statistics on
the scope of the problem have varied between 700,000 and
25 million, and most scholarship and public discussion has
focused on prostitution without regard to whether or not it
is consensual. Finally, the broader population whose forced
labor is not primarily sexual has largely gone unnoticed. For
these reasons, Denise Brennans in situ empirical study of a
well-defined, accurately counted, richly engaged subset of
the principals in the human trafficking drama is a welcome
addition to a growing body of knowledge that uses rigor-
ous research to study a population that has been wrongly
identified as unresearchable.
Instead of relying on the impressionistic categories and
inclusion criteria typically employed in human trafficking
studies, Brennan focuses on those who have received T-Visas
provided by the U.S. government to trafficking victims. Her
informants come from a variety of countries and have en-
tered the United States through a variety of means, typically
working in domestic labor but sometimes in the sex industry
or in other situations in which forced labor enabled an ex-
ploiter to steal wages, exert force or coercion, or sequester
them.
It is refreshing to read about human trafficking with-
out the usual prurient obsessions with sex, bondage,
discipline, and Albanian, Russian, Chinese, and so forth
gangster megaprofits. When stripped of the urban legends,
moral panics, and folk devils, there seems to be little to dis-
tinguish human trafficking victims from ordinary migrants
without documents or with temporary employer-specific
work visas. Brennan admits as much in her concluding chap-
ter, describing her informants key challenges as low or
unpaid wages; poor employment options; limited access to
education, job training, healthcare, childcare, and automo-
bile ownership; and the impossibility of visiting home while
waiting for permanent residence. In Brennans representa-
tion, being a T-Visa holder is largely dependent on meeting
a service provider who knows about it and being willing to
endure the bureaucratic hurdles and years of waiting rather
than disappearing back into a vast pool of migrants lacking
civil rights. After more than a decade, fewer than 5,000
individuals have received T-Visas.
Brennan has successfully produced the first ethnography
of human trafficking, richly representing the migrant life
interrupted in the title. However, the subtitle, Trafficking
into Forced Labor in the United States, takes an insti-
tutionally defined migration-stream study on a wild turn
into human trafficking debates that are never fully engaged.
Her first chapter deconstructs and dismisses antitrafficking
sensationalism through rationalist critique and well-chosen
examples, such as the New York Times, irresponsibly pro-
moting moral panic, but it fails to take up the empirical and
scholarly debates about trafficking to which her data might
have spoken, such as agency versus trauma in sex work (Mar-
cus et al. 2014; Morselli and Savoie-Gargiso 2014; Raghavan
and Doychak 2015); challenges to assumptions about prof-
itability and scope (Curtis et al. 2008; Mahmoud and
Trebesch 2010; Marcus et al. in press); patriarchy and rescue
(Cojocaru 2015); racial disparities (African Americans
are 62% of FBI confirmed traffickers) in law enforcement
(Banks and Kycklehahn 2011); and the metapolitics of policy
(Bernstein 2014; Weitzer 2014). However, Brennans book
is an excellent contribution to the literature on migration and
may eventually be seen as a prolegomena to future ethno-
graphies that robustly take up these debates about human
trafficking.
REFERENCES CITED
Banks, Duren, and Tracey Kyckelhahn
2011 Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents,
20082010. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cshti0810.pdf,
accessed December 3, 2015.
Bernstein, Elizabeth
2014 Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The
Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Anti-
trafficking Campaigns. Signs 40(1):4571.

Cojocaru, Claudia
2015 Sex Trafficking, Captivity, and Narrative: Constructing Vic-
timhood with the Goal of Salvation. Dialectical Anthropology
39(2):183194.
Curtis, Ric, Karen Terry, Meredith Dank, and Kirk Dombrowski
2008 The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in New
York City. New York: Center for Court Innovation.
Mahmoud, Toman, and Christoph Trebesch
2010 The Economics of Human Trafficking and Labour Migration:
Micro-Evidence from Eastern Europe. Journal of Comparative
Economics 38(2):173188.
Marcus, Anthony, Amber Horning, Ric Curtis, Jo Sanson, and
Ephram Thompson
2014 Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps: A
Closer Look at Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking. The An-
nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
653(1):225246.
The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian
Island by Nils Bubandt
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. 320 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12459
Richard Baxstrom
University of Edinburgh
Near the end of his innovative book The Empty Seashell:
Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island, Nils Bubandt fi-
nally asks the real question that his closely rendered study
raises for the reader: Why do people in Buli believe in
modernity in times of witchcraft? (p. 239). Effectively
drawing on historical and ethnographic evidence, Bubandt
addresses this question by carefully outlining the contin-
ued empirical reality of witchcraft in the everyday lives of
the Buli, a predominantly Christian group of approximately
three thousand people who live on Halmahera, the largest
island in North Maluku, Indonesia. Supported by a clear
presentation of evidence obtained over 20 years of sustained
contact with the community, Bubandt asserts, without sensa-
tionalizing or normalizing the phenomenon, that witchcraft
for the Buli remains terrifyingly real as an invisible, aporetic
force, rather than a locatable, singular object of belief, and
emphasizes that it is doubt rather than belief that sustains
witchcraft as a force within the Buli present.
At times echoing James Siegels writings regarding
similar phenomenon on Java and Sumatra, Bubandt makes
effective use of Jacques Derridas concept of aporia to
express how something can, without contradiction, be
simultaneously unknowable and real (pp. 3538). Evoking
Menos Paradox regarding the unknowable within knowl-
edge, Bubandt links the problem of witchcrafts aporetic
character to longstanding problems within Western thought
Book Reviews 185
Marcus, Anthony, Jo Sanson, Amber Horning, Efram Thompson,
and Ric Curtis In press Pimping and Profitability: Testing the
Economics of Trafficking in Street Sex Markets in Atlantic
City, New Jersey. Sociological Perspectives 59.
Morselli, Carlo, and Isa Savoie-Gargiso
2014 Coercion, Control, and Cooperation in a Prostitution Ring.
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 653(1):247265.
Raghavan, Chitra, and K. Doychak
2015 Trauma-Coerced Bonding and Victims of Sex Traffick-
ing: Where Do We Go from Here? International Journal
of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience 17:
583587.
Weitzer, Ronald
2014 New Directions in Research on Human Trafficking. The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
653(1):624.
and philosophy (pp. 6061). The subtlety of the authors
argument and his consistent care to link and limit his
conceptual claims to what the evidence will permit the
reader to grasp allows Bubandt to avoid the common
hazard of clumsily grafting the wisdom of the ancients or
Continental philosophers on to ethnographic situations in
which such connections may be less than clear.
Credibly making the claim that witchcraft cannot serve,
and has never served, as an object of belief for the Buli
requires a great deal of context. Thus, Bubandt wisely of-
fers several chapters of historical evidence to ground his
more general ethnographic claims. The authors account of
the Bulis sudden and near-total conversion to Christianity
around the turn of the 20th century is particularly fascinating,
as this ultimately served as a strategy to, finally, eliminate the
gua (witch) from the community once and for all. Carefully
taking the reader through the parallels between traditional
Buli cosmology and the promises of Christian missionaries,
the practical logic of Buli conversion as an antidote to the
poison of witchcraft is quite clear. Given that the dead did
not rise and the witch only seemed to get stronger in the
wake of leaving behind the old rituals and commemora-
tions, the Bulis subsequent doubt of these same Christian
teachings also makes perfect sense. Bubandt demonstrates
how Christianity itself later appeared to the Buli to mimic
the witch with its deception and ultimately generated
more danger and more doubt. Although rendered with less
detail, Bubandt further demonstrates that a repetition of this
cycle of fervent belief followed by radical doubt took place
during the time of the Suhartos New Order, this time with
modernity as the object of faith. Given the New Order
186 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
regimes commitment to its own version of development,
this aspect of the recent history of Buli bleeds into the neolib-
eral, developmentalist present with which Bubandt is ulti-
mately concerned. Even today, the noise (ramai; lit. busy)
of modernity strives to drown out the telltale cries of the
bird forms that witches often take in Buli; yet the Buli still
doubt and the witches remain (p. 213).
So it is doubt and aporia, rather than belief and cer-
tainty, that frames Buli contemporary life, and the perpetual
threat of the witch remains as real as ever. Bubandts call to
pay closer attention to doubt and to things that are invisi-
ble, even insensible, but nevertheless real as catalysts in the
present is credible and clear. Inevitably, however, questions
remain. Perhaps the most insistent question left unanswered
by Bubandt is what we should do with belief when it has
shown to be so ruinous for believers and so misleading as
a conceptual object for ethnographers. Bubandt also indi-
cates in The Empty Shell that belief and doubt, like proof and
Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers: A Bilingual Anthology
by Andrew Cowell, Alonzo Moss Sr., and William J. CHair.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. 584 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12460
Linda K. Watts
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
In assessing this rich volume, I aim to primarily address two
considerations. First, how is this volume positioned with
respect to other modern collections of Native American
texts? Second, how useful or accessible might the format of
this book be for language learners, as it is an explicit goal
of the authors to contribute to language preservation and
revitalization efforts?
Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers: A Bilingual Anthology
provides a treasure trove of Arapaho texts formerly found in
a wide range of earlier formats from various collectors and
utilizing various translators, along with a valuable cadre of
contemporary Arapaho consultants as coauthors.
Andrew Cowells background as a linguistic anthro-
pologist serves the volume well, both in the nature of the
materials assembled (e.g., including creation stories, mythic
legends, Ghost dance songs, and age grade songs, along with
trickster and animal tales) and in the commentary provided.
The authors use a culturally relevant mode of presenting
family relations of included collectors and translators so as
to give traditional respect to the family members support-
ing the authors in their broader biographical histories and
to acknowledge their communities. In this way, the book
is not owned by the individual authors so much as shared
from within their networks of kin and other relations; it is a
product of the whole, for the whole.
nonknowledge or visibility and invisibility, go hand in hand
in the course of social life. After reading Bubandts power-
ful account of witchcraft and life in Buli, we frankly feel a
little duped ourselves for believing in belief; yet without
the foolish certainty that beliefsome beliefgives us, it
is unclear how one cultivates an ethical way of living and
what Gilles Deleuze called a necessary belief in the world.
It is unfair to expect a single ethnographic text to answer
such a profound question. The fact that The Empty Shell al-
lows us to think alongside the Buli as they struggle with the
passionate demand to carry on in spite of all testifies to its
importance and skill as a work. I highly recommend it to all
readers.
REFERENCE CITED
Deleuze, Gilles
1989 Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. Pp. 171173.
The introductory material for each text is rich in his-
torical and interpretive material that situates the text by
highlighting its cultural significance. Annotations following
each text provide additional, contemporary insights from
the Native consultant coauthors along with linguistic infor-
mation pertaining to etymology or alternate forms. The
format for representing the Arapaho stories, songs, and
prayers themselves varies somewhat with the collector and
with the interpreter of the various texts in the volume, but
Cowells versification style generally applies a valuable tech-
nique utilizing a set of recurring particles and opening phrases
as discursive breath unit markers, such as Dell Hymes pi-
loted with his exemplary work, In Vain I Tried to Tell You:
Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (2004). This manner of
representing the texts as prose verse, rather than in sterile,
paragraph prose form such as in the earliest historic col-
lections utilized, raises the narrative content to more nearly
represent the oral tradition used by native storytellers in their
proper interactive settings. The poetic form that emerges
with this mode of properly parsing the narratives into breath
units based on discursive linguistic devices allows the voice
of the narrator and the force of the stories to ring more true
to a traditional oral mode of delivery.
The above being acknowledged, I believe that with re-
gard to the accessibility issue especially for Native readers and
for language learners generally, the three stories presented
with interlinear translation that are provided following a
very brief and overly abbreviated grammatical statement
near the end of the volume should perhaps be the standard
to which analysis of all of the texts could be held. Compare,

for example, the following two versions of the same two lines
of narrative, first in non-interlinear translation mode and
then with interlinear translation, from the story Nihoo3oo
and the Burrs:
Henei-hiten-o wooxe
Then he got a knife.
Henei-3iiyouheti-t
Then he cut his hair off short.
(p. 74)
Heneihitenowooxe
Henei- hiten -o wooxe
Then- get(TI) -3S knife
Then he got a knife
Hene3iiyouheti-t
Henei -3iiyouheti -t
then- cut own hair(AI.REFL) -3S
Then he cut his hair off short.
(p. 536)
A reader aiming to utilize the texts in this volume as a
means of learning Arapaho language forms and grammatical
organization may find it easier to comprehend the narratives
Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics
in Northern Ireland by Jennifer Curtis.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12461
Robin Whitaker
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Human rights loom large in accounts of political violence,
whether from third-party analysts or combatants themselves.
By extension, they are ubiquitous in prescriptions for peace.
Thus, the opening sentences of the 1998 agreement reached
by the parties to the Northern Ireland peace talks proclaim
that the best way to repay the suffering of the Troubles is
through a fresh start, which centrally includes the protec-
tion and vindication of the human rights of all (Agreement,
Declaration of Support: 2). Yet, Jennifer Curtis contends,
far from providing transcendence, claims for human rights
have served mainly to make war by other means in North-
ern Ireland.
Curtiss central focus is rights talk at the grassroots,
particularly among activists in two cheek-by-jowl, largely
working-class, West Belfast communities that are almost
bywords for Northern Irelands conflict: the Falls is known
as a heartland of Irish nationalism and ethnic Catholicism;
the Shankill as staunchly loyalist, ethnically Protestant, and
British identified. Curtis began her fieldwork in 1996 but,
based partly on oral history, her account starts three decades
earlier, tracing how rights discourse came to permeate
Book Reviews 187
in their interlinear translation format. In fact, presenting
grammatical and lexical analyses of simple cultural narratives
in interlinear translation format can be a valuable native
language teaching tool; such an approach is often used in
bilingual education curricula.
In sum, this volume clearly adds much of value to a
modern compendium of Native American and particularly
Arapaho narrative discourse. It represents a carefully se-
lected corpus of culturally significant narratives. At the same
time, many of the texts shared here might be more accessibly
utilized by Arapaho second-language learners were they to
be analyzed via comprehensive interlinear translation. That
being noted, the phraseology of the narratives is compelling
and instructive for those wishing to maintain the oral tradi-
tions within which these texts have their home.
REFERENCE CITED
Hymes, Dell.
2004 In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American
Ethnopoetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
grassroots politics and activism, how it transformed these
politics, and how rights discourse itself was transformed
(p. 33) over time.
Accordingly, chapter 2 focuses on 1960s civil rights
campaigns against injustices in housing, jobs, policing, and
electoral democracy. Proportionally, such discrimination af-
fected Catholics worst. Still, the campaigns alerted some
Protestants to their own disenfranchisement. The outcome
was not sustained class solidarity, however. Poor Protestants
resented the sense of being portrayed as privileged oppres-
sors. This, combined with a perception that the Northern
Ireland state was under attack, encouraged many Protes-
tants to view rights claims with suspicion. In the 1970s,
working-class activists mobilizing in a context of violence,
ethnopolitical territoriality, and material scarcity deployed
the rhetoric and tactics of civil rights on behalf of commu-
nally identified neighborhoods . . . [that] effectively became
collective subjects of rights (p. 47).
Chapter 3 offers a valuable account of how a potentially
radical politics of economic rights was neutralized in the
1980s. As deprivation became widely identified as a cause of
conflict, various funds were established in the name of peace
promotion. To tap these, local activists created commu-
nity enterprises: job training (workfare) schemes, business
development centers, and other projects aimed at mitigat-
ing socioeconomic exclusion. Coinciding with Thatcher-era
188 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
privatization, these schemes also turned community groups
into low-wage service providers, inculcating a neoliberal
vision of self-help [that] placed responsibility for curing
the causes of structural violence squarely on its victims
(p. 94). A nascent class analysis was further colonized by
sectional politics, partly because outside supporters of the
Irish cause trained international attention on anti-Catholic
discrimination as such, reawakening Protestant animosities
and suspicions that rights were being used for ideological
ends (p. 97).
Chapters 4 and 5 explore rights politics in the peace
process. In the 1990s, as paramilitaries were moving to-
ward ceasefires, official endorsement of parity of esteem
for both communities encouraged claims on behalf of com-
munal culture and traditions. These were often expressed
through other rightsnotably, freedom of expression and
associationgiving cover to provocative displays of commu-
nalism. Few would disagree that the power-sharing agree-
ment has bolstered this logic with its political authorization
of the two communities. Further, as Curtis argues, with
no agreed-upon account of a conflict in which the deadli-
est forces were nonstate actors, human rights discourses
conventionally aimed at statesare vulnerable to contests
over victimhood.
Having made a sustained case for rights as a weapon
of war, Curtis devotes chapter 6 to showing that another
politics of rights is possible. Northern Irelands lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender rights movement, says Curtis,
has used rights discourse to create new politics and public
spaces. This she explores through activist engagement with
Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India
by Stefan Ecks.
New York: New York University Press, 2014. 233 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12462
Sepideh Azarshahri Bajracharya
Lewis and Clark College
Eating Drugs opens with Dr. Roy, a plump Bengali in his
late forties, who introduces Stefan Ecks to the phrase
moner khabar, Bengali for food (khabar) eaten by the mind
(mon) (p. 2). A well-regarded psychiatrist, skilled in
establishing rapport with patients (p. 2), Ecks describes
moner khabar as a psychiatric artifice that physicians such
as Dr. Roy use with the intention of making psychotropic
drugs acceptable to those hesitant to take them (p. 3).
Thus begins Eckss fascinating inquiry into how Bengali
practitioners and patients share and employ popular idioms,
specifically vernacular metaphors of belly (pet) and mind
(mon) while providing, facilitating, and receiving treatment
for psychosomatic suffering.
international legal discourses and local provisions for equality
and human rights that were, as one LGBT activist observed,
slipped in [to the Agreement] by the Womens Coalition
while everybody else was concentrating on ethnic politics
(p. 176).
The Womens Coalition was a party to the peace talks.
Its role in securing provisions for groups ill-served by com-
munalism points to a lacuna in Curtiss studyone that
highlights both the force of Northern Ireland particularism
and its limits. The Northern Ireland womens movement
has long used rights talks and instruments to work within,
across, and beyond ethnopolitics. As with feminism else-
where, it has also faced dilemmas posed by how rights can
render politics legal in ways that regulate rather than undo
the conditions of womens subordination.
Pointing to this gap does not detract from the strength of
Curtiss cautionary tale. Her account of everyday rights talk
shows the value of a close examination of how universalistic
ideas and values get localized and incorporated into lived
politics. The book will be of most interest to Northern
Ireland specialists, although analysts of other conflicts may
find its questions and insights productive. Curtiss grasp of
activism over time and her strong, clear writing style make
this volume a particularly valuable resource for students
preparing for fieldwork in Northern Ireland.
REFERENCE CITED
1998 The Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations.
Belfast: Government of the United Kingdom and Northern
Ireland.
Situated in Calcutta, this is an ethnography of
healer/patient relations (p. 8) and pharmaceuticals that
focuses on what is happening in private doctors chambers
(p. 10). While the first chapter refers to popular Bengali
concepts of mind and body and interviews conducted in
southwest Calcutta, subsequent chapters focus on perspec-
tives offered by practitioners of three healing modalities
Ayurveda, homeopathy, psychiatryas they contemplate
expertise, pharmaceuticals, and patient expectations. Ecks
describes his study as a metaphor analysis (p. 19)an
examination of the language and idioms conveyed among
patients and practitioners as they negotiate their use of psy-
chotropic drugs.
Eckss take on medical pluralism, the concept alluded to
by the books title, is particularly striking. In one sense, plu-
ralism underwrites the distinctions, overlaps, and relations
among the three modalities. Against the tendency to por-
tray a single therapeutic mode or to convey nonbiomedical

approaches in terms of biomedical hegemony, this is an
ethnography of late modernity that provides nuanced per-
spectives on how different modalities exist in the seamless,
but no less tense, intersections of everyday medical practice.
Plurality also refers to the multiple frames of understand-
ing and use enabled by the availability of biomedical and
nonbiomedical drugs in view of the the worlds leading
producer of generic medications (p. 149). These two per-
spectives on pluralism gird each chapter.
In chapter 1, Ecks provides interesting, if somewhat
general, insights on etymologies of mind and body idioms
in West Bengal, as well as ethnographically inspired con-
cepts such as floating prescriptions and self medication.
Subsequent chapters on Ayurveda and homeopathy are en-
gaging studies in contrast. Ayurveda, the poignant theme of
chapter 2, conveys a tone of forsaken failure as practition-
ers lament the toxicity of the environment and modern
complicated polluted body (p. 82) that undermine its ef-
ficacy. Resulting reliance on biomedical diagnostics make
drugs critical to distinction; the situation is then further
complicated by an unregulated Ayurvedic drug market that
allows for wide-range commercial branding and by prescrip-
tion of Ayurvedic remedies by allopathic doctors who might
include an Ayurvedic liver tonic or a digestive aid in their
poly-drug treatments to counter the toxic effects of their
chemical drugs (p. 103). Interestingly, preparing their
own medicines (p. 97) thus becomes a point of pride and
differentiation. In contrast, homeopathy, the theme of chap-
ter 3, is more optimistic, no doubt given Calcuttas status
as the world capital of homeopathy (p. 107). Contra
Ayurveda, homeopathy conveys an ideology of enlightened
rationalism (p. 110) with roots in German philosophy; it is a
Clarity, Cut, and Culture: The Many Meanings of Diamonds
by Susan Falls.
New York: New York University Press, 2014. 224 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12463
Richard Robbins
SUNY at Plattsburgh
In Clarity, Cut, and Culture, Susan Falls tackles a critical ques-
tion about modernity and meaning: Why, when marketers
spend billions of dollars cloaking their products with positive
meanings, do people buy them even when they say they are
not influenced by what the marketer is trying to do? That is,
in a society of mass consumerism and ample exposure to the
fact that the meanings are socially constructeddiamonds
are, after all, just rocks and alcohol isnt really going to make
you sexydoes advertising still work? More generally, how
do commodities come to have meaning at all?
Book Reviews 189
kind of hypermodern medicine: more scientific than allopathy
and free from the colonial baggage of English medicine
(p. 110). Practitioners refer to environmental toxicity as
precisely what homeopathy is equipped to treat by rein-
vigorating a persons vital force. Drug quality is assessed
through standardized, quality-controlled production meth-
ods (p. 119) similar to allopathic drugs. The final chapter
on psychiatry focuses on practitioner use of popular idioms
in providing pharmaceutical care. Ecks notes how the avail-
ability of pharmaceuticals such as antidepressants condition
biomedical prognosis of bowel obsession as masked ex-
pressions of depression or anxiety. What is less clear is
the extent to which physicians might share concepts such
as bad mind (mon kharap) with their patients rather than
simply using them strategically to facilitate compliance with
the prescribed treatments (p. 165).
There is so much insight in these chapters that one is
often left seeking more ethnographic detail and analysis. For
example, while Ecks illustrates how classand to some de-
gree, gender and religionaffect practitioner and patient
perspectives, there is little discussion of these revelations.
Still, Eating Drugs stands as a critical addition to work on
the pharmaceuticalization and vernacularization of psycho-
somatic therapies in South Asia. The chapters are compelling
for where the boundaries get blurry (p. 11) as well as how
they stand apart. The chapter on homeopathy is particu-
larly interesting given how it has failed to fascinate Western
scholars by eluding binary classifications of East and West
that have been the focus of academic discussions about the
colonial and postcolonial underpinnings of healing tradi-
tions (p. 110). Indeed, Eckss ethnography is significant for
resisting such easy and reductive dichotomies.
As Falls summarizes:
When I started doing research [on diamonds], I was surprised
by the variety of ideas, images, and metaphors in consumers
stories that diverged from the ad-based associations with class and
romance that I had expected. Going far beyond those symbolic
associations, people treat diamonds as if they have personalities,
give them sacred histories, see them in terms that are primarily
metaphorical or poetic, or deploy them performatively. [p. 179]
What can we learn, she asks, from an analysis of these con-
sumers stories about the production of identity, creation of
kinship, and challenges to the status quo? How does material
culture help actualize selves and social relationships?
She proceeds to describe the history of diamond min-
ing, how the value of diamonds is determined (even en-
rolling in a course given by the Gemological Institute of
190 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
America on the grading of diamonds), and how public per-
ception is manipulated to turn an essentially valueless object
into a commodity worth thousands of dollars. Thus, as she
notes, a fine ten-carat stone, which costs about $15 a carat
to extract, is sold to an authorized rough stone buyer for
about $5,000 a carat, cut into a finished product (losing
some 50 to 70 percent of its caratage), sold to a retailer for
about $75,000, and finally retailed, some two years later, for
$125,000.
Diamond sales are widely successful, with 70 percent
of all U.S. women owning at least one diamond. Mar-
keters, no doubt, are partly responsible for creating the
meaning that attracts people to diamonds. Frances Gerty of
the N. W. Ayer advertising company coined what is one of
the most successful adverting slogans everDiamonds are
forever.
But the slogan and the association of diamonds with love,
romance, and status cant be the only reason for their success.
The majority of Fallss subjects rejected, sometimes vehe-
mently, the idea that their purchase or receipt of a diamond
had anything to do with the meaning created by advertisers.
They had their own personal, historically situated reasons
for valuing diamonds (e.g., a gift from a grandmother). Con-
sequently, the theoretical model associated with Ferdinand
de Saussure, in which a sign consist of only a signifier and
a signified, fails, she says, to recognize the idiosyncratic,
subjective, and creative activity by which consumers assign
meaning to commodities, as do structural models or those
derived from political-economy frameworks. She adopts,
instead, the framework of Charles Saunders Peirce in which
a sign is tripartite encompassing a sign-vehicle, an object,
and an interpretant (p. 83). Following Peirce, Falls suggests
that we need to identify three types of signsymbol, icon,
and indexthat allow us to account for highly individual,
R. Gordillo.
Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction by Gaston
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 336 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12464
Daniel M. Goldstein
Rutgers University
Modern popular culture reveals a fascination with ruins.
Television shows, novels, and films imagine the remains
of a postapocalyptic world and the fate of human-made
structuresboth social and materialafter the humans are
no longer around to maintain them. The destructive forces
that created these ruins are typically less of a concern than
are the struggles of those who remain.
In Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, Gaston R. Gordillo
turns an ethnographers eye to the material remnants of the
past in northern Argentinas Gran Chao region, their diverse
idiosyncratic, and crucial subjective renderings that are im-
portant to consumers themselves.
Given the spread of social media and the availability of
huge amounts of personal information available on the Inter-
net, it is clear that her observations are already prescient as
marketers directly appeal not only to market segments (e.g.,
Hispanics, African Americans, teenagers, white males, etc.)
but also to the subjectivity and idiosyncrasies of individual
consumers. Thus, a mention on Facebook of a failed romance
might trigger an ad from a dating serviceor, conversely,
mention of a new relationship might lead to an ad from
a jewelry company. Given the pressure under which mar-
keters work to assure that consumers buy more this year
than last, and more next year than this, in perpetuity, the
subjective and highly individual associations that Falls notes
consumers have with commodities is virtually certain to be
fully exploited by marketers.
Falls also offers a fascinating description and interpre-
tation of bling, the use of diamonds of exaggerated size,
color, or placement by celebrities, particularly rap, hip-
hop, or gangsta artists. Adopting the idea of ostranenie
making strangeas articulated by Russian formalist Victor
Shklovsky, she uses a literary analysis to suggest that hip-
hop, gangsta, and rap stars use bling to protest the racism,
sexism, and violence in U.S. society. Bling functions by
working against conventional expectations by exaggerating
and requiring special attention. It defamiliarizes and, by do-
ing so, requires often unpleasant interpretation.
Fallss work suggests, also, the political usage to which
her analysis can be applied. Do some politicians, for example,
use the equivalent of bling to distinguish themselves from the
highly stylized images constructed for typical candidates? In
addition, why are the meanings attached to political symbols
(e.g., the U.S. or Confederate flag) fraught with conflict?
meanings, and the violence they contain. The book is highly
original, deeply intelligent, and provocative in its many sur-
prising discoveries and insights. Although organizationally
problematic, methodologically quirky, and at times overly
theoretical, the book is a stirring example of ethnographys
power to reveal new perspectives on commonsense worlds
and to mobilize a set of localized concerns in the interpreta-
tion of broader global realities.
Gordillos point of departure is the very fascination with
ruins mentioned above, a fascination that he initially shares
but quickly discovers to be a bourgeois illusion. He distin-
guishes ruins from rubble, the former being objects of
supposedly transcendent value that feed the tourist imagi-
nation, the heritage industry, and the nationalist agendas of
state projects and politicians. Whereas ruins are imagined as

the past crystallized, disconnected from the present, and re-
presented as fetishes destined to be revered and celebrated,
rubble for Gordillo is uncoded negativity (p. 9). The very
idea of rubble, Gordillo tells us, is unsettling: it lacks glam-
our, form, and significance, and it points not to the glories
of some imagined past but to the fact of destruction that
produced it. Ruins and rubble thus evoke differing affective
responses. But whether a particular site is understood as
ruins or rubble depends on the observers political and class
position, a fact that Gordillo learned through his own ethno-
graphic encounter with rubble and the people who live amid
it. This is an insight that provides a core theme of the book,
demonstrating how ethnography can unsettle perspectives
of which the ethnographer was previously unaware. Writes
Gordillo: I arrived at the foot of the Argentine Andes look-
ing for ruins and found something much more complex
. . . I arrived there looking for debris from a distant past,
and residents taught me that those nodes of rubble, recent
and old, were part of the affective and social configurations
of the present (p. 19).
Unpacking rubbles dizzying multiplicity occupies the
remainder of the books chapters. Gordillo tracks the dif-
ferent kinds of rubble that he encounters across the Chaco
region, ranging from the precolonial to the very recent.
Insightfully, he explores the older sites of indigenous and
colonial habitation, now reduced to piles of stone through
war, conquest, and the ravages of time; yet, he also con-
siders more contemporary forms of rubble, produced by
the Argentine state and the predations of soy agribusiness,
whose massive machines level ground and obliterate all in
the name of economic and social progress. In each case,
he contrasts elite and local perspectives on rubble and the
destructiveness it embodies. Local responses often reflect
Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and
the Global Crisis of Authority by Zareena Grewal.
New York: New York University Press, 2013. 409 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12465
Erin E. Stiles
University of Nevada
Who speaks for Islam in America? In Islam Is a Foreign Coun-
try, Zareena Grewal poses and responds to this question in
an absorbing look at young Muslim travelers to the Middle
East. The subjects of her study are students from the United
States who are searching for an authentic form of Islamic
learning in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The context for these
journeys is the perceived global crisis of Islamic authority.
Grewal rightly frames the book as challenging conventional
understandings of the Muslim world, as a place and people
Book Reviews 191
the many hauntings that infest these places of rubble: the
ghosts of indigenous people long since destroyed or incorpo-
rated into local criollo (mixed race) bodies; the curses that
linger in sites of labor exploitation and abuse; the skeletons
of defunct railroads and of boats left stranded, incongru-
ously, in the forest; improvised shrines containing the bones
of Indians, quietly evoking the violence of past generations.
Gordillo examines what these sites mean to locals, how they
use the rubble in their own practices and productive activ-
ities, and how it invigorates local political critiques of the
state and its failure to address peoples needs.
The insights of this ethnography are so compelling that
one wishes that the organization of the text were a bit less
orchestrated. The book is divided into four parts, three of
which include a theoretical intermezzo followed by two or
three ethnographic chapters. But the conceptual analysis es-
capes these parameters and overflows into the ethnography,
at times threatening to overwhelm it. The narrative is peri-
odically interrupted by the sudden appearance of European
theorists, who arrive to colonize the books ethnographic
terrain. I would also have wished for a clearer description
of the authors methodology. The approach is multisited,
as a study of this kind demands; however, there is little
discussion of the details of the work itself (what the author
did, where, when, and with whom), and research that is
justifiably multisited ends up seeming peripatetic.
Nevertheless, the overall significance of the book is
beyond doubt. As Gordillo makes clear in the Conclusion,
the questions he asks of his material are not confined to the
Chaco region. At a time in which the planetary machinery
of spatial destruction is accelerating (p. 266), Rubble directs
much-needed attention to capitalisms destructive forces and
the political mobilizations the resulting devastation enables.
outside American geographic and cultural borders, and in-
stead charting an alternative, transnational Muslim world
imagined by American Muslims that includes them and the
U.S. (p. 6). Drawing on multisited ethnographic research,
Grewals ambitious work addresses authority and tradition,
transnationalism and citizenship, and gender and ethnicity
among U.S. Muslims.
A major strength of the book is the consideration of
the historical context of these eastward journeys. The three
chapters of part I address the crisis of Islamic authority in
the context of the 20th-century growth of the U.S. Muslim
community. Chapter 1 examines the perception of global
crisis among U.S. Muslims and the ensuing felt need for res-
olution that motivates young Muslims to head to the Middle
192 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
East; Grewal argues that their hopes for religious study
are merged with a particular moral geography of the Is-
lamic East as an Archive of Tradition (p. 36). Utilizing Saba
Mahmoods categorization of Islamic revival (2005), Grewal
characterizes her subject as an informal network of students
and scholars seeking revival through disseminating Islamic
knowledge (p. 48). In chapters 2 and 3, Grewal examines
the growth of the U.S. umma (Muslim community) in the
20th century, focusing on changing notions of moral geog-
raphy, citizenship, and authority among and across African
American and immigrant Muslims.
Part II is an ethnography of journeys to the archive of
tradition. Grewal works with itinerant students and teach-
ers from the United States in Amman, Damascus, and Cairo,
and each chapter includes engaging ethnographic vignettes.
Chapter 4 usefully critiques the familiar juxtaposition of
traditional and reformist scholarship by identifying more today (p. 295). Many readers will appreciate the focus on
nuanced orientations to Islamic learning among these schol-
ars: formalist, focused on continuity with the premodern
intellectual worlds of Islam through licensing expertise
(p. 204); pragmatist, in which classical pedagogical content
is more valuable than pedagogical form; and reformist,
whose advocates define their authority as a recurrence, not
a continuation, of the raw potential of Islams foundation
(p. 213). Chapter 5 carefully shows how the discourse of the
authority crisis is gendered, and Grewal offers an intriguing
look at female scholarly networks and leadership (e.g., the
Qubaysiyat in Syria). She discusses the double conscious-
ness of female Muslim scholars whose more likely struggle
is against the nafs (baser self) rather than patriarchy: they
hold a double burden of both proving that their religious
choices make sense and also reforming the intellectual
worlds of Islam in order for their tradition to survive
(p. 223).
The final two chapters examine travelers returns to
the United States. Chapter 6 considers the United States
as imagined by student travelers as part of the moral ge-
ography of modern Islam. Many such travelers view them-
selves as custodians of tradition in the present (p. 256) as
they journey home from the Middle East. Grewal writes of
the compelling nature of a progressive growth narrative
Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand
by Jocelyne Guilbault and Roy Cape.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12466
Donald Hill
SUNY College at Oneonta
For decades, Roy Cape has played saxophone and lead bands
in numerous venues, maintaining a vernacular Caribbean
(p. 265)after study in the Middle East, the young student
travelers aim to come back to build the umma in the United
States. However, while many perceive the United States as
place of possibility, they are ambivalent about the future of
Islam in the United States; in addition, debates about over
what constitutes authoritative knowledge may limit what
such travelers are able to accomplish back home. Chapter 7
considers an earlier influential generation of student travel-
ers with respect to the pronounced mediatization of Islamic
authority and scholarship in the post9/11 United States.
By considering the influence of and challenges facing leading
figures (e.g., Hamza Yusuf), movements (e.g., the Progres-
sive Muslim Union and Gender Jihad), and patterns (e.g.,
in African American Muslim religious authority) in Muslim
American counterpublics, Grewal adeptly addresses what
it means to be good Muslim citizens in the United States
media and current events in this chapter.
In sum, Grewals innovative focus on student travelers
makes for a fascinating and insightful look at U.S. Muslims
today. The distinctive subject matter and accessible writing
style will attract readers outside anthropology and beyond
academia, and through considering debates about authority
and authenticity in the search for Islamic knowledge, Grewal
engages with an area of great interest in the anthropology
of Islam. Grewals major contribution is the attention to
how such debates play out among U.S. Muslims today grap-
pling with the question of who speaks for Islam? Although
the book is (commendably) written for a broad audience,
anthropologists may wish for a more detailed discussion of
methodology. Intriguing moments of reflexivity throughout
(e.g., Grewal describes her approach as reflective partici-
pation rather than participant-observation) and tantalizing
clues about methodologically relevant issues are very wel-
come but may leave readers wanting more discussion of her
ethnographic methods than a brief footnote in chapter 1.
REFERENCE CITED
Mahmood, Saba
2005 Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Sub-
ject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
sound that, as often as not, accompanied calypso, soca,
and chutney singers in shows or Carnival contests, both
at home in Trinidad and Tobago and abroad. Jocelyne
Guilbault, a long-time professor of Music at the University
of California at Berkeley, is one of the few non-Caribbean
ethnomusicologists who has researched Eastern Caribbean
music as if she is an insider, particularly from the perspective

of band members rather than headline singers. Together in
unique collaboration, this matched pair has created a short
book that both illuminates the career of a pivotal musician
and constructs a refreshing approach to narrative, diologic
ethnomusicology.
Capes purpose here is to educate and inform; he ing the music that touches him is not new in the field of
traces his professional life and informs the reader about the
musicians in the bands he has been in and the bands he has led
(p. xi). He discusses with Guilbault just how he has bridged
and continues to bridge the social and musical sensibility gap
between musicians and calypsonians. Jocelyne Guilbault
sees this decades-long interaction between her and her alter
ego as an experiment in storytelling, which she spells out
in the Introduction (p. xii). The book is a way to dynamically
learn Capes world rather than simply objectify a musicians
life and times. In a Bakhtinian feast, the meat of the book
is constantly ingested, digested, and re-eaten so that each
chapter is reflected in the other chapters, just as Capes
story is in constant, serendipitous metamorphosis. Chapter
1, For the Love of Music, reviews Capes early life Bakhtinian theory.
growing up poor and in an orphanage. Chapter 2, Working
as a Bandsman, covers his early career playing in various
bands between 1959 and 1970. Chapter 3, Listening to
Roy Sounding, shows Guilbaults method well: an exegesis
unfolds that reveals Capes rich sound, which he in part
developed from listening closely to calypsonians, recordings
of saxophone players in many genres, and to the radio.
The dialogue between the two authors further elicits an
understanding of that wonderful sound. Chapter 4, Leading
the Band, tells how Cape evolved his bands. Again, chapter
5, Remembering with Pictures, is a good illustration of
Guilbaults technique as the authors discuss of a series of
photographs of band members, Cape himself, calypsonians,
and others. Chapter 6, Working with Roy, consists of
brief biographies of and discussions with band members.
The seventh and final chapter, Circulation: Summarizing
a Career, is just thatan overview. The book also
Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational
Conflict in Papua New Guinea by Courtney Handman.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 328 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12467
Brian M. Howell
Wheaton College
In her book about translation and denominational conflict
among the Guhu-Samane of Papua New Guinea, Courtney
Handman includes this joke: a rescue ship finds a Protestant
who has been marooned on a deserted island. He points out
Book Reviews 193
includes an Afterword, notes, a Selected Discography,
references, and an index. A CD may be purchased with the
book, although the review copy did not come with a CD.
A study using photographs, biographies of musicians,
and an unfolding construction of a musicians world by not-
ethnomusicology. However, this work notably rests on, and
is a variation of, eons-old dialogue, most notably Platos
rendering of Socrates or more recently Richard Prices var-
ious studies of maroon cultures in the Caribbean and South
America, most especially First-Time: The Historical Vision of
an African American People (2002). As for treatment of bands,
there is the book and ten-CD box set, West Indian Rhythm
(Classic Calypso Collective 2006), which contains biographs
of both calypsonians and musicians and is rich with pho-
tographs and ephemera by the Calypso Collective. The
Bakhtinian diologicat first a whisper in scholardom, then
a shouthas subsided in recent years. But Roy Cape: A Life
on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand pays its due homage to
I remember hearing and talking with Roy Cape once in
Brooklyn in an upstairs, round-the-corner dance venue and
seeing his band at the Spektakula Calypso Tent on Nelson
Street in Port of Spain in the mid-1980s. Those brief en-
counters are made much richer by this book, which gives
appropriate credit to Cape, to his band, and to the decades-
long personal research of Guilbault.
REFERENCES CITED
Classic Calypso Collective, ed.
2006 West Indian Rhythm: Trinidad Calypsos on World and Local
Events Featuring the Censored Recordings, 19381940. Book
accompanying a 10-CD box set [n.d.] Hamburg: Bear Family
Records, BCD 16623.
Price, Richard
2002 First-Time: The Historical Vision of an African American
People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
the world he created while living alone there, his house, his
barn, and his church. He then points to another building,
explaining, And thats the church I used to go to (p. 9).
This well-known joke gets at a common phenomenon
among Protestant Christians everywhere: church schism
and denominational conflict. Protestants themselves often
lament these events as symptoms of sinfulness, and an-
thropologists have typically framed these events in politi-
cal terms. Handman provides one of the first ethnographic
194 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
studies in the burgeoning anthropology of Christianity to ad-
dress and theorize this phenomenon head on. Through subtle
analyses of history, social practice, and linguistic ideology,
Handman explores how Christian projects are forever re-
newable through the introduction of new denominations or
technologies of critique, like translation (p. 9). In Critical
Christianity, Handman provides an important new perspec-
tive on how Christianity might be considered not merely the
object of critique but also a space for and means of social and
cultural critique.
The first part of the book focuses on mission history
and translation practices and theory of the Summer Institute
of Linguistics (SIL) workers among the Guhu-Samane
living in the Waria River Valley of the PNG highlands.
Their commitment to translation into heart languages
and resulting fixing of linguistic boundaries created ethnic
categories and changed sociality among those would come to
embrace the Christian religion. In Parts II and III, Handman
develops the consequences of these linguistic boundaries and
ideologies, particularly as Christian sociality came to replace
the organization of the mens house. In a manner echoing,
but distinct from, Joel Robbinss well-known analysis of
Urapmin Pentecostals, the resulting social life of the various
Christians groups resulted in an unstable and shifting set of
relationships. Handmans distinctive contribution is a focus
on how denominational schism (in particular, the revival
church) served as the source of community, inculcating
a kind of communicative individualism, and fomented
individualist critique of Christian (i.e., social) practice.
The result is predictably unstable, leading to further
schism.
Rather than viewing denominational schism as a source
of cultural malaise or a sort of maladaptive ideology, Hand-
man develops a nondialectal explanation for the productive
role it serves. In both local Christian theology of the rem-
nant and widespread Melanesian norms of personhood, the
social processes located in such instability serve as the basis
for critique and possibility of transformation. The longevity
of a group, she argues, should not be seen as the primary
index of its cultural value for either local people or for
social scientists (p. 23). The only ones troubled by such
event-based sociality, she writes, will be the structural
functionalist anthropologist looking for segmentary descent
systems (p. 23).
Throughout the book, Handman puts to use her skills
as an astute and well-trained linguist, as well as her talents
as an ethnographer and cultural anthropologist. She is able
to dig deeply into the linguistic features of Guhu-Samane, as
well as Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of PNG. For example,
when exploring the work of the main SIL translator of the
G-S New Testament, Handman deftly analyzes the technical
choices made among terms, idioms, and expressions
in specific biblical passages to illustrate the underlying
ideologies and tease out the consequences for the social and
religious practices of these contemporary Christians (e.g.,
pp. 116119). At the same time, she is able to present a
wealth of ethnographic observation and interaction to reflect
on the ways those Christians (re)produce their Christianity
in everyday life. Chapter 5 gives an especially vivid picture of
how linguistic anthropology and sociocultural anthropology
work together in Handmans book to make an exceptionally
rich analysis in which she explores the changing roles of
speech as a consequence of these particular linguistic ide-
ologies pushing out and merging with prior understandings
of sociality previously organized through the mens house
system.
As a part of the anthropology of Christianity, the book
contributes to an undertheorized aspect of religious life
and practice and positions itself smartly among current
work in the field. Published as the 16th book in the
Anthropology of Christianity series from University of
California Press, Handman is particularly well engaged with
the other works in that series, along with some important
contributions by key voices such as Fenella Cannell and
Birgit Meyer. Absent were a few recent contributions to
the literature that could have spoken to the central issues
herefor example, Joseph Websters (2013) work on
Scottish fishermen and Liana Chuas (2011) on Malaysian
ethnic minority evangelicals. Given, however, Handmans
extensive work with diverse literatures in history,
missiology, linguistics, and socialcultural anthropology,
this is a small matter in an otherwise excellent work. This
book deserves a wide reading among those seeking to develop
an understanding of global Christianity in the anthropological
literature.
REFERENCES CITED
Chua, Liana
2011 The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship,
and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Webster, Joseph
2013 The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among
Scottish Fishermen. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan
by Joseph D. Hankins.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12468
Emma E. Cook
Hokkaido University
Burakuthe Japanese word for neighborhoodis also a
euphemism for a group of people historically stigmatized as
a result of engaging in labor considered unclean or polluting,
such as leather and meat production. Studies of Buraku, and
other minorities in Japan, date back to the 1960s; however,
multiculturalism has been mobilized only since the mid-late
1990s as a concept through which to explore minority ex-
periences. The existenceand othernessof these groups
has primarily been used to challenge the idea of Japans ho-
mogeneity and to provide evidence of multiculturality. This
book, however, moves beyond such an approach. Through
fieldwork in a tannery and examination of the NGO Inter-
national Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and
Racism (IMADR), as well as extensive engagement with the
Buraku Liberation League (BLL), Hankins has produced an
exemplary ethnography of the complex realities of Buraku
experiences and politics in contemporary Japan. He offers
not only deep insight into political, ethical, and personal is-
sues currently (and historically) experienced by members of
this group but also a sophisticated argument of the making of
multiculturalism. Laborof occupations, recognition, and
multiculturalismis the main focus, and Hankins argues
that it is through these different types of labor that both
Buraku and multiculturalism is made.
The core argument is developed in chapters 1 and 2,
in which he asserts that multiculturalism necessitates vari-
ous kinds of labor to produce convincing signs of minority
status and that this labor of multiculturalism sits nestled
between the work of representation and work represented
(pp. 910). There is no tidy causality at play in this work;
rather, such labor constitutes a relationship that is continually
being worked and reworked. Not only does this transform
the people doing stigmatized forms of labor, but through
their actions organizations become recognizable, particu-
lar minority groups become legible, and Japan is seen as a
multicultural nation. A considerable tension, however, is
that while Buraku political movements rely on particular
signssuch as tannery laboras proof of Buraku status,
these types of work are gradually disappearing. Moreover,
more people are choosing to pass as regular Japanese or
are unaware that they could be classified as Buraku, both of
which further complicate the politics of both the BLL and
the labor of multiculturalism.
Book Reviews 195
In chapters 3 and 4, Hankins examines how multicul-
turalism, as a particular liberal mode of governing, is a tool
for managing social difference, which both disciplines and
transforms the groups that it includes or excludes. As a
tool, it demands vigilance: always looking for groups that
demonstrate both a distinct cultural core as well as being
recipients of social harm. In analyzing the ways that mul-
ticulturalism manages (and demands) difference, Hankinss
work both complements and departs from existing stud-
ies of multiculturalism in Japan. Furthermore, by locating
Buraku as a shifting and historically contingent group, he
opens up opportunities to explore why particular represen-
tations of difference and authenticity emerge at particular
points in time. Hankins does this by tracing out Buraku
experience, discourse, and political movements since the
beginning of the 20th century and by analyzing the complex-
ity and discord that emerges from changing ideas of what
constitutes Buraku. Such complexity is reflected in the dif-
ferent ways that the BLL have attempted to create particular
publicsone via human rights discourses, another through
denunciationsin their attempts to combat discrimination
and to bring about antidiscrimination legislation, which has
yet to exist in Japan.
In chapters 5 and 6, Hankins move us out of domes-
tic politics to examine Buraku politics internationally and
the cultivation of international solidarity between Buraku
and other minority groups, such as the Dalit of South Asia,
through shared ethical commitments and movements of peo-
ple and money. In particular, he investigates the kind of labor
in which Buraku movements engaged to foster the creation,
in 2002, of the UN category of Discrimination Based on
Work and Descent. Hankins argues that such classification
has created new possibilities for labor to be used as a discrete
social category through which an authentic culture and
identity can be signified and shared across disparate groups.
Moreover, he analyzes how political solidarity between the
Buraku and Dalit has been created and maintained through
shared painboth psychological and physicalthat enables
sympathetic engagements of solidarity with (rather than
feeling for) to be effectively cultivated. Despite very dif-
ferent experiences of discrimination, these groups are able
to work together and feel in solidarity, fragile though it may
sometimes be.
Hankins has written a fascinating ethnography that ex-
amines the complexities and contradictions inherent in
the labor of multiculturalism. Located in historical con-
text, and intricately interweaving experiences of individ-
ual, political, economic, and transnational actors, it is
196 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
an impressive analysis of how divergent experiences, dis-
positions, and positionings within and beyond Japan are
linked in a web that transcends national borders and works
Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central
Banks. Douglas R. Holmes.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12469
Keith Hart
The London School of Economics and Political Science
In Economy of Words, Douglas Holmes reports on his inquiries
into contemporary monetary regimes, meaning central
banks and their offshoots. He does not offer an explanation
of the current crisis of world economy, and his analysis lacks
historical depth. Rather, he documents a recent trend for
economic management to hinge on persuasive communi-
cations aimed at various groups of actors and the general
public. To this end, Holmes provides numerous extracts
from written documents and reported speech, including his
own conversations with officials and others. The economy is
now significantly a matter of wordshence the title of his
book.
Many chapter headings reflect this emphasis: Com-
municative Imperatives, Markets Are a Function of
Language, Kultur, Simulations, The Overheard Con- in 2012 to support the euro to the hilt and it would be
versation, Representational Labor. Language undoubt- enough, rates on the sovereign bonds of some beleaguered
edly plays a big part in most human activities. Our greatest
economistsAdam Smith, Karl Marx, Maynard Keynes
have been acutely aware of the role of rhetoric in dissem-
inating their ideas. Smith gave lectures on Rhetoric and
Belles Lettres for 15 years and had them destroyed at his
death, presumably to cover up how he wrote Inquiry into
the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1961[1776]).
Moreover, economics has now shifted from the hard analy-
sis of past and present facts to vague prognostications of the
future. Bank loans are granted not on an applicants record
but on his prospects. For over three decades, one economic
model has dominated public policy, leaving us to arrange the
deckchairs in word games while the economy plows ahead
on its disastrous course.
Development was once about how the poor might
concretely better their lot. But from the 1980s, many
anthropologists were persuaded by poststructuralism that
development was just talk. Neoliberal economics played a
part in this. Whereas development had hitherto been an in-
terdisciplinary debate about political economy, it was now
monopolized by economists who believed that they just had
to fix the prices in a model that was unassailable.
to create a multicultural Japan. Its highly recommended
for anyone interested in multiculturalism, labor, and
minorities.
Holmes has performed a valuable service here. It is
not easy to study up, and he has garnered many reveal-
ing insights from the powerful and not so powerfulsome
already made public but many not. There is also a bril-
liant compendium of Keyness obiter dicta (the author likes
Latin tagsits catching). The great man would surely have
appreciated Holmess initiative. In his own Essays in Persua-
sion (2009[1931]), short pieces published between 1919 and
1931, Keynes hammered across a simple message: spend,
dont save. But he also explained the class conflict underly-
ing the choice between inflation and deflation. Debtors gain
from inflation; creditors and savers lose; and vice versa for
deflation.
Economy of Words will not help most readers to figure out
the economic tsunami that threatens to engulf us all. The
euro is a time bomb waiting to blow up the world economy.
Holmes has quite a lot to say about this particular crisis,
but none of it is critical. We already know that when the
European Central Bank governor, Mario Draghi, promised
Southern countries tumbled dramatically and the eurozone
crisis went quiet for a couple of years. But what made this
utterance temporarily effective? Which interests shaped the
immediate effect and why?
The European Union has generated more misleading
rhetoric than most: the European family and so on. But
events of this summer revealed a harsher social reality
than mere words. The confrontation between the Greeks
and the Germans, their allies, the European Commission,
and the European Central Bank was brutal. The ECB forced
the closure of Greeces banks at the peak of negotiations.
The role of the commercial banks, particularly French and
German banks, remains opaque. Read Michael Lewiss The
Big Short (2011) to find out how they were overexposed in
the subprime crisis and have still not cleaned up their toxic
assets. Many of us imagined that the Lehman crash would
undermine neoliberalism. But Philip Mirowski, in Never Let
a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013), has shown how and why it
has been strengthened by the crisis. His method is historical
and critical, not least of us academics.
Money and language are both powerful means of com-
munication with overlapping and distinct features. There

is next to nothing about money in this book. We are of-
fered language instead of money (and of anything resembling
economic analysis). This pattern is not unique: in the new
ethnography of finance, one hardly ever sees money men-
tioned. Rather, these monographs are mostly concerned
with knowledge and its communication, as if the firms in-
volved had the same priorities as academic departments.
Anthropologists often ask why we lack public impact. One
reason is that we write for other anthropologists so that they
can feel at home when addressing alien topics like money.
Holmess book will not take his fellow professionals out of
their comfort zone.
The Ecology of Pastoralism by P. Nick Kardulias, ed.
Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. 272 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12470
Holly Miller
University of Nottingham
International bodies estimate that there are some 120 to
200 million pastoralists worldwide, in addition to the
500 million people in developing countries, 600 million
globally, who rely on small holding farms that support
pastoral activities (CC-BY-SA Heinrich Boell Foundation
2014). In a volume that sets out to discuss both the human and
biological ecology of such groups, consisting of a vast array
of people and animals in variable environmental settings, P.
Nick Karduliass collection of ten case studies is an interest-
ing mix and one that clearly demonstrates a central idea: pas-
toralism is a spectrum of highly variable, flexible strategies.
While the term pastoralist often conjures stereotypical
images of African cattle herders or groups of Bedouin sur-
rounded by goats and camels, this collection of essays, featur-
ing groups from Late Bronze Age Mongolia to mechanized
Irish dairy farmers, is part of a growing body of literature
that undermines such generalizations. Despite a seemingly
broad scope, the volume is patchy, as Kardulias admits in the
introductionthe studies are not as geographically diverse
as was initially intended. The result is an unintended focus
on Eurasian pastoralism; however, the five initial studies
that deal with this region are an important reflection of how
research has opened up in this area and the major body of
work that has therefore been enabled in recent decades.
Through the use of archaeological and anthropological
methodologies, each study in turn serves to illustrate
variable aspects of mobility, social interaction, and market
involvement that characterize the lives of pastoralist groups,
past and present. Among chapters of a consistently high
standard, outstanding contributions by Homayun Sidky
Book Reviews 197
REFERENCES CITED
Keynes, J. M.
2009[1931]Essays in Persuasion. Amazon: CreateSpace Indepen-
dent Publishing Platform.
Lewis, Michael
2011 The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York:
Norton.
Mirowski, Philip
2013 Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism
Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.
Smith, Adam
1961[1776]Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations. London: Methuen.
and Michelle Negus Cleary highlight key themes of the
volume. The take-home messagethat many pastoralists
practice combined adaptive strategies, such as pastoralism
with agricultural activitiesis shown particularly well
through Sidkys discussion of the Hunzakutz of Hunza. The
Hunzakutz strategyone that includes cultivation of
cereals, vegetables, and fruit and nut treesprovides
enough agricultural resources that, although they practice
cattle husbandry and transhumance, they are not reliant on
economic relationships with sedentary farmers. To some
this will be revelatory, as such trading partnerships between
the steppe and the sown are often seen as a cornerstone
of successful adaptation, particularly for groups that are
stereotypically understood to be pastoralists.
Crucially, at the heart of Sidkys contribution is the
fact that, despite a spectrum of complementary and flexi-
ble strategies, a reliance on pastoral activities remains un-
changed. The fundamental humananimal relationship that
this represents is often missing from other studies featured.
The discussion of how animal management is incorporated
into Hunzakutz ideology and rituals is a welcome diversion
in a volume that otherwise draws, almost exclusively, on
economic and social factors.
Clearys archaeological study of the Late Iron Age of
the Chorasmian Oasis in Central Asia is another important
criticism of the dualistic assumptions of the steppe versus
sown. In this case, long and repeated integration by pastoral
and agricultural communities in the region is attested by ev-
idence that suggests Kalas and Kurgans were built and used
by both groups. Rather than accepting the received wisdom
that fortified sites could only have been built by settled agri-
culturalists, Cleary emphatically links the sites to pastoralist
settlement patterns, interpreting the fortifications as cen-
ters of administrative, economic, and ritual practices, mark-
ing and protecting territory by communicating important
198 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
messages through monumental, and communal, endeavor.
This suggests that the multifunctional buildings were as flex-
ible as the groups who used them.
In a number of cases, the authors admirably strive to
illustrate how the pastoralists featured in these case studies
move discussions of such groups beyond evolutionary or
Marxist explanations (P. Nick Kardulias, Claudia Chang,
Nikolay Kradin, Michelle Negus Cleary, and Thomas D.
Hall). The result is almost a default switch to world systems
analysis, with its focus on economic and social interactions.
While this is entirely appropriate for discussions of ecology,
it may result in an unresolved yearning for more information
on the cultural variability within and between the groups
under discussion.
Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health by
Salmaan Keshavjee.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12471
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
University of Maryland
As one of the poorest republics in the former Soviet Union,
Tajikistans transformation to an independent nation in 1991
was plagued by what can only be called a humanitarian cri-
sis. A civil war had broken out in 1992 and would continue
until 1997, resulting in an estimated 300,000 deaths and
850,000 refugees. Living standards had severely declined
during this time period, with per capita GDP falling from
$2,870 in 1990 to $215 in 1998, and public services, includ-
ing healthcare, had collapsed. The impact on the populace
was devastatinglife expectancy dropped from 72.3 years
for women and 67.1 years for men in the early 1990s to 67.5
and 61.1, respectively, by 1998. Infant and maternal mor-
tality rates, along with communicable diseases, increased
rapidly as the provision of public goods and services came
to a halt. The situation was much more dire in Badakhshan,
a remote and mountainous region of Tajikistan that became
even more isolated in the aftermath of war once travel and
access were made nearly impossible by the destruction of
roadways. Badakhshans residents, who had once survived
on direct food and fuel deliveries from Moscow, were now
facing death from starvation and exposure to the severe
cold. During this critical period, the Aga Khan Founda-
tion (AKF), along with other multilateral organizations and
NGOs, stepped in to provide not only emergency assistance
but also to implement a social service system to deliver nec-
essary and vital public services that were once provided by
the Soviet Union. In the case of Badakhshan, AKF pursued
The Ecology of Pastoralism is a dynamic and provocative
contribution to the archaeological and anthropological liter-
ature of pastoral societies. Each of the case studies featured
illustrates diverse and adaptable strategies used by pastoral
peoples, something that is just beginning to emerge beyond
the image of the stereotypical mobile herder living on the
margins of sustainability.
REFERENCE CITED
CC-BY-SA Heinrich Boell Foundation
2014 The Meat Atlas. Berlin: CC-BY-SA Heinrich Boell Founda-
tion, Friends of the Earth Europe.
privatization to create a sustainable market for essential
medicines while at the same time addressing the shortages
of high-quality pharmaceuticals through the creation of a
revolving drug fund.
Against this backdrop, physician-anthropologist
Salmaan Keshavjees ethnography, Blind Spot, is a notable
journey deep into Tajikistans majestic Pamir Mountains
where Badakhshan is located. It is an account that helps
us understand not only the localized suffering of those
facing an extremely precarious future but also the broader
ideological framework of neoliberalism that exacerbates this
suffering. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted
in this remote and isolated region of Central Asia after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Keshavjee portrays the
real-life impacts of neoliberal ideology on the health and
well-being of Badakhshanis. Using a case study of the
provision of essential medicines, Keshavjee argues that
the introduction of a revolving drug fundnamely, a
plan to sell medicines to a poor and highly vulnerable
populationin the aftermath of extreme social, political,
and economic upheaval was driven more by aspirations to
institute neoliberal values into this previously communist
territory by way of global health development than a desire
to safeguard the needy and the vulnerable.
Keshavjee begins his exploration of the transformation of
healthcare in the Badakhshan region from a universal, social-
ized system under the Soviet regime to a privatized venture
guided by the priorities of Western and international donors
in 1995 as a consultant for AKF. It was during this time
that AKF had received funding to deliver healthcare to the
region, including providing essential medicines. The revolv-
ing drug funds mission, Keshavjee argues, drew from the

Bamako Initiative, a strategy developed by global leaders in
1987 to respond to the increasing number of poor countries
who were unable to provide basic primary healthcare and
to purchase medicines for their citizens. The response con-
sisted of shifting the responsibility of medical expenses from
governments directly to individuals. Despite the precarious
situation faced by many in Badakhshan, a market-driven ide-
ology by way of user financing of health services was seen
as the only viable option of delivering medicine to the pop-
ulation. Keshavjee asserts that, despite a lack of empirical
data and programmatic evidence, the idea that people, even
the most economically destitute, would be willing to pay for
their own medicine was seen as a fundamental step toward
political democracy and a move away from totalitarianism
and communismthese movements being key tenets of ne-
oliberal ideology. The privatization of healthcare, Keshavjee
argues, has become a commonsense strategy all across the
former Soviet Union and the developing world, so much
so that it creates blind spots, where the implementation
Culturing Bioscience: A Case Study in the Anthropology of
Science by Udo Krautwurst.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 224 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12472
Michael M. J. Fischer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For those enamored of redescribing science and its institu-
tions in terms of fluids (currents and eddies) and entangle-
ments or relationalities, Culturing Bioscience is a delightful
primer on science studies. Among the best, if fleeting, mo-
ments are explanations of Niels Bohrs complementarity (in
contrast to Werner Heisenbergs uncertainty principle) as
superimposition of possible outcomes, tipped when an ad-
ditional eddy occurs. Seventeen textboxes with concepts
associated with ten female and nine male authors in science
studies and anthropologywith Karen Barads agential re- liquid chromatography to the setting up of, first, a vet-
alism as the guiding light (1999, 2000, 2007)accompany
a case study of the setting up of a neuroscience lab within
an open concept, multi-user facility at the University of
Prince Edward Islands Atlantic Center for Comparative
Biomedical Research (ACCBR).
Some key names and concepts inevitably are missing.
Among those I miss are the Canadian scholars Peter Keating
and Alberto Cambrosios (2006, 2011) notions of biomed-
ical platforms (also a mode of shared core facilities) and
protocols within distributed networks of collective science
beyond the epistemological capacities of any individual. Such
absences are tokens, perhaps, of a tendency toward a kind of
epistemological absolutism beyond good enough pragma-
Book Reviews 199
of these ideals necessitates the neglect of important local
needs and programs like the revolving drug fund continue
despite mounting evidence that they cause irreparable harm
to individuals and entire communities.
Additional ethnographic details of life in Badakhshan
during this period of immense suffering might have been
useful to readers, although this lacuna does not diminish the
value that the book brings to a much-neglected area in global
health scholarship. Moreover, Keshavjees arguments about
how neoliberal ideology through global health development
has contributed to poor health outcomes throughout the
developing world at times seem reserved; perhaps, as he
states in his introduction, this is due to concerns about how
such arguments could detract from the notable work of AKF
and other organizations. At a time when the term neoliberal-
ism still is misused and overused, Blind Spot provides much
greater clarity in our understanding of the specific agen-
das promoted by neoliberalism, including the distinct forces
involved and their relation to health delivery programs.
tism, as in the example of a thermometer at room tempera-
ture raising (ever so minutely) the temperature of a cold glass
of water (if it mattered, the thermometer could be chilled
first). Because everything is entangled in everything else, all
that was inter becomes intra, as in textual intra-ludes
(rather than interludes), an Intra-duction (rather than Intro-
duction), intra-vening (instead of intervening), intra-acting
(rather than interacting), intra-secting (rather than intersect-
ing). To counterbalance this weightlessness, the text moves
in conventional scales from experiment, to lab, to univer-
sity, to regional and national plans, and to global political
economies.
As one moves from the microtechniques of cell-patch-
clamping and adjusting the apparatuses of high-pressure
erinary school for the four Canadian Atlantic provinces,
then adding other innovation cluster components (a nursing
school, biotechnology-oriented MBA, bioscience technician
programs, a bioscience incubator park, the ACCBR, and the
wonderfully Orwellian-named Department of Innovation
and Advanced Learning), no bioscientific or biotechnology
narrative or strategy is identified (no more labs or bioscience
after chapter 1). Instead, there is coping with neoliberal
economic pressures, wrapped in the language of agential
realism, currents, eddies, and diffractions and verbs of ac-
tion (doing a university). The distinction between Modes
1 and 2 knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994) gets muddled and
reductive in the process: rather than being a difference in
200 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
types of urgent problems that require action with too many
unknowns, Mode 2 is recoded as merely applied science
adapted to current economic pressures.
ACCBR and its open concept lab was a social experiment
(p. 137) that in the end was virtualized, giving space to
toxicology and to individual labs, returning to individualist
rather than other kinds of incentive structures. One might
say larger forces prevailed, but agential realism seems to
insist that instead there were intra-acting evolutions, smaller
eddies drowned in larger currents.
Whether or not agential literacy should replace sci-
entific literacy, as is almost suggested (p. 138), is a query
about the goal and intention of the book. While it is true
that scientific literacy does not itself entail social responsibil-
ity (p. 138), social responsibility does entail some scientific
literacy.
There are two books in one in Culturing Bioscience: one
is on the philosophy of science couched as opposition to a
presumptive mechanical (Newtonian) view of science, and
one is on PEIs experience trying to build a bioeconomy
cluster with some light comparisons and contrasts to a lab in
Wisconsin (described by Kleinman [2003]), biocapitalism in
Andra Pradesh (described by Sunder Rajan [2006]), Biopolis
in Singapore (a fieldsite of mine [Fischer 2013]), Silicon
Valley, and general theories of clustering for innovation.
The former is dominant. We learn less about the neuro-
science or other labs, or about the bioscientists own lives
and imaginations of what they are about. The changing nature
of the contemporary university is adduced (albeit missing the
foundational accounts for Canada by Jean-Francois Lyotard
[1979] and Bill Readings [1997], who sketched out the dy-
namics of the emerging information economy and the audit
culture in the 1970s80s).
Composting (to invoke Donna Haraways [2015] term)
an introductory text in the anthropology of the life sciences
is no easy task these days amidst the different currents and
eddies of matters of concern, and this text manages admirably
to cite many key names in its witty, possibly ironic, tour
of the field. While I have no particular objection to the
Heraclitean metaphors of currents and eddies, or quantum
physics derived metaphors of entanglements, I find them less
incisive and provocative to either scientists own views or
those of presumptive general opinion than those enamored
of these terms seem to think.
REFERENCES CITED
Barad, Karen
1999 Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understand-
ing Scientific Practices. In The Science Studies Reader. Mario
Biagioli, ed. Pp. 111. New York: Routledge.
Barad, Karen
2000 Reconceiving Scientific Literacy as Agential Literacy: Or,
Learning How to Intra-Act Responsibly within the World. In
Doing Science and Culture. Roddy Reid and Sharon Traweek,
eds. Pp. 221248. New York: Routledge.
Barad, Karen
2007 Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press.
Fischer, Michael M. J.
2013 Biopolis: Asian Science in the Global Circuitry. Science,
Technology, and Society 18(3):381406.
Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon
Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow
1994 The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Sci-
ence and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE.
Haraway, Donna
2015 Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,
Chthulucene. Environmental Humanities, May [No. 6].
http://environmentalhumanities.org/archives/vol6/, acce-
ssed December 3, 2015.
Keating, Peter, and Alberto Cambrosio
2006 Biomedical Platforms. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Keating, Peter, and Alberto Cambrosio
2011 Cancer on Trial: Oncology as a New Style of Practice.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kleinman, Daniel Lee
2003 Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Com-
merce. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois
1979 La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir [The
postmodern condition: A report on knowledge]. Paris:
Minuit.
Readings, Bill
1997 The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Sunder Rajan, Kaushik
2006 Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham:
Duke University Press.

Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks
by Peter C. Little.
New York: New York University Press, 2014. 264 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12473
Peter Wynn Kirby
University of Oxford
Early in the second chapter of Peter C. Littles important
ethnography of Endicott, New Yorkthe now-toxic birth-
place of the global electronics behemoth IBMa photograph
displays the following proclamation on a rudimentary sign
(p. 19):
People Matter in Toxic Spills
This imperative statement could, indeed, serve as a la-
conic alternative thesis of Littles book. Largely through the
carefully recorded responses of residents and other stake-
holders in Endicott, Toxic Town probes the calamitous after-
math of IBMs decades of operations in the town, now a Su-
perfund site. IBMs legacy is most notoriously metonymized
in the plume, a massive zone of groundwater contamina-
tion, more than 300 acres in size, lurking beneath a once-
bustling middle-class residential area that is now weighed
down by collapsed property values, toxic anxieties, and
stigma. Trichloroethylene (TCE), a dangerous carcinogenic
solvent that degreases metals used in high-tech manufactur-
ing, and a range of other volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
slowly diffuse out of the ground in gaseous form into the
homes of residents in Endicott, leading to symptoms and
risk narratives of a highly contested nature.
IBM, for its part, argues that it has mitigated the sit-
uation (p. 4), mostly by installing ventilation systems in
affected homes and by slowly filtering and replenishing pol-
luted groundwater, a laborious and pointless-seeming, even
Sisyphean, effort. Yet many residents of Endicott, particu-
larly in the plume, vocally resist IBMs mitigation strategy
as little more than a cynical PR ploy, resenting the resulting
neglect and uncertainty and feeling particularly hostile to
the idea of being mitigated by a remote corporate machine
that clearly wanted to contain its liabilities post-exodus af-
ter the sale of the Endicott facility in 2002. This move is
characterized in such varied terms as deindustrialization,
corporate dynamism, creative destruction, corporate ethnographic research in a toxic zone: daily groping and
abandonment, and IBM homicide (p. 37). entanglement in risk narratives in the field, which might
It wasnt always thus in Endicott. One of the most
compelling features of the book is the contrast between
the bold, utopian rhetoric of free-enterprise-driven pros-
perity mobilized by IBM and the messy toxic aftermath in
the corporations very birthplace. Little exults in citing IBM
anthems (e.g., Hail to the IBM) and slogans that display
Book Reviews 201
a paternalist, and even fascist-seeming (p. 51), concern for
community development and employee engineering. From
Endicotts precarious 21st-century vantage, campaigns like
THINK and Building a Smarter Planet take on an un-
fortunate ironic significance when invoked in the context
of a depressed, gloomy, downsized residential community
exposed to a toxic soup of dangerous industrial chemicals
over many decades. IBMs early concern for community vi-
brancy, cohesion, and welfare once manifested in company-
sponsored concerts by the IBM band (p. 18), barbecues, and
other events, yet Big Blue began downsizing its role in the
community from the 1980s to its token presence today.
For all the books relevance to other parts of the world,
the aptly named Toxic Town really is primarily about this one
community and its long-running toxic plight. The introduc-
tory chapter would have been an excellent opportunity to
connect this case to numerous others internationally and to
describe how this toxic spill seeps into the wider pollutant
terrain of rapacious global capitalism, but Little orients the
chapter primarily toward the story of how he got inter-
ested in Endicott and the plume controversy while writ-
ing an undergraduate honors thesis (20022003) and how
this segued into his doctoral research (with fieldwork from
20082009). The conclusion, enticingly titled The Paradox
of IBMs Smarter Planet, does a somewhat better job of
relating Endicott to the big picture. Much of the conclusion
is, however, dedicated to debating the relevance of the en-
vironmental justice framework and to outlining a political
ecology perspective nestled at the interface of anthropology
and STS (p. 186) and similar themes.
Most of the intervening chapters relate informants per-
spectives, often with long (sometimes very long) excerpts
from field interviews. (One bracing example: The fact is
IBM took a dump on this community. They messed up here,
big time [p. xv].) Taken as a whole, these not only ex-
press the poetics of varied ethnographic subcultures, largely
those of activists and residents, but also the immense fa-
tigue of battling a giant corporation in litigation that many
residents believe will likely endure beyond their lifetimes.
Most of all, the book conveys the manifold ambiguities of
shift daily depending on interview findings, contested symp-
toms, poorly understood technologies, and murky political
vectors.
While drawing on excellent material, the book is
weighed down at times by redundancies and occasionally
clunky writing. Cutting 10,000 words would have made
202 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
the narrative leaner and forced decisions that would have
taken the prose further from the doctoral dissertation on
which it is based. Nevertheless, this is an important and
The Viral Network: A Pathography of H1N1 Influenza
Pandemic by Theresa MacPhail.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. 248 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12474
Peter J. Brown
Emory University
Global health requires global networksof people,
pathogens, and experts in the various sciences of public
health. This creative and insightful book investigates those
networks by focusing on the H1N1 influenza pandemic
of 20092010. Theresa MacPhails multisited research in-
cluded participant-observation in a microbiology laboratory
in Hong Kong, at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
in Atlanta, and among a community of influenza experts in
Berkeley and San Francisco.
MacPhail labels her work as a pathography, but she
does not mean this in the way the term is commonly used
in area of narrative medicine; the utility of the neologism,
as well as claims of a novel methodology, is debatable. The
book contains seven chapters that first outline the overall
problem, describe laboratory life, analyze the cultural trope
of China as the focal point of influenza, and analyze the
2009 story of quarantine in Hong Kong. The author argues
that a single, linear narrative of the pandemic is impossible;
therefore, multiple narratives are offered concurrently. The
book includes sophisticated discussions of uncertainty, pre-
dictable unpredictability, the management of data deluge,
and the benefits of studying scientific heretics. It is a won-
derful addition to the growing literature on the cultures of
global health.
The central character of the study is the Influenza A
virus in its multiple and ever-evolving subtypes, particularly
HINI which first appeared in Mexico City in the spring of
2009. This unexpected outbreak triggered an extraordinary
amount of concern, fear, and rapid scientific research. Public
health experts and policymakers had to predict the upcoming
flu season (including the quantity and type of flu vaccine to
be manufactured) in the face of extensive media coverage,
new sources of data, a global surveillance system, and the
ever-present reality of uncertainty.
This book represents a superb synchronic ethnographic
analysis of the multiple narratives of a network of experts
known as flu guys or the influenza mafia, depending on The work presumes a good deal of prior knowledge about
ones point of view. There are two primary groups in this
network. First, there are laboratory-based microbiologists
well-researched study of the surfacing narratives of the
U.S. tech industrys erstwhile model village that tragically
descended into Computer Age ruin (p. 16).
focusing on sequencing the influenza virus genome using
sophisticated new technologies. The author did fieldwork in
an influenza lab in Hong Kong, and she does a good job of
explaining the seven steps by which genetic data are created.
Interpretation of that data is another matter altogether. The
second group, epidemiologists at the CDC, must interpret
both the genetic data discovered by such labs as well as
evaluate the data coming from disease surveillance reports
from many parts of the world. This is difficult, and a central
theme throughout the book is uncertaintya reality that can
also be used as a discursive technique to convince socially
construct expertise.
The 20092010 H1N1 influenza (a.k.a. bird flu) came
at a time when gene sequencing could finally be done very
quickly, and accumulated data would be shared by a global
network of laboratories. Molecular biologists use these data
to construct evolutionary cladograms. The interpretation of
these viral family trees is controversial, but there is complete
agreement among labs that there needs to be more research
funds for more gene sequencing in order to understand
the origins of constantly changing virusand, therefore, to
help predict the future. MacPhail deftly uses the metaphor
of the sirens song to describe this unattainable quest for
knowledge, and she shows how orthodox lab scientists also
have their own interests at heart.
However, the epidemiologists at the CDC were not ex-
actly sure how to interpret these new genetic data in order to
do their job of prediction. Epidemiologists search for good
data that can only be evaluated through an understanding
of the broad context (an emic term) and be useful for deci-
sion making. Outside this network of expertise, the media
helped create an atmosphere of fear, most often by making
scary parallels with the famous 1918 pandemic.
The authors fieldwork tends to focus on heterodox sci-
entists who question the value of gene sequencing for the
prediction of pandemics. They also questioned the deci-
sions of political authorities in both China and Hong Kong
to impose strong protective measures in 2009including
quarantine and bird killingin opposition to the World
Health Organizations (WHO) recommendations.
There are certain weaknesses in the book that stand out.
the biology, ecology, and history of influenza. For example,
there is no definition of the term pandemic and no analysis of

what actually happened in the 1918 pandemic (most deaths
were in India and were caused by secondary infections and
undernutrition). The analysis is historically thin, such that
important events of the past, aside from 1918, are neglected:
these include the standard processes of flu prediction and
vaccine preparation before molecular genetics, the severe
influenza season of 1957, swine flu in 1976, the H5N1 swine
flu of 1997, the anthrax scare of 2001, the SARS pandemic
The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect
from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Joseph Masco.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12475
Catherine Lutz
Brown University
In telling the history of the United States in the 20th century,
historians tend to underplay the importance, massive scale,
and culturally complex nature of state-led transitions in U.S.
ways and means of war: from a nation with an army a mere
135,000 men strong in 1935 to one that was ten times as
large in 1955, and from a military equipped with artillery
and short-range flamethrowers to one with a vast arsenal of
nuclear weapons that could incinerate cities, peoples, and,
ultimately, the planet as a whole. The United States rapidly
became a nation centered emotionally, economically, and
culturally around the idea of global domination through
arms.
Joseph Masco, in this wide-ranging and deeply original
book, writes a cultural history of the transition that goes far
toward rectifying this lack. He writes with the ethnographic
background and subtleties of his earlier book (The Nuclear
Borderlands [2006]) on nuclear sciences shaping of a section
of New Mexico. Mainly, though, he writes as an anthropolo-
gist of state and popular culture archives from the immediate
postWorld War II period forward. This periodization al-
lows him to suggest a narrative of change from the era of
mass industrial warfare to that of nuclearism as well as to
advance an argument about how the Cold War and the War
on Terror both resemble and contrast with each other.
The Theater of Operations argues that the War on Ter-
ror was able to mobilize the U.S. population not simply
because an attack took place on their soil or because of
the political economic machinations of an elite but because
the already well-established affective politics of the Cold
War profusely supported its new and old appeals. The Cold
War atmosphere of fear (and here Masco tells an especially
compelling story of state management of that climate) had
created a vast infrastructure of expertise, technologies, and
sentiments all organized by the new idea that the United
Book Reviews 203
of 2003, and so forth. In terms of the relevant localities
of global health decision making during this pandemic, the
role of the World Health Organization is sorely missed.
In addition to the paucity of background information, the
book is clearly in the genre of science studies, which uses
a particular argot that may make it difficult for undergrad-
uates or even experts in microbiology and epidemiology to
understand.
States was a nation that lived under a constant existen-
tial threat, nuclear and otherwise. The argument goes far
beyond the idea that the military-industrial-state-expertise
complex produces the conditions for its own reproduction
to the notion that the United States has produce[d] the con-
ditions for its own instability . . . and then mobilize[d] the
resulting vulnerability of its citizens and systems to demand
an even-greater investment in security infrastructures (p. 2,
emphasis added). Several of the books chapters detail how
various kinds of technocratic and military expertise do the
work of defining the notions of threat and well-being and of
promoting the notion of preparedness. They do the latter by,
for example, redefining water supply systems from public
services into critical infrastructures that require more polic-
ing and less upgrading for improved health and resilience.
Each of the books chapters richly details some aspect
of the production of fear. The first documents the various
efforts in the early period of nuclearism to marshall expertise
both to imagine the nuclear apocalypse and its ruins and to
prepare the population (citizenry no more) to avoid panic,
trusting that state civil defense measures and advice would
be life saving. A second chapter shows that U.S. responses to
environmental crisis have often been transposed with those
of nuclearism, envisioning the planetary catastrophe of cli-
mate change in ways that nuclear exchange had already been
imagined. More hopefully, however, imagining catastrophe
and how to avert it might allow replacing the concept of
national security with that of global sustainability and sur-
vival. A next, remarkable chapter shows how the national
secrecy state that emerged in the nuclear era set permissive
conditions for a further massive growth of a secrecy regime
under the name of the terror threat. The War on Terror
borrowed from its predecessor here as well: every secret
revealed was already a state secret whose exposure entailed
potentially catastrophic, nuclear-scale consequences. Masco
argues that the historical archive of U.S. foreign and do-
mestic policy was further erased over the last decade-plus,
making the behavior of global actorsresponding in some
cases to that U.S. policyseem ever more irrational and
204 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
terrifying. A final case study examines the rise of biosecurity
noir by which new expertise, administrative instruments,
and objects of fear emerge in the 2000s, building again on
an affective infrastructure already available via Cold War
alarmist mobilizations.
Throughout, the book demonstrates how the means of
violence that the state monopolizes are not simply or even
mainly its weapons but, rather, its affective, imaginary, and
material infrastructural deployments. Nuclear attacks do not
come after 1945 and terror attacks rarely do, but Masco
explains how fear has become virtually the only language
that the state and its citizens speak intelligibly to each other.
This book would work well as a monograph for grad-
uate seminars in historical social science, the anthropology
The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses,
and Sexual Assault Intervention by Sameena Mulla.
New York: New York University Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12476
Susan DiVietro
Connecticut Childrens Medical Center
Trinity College
In The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual
Assault Intervention, Sameena Mulla provides a rich and trans-
formative analysis of the sexual assault forensic examination.
Using ethnography, interviews, and historical and technical
materials. Mullla explores the intersection of medical and
legal aspects of sexual assault intervention as it is imagined,
as it is informed by and informs popular culture, and as it is
experienced by victims, nurses, police, prosecutors, and ad-
vocates. Mulla documents the continued violences enacted
on victims bodiesbodies that are manipulated, poked,
prodded, and set into specific timelines in the creation of a
unique clinic-courtroom.
Mulla explores how clinical protocols for sexual assault
nurse examiners (SANEs) dictate that they are in a race
to quickly preserve rapidly deteriorating forensic evidence.
In so doing, the focus on evidence collection often over-
shadows the nurses role as care provider. As nurses often
note throughout the book, we are not here for the vic-
tim. The evidence contained in and on the victim is the
true patient, as DNA becomes validation and confirmation
of the sexual assault. Confidence in the power of DNA to
offer juridical truth stands in stark contrast to the reality of
rape kit backlogs and the minimal efficacy of DNA on court
outcomes. This is particularly true in assaults by known per-
petrators, where DNA does little to elucidate questions of
consent.
Mulla describes the painful details of the forensic exam-
ination. As nurses manage their emotional work by adopting
of the United States, expertise, subjectivity and affect, or
the state. Written in highly sophisticated engagement with
a wide range of theory, its writing nonetheless has a clar-
ity, crispness, and vividness that would allow it to be used
with advanced undergraduates to introduce them to what
is sure to be one of this decades most important works
in our field and in interdisciplinary study of the United
States.
REFERENCE CITED
Masco, Joseph
2006 The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post
Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
legal criteria to judge credibility of cases, this often translates
into a cool clinical affect sharply felt by victims. Mulla also
examines links between sexual and reproductive violence in
the use of emergency contraception as a therapeutic tech-
nique. The victim who refuses emergency contraception out
of a desire for a child reveals the assumptions and horrified
judgment of the nurse who interprets this as weakening
the legitimacy of the assault. Additionally, Mulla examines
how institutional documents work to reinforce particular
gendered stereotypes about (female) victims and (male)
perpetrators and how suspicions of patient noncompliance
either because of drug use, prior sexually transmitted
infections, or HIV statusaffect victim credibility and
therefore patient care.
While Mullas account verifies some long-known but
often underappreciated truths, such as the overwhelming
prevalence of sexual assault perpetration by intimates, she
also offers a unique and fresh perspective on the forensic
examination. Mullas brilliant analysis of time, timing, and
framing identifies how victims stories become shaped and in-
formed by law enforcement criteria. In this creation of time-
lines, time saturates the forensic examination. While these
stories conform to courtroom requirements, they hide be-
ginnings and endings, how rape is often part of the everyday
violence of victims lives, how demonstrating compliance
includes tolerating pain and discomfort of the examination
kit, and the impact of rape on fragile family relations. Mulla
provides contrasting narratives of violence and survival from
the law enforcement perspective, wherein assaults start and
finish with the encounter with a perpetrator, to the sur-
vivors, wherein assaults exist at the intersection of multiple
contexts involving family, friends, work, poverty, and race.
For the vast majority, this narrative does not include the
successful prosecution of a perpetrator.

SANE programs mark a dramatic improvement in the
handling of rape victims. While the purpose of SANE pro-
grams is to improve accurate collection and documentation
of forensic evidence, with the ultimate goal of increasing
prosecution of rapists, Mulla demonstrates the limits of this
goal. Preoccupation with forensic evidence supports persis-
tent myths about rape and appropriate victims and perpe-
trators. This focus transforms nurses into mechanisms of the
state, objective collectors of evidence. As such, nurses may
limit their crucial role as caregivers to patient-victims, whose
interaction with the medical-juridical world will likely be
entirely encapsulated by the evidence collection event. As
most cases dont move beyond this event, the evidence col-
lection not only helps victims articulate and understand their
Giving Up Baby: Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood,
and Reproductive Justice by Laury Oaks.
New York: New York University Press, 2015. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12477
Ellen Lewin
University of Iowa
Laury Oaks faced a serious challenge in choosing to write a
book about safe haven laws. The systemdevised to enable
new parents (almost always mothers) to give up their babies
without being prosecuteddepends on secrecy. The laws,
now on the books in all states but configured somewhat dif-
ferently in each jurisdiction, specify locations where babies
may be left, usually hospitals or fire stations, and do not
require any information from the person who leaves them.
So there is almost no record of the voices of these mothers.
What Oaks deals with in the absence of these voices are the
cultural assumptions that shape the domain of these laws and
that have made them so compelling to U.S. citizens across
the social spectrum. She does this deftly, placing the story of
safe haven laws in the context of a larger cultural narrative
about who can be a suitable parent as well as the national
fixation on the evils of abortion. She also connects the rise
of safe haven laws with the exigencies faced by impover-
ished or overwhelmed parents, who are ironically offered
safe havens instead of programs to help them manage par-
enthood. This approach enables her to write compellingly
about the larger issue of reproductive justice, to frame her
analysis within a critique of U.S. reproductive health and
social policy, and to point to approaches that might make
safe havens less necessary.
Given the fact that girls and women who avail them-
selves of safe haven laws are almost never visible, Oakss
interlocutors are the media, the testimony of legisla-
tors, persons who accept babies who are left at safe
Book Reviews 205
experiences of assault but also provides the primary context
in which they receive care.
Mullas book is a highly engaging and valuable contribu-
tion to work on sexual assault, gender, power, and the
intersection of medical, juridical, and criminal justice
worlds. Mulla ultimately clarifies that the violences imposed
on sexual assault victims throughout the forensic examina-
tion are not the conscious goal of nurses but emerge from the
training regimes, technological tools, documentation styles,
and ethical orientations of legal and medical models designed
to produce a uniquely forensic encounter. This system re-
quires thoughtful analysis of the extent to which it meets the
needs of victims as well as of nurses, prosecutors, and the
state.
haven locations, and only occasionally the relinquishing
mothers, usually when some part of the safe haven pro-
cess goes awry. Her aim is to try to excavate the reali-
ties of safe haven use, burrowing beneath the myths and
stereotypes that resonate through much of popular dis-
course: that the mothers who leave their babies are very
young, probably gave birth at home, and often denied the
evidence of pregnancy until labor and delivery caught up
with them.
The theme that plays in the background of the book is a
national discourse about babies left in dumpsters. That the
image of the dumpster is so pervasive speaks to the moral
arena in which safe haven policies operate, which is the
larger discourse of abortion. Leaving a baby in a dumpster,
Oaks argues, is only a minor variation on anti-abortion
discourse; both depend on the notion that bad mothers
are likely to harm or kill their babies. So rescuing babies that
might otherwise end up in dumpsters stirs the imagination
of those who wish to act in opposition to what they regard
as an epidemic of bad mothering. Indeed, the discourse of
safe haven relinquishment rewrites the image of the bad
mother. The mother who would otherwise have been bad is
transformed into a good mother by leaving her infant at a safe
haven, insuring its adoption into a loving and presumably
more suitable home. This moral sleight of hand happens in
the absence of any apparent concern regarding the mothers
themselves, including efforts to find out what they really
think or to provide them with medical care. These bad-into-
good mothers have no recognized needs of their own. They
are appropriately silent through the entire transaction of
using a safe haven, making it possible for others to write an
acceptable script for them to perform or be thought to have
performed.
206 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
Oaks weaves together the story of safe haven relin-
quishment with the larger story of adoption in the United
States, and that discussion is perhaps the most compelling
part of her book. Adoption has become the focus of concern
for prospective parents throughout U.S. society, as more
women delay childbearing until they can no longer become
pregnant and supplies of desirable (i.e., newborn, white,
healthy) infants become more and more meager. Prospective
parents prefer infants, who they imagine to be undamaged
unlike those in the foster care system. Even so, they tend
to be apprehensive about private adoptions of infants, which
can be expensive and unreliable because birth mothers can
change their minds even after prospective parents have in-
Approaching Monumentality in Archaeology by James F.
Osborne, ed.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. 474 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12478
Jennifer G. Kahn
College of William & Mary
This edited volume provides a unique Old World view of
the current state of studies into monumentality. It derives
from a conference hosted by the Institute for European and
Mediterranean Archaeology. The Introduction, written by
the books editor James Osborne, lays out the major goals
of the volume and provides background into monumen-
tal architecture analyses. Osborne problematizes two often
interchangeably used terms: monument and monumentality.
Osborne defines a monument as an object, or suite of ob-
jects that possess an agreed upon meaning to a community
of people (p. 4). In terms of monumentality, the monument
derives active meaning through its experienced use, invoca-
tion, and remembrance by communities, thereby stressing
an agent-based and to some extent phenomenological theo-
retical perspective. To some, these definitions may seem too
broad and fluid, but widely defining monuments has allowed
Osborne to attract a wide range of chapters on a multiplic-
ity of monument types, including religious sites, tombs and
temples, trophy monuments, mobile obelisks, citadels, and
cityscapes. This diversity adds strength to the volume as does
the wide range of time periods represented.
The volumes second goal is to discuss the social and
political significance of monumentality, utilizing a relational
perspective that prioritizes relationships between the subject
(the monument) and the object (person or persons experi-
ence the monument and all of the activities and rites that
might surround its use). The aim is to move away from anal-
yses that focus explicitly on the form of the monument (size,
labor investment, relationship to urban planning) to more
vested their hopes (and money) in the process. Safe haven
babies are thus highly valued in the adoption marketplace,
arriving not only as (usually) healthy newborns but also as in-
fants that have an appealing rescue fantasy attached to them.
This appeal is amplified by the narrative that the babies birth
mothers have been good and loving to have relinquished their
infants in this fashion. Oakss analysis intersects with the
larger story of adoption in the United Statesparticularly its
commodification, even as infants are understood to be price-
less. She shows evocatively that the supply-and-demand
exigencies of adoption dovetail with imaginaries of good
and bad mothers, as they do with constructions of maternal
love.
holistic views that grapple with the meaning of monuments
and how these might have changed through time and space.
The edited volume is divided into five major subthemes.
In the Monumental Architecture and Social Transforma-
tion section, authors focus on the labor needed to cre-
ate monumental architecture and the degree to which it
was associated with major political figures. Others explore
whether particular monuments were created to communi-
cate ritual or political authority. William Carahers paper
on Christian architecture argues that audience perceptions
of monumentsin this case, lay patronage of basilica-style
churchescreated new social contexts that relied on a plu-
rality of meaning, thus moving away from more traditional
perspectives highlighting singular elite authority. Likewise,
Jens Notroff and colleagues frame their discussion of Gobekli
Tepe as monumental architecture that symbolized collective
action, group cohesion, and the development of social iden-
tities, rather than as materializing the political authority of
individual leaders. Notroff and colleagues argument has
close links to discussions of corporate strategies as opposed
to individualizing strategies that have been prominent in
political-economy discussions.
The second section, Monumentality and Landscape,
focuses on the spectacle-like character of monuments and
how communities marked these places and spaces through
collective action. Here, authors argue that monumental
architecture can be used to track the advent of expan-
sive policies and varying social roles, supporting more
diverse functions for monumental architecture than tradi-
tional readings. A case in point is Alvaro Ibarras discus-
sion of trophy monuments as public art commemorating
the Roman civilization. His careful analysis of the function
of trophy monuments, as well as their specific geographical
context (urban or hinterland), suggests that such monuments

manipulated both the landscape and the communal audience
in core political areas, but what of their function in isolated
hinterlands? Here, Ibarra argues that some of the symbolic
and textual messages on the monuments were not readable
at the local level; as such they largely sent messages to elites
in the political core.
In focusing on the meaning of monuments, several
case studies challenge perceived notions of monumental
architecture. An example is Peter Boguckis evocative case
study from Early Neolithic Society in Central Europe.
Bogucki argues that objects do not need to be large to be
considered monuments if one follows the approach that
monuments served as memory work, transmitting social
memories through the generations, actions that can take
place at the local level and the microscale. While some may
oppose his reading of stone tool caches and microcemeter-
ies, Boguckis analysis of these items in terms of their ritual
behavior has some logic. As objects that facilitated social
memory, that were positioned in standardized locations,
and that acted as long-standing material prompts crossing
Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes: Insights from
Archaeology, History, and Ethnography by Joel W. Palka.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. 392 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12479
Charles Golden
Brandeis University
In Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes, Joel Palka draws on
his ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork among the
Lacandon Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, as well as the broader
context of Mesoamerican research, to give us a data-rich
and deeply scholarly consideration of pilgrimages among the
indigenous communities of the Maya lowlands and high-
lands. His book addresses many topics, but fundamentally
focuses on two primary conclusions. First, communities like
that of the Lacandon who live around Lake Mensabak prac-
tice profoundly modern ritual pilgrimages, but such ritual
journeys have a deep and pervasive history and can be doc-
umented ethnographically, ethnohistorically, and archaeo-
logically across the Maya highlands and lowlands. Second,
and perhaps more importantly, such pilgrimages among the
Maya can best be understood under the umbrella concept of
religious pilgrimages worldwide and in particular by com-
parison with such practices in places like Pre-Columbian
Peru, Byzantium, Buddhist shrines of Asia, or the medieval
Catholic church of Europe.
The first of these points is richly argued with case after
case of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological
examples of ritual engagements with the landscape by
Book Reviews 207
multiple generations, tool caches and microcemeteries in-
deed seem to have a monumental function at the residential
scale.
My one critique of the volume is that while Tim Pauke-
tats closing chapter offers a fresh New World perspective,
it does seem a bit tacked on as all of the other chapters
deal with Old World case studies. Perhaps a short suite of
New World Case studies at the end would have provided
a richer comparison? Finally, while I am not an Old World
archaeologist, at a glance there seems to be some interest-
ing patterns in terms of how prehistorians versus historians
focus on different aspects of monuments and monumen-
tality. These similarities and differences could have been
effectively drawn out by a final synthetic chapter broadly
discussing the case studies in the book in terms of time peri-
ods, disciplinary perspectives, and so forth. That being said,
this edited volume is an excellent account of the state of the
art of monumental architecture studies in the Old World and
will be of broad relevance to archaeologists studying political
economy, social evolution, and materiality worldwide.
Maya communities from across the lowlands and highlands.
In some ways, this work builds on and offers a worthy
complement to Palkas previous book, Unconquered Lacandon
Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change
(2005). He details the similarities and distinctions among
the many communities lumped under the terms Maya and
Lacandon in the Colonial and independent regimes of
Mexico and Guatemala. Palka draws upon the ethnohistoric
and archaeological research, much of it his own, to show
ritual connections between the Lacandon and other Maya
communities. In so doing, we come to see the roots of
modern cultural practice around Mensabak.
The present volume, however, is more encyclopedic
in scope and delves more deeply into the past than did
Unconquered Lacandon Maya. As such, it serves as a useful and
thought-provoking work for any archaeologist working in
the Maya area and dealing with issues of landscape. It forces
one to reconsider artifacts, parietal art, and burials from all
periods found across the landscape in new light. While con-
sideration of the ritual importance of the landscape has long
been a central piece of the interpretive toolkit for Mayanists,
envisioning the significance of such ritual behavior under
the more broadly interpretive concept of pilgrimage
has not.
It is in his broad application of the term pilgrimage and
its use as an analytical framework for understanding the
ritual engagement with the landscape that Palka makes what
208 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
is perhaps the most provocative argument in this book. By
drawing on comparative materials from societies as diverse
as Byzantium, Neolithic Europe, Buddhist Asia, and ancient
Peru among many others, Palka points us to shared practices
and even types of artifacts that seem to be indicative of
pilgrimages globally. Mesoamerican archaeologists are thus
presented with new methodological tools for interpreting
archaeological assemblages that may constitute the sparse
remains of pilgrimages.
Yet, one is also left with the sense that any journey,
of any length, to a given place on the landscape for ritual
purposes constitutes a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage could, under
this rubric, be long or short and involve great effort or almost
no effort at all. What is important under Palkas model is
simply the ritual intent and purpose driving that visit.
In summary, Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes is a
fundamentally important piece of work for anyone con-
sidering landscape archaeology in the Maya region. Most
significantly, it integrates data from Mesoamerica into the
broader tapestry of pilgrimage in worldwide context. In so
doing, it in some sense demystifies the Maya engagement
The Reappeared: Argentine Former Political Prisoners
by Rebekah Park.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. 198 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12480
Donna M. Goldstein
University of Colorado Boulder
Rebekah Parks The Reappeared is a focused ethnography ad-
dressing the struggles and eventual success of Argentinas
former political prisoners to gain collective recognition of
their experiences during the Dirty War period. Park pri-
marily worked with members of the Association of Former
Political Prisoners of the city of Cordoba (Asociacion de Ex
Presos Polticos, or AEPPC), who were imprisoned and bru-
tally tortured during Argentinas Dirty War period (roughly
1974 to 1983). Park worked closely with this organization
between 2006 and 2009; her book considers the individuals
who survived their time in tortured captivity but who also
deeply suffered long past the time of their imprisonment.
The Reappeared features individuals who were imprisoned for
political reasons during the 1970s and 1980s, and at the time
of Parks interviews they spanned an age range from 53 to
75.
In 2007, the AEPPC became the first group of former
political prisoners to be recognized as survivors of this
period. Legal and political recognition gave them the right to
participate as historical guides at former military detention
with the landscape, showing it to be part of more general
human patterns of religious and ritual life. Yet, the book
also maintains a focus on what is particular to Maya, and
particularly modern Lacandon Maya, cultures. In the end,
however, Palkas fundamental argument that visits to any
place on the landscape for purposes of religious or ritual
veneration constitute a pilgrimage must remain a question
to be answered through closer scrutiny and careful applica-
tion of the term pilgrimage to archaeological analyses. Only
by treating this broader vision of pilgrimage as a hypothesis
to be tested through further archaeological research will it
be possible to determine whether this makes the term too
weak or, rather, provides scholars with a keenly effective
tool for better understanding the archaeological record and
ethnographic present in Mesoamerica.
REFERENCE CITED
Palka, Joel W.
2005 Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archae-
ology of Indigenous Culture Change. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida.
centers, now preserved as memorial spaces marking
Argentinas dark history. It has taken approximately 30
years for these specific voices to be recognized because
of the layers of complex debate in and across left- and
right-wing ideological factions about how to interpret the
events leading up to and encompassing the Dirty War, which
until recently left little room for these actors. A central
question still being asked in Argentina is how perpetrators
and victims of human rights abuses are to be treated in
transitional and post-transitional democratic contexts.
As Park explains well in The Reappeared, for some in
the human rights community, the voices of former political
prisoners may have been inconvenient to the larger battle
of how to reconcile divergent understandings of the Dirty
War, and for this reason they remained suppressed. One
predominant early narrative supported by the human rights
community depicted those who disappeared as innocent vic-
tims of the military regime. According to Park, the survivors
who reappeared therefore posed a conceptual problem to
this narrative because they preferred to be understood as
activists not victims. The human rights community has had
to evolve to a point whereby it could argue for a different
conceptualization of human rights, one that could encom-
pass individuals not conforming to the early narratives of the
disappeared. In the Kirchner period, it seems that a visible

societal shift has taken place that has enabled these particular
voices to emerge, to be respected, and to be accounted for
more clearly within and beyond the history of the Dirty War.
Their struggle and success at obtaining recognition and the
ongoing current reconstitution of their lives is at the heart
of Parks book.
Parks ethnography succeeds in explaining how differ-
ent voices may emerge in the aftermath of large-scale human
rights abuse cases and how the human rights community itself
can unintentionally marginalize some voices in the process
of pressing particular claims. The clearest argumentand
a compelling onecoming both from the former political
prisoners themselves as well as from Parks analysis is this:
the Kirchner period (since 2003) has expanded the meaning
of human rights and enabled the muted voices of ex-political
prisoners to emerge in contemporary Argentina. Yet The
Reappeared perhaps assumes too much knowledge on the
part of the reader regarding Argentine Dirty War history and
its attendant controversies. The books weaknesses include
overly simplifying and in places ignoring more complex de-
bates that have taken place in Argentina on these themes.
A more nuanced understanding of the Argentine public and
scholarly debates, as well as reference to the broader litera-
ture on human rights, would have strengthened this timely
ethnographic work. Yet without these complexities to tend
to, the book moves quickly into the experiences of these
individuals years after detention and torture, bringing us to
Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian
Mortality Crisis by Michelle A. Parsons.
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014. 224 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12481
Sarah D. Phillips
Indiana University
In Dying Unneeded, Michelle A. Parsons convincingly and
lucidly illustrates the utility of ethnography to shed
light on epidemiological puzzles. Through interviews and
participant-observation with Muscovites about their experi-
ences during the early to mid-1990s (the apex of Russias
mortality crisis), Parsons interrogates several such epidemio-
logical enigmas. Some questions are broad: What are the un-
derlying mechanisms that have transmitted the shocks of so-
cialist collapse into increased morbidity and mortality? How
do shifting political and economic structures translate into
a mortality crisis? Other epidemiological puzzles are more
specific: Why are certain social connections associated with
poorer health, while others are associated with better health?
[In Russia], why is alcohol drinking often associated with bet-
ter health? (p. 8). In her book, Parsons demonstrates that
Book Reviews 209
contemporary reflections on lives that exhibit a very deep
and particular form of suffering.
The Kirchner presidencies (both of Nestor and Cristina,
extending from 2003 to the present) have given oppor-
tunities for this emergence, advancing a broader human
rightsoriented perspective, including recognition of the
AEPPC as an official organization. Individuals belonging
to AEPPC found themselves on the margins of (if not
downright outcasts from) the human rights movement, in
spite of being direct witnesses to the abuses of the Dirty
War. Exhausted by levels of social and political exclusion
even from the human rights community, these former
political prisoners had their mere survival questioned as a
form of complicity because the narrative of the disappeared
did not account for those who returned from detention.
Parks book describes this Argentine habitus well.
In the more recent political opening since 2003,
AEPPC members who were once prisoners can now work
in memorialized public spaces and share their stories with
the general public, engaging with and producing distinctly
nuanced narratives that include resistance. The recognition
of their public marginalization and their more recent
historical recovery in the changing context of human rights
narratives in Argentina makes this book an important contri-
bution to the postDirty War history and to the process of
what has become known (beyond Argentina) as transitional
justice.
ethnographic perspectives are necessary for tracking and un-
raveling such connections between the political, economic,
social, and mortal. The ethnography focuses especially on her
respondents social connections, including their narratives of
being needed. Parsons tracks the centrality of this sense of
being neededand becoming unneededand combines
epidemiological and ethnographic data to argue that being
unneeded (an experience most common for Russias men)
is in fact a distal driver of the mortality crisis in Russia.
Dying Unneeded is essentially divided into two parts.
The first five chapters (a good two-thirds of the book) are
ethnographic. Parsons queries her informants (Muscovites
most at risk of dyingthose between 55 and 70 years old
in 2006 and 2007) about their experiences during and since
the socialist collapse. Through well-written ethnographic
descriptions and interview excerpts, Parsons explores key
Russian cultural concepts: dusha (soul), prostor (space),
blat (connections or pull), poriadok and bezporiadok (order
and disorder or chaos) and the related rozrukha (collapse),
krutitsia (spinning, meaning to hustle), and (ne)nuzhny
210 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
or (ne)vostrebovany (being [not] needed). Common threads in
informants narratives include the significance of the Great
Patriotic War (Second World War) in their lives (especially
for forming social ties and mutual obligations) and the
anchoring power of socially useful work. For those familiar
with post-Soviet anthropology, this is familiar territory.
These ethnographic paths exploring Russians personal ex-
periences of social and economic decline and neoliberalism
have been lucidly forged in the compelling work of Melissa
Caldwell, Tova Hojdestrand, Jennifer Patico, Margaret
Paxson, and Nancy Ries, among others. How men and
women experience these shifts differently has also been
addressed thoroughly in previous scholarship.
Parsonss book really hits its stride in the last several
chapters (chs. 68). It is here that the author familiarizes the
reader with the existing (English-language) epidemiological
literature on Russias mortality crisis (though it is curious
that no Russian-language sources appear in the books bib-
liography). She effectively cracks open the epidemiological
puzzles this literature presents and convincingly applies the
ethnographic toolkitlistening to peoples stories, partici-
pating in their lives, and trying to see the world through their
point of viewto solving these riddles. Perhaps the most
intriguing of these epidemiological riddles is the complex
and overstated role that alcohol plays in Russias mortality
crisisfor men, in particular. Although the social science
literature on Russias mortality crisis has focused primarily
on alcohol-related deaths (p. 133), in fact evidence from
prospective cohort studies indicates that most drinkers are
less at risk of dying than nondrinkers are. For a smaller
proportion of men, drinking confers risk; for a greater pro-
Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society
13501600 by Sergio Quezada.
in Yucatan,
Terry Rugeley, trans. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. 264 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12482
Robert M. Hill II
Tulane University
The appearance of this work by distinguished Yucatec his-
torian Sergio Quezada extends access to his expertise and
insight to an English-speaking audience. Specialists have long
recognized the importance of his publications spanning some
three decades. In the present work, Quezada presents an
innovative interpretation of Yucatec Maya political organi-
zation and new insights into the history of rulership from
the pre-Hispanic period down to the late 16th century. It
is a dense and detailed description more easily digested by
specialists but still accessible to the intrepid nonspecialist
portion of men, it confers protection. It is misleading to
refer to alcohol as the cause of the mortality crisis because it
is also associated with reduced mortality among a majority of
men (p. 138).
Indeed, studies have found that drinkers in Russia of-
ten report better health than nondrinkers; for a majority of
Russian men alcohol may improve not only self-reported
health but even objectively measured health (p. 152). To
explore how this is so, Parsons turns to ethnography. She
connects mens drinking to the concepts and experiences
of being needed, space, social connections, and soul by
drawing on her compelling ethnographic data and other
anthropologists observations. Here Parsons delivers the
fruitful synergy between epidemiology and anthropology
that her book promises. Although the books contribution
would be even more powerful if the ethnographic first two-
thirds and the more analytical last one-third were better inte-
grated, Parsonss approach here is a useful model for future
studies.
Parsonss Dying Unneeded should be of interest to spe-
cialists and students in different areas of cultural and medical
anthropology and public health. It may be especially suitable
for readers unfamiliar with Russia, as much of the ethno-
graphic territory here rings familiar for area specialists. It is
useful for teaching ethnographic methods to students in pub-
lic health and related disciplinesthe authors description
of ethnography (pp. 610 and passim) is excellent. A few
editorial errors are mildly distracting (the books running
header reads Dying Unneeding, and outdated reference is
made to the Ukraine) but do not detract from the overall
quality of the book.
or general audience. A short review such as this cannot do
justice to the richness of the presentation.
To summarize a complex argument, Quezada argues
that pre-Hispanic Yucatec political organization was based
on personalistic ties between rulers and ruled rather than
territorially based polities as in much of highland Mesoamer-
ica. The reason rests ultimately on the regions geology. The
absence of surface water and thin soil on limestone bedrock
forced swidden agriculture throughout the peninsula. With
only two years of good crops followed by a 25-year fallow
period, cultivators lived widely dispersed in order to move
about in a large enough area to support themselves. As a
result, Quezadas asserts that centralized control by a ruler
of a polity (characteristic in much of highland Mesoamerica)
with such necessarily vast territories was impractical in

Yucatan. Rather, he argues that personal, hierarchical
political relationships ensured the flow of tribute in the form
of goods and services to a politys ruler. Unfortunately,
the bases of such relationships are unexplored. In passing,
Quezada suggests someprotection, kinship, conve-
nience, war, or the simple quest for recognition of a title
(p. 9)but delves no further into the issue. Nor does
he suggest the ideological basis for Yucatec aristocracy
on whichin the absence of aristocratically controlled
landthe whole political system would have rested.
In chapter 1, Quezada first applies this model to later
pre-Hispanic Yucatan, beginning in the tenth century,
and traces developments in admirable detail down to
the eve of the Spanish invasion. Archaeologists working
in the lowland Maya region and with a focus on earlier
periods will find that this thought-provoking presentation
challenges long-held views of prehistoric lowland Maya
political organization. He concludes that high-level political
organization in Yucatan had largely dissolved in late pre-
Hispanic times, leaving local rulers (batabob) to confront the
Spanish.
Chapter 2 documents the impact of the Spanish invasion
and imposition of early colonial policies on the Yucatec pop-
ulation generally and the batabob rulers in particular. These
policies are familiar to students of Spanish colonialism,
including encomienda, religious conversion, and town for-
mation (reduccion). However, one of Quezadas key points is
that it was only with the imposition of the town formation,
along with Spanish concepts of formal borders, that territo-
rial organization was imposed on the Yucatec, among whom
such concepts were completely foreign. Batabob were given
the title of gobernadores (town governors) and, later, caciques
(chiefs) in the newly formed towns and initially were useful
in organizing tribute payments to encomenderos (individual
Spaniards rewarded for their service to the Crown with
rights to tribute from a given number of Maya), labor
Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism
by Maple Razsa.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 312 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12483
Andrew Gilbert
McMaster University
Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism makes
an excellent contribution to the study of political activism
and the social movements that have left an imprint on lo-
cal and international politics around the worldfrom the
antiglobalization demonstrations of the turn of the century
to the so-called Color Revolutions, Arab Spring, and Oc-
Book Reviews 211
drafts, and alms to the Franciscans who had been charged
with the conversion and religious administration of the
Yucatec.
Chapters 3 and 4 continue the narrative, examining
in detail and through numerous examples the diverse and
complex careers of batabob from various parts of Yucatan
to the end of the 16th century. In general, the importance
and influence and wealth of the batabobcaciques declined
as the Spanish introduced additional policies.
Of necessity, Quezada employs many Yucatec and Span-
ish terms. Fortunately, these terms are defined for the reader
both parenthetically where used as well as in a generous
glossary. On the downside, readers with less than a deep
knowledge of the location Yucatans many towns will need a
good map alongside, as the one provided in the text is far too
small to be of much use. Four appendices take up 55 pages,
versus 125 pages of actual text. These appendices are data
oriented, listing the lordships in the mid16th century and
the family lines that ruled them. The nonspecialist reader
probably will not benefit from them, though specialists may
find the assembled data useful.
More problematic is the absence of formal engagement
with studies of pre- and post-Hispanic aristocracies on other
parts of Mesoamerica. While Quezada makes passing ref-
erences to Central Mexican Nahua practices, other peoples
such as the Mixtec, Zapotec, and highland Maya are absent
from the discussion. The work would also have benefitted
by extending the chronological coverage through reference
to works by Matthew Restall and Philip Thompson, whose
coverage focuses on conditions in the 18th century.
Nevertheless, Quezada brings an immense amount of
knowledge to his account, drawn from both Spanish and
colonial Yucatecan documents. His extensive notes reflect
his complete control of the sources, providing a valuable
starting point for those looking to delve more deeply into
this specialized topic.
cupy Wall Street. This book approaches this study from
a unique vantage point, that of two post-Yugoslav states
(Croatia and Slovenia), and asks: How did activists develop
radical views, disobedient desires, and unruly sensibilities
in a territory dominated by nationalist and right-wing pol-
itics? How have activists rethought what it means to be a
leftist after socialism? What enabled the imagining of new
political possibilities and the creation of subjects prepared to
pursue those possibilities? (p. 16). Drawing on 42 months
of fieldwork between 1996 and 2011, Maple Razsa seeks to
answer these questions by accompanying activists in Zagreb
212 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
and Ljubljana as a militant researcherthat is, as a re-
searcher [who] both seeks to study as well as to contribute
to social struggles (p. 14).
Each of the books substantive chapters concerns a dis-
tinct setting or action: chapter 1 probes the everyday life
of activists in Zagreb, focusing in particular on the practices
through which activists build transnational community while
at the same time resist[ing] their own incorporation into the
national body politic (p. 39). Chapter 2 tracks the shifting
terrain of activism in Zagreb, using as a case study a protest
against the threat of war in Iraq to look at how alliances were
made or broken over relations with the state and with foreign
donors. Chapter 3 follows Zagreb activists as they travel to
participate in a huge and extremely violent demonstration
in Thessaloniki, and it explores the production of militant
subjects and the limits of mass confrontational protest. Chap-
ter 4 investigates post-socialist property transformation and
the struggle for rights to the city by considering how ac-
tivists sought to repurpose an abandoned factory in order
to produce new ways of relating to one another. Chapter 5
moves from Croatia to Slovenia, and from the early half of
the 2000s to 2011, to explicate the forms of minoritarian
direct democracy that emerged around Occupy Ljubljana.
Cumulatively, the author frames the book as an argument
about the limits of critique (of neoliberalism and national-
ism) and the need to move beyond a politics which only
denounces: If anthropology is to be relevant during these
crisesthis economic crisis, as well as this crisis of the politi-
cal imaginaryit must be prepared to make an ethnographic
contribution to the reimaging of politics . . . What is needed
is an affirmation of other social and political possibilities
(p. 210). Hence the author takes care to document and his-
toricize his interlocutors practices of direct democracy and
horizontal decision making, their prefigurative approach to
politics (whose means and ends ought to prefigure the world
Anti-Crisis by Janet Roitman.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 176 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12484
Amalia Saar
University of Haifa
In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman addresses the status of crisis as
a super concept in social science scholarship and the consti-
tution of this sign, which has become omnipresent in almost
all forms of narrative today, as an object of knowledge in and
of itself. Roitman engages the work of Reinhart Koselleck
on the centrality of crisis to the notion of modern historical
temporality. Although the idea of historical progress was
increasingly denounced in the aftermath of the First World
in which one wants to live and the kind of person one wants
to be), and what the author calls the subjective turn in
activism, in which activists sought to intervene in their self-
understandings and in the constitution of their very desires
(p. 11).
A clear distinguishing feature of the book is that it is
the fruit of a visual anthropology, using video in addition to
the more traditional methods usually glossed as participant-
observation. As the author makes clear at the outset, the book
is part of a Bastards of Utopia triptych: in addition to this book,
there is a more traditional feature documentary film and an
online interactive documentary. The latter is available for
free online, and many episodes in the book are closely related
to this documentary; relevant video clips are referenced
throughout the book. Razsa convincingly demonstrates the
methodological value of working in a visual medium in that
it attuned [him] to dimensions of social life not expressed in
language, such as gestures and space, as well as the sensory,
affective, and embodied aspects of protest (p. 13). He also
incorporated film screenings into his analysis, using audience
reactions and questions about his feature documentary to
clarify aspects of his data and offer insights in the book that
might have otherwise been obscured.
This study will be of interest to scholars and teachers who
focus on visual anthropology, activism and politics, postso-
cialism, nationalism, and global studies. The very breadth
of this study may leave some readers who are interested
in only one of these areas wanting more; in this regard,
the inclusion of visual material is of particular value to ad-
vanced scholars for the amount of primary source data it
makes available. In terms of teaching, the book and video
material is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and
should pair well with any number of recent anthropological
studies of activism, post-socialist transformation, or visual
anthropology.
War, the temporal understanding of action and history has
remained contingent on the concept of crisis, the sign that
distinguishes and signifies events and makes them legible
by giving them empirical status as history. The concept
of crisis became central to the idea that one could perceive
a dissonance between historical events and representations
of those eventsthat history could be alienated in terms of
its philosophy. For example, the financial observation that
credit does not match the real value of houses entails an
alleged dissonance between true value and representations
of that value. Roitman, by contrast, rejects the idea of cri-
sis as intrinsic to a system and understands it instead as a
distinction that produces meaning.

Narratives of crisis generate meaning in a self-referential
system. Crisis is posited a priori: the grounds for knowledge
of crisis are neither questioned nor made explicit. Crisis
is never itself explained because it is necessarily further
reduced to other elements, such as capitalism, economy,
neoliberalism, finance, politics, culture, and subjectivity.
In this sense, crisis is not a condition to be observed but an
observation that produces meaning. In critical scholarship
and here Roitman dwells on the semantic affinity between
crisis and critique, again following Coselleckit is taken
to be an instance when the contingency of truth claims are
made bare, and as such it presumably grants access to a social
world. Crisis is mobilized in narrative to mark out moments
of historical truthmoments themselves often defined as
turning points in history, when wrong decisions are taken,
thus establishing a particular teleology.
In her attempt to denaturalize the crisis narrative, Roit-
man focuses on the U.S. subprime mortgage market during
20072009. Analyzing academic and popular commentaries,
she questions the causality encapsulated in statements such
as foreclosure and then a contraction in the value of houses
(p. 47) or at the same time mortgage rates began to reset . . .
borrowers . . . began defaulting (p. 48, italics in the orig-
inal). Against such causality, she argues that given that the
creation of an extensive debt market took place over a sig-
nificant period of time and that the U.S. housing market was
always already undercollateralized, the judgment that crisis
obtains at a particular moment is a political act, not an objec-
tive observation. So, instead of asking what went wrong, she
asks, when does credit (asset) become debt (toxic asset)? Or
at what point do subprime mortgage bonds transform from
an asset to a liability? The bubble is a metaphor for the disso-
Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing
and Private Lives by Moshe Shokeid.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 240 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12485
Brian Joseph Gilley
Indiana University Bloomington
Moshe Shokeid begins Gay Voluntary Associations in New York:
Public Sharing and Private Lives by staking a claim for the ex-
tended case-method of ethnographic analysis (p. 3). Ethnog-
raphy in queer spaces for Shokeid stands in contrast to queer
theorists and scholars tendency toward literature, philos-
ophy, and discourse analysis. The book bears out this claim
with ten chapters of ethnographically rich description from
multiple queer spaces within New York Citys diverse gay
culture and social organizations.
Book Reviews 213
nance between empirical history and the philosophy of his-
tory, between truly grounded material value and unmoored,
theoretical, speculative assessments. By this understanding,
it is meaningless to attempt to establish a fundamental home
value that can be located or determined outside of the system
of financial valuation. In fact, houses are practically irrele-
vant to what has become a crisis. Roitman also rejects the
common conviction that the crisis in finance represents a
deeper epistemological crisis and a crisis of subjectivity, as if
the expropriated home owner becomes a subject in crisis,
with no stable grounds of truth value, staring into the abyss
of the limits of intelligibility (p. 66). Such arguments, she
maintains, are not substantiated. Crisis is not an observable
event that occurs in a given context; it is itself an experi-
ence of historical time. It is itself a context, such that we are
the subjects of times of crisis. Posited in this way, crisis is
the point from which hermeneutics or anthropology begins.
Emphatically, Roitman does not dismiss the fact that
for the people who have lost their homes and jobs, crisis is
real. Her argument, rather, is that the assumption that the
market is in crisis induced an inevitable leap into abstraction,
because crisis in itself cannot be located or observed as an
object of first-order knowledge. The point is to observe
crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the ways
in which it regulates narrative constructions, the way in
which it allows certain questions to be asked while others
are foreclosed (p. 94). Well written and provocative, Anti-
Crisis makes a great contribution to conceptual anthropology.
By dislodging a key term in contemporary critical theories,
it poses an exciting challenge to scholars within and beyond
the discipline, at the same time reasserting anthropologys
broader intellectual relevance.
In the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2, Shokeid es-
tablishes himself as a navigator within the field of LGBT
studies. Being a navigator for Shokeid means doing the work
of ethnography in an intensive way while remaining highly
sensitive to the wants and needs of ones research subjects.
In these first chapters, Shokeid details his efforts to en-
gage in thoughtful and active research while struggling with
the inherent intrusiveness of being an ethnographer in the
communal space of the other. He also explores his own
methodological concerns in relation to established debates
in the field of LGBT anthropology, such as the ethics of en-
gaging in sexual encounters with informants. Shokeid begins
to apply his extended case-method approach in the follow-
ing five chapters, which focus on specific gay community
214 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
organizations among which support groups are dominant. In
chapter 3, we learn about a gay support group for seniors,
SAGE (Senior Action in Gay Environment), which met at
the center where Shokeid concentrated his research. The
ethnographic detail Shokeid provides challenges the prevail-
ing public and academic assumption that older gay men lead
lonely and sexless lives. Chapter 4 is set in the regular meet-
ings of Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, where the promise
of generous sociability and a measure of affection (p. 86)
overrode attendees desire for real change. Chapter 5 uses
another group named the bisexual circle to consider the
paradoxical position bisexuality holds within a gay commu-
nity that is committed to an essentialist understanding of their
sexuality. The Interracial Gay Mens Association, described
in chapter 6, extends many of the conflicts of bisexuals to
the awkward position men of color hold in a predominantly
white gay society. In particular, we come to learn of the ways
white men who prefer black men are consistently chided by
their peers for what they see in them (p. 131). Gentle
men and bears occupy the ethnographically related chapters
7 and 8, in which Shokeid introduces us to intimate cultures
wherein sex is secondary to a sense of belonging through acts
of tenderness and acceptance. Shokeids previous work dealt
with the intimate lives of men who attended gay synagogues,
and he expands this inquiry in chapter 9 with an analysis
of sermons among multiple gay congregations, which in-
cluded Catholic, African American, and Protestant churches.
Chapter 10 and the Afterword reflect on the themes that
seem to impinge most profoundly on the life experiences
and the existential visions of gay men (p. 175). Shokeid
brings us full circle to again remind readers of the precarious
position of the ethnographer and the research subject when
Caged in on the Outside: Moral Subjectivity, Selfhood,
and Islam in Minangkabau, Indonesia by Gregory M. Simon.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. 272 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12486
Conrad William Watson
School of Business and Management ITB, Bandung
This is a very good, thought-provoking book about the
Minangkabau of West Sumatra, a society much studied by
anthropologists long fascinated by the apparently peaceful
coexistence there of matrilineal principles of social organi-
zation and a strong commitment to Islam. Gregory Simon,
while making good use of the existing literature, treads a
new path in concentrating not on questions of adat (alleged
tradition) and its manifestations but on the subjective per-
ceptions of individuals. In particular, he addresses the issue
of moral subjectivity and how individuals make sense of their
they are taken together as a set of experiences and intimate
connections.
Despite critiquing the practices of queer theorists,
Shokeid makes extensive use of a queer methodological
reflexivity that dominates the stories and analysis in the
book. Shokeids descriptions and analysis in the ethno-
graphically focused chapters reveal an intense inward gaze
on the authors own positionality as an Israeli and Jewish
scholar. For example, Shokeid takes the reader into very in-
timate worlds of particular and peculiar-to-the-mainstream
gay subcultures such as the Golden Shower Association (a
group of men who urinate on each for sexual pleasure).
He leads us through the awkwardness of arranging to at-
tend a meeting through a key informant and observing the
sexual acts of others, and he details the outcomes in his
personal relationships with informants. While captivating
in their description, the main point of these vignettes ap-
pears to not be our learning about these societies or asso-
ciations but, rather, how Shokeids ethnographic contexts
and personal associations are read through the lens of his
consciousness.
Gay Voluntary Associations in New York is a captivat-
ing work, particularly in its contribution to understanding
ethnography and positionality. The self-referential habits of
the author can be distracting if one is seeking to know more
about the societies and associations within which Shokeid
conducted his research. In this way, its most valuable con-
tribution can also be its greatest obstacle for queer studies
anthropologists seeking ethnographic detail with a set of
generalizable theoretical points. However, as a text on the
nature of the ethnographic project, and its queer forms, the
book is a significant contribution.
lives. His argument is that there is a tension between negoti-
ating the constraints of social norms to which individuals are
happy to subscribe (integration) and the desire to pursue
a lifestyle in conflict with those norms (autonomy). This
Simon explores through looking at paradigms that play an
important role in constituting Minangkabau society: how
concepts of what it is to be a Minangkabau, of the private
self, of the nature of good and evil, and of the opposition
between emotion and reason are worked through by individ-
uals. The method on which Simon principally relies to elicit
the moral subjectivity is a person-centered approach that
he warns us is not the same as a representative case study of
the culture.
Much of the analysis is thoroughly convincing. The con-
versations Simon reports regarding how people square the

discrepancy between a commitment to Islam with a failure to
carry out Islamic rituals ring true and correspond closely to
what this reviewer has heard in the field. Furthermore, the
overall conclusion that within the society there is a dynamic
tension between what people say they should doaccording
to social norms and the overarching moral universe of the
societyand what they do in practice, belying those norms,
is undeniable.
But herein lies the rub. All contemporary anthropol-
ogists since at least Bronislaw Malinowski have made this
point about the difference between the is and ought of
an individuals behavior, so one might ask what is new about
Simons analysis: Is it not the same argument dressed in con-
temporary fashion? In a way it is, but the novelty, Simon
seems to suggest, is looking at the way in which the dis-
crepancy is today perceived and negotiated in Minangkabau
society in a distinctive fashion. This leads to the corollary that
this approach of looking at the specific ways of formulating
what constitutes the moral self may usefully be employed
in conducting the ethnography of virtue and the moral life
in other societies. Here one inevitably bumps up against the
problem of representativeness.
Relating to this, I have strong reservations about the
broad way in which the analysis of the detailed interview
material obtained from a small number of individuals moves,
despite Simons disclaimers, to offering a general account
of the society. In short, I have doubts about the method-
ology in terms both of the individuals selected for close
analysis and the reliability of the information that can be ex-
tracted by this intensive method of interviewing. Although
Simon acknowledges in part the limitations of the latter,
Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material
Striving in Rural India by Bhrigupati Singh.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 328 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12487
Vinay Kumar Srivastava
University of Delhi
Bhrigupati Singhs eminently readable book is a fresh addi-
tion to the new anthropology that transcends the divide
between positivism and interpretive approaches, science
and literature, pure anthropology and action research, and
ethnography and the attempts toward induction. Based on
a fieldwork with the Sahariya of Shahabad (Rajasthan), this
book is an outcome of an extended period of student life
(brahmcarya), when one is free from the habitat of respon-
sibilities, of family, and of the institutions for which one
works. It is a time during which one can spend long, unin-
terrupted spells, living with people in their natural habitat
Book Reviews 215
he does not appear sufficiently aware of how the interview
situationin the private space of a room that he rented
away from where he livedand the probing nature of his
questions may have led to expressions of thought and feel-
ing that in other circumstances would have come out very
differently and led to different conclusions. I say this with
a certain amount of diffidence because Simon, most of the
time at least, is far from being the nave anthropologist.
Still, I should have liked more indication that he knows
that what his interlocutors are saying is often couched in
terms of what he is trying to impose on them and that there
might be other waysthrough a focus on events in which
the individuals were implicated, for exampleof getting at
ideas of the moral self. I would have also liked more ac-
knowledgment that most of individuals that he interviewed
intensively, the so-called preman (the street-corner frater-
nity), compose a somewhat marginal group in the Minangk-
abau world. Consequently, as a cultural accounteven one
that limits itself to describing how culture must answer
to existential demands (p. 8)there is much more to be
said: the reflections of many others need to be taken into
consideration.
Simon, however, might well reply that it was never his
intention to offer a representative account and that he simply
wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods that
he employed to describe lines of moral thought and the
articulation of moral subjectivity among the Minangkabau
he knew. I have no quarrel with this if that claim is made while
acknowledging more fully the limitations of the current
study as a general account of virtue and morality in the
Minangkabau alam (world).
as they do and pondering over life and its predicaments.
This all is done against the backdrop of ones own station in
life. What compels us to think so is that the ethnographer is
an outsider, from another communityspecifically a Delhi-
socialized, English-educated man reading for a doctorate at a
U.S. university, with his social capital situated in the modern
institutions of power and control. The strings of mulling,
unstructured in the beginning but not chaotic, oscillate from
philosophical concerns such as with the meaning of life to
the stories of the lives of the actors, to how and what people
grow and cultivate for their livelihood, to the ecology of
the customs and practices in the midst of which they find
themselves.
As noted (p. 273), the book may be read as a trea-
tise on economy, environment, and inequity or it may
be read as one on local religious practices, divination,
216 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
pursuits of spirituality, and charisma building. Whether it
is the first reading or the second, the book takes up the
high points in Sahariya culture and society and shows their
concatenation not in functional but in processual terms. The
actors speak and debate among themselves, and they also
engage in dialogues with their ethnographer, from whom
they learn many things that over time become a part of their
knowledge fund. For analyzing these ongoing interactions,
a part and context of which is frozen in this book, the
dichotomies that anthropologists generally employ are crit-
ically examined. For instance, the religious versus secular
divide, on being exposed as inept in understanding the local
situation, is replaced by the concept of political theology.
However, an insiders view is alien to the dualities and op-
positions that scholars use for analysis. Fieldworkers have
found that the way the West thinks about the separation
between and the opposition of the religious and secu-
lar domains is not the way in which traditional peoples,
such as the Sahariya, tend to approach their cosmos. For
them, their entire world is enveloped in a system of values
that defines the goodness of existence. Perhaps an explo-
ration of the concept of morality would have yielded rich
dividends.
Thoughts dispersed over a vast canvas are brought to-
gether in the last chapter of the book, a profound attempt
to demonstrate that notwithstanding the penury of the
Sahariya, they have zeal and vitality of life. They know the
political state can ameliorate their lot, but they are also con-
vinced about its indifference to their plights. In addition,
they think their tradition renders them strength with which
they combat the miseries of their existence. The Sahariya
life familiarizes one with the vivacity of their dynamic tra-
Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee
Plantation by Theresa A. Singleton.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. 286 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12488
Katherine Hayes
University of Minnesota
In this thoughtful and beautifully contextualized study,
Theresa Singleton traces the puzzle of the wall enclosure, a
massive masonry wall that once enclosed a group of enslaved
laborers on a coffee plantation in western Cuba in the 19th
century (p. 4). The wall provides elegant parallels to the
framing of her exploration, a dialectic movement between
how those within and those outside the wall are mutually
constituted. In addition, the study as a whole gives us a
much-needed perspective on the history and archaeology
dition, which neither makes them depressed nor lifeless,
descriptions often used in anthropological representations
of tribal communities. The accounts of the lives of the hero-
characters that this book provides assure one of the durable
roots of the local tradition, which has the ability to withstand
the calamities of life.
A worthy idea taken up here is of the threshold of
life. Threshold implies the final boundary (or crease) of a
space, from where one crosses over to liminality. This is
Arnold van Genneps and Victor Turners meaning: the
term threshold implies moving ahead to the next station
in life, but actually it is a fixed and immutable concept,
thus denying choice. In some matters, life is also like that:
choiceless, in flux. In other matters, people have the free-
dom to choose, to carve out their way, and to develop.
People do not restrict their choice to static minimum indi-
cator(s), such as the food of specific caloric value (p. 282),
but look for nonmaterial factors that make them happy.
Wherever they are, people want good life, and their con-
ception should be a part of the definition of the quality of
life.
Poverty and the Quest for Life convinces the reader about
ground-level reality and interpretations of it, and this marks
the success of an anthropological monograph. However, the
question remains: Did this work explore what the Sahariya
said, or what the author thought the Sahariya said, or what the
Sahariya said in reply to the interests the author displayed and
the questions he asked? Had this work been undertaken by
another fieldworker with different social baggage, would
the ethnography have been different? This question is partic-
ularly important in the context of autoethnographic research
and native anthropology.
of slavery in Cuba. Given the outsized role of Cuba in the
19th-century slave trade, this perspective is critical.
Although at times the author sounds regretful that the
archaeological context within the wall enclosure suffers from
disturbance and is not abundant in artifacts, she traces the
paucity of artifacts to link to the broadest analogous and
contemporaneous contexts through her research. In other
words, she exemplifies what historical archaeologists do
best. In chapter 2, the author outlines the geographic and his-
torical setting of Cuba, particularly as it relates to the onset of
Spanish colonialism and leading to the OFarrill family, who
came to be very wealthy owners of multiple properties in
the region. One of the family descendants, Ignacio OFarrill,
came to own the coffee plantation at the center of the case

study, Cafetal Biajacas. In chapter 3, Singleton details the
history and specificities of coffee operations, particularly as
compared to sugar plantations, with respect to labor, infras-
tructure, and role in the global market. Unlike sugar, coffee
plantations required lower initial investment and could be
successfully run as large or small enterprises. Interestingly,
the environmental conditions needed by shade-loving coffee
plants were met by also planting a variety of other lush trees
that not only offered food supplies but created a sense of
tropical beauty. The plantations, called cafetals, were thus
often the places where proprietors with multiple properties
chose to establish their homes. For a short period, Cuba was
the largest producer and exporter of coffee in the world, but
by the 1820s increasing supplies from Brazil and subsequent
dropping prices, Cubas coffee economy foundered. Thus,
the span of the Cafetal Biajacas case study, 1815 to 1846,
covers both boom and bust times.
The next several chapters hone in on the material world
of Cafetal Biajacas: built environment, landscape, housing,
provisioning, and consumption. In each of these domains, the
text weaves between the world of the plantation proprietor
and that of the enslaved laborers, as well as between ac-
tion and reaction. Singleton explores, for example, geogra-
phies of containment at this and similar coffee plantations
(p. 60). The symmetry of the popular neoclassical style in
Cuba worked both to keep the enslaved under surveillance
and to maintain a critical distance. The wall enclosure itself
is an extreme example, but other elements, such as coffee
dryers, operated to simultaneously restrict movement while
locating laborers in space. Yet such geographies may also
be thought of as wholly referencing the action of the enslaved
by putting such extensive effort into preventing slave upris-
ings. Similarly, in discussing prescribed forms of housing for
AIDS Doesnt Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social
Change in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 208 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12489
Alex Asakitikpi
Monash University, South Africa
Daniel Jordan Smiths mission in his book AIDS Doesnt Show
Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria is
clear: to use HIV/AIDS as a metaphor in interrogating Nige-
rias cultural convolution and social reconfiguration that ac-
centuates greed, moral crisis, and social inequality. He con-
tends that the ways Nigerians grapple with the [HIV/AIDS]
epidemic are a fruitful and important entry point into
understanding their broader anxieties about their culture,
their values, and an increasingly unequal society (p. 17).
Book Reviews 217
the enslaved, much of the archival evidence stems from colo-
nial mandates following an 1825 uprising. The differences
between the single-room wood or earthen bohos and the
barracks-like masonry barracones are presented in fascinating
detail, including the opportunities each might have presented
its occupants and the disadvantages to the proprietors. While
wall enclosures are suggested as appropriate for security, the
11-foot high and two-foot thick masonry wall at Cafetal Bi-
ajacas appears to be unique among comparable plantations.
The wall may have been intended as constraint and security
by OFarrill, but within lay a village of bohos with a fair
degree of privacy and self-sufficiency. The scant material re-
mains and contemporaneous literature suggest some garden-
ing, livestock, and thrifty use and reuse of commercially pro-
duced goods. What is lacking in direct evidence is filled in by a
rich review of the range of practices across the Caribbean, en-
hancing this work as not only case study but as broad synthetic
perspective.
Singleton closes in her final two chapters with a consid-
eration of the classic dialectics of slavery: slaveholders and
slaves, domination and resistance, conflict and compromise.
She does so in a way that cuts across ongoing debates about
the responsibilities of researchers in emphasizing the agency
of the enslaved, perhaps because of the historical conditions
of Cuba. Highlighting the possible roles of machetes and of
fugitives in this region, she demonstrates that the actions
of both enslaved and slaveholders can be seen upon a con-
tinuum, yet undeniably both are fundamentally constrained
by their opposite. This book should become core reading
in historical archaeology, not only for its rich and thorough
contextualization of the case of Cuba in the wider history of
slavery but also for its understated but powerful theoretical
enclosure.
The first chapter of the book discusses okada men (com-
mercial cyclists), money, and the moral hazards of urban
life. Their ubiquitous presence in the early 1990s was itself
a response to Nigerias economic downward spin and the
sharp decline in standard of living after the adoption of the
Structural Adjustment Program by the military government
in the mid-1980s. This chapter, therefore, serves as a good
entry point for the discussion of social inequalities addressed
subsequently in the book. While the link between okada men
and HIV is undemonstrated, the chapter prepares the ground
for a robust discussion on inequality, material acquisition,
and HIV/AIDS.
The relationship between gender inequality, sexual
morality, and the spread of HIV is well established in the
218 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
literature. However, one important point made by Smith
in chapter 2 is how morally driven interpretations and re-
sponses to social inequality contribute to the moralizing
discourse of African sexuality, hitherto described as un-
bridled and promiscuous. Smith demonstrates persuasively
that large family size, kin obligations, and a fragile economy
coexisting with a new form of labor economy contribute sig-
nificantly toward putting pressure on young ladies in helping
out economically through various means including transac-
tional sex.
The pervasive role of religion in Nigeria has a strong
connection with how HIV is framed in that country, and
chapter 3 effectively connects the strands used in weaving a
moral narrative around the disease. Such moralizing narra-
tive is not surprising in a country in which every aspect of
life assumes a religious meaning. What Smith perceptively
brought to the discourse is the ambivalence of a people
caught up between embracing modernity (and all its trap-
pings) without preparing to accept its challenge of traditional
values. This contradiction creates a dilemma of stigmatiz-
ing HIV patients (due to their immorality) and preaching
redemption from their sin.
Beyond religion, the role of international agencies
through NGOs as discussed in chapter 4 gives a fresh elu-
cidation of how donor agencies, with good intensions, un-
wittingly exacerbate the spread of the disease by moralizing
sexual relations, using condoms as a symbol of immorality.
The simplistic ABC model adopted in curbing the spread of
the disease is made apparent by Smiths insightful interpreta-
tion of how social organization, economic exigencies, and a
weakening kinship system serve as an overarching structure
sustaining HIV prevalence.
Chapter 5 discusses the demand of sustaining kinship
ties in the face of modern realities and how the HIV epi-
demic tends to further strain kinship networks. The shift
from communal living to individual lifestyles is linked to the
Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic
by Lisa Stevenson.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 272 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12490
Shepard Krech III
Brown University and Smithsonian Institution
This courageous humanistic work is well worth a close and
critical read, for the simple reason that its author, Lisa
Stevenson, addresses one of the most important contem-
porary healthcare issues in the Canadian Norththat of
suicideand along the way challenges the reader through
intrusion of external political and economic activities in local
lives, leading to new forms of material consumption, social
upheaval, and the undermining of kinship obligations. While
much of the interpretation in this chapter is insightful, it fails
to highlight the historical dimension of the ambivalence that
characterizes kinship ties in contemporary Nigeria.
By far the most important contribution of the book is
the powerful way that Smith, in the last chapter, weaves
the desire of HIV patients to participate in social repro-
duction, how they negotiate a hostile stigmatizing society,
and the spread of the virus. The cultural value of children (to
perpetuate the family name in a patrilineal society) serves as
a push factor and an explanation for the seeming irrational
decision of HIV patients to have unprotected sex with their
spouses. Meanwhile, social scientists and health workers
have persistently viewed the spread of HIV (and African
sexual behavior) as necessarily associated with promiscuity
and gross indiscipline without sufficiently situating the
discourse within a deep sociocultural context. Perceptively,
Smith conceptualizes the phenomenon as the ethical
dilemmas of building a normal life, emphasizing the
moral and cultural obligations to reproduce oneself (and
the family) and the desire to protect ones partner from
contracting the disease.
Smiths book does provide health workers, policymak-
ers, and donor agencies with brilliant, alternative, and
perceptive ways of examining and interpreting the social,
cultural, and economic dimensions associated with
HIV/AIDS in Nigeriaand, by extension, in Africa as a
whole. This insight is crucial to our understanding of the
disease and how intervention strategies may be designed and
executed. However, Smiths use of Nigerians responses to
HIV/AIDS as a metaphor in interpreting their anxieties and
the countrys processes of social transformation is rather ten-
uous, primarily because the disease is not so much regarded
by Nigerians as a pandemic as Smith himself has noted.
engagement with ideas in disciplines often not plumbed thor-
oughly by anthropologists.
Life Beside Itself unfolds in six chapters, framed by an
introduction and epilogue. It is based on ethnographic and
historical insight gleaned in Iqaluit, Arctic Bay, and other
communities in Nunavut, Canadas northernmost territory.
Created in 1999, Nunavut is vast and sparsely populated,
principally by Inuktitut-speaking (and secondarily English-
speaking) Inuit. As a former territory governed by Ottawa,
the federal capital, it both retains a deep history of what has

been termed welfare colonialism and continues to struggle
with a bureaucratic legacy determined by historical state
structure and policy.
It is this legacy on which Stevenson focuses in chapters on
various matters, including, critically, two important crises:
first, a tuberculosis epidemic during the 1950s and, second,
the current epidemic of suicides (particularly that of teens).
Stevenson argues that, despite philanthropic and humanistic
intentions, the biopolitical response by well-meaning ad-
ministrators and caregivers during both epidemics has had
nihilistic consequences. Her thesis is that in both cases one
can see an erasure of the person, his or her identity, and cul-
ture and the reduction, both literal and figurative, of named,
culture-bearing, social human beings to isolated anonymous
numbers. In both instances, the emphasis on sustaining life
trumped all else, including the human context of Inuit life,
as well as the possibility that life (and its corollary, death)
might be construed very differently by the Inuit than by
non-Inuit administrators.
The challenge of finding solutions to the current epi-
demic of suicides, especially adolescent suicide, which in
Nunavut occurs at a rate five times the Canadian na-
tional average, is great. Stevenson, a self-described activist,
worked with community and Inuit organizations on a suicide-
prevention video aimed at Inuit youth for part of the time
that she lived in Nunavut. Apparently there exist well-known
warning signs, if not predictors, of attempts, successful or
not, at suicide, including so-called broken homes, alcohol or
drug abuse, violence, boredom, suicidal thought or ideation,
dreams about suicide or seeing the dead, feelings of isolation
and hopelessness, a lack of longing for meaningful tradi-
tional activities, and a conception of life as directionless and
without future.
Complicating the desire to hang onto life in Nunavut is
the belief in name souls. Inuit believe that an infant named
for a recently deceased Inuk is the reincarnation of that
Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights
Worldwide by Ryan R. Thoreson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12491
Amy L. Stone
Trinity University
In Transnational LGBT Activism, Ryan Thoreson provides an
in-depth ethnographic account of the International Gay and
Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), a NGO de-
voted to advancing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) rights worldwide. While working as a research fel-
low for IGLHRC, Thoreson studied the complexities of in-
Book Reviews 219
personand that after death (the death, that is, of ones
corporeal presence) the re-emergence of ones name sig-
nals reappearance. The belief in name souls, in reincarna-
tion, and, to a more uneven degree, in metempsychosis is
widespread in Inuit culture. Less known is its exact cor-
relation (not to mention causal relationship) with suicide.
What does it mean to say when ones mother dies that she
is gone? That her body has ceased to be alive but that she
will still be present through the continuation of her name
soul? The dead, Stevenson explains, are always still there
(p. 157). In such a system of belief, there is always am-
bivalence, always uncertainty, and always ambiguity that is
heightened, not settled, by the content of dreams involving
the (physically) departed. It should be no surprise that life
and death do not have the same meaning to an Inuk than to
a non-Inuit healthcare administrator or suicide-prevention
volunteer. It is little wonder that suicide prevention might be
far more complicated than addressing the signs or predictors
mentioned above or providing anonymous counsel.
In her analysis, Stevenson interweaves reflections on
works that have informed her approach to ethnography and
biopolitics. They include wide-ranging works in philosophy,
literature, psychology, and other fields, in total a corpus
of deeply humanistic work by Walter Benjamin, Cora
Diamond, Judith Butler, Ted Hughes, Italo Calvino,
Adriana Cavarero, E. M. Forster, and J. M. Coetzee, among
others. They have led Stevenson to hesitations, silences,
contradictions, uncertainties without closure, and puzzles
that do not yield readily to explanation. Certainty, fact,
conclusion: these are all quite elusive. While of obvious
interest, the reflections, when extensive, challenge and even
interrupt the focus and analytic flow in Life Beside Itself. Nev-
ertheless they also provide, both in the text and in 40 pages
of footnotes, a clear indication of the open and impressively
productive intellectual arc traced by Stevenson in this
work.
ternational NGO work in the field of sexual rights. Central
to Thoresons account is the role of brokers, or the employ-
ees and activists in IGLHRC, who navigate interpersonal
relationships and power relations as they identify potential
human rights abuses, negotiate with complex partnerships
in other countries, and negotiate plans of action within the
organization. Thoreson provides a high level of detail about
specific brokers within the organization and how they nego-
tiate doing international human rights work. Both Thoreson
and these brokers are attentive to the fraught relationship
between the North and the global South and attempt to
220 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
negotiate power differences between IGLHRC and its com-
munity partnerships within the limitations of technological,
cultural, and linguistic barriers.
Ultimately, this book is an attempt to locate an inter-
national NGO contextually within a rich professional and
political context. The strengths of this book are the level
of detail in Thoresons work and his attention to power in
the creation of knowledge about sexual minorities. Thore-
son provides comprehensive case studies of IGLHRC work
across the globe and illustrates the complexities of working
on specific issues, including the Uganda anti-homosexuality
bill and the imprisonment of two individuals in Malawi
on charges of homosexuality. The logistics of actionhow
brokers get reliable information on an incident, find part-
nerships within the country, and formulate the best ap-
proach to support the partnershipcome to the surface
Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao
by Marzia Varutti.
Suffolk: Boydell, 2014. 203 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12492
Lothar von Falkenhausen
University of California, Los Angeles
Part of a well-established series published by the Interna-
tional Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle
University, this book aims to address the need for a concise
overview in English on the situation of museums in contem-
porary China. It comprises ten chapters, framed by an intro-
duction and a conclusion. After initial reflections about the
term Cultural Heritage and its meaning as applied to China
(ch. 1), Marzia Varutti proceeds to a historical overview
about the history of museums in China (ch. 2). There follows
a characterization of New Actors in the Chinese Museum
World (ch. 3), such as private museums increasingly
operating alongside state-run institutions. Two chapters
treat the transformation of artifacts into symbols of the
Chinese nation (ch. 4) and the means by which that nation
represents itself in museums (ch. 5). A general disquisition
on how the past is instrumentalized in the interest of
contemporary politics (ch. 6) segues into a chapter showing
how this is done in Chinese museums (ch. 7). Next, another
general treatment of The Politics of Identity (ch. 8) is
followed by two chapters on the Museum Representation
of Chinas Ethnic Minorities (ch. 9) and the display
techniques used for that purpose (ch. 10).
The book is based on ten months of field research
during 20082009 and 2012, during which Varutti visited
56 museums of different kinds (a full list of the museums
appears on pp. 165166) and conducted interviews with
in these detailed ethnographic accounts. He parses the nu-
ances of writing about and collaborating with individuals
whose identities do not necessarily align with Western sexual
identities.
The level of detail in the book is ultimately a double-
edged sword. Frequently, Thoresons prose and explana-
tions become overtaken with names and acronyms, and
he forgets to connect the minutiae of the ethnography
of an institution with enduring anthropological theories
and concepts. Frequently while reading this work, I won-
dered what we can learn from the details that Thore-
son describes so carefully. Potential readers of this book
include scholars interested in the LGBT movement, hu-
man rights, or global sexualities. This book is unlikely
to be appealing to an undergraduate audience or general
reader.
numerous museum professionals. She frankly admits that
my language skills were not advanced enough to enable
me to conduct structured research interviews in Chinese,
nor to read specialized literature without help (pp. 56).
Furthermore, she is under the quite-mistaken impression
that Chinese monographs and volumes on museology
remain sparse (p. 5). In fact, published Chinese scholarship
in museum studies is ample enough to fill an entire library.
The systematic, critical study of this diverse and often high-
quality body of work by a Western-trained anthropologist
able to read it remains a worthwhile task for the future.
Varutti pigeonholes her personal observations into a
generic account of contemporary Chinese politics, adding
some analytical commentary in light of an equally generic
sampling of cultural-studies theorizations. While her han-
dling of the concepts involved is basically competent, it is also
overwhelmingly superficial; the book resembles a journal-
istic account more than a work of professional scholarship.
Unfortunately, it is journalism without the fact checking.
Palpably deriving from the imprecise and haphazard trans-
lation efforts of Varuttis student assistants, the information
presented is confused and often wildly inaccurate. For in-
stance, Varutti apostrophizes the First Emperor of Qin (259
210 B.C.E.; ruled 246/221210 B.C.E.)surely one of an-
cient Chinas most famous and best-documented historical
figuresas a semi-mythical figure who was salvaged from
collective amnesia by the Communist government (p. 96).
About the First Emperors Terracotta Army, she writes that
in Xian, the site of the discovery, it has not been possible
to create a proper museum . . . Instead, large hangars have
been built above the archaeological site (p. 97). Varutti

seems to be unaware that the use of lightweight hangar-like
structures is established as best practice at archaeological
site museums all over the world. The Museum of the Qin
Terracotta Army was not on her itinerary, but any visitor can
attest that it is indeed a most presentable proper museum,
run according to the highest international standards.
To mention just one other example of the kinds of mis-
takes permeating this book: Varutti (p. 16, n. 4) mischar-
acterizes one of her most prominent interviewees, Wang
Hongjun (b. 1926), as former director of the Chinese Cul-
tural Relics Bureau (where he merely served as member
of an advisory committee) and former Professor at the De-
partment of History at Peking University (where he merely
served as outside member of doctoral committees). Else-
where, she states, less obviously incorrectly, albeit impre-
cisely: Professor Wang started his career in the cultural
A Pueblo Social History: Kinship, Sodality, and Community
in the Northern Southwest by John A. Ware.
Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2014. 272 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12493
Vincent M. LaMotta
University of Illinois, Chicago
John Wares A Pueblo Social History is a landmark publica-
tion that reimagines the relationship between archaeology
and ethnography in an attempt to address what historically
have been some of the most intractable questions in the
study of Southwestern Pueblo societies. The books prin-
cipal concern is with the long-term history of the Pueblo
community, as an organizational form, stretching back into
deep antiquity. At the core of this narrative is a detailed
consideration of the tensions between kin-based corporate
groups, on the one hand, and non-kin-based religious so-
dalities, on the other hand. More than just a richly detailed
regional case study, A Pueblo Social History represents an im-
portant contribution to the study of emergent complexity
in middle-range agrarian societies, focusing on the role of
ritual in the development of hierarchy.
Although it is addressed primarily to archaeologists,
A Pueblo Social History is especially concerned with Pueblo
ethnography and its implications for understanding the ar-
chaeological past. Wares thesis centers on a series of closely
argued hypotheses that are extrapolated primarily from
Pueblo ethnography and comparative ethnology and that
concern the nature of Pueblo communities and mechanisms
of change in these societies. His overall project in the book
involves the construction of what might be termed a trial
social history from early farming villages to recent times,
by negotiating back and forth between the aforementioned
Book Reviews 221
department of the army, before moving to the National
Museum of History in 1959, where he spent the rest of
his career (p. 50). Actually, as one can easily verify on
the web (http://baike.baidu.com/view/5066529.htm, ac-
cessed August 14, 2015), Wang was the long-term party
secretaryand, in that capacity, deputy directorof the
Museum of Chinese History, which in 2003 was combined
with the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and renamed
the National Museum of China. Confusingly, Varutti also
renders the name of Wangs former home institution as
China Museum of National History (p. 165).
I would have thought that the times of nonrigorous
Colonial-type scholarship, when any member of a Western
academic institution could claim expert authority on an ex-
otic subject merely by publishing his or her assorted jottings
on places she or he had visited, were over. Apparently not.
hypotheses and the material realities of the archaeological
record. The larger message here is that the ethnographic
record is not to be treated merely as a source of analogies for
interpreting archaeological remains; rather, ethnographic
destinations represent the outcomes of change trajectories
that began in antiquity, and knowledge of these outcomes
helps to constrain archaeologists interpretations of the past.
Consequently, Wares narrative rightly challenges recon-
structions that are not as cohesive when viewed through this
parsimonious historical-ethnographic lens.
What makes Wares perspective especially interesting
is his focus on religious sodalities, which, on the whole, have
received too little attention from Southwestern archaeol-
ogists. Ware projects a very early origin for the germ of
these organizations and sees them as having played a key role
in the long-term development of Pueblo societies. Ethno-
graphically, religious sodalities among the Western Pueb-
los tend to be closely affiliated with particular corporate
kin groups, but among the Eastern Pueblos, for whom de-
scent groups are weak to nonexistent, religious sodalities
are detached and constitute an independent religious and
political hierarchy. Ware argues that religious sodalities first
detached from kin group control in antiquity. What is at
issue here is the origin of organizational variation observed
ethnographically among the Pueblos, from Hopi in the west
to the Rio Grande Pueblos in the east: Can this variation
simply be ascribed to differential contact-era processes, or
is it more ancient? Seen in this light, Wares hypothesis
about sodality detachmentspecifically when, where, and
how this process might have happenedtakes on particu-
lar importance. He makes the case that detached sodalities
222 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
first emerged in the 11th century, in Chaco Canyon, and
suggests, furthermore, that this scenario helps to explain
certain enigmatic aspects of Chacoan society. Such organi-
zations later re-emerged among the Eastern Pueblos, Ware
argues, following the collapse of Chaco and the migration of
Colorado Plateau populations into the Rio Grande region.
The above comments reflect just a few highlights in a study
of far-reaching temporospatial and conceptual scope. While
the specifics of hypotheses advanced in the volume will be
debated and while the mechanisms of sodality detachment
may well require more theory building, the present effort is
of immense value alone for directing attention to religious
sodalities as potentially important elements in the Pueblo
social landscape in antiquity.
A Pueblo Social History represents the forward edge of a
long, sometimes contentious history of archaeological and
anthropological research on the organization of Southwest-
ern Pueblo societies. Wares theoretical approach manages
to be forward looking without needlessly severing ties to
Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm
in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia by Marina Welker.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 312 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12494
Fabiana Li
University of Manitoba
Representations of the corporationwhether in docu- sarily compromise their academic freedom. Instead, Welker
mentary films, activist campaigns, or even some scholarly
workoften reinforce the idea that corporate entities are
all-powerful, calculating actors driven by the single-minded
pursuit of shareholder profits. In Enacting the Corporation,
Marina Welker provides an alternative mode of analysis that
avoids the usual tropes without losing sight of the com-
plexities and contradictions revealed through ethnographic
fieldwork. Inspired by the work of science studies scholar
Annemarie Mol 2002, Welker approaches the corporation
as multiple and enacted. Newmont, the company that oper-
ates the Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Indonesia, takes
many forms: it is enacted as an agent of development; as part
of the community; as a socially responsible and transparent
company; and as environmentally destructive.
Welker conducted fieldwork in villages near the Batu
Hijau mine in Indonesia and in Newmonts head offices in
Denver, Colorado. She provides a sympathetic, but not un-
critical, portrayal of Newmont employees in both field sites,
emphasizing their different motivations, personalities, and
work styles. The narrative does not provide a strong sense
of place and daily life in communities around the mine, but
this is a consequence of the books transnational scope and
the tradition of anthropological research out of which the
corpus of data emerged. He finds fertile ground for develop-
ing hypotheses in kinship theory, for example, and revisits
the long-dormant Keresan bridge debate to demonstrate
its continuing relevance. Critical of functionalism, Ware in-
troduces a sense of history to the discussion and reminds
readers of the internal tensions within Pueblo societies that
can drive change. This volume contributes to an expanding
archaeological literature on religion and ritual in the an-
cient Southwest yet at the same time testing many of the
hypotheses advanced herein will require archaeologists to
develop new methods for distinguishing material signatures
of different kinds of ritual organizations in the archaeological
record. What sets this volume apart, however, is the vision
of archaeology that it articulates and the case it makes for
reuniting peoples and histories that are too easily sundered
in academic thought. Finally, if A Pueblo Social History raises
many as-yet unanswered questions, in doing so it promises
to inspire much productive future research.
focus on the various actors engaged in the production of
corporate social responsibility. With independent research
funding as well as some logistical support from Newmont,
her experience complicates the assumption that anthropol-
ogists associating too closely with corporations must neces-
argues that the ideal of moral purity often espoused by ac-
tivists and anthropologists stands in contrast with the desires
of most village residents, who emphasize the reciprocal
obligations of the company and local residents (p. 12).
The books nuanced analysis make an important con-
tribution to the literature on corporate social responsibility
(CSR), which sometimes assumes that CSR is simply a
smokescreen to conceal destructive practices and further
corporate interests. Welkers description of meetings and
interactions in corporate headquarters (ch. 1) reveals power
struggles, shifting priorities, and disagreements as commu-
nity relations specialists tried (sometimes unsuccessfully)
to convince managers and engineers to adopt CSR. In
Sumbawa, Indonesian employees variously enacted the
corporation as patron or as promoter of sustainable develop-
ment (chs. 2 and 3), depending on their different approaches
and commitments, but also in response to pressure from
villagers and their demands for jobs, goods, and benefits. In
training sessions and other company-sponsored programs,
attempts to turn local people into capitalist agents of sus-
tainable development were thwarted by conflicting moral
logics. For example, Newmonts workshop facilitators

emphasized economic independence from the company,
while villagers insisted on the interdependence of patronage
relationships and the companys ongoing responsibility
toward local communities (ch. 4). This failure to produce
autonomous, neoliberal subjects shows the limits of corpo-
rate programs, which led to unintended results (reinforcing
villagers dependence on the corporation or a preference
for Green Revolution technologies over the sustainable
agricultural practices encouraged in the workshops).
By focusing on the various enactments of the corpora-
tion, Welkers analysis also complicates how we think of
mine, community, and state, which are inextricable cautions us about letting our predetermined ideas about cor-
from each other in their interests, responsibilities, and ma-
terial operations (p. 71). Welker likens this relationship to
parasitism, wherein it can be difficult to determine which is
the host and which is the parasite (p. 98). These actors are
mutually constituted; they are neither bounded nor inter-
nally homogenous. For example, government officials and
mining employees go through a revolving door into public
or private industry jobs and mutually influence each other.
Newmont employs well-intentioned CSR managers but also
consults with public relations firms that offer clandestine
research on NGOs and strategies to invalidate the work of
activists (ch. 5). Villagers include local elites who resorted
to violence in defense of the corporation and sometimes also
against it.
School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the
Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity by Eitan Y. Wilf.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12495
John Szwed
Columbia University
Eitan Wilfs book on jazz studies in universities is one of
several recent writings that uses ethnographic methods to
understand arts institutions: other such works include Sarah
Thorntons (2009) Seven Days in the Art World (2009); Matti
Bunzls (2014) study of Chicagos Museum of Contempo-
rary Art, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde; and Helena Wulffs
(2008) article, Ethereal Expression, on the persistence of
traditional repertoire in ballet companies. School for Cool is
one of the best of these kinds of works in demonstrating that
anthropology has something vital to contribute to contem-
porary arts.
A jazz musician as well as an anthropologist, Wilf lived
among students, interviewed faculty and administration,
and participated in classes and performances at two major
schools of jazz: Berklee College of Music in Boston and the
Book Reviews 223
Welker draws on the literature on multiplicity and rela-
tional models of personhood to emphasize the multifaceted,
contextual, and indeterminate nature of the corporation,
but she avoids delving into the more contentious terrain of
ontological politics (including the suggestion that reality is
itself multiple [Mol 2002]). The books approach to multi-
plicity does not fully explain how some enactments come
to be more dominant than others and whose voices are si-
lenced, and it leaves open the question of how corporations
might be enacted otherwise. Welker wants to avoid malign-
ing or dehumanizing mining executives and employees and
porations compromise the unexpected insights that can be
gained from the ethnographic endeavor (p. 16). It follows,
therefore, that Welker does not take a definitive stance or
present an overtly negative view of the corporation nor does
she offer recommendations for change. Instead, the strength
of the analysis lies in its implications for how we think about
corporate agency, intentionality, and responsibility and in
its ability to capture the tensions, ambivalences, and contra-
dictions that characterize global sites of resource extraction.
REFERENCE CITED
Mol, A.
2002 The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham:
Duke University Press.
New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York.
His most important finding was that jazz schools were caught
up in a spiral of contradictory impulses and two faces of mod-
ernism: one based in rationality, rule-governed behavior,
and standardized knowledge; the other in jazzs particular
demand for individuality, creativity, expressivity, and
improvisation.
Similar conflicts could be expected at programs of paint-
ing, dance, film, and theater that gained entry into higher
education over the last 50 years. But jazz faced even more
difficulties: existing departments of music seldom welcome
jazz scholars and musicians, and until very recently those few
faculty who found their way in came by way of American
studies, ethnomusicology, history, and English.
What also made studying jazz different from other arts
programs was the complexity of the musics history and the
antinomies that shadowed it: white versus black, male versus
female, orality versus literacy, low versus high, singer versus
instrumentalist, past versus present, all of which are ignored
by most music schools. Jazz is a music developed and first
224 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 1 March 2016
mastered by African Americans that changed the nature of
the worlds music, but it has nonetheless faced a century of
struggle for full acceptance. Now, despite recognition from
some key institutions, it also faces fragmented audiences and
shrinking opportunities for performance.
Most of the students and faculty at the two jazz schools
Wilf studied were white males, and many of the teachers held
advanced degrees but had not devoted themselves to perfor-
mance. What once had been learned by a masterapprentice
relationship and what Ralph Ellison called the cruel contra-
diction of the musicthe demand for heightened individ-
uality within and against a coherent collectivewas now
being reshaped for classroom use that would gain academic
respectability. A once auditory-focused learning built on
a matrix of shared black community aesthetics was being
turned into a musical text- and theory-driven pedagogy.
Wilf found that these contradictions were recognized
within jazz schools, and attempts were made to bring au-
thenticity and individuality into the classroom by using guest
artists and adjuncts. But these efforts often made the prob-
lems even more obvious and significant, as when famous
visiting musicians questioned the curriculum and suggested
that the music could never be learned or developed that way.
There would seem to be other ways to reconcile the de-
mands on jazz in higher education: establish research centers
in jazz scholarship alongside performance programs; diver-
sify the faculty and hire more professional and seasoned
musicians, even without degrees; and increase offerings in
the history and aesthetics of jazz. The fact that most univer-
sities and jazz schools have no such courses, or if they do,
seldom require them, suggests that they still fail to recognize
the full significance of this music, lack the necessary training
to teach its history, or simply are playing to the narrow
current interests of students.
The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion
in Islamicate South Asia by Richard K. Wolf.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 408 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12496
Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy
University of California, Los Angeles
In a remarkable dialogue between truth-based Islamicate fic-
tion and sociological realism, The Voice in the Drum speaks
and howls ethnography in fictive dialects, narrating the trans-
formative tale of Muharram Ali, son of a lesser Sunni raja
of Avadh, and his Shii third wife. Ali becomes a seeker of
drummed mystical harmony among Muslim and Hindu ver-
nacular percussionists, mostly Islamic, mostly Shii, mostly
Still, as Wilf wisely notes, some students and faculty de-
velop their own rituals of creativity, techniques of the self
such as musical games and alternative musical relationships
that allow them to unlearn the learned and rebalance toward
individual identity and creativity. (Though Wilf doesnt tell
us this, all of the techniques he describes were in use by
musicians years before there were jazz schools and are part
of jazz tradition.)
However it is achieved, these schools do produce
some musicians of great virtuosity and scope who reach
well beyond what the public knows as jazz. In fact, one
of the problems of jazz is that it has now become so
panidiomatic and borderless that it is impossible to define
and difficult to market, much less house in a single university
department.
The book is not always clear about the differences be-
tween the two distinct schools studied. It has also been
almost a decade since the research was conducted, and both
schools have undergone significant changes in faculty that
may have addressed some of these issues. But as a detailed
picture of these institutions at a moment in time, this book
is evocative, persuasive, and a model for studies of arts
education.
REFERENCES CITED
Bunzl, M.
2014 In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investi-
gates the Contemporary Art Museum. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Thornton, S.
2009 Seven Days in the Art World. New York: W. W. Norton.
Wulff, H.
2008 Ethereal Expression: Paradoxes of Ballet as a Global Physical
Culture. Ethnography 9(4):518535.
in South Asia. Going to the living roots of their sacred and
musical origins among Iranian functional musicians and his-
torical Arab antecedents, the book surveys the forest through
rhythmic and vocal trails, leading to discoveries along a nar-
rative pathway connecting diverse subaltern communities of
Islam, sometimes interfacing with Hindu traditions and peo-
ples, even among Nilgiri tribals in the mountains of Indias
Dravidian heartland.
An Essential Note from the Author narrates Richard
Wolfs awakening from a dream of an Indian character
traversing Wolfs own ethnography-land (p. xiii). Inspired
by that dream, the author artfully cobbles an erudite

concoction of the fictive and the ethnographic. Wolf ac-
knowledges activating Michael Herzfelds social poetics and
Victor Turners subjunctive mood of culture, but the work
is unique, partly because of its multiple methodologies. A
Note from the Editor signed by Sufiya Rizvi of Lahore,
Pakistan, herself an invented creature, begins by explaining,
This work is a hybrid, a chimera with thick spectacles, the
legs of a gazelle and the musical skin of a goat (p. xv). Sufiya
quotes the author as confiding that he plagiarized extensively
from reality in his creative writing (p. xviii). Both a linear
novel and an academic work, it tells the protagonists story
of exploration and personal growth, using narrative tactics
to problematize conceptions of rhythm, melody, and the
hierarchy of voice over rhythm. Using precise linguistic and
musical transcriptions for texts and rhythms, the work en-
gages Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kota, Hindi,
Panjabi, Sindhi, and Saraiki languages, with terms defined in
a 20-page glossary-cum-concordance and correlated Index.
Although beginning in the fictive voice of Ali, each of the
first four of its ten chapters concludes in ethnographic, an-
alytic writing signed by the books author. This dual-voiced
device enables imagination and subjectivity to flourish along
with intellectual processes of theorizing and synthesis.
Scrutinizing drummed performances, Wolf explains how
drum patterns function as speech surrogate systems, often
understood only by performers and cognoscenti. Meticulous
observations of interactions, locations, languages, melodies,
rhythms, poetry, and social relationships are illustrated
in translations, tables, rhythmic notations, photographs,
appendices, endnotes, and references, with a map indicating
fieldwork locations and verbatim transcriptions from Alis
notebooks distinguished by a separate typeface. Ethno-
graphic fieldwork in India and Pakistan, as well as Iran,
Tajikistan, Trinidad, and New York City, is exemplified in
online audio and video documentation from Wolfs copious
quest for meaning within drumming and voicing.
The fictive and factual merge from chapter 5, Muhar-
ram in Multan, when the central protagonist Muharram
Ali takes charge of both narration and analysis, explor-
Book Reviews 225
ing a vast network of separate yet interrelated drumming
traditions in numerous locations and contexts. He com-
pares Lucknows Muharram with theatrical taziyeh (portable,
miniature mausoleum) processions with floats in Multan,
Pakistan; its musical influences from Iran; and the partici-
pation of local courtesans. In chapter 6, Ali experiences the
urs (death anniversary) at the dargah (mausoleum) of Shah
Jamal in Lahore, the controversial mystic poet whose trans-
gressive love of a Brahmin boy parallels the dargahs Hindu-
Muslim blending of Holi and urs. Urdu phrases are raptur-
ously drummed in processions of elaborate taziyehs, with
Shiis emotionally re-enacting and lamenting the tragedy of
Karbala, joined by dancing malang/malangni, qalandar, and
faqir mystics.
Through the process of field research, Ali develops from
a nave Indian journalist into a mature scholar and professor,
disillusioned but eventually reconciled to the loss of his ide-
alistic vision, eventually bound by love to a Britain-educated
Pakistani woman who returns to rejoin her cultural and
spiritual roots. This complex conceptual, musical, and imag-
inative journey is illustrated by over 75 original audio and
video field recordings on the books website (www.press.
illinois.edu/books/wolf/voiceinthedrum). The website
also contains a trailer video, edited by Masha Vlasova, that
provides an authentic introduction to the author as he speaks
about dreaming and creating his book, intermingled with
fresh-from-the-field video footage. All of the multimedia
examples are selected from Wolfs audio-visual field col-
lections accessible for restudy in the Archives and Research
Centre for Ethnomusicology of the AIIS in Gurgaon, India,
and in the archives of Harvard and Indiana universities.
Emerging afresh from numerous fields of cultural an-
thropology, including ethnology, ethnomusicology, human-
istic anthropology, linguistics, the anthropology of religion,
visual anthropology, and others, The Voice in the Drum con-
tributes new insights and creates innovative methodologies
much needed in todays growing anthropological and em-
pathic understandings of the performance of emotion in
South Asian Islam.